Like tattoos on the skin of façades, the sgraffito on Barcelona’s buildings displays the decorations and ornamental motifs of the different styles and aesthetic tastes that prevailed from the 17th century to Noucentisme.
Thus, the sgraffito technique belongs to the broad realm of decorative arts applied to architecture. At the same time, these stucco reliefs on wall surfaces possess characteristics of painting, as they cover two-dimensional surfaces and make use of polychromy, and of sculpture, since the layered stucco creates three-dimensional reliefs and a play of light and shadow. Naturally, they are also architectural elements, as they are found on buildings and serve to enhance their appearance.
The starting point for sgraffito in Barcelona is, as might be expected, the Ciutat Vella, where, in the 17th century, master stuccoers from Italy left their mark in the form of vertical incisions on the façades, while passing on their skills to local craftsmen. A century later came the so-called 18th-century sgraffito, a decorative phenomenon with a great productive drive that crystallised through the ornamental languages of the Baroque and Neoclassicism. Located in the streets of the Gothic Quarter, Raval, Sant Pere, Santa Caterina i La Ribera, the most common architectural typology featuring sgraffito is that of the single-family mansion and the single-storey house, whether single-family or multi-family dwellings.
At the end of the 19th century, the new Eixample district came to prominence, and, through the decorative fashions of Art Nouveau, we find a new impetus in the production of sgraffito. As a covering for the façades and common interiors of multi-family residential buildings between partitions, Art Nouveau sgraffito is presented to us as a vertical garden, where climbing plants and floral recreations are the absolute protagonists of the most beautiful buildings. At the same time, the opportunity is also taken to redecorate some façades in the old town that want to keep up with the fashion of the moment. The traffic in Noucentisme did not slow down the popularity of sgraffito, but we find it reinterpreted according to canons more closely linked to classicist, Mediterranean and allegorical motifs; a return to order with which the Catalan capital was to be monumentalised, and of which we have good examples in Ciutat Vella and the Eixample.
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