The traditional understanding of Italian Renaissance stucco as a revival after the antique by the Raphael school in the early Cinquecento, spurred by the late Quattrocento rediscovery of Nero’s Domus Aurea and used primarily for grotesque decoration, ignores the remarkable range of earlier uses of stucco, from late antiquity through the early Renaissance.1 Many medieval and Byzantine ensembles included monumental stucco figural reliefs and architectural ornament, still visible from Rome to Friuli: in Ravenna, richly decorated imperial ensembles featured stucco alongside mosaic, marble, and opus sectile of porphyry and serpentine, such as the Neonian Baptistery with its mid fifth-century stucco prophets (Fig. 172), or the sixth-century stucco arches of San Vitale.2 Stucco was the focus of particularly wide-ranging experimentation in the Quattrocento, and especially in the Florence of Donatello, where artists and architects deployed this versatile material to create figural and relief sculpture and novel decorations that blurred traditional distinctions among mural decoration, sculpture, and architectural ornament.