Many people ridicule the colouring of the Middle Ages as inharmonious and barbarous. Such absurd ideas in respect to the use of colour by the old decorators may have been derived from the knowledge that in early times the artist’s palette was limited to three or four colours, besides black and white, and
To face p. 14.]
[From a Water-colour by W. Davidson.
Plate 4.—Saint Michael.
(From a Painting on the Rood Screen, Ranworth Church: English, Early Sixteenth Century.)
that these colours, such as red, blue, green and yellow, were applied, in decoration, in their full strength, as undoubtedly they generally were. But it ought to be remembered that, however crude the colours may be, it is their arrangement, quantity, and proportion as to surface area in the scheme of decoration, that makes, or mars, the harmony, and not their individual strength, purity or crudeness. The early decorators hardly ever used broken tones or half-tones in their colour arrangements, and perhaps this largely accounts for the mistaken views that some hold in regard to the decorative colouring of the Middle Ages. There is of course a great beauty in broken-toned colouring, which is in much favour in modern decoration, but it is not a matter of much difficulty to harmonise such broken tones and tints. A greater difficulty is to harmonise an arrangement of colours in their full strength of hue, a task for a great colourist; but this we know has often been done successfully in all the best periods of art, and it certainly was done by the old decorators of the Middle Ages in painting, mosaic, enamels, and stained glass, in spite of the limitation of their palette, or, shall we say, because of it?
In all the great periods of art there was certainly the keenest delight in colour. It is difficult for some of us to believe that the Parthenon and other Greek temples, and also all of our old cathedrals were at one time highly coloured, but they certainly were so shortly after they were built. The modern prejudice against the use of colour in architecture set in about the same time that sculpture also became, like painting, an independent art, which was about the beginning of the decadence of the Renaissance, at the end of the sixteenth century.