Scottish Renaissance painted ceilings

Scottish Renaissance painted ceilings are decorated ceilings in Scottish houses and castles built between 1540 and 1640. This is a distinctive national style, though there is common ground with similar work elsewhere, especially in France, Spain and Scandinavia. An example in England, at Wickham, Hampshire, was recorded in 1974.

Most surviving examples are painted simply on the boards and joists forming the floor of the room above. Rooms or galleries in attic storeys were fully lined with thin pine boarding and painted. The fashion was superseded by decorative plasterwork and sometimes the painted ceilings were broken up to form lathing for the new plaster.

The paint used employed protein size with chalk and pigments, including natural ochres, vermilion, and orpiment often mixed with indigo to form vibrant greens. The pine timber was imported from Norway. The names of many painters have been found in contemporary records, but as yet no painter of any particular surviving ceiling has been identified through archival research. However, it is recorded that in 1554, Edinburgh painters led by Walter Binning assaulted an outsider, David Warkman, who had been painting a ceiling. The Warkman family were settled at Burntisland in Fife the 1590s. The Skelmorlie Aisle at Largs was signed by John Stalker, and initials "IM" painted at Delgatie Castle may be those of the painter John Mellin or Melville. It appears that only the wealthiest of the merchant classes and aristocrats could afford this decoration, though the picture is unbalanced as more modest interiors do not survive.

The largest group of these ceilings have patterns of fruit and flowers, and may perhaps have evoked tapestry borders. Some ceilings in galleries at the top of buildings incorporated with biblical or emblematic scenes. Others employ Renaissance grotesque ornament including symbolic emblems. A gallery in a demolished building on Edinburgh's Castlehill had scenes of the Apocalypse and Christ asleep in a storm, set in the Firth of Forth, with a backdrop of the Edinburgh Royal Mile skyline viewed from Fife. Fragments survive in storage at the National Museums of Scotland. Ceilings painted with rows of heraldic shields included; the gallery at Earlshall Castle and Collairnie Castle, Fife, a ceiling at Linlithgow High Street, and Nunraw House, East Lothian.

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