Mll!llimil!l!ll!lltll!tl!l!lll!ll!: ill! iltlillilllilHfHIM
THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
GIFT OF
DGiN S3YKOTR
THE INTERDEPENDENCE
OF THE ARTS OF DESIGN
I
THE
INTERDEPENDENCE
OF THE ARTS OF DESIGN
A SERIES OF SIX LECTURES
DELIVERED AT THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
Bring tlf? &rammmt Hettnrra for 1904
BY
RUSSELL STURGIS, A. M., PH. D.
FELLOW OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS ; EDITOR AND
CHIEF AUTHOR " DICTIONARY OF ARCHITECTURE AND BUILDING '';
EDITOR ART DEPARTMENTS OF WEBSTER'S AND THE CENTURY
DICTIONARY ; AUTHOR " EUROPEAN ARCHITECTURE,"
"THE APPRECIATION OF SCULPTURE," ETC.
WITH ONE HUNDRED ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
CHICAGO
A. C. McCLURG fc? CO.
1905
COPYRIGHT
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1905
PUBLISHED MAY 27, 1905
Cfjt Hakmtoc
K. R. DONNBLLEV &• SONS COMPANY
CHICAGO
r Art
Library
7425
NOTE
'T'HE lectures presented in this volume comprise
the second series delivered at the Art Institute
of Chicago on the Scammon foundation. The
Scammsn Lectureship is established on an ample
basis by the bequest of Mrs. Maria Sheldon
Scammon, who died in iqoi. The will prescribes
that these lectures shall be upon the history, theory,
and practice of the fine arts (meaning thereby the
graphic and plastic arts), by persons of distinction
or authority on the subject of which they lecture,
such lectures to be primarily for the benefit of the
students of the Art Institute, and secondarily for
members and other persons. The lectures are
known as " The Scammon Lectures."
975485
CONTENTS
LECTURE 1
MODERN JUDGED BY ANCIENT ART . . .11
REPRESENTATION AND SENTIMENT
LECTURE II
MODERN JUDGED BY ANCIENT ART ... 60
DECORATIVE EFFECTS
LECTURE III
THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS IN WHICH FORM PRE-
DOMINATES 85
LECTURE IV
THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS IN WHICH COLOR PRE-
DOMINATES 1 1 8
LECTURE V
SCULPTURE AS USED IN ARCHITECTURE . .157
LECTURE VI
PAINTING AS USED IN ARCHITECTURE . . .194
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
LECTURE I
FACING
FIGURE PAGE
Puvis DE CHAVANNES' "THE MUSES RISING TO
GREET THE ASPIRING SOUL" . Frontispiece
1. TOMB-SLAB OF HEGESO 12
2. DURER'S "THE KNIGHT AND DEATH" . . .12
3. DURER'S "MELANCHOLIA" 13
4. PORTRAIT STATUE OF BEST PERIOD OF GRECO-ROMAN
ART 13
5. PORTRAIT BUST BY BENEDETTO DA MAJANO . . 24
6. PORTRAIT BUST OK MACHIAVELLI .... 24
7. HEAD AND TORSO OF BARTOLOMEO COLLEONI . 25
8. PORTRAIT BUST, IN BRONZE, OF ANTIQUE ROMAN
TIME 25
9. PORTRAIT BUST, *IN BRONZE, OF ARCHAIC GREEK
TIME 25
10. EQUESTRIAN STATUE OF JEANNE D'ARC, BY DUBOIS 36
n. GALLAUDET TEACHING A DEAF-MUTE ... 36
12. STUDY OF CLOUDS, MEZZOTINT, BY TURNER . -37
13. "OsTEND," PAINTING, BY TURNER .... 37
14. "CALAIS PIER," BY TURNER (FIRST STATE OF
MEZZOTINT) 46
15. "CALAIS PIER," BY TURNER (SECOND STATE OF
MEZZOTINT) 46
16. "BEN ARTHUR," MEZZOTINT, BY TURNER . . 47
17. "TnE PINE TREE," WATER-COLOR DRAWING, BY
C. H. MOORE 47
[5]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
LECTURE II
FACING
FIGURE PAGE
1. MARBLE FIGURE, BY LUCA DELLA ROBBIA . . 60
2. Two BRONZE FIGURES, TOMB OF MAXIMILIAN I.
AT INNSBRUCK 60
3. DURER'S "CoAT OF ARMS WITH THE COCK" . 61
4. IDEAL HEAD, BY KLINGER 61
5. PORTRAIT OF RUBENS, BY HOLLAR .... 66
6. PORTRAIT OF EDMOND DE GONCOURT, BY BRACQUE-
MOND 66
7. JAPANESE PAINTING ON SILK 67
8. BATTERSEA BRIDGE, ETCHING, BY WHISTLER . .72
9. MOOR OF ALGIERS, ETCHING, BY FORTUNY . 72
10. THE MATTERHORN, FROM THE RIFFELBERG (Wooo-
CUT, BY WHYMPER) 73
11. THE MATTERHORN, FROM THE RIFFELBERG (FROM A
PHOTOGRAPH) 73
12. " SOUVENIR D'!TALIE," ETCHING, BY COROT . .78
13. "ENVIRONS DE ROME," ETCHING, BY COROT . 78
14. DRAWING BY RAFFAELLE, PRESENTED TO DURER . 67
15. ANCIENT VASE, "EAGLE" DESIGN, TWELFTH CEN-
TURY 79
1 6. AGATE VASE, PROBABLY ROMAN, TWELFTH CEN-
TURY 79
17. JASPER VASE, ORIENTAL MAKE, SEVENTEENTH CEN-
TURY 86
1 8. MIRROR OF ROCK CRYSTAL, SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 86
LECTURE III
1. CABINET, FRENCH, SIXTEENTH CENTURY . . .87
2. CLAY MODELS OF FURNITURE 87
3. SIDEBOARD, FRENCH, SEVENTEENTH CENTURY . . 94
4. PIECES OF COLOGNE STONEWARE .... 94
[6]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
FIGURE PAGE
5. KNEADING-TROUGH AND BREAD-CAGE, FRENCH,
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 95
6. SIDEBOARD, BY ALEXANDRE SANDIER .... 95
7. ARMOUR OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY . . .102
8. ARMOUR, EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY . . . 102
9. WROUGHT -!RON SHEARS, ON STAND, FRENCH,
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 103
10. SILVER COVERED GOBLET, GERMAN, LATE FIF-
TEENTH CENTURY 103
1 1 . SILVER COVERED GOBLET, FRENCH, EARLY SEVEN-
TEENTH CENTURY 103
12. GLASS VESSELS OF GRECO-ROMAN MAKE . .no
13. GLASS VESSELS OF VENETIAN MAKE . . . .no
14. GLASS VESSELS OF ORIENTAL MAKE . . . .Ill
15. REPOUSSE WORK IN LEAD ill
1 6. DECORATIVE SCULPTURE IN LEAD . . . .ill
LECTURE IV
1. GLAZED POTTERY VASES, FRENCH . . . .120
2. LACQUERED TRAY, JAPANESE 120
3. IMARI PORCELAIN, JAPANESE 121
4. INLAID Box, JAPANESE 121
5. ENAMELLED SCABBARD, STEEL WEAPON, AND SMALL
BRONZE VASE 128
6. TOP OF Box, INLAID LACQUER, JAPANESE . .128
7. ENAMELLED POTTERY, FRENCH, EIGHTEENTH CEN-
TURY 129
8. CABINET, ENGLISH, ABOUT 1870 (OPEN) . . .136
9. CABINET, ENGLISH, ABOUT 1870 (CLOSED) . .136
10. INLAID PAVEMENT, FLORENCE CATHEDRAL . . .137
1 1 . DETAIL OF VAULT, MAUSOLEUM OF GALLA PLA-
CIDIA, RAVENNA 137
[7]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
FIGURE PAGE
12. LAVABO, SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE . .129
13. PAINTED STATUE, GREEK . , . i . .146
14. FRAGMENT, PAINTED STATUE, GREEK . . .146
1 5. BUSTS, CALLED SEVERUS AND CARACALLA, ROMAN,
THIRD CENTURY A.D. 147
1 6. POLYCHROMATIC BUST, BY CORDIER . . . .147
17. POLYCHROMATIC STATUE, BY CORDIER . . -147
LECTURE V
1. TOMB-SLAB OF DEMETRIA AND PAMPHILA . .158
2. TOMB-SLAB OF DEXILEOS 158
3. SLAB, TOP OF A STELE RECORDING A TREATY . 159
4. CHARTRES CATHEDRAL, FROM THE WEST . . . 159
5. CHARTRES CATHEDRAL, SOUTH PORCH . . .166
6. REIMS CATHEDRAL, WEST FRONT . . . .166
7. REIMS CATHEDRAL, MIDDLE PORCH . . . .167
8. MARBLE RELIEF AND SHIELDS OF ARMS . . .167
9. PONTE DI PARADISO, AT VENICE . . . .174
10. LUNETTE, AT FLORENCE 174
11. THE MEETING OF SAINTS DOMINIC AND FRANCIS . 175
12. FRONT OF THE OPERA HOUSE, PARIS . . . 175
13. FRONTISPIECE ADDED IN 1903 TO CHURCH OF ST.
BARTHOLOMEW, NEW YORK 184
14. DETAIL OF THE FRONT OF SAME . . . .184
15. TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON, DETAIL OF THE GREAT
PORCH 185
1 6. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON, FOOT OF
GREAT STAIR 185
LECTURE VI
1. CHURCH OF SANT* APOLLINARE Nuovo, RAVENNA,
SIXTH CENTURY 196
2. CHURCH OF SAN VITALE. MOSAIC OF ABOUT 550 196
[8]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING
FIGURE PAGE
3. LUNETTE, MAUSOLEUM OF GALLA PLACIDIA, RAVENNA 197
4. INTERIOR, MAUSOLEUM OF GALLA PLACIDIA, RAVENNA 197
5. LABYRINTHS, FROM EARLY CHURCHES . . . 200
6. DETAIL OF PAINTED CEILING, MESSINA CATHEDRAL,
SICILY 200
7. WEST FRONT OF CATHEDRAL, LE PUY, FRANCE . 201
8. TOWER OF CHURCH AT CLERMONT-FERRAND, FRANCE 201
9. TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON, FROM THE SOUTHEAST . 206
10. DETAIL OF NORTH FLANK OF FLORENCE CATHEDRAL 206
11. CLOISTER OF SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE . 207
12. DETAIL OF PAINTING IN SAME 207
13. FRESCO, SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE . .210
14. THE SUPPER IN THE HOUSE OF LEVI, BY PAUL
VERONESE 210
15. CONCORD BRIDGE. IN MEMORIAL HALL, BOSTON. 211
1 6. WALL OF A DRAWING-ROOM, NEW YORK . .211
17. WALL OF SITTING-ROOM, NEW YORK. . . .218
1 8. PANEL FOR MURAL DECORATION, BY COLEMAN . 218
19. PANEL FOR MURAL DECORATION, BY COLEMAN . 225
20. HALL IN LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON . 219
21. CORRIDOR IN LIBRARY OF CONGRESS . . .219
22. MURAL PAINTING IN PUBLIC LIBRARY, BOSTON, BY
SARGENT 224
[9]
THE
INTERDEPENDENCE
OF THE
ARTS OF DESIGN
LECTURE I
MODERN JUDGED BY ANCIENT ART
REPRESENTATION AND SENTIMENT.'
There is constant demand for critical
treatment of contemporary fine art, — a
demand which takes strange forms and is
sometimes peremptory. Writers on the prin-
ciples of fine art are continually asked to
stop discussing the arts of old times and to
consider those of the present day. There
is, however, a very serious hindrance to one
who would gratify that demand, and here
lies the difficulty: very recent works of
fine art have not yet become well known
to any one.
1 Delivered April 19, 1904, at Fullerton Memorial Hall, The Art Institute
of Chicago.
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
Take an extreme instance, — the works
of James Whistler, who died a few months
ago. It was my business to obtain such
analysis of his work as could be had by
artists, especially by painters. We have in
the United States a number of painters who
write admirably well on matters of painting.
Seven or eight names arise at once in the
memory of one who is conversant with the
whole field, names of men who are simply
excellent critics in this, the most approved
and most popular form of the arts of design.
And those men, though they feel themselves
unable to speak of a brother painter while
he is yet alive, — of him or of his works, —
will yet consent to write or speak about the
works of him who has gone, and who is
beyond the reach of injury by any possible
jealousy or personal disapproval. But in the
case of Whistler there was this insuperable
difficulty to be met on the threshold — the
difficulty that not one of the painters whom
I consulted had seen enough of Whistler's
work to dare to speak of it. His black-
and-white productions, his etchings, his
[12]
3 S
s
3 H
I 5
ll
« G
> PI
? H
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
dry points, and his lithographs, even some
of his smaller chromatic work (not color
work exactly, as you will understand, but
work in more tints or in more hues than
one), — those were accessible, and the painter
who did not know that class of Whistler's
productions might put himself in the way
of knowing it rather soon. The paintings,
however, the larger works, the canvases,
were not accessible. My friends, the artist-
critics, were of New York and lived in the
centre of things there ; but they had had no
sufficient chance to study Whistler's paint-
ing. One artist had seen the " Portrait of
his Mother" in the Luxembourg; another
had seen the portrait of Carlyle at Glasgow ;
two or three had been at the Paris Exhibi-
tion of 1900, and had seen the two or
three life-size portraits that were exhibited
there, — in the American section, by the
way ; others had seen and had hoped to
study the paintings which were loaned to
the Society of American Artists two years
ago, and which were withdrawn immedi-
ately because of objections to the way in
['3]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
which they had been hung. In short, there
was no one who had seen enough of the
painting to warrant him in grappling with
the problem of expressing in a few words
his general opinion of Whistler's art; and
yet Whistler and his works — what with
their real artistic interest, and what with the
extraordinary reputation which that erratic
genius had gained by other than artistic
efforts — had not failed to attract the atten-
tion of every one.
There was indeed an exhibition held in
Boston at that very time. One or two of
the zealous students were able to put other
things aside and to stay a week in Boston
for the immediate purpose we are consider-
ing. But you see at once the difference
between that brief, and as it were, momen-
tary, effort and the easy, the life-long, the
unconscious training they had had in the
work of the great masters of the past. And
you will remember, too, that when George
Inness died and when Homer Martin died,
— to name only two men whose work may
be thought as precious as that of Whis-
[H]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
tier — there was not the same widespread
demand for a knowledge of their work nor
the same possibility afforded for the study
of it in a great and varied collection.
So it is generally. I am asked, let us
say, to discuss some pieces of recent Ameri-
can architecture; but the conditions of Amer-
ican architecture will not become familiar
to me or to any one of my generation until
it has ceased to be recent. It is not —
observe this — a matter of quickness of intel-
lectual appreciation. Given a building com-
plete and facing the sunshine, and a man
who has seen a great deal of architecture in
Europe and in America, and a ready appre-
ciation of that building may be asked for;
but this will not be a relative appreciation.
It will not be a comparative opinion that
this student forms, because he has not seen
other buildings to which this one may
properly be compared. He will not have
seen the buildings of the same class in this
land of magnificent distances, — not many
of them; and he will not have seen the
buildings of a correlative class in Europe.
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
And observe that all art judgment must be
comparative. There is absolutely no value
in your opinion of a building or of a paint-
ing,— no use to yourself and none to your
neighbor, — until you have seen and studied
a great number of works of art of the same
class, and have in this way discovered for
yourself the possibilities and the proprieties
of the situation. One has, let us say,
travelled somewhat widely; and let us say
also that only a few months have elapsed
since his return from his voyages; but no
sooner is he brought face to face in
America with a mural painting, or an
equestrian statue in a park, than he
realizes with horror that the mural paint-
ing in the churches which he has seen
in Europe is very different from this, the
sculpture different in its aim ; and also that
he did not study it in just the right way.
He will realize that he cannot say off-hand
just how the new conditions differ from
those of the older work. I will not im-
agine him as finding that he has forgotten
much that he saw, and that he has mislaid
[16]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
his notes, and that, in short, he is not as
well prepared to judge the new painting as
he might have supposed himself a moment
before the church door opened and he
entered the hall where it is to be seen. I
will not assume that ; and yet in the face of
the new surroundings, the new handling,
the new standard set up, our travelled and
experienced scholar will come near to
thinking sometimes that his study and
thought have failed him, somehow. But,
you will say, he has his experience of art
in general. This critic of yours is assumed
to have a wide knowledge of art! Yes;
and therefore his opinion of a work of art
of a settled kind, if one may say so, is easy
to form. Let it be, if you please, a work
by an American artist; let it be a painting
by Washington Allston, or even a landscape
by Homer Martin, than whom I cannot
name a more honorable and honored
painter. Of that picture our student of
imaginative or of landscape painting will
be quick to judge, and his judgment will
be of value. And why of value ? Because
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
the artistic form is accepted, the conven-
tions are known ; you involuntarily compare
Martin's work with the great pictures of
the noble past.
And so with architecture. It is fashion-
able nowadays for the architects to build
with Neo-Roman colonnades, and to find
their greatest delight in them ; and assuredly
these colonnades and the buildings of which
they form the chief part, artistically speak-
ing, are within the reach of the judgment
of him who has travelled, collected photo-
graphs, and matured his opinions about the
seventeenth-century Italian and the eight-
eenth-century French art. It will be seen,
however, that these conditions do not hold
when the recent work of American art is
of a more strenuous character, is original to
the extent of novelty. The moment that
this most important departure is submitted
to our critic, that moment — the moment
when judgment is the most needed — he
finds it unready. I shall show you by and
by a photograph of a most interesting
building by a townsman of yours, and I
[18]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
^
shall confess that it is extremely difficult
to pass judgment upon it. I think you
will agree with me that in such a case the
best judgment is that which is formed
slowly. So with paintings, and so with
sculpture, and so with the recent very
novel attempts at decoration — few, but
most interesting, most attractive. Who is
to pass upon them? They will have be-
come old things, accepted or rejected,
admitted to the category of works of art
or by common consent excluded from it,
before our critic, no matter how great his
gained knowledge, how great his quickness
of mind, will be ready to pass upon them
finally.
It is not asserted that the critic will
wait for popular opinion; on the contrary,
the critic with others, will lead popular
opinion; and this popular opinion will be
shaped out of the judgment of the special
students of art; but this judgment will be
formed slowly. If you go next month to
a newly made collection and hear even the
most intimate talk of artists about the
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
tendencies to be seen in the works exhib-
ited, you will find uncertainty as to signifi-
cance, as to purpose; indecision as to what
is portended or promised by the new de-
parture; indecision as to how far it is a
new departure; and you will conclude that
it takes years of time to give to any work
of art its proper place.
Therefore our experiments at doing this
same thing, at placing modern works of
art, must be conducted under the most fa-
vorable circumstances ; and I propose to you
that we should try to see what recent
art looks like in the light cast by the older
art. The older art is accepted, is ticketed,
and indexed. You can, with a certain
amount of reserve, discover what some
excellent judges think of it; you can find
out why one competent man prefers Velas-
quez and another Titian, and why most
able critics, while admitting each for him-
self his own preferences, still hesitate to
express them loudly, realizing that it is of
little consequence whether you or I prefer
Velasquez to Titian, or Rembrandt to
[20]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
Raphael, or the other way. What is of
moment, what is important, is that we see
clearly and well why Rembrandt and
Raphael are both supreme masters, each in
his way, the two working on lines so differ-
ent and yet so like; why Titian and Velas-
quez are both marvellous painters, execu-
tants of the first rank and colorists of
unmatched excellence, although their no-
tions of execution and their embodyings of
the central idea of color are so unlike.
To judge new art by old, that is the
problem; and the immediate aspect of it
which we take up to-night is that which is
primarily the representation of nature, in-
cluding expression of all sorts. The sub-
ject, of course, would fill ten octavo vol-
umes ; which would even be easier to com-
pose than a lecture, because then you would
have merely to arrange — now you have to
select with care. But still the selection is
possible, and let us speak at once of the
Grecian funereal monuments, the stelai of
the fourth century B. C. There is one
which I know by heart, because a well
[21]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
made cast of it was built into the wall
above my chimney-piece in that little
Athens hotel where I spent five weeks;
while the original itself was only a mile
distant, at the spot where it had been found
in the cemetery outside of the Dipylon, the
western gate of old Athens. It is now in
the Patissia Museum, the central museum
of Athens, but I show you a photograph of
it taken while it was still in the open day-
light, as the sculptor meant it to be seen
(Fig. i). The interesting point about it
can be stated in advance; it is a simple
expression of gentle womanhood, and a
photograph of it, or a drawing (especially
if the two figures alone were shown), would
not of necessity excite the emotions of re-
gret, of that pathos which comes of the con-
templation of brief human life, of loss and
deprivation, — all of which the tomb relief
assuredly held for those who saw it when
it was first put in place. Therefore let us
look at a photograph of Albert Diirer's
print, the famous piece called " The Knight
and Death" (Fig. 2), in which the mounted
[22]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
man-at-arms rides quietly and with his
eyes fixed on the space before him, al-
though close by his side is the ghastly
presence which he must know as Death,
and behind him, with prodigious hooked
spear, is as Frightful a fiend as even German
mediaeval art has produced. The knight,
Death, and the Devil: and observe that no
one knows what Diirer had in mind, nor
what thoughts he intended to convey.
There is doubt even to this extent, that ex-
cellent judges are of absolutely opposite
opinions with regard to it, the one class look-
ing on the knight as the Christian in his pil-
grimage, while another body of students
thinks that the triumph is with Hell, and
not with the Christian's hope in Death.
Those of you who still read Ruskin are
aware that he himself held both opinions
at an interval of twenty years, assuming
each in turn as certainly true. And we
might give the same amount of attention
to Durer's "Melancholia" (Fig. 3), and
explain to ourselves, if we can, why it is
called "Melancholia," and indeed just what
[23]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
Diirer meant by that word, whether written
as he writes it or as the Latin dictionaries
have it; and what the print is about, any-
way, as the boys would say. An intelligent
English critic says without hesitation that
it is the Genius of Industrial Art; but if
this is so, why is the word "Melencolia"
set so plainly on a scroll in the sky? As
for the Roman numeral or letter I, its
presence there has defeated all conjecture.
What is it that I am trying to show?
I am trying to show that in the important
matter of human sentiment expressed in
the art of design, the masterpieces of an-
cient art suffer from the same limitations
from which suffers also our work of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. How
was it about Hogarth? He was as bold a
characterizer as Diirer himself, and in one
way more unfettered, more bold and free,
in this, namely that he was less restrained
by what we now call good taste, and that
he was more modern in his time, more
immediately a portrayer of what he saw
about him. He sets forth in many a pic-
PORTRAIT BUST BY BENEDETTO DA MAJANO (1444-1498)
National Museum, Florence
LECTURE 1. FIGURE 5
HEAD AND TORSO OF STATUE OF BARTOLOMEO COLLEONI,
AT VENICE, BY VERROCCH1O AND LEOPARD1
From a plaster cast of the original
LECTURE I. FIGURE 7
PORTRAIT BUST, IN BRONZE, OF ANTIQUE
ROMAN TIME
Naples Museum
LECTURE I. FIGURE 8
PORTRAIT BUST, IN BRONZE, OF ARCHAIC
GREEK TIME
Naples Museum
LECTURE I. FIGURE 9
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
ture the bad effects of early dissipation, and
the horrors of disobedience, and the growth
of cruelty, and the miseries of ill-assorted
marriage. Nobody can tell an anecdote
better in a painting or an engraving; and
in that matter of anecdotical painting and
of sculpture of incident there is much to
be said and more to be thought; but the
question is how far Hogarth was able to
express more than the mere incident which
he relates. Is there anything in the figures
themselves, their pose or gesture, their
action separately or together, the expres-
sion of the human countenance in each —
anything to express goodness or evil, hope
or despair, gentle affection or brutality?
Mr. Hamerton has something to say about
this in his shrewd English way, and he
points out that if a certain acquaintance of
his, who had unfortunately a very red nose,
were immortalized by the pencil of another
Hogarth, it would be undoubtedly as the
dreadful example, as a hint of what would
happen to you if you drank too much.
"And yet," says Mr. Hamerton, "my friend
[*s]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
is an absolute water drinker, and his red
nose has had other causes." Is that a triv-
ial -instance? The difficulty is that more
subtle instances are hard to express in
words. Mark Twain describes the picture
representing the first meeting of Bliicher
and Wellington on the field of Waterloo,
and he suggests half a dozen other names for
the picture, one of which would be "The
Last Parting of Bliicher and Wellington on
the Field of Waterloo"; and as another,
equally appropriate, the meeting, or the part-
ing, of Bliicher and Wellington on some
other field. "For," says or implies Mr.
Clemens, "nothing in the figures themselves,
their attitudes, their faces, can express either
parting or meeting, or sorrow or joy, or
greeting or adieux, or, in short, anything
else." Here are the portraits of the two
rival commanders of the allied hosts, about
whose relative merits as winners of the
field there is dispute even to-day, and that is
all there is in the way of historical record,
except some partially accurate archaeology
in the uniforms and the horse-trappings.
[26]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
It is, of course, natural, as it is common,
that persons who are bid to study the art
of the Greeks find it unattractive because of
its lack of human expression. It is the
reliefs with which we naturally deal, be-
cause the statues are separate, each "alone
with his glory" in a literal sense of the
word. The Hermes of Olympia, even
if we had it intact and uninjured, the
Apoxyomenos, which is intact, the
Augustus of Prima Porta, an uninjured
antique statue of the best Greco-Roman
time, are all expressive enough in the way
of pure art. But we are not at this mo-
ment discussing the question of pure art;
we are considering the matter of the repre-
sentation of nature, and especially in the
way of bodily and facial expression. We
find that the Augustus expresses nothing
but a conventional thought of the Impera-
tor's gesture; that the Hermes expresses
nothing but the gentle, caressing glance
of the kindly elder brother; that the
"Scraper" is merely a thought of how a
magnificent young athlete looks at himself
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
and caresses, as it were, his mighty right arm
as he scrapes from it the oil and the dust and
the sweat of the pankration. Now, we have
no important painting of the Greek period
or of the Greco-Roman period. In the
way of graphic art we have only, to repre-
sent the spirit of classical antiquity, the
work of somewhat mechanical copyists at
Pompeii and on a wall or two in Rome.
