The modern practice of imitating a costly wood by graining an inferior one hardly ever obtained in the earlier periods; the old decorators often enough painted all kinds of wood in any arbitrary way or colour, but they did not grain them to simulate other woods. Although the imitation of wood by graining is not practised so much to-day as it was in the Victorian time, there is still a good deal of it done. Even worse than this is the modern practice of erecting wooden columns and entablatures as shop fronts, especially those of public-houses and gin-palaces, in simulation of a stone construction, which may be an excusable sham, but there is no reason why this stone construction in wood should be painted to imitate costly marble, which only makes a double sham. We can call to mind the instance of some large and heavy doors in a Government building of this country, which are, of course, made in panelled wood, but have been painted to imitate grey granite! The reader can think that the limit of imitative painting is here reached, if he can imagine the deception that is presented of two slabs of heavy granite swinging on hinges.
In the case of the Ca’ D’Oro battlements, and of similar imitations of marble in the painted decoration of late medieval buildings in Venice, we can see the expression of a striving after the rich effects of colour that were obtained in the earlier Byzantine architecture by the use of the real marbles, which were employed to give the structural and permanent colour to edifices built in that style. It ought to be remembered that the Venetian Gothic architecture, more especially in colouring—and we might safely say all Venetian art of later periods with its rich and beautiful colour—was strongly influenced by the splendour of Byzantine and Eastern colouring, as expressed in the mosaics, enamels, and richly-coloured marbles that were used so much to line the walls inside and outside of the Byzantine churches and palaces.
Although such coloured decoration as that of the façade of the Ca’ D’Oro might be classed as a decadent and artificial system, in so far as it was an imitation, or an attempt in applied colour at the survival of the more permanent Byzantine coloured architecture, still the general effect of the colour scheme, where full-toned blues, reds, black, white, and gold were frankly employed, must have been extremely rich and interesting, when seen in the radiant sunshine, and reflected in the waters of the Grand Canal. We might add that the colouring of this medieval palace, in common with that employed on all Venetian buildings of that time, was also in a great measure a reflex of the powerful and sensuous colouring of the East, which strongly influenced, if it was not indeed the chief source of the distinctive colour harmony that was the crown and glory of Venetian art.
CHAPTER V
ON THE USE AND MODIFICATION OF COLOUR IN DECORATION
JUST as the aims of the painter of pictures are quite divergent from those of the decorator, so is the use of colour in the representation of natural objects and of natural phenomena divergent from that of the latter’s in his employment of tints in coloured decoration. The painter of pictures is at liberty to use unlimited tints and shades of one colour, or of any number of colours, to represent the facts or effects of nature in realistic or in imaginative art, that is to say, he can make the greatest possible use of gradation both in colour and in light and shade, but the decorator is limited in the matter of colour gradation, and still more limited in the matter of light and shade, to the use of a few tints of closely related tones, and, as a rule, he must use them in a series of flat tints, with little or no light and shade, and which may or may not be separated from each other by contours or outlines of neutral or different colours.
The aim of the decorator is to beautify surfaces by the use of colour, so he selects or creates his tints and shades, which may be of extremely rich and deeply saturated hues, heightened perhaps with the addition of silver or gold, or he may use schemes of sober tints of broken colours; but the aim of the picture painter is to respect the colouring of nature and to produce another kind of beauty, which if not always strictly imitative of natural forms and facts in colour and drawing, must at least show that its foundations are laid on the solid ground of nature. Colour is therefore used by the artist-painter in a limited sense, in so far as it is imitative of any particular scene or natural effect which he may desire to record, but the choice of the decorator is unlimited, for he can always invent his own colour schemes. And as the latter is justified in disregarding shadows and gradation in the rendering of his decorative forms, even when they are derived from nature, he is equally free to use any colour in an arbitrary way on such forms instead of their natural or local colour, provided that it does not interfere with the harmony and balance of his colour scheme. The old Gothic glass painters, for example, who produced some of the finest coloured glass, did not hesitate to colour the feet or the hands of their figures a vivid green, a crimson, or a brilliant blue, though the other flesh portions of the same figure would be in the natural colour, if they found it necessary to have any of those colours in such parts of the design where the feet or hands happened to be. Although we should not agree with this arbitrary colour treatment of natural forms, it only emphasises the fact that the old designers looked upon their figure compositions as simply units or integral parts of the general colour scheme, and nothing more or less than legitimate decoration.
