APPLICATION OF THE STEREOSCOPE TO SCULPTURE,
ARCHITECTURE, AND ENGINEERING.
To the arts of sculpture and architecture, the processes of binocular
photography and stereoscopic combination are particularly applicable.
The landscape painter has every day within his reach examples of the
picturesque, the wild and the sublime in nature. In the fields which
surround him, in the river, or even in the “brook that bubbles by,” on
the shore, on the heath, or on the mountain side, he has the choice of
materials for every department of his art. The sculptor has no such
advantage. Swathed in impenetrable drapery the human figure mocks his
eager eye, and it is only by stolen glances, or during angel visits,
few and far between, that he can see those divine forms which it is his
business to portray. He must therefore quit his home and seek for the
models of ancient and modern art. In the British Museum, in the Louvre,
in the Vatican, and in the repositories of art in Berlin, Munich, and
other European cities, he must spend months and years in the study of
his profession. He must copy, day after day, those master triumphs of
genius which the taste of ages has consecrated, and gather from their
study the true principles of his art. Transferred to his own studio,
these copies will be his instructor and his guide. They will exhibit
to him forms more than human, though human still, embodying all that
is true and beautiful in what might be man. The value of these copies,
however, depends on the skill and care with which they have been taken;
but no labour however great, and no power of drawing however masterly,
can give even an approximate idea either of the outline or round of
solid figures, whether single or in groups. Light and shade can alone
evolve those muscular prominences, or those soft and sphere-like
relievos which give such power and beauty to forms, male and female;
but how can an artist catch and fix those lights and shades which give
relief to the parts which they illuminate or obscure? The light of
the sun, even in a cloudless sky, is ever varying in intensity, and
the breadth and direction of the shadows which he casts are varying
from hour to hour. In a cloudy day, the motion of the clouds, and the
varying reflexions within his apartment, subject the lights and shadows
to constant change. The portions of the drawing executed in the morning
will not harmonize with what is drawn at noon, or during the decline
of day. We consider it, therefore, impossible to execute a drawing of
a statue, or of a group of statues, from which the artist can have
anything like an accurate idea of the forms which compose them.
From all these difficulties the sculptor has been relieved by the
invention of the photographic process. He may thus take copies of
statues in a few minutes, and take them in all their aspects, and as
seen at various distances, and in this manner he will obtain drawings
with the shadows as they existed at a particular instant, so that the
lights and shades, upon every individual part of the statue, will be
correctly related to each other. But valuable as these drawings are,
compared with those executed by the pencil, their value becomes tenfold
greater when they are taken with the binocular camera, and with small
lenses, as already described. When combined in the stereoscope, he may
reproduce the statue in relief, in all its aspects, and of different
sizes, and derive from its study the same advantages which the statue
itself would have furnished. In one respect the creations of the
stereoscope surpass the original. While the artist is surveying and
drawing instruction from the marble prototype, its lights and shadows,
and consequently the delicate forms, convex and concave, by which they
are produced, are constantly changing, whereas, in the stereoscopic
statue, everything is fixed and invariable.[63] In taking busts and
statues from the living subject, the sculptor will derive great
advantage from the stereoscope. Double pictures of the whole, or of any
portion of the subject, may be taken and raised into relief, and from
such binocular pictures, executed on one side of the globe, an artist,
on the other side, may complete an admirable statue. The dying and the
dead may thus be modelled without the rude contact of a mask, and those
noble forms perpetuated which affection or gratitude has endeared.
[63] A French sculptor has actually modelled a statue from the
stereoscopic relief of binocular pictures.
We must warn the sculptor, however, against the employment of binocular
pictures taken with large lenses. Not only will the individual picture
be deformed, but a double deformity will be induced by their union; and
whether he copies from a statue or from a living figure, his work must
be defective, even to an ordinary eye.
In architecture, and all those arts in which ornamental forms are
given to solid materials, the binocular camera and the stereoscope
will be found indispensable. The carvings of ancient, or mediæval,
or modern art may be copied and reproduced in relief, whatever be
the material from which they have been cut. The rich forms of Gothic
architecture, and the more classical productions of Greek and Roman
genius, will swell the artist’s portfolio, and possess all the value
of casts. With the aid of the Kaleidoscope the modern artist may
surpass all his predecessors. He may create an infinite variety of
those forms of symmetry which enter so largely into the decorative
arts; and if the individual forms, which constitute the symmetrical
picture, are themselves solid, the binocular-kaleidoscopic pictures,
taken photographically, will be raised into the original relief of
their component parts, or they may be represented directly to the eye
in relief, by semi-lenses placed at the ocular extremities of the
reflecting plates.[64] If the symmetrical forms are taken from lines
in the same plane, no relief will be obtained from the kaleidoscopic
pictures.
[64] See my Treatise on the Kaleidoscope, second edition, just
published.
But it is not merely to the decorative parts of architecture that the
stereoscope is applicable. The noblest edifices, whether of a civil, a
religious, or a military character, which he could otherwise study only
as a traveller, and represent in hurried and imperfect sketches, will,
when taken binocularly, stand before him in their full relief and
grandeur, reflecting to his eye the very lights and shadows which at a
given hour the sun cast upon their walls.
In the erection of public buildings, hourly or daily photographs have
been taken of them, to shew to the absent superintendent the progress
of his work; but these pictures will be still more expressive if
binocular ones are combined in the stereoscope.
To the engineer and the mechanist, and the makers of instruments of all
kinds, the stereoscope will be of inestimable value. The difficulty of
representing machinery is so great that it is not easy to understand
its construction or its mode of operation from plans and perspective
views of it. The union of one or two binocular pictures of it, when
thrown into relief, will, in many cases, remove the difficulty both
of drawing and understanding it. Photographs of machinery, however,
consisting of a number of minute parts at different distances from
the eye, have, when taken by large lenses, all the defects which we
explained in reference to trees and their branches and leaves. Supports
and axles will be transparent, and the teeth of the wheels, and the
small and distant parts of the mechanism, will be seen through all the
nearer parts whose width is less than the diameter of the lens.
In taking a binocular picture of a machine or instrument consisting
of various parts, that minute accuracy which is necessary to give
the true form and expression of the human face is not required;
but if it should happen that, in a correct binocular view of the
object, parts are concealed which it would be useful to see, we must
discover the binocular angle which will shew these parts in the two
pictures, or, generally speaking, which will give the best view of
the mechanism, and then adjust the lenses of the camera to give the
desired representations of it. These observations will be found useful
in obtaining stereoscopic views of the structures in carpentry and
ship-building.