But as to the figures which have much
human expression, they are portraits gener-
ally. The seated draped female statue in
the Naples Museum is called Agrippina
because of its sadness of expression and
because it represents a mature woman.
This half-draped figure of Drusus, or Ger-
manicus, or some other noble young Roman
of the early Imperial time is also in Naples.
(See Fig. 4.) The two busts which came
from a Roman tomb in the Campagna and
now are in the Vatican are the portraits of
an unknown Roman and his wife ; and this
comes very near to giving us that pathos
which we ask for in funereal monuments.
And why does it so ? Because the caress
[28]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
of the clasped hands reminds the spectator
first of the life that was, the sympathy and
the mutual aid ; and, in the second place, of
the separation and the nothingness that is.
There is no mistaking the individuality of
the portrait busts of the Italian Renaissance,
— of the portrait bust by Benedetto da
Majano in the Bargello (Fig. 5), nor of
the anonymous bust at Quarto, of the same
epoch, nor of the portrait of Machiavelli
by an unknown artist (Fig. 6), nor I sup-
pose of the Colleoni equestrian statue in
Venice, of which I show the head and
body alone that it may compare the better
with the busts we are considering (Fig. 7),
nor of the bronze portrait bust of Henri IV.
in the Louvre. They are expressive enough,
but they are simply portraits. Each is a
study of one individual head, and it has
had no aim beyond fidelity. And so with
this savagely energetic bronze head in the
Naples Museum (Fig. 8), which is called
by various fantastic names — Seneca (an
absurd ascription), and Paulus ^Emilius.
That piece is also from the villa at Hercu-
[29]
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laneum; and so are the one called, rather
absurdly, Berenice and also Aulus Gabinius,
and the vigorous head which is set up
beside it. The first is alone among busts
or statues of good Greek work in the
addition to the bronze casting of spiral
ringlets made of thin ribbons of the metal,
each rivetted to the head, the point of
junction covered by an added band around
the forehead. Or, to take examples which
are not necessarily portraits in a nominal
sense, look at this head of a so-called
Apollo with the corkscrew ringlets (Fig. 9),
— the ringlet in this case not of a flat rib-
bon, but of a cord, a lock of hair round in
its general section. This bust is cut from
a bronze statue, as you see. In this way
has been preserved for us also the
exquisite bust called Plato because of
its lofty and gentle expression of face.
Comparetti, the historian of the Hercula-
neum villa, thinks it is a relic of the lost
statue of Poseidon holding his son Taras,
a piece famous in antiquity; it was set up
in the city named from the son, Tarentum.
[30]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
And now let us consider with each and
all of these how far they are expressive in
movement or in facial rendering. Is there
any widely different character given to
these works of plastic art found in the
works of the masters of the Grecian time,
of the Renaissance, of the moderns ? I note
the manipulation of the eyeball in the bronze
bust from Herculaneum (Fig. 8), a non-
sculpturesque motive found also in mediaeval
art and not of a nature that would com-
mend itself, one would suppose, to a Greek.
I note a similar treatment of the eyeball in
the Verrocchio statue of the soldier of for-
tune (Fig. 7). In either case the sculptor
has stepped out of his immediate sphere,
his narrowest, his most limited field, to
produce a natural effect by contradicting
the facts of nature. We can hardly ima-
gine a Greek of a great time doing that,
and yet here it is seen, in a portrait, as we
might find it in other heads, both bronze
and marble; and from these we learn this
lesson about the Greeks, that they were
not always in the mind for lofty architec-
ts']
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
tonic composition in sculpture. And on
the other hand, we find the expressive
Machiavelli portrait, the highly indi-
vidual Pietro Mellini, the busts from the
Roman tomb with their life-like aspect and
their memorial purpose, all perfected with-
out that non-sculpturesque device.
Now it is a most difficult question to
answer — the question whether the art of
the nineteenth century shows any advance
in this matter of facial or bodily expression.
I wonder whether any person present re-
members that picture by Arthur Hughes —
" April Love, " as it was called, when
exhibited in America. In that picture a
lover, whose face is not shown, is bending
over and caressing the hand of a girl whose
face is in full light ; and that face has been
wrought into a unique design — it has been
made the medium for the suggestion of
hope and fear and that pathetic sympathy
for the other person in the interview
which our imagination can easily supply.
In this instance there is really an attempt
at facial expression carried to a high pitch.
[32]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
It is possible that even if the head and
torso of the figure were shown without the
rest of the composition, the student of it
would be able to say correctly what the
sentiment of the face was meant to be.
And, pray, observe that in saying this I put
the highest possible estimate upon the suc-
cess of the attempt, in this particular case.
For indeed facial expression without the
setting, without the descriptive parts of the
design, would commonly be mistaken on
every occasion and would be rightly quali-
fied if we should say that it did not exist
at all. One is reminded of the familiar
experiment to try whether the expression
of the eye really exists or not. You take
the person with the supposedly expressive
eye and have him look through a small
aperture, allowing only the eye and the
small muscles around it to be seen — and
the result? The result is disappointment.
For it is not inaptly said that the expression
of the eye lies in the muscles at the corners
of the mouth.
The peculiar sentiment of nineteenth-
[33]
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century art will be found to be chiefly in
that the nineteenth-century man had a story
to tell, and that his effort to tell it included
facial expression; although this last, if we
look for it by itself, will not be found very
strongly indicated. Here (Fig. 10) is a
view of the Jeanne d'Arc of Paul Du-
bois, taken from the original shown in the
Salon of 1880 or thereabout. Notice the
violation of all true sculpturesque feeling in-
volved in the use of metal sheathing which
we designate plate armour. A Roman gen-
eral could wear the bronze cuirass closely
modelled to the muscular development of
his body; a Roman legionary could wear
the steel splints and spalls, movable and
flexible adaptations to his leather coat; the
Renaissance man, like Colleoni, could be
seen in a cuirass and still be a fit subject for
sculpture because the mind leaps over the
distinctions there and sees the body beneath
the rigid covering. But the complete pan-
oply of hammered iron of the reign of
Charles VII. of France has no such capa-
city. To put the body and limbs of a
[34]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
young girl into such a jacket as that, and
such cylinders of iron, is to deny the right
of the genius of Sculpture to limit with
any strictness the proceedings of her fol-
lowers. And yet one who feels this is also
aware that the lovers of narrative and sug-
gestive quasi-historical art have a right to
insist that once in a way the sculptor shall
yield to the historian.
Vela's "Last Days of Napoleon," the
massive seated statue with which many of
us are familiar, was injured for us by the
rather childlike device of the blanket cov-
ering his lower limbs, wrought over its
whole surface by a tool "specially prepared
for the purpose" as we were told. And
yet in this statue how seriously is the
problem faced, the problem of expressing
in sculpture the feelings which we assume
for the closing days of the greatest practi-
cal intelligence and the most prodigious
egotism which the modern world has
known ! French's " Gallaudet," with di-
rect reference to the teaching of deaf-mutes
by the patient instructor who developed and
[35]
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imparted the finger alphabet (Fig. 1 1), is as
perfectly capable of exciting our sympathy
as would be a poem on that subject. But
how hard it would be to find in these
works of art, any such facial expression as
that of which we have been talking ! You
may as well go to the late Roman reliefs
for pathos; indeed you will get it there in
a form more naive and confessed than in
our nineteenth-century work. In the great
relief preserved on the Capitol Hill, Mar-
cus Aurelius is entering a captured place.
The delegates of the Carnutes kneel before
him and pray that his mercy may be ex-
tended to their fellow citizens; a magnifi-
cent centurion accompanies the Emperor,
a grave statesmanlike head is seen above
his horse's neck, and beyond him again are
the helmets of legionaries. And here all
manner of non-sculpturesque devices are
resorted to for the sake of the narrative.
It is an important historical event related by
its contemporaries, and therefore the horses
must be reduced to the size of donkeys, and
their character as war-horses disappears in
[36]
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STUDY OF CLOUDS
Print from mezzotint on copper, by J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851)
LECTURE I. FIGURE 12
"OSTEND." PAINTING BY J. M. VV. TURNER
Exhibited at the Royal Academy (London), 1844. Belonging to the
estate oi Cornelius Vanderbilt, late of New York
LECTURE I. FIGURE 13
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
an innocent look and bearing as of ponies
in bakers' wagons. The trees are reduced
to the character of coral branches, and
their foliage to that of bouquets arranged
by human hands. The dancing banners are
allowed to flutter as they will, and no
serious attempt is made to give them any
charm as of floating squares of textile ma-
terial. Nothing is treated with vigor and
with insight except the Romans and the
Barbarians, with their strongly contrasted
costumes and their still more strongly
marked differentiation of face. But there
is no facial expression there beyond a sug-
gestion of imploring eagerness in the faces
of the kneeling suppliants.
We must admit, I think, that the senti-
ment which we find in a picture by Bou-
guereau, for instance, — an older sister car-
rying a smaller one across the shallow
water ; or in a Knaus, of the christening of a
baby, and the interest therein shown by the
members of the family, the clergyman, and
the visitors; or in a Millais, such as the
"Huguenot Lover," with its very prettily
[37]
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posed pair of heads with their contrasting
purposes to express, is always of a class
which would not be thought to exist were
not the story told partly by the figures
and their costume and surroundings, partly
by the description in the catalogues, and in
the more permanent treatises. And this
brings us directly to the question of expres-
sion by means of pose and attitude. Few
men can draw the figure in such a way as
to explain aright the fact of sudden, rapid,
violent, or otherwise significant motion.
That means, you will say, that few men
draw altogether well. Granted; and yet
there are different ways of drawing well.
Try to get rid of your knowledge of what
it is all about, and see how much the pic-
ture loses. I remember as a good one a
picture by William H. Over end, of a boat
with two oarsmen and an officer in the
stern, while beyond, two hundred feet off
and mounting on a wave, is a much larger
boat approaching, in whose bow are soldiers
standing, with muskets raised. The lieu-
tenant seated in the stern of the smaller
[38]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
boat is holding outboard what is evidently
a weighted box of signals, orders, or other
documents, which the enemy must not see.
If he should be struck and lose his com-
mand of the situation, the box at least will
be sunk and kept from the enemy's hand
and eye. And the reason for this action is
that the bullets from the larger boat are
coming straight; that the forward man of
the two rowers has just been shot and falls
backward, the loom of his oar striking the
stroke oarsman; that capture is imminent;
and that, whether as prisoner or as corpse,
the lieutenant will have carried out his
determination to save his box from the
enemy. As I said, that was a good picture
as I remember it, good in this matter of
convincingness of gesture and movement.
It is not easy to draw a sailor at the oar or
to give him exactly the right attitude.
And on account of such merits as this the pic-
ture is, as I have said, convincing; but here
we are dealing with the matter of choice,
and with the obvious willingness of the
artist to sacrifice something else in order to
[39]
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get realism of pose, and thereby to express
the fact of movement. Or, to take a larger
field, remember the battle-pieces which
came out of the war of 1870-71 in such
abundance. They are pictures of incidents.
They are not exactly anecdotes, because it
is no particular incident which any one
relates. One shows a group of mounted
dragoons who have captured a smaller de-
tachment of lancers, compelled them to
dismount, and, while one of the mounted
escort carries in a great sheaf the lances of
the prisoners, their fluttering little pen-
nons breaking the hard line of the shafts,
the prisoners themselves walk stolidly on,
smoking their pipes. In another a squadron
of dragoons has attacked a retreating squad-
ron,— a rear guard, as it seems, of cuiras-
siers. The forces in that skirmish are
nearly equal, and the sword-play is going
on vigorously, with really admirable draw-
ing of thrust and parry; and to make the
picture real, — to account for the retreating
of the cuirassiers and a certain frightened,
hurrying look which is given them, — a
[40]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
great cloud of cavalry is seen in the near
distance, a vast column of mounted men
coming down with its own cloud of dust.
There is a picture by Philippoteaux with a
panoramic view of an eighteenth-century
battle as it must have been fought really,
and not as the pictures of the time repre-
sent it. It is of- Fontenoy and of the
familiar old incident, "Gentlemen of the
Guard, will you please fire first." The long
line on either side is seen stretching over
hillock and into valley, as the eye crosses
the field of the coming strife; and the
sense of that line of battle — its signifi-
cance— is perfectly established. There
was such a picture at the time of the
American Civil War, though here one line
of battle only was seen, for the enemy had
disappeared in the woods. Woods, you
know, were an important part of cam-
paigning in the Southern States from 1861
to 1865. I remember a comment by the
London Times on some of Brady's photo-
graphs of the war: "Think of the diffi-
culty of campaigning in such a country,"
[40
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
says the London critic. But the interesting
thing in this picture was the realism of the
treatment. The line had just been formed ;
the company had just wheeled into place;
the unmounted officers had just run to their
posts behind the double rank of rifle-
bearers, of whom here and there a man
was wounded, and here and there a man in
his curiosity and excitement was breaking
the strict letter of the law by pointing
away after the enemy, asking his neighbor's
opinion as to what the next move would be.
You see that, without stating it very
plainly, my argument leads to the conclu-
sion that the art of old times did not relate
things very often, nor describe things very
exactly. In the nineteenth century the
painter was more desirous to tell a story, to
excite ready sympathy, to turn in search of
the non-artistic interest, — the to art unim-
portant statement of fact.
Raffaelle's " Miraculous Draught of
Fishes" is a familiar instance. The great
composer asked only a theme for his com-
position. It was nothing to him if all
[42]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
possibility was disregarded, and his three
human figures with a great catch of fish
are shown in a little boat with not flota-
tion enough for the fish alone. He cared
as little for that lack of realism as he did
for the fishes themselves and their species,
— the Mediterranean sea-fish of the always
well-supplied Roman market shown as
caught in the Sea of Galilee. Dutch pic-
tures of the seventeenth century show, as a
good critic has pointed out, a Hill with
Wind-Mill — a Harbor with Fishing-Boats
— an Interior with Sunlight — a Market-
place with Flowers, — never a bit of narra-
tive, never an anecdotical relation, never
a subject which you can put a name to.
And if this is true of the Dutchmen, those
sincere and most artistic realists, it is even
more true of the great schools which did
not pretend to realism. When did a Flor-
entine of the fifteenth century, or a Vene-
tian of the sixteenth century, or a Spaniard
of the seventeenth century paint an incident ?
"The Surrender of Breda," that grandiose
landscape with figures, by Velasquez, occurs
[43]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
to you at once as an exception, and rightly.
An exception, I say. I take down De
Beruete's quarto and the noble work by
Stevenson, and Carl Justi's octavos; three
most thorough treatises on the work of
Velasquez, and I turn over the numerous
photographs and cuts therein contained,
with the conclusion that no other similar
subject occurs in all the master's work.
"Las Meninas," the little maids of honor,
with the painter himself in the background,
shows indeed an interior of a room in the
royal palace, with elaborately dressed fig-
ures, but there is nothing going on more
than that which goes on every day, — the
chatting and posing and scuffling about of a
number of people, while the painter stands
and watches. And so there are portraits
with what are undoubtedly faithful repre-
sentations of the hound and the sporting
gun of the period and of the principal
subject himself. Counterfeit presentments
enough, but no narration. And I think
that the conclusion may be that art has
gained nothing from the modern addition
[44]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
of what is sometimes called "literary sub-
ject." Old art and new art alike recognize
book-illustration; that indeed we know,
and that may rightly have literary subject.
The sixteenth-century picture put into a
German translation of Livy's History of
Rome, or the eighteenth-century print from
a delicate line engraving bound in a volume
of Voltaire's political stories, or La Fon-
taine's versified tales, may indeed repeat and
extend, in a way, the statement made in
the text: but this is an exceptional branch
of art, illustration, with which our subject
hardly has to do.
We have still to consider, however,
what the nineteenth century gives in the
way of the representation of the forms and
colors of external nature. There are cer-
tain reasons to think that the scope of
painting was greatly enlarged by the land-
scape painters of this epoch. Nor does this
enlargement of the scope of nature-study
consist in color and the invention of new
pigments only, nor yet in the added knowl-
edge of light, and of the color of objects
[45]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
under strong light. Of all that, we can
hardly deal in these lectures, because the
subject is too subtle to be followed in the
spoken words, and because no photographic
view can possibly illustrate one's meaning.
But consider what the landscape painters of
the years before 1850 did for the study of
nature's aspects. This Turner "Study of
Clouds" is taken direct from an exquisite
mezzotint by him, entirely by his hand,
the plate existing in his house at the time
of his death, — a mezzotint work on the
copper without any purpose except to ex-
press the full meaning of a sketch or of a
memorandum of his own, taken from the
clouds of heaven (Fig. 12). This Turner
painting ( Fig. 13) is that marvellous
"Ostend" which belonged to Cornelius
Vanderbilt at the time of his death, as it
had belonged to him for ten years. Prob-
ably it still hangs in the house at 5/th
Street and Fifth Avenue in New York,
for it is not one of those which were
bequeathed to the museum. The photo-
graph was taken from the canvas by some
[46]
Print from first state of mezzotint
LECTURE I. FIGURE 14
Print from second state of mezzotint
LECTURE I. FIGURE 15
CALAIS PIER, FROM MEZZOTINT ON COPPER
By Francis Seymour Haden, about 1875, from painting by J. M. W. Turner
'BEN ARTHUR." PLATE NO. 6g OF LIBER STUD1ORUM
Drawn and etched on the copper by J. M. W. Turner. Engraved in
mezzotint by T. Lupton, 1873
LECTURE I. FIGURE 16
"THE PINE-TREE"
Water-Color Drawing by Charles Herbert Moore
LECTURE I. FIGURE 17
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
interposition of a most influential man in
such matters, the late Samuel Putnam Avery,
and it is precious in proportion to the diffi-
culty of procuring adequate photographs
under such conditions.
When the real Turnerian begins to talk
Turner, it is hard to stop him, and I must
control my own utterances, because to one
who has studied long and heartily enjoyed
the Turner painting of mist and fog, cloud
and storm, rain and snow, foam and spray,
there is nothing quite so bewitching in the
whole range of modern art. At least it is
certain that no one of the ancients ever
tried to do it. Titian was a great landscape-
painter and loved the mountain country
about Cadore, but what would he have said
had you asked him to paint the mountain
mists as his principal subject?
Turner's " Calais Pier," a picture which
is in the National Gallery at London, has
been engraved often enough, producing
prints which have, one must confess, a
somewhat commercial aspect. But here is
the rendering of it by a very powerful
[47]
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etcher of our own times, still living though
an old man and no longer at work, Fran-
cis Seymour Haden, whom they have dis-
guised by knighting him. This (Fig. 14)
is the first state of the print, and I will
show you the second state in a moment.
The student of modern etchings will say to
you that this is the best Haden there is,
because in addition to its being very large
and worked with prodigious force and
energy, with deep bitings and most vigorous
treatment, it is the only Haden in which he
had a stronger man than himself to make
his design. A student of nature, Haden is
a gentle and loving one, with a great fond-
ness for trees and for quiet English land-
scapes; but a great composer he is not.
Turner was a great composer, if you like,
and it was a wise thing in Haden to make
his greatest effort depend in this way on
Turner's design, while he invested it with
his own unsurpassed mastery of technique.
I said this was the first state. Notice the
boiling mass of heavy clouds on the left.
In the etching this is printed in dark
[48]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
brown, in bistre, or the like; the effect is
enhanced by the burr which at times almost
conceals the lines. It is a most powerful
composition in black and white, or brown
and white, this state of the print; and yet
when I instructed a London dealer who
knew Haden well to get me a copy of the
first state, this answer came back direct
from the artist : " Tell Mr. Sturgis that if
he has a good copy of the second state he
should really be content. It was for the
second state that I worked; that is the finer
print of the two."
Here then (Fig. 15) is the second state,
and you see how greatly the composition is
changed by simply planing down the plate
so as to produce a vast blank space of sky
between the heavier clouds on the left and
those on the right. There is no per-
ceptible change in the lower part of the
print except in a deliberate diminishing of
the blackness everywhere. Haden guards
his plates with religious care, sees every
copy printed, and allows no one to be sold
which is not faultless as an impression.
[49]
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Moreover, the proof from which this pho-
tograph was taken was completed as early
as 1878.
A very different piece of modern work,
though it is by the same great master, Joseph
Mallord William Turner, is the drawing in
the possession of the proprietor of Farnley
Hall, the name of which is "A First-Rate
Taking in Stores.'* It is a bit of that life-
long study of the British navy of the post-
Nelson day, the huge three-deckers, which
it is hard for us to imagine as really impelled
by sails and by wind power alone, and which
had for Turner that charm which a Lon-
doner, a street boy, a haunter of the wharves
and docks, a student from childhood of
rigging and sails and hulls, and a patriot as
well would surely come to feel; and it is
curious to see how this most non-realistic
of painters, this most deliberate and con-
vinced designer, the man more than any
other Englishman to determine on a
composition and make it without regard
to the natural facts which suggested it to
him — it is curious to see him studying so
[50]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
minutely the ports, with the port-lids swung
open at a regular angle, and, run out below
them, the muzzles of the 42-pounders on
the main deck and the 32-pounders above,
the quarter-gallery in the distance and the
rounding of the bow near at hand, the
chains above where the shrouds are made
fast, the anchor at its beckets, and, opposite
to that monstrous towering hull of the 80-
gun ship, the two lighters, whose masts as
well as their little flag-pole at the top reach
only to the third tier of guns of the man-
of-war. This is description of a kind which
the Dutchmen would have loved. But now
let us take a good and careful draughtsman
who is very little of an artist but every-
thing of a loving student of nature. Let
us see what could be done in the nineteenth
century between 1840 and 1860. There
is a drawing by Ruskin, engraved for
"Modern Painters," as plate 84 of the
fifth volume, and in the first edition of this
it appears as a noble print. The subject,
Peace, is a minute study of the moat of
a mediaeval town. The bounding wall of
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
the fortification goes running away at the
left, overgrown with vines and half
hidden by trees; and some one has built
a house against it on the inner side, —
windows for which house are cut right
through the massive ancient stonework.
The towers mark the places where there
are gateways; for this fortification is not
that of a great post or of an important
strategic point ; it is merely the defence for
a little mediasval town against roving bands
or hastily gathered armies of the neighbor-
hood. The wooden galleries at the top of
these towers are simply the bretesches put
in place to protect the defenders, who show-
ered their missiles upon the enemy below.
For, as you are aware, it was by missiles
thrown vertically from above downward,
and by arrows and bolts shot also from
above, that the siege of a mediaeval post was
resisted. Now, compare with this modern
work the older man's way of looking at a
precisely similar case. Hollar's view of
Lucerne is indeed intended to convey with
topographical accuracy the notion of the
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whole city and its immediate neighborhood ;
but in this fact itself there lies a notable
difference between the modern and the an-
cient in their ways of talking about a town.
The modern study of nature and pro-
found love of purely natural aspects is shown
in the careful and almost scientific observa-
tion which landscape-painters have given to
mountain forms. The best instance of this
that one can think of is Turner's wonderful
print, Ben Arthur, No. 69 of the Liber
Studiorum (see Fig. 16). No one would
assert that it is a faithful portrait, or even
that it is intended to be a faithful portrait of
the mountain-side and the stone-encumbered
valley. There may be an immeasurable dis-
crepancy in fact, the artist trying always to
give a great effect, and caring little about the
accuracy of his details. The great effect that
he desired was of course the character of
the mountain slopes, the markings of water-
courses, the indication by light and shade
of the folds of the stratified rock, and again
by the growth of trees in the ravines and
hollows. We may concern ourselves here
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with the joy which the modern landscape-
painter has taken in the complexity of the
structural forms of mountains. You will
find that there is nothing like this joy, this
knowledge, this artistic insight, in any work
of men previous to 1830.
But take another aspect of nature, a very
different aspect, indeed. Look at this draw-
ing by Charles Herbert Moore, "The Pine
Tree " (Fig. 1 7). This is a drawing made in
1 864, when that teacher of art was filled with
his youthful enthusiasm, and was working
hard for what he thought to be the only
career for an artist who was also a man of con-
science. The charm of the drawing is
partly lost in the loss of the pale blue and
white sky which the photograph will not
render. Apart from that it is easy to see
that the hilltop and its scarped and broken
slope where the diggers have been at work
are studied as carefully from nature as Ben
Arthur, and that in like manner the setting
down of the distant fields and low hillsides
is religious in its minute accuracy. The
same words are to be applied to the drawing
[54]
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of the pine-tree and the two little juni-
per-trees. They are mapped upon the sky
with precise and painstaking accuracy; and
yet, to one who loves the trees themselves,
and who cares for that manifestation of
nature which the trees represent, it is a
lovely drawing. Powerful it is not; rich in
color it is not ; it is not strong in synthesis,
nor in that instinctive selection of the vital
truths which makes Turner's landscape so
great. But the subject is chosen to fit the
artist's power and scope, and he has treated
it in a faultless way.
The hastening, struggling modern world
has so affected the mind of most of the art-
workers, with all their willingness to keep
out of it, that they also hasten, and believe
time lost which is spent in elaborating mi-
nute details. This view of the painter's
art, the notion that he will do more good
for himself and for others by disregarding
minute details and by seizing those general
truths which a swift and dexterous synthesis
will give him — this is a perfectly legitimate
view: moreover it has been the victorious
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principle, now for many years. The artist
has a perfect right to say and to act as
if it were hardly worth while to spend
months in the elaboration of details, when
hours given to the painting of effects will
do more toward the completion of a pic-
ture, an impressive, a powerful work of art.
