Making Magnificence - Architects, Stuccatori, and the Eighteenth-Century Interior (currently unavailable!)

This book tells the remarkable story of the craftsmen of Ticino, in Italian-speaking Switzerland, who took their prodigious skills as specialist decorative plasterworkers throughout Northern Europe in the 18th century, adorning classical architecture with their rich and fluent décor. Their names are not widely known - Giuseppi Artari (c.1690-1771), Giovanni Battista Bagutti (1681-1755), and Francesco Vassalli (1701-1771) are a few - but their work transformed the interiors of magnificent buildings in Italy, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Britain, and Ireland