the ancients allowed themselves in using the orders), "will think
himself happy, in designing a building that is to be enriched with the
Doric order, that he has all the latitude between two and a half and
seventeen for the projecture of its capital; that he can proportion
this projecture to the general idea of his building anywhere between
these extremes and show his authority. This is an happiness to the
person of real genius;... but as all architects are not, nor can be
expected to be, of this stamp, it is needful some standard should be
established, founded upon what a good taste shall most admire in the
antique, and fixed as a model from which to work, or as a test to
which we may have recourse in disputes and controversies."
If to these words be added his happy definition of the sense of
proportion as "fancy under the restraint and conduct of judgment," and
his closing caution that "it is mean in the undertaker of a great work
to copy strictly, and it is dangerous to give a loose to fancy
_without a perfect knowledge how far a variation may be justified_,"
the unprofessional reader may form some idea of the importance of
proportion and of the necessity for observing its rules.
If proportion is the good breeding of architecture, symmetry, or the
answering of one part to another, may be defined as the sanity of
decoration. The desire for symmetry, for balance, for rhythm in form
as well as in sound, is one of the most inveterate of human instincts.
Yet for years Anglo-Saxons have been taught that to pay any regard to
symmetry in architecture or decoration is to truckle to one of the
meanest forms of artistic hypocrisy. The master who has taught this
strange creed, in words magical enough to win acceptance for any
doctrine, has also revealed to his generation so many of the forgotten
beauties of early art that it is hard to dispute his principles of
æsthetics. As a guide through the byways of art, Mr. Ruskin is
entitled to the reverence and gratitude of all; but as a logical
exponent of the causes and effects of the beauty he discovers, his
authority is certainly open to question. For years he has spent the
full force of his unmatched prose in denouncing the enormity of
putting a door or a window in a certain place in order that it may
correspond to another; nor has he scrupled to declare to the victims
of this practice that it leads to abysses of moral as well as of
artistic degradation.
Time has taken the terror from these threats and architects are
beginning to see that a regard for external symmetry, far from
interfering with the requirements of house-planning, tends to produce
a better, because a more carefully studied, plan, as well as a more
convenient distribution of wall-space; but in the lay mind there still
lingers not only a vague association between outward symmetry and
interior discomfort, between a well-balanced facade and badly
distributed rooms, but a still vaguer notion that regard for symmetry
indicates poverty of invention, lack of ingenuity and weak
subservience to a meaningless form.
What the instinct for symmetry means, philosophers may be left to
explain; but that it does exist, that it means something, and that it
is most strongly developed in those races which have reached the
highest artistic civilization, must be acknowledged by all students of
sociology. It is, therefore, not superfluous to point out that, in
interior decoration as well as in architecture, a regard for symmetry,
besides satisfying a legitimate artistic requirement, tends to make
the average room not only easier to furnish, but more comfortable to
live in.
[Illustration _PLATE XI._
DRAWING-ROOM IN BERKELEY SQUARE, LONDON. XVIII CENTURY.]
As the effect produced by a room depends chiefly upon the distribution
of its openings, it will be well to begin by considering the treatment
of the walls. It has already been said that the decorator can often
improve a room, not only from the artistic point of view, but as
regards the comfort of its inmates, by making some slight change in
the position of its openings. Take, for instance, a library in which
it is necessary to put the two principal bookcases one on each side of
a door or fireplace. If this opening is in the _centre_ of one side of
the room, the wall-decorations may be made to balance, and the
bookcases may be of the same width,--an arrangement which will give to
the room an air of spaciousness and repose. Should the wall-spaces on
either side of the opening be of unequal extent, both decorations and
bookcases must be modified in size and design; and not only does the
problem become more difficult, but the result, because necessarily
less simple, is certain to be less satisfactory. Sometimes, on the
other hand, convenience is sacrificed to symmetry; and in such cases
it is the decorator's business to remedy this defect, while preserving
to the eye the aspect of symmetry. A long narrow room may be taken as
an example. If the fireplace is in the centre of one of the long sides
of the room, with a door directly opposite, the hearth will be without
privacy and the room virtually divided into two parts, since, in a
narrow room, no one cares to sit in a line with the doorway. This
division of the room makes it more difficult to furnish and less
comfortable to live in, besides wasting all the floor-space between
the chimney and the door. One way of overcoming the difficulty is to
move the door some distance down the long side of the room, so that
the space about the fireplace is no longer a thoroughfare, and the
privacy of the greater part of the room is preserved, even if the door
be left open. The removal of the door from the centre of one side of
the room having disturbed the equilibrium of the openings, this
equilibrium may be restored by placing in a line with the door, at the
other end of the same side-wall, a piece of furniture corresponding as
nearly as possible in height and width to the door. This will satisfy
the eye, which in matters of symmetry demands, not absolute similarity
of detail, but merely correspondence of outline and dimensions.
