The Library of the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts PRESENTED BY PHILIP LITTLE, JR. IN MEMORY OF PHILIP LITTLE 1942 I Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/studyofartistswa01stur STUDY OF THE ARTISTS WAY OF WORKING ^OUTH porch of the Erechtheion, Athens, date uncertain ( about jgo B. C). 'The finest known piece of Grecian architectural sculpture. Restora- tions can be seen in the superstructure, in the base on which the caryatids stand, and in the right-hand figure. The second figure from the left is a terra- cotta copy of the original given in Fig. 190. See Chapters XXIV and XXV L ■ i - A STUDY OF THE ARTIST S WAY OF WORKING IN THE VARIOUS HANDICRAFTS AND ARTS OF DESIGN BY RUSSELL STURGIS, A.M., Ph.D. Fellow of the American Institute of Architects Author of " European Architecture, a Historical Study," " How to Judge Architecture," "The Appreciation of Sculpture," etc., etc., and editor and chief author of " Dictionary of Architecture and Building " Volume I. NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 1905 copykight, 1905, By Dodd, Mead and Company All rights reserved Published, October, 1905 662 S THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. DEDICATED WITH ADMIRATION AND UNDYING GRATITUDE TO THE MANY ARTISTS AND SKILLED ARTISANS TO THE SCULPTORS AND CARVERS, PAINTERS AND DRAUGHTSMEN, SILVERSMITHS AND BLACKSMITHS, POTTERS AND GLASS- MAKERS, MASONS AND JOINERS, PRINTERS AND ENGRAVERS, ARCHITECTS AND DECORATIVE DESIGNERS, WHO DURING FORTY YEARS HAVE BEEN MY TEACHERS IN FINE ART Preface IT is an explanatory book, which is here offered to the reader. It is not a History of Art in any sense; it is a treatise on the ways in which the artist's conceptions are formed and take visible shape. No attempt is made to follow chronological order or to dwell upon the sequence of styles, nor is any attempt made to dwell upon national peculiarities of design and to differentiate the spirit of artistic work in different races of mankind. A given artistical process may be in its nature and its results essentially the same to-day as under the kings of the Fourth Dynasty. Now, it is with the artistical processes only, and what they reveal, that this book is concerned. The purpose is in every case to ask the questions : What was the artist in search of as he wrought his work of art? — How did he achieve the desired result ? — to ask these questions, and, if possible, to answer them. When artistic manual work is in the way of being done, that is to say, when an object is being made or a surface treated in a certain way by the hand of the artist, with the purpose of producing as much as practicable of beauty or effectiveness of some kind, the physical opera- tion, the way in which the tool is handled and is made to affect the material which it attacks, is inseparable from the [vii] PREFAC E artistic purpose. Suppose that we were to try to analyze the speech of a fluent talker, who has also knowledge and ideas, and who is engaged for the moment with some serious subject : The mind of that talker is at the same time producing thoughts from his store of memories and of impressions, and drawing conclusions from those memo- ries and impressions ; it determines at the same moment the action of the organs of speech in producing certain sounds, and still, at the same moment, it is preparing the thoughts which are to follow, and almost the words in the next sentence or clause. Try to explain to the satis- faction of a person who cannot speak nor hear, but who can read writing understandingly, how the mental proc- esses and the vocal organs work together in producing intelligible and intelligent speech, and then you may go on to explain just how the mental processes and the hand holding the tool work together in producing an original pattern or in shaping a block of wood to a decorative figure. It is to this subject that is devoted Part III, the Fine Arts of Hand-Work. There are other Fine Arts which are not directlv connected with Hand-Work, and those are treated in Part IV. This is, then, an attempt to show the way in which the artist's thought seeks its expression in artistic manipulation ; and also in the direction of the labors of subordinates. There are no authorities which can be cited as having aided the author in preparing the present work, which is, in no sense, a compilation. The author's onlv au- thorities are the pieces themselves. No statement is made concerning the character or the certain or probable method of production of any work of art without the [viii] PREFACE immediate consideration of a characteristic specimen of that art. There is no mention of ceramic painting, except as made in the presence of valuable pieces show- ing all the characteristics of the best decoration; and in like manner, no mention of a piece ot carving that was not held in the hand at the moment of composing the passage, no word about the essential nature ot expressional sculpture, except after close consideration ot the full statement made by the sculpture itselt ot its own nature and origin. The undertaking of such work implies, theretore, a lifetime of familiarity with Fine Art in nearly all its forms, and in nearly all the stages ot intellectual development ; and, in most cases, a knowledge also of the processes employed, a familiarity gained in watching the work going on, it not in practising it. Such experience comes more easily to an architect engaged in decorative work than to most other persons ; but a lifelong habit ot " making notes," mental or other, has something to do with devel- oping power ot observation and a retentive memory ot such things. In like manner the illustrations are taken very largely trom the author's own collection; and all others have their provenience clearly stated in the legends. It will be noted that small objects are selected, as tar as practicable. This is because the reproduction at the scale or nearly the scale ot the original is a great advantage to the student. The objects whose size makes this im- possible, the buildings, the pictures in public museums, and the famous objects ot decorative art reproduced in some of the pictures are, in almost every case, familiar to the author by close and continued study ot the origi- [ix] PREFACE nals, kept in memory by the same photographs which have served for the half-tone blocks. My sincere acknowledgments are offered to Dr. Wil- liam Popper, Mr. Okakura Kakasu, and the New York managers of the firm of Yamanaka & Co. for translations of Persian and Japanese manuscripts. Thanks are due to Messrs. Tiffany & Co., Messrs. Dodd, Mead & Co., and Mr. E. F. Bonaventure tor loan of works of art. All the laces are from a collection made by the house of Jesurum & Co., Venice. The photographs made from the Marquand Collection were taken, with Mr. Kirby's kind permission, before the collection was broken up and sold ; and those of the A. Sturgis Collection before its sale to the American Museum of Natural History. R. S. CONTENTS PART I Introduction Page Chapter One — -The Nature of the Inquiry 3 Chapter Two — The Work of the Lower Civilizations . . 12 PART II The Five Mechanical Processes Chapter Three — Carving „ . 33 Chapter Four — Modelling and Embossing ...„.« 63 Chapter Five — Painting , . . . 76 Chapter Six — Staining and Dyeing , 91 Chapter Seven — Drawing 97 PART III The Several Fine Arts of Hand- Work Chapter Eight — Ceramic Art 109 Chapter Nine — The Vitreous Art 134 Chapter Ten — Metal Work 164 Chapter Eleven — Leather Work 192 Chapter Twelve — Textile Art 205 Chapter Thirteen — Embroidery 237 Chapter Fourteen — Building 261 Chapter Fifteen — Plastering 284 Chapter Sixteen — Joinery ........... 297 ILLUSTRATIONS Frontispiece. — South porch of the Erechtheion, Athens, date uncertain (about 390 B. C). The finest known piece of Grecian archi- tectural sculpture. Restorations can be seen in the superstructure, in the base on which the caryatids stand, and in the right-hand figure. The second figure from the lett is a terra-cotta copv of the original given in Fig. 190. See Chapters XXIV and XXVI. Figure FULL PAGE 1 p. Statue by Canova, of Pius VI, pope 1775— 1800. Rome, St. Peter's, in the Confessio . . . To face page 43 21. Bust modelled in wax and colored. Lille, France; Musee Wicar " "71 28. Arms of the Visconti of Milan, painted on door of Cabinet in Sacristy, Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan (From Gruner's " Lo Scaftale") " "89 29. Greek vase (Hydria) 17 inches high, about 500 b. c. Thin black glaze, the large panel left in the, red of the clav. The main subject is a procession of Bacchus, the lower band is of lions and other beasts, and on the neck is painted Herakles and divinities. The subjects were drawn by incised lines in the clay before the painting was done (Marquand Collection) " " 97 30. Drawing in black and white chalk on gray paper, attributed to Titian. Louvre Museum . . " " 98 31. " Le Combat d'Oued-Alleg," 31 December, 1839. From the Lithograph by D. A. M. RafFet, 1 804-1 860 " "102 37. Greek vase (Amphora) 17 inches high, about 600 b. c. The reddish yellow clay forms the background, the bands are black and red, and the figures of beasts and fabulous creatures are in black, purple, and dark red (Marquand Collection) . . . " "123 [xiii] ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 39. Vase, French Faience: 16 inches high. Made at Moustiers-Ste.- Marie, in Provence; deco- ration probably by Olerys, about 1740 . To face page 128 42. Large vase, Japanese hard yellow ware, with crackled glaze. Province of Satsuma, eigh- teenth century a. d " " 130 46. Glass Dish. Vitro di Trino (Marquand Collection) " " 140 50. Hanging Lamp, 1 1 inches high. Glass en- graved with acid. The chain, brass, with colored wooden beads. Syrian work, uncer- tain epoch " " 1 47 55. Candlestick of Chinese Cloisonne enamel, 15 inches high ; seventeenth century a. d. . . " " 158 57. Bronze Bust, life size, apparently cut from a statue, formerly called " Plato," now, rather, Dionysos. Found in Villa at Herculaneum. Naples, Museo Nazionale " " 173 58. Bronze Bust, life size, apparently a portrait, found in Villa at Herculaneum. Naples, Museo Nazionale " "174 60. Wrought Steel Buckler, Italian, sixteenth century : parcel-gilt and dotted with silver ; diameter 22 inches (From Burlington Fine Arts Club, exhibition of 1900) " " 181 70. Cover of book printed in 1596 : from the library of Catherine de Medicis (Techener Histoire de la Bibliophilie) " "194 95. Gateway of Roman Imperial date at Athens, Greece. It connected the Roman " City of Hadrian " with the Greek " City of Theseus " " " 264 98. Timber-built house at Strasburg on the Rhine, sixteenth century " " 271 100. Temple of purest Roman style at Vienne (Isere), France: thought to be of the first century a. d. " " 274 107. Florence, Palazzo del Conte Boutourlin. Six- teenth-century Painting restored " " 293 115. Siena Cathedral stalls and decorative woodwork in choir " " 3 1 5 1 20. Cupboard in red cedar, with brass strap hinges, the design of George Fletcher Babb, in 1880. Private house, New York City " "327 [ xiv ] ILLUSTRATIONS ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT Figure Page 1. Blade of Paddle, Pacific Islands 14 2. Heads of two Paddles, Pacific Islands 16 3. Cloth made of extended bark, Pacific Islands : pattern in dark brown printed from wood blocks (A. Sturgis Collection) 19 4. Four War Clubs, Pacific Islands (A. Sturgis Collection) . 26 5. Grass-woven Belts, Pacific Islands : the color is that of the undyed dry fibre combined with red and black (A. Sturgis Collection ) 29 6. Cloth of printed bark shown on a smaller scale than Fig. 3 (A. Sturgis Collection) 30 7. Ivory box, total height 5 inches 35 7 bis. Ivory box, total height 4 inches 35 8. Sculpture in the Round : ivory statuette, eighteenth centurv 36 9. Tinted Ivory Relief, 4 inches high : contemporary portrait of Henry IV of France 37 9 bis. Tinted Ivory Relief, 4 inches high : contemporary portrait of Marie de Medicis, Queen of Henrv IV of France 38 10. Tomb of Sassetti : Church of SS. Trinita, Florence (original in the building) 39 1 I. Metope Relief from south flank of the Parthenon : head of man nearly free from background (Original in British Museum) 40 12. Concavo-convex Relief: Temple of Kalabsheh in upper Egypt (the ancient Talmis ) (Original in the building) 41 13. Chinese box : dark red carved lacquer (tio-tsi) .... 43 15. Chinese Cup of dark red Wood 46 16. Tomb at Limyra, Asia Minor (From Petersen and Von Luschan) 48 17. Portal of Chapel at Convent of Batalha, Portugal ... 52 18. Lower half of wrought steel Door, 18 inches wide, fifteenth century (Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1900) .... 53 19. La Danse de 1'Echarpe, by A. Leonard. Figures in Biscuit of Sevres Porcelain (Sevres Exhibit, Baumgart) ... 66 20. Study in clay, monument to Watteau, by Lormier ... 69 [xv] ILLUSTRA TIONS Figure Page 22. Portrait medallion in pressed horn, Frederic Henrv, Prince of Orange, signed by John Osborn, 1626 (Church, A. H., and others, "Some Minor Arts") .... 72 23. FLtui, Repousse work in gold, French, eighteenth century . 74 24. Patch box, Repousse work in gold, French, eighteenth century 75 25. Stone Screen, Aldenham Church, Herts, England, painted in bright red, bright green, dark blue and white, with touches of gilding, about 1480 ( Blackburne's "Sketches") 77 26. Indian or Persian vase with thick light blue glaze, eleventh or twelfth century, a. d. ( Marquand Collection, 1903) 80 27. Gold lacquer box, six inches across, Japan, seventeenth centurv, a. d 88 32. Greek Pot: Asiatic taste 112 33. Greek Kylix. Black ground. Best Period . . . . . 113 34. Persian plates (Marquand Collection) 115 33. Chinese bottle, silver mounted 116 36. Faience plate painted by A. Sandier 117 38. Majolica dish (" La Collection Spitzer " ) 126 40. Persian bottles in dark blue and pale blue on bluish-white ground ( Marquand Collection ) 128 41. Persian tiles, square panel (Marquand Collection) . . . 129 43. Chinese porcelain bowl 132 44. Two small plain bottles (Marquand Collection) . . . 136 45 j [Small glass bottles of Greco-Roman work. | . . . . 137 45 bis r These and Fig. 44 from graves on shores-, . . . . 137 45 tcr] of Mediterranean.] | . . . . 138 47. Two Persian aiguieres (Marquand Collection) . . . . 142 48. Wine-glass, seventeenth centurv 144 49. Venice bottle, 15 inches high 145 51. Enamelled tumbler 148 52. Tray about 15 inches long. Surface enamel (Marquand Collection) 152 53. Small Japanese vase. Enamel on silver ...... 134 34. Under side of Indian bracelet ......... 156 [xvi] ILLUSTRATIONS Figure Page 56. Cire perdue casting. Handles, frogs, and turtles separate . 171 59. Cast-iron medallion. Early nineteenth century . . . . 178 61. Steel keys, French, seventeenth century 183 62. Grille, eighteenth century. Bourges, France . . . . 184 63. Grille, fourteenth century. Verona ....... 185 64. Indian bracelet, turquoise side 186 65. Russian enamelled chain 187 66. Silver watch, French eighteenth century. The case set with carbuncles and a tortoise-shell medallion . . . 188 66 bis. Gold outer case of watch. French eighteenth century . 189 67. Pewter Vase 190 68. Persian two-edged Sword 190 69. Binding, dark blue Morocco, with the armorial bearings and orders of The Great Dauphin, Son of Louis XIV, died 171 1 (Collection of E. F. Bonaventure) 193 71. Binding of a manuscript Diploma of Bologna University dated 1650 197 72. Binding in red morocco, " Office de la Semaine Sainte," Paris, 1 69 1 . The Fleurs-de-lis and the crowned LL, mark it as belonging to one of the royal chateaux . . 198 73. Leather Bottle arranged to be hung to a strap over the shoulder ("La Collection Spitzer " ) 202 74. Binding, vellum, painted in vivid colors and with gilding applied on the smooth surface, without impression . . 203 75. Japanese brocade, dragons, clouds, and kylins in horizontal bands 215 76. Japanese Brocade woven with paper strips gilded on one side. Pomegranates and Persian Flowers 216 77. Oriental carpet, mixed pattern (Marquand Collection) . 220 78. Part of chasuble of Genoa velvet 221 79. Modern gold and silver brocade 223 80. Old Venice gold brocade 224 8 1. Part of chasuble, green silk 227 82. Part of Chinese gown, blue ground . . . . . . . 228 83. Genoa guipure, seventeenth century ....... 234 [ xvii ] ILLUSTRATIONS Figure ? a ge 84. Early Italian passamans (passement) 235 85. False Valenciennes ; Flemish work, eighteenth century . . 236 86. Embroidery in silk with couching of gold cord. Japanese work, eighteenth century 240 87. Embroidery on silk, the flowers and leaves in relief in cushions of yellow silk faced with gold thread. Persian work, seventeenth century 242 88. Dalmatic, embroidered very heavily in silk of many colors. Italian work, seventeenth century 245 89. Part of a chasuble, embroidery on white ground with silk of many colors. Italian work, sixteenth century . . . 246 90. Embroidery on silk. Persian work, seventeenth century . 249 91. Part of priest's ceremonial robe, embroidered in silk, with much applique work. [apanese work, eighteenth century 252 92. Needle-made lace, so-called Brussels point 254 93. Guipure a Brides, so-called English point 255 94. Venice Rose-point lace 257 96. Chateau of Josselin in Brittany. Court-yard front . . . 268 97. View in Nuremberg, Bavaria : houses of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 269 99. Chartres Cathedral : south porch central doorway. The sculpture is of about 1275 2 7 2 1 01. Florence, Loggia of S. Paolo. Designed by Brunelleschi about 1440. The rondels in the spandrils by Luca or Andrea della Robbia 275 102. Frame house, covered with shingles, at Orange, New Jersey, designed by Babb, Cook & Willard, about 1887 279 103. Frame house covered with shingles, at Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Designed by Andrews, Jaques & Rantoul, about 1886 280 104. Rome: stuccoes from a vaulted room near the Tiber, work of the first century a. d 286 105. Campagna of Rome. Stuccoes from a tomb on the Via Latina. Work of the first century a. d 287 106. Hatfield House. Long gallery ; plaster ceiling of about 1610 288 108. Florence, detail of Palazzo Corsi, Sgraffito Decoration . . 295 [ xviii ] ILLUSTRATIONS Figure Page 109. Part of a carved oak chest at Loches ; carved panels, the arms of France in the central panel. Work of about 1500 (Private Collection) 302 1 10. Cassone, or large chest, with tempera paintings on top, front and ends (Marquand Collection) 303 111. Amiens Cathedral, Choir woodwork. Details of canopies over back row of stalls 308 112. Cabinet of French or Flemish work, about 1550 (Private Collection in Austria) . 313 113. Walnut sideboard, of the South of France, about 1 700 a. d. 314 1 1 4. Table, about 8 feet long, of about 1600 (Marquand Collection ) 315 116. Siena Cathedral. Choir woodwork. Details of wall-lining behind stalls 317 117. Part of a writing table, with veneering of tropical wood and mountings of gilded bronze ; work of about 1725 (Private Collection) 319 118. Part of table, gilded wooden frame, marble slab, work of about 1775 ( Palace of Versailles ) 322 119. Table, chair, and part of arm-chair: work of Napoleon's reign, 1802— 1814 (Palace of the Greater Trianon) . . 323 The reproduction on the title-page is the obverse of a coin of Syra- cuse in Sicily, of the beginning of the third century B. C. The design on the back of the cover is a study from Renaissance [xix] Part I INTRODUCTION THE ARTIST S WAY OF WORKING Chapter One THE NATURE OF THE INQUIRY THE artist is a man who has thoughts to express, and who expresses them in a language altogether different from the language of words. The fact that these ideas are often inexpressible in words, and the fact that they are generally such as are capable of giving great pleasure to persons who understand the work are not, as it seems, essential to the nature of the artist's pursuit. In some cases the purely artistic thought may be express- ible in words, or partly so. On certain occasions and to certain persons the work of art may pro- duce the reverse of a pleasant impression ; it may not even be capable of giving the pleasure which a tragedy gives — a pleasure which is already some- what hard to explain. The sense of pain, of discomfort, which is produced by close study of certain works of art, may exceed the pleasure received from their artistic treatment, but this in no way changes their character ; they are still [3] THE NATURE OF THE I N Q U I R Y works of art, because the person who has produced them has had thoughts to express, which (in the Arts of Design) he seeks to convey either by pure form, or by expression of pure form on the flat surface, and, in either, by beautiful gradations of light and shade, — that is to say, of grayness leading into white on one side and to black on the other, or by color used for its own sake, or by two or more of these means employed simultaneously. By these means are conveyed the thoughts of the artist in form and color, the designer as we call him ; but also the means by which a musician conveys his thoughts are far more like to those of the painter or carver than they are to those of the writer or composer in words. Sounds may be combined for artistic effect in the simplest tune which can be learned easily and whistled on the streets, or in the elaborate orchestration of a symphony ; and it is rather generally understood that the musical thoughts so expressed would be wholly inexpressible in words. But what is a "thought" in line art? It is not the notion that such and such form or color would be prettier, that such and such a sequence of notes would sound well ; it is the unconscious creation of that very form, or color, or sequence of notes, — the taking shape in the mind of the group of parts which make up the color-harmony, the attractive pattern, the interesting pose, the sonorous and startling chord. And such a thought [4] * THOUGHT AND ITS EXPRESSION is more apt to take shape and consistence when the artist has begun his work and as he proceeds with it than at any other time. Dimly it may have been perceived, but it is not complete until the modelling-tool is in hand and already soiled with the clay — until the etching-needle has made its first few cuts through the hardened ground. The artist, then, is not a man who has thought at leisure and has gone to his piece of material with his mind made up, and prepared to do his piece of technical work. As an able thinker rises to speak "extemporaneously," as we say, that is, without having written down the exact words which he intends to use on that occasion, and speaks fluently and to the point, forgetting little of what he would like to say, and bringing together as he goes on much that he was not thinking of when he rose, so the artist in form and color is one who renders thought with his fingers, in a way quite inexplicable to one who has not something of the instinct, together with a little knowledge of the practice of such things. His thoughts are generally expressible only in the language of the art which he is practising : and as this language is known to the outside world only by study of the work of art itself, it follows that the purpose of the artist, his mental processes, cannot be explained apart from the movement of his intelligence which partly precedes and partly accompanies the work of his hands. [5] THE NATURE OF THE INQUIRY If now, having a work of art before us, we desire to ascertain what the purpose was which the artist had in mind as he worked, we are com- pelled to reconstruct the mental processes which the artist went through. We have the result ; and if we wish to know how it was reached we follow the reverse ot the course pursued by the artist himself — we remount the stream in hope of rinding its source. A comparison may be drawn from the well-known and often cited prac- tice of those grammarians of the fifteenth century who gave us the grammar of the Latin tongue. Such a grammarian had the manuscripts of certain Latin authorities, and he had his experience of his own vernacular, and of several dialects other than his own, and beside him lay such unscientific and too summary essays on the construction of language as might then exist, relating to his own vernacular or those of other tongues of his epoch. With such material as this, and with no other guide, he had to create from the texts of Latin authors the non-existing Latin grammar. If he found in a manuscript the word factus, he had no handbook, like one of those which are always within reach to-day, to tell him that this was a mode of one and the same verb with fio and fieri. The odd-looking word reipublicac, or juribusjuran- dis could be associated with the nominative res- publica or jusjurandum only after much reading, and then by a strong mental effort. There was [6] THE SEARCH FOR THE ARTIST'S THOUGHT no professor at hand to whom he could refer for advice or guidance. The world has no record of the hesitations and the blunderings with which the early study of grammar must have been thickly sown. Nobody has occasion now-a-days to con- sult the early grammars. Here and there a col- lector loves to have them by him to show to admiring fellow-collectors ; but it is not reported that any of them has been read since the fifteenth century. The public-school boys and the scholars alike take it for granted that a grammar is and has always been on the top shelf, and a lexicon among the larger books below. It never occurs to the modern reader of a Latin text, carefully edited, punctuated, and divided up into sentences and paragraphs, what the task was which the fifteenth-century student was compelled to under- take. Robert Browning's imagined grammarian, he whose burial is recorded in a well-known poem, was not concerned with controverting other scholars as to the " enclitic De." He found the word, the little word, the particle, in a dozen manuscripts or early printed books; and his busi- ness was to examine the context as to its meaning: and force, in each and every case of the recurrence of the word in question. Little by little his theory of it was built up, and one paragraph of the new Greek grammar had then been composed. Very much in this way must he proceed who would ascertain the artist's meaning in a given [7 ] THE NATURE OF THE INQUIRY work of art. The artist is not often capable of explaining in words what he has been intending to express in his artistic work. On the other hand, it has been found hitherto extremely diffi- cult for any one else — for any one other than an actual working artist — to translate into words the significance of any given work of art. And yet, without such verbal expression of the artistic thought, without such translation into the lan- guage of words of the artist's own utterance of his thoughts, no criticism of a work of art is possible. The criticism of a work of art must consist first in an explanation of the apparent and the probable artistic intention of the artist. The inquiry begins either evidently and as expressed in words, or tacitly and as understood between critic and reader, with a questioning of this sort — What may we assume has been our artist's intent? In order to meet this primary question we have to know a great deal about the possibil- ities. We have to know what are the mechanical processes used by artists in undertaking such tasks, and what the experience of past times has been ; who has succeeded greatly and who has succeeded only in part. The question as to what else was or may be possible does not come up : art criti- cism has always to do with the completed work of art brought before us for our study. And this, too, must be established, that the purpose of [8] WHY WE SEEK FOR THE ARTIST'S THOUGHT criticism is never to instruct the artist : the artist cares nothing for such criticism ; he gets a hint or two from a brother artist and may approve or resent such expression of opinion. What he hears from the critic can never be of use to him, and it is not for the sake of the artist that the criti- cism is written. Art criticism exists for the sake of the outside world. It is said above that artists are not often capable of explaining their intention in words. When they do, provided the explanation is sincere — that is to say, truthful — it is a most excellent guide to art criticism, and he who would study art should make careful note of every deliberate expression of opinion by an artist concerning his own work, or the work of others of his own occupation. But the main thing for the art student to remem- ber is that any such expression of opinion or record of experience of the artist, will be nearly always exclusively artistic in its nature ; that is to say, it will have nothing to do with ordinary sentiment or private affection ; nothing to do with patriotism or public spirit ; nothing to do with morality or virtue in any form ; nothing to do with religion. So far as the artist cares for any of those things, he cares not as an artist, but as a citizen, as a family man, as a brother of his kind. And so a work of art may have a purpose other than an artistic one, but that is not the purpose to which the artist gave much thought once the subject was [9] THE NATURE OF T H E INQUIRY