In insisting on the merits of Moore's draw-
ing I am talking exactly as if I were pre-
senting the minute handling of the brothers
Van Eyck or any one of the Florentines
painting their delicate background in the
first half of the fifteenth century. Moore
is incomparably more truthful in his work,
because he belongs to an epoch which rec-
ognizes the worth of precise accuracy of
record. He cannot be a better artist, be-
cause his epoch is not nearly so close to art
as was the fifteenth century. My purpose
is merely to show you that the same love
of nature which is characteristic of the mod-
ern is expressible and has been expressed
with the minute touch of the painter of
detail as well as in the headlong work of
Turner's mighty composition. We do not
[56]
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know whether a movement will be started
to oppose impressionism in all its forms and
set up once more the gospel of minute study
of details.
There is still another side to the ex-
pressional art of modern times. It cannot
be left without a word. It takes its shape
usually in the way of illustration — illustra-
trations to books, though by no means only
to be found there. Cruikshank's etchings,
made in his prime, though certainly too
huddled and too slightly drawn, are yet
great as record, as relation of incident; as
in the imaginary scene of Jack Falstaff, as
Justice Shallow describes him. He was "a
boy and page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke
of Norfolk. I see him break Skogan's
head at the court-gate when 'a was a crack
not thus high." I wonder whether the
most elaborate examination of seventeenth-
century books would reveal to us such hu-
moristic treatment of semi-historical subjects
as this. According to his lights George
Cruikshank has been a careful recorder of
details of architecture and costume.
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But passing over the purely humorous
side of modern expressional art, consider
also the strange, half-literary study of the
past and the present in the way of exciting
incidents recorded or imagined. Max Klin-
ger's remarkable study of the Centaur shows
how he, the Centaur, would escape from
the prehistoric Greeks who were pursuing
him, naked, mounted on barebacked horses.
The Greeks wear what may be thought
steel caps, and that is a bold assumption for
men of the twelfth or twentieth century
B. C., the time when Centaurs flourished
in the mountains of Thessaly and often in-
vaded the lowlands ; but then the caps may
be of bronze, and the chronological limits
of the bronze age are not precisely fixed.
The bow and arrow has always been the
weapon of the Centaur ever since he was
first devised, and in this case he has drawn
his bow with effect; the foremost of the
pursuing horses has a torturing wound in
the neck and rears and seems to scream with
pain, while his eager rider still hopes and
strives to drag him forward in the pursuit.
[58]
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Or, again, a very modern picture indeed
is Klinger's print, "The Interview." Here
a villa is shown by strong moonlight, and a
couple who have met on the perron, their
conversation interrupted by the bullet of
the jealous overlooker at the window above.
The stiff legs in trousers, the light stuff of
which droops away from them, are all that
we see, clearly, of the dead body; and much
is made of the contrast between that detail
and the gesture of the frightened and ago-
nized woman.
It seems that a very lofty style of com-
position is incompatible with such narration
as this. At least the artist who invariably
resorts to the dignified study of form and
color, such as was known to his predeces-
sors, will never take up such a subject; he
will, like the Dutchmen, like the Italians,
like the Spaniards of old time, paint scenes
of yesterday, to-day, and forever, not pro-
posing narrative or exciting incident at all in
any part of his theme.
[59]
LECTURE II.
MODERN JUDGED BY ANCIENT ART
DECORATIVE EFFECTS'
In dealing with art that is not prima-
rily representative of nature or descriptive
of human sentiment, we are troubled by a
curious defect in the English terminology —
we have but one word for such art as that in
all its differing manifestations. If we try
to express in words the main difference be-
tween Italian painting of the sixteenth
century and ours of to-day, it is found per-
haps in the great and splendid character
of the Italian designs. If we try to ex-
plain in words why we admire Dutch land-
scape-painting, it is found that what we
admire is the simple dignity of the small,
grave, subdued compositions. If we try to
discover why we love Greek relief sculpture
so supremely, it is found that what we love
in it is the quiet charm of the thing. The
1 Delivered April 14, 1904, at Fullerton Memorial Hall, The Art Institute of
Chicago.
[60]
MARBLE FIGURE IN CATHEDRAL OF FLORENCE,
BY LUCA DELLA ROBBIA
LECTURE II. FIGURE i
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LECTUKK II. FK;I'RK 2
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question as to whether it represents accu-
rately anything in nature is not a serious
question. The artist only knows how in
his loftiest flights of thought he had steadied
himself by constant reference to nature;
that is to say, to the great exemplar to
which all our artistic ideas are referred, as
they have been drawn thence. It is not
for the student to ask whether there is any-
thing of nature in the composition or not;
what he finds is the lovely, the stately, the
simple, and touching result. Now this side
of art is the decorative side, and we have
but the one noun substantive " decoration "
and that one qualifying term "decorative"
to apply alike to the Venus of Milo and to
a small and simple painted vase. The ar-
tistic side of art is the decorative side, and
we have no other phrase than that. There-
fore, if our subject to-night is Decorative
Art, we may include in it everything elab-
orate and simple — everything which has
been the result of human thought and
human toil applied artistically. The only
distinction we can make is this: that the
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work of art which takes the least from
nature in a direct way is the more purely
decorative, and is more obviously our theme
to-night. Thus the kneeling angel in the
sacristy of the Cathedral of Florence and
ascribed to Luca della Robbia (Fig. i), is
evidently intended for an ornament of the
shrine more than for any other purpose.
The angel is a candle-bearer; you see he
carries a pricket candlestick, all, with him-
self, cut out of one block of marble, and
the whole set upon a base inlaid with black
marble in the spirit of the exterior decora-
tions of the same mighty church. The six
bronze statues in the National Museum at
Naples, which represent young women in
stately and graceful postures, and which we
may consider to have represented ceremo-
nial dancers, were found under the portico
in the middle of one side of that famous
villa at Herculaneum, from which so much
that is precious and so much that is other-
ways unknown in ancient art has been
extracted. They stood there side by side,
three and three, as they now stand in the
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Hall of the Greater Bronzes in Naples City.
One is adjusting her chiton at the right
shoulder, for there the clasp or the pin had
threatened to give way. One lady is hand-
ling her very ample folds preparatory, as it
seems, to striking a more notable pose. The
figure in the middle between these two is
making one hardly knows what gesture
toward her head, as if suggesting the pla-
cing there of a crown or a wreath. They
are all engaged in that stately posturing
which the Greeks called the dance. By the
common consent of archaeologists these fig-
ures are of pure, and even of early, Greek
type. Another group of three stands oppo-
site them now as it stood opposite them
before the eruption of the year 79, only
that it was in the colonnaded garden of the
villa that they stood of old.
Well, that was a Greco-Roman idea of
decorative art, that grandiose ordering of
piece after piece of stately and costly char-
acter. The Parthenon had no carving, no
architectural sculpture in the usual sense,
but only sculpture of fully realized human
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subject; and in like manner the way, as the
Greeks thought, to make a truly decorative
figure, is the one which, now in the twen-
tieth century, we are reviving in a sense in
the setting up of statues posed and draped
in such a way as to fit the location.
Or, to leap over some centuries of time
and a vast chasm of discord and separation
in spiritual purpose, consider these portraits
of two of the ladies who stand around the
tomb of Maximilian I. in the church at Inns-
bruck. You will remember the King Ar-
thur who is so admired as the most mighty
of the warriors there, for all his graceful
form and bearing: well, these (Fig. 2) are
two of the women who go to make up the
great array of his martial and princely sup-
porters. They are bronze statues, some of
which at least are recognized as the work
of Peter Vischer, and are all thought to be
by men of his time and mode of thought;
that is to say, they are sixteenth-century
South German compositions, precisely equiv-
alent in their purpose to those dancing girls
which we saw at Naples. It is curious to
[64]
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see the queen and the grand duchess so be-
dizened with ornaments piled onto the sur-
face in embroidery and in jewelry work and
wrought in the material by the skill of the
weaver, while the dancer of twenty centu-
ries earlier was so severely plain in her at-
tire. But that is the change that had come
over the world. Let us see a little more
of the fantastic and yet graceful art of that
period. Albert Durer, that great engraver
and passionate designer, whose Melancholy
and Knight and Death we considered in
the last lecture, has left us two famous
armorial plates. They are like book-plates,
ex-libris, but the prints are larger than are
usually found in that connection, and they
have never, so far as I know, been found
pasted into a book. This one, the coat of
arms with the cock (Fig. 3), is really her-
aldic. The rampant lion turned to the
sinister side must be the bearing of some
South German family, and the cock with
spread wings, though not in its present form
strictly a crest, must have been Durer's ren-
dering of the crest of that family. The
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lambrequin, with its fluttering folds and
elaborate serrations, is heraldic enough.
The other famous one, however, the coat
of arms with the skull, can hardly be ac-
cepted as altogether heraldic. It is rather
the badge, the private impresa of some pub-
lic man of his time. The skull on a shield,
and what allusion to him and his is con-
tained in the German lady into whose ear
a satyr is whispering, have never been ex-
plained. The helmet, with its magnificent
wings, is evidently such a reminiscence of
the older Northern notion of the winged
helm as Diirer could not carry out in its
entirety in connection with the elaborate
tilting helmet of his own time. Such an
elaborate piece of smithwork as that would
seem not to allow of the early notion of a
pair of bronze or leather wings attached to
its two sides, and so the wings have passed
into the shape of a crest and are represented
in that way. I venture to speak of this
because it is so well known ; and those who
know it will feel how decorative the whole
thing is, how much the artist has cared for
[66]
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the composition of his details and of their
grouping.
Now, what have we to show of modern
art which is of this general character ? Why,
I think that this head by that same Max
Klinger, with whom we had to do in our
first lecture, may be thought to be born of
the same impulse in the human mind
(Fig 4). This is Mephistopheles, if you
like ; it is at all events a very skilful work,
an aquatint in which the great ruff is used
as it was used in the sixteenth century, to
frame the head and to separate it in the
most positive way from the body of the
man — in this case, of the demon.
Or, we might seek for more classical
feeling, and take a frank bit of reproduction
or imitation of late Greek thought; we
might take an etching called simply The
Idyl, the work of that marvellous Mariano
Fortuny, half Spaniard and half French-
man, who is not always content with so
peaceful a rendering of Sicilian motives.
Or, to take portrait art. See this portrait
of Rubens (Fig. 5) by Hollar, one of the
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greatest of engravers, at least in all that
makes up the technical and the workman-
like side of his art. How strongly marked
is the decorative sense ; how much the artist
has cared for the effectiveness of his design !
Now, in modern times, such decorative treat-
ment of portraits is not unknown, and I se-
lect from among many that might be shown
the Bracquemond portrait, Edmond de Gon-
court, novelist and antiquarian (Fig. 6). The
original is a nearly life-sized head and a bril-
liant piece of engraving, though hardly in the
first rank. But what I note is the singu-
larly successful treatment of the head and
bust, the silk tie, the distant ornaments on
the wall, and the portfolio near at hand, all
to make up a decorative composition.
If we were comparing ancient art of
pure decoration with recent art of the same
kind, our self-complacency and our natural
sympathy for the present epoch would be
roughly used indeed. It is because of this
— because of the weakness of the modern
world in the decorative arts pure and simple
— that it is on the whole more grateful to
[68]
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consider how the arts of sentiment and ex-
pression may also be decorative. I am not
showing you many Oriental things, because
in so brief a space as this, one cannot pre-
sent aright the essential differences between
Asiatic and European art. But this kakemono
we may look at (Fig. 7), in which the bird
poised on the scraggy and twisted limb of
a trained and dwarfed pine-tree is the sin-
gle theme. It is the earmark of Japanese
art — this contentment with one thought at
a time, a single impression, a single sugges-
tion, the most exquisite taste in the princi-
pal subject and surroundings, and the quiet
relegation of all other accessories to another
time and a different piece of paper or piece
of silk. Or, if we consider Meryon's power-
ful print, The Morgue, showing that famous
institution, the dead-house of Paris, as it was
about 1850. There are more objects shown
in this print than there are in the Japanese
painting, but there is only one idea, or, if
you please, the combination of two ideas
into one, the staring white plastered houses
on the Seine, far up the river at the Island
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of St. Louis, and the bringing ashore of a
drowned body. All the rest is mere acces-
sory, ornamentation, like the needles of the
pine in the Japanese drawing. The figures
crowded about and looking down upon the
scene, the woman who is weeping beside
the body, the other one who is trying to
reach the lower level by the staircase and
is prevented and ordered back — the whole
is intended to give, and does give, the one
single thought of the distress, the hard lot,
the cruel aspect, of life in the great city.
At least it is in that way that the buyers
of Meryon prints have taken it, and it is
not because it is graceful or because it is a
masterpiece of engraving that it commands
the highest price of all the precious prints
of Meryon. Or, take a subject which is
near akin to Meryon's; let it be " Battersea
Bridge," the etching by Whistler (Fig. 8).
What a completely decorative composition
is this, while yet it is to all appearance a
frank setting down of the facts concerning
the old rattle-trap of a wooden bridge
across the upper Thames, the traffic which
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
goes on above, passing over the bridge, and
that which goes on below, drifting with the
current between its piers. Whistler was
wholly and entirely a decorative artist, aim-
ing only at certain effects, as indeed the fan-
tastical titles chosen for his works, both
small and large, sufficiently attest. But it
is with him as with the men of simpler aim
and less conscious pose, and it is so with the
great realist, the master of humble life, Jean
Fran9ois Millet. His etchings of "The
Shepherdess Knitting," of "Going to Work"
with the man and woman on their way to
the field, of "The Gleaners" with the three
bent forms in the foreground — these are as
good examples as one finds of the decora-
tive treatment of simple out-of-door subject.
Mariano Fortuny, of whom we have
spoken before, to-day, is great among mod-
ern composers, and his work is characterized
by an almost unexampled decorative quality.
He has left a number of soft-ground etch-
ings of extraordinary beauty, of which I
show you one, the Arab seated by his dead
friend (Fig. 9). For "Arab" in such a
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case read, rather, Moor; for what Fortuny
had in mind was assuredly the habits and
the surroundings of North Africa, and he
did not trouble himself to inquire whether
the dead man and the living one were really
of Arabian stock. It is an abuse in the
nomenclature of France that Arabe goes for
so much more than the land and the pure
race of Arabia. But it is hard to imagine
a more effective composition in pure black
and white ; the original etching is nearly as
sharp in contrast as the photograph alleges
it to be. The passages of gradation, you
see, are but small, the contrasts frequent
and of extreme vigor. It is not, perhaps,
the loftiest kind of chiaroscuro, but when
it is combined with lines as effective as
these, such sharp contrast of mass has its
charm, just as sharp contrast of color has
its charm, in spite of the superior loveliness
of delicate gradation.
It seems interesting to consider the minor
art, as we think it — the art now under a
cloud, the art of wood-engraving. By turns
during the last five centuries this art has
BATTERSEA BRIDGE
Print from etching on copper by }, A. McN. Whistler (1834-1903)
LECTURE II. FIGURE 8
MOOR OF ALGIERS, MOURNING HIS DEAD FRIEND
Print from an etching on copper by Mariano Fortuny (1838-1874)
LECTURE II. FIGURE 9
ea
&_•
' w
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been of supreme importance to the com-
munity, and then again has been lost and
forgotten. It is passing out of our knowl-
edge now, because it is so largely replaced
by photographic processes; but it will re-
turn. In the sixteenth century it was in a
state of advanced development, for the Ger-
mans, Diirer and Lucas Cranach, and that
school, had made much of it, had carried
out splendid groups of composition by draw-
ing on the plank, which drawings were
afterwards cut for printing; and then, at a
later time, the Italians took it up and used
it for printing in two or three tints, pro-
ducing what we call, rather foolishly, chia-
roscuro prints, as if all prints of any conse-
quence were not in light and shade, and
therefore entitled to that Italian name. But
such stately things as the Sibyl, after that
Bartolommeo, who was called Coriolanus,
were made then and printed in black and
white and yellowish brown; and many a
grandiose painting of the day, and of a day
just past, was reproduced in this really sug-
gestive if not quite adequate manner.
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The Saturn, by Andrea Andreani, is
printed from four separate blocks, giving
four shades of gray, evidently in fac-simile
of a swift and dexterous drawing in mono-
chrome. And we are to observe that neither
of these is avowedly a reproduction of a
painting of some celebrity. These very
large and effective prints are wrought for
the sake of the chiaroscuro composition
alone. We must suppose that they were
meant for the adornment of the walls of
dwellings. The huge productions of later
men, especially the Englishman Jackson,
were rather intended for students of paint-
ing. They are among the most admirable
records or suggestions of great paintings
that we possess; but their individual inter-
est may be less than that of such prints as
the two of which there has been mention.
In modern times, wood-engraving has
been turned, as other graphic processes have
been turned, into other paths, especially into
the depicting of natural effects, and used in
book-illustration, though indeed this may be
of decorative quality. Edward Whymper,
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who is the author of two or three books on
mountain-climbing, is primarily a wood-
engraver of great excellence; and I show
you his print of the Matterhorn set beside
a photograph of the same place from nearly
the same point of view (Figs. 10 and 11).
You may assume that the artist was seeking
a close copy of the scene before him. The
camera for the photograph must have been
placed beyond these trees, perhaps in the
glacier hills and valleys below, or perhaps
the storms of the last winter have swept
some of the trees away. It is very curious
to see how the physical process, the action
of light upon the chemically prepared plate,
gives what the artist ignores, while the
artist gives so much that the camera fails
to record. The composition in such a piece
as this is hardly noticeable ; it is so very im-
portant a theme that to take it as it stands
is everything. But there is by this artist
another view of the Matterhorn, that is to
say, from the Theodule Pass; and it is no-
ticeable that in such designs the choice of
the point of view is everything. In the
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case of a mountain, more than in any other
natural object, except perhaps in a human
being, the point of view changes the aspect.
The perspective alone will make a seeming
peak out of a long ridge, as in the pres-
ent instance. One does not hastily alter,
as Turner and all the great landscapists
loved to alter, the lines of the landscape,
when it is of such prodigious dignity and
force as are the great Alps of the centre.
But there are landscape themes where one
alters, and that without hesitation, compos-
ing indeed with such independence of feel-
ing that it is open to doubt always whether
the artist had any natural object in his mind
or before his eye as he worked. Camille
Corot has been described often enough for
us to know how his canvas was set up, in
the early morning, before the stumps of
trees and the foregrounds of minor foliage
with which he had fallen in love ; and how
he would paint, producing his composition
as he went along, taking the piece of mid-
dle distance, the trees and bushes two hun-
dred feet from him, and making of them
[76]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
his picture in the half-light of the day.
But when he produced these etchings (Figs.
1 2 and 1 3), it is uncertain, of course, whether
he was so placed. He might easily have
made these in the studio from the thoughts
of the day, from the bits which he saw in
passing and could not include in his large
picture, or from the dreams of the previous
night. The treatment of his paintings is
decorative because, while he set up his can-
vas in the presence of the natural landscape,
he did not follow what he saw, closely. He
made a design ; he composed a splendid sur-
face of line and mass invested with cool,
gray color, resembling in this the great Eng-
lishman, Turner, although the quality of
the result was so different. It is so with
the etchings which I show you ; they are
slight and light, but they are as strictly
decorative compositions as the large and
famous oil-paintings.
In figure-painting great composition is a
characteristic of the older art. A picture
by Filippo Lippi might show how the
Florentines worked at a time when their
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local school had culminated. Raffaelle's
Madonna, the one they call the Madonna
del Gran Duca, now in the Pitti Palace in
Florence, that or another would show how
the school developed away from Florence.
And it is interesting to see the way in which
this grandiose style of RafFaelle's grew up
and took shape in his own practice. He
did not draw realistically, and then after-
wards compose by means of what he drew.
The drawings, of which we have numbers
ascribed to him with more or less certainty,
are themselves as grandiose. Any hasty
drawing in line is as characteristic as the
more elaborate ones. The student will see
in jsuch a drawing how the strokes are all
in one direction, arguing perfect facility of
hand; he will see how Raffaelle drew the
outline with almost certain conviction,
changing it only slightly now and again,
and then putting in his suggestions of shade.
In the more elaborate groups, the drawing,
carried much farther and wrought into a
quite complete system of light and shade,
is precisely as stately in its construction as
[78]
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THE ARTS OF DESIGN
any painting on the gallery walls. Yes,
and even the red chalk drawing of two
nude figures — the one which he sent to
Albert Durer of Nuremberg "to show his
hand," as you can read on the margin of
the illustration I give (Fig. 14) — even that
is a picture in every respect, except that
apparently it is not completed.
A word only about figure sculpture of
ornamental effect. If we take a Greek
votive tablet, a small simple offering to
Asklepios, the god of health, one of many
similar sculptures which exist, we shall
find a decorative treatment as pronounced
and as intelligent as that of any of the
paintings or prints which we have been
discussing. Greek relief sculpture is indeed
the most absolutely decorative thing which
we have from antiquity. No doubt its pur-
pose was different from what we now see;
no doubt the sculptor meant something dif-
ferent from that which we mean when we
say, A Greek bas-relief. We must not for-
get that the custom was to paint the bas-
reliefs in vivid colors. What we have is a
[79]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
monochrome in place of a splendid combi-
nation of form and color which the Greek
artist created. And so for us it may be
well to note the way in which the drapery
is composed and arranged in such simple,
cheap little pieces of the stone-cutter's art
as the votive tablets found by hundreds in
the ruins of great shrines.
And now as we take up the decorative
treatment of a very different class of art,
look at three or four of those wonderful
pieces of costly splendor, jeweller work com-
bined with triumphs of the lapidary's art,
which are kept in the greatest collection
of such things in Europe — that which fills
the glass cases in the gallery of Apollo, in
the Louvre. And these photographs that I
shall show you are taken from the etchings
of Jules Jacquemart, for I do not know
that the originals have been photographed,
except here one and there one for the
reproduction in color as by lithography,
and it is probable that the photograph from
the original would often fail of its object.
Jules Jacquemart, you know, is famous for
[80]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
his singular gift, his quite unexampled
power of reproducing exactly the amount
of divergence in a line, of curvature in a
surface; he is the man who, more than
any other, can represent a piece of barbaric
or archaic work with faultless accuracy,
giving just so much departure from the
standard of anatomical or other truth as
the original contains, and no more. He
can reproduce without exaggeration. This
curious vase is, as far as the vase proper is
concerned, a piece of Egyptian granite and
of Egyptian workmanship which had found
its way to Western Europe in the twelfth
century and was there and then mounted
with gilt and enamel, as you see (Fig. 15).
It is about 1 8 inches high over all. This
agate pitcher (Fig. 16) is known to have
belonged to Eleanor of Aquitaine, and it
has not been altered since her time. This
cylindrical vase with dragon handles (Fig.
17) is of Oriental jasper and no one can
say now where and by whom it was worked,
except that the foot seems to be of the
Renaissance and European in style, and
PI]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
probably the whole piece was wrought into
its present form when the mountings in gilt
were carried out, as it is asserted, by Ben-
venuto Cellini. And finally, this piece
(Fig. 1 8) this precious mirror preciously
framed, is Italian work of the seventeenth
century. The mirror itself is of rock
crystal and the setting is entirely in silver
gilt with an immeasurable number of deli-
cate cameos, antique and of the Renaissance,
and with large pieces of richly veined
agate; and, as you see, with two vases of
precious material, and below two busts of
jasper serving as pendants. There could
not be, I think, a better opportunity than
these pieces afford of dwelling on that
side of the whole question of old time
ornamentation, which question troubles us
so much to-day. Our attempts at doing
these things are feeble and therefore
clumsy, and if no more important con-
sideration interfered it would be well if
the state and wealthy citizens would try
to revive these lost arts of magnificence.
But there is, of course, the other question,
[82]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
that of the industrial value of such achieve-
ments as these, of their possible no-value,
even of a possible injury which they do
to the industrial community. It is one
of the assumptions of the more thought-
ful historians of our time that the decay
and death of the great Imperial system
of Rome was caused as much by the
absence of an industrial system in the
Empire as by any other influence. What
was the actual wealth of the Mediter-
ranean world of that time? As com-
pared with our modern achievements in
the way of gathering and storing up wealth
it was not great; and so much was used in
splendor, so many days' work was sunk in
magnificent decoration and stately archi-
tecture that there was less for the world to
live on. Are we prepared to listen atten-
tively to that cry ? It is a hard world we
are building up, a world in which no one
would wish to live if it were never to
change — this world which consists entirely
of strivers for more, lovers of acquisition,
believers in the doctrine that to have is to
[83]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
be, and that tangible possession is better
than the riches of mind.
It would be a finer thing to put all art
investment into beautiful art, and none of
it into precious material : and yet, although
that would be a finer thing no one would
be content with the complete banishment
from life of the arts of mere sumptuosity.
There ought to be here and there a work-
man who can and will manipulate the most
costly materials. The rivtire of diamonds
may be a poor, even an ugly thing, but a
cup of lapis lazuli mounted in enamelled
silver-gilt can hardly be poor or ugly, alto-
gether, and even personal jewellery is splen-
did in the hands of those races who still
understand decoration.
[84]
LECTURE III.
THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS IN WHICH FORM
PREDOMINATES.1
So far we have ranged over the field,
touching on many points and comparing
recent art with old art, trying to judge the
new and unclassified by the old and well
known. And we might recall again the
proposition with which we started, that if
there are many disagreements about each
manifestation of old art, there are disagree-
ments and nothing else about the manifesta-
tions of the art of to-day. No two men
agree as to the character and the importance
of anything artistic that is being done in
the twentieth century : and no two agree as
to the tendencies which have been at work,
say in this country since 1865, — say in
France or in England or in Germany since
in each country the revival of thought began
thirty or thirty-five years ago. Do any of
us feel a doubt as to the truth of such
sweeping statements as these ? Is it supposed
1 Delivered April 19, 1904, at Fullerton Memorial Hall, The Art Institute
of Chicago.