It is idle to multiply examples of the various ways in which such
readjustments of the openings may increase the comfort and beauty of a
room. Every problem in house decoration demands a slightly different
application of the same general principles, and the foregoing
instances are intended only to show how much depends upon the placing
of openings and how reasonable is the decorator's claim to have a
share in planning the background upon which his effects are to be
produced.
It may surprise those whose attention has not been turned to such
matters to be told that in all but the most cheaply constructed houses
the interior walls are invariably treated as an order. In all houses,
even of the poorest kind, the walls of the rooms are finished by a
plain projecting board adjoining the floor, surmounted by one or more
mouldings. This base, as it is called, is nothing more nor less than
the part of an order between shaft and floor, or shaft and pedestal,
as the case may be. If it be next remarked that the upper part of the
wall, adjoining the ceiling, is invariably finished by a moulded
projection corresponding with the crowning member of an order, it will
be clear that the shaft, with its capital, has simply been omitted, or
that the uniform wall-space between the base and cornice has been
regarded as replacing it. In rooms of a certain height and importance
the column or pilaster is frequently restored to its proper place
between base and cornice; but where such treatment is too monumental
for the dimensions of the room, the main lines of the wall-space
should none the less be regarded as distinctly architectural, and the
decoration applied should be subordinate to the implied existence of
an order. (For the application of an order to walls, see Plates XLII
and L.)
Where the shafts are omitted, the eye undoubtedly feels a lack of
continuity in the treatment: the cornice seems to hang in air and the
effect produced is unsatisfactory. This is obviated by the use of
panelling, the vertical lines carried up at intervals from base to
cornice satisfying the need for some visible connection between the
upper and lower members of the order. Moreover, if the lines of the
openings are carried up to the cornice (as they are in all
well-designed schemes of decoration), the openings may be considered
as intercolumniations and the intermediate wall-spaces as the shafts
or piers supporting the cornice.
In well-finished rooms the order is usually imagined as resting, not
on the floor, but on pedestals, or rather on a continuous pedestal.
This continuous pedestal, or "dado" as it is usually called, is
represented by a plinth surmounted by mouldings, by an intermediate
member often decorated with tablets or sunk panels with moulded
margins, and by a cornice. The use of the dado raises the chief
wall-decoration of the room to a level with the eye and prevents its
being interrupted or concealed by the furniture which may be placed
against the walls. This fact makes it clear that in all well-designed
rooms there should be a dado about two and a half feet high. If lower
than this, it does not serve its purpose of raising the
wall-decoration to a line above the furniture; while the high dado
often seen in modern American rooms throws all the rest of the
panelling out of scale and loses its own significance as the pedestal
supporting an order.
In rooms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when little
furniture was used, the dado was often richly ornamented, being
sometimes painted with delicate arabesques corresponding with those on
the doors and inside shutters. As rooms grew smaller and the quantity
of furniture increased so much that the dado was almost concealed, the
treatment of the latter was wisely simplified, being reduced, as a
rule, to sunk panels and a few strongly marked mouldings. The
decorator cannot do better than plan the ornamentation of his dado
according to the amount of furniture to be placed against the walls.
In corridor or antechamber, or in a ball-room, the dado may receive a
more elaborate treatment than is necessary in a library or
drawing-room, where probably much less of it will be seen. It was not
unusual, in the decoration of lobbies and corridors in old French and
Italian houses, to omit the dado entirely if an order was used, thus
bringing the wall-decoration down to the base-board; but this was done
only in rooms or passage-ways not meant to contain any furniture.
The three noblest forms of wall-decoration are fresco-painting,
panelling, and tapestry hangings. In the best period of decoration all
three were regarded as subordinate to the architectural lines of the
room. The Italian fresco-painters, from Giotto to Tiepolo, never lost
sight of the interrelation between painting and architecture. It
matters not if the connection between base and cornice be maintained
by actual pilasters or mouldings, or by their painted or woven
imitations. The line, and not the substance, is what the eye demands.
It is a curious perversion of artistic laws that has led certain
critics to denounce painted architecture or woven mouldings. As in
imaginative literature the author may present to his reader as
possible anything that he has the talent to make the reader accept, so
in decorative art the artist is justified in presenting to the eye
whatever his skill can devise to satisfy its requirements; nor is
there any insincerity in this proceeding. Decorative art is not an
exact science. The decorator is not a chemist or a physiologist; it is
part of his mission, not to explain illusions, but to produce them.
Subject only to laws established by the limitations of the eye, he is
master of the domain of fancy, of that _pays bleu_ of the impossible
that it is his privilege to throw open to the charmed imagination.
[Illustration: _PLATE XII._
ROOM IN THE VILLA VERTEMATI, NEAR CHIAVENNA.