decided, nor is it to that subject that art criticism is directed — good citizen or careless pococurante, he may in either case have produced a work of art which it would take all our energies to criti- cise aright. Therefore, it is not criticism of a work of art to say, as many moralists have said, that the artist should teach this or that — should aim at this or that effect upon the world. To say that he should be a teacher of truth of any kind, a moralist, a revealer, or an expounder, or a preacher, is to substitute one set of thoughts for another, and will never result in criticism. If you have occasion to form your own opinion of a poem, a piece of music, or a drawing, it will become you to find out first of all what the artist was really seeking for, because by much the greater part of your study must be the looking for what is. The consideration of what might have been, or of what ought to be, must come afterward if at all; and in most cases it will not be needed at all. The criticism of the works of a new poet must of necessity be an examination of what the work is. Little does the world care for the critic's opinion as to whether it might not with advan- tage have been something else. The student of Art must, therefore, look at a work of art many times, by itself, and also in comparison with other works of art ; he must look at it patiently, not hastily deciding as to the exact thoughts which were in the artist's mind, [ 10] WHY WE SEEK FOR THE ARTISTS THOUGHT but distinguishing little by little the essential from the accidental and temporary. At last a fellow- feeling will begin to arise in his, the student's, mind, by means of which he can really know that at last he has ascertained in part what the artist was trying to express. [ » ] Chapter Two THE WORK OF THE LOWER CIVILIZATIONS THERE is no fine art 1 work that is not of civilization. Primitive man in the true sense of the word, that is, the savage who has as yet achieved very little in his search for the greater physical comfort of his life and for greater security of his life and property, — primitive man in that sense has no fine art which need be reckoned with. The savage eats and sleeps, hunts, fights, eats and sleeps again ; he has no leisure, only torpor ; he cannot conceive of consecutive work or of work done for intellectual pleasure. But unless work is consecutive and deliberate, and 1 Fine Art : art which has for its object mental pleasure, usually of an ennobling sort: (but see page 3). The work which makes a utensil pleasant in form and color comes under this definition, and so does the representation of an object, a scene, or an incident when treated in such a way as to reach in itself an attractive and interesting result. In this work, decorative art will not be separated from other fine art. The highest mission of a great mural painting is to be deco- rative in the highest sense : on the other hand, the shaping of a sword- hilt into graceful curves and the adding of surface ornament to it, being good decoration, is also a fine art. THE ART OF THE PACIFIC ISLANDS done with intellectual pleasure, no fine art results from it. The apparent exceptions to this rule are not so certainly exceptions that they need be care- fully weighed. Civilization of much complexity may exist along with tyrannical government, with cannibalism, with great social disorder. Thus, in the case of the Pacific Islands ; to read the accounts of the earliest European visitants to these islands, one would suppose that those were de- graded savages who fought with Cook and La Perouse ; but if we read Mariner's record, as recorded by John Martin in 1818, his who lived among the people of the Tonga Islands until he grew to know them, we find that the civiliza- tion which Mariner knew in the first decade of the nineteenth century, which Melville found in 1846, and which La Farge describes as he saw it in 1892, existed already when the overbearing and contemptuous European refused to believe that those who opposed him in defence of their own homes could be men of any civilization at all. The very interesting art of the Pacific Islands contains an indefinite number of puzzles, and the attempt to apply scientific methods to its investi- gation has not been, hitherto, a brilliant success. Its antiquity is unknown, the origin of its symbols and its technical methods can only be guessed ; the practised student of decorative art 1 has noth- 1 Decorative Art : fine art applied to the making beautiful or interest- ing that which is made for utilitarian purposes. Architecture may be [ IJ ] THE WORK OF THE LOWER CIVILIZATIONS ing for it but to sit down before the works of art themselves and try to judge of their significance. Thus, in Fig. i , there is given the blade of a paddle. It appears that a series of incised lozenges are filled each by a ridge, leaving two triangles fitted closely together, and that a number of these loz- enges occupy a parallel- ogram ; that a series of crescent-shaped units occupy also a parallel- ogram, and that panels filled in these two ways alternate with one an- other ; while a double row of small incised triangles fills the blank surfaces between the ornamental panels ; that a modification of these patterns is used for the general border, which, with singular judgment and good taste in its design, encloses the whole. All these di- Fig. i . Blade of Paddle, Pacific Islands considered the chief of the decorative arts, or, it may be considered as a combination of decorative art applied to certain parts with constructional science and utilitarian devices which control the whole structure. [ H] THE ART OF THE PACIFIC ISLANDS visions and subdivisions occupy, with the narrow bands between them, a large surface of dark red wood ; they are produced by the process of digging little pits in the wood, each depression having distinctly sloping sides meeting at the bottom of the little pit. The general opinion is that such a simple carving was done with a shark- tooth, because the evidence of the use of imple- ments of hard stone, splinters of flint, and splinters of agate, is not often traceable in the Pacific Islands. It appears also that the sharp-pointed tooth of certain voracious fishes was quite hard and sharp enough to do the cutting, and that this was exactly the tool most desirable for the rub- bing smooth of the cut surfaces. Fig. 2 gives the crown or head of the same paddle that is shown in Fig. 1, as well as another of similar design. The top of each is cut square and itself adorned with a sunken pattern of considerable complexity ; and it is remarkable with what accurate skill the plane of this top, taken in a general sense, is made normal to the lines of the long, round handle. A machine could hardly have cut it more squarely off. The little projections around this flat top, forming the crown, are detached from the mass by cuts averaging half an inch in depth, and these projections are separated from one another by a space smaller than this depth. The technical skill shown is considerable ; and the noticeable thing about the whole is the leisure in which the work [15] THE WORK OF THE LOWER CIVILIZATIONS has been undertaken, the evident willingness to spend time upon it indefinitely, the calm satisfac- tion of the workman who could begin a task which, as he must have known from tradition and the example of others near him, would oc- cupy all the quiet hours of many months or years. Now the peculiar significance of these two pieces of work when compared one with another is in this — that the units of design of the crown are all of them studies of the human face. It is unmistakable, it is as certain as any- thing can be, that the front of the human head formed the Not that it appears cer- tain that the artist whose work we are con- sidering studied the human head with any care. He may well have copied a copy which was itself the copy of a copy, and that through many steps of the development of the design ; but it is indisputably true that the human head was the [ 16] Fig. 2. Heads of two Paddles, Pacific Islands a Head of Paddle shown in Fig. I b Head of a much shorter Paddle motive of this design THE ART OF THE PACIFIC ISLANDS origin of the design — taken up by what innovat- ing genius in the remote past no one can even surmise. Contrasted with this is the pattern of the blade (see Fig. i), in which it is as clear that no imitation or representation of any existing ob- ject was in the designer's mind. What he did was to divide up the surface with straight lines, and he amused himself by so doing and enjoyed the result. Here again he was not the first maker of this pattern, and in the remote past he who made the pattern which after many removes was at last embodied in this particular piece of work may first have drawn his triangles with a crum- bling shell, making white marks on a smooth surface of water-worn, dark-colored rock ; thus trying to make more permanent and more delicate what he had scrawled aforetime on the beach at low tide. The man who enjoyed drawing such patterns on the rock, for the rising tide to wash off again, would also feel a certain vexation that the pretty thing he drew yesterday was not in existence to-day, that he might show it to some one else. He would try then whether a harder piece of shell would cut a groove, and whether a softer surface would not admit of grooves being cut. His crossing lines would give him the pattern of triangles, and it would be a delightful surprise when somebody suggested that each tri- angle could be subdivided by three lines meeting in the middle. For his more enterprising suc- VOL. 1 — 2 [ 17 ] THE WORK OF THE LOWER CIVILIZATIONS cessor it was a not unnatural thing to sketch that skeleton drawing, that diagram, upon the blade of a paddle, and to make from that drawing a carved pattern somewhat like that which is repre- sented in Fig. i. It took a vast number of years and a long succession of artists before the pattern grew to be as fixed and accurate, and also as unchangeable, as the one before us, and before the work could be as highly finished. Minute- ness, exactness, and precise finish came together with formalism, inseparable in this as they have been ever since in the history of human art. Such are early manifestations of the art of sculp- ture ; the one shown in Fig. 2 being probably based upon a preliminary practice of a kind of drawing other than the scribing on the wood. We have now to consider a multiplied or repro- duced art, also based upon a piece of drawing. Fig. 3 is a pattern printed on the smooth, extended or pulled-out, inner bark of a tree, — a material known in the Sandwich Islands as tapa. This work is done, usually, by women, who print off impressions from a wooden block ; but it appears that the practice of different communities differs widely in this, some of them making the pattern up from many separate impressions of a block as square and plain as a brick, while with others the block is itself carved, something as in Europe a wood engraving is made, so that each impres- sion of the block gives a larger piece of the [18] THE ART OF THE PACIFIC ISLANDS diaper 1 pattern, including indeed several of the units of design. Fig. 3. Cloth made of extended bark, Pacific Islands : pattern in dark brown printed from wood blocks (A. Sturgis Collection) It is noticeable that the entirely non-representa- tive succession of straight and curved lines in flat 1 Diaper : a pattern in which the unit of design constantly repeats itself, or in which two or three different units of design succeed one an- [ 19] THE WORK OF THE LOWER CIVILIZATIONS patterns takes longer to develop, and meets the conditions of elaborate design more completely than work done in solid form. Carving or modelling is obviously a more simple and more primitive way of representing an object than draw- ing or daubing on the flat. Thus the "idols," or "fetishes," of many low civilizations, the amulets and symbols, tikis and totem-figures have but a far- away and grotesque representation of humanity, in which a superstitious terror has been the determin- ing cause of the work, and has affected the design to an extent almost impossible to trace or define. In like manner the hideous deformity of a New Zealand carved head wrought upon the framed posts of a chief's house does not express the artistic feeling of the Maori people ; it expresses threaten- ing and defiance, — just as do the steel vizors of the most artistic period of Japan. Now this very readiness to express other ideas than those of decoration points to the comparative ease with which free sculpture is handled by untrained men. It is clear that it would be a much more serious effort to produce on the flat surface a drawing in line or a daubing with pigment of any kind which should resemble humanity as nearly as such a carved log represents it. For a low civilization, that would be a prodigious achievement, nor are we other in the repetition, but always touching one another, or set in close juxtaposition. The term is connected with jasper. A design made of separate spots is more properly called a sowing, French seme. [ 20] ARTISTIC AND NON-ARTISTIC IDEAS likely to find even among the curiously traditional and fixed code of laws of Polynesian society any inspiration to such an art as that. What seems an exception exists in North America : there has been noted a tendency among the red Indians of North America to produce absolutely flat paintings, some- times on the smooth rock, sometimes on the inner side of a buffalo-hide. This often took the form of picture-writing of a very simple sort, but the question as to how early in the history of the North American aborigines this picture-writing was instituted is as yet unanswered. The tribes of what is now the United States never brought their pictographs up to the lowest artistic level in any region east of the great plains. Expressive of some ideas they were, like hieroglyphics in the proper sense, but the ideas were not artistic. The decoration dear to the North American savage of the forest region was rather that of strings of beads and tastefully arranged feathers than that which called for such abstract work as drawing : but the peoples of the country where life could not be supported by hunting were, when the white man came, somewhat farther advanced toward an epoch of decorative art. Unfortunately, the drawings which among early peoples probably existed as guides and studies, those which were preserved as patterns for the cutter of blocks in such printing as is described above, or even the scrawls made to commemorate the aspect [21 ] THE WORK OF THE LOWER CIVILIZATIONS of a natural object, have all perished. Indeed, it is the rarest thing to find among primitive work any drawings or paintings, at all more developed than the bands or spots or zigzags of color which are scrawled upon the face or a limb of a rude statue. The decoration of sculpture by means of color is as old as sculpture itself, and the inser- tion of a piece of shell for an eye seems to bring with it the want of a black painted bar above, for the eyebrow ; but drawing in the sense of a stain- ing of a flat surface with different colors, or marking it with positive lines with a view to representing a natural object or of embodying the dream of an ornamental pattern (see Chapter VII), is more rare among peoples of early civilization, than any other branch of fine art. See, however, what is said (Chapter XII) in connection with weaving of flat patterns in coarse, stout materials ; where the mechanical process employed is so obvious and simple, and the patterns produced by it are so purely decoration of a flat surface, that it differs from ordinary drawing only in the methods employed. In fact, the very existence of these woven fabrics and the evident enjoyment taken by the weaver in the patterns produced by the weaving suggest the existence, contemporaneously with this work, of drawing of the more familiar sort, scribing with the hard point and daubing with the brush, or chewed reed or bunch of fibres of some kind, and ground and wetted pigment. In [«] PRIMITIVE LOVE OF BRIGHT COLORS these ways variety of color was hardly obtainable, because of the very small number of available pig- ments. In this fact is seen one reason for the scarcity of such drawings ; for the primitive man is, at least as he begins to emerge from his lower state and begins seriously to decorate, a color- loving animal. That he may gratify his natural love for bright colors, four or five pigments are needed, and there are needed also appliances by which each of these or any mixture of them can be applied. It is not till a later time that these colors come to be carried through shades and gradations from darker to lighter, from richer to paler, or from one color into another color, as when we see, in the solar spectrum or in painting, blue pass into yellow through intermediate shades of green. That even flat painting was not feasible among any of the early races whose art has been studied seems to be evidenced from the fact that their building is so seldom helped out by color; for every tribe whose work we know as somewhat more advanced, when it has built, has also painted its buildings, and its carving has received the richest effects ; see the discussion of this subject in Chap- ters XX and XXV and also XXIV where painted and otherwise colored sculpture is considered. Buildings of the simpler races are also pecu- liarly susceptible of color decoration, because they have little or no constructional character. A hut formed almost wholly of round logs tied together, [23] THE WORK OF THE LOWER CIVILIZATIONS much as the simpler builders' scaffolding of our village and country work is made, hardly reaches the dignity of architecture, not because of its sim- plicity, but because of the unwieldiness of the ma- terials. If your way of building is to set up a dozen poles vertically, four heavy ones at the four corners and the other eight on the lines of the sides between those corners, and if your only means of filling in between them is to tie to the uprights other poles laid horizontally, and then to tie on a great number of sheaves of leaves, set ver- tically again, outside of the horizontals, in order to shed water, while the roof is covered with a thatch of cocoanut boughs, or, in the North, of marsh grass or other strong fibrous and easily matted material, you will find that architectural effect eludes you and is obtainable only by that which men of early civilizations seem not to think of, — by good proportion of roof, overhang of eaves, the width and height of the whole. If the spirit moves you to go further you must strip some of your round logs of their bark and carve in the solid wood, and then for the first time the oppor- tunity to use color is afforded you. But in the case of such architectural carving as this — and there is plenty of it in New Zealand — the use of color seems to have been extremely limited in all early times, and the inference is that only the black obtained from soot and the red obtained from the pounding of certain clays were within [34] PRIMITIVE ART SELDOM EASY TO TRACE the reach of the native designer. These he would use, enhancing the effects of his incisions by the darker color, heightening the effect of his surface by the lighter color, using them both with some consideration as to the best obtainable effect, but never reaching anything like Coloring, that is to say, the pleasing effects of colors combined to- gether so as to produce a pattern or a design. It is obvious that modern study of primitive design is accompanied by many difficulties. The earliest Egyptian work discovered during the nine- teenth century was not of really primitive times but was contemporaneous with a somewhat higher civilization. In the summer of 1901 news came of finds which must be dated fifteen hundred years earlier than those above alluded to, and still the epoch of the earliest decorative designing had not been reached. In such exceptional regions as the valley of the Nile and the plain of the Euphrates, civilization is immeasurably earlier than in more arid, less fertile and inviting regions of the earth. The development of decorative art in Egypt may prove to be ten thousand years old ; and a civili- zation as early may well be found to have existed in the plains of Mesopotamia. Obviously, only detached and widely separated epochs of such art will ever become known to us. Then, as for those peoples which have remained in a less highly organized state, the coming of Western civiliza- tion with its abuses tends to destroy immediately [25] THE WORK OF THE LOWER CIVILIZATIONS the traditional art, and even to do away with the traces of that art ; for the earliest explorers and settlers, tradesmen or missionaries, are instinctively b c d Fig. 4. Four War Clubs, Pacific Islands a is flat and the edges rather sharp, b is circular in section, like a base- ball club, c and d, see text ; all of heavy red wood. (A. Sturgis Collection) indifferent to or hostile to the habits and previous lives of the native inhabitants. Hence there may at any time arise a radical disagreement between those writers who hold that all early designing is [26] EXPRESSION AND DECORATIVE PURPOSE based upon attempted imitation of natural objects, and those who hold rather to the belief in an abundant use of purely decorative patterns — pat- terns which the unoccupied and untaught man finds extremely entertaining in themselves. It may be held that the advocates of the former doc- trine are the scientific men who enjoy the tracing out of the slow development, or degeneracy, of a pattern from a more direct imitation to a tradi- tional pattern in which imitation is hardly discov- erable. An interesting instance is in the sceptre or ceremonial staff carried by the Maori chiefs in New Zealand. This is finished at one end by a blade-like projecting member, sharp at the edges and point, and generally held to represent the tongue protruded in defiance, a theory which is made good by the two eyes and the extremely grotesque carving which stands for the lips and the whole face. So far there is representation of a natural object, but carried beyond the limits of mere copying into a recognized and tradition- ally accepted form for the tip of the staff ; but there is scroll carving upon it which cannot be imagined as originating in a study of the papilla- of the actual tongue. No ; as to these scrolls, as with the pattern on the paddle, Fig. i, the natural man's love of ornament has been the guiding prin- ciple. There is many a war club in which the idea of offence and defiance is carried farther be- cause made still more abstract. The marking of [>7] THE WORK OF THE LOWER CIVILIZATIONS the tongue as distinct from the lips and head disappears in such a staff, as it is now a deadly weapon and not a symbolical wand (see Fig. 4 c and d\ ; the eyes and the suggestion of the lips are still definitely expressed in low relief, or in the inlay of shells. Painting and drawing follow these same general rules ; but with the severe restrictions noted above, the restrictions involved in the difficulty found by all beginners in representing on a flat surface what is really a solid, and in making anything interesting with only one color or two colors. Therefore, the painted patterns are naturally more formal and severe than the carved ones ; and indeed the satisfaction which imperfectly de- veloped races feel in the simple flat patterns is so marked that in Egypt as late as the Sixth Dynasty, perhaps three thousand years b. c, color decoration is almost limited to zigzags and diag- onal scrolls. These simple designs as far as they are recti- linear may be thought to be largely the result of the woven patterns which are often among the most brilliant works of primitive races. Fig. 5 shows grass-woven belts of the Pacific Islands ; of which belts the fabric is solid, the threads drawn tight, the surface smooth ; so that it is evident that the work received careful attention. Fig. 6 shows two pieces of printed bark similar to that given in Fig. 3 ; but in this instance the [28] SIMPLE DESIGN SUGGESTED BY WEAVING Fig. 5. Grass-woven Belts, Pacific Islands : the color is that of the undyed dry fibre combined with red and black (A. Sturgis Collection) imitation of a woven pattern is obvious. The blocks have been cut and the printing done ex- [ 29 ] THE WORK OF THE LOWER CIVILIZATIONS pressly to imitate a piece of textile material. It is quite evident how slight a difference exists Fig. 6. Cloth of printed bark shown on a smaller scale than Fig. 3 b is a somewhat finer Fabric (A. Sturgis Collection) between a similar pattern produced by the direct work of the brush. [30] Part II THE FIVE MECHANICAL PROCESSES Book II Chapter Three CARVING A SIMPLE community, one where popu- lation is thin, towns small, and wealth rare, will not have workmen in special . lines. There will be no skilled me- chanics ; but in exchange, many of the individuals who compose it will be clever with their hands, and may even have preferences as to the work they will undertake. One man is rather inclined to moulding objects in tenacious earth, and may have learned how to harden them by heat ; while an- other prefers the sharp tool and the hard material. Even so one woman prefers the making of what may be called cloth, by expanding the inner bark of a tree, while another likes the weaving of bas- kets much better. Now, when the dawn of art rises upon such a community, the decorative pat- tern, which may also retain a semblance of visible living creatures which have interested the artist, will be sometimes the result of printing upon the bark cloth, sometimes of weaving dyed rushes or twisted yarns, sometimes of working in clay with thumbs and fingers and primitive tools of stick, and some- VOL. ,- 3 [33] C A R V I N G times of cutting wood or bone or shell or even stone into shapes deliberately chosen, or at least found pleasing as they take shape. This last-de- scribed process, which we call carving, 1 draws on very soon to work having some artistic quality. It is the most commonly artistic of all the simple industries. It is shown in Chapter II how easily the people of low civilization have used it and with how frequent an artistic result. As civiliza- tion grows, complexity is one of the first results of larger intelligence. Boxes of hard red wood about ten inches long are carved among the Maoris of New Zealand, the covers rather nicely fitted, the general shape rather symmetrical and deliberately neat ; and it must be noted that, as in the definition above, all the surface pattern is pro- duced by cutting away the hard substance of the wood in little chips, exactly as a boy carves his name on a bench, but with this peculiarity: that the New Zealander has cut into the surface in order to leave a raised pattern, while the letter- carving boy has chosen to produce an incised pat- tern. Now, the Japanese ivory boxes shown in 1 Carving .