[85]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
that though there are disagreements there
is also agreement ? We are safe, I think, in
accepting an appearance of agreement as an
appearance only — in holding that when
there is apparent agreement it comes of
fellowship in action, as when the men of a
certain school or society or alliance of any
kind agree heartily for awhile, because they
are working to a common end. But this
is fellowship and mutual help in action ; it
is not, I think, a critical agreement in any
case. Three or four of us have been taught
in one school, and when we were pupils
there the growth of thought was in a certain
direction and we went with it; and we re-
tain the set, the bias, given us then. This is
not critical opinion in any sense of the word.
Do not let us despise such unanimity of
thought. It has a singular value in helping
men to do their work. We shall never
find that the tendency of a number of artists
to work together and in unquestioned har-
mony is a bad tendency. It is not. It is a
condition of progress. No great advance
in art has been achieved without it. But
[86]
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CARVED CABINET, ABOUT SIX FEET HIGH
French, Sixteenth Century
LECTURE 111. FIGURE i
CLAY MODELS, PREPARED FOR ELABORATE PIECES OF
FURNITURE
LECTURE 111. FIGURE 2
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
the opinions held by these active artists are
not, on that account, to be considered
gravely as binding upon their contempo-
raries; they are the opinions of men who
are well satisfied with their own efforts and
who look no farther than that, as indeed
they have no reason to look farther. All
of which is indeed another way of saying
that the production of works of art and the
criticism of art are very different things,
often opposed to one another.
It is not as practising artists, full of our
own plans, that we must judge tendencies.
The student of art must, above all students,
be careful about his prejudices. He must
approach the question as to recent fine art
without even a prejudice in favor of Greek
perfection or of Roman grandeur or of
Gothic energy and logic or of Renaissance
grace. The student may admit the abstract
truth of each proposition as to the existence
of these excellences, but he must avoid too
enthusiastic a care for any one of them;
that he may not be swayed by his enthusiasm
and so ignore or underrate the value of the
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
other, the opposite view, the contrary gift,
the grace, the charm which is incompatible
with that which he admires. Every style,
every great conception, every embodied
thought in art has its defects along with
its qualities; and you cannot have Roman
grandeur while you are pursuing Gothic
realism and intelligence; they do not exist
together. In our own time there is a
curious tendency in decorative building, a
very strong set toward that form of Greco-
Roman architecture which has to do chiefly
with the colonnade. It has been noticed
often enough that this has always been the
tendency in Greco-Roman art in its original
field, and in its revival in what we call neo-
classic architecture. The builders of the
second and third centuries A. D. were much
swayed by it, and the great cities of the Med-
iterranean empire — the cities from Palmyra
on the edge of the Eastern desert, to Lutetia
built on and around that island in the Seine
where now stands the Cathedral of Our
Lady — were all adorned with such a display
of columnar architecture as we of the
[88]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
modern era can never thoroughly understand
or grasp; but we know also from a slight
instance here or an irresistible inference
there that the Roman builders had a style
for their domesticity and their times of
economical building; a style as important
to us, if we could only grasp it, as has been
the grandiose style of the imperial Fora and
the colonnaded streets of Antioch and
Gerasa. Unfortunately that slight and light
architecture has vanished, and while a dili-
gent archaeologist can partly restore it from
the crumbling peristyles of Herculaneum
and Pompeii and the stone-built villas of
Syria, it is not such perfect presentment
that the modern world of artists can take
thought and time to understand it. So it
is that we build even our inexpensive and
our highly practical and money-making
buildings of to-day as nearly as we dare in
a style which was used by its inventors for
grandiose public monuments in which time
and money were never spared.
This is so important a consideration that
we shall be returning to it ; but let us also
[89]
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approach it from below, from within, so to
speak; let us also think of smaller and
humbler things that are designed and have
been designed and may be designed : let us
take up furniture before we approach the
temple and the building of ceremonial and
state. I will not ask you to go back with
me into the Middle Ages; but there was
a certain dash and verve left by the Middle
Ages and impressing itself very strongly on
the earliest neo-classic art, — that of the
fifteenth century in Italy, that of the six-
teenth century in the North, — which we
cannot ignore altogether. Thus in furniture
the daring sculpture of the latest Gothic
had its influence on the design of the six-
teenth century in France, and such oak
chests as exist by scores, although worked
by men who were trying to be as Italian-
ate as possible (to use the good old English
phrase) still smacks of the late Gothic
school of carving in its panels ; and even in
the wrought iron locks and hinges there
are numerous purely mediaeval devices.
Now see what the next step was, and how
[90]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
the men of the days of Henry IV and Louis
XIII, the carvers who were working when
Dumas's famous Musketeers strode across
the stage, what they thought of and
wrought out. This cabinet (Fig. i) is a
rather famous one in France ; it belongs to
a wealthy gentleman of a southeastern de-
partment, to whom the wrought and
adorned furniture of his native land has
been a special delight, and the thing to
observe is, I think, the complete subordina-
tion of the extremely elaborate sculpture to
the general design. I do not one moment
defend the too architectural character of
that design ; to my mind a simpler chest is
a better thing. I cannot accept this sink-
ing of all the constructional element; in
church-building or in furniture-composition
alike I ask for the evidence of the Make
of the Thing, not because of any consid-
eration of morals, not because it is wrong
to conceal or deny or ignore the construc-
tion, but because by such concealment or
denial there is thrown away a noble chance
of suggested design.
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
See how the workmen of this later
school did their work. Here (Fig. 2) are
two models in terre gla ise , that is to say, in
modelling clay. The one, you see, is a
study for a cabinet not very unlike the one
we looked at a moment since, but smaller
and with perhaps a more vigorous, a more
strenuous design. You see, the artist is
comparatively indifferent to questions of a
larger or a smaller receptacle above, and as
to the opening of the front of that recep-
tacle by its doors. It is all one to him
whether each half swings open completely,
one of the panelled doors carrying the cen-
tral upright with it, as was often done; or
whether that central upright stays in place
to stiffen the whole and to make it a rea-
sonable thing, a rational, intelligent thing,
with its heavy entablature receiving ade-
quate support. In like manner he has not
cared whether there is to be a drawer in
either side in the frieze of his entablature,
or whether there are to be two drawers or
one in the surbase here above the little
arches of the substructure. So in the
[92]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
Prie-Dieu, the praying chair with its taber-
nacle above, the artist admits what he must
admit — the sloping desk at such a height
above the cushioned kneeling place below
that a person of ordinary stature will find
her Book of Hours conveniently under and
near her eyes — but more than that he has
not cared about. Do not suppose that I
deprecate the use of such a method as this
to bring a costly piece of furniture into
shape. Why, there is one of our architects
in New York who affects the use of mod-
elling clay for putting into shape every
country house he plans, every city fa£ade
even, that he lays out. With regard to this
I say only that the excellent method brings
with it its temptations, its almost inevitably
injurious effects. It tends to make the
artist careless of his constructional purpose,
of his structure, of the way in which his
pieces are put together; it makes him
think of his framed composition of wood-
work as if it were a monolithic structure
to be sculptured out of the solid mass,
and as if the question of pleasing proper-
[93]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
tions were the only question given him to
answer.
Better must we like, I think, the side-
board that I show you now (Fig. 3). It is
a late piece, probably of the reign of Louis
XIV, dating from 1680 or even 1700, but
as it is of the far South it retains some of
that freedom of design which had then
been abandoned in favor of a more purely
classical method of design by the workmen
of the great centres, Paris and Rouen and
Lyons. We may suspect, also, an Oriental
influence in those panels carved with anthe-
mions of semi-Persian look. But what I am
interested in now is the obviousness of the
structure. You can see how the pieces are
put together, and the heads of the trenails
which hold them: you can see how the
doors are put on with those admirable
hinges with outside knuckles, the like of
which we have never been able to intro-
duce in our nineteenth century design but
which prevailed in France through all the
later pre-revolutionary epoch; and we can
see how the drawer fronts lap over the
[94]
WALNUT SIDEBOARD, SOUTH OF FRANCE, SEVENTEENTH
CENTURY. JUG OF STONEWARE, CALLED BELLARMINE
LECTURE 111. FIGURE 3
PIECES OF STONEWARE (COLOGNE-WARE)
LECTURE 111. FICURF 4
KNEADING-TROUGH, BREAD-CAGE, AND OTHER PIECES
South of France, Eighteenth Century
LECTURE 111. FIGURE 5
OAK SIDEBOARD, FROM THE ORIGINAL DESIGN BY
ALEXANDRE SANDIER
LECTURE 111. FIGURE 6
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
frame of the piece, even as do the doors of
the main part. You see, it is a perfectly
understood motive — that of giving to the
drawer fronts and the doors the leading
part in the composition. The frame exists
for that only, and to my mind that is a
better design even than the stately cabinet
just shown. "Matter of opinion." Our
architectural school of to-day thinks noth-
ing a design which is not based upon
proportion. To me there is nothing so
important in design as realism of thought
tending toward originality; proportion is
the easiest thing in the world to those who
have the gift, and is out of reach of the
other three quarters of the artistic world,
and I am interested in securing that impulse
in our designs which is more tangible and
more within the reach of all thinking men.
A word about the pots which stand upon
the sideboard (in Fig. 3). Ignore the bowl
if you please — that is Persian, an enormous
utilitarian every day piece with a beautiful
painted design, but not to be judged by the
photograph. The other pieces are all of
[95]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
nearly the same epoch as the sideboard, or,
as in the case of the great jug on the corner,
of a time somewhat earlier. Three of the
beer mugs are German, painted on the
glaze of a delicate faience. The fourth
one is of yellow ware with the ornamenta-
tion in relief, and that I suspect of a Pro-
ven9al origin, perhaps from the old mountain
town of Apt where they still make the
covered pots for pate-de-foie-gras ; but as to
the jug on the corner, the Bellarmine, I am
sorry that the outline is lost in the elaborate
tracery in the background (a surface of
Japanese wall-paper) ; but you know the
kind of thing — it is of Cologne- ware,
which gets its chief ornamental effect from
coats-of-arms and the like, which are im-
pressed upon the paste before it is fired.
Here (Fig. 4) are richer specimens. These
are also of that same stoneware and these
are special museum pieces. You see how
there has been care taken to put a scale into
the picture, by means of which we may
ascertain that the tallest flagon — that on
the right — is four- tenths of a metre high,
[96]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
or rather more, eighteen inches approx-
imately.
But let us go back to our wooden
furniture, for this does seem one of the
most attractive studies which the decorative
artist can turn to. The simple chests of
drawers which are also of provincial make
and not of central design are often full of
interest. They are very simply wrought in
walnut, with the corner-pieces carved with-
out any special care for what was represented
as long as the form seemed spirited and lively,
with an extremely effective little border of
sunken relief to frame each drawer front,
and with all the metal work in hammered
iron, the handles, the plates or rosettes of
those handles, and the rosettes of the key-
holes. Again, other pieces go farther in
search of elaboration of design. They are
perhaps of Louis XV, say of the years
between 1720 and 1750, and the sculpture
is strictly decorative without any attempt at
representation. It is singular, by the way,
that that much abused rococo style should
have brought with it such a delicate feeling
[97]
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for sculpture in solid wood. As for the
metal appliques, except for their florid
rococo design they would command the
respect of every lover of refined metal-
work. They are of gilt bronze most gen-
erally and are combined with the wooden
frame in a way that shows the skill and
great experience of the artists. But here
(Fig. 5) is something still more interesting.
Thirty years ago there was a movement in
the far south of France in favor of bakers'
bread, and the families who for two hundred
years had kneaded their dough in just
such a petrin as I am showing you, began
to go around the corner to buy their loaves.
This was one more of those tendencies of
modern life which work against all fresh-
ness and inevitableness in decorative art.
We shall find abundant example of this in
the course of our talks. As long as the
families made their own bread, they required
these four pieces of curious furniture : the
kneading-trough itself, to which the hinged
cover was fitted, and which, in some cases,
had a drawer below — in this case concealed,
[98]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
as it were, by the elaborate lambrequin be-
tween the table-legs ; second, the flour-box,
seen on the right, with its portcullis, its slid-
ing cover ; third, the salt and pepper boxes,
seen on the left ; and fourth, the cage for the
baked loaves. For, as you see, the people
of Provence and Languedoc have always
preferred their bread to grow dry rather
than musty. "Our bread must hang up in
the open air"; and so they put it into the
cage and shut the door upon it, turning the
key if the housekeeper were of a careful or
suspicious nature. I am sorry that there is
a baluster missing from my bread-cage;
but, after all, the important thing in this
and in its fellow-pieces is the abundant dec-
oration in carving of low relief, and in the
solid mass of the walnut plank.
Now see how in modern times we strug-
gle with these problems. Here (Fig. 6) is
a sideboard made thirty years ago for a
wealthy New Yorker, and made strictly ac-
cording to the design copied in the photo-
graph before you. It was entirely of oak,
and very massive, parts of the frame being
[99]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
cut out of three-inch scantling and sculptured
in the mass. Thus the little colonnettes are
in one piece each. The shaft was turned,
and then the necking and the base mould-
ings, previously decided on, were turned
also, and finally the capital was carved by
hand. The sculpture of the two diagonally
set panels in the two doors is of birds on
their nests, also carved in a thick plank of
oak. The only metal work which shows
in the design is in the three drop-handles
of the three drawers. You see that the
attempt has been to make a working side-
board with three drawers for table-linen, or
for spoons and forks and the like, and a
rather large cupboard for bottles, — a cup-
board of which the master of the house
might keep the keys. So far, as you
see, the designer's way was plain. Any
draughtsman who thinks for himself can
make designs of that sort, more or less
charming in their ultimate results, accord-
ing as his feeling for form is more or less
acute and just. But take the more difficult
instance of a series of book-cases and the
[i oo]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
general fittings of a library. One's hands
are tied. Even in the country there is such
a thing as dust ; and the man who loves his
books will ask that they be sheltered by
close-fitting doors which, when open, will
swing clear and leave the last book in the
corner as accessible as the one in the middle
of the row. He will ask, also, for cupboards
below, in which unbound books and num-
bers of periodicals may be stored. He will
ask for a case no higher than that he can
reach the books on the top shelf without a
ladder, but as high as that ; that is to say,
the top shelf may be at seven feet from the
floor, bringing the top of the case at eight
feet from the floor, unless one follows the
example of his immediate ancestors and
piles on a sham cornice with a hollow space
behind it. But this he will not do. The
assumption is that our designer is a man of
ideas, who will not resort to such devices
as that. Moreover, he wants his top shelf
for the vases and statuettes which are to
stand there, and this must not be too far
from the eye; so that he is brought to some
[101]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
severe outline and grave right-angled uni-
formity of design; and this is the worst of
it, that the design will have a slender and
liny character, with evident reference to
the edges of planks and thin strips of wood.
Except at great cost this cannot be avoided.
Your book-cases are a row of boxes with
glass doors or fronts. You cannot escape
from that condition, and you will find that
even if you use two-inch planks for your
uprights or panel ends, you are still making
a boardy, boxy, liny composition. We may
remedy this partly by our treatment of the
mantelpiece and whatever is combined with it
in design with the book-case. The mistake
in such a case will be to make the mantel-
piece and mirror-frame of the same material
and part of the same design. When it is
feasible we will make that mantel very
massive, of marble or fine-grained stone,
and the mirror-frame a more slender com-
position of the same materials, exaggerating
by their contrast the hollow, boxy look of
the book-cases, no doubt, but improving the
general effect of the room.
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WROUGHT-IRON SHEARS, ON STAND
French work, Eighteenth Century
LECTURE 111. FIGURE 9
COVERED GOBLET, OF SILVER
German, late Fifteenth Century
COVERED GOBLET, OF SILVER
Probably French, about 1620
LECTURE III. FIGURE 10
LECTURE 111. FIGURE 11
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
But let us leave furniture for a while and
consider metal work; and, first, that aspect
of it in which the hammer has played the
greatest part. And if you want to consider
hammer-work, then the armour of the lat-
est tilts and tourneys is the thing to study.
The fact that it is wrought in steel makes
it all the more interesting. Even to the
veteran student and collector there is some-
thing peculiarly attractive in repousse work
in steel — in that obdurate, that rigid mate-
rial. This suit of armour (Fig. 7) is in the
Louvre and has been for many years in the
Gallery of Apollo. It has always been
called the armour of Henry II., that unlucky
king who, being determined to show his
courtiers that he was better at the lance
than they, managed to get himself killed
by a splinter from his antagonist's lance
which flew through the sight-slits of his
tilting helmet and pierced his brain. I am
sorry that the exquisite Renaissance design
of the relief cannot be seen very perfectly.
But take this suit of his later successor —
only thirty years later, by the way — which
[I03]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
is represented in Fig. 8 from the engraving
by Leonard Gaulthier, and see how intelli-
gently every separate piece of steel has been
wrought into relief by the hammer, while
yet the general design is left complete and
intelligible. You see that the time had come
when men thought for themselves about the
monstrous burden of the complete panoply
of sixty or sixty-five pounds weight, even
when the most extravagant, the most mon-
strous price was paid for the suit of steel;
and that an active and hustling king like
Henry of Navarre desired to leave twenty
pounds of that steel behind him even at
the expense of leaving some part of his
bodily frame less perfectly protected from
blows. Remember, too, that he is a horse-
man, and that when seated in the war sad-
dle the thighs are largely protected by the
high pommel and bow, while for the legs
below the knees it was found that heavy
jack-boots were almost as good a defence as
the steel greaves bolted and locked behind,
and the steel solleret with its laminations, as
we saw them in the steel suit of the Louvre.
[104]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
The armour of Henry of Navarre, then,
reduces itself to a cuirass consisting of
breastplate and back-piece, and complete
articulated steel coverings for the arms,
while below the waist there is no steel at all
excepting the laminated tassets which cover
the top of the thighs. We have only to
suppose that in the case before us the great
jack-boots of the field have not been assumed.
But here is iron work on a smaller scale
and of simpler purpose. This (Fig. 9) is a
pair of snuffers or scissors; though if any
one has a positive name to give it I shall be
glad to hear from him. But the thing is
six inches high or so, and is made, as you
can see, of a thin plate of hammered iron,
supported on four rounded legs with knobs
on the ends, all wrought on the anvil; and
it has a handle cut out of some thicker
plate of iron. Then the superstructure has
an upright rod, which may perhaps have
been cast, but is more likely to have been
hammered and filed; and a rosette at the
base, which is, of course, hammered and
pounded into shape. Then for the shears
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
themselves; they have been made with sin-
gular care, and after a hundred and sixty
years of preservation are still in good work-
ing order. Now, I call that intelligent
designing, for the artist who made the
thing was conscious that so small and so
utilitarian a piece might be better left less
stately in its ordonnance than a big cabinet or
a monumental sideboard could be. He was
working something in the spirit of the men
who made such silverware as this (Fig. 10),
although the silver hanap is an immeasur-
ably more costly piece — a really royal piece
of plate. But see how fearlessly the artist
has used his hammer; how dashingly he
has modelled up his glimmering bosses, and
alternated them with applied leafage in
silver as minute and fantastic as heart could
wish. That was the fifteenth-century (late
Gothic) spirit lingering on into the time of
the Renaissance in Germany. Here (Fig.
1 1 ) is another hanap, in which the classical
feeling has produced its effect and has given
no undeserved check to the fantastic exu-
berance of the earlier work. The relief
[106]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
sculpture in this piece is as delicate and re-
fined as the other was bold and dashing,
and the proportions of the latter piece are
at least as good. But let us consider how a
simpler thing is done. There are beakers
and goblets, sometimes made of very poor,
much alloyed silver, by workmen who had
a dozen or more thalers of the different suc-
ceeding dukes of Brunswick and Luneburg,
or of Hesse-Darmstadt, or of Mecklenburg-
Schwerin. The princes of Brunswick and
Luneburg are those very dukes or grand
dukes from whom the royal Hanoverian
line of Great Britain has descended; and
I had a goblet in which the medals of that
princely house which form the principal
motive of the design are placed judiciously,
and so that the reverse shows inside the cup
as the obverse is shown in the exterior.
Apart from the medals, the design of such
a cup may be of little worth; the artist
may have been content with the slightest
chasing of the surface in a design which
had been used a dozen times before.
And now, before we leave metal work,
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consider just one aspect of those old decora-
tive arts of Europe which, as I have inti-
mated, are out of our reach to-day. We
imitate them when we have. plenty of time
and money; but we do not, except in the
most desultory way, follow their lead. Here
once, and there again, we do something
like it, but without serious and consecutive
thought. There is embossed work in high
relief in those helmets exhibited at Naples ;
helmets of that curious pattern which was
used in a certain gladiatorial combat. One
such of them is reproduced in a copy in your
museum. They are of bronze, and the
hammering of the parts into high relief has
given to the thin metal a singular rigidity.
You will remember a similar treatment of
the metal defensive armour in the corselet
of that statue of Augustus which is in the
new arm of the Vatican Museum. By men-
tally putting that marble statue together with
this specimen of relief work in bronze, we
can form an idea of how a Roman Impera-
tor was armed, as to his body, when he
addressed his legions.
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
Metal work of a more grandiose type is
that which the Greeks of all epochs cast in
bronze and then finished with minute care.
Even where the pieces are small and used
in connection with utilitarian objects they
are splendid. Thus in a well-known piece,
the handle of a mirror, this handle is made
of a simple figure, treated like an architec-
tural caryatid, and the handle is so arranged
that the mirror may stand up on a definite
pedestal, with four little feet to keep it
steady ; and yet it is easy in the hand. The
best thing which the Germans have done
in our own times, in the way of decorative
art, is their bold treatment of the human
figure in just this way. Draped and un-
draped figures, male and female, alone and
in groups, are used for the handles of
mirrors, the supports of lamps, and in a
thousand such ways, that use of the human
figure forming by much the most im-
portant part of the decorative treatment
of these pieces. It is, of course, evident
that such work of our time will rarely
attain the grace of the finer pieces of
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antiquity, but it is admirable, and gives
great promise for the future.
And now see how the Renaissance men
took their bronze seriously. You know
how much there is in the way of portrait
busts and statuettes, how much there is in
the way of life-size bronzes of religious and
profane subjects. War itself is treated in a
wonderful composition in delicate relief,
surrounding the tube of a bronze cannon,
which lay for years on the floor of the base-
ment hall in the Bargello in Florence, and
is now set up in a more prominent fashion.
I have never seen a gun as elaborately
wrought as that. Even the knob or button
of the culasse is a bearded head of great
delicacy of modelling; and the delicate
reliefs, which can hardly be distinguished
without minute examination, are really val-
uable sculpture. But the bronze and brass
guns of the wars waged in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries were only one
degree less rich, and they are to be seen
in a dozen great arsenals. The Spaniards,
not generally of the highest rank among
[I.O]
GLASS VESSELS OF GRECO-ROMAN MAKE
LECTURE 111. FIGURE 12
GLASS VESSELS OF VENETIAN MAKE
Sixteenth and early Seventeenth Centuries
LECTURE 111. FIGURE 13
GLASS VESSELS OF ORIENTAL MAKE
Probably Persian, of about 1700 A. D.
LECTURE 111. FIGURE 14
REPOUSSE WORK IN LEAD
European, Nineteenth Century
LECTURE 111. FIGURE 15
DECORATIVE SCULPTURE IN
LEAD
French, Nineteenth Century
LECTURE III. FIGURE 16
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
decorative men, made splendid cannon of
this sort. I have seen them in old Spanish
colonies in America, in the old seaside forts
of Venezuela, Trinidad, and Santa Lucia,
and they all bear the famous motto which
means, "The last argument of kings."
And the preparation for such a delicate
piece of work may engage our best atten-
tion. There exists a drawing in which two
of the greatest artists who have ever lived
worked together, as the Latin inscription
assures us. " Holbein had drawn it ; W.
Hollar made it, at Antwerp in 1645, and
it is of the Arundel collection.'* So says
the legend. Now, Hans Holbein, grave
German as he was, and painter of religious
pictures, had yet a pretty sense of the light
and trifling branches of the designer's art,
and his drawings for mountings of a sword
and scabbard, for a buckler, or the like, are
fantastical and varied enough. Some of
these have been engraved by that man who
was the equal of Holbein in technical
power — Wenceslaus Hollar — and it would
be a most interesting study to compare the
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original drawing, if it could be found in
any case, and see how far the ingenious and
most intelligent engraver followed closely
on the design which he had undertaken to
reproduce.
Now, it is my point, that such orna-
mentation in form, such scrolls and leaf-
age as Holbein's, or as those of Henry's
armour, such delicate tracery as that of the
sixteenth-century hanap, and such bold em-
bossing as that of the earlier piece which
was shown in contrast with it, such carving
in low relief as that of the French eigh-
teenth-century furniture — all of it — is out
of our reach. It is not because we cannot
do just that, in any case. We ought not to
be able to do just that ; the time for those
styles of design has passed, and we ought
not even to dream of reviving a style that
has once developed, culminated, decayed,
and passed away. It is because we can do
nothing of our own which shall be to us
what the old art was to the old men.
Do you think that there are exceptions,
that there are some decorators, even in
[112]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
our time ? Yes, there are exceptions ; and,
you see, the argument is that, as these are
exceptions from a rule which applies to such
a gigantic community as that of these states,
or even as that of the more eastern part of
them ; a rule which applies with only a less
general force to France, artistic France,
where the carvers know every style and can
reproduce it, but have no style which is
not reproduced — so the condition remains
a general one. The exceptional work of
these exceptional men does not help very
much: they are not working together; no
general advance has followed it. In an-
other field this is not so: we do not find it
so in what there is to speak of in the next
lecture; but for decoration in form we
have to go to the highly taught, highly
paid artist of the studio; we have to pay
him his formidable price — and him, also,
we have to choose from among many.
