In the framework of historical buildings, wall thickness as well as wall constituents are not often known a priori, and active IR thermography can be exploited as a nonintrusive method for detecting what kind of material lies beneath the external plaster layer. In the present work, the wall of a historical building is subjected to a heating stimulus, and the surface temperature temporal trend is recorded by an IR camera. A hybrid numerical model is developed in order to simulate the transient thermal response of a wall made of different known materials underneath the plaster layer. When the numerical thermal contrast and the appearance time match with the experimental thermal images, the material underneath the plaster can be qualitatively identified.