APPENDIX
ON THE ORDERS OF ARCHITECTURE
IT seemed to me that a short chapter on the orders would be useful to students, not only because so much ornament is used as an enrichment to architecture itself, but also because a very much larger proportion of it is used in conjunction with architecture, and without some slight knowledge of the subject, the ornament and the architecture, instead of setting off each other’s characteristic beauties, are apt to spoil one another. The rigid lines of architecture should act as a foil to the graceful curves of ornament, and the plain faces should not only set off fretted surfaces, but make the undulations of carved ornament precious. When I speak of ornament, I include the highest form of it, the human figure, and I may point to the Doric frieze of the Greeks as a brilliant example of success. This conjunction of ornament and architecture, however, demands high qualities in the ornament, and insight in the artists as to what is wanted for mutual contrast or emphasis; and if this be successfully accomplished, I think it must be conceded that the combined work gives a finer result than the uncombined excellence of each.
Mean ornament, whether of figures or plants, tends to degrade the architecture with which it is associated, and may spoil it by the main lines not properly contrasting with the adjacent architectural forms, or by the ornament being on too large a scale. I have seen in modern work, the stately dignity of a grand room utterly destroyed by colossal figures. Michelangelo, in his superb ceiling at the Sistine Chapel, has by use of gigantic figures dwarfed the vast chapel into a doll’s house. I may add that there is monumental colouring as well as monumental form: the finest examples of such colouring may be seen in many of the grand buildings in Italy and at Constantinople, notably at St. Mark’s and at Sta. Sophia; but you may also see magnificent halls and churches, coloured to look like French plum-boxes.
The elaborate system of proportioning parts to one another and to the whole, which is so important in architecture as to be its main characteristic, is equally valuable for the division of spaces for ornament.
Mouldings which form so great a feature in architecture as to have given rise to the saying that “mouldings are architecture,” give lessons in elegance of shape, and in the proper contrast of forms, that are useful to the ornamentalist who has to design the shapes of small objects; while the Corinthian capital has been the prototype of most of the floral capitals up to the present day.
It is admitted that in those periods of history when architecture, sculpture, and painting attained their highest excellence, the painter, sculptor, and architect have not only sympathized with one another, but each one has been no mean judge of the sister arts. At the Renaissance, and immediately before it, artists are to be found who were goldsmiths, sculptors, painters, and architects, and some few who were poets, musicians, and engineers as well.
The origin of the orders was probably in the verandah of the Greek wooden hut. In some of the paintings on the Greek vases may be seen the processes by which the Doric and Ionic capitals were evolved; but for our purpose, which is not archæology, only some of the best examples need be referred to, after the wooden hut had been converted into a marble temple.
An order consists of a column supporting an architrave, frieze, and cornice, which is called the entablature. The column generally consists of a shaft, a capital, and a base, except in the Doric columns of the Greeks and early Romans, which were baseless. The capital was the capping-piece which you now see put on the tops of story-posts by carpenters to shorten the bearing of the bressummer. The architrave was what we now call a bressummer, and bore the trusses of the roof; the fascias of the architrave show that in some instances this bressummer was composed of three balks of timber, each projecting slightly over the one below. The frieze was the wide band immediately above the architrave and below the cornice, comprising the triglyphs or ends of the trusses, and the filling in between them, which is called the metope. The metopes were left open in early Greek temples, but were eventually filled with sculpture. The cornice was the projecting boarded caves; while the slanting
