eS

oe A

Ag lomt . the Technical ; Analaen

ry
air fips Lo

In tcuctiornb
nee Ci A110 ae
rave |
42 — Bo }- }

ranslation Maligrave and

Francisae
b larry ae d Micha 7
son '
tt > Taga Ee
Sr sete :

Texts & Documents |—

in
{ = Lif \
“ = <e~ , Lo eats P ‘ wh
fn Kat - AR ¢ v4

tthe
3
= 3 SS ‘
OTiT-Me) Mdit-Melcelatel-Tan dul-tele-i((xelmelcelian
plishments of the nineteenth century,
Gottfried Semper’s Style in the Technical
and Tectonic Arts is here translated into
English for the first time. Style, Semper
leY=\[(=\ cto MMV
ok-mecolateli{(olat-rel ome mecolanle) iron
tion of internal factors such as the con-
Tice cMlalatectalm lime mela muirsvell tame late!
=) 4csl gare] Mola cele MiV
ia melMallulel(-Malliia-
and the artist’s creative free will. Reject-
ing aestheticism, materialism, and the
deterministic underpinnings of Hegelian
idealism (historicism), Semper sought a
(of-Val=3(ComUlave(-1e-dolatellare elm) itlevelfomuated (Li
olatom (at-\] miic=t-Mc-llol delim omeomi-\wam e)euill (his
technical ideas. The novel development
of his theory of style not only reframed
the interpretation of preclassical and
aC ETA(oo] Melati Colacmel meltvem rele) (ome l clit
tects of the next generation to perceive
architectural form as governed by a logic
deeper than mere stylistic considerations.
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2022 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https ://archive.org/details/styleintechnicaloO000semp
Published by the Getty Research Institute
 Gottfried Semper

Sty
Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts;
or, Practical Aesthetics
Introduction by Harry Francis Mallgrave
Translation by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson

Texts & Documents

The Getty Research Institute Publications Program
Thomas Crow, Director, Getty Research Institute
Gail Feigenbaum, Associate Director, Programs
Julia Bloomfield, Head, Publications Program

Texts & Documents

Julia Bloomfield, Kurt W. Forster, Harry F. Mallgrave, and Thomas F. Reese,
Publications Committee

Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics

J. Duncan Berry, Editorial Consultant
Steven Lindberg, Manuscript Editor

Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Ktinsten; oder, Praktische
Aesthetik: Ein Handbuch fur Techniker, Kunstler und Kunstfreunde, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am
Main: Verlag fur Kunst & Wissenschaft, 1860; Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1863), was trans-
lated by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson, with translations from Latin and
Greek by Amir Baghdadchi. All photographs of illustrations from Semper’s Der Sti/ are
courtesy the Research Library, Getty Research Institute, 86-B18560

Published by the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

Getty Publications
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 500
Los Angeles, CA 90049-1682
www.getty.edu/publications
© 2004 J. Paul Getty Trust

Second printing

Cover: Gottfried Semper, Design for silver punchbowl (see p. 884); filigree glass (see p. 603)
Frontispiece: W. Unger, Portrait of Gottfried Semper, 1871. From Zeitschrift fur bildende Kunst
14 (1879): facing p. 293. Courtesy Research Library, Getty Research Institute, 86-S482

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Semper, Gottfried, 1803-1879.
{Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Ktinsten, oder, Praktische Aesthetik, ein
Handbuch fur Techniker, Kunstler und Kunstfreunde. English]
Style in the technical and tectonic arts, or, Practical aesthetics / Gottfried Semper ;
introduction by Harry Francis Mallgrave ; translation by Harry Francis Mallgrave and
Michael Robinson, with translations from Latin and Greek by Amir Baghdadchi.
p. cm. — (Texts & documents)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-89236-597-8 ISBN 978-0-89236-597-5
1. Architecture—Aesthetics. 2. Architecture
— History. 3. Decoration and ornament,
Architectural. |. Title: Practical aesthetics. I|. Title: Handbook for technicians, artists,
and friends of the arts. III. Mallgrave, Harry Francis. IV. Getty Research Institute. V. Title.
VI. Series.
NA2500.S46213 2004
720'.1-dc21
2002153381
 Contents

vil Preface

Introduction
Harry Francis Mallgrave

Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics:

A Handbook for Technicians, Artists, and Friends of the Arts
Part One. Technical Origin of the Most Important Forms, Types, and
Symbols in Architecture

7 Prolegomena

Volume One. Textile Art: Considered in Itself and in Relation to Architecture

103 Chapter 1. Introduction
109 Chapter 2. Classification of the Technical Arts
113 Chapter 3. Textiles: A. General-Formal
167 Chapter 4. Textiles: B. Technical-Historical

Volume Two. Ceramics, Tectonics, Stereotomy, Metallurgy: Considered in

Themselves and in Relation to Architecture
467 Chapter 5. Ceramics: A. Aesthetic-Formal
559 Chapter 6. Ceramics: B. Technical-Historical
623 Chapter 7. Tectonics (Carpentry): A. General-Formal
651 Chapter 8. Tectonics: B. Technical-Historical
IOLS Chapter 9. Stereotomy (Stone Construction): A. Aesthetic-Formal
Td Chapter 10. Stereotomy: B. Technical-Historical
823 Chapter 11. Metallurgy (Metalwork)

901 Semper’s Table of Contents

903 Plates
921 Works Cited by Semper
947 Selected Bibliography
953 Index
 : opel a» amd SaeedT
4 (ee eon)
7 7 é ™ Qe
LT oe ee) a

& Ghee Qin) ()eager gee Seat)

4 mart
(Ie Peay met) a]
=e ——a
— wre 7 es
: ne ee ee 7
Ty
% 7 oc
ped A Upper? *420
7 —a . ~ Ate
oma ap (i=
Gaited) Seer
otier Nea 7 elite ee uP

7 = ~
Preface

here is perhaps good reason why Gottfried Semper’s masterpiece on artis-

tic style has resisted English translation for 140 years, despite the plans of
two highly regarded architects, Lawrence Harvey and Bernard Maybeck. The
reason lies neither in the opacity of the literary style nor in the profundity of
the ideas nor even in the diffuseness of the book itself; it resides rather in the
considerable patience and resources necessary to bring such a difficult proj-
ect to fruition. The current volume represents a collaborative effort of two
translators and a team of scholars, stylists, and researchers, some of whom
devoted years of effort to bringing this work to completion. It is a project for
which only a major research institute could muster the necessary ambition
and resources.
It has been suggested by more than one reader that one does not venture
lightly into the ethereal realms of Semperian theory. While architects across
history have sought to imbue their productions with messianic fervor, Semper
regarded architecture itself as a religion whose meaning was esoteric yet dis-
cernible. He lived, breathed, and died with an artistic conception that he
derived from his love of Greek classicism; he offered his sacrifices on the altar
of Art and attempted to contribute, like an oracle, to its enlightenment. And if
today such a conception of art might seem bemusing, it is perhaps because it
is somewhat remote from our more simplified view of such matters. For me
this book completes an odyssey that began in 1984 when Joseph Rykwert first
proposed the task of translating some writings by Semper. In that venture I
was guided by the intellectual lantern of Wolfgang Herrmann, whose efforts
in the 1970s to resurrect the legacy of Semper may be seen as the true starting
point for this project. The Semper archive at the Institut fiir Geschichte und
Theorie der Architektur of the Eidgendssische Technische Hochschule in
Honggerberg, outside Zurich, greatly furthered these endeavors.
Michael Robinson prepared the first version of the translation and brought
his considerable talents to the project. Other scholars— foremost Cornelis J.
Baljon — provided further insights into aspects of Semper’s thought. The truly
prodigious task of editing the massive text and delving into Semper’s scant
bibliographic references was carried out by the always able editorial staff at
the Getty Research Institute, led by the manuscript editor (and superb German
linguist himself) Steven Lindberg. Among the many editors and researchers
who devoted seemingly endless hours to the editorial production were Sam
 Mallgrave

Gilbert, Michelle Bonnice, Courtney Booker, Britta Bothe, Elizabeth May,

Hannah Miller, Jason Moralee, Dana Ospina, and Aaron Thomas. The inter-
library loan staff of the Research Institute’s library, namely Aimee Lind and
Amelia Wong, has patiently complied with an astonishing number of loan
requests. Finally, this book would not have seen the light of day without the
administrative perseverance and determination of Julia Bloomfield, who for
more than fifteen years has headed the Getty Research Institute’s Publications
Program.
This translation must stand or fall on its own merits. The text is based on
the first edition of 1860-63, but the numbering of the subsections has been
corrected to follow the 1878 edition. Much time has been spent tracking
down the bibliographic sources to which Semper alludes (see “Works Cited
by Semper,” pp. 921-46), but in a number of instances it has been impossible
to determine which edition Semper consulted or to confirm the publication
information he provides. While classical quotations remain identical to those
in the first edition, classical citations have been updated where necessary to
make them easy to locate in modern editions; revised citations (principally to
Loeb editions) appear in square brackets. The terminology of Semper’s study
is, as always, crucial to his meaning, but to list the reasons for selecting terms
in a multitude of cases would simply tax the reader’s patience. Our goal has
been readability, and this objective demands flexibility in interpreting words
within specific contexts. The all-important theoretical term Bekleidung is an
exception to this rule: in every case we have translated it as “dressing” —
whether it refers to the chisel marks on stonework, the basket-weave pattern of
a column capital, or the tapestry-inspired alabaster wall panels employed by
_ the ancient Assyrians. It is our strong belief that for Semper this word was first
and foremost a textile-inspired concept. Also, the German word Kunstform
has been rendered as “art-form” throughout, to stress the nineteenth-century
origins of this concept.
—Harry Francis Mallgrave

Vili
Introduction
Harry Francis Mallgrave

f a great book can be said to have defined an era, it can also be argued that
a monumental study can be informed with the particular aspirations of its
time. The latter assertion, though fraught with historiographic perils, is per-
haps not too immoderate a thesis to defend in reference to the period of high
intellectual activity framed by the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the
Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) and the first volume
of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) —two studies that launched revolutions
on their respective fronts.! Both were infused with a comprehensive spirit of
investigation; both attempted to probe their subject genetically and thereby
discern underlying laws of human development; and both supplied their “sci-
entific” realms with radically new points of departure.
Although it may seem presumptuous, even indelicate, to speak of an inves-
tigation into the origin of art on the same page, similar epithets can be applied
to another ambitious study from this period, namely, Gottfried Semper’s Der
Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kiinsten; oder, Praktische Aesthetik:
Ein Handbuch fiir Techniker, Kiinstler und Kunstfreunde (1860-63; trans-
lated here as Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics:
A Handbook for Technicians, Artists, and Friends of the Arts).2 Granted, art
and the passion for it do not generally supply the ideological starch to march
armies across continents or to overturn long-held premises of biblical exe-
gesis, but their critical acumen can indeed be cut from the same intellectual
fabric. On occasion even their silken garments can be defined as “epoch mak-
ing,” as this particular study was.
Semper’s extended foray into the origin and unfolding of art-forms also
possesses kindred spirits within the arts. John Ruskin’s highly influential The
Stones of Venice (1851-53) did, admittedly, appear a few years earlier, but
the first volume of Semper’s study was published in the same year as Jacob
Burckhardt’s acclaimed Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien.4 Not only was
Burckhardt’s history the first comprehensive survey of a period that, only a
few decades earlier, was deemed to possess small artistic merit, but Burck-
hardt’s emphasis on philological and archival study also set a new standard for
art historical investigation. Perhaps an even more apt comparison to Semper’s
book is Eugéne-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire raisonné de larchi-
tecture francaise du XIe au XVIe siécle (10 vols., 1854-68).5 The aim of this
lengthy discourse on Gothic architecture was both to chronicle (in alphabetical
 Mallgrave

Fig. 1. Otto Speckter

Pencil portrait of Gottfried Semper as a young professor, 1837
Courtesy Archiv, Institut fur Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur,
Eidgendossische Technische Hochschule Zurich
 Introduction

order) the lineaments of its formal and technical evolution and to distill from
its particular building logic the spiritual vivacity then giving birth to the
French nation.
Semper’s study was no less grandly conceived, even if its intentions were
quite different. In his attempt to search out the “inner laws” of artistic forms,
Semper centered his investigation largely on the so-called minor arts. More-
over, the book proposed to resurrect from these artifacts the “organic life” of
their becoming, the process of their symbolic development, and their signifi-
cance for contemporary practice. And Semper’s study, with its aim to deduce
“the fundamentals of an empirical theory of art” (p. 71),6 both drew upon
and in turn influenced a number of other disciplines, among them ethnogra-
phy, linguistics, and archaeology. All contributed architecturally to his “com-
parative” fugue; in the end, his artistic theory was made to resonate with
unexpected timbres.
That such a rich euphony of themes could enchant a generation or two of
eager listeners struggling to define the meaning of art within an industrializ-
ing society, only to fall on deaf ears at the dawn of the twentieth century,
underscores the terrible fragility of historical knowledge. That this critique of
Semper’s leading ideas took place entirely within the conceptual framework
he helped to provide is also indicative of the normal course of intellectual
development. The sometimes fierce posturing toward Semper’s ideas in the
early years of the twentieth century, in any case, negates neither the magna-
nimity of his ambition nor the bravura of his time. It may even serve to our
advantage in evaluating his success and failure, for it allows us to review the
issues that he found to be so compelling but with a sense of freshness that
only historical distance allows. For now, after a multitude of failed attempts,
his full investigation has found its way into translation.” And with it, a mag-
nificent vista into the intricacies of nineteenth-century Germanic thought— its
highest dreams and aspirations — has been at least partially reopened.

The Life of the Architect

To anyone judging him by his errant youth, Gottfried Semper must have
seemed an unlikely intellectual. But his long and sometimes combative life,
which exhausted itself in the spring heat of Rome in 1879, can perhaps be
described (in an analogy he would have found appealing) as a Sophoclean
drama filled with many turns of personal fortune.8
He was born to parents of moderate wealth in the free city of Hamburg
on 29 November 1803. Gottfried’s mother, Johanna Marie née Paap, was
descended from a French Huguenot family that owned a respected wool firm,
founded in the nearby Holsteinian town of Altona in 1651. Gottfried’s father
managed the firm after his marriage, and he was also a prominent trader on
the Hamburg exchange. Gottfried’s early schooling, though interrupted (and
strongly influenced) by Napoléon Bonaparte’s occupation of the littoral
towns of northern Europe, was solid and fully in keeping with the tenor of the
time. He excelled in the classics (Latin and Greek) and in mathematics, and in
 Mallgrave

1823 he enrolled at the Universitat Gottingen to pursue a career as an artillery

officer.
That career ambition faded, but the student nevertheless pursued several
courses in higher mathematics under Carl Friedrich Gauss and Bernhard
Friedrich Thibaut, as well as a course on statistics under the noted historian
Arnold Heeren. The renowned classical archaeologist Karl Otfried Miiller
was also on the faculty, but Semper (who later would be attracted to Miiller’s
ideas) seems not to have enrolled formally in any of his lectures. His stay at
G6ttingen was too short-lived. He remained but three semesters, and each
was endured with growing impatience by an increasingly rambunctious and
unfocused youth who had succumbed to the more intemperate aspects of
romantic student life: gambling, drinking, and dueling. The last occupation,
which had largely disappeared in the eighteenth century, made a comeback
under the Napoleonic Code.
The remainder of the 1820s were almost entirely lost years for Semper.
He first sought employment as an engineer in Diisseldorf and then entry into
a military school in Delft before enrolling in the Akademie der bildenden
Kiunste (Academy of fine arts) in Munich in the fall of 1825, presumably to
study architecture. He seems, however, to have attended few, if any, classes.
Persistent scraps with the police caused him to move to Heidelberg and then
to Regensburg (to work for an engineer), where he became involved in a
duel. A warrant for his arrest was perhaps one reason why, in October 1826,
he set out on foot for Paris, a city that had long fascinated him. With no plan
for his future, he met by chance Franz Christian Gau, a respected German-
French archaeologist and architect who operated a private architecture school.
Semper enrolled, although his interest still lay with engineering. Impatient
with his progress, he left the city after ten months to pursue an engineering
position in Bremerhaven. When this job and the dampness of the harbor
proved inimical to his health, the student wandered about Germany for
much of the next eighteen months, before returning to the French capital in
October 1829. It was only then that he settled down to pursue architecture in
a serious way.
In the end Paris, particularly in the tumultuous period of 1829-30, opened
for the student a world of considerably higher expectations. In the studios of
architects, the air vibrated with Saint-Simonian enthusiasm and the debates
surrounding the collapse of neoclassical teachings at the Ecole des beaux-
arts.’ In the pages of archaeological journals, protagonists were engaging in
the first rounds of the highly animated debate on classical polychromy. In the
lecture halls of the natural sciences, the evolutionary and antievolutionary
forces of Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Georges Cuvier were squaring
off in public once again. Semper monitored all of these events closely, as he
did the somewhat precipitous overthrow of the last of the Bourbon kings,
Charles X. The July Revolution of 1830 both taught him the harsh lessons of
political power and kindled his —nearly lifelong — republican views.
Thus when Semper pursued his architectural studies in southern Europe in
 Introduction

the fall of 1830, he was a relatively well schooled though untested architect in
search of firsthand experience with the classical past. After a short period in
Rome he ventured to Pompeii to study the most recent excavations. With a
group of French students he chartered a vessel to sail to Sicily and explore its
sites. In Sicily, ancient Trinacria, Semper made the courageous decision to
pursue his classical interests to Greece, a land that had been in the throes of
civil war for nearly a decade.
The venture soon enough proved dangerous, as the provisional president
of Greece, Ioannis Kapodistrias, was assassinated on the day of Semper’s
arrival in the capital city, Nauplia. The murder shattered a tenuous political
calm and touched off a new round of fighting. Semper was soon, though
unofficially, pressed into the Bavarian diplomatic corps as the personal secre-
tary to the philologist Friedrich Wilhelm von Thiersch, a classicist who was
attempting to mediate a truce (through his friendship with King Ludwig of
Bavaria). In between the mediation efforts, and narrowly eluding at least one
assassination attempt, Semper found the time to advance his archaeological
studies, chiefly in Athens and on the island of Aegina. In all, he stayed in
Greece for nine months before sailing back to Italy in the summer of 1832.
The trip back included an armed showdown with pirates along the southern
coast of Greece.
Semper spent most of the next year in Rome working under the auspices of
the newly established Instituto di corrispondenza archeologica, directed by
Christian Carl Josias. Semper had in his possession his colored sketches of
Athenian buildings (fig. 2) as well as paint samples from Greek monuments,
from which he sought to prove the extent to which they were colored. Related
studies in Italy were largely focused on examples of Italic and Roman poly-
chromy. In the Bullettino dell’ Instituto di corrispondenza archeologica (1833),
he published his discovery of paint on Trajan’s Column, and he also visited
newly discovered Etruscan grave sites. During this time he was also at work
on a large colored folio devoted to antique polychromy.
Pressed by his family, Semper slowly made his way northward in the last
months of 1833. He studied Renaissance works in the principal Italian cities,
visited Munich and Berlin (where he met and conveyed his findings to
an enthused Karl Friedrich Schinkel), and arrived in Altona around the start
of 1834. Over the next three months he wrote and published a pamphlet
announcing the results of his studies: Vorlaufige Bemerkungen iiber bemalte
Architectur und Plastik bei den Alten (1834; translated as “Preliminary
Remarks on Polychrome Architecture and Sculpture in Antiquity”). It
appeared in the spring of 1834, at the time when the European debate on
polychromy had grown most intense—a debate sparked by Jacques-Ignace
Hittorff’s controversial presentation, in 1830, of a Sicilian heroon entirely
covered with paint. Semper, who privately was unconvinced of the accuracy
of Hittorff’s glittering restoration, nevertheless greatly expanded the claims
for classical polychromy by suggesting that the major works of high Greek
antiquity (such as the Parthenon), as well as Etruscan and Roman works, had
 Mallgrave

Fig. 2. Gottfried Semper Fig. 3. Gottfried Semper

Colored sketch of the Athenian Acropolis, 1833 First Dresden Hoftheater, 1838-41
Courtesy Archiv, Institut fur Geschichte und Theorie der Courtesy Archiv, Institut fur Geschichte und Theorie der
Architektur, Eidgendssische Technische Hochschule Zurich Architektur, Eidgendssische Technische Hochschule Zurich
 Introduction

been extensively painted, following color schemes that paralleled the codifica-
tion of the three column orders. Semper bolstered his ideas with arguments
(his essay was intended to announce his later folio) but little in the way of
documentation. Thus he appeared within this spirited international fray, how-
ever unwittingly, as an extremist in his defense of color.
Reaction was inevitable. The young Berlin historian Franz Kugler was
sufficiently provoked by Semper’s claims to publish a pamphlet specifically
to address the architect’s polychrome views. Kugler had never been to Greece,
and thus he based his contrary viewpoint entirely on the need for judicious
moderation. Semper, however, lacked the opportunity to respond immedi-
ately to these criticisms (later he would with a vengeance) or to publish the
projected volumes on classical polychromy. The publication of Semper’s
study of polychrome architecture seems to have been the deciding factor in his
selection, in the spring of 1834, for a chair at the Kunstakademie (Art acad-
emy) in Dresden.
Dresden launched Semper’s fame along another front. In addition to teach-
ing, he now began a brilliant career in architecture that burst forth with his
surprising commission for the Hoftheater (Court theater) in Dresden (fig. 3).
With the much touted opening of this opera and playhouse in 1841, Semper
was heralded as a major young talent in Germany —in some eyes the heir to
the architectural mantle of Schinkel, who had died that year. A dozen major
commissions followed in Dresden in the 1830s and 1840s, including the
synagogue, the Villa Rosa, the Oppenheim Palais, and the design for the
Gemialdegalerie (Dresden Gallery; fig. 4).
Semper also profited from Dresden intellectually. He became acquainted
with the porcelain collection at the Zwinger as well as with the nearby pro-
duction facility at Meissen. He studied both the ethnographic collections and
writings of Gustav Klemm, who was employed at the Zwinger as a royal
librarian. Above all, however, he partook in full of the vibrant artistic life of
the city, which then counted among its luminaries the painters Caspar David
Friedrich and Ludwig Richter, the writer Ludwig Tieck, the Devrient family of
actors and directors, the physician and art theorist Carl Gustav Carus, the
sculptor Ernst Rietschel, and the composers Carl Maria von Weber, Clara and
Robert Schumann, and the young Richard Wagner.
Semper’s sometimes tense friendship with Wagner contributed greatly to
the theoretical development of both individuals. The composer, ten years
younger than Semper, arrived in Dresden in 1842 intent on establishing his
artistic reputation. He did so on the stage of Semper’s newly designed theater,
where Wagner’s Rienzi, Der fliegender Hollander, and Tannhduser were first
performed. Wagner, whose use of medieval themes contrasted with Semper’s
preference for antiquity, also sharpened his views on art in his animated café
discussions with Semper — debates that on more than one occasion nearly
spilled over into fisticuffs. Each nevertheless respected the other’s talent, eru-
dition, and above all artistic ambition. In the last regard they never lost sight
of each other’s later successes.
 Mallgrave

§
sieeionscaeeasoiios,
§

Fig. 4. Gottfried Semper

Dresden Gallery, Theaterplatz facade, 1838-55
Courtesy Harry Francis Mallgrave
 Introduction

These happy and productive years came to an abrupt conclusion with the
political turmoil of 1848-49. The decision of the Prussian monarch to renounce
the national crown, constitution, and plan of unification put forth by the
elected Bundestag (National assembly) led to protests in the spring of 1849 in
various parts of Germany, chiefly in Saxony and Baden. When the Saxon
king, uneasy over the unrest, fled the city and asked for military assistance
from the Prussian monarch, he forced an armed conflict upon his capital city
and the protesting Landtag (State assembly) of Saxony. In early May a contin-
gent of Prussian and Saxon troops assaulted the insurgents’ defenses and
retook the city; hundreds of citizens who had supported the vision of a unified
and constitutional German state were killed, arrested, or forced to flee the
country. Wagner and Semper (the last now notorious for his construction of a
barricade that thwarted initial assaults) were both fortunate in eluding authori-
ties and making their way into political exile—the composer to Zurich and
Semper to Paris. It took Semper several weeks to come to the realization that
his most recent warrant of arrest (this time for treason) would cost him his
academic position, his architectural career, his means of support, his dignity,
and indeed for several years his wife and family.
Semper’s years in exile were for the most part exceedingly grim, but they
possessed the one redeeming value that the architect was able to turn his
attention to theory. His first year—living in Sevres — furthered his artistic edu-
cation as well, as he was able to examine regularly both the famed ceramic
collection there and the Assyrian bas-reliefs making their way to the Louvre.
Near the end of 1850, however, the still unemployed Semper made plans to
immigrate to the United States, where he hoped to join an established office as
well as start a school of architecture, but an offer of work diverted him to
London. He had booked passage on a steamship departing Liverpool for New
York on 19 August but delayed his departure for another vessel leaving from
Le Havre on 19 September. It was only after he had actually boarded this ship
on the eve of its departure that he was lured off by a letter from Emil Braun,
the secretary of the Instituto di corrispondenza archeologica in Rome, offer-
ing to help him resettle in London. The architectural commission promised by
Braun never materialized, and Semper would soon find himself more or less
stranded in London. There he foundered for another two years, that is, until
Henry Cole hired him to teach the “metal arts” at the recently reformed
School of Practical Art.
The British Museum’s collections and its library provided another invalu-
able base for his research, and Semper (daily sitting nearby Marx in the same
reading room) soon published two books that formed the direction of his later
thought: Die vier Elemente der Baukunst: Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden
Baukunde (1851; translated as “The Four Elements of Architecture: A
Contribution to the Comparative Study of Architecture”) and Wissenschaft,
Industrie und Kunst: Vorschlage zur Anregung nationalen Kunstgefihles,
bei dem Schlusse der Londoner Industrie-Ausstellung (1852; translated as
“Science, Industry, and Art: Proposals for the Development of a National
 Mallgrave

Taste in Art at the Closing of the London Industrial Exhibition”). In the first
he developed his model of four technical motives underlying architectural cre-
ation; in the second he began to consider the artistic and technological impli-
cations of the industrial age. In another unpublished manuscript on the
history of metallurgy, commissioned by Cole, Semper advanced his command
of this field and its ornamental techniques. And near the end of his stay in
England, Semper also completed a rather lengthy mathematical analysis of
Greek slingshot projectiles. All provided him with important insights that
came to fruition in the second half of the 1850s when, after moving to Zurich
in order to teach architecture at the Eidgenéssisches Polytechnikum (Federal
polytechnic school), Semper composed the two volumes of Style in the
Technical and Tectonic Arts. The long-awaited third volume, which was to
deal with architectural theory directly, never appeared.
A partial explanation for this lapse lay in the slow resurrection of his archi-
tectural career during the 1860s. The largest of his built works were the new
Stadthaus (Town hall) in Winterthur and the Polytechnikum building in Zurich,
but these projects paled next to what would have been one of the grandest
buildings of the century: Semper’s colossal design for the Festspielhaus in
Munich. The project was intended to house the first production of the full
cycle of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen, and it consumed three years of Semper’s
talent and energy. It never came to fruition, largely owing to Wagner’s insa-
tiable greed and adulterous relationship with Cosima von Bulow, the daugh-
ter of Franz Liszt. When the sullen composer fled the city with Hans von Biilow’s
wife late in 1865 for Switzerland, the project (the hallmark of the young reign
of the equally neurotic King Ludwig II) collapsed.
The last decade of Semper’s life, as fate would have it, was his most pro-
ductive architecturally. He built a new Hoftheater for Dresden (1869-78)
after his first theater had been consumed by flames in September 1869. Sum-
moned to Vienna by the young emperor Franz Josef, Semper also had his hand
in the design of a number of monumental works along the newly created
Ringstrafe. These included the buildings of the Hofburg Forum —consisting
of the Kunsthistorisches Museum (Art historical museum) and Naturhisto-
risches Museum (Natural history museum), and planned extensions of the
Hofburg Palace—and the adjacent Hofburg Theater. Squabbles in Vienna
with his partner Karl von Hasenauer eventually forced the aging and seriously
asthmatic architect into retirement. Still alienated from his recently unified
homeland, Semper chose to travel—for the most part in southern Europe,
especially Italy —to rekindle the artistic fire of his youth. On reading of Heinrich
Schliemann’s excavations at Mycenae in the late 1870s, the architect believed
that his earlier arguments on the vivid polychromy of Greece had at last found
their vindication. When he died in Rome on 15 May 1879, in the company of
the painter Franz Lenbach, Semper possessed a heroic stature and artistic rep-
utation unequaled at the time. His various writings and body of built forms
had established the framework of the German architectural debate for the
remainder of the century.

10
 Introduction

The Genesis of Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts

Although the two published volumes of Style in the Technical and Tectonic
Arts were written largely between 1856 and 1861, this complex and expansive
work had nearly twenty years of intellectual gestation. What began in the
1840s as an architectural textbook or a comparative study of building types
had by the next decade transformed itself into a more general work of aes-
thetics. Its conceptual evolution was also greatly affected by Semper’s chang-
ing interests, research opportunities, political fortunes, artistic instincts, and
even by a dispute with his publisher. Thus the circumstances molding the
work need to be considered in some detail.
Its initial impulse was a meeting that Semper had with the publisher
Eduard Vieweg in Dresden in the summer of 1843. Vieweg approached Semper,
who had just completed his theater, with a proposal to revise a new edition
of David Gilly’s Handbuch der Land-Bau-Kunst (1797-1811; Handbook on
rural architecture). After a few months of deliberation, Semper declined the
offer but made a counterproposal: he would write an architectural textbook
based on his lectures. It was tentatively entitled “Lehre der Gebaude” (Theory
of buildings) and considered architecture historically under nine building
types, with a tenth part devoted to city planning. Each building type was con-
sidered for its use, climate, cultural and social context, and predominant
materials.
In Semper’s letter to Vieweg outlining his proposal, dated 26 September
1843, he elaborated upon his desire to move beyond architecture’s technical
concerns and to search out the few “original formations” (urspriingliche
Gebilde) or “normal forms” (Normalformen) underlying its production.
“Architectural forms,” he noted, “are organic if they arise from a true idea, if
in their formation they display the lawfulness and inner spiritual necessity by
which Nature herself creates only the good and the beautiful, and uses the
uncomely as a necessary element to harmonize the whole.” !© Vieweg accepted
Semper’s proposal, and a contract was signed in the summer of 1844. Work
on the book did not advance, however —no doubt owing to the combination
of Semper’s teaching duties and busy architectural practice. In responding to
the entreaties from his publisher one year later, Semper pointed to the “thou-
sand hindrances” impeding his progress and promised that he would hence-
forth arise at 5:30 A.M. to attend to it." Two years later he blamed his lack of
progress on a broken rib suffered in a fall.2
Circumstances changed in the spring of 1849 with Semper’s political exile.
Now desperately needing some means of support, he wrote to Vieweg imme-
diately upon arriving in Paris in order to renew the contract and to repledge
his efforts.!3 Under the financial stress of his early months in exile, he began
writing and was pleased in August to have gained access to those private areas
of the Louvre in which the recently discovered Assyrian antiquities were being
examined. By early fall, however, he was forced to put aside the work and
redouble his efforts to find a more immediate source of income.
When these attempts failed, Semper resumed writing at the start of 1850,

at
 Mallgrave

but by now he had developed misgivings about the scope and direction of the
work. In an anxious letter to his publisher written in February, the depressed
and highly agitated Semper complained that the most recent discoveries of
Assyrian, Persian, Babylonian, and Indian artifacts had greatly expanded the
range of subject matter and rendered his earlier observations obsolete. But the
events had allowed him, by opening up a broader context of artistic culture
and its development, “to win for architectural history a fundamentally new
perspective.” 4 Deflecting Vieweg’s possible objection to a more grandly con-
ceived project that would consider the origin of art, Semper noted: “Do not
think that my concern for the beginning of artistic development is superflu-
ous. On it is based the idea that I propose to carry through the entire work —
the red thread that binds it.”
Finally, in May 1850, Semper dispatched a 380-page manuscript to Vieweg,
consisting of a preface and twenty chapters. He gave it a new title, “Verglei-
chende Baulehre” (Comparative building theory). In his accompanying letter,
Semper stressed once again the novelty of his historical approach (especially
in the chapters devoted to Assyrian and Egyptian architecture), through which
he hoped to allow young architects “to grasp motives in their connections, and
to recognize the importance of space in architecture.” As he himself explained
it: “I could not be content with a mere description of monuments. I had to
show why they were so and could not have been otherwise.” !6
In the preface to the work, Semper’s remarks were mostly topical and related
to the confusion in present-day architecture, in particular the lack of a uni-
versal world idea—a general architectural theory —such as that posited in the
sciences by such thinkers as Isaac Newton, Pierre-Simon de Laplace, Cuvier, and
Alexander von Humboldt.!” If the architectural textbooks of Jean-Nicolas-
Louis Durand (“lifeless schematism”) and Jean-Baptiste Rondelet (“purely
practical”)!8 had failed architecture on the level of theory, creative architectural
practice was even more severely impeded by the trends of historicism (arbitrary
imitation), aestheticism (lack of clear concepts), and materialism (technologi-
cal biases). Semper concluded the preface by invoking passages from his letter
of 1843 to Vieweg, in which he proposed to seek out this art’s “original forma-
tions,” those few basic forms that, as in nature, can be varied a thousandfold.
The twenty chapters of the first installment surveyed the dwelling —the
first of eleven building types —but the historical survey extended only to the
domestic architecture of Mesopotamia, Assyria-Chaldea, Media and Persia,
China, India, and Egypt. Several themes crucial to Semper’s later theory were
introduced, however. In the introduction he articulated for the first time the
four elementary motives underlying the making of architectural form: the
hearth (the embryo of social institutions), mounding, roofing, and walling.9 In
his chapter on Assyria-Chaldea, he invoked the notion of the dressing (Beklei-
dung) and its importance to artistic development in antiquity.2°
Architectural motives, Semper argued more generally, develop in a quasi-
evolutionary manner. Assyrian art, for instance, was an evolutionary mean
between that of theocratic Egypt and democratic Greece (a view Semper

12
 Introduction

would later reject), and it was here that the legendary tapestries or wall dress-
ings of antiquity (described in the Bible and by Greek historians) found their
translation into colored tiles and alabaster wall panels —emulating in charac-
ter the older textile style. In Semper’s eyes, this dressing motive was but a
prelude to the brilliantly painted temples of Greece.
With his partial manuscript mailed off in May 1850, Semper suspended
work on his project once again. The summer was largely consumed with his
efforts to borrow money and immigrate to the United States. After Emil Braun
persuaded him to move to London instead, Semper again turned to writing
but this time not to his projected treatise.
In the fall of 1850 he wrote Die vier Elemente der Baukunst (The four ele-
ments of architecture) —a short book, which was partly polemical and partly
theoretical. He hoped to direct it to an English audience in a translation, and
the first four chapters of the work were written as a refutation (in pungent
detail) of Kugler’s pamphlet of 1835. The issue of polychromy had recently
become a subject of debate in London, and Semper was seeking both to recap-
ture some measure of dignity and to make his presence felt in the city.
In the lengthy fifth chapter of the work, which shared the book’s title,
Semper sketched in a more elegant way his four-motive theory. One signifi-
cant advance he made in his thinking was his association of the four building
motives with four artistic techniques: hearth making with ceramics, mound-
ing with the development of masonry, roof making with scaffolding or car-
pentry, and walling with textiles (the original spatial dividers). This matrix
would remain the essential underpinning of his later theory.
When Semper completed Die vier Elemente, he was again in the midst of a
terrible fit of depression, as his search for work continued to fail on every
front. In December of 1850 he had the good fortune, at least, to have met
Henry Cole through the auspices of Edwin Chadwick, a friend assisting the
refugee at this time. Cole was favorably inclined toward the architect, although
he was very busy overseeing the erection of the Crystal Palace (fig. 5) and
planning the Great Exhibition, to be held in London in 1851. Sometime dur-
ing the winter, however, Cole put Semper’s name on a list of local designers
who could assist other nations in displaying their goods for the exhibition. In
the spring the embassies of Turkey, Canada, Sweden, and Denmark availed
themselves of Semper’s talent, and while the work and remuneration were
minimal, Semper took the opportunity to study the Great Exhibition in its
many facets, which proved an enormous boon to his theory. Coming from the
relatively backward industrial conditions of Germany, he was much impressed
with the machinery on display, but he was also enamored with the artistic
essays of the nonindustrialized countries. Textiles and carpets from Africa,
Turkey, and Persia attracted his attention in particular, as did the model of a
Caribbean hut from the island of Trinidad (fig. 6). Its pristine purity repre-
sented for him the confirmation of his four-motive thesis.
Toward the end of the exhibition, in the fall of 1851, Semper became
aware that Cole was in line to assume control of the Schools of Design. These

is}
 Mallgrave

uv
er eee ETT

Fig. 5. The Transept of the Crystal Palace, from the South
Entrance, London, 1851
From The Illustrated Exhibitor: A Tribute to the World's
Industrial Jubilee, no. 1 (1851): facing p. 1
Courtesy Research Library, Getty Research Institute,
87-S105
Fig. 6. Caribbean hut, model on display at the Great
Exhibition, London, 1851
From Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und
tektonischen Kunsten..., 2:276
Courtesy Research Library, Getty Research Institute,
86-B18560

14
 Introduction

were trade schools in London and in other manufacturing centers of Britain

that had been founded in the 1830s and 1840s to teach the principles of
industrial design and thereby further the cause of British trade. Cole had long
been the schools’ nemesis with his public demands for reforms. In a rush,
Semper sat down to compose his critical tract Wissenschaft, Industrie und
Kunst, in which he coupled his critique of the objects on display at the Great
Exhibition with his pedagogical beliefs and penchant for reform. The book,
like its predecessor, was published only in German and thus did not enhance
Semper’s immediate prospects, but circumstances were already turning in his
favor. As he was finishing the book, Cole was setting off on a trip to Germany,
where he would examine Semper’s architectural accomplishments in Dresden
firsthand. As his diary shows, he was much impressed with what he saw, and
amused when he heard the story there that the king had vowed to hang
Semper in his own theater —if he could ever get his hands on the architect.?!
Although Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst made but a small contribution
to Semper’s immediate circumstances, it did advance his deliberations in sev-
eral ways. The panorama of the exhibition offered the architect the occasion to
reflect stylistically on the products of the industrialized and nonindustrialized
nations— much to the benefit of the latter. The exhibition also affected his
later book in another respect. In August the publisher Vieweg came to Lon-
don to visit the exhibition, and he brought with him the first installment of
the manuscript that Semper had shipped off fifteen months earlier. No doubt
fearing the architect would never settle down to write it, Vieweg wanted
Semper to revise and shorten it.
The architect did so in the last months of 1851 and in the process made
several seemingly small shifts in the work’s conception that would have far-
reaching implications for his later book. For one thing, he now came to see
the work less as a work of architectural theory and more as a broad cultural
and ethnographic study that would “show the development of art-forms from
their first motives,” thereby revealing the practice of art “as always a manifes-
tation of a high cultural idea.”22 The Great Exhibition of London, this “cross
section of cultural science,”23 also made fully apparent the underlying connec-
tions between a people and their art.
Another major thesis that now emerged was Semper’s realization that
“architecture everywhere borrowed its types from prearchitectural conditions
of human settlement,”’2+ and that these types—the design motives underlying
the four technical arts of ceramics, carpentry, masonry, and textiles—also
continued to influence architectural production in later stages of develop-
ment, where they were raised to the status of symbols or emblems. The deco-
rative motifs of Maori tribes, the grass weavings from Africa, the highly refined
Asian carpets, the headdresses and decorative canoes of Canadian Indians—
all now came to assume centrality in Semper’s stylistic investigation because
of what they revealed about art and its development.
Semper was fascinated, for instance, with woven Maori fences he had seen
on display, because he saw that this “crude wattlework,” first used by tribes as

15
 Mallgrave

a perimeter defense, had effectively achieved a “fetish significance” in its dec-

orative application to domestic implements, weapons, ships, and houses; simi-
lar designs were even found in human tattoos.25 And the equally simple color
combinations in African grass shawls, like the color refinements of Chinese
tapestries, far exceeded the examples produced by the Western nations in
their style. From this point forward, such cultural and ethnographic interests
would overtake Semper’s architectural study, to the extent that the volume of
Style specifically relating to architecture would never be written.
But this thematic usurpation did not happen at once, as Semper suspended
work on his project once again—this time for more than three years. The
reasons are evident and fully understandable. When Cole returned from the
Continent and assumed his new position as the administrative director of the
Schools of Design, he had made a decision to hire Semper. The new director,
however, was at first much occupied with the larger questions surrounding
his reorganization of the schools into the Department of Practical Art, and
thus in early 1852 an already dejected Semper fell into another fit of depres-
sion and again planned his immigration to the United States. It was not until
March that Cole turned his attention to the architect, initially as a potential
instructor for a class on pottery. To this end he asked Semper to visit Herbert
Minton at the famed pottery works in Stoke-on-Trent and write a lecture and
a report. Cole was seeking to ascertain Semper’s knowledge in this field.
Minton dutifully informed Cole by letter that Semper had “good taste” but
perhaps “has much to learn” about ceramic processes.?¢
In April, Cole decided that the class on decorative metals might be better
suited to Semper’s interests and experience. The director then commissioned
Semper to write a comprehensive catalog on the technology of metals, which
the latter did in the spring and early summer.?” This labor —seven days a week
over several months—crowded out all other concerns, but it also advanced
Semper’s stylistic investigation by expanding his range of knowledge in another
field. The completed work led to Semper’s hiring at the Department of Practi-
cal Art late in the summer of 1852. The architect was finally able to bring his
family to London.
Semper’s remaining years in the English capital were busy ones, with a
multitude of interests and research. In addition to the architect’s preoccupa-
tion with a mathematical analysis of Greek slingshot projectiles (which he
correlated with general laws of proportion and beauty as well as with the cur-
vatures of moldings of Greek temples), Semper also lectured at the depart-
ment on a variety of subjects, specifically on themes related to his four technical
categories of ceramics, textiles, carpentry, and masonry. Most important for
his later work, however, was the time he spent at the British Museum. As he
did in Paris, Semper would master every area of the museum’s rapidly expand-
ing holdings.
The final stage of Semper’s conceptualization of Style can be summarized
succinctly, although in many respects it was the most complex owing to an
intervening legal dispute. When Semper moved to Zurich in the summer of

16
 Introduction

1855 to direct the new architecture department, he renegotiated his contract

with his ever patient publisher—now for a work eleven years in the making. In
his most recent formulation, it was to be a two-part study embracing the “entire
world of form,” of which only the second part would consider architecture.?8
Work progressed rapidly and in June of the following year Semper sent to
Vieweg the first installment of the new book, entitled “Kunstformenlehre”
(Theory of art-forms). It consisted of one hundred woodcuts, a preface and
introduction, and two of the projected six parts of the first volume. The first
part was devoted to the composition and general principles of ornament; the
second part dealt with the theme of ceramics. Yet it was at this stage —in the
summer of 1856 —that problems arose.
Semper, who had been receiving advance payments since the start of his
exile (in part out of Vieweg’s charity), now became dissatisfied with his fee
and proposed a renegotiation. Vieweg, who had been puzzled at the direction
that the book was now taking, sought a meeting with the author in Ragaz,
Switzerland. The two men met in September, and Vieweg agreed to raise the
payment once more. Almost immediately after returning to Zurich, however,
Semper complained in a letter to Vieweg of his severe financial plight. To
compound an already delicate situation, Semper then offered the manuscript
to another publisher for a higher price—and to his chagrin it was at once
accepted. When Vieweg became aware of this ruse, he was infuriated. He now
refused to return the manuscript in his possession to Semper (eventually it was
lost) and threatened to sue the recalcitrant author if he published any similar
material elsewhere. A standoff ensued.
Over the next two years Semper considered several different versions for
the book — always seeking to utilize his research and previously gained insights
and at the same time wanting to deflect a possible lawsuit. Among the plans
and partial manuscripts for another book were those for an architectural
dictionary, a cultural-historical and artistic-technical study of architecture,?? a
stylistic study of architectural history and theory,>° and (in several manuscript
versions) a pure work of aesthetics, entitled “Theory of Formal Beauty.”?!
Gradually, however, Semper drifted back to his original plan of a two-part
study —similar to the work in Vieweg’s hands. In 1858 Semper began writing
again—this time starting with textiles instead of ceramics. The first volume
was to consider the four technical arts together, and the second was to be
devoted to architecture. In the next year, after appending a lengthy excursus
on the principle of dressing to the section on textiles, Semper expanded the
project to three volumes. The first was to concern itself solely with textiles
and the second would consider the three remaining technical arts. Architec-
ture was thus relegated to a third volume.
This last volume, of course, never appeared. A forty-two-page manuscript
for it exists in the Semper archives in Zurich. This fragment was probably
written early in 1869 as an introduction to the third volume, and it is the sole
reminder of the subject that originally gave rise to the great endeavor.*2

NY
 Mallgrave

The Conceptual Scheme of Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts

The two published volumes of Style (fig. 7) consist of the prolegomena and
eleven chapters. The prolegomena (or critical remarks serving as an introduc-
tion) deal first with the contemporary state of art and then present a few gen-
eral aesthetic principles. The initial comments are for the most part gloomy,
as they address the crisis afflicting contemporary artistic production —a crisis
wrought by the twin agencies of poor artistic education and an abundance of
technical or industrial means. The second part of the prolegomena, prefaced
by a sobering and quite unexpected Schopenhauerian tinge of metaphysical
dread (soothed by art), largely centers on the concepts of eurythmy, symmetry,
proportion, and direction, which are presented to the reader as key aesthetic
terms for Semper’s stylistic analyses.
The problem with the presentation of these concepts, however, is that they
were not integrated into the main body of the text—a problem that no doubt
arose because of the several false starts and differing conceptions of the proj-
ect. The aesthetic concepts in themselves are also somewhat new to Semper’s
thinking and for the most part derive from his reading of two recent books by
Adolf Zeising. They also depart from, though in no case impede, Semper’s
earlier stated goal to write a “practical aesthetics” (the book’s second title) or
“empirical theory” of art.
This last point is quite important. Zeising, a mathematician and philoso-
pher, had published his first book in 1854, Newe Lehre von den Proportionen
des menschlichen Korpers (A new theory of the proportions of the human
body).33 In it he analyzed both the cosmic (planetary) and microcosmic realms
(minerals, plants, and animals) in terms of the golden section. In his lengthy
study of the following year, Asthetische Forschungen (Aesthetic investi-
gations), Zeising attempted to merge Hegelian aesthetics with the formalism
of Johann Friedrich Herbart.34 Although Semper rudely dismisses Zeising’s
endeavor in the prolegomena, in a public lecture given in Zurich in 1856 he
had alluded to the usefulness of Zeising’s aesthetic categories, while he was at
the same time critical of the Hegelian structure of his scheme.?5 Zeising had
argued that the goals of the artist and the aesthetician were essentially differ-
ent in that the artist strives to introduce ideal beauty into the real world, while
the philosopher traces phenomenal appearance back to the idea. Semper
believed that the relatively new field of aesthetics should be more practical
and provide theoretical guidelines for the artist, and he regarded any abstract
theorizing in a Hegelian or speculative sense as essentially irrelevant to art.
This was the practical underpinning of Semper’s conception of an empirical
theory for art, but again his explanation is somewhat weak and presented in a
negative way. Despite its subtitle, Style is not so much a handbook for the
creation of art but for addressing its becoming, for teaching the factors that
condition form. It is not a history of art or a history of style; rather, it seeks
to reveal the inner necessity of style—historically in its constituent principles.
The book is not an abstract theory of beauty but a concrete theory of style, that
is, an examination of the material, technical, and ideal preconditions of style.

18
 Introduction

DER STIL ue
he of BLT ee ar
technischen und tektonischen Kiinsten,—
oder
ftir sich betrachtet und in Beziehung zur Baukunst

PRAKTISCHE AESTHETIK.

Ein Handbuch fiir Techniker, Kiinstler und Kunstfreunde

you
Gottfried Semper,
Professor der Baukuuet aa (lem alg. eldg. Polytechnikum zu Zorich,

Gottfried Semper,
Professor der Baukenst so dem alg. cidg. Polytechuikam zn Zarleh.

Erster Band, Mit 125 in den Text gedruckten Holzschnitken

14 farbigen Tondraucktafeln.
und

Tex tiles Barat

FRANKFURT a. M. | FRANKFURT a. M,
Verlog fiir Kunst und Wissensehaft. Verlag tir Kunst und Wissenschaft,
1860. 1860.

Fig. 7. Title spread

From Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen KUnsten..., vol. 1
Courtesy Research Library, Getty Research Institute, 86-B18560

1)
 Mallgrave

For most of the twentieth century Style was criticized by many for its “mate-
rialist” bent, but such a label is both inaccurate and misleading.3¢ Not only
was Semper on several occasions at pains to distinguish his approach from
what he himself regarded as “the coarsely materialist view” (p. 106),?” but
simply reading those parts of the text devoted to art and its meaning would
convince even the casual reader that the work remains fully within the idealist
bounds of late German romanticism.38
Semper’s essential idealism is also supported by his definition of style,
which (owing to Vieweg’s threat of a lawsuit) was not made explicit, although
it is certainly implicit in the structure of the work. In a manuscript of 1856
the architect defined style as “giving emphasis and artistic significance to
the basic theme and to all intrinsic and extrinsic coefficients that modify the
embodiment of the theme in a work ofart.” This is actually a tripartite def-
inition. The basic theme is the heart of his theory, the essential artistic idea
to be conveyed. This theme is subsequently modified in a work’s production,
by both intrinsic and extrinsic factors. The first category consists of those cir-
cumstances affecting a work from within, such as the purpose for which it is
made, the material out of which it is made, and the techniques employed. The
second category consists of those variables affecting the work from without,
such as local and personal influences, climate, topography, politics, religion,
and cultural traditions.
That the two published volumes of Style focus almost entirely on the
intrinsic variables thus lends the work a misleading materialist coloring. Yet
as the prospectus for his third volume makes clear, Semper intended to dwell
almost exclusively on style’s external variables in that section, that is, on the
personal, social, and cultural conditions giving rise to style. Hence his theory,
because of the missing third volume, never achieved the balance that he had
intended.
Even the choice of the term style for the title was a last-minute decision.
Friedrich E. Suchsland, the managing editor with whom Semper was in regu-
lar contact, had favored using the book’s initially projected title, “Kunst-
formenlehre,” but Semper vetoed this idea because he felt it would lead to
legal problems with Vieweg. The architect then suggested the simple title
“Praktische Asthetik” (Practical aesthetics), which the publisher rejected as
too bland. The compromise title proposed by Suchsland — “Die Lehre von den
Kunstformen; oder, Der Stil und seine praktische Anwendung in den techni-
schen und tektonischen Kinsten” (Theory of art-forms; or, Style and its prac-
tical application in the technical and tectonic arts) — was again scaled back by
Semper, who was still concerned about Vieweg’s threat. Thus we have a title
prominently featuring the word style and a stylistic investigation, but this
principal term is not explicitly defined by the author.4°
It is also important to note at the outset that in Semper’s approach the four
primary technical motives are relevant not only to a specific technical art or its
primary material but also to its underlying idea. The chapters on textiles, for
instance, are concerned with artistic productions composed of strong, tensile,

20
 Introduction

and pliable materials woven into fabrics, and also with the allusion to such.
Ceramics considers soft, malleable substances that later harden in the open air
or over fire. Tectonics includes all structural frameworks, and stereotomy in
its conception considers small dense aggregates that are piled together and are
strong in compression. Artistic works, moreover, are often composite in their
underlying motives. For example, a Greek metal tripod might be tectonic in
its supporting apparatus, the profiling of its upper part might draw upon the
curvature of ceramic forms, and some of its ornamental motifs might derive
from textile designs. The principle of dressing, which for Semper originated
as a textile motive, can likewise be applied to the three other technical cate-
gories; for instance, a mosaic, which is stereotomic in its material, may be
designed as a textile dressing for a ceiling, floor, or wall. Semper seems to
have come to this realization quite late.
The guiding theme of the work is the interrelation of the various arts in
their shared development of a few primary technical and ornamental motives,
but here again the point is rarely made with clarity. The book (like its galleys)
sometimes takes on the character of a palimpsest with its layering of views and
interpretations, often appealing to different disciplines. For the purpose of this
introduction I would like to address three specific areas in which Style signifi-
cantly affected later developments: archaeology, aesthetics, and architecture.

The Archaeology of Style

Within the context of nineteenth-century archaeology Semper’s book is an
impressive compilation of observations and artifacts. It presents a veritable
tapestry of materials woven from classical sources, field observations, eigh-
teenth- and nineteenth-century travel reports, and historical guides. It is,
nevertheless, the work of an architect, not an archaeologist, even though this
distinction was not as sharply defined at the time. During these very same
years, in fact, the discipline of archaeology was engaged in precisely the trans-
formation that would make this distinction evident, passing from a pursuit of
dilettantes, architects, and adventurers to a science with specific qualifications
and critical guidelines. New ethnic discoveries and fronts of inquiry were
opening up almost daily and the situation in general was quite complex, even
for such better-known areas of research as Egypt and Greece.
Egyptian civilization, for example, had been one object of Napoléon’s
expedition to Egypt in 1798, but much of this civilization still lay enshrouded
in mystery. Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered the Rosetta stone in 1822,
which allowed for the first time an appreciation of this country’s lengthy
antiquity, but serious archaeological work on Egyptian sites did not com-
mence until 1858, when Auguste Mariette, the so-called father of Egyptian
archaeology, began his excavations in Cairo. Semper’s teacher Gau, in Anti-
quités de la Nubie, could still argue in the 1820s (based on his excursion to
southern Egypt and Sudan) that Egyptian civilization had originated in Nubia
and later spread northward.
Studies of Greek civilization were more abundant but in many ways not

21
 Mallgrave

much more advanced. The first accurate recordings of Greek architectural

monuments had been made in the early 1750s by James Stuart and Nicholas
Revett, but the second volume of Stuart and Revett’s study, which delineated
the Parthenon (fig. 8), did not appear until 1788. The fourth and final volume
of their atlas did not appear until 1816. By this date many Greek monuments
had been studied in some detail (many more ransacked for their art) by an
almost continuous stream of Western travelers, yet with varying degrees of
competence. Among the travelers to Greece at the turn of the century were
Lord Elgin, William Leake, William Wilkins, and Edward Dodwell. In the
second decade C. R. Cockerell, Carl Haller von Hallerstein, Otto Magnus von
Stackelberg, and Peter Oluf Brondsted visited most of the major sites. Cockerell
and Haller von Hallerstein, however, were less interested in study than in cart-
ing off the marbles for profit. A third contingent of architects and archaeolo-
gists —consisting of William Kinnard, Joseph Woods, T. L. Donaldson, Charles
Barry, Charles Eastlake, and William Jenkins
— made its way to Greece in 1816,
intending to prepare a second edition of Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities of
Athens. This edition, which made the earlier measurements more accessible,
appeared from 1825 to 1830.4!
The Greek war for independence from Ottoman control, which began in
earnest in 1821, largely put an end to these investigations. Thus when Semper
visited Greece from 1831 to 1832, he was still a relatively early traveler to
these sites, with little reliable material to study beforehand. This can be seen
by what he carried with him out of Sicily by way of guidebooks: a French
translation of Pausanias, an abridged edition of Jean-Jacques Barthélemy’s
Voyage du jeune Anacharsis en Gréce, and William Gell’s Itinerary of Greece.
Semper and his traveling companion, Jules Goury, scoured the Greek country-
side alone, mostly on foot, although at one point they had access to a mule. In
Athens Semper erected his own makeshift scaffold on the Acropolis; he
applied for, but was denied, permission to excavate. His measurements and
drawings, however carefully executed, were nevertheless undertaken in the
most dire political circumstances and no doubt suffered because of the war.
The fact that he scraped off paint samples from surfaces of the Parthenon
underscores both the novelty of his discoveries and his unprofessional approach.
His lack of academic or professional standing no doubt also impeded the
publication of his findings. When he began his polychrome reconstructions
back in Italy, he was initially uncertain as to how to proceed with his project.
He first thought to offer his work to Abel Blouet, the architect in charge of a
French-financed expedition to the Peloponnese in 1829. The latter’s L’expédi-
tion scientifique de Morée appeared in three volumes between 1831 and 1838,
but its topic was limited to southern Greece. When Semper was counseled
against this by his former teacher Gau (who feared that the French would take
credit for his findings),4* he established a connection with the newly founded
Instituto di corrispondenza archeologica in Rome. This was an institute whose
foundation in 1829, financed by the Prussian monarch Friedrich Wilhelm IV,
was in itself an event of great importance to this field. The institute’s director,

22
 Introduction

Fig. 8. View of the Parthenon in 1751

From James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, The Antiquities of Athens
(London: printed by J. Haberkorn, 1762-1816), vol. 2, chap. 1, pl. 1
Courtesy Research Library, Getty Research Institute, 85-B3279

23
 Mallgrave

3
é

Fig. 9. W. L. Walton
Lowering the Great Winged Bull
From Austen Henry Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains...(London: J. Murray, 1849), vol. 1, frontispiece
Courtesy Research Library, Getty Research Institute, 86-B4271

24
 Introduction

Christian Bunsen, encouraged Semper to prepare his own folio presentation

of his findings, but unfortunately the grandly conceived work —which Semper
offered to the publisher Johann Friedrich Cotta in 1833—never proceeded
beyond the publication of Semper’s prefatory brochure in 1834 and the prepa-
ration of a few colored plates.43
Nevertheless, there is indeed support for Leopold Ettlinger’s contention
that “Semper was, after the conclusion of his travels in 1833, as much an
archaeologist an architect.”44 While still in Greece, Semper had hoped to
travel directly back to Munich with Thiersch, but the latter was delayed in
Greece by the need to mediate hostilities. In Semper’s first letter home from
Italy, shortly thereafter, he noted that he was also writing to the Bavarian
crown and had to hurry through Italy to get to Munich as soon as possible.45
The urgency was motivated by the news that Ludwig’s son, Prince Otto, had
been designated king of Greece by the European powers (against Ottoman
interests), and Semper wanted to offer himself as the king’s personal guide
and artistic adviser. Semper had no need to travel north, however, as Otto and
his entourage were already making their way south through Italy. In Rome,
Semper offered his services to one of Otto’s top aides, but they were respect-
fully declined.*¢
Semper’s other activities in Sicily and Italy also point to a genuine interest
in archaeology. Before traveling to Greece he was a relatively early explorer of
Greek sites on Sicily (which came into prominence during the 1820s largely
because of the political instability in Greece) and at Paestum (discovered in
1745 but still little visited). Semper also sketched newly exposed murals at
Pompeii, and after his return from Greece he examined minutely (with a team
of architects) Trajan’s Column in Rome for traces of paint.4”7 Under the aus-
pices of the archaeological institute he was also one of the first people to record
murals of Etruscan tombs at Corneto, which began to be unearthed in 1827.48
This interest in archaeological investigation waned considerably with the
start of Semper’s teaching duties and architectural practice in 1834. By the time
of the writing of Style, almost thirty years later, his command of the rapidly
expanding field of archaeological knowledge called for a different yardstick.
Certainly one of the more significant lacunae of earlier archaeological study
had been the Middle East, which had remained virtually closed to Western
exploration until the mid-nineteenth century. The Englishman Claudius James
Rich was one of the first travelers to glimpse Babylonian and Sumerian ruins
in the second decade of that century, but these sites would not be revisited in a
serious way until William Kennett Loftus excavated Warka and surrounding
sites in the early 1850s. Thus the stupendous Assyrian finds of the 1840s,
unearthed separately in expeditions led by the Frenchman Paul-Emile Botta
and the Englishman Henry Layard in the mid-1840s, veritably defined the
state of archaeology of this decade. The confusion surrounding what was dis-
covered, however, also underscores the state of knowledge at the time. Both
Botta and Layard believed they had unearthed Nineveh, and both joyously
announced the event (fig. 9). As it turns out, Botta had found the ruins of

25
 Mallgrave

Khorsabad, and Layard had found those of Nimrud. The Englishman, of

course, did find the site of Nineveh on a second expedition that lasted from
1849 to 1851.
It is thus significant, though altogether accidental, that Semper would
shortly take full advantage of both discoveries. Arguably the most eventful part
of his Paris stay of 1849 and 1850 was his examination of the wall panels and
other artifacts from Khorsabad, which were just being received and processed
at the Louvre.4? And he was in London shortly thereafter to view the Assyrian
findings of Layard, which had arrived in 1848. He studied every facet of both
collections, and the Paris experience even seems to have revived —if only tem-
porarily —his interest in archaeology. In one of his more desperate efforts to
find work, he wrote to the Greek government to offer his services again; at the
same time he wrote to a General Jochmus, whom he had met in Greece in
1831 or 1832, and asked for letters of recommendation for someplace in the
Orient, “perhaps Constantinople, Athens, or Alexandria.”5° In another plea,
the political exile wrote to the former Saxon cabinet minister Bernhard August
Lindenau and informed him that, as part of a conciliatory attempt “to con-
tinue to serve my fatherland, which knows me and which I love,” he would be
willing to undertake a scientific-artistic expedition to the Orient, possibly
Egypt, the Middle East, or Turkey.5!
Semper’s archaeological mastery of Greek and Assyrian material would
provide the foundations and cornerstone to his theory of style, but there were
other areas of interest in which he, like many of his contemporaries, lacked
vital information. One area ripe for analysis around midcentury (and also
vital to Semper’s ethnographic interests) was that of prehistoric man. Biblical
accounts, or their interpretations, had previously limited human antiquity to
around six thousand years, and the most widely accepted scientific explanation
for this belief in the first part of the century had been Georges Cuvier’s “catas-
trophe” theory, which postulated a series of geological revolutions or floods
that successively obliterated life on earth. This theory held Homo sapiens to
be a postdiluvian species of the last creation, therefore not contemporaneous
with such antediluvian creatures as the mammoth, whose fossils were known.
This was the chronological framework within which Semper operated
until the mid-1850s. In a lecture given in London late in 1853 the architect
spoke of his delight with the osteological and paleontological collections of
Cuvier at the Jardin des plantes in Paris, “where the fossil remains of the ani-
mal tribes of the primeval world stand in long series ranged together with the
skeletons and shells of the present creation.”52 In the same lecture Semper
referred to the Assyrians as being of the Semitic race, which suggests he
accepted James Cowles Prichard’s proposal that the cradles of civilization
were the fertile plains and river valleys of three nations: the Semitic, or Syro-
Arabian, nation; the Japhetic, or Indo-European; and the Hamite, or Egyp-
tian. Semper had earlier made reference to Prichard in his Dresden lectures.%3
Sometime after this date, however, Semper dropped his acceptance of
Cuvier’s chronology and followed more recent scientific theories. Charles

26
 Introduction

Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-33) had set an alternative explanation in

motion at an early date,°4 but the implications of slow geological stratifica-
tion for human evolution were not immediately recognized. Thus the various
discoveries in the 1830s of human bones and pottery with antediluvian fossils
were largely ignored. The most spectacular finds were those of the Frenchman
Jacques Boucher de Perthes, who, beginning in 1838, collected flints, polished
axes, human bones, and bones of extinct animals in deposits of the Somme
valley near Abbeville.sS Nevertheless, his explanation for these findings, pre-
sented in his Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes (1847),5 convinced no
one, and it was not until Lyell and John Evans visited Abbeville in the late
1850s that scientists began to take Boucher de Perthes’s discoveries more seri-
ously.5? This was around the time, of course, that Darwin published his
famous book.
The same confusion surrounds the discovery in 1857 of the skeleton of
Neanderthal man, first reported by Johann Karl Fuhlrott. The importance of
this find of previously unimaginable antiquity was a subject of intense debate
at an international symposium of archaeologists assembled in Kassel in the
following year, but the consensus among the more respected scientists was
largely one of incredulity toward its early date. Most shared the view of
Rudolf Virchow, who pronounced the brutish build and low vault of the skull
to be the indications of a rachitic idiot afflicted with arthritis, rather than an
important link in the evolutionary chain.°8
Part of Virchow’s rationalization for his view that Homo sapiens did not
evolve from such apelike forms was another spectacular find of the 1850s: the
discovery of Neolithic lake dwellings on Lake Zurich. Once again Semper was
on hand. Low water levels in the winter of 1853 had brought into view a
series of piles, stone axes, and horn implements at Obermeilen, which the
Swiss archaeologist Ferdinand Keller pronounced to be the remnants of pre-
historic tribes.
Semper, who had just moved to Zurich, was much impressed with the dis-
covery. He followed Keller in believing the piles had supported lake dwellings
rather than shore settlements along a changed shoreline. The fact that these
settlements were of Neolithic origin, however, could not be surmised at this
time (John Lubbock first employed the term in 1865), and indeed the antiq-
uity of these “Finnish pile dwellings” (p. 105),5° as Semper refers to them in
Style, was a point of great confusion. Toward the end of the book Semper
even argues that the ornamental patterns found on iron sheaths were neither
Roman nor Celtic nor Saracen in origin, “but follow a quite indefinably bar-
barian style” (p. 896 n. 76).6
From this same passage and another in which the antediluvian period is
specifically discussed (p. 564),®! it is also apparent that by this date Semper
had accepted (although with some incredulity) the chronological division
into a Stone Age, a Bronze Age, and an Iron Age. The Danish archaeologist
Christian Jiirgensen Thomsen had outlined these stages as early as 1836,
but his hypothesis was not convincingly demonstrated until Jens Jacob

Ou,
 Mallgrave

Asmussen Worsaae aligned these periods with stratigraphic succession in

1843. It was not until the 1850s, however, that the distinction became widely
accepted.
One area of prehistoric culture that would have been of paramount impor-
tance to Semper’s theory was that of Paleolithic art, but once again the major
discoveries came too late. The Pyrenean explorations of Edouard Lartet did
not take place until the early 1860s, and Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola’s
fabulous discovery at Altamira occurred in 1879, the year of Semper’s death.
Indeed, a scientific consensus on its authenticity did not come about until
the early twentieth century. Semper was thus much at a disadvantage in this
regard, and it is understandable that for him Mycenaean and Egyptian art
stood near the infancy of human artistic development.
If we turn from the historical limitations of his archaeological framework
to his use of the material at his disposal, his insights and observations at times
bear the mark of great originality and insight, at other times simply of imagi-
nativeness. Of the various sources available to him, certainly the Assyrian
artifacts were the most studied, and they provided the greatest impetus to his
theories on art. Illustrations from and references to Assyria are repeatedly
evoked throughout the text. In the chapters on textiles alone, he speaks of the
symbolism of Assyrian royal tassels and headbands (symbols of unrestraint,
accentuating direction and movement), feather crowns and helmet decora-
tions (fig. 10), the battlements of castles (their relation to ornamental tassels
and fringes), floor patterns (stone carpets with directionless patterns), orna-
mental vegetal interlaces (mystical knots: symbols of primeval chaos), chitons,
belts and rings (the last two fully expressing the spirit of the people and their
architecture), Assyrian chairs (motifs of tapestry bearers), and tents.
Perhaps most instructive for our purposes is Semper’s use of Assyrian art
in his excursus on dressing. In Botta’s excavations, the alabaster bas-reliefs
found represented something of an artistic mean between the sculptures of
Egypt and Greece. Egyptian art in turn—with its dominant silhouette and lit-
tle regard for anatomical correctness — reflected for Botta the rigid theocratic
system of its place of origin and remained essentially shackled. Greek art-
forms, by contrast, broke the fetters of theocracy, freeing art to aspire
simply to naturalism. Botta saw Assyrian art as the mean between these two
stages: in its execution and naturalism it surpassed Egyptian art, yet in its
despotic conception it still retained many of the traditional religious forms
and limitations.°2 These bas-reliefs were thus the first essays in the artistic
evolution that later found perfection in Greece.
Semper concurred but only in the first half of the 1850s. In his four-motive
theory, the alabaster panels assumed central importance, but not for their
quasi naturalism; rather, they captured the precise moment at which the style
of the embroidered tapestry motif (the wall’s original motive evolving from
the mat or wickerwork) found its monumental expression or was transposed
into a hard dressing material (fig. 11). In essence, the celebrated wall tapestries
of the ancient Middle East (made famous by biblical and classical Greek

28
 Introduction

Fig. 10. Top: Greek and Assyrian helmet decoration, Assyrian miter with feathers;
Bottom: Greek acroteria
From Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kunsten..., 1:26
Courtesy Research Library, Getty Research Institute, 86-B18560

29
 Mallgrave

Fig. 11. Eugéne Flandin

The Assyrian tapestry motif in alabaster
From Paul-Emile Botta, Monument de Ninive (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1849-50), atlas, pl. 12
Courtesy Harry Francis Mallgrave

30
 Introduction

accounts) were here emulated in style, which for Semper makes them crucial
for understanding the later wall paintings of their Greek successors.
In Style this explanation burgeons with additional nuances. For one thing,
the various cultures of the Euphrates valley (Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian)
are now less beholden to Egyptian influence and stand more independent as a
center of early civilization, probably emanating from somewhere in western
Asia. And although the “stone embroidery” (p. 276)® of Chaldean-Assyrian
wall panels represents an important junction in cultural history
—a vital “miss-
ing link” (p. 247)64 for understanding Hellenic culture—it is also of “late
stylistic birth” (p. 317)6° and relates more broadly to earlier stucco and
glazed-tile work. The Babylonians and Assyrians were simply the “most
faithful guardians of the dressing motive” (p. 273), for with the Assyrian
panels —in particular, their decorative motif—they passed beyond the simple
imitation of textile models and strove for description, much like (in Semper’s
far-flung analogy) the brocade patterns of medieval gowns.
And if Semper’s bold attempt to designate “the woven and embroidered
arazzi fabrics of the skillful Chaldeans” (p. 324)§7 as the prototype for all
later monumental wall dressings may seem too speculative for modern sensi-
bilities, it at least resonates with artistic gumption. Richly polychrome Assyr-
ian art, as Botta argued, still seemed “fettered” to Semper, but “it is not
embalmed like a mummy and as completely petrified as it was in Egypt, where
art no doubt obeyed specific and irrevocable hieratic statutes” (p. 324).68
Assyrian art is, by contrast, invisibly bound to the canvas of the embroidery
frame, a technical model that at the same time allows muscles to be clearly
drawn and figures to be “defined as if with strong thread” (pp. 324-25). On
a representational level, the Assyrians transcend the calligraphic signs of the
Egyptian painted chronicles by giving free rein to mystical-tendentious
meanings, many of which were only partially lost in Greek imitations. In
fact, mature Greek art branches off from the early Hellenic understanding of
ornamental wall symbols in a structural-functional sense on this very point
(and not its naturalism), such that every possible reference to the underlying
mystical impulse is now made as faint as possible. For Semper, Greek higher
art is assigned to neutral fields (metopes, pediments), where it is then able to
divest itself of precisely these structural values and thus pursue beauty for
its own sake. Clearly, Semper takes us to places well beyond the interests of
modern-day inquiry.
This can be seen in another imaginative leap of archaeological faith that
Semper ventures — deducing the monumental column order from hollow-
body Assyrian prototypes used in furnishings. Speaking in part to his method,
his principal evidence is the absence of column remnants from Assyrian ruins.
Actually, his reasoning follows logically from the larger theory of Antoine-
Chrysosth6me Quatremére de Quincy, which saw the empaestic (embossed)
bronze sheathing of early sculptural cores as a monumentalization of the
earlier wooden idol (ceremoniously dressed in real clothing) (pp. 250-51).7°
In a related process, the pictorial and physical evidence of Assyrian chairs and

31
 Mallgrave

steles (wooden frames partially covered with metal sleeves and plates) con-
vinced Semper that Assyrian columns, too, defined a crucial transitional
stage: a columnar transition between decorative or religious furnishings and
the invention of the first (interior) monumental columns. Assyrian columns
had disappeared from the debris because the timber or brick cores that had
been sheathed in metal either had disintegrated over time or (with the evolu-
tion of this technique) had already been replaced by a tubular or hollow-body
construction, in which the metal itself assumed the structural load and the
now redundant timber or brick core was discarded!
In a later section Semper returned to this theme and followed his thesis
to its conclusion: the famed proto-Ionic column capitals found at the Persian
city of Persepolis (fig. 12) were nothing more than “the lapidary successors
to Babylonian-Assyrian bronze-dressed timber columns, which in themselves
are more or less monumental tent poles” (p. 760).7! The manner in which
Semper reasoned — his consideration of the empaestic seam, the derivation of
certain technical and ornamental motifs from the processes of folding (bend-
ing metal surfaces at their edges), riveting (skillful alteration of decorative nail
heads), and splicing (ringlike ornaments containing tubular bars or reeds)—
conveys an originality and wealth of insight that has not, I believe, been fully
appreciated in twentieth-century studies. An architect reading these sections
will also observe how these stone Persian capitals even bear a resemblance to
the nineteenth-century cast-iron style.
Still, this derivation of such structural-symbolic ornamental motifs from
the techniques of the industrial arts has at the same time led to much confu-
sion, at least in early-twentieth-century readings of his work. Indeed, some
archaeologists toward the end of the nineteenth century transposed Semper’s
occasional speculation in this regard into the general principle that all orna-
mental motifs had their origin in technical procedures. Yet such a thesis is
certainly not present in Semper’s work. If certain aspects of the Doric triglyph
related to the decorative edgings of textile fabrics, for instance, it was not
because the architect of the Doric entablature copied these details from cloth-
ing. Rather, it was because the ornamental principles contained in the logically
conceived textile edge or seam were, for Semper, universal principles that always
retained a certain stylistic necessity, even when transposed into the callous
junctures of Pentelic marble.
What will soon become apparent to the reader is that Semper’s technical and
stylistic investigation almost always turns on his solid aesthetic sensibilities. At
heart, Semper’s archaeological conclusions follow from the same proclivities.

The Aesthetics of Style

The fact that Semper wanted what became the subtitle of his book — Practical
Aesthetics —to be the main title is not without significance, as he obviously
viewed the study as a challenge to the speculative bent of contemporary Ger-
man aesthetics.”2 We should not deduce from this, however, that he rejected
idealism in the main. As various references in the prolegomena (in particular,

SZ
 Introduction

ied
cS ye

Fig. 12. Capital from the Hall of the Hundred Columns, Persepolis
From Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Ktinsten..., 1:384
Courtesy Research Library, Getty Research Institute, 86-B18560

33
 Mallgrave

to the recently published books of Adolf Zeising) make clear, what he really
sought was in some way to mediate idealism with the very compelling cur-
rents of realism—that is, to provide an “empirical theory of art” that would
also offer positive guidelines (p. 72).73 The reference to Carl Friedrich von
Rumohr made a few lines later points to Semper’s source for his understand-
ing of the term.
As early as his inaugural Dresden lecture of 1834 Semper had seized upon
the art history of Rumohr (the two men had met the previous year in Italy) as
the model for his own. In his address the architect denigrated the idealistic
and antiquarian predilections of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing and applauded what Rumohr called his attempt to build “a
documentary foundation for a new art history.””4
This foundation, as it were, both expanded upon and criticized the idealist
naturalism of Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling, in particular that version of
Schelling’s philosophy discussed in his Munich lecture of 1807.75 Schelling
had evoked naturalism (the imitation of nature) as a counterbalance to
Winckelmann’s overly idealized view of antique art, while at the same time
asserting that naturalism itself was but a means to transcend particularity
(details) and portray the species (the universal). Rumohr, in effect, sought to
carry Schelling’s naturalism one step further by excluding from the fine arts
both moral and religious sentiments and by ridding art of its romantic con-
cern for the profound depths of “being” (Dasein). To reorient art history in a
more practical direction, Rumohr stressed the notion of style, which he defined
qualitatively as “a successful accommodation of the artist to the inner demands
of the material, by which the sculptor actually creates his forms, the painter
makes visible his images.”” Semper obviously found this practical emphasis
quite appealing.
In the letter to Vieweg of 1843 in which he first outlined the methodology
of his proposed book Semper returned to this perspective, albeit in a slightly
different way. In rejecting the offer to revise the textbook of Gilly, the archi-
tect argued that the earlier text was simply too technically oriented. He also
denied the contrary possibility of approaching architecture “from above,”
that is, from a series of preordained aesthetic rules and precepts, because
architecture was too complex for such a schematic approach.”7 He then fell
back on the biological analogy of seeking to lay bare this art’s “normal forms,”
perhaps drawing upon Carl Gustav Carus’s contemporary evocation of Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe’s theories of evolutionary metamorphosis.78
Semper’s practical aesthetics subsided in the wake of his proposal for a
comparative typology of building forms in the early 1850s, but as the theme
of architecture itself became eclipsed by his broader aesthetic concerns of the
mid-1850s, his search for an alternative to the aesthetics of idealism resumed.
One basis for his new formulation of the book was the public lecture he gave
in Zurich in January 1856, “Uber die formelle Gesetzma&igkeit des Schmuckes
und dessen Bedeutung als Kunstsymbolik” (On the formal lawfulness of orna-
ment and its meaning as an artistic symbol).”? In it Semper dealt at length

34
 Introduction

with Greek aesthetic notions, in particular with similarities between the prin-
ciples used in jewelry and dress and those used in decorating Greek temples.
He also devoted part of his talk to criticizing Zeising’s theories. Instead of
assigning the artist and the aesthetician separate tasks, Semper countered with
the argument that a more practical aesthetics was needed to further the cause
of art. It was Zeising’s terminology, incidentally, that provided much of the
structure for the second part of Semper’s prolegomena, as Heidrun Laudel has
noted.8° The philosopher had first grouped architecture with music and dance
as “cosmic arts” defined by universal eurythmic laws, and it was he who
coined the designations “macrocosmic unity” (symmetry) and “microcosmic
unity” (proportion), also employed by Semper.*!
As contractual difficulties with Vieweg forced Semper to rethink the prem-
ises of the projected work between 1856 and 1858, he continued with his
critique of idealist aesthetics. In “Theorie des Formell-Schonen” (Theory of
formal beauty), a manuscript from this period, he voiced his opposition to
speculative aesthetics directly, questioning both its pretensions and its lack of
intelligibility (even to “academic-minded artists”).82 Lessing, he said, could be
excused for his idealism, because he practiced poetry and was thus influential
in that field. The influence of Immanuel Kant, Schelling, and Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel on the fine arts, he noted further, was minimal, and certainly
less than that of Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and the Romantic school. After
taking Zeising to task once again, Semper concluded the section with the
question of whether “philosophy does not also have the right and the liberty
to consider the idea as an object, as a coefficient of the work that is a function
of several variable quantities.”83 In a later version of this manuscript, Semper
repeated this question in a footnote, but then went on to say that idealist phi-
losophy had thus far produced only “schematic art criticism,” whereas the
art-form displayed both its underlying character and its beauty through its
deviations from the rule.84
Other manuscripts from these years echo similar themes. In a revised pro-
posal for a book entitled “Theorie und Geschichte des Stils in der Baukunst
und den ubrigen technischen und bildenden Kiinsten in ihren Beziehungen
zu der Baukunst” (Theory and history of style in architecture and in the other
technical and fine arts in relation to architecture), Semper promised to review
ancient and modern aesthetics (Goethe and Schiller) as well as the definitions
of style given by Hegel, Rumohr, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, and Arthur
Schopenhauer.®5 This suggestion, unfortunately, never advanced beyond the
stage of his outline.
Thus in the end, it is the art historical and stylistic conceptions of Rumohr
(with a Goethean or Schillerian tinge, broadened to include “content” under
the rubric of the material) that remain both the starting point and principal
theoretical base informing the pages of Semper’s aesthetic investigation. But
this does not by any means belittle the underlying idealist bent of Semper’s
lengthy study. The latter is fully transparent in Semper’s many denigrating
comments about a “coarsely materialist view” that sees art and architecture

Si)
 Mallgrave

as driven by material and technological factors. It is also a discernible artistic

and romantic vision that always comes to the fore in the most beautifully
written pages of Style—for instance, in Semper’s well-known footnote in
which he compares the invention of monumental architecture with high Greek
drama (p. 438 n. 85).8¢ Both arts, he insists, partake in a material and the-
matic masking or destruction (Vernichtung) of reality. Schiller and Goethe
could not have argued this point more majestically.
Still, if Style could be fully circumscribed by such a Romantic framework,
it would read as a somewhat backward-looking text and have only limited
value as a work of aesthetics. Instead, its great importance in the last regard
derives from the two impulses it gave to later aesthetics and art history —two
directions that largely condition Germanic aesthetic theory in the second half
of the nineteenth century.
The first, which is little more than an intimation of a future direction in art
history, is found, among other places, in Semper’s discussion of the Egyptian
situla and Greek hydria (fig. 13) at the start of the second volume — ceramic
artifacts being among “the oldest and most eloquent of historical documents”
(p. 468).87 What begins as a functional analysis of these two vessel types with
respect to the laws of physics quickly advances into something more. The
Egyptian situla, shaped like a water drop, is a vessel for scooping water from
the Nile; its overall form and low center of gravity derive from its leather,
tubelike predecessor. The Greek hydria, by contrast, is a ceramic vessel for
catching water from a spring and its high center of gravity facilitates carrying
it on the head.
But these two vessels and different centers of gravity also represent, as
it were, the collective psychological profiles of these two nations —for the
Greeks “the soaring, spiritual, and lucid essence of the spring-worshipping
Hellenes,” in contrast to the earthy characteristics of the Egyptian spirit
(p. 469).88 Both forms thus achieve the status of religious and national
emblems, and both vessels articulate forms that likewise correlate with their
nations’ respective architectural styles (Doric for the Greeks). In Semper’s
words, the “forms are precursors of what architecture invented as it struggled
to give monumental expression to the respective natures of these two peoples”
(p. 470).89
This attempt to examine a nation’s art-forms from within a larger cultural
and religious context was not especially novel to nineteenth-century theory,
but associating these art-forms with the collective psychological demeanor of
two nations certainly suggested a new approach. And this very passage later
resurfaces at a very important juncture in nineteenth-century art history.
Heinrich Wolfflin concluded his short dissertation of 1886, “Prolegomena zu
einer Psychologie der Architektur” (translated as “Prolegomena to a Psychol-
ogy of Architecture”), with a shift in the scope of his observations.” The first
forty-nine pages of the work had dealt mainly with architecture and its rela-
tion to individual or personal psychological moods, at times crossing over
into a purely animistic interpretation of architectural form. Yet on the very

36
 Introduction

s
a

b)
L
»
— s*
=

ra
}

Fig. 13. Egyptian situla and Greek hydria

From Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kunsten..., 2:4
Courtesy Research Library, Getty Research Institute, 86-B18560

37
 Mallgrave

last page of the work —almost as an afterthought, although it was certainly

more —the author raises the problem of joining a collective psychological atti-
tude with the formation of a style. He argues that because architectural forms
are too culturally conditioned to respond quickly to changes in popular senti-
ment, styles in their later stages are apt to become lifeless schemes. The “pulse
of an age” thus has to be sought elsewhere, and Wolfflin now lands on the
Semperian thesis that it can be more easily found in the technical or decora-
tive arts. “Here the sense of form satisfies itself in the purest way,” the art his-
torian says, “and here also the birthplace of a new style has to be sought.”!
In a book published two years later, Renaissance und Barock (1888; trans-
lated as Renaissance and Baroque), Wolfflin returns to this summation in
the important chapter delineating changes in style. After rejecting the thesis
that stylistic change can be explained by cultural-historical factors—and the
thesis advanced by Adolf Goller that it is brought about by the psychological
jading of the collective memory image? — Wolfflin returns to his earlier
argument that we project corporeal feelings into architectural form in a way
that reflects our social or national mood. In his footnote, by way of expla-
nation, he cites both the last page of his dissertation and Semper’s example
of Greek and Egyptian vessels.?3 It is unclear from the note whether Semper
actually prompted his new thesis. Yet Wolfflin clearly recognized the novelty
of Semper’s insight, and it is precisely the point from which his own metho-
dology now originated.
Wolfflin, incidentally, was not the only historian to be impressed by
Semper’s lead in this regard. In his personal copy of his printed dissertation
Wolfflin made a handwritten annotation near the end of the work —where
he first broaches the possibility of a collective psychology of art—to cite a
passage in Wilhelm Dilthey’s Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (1883;
translated as Introduction to the Human Sciences).°* The passage discusses
the need for the historian to master in the broadest way both the content
and the limits of the human sciences, chief among them the newly defined areas
of anthropology and psychology.®> Dilthey’s vision of what constituted a
descriptive and comparative psychology of history was to be treated in a later
volume (which never appeared), but we can see how it might have been for-
mulated with regard to art—and Semper’s influence on its conception—in an
essay Dilthey published in 1892, “Die drei Epochen der modernen Asthetik
und ihre heutige Aufgabe” (translated as “The Three Epochs of Modern Aes-
thetics and Its Present Task”).%6
The three epochs for Dilthey were the “Natural System of Aesthetic Laws”
of the seventeenth century,” the “Analysis of Aesthetic Impressions” of the
eighteenth century,?® and the “Historical Method” of the nineteenth cen-
tury.°? The pathways of this third epoch had actually been charted in the
eighteenth century by Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Winckelmann, and Goethe, but
this promising method had been waylaid, as it were, by the one-sided idealism
of Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and others. Speculative aesthetics was eventually
corrected, Dilthey reasoned, by the more balanced approaches of Rumohr

38
 Introduction

and especially by that of Semper —the last of whom Dilthey called “the real
successor to Goethe.”00 Semper was, Dilthey noted, the first to demonstrate
the “empirical historical method, which explores the inner structure of what
has been achieved historically within a particular art, while taking into account
its decisive constitutive moments.” !0! And though Semper made several errors
in his methodology, Dilthey noted, his practical aesthetics made a very signifi-
cant contribution to the human sciences: “The way he proceeded from the
laws of spatial imagination, traced their effects in simple artistic achieve-
ments, and then moved up to the great creations is an enlightening model for
how an important historical problem is to be solved in aesthetics.” 192
A second, not unrelated, impulse that Semper’s Style gave to the aesthetics
of the second half of the nineteenth century lay in his contribution to theories
of empathy (Einfiihlung). This term was first used by Robert Vischer in 1873
and in its simplest form can be defined as the unconscious projection of emo-
tions onto the objects of aesthetic contemplation.1%3 It was also the main
thrust of German aesthetics in the last three decades of the century.
The source for such a conception in artistic theory, at least, was not
Semper but Arthur Schopenhauer. In the first edition of Die Welt als Wille
und Vorstellung (1819; translated as The World as Will and Representation),
the philosopher ranked the various arts according to their idealistic premises.
Music, entirely freed of matter, was at the top (but also outside) of the artistic
structure; whereas architecture, with its very material dependence on matter
for its creations, represented the lowest grade of the mind’s objectification.
Such ranking systems were common in the German philosophy of this time,
but Schopenhauer brings something new to the process, particularly in his
second edition of 1844.1°4 In seeking to controvert the claim that the Hegelian
spirit was the content of form, he chose to view the manifestation of “will”
as the basis for his analyses. Thus each of the arts was considered in terms
of the will it displayed. For architecture these included such concepts as grav-
ity, cohesion, rigidity, and hardness. Gravity is, as it were, a natural will that
attempts to collapse building materials into a pile of rubble. Structural rigidity
in architecture was an ingenious human invention for subverting gravitational
will, that is, for making a useful and structurally sound building and thereby
depriving these unrelenting gravitational forces of the shortest path to their
goal. Architecture does this with its contrived lineaments of columns, vaults,
walls, roofs, and so on. In essence, architecture becomes the dynamic presen-
tation of the radical conflict between support and load: the willful spirit of the
human mind devising a construct to oppose these destructive natural forces.
For Schopenhauer a building literally trembles with these conflicts of forces.
It would not take long for such a view to find architectural appropriation.
The German architect and archaeologist Carl Botticher, in his major work of
architectural theory entitled Die Tektonik der Hellenen (1844-52; Greek tec-
tonics), drew heavily on Schopenhauer’s conceptions of architecture as
an animate system of load and support in conflict.!05 Botticher (with his
conceptual dialectic of a structurally functioning work-form and its symbolic

39
 Mallgrave

art-form) strove to demonstrate that the decorative parts of the Greek temple
emanated from or were closely connected with construction; the purpose of
each member’s art-form was to express symbolically the mechanical functions
of this structural dynamic.
For instance, Botticher interpreted the Doric cyma, a molding applied at
transitional points in the fabric of an entablature, as a symbol for load and
support, as a decorative seam signifying the dual notions of standing upright
and freely finishing. The curvature of this molding, he also indicated, depended
on the amount of the load that was to be symbolically expressed. When
placed high in the entablature—as a crown, for example—the molding only
slightly inclined from a vertical profile. At a point of greater load, the curva-
ture became more severe and horizontal, compressed, as it were, by the weight
represented. This theme of conflict was always expressed ornamentally as a
folding or bending of leaves, eventually attaining canonic form in such orna-
ments as the egg-and-dart and its many variations (fig. 14).
Semper came across Botticher’s book in the reading room of the British
Museum in 1852, and soon incorporated it into his theory.!% In a lecture given
in London in 1854, entitled “On Architectural Symbols,” Semper took over
Botticher’s analysis of the Doric cyma almost entirely, although he also went on
to speak of such other architectural symbols as the hearth and gabled roof.107
The same animate reading of architectural forms is found in various pas-
sages of Style, where architecture veritably teems with life. A column is no
passive element in conflict with the gravitational forces of the load; rather, the
building in all its parts (organs) is an elastic organism energetically expressing
or articulating its spiritual resistance. The lines of a temple gable, for instance,
do not simply crown the main facade; they also hover above it as a composi-
tion of horizontal and vertical forces—represented or finished at the top by
acroteria or statuary. The lines or curves of a column capital are no idle deco-
rations, but symbols expressing elastic resistance to the superimposed load
and the resulting tension. They bend as living points of energy, or as Semper
says, their “supporting elements become organisms, and frame and roof sup-
ports are expressed collectively and purely mechanically: they are the load
needed to activate the life inherent in the column. At the same time, the frame
and its supports are in themselves variously articulated and seem to be striv-
ing and essentially alive in their individual parts” (p. 728).108
Nowhere is this animism more apparent than in Semper’s ideas on rusti-
cation, or what he refers to as “taming this coarse natural motif” (p. 732).199
In his buildings his facades evolve vertically from the rusticated ground floor
up to greater stages of refinement in the upper stories, culminating at the top
with the unstressed wall fabric now free to express high art. In the icono-
graphic scheme of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, for example,
Semper aligned the three main stories into “material” (ground floor), “cultural-
historical” (main floor), and “ideal” (roof statuary) zones. The pictorial and
sculptural themes of the facade depict this evolutionary chronology. Art thus
emerges out of the material and formative influences of certain technical

40
 Introduction

OT os
[STOR a
UMMM i
"

Fig. 14. Depiction of the formal development of the egg-
and-dart motif
From Karl Botticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen (Potsdam:
F. Riegel, 1844-52), atlas, pl. 2
Courtesy Harry Francis Mallgrave
Fig. 15. Ashlars on the Dresden Gallery
From Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und
tektonischen Kunsten..., 2:364
Courtesy Research Library, Getty Research Institute,
86-B18560

41
 Mallgrave

arts and achieves its cultural and historical unfolding in the main story, again
to be gloriously transfigured at the top by the free creations of individual
genius,!10
Even the bossage of the stone blocks of a lower story bespeaks a lithic lan-
guage of art’s geological (earthly) time. The two elements of the bossage are
its edge and face; the former frames the face and the latter is outwardly active
in expressing the vertical pressure and counterpressure. Projecting the face of
the block beyond the framing edge can greatly enhance this effect, Semper
notes, as can beveling the edges toward the plane of the mortar (preferably
only vertically, as horizontally the latent gravitational forces are inactive). The
treatment of the rough chisel work of the face should also incline (following
the diagonals of the corners) toward the center, thereby collecting the lithic
forces. The bands and the joints thus acquire a regular or eurythmic “beat”
that has a decorative effect by the rhythm produced from the tension-filled
network of forces. Semper’s woodcut (fig. 15) depicting the stonework of his
Dresden Gallery illustrates one of his many possible details in this regard. As
an architect of monumental buildings, Semper was especially known for the
expressiveness of his rustication.
This metaphoric conception of a building as a vital organism would come
to have a profound impact on the next generation of German architects, but
already Semper was not alone in such thinking.!"! When the architect moved
to Zurich in the mid-1850s, he met and befriended the philosopher Friedrich
Theodor Vischer, who was just completing the sixth volume of his Asthetik;
oder, Wissenschaft des Schénen (1846-57; Aesthetics; or, the science of the
beautiful). Semper, who always enjoyed lively conversations with close friends
(the two would meet daily for evening aperitifs at a tavern), was no doubt
vocal in his rejection of Vischer’s speculative approach, not to mention its
Hegelian structure. Still, the architect would have been attracted to Vischer’s
somewhat untypical discussion of architecture as a “symbolic art,” one born
in the task of rhythmically animating forms by infusing “buoyant life” into
inert matter through ornamentation and the linear and gravitational suspen-
sion of bodies. Architectural lines and masses, Vischer argued, move, rise, and
fall in space; the symbolism of these effects collectively defines “the whole
outer and inner life of nations.”!!2
In 1866, after the second volume of Semper’s work had appeared, Vischer
embarked on a lengthy response to his own theories, “Kritik meiner Asthetik”
(Critique of my aesthetics), which largely turned on the “higher” symbolic
process of these animate readings of architectural forms. Architectural sym-
bolism, Vischer now insisted, was no longer aligned with any specific cultural
stage (as it had been for Hegel) but sprang from a more general and instinc-
tive human aesthetic behavior, evolving at least in part from the symbolic
transposition or reading of emotions into worldly forms. Vischer referred to
this animation of the art-form in general as a “unifying and contractive feel-
ing” (Ineins- und Zusammenfthlung) —that is, as a pantheistic impulse to
merge with the sensuous outside world.13

42
 Introduction

We should not be surprised that Vischer’s son, Robert, referred to his

father’s thesis in his own doctoral dissertation of 1873, in which he defined
the symbolic animation of form as “empathy” (Einfiihlung), or the uncon-
scious projection of one’s “own bodily form—and with this also the soul—
into the form of the object.”"4 It was also Robert Vischer’s philosophical and
psychological exploration that set the stage for a bevy of related studies in the
last decades of the century, collectively known as “empathy theory.” These
pursuits, when joined with a range of contemporary research on the physiol-
ogy of perception, dominated German aesthetic deliberations at this time.
Thus we can understand the leading question of Wélfflin’s doctoral disser-
tation of 1886: “How is it possible that architectural forms are able to express
an emotion or mood?”!!5 Now, several decades after Semper, the notion of
empathy is cogently brought back into architectural theory. Wélfflin is simply
summarizing a line of thought that had been mapped out by Schopenhauer,
Botticher, the two Vischers, and perhaps most lucidly by Semper. It was also a
line of thought that— by making possible the aesthetics of “visible pure form”
(nonhistorical or without content) —arguably set the stage for the aesthetics
of abstract modernism.!!6

The Architecture of Style

The two published volumes of Style remain a fragment of a larger work. Yet,
though the volume on architecture proper never appeared, Semper’s book is
nevertheless one of the more important books in the history of architectural
theory. Not only did its arguments and conceptual framework altogether rule
Germanic architectural debate until the end of the century, but it also radi-
cally reformed in many other ways the intellectual landscape in which archi-
tecture came to be approached and discussed.
How Style came to have such an effect on architectural theory is difficult
to describe, at least within the limited framework of this introduction. Cer-
tainly part of its appeal was the high standing of Semper himself —the monu-
mental designer commanded by kings and emperors; the heir to the tradition
of Schinkel; in Friedrich Nietzsche’s words, “the most significant living archi-
tect.”7 Part of the appeal, too, was Semper’s charisma —the admired and
testy intellectual; the close friend of Richard Wagner and Gottfried Keller; the
confidant to Wilhelmine Schréder-Devrient, Lola Montez, and Princess Sayn-
Wittgenstein; the duelist and fiery republican who put his life and career on
the line for his political beliefs. Part of the appeal, again, had to do with the
novelty of the historical factors converging during this time, above all the cre-
ation of bourgeois society in Germany (formally unified in 1871) with its
related institutions and accelerated pace of technological and social change.
In that regard Semper’s four-motive thesis offered a new and effective frame-
work for architects to interpret and translate these changes into practice—a
model that did not previously exist. This can be seen, for instance, in the way
Semperian theory came to replace Quatremére de Quincy’s epigenetic theory
of architectural types, first posited in the 1780s but reasserted as late as 1830.

43
 Mallgrave

Operating from the assumption of a biblical chronology, Quatremére postu-

lated three primary architectural types—the tent, the cave, and the hut—that
he correlated to three ways of obtaining food: hunting, gathering, and farm-
ing. Quatremére also associated these three types with the three presumed
seats of civilization: China (the Orient), Egypt (Africa), and Greece (Cau-
casia). But only the Greek hut, the French theorist argued, offered the possi-
bility of rich architectural development. Its construction was logical in its
reasoning, varied in its forms, and capable of infinite nuances in its details and
ornamentation. The fact that this type achieved early historical synthesis in
the classical Greek temple simply underscored his belief that the hut or its
temple successor should remain the appropriate paradigm for contemporary
monumental practice.
Semper’s four-motive theory neatly bypassed the logic of such associa-
tions. Although the antiquity of the human race was still an issue of great con-
fusion, Semper was decidedly of a more modern cast of mind. In the opening
pages of his introduction he points out that the oldest available evidence of
human-built forms had no doubt already been subject to countless transfor-
mations and development. And while he could refer to the Caribbean hut on
display at the Great Exhibition of 1851 as a purveyor of the original architec-
tural motives in their pristine condition, he could also remark that when we
think we are witnessing the most primitive stages of artistic development, we
are frequently —if not always— perceiving earlier or formerly more evolved
artistic conditions in a state of decline. This assertion in itself presaged a very
different attitude toward architecture, one quite removed from biblical specu-
lation or the Vitruvian explanations that had once been widely accepted.
Perhaps the guiding premise of Semper’s theory was that the four technical
motives of weaving, ceramics, carpentry, and masonry (originally mounding)
had preceded the formal development of architecture (which was for him syn-
onymous with monumental architecture), and thus the laws of architectural
style could be more easily discerned and applied by considering these simpler
arts. On the basis of this premise, the architect felt, a theory of style could
also offer very positive guidelines for the modern designer.
But it is also important to see how this connection became manifest in
practice. On the one hand, motives could be technical in origin but symbolic
in application, that is, easily transferable from one art to another. The orna-
mental elements of a textile seam, for instance, might offer hints for designing
a seam in a paneled door. Primitive rivets used in clothing could be symboli-
cally translated into rosettes, and the decorative plume of a warrior’s helmet
had an artistic cousin in the acroterion of a temple. On the other hand, forms
could be directly transposed without symbolism, or with a different kind of
symbolism. This was a very important point for Semper that is found when
ceramic and architectural forms are compared.!!8
Certain ceramic forms, he noted, acquired a religious and symbolic meaning
long before the appearance of monumental architecture and thus influenced
architectural design in two ways: first directly in that ceramic products or forms

44
 Introduction

were used in construction and in the ornamental outfitting of a building; sec-

ond indirectly in that the lines and principles of beauty and style established
by ceramic works in premonumental times were later taken up or assimilated
by the first monumental architects. These principles were both aesthetic—in
that they related to the formal articulation, detailing, and composition of
parts (the joining of the belly and neck of a vase, for instance, might offer les-
sons for joining a capital to a column shaft) —and symbolic, in that signs or
emblems developed in the language of ceramics were equally applicable to
architecture (a textile-inspired guilloche ornament might also express the ten-
sile forces of a building molding).
Semper was influenced in this regard by a book by Jules Ziegler, Etudes
céramiques, whose appearance in 1850 coincided with the architect’s arrival
in Sévres (at the home of the painter Jules Diéterle)."!° Ziegler was principally
a painter, a pupil of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and for several years in
the 1830s he worked on murals for the church of the Madeleine. In the 1830s
he also opened a ceramics studio at his country residence near Beauvais, and
between 1838 and 1842 he worked at the Sévres facility, where he brought his
formal scheme of classification for ceramic forms to the attention of Alexandre
Brongniart, the long-standing director of the facility. 2°
Ziegler conceived his Etudes céramiques as a series of twenty-four Carte-
sian meditations on the beauty of ceramic forms, but his aim was less mor-
phological and more artistic in its overall impulse. He defined the ceramic art
as a “first art,” as “une intelligence musicale exceptionelle,” that is, a musical
intelligence consisting of rhythms, accents, cadences, measures, poetry, and
choreography.'2! All of these qualities, of course, were shared by other arts.
In his second étude, subtitled “Influence de la céramique sur I’architecture
grecque,” he spoke of how in the pottery quarter of ancient Athens artists
carried out formal experiments with the laws of proportion, symmetry, and
ornamentation a hundred times a day— “abstract” formal experiments that
were then incorporated into the detailing of Greek monuments, such as
in the curvatures of moldings. Thus if one studies ceramics, he concluded,
“one is able to find the rudiments, the foundations for a national and new
architecture.” 22
Semper, who when citing Ziegler also alluded to his “many strange
remarks” (p. 527),!23 may not have followed the painter in all his assertions,
but he was certainly moved by the broad brush of Ziegler’s argument. One of
the claims in Semper’s mathematical study of Greek slingshot projectiles
(undertaken in the early 1850s in response to the question of proportions
raised by the Royal Institute of British Architects) was that there was an opti-
mal almondlike form for moving or thrown bodies that the Greeks investi-
gated empirically in designing their projectiles (fig. 16). Semper also noted—
in examining these projectiles at the British Museum —that the elastic curva-
tures found on such missiles (tending toward straight lines with pronounced
bending taking place along relatively short axes) also resembled those found
in forms of Greek architecture (which could be rigorously distinguished from

45
 Mallgrave

Tafel 2.

Fig. 16. Almond-shaped projectile

From Gottfried Semper, Ueber die bleiernen Schleudergeschosse der Alten und zweckmdssige
Gestaltung der Wurfkérper im Allgemeinen... (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag fur Kunst und
Wissenschaft, 1859), pls. 2, 3
Courtesy Harry Francis Mallgrave

46
 Introduction

those found in other artistic cultures). Semper came to the rather extraordinary
conclusion that it “should not be maintained that the Greeks designed their
[art-]forms according to mathematical formulas (which in art would be
absurd) but rather that the law of nature followed by the Greeks in the limits
of their form-making — everywhere letting tension dominate — was not simply
vaguely intimated but clearly recognized.” 24 Who else but Semper, after sixty
pages of complex mathematical analyses on the dynamics of moving bodies,
could have drawn such a parallel?
Similar stylistic speculation (if this is the right word) can be found in many
other areas as well, and was particularly fruitful to nineteenth-century archi-
tects. Semper’s attitude toward the use of iron is a case in point. Already in
comments made in 1842 and 1849 he protested against the open display of
ironwork, for the visual reason that the slight dimensions of iron called into
question its own structural stability.!25 In 1852 he referred to Joseph Paxton’s
Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of London as a “glass covered vac-
uum.”26 These early criticisms seemingly fall in line with the frequently dis-
cussed passage in Style in which Semper calls iron an “infertile ground for
art,” because its “ideal is invisible architecture! For the thinner the metal tis-
sue, the more perfect it is” (p. 659).27 In later passages he also faults cast iron
for being very brittle, easily damaged by shear forces, and for its modest ten-
sile strength (steel columns or beams did not begin to be used structurally by
architects until the 1880s).
Yet other passages of Style also suggest a solution to this problem. Imme-
diately after the remarks on iron as a poor soil, Semper goes on to speak
positively about metal used in tubular construction and lattice construction
(trusses), because of their enhanced dimensions. In the next chapter he devel-
ops this theme and—in a passage added to the galleys—applauds the use of
tubular construction and trusswork in bridge building and civil architecture.
Here he goes so far as to admit that “it might be possible to pin our hopes for
the future of art on it” (p. 660).!28
The key to Semper’s evolving view of iron, interestingly enough, is not so
much the technological possibilities of this very old material, but rather his
deliberations on the hollow-body columns of Assyrian architecture (columns
that no longer survive). In earlier passages on Assyrian techniques and the
tapestries of antiquity, Semper had come to realize not only that hollow-body
(tubular) construction possessed a special structural applicability to present
techniques of iron production but also that it was a very ancient technique
deriving from the plating of cores with metallic dressings, sometimes corru-
gated to enhance surface stiffness. He deemed this a “far-reaching principle of
construction” (p. 329)2° than which there is “nothing more important in the
whole stylistic history of architecture” (p. 292).8° He also attunes it to “the
innermost laws of nature” !3! or to the tubular systems of “the simpler organ-
isms of the vegetable kingdom” (p. 329).!92
In the wake of such musings, one can follow with a certain fascination
how architect after architect in the last four decades of the nineteenth century

47
 Mallgrave

not only responded to Semper’s formulation of the problem of iron but also
slowly began to adopt the same solution—almost unconsciously. For exam-
ple, the Gotha architect Ludwig Bohnstedt, in deliberating on the significance
of iron in 1867, insisted that the material could not in itself create a new style
because it lacked corporeality, even when shaped in a hollow-body form.'33
In two essays prepared in 1869 the Berlin architect Richard Lucae spoke at
length on iron and its diminished proportions when compared with tradi-
tional stone construction. He felt the answer to this problem would lie in the
future, when succeeding generations of architects became used to the more
slender proportions.4 In 1878 the Semper pupil and biographer Constantin
Lipsius addressed the Verband deutscher Architekten- und Ingenieur-Vereine
(Union of German architectural and engineering associations) and also lamented
iron’s slight dimensions (especially wrought iron) but insisted that when cast
iron is treated as a hollow body it gains “in this kind of presentation a corpo-
reality similar to that of stone, the monumental building material par excel-
lence.”35 German architects followed this line of reasoning into the 1880s.
But when Georg Heuser, toward the end of this decade, landed on a “web and
flange” (I-beam) solution to the problem of iron’s mass, he could do so only
in a way highly critical of Semper.86 The latter’s once brilliant aura, it seems,
was dimming by this date. It should also be pointed out that William Le Baron
Jenney used the first steel flange-beams and columns in the Home Insurance
Building built in Chicago from 1883 to 1885.
Similar paradoxes emerge in Semper’s comments on “space” (Raum) as a
medium for architectural exploitation. Spatiality had always been an aspect
of his theory, as the element of “walling” was from the beginning regarded by
Semper as the “spatial motive,” in that it delineated an interior world distinct
from the outer. But the architect never developed the notion architecturally
until the section on stereotomy in Style, where he describes the “architectural-
spatial idea” as rooted in stone construction (p. 753).37 A few pages later his
reasoning becomes transparent when he speaks of the “mighty spatial art” of
the ancient Romans as an outgrowth of their understanding of the “vaulted
cell system” (p. 756).88 Semper leaves this very fertile comment undeveloped,
but in a lecture six years later he returned to the same theme and concluded
with the stirring assessment that in the Roman “mighty art of space creation”
lay “the future of architecture in general.”89
Although it would take several decades for this comment to resonate fully,
some appreciated it immediately. Lucae in a lecture given in 1869, “Uber
die Bedeutung und Macht des Raumes in der Baukunst” (On the meaning
and power of space in architecture), rhapsodized on the “joy and airiness” of
large spatial creations, equating the spatial experiences of the cathedral in
Cologne and the Roman Pantheon with such modern creations as railway
halls and Alpine tunnels.'4° In an address prepared a few months later Lucae
ventured similar reflections but now joined his discussion of space with the
spanning possibilities of iron. Perhaps the most intriguing comment was his
designation of “soaring” (Schweben) as the “general symbol” for the new

48
 Introduction

spatial possibilities of iron.141 It is the same word that the historian Sigfried
Giedion would use in a revolutionary way fifty-eight years later!142
Lucae’s comments—in many respects the first exposition of one of the
conceptual cornerstones of orthodox modernism— passed almost unnoticed.
Eight years later, however, the philosopher Conrad Fiedler wrote a lengthy
response to Semper’s Style. Among the many revelations he gleaned from the
work was that this “new idea of spatial enclosure,”!3 partially developed in
Romanesque architecture, presented an escape hatch, as it were, for architects
trapped in a practice of relying on historical models for their designs. He sug-
gested that this “simple and formally unelaborated notion of a vaulted enclo-
sure of space” might be exploited in a nonstylistic way in its own right.144
In the early 1880s, however, we find two other essays by the architect and
former Semper student Hans Auer considering the same theme.!*5 In the
earlier of the two, “Der Einfluss der Construction auf die Entwicklung der
Baustile” (1881; The influence of construction on the development of archi-
tectural style), Auer argues that though construction should take priority in
architectural theory, “the most important and most original task of architec-
ture is the creation of spaces.”146 Two years later Auer advanced his position
with the essay “Die Entwickelung des Raumes in der Baukunst” (1883; The
development of space in architecture), which brought the issue truly into
focus.'47 The “poetry of space” was no longer an ancillary concept to design
but the very “soul of building,” and architecture’s new task of spatial devel-
opment largely followed the sophistication of the interior structural system. !48
Auer then surveyed monumental architecture historically through its ever
more elaborate spatial development. And it did not take him long to arrive at
the audacious spans of the modern-day railway station, prompting the asser-
tion that “we live today in a period in which a new style is forming.” The new
material that is facilitating this new style is, of course, iron— “which shakes
its brazen fist at all past traditions.” 4?
Auer’s foray into the future was apparently unknown to the art historian
August Schmarsow, who in a lecture of 1893 once again defined architecture
as “the creatress of space” and space as the “essence of architectural crea-
tion.” 50 In this lecture he was responding only to his reading of Semper. A few
years later Schmarsow would expand the concept in a volume devoted to the
theme of spatiality, and it was perhaps he who popularized the notion for
early modernists such as Hendrik Berlage, who wrote just after the turn of the
century.'5! It was also in keeping with the tenor of his time that Schmarsow
opened his 1894 lecture not by praising Semper for his thoughtful suggestion
(which Schmarsow had now assimilated as his own), but rather by denigrat-
ing him for being “unhistorical and unphilosophical” 5? and for postulating
his thesis of dressing, which in Schmarsow’s opinion had reduced architecture
to “little more than superficial composition of a purely technical and decora-
tive kind.” 153
Schmarsow’s comments, however self-serving, are instructive with regard
to Semper’s “dressing” thesis, which was certainly the aspect of his theory

49
 Mallgrave

most influential on the generations that followed. This also brings us to the
very heart of Semper’s architectural theory.
The idea of the dressing in Semperian theory, I think, has often been mis-
understood, particularly in its frequent English translation, “cladding.” The
root word of the concept is the German verb kleiden, which means “to clothe,
to dress,” and this sartorial association is critically important to Semper’s use
of the term, which he introduces—after all—as a textile concept.'4 In pre-
Hellenic or ancient architecture, admittedly, the term did sometimes have for
Semper the sense of cladding, as when the Assyrians clad their walls with
alabaster panels or glazed tiles. But Semper also used the term Bekleidung to
refer to the (nontextile) application of enamels and glazes to vases, the sheath-
ing of wooden doors and furniture with metal plates, and the delineation of
a masonry wall with a stucco dressing or ashlar pattern, such as when one
dresses stonework.
But something very important happened to the concept of the dressing in
classical Greek architecture. When the Greeks in their temples transposed the
solid wall dressings of the Orient into a thin veil of paint— “the subtlest and
most incorporeal dressing” (p. 379)'55—they at the same time raised the con-
cept of the dressing to a new artistic meaning— essentially, Semper argued, by
“transforming the forms of the Asiatic construction of the dressing that were
based on mechanical necessity into dynamic, even organic, forms, a matter of
endowing them with a soul” (p. 379).5¢ This new symbolism of the dressing
avoided all unnecessary references to weight: “It used the attributes of mass only
to emphasize precisely the activity and life of the organic members. In short, it
emancipated form from the material and from naked need” (p. 379).'57
The dressing, in fact, now became a veiling camouflage or artistic mask: a
physical masking of the material beneath the paint but also a symbolic or alle-
gorical masking of the work’s thematic content (p. 438 n. 85). This assertion of
Semper’s turned on his attempt to align the birth of the classical Greek temple
(which represented for him a monumental successor to the provisional stage,
literally draped with textiles, flowers, garlands, banners, and trophies) with the
development of high Greek drama. This attempt was not as overreaching as
it may first appear, even if drama was an art especially dear to Semper. If the
Greek theatrical mask endowed actors with typical personae for enacting
higher mystical rites, and also imposed on the actors a certain ambiguity with
respect to the contrapuntal choral chants, architecture—Semper reasoned—
became ideally ennobled through this dissimulating fabric first by ridding itself
of all references to morphological purpose or structural presence and second
by evoking a “certain carnival spirit” or festive “haze of carnival candles,”
which for Semper was the “true atmosphere of art” (p. 438 n. 85).458
I have elsewhere referred to Semper’s vision of monumental architecture
as essentially theatrical: theater in the positive sense of the Greek word the-
atron, meaning “a place to view, to behold.” 5? In unraveling the rich content
of his buildings, one also thinks of the related Greek word thedria, which con-
notes a “knowledge of the divine,” a sight or spectacle by which something

50
 Introduction

unexpected or wholly other is revealed.1°° Semper was principally an architect

of theaters in the literal sense, but he viewed monumental architecture more
broadly in emotional terms as the frenzied realm of a Dionysian dithyramb
or, as Friedrich Schiller has described the chorus, as “a living wall which tragedy
has drawn around herself, to guard her from contact with the world of reality,
and maintain her own ideal soil, her poetical freedom.” !6!
It was a conception of architecture that emanated from his youthful vision
of the Greek temple as a panoply of rich polychrome effects.162 It was a view
of art that evolved in a dramatic way in the 1840s, as he and Wagner together
developed their notion of a Gesamtkunstwerk, or “synthesis of the arts.” 16 It
was this view of art that especially appealed to the young Friedrich Nietzsche
in the summer of 1869, when he, in his critical reading of Style, was drawn to
these very passages. !64 Semper’s “masking of reality” was crucial to Nietzsche
at this point in his intellectual development because the philosopher was
attempting to transform two lectures on Greek drama into his first book, Die
Geburt der Tragédie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872; translated as The Birth
of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music).'6 And it is one of those interesting
coincidences (though not accidents) of history that Semper at this very
moment —in designing his second Dresden Hoftheater (fig. 17) — would give
overt priority to Dionysus over Apollo in the work’s complex iconographic
orchestration. 166
The resonance Semper’s thesis of dressing had with many architects of
the next generation leads us—by way of conclusion—to the unfinished third
volume of Style, and why this volume to be devoted to architecture never
came to be started in a serious way. The overt reasons, at least, are fully trans-
parent. In the early and mid-1860s Semper’s architectural practice picked up
as he became involved first with the design of the Stadthaus in Winterthur
and then—between late 1864 and 1867—with the design of the Wagnerian
Festspielhaus in Munich. In 1861 the author also complained to his publisher
that because of his political exile he was having trouble keeping up with
recent developments in German architecture; twelve years later he made a
similar complaint, although this time about his inability to keep up with the
proliferation of historical texts in specialized areas.!67 We now know that
Semper did not begin the third volume until 1869 and was able to complete
only forty-two pages of a draft. 168
The prospectus of 1859 announcing the third volume identified the strat-
egy Semper hoped to take. Whereas the two published volumes of Style —in
keeping with Semper’s theory of style—had considered such “internal” influ-
ences on the technical arts as materials and techniques, the third volume
would examine such “external” influences on architecture as its social, cul-
tural, and historical factors.16? His historical study was to consider architec-
ture from antiquity until modern times.
The impulse behind the manuscript of 1869 was a lecture he gave
that year in Zurich, entitled “Ueber Baustyle” (translated as “On Architec-
tural Styles”). In his lecture he opened with a few remarks on present-day

Dal
 Mallgrave

a
;
a
‘,
3 ee ee ee eee ee ae
: } Se ae a ae

Fig. 17. Gottfried Semper

Second Dresden Hoftheater, with crowning bronze quadriga, 1869-78
Courtesy Harry Francis Mallgrave

a2
 Introduction

architecture; in his draft manuscript for the third volume he began by setting
out his four-motive theory. Both the lecture and the manuscript converge with
his definition of “style,” which of course was absent from his earlier study. In
both works he defined it as “the accord of an art object with its genesis, and
with all preconditions and circumstances of its becoming.”!7° The definition,
as we noted earlier, ultimately derives from Rumohr, but Semper was now at
pains to point out that by “material” he meant both the physical matter and
the theme or content of the work of art. From this perspective, Semper now
proposed to examine the issue of style through its social, political, religious,
and personal moments, and under the three rubrics of the individual, the col-
lective (the state), and human ideals (the highest task of art).
In both the lecture and the book manuscript the most notable passage was
that in which he responded to the issue of Darwin’s theory and its misapplica-
tion to art history. After ridiculing those historians (Jacob Grimm in his lec-
ture; Wilhelm Libke in a draft of the lecture) who imposed on their field a
deterministic model governed by laws of natural selection, heredity, and adap-
tation, Semper—in case one were to doubt his underlying idealism — sided
squarely with artistic freedom and the autonomy of the artist. He concluded
his lecture (not his book manuscript), however, in a most curious way. Parry-
ing the reproach that present-day architects lacked invention, Semper reiter-
ated an earlier remark of his essay of 1851—that no new idea of universal
historical importance has appeared to shake contemporary design loose from
the trammels of the past. “We are convinced,” he ended, “that whenever such
an idea would really take the lead, one or the other of our young colleagues
will prove himself capable of endowing it with a suitable architectural dress.
Until that time comes, however, we must reconcile ourselves to make do as
best we can with the old.” 171
I believe this sentence almost in itself explains what happened to Semper’s
projected third volume. The first two volumes composed a colossal investiga-
tive and theoretical undertaking, but one that in many ways emanated from
his personal, highly plastic, and content-laden approach to architectural prac-
tice. By 1869 Semper had become aware that architecture could not proceed
in such a way much longer. His whole understanding of this art—for him
effectively a lithic architecture of plastic or iconographic expression —had in a
fundamental way become antiquated in the face of new social and fiscal con-
straints as well as the pace of technological change.
None of this, of course, speaks against the momentous importance of Style
in its time; in a certain sense it even enhances it. The work’s essential insight
into artistic thought speaks volumes, and if Semper in his final years still pos-
sessed the temerity to view himself as the architect of monumental expres-
sion—even to define his artistic ambition as something in keeping with the
hallowed lineage of Michelangelo — he was perhaps the last major architect of
the nineteenth century to do so. The artistic attitude of his era, in fact, could
be no better delineated than by this very ambition.

53
 Mallgrave

Notes
1. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or,
The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray,
1859); Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Okonomie, vol. 1 (Hamburg: O.
Meissner, 1867).
2. Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kiinsten; oder,
Praktische Aesthetik: Ein Handbuch fiir Techniker, Ktinstler und Kunstfreunde (Frank-
furt am Main: Verlag fiir Kunst und Wissenschaft, 1860-63).
3. One of the first reviewers of Der Stil, Carl von Liitzow, described the work as
“epoch making” (epochmachend) in particular for its scientifically grounded theory of
style; see his review in Recensionen und Mittheilungen tiber bildende Kunst 2, no. 5
(May 1863): 85-86, esp. 85. (Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in the introduc-
tion are mine.) In 1878 the German philosopher and aesthetician Conrad Fiedler alluded
to the fact that “Semper’s book has often been described as epoch making, and it cannot
be denied that its contents are entirely fitted to effect a radical change, to advance the
artistic understanding of architectural forms, and as a result to intensify historical
research in the field of architecture”; see Conrad Fiedler, “Observations on the Nature
and History of Architecture,” in Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou,
eds. and trans., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893
(Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 128; and
Conrad Fiedler, “Bemerkungen iiber Wesen und Geschichte der Baukunst,” Deutsche
Rundschau 15 (April-June 1878): 361-83, esp. 364. For more on Semper’s influence, see
J. Duncan Berry, “The Legacy of Gottfried Semper: Studies in Spathistorismus” (Ph.D.
diss., Brown University, 1989); and Harry Francis Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper:
Architect of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1996), 355-81.
4. Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (Basel: Schweighau-
ser’schen Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1860). Burckhardt joined Semper on the faculty of the
Eidgendssisches Polytechnikum (now Eidgendéssische Technische Hochschule Ziirich;
hereafter, ETH Ziirich) in spring 1855. After moving to Basel, Burckhardt wrote that
he was honored to have been called Semper’s colleague. See Jacob Burckhardt to
Gottfried Semper, 20 August 1862, in Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe (Basel: Benno Schwabe
& Co., 1961), 4:119.
5. Eugéne-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture fran-
caise du XIe au XVle siécle, 10 vols. (Paris: B. Bance & A. Morel, 1854-68).
6. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), vi: “die Grundztige einer empirischen Kunstlebre”
(Semper’s emphasis).
7. Several early attempts to translate Der Stil apparently failed. In 1884 the French
architect Paul Sédille reported in the Gazette des beaux-arts that the work had already
been translated into French, although no manuscript has since surfaced; see J. Duncan
Berry, “From Historicism to Architectural Realism,” in Harry Francis Mallgrave, ed.,
Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of Modernity (Santa Monica: Getty Center
for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1993), 274-75 n. 50. Also in 1884 the
Englishman Lawrence Harvey was asked by officials at the South Kensington Museum
(now the Victoria & Albert Museum) to prepare an English translation of the book: he
declined (Lawrence Harvey to Hans Semper, 16 December 1884, Semper-Archiv, ETH

54
 Introduction

Ziirich). In 1891 the third issue of the San Francisco journal Architectural News
(January) announced that the American architect Bernard Maybeck was preparing a
translation of the work, but this effort, too, seems to have been short-lived. A transla-
tion of the prolegomena and a portion of the section on textiles appeared more recently
in Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans.
Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1989), 182-263. Even more recent is the only Italian translation, Lo stile nelle arti tec-
niche e tettoniche, o, Estetica pratica: Manuale per tecnici, artisti e amatori, ed. A. R.
Burelli et al. (Rome: Editori Laterza, 1992), which renders slightly less than half of
Semper’s original. Even in the German language Style has not fared well. The book was
known mainly through its second edition (Munich: Friedrich Bruckmann, 1878-79). In
anticipation of the centennial of Semper’s death, Maander Kunstverlag published a
reprint of the first edition in 1977. The work is presently out of print in German.
8. For additional detail on Semper’s life, see Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper (note 3).
9. See especially chapter 3 of Barry Bergdoll, Léon Vaudoyer: Historicism in the
Age of Industry (New York: Architectural History Foundation, 1994), 75-108.
10. Gottfried Semper to Eduard Vieweg, 26 September 1843, in Wolfgang Herr-
mann, “Semper und Eduard Vieweg,” in Adolf Max Vogt, Christina Reble, and Martin
Frohlich, eds., Gottfried Semper und die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Basel: Birkhauser,
1976), 202-37, esp. 216: “Man nennt die Gebilde der Baukunst organisch, wenn sie aus
einer wahren Grundidee hervorgehen, und bei ihren Formation die Gesetzlichkeit und
innere geistige Nothwendigkeit hervortritt, durch welche die Natur schafft, nur Gutes
und Sch6nes schafft, und das Hassliche selbst als nothwendiges Element zur Harmonie
des Ganzen verwendet.”
11. Gottfried Semper to Eduard Vieweg, 27 November 1845, in Herrmann, “Semper
und Eduard Vieweg” (note 10), 218.
12. Gottfried Semper to Eduard Vieweg, 21 January 1848, in Herrmann, “Semper
und Eduard Vieweg” (note 10), 219.
13. Gottfried Semper to Eduard Vieweg, 15 June 1849, in Herrmann, “Semper und
Eduard Vieweg” (note 10), 221-22.
14. Gottfried Semper to Eduard Vieweg, 24 February 1850, in Herrmann, “Semper
und Eduard Vieweg” (note 10), 223: “der Architecturegeschichte eine ganz neue Seite
abgewonnen.”
15. Gottfried Semper to Eduard Vieweg, 24 February 1850, in Herrmann, “Semper
und Eduard Vieweg” (note 10), 223: “Glauben Sie ja nicht, dass meine Sorgfalt fiir die
Entwicklung der Anfange der Kunst iiberfliissig ist. Auf ihnen basirt der Gedanke, den
ich durch das ganze Werk durchzufiihren gedenke, der rothe Faden kniipft sich an sie.”
16. Gottfried Semper to Eduard Vieweg, 13 May 1850, in Herrmann, “Semper und
Eduard Vieweg” (note 10), 226: “die Motifs in ihrem Zusammenhange aufzufassen
und das Raumliche in der Baukunst in seiner Wichtigkeit zu erkennen.... Es war mir
nicht méglich mich mit blosser Beschreibung der Monumente zu begniigen; ich musste
zeigen, warum sie so werden mussten und nicht anders werden konnten.”
17. Semper-Archiv, ETH Ziirich, MS 55, fols. 1-13; published as “Vorwort,” in
Wolfgang Herrmann, Gottfried Semper: Theoretischer Nachlass an der ETH Ziirich,
Katalog und Kommentare (Basel: Birkhauser, 1981), 180-84; translated by Herrmann

DS
 Mallgrave

as “Influence of Historical Research on Trends in Contemporary Architecture,” in

Wolfgang Herrmann, Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1984), 189-95.
18. Semper, “Influence of Historical Research on Trends in Contemporary Archi-
tecture” (note 17), 190, 191; Semper, “Vorwort” (note 17), 181: “[des] todten Sche-
matismus... rein praktischen Inhaltes.”
19. Semper-Archiv, ETH Ziirich, MS 58, fols. 15-30; published as “Einleitung,” in
Wolfgang Herrmann, Gottfried Semper: Theoretischer Nachlass an der ETH Ziirich,
Katalog und Kommentare (Basel: Birkhauser, 1981), 185-90; translated by Herrmann
as “The Basic Elements of Architecture,” in Wolfgang Herrmann, Gottfried Semper: In
Search of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 196-203.
20. Semper-Archiv, ETH Ziirich, MS 58, fols. 94-120; published as “10. Kapital,”
in Wolfgang Herrmann, Gottfried Semper: Theoretischer Nachlass an der ETH Ziirich,
Katalog und Kommentare (Basel: Birkhauser, 1981), 191-204; translated by Herrmann
as “Structural Elements of Assyrian-Chaldean Architecture,” in Wolfgang Herrmann,
Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 204-18.
21. See Henry Cole, “Notes of a Journey to Vienna and Back in November and
December, MDCCCLI, in Company with Herbert Minton,” Victoria and Albert
Museum Library, 101.A.72.
22. Semper-Archiv, ETH Zirich, MS 97; published as “Neue Einleitung,” in
Wolfgang Herrmann, Gottfried Semper: Theoretischer Nachlass an der ETH Ziirich,
Katalog und Kommentare (Basel: Birkhauser, 1981), 205-16, esp. 205: “um die Ent-
wickelung der Formen aus ihren ersten Motiven... zu zeigen”; 206: “stets die Manifes-
tation einer hohen civilisatorischen Idee.”
23. Semper, “Neue Einleitung” (note 22), 205: “Querdurchschnitt der Kulturwis-
senschaft.”
24. Semper, “Neue Einleitung” (note 22), 207: “die Baukunst [entnahm] iiberall
ihre Typen aus jenen vorarchitectonischen Zustanden menschlicher Ansiedlung.”
25. Semper, “Neue Einleitung” (note 22), 212: “Fetischbedeutung...
[das] grobe
Flechtwerk.”
26. See Wolfgang Herrmann, Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1984), 58.
27. Two copies of Semper’s metal catalog exist: one at the Victoria and Albert
Museum Library in London, and the other at the Osterreichisches Museum fiir Kunst
und Industrie in Vienna.
28. Gottfried Semper to Eduard Vieweg, 25 July 1855, Semper-Archiv, ETH
Ziirich: “die gesamte Formenwelt.”
29. Gottfried Semper to Friedrich E. Suchsland, 27 October 1856, in Herrmann,
“Semper und Eduard Vieweg” (note 10), 99-100.
30. Gottfried Semper to Friedrich E. Suchsland, 29 October 1856, in Herrmann,
“Semper und Eduard Vieweg” (note 10), 100.
31. Semper-Archiv, ETH Ziirich, MSS 168-81; two of these manuscripts have been
published in Wolfgang Herrmann, Gottfried Semper: Theoretischer Nachlass an der
ETH Ziirich, Katalog und Kommentare (Basel: Birkhauser, 1981): MS 179 as “Vor-
wort,” pp. 238-49, and MS 178 as “Einleitung,” pp. 217-37; “Einleitung” was trans-

56
 Introduction

lated by Herrmann as “The Attributes of Formal Beauty,” in Wolfgang Herrmann,

Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 219-44.
32. For a more detailed summary of the projected third volume, see Mallgrave,
Gottfried Semper (note 3), 301-8; and Herrmann, Gottfried Semper (note 26),
100-117.
33. Adolf Zeising, Newe Lehre von den Proportionen des menschlichen K6rpers,
aus einem bisher unerkannt gebliebenen, die ganze Natur und Kunst durchdringenden
morphologischen Grundgesetze entwickelt und mit einer vollstandigen historischen
Ubersicht der bisherigen Systeme (Leipzig: Rudolph Weigel, 1854).
34. Adolf Zeising, Asthetische Forschungen (Frankfurt am Main: Meidinger, 1855).
35. The lecture was held on 24 January 1856 as part of a weekly lecture series at
the Polytechnikum; it was published as Gottfried Semper, Uber die formelle Gesetz-
mafigkeit des Schmuckes und dessen Bedeutung als Kunstsymbol (Zurich: Meyer &
Zeller, 1856).
36. Semper’s supposed “materialism” was the standard interpretation of his theo-
ries in the first half of this century, and it is still echoed on occasion today. It began
when Alois Riegl, in his Spatrémische Kunstindustrie (Vienna: k. k. Hof- und Staats-
druckerei, 1901), characterized Semper’s theory in passing as a “Dogma der materiali-
stischen Metaphysik” (dogma of materialist metaphysics). There is a long history
behind this statement and the confusion to which it led, and I refer the reader to my dis-
cussion of it in Gottfried Semper (note 3), 371-81.
37. Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kiinsten (note 2), 7:
“(mit der] grob-materialistischen Anschauung.”
38. Perhaps the most egregious mischaracterization of Semper’s theory was that of
Lionello Venturi, who wrote in 1936: “He is the adversary of all idealism and tends to
natural science of the Darwinian type. He is not interested in the intimate life of art, but
in the evolution of forms assumed as essential.” See Venturi, History of Art Criticism,
trans. Charles Marriott (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1936), 226-27. Semper’s Style, the
first volume of which was written prior to The Origin of Species (1859), owes nothing
to Darwin’s model. Semper first confronted the issue of evolution and its inapplicability
to art in a lecture given at the Rathaus (City hall) in Zurich in 1869, “Ueber Baustyle”
(translated as “On Architectural Styles”), in which he ridiculed those attempting to
apply Darwin’s theory to art. The lecture was published as Gottfried Semper, Ueber
Baustyle: Ein Vortrag gehalten auf dem Rathhaus in Ziirich am 4. Marz 1869 (Zurich:
Friedrich Schulthess, 1869), 10: “Man bezeichnet sehr richtig die alten Monumente als
die fossilen Gehduse ausgestorbener Gesellschaftsorganismen, aber diese sind letzteren,
wie sie lebten, nicht wie Schneckenhauser auf den Ricken gewachsen, noch sind sie
nach einem blinden Naturprozesse wie Korallenriffe aufgeschossen, sondern freie
Gebilde des Menschen”; for an English translation, see Gottfried Semper, “On
Architectural Styles,” in idem, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings,
trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1989), 268: “We can quite rightly describe the old monuments as the fos-
silized receptacles of extinct social organizations, but these did not grow on the backs
of society like shells on the back of snails, nor did they spring forth from blind natural
process, like coral reefs. They are the free creations of man.”

57
 Mallgrave

39. Semper, “The Attributes of Formal Beauty” (note 31), 243; Semper-Archiv,
ETH Zirich, MS 179, fol. 46; published as “Einleitung” (note 31), 236: “Es is daher
der Style das zu kiinstlerischer Bedeutung erhobene Hervortreten des Grundthema,
und aller inneren und Gusseren Coefficienten, die bei der VerkOrperung desselben in
einem Kunstwerke modificirend einwirkten” (Semper’s emphasis).
40. Wolfgang Herrmann has addressed this issue at length; see his “Zur Entstehung
des ‘Stil? 1840-1877,” in idem, Gottfried Semper im Exil: Paris, London, 1849-1855;
Zur Entstehung des “Stil,” 1840-1877 (Basel: Birkhaiiser, 1978), 95-124; translated by
Herrmann as “The Genesis of Der Stil, 1840-1877,” in Wolfgang Herrmann, Gottfried
Semper: In Search of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 88-117.
41. James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, The Antiquities of Athens, 2d ed., 4 vols.
(London: Priestly & Weale, 1825-30). The new edition contained annotations by
William Kinnard, many of which related to classical polychromy. For instance, in con-
sidering the Parthenon, Kinnard was one of the first to suggest that paint —still “dis-
tinctly perceptible” — may have been applied on other than the decorative parts: “The
polished columns of white marble with their architrave, triglyphs, and the chief part of
the cornice, may therefore have thus been relieved in a manner agreeable to the eye, in
so sunny an atmosphere, by the enrichment and combination with colours and gilding
judiciously applied” (1:44-45n).
42. Franz Christian Gau to Gottfried Semper, 18 February 1833, Semper-Archiv,
ETH Ziirich.
43. Gottfried Semper, Vorlaufige Bemerkungen tiber bemalte Architectur und Plastik
bei den Alten (Altona: Johann Friedrich Hammerich, 1834), was published that spring;
translated as “Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture and Sculpture in
Antiquity,” in Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other
Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge Univ. Press, 1989), 45-73. The Victoria and Albert Museum has six plates that
were prepared for the larger book. They deal with various monuments in Athens and
Sicily, and fragments from Etruscan tomb sites. The Hamburg Museum fiir Kunst-
gewerbe also has copies of these plates.
44. Leopold Ettlinger, Gottfried Semper und die Antike: Beitrage zur Kunst-
anschauung des deutschen Klassizismus, inaugural diss. (Halle, Germany: Carl Nieft,
1937), 47. In 1937 Ettlinger counted 199 surviving drawings of Athens alone by Semper.
Many have since been lost or destroyed.
45. Gottfried Semper to Johanna Marie Semper, 10 July 1832, Semper-Archiv,
ETH Ziirich.
46. Gottfried Semper to Johanna Marie Semper, 9 January 1833, Semper-Archiv,
ETH Zirich. Semper identified this aide as “General Heidecker,” probably Karl
Wilhelm Heideck (1788-1861), an army officer and amateur painter who was sent from
Munich to Greece as a member of Prince Otto’s regency committee to assist in organiz-
ing the military there; see Carl Brun, ed., Schweizerisches Kiinstler-Lexikon (Frauen-
feld: Huber, 1908; reprint, Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1982), 2:35-36.
47. The results were published in Italian in Bullettino dell’Instituto di corrispon-
denza archeologica in July 1833. This was later translated into German as “Entdeckung
alter Farbenreste an der Trajanssaule in Rom” (Discovery of traces of ancient paint on

58
 Introduction

Trajan’s column in Rome), in Hans Semper and Manfred Semper, eds., Gottfried
Semper: Kleine Schriften (Berlin: W. Spemann, 1884; reprint, Mittenwald, Germany:
Maander, 1979), 107-8.
48. Semper’s connection with the institute allowed him access to grave sites near
Viterbo and at Corneto. A colored sketch of one tomb at Corneto is preserved in the
Semper-Archiv, ETH Ziirich; it is reproduced in Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper (note 3),
51. For other sketches from Corneto, see Gottfried Semper, 1803-1879: Baumeister
zwischen Revolution und Historismus (Munich: Callwey, 1980), 104 (cat. nos. 235-37,
by Gudrun Stenke), with illustrations on pp. 103 (cat. no. 236), 106 (cat. no. 237).
49. Semper gained access to the private areas of the Louvre through his friendship
with Charles Blanc, which he recounted in a letter to Johann Andreas Romberg,
September 1849, Semper-Archiv, ETH Ziirich.
50. Undated draft of a letter from Gottfried Semper to “Herr Legationsrath,”
Semper-Archiv, ETH Ziirich.
51. Gottfried Semper to Bernhard August Lindenau, 10 April 1850, Semper-Archiv,
ETH Zirich: “meinem Vaterlande, das mich kennt und das ich liebe, ferner zu dienen.”
52. Semper-Archiv, ETH Ziirich, MS 122, fol. 3; published as “London Lecture of
November 11, 1853,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 6 (1983): 8.
53. See James Cowles Prichard, The Natural History of Man: Comprising Inquiries
into the Modifying Influence of Physical and Moral Agencies on the Different Tribes
of the Human Family (London: H. Bailliére, 1843), 136-37; Wolfgang Herrmann
identifies this source in his description of Semper-Archiv, ETH Ziirich, MS 40, in his
Gottfried Semper: Theoretischer Nachlass an der ETH Ziirich, Katalog und Kom-
mentare (Basel: Birkhauser, 1981), 83.
54. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former
Changes of the Earth’s Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation, 3 vols.
(London: John Murray, 1830-33).
55. For a vivid account of Boucher de Perthes’s research, see Herbert Wendt, In
Search of Adam: The Story of Man’s Quest for the Truth about His Earliest Ancestors,
trans. James Cleugh (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), 202-7.
56. Jacques Boucher de Perthes, Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes: Mémoire
sur l’industrie primitive et les arts a leur origine, 3 vols. (Paris: Treuttel & Wurtz,
1847).
57. See Glyn Daniel, A Short History of Archaeology (London: Thames & Hud-
son, 1981), 53.
58. See Wendt, In Search of Adam (note 55), 215-22.
59. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:5.
60. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 2:546-47, esp. 547 n. S.
61. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 2:129-30.
62. Paul-Emile Botta, Monument de Ninive (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1849-50),
5:174-76.
63. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:276: “steinerne Stickereien” (Semper’s emphasis).
64. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:226.
65. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:346.
66. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:271.

59)
 Mallgrave

67. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:358: “die gewirkten und gestickten Arazzis der
kunstfertigen Chaldaer.”
68. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:359: “gefesselt, aber nicht zur Mumie einbalsamirt
und so ganzlich versteinert wie in Aegypten, wo sie wohl berechneten und unabander-
lichen hieratischen Satzungen gehorchen musste” (Semper’s emphasis).
69. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:358: “wie mit Zwirnfaden umzogene Kontouren.”
70. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:220-21.
71. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 2:399: “die lapidarischen Nachkommen der
babylonisch-assyrischen bronzebekleideten Holzsaulen, die ihrerseits nur mehr oder
weniger monumentalisirte Zeltstiitzen sind.”
72. The issue of Semper’s “practical aesthetics” is discussed at length in Mari
Hvattum, Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2003).
73. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:vi: “einer empirischen Kunstlehre” (Semper’s
emphasis).
74. Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, Italienische Forschungen (Berlin: Nicolai’sche
Buchhandlung, 1827-31), 2:iv: “einer urkundlichen Begriindung der neueren Kunst-
geschichte.”
75. Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling, “Uber das Verhaltniss der bildenden Kiinsten
zur der Natur,” in idem, Sdmmtliche Werke, pt. 1, vol. 7, 1805-1810, ed. Karl Friedrich
Schelling (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1860), 292-329.
76. Rumohr, Italienische Forschungen (note 74), 1:87: “ein zur Gewohnheit
gediehenes sich Fiigen in die inneren Foderungen des Stoffes |...], in welchem der Bildner
seine Gestalten wirklich bildet, der Maler sie erscheinen macht” (Rumohr’s emphasis).
77. Gottfried Semper to Eduard Vieweg, 26 September 1843, in Herrmann,
“Semper und Edvard Vieweg” (note 10), 215-18.
78. For a discussion of Carus’s theories and his relation to Semper in Dresden, see
my Gottfried Semper (note 3), 70-71, 158-59.
79. See Semper, Uber die formelle Gesetzmafigkeit (note 35).
80. For Zeising’s influence on Semper, see Heidrun Laudel, Gottfried Semper:
Architektur und Stil (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1991), 168-73.
81. Semper, Uber die formelle Gesetzmafigkeit (note 35).
82. Semper-Archiv, ETH Ziirich, MS 169, fol. 3. The phrase he used was “unver-
standliche und selbst den academischen Kunstlern unliebsam.”
83. Semper-Archiv, ETH Ziirich, MS 169, fol. 3: “Aber, frage ich, had d. Philosopie
nich auch d. Recht u. d. Freiheit die Idee als ein Objekt, als einen Coeffizienten des Werkes
zu betrachten, welches letztere eine Function von mehreren variablen Gréssen ist.”
84. Semper-Archiv, ETH Ziirich, MS 178, fol. 23; Semper, “Vorwort” (note 17),
247: “ein schematisches Kunsturteil.”
85. Semper-Archiv, ETH Zirich, MS 186, fol. 1.
86. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:231-32 n. 2.
87. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 2:3: “die altesten und beredtesten Dokumente der
Geschichte.”
88. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 2:5: “das schwebende geistige und klare Wesen der
quellverehrenden Hellenen.”

60
 Introduction

89. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 2:6: “Beide Formen sind die Vorkiinderinnen dessen
was die Baukunst erfand, indem sie darnach rand das Weisen beider Volker monumen-
tal auszudriicken.”
90. Heinrich Wolfflin, “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur” (Ph.D.
diss., Universitat Miinchen, 1886); translated as “Prolegomena to a Psychology of
Architecture,” in Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds. and trans.,
Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa
Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 149-87.
91. Heinrich Wolfflin, “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur”
(note 90), 50; Wolfflin, “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture” (note 90), 185.
92. See Adolf Goller, “Was ist die Ursache der immerwahrenden Stilveranderung in
der Architektur?” in idem, Zur Asthetik der Architektur: Vortrage und Studien (Stutt-
gart: Konrad Wittwer, 1887); translated as “What Is the Cause of Perpetual Style
Change in Architecture?” in Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds.
and trans., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893
(Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994),
193-225. In their introduction, Mallgrave and Ikonomou describe the relation of
Géller and Wolfflin and their theories (pp. 51-56).
93. Heinrich Wolfflin, Renaissance und Barock: Eine Untersuchung tiber Wesen
und Entstehung des Barockstils in Italien (Munich: T. Ackermann, 1888), 64n. 1;
translated by Kathrin Simon as Renaissance and Baroque (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press,
1975), 167n. 5.
94. See Wolfflin, “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture” (note 90), 184,
190. Wolfflin’s annotated copy of his printed dissertation is in Special Collections,
Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; the annotations are included,
in both English and German, in the English translation cited here.
95. The passage in question is in Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissen-
schaften (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1883), 118; Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to
the Human Sciences, vol. 1 of idem, Selected Works, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and
Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989), 143-44. For further discus-
sion of this passage, see the introduction to Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios
Ikonomou, eds. and trans., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aes-
thetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the
Humanities, 1994).
96. Wilhelm Dilthey, “Die drei Epochen der modernen Asthetik und ihre heutige
Aufgabe,” Deutsche Rundschau 72 (July-September 1892): 200-236; translated by
Michael Neville as “The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and Its Present Task,” in
Wilhelm Dilthey, Poetry and Experience, vol. 5 of idem, Selected Works, ed. Rudolf A.
Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton Univ, Press, 1989), 175-222.
97. Dilthey, “The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and Its Present Task”
(note 96), 181; Dilthey, “Die drei Epochen der modernen Asthetik und ihre heutige
Aufgabe” (note 96), 205.
98. Dilthey, “The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and Its Present Task”
(note 96), 188; Dilthey, “Die drei Epochen der modernen Asthetik und ihre heutige
Aufgabe” (note 96), 210.

61
 Mallgrave

99. Dilthey, “The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and Its Present Task”
(note 96), 200; Dilthey, “Die drei Epochen der modernen Asthetik und ihre heutige
Aufgabe” (note 96), 219.
100. Dilthey, “The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and Its Present Task” (note
96), 204; Dilthey, “Die drei Epochen der modernen Asthetik und ihre heutige Aufgabe”
(note 96), 222.
101. Dilthey, “The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and Its Present Task” (note
96), 204; Dilthey, “Die drei Epochen der modernen Asthetik und ihre heutige Aufgabe”
(note 96), 222.
102. Dilthey, “The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and Its Present Task” (note
96), 204; Dilthey, “Die drei Epochen der modernen Asthetik und ihre heutige Aufgabe”
(note 96), 222.
103. See Robert Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefiihl: Ein Beitrag zur Asthetik
(Leipzig: Hermann Credner, 1873); translated as “On the Optical Sense of Form: A
Contribution to Aesthetics,” in Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou,
eds. and trans., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics,
1873-1893 (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities,
1994), 89-123.
104. Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 2 vols. (Leipzig:
Brockhaus, 1844); translated by E. F. J. Payne as The World as Will and Representation,
2 vols. (Indian Hills, Colo.: Falcon’s Wing Press, 1958; reprint, New York: Dover,
1966); see especially chapter 35, “On the Aesthetics of Architecture,” 2:411-18.
105. Carl Botticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen, 3 vols. (Potsdam: Ferdinand
Riegel, 1844-52).
106. A fact uncovered by Wolfgang Herrmann; see Wolfgang Herrmann, “Semper
und Botticher,” in idem, Gottfried Semper: Theoretischer Nachlass an der ETH Ziirich,
Katalog und Kommentare (Basel: Birkhauser, 1981), 26-40; translated by Herrmann as
“Semper and the Archaeologist Botticher,” in Wolfgang Herrmann, Gottfried Semper:
In Search of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 139-52.
107. See Gottfried Semper, “On Architectural Symbols,” Res: Journal of Anthro-
pology and Aesthetics, no. 9 (1983): 61-67.
108. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 2:359: “deren stiitzende Elemente sich durch
die Kunst zu Organismen beleben konnten, deren Rahmenwerk und Dachgeschrank zwar
kollektive, nothwendige Last, sich rein mechanisch dussert, aber zugleich in sich selbst
vielgegliedert und in einzelnen Theilen als strebend und gleichsam lebendig erscheint.”
109. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 2:365: “Zahmung des derben naturwiichsigen
Motivs.”
110. For the elaborate description of the iconographic symbolism of the Kunst-
historisches Museum, see “Entwurf eines Programmes fiir die bildernische Decoration
der Facaden des k. k. Museums fiir Kunst und Alterthum,” in Hans Semper and
Manfred Semper, eds., Die k. k. Hofmuseen in Wien und Gottfried Semper: Drei Denk-
schriften Gottfried Semper’s (Innsbruck: A. Edlinger, 1892).
111. For the best discussion of this influence, see J. Duncan Berry, “The Legacy of
Gottfried Semper” (note 3), especially the sections on Constantin Lipsius and Alfred
Friedrich Bluntschli.

62
 Introduction

112. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Asthetik; oder, Wissenschaft des Schénen, ed.
Robert Vischer, 2d ed. (Munich: Meyer & Jessen, 1922-23), 3:229 (sec. 559).
113. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, “Kritik meiner Asthetik,” in Robert Vischer, ed.,
Kritische Gange, 2d ed. (Munich: Meyer & Jessen, 1922), 4:316-22.
114. See Vischer, “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics”
(note 103), 92; Vischer, Ueber das optische Formgefiihl (note 103), vii.
115. Wolfflin, “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture” (note 90), 149;
Wolfflin, “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur” (note 90), 1.
116. The phrase “visible pure form” (sichtbaren reinen Form) belongs to the
unheralded Adolf Géller, whose “Was ist die Ursache der immerwahrenden Stilver-
anderung in der Architektur?” (note 92) is an essential text of this period. It was the art
historian Cornelius Gurlitt who proposed transposing Gdller’s abstract definition of
form into painting and sculpture. See the discussion in Mallgrave and Ikonomou,
Empathy, Form, and Space (note 95), 54-56.
117. Nietzsche made this comment in his lecture “Das griechische Musikdrama,” in
Friedrich Nietzsche, Sdmtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and
Mazzino Montinari, rev. ed. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), 1:515-32,
esp22)
118. The plan and the first installment of the work that Semper sent to Vieweg in
June 1856 (held in pawn in the contractual dispute and subsequently lost) had started
with ceramics.
119. Jules Ziegler, Etudes céramiques: Recherche des principes du beau dans l’ar-
chitecture, l'art céramique et la forme en général; théorie de la coloration des reliefs
(Paris: Mathias & Paulin, 1850).
120. Brongniart’s classification of vessels in his Traité des arts céramiques ou des
poteries (1844) and Description méthodique du Musée céramique (1845) also greatly
influenced Semper. See my discussion in Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth
Century (note 3), 279-82.
121. Ziegler, Etudes céramiques (note 119), 9.
122. Ziegler, Etudes céramiques (note 119), 16.
123. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 2:81 n.
124. Gottfried Semper, Ueber die bleiernen Schleudergeschosse der Alten und
zweckmassige Gestaltung der Wurfkorper im Allgemeinen: Ein Versuch die dynamis-
che Entstehung gewisser Formen in der Natur und in der Kunst nachzuweisen (Frank-
furt am Main: Verlag fiir Kunst & Wissenschaft, 1859), 60: “soll nicht behauptet sein,
das die Griechen ihre Formen nach mathematischen Formeln constuirten, welches in
der Kunst anzunehmen absurd ware, sondern dass sie das Gesetz der Natur, wonach
diese bei ihren Formengebungen die extremen Grenzen beobachtet und iiberall Span-
nung herrschen lasst, nicht bloss dunkel ahnten, sondern klar erkannten.”
125. Semper first commented on iron in a report prepared in 1843 on the use of
iron in a church by Eduard Heuchler; see Semper-Archiv, ETH Ziirich, MS 7. In 1849
Semper critiqued Théodore Charpentier’s Jardins d’hiver in “Der Wintergarten zu
Paris,” Zeitschrift fiir praktisches Baukunst 9 (1849): 516-26, reprinted as “Uber
Wintergarten,” in Hans Semper and Manfred Semper, eds., Gottfried Semper: Kleine
Schriften (Berlin: W. Spemann, 1884; reprint, Mittenwald: Maander Kunstverlag,

63
 Mallgrave

1977), 484-90. See also Wolfgang Herrmann, “Semper’s Position on Iron as a Building
Material,” in idem, Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1984), 174-83.
126. See “Science, Industry, and Art,” in Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of
Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang
Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 164; Gottfried Semper, Wissen-
schaft, Industrie und Kunst: Vorschlage zur Anregung nationalen Kunstgefihles, bei
dem Schlusse der Londoner Industrie-Ausstellung (Brunswick: Vieweg, 1852), 71:
“glasbedeckte Vacuum.” In context Semper’s remark clearly means the building could
be used for any purpose.
127. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 2:263: “mageren Boden fiir die Kunst”; 2:264: “das
Ideal desselben ist unsichtbare Architektur! Denn je diinner das Metallgespinnst, desto
vollkommener in seiner Art” (Semper’s emphasis).
128. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 2:265: “lassen sich dennoch hieran vielleicht fiir die
Zukunft der Kunst einige Hoffnungen kniipfen.”
129. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:366: “sehr folgewichtiges Prinzip der Konstruc-
tion” (Semper’s emphasis).
130. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:304: “nichts Bedeutsameres in der ganzen Stilge-
schichte der Baukunst.”
131. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:367.
132. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:367: “den einfacheren Organismen des vege-
tabilischen Reiches.”
133. Ludwig Bohnstedt, “Uber die Bedeutung des Eisens fiir die Baukunst,” Deut-
sche Bauzeitung, 25 May 1867, 201-2; 1 June 1867, 209-10; 8 June 1867, 219-20.
134. Richard Lucae, “Uber die Bedeutung und Macht des Raumes in der Bau-
kunst,” Romberg’s Zeitschrift fiir praktische Baukunst 29 (1869): cols. 197-208;
Richard Lucae, “Uber die asthetische Ausbildung der Eisen-Konstruktionen, besonders
in ihrer Anwendung bei Raumen von bedeutender Spannweite,” Deutsche Bauzeitung,
13 January 1870, 9-12.
135. Constantin Lipsius, “Uber die asthetische Behandlung des Eisens im Hoch-
bau,” Deutsche Bauzeitung, 7 September 1878, 363.
136. Of Heuser’s many articles discussing iron, see especially “Das Werden von
Stylformen: Fortsetzung Darwinistischer Studien,” Allgemeine Bauzeitung 59 (1894):
53-54, 63-69. See also the excellent discussion of Heuser in Berry, “The Legacy of
Gottfried Semper” (note 3).
137. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 2:389.
138. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 2:394.
139. Semper, “On Architectural Styles” (note 38), 281; Semper, Ueber Baustyle
(note 38), 28.
140. Lucae, “Uber die Bedeutung und Macht des Raumes in der Baukunst” (note
134), 202.
141. Lucae, “Uber die asthetische Ausbildung der Eisen-Konstruktionen”
(note 134), 12.
142. Lucae, “Uber die asthetische Ausbildung der Eisen-Konstruktionen” (note
134), 12. On Giedion’s use of the word Schweben, see his Bauen in Frankreich,

64
 Introduction

Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1928), 18, 58;
translated by J. Duncan Berry as Building in France, Building in Iron, Building
in Ferroconcrete (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the
Humanities, 1994), 102, 142 (where the word is translated as “floating”).
143. Fiedler, “Observations on the Nature and History of Architecture” (note 3),
142; Fiedler, “Bemerkungen iiber Wesen und Geschichte der Baukunst” (note 3), 379.
144. Fiedler, “Observations on the Nature and History of Architecture” (note 3),
142; Fiedler, “Bemerkungen iiber Wesen und Geschichte der Baukunst” (note 3), 378.
145. Auer studied with Semper in his last years of teaching, between 1865 and
1868. Little has been written thus far on Auer, and the best discussion in English is in
Berry, “The Legacy of Gottfried Semper” (note 3), 222-40.
146. Hans Auer, “Der Einfluss der Construction auf die Entwicklung der Baustile,”
Zeitschrift des Osterreichischen Ingenieur- und Architekten-Vereins 33, no. 1 (1881):
8-18, esp. 9.
147. Hans Auer, “Die Entwickelung des Raumes in der Baukunst,” Allgemeine
Bauzeitung 48 (1883): 65-68, 73-74.
148. Auer, “Die Entwickelung des Raumes in der Baukunst” (note 147), 66.
149. Auer, “Die Entwickelung des Raumes in der Baukunst” (note 147), 74.
150. August Schmarsow, “The Essence of Architectural Creation,” in Harry
Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds. and trans., Empathy, Form, and
Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica: Getty Center for
the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 281-97, esp. 287; August Schmarsow,
Das Wesen der architektonischen Schopfung (Leipzig: Karl W. Hiersemann, 1894), 11.
Schmarsow later noted that the idea of architecture as the creatress of space came from
his reading of Style.
151. Schmarsow first developed the notion in “Uber den Werth der Dimensionen
im menschlichen Raumgebilde,” Berichte iiber die Verhandlungen der kOniglich
Sachsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig 48 (1896): 44-61. He did so
more extensively in Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft am Ubergang vom Altertum
zu Mittelalter, kritische erértert und in systematischem Zusammenhange dargestellt
(Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1905). For Berlage’s references to architecture as the art of spa-
tial enclosure, see his “Kunst der Raumumschliefung,” in Hedrick Petrus Berlage,
Gedanken iiber Stil in der Baukunst (Leipzig: Zeitler, 1905), 52; translated as
“Thoughts on Style in Architecture,” in Hendrik Petrus Berlage: Thoughts on Style,
1886-1909, trans. lain Boyd Whyte and Wim de Wit (Santa Monica: Getty Center for
the History of Art and the Humanities, 1996), 122-56, esp. 152.
152. Schmarsow, “The Essence of Architectural Creation” (note 150), 284;
Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schopfung (note 150), 7.
153. Schmarsow, “The Essence of Architectural Creation” (note 150), 282;
Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schopfung (note 150), 2.
154. Ina note in chapter 3, Semper himself remarks on his extension of the meaning
of the term Bekleidung: “As will become clear in what follows, I use the expression dress-
ing in a very broad sense, closely connected with my ideas about ancient art in general”
(this volume, p. 165 n. 14); Der Stil (note 2), 81n. 1: “Dem Ausdrucke Bekleidungswesen
lege ich, wie sich aus dem Folgenden ergeben wird, einen sehr ausgedehnten, mit meinen

65
 Mallgrave

Ideen iiber antiken Kunst im Allgemeinen auf das Engste zusammenhangenden Sinn
bei.”
155. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:445.
156. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:444: “Es handelte sich nur, die mechanischen
Bediirfnissformen der asiatischen Bekleidungskonstruktion in dynamische, ja in organ-
ische Formen zu verwandeln, sie zu beseelen.”
157. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:445: “Beniitzung dieser Masseneigenschaften nur
dazu um die Thatigkeit und das Leben der organischen Glieder pragnant hervorzu-
heben, kurz Emanzipation der Form von der Stofflichen und dem nackten Bediirfniss”
(Semper’s emphasis).
158. Semper, Der Stil (note 2), 1:231n: “Faschingslaune...Kanevalskerzendunst...
die wahre Atmosphare der Kunst.”
159. See Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper (note 3), 7; see also 59-60, 87-92, 116-17,
125-29, 237-40, 260-65, 299-302, 326-32, 339-52.
160. An excellent discussion of these two related concepts is found in David
Leatherbarrow, The Roots of Architectural Invention: Site, Enclosure, Materials (New
York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 218-20.
161. Friedrich Schiller, “On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy,” in idem, Historical
Dramas: Mary Stuart, Maid of Orleans, The Bride of Messina, trans. Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, E. A. Aytoun, and A.J. W. Morrison (New York: Anthological Society,
1901), 243; Friedrich Schiller, “Uber den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragédie,” in
idem, Samtliche Werke (Munich: Winkler, 1968), 2:249.
162. See especially Semper, Vorlaufige Bemerkungen tiber bemalte Architectur und
Plastik bei den Alten (note 43), 4-5; Semper, “Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome
Architecture” (note 43), 51-52.
163. See Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper (note 3), 125-29.
164. Nietzsche’s notes have been published in Friedrich Nietzsche, Samtliche Werke:
Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, rev. ed. (Munich:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), 7:16, 9:123, 11:255-56. That Nietzsche also read
Semper’s Vorlaufige Bemerkungen iiber bemalte Architectur und Plastik bei den Alten
is apparent from Nietzsche’s comments on Greek polychromy in his “Das griechische
Musikdrama” (note 117), 1:518.
165. Nietzsche’s lecture “Das griechische Musikdrama,” which became the basis
for Die Geburt der Tragédie aus dem Geiste der Musik, was written in the fall of 1869,
just after he had read and taken notes on Style. For the relation of Semper and Nietzsche,
see Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper (note 3), 348-52.
166. Dionysus transcends the usual deity of the fine arts—Apollo—on both the
interior and exterior of the work. The leitmotif of the theater’s exterior is a quadriga,
containing Dionysus and Ariadne, pulled by four panthers, that sits atop the central
exedra. Apollo is relegated to a minor position: to a single side panel beneath the vault
of the exedra. Inside, the ceiling panels of the main foyer were all given over to the
theme “The Return of Dionysus.” For more details, see Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper
(note 3), 346-48.
167. See Hermann, “Zur Entstehung des ‘Stil? 1840-1877” (note 40), 110, 120-21;
Herrmann, “The Genesis of Der Stil, 1840-1877” (note 40), 104, 113-14.

66
 Introduction

168. Semper-Archiv, ETH Ziirich, MS 283; published as “Anfang des III. Bandes
des ‘Stil”” in Wolfgang Herrmann, Gottfried Semper: Theoretischer Nachlass an der
ETH Ziirich, Katalog und Kommentare (Basel: Birkhauser, 1981), 250-60.
169. There are two versions of this prospectus in the Semper-Archiv, ETH Ziirich:
MS 195 and MS 205; MS 205 is translated by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang
Herrmann as “Prospectus: Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aes-
thetics,” in Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 174-80.
170. Semper, “On Architectural Styles” (note 38), 269; Semper, Ueber Baustyle
(note 38), 11: “Styl ist die Uebereinstimmung einer Kunsterscheinung mit ihrer Ent-
stehungsgeschichte, mit allen Vorbedingungen und Umstanden ihres Werdens.” Cf.
Semper-Archiv, ETH Ziirich, MS 283, fol. 9; published as “Anfang des III. Bandes des
‘Stil’” (note 168), 251: “Diese Ubereinstimmung der Kunst mit ihrer Entstehungs-
geschichte, wo sie hervortritt, nennt man Stil” (This harmony of art with the history of
its origins is called style).
171. Semper, “On Architectural Styles” (note 38), 284; Semper, Ueber Baustyle
(note 38), 31: “Wir sind tiberzeugt, dass sich schon dieser oder jener unter unseren jiin-
geren Collegen befahigt zeigen wiirde, einer solchen Idee, wo sie sich wirklich Bahn
brache, das geeignete architektonische Kleid zu verleihen. Bis es dahin kommt, muss
man sich, so gut es gehen will, in das Alte hineinschicken.” A sentence similar to the last
one in the quotation also appears at the end of Gottfried Semper, Die vier Elemente der
Baukunst: Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Baukunde (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg,
1851), 103 n: “Bis dahin begniige man sich mit dem alten”; translated as “The Four
Elements of Architecture: A Contribution to the Comparative Study of Architecture,”
in Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans.
Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1989), 128 n: “Until then, one has to be content with the old.”

67
Ars infinita est, sed qui Symbola animadverterit,
omnia intelliget, licet non omnino

(Art is infinite, but anyone who heeds the symbols

will understand everything, though not entirely)
 Style in the Technical
olalemm(-Yel Cola] (om Va «Fs
ro)
Practical Aesthetics:
PW aleolale| evolve) aos
Technicians, Artists, and
Friends of the Arts

C=Yolalalroro| MO]ate ia MeyMmcal-Miucos-ya lanlekeya colar

Forms, Types, and Symbols in Architecture
Prolegomena

he nocturnal sky shows glimmering nebulae among the splendid miracle

of stars—either old extinct systems scattered throughout the universe,
cosmic dust taking shape around a nucleus, or a condition in between destruc-
tion and regeneration.
They are a suitable analogy for similar events on the horizon of art history.
They signify a world of art passing into the formless, while suggesting at the
same time a new formation in the making.
These phenomena of artistic decline and the mysterious phoenixlike birth
of new artistic life arising from the process of its destruction are all the more
significant for us, because we are probably in the midst of a similar crisis—as
far as we who are living through it (and therefore lacking a clear overview)
are able to surmise and judge.
At the least, this view has many adherents, and in truth there is no lack of
supporting evidence. The only thing that remains uncertain is whether these
signs indicate a general decline arising from more profound social causes, or
whether they suggest conditions that are otherwise healthy but that have tem-
porarily caused confusion in those fields and human faculties concerned with
discerning and representing beauty. Perhaps sooner or later they will lead to
happier things in this sphere as well and work to the general good and honor
of humanity.
The first hypothesis is bleak and unproductive because it denies artists
who subscribe to it any support for their efforts. If the world of art were
collapsing, Atlas himself would be too weak to hold it up; those who find
pleasure in building do not want to restrict themselves to tearing down some-
thing rotten.
The second hypothesis, by contrast, is practical and productive — whether
it is right or wrong.
As long as whoever embraces it guards against the presumption of seeing
himself as the founder and savior of a future art, he will view his work more
modestly as something in the process of becoming, or rather, as the becoming
ofart in general, and set for himself the following task: to explore within indi-
vidual cases the regularity and order that become apparent in artistic phe-
nomena during the creative process of becoming and to deduce from that the
general principles, the fundamentals of an empirical theory of art.
Such an approach will provide no handbook for artistic practice, for it will

Ys!
 Semper

not show how to create a particular art-form but rather how it comes into
being. The work of art will be seen as a result of all the factors involved in its
creation. Technique will therefore be a very important issue to consider, but
only insofar as it affects the principle of art’s creation. Nor will this approach
merely produce a history of art. In passing through the field of history, it will
not apprehend and explain the works of art of different periods and countries
as facts but rather it will expand upon them, as it were, by identifying in each
the necessarily different values of a function composed of many variables. It
will do this primarily with the intention of revealing the inner law governing
the world of the art-form, just as it governs the world of nature. For nature in
its infinite abundance is nevertheless very sparing with its motifs; it constantly
repeats its basic forms, modifying them a thousand times according to the
formative stage reached by living beings and the various conditions of their
existence. It shortens some elements and lengthens others, develops some ele-
ments fully, then merely alludes to them elsewhere. Nature has its own evolu-
tionary history, within which old motifs are discernible in every new form. In
just the same way, art is based on a few standard forms and types that derive
from the most ancient traditions; they reappear constantly yet offer infinite
variety, and like nature’s types they have their own history. Nothing is arbi-
trary; everything is conditioned by circumstances and relations.
An empirical theory of art (theory of style) is neither pure aesthetics nor an
abstract theory of beauty. The latter considers form as such; it sees beauty as
the combination of individual forms to achieve an overall effect that pleases
and satisfies our artistic sense.
All the aesthetic properties of formal beauty —harmony, eurythmy, pro-
portion, symmetry, and so on—are therefore of a collective nature.
Style theory, however, sees beauty as a unity, as a product or a result, not
as a sum or a series. It looks for the constituent parts of form that are not
form itself but rather the idea, the force, the material, and the means —in
other words, the basic preconditions of form.
This route through the world of art presents enormous difficulties. At best
it will produce results full of gaps, empty rubrics, and errors. But the ordering
and comparative method necessary for this effort to group related objects,
and to reduce what is derived to its simplest essence, at least helps provide an
overall view of a vast field that is still mostly fallow and waiting to be culti-
vated by others. For this reason alone it will not be totally in vain.
Our task also includes what [Carl Friedrich] von Rumohr appropriately
called the “Housekeeping of the Arts,” although he originally meant by this
only the ordering and at the same time subordinate role played by architecture
in the creation of works of high art: sculpture and painting. Architecture, in
its relation to the fine arts as well as in its own right, will be a major theme of
our considerations. Yet these higher realms of art represent only one of the
outer limits of the field to be investigated. In this field we also encounter those
simpler works to which the artistic instinct was first applied: adornment,
weapons, weaving, pottery, household utensils —in a word, the industrial arts

Te
 Prolegomena

or what are also called technical arts.! Our task will embrace these, will
indeed treat them primarily: first, because the aesthetic necessity with which
we are dealing is most lucid and comprehensible in these oldest and simplest
inventions of the artistic instinct; second, because a certain codex of practical
aesthetics was established and formulated here prior to the invention of monu-
mental art, which (as will be shown) adopted from them a preexisting formal
language in addition to being directly influenced by them in other respects;
and third and most importantly, because those arts defined by critics as minor
are most severely affected by our present system of education and by the ten-
dencies of this century, and because nothing is more urgent for the intended
improvement of artistic taste in general (and with it art) than to resist these
forces, particularly in the field of the technical arts. For there can be no doubt
that art—adrift within the maelstrom of conditions —has lost its rudder, its
course, and, most seriously, its motive power. We will have ample opportunity
to return to these issues in the course of this book, and enough has been said
about the book’s general tendencies —its plan is outlined in the introduction.
Therefore, let me conclude this preface with some observations related to
what has just been said.
In times when people adopt the perspective of artistic culture (a perspective
our philosophers consider antiquated), a genuine public education is idealis-
tic. At present it is precisely the opposite: realistic. The pure sciences have
come to dominate education. Schools no longer systematically educate human
beings as such but are solely concerned with producing specialists. This sys-
tem in particular affects the working class and those people who devote them-
selves to the arts, and it starts at the earliest stages of schooling. It effectively
kills the very faculty that is actively responsible for the perception and, equally,
the creation of art. I mean the sense and the purely human impulse of being
creative as an end to itself and the gift—so indispensable to the artist as well
as to people receptive to art—of direct intuitive thinking.”
Fortunately, the secondary schools and their affiliates, the technical schools,
have not existed for very long and have yet to come to terms with their own
tenets. Hence the results of purely realistic education are emerging in a way
that promises another revision of the educational system soon. For example,
pupils entering technical schools from secondary schools have to devote a large
part of their already overly prescriptive course time to the basic sciences, which
are taught without regard for their relevance to the students’ specialization.
But because these students think and feel “practically” as a result of what
has been systematically instilled in them from their earliest years, they seek
that rapport of science and their specialty from their first introduction to its
elements. If they fail to find it, they lose interest in the course, and neither
pressure nor fear of examinations can put it back. In a sense, they are justified
in wanting it, since the educational system does not allow the pursuit of
knowledge for its own sake and thus excludes many disciplines (especially
those most suited to shaping and enriching the mind) because they supposedly
have no practical application.

73
 Semper

When formerly the arts blossomed, when every artisan was in his own
way an artist or at least strove to be one, when the mind investigated every
conceivable aspect and approach at least as vigorously as today, schooling
(initially religious) had nothing to do with practice. When it did, it started
with practice and not with theory. The creative impulse was stimulated and
exercised earlier than was the student’s receptivity to extraneous exact knowl-
edge. He thereby discovered himself those things he had to know in order to
continue being creative. He thus acquired a thirst for knowledge that led him
to scientific studies that may often have been unsystematic but immediately
compensated for this by assuming the character of research and active, inde-
pendent creativity.
Knowledge and scientific explanations gathered in this way are self-
acquired property, immediately yielding high interest and profit. They are not
assets conferred then systematically deposited in the brain of the immature
student with uncertain prospects for later yield. The school of life, attended
by the majority of those who achieved fame with inventions or in the arts, was
of the former sort. And generally the public education of earlier days was very
similar, even if it was somewhat inadequate in other ways. Although the
formlessness of such conditions does not commend itself to direct emulation,
it is still the present author’s humble opinion that public technical schools, if
they are to accomplish even part of what is expected of them, should follow
this principle as much as possible — because it is a principle of nature. So let us
first have humanistic preparatory schools that aim only at cultivating the man
in man and developing his mental and physical abilities —that is, precisely the
antithesis of our present secondary and industrial schools.3 This should hold
for the preparatory schools of all classes of society, however much they might
differ, as necessarily they must, in the range and nature of their humanistic
education. Such teaching is not devoted exclusively to the ancient languages
and classical literature but is merely characterized by this tendency.
So the first priority is humanistic preparatory schools. The second should
be workshops in which skills are taught. And finally the third is ample oppor-
tunity for the student to satisfy his thirst for knowledge, stimulated by non-
compulsory creative work. There should be public lectures like those in Paris
given by outstanding experts in all fields, offered to all specialists without
exception and in particular to students of the various artistic ateliers of the
Ecole des beaux-arts.
France owes its greater fame and prosperity more to this extremely liberal
method of instruction than to those celebrated specialty schools that peda-
gogues in other nations are so keen to imitate —just when the French are start-
ing to think of reorganizing them. They have achieved fame and undisputed
preeminence in most branches of the industrial arts and their fine art is second
to none, whereas their lead is being contested in chemistry, engineering, and
mechanics— by England and America, where there are no polytechnic schools.
Such fields depend on a very comprehensive and exact knowledge and still
require special facilities, but it should be pointed out that a curriculum that

74
 Prolegomena

appears suitable for them should not be taken as a model for all branches and
fields of technology, much less for the arts, including architecture and the
applied arts.
This is confirmed by the above-mentioned conflicts within the French edu-
cational system, which has been considered and imitated only one-sidedly in
the reorganization of the schools in Germany and other countries. Certainly
the old art academies in these countries have been allowed to continue along-
side the so-called polytechnic schools, and next to them many so-called trade
schools, Sunday schools, and art schools have been set up to teach craftsmen
and artisans. Yet this arrangement has proven far more detrimental than bene-
ficial to art, which cannot flourish under systematic classroom instruction
and the fracturing of its domain without a motive power acting from below.
To avoid repetition on these and closely related issues, the author refers
readers to his brochure Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst: Vorschlage zur
Anregung nationalen Kunstgeftihles (Brunswick: Vieweg, 1852).
These conditions would seem less grave, were it not for the unfortunate fact
that a certain higher necessity comes into play, in which they, in company with
contemporaneous observations in other fields, have their roots.
Pure science, for instance, impinges upon present conditions in other ways
far more effectual than those previously indicated: as the guiding force, or
rather as the spiritus familiaris [attending spirit] of the speculative century.
With its discoveries and inventions, science enriches everyday life and expands
the sphere of influence of a business world bent on profit. Such inventions
used to be daughters of necessity but now they help to create need artificially
in order to increase sales and acceptance. Products scarcely introduced are
removed from the market as obsolete before they can be developed techni-
cally, let alone artistically. Something new, but not necessarily better, always
takes their place.*
The present has neither the time nor the leisure to grow accustomed to
the benefits that are being almost forced upon it, but both are absolutely nec-
essary for the artistic mastery of these gifts. Consumption and invention
have been handed over to practitioners and industrial capitalists to mediate
as they please, but without a millennium of popular custom to cultivate a
suitable style. It requires far greater artistic sensitivity than is commonly
found among our industrialists to hit upon (without the benefit of time) the
right art-form for all the new things pressing themselves upon our attention.
Such a form would be one in which free human work appears as a necessity of
nature and becomes the generally understood and perceived formal expres-
sion of an idea.
Capitalism certainly makes every effort to have the fine arts serve its ends,
just as it borrows all its technical means from science. It has brought about
the division of labor (a practice understandably necessary for coping with the
vast scale of an enterprise) but in a way that is highly detrimental to the hoped-
for success. For example, it separates the so-called ornamental from the for-
mal and technical aspects of art in a purely mechanical way, immediately

75
 Semper

betraying its lack of feeling for and misunderstanding of the true relationship
between the various means the artist uses to produce his work.
Many gifted artists are permanently employed by English and French indus-
try in a double servitude. On the one hand, they serve the employer, who sees
them not as equals but rather as troublesome advisers on taste and as embel-
lishers of form; he rarely pays them well. On the other hand, they serve the
fashion of the day, which is the only thing that ensures the sales upon which
the purpose and very existence of the industrial plant—indeed everything—
ultimately depends.
Thus artists take absolutely no initiative in industrial production; they are
just one more category of specialists employed by manufacturers —in the
same way that clay manufacture requires special kneaders or the furnace
needs a head stoker with his staff. The only difference is that manufacturers
are aware of the inadequacy of their own technical knowledge and allow
kneaders and stokers a relatively free hand, whereas every jackass thinks he
understands something about art. The instructions given by artists are unhesi-
tatingly criticized, altered, and distorted when they do not suit a manufacturer’s
taste, or if a foreman expresses misgivings about their technical feasibility,
doubtful profitability, outlay costs, or anything else.
To this must be added the low status of these industrial artists: first with
respect to the academic hierarchy of art that snubs them; second with respect to
the firm that claims the honors of success for itself alone, and out of jealousy
seldom or never credits the artist who really created the work or at least put
intellectual effort into it; and third with respect to the public, which shares the
prejudices of the academy and holds the so-called decorative arts in low esteem.
People involved in high art— painters, architects, and sculptors of repute—
have from time to time been called upon to work in craft industries, for
instance, when [Josiah] Wedgwood’s famous faience was partly modeled on
[John] Flaxman’s models and drawings. The porcelain factory at Sévres also
employs artists of stature, who to some extent keep themselves aloof from
fashion and a concern with sales. Yet even this influence from the heights
of academic art generally lacks a practical foundation, as skilled and highly
talented designers and model-makers are not metalworkers, potters, carpet
weavers, and goldsmiths—as was often the case before the academies sepa-
rated the arts. For this reason, products made under the guidance of these
men often contribute little to enhance the industrial arts because the results
come nowhere near the intention. Violence is done to the materials in order to
even partially fulfill the artistic intention, and thus the products do not com-
ply with the artists’ ambitious demands.
Architecture finds itself in a similar predicament, as speculation and the
machine have taken it over in the same way that they have subdued the technical
arts. The architect is often little more than an inconsequential adviser in mat-
ters of taste and can expect neither esteem nor profit from his commissions.°
The indirect influence of science helps shape our modern artistic condi-
tions in the ways indicated, but it also concerns itself with art as its actual

76
 Prolegomena

object more now than it once did. The amount of material assembled by sci-
ence and research in the ever growing number of writings and illustrated
works on art, and everything related to it, is already more than we can man-
age. It is difficult to find one’s way through such abundance while maintain-
ing a sense of direction.
In order to facilitate this, we have divided the wealth of material into cate-
gories, around each of which has evolved a self-contained discipline.
There is an overwhelming mass of books on aesthetics and the history of
art, not to mention the many books in related fields; the number of books on
specific subjects in the arts, especially architecture, is enormous. We Germans
are tireless producers of studies of domestic, rural, and church construction,
manuals on timber, brick, ashlar, and so on. The English and the French, on
the other hand, have treated more successfully the actual technology of the
arts.
These works contain an indispensable wealth of knowledge and experi-
ence, yet the principle of splitting the material into a number of sciences or
disciplines that our artists are expected to master separates more than it con-
nects or compares. It only adds to the bewildering state of modern art, or
rather, this variety is one of the symptoms of that higher necessity imposed
upon us and our artistic efforts.
Applying what has been said to architecture, we can see these myriad
directions converging in three main schools, which correspond to the three
ways in which science is applied to art, namely,
a. the materialists, under the influence of natural science and mathematics;
b. the historians, under the influence of art history and antiquarian studies;
c. the schematists, purists, and so on, under the influence of speculative
philosophy.

The Materialists
Probably the most powerful influence on our present artistic attitude has
come from those textbooks that show how to utilize materials for architec-
tural and structural purposes.
Such textbooks are consistent with the broader practical tendency of our
time and are supported and sustained by the major building enterprises, espe-
cially railways. They can be criticized in general for fettering the idea to the
material too much by accepting the false premise that the world of architec-
tural forms arises solely from structural and material conditions and that
these alone supply the means for further development. The material is in fact
subservient to the idea and is by no means the only factor controlling the
idea’s physical manifestation in the phenomenal world. Although form—the
idea made visible —should not be in conflict with the material out of which it
is made, it is not absolutely necessary for the material as such to be a factor in
artistic appearance. The first part of the present work will further elaborate
upon this important point and demonstrate the historical origins and develop-
ment of materialist principles in architecture.

a.
 Semper

Those who favor the so-called naturalistic styles of ornament must also be
counted materialists. They often disregard the basic stylistic and structural
principles of adornment.

