PLATE XIII
UNDER A ARE CERTAIN COLOURS AS VIEWED IN DAYLIGHT. UNDER B ARE SIMILAR COLOURS WHICH ILLUSTRATE THE TENDENCY OF CHANGE OF HUE WHEN THE FORMER ARE SEEN IN ARTIFICIAL LIGHT
lighting, and although the latter is not so deficient in violet and bluish rays as the former, still it has a considerable amount of yellow rays, though not so much of orange-yellow as gaslight. All kinds of artificial light impart some of their yellow to all colours, and while this kind of illumination improves the brilliancy of yellow and yellowish-reds, or of such colours as lie closely to yellow in the chromatic circle, it dulls and saddens blues, bluish-greens, and violet-blues, or in other words, the colours that are more distantly removed from the orange-yellow in the chromatic circle. Blues and bluish-greens suffer most change in artificial light, as they become degraded to duller and greyer shades. Greens become bluish-greens, yellow-greens are not much changed, bluish-greens become more yellowish. Indigo blue changes to greenish grey. Violet becomes purple, and purple much redder. Yellow becomes paler in artificial light, but, on the contrary, orange becomes redder, and all bright reds from vermilion to carmine become still brighter in hue. Brilliant blues, like cobalt and ultramarine, appear more purplish in gaslight. If we wish, therefore, to obtain a tint of blue that will look blue by gaslight, it must appear as a slightly greenish shade of blue by daylight, and must not be dark in tone. On Plate 13 there are shown a few colours on the left of the diagram, at A, and the approximate changes in these colours, at B, when seen in artificial light.
CHAPTER VI
ITALIAN DECORATION AND ORNAMENT
FROM the twelfth to the end of the sixteenth century was a long period of artistic activity in Italy, when nearly every building, public and private, sacred and secular, was decorated in colour, with paintings and ornament on walls, ceilings and other surfaces, and further enriched with sculpture, and carving in wood, stone or metal. Italian decorative art has in the past so influenced and modified the native art of France, Germany and England, and its influence being still felt and expressed in much of our modern decoration, that an apology is hardly needed if we devote the present chapter to some consideration of the architectural colouring and ornament of the Italian Renaissance.
Apart from the great frescoes and mosaics of the Italian churches and palaces, where pictorial compositions, or decorative pictures, with or without architectural or landscape backgrounds, give the required colour finish to buildings, there exists the very important class of carved, painted, or inlaid ornamentation; though in a measure secondary in
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