Monday 9 November 2015

Sgraffito

This fine sgraffito decorated cornice and external wall is on one wing of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. I'm guessing that it is part of the post World War II restoration, but it is a technique of wall ornamentation that was common in Italy in the Renaissance. It is related to fresco, in that it is a technique that manipulates layers of renders and pigments while they are damp so that the final design is chemically bonded to the wall, not just a surface layer.
This particular wing of the Sforzesco houses among other things the last, unfinished, work of Michelangelo. Unfortunately the interior is such a maze that we never found his Pieta. We did see lots of other fab things though, so we weren't too disappointed.
For more about the technique of sgraffito see my post on the Villa Rose in Saint-Aignan.
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Au jardin hier: Garlic planted. This year I've used my own garlic cloves, the best and fattest cloves collected from the best bulbs from my very good crop harvested in the summer. I still have plenty left to cook with until the new season's crop is in.

A small black and white woodpecker turned up and investigated the paulownia by tapping on some of the upper branches. It was a bit bigger than a sparrow so I think it must have been the Middle Spotted Woodpecker. The call matched the recording I listened to on the internet.

2 comments:

Le Pré de la Forge said...

From one lot of grafitti so another... fantastically over the top this... unlike yesterday's... could this really have been cheaper than the equivalent stone? Are the bricks real??
And I still think that the Villa Rose tops this for quality... this just does quantity....

Have you recorded the MSpW on Faune Touraine yet? Don't forget to... Pic mar.... and did it have a full red crown... both sexes have the red... clearly visible...

Susan said...

Anything that is brick coloured and shaped is brick in these photos. This has a lot more fine detail than Villa Rose, but VR would have been more technically difficult because it is more layers of colours.

I was waiting to see what your reaction was before recording the MSpW officially. Just in case there was an alternative lookalike I hadn't thought of. The light was too low to confirm a red head with the naked eye and the beast was somewhat silhouetted, but my overall impression was of the light/dark pattern of MSpW and I'd be willing to put money on it being that, so I will pop over to FT and record it now.

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