Stucco: The Rococo's Secret Ingredient - Part 2

It's not just churches that Rococo came up with in Germany, it also did spectacular libraries, fabulous temples of knowledge that fill you with the hunger for books. And my favourite of these temples of knowledge is this one here, the library at Viblingen. Look at that. Now we're here on the third floor of Viblingen, so all this couldn't be marble or stone. Marble would have been too heavy for these wooden floors. So all this is made of stucco and wood. See here, you can actually see inside this column. Look, it's hollow. It's just hollowed out wood. With this fake marble all around. Clever, eh? So how did they do it? To find out how they achieved these stucco marvels, I caught up with the finest stucco restorer in Bavaria, the intriguing Thomas Salvatore. So Thomas, one of the things about stucco that's so fascinating is how versatile it is. There's so many different kinds of stucco. And particularly important in the German Rococo were these coloured marble surfaces that they achieved. These wonderful, beautiful coloured marbles. How do you make that marbled stucco? I mean, you just put the colours in, different colours. And now you get the colour. So the stucco marble consists of several colours. Italian ice cream, eh? A lot of that. Fantastic. I'd like you to cook my Christmas dinner. You see so often in Wieskerk or Wiblingen Library. How do they make those? So this entire fantasy of knowledge, this paradise of facts, all of it is a kind of glorious illusion, a marvellous Rococo falsehood.