- the shaping of any hard substance by means of sharp- edged and sharp-pointed tools, especially when intended for decorative effect. Bv extension, work done in large measure by the drill is in- cluded. Carving differs from sculpture only in that it is of necessity done with a sharp tool in hard material, except where this hardness is so great that friction and slow attrition are needed ; whereas sculpture, though origiaally having the same meaning, has grown to include the shaping of plastic material, such as modelling in clay. [34 ] DESIGN SUGGESTED BY NATURAL FORM Fig. 7 are the direct descendants of the New Zealand pieces, in so far as the relief carving on Fig. 7. Ivory box, total height 5 inches the body is concerned. The curious, flower-like scrolls on the smaller box are just such an improve- ment upon the Maori curlicues as would be developed by an observing race after three thou- sand years of looking at feath- ers and clouds. The effect of ocean waves on the larger box is another bit of nature-study, and the cloud-forms belong to a still more advanced epoch of such observation. The rather bulky handles of this piece are made to repeat the swirls and spirals of those cloud-studies, — a subtile bit of feeling for deco- [35 ] Fig. 7 bis. Ivory box, total height 4 inches CARVING rative art of a high quality. As for the two human figures and the dragon, they will need discussion in Chapter XXIV, as being expres- sional sculpture, and the mon- ster which forms a knop to the smaller box is beyond anal- ysis in this connection. Carving is of several kinds, in fact it is of three general kinds ; and the reader may compare a similar classification of modelled work (see Chapter IV). We have carving in the round, as it is called, that is to say, the production of en- tirely solid objects, as clusters of flowers or leaves, and the many carved finials and bosses of decorative art, like the knops of the two ivory boxes, busts, statues, and groups, rep- resentations of beasts and birds, and all such pieces of design as are free on all sides. See Fig. 8, a piece of Dieppe ivory. Secondly, we have carving; in relief, 1 and what is called " carved Fig. 8. Sculpture in the Round : ivory statuette, eighteenth century 1 Relief : The character of being in projection from a background which may not be perfectly flat and uniform, but has sufficient continuity of surface to be on the whole flat and with the figures projecting from it. The terms bas-relief [basso-rilievo] or low relief, mezzo rilievo, and alto [36] DIFFERENT KINDS OF RELIEF work " is generally of this character, as in Fig. 9, where the bust has a relief of a quarter of an Fig. 9. Tinted Ivory Relief, 4 inches high : contemporary portrait of Henry IV of France inch in parts, while the emblematic jieur de lis in the corners are very slightly raised and the rilievo, are not capable of exact distinction. Thus some high reliefs have parts entirely detached from the background, as the heads and arms of figures in the Parthenon metopes and in the bronze work of Ghiberti. [ 37 ] CARVING shield of arms is merely scratched or engraved (see Chapter XIX). Thirdly, we have the rever- Fig. 9 bis. Tinted Ivory Relief, 4 inches high : contemporary portrait of Marie de Medicis, Queen of Henry IV of France sal of relief, or intaglio, 1 as in the ordinary cutting of a name, or as in the elaborate inscription in 1 Intaglio: incision, inscription. This Italian term is used in the absence of an English one to signifv sculpture which is hollow instead of [38] RELIEF AND INTAGLIO marble shown in Fig. i o, where the use of relief sculpture in ornament is contrasted with this incised lettering. It will be best to deal in this place with these different kinds of form, because Fig. io. Tomb of Sassetti : Church of SS. Trinita, Florence (Original in the building) it is as carved images in granite or marble, rather than modelled figures in clay and plaster or in bronze, that sculpture presents itself to us. There are some sculptures which show a com- bination of two or more of these three forms. convex, recessed instead of projecting. An impression in soft material of an intaglio would be relief. [39] CARVING Thus, in the definition of relief it is stated that high relief has sometimes parts worked in the round. This occurs in the metopes of the Par- Fig. I I. Metope Relief from south flank of the Parthenon : head of man nearly free from background (Original in British Museum) thenon (see Fig. 1 1 ), where the heads are free while the bodies are in alto-rilievo. In these instances the carving still keeps the character of relief in spite of the free members of it, and this because it is treated as relief, as described in the [40] RELIEF AND INTAGLIO Fig. 12. Concavo-convex Relief : Temple of Kalabsheh in upper Egypt (the ancient Talmis) (Original in the building) definitions and as explained below. Furthermore, in Egyptian architectural work and again in Jap- [4i ] CAR VI N G anese carvings in ivory and wood, a kind of relief is used in which the background is not cleared away, not cut down or abated 1 to the level of the least projecting parts of the sculpture ; see Fig. i 2, which shows a detail of the wall sculpture in the temple of Kalabsheh. Such sculpture as this is called by various names, as concavo-convex or coelanaglyphic relief ; and, technically, cavo- rilievo and intaglio rilievato. Some sculpture in relief has many different kinds of relief in one composition. Thus, the foreground figures will be in high, even in the highest relief, and the figures in the distance in the lowest relief possible, as low as that shown upon coins, while all the different degrees of relief are used between these. There is absolutely no accepted law controlling this. The carver is free to use his own system, and to be guided by his own instinct as controlled by a gained sense of propriety and reserve. In Fig. i i f , a piece of Chinese carving in lacquer, the figures in the boat and the boat itself are seen to be relieved upon a background of slight ridges in a pattern meant to give the effect of rippled water : while the trees and figures on the land as well as the elaborate flower on the outer curve of the box have a background of sim- 1 Abated: lowered with deliberate intention to produce an artistic effect as to set off a piece of carving or the like, as when a background is either hammered back, if it is in metal, or compressed by blows as with a punch if it is wood, or cut away if it is stone. ' [ 42 ] Fig. 14. Statue by Canova, of Pius VI, pope 1 775-1 800. Rome, St. Peter's, in the Confessio HE LIEF ON MANY PLANES ilar character. It is all relief sculpture together, but of many planes. " Sculpture in the round " may also be accompanied by much work in relief. Thus, in portrait statues like that of Pope Pius VI in St. Peter's Church, Fig. 14, and in many Fig. 13. Chinese box : dark red carved lacquer (tio-tsi) similar works of sculpture, the adornments of the dress and accessories (in this case ecclesiastical embroidery) are shown in decided relief. So far, the necessary defining and limitation of the term carving has taken us ; it is now to be urged that much the greater part of carving which the world has seen as yet has been in the nature [43 ] C A R V I N G of decorative work done in a way unconsciously. The paddle described in Chapter II is an instance of the simple kind of carving in which a smooth surface is attacked by the tool, slight hollows being made in the surface; when, if relief sculpture should appear, that would be left in relief upon sunken ground. That is the actual condition in many kinds of carving, executed in different epochs. Thus the Japanese take part of the tusk of an elephant, the harder exterior cleared of its softer parts, and made into a rather clumsy decorative vase by being attached to a stand : and the sur- face will be carved in representation of some legend or incident with human and animal figures, the relief of which cannot rise above the surface of the tusk. Here is concavo-convex sculpture re- sorted to (see pages 41, 42), chiefly to save labor and to avoid weakening the material. The same thing is done on the surface of a body as thin and friable as the shell of an ostrich egg, and here is an interesting illustration of the refined boldness of such work in the hands of an Oriental artist. A scrap or ivory of fine grain is used for the head and face of a human figure, the rest of which is worked in the egg-shell itself: and this bit of ivory may then project beyond the ovoid surface : for there is no superstition in the artist's spirit concerning the prescribed limitations of this sculp- ture in cavo-rilievo. In like manner, the Indian carvings made to-day for architectural purposes [44] THE PIECE SOMETIMES SHAPED BY CARVING and imported into the United States are so re- strained that the series of bosses or clusters of leafage are kept below the raised rim or moulding which is left on either side : that is to say, the strip of soft wood has two edges left of their full thickness, while the middle band is cut away and dug out in such a way as to leave the separate units of the design relieved upon a background which the carver's tool shapes on either side of them and between them. Precisely the same method of work was in use in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France, and again the same way of producing an effect is traceable to the spirited and powerful sculpture of the Gothic churches, in which one of the most common methods of architectural effect was to set leafage in distinct outlining upon a shadow, which was produced by cutting a deep hollow cove or cavetto — in long continued straight lines or curves. Thus the main lines of an arch are often empha- sized by such a deep hollow moulding, above which and relieved against the shade of the hollow is a long series of clusters of leafage, rather closely studied from nature (see Chapter XXVI and Fig. 208). It must be noted also that the carving of a dec- orative object often involves the shaping of the piece. Its ultimate form is not given it until the carved leafage or animal forms of the surface and the main contour are produced together. Thus [45 ] CARVING in Fig. 15a very small cup of dark wood has two handles formed of the stems of a flowering plant, the flowers and leaves of which adorn opposite sides of the cup, coming between the handles. As the whole of this has been wrought in one piece of wood, it is evident that, until the piece was finally complete, the form of the cup had no exist- ence except in the artist's mind. This manner of work is carried to its extreme of refinement, and of skilled overcom- ing of difficulties in the carving, in that elaborate work in jade, rock-crystal, and other very hard stones, for which the „ Chinese are especially Tig. 15. Chinese Cup or dark r J red Wood famous; although similar work has been done in all ages in Europe and is still done, though with less frequency (see Chapter XXI). Such work is worthy of note as illustrating the last complete- ness of carving; considered as an industrial fine art. It is impossible to feel any certainty as to the earliest works of carving, whether they were in the round or in relief. On the one hand, the figures we buy of sailors, where the twisted root of a plant which has already some resemblance to the human figure, and has been worked into a closer resemblance, suggests an original adoption of sim- [46] EARLY CARVING IS OF ALL FORMS ilar methods in the representation of the human head or body in the round. On the other hand, it is natural even to children, to the few who, in our sophisticated and school-taught epoch, show the gift of artistic observation, to model figures on the sand of the shore, which figures are, of course, in relief ; and in like manner the incised pattern in Fig. i of Chapter II leads directly into the relief pattern given in Fig. 2 of the same Chapter, and the sailor who whittles a row of notches in the plank-sheer of his barge is producing an effective carved moulding in relief upon the smooth rounded sides of the vessel. The tendency is at once tow- ard each of these forms of sculpture, and it may even be thought that the concavo-convex sculpture, mentioned above (see Fig. 12), is the direct result of carving begun in relief with the intention of lowering (abating) the whole background to a uni- form level, but that patience having given out, the original smooth surface was left with the figures filling the bottom of a depression no bigger than themselves. The sculpture on the fronts of the celebrated Lion Tombs of Lycia is a familiar instance of relief sculpture on a very large scale intended to dominate the country, and for this purpose cut upon the bare face of a beetling crag ; but much larger designs of the same sort are carried out on cliffs in Persia, and those colossal portrait reliefs of warrior kings, thought to be of the time of the [47 ] C A R V I N G Sassanian dynasty in the fourth or fifth century a. d., are complete bas-reliefs, with all the back- ground cleared away. Fig. 1 6 shows a similar large-scale relief of finer quality, a tomb-front in Lycia, wrought under Grecian influence. Fig. i 6. Tomb at Limvra, Asia Minor (From Petersen and Von Luschan) In this connection there should be mentioned the common assertion that architectural carving preceded all other sculpture ; this being urged as a sentimental consideration regarding the impor- tance of architectural art. As noted above, sculp- ture in relief and sculpture in the round have generally gone on together ; but architectural sculpture is nearly always in relief. So far as we can date the earliest sculptures of pure Greek [48 ] EARLY CARVING IS OF ALL FORMS character, such as the Selinus alto-reliefs, the painted bas-reliefs found in 1886 on the Acrop- olis, and the archaic statues exhibited in the central museum at Athens ( Apollo of Thera, Apollo of Andros), these tomb-statues are of nearly the same date as the bas-reliefs. Among the painted statues found on the Acropolis in 1883 and in 1886 there are some which are as early as any Greek relief sculpture known to us ; and one at least among them is a close reproduction in stone of a xoanon, 1 which piece in its original form would probably be older than the oldest Greek reliefs in stone. So with Egyptian antiquity ; the free statues in wood, and even in hard mottled granite, are known to be as old as the oldest relief sculpture. Of the Fourth Dynasty (perhaps about 4000 b. c.) and of earlier reigns are bas-reliefs in wood and in stone repre- senting scenes and giving portraits, sculpture in cavo-rilievo full of character in the heads, and wooden and hard stone statues of life-size and above it. It has been thought, until very recent discoveries were made, that the great Sphinx near the Pvramids of Gizeh was the most ancient piece of sculpture known, and this figure is cut entirely in the natural rock : for recent investigation has 1 Xoanon : a verv earlv statue of which the head and usually the hands and feet are worked into some semblance of life, while the body remains verv slightly finished or even a mere block, because intended to be draped with textile material in a ceremonial wav ; the bodv, therefore, is com- monly of wood, while the head and extremities may be of marble or other finer material. vol. 1—4 [ 49 ] CARVING contradicted the former opinion that a part was built up in masonry. It is a statue in its concep- tion ; but the forelegs and paws are of the nature of relief in that they are raised upon the back- ground of living rock below them ; and they enclose a small shrine which itself is partly cut in solid rock and is partly built. Of precisely the same character are the spoons, ladles, and trays preserved in the museum at Gizeh. In these the piece of wood is shaped to the form required for the shallow bowl and the handle of fairly conve- nient form, and by the same operation the bowl is surrounded by a delicate moulding of zigzags or billets, and the handle is wrought into the form of a woman surrounded by lotus blossoms and stems, or a nude figure, whose outstretched arms serve to support the bowl, or some equally elab- orate combination of significant forms. The fact seems to be that the early carvers worked, now on a separate block of wood, which they meant to fashion into human or other form, now on a larger surface, as of smoothed rock, on which they meant to cut a design at once representative and decora- tive, and suitable to the tomb or temple hollowed out within, or the simple receptacle or utensil needed. In Assyrian art we know almost no sculpture but low reliefs in slabs of alabaster and gigantic figures of bulls, winged or human headed, which, though apparently statues, are really reliefs worked on two adjacent sides of a solid block, as [50] MECHANICAL PROCESSES USED where four legs are shown, as of necessity, in the side view, but also two legs in front. Much earlier than this, however, are the separate statues found in southern Mesopotamia and identified with Chaldean art, such as existed centuries before the Assyrian empire was established. As to the processes employed, the carver is sure to use the tools by means of which other work- men less concerned with artistic design are work- ing around him. Thus, the reliefs of the Lycian tombs (Fig. 16) have been worked with just such pointing tools 1 and chisels 2 as were used by the workmen who cut in the solid rock the hollow tomb within and the square doorway leading to it. As the rock is harder or less hard, the use of deli- cate chisels, not unlike the pointing tool but much more slender, and with short, straight, sharp edges, is less or more practicable. In the soft limestone of the Paris basin, so much used in the north of France and imported into America under the name of Caen stone, delicate tools like these can 1 Pointing Tool: called also point ; in modern times, usually a steel bar or at least an iron bar with a steel point, sometimes pyramidal. With this the first cutting of a rough stone is done, for the workman goes around the edge of the stone, keeping the level surface which he has produced in a true plane by means of a straight-edge or rule at the cor- ners, and also cuts two diagonal grooves across the face of the stone from corner to corner, the straight-edge working in these also, and enabling him gradually to bring the whole stone to a true plane surface. 2 Chisel : in stone cutting, either with a straight-edge, or with a number of teeth. The first is more commonly called the drove chisel, from the peculiar nature of the work produced by it ; the other, the tooth chisel. [5l'] C A R V I N G be used, and the carving done as if one were work- ing in alabaster. Very light taps of a wooden mallet are all that is needed to impel the chisel. Fig. 17. Portal of Chapel at Convent ot Batalha, Portugal When elaborate carving is being made in limestone the blows are not more noisy than those of a wood- pecker on a tree ; and frequently for a moment the mallet is abandoned, and the chisel used nearly like a knife-blade (which itself may be used at times) [ 52 ] PROCESSES USED IN HARD MATERIAL to cut and scrape away small excrescences. Very elaborate carving is apt to come of the use of a harder and close-grained stone. Fig. 17 shows the portal which, in the convent of Batalha in Portugal, leads from the little court east of the church into the marvellous "unfinished chapel;" and it is plain that the builders were well-advised who chose a stone which has held its sharp edges, its delicate finish and its elaborate undercutting for four hundred years. On the other hand, in hard rock, chiselling is so slow and painful a task that, even admitted the constant use or the stone-saw and the drill with emery or diamond powder, much conjecture has existed among modern archaeologists as to the means employed to work the diorite and basalt not uncommon in Egyptian sculpture. Lapidaries work in still harder stones — jade, agate, rock crystal, and the like — by means of the drill. This instrument bores smooth, round holes by the friction of a sharp-cutting powder applied to a pin, which is not necessarily ot very hard ma- terial. Cameo work in stone and glass, although in relief, is mainly done by the revolving drill and the revolving wheel ; that is to say, all this sculpture in very hard material is not so much cut as it is worn and rubbed — friction being substituted for the cut- tins: ed«;e. Holes that are bored by the drill leave between them solid walls of the material which have to be partly cut, partly broken away; and here again the work has to be finished by the fric- [ 53 ] CARVING tion of diamond dust or emery applied to the hand-held tool. We know that gem engraving (see Chapter XXI) in the most ancient as well as in recent times was done in this way. The infer- ence is that similar processes, involving the slow work of many months, were largely used, even in colossal sculpture. On the other hand, carving in steel — for some very exquisite decorative work of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance was produced by working in the surface of that metal — is not extremely difficult (see Die-Sinking, Chapter XXI), though it is of course never clear how nearly the metal has been shaped originally, as by casting, so as to approach the finished shape in its details (see Fig. 1 8). The Japanese of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries worked in bronze with ex- treme delicacy, and it is evident that the finest pieces of this work are cut in the solid metal with but little help from casting; that is to say, the general form is got by careful casting in well made moulds, but all the surface as it comes to us has been elaborately finished with the tool. It is evident that your casting may be so fine as to leave only surface work to be done by the tool. In such working in the solid mass the names of the tools and their appearance differ very much accord- ing to the material. Thus, in metal work, the chasing tool, of which more is said below in the chapter on metal work, passes insensibly into [54] PROCESSES USED IN METAL-WORK the chisel in the usual sense, and the surface, if sometimes got by cutting away the metal, is got also by lowering it in the usual way of chasing. Fig. i 8. Lower half of wrought steel Door, i 8 inches wide, fifteenth century (Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1900) The work of the engraver should be compared with this (see Chapter IV and Chapter XXI), for engraving always consists in removing the material. There is, then, no great difference between the work of him who is cutting away the stone rapidly and knocking off big chips, and of him who is [55] CARVING delicately removing in the form of tine dust the superfluous material from the surface of marble, or in little curls or shavings from a surface of bronze ; and no essential difference between this work and that of the lapidary with his drill. In one respect, however, the processes differ very greatly, and that is in the kind of preparation which has to be made, and the care which has to be taken in advance to keep the workmen from vain and destructive work in a material which is too precious to be wasted, and also at a loss of valuable time. Thus, when vou see, cut on an obelisk in a cemetery, a small panel sunk three-fourths of an inch below the sur- face of the marble and enclosing a bunch of flowers in bas-relief, that piece of work may probably have been done with nothing to guide the carver more elaborate than a simple drawing in lead-pencil or pen and ink on a sheet of paper, and of the same size as the carving ; but, in the case of a very large piece of work, no such full-size drawing would be available, and in the case of the Lycian and Per- sian rock-reliefs we can hardly imagine a pliant material of parchment or made of vegetable fibre procurable in sheets large enough to allow of any such drawing being made (see definition of Car- toon). There can be no doubt that the Lycian figures were outlined in stiff color, probably red, on the smooth face of the rock, and this was prob- ably done from a sketch which the artist may have made in small, while the carver then went [56] S U R F A C E FINIS H to work lowering the background until he was satisfied with the amount of relief, which relief he then proceeded to finish by cutting away and rounding the bounding edges, — a slight and unso- phisticated way of work which, however, it is well for us to note, because it shows the essential nature of relief sculpture. Such sculpture is not made like a half statue ; it is, on the other hand, primarily, like one flat thing projecting from another flat thing, but rounded slowly as to its principal surface and more abruptly as to its edges, which may even be undercut, 1 and project, so as to throw sharp-edged shadows — though this is not a common treatment. The surface finish is important in all carving ; and carving can never be described without an ac- count of this. In all the harder materials the carver is apt to seek some approximation to polish. 2 1 Undercut: left in the solid, "in the round," by having the material cut away between it and the background ; said of part of a relief (see the definition of relief), or in simple architectural ornament, of a moulding or the like where the stone or wood overhangs, throwing a very decided shadow upon the space hollowed out below. 2 Polish : such smoothness of surface as reflects rays of light in a notice- able way, and which, when carried further, will reflect objects visibly. This may be produced by mere smoothness, however brought about (as when the amalgam of mercury laid on the back of a sheet of glass takes its smoothness from the glass itself), or by the addition of a liquid or paste which fills up the minute irregularities, the pores, etc. When varnish is applied, the surface is simply covered by a material which easily takes a perfectly smooth, glossy surface itself ; but the term " polish " is often used in contradistinction to varnish, as when a lover of old furniture says that he cares for polished wood and detests the furniture of the times when they used varnish freely ; see definition of patina. [57] CARVING This is carried to the furthest point in carvings in jade, crystal, agate, and the like, as has been stated above. Marble statues and busts were often highly polished in antiquity and in the neoclassic 1 epoch. Indeed, the Greeks and the artists of the Greco- Roman period, whose most important works were generally put into bronze lor the temple or monu- ment to which they were first attached, could hardly have preferred any other surface to that perfectly uniform and shining surface so easily obtained in the bronze casting when properly finished by hand. The modern disposition to object to a high polish on the surface of a statue or bust is founded largely on a fancy that it looks " unnatural." The notion is that the carver should try to imitate the surface of the human skin ; and in this connection one is reminded of the alleged invention bv the sculptor Vela of a special tool for cutting the surface of the blanket which envelops the lower part of the figure of his 1 Neoclassic : having to do with the attempted revival of the artistic feelings and processes of classical antiquity. In Italy the neoclassic period begins with the closing years of the fourteenth century. In the north of Europe, about eighty years later. It may be thought to have ended with the wars of the French Revolution and the rise of contemporary European civilization. During those years, from 1420 to 181 5 in Italy, and from 1500 to 1780 in France, no building was begun with other thought than that of pursuing the course of development of a previously well-known style, while changes, and what were considered improvements, came in gradually : the reference to antique art being always slight and generally mistaken in essentials. [58] ARTISTIC CONVENTIONS EMPLOYED Last Days of Napoleon. Sculpture has to do with form alone ; a statue is a true copy of the human form, or of so much of it as the sculptor finds that he can express, hut it is in no respect a copy of the human body, and still less can it be a copy of the garments worn upon the body. Beautiful and interesting form is the chief thing sought for by the sculptor of the human body and its parts, and a similar truth exists with regard to all kinds of carving. The twig of leaves on a jade vase is not imitated from nature ; it is a decorative adjunct carefully studied from nature, the study going no further than the carver finds he can go easily in rendering the diaphanous leaves and the slender twigs. But, as before said, beauty of surface is an immensely important adjunct, and this may be gained by mere perfectness of finish, or by color, as is explained elsewhere. It is also not uncommon to use relief and also intaglio to represent that which has no form in reality. Thus, to give the effect of the pupil of the eye, the sculptor sometimes abandons truth of form, which would require an absolutely unmarked rounded surface to the eyeball as seen between the lids, and cuts a deep, partly circular groove, with perhaps a central pit to express the pupil of the eye. In this way the effect of life is got by con- tradicting the facts of life ; and such conventions are very common in sculpture of all sorts. They were rendered necessary in expressional work by [59] C A R V I N G the abandonment in late times of painting applied to the carved figure ; but even while statuary and relief were freely painted, as in the Gothic period, these conventions were used to secure greater emphasis. It is noticeable how little in all times the artist in carving has been influenced by the nature of the material. The surface of the carving in wood, especially in open-grained wood like oak, differs greatly from the surface of the carving in stone, and still more from the carving in the hardest or finest grained stones ; but it is as to the surface chiefly that the artist finds an interest in the pecu- liarity of his material. As regards his treatment of the subject, that is so strongly affected by the artist's own sense of what the form must be, his own design as conceived by himself, his own idea of the human body, the plant or animal as he sees it in his mind conventionalized and prepared for rendering in carving, — all that is so much more important to him than any question of material, that he is apt to force his material, whatever it may be, into a semblance of his dream. In details only is there much difference in the result of carv- ing in this or in that material. It is sometimes said of the drapery of an antique marble statue that it is visibly a copy of the bronze original, the drapery being disposed as the designer for bronze would naturally have cast it. Too much must not be made of this tempting subject ; there is [60] REFINEMENTS OF SURFACE FORM not a single bronze in that wonderful collection at Naples of life-size busts and statues, all of unquestioned and unaltered antiquity, not one which could not be copied in marble or in boxwood with perfect success, the archaic treat- ment of some ringlets of hair alone excepted (see Fig. 58). Refinements of curvature are, however, of the very highest importance to the artist. The carver loves delicate modulations of surface for their own sake, and not merely because they represent the cheek or the wrist of the fair and perfect human body. The natural beauty of the shades with which the light falling upon the piece invests the retreating and projecting surfaces, the combinations and gradations, passing from the highest light to the deepest shadow, which the piece allows and which form our only means of judging by the eye of the surface of anything, are of supreme impor- tance to the carver and to the student of the piece of carving as well. The story of Michelangelo in his nearly blind old age caressing with his hands the famous Torso of the Vatican, and getting through his finger-tips a sense of its beauty, whether verifiable or not, is perfectly credible. Even as this sheet is in hand, an intelligent pos- sessor of a fine modern marble says to the present writer that his piece shows finger-marks — he sees it with his hands, mainly. A blind man born with an artistic sense may be imagined as [61 ] CARVING creating an artistic judgment of his own, and as determining between two pieces with regard to their relative merit ; but it is perfectly certain that a man who has not always been blind, and has learned through the eye to love artistically treated form, could receive enjoyment by the touch, and could even, within limits, compare the beauty of different pieces of carving. All these questions of artistic treatment of form belong to modelling as well, and are treated in that connection in Chapter IV. The truths with re- gard to such artistic conceptions, and the appre- ciation of them by others than the artist who has created them, assume a different aspect as each separate process of work is considered, and therefore what appears to be repetition should be a necessary restating of the case for the new conditions. [62] Chapter Four MODELLING 1 AND EMBOSSING 2 BY a curious twist of the meaning of "plastic," the term "Plastic Art" has been applied to sculpture in general. This involves the recondite idea that even hard materials are plastic, in that they can be given shapes as diverse as those which can be given to a soft material. Except in that sense, the term "plastic" continues to mean that which can be changed in form without destruction of its essential nature ; thus a piece of wax in cold weather is hardly plastic at all, as it will break if 1 Modelling : handling a plastic material so as to change its shape in a deliberate way; especially with the purpose of obtaining either an artistic effect or a shape of some sort from which something else is to be copied. It includes the making of models when they are of plastic ma- terial ; and therefore the shaping of a member of a structure in clay or wax, with the view to making a mould and casting from the mould, is modelling, as well as the work of the artist. The making of models, in the sense of copies on a small scale of the finished or unfinished structure, as of a public building, the purpose of the model being the description of the building to those who cannot see it, is hardly ever called modelling ; it would be rather model-making. 