CEILING, the overhead surface or surfaces covering a room; the under side of a floor or a roof ; often used as a surface built to hide the floor and roof construction ; the term is also em ployed, technically, for any finished boarding or sheathing, and especially for a type of narrow, thin board, tongued and grooved, with a moulding on the edge. Ceilings, in the larger sense of the word, have been favourite places for decoration from the earli est times, by painting the flat surface, as in the case of Egyptian tombs; by emphasizing the structural members of roof or floor, as in the beamed ceilings of the period of Francis I. in France, or the ceilings of Italian mediaeval churches; e.g., S. Miniato at Florence; by treating it as a field for an over-all pattern of relief ; e.g., the earlier rooms of Hampton Court palace near London.
Of Greek ceilings little is known, except for some of marble, over temple porticos, decorated with small, sunk panels or coffers, with moulded edges, and the field further decorated in poly chrome. Roman ceilings were rich with relief and painting as is evidenced by the vault soffits of Pompeian baths. Italian Renais sance architects found in similar examples inspiration for much of their most charming painted and relief decoration in stucco, and Robert Adam's i8th century designs for ceilings ornamented with ovals, fans, hanging garlands, delicate scrolls and little painted panels, have the same origin. The general Gothic ten dency to use structural demerits decoratively led to the rich development of the beamed ceiling, in which large cross girders support smaller floor beams at right angles to them, beams and girders being richly chamfered and moulded, and often painted in bright colours (the palazzo Davanzati in Florence contains numerous late 14th century examples).
In the Renaissance, ceiling design was developed to its highest pitch of originality and variety. Three types were elaborated. The first is the coffered ceiling, in the complex design of which the Italian Renaissance architects far outdid their Roman prototypes. Circular, square, octagonal and L-shaped coffers, with their edges richly carved and the field of each coffer decorated with a rosette, abound. Occasionally pendants are found at the intersections (the Hall of the Two Hundred, in the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence and various rooms of the ducal palace at Mantua are good examples). The second type consists of ceilings wholly or partly vaulted, often with arched intersections, with painted bands bringing out the architectural design and with pictures filling the remainder of the space, as in the loggia of the Farnesina villa in Rome, deco rated by Raphael and Giulio Romano. In the baroque period, fantastic figures in heavy relief, scrolls, cartouches and garlands were also used to decorate ceilings of this type; e.g., the Pitti palace, Florence; many French ceilings of the Louis XIV. style are similar. In the third type, particularly characteristic of Venice (e.g., the Doge's palace), the ceiling became one large framed picture.
The early Renaissance saw in England another interesting de velopment, that of plaster ceilings covered with an intricate pat tern of intersecting curved lines, ornamented with foliage, gro tesque animals and heraldic devices, and frequently accented by repeated large pendants; e.g., Bramall Hall; Hatfield House, Lon don ; Knowle ; Sizergh. Later, the skilful English plaster workers were trained into a more classic vein, largely through the influ ence of Inigo Jones, who developed a type with large and deeply recessed panels, bold mouldings and bands of high relief foliage and fruit, which remained fashionable for about a century after 165o. In modern work the general tendency is toward simplified ceilings. Rich colour decoration is, however, sometimes found, especially in public buildings; e.g., Nebraska State capitol, U.S.A., designed by B. G. Goodhue, with ceilings by Hildreth Meiere.
(T. F. H.)