The Bases of Design. Walter Crane
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу The Bases of Design - Walter Crane страница 4
Название: The Bases of Design
Автор: Walter Crane
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Документальная литература
isbn: 4057664620507
isbn:
END OF GREEK COUCH.
GREEK LOW-BACKED THRONE.
4. The value of largeness of style in the design and treatment of the groups and figures themselves, both as sculpture pure and simple and as architectural ornament.
When we come to examine the accessories of Greek life, furniture, pottery, dress, we find them all characterized by the same qualities in design as we have just been noting in the architecture; the fundamental architectural feeling seems to pervade them. A simplicity of line, balance, and reserve of ornament distinguishes alike their seats and chairs and tables, caskets, vases and vessels, and the expressive lines of their dresses and draperies falling into the lines of the figure give life and variety, while they contrast with the severity of the architectural lines and planes.
Now, so far we have been considering the architecture of the lintel, and its bearing upon design, and the qualities and principles we may learn from it generally.
With the use of the round arch—invented, it is said, by the Greeks, but always associated with the Romans, who used it—quite different effects come in, with different motives and ideas in design. The Roman architecture, the round arch, fulfils the functions of both construction and ornament, on the same principle of recurrence, or repetition, we have noticed before; as, for instance, in the Colosseum, where the tiers of round arches which support the outer wall of the building serve both the constructive and decorative functions. With the use of the arch the arcade becomes a constructive feature of great decorative value, and takes the place in Roman and Romanesque buildings, with a lighter and more varied effect, of the columned Greek cella. Sunshine, no doubt, had much to do with its use, since a covered arcaded loggia, or porch in front of a building, so frequent in Italy, gave both shelter and coolness. The use of the arch led to vaulting, and to the use of arch mouldings, enrichments, and to the covering the vaults with mosaic and painting, and the vaulting led to the dome, which, again, offered a splendid field for the mosaicist and the painter.
CONSTRUCTIVE & DECORATIVE USE OF ROUND ARCH & PILASTER FLAVIAN AMPHITHEATRE (COLOSSEUM) ROME.
(Ferguson).
The Romans borrowed all their architectural details from the Greeks, and varied and enriched them, adding many more members to the cornice mouldings, and carving stone garlands upon their friezes, to take the place of the primitive festal ones of leaves which were hung there, as in the relief of the visit of Bacchus to Icarius, a Romano-Greek sculpture in the British Museum.
HANGING OF THE FESTAL GARLAND,
FROM A GRÆCO ROMAN RELIEF IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM.
They (the Romans) fully realized the ornamental value of colonnades and porticoes, and they used the column, varying the orders, and translating them into pilasters freely as decorations on the façades and walls of their buildings, slicing up the peristyles of temples, as it were, for the sake of their ornamental effect, cutting down the columns into pilasters, and placing them, with intervening friezes, one on the top of the other, masking the construction of the real building, a favourite device with the Renascence architects.
USE OF DECORATIVE SCULPTURE IN ROMAN ARCHITECTURE: THE ARCH OF CONSTANTINE.
Roman architecture may be considered really as a transitional style. While its true constructive characteristic is the round arch, every detail of the Greek or Lintel architecture is used both without and with the arch, and in the latter case the column frequently becomes a wall decoration in the shape of a pilaster, as well as the cornice, and is no longer made use of, as in true lintel construction, to support the weight of the roof. In their viaducts and bridges and baths they were great builders with the arch, but, like some modern engineers, when they wanted to beautify they borrowed architectural ornament from the Greeks.
Nothing very fresh was gained for design in these adaptations except a certain heavy richness of detail in the sculptured cornices and friezes, and coffered ceilings. The use of the flat pilaster, however, led to the panelled pilaster with its elegant arabesque, which was afterwards revived and developed with such extraordinary grace and variety by the artists of the Renascence and carried from Italy westward.
With the round arch, too, several important decorative spaces were given to the designer, the spandrel, the panel, the medallion, all of which, with the frieze, may be seen utilized for the decorative sculpture on the arch of Constantine. The decorative use of inscriptions is also a feature in Roman architecture, and the dignity of the form of their capital letters was well adapted to ornamental effect in square masses upon their triumphal arches and along the entablature of their temples.
The Romans, too, brought the domed roof and the mosaic floor into use, and were great in the use of coloured marbles; also stucco and plaster work in interiors, the free and beautiful plaster work found in the tombs on the Latin Way being well known; so that on the whole we owe to them the illustration of the effective use of many beautiful arts, which the Italians have inherited to this day, though it must be said often with more skill than taste.
One might say, generally and ultimately, Roman art exemplified that love of show, and the external signs of power, pomp, splendour, and luxury which became dear as well as fatal to them, as they appear to do to every conquering people, until they are finally enervated and overcome as if by the Nemesis of their own supremacy.
MOSAIC, ST. APOLLINARE IN CLASSE, RAVENNA.
The art of Greece, one may say, on the other hand, at her zenith represented that love of beauty as distinct from ornament, and clearness and severity of thought which will always cling to the country from whence the modern world derives the germ of nearly all its ideas.
But when the seat of the empire was transferred to Constantinople, and Roman art, influenced by Asiatic feeling, and stimulated and elevated by the new faith of Christianity, became transfigured into the solemn splendour of Byzantine art, the architecture of the round arch and the dome and cupola rose to its fullest beauty, and such buildings as St. Sophia at Constantinople, and St. Mark's at Venice, with the churches of Ravenna, mark another great and noble epoch in the arts of design.
Byzantine design, whether in building, in carving, in mosaic, or goldsmiths' work, impresses one with a certain restraint in the midst of its splendour; a certain controlling dignity and reserve appears to be exercised even in the use of the most beautiful materials, as well as in design and the treatment of form.
The mosaics of the Ravenna churches alone are sufficient to exemplify this. The artists seemed fully to realize that the curved surfaces of the dome, the half dome of the apse, or the long flat frieze above the arch columns of the nave of the basilicas, like St. Apollinare in Classe, afforded splendid fields for a splendid material, the cross light from the deep-set windows enriching the effect, and that everything might well be secondary to it. The same principle or feeling is seen in St. Mark's where the architecture is quite simple, the arches and vaulting without mouldings, nothing to interfere with the quiet splendour of the gold or blue fields of mosaic varied with simple typical figures, bold in silhouette, placed frankly upon them, emblems, boldly curving scroll-work, and inscriptions. The execution, too, is as direct and simple as the design. Such design and decoration as this becomes an СКАЧАТЬ