2 Embossing : properly the forming of relief or projection (a boss or bosses ) upon a surface; in fine art, generally, the raising of relief patterns by other means than carving. Thus, sheets of metal are embossed by hammering on the back (see Repousse). [63 ] MODELLING AND EMBOSSING it is pressed too hard, but it grows more and more plastic as it is warmed, and finally becomes capable of taking and keeping any form that the modeller may choose to give it. In the modern practice of the art of the sculptor, the artist works almost altogether in some really plastic material, the copies of his work in hard material being usually made by others than him- self. This subject is treated in Chapter XXIV; our present purpose is with that kind of modelling in which the handiwork of the artist is shown as he left it, nothing modifying it except exposure to great heat, as in pottery and in glass, or some other preservative process. All kinds of ceramic ware depend for much of their interest on the work of the modeller. Even a plain vessel of rough clay is of finer or of less interesting form, according as the modelling is or is not that of a man of taste and of creative energy. The use of the potter's wheel is merely a simplification of the natural movements of the hand when trying to get a circular, horizontal form for any vessel. Thus, if the potter were working without a wheel, as is often done in pieces intended to be especially free and bold in design, like many cups and bowls in modern Japanese art and European imitations of it, the mass of clay would still be set upon a piece of board, a tile, or the like, and the natural action of the artist would be to turn this round from time to time as rapidly as the fingers of one [6 4 ]' PROCESSES EMPLOYED hand would enable him to do it, while the fingers of the other hand would shape it within and without. The potter's wheel, whether moved by the hand or by the feet, is a mere device for turn- ing rather more rapidly and much more steadily the plane surface upon which the vessel is being shaped. If now, to the vessel so formed, a handle or spout is to be added, which addition is to have considerable artistic character, that must be worked into shape by the fingers and thumb, with the aid of a small and light piece of stick more or less carefully prepared for the purpose, or it must be pressed in a previously made mould. Both of these processes are in common use. The mould tends toward uniformity and therefore toward mo- notony. Freehand work involves the taking of so much time that the tendency would be to aban- don ornament altogether in the case of pieces that had to be multiplied, or else the comparative dis- regard of their quality as pieces of modelling, and the abandonment of any high standard of merit. Pieces of ceramic art not turned on the wheel must of course be modelled throughout by the hand or by means of moulds. Thus, the rhyton 1 of Greek archaeology is commonly made in the semblance of a deer's head or ram's head (see Fig. 37), and there is nothing to prevent a mould being made, either for the whole of the head 1 Rhyton: a drinking vessel so shaped that it cannot stand erect and contain the liquid contents. vol. i_5 [ 65 ] MODELLING AND EMBOSSING outside of and beyond the horns, or two moulds, one for each side of the head and neck, which in that case may be moulded wholly except for the Fig. 19. La Danse de 1'Echarpe, by A. Leonard. Figures in Biscuit of Sevres Porcelain (Sevres Exhibit, Paris, 1900) horns themselves. Studies of the human figure, of animals and the like, are modelled directly from memory or in the presence of the object repre- sented. The sculptor of human and animal form makes studies in colored wax, a lump of it car- ried on a short stick. Then again, as the plastic [66] PLASTIC MATERIAL HARDENED BY HEAT material does not suffer from repeated handlings, and as it is scarcely more trouble to model roughly a whole figure than one part of it, the modeller is often seen to break up the whole of his partly completed work and begin again, the work that he has done sufficing to fill his mind with the preferred form on which he has decided, and to steady his hand for its completion. The terra-cotta images found in the ruins of Tanagra in Greece, in the neighborhood of Smyrna in Asia Minor, and in other Greek lands (see the Sicilian examples, Fig. 187), the groups of the same material made by Clodion and other masters in the eighteenth century, the portrait busts not uncommon in the Paris annual exhibitions during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, and the pieces of porcelain biscuit, such as those shown in Fig. 19, are all works of ceramic art 1 of the highest kind, that is to say, they are of baked clay, but modelled directly with but the slightest use of the mould, or with none ; the hand and the modelling tool of the designer producing the actual forms which we admire, with only such change as is caused by a shrinkage in the drying out of the clay and the subsequent 1 Ceramic Art (Keramic Art) : the art which has to do with objects made of clav, and, usually, of baked clay, or of any compound imitating natural clay, and capable of being hardened by the heat of the potter's oven. Ceramic wares are potterv, which term is used in a general sense, and also in the sense of the coarser kind, excluding porcelain, stoneware, faience, terra-cotta, and other fine varieties. [67] MODELLIX G AND EMBOSSING baking or firing. Fig. i 9 shows two statuettes in biscuit of hard porcelain of Sevres, modelled by Leonard for the National manufactory and ex- hibited at Paris in 1900. They are part of a set of danseuses ; each figure standing about sixteen inches high. These pieces are complete ; the originally modelled form has been fixed by the heat of the kiln. In Fig. 20, however, the clay model of a monument to W atteau is shown as it left the modeller's hand; or, if the drying of the piece has been aided by artificial heat, the piece still remains the mere first study of a composi- tion to be erected in large, and in some enduring material. In other words, this is not a piece of ceramic art ; the modelling is in wet clay ; its perpetuation in its own size and conditions can only be by means of a cast in plaster or other hard-setting material. The work done in baked clay for buildings as in the moulded bricks which were used exten- sively in Italy in the twelfth and thirteenth cen- turies and later, and those which were made during the second half of the nineteenth century in England and America, is produced largely by means of moulds, into which the clay is forced under a great pressure ; and this for the double purpose of giving to the work that sharpness and accuracy of detail which modern taste is supposed to require, and the possibility of multiplying each pattern somewhat rapidly and with perfect uni- [68] PLASTIC MATERIAL NOT TO BE HARDENED formity. There is, however, nothing to prevent the use of entirely free and original modelling of Fig. 20. Study in clay, monument to Watteau, by Lormier each part. A house might perfectly well be built in which every external ornament should be [69 ] MODELLING AND EMBOSSING modelled especially for its place, and this by the hands of the owner if he were so minded, or by a sculptor in his employ. What is called terra- cotta 1 is governed by the same conditions exactly. In all such work the artist's idea of the architec- tural sculpture needed is embodied in modelled soft material instead of carved hard material. The firing, or baking, is merely a device employed to make the soft material hard and permanent. The necessity of using heat brings with it some precau- tions which must be taken, lest the shrinkage of the work throw it out of all form and comeliness. Modelling is preserved for us also when it is done in glass. In all the schools of decorative glass-work, as under the Roman empire and in later times in Venice, France, and Bohemia, though color in the material is the main thing, (see Chapter IX), moulded parts and even parts modelled by the tool are constantly in use. Under the Romans there was a peculiarly happy use of 1 Terra- Cotta : hard ceramic ware, a term meaning baked earth and applied generally in Italian and always in English to specially prepared pieces of much hardness and excellence of make. Architectural terra- cotta was in use very largely in certain towns of Italy through the epoch of the earliest Renaissance; thus in Bologna and Ferrara beautiful deco- rative work, applied to doorways, balconies, arcades, and the like, dates from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was rarely used in the North of Europe. The application of the term to brilliantly colored and highly glazed wares, such as garden seats, vases, and the like, has no especial propriety ; even the Italian work in colored enamels, as ex- plained in what is said elsewhere about the Robbia work, is generally excluded from the category and is spoken of as enamelled ware rather than as terra-cotta. [70] Fig. 21 Bust modelled in wax and colored Musee Wicar Lille, France ; WAX IN ARTISTIC WORK modelling in glass in connection with tiling, such as was made for the sheathing of walls. Not many fragments of it have come down to us, but those that have are sometimes of great beauty, the figures being exquisitely designed though coarsely modelled, as if rough copies of well-known beauti- ful originals. Modelling which is not made hard and per- manent by fire may still be preserved for a length of time if it is treated with respect. The remark- able wax head (see Fig. 21) in the Musee Wicar at Lille in France is of disputed origin, having been claimed for Greco-Roman antiquity and also for Raphael : it is evidently of the most glorious days of the Renaissance. It was rather common in the early years of the nineteenth century, in England as well as in France, to make statuettes and the like in wax completely colored in close resemblance to life, and this for public sale, — little figures representing the characters of Dickens, each under its own glass shade, having been for sale in 1840, and after. Many collections of minor works of art contain modelling as of heads, in wax and other soft materials and of many epochs, these modelled pieces being richly colored and gilded, the material itself being sometimes uncer- tain because no one wishes to cut into it sufficiently for examination. Impressed or stamped work in many materials is properly a modification of modelled work ; but [7i ] MODELLING AND EMBOSSING in these processes the engraving of the stamp or mould is so much the most important part of the work, artistically speaking, that the subject belongs rather to die-sinking. Still, as the dies have to be made espe- cially with a view to the ma- terial to be im- pressed, designs in stamped horn, tortoise shell, leather (see Chapter XI), and wax are en- titled to especial consideration in Oriental and in European art. Wax allows of almost complete coloring ; the other materials are generally used for the medallion, and by the Japanese for the netsuke. 1 Fig. 22 shows a medallion portrait, Eng- Fig. 22. Portrait medallion in pressed horn, Frederic Henry, Prince of Orange, signed by John Osborn, 1626 (" Some Minor Arts") 1 Netsuke : a very small object of smooth and rounded shape used by the Japanese to receive and hold one end of the silk cord to which is attached a pipe-case, tobacco-pouch, or inro. The weight of the larger object cannot drag the netsuke through the girdle, and a convenient means of grasping and handling the whole is thus afforded. [72] WORK IN THIN METAL lish work of the seventeenth century, and the stu- dent will readily see how much the design loses in being transferred from the die or intaglio to the not perfectly ductile material upon which it has been impressed. This form of the sculptor's art is, therefore, best treated in connection with the cut- ting of the intaglio original (see Chapter XXI). The term "modelling " may with propriety be extended to cover the treatment of hard material which is in sheets so thin that it can be impressed easily, cut easily, and still more easily bent or rolled. It is more common, however, to use the word "embossing" for all work in thin plates of metal. When the work is hammered up from within, it is usually necessary to work also upon the outer surface, that is to say, upon the front, and this is done with the chasing tool (see Chapter X). This, however, has to do merely with the finishing of the work ; the first pattern in relief having been produced by good hard hammering from the wrong side. In doing such work as this it is evident that the artist must constantly watch the right side; and in fact, as is shown in Chapter X, it is in that way that embossing is commonly done, the plate of metal being held down with some firmness against the point of the hammer, which constantly comes back to it in rapid little blows. Of course the artist may be following more or less closely a model which he has made before, but in this case he as an embosser [ 73 ] MODELLING AND EMBOSSING is merely following his own preceding work as a modeller and goes through two technical processes instead of one. Fig. 23 shows an etui or case for scissors, bodkin, and the like, made of thin plates of gold hammered into re- lief from the wrong side and then chased upon the right side. This piece is in high relief. Fig. 24 shows a patch-box in which the relief is very low, hardly greater than that upon a coin, but pro- duced in the same manner as that shown in Fig. 23. There is still another kind of embossing which should be mentioned for a Fig. 23. Etui, Repousse work moment. In the Middle in gold, French, eighteenth Ages an( J at a J ater t [ me century it was not uncommon to carve in hard wood in low relief, and then to force very thin metal plates, as of silver, down upon this carving, the chasing tool or some equivalent being used to force the pliable metal into the recesses of the pattern. This once done, the thin metal plate could be withdrawn from the wooden background, which, with a little repair, would serve for a second undertaking of the same kind. The thin metal would be filled from within [74] WO UK IN THIN METAL with pitch or plaster or with some other material easy to liquefy, and which would then solidify itself. The best of all such substances is probably sulphur, as that has the faculty of cooling without shrinking notably, the hard mass occupying very nearly the whole space previously occu- pied by the sulphur when melted. The above described process depends upon carving in relief, and is therefore not em- bossing in a strict sense. In like man- F :°- 2 +- Patch box ' Repouss F FABRICS WITH PILE whim of his own, or of his employer ; and this without any great shock to his sense of artistic propriety ; while the loom, of very simple make and management, can be made to record every changing mood of the artist. Fabrics made like the one shown in Fig. 77, with nap or pile, are produced by weaving with loops like those which, when drawn tight, form the ribbed fabric described above, and by cutting those loops in a regular and uniform way, either by hand with a knife, or by a machine which takes off the upper surface of each loop. The same device is used for bringing this pile to a perfectly uniform smoothness. It is cut with knives or it is burned, and upon a careful and precise doing of this final work much of the beauty depends. Fig. 77 is an Oriental carpet of that type in which a strongly marked pattern has been thought inex- pedient. In a mixed and crowded pattern like this, without easily traced significance, the effects of wear or of accident are much less noticeable ; but one of the greatest beauties of Oriental design — a matter in which the Easterners excel the men of Europe of all ages — is thus neglected. Still, this pattern, which would be unattractive enough in silk or any smooth-surfaced textile whatsoever, is perfectly presentable in the pile fabric. It partakes indeed of the speckled or "pepper-and-salt" character of many modern Eu- ropean cloths ; but still the deep pile with its soft [ 2I 9 ] TEXTILE ART surface and irregular absorption of light redeems the whole. It may be thought strange, in the case of velvets and similar fabrics, that a similar cloud- ing and undetermined gradation of hue and tint has not been employed more frequently, for it Fig. 77. Oriental carpet, mixed pattern (Marquand Collection) would seem to be a natural way to give an added charm to the material. Plain velvet requires the most refined care in the weaving, so that the loops may be exactly of the same height, and the cutting or shearing must be done with equal care. There is a still greater elaboration of the material in what is called " raised " velvet, a fabric in which only the pattern, or a part of the pattern, is in velvet [ 220 ] FABRICS WITH THE PATTERN IN PILE pile, the rest of the surface being left smooth, like satin or other silk fabric. There is also the still more elaborate pile-upon-pile velvet, where a cer- tain pattern is woven with longer loops and is cut Fig. 78. Part of chasuble of Genoa velvet by itself, while the background is woven with shorter loops and again is cut by itself, so that a deep velvet pile is relieved upon a low or short velvet pile which may also be of a different color. Fig. 78 shows a piece of Genoa velvet of the seventeenth century forming part of a chasuble ; [221 ] TEXTILE ART the background is of nearly white silk, with that ribbed surface which is made by fine threads in raised loops enclosing a cord ; but the surface is lustrous and the ridges even add to its brilliancy. The pattern shown in the paler tint is of green silk, also in loops which rise a little higher than the white ridges of the background. The darkest part of the pattern is of deep green velvet pile ; but it is evident that this dark green silk was woven in just such loops as those of the lighter pattern, which loops were afterwards cut or shaved to make the velvety surface. Velvets are made now in Venice, in close imitation of those of the seventeenth century, it must be allowed, in which fabrics the background is plain smooth silk, or silk with a very slight pattern of points and ridges, perhaps in uniform color, perhaps with mono- chromatic flowering or chequer, with a pattern upon this in short velvet pile, and upon this again a pattern in longer pile, these velvet parts being of two, three, or more colors. Such elaborate figured velvet as this costs from sixty to one hun- dred lire a yard when of the usual width, three quarters of a yard or thereabout ; but nothing made in any quantity and for general sale in our modern epoch is of greater beauty and of more satisfactory design. Other materials than threads of naturally fibrous substance enter into weaving, and that very largely in the more ornamental fabrics. Paper, gilded and FABRICS PARTLY OF METALLIC SURFACE cut into narrow strips, has been mentioned above ; but paper of brown, gray, or yellow color also occurs. Gold thread, which is usually thin silver Fig. 79. Modern gold and silver brocade wire gilded, or rather an originally stout gilded silver wire which has been pulled out, both silver and gold together, to a very fine thread, is used in weaving what is known as "gold cloth" or gold and silver brocade, and this again is modified by [ 22 3 ] TEXTILE ART the introduction into some stuffs of very narrow, flat strips of gilded metal, which keep their color and lustre even better than the gilded silver wire, though not so perfectly as paper. Fig. 79 is a Fig. 80. Old Venice gold brocade piece of stuff" or which the background is ribbed white silk with pieces of flat silver foil introduced into it, producing a lustrous silvery ground. The small flowers are in colored silk of four hues. The larger flowers are entirely in gold, nearly the whole being of gold thread of round section, but [ "4 ] CLOTH OF GOLD AND GOLD BROCADE with the more brilliant parts at the opening of the blossoms made up of flat strips of gilded metal which give a wonderful play of light. This piece is of modern Italian manufacture, costing about three hundred lire the yard of the usual narrow width. Fig. 80 is a part of an altar frontal of Venetian brocade, probably of the sixteenth cen- tury. The background and the pale, less visible pattern are in two shades of yellowish brown, pale, or now much faded, and the strong and prominent pattern is entirely in " gold thread" of which the gilding has largely disappeared, leaving the silver to tarnish ; but this metal filament has been wound upon a yellow silk of stronger hue than any part of the background, and in this way an element of color intensifies and warms the metallic look of the surface. The piece has gained rather than lost by its misfortunes — such is the kindly way in which time deals with fine designs. The charm which textile fabrics have for the lover of color and of color design never grows less powerful, for the quality of the material and its surface, its pliability also, and capability of being arranged in folds, the exquisite effect of elaborate patterns, not flat as when printed upon wall-paper, but modified by the constant gradation of the slight irregularities caused by the weave — all of these peculiarities together make an important piece of decorative brocade or velvet one of the most fascinating things that a lover of ornamental vol. 1 — 15 r oor 1 TEXTILE ART art can possibly handle, while simpler weaves are as attractive, though they may demand less study. The modification ol the surface of stuff by em- broidery, treated in the next chapter, is a beauti- ful art by itself, and one to be considered quite apart from the beauty which is essential to the textile fabric ; and it may be that the true lover of textiles will never care quite as much for em- broidery, no matter how splendid and refined its results may be. This will be because of that very formality — of those very limitations which have been alluded to above. The free hand of the needle-woman is somehow less impressive in what it achieves than the set purpose of the weaver. Fig. 8 1 shows a piece of silk in which the weaving alone has produced some effects very like those for which we look to embroidery. The surfaces of the darkest shade are green silk in very fine threads and of a considerable gradation of color, passing through perhaps a dozen separate dyes ; and all this silk is broche on the surface in such a way that the fine threads hang or project very loosely. Where the background color sepa- rates the patches of green, marking off" the petals of the flower, the green silk threads go out of sight in the weave exactly as they do in the larger patches of background, and there they are held fast ; but each loop of green silk is so loose that a stout bodkin could be run behind it at any point, and without using force. [ 226 ] PECULIAR AND UNUSUAL WEAVES Another and a very different kind of weave has been used in the piece shown in Fig. 82 ; a pro- cess not known in Europe. The background of uniform blue is separate from the pattern of white Fig. 81. Part of chasuble, green silk and different greens, except for the threads of the warp. A very slight effort will pull the two stuffs apart, at the outline of any leaf or petal, enough " to show daylight " through the fabric. This process is used for very splendid materials woven in plain, strong, primary colors beautifully combined ; but the writer has never seen gold or [ 227 ] TEXTILE ART silver, either in threads or strips, introduced into the fabric. Carpet weaving has attracted so much attention in connection with the make of Oriental rugs Fig. 82. Part of Chinese gown, blue ground that the principles of the fabrication are pretty well understood. The workmen who produce the finest pieces are those who have the simplest, or very simple, machines, those who inhabit a warm climate like the northern provinces of India, [ 228 ] THE WEAVING OF CARPETS working out of doors ; while the Persian frames are hardlv more finished or more elaborate than those of the Indians. It is to be admitted, how- ever, that only small rugs are producible by these most simple appliances : and that very large Per- sian rugs of fine old fabrication show all the signs of having been woven slowly, with great delibera- tion in the handling of the design, and by means of specially built looms. They are of course very costly ; and yet have generally less charm for the student of decorative art than the smaller, fortu- nately more common, weaves. The attempt of the British government in India to have carpet weaving done in the jails of that country has re- sulted in the preservation and reproduction of good old patterns, and in providing Western mar- kets with rugs that have much charm, preserving as they do so much of the old patterns and colors as is compatible with perfect regularity of work. The real glory or the Eastern rug is not in such regularity. It depends largely upon strange and unexpected modifications of color, and slight changes in the form of the pattern ; as has been suggested above. This has been partly guessed by the intelligent dealers who undertake to supply Europe with Eastern fabrics, and a somewhat elaborate system ot changing dyes, even in surfaces of one general color, is followed in the modern rugs made to their order. Decided gradations from darker to lighter and even in hue, as from [ 229 ] TEXTILE ART browner to a redder orange, are constantly seen, even in modern rugs of no very great cost. Even the irregularity of pattern is attempted, and with so much success that the unpractised student is often betrayed into thinking that the piece before him, at least, must be of genuine up-country make and of the time previous to the coming of the Western employer. Tapestry 1 is made by a slow process in which the artist with his colored cartoon beside him, but facing the back of his future piece of tapestry, secures upon a framework of parallel cords thread after thread of colored worsted, such as he selects to match the colors of his cartoon. In the Gobe- 1 Tapestry : A fabric made by passing the threads which are to form the pattern, and which alone are to be shown, between the fixed strings of the warp, alternately, as in common