painted in different colours or in gold. Mottoes, texts in ornamental lettering on scrolls, and monograms, very much repeated, were all used as decorative motives, and also flat representations of architectural forms, especially of Gothic tracery. Lead stars, wavy-rayed, and gilded, were fastened to ceilings that were painted blue, thus giving a conventional representation of the firmament.
Projecting mouldings of windows and doorways, and arches, and the ribs of groined ceilings of the old churches, were all painted in parti-colours, and the fillets were usually gilded. It was a common practice to colour the groined and flat ceiling ribs and mouldings only a short distance from the bosses which decorated their intersections, and also a similar portion of the web, or ceiling portion around the bosses, but often the whole of the ribs and ceiling panels were richly decorated in colours, and with elaborate patterns of diapered work or arabesques. Stone and carved wood bosses were usually gilded, and the interstices behind the carved foliage, masks, or figures on them, were painted in some very strong colour, usually red, in order to relieve the carving. As a rule carved enrichments were either gilded or painted yellow to represent gold.
In this period of great activity in church decoration in England special attention was given to the painting of roofs with their rafters and beams. St. Alban’s Abbey (Plate [31]), Blythburgh in Suffolk, Sall Church in Norfolk, Plymouth Cathedral, Ufford Church, near Ipswich, and numerous others had all richly-painted roofs, although the generality of roofs were simple in colouring, most of them having red, black and grey decorations painted on a white or a blue ground. Sometimes, however, the ceiling decoration was more elaborate, as we have already seen, when it consisted of rich scroll-work, interspersed with emblems, monograms and various devices. Tracery patterns, flower and leaf designs decorated the rafters, and the round bead mouldings were often treated in spiral twistings of lines or patterns, like strips of ribbon round a rod, this kind of treatment being known as “barber-poling.”
Much of the pattern decoration of the old churches had somewhat the appearance of stencilling, which might be accounted for by the flat character of the designs. The painted decoration was, however, not stencilled, but was first applied to the surfaces by the method known as “pouncing,” by means of the pricked holes made in the original tracing or drawing, and the pattern work afterwards executed with the brush. That this method was adopted is proved by the slight variation in the drawing of the painted patterns, and by the characteristic freedom in the execution which brushwork can only give, and further by the absence of the effect which is due to “ties” of the stencil-plate. In some instances the oft-recurring rosettes and diaper powderings may have been stencilled as an easy and preliminary method of placing them in
To face p. 126.]
[From a Drawing by W. Davidson.
Plate 32.—Decoration on the Rood Screen, Ranworth Church, Norfolk: Early Sixteenth Century.