The decorator may design his ornamental forms on the bases of natural ones, and may, by colouring them in tints suggested by nature, produce a beautiful decorative work, which indeed has often been done. Still, he is free to frankly disregard the natural or local colour of such forms if the latter does not suit his purpose, and may use any other colours that will enable him to produce the best effect and most satisfactory decoration. In any case there should be no attempt to imitate either the colouring or forms of nature in a realistic sense, however much he may make use of suggestions from natural forms and objects. If purely natural forms, such as those of birds, animals, or the human figure are introduced into decoration, they should be firmly outlined in some neutral colour in order to show that they are only intended as portions of the decorative scheme and not in the sense of realistic representations. Accurate representations of natural forms and photographic realism should be avoided in decoration. If the Byzantine mosaicists had drawn, or could have drawn, their figures better, they might have produced worse decoration, and might have failed to express the essentials of decorative art.
The greater part of modern polychrome decoration, not only on buildings but on nearly every description of handmade objects or manufactured goods that have pretensions to artistic claims, is only misapplied painting which has usurped the place of true decoration. This kind of semi-pictorial work came into vogue about the beginning of the seventeenth century in Italy and France, and gradually spread and developed in other European countries, so to-day there is still a great demand for this kind of art which is neither genuine decoration nor painting. Interior surfaces of buildings, textile hangings, carpets, all kinds of pottery, and almost every kind of object that presents a surface for decoration is treated with naturalistic transcripts of flowers, birds, animals, the human figure, as well as copies of landscapes and architectural views, all represented in a pictorial manner with more or less merit, but all misapplied work. Such meretricious merchandise is welcomed and purchased by a very large section of the public, who are unable to distinguish between true and false decoration.
Decoration in Monochrome.—The simplest form of coloured decoration is monochromatic, that is, where one colour is used or where several tints of any one colour are used. This kind of colour treatment is often very satisfactory for the walls, ceilings, and woodwork of any ordinary room, where the pictures on the walls, the carpet, hangings, furniture and ornamental objects all combine to furnish the sharper and more contrasting colour notes that may be required. In such monochromatic decoration lighter and darker shades of the selected colour are used, the lighter and less intense tints being spread over the larger spaces, while the more intense and purer shades would be on the mouldings and on the smaller subdivisions of the architecture. The choice of the particular colour selected for any monochromatic scheme will in a measure depend on the uses of the room as well as on the decorative taste and feeling for colour. Monochromatic colouring may be enlivened by the use of gold in narrow lines or in small quantities, such as in the gilding of the fillets of door mouldings and cornices, etc.
Use of gold in decoration.—Gold should not be used in large quantities in any scheme of decoration, except in backgrounds where it would be partially covered with ornamentation, or else it will be liable to lose its precious quality, and so look vulgar and common. Where gold is used in great quantities, such as we see in the gaudy gold and white decoration of some state assembly-rooms, it completely loses its quality of preciousness, and in proportion to the increase of the quantity used, it becomes cheap-looking and appears more like brass than gold. If gold must be used lavishly in the decoration of state rooms it ought to be toned down with some transparent brown colour which would tend to make it still richer, and would destroy the tinselly or brassy appearance which large masses of gilding always present to the eye. Where gold was used in backgrounds of figure or ornamental compositions by the Italian artists, its natural glare was usually toned down either by having a net-work of lines, or a fine tracery pattern, or sometimes a fine diaper or checker pattern painted on it in black or dark brown. Also the surface, previous to the gilding of it, was sometimes prepared with a rough texture, in order to prevent it from having the objectionable shine that is common to the gilding of smooth surfaces, and to enable the spectator to see the real colour of the precious metal. Gold grounds look better when the surface is slightly curved, for all gilded flat surfaces, unless modified by one of the methods we have mentioned above, will either appear glaringly bright or very dark according to the position from which they are seen. It may also be mentioned that gold has in common with white, or very pale colours, the effect of spreading, so that thin lines, or delicate tracery patterns in gold, on a dark, or moderately dark coloured ground, always appear to look broader than they really are, this being due to the spreading effect of light which is reflected to the eye by the brilliancy of gold, or white.