weaving, but carrying this weave only as far with each thread as that particular thread is needed, — perhaps to cover onlv two or four warp-strings, — not often across the whole breadth of the stuff. The weaver has as many shuttles or bobbins or "needles" as he has different colors: beginning at the bottom, he carries his pale blue thread (for instance) through an inch only of the width of the stuff, once through and back again, and pounds down into place that woven-in pale-blue thread, with a " comb " of bone or ivory. Then comes perhaps a slightly darker blue ; it is carried through an inch and a quarter alongside of the first patch — on a level with it, and also above it for a little way. In this way the finished piece of the work grows irregularly on either side and upward. Forty colors perhaps may be in use at once : they are wrought into each other by slow accretion ; the broken lines of color are used like the hatchings of a drawing. The work, therefore, resembles in its nature that done in making needle-made lace : each is an embroiderv, not upon a completed surface, but upon a mere screen of cords or strings or threads In each operation, the em- broidering creates the stuff, which has no existence until the decorative shuttle-work or needle-work is done. [ 2JO ] THE WEAVING OF T APES T R Y lins establishment in Paris, the haute lisse process is the only one used ; the threads of the warp are vertical ; the workman can walk round to the front of his growing piece and examine it. When the parallel cords (the warp) are held horizontal, the tapestry is made face downward, and the work- man cannot see it without unshipping his frame : this process is called " low warp " [basse lisse). As the slow building-up of the mosaic of threads, for such it really is, allows of an indefinite amount of delicate gradation in the colors and of a very close approximation to precise accuracy in the fol- lowing of curved lines, no matter how subtle their curvature, the worker in tapestry is always tempted into design, which, though possible to him, is still more triumphantly possible to painting. This tendency is helped by the obvious fact that there must be a carefully made colored drawing from which the worker at the frame must take every detail of his work ; and that this drawing will be made by one who is not himself such a worker. It is therefore easy and natural, almost inevitable, that the maker of this cartoon should forget his terms of service to the tapestry loom, and expatiate as a painter ! He is probably, in fact or in desire, a member of the confraternity of painters: he is ready at all times to overstep the boundaries of the other art. The famous portraits framed into the wall of the Gallery of Apollo in the Louvre, remarkable achievements [ 231 ] TEXTILE ART of the Gobelins factory, would be better if they were painted as well in proportion as they are worked in tapestry ; and the same skill which went to those achievements would have gone further if used in a composition such as tapestry alone could do full justice to. This depends partly upon the softness and flow of tapestry, which, though not equal to that of thinner material, is very great when it is used in the large pieces which are commonly hung upon walls. The object of tapestry, the purpose to which it was originally applied, is the covering and concealing of walls, and when this is carried out — when the arras is hung by tenterhooks near the ceiling and swings free without anything to draw it tight except its own weight and the setting of the rings upon the tenterhooks so that the top edge is rea- sonably strained — the colors and the peculiar sur- face of the tapestry are seen to the best advantage. Even if it is used as a curtain and allowed to fall in great folds which are more or less adjustable, and often readjusted, the charm of tapestry may be at the full, for it is the best tapestry when its color design is such that this breaking up into folds improves rather than injures the resulting effect. It is evident, then, that tapestry is to be designed with a single aim, that of decorative effect. The wise designer does not try to represent natural scenery or single objects, man or beast or tree, but [ *3'2 ] P ILLO W O R BOBBIN LA C E uses them all as suggestions toward his proposed design in color. The composer in mosaic, or in that translucent mosaic of the colored window (see Chapter XVIII), is restrained, for his good, by very similar laws. Lace 1 again is a manufacture of great decorative effect with very severe limitations. It is of two kinds, not so readily distinguishable when complete and put to use, as distinct in their make. In each the thread is interlaced, tied, and knotted to form a meshed background with a figure upon it, but in the one case these threads are twisted, plaited, and knotted together by the ringers which handle threads kept in place — held down — by certain rather heavy pendulous pieces of bone or wood (rarely lead) known as bobbins, which are made 1 Lace, in decorative art: A fabric of threads woven, twisted, or plaited together, but differing from other textile fabric or needle-work by its open make, with meshes large in proportion to the thickness of the threads, and having no solid or close-woven surfaces except small parts of the ornamental pattern. Its effectiveness in design is gained by the very fact of its being open, so as to show in a light color upon the darker ground of a garment ; or, in the case of black or the rare colored laces, to show its pattern as relieved upon white or a light color. The names given to different kinds of laces, as from the nations or towns, Alen^on, Angleterre, Argentan, Bruxelles (Brussels), and the like, have wholly lost their geographical significance. " English Point ' ' is made in Auvergne, and "Point de France" in Venice. Moreover, the names as used for the laces sold in the shops- are no longer of any close or continued appli- cation. Just as the name " seersucker," when that striped stuff went out of fashion, was given in the shops to a wholly different material, so the trade names of lace have ceased to correspond to those used by collectors. The student of the terminology of lace should consult the books by M. Seguin, Mrs. Bury Palliser, Ernest Lefebure, and Mrs. Jackson. [ 2 33 ] TEXTILE ART fast each to the end of the thread. The variety of pattern and of the character of surface obtainable in this way is likely to surprise one to whom the subject is new. Thus in Fig. 83 is shown a fabric just as simply woven out of stout threads as any Fig. 83. Genoa guipure, seventeenth century piece of "sheeting"; and Fig. 84 gives such another piece of string-work ; only, in this piece there seems to have been added a little embroidery — a little needle-work — to the brides, or cross- pieces, which hold the fabric together. The threads of bobbin lace can be drawn tight into opaque and solid fabric, or a surface unlike any- thing woven in the usual way but equally firm and durable, or thev can be left in a slight open mesh, hexagonal or square, upon which the pattern may [ 234 ] PILLOW OR BOBBIN LACE be sewed or which may itself be broken up by the interposition of blocks of the solid fabric men- tioned above. Thus in Fig. 85 there are contrasted an elaborate mesh-background and a very solid and uniform tape-like scroll and flower. Lace in Fig. 84. Early Italian passamans (passement) its artistic character must be left for the next chap- ter, but it is not to be forgotten that the essential character of it was fixed by the use of the twisted threads hanging from a cushion and manipulated by hand without the use of the sharp point or of any tool whatever, and that needle-point lace is an addition, a modification of the original man- ufacture by the methods of the embroiderer. The lover of handwork for its own sake and [ 2 35 ] TEXTILE ART because it is handwork, will be apt to prefer bob- bin lace to point lace, and sixteenth-century Fig. 85. False Valenciennes ; Flemish work, eighteenth century work to that fostered by Colbert and taken up by imitators of the French in other lands, no matter how splendid the latter may be to the eye. [ 236 ] Chapter Thirteen EMBROIDERY DECORATIVE needle-work, though certainly familiar to the ancients, has made little impression upon modern students as an important branch of pre-christian adornment. The tombs of Egypt have preserved a few pieces of embroidery ; but practically the beautiful work of the Egyptian as of the Grecian maidens has disappeared, together with the delicate linens and woollens upon which they wrought their designs. The patterns repro- duced from ancient garments, in color on painted statues (see Chapters V and XXIV), in mono- chrome on vases, and in engraving on Assyrian bas-reliefs are not to be understood as assuredly wrought by the needle. In very many cases it is a textile pattern rather than needle-work that is represented ; and, again, many a representation in ancient wall-painting or relief sculpture of a fig- ured canopy, or sail, or wall-hanging, suggests to the archaeologist an original of painted cloth. For that pretty art of painting the textile fabric, in patterns, attends upon embroidery, accompanies [ 2 37 ] EMBROIDER V it even in the same piece, suggests new combina- tions, and prepares the way tor new triumphs. For our studies, the oldest embroidery is Euro- pean, and dates from the Western nations of the ninth century, although perhaps the twelfth cen- tury is rather the time of the beginning of useful progress. The Moslem work comes later ; even the exquisite needle-work of Persia and India is not known to us as of a time earlier than the fif- teenth century a.d. ; exceptions occur only in fragments so small and so relatively unimportant as to be but the slightest guide toward theories concerning the earlier development of the art. In the European Middle Ages, however, with an impoverished people, and an unsettled govern- ment never reaching far, controlling the action of only small communities, without systematic poli- cing or control over high and low alike, without systematic and regulated industry, while there was an almost complete inability to change one's place of habitation except as a poverty-stricken wanderer on foot, at the mercy of every strong thief and every tvrant who was beating up con- scripts for his petty wars, — in the Middle Ages, a time whose distresses were lightened by that which a more sagacious and intellectual age is devoid of, a sense of the value of pictured and figured art, bringing with it a true sense of decorative design, — those arts flourished which could be practised in his own shed, near his [ 238 ] ITS SIMPLE APPLIANCES own fireside, by the individual of but small knowledge and of little social importance. It was the development of this mood of mind that made Gothic architecture what it was, as is set forth in Chapters XIV and XXVI ; but the art of embroidery was sure to flourish under such circumstances, even as the art of illumination and the painting of miniatures in books would flourish wherever men were well enough in- formed to write on leaves of vellum and to care to bind them together into books. All that was needed for the embroiderer's work was the piece of reasonably solid textile material or leather, a needle, and some thread. Beauty of pattern was as obtainable with coarse flax or woollen thread spun from the distaff as if the appliances at the disposal of the workwoman had been more nu- merous and more elaborate. Beauty of color came afterwards and was separate, a thing which might or might not form a part of the embroid- ery considered as a work of art. Any one who has seen an initial worked with the needle on the corner of a handkerchief in white thread has seen what the greater part of embroidery consists of, — that is to say, of stitches taken through and through the stuff, lying side by side or crosswise, and producing a slightly relieved figure upon the smooth surface. The greater number of stitches and " points " which are mentioned in treatises on embroidery are mere [ 239 ] E M BR 01 D E R V changes in the way the needle goes in and comes out again, and in the resulting loops and their combinations. There are, however, some other processes which should be named ; thus Couching Fig. 86. Embroidery in silk with couching of gold cord. Japanese work, eighteenth century is the laying down of the thread, or bundle of threads of the cord or wire, usually a rather stout one, flat upon the surface of the stuff which is to be embroidered, and the holding of this in place by little stitches of thread meant to be as nearly [ 2 40 ] COUCHING AND CUSHION WORK invisible as possible, but which are in some cases made to tell by their color upon the couched cord, as when a gold couching is given a warm tone by being held down by stitches of red thread. Fig. 86 shows a piece ot Japanese embroidery done in large part by couching. The whole back- ground being pale red, the semblance of a basket is produced with gold cord, laid, some twenty lengths, side by side, each two adjoining pieces held down by stitches of white thread ; the little suggestions of mountain landscape are made by the same arrangement ot gold cord ; the chrysan- themums, which show so dark in the photograph, are of scarlet silk, each strand a twisted rope of fine threads, and so on ; these and the little knots which pass for trees on the mountains being mere stitching. So embroidery on padding, known as Relief embroidery, Raised Satin Stitch, and what not, consists of surface material of the color and texture desired put upon cushions of inferior ma- terial which is usually hidden altogether. Thus in Fig. 87, a Persian saddle-cloth, the ground is plain blue silk, and upon this the whole design is raised in relief higher than that in any one of 'the pieces illustrated in Chapter XXI — higher than any struck coin or medallion. This is all done with yellow thread, silk and cotton together, laid flat, layer over layer, and then covered with stitching in the same thread mingled with gold. Applique embroiderv is that in which a piece VOL. I — 16 f n , t 1 EMBROIDERY or many pieces of silk, or cloth, or even of such material already charged with embroidery, are ap- plied to the surface of the fabric to be adorned, Fig. 87. Embroidery on silk, the flowers and leaves in relief in cushions of yellow silk faced with gold thread. Persian work, seventeenth century and held in place by stitching around the edges. The piece so put on may itself be of the greatest richness, the whole acting like an encrusted enamel [ 242 ] ITS USE IN HERALDRY in a plain metal surface ; but the essential thing in applique work is that the piece so added should be in itself an addition to the general design, as affording a patch of color, large and solid and of any appropriate shape, of a kind hardly to be obtained by needle-work except at a great cost of labor. Where embroidery has a definite story to tell, as where it is of heraldic purpose, the bear- ings to be charged upon the escutcheon may often be obtained more intelligently, and therefore more usefully, by being cut out of another piece of cloth, for heraldic coloring is nearly always flat and without gradations, as shown in Chapter XX. Thus, if you have a red lion to charge 1 upon a gold field it is not so hard to cut out your lion from a piece of red cloth, taking great pains that he shall cover with his body, legs, and sweeping tail as much of the ground as possible, and then to apply and sew down this red silhouette upon the ground. That ground you then fill up, around the lion, with just so much gold thread work, probably " couched " rather than drawn through the stuff, as will make the whole blank surface of the quartering look as if it were gilded. This heraldic embroidery played a great part in the years of the later Middle Ages, when men of rank wore surcoats or jupons over their armor, these jupons being often worked with 1 Charge (v. t.) : in Heraldry to put one heraldic bearing upon an- other, or upon the escutcheon. [ ] EM B ROIDEH V the bearings of the owner, repeated over and over again on front and back, on body and sleeves and skirts. At a later time it was especially in the adorn- ment of clerical dresses — robes and accessory gar- ments lor the ceremony of the Mass — to which embroidery was applied with more especial rich- ness and splendor. The cope, which is a great cloak, approximately semicircular in shape when laid out flat, and which usually has a kind of hood (or what was originally a hood) hanging in the middle of the back ; the dalmatic, which was a garment like a herald's tabard 1 with short sleeves, usually not completed, nor closed beneath the arm, but covering the upper part of the arm alone (see Fig. 88) ; the chasuble, which was made up of a breastplate and backpiece, the two held together by broad straps over the shoulders, but otherwise wholly open ; the stole, which was a narrow strip laid over the shoulders, passing around the neck like the collar of a coat and hanging down on either side in long, pendulous bands, sometimes wider at the ends than above, — - all these were made splendid, sometimes by their material, the most costly that might be within reach, but also very often of plain silk elaborately embroidered. 1 Tabard : since the abandonment of complete armor for the body, an official outer cloak, for a herald or pursuivant ; that is, for the officer making special proclamation or supposed to direct certain court functions. Il is short, with short or open sleeves, and embroidered with the arms of the sovereign whom the herald represents. [ 244 ] ITS USE IN LITURGICAL VESTMENTS This needle-work was often in floss silk or what most nearly corresponded to that modern material, and such a surface as that would wear out easily ; Fig. 88. Dalmatic, embroidered very heavily in silk or many colors. Italian work, seventeenth century and it is therefore often found much worn at the places where the officiant's hands rubhed or pressed it as he performed his office ; but the pieces, how- [ ^45 ] E M B II 0 1 D E R V ever injured, remain always magnificent in effect. The pattern of these pieces usually retained a cer- tain mediaeval, or at least an early Renaissance, Fig. 89. Part of a chasuble, embroidery on white ground with silk of many colors. Italian work, sixteenth century character, — even when the piece, as is certain from the quality of the silk which forms its chief material, is evidently of a later date. Thus in the chasuble, Fig. 89, the pattern of scroll-work, [ 246 ] ITS PICTORIAL ASPECT shown as large as possible, with just that termina- tion of each spray and just that enrichment where sprays meet and part, is of the years before 1580 ; but these patterns linger on in church embroidery even while they change rapidly in other decora- tion. It is curious to see how late the early patterns hold, in this particular branch of decora- tive art. Sometimes, and especially in Spain, though oddly enough the same tendency is visible in English mediaeval work, the embroidery in soft, fluffy silk took on a pictorial aspect. The scrolls, of not very naturalistic design, were used as frames for a picture, for it can be called nothing else, — a picture of a saint or even of a biblical or legen- dary event. The needle-worker was, in intention at least, a painter ; and the Crucifixion, a glory of angels, whatever would be a chosen subject for wall-work or window-work, was intrusted also to floss silk and the needle. The drawing would be unskilful and even inartistic in character ; but the color effects would be fine. Such work is de- signed exactly on the same lines as the painting of the same epoch ; the long stitches of soft thread cover the ground almost exactly as brush-strokes with paint might cover it ; and, naturally, the fig- ures and the composition are not those of needle- work. Once put the antiquity of the piece out of mind, its rarity, its sincerity, its relation to other fine art of the time, and it is rather unattractive. [ 247 ] EMBROID E R Y Such representative or narrative work has been done in very recent times by ladies who have heartily enjoyed such unrestrained play of fancy, — the needle and the soft silk, the wheat-ears and banded bees shown in gold on a golden-brown ground, the autumn foliage, the spring blossoms, many-colored, in their relief upon a sky-blue ground. There is a charm in such work, but it is the charm of childish attempts at fine art, — the charm of a not very intelligent archaism. English embroidery was celebrated all over Eu- rope in the Middle Ages, perhaps on account of the greater richness of the designs undertaken. The same people who preferred for themselves the more " legitimate " designs of no immediate external significance might admire as a rarity the pictorial work of the islanders. The tendency above mentioned to make the embroidered surfaces soft and perishable is gen- erally avoided by Oriental workmen ; although most elaborate specimens of loose and even semi- detached applications of soft silk fibres are seen associated with solid work. The people of north- ern India, including Cashmir and those of Persia, affect, as is well known, a kind of needle-work in which the silk is as tightly drawn as possible and forms a solid and almost imperishable fabric, which moreover is usually applied to a very trust- worthy material. Fig. 90 shows another saddle- cloth in which the pattern in primary colors and [ 248 ] WORK OF WESTERN ASIA white are wrought upon a crimson ground ; the whole work kept very flat and tight. A student of costume will rind interesting: not the embroid- ■V- '/ '4?. Fig. 90. Embroidery on silk. Persian work, seventeenth century ered shawls and hangings alone, but the garments of many kinds in use in Persia, in Afghanistan, so far as that is a quiet and settled country, or has been so, and in India. The same kind of stitch is used, and the same colors are applied in the adorn- [ 249 ] E M 15 R O 1 1) E R Y ment of women's garments in use in Persia to- day, the outline and hang of which seem clumsy to us ; but the embroidered surface is beautiful beyond any possibility of Western handiwork. The people of Greece, of Albania, Montenegro, and Bosnia are great in embroidery, and so are those of Asia Minor. The designs are nearly always traditional, and in almost every case could be traced back to their origin if one took pains enough, but they are in daily use, and serve to adorn pieces which are sent with the bride to her new home, or are worn by her as maid, wife, and mother, through a long lifetime. The use of embroidery in this way tends in a direction coun- ter to our notions of personal cleanliness. Thus the heavily wrought robe of the Greek peasant can hardly be washed except in the unembroid- ered parts, and that only by holding the worked skirt up out of the water, while the parts most needing to be cleansed, or those more easily cleansed, are dipped and rubbed and beaten and then slowly dried. It is one of the many in- stances in which the modern tendencies of all sorts, even those which we think the most whole- some and essential, work against the beautiful arts of our predecessors on this planet. Chinese embroidery is less known in the West than it should be. Our fathers used to bring crape shawls (Canton crepe, as they were called) covered with embroidery of the ground color, but [ 2 5° ] WORK OF EASTERN ASIA embroidery in varied colors has never been a common article of export from China, before our own time of monstrous prices tor any delicate work of art ; although the seventeenth-century Dutchmen and the eighteenth-century English- men did bring such pieces to their wives at home. The invasion of China by European and other powers, in 1900, and the extraordinary "punitive expeditions " by which a helpless people suffered for the sins of others, gave a great opportunity for plunder, and also for buying cheap the property of a frightened and impoverished people ; and ac- cordingly great sales of magnificent Chinese em- broideries took place in Western cities in 1901 and 1902. In these great collections there was per- fectly well seen the natural and obvious decorative sense of the native Chinese. Embroidery was helped by many other appliances, as mentioned elsewhere with regard to the Japanese ; even gold foil and gilded paper were glued to the silk, — a simple kind of applique work indeed ! But the strength of the design, of huge wall-hangings and small screens and garments alike, was in solid and perfectly understood needle-work. Japanese em- broidery applied to those curious squares of silk which are used to cover presents or ceremony is generally very strongly made, the threads sufficiently stout and drawn tight, so that the needle-work itself will last as long as the silk or the woollen cloth upon which it is applied, and even be intact after [ 251 ] E M B R O I D E R V the stuff has worn to shreds. The Japanese use emhroidery less in costume, though it is so used, usually as a concomitant and heightening of splen- did woven fabrics. Thus a silk robe of gorgeous Fig. 91. Part of priest's ceremonial robe, embroidered in silk, with much applique work. Japanese work, eighteenth century green and gold background, with great red and white woven flowers in its surface, will be helped out by embroidery in gold thread and in white and blue rloss around that part of the skirt which is most visible and seems most to invite further [ ] NEEDLE-POINT LACE decoration ; and this added embroidery will per- haps represent or suggest some definite incident or some scene in the daily life of mankind. Fig. 91 is part of a priestly robe, the dragon being about three feet long ; and this embroidery is as solid in all its parts as needle-work may be. On the other hand, the long, red hair of a famous and legendary poetess is given, in another design, absolutely loose and floating, held at one end only of the fine and soft silk fibre. One kind of needle-work which is not usually included under the head of embroidery must be treated in connection with it. Needle-point lace is that which either in its whole fabric or in its decorative parts is made by threads which are guided and put in place by the needle alone. The fond itself, or background formed of even meshes, is sometimes of needle-work as well, though this may be of bobbin lace (for which see Chapter XII). But the pattern is worked with the needle, and that very much as it would be worked on a solid material. There is less of background ; and therefore the needle has to partly work a back- ground as it goes along. The first stitch passes around two of the little threads which form the mesh, and this and its succeeding threads gradually build up a little platform of greater solidity upon which the pattern is developed. This is true even where the pattern is extremely fine and apparently transparent. It is still of a much greater solidity [ ^53 ] EMBROIDERY than the open mesh around, and even where the surface of the leaf is generally very open there is a rim or cordon around the edge, which outlines it firmly and holds the pattern together, even if not the fabric (see Figs. 92 and 94). The great lace industry of Europe hardly took shape before the middle of the seventeenth century. Fig. 92. Needle-made lace, so-called Brussels point Previous to that time there was much drawn work, that in which threads were pulled out of the piece of linen, and the little openings so made caught with the needle and hemstitched as it were, making little lines of open mesh to alternate with the more solid fabric around. Guipure was made also, and guipure is to needle-point lace as Russian wood-work with the adze and hatchet is to deli- cate carving in boxwood. This is hardly a fair comparison, as guipure may be beautiful and even refined in itself (see Fig. 93 ), but the comparative coarseness and largeness of parts in the one is to [ ^-54 ] T II E EMBROIDERY OF BOBBIN LACE the delicacy of the other very much in the sug- gested proportion. Even here, however, it be- hooves the student of lace to speak cautiously. Guipure, then, is often a variety of bobbin lace (see Chapter XII), but it is sometimes needle embroid- ery on a surface as of linen, which is then entirely Fig. 93. Guipure a Brides, so-called English point cut away except where the embroidery remains so that the pattern, the scroll, the zigzag, or the like is left open — a jour, — so as to show the fabric of a gown over which it is worn. Little twisted lines of thread called brides are carried across from branch to branch of the scroll to hold everything together. These are put in by the needle after the ground is cut away, and can be put in in greater numbers at any future time. The delicate laces which we know as of Alen- con, first made in the province of that name in [ *55 ] EMBROIDERY France ; Valenciennes, named from the Flanders town ; and later, Brussels, — seem all to have had their origin in the heart of France, in those regions of the Cevennes Mountains and in Auvergne where the wildness of the country and the shortness of the agricultural season leave much leisure for other industries. It is certain that during the reign of Louis XIV these moun- tain regions of France were