XVI OR EARLY XVII CENTURY.
(EXAMPLE OF FRESCOED CEILING.)]
Of the means of wall-decoration already named, fresco-painting and
stucco-panelling were generally preferred by Italian decorators, and
wood-panelling and tapestries by those of northern Europe. The use of
arras naturally commended itself to the northern noble, shivering in
his draughty castles and obliged to carry from one to another the
furniture and hangings that the unsettled state of the country made it
impossible to leave behind him. Italy, however, long supplied the
finest designs to the tapestry-looms of northern Europe, as the
Italian painters provided ready-made backgrounds of peaked hills,
winding torrents and pinnacled cities to the German engravers and the
Flemish painters of their day.
Tapestry, in the best periods of house-decoration, was always
subordinated to the architectural lines of the room (see Plate XI).
Where it was not specially woven for the panels it was intended to
fill, the subdivisions of the wall-spaces were adapted to its
dimensions. It was carefully fitted into the panelling of the room,
and never made to turn an angle, as wall-paper does in modern rooms,
nor combined with other odds and ends of decoration. If a room was
tapestried, it was tapestried, not decorated in some other way, with
bits of tapestry hung here and there at random over the fundamental
lines of the decoration. Nothing can be more beautiful than tapestry
properly used; but hung up without regard to the composition of the
room, here turning an angle, there covering a part of the dado or
overlapping a pilaster, it not only loses its own value, but destroys
the whole scheme of decoration with which it is thus unmeaningly
combined.
Italian panelling was of stone, marble or stucco, while in northern
Europe it was so generally of wood that (in England especially) the
term _panelling_ has become almost synonymous with _wood-panelling_,
and in some minds there is a curious impression that any panelling not
of wood is a sham. As a matter of fact, wood-panelling was used in
northern Europe simply because it kept the cold out more successfully
than a _revêtement_ of stone or plaster; while south of the Alps its
use was avoided for the equally good reason that in hot climates it
attracts vermin.
If priority of use be held as establishing a standard in decoration,
wood-panelling should be regarded as a sham and plaster-panelling as
its lawful prototype; for the use of stucco in the panelling of walls
and ceilings is highly characteristic of Roman interior decoration,
and wood-panelling as at present used is certainly of later origin.
But nothing can be more idle than such comparisons, nor more
misleading than the idea that stucco is a sham because it seeks to
imitate wood. It does not seek to imitate wood. It is a recognized
substance, of incalculable value for decorative effect, and no more
owes its place in decoration to a fancied resemblance to some other
material than the nave of a cathedral owes its place in architecture
to the fancied resemblance to a ship.
In the hands of a great race of artistic _virtuosi_ like the Italians,
stucco has produced effects of beauty which in any other substance
would have lost something of their freshness, their plastic
spontaneity. From the delicate traceries of the Roman baths and the
loveliness of Agostino da Duccio's chapel-front at Perugia, to the
improvised bravura treatment of the Farnese theatre at Parma, it has
served, through every phase of Italian art, to embody the most refined
and studied, as well as the most audacious and ephemeral, of
decorative conceptions.
It must not be supposed that because painting, panelling and tapestry
are the noblest forms of wall-decoration, they are necessarily the
most unattainable. Good tapestry is, of course, very expensive, and
even that which is only mediocre is beyond the reach of the average
purchaser; while stuff hangings and wall-papers, its modern
successors, have less to recommend them than other forms of
wall-decoration. With painting and panelling the case is different.
When painted walls were in fashion, there existed, below the great
creative artists, schools of decorative designers skilled in the art
of fresco-decoration, from the simplest kind to the most ornate. The
demand for such decoration would now call forth the same order of
talent, and many artists who are wasting their energies on the
production of indifferent landscapes and unsuccessful portraits might,
in the quite different field of decorative painting, find the true
expression of their talent.
To many minds the mention of a frescoed room suggests the image of a
grandiose saloon, with gods and goddesses of heroic size crowding the
domed ceiling and lofty walls; but the heroic style of fresco-painting
is only one of its many phases. To see how well this form of
decoration may be adapted to small modern rooms and to our present way
of living, it is only necessary to study the walls of the little
Pompeian houses, with their delicate arabesques and slender, fanciful
figures, or to note the manner in which the Italian painters treated
the small rooms of the casino or garden-pavilion which formed part of
every Italian country-seat. Examples of this light style of decoration
may be found in the Casino del grotto in the grounds of the Palazzo
del T at Mantua, in some of the smaller rooms of the hunting-lodge of
Stupinigi near Turin, and in the casino of the Villa Valmarana near
Vicenza, where the frescoes are by Tiepolo; while in France a pleasing
instance of the same style of treatment is seen in the small octagonal
pavilion called the Belvédère, frescoed by Le Riche, in the gardens of
the Petit Trianon at Versailles.