The Historicists
The historical school, which is disintegrating into various embattled factions,
eagerly takes as its models certain works of art from times long past or from
other nations and imitates them with the greatest possible critical and stylistic
accuracy. They try to make the demands of the present fit this mold, instead
of (as would seem more natural) allowing solutions to develop freely from the
premises of the present, taking into consideration traditional forms that have
developed over the course of millennia and stood the test of time as irrefu-
tably true expressions and types of certain spatial and structural concepts.
In a certain sense the historicists and the materialists are opposites,
although both schools depreciate the present and tradition.
The many directions in which the historical school moves — so characteris-
tic of our time —have their starting point in the countless books that record the
discoveries and artistic studies of every country of antiquity, of medieval times,
and of the modern world. Its practitioners think that a historically accurate
conception and reproduction of the model guarantee success, and it must be
said that their achievements, considered as critical and rational imitations,
make a good impression in comparison with earlier attempts of this kind.
An exceptionally learned and thoroughly critical method, a highly diligent
and prudent classification, an utterly scrupulous examination of all research
sources (libraries, archives, monuments, and art collections) to document the
names of artists, dates of creation, stylistic criteria, structure, iconography,
liturgy, or any other information —all undertaken with little real artistic feeling
or imagination and therefore hardly stimulating the creative instinct —these
are characteristics of the most recent art historical and archaeological litera-
ture, and they are reflected in the artistic achievements of the historical school.
The neo-Gothic offshoot, now the dominant trend, first appeared only
some fifty years ago and was initially encouraged in Germany by [Johann
Wolfgang von] Goethe and the Romantic poets. Their first attempts were gar-
den pavilions and small country churches that turned out poorly enough. But
there are also more extensive projects dating from this time, such as the two
Gothic spires placed on top of the (Romanesque) towers of the cathedral in
Zurich. The movement did not really come alive, however, until an interest and
widespread support for preserving old Gothic monuments arose. The restora-
tion of buildings undertaken as a result of this romantic-antiquarian move-
ment provided training for a number of supervisors and craftsmen who have
since had the occasion to apply their virtuosity in this style to new buildings.
History reveals the neo-Gothic movement to be restorational in origin and
nature. It has a large number of technical and lay followers —the vast major-
ity of the former are the above-mentioned experts, for whom the compendi-
aria artis [technical shortcut] created by the Gothic style is a desirable vade

78
 Prolegomena

mecum. The movement also finds numerous supporters among materialists

and industrialists because of the structural principle pursued by this style with
extreme logic, and because of the ease with which its formal components can
be mechanically produced for the market. This is especially true in England,
where the style has remained in use, although in a most schematic way.
But there are also highly talented artists who subscribe to this school, and
almost all of them were converted to it after having acquired their artistic edu-
cation and proven their talent in quite different styles. This is especially true in
France, where such artists have adopted an early Gothic style still capable of
further development, whereas in Germany and England they pursue a style
that is already ossified.
The more prominent men of the neo-Gothic style are closely connected
with a very active political and religious party, the same party that introduced
the depraved Jesuit style (using that age’s love of ostentation as a lever for their
propaganda purposes) against which they are now campaigning. This party is
most active in France, probably because of the artistic influence Paris has
always had on other countries, although the uncertainty and instability of this
fulcrum in Paris seems disquieting. Zealots of this tendentious artists’ party
treat northwestern and northern Europe as a pagan country to be conquered
anew for Christianity, and they propose the same means of proselytizing used
once before in France to achieve the same goal (see [August] Reichensperger’s
Fingerzeige [auf dem Gebiete der kirchlichen Kunst]).
The correctness of the views of those who deny it a future, however well
buildings in this style might be conceived and their plans duly considered, is
best guaranteed by this movement’s characteristically deliberate and studied
manner and by the principle of servitude expressed clearly and decisively in the
program drawn up by priests and archaeologists.
For quite opposite reasons the so-called classical school still holds out
prospects for new activity. Archaeology can scrutinize the past as keenly and
shrewdly as it likes, but ultimately it is left to the divining sense of artists to
reconstruct something whole from the mutilated remains of antiquity. This
places the archaeological approach at a distinct disadvantage and deprives it
of its initiative. These uncritical methods and the need to invent where the
information for a servile restoration is lacking are partly responsible for the
fact that all revivals of antique art immediately achieve something new and are
never so completely bad as neo-Gothic buildings dating from the beginning of
the century. Even the dainty small renaissance of the period of Louis XVI and
the latest Hellenistic movement whose coryphaeus is [Karl Friedrich] Schinkel
were creative from the start; what was achieved remains the proud possession
of its time. Yet for very different and more deeply rooted reasons, antique tra-
ditions will always exert their newly invigorating force on us; they will out-
last all the strange and singular things that the richness of time has called
forth.¢ As for art history, it will truly lead art only when it moves beyond its
current, critically divisive and archaeological viewpoint to one of comparison
and synthesis.

ve
 Semper

The Purists, Schematists, and Futurists

Philosophy wants to define the concept of beauty and delimit its subconcepts
precisely. Second, it takes up more and more space analyzing beauty accord-
ing to its attributes. If, third, it could turn these results into an effective theory
of art, it would have accomplished the aesthetic part of its task. It would have
replaced the confusion and fragmentation presently so dominant in art with a
unity of purpose and harmonious fulfillment. But philosophy applied to art is
like mathematics applied to natural science; mathematics can certainly calcu-
late differentials of very complex functions but it rarely succeeds at integration,
especially in physical cases where forces interact in complex ways according to
laws that still need to be defined. But at least mathematics attempts such inte-
gration; indeed, it sees it as its most important task. Modern aesthetics, on the
other hand, simply rejects very similar tasks and problems of art-physics (if I
may use this rather daring expression as an analogy for what takes place
between the effects of nature and art) and declares this point of view to be, for-
tunately, a thing of the past ({[Adolf] Zeising, Alesthetische] F[orschungenl,
introduction, 2). By contrast, aestheticians like [Gotthold Ephraim] Lessing
and Rumohr, who (each in his own sphere) really knew something about the
practical side of art, considered it the basis from which the artist should learn.
The philosopher of art is simply concerned with solving his problem, which
has nothing in common with that of the artist, “who takes the phenomenal
world as the purpose and aim of his activity; whereas the aesthetician believes
ideas are the beginning and the end, the germ and seed of everything that exists,
the fertile force to which all creation, including beauty, owes its existence. ...””
For the aesthetician, the appreciation of art is an intellectual exercise or a
philosophical delight, consisting of tracing beauty back from the phenomenal
world to the idea, dissecting and isolating its conceptual kernels.®
Thus from this perspective art also appears isolated and relegated to a field
especially marked out for it. The opposite was true in antiquity, where philos-
ophy held sway over this field as well. Philosophy was seen as an artist herself
and a guide to the other arts. But in growing old, she turned to analysis and
devised dead categories instead of living analogies.
In just the same way, Gothic architecture was the lapidary transformation
of the scholastic philosophy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Similarly, studies of the anatomy of art are of no use to the arts, whose suc-
cess depends on reawakening in people the capacity for the undivided direct
perception of art and the pleasure therein.
Nevertheless, speculative aesthetics has significantly influenced our current
artistic conditions: first through the mediation of so-called connoisseurs and
lovers of art, who with the help of aesthetics have acquired a schematic and
puritanical art regimen founded in pure caprice, one that has produced a
dreary impoverishment of art-form wherever it manages to intrude. This is seen
in the work of a certain school of architecture in southern Germany that unites
the materialist and constructional tendency with aesthetic puritanism. Despite
its praiseworthy results in the area of utilitarian buildings, the inadequacy of

80
 Prolegomena

its means is apparent as soon as it tries to deal with truly monumental art.
The modern mania for principle has deprived it of these means. They are to a
large extent erroneously described as inventions of decadent periods, abso-
lutely inimical to taste, or as anticonstructional. And judged by this false
accusation, they have been condemned. These means, in fact, include some of
the oldest traditions of architecture, which are fully consistent with the logic
of building and with artistic creation in general and which have symbolic val-
ues older than history —values that cannot possibly be expressed by some-
thing new. This book will provide ample opportunity to demonstrate this.
Another effect of speculative philosophy in the arts can be seen in the ico-
nography of art concerned with trends and the future, the hunt for new ideas,
the boastful displays of thoughts, profundity, richness of meaning, and so on.
Such moralistic appeals to nonartistic interests (to which the ecstasy of art
and the often ludicrous mania of connoisseurs and archaeologists for interpre-
tation respond with equal dignity) are typical either of barbarism or of decline.
Art at its most sublime hates exegesis; it therefore intentionally shuns it. It veils
it behind the most general, purely human motives and deliberately chooses the
simplest, most familiar themes. It considers these, like the material from which it
creates (be it clay or stone), solely as a means to an end that is sufficient in itself.

Den Himmel schuf ich aus Erd’

Und Engel aus Weiberentfaltung,
Der Stoff gewinnt erst seinen Werth
Durch kiinstlerische Gestaltung!
[The sky I created from the earth,
An angel from a woman’s incarnation,
A material only gains its worth
Through artistic creation!
— Heinrich Heine, Neue Gedichte]

In this book, the author takes for granted some basic aesthetic concepts. Since
he interprets some of these concepts in a particular way, he owes his reader, as
an addendum to this preface, a short explanation of his terms.
On a more exalted plane, what we mean by terms like “sense of beauty,”
“delight in beauty,” “enjoyment of art,” and “artistic instinct” is analogous to
those instincts, pleasures, and gratifications that govern the way in which we
maintain our telluric existence. Strictly speaking, these can be traced back to
the momentary removal, numbing, or forgetting of pain. Just as pangs of
hunger make the purely physical individual want to try to alleviate them
purely for the sake of survival, just as frost and discomfort force him to seek
shelter, just as these and other needs lead him to various inventions, to work
hard to secure continued existence and prosperity for himself and his species,
so we are instilled with mental sufferings that govern the existence and enno-
blement of the human intellect and the human spirit in general.

81
 Semper

Surrounded by a world full of wonder and forces whose laws we may

divine, may wish to understand but will never decipher, that touch us only in
a few fragmentary harmonies and suspend our souls in a continuous state of
unresolved tension, we conjure up in play the perfection that is lacking. We
make for ourselves a tiny world in which the cosmic law is evident within the
strictest limits, yet complete in itself and perfect in this respect. In such play
we satisfy our cosmogonic instinct.
The imagination creates these images by presenting, expanding, and adapt-
ing individual natural scenes to our mood, so that we believe ourselves ca-
pable of discerning the harmony of the whole in a single event and thus for an
instant have the illusion of having escaped reality. This enjoyment of nature is
not very different from the enjoyment of art, just as the beauty of nature
(because it is born in our receptiveness and even in our active imagination) is
assigned to the general beauty of art as a lower category.
Yet this artistic enjoyment of natural beauty is by no means the most naive
or the earliest manifestation of the artistic instinct. The former is in fact unde-
veloped in simple, primitive human beings, who already delight in nature’s
creative law as it gleams through the real world in the rhythmical sequence
of space and time movements, in wreaths, a string of pearls, scrolls, round
dances, the rhythmic tones attending them, the beat of the oar, and so on.
These are the beginnings out of which music and architecture grew, the two
highest purely cosmic (nonimitative) arts, whose legislative support no other
art can do without.
But to these general phenomena of nature — with their sublime terror,
bewildering charms, and unknown inherent order —there are more active ele-
ments that grip our soul and make it receptive to the illusions of art.
A never-ending struggle —a frightful law of the stronger according to
which one eats another only to be eaten in turn— pervades nature, but it mani-
fests its full cruelty and harshness in the animal world, which is closest to us.
It forms the content of our earthly existence and that of history. This never-
ending process of extermination by the living has no end and no design. The
soul, vacillating between hate and pity, numbs itself with the following discon-
solate sentence: The individual is created only as nourishment for the whole.
Moreover, we encounter the accidental, the nonsensical, and the absurd
at every step along our earthly path, and each flies contemptuously in the face
of the law we thought we had discerned. Then there is the deep, unfathomable,
stormy world of our own soul: choruses of passions at war with themselves
and with fate, accident, custom, law. Imagination opposes reality, and folly
contradicts itself and the universe. There is nothing but discord from which the
arts snatch us away momentarily by sealing off these battles and conflicts and
placing them in a tight framework, in the end using them as elements of atone-
ment. These sentiments gave rise to the lyrical-subjective and dramatic arts.?
The magic that affects the soul through art in its most varied forms and
manifestations — enabling art to captivate the soul completely —is called
beauty. This is not so much an attribute of the work as an effect, in which the

82
 Prolegomena

most diverse elements are simultaneously active within and without the object
we call beautiful.
These determinants, when they do not emanate from the beautiful object
itself, must still be reflected in it, must still condition its particular formation
[Gestaltung].
Moreover, these determinants must also derive from and be consistent
with the laws of nature. Although art is concerned only with form and appear-
ance and not with the essence of things, its forms must follow what the natu-
ral phenomenon teaches, even if only by complying with the general law that
prevails in every realm of nature—sometimes undeveloped, sometimes in a
more mature form.
This analogy between the general law of formation in nature and art
appears most clearly in what speculative aesthetics calls the formal elements
of pure beauty.
A phenomenon can manifest itself as such only by isolating itself from the
general as an individual.
This separation from the general is absolute only in the first stages of for-
mation. More developed plant and animal forms are distinctive because they
reflect, so to speak, two determinants of form: first, their relation to the gen-
eral in which they are rooted and based; and, second, their relation to the par-
ticular, which sets them up as objective or subjective opposites.
As the principle of individualization is symbolized clearly and distinctly by
the arrangement of the parts of every phenomenon that claims to be com-
plete, there are three determinants of form that can be active in the generation
of form. In lower forms they may act together or one determinant may lie dor-
mant. In cases where all three are active, these determinants of form corre-
spond to the three spatial dimensions of height, width, and depth.
With respect to the three determinants of form, the multiplicity of form
must be arranged threefold into a unity; the following three necessary condi-
tions of formal beauty then emerge:
1. symmetry,
2. proportionality,
3. direction.
It is just as impossible to add a fourth homogeneous property to these attrib-
utes of beauty as it is to imagine a fourth spatial dimension. This will become
more apparent in what follows.

Principle of Formation for Completely Self-Contained Forms Indifferent

to the External World
These forms relate directly and only to themselves, therefore their elements
are arranged around a kernel or central point representing the unity. The parts
may revolve around this kernel or radiate from it in regular figures or sur-
round it in a composite, radial-peripheral arrangement, corresponding to the
complexity of the formation. We meet the most perfect such forms in the min-
eral world: sometimes as planimetric designs, like polygons, stars, composite

83
 Semper

forms (often richly inventive: for example, snowflakes); sometimes as solids,

such as polyhedra ranging from regular hexahedra to spheres. The law of
molecular attraction—ruling undisturbed, alone and all-embracing, and like-
wise indifferent to the outside, or rather rejecting all external influences —is
most perfectly expressed in these crystal forms in their strict regularity and all-
embracing enclosure. This regularity becomes absolute, all-embracing unifor-
mity in the circle (a polygon of infinite sides) and in the sphere (a polyhedron
of infinite flat surfaces). Therefore these forms have been valued since time
immemorial as symbols of the absolute and of perfection.

These regular, closed forms have only one determinant of form, which
emanates from the center and extends out in all directions.

AZ/ XS
® (0 r

|@
f
e/\\e
‘as
Complete in themselves—symmetry, proportion, and direction are one
and the same. They are omnidirectional, therefore nondirectional.
The law of proportion applies to them only when parts of the whole are

84
 Prolegomena

considered separately, and most clearly in radial forms such as snowflakes.

Here the radials and their branchings demonstrate proportional develop-
ment; they suggest a striving toward separation and an isolation from the
small universe of the snowflake. There is, so to speak, a polarization of two
forces: the positive force of independent development, as shown in A, and at
the center of the figures the negative force of dependence on the whole.
This arrangement of atoms along the radials is in accordance with the two
effects just mentioned and is a result of both forces: the counteracting energy
centers are mirrored and at the same time reconciled in the proportional artic-
ulation of the radials. To the observer, each radial appears to have an inde-
pendent formal existence only if
1. it is considered not as part of a whole but completely separated (iso-
lated);
2. it is in a vertical position with respect to the plane of the horizon or to
a line that represents the horizon.

In the same way, the symmetrical principle is already present in latent form
in that remarkable miniature world of snowflakes, flowers, and so on. Here
symmetry evolves from peripheral regularity, from eurythmy, and from mole-
cules strung in an orderly way around the center of crystallization. It is similar
to how we traced proportion back to the radial regularity of the formation.
If we break off a piece from such a regular wreath and consider it in isola-
tion, we are comfortable with its appearance only on the condition that the
parts are equal in number and position or that there is a balance of unequal
parts to the right and left of the line ab, at right angles to a horizontal line rep-
resenting the plane of the earth’s horizon. If there is a complete identity of
elements right and left of the vertical line ab, this is called strong symmetry; if
there is only a balance of masses, it is called weak symmetry [Ebenmaf].
The symmetrical arrangement of atoms takes place along the horizontal
line cd. The last is, as it were, the invisible balancing pole that gives the form
stability. It can be called the symmetrical axis, in contrast to the line ab, which
can be called the proportional axis, because the proportional arrangement of
parts takes place along this line.

85
 Semper

Eurythmy; Frames
Eurythmy is closed symmetry and stands in no direct relation to the observer
but only to a center around which the elements of the regular form are arranged
and strung peripherally.
To establish a rapport with the eurythmic figure, the observer has to imag-
ine himself at the center of relations. Verticality and horizontality are therefore
not basic demands of the eurythmic figure; its nature is enclosure. It expresses
the absolute concept of encirclement symbolically and therefore alludes to the
encircled as the actual object, as the center of the eurythmic order.
Door and window frames, for example, are eurythmic enclosures of this
kind, very similar to picture frames, except that the framed content is the per-
son who enters or looks out. These examples of frames show clearly the dif-
ference and separation between those parts that belong to the frames as such,
and in which the eurythmic law appears active, and those other parts of the
frame that are sometimes active symmetrically, sometimes proportionally,
whereby the frame and its content first appear as an object to the outside
viewer. The latter includes pediments, consoles, and similar accessories.
The frame is one of the most basic forms used in art: no enclosed image
without a frame, no scale without it. Eurythmy comes into play only when
the frame is used: a regular concentric articulation and order of formal ele-
ments that form an enclosed figure around the framed object.

Modifications to the Eurythmic Order

The articulation of eurythmic figures results from certain laws of repetition
with cadence and caesuras, with elevations and depressions from which, when
interlinked, the closed figure emerges. Musical figures (melodies) and visual
ones are subject to the same laws, except that the ear is able to follow and
resolve far more complex arrangements than the eye, which has to absorb
everything at once. Therefore, within the admittedly infinite variation of eu-
rythmic series, scarcely more than three modifications to the articulation of
visual figures can take place. Undoubtedly the Greeks devised the canon for
eurythmy as ingeniously as they did for music and poetry. We sense it in the
powerful concurrence of Doric columns, in the cadence of the entablature, in
the continual recurrence of the same decorative members —all of which stim-
ulate and soothe us but do not tire us. This canon was largely forgotten by the
Roman period when Vitruvius confused eurythmy with proportion and, any-
way, confused all the formal-aesthetic concepts that he probably picked up
by misinterpreting some Greek author. The relevant passages by this writer
(bk. 1, chap. 2), far from elucidating the Greek principles of beauty, only
spread confusion.
Eurythmy consists of stringing together uniform segments of space to
form an enclosure.
The first way in which this can be done is at even intervals, so that each
element is identical to the others. Such simple series include dentils, fluting,
wreaths, the simplest bead moldings (without reels), and several others.

86
 Prolegomena

The series becomes alternating when we separate the elements with inter-
mediate elements. This is the case, for example, when the simple carved
wreath, in the manner of the leaf-and-dart decoration, changes into a series of
two leaves alternating with one another, or when reels are inserted between
beads. The egg-and-dart molding with its so-called arrowheads is another
very familiar example of an alternating series. The same principle of alterna-
tion is evident in the wreaths of metopes and triglyphs. Contrasts in form and
design, as well as color, are necessary to articulate the alternating series. The
principle of alternation is the recurrence of unlike parts in eurythmic cadence.
In addition to the simple and alternating series, there is a third, which is
the richest. It involves interrupting a simple or alternating series with periodic
caesuras.
This again was known to the Greeks, although they deliberately used it
sparingly and only on accessories.
Examples: pearl strings with two or more reels (an easily understood alter-
nation of unlike parts), lion heads and masks that punctuate garland deco-
rations in the cymatia of Greek entablatures, Renaissance balustrades, and
especially aspects of barbarian styles as found in Hindu, Arabian, and Gothic
architecture.!° This intercalation is conducive to the romantic mood and has a
more painterly-musical effect, while simple and alternating eurythmy corre-
sponds to plastic beauty.
Because intercalation is more painterly than plastic in its effects, it is espe-
cially recommended in polychrome representation and as surface decorations
for carpets, ceramic work, inlaid metal, woodwork, and so on.
More elaborate eurythmic members are appropriate only if a rich con-
fusion or confused richness should appear, such as in curtains, embroidery,
fabrics, shawls, and generally in cases where a strict architectural eurythmy
would look too dry and stiff.
The beginning of the chapter on textiles will provide details on these and
related points. See also the woodcuts in this section and the colored plates in
volume 1, which show instances of all the modifications to the eurythmic
series.

Symmetry
Eurythmy is closely related not to symmetry but to proportion, because sym-
metry in a strict sense is only a piece, a fragment of a eurythmic whole that
turns upon itself. If one imagines a cut through the earth, the section would be
a circular disk, with the objects on the earth’s surface arranged on the outer
edge in radial formation directed toward the globe’s center. A piece of the
earth’s meridian, which the architecturally disposed mind sees as eurythmi-
cally arranged, is a symmetrical series. It pleases only because we recognize its
relation to the general, which lends static support to the individual phenome-
non. Unlike regular crystal forms that completely isolate themselves from the
universe and are true microcosms, symmetrical forms are not sufficiently con-
sistent in themselves for their form to express the possibility of their existence

87
 Semper

beyond the world. Thus they do not have the kind of lower-order perfection
that regular enclosed figures have, yet these are the forms in which organic
nature is clothed, thereby complying with a higher principle of working
together as a unit. Those gracefully rigid snow crystals that were so instruc-
tive for the rhythmic law and its relation to proportion are no longer suffi-
cient for understanding the principle of symmetry. The latter’s true meaning
and great diversity appear in combination with proportion for the first time in
plant forms.
In this respect it is remarkable that both the beginning and the end of a
plant’s life are represented by self-contained microcosms: globelike plant cells,
flowers, fruit. But a plant has a macrocosmic relation in its growth; accord-
ingly, a life evolves simultaneously that operates in conflict with this macro-
cosmic relation as a principle of formation, that is to say, as the principle of
proportionality.
The application of the law of symmetry to plants is best dealt with sepa-
rately.
The plant, considered as an individual and as a whole, grows vertically
from its seed along the earth’s radius. Maintaining this direction depends on
the distribution of the mass of branches, leaves, flowers, and fruit around the
stem or, where there is no stem, around a vertical line that defines the center
of gravity to achieve overall balance. This order is therefore eurythmic, and its
principle derives from the planimetric property of the ground plane, which
resembles a starlike crystal formation. Only in its vertical projection, that is,
on the retina of the observer’s eye, is the image of the plant symmetrical. The
vertical arrangement of the parts of the formation (the placement of branches
on a tree) is independent of the law of balance to the extent that equilibrium
is not affected by whether a ring of branches, balancing each other relative to
the stem, grows from the stem at a high or low point, over or under equally
balanced systems.
It follows that in all plants, and in all natural and artistic forms that obey
the same regular order, there is no symmetry in the form of vertical extension.
The plant as a whole is actually symmetrical only to the eye; in reality it is
eurythmic. Actual symmetry appears in the individual parts of the plant
according to an inherent order that is very instructive, even if its details are not
easily resolved.
A branch may grow out of the stem at right angles without bending
toward the horizon. It may branch out and its twigs terminate in leaves divided
like ferns, whose parts again consist of small leaves. Each part of the tree,
when taken individually, demonstrates a subordination to the whole in the
symmetrical arrangement of its lesser parts.
The stem, taken as a whole, is to the branch what the earth is to the stem:
namely, its closest macrocosmic relation, evident in the uniform distribution
of branchings and in the massing of leaves on the branch with regard to the
stem. At the same time, the branch directly relates to the center of the earth,
with which it should comply in the arrangement and distribution of its subor-

88
 Prolegomena

dinate members. Horizontal branchings, because they fulfill this dual condi-
tion, are no longer distributed eurythmically around the branch (as was the
case with the main stem, which simply related to the center of the earth), but
symmetrically, with a horizontal symmetrical axis intersecting the branch at
right angles. For twigs, leaves, and leaf parts, each considered as an entity, the
same dynamic law always applies. Thus the determinants of symmetrical form
are twofold: specifically, the relation to the point from which the individual
part grows, and the general relation to the earth by virtue of the attraction
of masses and gravity.!! Each of these parts has only one symmetrical axis,
always horizontal and directed at right angles to the part from which it grows.
For instance, the symmetry of a leaf, when projected as a line on a sectional
plane, intersects the stalk at right angles and runs parallel with the main stem
(which is vertical). In the same way, the arrangement of leaves frequently dif-
fers according to the type of the plant, but it is always symmetrical around the
twig, and again according to the law of horizontal and linear equilibrium. It
follows from this that a twig and its leaves must form a plane, like the leaf.
Trees that branch out horizontally, like cedars, acacias, and beeches, exhi-
bit this symmetrical arrangement. But the natural law becomes more complex
when the plant shows a different radiation principle — for instance, when the
branches of poplars and cypresses grow out of the stem at acute angles.

Here the symmetry of the branches with their twigs and leaves again
approximates the planimetric eurythmy of the main stem, yet without being
present in a pure form. The attempt to produce an equilibrium of mass and
symmetry under such complex interrelated circumstances spurs nature, with
its inexhaustible forms, to the infinite variety that the plant world offers; here
we intuit rather than see the law of symmetry working with proportionality,
more or less spiraling its way through it. This is partially responsible for the
romantic charm that plants have for us.
Although the animal kingdom is infinitely freer and richer in its creations
than the botanical world, its formal properties are also more apparent and
more distinct in their elements.
The kind of symmetry considered so far is planimetric; with animals it is

89
 Semper

found only in polyps, radial animals, and so on. The symmetry of higher ani-
mal forms is never planimetric, as with plants, but linear. In highly developed
animals, sections taken through any of the three main axes of spatial exten-
sion, or projected onto them, are never completely regular. The linear sym-
metrical axis of vertebrates and humans is a horizontal line that meets the
directional axis (which will be discussed below) at right angles. Yet animal
forms are not subject to the laws of symmetry, either from below upward or
from front to rear—the former for the same reason as plants, the latter for a
very similar one.
It would be possible to pursue the law of symmetry even into outer space,
in relation to the different levels of macrocosmic dependence of celestial bodies
on one another — but this would take us too far from the point.

Proportionality and Direction (Unity of Movement)

The principle of proportion can be observed first in radiating enclosed crys-
tals, where the individual radii at times appear articulated. This articulation
seems to follow a definite law that is expressed differently according to the
nature of the crystallized fluid and circumstances.
As was noted, we can observe such forms in some of the snow crystals
illustrated on page 84.
But the law of proportionality emerges as far more developed in organic
forms.
We must assume that a definite force is at work in the development of veg-
etal and animal organisms, which to some extent operates independently of
the general forces of nature (attraction and repulsion of masses, etc.), on the
one hand, and of the will power of living organisms, on the other. This force
comes into conflict with both, however, and the life of organic forms depends
entirely on the felicitous resolution of these conflicts.
In this struggle of the organic vital force against matter, on the one hand,
and will power, on the other, nature produces her most glorious creations.
This can be seen in the beautiful elastic curve of a palm, whose majestic
crown of leaves reaches vigorously upward while bending to the general law
of gravity overall and in its individual parts (the leaves of the crown).
This struggle is even more vigorous in organisms gifted with volition, for
example, in Artemis or Apollo as depicted in antique art. Here freedom of
will and movement are in balance with the requirements of mass and of life—
the greatest diversity brought into unity that the earthly mind can possibly
conceive.
The vital force (or if one prefers, the physical force of growth), though it
works in all directions, tends to follow one main direction, which in plants is
generally directed vertically against the force of gravity. In most animals it is
defined by the dorsal vertebrae, which are in most cases arranged horizon-
tally, and thus it coincides with the direction of the will. With humans it is
again vertical; it does not coincide with the direction of the will but forms a
right angle to it. Therefore in organic formation two or three forces are active,

90
 Prolegomena

depending on the evolutionary stage of the organism. In line with mechanics,

we might postulate special force centers for them.
The most generally active among these is the effect of mass, which is some-
times most evident as gravity, at other times as vis inertiae [inertial force].
Normally working against these are two other forces: organic vital force and
will power.
Plants are rooted in the earth and have no will power, only a vital force
whose center may be imagined at the zenith of an infinite projection of the
vertical line that forms the living axis of the plant. It combines with gravity,
which we project into the center of the earth, and operates along the same
vertical line but in the opposite direction.
This conflict (which still exists even after the equilibrium of mass has been
achieved) in part conditions the proportions of plants,’ which are indepen-
dent of the laws of equilibrium because, as already noted, equilibrium is not
affected by whether a complex of masses that balance each other branches off
the stem at a high or low point, over or under other, equally balanced systems
of branches.
If static equilibrium has no direct influence on the proportional formation
of plants, stability remains an important determinant. Conoid form best
accords with this principle of stability, which emerges from and is modified by
the inner principle of plant growth, as well as by other very complex causes
still largely uninvestigated. In fact, this tendency to conoid (flamelike) termi-
nation is always evident throughout the infinite variations that nature dis-
plays in the plant kingdom.
The law of proportion in the animal world is even more difficult to com-
prehend and more complex. Here proportion is twofold: every animal has it,
first, from below upward and, second, from front to back.
As with plants, proportion in the first sense must again express the resolu-
tion of a conflict between gravity and the opposing tendency of organic life
toward upright formation.
Proportion from front to back indicates a similar conflict and also consists
of the resolution of two opposites. This conflict takes place between move-
ment, as a manifestation of free will, and resistance of mass, and as a manifes-
tation of vis inertiae and the resistance of the media.
According to the law of inertia, those heavier masses and parts of the form
most affected by gravity (and therefore in conflict with the vertical force of
growth) also oppose the direction of the will, depending on whether the will
seeks to start or stop a system’s movement. In addition, there is a second man-
ifestation of material resistance that occurs—resistance of the medium, be it
air, water, earth, wood, or any medium suitable for animals capable of moving
on their own. These material effects always take place along the axis of move-
ment but in the opposite direction of the movement itself. And the animal form
that under specific conditions (independent of this question) best weakens and
moderates the two opposing tellurian forces is the one that is best directed.
In this regard symmetrical equilibrium relates to proportion in the direction

9.1
 Semper

of movement}3 (fitness of direction), analogous to the way in which symmetry

(dependent on gravity) relates to vertical proportion, as in plants. For inertia
and medium resistance must be balanced around the axis of movement, so
that no involuntary deviation from the uniformity of direction occurs as a
result of unbalanced distribution of masses with regard to the axis of move-
ment (which is normally assumed as horizontal). The arrangement of parts
along the direction of movement, however, would not be affected at all by this
principle, for the reasons stated above. Stability is superseded here by another
basic condition of formal fitness—namely, mobility, or capacity for move-
ment, together with speed of movement."4
With many lower animal forms, such as worms, the life axis coincides
completely with the axis of spontaneity. Like plants, they have only two
attributes of form: symmetry, which in section appears as planimetric symme-
try (eurythmy), and unity of movement. They almost always lack vertical pro-
portion entirely or nearly so.
Higher animals, such as quadrupeds and birds, form a very complex inter-
mediate class between this scheme and human beings, in which all three axes
of formation—the axes of symmetry, proportion, and direction—are clearly
distinct from and at right angles to one another, following the coordinates of
spatial extension.
Art, like nature, displays a similar variety of combinations but cannot
exceed nature’s bounds by an inch; its principles of formal configuration must
be in strict accordance with the laws of nature.

On the Principle of Authority in the Origin of Natural and Artistic Forms

Authority is a term Vitruvius uses in several places (perhaps referring to a
Greek author since lost whose terminology he translated into Latin as best he
could) to express something for which there is no equivalent word in the
German language. It means the emphasis given to certain formal components
of a phenomenon that stand out from the rest, thus becoming what one might
call the chorus leaders within their realm, the visible representatives of a uni-
fying principle. The remaining elements of the plurality, unified in formal
beauty, relate to the authorities as resonant, modulating, and accompanying
tones do to the keynote. According to the theory developed above, there are
three formal authorities, namely,
1. eurythmic symmetric authority,
2. proportional authority,
3. directional authority.
A fourth authority of a higher order can be added, that of content. It con-
sists of the dominance of one of the three modifications of beauty in their
combination.

Eurythmic Authority
As I have shown, eurythmy is either stereometric or planimetric symmetry.
Stereometric regular forms include the sphere and all regular polyhedra down

V2
 Prolegomena

to the tetrahedron: universally symmetrical without symmetrical authority.

Such authority occurs only in the ellipsoid and the oval, the hexahedron or
dual tetrahedron linked at the base, in the prism, the pyramid, and so on, in
the form of regular inequality of particular dimensions.
Snow crystals, flowers, plants, and trees generally show planimetric sym-
metry (eurythmy in the true sense). With these natural forms the effect of the
law of authority is evident in the concentration of parts as close as possible to
the center of the regular figure, around which they rotate, radiate, or partly
rotate and partly radiate. Contrasts of color between the parts closest to the
center and other parts emphasize this effect.

The Memorial
Early humans, even with their dim artistic sense, already understood the iso-
lated unit (in contrast to the eurythmic series that surrounds it) as a symbol of
authority and of wholeness, which they applied in the right places with admir-
able instinct.
The crudest effort to adorn oneself arises in part from this darkly divined
principle of authority. The adorned is a memorial to adornment.45 Frequently
the ideas of holding and holding together attach themselves to such a memo-
rial, materially and at the same time symbolically, as with an agrafe.
The memorial was used very early as a monument, to designate a conse-
crated place. Originally it was a mound. Memorials of this kind, usually bur-
ial places of fallen warriors and leaders, are the oldest monuments to be found
almost anywhere on the earth. The architecture of the memorial appears
already well developed in the tombs of Gyges and of the Tantalids near
Sipylos in Phrygia and in similar works in Greece, Italy, and Sardinia; it is
more developed in the terraced pyramids of Central America and Assyria; pet-
rified in the Egyptian pyramids; refined in the tombs of Mausolus, Augustus,
and Hadrian. The memorial is also used in games as a sign and goal with suit-
able allusions.
An interesting phenomenon is the combination of two elements — the
multiple series and the unified memorial—into a monumental overall effect
by surrounding the unified element with rhythmically arranged circles of
stone, a tangible illustration of pluralities merging into a unity. Such a com-
bination presents the memorial as a unified idea opposing plurality, which
becomes a unity itself through the peripheral rhythmic sequence, and at the
same time contributes powerfully to strengthening the authority of the memo-
rial. Examples of stone circles with menhirs'® at their centers are found at
Carnac, Avebury, Stonehenge, and many other places.

Symmetrical Authority
Linear symmetry is prominent in leaves and branches considered in them-
selves, in animals and humans, and in most works of art, especially in monu-
ments. Governed by the law of equilibrium, it consists of a distribution of
elements of the whole in a horizontal arrangement around a vertical axis, at

S3
 Semper

right angles to the direction of movement. This axis is the seat of linear sym-
metrical authority. It is emphasized by mass, by relief, by elevation, by the
richness of ornamental decoration, by color contrasts, or by all of these
together, so that the remaining elements of symmetry that accompany the
emphasized part simply resonate in unison. It represents, so to speak, the
gravitational center of the earth around which these parts rotate. By careful
choice of symmetrical authority, art is often successful in disregarding the
strict symmetry of all parts, as its enforcement is in many cases incompatible
with demands of purposefulness and character.

Proportional Authority
This authority never appears independently, never on its own, but either in
combination with macrocosmic authority or jointly with it and directional
authority.
In combination with macrocosmic authority, it appears as a characteristic
of radially arranged phenomena that have either grown directly from the
womb of the earth at its base or have branched out from the main stem.
These radially arranged phenomena show the polarizing activity of two
counteracting forces along one and the same vertical (or more generally
radial) axis of configuration. Both activities or forces are in conflict, and this
conflict should be reflected in the phenomena in such a way that the resulting
dynamic equilibrium becomes evident at the same time (see above).
As a reflection and representative of macrocosmic activity, the base of the
proportional system is first brought to bear in such phenomena.
As a reflection and representative of individualistic growth (in plants, for
example), the dominant part of the system emerges in that same proportional
phenomenon, specifically at the top at first. Mediating between the base and
dominant part is a neutral and supporting intermediate part that shares the
attributes of both of the above-named authorities equally and resolves their
opposites.
The base corresponds to the telluric (generally macrocosmic) unified ele-
ment that it reflects, either through inert mass, simple articulation, and dark
colors or through columnlike multiplicity, load-bearing capacity, and virtual
resilience.
The dominant part corresponds to the opposite, microcosmic, unified ele-
ment that it represents by its rich articulation, adornment, concentration of
all the characteristics of its individuality, splendid and bright colors. In mass
and especially in height it is the smaller of the two and always has the charac-
ter of something borne and crowning —a head.
The intermediate part has the dual character of supporting and being sup-
ported. In its bearing and color it is a mixture, or rather a double reflection
and resolution of the formal particularities and colors of the base and domi-
nant part. It forms, virtually at least, the proportional mean between the two
extremes, so that the base is to the mediating part what the latter is to the
dominant part.

94
 Prolegomena

Naturally only deviations from the strict principle endow proportion with
character, which has as many solutions as nature itself.1”
Things become more complex where the proportional axis is not rooted
but moves freely within a medium along its own directional axis, a condition
that in the foregoing was noted as the second possible combination. This is
the case with most animals that move horizontally on the earth, in water, and
in the air. The fish is the simplest example of this combination. The goal the
swimming fish pursues, whether it is a prey or any other desired object, is a
point of attraction that exerts a force quite analogous to that which the center
of the earth exerts on the tree or on any other vertically directed form. But
gravity opposes a tree’s growth, whereas with the fish the direction of will and
direction of life (of the spinal column) are not opposites: both strive uniformly
forward. Therefore, no conflict of forces takes place in this instance, and the
law of tripartite division no longer applies (see above). The authority here is a
dual one: the head of the fish represents both the microcosmic principle of
unity for individual existence and its movement.
Thus far the proportion of the fish is indeterminately two-part: a head
with a tailpiece that becomes indeterminately spool-like toward the rear.
There are, however, other determinants of form that give the incomplete
phenomenon the character of self-containment and unity: the general law of
the inertia of masses and of the resistance of the medium in which movement
takes place. The fish’s shape must yield to and reflect these macrocosmic
influences. This is achieved by means of imaginary sectional planes that pass
through the axis of direction at right angles and increase in size from front
to back according to a law that cannot be elaborated here, continuing to
increase up to a point on the directional axis where they reach their maximum
size. According to another law, the sectional planes decrease in size beyond
this point. Unlike the head, the greatest diameter of the fish is a reflection of
these macrocosmic influences.
But gravity also influences the proportional formation of the fish; its sec-
tional plane, wherever it passes through the longitudinal axis at right angles,
is symmetrical in width. In height, however, it conforms to the principle of
upright formation and is proportioned like a spindle or a flame. Macrocosmic
influences, we may conclude, operate less distinctly than they do in cases of
upright formation.8

Directional Authority
Like proportional authority, directional authority is never active on its own
but only in combination with the macrocosmic and symmetrical authority, or
with that authority and the proportional authority as well.
The latter case was discussed in the previous section; the former is most
evident in human beings.
Just as the head of the fish clearly and distinctly mirrors the convergence of
two principal axes (the living axis and the directional axis), so the human
head expresses intelligibly the normal position of these two axes at right

95
 Semper

angles to each other. It is the high symbol of absolute free will, equally inde-
pendent of self-preservation and material constraints.

Content Authority
The three above-named authorities, as representatives of the three unifying
principles of the Jower order, form again three groups of a higher order
that should act together in a higher unity. This is the unity of purpose or unity
of content, which, depending on the level of perfection that nature and art
allow, is manifested as regularity, type, character, and—at its highest power —
expression.
To bring about this unity of a higher power, the principle of subordination
(of authority) is again active in the same way it is active in the lower regions
of creation.
Thus it happens that in art, as in nature—now through crystalline regu-
larity, now through the dominance of symmetry, now through exceptional
proportional development, and finally through special emphasis given to
direction—the idea becomes manifested in a clear and distinct way.
Thus we find again in certain architectural works the eurythmic isolation
of crystals and other perfectly regular forms of nature.
Examples include grave mounds (tumuli), Egyptian pyramids, and similar
monuments; they are developed uniformly on every side without true propor-
tional or directional organization. For just this reason they are very expressive
as perfect microcosms existing only for themselves, as symbols of a universe
that knows nothing outside itself, as memorials to world-renowned and
world-conquering leaders.
Symmetry prevails in some works of architecture that belong to the class
of memorials, although they have a front and rear. In other cases, the propor-
tional authority dominates, for example, with high domes or still more emphat-
ically with towers whose symmetry and direction are overmatched by the
proportionality of the ascending forms. They are therefore significant symbols
of heavenward striving. In a similar way, a directional organization is the
leading principle in many works of the technical arts and architecture. One
example is a ship, which because of this capacity for movement can be devel-
oped to a particularly high artistic level —a fact fully realized in antiquity, the
Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. The same is true of winged battle chariots.
Even in monumental architecture the directional principle now and then
prevails over the other requirements of beautiful, closed form. Examples
include Egyptian processional temples and the—similar to it in this regard—
Roman Catholic basilicas of the thirteenth century.
Yet in the Greek temple, in its most perfect splendor and great freedom,
unity of purpose stands out much as it does in humans—in its purest har-
mony! Athena’s crowning pediment embodies, like the visage of this goddess,
the dominance of proportion, the quintessence of symmetry, and the reflec-
tion of the approaching sacrificial procession.

96
 Prolegomena

Notes
1. An expression that, through its pleonasm, indicates the folly of modern artistic
conditions so vividly that I am retaining it. It asserts that there is a broad gulf, unknown
to the Greeks, between the so-called minor arts and the so-called high arts.
2. [Carl Friedrich von] Rumohr’s expression to describe the independent mental
activity that makes possible the full conception and apprehension of beauty and crea-
tion in art without the mediation of the critical intellect.
3. Bavaria has an ordinance (I do not know whether it is enforced), passed by the
artistically learned King Ludwig, according to which no engineer or architect may enter
state service without having passed the gymnasium examination.
4. Did it take long for the masters of the great period toward the end of the Middle
Ages to learn to use linseed oil to bind paints, to replace older processes they found too
restrictive? Did it take long for the West to rediscover the secret of applying enamel to
faience, which the Persians and Saracens probably had long known from antiquity?
Not exactly exemplars of Western knowledge and science, [Jan] van Eyck, Luca Della
Robbia, and [Bernard] Palissy did know how to apply their own discoveries artistically.
By comparison, how few modern painters are masters of the means and refinements
in paint offered so profusely by chemistry. We see (completely ignoring actual artistic
matters) the deformation, whitening, and cracking of paintings after only a few years,
whereas those pictures by Italian and Flemish old masters are immortal in these purely
technical respects. Even though they may have darkened and become thickly covered
with the sediment of the centuries, they nevertheless maintain their condition and
indeed may even have improved with age.
5. The use of architectural competitions, which is catching on everywhere, greatly
encourages this unfortunate separation of architecture as an art from working practice and
it is (at least in its present arrangement) one of the leading causes of architecture’s decline.
6. The danger in continuing with Renaissance architecture, which along with the
painting and sculpture of the cinquecento is unsurpassed, is that it— unlike Gothic —is
incomplete and allows further refinement, and in fact can be practiced only by a truly
artistic hand. Yet when done hastily, as we nowadays demand, it degenerates into the
most trivial vulgarity of form. The so-called Gothic style, by contrast, insists on unifor-
mity in richness, which makes the difference between the noble and vulgar less striking.
Even the kind of taste that can perceive these differences is still fairly unreceptive to
them because of the novelty of taking up this style again.
7. A{dolf] F. Zeising, A[esthetische] Florschungen], introduction.
8. Words of a poet and connoisseur:

Speculative aesthetics, which is widely practiced, is almost as harmful for the artist
and builder as it is for the viewer of art. This aesthetics lacks a concrete understand-
ing of beauty. It may have generated much artistic rhetoric but little artistic sensitiv-
ity. It has not found the source of formal beauty; as a rule it has to be content with
distilling only the abstract spirit of the idea from the full grape.
Since art has been placed under this speculative control, the sense for creating a
beautiful space has not revived, nor have the nerves become more receptive to the
vis superba formae [sublime power of beauty]. Direct intuitive thinking is by no

OT,
 Semper

means encouraged by this aesthetics. Speculative aesthetics finds its support in the
inability of so many people to find pure enjoyment in beauty as such. It feeds this
inability by translating what is intended for the eye or the ear, in transforming art
into nonart, forms into concepts, the pleasure of beauty into God-knows-what kind
of pleasure, and artistic jest and humor into pedantic seriousness. But if form, color,
and quantity have to be reduced to categories before they can be correctly per-
ceived, if the sensual as such can no longer make sense, if the bodily, as in this aes-
thetic, has to be disembodied in order to reveal its wealth—doesn’t art lose its
reason for independent existence?
Much could also be said about art journals, which more or less echo speculative
and aesthetic handbooks. They also overemphasize material interests. The what
dominates the how; opinion, the appearance.
Thus speculative aesthetics in many respects recalls natural philosophy. Exact
science will succeed natural philosophy in the same way that empirical aesthetics
will succeed speculative aesthetics.

9. Art has the same goal as religion: namely, relief from imperfect existence, the
forgetting of earthly woes and struggles with an eye to perfection. But the two are
opposites in that faith, through the mystery of miracles, immerses itself in the inexplic-
able, in formlessness, whereas art gives form to the formless and lets the miracle in a
work of art seem natural, indeed necessary. In the same way, the instinct of knowledge
and the urge for truth are a third form of the same striving for perfection. But here the
goal is unattainable: the realm of the unknown stands in contrast with the circle of
what has been explored in that it yields no formal support and quantitative standard—
both of which are partially granted to the work of art in its external aspect. Thus sci-
ence will always remain imperfect and incomplete in terms of form. Knowledge does
not satisfy, only the striving for it does. Yet the highest in art, as long as it betrays inad-
equate skill and an unfulfilled wish, must be inferior to the most limited work of art —
when the latter is consistent with the fully attained goal of striving for perfection that
lies at the heart of every work of art. Both religion and philosophy leave their sphere,
indeed surrender their true nature, when they accept the art-form. Such a unity of the
three manifestations of spiritual striving, however, offers the most favorable conditions
for artistic creation, which was the case with the Greeks.
10. Christian architecture very early abandoned the simple column rhythm of
antique buildings in favor of the intercalation of alternating columns and piers, cer-
tainly as much for aesthetic as for structural and liturgical reasons.
11. This law is especially evident in the plants of the primeval world and their sur-
viving descendants: ferns, horsetails, palms, and so on. Later plant types more often
show a balance of masses instead of symmetry.
12. Only partially, because the plant’s organs and their mutual relations are first
conditioned by their purpose, as tools of nourishment and reproduction.
13. This proportion in the direction of movement or will is different in principle
from a proportion in the direction of vertical formation, for which reason it forms a
special category of formal beauty. But clearly there is a far closer relation between both
than between each of them and symmetry.

98
 Prolegomena

Here an example from the heavenly dynamic might be permitted, in which the
author believes he recognizes the close link between proportional formation and
motion formation, as well as the relationship and the difference of the forms resulting
from both of them. It is generally accepted that a comet’s tail is an atmosphere that is
created by the partial evaporation or burning of the heavenly body when it is close to
the sun. This tail is thus affected in shape and direction by two conflicting forces, very
similar to or even the same as those mentioned in the text.
If the star were suddenly to stand still when close to the sun—that is, if its movement
around the sun ceased—the burning caused by the sun would produce a flame like that
of a burning candle. The lighter, heated, and glowing exhalations would penetrate the
noncombustible medium that surrounds the core and fills the universe, in the shape of a
flame. The direction of this emanation, both luminous and illuminated, would be a
straight line running from the sun through the star. But the movement of the comet is
added as a form-determining element, through which the axis and shape of the tail
undergo a change. It takes the form of a curved, widening bundle of light, with the
lower part nearest the core turned away from the sun radially, a form that can be con-
structed graphically. This direction is probably also modified by the resistance of the
ether in which the comet floats. In explanation, let me insert the graphic representation
of the path of the comet of 1680, from [Isaac] Newton’s third book of the Principia
philosoph{iae| nat\uralis| math{ematica|, according to which its tail, at various observed
points in its orbit, corresponds exactly with the hypothesis in form and direction.

Before coming close to the sun at point / the tail is short and bent in a very weak
concave curve against the axis of the orbit, because the curvature of the part of the
orbit that the comet had previously described was only slight and the emanations of
vapor proceeded very slowly. The part of the column between 7 and k emanated from
the core when it was passing through the section of orbit between k and i, while the
upper part of the tail consists of vapors that had previously been emitted by the star
beyond k. But at the other side of the perihelion at m the vapor column is very long and
the preceding section of orbit is sharply curved. Therefore the vapor column (whose
upper regions consist of parts that the comet emitted in the direction of the rays of the
sun when it found itself on parts of the orbit through which it had traveled long before)
is strongly curved, and indeed at the point dictated by the construction, with the con-
vex side against the axis of the orbit. If one divides the tail md into four sections, then
the lowest belongs to those points on the orbit between m and a’; the second section
radiates from the comet between a’ and b’; the third emanates from the region between

Sh)
 Semper

b’ and c’; the fourth, coming from the region closest beyond c’, is identical with the
central section of the tail during the comet’s period at n’, and so on.
14. On this complex theme, which cannot be expounded here, see my publication
Uber die [bleiernen| Schleudergeschosse der Alten (Frankfurt am Main: Suchsland,
1858).
15. See the author’s essay “Uber [die formelle Gesetzmassigkeit] des Schmuckes,”
published by Meyer & Zeller in Zurich in 1856, both as a brochure and in the Monats-
schrift des wissenschaftlichen Vereins in Ziirich, no. 3.
16. Both tombs and performance memorials. The surrounding stone circles are the
prototypes for circuses, stadia, amphitheaters, and other arenas.
17. See the essay on adornment cited above [note 15].
18. See the section on aquatic animals in the essay cited above: Uber die [bleiernen]
Schleudergeschosse der Alten.

100
 ‘
"he
we
ay iji
 Vo}
(Ulpal= @)at=
N(=).cC1(= Va emGolitiie(-ecvomlMiGimelite
Tam scclloldle)p mom Veolaliccvedlic=
 CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

§1 General
Art has a special language of its own, consisting of formal types and symbols
that have changed in a great variety of ways over the course of cultural his-
tory. They offer as many ways of making oneself understood as language
itself. The most recent linguistic research has tried to show how human
idioms are related; it has tried to trace the changes to individual words over
the centuries and to lead us back to one or more points where they meet in
common primeval forms. The success of this process has turned linguistics
into a genuine science; it has even facilitated the strictly practical study of
languages and has shed a surprising amount of light on the dark realm of the
earliest history of peoples. Analogous efforts can be justified in the field of
art, where it is certainly proper to draw attention to the evolution of art-forms
from their seeds and roots to their transformations and ramifications.
It would scarcely be necessary to state this at the outset were there not a
certain mistrust of investigations into the origin of architecture’s basic forms
and symbols resulting from the often fruitless brooding about a field that has
not infrequently led to pernicious errors and false theories. Suffice it to recall
here the attempt (repeated a hundred times since Vitruvius) to show how all
parts and members of the Doric temple derived and developed from the
wooden hut; or the mistake, which even someone like [Franz Christian] Gau
could make, of suggesting that the Egyptian temple had its roots in the cave.
The latter speculation led to the formulation of quite erroneous theories
about Egyptian cultural history and prompted the suggestion that the civiliza-
tion of the Nile valley descended from the source of this river. In fact, all his-
torical and monumental records, and indeed the very nature of things, make it
quite clear that it developed in the opposite direction. The cave was also said
to be the basic architectural type for India (which, if possible, sounds even
more far-fetched), and Mongol tents were held to have served as prototypes
for curved Chinese roofs.
These efforts rightly stressed the primeval relations among art-forms, but
they misled us in the same way that it is misleading to trace different lan-
guages back to the babbling of children, the inarticulate sounds of animals, or
the cries of savage tribes
— which has, I think, also been attempted.
Comparative linguistics has demonstrated that the languages to which all
or most of the dead and living idioms of the old world can with certainty be

103
 Semper

directly or indirectly traced are precisely those that have the largest vocabu-
lary and the most flexibility. The linguistic poverty that appears to stem from
the infancy of the human race turns out, on closer review, to be the result of
atrophy, degeneration, or violent mutilation of more original and richer lin-
guistic organisms. In some cases even an affected pseudo originality is evoked
in the linguistic forms of certain peoples, caused or at least encouraged by
sociopolitical systems. The Chinese language, for example, is devoid of word
inflections and consists of a sequence of uninflected and unconnected ele-
ments. Yet this artlessness is more a sign of bonze-inspired simplification than
of childlike originality.
The same is true of the language of art-forms. When we think we are hear-
ing its first babbling tones, we are frequently, if not always, dealing with
degraded forms of earlier and more richly developed artistic conditions, as is
often the case with the social conditions of those peoples whose ostensibly
original art-forms we are observing. At least this is true for the inhabitants of
the ancient world, to the extent that they have left behind traces of their exis-
tence. The most primitive tribes we know present us with an image not of the
primeval human condition but of its impoverishment and stultification. There
are many suggestions of a regression into savagery, or more correctly, of the
living social organism breaking down into its elements.
Thus the patriarchy of the early fathers in the Euphrates Plain is a frac-
tured piece of despotism that must have existed as a splendidly developed
state before Abraham. If patriarchy had been the basic condition of society,
then it would be evident in society’s beginnings everywhere. But this is defi-
nitely not the case. There were and are examples of tribes at the same level of
development — herdsmen, for example — who despise and kill their powerless
elders, who roast and eat their fathers. This was reported of the ancient
Heruli and is still common among some peoples of the South Seas.
The tribes that now graze their flocks among the desolate ruins of the
Mesopotamian hills are, like Abraham, no longer aware of the times when
their fathers united to form large and powerful social bands. It is more correct
to see the provisional tents and smalahs they use today as symbols of their
current lack of peace and homeland than it is to call them prototypes for
Oriental architecture.
The situation was no different in the case of the Asians who poured into
Europe on successive occasions. All brought reminiscences of earlier, more
civilized states with them. The least blurred are found in those Indo-Germanic
tribes that first populated southern Europe —the Iapygians, Etruscans, and
Greco-Italians. In the north and west the Finns stand at the outpost of history.
They belonged to a cultural stage that was in itself very harmoniously devel-
oped, even though it extended back beyond the invention of bronze weapons
and implements. Perhaps they had even forgotten how to work bronze, as is
asserted of the New Zealanders, whose skill in wood carving and whose
Asiatic manner in art certainly suggest the possibility that they were forced to
give up the use of metal in their new metal-less homeland. The rich idioms of

104
 Introduction

the Finns and the surviving remnants of their very sophisticated poetic lore
show that their condition, though it may have reverted to being primitive, was
not originally so.
They were succeeded by the Celts, who pushed them to the outermost
borders of Europe, where they reverted from agriculture to an existence based
on hunting and fishing. The Celts knew how to work bronze and how to mine
ore. They too were the wandering outcasts of a social body whose original
social forms were retained only fragmentarily as they migrated. They were
succeeded in turn by the Germans, who were familiar with iron and enslaved
them. These Germanic hordes, not a nation though linked by a common lan-
guage, were also homeless and rejected by society, and their long years of
migration probably made them more savage than their predecessors.! Finns,
Celts, Germans, Scandinavians, and Slavs—all brought reminiscences of
earlier cultures and related architectural traditions with them to the West, and
these played a role in reshaping society after the fall of the Roman Empire.
These traditions were active elements in the new form of society and the new
art emerging from it—a fact whose full significance and meaning, in my view,
have never been properly recognized. We need only allude to the remarkable
Finnish pile dwellings on the shores of Swiss lakes, the mysterious stone con-
structions on the heaths of western Europe (perhaps erroneously ascribed to
the Celts), the atrial layout of Scandinavian banqueting halls, the Obodrite
temples at Rethra on Lake Tollense (decorated with tapestries and colored
reliefs), the no less wonderful temple in Uppsala, or those colorfully decorated
Rhaetic huts with lavish wood carvings. I would also point to that peculiar
ornamental style unique to Irish jewelry and Scandinavian wood carving,
whose serpentine windings seem primeval and darkly chaotic. This principle
came into conflict with antique works (Greco-Italic ornamental forms) at the
time of Charlemagne and blended with them to produce new combinations.
Thus the social forms that seem to be most original prove to be fragments
of earlier cultural stocks, a result of natural events or political catastrophes—
detours, as it were. Conversely, somewhere within the field of cultural history
visible to us, the phenomenon of the conjoining of new social forms becomes
evident: fragments of the kind described, fused together either by some natu-
ral event or most frequently by the need for defense or a shared greed for a
rich neighbor’s property. Each element of this synthesis, in turn, is a conglom-
erate or fusion of heterogeneous remnants of even older, long-destroyed social
formations.
Unless we assume that reminiscences of earlier political entities survive
within the consciousness of the most savage tribes, the sudden emergence of
these new social forms in history would be quite inexplicable.
If this is the case (and everything suggests it is), then it is pointless to try to
detect the first formative stages of society on the soil of the ancient world; it is
impossible to trace architecture, which is both an expression of and housing
for social organisms, back to its earliest beginnings. Egyptian art, for instance,
although apparently the oldest, turns out on closer examination to be at least

105
 Semper

secondary. In its stage of development it is inferior to others that are actually

more recent in origin by many thousands of years and that offer far more
complex combinations than Egyptian art. Assyrian art is one example; only
the most recent findings have given us the privilege of recognizing more clearly
its nature and its great significance for the history of art and culture.
This difficult theme will have to be pursued in the second part of this book.
For now we will simply propose two theses to be developed in what follows:
1. Whenever an attentive observer comes across monumental traces of
extinct social organizations, he will encounter certain basic forms or
types of art that in some cases can be clearly and distinctly seen but in
others only dimly so in a secondary or tertiary transformation. But they
are always the same, which makes them older than all social organisms
of which monumental traces have survived or of which we have other
evidence relating to their art.
2. These types were borrowed from the various technical arts, where they
were seen as the primeval protectors of the hearth’s holy flame (the
oldest symbol of society and humanity in general), whether in their
most primitive application or in advanced stages of development.
They acquired symbolic values at a very early stage (partly hieratic-
tendentious, partly aesthetic-formal) but at the same time were never
completely detached from their earliest technical and spatial applica-
tion. In this sense they continued to serve as important agents for the
later transformations of architectural forms.
It is not possible to understand architecture without considering this most
ancient influence of the technical arts on the emergence of its traditional
forms and types. Just as linguistic roots are always valid and their basic forms
reappear in all subsequent transformations and conceptual elaborations, just
as it is impossible to find a completely new word for a new concept without
failing the essential test— namely, that of being understood —we should never
reject or ignore these ancient types and roots of artistic symbols. The inter-
ested public and the majority of working architects follow these traditions
more or less unconsciously, but if an architect recognizes the primeval value of
the oldest symbols of his language and takes account of the way in which
they, along with art itself, have changed their form and meaning historically,
then he will have the same advantage as a modern orator who studies com-
parative linguistics and the most ancient relationships among languages. I
also think it will not be long before research into linguistics will start to inter-
act with research into art-forms; such a link is bound to lead to the most
remarkable revelations in both fields.
We will pursue the constructional-technical conception of the origin of
basic architectural forms alluded to above, but this will have nothing in com-
mon with the coarsely materialist view that holds architecture’s essence to be
nothing but improved construction—illustrated and illuminated statics and
mechanics, as it were — or mere materiality. This belief seems to have arisen in
Roman times and developed more consistently in the so-called Gothic style; it

106
 Introduction

was not openly acknowledged until very recently. It was based, as will be
shown, on virtually forgetting those ancient and traditional types that owe
their origin to the interaction of the technical arts in a primitive architectural
setting.

§2 Every Technical Product Is a Result of Purpose and Material

The task placed before me requires dividing the technical arts into categories
and considering each one separately. This is necessary in order to demonstrate
the impact of each on the origin of artistic symbols in general and architec-
tural symbols in particular. It will be shown that the fundamental principles
of style in the technical arts are identical with those governing architecture,
that the simplest and clearest expressions of these principles are to be found in
the technical arts where they were first established and developed. My inten-
tion in the following pages is to deal with the various technical arts in their
oldest relations to architecture, insofar as they influenced the development of
basic architectural forms. They will be treated essentially as an act of becom-
ing and will be examined from the following two points of view:
1. The work as a result of the material service or use that is intended,
whether actual or only presumed, and taken in a higher symbolic sense.
2. The work as a result of the material used to produce it, as well as of the
tools and procedures applied.
The use of any technical product remains essentially the same at all times.
It is based on universal human needs and on natural principles seeking formal
expression that are valid everywhere and at all times. But the materials used
to make this product, and particularly how they are treated, change radically
over time according to local and all other possible circumstances. It is thus
appropriate to link more general formal-aesthetic considerations to the ques-
tion of purpose and to link considerations of the history of style to materials.
But we cannot expect to apply this principle with full consistency, as a prod-
uct’s purpose a priori requires the use of certain materials and technical pro-
cedures that are more suitable than others. Thus more general formal-aesthetic
considerations begin to spill over into the sphere of material concerns. Let us
take a band, for example. Its use suggests a strip encircling an object or run-
ning along its length, but the fundamental characteristics of the concept of the
band are shown more strikingly if this strip is twisted like a rope or if it has a
surface pattern like braided or woven material. Clearly only certain, as it
were, abstract properties of the binding material need to be considered. The
question of how this band would differ if it were formally expressed in linen,
wool, silk, wood, clay, stone, or metal is a quite different one and is entirely a
matter for the history of style.

Note
1. Rural settlers living by agriculture and herding reflect not primeval conditions
but a state of neglect, like that of North American settlers.

107
 CHAPTER TWO

Classification of the Technical Arts

§3 Four Categories of Raw Materials

There are four main categories into which raw materials can be classified
according to their technical purpose. Their particular attributes are as follows:
1. pliable, tough, highly resistant to tearing, of great absolute strength;
2. soft, malleable (plastic), capable of being hardened, easily shaped and
formed, and retaining a given form when hardened;
3. stick-shaped, elastic, principally of relative strength, that is, resistant to
forces working vertically along the length;
4. strong, densely aggregated, resistant to crushing and compression, thus
of significant reactive strength. It is thus suited to being worked into any
required form by removing parts of the mass or by inserting regular
pieces in strong systems, constructed on principles of reactive strength.
On the basis of these four material categories, four main artistic activities
can be distinguished inasmuch as they require greater or lesser effort and tech-
nical procedures to make the raw material serve a definite purpose suited to
its qualification.
Accordingly, they can be divided into the following classes:
1. textiles,
2. ceramics,
3. tectonics (carpentry),
4. stereotomy (masonry, and so on).
It is essential for what follows to clarify this classification by adding that
every division is to be taken in its broadest sense, which leads to a number of
mutual relationships that will be identified and pursued. Each of the technical
divisions named above has its own domain of forms whose production is, so
to speak, the technique’s most natural and most ancient task. Second, each
technique has a certain material that can be considered its primeval material,
which is the most convenient means for producing forms within its original
domain. Later these forms were also made from other materials, and the orig-
inal materials were used for making forms that belonged to a quite different
branch of the arts. Such forms will therefore be stylistically assigned to one or
another technique, according to whether their formal or material properties
are being considered.
Thus ceramics, seen more generally, is not just restricted to clay vessels. It
includes the whole category of vessels as well as related glassware, stoneware,

109
 Semper

and metalware. Wooden artifacts can also be assigned to this genus as a spe-
cial stylistic family, for example, barrels, wooden pails, and so on. Even some
textile objects, like baskets, are stylistically related to ceramics in this respect.
Conversely, there are objects that certainly belong to ceramics from the
point of view of materials, inasmuch as they were formed from a soft mass
that was then hardened and fixed. But they should be seen as relating to
ceramics only secondarily, because formally they are in a different sphere.
Objects of this kind include bricks, roof tiles, terra-cotta, and glazed tiles—
used both for dressing walls and tiling floors. The glass cubes and colored clay
pegs used in inlay work, as well as other ceramic products, are similar. Stylis-
tically, they may be more properly assigned to stereotomy or to textiles, as
they can be used for inlay work related to stone construction and as a dressing
for wall surfaces, and so on.
Similarly, textiles encompasses more than actual fabrics, as will be shown
below.
Tectonics is also a broad field. In addition to timber trusses and the col-
umns that support them, a large number of domestic furnishings are assigned
to this realm, as are some elements of stone construction and certain types of
metal construction.
Stereotomy includes the art not only of masons and excavators but also of
mosaicists, wood and ivory carvers, and metalworkers. Even jewelers derive
some of their stylistic principles from this technique.
The interrelations inherent to these processes are very important; they rep-
resent the transitions between the four different kinds of artistic activities.
Thus textiles combine with ceramics in the above-mentioned wall and floor
coverings and with tectonics in wood paneling. Even more important stylistic
combinations of the dressing principle with tectonics will emerge below
(tubular construction, lattices). In tubular construction, textiles provide the
material and tectonics gives it shape; with lattices, tectonics provides the
material and textiles give it shape.
The work of the goldsmith is also a stylistic composite, as is (in addition to
the many other cases that will be considered below) antique stone construc-
tion, in which stereotomy appears in combination with tectonics and the prin-
ciple of dressing.
Metal is the one material that unites all the properties of the raw materials
listed above. It can be plastically softened and is capable of being hardened; it
is malleable, tough, and resists tearing to a great extent; it is very elastic and
has significant relative strength (this is its weakest property because of its
excessive elasticity and malleability), and therefore is very useful for stick con-
structions; finally it is hard, with a very homogeneous and dense aggregate
condition offering enormous resistance to crushing. These properties make it
more suited than any other material to processing into any desired shape by
removing parts of the mass or by combining it with fixed systems. This versa-
tility allows metal techniques to encompass all four classes of technology.
Metallurgy also is composed of a larger number of transitional technical

110
 Classification of the Technical Arts

processes not used for any other material. Thus, for example, metal’s mal-
leability leads to the important process of embossing. The process of forging
is different; it is a transition between handling metal as a malleable tough mass
and treating it stereotomically as a dense body. Other processes include stamp-
ing, minting, soldering, welding, riveting —all with their particular stylistic
features. There are also composite processes, like enameling, niello, gilding,
and many others. All of these should be considered separately and are very
important in their influence on the fine arts and architecture in particular.
Because metal technology is so significant in the arts and because it is so
difficult to place the named (and other unnamed) metalworking processes
into the four general classes listed above, a separate chapter will be devoted to
metal technology.
 CHAPTER THREE

Textiles
A. General-Formal

§4 Why Textiles Are Treated First

It is hard to establish which of the technical branches listed in the previous
chapter was practiced first in the natural course of human development, and
ultimately there is little point in knowing this. But there can be no doubt that
in the first two branches—textiles and ceramics —we find the first efforts to
embellish functional objects through a conscious choice of form and decora-
tion. Of these two arts, textiles should undoubtedly take precedence because
they can be seen, as it were, as the primeval art from which all other arts — not
excepting ceramics— borrowed their types and symbols, whereas it itself seems
quite independent in this respect. Textile types evolved within the art itself or
were borrowed directly from nature.
There can be no doubt that the first principles of style are bound up with
this earliest of artistic techniques.

§5 Basic Objectives of This Technique

The idea of a system of material units whose attributes are pliability, supple-
ness, and toughness came about for the following reasons:
1. to string and to bind;
2. to cover, to protect, and to enclose.
All forms arising from these purposes approximate either a linear or a plani-
metric form. Linear forms are better suited to stringing and binding or to rep-
resenting the idea symbolically. Planimetric forms are necessary to cover,
protect, or enclose; they have also become self-evident symbols for the con-
cepts of protecting, covering, and enclosing in art. Even language borrows its
terms for describing such concepts from textiles, and therefore they appear to
be older than present linguistic forms. The same is true of the oldest religious
symbols.

§6 The String
The string is an articulation of a simple and therefore aesthetically neutral
band and is probably the oldest artistic product. It is the first actual manifes-
tation of the sense of beauty striving to bring about the expression of unity
through multiplicity, to combine it in a eurythmic form. The unity to which
the string refers contrasts at the same time with the plurality through which
the authority and homogeneity of the subject are emphasized and enhanced.

LES
 Semper

The wreath of leaves is perhaps the earliest string; as a corona, it has

always retained its ancient privilege within the arts as a symbol of crowning,
of upward limitation, and—in the opposite direction—as a symbol of down-
ward limitation. In the latter case the wreath’s leaves point down.!
Equally original and alike in meaning is a string of feathers, which, like a
wreath, encloses but does not bind or fetter.
A related symbol, but one expressing a different nuance of the basic con-
cept, is a series of solid regular bodies (pearls or knucklebones, 5<opol, aotpa-
yadwTot) on a string, arranged according to the laws of eurythmy. It points
neither upward nor downward and is therefore neutral. The chain is active

EER
“aa

B=

MCLNENEN
hs
 Textiles: General-Formal

only in the sense of holding the units together; it does not actively relate to
what it surrounds. Thus, this symbol is not always used to characterize some-
thing as bound, but rather it enhances an object’s independence. This is the
symbolic meaning of a string of pearls adorning the neck of a beautiful
woman. But it also frequently conveys the hint of a loose connection.
A special association of ideas is evoked by a wreath of leaves or flowers
consisting of elements directed alternately upward and downward.? Unlike a

a WS

string of pearls, which does not involve the concept of upward and downward
at all, the wreath is not neutral but rather points expressly to both at the same
time and thus mediates the two. It often has functional meaning; that is, it is
used as a symbol of a simultaneous or alternating function in contrasting
directions or of forces working in opposition.

l
AAPA IPOIVEVIIVWNS

Examples: the neck of a pouring vessel that both issues and receives; the
trochilus at the base of the Ionic column, which expresses the conflict between
the column’s thrust and the resistance of the hard ground.
The same symbol often occurs as a simple wavy line or as a string of inor-
ganic or quite conventional units alternately directed upward and downward.

LNs)
 The string of conventional units formally expressing the notion of above
or below is often applied in an analogous way to a wreath of leaves pointing
up and down. The so-called egg-and-dart molding is of this type. It differs

from a pearl fillet only in that the latter is entirely neutral to the concepts of
above and below, whereas the former recalls one of the two. It is not neces-
sary to follow [Carl Gottlieb Wilhelm] Botticher in seeing these conventional
units in every case as leaves folded over and half concealing themselves; at
least they fulfill the required end (symbolizing above and below) quite per-
fectly without this assumption. More about this in the section on Hellenic art.

The Band

yi Fixed Band Decorations

The string expresses the concept of binding only when its elements are joined
and relate to a central reference point. The band, by contrast, joins parts that
do not belong to it, or it connects them as it frames them.
The band should proclaim itself as such; that is, it should overtly demon-
strate a certain degree of absolute strength, combined with suppleness.
The degree of strength manifests itself first in the proportion of the binding
to the size of what is bound, second in the texture and ostensible resistance of

2 _/
 Textiles: General-Formal

the binding material. Both ways of expressing the band’s strength oppose each
other in a certain sense; that is, a band that makes a forceful effect by its pro-
portions does not need to be reinforced by a formal emphasis of textural
resistance. Conversely, in cases where the proportion of the binding to what is
bound is slight, the concept of binding must be forcefully emphasized by the
band’s ostensible resistance. A band very light in its proportions and osten-
sible resistance should appear effortless. Examples: the string of pearls (astra-
gal), the leaf garland (stephanos).

Every band presents itself as a textile product, as a product that uses raw
material characterized by its tenaciousness and absolute strength, that is, by
resistance to tearing.
The simplest band is the line, the thread with a flat or circular profile. A
reinforced band has several similar lines or threads placed in parallel or twisted
around one another.

| SSG AISA

An even more forceful expression of the basic concept of binding is

achieved by plaiting, appearing either flat like a taenia or with a semicircular
profile like a torus. The concept of binding is given particular weight and
emphasis by plaiting straps in such a way that the thickness of each strap
becomes apparent.

COCO
The flat band (belt, zone) often appears in a more understated form as a
weave. It is usually used as a headband (epikranon), a hem (limbus), or an
edging (crepido, margo).

In certain cases, wide belts appear as free-hanging bands strung between

two fixed points in order to connect them but serving at the same time to
support covers. The belt has a double function in this case: as a longitudinal
link and as a seam (see below), that is, as something tensed longitudinally

ee,
 Semper

and transversely at the same time. A Joad placed on it can amplify the longitu-
dinal tension. This rich combination finds stylistic and symbolic application
in the fully articulated ceiling systems of Greek temples, which will be dis-
cussed in the chapters relating to tectonics in this chapter and in the section on
Hellenic art.
The concept of binding is associated with that of connecting. Something
that is connected must have once been separate. Thus a band is used when
something is to be connected and articulated. It serves to emphasize both the
unified nature of the parts and their relation to the whole and to mark the
articulation.
Hems and seams are bands that are tensed and supported not longitudi-
nally but diagonally. They and their general stylistic demands will be dis-
cussed after the following treatment of clothing and the cover.

§8 Fluttering Band Decorations

Fluttering band decorations, tassels, and other textile hangings differ from the
band types discussed so far. They are symbols of unrestraint and serve as such
in women’s fashion. At the same time, they are inexhaustible aids for accentu-
ating a form’s direction and movement.’ According to the greater or lesser
weight of materials selected and their degree of suppleness, the wavy motion
of a band decoration should be more or less independent of the movement of
the person wearing it. This is to avoid the problem of replicating every chance
movement, as happens with heavy hangings. This ensures that the expression
and emphasis conveyed by the fluttering convey only the intended direction
and the speed with which this direction is followed and the larger, regular
movements of the person. This has a decisive impact on the style, which is
applied to the decorations according to the intended purpose.
The decorations and embroidery on the band adornment should be chosen
first for their appropriateness to the general fluttering character, that is, for
unfurling with the movement. For example, let us take flags and pennants.
They are often designed such that their colored stripes do not run parallel
with but crosswise to the flight of the flag, which contradicts all good style. A
flag of this kind is almost always unclear: that is, an integral part of the color
system is concealed, leaving the flag without heraldic or aesthetic meaning,
and usually in both respects. (See the remarks below on brightly colored robes
with folds.)
Among flags, the American is one of the most beautiful. It unfurls simply,
and the way the stripes relate to the whole is well designed. Even the colors
are harmonious, cheerful, and not loud. Additionally, the most striking part —
the field of stars—is very properly placed close to the pole, so that it can never
become “unclear.” The opposite of this, a model of tastelessness, is the Napo-
leonic tricolor: its colors common, the relationships among its parts poor, and
its stripes vertical and thus always unclear.
Modern industry generally shows very little insight and taste in the pat-
terns of bands and bows intended for ladies’ garments. In general it can be

118
 Textiles: General-Formal

R)

(dss
a)
Wit Late
cil

ee

fon
POL
wt
Sa

Flagpoles, decoration on Egyptian pylons;

from a wall painting on the Temple of Chons in Thebes

assumed that those patterns that pass through the loom most easily are also
those that unfurl and unfold most attractively —but in our day everything
passes through the loom easily, and thus this test of style no longer holds true.
This touches on one of the most dangerous pitfalls of modern industrial art
and of art overall. The limits of the legitimate and beautiful can be found
amid this superfluity of resources only by clinging as a matter of principle to
the eternally valid laws of style, only by diligently studying those works that
stand near the origins of art and that still display stylistic laws in their full
naiveté, and only by observing what emerged from these motifs in periods of
the highest artistic development. On closer review, the lack of taste associated
with this wealth of means proves that we knew how to acquire such wealth
but have not yet learned to use it. We have not become the intellectual masters
of the material, and in this regard we allow ourselves to be put to shame by
the Hindus and Iroquois (see below and my publication Wissenschaft, Indus-
trie und Kunst [Brunswick: Vieweg, 1852]).
The style of the banding —its pattern, shape, and color, and especially the
way in which it is worn—should suit the character that this decoration is
intended to evoke. Loosely fluttering, bright, or multicolored bands and bows
suit youthful feminine forms and are appropriate for dancing and joyful occa-
sions, but the same decoration is also appropriate for serious or solemn occa-
sions, such as the gravity of a priest and ruler.

ALS)
Semper

Assyrian ruler’s vestments

Fad
y Wy
Wy) Wy}
jj)
/

Miter of Saint Otto (eleventh century)

 Textiles: General-Formal

In antiquity, the custom of employing this means to emphasize the stateli-

ness of an activity and those involved originated in the religious and court fes-
tivals of the Orient but later spread everywhere. The low-hanging cheekpieces
(paragnathides) on the miters of Persian kings, richly trimmed with tassels
and cords (krossoi), were the most lavish and dignified examples of this
Asiatic court etiquette. We can still see representations of the oldest specimens
on Assyrian reliefs, with their numerous grades of splendor reflecting the var-
ious degrees of rank.
The miters worn by archbishops and popes still carry the distinction of the
holy infula, but this ancient symbol has lost all sense of dignity and formal
significance over the course of the last few centuries.
Between these two set limits —namely, the light bands of the female dancer
and Iphigenia’s sacrificial band or the paragnathides of Assyrian dynasties —a
scale of nuances can be imagined. The character of the forms involved in
exornation is crucial. A very characteristic feature, seen not infrequently on
ancient vase paintings and sculptures, consists of sacrificial taeniae broaden-
ing toward the bottom, often weighted with an acorn.

SS.
xP

<a

Delphic consecration and sacrificial taeniae

Naturally the same principles apply when this kind of decoration directly or
indirectly relates to architecture. Here we may point to the above-mentioned
banners, flags, and pennants as festive architectural decorations from ancient
times.
A few remarks on the occurrence of these architectural-ovational decora-
tions during various periods of cultural and stylistic history will appear below,
in accordance with the plan described.

2a
Semper

Greek acroteria

Acroteria from ships

 Textiles: General-Formal

The ancient crownings of roofs and battlements (acroteria) are closely

related in that they are intended to clarify the direction of a monument. They
find their technical paragon in the weather vane. They symbolize both upper
termination and culmination, and indicate the rank of the work or the part
they decorate. Similarly, the feather headdress (phalos, crista)—the chief’s
warlike decoration from earliest times—still recalls the miters of Assyrian
kings in its conceptual associations. This again takes us back to cockscombs
and the crests of other belligerent birds that are the natural models for such
headgear. Early acroteria and their transformations throughout art history
will be discussed below.

§9 The Cover
The need for protection, cover, and spatial enclosure supplied some of the
earliest inspiration for industrial invention. Human beings first learned to
recognize the essence and purpose of natural covers (shaggy animal skins,
protective tree bark) and began to use them for their own ends according to
their correctly perceived natural use. Later, they imitated them with synthetic
weaving. The use of these covers is thus older than language. The concepts of
covering, protecting, and enclosing are indissolubly connected with those nat-
ural and synthetic covers and dressings that have become the sensible sign for
those concepts. As such they form perhaps the most important element in the
symbolism of architecture.
The cover’s purpose is the opposite to that of the binding. Everything
closed, protected, enclosed, enveloped, and covered presents itself as uni-
fied, as a collective; whereas everything bound reveals itself as articulated, as
a plurality.
If the basic form of the binding is linear, the surface appears as the forma-
tive element in everything intended to cover, protect, and enclose. The most
important general factors affecting the style of covers are the attributes of the
surface: that is, its extension in breadth and length, the absence of the third
dimension as a visually active element, the boundary lines (straight, crooked,
or composite), together with the above-mentioned general purpose of the
cover, as something uniformly inclusive.
From this follows, first, that the envelope or cover should manifest itself as
a surface. Even that abstract sense of beauty unconcerned with use and func-
tion is violated by covers that do not have the property of being surfaces or
those in which this attribute is artificially or only apparently eliminated but
are, in keeping with their purpose, actually complete surfaces. Even more
absurd are disturbances to surface continuity when the material purpose of
the cover urgently requires that it form not simply a surface but a flat plane.
Here I will give only one example of this somewhat baldly stated principle,
reserving the right to prove its validity as a norm in the following technical-
historical treatment of the subject. I will also consider the possibility of limita-
tions and exceptions and even examples of the contrary.
There is probably no case in which this principle is so strikingly evident as

Zs
 Semper

in floors that are dressed with carpets, tiled with marble, paneled with wood,
or inlaid with colorful mosaics. On a plane intended to be continually walked
upon, any architectural relief ornaments —any oddities like imitations of
fruit, shells, and other friable pieces or even bouquets of flowers strewn
about —are problematic. Strictly speaking, the more perfectly and realistically
they are reproduced in relief and color, the less appropriate they are. The
asarotos oecos [Historia naturalis 36.184: “unswept room”] of Sosos—the
famous Attalid mosaic floor on which, as Pliny tells us, table scraps were
deceptively depicted — was certainly an error in style, however great its merits
as a work of art. Yet this bit of humorous whimsy can be more easily excused
than another famous mosaic scene described by Pliny with a wonderful clar-
ity: namely, those well-known doves, shown drinking from a basin of water,
inlaid on that same floor, with the result that their heads were ceaselessly and
mercilessly trodden upon. The famous floor depicting Alexander’s battle is no
more stylistically correct, nor are the rough and jagged-looking combinations
of brightly colored stones often found in Roman and early Christian mosaic
floors. Such visual obstacles make those walking on the floor feel uncertain
and oblige them to turn their eyes downward. In defense of the architects of
ancient Rome, it should be added that they generally knew to restrict subjects
like Alexander’s battle to a place on the floor not intended to be walked on,
and on the whole followed this stylistic principle with instinctive correctness.
Imagining ourselves sophisticated, we neglect it almost universally, particu-
larly in our extravagant carpets.

§ 10 Top and Bottom; Right and Left

Depending on a surface’s purpose, the concepts top and bottom, right and left
either are clearly evident or remain neutral. Let us first consider those cases in
which an indication of surface direction is absolutely essential for top and
bottom, right and left. It is evident that the laws of symmetry and proportion
are applied simultaneously (see the preface) and indeed in a double relation:
first, with regard to the surface’s width and height as well as its general linear
boundary; second, with regard to any figures or designs on the surface. What
follows naturally concerns only vertical, that is, upright surfaces.

§ 11 General-Formal
Among the general-formal factors, the first basic principle is that a vertical
surface, if one thinks of it as bisected down the center by a vertical line,
should be regular with respect to that center, that is, the left side should
strictly mirror the right.
In this way, justice is done to symmetry or to the correct relation of partic-
ular appearance to general, but it is also essential that the general design of
the surface clearly indicate that it is either standing upright or hanging. Both
cases —namely, the surface as a standing wall or as a curtain—are as a rule
seen as upright because each is taller than it is wide. A perfect square would in
this respect be completely neutral; the proportional development of a square

124
 Textiles: General-Formal

is without expression unless subdivisions and patterns are added to give it the
required character and thus force it out of its passivity. The rule is that the
compartments and patterns should intersect the neutral square so that each
division created on its surface, as well as the system of divisions as a whole,
will meet the conditions of proportion and symmetry. If in the case of wall
dressings or something similar, one cannot avoid the square or something
approaching a square (a form insufficiently active in itself), good taste will
seek to divide the wall surface into panels or fields, which, taken individually,
are taller than they are wide. The design then ceases to be neutral, and this
ensures the necessary activity and resulting satisfaction to the eye in terms of
proportion and symmetry.
A surface can also present itself as standing upright or hanging vertically
by flaring toward the top or bottom, so that a contrast between the two is
expressed by the form. An isosceles triangle, for example, will always indicate
the top or bottom by its apex, depending on whether it is intended as a stand-
ing or hanging surface. This shows that although the ratio of height to base is
likely to emphasize the degree of proportionality, it does not in itself necessar-
ily determine top and bottom.
The effect of such triangles or other forms that absolutely appear as stand-
ing or hanging is neutralized if they form a series. The interstices produce
inverse forms and these work against the directional thrust of the series. In
certain cases discussed below, this attribute is suitable and desirable for these
forms, but it prevents their application to large fields where they are com-
bined with rectangular forms, which create highly expressive crownings at the
top and along their termination at the bottom.
More pleasing than such jagged and pointed elements, and even more
ancient, are edge decorations with toothed circular segments. They, too, have
analogies in architecture, especially in cornices used as battlements. They are
usually cut with shears to prevent the unraveling (Low German ausrebbeln) of
unhemmed textile edges. The Doric triglyph is a symbol that can with some
probability be traced back to this edging, which was derived from clothing
and textiles. In this case the triglyph forms a valance and alludes to the inner
cover or pteron (see under Doric style below).

Triglyphs as edging for a mosaic floor Egyptian dwelling with battlements

N25
 Semper

Assyrian castle with battlements

I am in fact anticipating later material because the technical evolution of

forms is not now under discussion. But in the accompanying woodcuts I show
some of the most significant edgings derived from the art of weaving, among
which the most important are the selvage and the fringe. In the latter, the card
threads extend beyond the fabric and are twisted together and knotted to pre-
vent unraveling.

PaiN

Medieval dress trimming Assyrian tassels and fringes (Layard)

Although upright and hanging surfaces have much in common, stylisti-

cally they should not be treated as identical or as contrasting equals. Their
main difference is based on a generally valid principle of proportion, which
demands that the proportional development of an art-form never point in the
direction of gravity but always in the opposite way, that is, contrary to this
direction. This principle requires a very different overall design and contrast-
ing principles of ornamentation in each case. In order not to anticipate the
following discussion on ornament, let me simply remark here that with regard
to the more general aspect of design, it is just as wrong to stand something on
its head as it is to hang it by its tail. The head should always be at the top;
something hanging down should never be identified with forms that are char-
acteristically crowning symbols of the upper border. The so-called valance is
an exception to this rule, however: it mediates the contrast between upright

126
 Textiles: General-Formal

Valance in the style of Louis XIV

and hanging and as such is very important as an artistic symbol in drapery

and other applications, including architecture.
The rule that the head should remain uppermost will apply to almost all
natural covers. It has to be observed in fur, for example, in the pile of hair. It
would run entirely counter to common sense to arrange a fur collar such that
the heads of the animal pelts were pointing down and the tails up. Although
this apparently self-evident rule seems natural, it is frequently violated in
every field of art, and rarely do we find the lower termination of a tapestry
being treated differently from its crown.
It is possible to think of cases where symmetry cannot be expressed and
proportion and upward articulation are the only elements determining form.
Such cases occur when the coverings or dressings are not smooth surfaces but
draperies with many folds (aulaea). It is wrong to have anything in the general
cut that works against the proportional relationships among the parts them-
selves and to the whole, that is, to the thing that is veiled or dressed. The folds
should fit the organism snugly, highlight its properties, and veil and correct
the flaws and irresolutions in its form.

§ 12 On Surface Figuration
In preceding sections we have focused on general-formal aspects. It remains to
demonstrate how the principles of symmetry and proportion apply to vertical
wall surfaces and hanging curtains — surface dressings with figures or designs.
As already demonstrated, the principle of surface ornamentation arises
from the basic idea of the surface as such and accordingly reaffirms it. At the
same time, however, it follows from the uniformity of what the dressing
encloses as a unity and a whole. The cover cannot present itself as undisturbed
if the ornamentation on the enclosing surfaces seemingly prevents it from being
a continuous spatial enclosure.
The correct relation of the enclosure to the enclosed should, moreover, be
apparent in the fact that the former (in all its formal properties and colors)
forcefully emphasizes and supports the effect of the latter. The enclosed should
present itself unmistakably as the principal theme and be placed upon a suit-
ably chosen background. But, again, this goal will be achieved only by using

27)
 Semper

precisely those properties of ornamentation that develop a priori from the for-
mal concept of the surface as such. These properties should at the same time
be easily depicted or produced and should derive from the techniques first
used in the production of such surface dressings (namely, textiles).
Let us cite a passage from Richard Redgrave’s excellent Report on Design,
prepared by that artist at the request of the Royal Commission for the Great
Exhibition of 1851. It may help to explain what has been said. In the section
of his report dealing with wallpaper and other wall dressings Redgrave writes
as follows:

If the use of such materials is borne in mind, the proper decoration for them will at
once be evident, since this ought to bear the same relation to the objects in the
room that a background does to a picture. In art, a background, if well designed,
has its own distinctive features, yet these are to be so far suppressed and subdued
as not to invite especial attention, while as a whole it ought to be entirely sub-
servient to supporting and enhancing the principal figures —the subject of the pic-
ture. The decoration of a wall, if designed on good principles, has a like office: it is
a background to the furniture, the objects of art, and the occupants of the apart-
ment. It may enrich the general effect, and add to magnificence, or be made to
lighten or deepen the character of the chamber: it may appear to temper the heat
of summer, or to give a sense of warmth and comfort to the winter: it may have the
effect of increasing the size of a saloon, or of closing-in the walls of a library or
study: all which, by a due adaptation of colour, can be easily accomplished. But,
like the background to which it has been compared, although its ornament may
have a distinctive character for any of these purposes, it must be subdued, and
uncontrasted in light and shade; strictly speaking, it should be flat and convention-
alized, and lines or forms harsh or cutting on the ground as far as possible
avoided, except where necessary to give expression to the ornamentation. Imita-
tive treatments are objectionable on principle, both as intruding on the sense of
flatness, and as being too attractive in their details and colour to be sufficiently
retiring and unobtrusive.
Some of the best examples, as well of paper as of silk, velvet, and other hang-
ings, are treatments of texture in a self-colour.... By these means the ornament is
necessarily flat, and does not disturb the general effect. With the slightest attention
to the choice of form it <such monochrome surface decoration in which the tech-
nique yields, so to speak, the pattern> can hardly be in bad taste, whilst great ele-
gance and beauty often arise from such treatments [p. 24].

In the historical-technical parts of this study on the relationship of textiles

to architecture, we will have the opportunity to explore how the applications
of this principle can be extended. Examples will be given in which this principle
is no longer valid or needs qualification because of the materials used and
their technical treatment. In this context, however, we need only emphasize
that it applies uniformly to all cases in which textiles are used. It is as valid for
clothing and garments as it is for wallpaper, curtains, tents, and carpets. It

128
 Textiles: General-Formal

also extends to those works of art that are stylistically related to the technique
in question.
In addition to these general principles, the ornamentation of dressing sur-
faces is restricted by some stylistic precepts relating to proportion and sym-
metry. These vary according to whether the dressing is viewed as an upward-
directed wall or as a hanging drapery.
In both kinds of wall dressings the pattern should develop—unfurl, as it
were —in the direction of proportion. For example, it would violate the prin-
ciple of proportion if stripes did not run with the direction of the proportional
development of the dressed object but cut across it at right angles or diago-
nally. Fashions of almost every era have violated this rule in the most ghastly
way, but the tastelessness of the present day far exceeds all that has gone
before. I need only draw attention to the false and clumsy use of Scottish tar-
tan patterns, which are not in themselves objectionable. As pleated plaids they
are tolerable. The colorful confusion of their patterns, which incidentally
clearly proclaims their purely technical origin, is made no worse by the fall of
the folds, even though the free development of that fall is disturbed by all
those colored squares. But now our dandies use this fabric for trousers, closely
fitting waistcoats, and cloaks without considering that the proportions of the
design are bound to be completely destroyed by the heavily accented stripes
of the Scottish pattern crisscrossing one another. The Greeks and Greek-
educated Romans were therefore in no way wrong to denounce bracae vir-
gatae [striped trousers] and any checkered materials as barbarian clothing
suitable for slaves (see [Carl August] Bottiger’s Kleine Schriften, vol. 3: “Uber
die herrschende Mode der gewiirfelten Stoffe,’ 8-22).
Persian and Indian veils and shawls are used in rich folds as a turban to
wrap the head or as a belt. Many of the stylistic attributes of these costly
materials are based on this use: the confused forms, the contrasts of the varie-
gated stripes, which seem to be motivated by and gain the necessary unity
only from the fall of the folds. These products are meant to be used in pat-
terns (calculated not for development but for its charming colors) that display
a rich confusion in the fall of the folds. Often twenty to thirty people work on
them for years, each completing a single section. In the end, the pieces are so
skillfully worked together that there is not a seam to be seen. Thus a genuine
mosaic style—in fact, the riskiest kind, really more of a patchwork —can be
seen at work here; it can be appropriately applied only in an Oriental manner.
But our European ladies spread out a brightly colored patchwork pattern
and wear it finely smoothed around their shoulders, so that the fantastic poly-
chrome hem often hangs smoothly and symmetrically in the wrong direction
down the back. Despite the desired symmetry, one shoulder appears yellow
and the other blue, red, or green. And the great genius of our European cash-
mere manufacturers lies in corrupting this essentially original and perfectly jus-
tifiable style— without considering or even knowing how it came into being.
Just as little attention is paid to the necessity (closely associated with the
above-mentioned law of proportion) that the motifs of the pattern always

129
 Semper

appear upright if they are significant in terms of top and bottom. This law
also applies both to a carpet that is hung on a wall and to a hung drapery.
Arabesques and any vegetal ornament, as well as designs taken from the
animal kingdom, should unfold from the floor upward. The actual curtain
should rarely be the exception here, and only when its ornament clearly indi-
cates that the upper part of the upward-directed vegetal motif has been
forced down in the opposite direction by a loop or by the powerful influence
of gravity.
All dressings have a third proportional style law in common: the heavier
form and the darker or more somber color should always dominate the bot-
tom; the lighter form and the brighter and more glowing color, the top. The
middle, however, should form a transition between the two extremes in terms
of its form and color.
As far as proportionality is concerned, the two kinds of dressing that are
commonly used in architecture (the standing or stretched tapestry wall and
the drape) display a similar order. But they are different with regard to sym-
metry in that the stretched tapestry wall requires a well-articulated symmetry
of the ornamental arrangement, whereas this does not seem necessary (and
indeed may be disturbing) in the case of the hanging drape, with its many
folds. A curtain, like Indian cashmeres, can be rich and confused, as the sym-
metry of the pattern is not in any way disturbed by the folds. It is replaced by
the plastic symmetry of the system of folds, which by its nature is not regular
but asserts itself through the balance of its masses.
The second difference between the two vertical wall dressings lies in the
nature of their termination. The stretched tapestry dressing terminates at the
top and coincides with the dominant of the proportional triad; the hanging
drapery terminates at the bottom and connects with the base of the propor-
tional triad; from this connection rich and very special terminations often
result. Compare the earlier remarks on this subject in the preface and in the
sections on the seam and hem to come later.

O13 Floor Dressings

In previous sections we dealt with cases in which the concepts top and bot-
tom, right and left appear clearly and distinctly in surface dressings. We have
yet to discuss those instances in which these notions are neutral or appear less
crucial—veiled, as it were. Of these, floor dressings and ceilings (which, as
horizontally extended, freely suspended, upper terminations of a room, are
the counterparts to floors) are the most important from our point of view. Let
us now address their stylistic rules.
The most general stylistic factor distinguishing a floor dressing or ceiling
from a wall dressing or curtain is obviously that the former are horizontal
planes whereas the latter are vertical. If we proceed from this point of com-
parison, it is nevertheless difficult to formulate in an orderly, succinct, and
graphic way everything related to the stylistic treatment of such spatial
enclosures that we are compelled to take note of and reflect upon —even if

130
 Textiles: General-Formal

we initially ignore material and technical influences. To simplify this problem,

I will treat the two horizontal enclosures separately, even though there are
major stylistic analogies between the floor and ceiling (plafond). I will deal
first only with carpets, or rather with floor dressings in general, and then con-
sider ceilings separately.
If one conceives the absolute concept of a horizontal surface in terms of a
smooth carpet spread out on the floor, one generally excludes the secondary
concepts of right and left, front and back. This absence of direction would
thus be exemplified by an undivided, unpatterned, circular or square covering
surrounded by a hem.
If this abstracted material expression is reduced to its simplest element, we
arrive at a point, namely, at the centerpoint of the round or square covering.
Now this centerpoint is the starting point and the end of all relations that
can be stylistically produced for such a carpet. It represents the absolute con-
cept of a horizontal plane in terms of subdivisions, lines, and patterns.
Even a carpet divided into equal or rhythmically alternating regular fields
repeated one after the other, formed from crossing systems of parallel lines on
its surface, would be no exception and would be stylistically correct, because
such patterns, while not directly drawing attention to the center, do not pre-
vent us from seeking it. This case would be quite similar to that of a com-
pletely undivided monochrome carpet. In either case the hem would mediate
the necessary reference to the ideal center.
The more refined sense of form, however, is not content with this less
expressive depiction of the motif; it seeks a coherent presentation of the cen-
terpoint and a visible contrast to the frame or hem that forms the outer marker
of the horizontal conclusion of the space. It does this by using its form and
color to give prominence to a central field within the neutral framed area. It
thereby achieves a triad, a uniform working together of parts according to the
rules of subordination and harmony.
Even more complex combinations can arise from this self-contained triad
and have actually been created. They are stylistically correct only if they
strengthen rather than weaken the unity arising from the forceful indication
of a center. This can be achieved only by a concentric arrangement of addi-
tional motifs and by subordinating everything that fills the space between the
frame and the emphasized center (however richly and artfully it might be
arranged) to the overall effect. The intermediate parts will then effectively
become a background and at the same time will mediate the contrasts that
arise from the principle of surface unity, which should always be maintained,
especially in the decoration of floors.
And so here we do not have the “up and down” treatment found in wall
dressings and even in the clothing with which we cover our bodies but rather—
following quite contrary principles—an “allover” treatment: a concentric or
radial arrangement, or a mixture of the two.
The matter is easily grasped when dealing with regular divisions: lines,
fields and stripes, geometric and other simple forms, dots, segments of circles,

131
 Semper

and straight lines, which are all intended to enliven the surface of the floor in
an orderly combination. Good taste rejects a composition for a floor decora-
tion that draws the eye too much to the floor, a direction that is not fitting for
God’s noble likeness on this earth. Good taste resists such a composition all
the more firmly if the effect of what is represented arises not from charm and
artistry but from a feeling of uncertainty, a fear of falling, the discomfort of
standing on a hard and knobby surface or on soft objects —in other words, by
means that are definitely less than artistic. Therefore, illusory holes in the
floor created by sharply defined compartments set off by vivid contrasts of
light and shade, architectural relief ornaments, elevated moldings, coats of
arms, plastic representations of fruit, shells, scraps of food, and similar motifs
are absolutely objectionable—wunless they are applied in places that are not
intended to be walked or lain upon.
The issue becomes more difficult when it comes to the use of vegetal and
other organically enlivened decorative elements or even objects of a more ten-
dentious representation.
The first thing to consider here is whether such decorative elements, and
historical representations in particular, can be stylistically employed at all,
and if so what conditions and limitations apply.
Obviously it would be taking purism too far to condemn every imitative
ornamental treatment of a floor as lacking style, as has been done from time
to time. Nature’s carpet, the lawn with flowers, presents the most gracious
analogy to ornamental treatment, one that is accessible to every unspoiled
faculty. In the art of embroidery, undoubtedly used very early for decorating
bedcovers, the imitation of vegetal forms, within certain conventional con-
fines predetermined by the technique, came just as easily as the repetition of
geometrical forms and intertwining parallel lines. More serious objections can
be raised against historical or realistic imitations of the kind that can be clas-
sified as genre work or still life. But even these should not be rigorously and
universally condemned. It is futile to attempt to improve taste and cultivate a
more refined sense of beauty in people by rigidly insisting on naked law and
constantly rejecting the incunabula of every art-form. The latter are indeed
noteworthy models absolutely indispensable for teaching the practical laws
of beauty and explaining their elementary propositions owing to the clarity
and sharpness with which the formal law stands out (almost independent of
human arbitrariness) and arising, as it were, from its own natural necessity.
We should not forget, however, that between them and us lies a great expanse
of cultural development; that our art has absorbed the traditions of this long
transitional period from the beginnings of culture to our day and cannot repu-
diate them, even if it strives to do so with the zeal of an antiquarian mandarin;
that the present has its right and there are, in the area of technology, almost
no limits to its fulfillment, which means that a large number of stylistic
demands, especially those emerging from the technical treatment of material,
are necessarily obviated; and, finally, that only a very liberal stylistic code,
one that limits itself to defining the outside limits of what is allowed and to

132
 Textiles: General-Formal

presenting a logic of free activity, can expect to have any influence on improv-
ing our taste and spreading tendencies of greater artistic appreciation among
the people.
The notorious “Chamber of Horrors” in London’s Marlborough House
showed how much care needs to be taken in this respect. Here all possible
industrial sins against the principles of style—interpreted somewhat too rig-
orously and one-sidedly — were brought together and pilloried, so that every
visitor to the Museum of Practical Art and Science saw them immediately
upon entering. The intended effect was not achieved, as even disinterested
observers not infrequently felt prompted to defend the pieces thus exposed
and criticize these principles and their somewhat high-handed application,
which had occurred before these principles were sanctioned by public opin-
ion. Those censored in this public reproof became embittered enemies of this
undoubtedly excellent institution. Thus the Museum of Practical Art and
Science somewhat compromised its influence on industrial England (which
had not been very profound in any case) right at the beginning of its active
life, as its insightful leaders very soon became aware. Consequently, the
Chamber of Horrors disappeared within a year after the museum opened.
In general, the same principle often mentioned above also applies to the
use of vegetal ornaments. They should not make the surface impracticable but
should blend in with it; furthermore, they should adhere to and therefore
strengthen the general spatial disposition of the cover, whose regularity has
been discussed above. Depending on the circumstances, the principle should
either stand out more clearly than it would without the ornaments or it should
be less severely rigid. Vegetal ornaments should, as a rule, be the connecting
members, the mechanically functioning parts of the composition, enclosing
and connecting the other parts that are passive in this respect. Therefore when
vegetal ornaments are used in this way, they have to be treated according to
a stylistic principle already discussed in the preface, that is, in a fancifully gro-
tesque and conventional interpretation, like arabesques. Furthermore, they
should occur naturally and suit the principles of the technique applied in
establishing the composition. With regard to the latter, the current stage of
technology should certainly be taken into account; in my opinion, it would be
going too far to attempt, for example, to apply Iroquois patterns, or those
produced by the artful hand of Arabian weavers with their conventional and
technically stylistic severity, to our tapestries or artistically woven fabrics.
Finally, they have to be restrained in their proportions and in the intensity of
their coloring. They should not violate natural laws (for example, pansies
should not be as big as peonies and cabbage roses should not shrink to the
size of forget-me-nots) and they should fit in with the proportions of the com-
position and the covered space.
Where flowers and other vegetal forms establish independent surface pat-
terns following the law of even distribution (the English call this diaper treat-
ment, as distinguished from powdered work, where a ground is decorated
with an even spread of unconnected units), the retention of conventional

SSS)
 Semper

forms and especially the principle of flatness are again stylistic principles.
However, apparent obstacles of the kind produced by flowers should not
impede the step of anyone accustomed to ovations (in which even the tri-
umphal path is strewn with real flowers and palm branches); nor should they
unduly attract his attention. For this reason, the naturalistic treatment of such
surface patterns may fall within the limits of what is permitted in luxurious
rooms intended for solemn processions and audiences (but not for balls), pro-
vided that the previously mentioned law of proportion is taken into account.
We might also mention that the eye is readily satiated with frequently repeated
images when they demand artistic values in themselves or because of their
technical perfection. See below for the use of objects with tendentious content
in the decoration of floors.
Before we turn to this topic we should make some more general points
regarding what is permissible in colored floor dressings and the polychrome
treatment of images on them.

§ 14 The Coloring of Floors

The principle to be followed for polychrome floors — whether they consist of
carpet, mosaic, parquet, or anything else — derives simply from the basic con-
dition of a stylistically correct floor: it should not unduly occupy and capti-
vate the eye. It seems that nature in this regard—the way in which it covers
the ground with generally neutral, secondary, and tertiary tones— offers the
best clue and model for the stylistically correct and artistic treatment of floors.
Usually we see a gradation of tones of the same color and a distribution of
colors that, in their overall effect, produce a result roughly equidistant between
lightness and darkness. Pure unmixed colors are nowhere abundant, and even
the warm yellow of the sandy desert is tempered and muted by the blue reflec-
tion of the sky and by indeterminate violet earth tones. Sparingly distributed
strips of light and darker areas of shade, far from destroying the unity of
effect, serve only to express forms and to ensure that the unified effect does
not appear monotonous. Taken overall, as I have said, secondary and tertiary
mixed colors dominate, and among these violet is the most subdued and
coolest basic tone, green the most distinct and warmest. Often the basic tone
is gray, which in all its nuances inclines sometimes more toward violet, some-
times more toward green. In the former case it combines with the muted red
against the green that dominates both in terms of contrast; in the second case
it combines with green against the red, in this combination relating as a domi-
nant shade to green-gray as a basic tone, and to green as a middle tone.
It is wonderful how nature with its all-soothing harmony sometimes seems
to take a hand personally and “join in” where humans first attempt to do
things their own way.’ Just as the stylistically most correct carpet patterns
should be prepared first of all according to the nature of the raw materials
and according to the art of making fabrics from interwoven threads (which in
principle is and remains the same everywhere) —or perhaps according to the
even more primitive art of composing such coverings by joining regular pieces

134
 Textiles: General-Formal

of animal pelts or tree bark by means of artfully and decoratively treated

seams —in just the same way these original products of industry owe their
admirable harmony of colors mainly to the principle of dyeing threads that
are otherwise natural in color and using them in alternation with undyed
threads of the same kind. In this way everything is held together by the natu-
ral basic tone of the undyed raw material.
Here the products of the Canadian Indians are instructive. Their very orig-
inal and pleasing ornamental system consists of decorative and pleasantly col-
ored feather embroidery, or representations thereof painted on tree bark and
leather, from which they make their utensils, canoes, clothes, and carpets. The
reddish brown color of animal and vegetable skins forms the basis of their
polychromy. But they also weave mats from straw with great skill and natural
taste, in which case the straw’s yellow tone forms the basis of the polychromy.
For them, as for Negroes, who in their weaving prefer dark colors or contrast-
ing blacks and whites, the decorative art joins harmoniously with their natu-
ral skin colors.
The Chinese follow the exact same principle. They do not dye bleached
cotton or bleached silk but use the beautiful natural color of both materials as
a connecting and unifying tone for all colors. By this simple means it is easier
for them to combine the most lively color contrasts harmoniously. This is also
part of the secret of Tibetan shawls, with their magnificent colors muted and
connected by the dull yellow-white glow of the cashmere wool. (On this, see
also the later section on dyeing.)
This principle is of the greatest importance for understanding antique art
and, it should be noted, for contemporaneous practice. Recently, however, it
has been abandoned by European industries everywhere — to our greatest dis-
advantage, for instance, in porcelain manufacturing. Strictly speaking, we still
follow this principle, in a roundabout way, without knowing it. For example,
an oil painter (upon whose sublime field industrial artists no longer hesitate to
intrude) embraces the same principle when “setting up” his palette, and the
characteristic magical effect of watercolor painting also derives from it. Yet it
is good to know what one is doing, because it is then possible to achieve one’s
intention by simpler means. Industrial chemists, who tolerate no tutelage
when directing their large manufacturing plants, invest great pride and energy
in producing chemically pure colors. Thus they become the greatest obstacles
in returning to better, more natural principles for dyeing. (See the section on
dyeing below.)

§ 15 Different Methods of Combining Colors

I believe that there are only two conceivable methods for achieving repose
and harmony in colors (as well as in spatial combinations). The first is based
upon the principle of regular distribution, the second upon subordination or
authority.
According to the first method, the juxtaposition of many colors or formal
elements of equally intense effect produces a kind of luxuriant and flourishing

SIS
 Semper

monotony, in which the eye misses nothing, but neither does it find anything
special.
This repose that results from very rapid vibration, this uniformity of rich-
ness, is actually the Oriental principle of ornamentation in forms and colors.
To remain with hues for a moment, there are three basic colors: yellow, red,
and blue. They form a mean proportional relation through their activity or
ability to engage and stimulate the sense of sight: yellow relates to red in the
proportion of five to three; red to blue in the proportion of three to two; or,
more accurately, yellow to red as eight to five, and red to blue as five to three.
Thus if all three colors are to be juxtaposed so as to stimulate equally, the
mixture must be in the converse proportions. If the whole colored area con-
sists of sixteen parts, then eight parts should be allotted to the mildly irritant
blue, five parts to the moderately irritant red, and three parts to the highly
irritant yellow — provided that all three colors used are roughly equal to each
other in intensity, that is to say, tonal saturation. The same is true of mixed
colors. A mixture of eight parts blue, five parts red, and three parts yellow
produces a quite neutral gray. If yellow is juxtaposed with a secondary violet,
yellow occupies three parts and violet the other thirteen parts. But violet itself
consists of eight parts blue and five parts red. If, following the principle of
equal distribution, one combines red with a contrasting green, the red has to
occupy five parts of the surface, and green the remaining eleven parts as a
ground. If green, blue, and violet are juxtaposed, then (since blue occurs in all
three tones and overall is allotted only eight parts) the blue field should have
four parts, the green field two plus three, or five, the violet field two plus five,
or seven.
In their color distribution most Oriental patterns are arranged in similar
proportions; therefore each color is given its due, and the result is neutral. It
goes without saying that when one color gains in power and intensity and in
this respect is stronger than the other two juxtaposed colors, this color should
be reduced in quantity, so that a balance is maintained.
The two polar colors—black and white—have to be considered in two
ways in this context: first as basic tones, second as mediating tones. If only
one of the two color extremes (black or white) is the basic tone, the three pri-
mary colors should be distributed against this background in proportions of
eight, five, and three, and only that part of the (black or white) background
actually covered by the colors is to be counted as the sixteen-part unit. If both
basic tones are juxtaposed, this should happen in two ways. Either the black
or white should be dominant and the contrasting color should be used much
less, or they should follow the law of equal distribution, as in checkered
floors. The first of these two cases is almost the same as the one in which only
one of the two extremes forms the basic tone. The color ornament on the
dominant basic tone should be balanced against the ornament on the subordi-
nated basic tone with regard to lightness and darkness, so as to level the
opposition between the two extremes (that is, the black and white back-
ground) to a certain extent, depending on the circumstances. If black and

136
 Textiles: General-Formal

white are equally distributed as a ground, they balance themselves out. But
when a colored ornament is combined with them, it can be resolved in accor-
dance with the principle of mean proportionality expounded earlier and at
the same time— by the contrast of light and dark and dark and light — moder-
ate the contrast of the equally distributed backgrounds, which may otherwise
appear too harsh. Also, in the case of black and white backgrounds, a neutral
gray basic tone may often appear. This will not be included within the color
distribution according to the law of mean proportionality, so that only that
part of the background covered with arabesques and patterns will form the
sixteen-part surface unit within which the three primary colors of the orna-
ment have to be distributed according to the law of mean proportion. In com-
binations like these, however, a special tuning of the colors is always necessary
because the neutral background is also active as a color and thus always affects
one or the other basic color.
Black and white often serve as a mediator in Oriental polychromy, prefer-
ably as an edging for the colored parts and their internal details. As a way to
grant individual parts of the surface decoration a stronger presence and to
enhance overall unity by stretching, as it were, a fine lattice over the whole, it
is very effective. The choice of black or white for edging is not always easy
to make, although it goes without saying that generally dark areas should
have a light edging and light areas a dark one. Here, however, one should
take into account (and this makes the choice of border more difficult) that a
black border makes light areas even lighter and a white one makes dark ones
even darker.
Black and white can be replaced by red (a rich neutral Indian red), which
can be used as a border. Even more frequent and richer is an edging made
up of gold or silver threads. Like black and white, gold can be neutral and can
be used just like black and white, in other words, as a background and as an
edging. The glow of this exquisite medium gives it the attributes of the two
extremes of black and white, making it suitable for all combinations. At the
same time, in cases where it contributes to harmony, gold functions as a color,
namely, as a variation of yellow.
Subordination as a principle of ornamentation is the opposite of media-
tion. Here the contrasting colors and tones are not balanced by effects but are
intensified to a certain culminating point, which so dominates the system that
the unity of the overall effect is achieved through its predominant authority.
This is possible simply because the very combination of the subordinated
contrasting elements sustains and powerfully supports the authority of the
dominant element. Where forces combine to achieve a common goal, we find
unity in diversity.
Let us postpone the exposition of the theory of polychromy that emerges
from this principle of subordination until it can be applied directly as a whole.
Then it will be shown that such a system allows its elements the greatest free-
dom to develop and the greatest degree of independence within the limits to
which they are subject.”

Si,
 Semper

It is formed by a free combination of units that are essentially emancipated

from one another and that (again according to the principle of subordination
or of hierarchy, if we may employ this expression), when combined by means
of secondary elements that share a goal, present themselves as unified within a
diversity. Because of the subordinate role that the cover or any coating must
assume (enough has already been said about this above), it is evident that a
polychrome system, like the one last mentioned, can never be fully developed
on them. Covers are only the subservient, preparatory elements for a whole
whose center of reference is not the envelope or the cover, nor any outstand-
ing part on its surface, but the thing that is deemed unified by the envelope or
cover. The system of polychrome ornamentation that emerges from the princi-
ple of equal distribution is evidently the most suitable and perhaps the only
one for backgrounds of the kind that can be considered here, where only the
more general principles of style can be discussed. This is confirmed by the fact
that only in such a system can they present themselves as a self-contained
unity without exceeding the limits of their definition and stepping beyond
their subservient role. The Oriental principle of polychromy has at the same
time the inestimable advantage (which incidentally follows from the same
causes) that it can easily adapt itself to any surroundings and harmonize with
everything placed in contact with it. In individual cases, it is not difficult to
find for it the broadly appropriate mood, ranging between the extremes of
the lighthearted and the gloomy. In this respect it may be compared with the
simple shading between black and white through all gradations of gray, not-
withstanding the lively charm of color that it permits.

§ 16 Direction of Ornamental Motifs

We now move to another very important question: what direction should be
given to ornamental or figurative themes that by their nature have or should
have a top and bottom?
Let us first take the simpler case, a carpet or some floor dressing derived
from an original motif, covered with evenly distributed tendrils, arranged
along basically geometrical lines, or overstrewn with ornamental units mod-
eled on organic nature. What direction should the pattern take in this case?
What principles should determine top and bottom for the flowers and other
vegetal forms? If we are dealing with something standing upright or hanging
down, then the question answers itself: the top would of course correspond to
the top of the room. But here, to be strictly consistent, one looks down at the
heads of bouquets of flowers and similar things. As it happens, this resolves
the difficulty, and many Oriental carpet patterns are arranged according to
this principle, for example, the one in figure 1 of color plate 4, as well as the
Assyrian floor illustrated here (p. 139). An Indian carpet maker would never
make the mistake of using a pattern with rising tendrils suited only to wall
coverings—such as the one illustrated in figure 2 of the same color plate—
unless under the influence of European industry he had lost his original and
naive sense of art, which unfortunately is an all too common occurrence.

138
 Textiles: General-Formal

AS \NYy

TS

FITS

ie
YZ

eepe)
82 1600000
Assyrian carpet pattern engraved in stone (Br[itish] Museum)

But it is also possible to imagine a solution to the problem that involves

viewing the bouquet or other vegetal motifs in profile, namely, in which they
are distributed with such apparent irregularity that they lie in all possible
directions and therefore display no direction at all. Evenly distributed tendrils
create greater difficulties if one wants a directionless effect. Three approaches
are possible: one can allow the tendrils to take root at the carpet’s center,
from which they spread eccentrically toward the outer boundaries; conversely,
one can allow the tendrils to spread out from the walls and grow together
toward the middle; finally, one can allow them to cross in opposite directions
in a system of parallel lines. Of these three systems, the first two are appli-
cable and stylistically justified from a general point of view, although they are
inconvenient on the loom. Their different uses in given circumstances can be
seen from what immediately follows. As the last resort, the third approach is
difficult to execute and generally ends in confusion. For it is not enough to
allow the tendrils to cross over one another in two directions; they must, to
leave the field quite neutral with respect to direction, work against each other
in four directions. With difficulties as great as those created by tendril diapers,
it is better to leave them out altogether when discussing floors.
Let us now turn to the case where the carpet is ordered and divided into
concentric or regular compartments around a central field, bordered with ten-
drils or other vegetal ornaments. There should be decorative motifs with a top
and bottom within the compartments as well. For reasons that will soon
become apparent, we will not consider the central motif initially.

139
 Semper

Here it is first necessary to know the overall orientation of the dressed

floor, whether from outside in or from inside out. Examples will demonstrate
that both cases can be found.
Let us imagine first a square room enclosed by four arcades supported on
four square piers. The arcades form open passageways, and at the top the
Janus arch has cross vaulting, a calotte, or another kind of ceiling. An articu-
lated floor is to be designed to suit this ceiling —this is our first case. Now let
us imagine another square room of the same size whose walls are covered
with historic pictures or other objects to be viewed by a person standing in the
middle of the room. The entrance is subordinated, light comes from above,
and the whole has the character of an “interior” or spatial enclosure
— our
second case.
Let us deal first with the bem, which, according to what was said above, is
the first element in the threefold arrangement into which any articulated floor
should be divided. It has a dual function in each case. Its first function could
be said to be static or mechanical in that it encloses and encircles the carpet or
mosaic floor dressing; in this function it refers exclusively to what is enclosed,
limited, and held together. Its second function is again twofold: it refers as
much to what is enclosed as to the person who enters the room and is ulti-
mately the central reference point. It designates and symbolizes the beginning
or the end of the covered space, when one looks toward one side of the room.
The notions of beginning and end depend first of all on how people imagine
the purpose and nature of the thing; second, on how they relate to it spatially
and temporally, that is, by what they first grasp, tread upon, and see. Its oppo-
site is the end of the thing. In art, both elements of the concept, the beginning
and the end, should function together as much as possible and never clash.
Let us take the simple example of a fur covering made of animal pelts sewn
together. These animal pelts have a headpiece and a tail. Now if the edge of
this cover begins to define the termination of the room, the heads of the pieces
of which the fur is assembled should be directed inward, because then the
orientation of the animals that we visualize will harmonize with our own ten-
dency or direction. In the opposite case, it is more suitable to turn the heads
of the animal pelts toward the outside.
Given all this, it is now easy to determine the proper style of the hem, inso-
far as this style affects the more general aspects of the arrangement. Both
functions under discussion must stand out within it either separately or uni-
fied in a symbol and thus present themselves figuratively. In the former case
the hem should have a special trim inclined toward one side, whereby the hem
symbolizes the notion of enclosure and the trim the notion of end or begin-
ning. Here the hem remains completely uncharacterized with respect to these
two concepts; but it symbolizes all the more clearly (by means of the linear,
vegetal, or composite patterns decorating its surface) the function as an
enclosing band following the direction of its longitudinal extent. It is possible
to connect this band to what is enclosed —that is, to the actual carpet or simi-
lar covering—by means of an intermediate element acting as a seam (see “The

140
 Textiles: General-Formal

Seam” below). The vegetal-tendril patterns, curling acanthus leaves, and

meanders of the hem should not have any upward or downward direction but
should be directed only along the length of the hem and should be the same
from whatever side they are viewed —from inside the room looking out or
standing outside the room.
Depending on whether the room is arranged from the outside in or from
the inside out (see above), a trim in the case we are discussing first should run
either inside or outside the hem and its seam, parallel with both. As a rule this
trim is not sharply delimited —that is, concluded by a line that again runs par-
allel with the hem—but runs out in a fringe. In the first of these two cases the
fringe points inward, in the second outward. Often these trimmings consist
not of fringes but of vegetal forms, leaf wreaths, flower calyxes, and so on.
These should always and without exception point in the direction in which
the room ends, or to which the start of the room leads.
These two symbols, hem and trim, can also be combined by allowing the
band its ostensible resistance and ability to enclose in the direction of its lon-
gitudinal development but at the same time rousing it from its neutrality with
regard to representing the concepts of ending or beginning, that is, by giving
its evolving linear, vegetal, or composite tendril patterns a direction from the
outside in or from the inside out. In figures 1 and 2 of plate 4, and figure 2 of
plate 10, the trimmings are neutral and evolve longitudinally. In figure 1 of
plate 10, the outer trim is directed from the outside in because of the inscrip-
tion. It hardly needs to be mentioned that the particular character of these
symbols depends on the circumstances and that their effects can be intensi-
fied: in part qualitatively by choosing more intensive and more powerful char-
acteristics, in part quantitatively by repeating identical or similar motifs next
to one another.
The rest of the carpet’s ornamentation is classified in terms of top and bot-
tom based on whether the hem is directed inward (toward the carpet) or out-
ward. If, for example, one thinks of the area inside the hem as divided by lines
into four squares and four rectangles surrounding a central square, and if
each of these fields is to be filled with arabesques combining vegetal and ani-
mal forms, these panels in the case of the enclosed room should be directed
from the inside out but in the room defined by the Janus arch from the outside
in. In the former case the animal heads and plant crowns should point toward
the hem; in the latter case they should point toward the middle.
The center can be filled in with concentric motifs of foliage and the like,
but they should differ organically in each case. In the open room the foliage is
rooted at the edge, as it were; in the enclosed room it is rooted at the center
of the field. In both cases, rosettes, wreaths, and other ornamental forms
seemingly viewed from above are naturally appropriate and usable. They have
already been discussed and do not particularly need to be considered here, as
they are neutral with respect to what we are trying to demonstrate. Any ques-
tionable cases that in essence fall into one or the other category can be judged
without difficulty by comparing them with the examples mentioned here.

141
Semper

Floor in the pronaos of the Temple of Olympian Zeus (scale 1:50)

 Textiles: General-Formal

Instead of a rosette, the center can be often decorated with a pedestal, a

candelabra, an urn, or some other object that is directionless in plan. This is
perfectly justified in stylistic terms, whereas representations of a historical
nature —such as the basin of Sosos with doves drinking, the tritons on the old
mosaic floor in the pronaos at Olympia (see the woodcuts on pp. 142, 144),
or Alexander’s battle from Pompeii—can be justified stylistically only when a
room is to some extent a mean between the Janus arch and the enclosed inte-
rior. It can be a room that leads to another room or one whose architectural
effect points toward the center but is neutral with respect to right and left.
Only in these or similar spatial arrangements is a historical field somewhat
justified stylistically. Of course it must display the image upright to someone
entering the room—that is, the head must be turned toward the interior, the
feet toward the entrance. In general we should reiterate that scenes on floors
do not meet the strict standards of good taste and that, if such decorations are
desired anyway, they should be placed not in the middle but preferably in
intermediate fields, where they then relate to a central work of art or other
such feature and should be arranged from the outside in or concentrically
toward this work. I imagine most floors with historical motifs that have sur-
vived from antiquity, or at least the most beautiful, were conceived not with
the intention of being walked upon but to be placed around a monument, or
they were intended to mark the temenos of the same and were probably also
surrounded by barriers.
The discussion above is fully confirmed and explained by the three floors
illustrated with woodcuts in this section. The fragment of a floor design
shown at the beginning of this section, which is undoubtedly a limestone
carving in imitation of an Assyrian carpet (the floor was acquired for the
British Museum by [Austen Henry] Layard), shows a vegetal trim beyond the
hem, facing out. The hem is decorated with buttons or rosettes, a symbol that
at the same time denotes a seam (see “The Seam”). The larger vegetal orna-
ments are so arranged as to convey no direction; they form, as it were, open
lotus calyxes seen from above.
This floor motif is extremely important from an art historical perspective
because it is the oldest surviving example of a decorated pavement. Yet the
mosaic floor presented here in my own drawing of the pronaos of the Temple
of Olympian Zeus is no less interesting, because it was probably executed at
the same time the temple was built (it was covered over with a second, pre-
sumably Roman floor consisting of small hexagonal slabs of Oriental ala-
baster). It is to my knowledge the oldest known example of a genuinely Greek
mosaic work. Hem, seam, and trimming are here separate entities and func-
tion only for themselves. The meander, neutral with regard to the inside and
outside, forms the hem; next comes the zigzag, a symbol especially well suited
for the seam — indeed almost its primeval symbol. Only then comes the trim
or edge termination, which marks outside and inside. It points inward but
only moderately so, as the corners of the wreaths are turned outward. The
central field is correctly oriented for those entering the temple. This detail of

143
 ry
es
a
4Cy
[J
Maes
ge Youll, oan
Mand SONI ee
TRS TMS
Ss
S<\ \es \]

OSES
SS SSS

Ie
SS
PANS

f-
I a (ie Us
rae

|
TAS
oe

f1

Detail of the floor (scale four times the above)

144
 Textiles: General-Formal

the lotus wreath is characteristic of a transitional period of the Greek style,

which still half belongs to the early period.
I sketched the third example, a fully geometric, Roman mosaic floor, in a
wine cellar near the triumphal arch in Orange in the autumn of 1830. I do not
know if it has been published elsewhere. It is, in any case, a very charming
example of the distribution of light and dark areas, and it avoids the stylistic
error common even in ancient floors of visual bumps and holes created by
alternating colors and designs. Equally remarkable is its perfect neutrality
with regard to inside and out, achieved by its rich disposition and by neutral-
izing contrasting motifs.

7
VVVVVVVVrVV
VV VV v
BESEARRRARDARERARR RARER

UT
UV
NAAAAAAAA
A44444ad

bd
INNaay ©

es
CI
Ed
7
BRaRaRRRRRRRRRRRRARRARE
“dA
AAddaaddaaagdassaadaaadad

oom
Ad
is ReRRRRAD
\44444444
mA
mA
m4
ww
=
4
m4
m4
ww
m4
mA

Roman floor in Orange, from my own sketch (scale 1:10)

The meander-like hem consisting of plinths is in itself neutral. It is fol-

lowed by a motif that notches the quadratic inner space on all four sides, and
thus it essentially works inward. The seam follows this band motif in all its
windings; it is by nature more laterally oriented and actually functions only
along its longitudinal extension. Internally, there are now four radiant forms
that surround a square, which is again kept wholly neutral. But those four
radiant stars work distinctly from the inside outward and maintain the static
equilibrium against the notches of the outer band. It is difficult to believe that

145
 Semper

these stylistic details were actually intended by the architect, but they do exist
and there are few ancient patterns that would suit our modern parquet crafts-
men as well as this one.
The division of floors becomes more complex, but also clearer and more
understandable in certain situations, the more it moves away from quadratic
neutrality, the more distinctly the contrasts of front and rear, right and left
stand out spatially. The front usually aligns with the main entrance; the rear is
denoted by the main elements of the interior and the defining spatial termina-
tion. In a church it is the altar; in a Greek temple it was the statue of the deity;
in a Roman atrium it was the tablinum, to which everything in front of it was
spatially related. In every parlor it should be the fireplace —that domestic
altar of family life that in the north unfortunately finds a poor replacement in
the stove, at least in the way in which we design and place it. A comparison to
what our forefathers knew to do with a stove would suffice to characterize the
current state of taste and culture.

The Cover as a Horizontal Spatial Termination Above

C7, The Relation of Ceiling to Floor and Walls

Like the carpet, the ceiling represents the concept of a horizontal surface that
initially excludes the secondary concepts of right and left, front and back.
Here one can also imagine the horizontal spatial enclosure as concentrated
around the centerpoint, which is both the beginning and the end of all stylistic
relations that—by means of subdivisions, lines, and patterns —represent the
absolute concept of a horizontal plane on the ceiling.
The unarticulated expression of the spatial concept is, as with the floor, an
unpatterned, uniform fabric enclosed by a hem.
Next comes the ceiling divided into equal or different fields; its rhythmi-
cally alternating divisions are formed by intersecting systems of parallel lines,
similar to the kinds of patterns so popular in floors. Richer subdivisions fol-
lowing the principle of tripartition, such as that which forms around the cen-
terpoint of floors, can also be used. Here again, the effect is not from bottom
to top, as it is with wall dressings, but either extends in all directions or
focuses toward a center. In both cases the tendencies of the two horizontal ter-
minations of the room are largely the same, although, as we will show, the
two styles will differ in details.
But there are other essential differences between the two:
The ceiling is not walked upon, and is situated above. It may be uneven.
The principle of surface decoration in this case derives not, as with floors,
from its material purpose or even from a general principle of style but chiefly
from the techniques used to construct it. We must certainly take into account
that the technique of the weaver, which is quite correctly applied to surface
decoration, was also the original technique in this case. This is to a certain
extent self-evident and can also be proven historically, as will be shown in the
chapters on the technical history of the textile arts. Thus textile surface deco-

146
 Textiles: General-Formal

ration is also typical here and only underwent a plastic modification in the
course of stylistic development without surrendering or renouncing its tradi-
tional, even hieratically sanctioned type. Another major distinction between
the styles of the two horizontal dressings —the ceiling and the floor —is opti-
cal. When looking upward the eye sees the opposite part of the ceiling most
comfortably and soonest, whereas in looking at the floor it views the closest
area first. Basically, it is fear or caution that compels the eye to examine the
closest area of the floor first.
Just as flower-covered meadows and the neutral tones of the ground repre-
sent a natural analogy for the carpet, so the starry canopy of the heavens with
its azure blue has since ancient times —as long as humanity has embroidered,
woven, painted, and built— been the model for those concerned with prepar-
ing upper horizontal terminations of a room. In this regard, too, ceilings and
carpets differ fundamentally. Good taste rejects a system of floor decoration
that attracts the eye too much to the ground, because this direction does not
enhance the sense of being human (to mention only one reason). It is equally
appropriate to good taste and human dignity that the eye should be drawn
upward by colors that are airy, light, and at the same time restful, and by light
ornamentation of the ceiling. The ceiling should overcome the oppressive feel-
ing evoked by any separation between us and the open sky, to the extent that
this is permissible without at the same time violating the principle that any
dressing (including ceilings) should always be subordinate and background—
never the most important thing. In any case, the ceiling should form the high-
est scale, the climax of the effect, and it should exceed the decoration of the
walls in its splendor; it is the dominant and concluding chord in the harmony
of the decorative system.

§ 18 Direction of Themes Represented on Ceilings

After these remarks on the overall role of the ceiling and how it accords with
the other parts that terminate the room, let us proceed with a few remarks on
the direction of the ornamental and figurative objects depicted on it.
In the strictest style for floors, anything depicted there should be seen as if
looking down at the top, and excellent Indian (and other) carpets are actually
decorated according to this principle. Likewise, the strict style for ceilings
requires that anything depicted there should be as if seen from below—a
reverse bird’s-eye view, as it were. Indeed, this is the case in all ceilings of
antiquity —the richest and most organically perfected architectural creations
that human genius, directed by correct stylistic principles, has ever produced.
In every age the coffered ceiling (an ancient invention that only the Greeks
perfected and articulated completely) has maintained its high architectural
grandeur.’ The Romans transferred it even to the vault and dome, never aban-
doning it entirely in temples, only in some secular works, such as domestic
ceilings, baths, and so on.
In all of creation, only two or at the most three things provide motifs to be
used for decorative purposes in the reverse bird’s-eye perspective mentioned

147
 Semper

above. These are the stars in the heavenly vault, birds soaring in the air, and
perhaps the shading branches of trees with blossoms and fruit hanging down.
And it is these things only (besides things taken from the loom and associated
with the idea of a primeval canopy, such as plaitings, labyrinths, and similar
ornaments) that have been the typical emblems of coffered ceilings from time
immemorial. Here we need to recall only briefly the stone ceilings of Egyptian
temples painted with stars, winged suns, and broad-winged eagles hovering
against a general azure background; the starry ceiling of the Greek uraniskos
[vault]; the rosette dome of the Pantheon with its (now lost) bronze decora-
tions; or, finally, the wooden ceilings of ancient Christian basilicas, Roma-
nesque ceilings and vaults, the Gothic groin vaulting of the Sainte-Chapelle,
Assisi,? the cathedrals in Siena and Orvieto, and the Certosa in Pavia. This
last ceiling, which enlivens this ancient motif with a new freshness, is already
a part of the transition to the Renaissance; it handles the theme with great
freedom and joins it with less severe motifs (comfortably adapted from the
newly emancipated representational arts)—taken partly from the rich and
fanciful ceilings of the Roman baths being rediscovered during that period of
the sixteenth century. The small ceiling panels (kalymmatia) placed in the
opaea [openings] between the joists were painted with stars. Omnidirectional,
like the plastic acanthus tulips or so-called rosettes that later replaced them,
they presented no difficulties in this regard.!0 The eagles and winged suns on
Egyptian ceilings oriented their flight toward the people entering the halls.
They were replaced in Christian times by seraphim, either heads or full-length
angels, or by rings with four pairs of wings, crisscrossing through each other
in all four directions. Such themes were apparently designed for decorative

aa

Ky 2
WY Zi)
aan geet a

Seraphim (neo-Byzantine Athens)

use, specifically for ceilings and vaults, to avoid problems that would result
from direction. They were followed, to be sure, by the other heavenly hosts
who surround God the Father, God the Son, or the complete Trinity with
Mary in a glory. The celestial hosts are arranged in a circle around the central

148
 Textiles: General-Formal

group, which for its part is oriented like those Egyptian eagles, that is, with
their heads toward the main door and feet toward the sanctuary over which
they hover. (See color plate 8, a Byzantine painting on the interior dome of a
small church in Athens.)
From this period forward, pictorial works on historical themes, enclosed
in special frames, are increasingly used as the main feature in the decoration
of ceilings. The Romans (and surely the Greeks as well) had given them only
slight ornamental significance in private dwellings and secular buildings. The
rule concerning the direction of framed pictorial works is easy to grasp, pro-
vided the covered room is somewhat directional and not, as frequently occurs,
completely neutral. The same is true of all ornamental work composed of ele-
ments with a top and bottom. One need only think of the flat or vaulted ceil-
ing as a transparent glass panel behind which the walls, which may be of any
conceivable height, remain visible.1 Anything painted upright on this ideal
vertical wall surface beyond the ceiling should also appear upright even if it is
only a projection on the ceiling (originally thought of as transparent). This
simple rule is also the starting point for that intricate art, the so-called per-
spective curieuse, that is able to represent the most difficult architectural com-
binations together with lavish groups of figures on any ceiling surface in a
way that does justice to art and is true to nature. In the Renaissance it was
often used by [Donato] Bramante, Balthasar Peruzzi, and other masters, but it
was later misused by the Jesuits with utter lack of taste.
Thus any figurative object with a head and a foot should be rooted by its
feet on the cornice of the wall, and this goes for all four walls and for the full
extent of an enclosing (circular or oval) wall surface. The tips or heads of the
upright figures would collide in the middle of the ceiling if this were not pre-
vented by appropriate divisions. Usually the main ceiling motifs are placed
exactly in the middle of the ceiling or vault, in the neutral area equidistant
from all four walls. This can make it difficult to determine their direction in
certain cases, as it frequently depends on local and random circumstances. In
rooms with a specific orientation, like the naves of churches, the central motifs
are arranged so that they are upright from the point of view of worshipers
entering the church: they have their heads toward the door and their feet
toward the altar. More difficult, by and large, is the orientation of central
motifs in the aisles and square Janus-arched passages so common in the domed
churches of the Renaissance.
Central motifs in the vaults of side aisles should be oriented for someone
entering the aisle from the nave through the arch of the main walls to worship
in the chapel adjacent to this part of the aisle. Given this, the subject of the
central section of the aisle vault should have its head toward the nave and its
foot toward the chapel. But very often this arrangement will present optical
problems, as when it is necessary to place oneself against the light (and not
the reverse) to see the picture in its true elevation. In many cases this consider-
ation governs the orientation of pictures and other objects. The image should
be placed so that one views it with the best light at one’s back, unless concerns

149
 Semper

about hierarchy, etiquette, or other conditions connected with the use of the
room militate against this.
On this score [Jean] Bérain’s masterpiece, the Galerie d’Apollon in the
Louvre with its magnificent vaulted ceiling designed and executed by [Charles]
Lebrun, provides an interesting case study. In truth, it is nothing but a dazzling
corridor. It is very long and no wider than forty feet, with the entrance on one
of the narrow sides and a large balcony window opposite it at a great distance.
The entire left side is perforated with windows, and its paneling is lavishly yet
moderately and tastefully decorated by Bérain with arabesques en camaieu on
a gilt ground. The opposite wall is also paneled and runs without interruption
from beginning to end, with the exception of some richly decorated doors.
Undoubtedly it was always intended to be hung with pictures, and it has no
central reference point. The bister-gray paneling is decorated to the height of
the dado with fine arabesques in the same style as the window panels. The
paneling concludes with a strongly projecting cornice that crowns the wall;
the segmental barrel vault of the ceiling begins above that. On the cornice sit
colossal stucco groups enclosing the round picture frames, also in white-gray
stucco. These contain medallions executed in a green tone and are surrounded
by the magnificent flowers painted by [Jean-]Baptiste [Monnoyer]. In the
spaces between these groups there are more pictures, by Lebrun and other
masters. The entire ceiling is divided into pictorial fields separated by frames
and friezes in bister-gray stucco. The main motifs are playfully linked by mod-
erate base grounds and ornaments tending to golden brown, acting as a tran-
sition between the white stucco and the large oil paintings and creating an
incomparably harmonious, splendid, and light overall effect: magnificence
moderated by taste. I know of no space comparable to this wonderful gallery
in terms of its general architectural harmony. The principal picture in the cen-
ter was completed by [Eugéne] Delacroix just a few years ago, when the
gallery was restored under the direction of [Félix-Louis-Jacques] Duban and
[Polycarpe-Charles] Séchan. Its orientation obliges the observer to step in
front of the window and turn his back to it to see the painting properly —cer-
tainly the most suitable disposition in this case. The shape of the gallery might
suggest turning the picture so that the visitor to the Louvre’s art collection
walking through the lavishly decorated corridor could see and enjoy it en pas-
sant. The orientation chosen by Delacroix for the ceiling painting makes the
middle field of the gallery’s wall side a central point in the space that, as has
already been noted, has no actual purpose except to be a corridor or passage.
The idea merely hinted at so far could be fully expressed only if some power-
fully protruding statue, equal to Delacroix’s magnificent painting, were to
break the monotony of the wall surface precisely in the painting’s center.
This presents us with an opportunity to defend lavish ceiling decoration,
especially ceiling paintings. Artistic puritans and neo-Gothics oppose them
with a special fury; almost all theorists, art critics, and knowledgeable laymen
have conspired against them. Yet the best painters have chosen to dedicate a
great deal of hard work to precisely those problems presented by localities of

150
 Textiles: General-Formal

this sort. The Sistine Chapel ceiling was the divine Michelangelo’s favorite
work and his greatest achievement in painting. Raphael took great pleasure in
his ceiling paintings for the Farnesina and the Chigi Chapel. Almost all of
Italy’s best painters sought and achieved their greatest fame in ceiling paint-
ings and painted domes, among them Domenichino, Guido Reni, Correggio,
Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese. [Anton] Raphael Mengs first achieved
fame with his ceiling in the Villa Albani, and our contemporary masters have
also produced their best and most celebrated work for the vaults and ceilings
of the Glyptothek and the Louvre. And the ceilings of great masters would not
have acquired and retained this reputation over and above their other work
if the majority of the art-loving public did not also prefer precisely these pic-
tures. This is clearly the case — notwithstanding the theories of aestheticians. I
think the preference of masters and the uninhibited public for ceiling paint-
ings can be better explained more by physiological and—if you wish —psy-
chological reasons, than by material ones. It is certainly true that for material
reasons floors are never and walls are very seldom suited for paintings in the
high style, and even more rarely do we fully enjoy them. When the so-called
Gothic style abolished the existence of the wall (the independent spatial limit,
not structurally or mechanically active), there were no fields left for painting
as such, except for the caps of groin vaults and the transparent glass walls of
windows. For paintings can and should develop only on independent spatial
limits with no mechanical function. Beginning with the Renaissance, the wall
has partly come back into its own but to a much lesser extent in public monu-
ments (churches for example) than in residential architecture. Churches are
still Gothicized in the sense that nave walls offer few smooth surfaces; they
are broken by airy arches below and by galleries above, or they are architec-
turally altered so as to resemble supporting elements of the building’s struc-
ture. Thus only the spandrels over the arches of the nave, ceilings, vaults, and
domes remain available for actual painting. In palaces and secular public
buildings, however, especially in our now so important monuments intended
to house collections, wall surfaces already have a projected purpose: they can-
not be a picture, as they are supposed to have pictures or other artistic, scien-
tific, or luxury objects hung from or leaning against them. Although there are
many exceptions and occasions favorable to wall painting, painting generally
seeks a quieter spot for undisturbed creativity and effect. Thus, for very mun-
dane and material reasons, art is placed up in the air; down here we cannot
think of anything special to do with it. It is only in our way.
Art may even enjoy its existence in peaceful exile. Up there, at least, it is
not so easily disturbed and endangered without expensive ladders and scaf-
folds. It is also reasonably safe from the shortsighted glance of the connois-
seur and the aesthetician’s magnifying glass: neither can find fault with every
brush stroke, and thus they are compelled to grasp it as a whole in its overall
intention (as they always should). Although this advantage proves to be illu-
sory in practice—thanks to opera glasses and [Georg Friedrich von] Reichen-
bach’s telescopes—it does to a certain extent reassure the artist, who works

ilfeyd
 Semper

with more confidence on a piece that is intended to be seen from a distance

that the average, healthy, unaided eye is compelled for material reasons to
maintain. Astronomers or people with poor eyesight do not concern him, for
his work is not intended for them; nor does he intend it for flatterers, slug-
gards, and snobs —those for whom it is too much effort to hold their noses up
higher in the air than the etiquette of pride prescribes, those who find it
“frightfully fatiguing” to look up and thus content themselves with a brief
coup d’oeil at the picture, which they find perfectly adequate.
Nothing is more advantageous for a work of art than being removed from
close, vulgar, and direct contact or from a person’s usual sightline. The habit
of lazy vision has so blunted the human optic nerve that it recognizes the
charms and proportions of colors and shapes only as if they were veiled. This
is proven by the phenomenon known to all artists: that distant views, a sunset
or a hazy mountain scene—if we look at them the wrong way, say through
our legs—all gain immeasurably and take on a clarity of outline and a glory
of color that makes them seem like something from another world, from a
higher creation. We gain a similar advantage by viewing paintings with our
head at an unusual angle; the awkwardness of the reading inundates them
with the same magic. Moreover, one should not stare at a good picture for too
long. When the neck tires, it has been long enough. When rested, the eye will
again become receptive to color contrasts and the right proportions of tones
and forms.” A viewing that takes longer necessarily ends in color confusion.
As a result of the effects of the so-called mixed color contrast, the whole
appears to be covered with a general muddy tone.
The same reasons that speak for ceiling paintings also justify the principle
of treating the ceiling with the maximum degree of decorative richness
allowed, given the purpose of the room. Thus, allowing the ceiling to domi-
nate all other decoration conforms with the law of proportion in both rela-
tions and colors, which demands that the ceiling should also be airy, delicate,
supported, and floating. The concept of floating freely is irrevocably con-
nected with the concept of horizontal ceilings and with every other covering
of a room; the more clearly and organically this concept is expounded, the
more the work approaches its ideal. This view in no way hinders the concen-
tration of ceiling decoration, which occasionally can be combined with a very
sober treatment of walls and floors. Thus the splendor of the inaccessible ceil-
ing in a sense compensates for the severity, seriousness, and sobriety of the
immediate surroundings, and even conveys a certain grandeur and festive
dedication through its reflection. I have taken a number of such risks in my
own architectural practice, not without a modicum of good fortune.
Although I have advocated ceiling decorations in general and the use of
historical paintings on the upper surfaces of spatial enclosures in particular,
and thus opposed the objection raised against the practice—namely, that such
work is uncomfortable to view—the decorative importance that I attach to
the ceiling as a primary decorative element nevertheless entails the demand to
observe a certain moderation in ceiling height, already materially prescribed

OZ
 Textiles: General-Formal

by human physical limitations and by the organ of sight. This must be consid-
ered in relation to a viewing angle that permits at least part of the ceiling to be
seen without too much discomfort. In reversing the argument applied to ceil-
ing paintings, I therefore reject any excessively high and slender spatial pro-
portions, especially when a space is not sufficiently developed in length. Such
spaces arise from a false and one-sided architectural —or rather, construc-
tional—theory and are now being passed off with an even falser sentimental-
ity as the most sublime work, indeed as the only appropriate and permissible
expression of genuinely Christian-Germanic faith and grandeur.

The Seam

§ 19 The Structural Significance of the Seam

The unassuming nature of this heading should not cause anyone to underesti-
mate its significance in relation to art and style. The seam is an expedient that
was invented to join pieces of a homogeneous nature — namely, surfaces — into
a whole. Originally used in clothing and coverings, it has through an ancient
association of ideas and even through linguistic usage become the universal

Assyrian vegetal entanglement (see p. 156, right)

cos
 Semper

analogy and symbol for any joining of originally discrete surfaces in a tight
connection. A most important and prime axiom for artistic practice is most
simply, most originally, and at the same time most cogently expressed in the
seam—the principle of making a virtue out of necessity.'3 It teaches us that
anything that is and must be patchwork, because the material and means at
our disposal are insufficient, should not be made to appear otherwise. If some-
thing is originally separate we should characterize it not as one and undivided
but, by deliberately stressing how the parts are connected and interlaced
toward a common end, all the more eloquently as coordinated and unified.
Astonishing is the subtlety with which half-civilized peoples who are
bound by telluric chains to the law of necessity and who create things more or
less arbitrarily nevertheless recognize the stylistic law at work here. Whether
this primitive state is original or a result of degeneration does not matter, for
the history of art shows that in this respect the beginning and the end of civi-
lization meet. The whole theory and practice of art is essentially based on this
motive, combined with a few other related motives. We admire the art and
taste with which the Iroquois and other North American tribes sewed their
badger pelts and deer skins using feathers, gut strings, animal sinews, even
spun threads. We admire how this patchwork produces a tasteful and colorful
embroidery, a principle of ornamentation that forms the basis of an authentic
artistic development unfortunately stifled in embryo.

Entangled snakes on the aegis of Athena, Dresden Museum (see p. 156, right)

154
 Textiles: General-Formal

The Romans and Byzantine Greeks admired similar achievements in our

“barbaric” German forefathers, who in our youth were ridiculously presented
as Savages wrapped in untanned skins. They were so skilled in the art of pelt
preparation, tanning, and particularly embroidering and trimming the tanned
hides that their leatherwear, especially reindeer jerkins (renones), were the
fashionable winter dress for high-ranking Romans as early as the third and
fourth century. In the late fourth century Emperor Honorius, seeking to pre-
vent Gothic fashion from being the precursor of Gothic rule, passed a sump-
tuary law that prohibited, on pain of severe punishment, the wearing of these
lavishly embroidered, imported fur garments. The decorations on these furs,
whose nap faced inward and was visible only at seams and borders, arose
from the skillful development of seam embroidery. Brightly colored red, blue,
and green leather and—if Tacitus has been correctly understood — perhaps
opalescent fish skins as well were inserted into the main sections of the fur to
accentuate the seam; this was done using decorative scroll embroidery, exactly
in the Canadian fashion. Thus—as can be seen from the Russian fur boots
with which we are more familiar —they are indeed very instructive and beau-
tiful specimens of the artistic technique under discussion here, an especially
interesting one for the theory of style. We need not go into the details, at least
at this point, of seam embroidery as practiced not only by all Eastern peoples
but everywhere folk industries display a certain freshness and naiveté—the
practices vary, to be sure, but all follow the same principle. It forms the actual
material basis for all surface ornamentation.
The extent to which artists in antiquity followed the principle of openly
acknowledging that the materials in dressings [Bekleidungswesen]'4 were
assembled is something about which Assyrian bas-reliefs, Egyptian wall paint-
ings, and above all Hellenic and Etrusco-Italic vase paintings provide ample
and highly instructive evidence — especially with regard to dressing in the nar-
rower sense of the word, that is, as costume, clothing, and drapery. This prin-
ciple was no longer used and was deliberately renounced as soon as the
inadequacy of materials or means made it necessary to assemble something
from parts, whose form then had to be characterized, by means of a shared
dressing, not as something unified but as a single piece. This follows logically
from the preceding discussion and from the no less compelling and abundant
evidence offered by the art of antiquity or of any superior artistic period. (See
the next chapter and throughout the course of the work.)
Given that the binding and linking element that combines two or more sur-
faces into one is of almost primeval validity and significance as an artistic sym-
bol, it is not surprising that it also gained a mystical and religious significance
that is associated everywhere with the traditions of the oldest civilizations and
that is in fact the surest way of identifying them. Among these civilizations,
however, no symbol has a secret meaning that is more far-reaching and more
broadly disseminated than that of the mystical knot—the modus Herculeus
[Herculean knot], the bow knot, the labyrinth, the loop, or any other related
form and name for this sign. In every theogonic and cosmogonic system it is

55)
 Semper

WWE r77
UU Hh li

¥ D-H

7) Alam
SHINN

A 3
ure ' i IS

The caduceus of Hermes as a Irish and Franconian Saxon Scandinavian

knot and symbol of commerce entangled snakes; the Egyptian asp

the universal symbol for the primeval chain of things —for necessity, which is
older than the world and the gods. It is that which joins and commands every-
thing. The sacred knot is chaos itself: a complex, elaborate, self-devouring
tangle of serpents from which arise all “structurally active” ornamental
forms, and into which they irrevocably return after the cycle of civilization

156
 Textiles: General-Formal

Ai

=
:

=
=

= SA
ND
a

Egyptian vegetal entanglement

has been completed. We find it therefore spreading rapidly (indeed almost

always identical or at least very closely related in essence) at the beginning
and end of every great social order. Even forms produced by a refined under-
standing are found to share striking similarities among peoples who appear to
have not the slightest contact or tribal connection with one another. And yet
if anything speaks for the theory that all nations share a common origin, it is
the community of this tradition and a few related ones and their identical
meaning —as an artistic symbol as well as in terms of mysticism and religion.
I have, from what was available to me, collected some examples of such sym-
bols from a wide range of time periods and from peoples wholly foreign to
one another. The fact that a technique has everywhere a natural and therefore
necessarily similar starting point does not in itself sufficiently account for the
remarkable formal correspondence of these symbols among all peoples.

§ 20 The Seam as Artistic Symbol

The seam differs from the band discussed above both in structure and in prin-
ciple. The seam works across the width of its extension; the band, along the
length.

WNB\7
 Semper

WNOOAITIL ONE LOUt

UI
KAKI
ORISSA
5

Cross-stitch from an Assyrian gown

In the seam there is an interaction from left to right, which can be most
simply represented by a zigzag or a double zigzag, an image consistent with
the technical means used in sewing. I will pass over here many more devel-
oped forms and patterns that in part arise from this simplest of motifs and in
part embody the structural-formal concept under discussion in simpler or
more complex compositions quite independently of this motif—there will be
an opportunity to return to this subject in the next chapter.!5 But one remark
about the most general stylistic justification for these ornamental forms is
appropriate here, namely, that they should refer directly to the units to be
joined. The first impression they make must always be that they form a chain,
move back and forth, fasten, tie, tack, or do anything else related to this basic
concept. This function also implies that the accessory ornamental element
also corresponds to the nature and propensity of the elements tied and stitched
together, from which it then follows that the ornament also draws attention
to whatever has the stitched cover and thus reveals it as something unified and
as the final reference.
Apart from those types derived from techniques, which have already been
described in their simplest form, certain symbols borrowed from nature, which
it offers in relative abundance, are the best expression of this. Through the
most direct association of ideas, such symbols awaken in us the feeling or
awareness that these linking elements are entirely appropriate to their func-
tion in every respect.
When translated ornamentally and stylistically into the material, such nat-
ural symbols (tendrils of creepers, clinging organs of the vine or the helix, the
network of the melon, the talons and claws of animals, the jaws of beasts)
provide motifs for ornamental decoration, evoking any mood one could wish
for, based on the choice of motifs and their treatment in color and form,
whether simple or complex, serious or lighter.
At the same time, the structural dependence and function of these motifs
demands that they neither exceed the limits of eurythmically regulated orna-
ment nor offer any scope to higher tendentious symbolism, as the latter (as
has already been stated in the introduction) can and should develop only on a
neutral, not technically and structurally functioning ground. Although these
remarks have a quite specific application here, they also hold more universally
for the structurally functioning parts of an artistically treated form. This law
is a basic principle of style, and it appears in textiles only in its greatest origi-
nality and simplicity —that is why it is best discussed here.
In the next section we will show how these same ornamental forms derived
from the processes of sewing, tacking, and knotting are also transferred to
other artistic endeavors related either distantly or not at all to the art of dress-

158
 Textiles: General-Formal

ing, and how in such cases naturalistic imitation and tendentious art are to be
avoided. The ornamental treatment of the theme should be conventional and
fanciful: in part because of the need to let the technical function appear as
clearly as possible, in part because of the opposition between an art-form that
is intended as structural (which tolerates no direct association of ideas that
could be derived from the purely technical significance of the chosen orna-
ment) and tendentious art (which has nothing in common with the structure
and technical assembly of the work). The strict Doric style, for instance,
strove to avoid any peripheral idea that might arise in the ornamental treat-
ment of certain natural forms that could be confused with what was denoted.
Just how much it strove can be seen in the painted series of leaves on the
Doric cyma. They are reminiscent of no particular leaf, are purely conven-
tional in color, and are treated as unrealistically as possible. They give only
what they should: the notion of the organic-elastic inner resistance of plant
life to lifeless gravity as such. More on this later.
The seam [Naht] is linguistically and conceptually very closely related to
the rivet [Niethe]. Consequently, the rivet is also self-evident as a symbol of
the concept under discussion here. Perhaps the nail head, which appears in
surface decoration as a rosette, became a decorative motif carried over from
secondary metallo-technical usage into the actual textile practice of dressing,
but it may have perhaps originated in the latter as a button or lace. Using but-
tons to fasten the connecting parts of garments was a Doric custom that dis-
placed the lavish use of embroidered seams in dressing — which had once been
a common practice among Greeks as well.

§ 21 Contrasting Direction of Seam and Band

The contrast between seam and band (which in basic form are identical, since
both are elongated strips approximating a line) is not expressed simply and
solely by differences in their formal and decorative treatment. It is at least as
important to show that they are almost always antithetical: bands cut across
the form’s axis of proportional development at a right angle in a ring shape,
whereas seams as a rule run parallel to the figure’s proportional axis. Seams
are therefore neutral to the proportion of the object dressed; they do not
define proportional articulation. They are that much better suited to disturb-
ing or enhancing the symmetry of the shape, to the extent that their distribu-
tion is also subject to the laws of symmetry.
The Greeks, who tacked their clothes together and in the golden age of true
Hellenism used the embroidered clothes of their Asian and Thracian neigh-
bors only on stage or as costumes for flute players, kitharists, female dancers,
and hetaerae. They themselves scorned such clothing as a form of barbarian
adornment and carefully avoided any clothing that cut horizontally across
the body or any part of it, in other words, in the shape of a ring. It is not diffi-
cult to prove that they did this out of a proper sense of style. It is also not dif-
ficult to show that those fashions and clothes that violate this principle — for
example, the custom of pinning the haut de chausse to the pourpoint and

LS9
 Semper

pulling the shirt out through the broad slits between the two upper garments,
a seventeenth-century fashion that originated in Holland—cannot withstand
the criticism of good taste. The same holds for the ruffle seams of our ladies,
which destroy the proportions of the lower body and legs.
The same aesthetic principle, according to which every piecing together of
a garment must follow, not cut across, its proportional development, also for-
bids dividing flags and banners into vertical patches of different colors, the
tastelessness of which has already been censured. In this example the stylistic
principle proves to be suited to its practical and material purpose, because the
wind can very easily weaken and break vertical seams.
As already noted, the situation with band and ring decorations, which are
by nature proportional rather than symmetrical, is very different: they are
arranged according to the laws of proportion. They are not parts of the dress-
ing, nor do they relate to such parts in any way as links, yet in some cases they
are intermediate elements between the garment as a whole and the thing
dressed. They function as the connecting elements of both—the belt, for
example, is an attractive ring ornament for the body that fastens the folds of
the garment as a whole to the body. In other cases they are completely inde-
pendent of the dressing and serve as pure symbols of proportional articula-
tion. (On this, see what was said in the preface about conditions of formal
beauty and decoration; see also the essay Uber die formelle Gesetzmassigkeit
des Schmuckes und dessen Bedeutung als Kunstsymbol [Zurich: Meyer &
Zeller, 1856].)

§ 22 The Hem: A Mean between Seam and Band

The two opposing elements of the band and the seam come together in the
hem, which is both at the same time. On one side at least, it functions along
its width, whereas as an edging it simultaneously works longitudinally as a
band. Thus in terms of ornament, as well as in terms of proportionality and
symmetry, the hem must logically stand midway between band and seam, or

Triglyphs as edging for a mosaic floor

160
 Textiles: General-Formal

rather it must express the tendencies of both. Several points have already been
made concerning the ornamental treatment of the hem that should be reiter-
ated here. The hem satisfies the second demand by framing the dress, garment,
cover, or any related item; as a frame, it satisfies the principle of planimetric
regularity in that its units or members arrange themselves eurythmically
around what is framed as the only center of reference. To avoid repetition,
readers are referred to what is said in the preface about the aesthetic concept
of regularity and its relation to proportion and symmetry. The concluding
forms of the cover have already been discussed; the upper crowning ruffles
and the lower zigzag or tasseled slits representing gravity are also types of a
frame (though only on two sides, those that denote top and bottom).
These latter frequently serve as a valance for the richer symbolism at the
upper termination of the covers and other dressings. But this can never be sty-
listically correct without a concluding upright ruffle or some other symbol
serving as a crown.

————<—_—_——_77

gi
TUT OLE

SD) be
Gaull oo" ie:
Ny

Valance in the style of Louis XIV

Notes
1. Athenaeus (Deipnosoph|istae| 15.16) says that the wreath symbolizes a certain
completion (TO 6€ oTédetv TANpwWotv TLva OnLatvel). It is evident from the whole
passage that the Greeks devoted as much artistic training to the art of wreath making as
to their other, more serious and more important artistic efforts. Athenaeus lists a range
of wreaths with different characters and meanings and justifies his classification of
wreaths with citations from ancient poets. He returns to the theme on several occa-
sions. There were head wreaths (otédavor) and neck wreaths (UTo8uptadat), sometimes
(like the Egyptians) plaited with lotus, sometimes with other fragrant and refreshing
plants and flowers.

TAEKTAG 8’ UTOBULLAdac
TEpl oTTPEot AwTivac EGevTO.
[And plaited lotus wreaths
they placed around their breasts. |

161
 Semper

How the Greeks followed the Egyptians in this too can be seen from wall images fre-
quently found in Egyptian tombs, where women and boys greeted guests with bouquets
of flowers. Others adorned their necks with lotus wreaths.
One recognizes in these Egyptian wall paintings, as in Greek sculptures and paint-
ings, the peculiarly architectural —that is, rhythmically regulated — character of ancient
wreaths. The naturalistic, more modern romanticism with regard to bouquets and
wreaths was used in antiquity only where suitable (at Bacchic pageants, etc.). Most
ancient combinations of flowers, fruit, and leaves consisted of simple or alternating
rows. The leaves were simply arranged in rows on a stem or a thread with the stylized
ends next to one another, or flowers were threaded like pearls, as the figure below
shows. Other wreaths represented wickerwork and twisted tori. There were double and
triple wreaths, and some probably twisted many times. Each type had its particular
symbolic meaning.

KLOOW TE VaPKLOGW TE TPLEALKAG KUKAW OTEAVUV EALKTOV.

[Garlands, wound three times in a circle with ivy and narcissus.]
— The tragic poet Chaeremon, in Athenaeus

For a better understanding of the various types of ancient architecture, it is important

to know the predominant character of their wreaths and the sense they imputed in their
modifications. The cited chapter of Athenaeus and the fourth chapter of book 16 of
Pliny the Elder are the principal sources for this subject.

162
 Textiles: General-Formal

2. See figure b of plate 2, and the same ornament in color in plate 1. On what has
been said see also plates 3, 5, 6, 8, and 9.
3. See color plates 1, 2, and 3.
4. See the preface.
5. Where nature, the enemy of all unresolved dissonances, has been deprived of its
rights, so to speak, by human delusions and lack of taste, it knows how to reclaim its
dominance over time by covering the harsh and barbarian human creations with dust,
soot, and rust, by knocking off arms, legs, and other incongruous extremities and by
bringing harmony to them as moss-covered ruins.
6. Other combinations of these three colors are, of course, permitted. If a blue-
green ground has eight parts (six parts blue, two parts yellow), then a pattern should
have eight parts. If this pattern is to have only one mixed color, it should be five parts
red, one yellow, two blue.
7. See Semper, “Observations on Some [of the] Specimens of Metal Work,” in the
catalog of the Museum of Ornamental Art, Marlborough House (Sth ed., London,
1853). See also [George] Field’s Chromatic Equivalents, and appendix D of the above-
cited catalog, which contains an essay on color by Owen Jones.
8. See color plates 5, 6.
9. See color plate 7.
10. These are the kdAyat, or rather yddkat [rosettes], that occur repeatedly in the
two famed building inscriptions on the Athenian Acropolis. The one discovered most
recently (as I pointed out in my essay in [Deutsches] Kunstblatt 1855, nos. 42 ff.) has
been wrongly ascribed to the Temple of Polias as well. They have been just as wrongly
connected with the ova or egg-and-dart moldings with which the cymatia of the Ionic
order are so richly decorated.
11. It is striking that the only sensible explanation we can give to certain descrip-
tions of vaulted ceilings belonging to the oldest written traditions is that people actually
thought the ceilings were made of sapphire, or rather of transparent sapphire glass,
through whose transparent dome paintings shimmered. More details are given in the
section of “Ceramics” that deals with glass. But let there be a passing reminder here of
the image of such a glass ceiling that appears in the Book of Job: Deus insistens nebula
dura ut speculum fusum [Cf£. Job 37.18: Hast thou with him spread out the sky, which
is strong, and as a molten looking glass?]. Ezekiel also sees a thundering God riding off
on a sonorous cloud above the shivery crystal sky. Moses thinks of the sky as vaulted
with sapphire bricks, the footstool of God. See also [Flavius] Philostratus, Vita
Apoll{onii| 1.33, where he alludes to a Babylonian room whose domed ceiling presents
an image of the sky vaulted with sapphires, above which appear images of the gods that
glow golden out of the ether, as it were.
12. We can distinguish between two kinds of color contrasts: instantaneous and
residual. The first makes two colors touching or adjacent to each other appear different
from the way in which the eye perceives them if it considers each alone. The change is
not just qualitative but also quantitative, that is, it makes something dark seem darker
against something light, and the latter seem lighter against the darker tone. Thus, for
example, if green is placed against violet, the former will seem more yellow and the lat-
ter more red than if each is considered alone. Yellow against green moves toward

163
 Semper

orange, green toward blue, and so on. Residual contrast is a visual stimulus that is con-
veyed or expressed to the retina by a color, such that one believes oneself to be seeing
that color that is farthest removed from the one being seen and that forms a precise
contrast with it. Thus a red dot, if looked at for a long time, leaves behind a spectrum
of green of the same shape when the eye is turned away. An orange circle leaves the
same image in blue, and so on.
If a polychrome surface whose effect is geared to instantaneous contrast only is
looked at for a long time, the colors start to have the effect of a residual contrast on the
eye, which then sees the opposite of the colors that appear in the image and transfers
these impressions to other points on the image. The local color of the point then min-
gles in the eye with the impressions brought over from the colors previously seen. This
produces a mixed contrast, which at times can turn out very composed and in the end
appears as gray. For example, if one has been looking at red for a time and then glances
at blue, the green spectrum in the eye mixes with the blue and a deeper green-blue
appears. If the eye has seen orange and then falls upon yellow, the latter appears green,
whereas the red becomes violet because of the residual effect of the orange, and so on.
This explains the disadvantage that a long, uninterrupted viewing of an image must
have for the enjoyment and understanding of the same. It also explains the phenome-
non noted in the text, whereby an unusual way of looking at something makes the col-
ors and shades of an object seem sharper and purer. The reason is that the retina
receives the image of an object at points that are not yet fatigued, and thus sees pure
correct nuances instead of those dulled by a mixed contrast.
The wonderful orange shimmer that a lower horizon takes on at a distance when it
is viewed upside down through one’s legs is explained even more decisively by the law
of mixed contrast. The lower half of the retina, saturated with the blue of the upper sky,
becomes disposed toward orange, while the upper part of the retina takes in a blue
spectrum because of the hazy orange of the horizon. Now I suddenly place myself
upside down, so that the spectrum in the lower part of the retina, which is orange, sud-
denly coincides with the orange line of the horizon, and the blue spectrum of the upper
half of the same is at the same time congruent with the blue of the zenith. The result is
necessarily a deeper and more beautiful blue for the zenith, a purer orange for the hori-
zon, and a sharper distinction between the two extremes, which, precisely speaking, is
not true. But what is truth—especially in the world of color, where everything is based
on illusion and appearance?
13. The play on words I have permitted myself here may well seem facile and
meaningless, and indeed I do not dare to claim that the words Naht (seam) and Noth
(necessity) are related etymologically and conceptually. Yet a similar association of
ideas between Naht and Knoten (Latin nodus [knot], nexus [bond]; French noeud;
English knot), between the tied-up avayxy [necessity] and the inextricable entwinement
through which again only Noth can cut, can be pursued in many ways, and it would be
difficult for this to be merely the result of a chance similarity between the two words.
It was not until after I had written these words that I found in Dr. Albert Hofer’s
Sprachwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen (p. 223) the following passage confirming my
assumptions about the link between these concepts and words:

164
 Textiles: General-Formal

Here at first glance and irrefutably a number of words can easily be associated with
the root form noc: Lat. neo=nec-o? [sew], nexus [binding], necessitatis [necessity],
(cf. Aayxos [fate], capesso, cap), connection, consequence, compulsion; nectere [to
twine], véw [to spin], v49w [to spin], German ndhen [to sew], Old High German
nahen (suere), Modern German neigen [incline], Sanskrit nah, to which natha must
be linked. The concepts of Vereinigung [combination], Fiigung [joint], Nahe [near-
ness] are clearly present in these and the above-mentioned words. Nanc-isci and
nahe [near], nach [after] are also too close formally for one not to assume a large
and deeply rooted link.

According to [Jacob] Grimm véw and dvayx? [necessity] are related. See Grimm,
Deutsche Grammatik, and [Lorenz] Diefenbach, Wérterbuch der gothischen Sprache.
14. As will become clear in what follows, I use the expression dressing in a very
broad sense, closely connected with my ideas about ancient art in general.
15. The decorative development of the seam led quite late—namely, in the Middle
Ages—to the invention of a fine textile art industry, from which emerged delicate laces
and openwork blonds, an adornment that seems to have been unknown to the ancients.
See the paragraphs below on technical aspects.

165
 1 GOs® ack) i qmiliengeen
ee
Cer mater) Gant inate Wee ee ay - ;
iN te OB.) oh eee be
=i om ieee) @whecewmhe
oe C9: 908-4 eee lw
MaelS Qala) en. oes
=e amg? = @ «ens © Gn=iEy
*
=

°e=<« eatin’
= 0 6 Gas

, [=
 GVA
Pa RS FOUR:

Textiles
B. Technical-Historical

§ 23 Introduction
Tracing the technological and historical development of the textile arts is cer-
tainly a most difficult task, even if we limit our review to their closer and
more distant relations to architecture.
In the first place, no material is more ephemeral than woven fabrics —and
yet we would still have quite a selection of old materials, especially antique
carpets, if the collecting spirit that chose to preserve and unearth so many
ancient objects from other branches of technology had not come so late to
textiles. For a long time we have had beautifully arranged and fairly com-
plete collections of ceramic products, making it possible to form a technical
and historical overview of this art. Here credit is due principally to the two
curators of the Musée céramique in Sévres, Messrs. [Alexandre] Brongniart
and [Denis Désiré] Riocreux. There are also instructive collections of metal-
work, gold and silver, furniture, and other items in almost every European
capital, but the remnants of textile products, which despite the ephemerality
of their material are still to be found scattered almost everywhere, have only
very recently started to attract attention. The author believes himself to be
one of the first to have indicated the value of textile museums arranged
according to technical and historical principles and to have noted their use-
fulness for the study of art and for this industry in particular.! Several such
institutions have since come into being or are being planned. Much other
material is scattered among other art objects in mixed collections, and much
is still buried in the inventories of churches and monasteries. An excellent col-
lection of this kind, distinguished more by its exquisite Oriental fabrics than
by examples of ancient art, forms part of the Museum of Practical Art in
London. The importance of textiles is also becoming apparent in Prussia, but
it would seem that Catholic clerics and their associated medieval-romantic
artistic party have taken the initiative and have pursued it more for propagan-
distic purposes than for impartial research on art or popular instruction. The
same can be observed in France. As a result of these efforts, a number of writ-
ings have appeared that are very instructive about certain aspects of this
extremely broad subject. A few are included in the list of books appended to
this section.
The complex material and technical aspects of this branch of industrial art
represent a second obstacle to a technological and historical survey of textiles—

167
 Semper

for me at least. A more thorough knowledge of them is unlikely in he who has

not long been exclusively concerned with them as a practitioner in the field.
I candidly admit this and simply regret that I know of no one who could
replace me and take over the practical and specialized elaboration of this
chapter of my book. Moreover, several of the most important books that give
practical guidance are not presently available to me.
Yet on the whole very little has appeared that leads the subject in the direc-
tion I wish to take. Thus the advantage of being able to rely on an earlier
authority, amply available in most other departments of the industrial arts, is
in fact entirely lacking in this case.
Under such circumstances the reader may consider many chapters in this
section to be empty rubrics yet to be filled in and thus choose to skip them.
Merely to indicate them seemed to me not without utility. By contrast, he may
want to examine more closely the parts dealing with the use of materials in
architecture and their historical and stylistic importance for this art, because
here 1am on my own ground and am responsible for presenting new material.
Meanwhile, I refer the reader for self-study to the following writings surveying
the goods and techniques of the textile art and their historical development:

[Johann Gottlob] Schneider, “De textrina veterum,” in the introduction to

his edition of the Scriptores rei rusticae.
[Lodovico Antonio] Muratori, “De textrina et vestibus saeculorum
rudium dissertatio vigesima quinta,” in his Antiquitates italicae m|edii|
alevi], vol. 2, cols. 399-436. This collection also contains much impor-
tant material on medieval weaving; see especially Athanasius’s reports
concerning gifts from the popes to various churches in Rome.
Albertus Rubens, De re vestiara.
James Yates, Textrinum antiquorum.
[Johann Reinhold] Forster, De bysso antiquorum.
C[arl] Ritter, “Uber die geographische Verbreitung der Baumwolle und ihr
Verhaltniss zur Industrie der V6lker alter und neuer Zeit.” Abhand-
lungen der [KOniglichen| Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin
1850-51.
[Pasquale] Amati, De restitutione purpurarum. Cesena, 1784. Including:
[Giovanni Battista] Capello, “De antiqua et nupera purpura.”
Don Michaeli Rosa, Dissertazione delle porpore e delle materie vestiarie
presso gli antichi, 1786.
[Clinton G. Gilroy,] History of Silk, Cotton, Linen, Wool.... New York:
Harper & Bros.
Dr. Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures; or, An Exposition of
the Scientific, Moral and Commercial Economy of the Factory-System
of Great-Britain, octavo. London, 1835.
James Thomson, esq., on mummy cloth, with illustrations by Francis
Bauer. Extracts in Dingler’s P[olytechnisches| J[ournal] 56 [(1835)]:
154, octavo.

168
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

Francisque[-Xavier] Michel, Recherches sur le commerce, la fabrication et

Pusage des étoffes de soie.... Paris.
Idem, Recherches sur les étoffes d’or et d’argent et autres tissus précieux.
Achille Jubinal, Les anciennes tapisseries historiées. See his treatise on the
same subject in [Lacroix and Seré,] Le moyen-dge et la renaissance.
[Charles] Cahier and Arthur Martin, Mélanges d’archéologie.
On dyeing techniques, see the writings of [Edward] Bancroft, Chaptal
Favier, Roland de la Platiére, [Jean-Baptiste] Vitalis, and others. See also
Lougier, “Die Kunst des Baumwoll- und Leinwandgarn-Farbens.” Dingler’s
[Polytechnisches| Journal (1847): 122, 207, 277.
For ancient costume, see Bottiger’s writings, especially his Sabina, Die
Aldobrandinische Hochzeit, and Vasenbilder. On the costume of the
Middle Ages, in addition to [Nicolas-Xavier] Willemin, [Bernard de]
Montfaucon, and other old writings, see especially J[akob] von Hefner[-
Alteneck,] Trachten des [christlichen] Mittelalters.
The most recent works in progress on this subject are: Fr[anz] Bock,
Geschichte der liturgischen Gewdnder des Mittelalters, with 110 color
illustrations. Bonn: Verlag von Henry & Cohen, 1856; and Hermann
Weiss, Kostiimkunde: Handbuch der Geschichte der Tracht, des Baues
und Gerdthes von den friihesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart. Stuttgart:
Ebner & Seubert, 1856.
On Jewish antiquities, see also A[nton] Th[eodor] Hartmann, Die
Hebrdéerin am Putztische und als Braut, useful mainly for the quotations
collected there.
On old German and Nordic clothing: [Karl] Weinhold, Die deutschen
Frauen, also Die skandinavischen Alterthtimer.

In order to provide the reader an overview of what is to come, | thought it

appropriate to precede it with the plan I have followed.

§ 24 Plan of This Chapter

It falls into three parts, namely:
A. Style as dependent on material
B. Style as conditioned by the treatment of materials
C. How style in the dressing of different peoples became specialized and
transformed over the course of cultural history
A. Style as dependent on raw materials
1. General
2. Simple natural products used in a completely natural state or after
being treated with a technical process that does not fundamentally
change the structural and formal properties of the material
. Flax and related plant materials
. Cotton and similar materials
. Wool and related materials
BW
Nn pooilk

169
 Semper

B. Style as conditioned by the treatment of materials

1. General
. Straps
. Spun yarn
. Twisted yarn (braid, rope)
. The knot (netting)
. The knit (knitting)
The plait (braid, tress, seam, canework, mat)
Felt
VW The weave (turning, weaving, garment, wall)
ONHANAAWHN
= The stitch, embroidery
—

a. Flat stitch (opus plumarium)

b. Cross-stitch (opus Phrygium)
11. Dyeing, printing, and so on
C. How style in the dressing of different peoples became specialized and
transformed over the course of cultural history
1. Style in clothing
2. The principle of dressing has greatly influenced style in architecture
and all other arts at all times and among all peoples (several subsec-
tions)

AT ON REAW MUA EARel AUS

1. General

§25 The Product Should Be Visibly Consistent with the Material

Early on, the need for defense and protection led the human race to use natu-
ral cords, bands, and enveloping surfaces. The first materials came, as it were,
ready to use from nature’s workshop. As industry advanced, people acquired
the skills to endow these natural products with certain properties and shapes,
combining them so that they were more appropriate to the purpose for which
they were intended. This tendency was soon linked with a natural inclination
to adorn. In fact, the question of which instinct was the initial impetus for
invention in the field under discussion has yet to be decided.
The chief attribute of these early industrial products is that they kept
strictly to the characteristics of the raw material in their form and color—a
property that is altogether understandable. But it is also very important and
instructive to note that this sensibility that guided the first inventors became
increasingly problematic and shaky as advancing industry found ever more
artificial ways to meet the complicated needs of a highly civilized time. An
essential principle, the first technical one, for the stylistic correctness of a work

170
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

is based on this attribute: that it is and appears to be a natural and logical

consequence of the raw material.
Stylistic correctness depends first on the natural properties of the raw
material to be treated; these properties must be thoroughly known to anyone
intending to produce a technical work or anyone called upon to prepare
instructions, directions, and patterns for the producer. In recent times the
hand of the producer is seldom or never one that has sufficient ability and
leisure to be the inventor, at least when such invention goes beyond the realm
of the empirical sciences and mathematics to become, at least in part, a con-
ception in the artistic and formal sense. Unfortunately, this has come about
at a time when bureaucracy and profiteering by factory owners, servitude to
the machine, and proletarian subjugation have combined to blunt the artistic
sensitivity of the workers. At the same time, even those in a position to com-
pensate for this do not fulfill expectations for the favorable influence they
could exercise to elevate industry and cause it to blossom artistically—
specifically because they are not sufficiently familiar with the raw materials
and technical procedures used by the different industries. Nor are they
entirely convinced that their “ingenious” compositions need be guided by the
properties of raw materials and relevant technologies. Nor, finally, are they
even aware of the stylistic principles to which the factors of industrial produc-
tion I have mentioned should, if properly addressed, direct them. (On this, see
my publication Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst [Brunswick: Vieweg,
1852]; see also R. A. Dyce, “Report on Foreign Schools of Design [Made in
1839],” extracted in Catalogue of the Articles of Ornamental Art in the
Museum of the Department, Appendix B, Marlborough House, London.)
How imperative it is for every branch of industry that belongs even in part
to the realm of art, or somehow leads up to it, to have a truly practical and
highly specialized theory of form, one written by a man steeped in the arts!
As indicated, it is not my intention in this book to provide a specialist’s
insight into every art; rather, a closer or more distant relation to architecture
will have to remain the governing standard in the treatment of the extensive
material, which is otherwise almost unmanageable.

2. Simple Natural Products Used in a Completely Natural State or after

Being Treated with a Technical Process That Does Not Fundamentally
Change the Structural and Formal Properties of the Material

§ 26 Our Own Skin: The Most Natural Cover

Without a doubt, the first natural product to be considered here is our own
hide or human skin. The remarkable cultural-historical phenomenon of paint-
ing and tattooing the skin is also of great interest for the history of style. We
do not really know whether the painted or etched lines and scrolls with which
people who go partly or entirely naked almost universally decorate their skin
(a custom that has survived for a very long time even among highly civilized

171
 Semper

people, and indeed among some living in temperate and even cold countries)
represent the earliest of all the decorative arts. It may be that here too, as
often happens with things that are believed to be primitive, we are dealing
with a reminiscence of a past, more advanced culture.
In view of this doubt, tattooing should have a paragraph of its own in the
section on clothing under the cultural-historical rubric of this chapter. Here
we need only indicate that most of the so-called savage peoples manage to
find colors for painting their skins that are most appropriate to their skin
color. Many even display accurate knowledge of the location and functioning
of the muscles under the skin, so that the muscles and their actions are repre-
sented on the surface of the skin pictorially or rather graphically using sys-
tems of lines—a very remarkable phenomenon that demonstrates they have
grasped and correctly understood ornament in its structural and symbolic
sense. Does this justify the conclusion that this conception of ornament is the
most original? Or should it rather appear to be a sign of a secondary cultural
condition of the people among whom it occurs? (See [Gustav] Klemm’s Kul-
turgeschichte der Menschheit —South Sea Islanders and passim.)
The ornaments on the skin of these peoples consist of painted or tattooed
threads, mingling with each other in all sorts of scrolls and coils, and alternat-
ing with straight lines.
Thus these lines bring us immediately back to the thread as the linear ele-
ment of textile surfaces.

§ 27 Bindings on Utensils and Weapons

Binding and fastening are certainly among the earliest needs of that manually
gifted but naturally weaponless creature—the human being. The plant and
animal kingdoms offer the most obvious materials for this. The bast of trees
and the stalks of the stronger species of grass were natural means of binding;
their use initially demanded certain procedures from which arose a kind of
style. Great artistic skill, correct mechanical instinct, and an evident effort to
satisfy a sense of beauty while enhancing strength can all be seen in the bast
and grass wrappings on the weapons and utensils of savages.
Many are reminiscent of the utensils and weapons of the ancient Egyptians,
which have been preserved in the grotto tombs of the Nile valley.
The same is true of the weapons, utensils, and tools of the Assyrians,
Hellenes, Etruscans, and Romans. Here, as everywhere, one sees that the high
culture of antiquity was, so to speak, directly oriented around nature.
The taste that distinguishes these simple utensils is especially evident in
the judicious alternation of the multicolored bindings that hold their parts
together. The natural colors of raw materials, of which we have already spo-
ken, are everywhere visible.
The use of animal fibers and sinews, hair, intestines, and strips or straps of
skin for bindings require more elaborate procedures and a modification to
their material properties. One must also admire the skill and taste with which
peoples at early stages of civilization employed these materials.

