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Where stone is scarce, brick buildings, with many arches, roughly constructed cornices and pilasters, and other peculiarities both of structure and ornamentation, make their appearance, as, for example, in Lombardy and North Germany. Where materials of many colours abound, as is the case, for example, in the volcanic districts of France, polychromy is sought as a means of ornamentation.
Our psychological state even now, alone prevents it, for we are rich in materials and methods to make such polychromy possible. In an article in a recent number of The Architectural Record, Mr. Leon V. Solon, writing from an entirely different point of view, divines this tendency, and expresses the opinion that color is again renascent.
The frontispiece attempts to suggest what the coloring of the Parthenon was like, and thus to illustrate the general scheme of Doric polychromy. The colors used were chiefly dark blue, sometimes almost black, and red; green and yellow also occur, and some details were gilded. The coloration of the building was far from total. Plain surfaces, as walls, were unpainted.
They hinted of all enamelled things that come out of the East of the peacock reflections of the tiles of Damascus and Cordova, of the franker polychromy of Rhodian kilns, of the subtler bloom of the dishes of Moorish Spain, of the brassier glazes of Minorca and Sicily all these things lay enticingly in epitome in these lustred Italian pots, as they glimmered with a furtive splendour.
Never expansively lyrical as was Monticelli, Carrière declared that a picture is the logical development of light. And on the external side his art is a continual variation with light as a theme. Morice contends that he was a colourist; that the blond of Rubens and the russet of Carrière are not monochromes; that polychromy is not the true way of seeing nature coloured.
We shall discuss the question of polychromy in Assyrian sculpture at a future opportunity; at present we are content with observing that the effect of the reliefs was strengthened here and there by the use of colour. The beard, the hair, and the eyebrows were tinted black; such things as the fringes of robes, baldricks, flowers held in the hand, were coloured blue and red.
So specks of blue paint may still be seen, or might a few years ago, on blocks belonging to the Athenian Propylaea. But our most abundant evidence for the original use of color comes from architectural fragments recently unearthed. Every new and important excavation adds to the store. At present our information is much fuller in regard to the polychromy of Doric than of Ionic buildings.
An Actæon torn by his dogs is much corroded by sea air, but displays great nobleness of attitude. The vigor in the left arm, which has throttled one of the dogs, can hardly be surpassed. A portion of the cella, of one of the temples has been removed hither, and its brilliant polychromy is sufficient to decide the argument as to the existence of the practice, if, indeed, that point be yet in doubt.
In the central hall was a single doorway, whose white marble architrave had been stained with different colored pigments by Francis Bacon; after the manner of the Greeks. The effect was so charming, and made the rest of the place seem by contrast so cold and dun, that the author came then and there to the conclusion that architecture without polychromy was architecture incomplete. Mr.
Now color is a precious thing, and its highest beauties can be brought out only by contrast with broad neutral tinted spaces. The interior walls of a mediaeval cathedral never competed with its windows, and by the same token, a riot of polychromy all over the side of a building is not as effective, even from a chromatic point of view, as though it were confined, say, to an entrance and a frieze.
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