With chapter eleven begins what we may regard as a second division of this ‘Introduction,’ in which various processes of the decorative arts are grouped together under the head of Painting, on the ground of the pictorial effects produced by their means. Decorative painting, in the usual sense, is first described as executed in monochrome for permanence on the façades of buildings, or for temporary purposes on triumphal arches and similar structures; and then follows a chapter on what is known as ‘Sgraffito’ work, or decoration in plaster of two colours, especially valuable as the first statement of the method and aim of this process, which had been evolved from pâte-sur-pâte pottery not long before Vasari’s time. ‘Grotesques’ in modelled and stamped plaster are next described, and the uses of colour in various ways in connection with them are noticed, though with tantalizing brevity. Recipes for gilding follow, and then with a treatment of glass mosaic we pass on to a discussion of eight different kinds of decorative work, which interest Vasari chiefly because of their pictorial possibilities. Of glass mosaic, while he gives very good advice about the sort of design suitable for it, he says that it must be so executed as to look like painting and not like inlaid work. Some, he says, are so clever that they make it resemble fresco. Floor mosaics in coloured marbles are to appear exactly like a flat picture; works in tarsia, or wood inlays, are dismissed because they cannot do more than counterfeit painting without equalling it; stained glass windows, on the other hand, are lauded because they can be carried to the same perfection as fine pictures on panel. Enamel is noticed because it is of the nature of picture-work, and even damascening on metal ‘partakes of the nature both of sculpture and of painting.’ Lastly wood-engraving is only described under the form of the Chiaroscuri, or shaded prints, introduced early in the sixteenth century, though W. J. Linton in his work The Masters of Wood Engraving regards these as merely aping drawings, and hardly coming under the engraver’s art at all!
To return for a moment in concluding to a comparison already drawn, the contrast is very significant between Vasari’s attitude towards these decorative processes and that of the mediaeval writer Theophilus. Throughout his treatise Theophilus hardly says anything about design, or what is to be represented in the various materials. It is the materials themselves that are his concern, and the end before his eyes is the effect of beauty and sumptuousness in colour and texture that their skilful manipulation will secure. To Vasari these materials are chiefly of importance as producing something of the effect of painting, and though he deals with them and their manipulation from the technical point of view, the vision of the completed result as a picture hovers always before his eyes. In this Vasari was only following in his theoretical treatment the actual facts of artistic development in his times. Since the beginning of the Renaissance period all the forms of industrial art which he describes had been gradually losing the purely decorative character which belonged to them in the mediaeval epoch, and were being hurried along at the chariot wheels of the triumphant art of painting. This is one of the two dangers to which these forms of art are always subject. The naturalism in design, which is encouraged by the popularity of the painter’s art on its representative side, is as much opposed to their true genius as is the modern system of mechanical production, which deprives them of the charm they owe to the touch of the craftsman’s personality. History brought it about that in the century after Vasari these arts were in a measure rescued from the too great predominance of the pictorial element, though they were subjected at the same time to the other unfavourable influence just hinted at. Italy, from which the artistic Renaissance had spread to other lands, ceased in the seventeenth century to be the main centre of production or of inspiration for the decorative arts, which rather found their home in Paris, where they were organized and encouraged as part of the state system. The Manufacture des Meubles de la Couronne, a creation of Louis XIV’s minister Colbert, which had its headquarters at the Hotel des Gobelins and the Savonnerie, was a manufactory of decorative work of almost every kind and in the most varied materials. That this work, judged on an aesthetic standard, was cold and formal, and wanting in the breath of life which plays about all the productions of the mediaeval workshop, was an inevitable consequence of its systematized official character and of its environment. The lover of art will take more real pleasure in the output of the old-fashioned and more personal English craftsmanship of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, than in the artistic glories of the French state factories under the Ancien Régime. This native British craftsmanship was however struck into inanition a century ago by the apparition of machinery; and the result of half-a-century of the new industrial era was the Great Exhibition of 1851, wherein was displayed what was probably the greatest collection of artistic failures that the world has ever beheld. In consequence agencies were then set on foot, and engineered by the Science and Art Department, to improve the artistic quality of industrial products, but unfortunately these were based on principles not wholly sound. The shibboleths ‘Historic Ornament’ and ‘Applied Ornament’ covered the desponding view that the decorative arts were dead, and that enrichment must henceforth not be a living thing, the concomitant and even the product of the work itself, but a dead or ‘historic’ thing, that might be procured from books or museums and then ‘applied’ as an afterthought to whatever was to be made a ‘work of art.’ The results of this system were not encouraging, and led to the revival of mediaeval ideas, which, embodied in the magnetic personality of William Morris, have done much to effect a real, though as yet not far-reaching artistic revival.