WH
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

: \
6d), \— >
A;
SX
rh
LAN 64 EE
Q R\ NZ eS
if sonia Aloe
"4 Ge
a Ke

=)
$
Wat
st
i)
PyINK

cathey

J; Ni
/A\

va\
\

Ss Sy

Binding as decoration on axes, implements, and weapons

§28 Furriery: A Recently Neglected Technique

Animal skins. The guild of furriers can rightfully claim greater antiquity than
most of its fellow guilds. The art of using and preparing natural fabrics —or
rather, the natural felt and fur of animal skins—had reached great refinement
and significant glory at a time when the other arts were still in their infancy.
Many of these other arts were first cultivated by furriers when they needed
them for their own purposes. Thus we see that even half-civilized tribes all
excel in furriery; at least this is true of those who live in harsh climates. Even
more than in other spheres of industry, these tribes are undoubtedly our
teachers and masters, a truth that may offend those gentlemen of the royal fur
trade, accredited by patents and medals from large and small exhibitions. In
this field too we need a discerning and aesthetically trained specialist who

WES}
 Semper

could restore honor to this splendid natural material, which we now treat in a
most crude and purely utilitarian fashion (in this respect we are much more
barbarian than the Laplanders, Tungus, and Iroquois), by producing a well-
illustrated, technical, stylistic, and at the same time culturally informed
monograph on furriery. Only in this way —when every profession within the
technical arts is treated by someone who is entirely at home with its practical
aspects, and not (as before) merely with technical matters, paying special atten-
tion to artistic, formal, and stylistic questions
— will the taste of the lower eche-
lons of artistic creation be improved. And only such a popular basis could
support a practical theory of beauty that extended to the higher arts.
Early on, humans learned to prepare animal skins to resist decay and to
achieve a suppleness sufficient for them to be used for coverings and clothing.
In preparing skins, especially when the slain animals were of the larger and
nobler species, care was taken to preserve the character of these animals as
much as possible. In early times men liked to allude to their own strength,
skill, and fighting courage by using the skins of beasts, which they wore on
their shoulders and pulled over their heads. The myths of ancient peoples liv-
ing around the Mediterranean have heroes and heroines clad in lion and pan-
ther skins, bear and wolf pelts, and even in the scaly skins of fish and lizards.
Egyptian and Assyrian priests wore them, a sure sign of a historically based
and ancient tradition, for the priesthood always had to maintain this image
and knew how to surround itself with the venerable aura of primeval begin-
nings. We see the same thing among the old Teutons and Scythian peoples.
When they fashioned their martial body dressings and probably their priestly
vestments as well, they knew how to retain as much as possible the form and
character of the animal that had provided the skin, even though they were
skillful enough to prepare and shape furs and leather in other very sophis-
ticated ways. This was probably done to make the animal look even more
terrifying and to enhance its frightening effect. Popular symbols among
these Nordic peoples included the skin of the aurochs (whose lengthy horns
extended above their heads like a martial headdress), the fur of the eland and
the bear, also the exuviae of the golden eagle, whose pinions made a terrify-
ingly beautiful headpiece decoration. According to Plutarch (Marius 25), the
Cimberi wore headpieces that resembled the jaws of frightening animals or
had other strange shapes; they crowned them with tall feathers in the form of
wings, which made them look considerably bigger.
In the same way, the prairie Indians in their savage war dances still hide
their heads behind frightening animal masks made from bison or bears. We
find a similar use of mask adornment among the savages of the South Sea
Islands. These terrifying animal masks appear among Egyptian priests in a
more refined form as hieratic headpieces for priests representing gods. The
animal mask became the early symbol of disguise, of the mysterious or the
terrible. Often nothing remained but the characteristic mark of the animal—
for example, the bullhorns used decoratively on the miters of Assyrian rulers
or the ram horns used as headpieces by Egyptian kings and also adopted and

174
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

worn by Alexander as ruler of Egypt and son of Ammon. The frightful Gorgon
on the aegis that Pallas Athena brandishes is a mask. This had long been used
as a highly important symbol in both life and art before drama adopted it.
Here again we see the seemingly most refined aspect of ancient art oriented
directly around primeval nature.

§ 29 Tree Bark
The skin of trees (their bark and bast) and the skin of animals display a
remarkable rapport that is doubly relevant to the question under discussion.
Like a pelt, bark naturally suggests the idea of peeling the tree’s natural cover
and using it for purposes related to its original function. Even apart from the
famous “full dress of an Indian lady” paraded at the Great Exhibitions in
London and Paris (a triangular piece of bark that Guyanese women tie in
front of themselves like an animal skin), bark is an important dressing mate-
rial for many peoples who already have significantly advanced cultures. The
natives of North America are perhaps the most advanced in this field: they
have developed a unique artistic style for their bark-and-leather canoes, highly
original in both form and color. It could be called the tanner’s style, since the
reddish brown color of the bark provides the basic shade for the polychromy.
This color is naturally related to the color of leather and moreover is identi-
fied with it through the tanning process. For the elegantly treated joints and
seams, they use the four contrasting colors of blue, red, black, and white (no
yellow). Similar tendencies can also be seen in the familiar birch-bark prod-
ucts that represent a major part of the Norwegian peasant industry.
A more refined —or rather, transitional —industry uses bast for dressings
of all kinds by pressing it into a fabric with the aid of a lye. Clothes and covers
are made from it by tribes of the South Seas and America. It represents a tran-
sition to the weaving of bast and has been developed with correct style and
faultless taste (see Klemm, Kulturwissenschaft, passim).
In India, too, tree bark and bast were made into clothing fabrics from ear-
liest times. Herodotus (3.98) called them é€o€r¢ bddtvn [clothes of reeds]; in
Ctesias (Indic[a frag. 45, |. 390, Jacoby]) they were called ipdtia EvAtva
[wooden garments]. They clothed the poor and penitent. Sacontala wore such
a cloak before she was given her costly clothes by the Devanis. Dushmanta
put them on when he became a penitent. We do not know whether they were
woven like gingham or assembled from naturally occurring pieces. Part of the
manufacturing process involved drying them in the sun.
Bark is related to animal skin in yet another way: it provides the material
for tawing or tanning it. The Chinese were masters of tanning at least three
and a half millennia before our calendar begins. From the earliest times
Egyptian tanners and leather manufacturers were an important branch of the
third class, the traders. Leather strips have been found on mummies, beauti-
fully and tastefully decorated with embossed figures and hieroglyphs. Some
such objects date from a period before the exodus of the Jews from Egypt.
Many representations on tomb walls refer to leather manufacture and its use

ARES)
 Semper

in footwear, furniture coverings, chariots, and musical instruments. Goatskin

was also used for wineskins, which seem to have been artistically decorated.
Tanned skins were also used as tapestries and protective roofing, as the famil-
iar description of the Tabernacle clearly shows. It was covered with two
stretched goat-hair carpets, on top of which was placed a cover of red-dyed
ram skin—and on top of this, in turn, a badger skin (Exodus 25:5 and 26:14).
The Jewish workers who executed this desert work must have learned their
art in Egypt.2 It follows that the Egyptians must have been accomplished
dyers of skins from a very early date, as is also evident from unearthed remains
and paintings of leather chairs with colorful coverings. They probably used
the plant Periploca secamone for dyeing, as they still do in Egypt. On the
tomb walls of Beni Hassan we see strap cutters using semicircular knives, like
those saddlers use today. These and the other instruments still in use must
have been invented four thousand years ago.
The remains of embossed leather mentioned above and the colored furni-
ture coverings depicted in the tombs of Thebes (undoubtedly made of colored
embossed leather) are as important for the history of style in this interesting
industry (which has recently found acceptance again) as the more dazzling
and better-preserved medieval and Renaissance examples of this technique.
The means at our disposal enable us to execute any relief and any ornamental
whim in leather, or materials related to or imitative of leather. Nevertheless,
we would do well to exercise with great care the freedom at our disposal. In
general, it is not advisable to overstep the limits prescribed by the use of the
simplest and earliest means, because the principal condition of leather is that
it always remains a surface. Also, everything produced by the human hand
has the charm of originality and artistic freedom. Machines may perform
their tricks and achieve things that the human hand could not possibly create,
but they will not have a benevolent effect on art until we have learned to sub-
ordinate them to materials and their natural properties.

§ 30 Egyptian Embossed Leather and the Style of Egyptian Sculpture in General

In a discussion of the relieflike embossed leather of Egypt it is not unreason-
able to insert a note about Egyptian sculpture in general. The peculiar style of
Egyptian sculpture, of which more will be said later, can be explained at least
in part by the technical demands imposed by the hard materials employed
and by the simple means used to overcome them. Those granite colossi with
their compact extremities and accessories, their sharply accented, refined, and
yet restrained contours amount to a conventional compromise, as it were,
between a hard and resistant material and the soft human hand with its
simple tools —the hammer, the chisel, the file, and the grindstone. These
sculptures also reflect the intention that the work should be long-lasting and
not easily destroyed. Their magnificent repose and enormous size, the some-
what angular and flat refinement of their lines, the restraint manifest in the
treatment of a difficult material, their whole character —all are beauties of
style that to some extent we no longer need because we can now cut the hard-

176
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

est stone with machines, as if it were cheese or bread. But we would do well to
use stone only where a hard and durable material is needed and from these
two attributes only deduce the logical principles of style that should govern
the work of machines. In leather manufacture the same is true of the stylistic
principles, though with different premises (because here suppleness, flatness,
and durability are the material conditions), which should curb the machine’s
omnipotence.

§ 31 More on Leather and Furs

It is unlikely that the art of tanning failed to reach a high perfection in Asia
even earlier than it did in Egypt. As has been mentioned, we know that as
early as the third century B.C. the Chinese were no novices in this art, as in
nearly every other technical art. Even in these early times they collected antiq-
uities and their oldest records allude to the skillfulness of their ancestors and
the excellence of the work produced.
The ancient population of the Euphrates valley also understood this art
from times that predate the beginning of history by at least as much as we
postdate it. They not only made ordinary leather but also finely embossed and
dyed garments with embroidered seams, and utensils of the same material—
all were popular luxury articles for these peoples. Babylonian and Persian
leathers — probably similar to the saffian and cordovan leather of the Arabs,
heirs to the ancient civilization of western Asia—have been famed since time
immemorial.
Fur and leather goods are also mentioned in the earliest Indian documents.
In the Ramayana (bk. 1, p. 605) the king of Videha presents his daughter Sita
with furs as well as splendid silks and wools. Periplous, however, suggests that
furs were imported from Serica (China). Certainly those beautifully embossed
shields and other protective weapons made of tanned leather (especially rhi-
noceros hide) that we admire in Indian collections are an ancient invention.
Those notorious sluggards, the Germans, were considered very skillful
furriers and tanners, surpassing even their highly civilized neighbors to the
south.3 Their furs were very different from those of Roman shepherds, which
according to legend were even worn by senators in early Roman times before
the introduction of cloth. Their form has survived up to the present day
among the shepherds of the Roman campagna. The Lanuvian Juno wears a
rough Latin goatskin as an allusion to a native rural deity. By contrast, the fur
mantles of the Germans were skillfully worked, well tanned, cut to fit the
body, and provided with beautifully embroidered seams. The fur was turned
inward and the edges of the coats were trimmed with more costly napwork.
They were called renones (reindeer pelts) and were probably very similar to
Canadian leather pelts. They were a sought-after trade item at the time of
Rome’s decline.
Wearing the hide inside out brings the furrier’s art to a new stage; now it
opposes nature instead of following it. Now it naturally shows an entirely
new style in which hem (the trimming) and seam (consisting of colored

Ads
 Semper

embroidery and inserted strips of fur), as well as other accessories like tassels
and bobbles, enliven the warm, brownish red base tone of the leather.
This style led to the use of smaller fur-bearing animals, whose pelts had
earlier attracted little attention. As these animals produce good fur only in
cold countries, it may well be that the fur-coat style first became widespread
there and then passed, fully developed, to the civilized lands of the Medi-
terranean basin, always retaining a foreign and barbarian flavor. The small
and costly pelts were used to trim the hides, even later when the hides were no
longer visible but were covered with costly materials (cloth and silk).
The luxury of fine furs was known to classical antiquity from very early
times. Some scholars suggest that even the voyage of the Argonauts was a
speculative venture in search of furs (Is[aac] Voss[ius] on Catullus, p. 190), as
were the Norman trips to the North American coast. Pliny mentions Chinese
pelts (Pliny, [Historia naturalis 37.78]: serum pelles); later furs came from
Parthia, hence the Roman legal term parthi[clarii for fur dealers. Trade was
conducted overland and then across the Black Sea. Seneca praises the high
quality and density of Scythian fox and sable furs (murium). These pelts were
sewn together and called caftans (kavautdavec). Tacitus and [Marcus Junianus]
Justinus mention terga murina. Muskrat skins were also sought after because
of their musky scent. On the ancients’ treatment of fur, see the interesting note
in Bottiger’s Griechische Vasengemadlde ([vol. 1, pt.] 3:187), where the relevant
literature is listed.
At the time of Charlemagne both men and women wore decorated fur-
lined garments, some even trimmed with the skins and feathers of birds; this
was an old Frankish custom favored by the emperor. A waistcoat (thorax)
made of otterskin protected shoulders and chest. Princesses at the court
of Charlemagne wore jewel-studded ermine collars on their cloaks. The
Scythians and Huns also wore furs made of mouse and cat hides.
The fur trade was the principal source of national wealth in the Scandi-
navian countries. The Finns, a primeval people reduced to hunting and fish-
ing, paid their ground rents in furs. Moreover, when ground rents were paid, a
great fair was held at the payment site where furs were the main item traded.
The fur trade led the Scandinavians to discover America, where they made
lucrative trades with the Skraelings, exchanging trinkets for furs. Their every-
day dress was lambskin and goatskin; reindeer skins counted for little but
more noble furs were provided by the fox, cat, marten, and sable.
This trade flourished until the late Middle Ages, a period that spent lav-
ishly for furs. Hunting for furs moved farther and farther north, where the
noble animals were soon exterminated. At present Canada and Nova Scotia
supply the market with scarcely lesser furs, from which our furriers make
boas, muffs, fur boots, and heavy fur wraps.
Art has also disappeared from this branch of the clothing industry.
Nowhere is this lack of taste more apparent than in England, although it is the
only country in which fur is still used to denote the rank of the nobility,
judges, and local officials. Here this heraldic adornment has retained the full

178
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

significance it held in the Middle Ages. The ermine tails on the crowns and
collars of duchesses, marchionesses, and baronesses are nowadays a some-
what impoverished and abbreviated symbol of ancient splendor.
Since ancient times the Asians have been and remain the most skillful pre-
parers of leather. Wherever the Moors and Saracens planted their industry—
in Spain, Sicily, and elsewhere — we likewise find these Asian products, of
which cordovan, saffian, shagreen, and Russian leather are the most famous.
Cordovan gets its name from the Moorish town of Cordova in Spain.
French shoemakers derive their name cordonnier from it; in the Middle Ages,
particularly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, this leather was used almost
exclusively for finer footwear. A finer and slightly different variety is saffian
leather, also called Moroccan. The best of this beautifully dyed and shiny
leather with its shagreenlike grain is still manufactured in the Levant. Our
sophisticated machine industry cannot approach it. Only in Russia, Poland,
Hungary, and Spain—that is, in countries where such techniques are not yet
taught at the universities —do they still know how to make these exquisite
leathers and how to use them in a stylistically correct way. The Tiroleans are
the only Germans who still understand this style. They embroider and hem
their black cordovan belts and braces very skillfully and tastefully with pea-
cock and black grouse feathers.
Shagreen, or sagre in Persian, is an interesting product. It is strong and
hard and appears to be entirely covered with globelike granules on the grain
side. It is nowadays best made in Persia, Constantinople, Algiers, and Tripoli.
Pallas tells us how to enhance the grain of shagreen. This is done by spreading
the skins on the floor and sprinkling seeds of Chenopodium album on them;
these are trodden into the soft hide and beaten out again. The leather is then
shaved on the pitted side and placed in water for a few days. The areas com-
pressed by the seeds then swell out into the seed’s spherical shape; the point
that was pressed down hardest in the middle will swell the most. A similar
process would certainly be a very practical starting point for making leather
relief tapestries; they would be embossed not with concave but with relief
molds, then shaved and softened. This would yield a greater softness of pro-
file, combined with finer modeling and a certain naturalness of form, as it
would have been produced less mechanically. This process could be applied to
other materials as well, for example, wood, ivory, papier-maché, and so on.
This has, in fact, already been done in the Eastern lands.
Russia leather — with its penetrating perfume, very pleasant and refreshing
in the more refined specimens —is a remarkable product. Its aroma comes
from the birch oils that are applied to make the leather supple. This invention,
too, comes from Asia. The best such leather is made in various provinces of
Russia and in Lithuania. These countries are also the home of the genuine
boot style. The Russian boot (dress boot) is a true mosaic in leather; it is sewn
together very tastefully and solidly from many layers of green, red, and yellow
leather. Apparently this is a Bulgarian-Byzantine tradition.
Our lacquered European leather with its monotone waxed surface can

WAS,
 Semper

hardly be called artistic. It lacks style because its manufacture follows a prin-
ciple of surface decoration that is useful and applicable only to stiff surfaces—
that is, a principle that provides no guarantee of durability and suitability on
supple surfaces always subject to bending and movement. As a result even
the most supple lacquers immediately crack at the points where the bends are
permanent. Oriental peoples recognize the nature of the task much better, so
they either first spread a lattice of fine, synthetically produced cracks over the
shiny surface of the supple leather or cover it with scars and a fine unevenness
following a principle of formal order. This prevents the appearance of natural
cracks caused by bending surfaces. At the same time, the luster is concen-
trated on many small points of light on the surface and thus appears richer
and more effective yet soothing and moderate.
We know another Oriental industry in which this same principle of surface
decoration seems less justified. I am thinking of Chinese crackle glaze porce-
lain, which was invented because it is difficult to match the thickness of the
glaze to the porcelain in such a way that both shrink at the same rate when
exposed to intense heat.
These instructive examples also show us that style in the arts derives in
part from skillfully adapting to the unavoidable deficiencies and imperfec-
tions of the materials and methods used to a particular end; often the whole
secret lies in making a virtue of necessity rather than flying in its face.
For European footwear at present, boot polish remains the most stylisti-
cally correct lacquer; it can be applied extremely thinly and lightly. Tawing, in
which vegetable tanning agents are replaced by alum, was apparently invented
by the Hungarians in the twelfth century; it produces supple white glove
leather. Chamois leather is related to it; it is prepared by milling and other
such drastic treatments using bran and animal fat. Chamois is rough on both
sides because the grain is rubbed off. Special varieties of leather include the
long-renowned Hungarian, the delicately lustrous Erlangen, the French, and
especially the Danish. Some can be washed, others not; not all are waterproof:
some absorb water like sponges. Styles for leather trousers and patent leather
gloves derive from these materials and have their own rules, which we will not
pursue here.
More important for our purpose are red-tanned horse hides. Their consid-
erable size, their pronounced and regular natural grain on one side, their
equally pleasant and velvety texture on the flesh side, and finally their light
chamois color make them particularly suited for wall dressings and furniture
coverings. When using horse leather these properties should be emphasized,
not concealed. The Canadian tanning style mentioned above may serve as a
model for the relevant principles. This is especially true for the seams and
joints, which are not to be hidden but frankly acknowledged.

oe Rubber: The Factotum of Industry

There is an important natural material that has only recently brought about a
radical change in many areas of industry thanks to the remarkable flexibility

180
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

with which it adapts and lends itself to every purpose. I mean gum elastic, or
caoutchouc, as the Indians call it. It has the broadest stylistic range imagin-
able, as its natural sphere —imitation — has almost unlimited application. It is,
so to speak, the ape of useful materials. It is made from the milky sap of trop-
ical plants: in the East Indies from Ficus elastica, in Java from varieties of the
fig tree, in Brazil and Central America from Siphonia elastica, in the Indian
archipelago from Urceolaria elastica, a giant creeper. Its remarkable proper-
ties were first discovered in Europe by [Charles-Marie de La] Condamine,
who in 1735 published a paper on it that had little success at the time. Only
in the last fifteen years has this material started to attract the attention of
industrialists, having previously been used more for gewgaws and for erasers.
Its chemical properties, which are no less important than its mechanical ones,
are only just being investigated; the most important among them are its insol-
ubility and chemical stability. It is not affected by any acid, with the exception
of concentrated nitric acid; it is soluble only in naphtha and some volatile oils
such as lavender, sassafras, and so on. It is also soluble in nonvolatile oils—
linseed oil, for example — but loses its ability to dry. Note also the material’s
mechanical properties: its elasticity, tenacity, ductility, impenetrability to
water and gas, lightness, suppleness, ability to harden, smoothness, and so on.
It also cannot be compressed beyond its natural limits; it yields to strong pres-
sure but always springs back to its normal density. On the other hand, it is
more easily stretched and is more inclined to stay in this condition. Finally, it
can be alloyed and dyed.
From these specific properties it is clear how rubber should be used and
the style appropriate to such use. It can be employed in three ways:
1. as a solid mass that is used in thin or thick slabs or even in compact
forms;
2. as pliable threads for bands and fabrics;
3. asa varnish that dries and forms a solid covering, whose properties can
be varied indeterminately.
We will deal here only with the use of rubber as a leatherlike dressing. The
second application falls into the category of spinning and weaving, which will
be dealt with later. The third application is closely related to the lacquering
industry, to which a section immediately following the present one will be
devoted.
Imported raw rubber contains a number of impurities that are frequently
added with fraudulent intent. Various means have been devised to purify the
mass, of which the most useful is that developed by Sievier, the former direc-
tor of the Joint Stock Caoutchouc Company in Tottenham. Raw rubber is cut
up into small pieces that are kneaded and masticated in a mill to produce a
compact ball. In the process an intense heat is produced by the internal work-
ing of the parts; thus water must constantly be poured over the rubber, which
also serves to clean the mass. The reddish ovoid lump produced by this first
manipulation is then kneaded again once dry, after adding some unslaked
lime. The heat thus developed drives the water particles out of the mass and

181
 Semper

makes it thick and black. A third and a fourth operation then take place fol-
lowing a similar mastication principle, during which very considerable forces
are developed. It is only then that the mass is homogeneous enough to be
pressed into parallelepipedal and cylindrical cast-iron molds. The cakes, usu-
ally rectangular, are about eighteen inches long, nine inches wide, and five
inches thick. They are cut into slices of the desired thickness by cutting
machines. These slices are used to make tubes for chemistry and other pur-
poses by soldering the two edges at an angle. They are used in many other
ways besides, but rubber’s natural properties are significantly impaired by
these manipulations. For example, so-called purified Indian rubber is almost
useless as a drawing eraser, as it quickly softens and crumbles. Nor does it
remedy rubber’s tendency to become stiff when it is cold and the ease with
which it sticks together when warm.
The American [Charles] Goodyear performed the great service of solving
both these problems, but his invention of what is known as vulcanization was
snapped up by the Englishman [Thomas] Hancock. This process makes the
material all but indifferent to heat and cold. The rubber is saturated with sul-
fur and then subjected to a temperature of 120° Reaumur, rather like trial by
volcano. Rubber did not attain its full importance for industry until this
process was invented; it has become a material that is almost immutable and
at the same time absolutely flexible, a factotum of industry. Another com-
pletely new process devised by the same inventive American gives rubber the
solidity of stone, the one property that it lacked. Thus it can be used as a sub-
stitute for ebony, horn, and lava in buttons, knife handles, combs, machine
parts, boxes, and furniture of every kind. It involves procedures foreign to the
materials being imitated, but it makes the articles infinitely easier to manufac-
ture and lowers the price. Still another remarkable property of the material
prepared in this way is that it can be hammered, which makes it even more
like a metal; additionally, it can be polished and can take on every possible
color. In this last respect, however, a fortunate limitation is that the mass itself
has a deep natural tone that combines in a most pleasant way with various
dyestuffs, which in a granular or powdered state are kneaded into the some-
what translucent mass. To some extent this alleviates grave violations of color
harmony, which our modern Western industry simply does not recognize or
understand (in this context see § 14). Another important attribute of prepared
rubber is that it readily accepts the galvanoplastic process as well as any other
form of gilding.
The following list of objects exhibited by Goodyear, [Charles] Morey, and
others at the last World Exposition in Paris is taken from Dr. [Lothar]
Bucher’s interesting report on rubber, which I also utilized in part for the fore-
going remarks.’ This will show how broad a range of uses this remarkable
material already covers, and the extent to which it must continue to claim the
attention of technicians and even artisans. There were shoes with fine vents
that were impervious to water but allowed perspiration to evaporate; clothing
of every kind; waterproof coverings, including a type coated with colored

182
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

sand, by [Philippe] Gagin in Clignancourt, for exterior wall dressings; maps;

tents; pontoons; lifeboats; life vests; diving suits; suspension rings (instead of
springs) for carriages, mounted on the chassis; picture frames; solid or uphol-
stered furniture; saddle racks; book bindings; small spigots for barrels; but-
tons; watering cans; gun butts; saber sheaths; cartridge cases; spools and
other machine parts; combs for personal care and for weaving; shiny spades;
ribs for corsets and spokes for umbrellas and parasols; walking sticks; excep-
tionally thin, flexible and durable spectacle frames; handles for knives and
every kind of tool; rulers for drawing, divided into millimeters; haut-reliefs
with and without gilding; jewelry items, little boxes, and every kind of knick-
knack. Even the red velvet with which the cabinets were hung and the gold
strings and tassels on them were made of gum!
Another splendid application is lining ships with rubber panels. Unlike
copper panels, they are not subject to oxidation, and because of their elastic-
ity they resist insects and boring clams. Last year ships with such plates sailed
on long voyages from American and French ports. Horseshoes and tires have
been made of vulcanized rubber, but they have not worked particularly well in
practice. Perhaps Goodyear’s new invention will make rubber more suitable
for this purpose as well. A stylist faced with a material of this kind will be at a
loss for words!

§ 33 Current Style in Rubber Production

Of all materials, metal is the most similar to rubber because of its broad range
of technical applications (if one imagines all the properties of particular
metals fused into one). It might therefore be appropriate to defer a discussion
of rubber’s style until the section on metals. It cannot, however, be completely
avoided here, especially since this material is starting to play such an impor-
tant role in dressings and the treatment of surfaces in general. It is interesting
to let experience speak first, as it can be very instructive despite the brief
history of the rubber industry. Points of comparison are offered by the exhibi-
tions of 1851 and 1855. Rubber and gutta-percha products were widely repre-
sented in both, particularly in the American and English sections, and they
provide a sure indication of the state of the new industry at the beginning and
end of this four-year period. At the exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851 its tech-
nology was dominated by the principle of carrying to extremes rubber’s abil-
ity to take any shape, even the most difficult. Here rubber was made to
demonstrate its adaptability in every possible extravagance and to do all sorts
of handsprings—a situation rightly condemned in the better critiques of and
essays on the exhibition. Was it the influence of these voices or did American
common sense find its way unaided? In any case, the Americans learned to
tame the youthful tractability of rubber. They did not again allow the mate-
rial’s great flexibility to lead them to produce artificial and inappropriate
forms and decorations. At the latest exhibition they may even have violated
correct style by the opposite approach: emphasizing smooth, bare surfaces
without any three-dimensional embellishment (even for jewelry boxes and

183
 Semper

other luxury objects) and then adorning them with restrained silver and gold
fittings. Thus it was only by adding extraneous accessories that the material
acquired its adornment; on its own, it asserted itself by means of its extraordi-
nary uniformity of mass, its mild black color, the smoothness of its flawless
polished surface, and finally a solidity and immutability that are made mani-
fest externally —and thus symbolized, as it were — by simplicity of form.
It cannot be denied that progress had been made, yet at the same time one
can see how the very novelty of the properties that Goodyear’s inventive spirit
managed to coax out of this material —in particular its solid texture, like that
of horn—has brought about a sudden change in the aesthetic treatment of the
material. Designers focused entirely on this most recently discovered attri-
bute, making it the criterion for the entire domain of technology, in which,
however, rubber was actually used in a wide variety of ways.
It is my impression that many objects made of hardened rubber are pressed
or cast in molds. Yet no molding procedure is so perfect that certain flaws,
seams, and other such imperfections in the product can be altogether avoided;
on the other hand, molding permits great richness of decoration for only the
initial cost of the mold. This richness of surface decoration can be used to
conceal and disguise the molding flaws so evident on a completely smooth
surface. A patterned surface—more or less on the principle of the beautiful
molded Henry II vases, which derived from very similar technical considera-
tions (see the rubric “Faience” in “Ceramics”)—is therefore by no means sty-
listically inappropriate for some of these objects. Thus the recherché simplicity
in the use of rubber discussed above may well in some cases be an error of
taste caused by reversing an earlier and opposite tendency.
I am, therefore, totally opposed to American rubber shoes, whose surface
is kept far too smooth. The most genuine property of rubber — indeed, the
most important one apart from its impermeability —is not supported but hin-
dered —completely nullified, in fact. Synthetic rubber intended to cover living
and moving organisms must have a certain rugosity. Feet in rubber shoes
would thus be relieved of some of the wooden clumsiness that makes such
shoes so awkward to wear.
I find rubber imitations of silk and velvet even more objectionable. Here
the ease with which pressing and other processes can create reliefs on the
material ought to be exploited to enliven a dead surface that has no natural
grain or other inherent decoration. Because soldering parts and pressing are
such important design aids in the rubber industry, both processes should work
together in surface decoration and define the style of similar rubber coverings.
Textile products like velvet should not be imitated, as they result from pro-
cesses quite different from the above.
I have already mentioned the quite special charm of dyed rubber, which
resembles in this regard colored straw, wax, wood, leather, and other tinted
materials with a natural color of their own. The natural color establishes a
common band for the added colors and unifies their dissonances. This advan-
tage, which rubber offers to a greater extent than any other material, should

184
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

also be exploited by soldering a charming polychrome system of surface deco-

rations, enlivened by shallow impressed reliefs. (See also the chapter on hyalo-
technology in “Ceramics.”)

§ 34 Rubber Used for Covering Houses

Nature has two ways of covering its organic creations, and both systems have
served us as models for artificial coverings. The natural protection for organ-
isms consists either of a continuous skin system, impenetrable to water and
resistant to other external effects (like that found in plants, in many aquatic
creatures such as dolphins, whales, and eels, and also in many land animals
such as humans), of a scale system (like that found in many plants and most
fish — most distinctively in the latter). It is also the basis for bird feathers, to
which animal fur can ultimately be traced back.
Until now we had found no material that offers the necessary imperme-
ability and suppleness for covering and roofing our buildings according to the
first of these principles. Cement stucco has many properties that make it suit-
able, but the principle of surface continuity (to which we will return in a
moment) means that it is not entirely satisfactory as a roof dressing in our cli-
mate. Likewise, asphalt dressings have so far failed to meet the expectations
they have raised in this regard. Many people now anticipate a radical change
in building technology —and consequently in architectural style, to the extent
that it is dependent on the material — based on rubber and cheaper substitutes
that have yet to be invented. By contrast, the system of imbricated roofing—
indeed, the roofs themselves—can no longer be stylistically justified on mate-
rial grounds but only historical ones. And yet I doubt that the system of surface
continuity for roofing will ever completely replace the ancient imbricated
system, as the latter has indisputable material advantages in addition to the
prerogative of artistic tradition. The most important of these advantages is the
ease with which imbricated roofs can be repaired. Because an imbricated roof
is made up of pieces from the very start, it does not need to be patched when
being repaired, unlike continuous coverings.

Lacquering

§ 35 Chinese Lacquering Processes

Lacquer is a specifically Chinese continuous surface cover to which a few
words may be dedicated here, as various stylistic observations can be related
to it, and it also has sufficient intrinsic artistic and technological interest.
Lacquer (gi, in Cantonese also chat) is a varnish that becomes black and
shiny as pitchstone when exposed to air. It is commonly used in China, partic-
ularly for decorating box surfaces and luxury furniture. But it is also used for
larger (architectural) works, and one could rightly assert that this material
essentially conditions the style of all Chinese art. The Chinese lacquer every-
thing —even the trunks of the trees in the decorative pleasure gardens of their
dwellings.

185
 Semper

The lacquering operation is divided into many processes, and each requires
specially trained workers who concern themselves with just one phase. First,
the piece of furniture or whatever is carefully made by the carpenter; it is
planed smooth with an iron scraper, and all the cracks and joints are carefully
filled with a fine resin (ma). These joints then have strips of paper made from
the Brussonetia plant pasted over them and the surface is given a grain by
covering it with silk canvas or a fine-grained paper.
This grainy surface is set up with ox gall and a very finely powdered red
earthenware; these materials are very slowly stirred together with an ebony
spatula on a rimmed board. This operation lasts a full day.
The grounding is done with a broad flat brush (about 15 cm wide), and the
layer has to be fairly thick. When dried, it has a grainy surface and brownish
red color.
Now this coating is smoothed with a red earthenware polishing stone.
Various means are used to prevent the lacquer from penetrating. In Japan wax
is used for this purpose; in China the red undercoat is covered with a second,
very thin coat of gum and fine chalk.
The lacquer is said to be the reddish sap or resin of a tree that grows in the
Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Jiangxi, Henan, and Zhejiang, and in various
areas of Japan. The Chinese call it gi, the Japanese shitsu or urushi no ki. This
tree is identified with Linnaeus’s Augia sinensis. Others say that lacquer is
prepared from the resin of melanorrhoea, Rhus succedaneum or Rhus vernix.
Less refined varieties are also made from the fruit of Dryandra cordata and
Rhus semialatum.
The varieties of lacquer differ greatly, and this affects the price. The finest
lacquer looks dark coffee brown with a hint of red, costs about four hundred
to five hundred francs a hundredweight, and comes mostly from Sichuan.
There are also lesser varieties that are not so dark; the lighter and whiter
they are, the lower the quality.
Father [Pierre] d’Incarville identifies fourteen different kinds of lacquer
and describes their properties (see Chine moderne; ou, Description historique,
géographique et littéraire de ce vaste empire, premiére partie par M. [Jean-
Pierre-]G[uillaume] Pauthier, seconde partie par M. [Antoine-Pierre-Louis]
Bazin, 630 ff.).
Lacquers are purified and prepared in various ways by adding pig’s gall,
deer-horn charcoal, and water. About 605 grams of top-quality lacquer are
added to 1 kilogram of water, and for the same quantity of lacquer 37 to 40
grams of oil of the Camellia sesanqua, pig’s gall,° and about 19 grams of rice
vinegar can also be added. After these materials have been well mixed, they
form a fine viscous shiny-black varnish.
A very fine flat brush (qi guan) is used to apply it. Any trace of dust must
be avoided in the process, so the operation takes place in carefully sealed and
well-swept rooms.
The Chinese avoid heated rooms for drying. Rather, they prefer rather
damp and cool places; they also sprinkle the floor in summer to prevent the

186
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

lacquer from drying too quickly, which may cause its surface to crack.
From the drying room the piece comes into the hands of a worker who
sprinkles it with water and carefully smooths it with a polishing stone made
of fine-grained schist (lao hang shi). It is then given a second coat of varnish,
and after this has dried it is polished for a second time; these operations are
alternated until the surface is completely even and shiny. The minimum num-
ber of such coats of lacquer is three, the maximum eighteen.
To complete the polishing process one also uses white argillaceous earth
from the province of Guangdong. Finally, the object is lacquered again, and
when this process is finished it is handed over to the artist.
The drawings are done freehand on the surface with cinnabar and brush,
then traced with a fine steel stylus. With the same tool all details of the out-
lines still missing are scratched into the lacquer. The artist always holds his
brush and stylus vertically with his hand free and unsupported; the steadiness
of hand and sureness in doing this are admirable. Sometimes the design is
completed beforehand on paper and then traced onto the ground.
Next the outlines of the drawing are gone over with Guangxi lacquer or
with another kind called hua jin qi, which serves as a mordant for the gilding.
A little camphor is added to this mixture.
When dry, these outlines are gilded with ormolu with the aid of a fine
swab. This ormolu is specially prepared and has a dull finish. A solution of
potash in water is used for this; it costs about five francs per gram. For pale-
green gold effects one employs a variety mixed with silver.
If reliefs are sought, a second layer of the above-mentioned mordant is
applied but without camphor. More gilt is also added until the relief reaches
its required height. As in porcelain painting, the relief is gradually built up
by the paintbrush, creating something of a mean between painting and
sculpture. Fujian lacquer is used on the gold ground to draw black outlines,
details of eye, mouth, hair, clothing, landscape, and so on. Finally, various
details are applied in pure or porphyritic, alloyed gold suspended in a gum
solution.
There is also white lacquerware with many kinds of ornamentation. Made
from hua jin qi, this lacquer is mixed with silver leaf and kept liquid with
camphor.
The red variety is Chinese cinnabar (zhu sha); pink is obtained from the
carthamus flower, green from orpiment and indigo, violet from zi qi, or cal-
cined colcothar, and yellow from orpiment. All these colors do not fade but
combine with the lacquer even more effectively over time. The paintbrushes
used are extraordinarily fine, and they too are very expensive (five francs or
more).
From the studio of the painter and gilder the furniture goes back to the
cabinetmaker, who assembles it, provides it with locks, fittings, and handles,
and furnishes it tastefully.
The workers work for a small salary the whole year without stopping, as
the Chinese know neither Sunday nor holiday. The workshop is closed only

187
 Semper

twice a year: on New Year’s Day and the Lantern Festival. Occasionally an
individual worker is granted a leave.

§ 36 The Relationship of Chinese Techniques to Ancient Techniques;

Indian Lacquers; Papier-Maché
The Chinese lacquering process was described at some length because it cor-
responds in many respects with the techniques employed by the Hellenes and
all artistically cultured ancient peoples (Assyrians, Egyptians, Etruscans, and
others) in their polychrome surface decorations. It also affords many an inter-
esting glimpse at the oldest painting techniques. I will return to this later; here
I simply wish to point out the extent to which the lacquer pieces described
above reveal the Chinese artisan’s total understanding of the demands of the
material and the requirements of his task. This leads to a particular charm
and beauty of form and color, which is quite independent of the more intel-
lectual enjoyment of higher artistic representation. Satisfying the latter fully
may be the highest aim of art, but it was never the ambition of the Chinese.
Yet we often pay too high a price for an inadequate satisfaction of these
intellectual demands at the expense of the beauty derived from purely formal
harmony.
The well-known papier-maché objects with inlaid mother-of-pearl and
gilded or three-dimensional decorations also belong to the category of Chinese
lacquer work. They are excellently imitated in England in terms of technique
(although in the purely technical sense we still do not approach Chinese and
Japanese lacquering), but in terms of style they still leave much to be desired.” It
is clear at first glance that the principle recently adopted by the Americans for
their rubber goods (see above) is actually at home here in the industry under
discussion and is borrowed from it; the similarity of the two materials has been
recognized, but not enough consideration has been paid to the differences.
Like the Chinese, the Indian peoples have been very skillful lacquer work-
ers from the earliest times. Moreover they appear to have an advantage over
the Chinese in that their soil produces a greater number of rare kinds of lac-
quer, principally light-colored ones. The most beautiful lacquer pieces are
those in the Indo-Persian style; their flower ornaments have something of the
imitation antique style of the Renaissance (there are various opinions about
their origin to which I will return) and something of the well-known shawl
patterns, with multiple intertwinings of cypress ornaments. They combine a
strict style with the genuine charm of purely vegetal ornamentation; gilding
never appears in great quantities on the usually light-colored lacquer boxes of
the Indians. Magnificent specimens of such modern Indian lacquer products
are found in the Museum of Ornamental Art in London. In his aforemen-
tioned report Redgrave presents several examples of typical Indian lacquer,
which I append here.’ He made the following remarks about them: “The
purely ornamental treatment of the forms and their elegant flowing lines, with
the agreeable manner in which both gold and color are dispersed over the sur-
face, is a lesson of richness without gaudiness worthy of the attention of the

188
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

manufacturers of papier-maché: and when it is remembered that this ware is

of the commonest and cheapest character, it serves to show that vulgar forms
and bad ornament are not necessarily connected with cheap manufacture.”?
Sharp corners are to be avoided with wood and papier-maché, as with all
similar lacquered materials, because lacquer’s brittleness causes it to flake off
most easily in these areas. Every lacquer style therefore requires rounded
shapes with edges that are not too sharp and at the same time adhere to the
basic requirement for flat surfaces. Compared with the art of enameling, to
which this technique is closely related, lacquer offers more freedom because
it does not need to be fired. There are many great stylistic difficulties in orna-
mentation, color, and so on, known to be associated with the process of firing
and its preparatory work, so lacquer manufacturers should recognize and
exploit this advantage. It is not sufficient to know and adhere to the nar-
rowest limits of style. We need nobly stylized and characteristic works that
display a sense of freedom when not confronted with material or technical
constraints.
I return once more to the fact that papier-maché fabrication has to meet its
own quite unique stylistic requirements, in which it differs fundamentally
from both woodwork and rubber products. The pulp or any mass similar to
the softened paper used in papier-maché production acquires the necessary
consistency and firmness only when rounded and curved forms are chosen
and any excessively elongated surfaces avoided. The principle for the manu-
facture of papier-maché objects will be described later in greater detail, when
we deal with hollow-body (tubular) construction. Here it is sufficient to point
out that a certain skewed style that is pleasing in smooth but curved and
crooked outlines and surfaces, used mainly for furniture and utensils, is fully
justified, and indeed necessary in certain cases, especially in the technique just
discussed.

§ 37 Fibers
Our consideration of simple materials used in their natural state or after a
technical processing that does not fundamentally change the material’s struc-
tural and formal properties has expanded almost excessively. It is therefore
time, in this section of the book devoted to textiles, to turn to those materials
that have to undergo a basic formal change before they are applied to certain
ends.
For the purposes of the present book, we will limit ourselves to the most
important among them, because most other similarly used materials follow
their essential characteristics. As such we will present here flax, cotton, wool,
and silk.
The first two belong to the plant kingdom, the last two to the animal king-
dom. But they could also be grouped otherwise, especially since silk, although
the product of a worm, is not truly organic but is much more comparable to
extremely finely spun and hardened tubes of plant gum, so that it is also
related to rubber. Flax could be grouped with silk, and cotton with wool,

189
 Semper

since both pairs are obviously the most closely related to each other in terms
of style.
At this point, we will speak only of the style of materials produced from
the four raw materials mentioned, that is, those that arise from the specific
properties of these raw materials (without giving special consideration to the
procedures necessary to process them, which will be discussed in subsequent
sections). For this reason, the specific properties of these raw materials will be
considered first.
The microscopic and chemical attributes of these materials have been the
object of much scientific research, apparently without wholly satisfactory
results. The investigations and observations of various specialists in this field
have, at least, varied considerably. The wave refraction of the media used in
microscopic research has so great an effect on the appearance of microscopic
substances that the most favorable medium must be chosen for each material
separately in order to obtain the most accurate image possible. Ignoring these
influences has led to the uncertainty described above in the results of different
observations.
Taken overall, however, the observations do agree to the extent that flax
fibers have a shiny outer surface and a cylindrical cross section with a glassy
breakage (according to Thomson they have tubular joints; according to Ure
they do not).
Cotton, observed in a dry condition, can take a variety of forms. Thus Sea
Island cotton looks quite different from Smyrna cotton. The former is band-
like and fairly regularly wound (like a twisted, hollow half-cylinder), whereas
the latter is gnarled and irregular, although on the whole it approaches a band
shape (with a flat cross section), and in this regard is characteristically differ-
ent from flax. When soaked in oil or balsam, there is scarcely any visual dif-
ference between the two kinds of cotton.
According to Ure, wool and cotton are best observed in Canadian balsam,
thinned with turpentine. Wool fibers look almost like snakes, with a scaly sur-
face and cylindrical form. Wool’s spiked outer rind gives it the ability to felt,
which distinguishes it from most other materials. An exception is the hair of
certain animals, which possesses this property to a high degree.
Silk threads are doubled and consist of twin tubes that the silkworm lays
in parallel when spinning and that are then bonded together more or less uni-
formly by the varnish that covers the surface. Each fiber of these threads has a
diameter of '/1800 to 1/2000 of an inch. In cross section the width of each tubular
pair comes to about '/1000 of an inch, although this varies for different types of
silk. Imported raw silks are already prepared and reeled, which causes the
twin threads to undergo changes in thickness and parallelism.
The diameter of flax thread is about '/2000 of an inch, the same as silk.
Cotton fibers are actually cylindrical tubes, but as they dry they collapse
and appear half-cylindrical. Their diameter on the side that has been pressed
flat is '/500 to 3000 of an inch, depending on the quality.
Under a microscope, in natural light, wool seems to have a diameter of

190
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

'/1000 to 1/1600 of an inch; even the finest Spanish and Saxon wool rarely or
never exceeds this degree of fineness.
The toughness or strength of the different fibers is 1,000 for flax, 1,390 for
hemp, 1,996 for New Zealand flax, and 2,890 for silk. The strength of cotton
and wool has not yet been established, but it is well below these other fibers.
Cotton and flax consist of carbon, oxygen, and a small quantity of hydro-
gen; silk and wool have eleven to twelve parts nitrogen among their con-
stituents. The specific weights of the raw materials have not been established
with certainty. According to Ure, the specific weight of wool, using water as
a unit, is 1.26; that of cotton, 1.47 to 1.5; that of flax, 1.5; and that of silk,
1.3. For mummy cloth he established a weight of 1.5, that is, equal to cotton
and flax.

With regard to the investigations touched on, see:

Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures; or, An Exposition of the Scientific,

Moral, and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great
Britain. London, 1835. Extract in Dingler’s [Polytechnisches] Journal
58 [(1835)]: 157.
Thomson, essay on mummy cloth, with illustrations by Francis Bauer.
Extract in Dingler’s Polyt|echnisches| Journal 56 [(1835)]: 154-55.
Ure, A Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures and Mines, with a Supplement.
New York and Philadelphia, 1846.
Ritter, “Uber die geographische Verbreitung der Baumwolle und ihr
Verhaltniss zur Industrie der Volker alter und neuer Zeit,” Abh[andlun-
gen] dler| Akad{emie] d[er] Wissensch{aften]. Berlin, 1850-51.

§ 38 Flax Fibers and Their Special Attributes

These microscopic — chemical and mechanical — properties of raw materials
may appear to tell us little about the question of style in the arts, yet they are
the basis for certain more apparent and physically active properties of raw
materials in general that govern their technical treatment. Among these
properties are differences in the ability to conduct heat and the related ability
to conduct electric currents, differences in the smoothness of the fiber sur-
faces, a greater and lesser capacity for absorbing pigments, the degree to
which they can be spun fine, the behavior of fibers in water (which determines
whether they are washable), and many other differences affecting their use
and application.
The earliest history of inventions is, generally speaking, wrapped in dark-
ness and fable but is nowhere more uncertain or unproductive than in the pri-
meval industry of garment manufacture.
It is pointless to address the question of whether the manufacture of wool
is older than linen or which southern people first spun and wove cotton. Even
the invention of silk, which is ascribed to the Chinese, is lost in the darkness
of prehistory. In our stylistic investigation it thus does not matter which order

evil
 Semper

we follow in comparing the characteristic properties and resulting stylistic

requirements of various fibers.
We will, therefore, ignore this question and start arbitrarily with flax fibers
and similar vegetable fibers.
Their characteristics are toughness (second only to silk, see above), their
peculiar freshness, and their ability to conduct heat, which is due, in part, to
the smoothness of their surface. For the same reason they absorb little dust
or dirt and have little affinity with most dyestuffs, essentially because of the
chemical properties of vegetable matter. Their shape and color are little
affected by washing and are little inclined to felt.
The first property, the great toughness of flax, combined with its slight elas-
ticity, makes it particularly suited to purposes requiring this attribute. Since
early times flax or flaxlike plants have been used to make ropes for binding
parts of implements or weapons to each other, as well as for other fastenings.
The nature of this material recommended it for defining and terminating,
as it were, the two extremes of the broad realm of textiles. Flaxlike fibers have
been used at all times for the strongest fetters and bands, for the most secure
wrappings and exterior covers, for thwarting powerful mechanical thrusts
from without, for protecting what is covered, and for effecting a mechanical
force (as with ship sails and covers for windmill vanes). The linen coats
of mail of Amasis, praised by Herodotus and Pliny, are a familiar example.!°
As early as Homer we hear of woven linen mail as the usual protection of
Hellenic and Phrygian heroes, garments frequently represented in Egyptian
and Assyrian wall paintings as well as in Greek and Etruscan vase paintings
and sculptures. Similarly, nets made of hemp and linen were used for catching
fish and snaring game, and even the strongest animals were unable to escape.
Pliny asserts that in his day there were linen nets so fine that they could be
pulled through a finger ring, including the running knot on its edges. One
man could carry a net large enough to surround a whole forest. This anecdote
takes us to the other extreme of textile art, where we again encounter the
same fiber, the ne plus ultra for producing the very finest but at the same time
the most long-lasting and durable threads and fabrics. In this regard the mate-
rial is scarcely inferior to silk and was exploited even in earliest times. The
special properties of linen fabrics were recognized at an early stage. They pos-
sess a certain resilience along with the greatest possible fineness and softness;
they are washable and when damp can be arranged by means of stiffening
agents (gum or amidine) into elegant symmetrical folds. As a free and more
naturalistic idea of beauty awakened the instinct for a strict style, symmetry,
and the artificial in general and thus began to seek gratification in every
human artistic endeavor, these thinly folded fabrics of “woven air” or “woven
mist” (as these most delicate linen fabrics were called in high antiquity)
became the favorite underwear of the rich and noble. Such linens retained this
reputation later when, as a religious archaism, they were revered as a hieratic
garment, to be worn only by the gods and their earthly representatives—
priests and rulers. That these “sindons” were originally linen garments can

192
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

be deduced from the fact that Herodotus refers to fine cotton as sindon
of byssus, to distinguish it from similar, probably more ancient linen mate-
rials, the cultivation of which spread rapidly from India to the lands of the
Euphrates and Nile valleys and throughout western Asia. Herodotus also says
that Egyptian priests were permitted to wear only a single linen garment and
sandals from Byblos, but this does not accord with other known information
about Egyptian priestly dress. Thus it can be assumed that Herodotus also
used the word linen for cotton. It is very difficult to ascertain the particular
features of these materials from the numerous passages in which fabrics and
clothing are described by ancient writers, as their reports are not technically
precise. The ancients had an excellent fine linen called carbasus, which Virgil
describes with the adjective rustling (Virgil, Aen[eid] 9.775-76: sinus crepan-
tis carbaseos [rustling folds of linen]).
However much a supple cotton may adapt to all the technical demands
made on it (making it one of the universal materials that, like rubber, reduce
stylists to despair), it cannot equal three properties of flax. These are fresh-
ness, smoothness, and durability.

§ 39 Principle of Style Derived from Preparation

These properties, combined with the negligible affinity that linen has with
dyestuffs (when compared with wool, silk, or even cotton), provide a specific
field of technical application for this fiber.
As is usually the case, its stylistic principle can best be understood in a
negative sense, by showing what should not be done to it. In preparing this
material one should avoid anything that runs counter to this material’s above-
mentioned exquisite properties or even makes them less effective or less
noticeable. Instead, one should seek treatments that enhance these properties,
either genuinely or merely with regard to sense impressions. Thus one should
avoid rough surfaces on linen fabrics, because grainy or fibrous surfaces dis-
turb that pleasant feeling of freshness unique to linen, also because they
reduce linen’s resistance to dirt and dyestuffs."! A cool color is appropriate to
the cool, smooth surface. Thus the gentle white of bleached flax, the coolest
of all colors, should always predominate, at least in those cases in which the
freshness of the material takes precedence over its other properties (such as its
relatively high resistance to dust and dirt). But when the latter attribute is the
principal consideration (as for example with coarser garments, table dress-
ings, working smocks, and so on), the fabric should retain its natural color or
should be dyed according to a system of polychromy in which the negative
(cold) colors dominate. These will best suggest coolness and are also the most
convenient for dyeing flax. Blue (indigo) has always been the most popular
color for linen fabrics; it is even found on some very old Egyptian linen cloths
that have survived.” Any colors chosen for linen must always be a little cold.
Thus, for example, pure orange-yellow and all warm tones beyond cherry red
on the color scale are scarcely permissible for linen, unless they are broken up
by mixing in some blue. As a corollary to all this, it is clear that excessively

BOS
 Semper

dark tones approaching black are not generally suited to linen, at least not for
large areas, but they may be used ornamentally, for instance, as narrow con-
trasting threads. In my opinion, however, such strong contrasts are inappro-
priate to linen. For mourning dress one should select fabrics other than linen
that are better suited to black. The possible exceptions here are, at most, fab-
rics for veils, mourning lace, and other transparent products made of linen
threads, whose gentle luster seems spun like a net and contrasts pleasantly
with flesh tones. Even so, twisted silk and cotton thread should be preferred
whenever black and any other dark-colored net weave is called for.
The peculiar matte shimmer of flax is best brought out when the surface of
the fabric made from it is either completely smooth (unie) or “damasked,” a
most appropriate weaving procedure for linen that will be discussed below.
This is about all that can be deduced from a strict consideration of raw
flax and the specific stylistic properties of the products made from it. Every-
thing else relating to it is associated with the technical processes applied in
manufacture and the intended use of the fabric.
Most similar to linen is cotton, which, as already noted, ancient authors
very often confused with linen.

§ 40 Cotton: Properties of the Material and Its Application

Herodotus, Theophrastus, Strabo, Philostratus, and many others frequently
mention cotton, of which there were many kinds. Some of these are no longer
known or are at least no longer used for industrial purposes. These writers
unanimously name India as the true fatherland of cotton and cotton products
(among which fine, muslinlike sindons are the most famous), although culti-
vation of the cotton plant must have spread through western Asia and Africa
at a very early date.'8 Cotton cultivation is probably even older in China,
where it extends beyond the pale of recorded history. The importance of cot-
ton as the least expensive and most useful fiber and article of trade increased
exponentially after cotton cultivation spread to America (where, incidentally,
it was already known to the civilized peoples of Mexico and Peru before the
conquest). It was given a special boost in England in 1770 by Richard
Arkwright’s invention of the spinning machine. Since then it has been used for
all inexpensive clothing and thus has become the greatest benefit to humanity—
without ever forfeiting its ancient reputation based on the fine and costly fab-
rics made from it.
Cotton fabrics that are considered inexpensive clothing materials must
naturally be styled differently from fine ones. Nothing is more absurd, and
therefore more generally widespread, than the foolish imitation of fine materi-
als by adding ornaments that are suited only to finery. Whereas fresh and
bright colors are well suited to luxury fabrics, ordinary calicoes should not
soil easily and so should, by and large, have a darker and more neutral tone
(gray, brown, or something similar). The difference between the two styles
(luxury and ordinary materials) can be grasped in many other ways; this is but
one example.

194
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

It has already been noted that cotton fiber is related to both flax and wool,
and to a certain extent it apes the properties of both. It therefore admits the
broadest range of treatments and is often mixed with flax, wool, or silk, and
not infrequently it is used to counterfeit the last of these.
The attribute that distinguishes cotton from flax—it curls like wool,
whereas flax remains smooth and flush—stands out characteristically in
muslinlike, fine cotton fabrics. These have something of a mossy, combed sur-
face, and it is from this property that many people believe the [French] word
mousseline derives (from mousse [moss]). Others believe that the name comes
from the province of Mussoli or Mosul in Mesopotamia. Certainly this place,
the seat of the Assyrian Empire, was famed in early times for its manufacture
of fine cotton fabrics. The finely curled, crepelike fabric that we call muslin is
very probably the same as the one known to the ancients by the name of sin-
dones byssinae. The Indians still know how to use the simplest methods and
tools (probably unchanged since ancient times) to weave such fine muslin that
a piece measuring twenty-five ells and more can be packed into an ordinary
snuffbox. Preparation of such fine cotton fabrics does not have a long history
in Europe, but since the technique became available, English, French, and
Swiss muslins, jaconets, zephyrs, vapeurs, and tulles have partly replaced sim-
ilar Indian fabrics. They lack, however, the genuine style and ancient tradition
that distinguishes their predecessors.
Another Oriental material deriving from the genuine cotton style is nan-
keen, a linenlike fabric very similar to Egyptian mummy cloth. The yellowish
color of this material was originally simply the natural color of the yellow
cotton used in its manufacture. Nowadays, however, most nankeens, even
Chinese ones, are dyed in the thread.4
But the most typical cotton product is calico. This linenlike fabric is princi-
pally suited to take printed patterns of all colors, an ancient technical proce-
dure about which more will be said below under dyeing.
On the whole, cotton is not much used for artistic fabrics —those materials
whose surface has been patterned and decorated by an artful and regular
alternation and interweaving of threads. Because it lacks the damask luster of
flax, such woven patterns would not stand out. The virtue of cotton is pre-
cisely the opposite: the matteness of its surface, which is exploited quite felici-
tously in muslins.
Even so, there is no shortage of patterned cotton fabrics: ribbed dimities,
quilted and checkered piqués, pillows, thicksets, and so on. Their style is
based on the principle that they should appear quilted like a mattress, with
surface depressions that give the material a significantly thick, stout, and
warm appearance. Overlarge patterns, very broad stripes, or wide checks do
not suit them and lack style. By contrast, small interwoven patches, broadly
spaced on the smooth ground of a fine cotton fabric so that a light but regular
pattern is created, are quite appropriate to the style of this industry. The
ancient veils that are still found from time to time in reliquaries provide the
oldest models for these kinds of fabrics. A very elegant example of this given

195
 Semper

by Willemin is the veil ascribed to the Sacred Virgin of Chartres (see “Silk”).
Other cotton fabrics imitate the hairy surface of wool or the artificial
fleece of silk-velvet, partly smooth, partly patterned; these include velveteens
and velverets. They have a character of their own that distinguishes them
from the genuine wool and silk they are intended to imitate. Formerly, this
difference was emphasized candidly, and the need to make these cheap materi-
als derived solely from their warmth and durability (the old Manchester mate-
rials, still so beloved by English workmen, are a distinctive and appealing type
in their sturdiness and peculiar, indeterminate brown color). But now the lack
of style has crept in here as well, as we now see cotton-velvets emulating silk-
velvet, posing as the more expensive material.

§ 41 Wool: Properties of This Fabric and Its Application

Wool is without doubt the most beautiful fiber (even including silk); it is also
the material whose style is richest and fullest. The fine curly hair of sheep pro-
duces a soft loose fabric, which conducts heat poorly and is thus highly suited
to keep heat in when it is cold outside and keep it out when it is hot. At the
same time, the specific weight of wool is lower than that of any other fiber
(only 1.26), thus the fabric also has the advantage of great lightness. Unlike
flax and, to a certain extent, silk, wool is not fresh to the touch, but it has
great specific warmth. This is partly explained by the scaly texture of wool
hair and its irritation of the skin. These attributes, taken together, make
woolen fabrics more appropriate for outer covers and dressings than for
undergarments. Fabrics serving this purpose were made most artfully at a very
early time in Asia, where the finest kinds of wool were produced. Herodotus
says expressly that the beautifully woven outer clothing of the early inhabi-
tants of the Euphrates valley and Arabia, with its rich colors and embroidered
emblems, was made of wool then as now. “They wear,” he says, “a linen <or
cotton> shirt <sindon, kithon> reaching to their feet. Over this they wear
another wool garment of the same kind <in fact a kithon or short-sleeved
shirt> and throw over this a woolly white shawl <klanidion>.” The last is per-
haps the actaea of the Ionian Greeks, which developed into the stola of
Roman clerical vestments. It was a broad, lavishly fringed wrap, which some-
times took on the dimensions of a cloak. It was probably made of finest cash-
mere and resembled cashmere shawls. (See under remarks on clothing.)
The branch of the Asian wool industry concerned with making tents, wall
coverings, and carpets operated on an even grander scale. In high antiquity
these were extremely important furnishings for domestic interiors and formed
one of the main articles of industry and trade in Babylon and Nineveh.
Nowhere were they embroidered more magnificently or woven with more
vivid colors than in those cities. Tyrian carpets and Ionian wools, in which it
was principally the Milesians and Ephesians who distinguished themselves,
came closest. Their wool approached the finest Arabian and cashmere wools.!5
The Bible makes it clear that the Egyptians, too, have carried out wool
manufacture and carpet weaving on a grand scale since antiquity. The tapes-

196
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

tries and coverings of the Tabernacle were probably made of hair, decorated
with embroidery in colored wool thread or gold wire. There is no doubt that
many of the brightly colored outer garments and carpets in Egyptian paint-
ings and sculptures were intended to represent wool, although to my knowl-
edge no fragments of such materials have survived. It is known that these
were worn principally by the poorer classes and that it was strictly forbidden
for priests to wear animal fabrics next to their skin. Priests were permitted
to use woolen garments only as outer wraps.!6 The magnificent patterns and
colors of depicted hangings and carpets indicate without doubt that woolen,
embroidered, and woven fabrics were represented here. According to Strabo
(17[.1.41], p. 559), Chemmis was the capital of Egyptian wool manufacture,
and it retained its reputation until Rome conquered Egypt.
Wool’s characteristic property of felting was also exploited very early by
these peoples for industrial purposes, especially for headgear (the red oriental
fez is ancient; it is modeled on the likewise purple-red Assyrian miter), car-
pets, and footwear. The Tomb of Cyrus was draped with purple sheets or felt
carpets from Babylon.!”7 Demetrius Poliorcetes wore purple felt soles with rich
gold embroidery at the front and back.'8
The land of marvels, India, was already manufacturing and exporting its
cashmere shawls from the very earliest times; this exquisite wool product has
probably undergone no fundamental change in manufacture or style for thou-
sands of years. The Ramayana mentions the wedding gifts King Videha gave
to his daughter Sita. These included wool cloths, furs, precious stones, soft
silk, polychrome dresses, and jewelry, in addition to coarse wool fabrics or
carpets stretched over carriages. The phrase wool cloths can only refer to
those finest of Indian wool fabrics, in which the raw material under consider-
ation appears in the most refined stage of its technical-stylistic development.
Wool was the most popular material for clothing at the high point of
Hellenic culture. The full fall of wool folds replaced creased and undulating
linen stuffs and spun cotton fabrics (vestes undulatae). The Ionian, old
Hellenic chiton (the undergarment) was of linen, the Dorian of wool. This
choice of the Hellenes, as they grew toward self-knowledge, is of the greatest
possible interest for the question of style to the extent that it pertains to the
raw fiber material. Greek wool was simple, uncheckered, unpatterned, and —
unlike the Assyrian xAavidvov [mantle] — without a hairy fringe. It was simply
and solely calculated to give the most beautiful, finest, and fullest fall of folds,
undisturbed by any pattern or broad fringe work. The strength of the weave,
the fineness of the material, and its color were chosen to suit the sex, size, and
character of the wearer. The domestic manufacture of fabrics and clothing
was always held in esteem by the Greeks, and numerous authors can be cited
to this effect. Not until after the reign of Alexander did Asiatic luxury and a
principle of fashion less favorable to wool reappear —a principle that had pre-
dominated earlier among the Ionian tribes, before the time of the highest
development of Hellenism. The heroic pageantry worn in the tragedies proba-
bly made its own contribution to this radical change in dress even earlier.

197
 Semper

The Romans, who in early periods sometimes still wore sheepskins like
those of shepherds in the Roman campagna today, were introduced to Greek
tastes in clothing at an early stage. Yet a barbarian element remained that can
be seen in their drape, which was conspicuous and heavy. In keeping with this
heavy style, a kind of felt was used for cloaks, instead of the light wool fabrics
worn by the Greeks. Wool was fulled and acquired a feltlike density. Here too
everything later became Asiatic, and silk partly replaced wool.
It is clear from Pliny’s well-known exposition of sheep breeding and wool
manufacture in the Roman period [Historia naturalis 8.72-75] that the
ancients correctly judged the attributes of the different kinds of wool and
applied them judiciously. They seem to have kept more to naturally colored
wool than is now the case. This Roman polymath found Apulian wool supe-
rior even to Milesian. Spain was famed for its black wool. Alpine wool was
distinguished by its whiteness. Erythaean and Batavian wool were reddish
brown, Canusian yellow, Tarentian blackish, Istrian and Libernian more like
hair than wool and not suited for soft-haired, sheared cloths. It was processed
to make synthetically checkered Lusitanian materials (similar to Scottish, so-
called plaid fabrics). Narbonensian and Egyptian wool were said to be similar,
and made clothes so durable that they could be dyed when they became worn
out and still have a generation of use in them. Another kind of wool resem-
bling goat hair was said to have been used for carpets from earliest times and
was mentioned as early as Homer. The Gauls had their own method for dyeing
these coarse carpets, the Parthians another. Felted wool was resistant to the
sword and even to fire. This industry seems to have flourished chiefly under the
Gauls, who created the shaggy camp blankets that bear Gallic names.
We know that the ancients knew to treat combed wool and short, fine
carded or woven wool differently and were familiar with the two methods of
wool preparation—combing and carding. The former was used, as it is by
us, for passementerie and embroidery; the latter for the manufacture of fine
scarves and other such things. It is clear from various passages, as well as
from the numerous technical terms for materials that occur in the works of
ancient writers, that the wool industry at this time produced at least as wide a
range of products as we do. Most likely this broad range of manufacture was
driven much less by the manufacturer’s whim than it is now but was instead
based on a thorough study of the materials, the particular ways to treat them,
and the special purposes for which they were best suited. It is clear from
Pliny’s chapter that the famed embroidered Babylonian materials and the no
less famed many-threaded, woven Alexandrine fabrics, as well as the Phrygian
carpets and clothing called Attalic (embroidered through with gold), were
wool, not silk.
Among the exquisite properties of wool is its receptivity to dyestuffs and
its capacity for deep color saturation. Owing to the velour and yet naturally
lustrous surface of wool (which always retains an organically translucent
property, something foreign to flax, cotton, or silk), even the darkest tincture
with which it is dyed always appears as a color and not as an indeterminate

198
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

black. It takes on bright and shiny colors no less agreeably. These never
appear opaque or applied (as is the case with cotton) but seem transparent
and united with the material that they fully penetrate. We should exploit these
marvelous properties of wool as much as possible yet in doing so observe that
style still practiced by the Orientals, Indians, Persians, Arabs, and Turks,
although it is at best only a faint reminiscence of the infinitely superior tech-
niques of the ancients. It seems permissible to formulate a positive principle of
style with respect to dyeing wool. Examples of the best Oriental wool fabrics
show that wool should be dyed according to a principle opposite to that suit-
able for dyeing linen (and for dyeing cotton as well, although less decidedly).
This principle derives from wool’s warm character and full fall of folds. The
polychrome system selected for a pattern using this material must as a rule be
positive and warm and limited to saturated, full, and sustained tones. The
material of Egyptian fabrics portrayed in wall paintings is easily identified
by knowing that wool fabrics unfailingly appear dyed in deeper, fuller, and
warmer colors, whereas linen and cotton are characterized by a light color
and colder tone in which blue, green, and violet predominate.
More on this and other aspects of ancient and modern Oriental poly-
chromy will follow below.
Already in classical antiquity, northern and western Europe produced
many woolen textiles that came to southern markets as highly valued articles
in trade. The Celts and Iberians provided smooth, bombazine-like, checkered
plaids; the northern Gauls, Germans, and Scandinavians produced shaggy
velvet and other wool stuffs that imitated fur or were felted (gausape [cloth of
woolen frieze], villosa ventralia [shaggy abdominal belts], amphimalla [cloaks
wooly inside and out]), frieze (togae crebrae papaveratae {closely woven togas
bleached with poppy]), and camlet. Each year Charlemagne presented his
people with frieze cloaks, which were so widely esteemed abroad that they
were even valued as costly gifts in Oriental courts.
Among the Saxons and Scandinavians wadmal, a coarse homemade wool
fabric, was used for barter in place of money. Several kinds were distin-
guished, coarser and finer, including some striped fabrics. Loden was very
strong and thick, similar to the fabric that Pliny said would resist iron and
even fire. It was even used as a kind of armor, and if in a wrestling match a
man fell into a fire in the hall, his loden coat protected him from burns. Flock
or felt was even sturdier. Knitting wool was used in the Baltic and North Sea
countries from the earliest times for knitting large stockings or trousers
(Hasen), usually blue, which were commonly worn by both men and women.
(See Weinhold, Altnordisches Leben.)
German wool manufacturers were famed for their fashionable materials
from the tenth century onward. From Germany finer wool weaving spread
toward Flanders and was particularly favored by the protection offered by
Baldwin III. He summoned to his states German weavers and spinners who
understood how to prepare the finest cloth, especially scarlet, which was
almost as highly esteemed as purple silk.!? From Flanders and Belgium fine

99
 Semper

cloth manufacture moved first to England and France then to Florence and
other industrial cities of Italy such as Milan, Genoa, and Naples. This took
place after Florence had become a grand duchy, but wool weaving (arte della
lana) had flourished there even in the early fourteenth century. According to
Giovanni Villani, there were already 200 stalls for the sale of wool in Florence
at this time, 70,000 to 80,000 pieces of cloth were manufactured each year,
and 30,000 people lived off the industry. In those early times most of the trade
in fabric, which was usually coarse, went to the Levant. Later (in 1460) the
number of stalls had risen to 275, after which the industry dwindled in size
from century to century.
During the civil and, subsequently, religious disturbances in Flanders and
Brabant, many of the most skillful weavers emigrated to foreign states: most
of them to England, some to Germany.
To them England owes the blossoming of its wool industry. In the mid-
sixteenth century over 100,000 weavers fled Flanders, most of them to
England. Incidentally, English dyers, especially woad dyers, were already
famed in classical times. The Scandinavians also held English and Irish prod-
ucts in high esteem in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries.
[Jean-Baptiste] Colbert made French cloth manufacturing fashionable.
Very old factories existed in Switzerland as well, especially in Zurich.
German wool products too were famous in antiquity and competed with
English and French fabrics with varying success. Certain products — for
example, the long worsted yarn so necessary for embroidery, passementerie,
and knitted fabric— are nowhere as beautifully prepared and dyed as in north-
ern Germany, particularly in Hamburg and Holstein. The long-haired angora-
like sheep of the North Sea coast and its heaths supply virtually the only
suitable raw material for this. A few historical notes on carpet mills and
embroidery plants will follow later.
Someone with a thorough knowledge of raw wool should investigate and
compare it, not just for its chemical and microscopic properties but especially
for those aspects that elude scientific experiment and rest upon indefinable
material properties. Recognizing, evaluating, and judging the true importance
of these properties requires artistic as well as scientific understanding. In this
way he could produce a monograph for technicians and manufacturers, prac-
tically and instructively developing matters that I—because I am unfamiliar
with wares and have also limited myself to the program I set—can only hint at
here. The same is true of the last fiber that remains to be discussed, namely, silk.

Silk?

§ 42 The Non-Greek Silk Style

We are assured by Stanislas Julien, who made Chinese industry the object of
his generally useful research, that the art of raising silkworms, cultivating
mulberry trees, and manufacturing silk fabrics has been documented in China
as far back as the twenty-sixth century B.C.

200
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

It was from the Chinese that the Indians learned to cultivate silk, presum-
ably after a long period of trading for the exquisite Seric silk of China. In the
Ramayana, silk clothes are described as festive clothes for the daughters of
princes and kings, not as everyday wear, from which we can conclude that
they were rare foreign fabrics. In Arrian’s Periplus silk fabrics as well as spun
silk are mentioned as items imported from abroad. It appears that silk cultiva-
tion was not introduced to Egypt. Nor is there any evidence that Egyptians
used silk (a fabric they could have imported from India) for festive or religious
garments or as carpets and curtains. If the word translated in the Bible as silk
really referred to silk, we would have to assume that this rich material was
used on a large scale early on for decoration and clothing by Egyptians, Jews,
and Phoenicians. But several interpreters now suggest that the Tabernacle’s
ropes and curtains of silk (according to Luther’s translation) are not silk.
Moreover, the entire description of the Tabernacle in Exodus is considered a
late insertion, so that even if silk is a correct translation here, it would not be
conclusive evidence as far as the present question is concerned.
It is equally uncertain when silk fabrics were introduced to the peoples of
the Euphrates valley in western Asia, and whether we should imagine silk
embroidery among the lavishly embroidered Babylonian and Assyrian gar-
ments and carpets. [Arnold Hermann Ludwig] Heeren favors the latter view,
because Roman poets always refer to silk clothes as Assyrian clothes and
because Procopius states explicitly that the garments the Greeks used to call
Median and that are now called silk were made of spun silk.21 But this con-
tradicts other passages in ancient writings in which Babylonian fabrics are
explicitly included under wool materials, as for example the passage from
Pliny cited above. We can assume that the use of silk came to the Assyrians
late and that the Greeks and Romans referred to silk clothes as Babylonian or
Assyrian garments only in the imperial period, as the silk trade was then con-
ducted via Assyria and Phoenicia.
Aristotle was the first Greek to mention the silkworm. His description of
silk cultivation, however, refers to a particular silk industry established on the
island of Kos, and probably involved separating the cotton out of heavy half-
silk Oriental fabrics and reweaving the silk warp or silk weft into a new, very
light and transparent fabric. At least this is how Pliny interprets Aristotle’s
obscure passage.?4
Pliny’s interpretation of Aristotle’s note on this product of Kos, though
disputed by [Claudius] Salmasius and Heeren, sounds quite plausible to me,
because it must have been entirely in the nature of Greek women to see this
barbarian fabric and its characteristic properties from a quite different point
of view than that of the Orientals, who loved rich splendor and veiling. The
colorful, glistening, heavy, and dense fabric, whose stiff and angular drapery
ran counter to the Greek principle of dressing, did not appeal directly to their
taste, so they created something new from it. They used the strength of silk
thread, combined with its sheen, to create a delicate, metallically shimmering,
canvaslike fabric.

201
 Semper

The Greeks did the same with many other imports; indeed, one is tempted
to see in this example the quintessence of all Hellenic art and custom: it too
was a secondary creation. The material was not new, but the idea that brought
the old material to life was.
Only slowly, and never completely until the Byzantine period, did antiq-
uity grow accustomed to the style of silk and assimilate it fully. The Greek had
to become a barbarian, become Chinese (which occurred at the time of Justin-
ian and succeeding emperors), before silk would receive its due on European
soil, before the silkworm could be fully naturalized. At the same time, that
is, around the time of the Sassanids, the silk style seems also to have taken
deeper root in the Orient, in the lands that were once the seat of ancient west-
ern Asian civilization: Persia, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor. This change can
be seen in the well-known baroque equestrian figures of Sassanid rulers at
Persepolis, and elsewhere in Persian rock carvings, whose creased and flutter-
ing costumes were obviously made of silk, whereas the folds in the robes of
ancient Persian carved stone figures not far away show that their fabric was
undoubtedly wool.
The robes of those remarkable royal figures prove that the fabric the sculp-
tor reproduced so painstakingly in all its details must have been a thin taffeta
or satin or something similar. The silk undoubtedly portrayed here is reminis-
cent of light Indian fabrics of the kind that are still produced chiefly in that
country (as opposed to the heavy silk fabrics of China, Japan, and other parts
of the Orient). It was in all probability obtained from India.
The lightness of the material also betrays a certain general stylistic relation
with India’s delicate fabrics, but it is quite different from those silk products
with their satin sheen, in that the actual silk style is not yet clearly apparent.
There are a few very remarkable remnants of fabrics for which silk was used.
To judge from the character and appearance of the ornamental and historical
objects portrayed, they are Greek or Roman and date from the early Christian
centuries. Very little has been published on them because Christian archaeolo-
gists prefer to study other artistic movements than the one whose last reminis-
cence is expressed here, although certainly many valuable pieces of this sort
have survived in church reliquaries.
An interesting, very old piece of fabric, the so-called veil of the Virgin at
Chartres, was published by Willemin in his well-known work, and I recall
having seen similar examples here and there on my travels.
This relic was presented to Chartres Cathedral by Charlemagne and must
therefore already have been considered to be of venerable age. It is a fine linen
or cotton fabric of a yellowish color (probably the color of the raw material),
and it forms a sash six feet long by approximately eighteen inches wide. At
each end (terminated by a violet fringe) is a wide border, consisting of many
narrow and broad stripes cross-woven at regular intervals, and colored violet,
black-blue, and green.?3 The light ground has similarly colored patches woven
in the spaces between the stripes that depict birds and rosettes; they are
embroidered with brightly colored silk. The broadest stripe forms a frieze of

202
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

lions alternating with palmette vegetal decorations. The style of these embroi-
dered and woven decorations tends toward the Oriental but is at the same
time strongly reminiscent of antique art. This is especially true of the varie-
gated, almost geometrical motifs of the narrower stripes, which keep com-
pletely to the embroidered style. Quite similar motifs occur on the borders of
murals at Pompeii. I have no objection to attributing this material, in which
silk is used only for decorative enrichment, to ancient times— perhaps an echo
of the famous industry on Kos.
Among the remnants of actual silk products a curious piece kept in Chur,
Switzerland (of which, I believe, a part was presented to the archbishop of
Cologne), seems to me to be of great interest for its antiquity and its place in
the history of style. A color print of it was published by Bock in his Geschichte
der liturgischen Gewdander des Mittelalters (p|. 2), albeit in somewhat inaccu-
rate color. In this fragment we recognize a work of artistic weaving that
undoubtedly dates back to antiquity —and not even a work of the period of
deepest decline but one in the highly characteristic and distinctive style of the
middle imperial period. The design and polychrome principles evident from
this material —the curiously arbitrary but tasteful way in which vegetal orna-
mental motifs are used to fill up fields, the frequent repetition of circle seg-
ments as a field border, the general spirit of the composition —all are well-
known motifs from the wall and ceiling paintings in imperial baths and at
Pompeii. The repeating animal fights in the band strips— when compared
with the miniatures on the oldest manuscripts and other late examples of
ancient art from the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries—are true master-
pieces of accurate rendering and lively grouping, especially when one consid-
ers the increased difficulties of depicting them by means of the loom. For
these stylistic reasons, I agree with those who ascribe great antiquity to this
relic of ancient textile art. I find that it confirms my assertion that the actual
characteristics of silk (satin sheen, velvet down, and so on) did not appeal to
ancient taste and could not achieve full stylistic recognition until the last stir-
rings of the antique outlook had subsided.
Although this material is silk in both the warp and the weft, in a striking
way it has the character of cashmere. One sees clearly that the colors and pat-
terns derive from a style that is foreign to silk.*4
As far as the pattern is concerned, Bock has in my opinion wrongly associ-
ated this fabric with the Scottish or Gallic fabrics so often mentioned by the
ancients. The latter were checkered —scutalis divisae —according to Pliny. The
stripes intersected one another in a variety of colors; both their weft and warp
were made up of threads that formed alternating broad stripes. This gave rise
to the scutulae [checks]?5 (mivOt0L), Livy’s vestes versicolores [multicolored
garments], Virgil’s virgata sagula [striped military cloak], and Propertius’s
braccae virgatae. Admittedly, other writers have indicated that the principal
color of the Gallic garments was red but one should not imagine them with a
general crimson ground like that found in our fabric remnant. At most, red
stripes may have dominated among other colors, as in contemporaneous

203
 Semper

Scottish patterns. Our remnant was probably never intended to be worn, but
most likely served to decorate and bedeck a special area at the public games.
For I see in these woven groups no Samsons but only Roman animal fighters,
who could, if necessary, be duplicated indefinitely without ineptitude, as
would not have been the case with the lone figure of Samson. What is certain,
however, is that by the fourth century bad taste had made sufficient progress
for all kinds of figurative representations to be duplicated on the loom. They
must have made it very difficult for the tailor to orient them such that they did
not appear standing on their heads or at an angle when used for clothing.
Thus Asterius, bishop of Amasea, complains about the folly of his age in set-
ting far too high a value on such vain and useless excesses as weavings that
wanted to imitate painting with a tissue of thread; people who dressed in this
fashion were mistaken for painted screens, and little children pointed fingers
at the pictures on their clothes. There were lions, panthers, and bears; there
were rocks, woods, and hunters; the pious wore Christ and the apostles and
all his miracles on their backs. Here one could view the wedding in Galilee
and flagons of wine; there the man stricken with palsy was carrying his mat-
tress; elsewhere the penitent appeared at the feet of the Savior or Lazarus
awakened from the dead! To judge from such reports, our own fabrics would
be perfectly suited to the clothing fashions of those times. After taste had
turned in that direction at such an early date, cheap silk merchandise pro-
duced in the Orient for the market —like roba della fiera [goods for the fair],
without purpose or content— was fallen upon with delight. The chimeric
beasts woven into and strewn all over these fabrics were nothing but stunted
and stereotyped descendants of those fantastic mythological beasts of Assyria,
which incidentally were all products of embroidery, to which I will return
later. Except that now they adorned and decorated liturgical priestly vest-
ments, church paraments, curtains, canopies, and carpets.

§ 43 The Neo-Babylonian Silk Style

These Oriental fabrics have survived in fairly large numbers as liturgical vest-
ments, coronation robes, and other ceremonial garments. Later they were also
imitated in Greece, Sicily, and Italy. The biting satire of pious Bishop Asterius
is entirely applicable to them. One wonders what he would have said if in his
day they had already found their way into the shrine of his church. Nowadays
they attract the interest of Christian antiquarians, iconographers, and symbol-
ists, who seek to make such woven vermin and garment beasts seem tasteful
again to the present. To this end, of course, a symbolic and spiritual meaning
must be read into the salamanders, griffins, unicorns, hares, foxes, monkeys,
elephants, leopards, stags, oxen, lions, eagles, geese, and other game with
which such fabrics are strewn. Without such meaning the absurdity of their
frequent use for consecrated church implements and liturgical vestments
would be so obvious as to make it unthinkable to impose this fashion upon our
taste. Perhaps when these fabrics were fashionable people did believe partly in
the holy and partly in the cabalistic significance of these textile images.

204
Textiles: Technical-Historical

!
i
| a8

i
SS

="hh)
i
|
iWH

Jf
r
| Say |)
Ale
"]

imWE ula)
i
at |
GQpalit
ome
aaa
Th

Ds

Hom
fwI)al iti,
2

<i lal5a
a

205
 Semper

This would explain why they had such an important influence on the whole
direction taken by art at the time, especially architecture. But it would be dif-
ficult for us to adopt such beliefs again.
Until the end of the ninth century, it seems, these neo-Babylonian fabrics
were little used by the church, as the older reports of gifts to churches and
monasteries speak mostly of silk fabrics decorated with embroidery, depicting
Bible stories and holy objects. These followed even earlier draperies made of
simple unpatterned silk fabrics or linen and cotton. This is known from the
reports of Anastasius Biblioth[ecarius] on gifts from the early popes. Sergius
(687) presented tetravelia octo, quatuor ex albis, quatuor ex coccino [eight
tapestries, four white, four scarlet]. Gregory III (731) gave altar cloths and
hangings of white silk decorated with purple (ornata blatto, which probably
means edged with purple borders). Saint Zacharias (742) donated intercolum-
nar hangings for the ciborium ex palliis Sericis [canopy of Chinese cloths]. In
short, no mention is made of embroidery or patterns in these older reports of
gifts. The same seems to be true of the other silk fabrics intended for liturgical
vestments. They, too, probably had a completely plain ground with simple
gold or damask patterns, and their only real adornment was embroidery.
Thus for the Church of Saint Peter, Stephen IV had a marvelous chasuble
made of gold and gems; it depicted the story of Saint Peter being freed from
his dungeon by an angel. For the great silver gates of this temple the same
pope (elected in 768) presented hangings as high as the walls and made of fab-
rics with crosses or squares (de palliis stauracinis seu quadrapolis). For the
arcades of the basilica separating the aisles from the nave, he donated sixty-
five large Syrian hangings with gold grounds. Pope Saint Celestine had images
of Saints Peter and Paul embroidered on his pluvial with a silk inscription, “a
work of Cypriot or English artistry.”
All the fabrics mentioned here were either plain, woven with linear pat-
terns, or embroidered; there is no longer any mention of marvelous woven
animal scenes. It was only at this point that the bestiary of the Orient was
introduced, and from this time forward reports teemed with strange and bar-
barian technical terms that derived in part from the animals and other woven
decorations on the fabrics they adorned.
Let us again emphasize that the historical representations on ecclesiastical
fabrics so often referred to by Anastasius and others were almost certainly not
woven but embroidered. For, as can be seen from the objects described, they
were made neither in the Muslim Orient nor in Constantinople but sometimes
in far western Europe and indeed often in Italy or Rome, under the eyes of the
pope who commissioned them. For at that time neither Italy nor England had
silk factories, or so it is generally assumed; even less did they have carpet mills
like the arras manufacturers, which did not appear until the late Middle Ages.
They worked with wool and were in fact nothing but huge embroidery stu-
dios, whose technique was a cross between weaving and embroidery. From
this it becomes clear how much one must qualify the accuracy of the assump-
tion that there were silk factories only in Greece but not in Italy until the

206
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

Norman princes introduced silk cultivation to Sicily. Magnificent works of

silk art were produced in the West much earlier than this— not woven, admit-
tedly, but embroidered. It has not even been proven that the plain fabrics
needed by this industry had to be imported from abroad when silk was
required. It is possible that imported dyed or raw silk could at the time be
made locally into simple fabrics, just as had already been done in the late
imperial period, as shown by the aforementioned late Roman, non-Byzantine
silk fabrics with historical representations. Despite the development of silk
manufacture on a colossal scale, this is still the case in Western countries
today. The great service performed by the Norman kings was simply the intro-
duction of the mulberry tree and silkworm cultivation to the countries they
ruled and the great protection and expansion of a silk industry established
much earlier by the Saracens in Sicily. From this they created a monopolistic
production plant, probably suppressing all private industry at the same time.
The Saracens, together with a few Greek workers of both sexes, were the
managers and most skillful producers.
Hugo Falcandus, a late-twelfth-century historian of Sicily, provides a
detailed and interesting report on this royal manufacturer in Palermo. He tells
us that the “Hotel de Tiraz” consisted of four main studios: (1) a studio for
simple fabrics, such as taffeta, levantine, gros de Naples, and so on (which
were called amita, dimita, and trimita); (2) a velvet (examita) and satin
(diarhodon) studio; (3) a studio for floral fabrics (what we call damask) and
patterned (strewn with circles and other motifs) fabrics (exanthemata et cir-
colorum varietatibus insignita); and (4) a studio for gold materials, brightly
colored fabrics, and embroidery. The last of these was, of course, the one
that produced the truly artistic fabrics, which were embroidered with pre-
cious stones and pearls. Thus we can see that no historiated fabrics were
woven and that this higher realm of silk manufacture was left to the art of
the needle.
Most likely all works of higher textile art dating from this earlier period
will turn out, on closer examination, to be embroidery, either opus Phrygium
[cross-stitch] or opus plumarium [flat stitch].2” Examples are the famous dal-
matic of the imperial coronation vestments, with its wide edging containing
strange animal forms, and the imperial alb that goes with it, which is more in
the ancient style with a simple edging of palmettes. Both probably came from
the Hotel de Tiraz in Palermo. Likewise I tend to believe that the coronation
robe preserved in Metz was largely embroidered, as was certainly the case
with that very remarkable example of silk embroidery on patterned linen, dat-
ing from before the eleventh century, published and described by von Hefner[-
Alteneck] in Trachten des christlichen Mittelalters. It is part of the lining of a
thirteenth-century flag that is preserved in Bamberg. This beautiful embroi-
dery is probably the remnant of a coronation infula or other sashlike garment
intended for festive or religious purposes. In some respects it is the counter-
part to the scarf or veil of the Virgin Mary at Chartres described above, which
likewise consists of silk embroidery on fine patterned linen fabric.

207
 Semper

From this detour let us return to actual neo-Babylonian silk fabrics, whose
most characteristic features are those rough depictions of animals used as iso-
lated motifs in the centers of regular mathematical figures (polygons or circles);
set adjacent to one another to form a series in bands; or, finally, placed freely
floating in groups on a dark ground without an edging. They are made of a
dense and heavy silk material of a simple cross-weave or of strong twilled lev-
antine. The oldest such fabrics have only two colors, with designs formed by
the weft in a different color; the later ones are almost always worked with
gold threads, so that either the ground or the pattern appears in gold. The
dominant colors are purple-red, violet, green, and yellow, the last of which is
often replaced with gold.
These materials relate to the ancient, heavy, image-laden Asiatic fabrics
and wool embroidery just as the previously mentioned late Roman silk fabrics
related to the lighter and less decorated fabrics of classical antiquity. The silk
in both has not yet been properly addressed in terms of style; it was simply
regarded as a fabric that shows to a greater extent some of the attributes of
earlier traditional materials. The idea of making its particular attributes the
basis of a new style and founding a new principle for silk weaving — perhaps
sacrificing some of the advantages allowed by wool, linen, or cotton—has not
occurred. Signs of a different and more correct understanding of silk’s charac-
teristics can be seen in pictures of costumes from the earlier Sassanid period,
but this shows only that finished silk fabrics were then still acquired either
directly from China or, more probably, from eastern India. As a foreign fash-
ion, they affected garments for a time but pushed them in a direction more or
less opposite to the developments around the seventh and eighth centuries,
when silk manufacture had had time to establish itself in Persia.

§ 44 Gold Brocade
The first important signs of progress in the development of a silk style (which,
I repeat, had as great and widespread an influence on the art of the Middle
Ages as textiles had on the development of ancient art) are seen in the systems
of assimilation that became dominant. The sheen of silk formed the basis for
the even greater sheen of gold thread, so that either a gold pattern stood out
against a silk ground or a silk pattern was grounded with gold. Such a system
of coordinating and harmonizing a colorful sheen with something even more
radiant could not fail to produce a splendidly solemn effect.28
Fabrics of this kind are called auric textiles, vestes ex auro textae [cloth
woven from gold], and so on. They became the predecessors of the gold
brocades that the Middle Ages held in such high esteem, and whose heavy
falling folds and Asiatic ornamental splendor reached the limits of the attain-
able. The medieval name for this magnificent material was baldachinus, from
Baldach —that is, Baghdad or Babylon. Sometimes gold was not used and the
contrast between the brilliant and duller parts of the silk fabric was achieved
by combining different degrees of sheen in the silk threads—of the same or
different colors—that made up the fabric. This product, less magnificent and

208
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

rich but related to brocade, was called damask, after another major site for
the manufacture of Oriental fabrics.29
The origin of gold brocade is all the more interesting as it is closely related
to an ancient method of counterfeiting silk. The intrinsic, that is, the material
value of the fabric diminishes the more lavishly these old fabrics are woven
with gold. On closer examination, the supposedly gold threads are seen to be
nothing more than cotton threads with very thin strips of gold paper spun
over them. There is no doubt that this invention came from China. I have
examined very ancient Japanese gold brocades kept in the garde-meuble [fur-
niture storehouse] of the king of Saxony and found that they were completely
woven with such gold-papered cotton threads.
Probably this invention remained a secret of the Chinese and Japanese, and
the gold threads were obtained ready-made from China, either directly or
through India. Much effort has gone into trying to discover the secret of its
manufacture but so far unsuccessfully. My impression has always been that
the paperlike gilded material was a kind of rubber that initially formed a
fairly thick strip. The upper side was then gilded and stretched until extremely
thin (gold is sufficiently ductile to make this process feasible provided it is
thick enough at the start). Spinning such fine gold surfaces over the threads
would then not be difficult. Thousands of louis d’or are melted down each
year in experiments to find an equivalent to the Chinese gold-paper thread to
replace our present, very cumbersome, and costly method of spinning gilded
silver wire around silk thread. Perhaps some application of the wonderful
material I am talking about will provide a solution to this problem; it would
certainly bring rich rewards to the inventor. It is by no means just a question
of finding a cheaper gold thread. The problem is much more to discover a
method of avoiding the excessive boardlike stiffness of our modern brocades
and at the same time achieving the mild golden sheen of ancient and even
modern Oriental gold fabrics, in contrast with the common, brassy, and
tawdry luster of our own.
Our present method for preparing gold thread dates only from the mid-
sixteenth century. Yet Muratori (2:374) passes on an old method for making
gold thread that is said to date from the ninth century: “De fila aurea facere”
(sic!) [On making gold thread].
The brocade-and-damask style was actually first developed by the Moors
and Saracens of Spain and Sicily in the third period of the history of silk weav-
ing. It then became in a sense the leading principle of Arabian surface decora-
tion, and as such had a powerful impact on the architecture and art of the
Orient as well as the West. Since that time it has not undergone any fundamen-
tal changes or improvements, except during the finest period when ancient
artistic sensibilities were reawakened, at which time the bright colors of the
Oriental dressing style gave way to more serious and cultivated ones. Adhering
to the same principle as vegetal arabesques, soft, mostly dark colors (dark red,
dark green or dark blue, brown, or black) now alternated with gold. Follow-
ing the same principle of keeping the surface rich but not interrupting it

209
 Semper

unnecessarily, they loved to combine naturally yellow silk with gold. White
and gold were also frequently combined. It was not until later, under Louis
XIV and XV, that brocade was again woven with colorful flowers and a natu-
ralistic conception of the arabesque emerged that encumbered surface decora-
tion (along with bordering and other offenses against style).
To conclude this section, I feel I must append the following passage from
Redgrave’s often-cited report, as it very accurately portrays contemporaneous
taste in brocade weaving:

Graceful and elegant foldings are very important in all goods intended for personal
wear, and many of the most beautiful qualities of materials are brought out by the
interchange of light and reflection playing over their surface on the motion of the
wearer; it is important, therefore, that no mode of decoration should be adopted to
destroy this quality, even irrespective of the sacrifice of proper utility which takes
place in all works so overcharged with decoration or stiff from embroidery as to
impede ease of movement and freedom of action in the wearer: the full lustre of silk
more especially is dependent upon the folding, and every fabric is more or less influ-
enced by the same cause. When gold or silver threads are introduced in the weaving,
stiffness must result from it, and the skill of the designer should be so exercised as
to give the greatest effect from the least possible use of such materials. This has
been particularly understood in the Indian tissues, which exhibit the best effects
under folding in a remarkable degree, while the opposite error was noticeable in
many costly priests’ robes exhibited in the North-East Gallery, so stiffened with
gold and covered with raised embroidery that the wearer must be encased in them
as in a suit of armour; the whole were not only vulgarized by excess, but were
perfectly unsuited for use, and for the best display of those ornamental qualities
sought for.30

Elsewhere Redgrave says:

The natural treatment of flowers as the ornament of textile fabrics is nowhere seen
to greater disadvantage than in the rich altar-cloths in gold brocade exhibited by
French, Austrian, and Russian manufacturers. The coloured and shaded flowers
instantly vulgarise and give a commonness to this essentially rich material; while
diapers of colour, or a different texture produced by weaving, or silver threads
woven with the gold, as in some of the Russian fabrics, have a rich and true effect.3!

Although we are in complete agreement with this assessment of the fabrics

under discussion, we cannot but think that Redgrave, in his zeal for a conven-
tional, entirely flat treatment of vegetal ornamentation on fabrics and for the
geometrical “diaper,” has perhaps expressed himself too severely. As long as it
observes the principle of flatness and other stylistic considerations affecting
the material, the modern loom should be capable of freeing itself from the
incunabular forms of its infancy. For example, one can imagine natural
arabesques with shading, reflection, and so on, so tempered and harmo-

210
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

niously blending with the ground that the surface remains undisturbed
—as
should indeed be the case with any good image.

§ 45 Satin
As splendid as they may be, damask and even brocade are still materials that
can be woven almost as magnificently using wool, even though this alterna-
tion of dull and shiny fabrics produces a slightly different effect than does silk.
By contrast, the fabric that we are now going to discuss is so much the natural
terrain of silk that only gold and silver thread, woven in a similar way, can
produce a corresponding effect. I am referring to satin or atlas.
Satin is an opus plumarium continuum [continuous embroidery], a kind of
ground embroidery produced on a loom. To a certain extent this material has
no texture but consists of interlocking flat stitches continuously laid next to
each other, so that the silk thread remains unbent and uncreased as much as
possible and combines its sheen with the sheen of the neighboring threads laid
parallel to form the smoothest possible surface and a very brilliant effect of
light and shadow. The wonderful attributes of this material were recognized
early and used sometimes alone but more often in combination with matte
sections, to which it formed a shiny contrast and ground.
Unfortunately, some of the most important books about the history of silk
manufacture are inaccessible to me here, so I am unaware whether anything
definite is known about the origin and first introduction of this beautiful
fabric into Europe. My efforts to gain a firm view of this matter have been
unsuccessful. Yet this product, more than any other silk fabric, has something
genuinely Chinese or Indian about it, depending on its particular treatment.
Flat-stitch embroidery, opus plumarium, has been perfected in those coun-
tries into a special art, holding the middle ground between sculpture and
painting —or rather, it is both at the same time (a matter that will be dealt
with elsewhere). This highly sophisticated technique, which could be attained
only through a thousand years of practice and experience, is evidence of its
age and probable origin in those Eastern lands. I am convinced that satin is an
attempt to imitate flat stitching in silk using a loom, and this remains true
even when it forms a ground or is placed in relief over certain patterns, either
in the same way as satin or in another texture. This is the basis for my view
that the kind of weaving under discussion originated in China or India. The
sculptures of robed figures in the Murgab valley (see above) lead me to believe
that this material found its way to Persia and the Euphrates valley at an early
date. It is difficult to say when it came to Europe. I have already mentioned
that, as far as can be deduced from surviving remnants, the oldest silk fabrics
imported to or made in Europe in the Christian era were simple cross-weaves
or levantine twill with a very thick texture. Yet very old embroidered chasub-
les with a satin ground, several of which Bock mentions in his book, indicate
that this material was probably introduced to Europe as early as the seventh
or eighth century, at the same time as neo-Babylonian animal fabrics. It may
also have been imitated at eastern Roman production sites.

Pas\ih
 Semper

Among the various terms for silk fabrics, so numerous in Anastasius and
elsewhere, for which the correct interpretation is usually in doubt, I have tried
to find one that seems to best characterize the material under discussion. I
think that the right term is the frequently occurring expression blattin. To be
sure, blatta originally referred to the insect —the kermes — used as a red dye in
lieu of cochineal when dyeing a deep red. But it has been shown that when
applied to fabric this name has little connection with the color from which it
derives. This is also true of scarlet and purple, both of which are also names
for fabrics whose shared feature is not their color but some as yet unknown
technical peculiarity. I am even inclined to doubt that blatta originally meant
the insect producing the red dye. The word makes me think unwittingly of
Blatt [leaf], that is, a smooth surface with shiny and saturated coloring. Fire-
red coclico, made from the juice of the kermes or from the gallnuts that this
insect produces on leaves, is the color par excellence for satin. It is entirely
appropriate to the sense of style, which is also confirmed by the wonderful
legends that abound in German lore about the preparation and origin of
Pfellel, which seems to be the old German name for satin. The Wigalois
relates a tale of how in Asia there is a cave of eternal fire, in which a salaman-
der weaves an incombustible and costly Pfellel.32 A particular kind of Pfellel
was called salamander.33 Wolfram von Eschenbach mentions a Pfellel (called
Pofuss) with so fiery a glow that an ostrich could hatch its eggs on it. More-
over, both blatta and Pfellel (which I consider to be synonymous with satin
and atlas) are found in the most varied colors: red, yellow, green, black — later
white, purple, and opalescent. Equally varied was its use in sacred and pro-
fane dressings, coverings, horse and tent blankets, edges and hems of other
fabrics, and so on. This costly fabric, “which lends infinite magnificence to he
who wears it” and retained (alongside and in combination with velvet) the
highest respect in the Middle Ages, came from Africa and Asia. This is indi-
cated by the place-names (usually in part invented and wonderfully sonorous)
found in the bombastic and notoriously boring descriptions in ancient poetry
of splendid garments developed for processions and knightly feasts. But there
are also Greek and Spanish towns, including Almeria, the principal seat of
Spanish-Arabian satin manufacture, that have lent their names to certain
kinds of Pfellel. Finally, Pfellel from Arras was also famed at a very early date.
The French name for this fabric, satin (perhaps identical to blattin), appar-
ently first occurs in the sixteenth century. When Francois I entered Lyon in
1515, all the citizens were dressed in silk. The councilors wore damask and
crimson satin robes. At the head of the procession were the men of Lucca in
black damask, followed by the Florentines in red velvet, then finally the citi-
zens of Lyon in white cloth, velvet, and white satin.34
Famous above all others was the satin de Bruges, which is very frequently
mentioned, much praised, and often named in inventories of church treasures
and state records from this period.35
More than any other silk fabric, satin permits the most lustrous and lively
coloring and the starkest contrast when juxtaposed with other hues. For the

PVE
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

reflected light from the metallic surface of this fabric appears white, whereas
the depths of the sharply outlined angular folds are always dark, almost
black, as with metal. A soothing triad results, because the local color always
seems to be placed, so to speak, halfway between black and white. At the
same time, satin reflects juxtaposed colors in a more lively and distinct way
than any other material, so that the reflection builds, as it were, a bridge that
mediates the starkest color contrasts. From this it follows logically that satin
should not be juxtaposed with colors that produce unpleasant tones when
mixed and mingled in reflection. Thus, for example, a fire-colored satin
undergarment would not go well with a purple outer garment, because the
reflected color would be a dirty shade of mixed red, yellow, and blue. A pat-
terned, damasklike floral ground can take richer and more highly colored
designs than any other. In this respect it surpasses even a gold ground, unless
the latter has the same texture as satin.
The influence that satin had on painting and sculpture is evident from late-
fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century work by German and Netherlandish
masters. It is seen most clearly in Albrecht Diirer, whose folded drapery was
such a conscious choice based on a penchant for this material. It is very
instructive to compare this German conception of this material with what
Italian masters (particularly Titian and Veronese) made of it, and then to look
at what became of it in the hands of the seventeenth-century Dutch masters.
This is of interest not just to painters and art historians but also to silk manu-
facturers, wardrobe masters, and those ladies who in the important question
of their toilet do not think it superfluous to support their innate taste with a
study of style.
Obviously Durer had different fabrics before him than did Titian, Veronese,
or even [Hans] Holbein. The satin painted by these masters was different from
that which gleams for us in works by [Caspar] Netscher and [Gerard] ter Borch.
Silk drapery, and especially satin drapery, is better suited to painting than
to sculpture, and in the late Middle Ages it had a deleterious effect on the lat-
ter field in some respects. Sculpture had to throw off the fetters of silk (some-
thing already happening in the work of the Pisan masters) before it could feel
free again.
Still, it cannot be denied that silk advanced a certain ceremonial and ten-
dentious direction in the representational arts (one that, though technically
perfect, always seems constrained in comparison to a freer style) and that
in this respect sculpture, too, produced great and beautiful works in the
Middle Ages.
An example of a noble conception of silk drapery (already more in the
spirit of the Renaissance) is the fine bronze statue of Emperor Ludwig of
Bavaria, created by the hand of an unknown master in the fifteenth century
and published by von Hefner in a tasteful presentation. The drapery seems
even grander in the engraved bronze memorial slab for the Copmans, illus-
trated here. It was executed with wonderful artistry in 1387 and now deco-
rates a wall of a side chapel in Bruges Cathedral.

23
 Semper

Tomb slab in Bruges

It would be possible to add many other technical and aesthetic remarks about
this fabric, were we not obliged to consider the minor arts only in their nearer
and more distant relationships to the high arts and especially to architecture.

§ 46 Velvet
Velvet contrasts with satin, and yet it too is the fortunate result of a well-
understood technical exploitation of the attributes of silk fibers.
Silk threads, considered longitudinally, are the shiniest thread (apart from
metallic threads). Nevertheless, a surface formed from infinitely many trans-
versely cut silk threads— for example, close-shorn velvet —is absolutely with-
out luster; it absorbs light or rather obstructs the division of the rays of light
into received and reflected light.
When velvet products were first introduced, people do not seem to have
recognized and exploited this property of the cut surfaces of the silk threads
to absorb light and made it part of a distinct style for silk fabrics. Instead,
they aimed at something similar to satin, and by laying long pieces of silk
thread together horizontally, so that light was refracted and reflected by their
cylindrical surfaces, they produced a silk fabric that was as substantial and
shiny as possible. These oldest fabrics, similar to plush, were in fact a satin

214
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

with a multithread weft, whose threads were wholly or partially cut through,
so that their loose ends formed a soft, long-haired fleece. Similar fabrics made
of wool were already known to the ancient Romans and are often mentioned
by Pliny and other ancient authors as a specialty of the Gallic wool industry.
The oldest surviving velvets, of which Bock describes several in his much
cited work, are mostly long-haired fabrics similar to plush. Nevertheless, what
is said to be the oldest appearance of velvet—namely, a piece of silk fabric
bound with fifty-three other very interesting pieces of fabric in the parchment
codex of Theodulf (twelfth century) in Le Puy in the south of France —seems to
be a short-shorn genuine velvet, which would prove that the transitional step
to a new, genuine velvet had already been made before the thirteenth century.
The word velours, allegedly a combination of the words velum and ursus,
first appeared in the thirteenth century. If this etymology is correct (which I
doubt, preferring to connect the word velours with the English velvet and the
German Felbel and thus with the word Welf, the smooth pelt of a young dog
or lion), it confirms the difference noted between the oldest velvet and later
kinds. The Orient, the ancient seat of silk cultivation, was also the seat of vel-
vet manufacture, and all poets and chroniclers have insisted that it came from
there and have given it Oriental names. It is said that there were velvets
among the gifts from Hariin ar-Rashid to Charlemagne. By that date velvets
were being used for turbans in the Orient. Many ancient velvet fabrics have
Kufic sayings printed on or running through them.
It is clear from the above-mentioned description by Falcandus that a spe-
cial studio was devoted to velvet manufacture in the magnificent manufacture
royale de Palerme. The expression hexamita in his text can in fact refer only
to velvet, just as there can be no doubt about the derivation of this name from
the Greek word €€duttoc, “six-threaded,” to which I will return.3¢
It may well be that short-shorn velvet was fully accepted for the first time
when chivalry was in its finest flowering toward the end of the Crusades—
after the treasures of the Orient had become known and sumptuous clothing
and other such extravagances were at their peak. Tight secular clothing no
longer permitted the use of the heavy fabrics that lent such dignity to the litur-
gical garments of the priesthood. Perhaps the invention of velvet shearing came
as part of a transition, when the patterning of older plushlike fabrics from the
long-haired fleece cut for ornaments led to shearing them completely.
Green seems to have been the favorite color for all this. Indeed, it is the
color that nature most frequently imparts to its velvety creations, such as
grass, leaves, and the fruits of certain plants (admittedly, green is but one of
many colors nature favors, such as brownish red, quince yellow, purple, and
plum blue). One can perceive a characteristic mixture of colors in all these
natural velours, a fact to be studied carefully and heeded by thoughtful manu-
facturers no less than by painters. It is particularly important to observe how
nature juxtaposes her velvety surfaces with other satin-sheen phenomena
colored according to a quite opposite principle. Just as the satin flowers of
spring stand out against the velvet carpet of a lush lawn, so green can be the

25
 Semper

main color of velvet that will usually serve as a ground for rich embroidery or
an even shinier piece of silk.
What lends velvet its characteristic splendor, apart from the fullness and
sweep of its rounded drapery, is the satiny sheen that emanates from those
parts of the folds that are seen sideways, together with the deeply saturated
but matte luster of color produced by those parts when viewed from above.3”
This fuller and rounder drapery should and must correspond to a principle
of ornamentation absolutely different from those that hold for other materi-
als, and this principle must at the same time take into account the already
noted nature of the surface. Gold brocades and damasks require different pat-
terns than velvet does, even though they are equal in weight. Like the former,
velvet should be covered with large flowers but with lighter tendril shapes, so
as to let the ground develop its characteristic property. Delicate satin, taffeta,
and mourning fabrics are to be treated quite differently. The general rule is
that the pattern has to follow the fullness of the drapery and its modality—
leaving aside other considerations like the purpose, surroundings, and so on.
The Orient has always been our teacher in the stylistic refinements of these
materials; medieval whims were quite baroque, though occasionally surpris-
ing or even beautiful, but self-confidence in even these subordinate areas of
art theory was not attained until the mid-fifteenth century (see above).
The great improvement in velvet manufacture already noted did not hap-
pen until the mid-fourteenth century. Velvets had been very uniform until
then: light and still plushlike. Then the Italians introduced a thick, low-shorn
velvet and over the course of subsequent centuries the aforementioned rich-
figured fabrics (a kind of half-shorn) appeared. Our embossed velvets are a
poor substitute.
In addition, heavy velvets were embroidered and sewn with gold and silver
ornaments, inset with satin panels. They formed the most desirable and beau-
tiful grounds for all the marvels of the needle.

§ 47 Other Silk Fabrics

I will conclude these remarks on the stylistic use of silk, which have already
exceeded the limits of my plan, by returning briefly to the term hexamita
[six-threaded] and similarly formed expressions with which it is usually con-
trasted in medieval writings on fabrics of earlier centuries. These are the amita
[simple-threaded], the dimita |twice-threaded], trimita [thrice-threaded], and
so on, or collectively (as a contrast to amita) the polymita, that is, fabrics in
which several threads are used for the weft, pitoc, to weave brightly colored
fabrics with either figures or flowers. The word polymita was common in
classical antiquity38 and was used for woven colored fabrics, in contrast to
embroidered ones. The colored threads are laid out according to the drawing
and, following the mechanical preparations and procedures of weaving, either
over or under the weave, depending on whether they are intended to be visible
or hidden. Only the thread of the ground forms a regular weft. The more
colors there are in the design, the greater the number of threads in the weft.

216
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

This antique sense of the word does not correspond, at least not always, with
the meaning it acquired in the Middle Ages. This is especially clear from
Falcandus’s already cited description of the famous silk factory in Palermo.
He tours the individual studios and begins with the preparation of the sim-
plest fabrics: “There you see how the simple and cheap fabrics —the amita,
dimita, and trimita—are made.” These must be the light taffetas, crosswoven
like linen, and then the heavy taffetas (gros de Naples) — dimita and trimita—
in which the weft has two or three times the thickness of the warp without
any brocading of the wefting threads, for the latter, finer work would have
been carried out in another studio. Undoubtedly different colored threads
were occasionally used as weft and warp, which produced iridescent fabrics or
regularly patterned and striped taffetas, according to the system of color alter-
nation adopted. These were all “simple and cheap fabrics.”
Then Falcandus enters the workshop of the velvet and satin weavers:
“Here you see how in the hexamita a greater fullness of silk is concentrated;
here satin is refulgent with a fiery gleam.” (“Diarhodon igneo fulgore visum
reverberat”; this is obviously the Salamanderpfellel of the old German poets.)
Only now that we come to the third studio does he show us the looms for
floral fabrics and so on. Thus hexamita is not a floral fabric. Besides, velvet
is usually made with six weft threads, of which three are cut, while the other
three make up the fabric. Therefore Falcandus probably meant velvet here.
If hexamita were only taffetas or levantines with a very thick sixfold weft
(which could still be assumed), they would in all likelihood not have been
allotted a special studio with satin.
I must add a few stylistic remarks on those light and pleasing taffetas
called rensa, after the town of Reims. They were much worn in the most dis-
tinct colors as early as the ninth century in Germany and were called Zindel.
They were used principally as linings or for lighter clothes and were, when
they were shot (in other words, when they shimmered in various colors), the
favorite material of the Florentine and Roman schools of painting, which fre-
quently clad their noble female figures, sacred and secular, in tunics of apple
green, shimmering, or pinkish red taffeta silk. This beautiful, shimmering,
peacocklike fabric has gone completely out of fashion and is now worn only
in England, where it has been made since the early Middle Ages and called
Pfawin or fown.3?
Similar points could be added about many other things, including the
strong levantines, what is now called gros de Naples, and especially the beau-
tiful moiré fabrics. The last of these permit an especially full, rich, and at the
same time sharp drapery and allow their masses to appear varied without
being interrupted by unduly striking patterns, however meaningful they
might be. We must, however, set certain limits for these historical remarks on
style.
 Semper

Sby EAS aGOIN

DT TOINIE DEB eed) Ete sl ROEVAW
eVine NIM
OF MATERIALS

§ 48 Preliminary Remarks
This opens up a broad field that offers many rewards to the manufacturer
who combines a thorough factual knowledge with a scientific and artistic
education, for whom the nation’s (and even the producer’s) growing sensitiv-
ity to beauty is inextricably bound up with true progress and the flourishing
of industry in general, even in material respects.
For my part I have already noted my incompetence to take on such a difficult
task, and I only wish to prompt discussion by making some suggestions about
what in my view should be considered in any future treatment of so rich a field.
This task, moreover, leads me to questions affecting my own art more
directly and for which I believe myself to be better prepared.
All textile processes contribute to the transformation of raw materials and
their unique attributes into products of great suppleness and considerable
absolute strength. In threaded and banded forms they are used for binding
and fastening; as supple surfaces they have the purpose of covering, contain-
ing, dressing, enveloping, and so on.

§ 49 The Earliest Products of Bands and Threads

The earliest products of this sort were borrowed, so to speak, directly from
the simplest processes of nature. They include stalks, reed stems, tree
branches, animal sinews and intestines, which are then twisted to give the
product a circular cross section and make it more durable and elastic. In
another group are straps cut from animal hides and—among other less note-
worthy products—threads made from resinous plant materials, which have
long since been known to some savage peoples and have only recently become
important to us again.
The style of these objects, deriving from procedures and implements used in
their production, is easily explained: some have or are given a circular section;
others, like straps, are bandlike but can also be twisted into a spiral shape.
Rubber can imitate the leather strap but it can also have the shape of a
smooth circular thread or take a spiral form. Because of rubber’s well-known
attributes, it has no special style but is totally flexible.
The technical methods and tools for making these products have remained
the same from time immemorial. In Theban wall paintings Egyptian saddlers
have the same crescent-shaped knife that our leather workers still use today
and they knew how to cut long spiral straps out of a single hide. It was with
such a strap, cut from a single cowhide, that Dido won the soil for Carthage.
The decoration of strapwork depends in part on its banded form and
should be appropriate to it. Above all it should remain a surface decoration
and should not interrupt the nature of the strap but instead emphasize its
function as a band.

218
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

§ 50 Spun Yarn
Spun yarn is a synthetic thread consisting of many natural threads. After the
natural threads have been suitably prepared, the yarn is produced by comb-
ing, plucking, squeezing, sticking, and twisting. Combing arranges the threads
as parallel as possible, and in the case of tangled and short raw materials it is
often replaced by carding, which gives the threads a feltlike property.
The processes of plucking, squeezing, sticking, and twisting have been per-
formed since ancient times with the assistance of a damp hand and a rotating
spindle. The new spinning machines have not changed the principle at all but
simply multiplied and simplified production by substitute for the hand, and
by using machines to set in motion a large number of spindles and related
substitutes for the hand. The finest and strongest threads are still produced in
India where the old method of spinning has been retained.
Each material requires its own particular method of preparation, which
influences the style of the spun yarn. Naturally this is also conditioned by the
use to which it will be put.
Much could still be said on this important subject, but only a better
informed specialist should do so.

§ 51 Twisted Yarn
Twisted yarn is a product related to spun yarn, a stronger synthetic thread
made from two or more synthetic threads. The necessary operations are sim-
pler than those of spinning. Plucking, pressing, and stitching are unnecessary;
all that is needed is twisting, facilitated by a flywheel or similar device. The
individual threads to be twisted are wound on cylindrical spindles or rollers
and then passed through a ring, behind which the twining occurs. Through the
same operation, several twined threads can be combined into a thicker rope.
Thus threads made from various materials with different diameters and colors
can be twined, and this process too can be varied according to the intended
use. For example, one can make loosely or tightly twisted yarn or contrive
double turns running with or against each another. Thus this simple technique
offers rich material for stylistic reflections that prefer to see the useful in the
beautiful, but we can safely leave its further elaboration to art-philosophical
haberdashers. We also have illustrations of this process that are older than
our written history.4°

§ 52 The Knot
The knot is perhaps the oldest technical symbol and, as I have shown, the
expression for the earliest cosmogonic ideas that sprang up among nations.
Knots serve first of all to join the ends of two threads; their strength
depends principally on friction. The system that maximizes friction by lateral
pressure when the two threads are drawn in opposite directions produces the
strongest knot. Other conditions ensue when threads are pulled not along
their length but perpendicular to their extension, although here too the
resultant tension running along the length of the threads is usually what is

219
 Semper

considered. The weaver’s knot is the strongest and most useful of all, perhaps
also the oldest, or at least the first to figure in the technical arts. Rope makers
and boatmen are familiar with a number of knots about which I can unfortu-
nately speak only as a layman. They could provide many details that would be
of interest to us, but this too will be left to more qualified hands.

A very ingenious and ancient use of the knot led to the invention of net-
ting, which even the most savage tribes knew how to make and use for fishing
and hunting. The mesh of the net, whose knot is shown here, has the advan-
tage that damage to one mesh does not affect the whole system and is easily

mended.4! This is in fact the criterion of netting, which in other respects

allows a very wide range of variations but always remains the same on this
point. The ancients considered Spanish hemp to be the best sort for netting.
Cumaean hemp was also famous in this regard. Nets for catching boars were
made so fine that a single man could carry enough netting on his back to
surround an entire forest. Yet the same netting in a denser mesh also served as
a cuirass, for which the thread, although fine in itself, was twined from 300 to
400 individual threads. This industry seems to have thrived in Egypt espe-
cially.42 The Egyptians also made decorative nets from strings of beads, of

220
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

which several very attractive specimens have survived. This ornament was
also worn by Greek women as well as by Etruscan and Roman ladies. Netting
is used in India as a rich motif for headpieces and necklaces; the alternation
in the meshes and the distribution of the decorations and pendants display
admirable taste. The Middle Ages loved decorative netting, and the Spaniards
have long valued it for the lightest wraps and as an adornment for hair.
In architecture and ceramics—in fact, in all the arts—netting is used for
surface decoration and is often applied structurally and symbolically as an
ornament for projecting or bulging parts, such as for the belly of vases.
On the archaeology of netting, see Bottiger’s various writings and essays
on ancient adornment.*4

§ 53 The Loop Stitch

The loop stitch is a moeud coulant: a knot that, if untied, causes the whole sys-
tem to unravel. It is an element in making stockings, in knitting and crochet-
ing, and the particular way it is formed is dictated by the tools employed and
by the use intended. I confess my incompetence prevents me from probing this
art more deeply, and I can only say that it is an extremely refined one and
yields products whose properties can be achieved in no other way. They carry
the elements of their richest ornaments in themselves in their construction.
Elasticity and ductility are the specific advantage of these products; this makes
them especially suited to close-fitting dressings that embrace the figure and
define it without folds. Gussets and seams lend particular adornment to these
products of the knitting needle and crochet hook. Fortunately, their decora-
tive motifs are inevitable here; as a result they have in almost all periods
retained their real significance and proper application.
I do not know how far the ancients advanced this art, but I do not doubt
that it was used for quilting the linen cuirasses mentioned above. Assyrian
warriors in later times wore tricot leggings that may well have been knitted.
The Egyptians knitted their wigs. In more recent times this art rose to its
greatest artistic heights in Spain. Out of a long-standing affection for it, Scan-
dinavians and northern Germans have always made warm, close-fitting gar-
ments (Hosen or, in modern Low German, Hasen), for which the elastic,
long-haired wool of the north is particularly suited.45 Machines have caused
upheavals here as well, partially destroying the aesthetic and ornamental
character of the work, or at least reducing it to meaningless monotony.

§ 54 Plaiting (Plait, Braid, Seam, Canework, Matting)

Plaiting should perhaps have been discussed before knitting, as one of the
products of the textile arts. Along with twisted yarn, it is used for making
skeins; it also serves for making integuments. Plaiting produces a stronger
ropework than does twisted yarn in that its individual strands act more along
their natural length, that is, in the direction of absolute strength when submit-
ted to tension. It also has the advantage that it does not unravel so easily, that
is, break down into its individual threads. Plaiting consists of at least three

(APAM|
 Semper

strands placed alternately over one another (see figures). The number of
strands can be increased at will, but in the preparation of a plait only three
single or multiple strands are active at any given moment, so that active
strands are continually dropped, and others taken up, according to fixed prin-
ciples. Round plaiting produces a torus and is much used in saddlery. Round

plaiting is also used as a braid in passementerie, and, as already noted, it

makes a very handy rope suitable for the heaviest of tasks, for example,
anchor ropes. For rigid materials like metal wire, it is the best way to combine
many wires into one. This complex of threads is capable of the richest orna-
mental formations and has, so to speak, absolute elegance. For good reason it
was chosen early, perhaps even by the mother of the human race, as a hair
adornment, and this association may explain why the plait became one of the
earliest and most frequently used symbols of the technical arts, which even
architecture borrowed. The plait can be used equally well on flat, cylindrical,
and circular surfaces, where it always alludes to the notion of binding. This
defines its use and correct application. To some extent, the modality and
intensity of the band can also be expressed by the nature and strength of the
ornamental plait. Maximum strength, for example, is expressed by the rich
strap plaits seen at the bases of Attic Ionic columns and elsewhere.
I must entrust any further remarks about the aesthetics of these interesting
textile products to trained haberdashers, saddlers, and above all to hair-
dressers; indeed, the last of these achieved everything possible in the technical
perfection of the plait and thus controlled the taste of entire centuries.
Plaiting, because of its absolute strength, not only is effective when
extended longitudinally; it also can serve as a seam for joining two parts of a
garment and as such functions perpendicular to extension.*¢

222
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

As a seam, the plait forms a wonderfully rich motif for ornamental use in
the handicrafts and even in architecture, as has already been shown above.
The seam gave rise to lace, that splendid and luxurious fabric. This open
work in yarn or silk, the glory of the modern toilet, was not known to or used
by the ancients or, if so, only at a rudimentary level. Lace (point, dentelle,
pizzi, merletti) may be divided into two distinct classes: needlepoint (guipure)
and bobbin lace.4’ The former is made freehand with a needle, the latter on a
pillow using bobbins.
1. Guipure is the most ancient lace. Many varieties are distinguished:
Rose point, Portuguese point, Maltese point, Alengon point, and Brussels
point. The ground for the last is prepared on a pillow; the motif is executed
freehand with a needle. All these other laces are made entirely freehand.
Each of these varieties has its characteristic differences, but all are easily
distinguishable from bobbin lace in that they consist of variations on the two
stitches represented in figures 1 and 2.

Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

2. Bobbinet, cushion, or pillow lace is a recent invention. Barbara Uttmann

of Saxony is named as the inventor in 1560.
We distinguish between Spanish, Grounded Spanish, Saxon-Brussels,
Flemish-Brussels, Mechlin, Valenciennes, Dutch, and Lille lace. Other vari-
eties include Chantilly, Honiton, Buckinghamshire, and finally blonde lace.
Pillow lace is made by a combination of weaving, twining, and plaiting.
The design of most varieties is produced by an interlocking of threads like
that used for weaving linen (fig. 3); the ground, by contrast, is made by plait-
ing the threads or, in some varieties, by simple twining (see figs. 4, 5).

Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6

There are also variations on these procedures, but essentially they form the
characteristic starting point for pillow lace.
The oldest known lace was worked on coarse linen. Threads were drawn
out and the gaps were filled with stitches as in figure 1. Linen threads were

ZeS
 Semper

then spun over with the stitch as in figure 2. This method always produces
geometric patterns. One finds it applied to seams and trimmings on the oldest
altar cloths and other ecclesiastical paraments.
These oldest points were executed on a sheet of parchment, upon which
the pattern was drawn and the leading threads sewn; the sheet of parchment
was separated when the work was finished.
These oldest varieties were mainly Italian and Portuguese work. Venice
was the most famed place of manufacture. It was not until the time of Colbert
(ca. 1660) that lace making was introduced to France.
French points (points d’Alengon) are identical in principle with old Portu-
guese and modern Brussels laces. Figure 6 shows the ground stitch, figure 7
the stitch for the pattern or filling.
Brussels points (points a l’aiguille) exhibit a variety of basic stitches
(fig. 8). Later the ground or net was bobbined and still later made on a
machine.

Fig. 7 Fig. 8 Fig. 9

Plaited lace is often difficult to distinguish from laces made on a linen

ground. The oldest pillow laces are of this kind.
Large-flowered Spanish laces are often executed on a net or ground con-
sisting of a yarn of two threads joined into a plait (fig. 9).
Valenciennes lace is flat and the pattern does not have the “tracing thread”
seen on Brussels and Mechlin lace; it is on a plaited ground (see fig. 9). The
pattern is made on this ground or net with a “clothing stitch.”
Mechlin lace is distinguished by the outlines tracing the pattern; it is made
with a weaver’s stitch on a plaited ground.
Brussels pillow lace is distinguished by the relieflike treatment of the pattern.
A very characteristic product is Irish lace, which consists of an irregular
lattice with nodal points worked in, imitating the lattice of plant fibers seen
when a thin slice of a dried tree branch is examined with a magnifying glass
or microscope.
Elaborate patterns are also executed on a similar ground. This is a charac-
teristic of Honiton lace. Its effects are exceptional. Irish lace can also be imi-
tated with a crochet hook.
Silk points and pillow laces are called blondes. The best are from France.
Second best, in my view, are those from the Erzgebirge.
But enough of these delicate, artistic products of hyphantics [the textile
arts]. The principle of their style, to the extent that it is governed by their

224
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

function and ideals, seems to be the simplest in the world and can be com-
pletely defined by stating that these products should be ornamentally treated
hems and seams. Thus their style is guided first of all by the fabrics they hem
or decorate, next by the person who wears them, by the occasion for which
they have been chosen as decoration, and so on. Any theory of their style is
made that much more difficult and complicated if it attempts to take into
account the processes that have already been invented and those that could
still be invented for their manufacture.
In the products just mentioned, plaiting appears as the means to prepare a
surface; it fulfills this purpose all the more decisively in the actual mat (the
braided cover).
The sole advantage braided covers have over woven ones is that their
thread elements do not necessarily have to cross one another at right angles as
required by weaving. Threads running diagonally and in every direction can
be woven into the texture. This advantage should be maintained in every way,
made evident, and elevated to the status of a characteristic feature of plaiting.
The art of preparing coverings from plaited cane is very ancient and has
made no significant technical progress since the Old Kingdom of the Pharaohs.
Nevertheless, the Egyptians of that time and now the North American Iroquois
(and many other savage or half-savage peoples) handle the motif with less
aesthetic inhibition—more happily and ingeniously —than do we Europeans
with all our admired technical omnipotence.

wes
a

HS
A Ns

Egyptian latticework

225
 Semper

Mat plaiting yields the richest variety of geometric patterns, especially

when the elements are varied in color and width. It was a very fruitful motif
for surface decoration already by the time of the Egyptians and Assyrians,
whose glazed tile walls were often patterned after plaited mats, especially
during the later dynasties of the Assyrian Empire (Khorsabad, Kuyunjik).
Following this ancient tradition, the same motif was used, sometimes to
excess, in the orientalizing Byzantine style and in the different schools of the
Arabian style. It reached its apogee in Spain under the Moorish caliphs. All
lower wall surfaces were paneled with glazed tiles in plait patterns.*8
The Renaissance picked up this Arabian motif again, not only in the hand-
icrafts (pottery, tarsia, metalwork) but also in decorative painting. Inciden-
tally, it had already been introduced to Europe in the Romanesque period of
the eleventh and twelfth centuries (Norman churches in Sicily and Normandy,
many motifs in the Saxon-Romanesque style, the doge’s palace in Venice).
The preference of the Chinese and Indians for cane plaiting as well as its
meaning for the early history of architecture and style will be discussed below.

§ 55 Felt
All natural integuments are felts, as for instance animal pelts and tree bast.
Early on, humans hit upon the idea of imitating them and making a tangled
mass of hair that has exceptional suppleness and density; affords excellent
protection against cold, damp, and even wounds; and yet is very light. Great
luxury was lavished on felts in the post-Alexandrian period, when they were
made of purple wool. Roman wool togas and even the light Greek chlamys
were woven wool fabrics made feltlike by the fullers’ hands and feet. They were
used early on for hats, sandals, and socks. I must leave further technical and
stylistic treatment of this interesting item to more expert hands and will merely
remark in general that stiff felts, as used in our men’s hats, for example, are
entirely contrary to all style.

§ 56 Weaving
If Iwere to do full justice to this section, it alone would fill a book! There is so
much to be done! Every salon, every novelty show, every industrial exhibition
gives evidence of the confusion of our artistic weavers, abandoned by the
graces and practically drowning in the excess of their resources. Their taste
and inventiveness lags far behind work produced with much simpler and
more limited means in less industrially advanced but more artistically sensi-
tive eras or the material made even today on the standing looms of Hindus
or Kurds. We have plenty of academic chairs from which the application of
science to industrial art may be taught, but we still have no practical aesthetic
whatsoever for industrialists and especially for artistic weavers, who, unpre-
pared for the artistic aspect of their industry, are therefore compelled to turn
to artists and designers. These artists in turn are weak in technical matters and
have not received the best artistic and general education. The person capable
of assuming such a position is an industrialist who is thoroughly familiar with

226
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

every aspect of weaving, with machines, with dyeing, with the commercial
aspects of the trade, one who is likewise a humanist, scholar, philosopher, and
artist in the true sense, and who has at his disposal, as a teaching aid, a well-
furnished collection of textiles arranged according to the history of style. Even
with these resources he will have a difficult time coping with the spirit of the
age and with his industrial colleagues. For my part, I would rather say noth-
ing on the subject than address it in a partial or incoherent way, which would
only betray my lack of thorough technical knowledge! The best treatment of
this theme is perhaps found in Redgrave’s already much cited “Supplementary
Report on Design,” but it is not sufficiently coherent, too incomplete, and too
rigidly schematic on individual points. Style, to the extent that it derives from
the purpose of a thing, can certainly be formulated more easily in principles
than a theory of forms can be deduced in those areas where form must be
viewed as a function of the technical means in question.

Roman silk fabric from Sion, Switzerland4?

One would have to review systematically all fabrics from the simplest
cross-weave to the most elaborate polymites, brocades, and high-harp weaves;
give their history; show the materials and purposes for which they are suited;
define their means and limitations in a formal artistic sense; indicate the direc-
tions in which they can be improved; show the influence of machine manufac-
ture on the style of products; criticize period taste; and decide where this taste
influences the artistic technique or where technique influences taste. One
would have to emphasize that something better could, but does not, exist and
make every effort to prepare for its arrival rather than holding up as an
absolute model an excellence that has vanished into history and thereby over-
looking the present and its inventions. One must instead use such excellence

227
 Semper

as an example of how in times of true artistic understanding the problem was

correctly solved using what was given at that time and how we, in following
this model, have to apply what is available now to solve an analogous prob-
lem. Finally, one should show that all the technical, mechanical, and econom-
ical means that we have invented and that give us an advantage over the past
will tend to lead back to barbarism rather than signify the progress in true
industrial art and in civilization as a whole— unless we master these means in
artistic terms! These —as well as many other things left unmentioned — are the
precepts that a professor of weaving must convey in theoretical and practical
instruction.

§ 57 The Stitch, Embroidery, Acu Pingere, Pinsere, Pungere, pddew

Embroidery is the arrangement of threads with the help of a pointed instru-
ment on a natural or artificial surface that is supple and soft. The elements of
the designs produced in this way are called stitches; they are comparable with
the units (tesserae [tiles], crustae [overlays]) used to assemble mosaics. Embroi-
dery is, in fact, a kind of mosaic in threads, and this defines its general charac-
ter and its relation to painting and sculpture. And just as mosaics occur not
only as flat depictions but as reliefs (and it is by no means clear which of the
two is more ancient), there is relief and flat embroidery, each of which is pro-
duced according to distinct and wholly independent principles of execution.°°
This contrast is seen even in the form and structure of the stitches that are
the generative elements in both kinds of embroidery. In fact, there are only
two stitches to consider: the flat stitch and the cross-stitch.
The limit or, if you will, the abstract concept of the flat stitch is the line;
the limit of the cross-stitch is the point.
The flat stitch seems to be the older of the two, as it is already known to
most savage peoples, who used it with the barbs or split quills from bird
feathers or other naturally colored threads to produce all sorts of colorful,
usually tasteful patterns on animal skins and tree bark. These patterns are
raised above the surface and thus in fact take on the rudiments of polychrome
relief. The moccasins, other clothing items, and hunting implements of North
American Indians are richly and stylishly decorated with such patterns, espe-
cially on the seams and joints of the pieces from which they are made. It is
clear even from its use in sewing that the flat stitch was originally an element
of decorative seaming. Sewing the seam produced the flat stitch, which then
functioned as an ornament as well.
Figures are created from rows of flat stitches, some with and some without
edging. A row is formed first by making the ends of the stitches meet, second
by making them touch partly or completely along their length. From making
the end of one thread protrude beyond that of the adjacent one, a step-shaped
border results for surfaces covered with parallel stitches, thus making it pos-
sible to represent any figure, whether it is delimited with straight or curved
lines or a mixture of the two (see the adjacent figure taken from a Tirolean
feather embroidery).

228
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

WLLLOELUEE OTE. 1004,

= ay = z= =
AY
asN
»
Nx
s
NI
$sN
"Wh
=
ae Ml
N allt
al 2

= NNY
NNY
DY Mg,
ay
aSs
NN
NN WT aLPELS
TI
aNSs ST MULLS
NNMOO
hci” S%
ee | O2OROTTbCeeats
hd any00ODOLOLOOIIIIOIOD
EL4 é
3
? Oo00ee ars

Tirolean feather embroidery

By placing threads close together and doubling them, and by using under-
lays over which the threads are spun, one attains designs that are raised more
or less in relief—a practice introduced quite early. I will return later to its
influence on relief art in general. The style of this practice is essentially linear,
in contrast with the pointillistic style of the yet-to-be-discussed second proce-
dure. This style is at the same time free, because the texture of the ground
does not directly constrain the style observed, as is the case of the cross-stitch.
After the bare essentials of cross-stitching have been discussed, I will return to
this distinction and the attention that still must be paid to the ground in flat
stitching. Probably because feathers were originally used for flat embroidery,
it was called opus plumarium in Latin and rekhameh in Arabic, from which
the Italian word ricami derives.5!
The cross-stitch fills in little squares marked out on a surface (usually by
means of the texture of a fabric), forming what is called the net or canvas.
Thus it surely appeared after or together with the invention of the simplest
woven fabrics; it could not have been used with hides, tree bark, and other
natural integuments because they lacked the network, or rather because they
had very irregular and dense networks.
Compared to flat stitching, cross-stitching is more limited and has from
the beginning been dependent on geometric forms, specifically those that
can be produced entirely from square elements and thus all share a contra-
puntal key that requires one to observe a certain canon of composition.
Cross-stitching is not suited to a relieflike treatment of its subject.
This results in an inherent contrast in style between the ornamental char-
acter of cross-stitching and the fact that flat stitching is inseparable from the
execution of illustrative subjects. Of course, such subjects can to some extent
be produced on the canvas using cross-stitches but always in a strictly con-
ventional way and under certain constraints prescribed by the squareness of
the net.52

229
 Semper

It is noteworthy that cross-stitching was the method of embroidery pre-

ferred by the Egyptians (numerous remnants in this manner have survived),
whereas the Assyrians embroidered with a flat stitch, which is still predomi-
nant today in India and China.°3 Might we not see this difference as proof of
the important and early effect of the arts of the needle and loom on style and
the development of all the fine arts?
From surviving networks for unfinished pictures we know that the method
of applying a grid to wall surfaces and filling the squares with images was
practiced in Egypt from ancient times. Egyptian sculpture and painting were a
kind of cross-stitch embroidery executed on walls, with all the attributes of
that style. The technique of sculpture and painting customary in Asia from
primeval times, by contrast, corresponds entirely to the style of flat stitching.
Archaeologists have preferred to interpret the frequent references to figu-
rative fabrics in the oldest sacred and profane books (where the manner of
preparation is often described or at least alluded to) as pertaining only to art-
fully woven materials and not to embroidery. From this they have concluded
that opus Phrygionium is a relatively new invention.°4 I do not accept this
conclusion but suspect rather it is the result of an unduly narrow interpreta-
tion of expressions like €udooety, EtroiKidAeLy, yoddety, Udatvetv, and so
on, which have a number of meanings and can refer to weaving, embroidery,
and even painting and all other possible means of representation. Artistic
embroidery is certainly older than artistic weaving, if one understands it to
mean figurative and illustrative representations stitched with thread on fab-
rics.°5 Colored weaving, on the other hand, may well have come into being
earlier than colored embroidery, that is, earlier than the simple embroidered
patterns that can be looked upon as an imitation of woven patterns and that
followed the constraints of a woven net. Assyrian reliefs are also of great
interest in this question, as the earlier ones depict nothing but richly embroi-
dered garments produced with illustrative designs in opus plumarium. On
later reliefs, however, we see only checkered clothes in colorfully woven fab-
rics, certainly rich but regularly patterned. Of the Chinese we know that their
oldest products were smooth (plain and unpatterned) fabrics. Colorful embroi-
dery was added to these with feathers.
But this kind of historical documentation is scarcely necessary for some-
thing that is to some extent self-evident. I repeat my belief that sewing is
older than weaving and that the former led to the idea of embroidery, which
was carried out much earlier on leather and tree bark than on actual woven
fabrics. These fabrics in themselves, and all the more their later figurative
refinements, are therefore of a later origin than embroidered integuments.
These questions may seem to have little practical relevance, but they do
matter to someone who recognizes the most profound coherence in every-
thing pertaining to art, and who considers the artistic conception to be the
acme of practice. Let us, however, turn to other observations that relate
directly to practice and are more tangible.
I do not want simply to reiterate the point that the style of embroidery has

230
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

to be guided by the material with and upon which the embroidery is sewn.
For example, embroidery on a pair of red buckskin trousers or a tobacco
pouch made of yellow maple bark will be different from embroidery on cash-
mere or transparent white muslin— although modern articles of the latter
kind, of which the Swiss are especially proud (among countless other examples
of unspeakably tasteless modern acupiction), absolutely fail to recognize the
limits of these distinctions. The principles in force here relate more to style as
it derives from materials and purposes, and these have been partially surveyed
from this viewpoint earlier in the book. With regard to these differences,
which are always to a certain extent determined by the procedures in ques-
tion, I would only like to note that stiff, coarse fabrics should be embroidered
with relatively coarse stitches made with threads whose thickness is appropri-
ate to the ground, giving them a dense, full embroidery, whereas fine, veil-like
spun fabrics should be given a loose tendril work, fine stripes (viae), sprigs,
and so on.5¢ If only we had a few fabrics from Kos, so that we could study a
genuine veil style!
But let us leave this and concern ourselves rather with other composite ele-
ments of style that are almost as numerous within the wide field of embroi-
dery as the individual fabrics and existing applications, which multiply daily.
Let us focus on free treatment, which is common to all flat-stitch hand
embroidery and almost raises it to the rank of fine art. Because of this style
factor, hand embroidery is not subject to strict symmetry and geometric pat-
terns —indeed it should express its style by disregarding both within certain
limits, in a free painterly arrangement, to the extent that this is compatible
with other stylistic conditions.
The freer the arrangement of ornamental motifs, the more necessary it is
to regulate the distribution of masses and the balance of form and color
according to certain higher principles of taste. Here the material, spatial, and
functional needs that always underlie the task decide the how of the concep-
tion. Freedom within these stylistic limits is the secret of higher art, which,
though still very constrained, first set its wings in motion in embroidery. It
can be argued that fine art in the Orient never developed beyond this point,
that it still remains within the constraints of the embroidery style. But if this
is so, it is also true that the spirit of this style was never grasped so completely
as there, and that the free ornamentation of Oriental art, especially Indian
and Chinese embroidery, provides in its principles of both form and color a
model for us and our industrial art that will enable us to refine our taste and
sense of style.
Tendrils, and vegetal motifs generally, which are so diverse that they can
be constantly repeated without becoming wearisome, are generally the best
for purposes of free ornamental embroidery —an unexhausted and inex-
haustible source of the freshest and most elegant inventions. But where art
goes beyond these and produces figurative, symbolic, or even tendentious
themes, it should carefully guard against provoking disgust by the unfailing
emetic of monotonous significance, by a symmetrical and periodic repetition

(ei
 Semper

of the identical motifs. Medieval embroidery and knitted fabrics, especially

those made in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy as well as in other Euro-
pean mills, are often afflicted with this stylistic error. One sees groups of
angels holding chalices, Madonnas and all the saints, and other mystical sym-
bols constantly repeated and strewn all over the surface at regular intervals.
They replace the old fabled beasts of Asia, whose ornamental repetition we
find almost easier to tolerate. A small but powerful party wants us to take up
this Gothic nonsense again, but we will not be deceived by their aesthetic ten-
dencies, which are by no means pure. We would rather stay with our Malakoff
towers, sun temples, and other tapestry motifs that, if not tasteful, are at least
harmless. This tendentious monotony is absolutely reprehensible in hand
embroidery, where it can be avoided, and in woven fabrics and tapestries,
where it becomes unavoidable as soon as one wants to be tendentious.
The simpler art of canvas embroidery is the most common and popular
among our ladies (especially for wool embroidery). What is characteristic of
canvas embroidery is styleless for wool embroidery, but for this very reason
our eccentric taste tends toward the most fantastic imitations of nature in the
freest arrangement, a wildly naturalistic conception in a technique that
requires just the opposite. It would be pointless to get worked up about this,
as embroidery design has fallen into the wrong hands and it would be difficult
for a genuine artist to succeed today, one who—like that old and honest
copperplate engraver [Johann] Sibmacher— would publish a true pattern book
on canvas embroidery.5” And yet this master (like his colleagues [Albrecht]
Altdorfer; [Heinrich] Aldegrever; [Georg] Pencz; [Hans Sebald] Beham; Virgil
Solis; Theodor de Bry; Jan Collaert; Etienne Delaulne, called Stephanus;
Pierre Woeiriot; and the other petits maitres) lived at a time when practicing
technicians no longer designed their own compositions, as they once did. Art
was already starting to separate itself from craft. Before this separation, our
grandmothers were neither members of the Academy of Fine Arts nor album
collectors nor did they attend lectures on aesthetics, but they knew what to do
when it came to designing an embroidery. There’s the rub!

§ 58 Dyeing, Printing, and So On

The tanning and dyeing of hides belong to the remarkable group of inventions
whose mother was not necessity but pure delight. They are also among the
earliest, for it seems that humanity was inspired to it by the instinct of joy.
Delight in color preceded delight in form; even the primitive insect takes
pleasure in the rays of the sun, in flames, and in those children of light —the
shimmering flowers of the field.
The simplest dyestuffs, that is, those closest at hand, are plant saps. Primi-
tive humans nowhere saw coverings of color but everywhere colors that were
inseparable from form and permeated it. Dyeing is more natural and easier
than coating and painting, therefore more primitive. This thesis has great
importance for style theory, and I will return to it often in the development of
my conception of polychromy in the fine arts of antiquity.

232
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

Dyeing was quickly joined by the practice of tanning, for striving after
lasting pleasure is as old as pleasure itself.
Our chemists can readily explain, or at least demonstrate experimentally,
how certain salts and lyes react with dyestuffs by changing their colors and
also improving their absorption and colorfastness. Modern dyers have bene-
fited greatly from this scientific progress, but it remains uncertain whether
even here (I mean in the purely technical aspects of dyeing) dyers of earliest
antiquity —in the Old Kingdom of Egypt and ancient Chaldea — did not know
far more about the mysteries of tinting and the fastness of dyestuffs than our
most distinguished manufacturers and steam-vat dyers. They may also have
known and put to good use all the secrets of nature that we have discovered,
even if they gave the most ridiculous explanations (from our point of view) of
the effects they produced. Pliny tells us very explicitly that the Egyptians were
masters of the art of applying certain stains to woven fabrics so that they
formed an invisible pattern. Fabrics thus prepared, and plunged into the
dyeing vat for only a moment, emerged with variegated colored patterns:
mirumque, cum sit unus in cortina colos, ex illo alius atque alius fit in veste
accipientis medicamenti qualitati mutatus, nec postea ablui potest. Ita cortina,
non dubie confusura colores, si pictos acciperet. [And the marvelous thing is
that although there is only one color in the pot, from it one color after
another is produced on the cloth, the color changing with the kind of dye it
takes, and afterward one cannot wash it out. Thus the pot would doubtless
mix up the colors, if it were to take in already dyed fabrics].58
Nothing similar, no combination of printing and dyeing using the most
diverse and at the same time the most natural and closely related colors, has
ever been achieved by our dyers.
Still, I feel that something other than the refinement of ancient practices
for decorating garments and other fabrics with color most deserves our admi-
ration: namely, the consistency with which they pursued certain simple princi-
ples of style, on which they based a music of colors entirely in tune with their
music of forms. Its harmonies blended with the latter, complementing them in
the most wonderful way.
The greatest achievement of our modern art of dyeing is the preparation of
colored yarns of wool, linen, cotton, or silk. The dyers sell the fibers thus pre-
pared to weavers and other manufacturers to select and use at will. They try
to get as close as possible to the absolute purity of abstract colors and to
achieve all levels of intensity and run the gamut of shades and nuances. The
absolutism of this system does not acknowledge effects that the material,
much less the nature of the goods themselves, could have on the process. At
most, it is recognized that one fabric, such as cotton or linen, is less suited to
producing a certain color than is another fabric, such as wool or silk. Then all
the subtleties and tricks of chemistry are used to make sure that, despite these
difficulties in production, dyed cotton or linen reproduces the scarlet or
orange almost as purely and brightly as does wool or silk. In short, style and
its dependence on the raw materials and the purpose of the goods are not

PAS};
 Semper

taken into account. But style, insofar as it relates to the processes applied and
to the extravagant richness of means and materials that chemistry and physics
have bestowed on us, is unlimited, boundless, and thus no style at all.
Despite this, certain colors produced by housewives of India, China, and
Kurdistan by the simplest means and without any knowledge of chemistry
delight and embarrass us with their depth, splendor, and indefinably natural
tone, which we cannot reproduce by any effort of our knowledge or will. This
is because they are truly natural shades that do not fit into our abstract color
scales, and the color of the raw material has as much impact on them as the
dyeing agent used. Most important, however, is the dyer’s natural sense of
style and lack of inhibition.
Those deep and harmonious natural colors share a common airy tone;
none is or strives to be a pure color abstraction. Such colors — now produced
only in the Orient, with its ancient traditions —are an echo of what we must
imagine the ars tingendi [art of dyeing] of antiquity to have been. Their entire
color system was united by an otherwise indefinable breath of nature that can
be described only by using natural metaphors; it disappears immediately if too
much violence is done to nature and we try to substitute it with chemistry.
Perhaps a time will come when we will succeed in this, but science has not yet
delved deep enough into nature’s workshops to be able to supplant them with
its own products.
The ancients dyed their raw materials before they were spun or otherwise
processed. When this was not done, the finished product —for example, a
ready-to-wear item, such as a peplos or chiton— went into the dyer’s vat.
The Egyptians even dyed the wool of living sheep with a costly purple,
although we are not sure whether they did this with external dyes only or
whether the sheep’s fodder had an effect as well. In any case it is clear from
this that they dyed raw unbleached wool; this must have imparted a special
hue, an otherwise inimitable breath of nature. They thought it necessary to
tone down even the richest and purest pigments in this truly subtle way. The
same thing was done with cotton and silk; even white was seen as a particular
shade and was probably never pure but, like black, always contained a hint of
color. White was seen as the unattainable extreme of all colors in the direction
of dilution; black was the same in the direction of density and concentration.
All shades blended in both, but they did not wish to reach that state. Thus
white, like black, was classified with the purple tones.
Pliny lists several breeds of sheep famed for the natural color of their wool.
Spanish sheep were black, Alpine sheep white, Erythraean and Baetican sheep
red, Canusian yellow, and Tarentian yellowish. Their wool was used for
splendid garments, and only the black wools were left undyed.
The dyestuffs too retained their characteristics. No effort was made to dis-
till a pure coloring agent from them; they were used with their own tinge, the
gout de pierre a fusil that nature gave them. Thus the dyeing methods were
the simplest possible, although, as the above example shows, the chemical
effects of acids, salts, and potash were known and used.

234
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

Two major shades or color keys had dominated ancient chromatics from
prehistoric times. Of these two groups of dyes, one was probably based on
iodine, that splendid dyestuff, shaded in the most varied but natural way by
means of different marine organisms. In some cases these organisms trans-
formed it into contrasting colors, like red, yellow, and blue, but all were united
by one and the same wonderfully mild yet profound and austere family char-
acteristic. Passing through a conchylia room one finds hundreds of shades—
from pure red through violet to blue, from blue through sea green to sea grass
yellow, from yellow through all shades to white (which is also reached from
blue and from red). White always retains its sea white hue and celebrates its
glory in the pearl, which contains and reflects all three primary colors and
everything that lies between. When one examines the wonderful harmony
among all these marine products or has seen that harmony in the even greater
splendor of the eternally changing color of the sea bed that created all these
things, it is suddenly quite clear what the ancients understood by purple, and
how black, violet, red, blue-green, yellow, and even white under certain condi-
tions and in certain shades could be counted as purple. The ancients used three
principal materials to prepare these colors: seaweeds of various kinds and two
types of mussels.5? One, buccinum, or keryx in Greek, was found on cliffs and
rocks; the other, purpura or pelagia, was caught in the sea using bait. They
both thrived throughout the Mediterranean and even in the Atlantic Ocean
and Persian Gulf. They varied in quality as dyes and in the color itself accord-
ing to locality. Mussels from the Atlantic produced the darkest shade; those
from the Italian and Sicilian coasts, a violet one; and the Phoenician varieties
and those from the southern seas, a deep reddish purple.
The Phoenicians are credited with the invention of this dye, and it was
through them that a taste and preference for purple spread through Europe,
Africa, and Asia. They were certainly not the sole practitioners of this indus-
try, but favorable circumstances enabled them to bring it to a high level of per-
fection and to maintain their preeminence. Wool was the most suitable fabric
for such dyeing, but linen, cotton, and silk were also successfully dyed with
purple. Wool was first treated with buccinum juice and then dipped into pur-
pura juice, producing the celebrated amethyst purple; the procedure was
reversed to produce a magnificent blood-red color, the fame and pride of
Tyrian dyers! Fabrics thus dyed were called purpurae dibaphae |double-dyed
purples]. The general term was conchylium, which included all the lighter
blue and yellow shades and contrasted with the regal and sanctified purples as
well as with false buccinum (used unmixed almost exclusively in counterfeit
wares). The dyeing process was fairly simple, as far as can be inferred from
Pliny’s principal passage on the subject.®° But there were a number of tricks
of the trade, particularly for determining the temperature at which the dye
would take.
For the yellow, blue, and green conchylium colors, various kinds of sea
grass and other marine products were used in conjunction with purpura juice,
as is confirmed by Pliny’s remark quoted above.

230
 Semper

The second major group of dyestuffs, alongside purple, is composed of

vegetable dyes (colores herbaceae). It is perhaps better to refer to them, after
Pliny, as terrenes, because animals such as kermes worms are used for dyes.
The latter term thus better expresses the contrast with the previously men-
tioned group of dyes based on marine products. Terrene colors retained their
natural tone and care was taken not to distill the pure dye from the natural
products and thus undermine its individuality.
Mixtures and pairings of the two kinds of dye were also attempted. For
example, Tyrian purple was prepared with Coccus, producing a color called
hysginum.°! Pliny criticized this as an overrefinement, though.
Thus artificially dyed fabrics were joined by a double bond: with one
another and with nature, because nature retained its special characteristics in
fabrics and colors. This made it easy to avoid disharmony and achieve the most
splendid effects of color balance and contrast. This classical principle of dyeing
is clearly reflected in the naming of the most popular colors of clothing, car-
pets, and other wares. Abstract references to colors such as red, black, yellow,
blue, and green are rare; the names of colors always allude to specific natural
phenomena. Very telling, in this respect, is the following description by Ovid
of the Roman meadows on the bank of the Tiber:

The most beautiful spring under the gentle Lusitanian sky could not clothe the
meadows with more numerous or more beautiful colors than those that now adorn
the fields along the Tiber, where spring entices our ladies out to stroll. We lack the
words to describe these myriad colors. Paphian myrtle or the darker leaves of oak,
the almond tree, and wax must lend their names and colors to wool. The white rose
must see itself outdone. Here the color of the air stands out when no cloud darkens
it; then the eye scans from this tone to the color of water. There a lighter red erupts,
sure to darken everything like the goddess of the dewy morn, and in its train is the
color of golden fleece and the deeply saturated amethyst. The dancing nymphs in
their manifold robes could not shimmer with such variety, even if they were joined
by all the goddesses and colors that they and nature could summon from the sea,
springs, woods, and hills.62

Much could be said about modern Oriental dyers, who have generally not
strayed far from ancient tradition; even more could be said, in contrast, about
the principles of modern European color harmonies in the technical arts —if
they can be called principles. Yet for reasons already cited, I leave this to those
better qualified and note only that the influence of dyeing on the polychromy
of the fine arts and monuments of antiquity will not go unconsidered in what
follows.63
Redgrave’s “Supplementary Report,” Div. 4, Garment Fabrics, contains
very useful remarks on the ornamental and color decoration of various fabrics
and on the aberrations of taste that prevail there.

236
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

Ce HOW STYLE IN THE DRESSING OF DIFFERENT PEOPLES

BECAME SPECIALIZED AND TRANSFORMED OVER THE COURSE
OF CULTURAL HISTORY

a. Clothing

§ 59 Relation of Costume to Architecture

The Ephesian Democritus prefaced his book on the Temple of Ephesus with
a report on the luxurious clothing of the Ephesians, which Athenaeus has pre-
served for us:

The Ionians have undergarments with violet-blue, purple, and saffron yellow
patterns, their trimmings uniformly decorated with numerous arabesques. Their
sarapeis are apple green, purple, and white, at times deep violet like the sea
<ahoupyeic>. The kalasireis [robes] are a Corinthian product: some purple, others
violet, others again hyacinth. Some are also flame-colored or sea green. Persian
kalasireis are common, and they are the most beautiful of all. One sees the so-called
aktaiai <shawls>, which are the most costly of all Persian wraps. The fabric is very
dense, outstanding in both durability and lightness, and covered with gold sequins.
Each sequin is fastened to the inside of the garment by a purple thread drawn
through its central eye.o4

This very remarkable fragment is perhaps the only one to have come down to
us intact of all the Greek writings on architecture that date from the height of
Greek culture. One may infer from it that Democritus related the luxurious
clothing of the Ephesians and its principles of color ornamentation to general
observations on the rules and decorative richness of the magnificent building
he describes. If only a few more lines preceding or immediately following this
passage had survived, we would very likely have had for centuries a quite dif-
ferent view of Hellenic architecture, and we would not have been saddled
with antiquated aesthetic prejudices, still widely held, about the coloring of
Greek monuments.
What strikes one first about this passage is the Ionian love of color, and
particularly of saturated shades of purple, in their clothing. We know this
from other sources as well, but it is important to keep it in mind in the follow-
ing chapters and note the close link between costume and the fine arts, espe-
cially architecture, which is evident in so many ways.®> This link arises in part
from direct, concrete, and material factors and in part by way of analogy to
all the phenomena that characterize the general cultural condition— one
could say, an indirect and generally ethnological condition.
A direct and material connection between costume and sculpture is evi-
dent, for example, in the fact that the ancient tradition of dressing wooden
statues with actual garments led to the invention of clothed sculptural figures.
Another connection is clearly evident in the shape of the Egyptian capitals

237
 Semper

illustrated here: they are decorated with lotus blossoms inserted in the same
way that the ladies of that country ornamented their heads by fastening stalks
of these flowers in their hair or behind their ears. In the most material transla-
tion of this analogy, the complete mask of the priestess Isis with her wig deco-
ration serves as a capital on other columns, Almost all structural symbols— by
which I mean the moulures or so-called moldings used in architecture, with
their painted or sculptural decoration—are, like those ornaments on Egyptian
capitals, motifs borrowed from the world of costume and from its finery in
particular!

P
i |
TE
i

Egyptian capital Egyptian ladies’ hair decoration

If the clothing, the related decorative use of color, and other kinds of orna-
ment have had great direct influence on the fine arts (which I have only hinted
at with these two examples) for the history of style and, conversely, for the
study of costume, then it becomes even more interesting to compare costume
and the fine arts when we do so from a general cultural-historical perspective.
Like all other achievements and peculiarities of peoples, these things are
always emanations of a particular cultural idea, which is mirrored and
expressed with equal clarity in all areas.
Descriptions of costume, or rather the brief hints about it in the written
records of various peoples, would provide us with only vague information
about their characteristic clothing, weapons, physical grooming, and decora-

238
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

tion if representations of these objects relating to the cult of the body had not
also survived in statues, monuments, implements, vessels, and so on.®* Thus
the study of these objects is in this respect as well very closely connected with
the study of the fine and technical arts of different peoples and especially of
their architecture. In view of the manifold and very close links between cos-
tume and the history of monuments, and to avoid unnecessary repetition, I
will defer until the second part of this study the drawing of parallels between
the different architectural styles and the different social conditions dominat-
ing among different peoples. Moreover, some indications of this have already
been given in my preface.®”
On the history of costume in antiquity our old rhopographer Bottiger has
achieved more than any other writer; his writings, apart from the erudition
with which they abound, are remarkable for their acumen and correct feeling
for antiquity. The fact that they were written before more was known about
Egyptian monuments and before Nineveh’s discovery increases their merit
and only slightly lessens the weight of their content.
Since then specialized research has significantly extended this field, partic-
ularly that of medieval costume. We have recently gained a more exact knowl-
edge of Egyptian monuments and cultural history, even more so of Assyrian
and Babylonian antiquities, and together with comprehensive studies of Persia
this has greatly expanded the scope of costume studies. Utilizing these new
sources of research, Weiss of Berlin has published the first volume of a history
of costume, architecture, and utensils from the earliest times to the present.
Its organization shows a skillful use of well-researched material, though I con-
sider his plan to be too inclusive. I think that architecture, considered as an
expression of national life that has more to do with the fine arts than with tai-
loring, could have safely been left out. In view of the difficulty of adequately
addressing all the topics of such a comprehensive book, I will do the opposite
and restrict myself to the artistic activities of peoples mainly with regard to
architecture and then only in consideration of certain stylistic principles that
can be explained by them. For this important topic I have thus selected the
approach noted above, namely, to link my ideas about the costume of the
artistic peoples of antiquity and of the Christian period with general observa-
tions on their architectural style. In light of Weiss’s book, whose great merit is
to have provided source material on this theme, I will restrict myself to some
general remarks concerning clothing styles, occasioned in part by what he has
published thus far.

§ 60 Contrast of Greek Free Drapery with Barbarian Dress

Of all that is wrong with the latest trend in historical painting, the greatest
error of all is its search for accurate costume in historical representation,
which not only is reprehensible in itself but also pursues a false trail. Since the
disastrous French conquest of Algiers it has become fashionable to present
Old Testament subjects in Bedouin dress: to make Abraham into an Abdel-
kader with a burnoose and flowing headdress or to dress Rebekah like a

239
 Semper

Kabylian water bearer, and so on. But all of the wide-pleated, free-flowing
garments now so prevalent in the Orient—such as the picturesque costumes
of Kabylian women (Weiss, [Kostiimkunde,| p. 152, fig. 102), the abas and
burnooses of the Bedouins, and even the togalike wraps of the Ashanti— were
introduced much later and are an echo of the Greco-Italian civilization that
made deep inroads into Asia and Africa only after Alexander and through the
Romans. This is evident from what is found on monuments and above all
from the fact that even in Greece free drapery —the garment as a decoration
that gave equal weight and attention to the three elements of beauty, namely,
proportion, symmetry, and direction —did not develop until after the Persian
wars.®8 In this field too it was drama and the theater that first made the
Greeks artistically aware. We know from Athenaeus that Aeschylus invented
the delicate and graceful stola and that the first to follow him in this practice
were sacrificial priests and torchbearers. Previously the Greeks had tended
toward barbarism in their clothing and had known nothing of free drapery, as
we see from archaic sculptures and vase paintings. We also know this from
ancient reports of luxurious clothing in earlier centuries, which was by no
means inferior to that of Asia. In paintings by Vernet, [Frédéric] Schopin,
and others we do not miss the accurate depiction of barbarian costume, the
symmetrical and ringlike Assyrian fringed shawl as we know them now; in
historical representations we would prefer to see drapery conceived in keeping
with the principle of freely falling folds and the balance of masses, a principle
the ancient Asians did not know. But we find it repellent when this principle is
not treated freely, after the fashion of a tailor of masquerade costumes, with a
portraitlike adherence to something that, far from being historically accurate,
puts self-imposed fetters on the independent handling of drapery according to
some absolute law of beauty. What would Michelangelo be if he had turned
his patriarchs and prophets into bedouin sheikhs or his sybils into modern
Jewesses from Damascus or fisherwomen from Nettuno!
Leaving aside head and foot coverings, the clothing of all peoples and all
times can be traced back to three basic forms or elements: the oldest is the
loincloth, second is the shirt, third is the wrap.
The loincloth was the least flexible of all clothing motives. It was aban-
doned early on by the Greco-Italians, but it remained a sacred garment in
Egypt, where it reached the highest possible level of formal development, fol-
lowing the symmetrical principles of order. The original scanty covering for
the genitalia was not adequate for a sense of decency, so it was extended
above and below and made fuller. When extended downward, it was fastened
with a belt at the hip; when extended upward, it was fastened with a strap
over one shoulder or double straps over both shoulders. These straps were
then replaced by shawls, whose ends were tied between the breasts in a knot,
from which the loincloth was also supported. In its ennobled form, we see the
loincloth in statues of Isis. It was even adopted and imitated by the Greeks
and Romans in their sculptural art.7° “There can be no doubt that the skirts
of European women tied with a belt at the hips—a garment that sharply con-

240
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

trasts with that worn by Greek and Roman women — originated in Egypt. The
outer gown of Isis is the prototype for women’s skirts.”7!
The garment of the modern European man—namely, trousers — also
evolved from the loincloth, which already in Egyptian times occurs in a sack-
like shape with holes for legs—resembling pantaloons but with a peculiar
stiffening of the symmetrical folds.72
In Egypt shirts were made of an elastic, crepelike material that clung
closely to the body like a leotard. A shirtlike garment made of very fine linen
or muslin was used as an upper garment by important persons. In both cases,
however, free drapery was avoided.
The Egyptians appear not to have developed this motive, but it did emerge
in all its glory with the Assyrians, whose clothing evolved mainly from this
basic form. They wore several shirts or tunics over one another in different
fabrics and colors; the innermost was linen, the outermost wool.73
The Assyrian chiton was likewise close-fitting and without free drapery; it
was sometimes short, sometimes reached to the ankles, and sometimes even
trailed along the ground. The Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor enlarged it,”4 and
in Attica it became a true work of art, especially in women’s clothing. The
Doric chiton was different and even more primitive; it was open at both sides
or fully or partially closed on one side only. The Italian tunic was little differ-
ent from the chiton. The Asian double chiton has survived intact in the dress
of Catholic priests.
The third principal motive, the wrap, was virtually excluded from the
Egyptian wardrobe, but when it did occur it formed a kind of loincloth worn
over the chiton and thus fell into that category. Herodotus calls it a lining for
the Egyptian kalasiris.
In Asia, too, the wrap was only imperfectly developed. For all intents and
purposes it remained a shawl—that is, a long, narrow shawl made of the
finest colorfully knitted and embroidered wool, wrapped tightly around the
body in several spirals. The shawl’s decoration was not its drapery but its
embroidery and especially its rich (often golden) fringe. In fact the best way to
imagine this type of clothing is to picture the cashmere shawls and wraps of
our ladies, which (like those Assyrian shawls and probably related in terms of
material) form an obvious contrast to the Greek himation and chlamys as far
as their form, mode of decoration, and how they are worn.
The Assyrian habit of wrapping the body with a kalasiris, in combination
with double chitons, and their preference for rich belts and rings, are charac-
teristic traits that, as I will show, perfectly express the spirit of the nation and
manifest themselves in a similar way in their architecture.
It was only with the Greco-Italians that the wrap found its full freedom.
Presumably the way was prepared by a very ancient national tradition, but, as
I have remarked, it was late in appearing. This transition to free drapery was
the result of a sudden understanding and recognition of what was artistically
beautiful —as sudden as the whole upsurge made by Greece after long lagging
behind its civilized neighbors.

241
 Semper

8. The Principle of Dressing Has Greatly Influenced Style in Architecture

and in the Other Arts at All Times and among All Peoples

§ 61 General
In chapter 3 it was pointed out on several occasions that most of the decora-
tive symbols used in architecture originated in or were derived from the textile
arts. This prepares us for what follows—the profound and general influence
that textiles and their original covering and binding elements had on style
and on the formal nature of the arts and of architecture in particular. It is sur-
prising that there has been no serious attempt within the literature of art to
deal with this question in all its extremely important aspects, as it contains the
key to many riddles in art theory and is at the heart of most of the formal and
stylistic contradictions and contrasts we encounter in the field of art history.
Yet it was impossible to resolve this question before the most recent discover-
ies and investigations. These include the recent polychrome conception of
ancient architecture and sculpture first proposed by [Antoine-Chrysosthéme]
Quatremére de Quincy, which has touched off many years of almost uninter-
rupted controversy among scholars and artists, according to which ancient
works are no longer bare (simply displaying the color of the material) but
dressed with a coating of color. These include the important excavations and
discoveries in those desolate fields where once the ancient empires of the
Assyrians, Medes, and Babylonians flourished. These include the more accu-
rate representations and descriptions of artistic events already known and
important new discoveries in the reaches of Persia, Asia Minor, Egypt,
Cyrenaica, and Africa. Finally, these include the no less important investiga-
tions of the last twenty years into medieval art, both Christian and Islamic.
The most significant result of these recent conquests in art history is the
collapse of an antiquated scholarly theory that had always impeded our
understanding of the ancient world of forms. This theory saw Hellenic art as
an indigenous growth on Greek soil — when in fact it was only the magnificent
blossoming, the culmination, the end result of an ancient formative principle
whose roots, so to speak, were deeply and widely planted in the soil of all the
lands that had been the seats of social organisms since ancient times.
Isolating and detaching Greece from that splendid backdrop of the ancient
world—in which classical antiquity stands out only as the main center, as it
were, dependent on its surroundings to support and clarify its true sense — very
much hindered the correct view of classical antiquity. Lacking a context, these
framing and preparatory parts of the dismembered picture— its parerga — alto-
gether lost their connections. This explains why many admirers of classicism,
those who possess no innate sense for the grandeur and multiplicity of beauty
but merely study themselves into a state of enthusiasm about beauty, fall into
a sovereign contempt for so-called barbarian art out of prejudice and a lack of
independent taste. They forget the admiration that the Greeks themselves,
such as Herodotus, Xenophon, Ctesias, Polybius, Diodorus, and Strabo, had
for the greatness and harmony of these barbarian works. The unanimity with

242
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

which Hellenic writers of the best period judged the monuments of Asia and
Egypt should teach us their value, and—since we lack a basis for our own judg-
ment —this Hellenic tribunal should logically serve as a standard for assessing
these works. Yet we are more Hellenic than the Hellenes and overbarbarize
the “barbarians,” imagining them as living in a state of modified cannibalism.
In truth, the word simply describes a contrast between Greek and non-Greek
nature that was not original but introduced only after that long-prepared
blossoming of ancient culture had first unfolded on the shores of Hellas. The
word barbarian does not occur in Homer because the very concept did not
then exist; the conflict between Hellenic and barbarian natures arose much
later out of a contrast. Even Greek art was barbarian in its elements, and we
must prepare the ground for studying it by examining the barbarian elements
from which it unfolded. We must once again conjure up Helen—the incar-
nate, the living, the true—from the “mothers.”
Another contrast no less meaningful for us is that between the Middle Ages
and antiquity. Now that we know the Middle Ages better, we can trace its gen-
erally romantic architecture and art back through Rome to the ancient forma-
tive principle. At the same time, however, this period proves to be profoundly
in conflict with that principle. In both respects the Middle Ages is essential for
a correct view and estimation of antiquity, while the later period cannot be
adequately explained in itself but only by comparing it with antiquity.
The creative genius of the Greeks had a nobler task, a higher goal than
inventing new artistic types and motives to replace those handed down from
ancient times, which still remained sacred to them. Their mission was differ-
ent, namely, to apprehend these types and motives, given that they were
already materially fixed, in their next, telluric expression and idea; to conceive
them in a higher sense as a symbolism of form, combining the oppositions
and principles that excluded or fought one another in barbarian works in the
freest association and the most beautiful, richest harmony. How can we grasp
this higher sense? How can Hellenic form, which is secondary and composite,
be understood in its original telluric sense without prior knowledge of those
traditional and, in a certain sense, natural components? This question must
be treated first, before we turn to the higher but derived meaning that the
Hellenes attributed to form.
Among these ancient and traditional formal elements of Hellenic art, none
is of such profound importance as the principle of dressing and incrustation.
It dominated pre-Hellenic art and by no means lessened or languished as part
of the Greek style but survived in highly spiritualized fashion, serving beauty
and form alone, in a sense more structural-symbolic than structural-technical.
This distinction will be further explained in this chapter, which is intended
to deal with precisely this important principle of dressing and incrustation as
an element of the fine arts.
In Quatremére de Quincy’s Le Jupiter olympien, the greatest French art
historian and connoisseur of antiquity came close to resolving a question of
vital importance to an understanding of ancient art as a whole. He did, in

243
 Semper

fact, provide a partial solution but not one general or fundamental enough for
his particular subject, Hellenic sculpture.
Had this book’s celebrated author proven the intimate link between the
fondness for polychrome, chryselephantine, colossal sculpture during the
height of Greek culture and the ancient, universal principle (widespread in
Greece as well) of incrustation, which dominated not only sculpture but also
architecture, conditioning not just its decoration but its innermost essence;
had he shown how, among the other materials used for incrustation (wood,
metal, terra-cotta, stone, stucco, and so on), colored ivory had been put to
this same purpose since ancient times, and further, how chryselephantine stat-
ues derived from the use of this material on large-scale sculpture —he would
have been led to even more important and more general results than those set
forth in his excellent treatise. Instead, he did the reverse, proving that the wish
to create colossal statues from ivory or similar materials not available in large
pieces necessarily led to the technique whose description and revival he con-
sidered the main purpose of his work.75
Even though this makes the book inadequate for our purposes, it is never-
theless very important for its practical orientation. It does not treat form as
something complete, paraded about by a school of aesthetic idealists. Rather,
it reveals to us the art-form and the high idea inherent in it; it considers both
inseparable from the material and technical execution, and it shows how the
Hellenic spirit manifested itself precisely in the freest mastery of these factors
and of the old sacred tradition.
Around the same time as Le Jupiter olympien, or perhaps somewhat ear-
lier, there appeared the lengthy study on Egypt that resulted from the labor of
the scholars and artists who had joined Bonaparte’s expedition to that coun-
try. Although it contained many illustrations of polychrome and encrusted
monuments, these were mostly unreliable and stylistically inaccurate, and so
several of the textual descriptions that accompanied them are more instruc-
tive for our purposes. Still, this work did not alter the general understanding
of ancient artistic techniques because —in keeping with prevailing contempo-
raneous prejudices—no one acknowledged the link between Egyptian and
Greek art. Important later publications dealing with the monuments of that
ancient and mysterious land met with a similar fate, and for our purposes
they are almost completely useless. One had become accustomed to seeing
that country as an ancient China, quite unconnected with the rest of the civi-
lized ancient world. This was doubly wrong because both Egypt and China
form very important links in the general chain of cultural history and of art
history in particular.
After this it would have seemed reasonable to assume that the beautiful
work on Pompeii, the first volumes of which were published a little later by
[Charles Francois] Mazois and completed by Gau after Mazois’s premature
death, would be all the more influential in establishing a new view of classical
art as a whole, but this too was hardly the case. For though the wall paintings
and other peculiarities of ancient artistic production were presented complete

244
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

and in their context, and though the links between ancient Greek art and the
newly emerging provincial cities of Magna Graecia were undeniable, the wall
paintings were seen as nothing more than a manifestation of a specifically
Roman technique, produced during a period already capricious, one that had
no more in common with ancient classical art than did the wall paintings and
other peculiarities of Egyptian monuments.
Egypt was said to belong to the infancy of art and Pompeii to its decline,
when it became childlike again, so to speak. And no inferences about the true
nature of Greek art could legitimately be drawn from either.
Around 1830 [Jacques-Ignace] Hittorff published for the first time a poly-
chrome restoration of a genuine Greek monument, throwing the antiquarian
world into an uproar and unleashing a memorable battle of pens, in which
both artists and scholars participated. This debate is of great importance for
the theme we are dealing with here, because the central issue is specifically
touched upon on several occasions, if seemingly only by chance.
The historical details of these discussions, in which the present author had
some part, is most extensively described in Hittorff’s most recent work,
L’architecture polychréme, and though we merely mention it now, we will
have ample opportunity to return to it later.76
The most important episode in this war of words, however, must not go
unmentioned here. This is the quarrel surrounding the claim made earlier by
Bottiger— based mainly on comments in Pliny —that the Greeks at the height
of their art painted only on wooden panels;”’ true wall painting did not enjoy
high esteem and was not frequently employed to decorate monuments. Rather,
it contributed to the decline of painting and was at the same time a symptom
of that decline; it was a practice that only in imperial Rome achieved the wide-
spread use that it was falsely claimed to have enjoyed among the ancient Greeks
of the best period.
The most zealous defender of this view was [Désiré] Raoul-Rochette, who
in individual essays and in greater detail in a scholarly but tasteless book,
Peintures antiques inédites, went to the barricades for it and spared no
weapons.’8 He was opposed by [Antoine-Jean] Letronne, whose most impor-
tant work in this connection was Lettres d’un antiquaire a un artiste.’”?
Writing with as much erudition as his opponent, Letronne displayed greater
spirit and none of the other’s tomfoolery. He took the contrary view that the
majority of the most famous paintings that decorated the walls of Greek archi-
tectural monuments —namely, those of the severe school of painting shortly
before and during the time of Pericles—were true wall paintings and not pan-
els. Had both antagonists considered the subject under dispute from the van-
tage point of ancient art history in general, and had they been willing to
recognize the manner in which walls were painted by the Greeks and Romans
as an ancient architectural principle of all the peoples of the ancient world—
a principle that was only uniquely transformed and spiritualized on classical
soil in an architectural context but without in the least betraying its prearchi-
tectural origins —they would have been able to reconcile the literary passages

245
 Semper

from ancient times, the traces of former Greek wall paintings, and the surviv-
ing remnants of Roman art with what the history of ancient art has taught us.
They would have shaken hands in reconciliation on neutral territory before
the monumental works of Polygnotos and Mikon, Panainos and Onatas,
Timagoras and Agatharchos. For these were not panel paintings but wall
paintings, though in a certain larger sense and in terms of style they were
related to panel painting. In fact, these works date from the period when
Hellenic architecture, too, retained the ancient, traditional principle of dress-
ing—no longer materially but still symbolically and spiritually. Before and
after this period, especially after Alexander, the same principle asserted itself
with more barbarous realism; in Rome it even came into conflict with a new
architectural principle according to which stone construction appears as a
form-giving element. Instead, both writers stuck to their positions. Raoul-
Rochette saw nothing but panel paintings on wood hung on walls or else-
where; for him the greatest paintings of the historical school were no different.
He only hesitantly conceded that in certain exceptional cases they were
inserted into the wall artificially. He should have shown that, both in terms of
character and of their spatial arrangement on wall surfaces, true wall paint-
ings were, in effect, panel paintings (albeit not intrinsically and factually so).
More correctly, they were painted wall dressings.
Only in a single passage of his book did Raoul-Rochette acknowledge that
the paneling principle of the Greeks is linked with ancient Oriental artistic
traditions, but I doubt that he recognized the significance of this fact, which
he simply called a “point curieux de l’archéologie.”8° On this occasion he
referred to his Histoire générale de l’art des anciens, which as far as I know
has never appeared. Letronne, however, had shown no greater a grasp of the
problem; in fact, he was probably even further away from it than his oppo-
nent. For instead of linking the frequent use of actual panel paintings (whether
painted on wood, stone, terra-cotta, slate, glass, ivory, or metal) to wall paint-
ings, he saw them as exceptional cases. He should have stressed the continuity
of this phenomenon, which was typical of the early and late period of Hellenic
art, with the nature of the ancient principle of wall decoration and with the
true essence of classical art. He should have linked this widespread method of
encrusting walls with panels to the even more striking fact that all sculptures
that decorated the monuments of antiquity (without being part of the actual
ornamentation) were in principle—and usually in reality —inserted panels
and then drawn his conclusions on this basis.
This tradition of incrustation in fact extends to all of Hellenic art and above
all governs the actual essence of architecture. It is by no means limited to the
tendentiously decorative manner of adorning surfaces with sculpture and
painting but essentially conditions the art-form in general. In Greek architec-
ture the art form and decoration were so profoundly and intimately bound and
influenced by this principle of surface dressing that it is impossible to consider
them separately. Here too Greek architecture contrasted with barbarian archi-
tecture, in which the same elements—structure and decoration— proclaimed

246
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

themselves, according to the stage of higher development, more or less inor-

ganically, almost mechanically, and in the most authentic and material way.
The fuller development of this important theorem of style theory, which I
see as more than a “point curieux de |’archéologie,” must be reserved for the
section on the synthesis of the arts in architecture. Yet because of its general
validity, not only for architecture but for all the arts, the important considera-
tions to which it leads should not be omitted here, where it also has a logical
and natural place because of the technical process on which it is based,
namely, the dressing.
I rather doubt that Raoul-Rochette would have arrived at a more general
solution to the issues under consideration in 1836, the year in which he
announced his Histoire générale de l’art des anciens, as it was only later that
[Paul-Emile] Botta and Layard made their important discoveries of Assyrian
and Babylonian monuments.*! For these discoveries allowed us for the first
time to observe these phenomena in their cultural and historical context with-
out any missing links and to infer the principle expressed in them. The most
recent and more accurate illustrations of Persian monuments were also results
of this research, as was the more detailed knowledge of the classical soil of
Asia Minor (strewn with the most remarkable traces of a very ancient civiliza-
tion), and all the most recent and, in some cases, surprising discoveries made
in Italy, Cyrenaica, and Egypt—the last still not completely explored. My
shorter writings on this subject, some in German and some in English, show
that this extremely important question has occupied me for a long time.*2

§ 62 The Oldest Formal Principle in Architecture Independent of Construction

and Based on the Concept of Space; the Masking of Reality in the Arts
The art of dressing the body’s nakedness (if one does not count the painting of
one’s skin discussed above) is presumably a more recent invention than the
use of coverings for encampments and spatial enclosures.
There are tribes of the most primitive savagery that are unfamiliar with
clothes but use skins and even possess a more or less developed industry of
spinning, plaiting, and weaving to furnish and defend their camps.
It may be that climatic influences and other circumstances suffice to
explain this cultural-historical phenomenon, and that the normal, universally
valid course of civilization cannot necessarily be deduced from this, but it is
certain that the beginning of building coincides with the beginning of textiles.
The wall is the architectural element that formally represents and makes
visible enclosed space as such, absolutely, as it were, without reference to sec-
ondary concepts.
We might see the pen—the fence of interwoven and tied sticks and
branches —as the earliest partition produced by the human hand, as the most
original vertical spatial enclosure invented by man, whose completion required
a technique that nature, so to speak, placed in the hands of man.
The transition from plaiting branches to plaiting bast for similar domestic
purposes was natural and easy.