the most fertile sources of the development of lace work. What Colbert cherished and tried to preserve for France was soon caught up in the other parts of Europe, and spread widely through the north. In parts of the south also it was carefully copied ; the women of the lagoons of Venice worked lace throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and there was developed the magnificent Venetian rose point, which is of all point lace the most superb in effect (see Fig. 94). The position of lace in the world of decorative art is peculiar in this, that it is almost exclusively a contrast of solids and piercings. Applied upon any colored surface, a piece of whitish lace would be considered chiefly as a pattern in light or dark, much as an inlay is considered. The eye seizes the yellowish-white pattern, or in contradistinc- tion to that, the probable darker background ; the intelligence is gratified by the contrast ; and one of the most attractive appeals to the artistic sense is thus made in a very simple way and in a way [ ] THE DECORATIVE EFFECT OF LACE moreover which allows of many changes. Take the piece of white lace, Figure 85, and remove it from the bluish-gray background upon which it lay when the photograph was taken, transfer it to Fig. 94. Venice Rose-point lace a piece of bright yellow, and the character of the design is changed in an extraordinary way. Again, dye the piece of lace a little, steep it in tea (a very common device), and then lay the greenish-yellow web upon a piece or dark olive-green silk and see how different again will be the result. These ex- VOL. I 17 [ - ^7 ] EMBROIDER V periments are indeed useful when one has to study effects in decorative art. There is still another consideration as to this view of lace as one of the decorative arts. The surface of the lace itself is so modified by the cordons or thick rounded ridges which form the borders of the separate leaves and flowers, as in Fig. 94, and this in many kinds of lace besides the exceedingly elaborate Venice rose point ; and again is so modi- fied by the irregularities of the solid web, the fill- ing, the broader surfaces of close-drawn, almost opaque, material ; or again by the constant and rapid passing from one kind of mesh to another, as in Fig. 85 and Fig. 92, that the conditions are as if the substance of the inlay to which we have compared the lace were continually broken up with veinings and cloudings — with irregularities of surface, bossings and sinkings and the like in a way not often used in the art of inlaying, properly so-called (see Chapter XVII). Then we have the slight relief of the piece of lace itself from the presumably heavier material upon which it lies ; and with this comes what is generally foreign to flat-pattern decoration of all kinds, the casting of little natural shadows. All this is merely a way of saying that lace is capable of wonderful deco- rative effect when used in costume and in such modifications of costume as are seen in stately ecclesiastical robes of office. And in this nothing has been said as to the effect of lace when stiffened [ ±5* ] THE PATTERNS OE LACE and left, as in the ruffs of the early seventeenth century, standing stiff and sharp-pointed, throwing, on occasion, its really beautiful shadows on the surfaces below it. Twentieth-century people have never seen that effect nor will they see it. It does not seem, however, that for actual decoration this would be an improvement upon the simpler ways which we know. The ruff itself, and all its modi- fications and its results, however acceptable as a piece of fantastic ceremonial, forms about the far- thest removal from noble and perfected costume that the world has seen (see Chapter XXIX). As to the patterns in themselves, there can be no doubt that this particular manner of displaying patterns is one of the most successful yet discovered. Let the student of such things trace or copy the outline forms of lace, its scrolls and leaves, its solids and piercings, and imagine them transferred to flat painting or to mosaic or to inlay or to printed paper or cotton, and see how inferior they would be. It is evident that the patterns which have been adopted and have perfected themselves little by little in the lace industry, are of less complex- ity, less refinement, less purity of line, less abstract beauty, than those in other departments of decora- tive design ; but it is also noticeable that they are entirely well fitted to the material, that more re- fined patterns would not be practicable in bobbin or in needle-point lace, and that we have here an instance of a perfectly traditional art growing [ 259 ] E M B R O I D E R Y among the people, impossible of improvement by the artist of great learning and originality, a thing perfect and complete in itself, and almost the only decorative art which holds its own in Europe in spite of untoward conditions. [ 260 ] Chapter Fourteen BUILDING. 1 THE methods used by builders are of two general sorts, first, that by means of massive structure, as where stones or bricks are piled one upon another ; and second, that of skeleton or framed 2 structure, as where slender uprights and slender horizontals are combined, and often held together by slender diagonal pieces, as ties or stiffeners, this frame 3 being built up with the purpose of enclosing or covering it afterward within or without, or both. In the first case the wall is the solid structure 1 Building : The practice of putting together material to produce a structure, especially one for the shelter of human beings, their property or pursuits, or of domestic animals ; also for purposes of military defence, though this has little to do with the artistic results of building. 2 Framed : Made up of parts, usually long and slender, which are held together at their points of meeting. A structure so made is called a frame. 3 Frame: In building, an assemblage of stiff pieces, bars, beams, posts and the like, as of wood or metal, put together by fitting the end of one to the side of another, and so on. In joinery (see Chapter XVI), a door or a window-sash consists of a frame, the openings of which are fit- ted with panels or lights of glass. In common trade-language, a frame in woodwork supposed to be put together with tenons or projecting tongues, fitted into mortises, or holes cut to receive the tenons. [ 26l ] BUILDING which carries the floors, if any, and the roof. In the other case, that which carries the floors and roof is the series of upright posts, which may or may not be entirely concealed by an outside sheath- ing. Thus if we look at two houses in an Amer- ican village, the one with walls built of brick or of rough stone shows on the outside the main prin- ciples of its wall-construction, as in Fig. 97; the other, presenting to the spectator an even and uniform surface of clapboards, up and down sid- ing, or shingles, is of unknown internal structure, no part of its actual framework being visible, as in Figs. 102 and 103. If, instead of an American village, we were to visit a town in northern France, such as Lisieux, or one in western Ger- many, such as Hildesheim, or one in England, such as Chester, we should be surprised by the appearance of many decorative houses built of admirable framework of the most obvious and workmanlike construction, and with that frame- work all exposed. (See Fig. 98.) Roofs, among peoples of European race, are almost always built in the second or framed manner: but the roof- frames must always be sheathed, for the more per- fect protection from rain and snow. The terrace roofs in countries where stone is abundant and wood scarce, as in central Syria and certain tropical and sub-tropical lands where rain is almost un- known, and where the flat roof is valued for its coolness as a sleeping-place at night, and where [ 262 ] MASSIVE AND FRAMED BUILDING also wood is scarce, are sometimes of masonry. The vaulting with which many rooms or great halls, churches and the like, are covered, is only a ceiling or inner roof, except in those buildings, rare in Europe, in which the same shell of ma- sonry serves for closing of the room within and for shedding the rain-water without. One or two cupolas like those of Saint Peter's Church at Rome, the Cathedral at Florence, and several smaller ones, are of solid masonry : the whole of the Cathedral of Sebenico in Dalmatia, modern sea-coast forts in which the bomb-proof vaulting of the casemates is floored over with flags, and some pieces of modern engineering in steel-framed, brick-vaulted city buildings are roofed in that solid way ; which is not uncommon in the Orient, even in much slighter and cheaper structures. In massive construction there are two principal methods of work, one by means of continuous walls, with or without openings for doors and win- dows, the other by detached uprights, pillars of some kind, carrying horizontals, and this either by what is known as post and beam construction, or by arches thrown from pillar to pillar. A solid upright, such as a column or a pillar of any sort, carries one end of what is known as a lintel when it is spoken of as a piece of the construction, although the architectural term may be different; or it car- ries one abutment of an arch, or a mass serving as abutment to two or more arches or part of a con- [ *6j ] BUILDING tinuous vault, as in Fig. 101. In almost all cases, however, the building consists of walls with win- dows in them, while that part which is built with detached uprights is an accessory — a portico, or an arcade. In these porticos and arcades the openings are large, the solids smaller ; in the main structure there is generally much unbroken wall, with openings of smaller size. If, in either of these two ways of building, the solid structure above the opening is carried by a lintel, that is, by a piece of material which sup- ports the weight by means of its resistance to cross breakage, this piece of material is subject to a strain against which neither stone nor concrete nor terra cotta is relatively strong ; and it follows that the width of openings must be small. In the case of arches, each piece of material has to resist crush- ing force, and the resistance of stones and bricks in this way is enormous, so that the span of arches is indefinitely great. Fig. 95 shows how the pressures of the load above are distributed through tbe stones or bricks of an arch. There is nothing here but just that resistance to pressure which stone and brick are especially fitted to receive. There is, however, one other consideration ; the arch is always pushing its two abutments in differ- ent directions, and therefore these abutments must be held fast in one of several ways, as by having a great weight of material in the wall beyond the abutment to right and to left, or by having a great [ 264 ] Fig. 95. Gateway of Roman Imperial date at Athens, Greece. It connected the Roman " City of Hadrian " with the Greek "City of Theseus" MASSIVE AND FRAMED BUILDING weight piled upon the abutment, which will thus be kept in its place in spite of the thrust of the arch, or by having the two abutments tied to- gether by an iron bar or the like. Each of these three plans is in use in architectural work of the highest importance and dignity. If, on the other hand, we adopt the non-massive, or framed con- struction, the conditions are those which we see in the United States, where a house is being put up in a country village, and also where a steel-cage structure is going up in a city. The frame is to be covered up in each of these cases — hidden so completely by wooden sheathings in the one case and by masonry in the other, that all signs of the essential structural framework disappear. There are, however, buildings which are treated other- wise, as has been said above. Fig. 102 shows this American sheathed system; Fig. 98 the other. As for the roofs, they may be entirely or nearly invisible in either system of building, not only in the case of the really flat roots spoken of above, but also as those are in modern towns, almost flat, because covered with thin sheets of metal or with tiles laid in cement, and because with these mate- rials a very little slope is sufficient to allow rain- water to run off. Such roofs as these do not affect exterior architecture at all ; and it often happens that a building will have a parapet which rises against the sky and completes the design of the wall. On the other hand, there are very [ 265 ] BUILDING many buildings of which the roofs are very im- portant external features, rising high above the walls in steep slopes of material usually darker than that of the walls themselves, and with sur- faces much less interrupted by window openings. It is easy to see how much difference in the pos- sibilities of external architecture there exists be- tween a building which stands like an almost cubical box, with four vertical sides and one hori- zontal surface at top, and a building which, with vertical sides, is closed at top by a pyramid or a structure which resembles a pyramid at least in having steep, sloping sides. In the one case, the walls themselves and the arrangement of the open- ings in them form much the most important part of the possible architectural design, the only ex- ception to this rule being where the building may be much broken up in its ground plan with wings and almost separate pavilions, — an arrangement seldom practicable, not only because of the want of room in modern cities, but also because of the much greater cost of a building with compara- tively so much exterior wall, involving the more elaborate workmanship of such wall, and many more corners to build carefully. In the other case, the roof is an important part of the possible archi- tectural design, and may easily become a control- ling part. It was one of Ruskin's dicta that the roof was more important than the walls, because it embodied the very purpose of the house, — the [ 2 66] STEEP AND LOW ROOFS keeping of the rain away from the inmates. Ar- chitectural designs are, however, seldom controlled by sentimental reasons of this sort. Construc- tional reasons have always had tar more weight with the designer in all times when architecture has been in a healthy and vigorous condition ; and the traditions of Style reinforce, or, as Decadence begins, replace them. The roof is made steep to keep the water from penetrating the joints be- tween slates, tiles, or shingles, and the roof once built with a high and visible rise above the walls, suggests an architectural treatment which will af- fect the exterior of the building as a work of art. Accordingly all manner of devices have been em- ployed. Sometimes dormer windows, which in their absolute utilitarian way need not be large nor extensive, have been made into huge structures of wrought stone, seen from afar as partly de- tached monuments, and throwing upon the roof, shadows of surprising power and effect upon the general design. Sometimes parts of the wall are carried up into the roof, as if in an enlargement of the dormer-window idea — as if some dormer windows had grown too large for their places and had established themselves as separate pavilions (see Fig. 96). Sometimes staircase turrets rise above the roof and dominate even the dormer windows, and very commonly the chimneys are set with some care and pains in the outer wall of the building, and built up with real enjovment [ 267 ] BUILDING in the shafts of cut stone, or of brick and stone, which shafts, while they must of necessity rise to a certain height relatively to the ridge ot the roof, Fig. 96. Chateau of Josselin in Brittany. Court-yard front lest the fireplaces smoke, are the more welcome to the architect on this account. Again, in some roofs, the dormer windows are set in rows, each row of windows representing a story of the many- [ 268 ] EFFECT OF STEEP ROOFS ON DESIGN storied garret, and the whole sloping surface being treated with elaborate fenestration much as if it were a vertical wall. Such roofs as these are to be found in Belgium, among the Flemish town- Fig. 97. View in Nuremberg, Bavaria : houses of sixteenth and seventeenth centuries halls like that of Louvain and that of Brussels ; and the old towns of Germany are rich in such pictu- resque dispositions (see Fig. 97). Of the others ■ — those with the lofty chimneys and high stone dormers — the French chateaux of the early Re- naissance are the favorite examples. There are chimneys which rise thirty feet from the eaves, and [ ±69 ] BUILDING dormer windows three stories high, and yet the harmony secured between these and the general masses of the building is seldom found deficient. Again, the roofs are broad and low, with slight pitch, and often with overhanging eaves. With such roofs, chimneys are low and dormers hardly visible if they exist at all. The processes of building are multifarious and in- clude very many of the industries treated in other chapters of this manual. Thus, carving is used in some of its forms for all the stone dressing; model- ling is used in the making of all the brick and terra cotta, plain and decorative ; woodwork of a rougher kind is used for the floors and roofs and the occa- sional interposition of a wooden partition or screen, and more delicate woodwork, or joinery in its more usual sense, for the interior finish of doors and door frames, casings, windows and their appliances, da- does and complete linings of rooms, and finally for such pieces of furniture as are attached to the building. Inlay in marble and in wood, painting and plaster work, as well as mosaic in glass and in ceramic tiling, are all used for those decorative ac- cessories, which become almost necessities in build- ings of any elaboration. The only industry which is peculiarly that of the builder as differing from the mechanic in other departments of decorative work is the putting together or piling up of his ma- terials so as to produce a house which will stand and prove adequate for all its purposes. This industry [ *7° ] Fig. 98. Timber-built house at Strasburg on the Rhine, sixteenth century P R O C E S S E S OF BUILDING is the subject of this chapter, and we have now to consider what the essentials of construction are. In the first place, what is said in the early para- graphs of this chapter indicates the necessity of pro- viding against certain special strains. In framed building, each square made of two uprights and two horizontals, must be stiffened by the use of diag- onal braces ; except where in modern steel-cage building, the parts are strongly riveted together at their points of contact. The way to meet this necessity in an artistical manner is shown in Fig. 98, where braces are arranged skilfully and so as to produce a really interesting design, and are then richly carved. So, in massive work, the superincumbent wall must not be allowed to bear too heavily upon a lintel, or the lintel will break. If, then, an opening, as of a door or window, must needs be spanned by a lintel, it will be essential to support that lintel either by a pillar in the middle or by two pillars, or by two corbels which will diminish its bearing. Or another device may be employed. The lintel may be left unsupported, but the greater part of the weight may be taken from it by means of a discharging arch. Fig. 99 shows all these devices at once. The central door- way has a middle pillar and also two corbels to sup- port the lintel ; the side doorways have corbels only ; all three have discharging arches which take all weight from the lintel except that of the sculptured slab of stone, the tympanum, as it is called. The [271 ] BUILDING same illustration shows the small free arches flank- ing the central porch, and three large arched roofs in the porches themselves. The triple arcades F I** » / ■ Fig. 99 . Chartres Cathedral : south porch, central doorway. The sculpture is of about 1275 above, where the statues are, one under each arch, are not of arch construction at all; each canopy is composed of large slabs of stone which meet at the point of the arch and sustain one another there, [ 272 ] PROCESSES SUGGESTING THE DESIGN supporting the little cornice and the pinnacles above. Those arcades are, therefore, of corbelled construction. Now, it is evident that each one of these ways of proceeding, if it is followed in the whole of a building, suggests a decorative or, as we commonly say, an architectural treatment of its own. If it happens that each one of these is thought to be identified with a particular style among the many historic styles of architecture, that fact ought not to influence the reader too far. The time will come when the designers of artistic buildings will realize that they are free — that the loss of that natural tradition 1 which has been the life of archi- tecture in the past, however serious a loss, has brought with it a liberty to recompose their de- signs according to logical principles and with re- gard to materials and ways of building not formerly in use, and to disregard those questions which have to do with any historical style, inasmuch as no such style will have been recognized by the de- 1 Tradition : in fine art, is of two kinds. That referred to in the text as " natural " tradition is the handing down from master to pupil, from a generation of builders to their successors, of ways of building and decorating which seem matters of course, and which change insensibly. So the Grecian Doric style is divided by the German archaeologists into the Pre-Doric, the Rude Archaic, the severe Archaic, the Developed Doric, the Late Doric, and the Corrupt Doric of the Roman period, six- distinguishable though very closely similar styles, taking a thousand years to arise, develop themselves, and perish. The other tradition is that of the schools, largely artificial, entirely modern of the last three centuries, and mainly contained in books. vol. i — i 8 f nn o 1 BUILDING signer while at work upon his design. So, in the case of the columnar portico, the Imperial Roman way of building this is shown in Fig. 100; nor was the original Grecian way — the plan followed in the fifth century B.C. — radically different. The Italian artists of the Risorgimento (that which the French afterwards called the Renaissance) were eager to restore Roman forms and even Roman principles of building, but it was a slow and diffi- cult process, and for many a year they were not only content with, but were even delighted with the system shown in Fig. 101. It will be seen how different are the schemes in these two cases : in the one, the structure is trabeated 1 exclusively, the lintels have so little weight to carry that they may be comparatively long, and this structure of column and lintel with two or three courses of stone above it is, and is intended to be, the whole architectural composition ; while in the Florentine example, not only is the wall above the columns carried on semicircular arches, but the portico it- sell, the broad ambulatory twenty feet wide, is roofed by an elaborate piece of vaulting in solid mortar masonry. Here are two broad, open por- ticos : but they are not at all alike, because the building ol them was very different and so the designs had to be very different. In the one case, trabeation is carried out without a thought of there 1 Trabeated: Built with beams; consisting of beams ; characterized by the use of beams or lintels rather than arched construction. [ 2 74 ] Fig. 100. Temple of purest Roman style at Vienne (Isere), France : thought to be of the first century a. d. TRABEATE1) AND A RCUATED PORTICOS being any other structure possible; and this al- though the Romans of the time were most accom- Fig. ioi. Florence, Loggia of S. Paolo. Designed by Brunel- leschi about 1440. The rondels in the spandrils by Luca or Andrea della Robbia plished builders of massive and enduring vaults. In the other case, although the structure is entirely arcuated, it puts on something of a pseudo-classical [ 275 ] BUILDING air by dint of having separate round columns to carry the points of weight and thrust, instead of the built-up and in outline more complex piers which would have been characteristic of earlier structures of medieval design. One comment is to be passed upon this Florentine building, namely, upon the frank adoption of what Northern builders would have considered a monstrous solecism. This is the elaborate system of ties which keeps this piece of vaulting from tearing itself to pieces in a few hours or days. From the point of view of constructive architecture this is indeed a fault so serious that at least one writer whose own designs and whose critical studies are founded upon the practical and in a sense scientific work of the French Middle Ages, criticises these Italian build- ings as unworthy of serious consideration as archi- tecture. We know perfectly well what Eugene Viollet-le-Duc means by this, and we sympathize with him to a certain extent. The fact that this arcade is lovely in its proportions, in its materials, in the sculpture which is added to it, and in its general aspect as we consider it in connection with the square upon which it fronts and the town of which it forms a part — that fact is to be consid- ered on the other hand as modifying what must be after all a tentative kind of criticism, a criti- cism which recognizes on the one hand its con- structional shortcomings, and on the other hand its artistic beauty. [ ^-76 ] LOGICAL CONSISTENCY, OLD AND NEW Buildings which are almost wholly free from constructive errors or shortcomings are to be found in Egypt according to the style perpetuated there through five thousand years ; in Greece and the Grecian colonies of the Mediterranean, repre- senting an epoch about six centuries long ; in the Byzantine or Eastern Roman world, an architect- ure which, beginning with the fifth century a. d., has not entirely perished even to-day ; and in western Europe from the time when the scattered and impoverished communities of the Middle Ages grew strong enough and intelligent enough to build wisely, that is to say, from about i i 50 a. d., until the invasion of the classical revival coming from Italy. These have been the great epochs of consistent and intelligent design based upon building, but it need hardly be said that there have been many outlying provinces of the king- dom of architecture which would have to be considered separately were this a historical investi- gation which we are conducting. Thus, the sev- enteenth century churches of Paris, S. Roch and the chapel of the Sorbonne, are, in their main masses, designed as completely in accordance with the constructional means employed as any French building of the thirteenth century a. d. or any Greek building of the fourth century b. c. ; and yet these churches were built in the very middle of the later neoclassic epoch, which it has been the fashion to decry as a decadent and altogether [ 277 ] BUILDING unworthy time for architecture, — a theory which depends upon the abandonment, by those late builders, of strictly classical details. So Roman building under the great empire was not always disfigured by the application of a pseudo-Greek ve- neer to buildings of a totally different constructive organization. There are many Roman buildings which are extremely consistent in their design ; and among them some of those which recent re- search has found in an almost uninjured condi- tion in lands that were prosperous when the empire was great, but which have decayed to deserts under Moslem dominion, — lands in Syria and in North Africa. In like manner, the per- fectly simple, obvious, and straightforward method of building which grew up in the United States under the combined influence ol the abundant forests of timber trees and of invention leading to methods of working wood and iron — cutting and planing studs, joists, and boards, and shaping nails and spikes cheaply and in vast quantities — a structure of simple framework, sheathed simply by means of weather boarding, is as respectable as any architecture which the world has seen. It is as worthy of respect, but not as worthy of our careful study, because neither its material nor the instinctive habits of the race have led to verv dec- J orative results. There were indeed in this system of sheathed framework, certain possibilities which were not discovered until, in the last quarter of [ 278 ] LOGICAL CONSISTENCY, OLD AND NEW the nineteenth century, certain highly trained architectural artists gave their thoughts to it. Then we had built at low cost in our villages Fig. i 02. Frame house, covered with shingles, at Orange, New Jersey, designed by Babb, Cook & Willard, about 1887 houses as good as those shown in Figs. 102 and 103. There is, however, one very important consider- ation. Architecture in the nineteenth century was throughout European lands, in all parts of the world, in a state never before seen in any historical epoch. At no previous time was it a matter of indifference and a matter of private choice what style of design would be adopted by the owner or the architect of a given building. [ V9 ] BUILDING In every epoch, from 5000 b. c. in the valley of the Euphrates and the valley of the Nile, to 1800 a. d. in England, France, Germany, Italy and Fig. 103. Frame house covered with