The first principle here is to discourage undue naturalism in ornamental design by withdrawing the decorative arts from the influence of painting, and attaching them rather to the arts of construction, under the beneficent control of which they did so well in the middle ages. The next principle, which is equally important, is to foster the personal element in decorative work, but at the same time to prevent individuality from becoming self-assertive and running into vagaries, by insisting on the vital connection of ornament with material and technique. For the worker to ornament a thing properly he must either have made it or at any rate be in intimate touch with the processes of fabrication, out of which the decorative treatment should grow. The fact that the more advanced Schools of Art in our own country, such as that at Birmingham, regard as essential parts of their equipment the range of workshops where technical processes are explained and studied, is an encouraging sign, and this return from the drawing-board and the book to the bench and the tool gives an additional practical value to the older treatises on the technique of the arts, of which Vasari’s Introduction is one.
OF ARCHITECTURE
CHAPTER I.
Of the different kinds of Stone which are used by Architects for ornamental details, and in Sculpture for Statues; that is, Of Porphyry, Serpentine, Cipollaccio, Breccia, Granites, Paragon or Test-stone, Transparent Marbles, White Marbles and Veined Marbles, Cipollini, Saligni, Campanini, Travertine, Slate, Peperigno, Ischia Stone, Pietra Serena and Pietra Forte.
§ 1. The author’s object in the Discussion of Architecture.
How great is the utility of Architecture it does not fall to me to tell, since the subject has been treated at length and most carefully by many writers. For this reason, leaving on one side the limes, sands, wood, iron armatures, mode of preparing the foundations, as well as everything else that is used in a building; disregarding also the questions of water and localities and sites, already enlarged on by Vitruvius[[3]] and by our own Leon Battista Alberti,[[4]] I shall only discuss, for the use of our artificers and for whoever likes to know, the essential qualities of buildings, and in what proportions they should be put together and of what parts composed in order to obtain that graceful beauty that is desired. In short, I shall collect all that seems to me necessary for the purpose in view.
§ 2. Of the working of hard stones, and first of Porphyry.
In order that the great difficulty of working very hard and compact stones may be clearly understood, we shall treat distinctly but briefly of every variety which our workmen handle, and first of porphyry.[[5]] This is a red stone, with minute white specks, brought into Italy from Egypt, where it is generally believed that the stone when quarried is softer than it is after it has been exposed to rain, frost and sunshine; because all these influences make it harder and more difficult to work.[[6]] Of this stone numberless works are to be seen, some of them shaped with the chisel, some sawn into shape, and some again gradually worked up by means of wheels and emery. There are many different examples in divers places; for instance, square, round, and other pieces smoothed for pavements, statues for edifices, a great number of columns large and small, and fountains with various masks, all carved with the greatest care. There are also sarcophagi still extant, with figures in low and half relief, laboriously wrought, as at the temple of Bacchus,[[7]] outside Rome, by Sant’ Agnese, where is said to be the sarcophagus of Santa Costanza, daughter of the Emperor Constantine, on which are carved many figures of children with grapes and vineleaves, that testify how great was his labour who worked them in a stone so hard. There is another example in an urn, near to the door known as the Porta Santa in San Giovanni in Laterano, which is decorated with scenes containing a great number of figures.[[8]] There is also in the piazza della Ritonda a very beautiful urn made for sepulchral purposes[[9]] that is worked with great care and diligence. It is of extremely graceful and beautiful form, and is very different from the others. In the house of Egizio and of Fabio Sasso[[10]] there used to be a seated figure, measuring three and a half braccia, preserved to our days with the remains of the other statues in the Casa Farnese.[[11]] In the courtyard also of the Casa la Valle,[[12]] over a window, is a she-wolf most excellently sculptured,[[13]] and, in the garden of the same house, the two prisoners bound, each four braccia in height,[[14]] executed in this same porphyry by the ancients with extraordinary skill. These works are lavishly praised to-day by all skilled persons, knowing, as they do, the difficulty the workers had in executing them owing to the hardness of the stone.