247
 Semper

Next came the invention of weaving: first with grass stalks or natural
plant fibers, later with spun threads made from vegetable or animal stuffs.
The diversity of natural color in the stalks soon led to their use in alternating
arrangements, resulting in the pattern. These natural art materials were soon
improved with synthetic preparations; dyeing and weaving were invented to
create colorful carpets for wall dressings, floor coverings, and canopies.
Whether the gradual development of these inventions occurred in this
order or not matters little to us here, for it is certain that a kind of crude
weaving began with the pen, as a means of dividing the “home,” the inner life
from the outer life, as a formal construct of the spatial idea. It preceded the
simple wall made from stone or another material.
Scaffolds that served to hold, secure, or support this spatial enclosure had
nothing directly to do with space or the division of space. They were foreign
to the original architectural idea and were never form-determining elements
to start with.
The same is true of walls built of unfired brick, stone, or any other build-
ing material that in its nature and use has no relation to the spatial concept.
They were used for fortification and defense, for ensuring a durable enclosure,
or for supporting the spatial enclosure above them, as well as for supplies or
other loads —in short, for reasons foreign to the original idea, namely, that of
enclosing space.
In all of this, it is extremely important to observe that wherever these sec-
ondary motives do not occur, woven materials almost everywhere (especially
in warm, southern countries) fulfill their old original purpose as ostensible
spatial dividers. Even where solid walls are necessary, they remain only the
inner and unseen support for the true and legitimate representation of the
spatial idea —which is the more or less artfully woven and knitted textile wall.
Here again we have a remarkable case in which the spoken language assists
the early history of the arts by clarifying the symbols of the formal language
in their primitive manifestation, thereby confirming the validity of our inter-
pretation. In all Germanic languages the word Wand [wall], which has the
same root and basic meaning as Gewand [garment], directly alludes to the
ancient origin and type of the visible spatial enclosure.
Likewise, Decke [cover, ceiling], Bekleidung |clothing, dressing], Schranke
[barrier, gate], Zaun [hedge, fence] (similar to Saum [hem, fillet]), and many
other technical expressions are not linguistic symbols applied to building at a
later stage but clear indications of the textile origin of these building elements.
All of the above refers only to prearchitectural conditions, whose practical
interest for the history of art may be doubtful. The question now is what
became of our principle of dressing after the mystery of transfiguration was
complete: as the essentially material, structural, and technical notion pre-
sented by the dwelling assumed monumental form, from which true architec-
ture arose. This is not yet the place to delve into the important question of
how monumental architecture originated, but many events in the earliest his-
tory of monumental art to which I will turn momentarily may make it more

248
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

readily understandable. For now I will merely point out that the outward rea-
son for monumental undertakings has always been, and still is, the wish to
commemorate and immortalize some religious or solemn act, an event in
world history, or an act of state. There is nothing to keep us from assuming,
from casting aside all doubt, that the first beginnings of a monumental art,
which everywhere requires an existing, relatively high culture and even lux-
ury, was in an analogous way suggested to its founders by similar festive cele-
brations. The festival apparatus —the improvised scaffold with all its splendor
and frills that specifically marks the occasion for celebrating, enhances, deco-
rates, and adorns the glorification of the feast, and is hung with tapestries,
dressed with festoons and garlands, and decorated with fluttering bands and
trophies—is the motive for the permanent monument, which is intended to
proclaim to future generations the solemn act or event celebrated. Thus
Egyptian temples arose from the motive of the improvised pilgrim’s market,
which even in later times was often knocked together from poles and tent cov-
erings — whenever some local god for whom no fixed temple had yet been
built acquired the aura of having miraculous powers and began attracting
Egyptian fellahin to his feast in unexpectedly large numbers (see “Egypt” in
the second half of this study). Those well-known Lycian tombs, two of which

are now exhibited in the British Museum, also illustrate this. These strange
wooden scaffolds executed in stone, decorated with painted relief panels
between the joists, and bearing as an upper floor or top a sarcophagus-like
monument, equally richly sculpted, with projecting knobs, a roof with
pointed arch, and a crowning crest—these alleged imitations of a particularly
Lycian timber style are in my view nothing more than funeral pyres, artfully
assembled in wood and hung with rich carpets—a practice common among
the Romans as well. At the top, covered and concealed by a lavishly gilded
capsule (kadutT1p), was the bier (pépetpov)—a funeral pyre monumentally
reconceived.83
Another striking example is the monumental celebration of the old
covenant in Solomon’s Temple, executed in unheard-of splendor from the
imagined or real motives of the Tabernacle, to which I will later return.

249
 Semper

Similarly, the highly characteristic style of the theater arose from the per-
formance stage, which was made of boards but richly decorated and dressed.*4
I cite these examples mainly to draw attention to the principle of the exte-
rior decoration and dressing of the structural framework —a principle that is
necessary for improvised festive buildings and always and everywhere carries
within itself the nature of the thing. From this I conclude that the same princi-
ple of veiling structural parts, combined with the monumental treatment of
the tent covers and carpets that were stretched between the structural parts of
the scaffold that is the source of the motif, must appear equally natural when
seen in early architectural monuments.®5

$63 The Figurative Use of Materials for Monumental Purposes

After all that has been said, there can no longer be any doubt that the tech-
nique chiefly used for the enclosure of space since the earliest memories of the
human race must have had a crucial and lasting influence on the stylistic
development of architecture proper. Moreover, this technique still serves simi-
lar purposes wherever circumstances similar to those earliest conditions of
society survive or reappear. It is the prearchitectural technique of wall finish-
ers, from which our building terminology has largely been borrowed.*¢ It can
be considered, so to speak, a primeval technique and the following review of
the related historical evidence will document it more fully.
It is no less important but far more difficult to ascertain which means were
used earlier, which later, and what transitions architecture proper (and the
fine arts in general) passed through in using materials for figurative represen-
tation. For the moment I will deal only with the materials themselves, not
their manner of use.
It is easy to see the significance of this question for the history of style. A
particular method of artistic representation is inherent in each material
because each has properties that distinguish it from other materials, and each
demands its own treatment or technique. When an artistic motive undergoes
any kind of material treatment, its original type will be modified; it will
receive, so to speak, a specific coloring. The type is no longer in its primary
stage of development but has undergone a more or less pronounced metamor-
phosis. If the motive undergoes a new change of material [Stoffwechsel] as a
result of this secondary or even multiple transformation, the resulting new
form will be a composite, one that expresses the primeval type and all the
stages preceding the latest form. If development has proceeded correctly, the
order of the intermediate links that join the primitively expressed artistic idea
with the various derivations will be discernible. I consider it so important
to grasp the importance of this artistic question of material change and its
chronological principle that I must give another example. Hellenic statuary is
most useful here, as the stages of its material development can be rather
clearly followed.
The wooden idol (8aiSaha, Edava), ceremoniously dressed in real clothes,
is probably the oldest motive in statuary art; the bronze statue is perhaps the

250
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

earliest monumental manifestation of this prototype.’” The first bronze stat-

ues consisted of a core covered with sheet metal. This technique was called
empaestics (€(LTAaLOTLKT) TEXVN), incrustation, plating (doublure, placage). The
earliest colossal statues of Assyria and Babylonia (as described by Herodotus,
Diodorus, and Strabo) were of this kind, “but clay <or wood> within, and
brass without,” like Bel of Babylon.88 Various pieces of embossed work from
Nineveh — bulls’ feet, and other fragments of ancient Assyrian empaestics
acquired by Layard for the British Museum —are similar. The inside is wood,
clay, or a bituminous mass; the outside is a thin coating of brass.8? The hollow
embossed work, ouvrage au repoussé, that the ancients called sphyrelaton
[(beaten metalwork)] can be thought of as a later development of this tech-
nique; this is what we see in the earliest Greek bronze works. All the metal-
work mentioned in Homer and all the known bronze colossi typical of high
Greek antiquity were embossed, hollow, and riveted from pieces. Only later
was soldering invented, or rather (like most other “inventions” in Greek art)
borrowed from older cultures and applied to statues. Pausanias describes the
statue of Zeus Hypatos on the citadel of Sparta as embossed metal fastened
with rivets; he believed this work by Clearchus of Rhegium to be the oldest
(Hellenic) bronze statue.2° Similar works were made much earlier in Meso-
potamia and Egypt, as is shown by existing fragments. In Greece this techni-
cal branch of sculpture went under the general name of toreutics.
The next technique was cast bronze, which first appeared as a kind of
empaestic work, that is, as a thin crust of bronze cast around an iron core.
Highly remarkable specimens of this kind are also found among the Assyrian
antiquities in the British Museum.” Only later did it occur to them to replace

251
 Semper

the iron core with one that could be removed in small pieces when the casting
was done; this method related to the older one just as sphyrelaton related to
empaestics. The oldest Greek hollow castings are still in very thick metal. The
British Museum also has a splendid example of a hero’s head in the most beau-
tiful archaic style, with a bronze skin at least an inch thick. The Egyptians were
far more advanced in the art of casting, even at a very early date.
Marble sculpture and chryselephantine colossal sculpture appeared along-
side metal casting even before the highest flowering of Hellenic art. Chrys-
elephantine sculpture was clearly a revival and refinement of the most
primitive technique —inlaid woodwork and empaestics. Hellenic marble
sculpture and Egyptian stone sculpture still bear traits of the old hollow-body
and dressing technique, and this stylistic relationship explains a great deal
about the peculiarities of antique stone sculpture. We can really understand it
only when we trace its descent all the way back to the primeval type. Only
then are we convinced that white stone was never displayed bare but had to
appear as polychrome according to some system. The same is true of bronze
statues.

Lo
i

]
vithy,
ih Hitt

SS
i
:

But what about sculpture proper, that is, the art of modeling in clay? Did
this have no influence on the style of Hellenic statuary? If so, this would con-
tradict the view of Pasiteles, who called modeling [Plastik] the mother of stat-

Zoe
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

uary art, sculpture, and chasing. In his own day (in the Roman year 662) he—
the leading artist in all these arts—never undertook any of these processes
without a clay model.
In fact, statuary sculpture was a very ancient Greco-Italic tradition in
which the Etruscans excelled. Their works adorned ancient Rome and in ear-
liest times this art flourished in Athens and Corinth. It is certain, however,
that statuary sculpture took more from toreutics than did the whole of high
statuary art. This was because, following ancient Asiatic processes of incrus-
tation, all sculptural works of antiquity were coated with stucco and paint,
beneath which the statue formed the core, just as in the oldest empaestic
works the metal coat surrounded a core of wood or unfired clay.93 By con-
trast, as far as we know, modeling influenced high statuary art in other mate-
rials only indirectly, that is, by providing the model on which the work was
based. Indeed, this custom did not flourish until after the highest development
of Hellenic sculpture, if we can trust Pliny’s often uncritical reports. He names
Lysistratus, Lysippus’s brother-in-law, as the first to have introduced clay mod-
els. In earlier times wax was used in small-scale models for statues in wood
and stone, which were then executed at the larger scale. Similarly, the core of
ivory statues may have been made from a small model and then covered with
a thin wax crust for the modeling; when the crust was taken off in pieces, it
served as a model for working the ivory.?* When casting metal, this shell of
wax must have been melted out after the form covering it was complete.
More particulars about the history of sculptural style will be given in an
appropriate place. This brief departure, as I have said, was meant only to pro-
vide an example of how an artistic motive is carried through successive mate-
rials and methods of treatment; it also shows the difficulties that arise when
trying to identify the influence of one technique on another and to place them
in their correct order. As we have seen, the relation of clay sculpture to the
other branches of ancient statuary art is highly problematic and its position
among them in terms of the history of style is by no means certain.
Similar investigations in architecture are even more difficult than those
touched upon here, as architecture went through a significantly greater num-
ber of material metamorphoses than sculpture. Yet the technical development
of architecture is generally similar to that of sculpture—not surprisingly, as
the two are profoundly linked and mutually condition each other.
Let us now turn to individual phenomena relevant to our theme in the his-
tory of architecture, or rather, in the general history of human culture, to see
what they have to say about many unanswered questions in the general his-
tory of ancient art. The sequence in which I present them is determined not by
the actual historical age of the reports and monuments through which we
know them but rather by the primitiveness of the conditions from which they
arose. Thus ancient Egypt, whose monuments are without doubt the oldest
surviving human works, does not come first but takes a relatively late place in
the middle.

203
 Semper

§ 64 New Zealand and Polynesia

The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London provided us with much material on
the question at hand. Of particular importance were the textile products of
primitive and domesticated peoples of non-European cultures and their close
connection with the domestic and architectural fittings of these peoples.
The arts of weaving and the associated arts of dyeing and ornamentation
were represented from their earliest beginnings to the point of their greatest
refinement. One had the opportunity to see how among nearly all these peo-
ples those arts made early rapid progress and then stagnated, possibly for mil-
lennia. One would think that this lull in progress in the technical arts must
have coincided with a hardening of civilization into a certain form, which at
times found expression in architecture and monumental art. Architectural
expression must then have corresponded to the state of the technical arts (and
in particular to textiles, the mother of all arts) at this fateful moment in the life
of a people and must have reflected this state in its symbolic language of form.
This lull occurred earlier with some peoples and later with others, namely,
those who were more advanced industrially. But in all peoples we can see this
dependence of the fine arts on textiles.
Of all the phenomena that point to this connection, none was more strik-
ing to me than the building methods of the New Zealanders, which originated
materially in primitive fence weaving in its purest and most pristine form.
They actually elevated it to a kind of monumental art. Here architecture took
over this motive directly from the hand of nature in a way that cannot be
found in any other people.
For the warlike New Zealanders the fence weave as a means of fortifying
and enclosing villages (pas) is a motive for all architectural fittings. Such
enclosures, according to the rules of fortification, are placed on steep hills and
surrounded by a broad, deep ditch. The fence behind serves as breastwork
and is provided with sally ports reached only by a tangle of paths, along
which the enemy would be forced to expose himself to the defenders’ spears.
Inside the enclosure are smaller enclosures laid out according to the same
principle; they can hold out independently as forts within the main wall.
Finally, individual houses are fortified in the same way, always so that the
sides of the enclosures and their access can be flanked and enfiladed. The
fence itself consists of thick piles rammed into the ground, with branches
woven between them. Yet at certain points along the fence, especially at the
entrance gates, the piles are decorated with colorfully painted carvings; for
that purpose, they are taller than their neighboring piles. Sculpture originated
here from the carvings on the piles. The pile heads exploit the symbolism of
grotesque human heads, no doubt based on the real heads of enemies killed or
sacrificed and eaten. This is enhanced by a brilliant polychromy that imitates
the ornaments the New Zealanders tattoo on their skin with much artistry.
The polychromy is, in effect, nothing more than a tattooing of the gnarled
bogey represented.
The actual dwellings inside this enclosure, also decorated with wood carv-

254
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

ings, are the most artistic of all. The main ornaments are the roof joints inter-
secting at the gable line, which, like the farmhouses of Lower Saxony, protrude
beyond the ridge and terminate in tattooed bogeys. In addition, carvings and
polychromy, which again follow the principle of tattooing, articulate the main
elements of the house, such as doorposts, and provide more richly or sparsely
distributed inner and outer adornment as the situation demands.
The sculpture is itself occasionally a product of the textile arts. In Hawaii
it takes the form of half-length portraits that “are plaited from a kind of thin,
pliable wood, complete with neck, head, nose, mouth, and ears.”95
Plaiting, and even weaving, progressed further among those remarkable,
cultured, white inhabitants of the South Sea Islands, a conquering tribe. But
these arts had no effect on their architecture, which apparently had been fully
arrested and formally regulated at a previous stage.
The development and diverse application of wood carving among these
peoples is all the more remarkable, as they did not know how to use metals
before European settlement. The taste they show in such work — provided
they hold to pure ornaments and do not represent calligraphic and conven-
tional imagines hominum et animalium [images of men and animals] —is
unusual and rich, often tasteful, but more reminiscent of a rococo style than
of the origin of art. I have discussed earlier the hypotheses to which these phe-
nomena give rise.
The morais—likewise tombs, sacrificial sites, and temples—are similarly
adorned with decorated piles and fences.
Pottery, on the other hand, is very little advanced among these peoples;
they hardly know or practice the firing of ceramics.
Models of New Zealand pas, some carvings, a lithograph of such a pa or
New Zealand village, and some original drawings showing these conditions
were exhibited at the London Exhibition of 1851. They were of no small
interest to architects.?°
The soil of the New World, especially that of the American continent,
might contribute much more of interest to the subject at hand, were it not that
what the Old World offers (bearing more directly on our conditions) is already
far too rich to do it full justice.

§ 65 China
No country other than China can claim to have a recorded history going back
to before the Great Flood. Its written history begins in the year 2698 B.C. At
that distant time the shape of the earth (round, flattened at the poles), the
Copernican planetary system, and the properties of the magnetic needle were
all known; metal casting had reached a high degree of perfection; silk was
woven with all the refinements of the loom; and the finest products of pottery
were produced. In a word, most of the inventions that belong to high civiliza-
tion had already been made. We are told of the most impressive waterworks,
designed to reclaim and protect flooded lands, built at an early date by the
emperor Shun and by his minister and successor, Yu.

255
 Semper

The emperors Yao, Shun, and Yu are China’s great lawgivers and role
models. Chinese philosophers ceaselessly refer to this golden age and to the
virtues of these monarchs. Every revival of Chinese popular life attempts to
re-create the golden age of the Xia dynasty. Indeed history has nothing greater
to show than what these three founders of the Chinese state perfected over
three generations.
But nature does not allow herself to be coerced with impunity! The
extraordinary circumstances and the genius of these great founders of the
state relegated the organism of the Chinese people to a hothouse upbringing
from its earliest youth. Some aspects of civilization matured early while others
stood still. An early decline gave rise to an antiquarian political party that
ruled China, with the exception of a few short intervals, for forty-five cen-
turies up to the present day. This party sought to fix the golden age of Xia
forever but only deprived the people of its power of spiritual growth and
expression. Thus the features of eunuchs, staring through their wrinkles with
haunting youth, remained an inherited trait of Chinese physiognomy.
It will be reserved for another section of the book to analyze the general
character of Chinese architecture on the basis of these and other national cir-
cumstances. Like these other factors, Chinese architecture is a mixture of
refinement and primitive naiveté, which is why it is discussed so early here.
Even though much has been muddied and falsified by later work, an ancient
building principle has been kept alive in China down to the present day (if it
is permissible to endow something inorganic with metaphoric life). This prin-
ciple provides information and explains the material origin of many pecu-
liarities, even of Greek architecture. Thus, for example, a technique of wall
preparation is in active use in China, though it is found in the ruins of west
Asian, Egyptian, and Greco-Italian monumental art only as something that
has long since died out, only as a fragment, and, moreover, in a way that is
not primitive at all but has been transformed and joined with other elements
into something new. The elements of Chinese architecture are not linked
organically, nor even quasi-chemically, but are held together mechanically
without a leading idea. Or rather, the idea dominating the whole is expressed
precisely in the separation and independent activity of these elements.?”
The outer surface of the wall is here wholly separate materially from the
wall itself; in fact, it is usually movable. The wall as such—that is, the wall as
stone construction and as a load-bearing, vertically supporting, statically
functioning element — appears only in the terraces and foundations that often
form massive and essential components of Chinese architecture. Staircases
and balustrades belong to them as well, although they are, so to speak, tran-
sitional forms between the stone construction of the terraces and the tec-
tonic and textile-inspired components of the upper structure supported by the
terraces.
In its upper sections the wall supports only its own load and serves as an
infill screen between the wooden supports; the latter serve the technical pur-
pose of supporting both the roof and the room’s horizontal ceiling.

256
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

Strictly speaking, the wall itself is a Spanish wall executed in tile, a support
for wallpaper. It is scarcely a load-bearing or supporting member. For this rea-
son it is everywhere most carefully marked with the symbolism of something
that has been attached at the sides and secured from tipping over, as some-
thing movable and completely independent of the roof load.
The framework supporting the vertical and horizontal terminations of the
room is a mixture of forms relating as much to wooden construction (tecton-
ics) as to plaiting (textile arts). In the last respect it is highly reminiscent of the
architectural fence weaves of the New Zealanders.
The principle of dressing is evident in the structural parts of the building in
still another way, namely, in the panels covering the wooden core.
The interior domestic furnishings are movable, usually actual carpets hung
on the walls, or wholly latticework or wooden panels fastened together with
hinges, which can be set up as desired. Sometimes they are fixed screens that
allude to the character of these carpets and Spanish walls.
The painted and sculpted elements derive throughout from the same struc-
tural elements so clearly distinct on the building as a whole: imitations of fab-
rics, lacquered paneling, plaited bamboo, gnarled posts and branches shaped
in fantastic forms.
This is the general character of Chinese architecture insofar as it arises
from construction and technical execution. But the insights it offers for our
purpose are so important that it seems necessary to go into greater detail, at
least about individual features.
We want, therefore, to separate the issues and consider first the spatial
enclosure, then the tectonic framework that supports it, and finally the thing
that is farthest from our present subject, the substructure of the building. The
following details were taken mainly from a beautiful manuscript in the manu-
scripts and engravings department of the Imperial Library in Paris. The work,
compiled by a learned Jesuit and missionary to China during the reign of
Louis XIV, is entitled “Essai sur l’architecture des Chinois.” French Jesuits in
the eighteenth century had free access to and enjoyed great privileges in
China, and we are indebted to them for their most valuable and detailed
accounts of that country, which was better known in Europe at that time than
it is now. In addition to the work mentioned, the library in Paris also contains
other splendid collections of architectural drawings, most of them beautifully
executed in the liveliest of color and gilding. They include ancient Chinese
works and others that the missionaries commissioned from Chinese artists. I
took other notes from an interesting work by Sir William Chambers, the only
architect that I know to have traveled in China and described it from the
point of view of his art.%8

1. Spatial Enclosure
The original motive for spatial enclosure, the hedge or the plaiting of branches,
evolved in China to the point of most refined perfection. Extravagant orna-
ment of the most unnatural kind is found already on most ancient Chinese

Zo:
 Semper

memorials, the famous bronze vases of the Second Dynasty (1766 to 1122
B.C.). It is grafted, as it were, directly onto this raw natural stock, so much
so that we can discern through the absurd baroque willfulness a kind of fine
canvas netting giving support to the whole. Clearly latticework forms the
basis of Chinese ornamentation; here it was originally applied directly. We
will encounter the model for this ornamental form in many other places but
generally not in ways that so specifically reflect its origin. We see it today just
as it was five thousand years ago. We see it in the bamboo lattices found on
every Chinese building in such a variety of patterns, some narrowly and some
more widely spaced. They are used as gratings to enclose spaces, as low para-
pet walls to surround terraces, as handrails, and as wainscoting between the
columns of pavilions or along their walls.
As noted, the character of this latticework varies widely, but it can rightly
be divided into three classes. First, there are the fine bamboo lattices, linked
more to textiles than to tectonics. Second, there are the barriers skillfully con-
structed from thicker laths. This technique is at the other end of the scale and
effectively forms a transition to carpentry. It is even fashioned very much in
accordance with the rules of the carpenter’s art. It strictly observes the basic
motive and takes the construction into account in the ornamentation. In
between these extremes, roughly equidistant, we find a linking element. Finer
latticework is chiefly used as a dressing for the lower parts of interior walls. It
usually consists of actual plaited bamboo, which either retains its natural
golden color or is brilliantly lacquered and gilded. It also serves as a substitute
for doors and window frames. In the latter case, it is not unusual for the
openings to be filled with transparent shells, colored glass (used as window
panes as early as the third millennium B.C.), or even paper. In many cases the
friezelike free space between the ceiling and the top of the wall, which will be
discussed further below, was enclosed across its entire breadth with lattice-
work, thus becoming an essential part of the interior decorative outfitting of
houses. When used for more monumental and solid buildings, this screen is
not infrequently executed in gilded metal, noble inlaid woods, or alabaster.
The last-named variety, of medium thickness, is used especially for garden
pavilions and other airy buildings. It is mounted between columns and sup-
ported on parapet walls. Its elegantly varied patterns display a charming arbi-
trariness that stays within the basic geometry, thus alleviating any excessive
monotony or severity. Its matte gilding forms an uncommonly rich polychrome
whole with the purple supporting columns, the glittering green-glazed roof
tiles, and the shimmering white marble foundation, and finally, the azure of
the sky that peeps through and in which the light pavilion appears to float.%
This type is no longer true plaiting because the wood pieces are carefully
fitted together with a system of tenon and table joints, which we will see again
in certain Greek ornamental forms.
The thickest kind is constructed entirely of wood, wedded to the substruc-
ture by the railing, a connection that we will also meet again.
The transition to actual fabrics is by way of the delicately patterned mats

258
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

% ie,

gy &
= SEZ la

Example of Chinese latticework

used to cover floors or used as curtains for doors and windows to partition
off the interior of the house and keep it cool.
After this we come to actual drapery, which has been an essential part of
spatial furnishings in China and all of Asia since ancient times as a freely
hanging room divider or as a curtain for doors and windows.
The excellence of Chinese silk and gold-thread fabrics, the richness of their
patterns and colors, has been known since antiquity. The invention of silk is
an age-old high achievement of the Chinese.
If Babylonian carpets were famed and much sought after by ancient peo-
ples, Chinese and Japanese fabrics have been used for regal pomp in more
recent times. Our forefathers showed better taste than we do, with our exces-
sive use of wallpaper, another material for which we have to thank these same
inventive Chinese.
Stylistically more original than those knitted and richly patterned damasks
and brocades, and of the greatest interest to our topic, are the embroidered
fabrics used for dressing walls or sections of wall in ostentatious rooms. The
oldest annals of China and the world date from the Xia dynasty; their early
origin (2205 B.C.) and authenticity have been confirmed.!° These annals list
products of the individual imperial provinces: gold, silver, copper, tin, steel,
iron, ivory, precious stones, pearls, mother-of-pearl, costly woods, varnish,
five kinds of mineral dyes, hides, pelts, raw silk, flax and cotton, fabrics
woven from these materials, the work of goldsmiths and jewelers, and feath-
ers of rock partridges and other birds.
The fabrics listed are all monochrome: red, black, and white silk fabrics
from Seres; black and red fabrics from King province. Colored knitting was
thus not known at the time, although the frequent references to feathers indi-
cate that they were used for embroidery. Flat embroidery, still a favorite of
contemporary Chinese women, was at the time still opus plumarium in the
strict sense of the word. Embroidery took the place of painting and was older
than it, if painting is understood to mean more than a simple coating, a kind
of color composition executed on surfaces. This is as certain as the fact that
wood panels and wallpaper are of a later origin than drapery and woven wall
dressing.

ZOO)
 Semper

The oldest Chinese colored embroidery was thus flat stitch, executed on a
ground of colored fabric with feathers. The characteristic feature of this
feather embroidery is the flat grandeur of the design over the surface of the
material, amounting to a sort of polychrome bas-relief.
Not only was this style retained in China when colored threads began to be
used for embroidery instead of feathers, but it was developed even further—
indeed, to the extent that the embroidered objects became a genuinely noble
work featuring rather advanced modeling and calculated effects of light and
shade. Life-size figures in a definite relief style—and even whole friezes and
continuous compositions —continue to be executed in this way, with a needle
and beautifully colored silk threads. In 1851 I saw examples of this art at the
Great Exhibition in London. They reminded me so much of the well-known
bas-reliefs of Nineveh in their style and treatment that I have since been
unable to see the latter as anything other than ancient Assyrian carpet embroi-
dery translated into alabaster. Indeed, similar relief embroideries of a more
recent date closely resemble antediluvian Chinese tapestries in their style.1
At the same time, it should be stressed that this style, which was undoubt-
edly rooted in embroidery, was also applied to other branches of the industrial
arts in China. In fact it became a defining factor in all Oriental art techniques,
manifesting itself in a great variety of ways. Japanese and Chinese lacquer
painting, even more so porcelain painting, and also enameling are all based
on the same method, a kind of painting in relief. This will be dealt with in
more detail in the section on ceramics, under the heading “Porcelain.”
It is curious that, apart from this style, true relief never occurs in larger
monumental use. Relief plays a role only in smaller carvings, in pottery, and
in metalwork, where it seems to have quite different roots.
In India, as we will see, stucco appears as a key transitional element to
monumental stone sculpture. But it does not seem to be much used in China,
which can be explained by the former laws mandating light construction.

The Solid Wall

The partition in a solid form as a wall [die Wand in solider Ausfiihrung als
Mauer] occurs in four ways: as a peripheral wall for courtyards, as a free-
standing screen wall before the entrance to a building, as a substructure, and
finally as a wall enclosing and dividing a covered residential space.
For all these types the most common material is brick —either air-dried,
fired, or colored with a glaze. The first two are both gray and are dressed with
stucco. Glazed bricks are found only in temples and imperial complexes.
Tradition governs everything in China, as does concern about dryness and
hygiene in a volatile and damp climate. This may be why brick is used almost
exclusively, even in areas where there is plenty of fine building stone. Etiquette
too plays a role, as white marble is used only in imperial palaces and monu-
ments, and even there only on substructures and courtyard walls, not as a
dressing for actual living spaces.
The bonding agent is mortar, prepared in a way not fundamentally differ-

260
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

ent from ours. The color for the stucco covering, which is always present
except on the massive foundations, is mixed in with the fresh mortar and not
applied later as a wash. At least this is true of the grounds of colored walls.
The materials, size, and decorations of the enclosing walls of the court-
yards are legally prescribed according to the owner’s rank.
The lowest type of wall is made of clay mixed with lime, which is not very
durable.
Then come walls of air-dried brick, which are plastered with gray lime.
Wisps of rice straw are added to the joints and these project to hold the plas-
ter in place. This method is still used, and we will come across it again in the
oldest works of the Babylonians and Assyrians.
Royal courtyards are built of fired bricks and an ashlar plinth. Sometimes
the lower parts are formed in very delicate opus incertum [irregular stone-
work], of basalt or a similar dark stone. These courtyard walls are crowned
with battlements made of stepped bricks.
The peripheral walls of the imperial palace are made of brick. Their
middle parts are covered with a red, matte-polished plaster. The walls are
topped with richly decorated glazed roof tiles in yellow or green with a simple
cornice molding underneath to provide protection against the weather.
The shape of the roof tiles is very similar to that of Greek tiles, but the sys-
tem of roofing is more primitive; the tiles are simply nailed to the framework.
Metal and stone roofing are not rare, the latter particularly in the southern
provinces. They do not use slate, as we do, but limestone, which breaks when
used in large slabs.
Freestanding screen walls, called zhaopings, are articulated in the same
way. They have strongly projecting plinths and are like colossal fire screens in
solid construction.
They are built in front of and behind palace entrances to avoid subjecting
passersby to useless ceremonies of prescribed etiquette. Because these screen
walls indicate the rank of the homeowner, their form and decoration are sub-
ject to the strictest etiquette. The simplest are made of unplastered brick.
Those that stand outside the gates of mandarins are more richly crowned and
plastered in white. The dwellings of the various classes of dignitaries and
imperial officials are distinguished by more or less lavish painting on the
white ground.
In front of princely or imperial palaces the zhaopings are red with greater
or lesser quantities of gold. They have green-glazed roof tiles with gold ridges
and acroteria.
The screen walls in front of miaos, or temples, are always gold.
Terrace walls are often made of ashlar, and in imperial palaces they are
dressed with white marble panels. Marble is applied here but only here and
on balustrades, handrails, and those things considered part of such terraces. It
retains its natural white color.
Walls connected with roofed spaces are everywhere built of brick; they are
unplastered to the height of the parapet.!°2 Above the wainscot begins the

261
 Semper

stucco painting, which varies according to the owner’s rank. Most walls are
white, divided into panels, and have encrusted scenes of landscapes or other
trappings.
Imperial houses have red walls richly decorated with gold. At the top, as
with the walls of Pompeii, they have a friezelike section on which are painted
openwork parapets or latticework, as if this section were void and the wall
had no connection with the roof.
The interior walls are dressed with tapestries of damask or lesser fabrics;
for the middle class, with paper. The wall openings are large and are shaped
as ovals, circles, polygons. Often an entire wall is open. Doors, when they are
used, are made of costly wood with decorative panels and openings, but like
all other woodwork they are painted with brilliant colors without regard for
the costliness of the material.
Everything about the treatment of solid walls, to the extent that they are
directly employed in dwellings or covered spaces, shows their variable and
secondary purpose. Their motive derives from those light mobile screens
made of lacquered papier-maché, fabric, or paper —something the Chinese
have taught us to use but which we still do not use enough. They give a room
an elasticity, an adaptability to changing needs, which we often find so
painfully lacking in our own interior arrangements.
The walls connect with the roof columns in one of three ways.
In the first the wall stands outside the outer row of columns. This arrange-
ment occurs in larger dwellings with more than one room. The visibly pro-
truding columns always serve as the actual roof supports; the wall, though
solid, merely encloses space and is often open along the top.
In the second the wall stands between the outer or inner columns in a kind
of pilaster architecture. We will see this again in the Greek pseudoperipteral.
In the third the wall is behind the columns; this arrangement is most fre-
quently used for kiosks and small pavilions.
Naturally there are many possible combinations: for example, if some of the
columns are freestanding while others are set within walls. Despite the poverty
of their motives and the rigorous restrictions imposed on gifted designers by
the building code, it must be granted that the Chinese constantly prove their
inventive spirit in varied and new combinations of this sort.

2. The Tectonic Framework

This is not the place to elucidate functionally the structural principle of
Chinese architecture or to present the nature of this style as a whole. I am sim-
ply concerned here with showing how the principle of dressing also impinges
upon this structural part and competes with its tectonics, so to speak.
The tectonic framework supports and keeps in place the interior ceiling,
on the one hand, and the outer roof, on the other. Both these elements belong,
in principle and in style, to dressing, and in China both are fully treated as
such. The ceiling, the inner covering, is a visible beam structure with ceiling
boards. It forms a more or less richly coffered ceiling, often lined with ivory,

262
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

ebony, mother-of-pearl, and other materials. In middle-class homes it is color-

fully lacquered (see below for Chambers’s description of a beamed ceiling).
The roof too, the actual exterior roofing, appears in imperial buildings,
temples, and other monuments as a covering: first because of its colorful pat-
tern of glazed tiles and second because of its tentlike curves. At the same time,
however, the roof with its framework contains a formal element that is decid-
edly and exclusively tectonic but, because of the absence of a gable, com-
pletely undeveloped.193
Corresponding to this system that is supported, there is a supporting sub-
frame. But this subframe, too, has scarcely developed into an art-form in
China, and its individual parts reveal its purely technical character —except
that the original fence weave, out of which the more solid columnar support
developed, still appears on it from time to time, in a largely symbolic and
ornamental way. It provides adornment and richness; at the same time, in an
antiquarian land such as China, it alludes to the golden age when the human
race had scarcely emerged from the dragon’s brood.!% This is also why the
primeval dragon (the symbol of the empire) and his teeth are always associ-
ated with this fence plaiting that runs as a decoration from column to column
under the supporting beams. This plaiting also serves as a collar beam. 105
A second band corresponding to this collar beam, and suggesting the same
origin, runs between the lower columns as a parapet. This imparts to the
simple post system (for no column order has been able to evolve) a sufficient
inner unity with suitable articulation, albeit in a superficially realistic way.
Thus in China the tectonic element was wrenched, as it were, from the
chaotic primeval plaiting and was symbolized as something formed out of it.1%
Usually the rafter heads are freely visible; in other cases the transition from
roof edge to collar beam is effected by a channel studded as if with dragon’s
teeth. In addition, there is a peculiar corbel system that radiates branchlike
out of the column, almost forcing us to view the column as a reminiscence of
a fence post with trimmed branches.
Less fantastic but more appropriate to the realistic idea of dressing is the
mediation of this transition with edges shaped like lambrequins, as often seen
in more recent work.
Thus the principle that concerns us here is inherent in the structure of the
building’s framework. Moreover, it is at work in the total incrustation in
which all parts of the tectonic structure are dressed, although this incrustation
may consist only of a rich coat of paint. As a rule, the columns are covered
with the most beautiful purple; by contrast, the collar beam is generally blue
with black and green panels, on which colorful flowers and arabesques alter-
nate with gilded motifs, inscriptions, and the like. The roof frame is similar:
the rafters or roof laths are yellow. The dragon’s teeth, which are, incidentally,
of ancient origin, are gold on a dark ground. The gnarled terminations of the
roof are gold as well. The technique of wood painting used here is a kind of
lacquering described in § 35. It was intentionally treated in more detail there
because many processes in ancient painting are related to it.

263
 Semper

Only a few imperial pavilions have columns made of marble. Such columns
are never used for official buildings because the law calls for timber columns.

The Substructure: The pavilions, usually of a single story, acquire stature

and size only from the massive terraces on which they are raised. Within these
terraces, which often have plinths and cornices like Roman ones, there are
vaulted gateways leading to other courtyards. Only on these terraces is the
construction undressed. We will encounter the same principle in all ancient
architecture.
Let it also be noted in passing that the platforms, courtyards, and interior
rooms of distinguished dwellings were laid with polished, polychrome marble
slabs, decoratively patterned, although rich carpets were also spread over the
marble floors when they were used.
The custom of dressing walls with metal panels, so prevalent since ancient
times in other parts of the Orient, was apparently never common in China. It
was a foreign luxury introduced by the Mongol Kublai Khan when he fur-
nished his Beijing palace. Marco Polo writes that this palace was the largest
he had ever seen; that the roof was very high, walls and columns of rooms
were completely covered with gold and silver, with pictures of dragons, birds,
horses, and other creatures. The ceiling itself was entirely gold and had paint-
ings, and so on.
Writing on ceiling decoration, Chambers reports that the Chinese, like the
Gothic master builders, often left woodwork undressed on the inside of the
roof, so this woodwork and its supports were built of costly woods. Some-
times they were adorned with inlaid ivory, bronze, and mother-of-pearl.
We will return to this architect’s instructive comments on the layout of
Chinese buildings and their general character in the last section of this book.
If we traveled in our imagination back to Pompeii as it was eighteen hun-
dred years ago, many things there would seem Chinese to us.

§ 66 India
The view of those who see India as the cradle of humanity and the earliest
seat of culture from which all inventions have emanated is only seemingly at
odds with the fact that this country’s architecture has the unmistakable char-
acter of a highly composite style, one assembled from the most heterogeneous
components. Even the earliest reports contained in the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata reveal Indian architecture to be a composite style, and although
the real age of these reports appears to be just as uncertain as everything else
referring to the archaeology of this mysterious land, they can confidently be
counted among the oldest documents of human society.!°7 Already by that
time Indian art had gone through every possible material metamorphosis and
bore the clearest reminiscences of its earlier stages — for a feminine receptivity
to new motives may then, as now, have been one of this country’s chief char-
acteristics. Perhaps four or five millennia have since left their impression on
the same soft, formative material. As a result, we have the style seen in con-

264
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

temporaneous Hindu monuments, whose oldest existing traces, incidentally,

cannot be shown to go back much beyond the beginnings of our time reckon-
ing. Thus it might seem premature to discuss Hindu architecture at this point
if it could not be clearly proven that what is seen glimmering through it is the
refined conclusion to an artistic phase that goes back well beyond our historic
horizon and is perhaps to be found many millennia beyond the first begin-
nings and dark memories of our present civilization.
Even the most ancient Sanskrit books reveal the style of Hindu art to be
highly composite and formally rich. Wood, brick, ashlar, metal, and above all
stucco mortar were used alternately and together in building, and each of
these materials, with its specific technical properties, influenced artistic style
in a great variety of ways, imparting to it that overloaded property that had
already become its distinctive feature. Those who accompanied Alexander
spoke of a very sophisticated timber building that they found among the
people of the Punjab. Combinations of brick and ashlar construction are
found in the remains of the oldest stupas. And whereas the technologies
in each of these two branches of construction (wood and stone) were far
advanced, we see at the same time that the famed grotto and monolith style of
construction did not yet exist. The very places where we find those fabulous
grotto buildings and monolithic temples today were described as desolate
wilderness at the time.
The oldest recorded grottoes, which still exist in Gaya, are either simple
cliff excavations or extensions of natural caves.!08 They date from the time of
ASoka (third century B.C.). Where sculpture does occur, it is the later work of
the Brahmans, executed after the Buddhist sects had been driven out. This
contradicts the chimera to which some people cling —that Hindu art origi-
nated in grotto building. Already untenable in itself for stylistic reasons, it has
been historically refuted as well.
This erroneous view, which has been all but eradicated, has recently been
joined by another, which suggests that stone sculpture was the starting point
for Indian art. It is claimed that stone sculpture first appeared not in grottoes
but on cliffs (monoliths) or artificial cliffs made of ashlar, which were chiseled
to form memorials.!0
A fleeting glance at these sculpted stone monuments will convince us that,
despite the fantastic license with which they are produced, these miracles of
the chisel are—in their main motives—the product of an architecture that
was unconditionally fixed according to definite artistic rules before these
stone monuments came into being. This is true of the main proportioning of
masses, whereas it may be shown from their ornaments that these sculptures,
though richer, reflected the same principles found in monuments by other
peoples.
The principal motives of these monolithic structures are by no means orig-
inal conceptions of the chisel (which reproduced them only as copies or trans-
lated them into stone). They belong rather to an already refined composite
wood and brick style.

265
 Semper

The Greeks, or those who preceded them, took over the motives of timber
construction for the hut (oknv%)), fresh from nature so to speak; their art com-
menced only with the stone temple. In the Greek temple style the basic motive
is important only for the overall idea, that is, only insofar as the raw work
scheme (the simplest expression of the construction principle to be followed)
lay within it. But the art-form did not appear until the advent of stone con-
struction. It was different with the Hindus. Here art was complete long before
the practice of cliff construction, indeed even before the practice of ashlar
construction. The latter was not subsequent to monolithic building but rather
prepared the way for it. The finished art-form had already been through vari-
ous material changes before it was expressed monolithically. This can be
demonstrated even for multistory monolithic pagodas, for pilaster systems,
for the formal articulations of stunted Chinese roofs, and for much else.
This is even more evident from many ashlar monuments, for example, the
stone temple at Deo in Bihar, executed entirely in the spirit of fully developed
timber construction.
Going much further, I refuse even to grant sculptors the honor of having
directly transformed the timber style into a monolithic style, which is already
evident in these pagodas, or of having originated the characteristic excess of
artistic decoration that distinguishes them.
It would run counter to the analogy of the beginnings of other styles for this
richness to have derived from stone; it must have existed much earlier, before
being imitated in the difficult medium of solid stone. The material that favored
this figured and bombastic richness and encouraged its emergence must have
been quite different and had properties entirely opposed to those of stone.
Ordinary common sense alone tells us this, and observation confirms its
self-evidence.
The medium that I have in mind has since time immemorial been one of the
most important aspects of architecture and sculpture in India—and indeed
throughout the Orient —namely, stucco. And this brings us right back to the
principle of dressing, which in my view dominates the whole of ancient art.
Sanskrit writings reveal a great deal about the age and scope of the custom
of dressing building parts with stucco.
In the passage from the Ramayana referred to above— in the description of
the city of Agodhya built by Manu, the father of humanity —it says that
palaces as tall as mountains were decorated with excellent work and that
there were beautiful multistory houses in large numbers. The whole shone like
Indra’s heaven. The sight was enchanting: the city was enlivened by changing
colors and the eye feasted upon regular arbors of fragrant trees. It was full of
precious stones. Its walls had colored panels like a chessboard."
The following passage from an old Indian drama, apparently dating from
the second century B.C., points in even clearer terms to the frequent use of
plaster on major buildings. A palace of magical splendor is described: “Above
the gates rises an ivory arch and above it fly flags dyed with wild saffron,
whose fringes flutter in the wind as though beckoning —enter, enter!... The

266
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

door panels are of gold and stucco and they glitter like the diamond breast of
a god.... Behold! Here is a row of palaces gleaming like the moon, like shells,
like the stem of a water lily—there the stucco has been applied hand high.
Golden steps, inlaid with various stones, lead to the upper rooms, from which
peer down crystal windows framed in pearl and shining like the eyes of a full-
cheeked maiden.” 12
It says further that the entrance to the sixth courtyard is shaped like a bow
on a sapphire ground, inlaid with gold and multicolored stone, and resembles
Indra’s bow in the azure air.
The sentence “there the stucco has been applied hand high” is probably a
mistranslation. The reference can only be to raised stucco work, or it would
mean nothing at all. This would confirm that there was a plastic stucco decora-
tion before the appearance of rock monuments. There is no mention of stone
sculpture, only of the most lavish polychromy and mosaic wall dressings.
And thus it is true that Indian wall sculpture first evolved from stucco
work, although even the latter was a metamorphosed technique that was the
basis for dressing in its truest sense (namely, textiles).
There is in India and throughout the Orient—and this can be stated with
confidence —not a single ancient stone sculpture that would not have been
covered with stucco or paint. Where neither is any longer in evidence, it has
dropped off or faded.
One may choose not to believe these poems, but even if some of them were
composed later, it is certain that they were assembled from elements of
ancient texts or interpretations thereof. There are also monuments from an
early period, the period of Asoka, which demonstrate this custom of stucco
dressing in its full original extent. These are the remains of the earliest docu-
mented brick monuments in India, the viharas and chaityas of Bihar, near
Gaya.'83 Still more interesting for our purposes are those well-known build-
ings by the Sinhalese king Dutthagamani (and his successor) found on the
island of Ceylon: the Mahastipa, a colossal brick vault, and that great and
wonderful work, the Lohapasada, a Buddhist monastery built in the second
century B.C. The latter was originally a nine-story brick building, 225 feet
tall, supported by stone columns twelve feet high and covered with iron roof-
ing tiles. In the middle of a courtyard was a hall supported by columns, in
which stood the empty, ivory-plated throne of Buddha. The sides of the
throne were encrusted with metal plates; on one side gleamed the sun in gold,
on the other the moon in silver. The third side was decorated with a starry
sky in pearls. Above the throne was stretched a white sunshade. This hall
inside the courtyard was the main room of the monastery: “All parts of the
building were made of the most costly materials and decorated with lavish
ornaments. The columns depicted rich sculptures of lions, tigers, other ani-
mals, and the gods.”
So run the reports on this building, the ruins of which still survive.!!4 What
do they look like? The majority of the sixteen hundred pillars are still stand-
ing; they are gneiss blocks, only roughly squared off, some left almost as

267
 Semper

rough as when they came from the quarry. They rise ten to eleven feet above
the ground, are twelve inches wide and eight inches deep, and stand eight feet
apart. Only the corner columns and the two columns nearest the center are
different from the others; they are blue granite, and the ones nearest the center
are more carefully executed. One can see that all the columns were covered
with a thick layer of stucco, giving them their regular shape and the rich deco-
ration mentioned in the old description.!!5
Thus these most ancient of Indian monuments were stucco work richly
outfitted with sculpture, mosaics, and paint.
Who could view this stone forest of raw pillars, the remains of a most lay-
ish and departed splendor, without being involuntarily reminded of the quite
similar — ostensibly druidic— forests of pillars at Stonehenge and at Carnac
in Brittany? Are they, too, not perhaps skeletons of the most ancient stucco
monuments?
Thus it is proven, for India at least, that stucco was used for decorative
sculptural purposes before the introduction of stone carving, and this material
continued to have an impact even long after stone sculpture had replaced it.
The stone structure was coated with a fine stucco and painted in colors that
corresponded more or less with the natural colors of the objects depicted,
or in line with quite conventional polychrome systems. The thin surface of
painted stucco that appears to be a secondary feature was in fact primary: the
original material of the motive, now historical and represented only symboli-
cally. Sculpture in solid stone was merely its last incarnation.
To insist upon material and structural reasons for the unbridled abun-
dance of plastic adornments found in the Hindu style —its baroque arbitrari-
ness and softness of forms —is not helpful, as they can only be fully explained
by deeper causes that will be indicated later. Nevertheless, it is more justified
to attribute them to the stucco’s pliable mass than to see them as a laborious,
belatedly zealous monstrosity of the chisel.
The same architect whose views on the sculptural element of Hindu archi-
tecture are refuted here describes the construction of pagodas as unique to the
Indians because the rough mass was first piled up before the sculptors shaped
the exterior art-forms. In pursuing these ideas he gave in to the temptation to
prove too much, and therefore proved nothing at all. For the same techniques
are found among the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans — in fact among every
people who built massive monuments in stone. It is the only correct system for
stone construction and it is still valid today. Only Gothic architects departed
from it, an issue that will be discussed in the appropriate place. We Germans
have remained faithful to this late technique, whereas the French have once
more abandoned it. It certainly does not benefit our technology or the harmo-
nious relation of the building’s various parts, as the effect can never be pre-
cisely calculated in advance. Whenever individual parts are made to a pattern
in the workshop and then moved or fitted together piecemeal, the result is
always unsatisfactory —to say nothing of other, related disadvantages.
The theory proposed here about the influence of stucco on the further

268
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

development of monumental types and styles is based on clearly proven facts

and is irrefutable. Its conclusions are revolutionary not only for Indian art but
more generally for all artistic theory as taught by our professors.
For the moment we can let this thesis rest. Let me simply point out that by
analogy to what we see in Indian stone monuments we can derive a principle
that is not without importance for the history of style—namely, that sculpture
in fired and unfired clay was never practiced by ancient peoples other than in
the manner of those stone sculptures. In other words, the clay formed only the
invisible stucco-encrusted core of the art-form.1!6 I therefore say that clay
sculpture is no more an original technique than stone sculpture; it is a second-
ary, or rather tertiary, phenomenon within the history of style.
Dressing walls with stone (mosaics), painting stucco (from which simple
painting of stone then developed, as colored stucco and paint are conceptually
the same, differing only in thickness), encrusting walls and structural parts
with metal plates —all of these were technical procedures in architecture that
in India, at least, were used as a result of and in conjunction with stucco. Such
metal plates are the oldest structural material for dressing walls built of earth
and brick. But this still leaves unanswered a number of questions: for
instance, the age and derivation of the metal dressing, when mosaics were
introduced and how they related to painting, how both related to sculpture,
and so on. I will not address these issues for the time being, merely remarking
on the first question that India’s metal dressings probably exceeded all other
barbarian achievements in this field, and that the early refinement of this tech-
nique there gives evidence of its great antiquity in that country.1!7
Philostratus’s description of the life of Apollonius [of Tyana] has a note
about the outfitting of a temple outside the walls of the Indian city of Taxila
that is remarkable in this context: “Bronze panels <xyaAkot tivakec> are
attached to each wall. They represent the deeds of Porus and Alexander; ele-
phants, horses, and warriors; helmets and shields in gold, silver, and tin;
lances, arrows, and swords in iron; allegedly in the high style of Zeuxis,
Polygnotos, and Euphranor, who strove to enliven their images with shading,
projection, and recession. The same effect is also said to have been achieved in
this metalwork by the skillful melting of the metals, just as if they were paints.
Even the content of this painting was pleasing: Porus dedicated these panels
after the death of the Macedonian, who in them is seen graciously lifting up
the defeated and wounded Porus and giving him back conquered India.”
Later, this work is once again compared to painting and is said to be a branch
of both painting and copperwork, and thus a kind of inlaid work."!8 In
another temple in the city of Taxila was a picture of Helios in mother-of-pearl
in the “symbolic manner <that is, in the encrusted manner> used by all bar-
barians for sacred dedicatory gifts.”!!
According to [Quintus] Curtius [Rufus], who drew on reports of those
accompanying Alexander on the Indian campaign, the royal strongholds had
columns covered with gold, surrounded by beaten-gold vine tendrils with sil-
ver birds between them.!2°

Z69
 Semper

Let us conclude this section with some important notes on the continuing
use of these most ancient technical traditions on contemporaneous Hindu
architecture, still polychrome and rich in images. The notes are taken from
Bishop [Reginald] Heber’s travel diaries.
In a description of the house of a rich citizen of Benares, Heber writes as
follows:

The facade had a number of small windows, all different in form, with some pro-
jecting considerably, supported by consoles richly decorated with sculpture. A large
area of the wall itself was covered with sculpture, representing branches, leaves, and
flowers. As they were also (according to the Indian tradition) painted dark red, they
gave the impression of being covered with a carpet of the old style. The general
impression was like that of the old Venetian palaces....
In Benares, private houses are made of good hewn stone, as are the public build-
ings. But the Hindus of Benares seem to be passionately fond of polychromy; they
cover their houses built of ashlar with a dark red stucco.
Temples are numerous, but they are small and fitted into street corners or along
the facades of large buildings, like cupboards. Yet they are decorative and many of
them are covered with splendid sculptures most excellently executed in stucco, rep-
resenting flowers, animals, palm branches, and so on. They compete in elegance
and richness with the finest examples of Gothic and Greek <?> art.

The clear-sighted Heber reports similarly on the palace of the rajah of

Rajput in the city of Jaipur. This city was built by a single monarch with rare
splendor and completely regularity, in accordance with the regulations of the
holy Silpasastra. I will defer its description to another occasion and note here
only a great gap in our history of architecture: we know almost nothing about
that quite peculiar, genuine, Hindustani civil architecture that has survived in
full vigor in the great cities of central India. It may offer more of interest than
those baroque rock monuments, chultris and pagodas, or those splendid but
empty Muslim buildings with which travelers have concerned themselves
almost exclusively.
In the palace of the rajah of Rajput, Heber found windows filled with
small panes of colored glass, set in a latticelike, perforated, marble frame-
work. At the London Exhibition of 1851 were delicate and rich specimens of
such window lattices made of alabaster and marble. They form an ancient, or
rather, primitive element of Oriental architecture that we have already seen in
China, and will meet again in Egypt, ancient Hellas, and Rome:

In the upper chambers of the palace, where the women of his seraglio lived before
the death of the former rajah, the floors were still carefully covered with quilted
blankets of white cotton or with costly Persian carpets.... In various parts of the
building I noticed thick wooden doors, whose bolts and locks were as crude as
those on prison doors, but in the chambers themselves the various rooms were
divided only by rich striped curtains hanging from the arcades....

270
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

The walls and ceilings were lavishly adorned with paintings and sculpture and
some of them were lined from top to bottom with small mirrors in the most bizarre
shapes.

We will also come across this custom again in the refined orientalized Rome
of the imperial period.
Before we permit ourselves to draw further conclusions from what we
already have before us, let us see now what the western slope of the great
Asiatic plateau, closer to us in every respect, can tell us about our question.

§ 67 Mesopotamia
Even science has its fads, and they reach their peak of crassness when a real
turning point is on its way. Scarcely had we seen that our entirely justified
enthusiasm for Hellas was on the wrong track—to the extent that we had
been trying to construct it entirely out of itself, as something complete and
absolute— when Assyria suddenly became our model, and people have in all
seriousness begun to prepare an Assyrian-European vassal empire centered on
Vienna. Then there are those who see a future in the abstract idea of kingship
and Zoroaster’s moral law, in that dry and unpleasantly infertile product of
the salt desert of upper Media, and find a captivating analogy for it in another
region. Pre-Zoroastrian beliefs, they argue, were joined on the soil of Chaldea
and Mesopotamia with a foreign — specifically Egyptian— principle of forma-
tion. This principle is said to have pushed to the sea, moving from the Persian
Gulf up along the two rivers, and cultivated the land traversed by nomadic
tribes. States were founded and with them an art was created, essentially out
of Egyptian elements.
Certainly the Egyptian monumental style shares some striking traits with
what we know of Mesopotamian buildings, and these become especially clear
if we keep in mind the very ancient pyramid style of the lower Nile valley. It is
also true that this concurrence of two artistic directions cannot be adequately
explained by the natural law of human evolution that asserts that under simi-
lar circumstances similar things will be produced. This concurrence is here, as
elsewhere, obviously determined by phenomena that are entirely random—
that is, that are not conditioned by circumstances, that in fact often seem to
mock them, and that could just as easily have turned out quite differently.
Consequently, there can be no doubt that they either share a common origin
or are the result of interaction between the peoples among whom they are
observed. These similarities in the arts of different peoples are also closely
connected to corresponding phenomena in the fields of religion, politics, and
customs.
Even if it could be shown with a relatively high degree of certainty, or
at least with a degree of probability, that the earliest works of Chaldean-
Assyrian art that have survived in the ruins of the individual mounds are rela-
tively recent and therefore modern when compared with Egyptian works from
the age of the pyramids, it still does not follow that the Assyrian civilization

PTF
 Semper

borrowed its most important forms from the Egyptians. The fish god Oannes,
who also appears in the Noah legend as the most authentic local and aquatic
hero, does not adequately support this hypothesis. Nor does the figure in the
winged circle, presumably the primeval god Zaruana, or whoever else he may
be. He has been judged to be a weaker copy of the winged Egyptian sun, even
though he could just as well have been its model, before being shrunk into an
abbreviated hieroglyphic form.
Still less do Egyptian and quasi-Egyptian utensils and ornamental building
parts found among the ruins of Assyrian monuments prove an original and
persistent Egyptian influence on Assyrian art. The most important find of this
kind was made in a little hall in the oldest, northwestern palace at Nimrud,
and consists of some very interesting beaten bronze vessels, fragments of uten-
sils in beaten and cast metal, and a quantity of ivory carvings that may have
served to decorate a valuable piece of furniture, a timber wall dressing, a door,
or some similar object. Layard and [Samuel] Birch consider these objects to
be Assyrian work in the Egyptian style, but others view them as genuine
Egyptian works and indeed at least in part from Egypt’s Old Kingdom.!2!
Evidence for this is the hieroglyphic inscription on the cartouches of two ivory
tablets, which refers to King Ra Ubn, who reigned long before the Eighteenth
Dynasty. Even stronger evidence is the style of these carvings, which is obvi-
ously archaic Egyptian. No Assyrian ivory carver or Egyptian artist from a
later dynasty would have been able to reproduce this inimitable style, the
feline quality of the archaic figures. On the other hand, there are items that
seem to be neither Egyptian nor Assyrian; they may have been taken to
Nineveh as booty from Phoenicia or somewhere else. All of the objects bear
the mark of very ancient art; some even have prehistorical traits. Between that
period and the first beginnings of recorded time, we may assume a long period
of decline and barbarism.
This would not be enough to suggest any far-reaching Egyptian influence
on Assyria, but merely speaks of the great age of the oldest palace at Nimrud
and a custom, followed by Alexander and the Romans, of decorating the halls
of royal castles with the spoils of conquered nations. It would square much
more closely with the traditions of all ancient peoples, including the Egyptians
(who conceded to the Phrygians the claim of greater antiquity), if we were to
view western Asia as the origin of everything in religion, politics, civilization,
and art whose recurrence in all peoples we find so very striking. Perhaps every
civilization that inhabited the Mediterranean basin was once modeled on the
same social form; perhaps this unity (starting from the same basis) splintered
and developed in its own way into isolated and unique entities; perhaps the
matter is better explained by the hypothesis of migrations and colonizations;
or perhaps both processes worked haphazardly. But one is always forced to
assume that some of the most ancient types in art (as in religion, politics, and
so on) were not acquired traditions but the common heritage of all peoples
from the time before their branching from the primeval stem. Some nations
clung to one form for a long period, while others held to the originality of

202
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

another, but in all cases these traditions were muddied by an admixture of

heterogeneous elements on foreign soil. At the same time, they underwent
metamorphoses occasioned by the individual progress of nations.
We will see for which forms the Egyptians should be given primary credit
for having preserved the original, though certainly not here, where we are
concerned only with those forms that arose from the principle of dressing.

What we know of Chaldean and Assyrian architecture through the momen-

tous discoveries of Botta, Layard, [William] Loftus, and [Hormuzd] Rassam is
limited to the lower stories of large terrace complexes, which form the basic
motive of the whole of ancient west Asian architecture. This motive reached
its culmination in the stepped pyramid of the memorial temple.
This richly articulated west Asian terrace system was completed and
crowned by a system of columns, roofs, and pediments that has long since
vanished, which we know about from ancient reports, from sketchy represen-
tations on Assyrian bas-reliefs, and from a few excavated members and parts
that composed this order. In another section of this book we will try to restore
this grand style in its totality; here we can concern ourselves only with what
bears on our subject. This leads us primarily to the constructional element
of this style.
Here too we must first seek out our principle in the actual textile dressing,
not in the form of the primitive pen, as in China, but rather in a more culti-
vated version. The connection to the fine arts and architecture, however, is
even stronger than that found almost anywhere else. Indeed, among the peo-
ples of Western cultural stock the Chaldeans and Assyrians might be consid-
ered the most faithful guardians of the dressing motive in architecture because
they preserved it in its full originality.
In the oldest human documents Assyrian carpets and fabrics are celebrated
for the magnificence of their colors and the artistry of their embroidered and
knitted images. Already in the Book of Joshua (7:21), we read of the splendid
work of Babylonian looms. The fabrics are described as covered with gro-
tesques, fabulous animal forms, battles, and hunts and are called peristromata
zodiata [fabrics embellished with animals], belluata tapetia [carpets embel-
lished with beasts], and so on. Ezekiel was also referring to carpet embroidery
when he wrote about red men in Chaldean pictures (23:24).
The famed tapetia alexandrina of a later period and the more hellenizing
aulaea of Attalid Pergamum imitated them, though significant Egyptian influ-
ence is also probable. It is likely that Hellenic rulers in Alexandria and Perga-
mum established state manufactures for such carpets, much as the Norman
princes would do in Palermo at a later date.
It may well be that the peplos prepared for Alcisthenes the Sybarite in the
Temple of Hera at Lacinium was also hellenized Asiatic. It was the object
most admired by visitors to the shrine, even though its treasures included
Zeuxis’s Helen— which incidentally proves that the public never changes. The

23
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

peplos seems to have consisted of three sections: gods and goddesses in the
middle, battles and hunting scenes above, and the men of Susa and Persia in
their national costume and attributes below.!22 According to Polemon, the
Carthaginians later bought this shawl for 120 talents.
According to Pliny, Alexandrian manufacturers were the inventors of true
carpet and tapestry weaving.!23 Did he therefore believe that the older Asian
carpets and tapestries were all embroidered? We can never be certain whether
the ancient writers who mention these works meant embroidered or woven
carpets, but I have already expressed my belief that the oldest works of this
kind were embroidery, from which the transition to actual colored weaving
can be traced in the clothing patterns of Assyrian kings depicted in the bas-
reliefs of Nimrud, Khorsabad, and so on. They vary greatly according to
whether they belong to the earlier or later periods of the Assyrian empire.
A remarkable and certainly ancient motive found in embroidered (later
often merely painted) wall hangings of unusual height and extent originated in
the custom of having them carried by servants for the full duration of a solemn
event, in order to enclose, consecrate, and adorn the site of the event. !24
In certain cases, when the fabric was not long enough for the wall it was to
dress, scaffolds were built and the men holding the fabrics formed two, three,
and even more levels one above another. Later this motive was taken up and
imitated in embroidery. We find it on aulaea and siparia, those colossal tapes-
try screens rising out of the ground to hide the skene of the Roman theater
before the action began. They were decorated in the manner described with
giants, telamones, and satyrs, also with captured Teutons, Parthians, and
Britons who, in several rows, seemed to be holding the cloth with their raised
arms.!25 Similarly, nymphs and female servants!26 (caryatids) are depicted as
carrying and stretching garments, and they were later thus imitated and used
on relief panels,!27 on vases, and as architectural replacements for columns.
These motifs in the late art of the Greeks and Romans were, like many
others, of ancient Asian origin. When European art (where later it would bear
the most beautiful fruit) was still in the deepest slumber, the arts of the loom,
copperwork, and pottery had reached a level of development in Asia beyond
which European art would never actually dare to go. Asian products were car-
ried by trade and theft to neighboring lands that remained uncivilized.
This early Chaldean embroidery with its incomprehensible symbols, fabu-
lous beasts and animal fights, and the related images found on clay and cop-
per vessels and utensils, had to have a lively effect on the imagination of the
receptive Hellenes. It is possible that in some cases local legends and religious
elements that were vaguely similar or even distantly related to such imagery
were forced into employ when interpreting it, but more often new legends
and religious images were created from it. At the same time, this imagery
awakened an instinct for imitation, and the fine arts flourished just as cre-
atively and freely as the poetry that had fertilized them, conjuring up from
this luxuriant soil an Asian world of form whose evident meaning had long
since faded away.

PAILS:
 Semper

Thus, for example, the edges, borders, seams, hems, buttons, knots, bands,
bows, valances, and other necessary structural elements of textiles became
general types within art, and through all the changes that later took place they
retained many of their specifically Asiatic features. Vegetal and animal plait-
ings and cosmogonic crisscross patterns that still had a mystical meaning on
the industrial products of ancient Asia were now applied in a purely ornamen-
tal way. Sometimes such patterns led to certain important architectural types,
such as the Ionic capital or other architectural scrolls, and at other times to
those rich grotesque forms of the so-called arabesque that evolved in so many
ways as ornaments for the structurally functioning parts of an artistic whole.
The same cosmogonic and primeval plaiting also produced the fabulous
animal allegories that the Asians embroidered on their tapestries, giving the
Greeks a taste for these arbitrary animal compositions: lions, bulls, stags,
goats, ostriches, eagles, lizards, fish, and humans locked in combat, some-
times overtly, sometimes in the form of crossing heterogeneous organisms. !28
Thus arose basilisks and chimeras, tragelaphs and hippocampi, griffins and
echidnas, sirens and nereids, sphinxes and centaurs. One can reasonably
maintain that the whole population of the Brocken of the classical world was
released from the tapestries of the Babylonians, where they had been bound
by a spell, by the words of Hellenic poetry. Pursuing this idea, it leads beyond
the rabble on Olympus and allows us to see the heroes fighting them as
embroidered heroes who have also been released from a spell. In the end,
Zeus and Hera and the whole of high Olympus must admit to similar origins.

In dem Schlosse Blay allnachtig

Giebts ein Rauschen, Knistern, Beben;
Die Figuren der Tapete
Fangen plotzlich an zu leben.
{In Castle Blay nightly
There’s roaring, rustling, and trembling
As the figures on the tapestry
Suddenly come to life.
— Heinrich Heine, “Geoffroy Rudél und Melisande von Tripoli” ]

Bottiger fully recognized the influence that Oriental embroidery had on

Hellenic culture when he said that “the embroidery of garments, as Homer
already knew of the Phrygians, was older than almost everything else drawn
or sculpted in Greece.” He saw with a scholar’s eye —long before the rediscov-
ery of Nineveh—the Babylonian-Assyrian embroideries with their animal
combats, fabulous beasts, and arabesques, just as clearly as we can see them
on the magnificent garments of the kings and heroes of Assyria.
But even the alabaster panels themselves, on which these colorfully embroi-
dered images of kings are placed, are stone embroidery. What is grouped and
depicted on them corresponds precisely with what archaeology had seen on
the long decomposed real tapestries of the Chaldeans and Assyrians. Think

276
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

what Bottiger would have been able to tell us from these if he had lived to
experience their discovery!29

§ 68 Excursus on Tapestry in Antiquity

Style theory is not art history. The former may and must treat later things first
if they reveal themselves as having evolved traditionally from the oldest cus-
toms; it should not hesitate to use them as a key to understanding very ancient
works whose context can no longer be discerned from the fractured remains.
Later, these remnants from prehistoric times can conversely help to explain
more developed art-forms and their style. This consideration has led me to
insert the following excursus on ancient tapestry.
When an ancient house was being furnished, carpenters had very little to
do; the vestiarii (in modern terminology, the upholsterers) did almost every-
thing. Our archaeologists have studied, almost excessively, many details of
ancient life and art but they have paid very little attention to the influence of
this important guild, presumably because of the scant yield provided by the
frequent but generalized and undefined allusions to this subject in ancient
authors.
Even Bottiger complained about this omission, but in his desideratum he
too focused only on the carpet itself and its pictorial art, not the aspect more
essential to us here, namely, the manner of its use and the actual art of tapes-
try.3° What I, a nonspecialist, have to contribute on this subject may scarcely
be sufficient for our immediate purposes and certainly cannot claim to be
exhaustive.
The ancient art of tapestry is identical to what has survived until the pres-
ent day in southern and eastern lands, especially in India, China, and Persia.
Even among us it can be seen in the rites of the Catholic Church and in several
profane practices.
What we have before us here throws a much needed light on the obscure
and sporadic information provided by the ancients on the preclassical res ves-
tiaria [craft of upholstery].
In addition, we have the ancient monuments themselves, which often show
clear signs that the vestiary art previously contributed to their overall effect.
Here I am thinking primarily of the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum,
whose wall paintings provide a whole treasury of revelations about ancient
drapery. Thus there is abundant material at our disposal, which can perhaps
best be understood if we distinguish the three tasks incumbent upon the ves-
tiarius in ancient times: (1) the outfitting of an architectural work that uncon-
ditionally required such drapery for its completion; (2) the adornment that a
vestiarius applied to a finished architectural work for special festive occa-
sions; (3) the erection of temporary tentlike facilities.
Anyone who examines the floor plan of an ancient house will soon be con-
vinced that the missing draperies must be replaced in the mind’s eye to make
the house seem inhabitable. This is even more apparent if we consider the
ancient way of life. For example, in Rome at least, ancient custom decreed

Pada
 Semper

that the patriarchal marital bed was to stand in the atrium of the house, and
that the wife was to perform her domestic tasks of spinning and weaving in
the same place, surrounded by her female servants.
The spacious room was open at the top and to the street, when the front
door was open; it served as an entrance hall and was thus the public part of
the dwelling. The atrium had to be equipped with special devices and tempo-
rary mobile screens flexible enough to make it suitable for such a variety of
purposes without destroying the unified effect of the whole grand concept. To
strengthen the effect, the concealing screens did not extend to the full height
of the room, thereby leaving the upper ensemble visible. It is quite impossible
to think of the atrium except as unified and articulated by movable installa-
tions. These installations appear in a later development —or rather in a later
ossification of the idea—as true masonry walls built in stone, but we must
think of them, in the manner of Spanish walls, as a screen that leaves the
space they enclose open at the top, covered only by the atrium ceiling.
Most atria in Pompeii and even those built to the Roman Capitoline plan
are of this later type. Only in the so-called wings or alae (a term of art used
by Vitruvius that we have interpreted, perhaps falsely, as referring to these
recessed parts of an atrial design) do we see the original breadth of the
hypaethral layout, originally constrained by any accessory. If we ignore this
later ossification of the idea, the tall structure of the atrium appears to be
articulated by low movable walls. These walls were sometimes suspended
draperies (catapetasmata) that hung down in a mass of folds, and sometimes
tapestries (peristromata, aulaea, also peploses) suspended like hunting nets
and supported by posts and movable scaffolds. In earlier times the bare or
simply colored walls of the atrium—that is, the actual masonry walls that
enclosed it—were similarly hung or covered for reasons of comfort. There
were also portieres, or door curtains, which must have been used extensively
in classical antiquity, as there are very few signs of true doors of wood or
metal in early domestic interiors. Rooms very often remained entirely open
on one or even two sides; entire walls were left out. Take, for example, the
tablinum of a Roman house, which was usually entirely open—both to the
atrium at the front and to the peristyle at the back. This arrangement suggests
that they must have been closed on both sides by draperies. The same was
generally true for the oeci and triclinia, which were accessible from the peri-
style. We find precisely the same arrangement in Chinese houses, up to the
present day (see § 65).
Antique sculpture and painting afford an interesting point of comparison
for the low and more or less movable enclosures discussed above, on which
the action unfurls in a scenic way, generally in front of the walls. They serve in
the fine arts as a purely symbolic allusion to enclosed space. Many of these
backgrounds consist of draperies hung with lavish folds between pillars, for
example, the well-known relief depicting Jason’s wedding with Glauce and
later images of Roman weddings.! Others suggest permanent walls resem-
bling Chinese screens, as in the famous Aldobrandinian wedding.!32

278
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

The scaffolds for hanging such drapery screens were called scabella (from
which derive escabeaux, échafaudages). They came creaking up from the floor
of the proscenium when the play was over, hung with the theater curtains men-
tioned above. I consider Cicero’s “scabilla concrepant, aulaeum tollitur” [the
scabilla rattle, the curtain is raised] to refer to this.¥3 The catapetasmata,
peristromata, and aulaea were used with particular splendor and effect when
they were hung or stretched between the columns of peristyles and stoas. This
served as protection against rain and cold on the side facing the prevailing
wind, as shade on the sunny side, but primarily as enclosure and decoration,
as a necessary ornatus of the galleries. In fact one should never imagine a
single hall without this necessary adornment, now appearing as a natural,
rich, colorfully embroidered or woven fabric, now via monumental meta-
morphosis as a constructed shear wall or diaphragma between or in front
of the columns. We have a well-known report of how the spaces between
the columns of the palace in Susa were hung with tapestries at the time of
Artaxerxes. The king is entertaining the people in his garden pavilion, “where
were white, green, and blue hangings, fastened with cords of fine linen and
purple to silver rings and pillars of marble: the beds (or rather, socles) were of
gold and silver, upon a pavement of red, blue, and white, and black marble”
(Esther 1:6). Older still are the Hebrew reports of splendid tapestries in the
Tabernacle and the Temple of Solomon, which will be discussed later.
Philostratus — who lived late, to be sure, but who was drawing upon
ancient sources—also related wonderful things about the magnificent dress-
ings of Babylonian royal palaces: “They are dressed in bronze so that they
shine. Rooms, men’s halls, and stoas are in part adorned with gold and silver
fabrics, in part even with embossed work in real gold. The curtain embroi-
deries were taken from the fables of Greece.... Others show Datis tearing the
island of Naxos from the sea and Artaphernes besieging Eretria....” We can
see that the Greek writer is giving the Asian heroes names familiar to him, but
one recognizes in his descriptions the same representations we see on the
alabaster slabs of Nimrud, Khorsabad, and Kuyunjik.
We know similar things about the Egyptians. Clement of Alexandria,
Paedog|ogus] 3.2, p. 216, [ed. Friedrich] Sylb[urg], speaks of Egyptian temple
veils and tapestries, behind which stood a grotesque idol. We will see that the
monuments of Egypt presuppose an extensive use of drapery in order to be
complete and that they are closely related to it in style.
Covering and hanging rooms with fabrics was an ancient and traditional
custom among the Greeks that retained a special religious significance in
sacred places, as can be seen from many passages in the works of ancient
tragedians who were at pains to explain very similar devices onstage before
the audience.%4 Of primary importance in this respect is Euripides’ Ion,
which borrows a good part of its decoration from the paraments of the
Temple of Apollo at Delphi, which were probably still in the treasury in the
poet’s day, to be exhibited at religious feasts. The whole play reads like an
exegesis of a temple, and we will cite it frequently in what follows.

279
 Semper

Certain especially venerated places within sanctuaries were accorded a

special consecration by the use of hangings, and this natural division marked
them as inaccessible to the unanointed. Thus the well-known Holy of Holies
of the Mosaic sanctuary was separated from the temple cella proper only by
magnificent curtains.
The statues of the gods stood in specially enclosed chapels (aedicula, secos
[sacred enclosure], bedos [shrine]) hung with draperies, which were unveiled
only at certain times. At feasts of death and atonement they were completely
veiled, probably with black curtains.'5
Chapels with statues of deities were also enclosed to protect the statues,
either with curtains or, like the aedicula of the Cnidian Aphrodite of Praxi-
teles, with doors. 136 Fervent Lucius, seeking to worship the goddess, waited in
the early morning for the moment when the white curtain would be pushed
back to either side of the statue of Isis.137
The countless wooden statues dressed in garments and the valuable chrys-
elephantine colossi required special protection. Such protection was conferred
on the Panathenaic peplos, the ceremonial embroidery of the priestesses of
Athena, which was mended annually. It is not really known whether it was
worn as a cloak or stretched in front as a catapetasma or spread as a para-
petasma*38 (canopy) above the statue.89 We are better informed by Pausanias
about the curtain King Antiochus [the Great] dedicated to Olympian Zeus.
This curtain was made of a purple Phoenician wool and covered with
Assyrian embroidery; it was lowered on ropes, not drawn up under the ceil-
ing like the parapetasma of Ephesus. This was probably an innovation that
replaced the antique custom of pulling up the curtain, which is still practiced
in Ephesus. According to Quintilian, the original aulaeum [theater curtain] of
the Greek stage was similarly replaced by the later Roman siparium, which
also was lowered.
The tragedians liked to allude to the ancient and sacred furnishings of the
temple precincts, because the decoration of the ancient stage consisted of quite
similar devices. This made it easier to illustrate the words the poet had put in the
mouths of his characters. Similarly, comic writers used the same motive based
on Athenian domestic layouts. Let me note here only one of the many allusions
of this kind, a passage from Aristophanes, in which someone who is misbehav-
ing is advised to look at the ceiling and admire the curtains in the aula. !4°
It goes without saying that the same custom existed in Rome, as is clear
from a passage in Propertius about the magnificent Attalid carpets in the peri-
styles of Pompeii.41 Martial too dedicates a number of epigrams to colored,
woven chamber curtains, the “cubicularia polymita” [damask tapestries]
(Martial 14.150).
In Pompeian wall paintings, the motive of which is nothing other than an
imitation of such stoas and halls, outfitted with draperies and screens, the
custom is so obvious that no further evidence is needed from ancient writers.
It is seen here in its full fecundity and in all varieties of later stylistic develop-
ment and deformation.

280
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

It is not overstating the case to assert that in ancient times it was unusual for
the space between the columns to remain free. One of the column’s purposes
was to support just such draperies and shear walls—a perspective that will
please modern aesthetics just as little as does my view of ancient polychromy.
The spaces between columns offered a very suitable field for tendentious
decoration in embroidery, sculpture, and painting. Unless this is borne in
mind, it is impossible to account for the richness of such adornments found in
descriptions of monuments and occasionally elsewhere. !42
This is not the place to treat this important question, but it should be
noted that well into the Middle Ages it was not at all customary in eastern
and western Europe to leave the intercolumniation open. [Anastasius] Biblio-
thecarius’s biographies of the popes teem with passages that demonstrate this.
For example, Sergius [I] had four white and four scarlet curtains (tetravelia)
made for the altar ambulatory of Saint Peter’s in A.D. 687. In 701 John VI
hung white curtains to the left and right of the altar columns. Saint Zacharias
hung carpets between the columns of the nave in the Church of Saints Peter
and Paul in 742. Stephen IV hung magnificent curtains woven from silver
thread beside the main entrance to Saint Peter’s. In 768 the same pope com-
missioned for this church sixty-five curtains “in Tyrian and patterned fabrics”
(de palliis Tyriis atque fundatis).
The same custom was common to France, England, and Germany, and it
continued into the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that is, until the introduc-
tion of the new Gothic style.'43
The reformed monastic orders, especially that of Cluny, railed against
these luxurious church paraments, which were later permitted only on festive
occasions.
This ancient practice held to its original form even more completely in the
East, where it has never been abolished. !44
The foregoing remarks apply to the custom of hanging and enclosing spaces
with vertical tapestry fittings that combine with and complete the more prop-
erly architectural elements of the building. Yet ancient drapery was not
restricted to this. It was frequently used subdiale, that is, to protect courtyards
that were wholly or partly roofless from the sun and weather and to make
them habitable. Canopies and baldachins of all kinds are frequently men-
tioned, and wall paintings also provide important information about them.
The Greek words pteryx and uraniskos were the more precise expressions
for such coverings in the form of a free-hanging canopy, whereas words like
parapetasma, peplos, and later aulaeum were used indiscriminately for verti-
cal and horizontal fabric coverings.
The use of open-air canopies is probably as old as the spaces themselves.
Reliable observations of Egyptian monuments suggest that they were intended
to have canopies and, what is more, that the latter formed an integral part of
the Egyptian style. The same can be asserted for the architecture of western
Asia, although here we lack conclusive evidence. For the Greeks as well,
woven canopies possessed the greatest significance in terms of materials and

281
 Semper

symbolism. The great importance of the firmament as a symbol of the

Hellenic architectural style will be discussed later. It is certain that real woven
fabrics were used as canopies in Hellenic buildings notwithstanding the lack
of definite confirmation of this custom in ancient writings. It has been sug-
gested that the famous Panathenaic peplos for the statue of Athena was such
a uraniskos, hung below the temple ceiling to protect the deity. I feel that
Bottiger was too quick to reject this theory, as the passage from Jon that he
discusses in this context quite unmistakably shows that the canopies known
as peploses were not unusual in ancient temples (see below).!*5
The oldest example of a monumental structure intended to integrate veils
is the gigantic isolated columns that slice through the middle of the great fore-
court of the temple at Karnak in Thebes, forming a pathway. Some are still
standing. Their purpose is revealed by the wall paintings of this temple fore-
court, built 948 B.C., in which similar columns are depicted, with an upper
section obviously intended to support a magnificent fabric canopy. We will
return to these columns and demonstrate their significance for the stylistic his-
tory of Egyptian architecture.
The parapetasmae of Roman atria and peristyles were made of the costli-
est fabrics, often of Tyrian purple; like the one in Jon, they were embroidered
with signs of the zodiac, the sun god, Eos, Iris, and other images related to the
uranos [heavens] —or at least studded with stars.!4° They were fastened to the
columns with fully tasseled silk or golden cords and colorfully draped with
the richest drapery. This is clear from many of the most beautiful wall paint-
ings of the Roman period.
Vitruvius referred to parapetasmae in atria as interpensiva [lit. “hanging
between” ].!47 This must be what he meant when he emphasized in chapter 3
of book 6 that supporting columns be used in atria—a technique that allows
for lighter joists, since they do not have to bear the weight of the hanging
covers.
The expression interpensiva was also used in the late Roman period as
the most appropriate word for the curtains and covers hung to provide
shade for streets and arcades. This Asian custom, which became widespread
in the luxurious era of Theodosius, was also known to the Greeks in early
times, although it was considered a sign of effeminate luxury. Timaeus tells
us that the Sybarites covered the paths that led to their villas. Perhaps these
Sybaritic arbors, like Persian streets, were shaded by constructed covers (680i
KaTaOTE yo). 148
A later section of this book will provide further details about velaria and
drapery in the theater.
In its third use—as a floor covering —the carpet seems to have been dis-
placed very early in Greece by composition floors, colored marble slabs, and
mosaics. Even in Homer, tapetia are mentioned only in connection with
couches or beds. They were very small and—as is still the custom in the
Orient — spread out only for special occasions; they were then rolled up again
after sleeping or sitting.

282
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

Similar customs prevailed in Egypt, as paintings show. Already in the most

ancient times the Egyptians used low estrades made from the ribs of palm
fronds (still popular today because of their coolness), on which they spread
colored linen rugs or cotton fabrics.149
Not so among the ancient peoples of the Orient: they spent lavishly on
fixed carpets for floor coverings. This is clear both from surviving reports and
from the arrangement of palace floors, which were simply tiled or sometimes
completely bare of any dressing, whereas the walls shine with the greatest
splendor. Only where carpets could not be laid— between doorposts, for
example —do we sometimes see richly patterned stone slabs, even bronze
floors with inlaid silverwork or the like.
The Hall of Melophores in the palace of Susa had a smooth Sardian carpet
on which the king alone walked when he led his cortege from the harem
through the hall on his way to mount his carriage or go riding.45° Xenophon
also mentions, as a foreign and excessive luxury, the Persian habit of placing
beds on rugs so that the stone slabs would not present too hard a foundation
and their resistance would be softened by the elastic fabric.
Those accompanying Alexander also introduced the luxury of foot carpets
to Greece, where previously they had been considered a mark of respect
reserved for the gods. Thus Aeschylus has his Agamemnon shy away from
stepping on the purple carpet spread out for him by Clytemnestra.
It was not until after Alexander that this luxury became more common in
the wealthy courts of kings and tyrants. According to Phylarchus, already by
the time of Clytus the audience chamber was covered with purple carpets.'5!
The tent of Ptolemy Philopator [recte: Philadelphus] had a path in the middle,
between the couches and tables, that was covered with smooth Persian rugs;
their embroidered (or woven) images of animals and humans were admired
for the beauty of their design.'52
This Asiatic extravagance was to find its way into common homes as well,
albeit on a modest scale.53 The same was true for the Romans.
The draperies discussed above were more or less integral to the architec-
tural system and should be distinguished from those that were brought out of
the garde-meuble for special festive occasions.
The temple cella with its magnificent peripteros, the peribolos with its
stoas, the aula and oikos in residential buildings may all have been perfectly
outfitted by the combined arts of the architect, the sculptor, the painter, and
the vestiarius. The walls may have glittered with precious stones and metals
or may have been covered with masterpieces of art. Yet for pageants, ban-
quets, and feasts they were adorned and transformed with all kinds of fittings
and dressings. Paneled ceilings of cedar, gold, and ivory appeared, half cov-
ered by colorful and lavish aulaea of costly purple, as though there were no
ceiling and one were lying under tenting. Marble and porphyry columns were
partially hidden behind embroidered tapestries that enclosed them tightly, or
they were transformed by garlands, sprigs, and wreaths into a new, impro-
vised order. Drapery screens were placed in front of the costly decorated

283
 Semper

architecture of the walls to make the hall more festive and at the same time
more habitable.'54 Similar devices were also continued outside the house to
draw the open air into its realm. A double cordon indicated the sacred dro-
mos [course] that the pageant would follow. Assyrian and Babylonian tapes-
tries, covers of Tyrian purple, and magnificent Alexandrian fabrics were
exhibited on such occasions. When there were not enough of them, painted
fabrics were used. These paths too were covered, and purple and white
peploses fluttered between the high columns adorned with pennants.!55
These are very ancient folk traditions, which are, as I have said, even older
than architecture itself. In many ways they profoundly influenced— both for-
matively and reformatively —the monumental style of this art. This is shown
by the aforementioned colossal supports for the baldachin at Karnak, which
marked the sacred dromos of the pageant of the imperial Egyptian god as it
ran the length of the temple forecourt. Those mystic avenues of sphinxes by
which the continuation of the dromos was defined from station to station,
down to the banks of the sacred river Nile, also served to support a baldachin.
According to the same folk traditions, the great temple feasts of Greece at
its height were surely enhanced by improvised decorations and dressings
placed on monuments in public squares and streets. If only we had more
detailed descriptions of those paired Panathenaic festivals of Athens —the
greater and lesser Dionysia (the Thesmophoria and Eleusinia) —like those we
have of the pageants and feasts of the luxurious post-Alexandrian period.'6
Unfortunately, neither Callixeinus’s otherwise prolix narrative about the pag-
eant of Ptolemy Philopator [recte: Philadelphus] nor Polybius’s description of
the pageant of Antiochus Epiphanes provides any information pertaining to
our present theme, that is, the temporary decoration of monuments and pub-
lic squares during festivals.157
The frenzied pageants of Antiochus were themselves copied from Roman
triumphal processions and public games, at which the principle of improvised
dressing and outfitting of public monuments, streets, and squares was applied
on the grandest scale.
Given our lack of information on the more ancient customs of decorating
public monuments, squares, and private residences during festivals, the
detailed reports on the magnificence of Roman triumphs are of great interest
to us, even though they too provide very little information on this point in
particular and hardly ever give us a clear, concrete idea of how things were
arranged. Were that not the case, they would be all the more meaningful for
us, for the luxurious pageants and feasts of late Roman times (as with so
many other innovations of post-Alexandrian and Roman life, particularly
those affecting architecture) show a clear and unmistakable return to the most
ancient motives, through the mediation of Asiatic influences.
At pageants, triumphs, the circensian games usually associated with them,
and at all kinds of folk festivals in general, an important part of the official
duties of the aediles was to decorate the Forum, the comitia, the porticoes, the
basilicas, and the temples with improvised adornments. Through the magnifi-

284
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

cent and surprisingly new ways in which they performed these tasks they
strove to instill in the people the memory of the state dignities that they them-
selves invested. Consequently, it was largely these festive arrangements that
made the public aware of the activities of the aediles. Their arrangements for
these feasts were to a certain extent judged by the public. Decorations for
public monuments were initially planned to last only as long as the festivals,
and in material terms they were no different from our own festive arrange-
ments—namely, decorative painting on canvas with a light lath frame. Even
when the arts were in deepest decline, people always clung to the idea that lay
behind the festive decoration of squares and monuments, whereas our archi-
tects and decorators, the so-called practitioners usually favored with such
profitable commissions, know nothing of this and, for good reason, want to
know nothing.
Squares and monuments were ancient and sacred bearers of a people’s dig-
nity. As such they were not to be veiled or made unrecognizable but were to be
enhanced in a surprisingly festive and new way appropriate to the occasion.
Through this added decoration, as it were, they could address the people in an
improvised manner about the event that occasioned the festivity. To preserve
as much as possible the individuality of old world-historical monuments was
therefore the first rule and task of the aediles in charge of decoration, as it was
for the architects and decorators working under them. Only through their
ornatus [ornamentation] and the themes applied to them did these monu-
ments become festively animated, were they endowed with an organ to con-
verse — as with an old acquaintance — with the people about their times.
The earliest example of the decoration of a Roman monument about
which we have some details is the pageant for Manius Valerius Maximus
Messala in the Roman year 490 (262 B.C.). Pliny relates that on a side wall of
the Curia Hostilia this commander “exhibited” a picture of the battle in
which he defeated the Carthaginians in Sicily.'58 It was not until forty-seven
years later, in the Roman year 443, that L[ucius] Papirius Cursor triumphed
over the Samnites— which Livy wrongly identifies as the first occasion on
which the Forum was decorated by aediles (Livy 9.40: “Inde natum initium
dicitur fori ornandi ab aedilibus quum thensae ducerentur” [This, it is said,
was the beginning of the practice whereby the aediles decorated the Forum
when the parade floats were to be led through]). Later L[ucius] Scipio exhib-
ited on the Capitol a painting of his Asian victory. L[ucius] Hostilius Manci-
nus had paintings made of his heroic assault on the walls of Carthage, of the
situation of the town, and of all the circumstances of the siege. These he
“exhibited” in the Forum and he personally served as the exegete, explaining
to the people the scenes represented. True decoration, in the form of painted
architecture, also played a role in this context; this was a distinctive feature
of Claudius Pulcher’s term as an aedile. During the circensian games he
brought out large theater sets with painted temple facades and the like, which
greatly confused the ravens who wanted to perch on the painted roof tiles.
The emergence of a pictorial principle in painting can be discerned in this

285
 Semper

older approach to decorating squares and monuments in Rome. This stands

in marked contrast to the plastic, ideal painting style of the Greeks, but it is
strikingly similar to the broad illustrative tone of representation on Assyrian
and Babylonian carpets, as we know them from ancient descriptions. The
principle recurs in the alabaster reliefs of Nineveh and then—after many cen-
turies and under totally different social conditions— miraculously reappears
almost completely unchanged in the earliest medieval tapestry weavings and
canvas paintings.5? The most detailed information we have about the content
and treatment of this unusual branch of ancient painting comes from Flavius
Josephus and his description of the triumph of the Flavians over the ruins of
Jerusalem. Huge floats (fercula, pegmata), three and four stories tall, were
surrounded (teptBéBAnTo) in part with fabrics worked in gold, some with
painted scenes. The account of battles, slaughters, escalades, river crossings,
victory processions, and other scenes of war painted on them reads like a
report by Layard on new alabaster panels from Kuyunjik.'6° I do not doubt
for a moment that these transportable paintings drawn on floats were painted
canvas tapestries, as were the corresponding ones that festively decorated the
halls and walls of monuments. They were a substitute for real tapestries,
which could not be obtained in sufficient numbers, or for which there was
neither the time nor the skill to embroider them with images appropriate to
the occasion. It is true that this view contradicts that of Raoul-Rochette, who
remains faithful to his marotte, which admits only paintings on wood,
because they are called tabulae.'® Yet it is both logical and appropriate that
paintings were associated with true embroidered carpets in such a way that
each could, to a certain extent, be identified with the other. And why should
parts of the pegmata—namely, the frames stretched with canvas —not also
have been called tabulae, or even, in Greek, pinakes,'®? as these expressions,
at least in their later, improper usage, refer only to the formal concept of a
surface suited to painting or sculpture and no longer to the material. In mod-
ern languages the words Schilderei, Tafel, toile, quadre, fraim, and tablet are
abstractions; no thought at all is given to the three-dimensional object but
only to the image presented — the painting on the framed surface. The concept
of Tafelung is not only similar to what ancient writers meant by the words
tabula, pinax, abacus, and crusta but also very close to the more general art-
technical expressions pictura and graphe. And it has grown closer to the aes-
thetic concept of painting than modern surface decoration has, to the extent
that ancient painting was a part of wall decoration and in its style was and
remained panel painting. It already was so as embroidered drapery, since
embroidery more than any other technique of surface decoration is dependent
on framing. Without it, nothing woven can develop as a surface, since both
the loom and embroidery frame impose quite specific and indeed very tight
spatial limits. In recognition of the spatial limits that hyphantics (the textile
arts) establishes, we still often apply similar words, such as Bahn [breadth]
and Stick [piece].
Countless passages by ancient writers show how often painting replaced

286
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

embroidered patterns and fabric prints, even on items of clothing.163 This cus-
tom seems to have originated in Egypt and, like so much else characteristic of
late Greek and Roman art, found its way to Greece and Rome via Alexandria
thanks to the glorious Ptolemaic period, which hellenized Egyptian elements
in a most peculiar way.!¢+ We will come across this Alexandrian influence
again when our investigations take us to Rome’s monumental buildings of the
imperial period.
I am thinking of those gigantic machines on wheels, called thensae or ten-
sae (from tendere, “to stretch out”) and fercula (or, in Greek, myyyaTa), sur-
rounded with layers of tapestry and painted canvas, richly adorned with
statues in ivory, gold, and silver, coats of arms, festoons, and crowned with
trophies, spoils, and plundered valuables of all kinds. They resembled the dec-
orated funeral pyres (busta, rogi, tupal) to be discussed later. Often they were
built in the shape of fortresses — models of the towns conquered. !65
The influence of these ponderous wagon scaffolds, with their descriptive
decoration, on Roman monumental architecture is seen most clearly in tri-
umphal columns, of which those of Trajan and Antoninus Pius still survive.16
These columns are indeed somewhat similar to those display scaffolds, stand-
ing thensae, as it were, executed in marble, just as the rogi supplied the motive
for a whole class of funeral monuments discussed earlier. The figurative frieze
winding its way up the shaft of these columns is nothing other than a monu-
mental evolution of the motive seen in the painted canvas wrappings of those
pegmata, and thus it was now free run in a continuous strip around the cylin-
drical column. The Romans did not see any stylistic infelicity in this, simply
because they were reminded of those supple originals, that is, those canvas
paintings used as dressings on display scaffolds. Our artistic puritans who
loathe spiral columns simply lack the correct point of view for judging them. I
will return to this on another occasion and show that the traces of color on
the sculptures of Trajan’s Column prove that they were actually paintings.
In analogy to these triumphal cars there must have been very similar deco-
rations placed in front of and fastened to the monuments along the route
through which the cars were pulled, principally along the Circus and Forum.
We know from admittedly inadequate indications by authors, some of which
have already been cited above, that the objects displayed on these monuments
were similar to those on the painted placards that were driven around. Some
were allegorical, like captured towns, conquered provinces, river gods, or
local nymphs.'6” Others were colossal portrait figures of victors and the van-
quished.!68 Still others, it would seem, were topographical plans or bird’s-eye
views of entire countries with battles and martial achievements commemo-
rated on them.'6? There were also actual battle scenes, massacres, dreadful
catastrophes, and the whole course of the campaign presented in a sequence
of pictures.!”9 There were peaceful genre pictures, scenes of sutlers, and cari-
catures (like the reception banquet described by Livy, which the people of
Beneventum commissioned for the triumphal return of Tiberius [Sempronius]
Gracchus’s legions) and, finally, some scenic decorations. The expressions the

287
 Semper

authors used to describe what was shown were characteristic of the way the
themes were applied. Livy and Pliny generally use the words proponere and
ponere (to exhibit, to display).!7! Then the expression dressing appears, when
the outfitting of monuments with occasional adornments is discussed. For
example, Pliny (35.[33]) mentions that for the gladiatorial games in Antium
the public portico was dressed with paintings, in which the gladiators and all
the assistants were depicted with portrait likeness.
Where such expressions occur I believe one is always justified in assuming a
loose, provisional connection (or at least a connection that was not original to
the building’s design) between what was displayed and where it was displayed.
For example, Juvenal (Sat(urae], 12.100) discussed bulletin boards that dressed
the portico;!72 and Cicero (Verr[es], 4.[1.22]) spoke of the paintings that
dressed the interior walls of the Temple of Minerva at Syracuse.!73 When, on
the other hand, the principle of dressing entered into a closer monumental con-
nection with architecture, both the Greeks and the Romans used special words
to characterize the particular situation. One of these is appdCetv, EvappoCev
(to fit, join), a word that is also used for vaulting;!”4 thus the keystone was
called harmonia. There is also €yxpotetv, a word used by Philostratus to
describe the insertion of bronze (enameled or inlaid) pictorial panels, which in
the art of vaulting is used in the same sense as appocetv.!75
Latin authors use the words imprimere, includere, inserere |impress,
insert, inlay].!76 Several ancient passages make their meaning clear — above
all, book 7 of Vitruvius, which I will have to discuss later in connection with
these other passages. But the wall decorations on ancient Roman buildings
make their meaning clearer still. Here we find the process of inlaying and pan-
eling walls: sometimes in fact, as when we see recessed and inserted panels
aligned with the openings in the walls into which they are placed; sometimes
only in principle, but in this sense it is the case wherever such remains are still
to be found.!77
Such provisional, nonmonumental decoration of squares and monuments
may occasionally have been left in place for a while—in addition to other
abuse, like the proliferation of inscription tablets and anathemas on public
buildings — until a decree from the Senate or the edict of an emperor made a
clean sweep and tidied things up again.
We have various examples of such settling of accounts with the past.!78 It
also seems that some of these decorative paintings, having completed their
public service, were used to decorate the entrances and atria of the houses of
aediles, feast givers, and triumphators.!7? Inscribed with titulis [inscriptions]
and prooemiis [introductions], they proclaimed the family’s fame and nobility.
In other cases they may have led to a later and more permanent commis-
sion for the motive they presented. Triumphal arches should be mentioned in
this context. They were, so to speak, counterparts or antistrophes to the
above-cited triumphal columns, representative of a festively decorated thor-
oughfare. Here too we see a style of sculpture and a use made of it that can be
fully and correctly explained only by the circumstances mentioned above.

288
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

Who could fail to sense here the intimate connection of this principle with the
whole of ancient architecture or its uncommon importance for the theory of
architectural style—even from these brief hints!
The old Roman principle (probably an ancient tradition) of festively deco-
rating monuments for pageants and solemn days took a particular turn when
the Roman people became familiar with art treasures stolen from the Greeks.
The older, less pretentious, decorative painting and lacing of monuments with
canvas hangings and decorative images now had to make way for—or at least
combine with—a far more solid and expensive method of decoration. The
passion to rob conquered provinces of their best treasures and use them for
the aedile’s glory grew apace, and no triumphator could return to Rome with-
out a magnificent show of spoils from shamelessly plundered shrines and
cities.
The example of desecrating temples and plundering art treasures was not,
however, first set by the Romans but by the Greeks themselves. In the wake of
superior Macedonian power, both practices took root, along with a corrupt-
ing, dilettantish interest in art and a passion for collecting, for which the new
dynastic courts set the example.
Carthaginians and Romans followed suit, and the passion for collecting
and the concomitant plundering of monuments soon became universal, so
that already in his day Polybius was able to predict that Greece would soon be
completely stripped of her glorious art treasures. He reproached the Romans
for dishonoring their victory by removing paintings and sculptures that should
have been left in their original and sacred places, for attempting to decorate
the victory at the expense of the vanquished. !8°
[Marcus Claudius] Marcellus was the first Roman to engage in this kind of
plundering, namely, at the capture of Syracuse. He adorned his triumph with
plundered paintings and statues; later he placed them in the Temple of Honor
and Virtue and in other shrines in allied cities.18!
His example was followed by T[itus] Quinctius Flaminius, who robbed
Eretria in Euboea of its ancient sculptures.!82 It seems that in this case he was
merely indulging his private hobby, as they are not mentioned on the occasion
of his triumph in 198 B.c. Nine years later M[arcus] Fulvius Nobilior plun-
dered Ambracia, home to Pyrrhus, the wealth of whose paintings and artistic
treasures of all kinds was, according to Livy, enormous. !83
Plutarch describes the triumph of [Lucius] Aemilius Paulus (168 B.C.),
which lasted for three days and was glorified by Greek art treasures. Two
hundred and fifty chariots were filled with sculptures.
This was followed by the destruction of Corinth by [Lucius] Mummius.
Not an art lover, Mummius stole for the honor of the people and did not
reclaim his art treasures after they had been borrowed by [Lucius Licinius]
Lucullus for decorating the hall of the Temple of Bona Fortuna at its dedica-
tion. The latter refused to hand them back at the conclusion of the ceremony
and left it to Mummius to collect them, if he wished. Thus they remained the
sacred property of the temple.

289
 Semper

The plundering continued on an ever larger scale, perhaps reaching its

greatest heights during the Mithradatic campaign of Pompey the Great, dur-
ing which it was pursued in the most shameful fashion by subordinate prefects
and provincial officials. It lasted until there was virtually nothing left to take.
At the same time, artists from Greece and Sicily migrated en masse to Rome,
into which all resources flowed and where the greatest enterprises assured
employment.
Thus Rome became the general art museum of the ancient world, almost
entirely without an art of its own. But it was not in the spirit of antiquity to
collect and cram works of art into a single room. There was no systematic iso-
lation and arrangement of masters according to schools and styles; there was
no modern, inartistic, and above all unarchitectural hanging of empty walls
with picture frames that bear no relationship to the walls or to each other but
instead immediately betray the random or constrained nature of their pres-
ence. The task to be solved was how to use an architectural motive to serve as
the link between works that had been brought together from the ends of the
earth, to reconcile them to their immediate surroundings and to each other.
This led to a wholly new style of decoration, which differed fundamentally
from the old drapery style, but without conflicting with it in principle. The
late Roman incrustation style—the dressing of already complete architectural
orders with representational wall surfaces in which picture panels are inte-
grated and before which statues and other treasures have a quiet background—
can be thought of as a superfetation of the ancient principle of dressing. This
decorative field is not the only one in which such superfetation (the over-
growth of a fertile motive) occurs in the history of architecture. We will
encounter it again often.
In a certain sense this sumptuous motive first developed naturally — out of
the abundance of accumulated art objects for which an architectural setting
needed to be created. As the sources of foreign wealth, which had in any case
benefited only a few powerful individuals, began to dry up, the theme was
taken over as a whole by decorative painting in an imaginative way — with all
the freedom that the art of the decorative architect, now emancipated from
reality, claimed for itself in its treatment of internal and external walls. This
led to the wall paintings of imperial Rome about which Pliny and Vitruvius,
with their somewhat narrow-minded purism in matters of taste, were so indig-
nant.!84 For us, however, these paintings are of great interest, because they
show what is, so to speak, the last metamorphosis of the ancient principle of
dressing in an architectural order. Thus we will return to them frequently.
A not unimportant subject remains to be discussed, one that, together with
the above, will help to place the architectural ruins of Chaldea, Assyria, and
Persia in a clearer perspective. I am thinking of certain light, temporary, fes-
tive structures, such as magnificent tents, provisional halls, funeral pyres, and
the like. As noted, they were usually created together with festive arrange-
ments and employed the same materials, but they are of especial interest for
our subject in a way that I will come to discuss in a moment.

290
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

The oldest and most famous ceremonial tent is the Tabernacle of Moses;
the architectural descriptions of it that have survived are the most detailed of
any building of antiquity.!85 I assume that these descriptions, as found in
Exodus and Flavius Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, are familiar to my readers,
and I would like to emphasize a point that puts us on the track of a new and
very important application of the principle of dressing in the most ancient
architecture — namely, the veiling of the structural parts of a building. To be
sure, we have already come across this tendency to veil the columns and
epistyles of architectural monuments for lustrations and festive occasions. It
can still be seen today at church festivals, coronation ceremonies, and other
places. Yet this would scarcely suffice to convince us that the architectural
adornment that disappears behind these rampant epigonal proliferations of the
principle in question, for its part likewise emerged from an ancient petrified
veiling. At this point those early, quasi-prehistoric traditions of metal-dressed
wooden walls, posts, and ceilings are of the utmost importance to us. All the
more so since on the oldest monuments of the world, despite all the depreda-
tions that make them almost unrecognizable in their context, it is precisely the
traces of long since vanished metal dressings that have most clearly survived.18¢
Indeed, not the slightest doubt about their former presence remains.
The woodwork of the Tabernacle, though of the best quality,!8”7 was com-
pletely covered with metal: gold on the Tabernacle itself,!88 sheets of silver on
the framework of the peribolos, whose columns had bronze bases. !89
It may sound improbable that the Jews in the desert had the means and
the artists at their disposal to develop such technical richness, yet it remains
certain that empaestics, that is to say, the art of covering wood and stone
with metal, was practiced by both the Phoenicians and the Egyptians long
before the time of Moses. The earliest technical use of metal (namely, gold,
which is the only metal found naturally in its pure state and which distin-
guishes itself by its ductility) could be no other than the noted process of coat-
ing and strengthening certain tools with gold plating —tools that needed to be
resistant to a strong force and yet shiny. Such sheets may have served simply
as ornament long before this, and their resistance was perhaps first tested in
offensive and defensive weapons. The oldest breastplates of gold sheets,
ostensibly of Celtic origin and found in tombs, are perhaps proof of the most
primitive use of metal as a decoration that occasionally functioned as protec-
tion as well.!9°
Because of these properties of luster, malleability, and a high degree of
resistance, which were recognized early on, sheet metal became the usual
dressing for the fixed, structural-functioning parts of a pegma—an assem-
blage—no matter whether it was used for an instrument or a building. These
observations thus lead us sometimes into the field of tectonics, sometimes into
metal technology. In fact they circle a point where the three procedures of
dressing, carpentry, and metalworking (the last is actually a derived technique
and not independent in principle) meet and work together. We will leave them
for now, but we will return to them frequently later on, as their importance

Axe)II
 Semper

necessitates. There is nothing more important in the whole stylistic history of

architecture than the hollow-body (tubular) construction system, a concept
latent in the original metal-sheathed boards and posts —in embryo, as it were.
This may perhaps be the point to mention another remarkable and very
important practice in the history of style—the process, dating from earliest
antiquity, of coating a surface or structural part of a metal, even a metal as
precious as gold, with another transparent material. A gold surface, for
example, might be treated as merely a ground for a colored enamel finish,
despite the noble splendor of its own sunny glow. Clear and remarkable evi-
dence about this procedure, and precise details about the material used, have
been handed down to us by Flavius Josephus. In book 17 of his Jewish Antiq-
uities he documents a revolt by the Jews against the Roman occupation of the
citadel of Jerusalem, which broke out soon after the death of Herod the Great
(A.D. 2). In the midst of the conflict the stoa of the temple courtyard caught
fire. The ceiling timbers, which were coated with a great deal of resin and wax
and whose gold dressing was also coated with wax, were engulfed in flames,
which spread so rapidly that the great and remarkable work of that king of
the Jews who had so loved splendor was destroyed in the shortest possible
time, along with those who had sought shelter on the roof.
The oldest Egyptian metalworks prove that this custom of coating metal
with an enamel crust to protect it and close its pores was an invention not of a
later period but of a very early one. The remarkable durability of these works
is attributed to this coating process. Even in the damp museums of the north
where they now reside, these objects retain their smoothness and soft glow.
Others seem to have been prepared by an artificial process of oxidization
before being coated.'!
I will have something to say later about how this process of enameling
gold surfaces with bright transparent colors was also practiced by the Greeks
down to the time of Phidias (and by him) and how the best art employed
such means to attain the most exquisite effects. For now it is sufficient to state
the simple fact that using transparent color coatings and coverings was an
ancient tradition, even for a material as noble and indestructible as gold.
Enamel painting on a gold ground (for that is how we should imagine the
golden splendor of ancient monuments) was also enhanced by embossed
work, which could be easily applied to a solid yet pliant core of wood (though
that was often replaced by other more suitable materials). This is the art of
empaestics.!2 It is followed by the actual hollow-body technique known as
sphyrelaton. But I must not anticipate what is to come and only wish to add
that the gold incrustations of the Tabernacle are described as perfectly smooth
(unis), whereas the gold-sheathed cedar panels and beams on the Temple of
Solomon were decorated with embossed sculpture.
We see again —and it is indeed an ancient technique — what I characterized
above as the superfetation of the principle of dressing: the wooden core veiled
by a metal cover, which was in turn dressed with a crust of wax.
The construction of the Tabernacle is extremely interesting for the history

292
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

of style in another respect: the occurrence of columns that here too stand mid-
way, so to speak, between furniture and architectural members. As hybrids of
this sort, such columns are characterized by a base that is a transitional form
between a candelabra base and the Doric plinth common to all column
orders. This phenomenon, however, belongs to the realm of tectonics, where
its connection with other phenomena will be discussed in greater detail.
The walls of the actual Tabernacle were in all probability inclined, in the
manner of Egyptian temple walls. This can be deduced from the mention of
“special corner posts cut (into wedge shapes) out of wood an ell wide and set
into the corners in such a way that they fitted precisely with the broader posts
of the side and rear walls.” 13
The front porch of the Tabernacle was completely open, so that here this
device was not needed. The roof was made of tent covers.
The first cover, made of wool, consisted of ten pieces fastened together
with hooks and eyes. Each field of the cover was four ells wide and twenty-
eight ells long. These hung so far down the outer tabernacle walls on the back
and both sides that the walls remained visible for only a foot above the earth.
The second cover, made of hair, consisted of eleven pieces of the same
width as the lower ones (four ells). These pieces were, however, significantly
longer (thirty ells) and were drawn tentlike toward the ground. At the front
they formed an aetoma, a freely floating baldachin, with the eleventh strip
serving as a ceiling. This aetoma was four ells deep. The third and last cover,
made of animal skins, served to protect the second and was the same width
and arranged in the same way. Thus the whole thing was a tent, whose inte-
rior, gold-encrusted, wooden walls (also decorated with hung, lavishly
embroidered wool covers) were hidden from the outside with tentlike fabrics
stretched in front of them, probably fastened to the ground with bronze pegs,
similar to the posts of the peribolos. It was only from the front that one had
an open view of the magnificent tapestries of the porch, which in turn were
protected by white canvas curtains that could be pulled to the side (for this
purpose they were hung from rings running on a metal pole).
This is certainly a remarkably detailed description of very early drapery
work, and it would still be of interest even if it was a later invention unrelated
to Moses.
Among the oldest and most remarkable documents on ancient tents are the
representations of such provisional works in Egyptian and Assyrian wall
paintings, most of which appear to have been set up within a fortified
masonry peribolos.
Layard illustrates a very costly tent for an Assyrian king in plate 30 of
his first series on the monuments of Nineveh. According to the illustration
drawn from two sides [p. 294], it seems to form a long, rectangular protective
roof in the shape of a dome, supported by four lavishly decorated steles or
tent posts. Those nearest the front, at the entrance, are somewhat lower than
those at the rear, and each is tastefully topped with an ibex perched in a deli-
cate position on the narrow capital. These steles are square posts with a

293
 Semper

Y,

Sy]|
ah
3

>>
SS
>
=—

oN> >
Halt
2
DD
iy Pray iA
Ty PW Py

=
>

>
2 =)
= SsBb >>
2

2
chevron design on the sides and trimmings along the edges. Each of the higher
steles, at the rear, terminates in an Assyrian lily and has surfaces decorated
like those of the front steles. Bells and other trinkets hang as decorations from
the beams connecting the four posts.
I accompany the drawing of this interesting baldachin with an illustration
of a similar protective roof from Egypt of a light, provisional structure as
well as with section and side views of a traditional Assyrian field tent, the kind
so often depicted in reliefs. Some have recognized in the latter a domelike
vaulted building and attributed to it Assyrian systems of dome architecture.
This might be proven from other illustrations but not from the one shown here.
Greek literature contains many interesting accounts of tents and festive
scaffoldings of all kinds, which were equally significant in the religions and
history of customs of all ancient peoples. The remarkable description in
Euripides’ Ion of a festival tent set up in the shrine to Apollo at Delphi has
already been noted.
The descriptions of magnificent tents and pageantry scaffolds from the
time of Alexander, which imitated the luxury of the Persians in this regard, are
in a more realistic style. Alexander’s tent contained one hundred couches
and was supported by fifty gold columns. Stretched over them were canopies
woven through with gold, which formed an artfully embroidered protective
roof, shimmering with color. This tent was probably circular, like the tent of

294
Textiles: Technical-Historical

ISOOHGOS OOO
>
(2) (AABDE
4 /
heZ 1g
a 7
Z)
\
me
i \
/ F;
Ne
eueHI
\ et ay
= 29
“A s we XWO NaN X

TH A

%
,
%
yj
J

Ses
Si

290
 Semper

Cyrus, and was also surrounded by several living periboloi of Macedonian

and Persian guards. Awed by the majesty of these surroundings, no one dared
approach the king.!94
Even more magnificently outfitted was the festive tent in which Alexander
and ninety-one of his comrades-in-arms celebrated their weddings after their
return from the Indian campaign. The tent covers were doubled; the inner
one—the most lavish—consisted of crimson and scarlet fabrics embroidered
with gold. Columns twenty ells high, covered with gold and silver sheets and
inlaid with precious stones, supported them. The walls of the peribolos con-
sisted of magnificent illustrated aulaea worked through with gold, hung from
gold-plated, silver-encrusted crossbeams (kavovec).!95 The forecourt was four
stadia in circumference.
On the occasion of the above-mentioned pageant for Ptolemy Philadel-
phus a tent of extraordinary splendor was erected in the citadel of Alexandria;
a description by Callixeinus has survived in Athenaeus. It contained 130
couches set up in a circle (or rather, semicircle). Five columns stood along
each long side of the tent, one less on each narrow side. They were made of
wood and stood fifty ells high. Above them was a rectangular epistylion
(girder) of timber, which supported the tent roof. This roof was hung in the
middle with a scarlet canopy edged in white. Rafters sloped from each side of
the central section down to the epistyle, and they were covered with white-
striped fabrics with a pattern that resembled merlons. Between these rafters
were hung fabrics with decorated fields. The four corner columns emulated
palm trees, but the ones in the middle looked like thyrsus staffs. Outside these
columns a peristyle passage with a vaultlike covering encircled three sides of
the tent. Here the retinue of guests lingered. This passageway was separated
from the tent by scarlet curtains; in the middle of each curtain were animal
skins, notable for their size and markings. The outer, open side of the ambula-
tory was shaded by myrtles, laurels, and other suitable plants, and the ground
was covered with every kind of flower, which Egypt offers in abundance in
every season. Thus the floor of the tent indeed resembled a divine meadow.
Near the entrance and columns were one hundred marble statues, the
work of the best artists; between them, on wall panels, were the famous
Sicyonian paintings (the legacy of the house of Ptolemy). They alternated with
the choicest portraits, garments worked in gold, and splendid covers embroi-
dered with royal portraits and mythological themes. Over these art objects
hung alternating silver and gold shields, and above them was a space eight ells
high above the covers of the ambulatory that was used to construct niches, six
on each longitudinal side and four across the breadth of the space. In these
niches (or grottoes) realistically dressed tragic, comic, and satyrical figures
faced one another; next to them were gold vessels. In between nymphs were
inserted,'¢ and, alternating with them, gold Delphic tripods and their stands.
At the roof’s peak were eagles fifteen ells high, facing one another and made
of gold. The hundred golden couches supported by sphinxes stood on the two
long sides. The side opposite the entrance remained empty. The couches were

296
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

magnificently upholstered with crimson, long-haired woolens; over them lay

colorful embroidered aulaea of outstanding artistry. The Persian carpet spread
out in the middle was covered with beautifully designed figurative pictures.
The furnishings (tables, etc.) were appropriate to this splendor. In the back-
ground, opposite the entrance and likewise visible to the guests as they entered,
were boxes on which were displayed vessels of the most varied forms, artfully
shaped from the noblest materials and set with precious stones. The value of
these vessels, in weight alone, was estimated at ten thousand silver talents.
Here we see another principle of dressing: the structural parts of a building
were decorated not with gold or other metals but even more provisionally and
transitorily with garlands, branches, and wreaths; the roofs, however, were
covered with fabric. Nevertheless, they are no less interesting for the history
of style than the former. With their festive dressings they are in fact the purest
types of an ancient column system, not yet organically developed but moving
within a superficial conception of a basic idea. Here we find them on a work
dating from a very late and by no means naive time, and indeed they can be
seen in just this form on festive buildings today. Architecture was caught by
surprise, so to speak, as it arose from this bare basic idea, and it calls to mind
the passage in Strabo in which he describes the building methods for Baby-
lonian residences: “Because of the scarcity of timber, Babylonian houses are
made of palm beams and palm columns. Ropes twisted from reeds are tied
round the columns, and later they are colored and patterned with paint.” 197
But what proof do we need from ancient writers? This course of develop-
ment can be seen very clearly in the Egyptian orders, albeit in a learned, hier-
atic, archaic, and by no means natural way.!?8 This is so, in particular in those
monuments that still stand before us in stone as well as, even more unmistak-
ably, in the smaller chapel-like monuments and pavilions that appear so fre-
quently in wall paintings and papyrus rolls. Perhaps we may assume that the
architects at the Greco-Egyptian court of the Ptolemies had similar motives in
mind when they decorated the magnificent tent described above. The juxtapo-
sition of primitive and highly refined motives is characteristic of that luxuri-
ous period initiated by the successors of Alexander the Great, which paved
the way for the East’s decline into barbarity. We also know from the famous
description of the ship Thalamegos, built by the same Ptolemy Philadelphus
mentioned above, of an infatuation with Egyptian forms at that time. We will
return to this in the chapter on tectonics.!9?
One can assume that on similar festive occasions, such as triumphs and
aedile ascensions, the Romans refused to be outdone by the Greek dynasts of
the Alexandrian period from whom they inherited their love of pomp.2°° We
have general remarks about the kinds of structures in which the common
people were entertained, about provisional porticoes and festive halls built of
wood. Yet these provide so few details that unfortunately we know little
about them.
We are better informed about the splendid provisional theaters of the
Romans, but we are going to pass them over here, as their contribution to

297
 Semper

the subject under discussion will be more appropriately dealt with later.
For now, let us consider the charming report by Socrates of Rhodes, found
in Athenaeus, on how [Mark] Antony festively decorated the Theater of Bacchus
on his visit to Athens. This story also sheds interesting light on certain decora-
tive motives often found in ancient wall paintings. Antony erected a tempo-
rary structure (ay¢eSia) over the whole theater, visible from afar on all sides,
and covered it with green foliage, as with Bacchic grottoes (or arbors). To this
foliage cover he then attached tambourines, deerskins, and every other pos-
sible attribute of Dionysus. Under this he caroused with his friends from the
early morning on. The buffoons and mimes who had accompanied him from
Italy waited on him and served as the subordinate retinue of Bacchus, while
all the people of Athens participated as spectators. I believe that for the Roman
Bacchus only the skene proper underwent this transformation into an arbor.
On several occasions I have referred to the decorated funeral pyres that are
of such great interest to art historians. I must once more return to them. This
custom of demonstrating final respects to the deceased by means of the archi-
tectural decor of the funeral pyre seems once again, like so many motives of
ancient customs and art, to be of Asiatic origin. The grand scale on which the
Assyrians followed this custom is, of the many possible examples, perhaps
most evident from the report of the downfall of the last of their kings.
According to Ctesias, he commissioned a funeral pyre four hundred feet high,
on which he placed one hundred gold couches and the same number of tables.
On one level of the rogus [funeral pyre] was a wooden chamber measuring
one hundred feet in either direction, in which were placed beds for him, his
consort, and all his concubines. The chamber’s ceiling was made of thick,
long beams, around which were piled enormous masses of wood, with no
room left for an exit. In this room he had his boundless treasures assembled,
which he consigned to the flames with himself and his entourage. Then he had
the structure set afire, and the blaze lasted for fifteen days. The people saw it
as a great sacrifice that Sardanapalus was making to the gods.2° Mithradates
[VI Eupator] did something similar after an ancient royal custom,2°2 com-
monplace since the self-immolation of Hercules,2°3 in whose memory a beau-
tifully decorated funeral pyre was burned each year in Tarsus. The medallions
of Tarsus depict this monument. These and the consecration medallions of the

Consecration medallion

298
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

Roman emperors are of great interest to art history, since they provide
detailed information about this extremely important phenomenon, from
which, as has already been mentioned above with reference to Lycian tombs, a
whole class of ancient architectural monuments must derive.
Like those medals, reports of these wooden scaffolds (which should be
envisioned as well crafted—certainly not as rough funeral pyres) describe
them as multistory, pyramidal structures. Herodian compares the funeral pyre
of [Lucius] Septimius Severus with a lighthouse. The decoration proper was
again formed by the same dressing materials and incrustations that we have
so often encountered previously.
We have a detailed description of the funeral pyre that, according to
ancient custom, Alexander dedicated to Hephaestion.2°* The commanders
and friends of the king had to supply sculptures in ivory and gold and other
costly materials.
A large number of architects and artists were brought in to complete the
work, which apparently was not made entirely of wood but had a brick base.
The square base was a stadium (600 feet) and was divided into thirty (thirty-
six?) chambers. The top was covered with palm trunks. Five stories rose from
this platform, and on the final one stood colossal hollow Sirens, which ampli-
fied the sound of the dirge sung by the singers hidden within. The total height
was 150 ells or about 225 feet. Each level was dressed with sculptures and
drapery. At the lowest level were 240 colossal golden ships’ prows; on the
oarsmen’s benches were two kneeling archers and an armored warrior, five
ells tall. The spaces in between were hung with shaggy purple draperies, ten
feet wide.
The second level was decorated with torches, fifteen ells tall. On their han-
dles gold wreaths were hung, and an eagle descended from the point of the
flame. At their bases, however, dragons rose up against the eagles. These
emblems were probably attached to a background of rich fabric.
The third level was hung with draperies, which formed a frieze of hunts
and animals. The fourth level had a centauromachia wrought in gold, and the
fifth a repeating group consisting of a lion with a bull. The sixth and last level
was covered with Macedonian and barbarian weapons. The cost was about
twelve thousand talents, about twelve million talers.
For this structure, the decoration of which shows few Greek elements, the
Macedonian benefactor of the dead may have taken the Chaldean-Assyrian
Belus pyramids as his model. (See below and under “Assyria” in volume 2.)
A companion piece to this magnificent burial is the consecration of the
emperor Septimius Severus, the details of which are better known to us than
those of most others, thanks to Herodian’s report.?9
For seven days the funeral rites were observed in the vestibule of the impe-
rial palace, where the emperor’s wax image dressed in gold was displayed on
an ivory couch; he was portrayed as a dying man. On the right sat the mem-
bers of the senate in black mourning vestments; on the left sat matrons in
white. After the seventh day the bier was carried along the Via Sacra to the

299
 Semper

Old Forum, the place where, according to ancient tradition, the magistrates
stepped down from office. Here it was set on a dais that had steps leading up
to it from the left and right. On the right stood a choir of pages, on the left
one of maidens; they alternated in singing hymns of mourning. The proces-
sion next proceeded to the Campus Martius, where the rogus was erected: a
scaffold, square in plan, that was completely filled with brushwood inside but
decorated outside with gold embroidered covers, ivory sculptures, and several
kinds of paintings. On the scaffold stood a second structure, quite similar to
the lower one in form and decoration, but smaller. It had doors with open
wings to receive the bier. Subsequent stories, four in all, decreased in size. On
the fourth and last level was a tabernacle, from whose pedimental roof an
eagle soared into the air at the moment the funeral pyre was glowing most
fiercely.
The septa and septizonia were monumental versions of the motive found
in the rogus rendered in a Roman style; they will be discussed elsewhere.
I should like to mention another famous temporary structure before con-
cluding this excursus on ancient drapery and decoration: the carriage that car-
ried the corpse of the Macedonian conqueror to Alexandria.
The body was hermetically sealed in a coffin of beaten gold. The coffin, in
turn, was enclosed in a gold capsule (kakutTi)p). Over that was spread a pur-
ple cover sumptuously embroidered in gold, and the weapons of the deceased
rested at the side, as a reminder of his deeds.
The carriage was vaulted with a gold cover that was lined with precious
stones and decorated with scales. The barrel vault was eight ells wide, twelve
ells long. Under this baldachin was a gold throne or catafalque, square in
shape, taking up its whole extent. Heads of stags on the catafalque held gold
rings in their mouths, two spans wide, from which hung a magnificent wreath
of multicolored artificial flowers.
Along the topmost edge of the catafalque ran a netlike hanging, with bells
that were of an appropriate size for the carriage to be heard from a consider-
able distance.
A gold Nike holding a trophy was placed at each corner of the vaulted bal-
dachin, which was supported by gold columns with Ionic capitals. Between
the columns was stretched a gold net with threads as thick as fingers, and at
the bottom, friezelike, were four sculptures that formed a stylobate, so to
speak.20 A description of these sculptures will follow.
The entrance to the enclosed tabernacle was guarded by two gold lions
that gazed at those who entered. Each pair of columns was connected by a
gold garland of acanthus leaves that hung down from the capitals. Over the
canopy was yet another purple cover that extended from a large olive wreath
in the middle and sparkled in the sunshine. The axles, spokes, and rims of the
four Persian wheels were gilded, the tires made of iron. The projecting parts
of the axles formed lions’ heads that held hunting spears in their mouths. A
mechanical device kept the canopy horizontal, even on bad roads.?97
I picture the kaydpa, or vault, like those pointed-arch pediments at the top

300
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

of the above-mentioned Lycian tombs. Above the crista [crest] of this vaulted
canopy was a metal scaffold, from which the uppermost purple cover hung,
falling lengthwise on either side. The olive wreath—or rather, the running
ornament of olive leaves—continued over the cover along the sharply sloped
roof that it formed, reminiscent of and alluding to the coronas of temple
roofs. The scales of the curved roof were covered with precious stones,
perhaps enameled, attached not on the outside but on the inside, that is, to
the underside of the cover. Otherwise they would have been covered by the
upper mantle.
We can get a clear idea of the coffin capsule from the painted wooden
coffins of Egypt that came into use during the Ptolemaic period. Several of
these are on display in the British Museum in London. A similar calyptra,
which surrounded a coffin and was decorated with paintings, was found in a
tomb at Panticapaeum.2°8 We see the same custom predominant throughout
the Middle Ages and find an exact repetition of this ancient form of burial in
the monumental catafalques in which sepulchers were placed. Often medieval
calyptras or coffin capsules are of beaten silver, for example, the famous
Sebaldus monument in Nuremberg. On a smaller scale, the same form is used
and becomes typical for reliquaries, lavishly set with precious stones and
enameled. I remember seeing a very beautiful large reliquary with a coffin
container, carved from wood in the Gothic style, in a chapel of the Marien-
kirche in Zwickau. Similar ones can be found in the medieval museum in the
Grofer Garten in Dresden.
The four paintings that served as screens (icouc totic totxote [the length
of the wall]) must have encircled the entire catafalque. I imagine them as a
peribolos, surrounding the columned building proper in such a way that the
latter, with its transparent latticework and lion-guarded doorway, towered
above it.
It would certainly be of great interest to the history of style to trace, from
medieval times until the present, the custom of the festive dressing of monu-
ments for ecclesiastical and secular pageants and celebrations as well as the
associated erection of temporary buildings, in order to show their connection
with the ancient tradition. This would, however, lead us too far afield.
I had an opportunity in Rome to witness a papal coronation and thus
could see all the ancient arazzi and splendid tapestries that have been stored
for centuries in Vatican vestiaries. Like those in the treasury of the shrine to
Apollo at Delphi, they are displayed only at major church celebrations. Like
the walls of the temple courtyard at Delphi, the route to be taken by the coro-
nation procession — inside the nave of the apostolic prince’s basilica as well as
outside the sanctuary —is surrounded by these tapestries. They alone impart
the correct scale on the grand order of columns and piers of the temple and
give the curved colonnade of the courtyard its true significance, as the pro-
portions of the permanent architecture tower majestically over the splendor
of the darkly saturated colors of the tapestry wall and vanish in a haze of
incense. Magnificent draperies, family heirlooms kept by each patrician

301
 Semper

household for this purpose, hang down from the balconies of every palace
facade. The images rendered on them often relate to the history of the house.
Paintings, all in the ancient manner, are also carried around. The greatest
masters did not hesitate to contribute their art to the glorification of these
ecclesiastical festivals by painting such processional images.!°
It is characteristic of the Gothic that, far less so than the ancient architec-
ture of basilicas or even the renewed classical architecture of the Renaissance,
it is conducive to the adornment of sacred places by means of such additions,
and yet its own effect is by no means enhanced by them. This is in part
because the horizontally confining walls formed by the drapery are absolutely
incompatible with the upward thrust and pointed nature of this style. Addi-
tionally, the style eschews all dressing, as its essence lies in the bare appear-
ance of its functioning parts. Like the armored crab, it must parade its
scaffolding of bones while at the same time making their function conspicu-
ous. Also, this style needs no third scale between itself and man, because scale
of a Gothic work, in each part and as a whole, is derived from human propor-
tions, and thus the scale is already extrinsic to the work. The scale of the
ancient architectural style, by contrast, is intrinsic to the work, related not to
man but to itself and the idea contained in and individualized by it. Its scale is
not the foot but the module or some other unit belonging to it. To mediate the
monuments of the ancient style and man, who cannot directly apply his foot
here, a third normative standard is needed, to define as relatively large or small
the harmonious, the absolute, which in itself is neither large nor small.2!!
This explains why church feasts and the other traditional events in Gothic
churches always produce an artistically unsatisfactory effect, are often posi-
tively annoying, and not infrequently are even ridiculous. I have attended fes-
tivals in Milan Cathedral, in Notre Dame de Paris, and also in the
Frauenkirche in Munich and I have only fragmentary and chaotic memories
of cloth-wrapped bundled piers, of long draperies hanging down as though
the house of God were a dyer’s drying loft to which balconies, baldachins,
screens in the pointed-arch style, and similar absurdities had been added. To
judge from illustrations, the sacres [consecrations] in Reims Cathedral must
have overstepped all limits of bad taste in this respect. That such arrange-
ments so frequently fail proves the difficulty of the task. If one has to attempt
them, I think the best way is not to pander to pointed arches but to follow
antiquity by dressing monuments in an ancient and, at the same time, natural
fashion. Anything temporary, anything belonging to a particular moment,
should be arranged not according to the style of the monument but to the
style of the moment. In doing so, however, the specific and heterogeneous
should be excluded as much as possible in favor of universal principles. I
think that old pictures from the Gothic period — miniatures as well as oil
paintings and frescoes, which frequently depict draped rooms — ought to
prove that this was the preferred method for dealing with festivities. In living
rooms and in secular buildings generally the Gothic style loses its brittleness.
Indeed, outside of the church it does not actually exist as a principle but only

302
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

in a decorative sense. Drapery therefore suits the walls and other elements of
Gothic residences (which in principle are still completely Romanesque) much
better and more easily than it does high-vaulted pillared halls and churches in
this style. The dressing of bare and essentially undecorated walls with tapes-
tries that have their own frames set out from the wall remained a custom from
the earliest Middle Ages until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They
were an important device in dramas and in novels of the period: from behind
them one overhears secrets; many a traitor with blood-hungry steel lurks
behind colorful tapestries; many a furtive visitor finds refuge or escape in the
space between them and the wall. From the earliest times the fabrics for these
wall arrangements were an important item of Oriental trade; their patterns
and splendid colors had an important effect on the style of early medieval art.
As a result, the evolution of architecture was pushed back to exactly the same
starting point from which it had begun in antiquity.
With the rise of the Gothic style and the reform of monastic rules, the wall
dressing steadily changed. Wood paneling and openwork tracery (carpentry)
replaced tapestry walls and draperies, without quite driving them out of civil
architecture. More about this under “Carpentry” and in volume 2 under
>

“Gothic Style” [see chapter 8].

In this excursus on ancient drapery and the decorator’s art I hoped that
I could bring the reader imperceptibly to a point from which the antique
style would no longer seem comprehensible or possible without such acces-
sories; that he would come to have an image of antique architecture as color-
ful and lively, though that image may conflict with some old conceptions he
had picked up before; and that he would come to guess the connection of
ancient polychrome ornamentation with the principle of dressing under dis-
cussion. My immediate purpose in the preceding section, however, was to
make certain phenomena in the early history of monumental art more readily
understood.

§ 69 Continuation of § 67 in Relation to Chaldea and Assyria

Just as the civilization of the Nile valley arose in the lowlands of the delta, the
valley of the twin rivers Tigris and Euphrates produced its civilization from
the culture of the alluvial plains of Chaldea. The oldest myths, historical tra-
ditions, and above all the physiology of humanity (that is, civilization consid-
ered as an organic entity) —all these things combine to lend this hypothesis a
high degree of probability, though without ruling out the other, wholly differ-
ent view that the first seeds of this social organism came from across the sea,
from India or Ethiopia.?” In any case, if ever there was a primeval seat of civ-
ilization and an architectural style appropriate to it, there could hardly be a
more probable spot for it in all the ancient world than the southern valley of
the Euphrates, where popular legend also places the first states founded after
the Flood.
Any traveler who dares to enter that wilderness (already in prehistoric
times partially reclaimed by the elements and by hostile nomadic tribes) will

303
 Semper

meet at almost every step traces of a long-abandoned culture. There he finds

canals that are dry and nearly filled in, as well as other hydraulic works, sites
with regular walls, the last traces of cities with names that history can no
longer recall, and also, usually associated with the latter, splendid terraced
complexes almost indistinguishable in their present form from natural hills.
Only on closer inspection do they turn out to be constructions made of fired
and unfired brick.
What the most recent travelers tell us about these weathered ruins
cannot teach us anything about the oldest architecture in its own context,
although we think we see something analogous to that offered by the monu-
ments of Nineveh, which we already know somewhat better. Yet we are not
concerned at this point with putting together an overall architectural image
but rather with demonstrating the dominance of the principle of dressing
structural parts where it reveals itself in existing building fragments. For this
immediate purpose the sparse travel reports about these ruined Chaldean sites
are of great interest, even if they often leave us in doubt about the age of the
works in question and uncertain whether the works we have before us belong
to the most ancient period or to a late one in this country’s culture, perhaps
even to post-Alexandrian or Roman times.
Of the countless rubble mounds in the lower Euphrates region that have
been convincingly ascribed to the ancient Babylonian (Chaldean) period, only
a few have been studied in detail. The best known are those of Warka, only
recently visited and examined by the travelers Loftus, [John] Churchill,
[William] Boutcher, and [William] Lynch. They are about 180 English miles
south of Baghdad and some eight miles east of the Euphrates. A rectangular
site surrounded by a high earth wall about six or seven miles long forms a
single vast necropolis; out of it arise three large and many small mounds of
ruins with high broad terraces. Everywhere inside the precinct clay coffins are
piled on top of one another, often to a depth of fifteen to twenty feet. There
are also smaller mounds outside the ring wall; a large one called Nifayeh lies
on the north side of the precinct. All are covered with nitrous earth, small
shells, and potsherds and are cut with deep ravines. The canal, now dry, that
formerly supplied the city with water intersects the walled precinct. Roughly
in the middle is a conical mound of ruins, now called Bouarieh, because of the
reed mats placed horizontally between the layers of brick in five by five foot
spaces. The square construction of unfired brick is reinforced on every side by
double buttresses of fired brick.243 According to Colonel [Henry] Rawlinson,
a monogram inscription found there bears the royal name Uruk.
A second, even more significant mound of ruins rises within the same cir-
cumvallation to the left of Bouarieh. It is called Wuswas, after a Negro who
was digging for treasure some years ago and penetrated deeply into the solid
mass of fired-brick construction. He had worked his way sixteen feet in before
abandoning the enterprise. If he had gone only two feet deeper, he would have
discovered the inner chamber, but he had convinced himself that it contained
nothing but the rubble from the collapse of the brick vault that had covered it.

304
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

What is buried beneath this rubble may, however, be of great interest. The
fired-brick building is set on a platform of air-dried bricks, which itself rises
forty to fifty feet above the floor of the plain. Around it smaller mounds of
ruins and raised alignments suggest complexes of courtyards and ancillary
buildings that surrounded this main building; an encircling wall (independent
of that which encloses the whole city) encloses all of these related structures.
They are buried under deep rubble that can only have come from the main
building, which must have towered like a pyramid over the whole palace com-
plex. The facade of this main building faces southwest and is about 175 feet
long. The entrance is not located here but on the opposite, northeast side. The
walls, as mentioned, are of fired brick and vary in thickness from twelve to
twenty-two feet. The interior rooms are long and narrow (as in Nineveh, see
below) and the walls on the longer sides are always the thickest, apparently to
resist the thrust of the vaults that covered the rooms and whose rubble now
fills them completely. The rubble even covers the slopes of the terrace on
which the building stands.2!4
The southwest facade was dressed in plaster, two and one-half inches thick
at some places. This stucco coating, where it has survived, is as hard as ever —
after 2,500 years at least. Besides this, the most remarkable fact is the peculiar
architectural arrangement of this facade. The following illustration from
Loftus’s Travels and Researches in Chaldaea and Susiana shows the elevation
and horizontal section.2!5
It would appear that a memory of timber construction or log-cabin archi-
tecture is at the root of things here, something similar to those Egyptian
tomb facades from the first dynasties of the Old Kingdom. In both cases we
are certainly justified in recognizing it as a very ancient motive of decorative
architecture.
Seven half-columns or, more correctly, half-cylinders (pressed closely
together like organ pipes or posts in a log cabin) are set within a kind of
frame. Centered above this is a stepped wall niche. Next to it, to the right and
left, the walls are pierced with half-cylindrical channels, as though they were

View of an Assyrian wall

intended to accommodate something like masts. This motif is repeated seven

times on the same facade. A very skillfully executed brick base has been care-
fully faced with stucco, using a mason’s trowel and template. No trace of
color has survived, but the paint could only have been decorative as there is

305
 Semper

no free wall space for paintings. Similarly decorated walls were later discov-
ered by [Victor] Place in Khorsabad and by Loftus in Nimrud. Thus there can
be no doubt about the antiquity of this motif, which is at least contemporane-
ous with others that will be mentioned later.
No less interesting for our special purposes, and especially for the history
of style, is the peculiar way in which the (unfired) brick construction is
encrusted to give it both durability and decoration. On one of the small build-
ings enclosed within the circumvallation, Loftus found that the wails made of
air-dried bricks were encrusted with a mosaic of small fired-clay cones or pegs
set in asphalt and glazed with color at the thick visible end. The pegs, about
six inches long and three-quarters of an inch thick at front, are circular and
arranged in such a way that they make geometric patterns in bright colors;
they protect the clay brick from humidity to a depth of several inches. We will
see below that this method of encrusting clay walls also occurs in the oldest
Egyptian buildings, although not in the same primitive way as here. This
method will be shown to form a contrast in principle, as it were, with another
method of covering clay walls with a glazed crust that also occurs in Baby-
lonian and Assyrian buildings. Glazed clay wedges of this kind are often

otf, Wy
y / YY Li YYW) y
\ Mi; tie “ Yi
NOM
Anya \\\ Yj YY YYYj

Yyf Y
Ui fh MYWII
WOM

Plan and elevation of an Assyrian mosaic wall

found under the rubble of ancient Assyrian pyramids, which shows that this
dressing method was often used in an early period of the architecture peculiar
to these countries. Warka, where whole walls are still dressed in this way, is
thus not an isolated example, nor does it belong to a later period.
In a small ruin opposite that of Wuswas, Loftus discovered a low wall con-
sisting entirely of jars placed horizontally in layers with their openings facing
out, giving the wall the appearance of a honeycomb. If only we could date
these remarkable constructions precisely!
The lack of an answer to this question is felt even more keenly with the
discovery made by Loftus in another ruin within the same Warka precinct. In
an inner chamber he found a confused heap of stucco ornaments consisting of
capitals, bases, friezes, and other members, some belonging to the Ionic, some
even to the Corinthian column order, and painted with polychrome orna-
ments. They are only vaguely reminiscent of the well-known Greek forms.
Though it is, admittedly, imprecisely depicted, even the Corinthian capital,

306
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

with its corner leaves framing a half-human figure in the Babylonian style,
leaves some doubt as to the origin of these stucco decorations. It is unclear
whether they actually belong to the Seleucid period or even later, or if they
were instead of Babylonian origin. The ruins are believed to be those of a tab-
ernacle or sacellum built above a coffin that lay under the floor of this cham-
ber. Not far from the building in which these stucco remains were discovered,
tablets inscribed with cuneiform were found that bore Greek zodiacal depic-
tions and the names Antiochus and Seleucus. This suggested to the explorers
that the stucco ornaments dated from the same period. Even so, some doubt
may still be permitted, as the character of these architectural members is
simply not in keeping with the architecture of the post-Alexandrian period, to
the extent that this can be judged from the very imperfect illustrations of the
objects that have been published.
Be that as it may, I do not doubt that the technique of forming plastic
architectural objects from stucco was an ancient tradition among the Baby-
lonians as well as in India, and that this process arose from the custom of
dressing clay walls with stucco. Of no less interest are the above-mentioned
coffins in fired and green-glazed clay, which are to be found in and among the
ruins of Warka by the thousands. One whole area of the precinct is filled with
them to a depth of twenty feet. Because they were also found in quantity
above the ruins in the rubble that covers them, some have concluded, surely

Stucco ornaments from Warka

prematurely, that they all belong to a later period. Certainly the places in
which they were found had been very ancient sacred burial places; their repu-
tation lasted long past the time of their decline. Whole caravans of coffins
were regularly taken there from neighboring and distant areas, even after the
high pyramids had already collapsed—either from natural decay or owing to
the destructive zeal of those who professed a different and temporarily victo-
rious principle of civilization. This is why the same coffins are found in the
upper layers of rubble, which fill the monuments’ interiors and the surround-
ing land. Old Chaldean necropolises, probably the burial grounds of the most
ancient kings, remained sacred perhaps as late as the introduction of Islam,
which incidentally did not in any way alter the custom but simply led the
adherents to the new faith to look for new burial sites.
And so today caravans of Persian pilgrims constantly drive their innu-
merable camels through the Babylonian steppes and the desert west of the

307
 Semper

Euphrates to Mashhad Hussein and Mashhad Ali, to unload on that sacred

soil their burdens, consisting entirely of the coffins of pious Persians.
In addition to smaller objects in fired clay, metal, glass, and mother-of-
pearl, a number of statuettes and terra-cotta votive tablets with raised bas-
reliefs done in a very peculiar style were found among the tombs and rubble
of Warka. They appear to belong neither to the neo-Babylonian, nor to the
Assyrian, nor even to the Persian sculptural style, and are almost closer to the
Egyptian. It is tempting to view their inherent naive character as original, as if
it lay beyond the development of even the oldest of the styles mentioned —if
not chronologically then certainly in a cultural historical sense. Primitive
things managed to stagnate here for millennia and survive all the derivatives.?'¢
Fifteen miles east of Warka lie the Sankarah ruins. They consist of three
earth mounds: the Great Mountain, the Red Mountain (from the color of its
red bricks), and the Camel Mountain (from its resemblance to that animal).
Seen from Warka they do in fact rise up out of the mirage like mighty moun-
tains. Here too the land between the monuments is filled with coffins, which
contain many interesting antiquities. In these and other ruins in the area,
according to reports from Arabs, great treasures and the bodies of kings with
gold coronation adornments — including crown and scepter —have been found.
Loftus has examined these ruins and discovered monogrammatic runic
inscriptions as well as numerous terra-cotta tablets similar to those described
above. If only we could confidently decipher these inscriptions.
The alluvial plains, which were once the cradle of humanity but had
already succumbed to the elements by the time of Alexander, are still covered
with countless other ruined cities that have been explored to a far lesser
extent (some have not even been visited). The Macedonian hero visited the
tombs of the ancient Chaldean kings and undertook the herculean task of
reclaiming these marshy lowlands and parched highlands of civilization —an
enterprise that led to his illness and death.
The chain of these remarkable circumvallations — with their system of
terraces, palaces, and burial temples looming high above that also served as
a fortress—ran along both sides of the Euphrates as far as Babylon. There
this type of structure underwent a metamorphosis during the neo-Babylonian
Empire that Cyrus would topple, which will be discussed later. Few have been
examined but almost all served for centuries as burial sites. Adjacent to
Babylon are the ruins of El Hymer, a solid square structure. Like Birs Nimrud
it consists of a sequence of terraces one above the other, accessible by steps
and ramps, but now weathered and rounded down to a conical form. The
lowest story is built of clay; the upper ones are built in a red, incompletely
fired brick, with which the lowest terrace may also have been dressed.?!7
Clay, not chalk, was used as a binder. The lower structure seems older,
whereas the upper terraces must date from the neo-Babylonian period, as
Nebuchadrezzar’s inscriptions were stamped into the bricks.
Further south, on the east side of the Euphrates, are the great mounds of
Nippur and Zibleyeh, among many others that are unvisited and unknown.

308
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

They were investigated by Layard but only fleetingly and more with the aim of
finding treasures for the British Museum than of furthering architectural
knowledge.?!8 They lay at the edge of marshes and here too hundreds of terra-
cotta coffins were found, with the green lead glaze colored with copper oxide
that makes them so remarkable for the history of ceramics (see “Ceramics”).
Aside from these, there are other objects in this peculiar style, which I wish to
call Chaldean.?!
The ruin consists of irregular masonry masses divided into four separate
groups by streetlike furrows. A rectangular tower built of air-dried bricks
rises at the northeast corner of the ruin. Near the tower are other masonry
structures, some of air-dried brick, some of fired brick. The latter are not
square but elongated, like modern ones. Some bear as yet undeciphered Baby-
lonian inscriptions that presumably contain a royal name.
This chain of ruin mounds continues north of Babylon; most of these ruins
probably belong to the more ancient Chaldean-Babylonian cultural period.
West of Baghdad is the curious Aqar Quf, a colossal, now formless mass of clay
bricks with straw mats set between them, still in good condition. The straw
served not only to strengthen the wall but also to hold the chalk mortar to
the outside walls, a practice that is still commonly used in China. The top of
the terrace building is over 150 feet high despite its decay. Parts of the build-
ing, probably more recent ones, were dressed with fired brick, now reduced to
rubble lying around at the foot of the mound. Inscriptions are here still wholly
absent, as with the bricks of Chaldea itself on the lower Euphrates (for the
processes used for encrusting the walls with fired bricks, see pp. 321 ff.).
Another of the most ancient monuments of Mesopotamia is Qal’at ash-
Sherqat, the most extensive of all the mounds of ruins in that country. It is
partly natural but extended with brick terraces from the south to the north. It
has an ashlar substructure, of which one section has survived with its battle-
ment crown. The bricks bear Babylonian inscriptions with the monograms of
ancient Chaldean kings.?2°
The ashlar substructure was an innovation that the Chaldean style adopted
in the rocky area of the northern Tigris.
This gigantic fortress may have been the last outpost of Chaldean civiliza-
tion before Nineveh. There, as a result of both political circumstances and local
conditions —especially the proximity to limestone and alabaster quarries —it
matured into a wonderful metamorphosis on the banks of the Tigris and the
upper Zab, at the foot of the mountains of Kurdistan.
The chain of ancient Chaldean monuments also extends to the north and
west of Nineveh —evidence of the course taken by a civilizing principle that
emanated from Chaldea and the limits of its influence. The monuments are
scattered over the broad plains and only a few, at the foot of the Sinjar
Mountains and along the banks of the Khabar, have been explored —or
rather, ransacked — by Layard.
Here, on the bank of the Khabir, rises the artificial hill of Arban with its
remarkable sculptures that neither reflect the Assyrian style nor show much

309
 Semper

likeness to what we know from older Babylonian sites. “The outline and
treatment was bold and angular, with an archaic feeling conveying the impres-
sion of great antiquity. They bore the same relation to the more delicately fin-
ished and highly ornamented sculptures of Nimrud, as the earliest remains of
Greek art do to the exquisite monuments of Phidias and Praxiteles.” Such is
Layard’s judgment, though I would not always swear by it in matters of art.
Nevertheless these sculptures are of great interest because of their undoubt-
edly archaic type, and especially because of features that are related to what a
European interpretation made out of Asiatic artistic traditions in its earliest
attempts. Even though they are more exaggerated and rawer in certain details
(for example, the sinews and muscles of the body look as though they have
been applied like a rope), they in no way relate to the sculptures of Nimrud
and Kuyunjik in the manner described by Layard. To all appearances they are
older than the style we wish to call Assyrian; in other words, they antedate the
time at which the old Chaldean-Babylonian civilizing principle changed into
the Assyrian—even though a system of dressing clay and brick walls with
stone tablets, not found in ancient Babylonian masonry, does appear here for
the first time. Its use, however, was still limited to dressing doorways with this
durable local material.
The same traces of ancient Asiatic culture and art, which probably extend
back historically far beyond the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, are found
spread all over Asia Minor, Syria, and Phoenicia, down to the Mediterranean,
and over into Egypt. They take the form of moundlike brick terraces with
traces of an earlier dressing of the building masses by incrustation of the most
varied kinds. They are like artificially raised and extended natural mounds.
Fortified slopes to render them inaccessible and secure have survived in good
condition here and there. For example, at Bir on the Upper Euphrates a
fortress stands on an artificially raised natural rock. The interior contains
vaulted passages (syringes); the exterior consists of inclined walls built with
colossal stones. At the time of [Richard] Pococke’s journey this fortress still
had a Roman defensive system with ancient artillery, catapults, slings, and so
on. Similarly, the castle of Aleppo is an artificial cone with an oval ground
plan, but it may originally have been a stepped pyramid in the Babylonian
style. Yet the ashlar blocks on the inclined walls date from the time of the
Crusades. Incidentally, the Aleppo plain is strewn with such Babylonian pyra-
mids: some are almost two hundred feet high and still have traces of temples
at their peaks.22! These indestructible boundary posts of human memory
extend to the sandy Arabian deserts—to Hama and Edessa—where an oval
citadel with recognizable terraces of stone-paneled clay brickwork once bore
the notorious sun temple of Heliogabalus. At Damascus there is still a suburb
built on the terraces of a Babylonian castle. But we will leave the ruins of this
most ancient civilization for now, though they could be pursued still further.
Let us return to the place from which it all started —the alluvial valley of the
lower Euphrates.2?2
Our ideas about the nature of this lost architecture are naturally almost as

310
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

formless as those brick hills themselves, worn down by the millennia that
have passed over them. We are least informed about the architectural orders
that must once have enlivened and adorned them, and we can speculate only
by analogies with later works in the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian styles.
For what has been found (for example, the cylinder decorations on wall niches
and recesses) cannot be integrated into a whole that would obtain form. We
cannot even demonstrate that it originated in the ancient Babylonian period,
just as we could not for those remarkable stucco fragments of a Corinthian
order found inside the tomb chamber at Warka. All we can do therefore is
establish the principle of the incrustation of wall masses constructed out of
raw or fired brick, in an extension of the principle that permits no exceptions.
In doing so, it would be good to start by showing which of the various incrus-
tation methods was the earliest (besides the primeval tapestry, whose priority
I am permitted to assume, given our remarks above) and thus which one
determined the style of those that followed.
We know from biblical and secular writings that the Babylonians used
bitumen as a binder and as a dressing medium for their walls and even for
their timber constructions. But we also read of contemporaneous or even ear-
lier works that were built and dressed with gypsum and lime. This material
was used in building the Tower of Babel. The fingers of God wrote the damna-
tion on the gypsum of the wall of the king’s palace. Asphalt was not actually
indigenous to Chaldea, the motherland of this custom. This material was
adopted later, when civilization had already moved upstream. The reed mats
with braids that protruded between the courses of brick (we know this prac-
tice from China) served primarily to permit a stucco coating on the clay that
would be durable and remain firmly attached. In short, the first architectural
coating in this country, as in China, was probably plaster. It was on such sur-
faces that wall painting and sculpture developed — although it is still debated
whether the latter evolved later, simultaneously, or even earlier than the for-
mer. The two could be said to be simultaneous in the sense that smooth walls
were decorated with painted reliefs, a process I believe to be older than
abstract painting. Next we encounter incrustation by means of glazed bricks,
executed like a mosaic. This remarkable appearance of mosaics and glass
painting on the horizon of architecture will concern us later. It is no less inter-
esting than those glazed coffins whose ornamentation distinctly resembles a
wrapped corpse as executed in clay. For this one does not necessarily have to
think of Egyptian influence. These coffins do not imitate mummies but simply

" Assyrian coffin

Sie
 Semper

wrapped corpses. The transition from a burial shroud to a clay covering for
the body is no more abrupt than the transition from a tapestry wall to a wall
encrusted with gypsum and clay. Each phenomenon helps to explain the other,
and the former amply confirms my view of tapestry as the basic motive of all
decorative wall dressings. The transition to fired clay, a more solid material, is
very direct. If there had in fact been Egyptian influence, it would have medi-
ated this transition very differentl y means of the wood and stone style.
—by
The incrustation of walls with stone is not yet customary at this point, but
its beginnings can be seen as soon as Chaldean culture extends to the more
northerly region, rich in stone. Of course, this is a tertiary, or even a more dis-
tantly derived stylistic metamorphosis.
As far as I am aware, no traces have survived of wood and metal incrusta-
tions, with the exception of some small gold plates that could hardly have had
any other purpose than to dress some other material, probably wood. But we
do know that these plates were used at a very early stage and can assume that
this was also the case here.
Of the tectonic elements of the ancient Chaldean style, by which I mean
columns and the roof that they supported, we have no direct evidence. There-
fore we must base all our assumptions on later, and also very uncertain, data
offered by the Assyrian, neo-Babylonian, and Persian styles. Still, the discov-
ery in the midst of an ancient Chaldean ruin of a Corinthian entablature with
corresponding stucco columns is a striking one.

§ 70 Assyria
The Chaldean cultural idea was reformed and acquired a new power center
on the banks of the upper Tigris at its confluence with the upper Zab, which
flows down from the Arrapachitis Mountains, the range that divides Media
from Assyria. The foundation of the new empire is linked with the mythical
names Ashur and Ninus. According to a report or legend that comes down to
us from Diodorus, Ninus, probably a vassal of the ancient Chaldean empire, is
said to have formed an alliance with nomadic Semitic tribes and, with the
help of these warlike Arabs, subjugated the southern cities and the whole of
western Asia, apart from India and Bactria. After securing his dominion he
founded the city of Nineveh and divided the surrounding territories among
the city’s new inhabitants. After his death a tomb of enormous size was built.
According to Ctesias it was nine stadia tall and ten stadia in its lower diameter.
The ruins of the works established by the city’s founder and his successors,
only recently brought to light, provide us with detailed information about the
form of society and the state of the fine arts, which, with only minor changes,
remained the same for millennia in this cradle of human culture (according to
Rawlinson the empire lasted from the thirteenth to the seventh century B.C.).
Although they are relatively recent by comparison to the rubble mounds in the
southern regions of the Euphrates Plain, they might have remained silent for
us: even less of their original form had survived than in the case of the
Euphrates mounds, because fired bricks were used less in their execution than

312
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

in the building of those most ancient works. As it happened, however, a new

principle of wall dressing developed simultaneously with the appearance of
the new empire. This involved the use of a new material that resisted weather-
ing within the damp mounds and the masses of air-dried brick walls, which
have decayed into soil again. Without this principle —the flat stone slabs with
which the lower parts of rooms in Assyrian palaces were dressed and which
would have survived unscathed on site, if they had not been destroyed by fire
or pillaged by human hands—excavations would have yielded at best a few
clay vessels, bronze objects, stone cylinders, and so on. Diggings would soon
have been abandoned, and they would not have provided us with any infor-
mation about Assyrian-Chaldean architecture. Wherever this stone paneling
on the walls of air-dried brick was lacking (and only a small fraction of the
walls were dressed in this way), we lose the thread of Ariadne that leads us
through the labyrinth of passages that are for us such a new and characteristic
element of the architectural arrangement of the floor plan of an Assyrian
palace.
These stone panels, mainly of alabaster, preserve the spatial idea that
found its expression in architecture. In this sense they are the most important
finds—both from an architectural perspective and more generally — uncov-
ered by the excavations of Botta, Layard, Loftus, Rassam, and others. Through
the content and treatment of what is presented on them as well as through the
inscriptions they contain, they provide invaluable insights for cultural history
in general but especially for the history of those long-fallen Asian empires. We
do not wish to anticipate what is to come and will therefore consider the lay-
out of these palaces and their representations and inscriptions only to the
extent that is absolutely necessary in the present context. For further analysis,
see the chapter on Nineveh in part 2 of this book, as well as the well-known
works on this subject.
As I observed above, excavations have revealed only the lower sections of
a very extensive and complicated terraced building. They merely form cellar
rooms, so to speak, and their main purpose was simply to support the build-
ing proper above ground, which no longer exists. Unfortunately the tectonic
element of the construction, the column with its accompanying entablature
and roof, has also disappeared, almost without a trace.
As is well known, the most important discoveries about Assyrian architec-
ture were made at three isolated mounds of ruins: Khorsabad, Nimrud, and
Kuyunjik. All three lie to the east of the Tigris, not far from Mosul. The first is
a few miles north of this town; the second, which includes the oldest monu-
ments, is near the bank of the river; the third, on the bank opposite Mosul, is
a day’s journey to the south.
Within the broad limits of the city of Nineveh there were isolated fortified
castles, dynastic houses, and many other works that are scattered about in the
vicinity.
They all share a similar layout and resemble the noted Chaldean rubble
mounds south of Baghdad: more or less regular, approximately rectangular,

Sis
 Semper

circumvallations several miles wide enclosing a space irregularly strewn with

scarcely recognizable traces of ancillary structures. Yet the most significant
feature of the complex, the core and focal point of all its parts, is a raised plat-
form that, much like a bastion, is not surrounded and protected by the encir-
cling wall but rather intersects and flanks the wall to give it protection.
The level part of the platform is a small-scale version of the whole space
enclosed by ramparts. It in turn is dotted with isolated buildings, the most
important of which again rise terracelike from the edge of the ring wall and
form self-contained masses. They also have (on a smaller scale, which expresses
the architectural idea all the more powerfully) the same system of enclosure,
dependence, and culmination but in a tangential rather than concentric order.
The dominant mass rises from one of the side walls like a fortress tower, and
the center of gravity of the entire structure is not at the center.
These terrace systems are grouped irregularly rather than symmetrically.
One of them in turn forms the base for all the others, dominates them, and
links them to provide a magnificent overall effect. The organizing principle is
not symmetry, which even in its details was perhaps deliberately violated, but
the subordination and proportioning of masses (see “Assyria” in volume 2).223
Only a few of the lowest elements of this rich and elaborate hierarchy have
survived. They are wall masses built of air-dried bricks, which merely provided
a material core for an outer dressing that resisted weather, provided strength
against external forces, and was decoratively treated. The latter emerges as the
true representative of the spatial idea, whereas the wall mass concealed behind
it functioned materially and had nothing to do with the spatial idea.
Dressing materials were chosen according to prevailing circumstances.
Naturally the most durable and strongest ones were chosen for those parts of
the building most exposed to humidity, subaerial agents, fire, and especially
to violent destruction during sieges.
Let us look first at the lowest and outermost walls. These include the sub-
structures of magnificent bulwarks, on whose raised platform arose those
royal palaces decorated with gold and ivory, and the towering tomb temples
with their colorful shimmering merlons.

From the blasts of the south wind the citadel

of Babylon rides high into the clouds.
Long ago Semiramis girt the city with walls
which neither flames can consume nor a
battering ram penetrate; the palace of Belus stands massive,
gleaming in ivory and silver; gold covers the roofs,
the floors everywhere are gold.
— Rufus Festus Avienus, Mundi descriptio ll. 1196-1201224

Both at Nimrud and Khorsabad the rampart walls have in places been exca-
vated to the point where they meet the natural floor. They were dressed with
stone masonry to a varying height. In the oldest monuments of Nineveh this

314
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

consists of a regular limestone ashlar, whereas Botta found on the outer ram-
parts of the later examples a kind of cyclopean wall structure in addition to
regular ashlar. In its solidity and execution, however, it was significantly infe-
rior to Hellenic and Italic construction of this kind, more like a kind of
undressed stone masonry. Yet this opus incertum was found only at the base
of the outer walls surrounding the larger enclosed precinct. The walls lining
the artificial plateau were more carefully built. Their outer dressing consisted
of hewn ashlar, bound to the air-dried brick masonry of the core by deeply
penetrating ties. The most important investigation of them was carried out by
Layard at the foot of the square stepped pyramid that protrudes like a bastion
at the northwest corner of the Nimrud platform. The pyramid’s base is made
up of massive limestone blocks that, at least on the sides unprotected by other
masonry, are as tall as twenty feet in ten layers, each two feet high. Above this
ashlar masonry rises a large-scale dressing carefully executed in large-scale
fired brick. Like the ashlar construction, this may also have been plastered
with stucco or, more probably, bitumen.225 This discovery confirms
Xenophon’s report, in which he gives the ramparts of the city of Larissa
(Nimrud) a base twenty feet high of plastered shelly stone.26
A piece of wall, similar to the base of the terrace at Nimrud, is still to be
found on one side of the great mound of Qal’at ash-Shergat. “It consists of
well-hewn stone or slabs, carefully fitted together, and beveled at the edges.
The battlements still existing on the top of this wall, are cut into gradines,
resembling in this respect the battlements of castles and towers, as frequently
represented in the Nimrud sculptures.”227
I will return later to these Assyrian foundations encrusted with stone. Here
I merely wish to note that they were not set in lime mortar but were tied with
iron anchors, and that it appears the joints and gaps were filled with clay.
The great terraces that formed the principal mass of these artificial
mounds were thought by Layard and Botta to be massive embankments, in
which only the outer dressing was constructed of masonry. Later investiga-
tions have revealed, however, that they too consist of a cellular system of par-
allel walls intersecting one another at right angles.228 The intervening spaces
formed long passages, some of which were filled in while others were used as
living spaces, corridors, storerooms, prisons, or for other purposes. They were
therefore dressed internally with stucco or in some other way. Likewise, the
terrace upon which tall Persepolis stands is hollow and is pierced with long
passages. Hephaestion’s funeral pyre, as we saw, had a similarly constructed
base. These are what the Romans called favissae, which existed underneath
the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter even in the pre-Roman period. The Greeks
called them syringes (pipes), and we could point to similar ones in their cyclo-
pean works in Tiryns and Nauplia. From them the fable-making Epigoni cre-
ated the infamous labyrinths, which are mentioned in the myths of all the
Mediterranean lands and provide one more piece of evidence of the univer-
sal dominance of a homogeneous principle of civilization and architecture
that was disseminated throughout the Mediterranean region in prehistoric

St5
 Semper

times. One of the most remarkable prehistoric complexes of this kind, built
of colossal ashlar and skillfully vaulted, is the terrace of the temple at Baalbek.
An artificially created mountain of this kind dominated the plain. At the
top it leveled off in a plateau crowned with battlements, upon which the mag-
nificent royal palaces, temples, and tomb pyramids towered up in irregular
groups, arranged according to principles no longer easy for us to identify, per-
haps even in an arbitrary manner, according to the whims of the successive
generations who were active in its construction over a period of centuries.
Let us dwell first on the floor paneling of these artificial platforms, for it is
not without interest to our theme. Inside rooms and in places that presumably
remained uncovered it was as a rule executed in fired tiles of various degrees of
hardness and color.229 The individual tiles were perfectly square, measuring (in
Khorsabad) forty centimeters long by ten centimeters thick. The paving con-
sisted of a base of unfired clay brick, then a layer of fired tile laid in bitumen.
Small recesses concealed by slabs and containing clay images of idols have
often been found under the floor near the entrances.
Large limestone slabs set into the floors of interior rooms may mark the
places where thrones, statues, or other room furnishings were placed.
Other rooms were completely floored with alabaster slabs, each of which
bore an inscription in which the titles, genealogy, and deeds of the king were
recorded. The same inscriptions can be found on the backs of the same slabs
and on the backs of fired tiles, so their presence by no means proves they
formed the final decoration and visible surface of the floor. In fact, this would
not have corresponded with the other splendors we still find in those rooms,
or with reports from ancient authors, who never miss an opportunity to stress
the exceptional luxury practiced by Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians in
their carpets and gold-inlaid floors (in contrast to the composition floors of
the Greeks). Either the chambers covered with slabs were only minor rooms
of lower rank, or their floors must formerly have been dressed with carpets,
perhaps even with gilded metal plates, with encrusted cedar panels, or in
some other way. It was only at the threshold that this kind of thing could not
be done, and for this reason it is precisely here that we find stone panels mod-
eled on lavish carpets, decorated with engraved patterns (probably in niello)
and inscriptions (see Layard, 2d ser., pl. 56, and the woodcut above on
p. 139, § 16).230
A complete system of water pipes and drains continued under the floor
panels and was connected with sinks placed in the corners of the rooms.
This raised platform, with its tile facings and battlements that were more
ornamental than protective, had magnificent open staircases and ramps lead-
ing up to its palaces and temples. All that has survived of the latter are the
lower parts of the walls buried under mountains of rubble and earth. That
alone proves that a major multistory building must have arisen above them,
as also follows from the enormously thick walls and the narrow spaces
between them. These passages can be seen quite clearly; they are thirty to
forty meters long but sometimes only six to seven meters wide. They are not

316
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

dictated by the need to divide the space; like the favissae in the substructure
on which they stand, they developed from a structural idea —namely, that of
supporting a multistructured terrace that surrounded a very spacious court-
yard, nearly square in shape. Everywhere this courtyard is at the center of a
multiple belt of encircling walls up to five meters or more in thickness. Oppo-
site this courtyard the greatest splendors of the surviving architectural out-
fittings unfold. All walls are now encrusted inside and out, and the most
significant such ruins reveal the more composite application of the principle
of wall dressing that I described above—in my excursus on the ancient art of
drapery —as a rampant proliferation of such a principle. Following ancient
Chaldean fashion and tradition, one has to think of these spaces as having
been originally dressed with stucco, glazed brick, wood paneling, or in some
other way. Typically this dressing corresponded to the figures and color deco-
ration borrowed from weaving and tapestry embroidery. In ceremonial pro-
cessions, that is, on the occasion of the victorious return of the monarch after
a war of conquest, the paternal halls through which the procession led were
transformed according to a very ancient fashion, though one that is still prac-
ticed (see § 68 above), with tapestries and sometimes with paintings (surro-
gate tapestries) recalling the hero’s most recent deeds. The holy dromos of the
procession was defined by these boundaries. Religious themes were depicted
as well: the devotion of the victor, human sacrifice, and the torture of the
weak and defeated always so pleasing to the gods.
To immortalize this memorable victory celebration, the provisional deco-
rations were imitated in stone—or rather, refashioned in the stone style—a
custom that persisted in imperial Rome. Thus arose the style of Assyrian
stone dressing that became typical for new buildings. Other factors involved
in the manifold development of this style were of a structural—or rather, pro-
tective —kind and favored by the locally available stone. Probably the ancient
Chaldean kings already had a less durable substitute in their empires so lack-
ing in cut stone.?3!
From this it follows—and the point is incidentally confirmed by the quite
analogous position that stone holds relative to other materials in the stylistic
history of sculpture—that, architecturally speaking, these Assyrian alabaster
panels had a late stylistic birth. Order therefore requires that we consider
what existed before those stone wall panels, what they conceal, as it were, in
the lower parts of the walls. We must indeed think of all these rich dressings
on the lower part of Assyrian walls —including those wonderful bucentaurs,
sphinxes, griffins, lions, and the colossal custodians at the entrance to the
royal castle—as structurally speaking completely unrelated to the work. In
fact, even the spatial concept is not first expressed by them; rather, it was
already expressed by the dressing proper of the walls, which were transformed
and adorned at the socles.
Definite traces of this dressing proper have survived in Assyrian ruins, and
much that can no longer be demonstrated has been clearly reported or can be
reconstructed by analogy with other related works. Many rooms— indeed,

Sy
 Semper

most of them—had no stone dressing at all, and because they provided no

booty for antiquarian treasure hunters and museum agents, they were scarcely
investigated. In the venerable primeval text of architectural history, a text we
were so happy to rediscover, this leaves a hiatus that can, regrettably, no
longer be easily bridged.
Perhaps very old stucco work would have been discovered, that is, stucco
reliefs and stucco ornaments or clay reliefs covered with painted chalk. That
would not have surprised me in the least but would have corresponded to my
ideas about the stylistic history of painting and sculpture and also to related
phenomena in India, China, and elsewhere.
We also have but very sketchy information about those most interesting
wall paintings on a stucco ground —for example, about the nature of the
ground and the kind of painting employed—even though walls thus deco-
rated were found in significant numbers. Two plates in the first series of
Layard’s Monuments of Nineveh (pls. 86, 87) provide only a feeble idea of the
elegance and harmonious polychromy that enlivened the veneered walls of
those royal Assyrian castles. They come in part from the oldest, northwest
palace, founded in the late twelfth century and said to have been completed
by another king in the tenth century, and in part from a raised pavilion to the
south of this palace.
These two examples reveal a marked difference in style between their
respective periods of Assyrian wall decoration. If it is permissible to venture
some sort of view on such isolated fragments stripped of their context, then I
would say a dark ground (namely, blue) predominated in the older style,
whereas later a light ground (white and yellow) was preferred.*32 Perhaps this
later taste came from Egypt, whose influence on the situation in Assyria at the
time is also apparent in other ways, where bright polychromy has always been
traditional. The style of drawing and the ornamental motifs also differ. In
both one recognizes the strong influence of textiles: it is embroidered orna-
mentation that we see painted here. The older style was dominated by the
guilloche —that symbolic plaiting —and the anthemion band, specifically, the
original Assyrian version of the latter, a vegetal ornament that has remained
traditional throughout the centuries. Its pinecones, tulips, and other motifs
developed from the sacred tree. With the Assyrians these still had a mystical-
tendentious meaning that was lost to the Greeks, who perfected them instead
as beautiful forms.
The later style, to be sure, resembles the older stitchwork style, but its con-
ception is more straightforward. One sees rosettes, tassels, seams, straps,
trimmings, and so on.
In addition we already find constructional or architectural details— battle-
ments, for example —used as ornamental and decorative motifs.
Although the light-ground wall painting of which we just spoke is decid-
edly more recent than those plaited and tendril whorls on the walls of the old-
est building, it nevertheless dates from the earlier dynasties of the Assyrian
monarchy. This is clear from its imitation of a kind of clothing embroidery

318
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

that was no longer practiced in the Khorsabad and Kuyunjik dynasties. By

that time the loom was already producing regular patterns, which would later
almost completely replace hand embroidery.233
If fragments of the oldest paintings show no traces of animal friezes (evi-
dent imitations of the embroidered garniture of clothing), this is probably
only coincidental, and that should not lead us to conclude that that older wall
decoration was unfamiliar with this motif.
In both styles the forms are highlighted with black lines, as if with threads,
and their surfaces are uniformly colored with simple tones. There is no sug-
gestion of any shadow. The drawings of animals are more accurate than those
on bas-reliefs of the same period, whose polychromy, incidentally, can be
restored with greater certainty based on these wall paintings.
I do not know whether they were executed a tempera or a fresco, or ina
saponaceous medium (wax, water glass, or the like), or even in oil—although
I presume the first process. To my knowledge no one has yet explored this
type of Assyrian painting on these matters. At a certain point colors with a
vegetable base seem to have been used more frequently, which is why on most
limewash or stucco walls the paintings are so faded that only faint traces of
black contours here and there testify to their earlier existence.234
In some places the stucco is applied very thinly, in others very thickly, and in
various places there are several superimposed layers, each with its own paint,
from which it follows that the wall decorations in these places were renovated
at various times. One can see from this how difficult it is to determine the age
of buildings from inscriptions and depictions on walls. In the building south of
the great northwest palace at Nimrud, the decorated stucco wall can be traced
fourteen feet above the slabs of the lower dressing, which is only two feet high
here and is made of unsculpted limestone. The wall probably far exceeded this
height, even though the room was only fourteen feet wide. The whole mound
of Nimrud is, so to speak, covered with traces of such stucco wall dressings. As
noted, only those sections adjacent to the large central halls— which form the
smallest part of the layout —were dressed with stone panels.
We come now to another kind of wall dressing that raises important sty-
listic and historical questions whose solution presents more than one diffi-
culty. I mean the incrustation of clay walls with fired and painted—or rather,
glazed —tiles.
We have already discussed the remarkable tile dressings that Loftus and his
companions discovered in the ruins of the old Chaldean city of Warka. In form
they were a proper mosaic, assembled from pegs or cones of fired clay and cov-
ered at the thick (visible) end with a colored glaze. Each cone had a specific
color, and by lining them up and fitting them together regular geometric pat-
terns such as squares, imbrications, networks, and so on were formed. Traces
of similar mosaic wall dressings were found below the Assyrian mounds of
ruins. Remnants of a very different technique that is the exact opposite of this
one, even though it uses the same material, make it impossible to decide
whether an older tradition was replaced by a new discovery or whether the

Se)
 Semper

reverse was the case and the later invention did not have sufficient time to
forge a path for itself alongside the earlier one.
In rooms trimmed with stone panels, and especially between the entrance
gates, a number of fired bricks were found with paintings that differ much
from those noted stucco wall dressings — both in terms of the themes depicted
and still more in terms of the technique of execution.
To my knowledge none of these decorated walls has ever been found
upright but only in scattered debris, completely stripped of context, amid the
rubble that filled the rooms and sloped down over the terrace walls.735 Yet
this view seems to be confirmed, and it corresponds to ancient reports on the
polychrome tile decorations of similar Babylonian fortresses and palaces—
that a part of the interior and probably all of the exterior walls of Nineveh in
their upper parts were protected and at the same time decorated with this
more solid incrustation.
Diodorus has preserved a report, probably by Ctesias:

The inner circular wall of the royal palace at Babylon (on the west bank of the
Euphrates) was decorated with reliefs of different animals formed and fired in the
soft clay of the tile; they approach nature in their color and skillful design. Within
this second enclosing wall a third peribolos surrounds the actual acropolis; on its
doors and walls several animals are very skillfully imitated in color and form. The
whole, most of which still survives, represents a hunt of several animals. The figures
are more than four ells tall. Semiramis is depicted shooting a panther from a horse.
Next to her is her husband, Ninus, who is stabbing a lion with a lance.

The Greek mistook for Semiramis the beardless eunuch who accompanied
the king on his hunts and military expeditions and from that built his hypoth-
esis that the citadel was founded by this mythical princess. In fact, he saw
nothing other than what we can still see today on the Assyrian alabaster
reliefs as well as what must have been presented on those Assyrian terra-cotta
walls (apart from scenes of the public and private life of kings), which can be
surmised clearly enough from the broken pieces found.
Thus we have a principle of decoration that already goes beyond the orna-
mentation and imitation of textile models and strives to present and describe
events and localities. Still, it has not completely freed itself from ornament
and embroidered pattern; it represents a transition similar to that made by the
historicized gowns of the Middle Ages, between the earlier broché fabrics to
the later, perfectly developed arazzi fabrics. The framing and separating orna-
ment runs through the scene and bands of cuneiform writing are more decora-
tive than explanatory of the simple intention. In the alabaster reliefs these
bands are applied without any regard for symmetry and beauty, and in most
cases the forms and lines crisscross mercilessly.
So much for the representational content and arrangement of these terra-
cotta images as far as I am able to judge them from the isolated and very muti-
lated pieces that I examined in the Louvre and the British Museum.236

320
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

With regard to the artistic treatment of the images depicted, there is a

marked difference between the style of clay painting and that of stone sculp-
ture. The former even deviates significantly from that of images painted on
stucco. The contours of the figures and ornaments are not black or red, as in
stucco painting, but white on an apple green ground, which may have faded.
Yet as it stands in perfect harmony with the other tones, it now seems that all
the tones were kept extremely light and subdued. The forms within the white
contours are filled out with flat tones: Naples yellow, a soft and airy blue,
brown, and white. The green of the ground is characteristic of Assyrian paint-
ing; it is probably the prasinus [leek green] of antiquity, which, as the opposite
of caeruleus [sky or sea blue], had a symbolic meaning and stood out among
the colors of the circus. The draftsmanship of this glazing is an improvement
upon that we observed on the sculptures found in the same place. A certain
slenderness and conventional elegance recall Egyptian works. They lack the
exaggerated indications of muscles and rounded forms so characteristic of
Assyrian sculpture.
These distinctions, while difficult to explain on purely technical grounds,
are nevertheless of sufficient interest to deserve our attention.
The technical treatment of these wall paintings is in the end perhaps the
most remarkable for a general history of style.
The following features are found in the enameled tiles from Khorsabad
and Babylon in the Louvre, which I was able to examine rather closely:
First, they are formed of fairly impure clay and fired only superficially at
very low heat. Thus the heat penetrated at most only half an inch beneath the
glazed or painted surface. The back side of the tile was left raw and untouched
by fire.
Second, with the exception of a few friezelike inscriptions and band deco-
rations, none of the paintings covering the surface relates in any way to the
tile joints. In fact, the subjects were painted on the wall after it had been set
up, quite freely, without considering coursing. The borders of some friezes
and band decorations, but by no means all, meet the joints at the top and bot-
tom but no attention was paid to the vertical joints. Thus rosettes, palmettes,
and similar motifs were sometimes placed in the middle, sometimes in the tile
joints, or wherever else chance decreed.
Third, a peculiarity that must be stressed is that only the side of the tile
that forms part of the wall surface carries any traces of color, with the excep-
tion of some places where the paint ran over the edge and down the sides of
the tile while it was being painted.
These tile dressings could not, therefore, have been mosaic work, like
those found at Warka. Here the tiles were painted when they were already on
the wall, or at least after they had been assembled into a plane. At the same
time, because paint ran down the sides of the tiles perpendicular to the visible
face, it is clear that the assembled plane lay horizontal as it was being painted
and that the joints were not bound with any kind of cement during painting.
The most puzzling thing now is determining the kind of firing employed. I

Sail
 Semper

am convinced that the unfired bricks must first have been laid out and num-
bered on a flat piece of ground and then painted as a single surface.?3” They
were then taken apart and assembled in the same order vertically, as a dress-
ing for the clay walls. When this wall (that is, the entire inner or outer dress-
ing of a spatial enclosure) was complete, it must have been heated sufficiently
to transform the highly fusible paint into a glaze, and at the same time to pro-
vide the clay tile with a thin terra-cotta crust. This was encaustics in the most
genuine and perhaps oldest technical sense of this word, and the highly fusible
siliceous compound with which they painted, similar to water glass, was in
fact closely related in its chemical properties to the wax used for later encaus-
tics.238 Wax enamel was probably first discovered and used for materials that
could not take high levels of heat, such as ivory or marble. For highly com-
bustible wood the wax was first melted, or even dissolved in volatile oils, then
applied with a brush as a coating and binding agent for the colors. Perhaps
the most ancient encaustics used bitumen, and the enameling on tile was later
derived from this.
Already several years ago—in my small book Die vier Elemente der Bau-
kunst, as well as in various essays published in English—I first proposed my
hypothesis about glazing entire air-dried tile walls that had already been
painted and the shallow hardening of the clay mass that resulted from the
firing. Later I was not surprised to find it confirmed by Babylonian docu-
ments discovered and publicized by Colonel Rawlinson, that most esteemed
scholar of Oriental antiquities and decipherer of cuneiform script. In a lecture
given in Bombay for the Asiatic Society, that distinguished scientist reported
on the content of cuneiform inscriptions on clay cylinders that he had found
immured at a carefully chosen site in the ruins of Birs Nimrud, near Babylon.
According to these inscriptions, Marduk-nadin-ahhe, the conqueror of Tiglath-
pileser I, built a temple of the seven spheres there in 1120 B.C., which was ren-
ovated by Nebuchadrezzar in 580. The temple had seven stories, each with a
planetary color: black, orange, red, gold, white, blue, and greenish silver, cor-
responding to the heavenly bodies of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus,
Mercury, and the Moon. “The color was fired into each individual tile, but
the floor of Mercury, through an intense and sustained firing, had preserved
the slag blue emblematic of this planet.”23°
The sides of the fired tile cones that remain in place on this most ancient
monument (which Nebuchadrezzar merely restored) are still covered with
remnants of this remarkable glass incrustation, confirming the accuracy of
Rawlinson’s interpretation of the cuneiform inscriptions. Some have fanta-
sized that the tiles were glazed later by a great fire set by poor inhabitants of
the area who wanted to burst open the tiled masses with heat to make it easier
to carry them away —as if Birs Nimrud were in the middle of a jungle and the
poor brick-grubbing inhabitants of Hillah could have easily collected wood
in the quantities necessary to achieve this end. Equally inadmissible is the
hypothesis that a fire from heaven or a lightning bolt might have vitrified or
split open the whole mound.