Now let us take another department or
branch of decorative art. Here (Fig. 12)
are seven glass phials and jugs, from graves
chiefly, and always from the shores and
["3]
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islands of the Mediterranean. The mate-
rial is simply thin glass, blown into forms
and moulded, with handles and lips ce-
mented on by the voluntary action of the
half-melted glass, with spirals and ribs
wrought in the still hot and yielding and
tenacious material; pieces having no orna-
ment but in these easily applied threads and
ribs, except as the little amphora on the
left has designs of a slightly different char-
acter wrought upon its sides. There are
much larger vessels with double handles —
jugs — also of Greco-Roman origin. Some
of them have been found in use as cinerary
urns, holding the ashes of the dead. And
if we turn now to what Europe was doing,
as the nations grew more civilized in one
sense than they had been, look at Fig. 13
and consider these Venice glasses of the
sixteenth century, in which, as you see, there
has been much more daring work done than
that represented by the pieces of the Greco-
Roman time. The bowls are cemented to
the feet or pedestals, and the handles are ex-
panded into volutes and spirals, even into
["4]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
monsters of the deep and serpents of the
rock ; all wrought in plastic glass, at a tem-
perature of four figures Fahrenheit, and hard-
ening in the forms so given them. There is
no doubt about the fact that all these pieces
are open to the objection that they are not
coherent in their make, nor very durable;
even the simplest ones are too liable to split
at the points where the foot and bowl are
united. But this is not a serious objection,
for no one would dream of utilizing such
glass, except once in a while to drink a
special health to a friend. So the Persian
glass of the same epoch, which I show you
now (Fig. 14), having some of its charm in
a delicate blue color, very often shows how
the artist in glass is led inevitably toward
vagaries, toward fantastic combinations of
form. He cannot escape it; the opportu-
nity is not to be lost. Glass allows him
and invites him to sport with it, and he
would be either more or less than human
as a designer if he could resist the tempta-
tion.
The work of the nineteenth -century
["5]
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men cannot, indeed, compare with that of
older times in purely artistic merit. The
nineteenth century seemed to have a differ-
ent mission in decoration. What was the
lack of grace, what was the clumsy ineffi-
ciency of design which characterized its
work ? At first unintelligent, dull, without
interest, it changed in the second half of
the century, and grew to have significance,
but significance of a different kind from
that known to earlier ages. Its quality, as
design, takes it out of our subject to-day,
and it comes under the head of color-work
altogether.
And, as I have not wished to prove or
to elucidate my point by showing you ill-
designed modern work, take two specimens,
each illustrating a class of decoration which
the nineteenth century did well. This
group of poppies (Fig. 15) is all of ham-
mered lead, and it was made in Rouen for
the Paris exposition of 1878. You see, I
think, in this piece, what the better thought
of the nineteenth century was in search of.
The power of natural, instinctive, easy design
[1.6]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
had gone, but there was love of nature,
and a keen eye for nature; and when such
a French hammerman as this artist said to
himself, "Now, let us take out of a great
bunch of poppies all that is expressible in
lead," he began as they begin who build up
a great school of design.
Or, again, to show how the studio sculp-
tor goes at his task of decoration, take
Lanson's terminal statue, " La Geographic,"
shown in Fig. 16. You know what I
mean by a studio sculptor : a man who has
had all the chances, and who has learned to
model the human figure with accuracy, and
what we call anatomical truth. Such a
workman desiring to produce a figure which
shall be a stately ornament and nothing else,
may well adopt the classical device of using
what is called a terminal figure; and if
he arranges a number of them to set off
the grounds of a great university, he may
well treat them with such attributes as he
would give to fully realized statues: letting
one stand for History, one for Geography,
one for Philosophy, and the like.
LECTURE IV.
THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS IN WHICH
COLOR PREDOMINATES.1
In the last lecture it was hinted that the
nineteenth-century world (of which, as yet,
the twentieth-century world is an exten-
sion) understood little of decorative art,
except as a matter of delicate gradation,
slight contrast of color, or of light and
shade; and this without much connection
with form. Let us consider the exact sig-
nificance of this.
The typical adornment of the walls of a
rich man's drawing-room, at least in the
Eastern cities of the United States, and from
1880 to 1 904, would be hangings of rough,
ivory-white material, embroidered with
crewels or raw silk, in buff or yellowish
brown. This needlework would be car-
ried out without floral form or leaf form, or
the representation or suggestion of anything
1 Delivered April ai, 1904, at Fullerton Memorial Hall, The Art Institute
of Chicago.
[118]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
in nature. Or else there would be a hang-
ing of oriental silk; but even then, with
all the magnificent world of pattern and
scroll and floral ornamentation of China
and Japan, India and Persia, to choose from,
the piece chosen would be effective chiefly
by its cloudy gradations of color — that
would be the character of the stuff selected.
Or else it would be, if expense were not
disregarded so entirely, a hanging of bur-
laps, to which a rough embroidery might
be added ; or else, if there were pictures to
hang on the wall, the coarse texture which
causes play of light, and the changing tint
of the stuff, would suffice. Or else it
would be tapestry; but, unless a chance
had brought to the house-owner a good
opportunity to purchase old work, an un-
doubted and important antique, the tapestry
that he would use would be verdures nearly
always ; that is to say, those effects of green-
ery, of forest trees and undergrowth, which
have but little significance, except as fur-
nishing a greyish-green background to his
furniture.
["9]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
And this mention of tapestry reminds
me of the difficulty of explaining what
the American would do, if he or his art-
ists were left to do their own decorating
from their own designs. That is what we
have considered already, but that is just
what does not happen when the man is rich
enough to buy freely. Then he purchases,
ready-made, the tapestries, or the rococo
panel work, or the Louis Quinze carving,
from an ancient house in Paris, or a coun-
try chateau, brings them across the water,
and builds a room around them. Even if
a certain room is left to be treated inde-
pendently, and from designs made expressly
for it, the chances are ten to one that it
will be designed strictly in accordance with
the accepted rules of the Louis XVI, or the
Empire, or the rococo style; and this fact
puts it outside of our consideration. The very
last time that John La Farge told me of a
decorative effect which he had to produce
for a millionaire's Newport house, he cited
with disgust what the owner had said to
him: something to the effect that "the
[120]
GLAZED POTTERY VASES
French, Nineteenth Century
LECTURE IV. FIGURE i
LACQUERED TRAY
Japanese, about 1800 A. D.
LECTURE IV. FIGURE 2
1MARI PORCELAIN
Japanese, Eighteenth Century, A. D.
LECTURE IV. FIGURE 3
INLAID BOX
Japanese, Nineteenth Century, A. D
LECTURE IV. FIGURE 4
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
painting would be well set off, for all the
woodwork of the room, dado and mantel
and all, was genuine Louis Quatorze carved
work from Chateau Un Tel." We are not
now concerned with recalling the ways in
which old designs are copied or adapted to
modern use ; and the cases in which strictly
modern designs have been made for modern
rooms have been relatively few. It is of
those that we are talking — those few —
and it is of them that we say that even
when the American decorator is given full
freedom he will refrain from committing
himself, and will stay in the safer regions
of soft gradations without pattern. Why,
even the mosaic that we see so commonly
in the flooring of the new business build-
ings and hotels, when it is not a frank copy
of mediaeval Italian work, is a surface of
subdued white, checked and scored by the
little lines between the tessera?, and with
this for its only pattern, except a most
simple fret or zigzag of dark grey at the
edge. So with our pottery; and so with
our boasted brilliant glass — the glass vessels,
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THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
I mean, which here in America, as in
Austria, as in Bohemia, are produced in ac-
cordance with a sincere desire to be original
and to be interesting. The old knack at
graceful forms has gone, of course. The
old power of embedding a beautiful pattern
in the body of the colored glass can only
be imitated at a distance; it has been re-
vived, with a difference, and this revival
may come to something, but is only the
suggestion of an industry, as yet. The ef-
fects generally sought are iridescence, pearly
or fiery or in suggestion of peacock feath-
ers, or in suggestion, perhaps, of sunset
skies ; there are always cloudings and stain-
ings, there are never patterns. Thus the
work of that famous potter, Clement Mas-
sier, of the Golfe Jouan, consists very largely
in splashings and tricklings of colored glaze,
which may indeed be guided a little to ex-
press the idea of sunset or mountain chain
or clumps of foliage, but which are often
merely combinations of color without even
a suggestion of a further significance. Larger
pieces have the suggestion (but only the
[122]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
suggestion) of great birds soaring or hover-
ing on outspread wings, or of a whole sierra
of sharp-pointed mountain tops, or of a
fir-grown hillside. Those that are in this
way suggestive of nature are the earlier
pieces, such as we admired, and bought
now and then, fifteen years ago; but here
(Fig. i) are some bottle-shaped vases by
the same Massier, and you will see here
very plainly how the conception takes form
in the artist's mind. The left-hand piece
is of a cold grey, whose iridescence, how-
ever, is golden, and the grey is modulated
by a bluer and a greener cast. The pattern,
as you see, is a mere splashing of unformed
and poorly understood chevrons and ovals
on a background made of irregular spots.
The right-hand piece is in brownish yel-
low, again with a golden iridescence, and
you see how completely devoid of signifi-
cance is the pattern — if, indeed, it can be
called a pattern. The middle piece is easily
the best in effect; it is of a richer color
than the others, and the effect of zigzag is
produced by, not a continuous line, but by
[I23]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
separate chevrons, each like a pair of com-
passes almost, the points touching or nearly
touching, and the rounded tops made darker
by the meeting of the two sweeps of the
brush lapping over one another where they
meet. Do not suppose I am out of sym-
pathy with these pieces; I admire them
with all my heart. But we are defining
and describing, are we not ? and our descrip-
tion must certainly be to the effect that these
pieces are all lustre and glaze and brilliancy,
with but little care for the drawing of pat-
terns or the consideration of what nature
has to say in the way of lessons in form.
Now see, on the other hand, how the
Oriental attacks such a problem. Here
(Fig. 2) is the simplest and cheapest way.
This is a wooden tray, so slight and light
in make that it cannot have cost a dollar in
Japan ; the rim, set at an angle of forty-five
degrees with the flat bottom, is a separate
strip of wood, lacquered in red. The flat
bottom itself has the grain of the wood
picked out, so as to show the fibre, by some
process that we do not fully understand,
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
and is then painted in lacquer with a spray
of peony blossoms, as you see — the colors
being strong and clear, not vivid, as so often
in European water-color, but grave and
emphatic as decorations. Again, the two
pieces shown in Fig. 3 are cheap enough,
or were so when they were made for the
Dutch at Deshima two hundred years ago.
They are barbers' plates, you see, just such
in form and purpose as the famous helmet
of Mambrino, which, being of brass, served
its knightly purpose better than these porce-
lain platters would have done. They are
painted in the famous Imari or "Old
Japan " taste, in dark blue under the glaze
and crimson and gold, with dashes of green
above the glaze; and of course the work is
conventional, of course it is traditional, of
course the flowers are drawn, not with the
artist's eye on the blossoms themselves, but
from his well-learned lesson of how a peony
ought to be represented; but, nevertheless,
here is real pattern-drawing, and it is need-
less to say — it is a truism — that the Oriental
has the secret of such work as this. Or,
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
to consider something which is not done
with the paint-brush, — to consider such inlay
as we might produce if we cared to, be-
cause we have sculptors who could work it,
and some painters who could design it, — let
us take this cylindrical box, hollowed in a
curious, dark-brown wood with an open
grain, and then adorned with those three
pieces of inlay, and no more, two bats in
black horn, and a crescent moon in mother-
of-pearl (Fig. 4). You see that the inlay
is in slight relief; that this relief is a bril-
liant addition to the mere contrast of color
with color. An inlay without relief is
good, and is capable of much in the way
of splendid adornment; but an inlay of
which the surfaces can be sculptured, as seen
here, is a triumphant thing, is a device
which we never shall exhaust, if we were
to work it, beginning to-day, throughout
the twentieth century.
Of course, if we are considering inlay,
we can go much farther afield; there is no
end to the splendour of Oriental work in
that direction. Enamelling is often a kind
[126]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
of inlay. The Chinese use such an inlay,
with patches of good size and much breadth
of design, the patches of bright-colored
enamel separated by gilded lines of a definite
and appreciable width. The Japanese affect,
as a general thing, a more minute style and
graver colors, and the delicate little lines
of gold appear and disappear in the play
of light upon the surface. For all this,
you understand, is what we call cloisonne
enamel, the ornamentation which is pre-
pared by building up a pattern with little
strips of metal soldered upon the surface of
brass, in most cases, but sometimes of porce-
lain. The enamel fills the little spaces left
within the walls or partitions (c/oisons), and
the edge of each partition shows as the
boundary of the patch of color. We of
European stock cannot design those things,
we can only copy them.
Here (Fig. 5) is a simple picture — a
dagger-sheath — Chinese enamel of the sev-
enteenth century of our era, the five-leaved
flowers, white, on a nearly black back-
ground, with little scrolls made of the
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
edges of the partition only; that is to say,
in dull gold like the outlines of the white
flowers. See how the artist has combined
his blossoms to make them adapt them-
selves to the tapering form of the scabbard ;
a clump of three, then two set thwartwise,
then another clump of three more, packed
together so as to get into the narrowing
space; then another pair set diagonally, in
order that both flowers may be seen, and
again, a pair set longwise of the sheath, and
finally, one to fill up the point. That is
the rough and commonplace Chinese way
of doing it. And the people who were
capable of that art, and are capable of it
now for all we know, are the people that
Europe is hustling into corners because they
(the Chinese) have not perfected their mil-
itary organization ! The Chinaman hates
and despises war.
But here is set up, in contrast to the
Chinese dagger-sheath, a piece of work in-
spired by that tradition which is the most
warlike of all traditions. This is Arab
work, done by the Moslems in northern
[128]
CHINESE ENAMELLED SCABBARD; INDIAN STEEL WEAPON,
DAMASCENED IN GOLD; SMALL JAPANESE BRONZE VASE
LECTURE IV. FIGURE 5
TOP OF BOX, INLAID LACQUER
Japanese, about 1700 A. D.
LP.CTURE IV. FIC.URE 6
ENAMELLED POTTERY
French, Eighteenth Century
LECTURE IV. FIGURE 7
LAVABO, SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE
LECTURE IV. FIGURE 12
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
India, damascening in gold on black iron.
In passing, we may allude to the fortunate
possession by the Arabic-speaking people,
as also by the Chinese and their fellows
of the far Orient, of a system of written
characters which are beautiful in themselves.
It is easy to see that it is of immeasurable
benefit to the decorative arts in Japan, in
China, and in the Moslem East, that their
written characters, which replace the letters
of our alphabet, are capable of such ex-
quisite treatment.
And yet, as you will hear on every side
that the modern taste for the vapors and
the clouds, for the gradations unlimited by
outlines, and the combinations of color
without shape, are largely inspired by Jap-
anese example — and as that is true, not to be
denied — let us consider the way in which
the Japanese use that cloudy effect of theirs.
Here (Fig. 6) is a top of a box, about four-
teen inches long, a very precious piece of
old lacquer. All of the five-lobed blossoms
of that tree are in silver-foil, in the metal
itself, cut out, and then inlaid in and
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cemented down by the lacquer; and the
moon also is a real silver crescent. All
the branches and leaves are in painted
lacquer, the sprinkle which fills up so much
of the background is in gold, and, as you
see, the whole effect is pale and in high
light. Now, why are these clouds intro-
duced? For you see they are clouds —
the suggestion of the long bands of the
vapor which fills the evening sky is unmis-
takable. Their intellectual purpose here is
to suggest, I think, that the flowering tree is
high on the mountain side. That intellec-
tual suggestion is, however, of but little
importance to the designer. He desired
the bands of grey across the deep-black,
star-strewn background, in order to give
horizontality to his composition, and to re-
mind you that this tree, the root of which
is not visible, nor even the trunk, and
which seems to float in the air, is really
rooted in Mother Earth, and is a part of
that low, level, long-drawn-out panorama
which we will call external nature. The
disposition to use soft gradations of color,
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
without determinate outline, is as true in
Japanese lacquer workmen and silk man-
ufacturers, water-color artists and metal
workers, as in the paintings of the great
Turner. It is plainly an important part of
their artistic outfit, as is their strong inclina-
tion to use browns and greys and dulled
gold where the Chinamen would prefer to
use strong, pure blue and crimson, green
and imperial yellow. We accept it to the
full, only we are not to forget that the Jap-
anese use that as part of a great decorative
system — of which Europe can have but a
faint idea — a living art, in which the out-
lined pattern, the firm and unmistakable
diaper, the perfect distribution of spots, is
an every-day matter, a thing in which they
always succeed.
Now let us consider some cases in which
the Europeans of better times than ours tried
their hand at adornment in color. Glass
vases of Venetian work in dark blue glass
were sometimes adorned with the enamelled
pattern in white and red, spotted, as it were,
all over it. And let us remember that
['3']
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this enamelling has not been done by the
cloisonne process, with firmly set gilded par-
titions to hold it in place, but is applied like
paint with a brush upon the already glassy
surface, and then fired that it may be fixed
forever in that place. In other words, this
enamelling is akin to and exactly equivalent
to the painting on the glaze of porcelain or
fine earthenware. We cannot refuse to ad-
mit the presence of a strong Persian influence
in this decoration ; the coloration as well as
the shape suggests that, and we are not likely
to forget that the Venetians in the sixteenth
century had close affiliations with the nearest
East. So the French pottery of the six-
teenth century (the great round platters) is
entirely glazed with bluish white, and the
pattern is painted in a darker and rather dull
blue directly on the ground. Certainly the
scrollwork is never equal in beauty to that
which an Oriental would have done under
the same conditions, but it is perfectly well
applied to the dish, both to the raised rim
or marly and to the bottom of the piece.
Here (Fig. 7) is what the French were
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doing in their exquisite faience, at a still
later time, a hundred years later indeed.
The two pieces on the left are, as I think,
of Moustiers ware; they were bought in
Marseilles; and at that time, twenty years
ago, pieces of southern manufacture could
still be had cheap. They seem to have been
made in that little town of Moustiers-Sainte-
Marie or Moustiers-la-Reine, for it is known
by both names. These on the right are, I
suppose, of Nevers. They are altogether of
the first half of the eighteenth century ; the
right-hand piece entirely in orange-brown,
while the others, especially the one on the
left, are much more elaborately adorned with
a thin outline of that same orange color, and
this filled in with red and blue, not very
vivid, but intelligible and decided patches
of uncompromising color. I have never
seen inexpensive glazed pottery more beau-
tiful in color effect than this.
Of course this inquiry might be carried
on indefinitely. There is no limit, absolutely
none, to the stock we might draw upon,
the stock of beautiful decorations of the
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Renaissance and the Middle Ages in Europe,
of the Moslem for eight centuries, and the
farther East for twice as long a lapse of time.
But we have to consider a more elaborate
application of color design, and, first, some
of that furniture which two or three modern
Englishmen have painted, with their whole
hearts in their work. The firm of Morris,
Marshall, Faulkner & Co. was established
in London about 1865, for the purpose of
producing just such pieces as I wish to show
you, as well as decorative stuffs and glass for
church windows and the like; but it soon dis-
appeared in the business of William Morris
himself. That work by William Morris I
will not ask you to admire. It is the re-
sult of immeasurable energy, industry, sym-
pathy, and a noble ambition, but in the
hands of a man who, I think, was not by
nature a strong designer. But in the hands
of a man who really could design, namely
William Burges, the architect and collector,
the style took shape; and there was made
some English furniture which cannot have
been surpassed, even when, under the Byzan-
[•34]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
tine emperors, color and color patterns were
the chosen ornamentations for buildings and
their contents alike, for dresses and armor,
for everything to which man set his hand.
Little is accessible to us of that ancient
Byzantine magnificence, but by one or two
workmen in the modern world some part of
its spirit has been preserved and restored;
and those cabinets in Burges's house are so
exceptional and yet so exactly what we need
to have a try at in order that something of
our own may develop out of that style, that
we must pause for a moment to look at one
of them. This (Fig. 8) is a cabinet, serv-
ing as escritoire — open, with its books
tumbled down and its papers showing as
they are piled loosely into the pigeon-holes.
There is a portrait of Chaucer in the quatre-
foil at the top, and portraits of friends of the
owner on the inside of the door which is
swung open. And now I show you (Fig. 9)
the same piece with the doors closed, and
you see how on the outer or under side of
the great door which makes the writing-
desk when it is lowered, there is a stately
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composition of human society — the king
with the warrior on his right and the bishop
on his left, the husbandman on the more
distant right, the merchant on the farther
left. I will not dwell upon the pattern,
because it will take too Jong to explain the
exact system of coloring adopted, and because
it is obvious that it is not equal in charm to
those that the Oriental knows how to pro-
duce. But the frank acceptation of the
situation, that where there is color there need
not be so much thought given to form, and
that when color is rich and pure, even slight
and unmeaning patterns suffice — that, I
think, is important as showing us in the
twentieth century how we could work more
easily. I do not suppose that anything that
could be done in the next fifty years would
give us a system of real sculpture for the
adornment of our architecture, or for our
minor articles of utility ; but it is practicable
to do something in color.
I think we shall not fail to see plainly
enough how much those designs made by
the Englishmen of 1860 to 1870 under the
•*> n
3 >
3 g
: Z
H W
^ o
s 3
» 5
PI 3
* S
INLAID PAVEMENT, BAPTISTERY OF FLORENCE CATHEDRAL
LECTURE IV. FIGURE 10
DETAIL OF VAULT OF SS. NAZARIO E CELSO, MAUSOLEUM
OF GALLA PLAC1DIA, RAVENNA
The Mosaics are probably of the Fifth Century
LECTURE IV. FIGURE n
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
influence of the pre-Raphaelite movement
and the study of mediaeval art — how very
much they confirm the opinion which has
been suggested already in these lectures;
I mean the opinion that the power of ab-
stract design is lost to the modern world, —
that we must paint pictures or carve ex-
pressional groups when we wish to adorn,
— that there is no apparent means of restor-
ing the decorative gift once held by Eu-
ropean men, of reawakening it, of teaching
it to our pupils or learning it for ourselves.
It is necessary to linger for yet a few mo-
ments in the consideration of this unpleasant
truth. The photograph (Fig. 10) shows a
detail of the pavement of the Baptistery at
Florence, that famous Church of St. John
of which Dante speaks with so much affec-
tion ; and that pavement must have been in
Dante's time even as it is to-day. The
guide-books say that the designs of that in-
lay, carried out and shown to Florence
seven hundred years ago, were of infinite
value to the silk-weavers of that early time.
And we may as well accept that statement
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as true or as true-seeming; that is to say,
true in the historical sense, according to
which the author of the statement does not
guarantee absolute accuracy in details, but
states, tacitly as it were, that this is the his-
torical verity. It is so that we have agreed
to declare it. And if you think of it for a
moment, that will appear to be the only
historical truth that there is. What is your
authority for saying that a given statue was
the work of Praxiteles or is a copy from a
work of Praxiteles ? What is your author-
ity for the separate and individual existence
of Praxiteles ? All such statements are ac-
cepted by the modern student as true for
the present — true until further advices.
There is certainly every reason for a weaver,
for a designer of a textile fabric, to study
his diaper patterns in such a school as this,
for, as you see, that pattern might be woven
in a fine material without serious altera-
tion. The signs of the zodiac and other
natural or emblematic forms are just suffi-
ciently suggested to give the piece a slightly
extraneous merit, a merit apart from its
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
artistical character. I call that pattern a
normal one, the sort of pattern which an
inlay ought to affect; for I think that when
the inlay or the imitation of the inlay by
the paint-brush is sharp-cut, with clear out-
lines, and strong contrast of tint between
background and pattern, it is a mistake to
have a design of mere spots, a sowing, a
seme as the heralds have it. But when the
outline is not so sharp and the contrasts are
not so strong, the sowing may be the best
of patterns. See this figure of a mosaic
(Fig. n). Here the pattern of circles set
at equal distances and alternating with
eight-pointed star-flowers seems to me fault-
less for its place and purpose, because the
circles are extremely inaccurate in their
curvature; because they are not spaced with
geometrical accuracy, because their pattern
differs slightly, there being two separate de-
signs, and each design being modified largely
in the separate units; because, finally, the
broken up irregular character of the sur-
face produced by the juxtaposition of the
tesserae would prevent the pattern from
['39]
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being too formal, even had it been designed
in the way of formality — a pattern that is
visible and yet is not too insistent, a diaper
which is not too exact, a sowing which is
not too regular. And, in the pursuit of this
mingling of exact meaning and less precise
expression, let us consider the lovely eigh-
teenth century marquetry. This work was
applied to little ornamental writing-tables
as well as to secretaires and still larger
pieces, all of the eighteenth century. We
will not discuss now the plaques, the large
ones which are painted on a gold ground in
the style we call Vernis Martin, and the
small ones of Sevres porcelain, which are
very numerous. That is indifferent. The
present question is about the inlay of veneers
which covers the greater part of each one of
these pieces — front, ends, back, and top of
each upright escritoire. This inlay was
made by taking for it little pieces of veneer,
some of which were left in the natural
color of the rare, imported, tropical wood,
while others were of holly and maple and
the like, dyed in strong colors. It is a
[140]
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charming art when, for any reason, the
greater decorative appliances of actual carv-
ing or painting or even inlay with hand-
work are ruled out. But really, if one
cares to consider how color can best be
applied to the decorative arts, he must con-
sider very seriously that combination of poly-
chromy with form, which is as well seen
as embodied in the work of Luca della
Robbia and his nephews, as in any other
work of which we have any knowledge.
