We have already seen in Chapter V. how the busy ceilings of the Jacobean type changed into the coffered ceilings of Inigo Jones and Webb, who established a type which held the field, under Wren and his successors, well into the eighteenth century. The general tendency was to increase the relief of the plasterwork, to imitate nature instead of conventionalising it; to work on the same lines which Grinling Gibbons was following with his carving in wood. The result was that the plasterwork had frequently to be modelled on wire which formed the stems of the leaves, and much of it was completely detached from the surface of the ceiling which it adorned. A very fine example of this treatment is to be seen in the Courts of Justice at Northampton (Fig. 306). [Illustration: FIG. 308.--OLD BUCKINGHAM HOUSE. THE STAIRCASE, WITH PAINTED CEILING AND WALLS.] [Illustration: FIG. 309.--HAMPTON COURT PALACE. THE GRAND STAIRCASE, WITH PAINTED CEILING AND WALLS.] [Illustration: FIG. 310.--Part of a Painted Ceiling, Boughton House.] Contemporary with this kind of ceiling was a treatment entirely different, which was in vogue in great houses during the reigns of Charles II., James II., and William and Mary; this was the painting of immense plain surfaces with allegorical, mythological, and scriptural subjects. Old Buckingham House had a large ceiling of the kind over the principal staircase (Fig. 308); and the walls were painted so as to produce the effect of architectural perspective. This fashion is intimately associated with the name of Verrio, an Italian painter, who was brought to England by Charles II. He and his assistant and successor Laguerre are the best known of those who worked in this line of decoration, for they are immortalised by Pope, who describes how in a great house, being summoned “to all the pride of prayer” in the chapel-- “On painted ceilings you devoutly stare Where sprawl the saints of Verrio and Laguerre.”