I was just browsing some photo collections on Pompeii and Herculaneum, and it just struck me. [For the buildings we have excavated] No matter how rich someone was, the walls were painted plaster, with a very rare tile mosaic.
How funky is that?! The movers and shakers of the Empire didn’t make marble palaces, with tons of gilding, they lived in palaces with painted stucco walls. [Seriously ornate in many cases, but still just painted plaster.]
And it is sort of homey to notice they had problems with people tagging their walls as well. There is actually a page online I ran across a few weeks ago that posted translations of graffiti found there. Same shit, different eon!
It’s a complete bitch to do - I don’t even want to think about the amounts of work and waste that doing so without modern tools would involve. In Spain it is done in luxury flats.
Nowadays, marble and other stones are cut out of the mountain in big sort-of-cubic chunks, which then get transported to the stonecutter; the stonecutters use computer-controlled gigantic saws (the part which does the cutting can be metal, a laser or a waterjet) to cut the big stone into adequate slabs following a draftsman’s design; the parts that will be on display are polished. Effects such as “continuous” (the slabs on a area have been cut from beside each other in the same position in which they’ll be set, so the lines and accidents continue from one to the next) are possible but there’s a reason they charge an arm and a leg for them; not only is it more complex to set up, losing a single piece means losing all that area (relatively easy, specially with some types of marble which break if you look at them hard).
Nava, sister to a former marble-and-stone draftsman-headman and a former marble-and-stone finance guy.
Look carefully. While there are plenty of marble columns and other details, most of the walls are covered with either wallpaper or plaster. You can’t hang a portrait on marble.
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