322
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

According to Herodotus, the walls of Ecbatana were encrusted with

encaustic in a similar way, in seven gradations corresponding to the seven
planetary colors. With slight deviations, these are the same as those given in
Rawlinson’s inscriptions.
The investigations of the enamels thus far undertaken give the chemical
composition of the paints, but the interesting questions of the technical
processes used have not been considered. I believe there have still been no
investigations of the glazed colors used at Nineveh. By contrast, Dr. [John]
Percy and Sir Henry [Thomas] De la Beche, director of the Museum of Prac-
tical Geology in London, have carefully analyzed the Babylonian tile glazes.
The yellow is an antimoniate of lead and contains tin; this mixture, called
Naples yellow (believed to be a modern invention), was also known to the
Egyptians. The white is a tin-oxide enamel. Thus they knew how to use tin
oxide to produce opaque enamels, an invention that was credited to the Arabs
of the eight or ninth century, and to Luca Della Robbia in the fifteenth cen-
tury — who was perhaps unaware of what was known so long before his time
and used with such technical and artistic genius. The blue,?4° and probably
also the green so dominant in Nineveh enamels, is pure copper oxide, com-
bined with lead. The latter was added not for color but for ease of flow, an
innovation that in the history of pottery is usually credited to the twelfth or
thirteenth century after Christ. The red is a copper suboxide. The report con-
tains no information on the brown, which may not occur on Babylonian tiles.
On inspecting the Khorsabad tiles in the Louvre, I found two kinds of
glaze: one glassier and shinier, the other chalky and matte; both were fully
opaque. Perhaps the differences can be explained simply by the fact that
glazes did not weather at the same rate for all colors; some did so earlier than
others. All appeared to me to be extraordinarily fusible, thanks to the shal-
lowness of the red-fired crust of the tile, which is otherwise raw.
Seeing this half-fired, half-raw red tile and recognizing in it the purpose of
the firing — which was none other than to fix the glaze color—led me to my
own supposition about the firing and construction of the tile. I pass it on sim-
ply as such, that is, as a hypothesis needing further proof.
Is it not possible that painting unfired earthenware vessels, thus making
them largely impermeable to liquids, is a more ancient invention than firing
earthenware? Is it not possible that this firing was originally intended simply
to fix the more primitive color incrustation better and more durably than was
otherwise possible? In short, could not the painting of clay surfaces and their
encaustics have been the actual starting point for the art of using fire to
transform clay into stone and then, after this metamorphosis, to use it for
construction? If so, the encaustically painted and very superficially fired
incrustations of the walls of Nineveh and Babylon are precursors in the his-
tory of style to solid constructions of fired brick. This would place them in the
same lineage with the stone panels that dressed the lower parts and terraces of
ancient Asian works, which likewise prepared the way for massive ashlar
works, which evolved only gradually. The evolutionary history of this later

323
 Semper

construction method belongs in the chapter “Stereotomy,” where further

material on this subject will be found.24! But the above-mentioned stone pan-
eling, which, as we know, covered the lowest parts of the outer and inner wall
surfaces in places, should be considered in further detail here. As has already
been observed, this paneling was customary only in Nineveh and in the rocky
regions of northern Mesopotamia, Armenia, and so on. It was not done in
Chaldea or Babylon, nor were all rooms in Nineveh dressed in this way, not
even the more important ones.?4?
In such paneling the art of dressing walls progressed in a way that obvi-
ously went hand in hand with progress in the graphic arts and especially in
textiles that may have occurred not long before the panels were introduced.
The panels are stone imitations in relief of Babylonian-Assyrian carpet
embroideries, which were so highly praised and esteemed throughout antiq-
uity that they were weighed against gold and used only in decorating temples
and royal palaces. Perhaps it is wrong to see embroidery as a direct model for
these stone reliefs, which were used only for subterranean parts of the palace
building or in areas that were low and therefore damp. Perhaps they were
modeled on the gilded wooden panels that we know to have been used instead
of carpets for wall dressings in the sumptuous rooms of Oriental temples
and palaces. But the woven and embroidered arazzi fabrics of the skillful
Chaldeans remained the prototypes for all these /ater and more monumental
wall dressings. From what was said above, and especially by analogy with the
dominant tradition throughout the Orient and especially in China, we can
definitely consider this to be the case and find it confirmed in the style of the
relief sculptures under discussion. Obviously they move within the limits
imposed on the style by its prototype, even if the new material necessitates a
modified treatment of the basic theme. These Assyrian relief panels are obvi-
ously closer to the basic type than Egyptian wall sculpture or any other
antique sculpture known to us. They show the constraints imposed by a for-
eign technique still fresh in memory. Although the technical and stylistic tradi-
tion (also the rigid hierarchy and despotic court etiquette that dominated the
entire Babylonian-Assyrian civilization) makes this art seem fettered, it is not
embalmed like a mummy and as completely petrified as it was in Egypt, where
art no doubt obeyed specific and irrevocable hieratic statutes.
Thus the Assyrian style seems ensnared in an invisible canvas and its free
development is externally inhibited by the embroidery frame. Nevertheless
it strives toward naturalism and struggles to free itself. By contrast, the
Egyptian style is bound not by external, material constraints but by internal,
spiritual ones; it chooses to remain within limits that have long been techni-
cally superseded.
Despite all their ungainliness and stiffness, at least these Assyrian forms
are representational and give a more or less successful image of an action or
situation. They are not like Egyptian images, which are the calligraphic signs
or conventional formulas of a lapidary primeval language or a painted chron-
icle. In Assyrian works muscles are clearly drawn, outlines are defined as if

324
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

with strong thread, and ornamental accessories and embroidered garments

dominate. These and many other things are evidence of art’s technical origin
in the world of textiles, of a primitive clumsy conception, and of childlike
exaggeration but not of a dead style. It is the latter, however, that dominates
in the Egyptian style and especially in the sculpture and painting of temples
and large palace complexes. This fact alone shows that it was not a primitive
style but a refined and later one—even though in historical terms the works
are among the earliest of which traces have survived and predate Assyria’s
oldest works by millennia.
Discussions of the polychromy of Assyrian bas-reliefs are still dominated
by differences of opinion and doubts that will be difficult to resolve entirely. I
am convinced that the alabaster panels must have been like their models, the
stretched carpets that on certain feast days transformed the lower parts of the
walls and were also dressed with paintings or paneling. They must have been
richly colored to fit in with the general character of Asiatic architecture,
whose polychrome splendor was singled out repeatedly by classical writers for
praise and emphasis. But I believe it will prove difficult to determine how they
worked together with the painted tile walls and timber ceilings. This task is
made all the more difficult because the stone wainscoting of early wall paint-
ings varied greatly according to the period and method of dressing. Thus the
lower paneling also had to change its mood.
This is confirmed by the widely divergent observations of various monu-
ments made with this question in mind. In Nimrud remnants of color were
rarely found on sculptures.?43 In the oldest Nimrud reliefs the pigments seem to
have been limited to blue, red, yellow, black, and white. The same is also true
of the— probably contemporaneous— stucco paintings of the oldest period.
But a gentle green also occurs as a background for terra-cotta paintings. It
was probably also used as a ground in relief painting.
Many more traces of paint were found in Khorsabad: on drapery, on a
royal miter, on flowers, horse harnesses, chariots, trees, and so on. Even the
flames of burning cities and the torches are represented in paint, as they were
in Nimrud. In addition, [Eugéne] Flandin claims to have found an ocher-
colored ground on all parts of the Khorsabad bas-reliefs that were not other-
wise painted.244 This would imply that the flesh tints of the figures, the gar-
ments, and the ground were painted a uniform yellow, which is scarcely
credible. What is much more likely is that these sculptures were gilded, and
later the gold may have been partially painted over with a lacquer or with
other colors, a process that was still used by Phidias for the Olympian Zeus
and was probably common throughout antiquity.
In a newspaper article on the palace of Ashurbanipal, the last Assyrian
king, it is expressly explained that with the exception of a few details that
were painted red, the alabaster panels remained as free of color as they were
before a line was drawn or sculpted on them.245 The article made the addi-
tional point that the Assyrians were not as barbaric as the court in the Crystal
Palace might have us believe. Although I am in complete agreement with

329
 Semper

this last judgment made on [James] Fergusson’s reconstruction of the royal

Assyrian hall, I must at the same time—from a contrary direction—defend
the taste of even the degenerate Assyrians on the verge of their downfall. They
would never have allowed a chimerical creature with a lion’s head, feathered
eagle’s neck, and claws, as well as the ground from which the figure emerged
plastically, to retain a dirty gray alabaster color only to paint the monster’s
neck feathers, claws, and eyelids red. This would have been almost as hideous
as [Franz] Kugler’s polychrome restoration of the Parthenon, and the notion
could exist only in the brain of an art scholar.
Alabaster is white when freshly cut, but when exposed to the air it decom-
poses rapidly and soon takes on a gray tint. This must have been why it was
given a protective coating. We hear that even reliefs and inscriptions carved
by Assyrian sculptors in rock walls were coated with a siliceous varnish —in
other words with water glass—to protect them from weathering and at the
same time to make them more visible and legible from a distance. And we
know that even gold, which for decorative purposes may have been heavily
alloyed with copper, was coated with resinous glazes and transparent paints
to moderate its glow and regulate it according to the circumstances, as well as
to protect its copper from oxidation.
Yet I can also see the matter from another, less utilitarian point of view: in
this ostensibly protective coating given to the sculpture I believe I recognize
the essence of the visibly realized artistic idea—the “body” of the sculpted
stone. The alabaster was painted not because it was brittle and weathered eas-
ily, but because the sculptures were to be covered with traditional encaustics
or an incrustation of color. The material was selected not for its permanence
or solidity but for its transparent and gentle whiteness. When protected by a
transparent coat of paint, the material made a good ground for glazed colors.
Above all, its soft and delicate texture allowed the sculptor to work with
pleasure and ease.
This relation between the dressing and the thing dressed shows even more
clearly in Assyrian masonry itself. Clearly, air-dried brick was used for the
walls only because they were meant to be dressed. The material’s weathering
properties were not an issue, as it was not to be exposed to the elements. The
opposing view, that the incrustation was a protection for the earth rampart, is
devoid of stylistic logic.
This explains the predominance of air-dried brick walls in the later Assyrian
period, when more solid materials were used for incrustation, as opposed to
the more frequent use of fired brick in very ancient buildings in Chaldea,
where there was no stone and the incrustation consisted of stucco and mortar.
How does this explain the partial disappearance of the polychrome glaze
or painting that invariably covered the lower stone wall dressings as well?
Layard rightly sensed the reason behind this:

But although earthy and metallic substances were used by the Assyrians, it is not
improbable that vegetable colors were also known to them; they may even have

326
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

been employed in painting their sculptures.... Dyes of the finest quality, particu-
larly reds and greens, which even European ingenuity has been unable to equal, are
obtained by the inhabitants of Kurdistan from flowers and herbs, growing abun-
dantly in their mountains. The art of extracting them is not a recent discovery, but
has been known for ages to people living in the same country; as we learn from the
frequent mention of Babylonian and Parthian dyes by ancient authors. The carpets
of Kurdistan and Persia are sill unrivaled, not only for the beauty of their texture,
but for the brilliance of their hues. From the ornaments on the dresses of the figures
in the Assyrian sculptures, we may conclude that similar colors were extensively
used, either in dying the garments themselves, or the threads with which the mate-
rial was wove.24¢

The two contrasting systems of coloring — painting and dyeing — were

combined in architecture from the earliest times: a transparent substance (a
penetrating mordant that was applied without a substantial medium and
often prepared from plant juices) was used along with a coating of paint that
could be opaque, earthy, or metallic and was applied according to widely
divergent principles. The technique represents an especially important ele-
ment in ancient polychromy, which would remain utterly incomprehensible to
us if we were unable to examine the faded and isolated traces of it. One com-
promise between a glaze or stain and a coat of paint that physically sheathes
and protects —that is, an invention that combines the properties and advan-
tages of both—is enamel. It can be applied only by the encaustic method and,
like glass and glazing, is among the earliest human inventions. I have already
stated above with good reason that wax encaustic is a kind of abbreviated and
simplified enamel painting. The ancients applied to it the same technical prin-
ciples and procedures they had long since used for their far more original tile
and metal encaustics and for their related mosaic painting.
In any case, I do not wish to repeat what has been said already (see § 58,
on dyeing) or to anticipate what is to come. For the present I will abandon
this theme for another.
I have already remarked that all that has survived is probably only lesser
remains from the magnificent complex of an Assyrian palace: the actual cere-
monial chambers — with their gilded paneling of cedar and cypress, with their
wall panels of carved ivory and other costly dressings — probably either
became the rubble that filled up the lower rooms or now lie buried in the
labyrinth of rooms. Because they had no stone dressing to make it easier and
more rewarding to seek them out, they have remained largely unconsidered
and unexplored by antiquarian researchers.
The information handed down by authors about the unbelievable splendor
with which these rooms were furnished is couched in fairly general terms, so
that no really clear picture can emerge.
A report on the royal palace of Babylon that has come down to us through
Philostratus the Elder (though it is certainly from a much earlier period) tells
us that its bronze roofs glittered in the sun; that its rooms, men’s halls, and

327
 Semper

stoas were decorated with silver and gold fabrics; that other rooms were
dressed with solid gold as well as with paintings; and that the images on the
peploses of the walls appeared to have been taken from the Greek legends of
Orpheus, Amymone, and Andromeda. Another room had a sapphire dome
shaped like the heavens with gold images of the gods above it, as if shining
down from the ether.
It would be more original and interesting for us to learn something about
Assyrian and Babylonian paneling. All we know is that despite the lack of cer-
tain kinds of wood (the country produced only poplars and palms) it was still
a very important architectural material, so much so that the Greeks appar-
ently considered wooden dressing to be characteristic of the Babylonian archi-
tectural style.
Xenophon has his fictional hero Cyrus encourage the storming Persians by
saying that Hephaestus would fight with them, for the cedar gates and colum-
nar halls would provide a choice dish for their torches.
The cedars of Lebanon that were supplied for the palace buildings of
Nimrud are mentioned in a cuneiform inscription quoted by Layard, and his
workers made a watch fire from cedar beams felled for the temple three thou-
sand years earlier.
Apart from the authentically Asiatic gold dressing of the panels, these
beams may also have been covered and ornamented with costly woods,
mother-of-pearl, glass, and stones as well as with paint.247
Carved ivory accessories gave them a special richness. Layard has found
interesting fragments of this sort at Nimrud. Considered in themselves they
are remarkable specimens of a type of sculpture we do not know how to clas-
sify properly, but in the context of the rest of the room decoration they offer
extremely interesting material for our theme.
It is unlikely we will ever discern and know all the stylistic peculiarities of
the famed wood paneling of Assyrian, Phoenician, Jewish, Chaldean, and
Persian architecture, or know how familiar they were at the time with tongue-
and-groove or framing planks—in other words, with carpentry proper.?48
The latter was an art from which many architectural and ornamental forms
emerged that then became established in other materials and altered the style
of their technique. I will illustrate this with an example from metal technol-
ogy: the bronze doors made in earliest antiquity to secure and glorify the tall
royal halls and temples. Two quite different principles were applied in their
construction, one of which is obviously the older and more original, whereas
the other belongs to a relatively late artistic period. The older principle simply
involves reinforcing the wing of a gate (artlessly assembled from boards) by
covering it with sheet metal fastened to the wood with rivets and nails. It is
perhaps one of the oldest applications of empaestics for building purposes.
The other principle is certainly derived from the art of fashioning a more or
less complicated system of timber construction by skillfully fitting together
smaller boards. This system resisted the material’s tendency to warp, become
crooked, and dry out, and it mitigated other adverse affects. Following an

328
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

ancient tradition, they liked to dress these examples of carpentry (no longer
flat but assembled from filler and framework) with sheet metal. The inner
construction naturally constrained the lineaments and reliefs of its visible,
external garment. The basic features of the metal dressing’s ornamentation
were given and fixed in this way as a new and fertile decorative motive, but
they also continued to develop in other directions.
At the same time, this combination of raised and recessed areas on the sur-
face improved the strength and rigidity of the metal. Once this was recog-
nized, a very far-reaching principle of construction was based on it, which we
will now consider in detail.
The discovery was that the metal sheathing, rather than the dressed
wooden core, could give the system the rigidity it needed. This happened well
before the earliest documents of the history of art— both monuments and lit-
erature —and, probably by a purely empirical route, it led to the application
of the enormously important principle of hollow-body construction and cor-
rugation to architecture. Using this technique, curved and pleated metal can
enclose a room of suitable stereometric shape as an envelope and achieve the
greatest firmness and stability with the least material expense.
Or had those ingenious successors of old Tubal-cain, “the masters of every
kind of bronze and ironwork,”24? already gazed deep into the innermost laws
of nature, which produces all its organic forms according to the tubular sys-
tem, as is clear from the architecture of the simpler organisms of the vegetable
kingdom? It is conceivable that the unbiased mind of primitive man, whose

N
N
N
Z
N
N

NI}o7
NNy
N
NN
N
RSS
GOSS : Le

creative instinct had not yet been blunted by theory, intuitively came to realize
something that our abstract science has established only with difficulty—
without, however, touching upon the aesthetic issue. Be that as it may, it
remains certain that this tubular system, combined with the basic principle of
welding and pleating metallic and other laminated bodies, was a factor in
architecture very early on. It proved to be especially fruitful in tectonics and in
a purely structural sense but also in a stylistic-theoretical one. We will pay
particular attention to the last of these in what follows.
Examples have survived from antiquity of both the older method, which
involved simply covering the surface of wooden boards with sheet metal to
dress walls and seal rooms, and the later method that imitated carpentry and
framing by using hollow metal shapes. Because of the ephemerality of wood,

329
 Semper

the former has survived only as thin individual bronze plates, many of which
have been found in Etruscan tombs, where their context is no longer clear.
Excellent examples of the latter have survived, among them the door of Santi
Cosma e Damiano, which represents the oldest style and still takes the form of
a simple imitation of a wooden paneled door. It is said to have belonged to
the ancient Temple of Remus. The famous doors of the Pantheon, with their

OO"
ae

R80
YO
B20
SS)5

Door of the Pantheon

bronze posts and lintels, combine the panel system with the tubular system.
The gate wings, in fact, consist of two panels of cast bronze separated by a
space and connected only on the four panel edges. The same monument still
had many other examples of ancient bronze tubular construction at the time of

330
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

Serlio, but they were shortly thereafter removed by Bernini—both to recast his
Baroque baldachin in Saint Peter’s and to make cannons. The inner dome of
the Pantheon was completely covered with metal and the ceiling of the portico
consisted of a bronze barrel vault suspended from rectangular metal beams.
It seems that this later style came into prominence only after the art of
casting had been perfected. Although the Greeks used metal for dressing their
buildings and above all for door mountings and frames, it remains uncertain
whether these mountings always had a wooden core or whether some were
made in the second style as well.259 A passage in Cicero on metal decoration,
in which he accuses [Gaius] Verres of having taken the doors of an Athenian
temple to Syracuse, seems to confirm that the magnificent doors were only
partly lined with metal.

C Cs

tee
Wey

eee Seat a

SNA ies een

OL2S4# FCT ES JIM 42.

Details of the door of the Pantheon

\ GD
: Ih
iA un
a Ca
A im
BW) SS

Ancient roof truss in the porch of the Pantheon, after [Sebastiano] Serlio

Rome also had many doors that were not cast but simply mounted with
sheet metal in the old style. [Flavius] Stilicho was ordered by the emperor to
remove the gold plates from the doors of the Capitol to fund his preparations
for war. Some of the doors of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, including their

Soil
 Door of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople

cladding and topping, are still completely covered with sheet metal entirely
in the antique-Asian manner. They give the clearest idea of construction
methods that were dominant in Assyria and probably across the Orient in
antiquity, for which reason I enclose an illustration of such a door, after
[Wilhelm] Salzenberg.
Later, in our discussion of Roman wall decoration, we will see how car-
pentry and the framework, in a purely decorative sense, influenced the archi-
tecture of antiquity. Like so much late Roman art, it shows the influence of
Asiatic customs, or rather, the direct imitation of Oriental motives. We see
and recognize the latter in part in their reflection thrown back by the late
Roman period, which is more familiar to us.

Details of the same door

S62
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

During the Middle Ages this branch of art had to undergo this process of
development again in almost the same way, and we will discuss that in the
appropriate place.
This leads us to another very important question concerning the roofing
system and column orders associated with the Assyrian style.
It has been established that the horizontal ceiling combined with columns
and gable roof yielded the fundamental organic motive of Assyrian architec-
ture and its related styles, as it does in the arts generally. It has also been
established that the vault, although much used for purely structural purposes,
was not properly an architectural element, or at least did not fundamentally
influence the higher style used for temples, palaces, tombs, and the like. We
know this from sculptural images and also from information passed down by
the ancients —indeed, from contemporaneous documents — insofar as they
have been reliably deciphered. And yet no trace of columns has survived, with
the exception of some stone pedestals or bases, which probably once bore
columns or columnlike steles, and also of some very interesting bronze details
that are thought likely to be dressings and decorations for timber columns.
The reason no trace of columns can be found among the extensive and much
plundered ruins of Nineveh and Babylon is that they were executed partly in
wood and metal and partly in brick, and have long since broken down into
their component parts.
In the architectural style with which we are presently concerned, the col-
umn was much nearer to its origins, much less transformed by a monumental
conception and translation of its basic form into foreign materials, than in
any other antique style known to us. In this regard it is to some extent compa-
rable with the form that has survived in India and China, that is, a compromise
between furniture and a fixed architectural member—but as a transitional
form it was far more sharply defined and more nobly shaped than is the case
with the styles of eastern Asia.
As a domestic item, the column and its beam were still in principle neces-
sarily detached from the house and not structurally linked to it, at least not
conceptually; they were therefore also exclusively interior and developed in
hypostylar but not in peristylar arrangements. There are no signs anywhere
that columns served any purpose other than to support a protective ceiling in
the interior of an enclosed courtyard space or as an intermediate support
between a pair of orthostats (antae). In both cases the column functioned and
was characterized (both in itself and in combination with what it supported)
in a way different than, for example, its use in the Greek peripteral temple.
We will return to this distinction, which is related to the difference between
the Doric and Jonic order, in the appropriate place.
As a transitional form between furniture and the monumental column,
we may rightly consider the Assyrian column in connection with household
furnishings, about which we have more precise information. In this context its
nature and its parts will become clearer and afford us some not unimportant
general stylistic remarks.

333
 Semper

Tables, thrones, chairs, stools, baldachins, and other furnishings are car-
pentry work (pegmata), consisting of the same elements used in the larger
pegma of the columns and beams supporting the ceiling of a room. The two
functions of supporting and bearing are represented in the simplest way by ver-
tical posts and horizontal joists or beams. The ceiling framework is, so to
speak, furniture set up in the courtyard, which forms the center of each corps
de batiment of an Assyrian palace complex and to which all other parts relate.
Often this pegma is an actual piece of furniture, or close to it, and has to sup-
port only a light tent roof of woven fabric, as we know from certain accounts
in the Old Testament and even from cuneiform inscriptions, if Rawlinson’s
interpretation can be trusted. But even the solid ceiling with its columns, con-
sisting of jointed panels with beams below, retains a certain independence. It
stands in the hall as a self-supporting pegma, without being connected at all
with the masonry that encloses the hall. The stylistic idea behind the latter is
that of a prop, of which the ceiling is completely independent.
As the luxury of furniture certainly predates the architectural extravagance
of timber ceilings, I detect the prototype of the latter in household furnish-
ings, or rather in furniture made by carpentry. This hypothesis, or rather this
fact, is of enormous importance: first in terms of the expression and form of
the general structural idea inherent in the antique ceiling system, and second
in terms of the architectural expressivity the ancients invested in the masonry
wall, which was independent of the ceiling system. I will not pursue this
hypothesis any further here, because it is far more relevant to the section on
tectonics. It suggests, however, that we should look to the decorative details
and proportions of Assyrian furniture for the models and starting points of
those art-forms and proportions that the Assyrians transposed to their col-
umn orders, which had not yet been translated into a stone style but stood
materially on the same level as furniture. With regard to column orders, this
hypothesis will lead us back to that same remarkable principle of tubular con-
struction already encountered in striking form on several occasions in the
construction of massive terraces with pipelike passageways and vaulted tun-
nels. It is, as it were, the basic structural idea of Assyrian-Chaldean architec-
ture —or rather, all Asian architecture.
The household furnishings that we know from images and from actual
finds represent furniture proper: chairs, thrones, stools, tables, candelabras,
baldachins, altars, steles, chariots, couches, and so on. Then there are vessels
and other furnishings, including tripods, fonts, and fountains. Finally there
are jewelry, weapons, and other objects that have to do with the dressing,
care, and protection of the body.
All are extremely interesting technically and formally. They have some-
thing original to them, and wherever we encounter long-familiar forms in
them, these appear without a doubt to be stylistically older types and expres-
sions of the idea. In many ways they differ fundamentally from other known
antique furnishings, but even their differences prove they are more original
and the latter are derivative. Thus, for example, all furnishings that can be

334
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

assigned to tectonics (chairs, tables, candelabras, and so on) most decidedly

have the character of wooden carpentry works sheathed with sheet metal and
executed and decorated in an empaestic manner. Even those objects cast in
metal have this character, which appears remarkably primitive, as if they were
still imitating metal sheathing. By comparison, similar objects illustrated on
Egyptian tombs and numerous wood and metal specimens found in museums
are all either pure undressed carpentry work or cast metalwork, and indeed
not merely in execution but also in form and style. The curved and delicate
chairs, folding seats, stools, bedsteads, and other furnishings of the Egyptians
are in keeping with a refined carpentry accomplished with the most profound
understanding of wood’s attributes. Wood emerges here as the autonomous
substance of the system, and its rigidity depends on no other material and on
no technique other than carpentry. Likewise, Egyptian battle chariots, too,
were delicate cabriolets of the finest metal bars. Bronze and iron have already
created a new style here, whereas in Mesopotamia the more primitive style of
empaestics predominates, at least in terms of form, and objects made wholly
or partly of those materials fall into the category of beaten work and metal fit-
tings. Assyrian battle chariots thus looked like ponderous carts, but they were

Assyrian battle chariot

rapidly and surely drawn by fleet horses and easily carried by a single man. It
is obvious that they were hollow and that their linear, square, and full forms
conformed to the principle of tubular construction. In this respect they con-
trast so vividly with the Egyptian chariot that one has to assume there must
have been a number of transitional styles between the two.

SSIS)
 Semper

Egyptian battle chariot

Inlaid work in wood, the use of ivory, metal, amber, rare kinds of wood,
tortoiseshell, mother-of-pearl, and costly fabrics were, incidentally, no less
familiar to the Assyrians than to the Egyptians, Phoenicians, Jews, Greeks,
Etruscans, or any other ancient people skilled in the arts.*5! In the style of
these works, the Assyrians again show that they were probably its first origi-
nators. That ivory was previously used for these purposes in the regions of the
Euphrates seems to be proven by the fact that this costly material was princi-
pally acquired from India, with Assyrians as intermediaries.
Nevertheless, one may still doubt that the technique of dressing wood with
metal is—as I suggested above — older and more primitive than both carpen-
try proper, based on the principle of stick construction, and the inlaid work
associated with it. Perhaps they were twins and became united in cast metal
with inlaid work, a technique that is in any case secondary. Likewise, the
question arises whether inlaid work, or intarsia, already practiced by savages
on their weapons and equipment (one is almost tempted to trace it back to the
custom of tattooing), should be seen as a more durable kind of painting, or
whether the painted ornament is a cheap and easily executed substitute for
intarsia, which was older or at least was earlier elevated to an art. And how
does relief relate to the two methods of surface decoration just mentioned? All
of these are important questions for a theory of style, which we will encounter
wherever we find traces of early artistic activity.
Whatever the answer may be, it remains certain that for architecture the
first process mentioned — of dressing wood with metal—must also claim our
attention first because of its early application in this art and because of the
important consequences that resulted from that. In fact, it was from this
process that the canon, the organon of classical architecture, emerged.
The decorative details on Assyrian furniture, which carry the stamp of
great originality in this respect, arose in three ways. First, they had a purely
technical origin, that is, they emerged from processes applied during their
manufacture. Second, they were utilitarian in origin; they related to the use of
the whole or to the way in which every part worked with other, differently

336
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

functioning parts of the same system. Third, some of them were of tenden-
tious and symbolic significance.
These tendentious-symbolic forms almost never appear purely as such and
for themselves alone but usually with a secondary technical or utilitarian
meaning, which often becomes the main idea. The Assyrian style is extremely
important and interesting for the theory of art-forms because here the sym-
bols fully retained their tendentious meaning even as they were consciously
and skillfully used by the Assyrian masters in a structural-symbolic way or
with utilitarian implications.
As for the aforementioned technical elements of form, they must have
derived almost exclusively from that metal art I have called empaestics.
Initially, the forms were full, inelastic, and completely rigid. The support and
bearing pieces were either square in section and uniformly parallelepiped or
circular in section and grooved, scaled, or corrugated in some way. Finally,
their peculiar form reminds us of sheet metal pressed onto wooden dies using
a lathe or some similar mechanical device. This process is still frequently used
by tinsmiths in hardware fabrication because it easily produces cheap yet lux-
urious goods. Its peculiar style is, however, no longer acknowledged or con-
sidered in the least. Only the Hindus and other Asians who practice industry
have retained it as a tradition and even now achieve wonderful things in it.252
The results of the incrustation method just mentioned find their natural place
only on the rising, vertical, supporting parts of the pegma, especially at the
bottom, as in the example shown here from the earlier Assyrian period. It was

roeeeneae
A

Assyrian chair

used extravagantly by the Persians, as may be seen in the thrones and high
pedestals upon which such thrones were erected or upon which the great king
made his offering. Depictions have survived in Persepolis and on royal tombs.
Conversely, the motive seems to have been used less frequently in the period
between the early days of Assyrian power and Persian rule.

BS)//
 Semper

Rais
ae sai So
SOLIDLADLES SHDN
TTT AT

SANT
Btsasetuasassastta

Dra
uy

ilta =

Etruscan furnishing

The Etruscans, the most skillful metal technicians in the ancient West,
developed it further, but it acquired new life and its most delicate structure in
Greece. It appears with exquisite grace on hand altars and candelabras of the
older style, couches, chairs, tripods, and other tectonic products of these two
peoples.
A second, specifically technical motive is the seam, which was used extrav-
agantly for Assyrian furniture and utensils.
Sheet metal can be assembled into rigid tubular and hollow shapes only by
means of this type of joint.
The seams were formed by folding and riveting; soldering came later.
Soldering was unknown to the most ancient metal technology, but the pre-
tension of the Greeks in giving their countryman Glaucus of Chios the honor
of inventing this process is—as in most such cases —absurd.?53 It had been
known and applied in numerous ways by Asians and Egyptians much earlier.
Folding, that is, bending metal surfaces at the edges, both reinforces and
stiffens the hollow system. T-sections are produced in this way, and their mer-
its have been recognized and emphasized by the latest theory (see the figure
on p. 329):
Riveting is a type of ligature that in metal structures produces a particu-
larly fertile decorative element when applied on its own or in combination
with folding. The surface is enlivened by a skillful arrangement and by euryth-
mic alternation of decoratively shaped nail heads that shimmer with metal in
a contrasting color. Riveting and folding clearly shine as a material motive in

338
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

the ornamentation of Assyrian furniture and utensils, from what we know of

them. Many surviving examples of Assyrian metalwork attest to the orna-
mental use of this technical means.
In addition, we should emphasize a third process, known as splicing, a
technical artistic motive characteristic of empaestics. Splicing is when mem-
bers are fastened together lengthwise to form a single, longer rod. Generally a
link is needed for this, in the form of a ring or clasp, which encloses, connects,
and holds firmly the two jointed ends.
Splicing is a technical process that is still frequently used in tubular con-
struction, as in modern tinsmithing, for example. Unfortunately, its stylistic-
formal meaning is as little understood as that of other techniques.
Splicing was common among early Asian peoples and still is among some
of their less civilized descendants. Assyrian furnishings demonstrate that the
most important ornamental motifs of tectonics and of architecture itself (now
applied so thoughtlessly and often in the wrong place) developed from those
ring-shaped splices of tubular bars. These joints form breaks like the nodes of
plant stalks, such as the reed, and were conceived and aesthetically valued in
accordance with that analogy by Assyrian artisans, or probably much earlier
by their prehistoric predecessors in the arts. Yet that is not the only way they
were treated in structural-symbolic terms; often they were given the form and
ornamentation of bands, clasps, splints, and hooks, especially when used as
objects of bodily adornment.254
With proper tact such splices were used by Assyrians (and by all ancient
artisans generally) as ornamental motifs only for structural members that
functioned with compressive absolute strength—for example, columns and
supports. They were also used for collar beams and struts but never for parts
that had to carry a load along their length and were therefore active by virtue
of their relative strength, as for example in the framing pieces of chairs and
tables or in the epistyles (architraves) of columns.
I will set aside these structural motives of artistic design for the moment
and return to them later. We must first make a few brief remarks about func-
tional motives and the tendentious motives that occur with these very interest-
ing joints on Assyrian furnishings.
A piece of furniture is a pegma that is self-consistent and that does not
require a ground as a point of support to be structurally coherent. In this it
differs from the monument or architectural construction, which is immov-
able, because the base or ground on which it stands belongs, so to speak, to its
system. Yet furniture is movable. This establishes the most important stylistic
distinction between the two, insofar as style is dependent upon purpose. The
shape of a piece of furniture should express its independence from the place
where it stands. It must therefore have an adequately extended static base
area, but that should be as small as possible materially. In other words, the
points of contact with the ground must be as small as possible but must sup-
port the center of gravity of the functioning system as advantageously as pos-
sible. In this respect Assyrian furniture is most excellently styled, for it stands

339
 Semper

on the broadest static base and its feet all terminate in points, which mini-
mizes their contact with the floor. The idea of mobility inherent in furniture is
expressed in these Assyrian furnishings in yet another symbolic way that is
related to tendentious symbolism. Thus I prefer to discuss it first in connec-
tion with the latter. The same applies for other very interesting symbols that
convey the structural and functional purpose of the parts, which occur on
these objects with remarkable naiveté. Therefore the tendentious-symbolic
components of Assyrian furnishings should now be discussed.
Everything of this kind that is evident in furniture is also found on wall
decorations and is obviously part of the iconography of the Assyrian-
Chaldean religious system, but it would be entirely unsuitable, as well as
superfluous, for me to go into that subject here. They are partly symbols in
the proper sense of the word, partly figurative representations of gods, protec-
tive genii, rulers, and their slaves. They are woven into the compositions in
various ways and more or less blend into the structure of the objects. This is
particularly true of symbols proper, among which the most frequent and most
important is the sacred tree —that entanglement of plants so often mentioned,
whose components have been conventionally and ornamentally prepared
through long use as religious symbols to function as analogues from nature.
As such, they generally serve to symbolize a structural or functional idea,
which invests them with a double symbolic meaning. For example, struts and
even the supports of thrones, altars, tables, and other furnishings, together
with their splices and sleeves (tepdvat), are often shaped like the trunk of a
sacred tree, with its breaks characterized by leaf volutes (see the woodcut on
p. 153).
Evidence of the origin of this very pervasive tectonic ornament may be
seen on the oldest furnishings, such as the chair depicted on page 337. Here
the origin functions as a symbol in a dual sense: it organically enlivens, as
it were, the sleeve of the spliced member and at the same time marks the chair
as a sacred object. The idea grows weaker and later degenerates into the
excessive use of leaf volutes (see the woodcut on p. 274). Finally, the memory
of the origin of this ornament disappears completely with the Persians. The
series of volutes is applied thoughtlessly and in garbled fashion in all the
wrong places. Thus we find, for example, the fourfold double volutes stand-
ing upright, awkwardly joining the shaft of the Persian column to the capital
proper (see the facing woodcut).
Similarly, this volute break, combined with a palmette growing out of it,
serves as the crown of an upright construction member (as in the second fig-
ure on p. 342).
The structural idea reinforced and symbolized here is the same, except that
an upright organism is terminated at the top. I have already presented on page
252 a drawing of such a metal crown in the British Museum that functions
materially and formally as a terminating sleeve on a spliced hollow rod.
The Ionic volute capital seen in well-known depictions of Assyrian archi-
tecture—perfectly exemplified by an ivory fragment found among the Assyrian

340
Textiles: Technical-Historical

Persian column capital

341
 Semper

Volute with palmette crown of an

Sleeve with palmette decoration upright constructional member

relics in the British Museum — originated, in my view, in the Assyrian volute

calyx of the sacred tree. This genesis of the Ionic capital form is valuable and
significant, however, only if it is combined with more important and more
general analogies between ancient Asian hollow-body construction and its
related ornatus and between Greek stone construction and its decoration.
This I will do later.
The well-known Assyrian pinecone functions similarly but more often as a
symbol for the lower termination of an upright. The legs of most tables,
chairs, and other furniture conclude in this shape, which is likewise related to
the sacred tree (see figure, p. 274).
Other symbols are taken from the animal kingdom; these are the same fab-
ulous animals and composite beasts that occur so often in embroidery and
wall decorations and have been discussed extensively above. They are, so to
speak, the representatives of the second day of the creation of the organic
world, just as those mystical plant entanglements aptly characterize the first
day of creation. They are the half-plantlike telluric expressions of a serving
force; the organic vital principle reached here the stage of an unfree expres-
sion of will. As the artistic expressions and allegories of certain serving func-
tions they are thus perfectly suited for use as additions to furnishings or parts
thereof.
The ornamental form that they were given as religious and cosmogonic sym-
bols prepared them for this use. They are symbols of a tendentious nature—
that is, meaningful signs for ideas that have nothing to do with the immediate
purpose and construction of the furnishing but refer to something outside it.
It remains to be seen whether this tendentious character first mediated their
introduction into the formal circle of the technical arts. In any case a natural
artistic sensibility then led instinctively to their proper assessment in the other
sense indicated above.
Artistic Assyrian furnishings are so enormously interesting because we can
still decipher in them the double meaning of these symbols. Free art has not

342
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

yet detached itself from ornament; the latter therefore retains a higher signifi-
cance than that of mere adornment.
Greek art, by contrast, splits this double meaning and assigns to each
its rightful place. It conceives ornamental symbols above all in a structural-
functional sense, with any reference to the tendentious meaning they still
retain made as mild and faint as possible. It allocates to higher art its neutral
fields, where it can develop freely, independent of the structure and the imme-
diate material function of the system.
The powerful but unfree and lower expression of the will displayed by
those fabulous Assyrian beasts makes them, as I have said, particularly suited
to express certain ideas of purpose that an artist includes in his work. The use
of these animal forms elevates the dead piece of furniture to the status of a
person and individualizes it. Just as vegetal ornament re-creates a structure as
an organism, animal ornament raises dead household furnishings to the status
of a voluntary or involuntary domestic animal! When I give a piece of furni-
ture feet in the shape of lion’s paws or deer’s hooves, I define it as an object
that moves according to my will, or at least as one that can be moved. I have
the ability to adjust symbolically the degree of mobility that I wish to give it!
A post’s capacity for support and verticality is given living expression when I
invest it with those forms that carry out a similar function in the animal
world. The leg supports, the head is held erect, thus I need only these two
symbols to define the matter fittingly and succinctly. The backs of many
domestic animals are used for carrying, thus one gives bearing elements — the
horizontal rod above the vertical supports of an armchair, for example—a
faint resemblance to an animal’s back.
There are certain limits imposed by good taste to be observed, and it is
easy to go too far, as is demonstrated by the animal-shaped chairs and
couches of the Egyptians, which were naturalistically conceived and yet stiff.
Even the Assyrians were too far from the Greek level of taste in this regard.
Their baroque and inorganic combinations of heterogeneous animal forms,
avoided by the more sober Egyptians, were a sin against the rules of formal
beauty; their forms and models were ponderous, more frightening than beau-
tiful, and display little progress in higher art. And yet it was from such fantas-
tic growths that Greek art flowered, not from the rationalistic and desiccated
stem of Egyptian art.
Good taste and common sense require above all that one select from the
analogy or model only those properties and characteristics that illustrate the
idea in question. Anything indifferent and especially anything unduly striking—
that which is unique to the model but should not be given voice—should be
omitted. To do otherwise would be to say too much and thereby cloud the
intended meaning. Thus, for example, a vessel or other utensil that stands on
naturalistic animal feet captured in the act of running or jumping would no
longer be symbolically identified as something movable but as something
actually running. In general this cannot be the intention, although sometimes
there is sufficient reason for it. Peter Vischer had this in mind when he placed

343
 Semper

his sepulcher for the Sebalduskirche, whose basic motive is a funeral bier, on
snails. The French sculptor Jean Cousin, following older medieval models,
expressed the same thought much more nobly when he had the arc of Saint
Geneviéve borne by angels.
A very original use of mystical animal symbols in a functional sense is seen
in the remarkable bracket capitals of the Persian column order, consisting of
two powerfully curved animal necks that grow into a single back, upon which
epistyles are mounted. This motive must have been very popular with the
Persians, as it also occurs on the sculpted facades of royal tombs, first below
as a column capital, and then above on the elevated scaffold, the solium, upon
which the king made offerings.255 The platform of this scaffold was borne on
joists, each end of which terminated in the forepart of a horned monster.

Monstrous double head (Khorsabad)

No trace of this motive, which was later imitated by the Greeks, is found
on Assyrian reliefs or on the other objects that have been discovered. Perhaps
their proper sense of monumental style led them to prefer vegetal symbols;
perhaps chance has decreed that we will never get to know their interior ceil-
ing joists, which as quasi furniture were probably suitably shaped in a similar
way. But we do see a similar motive on some utensils, on weapons and stan-
dards, like the one illustrated here: a monstrous double head with a single jaw
that forms the attachment by biting firmly into the bearing member. Here, as
in many other motives, the animal element is expressed in a symbolism that is
not functional but structural. As the jaws do here, the claws of beasts, and the
beasts themselves, often serve to express the joining of parts that were origi-
nally separate (see accompanying figure).

344
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

Metal fitting attached to the

scabbard of a sword (Nimrud)

In addition to plant and animal forms, human figures must be mentioned

as a third class of pictorial symbols used on furnishings. They too have a dual
meaning, initially with a purely tendentious significance that bears no relation
to the structure or immediate purpose of the object as a whole or its parts. As
such they are often placed as the crowning decoration of the shafts of thrones
or in other suitable places. Occasionally they also function like a relief, filling
in the spaces between structural parts. But usually when such friezes or panels
appear, their figures also function structurally. They are transitional figures to
caryatids, supporting with their hands transverse posts, intermediate beams,
and armrests. They vividly recall the carpet bearers discussed above and may
have developed from the same motive (see the woodcut on p. 274). The
Assyrians’ structural-symbolic use of human forms in art was, however, lim-
ited to this; to the best of my knowledge no genuine column supports in
human form have been found among Assyrian artifacts, nor has anything like
the chained slaves on Egyptian furniture been found. Nor do the colossi at the
entrances to palace chambers have anything in common with Greek column
figures; conceptually, at least, they are independent of the construction.
All of this— ornament and structure, as well as pure sculpture where it
appears —corresponds entirely in style to the procedure of dressing wooden
cores with metal plates. This technique completely dominates the entire range
of Assyrian furnishings and develops there in a most remarkable way, from
the inside out, as it were. That is to say, something that once was the struc-
tural support and whose metal dressing was not much more than decoration—
namely, the wooden core—transfers its functions to the surrounding shell
and disappears. This shell comes to combine the structural and formal ele-
ments! Thus the “structural scheme” and the “artistic scheme” become one,
and the organic idea that would find its ideal application in Greece is already
reality here.25¢ Everything is ready; all that is needed is the animating spark of
Prometheus!

345
 Semper

I would not have lingered so long over Assyrian art and especially its fur-
nishings if the most intimate connection between Assyrian art and the column
order developed by this nation had not already been demonstrated, and if I
had not been convinced of the importance of the insights afforded by the
recently discovered Mesopotamian antiquities to a general theory of style.
The existence of columns in Assyrian architecture — indeed, of fully evolved
column orders —has been demonstrated, even though only isolated fragments
have survived. But these fragments are sufficient to confirm my assertion that—
following the model of Assyrian furnishings —their development evolved
from a solid-core wood style to a tubular metal style. In the end it is not essen-
tial to know what point was reached in this evolution or to what extent this
metamorphosis was realized.
The column fragments that have been discovered, all in bronze, are identi-
cal with the components of the columns at Persepolis.25”7 Only the striking
motive of the bracket capital, which is so characteristic of the transition from
the movable tent support to the monumental column, has not been found,
except at the royal palace and tomb of the Achaemenids.?5% Vertically placed
volutes and column bases completely appropriate to the stylistic transition
described above have, however, been found.
I have pursued these architectural forms to a point where they no longer
belong to this section, and so I will have to return to them in the sections on
tectonics and stereotomy.
Finally I must mention Assyrian bronze vessels, for they too belong here in
terms of style. All are beaten works and are for the most part emblemata or
symbola in the most specific sense of these synonymous terms, that is to say,
they are the inner metal lining of larger vessels made of other materials.259
They are of considerable interest in many respects: both because of the tech-
niques applied in their manufacture and ornamentation— specifically, because
they are beaten work (sphyrelaton) of a rather peculiar kind and because they
probably functioned as a ground for enamel painting that has disappeared—
and because the manner and choice of themes represented and the foreignness
of their style do not point to Assyrian manufacture. I will, however, defer
closer consideration to a later section of this work.26° This also applies to
other cast metal objects, about which all that need be said here is that stylisti-
cally they are beaten works. They are usually cast over iron cores or, like the
beautiful Khorsabad lion, completely full and solid. The Assyrians’ preference
for solid casting is confirmed by other examples as well.26! It disproves noth-
ing discussed above but merely demonstrates that the Assyrians were inexpe-
rienced in casting metal. There are also examples of hollow metal casting used
for furniture legs and other purposes.

§ 71 Nebuchadrezzar’s New Babylon

The neo-Babylonian empire of Nebuchadrezzar offers little new of interest to
us. What the ancients tell us about the art of this period of the restoration of
the old Chaldean monarchy merely confirms our view of west Asian art.

346
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

In rebuilding Babylon, Nebuchadrezzar followed the methods of early

Babylonian construction and used fired brick more extensively than the
Assyrians had. Brick construction was brought to a high level of perfection. A
fine white mortar served as a strong binding agent; it was also commonly used
as a dressing for interior and exterior walls.
A large quantity of brick fragments have been found that are covered with
a thick enamel glaze, and they confirm the well-known reports by Herodotus
and Diodorus on the visual splendor of Babylonian walls. The main colors are
a brilliant blue, red, yellow ocher, white, and black. I have already discussed
the slag blue bricks of Birs Nimrud above. No stone sculptures have been
found, with the exception of a colossal lion holding a man under his paws.
The Assyrian practice of paneling walls with stone slabs was rarely used
and was confined here, as at Khabar, to the dressing of door frames in royal
palaces. Stone was replaced by wood paneling and stucco dressing —as well
as more costly materials —as we know from the classical passages already
cited.
The general character of the subject matter of the sculptures and paintings,
few fragments of which have survived, is similar to that of the late Assyrian
period. Traces and remnants of terra-cotta sculptures are frequent and prove—
understandably in any case—that local clay was used for artistic purposes
more often than stone, which had to be transported from a distance. Clay
gives Babylonian sculpture a unique quality, which deviates, in ways not
unbeneficial, from the Assyrian influence on this art.262
One Babylonian inscription contains very remarkable notes on Babylonian
architecture. This inscription is on several black stone tablets found in the
vicinity of Baghdad by Sir Harford Jones and now housed at the museum
of the East India Company. It has been published in facsimile and interpreted
by Rawlinson and [Edward] Hincks. It begins with the names and titles of
Nebuchadrezzar the Great (604 B.C.) and discusses the building of various
temples and palaces as well as the ramparts of Babylon and Borsippa. Two
works in particular, the House of Peace and the House of Fame, are men-
tioned by name. The inscription gives detailed information on the ornaments
of these temples and palaces, which must have been very lavishly decorated.
Unfortunately it has been impossible to decipher and explain the meaning and
significance of all the artistic terms in this detailed description. The walls were
built of fired brick and bitumen and dressed with gypsum and other materials.
Some appear to have been paneled. There was timberwork above the walls,
and above the open spaces a curtain was stretched out as a ceiling, supported
by poles or columns like the tapestries in the Palace of Ahasuerus in Susa.
Parts of the timber were gilded, parts silvered, and the bulk of the wood came
from Lebanon.
So much for this remarkable architectural inscription from the seventh
century, which I unfortunately know only from Layard’s brief mention of
it.263 I conclude this short section on neo-Babylon with the wish that the
English interpreters of cuneiform will provide a more reliable and definitive

347
 Semper

translation than the one now available and that they will successfully explain
these and other ancient documents on the oldest customs and art.

§ 72 The Median Empire: Ecbatana

Ancient descriptions of Median architecture are all we have. Nothing has sur-
vived, or at least no Layard has so far examined the hill near Hamadan, the
ancient citadel of Deioces at Ecbatana.
The city was founded by Deioces around 700 B.C. The circular hill that
formed the natural base of the complex was fortified with terraced ring walls
such that one circle always rose above the one in front of it by the height of its
battlements.
In all there were seven ring walls, and the innermost wall contained the
palace and royal treasury. The circumference of the outermost wall was
roughly that of Athens. The battlements of the first perimeter wall were white,
those of the second black, the third purple, the fourth blue, the fifth orange-
yellow, and the last two were silver and gold. This is how Herodotus describes
the royal fortress; according to Diodorus, however, it was founded not by
Deioces but by Semiramis in prehistoric times. But the magnificent battle-
ments without sculpture may have been the work of that Zoroastrian imperial
rebel against the Assyrian feudal empire, the inventor of the abstract idea of
kingship.
Note how here too we have a most striking demonstration of the general
principle that dominated all ancient architecture — namely, the principle of
dressing, which was applied even to the layout of entire cities!
Polybius says of this royal castle:

The richness and splendor of its buildings far exceed anything one sees in other
cities. It is set in a hilly region on the slope of Mount Orontes and is without walls,
though it has an artificial castle mound of astonishing solidity. Below this is the
royal palace, of which I do not know whether it is better to speak or to remain
silent.... The palace has a circumference of seven stadia and the magnificent way in
which it is built is evidence of the power and understanding of those who built it.
Although all woodwork is in cedar and cypress, nothing is left bare. The beams,
panels, and columns in the halls are dressed with sheets of gold and silver. All bricks
are of silver. In the temple itself are columns covered with gold. There are silver
roof tiles and even gold and silver wall bricks,2®4 the value of which is estimated at
four thousand talents <six million talers>.

This is indeed the most remarkable of the passages from antiquity that dis-
cuss the columns of Median and Assyrian architecture, and it completely con-
firms the preceding points!
Information on the gold-covered roof tiles suggests decorated, and there-
fore visible, high roofs. Their use is confirmed by individual images of such
buildings with frontons and raised roofs that appear on Assyrian reliefs.
The Englishman [William] Ouseley found a column in the environs of the

348
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

mound on which the castle stood, corresponding precisely with those of Djil
Minar (Persepolis). Perhaps in Media the material change to the column order
and the transition from the old tubular steel to marble had already begun.
This question will be considered more closely in another section of this book.

§ 73 Susa; Persia
The city of Susa is said to have been built by Cambyses using Egyptian
architects, but it existed as a city before his time. What remains are great
mounds of brick and colored tile, which are certainly no smaller than those at
Babylon. Remnants of columns quite similar to those of Persepolis have also
been found.
These important Persian monuments, which reveal so clearly the transi-
tions and stylistic metamorphoses brought about by changes of materials, do
not offer anything particularly new with respect to the subject at hand. They
will therefore be considered separately in the discussions of tectonics and
stereotomy.
It should also be noted here, however, that more recent travelers to Persia,
especially [Charles] Texier, have found everywhere on the remnants of these
white marble monuments traces of a truly rich and distinctive polychromy
that once covered them completely. Consequently, the reconstructions of parts
of these royal palaces (inadequate in other respects as well) in the large book
by Flandin and [Pascal] Coste give a quite false and impoverished impression
of their former glory.

§ 74 Phoenicia and Judaea

Preserved works are the only secure basis upon which the edifice of a compar-
ative history of style can be erected. New evidence for this was provided by
the discoveries made inside the Mesopotamian earth mounds, the Lycian finds
in Asia Minor, and other recent discoveries in Asia and Egypt. Collectively
they have dealt such an alarming blow to our earlier understanding of art his-
tory that a mere revision or simple amendment is scarcely adequate to accom-
modate the new insights that have been won. We have always had fairly
detailed and lively accounts of the wonders of Nineveh and Babylon, and
these should have enabled us to form a correct perception for ourselves — for,
as we now see, they were entirely accurate. Yet how false and above all how
colorless and lifeless was that image when compared with the (admittedly still
veiled and incomplete) reality that we are now encountering! Who would
have suspected that during the reign of Cyrus or shortly thereafter, when
sculpture was still in its swaddling clothes in mainland Greece, Asia Minor
would already have produced a school of sculptors that —in terms of the high
drama of its presentations, its free treatment of nude and draped subjects, and
its mastery of the material—had already exceeded the heights of art. The
school is thus more reminiscent of the bold chisel of Scopas than of the higher
style of Phidias and Polyclitus. Our art historians try to deal with their embar-
rassment when faced with this art by denying its great antiquity, by dating

349
 Semper

actual evidence of its early influence as late as the third century, and by dis-
missing it with curt remarks, as art historical hors d’oeuvres or curiosities, so
to speak. But eventually our system of art history —once based mainly on
meager reports from Pliny, Pausanias, and Philostratus — will have to yield to
the facts.265
Very few real traces of Judaic and Phoenician antiquities have survived
and most (among them the most remarkable) are of very dubious origin.
Take, for example, the stone coffers found in the vicinity of ancient Carthage,
similar to the allegedly Celtic monuments of western Europe.?¢ There are
also the similarly constructed crude temple precincts that have survived on
Malta and the neighboring island of Gozo. They display, in its rawest appli-
cation, the system of stone-slab construction practiced and perfected in
Nineveh. I have not seen any of these remarkable buildings myself, and it is
hard to form an impression from published accounts. But I would almost like
to relate them to certain stone monuments I have already mentioned, found
on the island of Ceylon and in other places in India, which we know to be
crude cores for a very refined stucco architecture that has long since disap-
peared. Imagine that a model for a colossus made by a famous sculptor of our
time had been buried and then brought back to the light of day after thou-
sands of years. The iron skeleton of this figure would give precisely the same
idea of our sculptural art as those clumsy stone structures give us of the archi-
tectural style of their creators.
Another type of monument—the nuraghi of Sardinia and the talayots on
the Balearic Islands—is also ascribed to the Phoenicians. If this is correct,
then the style of Phoenician architecture must have undergone a massive
change, as those tholoi do not bear the slightest resemblance to the works
mentioned above, either in their spatial concept or in their execution.
These are circular or oval buildings, rising conically with a platform at the
top. Their construction consists of a very thick ashlar assembled without mor-
tar, enclosing an interior space in ring-shaped layers, with each outer layer
always projecting slightly over the one below it toward the inside. Within the
thick walls there are spiral staircases leading to the platform and upper cham-
bers; several of these conical buildings have two or more stories inside.
Identical or very similar monuments are found on the classical soil of
Hellas. They play an important part in the oldest myths and sagas of the
Greeks, and are thus certainly of pre-Hellenic origin. In Italy as well there are
traces of similar buildings, especially in the area around the Etruscan city of
Volterra. The oldest histories concerning the mystical origin of the name of
the Roman acropolis—called capitolium after a tholos found there with a
human head for a keystone —confirm the great antiquity of this form.
Whatever the case, these monuments from the remotest days of prehistory,
effectively the fossil remains of a civilization that lived before human memory,
have a definite bearing on the subject at hand. They show clear traces and
remnants of the dressing with which their stone walls were once clad inside
and out. This confirms why legend describes them as bronze (bronze-dressed)

350
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

barrels, that is, barrel vaults. As I will return to them on other occasions, I
will touch upon them only lightly here and instead turn to works attributed
with greater certainty to the Phoenicians. These are the enormous stone struc-
tures that served either as foundations for the temples and palaces built on
them or as embankments; they consist of regularly hewn bossed ashlar blocks
of colossal dimensions. Remains have been found in the vicinity of ancient
Byblos, in Cyprus, on the island of Aradus, where the partial remnants of
gigantic quay walls are built of fifteen-foot bossed ashlar, and elsewhere. In
addition, there are the remarkable and partially surviving substructures of
the peribolos of the Temple of Solomon on the east side of Mount Moriah. In
his account of the Temple of Herod, Josephus gives us a description of this
peculiar construction that is very interesting, if somewhat obscure in its
details. We can understand this construction by comparison to a similar and
more easily accessible substructure intended for the same purpose under the
great Temple of the Sun at Baalbek, which, like the former, is obviously of
Phoenician-Israelite origin. The constructional features that strike us as espe-
cially remarkable in both are their massive square walls, which actually fall
into a different area of our stylistic considerations and will be discussed later.
Both works, however, are executed according to the same principle we per-
ceive in the Assyrian substructures; they are, so to speak, an interweaving of
ashlar walls that in the interstices sometimes run parallel to one another and
sometimes intersect. The intervals are filled with rubble to increase the mass,
with the exception of a few that remain open as vaulted underground pas-
sages or to serve other purposes. We can read about this in ancient descrip-
tions, and we can also see it in the substructure at Baalbek, which has been
carefully examined by travelers. The whole forms a so-called castle wall. The
masonry proper serves only as a dressing and distributes the thrust of
the earth masses that form the main part of the “moles.” It is a traditional
construction method of ancient Asian origin, which the Romans, as the true
keepers and emulators of Asian techniques, always followed in their ashlar
work. Vitruvius describes the technique in chapter 5 of book 1 and empha-
sizes its advantages. We recognize it again in those Roman wall masses seem-
ingly built of the most solid ashlar but consisting only of the filler that
remains now that their former ashlar dressings have been largely stripped
away. An easily accessible, well-preserved, and instructive example of this is
those pipelike substructures of the Athenian Temple of Olympian Zeus, dating
perhaps from the time of Peisistratus but later rebuilt by Hadrian. I have pene-
trated deeply into its vaulted favissae (syringes, pipelike passages) without
reaching their end. Quite similar substructures are seen in the large temple in
Aizanoi in Asia Minor (described by Texier), and also in Mesopotamia and
Persia. Some date from the Persian and Sassanid periods and are still largely in
good condition, although everything they were intended to support has long
since ceased to exist.267
In fact no people in antiquity were the equal of the Phoenicians in the
building of massive bulwarks and hydraulic structures. They were equally

Sow
 Semper

famed in all branches of the arts applied to practical life and luxury, espe-
cially in the manufacture of fabrics and dyes, and of objects made of wood,
ivory, and metal. But we would have only a very general idea of Phoenician
activity in these technical arts (even though in the well-known biblical
accounts there are detailed descriptions of the buildings of King Solomon
and the luxury of Israelite furnishings, which they borrowed from their opu-
lent neighbors), were it not for certain highly significant and artfully beaten
metal vessels and other utensils (some in metal and some in ivory) recently
excavated from the basement of the oldest palace at Nineveh. They are
almost definitely Phoenician in origin. These specimens, already mentioned
and partially described above, have a very peculiar artistic style, forming, as it
were, a link between Assyrian and Egyptian art. It is a style that, incidentally,
appears strikingly similar, if not identical, to ancient Etruscan sculptures done
in metal and other materials.2©8 Through these and other, more general investi-
gations of the palace ruins in central Asia, we have come somewhat closer to
an understanding of the famous temple building in Moriah and of the architec-
ture of Solomon. Still, it would be presumptuous, even with this help, to pres-
ent the reader with a portrait thrown together — however intelligently — from
fragments corrupted by transcribers and later interpretation, one assembled
from biblical reports and later writers, and to claim that it is the only reliable
one, after so many unsuccessful attempts of this kind.
Moreover, that is not the subject of this chapter. It can, however, be stated
here with the greatest confidence that the description of the Tabernacle (albeit
probably based on a Davidian tabernacle and then projected onto the ancient
Tabernacle of Moses), together with the description of the Temple of Solomon,
forms the heart of this important section in our theory of style. The inferences
on this matter to be drawn from reports so discordant in other respects can-
not be doubted. In these reports we can trace with great certainty the progres-
sive development of the elementary architectural principle of the cover
[Umkleidung], its intimate connection to and merging with ashlar building. It
is precisely here that these written documents of the history of style are so
important, because when the dressing was not made of stone—as it was in
some parts of Assyrian palaces—it was the most ephemeral element. There-
fore, where the dressing is missing and nothing in particular is written down
about it, its former existence is everywhere denied—a comfortable, genteel,
but mindless way of thinking that in our day is still considered acceptable.
The Jewish temple, a monumental copy of the motive contained in the
Tabernacle, was built of massive blocks of white stone (€k \euKod A{Gou
TeTroLnyevov [made of white stone]),26? which the Syrian workers fitted
together so smoothly and precisely that no traces of hammers or chisels can be
discerned anywhere.?”° Yet these beautifully crafted walls of white stone
(marble) were encrusted inside and out with gilded carved cedar and precious
stones. The same carvings and the same gold splendor were displayed on ceil-
ing panels. The floors, like everything else, were dressed with cedar and gold
foil. All doorposts and doors were golden, and rich gold fittings in the form

SZ
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

of knobs, chains, and vine tendrils further enhanced their richness, as in

all probability they shone out from beneath transparent colored ornaments.
The most essential motifs of surface decoration were egg-and-dart moldings,
lotus flowers (colocynths), palmettes, and frieze strips with grotesque figures
(cherubim) similar to Assyrian ones. Thus, as Josephus repeatedly assures us,
“there was no part of the temple, inside or out, that was not gold.” He was
perhaps the most prudent and reliable of all ancient writers and must have
taken this remarkable report from sources that have only partially survived in
holy books, obscured by every possible form of textual mutilation, corrup-
tion, and misunderstanding.271
Although they reveal little specifically about the exterior of Solomonic
works, there are some passages that indicate that, like the interiors, the exteri-
ors were paneled in wood and consequently decorated with lavish gold orna-
ment (1 Kings 6:29-30; 2 Chronicles 3:5-6). I take the well-known and often
repeated report on the walls of the courtyards and palaces to refer to the outer
paneling of the walls: “And the foundation was of costly stones, even great
stones, stones of ten cubits and stones of eight cubits. And above were costly
stones, after the measures of hewed stones, and cedars. And the great court
<peribolos> round about was with three rows of hewed stones, and a row <?>
of cedar beams, both for the inner court of the house of the Lord, and for the
porch of the house” (1 Kings 7:10-12). Further: “And he built the inner court
with three rows of hewed stone, and a row of cedar beams” (1 Kings 6:36).
Thus the paneling was stone up to a certain height, and above that began the
wood dressing. We see exactly the same construction principle in Assyrian
works and Persian palaces. In his description of the inner peribolos of the
temple, whose threshold no stranger was allowed to cross under penalty of
death, Josephus describes this wall technique as a stone enclosure (€pkiov Aibt-
vov SpvdbakTov).272
Even though it is not unreasonable to doubt the positive assurances of
Josephus and other writers from a later period regarding the exterior decora-
tion of the temple, no architectural historian should wish to ignore them com-
pletely.273 For they are all that has survived on the subject —except for the
passages from the Old Testament quoted above. Considered entirely on their
own, merely as the expression of an idea, dominant at the time of Josephus,
regarding the style of Solomon, they are still of considerable interest in a his-
tory of style. Moreover, one sees clearly in the report by Josephus what is less
apparent in Pausanias and other writers: When the ancients described these
monuments they thought it appropriate to mention the white marble and the
excellence of its treatment, as well as the materials generally and the manner
of execution, even when these materials were not visible from without but
rather concealed under some kind of cladding, where they could be perceived
only by their constructional inner influence on the style of the work.274 This
confirms my earlier assertion that “white stone” (that is, white marble) was a
term used by the ancients in the same way that we speak of graywacke, green-
stone, or red fir, without necessarily thinking of the grayness, greenness, or

353
 Semper

redness of the material. The color of these materials is the last thing that
occurs to us when we are talking about their technical use. Exactly the same
holds for the white stone of the ancients.
I will not linger over the famed three-inch cast-metal columns of the por-
tico: whether they were free-standing or supported architraves and a tower,
the form of their capitals, or other questions that almost everyone answers
differently. Such questions are not appropriate to this chapter and lead to
points that have already been discussed on earlier occasions for which more
reliable documentation exists.
The same is true of the sacrificial vessels, the sacred utensils in the temple’s
interior,2”75 and Solomon’s throne. The imagination has free rein in their
restoration, even if the Assyrian and Phoenician vessels for display and sacred
rites that we now know from representations and to some extent from actual
examples oblige us to conceive them rather more concretely than was neces-
sary earlier.
Allusions in the Song of Songs to ivory-clad towers looking toward Damas-
cus and to Ahab’s ivory house indicate a luxury in the outfitting of buildings
that took hold after the dazzling reign of Solomon. The incrustation of wall
surfaces with the most noble materials remained the characteristic idea.
The Tyrians were also considered to have invented colored ashlar and
introduced it to the list of art-forms, a momentous innovation whose true sig-
nificance was first grasped by the Romans. We must therefore return to this
topic when dealing with the architecture of that world-conquering nation.?76

§ 75 Egypt: Old and New Kingdoms

Herodotus’s well-known assertion that in their customs and laws the Egyp-
tians were the opposite of all other peoples is fully confirmed in the arts and
applies particularly to the question at hand. Thus we can review them here
from a contrasting viewpoint and see them in a completely different light. Yet
this holds true only for theocratic-monarchic Egypt, whose founders created
for their state an architectural expression whose basic premise was the oppo-
site of west Asia’s militant and feudal building principle.277 Although the
origin of pharaonic Egypt that Herodotus had in mind when he made his
observation extends beyond the horizon of all the annals and even beyond the
natural duration of the most robust human works, it is nevertheless based on
and rooted in the ruins of much older social conditions, which may have been
more closely related to those of western Asia. The oldest and most massive
monuments on earth—the pyramids of lower Egypt —describe at the limits of
human history the transition from the most ancient feudal and bellicose state
to the lapidary history of a hierarchic-national aristocracy that was grafted
onto it. They still carry clear traces of the older regime and—together with
their surrounding tombs and memorials, which sometimes date from the
same period —in many ways almost belong more to the earlier period than to
pharaonic Egypt.
They still speak a different language to us than those Theban temple

354
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

palaces do, a language from which the more recent one borrowed only a few
of its types, where they did not contradict the new principle. We recognize
this clearly, although in the monuments of the pyramid kings that older lan-
guage is already in a state of metamorphosis, and these monuments, like the
Tower of Babel, belong to the time of the confusion of tongues, as it were.
The real lives of Egyptian people, when not overly restricted by priestly-
bureaucratic patronage, remained, even in later periods, more favorable to
free art. This is demonstrated by the tomb grottoes, with their sometimes
charming, uninhibitedly narrative depiction of folk and family life. To be sure,
with the progressive growth of the new regime this was bound to disappear as
well and submit to the hieratic style.
At the same time, these tombs — with their inexhaustible treasury of imple-
ments, jewelry, and other well-preserved products of artistic industry —are the
most important source for the study of the people’s true inner character. Its
fresh and natural countenance stands in starkest contrast to the outer mask of
official royal Egypt.
Egyptian works are especially noteworthy for their excellent state of pres-
ervation. All other remnants of antiquity are mere skeletons or, as it often
turns out, fossilized colorless receptacles of the extinct social organizations
that once inhabited them. Still, throughout its numerous metamorphoses
ancient Egypt was preserved by its monuments like a mummy, so to speak.
Everything — flesh, color, even the dressing accessories — remains; only life is
missing. This can be explained in part by the climate, but more by the fact
that no other people nurtured the idea of keeping fleeting existence alive in
human memory for as long as possible by preserving the shell that was its
condition. Thus solidity and monumentality became the theme of architec-
ture, to which beauty and even functionality were subordinated.
Thus with regard to other peoples (especially the Greeks) whose material
evidence seems doubtful or has disappeared without a trace, Egypt’s well-
preserved dust yields much supplementary or more detailed information—
depending on the analogies with what is still preserved or on the contrasts
that exist between that and what has disappeared.
Analogies are found principally in the works of ancient prehistoric Egypt.
Contrasts emerge more clearly under the New Kingdom.

Pyramids
The pyramids of Giza and Saqqara are full ashlar masses, the most solid
and indestructible stone monuments ever to have been conceived and built,
but they merely imitate earlier works of similar form in unfired clay brick
encrusted with a harder material. The incrustation principle therefore most
decidedly applies here: first in the way in which the stone core itself was con-
structed. Although it consisted of rectilinear ashlar blocks, it was not exe-
cuted with a horizontal banding in parallel layers. Rather, it consisted of a
series of sheathings or shells surrounding a core, rather like the annual rings
of a tree trunk. This core was usually small and was either constructed or

359
 Semper

composed of natural rock. In a way quite appropriate to this system (at least
in the half-derelict great pyramid at Saqqara, the inner construction of which
is exposed) the stone layers were not quite horizontal but were set to incline
toward the core.278
According to [Richard] Lepsius’s subtle hypothesis, these stone sheathings
correspond to the years of the king’s reign, since he had the core of his pyra-
mid built on his accession to the throne. But they also relate to a most natural
construction process used in the banking of earth mounds. In fact this process
still recommends itself for similar structures because it makes the work easier
and holds the mass together so as to press down on the foundations almost
like a single stone block.
Even more interesting for our question is the way in which these powerful
ashlar tumuli were finished. Starting at the top—probably after a sanctuary
or enthroned colossus of the king had been erected on the flattened apex in
the west Asian manner—the ledges of the terraces were filled in with ashlar,
forming a pyramid composed of four triangular surfaces at the same angle.
Only the small ledges corresponding to the tops of the individual ashlar
blocks broke the continuity of the four surfaces. These in turn were covered
with a layer of harder and more valuable stone, in accordance with the princi-
ple of ancient roof coverings — namely, such that each upper stone covered the
lower one and effectively held it fast. Then the stepped dressing was chiseled
smooth from the top downward, leaving a significant thickness of stone on
the edges of the construction blocks. The flat chiseled surfaces were then pol-
ished like a mirror and covered with carved hieroglyphic inscriptions. On the
second great pyramid at Giza, that of Khafre, part of this dressing has sur-
vived at the top. Similar fragments were found at the bases of the others.

Remnants of the covering on the Pyramid of Khafre

From Herodotus and other ancient writers we learn that all pyramids were
dressed in the same way, some with polished granite, and were covered with
inscriptions. Their statements are confirmed by Arab writers of the Middle
Ages who report that after the conquest of Egypt by the Arabs the burial
chambers hidden under the covering were broken into and plundered and the
dressing stone carried off for other purposes.

356
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

In the face of all this firm evidence, some people, such as [Jacques-Joseph]
Champollion-Figeac, prefer to doubt, or resolutely deny, that the stone core
was encrusted. I, on the other hand, hold this incrustation to be the most
essential element, the motive for the entire stone structure, and I consider the
use of syenite and pink granite for dressing the (oldest) pyramids of unfired
Nile brick as the beginning of stone construction in the Nile Delta, the first
cultivated land. I hold this technique to be older than ashlar, which because of
its solidity came to replace the brick filling, though not until later. The brick,
as well as the later ashlar work, was merely the support for the four colossal
tablets of hard stone with inscriptions intended to proclaim the deeds of the
founder to all points of the compass and for all centuries. That the pyramidal
form is indeed the best and most stable for this purpose can be mathemati-
cally demonstrated.
This explains why the oldest Egyptian stone monuments, those of the
stoneless delta, were built of Ethiopian granite or syenite and not of local
limestone or sandstone. In royal Thebes, the oldest part of the imperial temple
of Karnak —endowed by the founder of the first Theban dynasty Sesostris I
but destroyed, probably first by the Hyksos and then by Cambyses —is a gran-
ite building. In fact it is the only coherent temple ruin from the period of the
Old Kingdom (about 2700 B.c.), although its granite dressing was partially
renovated or completed under Macedonian rule by Arrhidaeus.
Similarly, the burial chambers of the Pyramids of Giza are lined with gran-
ite, though without hieroglyphic decoration. Likewise, the oldest parts of the
labyrinth, belonging to the Old Kingdom and to the Twelfth Dynasty, were
built of granite-dressed brick walls and columns of the same material.?7?
The circular molding that frames the edges of all Egyptian wall masses is a
reminiscence of timber construction that retained its practical value in the
context of paneling with stone slabs. Its origin can be seen in the accompany-
ing illustration of a very ancient sacellum or sekos, consisting of a light frame

Egyptian sacellum

Soy)
 Semper

on which the image of the deity was stretched. When used with the incrusta-
tion of masses, this hieratic-symbolic representation of a scaffold or wooden
frame served to conceal the panel joints at the corners of the monument,
which would be hard to achieve without this technical device, one still well
known to carpenters.
On the subject of these most ancient granite constructions, it is important
not to overlook the interesting fact that they all show the clearest traces of a
color coating that once covered them completely. Magnificent rose-colored
Ethiopian stone, highly polished and carved, was covered over and over with
a colored glaze! Who would believe it, and yet it is true! ‘Abd al-Latif, an Arab
writer of the mid-thirteenth century who described the ruins of Memphis,
mentions a monolithic sekos (tabernacle) nine ells high, seven ells wide, and
eight ells deep. It was called the green chamber, no doubt because of its green
surface. Similarly he speaks of a red granite colossus thirty ells high covered
with a red varnish, the freshness of which seems only to have been enhanced
by age. More recent travelers confirm this with regard to other monuments.78°
But we hardly need to cite these reports, as anyone who more closely exam-
ines those splendid polished syenite and granite sarcophagi that adorn our
larger museums will easily discover traces of the colored enamel with which
they were once covered.28! The procedure used for encrusting granite surfaces
with color was probably similar to enameling and would presumably have
been called encausis by the Greeks, a word that referred to painting a ground
with the aid of greater or lesser heat. The polished surfaces would appear to
have generally been covered with transparent enamel colors, but the ground
for hieroglyphs and images was matte and covered with opaque colors.
Probably they were applied first and then the whole surface, including the
colored hieroglyphs, was coated with the same varnish. To the best of my
knowledge no study of these partially transparent stone glazes has yet been
undertaken. I suspect that these Egyptian stone coatings, like Assyrian protec-
tive coverings on rock inscriptions, are fusible glass, water glass, or some simi-
lar siliceous compound.
In the interior of the large pyramid at Saqqara, opened up by [Johann]
Minutoli, the remains of a remarkable wall incrustation were found, similar
to the ancient Chaldean faience dressing discussed earlier. One tomb chamber
is encrusted with a faience pumice (or infusible clay sagger) in convex cylin-
drical sections. The pieces are linked so that the room appears to be enclosed
with shallow pilasters in a packed series. The glaze is greenish blue and hard
as glass (probably opaque and therefore containing tin). Strips in a different
color run horizontally between the ribs of the blue glazed walls. The slabs are
set in lime and attached to one another and to the stucco by a metal wire run-
ning through an eye at the rear surface of each panel.
Other rooms are dressed similarly but with pieces of colored Egyptian
porcelain (a misnomer) less than an inch long, something over an inch wide,
and not convex but flat. The pieces are green, black, red, and purple.282
This is the oldest example of the use of mosaic to dress wall surfaces and

358
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

eee ee *
wr I mM a“ BB wZ
Oe Gi er on Poo gsc
So) eeseS

re
Z| RN PAP) DN SO A, OS
| CAPA SOS! AMP: WES! AAP)

1
iI
f |i
SS WZANS S IZZANSS MIZZAAS NIZA SHI Z SSHZZHINS MZ
224 WW! 1274) INS IZ ZABNN NZ ZN IZ ZAG N Dod SS: ZA SN ZN SN ZS S
i
!
!
|
Zi DS SSAC AD SS [LAWS SSIC ZANSS MLAB SHIZZ a

| LITA
AY D2 Ki ZZAB\\NUZ ZANE ZS NZ 7

se)
&

iN
it —

SSCA SMI ZAI

BZA yaa wd Pak

a
BWI ZS SWISS
Yea A SNE 2 ZN ST 77

i fi |
}|
aZZS ZANSS SEZ ZS Ia
D> KS Daa KG WPA WZ ISA

Mosaic dressing of a chamber in the Pyramid at Saqqara

to my knowledge the only such case found in Egypt. It is therefore entirely

worthy of the attention paid to it here.

Tombs of the Old Kingdom

The tomb chambers around the Pyramids of Giza, which are as ancient as the
Pyramids, or at least belong to the same period of Egyptian culture, are inter-
esting in several respects. They are massive constructions in a light yellow
Libyan limestone ashlar, but the motive of wood-dressed clay walls had yet to
be turned into stone at the time they were constructed. The door lintels are
powerful round stone slabs; the ceilings and projecting cornices consist of
round palm trunks; the facades are constructed of boards and latticework,
sculpted in stone and refined with plaster, and painted with the gaudiest alter-
nation of colors. This is how they look in reality and in illustrations.283
A glance back at the oldest known Chaldean facade decoration leaves us
no doubt that it is related to this remarkable wood-dressed architecture exe-
cuted in a stucco-covered stone. At the same time, both are reminiscent of
similar things found in Lycia and even in ancient Etruria.

359
 Semper

A
STON
A00
GVH
COORONG}
ASEALLUS
FOOSE rT
ENA
COMER
AVEDA
HAART

Illustration of an Egyptian portal from the Old Kingdom

As for the painting and sculpture on these tombs — whose style, as I have
already briefly described, is generally not symbolic-mystical but simply repre-
sentational—I would note further that in the early periods from which those
oldest tomb grottoes date, relief en creux was probably already known but
used only for specific purposes. Most of the pictures proper are in slight relief
or merely painted. There are also statues from this period that display more
movement, truth to nature, and a finer artistic spirit than those of the New
Kingdom. The forms in general are compact. Faces are by no means rendered
as types but have an almost inspired portrait likeness with inserted eyes of
rock crystal and onyx that are astonishing for their naturalness and life. The
most beautiful example of statuary from this period, a seated scribe found
not far from the so-called Serapeion or Apis tombs near Memphis, is in the
Egyptian section of the Louvre with other excellent sculpture from the Old
Kingdom. This figure, done in a reddish brown polychrome limestone similar
to Egyptian skin tones, is scarcely inferior to the plastic perfection of form
found in Aegina and is even vastly superior in its lively facial expression.
The Egyptian custom of using stucco to dress walls and all objects made of
stone and terra-cotta—and the polychrome decoration inseparably related to
it— was never entirely abandoned but continued to be used in a determined
fashion until the beginning of the New Kingdom. An example is the famous
royal family tree of Thutmose III, made of stucco and found in the addition he
made to the complex at Karnak.284
Well into the pharaonic period all tombs had wall decoration reminiscent
of the primeval motive on which they were based: the dressing of walls with
embroidered tapestry. Individual images were framed and provided with bor-
ders, as if they were fastened to the walls and not, as later, identified with
them. The lapidary temple style, in which the old motive was rendered in
stone and pictorial representation metamorphosed into wall writing, was

360
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

slow to find its way into the tomb grottoes, and it appears that this influence
of the theocratic hieroglyphic style dominant at the time remained confined,
even later, to the tombs of kings and members of the royal household. The
representations on these tombs, roughly from the time of Ramses V (fifteenth
century B.C.), dealt only with a death cult, the judgment of the dead, and life
after death, whereas private individuals and even high officials continued to
have their earthly treasures, joys, and relationships depicted on the walls of
their tombs according to ancient custom. But the way in which things were
portrayed could no longer escape the influence of the dominant artistic style.
Moreover, the old-style tomb ceilings were covered not with figures and sym-
bolic images but with motifs of a purely decorative nature that clearly derived
from embroidery and weaving. The same ornamental motifs also formed the
borders of the wall images discussed above. Here hieroglyphics could control
ornament no more than it could representational art. Instead, ornament
retained its primitive and simple structural meaning as a pattern, seam, hem,
and so on. These wall decorations in the old style are immaculate in composi-
tion and color, and they could be taken as models for Greek art, were they not
the common property of all peoples, who were effectively directed and led to
them by Nature herself (see plate 11).285
The hieratic pharaonic style replaced these wall decorations with symbolic
ornament, composed so to speak of a series of hieroglyphs that only rarely
make sense in a structural-symbolic way, and even then as if by chance or
instinct. Hathor masks are among these symbolic ornaments, as are rows of
uraeus snakes above the slab of a cavetto crown, nameplates of kings framed
with the sacred symbol of the snake, scarabs, and the like to the left and right.
Only a few of the original ornamental symbols are retained by the hieratic
hieroglyph style and these are seldom unchanged. For example, there is the
feather ornament on the cavetto, interspersed with nameplates, winged globes,
beheaded prisoners, and so on, designed in the manner of a triglyph. Then
there is the braided band of astragals that frames the walls, the lotus orna-
ment on the dark ground of the plinths of the building (which incidentally has
itself become hieroglyphic), and a few others.
There is a widespread misconception that the rigid hieratic Egyptian style
is something original, the swaddling clothes of art, the chains from which
Egypt was never able to free herself, from which an impulse toward free art
was nonetheless possible, a step first ventured by the Greeks. In fact, the
reverse is true.
This work of transforming things into stone was shaped by influences that
worked slowly over millennia. It was already well advanced by the time of the
Pyramids, and even on the most ancient monuments all that remains are
traces of a fresher art in the process of ossification— seemingly forever and
irretrievably the victim, even at this early developmental stage, of Typhon, the
petrifying demon of the desert. At this early stage it had features related to the
art that survived into later times in west Asia, which was also native to prehis-
toric Hellas, where it found a climate and soil favorable to full development.

361
 Semper

Greek art was not without Egyptian influence, or at least not without an
admixture of a hierarchic-Egyptian element that emerged upon Hellenic soil,
perhaps quite independently of Egypt, but threatening Greek art throughout
a period that was by no means its earliest. Fortunately, the Ionian spirit was
able to tame the petrifying aristocratic demon, enabling him to acquire a sense
of moderation and regularity that was not innate but was necessary for his
formal activity.

§ 76 Column Orders
The contrasting principles of early Egyptian and pharaonic art are even more
sharply evident in the columns and their loads, although, as noted, the earliest
surviving works of Egyptian art had already made the transition to the later
style.
Here I must refer back to previous remarks. It was shown earlier how the
so-called column order (the art-form of the supporting and supported parts of
the building) of west Asian art was mainly technical in origin. We derived the
column order from the principle of hollow construction, in which the static
function was gradually transferred from the original wooden core to its sur-
rounding sheathing. The core became superfluous as the metal sheathing itself
acquired sufficient strength to support and span. The order even retained this
hollow-body type after it had metamorphosed into the stone style. Its art-
form thus emerged simultaneously from the sheathing and the structure; the
two opposites are reconciled within it. The contrary is true of the pharaonic
Egyptian order. It came about through an intentional, fundamental separa-
tion of the sheathing art-form from the structure. The structure, the original
wooden core, is carefully kept separate from the sheathing. The latter has
nothing to support but need only dress and decorate — or rather, speak a sym-
bolic language whose meaning refers not to the work itself but to its purpose
and dedication. This motive is original and natural but in a stilted way, like all
the motives of the pharaonic style. Examples include the square wooden poles
of baldachins decorated with cane stems and papyrus rushes, like those some-
times seen beribboned and garlanded in the oldest representations of religious
festivals and celebrations.28¢ They were still used in the Ptolemaic period, as
we know from the descriptions of Alexander’s festival tent and the great Nile
barge cited earlier. The stone core of the structure towers above the chalice-
shaped crowning tuft of the cane tied together at the neck of the column; it
supports the smooth lintel, decorated only with rows of hieroglyphs. Because
the cane stems, as rods moving upward, permit a kind of structural activity,
they were later covered with a painted tapestry. Thus in structural terms they
were completely neutral and passive with respect to the sheathing, so that no
dynamic-symbolic ancillary concept at all could force its way into the tenden-
tiously hieratic meaning of this decorative sheathing and mar its intelligibility.
To my knowledge the first example of this is the magnificent double row of
triumphal columns leading into the second inner forecourt of the Temple of
Luxor, a work by Amenhotep III.287

362
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

In ancient Egypt this form was not used for monumental purposes, or at
least no traces from the Old Kingdom have survived. But we do find two
other columnar forms from this period. One contrasts absolutely with the
pharaonic calyx column. The second is, so to speak, the bud, the germ of the

iLal
ill ifr

?
Hii
Me

Columns with calyx-shaped capitals

latter; it is decidedly a transitional form. In the first, the so-called proto-Doric

order, it is clear the structural element alone gives the form. A tightly fluted,
tapered, occasionally drum-shaped shaft with slim, manly proportions sup-
ports an abacus—either directly (Beni Hasan)?88 or by means of a torus con-
nected to the shaft by several rings or straps. Perhaps the same priestly idea
that later produced the calyx column was seeking an equivalent, if antiphonal,
expression in these naked structural forms—the idea of using seemingly
primeval architectural motives to instill in the people a belief in the autochtho-
nous nature of the regime to which the monument belonged. They sought to
characterize the column as a slightly beveled (blunted at the corners) square
pilaster. Or perhaps the form had already become impoverished naturally, and
it really did date from the same artistic period as the stone-dressed earth mon-
uments and lattice facades executed in ashlar in the Memphis tombs. The
slightly beveled shaft with an abacus but no echinus would then be of more
recent stylistic origin than the same column with an echinus capital. It would
then be stylistically related, albeit distantly, to Asia’s tubular metal columns.

363
 Semper

In view of the contrast between the nakedness of these supports and the rela-
tive richness of the tripartite articulation of the entablature they support, we
are almost compelled to accept in this case that the formal impoverishment
was unintentional. Certainly the entablature of some proto-Doric tombs still
seems very primitive, as is the case at Giza, where it takes the form of a joist
projection. And yet other images in these tombs suggest an architrave with
cornice, drips, and a frieze. The corona seems to be missing; perhaps it
already took the form of the later cavetto.

Proto-Doric capital

Similar causes could yield very similar results in other places. A principle
of statehood that was related to the pharaonic one in some of its tenets arose
in Hellas and, with the proper political tact, immediately gave expression to
its institutions through monumental architecture on a grand scale. From
richer forms (the common property of all civilized peoples in antiquity in the
earliest times, as it were, and thus found to a similar degree in ancient Hellas
as in Old Kingdom Egypt or in Asia) there was a movement to simpler ones,
which established the basics of the Doric style without borrowing them from
models in Memphis. Even if they were borrowed, however, that does not
detract from the originality of what the Doric Greeks were able to do with
this allegedly borrowed motive.
The mean between the so-called proto-Doric shaft (whose fluted decora-
tion is visually appealing because it seems to express the dynamic function of
columns by illustrating their tautness and concentrated power of resistance)
and the column with the calyx capital (whose structural schema has nothing
in common with the decorative dressing) is the column with the lotus calyx
capital. There the invisible structural core supporting the abacus is, as with
the calyx column, sheathed with cane stems that grow into a natural entasis
around the base of the structural core, as though from a single leaf, and tied at
the top, under the crown of buds, by straps around the lotus blossoms. This is
an ornamental motive borrowed from the traditional headdress of Egyptian
women: lotus flowers that seem to be tied by straps and placed in between the
lotus calyxes of the capital, in order to enliven it and characterize it as a
head.?8? The same intention— purely decorative, not yet mystical-symbolic—
is betrayed by the polychrome decoration of the columns, which, at least in

364
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

Columns with lotus bud capitals

some of the oldest examples, consists of alternating blue, yellow, and green
rings of equal width around the shaft, as though it were made of differently
colored ashlar blocks. In its earliest appearance the cane bundle had only four
shafts (Beni Hasan); later the number rises to eight and then twelve (Soleb in
Nubia, Luxor). Finally, as in the later calyx column, the rings disappear alto-
gether behind a hieroglyphic covering that encloses the shaft along with the
capital. Only at the base does a light, painted reed decoration remain as the
last reminiscence of the veiled organism that has been transformed by pupa-
tion into a compact resisting mass (Hypostyle of Ramses II at Karnak; Temple
of Khons on the same site).
The characteristic feature of this column, whose stylistic history has been
very briefly presented here, is that its original cane sheathing does not remain
neutral and indifferent to the function of the column as a supporting member,
as happens with the calyx column, but rather all the vegetal lines and curves
that enliven it clearly express an elastic resistance to the weight and resulting
tension of the cube that rests on the flattened lotus buds. But the resistance of
the fragile lotus calyxes is not sufficient, and the aesthetic sense is only partly
satisfied by the presumption that there is a more solid core that the calyxes
surround only as extra support, as it were. Thus this form is not organically
independent since it cannot exist without the imagined inner pier. Nor is it
independent in the sense of being free of all mechanical activity, as in the case
of the column with a calyx capital, which unambiguously hands this function
over to the inanimate core.

365
 Semper

True to its inorganic architectural principles, pharaonic Egypt was thus

obliged either to drop this art-form completely or, by the means described
above, to deprive it of any trace of organic ambition—so as to turn its sheath-
ing into a broad field for symbolic representations and extensive hieroglyphic
writings.279
The deliberateness with which the pharaonic regime pursued the principle
of the full separation of the art-form from the structural core can be seen most
vividly in the placement of the wall statues in front of the completely unartic-
ulated and lifeless piers. Hellenic art sought to fuse spirit and matter as inti-
mately as possible; here these two elements are most decidedly divorced.
Like those pupated or mummified columns with bud capitals, all of the
walls follow the same principle and are, so to speak, completely wrapped in
tapestries. The stone core as such—namely, as structure —is not visible and
does no more than keep itself upright and stiff. Otherwise it is completely pas-
sive, for the stone ceiling it supports is not visible outside, whereas inside the
effect of its mass is negated by the painted dressing.
This structural core of the masonry is nothing other than the easel of the
sculpted, stucco-dressed, and polychrome partition wall, which serves both as
a termination to the room and as an enormous writing tablet. In fact this last
aspect could be seen as its chief purpose. In other respects the masonry, con-
sidered as a mass, still seems like an imitation in stone of the original Nile
brick construction in terms of its slope, its immoderate thickness, its lack of
articulation, and its lack of projecting parts. The ever present stucco cladding
also recalls this origin; without it, the ashlar structure, which is regular but
irregularly ordered, would be unattractively obtrusive and would make the
lines of the hieroglyphic writing indistinct. Not only were the sunken reliefs
prepared with fine stucco and then painted, but entire wall surfaces were
dressed with it and colored. This was noted by architects of the Expédition de
l’Egypte and has been confirmed by later travelers. Even where it is now
gleaming white the stucco shows traces of having been treated with a preser-
vative, a Bad [lit. “a dipping in dye”], a varnish coating that strengthened it
and that was usually colored.2%! The socle plates at the base of the walls are
black and painted with lotus and papyrus bushes. The main wall surfaces are
often dark in tone as well, like parts of the temple at Deir el-Bahri (Thebes),
which have polychrome images on a dark ground. Egyptian wall paintings on
a dark ground are not rare in European collections either. Generally, however,
the light ground dominates because of its legibility, for Egyptian polychromy
had ceased to serve the purpose of decoration and managed to allow the
meaning of what was represented to speak clearly, following the strict canon
of hieroglyphics. What was executed was no longer color music but color
rhetoric. Retaining the ancient and traditional sky blue color decorated with
stars for the ceilings did not run counter to these rules. The simple firmament
was enriched by a spreading pictorial script: with winged suns, colossal vul-
tures, zodiacs, and other, in part rather bizarre, astronomical symbols.
To sum up: the assertion of Herodotus cited at the beginning of § 75 is

366
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

correct with regard to the Egyptian style; it is the converse of other ancient
styles —in the sense that elsewhere the construction increasingly abandons the
core, becomes external, and visibly identifies with decoration, whereas in
Egypt the construction is pushed back to the core and has no direct relation to
the decoration, that is, to the art-form. This corresponds in a remarkable way
to a tendency visible in other works of art and in those applied arts that are
more independent of architecture. Beaten metalworks are rare, if anything of
significance can be found; instead we find solid wood and cast metal with a
fixed core. All utensils made of these materials, in contrast to those early
works of other peoples, are in the cast-metal style and of solid stick construc-
tion. Much that is pertinent about this has been noted in the chapters on the
Chaldean-Assyrian style of furniture.
Certain peculiarities of Egyptian polychromy — of the only examples to
have survived complete — will be discussed in later sections. There is, how-
ever, a particular technique whose influence on Hellenic encaustics seems to
me to be beyond doubt, and I must discuss it briefly to conclude this chapter.
This is enamel used on metal, the knowledge of which, for no apparent rea-
son, recent scholars have denied to the Egyptians. Pliny had in mind some-
times a transparent, sometimes an opaque enameled silverware when he says:
“The people of Egypt stain <tingit> their silver, so as to see their god Anubis
in their vessels; they do not engrave but paint the surface <pingitque, non cae-
lat, argentum>.”
292
In the 1820s a gold plate covered with a transparent purple enamel was
found near ancient Canopus.??3 Small gold figures with colorfully feathered
wings and other objects of gold and other metals whose surface has been
engraved and the hollows filled with liquid glass in a variety of colors to form
a polychrome gold-rimmed pattern or design—all these were nothing other
than enamels, in the so-called champlevé style. I have also seen decorative
objects that belong to so-called émaux cloisonnés, that is, thin gold threads
soldered to a metal surface with enamel filling the gaps. Thus Egypt produced
every kind of enamel work known to us and was famed and preeminent in
antiquity for this art, as for every other kind of glass manufacture. The
ancients called this form of fired painting encaustum. The wax encaustic on
Greek temples was merely a branch of this technique, and it inherited many of
its stylistic properties from metal encaustics and from terra-cotta encaustics,
both of which were older. More about this will follow later.
Finally, it is appropriate here to comment on the remarkable stone screens
found everywhere in Egypt where there are columns in antis [at the corners].
Enclosures for sacred animals were the first motive for these columnar
buildings, which were somewhat related to the Greek peripteros. Only later
were they associated with temple facades, the so-called propylaea, all of
which date from a later time.
In these layouts the screens, with their strange openwork door frames,
often surround the columns to three-quarters of their height, providing us
with a model for similar dispositions on Greek and Roman columnar facades.

367
 Semper

The destruction of these screens has led to a deep-rooted error, according to

which we view the ancient peripteral temple as if it were designed like a bird-
cage, with its intercolumniation open at the base. We will return to this erro-
neous notion later.

§ 77 Hellas; Asia Minor

We are approaching the final development of the principle that has concerned
us for so long.
Greek art could only have grown from the humus of many past social con-
ditions long since dead and decayed. Its elements and motives had to corre-
spond to the composite character of Hellenism in general, which appears so
clearly in other areas as well, such as Greek mythology. The last was an inde-
pendent poetic creation of later Hellenism, whose artistic formation we first
encounter in Homer and Hesiod. It was based, however, on a wasteland of
metaphysical and natural symbolic fragments fast becoming obsolete, joined
with historical traditions, foreign and indigenous articles of faith, legends,
and superstitions.
Just as the free poetry of the gods liberated itself from this bountiful chaos,
so the fine arts, as an illustration of the former, burst forth from the remnants
of older indigenous and imported motives. And just as the splendid marble
that gives shape to the coasts and cliffs of Greece — notwithstanding its homo-
geneous formation — betrays its sedimentary origin through veins, scattered
fossils, and other signs embedded in it, Hellenic art cannot deny its secondary
origin. It too reveals to the observer all the deposits that form its material
basis but that, in a great metamorphosis of a whole people, rushed together
from their sedimentary conditions into a crystal-clear homogeneity.
We have to consider the traces of earlier artistic conditions in Greece and
in other artistically related countries whose conditions preceded the Hellenic
proper, if we are to understand certain events in Greek art that are for us no
longer explicable otherwise or that often seem contradictory owing to both the
destruction of monuments and our lack of an encompassing view of their art.
Among the countries that contain such traces, Asia Minor is the first to
claim our attention. It is, as it were, the kettle in which most of the composite
material that later gave rise to noble Hellenic art was mixed.2%4
How it happened is unclear. Perhaps Asia Minor was still wrestling with
earthly forces, the powerful signs of which are strikingly clear in later histori-
cal periods, while in Mesopotamia and the Nile valley dense populations had
already formed themselves into states, quarreling over this adopted homeland
that had scarcely been wrested from nature and leaving behind monumental
traces of their migrations. Or perhaps the remnants and evidence of many
older social conditions now largely foreign to us will prove that this was the
earliest seat of the human race, an opinion that Herodotus says was shared by
the Egyptians, who were otherwise proud of their antiquity. In any case the
most varied elements of the oldest civilizations were deposited in Asia Minor.
As a result, a mixture of forms emerged in Asia Minor. Some negate each

368
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

other in blunt contrasts while clinging to certain types of architecture with

great naiveté and determination; others combine to form composites that
develop this character in unique ways.
Among the most remarkable monuments of the first kind are the walls and
stone tumuli of old Tantalus’s city at Sipylus, and the even more ancient, still
uninvestigated grave mounds at Sardis. They include the Tomb of Alyattes
mentioned by Herodotus, which was 1300 feet in diameter and had five
memorials on its peak. Even now the earth mound is over 250 feet high.295
The ancient Chaldean building principle—the construction of massive
foundation structures with the aid of intersecting walls filled with rubble, and
the incrustation of the poor material exteriors with a stone dressing —can be
seen in these works. The only difference is that, instead of the earth filling
of Chaldea, there is a harder filling of broken stone and mortar, such as the
Romans were later to find so convenient for their huge, rapidly constructed
buildings. In their forms too these pyramidal tumuli in Lydia are also central
Asian.
Quite different in building type and character from these presumably
Lydian structures are the cyclopean walls of the ancient Leleges, which were
assembled from massive polygonal stones. They are perhaps a remnant of a
building style originally indigenous to Asia Minor, which spread from here to
Greece and Italy; at least nothing of the kind is found in central Asia or in
Egypt. As they will be discussed in the section on masonry, I will only add
here that they do not belong to the art of building proper but are ramparts
and substructures, and as such they were intended only to protect and sup-
port. Thus we must not judge the style to which they belong by their massive-
ness. Rather we will see that those so-called cyclopean walls provided scope
for the most lavish and delicate ornament. Already on such Asian works one
occasionally finds clear traces of a metal dressing, behind which the irregular
joints of the blocks of rock long ago disappeared. Because of these metal outer
walls, they were called adamantine, that is, steel or bronze walls. Some
accounts of Babylon’s ramparts even say that they were partly dressed with
metal in the same way. If this was perhaps not true of distant Babylon, that
does not mean these tales should be shrugged off as fable, given the clear evi-
dence of the sort I have mentioned.
The main seat of this cyclopean style seems to have been Caria, where per-
haps the most ancient remains of this kind are found near Calynda. The
polygonal walls near Iasus on the coast of Caria are more regular, and so are
a few others in neighboring Lycia. Other polygonal works, together with
the most remarkable rock sculptures, may be the work of Carian builders—
perhaps the remains of ancient Pteria or those of Tavium on the border of
Armenia. They have decorated parts, such as doorposts, featuring eagles with
human heads and lions’ feet, and other details reminiscent of central Asia.
The tombs of Phrygian rulers in the vicinity of Nikoleia, which are almost
colossal tapestry walls hewn in rock, present a striking contrast to these
Lydian royal tombs. Evidently they were once stuccoed and richly adorned

869
 Semper

with paint and gilding. Nowhere is the original type of dressing as facade dec-
oration expressed in a style more naive or more realistically direct than in
these Lydian rock tombs. The most famous of them, the so-called Tomb of
Midas, is shown here as an example.

|
io)
mm

Tomb of Midas

In other such tomb facades only the frames and crowns were decorated
with sculpture. The enclosed field is smooth but certainly once had painted
decorations. Still other examples have a more composite form and are there-
fore probably later.
The people of Lycia must have been quite different from the Phrygian,
Carian, and Lydian tribes. In their tomb monuments, at least, the Lycians
clung to a decorative principle that was certainly extremely ancient and
derived from timber construction. Yet the very people who constructed their
tombs in this style lived in stone houses of polygonal masonry. We know this
because many of these buildings were so solidly built that they are still stand-
ing —from who knows what earlier time. The highly remarkable relief panels
that decorate some of the rock tombs, moreover, give perspective views of
whole towns and their suburbs. The houses and monuments shown are quite
definitely in a stone style; some even have domes. And on the same relief pan-
els, alongside these stone buildings, one can discern representations of the
aforementioned memorials done in a timber style. Thus they are not copies of
a timber architecture peculiar to the Lycians but, as I have already stated in
my excursus on ancient tapestry, most probably monumental funeral pyres
translated into stone. The oldest monuments of this kind were the freestand-
ing sarcophagus supports. Later this traditional decoration, sanctioned as a
type, was used on rock tomb facades, though by then it had lost its meaning
because a different method of interment had come into use. So another motive

370
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

was substituted for it, one more or less clearly modeled on a frame wall with a
protruding rafter cover. On these monuments, that is, on the sarcophagus
supports as well as on the rock facades, the tapestry dressing, as has been
shown earlier, is clearly a curtain for the spaces within the timber framework.
The original polychromy has survived with a rare freshness otherwise found
only in Egypt. The entire surface of these sculptures appears to have been
painted. The bare parts of the figures have a conventional flesh tone, and the
color of the hair and eyes and the redness of the cheeks are indicated in a nat-
ural way.2%6
Above these monuments are other rock facades that reproduce the same
motive in fully developed columnar architecture. Here Hellenic influence
is said to have been at work again, although the so-called Ionic style seen
here quite definitely hails from western Asia.297 Anyone who examines and
compares the two styles on the same facade side by side—the so-called log-
cabin style and the column style — will see clearly that a transition from timber
construction to column architecture proper would not have been possible
without an intermediate stage. The timber style must have been modified by a
prior change in material and could have evolved from this change to the stone
style only through the mediation of a second change in material.
The intermediate stage to which I refer here can be easily surmised from
what was said earlier, but for the moment nothing should be emphasized
other than the evidence visible on Lycian monuments — the impossibility of an
unmediated transition from utilitarian construction to lapidary columnar
architecture. No more do I share the view that the column, this organic
growth, was gradually chiseled out of the rigid and lifeless rock pier: first into
a square, then an eight-, a sixteen-, and finally a thirty-two-cornered column
to open up the space. This opinion, espoused by [Ludwig] Ross??8 and the
Egypto-Dorians, contradicts the physis, the principle of creation and growth
expressed in the column and what it supports. This fantasy about the genesis
of the Doric fluted column is shown to be untenable by its earliest (alleged)
occurrence in the tombs of Beni Hasan, where it is associated with an archi-
trave constructed in wood (that is, with an imitation of the same hewn out
of the rock).
But let us turn next to some other more or less fossilized remains of human
work found in Asia Minor, no less characteristic yet totally different.
The Doric style, too, has more or less prehistoric representatives here. Like
those of the Ionic, they show unmistakable signs of being older than the earli-
est specimens of the same style on Hellenic soil proper. At least one such
example has already been discovered, which undoubtedly has this privilege of
supreme originality of style. It could be used in an architectural museum to
open the rubric “Doric Style,” to be emphasized and illuminated in the best
possible way. Instead, the most recent and most widely distributed German
textbook on architectural history dispenses with this fragment in twenty-three
lines. The author of this work justifies this cursory treatment by alluding to
the restoration by Texier, its discoverer, which the author considers arbitrary.

37 ll
 Semper

But even if this conclusion were fully warranted, such things could only be
assigned their place within the established system of our art physiologists as a
curiosity, a monstrosity —and this was the way he chose. Anyone who is not
concerned with this system, however, is entitled to take the matter more seri-
ously and to choose this remarkable Doric architrave of the temple on the
acropolis of Assos on the Aeolian coast of Asia Minor, with its ancient sculp-
tures, as a lever or fulcrum that will facilitate a major leap toward the ulti-
mate goal.
These sculptures are highly unusual both in terms of their placement and
in terms of their character and what they represent. First, let us address the
remarkable friezelike treatment of a building member that clearly presents
itself as a Doric epistyle— because of its taenia and the slabs below (without
guttae, to be sure) the divided triglyphs. Kugler, probably thinking of the
sculptures placed in front of Egyptian epistyles, hears it as “an echoed remi-
niscence of Egyptian treatment.”2%? But here especially Egyptian epistyles
adhere in dimension and character most strictly to the limits of writing and
never stray into the realm of representation, except in the walls and column
bellies of the middle pharaonic style. It is far more relevant to compare this
Doric architrave with its caelaturae [relief] decorations to the architraves on
the royal tombs at Persepolis and Naksh-i-Rustam, which also have sculptures
running around them whose motifs correspond in part with those on the
Assos architrave — namely, animal fights and animal symbols. The architrave
beams? of Assyrian monuments were probably decorated in the same way —
an assumption based equally on ancient reports and on what is seen today,
especially on the remnants of stucco painting and on the embroidered gar-
ments of relief figures found on beamlike terminations and crowning edges.
Several other items demand attention in this context. First, the famed, very
ancient, so-called Harpy Tomb that stands on the acropolis of Xanthus next
to the theater. The friezelike crown, which certainly doubled as a sarcopha-
gus, directly supports the hanging panel of the cornice. Next is the so-called
Harpagus Monument, which is no less remarkable and is lavishly decorated
with friezes, though to the best of my knowledge no trace of an architrave has
been found. Here again both frieze and architrave may have formed a single
unit around the cella both externally and internally. Finally, there are a num-
ber of friezelike relief panels, some provided with an epikranon [capital] (with
a continuous taenia), that Sir C[harles] Fellows cut out of the walls of
Xanthus and brought to London along with all these other objects. These too
I believe to be epistyles, at least in part, and I recognize in their pictorial
themes the greatest similarity, on the one hand, with the already much dis-
cussed animal friezes of inner Asia and, on the other hand, with the reliefs of
Assos, except that the latter are executed much more coarsely in black lava
and are in the older style. One such frieze represents satyrs, a lion tearing a
doe to pieces, panthers, dogs, bulls, and boars. A smaller one in the same style
shows cocks and hens in the most faithful and yet stylistically correct imita-
tion of nature. Still other such fragments are in a similar Asiatic style.

Sii2
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

a_i
eal

LO RED miNG VX cs

Entablature of the temple at Assos

All these analogies and examples convince us of the Asiatic derivation and
the wide distribution in Asia Minor of the motive under discussion, but they
alone do not yet address its actual stylistic meaning and origin. These I believe
can be understood by comparing the Assos sculptures with certain Etruscan
reliefs in beaten metal, clay, and stone, with which they show a remarkable
similarity, both in what is depicted and in the way it is done. Here I will first
mention the remnants of battle chariots and other luxury objects found in
Perugia and other places, consisting of sheets of beaten metalwork on a
wooden ground. They are distributed among various museums; the best
known of them, on which I focus here, are in Perugia, Munich, and the British
Museum. Their style is very ancient; the compartments of the metal covering
are separated by decorated seams and filled with winged creatures with
human faces, fighting animals, youths with swans, gorgons, and often the fish
god Oannes or Melicertes. Not only do these images in very low relief have
the qualities typical of ancient Asiatic art, but also the objects— for example,
the fish people and the sphinxes —are identical in every detail with those
of the epistyle at Assos. The only difference is that the Hellenic sculptor did
not know the fish god Oannes should be inactive and thus gave him something
to do, made up a story for him, and turned him into a polymorphic Proteus.
Other bronze pieces and friezes depict banquets and centaurs just as is done on
the temple, and exactly the same forms are to be found on the panels of certain
stone doors that sealed Etruscan tombs. When I was in Corneto | saw several

SIZ8
 Semper

lying around on the necropolis of ancient Tarquinii, exposed to every mutila-

tion. This sketch, which I recorded in my sketchbook at the time, shows one
of these fragments.

Etruscan door

No one doubts for a moment that the bronze-studded wooden doors of

Etruscan houses and temples were the models for these stone doors. And it is
equally certain that the architrave at Assos was modeled on those Lycian
epistyles, whose sculptures, as was shown, were almost identical to their
Etruscan counterparts in character and treatment and even in their subject
matter. It is equally certain that these are products of sphyrelaton metamor-
phosed into stone. Without the power of this comparison with the tomb
doors of Corneto it would have been difficult to prove convincingly this influ-
ence of metal technology on the formal and decorative nature of one of the
most important components of the Hellenic style. This is why I felt it neces-
sary to dwell for so long on these antiquities, the artistic value of which is oth-
erwise insignificant. For I wish to establish as a fact that the direct model or
motive for the Hellenic columnar style was not the wood utility building, and
that this columnar style did not spring from stone construction as Athena,
perfect and fully armed, sprang from the head of Zeus (as Carl Botticher
would have it). It was, in fact, long prefigured by the ancient Asiatic encrusted
pegma, or more correctly, by the pegma with tubular elements. Something
that is almost self-explanatory in statuary art and probably no longer doubted
by anyone is the transition from the timber style through the metal style and
then to the stone style—the latter happened only after the fiftieth olympiad.
The same is literally true for architecture. Just as marble statuary continued to
retain something of the style of archaic sphyrelaton colossi, though it no
longer bore any sign of having evolved from the Daedalic figurine, so the
stone temple revealed a dynamic principle that found its full justification only
in hollow-body construction. I will show how the Hellenes, having achieved
full consciousness in its pursuit of absolute formal beauty, did not grasp this
structural idea realistically but in a higher sense.

374
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

According to Vitruvius, the Hellenic colonists of Asia Minor, driven out by

the Dorians and lacking their own architectural style, built their national tem-
ple to Panionian Apollo in the Doric style, using as a model the Temple of
Hera in Argos built by Dorus but with slighter proportions. Only later did
they acquire the Ionic style. Therefore, the temple at Assos probably dates
from this early period of Greek emigration. Still, Vitruvius is not to be trusted
in these matters, and moreover, several Doric colonies had settled into this
part of Asia Minor near the temple at Assos, and they adhered for a long time
to their Doric customs. Who, finally, can be so sure that this temple, with its
chaotic mixture of constructional and pictorial motives, is not a genuinely
Asiatic work? Other examples of hybrids of the styles later called Doric and
Ionic, enriched with barbarian elements that were rejected in purified Hellenic
art, are plentiful. They are not from a late period of decline but are among the
very oldest objects in which any of the elements of Greek architecture occur.
They are well suited to complicating our acquired academic notions about the
genesis of the Greek orders. Who, for example, built the rock tower in the
Kidron valley near Jerusalem that, according to the oldest annals, was called
the Tomb of Absalom? We know from the Second Book of Samuel (Josephus
confirms it) that Absalom, the son of David, had a monument erected to him-
self during his lifetime two stadia from the city in the Kidron valley. We know
of no work of such importance that might have been built during the time of
the Diadochi or the Romans.?°! This may therefore be the oldest surviving
monument after the Egyptian ones. The Doric architrave and triglyph frieze
are mixed with Ionic columns, and an Assyrian-Egyptian cavetto is joined
with a Doric pediment. Other tombs in Palestine show the same or similar
combinations and at least some were probably built, or rather carved out of
the rock, before the Babylonian captivity. In the necropolis of Cyrene, too,
Ionic columns of a primitive Asiatic form are joined with a Doric frieze and
gable. Etruscan rock tombs show similar features, as does the relatively
ancient, so-called Monument of Theron in Agrigento, the small Corinthian-
Doric temple at Paestum, and the heroon in Selinus restored by Hittorff. A
mixture of Doric, Ionic, and barbarian parts is also found on temples, foun-
tains, houses, and tombs depicted on Greek painted vases of the middle
period. I would also count among these archaic hybrids the lone standing col-
umn of the Temple of Hera at Samos, which could just as well be called Doric
as Ionic, for the only remaining fragment of its capital has an enormous egg-
and-dart echinus and there is nothing to prove that it ever bore an Ionic
volute. The old Heraeum was built around the fortieth olympiad by Rhoecus
and Theodorus and is described as a Doric monument; Polycrates never
restored it and thus transformed it into the Ionic style, as O[tfried] Miiller has
tried to persuade himself. History’s silence on an event as important as the
destruction of Greece’s greatest national temple and its reconstruction in a
different architectural style points to the baselessness of this claim. Thus it
follows that the column in Samos, despite its curious trochilus under the spira
of the base, was Doric to the Greeks of the time!

375
 Semper

The orders, then, are nothing more than the organizational work of the
spirit, which introduced an ordering division into this chaos.

§ 78 Greece Proper: General Observations

But let us now turn to Greece proper! Here too we encounter a number of rid-
dles of early Hellenic architecture that bear much on our theme (the dressing
principle as a formal element in architecture).
First to be mentioned here are the ancient castles and Pelasgian works. The
most famous and earliest of these are found around the Gulf of Argolis: the
labyrinthine substructures at Nauplia, as well as the walls of Tiryns and Argos.
They were initially intended to be what they have since become again: colos-
sal stone pens, places of refuge for herds and people against predators —the
beginnings of an urban community for Hellas. Next at Mycenae, the seat of
the Lydian dynastic house of the Atrides, there is the remarkable Lions Gate
(about which already too much has been said and blathered) and above all the
bronze-studded tholos of Agamemnon, the only Pelasgian building whose
architectural decoration still survives, at least in fragments! These are valu-
able relics — without them everything that Homer sings to us (with complete
accuracy and without exaggeration) about the richness of palaces and halls
encrusted with metal and stones would seem to be only a poet’s idle fantasy.
They cannot be argued away. They show the heroic primeval braid in its
full bloom and glory, directly preceding the apparently natural and original
simplicity of the Doric style!
Now what are these marble column shafts with their generally decorative
covers and slightly depressed, slightly raised zigzag and spiral ornament, with
their similarly decorated deeply undercut bases, what are these other than
metal columns executed in marble —in other words, columns in beaten metal?

Mycenaean building decoration in stone

The same ornamental principle can be seen in all early beaten metalwork by
the whole European and Asian human family, wherever metalwork is found:
from Celts and Germans to Assyrians and Phoenicians. It was also the most
authentic legacy and family trait of all Indo-Germanic pottery until the inven-
tion of the potter’s wheel, which caused both a formal and an ornamental rev-
olution everywhere it was introduced.3°2 Ornament was now no longer plastic
and this affected architecture. The Romans, as I will show, remained true to
the old plastic ornaments, even after the introduction of the potter’s wheel,
transforming them according to the means at hand. This tradition is also

376
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

STU
CO
RA AU

= Z V4
a

Mycenaean pottery shards

expressed in Roman architecture, in contrast to that of Greece. Like the

columns, the green, white, and red marble panels that ran as antepagments
(door surrounds) in multiple strips around the doors of the monument of the
Atrides are lavishly decorated, or rather fully covered, with shields, wavy
lines, clasps, and rosettes.3%
Everywhere the dressing principle is the same; only the materials are dif-
ferent. The most durable materials —stone and terra-cotta—survived, while
the ephemeral materials disappeared, and thus for the “prudent” were never
there. But fortunately a few nails and some pieces of the bronze dressing that
covered the whole monument (even the exterior parts that were above grade)
have survived. The tholos was covered with rich caelaturae in the style of the
stone slabs of the door surrounds.
The temple at Assos gave us an opportunity to observe how the early style
represents the epistyle in such a way that the structures appear to be sur-
rounded with an antepagment of beaten metal. Now in our Mycenaean treas-
ury the column too appears unmistakably as sphyrelaton, as beaten metal
inlaid with precious stones—or at least a sculptural imitation of that. The
door frame is also a pegma, which, incidentally, it remained throughout the
classical Greek period; the same is true of the crowning cornice, which is con-
sistent with what Vitruvius tells us of the wooden beam heads of the Tuscan
temple. It was sheathed with boards, stucco, metal, or terra-cotta. Thus every-
thing that supported and was supported—and equally the space-enclosing
member, the wall—was necessarily treated in fuller detail, was made more
ceremonial and more decorative than would otherwise have been necessary or
permissible if the supporting core hidden under these dressings had been con-
ceived of by the architect as an exterior, form-giving idea.3%
These phenomena are already familiar to us from Asia, but they appear
even more strikingly here and, as it were, touch directly our own architectural
traditions.35
In fact, Hellenic art up to this point offers nothing new—simply the old
barbarian elements, partly borrowed and no longer understood, including the
already familiar Asian ones, probably inherited through tribal relations. But

SG
 Semper

here, in a confused mixture that follows no laws, they are handled with weaker
artistic skills and at times with poor understanding. A richer being —the “art-
work of the future” —is revealed only in a figurative decoration that is moti-
vated more from without than enlivened from within; it starts getting bored
with its subordinate role as objective representation (which in any case no
longer has meaning, because it is no longer understood), and for its amuse-
ment begins to fidget and run about in a highly subjective way.
We recognize this sign of an awakened life most easily in figurative work.
The attentive observer, however, will not have missed the traces of simultane-
ous and analogous stirrings in the components of the work that were actually
architectural and ornamental! Where did this newly stimulated life lead? We
cannot pursue its more general tendency here. Let us therefore ask what hap-
pened to our principle of dressing, which retained such an important and
thoroughly realistic significance in the barbarian styles we discussed? What
became of this principle after the completion of the great metamorphosis
from which a new Hellenic art emerged?
Two antitheses were found: the west Asian architectural style (Chaldeo-
Assyrian) and the architectural style of pharaonic Egypt. These contrasts
manifested themselves (as will be shown in part 2 of this work) in the most
general conditions of emergence and growth of architectural works of these
two countries, and therefore also in the way their masses appeared. They
appear no less distinctively in our present topic.
In the later, fully developed Chaldeo-Assyrian architecture the dressing
was both a constructional and an ornamental principle. The only fixed thing
on the building was its crust (and purely technical procedures connected with
dressing and encrusting, like weaving, hemming, sewing, embroidery, inlay-
ing, riveting, creasing, soldering, jointing, and folding crusts), which together
with a few structural elements (such as those that appear on the head and
base of the gable columns and on furniture, as discussed above) generated the
architectural artistic scheme and even the ornament, which only becomes or
can become symbolic along with it. The dressing appears here in a purely
technical and realistic way as form-giving; the result is hollow-body construc-
tion in the true material sense of the word.
The Egyptian style, by contrast, did not want the dressing to be linked in
any way with the structural idea, and yet the latter came to absorb the dress-
ing. The structure became massive stone. The dressing was carved into it but
retained its own, one might say, antistructural essence, as a result of its osten-
sible conceptual detachment from a structure with which it is in fact one.
Without a doubt, both conceptions not only were justified but also had a
profound symbolic significance that resulted from the contrasting cultural
ideas of these countries and that helped to articulate them. But we cannot dis-
cuss this further here.
The Hellenic temple was built in accordance with the Egyptian principle
but in a more developed way: as perfect isodomic masonry outfitted (4okntov)
according to the Asiatic principle of incrustation, understood in the higher

378
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

structural-symbolic sense. Through this combination the incrustation was

freed of material service; it appeared only as a carrier of the formal idea, while
at the same time emancipating the latter from the building material by hiding
the joints in the stone. Thus form is explained only in terms of itself and by the
organic idea contained within it, as happens with a living creature. We do not
ask what material the creature is made of, even though the quality and quan-
tity of materials are crucial conditions of existence and profoundly affect it.
Therefore the Greek architectural style did not draw a distinction between
the “core schema” and “art schema,” a distinction that unmistakably contains
a slavish tendency to Egyptianization. Professor Botticher —and let this be said
with all regard for his learning, taste, and acumen — was inspired by Hermes
Trismegistus, who was also the guiding spirit of Pythagoras when he wrote his
exegesis on Hellenic temples.
The figure column (caryatid) was for Greece what the pier statue was for
Egypt— namely, the expressive limit of the architectural principle of each
country. The difference between them cannot be defined more succinctly or
more comprehensibly than by comparing these two opposites!
The Hellenic principle obviously had to be based on formal traditions that
favored masking the material construction. It could never have arisen without
these traditions — for instance, on pure speculation—and these traditions
were Asiatic!
It was merely a matter of transforming the forms of the Asiatic construc-
tion of the dressing that were based on mechanical necessity into dynamic,
even organic, forms, a matter of endowing them with a soul. Anything that
had no morphological purpose, anything that was foreign or opposed to the
purely formal idea, had to be excluded or removed to a neutral ground. In
reviewing what existed previously —and in animating it—the act of creation
did not reside in inventing new types, which would have remained incompre-
hensible to the masses or had a chilling effect.3°
This new style had to avoid all unnecessary references to weight and iner-
tia of masses, and so it banished the arch from the store of art-forms. It used
the attributes of mass only to emphasize precisely the activity and life of the
organic members. In short, it emancipated form from the material and from
naked need.
As part of this trend the Hellenic architectural principle had to vindicate
and nurture color as the subtlest and most incorporeal dressing. This was the
most perfect means to dispose of reality, for while it dressed the material it
was itself immaterial. It also corresponded in other regards to the freer ten-
dencies of Hellenic art.
Polychromy replaced the barbarian dressing with precious metals, and
incrustations with the precious stones, paneling, and other ornamental acces-
sories with which Asiatic work was so extravagantly outfitted.
This is already clear from the contrast between barbarian and Hellenic art
outlined above. It is fully confirmed by things we can still see on the remains
of monuments, and not least by the reports of the ancients themselves.

379
 Semper

§79 The Old Hellenic Style

Even though this new artistic approach should not be viewed as a continua-
tion of preexisting conditions but rather as a result of a new spirit that created
its own formal expression out of this earlier material, the process needed time
and transitional stages to come to completion. Also, some reminiscences of
pre-Hellenic times retained both their symbolic and real validity into later
times, even after the new style was fully developed. Thus, for instance, the old
architectural principle based on dressing and paneling a structure persisted
through all stylistic periods in the frieze, in relief panels of the metopes, in the
panel-like construction of the pedimental tympanum, and most particularly in
the paneling of the lower, inner, and outer walls of the cella—in a style all but
true to the Assyrian tradition. Such panels inserted into isodomic masonry
did not actually correspond to the general principle of construction expressed
in the old Hellenic isodom but merely filled spaces that represented resting
points in the construction. They were, in principle, altogether foreign to the
structure and could therefore retain their place there as representatives of the
old tradition without obtruding. Other such reminiscences and traditional
forms survived, and they will be discussed in a more suitable place. Here I
simply wished to illuminate my remarks by means of a few examples.
The actual mediators between the old and the new were the two ancient
and traditional dressing materials: stucco and terra-cotta. Both were used on
archaic temples in combination with wood and brick construction —that is,
mortar generally as a dressing for masonry walls, terra-cotta for woodwork.
Both the exterior wooden entablature and the interior ceilings were com-
pletely covered with richly ornamented terra-cotta panels. We know this from
the description given by Vitruvius of a Tuscan temple, the execution of which
was certainly not very different from that of ancient Greek works. Pliny also
provides us with some reports about ancient Roman temples executed in
brick and wood, to which extravagant terra-cotta decorations were applied.
Where texts leave us in the dark on this question, however, all doubt is
removed by numerous surviving fragments of such dressings. Such evidence
was found beneath the ancient terrace of the Parthenon—namely, the terra-
cotta that had dressed the old Hecatompedon. The duke of Luynes found sim-
ilar fragments under the rubble of a temple at Metapontum. Sicily’s museums
are rich in terra-cotta of this kind, including painted panels that dressed the
interior walls and the area between the joists of the coffered ceiling —a func-
tion later filled by stone panels. In the vicinity of Cortona and Perugia, tombs
have been discovered that were paneled with terra-cotta or slate and then
painted.3°7 Similar things were found in Ardea.
All this leaves open the question of how in ancient times the terra-cotta
dressed woodwork of the epistyle and ceiling harmonized with the wooden
supporting members (columns). For my part I do not doubt that archaic tim-
ber columns had a dressing much like that of the ceiling. Italian antiquities,
which long retained their Greco-Italic artistic motives, demonstrate this.
Fragments of capitals and column dressings in baked clay were found in

380
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

Terra-cotta column capital, Sicily

Pompeii and Sicily, although to the best of my knowledge these were Corin-
thian and not Doric. Stone Corinthian capitals have also been found from
republican times with reminiscences of the old style. These are definitely in
the ceramic style and betray their stylistic origin in this technique, which, as is
well known, flourished in Corinth from the earliest times.3°8 I should like to
call the Corinthian order the most typically ceramic one. By saying this I am
also denying the Jate origin of the Corinthian order, which I hold to be as old
as the oldest order—the Doric. Further support for this view will be given
shortly. Beforehand I would like to give my observations and interpretations
of the ancient reports on wooden column orders. First there is Pausanias’s
account of the timber column of the Heraeum in the temple precinct at
Olympia, placed among other stone columns of this temple that were cer-
tainly dressed with stucco. Then he mentions the column surrounded by a
protective building that was considered to be the reliquary of the palace of the
hero Oinomaos, the monument of Oxylus at Elis (whose roof was supported
on oak columns), and the shrine of Poseidon Hippias near Mantinea.3°9
Finally, there are the vinewood columns of the temple at Metapontum men-
tioned by Pliny ([Historia naturalis| 14.2). At the time of Pausanias and Pliny
these remnants had survived for over a thousand years; in the open air they
could have done so only with the protection of a dressing. The latter was not
mentioned because the ancients, when describing monuments, always empha-
sized the inner material, the core, as the most noteworthy feature (a singular-
ity that is only apparently in contradiction with the negation of the material
as such in art). It was not mentioned because it was, as it were, self-evident.
The material was negated only in a particular sense —namely, in its material
appearance as such, in its specific naturalness and color, which were not used
as decoration. At the same time, in order to cause the material to be forgotten,
one had, in giving it form, to take its properties completely into account. Thus
the material became, as it were, the key to understanding form, and when
explaining an art-form it was quite rightly noted before anything else pre-
cisely because it was hidden.

381
 Semper

When it was not a heroic metal incrustation, such dressing was sometimes
stucco and sometimes fired clay (terra-cotta) with a stucco coating! The last
addition, the stucco, was never omitted, and it covered the clay panels or
terra-cotta whenever they were used. This permits us to emphasize the remark-
able reciprocity between the developmental history of ceramics among the
Greco-Italic peoples and the stylistic history of their architecture. This point is

Early Doric capitals alongside examples from the developed period

382
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

so important that I am obliged to postpone the treatment of some of the most

important issues of polychromy in ancient art until chapter 6, which concerns
the history of ancient ceramics.
There I will explain how the oldest monuments of Greek temple art, related
to heroic architecture in certain respects, still carry the mark of the earliest
ceramics —namely, plastically decorated pottery before the invention of the
potter’s wheel, or at least before the general spread of the style of pottery
introduced by this tool.
The principle of their decoration is still a plastic polychromy—a laxer,
more lavish, more luxuriant approach than that of the later Doric art. It is a
delusion to view the simple, taut forms of the Doric style, which were deco-
rated only by painting, as older and more primitive than the plastic pictorial
decoration rejected by the Doric style but retained by the Ionic and later
adopted again by the Diadochi and Romans. This false belief is fostered and
spread with the most fervent piety by the leading advocates of popular
instruction in art history. The swelling profile of the echinus with its fluting
terminating in a reed leaf, the pearl bars in the hypotrachelium [neck] of the
columns on the very ancient temple at Kardaki on Corfu, as well as the other
undeveloped and plastically overladen forms of that temple, similar features
on the Temple of Demeter and the so-called basilica at Paestum—these pecu-
liarities and many other remnants and fragments of a plastically decorated
and lavishly swollen Doric style are ascribed to the first century B.C. or even
later, or unhesitatingly described as an Asiatic or barbarian mix of forms. But
they are unquestionably (sometimes in reality, sometimes in archaic imitation)
the older forms. Their earlier, more primitive style should be emphatically
stressed, without regard to the date of their construction, which is in any case
difficult to establish.3!°
The dressing material mentioned above in conjunction with terra-cotta—
namely, stucco—should perhaps have been discussed earlier, at least with
regard to the age of its use. It must have preceded fired clay, as the latter never
appears without a stucco dressing. The stucco dressing (koviaotc [plastering],
dealbatio [whitewashing], expolitio [embellishing; fresco work], opus tecto-
rium [stucco work]) has already been described above as one of the earliest
technical traditions, the legacy of all peoples of the old world and even the
new. It is so closely bound with the developmental history of the Hellenic and
indeed all of the Greco-Italic architectural styles that I think I will have to
return to it in some detail. Among the many erroneous views that dominate
the archaeology of art is the belief that the custom of dressing building mate-
rials with stucco (or mortar) resulted solely from an intent to conceal imper-
fections, roughness, or other material flaws, or to give them greater durability,
and perhaps even to imitate a better material—for instance, white marble.
One need only reverse this fanciful explanation to be correct. Stucco plaster
was the ancient, traditional representative of wall dressing as an architectural-
spatial element, and in the most ancient technical tradition it was at the same
time the indispensable ground for painting. For this reason the preferred

383
 Semper

materials were porous stones, tufa, brick, terra-cotta—in short, the materials
best suited to retain stucco in the most durable way.?!!
For the ancients beautiful white stucco was the prime requisite for fine
execution. The success of the all-important color decoration depended entirely
on it; color was conceived and mentioned always and everywhere as insepara-
ble from the koniasis [plastering]. Thus [Raffaele] Maffei’s Fasti has “expolien-
dum et pingendum” [polishing and painting].3!2 Thus Swidas explains the
word kovidtat — plasterers — with the remark “those who color walls” (ot Tove
Tolxous Trapaxpiovtec). In an Antian inscription the stucco worker is listed
next to the painter. In another inscription the architect of a museion (a sump-
tuous room decorated with mosaic) is named alongside the stucco worker.3¥
The evangelist’s “whitewashed” sepulchers are to be understood as nothing
other than painted. The seventh book of Vitruvius makes so many unambig-
uous references to the inseparability of expolitio and dealbatio from poly-
chromy that I should have to quote it here almost from beginning to end.3!4
Raoul-Rochette, [Heinrich Nicolaus] Ulrichs, Kugler, and other opponents
of polychromy ignore these passages and insist on interpreting tectorium opus
and dealbatio literally as whitewashing and politio as polishing in the modern
sense of this word.34 Based on the occasional use of the term dealbatio, these
scholars impute to the Greeks and Romans something only the latter could
have done, and only in a late period at that—namely, that they really white-
washed their temples and monuments from time to time. Thus these same
masters of classical taste must also concede the palm of white classicism to
our fathers, who with their wall brushes and pails of whitewash waged a cruel
and unfortunately most effective war against medieval polychromy.
Only a more correct understanding of ancient works and their artistic
expressions protects them from the opprobrium that this comparison would
bring to them —if it were true.
I repeat my assertion: ancient stucco is inconceivable apart from painting.
Stucco was the base, the actual body, not only for wall decorations and mon-
umental polychromy but also for wooden panels, terra-cotta, and many other
materials that were to be painted. These materials too had to be prepared with
a koniasis (a leakoma [plastering]). Only metals, ivory, and marble did not
need this artificial ground, which was why these precious materials were so
highly sought during the period when the artistic technique was perfected.
But stucco was by no means used only as a smooth ground for painting.
Among the ancients the plastic treatment of stucco surfaces, stucco work
proper (caelatura tectorii)—that is, the process of raising painted ornaments
and paintings on wall surfaces through stucco caelaturae —was a highly devel-
oped technique.
Art historians have not failed to date the adoption of this art later.
Certainly this style was readopted (like so much else that belonged to the old-
est art traditions) as society fell into decline. But it is nevertheless ancient.
And even though its early existence on Hellenic soil proper can now no longer
be proven by surviving remnants, certain ancient Greek tomb chambers at

384
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

Cumae, Naples, Paestum, and other spots in southern Italy are decorated with
stucco cornices and slightly raised, relief, wall paintings. They therefore speak
for the early spread of this art among Hellenic and related Greco-Italic tribes.316
Unfortunately these antiquities, which are highly interesting for the history
of style, have always been described and drawn one-sidedly —in terms of the
objects depicted and their meaning—and badly as well. Above all, descrip-
tions of the architectural elements and decorations are lacking. Yet even an
imperfect knowledge of these works makes it clear that they are representa-
tives of a very old principle of decoration, one older than smooth painting,
which can already be considered abstraction in representation. We know it to
be a guiding principle in the Orient from earliest times.
There is no doubt that the kinds of wall decorations executed for the
Temple of Ceres in Rome by the Greek artists Damophilos and Gorgasos,
who were both sculptors and painters, were paintings in stucco relief. Pliny
reports (after [Marcus Terentius] Varro) that they were cut out of the wall
when the temple was being restored and mounted on framed panels presum-
ably so that they could be put back into the restored wall. The Temple of Juno
was built in the Roman year 258 by the dictator A[ulus] Postumius, in other
words three years before the Battle of Marathon, 493 B.C.

§ 80 Perfected Style
This luxuriant plastic principle, mixed with other reminiscences of Asia, by
and by had to give way (along with the plastic treatment of architectural
details) to a new artistic trend —its transformation into monumental wall
painting and the surface ornament associated with it.
Most of the older temples that have survived in Sicily and in the Hellenic
world are in this second style. Only the very oldest (and some that are perhaps
not so old but nevertheless archaic) recall the early, plastic style of decoration.
They correspond to the genuine Hellenic style of the second and third vase
styles. Similarly, those soft plastic and sometimes overly ornate architectural
forms of the early period run parallel to the Greco-Italic vase style, which was
still plastic in its first appearance (see “Ceramics”).
At the conclusion of this stylistic period, wall painting —that is, historical-
monumental wall painting proper —now achieves its most sublime direction
in the work of Polygnotus and his famous contemporaries.
The learned polemics of the 1830s regarding Greek wall and panel paint-
ing established beyond any doubt that the great monumental paintings of the
fifth century were wall paintings.3”
There are isolated cases where it has not been established whether paint-
ings from this period of art were inserted into the wall or painted directly on it
(for example, the paintings on the Stoa Poecile in Athens, which according to
a report by Synesius were removed from the wall at the time of [Flavius]
Honorius and Arcadius in about A.D. 400). Yet there is no doubt about their
monumental style and the technique that produced them, which was com-
pletely different from the later technique of easel painting proper. A picture

385
 Semper

frame set into the stucco wall was too confining for the monumental tendency
of these works. Their drama needed the length of the entire wall to develop,
the entire neutral area between the dark plinth around the wall and the corre-
sponding frieze below the coffered ceiling.3!8 The main image seems to have
been hung like a tapestry in sections across this field and was surrounded by
borders —just like the images on the bellies, between the bases and necks of
Corinthian and Athenian amphorae and kraters that were created at the same
time as these wall paintings. The bases reflect but a shadow of their greatness
and beauty.

See eee

=
SS. WOW NWN 2

>

\
\\ K
4
38&”600
1085
SNAG CW (WW
«<<
BOO WNC GaROCC>oOo WK QQ G
ee
KW.KK GG. GQ... GK. CG CGC CG G@@ \\CCSAAN
AS
™C™E&; GK Gl
AS \

Partial section of the Temple of Theseus

Pausanias provides a few interesting indications about the distribution of

these paintings that confirm these remarks.
The Stoa Poecile, for example, consisted of three wall surfaces, and each
contained three paintings:
First wall
1. Athenian battle array at Oenoe
2. Beginning of the battle
3. Spartan battle array
Second wall
1. Battle of Amazons
2. Fall of Troy
3. The kings gathered around Ajax and Cassandra
Third wall
1. Battle of Marathon: Plataeans and Athenians battle the barbarians
2. Flight of the barbarians
3. Naval battle and defeat
The last three paintings were framed by four heroes and gods not directly
involved in the action: Marathon, Theseus, Hercules, and Athena. The three

386
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

paintings on the other two walls were surely separated in a similar way.3!
The compositions by Polygnotus on the walls of the Lesche at Delphi must
be imagined as even richer, even closer to tapestries, and even more like the
vase paintings of the perfected later style. On one side was the storming of
Troy and next to it the departure of the Greeks; on the other was the descent
of Odysseus into Hades. The separate actions are grouped alongside and above
one another—a rich and sumptuous tapestry with an abundance of figures.32°
These painted wall tapestries covered open stoas, temple cellas, and the
interiors and porches of temples. As the exterior walls of peripteral temples
were similar to stoas, such paintings were undoubtedly there as well.
Whenever a wall functioned as a facade and contributed to an architec-
tural effect, it was polychrome and decorated in part with historical or scenic
paintings.32! If an artist who imagines all of the parts of the temple now gen-
erally agreed to have been colored (those even the most zealous advocates of
white temples have conceded) in relation to the remaining parts in order to
form a harmonious idea of the whole, it becomes clear that polychromy is
necessary and requires no proof. But art history professors do not accept that
existing data and the laws of harmony prove that polychromy was wide-
spread. When such data fly in the face of their own antiquated theories, they
deny them or raise doubts about the observer’s accuracy and respect for the
truth— an exceedingly convenient system that spares them the trouble of con-
ducting their own research and investigations on classical soil.
As they have a significant influence on contemporary art education today
and seek to present a corrupt and bastardized system of their own invention
as the conclusive result of all previous research on a matter “that can now be
considered closed,” it is the duty of an architect who recognizes the great
importance of this issue to resist this imposed arbitration. The question has to
be taken up again on the basis of “matters of fact” and the evidence of ancient
writers.
So far this subject has been recognized only for its decorative significance,
but it also pertains to the innermost essence of ancient art and is a prerequisite
to understanding it. Without its proper complement of color, a work of archi-
tecture cannot be imagined or understood in its true sense. The nature of form
is conditioned by color. For example, the fluting and profile of a dark column
must differ from that of a light or white one. The latter demands deep shad-
ows on its surface, whereas other columns, for instance porphyry ones, should
not be fluted at all. Conversely, it is possible to draw conclusions about the
original color of forms that have since been deprived of their former hue.
Thus it is a priori probable that the deeply fluted Ionic column was lighter in
color than the shallowly fluted Doric, as the remnants of color confirm.
Yet it is almost unnecessary to deal with specific cases here, as this whole
chapter, which is devoted to dressing as applied to architecture, has no other
purpose than to trace this interrelation of form and color.
Let us first discuss those ancient Greek walls made not of white marble but
of other materials and covered with stucco. Let us look at examples from the

387
 Semper

early period of Hellenic art to which I assign most of the temples built of
porous stone, a considerable number of which have survived. None of these
porous stone walls from the relatively early Hellenic period—regardless of
where they are found—lacks traces of a previous stucco covering. Although
colors are only faintly visible and cannot always be made out, signs of their
earlier presence are not rare. Examples include stucco and traces of color on
the cella walls of the temple at Selinus.322 A fine sanded stucco stained with
vermilion covers the internal and external walls of the temple on Aegina,
attested by [Martin von] Wagner’s report on the Aeginetan pediment and my
own inspection. The outer cella wall of the archaic temple at Metapontum
was, according to the duke of Luynes, smoothed over with yellow stucco of the
same hue as the terra-cotta with which the temple’s beams and other parts
were decorated.
There are also red stucco tomb facades in Lycia that have survived intact,
some of which are exhibited in the British Museum. Often there are traces of
color on the Etruscan tombs hewn out of tufa and covered with mortar.
The coloring of walls and ashlar is also frequently mentioned by ancient
authors. I will pass over the frequent mentions of green and red tribunals in
Athens and other well-known passages about ancient painting and the col-
ored decoration of walls that have been discussed in detail in the writings
noted above. I will mention only a passage in Lucian that has not to my
knowledge previously been considered; it points to the antiquity and appar-
ently widespread occurrence of polychromy on stone walls. “The human
race,” he writes in the Amores, “built houses and learned with little fanfare
the associated arts. Instead of simple colorless garments they most colorfully
embroidered them; instead of poor dwellings they invented great palaces and
magnificent stone buildings and covered the bare, formless walls with beauti-
fully patterned color washes.”323
The striking report of Vitruvius on the palace of King Mausolus in Hali-
carnassus deserves mention here. Its ornatus was executed in Proconnesian
marble but its walls were of (unfired) brick, plastered so as to seem as trans-
parent as glass. One can only assume that this plaster was a glaze. Pliny’s
well-known report on the temple at Cyzicus, which he mentions among other
architectural wonders, also suggests a transparent plaster. Inside this building,
which was designed to contain a wreathed ivory Zeus and a marble Apollo,
the artist reportedly placed gold threads between the joints of the plastered
(stucco-covered) ashlar wall.32+ Thus the fine gold threads shone through the
wall paintings and enveloped the statues with a faint aura. Apart from the
artist’s ingenious idea, this work is chiefly admired for the richness of the mate-
rials, even though they were concealed.325
Aspects of this report that were incomprehensible before the Assyrian dis-
coveries can be easily explained today, thanks to our familiarity with the
glazed-brick walls of Nineveh’s palaces and temples.
Such rich and widespread wall polychromy must have been accompanied
by the polychromy of the structural parts, and this is confirmed by the most

388
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

unambiguous traces found on monumental ruins, of which we will examine

first only the stucco-coated works in stone, not marble.
The plastic ornamentation of constructional parts was abandoned in the
early days of the period that concerns us here. All the parts appear to have
been turned on a potter’s wheel or pulled in clay. The complementary forms
on smooth profiles are painted. The masses of the constructional parts, mean-
while, were colored.
I mention first the very ancient temple at Corinth, whose tufa columns are
dressed with red stucco. This is confirmed by almost all travelers who have
seen these ruins. [Ernst] Curtius even claims to have made out two layers of
red stucco, one above the other. In response to this report, Kugler immediately
tries to justify his doubt about the authenticity of these dressings, even though
we know that the dealbationes and expolitiones of temples and public build-
ings recurred fairly frequently.
The well-preserved stucco dressing on fragments of tufa columns near the
entrance to the Acropolis, which belonged to an old temple probably destroyed
by the Persians, is also red.
The columns of the temple at Metapontum were colored in a different
way. They must have been in keeping with the somber color of the terra-cotta
with which most greater Greek and Sicilian temples in the older style were
decorated. This more somber, oligochrome (moving within limited color
shades) style of wall decoration used not red but yellow ocher as a surface
ground.?2¢ Red was used only as an enlivening element in the harmony of col-
ors. In this it differs in principle from another style that dominated very early
on in Asia Minor and Greece, at least for temples and public buildings. In that
style a magnificent red (even now the color reserved for the walls of imperial
buildings and temples in such Oriental countries as China) formed the basis
of the polychrome system.
Dragon’s blood, a red resin, was produced in the Orient and called indi-
cum or cinnabaris. It was used in this context to color larger areas and give
them a Bad7y [coloring].32”7 The name cinnabaris was later also used for the
color we now call vermilion, which has led to confusion and a number of
errors, even in antiquity.228 Vermilion, minium to the Romans, tAToc to the
Greeks329 (though it appears the last of these once referred to red ocher,
rubrica), was never used extensively on monuments of the earlier and better
style or as a ground but only in decorations, as the monuments clearly show.
This is also confirmed by Vitruvius in chapter [9] of book 7. It was not until
the period after the Punic Wars, when Spain’s rich mercury mines were being
exploited (a period that coincides with the introduction of Greek art to Italy)
that actual cinnabar seems to have been used by the Romans in large quanti-
ties for wall decoration.
Megalography,?3° that is, historical wall painting and the polychrome sur-
face ornamentation associated with it, had fulfilled its highest task and was
perhaps already in stylistic decline at the moment when, after the Persian
wars under Cimon and later under Pericles, the art of the Athenians rose to its

389
 Semper

most magnificent peak. Just as in the Renaissance the highest achievements of

Raphael and Michelangelo simultaneously represented the most sublime peak
and the first stage of artistic decline, the same thing is even more clearly evi-
dent in the monuments, sculpture, and paintings of the golden age of Hellenic
art! This turn of events is expressed most vividly in art’s striking tendency to
revert to the technical processes of the early period and of the Orient. Thus we
find that Phidias, Polyclitus, and their contemporaries and followers actually
preferred toreutics and sphyrelaton to metal casting and marble sculpture,
which in turn brought about a revival of the colossal statuary of Greece’s
early period.
This period of artistic maturity, in fact, first introduced marble into architec-
ture, although it had been used earlier in such isolated cases as the Temple of
Olympian Zeus of Peisistratus and his sons. One may well ask whether this
use of marble as a building material suggests a reminiscence of the old heroic
marble style.
But white marble was not chosen for its color, at least not with the inten-
tion of presenting its whiteness as such.33! In the best period of Hellenic art
even less thought seems to have been given to the use of different colored mar-
bles for polychrome purposes, although this might have happened in isolated
cases.332 So why did they start to use this new building material? Quatremére
de Quincy has already pointed out the primary and most substantial reason;
he says (Jupiter olympien, 31):

Les anciens separérent beaucoup moins qu’on ne le se figure dans leurs travaux les
plaisirs des yeux de celui de l’esprit; c’est a dire que la richesse, la variété et la
beauté des matiéres qui sont la parure des ouvrages de |’art furent chez eux bien
plus intimement réunis qu’on ne le pense au beau intrinséque ou a la perfection imi-
tative qui sans aucun doute en sont le principal mérite.
[In their works the ancients distinguished to a far lesser extent than we might think
between the pleasures of the eyes and those of the spirit, which is to say that for
them the richness, the variety, and the beauty of the materials that form the orna-
ment of works of art were more intimately connected than one might think to the
intrinsic beauty or imitative perfection which are without doubt the principal merit
of those works. ]

But apart from this, throughout antiquity it was considered extraordinar-

ily important that the material in which a work of art was to be executed be
genuine and costly, even when the material would not be visible. The ancients
liked to stress the work’s material nature above all else, even when the mate-
rial did not directly affect the appearance of the work. For example, the gold
used in chryselephantine statues and other votive offerings had to be com-
pletely pure, although it was partially covered with painted ornaments. This
interest in the material also extended to less costly media of execution. With-
out citing the many passages concerning monuments made of porous and
other building stones that, as we know with certainty, were invisible under

390
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

stucco and paint, I might in passing allude to a previously mentioned passage

in Josephus about the Temple of the Jews. He stresses that it was built of
white stone, although (according to him) not a trace of it remained visible
inside or out, for it was completely covered with gold.333
The report of Pausanias on the Temple of Diana in Stymphalis may serve
as a second example. Stymphalian birds were depicted on the ceiling of the
cella of this shrine, but it was difficult for him to determine whether they were
made of plaster or wood, “although it seems more probable to me that they
were plaster.” He could not get close enough to inspect them, but had the
carved ceiling retained its natural color, it would not have been necessary to
touch it to determine the material from which it was made. Related facts that
speak to this issue will be cited later.
We moderns find it difficult to imagine the extent to which the ancients
made the authority of a work of art dependent on the magnificence of its con-
struction, the cost of the materials used, and the difficulty of working with
them. As has already been shown, in itself such an approach in no way con-
tradicts the general tendency of ancient art, although in later periods it some-
times degenerated into an almost childish search for curiosities. Without this
key it is impossible to understand ancient works of art and to divine the
correct meaning of passages related to art by ancient authors.
On one occasion Pliny expressly states that white marble was not origi-
nally used because of its beauty (/autitiae causa), which had not yet been rec-
ognized, but because of its hardness.?34 This confirms a curious feature of
antique artistic conceptions that has already been stressed. Also relevant here
is a remark by Vitruvius on the Temple of Honor and Virtue, which, he claims,
would have been counted among the finest buildings had it been dignified by
the magnificence and costliness (expensis) of its materials to the same extent it
had been distinguished by its art. Thus it is not the beauty and whiteness but
the costliness, that is, the expense, the difficulty of preparation, and the rarity
of the material that weigh into this judgment.335
Let us assume that Pliny was justified in asserting that the lautitia, the
charm of white marble, had not yet been recognized when it was first used.
We can then trace, as far as possible, the ancients’ growing recognition of the
gleaming properties of this material and the corresponding modifications in
its use. We will then encounter the first use of white marble for individual
columns and other prominent parts of the building, even as the other parts
were made of brick or ordinary building stone.
This acrolithic use of white marble preceded all-marble architecture, much
as such use characterized the early period of marble sculpture. The acrolithic
appearance of white marble can be seen in a variety of works that represent
the transition to the golden age of architecture— for example, at the temple at
Delphi, completed around 520 B.c.33¢ The Alcmaeonids (who had taken over
the construction of the temple) finished the facade in Parian marble, although
not contractually obliged to do so, simply in order to honor the divinity all
the more, while the rest of the temple was built of a porous stone.

heh
 Semper

Another example is the temple at Aegina, which is still standing. The walls
and columns were covered in stucco, except for the crowning cornice and roof
of white marble.
The temple at Bassae also falls into this category; its columns and walls
were not built of a porous stone but of a gray unassuming limestone, covered
with stucco. Only the frieze, gable decorations, and roof tiles were marble.
The palace of Mausolus, probably of glazed brickwork with cornices and
other ornatus in Proconnesian marble, has already been mentioned above.
How was the ultimate harmonic perfection achieved in these and other
works that used so many different materials? It is obvious that color varia-
tions and contrasts were not sufficient to harmonize architecturally or orna-
mentally these heterogeneous materials, which did not even come together in
a rhythmic order. No one would accuse the Hellenes of having the bad taste
to tack colored stucco columns and painted walls onto a white front, much
less to place a white hat on them.
Thus only two possibilities remain. Either all the materials disappeared
under a common polychrome sheathing or the white marble was imitated by
means of stucco marble on the other parts such that the entire building
appeared white. Kugler, Ulrichs, and others follow the latter assumption; they
argue that any other premise is absurd, and with that high-handedly declare
the contentious matter closed. First of all, we now know that the columns and
walls were red, at least in the case of the temple at Aegina, which is the best
preserved of those mentioned. Second, we know that precisely that part built
in marble even now shows unmistakable traces of paint, especially on the
gable figures, the background of the gable, and the other decorations on the
marble cornices. Thus in the case of the temple at Aegina the opponents of the
polychrome thesis would have to restrict their assertion of whiteness to the
front of the cornice mutules, to the rising crown of the gables, and to the roof
tiles; at the temple at Delphi only six columns and some parts of the main
entablature would have been white. Yet these opponents claim that the whole
building followed the example of these few parts, even though the colors had
been established by a thousand-year-old tradition before the use of white
stone had even been imagined. In one of the examples cited it seems to have
occurred accidentally, as it were, an idea that came to the builder as he
worked on a few small parts. How would white stucco columns and white
stucco architraves have looked arrayed with other parts in Parian marble?
What person with any knowledge of the Greeks, what architect could think
such a thing possible even for a moment! And would we not have heard some-
thing about so profound a revolution in Greek architecture? The whole of
antiquity is silent about it; we do, however, have numerous passages referring
to the painting and coloring of white marble buildings and sculptures or
depicting them thus colored. Most important of all, remnants of this paint
have survived to a greater or lesser extent.337
The only possibility that I can accept is the second one—namely, that in
fact the addition of marble did not change the old principle of decoration at

So2
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

all. This material was chosen partly for its hardness, then especially for the
fine, firm, and soft grain that made it suitable for particularly precise and
sharp preparation, and thirdly for its dazzling white underglow. Only this last
property dissuaded the Greeks from using the ancient koniasis, that stucco
skin made with marble dust (an application of marble that is far older than
the use of marble stairs and marble blocks for building). Instead, they applied
the paint directly to stone inseparable from koniasis. This is the only thesis I
can accept after many years of research on monuments and as a result of the
view that I have formed about the art of antiquity in general. At the same
time, let me reiterate that this view is fully confirmed by the statements of
ancient writers, provided they are not taken out of context but cited appropri-
ately in the general context of the passages where they occur.338
Acrolithic marble temples (to stick to the analogy used, even if improper)
were the precursors to monuments built solidly and entirely in marble, in
which Hellenic architecture first achieved its emancipation from the material.
Along with this marble style a major revolution in color decoration also
emerged, and ancient reports and allusions on the subject are not lacking.
This was the introduction and spread of encaustic painting: more commonly
in places where this art provided the actual decorative adornment in associa-
tion with architecture and less commonly within its own sphere of influence.
There was also a transition from the oligochromy of Polygnotos to the poly-
chromy of Pamphilos and Pausias, from the solemn terra-cotta style of wall
decoration (most of the surviving remnants of which are in Sicily and Italy) to
the richly colored decoration of the encaustically decorated temples of Athens!
Sculpture also followed this polychrome direction, as the refined painted fin-
ish (circumlitio), ennobled by the highest art—a task that the sculptors left to
master painters—came to replace the conventional coloring of statues and
bas-reliefs of an earlier period.33? The extent of this trend is demonstrated by,
among other sources, the report that Scopas enhanced the contrasts in the
glowing color scheme of his famous Bacchante by adding a leaden tinge to the
dead flesh of the doe.34°
Even today we can discern on the most beautiful statues in the perfected
style adorning our museums faint traces of the rapidly fading paint that was
still clearly visible immediately after they were discovered.3*! The delicate
glaze on the bare flesh disappears first; the opaque colors of the robes and the
gilding on the hair and other parts survive longer.342 On the frieze figures of
the Temple of Theseus I found a very fresh pink and green in the folds of the
garments, thickly applied and opaque. Traces of these colors, their body, can
still be seen clearly today on the Elgin marbles in the British Museum, as can
the blue in the folds of the Erectheum caryatids in the same place.
At the same time, ceramics pursued an analogous direction. “Pottery painted
with wax in all sorts of colors” displaced the monochrome urns of the earlier
style.343 Wax painting has been perfectly preserved on them, and they provide
a reliable analogy to the type of polychromy prevalent at the time, as well as
allowing us to recognize with assurance the general style of the preceding art.

393
 Semper

Because of these remarkable and close links between pottery and poly-
chrome architecture, and because many products of this artistic technique
have survived intact from all the periods through which it passed, I will pro-
vide further details in the next chapter, on ceramics, particularly with regard
to the technical aspect of the important question. Here I will merely briefly
outline general historical aspects of polychromy in its subsequent phases.

§ 81 The Displacement of Wall Painting by Panel Painting

When, in the third period in Greek art, marble became the principal building
material, architecture and sculpture certainly did not become colorless. Rather,
the reverse was the case. It was only now that a somber conventional oligo-
chromy blossomed into a radiant polychromy.344
It was also during this period that easel painting increasingly replaced wall
painting and went its own way, independent of architecture, to the highest
level of technical perfection, to the expression of passions and the world of
emotions, and to a faithful depiction of nature. This period of art history is
adorned by the names of the greatest artists— but only names and a few un-
satisfactory dates assigned to their works, effectively just lists, for nothing of
the works themselves has survived. Some of the most perfect and highly
praised works by these masters were executed in the encaustic style that had
recently been discovered or rather borrowed from Egypt and Asia (we still do
not know what this technique actually was), but the majority were painted a
tempera and coated with a varnish or wax (causis) to fix the colors perma-
nently.345 Some panel paintings were sometimes placed in the temples as
votive gifts and sometimes — in fact, most often— incorporated as emblems in
an architecturally decorative arrangement of the cella wall (appocetv, €yKpu)-
TELV, ELBaAAELV, inserere, includere [to join; to fit inside]).346 They were prob-
ably also fastened between the columns of parapet walls (diaphragma,
erymata) as column pictures (stylopinikia). Pliny once referred to this school
of painting (truly the height of the art of painting proper) when he said that
there were no famous names among artists apart from those who painted
panel pictures. It is not possible to interpret this Roman’s lucid explanation in
a way more favorable to wall painting, as Letronne tried in vain to do. But no
more will Raoul-Rochette (with all the showy erudition and all the boorish-
ness toward other ways of thinking that a Frenchman is capable of) convince
us that wall painting was nothing more than the result of a facheuse révolu-
tion in the arts that emerged in the late Roman period. Nor do we have to
agree with him when he calls the contrary opinion “une erreur grossiére et
‘

une malheureuse illusion de notre age.” Nor do we share his view when he
sees nothing but wooden panels everywhere when the ancients refer to paint-
ings with expressions like tabula, odvic, or tivaé. These terms can be used for
pictures or representations in general, and hence they can refer to panels other
than wooden ones. At the very least we know that panels were frequently
made of slate, metal, terra-cotta, marble, and stucco, and they were often so
large and heavy that the easels that supported them during painting were

394
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

called machines and often really were machines. This is clear from the famous
competition between Apelles and Protogenes, which was judged on the basis
of a large panel that was fixed or hung up in the machine to be painted.347
Paintings on large slate panels were found in Etruscan tombs and similar ones
on terra-cotta in Sicily. The four famous marble panels from Herculaneum,
covered with delicate drawings edged in red, were in all probability the ground
for encaustic paintings that were later destroyed by the heat of the lava.348
Four paintings on prepared stucco panels were found in Stabiae or (according
to others) in Portici.34? They were leaning in pairs against a wall with reces-
sions in the stucco of identical size that could accommodate them. Many of
the pictures in Pompeii were inset in this way. There can be no doubt that pre-
cisely these stucco panels (a medium selected recently by the excellent land-
scape painter [Carl] Rottmann for his encaustic paintings) were the usual
ground for paintings intended to decorate a particular place, such as a temple,
a stoa, or the like.
These stone and stucco pictures are closely analogous to metopes and
friezes, which are of course nothing but panel pictures set into the construc-
tion. Also, this custom of painting pictures in the studio and then inserting
them into walls, instead of painting them in place, may have affected only the
genre of painting and not so much the style of the overall decoration. Never-
theless, it would soon make its influence felt on the latter, which reverted by
stages to Asiatic paneling, transforming into the painted wall tapestries of
Polygnotos’s time. The Hellenic spiritualization of the wall-dressing principle
yielded to a more naturalistic and materialistic conception. A simultaneous
inclination toward the plastic outfitting of architectural forms proper corre-
sponded to this change. The Corthinian style, which was more Doricizing yet
plastically richer, appeared alongside the Ionic. The Doric order proper atro-
phied and stiffened into an inorganic structural scheme.
Greek art had gone a long way down this road and had absorbed many ele-
ments of barbarian art through its extensive trade with Asia when Alexander
toppled the Persian empire. As a result, the countries of west and central Asia,
from India to Egypt, came under the rule of Hellenic kings, and Hellenic edu-
cation took hold among the ancient seats of Eastern culture. Although there
was never a more intimate, so to speak, chemical union of the heterogeneous
elements of Asian and Greek culture, this mixture was bound to have impor-
tant effects on both cultures. Alexander’s bold architectural undertakings,
and the even grander projects that remained unexecuted because of his early
death, already bear a decidedly Asiatic stamp, evident both in their concep-
tion and in their means and manner of execution.
With regard to this last point, we should emphasize four factors through
which the Asiatic artistic techniques used at the time of Alexander affected
the artistic practices of the Greeks.
First, there was the much discussed ancient luxury lavished on the dress-
ing. As I have already shown, this practice extended to the constructional
parts of the building and even appeared in the stone constructions of the

395
 Semper

Persians where they reproduced in a realistic way Chaldeo-Assyrian timber

columns dressed in bronze. Second, there was the technique of carving stone
and the incrustation of architecture with brightly colored stones, and similarly
the use of precious stones and gems in emblematic decorations on vessels and
utensils made from precious metals, ivory, and rare woods. The imitation of
these naturally colored materials in glass, enamel, and mosaics—and their
decorative use in architecture—can be seen as closely related to this. Third,
there is the addition of jointed ashlar to the lexicon of decorative means,
probably prepared by the use of naturally colored materials in the polychrome
decoration of monuments. Fourth, there is the appearance of the arch and
vaulted ceiling, including the dome, and of vaults visible from the outside that
replace the roof, as elements of the art-form and as decorative devices.
As regards the first of the four influences, we have already mentioned and
partly described in an earlier section (on ancient tapestry) the sumptuous
tents, funeral pyres, and other provisional buildings furnished with Asiatic
luxury and commissioned by Alexander and his successors. Yet this specifi-
cally Asiatic splendor also extended to permanent monuments. Alexander
wanted to build a bronze proscenium for a theater in Pella.35° An encrusted
theater is also mentioned in an above-cited inscription from Asia Minor from
the post-Alexandrian period. The Oriental dressing of temple walls with gold-
covered paneling is also imitated in the Temple of Zeus (built in Antioch by
Antiochus IV) and in the Temple of Baal and Astarte at Hierapolis, whose walls
and ceilings were completely gilded like those of the temple at Jerusalem. This
Asiatic luxury inevitably drove out wall painting proper and also affected the
style of ornamentation and color schemes. Unfortunately we cannot pursue
this transition because of the almost complete lack of surviving monuments
from this period. But it is known that sculptural decoration in gilded metal
was often affixed to the predominantly Corinthian buildings, with the result
that a glow of metal and a lavish display displaced the more modest adorn-
ment of color on the exterior, just as it did in the interior.
Also Oriental and closely connected with metal furnishings is polylithic
decoration, that is, polychromy with inlaid accessories (piéces de rapport,
appliqués) in brightly colored marble and even more precious stones.
Asia and Egypt are the homelands of the precious and semiprecious stones
that the Greeks and Italic peoples much preferred even in early antiquity. But
the polishing and cutting of these hard and costly materials seems to have
long remained a privilege of Egyptians and Asians, who brought their cut
stones to Europe as trade items. This explains why only Egyptian, Phoenician,
and Assyrian gems and intaglios have been found in older Etruscan and Greek
tombs. Intaglios were used as seals and as jewelry. The earliest attempts of
Etruscans and Greeks to cut stones and stamps themselves were simply crude
imitations of Asian models, and it was not until the golden age that this art
too achieved an independent reputation, although in fact it was only just tak-
ing root there. It reached its highest level of perfection shortly before the time
of Alexander, when the stonecutter Pyrgoteles achieved the height of fame in

396
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

this meticulous art. He is in fact the only one of his contemporaries to be men-
tioned by ancient authors. But the application of this art remained limited to
the manufacture of signet rings.
During this period in Asia the application of glyptics to the arts proper had
come to a standstill or even declined. But its effects were felt across a wide
domain as it was used to decorate costly utensils and vessels in precious met-
als. These objects had been Asia’s most fashionable luxury goods from the
earliest times; it would seem, however, that they were not yet the work of jew-
elers during the older Chaldean and Assyrian empires. This extravagance was
exceeded by a practice that was also native to the Orient but was especially
prized in the Persian era, namely, the fashioning of chalices and bowls entirely
from precious stones of extraordinary size.
Glyptics had even extended to architecture, where, by analogy with its use
on vessels, it lent its color and splendor to the metal dressing of monuments.
Colorful and costly stones of the greatest possible size were also applied to
panels (crustae). They replaced the less luxurious wooden paneling or the
carved alabaster slabs of the ancient period.
There are definite signs that this luxury was predominant in Asia at the
time of Alexander’s conquest; it is clearly recognizable in the fantastic reports
of Babylonian splendor recorded by Philostratus and other later writers (but
taken from earlier authors).
Alexander, who enjoyed the Oriental way of life and accepted it for politi-
cal reasons, also enthusiastically adopted this kind of luxury (foreign to the
Greeks) for domestic furnishings and even for domestic architecture. His ear-
liest building projects demonstrate this. The great marriage tent at Susa had
gold columns set with precious stones, and Hephaestion’s funeral pyre was
decorated with carved ivory panels with gems.
His successors followed their hero in this as in other things and trans-
planted this new Asiatic luxury to Greece. It was refined by Seleucid and
Ptolemaic artists in particular. The cameos—relief carvings in multicolored
onyx —and the drinking vessels and bowls of this period carved from precious
stones (some valuable examples of which have survived) are true miracles of
beauty and technical perfection.
Enamel was closely connected with the luxury of gems. This is both a kind
of incrustation in which precious stones are imitated with paste and also a
kind of encaustic painting, probably the true and original kind. Its relation to
wax encaustics will be shown in the next chapter —on ceramics — where some
technical questions not yet discussed will be taken up.
Enamel was used on the roof of Alexander’s ceremonial chariot and would
certainly have been present wherever gold or another metal was used in archi-
tecture or on tools. It replaced Phidias’s simple painting on a gold ground,
although this was itself a daughter of Oriental enameling.
It has been shown above (under “Egypt”) that all the procedures for this
enameling technique were known to the Egyptians at a very early date. And
yet it has been asserted that it was the secret property of barbarians of the

Soi
 Semper

West, as no ancient writer described it or indicated its occurrence among the

Greeks or the Italic peoples. A third-century author (Philostratus) describes it
as the property of the peoples of the western ocean, in whose former domi-
ciles the most significant finds of enameled objects in the antique style have
indeed been made.35! But wherever the Gauls and Celts acquired this art—
whether they brought it with them from the Orient or learned it from the
Phoenicians —it remains certain that this use of glass paste was invented in
the Orient. Some kind of enameling was practiced at an early stage in Greece
and Italy, as is demonstrated by small luxury and decorative metal objects in
a genuine Greek style that have glass paste melted into them. The Museo
borbonico in Naples, the Louvre, and the British Museum each have several
specimens, and they are not rare in other collections as well.
Inlaid decorations and paintings on walls and building members should
also be mentioned here as related. As shown above for Chaldea and Assyria,
they originated in an ancient practice of the peoples of central Asia. Although
there is proof that mosaic floors were introduced into Greece at a very early
date (an early example dating from the fifth century B.C. has survived in
Olympia), inlaid decoration did not become widespread until the Alexandrian
period. It was frequently copied from older polychrome sculpture; panels of
polychrome mosaic relief were inserted into walls and ceilings. Some of these
inlaid reliefs —among others, the beautiful relief at Wilton House (which I had
the opportunity to examine), the Spes in Naples, and the pendant to it, the
Mercury, both said to have come from Metapontum—are thoroughly Greek
and probably came from the pre-Alexandrian period. It is difficult to resolve
the contradiction of how Raoul-Rochette, for example, can describe such
reliefs with affection and yet continue to reject the idea of polychromy in
ancient sculpture.352
As with the earlier period, it would not be misleading to view the architec-
ture of the Alexandrian period as analogous to the art of ceramics, which was
also changing at the time. The metal vessels encrusted with precious stones,
the emblematic and tendentious luxury utensils cited by Cicero in his speeches
against Verres, for example, are just as typical of the decorative style of the
architecture of this period as the brightly colored encaustic items are of the pre-
vious period, the oligochromic Corinthian and Asiatic hydriae are of the
period of Polygnotos, and finally the plastically decorated pottery made before
the introduction of the potter’s wheel into the countries of southern Europe is
of the architecture of the heroic period.
Of the four Asian influences on the Greek architectural style noted above,
two remain to be considered. They relate to an area of technology foreign to
the subject under discussion that must nevertheless be touched upon briefly
here. Let us turn to the third one, the use of the joints of the masonry for
architectural and decorative purposes. We do not find such decorative joints
anywhere before the period under consideration — neither in the Egyptian nor
in the Asian nor even in the Greek style, except in the foundation of the work.
Mounted on this foundation was the work proper, the agalma, which was

398
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

constructed of the most solid stone and finished with the greatest regularity
and care. Yet the Greek isodomon, stonecutting’s highest achievement with
respect to these properties, always remained independent of the ashlar work
in its form and outward appearance. The ashlar was worked and jointed to the
highest possible state of perfection precisely so as not to appear to be a formal
element, and it was covered with stucco and paint for that very reason. Where
was ornamentation of trimmed and natural-colored ashlar —something that
contradicted the attempt within Hellenic tectonics to emancipate the art-form
from the construction and the material —first used to decorate temple walls?
Whence came this innovation that, together with the raising of the arch to an
art-form, would call forth the most lasting revolution in architecture?
Once again the first hints and examples of this are Asiatic, probably dating
only from the time of Alexander or the Diadochi. First there is the Temple of
Zeus at Cyzicus, whose transparent ashlar plaster353 allowed the gold-
trimmed joints of the construction to shimmer through—a refinement that
seems to be a compromise between the old constructional principle of decora-
tion and the new one.
Then there are the city walls of Chios, mentioned by Pliny as the earliest
example of colored marble. Cicero said that he would have admired them
more had they been built of Tiburtine stone. Pliny adds that the authority of
marble should not lead us to admire a decoration that can be matched by the
commonest wall painting; indeed, the latter is still to be preferred.354
If we understand this anecdote and its postscripts correctly, it follows at
once that the Romans of Cicero’s time coated their Tiburtine ashlar with
multicolored stuccos. In the same chapter Pliny adds that Menander, who was
wont to describe luxury in great detail, was the first to mention colored mar-
bles or, for that matter, marble decoration in any form, and then only briefly.
Menander wrote his comedies around 300 B.C., or shortly after the time of
Alexander.
Without a doubt this idea, at first purely decorative, was anticipated by
the polylithic use of colored marble slabs and inlays of rare stone. The inten-
tion was to make the extravagance all the more evident by building the wall
itself in these precious materials, and this produced the colorfully checkered
ashlar work so frequently imitated in paint at Pompeii.3°° Nero showed more
originality in his Golden House by having an entire temple built of Oriental
alabaster, and the translucent walls seemed to hold the light of the cella cap-
tive. But this belongs to the next article, on Roman art, to which the period of
the Diadochi provides an important transition.
Finally, the acceptance of the vault and arch as art-forms must have lent an
even more powerful impetus to advance architecture in the constructional
direction that was so appropriate to the genius of world-dominating Rome,
where it achieved its fullest development.
The vault and the arch (especially the segmental arch, a transitional form)
were perhaps first conceived as decorative elements by the Greeks during the
construction of Alexandria in Egypt. There the roofs were also vaulted with

399
 Semper

segmental arches and covered with a topping or stepped and paved with an
artfully laid-out flooring.25¢ A mysterious propylaeum leading to the castle
was topped with a domelike construction. Some Egyptian elements (the seg-
mental arch as a roof form is ancient Egyptian) may have been mixed with
Asian and Greek elements here. Unfortunately, with the exception of the
famous mosaic floor at Praeneste, nothing has survived that would enable us
to get a clear idea of this remarkable style.
The overall effect of these glittering devices that art had at its disposal
thanks to the whim of art-loving and immensely wealthy rulers is evident
from the descriptions of ceremonial tents, chariots, and giant ships that have
been set down for us by the polyhistor Athenaeus. Like all descriptions of
works of art, however, they leave too much scope for arbitrary interpretation
and do not always assume plastic form.