shingles, at Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Designed by Andrews, Jaques & Rantoul, about 1886 throughout European lands and their colonies, a building, if undertaken would be, of necessity, con- ceived and carried out according to a recognized system of building and design. If, then, the awakening to artistic matters of the peoples of Europe about 1850 a. d. allowed them to per- [ 280 ] THE LOSS OF TRADITION ceive the fact that then no such uniformity of practice existed, and that architects felt them- selves at liberty to design in any historical style whatever, and if this condition of things has prevailed ever since, in spite of the universally admitted fict that it is unfortunate, the reasons for this state of things must be rather numerous, varied, and far to seek. It is impossible to explain the full causes of this or the different opinions which prevail concerning those causes, without writing a volume on that subject alone. But it will not be disputed that one cause is the disappearance of bind- ing traditions natural to an epoch which makes scientific investigation its first and most fruitful sub- ject of thought, and that another cause is the nearly related one that the best intellect of the day is not giving thought to artistic expression. The reader will observe that this reflects in no way upon the intelligence and ability of those individuals who are devoting themselves to artistic modes of thought. The weight of intellect is the other way ; and the chosen modes of expression of the nineteenth century in the world of imagination and fancy, representation and record, were first verse, then music, and, in that which appeals to the eye, painting in some one of its many forms, together with drawing carried to a singular pitch of ingenuity and expressiveness. So that the ar- chitect who may choose to put such thought into his work as would have been of necessity put into [281] BUILDING the work of his predecessor of two or three cen- turies back, if he have the gifts enabling him to bring imagination and power of abstract design to his task as well as ordinary knowledge of build- ing, will find that his embodied design is accom- panied by buildings which have been erected without design at all, and by other buildings put up either as professed copies of what has been done in the past or copies of the spirit and details of those buildings somewhat rearranged owing to abso- lutely novel necessities. Under these conditions it would be a matter of surprise if anything very im- portant in the way of architecture were produced. Let us consider, for instance, the steel-frame struc- ture with which American cities have become familiar since 1880. It has the singular advan- tage — this method of construction — that you can build the frame of a twenty-story building in a very few weeks, and can then proceed to put on the outside case and the inside finish anywhere, at top as well as at bottom, or in a half a dozen parts of the building at once. The structure is a frame- work of relatively slender steel uprights and hori- zontals held together in the firmest possible way so as to do away with the necessity of elaborate diagonal bracing; but this structure is by its very nature prohibited from taking on the aspect of a decorative system of building, that is to say of an architecture. It must not be exposed so as to be visible either within or without, and this because [ 282 ] ATTEMPTS TO MEET NEW CONDITIONS of the great prevalence of serious conflagrations in American cities, which have made it the primary need of each municipality to prohibit the exposure of this steel frame and to require its jacketing by mason-work many inches in thickness. Two or three American architects have struggled manfully with the problem. They have tried, and not wholly in vain, to devise a system of exterior or- namentation which might allow of the covering- in of all the parts of this cage with a suitably suggestive and not disagreeable investiture. The vast majority of the architects have been satisfied, so far, however, with covering up their light metal work by what seem to be solid walls of masonry, though thev are in reality mere veneers, and of the giving to a twenty-story, tower-like building three hundred feet high the appearance of an extremely massive fortress tower, although its walls in reality are thinner than the masonry walls of the five-story building next door. It is not meant that any serious harm is done to modern architecture by this pretence; this is not a cause, but a symptom of our ailment. Modern city architecture is neither better nor worse for the appearance of these lofty structures; and all that one regrets in their appearance is that in this case again the opportunity has been left unimproved of designing a new class of buildings as they should have been designed. [ 283 ] Chapter Fifteen PLASTERING 1 IN the protest which, during the second half of the nineteenth century, was made against the slovenly habit of using one material to imitate another and more valuable or more admired substance, the real merit of plaster and its like came to be overlooked. A rough wall can be faced with weather-proof stucco outside, and within with fine mortar (that which is ordi- narily called plastering), with pure gypsum or plas- ter of Paris, or with one of several forms of fine cement. Highly decorative and perfectly artistic results can be attained in this way; because the surface of the plastic material lends itself to all kinds of relief sculpture and incision. In good Plastering : the application of any soft material which hardens and retains its tenacity and its form under ordinary circumstances. Plaster of Paris (gypsum), cement (a powder obtained from burning certain rocks, and which combines with water much as gypsum does) are the chief ma- terials used when plastering is made an accessory of building. These may be used pure or mixed with sand, producing what is called mortar; some of these mortars are used for making what is called artificial stone as well as concrete of the usual sort. As the subject is treated in this chapter it has to do with a kind of modelling in one of these soft but soon hardening materials. [ ^4 ] THE COATING OF GREEK TEM PLES times of architectural art, when straightforward methods of building were matters of course, these plastic materials were accepted as a covering and nothing else, and were allowed their full share in the work. Simple effects, with incised lines and varying colors, were easy to secure for the humble house; the splendors of plastic art were equally accessible for other occasions. When Greek tem- ples were built of coarse-grained stone, as at Paes- tum, at Girgenti, and at Olympia, the columns and architraves were covered with stucco, in which material indeed the most delicate architectural forms received their final modelling. This plas- tering was made necessary by the unfitness of the stone to receive its polychromatic painting. But this use of a soft wall-covering which would harden was not a thing to neglect ; artistic possibilities were visible therein. Columns could be built as cylinders of common brickwork, and then coated with hard plaster, two inches or more thick, allowing of all the needed liutings and reedings, as in the Temple of Isis at Pompeii, and in many a house there, and in two or three in the small cleared space at Herculaneum. When, instead of building out in stucco for the architectural details themselves, there was only a smooth masonry vault to be lined and made splendid, stucco plas- tering was at its best. The great vaults of the thermaj and basilicas were panelled in that mate- rial, perfunctory octagons alternating with smaller [ 285 ] P L A S T E RING squares ; but the vault of the bath of Stabii at Pompeii is exquisitely adorned with interlacing guilloches enclosing relief groups of figures and animals ; halls of that congeries of Imperial build- ings on the Palatine are panelled so as to enclose really lovely bas-reliefs of cupids ; a huge room of Fig. 104. Rome : stuccoes from a vaulted room near the Tiber, work of the first century a. d. the villa of Hadrian at Tivoli is glorified on a still more extensive scale by the same means. In the Farnesina Garden on Tiber-side is an antique hall of which the whole wall surface has been covered with such relief in the most elaborate and most refined designs of figure subject (see Fig. 104). This is really sculpture of a very high order, the forms, the draperies, and even the human faces modelled as finely as if each one were a medallion in wax ; and, in the so-called tomb of the Valerii, outside [ 286 ] ROMAN STUCCO RELIEFS the walls, on the Via Latina, the enclosing pattern of circles and octagons and squares is as carefully planned and as delicately worked as the bas-reliefs themselves, which are of such slight and graceful Fig. 105. Campagna of Rome. Stuccoes from a tomb on the Via Latina. Work of the first century a. d. figure subject as the Pompeian paintings of danc- ing maidens (see Fig. 105). These and other pieces previously known had excited in former times less attention than they deserved ; and all have helped us now to rewrite the history of Roman art as it is now being very generally rewritten. [ 287 ] PLASTERING Even in the far later day and far less thorough- going work of the Tudor monarchs, in England under Elizabeth and James I, the plastered ceil- ings, introduced perhaps from Italy, however un- Fig. 1 06. Hatfield House. Long gallery ; plaster ceiling of about 1 610 lucky in themselves as replacing the manly old system of beams and girders which formed the underside of the real floor, were yet carefully de- signed, and that with a certain daring firmness as if the possibilities of the new material had been [ 288 ] POSSIBILITIES IN DECORATION grasped at the first beginning of its use. A ceiling such as some of those in the great country palace of Hatfield is worthy to rank with purely architectural decoration anywhere (see Fig. 106). It is still with the Imperial Romans, however, that our fancies remain when we think of what is possible to plaster and stucco. Among them the lower part of a temple wall might be sheathed with marble slabs, because there the impact of really heavy bodies was to be feared, and blows from sharp instruments could not be avoided in the course of succeeding years. Moreover, a marble slab could be rather easily detached and replaced if broken. But above the six-foot or ten-foot line the Avail was coated with stucco blocked off in imita- tion of courses of stone. This stucco, though per- haps always left white in the public buildings of the Imperial city, was frequently charged with color in residences, as we know from the discoveries in Pompeii. A whole system of wall decoration is traceable there, as pointed out in Mail's Pompeian book, in the simple process of coloring each block or apparent block of the ostensible stone wall with a separate hue, and then alternating these raised surfaces of green, violet, and red in such play of light and dark, warm and cool, as the artist might imagine. Vitruvius tells us that this plastering was, or at least, in his opinion as a builder, should be, put on with extreme care and VOL. 1—I 9 [ 2 ^9 ] PLASTERING with quite remarkable precautions of time passed and patience used. Three coats, four coats of plas- ter with sand, three coats more made with marble dust (unlucky that he did not tell us how thick these coats were, and exactly how mixed !) would produce, he tells us, a plaster so attractive that old pieces of it were cut from ruinous walls and then used for table tops. He goes so far as to say that this was not at all mere saving, but because the polish of the old plaster was so beautiful. Nothing like that comes in our modern way ; but the finish by means of certain patent cements of interiors of buildings meant to be wholly incom- bustible, fireproof, has given the observers who have watched the work done since 1885 a hope that with the coming of a more sincere demand for artistic architecture this plastic substance may well be utilized in the Roman way. The cement out of which a mere surbase of a few parallel mouldings is " stuck " 1 would f urnish equally well the material for elaborate patterns stamped or cast in moulds and fixed to the walls in a way altogether permanent. In Great Britain and the United States, plaster- ing is so much identified with light substructure 1 Stick (v. t. ) : to give shape to, as a moulding, by running a cutter, a scraper, or the like, in one direction, so as to produce a group of forms having everywhere the same transverse section. This is applied to the making of wooden mouldings by a machine like a planing mill ; and also to the making of soft plaster mouldings with a form ; though this last process is also called running, [ 2 9° ] POSSIBILITIES IN SCULPTURE of laths ; and in America especially, the whole in- terior even of city houses is so generally divided up with wood-framed floors and partitions, that we think of all forms and all varieties of this ap- pliance as hopelessly trivial and temporary. This impression can be done away with by the general adoption of the custom of applying the inner plastering, as the external stucco has always been applied, to solid masonry, ot which it immediately forms a seemingly unremovable part. Some of our newly built, quasi-fireproof structures have been finished within by dadoes and panelling run in hard cement, and forming a part of the plastered facing of the brick walls. Here is a beginning of what may be an excellent method of decoration. It leads directly to the noble work of the vault in the Farnesina Garden as above described; but even before that advanced point of fine art is reached, admirable borders and panel-fillings may be made in low and in high relief — if some sculptor will give his attention to the designing of " arabesques." Indeed it is painter's work as well ! It is study in delicate light and shade that is wanted — light and shade distributed over flat surfaces; and where is the painter that does not work in monochrome at times ? It is not to be forgotten that plaster is the ma- terial in which is shown, at the annual salons of Paris and other great public exhibitions, all the more important works of modern sculpture. The [ 291 ] P L A S T E R I N G medals are given, the pieces are bought of their creators, the reputations are made, with plaster only for the incorporation of the sculptor's thought. These plaster figures are cast from the wet clay ; it is a mere transferring of the forms from a plastic material which cracks and crumbles as it dries to one which is permanent. And in this connection we must recall the bas-reliefs of the Italian Renaissance — the pieces in gesso duro ) saints and Madonnas — which adorn our cabi- nets. There are some of these works of art which exist also in more precious material; but the greater number are not known to the modern world of dealers and buyers otherwise than as reliefs of plaster, framed in wood, with orna- mental carving simulated in plaster or in another plastic composition, and painted the color of dark bronze. There is something like this seen in those chests and coffers of the seventeenth century whose wooden tops and sides are covered thick with what seem carvings, painted according to some chromatic scheme. They are really made as many of our gilded picture-frames are made, the orna- ment in some hard variety of plaster ; and even a metal rim may be used here or there. The subject of plastering includes exterior deco- ration of two kinds, although one of these is strictly a branch of painting and noted further in Chapters V and XX, and the other is a variety of [ 292 ] Fig. 107. Florence, Palazzo del Conte Boutourlin. Sixteenth- century Painting restored EXTERIOR DECORATION IN COLOR engraving, for which see Chapter XIX. Fig. 107 gives a Florentine house-front. The building, of the sixteenth century and ascribed to several differ- ent architects of the greatest period of the perfected Renaissance, has been renewed as to its exterior face on more occasions than one ; and yet the present system of painting and even the details of the design are sufficiently authentic as faithful re- productions of early work. Similar fronts from Florence itself, and earlier examples from Vicenza would be easy to give; and again the possessors of photographs made long ago in Venice, when Ponti first began to apply the new invention to archi- tecture, will find among their treasures Venetian painted fronts as well. Some of the Venice fronts were painted with fully realized legendary or met- aphorical subject ; but those great compositions have perished, — one building alone retaining traces of its decoration down to i860. The art has been revived in Germany in very recent times ; nor would it be hard to find in other European lands some traces of this attempted restoration of what was once a beautiful device for the adornment of an otherwise plain exterior. The question of com- bining painting with a stucco exterior in such a way that it will bear the exposure of the years of storm and changing temperature is not, then, as difficult as it would appear, for the climate of Ber- lin is harsh enough and damp enough to try the strength of any exterior coating of whatever sort. [ 2 93 ] PLASTERING Florence, however, remains the best town for the study of these external effects. By this time the Palazzo Borgo-Antellesi must have been restored, and its elaborate paintings refreshed. The Pal- azzo Guadagni is as spick and span as it was in the days of Cronaca. The Villa Palmieri, in the close neighborhood of the city, is a good instance of sim- ilar work on a very large scale, done as if with the purpose of telling against the dark foliage and the broken hillside scenery ; and within the walls the old Palazzo Quaratesi has been put into shape and stripped of its modernizations as a hotel, show- ing now a perfect example of the mural painting in decorative patterns as it was understood by the men of the Risorgimento. The art of sgraffito 1 decoration is used in the adornment of small objects as well as in archi- tectural compositions. It is, however, in the house fronts of central Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that its most important develop- ments have been reached. The cartoons for these decorations were sometimes furnished by artists of high rank ; and at a time when drawing of the human figure and of all decorative detail was familiar to very many workmen other than the artists of exceptional renown, such cartoons were 1 Sgraffito : ornamentation by means of incised lines scratched or cut in damp plaster. The term is an accepted noun in Italian, and it is not necessary for correct usage to employ the participle of the verb sgraffiari, as is sometimes done in English writing. [ 2 94 ] S G R A F ¥ I T O I) E CORA T I O N pieces. The one given, Fig. 108, is from the old Palazzo Corsi near San Gaetano in Florence. [ 2 95 ] PLASTERING When considered as a polychromatic decoration, or even as a decoration in monochrome or nearly so, this effect is brought about by laying a coat of light plaster over a dark coat, or the reverse, and scratching through the outer so as to expose the inner mass of the plastic material. In all these modifications of the art and practice of painting, caused by peculiarities of the ground, the differences caused by the changing material and the greater or less facility with which the artist can work upon it are of extreme interest to the student. The touch of the draughtsman who is scribing with a sharp tool a yielding but still firm and resistant surface, like that of plaster, is very different from that of him who guides the point of a brush over canvas or panel. The art of draw- ing, too, if considered in detail, is seen to involve the use of many different methods of procedure in- volving sometimes considerable physical exertion. The result of these differences has been that, with the disappearance of the old feeling of solidarity among the arts, the processes of drawing and paint- ing on a large scale and in what is considered rather a mechanical way, have lost their artistic value. A great change would need to appear in the spirit of the modern artist painter before he would be found ready to give his own personal attention and his personal effort to the production of exterior ornamentation of this character. [296] Chapter Sixteen JOINERY JOINERY, in its larger and more showy developments, might be treated in connection with Building, of which, indeed, it may form an important though secondary part. The form of the house, its architectural style, does not depend upon the finer woodwork of the interior, and therefore this art has no place in such a dis- cussion as our Chapter XIV. In its general char- acter, as elaborate woodwork, it is an art by itself • and the matter of furniture may be considered in connection with architectural joinery. The pro- cesses of work are familiar, being in their essence the same as those of any village carpenter, although the worker in fine and hard woods uses certain delicate tools unknown to the house carpenter. The newer wood-working by machinery must be excluded altogether from our present subject : for artistic joinery is a manual art, and has no use for the power-plant. The distinction here made between carpentry and joinery would have been hardly so perceptible to a fifteenth-century workman as it is in modern [ n -97 ] JOIN E R Y times. He, the earlier workman, would have thought the making of a door which was to be painted very nearly the same piece of work as the making of a door of which the natural wood, its color and veining, were to show. The old work- man would have given a little more pains and thought to the selection of the wood, and even to its finish, in the one case than in the other ; but the modern man, when paint is to hide all the details of the make of his door, builds it up in a curious sort of way by separate pieces nailed on with short nails and brads, the panel no longer inserted, as in old work, on all four sides into grooves in its frame, but held at top and bottom only (and only in the middle of the top and bottom edge, so that it will remain free to shrink from both sides toward the middle) while the borders of it are concealed by mouldings " planted on." Those mouldings and each separate part of the door have been shaped and planed in a power mill, and the workman gives but a very little additional labor to bringing any of the surfaces to a more perfect smoothness. The painter arrives and covers up everything with a solid coat of white lead and oil, perhaps colored by some other pigment. Very different is the work of him who has a hard-wood door to make, if there is any kind of architectural supervision to be ex- pected or if the standard of his workshop is a high one. The nail-heads must not show ; they must not even come to the visible surface. The mould- [ ] PAINTED AND UNTAINTED WOODWORK ings must be worked in the solid ; but if from long habit of dealing with the moulding-mill this last good rule is overlooked, the putting on of these mouldings will require especial care, for otherwise they will show for the wretched things they are, while in the painted door all that is needed is to sink the nail-heads deep, to rill up the hollow above them with putty and to paint over the whole. It is not suggested that painted woodwork may not have its artistic value : — but the inevitable result of covering your piece with paint is that its parts are less varied, its make less elaborate, and its whole workmanship less minute. The bedstead and the throne, alike, were simpler and heavier in their parts, when color and gold were looked to for their completion, in the time of Charlemagne, in the time of Coeur-de-Lion. The work became more inter- esting as joinery when, in Saint Louis' time, the unpainted wood showed its delicate reliefs and statuettes, — its highly wrought groups of mould- ings ; and, from that time onward, the joiner's art grew continually in refinement and elaboration, whatever the design might be in its purely artistic character. It we go back in the history of joinery we find very simple appliances used. The church door of the twelfth century was not framed 1 at all, nor was that of a later time, in the out of the way parts of 1 Frame (v. t.) : To put together a frame. See note, Chap. XIV. [ 2 99 ] JOINERY the country built up with stiles, 1 rails, and mullions; the church door with its hinges would cost, measured in day's work or in bushels of wheat, vastly more than its modern successor, but the cost was in the ironwork, and not in the framing of the door. There was no framed door. The solid vantail which stood between the congregation and the weather, when it was closed, was made up of three or four planks set in conjunction each to each, and perhaps held together by a system of dowelling, or by a continuous groove and tongue, or by two rebates which overlapped ; but the hold between these solid and heavy oak planks was but a slight one, and what kept the door together and made one piece of it was the firm nailing with wrought nails driven through holes punched in the long and often branched and ornamented strap hinges. It will be noticed that here joinery is at its very origin, and that such primitive work as this requires absolutely the support of the metal strap or tie. Applying these same principles to furniture it appears that in simpler times than ours furniture was as heavily and plainly made as were doors, dadoes, or screens. In the earliest days of house furnishing, when to have more than a few wooden 1 Stile : One of the primary pieces in a frame. Rail: One of the secondary pieces. Mullion : One of the tertiary pieces. In a common door, the stiles are the main uprights, the rails are framed into them, the mullions are framed into the rails. [ 300 ] THE FURNITURE OF EARLY TIMES; CHESTS platters and a tew earthenware jars was to be rich in " plenishing," a chest or two or three chests of solid wood were the pieces most in vogue. These were good to hold winter garments in summer and summer garments in winter, to hold bed-clothes and such floor cloths and curtains as were not in use. And these chests were made in such a way that they could go down the generations without deterioration, namely, of solid planks held together as the church door above described was held together, by elaborate wrought-iron straps or bands, passing around them and secured to sides and bottom, while the movable top was held in place by strong hinges worked into straps of just such make, though perhaps of more ornamental appearance. The chest continued for four hundred years the princi- pal article of in-door service. There is one type of chest thought to be peculiarly English, that of which the upright sides reach the floor, sometimes at the four corners only, which in that case form feet to raise the bottom of the chest off the floor. Here, evidently, there is not much room for fine designing; the surface-carving only tells — apart from the iron-work. The more elaborate and semi- classical Italian design of the same epoch, and the French and German framed chests of a few years later, of the early sixteenth century, consisted of a solid frame set horizontally and supported on feet, into which frame the lighter bottom panel and the heavier upright sides were firmly dadoed, as partly [ 301 ] JOINER V shown in Fig. 109. In this piece there are seven panels in the front, and each panel is a solid plank carved into the semblance of florid Gothic tracery, with the royal arms of France on an escutcheon. Fig. 109. Part ot a carved oak chest at Loches ; carved panels, the arms of France in the central panel. Work of about 1500 (Private collection) The wrought-iron fittings are here reduced to four corner straps, three flat hinges of no decorative quality, and the box and plate of the lock, — the key alone being rich in design. A modification of this would be that the four corners would be [302 ] THE RICH CHESTS OF THE RENAISSANCE marked by solid uprights, and that the sides and ends, whether each of a solid piece or framed and panelled, as in Fig. 109, were slipped into grooves in these and in the bottom rail as well, as is shown in Fig. 1 1 o ; a top rail finishing this frame on each side, and holding the panel in its place. The Fig. 1 10. Cassone, or large chest, with tempera paintings on top, front and ends (Marquand collection) hinged cover would still remain a solid plank, or set of planks grooved together, and kept in shape by its hinges ; though a still later development made of this cover a much more massive and elaborate piece of framing in itself, sometimes even boxed up into a raised central framed panel, as shown in Fig. 110. Here is design in joinery carried very far : the piece is planned and wrought on architectural principles, while still the construc- [ 303 ] J OINERY tion — the make of the piece — is partly shown in the design. The four uprights are elaborately carved and with excellent treatment of their form and function as corner-posts. The very heavy base is visibly a massive sill of timber, mitred 1 at the four corners ; and the feet are as