Timpano di Travertino

In my workshop I imagine the Timpano di Travertino wallpaper as the silent echo of an architecture that has crossed the centuries. The design takes up the style of the Italian Renaissance, that season in which stone became geometry and the measure of man, to render at monumental scale the façade of a church in two superimposed orders.

Below, pairs of pilasters frame the central arched portal, while slender niches mark the side bays beneath the dentilled entablature. Above, a narrower order encloses a rectangular window — almost an oculus — whose ends tie into the lower band through two symmetrical scrolled volutes. The triangular pediment closes the composition, with radiating mouldings and a sober cross at the apex.

The surface tells the true grain of the stone: warm travertine and pale limestone, ivory, sand and soft grey, ochre veining and deep shadows gathering in the flutes and the volutes. Close up you find the marks of the chisel, the clean line of the capitals, the acanthus-leaf frieze along the entablature.

I wanted this Timpano di Travertino wallpaper to give back, on a single wall, the measured solemnity of a whole façade, without crowding, breathing in the space like a real architecture. At WallZad every stone is redrawn and printed with tailored care, so that Renaissance grandeur can inhabit, discreet and genuine, any contemporary room.