This (Fig. 1 2) is the lavabo or wash-hand
fountain which stands in the sacristy of
Santa Maria Novella. Everybody goes into
that sacristy. You enter it through the
heavy door-piece seen on the right, and the
lavabo is at your elbow as you pass through
the doorway. The guide-books say that
this was the work of Giovanni della Rob-
bia, and that it was erected in 1 497. Such
historical truths as these are of the more
accurate sort, for the facts are recorded in
conventual records; although those truths,
again, have been transmitted from hand to
hand, from pen to pen, through a term of
[HO
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years, and the truths are no longer to be
accepted absolutely, even as they are stated
in the records. The agnostic spirit is the
only one in which to approach these ques-
tions. One is free to speak of a date and
an artist together, accepting it always, and
counting on his hearer's knowledge of the
fact that he accepts it all as approximate,
and as a theory good enough to help in the
investigation. The decorative sense mani-
fested in all that Robbia work is a matter of
universal consent; and if I insist upon it
here, it is very largely because we have in
this monument one of the very few instances
of Robbia work in flat painting. The land-
scape in the lunette above the fountain, and
the tiles with a formal pattern of circles be-
low, are of the same epoch as the colored
reliefs of the great archivolt and the still
more prodigious swag held up by the Cu-
pids. As in most of the earlier Robbia
ware, the figures are in pure white enamel ;
and the background of the upper lunette is
blue, while the fruit and leafage is all in
naturalistic coloring, making the strongest
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
contrast with the gleaming white of the
flesh and the draperies. The smaller fes-
toons of the frieze and the details of the
capitals form a middle term between the
glazed white group of the upper lunette
with its pendant angel-children and the
strongly colored decorative relief; and on
the other hand, the panels of the pedestals
form a middle term between the flat paint-
ing and the relief; for in these the orange-
tree is a flat painting — and yet seems to
spring, as you see, from the vase moulded
in relief below. This is deservedly classed
as one of the great things of the Robbia
school, and it is worth while to compare it
with any of those great vases, those huge
show-pieces from the national manufactory
at Sevres, which stand in a gallery of the
Louvre. These are of the reign of Louis
Philippe and of the Emperor Napoleon III.
In these vases all the relief parts are richly
gilded, and this gold-embossing contrasts
with the realistic band of painted flowers
and leafage in full color. The artists were
not contemptible ones. The names of the
['43]
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men who have done the technical master-
pieces of the Sevres atelier are recorded in
the roll of French masters of fine art;
there can be no doubt that the painters of
these vases had their own theories of what
they were about and worked intelligently.
They give no shadows to their design, which
has no great diversity of planes, their
clumps and bosquets are composed so as to
be all close at hand, as if they were on one
side of a plate-glass through which you
might see them ; and yet we can see very
readily how different is the French treatment
of such a realistic piece of drawing from that
which a Japanese painter of correlative rank
would have employed about a hundred years
ago. The Satsuma vases, and those which
are of the Kaga province, show an immeasur-
ably greater knowledge of decorative condi-
tions. Their clumps of flowers and foliage
have relief and solidity without cast shadow,
and are without excess of shade; but so do ,
their birds — magnificent pheasants and dainty
partridges, cocks and hens of splendid plum-
age, and the little songsters of the bough.
[*44]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
It is a feat as rare and praiseworthy to put
life into a perfectly flat painting, wrought
only by pure color, as it is to master light
and shade and cast shadow, together with
color in our oil-paintings. Do not suppose
that I am preaching the doctrine much too
loudly announced fifty years ago and since
that time — the doctrine that decoration must
be flat. I do not understand that Michel-
angelo obeyed that doctrine or recognized
it when he was painting the vaults of the
Sistine. But there are degrees and limita-
tions, and just as the cast shadow is elimi-
nated from fine work in glass, from the
windows of the great times of the past and
from those of the nineteenth century, and
as, again, there are no cast shadows in the
illuminations of the mediaeval manuscript,
or even one of the Renaissance, so in these
bands of decorative purpose, however natu-
ralistic their drawing and however strong
and vivid their color, there are no shadows
and no perspective, no relief beyond that
which design and color give to the mind
already prepared to accept a magnificent
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fowl or a cluster of peonies as a solid object.
The two bands of decoration — the French
one and the Japanese one — are, as I say,
alike as to this. And yet, how different is
their aspect, how much more decidedly is
the Oriental work truly decorative, a thing
of the surface, taking nothing from the
solidity of the piece! How much more
like the facts of nature is the Frenchman's,
and how little decorative effect he gains by
this semblance of solidity, of air and space !
If you were to see these two vases in your
museum this afternoon, the immense Sevres
piece would produce a knock-down effect as
of the wholly unexpected, of the striking,
the startling, the impressive work of art;
and yet the more you turned around it, and
looked at it from different points of view,
the less you would find your artistic soul
content; while the Japanese piece would, I
think, never tire any one.
This matter of what is decorative is, you
know, of a most baffling nature. You say
that a Greek vase is the most intelligent, and
on the whole the most admirable, decoration
['46]
> G
q PJ
ft 2
BUSTS, CALLED SEVERUS AND CARACOLLA
Roman of Third Century A. D. Heads of white marble, drapery of
veined marble
LECTURE IV FIGURE 15
POLYCHROMATIC BUST, BY CORD1ER
LECTURE IV. FIGURE 16
POLYCHROMATIC STATUE
(LAMP-STAND), BY
CORDIER
LECTURE IV. FIGURE 17
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
in the world, and yet it does not decorate a
room, nor even a mantelpiece or even the
top of a book-case. Its subtile form cannot
be appreciated till you have it in your hand.
Its ornamentation does not carry. From ten
feet away, even its color, its grave reddish
brown and black, passes into a not very
striking blot on the background; while an
Oriental piece, or a piece of majolica of one-
tenth the intellectual force of the Greek vase,
affects the whole room in which it stands,
and has to be reckoned with in any system
of decoration which you may think of carry-
ing out. In its figure-painting in flat
silhouette, the Greek vase is of immense
intellectual importance, and of greater im-
portance to us moderns, because through it
we receive a far-away notion of what Greek
wall-painting of the time may have been.
But at no time does the painting of the earlier
or of the later amphorae and phials reach the
condition of a continuous solid decoration of
the whole piece. It seems never to have
occurred to a Greek painter of pots that he
could carry a continuous frieze around the
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whole body of his vase. His procession of
isolated figures, his Hercules bringing the
Erymanthian boar to the unhappy King
Eurystheus hiding in a great earthenware
pot, or his Peleus carrying off Thetis while
her sister nymphs seem rather to applaud
than to resist the ravisher, may indeed sur-
round a vessel without handles except at the
top, or may be broken only by the handles
if they are at the sides. But they are not
continuous and wrought into one com-
position; whereas, since the time of the
discovery that a band making the circle of
a vase may be considered as a flat frieze of
indefinite length, the treatment of that as
such a frieze is a commonplace of the de-
signer. One of the best pieces that I have
seen of American pottery is a Volkmar vase,
in which a landscape study of trees and
undergrowth passes entirely around the body
of the vase, returning into itself, a landscape
without beginning or end, suggesting in a
curious way, in its convex roundness, the
concave roundness of the great natural world
without. It is a pity that the work turned
[148]
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out by that pottery should be so seldom
treated with polychromy or other significant
painting. It is mainly the interesting in
form and the attractive in tone which makes
interesting pieces of the Volkmar works.
Decorative pieces are so very unusual in the
United States and in modern European lands,
anywhere, that it is to be regretted that this
remarkable product should be so seldom used
for the finest pottery decoration.
I must remind you again of the profound
conviction which the ancient men held, and
the Eastern men of to-day hold, the con-
viction that sculpture was as nothing until
it had been completed by polychromatic
treatment. The Athenians of the great time
— the time of Phidias and of Praxiteles —
used polychromy as freely as their early
ancestors, but it has so happened that the
greatest number of examples of such color
adornment of sculpture have come to us from
a somewhat earlier time. The wonderful
find of painted statues on the Acropolis in
1886, preceded by the discovery of six or
seven most interesting pieces in 1883, has
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given to the Acropolis Museum a collection
of Greek sculpture of a time just previous to
the great culmination of art about the middle
of the fifth century B. C. Those statues and
reliefs in a few cases preserve the marks of
a still earlier archaism, but the greater part
have all the characteristics of the years 500
and thereafter, that is to say, of the time
just before the Persian invasion of continental
Greece. I show you (Fig. 13) one of which
I have thought the back more interesting
than the front. Note the rippled hair lying
down the back and at one time gilded. Note
the crinkled stuff of the garment which cov-
ers the left shoulder, and again the crinkled
stuff of another texture which forms a part
of the outer or upper garment and covers
the right shoulder. You see the study made
by the sculptor of the very material, the
crepe-like woolen gauze which the Greeks
used continually, and which their successors
to-day have begun to make once more. The
band around the head, and the outer gar-
ment, are painted with patterns, that of the
cloak itself — the himation — being made
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
up of detached round figures arranged like
a star, and of two patterns; and a border
composed of a series of parallel lines em-
phasized by a row of dots on the upper or
inner side. The smoother parts of the
garment above — the chiton or tunic or shirt,
which shows on the left shoulder — was,
when found, of a positive green. The
picture which I show you now (Fig. 14) is
of a larger statue, one of life-size, and in
order that you may see the colored pattern
more accurately, I give you only a fragment
of it. You have the body below the elbows
with what remains of the two arms, but you
see nothing except the painted drapery ; and
here again the chiton beneath is painted
with detached spots, while the himation has
a very complex and richly colored border
made up of a succession of frets, or, as we
call them sometimes, key patterns.
Now, the disposition to paint statues in
this frank and outspoken way gradually
diminished with the growth of a self-con-
scious civilization. In a way which is very
hard to follow and to explain, the change
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in social organization from the simpler to
the more complex, and of social feeling from
the conscious and natural to the more care-
fully organized, is often accompanied by a
reluctance to use brilliant colors. Explain
that who may — no adequate description of
it has come in my way. But the love of
color remains and is modified in a curious
fashion by the constantly growing love of
the costly and precious in the way of material.
And thus, to leap over some centuries of time,
the photograph which I show you now
(Fig. 15) gives us two of those imperial
busts with which the haunters of the
museums in Rome are so familiar. There
are scores of them, and one does not always
accept the ascriptions — the imagined names
of the originals — which, as you know, are
inferred from the resemblance of the heads
to coins whose inscriptions make the profiles
upon them authentic. The bust on the left
is lettered Severo, which is intended to stand
for Alexander Severus, emperor from 222 to
235 A. D.; while the other has been variously
named. In each of these pieces the head
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
and neck are of white marble, and the whole
mass of carved stone which stands for the
draped shoulders and bust is of a very
precious, beautifully veined marble from the
Pyrenees or from Numidia, marble of some
variety so rich and precious that it may be
considered as a jewel — a precious stone
whose units are somewhat larger than those
of the turquoise or the topaz, but not less
desirable or less lovely. The work of Europe
and the East in the pictra-dura, the hard stone,
that is, the crystal and agate and jasper, is not
more beautiful or more worthy of an artist's
attention than that in the softer stones and
the metals, the marbles and alabasters which
serve for statuary and also for the shafts of
columns in high-wrought decorative archi-
tecture.
Now in modern times, with our compara-
tive inability to spend money freely on
magnificence, the longing of the artist for
brilliant and delicate color is to be gratified,
if at all, by other appliances than these. A
certain French sculptor, named Charles
Henri Cordier, has made himself a name for
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polychromatic sculpture of much less beauty
than that of the workmen of old times, but
of even superior significance. He has gone
far toward realism in his desire to express
the facts about the clothing and the person-
ality of races of men more picturesque than
his fellow Europeans. The inhabitants of
North Africa, Moors and Berbers, the peo-
ple of mixed blood whom the French call
too often by the not wholly appropriate
name of Arabe, have always excited interest
in the minds of the artists of Europe ; and
the people of France have a political inter-
est in them which comes of their control
over so vast a territory in Algeria and Tuni-
sia, a tract of country at least as great as
France herself. Among the statues by
Cordier there is one which I can only de-
scribe to you, an ancient Egyptian playing
upon the harp, in which life-size composi-
tion the opportunity offered by the costume
and by the form of the harp itself has been
used to the full, and a system of brilliant
color is added in what seems to be enamel-
ling of a certain rough and expeditious sort.
[-54]
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The pieces which I can show you (Figs. 16
and 17) are more simple, and the colors
used are merely those of dark bronze gilded,
or copper-colored bronze, white marble, and
the like. And this bust is called simply
"Un Kabyle" that is, an individual of the
tribe which gave to the French invaders the
most serious and constant military problem
to solve. The colors here are all metal-
lic, and the system is merely that of con-
trasting the lighter and the darker tones of
bronze. But in the other, the decorative
lamp-stand, the very effective pose of the
woman carrying a jar upon her head, by
the contrast between the marble and dark
bronze, with the lustre and appearance of
gold in smaller parts completing what is
really a very effective composition of soft
and suggestive color, we are, as I think, at
the beginning of an epoch of polychromatic
sculpture. The works of our countryman,
Herbert Adams, are known to many of you;
and while Mr. Adams has limited his ef-
forts to the more gentle and cooler colors
which are those most readily accepted by
[•55]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
the modern world, he is eager, as I know,
to try polychromy in a more strenuous
way. Portrait busts of his have been ex-
hibited, in which colors were used with ex-
traordinary effect, and that these have been
accepted in portraiture is assuredly a good
sign. We cannot afford to leave unnoticed
and unimproved so splendid a field as that
afforded us by the application of polychromy
to disciplined and marshalled form.
The subject of polychromy in architec-
ture is so immediately connected with the
sixth lecture of this course as announced,
that we will leave it unintroduced to-day.
LECTURE V.
SCULPTURE AS USED IN ARCHI-
TECTURE.1
There is no reason for the constant
application of sculpture to buildings except
this, that the building affords a solid and
generally a noteworthy mass of hard material,
parts of which may be carved with advantage.
You will observe that one main reason for
the special glory of architecture is that it
allows of such carving; shows it well;
associates many pieces of carving into a
whole. The poles which support the front
of a New Zealand chief's wooden house are
liable to be cut into ornamental shapes ; and
it does not take much thought on the part
of the half-savage builder to inspire him
with the strong desire to turn that cutting
and carving into the forms of such expression
as comes natural to him. If he wishes to
produce an effect of terror on the supposed
1 Delivered April 26, 1904, at Fullerton Memorial Hall, The Art
Institute of Chicago.
t'57]
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enemy who may come in sight of the chief's
dwelling, or merely to announce the for-
midable character of the chief or of the
tribe, he will give to those sculptures the
effect of grinning and ferocious heads, em-
bodying in them, not so much his ideas of
what would be beautiful decorations for
the purpose, as his overmastering thought
of terror-striking ferocity. The Assyrian
builder, preparing to line the walls of the
larger halls and corridors of his master's
palace on the Tigris, will resort to repre-
sentations of his master or his master's father
or predecessor hunting — and generally
hunting some ferocious and formidable beast
— or heading his troops in battle; or adoring
the divinities of his race or his family. It
has not often been objected to by the prince,
or by his followers and admirers, that his
own achievements should be recorded in his
own palace. That saying of the English
ambassador, when at Versailles they showed
him the historical paintings of the palace of
Louis XIV, and asked him whether such
decorations were to be seen in England,
f
PI
<v
H
c
-
SLAB, TOP OF A STELE RECORDING A TREATY
Three feet long. Now in Acropolis Museum, Athens
LECTURE V. FIGURE 3
CHARTRES CATHEDRAL, FROM THE WEST
Only the southernmost of the three doorways is visible
LECTURE V. FIGURE 4
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
"My master's achievements are to be found
recorded anywhere except in his own
palace," may have been caused by the fact
that there was no other answer to make. It
was not good taste, nor in all probability
was it any form of reluctance on the part of
William III of England, or on the part
of his admirers, that kept Windsor Castle or
St. James's Palace from such adornments.
The subject uppermost in the artist's mind
is that which he will utilize in painting on
ceilings or on the lunettes of vaulted rooms,
just as the sculptor is thinking of that which
he will show in the carved decoration of his
rising wall or newly completed porch ; and,
in the reign of Louis XIV, the assumption
that the glory of France was all embodied
in the worship of the monarch was the con-
trolling thought.
Sculpture is added to Egyptian palaces
and temples in two notable ways. There is
first the carving in relief of some kind upon
the walls, vertical or sloping, and the rounded
surface of the great columns; these reliefs
being painted in brilliant colors, as was all
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sculpture of antiquity. Second, there were
the statues, which were still in a sense reliefs,
because they were almost always backed up
by the walls of a natural cliff. These statues
were often of colossal dimensions.
Sculpture existed in other forms and in
great abundance, and also from the earliest
times there are wooden statues, and statues
of the hardest materials, basalt and diorite,
dating from a time long antecedent to any
dates which generally have been assumed
as the earliest of human civilization. But
at the same time that sculpture was carried
on independently and for the sake of the
beautiful works of art resulting from the
unfettered play of the human mind and hand,
there were produced works of sculpture
which are closely attached to and form a not-
able part of the buildings themselves. Then,
when the work of Greece began to rise out
of the semi- Asiatic Mycenaean period, sculp-
ture of human subject replaced very rapidly,
for the exterior decoration of the temple, the
glass mosaic, the metal capitals, and the like,
by which the early monuments were made
[160]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
splendid if not always beautiful to behold.
The temple walls themselves in the time of
perfected Greek art did not receive sculp-
ture in any case; but this is chiefly because
the buildings which have come down to us
as being the most important monuments of
Greek art have but little exterior walling,
which is not masked by colonnades throw-
ing deep shadows and preventing a full view
of the smoother wall behind. The one ex-
periment made in the Parthenon seems not
to have been repeated. There is no other
frieze set on the back wall of the colon-
nade. There are elsewhere continuous
friezes or figures in low relief, such as the
one which follows the exterior of the wall
of the sacred enclosure at Gjolbaschi; but
this is really a bounding wall, and no part
of a building in the usual sense; it is the
enclosure of a temenos, or sacred place.
There is the frieze of the temple at Bassae,
but that also is free from the interference of
columns. There is the monument of Lysi-
krates, and again the main frieze in the
Erechtheion; but indeed, if we had more
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completed and not ruined buildings of
Ionic style to refer to, we should have more
of these ; but those friezes of the entablature
are necessarily small and low, the figures
themselves of almost minute proportions.
There is the parapet which surrounds the
temple of Athena Nike ; and in this, almost
for the first time since the Parthenon, we
find figures in relief of important scale and
free and vigorous treatment. There is the
mausoleum at Halicarnassos ; and at Perga-
mon there is the smaller frieze above, and
the huge and abnormally great and vigor-
ous frieze of the Battle of the Gods and
Giants; but it is curious that among all
these examples almost none of them play an
important part in the adornment of the
building. The maxim stated in the first
sentence of this lecture has been verified in
almost every one of these examples. The
ornamenting has been done because here
was a large and prominent piece of smooth
stone work which formed so tempting —
so obvious and natural — so easily a medium
for the display of the sculptor's art. Reliefs
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THE ARTS OF DESIGN
are also used in those square panels which
are left between the triglyphs of the
Doric entablature. Not all these metopes
are carved ; some are painted, some are plain
and bare, and have always been so, as we
think; but where these are carved they are
apt to be in high relief. In the Parthenon
these alto-reliefs have parts wholly detached
from the background; they are half-way
between bas-relief and the free figure sculp-
ture mentioned below.
Sculpture in the form of free statuary
occurs, in connection with buildings, mainly
in the form of groups which fill the tri-
angular panel at either end of the roof of
the temple. This triangular panel, which
with the moulded projecting plates below
and above forms what we call the pediment,
was again simply the most obvious and nat-
ural place to set up statues. It was at a
rather too great height above the ground
outside, but this was made up for by the
vivid and strenuous painting in clear and
bright colors of the statuary and the back-
ground which set it ofF. It is curious to
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note how, in that mental reconstruction
which we are compelled to make of each
important temple, the sculpture in this form
of statuary in the round assumes the shape
of an accessory which might perfectly well
be omitted, and which could be replaced
by painting the triangular panel, or by filling
it with mosaic or inlay, — which, in short,
formed no obvious and natural part of the
temple structure.
We have really only a single monument
of pure Greek style in which the sculpture
is an absolutely essential part. Others ex-
isted; we know that they existed in Delos,
in Epidauros. We have no record of what
they were, and their names are merely a
part of that record of irreparable loss to
which we soon grow accustomed. After
having passed in review the splendid history
of Greek civilization, the one monument
of associated and truly architectural sculp-
ture which remains for us is the Portico of
the Maidens, that is to say, of the draped
statues carrying on their heads the entabla-
ture which once supported the roof at the
[164]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
south side of the Erechtheion. Now, as
regards this building, one has to give its
image in photography, or give a description
of it, or both ; for it stands alone as a speci-
men of a class which has disappeared, and
this is the peculiarity of the situation, that
there is a general unwillingness to admit
that this could have been a normal and
natural piece of Greek decorative work.
We are so accustomed to think of Greek
buildings as devoid of decorative treatment
other than by use of delicate mouldings,
and to think of Greek sculpture in any
other way than as reliefs or as free statues,
that it seems foreign to our notions of pro-
priety that the people of Hellas should have
allowed themselves architectural sculpture
in its true form ; that is to say, as constitut-
ing an important part of the design of the
structure. We know the Doric temples as
buildings without architectural sculpture;
the Ionic temples are all ruined and de-
stroyed except the Erechtheion; we are
only half prepared to believe that which may
still be accepted as truth, that those Ionic
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buildings were treated much as the Cathe-
drals of medieval France were treated —
with sculpture forming an inseparable part
of their design.
Now, as these great buildings and parts of
buildings are all ruined, it is well to correct
our observation of such mangled and dis-
figured works of art by those works of the
great period of Greek art which we have
almost wholly intact; viz., the memorial
stelai which were set up beside graves in the
churchyards near city walls. The very first
picture which we studied at the com-
mencement of this course of lectures was one
of those tomb sculptures; and I show you
now (Fig. i) a stele of two ladies, sisters
perhaps, whose names are carved upon the
narrow epistyle above. In a small way the
conditions of architectural treatment are seen
in these upright slabs. The high relief is
sheltered in a way by a projecting roof, which
is carried by just such antas as are used at a
temple porch, only smaller ; and the feeling
of the Greek for the surrounding by archi-
tectural forms of his more elaborate, more
[166]
H
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H"
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5" ^ H
3 %3
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S- 5=
REIMS CATHEDRAL, MIDDLE PORCH
TWO STATUES OF SOUTH JAMB
LECTURE V. FIGURE 7
MARBLE RELIEF AND SHIELDS OF ARMS
Formerly built into wall of house at Ponte dei Dai, Venice. Removed
about 1883
LECTURE V. FIGURE 8
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
refined and complete sculpture is seen even
in this minor example. It is just in that
way that the statues of the pediment were
set up, standing in the place made by the
geison or shelf made by the top of the hori-
zontal cornice, and sheltered in part by the
overhanging of the cornice at the edge of
the roof it is on. In this example (Fig. 2)
the slab of Dexileos, where the idea remains
of the projecting shelter, it is different, as the
pediment has never had support in the way of
pillars of any sort. However it may have
been surrounded by other parts of a greater
structure, the overhanging piece itself has
had no support. The artist has cut away the
whole of the surface of his slab from side to
side, sinking the background many inches
back from the highest point of the relief, and
leaving the vigorous action as if in the case
of an equestrian statue. Much smaller and less
grandiose sculptures are found in abundance
in Athens, and in such other cities of Greece
as have been rather thoroughly searched with
the use of spade and pickaxe. The museum
of the Acropolis alone contains scores of
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votive and memorial tablets. There is one in
which is recorded the greeting of the Goddess
Athena, the protectress of the city named
from her, and the people of that city embod-
ied in the draped figure which we call Demos.
Demos, here, is an elderly male figure.
The composition (Fig. 3 ) heads the record
given below of an important event in the
city of Athens, an event which happened in
398 B. C. In this relief of three figures,
the subject of the legend is a treaty made
between Athens and the State of Korkyra, or
Corcyra, in 375 B. C.; and here the Goddess
Athena standing for Athens, and a female
figure meant to personify the state of Cor-
cyra, appear before a seated male figure, who
embodies in himself one of those great inter-
national tribunals which the pan-Hellenic
spirit created to preserve peace and a certain
amount of common feeling among the states
of the too scattered, too often quarrelling
peoples of Greece.
In a former lecture we looked at one of
those great slabs from the destroyed arch
of Marcus Aurelius. The one which we
[168]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
then chose represents the entry into a
conquered town on the borders of southern
Germany, of the philosophical emperor with
his soldiers and his advisers of state. In
another of the same group we see Marcus
Aurelius preparing to offer a solemn sacrifice;
and the architectural background of this one
seems to fix the place as the Roman Forum
itself. The victim, the sacrificing priest
with axe in hand, the acolytes beyond, who
bring water or wine or other things needed
for the ceremony, the flamen with his
curious official cap seen just beyond the
emperor, and the singular grouping of the
whole assembly, bring the student into that
pleasant, inquiring mood which is so often
our state of mind in the presence of the
important works of antiquity. To lead our-
selves into their habit of mind; to know
what those men were thinking of, not so
much the emperor (for it is hard indeed
for us to see how a philosophical man upon
whom was forced the almost unlimited
sovereignty of the Mediterranean world
would have looked at his own fate and at
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life), not so much the Emperor himself,
but to see things as any one of his attending
ministers would have looked at them — is,
indeed, a definite object of study.
Now, let us consider another Roman
work — the great Mausoleum of Hadrian,
on the Tiber, the same building which is
now called the Castello Sant' Angelo. Con-
jectural restorations are not, of course, ab-
solute ; nobody would pin his faith to them
without reserve; but it is evident enough
that the general scheme of the building was
as it is generally represented. The great
circular drum is surrounded by columns,
and a small round peristyle is at a higher
level. The independent position of the
statuary is even more absolutely asserted here
than in the case of the Greek building we
have named. The statues are set up be-
tween the columns of each order, and also
on a sort of cornice above, although one may
dispute altogether this third row of statues,
if he pleases. A similar arrangement ex-
isted unquestionably in the famous tomb at
Halicarnassos, which gives us the term
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
mausoleum. There were friezes in relief on
the walls of that great tomb, but the statuary
stood free between the shafts of the col-
umns. Or take the arch of Titus at Rome.
