CHAPTER IV

THE COLOURING OF EXTERIORS

The colouring of the exteriors of important buildings should be, if possible, effected by the use of the constructive materials, such as stone, marble, granite and coloured terra-cotta in conjunction with panels and friezes, etc., of enamelled tiles or mosaic, and even in the case of less pretentious buildings a good deal might be done by ordinary painting. Stucco plastered exteriors, however, should not necessarily be painted in a uniform stone colour. Stone and soft bricks get black in cities, but hard bricks retain their colour much better. A highly polished material, such as granite or marble, does not go well with freestone, owing to the violent contrast between the polished and dull surfaces; also, any highly polished surface reflects light in such a way that to the sight the form is often altered. Granite polished with emery brings out the natural colour without giving a glaze to it, and is therefore better for an outdoor effect. Bronze sheathing on doors and bronze window and door framing, when it is not too dark in tone, goes well with a grey granite building, and when such a building has some panels of mosaic, or of coloured marble, such as “opus Sectile,” the colour scheme is very effective. These materials are now being used very much in some important buildings in the continental cities.

In using coloured marbles, the best effects, as a rule, are obtained when two kinds only are used together, or merely one colour with white, such as black and white, red and white, green and white or purple and white. The finest early Italian marble altars, pulpits, and monuments generally conform to one of these simple colour arrangements. The principal parts of these works are executed in white marble and have only one coloured marble introduced for columns, pilasters, friezes, and panels at the bases and pediments. It may be mentioned that the white marble of these monuments is yellowish in tone, and the black somewhat greenish, thus producing a soft and mellow effect. At Palermo and Naples there is a great deal of marble work of the later Renaissance and modern times which has inlaid floral arabesques in various coloured marbles, such as black, brown, orange and red, all in combination, the greater part of which is unsatisfactory as it lacks repose, owing to the harshness of the contrasting colours.

A notable exception to the use of two, or at most three, kinds of marble in combination is seen in the magnificent “opus Alexandrinum” floor pavements, and in other marble work of the Byzantine buildings, where three kinds have been used, namely, porphyry, serpentine and white, with sometimes little portions of yellow, but the purple of the porphyry and the green of the serpentine, with their variegated tints, are colours which are in complete accordance with each other, and the effect of this arrangement is always pleasant and harmonious.

There is every reason why public buildings should be erected in natural or artificially coloured materials. Such coloured materials would not be more expensive than the grey, drab, and white stone and marble which is now used so much for exterior elevations. If we cannot have rich colouring on the outsides of our public buildings, we might at least be permitted to have schemes of colour that would present quiet and restrained harmonies, so that, even in a modest degree, they would contribute to our pleasure by counteracting some of the greyness and gloom that overshadows and often conceals the architectural beauty of many buildings in our large towns and cities.

Architects and sculptors, as a rule, are responsible for the appearance of the exteriors of buildings, and they only in exceptional cases appear to have a love for colour, but they should remember that colour appeals, if not to everybody, to a considerably large section of the public, which includes both cultured and uncultured people, who can appreciate a coloured building, but are not much interested in seeing a colourless exterior.

Some of the simplest and inexpensive examples of exterior structural colouring may be obtained by the use of red brick, and common stone dressings on the façade of a building, if to this could be added some notes of grey-blue in terra-cotta, or tiles, in bands, borders, or in panels. Mosaic in panels would be better still, but we leave that out on the score of expense. Such an example as this colour arrangement may be seen in many buildings in Florence, Milan, and in the northern towns of Italy. We might mention one, that of the front of the Hospital of the Innocents, in Florence, which is a yellow-red brick elevation with severe columns and arches of a warm-coloured stone, and in the spandrels between the arches are the grey-blue and white roundels of Delia Robbia glazed earthenware, the whole effect being a pleasant and warm colour arrangement, and besides being extremely simple, it is certainly very effective, and an admirable example of structural colouring.

At Verona, Venice, and many other places in Italy there are fine examples of this style of exterior colouring where the red bricks give the dominant tone, whether terra-cotta or stone be used for the dressings, or glazed earthenware heraldic panels, mosaic, or fresco are added to give the balance of blue, or other sharper notes of pure colour, that may be required to complete the harmony.

It is a matter well known that in Northern Germany, Belgium, Holland, and in England red brick buildings with stone and terra-cotta dressings and sculptured work were erected as manor houses, palaces, and every kind of public building, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, most of which were fine examples, not only of architecture, but of exterior colouring.

The front of the Doge’s Palace at Venice is an example of suitable application of colour to public buildings. The sculpture and mouldings are in white marble, and the wall surface has a chequered pattern of marble slabs of a pale rose colour and white Istrian stone.

Fresco paintings and mosaic have often been employed in Italy on the exteriors of churches and palaces. There is a beautiful bit of heraldic painting, alternating with cardinals’ hats placed in squares, on a wall behind the Duomo of Verona. This, however, and nearly all exterior wall paintings have suffered very much by the weather in course of time, and such decoration has no chance of lasting compared with the colour of the more permanent materials of stone, marble, tiles, or mosaic.

