Sgraffito is a way of drawing by scratching. The maker lays one color over another, then cuts a design through the top layer with a pointed tool, so that the color underneath appears in every line.
The technique lives on two very different surfaces, the plaster of house facades and the clay of pots and bowls.
On a wall, the two layers are coats of plaster spread one over the other, usually a dark one under a white one. The lines of the drawing come out dark on a pale ground.
On a bowl, the top coat is slip, clay thinned with water and washed over the pot before it is baked in the kiln. Each cut uncovers the darker clay of the pot itself.
Sgraffito is Italian for "scratched," from the verb sgraffiare. The man who explained the name was Giorgio Vasari, the Italian painter and architect who published in 1550 the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, the first great collection of artists' biographies.
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In the introduction to his book, he describes step by step how painters of his time decorated the facades of houses and palaces this way. The work, he says, takes its name from the tool that scratches it, an iron point.
Potters, however, were scratching through slip centuries before Vasari wrote. A fragment of earthenware cut this way and covered with a glassy glaze was found at Samarra, in Iraq, a city on the Tigris north of Baghdad, and it dates to the 9th century.
The walls and the pots therefore have separate histories, which began in different places, centuries apart. Vasari tells the story of the walls, and he tells it as a recipe.
Vasari's recipe for a scratched wall
His recipe opens with a surprise. The gray of the bottom coat, the color every line will show, comes from an ingredient nobody would expect to find on a palace wall…
What You'll Discover
The facades that only pretend to be scratched.
What Rembrandt did with the end of his brush.
How potters from Egypt to Korea used it.
A Czech castle covered with thousands of scratched designs.
The everyday word that grew from sgraffito.