Here is the Roman system of combining
sculpture closely with the architectural or-
donnance, and therewith the Roman custom
of bringing statues against the sky. The
bronze figures set upon the top of the struc-
ture, that quadriga with its triumphing im-
perator which must have been there, and
the grooms leading the horses, and perhaps
two Victories, one on either side, all these
have disappeared, and their character and
places can only be conjectured; but other-
wise the sculpture of the building is recog-
nizable. The sacrificial procession in the
frieze ; the admirable figure carved upon the
front of the keystone and giving an almost
Gothic freedom to the combination of
sculpture with architectural forms; the fa-
mous high-reliefs under the arch, one on
either side, and representing, as you know,
the triumphal procession bearing along the
trophies of the siege of Jerusalem — these
['70
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reliefs are just above your head as you pass
through the arch on horseback or in a char-
iot. It is, of course, not known to us how
busy a way was that one. If the hustling
crowd of the Imperial City streamed through
there on that road, we should challenge the
fitness of the location for so important a
triumphal sculpture; but this is the only
questioning criticism that we make, for, in-
deed, this arch is one of the best in its
scheme and plan of any that has come
down to us. And let it be said, it was
really a "triumphal" arch; for of the four
or five hundred Roman arches which are
known to have existed, the majority were
not triumphal; that is to say, they had noth-
ing to do with a triumph. They were
memorials, which were often erected after
the death of the great citizen in whose
honor they were put up, or by vote of the
Senate, or by the authority of some provin-
cial governor.
You will not need to be reminded of the
larger and more splendid arch of which you
have the beautiful photograph hanging in
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THE ARTS OF DESIGN
the Sculpture Gallery alongside of the un-
usual and really splendid casts of sculptures
from its face. That arch of Trajan at Bene-
vento is the best preserved of all the great
arches, and it is of quite inestimable value
and importance to us because it is so noble
an example of Roman Imperial art at its
culminating period.
Now, to skip eight centuries and to take
the Romanesque art of middle France also
at its culminating period, let us consider
the front of Angouleme Cathedral. It is a
noble church, and its sculpture is among
the most beautiful of the time ; but I think
that we must discriminate, and not claim
for its ordonnance a wholly faultless lay-
out, so far as the sculpture is concerned. It
seems to be huddled into place, it does not
seem to have grown naturally out of the
architecture. But if we look at a single
detail of it, we shall see how perfect is the
application of the sculpture in each given
member of the front. We shall find in
the work of the great Gothic period an
immeasurably more noble sculpture, and a
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vastly more perfect alliance of the sculpture
with the building, but we shall hardly find
there or elsewhere in the history of art a
more admirable piece of sculptured orna-
mentation.
Or if we take the Church of Notre
Dame la Grande at Poitiers, here is cer-
tainly a more perfect distribution of the
sculpture. In that case it was proposed to
carve every part of the front, at least all the
flat part of the front, and to repeat that
elaborate embossing of the whole surface
by the admirable disposition of the imbrica-
tions which cover the little cones at the head
of the flanking towers. Imagine yourself
called upon to emboss such a front, using
fourteen statues or groups in as many niches,
a descriptive bas-relief covering every part
of the flat wall above the arches of the
lowest story, and a covering pattern of great
richness investing all the faces of all the
arches — say the archivolts and soffits of not
less than twenty-two arches of actual con-
struction. It would be no shame to any
modern designer to confess that that effort
PONTE DI PARAD1SO, AT VENICE
LECTURE V. FIGURE g
LUNETTE, FLORENCE, BY LUCA UELLA ROBB1A
Formerly in a house-wall, now in National Museum
LECTURE V. FIGURE 10
LOGGIA Dl SAN PAOLO, FLORENCE. THE MEETING OF
SAINTS DOMINIC AND FRANCIS, BY LUCA
DELLA ROBB1A
LECTURE V. FIGURE n
FRONT OF THE OPERA HOUSE, PARIS
Finished, 1875; the design of Charles Gamier, died, 1898
LECTURE V. FIGURE 12
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
was beyond his strength, at least beyond
his training.
The sculpture of the far south of France
is claimed by the French authorities them-
selves to be more soft and, in a way, classical
— far less notably invested with the savage
energy of the northern style out of which
the Gothic architecture was to spring; and
I think the result of considerable familiarity
with the sculpture of both the north and
the south will tend to give to us a greater
care for the former, — will tend to convince
the student that the glory of Romanesque
art is to be found north of the mountain
chain of the Cevennes and between them
and the Province of Flanders. Indeed, a
still narrower field might be marked out,
but we will not be too precise when there
is no opportunity to explain the reasons for
our precision.
Meantime, consider the most famous and
most valuable specimens of that southern
sculpture. The great portal of the church
of Saint Gilles has been rather closely fol-
lowed in its disposition by the architects of
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the Church of Saint Bartholomew in New
York. This church of Saint Gilles was
never completed; and indeed, this magnifi-
cent frontispiece and a single half-completed
spiral staircase on the flank of the choir is
all that we expect to see. There is an
eleventh-century dwelling-house across the
street from the flank of the church, but it
has been restored out of recognition and
its value greatly impaired.
A better known front is that of Saint
Trophime at Aries, a church now used as
the cathedral of the town, but originally a
monastic church with a singularly rich
cloister. The cloister has a very famous
system of colonnettes arranged in pairs, two
in the thickness of the wall ; these alternate
with large square piers which divide the ar-
cade at each fourth interval, and the piers
themselves are flanked by statuary of great
relative importance. One agrees with the
Frenchmen who have ruled that there is
too much of a Sicilian softness about this
work, and that the admixture of barbaric
energy with Roman tradition is more
[176]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
perfectly established in the north than here ;
but how dignified and full of opportunity
is this sculptured cloister, how successful as
a piece of decorative art are its long-drawn
walks !
Now, when we touch upon the Gothic
system, it is quite ^necessary to deal with the
whole building — so close is the alliance, in
this style, between sculpture and architec-
ture. This is the west front of the Cathe-
dral at Chartres (Fig. 4), and the three
doorways, of which you see one only, are
of Romanesque type, or, if you please, of
the Transition, and the story about those
doorways is pretty nearly this : That origi-
nally the nave was shorter by two bays,
and that that great south tower, the most
famous steeple in France or in Europe, was
built, and with it the lower part of the north
tower, at the close of the twelfth century.
Thus the church, or at least the nave itself,
was lengthened by rebuilding its front in
the place where you see it now. It must
be that the three doorways were those of
the older and Romanesque cathedral, but
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these remarks are not offered by way
of apology. Nowhere in the world has
statuary been made so architectural in
effect. If you will ask, as students do ask
from time to time, why the proportions of
the human form are abandoned altogether
in this design, and no attempt made to pre-
serve even the relation of the head to the
body, or of the width and thickness of the
draped person to total vertical height, the
answer is that these statues are serving al-
most absolutely as caryatides; for though
their heads do not support the cushion or
basket upon which the superstructure is
rested, they themselves (the figures) are
carved upon the very stone of which the
column is made up. It is a new order of
columnar architecture — an order in which
the shaft was to be completed by this
sculptured human form upon its outer face.
The sculpture of the tympanums and the
lintels below them is still wholly Roman-
esque in distribution, but on the arches
which rise above those flat roofs, the Gothic
system of little niches with a statue in each
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is already well established. The south porch
of the same church which I show you now
(Fig. 5) is the porch leading to the south
transept and which was just visible in the
picture of the west front. It is entirely
Gothic. That is, it belongs to the period
of complete ribbed vaulting and of the de-
veloped Gothic sculpture, and it is interesting
to see here also how the statues are inherent
parts of the vertical structure, of the great
pier which served at once as impost and as
buttress for the arches of the porch.
Now, one word about the Cathedral of
Reims, for it is in this west portal (Fig. 6)
that the Gothic statuary reached its highest
level. Here we see the statues on one flank
of the central doorway and of a side doorway,
and here are two statues by themselves. The
two statues put together, as seen in Fig. 7,
form the exquisite group which we know as
the Visitation ; that is, the meeting of Mary,
the mother of Jesus, and Elizabeth, the
mother of John. The photograph of the
general view in this case is vague and not as
distinct as we need it for the study of details;
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but the general charm of the porches may be
more intelligibly seen through this hazy me-
dium than if every detail were sharply noted.
You will notice two tendencies here which
indeed seem to be inevitable in sculpture. As
the artist grows more competent to deal with
the human figure, both nude and draped — as
he learns the secrets of anatomy, observes the
action and pose of the body, and notes more
and more closely what is beautiful in the cast-
ing of the loose garment about the form —
he grows less interested in architectural sculp-
ture of the older and simpler sort. So in this
noble porch there is shown, below the feet
of the great statues, nothing but a really fee-
ble and inadequate motive — a poor little
affectation of a curtain or loose hanging gath-
ered in festoons, in the very spot, mind you,
where the Cathedral of Amiens has that
magnificent series of bas-reliefs in which
Ruskin thought he found the whole Bible
history portrayed. In like manner you will
look in vain among these statues and the
statues in the arch above for leaf or flower
sculpture as effective as that in earlier and less
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splendid churches. The knowledge of na-
ture is there, as you will see in the capitals
above the heads of Mary and Elizabeth, but
the care for it, the profound love and sym-
pathy for it, is diminished. It was so with
the Greeks — apparently it will always be so.
Success in figure work has always tended to
make the artist careless of the detail of lesser
aspects of nature. The great Venetian
painter, Paul Veronese, and his fellows, are
almost the only artists of the highest rank
who have retained their love of detail.
Now see fourteenth-century work — dec-
oration of garden gates and simple house-
walls in Venice. See in Fig. 8 how the
mediasval love of sculpture has led to a more
advanced art, at once narrative and artistically
perfect. This bas-relief, with its accom-
panying shields of arms, was, until recently,
built into a house-wall at the entrance to
the Merceria, just north of the great square
of St. Mark at Venice. This was fifteenth-
century work: but that of an earlier time
has constant interest for the student. Do
not forget that the fourteenth century
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in Italy is a much more advanced epoch,
a more modern epoch, than the same
years in the north; the spirit of the Re-
naissance was already starting in Italy,
and so we find two Renaissance interpre-
tations of the Story of Saint Martin and the
Beggar, and in each in a subordinate place is
seen the arms of the family which held the
property, the house and garden beyond the
gate. Passing to a more elaborate and very
well-known instance, look at this tablet
which is set up upon two imposts across a nar-
row calle, which is reached by going over the
little Bridge of Paradise, so called (Fig. 9).
The traditional account of this feature, not
known in other cities, is that the two man-
sions which flank the little calle were held
by the same family. The subject, however,
is purely religious. The Madonna, with
wide-spread mantle, is covering her wor-
shipper, a person who may be assumed to be
the donor of the piece.
All this smacks of the revival of classical
art. It is not Roman art, but it comes of the
study of Roman antiquity. Three-quarters
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
of a century elapses and then we find the
completed and developed Renaissance in
the work of one of its greatest and most
lovable men, Luca della Robbia. This
lunette (Fig. 10) is one of the many de-
tached reliefs of Robbia work which we
find set up along the streets of Florence,
often in places where their presence is not
easy to explain. This one, for instance, is
built into a wall in the Via dell' Agnolo;
but that means, of course, that there had
been a church or the entrance to a convent
thereabout, which buildings have been re-
moved, while the sculpture was preserved.
As usual in such reliefs, the figures them-
selves are white on a ground of blue,
the whole being covered as you know
with a delicate glaze, which receives strong
color in the most perfect way. The flower
decoration in the archivolt is, on the other
hand, in strong colors, as was that fountain
in the sacristy which I showed you a week
ago. But now we will consider the great-
est existing work of the family della Robbia,
in the little town of Pistoja, a few miles
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
north of Florence, on the road to Modena.
It contains a little hospital, a building of two
stories above an open arcade, and a broad
frieze runs along the front and returns along
both ends of the small building. There are
seven divisions in this frieze. One subject
fills each of the end walls, and five go to
make up the longer central piece, that of
the main fa9ade. They are all devoted to
the works of mercy — the seven virtuous acts;
and the first shows "Feeding the Hungry"
All of these figures are in enamelled terra-
cotta, as are the other works which we call
Robbia work, and these colors are used
freely; and as you see, great vivacity, inten-
sity of expression, strength, and realism of all
kinds have been employed in it.
In one of the pictures is shown " Clothing
the Naked" and we have the wretched beg-
gars to whom garments are being doled out
and children brought by women, who ask
for them a share in the charitable dole.
Again, we have the Giving of Aid to Travellers,
and in this composition the artist has flown a
little higher and has associated his design with
[184]
FRONTISPIECE ADDED IN 1003 TO CHURCH OF ST.
BARTHOLOMEW, NEW YORK
LECTURE V. FIGURE 13
DETAIL OF THE FRONT, FIGURE 13
LECTURE V. FIGURE 14
fa O
°
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
religion in this way: First, he has pilgrims
as his travellers. They all appear as newly
come from the Holy Land, with scrip and
staff and cockle-shell ; and again, in one of
these pilgrims is to be recognized the Saviour
of the world. It does not appear that they
recognize the Divine Being, but the artist
means that the spectator shall recognize him.
There is nowhere a more perfect instance or
a more perfect combination in one design,
of a noble decorative effect with a realistic
simplicity and a moral significance.
I show you another piece (Fig. 1 1), the
one which of all the numerous works of the
family seems to be the noblest, the lunette
which opens upon the gallery or arcade of
St. Paul in the square opposite the church
of St. Maria Novella. The subject is the
meeting and greeting of the two great found-
ers of religious monastic bodies — St. Dom-
inic, in his white robe, and St. Francis, in
his brown or cinder-colored gown — meet-
ing, we may suppose, in Heaven; the leader
of the great order of poverty, the friars prop-
erly so-called, and the leader of the preaching
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
monks, the man who tried to complete St.
Francis's work by insisting upon dogma.
When St. Paul's Cathedral was built in
London, between 1675 and 1 700, architectu-
ral sculpture, or sculpture of the old sort
used architecturally, had almost ceased to
exist. The perfunctory acanthus leaves of
the capitals, and a few descriptive reliefs in
the pediment, which do not fill the pedi-
ment,— which form really an ornamental
adjunct hanging in the middle of it, — these
and the very few statues showing against
the sky are all the great cathedral offers.
There is, indeed, admirable wood-carving
within, and if it were a history of orna-
mental sculpture we were writing, it would
have to be considered carefully. I want
to make it clear that there was that lapse
of time from the middle of the seven-
teenth century on to the French Revolu-
tion when sculpture, applied to a building as
part of its system of design, had been almost
forgotten; and I wish to insist upon this,
because it makes more interesting the return
to the display of fine sculpture in much more
t'86]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
recent monuments. After the French Revo-
lution people tried to study real antiquities ;
they tried to go back of the Renaissance and
of the classic learning and decoration and
to draw from Roman art direct. So it was
that they studied the great memorial arches
of Imperial Rome, and so it was that, when
Napoleon undertook the construction of a
vast monument to record the glories of his
campaigns and to do honor to his fellow-
soldiers, his advisers naturally chose the form
of a Roman arch, which, however, they in-
creased in scale until they made it larger
than the largest building of the kind which
had existed previously. On the side toward
Paris are two great groups of sculpture ; that
to the south is that high relief showing " The
Departure for the War," the most renowned
work of the sculptor Fran£ois Rude. The
other piece, that to the north, is " The Deifi-
cation of Napoleon." On the side toward
Neuilly, the two corresponding groups by
Antoine fitex represent the one on the north,
resistance of the French to the invading
armies of 1814; that on the south the
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
blessings of peace. That arch was finished
by the successors of the great emperor; it
was not wholly abandoned even by his ene-
mies of the Restoration, and it was finished
under Louis Philippe about 1 845. It seems
odd to us now that only fifteen years were to
elapse before the building was begun of the
great Opera House at Paris. This (Fig. 1 2)
was intended to express the glory and the civic
splendor of the second empire, which indeed
did so much to make Paris the admirable
city we know. Our purpose is mainly with
the sculpture, and you will note that here
there have been consulted other influences,
other arguments, other rules of procedure;
for it had been made clear to sculptors that
they must insist on putting their great works
nearer to the eye. Therefore, while certain
pieces are set high on the roofs with the sky
for their background, they being in this way
sacrificed, for nothing shows aright with the
brilliant sky (even though on a cloudy day)
eating away its outline, yet the important
pieces are on pedestals hardly higher than
the heads of the passers-by. One of these
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
two groups on the right is that composition
by Carpeaux, "The Dance," which caused so
much of an excitement and something like
a scandal soon after its erection.
And now that we come to our own
time, I must show you first the front of that
Church of St. Bartholomew in New York,
to which there has been allusion already.
(See Fig. 13.) In its disposition it is very
like to the front of St. Gilles, except that it
is made flatter and thinner as of necessity.
It is the same composition as the porch of
the older church, and even the statues are
intended to be put in, although the work
has been delayed in that respect. I show
you this as a piece of the best possible copied
or derived work in modern reproduced art.
We do not often succeed so well. The re-
production that I speak of is mainly in the
architecture, but in the sculpture, too, there
are instances of similarity worthy of the
best attention. The lunette on the left by
Herbert Adams is assuredly based upon the
art of Luca della Robbia. The bronze
doors are among the finest that exist,
[189]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
generally admirable in design and splendid
pieces of foundry work, the sculpture and
mouldings cast together with no planting
on. Here is that southern door with Mr.
Adams' lunette (Fig. 14), and the whole of
the work is by him. In this picture also
is seen on a larger scale one end of the
greater frieze, the work of Mr. Daniel C.
French, aided by Andrew O'Connor, Jr.,
who indeed appears to be responsible for the
actual work of the greater part of Mr.
French's sculpture on this front. The north
doorway, of which I have no separate pic-
ture, is the work of Mr. Martini, and now
I wish to show you another composition,
also suggested by that church at St. Gilles.
Here, however, (Fig. 15) you will notice
that there were opportunities for doing
things on a great scale. This porch is im-
measurably more massive than the neighbor-
ing parts of the original church. It projects
boldly from the front of the church, and it
is solidly built, and casts deep and sombre
shadows. The design is in harmony with
these features. Nothing certainly was ever
[190]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
better done than that treatment of each
separate pier as made up of a crowd of col-
umns with here and there a massive fluted
pilaster, copied, as it were, from that splen-
did cloister of Aries, of which we have spoken
to-day. Architecturally this achievement
is far beyond the previous example in dig-
nity and splendor; and as for the sculpture,
we have side by side these two very curious
results — that one porch has come of the
employment of very highly praised and re-
nowned sculptors, men of the class which
we rank as among the most renowned of
artists, while the other is the work of a man
who professes himself rather an architectural
decorator and carver, and whose work has
been the placing of sculpture in relation to
the building in the spirit of the work done
in mediaeval times. It is the strangest thing
to see how nearly sculpture, which pretends
only to be decorative, approaches in individ-
ual merit the work of the renowned sculp-
tors named. The consideration, however,
of the problem is out of our reach at present,
and I only wish to call your attention to the
[191]
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fact that, when you undertake sculpture
combined with architecture, it is the last
named art which must talk first and which
must impress itself upon the sculptor.
The recently completed Appellate Court
House in New York City has two great
statues on pedestals at the steps of entrance.
Other statues are seen against the sky.
Again, semi-recumbent figures adorn the
pediments of the great windows, and a great
group adorns the southern front. In this
way, you see, almost every application of
free statuary to a building has been utilized.
The sculpture has not a fair chance, because
the building has been of really unusual ill
success. More than once I have taken some
architect, one of the school to which this de-
sign belongs, to this corner, or to walk past the
long front, and have put to him innocently
the question why the sculpture fails so utterly
to give its true effect, and the answer has al-
ways been the same; the poor composition
of the building destroys the best worth of
the figure-work.
The Washington Congressional Library,
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
however, gives a partial relief to those who
are longing for sculpture in modern build-
ings. This (Fig. 1 6) is the foot of the
great stairway on one side; and here the
sculpture is by that same Philip Martini,
whose work we could not examine closely
in the north door of the New York church.
The light-bearing statues are in bronze, and
all the rest of the work, including the little
genii, is of marble. Of marble, too, is the
great cylindrical newel-post, and so is the
hand-rail that sweeps around it and finishes
by disappearing in its mass. And we accept
this building as the most important thing yet
done in America in the way of decorative
treatment of an interior, for the mosaics and
the paintings which we must study in the
next lecture are supported and helped by
the marble and bronze to which the sculp-
tor has given life.
[>93]
LECTURE VI.
PAINTING AS USED IN ARCHI-
TECTURE.1
The relations of color-decoration to archi-
tecture are difficult to put clearly before one's
own vision because of the extremely uneven
character of European art in that respect.
Nowhere will you find a building with color
decoration applied as generally and with as
much desire for a complete composition in
color, as to equal at all the similar combi-
nations in sculpture, of which we have many.
The first building that I shall show you
contains in its interior a splendid scheme of
color ; and I might with equal propriety give
you the interior of a still larger and more
brilliantly decorated building, St. Mark's in
Venice, or the Cathedral of Monreale in
Sicily ; and still, with the possible exception
of St. Mark's, we should find no building
which is adorned without and within by a
1 Delivered, April 28, 1904, at Fullerton Memorial Hall, The Art
Institute of Chicago.
[J94]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
consistent scheme of chromatic decoration.
We know that a Doric temple in Athens or
in Sicily was painted all over, as one may
say, outside. The sculpture, both in relief
and in the round, received the richest paint-
ing, but all parts of the building were treated
with a consistent scheme of decoration ap-
plied with the brush. We do not know of
what nature this color-harmony must have
been. We can only guess at it; and as to
the interior, simply we know nothing about
it at all. We do not even know whether
daylight was admitted to that interior oth-
erwise than as it shone through the great
west door, and so was reflected from the
pavement and the walls upon the statue of
the goddess. That statue of the goddess it-
self, of ivory and gold — of what nature was
its color scheme? — shall we agree with
those enthusiasts who are sure that the
Greeks understood and practised the art of
enamelling on metal, and that the "gold"
was not merely the gleaming and generally
yellow substance which we know by that
name, but was made into a rich color
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THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
combination by the different alloys used in
casting the metal and by the application
of colored enamels?
The best thing for us in this too brief
inquiry, is to abandon the insolvable problem
set for us by the remains of Greek temples,
and to take up those mediaeval buildings —
those very early Christian shrines — which
are richly adorned in color. And first the
church at Ravenna, which is called by the
name of its patron saint, and to distinguish
it from another of the same dedication, is
called the New — Sant' Apollinare Nuovo.
In Fig. i we are standing in the north aisle
and looking eastward, and all along the
south wall, above the arches of the nave ar-
cade, is a long row — a procession as it may
be called — of Christian martyrs ; men draped
in priestly garments and marching eastward
toward the throne where Christ sits, near to
the chancel or the sacred centre of the
church. If we should look at the north
wall we should see a corresponding row of
virgin martyrs, twenty-two female figures,
also moving eastward. These walls above
[196]
CHURCH OF S. APOLL1NARE NUOVO, RAVENNA
Completed in the Sixth Century A. D.
LECTURE VI. FIGURE i
CHURCH OF S. VITALE, RAVENNA
Mosaic of about 500 A. D.
LECTURE VI. FIOURE 2
MAUSOLEUM OF GALLA PLACIDIA, RAVENNA
Mosaic in lunette beneath vaulted roof
LECTURE VI. FIGURE 3
MAUSOLEUM OF GALLA PLACIDIA, RAVENNA
Interior
LECTURE VI. FIGURE 4
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
the nave arcade including the spandrels, as
they are called, that is, the triangular spaces
above the arches, are covered with mosaic
of glass tessera? ; and not only is the proces-
sion of saints or of worshippers wrought in
that material, but also the figures of Fathers
of the Church and the ornamental patterns
above.
At the eastern end of the corresponding
church of Sant' Apollinare in Classe, outside
the walls of Ravenna, the semi-dome of the
apse, which is cpvered with mosaic, is filled
with the subject of the benediction given to
the sheep of Christ, which in this case is
pronounced by the saint to whom the church
is dedicated, a splendid decorative cross in a
circle above the figure is accompanied by
angels and attended by other sheep ; and this
is assumed to stand for the Transfiguration
of Christ. Again, in the wall above and on
either side of the arch the same subject re-
curs, the faithful symbolized by figures of
sheep; and everywhere there is a free use
of conventional patterns of color to serve as
frames and settings for the whole.
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
The most famous of the wonderful old
churches of Ravenna is San Vitale, but un-
fortunately that interior has been so spoiled
by repainting in the eighteenth century that
no knowledge whatever is now obtainable
of its chromatic effect within. We have
in its original condition only the chancel, a
short, square member with the apse beyond,
forming a space about twice as long or deep
as it is wide. The walls and roof are in-
deed covered with the original early mosaics,
and in Fig. 2 is shown a detail of this —
three small arches carried on columns and
built in beneath a huge discharging arch.
Please note the relation which it bears to the
other surfaces around. The pictorial com-
position in the great tympanum itself, as you
see, has to do with the Christian sacrifice, and
it is personified here by those Old Testament
characters, which were taken by the early
church to stand as the precursors of the
High Priest, Christ. Abel on the left, Mel-
chizedek on the right, are offering each his
sacrifice ; for Abel, you will remember, was
he who sacrificed the living creatures of his
[198]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
flock, while Cain offered the fruits of the
earth only, and Melchizedek is especially
named as being the "Priest of the Most
High God." That mosaic-covered tym-
panum is on the north wall of the chancel,
directly opposite the high altar. A little
farther east, on the wall where the rounding
of the apse begins, is a scene of mingled
imperial and religious state and splendor.
The Emperor with four of his great minis-
ters occupies the centre of that composition.