§ 82 The Romans: The Early Period

The earlier, pre-Alexandrian influences of Greece on Roman architecture are
usually greatly overestimated, whereas insufficient attention is paid to two
other factors at least as important that serve as the basis for the mighty archi-
tectural expression of the idea of world domination.
First and foremost, these are old Greco-Italic artistic traditions, which
could just as well be called Indo-Germanic. They were the common stock of
the Greeks and the peoples who migrated to Italy before they were divided
into nations —traditions the Italian peoples clung to longer and more literally,
so to speak. The better-organized Greeks (initially under favorable circum-
stances and under a variety of influences from other, more or less related peo-
ples with whom they came into contact) developed some of these traditions
earlier and more freely, whereas others, like the arch, they dropped altogether.
Both related tribes had the same technical principles and methods of dressing,
pottery, metalwork, carpentry, and masonry. Their household furnishings
were originally the same, and so were many of the architectural forms and
artistic symbols that had evolved before the division into nations. This makes
it difficult for us to decide conclusively in individual cases whether certain
Roman motives that were also Greek are part of the older shared tradition or
were brought from Hellas after she had established her colonies in Italy and
other Western countries and had opened up extensive trade with them. Many
indications lead us to assume that in most questionable cases the first assump-
tion is correct and that the Etruscan and Roman modifications of certain
forms that were also customary to the Greeks represent older types.357 The
same may be the case in other areas, such as mythology and legends.
In addition to these old Italic artistic traditions and Hellenic culture’s early
domination of Italic taste, a third factor that led to the emergence of the archi-
tectural style of imperial Rome consisted of direct Egyptian-Asiatic influences
on Roman customs, lifestyle, and art immediately preceding and during the
period of imperial rule. These influences were direct only in contrast to tribal
traditions that were also more or less Orientalizing, for they were already

400
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

mediated by Greek princes who, when founding their cities in Asia and
Egypt, had assimilated these same barbarian architectural elements along
Greco-Italic lines even before the Romans had. But the kind of spatial poetry
expressed by the juxtaposition of many architecturally ordered and decorated
spatial entities to create a single overall effect, working from a predetermined
plan, always remained the weaker side and was the last element to develop in
Greek architecture, which by its very nature was microcosmic, that is, striving
toward individual being. It was the Asiatic-Hellenic urban planners who first
showed a sense for large-scale urban complexes and in this they were defi-
nitely influenced by the Orient. Thus Pergamum, Sardis, and Halicarnassus
were built on Assyrian models. Hippodamus, the architect of Piraeus, Thurii,
and Rhodes, was an Asian Greek (from Miletus). Meton, another town plan-
ner, was satirized by Aristophanes. Yet the name of Dinocrates, court archi-
tect to Alexander, eclipses all the other known masters of town planning.
Cleomenes, Olynthios, Ereteus, Heron, and Epithermus were architects work-
ing under Dinocrates on the city of Alexandria, designated by the Mace-
donian as a metropolis. Here architecture first assimilated the great spatial
layouts of Egyptian temple-palaces, and above all the basilican form and arch,
of which Greek art, by no means inclined toward colossal architecture, did
not grasp the true significance. They built serapeums (temples with broad out-
works, symbols, so to speak, of hellenized Egypt), museums, gymnasia, and
baths —all following the grand models of Egyptian monuments.
The scale of the buildings in Antioch and in many of the seats and cities
that appeared as if by magic in that enterprising period was not much smaller
and more Asiatic. They became the legacy of Rome, which was destined — and
possessed the means—to make Alexander’s world idea come true and at the
same time to invest it with a genuine architectural expression. The Romans,
whose faithful preservation of Indo-Germanic art traditions meant they were
still half Asiatic, found themselves more at home in those eastern provinces
than did the Greeks, and they solved the problem of fusing Asiatic-Egyptian
and European motives into a world architecture that dominated everywhere!
They carried from Asia to Europe a structural sense directed at the purpose-
ful, a view of art inseparable from that sense, a predilection for the appear-
ance of materials, for colossal scale, and for the effects of mass, all of which
contributed to the solution of this task. They developed these things in them-
selves over many centuries. Thus inherited and acquired Hellenism, inherited
and acquired Orientalism — or rather barbarism — fused into one!
The result of this amalgamation is so homogeneous that it is difficult to
identify the origin of the individual features that constitute it. This is most dif-
ficult of all in the case of the question that concerns us here: what happened
to the tradition of wall dressing under the Romans?
In order to provide perspective, here too a strict distinction must be made
between the different periods of Roman history.
First, the customs prevailing in Italy provide a few clues about the pre-
Republican period in Rome. The age of triumphs over conquered lands

401
 Semper

superior in culture, wealth, and art (southern Italy, Sicily, Greece, Egypt, and
Asia) represents a second period of wall decoration, and there is no lack of
information about that. Third, stable world domination under Augustus and
his immediate successors introduced new motives into the decorative arts,
which had a powerful effect on architectural style in general. Finally, the
period of greatest extravagance and general moral decline offers a confusion
of wealth in which it is difficult to recognize a principle, although here too
there is no lack of information about this luxury and its vestiges to be gleaned
from ancient authors.
As early as the old period of the kings and during the Republic the
Romans exhibited the tough practical energy and cooperation in working
toward a lofty, long-pursued goal that would make them masters of the
world. This is evident from those grand functional buildings of ashlar in
which the arch appears completely developed and most excellently executed.
Nothing seems farther from our theme than the arch, the architectural
form in which the core schema is least open to being separated from the art
schema —a form that is absolutely corelike and constructional. But it is rele-
vant here in that it is a breached wall, or rather a breaching of the wall.
Architecturally it was conceived as such only by the Italians, since wherever
vaults appear in ancient Italy they are merely running arches, as it were, open-
ings in walls of exceptional thickness. The true vault was not invented until
the imperial period, and even after its introduction by the Romans it lacked
the properties of an independent art-form. It lacks structural symbolism and
is no more than an arched ceiling spanning space.
We therefore speak of the arch here only in connection with the wall
through which it passes. In this context, wherever it appears architecturally
and not merely as a structural or technical device, it has nothing to do with the
roof support or floor joists. It is simply a breaching of the spatial element—a
wall—which, as we know, remained conceptually independent of the roof in
all architectural styles, with nothing to support but only to enclose. Archi-
tecturally it works only in this sense and its entire ornamental symbolism
relates exclusively to this purpose.
Further, in accordance with the building traditions shared by the Italians
and the Greeks, the column with its epistyle was the supporting element that
fulfilled the function of supporting the roof. To them, a roofed or multistory
building with arched openings but lacking those supporting and supported
members would have been an architectural absurdity.
From this it follows that the union of these two elements in an arcaded
work must be as old as the introduction of the arch into Italic architecture,
that is, into truly monumental building. To assume the reverse and see this
union as a late, random, and purely decorative invention is to misunderstand
completely the spirit of ancient Indo-Germanic architecture. For someone
who is ignorant of or neglects to consider these architectural principles and
traditions but nevertheless has a feeling for architecture and follows that
alone will always find that an arcuated facade without columns or pilasters,

402
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

such as the Pitti Palace, looks like a breached wall, a kind of bridge, like the
Pont du Gard, behind which, for all I care, a giant might have made his home.
This combination is not only traditional, it is also completely rational and
even natural. We need to revise our aesthetics and art history, especially relat-
ing to Roman art.%58 It is typical to view the Italic combination of columns
with arched walls as “a decoration for which Hellenic architecture had to
provide the forms,” or as irrational, “a marriage of convenience entered into
for reasons of extreme functionality.” Others have equally flattering views of
the ancient republic and see the columns as Greek maidens whom the Romans
carried away as slaves, “high-born, but with their original grace and lightness
dulled by being compelled to serve in foreign houses where the laws are not
their own.” All of this— however elegantly devised —cannot stop me from
arguing that combining the arch with the engaged column mediates the
masonry’s incorporation of the ceiling and roof in a more natural and also
more rational way than the cella wall of a Greek temple did. For the aestheti-
cally educated eye, the cella wall leaves the architrave that rests on it unsup-
ported from one anta to the next, as Greek architects were all too aware. It led
them to all sorts of faltering alternatives, none of which satisfactorily solved
the problem or the contradiction from all sides.
This is a good opportunity to counter another generally held view, namely,
that engaged columns were, architecturally speaking, late births or degenerate
forms; in fact, they are archaic or at least correspond to the ancient period
(archaistic). Several times I have noted the antiquity of the custom of filling
in intercolumniations, or at least of placing grilles between them. Roman
arcades should be viewed in the same way; they are nothing more than
breached diaphragms (dwarf walls or cross walls) between columns, at least
ideally. In accordance with the same idea they do not rise above impost
height. This led to the Roman impost termination and also to filling in the
spandrel, which was originally intended to be empty, to the right and left of
the arch with sculptures (usually winged or hovering figures). At the Choragic
Monument of Lysicrates in Athens an astragal runs around the walls between
the columns, and there too the (ideally) empty space over it is occupied by
sculpture (tripods). There is no doubt that here, as in Roman arcade spandrels,
this idea was made even more evident by using a lighter background, usually
blue, for the polychrome or gilded sculptures to distinguish them from the
darker color of the lower walls.
Conceived in this way, there is nothing idle, strange, or forced in this pow-
erful yet manageably elastic Roman combination so rich in character. In fact it
shows the greatest possible logic in the detail and as a whole: each part is nec-
essary and explains its purpose by the service it renders to the whole, with a
clarity unmatched even by a Doric temple.
Following ancient Indo-Germanic architectural traditions, the arch itself
when used as an architectural member in combination with columns, as an
arcade, is given its own dressing, an antepagment of wood, terra-cotta, or
metal. Later this would be translated into the stone style and reproduced

403
 Semper

sculpturally. The antepagment is not an architrave but a frame, a border

dressing. Just as no one finds it “almost strange” when it stands upright by
the vertical doorpost, so it might turn in a semicircle and sit vertically with
both ends on the impost.35? A frame is generally not articulated with regard to
the prevailing horizontal and vertical proportions, but with regard to the cen-
ter of what is framed. The parts of the frame neither stand nor fall but enclose
that which was framed microcosmically. Their order is planimetric regularity
and eurythmy (see § 22, § 30, and the introduction). Here again one need only
reverse the traditional views to arrive at the correct state of affairs. The ante-
pagment, being shaped like a cornice, is perfectly suited to serve as a frame.
As a frame, the antepagment is related to a form much older than the archi-
trave, which in turn is derived from that same form, being simply a modified
frame, and, as was shown above, it develops from the antepagment as well.
The form of the architrave is certainly similar to that of an antepagment,
but it does not follow that the latter is a curved architrave when used as an
archivolt.
The use of joints in the voussoir of an arch as a decoration and substitute
for archivolt dressing is, like cut joints in general, a characteristic of a devel-
oped style. In Tuscan-Roman times this practice was not employed in domes-
tic architecture but only for foundations and for large utility structures such
as walls, bridges, aqueducts, culverts, and so on. This manly decoration
makes a considerable contribution to the powerful, almost awe-inspiring
effect of these works, which have defied the passage of millennia. Likewise,
the use of the crown of the arch—or rather of a corbel fitted as a keystone—
to support the middle of the architrave above the crown is not original but a
clever invention of an age already influenced by Hellenic taste. To the eye of
the ancient Tuscan or Roman, this intermediate support was unnecessary,
since the timber architraves of the temple had accustomed them to wide spans
between columns. In this context I should point out that here too it is highly
probable (Vitruvius says nothing about it and indeed the arch is hardly men-
tioned in his treatise) that there was a relieving arch in the cella wall corre-
sponding to the center of the intercolumniation, more or less in the manner of
the Pantheon (see color plate 13 for an illustration of a Tuscan temple).
Vitruvius gives us a fairly precise image of the Tuscan-Roman temples of
Republican Rome whose structural aspects will be discussed elsewhere. We
also have reports on the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, built to the specifica-
tions of Tuscan augurs, and on the Temple of Ceres, which was outfitted with
works by the Greek artists Damophilos and Gorgasos, who both sculpted and
painted. We can infer from these reports that wood, brick, masonry, terra-
cotta, and a mortar dressing all had a part in such ancient Italic temples.36°
Such diverse materials made a harmonizing cover essential. Probably all the
woodwork — in particular, the wide-spanned timber architraves — was dressed
with terra-cotta antepagments in the same way as the above-mentioned older
temples in Metapontum and in greater Greece and Sicily. But terra-cotta, cer-
tainly the principal exterior decoration of these temples, never occurs without

404
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

a coating of polychrome stucco, and it should always be imagined this way;

where it is missing it has simply fallen off. It is thus safe to assume that the
whole temple gleamed with richly colored and metallic decoration. The Italic
people probably had a taste for gold decoration from early times and always
remained faithful to it. In this respect they differ from the Hellenes during
their finest period, who used this costly material only in great moderation,
reserving it for the highest artistic effects. What effect would Phidias’s gold-
shimmering Zeus have had if the whole temple had been gilded?
For the Italians, as for the central Asians and Greeks, the national masonry
was opus lateritium, that is, unfired brick masonry, which was inseparable
from the stucco coating that protected it. The second book of Vitruvius offers
the most reliable information on this topic, and it is confirmed by Pliny, who
either borrowed it from Vitruvius or drew from the same sources. According to
these reports the city walls of Athens as well as the cella walls of the Temple
of Olympian Zeus were opus lateritium; at the time of Peisistratus it must
therefore still have been used for magnificent buildings and fortifications. It
was still much in use in Rome in the late imperial period and was preferred to
other masonry bonds because of its solidity. The Italic peoples probably fol-
lowed Asiatic models in fashioning their arches of this material, which would
explain their antepagments or archivolts nicely. Saxa quadrata or lapides qua-
drati [squared hewn stone], ashlar stone, was actually used only for ramparts,
water systems, and foundations, and then only to sheathe a core of less-solid
material, as will be shown in the section on hewn stone. In this too Rome fol-
lowed the Asiatic model. Caementa, or rubble stone, mixed with materia,
mortar, was used for the core, serving as a filler between the ashlar walls.
Brick construction proper (using fired brick) may not have found acceptance
until the Sullan period toward the end of the Republic, and it was still rare at
the time of Vitruvius.
In early times marble was used neither by the Etruscans, who were familiar
with their Luna stone but did not use it for building,36! nor by the Romans,
nor by the other peoples of central Italy. Tufa and calcareous sinter were pre-
ferred for stone construction, as they were easy to process and took stucco
well. In Rome a green-gray Albanian peperino was used at first, and after that
Tiburian calcareous sinter (travertine). These remained secondary materials,
at least in architecture proper (whose works, as we have often shown, were
throughout the ancient world always clearly distinguished from the great util-
itarian works). They were never without their expolitio, or stucco dressing,
which can be explained in stylistic-historical terms and is proven by many
passages in Vitruvius, Pliny, Cicero, Seneca, and others.3°* This expolitio was
colored, though white was certainly used as often as any other color —defi-
nitely not in imitation of white marble, however. Yet red may have been the
richest and most popular tone, as it was even in Vitruvius’s day, to judge from
what he says about it in his seventh book. This ancient custom can even be
seen on travertine works of later periods. For example, the construction tech-
nique used for the Colosseum —that is, the cut joint —was not chosen to

405
 Semper

enhance the effect of the work. The same is also true of an old, probably
Republican, arcaded building covered with red stucco that was discovered at
the foot of the Palatine Hill near the Via Sacra, not far from the Arch of Titus,
during my stay (in 1832). I would cite several more examples, if I did not
know how easy it is for aestheticians to argue them away. Even brick walls,
opus reticulatum (reticulated) and opus incertum (rubble), a reduced version
of cyclopean walls that the Romans employed for their civil buildings, did not
remain free of this covering, as is shown by the Sullan terrace work in Praeneste
and in countless other examples, especially in Pompeii and Herculaneum. At
the latter sites the oldest works are built in the most beautiful opus reticula-
tum with small square tufa stones, and the entire wall area has retained the
original colored stucco coating, the expolitio. The genuine red brick color
used as a polylithic wall decoration was not introduced until a later period,
which will be discussed shortly. This color must have appeared at least on the
cornices of the two little brick temples above the Egeria valley near Rome, as
they are nielloed, as it were, with dark blue stucco ornaments pressed into the
brick indentations.
Thus the Italians, devoted as they were to the ancient building tradition of
covering walls with stucco, developed early on their own art of wall painting.
They may have used it earlier than the Greeks for mythological and historical
scenes and for other depictions that went beyond the bounds of pure decora-
tion. Pliny the Elder provides sufficient evidence of this.
Above all, this author admires the paintings in the temples in Ardea, which
he considers to be older than the city of Rome. Although Pliny may have over-
estimated their age,3¢3 it can still be assumed, given the early destruction of
Ardea and the ruinous condition of the buildings in which the paintings
were found, that they were very old and probably the work of a native artist.
According to Pliny the same artist painted equally magnificent pictures at
Lanuvium that Caligula found so beautiful that he would have removed them
from the wall if the consistency of the stucco had allowed. According to the
same author, certain equally fine wall paintings at Caere were of the same age.
Some pictures from this early period may have survived. At least it is
impossible to determine the age of certain Tuscan and ancient Italic tomb
paintings discovered only in our day. The oldest have very little Greek about
them but are instead Asiatic: both in terms of the representation, which is
always descriptive and concerns experiences, usually ceremonies for the dead,
and in terms of the technique, which consists of the simplest coloring of out-
lines, mostly concerned with external life but sometimes expressing an almost
modern sentiment. The colors are those found in the oldest painting tech-
niques, for the so-called florid colors (for example, vermilion) are completely
absent.364
The principle of these wall decorations, from an architectural perspective,
is similar to that of the Greeks at the time of Polygnotus: a sort of tapestry of
uninterrupted images distributed in one or more friezelike zones set above one
another over the whole wall, which is usually provided with a painted wain-

406
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

scot in a darker color. The panels, fields, pilaster strips (abaci, orbes, cunei,
etc.), and other motives that Vitruvius indicates correspond to the ancient
manner of colored wall dressing are not found in the older tombs, nor even in
Etruscan tombs from a later period when the Romans already ruled the whole
of Italy. This shows that the plaster imitations of incrustation said to belong to
the ancients (veteribus) are probably no older than the Alexandrian period.

§ 83 The Romans as World Conquerors

The impact of the systematic plundering by the Roman victors, proconsuls,
and aediles of the late Republic on the customs and way of life of the Romans
in general, and on architecture in particular, has already been discussed in
some detail (see above, pp. 288 ff.). Stolen statues and paintings filled the
temples, markets, and halls, as well as the houses and villas of art dilettantes
and Roman citizens and freemen with a mania for pomp. At first these works
were but outward adornments that did not affect the architectural and deco-
rative compositions at all, and later only superficially so, for their assimilation
was incomplete and more or less violent. Yet in this the Romans were not
original, but merely the heirs and perpetuators of a decorative system that, as
I have shown, had been accepted by the Greeks since the time of Alexander or
even earlier.
Corresponding to this was polylithic decoration, an Asiatic luxury that
had penetrated simultaneously into architecture, sculpture, and the minor
arts, and was already in full bloom, at least in Greece’s Asian and Alexandrian
capitals, before the Romans had started to extend their power in that direc-
tion. Already among the Greeks it had led to the invention and perfection of
the kind of wall decoration with colored plasters, very precisely described by
Vitruvius in his book 7. He points out that the Greeks were especially skilled
at preparing various plasters for walls, so much so that sections of old Greek
mortar were later cut out so that they could be set in Roman walls like pic-
tures or marble panels. Thus the Romans were again following Alexandrian
models in this sort of incrustation, which is executed in limestone mortar with
a filling of the same material in a wet state, following a procedure that is in
many ways related to the one used in modern fresco painting.36
When Vitruvius speaks of the ancients (antiqui) he makes it perfectly clear
that he is thinking only of Greek predecessors in the art of wall dressing.36
He also betrays an erroneous view of their history by asserting in chapter 5 of
book 7 that the inventors of the art of plastering walls began by imitating the
varieties of colored marble crust and arranging them next to each other and
that stucco cornices, the ocher-yellow and vermilion panels in stucco, and a
system of dividing the wall into fields that was appropriate to this process
came only later. Finally, actual scenography appears: perspectives of archi-
tectural scenes painted on the wall, imitations of projecting colonnades,
pediments, and so on, as well as historical paintings in the grand style in suit-
able places with pictures of gods and heroes, mythical representations, Trojan
battles, or scenes from the Odyssey.

407
 Semper

“But these naturalistic motifs,” Vitruvius continues, “are now wrongly

scorned. We prefer monsters painted on the mortar ground to truthful repre-
sentations of real things. Instead of columns we paint reed stems, instead
of pediments small harpylike monstrosities that terminate in curly leaves
and rising volutes. Further, there are candelabras supporting little temples,
from whose pediments tender flowers grow out of scrolled roots and upon
which small figures senselessly sit, and sometimes flower calyxes with little
half-figures sprouting up from them, some with human and some with animal
heads.” The architect then follows with his well-known philippic against this
bad taste and recounts the anecdote of Apaturius of Alabanda, who in Tralles
decorated a scene in the fantastic style that Vitruvius laments but later altered
it after it had been criticized by the mathematician Licinius.3¢7
If Vitruvius did not go back to heroic times for his history of decorative
painting, and if he did not consider, for instance, the marble incrustations on
the Tomb of Atreus in Mycenae or their like, which could have provided some
sort of justification for his theory, then it is certainly incorrect. The true incrus-
tation method had been completely forgotten during the Hellenic period, and
there is no trace of plaster imitation of marble wall incrustations, on either
the monuments or the surviving tombs of this period. Equally unknown to
Romans and Etruscans, until shortly before the fall of the Republic, was the
use of marble (even their own from Luna) for constructional and decorative
purposes. They borrowed it from the Greeks, and in the case of wall incrusta-
tion and the decorative principle that derived from imitating it with colored
stucco panels, more specifically from the Greeks of the Alexandrian period.
After having been long forgotten this ancient barbarian principle of deco-
ration was revived through Asiatic influence on the Greek mind, displaced the
megalography and scenography of painters like Polygnotos and Agatharcos,
and combined with the luxury of stolen and imported works of art set into the
walls or otherwise incorporated into the architectural setting of decorated
rooms. This is how composite Roman wall decoration emerged. It antedated
the Augustan Age, and by that time it was already entering a new phase.
By the time Rome consolidated its domination of the world and pacified
the provinces, many of the art treasures of the provinces had already been
stolen. Sometimes, too, the more peaceful conditions in these lands made such
plundering more difficult. Old works of foreign art became ever more rare
and costly, and living artists could not keep up with the general passion for
pictures and sculptures to decorate walls. Consequently, wall painting proper
returned, but this time it absorbed motifs drawn from the incrustation deco-
ration that had preceded it, as well as other elements clearly of Alexandrian
origin. These included the light reed colonnades and baldachins with fron-
tispieces of segmental arches crowned with fantastic sphinxes and griffins,
which the Ptolemaics borrowed from the ancient Egyptians and which they
liked to imitate for their provisional festival halls and even for more perma-
nent furnishings, for instance, on ceremonial ships. We find their models in
numerous wall paintings and papyrus rolls from the earliest days of the

408
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

pharaonic empires. Among these were several other decorative motifs of a

purely conventional kind that have nothing to do with naturalistic imitation.
Some are highly remarkable conventional color combinations, a palette that
contrasts with the more purple Asiatic-Hellenic hues.3° In the older, Egyptian-
style wall decorations at Pompeii this palette is clearly different from that
found in later paintings there and in other remains from the same period.
Petronius is referring to this Alexandrian-Egyptian influence when — after
complaining of the deleterious effect of Asiatic shallowness and bombast on
Athenian oratory —he exclaims: “Painting, too, has come to no better end
since the impudent Egyptians invented a scheme for this great art” (see color
plates 14 and 15),3°9
Nevertheless, Vitruvius had much less cause to complain about this revival
of ancient wall painting (even if it yielded too much to the fashionable trends
of the period) than about the above-mentioned second Oriental revival,
namely, polylithic wall dressing. This fashion appeared at about the same time
as the revival of wall painting, or a little later, and initially in combination
with fantastic wall painting, but then it displaced wall plastering and the
painted polychromy inseparably linked with it, or at least compelled both to
metamorphose into mosaic painting, the better to assimilate true marble
incrustation.
To suggest that Vitruvius thought wall painting in general a regrettable
revolution in art would certainly be to put words into his mouth.3”° In fact,
he speaks out only against excesses committed in the name of fashion and
against the foolishness of painters, not against wall painting as such. Nor does
Pliny, who praises Ludius for reviving scenography and finds his decorative
style graceful and inexpensive. On the contrary, Pliny zealously revolts against
the displacement of painting by the newly emergent polylithic decorative prin-
ciple. Vitruvius does not address the latter at all, except in the passage quoted
above, where he declares it the oldest technique, perhaps because in his day it
had not yet been introduced on a large scale. As we know from other sources,
it began to spread only under Augustus.
The earliest writer to give more precise information about polylithic
decoration is Seneca, who contrasted the extravagance of his period’s wall
decoration with the common wall plastering of Scipio’s villa. “Now everyone
considers himself poor and miserably housed if his walls do not gleam with
massive and costly marble panels; if Alexandrian marble does not contrast
with Numidian panels; if, as in painting, a polychrome circumlitio <the
wax coating that was always present, even with colored marble> does not
everywhere border the marble fields; if the ceiling is not invisible behind mir-
ror glass.”37!
This passage, apart from proving the extravagance of polylithic decoration
during Seneca’s time, even among the middle classes, is also of particular
importance because it shows that circumlitio (which can be only the kind of
glaze that, following an ancient tradition, was applied to all marble art works,
both statues and architectural members) was used to tint and occasionally

409
 Semper

modify the bright hues of polychrome decoration.3”2 I read this sentence as

the most succinct and yet precise description of the process still clearly visible
in traces on the marble temples of Athens and on many statues. Some associ-
ate it with mosaic trimmings, but this is contradicted by the precise meaning
of the word circumlinire—to coat completely with a coating substance (one
that is initially liquid).373
In Pliny’s time, significant progress had already been made in this new dec-
orative technique. He gives the history of the introduction of marble into
Rome. His first example is that of the orator L[ucius] Crassus, who acquired
for his Palatine house six small columns from Hymettus only twelve feet high.
He was followed by M[arcus] Scaurus, who during his term as aedile acquired
360 columns for use as scenery in his provisional theater. He later used the
finest and largest of them to decorate the atrium and peristyle of his house on
the Palatine Hill.
The first marble wall dressings were commissioned by Julius Caesar’s prae-
fectus fabrorum [chief engineer] in Gaul, for his house on Mount Coelius.
M[arcus] Catulus was the first to extend this luxury to flooring, laying thresh-
olds of Numidian stone in his house. The lower parts of Scaurus’s theatrical
scenery were covered with marble crusts, and the Temple of Jupiter Tonans
on the Capitol was the first building, or one of the first, to be built in solid
marble ashlar, in accordance with Greek building methods.
But the most important of Pliny’s comments on this subject is his com-
plaint about the decline of painting, which had been completely driven from
the field by marble, that is, by polylithic wall decoration:

Now, however, it has been totally pushed aside by marbles—what’s more by gold —
and not only to cover entire walls but even to decorate them with engraved marbles
and marble slabs covered in wavy lines to look like animals and objects. It isn’t even
enough to have panels or wide wall spaces in a bedroom depicting mountains. We
have begun even to paint stone.>74 This practice was invented in the principate of
Claudius, while under Nero the technique was invented whereby markings were
inserted in marble slabs which were immaculate, to break up the monotony. Thus,
Numidian stone could have oval-shaped markings, and Synnadic marble could be
embellished with purple, the way luxurious tastes would have wished them to be
naturally.375

Here one can see the contrast with ancient Greek polychromy, which does not
want stone to look like a piece of wall and therefore covers it up with paint.
Here the opposite approach demands that painting and other means be used
deliberately to emphasize stone’s material and structural capacity as a panel
and even as ashlar and make it stand out.
Even without these very interesting but always misunderstood reports, the
monuments dating from the period in which the Roman way of building
achieved worldwide dominance leave no doubt about the important changes
in decoration described in these reports that are closely related to the principle

410
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

of building in general. In all temples and other monuments from the Roman
imperial period we find cut ashlar and sharply marked, rectangular recessed
stone joints as the most important decorative elements (albeit initially only
by chance in buildings left incomplete —for example, the amphitheater in
Verona). It even extended to the actual column supports and entablature,
whereas in early Italic and Greek work from the finest period the masonry or
ashlar joints on columns and entablatures were never visible and had no
architectural effect. At the same time, we notice that in Pompeii all walls
adorned with quadratura [squared stone], used decoratively both outside and
inside, have an especially lively polychromy, imitating colorfully alternating
marble ashlar and using color to accentuate the joints. We can be certain that
temples now colorless in their ruined state were just as colorfully decorated at
the points in question, and this includes temples and monuments built of
white marble.376
According to the new polylithic architecture of Rome, white marble could
retain its natural color as a white element in the new polylithic system. But it
was already modified by the circumlitio, which was retained by the Romans
for every kind of marble. Moreover, white marble as such was no longer highly
esteemed, as can be seen from Pliny’s remarks on luxurious Roman columns.
One can be certain that it was permitted only when it was compatible with
the predominant taste for colored stone. Here the columns of Luna stone
inside the Pantheon, transformed into colored marble by ancient encaustic
techniques, deserve to be mentioned. (On this remarkable fact, which to my
knowledge no one has disputed, see Quatremére de Quincy’s Jupiter and
[Aloys Ludwig] Hirt on the Pantheon.)
Moreover, the Asiatic preference for gilding, which the Romans inherited,
led to massive use of this richest of all dressing materials, chiefly on roofs and
thus also on columns, as supports for and components of the roofing system.
Although most Roman temples and other white marble monuments are
now ruins, and those in the best condition have been altered to serve other
purposes, especially ecclesiastical ones, unquestioned remains of the antique
circumlitio have survived in part, and this covering still frequently shows
signs of its former color and gilding. Generally, the paint that served as the
external decorative element was removed, as it too clearly betrayed the pagan
origin and profane purpose of the building. The most suitable and convenient
way of doing this was to scrape the walls or, even more frequently, to repaint
and whitewash the work. Such is the case with the three columns in the
Forum Romanum, apparently a remnant of the Curia Julia, of which the
lower sections lay buried deep in rubble for many centuries, probably from
the time of the downfall of Roman rule. It is upon just these lower parts,
extending precisely to the level the rubble once reached, that a red tint can be
seen (not even the opponents of polychromy deny this),377 as if it were fused
with or bled onto the surface of the stone.
Equally clear are remnants of color and gilding I discovered on Trajan’s
Column, the presence of which was confirmed by other architects, of various

411
 Semper

nationalities, whom I asked to reexamine the column with me. I hoped to use
this testimony to confound certain doubts or contradictions that I antici-
pated — easily asserted and just as easily believed. One by one, nine architects
lowered themselves down the column on a rope to examine its full height.
Without exception they confirmed my observations. A few years later, in
1836, one of them—[Mathieu-Prosper] Morey —retracted his testimony and
claimed that both the blue and the green were copper oxide that had bled
from the bronze statue, while the red he had found was only red crayon. This
tardy recantation and incredible attribution of the presence of color to ran-
dom causes (perhaps even intending to suggest that I had smeared crayon on
the column to deceive my colleagues), based on unconfirmed observations,
are dealt with in Hittorff’s great work ([Restitution du temple d’Empédocle a
Sélinonte,| 142), where all the details on this subject have been collected.
Among them is a memorandum by Constant Dufeu that confirms my obser-
vations.378 Dufeu examined all parts of Trajan’s Column very closely in 1834
and, “d’une maniére évidente et incontestable pour lui,’ found the same rem-
nants of the ancient circumlitio that I first noted. I considered then and still
consider today that the presence of this circumlitio is the most important fact
for our question, more so than its actual colors. This circumlitio was found
under the abacus and on the parts of the capital protected by it, a thick
resinous crust still intact, with shiny cracks similar to old tar on ships; it could
still be seen on other parts of the monument as well. The remnants, in any
case, are not sufficient to reconstruct the whole system of polychromy that
was used on this monument. But wherever we closely examine an ancient
work of sculpture or architecture of white marble that has to some extent
retained its exterior integrity we find traces of this same resinous coating, the
presence of which cannot possibly be explained by random events. In some
places, especially on the nude parts of statues and on the main surfaces of the
constructional members (like the shafts of columns, architraves, and friezes),
this coating is transparent and not of measurable thickness. On the garments
of the figures, on certain ornamental parts, and on wall surfaces, it is opaque —
an opacity achieved by adding in some cases plaster or lime, in others frit or
some other opaque dyestuff, to the wax. There it is applied fairly thickly,
almost in the manner of enamel. For bare skin, or where the whiteness of the
marble was the effect desired, this whiteness was nonetheless first mitigated
by a stain (Bad) and in some cases painted; this was followed by a colorless
Wax coating, in accordance with the process described by Vitruvius (7.9). This
author makes it clear that only the nude parts of the marble statues (in other
words not the clothing) were treated in this way. This causis, this transparent
wax coating, should not be confused with the thick, encaustic, mosaic-like
painting in which circumlitio became an ornamental device (according to my
observations of the Temple of Theseus and the Parthenon statuary, the fully
opaque paint containing lime that is found on the garments of the latter is
something else again). The gilding was laid on a red bolus mordant or on gold
ocher and then fixed again and protected from the weather with the help of

412
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

encaustic. These are, briefly, the results of my observations of this material

aspect of polychromy on white marble among the ancients, and they agree
completely with the relevant passages from ancient writers. More on the same
question will follow in the concluding sections of this chapter and especially
in the chapter on ceramics. The technique of coating white and colored mar-
ble works, and of mortar coating, remained unchanged under the Romans,
except that, as a result of the introduction of polylithic decoration, it under-
went numerous modifications, which have already been indicated.

Thus in the Augustan Age ancient Indo-Germanic architecture entered a new

phase of its history, as the constructional and material elements were assimi-
lated with full awareness of their significance. This structural trend, combined
with the massiveness and spaciousness achieved by the Roman style, espe-
cially with the aid of the arch, the groin vault (now handled with the greatest
daring and technical assurance), and the dome, and finally with that quality
Roman works possess of fitting into any surroundings, becoming part of
nature and yet at the same time dominating it, setting themselves in opposi-
tion to it as a microcosm —all these things made the Roman style the architec-
tural expression of a magnificently material, worldly, and at the same time
world-dominating imperialism!

§ 84 Rome in Decline
We will now deal very briefly with the conclusion and final stirrings of this
imperial idea before its demise, inasmuch as these death throes are revealed in
the decline of architecture —all this, of course, from the point of view that
particularly concerns us here.
One characteristic of this period is that the structural-lithotomic element,
which is apparently married to and intimately bound with the Hellenic formal-
tectonic element during the empire’s golden age, begins to separate itself.
Over the course of this breakdown the structural element develops uni-
laterally and increasingly as a building mass, a trend within which even late
Roman architecture still produced magnificent work. The formal-tectonic ele-
ment, by contrast, noticeably withers and returns ever more decidedly to
Asiatic materialism in its dressing. The same shining, brightly embroidered
covers that could be said to have been the swaddling clothes of antique art
were also to be the shroud in which its mummy was wrapped. All this richness
of tapestries; this extravagant use of precious metals with which walls and
buildings of every kind were paneled; this jewel work and skillful enameling
squandered on walls, ceilings, and floors; these rooms paneled in jasper and
ivory, with glass and amber; these mosaics and other such decorative dress-
ings for which an Asiatic, aging Rome sacrificed its stolen treasures —how
similar this is to the barbarian splendor of the rough and refined Chaldean-
Assyrian encrusted earth walls!

413
 Semper

Much of the luxury of the late imperial period would not have been new to
the Diadochi, as it was introduced to Rome by Nero, or even by Augustus. Yet
this luxury managed to move, at least to some extent, within the bounds of a
general architectural law. The skill with which the materials were processed
was appropriate to their costliness, although the step backward that these
techniques had already made under the Ptolemies is expressly mentioned with
regret in the description of the Ptolemaic Nile barge (the Talamegos), famous
for its incredible splendor.
[Flavius] Rufinus’s description of the Ptolemaic Serapeum in Alexandria,
which indicates the inner shrine was lined three times—first with gold, then
with silver, then with bronze —is evidence of how a profound and religious
tradition, which Phidias, too, honored but then put to artistic use, can become
the most arrant nonsense in eccentric times.
Scaurus had already rivaled this Asiatic splendor with his wooden theater
in Rome, which had a three-story skene paneled with marble, gold, and
mosaics. In his Golden House the mad Nero dared eccentricities in this vein
that had been unheard of previously and would never be achieved again. He
mimicked the Alexandrian masking of material, hiding something costly
behind something less costly. Pliny reports that it was during Nero’s reign that
it became the practice to paint the tortoiseshell with which furniture was
veneered to resemble wood.
The unfortunate use of glass for decorative purposes was taken to extremes
shortly after the age of Augustus (the manufacture of glass was already popu-
lar in Rome in Cicero’s time), as was emblematic decoration using semi-
precious stones of significant size, chased silver, carved ivory, and so on. In
addition to descriptions in ancient writers, who tended to treat this luxury
expansively, there is no lack of artifacts to confirm it. The soil of Rome is
more or less strewn with pieces of glass, the remains of such wall and floor
dressings of artificially patterned and carved glass. In Veii a floor of compact
glass the size of the room was found. Objects of two-toned glass, carved like
cameos (in the manner of a Portland vase), have been found with stucco rem-
nants from the wall into which they were fitted. Nor is there any lack of frag-
ments of genuine painted glass. On the Palatine was found, among other
remnants of Roman splendor, a room completely encrusted with silver and set
with precious stones ([{Pietro Santi] Bartoli, [in] Memorie [di varie antichita,
nos.] 101, 102, 118). It may date from the time of Nero, whose house was
dressed entirely with gold and inlaid with gems and mother-of-pearl (Sue-
tonius). In the seventeenth century a room was found on the Aventine whose
walls disappeared behind gilded bronze plates encrusted with medals.
These and other remains of ancient wall dressings consist in part of non-
degradable materials, which is why the taste for polychrome architecture and
sculpture in the centuries of the late Roman Empire can be seen so clearly and
undeniably. Even the ivory panels from this period that have been discovered
are polychrome. The mosaic reliefs discovered in Hadrian’s villa are poly-
chrome, and they are analogous to the other, much older Greek mosaics

414
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

already mentioned. They provide incontrovertible evidence that color domi-

nated in sculpture and architecture until the ultimate decline of ancient art; at
the same time, they represent an indirect argument for the antiquity of this
dominance. The assumption that they might have introduced a new principle
into the visual arts is not in keeping with the imaginative proclivities of late
Roman art, which focused only on the architectural mass.

After [Titus Flavius] Domitian[us] there was a return to simpler or more regu-
lar habits, and the lofty artistic ambitions that went along with it lasted for
only eighty years (from the end of the second to the late third century), where-
upon Orientalism burst its banks and flooded the seat of the Roman Empire
to even more devastating effect.
Syrian luxury now increasingly freed itself from the constraints of antipa-
thetic Hellenic rules of beauty that had until now maintained their shaky rule
over materiality. Thus the bond that held together the technical aspects of
architecture to produce a general artistic effect was increasingly loosened. The
interior wall detached itself from the masonry exterior, and the latter became
the ceiling support. At the same time, sculpture and painting ceased to be art;
as a result the enjoyment of materially beautiful and sensually attractive things
was sought out ever more greedily as a substitute for artistic enjoyment.
All the material relevant to this is assembled in Raoul-Rochette’s book
Peintures antiques, where one will find, in addition to citations from ancient
writers and the objects found, the titles of all ancient and modern writings on
this subject. Rather than make a great show of quotations borrowed from
that scholarly work, I would prefer simply to direct the reader to it.

§ 85 Christian Era: Western Empire

As the secular empire faded, a new idea of spiritual domination that had been
growing quietly and slowly in seclusion slipped into the great house of the
dying world giant. Constantine the Great, the bitterest enemy of this idea
(although the Roman Catholic Church nevertheless recognizes him as a saint),
sensed its potential power. He wanted to subjugate it, to use its spirit to reju-
venate the secular empire. But this magnificent plan was thwarted in the
greater, Western half of the empire owing to the failure of his successors, per-
haps also to the uncontrollable force of circumstances. Here in the West the
new idea of world domination, a spiritualized Rome, indeed entered upon the
inheritance of the empire after many vicissitudes and struggles, and it entered
the house of the Caesars not as a slave (as in the East) but as a master. The
way in which Rome established itself within this inheritance; the way in which
this spiritualism, in accordance with the doctrine of the crucifixion of the
flesh, which also contains an acknowledgment of that flesh, symbolically
absorbed the structural, technical, and materialist principle of late Roman
architecture into its new mortification of the building material and pursued
this trend with utmost consistency; the way in which the Roman basilica

415
 Semper

metamorphosed into the rib-vaulted pier structure of the Gothic cathedral—

these are all important elements in the history of style, but they are more
appropriate to another section.
Even so, the wall retained its antique significance as a spatial termination
until the end of the twelfth century. Although it became a bearer and sup-
porter of vaults, it did not yet make these mechanical functions evident in art-
symbolic terms. It performed these services almost furtively, and the ancient
Indo-Germanic symbol of roof support — the column— remained the apparent
support for the vaulted tent ceiling. Thus during the whole Romanesque
Middle Ages the interior wall and ceiling vault retained their ancient and tra-
ditional formal meaning of spatial termination and cover, and were architec-
turally marked as such by the principle of dressing and by the basic principles
of antiquity. Indeed, in western Europe during this period, perhaps as a result
of Byzantine37?—or rather directly Oriental —influences, the ashlar decora-
tion of walls that had been so characteristic of ancient Roman works was
again abandoned. The ornaments derived from the dressing, whose origin and
meaning could only be surmised from classical architecture, were quite mate-
rially and naively borrowed anew from the textile arts. The Normans of the
eleventh century, for example, once again borrowed elements from wicker-
work, braiding, and tapestry patterns for decorative purposes; as was the case
among the Chaldeans, these elements were not so much symbolic as represen-
tational and imitative.38°
The situation was different for the dressing when combined with the roof
frame and related supporting elements.
This combination, by means of which the Hellenes were able to purge the
artistic idea of all material additions, was bound to shrink and wither away
all the more as the ancient Indo-Germanic tectonic spatial cover was super-
seded by stonecutting and masonry, which claimed their place in the architec-
tural and formal appearance (see the section on masonry).
Where columns still occur in Romanesque buildings, especially when they
support wall arches (for example, in church portals or in the interior of the
arcade supports for nave walls), they retain all the parts that belong directly
to their system — namely, the admittedly stunted architrave; the wall arch sup-
ported by it; down to the square frame that, with the wall arch, encloses the
triangular spandrels of the arches. Faithful to the antique tradition of dress-
ing, all these parts are treated visually not as masonry work but as interwoven
tendrils, mats, tapestries, and embroidered hems.
The stylistic revolution proper begins only with the invention of the rib
vault. As soon as the ceiling was stripped of its dynamic neutrality and its
integrity as a soaring veil that is supported only vertically before disappearing
into a network of vault ribs (which are, so to speak, horizontal and vertical
only at isolated points along the wall), both the eye and the structure demanded
counter supports.
The Gothic style was able to solve one half of the problem—namely, the
mechanical—in a thoughtless and insipid manner, by means of buttresses and

416
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

flying buttresses supporting the exterior walls. It neglected the aesthetic half
of the problem, however. It is not simply that it leaves the eye unsatisfied at
the point where the lateral thrust of the vault ribs becomes apparent—namely,
in the interior of the vaulted space where the exterior counterweights cannot
be seen—and that the unprejudiced eye is bound to be anxious about their
absence and the one-sided effect of the vault ribs thrusting outward against a
pier whose strength cannot be seen from the interior and appears to be too
weak. It also disturbs our aesthetic sensibilities on the exterior as well, where
overpowering and merely technical piers counteract something that is invisible
and therefore does not exist in a formal sense. Certainly the aesthetic eye can
easily transfer spatial impressions from something seen earlier to something
seen later, but it is not permissible to make static additions to the overall
impression by counteracting masses that cannot yet or can no longer be seen.
This is because half a static system cannot produce something complete in
itself and in fact cannot exist. By contrast, a space such as a vestibule that
forms a harmonious overall unit with the peristyle of the courtyard, the
ascending steps, the upper loggia, and the antechamber into which the loggia
leads is a complete whole in itself.
The problem had been solved far more beautifully, for example, in the
magnificent groin-vaulted halls of Roman baths, where the abutment and the
vertical supports of the vault combine in a way that is both mechanically and
aesthetically pleasing. Columns placed in front of the interior walls and their
entablatures engage the wall and receive the lateral thrust. The placement of
the column supports for the ceiling inside the room satisfies the old Indo-
Germanic principle that the wall should not support but enclose, and in this
respect the wall is emancipated from service to the vault. Moreover, the
Roman unbroken semicircular groin vault with its lacuna decoration scarcely
conveys a sense of lateral thrust, because the symbolism of this decoration
merely makes the vault look like modified ceiling compartments.
Splitting up the ceiling into dynamic wall arches and vault ribs inevitably
led to what the modern Goths call organic articulation,3*! or enlivening the
wall. In fact, it is nothing other than the annihilation of its existence, a visible
demonstration that it has lost all significance as a wall. It has now gone over
to the service of the vault and is split into a double row of tall piers that rotate
their fronts a quarter turn so that their axes are directed vertically at the axes
of the now dissolved walls. Another consequence of this system (the rigorous
logic of which certainly leaves all the rest behind) is the complete disappear-
ance of any visible vertical spatial enclosure—that architectural element or
natural field that architecture’s two noble sister arts, painting and sculpture,
had at their disposal from time immemorial, in a way that was not directly
dependent on architecture. Some compensation for this loss was at least pro-
vided by staining the glass that was set in networks of iron and lead in the
wide openings between the piers to provide the necessary protection against
weather. But however admirable medieval stained glass may have been, it is
undeniable that it always retained a certain barbarian quality, and it was not

417
 Semper

the branch of painting in which this divine art could excel. For by serving as a
transparent pictorial panel—a means of protection —it did not simply dress the
wall but was itself a protective wall. Moreover, as a window in this location it
was subject to the rigorously structural architectural laws of the Gothic style.
In addition, the technical difficulties of this variety of mosaic, and especially
the peculiar use of light intended for it, forced it to work within the strictest
constraints when developing its means. These limits could not be exceeded with
impunity, and they had been reached as early as the early thirteenth century.
Yet another location enabled this style of painting and sculpture to move
more independently of the general structure: the low walls found between the
piers surrounding the choir (following an ancient tradition) and in other suit-
able places. But stained glass, with its colorful lighting effects, was bound to
come into conflict with representational works here, and the ever expanding
web of architectural tracery soon took over these few fields still available to
autonomous art. Only in older cathedrals do we still find these areas used for
historical representations — one successful example is the choir of Amiens
Cathedral, which is surrounded by a series of very lively images in poly-
chrome relief.
Sculpture proper was left even less scope as an independent art than paint-
ing. The Gothic style allowed the former to develop more splendidly only dur-
ing its initial stages, which really still belonged to the late Romanesque period.
Sculpture soon declined, however, because the logic of the new architectural
system did not tolerate statues larger than the human form, and there was room
for them only on the structural parts of the building for lack of walls and thus
wall niches. Crammed between pier bundles and channels or leaning on piers
and functioning as a crown, the statues lacked independence and yet did not
form an active part of the architecture either. Sculpture seldom rose above an
iconographic existence and in this respect is almost Egyptian.
There are, incidentally, several links between the hierarchic architectural
system of Egypt and that of the thirteenth-century Catholic Church, and I will
have another opportunity to discuss them later. Here I would simply like to
emphasize that Gothic ornament also abandoned its structural-symbolic
meaning and was only loosely connected with the constructional core, partly
as pure decoration, partly with tendentious-symbolic significance.
One might think that a general polychromy would be incompatible with
the principles of the Gothic style, and yet it was never applied more completely
and decidedly than in the architectural and sculptural works of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries. Only on the exterior (apart from portals and some
other areas meant to stand out, such as the roof) was the natural color of the
stone retained. Perhaps in the interior it seemed necessary to address the unfor-
tunate state described above in which the eye, being unable to perceive the
abutments and buttresses from the interior, cannot find the reassurance it
needs in a dynamic rib system of wide-span vaults and a light system of pillars
without intermediate walls. A partial solution can be achieved by using profil-
ing and painting to keep the vault’s reinforcing arches and ribs from looking

418
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

like a structure consisting of individual vaulting stones and instead, using

analogies borrowed from the textile arts or from nature itself, make them
look like curved branches or a continuous, strong tissue of tendrils.
In my opinion, nowhere is polychrome dressing more necessary, nowhere
should it be more fully carried out than in Gothic architecture. I know of no
building in this style that has completely satisfied my architectural sense, other
than perhaps the completely polychrome Sainte-Chapelle in Paris. Its architect
was the Ictinus of the thirteenth century, Pierre de Montreuil, who also sought
through the disposition of his works to address the above-mentioned reproach
lodged against the Gothic pillar church in general.382
In this period enamored of decoration and inclined to the Orient, the poly-
chrome splendor of walls and vaults was matched by polychrome floors, usu-
ally consisting of glazed or inlaid tiles arranged in a mosaic. The geometrical
law that dominated this entire artistic trend finds its most satisfying applica-
tion here, and a logic of disposition and style often missing from ancient
Roman floors can be found in Gothic mosaic floors. There will be an oppor-
tunity to return to this in the section on ceramics.
The intellectual rigidity of the eastern empire meant that it retained the
late Roman traditions with only slight modifications. Our theme, already
quite broad, cannot therefore be traced through the Middle Ages of this
empire to its fall without repeating many things already touched upon.

§ 86 The East
The same is true of the East proper, where ancient phenomena constantly
reemerge in a renewed form, and the tradition of wall and structural dressings
found in old Chaldea persisted.
And yet in the various branches of the Arabic style (as well as in Byzan-
tium) there are remarkable connections as well as conflicts between the prin-
ciple of the polychrome and polylithic masking of structure and its opposite—
the use (indeed, the always barbarian misuse) of constructional forms for
merely decorative purposes, peculiarities of style modified in different ways
according to the times and individual trends within Oriental peoples related
by tribe and religion.
Later sections will provide opportunities to return to this in more detail.

§ 87 The Renaissance
I also refer the reader to these later sections for the architecture that we clas-
sify under the name Renaissance style, which was in fact (like all other styles
since antiquity, not excluding the Gothic) a restoration of ancient art in the
minds of architects. In fact, they borrowed only individual features from
antiquity, and uncritically at that, but, inspired by a wonderful creative spirit
of their own, they did create something new and hitherto unattained —all the
while believing they were merely copying. The Renaissance digested and
processed the erroneous view that ancient sculpture and architecture were
colorless in a way that produced a kind of art that was largely self-justified.

419
 Semper

These cinquecento monochrome innovators denounced as barbarian and

Gothic the sculptural and architectural polychromy that had survived in the
tradition but had disappeared from the excavated ruins of antiquity. They
were too artistic not to have sensed the lack of effect and vitality in ancient
works stripped of their color. They blamed antiquity instead of recognizing
the error of their conception, and they tried to compensate for what was miss-
ing through the use of forms in motion and strong contrasts of light and shade.
Thus they fell into a trend that ended with formal projections and curli-
cues, with Borrominian coloratura. Between this extreme and (due to a lack
of coloration) the somewhat drier and colder style of Bramante lies the only
artistic period —apart from the age of Phidias—that can be deemed com-
pletely free of barbarism in all its plastic and technical arts. There will be
opportunity to return to it elsewhere.

Concluding Remarks>*3
In the final sections of this chapter on polychromy and its relation to Greek
and Roman art, the reader may have missed a consideration of opposing
views — views that in most textbooks on art history, and certainly in the most
widely read, are presented categorically as the only permissible approach to
the Hellenic-classical idea of beauty. On the one hand, it was not my intention
to be polemical; on the other, we really cannot see how the opposing party
has deserved this consideration since its most effective tactic lies in denying or
completely ignoring inconvenient facts. Or, when neither of these tactics is
possible, it haughtily winds its way along with stilted and vague phrases, tem-
pered with a “might,” a “may,” or a “could.”384
Compared with that way of treating our controversial theme, the positive
language of the late Professor Ulrichs in Athens was at least honest: he simply
wanted to consider only those texts that seemed to confirm his view, and he
was as little concerned about what previous archaeologists had written about
the same texts as he was about anything else that can be found in ancient
and modern writers on the question, which to him did not seem in the least
controversial.
And I can also find praise for Mr. [Hermann] Hettner, who after his return
from a journey to Greece lasting several weeks expresses his youthful and
fresh opinion about the controversial question in twenty printed octavo pages,
“truly bringing the whole controversial question to a conclusion, by judging
the case of Kugler versus Hittorff-Semper and attributing right and wrong to
both parties.”385 This proves quite fatal to Kugler, who, although himself on
trial, wishes to be the sole judge of the case he has so naively declared closed.
“Truly charming thrones are often built from finished building stone,” says
Kugler at the end of his review of Hettner’s text.38¢ Certainly Kugler had no
need to build the throne upon which he sits in judgment over this affair, as it
was already finished before he came on the scene, or at least its model was—
its white-speckled archetype. I am alluding to the Aeginetan temple that [Leo
von] Klenze restored for the Glyptothek in Munich, about which the catalog

420
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

says: “This painted relief has been approached so conscientiously that nothing
was added that could not be conclusively proven from the ruins, even in cases
where it would have added to the harmony of the whole.” Paint was applied
only where there were clear traces of it; the rest was left white. Thus the white
on the model of this temple is, in the clearly expressed view of the architect
Klenze, a dash —a space that has not been filled in!
And Kugler has been enthroned upon this unfinished Munich temple for
over twenty years and speaks in judgment from it as if he were Solomon! But
what gives him more right to it than Hettner? And how does his judgment dif-
fer from Hettner’s? Had Kugler, as Hettner may certainly claim, even set foot
on classical soil before he delivered it? Is Kugler’s polychrome system any-
thing other than “an attribution of right and wrong to both parties,” a com-
promise between the color-shy aesthetics of the past and my polychrome
restoration of Greek temples from the Periclean age, which is based upon long
study of the monuments of Attica?
Artists cannot comprehend a Kugleresque monument: masses of dark
and bright colors above, dazzlingly white below, with entirely white marble
figures, set off against a blue or red ground, with painted hair, lips, eyes, eye-
lashes, eyebrows, and nipples and an abundance of colored and gilded deco-
ration. They say that too much or too little has been conceded. A white
temple with the powerful masses of color applied above, and only above, is
unthinkable, whereas the old academic idea of a completely white columnar
building, possibly edged and bordered with light gold straps and bands, has a
certain viability as an artistic creation. With marble statues it is very much the
same. Thus speaks the artist, but I know how little consideration aesthetic
necessities can claim in our time, which wants “matters of fact.”387
For that reason I will let the matter rest, but that gives me all the more rea-
son to take issue with the opposing party for its categorical judgment of the
unanimous views based on the actual observations of all the architects who —
subject to exertions, privations, and even danger of every kind—have been
concerned with the study of Attic monuments since the 1820s, and for doing
this without having seriously participated in such work at all. What author-
izes them to ignore genteelly or cast doubt upon the results of others’ work?
As if all of us—first [Thomas Leverton] Donaldson, then [Jules] Goury and
myself (who spent two months together in the Temple of Theseus alone,
which has certainly not been examined more thoroughly or under more favor-
able circumstances before or since, as no one directed our activities at the
time), then [Alexis] Paccard, the pensionnaire of the Académie Francaise (who
studied for two full years in Athens and exhibited the result of his studies, a
polychrome restoration of the Parthenon, in Paris in 1847), then H[ermann]
Hermann (whose observations agree fairly precisely with my own) —and
other unnamed architects who have found the same thing were all merely
dreamers and sometimes even braggarts for the sake of an idea! And yet the
only difference in all our observations on this question was that some of us
saw the principal shade of the columns, architraves, and so on, as rather more

421
 Semper

yellow and others as rather more red. As for me, working on a suspended
scaffold I found reddish remnants of a transparent resin (dragon’s blood?) on
isolated parts of the columns and architrave and examined them individually
using a penknife. Even the difficult [Francis Cranmer] Penrose confirms the
presence of a fine shimmering color coating in a warm shade. And if Herr
Geheimrat von Klenze is of a different opinion on this matter, it seems proba-
ble that he, having much more important labors during his stay in Athens, was
not able to clamber around for weeks on the Temple of Theseus and scratch
away at the walls and columns as I did, an obscure worker in a linen jacket.
Quite without prejudice (before I went to Athens I had little idea what I
would find), I came to see something that would be reinforced by long years
of study, by a more mature general understanding of art, and by artistic prac-
tice until it became an unshakable conviction about the marble temples of
Athens. I have since had several occasions to profess this publicly.
The principle that I am defending is often skillfully parried using para-
leipsis, in which texts by ancient writers, reports of discoveries that have been
made, and chemical analyses that support my view are made to seem as if they
mean nothing at all or even contradict my view. Thus, for example, of [Michael]
Faraday’s analysis of various remnants of paint on the exterior of ancient
Athenian buildings only those parts are quoted that leave the question uncer-
tain, whereas other parts that reach a definite conclusion are either ignored or
the vagueness of an expression is used to undermine its value as evidence.
The blue color on the walls of the north wing of the Propylaea, definitely
confirmed by Faraday, was taken not from the interior but from the exterior of
this building, which Hettner could have known had he not hurried so quickly
through the Pinakothek to the left of the Propylaea (Reiseskizzen, 79). This
would have convinced him that the condition of the interior walls of this room
was incompatible with the assumption that they could ever have been painted.
Moreover, I know from verbal communications with Donaldson and from his
publications on the subject in the Transactions of the Institute of British
Architects that the colors in question came from the exterior of the Propylaea.
Thus, according to Faraday’s analysis, the exterior walls of this white
marble building had blue paint on them. The same chemist also confirms the
existence of fragrant resins and iron in the crusts that were taken from the
columns of the Temple of Theseus. Thus my findings are confirmed point by
point by these experiments, despite the dismissive phrase with which Kugler
rejects them, “as if it were no longer worth the effort of serious discussion.”
I have in fact repeatedly explained that several distinct principles of color
appear on Greek marble temples. Everything structural, analogous with the
bare parts of statues, was thinly coated—or rather stained —with a Badn, a
transparent resinous vegetable paint. The ornaments of the members and sur-
faces were then applied over this glaze in thick crusts of encaustic paint—a
process that is not really painting but must have been closer to enameling
with wax pastes. The walls, or at least parts of the walls, were treated in the
same way, and blue was probably used most often. I found the same blue

422
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

(a light greenish one) in the ground of the frieze, on one opisthodome anta of
the Temple of Theseus. In fact, it was found in such good condition and in
such quantities that any mistake is impossible. I am convinced that if Hettner
had acquired a ladder to examine the area I described he would still have
found the patch, twenty years after my stay in Athens. Donaldson found the
same blue on the outer cella wall of the Propylaea. But it cannot be assumed
from this that the walls were uniformly blue, which to my knowledge no one
has claimed. Rather, it is likely that certain parts— principally the large slabs
at the base of the walls—were different and in fact darker. In addition, the
walls may have had fields in different colors and a special frieze, and not
infrequently the exterior would have been decorated with painted images. As
far as the structural parts are concerned, they may sometimes have been
lighter and sometimes darker, but never completely white. As I have said, I
found a warm yellow-red there, translucent like mastic; here my assessment
agrees with that of the famous chemist who found a fragrant resin and
organic substances. We also know from the ancients that saffron, dragon’s
blood, and other plant essences were used for similar purposes. Exactly the
same Badr using plant dyes was applied to marble statues, and in certain
places (just as with temples) it was supplemented with encaustic painting.
Without this glaze, which is applied in association with the circumlitio, it
would have been impossible to bring the cold marble into harmony with the
colors that my opponents concede, namely, on the accessories and even on
certain parts of the bare flesh. Accepting the foregoing and assuming a
Hellenic naturalism are two positions that are worlds apart, and Kugler had
no need to contest me on that matter.
It has been noted that the columns may have had the same color on frac-
ture surfaces as elsewhere, and this was used as evidence against the existence
of color remnants. This uniformity, if indeed it occurs to the extent that we
are assured, is only apparent, only a matter of color (a fragrant resin could
never be distilled from those fracture surfaces). It does not speak against the
painting of columns at all; rather, it speaks rather well of the good taste of the
Hellenes if they took great pains to tint white marble with the same brilliant
shade that it assumes naturally over time. It is as if they were securing eternal
youth for their work in this way.388
The proponents of partial polychromy have found much support for their
belief in the above-mentioned quotations that Ulrichs compiled.3%? But they
have not been particularly fortunate in applying this method of proof. Thus
Kugler attaches great importance to a passage from Pliny that Ulrichs put into
his hand,39° which again, as with the story of Pythia,??! proves the opposite of
what he wants to demonstrate. It proves, first, that naturally colored white
marble statues were a rarity and, second, that the opisthodome
— that is, the
outer wall of the Temple of Diana in Ephesus—was not white, because the
marble statue could only have shone so strikingly if set off against a dark
ground. If, as Ulrichs and Kugler would have it, the temple servant was refer-
ring to the whiteness of the temple and not that of the sculpture, then he

423
 Semper

could justifiably have expressed his warning earlier and need not have con-
nected it with the sight of the opisthodome. Moreover, the relevant chapter of
Pliny refers to marble statues and not to the Temple of Diana. Kugler’s haugh-
tily dismissive approach to a view opposed to his own—on the meaning of a
passage open to at least two interpretations —is very much his style.
Now let me say a few words about the Siphnians and their white market. It
is claimed that Hittorff and I failed to notice the relevant issue, although it
had been expressly pointed out by Kugler. We certainly did notice it, but we
do not concede that “where Parian stone (noble white marble) was used to
outfit a building, its appearance, at least in the main, must be white.” For this
passage from Pliny proves just the opposite, and Kugler can wriggle like an eel
but he will not get out of the trap that he has set for himself.
Incidentally, in my previous encounter with Kugler over this passage from
Herodotus I did not make this assertion categorically: “Just as one must see
that it is a red herald, and not a white one, that fits the facts, so it is a red
building, not a white one.” Rather, I apologized to my readers for the boldness
of its logic. I point this out only to show that when quoting an author’s text it
is not genteel to omit his qualifications and explanations of motives.
Kugler finds my objections to his interpretation of the much discussed
passage from Herodotus charming — except that I am proceeding from a com-
pletely arbitrary premise and thus my “felicitous conjecture” collapses. Dressing
heralds in white was never a tradition among the ancients, he says, and I need
only to recall the “famous” passage in Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, also cited by
Plutarch in the Cimon.3%2 He then presents me with this “famous” passage in
a translation by [Johann Gustav] Droysen that is imprecise and arbitrary pre-
cisely on the issue in question. For in the original Greek passage Aristophanes
speaks not of a herald’s mantle but of a warrior’s red robe and its polychrome
contrast with the pallor of the commander Pericleidas, who is sitting on the
altar praying for protection. This passage is a travesty, so to speak, of the pas-
sage from Herodotus, with similar but comic contrasts, and by quoting it
Kugler has therefore very astutely explained and confirmed my view. Famous
as it is, without Kugler this valuable passage and its importance to our ques-
tion would have remained unknown to me—unlearned as I am! Here again
there are two contrasts: commander and seeker of protection, warlike purple
and the pallor of fear. What better confirms the double contrast I saw in the
oracle’s pronouncement to the Siphnians? I am even confident in the belief that
Aristophanes’s verses allude directly to the oracular pronouncement, or at least
that he had it in mind as a formal model for his figure.
Kugler will once more reproach me for reading everything possible into the
author and contend he simply took the words as they are. But why then did he
refer to an inaccurate translation of this text instead of the original Greek ?393
I am also surprised, by the way, that this white ceryx mantle did not cause
this learned Christian writer to recall the white-clad angels of the Apocalypse
and those at the tomb of Our Lord. And many other parallels may be drawn
with these white heralds (messengers, angels) from what is found in apoc-

424
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

ryphal writings and in the iconography of the early Christian centuries. It may
be they can also be pursued in the wall paintings of Pompeii or in other
ancient paintings, though I am unable to do this myself given Zurich’s limited
resources for the study of art.
In addition, I should like to draw attention to a passage from [Julius]
Pollux that indicates that when leading the goddess’s procession the nomo-
phylakes were crowned with white taeniae (otpodiw; Pollux, [Onomasticon]
8.94). Yet the nomophylakes were a type of usher or guardian of the
law among the Spartans and, like English constables, were also heralds.
Constables, too, perhaps following an ancient Indo-Germanic tradition, still
wear a white band on their sleeves during ceremonial occasions.
Hardly more fortunate are the uses to which opponents of polychromy in
sculpture and painting put certain passages from Lucian, as has been demon-
strated in part by Ch[ristian] Walz in his above-mentioned review of the writ-
ings on polychromy for the Heidelberger Jahrbiicher. Either Ulrichs has not
read this or he did not consider it worthy of consideration, because in his
Reisen und Forschungen he puts forward the same passages in their old inter-
pretation, as though he was the first to discuss them in this context. This led
me to review these often-cited passages once more for their broader contex-
tual similarities, and in doing so I became engrossed with the highly interest-
ing writings of the entertaining sophist of Samosata, who likes to borrow his
images and metaphors from the techniques of the fine arts, and who refers to
the painting of sculpture and architecture so frequently and unambiguously
that it would be inadvisable for opponents of polychromy to appeal to him.
The two dialogues Imagines and De imaginibus seem to turn on this point. In
fact, they are nothing more than paraphrases of a charming Greek work of
polychrome sculpture. All the arts, including poetry, prose, and philosophy,
have contributed to the decoration of this work, not “just superficially but
with a deeply penetrating stain of splendid saturated color!”3%
Philosophy is described as the lawgiver of the arts; it corrects the image of
sculptural or painted works according to the rules of both arts and it shows
how one can execute them according to the principles of ancient sculpture
(Imag|ines 12.11-13]). This passage makes it almost certain that Lucian’s
archetype was a renovated sculpture by an old master, whom he mentions
previously, whose works had by that time lost their charming colors as a
result of age. Or possibly it was a new sculpture, completed according to the
principles of ancient art and even far more richly decorated.
In the dialogue Iuppiter tragoed[us| Lucian says that ivory statues were
painted and polished only on the outside, but inside they were nothing but
wood. Where the whiteness of the ivory was to be emphasized, it was freshly
cut (Imag|ines 9.21]: TO €€havTt TPLOTH Spovot).
We have already cited a passage alluding to polychrome architecture above
(Amores 34).
As for the natural and accidental patches on the Aphrodite of Praxiteles,
about which Lucian has much to say, these could and must appear under a

425
 Semper

(necessarily transparent) Badr, which over a layer of paint would be all the
more difficult to remove. But enough of passages from Lucian, several more
of which could be cited as relevant to our subject.
Apart from the passages about the dealbationes of Roman temples, which
have already been sufficiently discussed, the only passages adduced by the
above-mentioned Athenian scholar in support of his view are from poets, and
as such they are less important.
When, for example, Pindar sings, “We will erect for you a monument
whiter than Parian marble,” this proves that an architectural work in Parian
marble or (as opponents of polychromy assume for stuccoed work not made
of marble) in imitation thereof was not usual or commonplace.?” For if all
the temples, public and private works, and statues of the poet’s time (about
500 B.c.) had been white, the cold metaphor would have been completely
lacking in Pindaric verve. A stele, a sign from the distance (ofa), would per-
haps— following an ancient tradition—have been made of white stone and
left white. Perhaps the whiteness of steles was linked with the cult of Hecate,
whose statue was, according to Pliny, also white. But it is all the more striking
in relation to this Pindaric phrase that of all the Greek monuments steles are
known to be the only ones on which undisputed traces survive, not just of
paintings but also of the red with which the main surfaces of the stone were
covered.3%6 Rose-colored steles also occur on polychrome vases.397
I could justifiably overlook entirely the passages from Roman poets cited
by Ulrichs, as it has already been shown that the polylithic style admits white
marble as such. Still, it would be difficult to prove this from the eighth book
of Virgil, where the poet describes in detail the shield of Aeneas in beaten
silver and gold and presents us with, among the other engravings found there
(the gold portico of the Capitol, the silver goose, and the Gauls made of this
same metal but with gold hair and gold-striped robes), the snowy threshold of
radiant Palatine Apollo. This threshold probably refers, pars pro toto, simply
and solely to the famous ivory doors Augustus bestowed on the Temple of
Palatine Apollo. Incidentally, properties like candor, splendor, and nitor that
poets and prose writers attributed to white marble and stucco by no means
disappeared along with the white color of these materials, as is irrefutably
demonstrated by the following passages from Vitruvius, among others:

Vitruvius [1.3.1]: sed et bacillorum subactionibus fundata soliditate marmorisque

candore firme levigato, coloribus cum politionibus inductis, nitidius expriment
splendores [once they have been made solid and polished to the whiteness of marble
by the actions of the polishing tools, when the colors are put on they will radiate a
brilliant luster].

Vitruvius 7.7 sub fine: quibus inductis et diligenti tectorum fricatione levigatis colo-
rum ratio habeatur ut in his perlucentes exprimant splendores... {after these have
been laid on and the plasterers have polished them with extensive sanding, the order
of colors must be observed in order that they might radiate a translucent glow].

426
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

Finally, I should like to point out a brilliant image from Ovid’s Metamor-
phoses. I do not know whether it has yet been mentioned in connection with
our subject. In his Metamorphoses (10.591) he writes of Atalanta, who has
grown hot in a fast race:

... Cursus facit ipse decorem.

Aura refert oblata citis talaria plantis
Tergaque jactantur crines per eburnea, quaeque
Poplitibus suberant picto genualia limbo;
Inque puellari corpus candore ruborem
Traxerat haud aliter, quam cum super atria velum
Candida purpureum simulatas inficit umbras.
|... Even the running itself makes a kind of beauty:
the breeze bears back and aloft the streamers from her fleet sandals,
and her locks are tossed down her ivory shoulders;
while at her knees ripple brightly trimmed ribbons,
and over her snowy girlish body a pink flush spreads,
just as when a purple veil, drawn over a marble hall,
infuses it with counterfeit tints.]

Thus the Romans even dyed things that they intended to leave white with
transparent purple light. In this case they saw white, as with the dyed politio
[dressing], as the necessary base for the color scheme, and it by no means lost
its candor with the addition of color. This image from Ovid is again, like that
from Lucian cited earlier, dipped, as it were, in antique polychromy. Form is
saturated with deeply penetrating transparent colors; form and color are one.
Only the decoration, the ornatus (here the hair of the head, the talaria
[pinions], and the genualia [knee ribbons] with the painted or embroidered
limbus [border]), still stand out from the local color and are enameled and
painted encaustically. They are Seneca’s “operosa et picturae in modum vari-
ata circumlitio” [elaborate coating which colors the stone as on a painting].
Doubtless the poet had in mind some polychrome Atalanta, a work by a
famous sculptor that was known to everyone at the time.378

Consequently, the polychromy question should not be considered closed, and

every contribution to it should be weighed. In conclusion, I am reproducing
a letter that I received from Schinkel upon sending him my first brochure
on this theme. In and of itself, everything that famous men say about their
specialty is worthy of being recorded and this letter certainly all the more so
given that it expresses the great architect’s own convictions about the contro-
versial question and contains, as it were, a prognosis of its immediate fate.
As a second appendix I am including a qualitative analysis of remnants of
paint taken from a segment of the ceiling of the Temple of Theseus, carried
out by the chemist Wilhelm Semper, the author’s brother. This segment had

427
 Semper

been walled up in a Christian niche in the temple and, thus, having been pro-
tected for centuries, retained some of its colors in very fresh condition. Also
analyzed was a piece of the coating of Trajan’s Column that the author
removed and brought back to Germany. It makes an interesting contribution
to chemical investigations of antique color that have already been published.

Letter to the Author from Herr Oberbaudirektor Schinkel

Your Honor
has given me a very special joy by kindly sending me your brochure on the painted
architecture and sculpture of the ancients, as I saw with pleasure that you did not
hesitate to send out into the world your preliminary revelations about this impor-
tant theme so variously applicable to our modern architecture, in order to forestall
other possible misunderstandings. The novelty of the matter is bound to lead to
much resistance from our colleagues, but this can only be welcome to you because it
will put you in a position to enrich those later efforts you have planned for this
extensive field of art. This will allow the spiritual source of Greek culture to emerge
convincingly from every side.
From the bottom of my heart I wish you luck and much progress in this under-
taking, for which your brochure has created high expectation among art lovers.
Mindful of the most pleasant personal conversations we shared during your stay in
Berlin, no one can show more interest in all your meritorious efforts than
Your Honor, etc., etc.
Schinkel, Oberbaudirektor
Berlin, 19 June 1834

Qualitative Analysis of Paint Samples from Antique Buildings

The first is a glowing, light blue coating applied to the white marble ceiling of the
Theseum and was easily removed.
Heated on a platinum sheet it melted, ignited, and burned with the fragrance of
burning wax. This fragrance was even more pronounced when the paint was slowly
broken down on a piece of coal using a blowpipe. It did not dissolve in alcohol. The
binding agent thus behaved exactly like pure wax.
The residue from the burning process consisted of a coarse blue powder, the
actual coloring substance. Under the microscope the individual grains looked like
transparent, beautifully blue splinters of glass. They scratched window glass. Under
the blowpipe borax dissolved them with a color that was green at the beginning and
then blue on cooling. Immune to acids, they were broken down with potassium car-
bonate. A neutralized solution in hydrochloric acid with potassium ferrocyanide
gave the characteristic red copper deposit. A copper deposit also formed on an
inserted shiny iron surface. Brought to red heat with soda, the glass splinters pro-
duced a grain of ductile copper.
Thus the coloring agent is a pulverized hard glass frit colored blue with copper
oxide, and the binding agent is wax.
The other is a brown coating almost an inch thick from Trajan’s Column (the
neck of the capital). Heated in a platinum spoon it carbonized, releasing a smell of

428
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

burnt feathers. It therefore contains nitrogenous organic components.

The residue was still brown, but lighter, and dissolved in melting borax, produc-
ing a yellow color that disappeared on cooling (iron oxide).
Boiling nitric acid dissolved most of the residue, effervescing in the process (car-
bonic acid).
From the neutralized solution potassium oxalate and, with greater dilution,
lime precipitated. Thus: calcium carbonate.
Sulfuric acid produced no precipitate in the diluted solution (absence of lead).
Ammonia produced a weak brown precipitate (potassium ferrocyanide), a dark
blue one (hydrogen sulfide ammonia), and a black one, thus iron oxide.
The insoluble matter was treated in nitric acid with cold water. Barium hydro-
chloride and potassium oxalate produced weak white precipitates, thus gypsum.
The gypsum was broken down with sodium carbonate and treated with hydro-
chloric acid, which caused everything to dissolve with the exception of a slight car-
bonic residue, thus pure gypsum without siliceous earth.
To investigate the nature of the organic component the powdered paint was
boiled with ether, alcohol, water, and diluted caustic lye. The first extracted nothing
at all, alcohol only a trace, water somewhat more, in that it turned yellow and left
behind a slight combustible deposit but without extracting any color from the pow-
der. The diluted caustic lye did not have much greater effect.
A solution of sodium carbonate affected it more strongly, producing a strong
brown color as the powder became lighter. Acids did not precipitate the organic
component of this solution. Further attempts to isolate the organic component and
determine its nature more precisely failed to produce more certain results. It seems
to be most readily reconciled with humus in combination with lime. But the lime
was already partially combined with carbon dioxide in the unburned paint, as
diluted hydrochloric acid produced a weak effervescence. Ammonia precipitated a
combination of lime and an organic substance from this solution, and left calcium
chloride dissolved.
According to these experiments, the paint consists of calcium humate (umber-
like kelly), calcium carbonate, calcium sulfate (gypsum), and iron oxide. Gypsum
was probably added as a binding agent for the dyeing substance.
Wilhelm Semper, Chemist
Hamburg, 3 August 1834

Notes
1. See my Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst (Brunswick: Vieweg, 1852).
2. If indeed the report about them is genuine and does not in fact refer to the
Tabernacle of David.
3. It was principally the tribes living far from the western seaboard who showed
particular skill as furriers (Tacitus, Germ[ania] 17): “They select those animals that
have the finest pelts and make a pattern of the stripped-off hides by applying patches
<maculis> from the hides of other animals <or, according to another version, from the
hides of sea creatures> that come from the northern ocean and its unknown seas.” See
the section “The Seam” above.

429
 Semper

4. See [Marcus Junianus] Justin[us], Epitoma 3.29; Amm[ianus] Marcell[inus]

31[.2.5-6]; on the German fur industry in the Middle Ages, see [Karl] Weinhold, [Die]
Deutsche|n| Frauen [in dem Mittelalter|, 426.
5. National-Zeitung, 15 September 1855.
6. Gall is also a well-known binding agent in watercolor painting.
7. A well-known and large factory of papier-maché goods is that of Messrs.
Jennens & Bettridge, Belgrave Square, London.
8. See color plate 10.
9. [Richard Redgrave, “Supplementary Report on Design,” in Reports by the Juries
on the Subjects in the Thirty Classes into Which the Exhibition Was Divided (London:
William Clowes and Sons, 1852), 724. TRANS.]
10. Herod[otus] 2.182 and 3.47. Pliny, H[istoria] n[aturalis| 19[.2.12-13].
11. Some have gone so far as to transform flax into cotton artificially and to serve
up this invention of making lead out of gold to a public that, to my knowledge, only
took momentary notice of it. See Der Flachsbau...; nebst Anweisungen zur Bereitung
von Flachsbaumwolle, translated from the English of Chevalier [Pierre] Claussen
(Brunswick, 1851).
12. See [James] Thomson, “On the Mummy Cloth of Egypt,” and J[ohn] G[ardner]
Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, 5.3.119.
13. See Ritter’s work mentioned at the end of the list of books in § 37.
14. From a passage in Philostratus (Vit[a] Apoll[onii] 2[.20]) one might conclude
that this nankeen was known to the ancients and was one of the materials that carried
that imprecise name byssus [a fine linen]. The passage says that byssus grows on a kind
of poplar tree with leaves like a willow’s. Apollonius says he wore a byssus garment
that was like a philosopher’s yellow mantle (TpiBwvt).
15. See Democritus, in Athenaeus 12.525.
16. Herod{otus] 2.81.
17. Xenop[hon] and Arrian 6.29.
18. Athenaeus 12.53[5].
19. They were of every color and used in the knight’s costume. Scarlet seems to
have meant to the Middle Ages what purple meant to antiquity: that deep, fiery, and
genuine color.
20. It is not within the scope of this book to give a complete and detailed account
of the technology and history of silk manufacture, and thus a certain acquaintance with
silk will be assumed in the following observations on silks as they developed aestheti-
cally in ways at variance with the properties of the raw material; the reader is encour-
aged to consult the relevant books listed. They include the above-mentioned work by
F[ranz] Bock. Though it has not yet been published in full, it certainly deserves to be
commended for its more artistic part. The developmental history of silk manufacture in
the western part of the ancient world may be divided into five main periods: the Latin,
Persian-Byzantine, Saracen-Romantic, Gothic, and finally the Renaissance.
That first period
—namely, the Latin — bordered on the pagan period and may have
extended in some aspects down to the seventh and eighth centuries. The fabrics of this
period were light and much more reminiscent of Indian models than of the style that
has had its seat since ancient times in western Asia (Assyria, Persia, Phrygia, Phoenicia).

430
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

The second stylistic period extends to the time of the Hohenstaufen. Its boundary
with the first period is ill defined.
The fabrics of this period were very heavy, densely woven, and usually without pat-
tern in the early stages; then they were dominated by Persian animal designs woven in
two colors or, later, in gold, combined with square, polygonal, circular, crossed, and
other geometric patterns. The usual colors were yellow, red, purple, and every shade of
gray. Embroidery during this period, particularly in the eighth and ninth centuries, was
applied on a grand scale. The damask and brocade style began to develop out of the
Babylonian excess of ornament that had spread over Europe during this time. The style
of liturgical garments also followed Asiatic traditions in their cut. Oriental cities, espe-
cially those of Persia, Alexandria, and later Constantinople, were the main manufactur-
ing sites for these fabrics. But we know that by the tenth century silk was being woven
in French monasteries and in the cities shortly thereafter.
The third period, the Saracen-Romantic, began with the introduction of the silk-
worm to Sicily and the establishment of a royal and privileged silk manufacturer in
Palermo (circa 1152). It continued down to the time of Emperor Charles IV (1347).
High point of Arabic-Moorish fabric manufacture. Silk manufacture in Persia, Asia
Minor, Egypt, and North Africa reaches its greatest expansion. Blossoming of the silk
industry on the Iberian peninsula under Sultan Ibn al-Ahmar. Manufacturing towns:
Almeria, Granada, and Lisbon. Designs were lighter; animal pattern was no longer iso-
lated and dominant but combined with foliage and purely decorative. Arabesques, ban-
ners, multicolored fabrics, gold fabrics, light and delicate fabrics; highest technical
perfection. Satin and velvet.
Factories in Lucca, Florence, Milan, Genoa, and Venice arose as rivals to Palermo
and even to the Orient. They imitated Oriental fabrics, technically and in their patterns.
The fourth period is the Gothic, which extends roughly to the mid-sixteenth cen-
tury. Two directions in figured fabrics. The first is a return to the false principle of mak-
ing patterns by duplicating historical and figurative subjects on materials and curtains
with the assistance of the loom: fabrics with images of saints and groups of angels
worked into a gold ground, often very beautiful but lacking in style. This style was par-
ticularly influential in Italy, and the architecturally decorated fabrics of the north were
in another respect part of the same trend. Second tendency: purely decorative plant ten-
drils, originally, it seems, a Moorish or Saracen surface decoration that became typical
and repeated itself in countless variations throughout the Middle Ages. It went under
the name of pommes d’amour. In general, the heraldic nonsense and tastelessness of
the late period of knighthood began to assert itself, especially in secular fabrics. By
contrast, in embroidered tapestry (arazzi) the principle of the Renaissance, the influ-
ence of higher art (painting), can already be recognized in the art of the loom.
During this period fabrics “from beyond the sea,” such as those from Moorish
Spain, retained their status alongside European products, even though they were
already in steady decline. Pure geometric patterns, similar to the plaited bands worked
through with flowers on the panels of the Alhambra, as well as damask patterns, are
typical of these late Moorish products.
At the end of this period Italian manufacturing found formidable competitors in the
factory towns that were starting to flourish to the west under the skillful influence of

431
 Semper

Italian emigrants: Lyons, Tours, Vitré in Britanny. Later (in the sixteenth century) came
Montpellier, Orléans, and Paris. Early establishments in Bruges, Ghent, Mechlin, and
Ieper, founded as early as the thirteenth century, were particularly famous for their
satin and velvet fabrics.
The fifth period begins to develop in the early fifteenth century. The principle of orna-
mentation of the so-called minor arts, including textiles, follows the prevailing trends and
freely revives the abandoned traditions of Indo-Germanic (Greco-lItalic) art, rejecting a
thousand years of barbarian influence from the east. Even more consequential is the
newly awakened sense of harmony and better taste in clothing and drapery, because they
are subordinated to the things they serve, colors are less noisy, and garishness is avoided.
Monochrome fabrics (white, brown, violet, black, particularly dark colors with golden
decorations) dominated, and the relationship of the pattern’s forms and colors to what
was dressed was well calculated. There was also a deliberate avoidance of the meaningful
(symbolism) in patterns. In the late Renaissance, as the free, bold, and imaginative spirit
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries waned and was replaced by a cold, classical
schematism, this resulted, to be sure, in a certain emptiness of form. A true damask style
is seen in the pictures of Veronese—a true embroidery style in those of Raphael—a true
velvet style in those of Titian. There was a well-understood silk style even in the age of
Louis XIV. The atrophy in liturgical garments during this period was an unconscious but
healthy protest against earlier Assyrianism. The great historical tapestries, the highest
possible achievement of the loom, belong to the first part of this period and are products
of the most noble development of art. So why are they valued less than earlier oddities?
21. [Arnold Hermann Ludwig] Heeren, Ideen [tiber die Politik], pt. 1, sec. 1, 113.
See also [Johann Reinhold] Forster, De bysso antiquorum, 16.
22. Aristotle, H[istoria animalium] 5.19. Pliny, [Historia naturalis| 11[.25-27].
With regard to these transparent classical silk fabrics, see also Pliny, H[istoria]
nat{uralis| 6[.20]:

The Chinese are, as far as we know, the inventors of silk manufacture.... Hence our
women have the double labor of unraveling the threads and weaving them together
again <reordiendi fila rursusque textendi>. Such complicated work, from such far-
flung parts of the earth, gives our women the privilege of appearing naked in public
<tam multiplici opere, tam longinquo orbe petitur ut in publico matrona traluceat>.

Arrian mentions via onptKov, that is, silk thread in his Periplus. I leave it open as to
whether Pliny was trying to say in this cited passage that Chinese silk already woven
into fabric had to be disentangled, or whether he was thinking only of raw silk threads,
which were imported from China and had to be unraveled in the West to make the fine
transparent fabrics. The most improbable assumption is that the Chinese exported the
raw cocoons of the silkworm as trade articles, and that Pliny took these cocoons to be
the products of a particular Chinese industry. The author’s rursumque texendi [weaving
together again] contradicts the last two assumptions. [Marcus Terentius] Varro and
Publius Syrus had earlier joked about the toga vitrea [glass toga], the ventus textilis
[woven breeze], and the nebula linea [thread of clouds] long before Pliny. See various
places in Salmasius’s Script[ores| bist[oriae| Aug|ustae]. He collected all the passages
referring to ancient textiles and commented upon them in a very learned fashion.

432
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

The following passage from [Marcus Annaeus] Lucan also refers to the way of
reworking Chinese silk stuffs that is indicated in the text:

Candida Sidonio perlucent pectora filo

Quod Nilotis acus percussum pectine Serum
Solvit.
[Her white breasts were exposed by the Sidonian fabric,
which, first woven tightly by the combs of the Seres,
the needles of the Nile loosen out.]
—Pharsal{ia] 10.141

23. The Greeks called these stripes orata, the Romans viae or trabes. Together
with patches or sequins (Kéyxpot, clavi), they formed the decoration of garments from
Kos: “Illa gerat vestes tenues quas femina Coa Texuit auratas disposuitque vias” [She
wore thin garments which a woman of Cos had woven and striped with gold] ([Albius]
Tibullus 2.3.54). See also Democritus, in Athenaeus.
24. A very rare piece of ancient silk fabric, which is a companion piece to the one
published by Bock and likewise dates from a period of quality, is in the possession of
Dr. [Ferdinand] Keller, president of the Antiquarische Gesellschaft in Zurich, who has
most kindly given me permission to publish the same. It was discovered in an ivory
chest decorated with pictures of Asclepius and Hygieia that was found in the archives
of the cathedral chapter of the Church of Valeria in Sion. The fabric is entirely silk and
twilled. The decorations are raised in yellowish brown on a dark green ground (an
illustration follows in the section on weaving).
25. The authors of the bas empire used the word scutulae to mean something quite
different from what Pliny and ancient writers in general intended by it.
26. The motif on the Sassanid fabric illustrated here is, by the way, strikingly remi-
niscent of the well-known sculpture over the gate of Mycenae and similar representa-
tions on ancient vases. See Raoul-Rochette, “Mémoires d’archéologie comparé[e],” in
the Mémoires de l'Institut royal de France 17 [(1848)]: pt. 2.
27. See “Embroidery” for this distinction.
28. We know that the ancients were familiar with gold fabric, loved it, and even
sometimes used it to the point of excess. The oldest reports on gold fabrics are contained
in Old Testament songs and in Homer. Pliny the Elder reports from an earlier writer,
[Marcus] Verrius [Flaccus], that [Lucius] Tarquinius Priscus celebrated his triumph
dressed in a golden tunic, and as an eyewitness he reports that the wife of Claudius
Agrippa attended a naumachia wearing a cloak (paludamentum) of spun-woven gold
without accessories (Pliny 33.63). Josephus tells a similar story about the Jewish king
Agrippa who, when he arranged glittering plays and festivals in honor of the emperor,
showed himself to the assembly in a festively flowing robe woven completely of silver
thread, which produced a most wonderful effect as the sun rose. Various museunns still
show remnants of fabrics spun in the finest gold thread, originating from the classical
period of ancient Rome. Most of them form friezes (viae) of fine wool and linen, as fre-
quently noted by ancient writers.
But if one compares this Roman luxury, preceded by that of the Greeks of the era of
the Diadochi, with the resplendent gold brocades of Asians as they are known to us

433
 Semper

from contemporary reports, the contrast between the two principles of dressing (ignor-
ing all the excesses of the late imperial period) still emerges clearly. The flowing drapery
of the gold cloak, undisturbed by any floral decorations, subordinates itself to the
shape of the body in just the same way as the simple wool toga. It is created only to
emphasize the shape all the more brilliantly. By contrast, the floral patterns of a gold
brocade (even of mediocre quality) attract the eye to individual points of the fabric and
destroy the overall effect of the garment’s form.
29. This is not, however, the ancient name for the fabric in question, and it is diffi-
cult to sort out among the confusing names used by medieval writers for materials.
Perhaps the corrupt expression in the passage of Falcandus cited above, exarentas-
mata (which should probably be replaced by exanthemata), refers to floral damask.
According to [Julius Caesar] Bulengerius’s “De re vestiaria,” the adjective fundatus
(vela de fundato [of golden material]) corresponds to the French étoffe a fond d’or. See
{Charles Du Fresne] Du Cange, s.v. “fundatus.”
30. [Redgrave, 745. TRANS.]
31. [Ibid., 730. TRANS.]
32. Wigalois 14462.
33. Willebalm 366.5-11; Lohengrin 164; and others.
34. I have taken this passage from the book by Bock, which cites a Rélation des
entrées solennelles dans la ville de Lyon, quarto (1752), 6. See Bock, 76.
35. See the cited passage of Bock.
36. This name has led some to think of Siam, the Indian empire.
37. Precisely these properties allow the darkest colors for velvet; there will always
be parts of the surface that far exceed the darkness of the local color and make it seem
relatively light or colorful. This deepness that velvet permits should be exploited. Light
colored or even white velvet has always had a morbid effect on me, as though I were
seeing a white Negro or an albino. Yet in this case much depends on the overall effect.
A dissonance can be a masterstroke in the right place and can be properly resolved.
38. Aeschylus, Suppl [ices] [432]: métot ToAVpLTOL. Pliny 8[.74.196]: Plurimis vero
liciis texere quae polymita appellant Alexandria instituit [Weaving with many threads,
which they call polymita (damask), began at Alexandria].
39. Parzival, passim. See Weinhold, Die deutschen Frauen, 424, where all the pas-
sages are cited. See also Du Cange, s.v. “pavonatilis pannus.”
40. See Wilkinson’s often-cited work on Egypt, 3:144.
41. Closer examination shows it to be identical with the weaver’s knot.
42. See Pliny 19[.2.12], and Herodotus.
43. Some charming medieval nets appear in Hefner’s Trachten and in the article on
costume in [Lacroix,] Moyen Age et Renaissance. The Museum for Practical Art and
Science in Kensington contains Indian nets and ornaments in net form.
44. [C.A. Bottiger, Die] Aldobrand|inische) Hochzeit, 150.
45. It is curious that the technical terms for this branch of textiles are of Nordic
origin in all languages: stricken, Low German kniitten, English “to knit,’ French tri-
coter; Masche, from which come maglia, “mail,” far lavori di maglia, and so on.
46. The relation of the seam to the hem has already been discussed above. In this
regard the hem is also a basic motive of lace manufacture.

434
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

47. See the report by Octavius Hudson, professor of woven fabrics in the Depart-
ment of Science and Art in London, in First Report of the Department of Science and
Art (1854). In this context I must not fail to draw attention once more to this depart-
ment’s fine textile collection in Kensington, London, which also contains a series of
lace specimens systematically arranged.
48. See Jones’s Alhambra, which carefully treats the different principles used in the
composition of this pattern. They were constructed from either a square or a regular
hexagon. The system of colors used on them contrasted with that of the walls above
this paneling. The former was cold and moved in secondary and tertiary color tones;
the latter was warm and consisted of primary colors.
49. This piece of ancient fabric is referred to in note 24. The outlines give a hypo-
thetical reconstruction of the group of figures, which has survived only in part. This
piece also serves as an early example of the stylistically incorrect repetition of figurative
motifs on woven fabrics and canvas embroideries that was criticized on page 232.
50. The oldest mosaics are perhaps the wall decorations found in Warka, which
also form relieflike projections. Among Greco-Roman mosaics, it is precisely relief
mosaics that reveal the unmistakably older Greek style. With the exception of the
mosaic floor in the pronaos of the Temple of Olympian Zeus and some fragments of
uncertain date, all true mosaic pictures date from the late Roman period.
See [Raoul-]Rochette, Peintures antiques inéd|ites, précédées de recherches sur
lemploi de la peinture dans la décoration des édifices sacrés et publics (Paris:
Imprimerie Royale, 1836)], 393 ff.
51. Seneca, Ep[istulae morales] [14.90.16]: Avium plumae in usum vestis conserun-
tur [Birds’ feathers are woven to make fabric].
52. The tapestries executed entirely au petit point dating from the age of Louis XV
reveal a glimmer of a certain style appropriate to the process despite the free and licen-
tious taste of the times.

53. As the opus Phrygionium (or opus Phrygium) of antiquity was surely cross-
stich embroidery, we can conclude that this technique (in contrast to opus plumarium)
was the one generally used for embroidery in Asia Minor. [Gaius] Petronius [Arbiter]
mentions a plumatum Babylonicum [Babylonian embroidery]. The woodcut repro-
duced here (one of many no less artful patterns of the same kind) shows a linen embroi-
dery sewn on a tunic found inside a tomb at Saqqara in Egypt. The tomb dates from the

435
 Semper

Old Kingdom, and this delicate needlework is perhaps over six thousand years old.
There are several references to the type of ancient embroidery used in antiquity in
Salmasius’s notes on Flavius Vopiscus, passim.
54. Béttiger, [Griechische] Vasengem|dlde, vol. 1, pt.] 3:39; [Anton Theodor]
Hartmann, Die Hebréerin am Putztische, 3:141; cf. [Antoine-Yves] Goguet, De l’orig-
ine des loix, 2:108; Salmas[ius], H[istoriae|] A|ugustae scriptores| 511, 126, 127, 224,
311, 394, 894, 858; Schneider, index to Ser[iptorum] r[ei] rust[icae veterum Latinorum],
360-61.
55. [Marcus Valerius] Martial, Epig|rammata] 14.150:

Haec tibi Memphitis tellus dat munera; victa est

pectine Niliaco jam Babylonis acus.
[The land of Memphis gives this gift to you.
The needle of Babylon has been bettered by the comb of the Nile.]

56. It may be appropriate to give here a short extract from Redgrave’s often-
quoted report in which he says the following about muslin curtains:

These fabrics should, of course, have a perfectly flat treatment, whether purely
ornamental forms or flowers are used for their decoration. The best effect for bor-
ders is obtained by a symmetrical arrangement of flowing lines, which may be large
in pattern, from the lightness of the material; while a diaper treatment, or small
sprigs arranged with large and regular spaces over the central field, are the simple
rules for their decoration. It would seem hardly possible to err much in designing
for a fabric which admits of such small variation, the contrast of the thick work
with the more filmy ground being the source of the ornamental form, and colour
being rarely used; yet, perhaps, in the whole Exhibition, there are not more glaring
mistakes than are made in the decoration of these goods. In the Swiss muslins, the
effort seems to have been directed rather to curious skill in workmanship than to
taste in design, and some of the most costly goods are in the worst conceivable
taste —immense cornucopias, pouring out fruits and flowers, palm-trees, and even
buildings and landscapes being used as ornament. Even when this only consists of
flowers, they are used imitatively and perspectively, foldings of the leaves, and in
some cases the actual relief of fruits, being attempted. Although the same faults
occur in the English manufactures, these, on the whole, slightly incline to better
taste,... but there is a sad want of good design in this class. [“Supplementary
Report on Design,” Reports by the Juries, 730.]

Worse than the English —that’s strong! I certainly agree in general with this final judg-
ment about the achievements of modern embroidery, but I do not always share all of
the author’s opinions about the simplicity of the principles of style to be considered
here. I find, for example, that the size of the curtains and their purpose as hangings
influence the character of the patterns, which should answer both to this condition and
at the same time to the seemingly opposite condition prescribed by the delicate trans-
parent fabric. Fine sprigs, therefore, would scarcely be stylistically justified here, nor
would an unduly regular diaper decoration be desirable, as it is not characteristic of
freehand embroidery in the flat-stitch manner. Such decoration is more appropriate to

436
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

woven and printed materials and also to embroidery in the cross-stitch style. But more
on this later in the text.
57. [Johann] Sibmacher’s compositions are included in part in Reynard’s reproduc-
tions of the minor masters. They should be used or, better, copied by a fashion journal-
ist and presented to his lady subscribers, instead of the bad things currently offered to
them.
58. Pliny, H[istoria] n[aturalis] 35[.42.150].
59. Pliny, H[istoria] n{aturalis| 9[.60.127]: Sed unde conchyliis pretia, quis virus
gravis in fuco, color austerus in glauco, et irascenti similis mari? [But what reason is
there for the price of purple shells, which have a foul, poisonous emanation in a dye,
and a somber color like that of a murky and angry sea?]. [Wilhelm] A[dolf] Schmidt
has assumed that Pliny is referring here to the stench of these dyes—I leave it to the
reader to decide whether this is correct.
60. On the purple of the ancients, see [Pasquale] Amati, De restitutione purpu-
rarum, 3d ed. (Cesena, 1784) with an appended treatise by Capello, “De antiqua et
nupera purpura,” and [Michele] Rosa, Delle porpore e delle materie vestiarie presso gli
antichi (1786). Heeren’s Ideen, pt. 1, sec. 2, 88. [Anton] Hartmann, Die Hebraerin am
Putztisch, pt. 1, 367. Schmidt, Die griechischen Papyrusurkunden der Kénig|lichen]
Bibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin, 1842). With regard to the reading and interpretation of an
unfortunately corrupt passage of Pliny’s on types of purple dyes and their preparation, I
do not agree with Schmidt in all details. But these questions have no further bearing on
the aesthetic principle set forth by me in the text, which is my sole concern. Therefore, I
will not touch upon them here but will return to them in the conclusion of this section.
61. Turkish red or something similar.
62. [Johann Heinrich Ludwig] Meierotto, Ueber Sitten und Lebensart der Romer,
2:213. [Joannes Georgius] Graev[ius], Thes[aurus] a[ntiquitatum] R[omanarum], 3:1310 ff.
Ovid, De arte am|andi] 3.169.
63. The literature on dyeing and everything related to it is very copious but always
deals with technical matters. It is mentioned, quoted, and even published in extract
in the relevant articles of the best-known polytechnical journals. See also E[ugéne]
Chevreuil’s Farbenharmonie in ihrer Anwendung, German trans. by an engineer (Stutt-
gart, 1840). A very good essay on dyeing is contained in Dr. Sheridan Muspratt,
Theoretisch-praktischer und analytischer Chemie in Anwendung auf Kiinste und
Gewerbe, freely adapted by F[riedrich] Stohmann (Brunswick: Schwetschke & Sohn).
64. [Athenaeus 12.525. TRANS.]
65. Without anticipating what will be shown in the following paragraphs I ask
here: Would a white marble temple be conceivable in a city like Ephesus, whose popu-
lation exhibited this taste in clothing?
66. This is true not only of antiquity but also of the costume of the Middle Ages
and all the centuries of which we would have only a very cloudy and confused idea if
not for surviving representations in works of art.
67. See the essay “Ueber die formelle Gesetzmassigkeit des Schmuckes und dessen
Bedeutung als Kunstsymbol,” by G. Semper (Zurich, 1856). Published in the Monats-
schrift des wissensch{aftlichen| Vereins in Zurich and available separately from Meyer
& Zeller in Zurich.

437
 Semper

68. Aristophanes, Nubes 987.

69. Athenaeus [1.39.1]. See Bottiger, [Griechische] Vasengem|dlde, vol. 1, pt.] 2:56.
[Also Bottiger, Ideen zur] Archaeologie der Malerei, 210.
70. The peplos is an apronlike wrap worn by Pallas Athena.
71. Bottiger, Kleine Schriften, 3:260n. [Johann Joachim] Winckelmann, Storia
delle arti, 1:98, with [Carlo] Fea’s note.
72. I consider the strange triangular pharaonic apron a kind of pantaloon.
73. Herod[otus] 1.195.
74. The Harpy Tomb in the British Museum.
75. [Antoine-Chrysosth6me] Quatremére de Quincy, Le Jupiter olympien; ou,
L’art de la sculpture antique considéré dans un nouveau point de vue (Paris, 1815),
“Avant-propos,” pp. x ff. and passim.
76. [Jacques-Ignace] Hittorff, Restitution du temple d’Empédocle a Sélinonte; ou,
L’architecture polychrome chez les Grecs (Paris, 1851).
77. In his Ideen zur Archdologie der Malerei (Dresden, 1811).
78. [Désiré] Raoul-Rochette, Peintures antiques inédites... faisant suite aux
Monuments inédits (Paris: Impr[imerie] Royale, 1836).
79. [Antoine-Jean] Letronne, Lettres d’un antiquaire a un artiste sur l’emploi de la
peinture historique murale (Paris, 1836).
80. Peintures [antiques] inédites, 346 n. 4.
81. The Monuments of Nineveh, from Drawings Made on the Spot by Austen
Henry Layard Esq. (London, 1849). A Second Series of Monuments of Nineveh...
from Drawings Made on the Spot, during a Second Expedition to Assyria, 71 plates,
oblong folio (London, 1853). Discoveries on the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon...,
with maps, plans, and illustrations, octavo (London, 1853). Nineveh and Its Remains;
with an Account of a Visit to the Chaldaean Christians of Kurdistan..., Sth ed.,
2 vols., octavo (London, 1850). A Popular Account of Discoveries at Nineveh with
Numerous Woodcuts, octavo (London, 1850). James Fergusson, The Palaces of Nineveh
and Persepolis Restored: An Essay on Ancient Assyrian and Persian Architecture.
82. Die vier Elemente der Baukunst (Brunswick, 1851). “On the Origins of Poly-
chromy in Architecture,” as an appendix to the brochure An Apology for the Coloring
of the Greek Court, by Owen Jones (Crystal Palace Library, 1854). “On the Study of
Polychromy and Its Revival,’ Museum of Classical Antiquities [1], no. 3 (July 1851)
(London: John W. Parker and Son).
83. Diodor[us Siculus] 18.26, where he described Alexander’s sarcophagus. A sim-
ilar wooden catafalque with paintings was found in a tomb in Panticapaeum. Journal
des savants (June 1835): 338-39.
84. Rob[ert] Walpole ([Travels,| 1:534) mentions an inscription from Patara in
Asia Minor: tiv Tod doyelov KaTaoKeuTHD Kal TAaKG@otv [the ornamentation and mar-
ble slabbing of the theater]. The richly encrusted prosceniums of the provisional the-
aters in Rome are known from Pliny and Vitruvius.
85. I think that the dressing and the mask are as old as human civilization and that
the joy in both is identical to the joy in those things that led men to be sculptors,
painters, architects, poets, musicians, dramatists—in short, artists. Every artistic cre-
ation, every artistic pleasure, presumes a certain carnival spirit, or to express it in a

438
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

modern way, the haze of carnival candles is the true atmosphere of art. The destruction
of reality, of the material, is necessary if form is to emerge as a meaningful symbol, as
an autonomous human creation. Let us forget the means that must be used to achieve a
desired artistic effect, and not blurt them out and thus woefully forget ourselves. The
unspoiled feeling led primitive man in this direction in all early artistic endeavors. The
truly great masters of art in every field returned to it, except that in times of high artis-
tic achievement these individuals also masked the material of the mask. This instinct
led Phidias to his conception of the subject matter for the two tympana of the Parthe-
non. Evidently he considered his task, the representation of the double myth and its
actors (the deities), as the material to be treated (just like the stone in which he formed
them), which he veiled as much as possible, thus freeing it of all material and outward
expression of its nonpictorial and religious-symbolic nature. Therefore his gods con-
front and inspire us, individually and collectively, first and foremost as expressions of
true human beauty and grandeur. What was Hecuba to him?
For similar reasons drama could have meaning only in the beginning and at the
height of the progressive education of a people. The oldest vase paintings give us an
idea of the early material masks of the Hellenes. In a spiritual way, like those stone
dramas by Phidias, the ancient mask is taken up again by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides and at the same time by Aristophanes and the other comic dramatists. Thus
the proscenium frames an image of a noble piece of human history that did not simply
occur somewhere once but happens everywhere as long as human hearts beat. What
was Hecuba to them? The spirit of the mask breathes in Shakespeare’s dramas. We
meet the humor of masks and the haze of candles, the carnival spirit (which, in truth, is
not always joyous), in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. For even music needs a means to
destroy reality. Hecuba means nothing to the musician, either, or should mean nothing.
But masking does not help when the thing behind the mask is not right or when the
mask is no good. If the material, the indispensable, is to be completely destroyed in the
artistic creation in the sense meant here, then the material must first be completely mas-
tered. Only complete technical perfection, only the judicious and proper treatment of
the material according to its properties, and above all only the consideration of these
properties in the act of shaping form can cause the material to be forgotten, can liberate
the artistic creation from it, can elevate even a simple landscape painting to become a
high work of art. These are, to some degree, points that will lead the artist to disregard
the aesthetics of both the symbolists and idealists, against whose dangerous doctrines
Rumohr—that same Rumohr who is now no longer discussed by our aestheticians and
art scholars — rightly campaigned in his writings.
How Greek architecture too supports what has been said, how it was dominated by
the principle that I have sought to convey, according to which the appearance of a work
of art should make us forget the means and the materials by which and through which
it appears and works and be sufficient to itself as form —to demonstrate this is the most
difficult task of a theory of style. See [Gotthold Ephraim] Lessing, Hamburgische
Dramaturgie, pt. 21 and passim.
86. See the article on Hellenic architecture in part 2 of this book and passim.
87. Also here the same basic motive forms the starting point: the dressing in the
true sense of the word.

439
 Semper

88. Bel and the Dragon, [Apocrypha,] verse 6.

89. See Homer, Odyssey 3.425-26, where Nestor commissions the goldsmith
Laerces to overlay the horns of the sacrificial bull with gold. See [Quatremére de
Quincy,] Jupiter olympien, 160. The bituminous core was also the pliable base on
which Renaissance metalworkers hammered their beaten work. Benvenuto Cellini
describes this process in his treatise on the goldsmith’s art.
90. Pausanias, 3.17. Quatremére de Q[uincy], Le Jupiter olympien, 156.
91. An iron cow’s hoof coated with cast bronze (illustrated here after my own
sketch) is found there. The other two pieces illustrated also come from there. One is a
trefoil crown, empaestic on a wood or mastic core that has disappeared; the other is a
beaten piece of an Assyrian column capital.
92. Pliny 35.[156].
93. See under “India[n Lacquers]” in § 36.
94. Quatremére de Quincy suggests that the model of the chryselephantine colos-
sus was finished earlier (Jupiter olympien, 397), but I think the other method is easier
and more natural. Reports from antiquity shed no light on this.
95. [Gustav Friedrich] Klemm’s Kulturgeschlichte] der Menschheit lists the writ-
ings and travel descriptions relating to this.
96. These lithographs and drawings, which were probably also lithographed later,
are said to be the property of P.G. Moore (30 Arundel Street, Strand, London), to
whom inquiries can presumably be addressed.
97. More details will be given in the article on China in part 2 of this book.
98. [William] Chambers, “Travels....” Idem, Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furni-
ture, Dresses..., folio. London. A bibliography on China, in which however the manu-
scripts referred to above are not mentioned, is found at the end of Pauthier and Bazin,
Chine moderne; ou, Déscription historique, géographique et littéraire de ce vaste
empire, Univers pittoresque (Paris, 1853).
99. Several imperial pavilions of this kind are depicted in glowing and splendid
color in the above-mentioned collection of original drawings in Paris, and they produce
a very favorable effect.
100. In the imperial annals, called Shu jing, collected by Confucius toward the end
of the sixth century B.C. See Pauthier, Chine; ou, Déscription historique, géographique
et littéraire de ce vaste empire... (Paris, 1844), 47.
101. The cited piece of Chinese embroidery mentioned was exhibited by the Board
of Trade under the following words: “Bas-relief specimen of Chinese Costume,” “a lady
of rank reclining on a Sopha.” It is now in one of the board’s rooms. Other embroidery
at the same exhibition included “a feather-painted and embroidered fan.”
102. I am faithfully following here the manuscript report of the Jesuits found in the
Imperial Library. Probably the lower, unplastered base of the wall was reserved for pan-
eling, so that here too a similarity with Assyrian walls is striking.
103. Where it does appear, it has yet to achieve the status of an art-form.
104. On this point, the Chinese also differ from all other peoples, in that, accord-
ing to their anthropogony, people slowly perfected themselves from an imperfect
dragon condition and became human. All other peoples work from the idea of the orig-
inal perfection of their race, which was lost in a sinful fall from grace.

440
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

105. For details on what has just been touched upon here, see the chapter on
tectonics.
106. See § 19 and the introduction.
107. The final version of the Mahabharata, to be sure, is placed by [Albrecht]
Weber several centuries after Christ.
108. See Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 16:275.
109. See [Johannes] Andreas Romberg and F[riedrich] Steger, Geschichte der
Baukunst ... (Leipzig, 1844).
110. [Thomas Daniell and William] Daniell, [Oriental Scenery, vol. 2, pls. 6, 16. It
is striking that in the Silpasastra, the carpenter assumes the most important position
next to the architect, but no mention is made anywhere of the mason.
111. Even more fantastic and magical is the description in the Mahabharata of the
miraculous city of Dvaraka, built by Visvakarman, the celestial architect, on Krishna’s
orders. The poet must have had knowledge of metal incrustation, mosaics, and poly-
chrome stucco dressing.
112. [Horace Hayman] Wilson, Select Specimens of the Theater of the Hindus
(London, 1835), 1:82 ff.
113. See [Markham] Kittoe, “Notes on the Viharas and Chaityas of Behar,” Jour-
nal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 16:275.
114. George Turnour, Esq., The Mahawanso in Roman Characters, with the
Translation Subjoined and an Introductory Essay on Pali Buddbhistical Literature,
2 vols. (Ceylon, 1837).
115. See [Transactions of the Royal] Asiatic Society |of Great Britain and Ireland]
3:463 ff.
116. Here, of course, we are not talking about works in clay from periods in which
every artistic tradition was largely forgotten.
117. Philostr[atus], Vit{a] Ap[ollonii] 2.2[0).
118. Ibid.
119. Ibid., 2.24: 1d S€ ES0c¢ auTd papyapitLBoc EVyKertat EvpBortKov TPdTIOV, @ Bap-
Bapot Tavtec €¢ TA Lepa xpavTat [And the statue itself is composed of pearls in the sym-
bolic manner, which all barbarians use for their sacred offerings].
120. Quintus] Curtius [Rufus], 8.9.
121. See Layard, Niniveh und seine Ueberreste, trans. [Nicolaus Napoleon
Wilhelm] Meissner, 200, 297, and his Monuments of Nineveh, 2d ser., pls. 57-69.
122. Aristotle, [De mirabilibus auscultationibus| [96]. Athenaeus 12.541.
123. Pliny, [Historia] nat{uralis| 8[.74.196]: Plurimis liciis texere quae polymita
appellant Alexandria instituit [Weaving with many threads, which they call polymita
(damask), began at Alexandria].
124. A scene that took place at Southampton Station on the occasion of a visit to
England by the Queen of Oudh, in September 1856, serves as an example of how the
oldest artistic motives are alive and well in the Orient in all their original freshness. To
protect the queen and her female court from the curious and defiling glances of the
English infidels, eunuchs carrying magnificent extended shawls and carpets formed a
double rank along the route leading from the closed coaches to the coupé of the rail-
way carriage and stood as motionless as statues until the train had departed. See the

441
 Semper

illustration and description of this scene in the Illustrated London News, 6 September
1856.
125. Ovid, Metam[orphoses] [3].111. Cicero, [Pro] Cael[io] 27. Virgil, Georgics
3.25: Purpurea intexti tollant aulaea Britanni [The Britons, interwoven, raise the purple
curtains]. See [Johann Heinrich] Voss on Virgil’s pastoral poems and the learned note
in Bottiger, Kleine Schriften, 1:402.
126. Claudian, De raptu Proserp|[inae] 2.320.
127. Very interesting in this regard is that famous relief in the museum in Naples
that is obviously meant to imitate a carpet.
128. Euripides, Jon [1160], describes the barbarian tapestries that decorate the
walls of the temple court: “[There were] well-oared ships facing those of the Greeks,
and half-beast men, and the horsemen chasing hinds, and hunts of savage lions.”
129. The main passages on this subject in Bottiger’s writings are [Griechische]
Vasenbilder, |vol. 1, pt.] 1:76, 115; [vol. 1, pt.] 2:105, and Kleine Schriften, 1:402,
3:448, 455.
130. See his essay “Die Teppiche nach Rafael’s Cartons,” in K/[eine] Schrliften],
3:448 n. 2.
131. [Giuseppe Antonio] Guattani, Notizie sulle antichita e belle arti di Roma.
132. Since the overpainting has been removed, the whole background of the pic-
ture now shows a single continuous wall surface.
133. Cicero, Pro Caelio 27. One should not think of these curtains, or rather
screens, in the Roman theater as being higher than necessary to conceal the action even
from the spectators in the uppermost row of seats. The upper stories of the richly deco-
rated prosecenium towered above this, and their effect was only reinforced by conceal-
ing the base. This effect was very familiar to the ancients, and they used it everywhere;
we, on the other hand, do not understand the meaning of such an arrangement and
believe we have to present the monument quite bare, concealing nothing if we are to
make it work.
In a stage set for the Antigone of Sophocles, for which I was commissioned many
years ago in Dresden, I followed a Roman model and had a siparium rise out of the
floor, on which was the scene setting, executed in a polychrome fashion. It made such
an effect that the audience did not ask whether ancient temples had been painted in
such a way. People completely forgot that they had before them a quite striking devia-
tion from the traditional view of antiquity. No skeptical critic said anything about it.
134. Ammianus reports in book 24[.63] that the Assyrians were accustomed to
portraying hunts and scenes of war on their aulaea.
135. Diod[orus Siculus] 17.10; Ovid, Fasti 2.563; Aelian, [Varia historia] 12.57;
Paus[anias] 9.6.2.
136. Lucian, Amores 14.
137. [Lucius] Apuleius, Met{amorphoses| 9.20.
138. The distinction established by Bottiger between a parapetasma (canopy) and
a catapetasma (drapery screen) is not borne out everywhere. Thus, for example,
Pausanias uses the word parapetasma where he clearly refers only to the tapestry wall.
Similar examples are found in other ancient writers.
139. See [Alois] Hirt, Gesch[ichte] der Baukunst; Bottiger, Kleine Schriften, 2:51,

442
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

3:455. See [Johann Ludwig] Volkel on the statue of Jupiter, pp. 50 and 235.
140. Aristophanes, Wasps 1215. Athen[aeus], 5.6 in fine.
141. Propertius 2.2[2], 46: Scilicet umbrosis sordet Pompeia columnis Porticus
aulaeis nobilis Attalicis [The portico of Pompeii, I suppose, is shabby, with its shady
columns and magnificent Attalid tapestries].
142. In my view [Raoul-]Rochette is quite wrong to believe that so-called column
paintings (stylopinakia) are paintings attached to the columns. [Karl Otfried] Miller
does not dare to describe their application ([Handbuch der] Archdol[ogie der Kunst],
157.2). Might they not refer to painted relief panels, or under certain circumstances
merely to paintings that, like drapery or curtains, filled the space between stoa columns
to a certain height? If one did not wish to cling obdurately to the material concept of
the word pinakion [tablet], those bas-reliefs on the columns of Trajan and Antoninus
could also be called column paintings (stylopinakia).
143. In the Miraculis S[anc]ti Benedicti we read that in 1095 the Church of Fleury-
sur-Loire was decorated with many tapestries ({Luc] d’Achery, Spicileg[ium]). See also
Gregory of Tours, passim.
144. [Peter Erasmus] Miller, Commentatio historica de genio, moribus et luxu
aevi Theodosiani, 122 f.
145. Kleine Schriften, 3:455, and Euripides, Ion 1143: tpdtov pév opddw TTEpvya
TeptBdAdeL TéTAWVY [First on top he put a covering of robes].
146. Artaxerxes presented Timagoras with, among other things, “a colorfully
embroidered canopy” (okjnvnv ovpavdpodov avOtvnv). See Heraclides, in Athenaeus
2
147. [In the errata to this volume Semper remarked on this passage, “This interpre-
tation of Vitruvius’s use of interpensiva is modified in “Tectonics.” TRANS.]
148. Timaeus, in Athenaeus 12.17 (vol. 3, 519, ed. [Isaac] Cas[aubon]). [Pascal]
Coste and [Eugéne] Flandin, Voyage en Perse.
149. Wilkinson, The Manners and Customs.
150. Heraclides, in Athenaeus 12.8.
151. Athen{aeus] 12.55.
152. Athen[aeus] 5.26.
153. Terence, Phorm[io], prol. 27: Tegiculum dicunt Graeci quod insternitur pavi-
mentum [The Greeks spread on the floor what they call a tegiculum (a little mat)].
154. At the wedding feast of Caranos of Macedon an oikos [house] was hung on
all sides with white batiste draperies that opened and behind which torchbearers
appeared; see Hippolochos, in Athenaeus 4.5. At a feast given for Antony by Cleopatra,
the walls of the ceremonial chamber were covered with purple tapestries embroidered
in gold, specially made for this feast; see Socrates of Rhodes, in Athenaeus 4.29.
155. Ovid, Amores 3.13: It per velatas annua pompa vias [The annual process
moves along the carpeted paths].
156. We know only of the peplos of Athena, woven and embroidered by embroi-
derers (Epydotivat) under the supervision of two arrhephoroe selected from noble fam-
ilies, and with the participation of several priestesses. It was unfurled like a sail on a
machine on wheels that looked like a ship, and displayed in this way it was drawn
through the streets and squares as part of the sacred procession. It was embroidered

443
 Semper

with gold on a scarlet or saffron ground. The very artful embroidery represented the
combat of the giants and other themes taken from local myths and the history of
Athens. Athenaeus (4.64) informs us that during these feasts the streets and squares
through which the procession moved were adorned with decorative structures. Accord-
ing to this passage, the hipparch of the Panathenians, Demetrius, the grandson of
Demetrius of Phalerum, built near the herms a scaffold to honor Aristagoras that was
taller than the herms themselves.
157. Athen[aeus] 5.21.
158. Pliny 35[.7.22]: Dignatio <picturae> praecipu Romae increvit <existimo> a
M. Valerio Max Messala, qui princeps tabulam picturae prelii quo Carthaginienses et
Hieronem in Sicilia divicerat, proposuit in latere Curiae Hostiliae anno ab urbe c. 490
[Appreciation of the art of painting actually began I believe with Marcus Valerius
Messala. It was he who, 490 years after the founding of the city, was the first to display
on the side of the Curia Hostilia a painting, which depicted the battle in which he had
defeated the Carthaginians and Hiero in Sicily].
159. See below.
160. See below.
161. [Flavius] Joseph[us], [De] b[ello] J[udaico] 7.5. See also the description of the
triumph of [Lucius] Aemilius Paulus, in Plutarch, Aem|[ilius| Paulus 32, and Livy
45[.40]. More on the triumph of Pompey, in Plutarch, Pompey 45, and Appian,
Mithridat{ica] 117. See also Pliny 33.12 and 33.54; [Julius Caesar] Bulenger[ius], “De
triumphis”; and Raoul-Rochette, 298 ff.
162. Unless it is a question of stolen works of art, which at a later period were
displayed and carried around on occasions like the one mentioned in the text, the word
m{vaé is never found at all—a fact that strongly supports the assumption that the deco-
rative paintings used to adorn triumphs, which were actually older, were painted on
canvas.
163. For example, Apuleius, Metamorphoses, bk. 11[.24]: Tribunae jussus super-
stiti, byssina quidem sed floride depicta veste conspicuus.... Quaque viseres colore vario
circumnotatis insignibar animalibus. Hinc dracones Indici, inde gryphes hyperborei
quos in speciem pinnatae alitis generat mundus alter. [On orders I stood on a platform,
and because of my garment (which, though linen, was lavishly embroidered), I was con-
spicuous.... All over you could see me marked with animals of various colors: on one
side Indian dragons, on the other Hyperborean griffins, which looked like winged birds
but are created by another world].
164. The extent to which the imperial Romans transgressed the boundaries that art
generally respects in the best of times may be seen from the 120-foot-tall colossal por-
trait of Nero (Pliny 35.51) and by the above-mentioned siparia in the theater. We might
also cite the curtains painted with crime scenes, which, when the court was in session,
were hung between the tribunal and the basilica to separate the two and put the judges
in the correct frame of mind. Quintillian], Imst[itutiones| orat{oriae] 6.1.3.
165. Appian, Punica [9].66: TUpyotTe TapadépovTat, LLWHWaTa THY ElLAnLWEVwWV
TOAEWY, KaL ypadal, Kal oxNLATAa TOV yeywvoTwv (sic!) (Towers, reproductions of con-
quered cities, pictures, and models of the martial achievements proclaimed by criers
were carried around and displayed).

444
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

166. For the eightieth birthday of King Anton of Saxony, I erected a wooden
cochlear column in the marketplace of Dresden, topped by a splendid winged figure by
the sculptor [Ernst Friedrich August] Rietschel. The people later wanted it to be exe-
cuted again in stone, and they collected forty thousand talers to that end. But the idea
was defeated through the opposition of art philistines and fanatics of utility, and the
money was given to the poor.
167. Pliny 5.5. Tacitus, Annals 2.41: vecta spolia, simulacra montium, fluminum,
praeliorum [carried spoils, captives, and representations of mountains, rivers, and bat-
tles].
168. Cass[ius] Dio [Cocceianus], [Romanae historiae] 56.34.
169. Livy 41.28: Sardiniae insulae forma erat et in ea simulacra pugnarum picta [It
was in the shape of the island of Sardinia with the battles depicted on it].
170. Such as the above-mentioned forum decorations displayed by L. Hostilius
Mancinus himself (Pliny 35.[7.22]). The touching scenes of the downfall of
Mithradates and those of the Judaean war should also be mentioned here. Plutarch,
Pompey, 45; Josephus, [De] b[ello] ][udaico] in fine; Tacitus, Annals, 2.41.
171. Pliny 35[.7.23]: Tabulam picturam praelii... proposuit in latere Curiae
Hostiliae. Situm Carthaginis ejusque expugnationes depictas proponendo in foro [He
placed a painting of the battle on the side of the Curia Hostilia... displaying in the
forum the position of Carthage and his assaults]. Similarly, Livy 41.28.
172. Fixis vestitur tota tabellis porticus [The entire portico is clad in hanging
tablets].
173. His autem tabulis interiores templi parietes vestiebantur [The interior walls of
the temple are clad with these tablets].
174. Philostr[atus] Sen[ior], prol., Imaglines], ed. [Friedrich] Jacobs, 4. See Raoul-
Roch[ette], Peintures antiques inédites, 161, where many passages are cited.
175. Philostr[atus], Apoll[onius| 2.20, p. 71. Letronne, Lettres d’un antiquaire a
un artiste, 435.
176. Letronne, [Lettres,] 87, where the relevant passages are to be found. Also
Raoul-Roch[ette], Peintures antiques, 162.
177. Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst, 2:126-27; letter to Graf Brihl, p. 31;
Letronne, [Lettres,| 74; [Raoul-|]Rochette, Peintures antiques, 378, 29 ff., and 351 n. 2.
178. Livy 40.51: M. Aemilius Lepidus censor—aedem Jovis in capitolio colum-
nasque circa poliendas albo locavit; et ab his columnis, quae incommode apposita vide-
bantur, signa amovit [Marcus Aemilius Lepidus the censor contracted for the Temple of
Jupiter on the Capitoline and the surrounding columns to be whitewashed, and from
the columns he removed the statues which appeared inconveniently placed in front].
This happened in the year 179 B.C. Two centuries later Augustus, with the consent of
the senate, ordered a second cleanup.
179. The author of the “Carm[en] ad Pison[em].” See [Johann Christian] Werns-
dorf’s Poet{ae| Lat[ini] minores, 4:238: Nam quid imaginibus quid avitis fulta trium-
phis Atria [For what good are halls supported on images and pictures of ancestral
triumphs?]. Pliny 35[.2.7]: Altae foris et circa limina alienarum gentium imagines erant
affixis hostium spoliis [Around the doors and thresholds were images of foreign peo-
ples and spoils of the enemy were attached]. Livy 38.43: Ambraciam captam signaque

445
 Semper

quae ablata criminantur et caetera spolia ejus urbis ante currum laturus et fixurus in
postibus suis [Captured Ambracia and the statues which they charge were stolen and all
the other spoils of the city (he is) going to carry before his chariot and fix on his door-
posts]. See R[aoul-]Rochette, Peintures antiques, 344 ff.
180. Polybfius] 9.10.12.
181. Plut[arch], Marcellus], 21 and 30. Livy], 25.40. Ciclero], Verr[es] 4.54.
182. Livy 32.16. Pausan[ius] 7.8.1.
183. Livy 38.9. Polyb[ius] 22.13.9.
184. Both these authors—as well as Seneca, Petronius, and their contemporaries
who complained about the decline of painting in their day—have yet to be correctly
understood, at least as far as the actual target of their complaint is concerned.
185. Though we may doubt their authenticity —that is, whether they were part of
the original texts of the Books of Moses and not simply later inventions
—even as fic-
tions they would have been based on similar things that the writers had seen and are
thus still of great interest for the history of style.
186. The oldest folk legends deal in part with works of architecture that should be
envisioned as dressed with metal. The Book of Genesis contains remarkable reports on
a metallurgy that was very advanced before the Great Flood. The thalamos [chamber]
of Danaé was a bronze tholos. Like the one that Homer describes at the palace of the
king of Phaeacia and at other royal fortresses, it was not a figment of one’s imagina-
tion, as can still be seen, for example, inside the Tomb of Atreus at Mycenae, from the
remnants and traces of the nails used to fasten the metal dressings. The underground
temple at Delphi was similar (Paus[anius] 10.5.5), as was the treasury of the Minyans,
the ruins of which still stand. The Temple of Athena Chalkioikos is known from
Pausanias (3.17.3). The tombs of Etruria were dressed with bronze. Such a grave was
found in Chiusi in the sixteenth century ([Luigi Antonio] Lanzi, Saggio [di lingua
etrusca], 3:211). In the late eighteenth century a similar one was found at Corneto
({Giovanni Battista] Vermiglioli, Opuscoli, 4:7). [Melchiade] Fossati excavated another
grave in the same place, whose ceiling was decorated with bronze coffering (Anmnali
dell’Instit{uto di corrispondenza archeologica] 1 [1829]: 120). [Thomas Leverton]
Donaldson and [Graf Anton] Prokesch [von Osten] found traces of metal dressing on
Asiatic tombs. A tomb in Panticapaeum is described in the Journal des savants (1835):
338-39. An ancient poet calls such a grave “well beaten in metal” (TUWpBoc evyhiTTOLO
yeTddAou); see [Richard-Frangois-Philippe] Brunck, Anal[ecta veterum poetarum
Graecorum,] 3:296. Under Alexander, taste again moved in this direction. The Romans
retained a sense of it. Alexander wanted to erect a bronze proscenium in Pella (Plutarch,
Moral[ia] 2.1096). The Temple of Olympian Zeus in Antioch, dressed completely in
gold, is mentioned by Livy with amazement. The Temple of Derketa in Hierapolis,
which was clad inside with gold and precious stones, is described by Lucian (De dea
Syria, 32). Until the papacy of Urban VIII (1626), the Pantheon retained its bronze
dressing and bronze roof trusses. The Forum of Trajan was similarly outfitted and
partly covered with gold sheets. Suetonius reports that Nero’s Golden House was coy-
ered with gold in most places: in ceteris partibus cuncto auro lita, distincta gemmis
unionumque conchis erant [The rest of the parts were covered all with gold, picked out
with gems and pearls]. The prosceniums of Roman theaters were dressed partly with

446
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

gold, partly with glass mosaic, and partly with marble. In the seventeenth century a
room was discovered on the Aventine, with a floor of agate and carnelian and walls
dressed with plates of gilded bronze with inlaid medallions (Fl[aminio] Vacca, Memorie
|di varie antichita|, nos. 101, 102, 118). Excavations on the Palatine revealed a room
lined with silver plates and covered with precious stones ([Pietro Santi] Bartoli, [in]
Memorie |di varie antichita|). One also recognizes here the return to the ancient Asiatic
barbarian principle that in Greek and Roman times was still in the bud, so to speak,
and it would only yield a higher style of art after a few centuries. We will give further
evidence below that the most ancient monuments of Assyria and Chaldea bear rem-
nants of the same custom of metal dressing of structural parts and walls.
187. Josephus], A[ntiquitates| ](udaicae] 3.7: Edda The KahAlaoTne VANE [timber of
the finest wood].
188. Exodus 26:29-30: “Plate the boards with gold, and make gold rings on them
as holders for the bars, which are also to be plated with gold. You shall erect the
dwelling according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.”
189. Joseph[us] [3.102.3]. Exodus 27:10.
190. There is such a breastplate in the British Museum, though its dating is very
problematic. Compare this with the well-known passages in Homer about the shields
and weapons of the heroes. Gold and tin plates of remarkable thinness, stamped with
indented figures and hieroglyphs from a very early period of Egyptian civilization, are
also found in the British Museum, namely, on mummies.
191. Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, 3:253.
192. We have misgivings about describing this step as the second one, that is, sug-
gesting that embossed work in metal (gold) developed gradually from the original cus-
tom of coating base materials with smooth gold surfaces. This is because the embossing
of metal surfaces follows so naturally from the principle of hollow-body construction
that it must, in a crude way, have been evident in the first human efforts in this direc-
tion. Perhaps it would be better to think of the smooth painted metal field as a second-
ary abstraction and to think of the embossed work with its indentations filled with
color as the more original. It should not be forgotten that the principle of dressing
scarcely originated in this metallic material and that embroidery on leather, tree bark,
and even fabrics preceded the time when people first learned how to beat metal. The
smooth surfaces of the Tabernacle —in contrast with the embossed developments of the
same technique on the walls of the Temple of Solomon—cannot be adduced here, and
not simply because of the dubious dating of the reports about them. The former was a
temporary structure, and the artists who worked on it must have already known the
embossed metal dressings of the Egyptians and Phoenicians.
193. Fl{avius] Josephus, A[mtiquitates| Jud{aicae] 3.6.3.
194. Phylarchus, in Athen[aeus] 12.55. In describing this tent Phylarchus also men-
tions the gold plane tree and the grapevine, in the shade of which the kings of Persia
held audience. The grapes and leaves were made of emeralds, Indian rubies, and every
possible kind of precious stone. A depiction of such a magnificent example of the gold-
smith’s art—similar ones have been mentioned by Athenaeus and Flavius Josephus—
has survived on an Assyrian alabaster slab that shows us King Ashurbanipal lying on a
couch under the arbor, with the queen sitting in front of him and attending to him.

447
 Semper

Illustrated London News, 3 November 1855.

195. Chares, in Athen[aeus] 12.54.
196. Probably in the form of wall figures leaning against the pilasters or ortho-
states that rose between the grottoes and formed the supports of the ceiling. This pas-
sage from Athenaeus seems to be corrupt. Casaubon suggests reading nymphaes instead
of nymphs. One might also think of nichelike recesses that filled the spaces between
these grottoes where tripods stood.
197. Strabo [16].739.
198. See the section on Egypt in this chapter and in part 2 of this book.
199. Callixeinus, in Athenaeus 5.38.
200. Suetonius, Julius Caesar 10. In addition to the comitium, the Forum, and the
basilicas, Caesar also decorated the Capitol with temporary porticoes (porticibus ad
tempus extructis), and the preparations were endowed with as much luxury as the
objects presented.
201. Athenaeus 12.38.
202. Appian, [Mithridatica] 110 ff.
203. Dio Chrysostom, Orat[iones] 32 (ed. Reiske, 2:22-23).
204. Diodor[us] [Siculus] 17.115. Reconstructions of the monument are given in
Hirt, Geschichte der Baukunst, and Quatremére de Quincy, [Recueil de] dissertations
sur différents sujets d’antiquité (Paris, 1817), 201-8.
205. Herodian 4.2.
206. Diod[orus] Sic{ulus] 18.26: kai tivakac TapaddnArove Cwhdpovs TETTAPAG
tooug Tole ToLxote Exov [which had four sculptured tablets, end to end, equal to the
walls].
207. [had the opportunity to execute a comparable work for the funeral of our cen-
tury’s second greatest military commander, and I will report on this in another place.
208. Described in Journal des savants (June 1835): 338-39.
209. In his most recent collection [Jules] Gailhabaud gives an interesting depiction
of a “chapelle ardente” in Nonnenburg near Salzburg.
210. According to artistic lore, Raphael painted the Sistine Madonna, his most
beautiful creation, for such a purpose, in the shortest possible time.
211. More on this subject in “Gothic Style” in volume 2. See [Eugéne-Emmanuel]
Viollet-le-Duc, Dictionnaire d’architecture frangaise, s.v. “Architecture.”
212. See Julius Braun, Geschichte der Kunst, 139 ff.
213. Perhaps a later addition.
214. The rubble from the vault alone would not be sufficient for this. Apparently
the building had several stories above it, and the lowest ones survived under their rubble.
215. See the work mentioned in the text and an article in the Illustrated London
News, 27 December 1856. The reader will find more precise details, plans, and draw-
ings in a report by Mr. [William] Boutcher, sent by that traveler to the Assyrian Exca-
vation Fund but unavailable to the present author.
216. The lack of style in these representations on clay tablets, sea shells, and cylin-
ders from southern Babylon
— that is, the lack of any influence from architecture on the
sculpture or fine art displayed in them— makes them seem, on cursory examination, to
be late works belonging to a period of decline. But a certain stylelessness, superficial

448
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

movement, and burlesque (the plank manner, which differs strikingly from the baroque
styles of periods of decline) always precede a rigid, hieratic art, which is never charac-
teristic of a primitive stage in a nation’s artistic culture. I shall have an opportunity
later —in the articles on Egypt and Greece and in other places —to return to this point
that I have touched upon fleetingly here.
217. In Mesopotamian constructions there are two kinds of brick masonry: one con-
sists of red, raw-fired bricks bound with clay or asphalt, the other of yellowish white
clinkers composed of almost pure argillaceous earth and carefully set in lime in a way
that makes it difficult to distinguish them from the lime or from each other. This kind
of clinker was customary during the neo-Babylonian empire under Nebuchadrezzar;
consequently, it has been thought that it was a later invention, a relatively recent step
forward in brick construction. Now, however, the true ancient Tower of Babel is said to
have been discovered, and its square base (194 meters wide) is made of bricks of the
finest pipe clay, which is yellow-shimmering, almost white. They are excellently fired,
after being marked freehand with the most delicate script. Two of the tower’s eight
stories have survived intact. The mound can be seen from a distance of twenty leagues.
See the report on M. [Victor] Place’s discovery in the Moniteur universel (1856) and in
[Francois-Napoléon-Marie] Moigno’s Cosmos, 20 February 1857.
218. In this he was not fundamentally different from the Negro Wuswas (see
p. 304).
219. Layard, [Discoveries in the Ruins of |Nineveh and Babylon, 562.
220. [Henry] Rawlinson, Athenaeum (18 March 1854): 342.
221. [Francis] Chesney, The Expedition for the Survey of the Rivers Euphrates and
Tigris, 1:411. [William] Ainsworth, Travels and Researches in Asia Minor, 2:101.
222. The history and origin of these ancient castles strewn over Asia was unknown
even to the magi of the Persian period. They are generally called works of Semiramis,
that mysterious figure who plays the role for Asia that Hercules, the mythical founder
of all cyclopean castles and walls in Hellas, does for us.
223. It is known that among the Hindus, whose earliest building complexes have a
great deal in common with those of Assyria, building practices avoided symmetry in
many cases, for example, in the arrangement of entrances.
224. Qua sunt flabra Noti Babylon subducitur arce
Procera in nubes: hanc prisca Semiramis urbem
Vallavit muris, quos non absumere flammae
Non aries penetrare queat; stat maxima Beli
Aula quoque argento, domus Indo dente nitescit,
Aurum tecta operit; sola late contegit aurum.
[From the blasts of the south wind the citadel
of Babylon rides high into the clouds.
Long ago Semiramis girt the city with walls
which neither flames can consume nor a
battering ram penetrate; the palace of Belus stands massive,
gleaming in ivory and silver; gold covers the roofs,
the floors everywhere are gold.|
—Rufus Festus Avienus, Mundi descriptio ll. 1196-1201

449
 Semper

225. Layard does not mention this.

226. Xenoph[on], Anab[asis] 3.4. I translate Xenophon’s term in the manner indi-
cated in the text, and for that reason I wish to draw attention to what will follow later
on this topic.
227. Layard, Niniveh und seine Uberreste, trans. Meissner, 223 [English ed., 2:54.
TRANS.].
228. In the lowest terrace of Nimrud, Loftus found richly furnished chambers with
magnificent entrances decorated with bucentaurs and the like in the known manner.
229. In the palaces of Nineveh only the open platforms are paneled with brick.
230. In other places the remains of thick cast-metal plates that had served as
thresholds were also found between the doorposts. One such plate can presently be
seen in the British Museum.
231. Here I must protest once and for all a misunderstanding
— namely, the sugges-
tion that I hold the Assyrian wall sculptures found at Khorsabad, Nimrud, and so on,
to be apres coup works, as though I believed they actually sprang from something pro-
visional that preceded them. Nothing could be more wrong than this assumption!
Rather, art had already adopted the mixed and composed motive and completely made
it its own. Every new work is conceptually a composite product of the ages. I extend
this protest to all similar cases that will come up in the future, in particular to what will
be said about the genesis of the Egyptian style. In the meantime, I cannot but point out
that, of the few discoveries made in the field of Assyrian art, at least one offers us an
actual example of an earlier, already finished monument that was subsequently dressed
with alabaster slabs. J am referring to the southwest palace at Nimrud discovered by
Layard, which was destroyed just as its walls were being dressed with such panels. They
had been taken from an older monument but were reversed so that new carvings could
be made on the smooth rear surface. This example teaches us about the technical
process found in these sculptural dressings, which corresponds to their stylistic origin,
and at the same time reminds us to be careful in judging the age of monuments by their
sculptural themes and inscriptions. I think that insufficient attention has thus far been
paid to this caveat and also that inscriptions on bricks, when they occur, are more reli-
able indicators of the age of monuments than are their sculptures; the latter may be
deceptive, because they may belong to later repairs and additions to a much older mon-
ument. A building made of air-dried brick, and even one built of fired brick, would
soon fall into decay without such repairs.
232. In both styles, by the way, except for white and black only the three basic col-
ors are used: yellow, red, and blue without nuances.
233. See “Embroidery” above.
234. Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains, German ed., 201.
235. A travel report by [Abbé de] Beauchamp in the last century spoke of a room
in the mound of ruins of Kasr, near Hillah, with walls of enameled brick, on which a
cow and an image of the sun and moon were depicted. Layard could not locate this
room again.
236. In terms of the content of the depictions, the styles differ according to the age
of the monuments. In the northwest palace (the oldest) at Nimrud, Layard found only
bricks with purely ornamental painting. By contrast, the bricks he found in the lowest

450
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

foundations of a ruin outside of the great terrace at Nimrud, which had apparently
belonged to a much older building before they were used for the newer one, had histor-
ical depictions. They were covered with scenes similar to those found in the alabaster
sculptures but were intersected with ornamental motifs. The same combination of
ornaments with historical representations is seen on bricks from Khorsabad and
Kuyunjik.
237. The enameled bricks found in Nimrud were all marked and numbered on the
back, something that Layard was unable to explain. The hypothesis stated in our text
explains it completely.
238. See |Johann Wolfgang] Dobereiner’s essays on water glass in various journals,
including Die Gartenlaube.
239. The principal points of Rawlinson’s lecture were published in supplement 164
of the Augsburger allgem|eine| Zeitung of 1856.
240. This is darker than the blue of the Egyptians, at least in the case of some
glazes that may perhaps be older. By contrast, the glazes with an apple green ground
contain a light blue similar to Egyptian ceruleum, which is a smalt. Assyrian copper
oxide seems to have been a much sought-after trade item and was listed as a tribute
item. Layard visited the old copper mines in the Tijari Mountains, from which this pig-
ment was probably obtained.
241. This is another of those instances in which something that initially seems sub-
servient and accessory proves on closer examination to contain the principle of an idea
that is growing and developing in a quite different direction.
242. I think it perfectly legitimate to forgo a more detailed description of these
famed wall dressings here, as we will have to consider their general architectural signif-
icance in combination with other components of the building in part 2 of this work.
243. Layard could discern color only on the hair, beard, and eyes, on sandals and
bows, on the tongues of the eagle-headed figures, very faintly on a wreath, and on a
flame. The British Museum reliefs are so stained and distempered that we can no longer
observe anything on them. Greater care has been taken to preserve the original surface
of the Assyrian monuments in the Louvre, however, which enables us to recognize and
study the remnants of paint on them.
244. See his “Voyage Archéologique a Ninive” in the Revue des deux mondes and
the text to the collection of etchings on Khorsabad.
245. Illustrated London News, 15 November 1856.
246. [Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains (New York: George P. Putnam, 1852),
2:242; Semper made minor changes to the text. TRANS.]
247. Jeremiah 22:14 mentions a room paneled with cedar and painted red. Zepha-
niah 2:14 cites the cedar planks of the roof (ceiling). See also 1 Kings 6:15 and 7:3.
248. English: “framing.”
249. Genesis 4:22.
250. The art of the Greeks in metallic decoration grows richer the closer one
approaches the heroic age. But traces found on the monuments of the golden age of
Greek art also point to even earlier use of metallic parts for finish work in architecture.
Examples include the doorframes of the Propylaea and the Parthenon. Many demon-
strations and examples of metal detailing were cited earlier.

451
 Semper

251. The Greeks were familiar with inlaid woodwork from earliest times. Examples
include the bed of Odysseus (Odyssey 23.200), Penelope’s chair made by the TéxTwv
[craftsman] Icmalius (Odyssey 19.56), and the chest of Cypselus (Pausanias 5.17[.5]
and Dio Chrysostomos, ed. Reiske, bk. 9, 325).
252. The Indian section of the London Exhibition of World Industry had excellent
works of the kind described in the text, outstanding among which was a bedstead in
beaten and enameled silver. It was in fact a perfect illustration of this chapter’s discus-
sion of hollow metalwork.
253. Herod[otus] 1.25: [havKou tod Xtov Totnpa, 6¢ Lobvoc Sy TavTwv avOpuTov
oLdypou KOAAnow €Eevpe [the work of Glaucus the Chian, who alone of all men knows
how to solder iron]. We are speaking here only of the soldering of iron. But one can see
from this and similar passages in ancient writings the great importance placed upon
individual technical processes and the accuracy of their assessments of the influence of
these processes on artistic design.
254. For that reason the Greeks gave them different names according to the motifs
with which they were decorated, for example, Séoj101 [chains] (Iliad 18.379), Tepdvat
[pins] (Pausanias [10.16.1]), kévtpa [stakes], and so on.
255. Fergusson sees this sacrificial scaffold—which really should be pictured on
the top of the mountain above Persepolis
—as the upper story or the attic of a palace.
This notion led him to a very unfortunate reconstruction of Persepolis. His ideas are
generally more original than true or beautiful.
256. This also expresses the difference between my view of Greek tectonics and
that which Prof. Bétticher expresses in his Hellenicis. I will have an opportunity later to
give my reasons for what is suggested here.
257. The throne of the Persian king is described in Athenaeus (12.8). The throne
upon which he sat in judgment was gold; surrounding it were four columns encrusted
with precious stones, above which was stretched a colorfully embroidered baldachin. The
detail of a capital shown on page 252 belonged in all probability to such a baldachin col-
umn. It was found in the room at Nineveh that contained such a rich yield of bronze
objects. Such thrones with baldachins are represented on the bas-reliefs of Persepolis.
258. A forked capital with coupled bulls’ necks is depicted on a rock relief at
Bavian, over the head of King Sennacherib. The column to which it belongs is not sup-
porting, though, but more like a staff. Another column without a capital and a third
with pinecone capitals stand beside it. See Layard, N[ineveh]| and Bab{ylon], 211.
259. The indentations on the tripods, altars, and stone vessels that have been
found seem to be intended to accept these emblems that are reversed on the outside and
decorated only from the inside. See Layard, N[ineveh| and Bab[ylon], 595. The locus
classicus for emblems of this kind is Cic[ero], Accusl[atio] in Verrem 4.23 and [4.24].
260. Illustrations of these vessels in Layard, Nlineveh| and Bab[ylon], 183, 199,
and the last plates of the second series. I will return to them in the section on metal
technology.
261. King Nebuchadrezzar set up his statue in the Plain of Dura, forty-five ells
high, six ells wide, and entirely of solid-cast (?) gold; all the nobles and officials of the
kingdom paid homage to it. See Daniel 3. Presumably the statue actually had a substan-
tial core of clay or some other material.

452
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

262. See Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, vignette from chap. 23, 527.
263. Ibid., 530.
264. This always means tiles that were covered with gold and silver plate. Layard
also found gilded tiles.
265. These monuments include the so-called Harpagus monument, which evi-
dently commemorated a victory by the barbarians over a Hellenic city. The perfection
and style of sculpture make it very important, though not the most important of the
works touched upon in the text. Even more masterly and lively are the reliefs on the
two Lycian tomb monuments exhibited in the British Museum, together with the rem-
nants of the mentioned victory monument, the famous Harpy Tomb, and various other
excellent sculptures from Lycia. Particularly striking among the latter are the two half-
squatting lionesses, which were found under the debris of the fortress of ancient
Xanthus, and which recur on the battlements of the city threatened by the Persian com-
mander, depicted clearly and indubitably on one of the frieze panels of the victory mon-
ument. Thus these lionesses are works from a much earlier period than that in which
Xanthus was taken by the Persians.
266. See [Heinrich] Barth, Wanderungen durch die Kiistenldnder des Mittelmeeres,
1:8, 230 ff., and Revue archéologique 1 [(1844)]: 566.
267. [Charles] Texier, [Description de I’|Asie Mineure, Coste and Flandin, Voyage
en Perse, pl. 230.
268. Compare Museum Gregorianum Etruscum, vol. 1, with Layard’s Nineveh
[and Its Remains].
269. Josephus 8.[64.1].
270. Here I am following the reports in Josephus. He had access to sources other
than the well-known biblical ones. They must have sounded more plausible on this sub-
ject than the material in the First Book of Kings. There the stones are said to have been
prepared before setting such that no hammer, ax, or any other iron tool could be heard
hewing. Strictly speaking, however, this is impossible, and even in a figurative sense it
contradicts the whole of ancient building practice.
271. See [Heinrich] Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel, 3:304 n. 6.
272. If rows were translated as friezes in all the relevant passages of the Bible and
Josephus, they would be easier to understand.
273. See [Franz] Kugler, Geschichte der Baukunst, 1:125 ff., where no considera-
tion is given to Flavian reports about the temple building at all.
274. How much the material of execution meant to the ancients and what value
the artwork obtained from the excellence of the material, even when neither its form
nor its color was respected—on these questions, please refer to the important passage
in Quatremére de Quincy’s Jupiter olympien, 31. I will return to this theme on another
occasion.
275. The depiction, probably accurate, of the seven-armed candelabra in the Arch
of Titus in Rome has since the first centuries of Christianity served as a model for litur-
gical candelabras that goldsmiths have treated freely. This piece is clearly an example of
those empaestic or sphyrelaton works that preceded all other works in metal. In com-
parison, works in metal using other techniques always remained derivative and more or
less stylistically dependent on these earlier works (see above).

453
 = ct oS =

Kan AAW Ha
{Sa 2) i
JPUUVCLETTT CCU TUUG TTSCOCATTTCCCCCCeCcC

Seven-armed candelabra

276. Nonnus, Dionys{iaca] 5.[56-58], p. 134:

Kat 16Ate *Aovin Tuptne TorktAAeTo TEXVTS

Kade Aalvéw, Kal éTittvuEeV GAAOS ETT” GAAW
YELGOTOLW YAWXLVL TALOV ETEPOXPOA TETONDV.
[And the Aonian city was decorated by the stone beauty of Tyrian art, and one
after another was busy slicing the multicolored rock with earth-cutting picks.]

277. See the two sections on Egypt and Chaldea in part 2.

278. See [Johann Heinrich Carl] Minutoli, Reise zum Tempel des Jupiter Ammon...,
chap. 14 and atlas, pl. 27.
279. [Richard] Lepsius, Briefe, 74.
280. [Eugéne] de la Roziére, “Anciennes exploitations de granite,” in the Descrip-
tion de l’Egypte, 3:461.
281. For example, the green and blue glazes on the syenite sarcophagus of
Ramses III (Twentieth Dynasty) in the lower Egyptian room of the Louvre.
282. Minutoli, [Reise zum Tempel des Jupiter Ammon,]| 299 and pl. 28.
283. See Lepsius, Briefe, and his large etchings. Wilkinson, 2:115. A style of wall
decoration emerged from this wood-dressing imitation in stucco that also recurs in
Chaldean wall decorations (in Warka and elsewhere) — namely, the panel work. See the
illustration of a house in Wilkinson, 2:131.
284. Now in the lower rooms of the library in Paris and no longer accessible with-
out permission.
285. Wilkinson’s commendable work contains a selection of such patterns (2:124).
I have reproduced a few of these in plate 11 of the chromolithographic illustrations,
alongside a piece of Scandinavian embroidery from the early Middle Ages, although
similar embroidery is still produced by the peasant women of Holstein as a proof of
skill and as a model to be used later in designing clothes.

454
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

286. See the woodcut on page 295 top.

287. The columns with calyx-shaped capitals are, first of all, only baldachin bear-
ers and are still effectively independent of the actual temple complex. They designate
the sacred dromos, the route of the procession, which moves under the shade of the
protective coverings the columns support. Thus they are found at Luxor and also at the
Memnonium of Ramses II, which is approximately the same age, and again in the
courtyard in front of the Temple at Karnak. Unlike these baldachin bearers, all actual
stone ceiling supports are either of the so-called proto-Doric order or have capitals in
the shape of lotus buds.
288. They are by no means rare. See [Edward] Falkener, “On Some Egyptian-Doric
Columns,” in the Museum of Classical Antiquities 1 (January 1851).
289. See the figures on page 238.
290. Other types of Egyptian columns are not considered here because they differ
only formally and not in principle from those discussed. For the most part they belong
to a later period, in some cases Ptolemaic or even Roman.
291. The granite blocks of some temples are partly eroded inside, and only their
crust has survived the destructive influences of damp and air, because of the impregna-
tion or stone glazing mentioned in the text. See Minutoli and other travelers.
292. Pliny 33.131.
293. Minutoli, [Reise zum Tempel des Jupiter Ammon], 308.
294. What follows on the antiquities of Asia Minor is in part based on the great
work of [Charles] Texier, Description de l’Asie Mineure, and on [Sir C.] Fellows’s texts,
[Journal Written during| an Excursion in Asia Minor (1839) and An Account of
Discoveries in Lycia (1841). Mainly, however, I have relied on my own careful study of
antiquities from Asia Minor in the British Museum and the Louvre.
295. See Texier, Description de l’Asie Mineure, 3:20. [Ernst] Curtius, “Artemis
Gygaia und die lydischen Fiirstengraber,’ Archdologische Zeitung 11 [(1853)].
296. I have seen several of these sculptures in the British Museum, although unfor-
tunately they have been retouched. I have also seen views of cities on relief panels like
those mentioned above in the text.
297. More on this in part 2 under “The Hellenic Style of Architecture.”
298. [Ludwig] Ross, Inselreisen, letters 15 and 24, pp. 5-147. Idem, Reisen im
Peloponnes, 1:7.
299. Geschichte der Baukunst, 186.
300. This is the technical term used in architecture to refer to entablatures with-
out friezes whoses cornices are directly supported by or assumed or integrated into
the architraves (epistyles). Examples include the entablature of the Virgins’ Hall in the
Temple of Athena Polias in Athens; the majority of the older tomb facades in Asia
Minor in the Ionic column style; and all Egyptian, and likewise Persian, monuments.
The entablature with frieze does not actually come into being until the peripteral use
of the order, which —at least for the Ionic order —is not the original application (see
part 2).
301. 2 Samuel 18:18. Joseph[us], A[mtiquitates| ]{udaicae] 7.10.3.
302. On this, see [Raoul-Rochette,] “Mémoires d’archéologie comparée asiatique,
grecque et étrusque,” Mémoires de I’Institut royal de France 17, pt. 2:80. I have made

455
 Semper

use of the illustrations of Mycenaean pottery shards appended to that essay for the
woodcuts included here.
303. Donaldson’s reconstruction in [James Stuart and Nicholas Revett,] The
Antig|uities| of Athens (supplement, p. 5) leaves these door frames undressed, although
a double indentation running around them shows clearly enough the purpose for which
it was cut, namely, to receive the marble frieze.
304. Pausanias saw the treasury at Olympia endowed by the tyrant Myron. It had
two chambers: one in the Doric and the other in the Ionic style, both in bronze (mid-
seventh century B.C.). Also done in bronze was the Temple of Athena Chalkioikos on
the acropolis of Sparta (from the heroic period). The throne of Apollo Amyclaian, built
by Bathycles the Magnesian (seventh century) was also probably in beaten metal (see
Pausanias 6.19.2; 3.17.2; 3.18-19). Ancient bronze columns (cast) are now found in the
basilica of the Lateran.
305. Everything suggested thus far is given surprising and welcome support by
comparisons with similar phenomena in other fields of formal creation. Sculpture has
already been discussed in the text, but Greek utensils went through the same stages of
material change as the temple, but in a much clearer fashion. For instance, it attracts
less attention to assert that the beautiful marble candelabras and tripods that adorn the
Vatican and the Louvre are not art-forms determined entirely by the material (stone) —
that is, not forms that had to be adopted by the basic constructional idea in order to
satisfy the aesthetic sense —but rather that their formal appearance is determined by
the style they still retain from the time when they were made of beaten metal or fired
clay, not stone. In my view, this is considered less surprising than when the same point
is made about marble temples — and yet things were very much the same with the latter.
To illustrate what I have said I give here a candelabra from the best period, which I
drew in one of the Sicilian collections of antiquities, in Palermo, I believe. The metal
style is still unmistakably present in this delicate white marble piece.

Greek candelabra lintel from Sicily

456
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

The style of Greek clothing also presents interesting analogies with architecture.
The heroic age had its deeply dyed, brightly colored, richly embroidered, and veiling
Oriental gowns: the saraps, kalasireis, and Assyrian aktaias. After this, during the
period of the tyrants, came the delicate folds of the sindon and peplos, corresponding
to the conventional curling of hair with elegant cicada adornments. Finally, freely
falling folds emerged—the himation and the chiton. These transitions absolutely paral-
lel those the temple went through before it was completely emancipated from the mate-
rial, as I will demonstrate.
306. It is clear from various poetic passages that hollow-body construction was for
the later Greeks particularly characteristic of heroic architecture, and that the memory
of it remained alive even among the people. It seems to me that these passages can be
explained only by reference to this principle of building in its true and complete sense.
Thus Theocritus (Idylls 24) has the dragon sent by Hera slip through the hollow door-
posts in the oikos of Amphitryon to attack the infant Hercules: Qpcev <dpdKovtac>
ETL TAATUV OVS6V, OPL OTABLA KOLAa BuUPdw oiKw, aTELAOaGa dayeiv Boédboc ‘HpakAha
[She sent the serpents up to the broad threshold, where stood the hollow doorposts of
the house, to eat the baby Hercules]. Oedipus, too, pulls the hollow posts of the inte-
rior bolted door out of their sockets in order to get into the thalamos in which Jocasta
has strangled herself (Sophocles, Oed[ipus Tyrannus] 12[6]1 ff.: €k € TuOnévuw / Exdtve
Koika KAHPpa, KauTittTet oTéyq [He pulled the hollow doorposts from their sockets and
threw himself into the chamber]). Even the oikot Koihkootd8pou [houses with coffered
ceilings] and the verb ko.koota8péw [provide with a coffered ceiling] can be explained
by the same, originally Asiatic building method as the one under discussion (Septuagint,
Agg[aeus] 1.4; 1 Kings 6:9). But see [Jacob] H[einrich Samuel] Rumpf, De interioribus
aedium Homericarum partibus, Dissertatio sec. (Giessen, 1858), 83, who interprets all
these passages as referring only to carving (caelaturae).
307. Marchese Venuti, “Sopra un’anticha pittura trovata nel territorio cortonese,”
Atti di Cortona 9 (1791), quarto. Because slate is, as it were, naturally baked clay, a
mention of the remarkable slate paneling of an ancient Etruscan tomb may be permit-
ted here.
308. Such capitals are not rare in Pompeii, yet they all point to the older, better
style that flourished there before Pompeii was nearly flattened by an earthquake that
occurred before the city’s complete destruction. The columns of the Temple of Vesta in
Tivoli, as well as those of the monopteron in Rome of the same name, display the same
ceramic style. A beautiful capital in baked clay can be found with other terra-cottas in
the Biscari Museum in Catania. See the woodcut after my sketch.
309. According to legend it was built by the old Pelasgian architects Agamedes and
Trophonius, by shaping (Epyaodpevor) oak trunks and joining them together.
310. On ancient painted terra-cotta, see also Marco Carloni, Bassirilievi volsci in
terracotta dipinti a vari colori trovati nella citta di Velletri (Rome, 1785). The two brick
temples in the Egeria valley near Rome are also in the ancient terra-cotta style, if not in
terms of age then of principle.
311. It struck me during my travels that Greek colonies can always be found where
that much-mentioned shelly limestone (a porous stone) is found on the surface and is
easily quarried. I should like to extend this remark to all Greco-Italic settlements, and I

457
 Semper

do not doubt that the presence of this important building material was important to
settlers in choosing their site.
312. [Christophorus] Saxius and Jac[obus] van Vaassen, Animadversa ad fast[os]
Rom|anorum sacros| fragmenta, quarto (1785).
313. MeSv\d\0Gg Kateokevdteto Movoetov Mdvikoe kexoviaxe [Medullus designed
the museion; Manicus did the plasterwork]. See [Raoul-|Rochette, Peintures antiques
inéd [ites], 240 ff., where many relevant passages are cited.
314. Utinam dii immortales fecissent, uti Lycinus revivesceret et corrigeret hanc
amentiam tectoriorumque errantia instituta! [If only the gods would bring Licymnius
back to life, so he could fix the insane, deviant practices of the fresco painters!], says
Vitruvius, when mentioning the excesses of wall decoration painters (7.5.7). In chapter
[9] of this book he mentions an expolitio miniacia [vermilion wall dressing].
315. It is incorrect to assert, as do some learned nontechnicians, that the white
marble of Athenian temples was polished. Their surfaces rather show a careful final
preparation, and the smoothness of polishing was intentionally avoided by the choice
of material.
316. Scheletri Cumani dilucidati dal Canonico Andrea di Jorio (Naples, 1810), 8.
F.C.L. Sickler, De monumentis aliquot Graecis e Sepulcro Cumaeo recenter effosso
erutis (Weimar). [Andrea de] Jorio, [Metodo per rinvenire e frugare 1| sepolcri [degli]
antichi, 26. The tomb of Armento had four sides decorated with ornaments and figures
in colored and gilded stucco. [Giuseppe] Bamonte, Antichita pestane del Canon. D{on}
Nicola, Memorie sui monumenti di antichita (plate 6). On the tomb at Ruvo, see
R[aoul]-Rochette, Peintures antiques, 454.
317. See Raoul-Rochette, “Mémoire sur la peinture sur mur,” Journal des savants
(June-August 1833). Letronne, Lettres d’un antiquaire a un artiste (Paris, 1836).
Raoul-Rochette, Peintures antiques. Gottf{ried] Hermann, De veterum Graecorum pic-
tura parietum conjecturae (Leipzig, 1835). Ch[ristian] Walz, “Schriften uber die
Malerei der Alten,’ Heidelberger Jahrb|ticher| d\er| Lit{eratur| 14-17 (1837).
318. In the Temple of Theseus the space prepared for painting begins directly above
the base of the walls and consists of upright panels. It extends to the height of six ashlar
courses. I repeat this last fact as something I can vouch for because Letronne’s Lettres
d’un antiquaire [101-2] contains a note by [Friedrich Wilhelm von] Thiersch about this
much discussed stucco dressing of the temple’s inner cella that does not agree with my
observations. To illustrate my view, I provide here a partial section of the Temple of
Theseus, which I made on site.
319. Paus[anias] 1.15.
320. Paus[anias] 10.25.
321. Ancient architectural designs often permitted a kind of scenic handling of
architecture in that the sides and rear walls of a monument remained hidden from view
by the surrounding walls, trees, or other objects. There was also a desire to decorate the
koniasis only very simply, but this hardly meant leaving it white everywhere.
322. J.-I. Hittorff, Temple d’Empédocle and Monuments de la Sicile. [Domenico]
Serradifalco on Sicily.
323. Lucian, Amores 34[.11-12]: kat yupnvnv Totxwv apopdiav evavO€eot Badaic xpw-
LaTwv KaTeypaxsav [And they paint over the bare ugliness of the walls with bright tinctures].

458
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

324. “Politi lapidis.” In technical language lapis always means cut stone, as
opposed to marble.
325. The passage is in Pliny, [Historia naturalis,| ed. [Jacques] Dalechamps, 36.15:
Durat et Cyzici delubrum in quo filum aureum commissuris omnibus politi lapidis
subjecit artifex eburneum Jovem dicaturus intus, coronante eum Apolline. Tralucent
ergo picturae <this word appears in place of juncturae in some manuscripts> tenuis-
simis capillamentis, lenique afflatu simulacra refovente praeter ingenium artificis ipsa
materia quamvis occulta in pretio operis habetur [There still exists at Cyzicus a temple
in which the artist set a gold thread into all the joints of the embellished stone, intend-
ing to dedicate within an ivory Jupiter with Apollo crowning him. As a result, through
the painting shine very fine filaments of light, and a gentle breeze cools the statues. And
besides the cleverness of the artist, the material itself is considered a part of its value].
See below for my translation of this passage and my justification of it.
326. Vitruvius 7.7: Itaque antiqui egregia copia silis ad politionem sunt usi [And so
the ancients used a great deal of yellow ocher for their fresco work].
327. It seems to me, however, that the red paint that has survived on the above-
mentioned ancient Greek stucco work is red ocher (rubrica). Dragon’s blood (a trans-
parent vegetable paint) was used only on marble surfaces.
328. Pliny, [Historia naturalis,| ed. Dalechamps, 33.7, [Pedanius] Dioscorid|[es]
5.109.
329. Miltos was not lead oxide but cinnabar. Lead oxide was called sandaracha, or
sandyx, and was partly mined and partly manufactured. Vitruvius 7.7 and 7.1[2]. Pliny
34.[176-78], 35.[39-40].
330. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in a fragment perserved by Angelo Mai, says:
“The wall paintings were absolutely perfect in drawing and pleasing in color combina-
tions, and in every way far removed from the decorated style of so-called accessories!”
Dion[ysius] Halficarnassus], [Opera omnia quibus etiam accedunt| frag|menta], ed.
Mai, 16.6. I am surprised that no one has actually ever seriously challenged the author-
ity of this statement by juxtaposing it with Pliny’s well-known remark: Nulla gloria
artificum est nisi eaorum qui tabulas pinxere [There’s no fame for an artist unless he is
one of those who has painted pictures].
331. The white was frequently added to the tectorium, and later to the marble sur-
face, especially by means of white chalk. The best chalk, called paraetonion, came from
Egypt, and it was said by Pliny to be best at adhering to stucco: tectoriis tenacissimum
propter laevorem [sticking best to stucco because of its smoothness] (35.6). This is also
attested by the walls and ceilings of Greek and Etruscan tombs, and by the white work
in Pompeii.
332. Thus, for example, the green columns, apparently antique, whose remains
were found in the interior of Athena Polias make me uneasy about this question.
333. People really should stop adducing the \euKdc A{8o0c [white stone] as evidence
against polychromy on marble buildings.
334. Pliny, H[istoria] n{aturalis,| ed. Dalechamps, 36.6.
335. Vitruvius, bk. 7, preface.
336. It appears that the temple was never completed in all its parts.
337. There can be no more doubt about remnants of paint on sculptures from the

459
 Semper

best period. Only the blindly obstinate are unprepared to recognize it. On this subject,
see Quatremére [de Quincy], Jupiter olympien, passim.
338. On this, see the conclusion of this section.
339. Praxiteles was asked which of his marble works he considered to be the most
successful: the ones on which Nicias had set his hand was his answer, “so highly did he
value his coloring” (Pliny [35.40.133] ff.: tantum circumlitioni eius tribuebat). On circum-
litio, causis, and so on, see [Johann Ludwig] Volkel, Arch|dologischer| Nachlass, 79-96.
340. Callistratus, Stat[wae,] ed. Jacobs, 2:147. [Friedrich Gottlieb] Welcker,
Syllogle epigrammatum Graecorum], 687.
341. In Jupiter olympien Quatremére de Quincy provides a detailed summary of
these traces of paint on statues. Since then, nearly every day has brought new indica-
tions of the universal distribution of polychrome sculpture among the ancients.
342. Some remarks on the technique of painting statues and buildings follow in the
section on ceramics.
343. Athenaeus: kepdpita —Keknpoypadnyéva ypupact tavtototc. Raoul-Rochette
(Peintures antiques) gives precise information on this.
344. The color plates relating to Attic marble temples belong to this and the previ-
ous chapter.
345. Letronne, Lettres, 395.
346. [Justinian,] Digest[orum] 19.1.17.3: Tabulae pictae pro tectorio includuntur
[Painted panels are inserted in the stucco].
347. Pliny 35.10: tabulam magnae amplitudinis in machina aptatam picturae anus
una custodiebat [a large tablet on an easel ready for painting that one old woman took
care of].
348. Bottiger, [Ideen zur] Arch[dologie] der Malerei, 143 ff. See the chapter on
ceramics.
349. Pitture |antiche| d’Ercolano, vol. 4, pls. 41, 42, 45, and 46. Paintings in
wooden frames were found in Civita, fastened with iron hooks into indentations in the
wall. Pitt{ure antiche| d’Ercolano, vol. 2, pl. 28. Jorio, Peintures anciennes (Naples,
1830), 12.
350. Plutarch, Oplerum] moral [lium], 2.1096, ed. Reiske, 10:509.
351. Philostratus, [Imagines] 1.28. But the same author also speaks of colored
metal reliefs in India in Vita Apollonit.
352. See [Raoul-]Rochette, Peintures antiques inédites. The Isis mentioned in this
work is reliably from the Ptolemaic period, but I believe that the two pieces called Spes
and Mercury are still half-archaic art and from the same flourishing period of this
Greek free state as the Metapontine temples.
353. In the technical language of the Roman builder /apis, short for lapis quadra-
tus, is contrasted with marble and refers to normal cut stone, which was always dressed
with stucco and paint in artful buildings. Examples can be found in the following and
in many other sources:

Pliny, H[istoria naturalis] 36[.5.45]: Fuit tamen inter lapidem et marmor differentia
iam apud Homerum [Already in Homer there was a difference between stone
and marble].

460
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

Pliny, ibid. [36.5.46]: Primum ut arbitror versicolores istas maculas Chiorum

lapidicinae ostenderunt cum exstruerent muros; faceto in id M. Ciceronis sale:
omnibus enim ostentabant ut magnificum. Multo inquit magis mirarer si
Tiburtino lapide fecissetis. Et Hercules non fuisset picturae ullus, non modo
tantus honos, in aliqua marmorum autoritate [The stone quarries of the Chians
were the first, I think, to show those multicolored markings when the Chians
were building their walls. Cicero made a witty remark about it, when they
showed them to him as a marvel. “I’d have been more impressed,” he said, “if
you had made them of stone from the Tiber.” And, God knows, if there had
been any esteem for marbles, there wouldn’t have been any prestige given to
painting, let alone so much].
Vitruvius 2.8[.3]: e marmore seu lapidibus quadratis [out of marble or cut stone].
Vitruvius, 2.8[.16]: Cum ergo tam magna potentia reges non contempserint lateritio-
rum parietum structuras quibus et vectigalibus et praeda saepius licitum fuerat
non modo caementitio aut quadrato sed etiam marmoreo habere etc. [Therefore,
since kings of very great power have not disdained structures with brick walls
for which, through taxes and spoils, they could have used not only rubble or
squared stone but even marble ...].
Vitruvius, 4.4[.4]: seu autem quadrato saxo aut marmore [but if out of squared
stone or marble].
Pliny, 22.3[.4]: herbis tingi lapides, parietes pingi [stones dyed with plants, walls
painted].
Pliny, 35.1[.3]: Coepimus et lapidem pingere [We have even begun to paint stone].
Vitruvius, 3[.3.5]: In araeostylis autem nec lapideis nec marmoreis epistyliis uti
datur, sed imponendae de materia trabes perpetuae [In aereostyle buildings it is
not the practice to use architraves of stone or marble, but continuous wooden
beams].

354. Icannot vouch for the correctness of my interpretation of this difficult passage.
355. Nonnus, a fifth-century Christian writer, ascribes the invention of colored ash-
lar to the Tyrians. Dionys|iaca], 5.55, p. 134. Incidentally, this conforms entirely with
the view of the Asiatic manner of decoration that we developed earlier, namely, that
multicolored ashlar was initially mentioned only in the context of city walls and founda-
tions.
356. [Aulus] Hirtius, Blellum] Alex[andrinum] 1.3.
357. This remark will be pursued in the second part of this work, which will treat
the more general issues in terms of architectural style.
358. In all new German handbooks on art history and architectural history the
Cloaca Maxima is followed immediately by the architecture of Augustus, as if there
were nothing in between! Republican Rome is left almost completely out of considera-
tion, despite the fact that its noble ruins, though rare, are still sufficient for us to see in
them a style with its own high level of justification, one that is much more independent
of Greece than generally accepted, and one that in many respects, particularly in unity
of profile and individual execution, is far superior to the style of Augustus. None of
these handbooks discusses the Tabularium (built by Q[{uintus] Lutatius Catulus in the

461
 Semper

Roman year 676), the oldest surviving example of arcade architecture with half
columns, which is so important for the developmental history of this architectural
form. Nor do they speak of the temples at Cori or other important ruins dating from
the Republican period.
359. Kugler, Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, 3d ed., 192.
360. The role of clay decoration was sometimes filled by technically related bronze
work,
361. Ostrich eggs and other small objects in Luna marble, probably very ancient,
have been found in Etruscan tombs.
362. Cicero’s witty remark (cited above) about the colored walls of the Chians
remains a key passage. In Livy and Cicero there is repeated mention of a new dealbatio,
which Ulrichs, Kugler, and others take to be whitewash —although, as I have shown,
it was always inseparable from painting. According to [Lucius Annaeus] Sen|[eca],
Epist{ulae], Scipio Africanus’s baths had ashlar walls dressed with stucco (tectorium).
Pliny speaks of tinting the ashlar (lapidem tingere).
363. Pliny 35[.6.17].
364. As I write this, a vivid memory takes me back to the Cornetan tomb cham-
bers; my impression of them will retain the full freshness of their colors for as long as I
live. The figures in the wall paintings of these Tarquinian tombs at times really breathe
a kind of modern weltschmerz that was always incomprehensible to the Greeks.
365. Accurately described in the outstanding book by R[udolf] Wiegmann, Die
Malerei der Alten in ihrer Anwendung und Technik (Hannover, 1836).
366. Throughout his text Vitruvius appears as a decided Grecomaniac.
367. Unfortunately it is not known when this happened, but it must have been in
the late Alexandrian period, perhaps even in Roman times. For the Latin name
Licinius, by the way, Letronne suggests a reading of Lycinus, and [Karl Julius] Sillig
proposes Licymnius.
368. There was a purple in every color; the ancients used the term to describe
a quality, a certain depth and richness of color peculiar to products of the sea and to
the sea itself. An overall purple coloration is predominantly Asiatic. See the article on
dyeing.
369. Pictura quoque non alium exitum fecit, postquam Aegyptorum audacia tam
magnae artis compendarium invenit. The parallel between the poetry and the fine arts
of the Romans is interesting and instructive. The former was also based on Alexandrian
models but managed to breathe new life into them. See K[arl] F[riedrich] Hermann,
Culturgeschichte der Griechen und Romer, 2:137.
370. See Letronne, Lettres d’un antiquaire, 211 ff.
371. Seneca, Epistulae 86[.6]: nisi alexandrina marmora Numidicis crustis dis-
tincta sunt [if Alexandrian marble does not contrast with Numidian panels]. I do not
think that Seneca was thinking of the artificial marbling of slabs mentioned by Pliny.
372. Operosa et in modum picturae variata circumlitio [elaborate coating which
colors the stone in the fashion of a painting].
373. Horace says: musco circumlita saxa [stones decorated with moss].
374. This is not about painting stone but about imitating stone with painting. I even
think that /apis here is short for lapis quadratus, and the sentence should be translated:

462
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

“We have even begun to decorate the walls with painted ashlar work”; at that time this
would have been an important innovation in wall decoration that would have deserved
comment. But it is also quite possible that Pliny may have been referring only to the sim-
ple painting of the faux veins and druses on marble for which, under Nero, the expen-
sive device of inlaying hard stone into the marble was invented. Neither translation of
the passage argues against polychromy on marble, just as the previously cited passage
from Seneca’s letters did not. Rather, both cases clearly favor my view of polychromy.
375. [Pliny, Historia naturalis 35.2-3. TRANS.] It is incomprehensible that oppo-
nents of polychromy, like Kugler and others, could quote this and the earlier passage
from Seneca in support of their opinion!
376. See color plate 15, representing the decoration of a Pompeian atrium.
377. Kugler, to be sure, refuses to let it pass for antique, because apparently it
extends over some parts of the columns that were chipped or damaged in antiquity. But
can these not be very ancient, that is, older than the last antique expolitio of the build-
ing? If not, who then was responsible for this red tint, which has survived best on the
lowest parts of the column and reaches exactly to the height of the rubble that sur-
rounded the columns until a few decades ago?
378. See my letter of 10 July 1833 to my late friend Dr. [Olaus] Kellermann, the
secretary of the Archaeological Institute in Rome, in the Bullettino dell’Inst{ituto] di
corr[ispondenza| arch{eologica 4] (1833): 92.
379. Attributing the dominant preference for incrustation of architectural elements
to Byzantine influence is a questionable conjecture, since the ancient Byzantine monu-
ments—such as Hagia Sophia and the remains of the old imperial palace—reveal no
such features on the exterior but are rather structurally conceived.
380. The tireless zeal medieval propagandists showed in publishing and distribut-
ing etchings and colored reproductions of ancient paintings and other examples of
Romanesque and Gothic styles makes illustrations superfluous in the discussion that
follows.
381. It seems to me that this word has been much abused recently as an attribute of
an art-form. In many cases no particular concept seems to be attached to it. Not every
system for giving form that is rigorous is consequently an organism. That would
require the emergence of certain formal phenomena that proclaim themselves expres-
sions of life and are homogeneous with the distinguishing features of living organic
creatures — namely, plants and animals —in their microcosmic activity and conflict with
the external world. The Greek column, in conflict with a load applied only in a vertical
direction, is an organism; the Gothic pier with its vault ribs
— however consistently exe-
cuted, and despite the loose foliage decoration of its capital that inadequately and
superficially suggests an organism —is and always will remain a structure. The vain
intent to enliven it led in the fifteenth century to a tree-branch architecture, which was
the last attempt to breathe some life into this stone scholasticism.
382. See the article “Chapelle” in Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire de l’architecture.
383. These concluding remarks are intended primarily for those readers who have
closely followed the controversy on polychromy in antique art between scholars and
artists. It will soon become clear that they were drafted during the lifetime of the
famous art historian who is frequently mentioned. When the printer sent me the proofs,

463
 Semper

the question was raised as to whether these remarks should be allowed to stand or be
suppressed. The former course was taken because of the widespread influence that
Kugler’s views on this question—and his way of presenting them as though there could
be no further doubt
—have had and still have upon his readers. Both had to be confonted,
and it was impossible to leave Kugler, now deceased, completely untouched as a writer.
Moreover, Kugler represented for the author the requisite personification of the
Hofrat type so widespread and persistent in Germany, and it is actually just this type
that he has in mind when he speaks out against Kugler.
Besides, what is there to prevent the author too from being counted among the
dead? Artifex periit [the author perishes]. And who will guarantee that this work will
not appear posthumously, given the present organization of the bookselling trade!
384. To give an example: “The ostensible remains of red paint on large architec-
tural surfaces cannot in general be taken into account, and consequently the former
presence of reddish color, where it does not at the same time appear surrounded by the
outlines of an ornament, must be approached with some caution. In particular I think I
may be permitted to ignore the reddish or even dark red coloring, for which there is
little authentication, on the architrave of the Temple of Theseus.”
385. Hermann Hettner, Griechische Reiseskizzen (Brunswick, 1853), 187.
386. Kugler, Kleine Schriften, 361.
387. The French aesthetician [Charles-Ernest] Beulé proclaims outright that argu-
ments based on taste are inadmissible in addressing this question.
388. Thus the temple of the Virgin Goddess, after five and one-half centuries, still
retained the fresh appearance that Plutarch underscored with such amazement in his
De gloria Athen|iensium]! Some Athenian monuments survived down to the Middle
Ages with the same degree of freshness, as is clear from an anonymous fourteenth-
century report about their condition at that time. Comte [Léon-Emmanuel-Simon-
Joseph] de Laborde arranged for its publication in his interesting book Athénes aux
XVe, XVIe et XVII¢ siécles. There mention is made of a Totkidn S6En, a polychrome
style of architecture, in which Cecrops is said to have built these works. The interior of
the Propylaea was brightly colored and the exterior gilded (gold-colored?). The colored
decoration of the Parthenon is also mentioned.
389. See [Heinrich Nicolaus] Ulrichs, Reisen und Forschungen in Griechenland
(Bremen, 1840), 86.
390. Pliny 36.[4].2: In magna admiratione est et Hercules Menestrati et Hecate
Ephesi in templo Dianae post aedem, in cujus contemplatione admonent aeditui
parcere oculis, tanta marmoris radiatio est [Greatly admired are the Hercules of
Menestratus, and the Hecate which is in the sacred enclosure behind the Temple of
Diana at Ephesus. The temple attendants warn those who would examine it to spare
their eyes, so great is the brilliance of the marble].
391. I cannot bring myself to repeat this frequently mentioned story yet again.
Therefore I must ask those readers who would like to learn more about the debates
over Herodotus’s story of the white market and the prytaneum of the Siphnians, and
about how the story relates to the subject under discussion, to consult Kugler’s writings
on the polychromy of the ancients and my brochure Die vier Elemente der Baukunst.
See also Hittorff’s work.

464
 Textiles: Technical-Historical

392. Lysistrata [1137-41]:

Eit, & Aakdves (pds yap buds TpeYsouat)

ovK to8 OT EABdV SedpO Tlepikre(Sas ToTe
6 Adkwv ‘A®nvatwy ikéTns KabéCeTo
ETL TOLAL BWHLOs WXPOS EV HotviKtSe
oTpatiav TpocatTav
[Next, Spartans —I’ll turn to you now—
Don’t you recall when Pericleidas
the Spartan came here and, as a suppliant of the Athenians,
sat at the altars, pale in crimson,
pleading for an army?]

393. [must take this opportunity to complain about a certain way of quoting texts,
namely, the orthodox manner in which theological candidates adduce their biblical
verses. Often, indeed in most cases, the true meaning of a sentence becomes clear only
in combination with what precedes and follows it, even distant passages. It is therefore
not advisable
—or, even when it is, not honest —to present it out of this context.
As for the reproach that I have read things into the work of ancient authors, I think
it is always a good thing to have something to read into something else. Moreover,
every good interpreter has always skillfully read something into the text at the appro-
priate moment.
394. Our ignorance of the lost encaustic technique makes it impossible to translate
this passage: TGot ToUTOLS 1 ELKAV KEKOOLLAPO GUK AxpPL TOU ETILKEXPWOON [LOVOV, GAN’ ES
Bd8os SevooTratdts TLol dappdKots Es Kdpov KaTaBadetoa [With all of these the picture is
embellished, and not merely tinted on the surface but stained down deep to the full
with permanent dyes]. Imag|[ines] [16.13-16].
395. Pindar, Nem[ean Odes] [4.81].
396. Fauvel has described things like this, and Ross confirms their occurrence.
Kunstblatt 1838, no. 59.
397. Raoul-Rochette, Peintures antiques, sub fine.
398. Kugler will again accuse me of reading things into the words of the text—so
be it! I reply with the same reproach against him.

465
 Volume Two
OCT olan] Cok-yam(-1e
(ola (o- Shackotonty
Metallurgy: Considered in
Themselves and in Relation
om AUcoal(rel (l=
 GEAR TERS Bil WE

Ceramics
A. Aesthetic-Formal

§ 88 Introduction
Our language lacks a general and comprehensive expression for all the arts
whose common material basis or primeval material (if I may use this expres-
sion) is potter’s clay—that is, those arts whose common primeval technique
consists of giving form and shape to a plastic soft paste and then fixing it by
hardening.
We have adopted the Greek word plastic only for those cases in which this
primeval technique is used for figurative representation. It therefore excludes
pottery proper in our sense of that word.
Still more limited is the related notion of pottery, by which we understand
only the purely functional and industrial making of pots.
The expression chosen for the heading of this fifth chapter has, like the
word plastic, the disadvantage of being a foreign word — even worse, one that
is not in general use and therefore sounds affected. And yet, strictly consid-
ered, it is no less specific than the aforementioned terms. Plastic refers to the
process of forming and pottery to the practical material purpose that first
called it forth. Ceramics alludes in the first instance only to the material to be
treated
—namely, clay (képayoc) — which was the first material to be used for
this technique and which in its many guises has continually asserted its claim
to being the plastic material par excellence throughout all stages of this
art’s development. Because clay has been of general importance for all branches
of the technique in question (forming, so to speak, its material basis), and
because clay, as the first plastic material, to some extent established the style
to be followed for other materials later, we are perhaps justified here in
assigning to the word a more general meaning than it had for the Greeks. For
us it will encompass the whole art of making vessels, including vessels made
of such other materials as metal, wood, ivory, glass, and stone. This section
will deal with all of these together and consider them and pottery proper as
stylistically dependent on one another. Second, our definition of the word
ceramics will include objects stylistically related to the art of vessel making
thanks to their material and treatment but not to the purpose for which they
were formed — examples are roof tiles and terra-cotta panels, and in a certain
sense also sculpture from among the fine arts.
The products of ceramics have been held in extraordinarily high esteem by
all peoples in all ages. They acquired religious and symbolic meanings long

467
 Semper

before the appearance of monumental architecture, which they influenced

significantly. Ceramic objects influenced architecture directly because these
products were used in construction and in the ornamental outfitting of monu-
ments; they also influenced architecture indirectly because principles of beauty
and style (even complete forms) that had been established in prearchitectural
times by ceramic works and fine-art potters were taken up by architecture.
The earliest and most general application of this art was without doubt to
satisfy needs: eating, drinking, and washing above all. Yet ceramics acquired
great significance even in the earliest times because urns were used in funeral
rites. Not only were the remains of the dead interred in earthenware cinerary
urns but vessels were also placed in tombs as pledges of a continuing cult of
the dead, as favorite possessions of the deceased, and as mementos of impor-
tant moments of his life. Remarkably, we find this custom wherever a people
displays the first signs of higher culture. It follows that vessels had a religious
significance as general as their use in rituals for the dead, for there is not and
has never been a religion without sacred vessels.
Thus pots became symbols of faith and therefore also objects of high art!
And it was precisely these works of fine pottery that were preserved in the
protecting womb of the earth because of their use as objects in funeral rites,
whereas almost no household pottery proper remains from any period.
Except for its brittleness, fired clay, even when incompletely hardened, is
the least perishable of materials; it lasts considerably longer than stone, metal,
or any of the other extremely stable materials that nature provides for our
technical use. Even those precious metals that do not decompose are less
durable than fired clay, as they incite the human urge to steal and the associ-
ated urge to destroy.!
That is why fossil pots are as interesting for the history of art (and of
humanity in general) as the prehistoric remains of plants and animals are for
natural history. Pots are the oldest and most eloquent of historical docu-
ments. If one examines the pots produced by a given group of people, it is
usually possible to say what they were like and what stage of development
they had reached! Here two illustrations of vessels that originally had a high
religious significance have been juxtaposed. The first is the sacred Nile pail,
the situla, of ancient Egypt; the second is the Hellenic hydria. Both have the

Situla Hydria

468
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

same original purpose of collecting water. The first is a scooping vessel for
drawing water from the Nile, and is thus characteristic of Egypt —recipient
of the gift of the Nile— which has no water sources trickling from rocks. Two
such pails were carried on a yoke by Egyptian water bearers, one in front and
the other behind. The heaviest part of the vessel is lowest, and it tapers
toward the top to prevent spilling. It is shaped like a water drop, and both its
overall look and its ornamentation recall the original leather tube that was
customarily used for drawing water in the earliest period of Egyptian civi-
lization, as it is once again for the Turks today. Notice the strips of hiero-
glyphics below the rim that forms the edge of the vessel — these are motivated
by a recollection of the folds in the leather tube, pera in Latin, which are also
found in similar metal or earthenware vessels and must have resulted from
drawing the mouth in.
We feel vividly the complete functionality of this form; it contrasts markedly
with the Greek hydria, which is intended not to draw water but to catch it as
it flows from a fountain. This is the reason for the funnel-shaped neck and the
kettlelike belly, which places the center of gravity as close to the mouth as
possible. Etruscan and Greek women carried the hydria on their heads —

=|
eS oe
==
=
a :, |

Carrying the hydria

upright when full, horizontal when empty, as shown in the picture on the
hydria illustrated here. Anyone who tries to balance a stick on his fingertip will
find this trick easier if he keeps the heaviest end of the stick at the top. This
experiment explains the basic shape of the Greek hydria, which when complete
has two horizontal handles at the center of gravity to lift the vessel when full,
and a third vertical one for carrying and suspending the empty vessel. The
third handle was perhaps also a grip with which a second person helping the
woman carrying the water could lift the full vessel onto the other’s head.
How significantly the soaring, spiritual, and lucid essence of the spring-
worshiping Hellenes emerges symbolically from this subordinated artistic
form, in contrast to the situla, which expresses the physical law of gravity and
balance in a way quite opposite but no less appropriate to the spirit of the
Egyptian people!
These significant forms were recognized as such and therefore raised to the
status of religious and national emblems. Just as the Nile pail was the Egyptians’

469
 Semper

most sacred vessel, the Panathenaic pageants were opened by a procession of

maidens carrying hydriae.
And there is more! The basic features of Egyptian architecture seem to be
contained in embryo in the Nile pail, and the formal relation of the hydria to
certain types of the Doric style is no less striking! Both forms are precursors of
what architecture invented as it struggled to give monumental expression to
the respective natures of these two peoples.

§ 89 As in the previous section on dressing, the rich material to be considered here

will be divided into two chapters. First, pure, as it were, abstract aesthetic-
formal questions can be linked with those addressing the purpose and use of
vessels. In a second chapter a consideration of the materials of ceramics and
the most important procedures used in this art will almost of necessity lead to
a history of style.