visibly let into it, held to it, as by dowels or a pin. The painted panel of the front and the smaller one of the top are simply held by their edges so as to be free to shrink and swell a little without injury. In this instance the front panel especially has received a descriptive and decorative picture of great beauty. It is evident that the simpler and more obvi- ous construction suggested the covering of the whole surface with a sculptured design of slight incision, reminding one of the South Sea Island paddle shown in Chapter II, Fig. i, while the more elaborate later work suggested in its turn the investing of the solid horizontals and uprights with carving of an intricate sort, deeper cut, wrought into high relief and having much more significance. Again, the larger surfaces of the fifteenth-century pieces remained plain, and showed the beautv of the wood alone ; or in very many cases were covered with representative painting, domestic 1 Mitre (v. t.) : to put together at the corner, as of a picture-frame, by cutting diagonally across the whole strip, bar, or group of mouldings, so that two such diagonally cut ends would exactlv fit together. The manner of securing the two ends to each other is indifferent. [ 3°4 ] THE CASSONI, AND OTHER HOUSE FITTINGS scenes, hunting, repose in walled gardens, and the simple pleasures of lite out of doors. Inlay was another obvious means of decorating these other- wise simple boxes, with their broad, flat sides and tops, as shown in Chapter XVII. The elaborately painted large chests are known, in the world of collectors, by the Italian word cassone (plural cassoni) and are called also bridal chests, though there is no evidence that even the more splendid ones were generally made for this purpose. Probably they were made also as gifts, especially for those presents of ceremony to one's immediate superior which were a form of delicate bribery most easy to disguise as courtesy. The chest, Fig. i i o, is a fine specimen ; so, in another style, is the earlier piece shown as a specimen of inlay, in Chapter XVII ; but some of these chests are of enormous size, nine feet long and half as high, and intended to form an important part of the decoration of a long gallery or great reception room. The joinery of the wardrobe, of the solid chest of drawers, of the " standing bed-place," as our ancestors called it, not so long ago, of the table and the more massive chairs and armchairs, is merely such a modification of the joinery of the chest as would naturally result from the varying forms and the greater or less massiveness of the pieces in question. The pieces are not very dif- ferent in the way they are planned and made, JOIN E R Y whatever their date. A change is noticeable, however, between the twelfth-century work, which, like that of earlier days, depended largely for its artistic effect upon conventional patterns in bril- liant painting — or, farther south, in simpler pat- terns of inlay — and the work of the thirteenth and certainly of the fourteenth century, when delicate handling of the wood in solid sculp- ture, carried very far toward realism and left in the natural color and surface of the wood, was the charm of splendid and admired furniture. The spirited character of the later mediaeval carving in such connection is surprising ; but unfortunately very few pieces remain, and of those some have been much injured by restoration and by such later painting and then removal of the paint and painting again as the varying whims of succeed- ing owners have brought upon the pieces. Early joinery is more apt to keep its place and its integrity if permanently set up in a church or hall ; as such a composition, though subject to whimsical change as fashions change, and also to ruinous restoration, is still a thing too costly to disregard. Your beautiful carved chest goes down-cellar and rots away, or up-garret and is gradually split to pieces ; but your carved screen, pew-head, pulpit, or stall in the choir will have that inertia which is the quality of a money in- vestment not to be lightly ignored. There is, indeed, not very much Gothic woodwork of a [306] STALLS AND ELABORATE CHURCH WORK good time left in Europe, but there is some ; and fortunately the most magnificent of all possibly conceivable pieces of joinery still remains in the choir of Amiens Cathedral. The stalls are ar- ranged in the usual way, in a higher back row, and lower seats in front, about sixty of the former under a continuous canopy of great richness, end- ing on either side in a magnificent Bishop's-Throne at the west end, near the great entrance to the choir. A part of that great canopy is shown in Fig. iii; a piece of stuff having been hung from the triforium gallery above, to afford a good background for the delicately pierced wood- work. When a piece of woodwork becomes as elaborate as this, the organic and logical character of the construction is certain to disappear. The artist becomes in a sense too architectural in his thoughts, and cuts and joins his pieces of oak as if they were stone. It is even doubtful whether a design in which the structure should be insisted on would be effective. The chances are that it would lose so much in unity, in grace, in artistic char- acter in short, that the loss would be notably greater than the gain. One would like to know how an artistic joiner of the time of perfect logic in design, as of the thirteenth century, would have designed so complex a piece of woodwork. That which we have, however, dating from the years 1508-1522, has remained perfect until the present day without restoration or important repairs, al- [ 307 ] JOINER V ways respected and always cared lor. As the composition includes about no separate seats, Fig. iii. Amiens Cathedral, Choir woodwork. of Canopies over back row of stalls Details and as there are eight passages reserved through the front row in order to reach the higher back [308 ] THE STALLS OF AMIENS row, there are no misereres 1 to receive carving, about as many arms separating the seats, a dozen seat-ends with surface enough for elaborate bas- reliefs, the four magnificent terminal members, of which two are the thrones named above, and architectural members past counting which receive more formal sculpture ; all in addition to the seventy or more carved pendants, and the gables with their cusps and crockets, partly shown in Fig. ill. The cresting or crown of each of the heavy uprights is decorated with three groups of figures: every curved arm which divides two seats has one figure at least rising from the smooth sweep of the mouldings ; every miserere or carved bracket-like support has its group, or its contorted monster ; every pendant of the arched canopy above has its group of figures or its cluster of scrolled foliage; and every short length of mould- ing between the uprights has its separate design of carving. No two similar pieces are alike in their sculpture, and the computations made that there are 3,600 figures of men or animals are well within the probable truth ; while no one has tried 1 Miserere, called also misericorde, which is the French term adopted into English : a projecting boss like a bracket wrought on the under side of the hinged seat of a stall in a church choir. The stall was commonly made with large and projecting arms, on which the elbows of the canon or chorister could rest while he was obliged to stand ; and the fniserere gave him a further support, because he could rest upon it in a partlv sit- ting attitude while apparently standing. These projecting bosses received very elaborate carving in some of the richer choirs. [ 309 ] J OINE K V to count the separate thoughts in delicately com- bined architectural leafage which the simpler parts contain. Now, the extreme brilliancy and great diversity of the carving should not be al- lowed to conceal from modern students the excel- lent quality of the joiner-work. That it should have taken four master-workmen with an indefi- nite large number of assistants twelve or fourteen years to have achieved the work, is quite within reason. The interesting thing for us moderns is this fact, that it did take fourteen years to make it, — that, as Ruskin has said somewhere, these masterly workmen and admirable artists were in this way employed to the best possible advantage for so long a time, and that the result has been so triumphant. It is a rather pleasant assurance to the world that fine decorative work may be again within the reach of modern society when modern society is prepared to pay for it in cash and in patient waiting. At a later time we shall find equally elaborate work bestowed upon pieces of neo-classic design. But it is well to recall the fact that during those years of change, when the North and the South alike were troubled with the question whether their design should be that of their ancestors or made according to the new lights coming from Italy, elaborate wood-work was in its glory. The choir-screens of many small English churches remain more or less perfectly preserved and date [ 31° ] ENGLISH CHOIR-SCREENS AND HALL-SCREENS from the Tudor period, that is to say the century beginning with 1490. The choir-screen, or as it is called there, organ-screen, of King's College Chapel, in Cambridge, it truly of the reign of Henry VIII, is wholly exceptional — Tudor in epoch but not in style, for the design of it must have come from Henry's friend for the moment, Francis I of France, and his workmen. It is French Renaissance in every line. The choir- screen of Croscombe Church is of the reign of James I, and the very effective pulpit which almost adjoins it is dated 16 16. The screen across the hall of Trinity College, Cambridge, is of about the same period and still more foreign, or, as the phrase was, Italianate in design ; if the date given to it locally, 1605, be indeed accurate, it is a wonderful conception for its time, formal in general design, but fantastic in the details of the ornamentation. It is noticeable that one cannot perfectly sepa- rate the carpenter work from the joiner work of these ages of straightforward design and simply excellent execution. The roof of a great com- pany hall in London will be as elaborate in make and as complex in design as the screen, and yet we call the roof carpenter work whereas the screen is more properly described as joiner work. The distinction is not merely in greater fineness of workmanship, it is also in the fact that the roofs make no such attempt at being architectural [311 ] J O I N E R Y according to a given style. The timbers are framed together in such a way as to do their work; not a very scientific way, but one suffi- ciently efficacious; and there is no disguising the methods of construction employed. The screen, on the other hand, was always designed in an architectural fashion ; it was Gothic, it was Eliza- bethan, it was Renaissance of France or of Italy — its make was lost sight of in the necessity of the architectural programme. The significance of this is not that the joiner was less of a good constructor than his associate the carpenter working in the roof overhead, but that the work on the piece of furniture, the wall lining, the door-piece, the stall, or the screen, partakes so much of the nature of furniture — is so much within reach of the hand and under the immediate daily inspection of all who use the room — that the natural desire to make this work equal in style with the stone-work around, takes precedence of all other considera- tions. This does not amount to a definition of joinery, but it explains why the highly wrought woodwork within reach of the hand differs essen- tially as well as in mere fineness from the work of the roof above. Another change was to take place, though not at the beginning of the classical Renaissance as one might suppose — for the work of the time of Francis I, and even of the next reign, was as simple and obvious in its make and finish as that of the [312] THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER fourteenth century. Fig. i 1 2 shows a piece in which the system of framing is almost entirely logical, and is entirely visible ; and this is six- teenth-century work, with all the decorative feeling of the epoch. The change was to come at the time when the home began to take a more r e fi n e d and more luxurious shape, in the reign of Louis XIV, and still more after his death in 171 5. Then the more elaborately planned and fitted, and there- fore smaller, apartment seemed to call for a different Fig. 112. Cabinet of French or Flemish r . . . 1 k , rr~ furnishing. Hut work, about 1550 o (Private collection in Austria) thlS W3S 111 the [3U ] J () I N E It Y great capitals; in the country, and in the smaller towns, the time was long in coming. The Hall and the Gallery of the Elizabethan country-house Fig. 113. Walnut sideboard, of the South of France, about 1 700 a.d. and the French chateau were still, down to 1650 or later, large, open, airy — cold, except for the screened-off place around the roaring lire of logs in the great open fireplace. The floor of stone [3H] Fig. 115. Siena Cathedral stalls and decorative woodwork in choir THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER flags was like an out-of-door yard, for the purposes of the children, the dogs, and the retainers who raced about it or dragged burdens across it. The furniture, the screens, the tables, the settles, and the stools were then of a nature not unlike the fram- ing of the building itself within which it stood, or of those parts of it to which wood could be Fig. 114. Table, about eight feet long, of about 1600 (Marquand collection) applied. Thus in Fig. 113, a Provencal side- board, of perhaps 1700, has preserved in its up- country make and adornment the simple general design and the carving of an earlier time, while the mouldings and the make-up is of its epoch. In Fig. 1 14 the huge hall-table is like a piece of house-carpentry in its massive and somewhat rude construction. Fig. 1 1 5 shows a part of the choir-stalls and the woodwork accompanying them in the great cathedral of Siena in Tuscany. Its date is [3i5] ' J 0 1 N E R Y 1567-70; and when we compare this work, with its extremely refined neo-classic system of design and its wholly cinque-cento sculpture, with the Amiens work of only a half-century before, it is necessary to keep in mind that other century which is to be interposed in style, if not in actual revolution of the years, between Italian and French work of these times of change. The classical re- vival of architecture had been flourishing in Italy for a century and a half before these compositions were undertaken. That the true nature of this joiner-work may be rightly understood, Fig. 116 is given to show the central feature on one side with the arms of the Medici family in the escutcheon above. If it was said of the work in Amiens cathedral, Fig, 111, that the construc- tional nature of the design had been abandoned for a more strictly architectural disposition, the woodwork treated like stone-work for the better delectation of the eye, what shall we think of such slovenly putting together, such poor and careless workmanship as is shown in the magnificent Ital- ian example ? In any part of the work which betrays its structure — any place where the joints can be seen, and where the combining pieces of wood into one framework can be understood — the whole is seen to be as slight and trivial in make as it is elaborate and cared-for in design. It is an instance of the inevitable result of treating your design as a thing apart. This design might [316] LATE WOODWORK, NON-CONSTRUCTIONAL have been modelled in clay, the model cast in plaster and then followed by marble-cutters, by Fig. i i 6. Siena Cathedral, Choir woodwork. Details of wall-lining behind stalls bronze-founders, by workers in embossing, ham- mering up the thin plates, by plasterers doing [3i7 ] JOINER Y their work in approved stucco of durable quality and capable of taking a sharp edge, or, rinally, as has been done, by workmen in solid wood. Such designs as these are not the ones to which we give permanent and enthusiastic affection. At the close of the seventeenth century there was coming in a changed world with new desires; the rooms of the courtier and even of the country- living gentleman had grown smaller, their joints were tighter, the windows fitted more neatly, the blast of the winter air was shut out ; a single fire- place would warm one of the rooms throughout, or a stove on the German pattern was set here and there to guarantee a still steadier warmth. The same tendency was still more marked in France, under the Regency ( 171 5-1723) ; or in England after the settlement of the political situation under William III and Anne. And the furniture for these rooms speedily lost its constructional and ponderous character, with straight uprights and horizontals, and firm and visible framing. The furniture was turned into a semblance of carved form throughout ; or even of a casting in metal, so slender and so continuous were its parts. This is so absolutely the case that under Louis XIV, and still more often under his successor, tables and the like in solid silver were made, having exactly the aspect of the wooden pieces of the time, and seeming really to be made of the material called for by the florid design suggested by no possible [318] RICH NON -CONSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN framing of wood. The actual construction and the actual shaping of the parts in hard-wood was very ingenious indeed, but this sort of design is a little ashamed of itself and tries to disguise the Fig. 117. Part of a writing table, with veneering of tropical wood and mountings of gilded bronze ; work of about 1725 (Private collection) facts of the case under a semblance of continuous curvature and delicately worked mouldings. The rounded forms, the flowing and often interrupted curvature of the parts carried even to the framing of panels, the skilful putting together by means of glue and invisible nails and wooden pins, the con- stant use of veneering in beautiful woods applied [ 3 T 9 ] J O I N E R Y even to the most elaborately double-curved surfaces (see Fig. 117), — all seem to be intended as a denial of the origin of these structures in any kind of joinery. The very high class of the workman- ship in the sense of final finish, with all that that implies, and the extraordinary delicacy of the sculpture worked in the solid wood until it is as dainty as if it had been carved in ivory, — all this went to give to the furniture of the eighteenth century a character hitherto unknown in deco- rative art. The work of the ancient imagier or carver of representative forms in ivory or in wood seemed reproduced anew in the making of wooden articles of every-day use ; and when this furniture was for something more than every-day use, and had become a piece for a princess, the surface came to be invested with such a delicate film of polished wood in fine mosaic, or had given to it such a charm of color and elaborate painting of subject and incident, that it is no wonder if the simple woodwork was lost sight of in the con- summate piece of refined art. Those were the days of Vernis Martin 1 and of the delicate paint- 1 Vernis Martin ; French varnish painting of the eighteenth century; named from the brothers Martin, who produced their finest work between 1750 and 1780. The imitation of the lacquers of the far East was com- mon in Europe from the beginning of the eighteenth century and used in the Low Countries especially, because of the constant intercourse between the Dutch and the Japanese. The French makers of fine furniture and decorative objects excelled all others in this direction, and the finest of their work came to be named from the most celebrated group of artisans. [ 3 2 ° ] THE REACTION UNDER LOUIS XVI ing which that name brings up to us, painting of flowers and fashionable ladies with sedan-chairs all in bright colors on gold ground (see Chap- ter V and note p. 88). The reign of Louis XVI brought with it a renewed and wiser study of antiquity, and a dis- position to seek some of that severity which the students of the day thought and said must needs have been characteristic of classical design ; and with this there came a revulsion. The fine curves of table legs were straightened into firm though slender tapering gaines, 1 and the excessive elabora- tion of curvature in the body of chest and writing- table disappeared, to be replaced by very delicate ovals, or even by straight lines slightly modified by rounded corners and finishing curves. Still, the general aspect of the slender, light structure with its joints concealed, and the insistence upon the apparent fact that the whole piece was cut out of a single block rather than framed together, — all this remained even in the Style Louis Seize, and so on into the florid Style Empire. Thus in Fig. i 1 8, the design of the years 1775 and after is shown as it was worked out in palace furniture, 1 Game: In French, literally, a sheath, like the scabbard of a sword. In architecture and decoration, a member having the general shape of a sheath, that is, of a reversed truncated pyramid, the height of which is great in proportion to the width either at top or bottom. Inhere is often a moulded or sculptured base upon which the moulded piece forms a table- like projection at the top ; so that the whole affects the appearance of a column or pilaster whose shaft grows larger upward. vol. 1 — 21 [ 3 2 1 ] JOINER Y gilded carved wood; and a marble slab; and in Fig. 119, the Percier and Fontaine style of 18 10 Fig. 118. Part of table, gilded wooden frame, marble slab, work of about 1775 (Palace of Versailles) is seen in its perfection, with mahogany and gilded metal in the table, white and gilded wood in the [ 3" ] RICH FURNITURE, APPLIED ORNAMENT fauteuil and the chair ; all invested with a pseudo- Roman dignity and coldness. Throughout this whole period, during the rococo work and the later reaction to severity, the mountings in metal, the marble slabs which formed Fig. 119. Table, chair, and part of arm-chair: work of Napoleon's reign, 1802— 1 814 (Palace of the Greater Trianon) the tops, and the porcelain or soft-porcelain 1 plaques which were let into the wooden surfaces, these as well as the use of colored veneers were 1 Soft Porcelain ( porcelaine tendre) is one of those substances which were made by the skilful potters of Europe in the eighteenth century; when they were trying to discover the secret of Oriental porcelain. It is not strictly ceramic ware at all, but rather a kind of glass. It has an exquisite surface and tint, and takes ceramic painting beautifully. [ 3 2 3 ] J 0 1 N E R Y constantly maintained, as well as the fashion, vary- ing a little from time to time, would allow. The gilded bronze mountings were especially important; and this importance has been curiously observed even in modern times, the French, English, and German collectors vying with one another in the prices they will give for pieces of eighteenth-cen- tury furniture with original bronzes signed by well- known makers of the time, — such bronzes as are shown in Fig. 117 on the corners of the piece, and in the form of handles which include escutch- eons for the keyholes. A writing-table six feet long, with four little drawers but otherwise open, and a simple table enough, its top covered with green cloth, perhaps renewed, and its sides and legs veneered with bois des lies or some very fine-grained and .fine-colored tropical wood, will bring at auction a hundred thousand francs if well made and in good condition, even if it has but few bronzes, or those not signed by a well-known maker. If the whole rounded contour of the legs, and their passing into the lower edge of the rim which makes the table frame, be covered or guarded every- where by delicately cast and chiselled bronzes, somewhat as in Fig. 117, bronzes retaining their original gilding without change, and stamped "Gouthiere," that piece, fought for by two national museums and three or four amateurs with longer purses yet than the national museums are likely to have, will reach half a million francs without a [ 324 ] RICH FURNITURE, CHARACTERISTICS very protracted contest. The table in question might belong to either one of these classes, accord- ing to what the gilt-bronze mountings betray when they are taken off and searched for stamps and other evidences of origin. The artistic value of these pieces is somewhat less considerable. Refined modelling: of heads and of decorative scrolls there is, indeed ; and much judicious application to the wood of the peculiar color and lustre of the metal : but this does not go very far in the way of giving high artistic delight. As for the marble tops that come from quarries of splendid ancient fame, now forgotten or disused or exhausted, they have been sawed by hand and then polished by hand, and therefore are not true in their surfaces, but visibly rounded. It is one of the " ear-marks " of an un- altered old piece, its convex slab. It may have been broken along the lines of some natural vein, and put together again with an ingenious simulation of the color made by some cement which the marble workers have the secret of, and this will not greatly injure its value. Veneer in woods of natural color or stained green and violet and ruby red may have been repaired in the case of an injury now forgotten ; nothing but the little plaques with figures in relief or painted groups can vie with the bronze mountings as fixing the value, artistic and pecuniary, of a piece. We are reminded by them of the fashion prevalent in Holland a hundred years earlier of incrusting into the solid frame and the [325 ] JOINER Y panel doors alike a whole series of Dutch tiles, or as an improvement upon that, of half a hundred Chinese saucers of approximately uniform size but of varying color. These are the developments to which furniture was carried in the ages of deco- rative design, one refinement leading to another until the piece lost to a great extent its original character of plain utility. There has been mention above of the use made in joinery of the beauty of the wood used. By this term, Europeans mean in most cases the beauty of polished and richly veined surfaces, usually of veneer, more rarely of the solid piece. In fact the wood is treated as marble is treated — highly polished and often finished with such a liquid application as is thought to bring into strong re- lief the varieties of color and of veining. The Orientals have resorted to other devices as well, as, for instance, that process by which the softer parts of the surfaces are removed, leaving the strongly marked fibre and the still more promi- nent waves and ripples of the natural structure in tangible relief. Stopping short of this, they plane and polish the unstained, unaltered natural wood and take a delight, hard for an Occidental to share, in the slight and delicate cloudings of the surface of pale buff or soft gray. If you are very active and prosperous in industrial commerce and com- mercial industry, you will not be able to design in this way ; that refinement belongs to the [ 3*6 ] Fig. i 20. Cupboard in red cedar, with brass strap hinges, the design of George Fletcher Babb, in 1880. Private house, New York City CARVED AND PAINTED DECORATION tranquil people leading undisturbed, and, in our sense, unambitious lives. There is still, however, something which may be done in the twentieth century and in the act- ive and self-asserting European lands. Fig. 1 20 shows something that was done in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and in the United States. This is a closed cupboard built above a fireplace in a New York City house. The material is red cedar, and the whole was built and carved from the highly wrought, full-sized drawings made by the designer ; the filling of each oval medallion is a letter, B. A word should be said about painting furniture ; but when the painting becomes more than mere chromatic decoration of framework and panelling, it reaches at once the scope of painting of signifi- cance and representation, for which see Chapter XXV. The prepared surfaces of wood lend them- selves perfectly to landscape or figure subject, and a whole school of design grew up in the seven- teenth century, in Holland and elsewhere, based upon the decorating of plainly formed cabinets and tables, chests of drawers and wainscoting, which are wrought in color to the highest pitch of painted design. Thus, a cabinet may have four or eight landscapes on the front, capable of com- parison even with the work of the recognized masters in the galleries ; though indeed such pieces are rare. In the nineteenth century the work of [ 3^7 ] JOINERY a very few artists took a similar direction ; the Frenchmen tried to imitate the glories of the eighteenth-century varnish-painting ; the English- men, going farther back, kept before them a^ models the simple painting in distemper of the fourteenth-century pieces. All this, however, has but little connection with joinery and must be considered a part of the great subject of painted decoration. END OF VOL. I [328] GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE 3 3125 01430 1861