On his left (or the right of the spectator)
are servants of the church, and on his right
are the warriors who, it is assumed, are to
fight for Christianity against the pagan and
against the heretic. And we have to note
in this pictorial composition the continuance
of that spirit which we noted in the statues
of the west front of Chartres. There is the
same readiness to sacrifice everything to the
dignity of the composition. The lines must
be severe, formal, nearly vertical ; the surfaces
must be treated with grave and severe color-
ing ; and the use of flat patterns of peculiarly
ornamental character replaces all landscape
['99]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
background or similar completion of the
design. You will understand that this is
not mentioned here as the final or as the
only possible treatment, for I can show you
compositions in which the mosaic designs
are treated more freely. Still, it is on this
general principle that mosaic has always
been treated when good taste was the rule
and when its peculiarities as a medium were
kept clearly in mind. That was poor mosaic
which was made in the eighteenth century
in close imitation of paintings of the great
masters of a preceding epoch.
The Church of SS. Nazario and Celso
is the name given by the later clerical
authorities to the old mausoleum of the
Empress Galla Placidia ; and that little build-
ing remains, with its three great sarcophagi
standing in the three arms of the cross.
This picture that I show you (Fig. 3) is
the lunette at the end of one of those arms
with the same familiar subject of the Shep-
herd and the Sheep. You will note that
the roof or vault in this picture is that which
I showed you for the sake of its pattern in
[200]
H i—
^ C
2. cr.
- B C
n *^ ^
g
z n
•"
t o
'
z
1=
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
the fourth of these lectures; but it is very
true that one of the difficulties in discussing
the nature of art which depends chiefly
upon color, is found in this very opacity of
our glass pictures. The light of the lan-
tern cannot be forced through the dark
surfaces.
This picture (Fig. 4) shows a general
view of the interior of that little church,
for it is really very small. The width of
the nave and the transept cannot exceed
twenty feet, if it equals that. Two hundred
persons, all standing, would crowd the little
church in a disagreeable way.
The square domes at the crossing of gal-
leries in the Archbishop's palace at Ravenna
have, on the vault, interesting angelic figures
with upraised hands, and wrought, of course,
upon a domical or rounded surface — part
of the inside of a sphere. Therefore, the
figures are not to be taken as if they were
really flat. They are designed with singular
skill and propriety for the generally hollow
concave surfaces.
And now a brief allusion to two rather
[201]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
curious forms of color decoration in use at
different times during the Middle Ages.
They are all Italian, because in Italy there
has been less destruction of the monuments
of a period which afterwards passed for bar-
baric and tasteless. The contemptuous judg-
ment of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries was not allowed to prevail in the
churches there so far as to destroy the re-
mains of earlier art.
These curious labyrinths, shown in Fig. 5,
are not indeed unknown in the pavements
of French churches; but those of Italy are
equally attractive and elaborate and have
preserved their original aspect, whereas the
French ones have been restored and relaid
and generally freshened up. That comes,
you see, of there being too much prosperity
in France — too much money to spend.
The impoverished Italy of the seventeenth
and eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies could not undertake such costly re-
pairs. One of these labyrinths is in that
same church of San Vitale of which we
have heard so much already. Another is
[202]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
in the Cathedral of Lucca ; and it is to this
that belongs the Latin inscription according
to which it appears that the word "laby-
rinth " is to be taken as the feminine article
"la" and the long word beginning with
"B." The thirteenth-century artist really
thought that "la Berinthus" was the proper
and satisfactory way of writing the Latin-
ized Greek term, and he followed it with a
pretty little reference to the father of laby-
rinth, the Greek Daedalus. You understand,
of course, that the significance of the laby-
rinth is that it exemplifies the difficulty which
the Christian finds in reaching the goal of
his hopes. The path which he is to fol-
low is sometimes marked by a band of tri-
angles all pointing one way, as in the ex-
ample taken from San Vitale, but more often
it is a mere black band.
The other single example which I have to
show you is the painted roof of the Cathe-
dral at Messina in Sicily. (Fig. 6.) The sur-
face across the top of the picture is the under
side of that lowered part of the ceiling,
which is boxed down to cover the starting
[203]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
of the roof timbers from the wall. You
will see projecting from this, the under side
of one of the great tie-beams of the wooden
roof, and the space on either side of that
tie-beam is the ceiling in boards above and
beyond. You will see how every part is
covered with the most elaborate painted
patterns. You will easily understand how
impossible it is to draw up a scheme for the
classification of these different forms of
chromatic decoration. It would take a
volume to express that thought; and I am
compelled to go on to the mediaeval adorn-
ment of interior walls.
This picture (Fig. 7) is the west front
of the famous cathedral at Le Puy in central
France. According to a system much more
common in Italy than in the north, the front
is designed in an abstract way; nor is the
designer ashamed of the fact that his flanking
gables do not correspond with the aisles or
flanking parts of the interior. He has taken
from the plan of the church with its broader
and higher nave and its too subordinate
aisles only the central idea — the triple
[204]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
division ; and it has not worried him that his
aisle-roofs did not come as high as he de-
sired to put his side gables. He has let the
sky show through the openings of these
without the slightest disguise. The very
beautiful composition in stone of three col-
ors, growing more and more elaborate as
the front climbs against the sky, replaces,
as you see, all treatment by means of sculp-
ture, near as this front is, geographically, to
the magnificent sculpture of the Roman-
esque churches farther north. It has taken
nothing from them and is content with its
effect of color.
So in the famous and really lovely church
of Notre-Dame-du-Port at Clermont-Fer-
rand, the inlay is used with more reserve
and with excellent taste. The octagonal
tower shows only the tympanums of the
arches treated with color, but in the little
square tower which I show you (Fig. 8)
the decoration is carried further. In the
chancel and transept of that admirable
church, you may see the true origin of much
of the interesting American work to which
[205]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
we give the name of Richardson without
asking too closely whether he was really
the designer of all of it. However, as a
matter of comparison with the French origi-
nals, here is Richardson's own church in
Boston (Fig. 9), the one which made his
celebrity. And you will see how closely
the French feeling of the twelfth century
was reproduced, or, if you wish, to use a
less complimentary phrase, was copied, at
the close of the nineteenth century. The
square blunt tower to the left has gone. It
has been replaced by the completion of that
west end, carried out at the time when the
great porch was built — that porch of which
we spoke in the last lecture.
In the fourteenth century the Floren-
tines, who had been as reluctant two hundred
years before as any of the Italians to accept
the Gothic style as the northern builders
created it, had adopted this curious com-
promise. They built in what was the old
Gothic system, and they carried it out in
the pointed arches for the windows and
doors, but in every other way they kept and
[206]
TRINITY CHURCH, FROM THE SOUTHEAST,
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
LECTURE VI. FIGURE 9
DETAIL OF NORTH FLANK. OF CATHEDRAL,
FLORENCE, ITALY
LECTURE VI. FIGURE 10
CLOISTER OF SANTA MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE
LECTURE VI. FIGURE 11
DETAIL OF PAINTING SHOWN IN FIGURE 11
LECTURE VI. FIGURE 12
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
even carried further, the southern notion of
smooth wall surfaces treated in color, as
opposed to the northern idea of a building
without flat walls, but made up of slender
supports — the space between them filled
by colored glass.
This time I show you (Fig. 10) a part
of the northern flank of the Cathedral of
Florence, and, included in it, the western-
most of the three doorways which lead into
the church. Here the brick walls are
sheathed with thin plates of marble; and
around the windows and the doorways the
decoration is required to be the richest and
the most concentrated. This sheathing cul-
minates in the jambs and in the archivolts
of the doorway and windows, and in the
gables above them, in beautiful mosaic of
small pieces of marble. This decoration
is much too minute to be seen in the
photograph. In the beautiful bell-tower
the decoration is carried still further,
because the inlay in color pattern is eked
out, strengthened as it were, by carving in
low relief. Like that Japanese box which
[207]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
I showed you a week ago with its little bats
in black horn, each bat wrought in relief in
the most delicate fashion, so here in the
bell-tower the effect of a color pattern is
enhanced by raising a part of the design in
carved relief. The feeling for such decora-
tive inlay continued into the time of the
Renaissance, although it disappeared sooner
in Florence, lingering much longer and
produced more effectively in Venice and in
the cities under Venetian control. The
Renaissance church of S. Maria Novella is
the latest in date of all the pieces of such
work that we have in Tuscany ; and in the
front of that church the whole scheme of
the exterior is based upon the decorative
pattern in color. The marbles of different
shades are used here just as they were in
the Cathedral of Florence, but with the
semi-classical spirit visible in the patterns,
whereas those of the Cathedral retained
their full mediaeval character.
Still the most important part of archi-
tectural work in color is, for us, that which
is done by painting on walls and ceilings,
[208]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
and, as we have had occasion to learn be-
fore, that painting which is done with the
deliberate purpose of narrating or describing
— that which we call commonly " painting "
without qualification, or the painting of
pictures. Here in the cloister of that same
Church of Santa Maria Novella (Fig. 1 1) is
a combination of painting in mere flat pat-
tern and the painting of pictures of historic
or religious significance, which marks that
period when pure adornment had reached
its culminating point in Europe, while at
the same time the painting of expression
and representation was approaching its per-
fect splendor.
The picture on the left is ascribed to
Giotto, but I think not with sufficient
authority. It seems to be the work of one
of his followers; that is, of a man of
greater acquired knowledge and of less vig-
orous purpose. We shall see that picture in
a moment, but look first at the general
effect proposed by the designer. You will
certainly understand that these patterns,
which I have praised by implication, are not
[209]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
•
in reality as sharp in contrast of color as the
black and white makes them. They do not
injure the picture by contrast. Before we
leave this view let me remind you that the
famous Spanish Chapel, of which we must
speak in a moment, opens out of this cloister.
The door to it is behind us as we stand here
looking up one arm of the cloister, and on
our right is the open arch which leads to
the green space within.
In this picture (Fig. 12), the Presenta-
tion of the Virgin in the Temple, you will
note the type of composition, the distribu-
tion of the parts, the way of telling the
story, which remained the accepted one for
two centuries at least. You will find it in
Titian's magnificent picture in the Acad-
emy of Venice ; you will find it in Tinto-
retto's no less magnificent picture in the
Church of Santa Maria del Orto.
As to the Spanish Chapel, it is one of
the most interesting rooms, artistically, even
in Italy, for it is a beautiful specimen of
Italian Gothic vaulting, a square room of
sufficient size to enable one to see the
[210]
FRESCO IN THE SPANISH CHAPEL, CLOISTER OF SANTA
MARIA NOVELLA, FLORENCE
LECTURE VI. FIGURE 13
THE SUPPER IN THE HOUSE OF LEV1 ; CENTRAL GROUP
Paul Veronese (1528-1588)
LECTURE VI FIGURE 14
Copyright by Curtis and Cameron, Publishers, Boston
CONCORD BRIDGE
In Memorial Hall of State House, Boston, Mass. Edward Simmons (b. 1852)
LECTURE VI. FIGURE 15
WALL OF A DRAWING-ROOM, NEW YORK CITY
LECTURE VI. FIGURE 16
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
paintings perfectly, and so adorned with those
paintings that vault and walls work together
in perfect harmony. There is nowhere a
more faultless example of how an interior
may be made glorious by painting, and its
true artistic character shown for the first
time, as it were, by such painting, while the
painting itself is satisfactorily lighted. The
wall above the altar, the north wall, oppo-
site the doorway which enters it from the
cloister, is adorned with the great picture
of the Crucifixion. On the west wall is
the still more important picture which I
show you now. (Fig. 13.) This is a sym-
bolic design, expressing, in a way too recon-
dite to be followed here, the relations of
society and life, intelligence and morals, to
the world of religion. It is commonly
called the Triumph of Saint Thomas Aqui-
nas. But, of course, while such work as
this is of faultless effect as mural decoration,
and has quite immeasurable interest for us
as expressing the religious and philosophical
thoughts of the age, — an age peculiarly sus-
ceptible and refined in its tone of thought,
[211]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
— it is still not as vigorous painting as that
which was to follow. That is always a very
difficult proposition to make clear to the
mind, to one's own intelligence, and even
more difficult to express in words — the
strength, the value, the profound interest of
the early work which is not as yet based
upon perfect artistic knowledge. Thus to
many a student of painting and of architec-
ture, that picture which we are now leaving
behind us is a more precious monument than
the superb work known to all of us as the
fresco by Raphael in the Vatican, The
Burning of the Suburb (Incendio del Borgo).
In that picture everything that art can do
for beauty in the way of admirable compo-
sition is done. Composition in line, com-
position in mass, are produced with faultless
accuracy; moreover, a notable tradition of
the church is preserved, and again the nat-
ural desire of every great draughtsman to
represent the nude figure in vigorous action
is made possible — even necessary in appear-
ance— by the subject, the sudden outburst
of fire, the sudden alarm, the beseeching
[212]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
multitude who address the Pope, all work
toward the result which Raphael had most
in mind. It was quite indifferent to him
that the picture is conceived in an impossi-
ble way, the flames flickering where there is
nothing to burn, the people collecting
water in Greek vases of beautiful type, but
in a most ineffective and impossible way,
the whole conception non-realistic. A
complete contrast is seen in one of those
tremendous Venetian conceptions, the fa-
mous Crucifixion of Tintoretto's which is
placed in one of the smaller rooms of the
Scuola di San Rocco in Venice. Now, it is
a truism, an accepted dictum, that the oil-
paintings of the Venetians were not as effec-
tive mural decoration as the frescos of the
Florentines; and if we understand exactly
what is meant by the true worth of paint-
ing, that dictum is to be accepted to the
full. One would rather adorn a stately hall
with such paintings as those of the Floren-
tine Chapel than with even the more
tranquil paintings of the Venetians — cer-
tainly rather than with the tumultuous and
C2I3]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
realistic composition we are considering —
a picture in which for the first time in
Christian art one meets with a studied ren-
dering of the Crucifixion as it might have
taken place. On the other hand the pic-
ture of which this group (Fig. 14) is the
central feature, the magnificent Paul Veron-
ese in the Academy of Venice, called the
Supper at the House of Levi, and more
generally called "The Green Man," from
the splendid figure which does not appear in
this group before you; this group, I say,
shows what the Venetian was when he was
painting with almost a simple decorative pur-
pose. There are those of us who think that
Paul Veronese was the greatest painter that
Europe has ever seen, and this because of
the unfailing serenity with which those
superb compositions, perfect in line and in
mass, perfect also in color, succeed one an-
other as we follow his tranquil and hard-
working life. It is hard to say that any
mural painting can be better than this —
and yet here again there is room to ask that
the hall to be adorned shall at all events be
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
planned with reference to the unmatched
stateliness of the decorations which are to
be given to it. There are few rooms which
such painting would not dwarf.
Now, in our modern art, there is one man
who, more than any other painter, has pre-
served the tranquil perfection which marked
the greatness of the Italian sixteenth century.
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes is represented in
America by one very noble composition,
the Muses rising to greet the Aspiring Soul,
or a subject of that character, a painting
which covers the wall at the head of the
great stairway in the Boston public library.
(Frontispiece.) And this picture shown after
a Paul Veronese, is to us as if we returned
to the earlier epoch of the Spanish Chapel
— so grave, so simple in its composition, so
subdued in its coloring is the modern's
work. But as a piece of mural decoration
there is this to be said and insisted on, that
the very dark background with the diaph-
anous figures floating in the air and relieved
against the darkness is notably a finer thing
than the white, or nearly white, background
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
with figures relieved upon it in strong
light and shade. The solid parapet in front
of you conceals nothing of importance in the
painting, but it does conceal the lowest edge
of it, and the space between that marble
wall and the painted surface beyond may be
twenty feet; so that the columns that you
see, relieved against the darker background
made by the picture and the vault which
they carry, mark the width of the passage-
way between. The smaller panels are sym-
bolical, one of pastoral poetry, the next one
of epic poetry, and they occupy the side
walls of the same square hall in which the
stair goes up. It is curious to see the de-
termination of the artist to relieve his figures
in a generally pale chord of color against a
somewhat darker background. They have,
however, no very close relation to the form
of the hall. Except in the case of the great
painting of the Muses, these pictures might
be in any large and stately room, and in
fact would be better were they not quite so
far above the eye. It is but seldom that a
room fits its painted decorations, and seldom
[216]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
that the paintings fill the room as perfectly
as in the case of the vaulted hall at Florence.
And now take another instance of the
tendency to paint historical and narrative
pictures on walls without considering too
closely their strictly mural nature. This
(Fig. 15) is the very splendid painting by
Edward Simmons, in the State House in
Boston, one of four pictures which by ex-
press order were painted to deal with scenes
in the patriotic history of Massachusetts.
The artist has himself explained his strong
feeling for the situation as it really was. It
was an early spring that year, so that even
when the fight at Concord Bridge occurred,
the whole country was bright with the ten-
der green of the coming vegetation. The
topography is understood to be accurate.
Now, there are many ways of representing
a battle, and an interesting screed might be
delivered on the comparative fitness of these
different ways of telling the story; but in
this one there seems to be peculiar fitness in
leaving to imagination the almost unpaint-
able struggle itself, to leave that wrapped in
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
white smoke through which flashes the blaze
of infantry musket and farmer's rifle, and to
concentrate the attention of the observer on
the rallying crowd of villagers who hurry
down the road to the scene of the conflict.
If it is not a perfectly understood mural
decoration, this is because it is so thoroughly
realized as a historical picture. The depth,
the perspective, the range of country from
the distant hill to the near foreground — all
this on the one hand ; and the vigor of move-
ment, even the violence of action, on the
part of the nearer figures, all tend to remove
it somewhat out of the sphere of mural
painting into that of the historical gallery.
But this, you will understand, is said by way
of hypercriticism — there is no reason why
one should not enjoy the painting as heartily
on the wall of the circular hall in which it
is found as if it hung in a gallery, while
again, the hall is the richer for the possession
of such a work of art.
I have now to ask you to consider how
we decorate rooms when such splendid ap-
pliances are not allowed us; and first consider
[2,8]
WALL OF SITTING-ROOM, NEW YORK CITY
LECTURE VI. FIGURE 17
I'ANEL FOR MURAL DECORATION
C. C. Coleman
LECTURE VI. FIGURE 18
HALL IN LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON, D. C.
LECTURE VI. FIGURE 20
CORRIDOR IN LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON, D. C.
LECTURE VI. FIGURE 21
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
the necessity of sticking to the general
lay-out of the room as our main theme.
Here, for instance (Fig. 16), is the design
for a drawing-room in New York, which
design, indeed, was carried out. The wood-
work— consisting of door-trim and window-
trim, and of the mirror frame, so arranged as
to correspond with the doorway and also
with the mantelpiece, which is inclosed in
the mirror frame, as you see — is all framed
of white holly with the panels of doorway
and mirror in mahogany, very delicately
carved in low relief. The carving takes the
form of a continuous little vine climbing
each vertical member. But in the window-
trim no such broad panelled frame is used, only
a narrow group of mouldings of the white
wood with a slight narrow band of mahogany
to serve as "echo," and to bind the room
together in design. Now, to carry out the
wall decoration, the whole surface is divided
up into squares, each one filled with a deli-
cately suggested pattern only slightly relieved
in color from the background, and above
this is a frieze of much stronger coloring,
[219]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
repeating in paler tints the creamy white and
dull red of the woodwork. The little sugges-
tions of leafage and tree-form with birds
shown in the panels of this frieze are in the
working scheme wrought into almost real-
istic effects of treetops, and of birds that,
indeed, seem solid enough. In this case there
is no attempt, as you see, to provide for the
hanging of pictures. This drawing-room
was intended to be complete in itself; but
take this other case (Fig. 17), the case of
a large living-room in which it was in-
tended to house a great many works of art
hung on the walls, — water-colors, and now
and then a smaller painting, and perhaps a
number of etchings. You see there is a
simple dado of dark wood; and above that
the surface of flock paper, or velvet paper as
it is called nowadays, affords a faultless back-
ground for the drawings to be hung upon it.
They might be crowded much closer than
they are shown here. The band of back-
ground finishes at the top with a row of those
Japanese colored woodcuts, which were
cheap enough at the time when this design
[220]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
was made, and which can still be bought at
reasonable prices if one is fortunate; and
above this again a very rich flowered French
paper was used. In practice this scheme
was modified; it was thought necessary to
increase the width of the background for
pictures, and accordingly the Japanese frieze
disappeared, the band of velvet paper was
made higher, and a group of wooden mould-
ings alone separated it from the very rich and
beautifully composed flowered surface above,
of which the suggested figure in the photo-
graph gives no idea at all. The complete
success of the room was partly dependent upon
that wall-paper, which was, indeed, a remark-
able piece of modern designing — its discovery
at the right time a real stroke of good for-
tune. It would have been feasible to have
had such a paper made to order; but the
cost of it in America with nine blocks to
have cut and used in printing would have
been prohibitory. This would be the way
to proceed if you clearly understood that
your purpose was to show to the best ad-
vantage your valuable prints and drawings;
[221]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
but now look at Fig. 1 8, to see Charles Cole-
man's notion of how to make the elaborate
color compositions themselves, the repre-
sentative paintings themselves, a part of the
wall. These that I have to show you are
some of his compositions painted lately in oil
and intended for mural work. The frames,
indeed, are not what he would choose — he
desires to see the pictures framed into the
panelling. In the first one, as you see, he has
represented a small oleander tree growing
in a very beautiful bronze pot, and beside it
some branches of another flowering plant in
a Chinese vase. In the oblong picture
(Fig. 19), the same bronze pot does duty,
used this time as the receptacle for water
and branches of a flowering tree; while
its very beautiful cover lies beside it, and
a saucer and an ornamental glass carry
other blossoms of the same tree. The dec-
orative sense, you see, is very strong, and
in each case the artist has used his cipher
in a fashion to truly aid the decorative effect,
which in the case of the oblong picture is
enhanced by the very splendid eastern stuff
[222]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
which forms the background. That cipher,
you will perceive, is merely the three initial
letters of his name turned into crescents and
interlaced ; all with a kind of reminiscence of
Diane de Poitiers. And now see in Fig. 20
how, in very recent times, these decorative
appliances, which we have dealt with, work
out when used together. This is in the
Library of Congress in Washington, the
northernmost corridor on the ground floor,
the great stair being behind us and on our
right. The lower wall and the floor are
not now engaging our attention; they are
of simple veined marble and of simple mo-
saic. But the vault is covered with mosaic
in a very rich and fairly successful decor-
ative pattern, and the lunettes are filled by
the paintings of Charles Sprague Pearce.
The large picture opposite us is called The
Family; the lunettes on the left are filled
with the several subjects — Religion first on
the left, Labor, Study, and Recreation. The
first of the series, Religion, is not visible in
the picture we are just leaving ; it is a beau-
tiful composition and a beautiful thought.
[223]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
Here again (Fig. 21) is one of the long
corridors in that richly adorned building,
and the lunettes here, which are faintly seen
on the left, are all filled by the paintings
of Walter McEwen. You get from this
picture a fairly good idea of how such highly
adorned passages tell in effect when they are
carried out with complete control of ma-
terial; with this exception, that the photo-
graph betrays us a little and makes the blacks
and the whites too sharp in contrast and too
aggressive.
To close my lecture, and with it this
course, we will speak of the latest of those
mural paintings by Sargent which have been
put up at different times in the Boston Pub-
lic Library. This picture, reproduced in
Fig. 22, was in place in October, 1903,
when I saw it with absolute astonishment
and with a feeling that at last the country
had been so favored as to possess a really
superb piece of mural decoration. In that
way it is one of the finest things of mod-
ern times, able to hold its own against any
composition of the nineteenth or twentieth
[224]
From a Copley print, copyright, 1903, by Curtis and Cameron, Publishers, Boston
MURAL FAINTING IN PUBLIC LIBRARY, BOSTON, MASS
John Singer Sargent, (b. 1856)
LECTURE VI. FIGURE 22
PANEL FOR MURAL DECORATION
C. C. Coleman
LECTURE VI. FIGURE 19
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
century. The picture fills the end of a
gallery of great length, but only twenty-six
feet wide and thirty-two feet high ; and of
this thirty-two feet, thirteen feet is the
height of the semi-circular lunette, where
the wall is bounded by the barrel-vault
above. That lunette then, the semi-circle
and a little more, is filled with a great com-
position of religious significance, and below
it is a broad band forming a frieze of painted
figures. These two painted surfaces occupy
all of the wall except a plain gray marble
dado. Right in the middle of the color
composition is a strange oblong panel filled
and more than filled by a secondary panel
in the form of a broad cross. This cross-
shaped panel is filled by a Crucifixion; the
crucified Saviour and the cross that bears him
modelled in high relief; and the groups of
mouldings which inclose the panels also
in relief and gilded with burnished gold.
At the sides of the crucified figure are
Adam and Eve crouching; held to the
cross by the blood-colored band of drapery
which has its own obvious significance ; and,
[225]
THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF
by a very unusual reading of the symbol, it
is Adam and Eve themselves who catch in
goblets the blood that drips from the
wounds made in the hands of Christ. The
feet of Christ press upon the coiled and
folded serpent, whose coils however hold
fast the feet of Adam. All this, you under-
stand, is in relief, and also in full color with
much use of gold, and this forms the centre
of the great composition.
Now, the lunette above and around the
uppermost member of the cross presents a
great group of the three persons of the
Trinity draped with a single vast robe, upon
the border of which is wrought the often
repeated word, Sanctus, sanctus. The three
faces are in relief; and as you are told, and
as appears true, they are cast in the same
mould, their crowns only differing as differ,
in European political history, the crowns of
the pope, of the emperor, and of the king.
The figures are relieved upon a splendid back-
ground of sombre blue, like that of the mid-
night sky. The frieze below is occupied
by the angels of the Passion, and it is a mag-
[226]
THE ARTS OF DESIGN
nificent band of grandly harmonized color.
The whole effect gives to the lover of mural
decoration but little to desire; and yet we
know that the effect will be modified when
the rest of the hall is painted. It is to be
hoped that the artist himself will be there
to save the picture from possible injury by
its new surroundings, and indeed to give it
that slightly modified tone which the new
conditions may require.
[227]
N
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