Fig. 4 is its profile, rather carefully drawn at the top, to show the
tulip and turkscap lily leaves. Underneath there is a plate of iron
beaten into broad thin leaves, which gives the centre of the balcony a
gradual sweep outwards, like the side of a ship of war. The central
profile is of the greatest importance in ironwork, as the flow of it
affects the curves of the whole design, not merely in surface, as in
marble carving, but in their intersections, when the side is seen
through the front. The lighter leaves, _b b_, are real bindweed.
Fig. 5 shows two of the teeth of the border, illustrating their
irregularity of form, which takes place quite to the extent indicated.
Fig. 6 is the border at the side of the balcony, showing the most
interesting circumstance in the treatment of the whole, namely, the
enlargement and retraction of the teeth of the cornice, as it
approaches the wall. This treatment of the whole cornice as a kind of
wreath round the balcony, having its leaves flung loose at the back,
and set close at the front, as a girl would throw a wreath of leaves
round her hair, is precisely the most finished indication of a good
workman's mind to be found in the whole thing.
Fig. 7 shows the outline of the retracted leaves accurately. It was
noted in the text that the whole of this ironwork had been coloured.
The difficulty of colouring ironwork rightly, and the necessity of
doing it in some way or other, have been the principal reasons for my
never having entered heartily into this subject; for all the ironwork I
have ever seen look beautiful was rusty, and rusty iron will not answer
modern purposes. Nevertheless it may be painted, but it needs some one
to do it who knows what painting means, and few of us do--certainly
none, as yet, of our restorers of decoration or writers on colour.
It is a marvellous thing to me that book after book should appear on
this last subject, without apparently the slightest consciousness on
the part of the writers that the first necessity of beauty in colour is
gradation, as the first necessity of beauty in line is curvature,--or
that the second necessity in colour is mystery or subtlety, as the
second necessity in line is softness. Colour ungradated is wholly
valueless; colour unmysterious is wholly barbarous. Unless it looses
itself and melts away towards other colours, as a true line loses
itself and melts away towards other lines, colour has no proper
existence, in the noble sense of the word. What a cube, or tetrahedron,
is to organic form, ungradated and unconfused colour is to organic
colour; and a person who attempts to arrange colour harmonies without
gradation of tint is in precisely the same category, as an artist who
should try to compose a beautiful picture out of an accumulation of
cubes and parallelepipeds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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