§ 90 Every ceramic product is conditioned first of all by the purpose for which it is
intended, by its use, which may be actual or only assumed, that is, conceived
in a less real or more ideal sense. Take the most beautiful and splendid vase of
marble or porphyry, intended to stand in the entrance hall of a palace, to dec-
orate a niche, or to adorn the center of a room. Even if it is not intended for
use it must be motivated in a formal sense by some real practical vessel that
provides the necessary realistic basis for the ideal treatment of the artwork.
Without it, any such composition is left effectively hovering in the air, mean-
ingless and incomprehensible, even deprived of a formal existence.
The variety of uses occasions the production of vessels in either simple or
mixed forms, depending on whether one intention or several simultaneous
intentions were being pursued in its invention.
The first and most general purpose is containing. One strives for a means
of enclosing and keeping together a liquid or a number of dry objects.
A second and different purpose pursued by the pottery industry is to pro-
duce an instrument for scooping liquids. We need an implement suitable for
collecting part of a larger quantity of liquid and isolating it for some broader
purpose.
Then there is a third purpose that frequently occurs in association with the
second, namely, filling. We want to place a liquid that has been scooped and
contained into a reservoir. And a fourth purpose is the converse of the third—
pouring.
Thus the actual container (reservoir), the scooping vessel, the filling vessel
(funnel), and the pouring vessel are the four basic forms of ceramics.

§ 91 Nature offers certain forms that are the purest expression of these four con-
cepts of the potter’s art.
Cucurbits and eggs are containers or reservoirs in the strictest and purest
form. The egg is therefore a profound symbol of the absolute, of the all-
embracing, of the “world as will.” In Etruscan tombs one often finds (among

470
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

other vessels) ostrich eggs (sometimes real, sometimes made of clay or marble)
with richly decorated surfaces. The mothers of death on the so-called Harpy
Tomb are shaped like eggs.
A primeval type for the scooping vessel is the hollow hand. Undoubtedly
the horns of certain animals were also one of the earliest motives for the shape
of such vessels. The same horn, cut off or pierced at the bottom, is the sim-
plest funnel, the most ancient filling vessel. It was also particularly revered as
a drinking horn and was even copied later, with all of high art’s decorations
and embellishments, in clay, stone, precious metals, and other materials.
In the same way seashells and mollusks make natural pouring vessels.
Such natural motives were sometimes used materially and sometimes
served as early models for related utensils. The human race scarcely needed
such models, however, since even at an early artistic stage instinct was a sure
guide to selecting what was most suitable for one’s purpose.
On closer consideration it is clear that no single vessel created by the
human hand is ever pure and unmixed; all combine several motives, usually all
four of those mentioned, in fact. Even the natural egg that one prepares to eat
becomes a vessel that satisfies at least the three functions of reservoir, funnel,
and pouring vessel. Creating an opening and then flattening the lower end by
gentle pressure on a table suffices to wrest an egg from absolute neutrality and
make it relate to a person as a vessel.
Although there are therefore no pure and unmixed shapes for vessels, in
most cases one of the cited motives is dominant. In cases where two are pres-
ent with equal intensity, the others retreat to the same extent. For example,
every spoon is a small reservoir, but at the same time the functions of scoop-
ing and pouring are dominant and determine its form.
These fundamental design motives are joined by three accessory motives,
namely,
1. the base support (stand),
2. the grip (handle),
3. the lid, or in some cases the plug.
It is only when these three accessory parts of a vessel are combined with the
four basic forms that they are raised to the status of articulated organisms
whose varied nature can achieve unity of purpose and form through artistic
beauty.
However important these extremities may be to questions of style in the
art of vases, we cannot allow them to be considered a means for distinguish-
ing genres when classifying vessels. We intend to group vessels solely accord-
ing to the four fundamental design differences named above.

§ 92 Class I. The Container (Reservoir): Greek Pithos; Latin Dolium; French

Jarre and Cuvier; Spanish Tinaja; Tuscan Orcia, Cziro, and Coppo;
Armenian Koupchin; Brazilian Camuci
Here the typical and natural form is the spheroid or ovoid in vertical section,
more or less approaching a circle. Yet this basic form is subject to a wide

471
 Semper

range of variations depending on the specific conditions of its use. For example,
containers are given a concentrated form when hot liquids are to be kept
warm or cold liquids are to be kept cool as long as possible in warm sur-
roundings without evaporating. A contrary shape is chosen if the goal is to
cool a liquid or the surroundings by evaporation. In that case one naturally
tries to increase the surface where evaporation takes place. This has led to the
otherwise inexplicable baroque forms of the Spanish alcarrazas and bucaros,
whose companion pieces may perhaps be those antique vases in southern Italy
with equally baroque sculptural extremities but less surface area. A reservoir
intended as a kettle for heating a liquid over a fire should have a surface that
is spheroid at the top but flattened or, even better, concave at the bottom.
The oldest pots are largely of this kind. Most Assyrian and Egyptian clay
vessels are in a more or less pronounced dolium form. Ancient Greek and
Roman dolia, some of which are colossal, are also a pure expression of this
type. Large ones are found in various museums. There is, for instance, a fired-
clay dolium of exceptional size in the Musée céramique in Sévres and another
huge one in the British Museum. The dolium of Diogenes is famous, and the
illustration here is taken from an antique wall painting.

Cask of Diogenes

As with almost all other kinds of vessels, here too a gradual transition can
be seen from the oldest, spheroid, highly bulbous shapes to the ovoid and
more slender ones.
Forms derived from this type are:

§ 93 1. The Amphora?
This is a tall dolium with a wide opening and a short neck, usually with two
(sometimes three or four) handles but without a base. It often ends in the
shape of a top or in a point because it was placed on a support or buried in
the earth. The need to keep the wine or oil fresh explains its not very concen-

472
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

trated, spindlelike shape and its high proportion of surface area to volume. Its
usually short neck already marks it as a hybrid form. It lies at one extreme of
the reservoirs extended along their length; the shallow dish or platera lies at
the other extreme and will be discussed below.
Amphorae, incidentally, are related to one another in their overall shape
and type but differ greatly in their details. Two groups can be distinguished:
(1) the so-called canopic amphorae, which are widest at the top immediately
under the neck and are reminiscent of the singular form of the Egyptian canopic
vase; (2) the amphorae in the shape of a pouch, which taper toward the top
and have their largest diameter nearest the point in which they terminate.

Canopic amphora Pouch-shaped amphora

Amphorae are among the most beautiful artistic vases. In addition to

antique vessels, whose formal beauty is unmatched, there are the magnificent
Moorish and Saracen vessels of Spain and Sicily, some of which are of faience
and some of metal. They have no feet but come to a point in the antique fash-
ion and need a special base, an incitega, on which to stand.3 Our illustration
of a small amphora from the best Athenian period was published by Baron
[Otto Magnus] von Stackelberg and shows a very graceful combination in
which vase and incitega form a whole (see upper figure on p. 474).
The amphora-like vessel with a flat bottom and base, which enables it to
stand without a separate support, appears to be a later form. The famed cere-
monial vessels in which oil from sacred olive groves was presented to victors
of the Panathenaic games were of this type. The older ones are squat and full
in their proportions, the later ones of a more elongated shape. Imitations
include the slender white marble urns for ashes that are generally found in
Athens, Marathon, and elsewhere in Attica (Brit[ish] Museum and Louvre;
Stackelberg, Graeber der Hellenen, pl. 3).

473
 Semper

Vs
/4)

atHa
. NUYS \\ DWl
N
oe SS me
Panathenaic prize amphorae

Unusually, it is possible to identify as a characteristic of these vessels the

presence of handles, as well as their shape and number. An amphora is never
without handles, never has fewer than two handles on opposite sides, and
often has four, and they are always ear handles—that is, they are fastened
vertically to the vessel’s neck.

§ 94 2. Urns
This is the name for dolium-like vessels that are flattened at the bottom and
sometimes also have a low torus or molding as a base. In their simpler form
they have neither neck nor handles but usually do have a lid—and probably
originally almost always did.
The Egyptian canopic vases mentioned above are urns; similar ones are
also found in Etruria.

474
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

(a) Egyptian canopic urn, (b—d) Etruscan urns

Although these vessels often served as containers for ashes, their form was
by no means either dependent on this function or irrevocably associated with
it. The canopic vase, which might be called the archetype of all urns, was orig-
inally a vessel to hold Nile water, and it was used as such in the service of the
dead. It resembles other water containers, such as the hydria, amphora, or
lecythus. The sarcophagus, before it became a coffin, served as the reservoir
for a fountain, as a winepress, and as a bathtub. Even as a sarcophagus it
continued to be decorated with symbols taken from water containers or wine-
presses, such as lion heads, wavy fluting, aquatic plants, vine leaves, and sim-
ilar motifs. This association between burial rites and the cult of springs and
water appears again in the old Attic custom of burying someone between
fired-clay roof tiles and pieces of guttering.
In the Elgin Room of the British Museum there is an enormous embossed
bronze Attic vessel in the purest canopic urn form that is distinguished by its
very simple decoration. It is half-hidden in a chest and visible only from above.
Not infrequently one also finds metal urns on a separate low tripod with
figurative lids. They were probably competition prizes or testimonials pre-
sented for exceptional luck in hunting or similar events. In the Bronze Room
of the British Museum there are several of this kind, including one with a bear
in the middle of the lid and four riders circling it on the edge of the lid.

Bronze urn with tripod Greek urn with handles

475
 Semper

The echinus-shaped urns with a low base, two horizontal handles, and a
short neck are the product of an evolved classical art. They form a very broad
family to which belong the majority of the most beautiful painted vessels of
fine terra-cotta.

5 3. Kraters, Originally Mixing Vessels

Their characteristic feature is the breadth of their mouths, where the diameter
of the vessel is largest. They come with or without handles and in their earli-
est form they are effectively half dolia, cut horizontally through the middle.
Underneath they require a support, which in the most magnificent vessels of
this kind is often lavishly decorated with figurative ornament. The basic motive
of the stand,* however, are now a simple stick frame with three or more legs —
there are many such wooden specimens in most Egyptian collections. Similar
ones are now very common in Egypt, particularly in the east, some richly deco-
rated with inlaid work in mother-of-pearl, ivory, tortoiseshell, and the like.
Initially, metal supports and tripods were the same size and shape as the
wooden ones and were hollow. Later they were made from bar metal or were
cast, and consequently their style changed (see additional material in “Tec-
tonics” and “Metallurgy”).
In some cases the stand represented the dominant part of the whole, and
then it was called a tripod. The krater placed on such tripods and—theo-
retically, at least—intended for cooking was the lebes, the kettle, also called
chytra (Latin pelvis, ahenum), which includes the cortina (cauldron), the ansa
(handle), and the spheroid lid or holmos.
In other cases the tripod was very low; however, it still formed a separate
part. Various kraterlike vessels of this kind, some of them very beautifully
executed in bronze — usually Etruscan work —can be found in museums. In a

Etruscan krater with low tripod

later development the tripod became an integral part of the vessel, but the orig-
inal separation of the parts is still clearly articulated in form and ornament.
Herodotus distinguishes between Lesbian and Argolic kraters,5 but he
describes only the latter in detail. It was decorated all round with projecting
griffin heads and supported on three kneeling bronze colossi, seven ells high.
Laconian and Corinthian kraters are also named as particular types.®
Similar tripods supported by colossi, like the one Herodotus places in the

476
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

Samian Temple of Hera, can be found depicted on Egyptian reliefs. A small

Etruscan clay model also recalls showpiece vessels of this kind that were wide-
spread in the ancient world.

Egyptian krater Etruscan krater

The krater also appears frequently on Assyrian wall reliefs —sometimes

with a low stand, sometimes with a high one.
Heavy kraters on stands are sometimes provided with a special central col-
umn as a support (6udados); this is especially true of the showpiece kraters
imitated in stone (marble). Here the above-mentioned transition from the
metal style to the stone can be seen in highly characteristic fashion.

Assyrian krater

Finally there are those kraters with only a central column, but even here
there are often allusions to the support’s original tripod form.
Such a support is called a hypokraterion.

Assyrian krater

477
 Semper

It is not unusual for kraters to have handles, as has already been noted,
although in most monumental showpiece vessels they are merely decorative or
symbolic of transportability. They start at the lower edge of the belly above
the foot, at least when the latter is no longer a tripod but forms a full base.
A special, composite form of the krater is found in the famous chalice-
shaped display vessels that widen at the top. They include most of the Lucan-
ian terra-cotta vases in the late style, some of which are extraordinarily large
and magnificently decorated. This chalice form is also predominant in the

Athenian krater Chalice krater with and without stand

colossal stone vases that later typify this kind of showpiece vessel in the art of
late antiquity. There are beautiful examples of such vases in [Giambattista]
Piranesi’s Vasi, candelabri.... The famous Medici and Borghese vases, those
in Warwick and Woburn Castle, as well as other display vessels are well-
known examples of this subcategory of the krater (see [Henry] Moses, [A
Collection of Antique] Vases..., pls. 36, 37, 40, and 41; Piranesi’s work cited
above; and the monograph by Count [Lucantonio] Floridi, “Sopra il vaso
appellato cratere[m]”)
Not many large krater-shaped vases have survived from the Middle Ages
or the Renaissance, if one excludes the baptismal fonts better placed in the
category of basins. The accompanying sketch shows one of the two beautiful
bronze kraters, attributed to Benvenuto Cellini, in the antiquities collection in
Dresden.

Krater in the Renaissance style

478
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

Deep kraters with a flattened base and no feet form a special group; as
actual mixing vessels, they serve a practical purpose. This group includes the
archaic vessel shown here, which specialists have identified with the oxy-
baphon of antiquity. Other kraters with supporting handles (column handles)
but no feet are also archaic and have been identified with the celebe.

Oxybaphon Celebe

Krater with tall handles

A remarkable example is the mixing vessel said to have been used at the
Wedding at Cana (see mixing vessel below).7
Another vessel whose style is said to be of Tyrian or Jewish origin can be
found in Quedlinburg. Similar Greco-Italic vessels are not rare.
This family also includes the beautiful Arab vessels in damascene bronze.
The most famous specimen, called the vase of the chateau de Vincennes, is in
the Louvre. It is said to have been brought back from the Orient by Saint
Louis. Other such chased and damascene vessels are described by [Joseph
Toussaint] Reinaud in his work on the collection of the duke of Blacas. They
are still used in the Orient today.

TT RR
ih
1

Mixing vessel

479
 Semper

For further material on the reservoir subtype under the heading “krater,”
see the essay by Count Floridi mentioned above, and [Karl] O[tfried] Miller’s
treatise, De tripode delphico.

§ 96 4. The Bowl (Phial, Patera, Tazza, Basin)

The bowl is in a certain sense the opposite of the amphora, which is the
most extreme vertical elongation of the originally spherical dolium. The bowl
approaches the other extreme of flattening within that basic form.
Here three forms appear as characteristic subdivisions:
(a) Bowls with a curved bottom that need a special device to stand are of
various depths and ultimately turn into a completely flat discus form. They
were sacred vessels used for the direct pouring of libations. This type occurs
most distinctly in the deep Assyrian-Phoenician bowls of beaten metal brought

Assyrian bowls

to light by the excavation of Nineveh; they correspond entirely to those so

often seen represented on Assyrian reliefs. They have no feet and cannot stand
independently; they are intended to sit on a separate base in such a way that

Assyrian basin support

480
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

only the interior of the vessel is visible. Thus they do not usually have handles
and are decorated only on the inside, while on the outside one sees the rough
reverse side of the embossed and stamped ornamental forms that decorate the
inside. This peculiarity of Assyrian metal bowls is found even on those that
have handles. All are obviously emblems in the figurative sense, alluding to
the technical origins of this expression (see Layard’s and Botta’s well-known
etchings and the woodcuts shown here).8 Decorated clay vessels with aspira-
tions to being high art have not been found in Assyria, nor, to my knowledge,
in Egypt. In these southeastern seats of the earliest civilizations high art in
vase making must have passed from the potters to toreutic artists and metal-
workers at a very early stage.? On the other hand, it was in keeping with the
genius of the Greeks that they were able to endow potter’s clay — irreplaceable
in its plastic qualities though worthless in itself —with the highest nobility,
simply by the form and artistry of the objects made from it.1°
Still, the oldest clay utensils made by the Greeks are vividly reminiscent of
those Assyrian metal vessels in their form, in the themes represented on them,
and in the general nature of their ornamentation. This does not imply that we
should consider Greek works to be imitations of the latter, but we should at
least accept that both emerged from a single, even older original form of pot-
tery that was in fact Asiatic.
This is particularly true of the vessels under discussion here. Most Greek
clay bowls of the oldest style are deep and squat in the Assyrian manner, with
no feet; in fact they are not equipped to stand at all and their form strongly
suggests an Asiatic type. They usually differ from Assyrian metal bowls only
on the important point that they are ornamented outside as well as inside,
although similar principles guide both. The entire (outer) surface is divided
into zones and almost completely covered with animal friezes and similar,
quasi-Assyrian Asiatic motifs. This type of deep bowl was later used by the
Etruscans and Romans as well, among whom the oldest pottery traditions
survived longer, as will be shown.
In the age of beautiful Athenian pottery the bowl acquired that finely curv-
ing, shallow line whose extreme simplicity makes it one of the most elegant
forms of antique ceramics. Bowls from this period have no lip and are indented

Profiles of Assyrian bowls

underneath in such a way that the indented section on the inside of the vessel
forms a navel (6u.ahdc),"! often with a very low ringlike edge serving as the foot
of the vessel. They are partly decorated with the most typical vase images on
the exterior as on the interior, where the middle part rises. Though the inner
image, executed in an austere or delicate style, formed the chief decoration,

481
 Semper

the everyday decorations on the outside were executed more casually. This
was because the vessels were inverted and stacked, together with other display
pieces, on the buffet (kuAtketov), as can be seen from images of Etruscan
étageéres in Tarquinian tombs.
After the time of Alexander the Asiatic the luxury of metal utensils was
adopted and the manufacture of fired-clay vases fell into decline. Athenaeus’s
well-known list of antique vases (as well as most of this polymath’s other com-
ments on our topic) refers only to vessels made of (precious) metals. It contains
some very interesting details, particularly about the sumptuous Greco-Asiatic
vase art of Alexander’s day, but it does not shed the desired light on the mor-
phology of these artifacts.
Here it is interesting to note how, along with identical phenomena in all
fields of antique (Greek) art, the later period again more or less returned to
archaic artistic techniques that had been abandoned in the finest period.
Before the development of Greek art pottery metal utensils and implements
already exhibited a significant degree of luxury, which must have resulted from
a trained native crafts industry (even if it is assumed that this emerged only
through contact with foreign lands and that it developed slowly). Etruscan
metal implements, which have been preserved in significant numbers in
tombs, also give unmistakable indications of the style of early Greek metal
techniques —if one distinguishes the general related traits from the specific
things unique to Etruscan art.
It is necessary to distinguish between bowls, or paterae, and patinae or
patellae (paropsides, lances), that is, eating bowls intended especially for fish
dishes. According to Pliny, clay dishes of enormous size were made in the
imperial Roman period. They were often decorated on the inside with fish (a
reference to their purpose) or with sailing ships—a quite excellent example of
which, I remember, is in the British Museum.
There are some very fine pans of considerable size in the Etruscan Room of
the British Museum, some of which are of embossed metal and set on special
low tripods. One has handles of intertwining snakes and is particularly large
and beautiful.
A rare vessel from the magnificent late flowering of Hellenism, combining
richness with high art, is the famous, six-inch-wide, Farnese onyx bowl in

Farnese bowl

Naples.'3 This is decorated on the inside with an allegory on Egypt’s flourish-

ing condition under Ptolemy Soter; on the outside, underneath, is a beautiful
head of Medusa, but a hole has been clumsily bored through it, probably to
accommodate a metal support.'* See also the coupe des Ptolemées, which is
(or was, at least) in the cabinet des Médailles of the library in Paris.

482
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

(b) Standing bowls with flat bottoms, that is, free-standing (needing no
supports), of every material and from every period, are abundantly repre-
sented in museums. Most of the surviving antique vessels in precious metals
are in this form—for example, the famous Aquileja bowl in Vienna,!* the
Bacchic silver vase in Bologna,!” the bowl in the Stroganov collection,!* and
others. Large silver pans intended for use were appropriately given only flat
vegetal ornaments, between which masks, haut-relief heads, and the like often
break the surface at the edge.!9 The so-called disci were the inner piéces de
rapport, the emblems, of other bowls into which they were fitted to form their
rich interior decoration. Silver disci were found in Pompeii2° and Geneva,?!
and a very beautiful bronze example was found in Epirus.22
Cicero (Verrine Orations 4.23) distinguishes these emblems from crustae—
and rightly so, because the latter pieces are applied externally, whereas the
former are fillings for the interior parts of the vessel.
Emblems are sometimes applied to Sassanian and Gallo-Roman bowls. The
Sassanian patera in the library in Paris, formerly in Saint-Denis, has transparent
glass fillings in its pierced rim and the emblematic image of Khosrow in its cen-
ter.23 The large Sassanian bowls in Saint Petersburg are similar. Still others are
described by [Henri-Adrien-Prévost de] Longpérier in Annali dell’Inst[ituto]
15.24 The metal coupe aux léopards, inlaid with gold and silver and found in
Pesaro in the Duchy of Urbino in 1838, dates from later (Arabic) times.?5
Here I should mention a long rectangular dish from the sixth century,
found near Gourdon in the department of the Haute-Sadne and deposited in
the library in Paris. It is made of embossed gold plate with enamel shields in
the shape of trefoils and lozenges.
As has already been noted, the patera was used in pagan sacrifices together
with the sacrificial pitcher (prochus). The libation was poured into the bowl
from a pitcher held high before the contents were poured onto the flame.
These sacrificial vessels are not infrequently depicted on Roman reliefs. The
sacrificial patera shown below is borrowed from such a relief.
With the advent of Christianity both implements became sacred vessels,
but their use changed slightly. Gallo-Roman sacrificial vessels of both pagan
and Christian origin have been found in England and France. Example: the
bronze patera with busts en ronde bosse around its edge, together with its

Roman patera

483
 Semper

pouring vessel.26 A similar bowl of British origin was found in Suffolk and has
been described by John Gage.27 I recall seeing in the precious metals room of
the British Museum a splendid silver dish from Agrigentum with six bulls en
ronde bosse around the border and a motif in the omphalos.
The catinus of the cathedral treasury in Genoa, probably antique, should
also be included among the remarkable examples from this family of utensils;
it is a hexagonal smaragdine glass bowl of considerable size. The same goes
for a paten of blood red jasper, which is probably also antique but set in a rich
mount from the time of Abbé Suger. It was previously in Saint-Denis and is
illustrated by [Alexandre] Lenoir.
Artistic Chinese and Indian bowls in all sorts of materials, some of great
splendor and beauty, are by no means rare in collections of Oriental art.28
Among them, Moorish majolica dishes —as well as early Spanish imitations—
are of particular interest for art and the history of style, in part because of
their intrinsic artistic value, and in part because they are the starting point for
the splendid faience industry that flourished in Italy beginning in the fifteenth
century. This initiated a new era of pottery —the only one that can bear com-
parison with that of ancient Greece. The most important pieces to emerge
from the Umbrian faience industry will also be classified as dish-shaped ves-
sels. There will be more about these and other such works in the article on
faience in the next section.
During the Gothic Middle Ages, too, this vase motive was a favorite and
yielded felicitous results. The patens of the Limousin factory, in which all the
styles of the enameler’s fascinating art can be seen one after the other, have
become widely known thanks to numerous publications and examples in
collections.
The accompanying sketch of a thirteenth-century enamel dish found near
Soissons may serve as an example.

DI IIT TP
IIIS BLO SLADE
TR Pe VO. a GIN @. CE:
IER SL? LEE

Enameled patera (thirteenth century)

In the section on metallurgy we will return to these and to the disk-shaped

vessels produced during the flowering of the goldsmith’s art in the Renais-
sance. I will therefore mention only in passing Donatello’s bronze dish from
this period (held by the Casa Martelli in Venice) as the finest example of its
kind produced.
Another line of richly decorated dishes, again mentioned only in passing,
belongs more properly to the late Renaissance. Most of these works appear to
be by German metal artists, and examples in tin or lead are most frequently
found in Franconia, Bavaria, and the Tirol. The principal center of manufac-

484
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

ture was perhaps Augsburg. These examples in lead, however, are only pale
imitations or models of others in silver or gold. Thus we find in Paris a silver
dish with elaborate allegorical images; a lead duplicate is in Innsbruck. Other
examples are the duke of Mantua’s bowl in Bologna and a splendid baptismal
font in Gotha. In this context we should refer to the museum catalogs of
Berlin, Munich, and Vienna, which have numerous such vessels.
Finally I will mention, admittedly somewhat out of sequence, the beautiful
antique basins and fountain bowls in granite, porphyry, and other hard and

Fountain bowl from Paestum

costly materials, some of colossal size, that adorn the museums and palaces of
Italy. Some are paterae with low feet, flattened underneath. As an example I
insert here a sketch of the large bowl found in the Middle Ages in Paestum.
For a long time it adorned the courtyard of Salerno Cathedral and now it
serves as a fountain in the Villa Reale near Naples. Other antique basins are
to be found in Piranesi, in the Mus[eo] borbonico, in [Lorenzo] Roccheg-
giani’s Raccolta,*? and in other etchings of antiquarian works.
(c) Bowls with tall integrated supports. These are not different in principle
from the bowls with a convex lower surface that were discussed first, as the
base may always be considered an appendage (like the incitega in the earlier
case). Nevertheless, art has bestowed on this bowl with a high base a realm of
its own, where it is known under the name chalice (kv\E, tazza, coupe).3°
It was one of the most popular forms during the Renaissance, but in fact it
dates from earliest antiquity, as is shown by numerous depictions of such cups
in Assyrian reliefs.31
The Greeks also used this form for drinking vessels, for fonts of holy water
in temple vestibules, and for fountains.
As a drinking vessel the Hellenic chalice has two handles and a curved
base (sometimes high and sometimes low) that terminates below in a plate.
The older kylix is deeper and has a tall support; the same type of vessel becomes
shallower and has a lower base in the finest period. It loses its character as a
kylix in the late period (see accompanying figures).

Archaic chalices (Gr[eek])

485
 Semper

Later chalice forms (Gr[eek])

The base of the holy water font (aporrhanterion or peryrrhanterion) is

appropriate to the size and weight of the vessel: strong and markedly curved,
much like Assyrian vessels made for the same purpose. Splendid fonts in por-
phyry, rosso antico, puonazzetto, and other kinds of hard stone can be seen in
the Museo borbonico and the Vatican, and some still function as fountains in
Italian palaces and squares. In keeping with their purpose, they are usually
curved with an overturned rim.
This form, as well as the kylix so frequently used in the Middle Ages, was
(as has been said) extremely popular at the time of the rebirth of antique art,
when the best ceramic artists of the time treated it in a rich and felicitous style.
Famed are the bowls by Benvenuto Cellini in Paris, Vienna, and Florence. He
is often praised for work that should rightly be attributed to other masters
who have remained unknown.

S97, 5. The Tub; the Trough (Labrum)

This form deserves a special category among containers, as it is one of those
voluminous vessels whose vertical section approaches an inverted conoid. It is
usually, though not necessarily, curved outward slightly at the upper edge.
This is the shape best suited to (a) bathtubs, (b) cooling vessels, and (c) drink-
ing vessels (beakers).
(a) When it serves as a bathtub, or more generally as a water trough, the
labrum is usually oval, although there are circular bathtubs for seated bathing
and for washing the feet.32
The oldest examples of these vessels are the Egyptian Jabra that were used
as sarcophagi—or rather, that survived in the form of sarcophagi modeled
after them.
There is a Greek bronze labrum in the Louvre. Otherwise, Greek labra are
relatively rare, as the Greeks did not customarily use them as coffins. Greek
sarcophagi usually take the form of rectangular boxes (61}\kat).
Several collections have numerous Roman Jabra, usually made of hard

Roman bathtub

486
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

stone (porphyry, granite, puonazzetto). An example is the large granite tub

formerly in the Villa Medici, now in Florence. There is a large wash basin
made of rosso antico in the Vatican.
The ancient labrum is also the archetype for the Christian font, though the
latter is circular and not oblong.
Examples: the old font in Chiavenna published by [Jean Baptiste Louis
Georges Seroux] d’Agincourt; lead fonts in the churches in Tedenham and
elsewhere in England (Antiquary, 1840, 966); the cast-bronze font in Saint-
Barthélémy in Liége, modeled on the bronze sea in front of the Temple of
Jerusalem, an early masterpiece by Lambertus Patras of Dinant, dating from
1112 (see Didron, Annalles archéologiques] 5:21).
A beautiful Renaissance example, discussed by Tiziano Minio and Desiderio
da Firenze, is the font of San Marco in Venice. This form was also frequently
used by Christians for coffins and reliquaries, a motive that the early Renais-
sance took up with its particular freshness and grace.
(b) Smaller circular dipping vases are used as cooling vessels. In keeping

with their general type and use, they are broader at the top, basket-shaped,
and in some cases do not have a foot. Some stand on a low hypokraterion.
The Greeks called the wine cooler a psykter, which Hesychius identifies with
the kalathos (basket).33
This form, rare in antiquity, is beautifully represented by the famous Sapphic
vase from Agrigentum, now in the Munich Glyptothek (no. 753 in [Otto]
Jahn’s catalog), described and illustrated by [Anton von] Steinbiichel, [Fried-
rich Gottlieb] Welcker, [A.] Dubois Maisonneuve, and others.34
Cylindrical vessels have always been very popular in the Orient, and even
now they account for the majority of Chinese display vases. Their shape also
makes them excellent flowerpots.
(c) This vessel in its diminutive form as a beaker (gobblin) also serves as a
drinking vessel. It has been used everywhere in all ages and especially as a
motive for goldsmiths. A later section will be devoted to drinking vessels,
however, and we refer the reader to that.

487
 Semper

§ 98 6. The Tubular Reservoir (Aryballos, Alabastrum, Sinus Pera, Perula,

Ampulla, Capula)
The oldest and most emphatic expression of this tubular vessel is the Egyptian
situla mentioned above. For the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans this form
was typical not for a water pail but for an ointment vessel. The tubular oint-
ment vessel therefore also became a theme for goldsmiths and glyptics (the art
of cutting stone), as befitted the costly fragrant oils it contained. The most
beautiful antique vases in carved stone, agate, onyx, and glass are found in
this form, and examples include the famous onyx vase in Wolfenbiuttel, the
Beut vase in Berlin, and numerous glass-paste vessels in museums. Antique
ointment vessels made of clay, like that illustrated in Stackelberg’s plate 35,
are rare; that one is shown here as an example of this vessel shape.

Situla

As a teardrop vessel it is found in tombs, principally Christian ones, dating

from the first centuries of the modern calendar. It appears in all possible
shapes, some in clay but mostly in glass. The tubular shape is related to the
teardrop and was indeed a symbol of that and of mourning, but the earlier

>=
=
a
ZSSS

Glass ampullae Earthenware alabastron Teardrop bottles (glass)

488
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

assumption that teardrop flasks were really intended to contain tears is

unfounded. In fact they contained balm dispensed at funerals. The relation of
the tubular vessel to the flask suggests that the former should be seen in terms
of the latter, which will be discussed later.

§ 99 7. Reservoirs or Containers Also Include Receptacles for Dry Substances

Whose Archetype Is the Basket, a Vessel Woven from Wicker
The vertical section of a basket is a rectangle more or less approaching a
square; sometimes it is curved toward the top, or toward both the top and
bottom in the form of a hyperboloid, narrowing toward the middle.
Related to it—or perhaps also following the hollow bamboo tube, its nat-
ural basic motive —are quiver-shaped cylindrical receptacles that are usually
tall and narrow.
The basket (kavotv, canistrum), one of the most elemental vessels, naturally
found acceptance as a sacred utensil and could scarcely be omitted at sacri-
fices. One thinks of the low, broad, tambourine-shaped vessels that are fre-
quently depicted on Attic lecythi in the hands of women making funeral
offerings; they are also depicted on vases. They contained sacrificial utensils,
salted meal, and garlands, and were also adorned with sacrificial taeniae.
Similar in shape, though somewhat deeper, is the tumbler (vannus), as well as
the modius (grain measure), another customary utensil in the Cerelian religion.
This form was inherited from the earliest pre-Hellenic period in Asia and
Egypt and adopted by classical antiquity as a special type. Basketlike vessels,
decorated with ornaments in imitation of basket weaving, are found in the
hands of Assyrian sacrificial priests. In Old Kingdom Egypt, baskets served as
motives for column capitals (see figure on p. 490).

I\

Basketlike container (Khorsabad)

489
 Egyptian basket column capital (Minutoli)

The chest (larnax) of Cypselus, known from Pausanias’s detailed descrip-

tion, was an oval basketlike carved vessel of inlaid cypress. Its surface was
entirely covered by five figurative friezes one above the other, following the
same Asiatic principle of decoration that can be seen on Greco-Italian and
Greek vessels of the most ancient style.°5
The same character can be discerned in Greco-Italic so-called cistae, even if
the presentation and content of their engraved figurative friezes also show the
influence of a developed Hellenic art and a later conception of myth. They are
cylindrical votive vessels made of embossed, partly rolled sheet metal and have
shallow conical lids decorated with figures, three low feet shaped like lion or
panther paws, and three chains to carry or secure them. Most have been found
near Praeneste, including the most famous one, which has a frieze depicting the
myth of the Argonauts and a Latin inscription that indicates it was made in
that town around the Roman year 500. Others almost as interesting are found
in the British Museum, among them the ones illustrated here.?¢

Cistae (Br[itish] Museum)

A remarkable example of a similar container is the silver-filigree cista

belonging to Projecta, with a domed lid, niches, and the like. It was found
with many other silverworks on the Quirinal and dates from the Christian
period.37 Here the old type (known from book holders, both actual finds and
depictions) has already become rather blurred. We also come across the same
shape on a smaller scale in the rather graceful and charming saltcellars of the

490
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

Saltcellar (Stackelb[erg])

ancients (Stackelberg, pls. 26, 36; see the adjacent woodcut). Baskets used in
working wool and other objects connected with female occupations are fre-
quently depicted on vases.
The quiver, as has already been noted, is a related form. It achieved partic-
ular solemnity in the Middle Ages when its cylindrical form was imitated for
pyxes and reliquaries, a practice that dates chiefly from the thirteenth century
and later.

Vase painting (Stackelb[erg])

Some antique quivers have survived, though only in fragments —like the
quiver of Delos, described in the Annali dell’Instituto [di corrispondenza
archeologica]. This shape is otherwise known from antique memorials. There
is a quiverlike cylindrical lead vessel of Greek origin in the museum in Naples
(Real mus[eo] b[orbonico] 12:46).

§ 100 8. Other Forms of Receptacles

In addition to those mentioned, various other shapes have become typical and will
briefly be discussed here, beginning with the censer (8uptaTrptov, ALBavwtpic,
acerra, turibulum).

491
 Semper

With a high base of embossed and soldered metal, it forms a very charm-
ing whole and is often encountered as a small sacrificial altar on reliefs and
vase paintings (fig. a).
A bronze turibulum, formerly in the Museo de’ Gualtieri, is illustrated in
Roccheggiani, plate 39 (see woodcut, fig. b).

Libanotris Roman turibulum

Chinese and Indian censers are delicate and vary in shape and decoration.
The former, called ding, are usually bronze, highly naturalistic imitations of
plant forms.?8 The latter are made of precious metals and are set with pre-
cious stones or enameled; another Indian type is made of black cast iron, with

Chinese incense holder

silver niello work. If one wishes, it is also possible to include in this category
the delicate and highly stylized narghiles, the well-known Oriental water
pipes. Indian ones, in particular, have been raised to the level of fine art-forms.
There were many highly interesting examples at the London Exhibition of
1851, some in precious metals, some in black cast iron with niello, and they
stood out in particular for their felicitous combination of rich and shining
tube work (fig. c).

492
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

Indian pipe

The turibulum is known to be one of the most important implements in

the Catholic rite.
The basic form of this Christian swinging censer is a perforated shell: two
hollow hemispheres fastened to three chains, with the upper half perforated.
They are depicted on early Christian reliefs in this simple form. The Old
Testament also informs us that the swinging censer was used in antiquity. The
Etruscan or Roman vessel illustrated in figure b has three rings for attaching
the chain.
The Middle Ages liked to treat this sacred utensil architecturally: as a roof
with corner windows, as a crenellated fortress, or as pinnacles and baldachins
set over niches that contain figures.
Whereas formerly it was left to those interested in the Middle Ages to jus-
tify this phenomenon in terms of good taste, I reserve the right to return to
this matter later in connection with the whole direction taken by the applied
arts in the Middle Ages. In any case, these late Romanesque and Gothic turi-
bula are by no means lacking in a certain fantastically solemn seriousness, and
certainly one cannot deny them style; it is simply that the style does not derive
from the object’s internal motives but rather seems to have been imposed
externally by the hierarchy that placed architecture over all the other arts.39
On the incense containers discussed, see also [Presbyter] Theophilus, Diver-
sarum artium schedula, book 3, chapter 59.

493
 Semper

Because the value of their metal made them subject to theft and destruc-
tion, such containers are rare. The Vatican Library has on display a mag-
nificent incensorium in the form of a round, two-story chapel, a thirteenth-
century work. Another example, owned by the architect Beuvignat of Lille

Incensorium

and published and described by Didron in his Annales, dates from a time
when the architectural element had not yet gained dominance over the minor
arts as described above. Although it is only made of bronze, it is nevertheless
rightly praised as one of the most beautiful works of the Middle Ages.
Gothic incense pans can be found more readily, both in museums and
occasionally in the treasuries of churches and monasteries.4°
They are described as follows in the inventories of the duke of Anjou and
of Charles V of France: “A large gold encencier, made for the royal chapel, in
the form of a building with eight capitals <ouvré a huit chapiteaulx en facon
de maconnerie>,*"' with eight doors <osteaulx> fitted on the lid <le pinacle> of
the vessel, and a perforated base.”
“A gold <encencier> with eight gables and eight turrets.”
This form of the vessel in imitation of a building also remained in fashion
during the Renaissance, as is demonstrated by the beautiful etching Martin
Schongauer made of one. It is not rare to find the most charming examples in
early German and, in particular, early Flemish oil paintings.
A second type of container to be discussed is sandglasses, a kind of double
vessel with a tripodlike support. They were not known in ancient times and
are an invention of the Christian period. They reached the height of their
artistic development (as did every other household object) at the end of the
Middle Ages and during the Renaissance.
The same is true for such other motives as etuis, inkwells, powder horns,
and especially saltcellars, which offer a rich field for symbolic decoration.
Old saltcellars, sumptuous works by goldsmiths, are on display at New
College and Corpus Christi College at Oxford.

494
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

Another famous example that deserves mention is the saltcellars made by

Pierre Reymond, the famous Limousin enamel worker, for Francois I (shown
in (Lacroix, Le] Moyen Age et la Renaissance, vol. 5, “Emaux”). There is also
the saltcellar made by Benvenuto Cellini for Francois I, which is found in
Vienna.
A saltcellar in fine Henry II faience, which Brongniart presumes to be
Lombard work, is one of the most tasteful ceramic products of the sixteenth
century (see Brongniart’s atlas, pl. 37).
An exhibition of old work by goldsmiths shown in London in 1849 pro-
vided an opportunity to admire the abundance of such objects hiding in pri-
vate collections in England, although only a tiny fraction of the owners agreed
to expose their treasures to the public gaze. Saltcellars were one of the most
numerous and beautiful motives found among these objects. See the I//ustrated
London News of 1849, whose issues contain woodcuts of the most outstand-
ing of these objects.#2
The most popular basic shape for saltcellars (which probably had a sym-
bolic meaning) was the hexagonal prism with a spherical hollow on its upper
surface to hold the salt. Thus the vessel was in the form of a small domestic
altar, a form that may well have been at the back of many artists’ minds as the
basis for the composition. The prismatic and compact form also commends
itself in practical terms for its great stability—for it has always been a bad
omen if the saltcellar falls over and spills its contents.

§ 101 Class II. Scooping Vessels

1. The Spoon
In this class it is the spoon, the most original and most characteristic form, that
illustrates the motive in the purest way.
The spoon is a vessel form that has received the most careful and studied elab-
oration, even among savage and half savage peoples. In the British Museum’s
ethnographic collection I have made sketches of such tests of the industry of
Eskimos and primitive Alaskans, as well as of those civilized Indians who
retained the primitive motive, and I include a few of them here.

Primitive spoons

495
 Semper

One can see that this vessel is the least developed of all, since —if one dis-
regards more superficial decoration as well as the elegance with which every
lesser object that has passed through Greek hands is enlivened —the spoon
has always remained essentially the same.

Greek simpul/um (Br[itish] Mus[eum])

Egyptian spoons, which have survived in significant numbers, can be

divided into two groups, according to whether they are intended for profane
or sacred purposes.
The long-handled spoons illustrated here, with a sharp twist at the top of
the handle and at the pouring lip, already represent a composite form. Such a
spoon is a simpulum and belongs with the situla depicted above.
The eating spoon proper is straight but often richly decorated with picto-
rial work; the handle often represents a human or animal figure.

Egyptian simpul/um (Br[itish] Mus[eum]) Egyptian spoons for eating and

incense (Wilkinson)

A spoon shaped like a hand was used to heap incense onto the smoke pan
or altar.
Although designed according to a similar principle, Assyrian spoons are
less elegant; several examples are found in the British Museum.
The form of the Egyptian sacrificial spoon is also found, somewhat miti-
gated, in Greek utensils intended for the same purpose (arystichos, arytaina,
aryster, kyathos, Latin simpulum and trulla).

496
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

Trulla

It is difficult to determine the distinctions denoted by these terms.*3 Accord-

ing to Varro, the simpulum was the sacrificial spoon and the cyathus the
spoon used for eating. Of those in collections, some spoons have long han-
dles, others short ones; some have handles made of wood or other such per-
ishable materials. Spoons with vertical handles in the Egyptian manner have
been found in tombs and have been depicted on reliefs and coins. Classical
antiquity has also left us spoonlike vessels without handles, though some of
these have small rings, perhaps for hanging. They imitate the earliest and
most natural of all scooping vessels, the shell, and they were used (as they still
are) for baking and confectionery. The Greek name was kribanos, because the
vessel was said to have been used for roasting barley (kp{@n) (see [Real]
mus|eo] borb[onico,] vol. 6, pl. 44).
For Christians the spoon, too, became a sacred utensil, for holding the
sacred host. There are fine examples in Willemin and in Moyen Age et la
Renaissance.
The former Duménil collection contains a large number of medieval spoons
and similar utensils from the time of the return to the classical style. Such
objects can be found in almost every antiquities collection. On the whole,
medieval spoons are somewhat stiff and are mentioned here only for their
ornamentation. The cyathus is the transitional form between the spoon and
the kylix; it is a kind of spoon with a foot and vertical helix handles, and it is
used for scooping wine from the krater and filling the drinking cups of the
revelers (see woodcut below).

Cyathus

497
 Semper

Concern for cleanliness necessitates great care in the choice of decorative

elements, including all chasing and relief decorations that can make cleaning
the spoon more difficult. As a result, our efforts to improve our present
spoons (efforts that are certainly needed, although spoons in general are quite
practical) should focus first on cleaning up their outlines and proportions and
secondarily on ornament— inlaid work, enamel, or in short any such means to
remedy the current poverty of form without interrupting surface continuity.
To my knowledge there are no examples of sculpted Hellenic spoons or of any
utensil serving a similar purpose; by contrast, Roman spoons (trullae) are
often decorated with reliefs. More information on the principles of applying
decoration to spoons, as well as to vessels and utensils more generally, will be
given below. The topic has already been covered in part in the earlier section
on Assyrian vessels (§ 70).
The pail, too, can be considered a combination of scooping vessel and
portable reservoir, although it has already been associated with the tube above.
For this reason we might refer back to the discussion of the Egyptian pail.
This vessel came to be a sacred symbol in Assyria as well as in Egypt,
which can be explained by the similarity of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian
landscapes and their means of irrigation. The scoop, the basic form of the
pail, was and is the spoon both countries attached to waterwheels to fill their
canals and irrigate their dry plains. In keeping with earlier remarks, Assyrian
pails reveal an especially rich and fanciful symbolism—a lion’s head with cast
neck and stirrup, for example. This symbolism may refer to the dryness of the
high summer, when the sun enters the constellation Leo (see woodcut below,
left).
The Greek pail, though beautiful and elegant, completely lacked the intri-
cate character of Egyptian and Assyrian utensils.

Assyrian pail (Botta) Etruscan pail (M[useo gregoriano] etr[usco])

498
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

Some of the most beautiful and best-known Greek pails are those lined
with silver niello and displayed in the museum in Naples. These pails have a
pair of rich and exquisitely decorated handles and three low feet in animal
shapes. Their form is more kraterlike than tubelike, and they are far less
suited to carrying water than the situla, with its low center of gravity and nar-
rower mouth to reduce spillage. Less well known is the pail from Vulci in the
Hetruscum, shown on page 498, right. It is only two decimeters high and its
shape is that of a krater with a handle. The other bronze pails from Pompeii
shown here are also very charmingly formed.
The Etrusco-Roman well pail said to have been found in a tomb at Veii is
also functionally styled, although it is somewhat ponderous and complex (see
fig. aon p. 500).44

a
LEELA LIDIA

Bronze pails (Pompeii)

499
 Semper

A Gallo-Roman pail in enameled bronze published in the Archaeological

Journal (1857) also deserves mention here.
The Middle Ages saw the installation of sacred fonts in its churches, and
did not fail to exploit this motive for artistic purposes. Even the pail was trans-
formed into an art-form. Portable fonts in the shape of pails were customary
in even the early Middle Ages. In volume 16 of Annales arch[éologiques| chré-
tiennes there is information about such a pail dating from the twelfth century
that is found in the treasury of Milan Cathedral. I include it here as an example
of how the Middle Ages conceived this motive.

===A SWE BS

(a) Etruscan well pail (b) Stoup (Milan)

Similar Renaissance vessels of great beauty are found, among other places,
in the sacristy of the Carthusian church in Pavia and in the splendid forecourt
built by Bramante for Santa Maria di San Celso in Milan.

§ 102 2. The Funnel

An example of this type, showing the motive in its pure form, is the vessel illus-
trated on the following page. The funnel-shaped pot with its own clay stand is
probably a Tyrrhenian work of the earliest period.*5

500
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

roe

Funnel-shaped vessel (Gr[eco]-!talic)

The drinking horn with pierced tip, called the rhyton, shows a peculiar
simplicity (more likely a refined archaism than natural and original) in its
application of the original funnel shape. It will be discussed below in the sec-
tion on drinking vessels.
This form actually acquires its first artistic significance in combination
with the portable reservoir.
This combination of funnel and container led to the much praised hydria
(see § 88). The most beautiful Greek and Greco-Italic decorative vessels all
follow this form, which is why we characterized it in the section just cited as
the Hellenistic vase par excellence. It surpasses all other forms in the richness
of its parts and in their organic integration.
Probably no collection of these glorious creations is more comprehensive
or has a better selection of the finest examples than the British Museum’s.
Among them is found that vessel that [Eduard] Gerhard and others have iden-
tified as the kalpis, which belongs to the advanced vase style owing to its par-
ticular elegance (see woodcut).

ond
 Semper

In addition to the most beautiful Greek clay vases of this type, the museum
also holds large quantities of bronze hydria, although the museums of Naples
and the Vatican may contain a greater number of the latter. The majority of
these vessels are pitchers in a great variety of forms, but they all follow the
same basic idea. They are intended to be carried not on the head but in the
hand, and so they have only a single vertical side handle (see woodcut below).

Hand hydria

They are both a kind of simplification and a characteristic branch group of

Corinthian three- and four-armed, echinus-shaped hydriae.
Roman hydriae never achieved the elegance of Greek clay utensils put to
the same purpose, or even of Etruscan bronze pitchers, since, like all Roman
vessels, they expressed Rome’s incessant preference for plastic exaggeration.
Certain Celtic-Roman hydriae, richly decorated with champlevé enamel
and found only in England and France, are remarkable for their technical and
historical style. One found near Bartlow with its accompanying praefericulum
(sacrificial plate) now adorns the British Antiquities Room of the British
Museum in London.*¢
Similar ones have also been published by [Anne Claude Philippe] Caylus.47
Funnel-shaped vessels, which actually lean more toward bottle form, often
completely covered with opaque champlevé enamel, are among the most
prized Chinese artistic vessels. One such vase, with enameled foliage and
flower work outlined in gold on a turquoise ground, was one of the most beau-
tiful objects at the exhibition of 1851.
In Italy, Germany, France, and England this form had assumed the shape
of the pitcher as early as medieval times. It was developed artistically in stone,
pewter, copper, silver, ivory, and wood. I will return to it and to other Ori-
ental and medieval forms in my chapter on the technical aspects of ceramics,
because, as has already been noted, the characteristic features of all nonclassi-
cal forms are largely dependent on their materials.

502
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

§ 103 Class III. Pouring Vessels

These vessels derive their special character from their intended use, namely,
pouring liquids in specific directions and in specific quantities. This purpose
naturally necessitates a certain construction and special organs, so to speak,
making these vessels different from others.

1. Sauciéres
So-called sauciéres (sauceboats) are the simplest pouring vessels; most are
shell-shaped, some are fish-shaped. See the sketch below of a vessel of the lat-
ter type carved in rock crystal and exhibited in the British Museum.

Sauceboat (cinquecento)

2. Lamps
A particularly important subdivision of this type is the lamp (lychnos,
lucerna), which, as is well known, has always had great religious and sym-
bolic meaning.
The lamp is already a mixed form, pouring vessel and reservoir in one,
even though pouring is the dominant characteristic.
The antique lamp consists of a container for the oil, a spout (often several
spouts that the Greeks called stome), an opening for adding the oil (ompha-
los?),48 and a small opening between this and the spout through which the
wick can be stroked with a needle. Additionally, there is a lid and, in most
cases, a vertical handle for holding or hanging the lamp.
The type that the Greeks so frequently treated artistically in clay, metal,
and stone appears to have been retained by the Egyptians and Assyrians in
extremely elementary form (see woodcut below).

Egyptian lamp

503
 Semper

Very complex, capriciously shaped lamps have, however, also been found
in Egypt — for example, one in the shape of a duck (Minutoli).
The ornamentation on antique lamps leads us through a broad cycle of
symbolic references to human life and its fates. Therefore the richness and
diversity of variations on this important vessel are incalculable. No other
utensil has been open to more license in design and ornamentation, which
makes its subtypes as difficult to classify as the drinking vessels to be described
later. It is also represented in every collection in such numbers that it would
take too long to mention even the most outstanding examples.
The accompanying woodcuts give examples of a few lamps from the
museum in Naples, as drawn by the author. Etchings and other literature
about antique lamps can be found in [K.] O. Miller, Arch[dologie der Kunst],
§ 302.

Pompeian lamps (Mus[eo] borb[onico])

The Museo gregoriano etrusco (not cited in Miller) should also be men-
tioned because of the richness of the Etruscan lamps in terra-cotta and metal
found in this collection and reproduced in the eponymous book.
Antique lamps are scarcely to be considered as isolated entities, since they
form a whole only when considered along with candelabras (lychnuci). There-
fore we will deal with them later in relation to other utensils in the chapter on
tectonics, where we will return to objects that are carried (lamps).

Bronze lamp (Mus[eo] greg[oriano])

504
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

The tradition of antique lamp forms survived relatively unaltered through-

out the Middle Ages. It still persists, especially in Italy and Spain, wherever it
has not been forced out by new lamps a la mécanique. Illustrations of lamps
from the early and late centuries of the Middle Ages have been published in the
volume on the Goodrich Court collection of Llewelyn Meyrick, Esq. Others
can be found in books depicting the many very recent collections of medieval
art, for example, in Didron’s Annales archéologiques and Moyen Age et la
Renaissance.
For comparison, two multiarmed pendent lamps—one ancient and the
other from the thirteenth century —are shown together here (see woodcuts
below and on p. 506).

> SSF

Lamp with four spouts (M[useo] b[orbonico])

505
 Semper

Pendent lamp, thirteenth century (Didron)

Such multiarmed pendent lamps are not to be confused with so-called

ampullae. These are dishes hung from chains that attach to three or more
arms. They are not actually themselves lamps but rather the supports or stands
for lamps. This form seems also to have originated in the most ancient times,
and traditionally it appears to have changed little. An example is the cym-
bium, an Assyrian clay vessel exhibited in Botta’s work and shown on page
507; here the lamp is still effectively fused with the ampulla. Clearly devel-
oped ampullae, however, were found in the 1830s in the great tomb at Caere.

506
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

ee a IN

Assyr[ian] cymbium

They compose the most important part of the Gregorian collection of Etrus-
can antiquities and demonstrate that the most ancient Greco-Italic style is
almost identical with the Assyrian style. They combine the most naive sim-
plicity with a delicate elegance of form—particularly in the fitting of the six

Kall

Etr[uscan] cymbium (M[useo] g[regoriano])

507
 Semper

hooks that project from the rim and bend inward to receive the chains; if their
ornamental themes were altered, they could still fulfill their old purpose today
without appearing strange. Unfortunately our taste has been poisoned by
those abominable pieces of crinoline-styled metalwork that the highest circles
of modern society feel compelled to demand at every royal wedding, every
coronation, and every other occasion calling for pomp and circumstance.
Illustrated newspapers perpetually parade such things in their ever increasing
hideousness.
The ampulla, however, was not very common among the Greeks and later
Italian peoples, as is clear both from its infrequent appearance and from a
statement by Apuleius, who, in contrasting ampullae to Greek festive lamps,
describes them as utensils peculiar to the cult of Isis.4?
We may conclude from this that the ampulla was a sacred utensil for the
Egyptians and probably also for the Asians. Philostratus tells us in his life of
Apollonius (apparently based on earlier, Babylonian reports) that in the Baby-
lonian palace gold jynxes (probably ampullae in the form of harpies or birds)
were hung from the vaults.
Christianity made this vase, along with many other Asian and Egyptian
motives, one of its ecclesiastical implements and thus in medieval times it too
received the sanctification of art. For this reason very old ampullae, simple or
exquisitely shaped but always Oriental in style, can often be found in the
crypts and chapels of old churches, even in synagogues. The Gothic style was
able to reshape them skillfully to its own ends.
The appended sketch shows a silver ampulla that the author had made for
the synagogue in Dresden, according to an original design that took into
account early medieval types.
Thousands of ampullae hung as votive offerings from the ceilings of
mosques in the Muhammadan Orient offer rich material for the study of this
interesting vessel shape. The familiar hanging flowerpots are based on the
same principle.
Different again from these are the so-called coronas or chandeliers that
antiquity seems to have treated simply as large pendent lamps with radially
attached wick spouts (see woodcut on p. 505).
But the Middle Ages and the Renaissance developed this motive differently,
making it more of a utensil. Therefore we will assign it a place in the chapters
on tectonics.

§ 104 [3.] The Pitcher (Prochus, Praefericulum)

No combination used in the art of making vessels has achieved a development
as rich as the combination of hydria and spout. This felicitous alliance was
brought about simply by bending the rim of the hydria while narrowing its
neck —it was thus that the vessel described above as the Hellenic vessel par
excellence reached its final state of perfection. What it lost thereby in Doric
size and simplicity it gained in lively expression and Ionic grace. The severity
of the form imposed by the potter’s wheel achieves direction, physiognomy,

508
Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

Lamp (modern)

509
 Semper

and force from the movement of the feeling hand pressing upon it. One can
see that a soft plastic material acquired its shape under the artist’s hand. The
form in no way denies its origin—the wheel—but it has emancipated itself
and become individual. Thus this vessel too was sanctified in a particular way
by being raised to the status of sacrificial vessel. From the prochus a hand
held high pours the gift of wine to the patera, with which the libation is exe-
cuted; for this reason both vessels are almost always found together on tombs
and on reliefs.

Prochus (arch{aic]) Olpe (arch[aic})

Here too there is extraordinary diversity. Generally speaking, older vessels

show an almost baroque boldness and a free hand that oversteps the bounds
set by the rights of the wheel, determinant of the main form (compare the
older forms shown above and below).
Then there are tubular olpes or oenochoes, as Gerhard calls them; they are
usually found only among archaic vases.
The mature oenochoe of the golden age is a Doric hydria with an echinus
profile and a spout (see fig. b below).

(a) Oenochoe (archaic) (b) Oenochoe

510
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

At its side is the slender hand hydria (see above) with spout, what one
might call the Ionic order of this vessel.
In between these forms and beyond them the quantity of varieties could be
expanded at will, even leaving aside the subgenres (heads with openings for
pouring, flattened vessels, and so on). Thus with the exception of lamps and
drinking vessels, no ceramic form has greater diversity or freedom.

Pitcher (M[useo] b[orbonico])

Roman clay pitchers intended for pouring are rare but usually have a com-
pact, round spindle form. The Roman metal vessels that have been found, and
those represented on reliefs, have wide mouths and are seldom attractive.
They follow Roman ceramic principles and are richly decorated with plastic
ornaments. Enameled Gallo-Roman sacrificial pitchers, some of which are
actually pouring vessels with spouts, have already been discussed above.
In Assyria and Egypt apparently only what might be called a subspecies
of this vessel enjoyed popularity, although now it is virtually the only vessel
used in the Orient. The Middle Ages considered it an art-form as well; it
was treated artistically for both secular and ecclesiastical purposes. The
inventories of monasteries and kings (in France) list such ceremonial vessels
(aiguiéres) in large numbers, although few have survived. A fairly colorful
taste informed these vessels at the time of these inventories (under Saint
Louis). One was in the shape of a hen with its body and tail in pearls, its neck,
head, and wings in enameled silver with yellow, green, and azure feathers:
“On its back it is carrying a fox that is holding it by the comb.” The ecclesias-
tical utensils that have survived here and there are nobler in form; generally,
however, they are pitchers with cast spouts (buires). Various facts about them
are contained in the well-known and often-cited works on medieval art to
which I have referred.
With the Renaissance the purer and simpler beauty of the antique pouring
vessel was acknowledged and then adopted again with enthusiasm. Because

ona
 Semper

Renaissance pitcher

of its inherent wealth of motives, no other vessel lends itself as well to com-
bining richly imaginative, romantically medieval, and Oriental taste with
antique formal purity. This is why, in that golden age of modern art, it entered
the first rank of display vases.
From this point forward the basic form of the antique archetype is found
everywhere, but now modified thanks to a free and ingenious yet highly
knowledgeable understanding of style. It takes into account the new and infi-
nitely rich methods of technical execution that the ancients were unaware of
or that at least had to be rediscovered in a modified form on the basis of
vague references in ancient texts or occasional surviving fragments of antique
art. At the same time, they became artworks of greater significance, attracting
artists of the first rank because of the plastic and painterly accessories with
which they were so extravagantly endowed.
These artifacts in faience, enamel, gold, bronze, crystal, and other materi-
als bear too heavily the mark of those responsible for their design and orna-
mentation. Also, since they were pure display vessels and art objects their
form was not sufficiently determined by their actual purpose and use. For that
reason these vessels no longer fall within our plan, and we will consider them
more closely (along with other products of cinquecento vase art) in the pas-
sages discussing related technical procedures. A sketch of an enameled vase
from this period is included here to illustrate the basic features of this vessel
that began to prevail during the Renaissance.

§ 105 [4.] Pouring Vessel with Spout (Prochoos, Epichysis, Guttus, Buire)
In the tombs of Caere and Vulci, as well as in other antique graves, vases of a
remarkable shape have been found. They are, so to speak, transitional shapes
between the previously described pitchers and that type of pouring vessel
whose characteristic is the spout. They are handheld hydriae with mouths
that are strongly tapered and yet extended, resulting in a spoutlike form (see
adjacent illustration).

Sa
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

Prochoos (Gr[eek])

Greek and even Italic vases with a genuine spout are rare, which proves
that this motive did not appeal to classical taste. Apuleius explicitly describes
it as foreign, as a symbol of Isis representing her divine honor and mystical
splendor: “A very artfully crafted small urn with a rounded bottom, splen-
didly decorated on the outside with images of Egyptian gods; its mouth is not
directed upward but stretched forward like a long groove for pouring. Oppo-
site the spout is a sharply curved handle, and above it a scaly asp with a
puffed-up neck rearing up over its coiled body.”5°
We think we recognize the essential features of the form described in the
outlines of a small Egyptian beaked vessel found among other beaten copper
vessels in the British Museum, even though it lacks a handle or any other
decoration.

Prochooi (archaic and barbarian styles)

Thus this vessel, like the ampulla, may have been used mainly in barbarian
rites and may have found its way into the Christian church via Asia or Egypt.5!
Certainly it is still a common pouring vessel in the Orient, and our museums
have very rich and beautiful specimens, including a few from the Sassanian
period.52
Its type seems to have changed very little in west Asia since that time.
By contrast, both the form and decoration of Indian pouring vessels reveal

Suks
 Arabian pitcher (B[ritish] M[useum])

a tremendous variety and freedom. Various Indian vessels were among the
most interesting objects at the London Exhibition in 1851. The best of them
were acquired for several London collections so that they might serve as
models, accessible to everyone, and thus reform the taste of industrialists. Yet
this praiseworthy aim has so far been entirely unsuccessful as a result of a
widespread lack of taste.
The Chinese treat this vessel in their naturalistic and baroque way but
with the happiest regard for its function. From them we have the famous tea-
pots, and for that purpose we can do no better than buy finished vessels from
them —at least until all the arts have experienced the promised upswing in the
manner of the thirteenth century, when we will be able to refresh ourselves
with Chinese nectar poured from Gothic pots and bowls.
Indeed, the vessel with spout is one of those motives that artisans of the
European Middle Ages knew how to handle well in their own way, for both
profane and sacred purposes.
The published works I cited earlier contain various illustrations of such
medieval vases, many of which have survived. As the material element is the
decisive factor in their creation (as in the creation of all medieval forms), they
are better discussed in later chapters. The same could be said of the Renais-
sance, which was most original precisely where this form was involved,
because it was not encumbered by any positive models from antiquity. Both
periods produced items in this genre in metal, earthenware, faience, glass,
crystal, and other materials, and these will be discussed in one of the sections
to come.

§ 106 [5.] The Flask

This form, too, came to be highly regarded in the Orient early on. The flask is
a combination of the funnel and the ovoid container and usually lacks a han-
dle. Flask-shaped vessels, generally without a base, are often found among

514
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

Egypt’s most ancient ceramic works. It is not unusual for them to assume the
tubular form that, as has been shown, was especially characteristic of Egypt.
One finds very similar flasks hanging from tent poles in Assyrian reliefs.
Though it was not actually Hellenic, on the classical soil this vessel was
put to a higher purpose and given a nobler design.
The Etruscan flasks made of beaten bronze and fitted with rings and

Embossed bronze bottle (Etr[uscan])

chains for fastening or hanging were probably very early works and are still
entirely Oriental in their form and decoration.
Such forms are also common among the oldest in Greco-Italic pottery.%3
Later this form was used only on a small scale, especially for ointment ves-
sels, which in their most exquisite development as Attic lecythi are more rem-
iniscent of tubes than flasks. Other ointment flasks already discussed, especially

Lecythi

5S
 Semper

those made of precious stones and glass, are also reminiscent of tubes or of
spindle-shaped amphorae.
Teardrop flasks have already been discussed above.
The field flask, a special type, must have been held in high esteem by a mar-
tial people like the Greeks; indeed, metal and earthenware field flasks dating
from classical antiquity are not rare. A metal flask of very ancient design and
still decorated in the Greco-Italic style (below, right) was found in the great

Field flasks

tomb at Caere and is now preserved in the Museo gregoriano in Rome. A

decorative Roman field flask (a kind of flattened, fluted spirits bottle made of
glass) can be found in the antiquarian museum in Zurich. Certain very old
Chinese, flasklike display vases in enameled bronze are distinguished by their
form, size, and ornament. A cast-bronze Chinese vessel in the most ancient
style, now in the Museum of Practical Geology in London, is illustrated below.
This motive was later imitated in porcelain.
The porcelain flasks of China are, however, far exceeded in formal purity
and splendid color by the very rare, ancient faience flasks of Persia, though
the latter cannot be dated with certainty. We mention them because of their
unusual form, displayed here in a sketch made at Sévres of one example.

Ancient Chinese Persian faience bottle

bronze bottle

516
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

Both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance naturally adopted this form for
artistic purposes. It is particularly suited to glass manufacture and is, as it
were, the glass form par excellence. The flask is the blown vessel proper; the
bulla, a hardened glass bubble. We will therefore return to it in the discussion
of glass manufacture.

§ 107 [6.] Drinking Vessels

Athenaeus has left us the names and descriptions of more than a hundred
drinking vessels, and yet he addresses only those that are made of precious
metals, which had displaced earthenware vessels among the Greeks long before
his time.
The same diversity of drinking vessels is found in the Middle Ages, and
even though our present poverty is confirmed when confronted with this rich-
ness of invention, a list of the various shapes and kinds of drinking vessel now
in use would nevertheless turn out to be fairly long. Such a list is probably
made all the more difficult by our failure to adhere to certain typical forms, or
rather, our loss of any sense of what type is.
Along with the arbitrary, capricious, and playful confusion of forms, the
influence of material factors is nowhere more evident than in this domain
within the art of vessel making, and thus any attempt to classify drinking ves-
sels into subdivisions, as they once existed and to some degree still do, must
fail. But if we disregard the subgenres and anomalies in drinking vessel forms
that result more from the influence of materials, fashion, and caprice than
from their intended purpose, we find that the distinctions we have established
for vessel forms in general also apply to drinking vessels in particular. To a
certain extent they are reductions of all vessels, with certain special features
unique to them and their purpose.
One form that belongs to this category alone is the horn (keras, cornu
 Semper

potationis, rhyton, medieval olyphant), which enjoyed almost religious vener-

ation as a primeval drinking vessel in ancient times and among our ancestors.
It still enjoys high standing among certain Oriental peoples, such as the Sin-
halese of Ceylon. Even in Europe it has not lost this status completely; for
instance, the drinking horn remains an indispensable symbol at certain feudal
ceremonies in England.
Even after the use of real horns for drinking had long since ceased among
cultured and wealthy peoples in antiquity, they remained popular drinking
vessels at festive occasions in the form of rhytons. Their imaginative combina-
tion with decorative accessories did not disturb the basic form, or at least
allowed it to show through. The custom of holding the vessel in the right
hand high above one’s head and pouring the grape juice into the mouth in a
thin stream through a narrow opening at the tip of the rhyton may be ancient
in origin or may be a by-product and refinement of indulgent times. In any
case this practice is original and could perhaps be connected either to remarks
made above about the characteristics that distinguish Hellenic pottery from
barbarian pottery or to the Greek cult of springs. Indeed, the custom seems to
have been practiced only by Greeks and Etruscans, not by Asians or Egyptians.
Our forefathers probably found this procedure ineffective and too labori-
ous; they drank their mead in full drafts from the lip of the horn. Yet whether
they also used true drinking horns or merely vessels in the shape of horns—a
hole was drilled through the tip so that the horn might be used to sound a sig-
nal during a hunt or a battle—remains uncertain. In his Otii imperialis liber,
Gervase of Tilbury mentions as a fairy gift a horn decorated with gold and
precious stones, “like those common among the most ancient Englishmen.”54
Similar gold vessels have been unearthed on several occasions in precisely
those places where the Angles had their most ancient seats. One of significant
size and richly sculpted — from Tender — was stolen by a Jew from the museum
in Copenhagen, and a copy is all that is available.°5
The drinking horns still used in England have stands against which they
are leaned. The stands are in the shape of three-footed dragons or monsters,
after early medieval models. A few are in the Goodrich Court collection, and
they are illustrated in the published engravings of the collection.5¢
Most of the medieval horns in metal, ivory, and other materials that are
found in collections are closer to signal horns and need not be discussed here.
This entirely distinctive form is one of the simplest and purest funnels in
all of ceramics, a word that its [Greek] name, keras, clearly brings to mind.
All other drinking vessels, notwithstanding their great variety of shapes and
sizes, can be subsumed within several of the categories with which we are
already familiar. Drinking vessels differ from vases and from one another only
in size and in their accessories, especially in the use and shape of their handles
and base. One might think that certain vessel forms—such as the deep and
narrow-necked amphora, the tall pouring vessel, and other forms more or less
unsuitable for drinking — would not be used, but it seems that fashion and the
fondness of drinkers for drinking competitions involving encumbrances have

518
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

from time to time called for highly inconvenient vessels that necessitate a par-
ticular drinking style. For example, there have been pouch-shaped mugs that
were narrower at the top (aryballoi); the Rothon was a vessel with a broad
mouth turned inward,” and only by bending one’s neck way back could one

Kothon (Brongniart)

drink from it, but it was convenient for scooping water from streams, since
its turned-back mouth caught impurities in the water and held them during
scooping and drinking, which is why it was used on marches and in the
field.S8 The related gold bowls found in Hungary with handles at the top for
hanging on saddle pommels served the same military purpose; they have a
peculiarly Asiatic chasing. Parthian riders used similar vessels on their migra-
tions and crusades, and they are still found among Arabs. Examples can be
seen in J[oseph] Arneth, [Die antiken] Gold- und Silberornamente des k. k.
Miinz- und Antikenkabinetts in Wien (1850).
The art of drinking a great deal or drinking very quickly led to the inven-
tion of the deinos and the skyphos—the great tankard of Hercules in the

SWS,
 ee aiaaaaeeae
PTI TEI ATTA A6 SRE BS SSMS S ARUN
SAAN

Deinos (Cumae)

shape of a deep bowl; while it was made both with and without handles it
never had a base and thus could not be set down.
The cantharus was a krater-shaped vessel with a base and broad side han-
dles; it is called the chalice of Dionysus, in whose hand it is frequently seen
(see figure).

Cantharus (Stackelb[erg])

[Theodor] Panofka somewhat implausibly connects the name with a certain

Heros Kantharos and makes of the Egyptian dung beetle a primeval potter.
Examples of canthari include the two silver drinking vessels found in 1835
in a house on the Strada della Fortuna in Pompeii, which are among the most
precious works of antique toreutics.°?

Silver cantharus (Pompeii) Earthenware cantharus (Brongniart)

520
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

When used as a drinking vessel, the bow! (kylix) takes the same forms that
have already been described above in all their nuances and varieties.
When used as a chalice, the deep bowl in the Middle Ages came to be
shaped like half an egg; it lacked a handle but had a high base. This vessel also
passed through the same transitions of taste from the Gothic style to the
Renaissance that will be considered in detail elsewhere. The chalice was origi-
nally fairly shallow, then became more cuplike, and finally lost its old charac-
ter altogether.
Saint Rémi’s chalice from the abbey of Saint-Rémi in Reims (now in the
library in Paris), the chalice from the abbey of Weingarten bearing the name
of the goldsmith Magister Conrad de Huse (no longer extant), and finally the
chalice (shown here) of Hervée, bishop of Troyes (died 1223), distinguished by

Chalice of B[ishop] Hervée

its simple elegance, are specimens of that noble early medieval style in sculp-
ture and the other fine arts (with the exception of architecture) that into the
thirteenth century managed to remain free of the Gothic influences that just a
few decades later would send ceramics and goldsmithery in a completely false
direction.®°
There is a famous gilded silver chalice dating from 1290 in Assisi. Others
are exhibited in the cathedral treasury in Regensburg and at Christ Church
and Trinity College in Oxford.
Gothic chalices are illustrated in [Augustus] Pugin, Designs for Gold and
Silversmiths and in [Matthew] Digby Wyatt’s book on metalwork.
The peculiarities of the early Renaissance style are already evident in the
chalice reproduced in the Magasin pittoresque of [October] 1851, engraved by
[Wenceslaus] Hollar. Another well-known example is the calix of Schweinfurt
(1519) in the chapel treasury of Schloss Marienberg near Wurzburg. The
works of the so-called minor masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies, reproduced by [Ovide] Reynard, include various items in this style (see
“Metallurgy”).
The chalice was also a popular form for profane use and luxury items,
but very few medieval specimens have survived. Unlike the sacred utensils,
they were not protected by reverence for antiquity and were more subject to

OZ
 Semper

changing fashion, which never shrank from destroying the old forms to use
their precious materials for new ones. A countless number of works of art
also fell victim to need or robbery and were turned into money.
In this regard the transition to the Gothic style in the thirteenth century
was especially ruthless, and the Renaissance treated Gothic domestic treasures
in precisely the same way during the sixteenth century. Attitudes were no
more conservative in later times, and yet a fairly large number of secular fif-
teenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century display chalices in silver, gold,
glass, crystal, ivory, onyx, and faience have survived.
An interesting example of the way in which the Renaissance used this form
for secular purposes is the famous design by Hans Holbein in the print room
of the British Museum. A so-called poison chalice in a rich Renaissance style
is kept at Oxford.®! The same is true of the famous silver chalice in the British
Museum, attributed to Benvenuto Cellini.
In § 97 (under c) we mentioned the chalice as a form that corresponds to
the Greek psykter or cooling vessel. In fact, the chalice is a general type,
which has features in common with a large group of similar drinking vessels;
and for all the differences among the individuals, families, and species that
belong to it, it nonetheless belongs in the same lineage.

Beaker (Stackelb[erg]) Silver beaker (Pompeii)

The common feature of chalices is that all are more or less cylindrical, con-
ical, or claviform (that is, inverted conical form, wedge-shaped), yet the rigid-
ity of this form is often alleviated by a gentle inward or outward curvature, or
both (like an ogee). As a rule, they lack handles and are flattened below for
support, sometimes with a low, wide base.
Beautiful silver chalices have survived from antiquity; most were unearthed
at Pompeii and Herculaneum.® See the accompanying sketch of a silver chal-
ice preserved in Naples.
The famous Bacchic onyx vessel (with handles that were added later) that
is known as the vase de Saint-Denis and is now in the library in Paris is
another such chalice. It is described by [Charles Othon Frédéric Jean Baptiste]
Clarac (vol. 2, pl. 125), and by [K.] O. Miller ([Denkmdler der alten Kunst]
2:50). The glass chalice illustrated on the following page, top, was found in
Augsburg and is probably still there.

322
Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

Glass goblet

) AS
Kiseeseseseot Ry
rs]

ANY. \\
IN
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSE xy

Rummer (Rhenish wineglass) Amphikypellon

p23
 Semper

The single-handled cyathus was a vessel equally suited to scooping and

drinking and is related to our cup. The kotylos, which also had a single han-
dle (udvwtoc), was similar to it.
The amphikypellon mentioned by Homer was a double chalice, with the
lower part serving as a base. The Greco-Italic vessel illustrated here [on p. 523],
taken from the Museo greg[oriano] etrusco, gives a sense of this antique com-
bination.
The toplike plemochoé was a pointed vessel that seems to have been rare
in antiquity; its development only really began with glass manufacture in the
Middle Ages.
The chalice was the favored vessel of the peoples of the north, and a very
large number of medieval chalices made of every material have survived.
Some forms were probably borrowed from the Romans, for example, the
beautifully stylized Rhenish wine goblet (see p. 523, bottom left).
Others — namely, the footless, almost cylindrical or conical tankards and
pitchers—are perhaps of old Nordic origin. Nothing similar is found among
antique vessels.
Other forms invented during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were
derived in part from technical motives, in part from different modes of con-
sumption. The most elegant and delicate members of this group are the
pointed glasses produced by the glass factories of Murano (see under “Hyalo-
technology”).
Oriental vessel making had a particular influence on these drinking ves-
sels, in parallel with the introduction of new drinks from Asia.
This influence is especially evident in the beautiful faience vessels of the
cinquecento, though there it is primarily the ornamentation that is affected.
Arabian footless coffee bowls, however, have never become fashionable here
and failed to establish themselves in parallel with the Arabian drink. Instead
we borrowed two Chinese vessels intended for tea, that is, the cup and saucer—
though the saucer was not at all common in China. Along with other porce-
lain products, this cup has had no small influence on European taste since the
seventeenth century.

§ 108 The Integration of Vessel Parts and the Art-Forms Arising from Them
All of the vessels described above are examples of how something made up of
a multiplicity of parts acquires an integrated appearance. The parts may truly
be separate, or they may be independent only in idea, whereas in reality the
work is a whole.
Both the separation of the elements and their combination into a unified
purpose should be clearly apparent in the work. As much as possible one should
emphasize and symbolize the functionally unified appearance through the rela-
tion of the parts to one another, the form of the parts, and their decoration.

524
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

We identify the parts of the vase as

the belly;
the base or support;
the neck be
often joined;
the spout
Sts
Tap
te
sarge
the handle;
6. the lid (or, sometimes, the stopper).
Each part has its own role, and its design is principally dependent on this,
interpreted either materially or symbolically. I say principally because the
material and its technical treatment are also factors.

§ 109 The Belly

The belly, or the tank, of a vessel is intended to be filled with a liquid and to
keep it in a state of hydrostatic balance. There is a dynamic effect and coun-
tereffect of the contents on the enclosing vessel and of the vessel on the con-
tents. Each of these effects neutralizes the other and is not transferred to such
other parts of the vessel as the neck, the base, or the handle. The belly satisfies
its purpose in itself. It does not serve the other components but rather they
serve it. They exist for it, and thus the effect is directed outward.%
Therefore with most vessels the belly should be treated as self-contained
and autonomous. The choice of form and ornament should enhance this
impression.
The belly, or tank, of the vessel, however, abandons this neutrality with
respect to form to the extent that it confronts the viewer or user as an object.
In this regard the vase (an artificial utility vessel) differs from such natural ves-
sels as eggs and fruit, which have in themselves no relationship to humans or
even to the outside world.
This difference should be clearly expressed, and the vessel should first of
all be seen as vertically oriented, as having a top and a bottom. This necessity
derives from its most general relationship to humans as well as from its more
particular purpose as an open container for liquids.
Both the general form and the decorative attributes should be appropriate
to these properties of the main part of the vessel under discussion.

Form
The container (the belly of the vessel) must be expressed either as standing
upright or as hanging down like a tube. This must occur quite independently
of the mouth (which is clearly defined in terms of top and bottom), the neck,
the base, or any other of the accessories that harmonize with the main body
only if the latter in itself prepares the way for those parts in advance, as it
were, and makes the parts aesthetically necessary. All of this is self-evident,
although transgressions nevertheless occur not infrequently.

D20
Semper

Basic forms in pottery (after Ziegler)

526
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

Note on the figure on page 526: This plate is from J[ules] Ziegler’s Etudes céramiques,
which contains much that is good and instructive, as well as many strange remarks. The
present author has included Ziegler’s classification and nomenclature, with the remark

that in the so-called mixed forms that Ziegler proposes some important ones are missing—
for instance, the hyperboloid, and in this classification scheme in general no attention is
paid to it.

Generative Forms
A. Straight line and cube
Z. Curved line and circle

Primitive Forms

Straight Lines Curved Lines

B.1 Cylinder C.1 Spheroid
B.2 Conoid C.2 Ovoid
B.3 Claviform C.3 Inverted ovoid

Mixed Forms

Inward-directed forms belonging to the cylinder and the sphere

D.1 Canopic form E.1 Procene form
D.2 Spindle form E.2 Teardrop form
D.3 Top form E.3 Pear form
Outward-directed forms belonging to the cylinder and the sphere
F.1 Chalice (flaring on the upper third)

F.2 Chalice (flaring on the lower third)

F.3 Bell form (flaring above, lower third narrowing)

Krateroids
Two to five times wider than high
G.1 Krateroid in a spherical segment
G.2 Krateroid with width five times the height (canopic)
G.3 Krateroid three to four times the height (bell form)

Diskoid
These have a width at least five times their height
H.1 Diskoid in a spherical segment
H.2 Diskoid in echinus form (canopic)

H.3 Diskoid in roof form (lid, vase base)

Stems
These have a height greater than three times their diameter
J.1 Stem with flaring on the upper third
J.2 Stem with flaring on the lower third
J.3 Bell stem with double curvature

527,
 Semper

It follows that the sphere as an absolutely neutral form does not fulfill the
stated conditions in itself, although it is very practical as a vessel form because
of its great capacity and hydrodynamic utility. One finds that in its earliest
stages the art of vessel making adhered to this scheme, then gradually moved
away from it by selecting more distinct proportions for its vessels. This is
shown by the history of almost every vessel type. Compare, for example, the
archaic bulging hydria with the bold curves of the later kalpis, or the ancient
amphora with the slender vase of the same type (pp. 474, bottom; 501, bot-
tom). Likewise, the cylinder with a quadratic section, which looks the same
right side up and upside down, is unaesthetic as a vessel form for the reasons
stated above. The cambered cylinder (p. 526, B.3) seems better defined.
In this regard the ovoid, which has changed countless times during its evo-
lution, has the required formal attributes that the sphere lacks. And, like the
ovoid to the sphere, the conoid and even more the hyperboloid (the chalice,
the surface of a basket) relate to the cylinder in the same way in terms of their
comparative resoluteness.
All of these forms—the ovoid, conoid, and related hyperboloid — permit a
dual use depending on the location of their centers of gravity relative to their
peripheral surface.
In addition, these forms lend themselves to endless variations (even apart
from mixed forms), placing no limits upon the inventive spirit.65 These few
types—the ovoid, conoid, and hyperboloid—are adequate to express every
nuance of character in the vessel form. They also confirm the law that gener-
ally predominates in nature as well as art: the greatest economy of basic
motives with an unlimited diversity of development.
Yet freedom moves only within certain limits and may not exceed them
with impunity. Here the aesthetic laws coincide with the limits of stability,
and also in part with the possibility of executing ceramic forms. Stability, for
instance, requires that tall, sticklike chalices that broaden toward the top

Tall Apulian chalice

528
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

should never exceed a certain proportion of height to lower diameter (about

three to one). The same form inverted permits taller proportions, for which
reason it is particularly suited to candlesticks and similar utensils.
The opposite extreme — namely, the vessel’s shallowness — is, to my way of
thinking, governed only by its execution. For plates and bowls the relation of
height to diameter is scarcely an aesthetic consideration, because their formal
effect is exclusively that of a surface, and they are to be treated decoratively as
such. Thus as their taste progressed the Greeks did not hesitate to make their
bowls, which had been very deep in earlier periods, ever shallower.

Decorative Attributes
First, the decorative attributes must express simultaneously the notion of
enclosure and that of uprightness. They must never run contrary to either or
both of these notions.
Second, they must correspond to the vessel’s particular purpose and form.
Third, they must correspond to the material and technical processes used
in manufacture.
The limits of free composition are thus staked out. Far from confining the
spirit, they are safe guides in the realm of invention, for lawlessness in art is
synonymous with helplessness.
The principle cited first is valid for all vessels, whether they are made of
earthenware, metal, or glass, and whether the decoration is plastic or painted.
Here too nature is an inexhaustible source of design for us. For example, the
general form of a melon is not just a result of the hydrostatic conditions men-
tioned above; it is also decorated with furrows and bulges running out from
the stem, which eurythmically divide up the surface and provide a very pow-
erful expression of its purpose.
The rinds of other fruits, though they may be quite different, can never-
theless be equally revealing in this sense. Some are woven with networks;
others have scales; others are surrounded with rings. All powerfully convey
the nature of the fruit rind—self-contained and excluding the outside world.
When such decorative motifs are borrowed from nature, it is easy to give
them the sure expression of the uprightness of the vessel that they usually
lack. Generally speaking, what was said in § 12 about vertical covers and cur-
tains is also valid here.
The same distinction that was made between the vertical wall and curtains
also exists between kettles that stand upright and those that hang down like
tubes. In both cases the decorative attributes should be oriented upward—
whether they are purely ornamental, made up of vegetal motifs, or figurative
representations. Such ornaments as latticework, netting, hoops, bosses, and
other regularly distributed patterns are neutral in this respect and make fitting
decorations, but they are better suited to tubular kettles than to those that have
a base. For clarification of these remarks, see the figures on pages 475; 488, top;
489; 490; 510; 514; 515, top; 516, bottom; 523, top; and the example on page
530 of an earthenware urn from Toscanella with a braided net decoration.

B29
 Semper

Earthenware vessel with modeled net ornament (Toscanella)

The more a form is aesthetically satisfying in itself, the less it will need the
aid of ornamental attributes for the completion and fulfillment of its expres-
sion. Ornaments, however, are often needed to correct a certain indetermi-
nateness or even transgressions of the limits of pure form, or to bring into
sonorous accord those dissonances that are unavoidable, even inevitable, in
high artistic endeavors. Just as the luxuriant abundance of a youthful head
of hair becomes even more attractive when restrained and confined with a
golden net, a bulging vessel will seem even larger but also more secure when
ornamented with a braided pattern.
Yet it is frequently advisable to follow the example of eggs** and smooth
fruit by leaving the surface of the belly of the vase smooth, contrasting it with
the enclosing and facilitating parts.6” This is in keeping with a stylistic prin-
ciple that has often been touched upon: the belly is the enclosing element, the
resting point of the structure, the neutral ground on which higher things indi-
cating the vessel’s purpose, content, and dedication can be represented.
This is how the decoration of the vessel’s belly was understood in periods of
high development in the ceramic arts: the painted images on Greek clay vases
from the finest period were contrasted with the ornamentation on vessels of
the old style—some with spun decorations, some with rising grooves, some
encircled with bands and girded with hoops as barrels are, some decorated in
other ways;°8 Alexandrian metal vessels decorated with emblems were con-
trasted with the old embossed sheet-metal vessels; the free principle of vessel
ornamentation of the Renaissance was contrasted with the technical orna-
ments found on vessels of the Middle Ages.
It should also be pointed out here that the old principle of dressing returns
to the fore in the painted and plastic tendentious decorations applied to the
bellies of these vessels. The images are treated as true image panels, literally
fastened to the vessel with seams and bands. The structural meaning of these
bands as borders for the image cannot go unappreciated here; they retain this
meaning in all their applications, regardless of the field of art in which they
occur. It is wrong to use them where they do not have this meaning. Their
symbolism is linked with the simplest processes of making rows, lacing, pin-

530
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

ning, twisting, braiding, weaving, sewing, and hemming—for the aesthetic

importance of which see § 5.
The richest decorations can be seen on some display vases of the Alexan-
drian and Roman periods, whose bodies are more or less covered with both
purely structural-formal and tendentious decorations. For example, we find
display kraters with undulating ribbed surfaces on which bacchanalian and
other types of scenes are depicted in relief.6? Some vases are completely covered
with rising tendril work, from which genies, Nikes, or other figures unfold.
Such richness, together with different colors and the mixed use of plastic
and painted motifs, should be handled with extra caution and a heightened
attention to the precepts of style, because recognizing and adhering to stylistic
principles always becomes more difficult as the available means increase.

In addition to more general requirements of style, ornament must also corre-

spond to the particular purpose and form of each vessel. This affects not only
the choice of subject in decorations
— for instance, bacchanals, vine tendrils,
ivy leaves, panther heads, masks for drinking, and mixing vessels; competi-
tive games and olive leaves on Panathenaic amphorae, and the like — but also
the purely formal relation of the decorative means (whatever they may be) to
the vessel. It is only in this way that the subjects represented come into ques-
tion — namely, to the extent that the praiseworthy striving of the artist for the
most ingenious and spirited solution for the task does not lead him to over-
step those controlling formal limits. Thus a display vessel obviously made
only as a vehicle for painted or plastic work is the result of a tasteless direc-
tion in art. Take, for example, almost everything produced in our modern,
internationally renowned porcelain factories and goldsmiths’ shops. Such
pieces display an addiction to tendentiousness that strives to be clever but is
in fact spiritless, combined with an arrogant conceit that refuses to be subor-
dinated.”° As a contrast to our present tastelessness, we should examine the
vessels of antiquity and, indeed, even the dangerous models of the Renais-
sance, which in this regard reach the extreme stylistic limits that only a
genius in complete command of his technique is permitted to exceed. The
meaning of the subject matter should be linked playfully and effortlessly with
the decorated object. It should move freely within its formal limits, fit closely
with the whole, and complete it without renouncing its right to an indepen-
dent existence. Its relation to the whole is much closer than that of the theme,
which is purely intellectual and is often only loosely related —and sometimes
not at all related —to the purpose of the decorated object.
Even the Middle Ages came closer to the mark here, except that icono-
graphic tendencies placed art—as transpired in antiquity with pre-Hellenic
art—in the service of nonartistic purposes, a tendency that extended to the
minor arts as well. At the same time, technical concerns, as well as functional-
formal ones, made medieval art more dependent on the material than was the
case in antiquity.

53a
 Semper

Disregarding for the moment the physical properties of the ornamentation

selected, we will consider first its formal effect in terms of scale. Without a
doubt small things suggest a different ornamental treatment than do large
things. The small in art must never be a reduction of something large, nor
should something large be an amplification of something small. A motif that
can be richly developed on a large scale without looking jumbled cannot be
made suitable for smaller objects merely by reducing it. Simplification of the
motif must accompany any reduction to avoid fussiness and confusion.
Representation of the essence is the secret that makes the master, and in this
respect too the ancients showed a greatness for all time.
To confirm this, compare the simple meanders, egg-and-dart patterns,
wreaths, and similar motifs that occur on painted vases with similar decora-
tions found on colossal sculpted display vases or even on monuments. Or
compare the way ancient coins reveal the essence of temples and triumphal
arches — some of which still exist —to the lack of style in modern medallions,
which reproduce the object according to the most laborious perspective with-
out omitting a single detail. High sculpture and painting (of the best periods)
capture living nature in just such an essential way. For reasons of space —to
remain as large as possible in a limited space—objects often were rendered
pars pro toto. This was the principle followed by Michelangelo, Raphael,
Correggio, and others in their magnificent compositions on limited ceiling
surfaces.
In certain cases small objects should appear smaller and large objects
larger than they are, or conversely, large things should appear smaller and
small things larger. In each of these cases one should consider whether it
might be used for a model, that is, whether it yields a certain internal stan-
dard for the choice and proportion of the ornamentation as well as a hint for
the composition. Invention emerges of its own accord from such reflections.
Internal and external factors determine whether one chooses slender or
stocky, playfully cheerful or mysteriously gloomy forms. Such formal attrib-
utes can be subtly modified at will and tuned to any key using ornament and
color.
Thus, for example, such devices as rings and zones horizontally encircling
the belly of a vessel serve to shorten and broaden, and their effect can be
enhanced by repetition or moderated by spaces. This principle of ornamenta-
tion is characteristic of the stocky vessel form of the most ancient style (see
figures on pp. 510; 515, top; 523, bottom right).
Hollow beading, rings, and fillets that run up the belly of the vessel from
its base have the opposite effect. When arranged in a continuous and dense
pattern, they are lengthening devices and make a form appear slender.7!
A different effect is produced when grooves running up the belly are sepa-
rated by broad gaps, or when these gaps swell between the grooves, that is,
form burls (bosses), such as those often found on medieval gold work. They
actually strengthen a form and make it appear wider. Thus this motif should
not be continued where the belly contracts.72

a2
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

Although in certain cases it may be permissible, it is not generally advis-

able to break fluting, fillets, and the like horizontally into zones, or to resume
them above zones. By contrast, it is very common for them to end or termi-
nate at a certain point on the belly, giving it an articulation as it grows —like
a blossom from its seat—out of the fluted cup. A fluted neck can also arise
from a smooth belly (see below). Spiral fluting and fillets, imbrication, scales,

Candelabra capital (Pompeii)

nets, and similar ornamental motifs are an intermediate stage between ring
work and decorative fluting; consequently, they have less influence on the
form’s proportions but instead add strength, because they call up similarly
arranged natural and technical reinforcements or protective elements.
Finally, vegetal tendril work is an adornment that merges well with and
helps to enhance almost every expressive nuance of a vessel’s form. When
used correctly, this ornament allows an inexhaustible wealth of motifs.

Finally, the vessel’s decoration should correspond to the material used in its
manufacture and the way in which it has been made.
The truth and importance of this rule cannot be disputed, yet it raises
doubts not easily resolved about the technical origin of many decorative
forms that have become typical and also about the material in which they first
appeared, given that early interactions and influences of materials in this field
modified the style of every corresponding form. Zones of zigzag ornaments,
waves, and scrolls, some painted and some in relief, regularly appear almost
everywhere on the surfaces of the most ancient clay vessels, but we still do
not know whether they were models for or copies of the same decorations in
shallow relief found on the oldest bronze utensils and metal weapons — or

SIS!
 Semper

whether they were originally associated with both materials. The same uncer-
tainty exists about some richly plastic Etruscan pottery decorations and their
stylistic relation to contemporary bronze vases made by the same people.”
It is only with advanced art that conscious distinctions and artistic evalua-
tions are made about the limits and advantages of the different materials
available for formal creation.
Yet the important style questions associated with these things are so
closely connected with technical matters that it seems advisable to take them
up later.

§ 110 The Base (Support, Stand)

Every aesthetic-formal necessity is based on an actual and quite naive mate-
rial one. This is a necessity in the most childlike conditions of society and the
arts; it ceases to exist actually but not formally as culture progresses. It leaves
its ineradicable mark on even the highest creations of perfected art. It writes
the rules of formal creation; for in truth art invents nothing —everything it
touches was in fact already there, and it has only to make use of it! And
indeed Nature, the great original creator, is subject to her own laws here; even
she is able to reproduce only herself. Her types were there at the beginning of
all things and remained the same for everything her womb has produced over
the aeons.
This truth, which rules over all the highest realms of art, also applies to the
modest art of vessel making, and indeed this art in particular gives it an oppor-
tunity to reveal itself in a most striking way.
We showed that the belly of the vessel, which fulfills its purpose in itself, is
the part to which all the other components relate, which makes them exter-
nally active. This is their nature; they must clearly describe and emphasize this
effect according to its means and intensity. As in the case of the belly, this is
achieved through the appropriate form and its accompanying ornament.
Let us begin with the base.
The oldest vessels did not even have one! They are either rounded off at
the bottom or pointed like dolia and amphorae, so that they can be placed in
the sand or stood on a hollowed-out stool, or they were stabilized by flatten-
ing the curve of their bellies below (see the illustrations on pp. 510, top; 513).

Tapering of a vessel flattened at the bottom

534
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

This latter method (simplicity itself) cannot further concern us here, but it
should be noted that the more refined artistic sense was not content with this
solution. The flattened part was encircled with a torus or at least with a hem
to suggest more fully a base or an apophyge, as shown by the examples included
here (see also pp. 515, top; 523, top).
The footless vessel that is unable to stand unaided has far more significant
implications. Reports of how the naivest crafts provided supports in their
early stages are as numerous as the motifs found on the higher pottery that
remained true to them; the latter merely conceived and expressed the idea
lying within them more ideally.
Certainly a very original solution was the circular torus woven from straw
or from some other material, like the supports chemists still use for their
retorts. Once the craft of making pots from clay had been learned, the idea of
making the torus from the same fireproof material followed. It is surprising
that this level of progress is seen in pottery made by the earliest inhabitants of
Germany, Switzerland, and the whole of northwestern Europe. Almost every-
where in Celtic and Teutonic tombs we find rings of fired clay intended to
support footless pots.
Greek pottery retained this natural motive through all of its developmental
stages. Clearly the creators of those splendid hydriae and amphorae with
simple ring bases were aware that they had originally been separate. They kept
the original torus shape for the base (now made together with the vessel as a
single piece) but gave it the noble outline of an inverted echinus; they attached
the torus symbolically, using a painted or plastic band, to show that it was
originally separate. They took this ideal separation further by painting or
sculpting a leaf calyx above the circular foot, as though it were to receive the
latter. In its final development the ring base appears connected to a more or
less developed mediating member in the form of a channel or inverted foliage,
through which the vessel transfers its load to the base.
This leads to the forms and ornaments shown here. See also the hydria on
page 468, the prize amphorae on page 474, and others. The low ring base is a
characteristic of a very extensive family of pots.

Ring bases

5385
 Semper

Let us consider first their opposite, then the intermediate and the com-
bined forms.
The tall stand (incitega, éyyv0i\Kn) is an appendage to the vessel body no
less ancient than the aforementioned ring. It too arose from the need to give
the basin the stability it lacked, although under different conditions. It is a
stand or seat, something upright, with a fixture to receive the basin. Stands
assembled from four or more wooden rods have frequently been found, along
with their kettles, in Egyptian tombs. Similar devices are still in use there to
support containers for Nile water. The Egyptians, it seems, did not care for
the noble tripod, the safest stand, which can be used on uneven ground. It was
in this form that Hellenic art — following Asiatic tradition — brought the stand
motive to its greatest height.
The essence of the tripod is once again the ring (stephane), which receives
the basin (pelvis) and which is supported by a framework of rods. The frame-
work belongs more properly to the realm of carpentry, and it is of great interest
for the development of those art-forms that sprang from this technique.
Hence its fine features and artistic development will be considered in the sec-
tions on carpentry.
As above, the ring receives the basin, but in a different way; it is not the
lower termination of the vessel but the upper one, and therefore it is like an
upward-directed leaf calyx (corona, stephane), which more or less folds over
(as a supercilium), thus allowing the finest nuances of expression between the
light supports and heavy load. Either it is directly connected with the upper
edge of the basin and identified with it (see example below), or it supports the

basin lower down, closer to the floor (see figures on pp. 475, bottom; 476;
477, top and center). Tripods are conceptually divided in these two ways—
though several intermediate forms also show the richness of the artistic lan-
guage, conveying through slight inflections every nuance of a formal concept
in the root expression. Often the actual basin, movable and autonomous, has
a representational stand, which, in receiving it, forms a hollow together with
the rim of the tripod; in this way it becomes an emblem. Assyrian tripods are

536
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

like this—for example, the stone tripod in the Louvre that resembles those
depicted in reliefs (see figure on p. 480, bottom). In fine art no less than in
music, suggestions of a theme before it is fully developed —like that described
here —serve to combine the formal parts into an overall effect; they also help
properly assess and emphasize the motive.
The basin’s frame either dominates the basin by being higher and of greater
formal significance, or the basin itself dominates.”4 Decisiveness is the rule
here, but exceptions occasionally permit a balance between the two elements
of the tripod.
Often the tripod is combined with a central column stand (omphalos) that
supports the (heavy) vessel in the center of its underside. With the Delphic
tripod this had a mystical significance. This combination is usually found
on stone tripods and is at its most magnificent on the roof of the Choragic
Monument of Lysicrates in Athens, although admittedly the surrounding
omphalos of the bronze tripod, characterized as a luxuriant plant stem, has
long since been stolen. This feature leads us to the second, simpler, no less sig-
nificant form of the high vessel stand. This motive, like the multifooted stand,

Stand similar to candelabra

(Berl{in] Mus[eum])

can still be found in the Orient in the greatest natural simplicity: a stalk or
stem, broadening both below and upward and ending at the top in a chalice
form, receives the vessel. Once again—as above—it is a vessel for a vessel,
like our eggcup for an egg. (The cortina [cauldron].)75
Let us look first at the lower stem, independent of the basin (which merely
represents the thing being supported, gives the stand its formal termination,
and indicates its purpose). As was shown, it is present as a support only for
the thing it bears; it is active for the latter and is also independent of the
ground to which it has to transfer its load. Thus on top it receives and below
it conveys. This double function is expressed in both its form and its decora-
tion. The hyperboloidal form with a stronger lower curve is the traditional
one, and certainly the most eloquent: flutes, leaves, or other rising and falling
decorative forms, reminiscent of and expressing tautness and elasticity, develop
upward and downward from a common point of support near the center of
the hyperboloid. The point of support is a place of rest; it is often in the shape

Byshd
 Semper

Transitional forms between ring foot and high edge

of a knob and should be decorated according to principles similar to those

used for the basin, as it too is neutral; often it is only a horizontal band encir-
cling the base and thus is not active above or below. Horizontal zones or cir-
cles, running from top to bottom around the whole hyperboloidal stem, are
less characteristic in terms of their effect. In metallurgy and ceramics they are
motivated technically (by use of potter’s wheel and lathe) and are thus unob-
jectionable. Here too the projecting lip (the supercilium) is an eloquent termi-
nation at the top; it expresses a weighted but self-acting tightening; it contains
and adds nuance.
This main part of the stand ends near the ground, which is sometimes rep-
resented by a special square plinth, by a simple torus, or even a richer version
of the ringlike base that consists of several assembled parts (see figures on pp.
478, 479).
Just as the torus fastens the plinth to the base, there is a second connecting
member (astragal) above the projecting lip, from which follows the belly of
the vase, either without a transition or mediated by the cortina, acting as a
prelude, as discussed above. This is often indicated with paint on a shallow
molding set on the surface of the basin. This sort of ornament is customary on
the lowest part of the basin (called /e culot in French).
It follows that there should be a more or less developed ring base between
the culot and the astragal. See the example of a krater on page 478, top.

Examples of separate stands in bronze and clay

53S
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

This illustration of an ancient bronze vessel in which the two components

of the system that forms the vase are completely separate shows the purely
technical origin of the compound krater form of Campanian vases, which
was also common in the large Bacchic stone vessels of the Alexandrian and
Roman periods.” A krater that is in fact quite independent is supported by a
deep bowl with a base, like an egg and eggcup. The same utilitarian and tech-
nical processes are also found in all the other combinations found in the art of
vases, which during the finest period strove to deviate as little as possible from
natural motives, to avoid undue subtlety, and to find the proper way without a
metaphysics of aesthetics.
Between these two extremes —the low ring base and the tall vase stand—
lies a rich scale of intermediate forms in which first one then another part
of the fully articulated base is abbreviated, merely suggested, or disappears
entirely. The principle remains the same in all cases, but it is modified accord-
ing to the character of the vase: in all cases the base should be sharply distin-
guished from the basin. See both the many vessels illustrated above and the
examples here.
In the case of large display vases, kraters, and so on, the base will fre-
quently have the effect of a pedestal, that is, there should be a clear distinction
between the vessel fitted with its own base and the isolated stand. One should
imagine most large stone vases in a similar combination with their associated
base stands. But the missing part has often been tastelessly restored—to the
great disadvantage of the ensemble. This separation would be marked (if it
did not actually exist) by omitting the mediating parts (spira, torus, bands) to
give the vessel the character of a movable object, separate from the immobile
pedestal.

Ceremonial krater with pedestal

539
 Semper

The combination of the tripod with the column base has already been dis-
cussed for cases in which the tripod forms the main motive. Sometimes the tri-
pod is just a secondary motive—a reminder, so to speak, of the mobility of
the object.
As the base and support of the most solid part (see the prolegomena, p. 94),
the tripod should correspond to it not only formally but also in terms of color.
Thus this part of antique clay vessels is usually black. If metal and other mate-
rials (glass, crystal, porcelain, and so on) are combined in a vessel, the tripod
should be metal. It would be ridiculous to give a silver chalice a crystal base.

;
C=

Stand with allusion to a tripod

If metals with different colors and lusters are used, the darkest and dullest
should be used for the base. A silver basin with a dull gold base is stylistically
correct, but I would not dare to mount a gold vessel on a silver base— unless
oxidation had turned the silver a dark, matte black color.

iit The Neck

There are close links between the base or stand of the vessel and the upper
part or neck.
Here too there are multiple activities and inherent contrasts. The neck is the
funnel for filling the vessel, and at the same time the spigot for emptying it.
Like the stand, it exists only for the vessel: it serves it and is externally active. It
serves the vessel in these two senses, but in such a way that they do not negate
each other (as happens with the fulcrum, or point of support, of the base); the
funnel and spigot can never function simultaneously but must instead take
turns. Thus the dynamic point of support at the neck is superfluous, although
on occasion (for example, the Persian bottle on p. 516) it seems to have been
used in a more utilitarian sense, as a handle. The Greeks encouraged this dis-
tinction, and their customary acuity enabled them to exploit it formally. They

540
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

made the neck a double funnel working both upward and downward — first by
its form (by broadening the neck at the top and the bottom and narrowing it
in the middle), then in its ornatus (embellishment), which encircled the neck
with a ring of decoration that pointed alternately upward and downward, ina
simple or rich unfolding of the motif (see pp. 115-16).
At the same time, it seems quite clear that in this case the Greeks were also
consciously striving to express every fine nuance of the basic thought through
the form.
Thus, for example, short necks atop very wide vessels appear to be only
for pouring, because the neck narrows not in the middle but where it meets
the belly. The mouth of the neck widens abruptly, and its decoration consists
only of elements pointing upward.
Ointment vessels, which are intended to dispense their contents economi-
cally, have longer necks that are narrowest at the top and broaden gently
toward the belly. On such vessels the ring ornament is very often directed only
downward and consists of a neck band (monile) that horizontally encircles it
like a wreath, without invoking the concepts of top and bottom, in or out (pp.
516, top right; 543, bottom).
Another characteristic of this vessel part to be considered, one that was
already emphasized in the discussion of the basin or belly, is the proportional
development of an upright vessel on which the neck with its mouth is also the
conclusion, the upper termination. This concept is expressed best and most
intelligibly by following the general tradition of art and using an upright
crown of leaves that inclines outward in a slightly projecting lip.
Following this conception, the neck is therefore either single or divided in
two. In the latter case it is articulated at the point at which it narrows, which
is the appropriate place for a connection (astragal, taenia, and so on). See the
kalpis on page 501, bottom, and the one on page 543, top. Potters and painters
seem to have had a woman’s necklace in mind when adorning the vessel’s
neck —another illustration of the many links between artistic symbolism and
early efforts to adorn the human body.
The place where the neck meets the belly of the vessel is, of course, another
point of articulation that speaks more or less decisively in a manner similar to
the one discussed earlier. Only rarely is there no ring decoration at all, even if
it is only faintly suggested by a painted hoop or a band. Here, as in the case of
the base, the origin of the decoration also has a technical reason.
This connecting part should be designed as an apophyge (a curving out),
because here the neck ends and rests on the belly. Often two symbols are
placed next to one another, one for the connection and one for the apophyge.
The latter is logically decorated only with forms that suggest downward move-
ment, like egg-and-dart patterns, leaves, and so on.
The close connection between the neck and base can also be seen when the
former comes down as low as the broadest point of the belly so as to conceal
its upper part, almost like a capsule or an inverted basin; it corresponds to the
upright basin of the base, which does the receiving (see above).

541
 Semper

Ceremonial krater from Calvi (M[onumenti] ined[it/] 5, pl. 73 [sic])

This shoulder piece (épaule), fastened to the belly by a seam, is not actu-
ally part of the neck; it has its own ornamental principles, consisting of down-
ward-bending elements such as scales, leaves, fluting, and so on. As it exists in
its own right, it is also bound to the neck by one or more of the familiar con-
necting elements.
Because of the many similarities between the neck and the base, and because
both contrast with the belly, it is customary to give the neck a color similar to
that of the base and to use the same material for both in cases where the piece
is made of different materials. Examples include Attic lecythi, garnished cinque-
cento crystal glasses, and so on.
This close link between the vase’s neck and base is also seen in the fairly
constant proportions of the two: the height of the base may increase in pro-
portion to the vessel’s opening, but the latter contracts in inverse proportion
to the length of the neck —that is, the smaller the mouth is in relation to the
vessel’s belly the more the neck may stretch. It thus follows that long-necked
vessels, as a rule, should have low bases, and vases with short, broad necks
should have high bases. Still, it in no way follows that one absolutely cannot
have vases with short broad necks without high bases, or long-necked vases
with high bases.
The bowl (kylix) and the flask are extremes in the application of this prin-
ciple, with hundreds of modified forms in between.

542
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

§ 112 The Mouth (Lip)

The first distinction to be made here is that between the simple circular mouth
and the curved lip with its related spout.
The former is often just the conclusion or termination of the neck. As its
edge, it takes the form of a flattened torus or even more characteristically of a
projecting lip (of a wave or cymatium). Seen from above, the highest point

Circular projecting mouth

forms the end of the upward-striving plant calyx of the upper neck. In such
cases the mouth usually has a ledge that suggests and defines the inner vessel’s
surface as separate from the outer and also serves to receive the lid. This con-
trast between the inner and outer vessel walls is also often emphasized with
color or with appropriate natural analogies. Thus faience or porcelain vases
with colored decorations frequently have lips of pale red, in imitation of a
mouth, or of the delicate pink interior of shellfish (see “Glass”).

Independent mouthpieces

543
 Semper

In the case of figure a, the mouth sits on the neck like an echinus-shaped
dish, and is separated from it by a sharply and finely marked tapered profile.
In the case of figure b, the mouth is also separated from the neck: not dish-
shaped but raised in the form of a (bell-shaped) krater. Notice that the dish-
shaped mouth sits atop an expanded neck, while the bell-shaped funnel rises
directly from the narrowest part of the neck.’” The latter is therefore charac-
teristic of vessels that approach the flask type, are provided with long necks,
and can be closed with stoppers. The still more marked parabolic mouth fun-
nel of figure c makes it a true flask—the lecythus, and other forms merely
approach the flask. Ordinarily, funnel-shaped openings are undecorated and
merely heightened by a black coloring, like Attic ointment flasks. But if deco-
ration is to be used, the enclosing part that receives the stopper and termi-
nates the vessel at the top must be taken into account. One may also
surround the conical mouthpiece with rings to make the stopper fit snugly or
to indicate this idea, at least. A motive that arises purely from the modern
technique of making glass bottles is to surround the mouth with a torus of
melted glass; the application of this to artistic flasks as well would distin-
guish the thoughtful artist. This motive is more practical and at the same
time more stylistically correct than the fragile collars now customary for
crystal carafes, which are neither convenient for pouring nor beautiful. The
mouth (even more than the vessel parts considered previously) is formally
dependent on functional and technical conditions, to which purely decorative
considerations have to defer.
Greek potters were well aware of this principle, as is clear from the bold
curves and reckless deviations from austere regularity they permitted them-
selves in making mouths for their vessels, in particular true pouring vessels,
some of which had lips; those with spouts will be discussed below.
Spouts endow simple upright and proportional vases, so to speak, with
their own will-to-live and direction. The true genius of the potter, here with-
out the support of the wheel, is evident from their free curves, their function-
ality, and their well-considered proportions in relation to the other parts,
especially the handle.
Because of the higher forms of life expressed by these parts, they are often
very effectively decorated with animal motifs. The concepts of flowing, pour-
ing, and stretching forward should guide the choice of such motifs. Yet the use
of such symbols in a functional or utilitarian sense is found more in barbarian
vessels, such as certain Netherlandish pitchers whose spouts resemble portly
persons, or in Indian and Chinese vessels, which often have spouts in the
shape of an ostrich neck or a dragon. The Greeks also used masks and other
animal symbols, but only in a structural rather than functional context.78 We
will return to such symbols in considering the handle. Here the intention of
indicating the direction of the vessel (its front and rear) through figurative
ornament comes to the fore in the best examples of Greek vase art, as for
example in the beautiful oenochoe shown here, the work of the potter Nikos-
thenes—see Mon[umenti] ined|iti] (1854): 47. As noted, however, the beauty

544
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

Spout (oenochoe of Nikosthenes)

and adornment of the spout lie mostly in its bold and noble curves, in the
way in which it is attached to the vessel, and in the expression of the purpose
for which it is intended (see the numerous examples given above and below).

§ 113 The Handle

Between the handle and the spout there is a rapport resembling that between
the neck and base of the vessel. If the latter are in a proportional relation to
each other and to the vessel as a whole, the former are the parts that give the
vase a front, a rear, and a direction; their harmony with the whole and among
themselves thus follows the principle of directional unity.’°
This is true of true pouring vessels, whereas the double handles of the
dolium, amphora, and hydria are in a symmetrical relationship with them-
selves and with the vessel as a whole. They are thus indispensable when ele-
vating a form that is symmetrically neutral (symmetrical on all sides) to the
level of a more highly developed symmetrical form. There are important aes-
thetic factors governing the design of these parts of the vase (their relation

(a, b) Horizontal handles, (c) Vertical handle

545
 Semper

with it and the other components), which can always be harmonized with
function and structural appropriateness. These factors usually guide the artist
to do the right thing in every respect, even though he may be unaware of them.
The handle’s shape, size, and the way it is attached are infinitely varied
according to the nature of the vase, but here too the economy generally found
in nature and art is confirmed: all variations can be traced back to a very few
basic motives.

(a-e) Vertical handles, (f) Bow handle

546
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

On the whole, three types of handles can be distinguished, namely,

1. the horizontal handle for basins, bowls, kraters, hydriae, spoons, and
sO On;
2. the vertical handle for amphorae, pouring vessels, and related forms,
usually with a narrow opening;
3. the stirrup for baskets and buckets.

So-called strut handles or column handles are one subcategory and are, strictly
speaking, simply vertical handles that have merged with the edge of the vessel
and support it to a certain extent — hence the name.®?

Composite handles

Another subcategory is the composite handle of the Lucanian krater,

which is a vertical handle that rests on a horizontal one (see fig. e on p. 546
and the example on this page).
With regard to the use of these basic forms and their derivatives, it is nec-
essary to determine whether they are closely connected with the belly, the
neck, the base, or with two of these parts at the same time, which would mod-
ify or affect the form of the vase.
It must also be determined whether the same handles occur once, or twice,

547
 Semper

or several times, or whether the same vessel has different kinds of handles.
Thus there are bowls with only one handle, which is horizontal, and there are
pouring vessels with only one handle, but it is vertical. In both cases, and in
all related ones, the addition of a handle (often in combination with a spout)
endows them with a definite direction, which decisively influences the prin-
ciple of their decoration. Vessels such as the bowl (with two horizontal han-
dles) and the arnphora (with two vertical handles) are symmetrical and should
be treated as such. Then there are four-handled amphorae, and hydriae with
two horizontal handles and one vertical one. Here symmetry and direction are
represented equally; for this reason the hydria is ideally suited to the richest
formal development.
Even if we consider only Greek vase art at its zenith and completely disre-
gard the works of other periods (often no less elegant but less ennobled by
taste), we are amazed by the richness of invention and the changes of expres-
sion that the Hellenic masters summoned from the simplest combinations of
the placement, number, shape, and fit of the handles. One despairs of finding
the thread of a principle within this variety, as one would in the richness of
natural creation. And yet one does recognize this principle in the fact that the
work, when it is worthy of its master, appears as though it could not have
been made in any other way—even though the same task is handled differ-
ently in another work in an equally masterly fashion. One recognizes it in the
quality of the typical that, within this variety, impresses itself upon forms that
are otherwise very different.
Here too function is the first governing element of design. The handle
must be comfortable — itmust invite the grasp, so to speak, entice it. First the
human hand and then the size of the vessel are defining criteria; manageability,
suitable strength, and the correct placement and fastening of the handles are
formal criteria. Thus excessive thickness or thinness are to be avoided (even
when strong materials like metal or stone permit minimal thickness), as are
too much or too little projection, stiffness, straightness, and sharp corners
that hurt the hand or the eye (but also roundness or smoothness). In addition,
for the positioning and placement of horizontal handles we should consider
the center of gravity, which should be below the point of attachment, not
above it—or better still, at the point where the handle is gripped. In this con-
text the size of the vessel is also a factor. On the large Lucanian kraters, which
incidentally do not lend themselves well to patterns, the horizontal handles
represent an exception and are below, at the base. They are merely vestigial
and definitely not intended for picking up the heavy vessel (see p. 478, top
right). In the case of vertical handles, the grip should be attached at a high
point if the vessel is short, lower if it is tall. With pouring vessels the handle
should be directed and placed in relation to the spout to make pouring as easy
as possible.
The relations between the vertical handle and the vessel’s belly, mouth,
and base yield the most readily comprehensible set of rules —despite the great
variety of uses for such handles.

548
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

In keeping with their inherently dual service, vertical handles should be

suited to the dual functions of both carrying and holding the vessel at a par-
ticular inclination. The first purpose thus relates to the horizontal handle,
which carries the belly by holding it upright. The second purpose requires that
it be suited to holding in an equally distinct way.

Amphora handle

Usually the part of the handle that tends toward the horizontal, and is thus
best suited to carrying the vessel, is on top, as it is on the two amphorae on
page 473, where the articulation of the handle is very thoughtfully and decid-
edly expressed.8! The part of the handle intended for carrying can, however,
also form its lower end, at the point where it joins the belly.
Its other part, used when pouring, should by its shape and position make
this act equally comfortable whether the vessel is full or almost empty.
To best achieve this, pouring should be at its most comfortable moment
when the vessel is half full. The position of the hand should be such that the
axis of the tube formed by the fingers holding the handle lies at approximately
forty-five degrees to the horizon or to the surface of the liquid being poured.
Once the basic shape of the pot has been fixed, one should determine
empirically the height of the liquid when the container is half full. The apex of
a right-angled triangle should be placed at the midpoint of the horizontal
plane corresponding to this level, and one of the triangle’s legs should touch
the vessel’s edge, or even cut through it if there is a spout or pouring lip. The
angle of this leg then gives the direction for the edge, spout, or lip and for the
flowing stream of liquid. Then the right angle should be halved and the part
of the handle to be used when pouring should be given a direction parallel to
this dividing line.82 Instinct will decide the best application of the principle to
each individual case.
The examples on page 550, taken only from existing designs, will clarify
these remarks.83 Archaic and late Lucanian vases are not worthy of consider-
ation here — least of all the latter, as the handle is usually composite, no longer
has a purpose, and is merely an ornament. On the other hand, most Oriental
(Chinese) vessels with spouts conform to these rules for the disposition of
their parts. The same is true of Renaissance vessels.

549
 Aside from functionality, the material and the way in which it is to be
treated are significant factors in the design of this part of the vessel —as is the
case with all artistic creations. The handle is more clearly added on than are
the other facilitating parts of the vessel; it does not need to be made of the
same material as the belly, and originally it was not. Primitive Celtic, Teu-
tonic, Slavic, and Indian pottery had no handles—or very undeveloped ones.
Here again there is cause to return to the assumption that the pottery so richly
developed by Greco-Italic peoples was, in the beginning, metallurgy metamor-
phosed by a material change. This is clearest in the design and attachment of
handles (though, to be sure, in the latter case its archetype will have to be
sought in textiles, namely, in cords and bands). This is the most natural expla-
nation for most of the valid vessel types under discussion that have remained

550
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

traditional to the present day, as well as for their more general form, their
ornamentation, and above all for their method of attachment and the way this
is indicated and exploited for decoration.
For example, most vertical handles on clay vessels are certainly not prod-
ucts of the potter’s art but rather elastic, spirally curving metal bows. Simi-
larly, horizontal, more or less upwardly curving handles have bow shapes
comparable to the handles on bronze shields. They are also similarly attached —
or at least this is suggested — by rivets, clasps, circlets, buttons (small wheels),
caps, lugs, rings, and other fasteners used in metallurgy. Even the often recur-
ring but only vaguely expressive anthemion at the base of the handle corre-
sponds to similar things in bronze that point far more clearly to a technical
origin. Once again we admire the Hellenic spirit—the tact with which they
understood how to do justice to the material requirements of potter’s clay by
translating traditional types into a true potter’s style. Thus the overly plastic
handle found on the most ancient vessels came to be simplified as the ceramic
art evolved. The attachment disappeared completely or was merely alluded to
with paint. Often it consisted of tapered forms of the kind that naturally
occur when the thumb is trying to press a soft paste onto something solid to
fasten it. In this way the creative spirit unconsciously grasped the higher prin-
ciple of curved surfaces.
The naive idea of symbolically veiling the difficulties or flaws of practice
may have led to the use of the mask, the ancient symbol of concealment and
the one most frequently found at precisely such places. At the same time, the
mask made a tendentious reference to the purpose of the vessel (the rite of
Bacchus, see figure, p. 502).
What has been said about the influence of metallurgy on pottery by no
means contradicts the fact that handles borrowed their decorative motifs
from bands and knitted works. Examples such as twisted or even knotted
bows, braided wickerwork, taenia ornaments, and similar patterns are very
common. As was repeatedly shown in volume 1, these are the most primitive
techniques, which received artistic treatment earlier than any others, and it
was therefore from them that metallurgy borrowed its analogies (see p. 546,
top right; and passim).
The predominance of technical considerations in the design and decora-
tion of handles explains the rarity of a felicitous use of natural analogies. For
example, some have tried to see the human ear in the tall upright handle of
the cyathus as an allusion to the Greek word for the upright ear handle (ovc
[ear]). This allegory is neither felicitous nor clever. Intertwined twigs and ten-
drils, perhaps even knotted snakes, are more suitable for handles. The natural
formal symbolism of the individual parts of handles, harmonizing with the
technical symbolism and with their fastening elements in particular, is largely
prescribed by the plastic-metallic vase art.84
As a separate part, the handle is generally colored differently, usually
darker than the belly. Its color should also clearly relate to the beak or spout.
In the case of decorated vessels (with metal extremities), it is linked with the

Sion
 Semper

spout and the neck by a ring, and together with these parts carries the richest
plastic and painted ornamentation. See the magnificent crystal vases in the
Louvre, in Dresden, Berlin, Vienna, and in many other museums.

§ 114 The Lid

Strictly speaking, the lid is a separate vessel in its own right, a patera or pinax,
which is placed upon the hollow or mouth. Sometimes the lid also takes on
the form of an inverted funnel.
The lid should provide adequate covering and protection, and it should be
easy to put on and take off. For this reason it is provided with a knob or navel
atop the raised middle, and in formal and ornamental terms this is recognized
as upright. The vase’s facilitating parts are attached to the belly by means of
appropriate elements that have already been sufficiently explained; the knob,
which may be considered as the reverse of the vase’s base, is connected to the
lid in a very similar way. Because of the relationship that exists between the
vase’s knob and base, its lower part is also frequently (in the fullest develop-
ment of this motive) treated in a similar way to the base: its lower part strives
upward as much as it does downward because it receives and supports the
actual termination. The form and decoration often follow natural analogies,
such as a pinecone, a blossom, a pear, and so on.85 The bases of flower and
fruit stems —the delicate furrow under the head of a poppy, for instance —are
natural models or analogies for this decorative idea.
Some ancient Egyptian and Etruscan urns have lids in the shape of human
or animal heads (see figure, p. 475, top), which always have a canopic form
(an inverted conoid) with a more or less distinct resemblance to a mummy.
This kind of symbolic formal treatment goes beyond the boundaries of art to
become religious symbolism and mysticism, which the Greeks avoided as
much as possible. Thus it appears on Greek vases only playfully or jokingly —an
approach that is permissible when we have the necessary mastery to solve
extremely difficult problems with style and spirit. Otherwise we would do
better to leave it alone, which is good advice for the majority of today’s
ceramic artists and goldsmiths.
The lid unfolding from the knob in a radial manner can be designed in an
aesthetic-formal sense in a variety of ways: through its special purpose, through
its relation with the vessel as a whole, and finally through the technical means
permitted by the material. The underlying idea is that of a roof, which sug-
gests that it should be treated similarly, that is, with downward falling, devel-
oping elements such as scales, reed leaves, pipes, and so on. Yet it by no means
contradicts the logic of style if it contains the idea of stiffening, supporting
from below on the rim, and leaning against the wreath of the knob at the
top—in short, to conceive it as an abutment and to treat it formally and
decoratively as such. This dynamic idea is not infrequently expressed on
Lucanian vessel lids with upward-directed tendril work, and most frequently
on medieval ones with architectural and structural associations. So long as
one knows what one wants to design!

552
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

The lower termination of the lid is the rim, which can be characterized as a
hem; its ornamental motifs must either be neutral with regard to top and bot-
tom or they must emphasize the top. Thus, for example, animals, animal
heads, inscriptions, coats of arms, and so on, are always placed with their
tops against the knob. Everything that was said about hems and borders in
volume 1 (§ 16) applies here.
The connection with the vessel’s rim is made with an astragal, which can
be associated with such forms as those found on ring bases, namely, sloping
concluding parts (see p. 535).
The rim of the lid can protrude beyond the edge of the vessel; it can also
coincide with it; or it can recede behind it. This is governed by the vessel’s

Lid

shape. Krater-shaped vessels whose edges curve outward and end in a lip
should not have broad-rimmed, projecting lids. They must therefore have a
shoulder above the projection to receive the lid. Dolium-shaped (ovoid) ves-
sels and urns with convex bellies may have projecting lids. Frequently the lids
follow the curve of the vessel, whose ovoid shape they are completing (see the
urns on p. 475, top).
The stopper is a reduction of the lid to nothing but the knob. Thus what
has been said about the knob applies to it as well; it is well suited to a bold
and free treatment, but practicality and, above all, appropriateness to the task
must always prevail. Thus the stopper is not infrequently reduced to a flat
disk, either vertical or (as in modern glass flagons) horizontal.
In flasklike vessels the stopper should fit into a deep, thick-lipped mouth-
piece (see pp. 515, bottom; 516; 543, bottom).

553
 Semper

§ 115 The Significance of Ceramics for Architecture

We conclude this chapter on the aesthetic-formal elements of the vessel art by
pointing to the great significance of its repertory of forms— which developed
out of both utilitarian and technical conditions—to the traditional formal
language of all the arts and for architecture in particular. Not only are the
general architectural principles of formal articulation and the contrasts
between the parts that compose this articulation exactly the same as the prin-
ciples we have just discussed, but architecture also obviously borrowed many
of the traditional signs and the terms of its formal artistic language from the
earlier vessel art. Even the prevailing techniques of potters, as will be shown,
have often had a quite direct effect on the generation of new architectural
principles.
To be sure, other factors have been active here. In volume 1 we saw the
enormous influence of textiles on the formal nature of architecture — an influ-
ence yet to be shown for tectonics, stereotomy, and metallurgy. Therefore, let
it suffice here to have made a preliminary reference to the close connection
between the vessel art and architecture in terms of the commonality of their
formal language. We reserve the right to take up this important subject again
from a more general point of view after the discussion of the other technical
arts that is still incumbent on us.

Notes
1. [Alexandre] Brongniart, [Traité des arts céramiques, x:| “Two materials that are
highly instructive for the history of civilization and the history of the earth can survive
for millennia and teach us the first elements of the earliest history of humanity and of
the earth. They are terra-cotta and the solid parts of animals and plants in a fossilized
state. Apart from these two artifacts of the past, everything is formless and silent.”
2. The name indicates a vessel carried between two people, so that there is a sup-
port on either side.
3. Arab ceremonial vases of this kind are illustrated in Owen Jones, [The] Alham-
bra [Court], [Joseph-Philibert] Girault de Prangey’s [Essai sur I’|arch[itecture des]
Arabe|s et des Mores] en Espagne [en Sicile et en Barbarie|, and elsewhere.
4. Greek Utokpatnptov, ettotatov, EyyvoyKn, Tpel{touc. Athen[aeus] 5.209. [Imman-
uel] Bekk[er], Anecd[ota Graeca}, 245, |. 29. Latin incitega.
5. Herod[otus] 4.61, 4.152.
6. Athenaeus 5.199.
7. Published in Didron’s Annales [archéologiques] 11 [(1851)]: 252.
8. In the Louvre there is a stone altar Botta found at the base of a terrace in
Khorsabad. Its triangular shape and attached lion’s paws allude to the tripod. Its
rounded surface has a recess to receive a sacrificial basin. This function of accommo-
dating a basin can be seen even more clearly on another tripod illustrated on page 480,
bottom, taken from a bas-relief. j
9. For the relation between this phenomenon and the early use of the potter’s wheel
in those areas, see the technical procedures for ceramics discussed later.

554
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

10. Tuponvn S€ Kpatel xpvodtuToc diddy

Kal TAG XAAKdG, OTLG KOOHEL SdpLoV Ev TLL Xpela...
TOV 5€ TPOXOD yaine Te KautVvou Exyovov EvUpEV
KNELVOTATOV KEPAILOV, XPTIOLLOV OLKGVOLLOV
1) TO KaAOV Mapaddvt kaTaoTHoaoa TpdTaLoV .
[The Etruscan bowl of beaten gold is preeminent,
and all the bronze that decorates a house for any use...
And the city that set up the fine trophy at Marathon
invented the child of wheel, earth, and oven,
the most famous earthen vessel, a useful housekeeper.]
—Critias, [frag. B2, West]

11. This navel, too, is already present on Assyrian (Phoenician?) bowls, as can be
seen from the elegant sections of two such vessels shown on page 481.
12. Illustrations of the largest and most beautiful bowls from the best period may
be found in the 1834 and 1835 volumes of Mon[umenti] ined[iti] or in compendiums
on vases. For the kylikeion, see “Tectonics.”
13. See the bowl’s profile on page 482.
14. [James] Millingen, [Ancient] Unedited] Mon[uments], ser. 2, pl. 17; Monu-
mlenti] ined|iti] dell T. A. [= Instituto di corrispondenza archeologica?|; Mus{eo}
borb{ornico}.
15. Many of the objects that used to be stored in the library are now in the Louvre.
16. Published and described by K. O. Miiller in Annali dell’Instituto 11 [(1839)]:
78-84.
17. Described by [Girolamo] Bianconi in Annali dell’ Instituto [4] (1832): 304-11.
18. Koehler, Mag[asin] encyclop[édique] 5 [no. 19] (1803): 372.
19. Trebell[ius Pollio], [Divus] Claudius] 17: disci corymbiati, lances pampinatae,
patinae hederatae [emblems of berry clusters, platters with tendrils, dishes with designs
of ivy].
20. Antich{ita di] Ercol{ano] 5:267.
21. [Bernard de] Montfaucon, Suppl[ément au livre de L’antiquité,] vol. 4, pl. 28.
22. [Johann Heinrich Wilhelm] Tischbein, Homer, 7:3. Millingen, Un[edited]
Mon{uments], 2:12. Gétting|ische] glelehrte| A|[nzeigen] (1800): 1801[-7].
23. This Sassanian prince reigned from 531 to 579.
24. See also Revue archéologique (1844): 264, and Jean de Witte, “Le musée Gré-
gorien a Rome,” 312.
25. See [Joseph Toussaint] Reinaud, Monumens arabes du cabinet de M. le duc de
Blacas, and Jules Labarte, Description des objets d’art qui composent la collection
Debruge Duménil, 404. Both publications are highly recommended for specialists.
26. Archaeologial; or, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity,] 29.
27. Archaeologia|; or, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity,] 28.
28. Labarte, [Description des objets d’art,| 793.
29. This useful work is called Raccolta di cento tavole rappresentanti i costumi
religiosi, civili e militari degli antichi... tratti degli antichi monumenti da Lorenzo
Roccheggiani, n.d., n.p.
 Semper

30. The word chalice is used here as an equivalent for kUALE and should not suggest
the outward-curving shape of the calyx of certain flowers. In fact the oldest antique and
Christian chalices are bowl-shaped and do not curve outward.
31. See the woodcuts on pages 477 and 478.
32. Isaw ancient Greek bathtubs in Sicily with ring bases and a step to sit on, made
of a single piece of fired clay. They were also provided with backrests.
33. Others suggest that the psykter had the form of the deinos, that is, like a krater
rounded off below or running to a point and thus needing a special stand. Thus [Theo-
dor] Panofka refers to the form of the Sapphic vase just described as a Laconic krater.
For the uncertainty surrounding the names of Greek vases, see [Antoine-Jean] Letronne,
Journ{al] des sav[ants] (1833): 612. Otto Jahn, Beschreibung, |xxxix.
34. [Anton] Steinbiichel [von Rheinwall], Sappho und Alkaios (Vienna, 1822), fol.
[Friedrich Gottlieb] Welcker, Alte Denkm[dler, vol. 2,] pls. 12, 21, 22. [A.] Dub[ois]
Maisonneuve, Intro[duction a l'étude des vases antiques], 81. See the accompanying
sketch of this vessel, height 19.7, diameter 14.2.
35. Paus[anius] 5.17; Quatremére [de Quincy], Jup[iter] ol[ympien], 124. [K.] O. Miller,
Arch|dologie der Kunst], 8, 37.
36. On the famed Ficoronic cista, see Miiller, Denkm|dler der alten Kunst], 1:309;
[Kircher,] Mus[ei] Kircher[iani], 1:6-8; [Aubin Louis] Millin, Gallerie mythologique},
pl. 106, [cat. no.] 422; [Eduard] Gerhard, Etr[uskische] Spiegel, vol. 1, pl. 2.
37. [Ennio Quirino] Visconti, Lettera su di una anticha argenteria, quarto (Rome,
1793).
38. The accompanying sketch of one such metal Chinese vessel is from a private
collection in London. See also [Jules] Labarte, Collect[ion] Debruge [Dumeénil], “Intro-
duction,” 408, and cat. nos. 832-33 (see fig. d on p. 492).
39. Although this example is less striking than others, here at least the idea of win-
dows and doors is suggested by the requisite perforations.
40. Didron’s Annalles archéologiques| 3 [(1845)]: 206. This journal shows a vari-
ety of twelfth-, thirteenth-, and fourteenth-century vessels used for incense.
41. Labarte, Coll[ection Debruge| Duménil, 233 and cat. no. 956.
42. See also Matthew Digby Wyatt, Ornamental Art in Metal.
43. The relevant texts and sources are quoted in Miller, Archdologie der Kunst,
394 (1835 edition).
44. Rocchleggianil], 7, pl. 23.
45. This shape is said to have been modeled on the female breast, which, as we
know from Homer, was used as a model for certain vessels.
46. Described and engraved by John Gage in Archaeologia|; or, Miscellaneous
Tracts Relating to Antiquity] 26:300.
47. [Caylus,] Recueil d’antiquités, vol. 2, pl. 91; vol. 5, pl. 104; vol. 6, pl. 85.
48. More probably the term refers to the somewhat raised lid over the opening.
49, Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11[.10]: lucernam claro permicantem lumine, non
adeo nostris illis consimilem, quae vespertinas illuminant epulas; sed aureum cymbium
medio sui patore flammulam suscitans largiorem [a lamp gleaming with a bright light,
not at all like our kind, which glow at evening banquets, but a golden cup emitting a
wider flame from its middle opening].

556
 Ceramics: Aesthetic-Formal

50. Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11[.11].

51. Certainly there are both Etruscan and genuinely Greek pouring vessels with
beak-shaped tops and even with definite spouts, but during the best period of Hellenic
pottery they were used only rarely, and only when there was a particular material pur-
pose. Some such vessels are depicted in the woodcut on page 513, bottom. They are
probably what the Romans called gutti. The one with an especially prominent beak is
the Egyptian item mentioned above.
52. There are two magnificent Arabian buires in the collection of the duke of
Blacas. The British Museum also has two thirteenth-century specimens with rich chas-
ing, arabesques, birds, and so on. See the sketch of such a vessel on page 514.
53. The handle also deprives the lecythus of its bottle shape, which does not allow
for a handle.
54. See [Gottfried] Leibniz, Scriptores rer[um]| Bruns[vicensium], 1:980.
55. Trogil Arnkiel, Beschreibung des zu Tondern im Holsteinischen 1636 gefunde-
nen goldenen Horns, nebst einer Abhandlung ..., octavo (Kiel, 1683).
56. Joseph Skelton, F.A.S., The Collection of Llewelyn Meyrick, Esq., at Goodrich
Court, Herefordshire; after the Drawings and with the Descriptions of Dr. Meyrick
(London, 1830).
57. It was therefore described as fat-lipped (taxtvotoyoc). Athen[aeus] 11.483 E.
58. Xenophon, Cyropaedia 1.2.8. Critias in Athen[aeus] 11.483B. Plutarch, Lycur-
gus 9. The ayuBdvec that Otto Jahn (Beschr[eibung] d[er] Vasen[sammlung], p. xciii,
note 650) did not explain are the turned-in lips. See the section of a kothon shown here.
59. Mus{eo] borb[ornico] 2, vol. 13, pl. 49. The deinos pictured on page 520, top,
is from [Giuseppe Fiorelli,] Notizia dei vasi depinti rinvenuti a Cuma nel 1856, posse-
duti [da sua] A. Reale il conte di Siracusa.
60. See Didron’s Annales [archéologiques| 2 [(1845)]: 363 and 3 [(1846)]: 207.
61. Published with other similar vessels from the period in the Illustrated London
News, 1849.
62. Mus[eo] borb[onico,] vol. 6, pl. 11; vol. 10, pl. 14.
63. Passages from ancient writings relevant to this and other vessels can be found
in the above-mentioned works on the classification of ancient vessels by Panofka,
Gerhard, and Letronne. Otherwise see especially O. Jahn, Beschreibung der Vasen-
sammlung ..., xcvi. For the cyathus, see the woodcut on page 497, bottom.
64. This is particularly true if one disregards those exceptional cases in which the
belly is a relatively subordinate part in both size and importance. The spoon is an
example of such a vessel that reveals its function outwardly in all its parts and thus is
meant to be viewed aesthetically.
65. If one compares one thousand eggs, no two will be identical, and yet none will
be less elegant than any other.
66. The egg, with its absolutely smooth surface, never suggests the idea that the
shell might need reinforcement in holding its contents together. The general form is in
itself an adequate symbol of the idea of which the egg is perhaps the most perfect
expression.
67. Certainly technical progress, principally the spread of the potter’s wheel, was a
contributing factor in bringing about this contrast in the ornamental treatment of this

Soy
 Semper

particular part of the vase. Yet if only technical reasons had prevailed, then people
would also have stopped marking the active (functioning) parts of the vessel with struc-
tural symbols. The opposite is, in fact, the case.
68. In this respect vase paintings are entirely comparable with Polygnotos’s ancient
wall paintings or even Egypt’s painted column cladding. Trajan’s Column. Columns
with painted images from the Christian period. See the illustrations on pages 468; 469;
474; 475, bottom; 479, top; 487; 490; 513, top; 515, bottom; 520, bottom.
69. See the rich vessels of this type in the works of Piranesi and [Henry] Moses.
70. Our sculptors could also take note of this in their works of monumental art.
71. They are therefore also a feature of the elegant and slender vessels of the per-
fected style.
72. See below for the technical origin and significance of these motifs.
73. See figures on pages 485, bottom left; 507, bottom; 510; 515, top; 516, top. See
also Brongniart’s atlas in his Traité d[es] a[rts] c[éramiques] for Celtic, Germanic, and
ancient Tyrrhenian pottery, pls. 20, 21, 29; Birch, History of Ancient Pottery, 2:202.
74. See figures on pages 475, bottom; 476; 477; 480, bottom; 490, bottom; 492,
top right.
75. See accompanying illustration of such a stand in terra-cotta (Berlin Museum).
See also the amphora with tall separate stand on page 474, top. A similar specimen from
an earlier period, with its associated vase, is described by Cav[aliere Giovanni Ghe-
rardo] de Rossi, Mon[umenti] ined{iti] (1851): 36 (fig. on p. 538, bottom right).
76. See Piranesi, Moses, and (for the southern Italic vessels) Gerhard’s Apulian
vase images in Berlin.
77. The figures on pages 474; 501, bottom; 515, bottom; 516, top; as well as other
examples, show how these simplest types can be developed.
78. Certainly spouts with a symbolic quality —for example, lion heads spouting
water
— are seen on gutters and are thus functional.
79. On this difference, see the prolegomena, pages 90 ff.
80. See the figure on page 479, top right, and the one on page 547, top.
81. The two parts of an ear-shaped handle are even more clearly separated on the
illustrated amphora handle, found along with many similar ones in Alexandria, Egypt.
On the refined metal hand hydriae of the Alexandrian period this articulation of the
handle is usually emphasized at the transitional point dividing the two parts of the
handle by a thumb support in the shape of a leaf, a finger, and so on (see pp. 509; 546 a).
82. It is scarcely necessary to point out that the angle but not the position of the
handle is fixed by this line. It is clear that if the horizontal surface of the liquid and the
direction of the spout coincide in pouring, then according to the given rule the angle of
the handle to the horizon will be forty-five degrees.
83. See also the figures on pages 473, 474, 496, 497, 500, and so on.
84. For this and the nature of this symbolism, see chapter 4 of volume 1, pages 333 ff.
85. The most famous and splendid example of a very richly developed knob form
is the crown of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens.
 CEUAPR AER SS Ix

Ceramics
B. Technical-Historical'

§ 116 Ceramic Materials and Their Properties Determine the

General Ceramic Style
Alumina, which occurs in nature in combination with the most varied propor-
tions of silica and water, is the “primeval material” of ceramics, that is, the
material whose general, physical, and chemical properties establish the princi-
pal features of the ceramic style insofar as it is governed by material factors.
This material’s special properties— governed by the proportions of the mix-
ture, by the addition of other materials, by still unexplained natural effects, by
special treatment and preparation of the paste, and by other circumstances—
impart a specific character to the principal features of the ceramic style.
The general properties of the alum compounds to be considered first are
their plasticity or malleability. All artistic products made from them are there-
fore of the type originally made from a soft paste. As the most general family
feature, this applies even to ceramic works made not from a soft paste but
from solid materials such as stone, metal, wood, and so on. The primeval
material of the technique to which they belong, based on their intended use,
retains its ancient claim, although this does not mean that the claim of the
material of which they are actually made may be denied.
Plasticity, although it is the first requirement for the making and shaping
of pastes, nevertheless imposes practical limits, for a paste that is too plastic
dries heavy and uneven. Objects made from such a paste suffer significant dis-
tortions and are inclined to crack even when merely dried, and of course
much more so when fired.
If when modeling one wishes to be assured of the practical and therefore
aesthetic success of one’s work, one should control the putty knife or wheel to
achieve the artistic goal with a less plastic paste: to achieve it in a way that is
different but no less adequate and perhaps even better. Shaping plastic works
when they are still wet—as with plaster casts—only appears to remove the
reasons for observing certain limits in the exploitation of the plastic proper-
ties of the modeling paste. Instead it increases the problems discussed when-
ever plaster models are to be faithfully executed in other materials, such as
stone or cast metal.
In this regard, the greatest sculptors of our century have violated the laws
of style by treating metal, and to an even greater extent stone, too plastically;
that is, when modeling they did not give sufficient thought to the material to

559
 Semper

be used for the final execution and thus translated the forms too literally into
a stone or metal style. In this regard the ancients, and indeed — despite their
stylistic boldness —the masters of the Renaissance, were far superior to us.
Our potters and ceramic artists are guilty of a similar disregard for style in
that they find it convenient to copy certain models from antiquity, the Middle
Ages, or the Renaissance in an unsuitable material, one with properties com-
pletely foreign to those of the paste from which they were originally made and
to some extent emerged.
Every paste demands its particular style. Highly plastic infusible sculptor’s
clay (argile plastique), which needs a hot firing, must be treated differently
from potter’s clay (argile figuline), which is less plastic but hardens at a more
moderate heat, or from marl (marne), which has a quick and fluid paste.
Finally, all of these differ from porcelain clay, which is less plastic but can be
treated and cut in a semidry state as a solid body. The latter acquires its shin-
ing properties only through intense heat and the use of additives, and it gener-
ally presents very significant technical difficulties.
Style, however, does not depend solely on the correct treatment of a paste
and the exploitation of its properties; a fine sense of style is also at work in
appropriately and correctly selecting and preparing a plastic material for spe-
cific, predetermined purposes. A material’s properties can be modified by
additives and by special treatment. For example, one can degrease if the mate-
rial is too plastic or, conversely, prepare the paste with melts (fondants), so
that it acquires the ability to sinter down to a completely watertight paste at a
certain moderate heat level—or by any other method desired.
Along with plasticity, the fundamental property of all ceramic materials is
homogeneity. Here a distinction has to be made between the homogeneity of
the components and the homogeneity of the paste. The former is not always
necessary — indeed, it is usually harmful —so it is deliberately avoided by adding
degreasing agents and caementa (chamotte) to the paste. These coarse-grained,
fire-resistant additives, often of foreign materials, neutralize the homogeneity
of the paste in a consistent and even way. Quiet points are created in the paste,
and these reduce both its fragility after it is fired and the danger of cracking
(whether through temperature variations or shock), because the coarser ele-
ments distributed through the paste interrupt the regular oscillations that
transmit incipient cracks by shooting them radially through the body. These
coarser components perform the same service as the holes one bores in mirrors
at the end of a crack to prevent it from advancing.
Here, as in most cases, aesthetic considerations go hand in hand with prac-
tical ones. The coarse-grained material requires more robust treatment and
leaves no room for fastidious, painstakingly precise work. It favors a broader
style and therefore has been despised from time immemorial by minor artists
in all branches of art (and by those who recognize nothing but a certain mate-
rial technical perfection in the execution of a work). Yet one should also
know where it is inappropriate. To illustrate what has been said, let us take
the imitations of Arabic glazed tiles produced in the famed Minton factory

560
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

and used by English architect Owen Jones for his Alhambra courtyard in the
[Crystal] Palace in Sydenham. In his description of this work, this architect
rightly bemoaned the excessive mechanical perfection of the tiles, and the
excessively even and fine-grained faience paste of which they were made. This
encourages the glaze to flake off and achieves for the artist and the true con-
noisseur of art little more than mechanically lifeless regularity. It lacks the
magic produced in the original work — which emerges true and fresh precisely
because of its roughness, technical accidents, and aberrations.
Modern imitators of old majolica meet with the same reproach (namely,
choosing a paste that is too fine and too homogeneous), quite apart from the
lack of style shown by our excessively colorful palette of glazes. It was the
coarser paste of old faience, which required far lower heat levels to be fully
fired, that helped to create and individualize the style we admire in it.
The generalization for all branches of art emerges so naturally from these
observations on the ceramic style that it is left to the reader to make.3 In addi-
tion, it scarcely needs to be stated explicitly that the heterogeneity of the parts
of a plastic mass need not be visible everywhere and absolutely, neither for
technical nor for aesthetic reasons. It is possible to achieve the properties of
heterogeneous pastes emphasized above, at least to a large extent, by other
means (hard porcelain is heat-resistant; soft porcelain is shockproof; both are
very homogeneous). Similarly, certain ceramic products require a fine mate-
rial that is as homogeneous as possible for aesthetic reasons as well.
The second kind of homogeneity, that of the pastes, is necessary in all
cases; the success of almost all works of pottery is dependent upon it. It con-
sists in maximum uniformity of density and composition of the pastes, which
means that products shrink (that is, decrease in volume) as evenly as possible
when drying and firing.*
In terms of the effects just mentioned this homogeneity corresponds to the
greatest possible uniformity of depth, and this is one of the most important
stylistic factors to consider in the ceramic and plastic arts. This factor has
been transferred from ceramics to sculpture, into metal and stone, and indeed
even into architecture. Let us take the example of a large porcelain vase with
handles that are excessively thick. The massive size of such handles> causes
them to shrink at a different rate when fired than the thin body of the belly to
which they belong, and thus they break off, contort the belly to which they are
attached, or even smash it to pieces.®
The glorious balance —the calm—of antique sculptural forms may not be
explained solely by this technical element of style, but at least it is fully in
keeping with it. Here too, because of the abundance of the material that offers
itself for consideration, I have to content myself with suggestions, leaving the
reader to pursue the thoughts they provoke.
In addition to the two noted properties of plasticity and homogeneity in
sculptural bodies, a third important common property that needs to be con-
sidered is their ability to harden. This is necessary first of all for works to
acquire strength and durability. It also makes them impermeable to liquids,

561
 Semper

and for a variety of reasons their utility depends on that. Finally, hardening is
necessary for other reasons that are partly aesthetic—for example, to give the
vessel or work the properties and appearance of marble or other, more pre-
cious stones, such as rock crystal, onyx, and opal (porcelain, glass).
The first purpose (strength and durability) is the most important and most
essential; it was thus the earliest objective to be addressed. To some extent, it
can be achieved simply by drying the ware in the sun, which eliminates the
need for certain properties of plastic materials that are required if the object is
to be hardened by firing. It precludes, however, other properties and advan-
tages of materials that are not resistant to fire. The southern peoples of antiq-
uity and today (Egyptians, Indians, South Sea Islanders) have clung to the use
of sun-baked vessels, or they give their pots made of easily fused marl only an
imperfect degree of strength by using a very low heat.
Firing at a higher temperature is necessary only if the vessel must be made
impermeable to water and fat. Yet this end can also be achieved with the aid
of varnishes and glazes, a means that is probably older than firing, which may
originally have only served the purpose of hardening this varnish. The inven-
tion of lead glaze allowed our potters to make their work completely imper-
meable without using an intense heat and without giving up their soft and
highly fluid marl pastes.
The Greeks were not aware of or did not use these means; at the same
time, however, their plastic pastes were too fluid to be rendered impermeable
by high temperatures. As a result, almost all antique pots are not fully imper-
meable to water, fat, and other fluids. This material disadvantage was the
cost paid for certain formal advantages contingent on materials unsuited to
other processes. In addition to these aesthetic-formal advantages, there is the
practical one that a porous object fired at low heat is more resistant to rapid
temperature change and does not crack as easily. A high temperature requires
above all a mixture capable of withstanding it; the properties that enable a
paste to do this are not entirely favorable to shaping form and thus impose a
limit. In addition, objects made from such pastes shrink and distort more
under high heat than clayware fired at low heat does. If this kind of plastic
work is to be entirely successful, a number of precautions have to be taken to
solve the countless problems presented. Finally, these objects, when they suc-
ceed, are fragile and not heat-resistant —and in precise proportion to the
greater or lesser functionality of the forms they were given. It follows from
this that the form selected should be the one best suited to these problems
and that this form must differ from that which a more convenient material
would permit.
For that reason alone, it is a questionable practice to imitate antique vases
in faience or porcelain, even though those vases offer the fewest problems for
copying in any material because (as has already been shown) the Greek style is
less dependent on materials than any other.
But lightweight enameled metal pitchers, silver goblets, or cast bronze can-

562
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

delabras copied in hard earthenware or porcelain—in short, the majority of the

most recent products of high ceramics, when not based on the baroque forms
of the last century —are definite sins of the modern potter’s art against ceramic
style, even though they sometimes demonstrate what can be achieved with the
aid of a perfect technique that runs counter to nature and the laws of style.
The ancients too often transposed fashions and transferred them from one
technique to another, but they did this with true artistic insight and a correct
understanding of what was involved. Thus, for example, the oldest Greek clay
vases are to all appearances copies of metal vessels, since pottery in the Orient
was elevated to an art only along with and after the use of metal for the man-
ufacture of such vessels. However, as soon as they were able to divine the
nature of this new material, fired clay, they created a pottery style distinct
from the metal style— particularly once the potter’s wheel gained acceptance.
The style was modified keenly and delicately according to the materials and
methods used.

§ 117 The Interrelation between the Sediments of the Earth’s Crust and the
History of Pottery
In general, the ceramic style is dependent on the three properties of all plastic
pastes: plasticity, homogeneity, and the ability to harden. Following the order
adhered to thus far, it remains to demonstrate which modifications to the
style are conditioned by the special properties of the various plastic materials
used in ceramics. Only by means of an examination of the details will these
generally stated principles of style acquire practical value and prove them-
selves correct. A remarkable (although explicable) interrelation between the
history of ceramics and that of geology makes it possible to arrange geologi-
cally the ceramic works that interest us. For indeed we find that the oldest
pottery works, in a certain sense also the most imperfect, are made of materi-
als that came into being as a result of the most recent earth formations. These
types of soils may be close to the surface and easy to acquire, but clays of
the oldest formations were often more accessible and yet were never used in
ancient times, except by the Chinese.
In contrast, modern pottery —not yet three centuries old—has been made
of materials that, although often accessible, belong to the earth’s earliest for-
mations and strata. And the most remarkable thing is that pottery of the
middle period, like faience and earthenware, is made of clays from the middle
ages of the earth’s crust! Therefore if we relate those of our stylistic observa-
tions that are more specific to the material first to the earliest clay formations
and then proceed progressively to the oldest, the history of ceramics will offer
us a series of explanatory examples running in parallel.
As this history is at the same time the history of the inventions made for
processing materials for ceramics, the question of the dependence of ceramic
style on the procedures and tools of the potter’s art can be combined with
these same observations on the history of style.”

563
 Semper

§118 The Oldest Pottery: Its Plastic Tendency

The grotto of Miremont near Sarlat (France) contains fragments of pots mixed
with the bones of antediluvian creatures. This is considered proof that these
creatures were coeval with the people who made these pots.
In the province of Moxosa in South America, Alcide d’Aubigny discovered
a seam of coal containing potsherds, two meters above the brine of Pampas
clay, in an eight-meter layer of washed-up sand, and concluded that this area
had been populated before being flooded to a depth of six to eight meters.
These things (and many others) constitute the evidence for an antediluvian
art! Yet what makes these remnants of the earliest industry far more interest-
ing than their real or imaginary provenance from antediluvian times is that
they show that all peoples revered and used clay vessels in the same way for
burials, and they bear a striking similarity and stylistic resemblance to vessels
from very distant regions. The same clay mixtures (with slight variations), the
same coatings, the same basic forms, the same decorative motifs!
Celtic, Teutonic, Scandinavian, and Slavic pots are very difficult to distin-
guish from one another. The oldest products of Greco-Italic pottery are in the

Celtic and Germanic pots

same style. They have in common an earthy, fairly soft, porous, dull, and only
lightly fired paste made from alluvial soil, and their trochoidal or undevel-
oped forms often approach the shape of a top at their upper and lower
extremities. They lack any glazed coating but show the first stirrings of a plas-
tic tendency whose motifs are very well suited to mitigating and covering the
imperfections of freehand form. The motifs are probably calculated in part to
strengthen the fragile hollow body by means of undulations. The same prin-
ciple is valid in toreutics, for which reason quite similar decorations (straps,
fluting, indentations, and bosses) also occur on the most ancient weapons,
utensils, and jewelry made of metal.
The pottery of the Indo-Germanic tribes was at this stage when they over-
ran Europe, but probably the older tribes who occupied Italy and Greece had
already advanced the plasticity of this art. Still, as I have said, most ancient
Etruscan clay vessels are similar to Celtic-Teutonic ones or are, at least, very
close to those of more advanced techniques with respect to the principles of
their formal and decorative style. They were neither made on the wheel nor
glazed (lustrous); they were carelessly modeled, thick walled, and uneven in the
thickness of their walls; they belong to pottery’s infancy. They were made of a

564
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

Oldest Etruscan clay vessels

coarse brown-gray terra-cotta, incompletely fired, and like Teutonic urns they
were decorated with rows of dots and engraved lines in spirals and zigzags,
bosses, and depressions. Other vessels already show significant progress in
plasticity, that is, the art of sculpting clay.8 They were all painted, either simply
with paint, or, like Egyptian and Assyrian ones, over a coat of white pipe clay.?
From these crude beginnings a unique and highly developed plastic pottery
arose on the classical soil of Greece and Italy that forms a vivid contrast with
pottery made on the wheel in terms of style and manner of execution. This
contrast deserves all the more consideration since the very same phenomenon
is to be found in works of antique architecture, as will be shown later.
The next step in this plastic tendency is represented by so-called Tyr-
rhenian vases, made of lightly fired blackish terra-cotta, which lacked a glaze
but were probably quite often painted on the surface. They were still, like the
oldest pots, made entirely by hand; their raised and depressed decorations
recall somewhat the old linear motifs (principally in transitional areas, as
in fig. a). Later the plastic principle displays itself in more sculptural ways
(fig. b). It is probable that metallurgy —a skill that the Italic peoples possessed

OS,<Gon

SEMIS

Tyrrhenian and Samian vases

from time immemorial, especially in the case of embossing—led pottery in

this new direction. A division of vase walls into zones took place, a shallow,
already figurative relief filled them, principles of stamping and molding were
adopted, as were ancient Asiatic animal motifs—all of which proclaim the
influence of embossed metalwork and either a traditional or an imported
Asian sensitivity.
Later this figurative decoration became more refined and there was a

565
 Semper

return to conventional ornament but conceived more freely in terms of struc-

ture and symbolism, mixed with natural motifs like vine tendrils, ivy, masks,
festoons, and so on. This was the golden age of plastic pottery, which is said
to have flourished first and in its most beautiful form in Greece (on Samos
and other islands of the archipelago)."° It fell into a decline at home, however,
at the same time the Romans carried it from Italy across the whole of the
antique world, where it became the dominant style in the years immediately
before and after the birth of Christ. Its characteristic feature was still its dis-
avowal in principle of the potter’s wheel,"! although by the late imperial period
the Romans had introduced this Asian or Egyptian instrument into Greece
and Italy and it had, in fact, already become dominant.

§ 119 The Upheaval in Pottery Caused by the Introduction of the Potter’s Wheel
But let us turn our glance back to those oldest Eastern seats of culture, where
since time immemorial pottery had taken a quite different path, thanks to the
invention of the potter’s wheel.” There this ancient invention had the nega-
tive effect of impoverishing and devaluing pottery without inspiring new
artistic ideas. Pottery was disdained in Egypt, and probably Asia as well, and
practiced only by slaves; it served no function other than necessity, or it pro-
duced cheap substitutes for costly display vessels in metal and precious stones.
Here it adopted a thoroughly industrial tendency and in this regard achieved
more than it ever had, or had even aspired to, among the Greeks.
Yet it was left to the Greeks to revive this fallen art using the same tool
that had brought about its downfall when used by barbarian slaves (probably
skilled but lacking any true artistry). Unlike the barbarians, the Greeks con-
sidered pottery high art and held it in such esteem that medals were struck for
and monuments erected to excellent potters.!4

Archaic flower vessel

The introduction of the potter’s wheel in Greece occurred before historical

times. Homer knew of it. Potsherds with ornaments reminiscent of the most
ancient Indo-Germanic motives have been found deep under the rubble of
old Mycenae, and these were obviously produced with the potter’s wheel (see
p. 377). By contrast, old-Hellenic pots were very rarely made in the manner of

566
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

the so-called Tyrrhenian ones, namely freehand. They are plastically deco-
rated vessels covered with a layer of clay. Still, they suffice to convince us of
the common origin of ancient Greek and Italic plastic pottery.

§ 120 Oligochrome Hellenic Ceramics

The classification of Hellenic vase art that we assume here when contrasting
oligochrome with polychrome pottery emphasizes distinctions hitherto thought
of as less essential. We are moved to do this by the connection we have fre-
quently hinted at between the differences in pottery described here and similar
distinctions between the early and late architecture, sculpture, and painting
of the Greeks. We will adhere to the guiding idea of this book, according
to which the ultimate point of reference of everything considered will be
architecture.
Because of space constraints, a rigorous history of Hellenic pottery should
not be expected. Moreover, it is sufficient for our purposes to record and
identify only certain crucial elements of this history. For reasons of clarity and
brevity this will be done in schematic form. We will consider first the mate-
rial-technical aspects, then the general formal character, and finally the deco-
rative element and pictorial adornment of vases.

a. Archaic style !¢

1. Material-Technical
The introduction of the potter’s wheel and glazing (the latter as a substitute
for the original pipe-clay ground) required first a completely new paste. The
glaze was completely unusable with the old terra-cotta paste, and the wheel
could be used for coarser products only.
What was needed was a denser paste that would withstand greater heat,
with a fine grain and plasticity suited to producing the most delicate forms on
the potter’s wheel. The hardness that the paste acquired in firing and the
smoothness and purity of its surface would have made it more appropriate to
the new technique.
Pottery arrived at this material change in stages and only by experimenta-
tion. The paste used for the oldest glazed pots was still coarse-grained and did
not have the beautiful orange-yellow tone for which it was striving. It was at
times almost as hard as earthenware (grés): a dirty gray-yellow paste, less
homogeneous and less fine than that used in later times when the technique
had been perfected.!” The customary leukoma (clay ground) of the oldest
terra-cotta was still mixed with a black glaze, a technical process that was in
fact never completely abandoned and, as we will see, later came back into use.
The glaze (luster) is matte and brownish black. Its unevenness and stains
reveal a lack of certainty in the practice of firing. In addition to the black
glaze, there were purple, reddish brown, and white tints. They were applied as
a slip or covering tint and fixed (imperfectly) on the ground by firing.
The outlines of the decorations and figures were done by scratching the

567
 Semper

black ground to reveal the clay ground below. This work shows the greatest
neatness and assurance with the needle.!8

2. General Character and Form

With the exception of the large pithoi (wine jars) found on Thera, these ves-
sels are usually of moderate size and squat in form. Some are capriciously
shaped, with bold interruptions in the continuity of the curves, with sharply
concluding trochoidal bellies, and bold connections at the extremities. The
structural significance of the ornament is not yet consciously asserted. The
most usual forms are deep bowls, pouring vessels, boxes, and ointment bot-
tles. The finer differences in character between the different types are blurred
by the typical, less distinctly marked basic forms.

3. Decoration
Some (the oldest?) are completely coated with black glaze (luster); some have
a clay base with linear decoration, in the spirit of the most ancient Indo-
Germanic pots, though better executed. The oldest are completely covered
with lines, dots, and the like; later the lattice of lines is simplified and covers
only the belly, while other parts are marked with rings.
Painted animal friezes, either simply applied or surrounding the pot in sev-
eral parallel zones, represent a further development of this style. This decora-
tive principle is almost identical with that of the plastic decorations of the
second group of Tyrrhenian vases, and their probable origin in the art of
metal vessels has already been suggested. Though the beginnings of both
styles (plastic and painted) were identical, what emerged from them demon-
strated the higher artistic gifts of the Greek tribe in comparison to Italic
peoples, whose spirits had not yet broken with tradition. A peculiar feature of
the decoration of the oldest oligochrome vases is the flowers, balls, crosses,
meshes, and so on, scattered irregularly over the surface. Perhaps they are
technical in origin and, like the so-called flies in porcelain manufacture, origi-
nally intended to hide certain technical problems.
The last group of these oldest Hellenic vases already shows human figures
alongside the Asiatic zones of animals and monsters: first, it seems, as mean-
ingless copies of well-known Oriental types. They include winged genies,
gods, symbols, half in profile, half full face, who are taming or slaughtering
lions, panthers, ostriches, swans, or similar beasts.
Next we have the first attempts to impose a new native fable on these for-
eign and mythical monsters. For example, the game of charades between the
previously inactive Oriental sphinx (who meant nothing to the Greeks) and
Hermes or Pan was probably one of the earliest comical and humorous transi-
tions in representational treatment. It was a reference, not an action, but
enough to motivate the group. Perhaps an even more obvious way to make
this desired reference in the most sensual way possible was to use animal
hunts, human combat, or erotic wresting. Thus it became possible to connect
whole figure friezes around a center; and this method was soon exploited to

568
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

Sphinx and Hermes

the full. Finally this striving for artistic combinations developed into the first
pre-Homeric circle of myths that—being both Oriental and Greek —is still
largely incomprehensible or obscure, thanks to all its monstrous combina-
tions of human and animal forms.

b. Hellenic style
I understand by this term the whole of oligochrome pottery from the periods
of the growth, blossoming, and decline of Greek culture down to the Romans,
who also expressed their power through the arts. Wherever Rome’s absolute
power extended, the Roman pottery style, together with Roman architecture,
quickly became dominant. Still, I exclude Greek polychrome ceramics from
this heading, although it also falls into this period, which was indeed the true
golden age of the arts.
Just as the general character of Greek architecture remained the same from
the beginning of temple building down to the Romans, so it was with the vase
style, although there are enormous differences between the early stages, the
great periods, and the times of decline.

1. Material-Technical
The first works of the Hellenic style proper were, in essence, little different
from archaic ceramics, although technical progress paralleling the progress in
the formal and decorative elements is already evident. The paste became finer
and harder, and its color was especially beautiful: its mild and yet saturated,
fiery orange tone was achieved through an admixture of red earth (rubra,
creta, bolus).2°
To enliven the visible clay ground the vessel was polished on a wheel
before firing, or the vessel was coated in whole or part with a very fine trans-
parent glaze. As techniques improved, this glaze acquired a very high degree
of thinness, evenness, and mildness of sheen; the black became even, flawless,

569
 Semper

and dark, and at times an attempt seems to have been made to achieve a
greenish shade. The painting method remained the same at first, namely,
black figures and decorations set on the vessel’s red ground. The vessel, how-
ever, was essentially black, as red zones were set aside only to make room for
the black figures.
Techniques changed about the time the style became fully developed. The
redness of the paste became less fiery and more gentle and harmonious; fig-
ures and decorations were avoided on this pale ground, and the rest of the pot
was filled out with black. The internal outline and details of the figures were
no longer incised but drawn freehand on the light ground using a paintbrush
(black) with incredible precision and refinement. Yet for a time the earlier
technique survived alongside the later one, both being used at the same time;
indeed, they were frequently combined on one and the same object.
It was now no longer necessary to frame the image
— an important stylistic
innovation and an advantage that offered the hand room for a grander artistic
conception but also favored laxer principles of style.
In the first period of Hellenic pottery, when the figures were still set off in
black, other colors were used as well. They were fixed with the aid of a pipe-
clay underlay (engobe) or used as a color coating without this underlay. Apart
from white, only brown, purple, yellow, and red were generally used.2! Green
and blue were very rare.
This oligochromy, characteristic of the oldest vases, is lost in the middle
period and it becomes almost monochrome. Later, toward the end of the
fourth century, the potter’s art returns to polychromy. A quite new and dis-
tinct polychrome pottery arises, marking a third period of this art.

2. General-Formal
The greatest glory of Greek ceramics was not the much lauded art it bestowed
on its works; in the best period this was subordinated appropriately to the
whole. It was rather the work as a whole: its form, its general character as an
artistic unity, and the fact that it was the result of the freest, most conscious,
and most perfect mastery of all functional (or ethical), material, and technical
conditions of form. The struggle with these zonformal elements was no longer
betrayed in the form at all, which emancipated the form completely from those
elements: as the beautiful in itself, it had no purpose outside of itself. The eman-
cipation from the nonformal elements of form in this sense was the constant
aim of Hellenic art on a large and small scale. It also describes the history of
Hellenic pottery, which struggled toward the same goal in this field of art that
was essentially subordinate—and going beyond it, after it had been achieved.
In the early period of Hellenic pottery the forms were still half archaic: the
paste, the potter’s wheel, and the procedures of painting and glazing still ham-
pered the potter’s will. The metallurgic style is still being directly imitated and
barbarian traditions are still making their presence felt. Yet in comparison
with archaic work there is more variety, and above all the forms have a more
homogeneous sweep, a result of a better handling and understanding of the

570
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

kick wheel. The first steps along this new road were not necessarily more
beautiful. The bold trochoidal forms of the better archaic vessels, with their
direct transitions from convex to concave, became rounded, ornate, and volu-
minous. There are two-handled amphorae, three-handled hydriae, dishes,
oenochoes, lecythi, and chalices— most of considerable size. The vessels illus-
trated on pages 474, bottom; 510; and 538 are in this style.
Nevertheless, progress toward something more powerful and skillful can
still be seen in the wealth of expression and also in the tautness of vigorous
and elastic curves, which increasingly approached the profile of the Attic-
Doric echinus. Some of the hardness of the archaic style remained (for example,
in the transition from the neck to the belly, and in the first section of the base,
and elsewhere); the continuity of curves was repeatedly broken, and the struc-
tural significance of certain symbols still does not seem to have been clearly
recognized and handled in this way. A certain monotony in the brightness of
the decoration, which had still not quite shaken off the Oriental principle, is
in keeping with the luxuriant forms, although a tendency toward the opposite
system of harmony (subordinating contrasting styles around a central con-
necting point) was already awakening.?2
A radical change of direction ensued, namely, toward an artificial austerity
of decorative forms. If this style had remained dominant and ossified into a
canon, it would have resisted the highest development of the arts and true
Hellenism in general. It held sway during the time of the tyrants, in the era of
Peisistratus, and up to the Persian Wars. Its vase forms are correct, of flawless
technical perfection, but confined. Linear continuity (for example, from the
base of the neck to the belly, the base of the dish, handle transitions) has
already been raised to a principle.
The less conventional, more absolute-formalistic, Doric-Ionic Atticism
mediated the contrasts and led to the highest perfection of art. It achieved the
most lively formal development in this field by liberating ceramics from rules
that hindered individual understanding of the artistic theme. The amphorae,
ceremonial hydriae, and bowls dating from the height of the most perfect artis-
tic pottery in Greece, with their simple and decorative but at the same time vig-
orously free and powerful curves and transitions, are among the most beautiful
of human creations. See the illustrations on pages 474, top; 475, bottom
right; 478, top; 485, bottom right; 486, top right; 501, right; 502; 515, bot-
tom; 520, bottom; and so on.
When we move beyond this apex of the perfection in Greek ceramics, we
arrive at a field in which another technique became dominant.

3. Decoration
Decoration follows the course of development and describes its stations more
definitely than the general form does, especially for those who read the work
of art, that is, the majority of art lovers.
In the beginning the traditional Asian types were sorted; some were incor-
porated into the national cycle of myths and endowed with a Hellenic point

bya
 Semper

of reference. Others were initially relegated to subordinate friezes and later

discarded or transformed into domestic pets.
In the first case, however, this acceptance into a mythical frame of refer-
ence was not an elevation, although the motifs enabled the Greeks to give
unity to the composition in the manner already suggested.
Often one suspects this frame of reference was invented by potters who, in
an entirely irreligious manner, were humorously mocking these large and
humdrum beasts and mysterious winged monsters. One by one they were dis-
carded in favor of such Greek heroes as Bellerophon, Perseus, Hercules, and
Theseus —the symbols of emancipation from ancient Asiatic tradition and
barbarism. Then ceramic painting seems to have taken a further step, initially
in alliance with epic poetry. Increasingly, like a nut throwing off its shell, the
plot shed the surrounding chorus of figures whose unifying point it formed. It
did away with its figurative nature and concentrated itself. From this arose the
rich and finely pleated, well-groomed, aristocratic and distinguished, man-
nered, controlled yet luxuriant, and always highly elegant art of the era of
tyrants. Then came the midsummer of Attic art and finally the mature and
emancipated paintings of the Macedonian autumn. These styles were reflected
only feebly in the modest works of potters of this final age, for the period of
personal creativity and initiative in this minor art had long since ceased.
Sufficient instructive material on this topic can be found in the main
works on Greek vase paintings, and I should like to close this topic with this
reference.?3

S124 Polychrome Hellenic Ceramics

This emerged directly from the old terra-cotta style, which was coated with
white pipe clay and painted. It continued to exist alongside the oligochro-
matic style, which was limited by the procedures of turning and baking the
glaze, but returned to dominance again during the great blossoming of Athen-
ian art. Even some of the fine turned and glazed pottery done in the archaic
style still has the traditional white pipe-clay ground combined with a black
glaze, in addition to colors other than white, most often red, violet, and yel-
low iron oxides.”4
The relation of glass vases in the later style to the most ancient painted
terra-cotta can also be seen in the use of white slip as an underlay for the bare
skin of women and children and for certain ornamental parts. Perhaps this
underlay was coated with varnishes (flesh tone, yellow) that did not resist the
ravages of time because they were not fixed by firing. Lucanian vases were
treated in the same way. (Since the most recent discoveries of colored vases in
the Crimea and elsewhere, in general there is more and more doubt about
whether and to what extent polychrome painting extended to vessels with red
scenes on a black ground, the oligochromy of which seemed certain.)
On the whole we can accept the predominance of an oligochrome color
system in the early and middle period of Hellenic pottery, as the kiln necessary
for the glazing process permitted only a restricted selection of colors.

Die
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

Things were different at the time of the highest development of art, which
in architecture and sculpture coincides with the use of white marble and ivory
for works in the high style.
At the same time these material changes were taking place, which were
bound to bring about significant changes of style, we see the rise of a kind of
vase painting that is no longer dependent on the potter’s kiln. This was a
florid polychrome painting on a white clay ground, prepared by the tradi-
tional method using encaustic glaze colors that could be fixed at a very low
heat, which colors other than earth colors and metal oxides could withstand.
This encaustic painting —a kind of mosaic—consisted of a multicolored,
amberlike, more or less opaque paste, containing silica as well as wax; I do
not dare guess whether it was used simply as a finely pounded frit and tinge-
ing agent or as an essential component of a waterglass-like composition.
It is well preserved in part on the well-known Attic lecythi (oil flasks), and it
has left behind clear traces on the architectural parts of Attic marble temples.?5
Here again there is a question of whether the pipe-clay ground of this
encaustic painting remained entirely white or was bound with the lively paste
colors of the actual subject by a varnish that has since disappeared. This can
be considered a certainty in the majority of cases, at least according to the
laws of analogy and taste.6
According to Brongniart, even the hard glaze of Greek vases has changed
completely as a result of the dampness to which they have been exposed for
millennia. We can only be amazed that any trace of paint or gilding has remained
on these more fragile vessels. Another kind of polychrome vessel— black with
red figures and covered with a brightly colored, pipe-clay impasto — differs
from the polychrome vases with white leakoma produced during the finest
period that frequently (presumably always) had a rose ground. The former are
found mostly in the Crimea, near Panticapaeum (Kerch), and some were pro-
duced during the fine period. Paint and impasto have survived only in a few
places, even on male figures. Where both have disappeared the red figures are
not particularly different from the usual unpainted ones.?’

§ 122 Roman Ceramics

It remains surprising, however, that Roman pottery, although neither techni-
cally nor formally perfect, became dominant within a few centuries. Not only
did the barbarians, Gauls, Britons, and Germans rapidly learn and practice
Roman techniques, but the Egyptians, Asians, and even the Greeks (whose
ceramics alone would have made them immortal) dropped their native pro-
cesses to adopt Roman technique and forms, without any pressure to do so.
The secret behind this rapid entrenchment of Roman influence (both in this
narrow field of pottery and in general) is explained in part by the faithful
retention of the oldest Indo-Germanic cultural forms, which was in keeping
with the conservative character of the common people but which also raised
the Roman idea of world domination to a political principle. This was proba-
bly done with an eye to the common bonds of the oldest traditions, in which

573
 Semper

the conquered and conqueror met, which would serve to secure the con-
queror’s rule and help each culture to understand the other. The glorious pot-
tery of the Greeks was a revolutionary achievement. It broke with tradition in
that the free Hellenic spirit recognized all the formal consequences of the new
procedure and adopted it. The Romans did the opposite: they used the wheel
for their own purposes without according it any rights but instead making it
serve their traditional system of forms. The wheel assisted only in creating the
more general form that was already supplied by tradition; it prepared a form
perfected by the sculptor, a form privileged from time immemorial. To be
sure, practical progress was made. The machine facilitated the stamping,
rolling, casting, and pressing of forms, as it did the soldering (borrowed from
metalwork) and stitching of decorative emblems onto the naked turned form.
Here the potter found the secret to the fastest and cheapest way to reproduce
his work.
The Romans knew how to use glaze as well as the wheel. No Greek “lus-
ter” is as gleamingly clear and pure as the transparent rose glaze on the red
Roman ware called Samian. Yet they never hit upon the idea of exploiting
glaze artistically, that is, applying the painterly decorative principle to hard-
fired ware as well. Coloring and painting ceased as soon as pottery had to
be fired.?8
In terms of the outlines and general character of these Roman pots, a slight
distinction can be discerned between the most ancient Italic, Celtic, and even
Teutonic pots. It became all the more striking as the Roman works separated
themselves from those rough works of barbarian potters through their tech-
nical perfection and the plastic decorations that accompanied the decline in
the arts.
These characteristic features of Roman ceramics will have to suffice here,
as attention to their details yields far less of stylistic interest than is the case
with Greek pottery. Roman potters improved and facilitated only the material
presentation,2? following known principles from the Greco-Italic legacy. These
features will also suffice as context for our views, to be presented later, on the
rapport between the architecture and pottery of this conquering race.

§ 123 Southern Italic Pottery

Southern Italic pottery represents a remarkable compromise between the
ancient Italic plastic principle and the smooth-surfaced painted pottery the
Greeks produced using the wheel and the glazing kiln. Old traditions are here
reconciled with revolution, and this happened at the time of the late Mace-
donian flowering of Greek art, shortly before Pyrrhus and the Roman sub-
jugation of southern Italy. It occurred in part through the luxury of the
tendentious and emblematized metal vessels that then generally came from
Asia, but tradition may also have had an effect, through the retention of a
certain plastic element in pottery. Large Lucanian display vessels are remark-
able in this regard: a conservative spirit combines with degeneracies of an
already confused artistic style to produce a very peculiar mixture. We do not

574
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

mean the plastic treatment of their extremities, which is more beautiful and
much more decisive on certain Campanian vases with plastic and painted dec-
orations (from Cumae, Nola, Capua), but the recurrence of the oldest formal
and decorative motifs. For instance, a number of archaic animal friezes that
had long been abandoned now reappear in the somewhat modernized form of
hunts, battles of Amazons or centaurs, and so on. Additionally we have myste-
rious and incomprehensible Asiatic burial rites performed by draped and cos-
tumed actors—everything on these vases breathes sensuality and gloom
simultaneously. This plastic and painted southern Italic style also has analo-
gies to architecture.
There is one other important branch of ancient pottery to be considered—
terra-cotta applied to architecture and sculpture. We do not think it belongs
to this section, however, but in part to the realm of dressing techniques and
especially to the next part, which will treat architecture.

§ 124 The Middle Ages and Recent Times

Soft-Glaze Lead Pottery (Brongniart’s Poterie Tendre Vernisée)

Ceramics never again regained the importance that it had in antiquity, whether
considered in itself or in relation to architecture and the arts in general.
After textiles, ceramics made the greatest contribution to establishing and
enriching the formal language of art, which modeled itself in part on analogy
to what was valid in ceramics. No one denies the influence of the potter’s
wheel on the development of the Doric echinus, whose history in fact runs
parallel with the Corinthian hydria.3° Similarly, the influence of sculpture can
be seen in the origin of the Corinthian capital. The principle of articulating
and connecting parts by dividing and linking symbols, as applied to column
orders, is contained in the principle of vase articulation. And finally there is
no doubt about the most intimate of links between architectural and sculp-
tural polychromy and antique vase painting and specifically about the prece-
dence of the latter.
In addition to this, so to speak, principled and legislative effect, ancient
pottery was also technically and materially a highly integral part of architec-
ture, that is, in the actual execution of buildings.
It is only in this last regard that medieval pottery’s contribution to the
architecture of the period was of almost equal importance in the Orient and
in the Occident; the principles of architecture, however, were not affected by
it. Rather, architecture exerted a unilateral pressure on the other arts through-
out the Middle Ages. To a certain extent, the old principles of style and the
relation between architecture and ceramics were stood on their head.3!
Thus medieval pottery’s most important inventions and more significant
products usually served immediate architectural purposes, which places them
in other sections of this book. Examples include flagstone floors, terra-cotta
paneling, glazed colored roof tiles, even building bricks and beautiful medi-
eval stove tiles.