In Germany, much more than other countries, exterior colour-painting and decoration has always found great favour. Even to-day the exteriors of many buildings, especially hostelries and restaurants, are painted as they were in the sixteenth century. A great revival of colour decoration took place in Germany, as it did also in France, about the middle of the last century. We shall consider this at more length when making an historical survey of the subject in later chapters, and endeavour to describe some of the methods and principles of colour decoration adopted and carried out by the old decorators of England and the continental nations. Before leaving, however, this portion of our subject it may be useful and interesting to notice an important example of Venetian exterior polychromy of the late medieval period.

The building in question is known as the Ca’ D’Oro, or “Golden House,” so called on account of the great quantity of gilding that it formerly had on its façade. This building must have been erected on the site of a former medieval palace, for the rebuilding of it was begun in 1424, contemporary with that of the Piazzeta façade of the Ducal Palace at Venice. The architect or “stone-mason” was Giovanni Buon, who was assisted by his son, Bartolomeo, the palace being erected for a nobleman named Marino Contarini, at St. Sophia on the Grand Canal. The existing documents, which consist of the original memoranda of Contarini, dated 1431-2, and preserved among the papers of the Procurators of St. Mark’s, give in detail the orders for the gold and colours, and how they were to be used in the decoration of the façade. From these and also from the traces of the colour and gold which Signor G. Boni found on parts of the building in 1885, we are enabled to form an estimate of the polychromatic decorations of this medieval palace, which may serve as an illustration of the external colour-decoration of the period.

From these evidences we find that the balls of Istrian stone which decorated the embattlements were gilt, also the carved mouldings, the abacus of each capital, lions, shields, dentels, rose-flowers, and other salient points of the carvings. The backgrounds of capitals, soffits, some shields and bands were painted ultramarine blue, “fine azure ultramarine, in such a manner that it may last longer” (that is, twice coated). The blue ground of the soffits was studded with small golden stars. It is interesting to note how all the stonework was painted in the early times, when it is mentioned that all the red stones of the façade and the red dentels were to be painted with oil and varnish in still deeper tones of red, “so that they will look red.” It appears that this was done in order to give a look of uniformity to the red Verona _Broccatello_ marble, which, being composed of the detritus of ammonites, had a variegated, or patchy-like appearance when newly cut, and therefore its effect, when new, did not find favour in the eyes of the decorator, as perhaps he thought that in its virgin state its appearance disturbed the broad colour effect he was aiming for. The crowning cornice was painted with white lead and oil, and also in a like manner the roses and vines on the façade. The backgrounds of the latter carved decoration, and that of the fields of the cusps of the window tracery and of the cornice foliage were painted black, in order to give the effect of penetration.

The parts of the façade which were painted white were those of bluish or yellowish Istrian stone, the natural colour of which the Venetians did not like, so they generally obliterated it with a coating of white paint. In the memoranda it is also stated that the stone battlements were to be “painted and veined, to make them look like marble.”

The imitation of marbles and woods by painting the commoner stone, or inferior wood in simulation of the more costly materials, though rightly condemned as a common practice by purists has, however, been largely practised by the decorators of primitive Greece, Pompeii, Rome, and of the East, as well as of the Renaissance and later periods. The old decorators had no scruples in regard to the painting of plaster or common stone to make it look like marble; but generally in such examples the imitation was more strictly confined to objects and surfaces where the more costly materials would have been used if sufficient means had been available to procure them.

The modern practice of imitating a costly wood by graining an inferior one hardly ever obtained in the earlier periods; the old decorators often enough painted all kinds of wood in any arbitrary way or colour, but they did not grain them to simulate other woods. Although the imitation of wood by graining is not practised so much to-day as it was in the Victorian time, there is still a good deal of it done. Even worse than this is the modern practice of erecting wooden columns and entablatures as shop fronts, especially those of public-houses and gin-palaces, in simulation of a stone construction, which may be an excusable sham, but there is no reason why this stone construction in wood should be painted to imitate costly marble, which only makes a double sham. We can call to mind the instance of some large and heavy doors in a Government building of this country, which are, of course, made in panelled wood, but have been painted to imitate grey granite! The reader can think that the limit of imitative painting is here reached, if he can imagine the deception that is presented of two slabs of heavy granite swinging on hinges.

In the case of the Ca’ D’Oro battlements, and of similar imitations of marble in the painted decoration of late medieval buildings in Venice, we can see the expression of a striving after the rich effects of colour that were obtained in the earlier Byzantine architecture by the use of the real marbles, which were employed to give the structural and permanent colour to edifices built in that style. It ought to be remembered that the Venetian Gothic architecture, more especially in colouring--and we might safely say all Venetian art of later periods with its rich and beautiful colour--was strongly influenced by the splendour of Byzantine and Eastern colouring, as expressed in the mosaics, enamels, and richly-coloured marbles that were used so much to line the walls inside and outside of the Byzantine churches and palaces.

Although such coloured decoration as that of the façade of the Ca’ D’Oro might be classed as a decadent and artificial system, in so far as it was an imitation, or an attempt in applied colour at the survival of the more permanent Byzantine coloured architecture, still the general effect of the colour scheme, where full-toned blues, reds, black, white, and gold were frankly employed, must have been extremely rich and interesting, when seen in the radiant sunshine, and reflected in the waters of the Grand Canal. We might add that the colouring of this medieval palace, in common with that employed on all Venetian buildings of that time, was also in a great measure a reflex of the powerful and sensuous colouring of the East, which strongly influenced, if it was not indeed the chief source of the distinctive colour harmony that was the crown and glory of Venetian art.