A painted frieze of figures above plain oak-panelling has a good effect in a large and well-proportioned room, and is perhaps one of the pleasantest ways of treating interior walls.
Ceiling decoration, again, presents problems of extension in designing, and the large flat plaster ceilings of modern rooms are by no means easy to deal with satisfactorily. The simplest way is to resort to wall-paper, and here, restricted in size of repeat and the usual technical requirements of the work, the designer must further consider appropriateness of scale, and position in regard to eye, relation to the wall, and so forth.
The natural demand is for something simpler in treatment than the walls—a re-echo, in some sort, of plans agreeable to the floor, yet with a suggestion of something lighter and freer: here we may safely come back to rectangular and circular plans again for our leading lines and forms.
Painting and modelling, again, offer more elaborate treatment and possibilities, and we know that beautiful works have been done in both ways; but art of this kind seems more appropriate to lofty vaulted chambers and churches, such as one sees in the palaces of Italy, at Genoa and Venice, at Florence and Rome.
I remember a very striking and bold treatment of a flat-beamed ceiling in the Castle of Nuremberg, where a huge black German eagle was painted so as to occupy nearly the whole field of the ceiling, but treated in an extremely flat and heraldic way, the long feathers of the wings following the lines of the beams and falling parallel upon them and between them; and upon the black wings and body of the eagle different shields of arms were displayed in gold and colours, the eagle itself being painted upon the natural unpainted wood—oak, I think. The work belonged to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, I believe. It seemed the very antithesis of Italian finesse and fancy, but the fitness of such decoration entirely depends upon its relation to its surroundings, which in this case were perfectly appropriate.
Co-operative Relation