RUSTICATION, in architecture, a form of masonry in which the stones have their edges cut back to a careful plane surface, but with the central portion of the stone face either left rough or projecting markedly. (See DRAFTED MASONRY.) Rusti cated masonry is found in the platform of the tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae in Persia (560 B.c.) and is common in certain types of Greek and Hellenistic work such as retaining walls and the like. It was similarly used for terrace and retaining walls by the Romans, who also realized its decorative value and employed it not only for such utilitarian works as the Pont du Gard at Nimes, France (c. 15o) and the aqueduct at Segovia, Spain (c. 109), but also decoratively as in the Porta Maggiore at Rome (time of Claudius), where the rustication is very rough, and the walls of the temple of Augustus at Vienne, France (c. 41), in which the rustication is carefully finished, the faces of the stone cut to a plane and the edges very delicately sunk.
The early Renaissance architects developed this tradition still further, and in the 15th century palaces in Florence used it with magnificent effect. Thus in the Pitti palace, by Brunelleschi (1458), the Riccardi, by Michelozzo (1444-52), and the Strozzi, by Benedetto da Maiano (1489), the carefully studied rustication forms the chief element in the design, and in the Rucellai, from designs by Alberti (1446-51), the wall surfaces between the pilasters are delicately rusticated. During the Baroque period
rustication assumed great impor' ance in garden and villa design and all sorts of fantastic surfaces were employed on the project ing portions of the stones, such as vermiculated work, in which the surface is covered with wavy and serpentine sinkages like worm-eaten wood, or treated with vertical dripping forms like lime deposits from dripping water. Sometimes the stones had sides bevelled and brought to a point or ridge in the centre.
The use of rustication was introduced into England by Inigo Jones, as in the gate of the Botanic Gardens at Oxford (1632), and became a dominant feature in much English Renaissance work. In American colonial work this influence is seen in the occasional shaping of outside sheathing boards to imitate rusticated masonry, as in portions of the Morris-Jumel house in New York (1765). Quoins (q.v.), or corner blocks are, in many styles, rusticated, where the face of the wall is left smooth.