As regards panelling, it has already been said that if the effect
produced be satisfactory to the eye, the substance used is a matter of
indifference. Stone-panelling has the merit of solidity, and the
outlines of massive stone mouldings are strong and dignified; but the
same effect may be produced in stucco, a material as well suited to
the purpose as stone, save for its greater fragility. Wood-panelling
is adapted to the most delicate carving, greater sharpness of edge and
clearness of undercutting being obtainable than in stucco: though this
qualification applies only to the moulded stucco ornaments used from
economy, not to those modelled by hand. Used in the latter way, stucco
may be made to produce the same effects as carved wood, and for
delicacy of modelling in low relief it is superior to any other
material. There is, in short, little to choose between the different
substances, except in so far as one or the other may commend itself to
the artist as more peculiarly suited to the special requirements of
his design, or to the practical conditions regulating his work.
[Illustration: _PLATE XIII._
DRAWING-ROOM AT EASTON NESTON HALL, ENGLAND.
BUILT BY NICHOLAS HAWKESMOOR, 1702.
(EXAMPLE OF STUCCO DECORATION.)]
It is to this regard for practical conditions, and not to any fancied
superiority over other materials, that the use of wood-panelling in
northern Europe may most reasonably be attributed. Not only was wood
easy to obtain, but it had the additional merit of keeping out the
cold: two qualities sufficient to recommend it to the common sense of
French and English architects. From the decorative point of view it
has, when unpainted, one undeniable advantage over stucco--that is,
beauty of color and veining. As a background for the dull gilding of
old picture-frames, or as a setting for tapestry, nothing can surpass
the soft rich tones of oak or walnut panelling, undefaced by the
application of a shiny varnish.
With the introduction of the orders into domestic architecture and the
treatment of interior walls with dado and cornice, the panelling of
the wall-space between those two members began to assume definite
proportions. In England and France, before that time, wall-panels were
often divided into small equal-sized rectangles which, from lack of
any central motive, produced a most inadequate impression. Frequently,
too, in the houses of the Renaissance the panelling, instead of being
carried up to the ceiling, was terminated two or three feet below it a
form of treatment that reduced the height of the room and broke the
connection between walls and ceiling. This awkward device of stunted
panelling, or, as it might be called, of an unduly heightened dado,
has been revived by modern decorators; and it is not unusual to see
the walls of a room treated, as regards their base-board and cornice,
as part of an order, and then panelled up to within a foot or two of
the cornice, without apparent regard to the true _raison d'être_ of
the dado (see Plate XII).
If, then, the design of the wall-panelling is good, it matters little
whether stone, stucco, or wood be used. In all three it is possible to
obtain effects ranging from the grandeur of the great loggia of the
Villa Madama to the simplicity of any wood-panelled parlor in a New
England country-house, and from the greatest costliness to an outlay
little larger than that required for the purchase of a good
wall-paper.
It was well for the future of house-decoration when medical science
declared itself against the use of wall-papers. These hangings have,
in fact, little to recommend them. Besides being objectionable on
sanitary grounds, they are inferior as a wall-decoration to any form
of treatment, however simple, that maintains, instead of effacing, the
architectural lines of a room. It was the use of wall-paper that led
to the obliteration of the over-door and over-mantel, and to the
gradual submerging under a flood of pattern of all the main lines of
the wall-spaces. Its merits are that it is cheap, easy to put on and
easy to remove. On the other hand, it is readily damaged, soon fades,
and cannot be cleaned; while from the decorative point of view there
can be no comparison between the flat meanderings of wall-paper
pattern and the strong architectural lines of any scheme of panelling,
however simple. Sometimes, of course, the use of wall-paper is a
matter of convenience, since it saves both time and trouble; but a
papered room can never, decoratively or otherwise, be as satisfactory
as one in which the walls are treated in some other manner.
The hanging of walls with chintz or any other material is even more
objectionable than the use of wall-paper, since it has not the saving
merit of cheapness. The custom is probably a survival of the time when
wall-decorations had to be made in movable shape; and this facility of
removal points to the one good reason for using stuff hangings. In a
hired house, if the wall-decorations are ugly, and it is necessary to
hide them, the rooms may be hung with stuff which the departing tenant
can take away. In other words, stuff hangings are serviceable if used
as a tent; as a permanent mode of decoration they are both unhealthy
and inappropriate. There is something unpleasant in the idea of a
dust-collecting fabric fixed to the wall, so that it cannot be shaken
out at will like a curtain. Textile fabrics are meant to be moved,
folded, shaken: they have none of the qualities of permanence and
solidity which we associate with the walls of a room. The much-derided
marble curtains of the Jesuit church in Venice are no more illogical
than stuff wall-hangings.