S75
 Semper

Still, the Middle Ages were not lacking in truly artistic pottery. It had sur-
vived as a respected force and had even gained new impetus, chiefly in the
Orient among the Arabs and Moors, and also in Byzantium, even though
architecture also extended its dominant influence to this field as well.
Soft-glaze lead pottery was known to the Egyptians, to the Chaldeans, and
even to the Romans. Among the Romans, however, it seems never to have
acquired the status of fine pottery and was probably not really accepted until
Rome was already in decline (see Brongniart, 2:96). The Chinese and Japanese
also knew of common lead glazing at a very early period, but according to
Brongniart they made little use of it.
In Asia it seems to have remained in traditional use, for it can be found on
the glazed bricks and tiles of the most ancient Arabian monuments in Syria
and Egypt (ninth century). Theophilus was unaware of it, but, according to
[Giovanni Battista] Passeri, lead-glazed terra-cotta rosettes (perhaps of Orien-
tal manufacture) were used in Italy as early as the eleventh century. Baron
[Isidore-Justin-Séverin] Taylor found the north’s oldest known lead-glazed
pottery in France (twelfth century) in tombs at the ancient abbey of Jumiéges.
This would seem to refute the usual assumption that a potter from Schlett-
stadt in Alsace invented the process as late as the thirteenth century.
The use of this procedure in artistic pottery seems to have been very lim-
ited in the Middle Ages; or, at least, remnants of it are rare. I believe it was not
practiced beyond the early fifteenth century. It played a dazzling role in the
service of architecture, as has already been said.
Its characteristics are a porous, opaque, colored, and somewhat brittle
paste, covered with a thick, transparent, fairly soft, shiny, and colored glaze.
It does not need to be fired or glazed at intense heat, a fact that facilitated its
manufacture and was also of stylistic importance. The means of formal deco-
ration were thereby increased but the thick glaze also imposed certain limits.
The difficulty of using polychrome glazes led to the plastic decoration of
this kind of pottery. In fact most ancient glazed pottery is plastically deco-
rated and covered with a dark (usually green) glaze. Yet alternating glazes
of different colors were also used with skill and success (Brongniart, 2:14).
Plastically decorated stove tiles were customary as early as the thirteenth cen-
tury (chateau de Saléve near Geneva).32
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

Stove in Tirol Castle, near Merano

The main centers of this kind of pottery from the fourteenth to the seven-
teenth century were south and central Germany, especially Bavaria and
Franconia (where it still flourishes).33 Another process involved applying
decorative forms to depressions and borders, then wholly or partially filling
the low areas with monochrome or polychrome glazes. The imposed patterns
gave the floor tiles the roughness they needed to compensate for the excessive
smoothness of the lead glaze. There are examples in the older palaces of Genoa
and in the loggia of the Vatican.
A related process is pressed sunken surface ornamentation with transpar-
ent lead glaze; popular in the early Middle Ages, this has recently been taken
up again.*4
The process of applying a shallow colored relief to a ground of a different
color is just as old. Either a slip is used or the relief is formed in silhouette and
glued on; the whole thing is then coated with the same glaze.>5 This too has
been imitated, in Munich for example.
Finally we have true enamel painting on a glazed ground. Neither the
genre of this earthenware nor its intended use permits unduly refined enamel
painting, especially where a classically conceived theme or a simple mono-
chrome or oligochrome ornamental treatment is appropriate. In this regard
Oriental and medieval glazed tiles provide excellent models— without com-
pelling one to imitate some meaningless fourteenth-century heraldry or a line
of Arabian latticework interwoven with flowers.36

ByTT
 Semper

§ 125 Majolica; Faience

Recent investigations suggest that the invention of an opaque tin glaze as a
coating for terra-cotta is ancient. It was used by the Assyrians and Babylonians
to cover walls. In the Orient it probably survived throughout the Middle Ages,
from the fall of the first Persian empire to the present. It was taken to Spain by
the Moors and to Sicily by the Saracens, and it was used for architectural pur-
poses and in fine pottery for the manufacture of special display utensils.
This invention probably first came to us through the Moors in Spain, who
continued to manufacture under Christian rule, and down to the early seven-
teenth century, their shimmering gold, floral pottery (mostly large bowls)
decorated with coats of arms. The island of Majorca was a center for this
industry, hence the name majolica.37 Its style is still medieval and architec-
tural; the decoration is latticework interwoven with flowers and arabesques,
imitating similar patterns on the stucco walls and paneling of Moorish build-
ings. Such pottery, and also Arabian display fabrics and metalwork, spread
this latticework style across Europe, so that even in the antique-inspired
Renaissance it was much imitated in the decorative arts and in decorative
painting (arabesques).
In Italy Luca Della Robbia was the first to make enameled faience true to
the technically precise definition of this clayware.38 His relation with Spanish
potters is uncertain, but the great independence of direction and style in his
famous ware, which owed nothing to Spanish-Moorish principles of treat-
ment or decoration, also seems to attest to his originality.3°
Luca’s so-called terra invetria is true enameled faience. Its inventor used it
first instead of terra-cotta for sculptural and architectural purposes and then
for pottery proper (more relevant here). It takes its name from Faenza, one of
its principal places of fabrication. Its style is mainly plastic and the added
enamel makes its effect only by means of an opaque, opalescent, milky white
shimmer. Colors and arabesques are added only later, and the milky white
ground, a characteristic of true Tuscan faience, is always predominant.
Whereas Luca applied his invention in an entirely new and personal way,
free of all Oriental influence, in terms of plastic form, the opposite is the case
with the so-called majolica ware of the Umbrian school of pottery. For a long
time it retained the Oriental principle of surface decoration, inspired in part
by actual Arabic models*° and in part by the laudable aim of hiding the poor,
impure glaze of so-called mezza majolica.*!
In the end the mutual influence and rivalry between manufacturers pro-
duced a mixture of both tendencies. The Tuscan school adopted the arabesque;
the Umbrian added the charm of plastic abundance to its color decoration.
Admittedly a certain originality was sacrificed in each case.
Perhaps stimulated by [Della] Robbia’s invention, but working more or less
independently, faience artists emerged in the sixteenth century in Nuremberg
and Augsburg, northern Italy, Switzerland, and France. All strove to harmo-
nize Oriental surface decoration (which is justified in the case of this tech-
nique) with the plastic tendency shown by Luca.

578
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

Material-Technical
Faience paste consists of purified pottery clay (argile figuline), clay marl, and
sand.
The calcium content limits the plasticity of the paste, makes it fusible at a
certain temperature, and reduces its resistance to temperature changes, but it
also gives it more whiteness, greater affinity with the glaze, more sonority,
and hardness.*2
It can be shaped by hand both on the potter’s wheel and on the turner’s
wheel. It can also be conveniently molded.
The porousness and unassuming gray color of the paste are hidden behind
a thick opaque enamel coating, which cracks slightly. Applying and fixing this
coating present the greatest difficulties in manufacturing this ware.
This glaze is always opaque and contains lead and tin.#
It is applied by immersion or by sprinkling and is always quite thick, thus
the fineness and sharpness of a form are blunted by the milky paste.
Faience is fired twice with the kiln at a heat between cherry red and pale
red. The final firing (to fix the enamel) is the most intense.
The enamel is colored as a paste, or the (glassy) colors can be added later
to the finished ware by firing at a low heat. For the first procedure the choice
of colors for tinting the enamel paste is limited: antimonium oxide (Naples
yellow), cobalt oxide, copper protoxide, manganese peroxide (violet). The
greatest difficulty in this technique is thus the enameling process and the
intense heat that it requires.

Formal
The most difficult aspect of this technique is the production of large, perfectly
smooth enamel surfaces without blemishes, flaws, or cracks. Therefore this
difficulty should be avoided and large surfaces should not be forcibly imposed
where they are not necessary. Luca Della Robbia was following this principle
in treating his work plastically, specifically with a robust plasticity, owing to
the enamel’s thick skin, which makes the forms sticky if it is not taken into
account.
The same technique was followed by Bernard Palissy, the German masters,
and in the related pottery by the unknown masters of Henry II ware.
The Umbrian masters dealt with this difficulty indirectly by covering flaws
in the glaze with paint. Contemporary faience manufacturers make much of
producing stove tiles that are as large, white, pure, even, and crack-free as pos-
sible. They succeed astonishingly well, but it is not art. All good faience ovens
from earlier periods (there are many in and around Zurich and Winterthur,
incidentally) take the opposite approach —namely, they avoid large surfaces,
undue extravagance, moldings, and parts. They have a plastic treatment — not
defiance but a well-considered approach to the technical difficulties.
Conceived in a different way and produced under different formal circum-
stances, the famed Alhambra vases are examples of a genuine faience style.
They follow the Asiatic principle of surface decoration and are covered with

S79
 Semper

slightly raised bandwork, with the sunken spaces filled with enamel of another
color—a niello process, as it were. The imperfections associated with faience
glaze became a welcome pretext for the master to make something rich, beau-
tiful, and characteristic. At the same time, they are true models of style for
molded vessels, which should not be treated in the same way as turned vessels.
Because it is difficult to take them out of the mold and avoid faults in the form
if they are perfectly round, it is better that molded ware should not be circular
but oval or polygonal. The surface should not be left flat but should be ribbed
and provided with every kind of richness that the molding process itself
can provide. It should be convenient for the molding process —in other
words, flat, not sunken. This facilitates removal from the mold and confines
the cost difference between rich objects and simple ones to the single expense
of the model. All these principles are met perfectly by the Alhambra vase and
the exquisite Henry II vessels, executed on the same principle but much more
elegantly.44

§ 126 Fine Faience, Earthenware (Faience Fine)

As is often the case, this invention probably came about during the pursuit
of quite different ends—at least the oldest known fine faience dates from the
time when majolica manufacture, favored by fashion, was experiencing a con-
siderable upturn and the secret of opaque tin glazing was not yet universally
known. Alternative means — the greatest and most consequential inventions—
were adopted and over time displaced old procedures that could no longer be
produced. According to Brongniart, neither the people of antiquity nor the
Chinese and Japanese were familiar with fine faience, which would make this
the only significant invention in pottery of which Europe can boast.*5
We have noted (p. 578) that so-called mezza majolica served for a time as
a substitute for true majolica. The plain, porous terra-cotta paste was covered
with a thin crust of pipe clay, the white color of which shone through the
transparent glaze and made it look opaque. This procedure led to the idea of
omitting the terra-cotta core completely and making the whole vessel of a
paste whose main ingredient was pure pipe clay (argile plastique).
The proof that invention took this course (that here too the skin led to the
core) is found in the remarkable and beautiful so-called Henry II vases, which
are of uncertain origin. According to Brongniart’s investigations, they consist
of a smooth molded core of pipe clay, covered with a second crust of even
finer and whiter paste into which every kind of arabesque and pattern has
been engraved and filled with a different colored paste of the same consis-
tency.*¢ The tasteful surface decoration thereby achieved serves as a base for
freely modeled plastic ornament that is very fine and sharp, in the spirit of the
early Lombard Renaissance: small figures, masks, medallions, fruit clusters,
consoles, and other such motifs.
The even, transparent coating is very shiny, though extraordinarily thin,
with a tinge of yellow.

580
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

In addition to the colors mentioned —the yellow-white ground, ocher, and

brown —green, purple, black, blue, and, more rarely, lacquer red were also used.
The technique used, as well as the formal and decorative treatment, is
entirely appropriate to the light and very plastic material, so that it is scarcely
possible to imagine these products in another material. They are genuine
examples of the freest reign of art within the bounds of style.
This new invention, so glorious in its first results, seems to have been dis-
placed for almost two centuries by majolica and earthenware —the branches
of ceramics that were characteristic of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Europe. It was not until the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that fine
faience found new standing, beginning in England. Around 1700 a Stafford-
shire potter happened upon the idea of mixing black flint (which forms a
white siliceous powder when fired) into the pipe clay and thus producing fine
faience paste.4”
Yet the glaze was still the old lead glaze; it was not until 1760 that the
transparent, hard, very brilliant, somewhat yellowish, crystalline leaded glaze
was introduced, presumably from France, and the combination of the two
inventions gave us genuine fine faience.
Jonas Wedgwood, a Staffordshire potter, garnered the fruits of all previous
labors when, around 1763, he set up an automated factory. At an incredible
level of productivity, this factory manufactured so-called queen’s ware: a very
fine, watertight earthenware with an appropriately transparent, very brilliant
and hard, although still somewhat yellow glaze.
In addition to the genuine fine faience produced in countless varieties by
Wedgwood and his heirs and other manufacturers, these factories also created
a number of other ceramic combinations that will be discussed in the next
section.
The English, and manufacturers in Staffordshire in particular, invented
many new procedures meant to facilitate faience production and its material-
functional and formal-decorative perfection.
But the true refinement of this ware did not keep pace with all this inde-
fatigable effort, or at least this is true of the formal-decorative elements.
Thus, for example, there has been a continual decline in form of the ordi-
nary dinner service since the time of the light, finely profiled, elegantly simple
dishes, tureens, and plates produced at Wedgwood’s factory at the beginning
of this century, which correctly have the true faience style. This is especially
true after the invention and distribution of the softly and dully contoured,
heavy faience with a blue-white coating*® and colorfully decorated with large
floral patterns.4? This faience owes its origin entirely to an effort to reduce its
diameter, as the soft and thick forms are certainly more appropriate to the
simpler and cheaper moulage a la croiite process.
The indefatigable search for invention of which I speak actually restricted
itself almost entirely to easier and more practical mechanical means that
promised almost unlimited decorative possibilities—because every conceivable

581
 Semper

procedure of plastic and colored decoration was used for fine faience. In this
regard it proved a far more durable material than genuine porcelain and the
many other inventions that drove fine faience from the realm of artistic pot-
tery, to which it properly belonged.
As confirmation of these remarks, I should like to append here a short
review of the decorative means that have been considered for fine faience and
pottery in general.

1. Colored Paste
According to Brongniart, only brownish red, black, and yellow are used for
fine faience. He does not explain why other shades cannot be used, such as the
excellent prasinum or the light apple green that has such an agreeable effect in
Chinese porcelain vessels.5°

2. Coloring the Surface under the Glaze

A. BY MEANS OF A SLIP (ENGOBAGE)

This means is peculiar to fine faience, as it were, and is closely connected to its
history (see above). It can be used in a painterly as well as in a plastic sense.
Indeed, its color and plastic effects can be combined by pressing ornaments
into a ground of a different color or applying them in some other way and
glazing the surface with its slightly raised pattern—a process used most hap-
pily by the Chinese.

B. BY MEANS OF GLAZE (VITRIFIABLE) COLORS

Slip is clayey; here the colors are vitrifiable. This process is appropriate for
modern conditions, since it is easily mechanized. Printed paper is pasted to the
vessel and then washed off again, leaving the vitreous printer’s ink (made of
glazed paint) behind; the vessel is then coated and fired. It is a very dangerous
process, as a minimum expenditure of time, work, and art can provide any
desired level of rich surface decoration. The proof of this is found in the many
improper uses to which it has been put. The principles to be followed here
have already been listed, in part in volume 1 under the rubric “Cover” and in
part in the previous chapter in the discussion of vessel parts.
The less expensive and the easier it is to be extravagant, the more carefully
should the following be avoided: quasi-meaningful monotony (this is the
worst and most boring fault; it has long been, and still is, the fashion for
plates, cups, and chamber pots), excessive decoration, incongruity of the dec-
oration to the object as a whole, excessive color, and so on.
Diaper ornament, acanthus work, patches and arabesques, motifs distrib-
uted over the surfaces in Chinese fashion without following strict rules, and
so on, are all to be recommended, because the irregularities of execution that
are inevitable when manufacturing is done quickly are thereby less conspicu-
ous. Conversely, regular figures, zones, egg-and-dart ornaments, and straight
lines should all be avoided.

582
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

3. Colored Glaze (Fond de Couleur)

The technical difficulties presented by this process seem to be the reason it is
used only for opaque faience and porcelain and only rarely for fine faience.°1
In a more limited sense —namely, when the glaze is colored with a little
cobalt oxide —it is indeed used a great deal. The cold white produced by this
means can never satisfy refined taste. Bluish white tableware seems gray in
candlelight, but the somewhat greenish porcelain of the Chinese acquires its
wonderfully mild and magical color oly in such light. This is not chance but
a precisely calculated effect.

4. Coloring over the Glaze

There are two kinds, namely, (a) that applied under intense heat and (b) that
applied in a sagger box (weak or intense).
The former can be applied to an unfired glaze and fused at the same time,
or it can be applied when the overall glaze has been fired, in which case a sec-
ond, equally intense firing is required to make the glaze fuse with the homoge-
neous second application (whether it consists of a ground or of individual
painted decorations).
Application in a sagger box (feu de moufle) is a similar technique using
enamel paints that fuse more easily; such paints do not fuse as thoroughly to
the less fusible ground but adhere to it like a glaze cover. Grounds of this kind
present greater difficulties than do those requiring intense heat.52 This tech-
nique is therefore reserved for painted glaze decorations that frequently require
three or more firings before they are complete. For this purpose, enamel col-
ors are used, either transparent or opaque (through the addition of Chinese
white). Alternatively, the desired effect can be achieved by applying the trans-
parent colors over opaque ones as a varnish, but this requires multiple firings,
which can be risky, time-consuming, and also expensive.
The laboriousness of this procedure makes its extensive use in faience
manufacture more difficult, which is why porcelain has almost completely
displaced faience from the field of luxury pottery.
If similar results, and perhaps even more effective ones, can be achieved less
expensively by dint of ingenious invention, the application of these means in
more commercial kinds of pottery should be confined to decoration. The imi-
tation and mass production of true art painting on luxury vessels could only be
considered a vulgar stylistic error. Even apart from the previously expressed
reservations about reproducing things of great significance by mechanical
means, making wares cheaply calls for a certain restraint in the use of the
formal-decorative means and motifs; that is their right, I would even say their
prerogative. Nothing is more vulgar than richness produced with ease; nothing
is more dignified than harmony of condition and appearance. We cannot over-
estimate the benefit that has accrued from the ability to manufacture incredibly
cheap and yet excellent, durable, and healthy earthenware for the lower
classes, indeed for all classes of society. Yet the illusory luxury that has crept
into all levels of society in conjunction with these and other inexpensive

583
 Semper

products can certainly not be counted among these benefits. Even less can it
be seen as a gain for art or for instilling a true sense of art into the people.
This is true in general, and enamel painting has only incidentally brought it
to mind.

5. Gilding, Platinizing, and Silverplating

The difficulties of combining metallic surface decoration with an enamel crust
derive in part from the modern European preference for shiny metal—an
effect that the ancients deliberately avoided, and for which even Orientals
(and especially the Chinese) have no taste at all. If the idea of polishing metal
decorations is abandoned, then the above-mentioned procedure of transfer-
ring a gold pattern to the ground with the aid of printed paper and applying a
layer of glaze over it is a fertile and inexpensive way to create rich decoration.
Because of the great ease with which such richness can be created, a warning
against its obvious misuse was issued above. See the article on gilding under
“Metallurgy” (§ 187) for the selection of parts to be gilded, as well as other
material on this particular surface decoration.

§ 127 Earthenware (Brongniart’s Grés Cérame)

The fact that the oldest clay products that reveal the decorative urge are not
models for but imitations of other objects put to the same purpose and made
not of earth but of ore, precious metals, or hard stones, is entirely compatible
with our view of the antiquity of civilization and the arts.
Much has already been said about the relationship of Greco-Italic vases to
vessels in embossed sheet metal or cast metal. Certain ceramic products made
by the Egyptians, wrongly referred to as Egyptian porcelain, are closer to our
present subject. They are made of a very thin sandy paste—a kind of sand
conglomerate or rather a ceramic imitation of sandstone.
This material was used to make idols, votive vessels, amulets, children’s
toys, and other objects, as a substitute for similar ones in metal and stone.
That is why they were glazed a bronzelike green-blue or made to imitate mar-
ble, jasper, and alabaster.
Ordinary terra-cotta covered with pipe clay is perhaps older evidence of
this taste; it is marbled with watercolor and lacquered with resin. No less
remarkable are the real stone vessels and other stone objects covered with
glass painting, including one from the period of Cheops, together with his
escutcheon. The British Museum has a beautiful artificially marbled sand-
stone vessel with the escutcheon of Thutmose I. Smaller objects made of this
glazed earthenware —in the true sense of the word—are fashioned from a
hard agalmatolite. Some are still encrusted with enamel paste and lavishly
carved.53 We should point out the remarkable connection between this glazed
earthenware and the already noted glazing of Egyptian sandstone and granite
monuments.
The nature of these easily fused stone glazes has yet to be adequately stud-
ied. Such study would probably extend further our knowledge of ancient

584
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

Glazed stoneware (Egypt)

encaustic painting, whose relationship to potter’s glaze is confirmed by all the

new findings that are continually appearing. Certain nuances of the above-
mentioned Egyptian and Hellenic earthenware that become apparent as a
result of a peculiar kind of colored mosaic glazing seem to me to be of partic-
ular interest in this regard. In technical terms this glazing is identical to the
wax-encrusted ornaments on white-marbled Athenian buildings, the execu-
tion of which likewise corresponds to that of the wax paintings on white-
ground lecythi (also to mosaic-like incrustations in wax paint). See Birch, 1:79
and 2:172.
Contemporary practice must also be interested in the ancients’ easily
fused, almost waterglass-like stone glazes, as they touch upon a technical
problem much discussed today that has yet to be solved. In fact we are dealing
with a real glaze (not a simple coating of waterglass) that serves as a protec-
tive covering for surfaces, one that is so easily fused that it can be applied to
limestone, marble, ivory, and similar surfaces at low heat levels. As I have
said, the ancients discovered wax incrustation in this way, but it always had
a silica content. The dolium-like vessel reproduced here from Birch was found

Glazed stoneware vase (Vulci)

by [Secondiano] Campanari in a tomb near Vulci. The ground is a pale sea

green (prasinum) with inlaid light and dark blue fields. Other no less remark-
able products of the most ancient pottery contrast with this to a certain
extent, such as the so-called polished pots made of very hard terra-cotta. They
are a kind of true earthenware, but their shine is mechanically obtained on a
polishing bench.
Others were coated beforehand with pipe clay (chalk?) and then polished.
This is thus an imitation not of stone but of the polishing technique applied to
hard stone.

585
 Semper

We feel justified in mentioning these products of the most ancient pottery

here, together with their distinctive stylistic and technical features, because an
insight into such early efforts by a highly intelligent industrial people is highly
informative with regard to the practical question of earthenware style.54
It is indeed possible to identify a common ground for the branches of
ceramics still to be dealt with—earthenware, hard- and soft-paste porcelain,
and finally glass—in that all imitate hard, more or less precious kinds of
stone. This will at least provide a stylistic footing for treating and assessing
them, although naturally the styles of these three types of noble pottery are
also affected by their other characteristics.
Building on our discussion of Egyptian earthenware, we would like to iso-
late three other factors in the history of this limited branch of pottery to
demonstrate the enormous range of treatments that could be achieved while
still rigorously observing the stylistic limits and demands imposed by its tech-
niques. Finally we will show how even in this narrow field of activity the best
our industry can do, with all the means at its disposal, is simply to imitate
ancient practices, since anything it adds is nothing but a complete lack of style
intended to spoil the ancient motives.
First let us consider Chinese earthenware. From the earliest times almost
all household pottery in China and Japan was made of earthenware, and even
this ordinary ware is distinguished by its functional and careful design and
usually by its beautiful and harmonious coloring as well. Moreover, many
such purely functional objects are remarkable for their size, such as the well-
known Chinese garden chairs. Their compact forms reveal an equal under-
standing of the functional and technical aspects. Their colored glazes (fonds
de couleurs au grand feu), although everywhere rich and shiny in their color-
ing, nevertheless evolved from the process and thus were in harmony with any
surroundings.°5
The finer earthenware is made from a paste excellent in terms of its fine-
ness, hardness, regular thickness, and color.
Two kinds of earthenware can be distinguished. The first is not glazed but
(in the main, at least) matte. The principal motif of its decoration is the deeply
splendid color of the matte paste,5¢ which serves as a background to sculpted
work of a different color or to thickly applied, extraordinarily brilliant enamel,
sometimes raised in relief. In addition, there is a very restrained and tasteful
trimming in matte gold—its secret must have eluded our manufacturers, for
they criticize it for precisely this effect.5”
Even the irregular distribution of plastic and colored decoration over the
mostly compact vessel bodies (a principle, incidentally, that governs the whole
of the Chinese-Japanese art industry) is a felicitous aspect of the decoration of
earthenware in general. It is completely justified as an alternative to Egyptian
symmetry and strict rhythm.
The second type of earthenware owes its color either to a yellow-white
covering of pipe clay with a transparent feldspar glaze or to a colored general
glaze fired under intense heat. These are the coarser and larger products,

586
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

among them the famed Chinese tiles. Very frequently the inside of earthen-
ware (unglazed on the outside) is very shiny and evenly coated with a trans-
parent crystal glaze.
In Europe earthenware appears as an artistic ware only in the late Middle
Ages. The justly praised German-Flemish earthenware drinking vessels, which
still exist in quantity, although they have not been made for two centuries,
amply demonstrate the unusual productivity of the potteries in which they
were produced.°8
These potteries were active chiefly in the Rhine valley, where the best pipe
clay can be found (Vallendar, Grenzhausen, and other places not far from
Koblenz), but also in Augsburg, Nuremberg, Regensburg, Mansfeld, and other
areas of Germany.
The oldest of them date from the first quarter of the fifteenth century, and
their manufacture ceased in the first quarter of the seventeenth century.
They are very different both in their technique and in their stylistic-formal
treatment, the latter being primarily plastic.

Italian pitcher

They are usually simply compact, cylindrical, conical, and ovoid basic
forms but finely profiled on the outside on a solid base. They are appropriate
to the plastic but intensely fired paste, impressed with surface decoration con-
sisting of shallow raised patterns— motifs reminiscent of metal predecessors.
The reliefs are usually shallow, pressed on, and suitable for molding, but fre-
quently they are also applied (attached to the paste while soft) to the sculp-
tural work en ronde bosse. Some are very baroque, especially the Flemish
products, which are distinguished by their plastic fullness.
Nor do they lack colored decoration, which is particularly effective against
the naturally colored clay ground, a principle that gives these products a sty-
listic significance of their own. Another characteristic feature of this earthen-
ware style is moderate use of gold and tin incrustation, which is usually integral
or entirely necessary to complete the work of art.

587
 Semper

Brongniart distinguishes four varieties, according to the color of their

paste and their glaze:
1. Pearl-gray and white earthenware without glaze —the rarest.
2. Matte yellow or white with red, yellow, or bronze yellow glaze—the
commonest.
3. Brown earthenware with very black, full, or partial glaze—often with
richly colored decoration in easily fused enamel.
4. Bluish earthenware with a hint of rock salt and with blue, or some-
times purple, patterns and ornaments of large flowers — usually treated
very plastically.
The first results of the attempt to imitate Chinese porcelain should also be
counted as historic earthenware. In my opinion they are as much a credit to
their inventor [Johann Friedrich] Béttger as his more brilliant success in dis-
covering the true secret of porcelain manufacture. They show him to be a gen-
uine master of form; nothing could correspond more closely to the true style
of the finest of all earthenware than his unarticulated but extremely elegant,
thin, light, highly polished coffee cups in a splendidly consistent porphyry
paste. It would be interesting to know whether the idea of polishing the hard
porphyry-like material came from him or whether he was guided by ancient
Egyptian models. I think that this process has quite unjustly been ignored by
modern industry almost entirely.5? Advances in machinery ought to allow us
to employ this procedure cheaply.
Bottger’s invention was followed by the first achievements in this genre in
England by the brothers [John and David] Elers, who were his pupils. But this
brings us to the most recent history of earthenware production, which will be
dealt with shortly.
All these varied products, and the many procedures used to make them, do
almost equal justice to the essence of earthenware.°?
Can we say the same about the most recent earthenware products? What
progress or inventions can our age boast in this realm?
We have to answer the first of these questions immediately in the negative,
although modern earthenware has usually confined itself to imitation. With
its plethora of material improvements and new technical knowledge, it has
been unable to free itself from its bonds.
First let us consider England. What the famed Wedgwood has invented
and achieved in this field is still the basis of England’s manufacturing bril-
liance and preeminence. He first made a name for himself with his imitations
of Greco-Italic terra-cotta vases, after which he gave the name Etruria to his
new workshop near Stoke on Trent. They have or are intended to have the
character of an artistic ware that belongs to a quite different field of ceramics,
and therefore they are lacking in originality —like everything that Wedgwood
has manufactured to this taste and for modern uses. His great merit remains
his purification of such taste.
Let us turn to the Portland vase and other similar earthenware vessels.
The original is already a copy, but actually only in its material composition

588
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

(translucent glass) and in its technical execution (an onyx vessel). It has a
milky white glass coating on a dark, likewise translucent base, carved like a
cameo so that only the subjects in white remain on the ground and blend into
it in the finest tints. The freedom of the glass artist shows in the treatment of
these subjects, where there are no restraints like those caused by the random-
ness of stone. Artistic treatment is subject to very different rules and accidents
in true cameos.
Wedgwood uses opaque earthenware instead of glass and he glues his fig-
ures to the ground with steel molds. Here too there is a related yet different
technique! It should have modified the imitation but it did not. It is the same
but also not the same, yet not different enough!
Nevertheless, this seeming return to antique technical traditions performs
a great service. Let us consider next his imitation of Chinese earthenware, of
which —next to the above-noted Chinese vessel—I have a fine specimen before
me. The jasper ground is almost as fine and fiery as that of the Chinese pot;
the enamel glaze is in fact not as rich and fresh but nevertheless approaches
the Chinese. The form is Greek (an amphora flattened below) with freely scat-
tered (somewhat too Chinese) flowers. The mixing of a Greek form with
Chinese decoration is daring but not absolutely reprehensible, as the (Chinese)
material has something of a mediating effect. I consider this kind of Wedg-
wood earthenware to be the most felicitous, but it is “caviar for the masses.”
So-called Parian ware (Parian marble) —and similar ware —is not an inven-
tion but a modification of biscuit porcelain, using a transitional material
between earthenware and artificial porcelain (porcelaine tendre). It is used for
bas-reliefs and even for statuettes and groups, but at the expense of good
taste. For this material shrinks more than usual and unevenly when fired,
which thwarts the sculptor’s calculations; also any plastic sharpness and
refinement softens under intense heat. A colossus whose legs give out at least
suggests its own weight, but a shrunken, cockeyed manikin is eerie, almost
horrifying. Yet people love these little sugar men! This ware turns out better
when used for vessels but the form must be good, that is, appropriate to the
difficulties of preserving it.
That is all! No, actually, some mention must be made of the most recent
earthenware in the plastic style: mismatches of Gustav Adolph’s wretched
jerkin with crinoline, drunken beer-hall humor on a large scale. In better cases
this is the academic condescension of an idle sculptor who indulges in Val-
halla forms that might be permissible cast in plaster but not in fired earthen-
ware; in the best cases they are defective copies of good medieval models.
The last-named monstrosities of taste are more the responsibility of Conti-
nental earthenware manufacturers than the English. The Germans are the
worst, but France too produces nothing but mannered stuff.¢!
When I reflect upon the best the Continent has produced since Bottger in
this genre of earthenware, my eye alights on those brown Bunzlau coffeepots,
a happy memory of my early youth.
They were a true and genuine earthenware — grainy, solid, shockproof,

589
 Semper

fireproof, and yet light, with a very simple basic form that was by no means
unbeautiful since it suited its function. They had a very pleasing rust-colored
glazing and a grayish white, cracked lining —in short, excellent in every respect
and yet in no way an imitation of anything earlier. And I should also mention
the large-scale and meritorious return to polished earthenware attempted by
[Paul] Utzschneider, the owner of the factory in Sarreguemines. It consists of a
very hard, red and dark green, so-called porphyry and jasper paste, from which
large vases, candelabras, chimneypieces, and even column shafts are made and
polished by grinding. This ware, however, has no market, and is in fact dispro-
portionately expensive. It was a good idea but too ambitious.
Thus the reply to the second question posed above concerning present-day
inventions in this field would have to be somewhat apologetic. One would
have to respond immediately that the present has shown itself to be neither
especially clever nor active in the use of the ancients, whose usefulness has by
no means been exhausted. I need only refer back to the beautiful mosaic
enamels of the most ancient Egyptian-Etruscan earthenware, to which a remark
and illustration were devoted above.

§ 128 Porcelain

a. Hard-Paste Porcelain (Brongniart’s Porcelaine Dure)

The old archaeological riddle of the antique murrhine vases has yet to be
solved. Still, from everything that we know from ancient writers about these
precious, translucent, purple-shimmering vessels, we may be certain that there
was genuine and false murrhine ware: the former was carved from a fossil; the
latter was an imitation made from paste. The latter was most probably not
porcelain, as otherwise shards of this nondegradable material would have
been found here and there, as the use of false murrhine ware was fairly exten-
sive. It must have been opal glass, or some other degradable material in its
composition, which would account for the disappearance of all traces after so
many centuries.°2
Be that as it may, we can recognize Chinese porcelain as a result of pre-
cisely the same efforts, as a surrogate for vessels made of fossilized materials
for the same purpose, namely, the enjoyment of hot drinks and foods.*3
Chinese and Japanese porcelain satisfy this prerequisite —to the same extent
as they do their purpose and the difficult technique of porcelain manufacture.
They are luxury vessels intended for refined enjoyment. They always dis-
play their explicitly practical purpose, and within this realistic constraint,
which excludes the idealism of free artistic development, they are stylistically
correct and perfect. They also satisfy the idea of perfection to the same extent
by displaying a full mastery of technique that is also aware of its limits and
that asks everything of a difficult material except what is foreign or contradic-
tory to it. This mastery, in addition to its functionality, also seeks to empha-
size the special properties of porcelain and to exploit formally all the benefits
that it offers.°4

5910
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

But what gives this utilitarian porcelain, particularly the older vessels, its
special charm—in addition to the excellence of the paste and its technical
treatment, in addition to its functionality and material suitability to the applied
forms and decorations —is the above-noted quality that identifies vessels as
being made of artificial precious stones without in the least betraying the real
intention that the stones should deceive. They simply bear the mark of their
origin: as an artificial substitute for those Indian and Chinese vessels in pale
green, hard and translucent “jade” (not to be confused with common soap-
stone), decorated with valuable precious stones and gold threads, which are
the treasures of our Oriental collections.®
Their form (more turned, ground, and carved than modeled) suits this
gemlike character, but the latter is even more clearly visible in the inimitable
celadon color of their paste, sometimes tinged more with olive green, some-
times more with a clear sea green. The same is true of the decoration, which is
identical with the paste, in the form of a slightly raised or slightly sunken
pattern, or is identical with the stone glazing of this paste, in the form of a
shimmering enamel relief with either opaque or transparent colors. Whatever
other decorative means may be used, they always have this same character of
being intimately bound with and arising from the material.
Completely separate, then, are their fittings, that is, their external, usually
metal parts and settings, which again gives them the character of gem vessel
work, which requires the same fittings.®°
The early history of porcelain is obscure. According to [John Francis]
Davis, this invention came as late as the seventh century A.D.; according to
other sources it is as old as the history of China itself.¢7
The material and its treatment have remained essentially the same. It is
known to be kaolin (weathered gneiss or granite, consisting of silica, clay, and
water) mixed with feldspar (petuntse)¢’ as a vitrifying agent (fondant). At a
high temperature this mixture sinters into a flinty, fine, translucent paste.
When fired at that temperature, it acquires a very hard, transparent, and bril-
liant coating that contains quartz and feldspar but not metal.
The style of the objects produced, however, underwent very significant
changes over the centuries, even in China.
Baroque plastic taste—overornamentation; polygonal, angular, and natural-
istic forms instead of rotational surfaces; stilted new decorative motifs
— took
the place of the old gemlike style. Common soft soapstones and the baroque
carvings they made possible displaced the hard and noble yw and determined
the form and decoration that would alter the porcelain style, even though they
did not suit at all the flintlike paste produced by firing. The superior principle,
however, survived in China in simple domestic products, in tableware, tea
services, and the like, because their purpose protected them to some extent
from the degeneration of forms.
Since Béttger produced genuine porcelain paste around 1709 or 1711 in
Saxony, our porcelain manufacture has followed a very similar path. We must
acknowledge that the earliest European porcelain was best in terms of style

59
 Semper

and more generally; at least the early history of European porcelain style is the
most interesting and instructive for us, and porcelain of the previous century
generally had more poise than now, despite the improvements occasionally
produced by the admirable but vain efforts to direct and ennoble taste from
the top downward.”
Bottger’s first efforts seem to have been directed at making perfect copies
of genuine Chinese porcelain. He was so successful in this that it is difficult to
distinguish his wares from the real thing.
Later, under [Johann Gregorius] Horolt’s and [Johann Joachim] Kandler’s
direction, came the dawning of the plastic era of porcelain manufacture,
which abhorred everything regular and turned.
One has to admit that this original tendency fully met certain stylistic
demands imposed by porcelain, if one wishes to place these demands in the
foreground. One also has to concede that the countless flower calyxes glued
together with porcelain sludge to form a rich upper garment for an irregularly
shaped vase are appropriate both to the peculiar conditions imposed by the
plastic nature of porcelain paste and to the difficulties the intense heat required
from the kiln presents for the production of completely flawless simple forms.
In the meticulous and sweetly supple manner of the famous Meissen porcelain
groups one can sense the well-calculated influence of the uniquely plastic
kaolin paste, of the feldspar glaze covering the forms, and of the fierce heat of
the kiln twisting and blunting them!
These soft and charming little rococo dolls have nothing in common with
the wretched “Parians” of contemporary England. They justify themselves in
a quite different sense, but almost as effectively, by the sharp and succinct
forms appropriate to hard stone and, by extension, to hard-paste porcelain.
They and the things associated with them — painting with a filmy, bodiless
cassette enamel, careless treatment of forms, lax and blurred vegetal orna-
ment —confront, to a certain extent, the difficulties of material and technique
in a polite and supple fashion.
The history of porcelain is closely bound with the architectural history of
the eighteenth century, a fact to which far too little attention has been paid.
True rococo was born not in Paris or Versailles but in Dresden, the original
seat of the late baroque.
There it was developed and nurtured under the general influence of the
period’s lax manners but also under the particular influence of the porcelain
factory that was enormously popular at the luxurious court of Augustus the
Strong and his successors. From there rococo was transplanted by a Saxon
princess and her porcelain utensils to Versailles, where it matured into its
highest culture. The Zwinger, the richest and most perfect specimen of a still
naive rococo style (started in 1711 by the talented [Matthaus Daniel] Poppel-
mann); the (unfinished) Japanese Palace, which was to be encrusted with
Chinese and Saxon porcelain (started in 1715 and brought to its present form
by Poppelmann, [Gottfried] Kn6ffler, and [Jean de] Bodt around 1729); and
the palace at Pillnitz, a less imaginative direct imitation of Chinese baroque—

59/2
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

these are the most outstanding of the many monuments of the age that gave
the Saxon court its present countenance, just some of the many types from the
various phases of rococo and the late baroque.
Kandler even essayed a colossus, though fortunately he had no luck. The
thirty-six-inch-high statue of Saint Peter and the head of the colossal eques-
trian statue of King Augustus (on whose model, still extant, Kandler labored
four years) are—apart from a few large beasts —all that remains of these bold
experiments.7!
The Seven Years’ War, which lasted until 1763, interrupted the work at
Meissen. At this point the age of [Johann Joachim] Winckelmann and Mengs
began. The painter [Johann Christian] Dietrich became director of a drawing
school in Meissen and skillful painters, modelers, and sculptors were appointed.
All humor associated with porcelain ceased. Apollo, the Muses, and the
Graces drove out the lovely shepherds and shepherdesses dressed in the lace-
trimmed court costumes of Versailles and Pillnitz and [Count Heinrich]
Bruhl’s tailors, monkey concerts, and ducks. Antique reliefs, medallions, and
cameos served as models for biscuit work, for the decoration of colored ves-
sels, or as incrustation for furniture and walls. At the same time, forms in gen-
eral assumed a somewhat austere antique style.
The influence of painting on the porcelain style was rather happier.72
Nothing can even begin to approach the eggshell, lightweight services of that
period, with their delicate and beautifully executed enamel paintings (mainly
landscapes, birds, butterflies). The simpler ware was also handled with skill;
many motifs and patterns from that period—for example the well-known
blue flower — have become ceramic types and have survived unchanged.
The secret of porcelain manufacture was divulged rather early —almost
every small court had its own porcelain factory. Even private studios were built.
Although none of these subsidiary factories ever quite achieved the charac-
teristic material-technical excellence of Dresden porcelain, the initiative in
invention and taste no longer radiated from Meissen. For some time Meissen
has continued to vegetate, merely reproducing old, famed rococo ware or at
best claiming isolated inventions unworthy of its old fame.73

b. Soft-Paste (Synthetic) Porcelain

This initiative was to pass to a remarkable branch of ceramic production, as
French manufacturers (even before Béttger’s invention) were moved by the
same desire to copy Chinese ware. So-called soft-paste porcelain was pro-
duced by a potter in Saint-Cloud, near Paris, as early as 1695, and it was much
praised by contemporaries. Beginning in 1735 another factory in Chantilly,
under the direction of the brothers [Robert and Gilles] Dubois, provided com-
petition for the older one. Their successor, [Francois] Gravant, sold the manu-
facturing secret to the minister of finance, Orry de Fulvy, who founded a
joint-stock company with a thirty-year privilege and moved the factory to
Vincennes. Under Louis XV it moved to Sévres with the title of royal manu-
facturer, and in 1760 it became a royal domain by purchase, with an annual

BS)
 Semper

budget of 100,000 francs. It survived in its distinctive form until 1804, the
year in which Brongniart completely stopped the manufacture of beautiful
porcelaine tendre, and in its place Empire taste found sufficient occasion to
occupy itself with porcelaine dure.
The synthetic paste of porcelaine tendre, which contains no kaolin and
generally very little plastic earth (alum), is heated until it softens and then
undergoes a kind of vitrification. This type of paste complicates and limits the
making of forms; the means available are essentially restricted to molding,
turning when dry (which has health risks), and application by welding. After
the shaped paste has been fired to the point of vitrification —at which point it
is called biscuit —a crystal glaze resembling flint glass is applied. Its celebrated
luster and the unsurpassed splendor of its color results from a very laborious
and careful technical treatment and from the firing, which is repeated as many
as five times.74
To this is added enamel painting, which cannot achieve the same perfec-
tion, the same splendor of color, on any ceramic product other than porce-
laine tendre, with its flint-glass glaze.
The advantages and disadvantages of its manufacture described here explain
both the faults and the brilliant properties of the product. It is stylistically
lacking when the unplastic mass produced by firing is treated too plastically.
The most brilliant and beautiful colorfully painted decoration cannot com-
pletely come to terms with unlovely baroque forms (true, graceful rococo is
rare). This artistic technique improves toward the end of its short existence,’5
that is, when it was used as an incrustation for the graceful furniture of the
age of Louis XVI (see “Tectonics”).
Although its paste differs, the so-called natural soft-paste porcelain still
made in England is very close to old Sévres in style. It was invented somewhat
earlier than the latter: as early as 1745 there was a factory in Chelsea making
a kind of porcelain frit.
The discovery of kaolin and feldspar deposits in Cornwall and the intro-
duction of these materials into the paste brought it significantly closer to gen-
uine porcelain paste. Since then the Staffordshire factories have become the
most distinguished; it was there, at the beginning of the present century, that
Charles [recte: Josiah] Spode first added calcium phosphate (burned bones) to
the paste. The resulting improvement was consolidated by [John] Ridgway,
[Henry] Shelton, and others.
This paste is softer (less viscous) than that of genuine porcelain but some-
what more viscous than that of Sévres porcelain. Additionally, it is more
translucent than both and significantly more plastic than the latter. The glaze
is usually flinty, somewhat harder than that of old Sévres ware but less bril-
liant and more prone to small cracks. Incidentally, the composition and treat-
ment of the paste, like that of the glaze, differ for almost every factory owner.
Manufacture is much easier and cheaper than with old Sévres or even gen-
uine porcelain. The steam engine and many other mechanical and technical
benefits have boosted production; they have extended almost indefinitely the

594
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

strictures of the formal and decorative treatment of even the most difficult
materials. This partially explains the recent taste exhibited in these and most
other products of the latest artistic techniques: they have no strictures but are
weak in invention. All that has come of this is blind copying and, at most,
improvements to specific features of earlier examples.
This was meant to cast a shadow on the good reputation of old Sévres.
Naturally the first goal was to imitate and surpass even the bad forms of old
Sévres, then assure victory by using absolutely pure colors —chemistry’s latest
achievement. Yet can we compare this abstract blue Minton ware with its glit-
tering gilding with the subdued, though splendid, blue green, amaranth, or
matte gold of the Pompadours and du Barrys? This is just one example.

We have already remarked that in 1804 the Empire influence began to domi-
nate Sévres and approach the porcelain style from a heroic direction, in con-
trast with the soft, playful Indian approach of the Regency period and later.
Evidence of this is found in the giant Roman, Egyptian, and “Olympian”
kraters, centerpieces, and tables with their painted victories, colossal portrait
medallions, landscapes, giant flower bouquets, and exuberant golden laurel
wreaths— gifts for emperors and kings.
What followed under Charles X and Louis Philippe was the beginning of
modern stylistic confusion and a simultaneous literal imitation of all styles.
For a short time it appeared as though this eclectic tendency —led by art
historical criticism, with the influence and participation of some artists of
intelligence, taste, and broad education—was going to improve the applied
arts, especially ceramics, cabinetmaking, and goldsmithery. The Sévres work-
shop led the way with the best examples. There, under the (artistic) direction
of [Jules-Pierre-Michel] Diéterle, with [Jean-Baptiste-Jules] Klagmann as mod-
eler and other equally talented artists at his side, the resources of hard-paste
porcelain manufacture underwent, so to speak, a true stylistic revision. They
were enriched by new procedures and old ones that had been forgotten and in
other cases returned to their former strictures.Ӣ
Although these efforts depended on works from earlier successful periods
of art (including some made in other materials), the results were by no means
copies; rather, motives underwent a transformation that resulted from an
artistically appropriate grasp of the new materials, purposes, and means avail-
able and from a response to them —an artistic necessity, as it were.”7
What has happened recently since Diéterle stepped down in Sévres, I do
not know. Perhaps the neo-Gothic has planted its victorious banner there as
well; perhaps other trends are being followed.
Unfortunately these achievements in fine pottery today are only idealized
creations, for they do not come from the people and do not influence them—
at least no such influence can be found anywhere in contemporary pottery
fashions.

595
 Semper

§ 129 Glass78
The versatility of glass was praised as early as Pliny (nec est materia sequacior
[there isn’t a more pliant material]), and in this respect it bears comparison
with metal and rubber. It also has remarkable properties of its own that it
shares with no other material, however, and thus it also has its own exclusive
domain of style.
Glass as a material is found in three states:
1. a very hard, brittle, and solid body that can be given any desired shape
by removing parts with the aid of cutting instruments;
2. a fluid substance that can be poured into molds like metal to change,
after cooling, into a solid, brittle, crystalline mass that retains its shape
and color;
3. a soft, very workable, tough, and ductile substance that, after cooling,
retains unchanged the forms and colors it acquired when soft.

1. Glass as a Hard Material

This sequence of the three technical processes for shaping glass seems to cor-
respond to the history of its production. In the oldest human annals, in which
there is no mention of glass vessels, there are references to the use of colored
glass as a decorative object, to the shaping of glass pieces, to stringing coral
beads and composing mosaic panels. Job considered glass shot through with
gold superior to sapphire and gold; crystal and ramoth (meaning unknown),
by contrast, are not worthy of mention. Moses saw a solium (throne) of sap-
phire (glass) tiles under the feet of God. Ezekiel saw the God of Israel thun-
dering by on a resounding cloud above the trembling crystal heavens.7?
The early use of glass as a decorative material seems to be confirmed by
the high esteem accorded to it by all primitive tribes. In the deep interior of
Africa and along the coast of Guinea so-called aggry beads have been found
in the most ancient tombs, and in those lands they are still weighed against
gold. They are a kind of opaque glass mosaic and were probably produced by
a long-forgotten domestic glass industry.8°
This very ancient manufacture of artificial gems has nothing in common
with the deceitful imitation of precious stones; the latter was a later invention
of the Indians or Egyptians, who held their extremely lucrative fair in the opu-
lent days of imperial Rome.*! They even knew how to color rock crystal; there
were written instructions for this procedure that Pliny knew but did not want
to reveal.
The goal of the oldest naive method for preparing stone was much more to
use art to give stone the rhythm missing from its more or less random charms,
that is, to order and improve nature. In a similar way, primitive man at the
earliest stage of his artistic development aspired to improve nature by making
flower wreaths, by tattooing, by hair ornaments, even by mutilating and dis-
figuring the individual parts of his body. In this lies a profound law that can
be seen in a purified form in all manifestations of ancient art, and very clearly
in their art of glassmaking. For example, it seems incomprehensible that

596
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

people could have deceived themselves for so long about the material of cer-
tain antique glass vessels, including the Portland vase, for there was in this
case never any hint of a desire to lead people astray by artificially imitating
the contingent features of sardonyx. Moreover, there was a desire to prepare
on the largest possible scale the costly, transparent, magnificently colored pre-
cious stones that nature provides only sparingly and in small pieces, as well as
an aim to surpass nature and not simply imitate it. This explains the reports
of colossal emerald columns and sapphire statues told in the legends of the
oldest temples of Phoenicia and Egypt; the reports may sound like fairy tales,
but they are not groundless.
Large and small glass spheres used for decoration, for cooling the hands,
and for ball games, as well as glass flux in gemlike settings, were found in the
oldest tombs of Etruria and among the temple ruins of ancient Veii, which
was destroyed long before the luxury of glass vessels was introduced to Italy.82
The art of cutting and grinding glass is even older than the invention of
glass itself, since it was used on natural glass flux and on hard obsidians to
make them into weapons, tools, and decorative items.
I do not know whether vessels have been found anywhere carved from a
hard, solid body of glass.83 Most cut-glass vases take advantage of sculptural
elements or the use of the wheel to perfect the decoration of a form acquired
in a softened or liquid state. Because stereotomy is the means used to achieve
this final perfection, however, such vessels belong in the sphere of our present
concerns.
The faults and flaws lie, in a certain sense, in its hardness and brittleness,
both of which hamper the shaping process and make it more difficult. The lat-
ter property is also responsible for its proverbial fragility.
Art has addressed this in two ways: first, a clever compromise between the
stubborn material and the hand armed with a tool; second, maximum exploita-
tion of the properties of the hard material, the boldest and easiest shaping of
form. It is the enhancement of illusionary value through the difficult treat-
ment and fragility of the costly work of art.84
The first of these principles of style (which may be called the Egyptian
principle, as it effectively forms the technological basis for the style of all
Egyptian sculpture) retains its validity to a certain extent for any hard mate-
rial, including opaque and colored glass, like gems. But it is clear why art
would incline to the opposing principle for transparent, airy, almost bodiless
glass.
The decorative glasses (diatreta) of the Alexandrian and Roman periods,
spun around with a light glass lattice, correspond to the latter to a certain
extent —those calices audaces [bold goblets] that so often shattered when an
artist was attempting to apply the wheel for the last time or when a young ser-
vant held them too tightly for fear of dropping them.®5
Yet these antique vessels belong to the second, bold style only because of
their spun glass; in their overall form they, like all antique vases made of hard
stone and glass, are compact, simple, and resistant.

5977
 Semper

Glyptics—the art of carving figures and ornaments in hard stone and

glass, either incised (intaglio) or raised (ectypa scalptura, camaieu, cameo)—
was not practiced at all during the Middle Ages; only in Byzantium did this
antique technique survive, and only barely. It was recalled from oblivion in
the early fifteenth century beginning in Italy, where its techniques had to be
relearned from stonecutters fleeing Constantinople.
Costly gems were once again sought for carving vases and utensils, and the
greatest glyptic artists (Domenico de’ Camei, [Francesco] Francia, Caradosso,
[Giovanni] Jacopo Caraglio, Anichini of Ferrara, and especially Valerio Vicen-
tino) took up this most expensive and refined of the vessel arts, in which the
goldsmith played the next most important part.
The most fashionable material for these gemstone vases (the one favored
by these masters) was rock crystal, which could then be found—I know not
where —in unbelievably large pieces. It was cut into every imaginable shape,
some very bold and free, and the crucial stylistic factor seems to have been the
ethereal immateriality of the dense crystal, not its hardness or fragility.8¢
In complete contrast with antique vase carving, however, the ornament
(slightly recessed matte, or sometimes gilded, intaglio) remains within the lim-
its of the strictest pietre dura style; it grows out of the stone and the grinding
wheel, as it were, in those brisk and expansive undulating lines that the wheel
seems to produce of its own accord. One could argue that the key to one
aspect of the Renaissance acanthus type, which is so peculiarly fine and yet
rich in effect, is found in this pietre dura sculpture and in the contemporane-
ous toreutics found on weapons and in goldsmithery.87 This is also true of
Renaissance sculpture in general; especially in the beginning it was more lap-
idary than plastic.
The art of glass ceramics survived the Middle Ages only in Constantinople
and only just barely. Theophilus, when he speaks of glass vases, mentions only
Greek manufacturers.
He describes the processes used by Byzantine glass manufacturers, who
even added new processes to the old ones, for example, painting with vitrifi-
able colors.88 To judge from the few surviving remnants on which this tech-
nique is found, it was unpleasing to the ancients.%?
There is one part of western Europe, however, where ancient glass manu-
facture seems never to have died out completely —in Venice, where it is said to
be as old as the city itself.9°
Nevertheless, Venetian hyaloceramics —the source of the genuine and true
glass style—dates only from the fifteenth century; prior to that the city pro-
duced mainly conterie [bead] ware, a decorative glass. This style was based on
the second of the two principles emphasized earlier —that of boldness — but
here it did not derive from grinding but from welding and blowing (although
the fine and thinly ground crystal celature did have an influence on this). For
this reason we will return to the matter later.
By contrast, the famed Venetian mirrors do belong here, since they make
use of the grinding process. They have faceted edges, glass framing in every

598
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

possible shape, and are enriched with intaglios and other decorations. These
are true models of elegance and style, in contrast to clumsy modern glass
grinding in cumbersome leaded glass.%!
The fatherland of modern ground glassware is Bohemia, where it has been
made since the early seventeenth century. Skilled stone carvers were brought
in from Italy and Germany who imitated thin and delicate rock crystal vases
using local glass.92 Many of these older crystal glasses decorated with rich
intaglio are masterfully composed, drawn, and executed. They all belong to
the brash, bold glass style, which has only recently been compelled to make
way for the compact forms from England.%3 The latter style may be more
practical (though this has yet to be proven), but in its formal development it is
far behind anything carved out of glass or hard stone. Faceting and polygonal
forms are the main decorative devices of the English glass style.
The best sources of information on how elegance and richness of decora-
tion can be combined with compact and genuinely lapidary forms are pro-
vided by Egypt’s ground earthenware and —still more clearly — by its massive
granite colossi and even its monuments.

2. Molded Glass
The Egyptians had already begun to mold scarabs, glass spheres, amulets, and
figurines in transparent colored glass. Minutoli had an amulet in blue trans-
parent glass in his collection, among other such objects.%4 Since time imme-
morial this process was also exploited for the countless glass pastes that were
used either raw or after additional wheel and tool work for body jewelry and
for decorations on metal and glass vessels and utensils. Glass pastes in imita-
tion of cut gems also fall into this category.
Numerous surviving fragments prove that the Greeks and Romans used
this process (molding) for their splendid glass wall panels and especially for
windowpanes.
The molding of glass was equally known to the barbarians (especially the
Celts and Iberians).
It may be that this one industry was indigenous to these peoples rather
than acquired from the Romans, as the former were particularly successful
and skillful in enameling metal, which though known to the Greeks and
Romans was little cultivated by them.5
In a Celtic grave near Affoltern, Switzerland, two pairs of molded glass
armbands were found alongside other ornaments and weapons. One pair was
dark blue and merely translucent; the other was made of clear, colorless crys-
tal glass with an inner lining of Naples yellow, opaque paste ground to a
matte finish, which gave the jewelry a delicate, light yellow coloring.*¢
In this barbarian jewelry we first encounter a process common to all antique
glass preparation: the artful muting and moderating of that attribute of glass
that we moderns see as an absolute advantage, namely, its transparency.
To be sure, we find in Pliny a passage stating that white transparent crystal
was the most highly esteemed glass in his time,” but this is contradicted by

Shy
 Semper

the ancients’ undeniable preference for colored, merely translucent glasses.

Given the numerous finds of shards of ceremonial vessels of the most beauti-
ful white transparent glass that have all been ground matte by the wheel on
the inside or even covered with a trace of opaque milk glass,?8 this almost uni-
versal perception should convince us that the ancients took little pleasure in
the perfect and general transparency of glass vessels. This sense of style among
the ancients, only half comprehensible to us, may also have led them to dull
genuine crystal in a similar way.
Anything absolutely transparent appears to be formless, which may be the
reason for the limited use of this property of glass and transparent precious
stones in antiquity. For ajouré setting and faceting of precious stones were also
unknown to the ancients, or rather ran counter to their taste. This antique
sense of style also seems completely justified to us in raised work or even sculp-
ture in transparent materials, which do not permit the raised and recessed
areas to have a natural effect; instead, all effects are destroyed because the
recessed areas produced by making the body thinner, which should lie in
shadow, necessarily seem brighter and vice versa. Something that bothers us
only in glass sculpture disturbed the ancients’ finer artistic sense in any form.
Light, transparent plastic effects on glass are therefore rarely found on old
vessels and are always secondary elements, such as gemlike emblems, beads,
and the like, attached to the handle or to other suitable places.?9 More com-
monly we find a light opaque crust over a dark transparent ground —the
most beautiful and most famous antique glass vessels reveal this technique.!©°
Intaglio ornaments were also occasionally ground from the crust. The glass
described by Achilles Tatius was of the latter kind, with vines that glowed
when the vessel was filled with wine. Sometimes this intaglio was filled in
again with a differently colored paste (see Buonarroti, “Proem[io],” xvii).

3. Glass as a Soft, Very Plastic, Entirely Ductile, Forgeable,

and Pliable Substance
It is both strange and yet characteristic of the glass style that the very proper-
ties most often lacking in glass are found in no other material to a greater
extent once the glass has been raised to even a moderately high temperature,
so it can be shaped easily by hand into any desired form and in the greatest
variety of ways—not directly, of course, but with the aid of the simplest of
tools. These properties are the foundation of the true glass style, which is
peculiar to it alone.
The most prominent of these properties are the unlimited and ready ductil-
ity of glass; its malleability and weldability, which call for equally straightfor-
ward procedures; and finally its ability to take on all colors, to show them off
in the most brilliant way, and to retain them without changing. Eventually
these properties led to shaping glassware through the pneumatic pressure of
the blowpipe—an instrument that may well be the equal of the potter’s
wheel, in that it is a machine that does not eliminate the immediacy of manual
labor but simply leads it in a particular direction that opens up inexhaustible

600
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

sources of assistance. Glass blowing, as we said, was a Jate invention and cer-
tainly Seneca was right when he identified it as such in his ninetieth letter. The
previously mentioned properties of glass had been recognized and exploited
in the greatest variety of ways long before the invention finally served as rich
material for new exploitation. We will therefore return to it after dealing with
other matters.
Let us first discuss spinning the soft glass mass, a procedure every boy dis-
covers when he softens over a flame the strips of glass left behind by the glazier
who has replaced a pane: when he turns them, stretches them, and draws them
out into long threads. Next to the spherical glass bead, glass thread is probably
the oldest form in which this substance appears.
It forms the element of a very particular and very ancient glass style.
The ancients observed that several threads of different colored glasses
when melted would retain their form, color, and relative position, and that a
bundle of such rods, softened in the fire, could be not only spun but also
shaped into spiral forms, often with double and multiple twisting, and would
still retain their form when hardened.!®!
This led to the invention of the celebrated glass mosaic of antiquity. Coarse
glass rods of different colors were combined in the manner of a mosaic to
form an image; this image was then surrounded with monochrome glass as a
ground, fused by heating, and stretched. The image could thus be reduced to
any size, as stretching the thread permitted a limitless reduction of its diame-
ter. Any cross section of the thin thread would reveal the mosaic image reduced
to the desired scale.
The simplest, most easily produced motif for this purpose was of regularly
arranged petal crowns. Yet whole compositions were also executed in this
way, or at least whole figures. 102
The cross sections were sometimes used as gems in rings and other jewelry,
and sometimes they were used in turn as components of a variegated florid
glass paste by molding them together with a binding putty of transparent or
translucent glass, either quite irregularly or set in a particular arrangement.
Finally the body was coated with a thin, colorless, translucent layer of glass.
Such pastes were then used either directly as ornaments (glass balls, pearls,
trinkets, and so on) or as a plastic mass for vessels or other luxury wares. This
is the famous millefiori to which gold leaf and other elements were sometimes
added.103
The Venetians, who probably learned filigree glass work only in the fifteenth
century from Greek artisans, also tried to imitate antique mosaic pastes. But
they fell far short of their models, whose never garish but softly shimmering
color and graceful alternation of transparent and opaque glass has yet to be
equaled in our modern age. Perhaps the calices allassontes [multicolored gob-
lets] so prized by the ancients were made by this millefiori technique, but they
may also have been opal glass.1%
This use of cross sections of glass mosaic threads as elements in a glass
paste shimmering with shapes and colors differs in principle from a second

601
 Semper

use for decorative purposes: namely, longitudinal sections. I would compare

the difference between the two with certain differences in the use of threads in
textiles — in fact, the two are related.1°5 This demonstrates once again the gen-
eral analogy that unites all the arts, which both permits us an overview of art
as a whole and offers new hints for invention in the individual arts.10
So-called filigree glass, the material under discussion, consists of a rhyth-
mic arrangement of a certain number of spun-glass rods with a cylindrical
diameter of three to six millimeters. Some rods are opaque white; some are
colored; and others have their own filigree patterns; they are kept separate at
regular intervals by similar rods of colorless transparent glass. The glass artist
arranges this bundle of rods into a decorative pattern, then fuses it into a mass
under heat, such that the rods retain their position and shape. When soft, the
bundles of rods can be spun to any required thinness, in the course of which
their inner parts shift by turning movements that follow a definite regularity.
This regularity is expressed in the way the colored threadlike elements seem to
swim in the transparent glass, and it seems to be fixed formally.1°”
If the softened bundle of rods is pressed flat, a band pattern is formed.
Here the principles for coordinating the rod elements and their spiral move-
ments are again expressed in a different way. These plates can then be welded
around the mouth of the blowpipe either along their length or sides,!°8 shaped
into a bubble of glass,!°? and blown to form a vessel. They can also be welded
together with others as elements in mosaics!° or otherwise exploited in the
greatest possible variety of ways according to the genius of the glass artist.
It seems the ancients usually made their filigree glass from glass facets in
this way.!4! The Venetians use the following process. As many rods as are
needed for the combination!” are arranged in a circle around the inner wall of
a hollow metal cylinder, whose circumference conforms to the number of rods
and the size of the object to be made. A little soft clay keeps the rods in posi-
tion. The cylinder is heated and when the rods reach a temperature at which
they can be touched by hot glass without cracking, a blowpipe is used to
introduce a cylinder of colorless glass into the space inside the ring of rods and
fuse the glass with the rods by blowing, so that the whole object can be drawn
out of the metal cylinder.!3 After various other operations, which we need not
describe in detail here, the cylinder of soft glass, which is open at the bottom,
is pinched together with a pair of tongs and the tip is twisted so that all the
threads and patterns in the rods converge at this point. Afterward the glassy
mass may be shaped into dishes, glasses, or bottles by the usual processes,
but it inevitably obeys the principle that all the filigree threads will converge
radially at a point of concentration (which is determined by the tong opera-
tion described above and represents the pole of the glass bubble opposite the
mouth of the blowpipe).!!4 This modern process may well permit an enor-
mous variety of combinations, but it has not been able to imitate antique fili-
gree glasses, judging, at least, from the numerous examples I have seen.
This difference between antique and modern filigree glass making is closely
connected with another decorative glass procedure that is exclusively antique.

602
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

We are referring to the lamination process, as it can perhaps best be called,

which involves creating a colorful scree or conglomerate of glass by means of
horizontal, vertical, or diagonal stratification of glass lamellae of different
colors and types. Myriad decorative surface effects are brought about, partly

i SSS

by the alternation of colors, inlaid crusts, and designs, partly by the interac-
tion of various translucent colored glasses that create a highly nuanced play of
color through contrasts of opacity, translucency, and transparency and of the
matte and shiny parts. The process is also meant to increase the resistance and
toughness of the glass (see above, pp. 559-60).
It is difficult to classify all the ways in which this process was applied in
ancient glass, but we would like to try to define its nature a little more closely
by reference to the most outstanding examples available.
First, there is damascened band glass, usually monochrome (colorless and
transparent, blackish blue, translucent, or with a milky shimmer) but some-
times polychrome.'5 The surface is undulating and matte with moiré patterns
that continue through the thickness of the glass wall. These wonderful glasses
were produced by precisely the same process as metal damascening — that
is to say, very fine glass threads or bands were welded together in a rhyth-
mic order to make a glass surface. This surface was then used to mold or blow
the vessel.
Second, there is double glass. Antique glasses very often consist of two,
three, or more glass walls. Often the outer layer is colored, transparent, and
shiny, and the inner layer is opaque, milky, and matte.!!6 The converse proce-
dure was used for the diatreta and gem glasses mentioned above.
Ancient glass painting, an application of this doubling method, is almost
identical to transparent enamel painting on cinquecento gold or silver reliefs. !!7
On a gold or silver plate with medallion-like borders, the subject is exe-
cuted in very low relief, then prepared with transparent enamel paint, enclosed
between two layers of glass (the outer one must be transparent), and fused
with the others to form a single mass. By doubling or tripling the glass walls,

603
 Semper

otherwise impossible color effects become possible; they vary according to

whether the light is in front of or behind the glass. 118
Third, there is onyx glass—a very inappropriate description of the won-
derful glass scree used by the ancients to produce a kind of conventional imi-
tation of the textures and color mixes of hard and precious stones. In fact,
nature did not proceed any differently in forming such stones. Clearly, malax-
ation and rolling must have served to prepare these pastes (just as one handles
cake batter that has succades, currants, and almonds mixed in).!
The above-mentioned millefiori glass is closely related to these onyx glasses.
Fourth, there are encrusted glasses. They differ from the foregoing types
only in the regularity of their decoration, which is produced by juxtaposing
and linking glass surfaces of different colors, by embedded nielli, and by
incrustations. The disruptions in the regularity of these patterns that are usu-
ally found prove that they were applied before the vessel’s shape was finished.
Strips of filigree glass were often used as incrustations on these glasses (see
fig. 11 of plate 16).
One fine and perfectly preserved example of this procedure is a blue (dark
and light) and yellow glass amphora with zigzag decorations and hoops (in
the Naples museum, published by Minutoli, pl. 3, fig. 2). Other examples are
to be found in plate 2 of the same work.
The preceding comments were concerned with the preparation of materi-
als. Let us now turn to those processes that, building on the same properties
of softened glass mentioned above (plasticity, high ductility, and pliability),
pertain more to the actual form.
First, there is molding. Most of the larger antique glass vessels seem to
have been molded. Their characteristic feature is the principle of shaping and
arching surfaces, or parts thereof. Inside and outside their smooth parts are
usually turned on the wheel and left blind, at least inside (see figs. 3 and 4 of
plate 16, from the antiquities collection in Zurich).
Molded ornaments on ancient vessels are deliberately kept round. By con-
trast, when molding our beer and spirit glasses (even luxury vessels, tureens,
and so on) we try to imitate the sharp edges and faceting common to the
grinding style. This is a very reprehensible lack of style! More often the impres-
sions in the mass are created with the help of a glassmaker’s blowpipe, to
which we will now turn.

SHAPING WITH A BLOWPIPE

The most refined and lavish blown-glass vessels of antiquity are ceramic in
form, that is, imitations of earthenware amphorae, oenochoes, urns, dishes, and
so on. Only in the case of everyday glassware —so-called mourning bottles,
ampullae, aryballoses, and ointment vessels —does form correspond to the
applicable form-giving principle.° They are not rotational bodies but glass
bubbles, as they were produced not on the potter’s wheel but by the simple
pneumatic machine called the blowpipe. They belong to these types even
under all of the functional and technical influences that affect the shaping of

604
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

their form, because the types likewise correspond to the properties of softened
glass, which typically condition the character distinctions within the general
types. The most general type is, as has been said, the spheroid glass bubble.
The form-giving force, internal air pressure on a soft and tough mass,
needs only a very small opening to work. Consequently, narrow mouths as
well as, on occasion —as a result of the ease with which glass can be stretched,
a property in which it surpasses all other materials — narrow necks, long
necks, and indeed any stretched forms are characteristic of vessels by nature
more suited than others to production in glass. The vase’s diameter can be
tapered without disturbing the internal pressure that gives the glass its form,
whereas the potter, for obvious reasons, cannot achieve this narrowing of
form. Therefore grooved vessel forms of the kind nature occasionally pro-
duces (in pumpkins for example) fall into the realm of glassware —all the
more so because the external pressure and simple turns in the glass that pro-
duce these grooves are very easy to execute.
The rotational process in pottery favors circular decoration and the divi-
sion of the vessel’s surface into parallel horizontal zones. By contrast, the
blowing process (which always directs the air pressure principally along the
axis of the pipe and extends the glass bubble in this direction) and the stretch-
ing process (which is such a major factor in glassmaking) work against this
partitioning. They favor the division of the vessel walls into compartments,
strips, grooves, and the like, developing from top to bottom and converging
concentrically at the base. Another very useful aid to the glassmaker is the spi-
ral twisting of these motifs as a way to enrich the decoration.2!
As centrifugal force is a necessary form-giving factor in pottery, every
nobly shaped pot should express this force. In the art of glass blowing it is not
necessary, but in cases where it is used it becomes a much more powerful
factor in shaping form, for reasons I need only allude to here. The use of cen-
trifugal force brings even flat dish-shaped vessels within the realm of glass

manufacture, and they are greatly enriched by the wonderful technical-formal

means that belong exclusively to this art, raising them almost to the pinnacle
of ceramics.
Blowing and centrifugal force are, so to speak, internal formative means,
which are insufficient to complete the glass design without the modeler’s
hand. Yet softened glass cannot be touched, and therefore the modeler’s hand
can contact it only indirectly, using tools. For this reason modeling in glass is
very limited but at the same time it has its own highly characteristic style.

605
 Semper

The Venetians brought the arts of blowing and shaping glass to stylistic
perfection in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Their glass objects
— some
very noble and simple, some fantastic and even grotesque —serve to confirm
the remark made earlier that the Venetians deserve the credit for being the
first to have recognized the genuine glass style.

Venetian glass

Glass technology, which already had abundant means at its disposal,

acquired significantly more through the welding process, which is particularly
easy with glass, and through the closely related processes of stamping and
incrustation.
Ancient glaziers often exploited these technical processes very naively,
almost always in a purely decorative sense. For example, small white pieces of
opaque glass were welded irregularly onto a dark ground, or transparent
beads of glass were regularly distributed on a similarly transparent ground. At
times, however, the applied welded work was extremely delicate (see fig. 15 of
plate 16).
The Venetians knew how to use welding to articulate their glass in the
most varied and unusual ways. In this respect, too, Venetian glass manufac-
ture shows itself to be superior to that of antiquity. 22

606
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

Notes
1. Most works on pottery either ignore the artistic element or touch upon it in
passing, marginalizing it in favor either of pure technique or of archaeology and art his-
tory. By contrast, we shall not deal with technique as such, nor with the history of pot-
tery, except to the extent that both form the necessary background for our stylistic
observations.
The most important work on the techniques and history of pottery is Alexandre
Brongniart, Traité des arts céramiques, ou des poteries, considérées dans leur histoire,
leur pratique et leur théorie... (Paris, 1844), to which the author refers frequently
below. It remains the premier authority, despite a few errors and omissions.
Of the older authors, Passeri dealt with technique from an artistic point of view,
which put him in a class above everyone else who has written on this subject. See
G[iovanni] B[attista] Passeri, Picturae Etruscorum in vasculis nunc primum in unum
collectae explicationibus et dissertationibus illustratae, 3 vols. in fol. (Rome, 1766-75).
Histoire des peintures sur majoliques faites a Pesaro et dans les lieux circonvoisins,
décrite par Giambattista Passeri, avec appendice par Henry Dulange (Paris, 1853).
Jloseph] Marryat, Collections towards a History of Pottery and Porcelain, in the
Fifteenth, Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries; with a Description of
the Manufacture, a Glossary, and a List of Monograms. Illustrated with colored
plates and woodcuts, octavo (London, 1850). It is noteworthy in particular for the
illustrations.
The most recent book, Samuel Birch, History of Ancient Pottery, 2 vols., octavo
(London: Murray, 1858), is full of interesting facts but lacks a true guiding idea.
Jlules Claude] Ziegler, Etudes céramiques: Recherche des principes du beau dans
architecture, l'art céramique et la forme en général; théorie de la coloration des reliefs
(Paris, 1850), is an attempt at a formal aesthetics of ceramics. The author was a painter
and also a practicing potter. His book is full of paradoxes but also contains some good
ideas and useful hints.
The learned “Introduction historique” to Jules Labarte, Description des objets d’art
qui composent la collection Debruge Duménil (Paris, 1847), is important here because
it deals with medieval and Renaissance art, including pottery, from the required techni-
cal and aesthetic standpoint.
[F.] Bastenaire-Daudenart’s writings on the various branches of ceramics take a
merely practical-industrial line.
The Description méthodique du Musée céramique de la manufacture [royale de
porcelaine] de Sévres (1845), compiled by Brongniart and Riocreux, is an ideal compan-
ion to the above-mentioned work by Brongniart, and he refers to it a great deal himself.
Also to be recommended, among many similar works, is C[arl] Hartmann’s Hand-
buch der Thon- und Glas-Waaren-Fabrikation (Berlin, 1842).
2. Another process for neutralizing the homogeneity of pastes for similar reasons is
lamination. See below, in the discussion of glass preparation.
3. A comparison of the various masters shows how much the choice of ground
influences the style of painting. Each has a particular material (canvas) whose grain and
texture are appropriate to him and his genius. But the best masters hated a ground that
was too smooth.

607
 Semper

4. It can be said that the principal goal of all operations in the mechanical prepara-
tion of pastes is a homogeneity of paste.
5. Making such parts hollow does remove the technical problem mentioned in the
text, but our stylistic-aesthetic sense will take things to be solid unless their form also
shows them to be hollow bodies and thus will remain unsatisfied.
6. All such accumulations of plastic paste at a given point in the work are called
centers of contraction (“centres de contraction”) in the language of this art. They can
never be avoided completely: every ceramic product, even if it is faultless in this respect,
has its centres de contraction that one must know.
7. The procedures for ceramics are as follows: (1) mixing the plastic paste; (2)
shaping the form; (3) covering the form with a glaze or clay crust, in combination with
decoration by painting and coloring; (4) fixing the form, that is, firing.

1. Mixing has the dual purpose of creating a homogeneous paste and giving it phys-
ical and chemical properties that it originally possessed not at all or insufficiently.
2. Shaping the form:
a. Freehand modeling.
b. Molding (moulage) — this can be done by pressing the softened or powdered
(dry) paste into the mold or pouring the liquid paste into it (coulage).
c. Milling and stamping (moletage et estampage).
Shaping form with turning machines, including: (1) rough-forming (ébau-
chage) using the treadle wheel; (2) finishing with the vertical turner’s wheel;
(3) calibrating with a template.
e. Combining the parts. Soldering.
(The whole should consist of no more parts than elements; when a large
work has to be put together from pieces for technical reasons, its articula-
tion must conform to the number of its parts and their combination. Where
this is not possible, the joints should be so perfect as to be imperceptible.
Example: Greek isodomon masonry.)
3. Covering ceramic products with a glaze or clay crust
— first, this is done to
make the porous clay paste impermeable to water and fat; second, it is decora-
tive. It remains to be seen which purpose is older.
a. Simple painting, earthy substances, ocher, bolus, rice lead without encaustic.
Resinous paints (vegetable or bituminous) with slight encaustic.
c. Antique lustrum. An infinitely thin silico-alkaline shiny encaustic, very
strong, impermeable, acid-resistant, not yet precisely known, let alone imi-
tated, by us. It was probably first produced by chance by firing resinous
vegetable coatings, in that the alkaline content of the ashes of the burned
vegetable material combined with the silicium content of the paste of the
pottery to produce a silicate.
d. Egyptian glaze (usually blue), a combination of siliceous earth and soda,
colored by the addition of copper. Prone to weathering and not acid resis-
tant (vernis).
e. Engobe. An opaque covering consisting of an earthy base containing clay; it
is white, colored with ocher in the paste, or artificially colored with metal

608
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

oxides. Is also used on other materials, such as stone and wood. Used to
achieve white, red, violet, and yellow shades on the luster of the oldest ves-
sels (Arkesilaos vase) and as ground for encaustic painting on late Hellenic
ceramics (Brongniart, 2:628). It is also used in modern ceramics as an inter-
mediate layer between the clay-colored paste, often porous and rough, and
the translucent glaze, which appears unclouded on this ground (which can
be treated beforehand with inlaid work, incised ornament, relief, or even
painting).
f, Antique encaustic wax painting, which is characteristic only of the golden
age of Hellenic art and the late Alexandrian period.
g. The common pottery glaze (vernis). A glassy, translucent, lead-based coat-
ing, shiny, easily fusible and not insensitive to acids. Known to Asian peo-
ples from the earliest times, and apparently not rediscovered in Europe until
the twelfth or thirteenth century. (The most recent analyses of Assyrian
glazes, done by Dr. [John] Percy at the London Museum of Practical Geology,
show that the opaque white of these glazes is a soda glass with stannic
oxide, and the yellow is the same soda silicate with lead antimony <Naples
yellow>: the blue contains copper, but also lead, so that probably the lead
oxide was used as a fuser as well as a coloring agent. This contradicts
Brongniart, who thought lead glaze was not known to the ancients.)
h. Enamel, glassy, opaque, and usually containing tin (Assyrians, Chinese,
Persians, Moors, Luca Della Robbia, ancient faience).
i. The cover (couverte) in the narrower sense, an earthy, glassy, hard coating
(feldspar, pumice stone, lava), very shiny, colorless, translucent, fusible
only at high temperatures, brittle, resistant to most acids (hard porcelain,
earthenware).
4. Fixing and firing. All operations aimed at making products strong and imper-
meable, though they may provide certain decorative advantages (gloss, translu-
cency), are necessary evils, since they involve a certain alteration and partial
destruction of form and color in the firing. We therefore have to know, first,
what forms and procedures are the most advantageous for given materials at
certain heats; second, how this advantage can be best exploited by the choice of
glaze and painting; third, in what way the shapes and glazes can be altered so
that the changes taking place during firing produce a harmonious result; fourth,
how and with what resources the ceramic purpose is fulfilled while keeping the
necessary evil of firing to a minimum. The Greeks were fully aware of what they
were doing when they made their splendid pottery from pastes that did not
require much heat. The Athenians of the fourth century found the old glaze
encaustic too clumsy and thus used so-called wax encaustic for their display ves-
sels, as it could be fixed at the lowest possible temperature.

8. Remarkable small clay models of huts were found deep under the volcanic tufa
near Albano. They contain the ashes of the dead, which were inserted through little
doors. Similar models of huts were also found in Teutonic tombs near Halberstadt,
Aschersleben, and elsewhere. See [Alessandro] Visconti, Sopra alcuni vasi sepolcrali

609
 Semper

rinvenuti nelle vicinanze della antica Alba-Longa (Rome, 1817). [Georg Christian
Friedrich] Lisch, “Ueber die Hausurnen” (Schwerin, 1856).
9. [Giuseppe] Micali, Mon[umenti| ined{iti], pls. 4, 5.
10. See Samian vase “c” on the woodcut above [p. 565, bottom].
11. To the extent, that is, that the potter’s wheel was actually used, though it had
no fundamental influence on style.
12. There are many Egyptian and Asiatic vessels and implements that are in the
plastic style, but these are essentially reminiscences of a primal period that observed
religion piously and maintained it. Examples are the canopic jars in the shape of Isis, or
at least with the head of Isis on the lid.
13. See below on Egyptian earthenware.
14. Famous names included Butades of Sicyon, the alleged inventor of clay sculp-
ture; Coroebas of Athens, the mythical inventor of pottery (that is, of one particular
kind); Talos, nephew of Daedalus, credited with the invention of the potter’s wheel;
Thericles of Corinth; Cherestrates, famed for the speed with which he worked. Phidias,
Polyclitus, Myron, Mentor, and other famous artists were quite happy to make models
for potters, or to apply their artistic skills to their own vessels.
15. Some other old pieces that undoubtedly belong to this category
— like the item
illustrated (taken from Birch’s History of Ancient Pottery), a flowerpot in archaic style
found on the island of Melos—are not plastically decorated, even though they were
formed freehand; they are painted with old Indo-Germanic patterns (chevrons) on
white slip (engobe). They thus seem to show the Greek preference for smooth pottery
even before the use of the wheel. Not to be confused with old plastic pottery are works
of a school of potters based primarily in Magna Graecia (Capri, Capua, Cumae), who
do not belong in this category for that reason alone; they follow the Italic direction.
They belong to the Macedonian period and their motives are seen as imitations of
Asian-style emblematic metal ceramics, which was dominant at the time (emblems, set
pieces, soldered and riveted piéces de rapport, Greek encrossoi). See Birch, 1:204.
16. Nothing could be further from the mark than to call these most ancient of
glazed vases Egyptian or Egyptianizing in style, as there is not even a superficial simi-
larity to Egyptian ware. To assign them to the Doric style, because the earliest inscrip-
tions found on them are in the Doric dialect, would not be sufficient to distinguish this
group from the latter.
17. Brongniart refers to a particular kind of early Hellenic pottery that he considers
to be the most ancient. These wares are not glazed but simply painted with a few black
and red lines and rings. Their paste is a very hard, fired terra-cotta, fairly impenetrable,
like earthenware. Their forms, although produced on the wheel, are extremely arbi-
trary, almost willful, but have a certain grace, despite this originality. See Brongniart,
1:460; and our woodcut, page 513, bottom right.
18. This new technique seems to have moved from Asia via Asia Minor, the
Cyclades, and the Argive plains to Athens and Corinth. In any case, the most ancient
specimens are to be found on Mount Sipylus, the seat of the Tantalids, at Thera, Melos,
Cyprus, Aegina, Mycenae, and Corinth. They are rare in Apulia and on Sicily but occur
frequently in Nola and especially in Etruria.
19. The figurative and purely conventional decorative motifs on the oldest Italian

610
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

and Greek vases appear to be misunderstood remnants of an extinct prehistoric art.

They are by no means naive or rough attempts at a pictorial expression of an idea or a
direct view of nature. Even animals that are not indigenous to southern Europe— such
as lions, panthers, ostriches, and dromedaries, and the fabulous beasts from the heyday
of the Orient (mixed, to be sure, with native pigs, mules, hens, storks, dolphins, etc.) —
suggest distant influences. Their use is purely decorative — at least they are meaningless
to us and probably were to the artists who created them as well. On this soil of foreign
types (or those made foreign by cultural regression), which had to be imbued with new
life, a new art was to sprout. Did the poetic form of the myth grow directly from the
chaos of confused traditions and from a foreign mysticism and symbolism whose true
meaning was lost, though orally preserved by the people, or did fine art lead the way
for epic poetry and prepare the form for translation into other types of representation?
It is tempting to believe the latter when one follows the progress of mythical images on
vases and sees how the purely conventional and inactive existence of the fabled beast
first comes into conflict with itself (as a heterogeneously composed monster), then with
other similar beasts; then with man who at first calmly slaughters the beast (a purpose-
less death, since the Asiatic-mystic sense of the symbol had been lost); then a hunt with
no reference to specific events; then Meleager or Hercules, as bearers of culture battling
with bestiality; then fighting centaurs; finally, battles and duels between men. The con-
trast between Hellenism and barbarism develops; battle rages beneath the walls of
Troy. Only at that point did the formerly nameless warriors acquire individual names
and come to be described as national heroes or as heroic persons. Just as the Asiatic and
traditional, purely decorative animal frieze had previously been treated as a quite general
and indefinite hunting scene, and only later started to express a particular adventure (for
instance, a fateful hunt involving Meleager), so was the image of warriors generalized
at first and only later became a particular event. In Achilles’ duel with Memnon the
general war of all against all is “localized” as a struggle between West and East,
Hellenism against barbarism. Monstrous Asiatic figures (winged Gorgons with out-
stretched tongues, animal-choking demons) are borrowed from tradition for the warrior
image, initially as idle figures not involved in the struggle, then as involved and active
forces (as seconds to the fighting heroes, so to speak), and finally as tutelary gods in a
noble Hellenic transformation (Mus[eo] Bor[bonico] 21, pl. 56. Mon[umenti] ined|{iti] 3.
Gerhard, Vasenb{ilder], passim). In short, in early Hellenic art action and thought are
subordinate, they serve, in order to breathe new life into a paralyzed and meaningless
form. And this behavior is important for understanding the Hellenic nature in general.
“Tt is said that Homer invented the Greek gods. That is not true; they already
existed in uncertain outline, but he invented their stories.” (H. Heine)
20. According to Suidas, a lead oxide glaze (Baby) was used for the same purpose,
though it is not known whether it produced a translucent lead glaze. In his Malerei der
Alten, [Johann Friedrich] John maintains that he found no lead oxide. Brongniart,
[Louis-Alphonse] Salvetat, and the duke of Luynes say the same. But the lead glaze
could have been removed by centuries of weathering (Brongniart, 1:552).
21. According to John, Malerei der Alten, 173, all these colors were iron oxides,
with the exception of white.
22. See volume 1, § 15.

611
 Semper

23. The illustrations in chapter 5 include examples of works from all of the periods
of the history of antique vase art just mentioned.
24. The most famous and remarkable of these
— because of its technique
—is the
so-called Arkesilaos vase. ({Ludwig] Ross dates it in the forty-fifth Olympiad; Jahn,
improbably, places it in the period of Phidias.) It was glazed first entirely in black, then
covered with a slip into which figures and linear ornaments were engraved in the man-
ner of Italian sgraffiti. They look black because the ground shows through; the usual
coating colors have been applied: yellow, violet, and red.
25. In the East they sell fragrant, so-called amber pearls made of an opaque mate-
rial scattered with shining points that pick up all colors and give them a particularly
pleasant local tone. This material is very similar to antique encaustic paste.
26. There can no longer be any doubt that all such vessels had polychromy, even
though most of them no longer bear any traces of it. It is equally certain that paint was
added to the very delicate contour drawings on their white surfaces, just as it was to
very similar outlines finished with equal artistry found on vases that have lost some but
not all of their color. In addition to these Attic lecythi, there are also some large bowls
in the perfected style that are painted on the outside with red figures on a black ground
and inside with more than one color on a white ground. The chief finds are from Vulci
(O[tto] Jahn, p. Ixxxviii). Some are illustrated in Thiersch, “Ueber [die hellenischen]
bemalten Vasen,” pls. 3, 4. A vase from the Cabinet Durand, of considerable size and
formally rich, was painted encaustically in polychrome with four draped standing fig-
ures on a white clay ground. The ground itself was a shade of pink ({[Raoul-]Rochette,
Peintures |antiques]| inédites, 431). A similar vessel with the three Fates painted encaus-
tically on a pink ground was found in tomb near Kerch (ibid., 431).
27. Antiquités du Bosphore Cimmérien conservées au Musée impérial de l’Ermi-
tage (Petersburg, 1854). Plate 50 shows an amphora with black ground and red figures.
Traces of paint are visible on the figures to the right and left, even though they are sub-
sidiary figures, while the others are white and red in the usual way. The same is true
of plates 51 and 56. In plate 62 traces of the Jeukoma can be seen on the male figures
as well. There is no longer any doubt that the encaustic applied to a white clay ground
on later vases is identical to Attic white-marble encaustic. Even Rollin saw this encaustic
as a kind of mosaic produced with colored wax crayons (or pieces of wax). [Félix de
Juvenel de] Carlengas, in his Essais sur l’histoire des belles lettres[, des sciences] et
des arts (3:186), describes Pausias’s encaustic technique quite correctly as follows:
“La caustique consistait 4 plaquer sur le bois, ou sur l’ivoire, des cires de différentes
couleurs” [Encaustic consisted of laying down on wood, or on ivory, waxes of differ-
ent colors]. Du Cange says: Cerae diversis coloribus imbitae absque pinicello invicem
committebantur, quod encaustum proprie vocabant [The technique whereby layers
of colored wax are applied one after another without a brush is what is properly
called encaustic] (Gloss[arium ad scriptores| med{iae] et inf[imae] Graecitlatis], 648).
Later, however, scholars and ever more frequent experiments with wax painting of all
kinds have spread only confusion about this archaeological and artistic-technical
question.
28. Exceptions merely prove the correctness of this assertion. The rarity with
which enameled vessels of Roman origin are found proves this technical approach

612
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

failed. The decoration of vessels using the barbotine method described above belongs
more to sculpture than to painting; among the Romans it was always monochrome
(white on black or red).
29. Pottery was subject to modifications as a result, and it would be interesting to
follow them. Because of the abundance of material, however, we must keep to our prin-
ciple of considering the ceramic style mainly in terms of its relation to architecture. The
formation, reproduction, and decoration of plastic works and the resulting stylistic
modifications are better discussed elsewhere.
30. We emphasize the echinus only because it epitomizes the whole: the entire col-
umn is conceived ceramically.
31. See the related comments in “Tectonics.”
32. The stove tiles (fourteenth century) shown here were found recently in the
foundations of the old salt house near the main cathedral in Zurich. A beautiful stove
made of glazed tiles with plastic decoration that I sketched in the old Tirolean ancestral
castle in Merano also dates from the same period. It is also illustrated here, though it
belongs more properly to masonry.
33. The German pots in this style are imaginative and plastically rich with strong,
soldered relief decoration that avoids unduly shallow detail. In many ways they resem-
ble Henry II faience. See Brongniart, [Traité des arts céramiques,| atlas, [pl.] 37. A
richly sculptured bowl (forty-eight centimeters in diameter) dating from 1411, in the
reign of Charles VIII of France, is in the Imperial Library in Paris.
34. Namely, in a process that causes impressed (indented) decorations, fruit, leaves,
and figures to look like reliefs, because the green glaze is darker where the indentations
are deeper, which brings out the difference between light and shade.
35. The glaze on such ware is also occasionally polychrome (Brongniart, 2:14).
36. On medieval glazed ware, see also Albert Way on encaustic tiles; also [John
Gough] Nichols, Examples of Encaustic Tiles, and [Thomas] Oldham, Ancient Irish
Pavement Tiles.
37. Riocreux distinguishes Moorish-Spanish from Spanish-Moorish pottery, saying
that the latter is not actually faience but a translucent glaze on a white clay base (see his
essay in [Lacroix, Le] Moyen Age...).
38. 1388-1430.
39. The history of this interesting genre of clay ware is easily told thanks to Passeri,
and hence many like to tell it, but I will not repeat it here, referring instead only to well-
known works. See Brongniart; Marryat; Labarte, “Introduction [historique],” 282 ff.;
Riocreux, “Arts céramiques,” in [Lacroix,] Le Moyen Age et la Renaissance.
40. Originality was never this school’s strong suit.
41. It took almost fifty years, to the end of the fifteenth century, for Umbrian pot-
ters to produce a true tin enamel. Previously, white chalk coverings (engobes) had been
used under a transparent lead glaze. This was the so-called mezza majolica, to which
according to Riocreux the majolica of Moorish Spain also belongs.
42. Palissy ware has the lowest lime content, only 1.52. Luca Della Robbia ware
has the highest, at 22.4.
43. Glazes with the highest tin content are the hardest.
44. The latter, incidentally, really belong to the fine faiences described below.

613
 Semper

45. Brongniart does admit, however, that a few vessels from China seem to fall into
this category (see 1:30).
46. Ocher zones and bands in the Arabian manner, entwined and edged with dark
brown lines and entwined with flowers and tendril work.
47. According to other descriptions, silex had been used since 1697. See [Richard]
Watson, Chemical Essays (London, 1787), 2:255.
48. The supposed improvement made to paste and glaze by adding an unnatural
blue white and by removing any trace of the materials’ natural shade has already been
discussed (pp. 233 ff. and elsewhere). More on this under “Porcelain.”
49. See Brongniart, 1:137.
50. Colored pastes from the Sarreguemines factory are of excellent quality. Bron-
gniart describes this ware (2:140).
51. Brongniart, 2:635.
52. Brongniart, 2:640.
53. See Birch, History of Ancient Pottery, 1:98 ff.
54. The Samian pots whose shards were used for the notorious surgical operations
performed by the priests of Cybele (because they were so sharp and made such clean
incisions) were definitely true earthenware.
55. See the section on dyeing in volume 1.
56. It is never pitch black like Wedgwood ware but more subdued, tending toward
brown or green, greenish white, greenish Naples yellow, gray, reddish gray, and dark
jasper red. The last-named in particular is of incomparable splendor. I have such a
Chinese piece, with colored enamels on a deep red ground. For years now, when my
eyes are tired, I have feasted on it to restore their strength.
57. See, for instance, Brongniart, 2:442, bottom.
58. Although there is no doubt that this artistic technique originated in Germany,
and although most objects of this kind are absolutely Germanic in type, France and
Italy also achieved a great deal in this genre, though with their own characteristics. See
the Italian pot illustrated (after Brongniart).
59. Only [Paul] Utzschneider in Sarreguemines has attempted something similar.
60. According to Brongniart, earthenware is characterized by a dense, very hard,
sonorous, and opaque paste with a more or less fine grain. Coarse earthenware consists
almost entirely of pipe clay; fine examples add kaolin, feldspar, and other materials
that modify the properties of the paste either as fusers, dyes, or in some other way. The
glaze, if used, is either a very thin glassy coat of almost no thickness, of sea salt, potash,
and lead oxide (with very little of the last). Or it is a more or less viscous glass that has
a high lead content and is applied in liquid form. The enamel decoration itself, applied
thickly like a relief, presents fewer difficulties than with other materials. See Bron-
gniart, 2:192.
61. Even those produced by the painter Ziegler
—which Brongniart placed along-
side medieval stone jugs—did not please me when I saw them at the Great Exhibition
in London (1852).
62. Some say that the basis of murra was fluorspar, which is also a very perishable
material.
63. In fact it is said that a very valuable fossil called yw was used in China for

614
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

bowls and vessels of inestimable worth, but others doubt its existence. See “Die mur-
rhinischen Gefasse,” in C. A. Bottiger, Kleine Schriften, 2:152, and [Wilhelm Adolph]
Becker, Gallus, 144. Both writers, who cite the relevant literature, incline to the view
that murrhines were Chinese porcelain.
64. The large Chinese and Japanese display vases are already themselves stylistic
aberrations. They are completely lacking in the gemlike quality that colossality excludes.
They are difficult to execute but they retain their character as utility vessels. They are
incomplete in themselves, since they are completed only by metallic fittings and a bou-
quet of flowers, as decoration in a garden or a luxurious room. Where Chinese porce-
lain leaves its realistic and decorative terrain and becomes figurative-sculptural and
statuelike it immediately loses all stylistic interest.
65. The Kensington Museum has several very valuable vases and decorative items
in this stone (called jade in English). Their rich gold decoration, with rubies, emeralds,
and sapphires, is evidence of the great value of the fossil material of which these objects
were made. Perhaps the mysterious yu (see above) is only a particularly excellent form
of this fossil.
66. The older Chinese vessels are usually bowl-shaped, dish-shaped, egg-shaped,
cylindrical, or flask-shaped. They are always unarticulated, as the decoration always
provides the articulation. With the exception of celadon (produced both by the color of
the ground and by a particular shade in the glaze), turquoise (the caeruleum of antiq-
uity) is the most frequently occurring ground, but this is a glaze color, even though the
paste, which is always green, affects it. In addition there is purple, light indigo, dark
violet, and blue (bleu du roi). White is never quite absolute but always inclines toward
the mentioned clear green shade, which gives this ware its particular charm.
First of all, the decorations are chased, effectively cut out of the mass, then covered
with a translucent crystal glaze whose mirror surface is gracefully interrupted and miti-
gated by the translucent spaces in between. (Because shallow patterns and guilloches
can easily be produced in the paste by the moulage a la croiite process, they are used
a great deal in factories, but what abuses are committed in their name! The heavy
baroque curlicues of certain modern products are tasteless, the absolute opposite of
fine chased Chinese porcelain.) Often this decoration devolves entirely into an open fil-
igree network. Second, the decorations are made plastic, under and not infrequently
over the glaze, with a slightly raised porcelain mass. True sculptures on handles, lids,
and feet are rare on the oldest porcelain, as they were in wood or metal. Third, they
were painted with colored enamel but applied pastose, relieflike, not in the quite differ-
ent style of modern cassette enameling. The gemlike sheen of this hard Chinese porce-
lain enamel made with quartz has to be seen to be understood. It cannot be described.
A remarkably instructive decoration of the glaze, stylistically speaking, is the network
found on old so-called cracked porcelain — originally a mistake resulting from the paste
not being homogeneous with the glaze, but this was then exploited decoratively. The
naturalism of this decorative method corresponds to free tendril work with the irregu-
larly distributed floral decorations, medallions, landscapes, and other decorative motifs
that are characteristic of ancient Chinese porcelain.
As was already noted for Chinese earthenware, Chinese gilding did not accord with
our ideas of perfection, that is, it was matte. It was used very sparingly on the vase

615
 Semper

itself. A rich gold decoration (also matte) was also used; in some types of large Chinese
and Japanese porcelain vessels it consisted of a rice paste covered with gold.
67. Stanislas Julien, L’histoire de la fabrication de la porcelaine chinoise (Paris).
[Antoine-Pierre-Louis] Bazin, Chine moderne, pt. 2, 638. Hoffmann’s monograph on
the history of Japanese porcelain (reproduced in the first-mentioned work).
68. The Chinese fossil called petuntse is somewhat green, hence the inimitable
celadon shimmer of Chinese white porcelain.
69. Old porcelain items, usually small ones, are almost rarer in China (at least
commercially) than in Europe. They are extremely expensive and are searched for in
rivers, fished for in wells, and forged.
70. By and large, this desire to refine taste from above is never found in the luxury
items of our manufacturers. Here we have a particular state manufacturer in mind,
whose achievements we shall return to later.
71. They were intended to decorate the staircase in the Japanese Palace.
72. Old Saxon porcelain painting has something of a Chinese quality. The outlines
and shades are underpainted and covered with translucent enamel crystals.
73. This includes so-called light gilding, which leads to excessive abuse of this rich-
est of all modes of decoration and to total tastelessness. It is so impermanent that you
can lick it off with your tongue.
74. The turquoise and rose grounds—a la Dubarry of old Sévres porcelain —are
particularly famed. No manufacturer produces them with the same grace and freshness.
75. A rare exception in the history of art.
76. Many achievements in modern porcelain manufacture had to be combated, for
instance, pure white paste and glaze, shiny gilding, an excessively rich palette of colors
unnatural to this difficult material, and a fastidious appearance. Sometimes so-called
perfection had to be achieved artificially: for instance, an excessively white paste had to
be dyed to produce the natural green tinge of Chinese porcelain.
77. Thus they produced white biscuit vases conceived in the Greek style of exqui-
site form and decorated with matte polychrome paint. Other vases, with more plastic
decoration, followed the style of Campanian vases.
The beautiful Limoges enamel vessels, painted on a black ground or en camaieu,
also provided a basis for a series of new compositions that made varied use of enamel-
ing and gilding. The oligochromy of the noncombustible colors —the very few to which
one is reduced when paste for porcelain has to be dyed, or painted under the glaze—
provided the key to the appropriate treatment of form. This method was used for gar-
den urns and the like with felicity and originality.
Then sixteenth-century faiences spurred new invention.
But the very best produced by this brief golden age of the Sévres factory was that
made in the true porcelain style. These were Chinese technical motives applied with
European invention. Large bottle-shaped vases with free vegetal arabesques and refined
but unpretentious painting, with a relieflike, pastose treatment of the enamel, chasing
under the glaze, and so forth. The finest products of this kind that I have seen were four
great flowerpots with vegetal ornament and depictions of the four seasons that were
displayed at the Paris Industrial Exhibition of 1854. See Lothar Bucher’s report in the
National-Zeitung (1854).

616
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

78. Writings on the manufacture and history of glass:

1. TECHNICAL

[Sheridan] Muspratt, Theoretische, praktische und analytische Chemie, in Anwend-

ung auf Ktinste und Gewerbe, vol. 2.
C[arl] Hartmann, Handbuch der Thon- und Glas-Waaren-Fabrikation (Berlin, 1842).
H[einrich] Leng, Vollstdndiges Handbuch der Glasfabrikation (Weimar and Ilmenau,
1835).
[F.] Bastenaire-Daudenart, Traité de l’art de la vitrification..., vol. 8, with plates,
octavo.
G[eorg] L[udewig] Hochgesang, Historische Nachrichten von Verfertigung des
Glases (Gotha, 1780).
J[ohannes] Kunckel, Vollstandige Glassmacherkunst (Nuremberg, 1789), quarto.
[Georges] Bontemps, “Exposé [historique et pratique] des moyens employés pour la
fabrication des verres filigranés.”
Jules Labarte, article “Verrerie” in the introduction to the Description de[s objets
dart qui composent] la collection Debruge Duménil.
For Venetian glass see also an essay in the Bulletin de la Société d’encouragement
pour l'industrie [nationale] (1842): 309.
[George] Dodd on the imitation of marble, agate, and so on, using glass.
Ayres on ornamenting glasses, in The Repertory of Patent Inventions.
[Presbyter] Theophilus, Diversarum artium schedula, bk. 2, chaps. 12 and 13.
2. HISTORICAL

“Notice historique de l’art de la verrerie né en Egypte par M. Boudet,” in vol. 9 of

the Description de l’Egypte.
[Robert] Jameson on the glass fabrication of Egypt, in Edinburgh New Philo-
soph{ical] Journal [(1838)].
[John Gardner] Wilkinson, Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians.
[Georg Christoph] Hamberger, “Historia vitri ex antiquitate eruti,’ Comml|enta-
tiones] Soclietati Regiae Scientiarum] Goetting|ensi], vol. 4.
[Johann David] Michaelis, “Historia vitri apud Hebraeos,” ibid.
G.L. Hochgesang, Historische Nachrichten von Verfertigung des Glases (Gotha,
1780).
M[aximilian] L[udwig] C[hristoph] Schiilen, Geschichte des Glasses (Nordhausen,
1782).
Various essays in [Johann] Beckmann, Geschichte der Erfindungen (on ruby glass,
1:373; on mirrors, 3:467; on the art of cutting and etching glass, 3:536).
For glass incrustation see Raoul-Rochette, Peintures antiques inédites, 580.
ADDITIONAL ANTIQUARIAN TEXTS:

[Filippo] Buonarroti, Osservazioni sopra alcuni frammenti di Vasi antlichi] di vetro

ornati di figure, trovati nei cimeteri di Roma (Florence, 1816).
[Johann] Hf[einrich] C[arl] von Minutoli, Uber die Anfertigung und die Nutzan-
wendung der farbigen Glaser bei den Alten (Berlin, 1836).
[Pierre] Le Vieil, Art de la peinture sur verre (Paris, 1774), folio.
79. All relevant quotations are to be found in the essays by Hamberger and Michaelis
in the Comment|ationes| Soclietati Regiae Scientiarum| Goetting|ensi] 4:58, 127.

617
 Semper

80. Minutoli, 20. Others suggest they are Egyptian or even Venetian conterie [bead]
ware.
81. Pliny [37.198]: Neque est ulla fraus vitae lucrosior! [And there isn’t a more
lucrative fraud in life!] This passage and one in Seneca (Ep[istulae] 90[.33]) are, with-
out a doubt, referring to the coloring of genuine crystals, not glass. Such branches of
the art industry are not within the scope of our reflections.
82. See Bottiger’s Kleine Schriften, 3:351, and Minutoli, 10.
83. We do have other old glass sculptures or reports about them. An old obsidian
glass sculpture was restored by Tiberius the Heliopolitan. The Egyptian love of sculp-
tures in hard materials spread to Rome during the early imperial years. Elephants
carved in obsidian, a statue of Augustus, and so on are mentioned by Pliny.
84. Tiberius’s fear that the invention of a malleable and cold-hammered glass could
lead to a social revolution, by reducing the value of gold, was certainly very foolish.
85. Martial, 14.9[4], 14.111, and 14.115. Winckelmann describes a dish of shim-
mering color, covered with a blue net and an inscription, found in 1725 in the Novarese
area. The net was fastened to the core with fine, small, blue bars: “Neither the letters
nor the net was at all reliably soldered to this dish, but the whole thing was produced
from a solid glass mass using a wheel, just as a cameo is. Traces of the wheel can still be
clearly seen.” A similar vessel, white with a purple net, was found near Strasbourg
(Minutoli, 6). There is a fragment of such an item in Vienna (see [Joseph] Arneth).
Perhaps the fragment numbered 14 in color plate 16 was part of such a diatreton.
86. Valerio Vicentino, the true crystal artist of the Renaissance, made a number of
richly sculpted vases for Clement VII; many of them have been dispersed but several are
now in Florence. The Griine Gew6lbe in Dresden, the Louvre, the imperial treasury
in Vienna, the Kunstkammer in Berlin, and the Schatzkammer in Munich have many
such works.
87. I used cut-glass colored window panes for the Dresden theater and for private
houses, and in trying to make the ornament as easy as possible for the cutter, early
Renaissance tendril work immediately suggested itself. Irregularities of execution,
which are always unavoidable, are not concealed by the free treatment of the ornament
but rather justified by it and even make it a virtue.
88. They no longer produced their own, however, but instead used colored glass
from old mosaic floors.
89. In his Peintures antiques inéd[ites| R[aoul-]Rochette published a piece of
antique glass with enamel painting. [Conyers] Middleton (Antiquitat[is], pl. 5, pp.
85-93) gives an example depicting Cupid and Psyche. A third was found in Cumae.
Rochette, Pleintures| a[ntiques], 387.
90. Carlo Marin, Storia civile e politica del commercio de’ Veneziani (Venice,
1788), 1:1; 2:147, 2:213, and 5:1.
91. It has been doubted that the ancients were familiar with glass mirrors using tin
foil, but examples have been found on very old Egyptian statues (Turin Museum). The
so-called mirror of Virgil, made of flint glass, with half its weight in lead oxide, was
part of the treasury of Saint-Denis and indeed from the time of its founding, when mir-
ror manufacture had long been abandoned.
92. Bohemian glass is extremely pure and remarkable for its very low specific

618
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

weight. It consists of 100 parts quartz, 10 parts lime, and 30 parts calcium carbonate,
with no lead content.
93. The dark tradition of the old style has survived to an extent, ensuring the
charm of Bohemian glassware; it should be kept pure and fostered, rather than mixing
foreign principles with it.
94. Minutoli, 8.
95. Small metal objects found in Greek and Etruscan tombs are indeed decorated
with a kind of champlevé enamel (Br[itish] M[useum]), but the well-known magnifi-
cent enamel vessels are found only in France and England. Philostr[atus], Imag[ines]
1.28.
96. See color plate 16, figures 1, 2.
97. Pliny, 36.[67]: Maximus tamen honos in candido translucentibus, quam prox-
ima crystalli similitudine [However, the greatest esteem belongs to clear, transparent
glass, the kind as similar to crystal as possible].
98. See color plate 16, nos. 3, 4, and 5, which illustrate fragments from the collec-
tion of the Antiq[uarischer] Verein in Zurich.
99. Likewise, a transparent ground is found only in common glassware.
100. In addition to the Portland vase (in brown translucent glass with an opaque
white coating engraved with the fable of Theseus and Thetis), which has perhaps been
praised excessively, other works in this category include the glass pot with foliage of
white paste set on a blue ground (found in 1834 in the House of the Faun in Pompeii)
and countless fragments of similar glasses and wall panels. The largest (ten square
inches) and finest such fragment is in the Vatican.
101. In this respect spun glass is more perfect and richer than materials woven from
soft fibers, whose threads, for instance, do not permit twisting around a free axis with a
double rotation movement.
102. For Winckelmann’s famous duck, see his Geschichte der K|unst], 1.2 §22. A
ring with an oval glass jewel with a bird on it was found in Cortona in 1790. See
R[aoul-]Rochette, P[eintures| a[ntiques] i|nédites], 384, and Minutoli, 9.
103. See figures 6 and 11 of color plate 16.
104. Hadrian sent his brother-in-law calices allassontes that an Egyptian priest had
given him, with the instruction that they should be shown only on festive occasions.
[Flavius] Vopiscus, Vita] Saturnini, chap. 8.
105. See the chapters on velvet and satin, canvas embroidery, and satin-stitch
embroidery in chapter 4 of volume 1.
106. A thoughtful pattern designer for silk manufacturers could learn a great deal
from ancient millefiori glass fragments and could derive many hints for his own work.
The same is true of other silk stuffs, especially satin, which could benefit from the fili-
gree designs of antique and Venetian glass. Conversely, the glass artist could draw
inspiration from artistic fabrics.
107. The bundles are dipped into colorless glass before being spun, which gives
them a thin, invisible coating.
108. A diagonal direction would produce another range of combinations.
109. By glass bubble I mean here a rounded lump of glass that is hollow inside.
This forms something like an embryo on the mouth of the pipe, from which the glass

Gil)
 Semper

artist produces a vessel or some other shape by blowing and other manipulations. The
French technical term for this is paraison.
110. As figure 11 of plate 16 demonstrates.
111. See figure 7 of plate 16.
112. Often twenty-five to forty rods are used to produce a single combination.
113. Here I must note that a glass factory on Murano made for me in my presence
filigree vessels that were rather large and based on a complicated design, but the proce-
dure used was much simpler and did not require a hollow metal mold. The glass rods
were arranged in a row alongside each other on a hot metal base, and the hot end of the
pipe was rolled slowly over this layer of rods, so that they stuck to the tube, close
together and in parallel to its longitudinal axis. The rods were then welded together in
the kiln. The resulting glass cylinder was pinched together at the bottom, and the vessel
was blown from that.
114. See figure 2 on the woodcut on page 603 (a filigree vase from the former
Debruge collection).
115. The latter is fairly rare. Some fine fragments, unfortunately quite small, are
found in the antiquities museums in Zurich and K6nigsfelden (Vindonissa Museum).
116. As in figure 5 of color plate 16.
117. See Benvenuto Cellini, Trattato dell’oreficeria (Milan, 1811), 45; Labarte,
“Introduction ...,” [Description des objets d’art qui composent la collection Debruge
Dumeénil,] 156. See also “Enamel” under “Metallurgy.”
118. If the fake murrhine glasses of antiquity were opal ware and made by the mod-
ern process, it is not surprising that none of them has survived: the metal decorations
(purple of Cassius and silver chloride) cannot stand high temperatures, and the soft glass
quickly draws humidity and melts. An ancient Assyrian glass in the British Museum gave
me the idea that the ancients might have known how to fix the irisation of glass surfaces
caused by weathering. That glass object seemed to have been irised internally, by expos-
ing the surface of a prepared paraison (glass bubble) to weathering, which may have been
artificially accelerated so that the surface became irised. Then it may have been given a
transparent lining. Thus the internally irised glass bubble could have been made into a
vessel whose entire surface was irised but with the finest, hardest glaze. The effect could
be modified in many ways according to the colors and properties of the glass bubble and
the coating. Perhaps this is the process that Ziegler withholds from the reader in his essay
(Etudes céramiques, 262). I hereby claim the patent, should the process turn out to work.
119. The great diversity of these antique onyx glasses makes it impossible to
describe them in detail. Two examples from the Zurich antiquarian collection are
appended here as examples (figs. 9 and 10 of plate 16). Others are found in Minutoli
and in C[ésar] Daly’s Revue de l’archlitecture| 15 [(1857)]: 238, presented by the
painter [Pierre] J[ules] Jollivet. [Otto Magnus] Stackelberg’s Graeber der Hellenen also
contains various colored illustrations of glass onyx vessels.
120. This also confirms the universal experience that naive popular instincts are
least likely to be led astray in matters of legitimate design.
121. The small, squat, fluted bottle (fig. 16) is, like all the objects in plate 16, from
the collection of the Antiquarischer Verein in Zurich and serves as an explanatory
example here.

620
 Ceramics: Technical-Historical

122. See the woodcuts on pages 603; 605; 606, top; and the vignette at the conclu-
sion of this chapter. If some ancient or modern inventions in glassmaking have not been
dealt with here, this requires no apology: they have no stylistic significance of their
own, and our task is by no means to write a general technological study. The famous
Kunkel ruby glass, for example (magnificently translucent crimson glass, colored by
gold and tin) was matched by ancient products almost as beautiful that used copper for
coloring. Ancient haematinum, a process recently rediscovered by Pettenkofer, falls—
like the imitation of a semiprecious stones beloved by the ancients —into our category
of imitation of stone by glass. Likewise, aventurine glass, closely related to haematinum
in material and preparation and known from time immemorial, is (if its exponents have
interpreted it correctly) a paste that imitates stone. Thus it too is implicitly covered in
terms of style without being specially identified in the text. For ruby glass and the like,
see the relevant article in Beckmann. For haematinum, aventurine glass, and other
inventions of modern glass manufacture, see the essay “Das Glas,” Aus der Natur,
vol. 12, published by [Ambrose] Abel.

621
 ‘Pia Ol ¢atank » CGew (aig Wand WOT aud
ROE Se eee ty « akoee
=) Hea A) @S Dahin
EA Nar
7 mt in~@e> eT)

7 aa. Las

= ow —,

iw : 7 we ©

if Bente
= seen!)oO < — 7 7 pe Ong 7 a, ¢ = . =

, teehee yo =
elasts fas &
i ee,
Wei vo

=a” (Gases

np sae
mm BA RED & ie < eG
ee ee
2) on : = qu: Aqsapt-
(Gn So Sa eee GaipUr
> DE 66 0 HS rSr-eLg clea Reels Sag :
1) Geeaawk.
ici Se gla, Inve
| Cpwesaery & At ee (i= - 7 4 eel
 CHAPTER SEVEN

Tectonics (Carpentry)
A. General-Formal

§ 130 The Formal Language of Tectonics Was Fixed before Its Use
in Monumental Architecture
The art of assembling stiff, planklike elements into a rigid system is indis-
putably the most important art for the theory of monumental style, if only
because the gable roof with its supports has been the traditional symbol of the
sanctuary, the consecrated house of God, since the most ancient times and
among all peoples.! The framework embodies the highest and most universal
theme of architecture —the type that, having been established as an art-form
in the temple, became appropriate for other architectural works. Yet carpen-
try continued to influence architecture actively in the most direct and material
way, as the primary codeterminant in the different phases of the stylistic his-
tory of this art.
The true significance of this continuing direct influence of carpentry on
architectural style can be grasped only if we proceed from the oldest architec-
tural types that emerged from carpentry and trace the new motives and trans-
formations of these types as they occurred throughout the history of technology
and art. Ultimately, all of them point back again and again to those oldest root
forms and find there the key to their artistic value.
These tectonic root forms are much older than architecture and had already
in premonumental times —even before the sacred hut, the house of God,
acquired the monumental framework of its art-form—achieved their fullest
and most marked development in movable domestic furnishings. From this it
follows, according to the general laws of human creation, that the monumen-
tal framework as art-form was necessarily a modification of what tectonics
had developed on its own in its earlier objective.
This important fact, often pointed out in my earlier chapters, settles once
and for all the vain quarrel about the Vitruvian wooden hut as the ostensible
model and crudest motive for the temple, in terms of its overall form and
architectural members. It also explodes other, more recent theories according
to which the perfect Doric temple sprang —like Pallas Athena fully armed and
ready — without model and precedents solely from the requirements of the
material used, namely, stone.? The temple has always remained a pegma, a
framework in the sense described, whether it was built of wood or stone. Yet
the wooden temple and stone temple as art-forms “developed” neither on
their own nor one from the other, but rather together with pegmas that, as

623
 Semper

domestic furnishings, had been dressed with their characteristic art-forms

already much earlier.
In the monumental structure these types were indeed considerably trans-
formed, though only to the extent required by their new purpose, the new
material, and above all the contrast that now emerged between the movable
domestic furnishing and immovable building.
The art-forms used to dress domestic furnishings before they were adopted
by monumental art were not primitive either but assembled, in a certain sense
borrowed — insofar as they make themselves heard in a known artistic lan-
guage that borrowed its word formation (to continue with the grammatical
analogy) largely from the oldest textiles, whose syntax is the same as that of
ceramics (vol. 1, chap. 3, §§ 4 ff.; vol. 2, chap. 5, §§ 108 ff.).
This makes the course of our stylistic reflections on tectonics both shorter
and easier, as we are able to refer to much that is already known from earlier
parts of the book. Additionally, we have already thoroughly discussed the
connection of an important factor in ancient tectonics —hollow-body con-
struction — with the emergence of the earliest tectonic art-types, so it is not
necessary to add much on this either (see vol. 1, § 70, pp. 328 ff., and § 77,
pp. 368-76).

§ 131 The Main Purposes of Tectonics

The tasks of tectonics can be generalized as follows:
the frame with the corresponding filling;
the lattice, a complicated frame;
the supports;
wWNthe structure, an integration of the supports with the frame.

§ 132 The Frame with Its Corresponding Filling

Most aesthetic-formal factors associated with the frame and its corresponding
filling are identical to those already dealt with in the prolegomena under
“Eurythmy” (p. 86) and in § 9 (pp. 123 ff.).
The general aesthetic-formal principles established there under the head-
ings of band, cover, seam, hem, and edging also apply to tectonically framed
filling, but the requirements that the filling be rigid and fixed within the frame
make it not merely a formally concluding and limiting hem work but a far
more active element that completely dominates the system. This distinction
between tectonic and textile frames becomes even more explicit when the for-
mer performs other functions in addition to framing, as is usually the case in
tectonics. Obviously the symbolism of the frame then changes as well.
The relation between textiles and tectonics, so clearly expressed here and
elsewhere, is so strong that we still borrow technical terms from textiles to
refer to tectonic elements (band, strap, wreath, lining, dressing, tension, etc.).
This was even more strikingly the case with the ancient Greeks and Romans,
and so it must have seemed entirely self-evident and natural to use symbols
borrowed from textiles to dress tectonic members thus named.3

624
 Tectonics: General-Formal

The energetic contrast in the framed filling between its two components —
the frame and the filling —soon led artistic sensibility to utilize it and make it
clear in an ideal way by expressing it symbolically. The inactive (and thus in
this sense empty) field was adorned with symbols that primarily suited the
nonparticipation of the filler in the structure but also endowed the struc-
turally active frame with a higher, extrastructural purpose and gave a focus
and ultimate purpose to its effect.
This contrast can be seen much more clearly and probably closer to its
original form in mounted gems (in jewelry). We also came across it in our aes-
thetic-formal analysis of vessels whose bodies, in contrast to their outwardly
active parts, provide a quiet background for higher representation. This is
already clear enough in barbarian art, although its still unfree tendentious-
symbolic products almost always have a technical or utilitarian secondary
purpose or vice versa. It was left to the Hellenes, as free artists, to recognize
the spirit of this principle, that is, to make a clear distinction in allowing
ornamental symbols to speak out in a purely structural sense and only at the
right time and to assign higher art exclusively to the structure’s neutral fields.
In this context we refer to the whole passage from pages 328 to 331 of vol-
ume 1 and to the images accompanying it.4 For the moment it suffices to pre-
sent an illustration of an extremely interesting fragment of timber construction

oiAF

Coffin from a tomb at Panticapaeum (Crimea)

625
 Semper

from a Greek tomb near Kerch (ancient Panticapaeum) that dates from the
best period.5

§ 133 The Upright Framework; the Triangle

Let us first consider upright, vertical frames—here, of course, only in an
abstract, aesthetic-formal sense.
The most important of these is the triangle, that is, the frame produced
when two rigid sides are placed diagonally so as to touch each other and set
into the ends of a third side, which serves as a horizontal support and also as
a band or clamp to prevent slippage.
This frame achieves its most glorious form in the gable (aetoma, fastigium)
of the Hellenic temple. As is well known, it is also statically and structurally
the most important joint in carpentry, and in fact the theory of carpentry is
based on it because of the rigidity of a tightly jointed triangle.

Vertical Triangular Frames Generally Considered

When this frame is seen as a whole (leaving aside for now the relation of the
parts to one another) its effect varies according to the proportion of its height
to its width at the base. If verticality is to be emphasized, the proportion of
base to height should be kept low. This becomes even more essential if the
frame also functions as a support, as is the case with some Egyptian and pre-
Hellenic roofs built over openings in walls, for example. These are the earliest
examples of stone tectonics and of interest for our present subject in many
respects.® If a frame is not load-bearing but merely forms a termination, tall
proportions make sense only if it is topped in an aesthetically satisfying way.
The towering Tuscan-Roman fastigium is in need of such correction; it is
incomplete without quadrigas or other majestic ridge crownings. The low
slope of the Greek-Doric version carries on its top only plant decoration as a
light acroterion or sometimes a winged (and therefore weightless) Nike, as in
the Temple of Jupiter at Olympia. These serve as a termination and a direc-
tional symbol but not as a load. Correcting this other extreme in the use of
the triangle as a vertical tectonic framework depends not on topping the peak
but rather on whether the sides of the triangle, which threaten to slip out at
the point where they join the base of the triangle, are connected and weighted
at their ends in an aesthetically satisfying way. This is why the side acroteria
of a Doric fastigium are higher, or at least more substantial, than those in the
middle.
Generally speaking, the choice of proportions for vertical triangular frames
is governed by the principle of determination mentioned in a similar context
on page 125 of volume 1. In the case of steeply sloping triangles, aesthetics
(and statics) permits the suppression of the horizontal base that connects the
sides of the triangle, but it is still necessary to indicate somehow the horizon-
tal force that resists the thrust. This can be done either by having the diagonal
line of the gable be absorbed on both sides by the continuous horizontal line
of the cornice (as is the case with the gables of Roman baths) or by using

626
 Tectonics: General-Formal

Gables, Roman baths

imposts or horizontal transoms to support the ascending sides of the triangle,

but in my opinion they are always an unsatisfactory solution to this problem.
They are often found on Romanesque gables.
In the case of very steep (Gothic) gables, aesthetic sensitivity no longer
demands a visible manifestation of horizontal resistance to thrust. Here the
sloping sides need a vertical base, which is provided by imaginatively shaped
supports (wall projections, consoles, or so-called bosses).
Very shallow gable roofs do not necessarily need horizontal banding, but
here the eye wants to see the ascending edges of the roof vertically supported
at several points along its length.
This incomplete form of the fastigium seems to have been used very fre-
quently in ancient Greek and Roman (also Egyptian) civil architecture. It can
be seen in Pompeian wall paintings and even today on rural houses in central
and southern Italy. A similar feature can be seen on the familiar Swiss, Tirolean,
and Styrian farmhouses, which perhaps preserve one of the most ancient types
of the Greco-Italic architectural style.’
The gable or the fastigium is only the externally visible representative, the
leader of the chorus (hegemon), so to speak, for a series of similar structural
triangles that form the structure of the roof. Here and in similar cases art tries
to provide an external, aesthetically comprehensible indication of what is
present without being seen but only represented. It uses means drawn from
reality, but it does so no more by imitation or literal, slavish translation of the
motive (such as transposing a timber-beam system into a stone style) than by
any strict logic. It grasps the abstract-formal concept and reproduces it almost
playfully in a decorative symbolism, striving only for aesthetic consistency.
It remains doubtful whether and to what extent the Greeks and Romans
treated the triangular assemblage of the internal roof structure artistically.
Vitruvius’s description of the Etruscan atrium corresponds to the ceilings of
some Etruscan tombs, which slope and are decorated with painted rafters.
Painted ceilings with rafters are also seen in antique wall paintings.
But there is no proof, in ancient authors or elsewhere, that the decorative
exhibition of the entire rafter system was antique in origin. Rather, wooden
paneling’ that dressed the beams and filled the gaps between them (the lacu-
nar) was usually — perhaps always — used as the monumental ceiling motive.?

The Vertical Triangular Frame in Its Parts

The antitheses between filling and frame have been sufficiently emphasized
above. The filling should never reinforce the frame, which in structural terms

627
 Semper

is not even present. The frame should seem to the eye to be completely rigid in
itself, and the filling should be recessed, either actually, apparently (by means
of color), or ideally by both means at once. In general, bright and positive
shades should be chosen for the structure, and airy and neutral (bluish) ones
for the filling. Stylistically, filling themes independent of the structure stand
out best on a neutral ground. Even so, depending on the mood of the whole,
other colors can be justified as a ground for the filling, even an appropriately
modified yellow and red —for example, if the framework is white, hard wood,
or metallic and shiny, suggesting a solid material. Here, as everywhere, there
is complete freedom within the general principle.
Whatever means one chooses to elevate an upright triangular framework
to an art-form, three guiding motives should be followed:
First, its function as a frame, which has been sufficiently discussed. The
ornamental symbolism must allude to what is framed.
Second, the structural activity of the framing parts. Ornament should rep-
resent the sustaining forces that give the pegma its rigidity.
The frame’s horizontal band is the collar beam that holds the sides of the
triangle together.
Thus every ornamental motive should at the very least be neutral with
respect to that activity of the intended member. For example, vertical fluting
of the kind found on the coronas of certain Roman temples with the richest
Corinthian order is incorrect, as are the straight joint cuts on some late
Renaissance window gables, because visually they destroy this member’s ten-
sile strength. The disks (menisci) or rosettes frequently found on coronas —in
the central zone of the epistyle of the Caryatid Porch in Athens, for instance —
are permissible, but they convey nothing in the sense described here.
Guilloches, labyrinths, and other textile symbols are more suitable. Mean-
ders and running waves (spirals) are appropriate decorations too, provided
that they begin at the two extremes and meet at the middle. These same run-
ning ornaments moving in one direction, from right to left or vice versa, are
unsuitable.!° Ornaments that start in the middle and run outward would
express not the tensile strength of the beam but rather the pull created by the
sides, which would be unsatisfying.
Similar considerations apply to the form and ornamentation of ascending
sections of the frame. Running ornaments must ascend from both corners and
peak at the tip of the fastigium.
Even more suitable are taut climbing motives, if they can be successfully
harmonized with everything else. Examples are the moldings in Gothic gables
and the chevrons in the ascending parts of painted roof trusses (the Messina
Cathedral, Church of San Miniato near Florence, and others; see plates 17
and 18).
If interior structural reinforcement of the triangle is needed, the parts of
the system should be treated according to the same principles that apply when
they are visible and artistically significant. These principles are universally
valid and identical for every conceivable architectural style.

628
 Tectonics: General-Formal

It would violate taste, for example, to treat a truss post and a pillar in the
same way, as the former pulls and the latter supports. That both are upright
makes no difference, for in a certain sense everything must be presented to the
viewer as upright (see § 11 and what follows here).
The truss post is, so to speak, the personification of absolute rigidity and
elastic resistance, and the standing post personifies compression and tension.
We are inclined to regard the former as a passive force, the latter as active.
Thus the structural activity should be symbolically transposed to anything
hung from it, and the latter should be characterized as something hung. This
will also draw attention to the less conspicuous structural parts that are kept
suspended. A striking example is the woodcut on page 507.
Likewise, a sensitive eye will perceive that all the other components of a
roof system have a particular dynamic principle of formation, which can be
further articulated using appropriate symbolism.
The third guiding motive in the artistic development of the tectonic form
that we are dealing with here is uprightness, which both the whole and the
parts should follow.
The upward-pointing triangle in itself is, as it were, a symbol of upright-
ness; turned upside down it is often seen as an expression and symbol of
something hanging—in covers and clothing as well as in architecture."

Pendent triangle

Each of its parts, however, must also convey to the viewer (for whom it is
intended to appear upright) the objective behavior of the tectonic form. Both
what constitutes the form and what appears on it should in a certain sense be
placed upright, or if not, it should be complemented by other motifs that dis-
tinctly emphasize “uprightness.” For example, if I roll waves along a gable’s
ascending cornice, then each wave must be treated vertically. If not, the eye

629
 Pendent triangle

needs another equivalent to the diagonal movement of the wave. The dentils
and modillions on the cornices of Greco-Roman architecture follow this law:
they are not placed vertically on the cornice but perpendicular in relation to
the viewer. 2
The same law— along with the principle that each part contributing to the
whole should be as individually developed as possible within its own area,
provided that this does not vitiate the combined effect of these parts as a
whole—also requires that every part of the pegma have its own upper and
lower terminations. Symbols invented by art, based partly on natural and
partly on technical analogies, to crown individual items as uprights and to
join them with others to form a whole, are eternally valid —they can be trans-
formed, but they cannot be replaced by something fundamentally new. Such
symbols were discussed in chapter 3 [recte: 6], in the discussion of ceramics,
and we will return to them frequently.
The crown that effectively integrates the parts of the work should accentu-
ate the sense of verticality, in the form of a cyma (gutter), anthemion, or
ascending wave; should be only on the diagonal sides of the frame; and should
be terminated at the ends of the sides with acroteria.¥
The three leading motives cited are not necessarily always congruent. For
example, the principle of ornamentation derived from framing has nothing in
common with upright verticality. Likewise, dynamic motifs —for instance,
those used on the ascending sides of the frame—are not always eloquent in
the sense intended here. But it suffices that they do not contradict that sense,
provided that it is adequately expressed elsewhere. Good and sure taste will
sometimes violate the principle to make its effect all the more valid by means
of contrast.

§ 134 Upright Rectangular Frames; Uprights Enclosed by Curves and

Mixed Regular Forms
What was said in § 132 is valid for all frames and thus for these as well. The
principle of determination with respect to verticality applies to them as well —
namely, reinforcing the expression of an upright orientation by adding height.
Of course this must be done within the limits of functionality and sound con-
struction. Frequently, higher aesthetic considerations come into play. For
example, they may be demanded by the character of the whole, of which the

630
 Tectonics: General-Formal

framed is one part. Or they may accord with gauging a contrasting effect, that
is, toning down the expression of upright support or even seeking the oppo-
site effect of compression and reclining.
Thus square or even compressed window panels that are small in relation
to the frame are appropriate for fortifications and prisons. A series of com-
pressed panels in a triglyph frieze provides a pleasing contrast with the inter-
columniation. A similar effect is often achieved through square or round half
windows in mezzanines and attics, which contrast with the windows on the
principal floors; they make the latter appear more slender. Compressed cellar
windows also give expression to the heavy base.
For the same reasons, the panels in a wooden wainscoting are wide and
essentially horizontal. Together they form a band, which may correspond to
the horizontal panels of another band above the wall’s main paneling. In
keeping with the nature of bands, both make a longitudinal rather than a ver-
tical effect; they are thus upright only as perceived by the viewer, not in terms
of their own direction. Ornamental symbolism should take this duplicity into
account and consider the difference between the main paneling, which is
upright in every sense, and the frieze paneling articulated as a band. A mind-
ful artist will easily find ways to stress this difference; for him the font of
invention will never dry up. The richest imagination, by contrast, will soon
run aground or be swept away by the whirlpools of nonsense if it neglects the
logic of invention. Therefore abstractions such as these represent the only true
practice (although I anticipate that many so-called practitioners, expecting set
patterns and recipes, will find them disappointing).
The principle of determination also holds for compressed panels, since
pure squares, circles, and polygons inscribed in circles must alternate with
horizontally extended forms. Generally speaking, such neutral panels consti-
tute center points for other, more highly developed forms. The isolated Gothic
rosette in its late, immoderate development needed the correction of the rich
internal tracery, but it remained an encroachment on that style.
For optical reasons that are easily understood, it often seems advisable to
give frames more real height than they seem to have. A rectangle appears
compressed if viewed from a greater height, and a circle seems to be flattened
into an oval. Therefore a rectangle should be made a little higher and an
upright oval should be selected instead of a circle."
A virtual (apparent) proportion of width to height of 1:2 is normal for
window and door panels. Following the antique tradition, the width of the
frame should be at least one-seventh and at most one-sixth of the breadth of
the panel. But clearly these proportions can be modified in every way accord-
ing to circumstances.

Relation of Parts to One Another, to the Whole, and to the Surroundings

What has been said earlier in this section about triangular frames is also true
here, mutatis mutandis. The tectonic forms under discussion differ in charac-
ter according to which of the three principal motives available for their artistic

631
 Semper

treatment is used as their principal design feature. We mean, first, the pegma’s
function as a frame and its relation to what is framed; second, its structural
function; and third, its upright relation to the viewer. The simple eurythmic
frame is fully represented by the antepagment, which extends evenly around
the panel. According to the earliest tradition, which has been shown to be
closely related to the old principle of encrusting the constructional parts, this
antepagment consists of a border (crepido) and various zones (fasciae, corsae)
that run in parallel strips around the frame. Any symbolism placed on this
antepagment encircles or radiates from what is framed, that is, it should stand
upright only in relation to this and structural motives should be permitted
only if they do not detract from what is framed — for example, nailheads, cor-
ner reinforcements, and the like.’ The most perfect frame of this kind is
round, but the principle is the same for linear forms and mixed regular forms.
It is agreed that a frame collects better, the more exclusively it relates to
what is framed. If the framed image, moreover, is placed inside a standing tab-
ernacle, it becomes a destination (altarpiece). Such an approach may be neces-
sary in churches where art inclines toward tendentiousness, but it is wrong for
galleries.
In architecture too the simple, most abstract frame is frequently used. The
more one understands its true meaning, the more it will be applied correctly.
As examples have already shown, the expression of a frame’s structural
purpose can coincide with the expression of its functional purpose. The for-
mer will always more or less distract from the image in that it recalls the
dynamic properties of the framing material and thus its materiality. This
effect can be mitigated if the structural expression is symbolic, that is, if it
makes analogies to nature or other things. The predominance of structural
motives here and in general is a characteristic of medieval architecture.
The frame with the greatest architectural significance is objective; it
expresses its relation to the outside world by formal means. Adjusting the
proportion of height is the easiest way to deprive the frame of its absolute
neutrality.
A framed panel may also step decisively out of its isolation when the bot-
tom piece of the frame is missing and the panel rests on a sill. The Greeks and
the Renaissance masters used to indicate the cut frame in the most naive way
by reintroducing the surround and the fascia at the bases of the ascending
jambs.'6
The frame acquires an even more emphatically outward appearance through
the use of “ears” (projecturae), that is, shoulder pieces on the lintel (super-
cilium). In its origin it is a structural motive that is as old as architecture itself.
Then comes the crowning cornice, with or without a frieze. Its decoration
is enriched by consoles (ancone, protyrides) to its right and left. The addition
of a roof makes it even more complete.
If this roof has a complete entablature (no longer resting on consoles but
supported by columns), the frame has reached the pinnacle of its monumental
development. A tabernacle has been created around it, but, like a frame, it

632
 Tectonics: General-Formal

retains its ancient, traditional jamb. Medieval architecture still retains this tra-
ditional doorjamb or antepagment in details (in church doors proper, for
example), but in general the frame increasingly lost its functional symbolism
and came to appear to be something constructed. In the end, the carpenter
will borrow the decorative forms of his cupboards from vault construction, as
will the goldsmith for the framing of gems!

§ 135 Horizontal Frames

The functional purpose of a horizontal frame is no different from that of an
upright one: it encloses an interior, and the arrangement of its parts (of what-
ever type they may be) is rhythmic with regard to this content (see above).
The structural purpose of the parts of a horizontal frame is, however, very
different from that of the same parts in an upright frame.
There is no longer any direct tension or compression along the length of
the framing members, but there is indirect tension caused by its own weight
and loading.
Thus for adequate support the eye demands that the sides of a freely sus-
pended frame have a height proportional to the load (indirect tension) and
that this height be greater than the other horizontal force in its depth. This
dimension should also dominate the other horizontal dimension of thickness.
Finally, the formal fittings should accord with these two purposes (the func-
tional and the structural).
The parts of horizontal frames, like everything else, naturally have their
proportional development directed upward, that is, no longer in parallel with
the framed area but at right angles to it.
Here again we encounter the old familiar scheme of the antepagment, with
its multiple zones and its crowning edge, as the traditional dressing for the
exterior and interior walls of the frame. The eurythmic order of this scheme
does indeed satisfy the first of the requirements discussed above. The repetition
of the fascias, moreover, makes it an expression of vigorous relative strength,
and this can be reinforced by the use of ornamental symbolism. Third, it char-
acterizes the top and bottom of the frame in the sense desired. The third visible
lower surface of the horizontally suspended frame is decorated with motives
that correspond to and make tangible the concepts of freely suspended and vig-
orous resistance to vertical load. This is why hanging festoons, straps, strong
guilloches, and other such textile motives are often chosen.
The full significance of this rich tectonic combination becomes evident
only when combined with the supporting structure, which keeps it suspended
in a horizontal position.
Not infrequently the horizontal frame is perceived in the same way as the
upright version, though it assumes a conventional top and bottom. For
example, framed ceiling panels were treated by the Alexandrine Greeks and
Romans like niches and tabernacles, on whose roofs were grouped figures or
arabesques. In a very similar, opulent way this motive was taken up again in
the Renaissance (see p. 149).

633
 Semper

§136 The Lattice

By lattice I mean a flat rigid system resembling a grid (compages) assembled
from planklike constructional parts. It deserves particular consideration here
because of the high status it has held since the beginning of tectonics — partly
in terms of material and construction, partly as a type (primitive art-form). It
warrants such attention even though on closer consideration it is no more
than a multiplied or subdivided frame, with which it therefore shares most of
its stylistic properties.
We can also assign the lattice another origin, according to which its style is
to be grasped in a related but modified sense. In the chapters on New Zealand
and China in volume 1 (§§ 64-65), it was shown that among these peoples
the lattice evolved from a network or grate of light bamboo canes, that it
asserted itself architecturally as a lattice wall, that other parts were consoli-
dated through gradual transitions into a solid framework, and that even the
Chinese tectonic structure retained a hint of its origin in pile-supported woven
fences (p. 263).
In the architecture of all ancient peoples, especially the Greeks and Romans,
the lattice as a spatial termination had nearly the same significance as in
China. The only difference is that the realistic conception of this motive that
was typical in China gave way to a more artistic and decorative one in Greece
and Rome. Only the basic idea of a pierced wall was retained and the lattice
was apparent, so to speak, only as a stratum under an ornamental and often
very rich symbolism (of wickerwork). Many such lattices (Epkoc, S5ovdaKTov,
KLYKAic, Siddpaypa, €pupa, cancellus, pluteus) made of marble and metal
have survived. Very ancient specimens in embossed metal have been found
in Etruscan tombs—some imitate ancient Chaldean tree plaitings (Museo
greg[oriano] etrusco and the woodcut on p. 153), and some are pure lattice
constructions. Representations of temple diaphragmata [partition walls] on
bas-reliefs. Lattices on the doors of the Pantheon (p. 331). Lattice in Aachen
Cathedral.

Etruscan couch

634
 Tectonics: General-Formal

The extremely widespread use of lattices gave ancient architecture a partic-

ular style that we usually fail to recognize because these and other things that
once completed Greek and Roman monuments are now missing, which has
led to erroneous views.

Latticework between the legs of the bed

This is particularly true of the columnar porches and peristyles of temples,

which were very often closed off with lattices or screens, as is demonstrated
by traces of their mountings.!” These lattices were also predecessors to balus-
trades, which were not invented until the Renaissance.!8

Suggestion of lattice ornament between Gothic columns (vase)

Arabian architecture returned the lattice to its status as the principal motive
of wall decoration and also used it in other ways, for example, as an open-
work terminal wall or even for structural purposes. See the magnificent build-
ing by Owen Jones and his description of the Alhambra Court on Sydenham
Hill, an essay that contains some very interesting observations on the methods
the Moors observed in neutralizing the principal lines of their grid divisions.
This corresponds with the principle of Oriental art that strives for harmony
through the balance and counterbalance of forms and colors. It is not, how-
ever, the only valid and uniquely true principle of harmony, as Owen Jones
would have it, nor even the highest such principle.

635
 Semper

In the Christian architecture of the Middle Ages latticework remained

almost as significant, partly as a result of ancient traditions, partly through
Oriental influences. This holds especially for Byzantine art. Because of its
inherent structural tendency, the Gothic style almost transformed it back into
the naked primeval scheme; alternatively, with less justification, it symbolized
that scheme by analogy to the system of the pointed arch and used decorative
forms derived from that system. The imaginative Renaissance period wonder-
fully mastered this rich theme as well.
A far greater importance is attributed to latticework today than has ever
been the case before, though admittedly only in a purely technical-mechanical
way. It has almost been elevated to the basic principle of construction, which
makes style studies in this field extremely important (see “Forging” under
“Metallurgy”).
The already familiar laws of vertical development also hold for the lattice
or grid, depending on whether it is used as a vertical wall or a horizontal sur-
face (see vol. 1, §§ 9-18, also above §§ 135-36).
The most richly developed type of horizontal decorated latticework, and a
model of stylistically correct execution for all the centuries, is the (freely sus-
pended) coffered ceiling of Greek temples.?°
When lattices or grids are angled or curved, and thus cannot be considered
either horizontal or vertical surfaces, our architectural sense becomes con-
fused much as nature does in those vegetal forms in which verticality conflicts
with eurythmy (see the prolegomena, p. 89). We look for ways to mediate, to
satisfy the laws in all respects. The coffered ceiling of the dome of the Roman
Pantheon offers a remarkable and very instructive example of how a sense of
style resolves such cases.
Often lattices are given a type of frame whose relevant stylistic principles
are already familiar to us. In these cases the lattices constitute the filling of the
frame but an active filling whose activity should be expressed in a structural-
symbolic sense.
If the tips or extremities of the elements that form the grid project beyond
the edges of the frame, the structural activity of the lattice can extend beyond
it as well. These extensions of the grid structure become very significant for
types and decorations in furnishings and in architecture. To be sure, their
symbolic meaning derives from their structural origin, but even when they are
freely applied they are pure types and symbolic expressions of certain formal-
aesthetic concepts.?!
They are acknowledged in every style and are identical in their formal
idea, even though they differ in other ways. Everywhere they are the most
highly decorated part of the work and the true focus of ornamentation, because
correct artistic sensibility recognizes or at least senses their high functional-
structural significance and rich meaning. We must therefore consider this
meaning here.
First, they are projections; specifically, projections that belong to an inter-
nal structural system that ends or terminates in them. They are therefore rigid,

636
 Tectonics: General-Formal

strong projections. This echo of an inner coherence reinforces the expression,

for instance, of the garland mutules supporting the fascia of a corona. In
Greek such projections were called prokrossoi (or simply krossoi) or probo-
lai; in Latin, proceres. Herodotus said of a bronze mixing vessel, “The pro-
krossoi set all round it were griffins’ heads.”22
If their connection with a real or imagined inner pegma makes the projec-
tions seem fixed and strong, in the arts they have, by the same token, also
served to complete the pegma, as extremities, acroteria, and directional sym-
bols (see the example of a table, p. 338). As a eurythmic crown they are
essentially a type of trimming, mediating a form that is complete in itself with
the exterior. Thus the Greek word krossoi, which is synonymous with
thysanoi, also refers to the tassels that adorn gowns. Thus we return again to
root forms of artistic symbolism in textiles (see pp. 126 ff., 141, and 160, and
the accompanying woodcuts).
These forms (the proceres) likewise suggest and serve as a prelude to a tec-
tonic system that is hidden or present only as an idea. They are symbols that
allude to that system.
We have already shown that the multiplicity of the roof frame, though
expressed in the external form just once, in the gable (as hegemon), is ade-
quately indicated by the means just described —the external decoration of the
so-called viae or mutules or the related decoration of the modillions— although
this is not true to the construction. These are means for increasing the artistic
interest of the exterior by increasing the richness of associations made by its
parts and using echoes of ornamental motifs that correspond to the interior to
connect the exterior with the interior so that the latter may be conceived in
aesthetic-sensual terms. Entirely justifiable interpretations of this kind, which
would permit the beautiful adornment of the mutules described above, would
be futile if (as Botticher suggests) they owed their technical origin and their
decorative form only to the hollowing and resultant lightening of the project-
ing part of the corona required by stone construction (so that the load-bearing
part behind it would continue to dominate). This view is no better than the
suggestion that cylindrical stone columns were invented to make it easier to
roll them down from the quarries.
Even if we were to concede that these forms had a technical origin in the
stone style, the sculptor looking for art-forms for the tasks he has set aside
would still always be led to a sequence of ideas that corresponds roughly to
what has come before and what will come after, building on the absolute-
formal conditions of every tectonic work.
In addition to protruding and terminating, the elements of plank construc-
tion described here are often, if not always, also active in a dynamic sense as
supports and beams. As supports they serve with their compressive strength;
as beams more in the sense of their relative resistance.
Consequently, there are, first, free terminations:
a. vertical lattices;
b. horizontal lattices.

6Si7
 Semper

Second, there are serving terminations:

a. vertical lattices;
b. horizontal lattices.?3
These four categories, with their great range of nuances, correspond to an
equal number of design motifs.
In a eurythmic conception the free terminations of a vertical lattice should
be clothed identically on all sides by natural or primeval-technical (textile)
analogies (see the figures on p. 84 of the prolegomena and pp. 153, 342, and
435), which express a free termination on all sides without regard to top and
bottom.
A eurythmic approach to the horizontal lattice does require some consid-
eration of top and bottom (relative to the viewer), but this does not disturb
the uniformity of the terminations.
Appropriate symbols here should be based on animal and vegetal motifs
that at the same time conform to the notions of termination and standing
freely upright. These include the tips of leaves, volutes, taeniae (on the ridges
of Doric architraves), animal heads, masks, and human and animal torsos
(examples: the griffin heads on the Argolic kraters mentioned by Herodotus;
similar heads on the Etruscan ampulla on page 507; radial decorations of the
most lavish kind on multiarmed lamps;?4 fountain bowls and similar vessels;
lion-shaped consoles on Lycian tombs, gutter spouts treated in this way, and
many others).
The arrangement of projections on lattices that have a top and bottom and
a front and rear is no longer eurythmic; rather the projections are asymmetrical
in their position and orientation. They are found on furniture, chariots, and
ships, as well as on architectural members (acroteria, battlements, pinecones,
terminations, and tapestries). Their treatment is often dependent on technical
motives (see pp. 334 ff.).
Finally, let us turn to serving terminations, which are even more important
for the arts. They can be treated as parts that actually serve (as the barbarians
and the Middle Ages loved to do). Alternatively, in a more elevated concep-
tion of the basic idea, they may be characterized as the, so to speak, absolute
expression of a vivacity, elasticity, and organically alive counterforce to the
dead load, scarcely employed and thus utterly capable of serving (as the Greeks
preferred). Examples include the Egyptian keystones in the niche of the pavil-
ion of Medinet Abu at Thebes (with slaves’ bodies that seem to groan under
the weight of the slab), similar features on Egyptian furniture, Persian gable
capitals, Gothic responds [Dienste] at the springing of ribs and in other places
as consoles (often with a figurative and grotesque expression of their serving
function [Dienst]). By contrast, the veiled and spiritualized expression of the
same idea in Greek art was expressed by freely attached vegetal volutes and
tendril work, organic leaf profiles, and the cyma (representing a lightly sup-
porting wave ascending under the load).
Horizontal beams with this kind of dynamic activity are reminiscent of the
supporting triangle with its point of application mentioned in note 11. When

638
 Tectonics: General-Formal

they functioned as horizontal supports for the coronas in the Greek entabla-
ture they were called cornice bearers or cornice feet (geisiphores, geisipodes).
Vertical terminations that are meant to serve some purpose (namely, sup-
ports and bases) react in part to something above (the load) and in part to
something below (the base, the ground). This fact, as well as the attributes of
standing upright and supporting a vertical load, are all considerations in their
formal treatment. They constitute the principal topic of the next section. See
also § 110 in “Ceramics,” which concerns vase bases.

The Support
Consistently following a system sometimes leads to apparent contradictions
that justify rather than condemn the process being used.

Etruscan candelabras

This seems to be the case here, in that, following § 131, we are discussing
the tectonic support in its own right and only later in combination with what
is supported. For it turns out that every support already in itself contains and
expresses such an interaction of supporting and supported parts and that this
internal integrity rests on structural-formal grounds, which are grasped aes-
thetically and further developed.
Artistic sensibility makes the supported components both representatives
and, so to speak, harbingers of the actual load; it imparts to the stand a cer-
tain inner integrity and makes it into an art-form that is complete in itself. Its
integration with the actual load external to it is borne and stabilized by those
mediating representatives of that load within the support.
Art follows this principle partly in a downward direction by articulating

639
 Semper

the stand’s actual supports in the same way, partly in an upward direction by
extending and completing as much as possible that to which the whole stand
refers.
Connected with the contradiction described is the important and generally
valid synthetic rule of repeating the whole in its parts, and combining the lat-
ter to form a whole that is homogeneous with them and is already contained
within them in embryo.*5
We have already seen that the movable pegma developed into an art-form
earlier than the monumental version, and we have already emphasized that
the two are opposites.2° We can thus refer to what is already known.
Of all the movable supports, the crossed (fastened according to the prin-
ciple of a triangular lattice) tripod is certainly the most perfect, as it conforms

Tripod from Pompeii

in every respect to the static and formal demands of a movable system that is
very stable and light yet fixed in its parts. It is, as it were, the ideal of a stable
and yet very movable structure; it is characterized by the trinity of its supports
and especially the artistically formal value of its gridlike bar-construction.
Yet this support would be neither internally stable nor outwardly func-
tional without the upper crown2’ that binds the three legs and serves as a
receptacle for the load (the basin). At the same time, it addresses the concerns
expressed above by representing the basin,?8 which, though independent of
the self-contained tripod form, nevertheless combines with the latter to pro-

640
 Tectonics: General-Formal

duce a more unified appearance. The crown thus simultaneously serves as a

symbol of crowning (terminating), binding, and receiving (grasping); it is
often itself a chalice-shaped vessel that expands outward —a basin for the
basin. In addition, three ears (ota) or handles are attached to the crown between
the legs. The concluding element to the whole work, whose religious impor-
tance for the ancients is well known, is the lid (olmos) resting on the tower-
ing handles.
Heavily loaded tripods have a fourth, central support, which, like a stele
or column,2’ receives the bottom of the basin directly. Seen conceptually, it
remains independent of the other supports. We will see the significance that
this form, which was initially just added on, will later acquire.
The many examples of tripods made of clay, metal, and stone, or merely
painted on vases, walls, or surviving reliefs, give ample evidence of the way in
which art gradually adopted this composite motive as a whole and in its parts,
and how the Hellenic poetry of form gave it the profoundest expression. Their
analysis will bring us back to principles already stated. Volume 1 (pp. 328-46)
also contains specific material on this subject, especially on the structural,
functional, and mystical origin of traditional artistic symbols found on
ancient furnishings. In what follows we will inevitably be led back to this. Let
us therefore consider now how the components of the tripod—a most perfect
and most richly articulated stand, which may be deemed the quintessence of
furniture —contrast with monumental supports. Our aim is to show how the
shrinking and merging of these parts into the single center stele that now
remains correspond with a hierarchy of expressions that range between the
extremes of the absolutely movable and the immovable (monumental) objects
fixed to the ground.30
The crossbars (rhabdoi) that hold the three legs in a triangular unit are an
eloquent expression of a system that is light and thus requires internal rein-
forcement. The trestlelike mutual support of the three legs, which spread out
toward the bottom to give the load the broadest possible static base, is also
an expression of a structure in need of support because its parts are not self-
sufficient. The lack of crossbars and the vertical orientation of the three legs
are therefore also symbolic, and in fact negatively symbolic, of a massive sup-
port system that is stable in the self-sufficiency of its parts even without cross-
bars or mutual support.
Then these three legs themselves atrophied; they survive only transition-
ally, as symbols attached to the monumental support structure, almost as
reminders that monumental form originated in furniture. Antiquity loved
these attributes on altars, fountain bases, and other immovable objects. The
Renaissance also took up this contrast between monumental and movable tec-
tonics; the masters of this artistic era were conscious of and fluent in the many
shades of expression these transitional forms contained. Examples include the
beautiful semimonumental flagstaffs in front of Saint Mark’s in Venice and in
the marketplace in Padua, sarcophagi on early Renaissance tombs, and many
others.

641
 Semper

Finally, all that remained was the pure stele; only then was the functional
and structural idea contained within it expressed on its own as an art-form.
But even this most simple of vertical supports has shades of expression
ranging from mobility to monumentality, depending on how its formal motives
are developed.
These motives, and especially the way in which they are used to intensify
monumental expression, are so important for the general theory of architec-
tural form that more detail is needed here. We will keep to the assumption,
and indeed take it as axiomatic, that the formal language of architecture is
derivative, and that its types already existed in finished form before there was
any monumental art.
The support is determined by its function of accommodating a vessel. Or
formulated more generally for all furnishings, the central vertical base or stele
is characterized above all by its roundness, that is, the circular form of its hor-
izontal section. This form corresponds to the purpose of directly accommo-
dating (grasping) the thing supported, especially when the latter is itself a
rounded body, for instance, a basin or any other kind of vessel. It also corre-
sponds to the purpose of transferring the load to the ground uniformly and
supporting it equally on all sides.
It is thus far more correct to explain the preference for this (cylindrical)
form of vertical support by reference to its familiarity from the beginnings of
art than by other reasons, such as the use of rough trunks for columns, the
ease with which stone column drums could be rolled from the quarry to the
building site, or the opening up of space, as others insist.3! The sensibility
developed early in the manufacture of implements consistently rejects using a
circular form for supports that do not assume the load vertically but are built
like trestles. One example is the (usually rectangular) legs of the tripod.
The cylindrical stele is intended to receive, carry, and distribute a load.
This is expressed in a clearer and more specialized way in the later develop-
ment of this art-form in which special organs are assigned to each of its activ-
ities; being thus articulated gives the art-form greater individuality.
In addition there are connecting parts that in the form of rings, bands, and
toruses are sometimes literal and symbolic, sometimes entirely symbolic con-
nections among the elements of the stand, as well as between these elements
and the object being supported, on one hand, and the floor, on the other. It
has already been shown in the section on ceramics, in the discussion of vessel
bases, how art mastered this richest of formal elements, so we refer the reader
to that.
Yet just as the tripod’s lack of external attributes is a negative symbol of a
massive vertical support stable in its own self-sufficiency, so the disappearance
of certain art-forms on the stele is an equally eloquent negative symbol of
greater monumentality.
Thus all the vertical supports, otherwise so different, that art has dressed
in its formal garb are derived from the same beginnings and morphological
ideas. This is the origin of the base that fits snugly under its load, whose most

642
 Tectonics: General-Formal

Choragic monument in Athens

genuine basic form is the trochilus, the circular disk or drum that flares out at
the top and bottom and recedes in the middle.32 It conveys the three activities
of receiving, carrying, and distributing a load in a way that lends it an elo-
quent expression of subordination, one that it retains even with the richest
formal decoration.33 Its character is, by they way, modified variously by the
addition of moderate or more substantial connecting elements, by the relation
of its height to diameter, and by the selection and expression of decorations.
Second, the stele is a very important and interesting transitional form, a
kind of tall base intended more to accommodate and raise an object than to
actually carry a load. Depending on how they are decorated, steles can be
treated more like furniture or monuments.

Doric and lonic steles on vases (see also p. 644)

643
 Semper

Light candelabras made of cast metal are movable steles and as such char-
acteristically have wide tripods that they need for stability.
The same device made of beaten metal or marble may still have a tripod
base, but it also needs a center support.
The stele proper (altar or memorial) is more monumental. It was perhaps
here that the Doric and Ionic styles of Hellenic architecture first went their
separate ways. It would seem so, at least, as we have steles, some real and
some painted on vases, in which appear the most ancient and original Doric
and Ionic elements of the Greek style.
These transitional forms of monumental art are characterized by a hyper-
boloidal shaft that flares downward, though it no longer has a corresponding

protrusion at its top as a trochilus does. It has a Doric or Ionic capital intended
to accommodate a sacrificial vessel or other sacred object. As the fluting on
the shaft becomes narrower and the flaring toward the bottom less pro-
nounced, it becomes less like a base and more like a column. If it is also pro-
vided with a separate base, this is obviously meant to separate the stele from
the ground, making it less fixed, more independent, and mobile. Conversely,
omitting this base is a negative symbol with the opposite meaning. The pro-
portions of the shaft must necessarily conform to the presence or absence of
these symbols. Thus, for example, a stele that flares outward at the bottom is
allowed to have taller proportions than a cylindrical shaft. An example of the
latter without a base must be inherently stronger than one that has a base
(even if only apparently to the eye) to give it additional stability.34
Third, the column is, as it were, anticipated by and contained in the iso-
lated stele, but together with other similarly constructed supports it forms a
system based on the shared epistyle and the solid ground on which it rests. In
this context, however, we should see it as dependent on a whole of a higher
order and thus part of it, so it should be treated later.

644
 Tectonics: General-Formal

We conclude this section—the content of which is complemented both by

earlier parts of the book to which frequent reference has been made and by
material that is still to come — with a very important general remark about the
tectonic principle of Greek architecture.
The Hellenes were not the first to bring this principle to life, for it domi-
nated the whole of ancient art down to the Romans, but they were the first to
recognize it as such and to cultivate it consciously, by carefully excluding from
their art anything that did not conform to it.
This principle is based on a universal law of the phenomenal world,
according to which formal combinations, of whatever sort, will be most satis-
fying to the eye when nothing in them evokes even the idea of material exis-
tence and duration, much less raises doubt about either.
No one looking at something upright and vertical thinks of its weight or,
if the proportion of height to base is correct, of its stability. Nor are we
reminded of weight as an active force in something horizontal; rather, it
should be for us an eloquent symbol of absolute rest.
But the situation is different if, for example, two stone posts are propped
against each other. Then the heavy masses immediately appear as active forces.
Their conflict makes us aware of their activity and the viability or durability
of the system subject to their influence. That is why the Hellenes rejected this
motive, which had been common among their predecessors, the Pelasgians—
at least for monumental purposes. It occurs only in the fastigium of a temple
roof, where, because of the roof’s low angle and the poor strength of the slop-
ing cornice with its crown (which presents itself less as a brace than as a hori-
zontal border), these parts are no longer active in the sense of leaning against
each other—or at least the eye does not at first perceive this relation. In any
case, the Doric gable remains a compromise between this and another formal-
aesthetic principle of Hellenic architecture. Nor is it the only example of
inconsistency in Hellenic art carried out consciously and openly, which only
confirms the intellectual superiority of the Greeks.
This is why the Greeks were even more decisive in excluding the vault
(with which they were perfectly familiar) as an architectural element from
their monumental art.
It also explains why they refrained from the decorative use of technical-
structural means in this sphere of high art, even though they by no means
spurned them in the area of furniture design or even in the architectural
detailing of doors, grilles, steps, and so on. Decorated masonry anchors,
quoining, and similar devices with which Gothic architecture is so extrava-
gant (often to the extent of using them as ornamental playthings) contradicted
the architectural principles of the Greeks, because they reminded one that a
wall, a panel, a stand, and the like needed reinforcement to be secure and thus
were not constructional or at least not monumental in the higher sense. The
bars that crisscross one another to bind the legs and give the light cast-metal
tripod both necessary stability and decoration could never be a monumental

645
 Semper

constructional motive for the Greeks, because reinforcement is incompatible

with independent stability.
How the art of the Greeks in a purely formal field, following the same
principle, in a certain sense even denied the material as such has already been
discussed in volume 1 (§§ 78, 79, 80, 81, and passim, especially p. 379).
This brings us back to the contrast between the constructional architecture
of the Middle Ages and the material-denying architecture of the ancients. It
was a contrast, incidentally, that medieval builders asserted with far less con-
sistency than the ancients, for in the end they too were striving for the same
goal. For example, they placed the buttresses needed to counter the lateral
thrust of the vaults in such a way that their activity could not be perceived
from the interior.

§ 138 The Structure: Integrating the Supports with the Frame

Here we are considering the structure that is complete in itself and not
intended to support anything else. The previous section dealt with the sup-
ports for an independent object that was not part of the system. Incidentally,
as has already been shown, both are fairly similar in nature, because support-
ing devices that are not complete in themselves—like an armchair (which is
intended to accommodate a person) or a candelabra (which accommodates a
lamp) — must themselves have a certain formal termination as stands.
Thus this section must deal with the properly architectonic structure, the
whole of the roof frame and its supporting structure.?5
In a strictly formal sense one demands first that it appear to the viewer to
be self-contained and complete. This demand is best met by giving the roof a
diagonal incline. Thus from an aesthetic-formal viewpoint too, quite apart
from its appropriateness to the material and its being sanctified by tradition,
this form turns out to be the most perfect upper termination for an architec-
tural structure—no matter whether the floor plan is circular, rectangular, or
any other shape.
The series of vertical triangular frames that make up the roof is received
by the horizontal frame of the epistyle,3¢ which can be articulated in a variety
of ways.
The whole of this supported mass may thrust down to the extent that is
necessary to make the supporting parts seem active, giving them the opportu-
nity to engage their energy and their living, independent, intrinsic powers of
resistance. Anything above or below disturbs the absolute harmony, but the
gradations of this interplay between dead load and living support are the prin-
cipal means to achieve the finer characteristics or expression of which monu-
mental forms are capable.
In consideration of the above and with a view to what is still to come, I
would like to let that general remark conclude chapter 7, on absolute form in
tectonics.

646
 Tectonics: General-Formal

Notes
1. Egyptian architecture rejects the roof everywhere, with the exception of the
pyramidal tabernacle of the deity in the innermost part of the temple. The tip of the
Pyramid of Baal was crowned with a pedimented temple. The Temple of Solomon was
roofed like a Greek temple; likewise the Muslim Kaaba is a hut with a roof. The
Christian church adopted this type.
2. The architect Viollet-le-Duc goes furthest, claiming that columns derived their
cylindrical form from the advantage to quarry workers of being able to roll them down
from the quarry!
3. These terms were not merely hieratic-mythical metaphors but were deeply
rooted in the popular mind and language.
4. See also pages 534 ff.
5. Taken from the magnificent work Antiquités du Bosphore Cimmérien con-
servées au Musée impérial de l’Ermitage (Saint Petersburg, 1854).
6. See the gate of Mycenae, the second woodcut in “Stereotomy” [p. 747, bottom].
7. See § 154.
8. The tabulatum and opus intestinum, which Vitruvius, too, discusses under atria
(see the technical-historical chapter below).
9. Following an interpretation of a passage of Vitruvius on the basilica at Fano
(bk. 5, chap. 2) that is at the very least uncertain, an attempt has been made to recon-
struct it using exposed ceiling joists and a roof truss. Vitruvius spoke only of the exter-
nal appearance of the actual roofing system that he used for this building, which was
expressed on the exterior by two fastigia, one above the other.
10. Continuous, unidirectional ornament is permitted in these and similar cases
only if several zones arranged in parallel above one another have ornament running in
opposite directions, which then cancel one another out, symbolizing a dynamic equilib-
rium. This is the dominant ornamental system on most ancient bronze work, pots, and
utensils, as well as in pre-Hellenic (heroic) architecture (the Treasury of Atreus) and in
India today.
11. The pendent vertical triangular assemblage occurs only as an accessory, thus it
is sufficient to mention it in a note. It is usually combined with freely suspended frames
(windows, inscription tablets, relief fields, etc.), where it functions as a support and as a
lower termination. It was most popular and most finely developed during the Renais-
sance. The oblique sides must be supported vertically; their function is not the same as
in a gable and therefore their shape and symbolism are different. They are also the reverse
of oblique gable sides in that their head is where the feet of the latter are. Their elastic
tendency rests on a support that is a kind of acroterion in a negative sense, in that it ter-
minates below but also stands upright. The horizontal result of the upward but oblique
effect of the sides is conveyed by the base of the triangle, which in this case averts its
top from the tip of the triangle. See the example in the text, a design by the author.
12. In various temples in Greece and Asia Minor the anthemion garlands on the
cymatium of the pediment are placed neither quite vertically nor at right angles to the
oblique line of the cornice but on a line midway between the two, clearly following a
correct sense of style.
13. Strictly, the acroterion at the center and the angularia at the corners.

647
 Semper

14. For the same visual reasons, the ancients used to taper their door and window
frames slightly toward the top.
15. For example, cotyledons, egg-and-dart, or similar ornaments with a top and a
bottom must always have the top directed outward and the bottom inward. A runner
and transition (dissolution, /ysis) to the outside world, comparable to the tassels of tex-
tile coverings, is permissible for such frames (in an aesthetic sense)
—indeed is often
necessary. Clasps, hooks, and corner reinforcements (that is to say, actual construc-
tional means) must follow the same rules in their ornamental treatment. Plants, ani-
mals, or human forms need to be handled with particular care in this case, as they have
to unfold not just relative to what is framed but vertically as well.
16. The doors of ancient Lycian rock tombs are still completely framed, so that the
jamb or antepagment continues below as a threshold. See [Charles Félix Marie] Texier,
[Description de Il’|Asie Min{eure], “Lycie.”
17. For ancient grate structures, see also §§ 142, 147.
18. As, for example, on the Parthenon. These diaphragmata between the columns
of the Parthenon were still there when Father [Jacques-Paul] Babin wrote about them
in his Relation de l’état présent de la ville d’Athénes (Lyon, 1674). Carl Botticher
(Tektonik, 2:83) misunderstood his note, as the little walls to which Babin refers did
not run from the temple wall to the columns but (as is perfectly clear from the text)
from column to column. They are also mentioned in a much older topographical note
on Athens, a fifteenth-century passage in Greek that is explained, though somewhat
inaccurately, by [Léon] marquis de Laborde in his Athénes au XVe, XVle et XVIle
siécles.
19. See § 15 of volume 1.
20. See color plates 1 and 6.
21. An unimaginative and inartistic mind wants to see such symbols applied with a
strict structural logic or wants to explain their traditional applications (for example, on
ancient entablatures) rigorously down to the last detail by reference to a real (earlier or
current) structural system for temple roofs and ceilings. In his Tektonik der Hellenen,
Botticher attacks this homebred approach without ever quite emancipating himself
from it completely. He attempts to disprove Vitruvius’s theory of the origin of rafter
heads, for example, merely by its lack of logic (Tektonik, 2:83).
22. Herodotus 4.152.
23. For the sake of simplicity we will not discuss diagonal lattices here, though
they too are certainly found on ceilings and the (exposed) interiors of roofs, and they
often present the aesthetic sense with difficult problems (see p. 636 and color plates 19
and 20). Given other characteristic features of Greek architecture, I think we can
assume that the Greeks chose not to use diagonal lattices at all, or at least not for tem-
ple building (architecture’s highest task), because of the aesthetic difficulty of creating
diagonal or curved frames.
24. “Il lampadario di Cortona publicato da E. Braun ed illustrato da G. Abeken,”
Mon{[umenti] ined{iti], 1839; Annali [dell’Instituto di corrispondenza archeological],
12:41. See also the figure on page 490.
25. An interesting example of conscious application in the sense described can be
seen in the candelabra illustrated here. The load (the lamp) is repeated as a vase shape:

648
 Tectonics: General-Formal

first at the top (in the receiving part of the stele), then at point b, then again at c and d,
thus the basic note resounds four times.
26. See page 333. The entire passage to the end of § 70 should be consulted for
what follows. See also the woodcut at the beginning of this section.
27. Greek stephane; Latin corona.
28. Greek lebes; Latin pelvis, ahenum.
29. Omphalos?
30. Most marble tripods described in the text are transitional forms (see the figures
on pp. 477, 536, 537, and elsewhere).
31. It is impossible to be too cautious when deriving certain artistic forms from
models in nature. Early phenomena in the field of art history that seem to support such
a derivation often result from these same naturalistic theories and demonstrate nothing
more primeval than the Jate results of this false aesthetics
— for example, the tree-
branch architecture of the late Gothic period. Even when culture was in its earliest
stages, it was purely aesthetic motives
— based, for instance, on an intuited law of
higher morphology— that led to the invention of those types that have survived contin-
uously in the arts. Only later were they interpreted in the manner described.
32. All the other elements added to the base to complete it formally and artistically—
such as the rings, bosses, and plinths
—are accessories.
33. As the most beautiful example of a monumental base, the crown of the Choragic
Monument of Lysicrates in Athens is illustrated here. The tripod it was intended to sup-
port, which left behind unambiguous traces of its former existence, has been restored.
In this context it is the best illustration of the content of this section.
34. This stability, demanded by the eye, is independent of material conditions. At
least this is true of the isolated stele. We will return to this important subject later.
35. Even mobile stands—cupboards, chests, and so on—are frequently architec-
tonically complete in themselves. They follow similar rules. The relation between them
and the architectural stand proper is remarkable enough. Thus the temple was at times
a treasure chest, and a treasure chest at times a temple.
36. Here this word refers to the paragon of all the supporting parts of the architec-
tural frame. Elsewhere it is also used synonymously with architrave.

649
 Ce 6) vfery 4) 60 0d \rwnih Cem
Oe Soll Ge) ie ots wot dual
ies) Dae ies eae 0 egpe
GOD etge mm Dit uh @mmnqrenaded
Crearre Ed (1 > Bie A
ee a ee ee ne
PE CB -Sa@ 19% (eG. On ee aad
Peta > tar 4.4m 4 wowed 40 >
AN eee, =A .fy 6 tiaecd texdadd
ON Ww WS 6 6Htze~q+Ud CEA
6s &
eeer eer jim tol 0-6-4 6 cme
AD Dt
O78 FF a 4 @ Bic qos wT

es oe DS eee Se heer Eh o«6 a1 ie

NPS E> Sika) S60 ye ae GK Se
ee
SOP RA ¢ 6 eA ret oe ae
SSR &5)'4 4690
eo tn ses = Mw
MEE SSOa > - »Gian Shs WSs 2 ie0).«e>’
apps
Ge & Siang Odd) art =~ an <>!
ee ROGies,s Os 4 e464 1 ean
ees ea Te G ; .
GR daa 4 -
_ sera = , jeg
Gee 1a 69 ee : aie
. ep Ca Sn" sree : i =A.ms8 96ay
A @ “caspm’ 2 .) (-=m 64.206 Lo as
het Bx bo 6 Gee) PO yin 5 ens 4 o@ ©o-&= 63 teem
POPS OM HA, «ae oh ote 16 oa
‘a jp Sle > S.*=
> 4 ee * cE= 0@=>-< i iw haa dep
in = € ar 24e@ bers oe vy r es se

ci (2 6>@> me en= 6 @ ‘oes

a easy @& >. Gia lesieeee
= @ Se“e
ed4 “aw al < Vas ¢ a Se
 CEVAVP
gE Rese G Eien

Tectonics
B. Technical-Historical

6139 Materials
The previous chapter did not consider materials at all, although it contained
the principal features of the laws of carpentry and also touched on the pro-
portions of the various elements of a framework in relation to one another
and to the whole. In fact, these matters depend much less on the material than
is generally assumed. Material only serves the idea; it is either better or less
suited to this or that artistic purpose than another and is chosen accordingly
without affecting the basic principles of art. Thus nothing is more suited to
the light candelabra or lamp holder than metal bars, which also suit the most
decorative and movable kinds of tripod. Wood, as a carpentry material, like-
wise has its particular field related to that of metal bars. Through the dressing
of wooden scaffolds, however, it is capable of broadening and extending to
the monumental field proper, where it prepares the way for stone carpentry,
which more than any other field adheres strictly to the laws of stability that
state that each part, even when not joined with other parts, must have static
stability on its own, though it is immobile.
Thus a certain subordination of the material question is appropriate both
to the true principles of practical aesthetics and to the general tenor of this
book (whose author is fundamentally opposed to modern materialism in art).
Yet it remains an extremely important factor in dealing with the more general
question of the emergence of art-forms, many of which are directly or indi-
rectly material and technical in origin. We will therefore now take up this
question in the following order:
a. plank construction in wood and metal;
b. hollow and lattice construction in wood and metal;
c. stone carpentry.
In these three areas we will not discuss the material and its treatment sepa-
rately, which is somewhat of a departure from the procedure followed for tex-
tiles and ceramics. As in those two areas, an overview of the stylistic history
of carpentry will thereby present itself, as it were, of its own accord.

§ 140 Timber Plank Construction

It is a characteristic of our age of wood that architecture best understands the
timber style and that it occasionally produces truly notable works in that style,
whereas our monumental art betrays a greater dependence on earlier styles

651
 Semper

and greater uncertainty than ever before. The explanation is obvious: the kind
of architecture that deals with the decorative treatment of timber construction
and has the opportunity to develop itself in the spacious and light buildings of
industry and railways is at heart fundamentally unmonumental.
Timber construction —that is, plank joinery — was never the precursor or
model for monumental art, for which stone remains the true material. The
principle of this monumental art is the converse of the constructional, that is,
it strives to show or even to suggest the material construction as little as pos-
sible (see above).
Nevertheless, a reminiscence or hint of timber architecture can be seen in
almost all of the oldest monumental styles, including the tomb facades of Old
Kingdom Egypt, the encrusted walls of Chaldean and Assyrian palaces, the
temple grottoes and pagodas of India, and even the orders of Greek art. Don’t
these examples contradict what was said above? By no means, for all these hints
are of a merely symbolic nature, partly related to priestly legends about the age of
the country’s culture, and partly as symbolic expressions of certain more general
formal-aesthetic ideas borrowed from timber construction (see § 136 on pro-
ceres, on lattices and their projections as supports for cornices and other things).
The proper sphere for timber carpentry is domestic furnishings. Where it
occurs in architecture in its true nature it creates transitions between movable
domestic furnishings and monumental construction.
The well-known properties of wood, which all but forces itself on human-
kind, invite us to see it as the “primeval material” of plank construction, just
as clay was the primeval material of ceramics.
In terms of this technical purpose, wood is much more specific than the
plastic mass of clay. Its advantages and disadvantages suggest that a definite
material statement has to be made when it is used.
Wood’s great compressive strength vis-a-vis pressure applied perpendicu-
larly to its cross section permits — when trunks are used as vertical supports—
height-to-width ratios that far exceed the stability ratios in absolute terms
(namely, the same for all upright bodies) of these two dimensions.
To compensate for this lack of stability and to counter the bowing of a
support under a load, wood requires appropriate connections using rails,
struts, corner bands, ties, and so on.
Without these means, timber supports must adhere to the normal propor-
tions contained in the three orders of Greek architecture, which correspond
not to the variable compressive strength of the support but to the constant
requirements of absolute stability.
As a result, we find in wood tectonics either short columns alone (because
wood in general offers a narrow cross section) or columns of slender propor-
tions with intermediate ties (latticework).
Furthermore, wood’s significant relative strength and toughness when pres-
sure is applied vertically to its fibers make it possible to place the supports
resisting this pressure farther apart than they can with any other material
(with the exception of metal). Wood’s elasticity and flexibility also impose

652
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

certain restrictions in this regard, but these far exceed the limits of what the
aesthetic eye permits or tolerates.
This explains the wide spans found in timber construction and the corre-
sponding lightness of the framing pieces necessary to prevent the framework
from bending under its own weight and external loading.
Third, wood has very significant absolute strength. This attribute —com-
bined with the tough consistency and stereotomic plasticity of its mass (prop-
erties that facilitate the joining of structural parts) and the lightness of the
material — favors the suspension of the horizontal components of a frame-
work. This is a constructional principle particularly characteristic of timber
construction; its implications (at least from an aesthetic-formal perspective)
have yet to be grasped or exploited fully by contemporary practitioners.!
Fourth, it facilitates timber architecture greatly that wood can be cut into
thin planks and laths of any dimension, which in themselves are a kind of
natural textile material and accordingly are used for dressing timber con-
struction. This type of dressing, applied generally and in a principled man-
ner, leads to a new style of timber architecture—one that contrasts with
plank construction — by preparing the way for monumental architecture (see
p. 371 and farther below).
A middle way between solid columns and beams and the boards used for
dressing consists of posts and planks that, when applied as the dominant ele-
ment, likewise define a special style (see Norman timber architecture below).
Although wood’s properties as a sculptural material have frequently been
mentioned in passing, they will be emphasized here as the fifth very important
factor in the development of its specific style. Its most characteristic orna-
ments are carved work produced by notching, cutting, grooving, perforating,
fluting, mortising, and so on.
It is not necessary to point out the richness of these decorative means to
our artists in wood, for they use them far too much. What is needed is a seri-
ous warning against their abuse. Yet all seriousness and all humor are but
blunt weapons against the threefold armory of bad taste displayed by our fur-
niture manufacturers and sculpteurs en bois.
The rule requires only brief explanation as it has been referred to frequently
above: separating ornament from tendentious art. Ornament should be used
for the parts that are active in terms of purpose and structure and that always
serve both functions. It should emphasize and not distract from them — either
materially, by weakening the parts through bulbous protuberances on which
one will get caught? or bruise oneself, or ideally, through the incorrect and
thoughtless choice of decoration. Tendentious motives or so-called arguments
in the quiet parts of the structure should also be selected and handled without
any abuse of the material or the idea. They should follow that same spirit of
moderation that always keeps an eye on overall appearance, particularly on the
purpose and character of the object, and remains master of its means.

653
 Semper

The disadvantages of the material are almost as important a factor in artistic

design as are its advantages. First of all, wood is not very durable, which
means that it has to be protected with dressings: varnish (paint), board dress-
ings (shingles), slate, metal, terra-cotta, stucco, and so on.
With the exception of varnishing, all the other means mentioned here push
the timber frame under discussion here in a different direction, which will be
considered later.?
A second disadvantage of wood is the fibrous structure of its nonhomoge-
neous substance, which does not provide support when the fibers are incor-
rectly cut and thus unfavorably exposed to exterior forces.
The lack of attention paid to this fact is most evident among modern fur-
niture makers. In imitating better models without understanding them, they
do not hesitate to cut immoderately curved legs, backs, and other parts of
chairs from boards that are usually coarse with age, cracked, and brittle,
instead of choosing solid young planks that either grew curved or were bent
artificially —as used to be the practice. The ancient Egyptians were very skill-
ful in this kind of plank construction. They left behind domestic implements,
armchairs, stools, and tables (some still complete) that are the best models —
not necessarily for the purpose of imitation but for the study of style. They are
better models even than the less logical but more refined Greco-Italic plank
constructions, the diphroi and thronoi, whose backrests and legs have exces-
sively bold curves.
Even the Chinese have something to teach us! There is no half-civilized or
savage people in the ancient or modern world that did not show proper tact, a
sense of style, and even taste in its simple domestic furnishings. But we — mas-
ters of nature! —have been reduced to inventing economical methods and
machines to make mass-produced and superficial imitations of models from
earlier artistic periods, which were originally produced with loving care by
individuals as their own work.
A special style still needs to be created for the machine, and the critical fac-
tor should be function, measured independently of the machine.4
A third great disadvantage of wood is that it is very hygroscopic, so it
shrinks, cracks, and warps as it dries;) it also swells when wet.

654
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

Art should confront these disadvantages, exploit them, and make a virtue
of necessity. Nothing should be affected or feigned, which would contradict
the nature of wood. For example, boards should not be artificially glued
together to appear to be cut from a single large trunk; rather, the units should

be reduced even more: wood’s natural inclination to separate should be antic-

ipated by a separation that is deliberate and thus harmless and imperceptible.
The noted disadvantages of the material are the richest source of ever new
formal devices without which the timber style cannot actually come into its
own.
For example, if a task calls for strong beams and supports to be executed
in a single piece of wood, cracks are inevitable. This was recognized by Swiss
chalet builders working in the log style.¢ In their latticework structures they
decorated the beams along the length and toward the middle, using a carved
linear ornament. So the cracks that follow the same line disappear between
the horizontally undulating carvings.
Vertical ornaments would have the opposite effect; the cracks would cut
through all the ornamental lines and be doubly disruptive.
The same theory suggests that vertical beams or supports should be fluted
or otherwise decorated along their length, not with transverse rings or notches.
Stylistically speaking, the confused snake ornaments found on vertical posts
of old timber churches in Norway are entirely correct.’

The first protection against warping wood is so-called arris fillets. The grooves
cut vertically through the wood fibers receive the arris of these fillets. Less
effective are the so-called crosscut fillets, which provide the crosscut ends
with a tongue, while the fillet contains the groove.
Better protection against the noted disadvantages of wood is afforded by
framing, where it is applicable. Its purpose is in fact threefold:

655
 Semper

1. to strengthen a surface made of boards;

2. to protect against warping;
3. to combat the disadvantages and problems of shrinkage in the con-
structional elements.
A large wooden surface will always be strengthened if it is divided into
fields, if every field is framed in a way that concentrates, as it were, all the
wood’s mechanical activity. Otherwise dead surfaces are at the same time
given organic life through the contrast between the structural (active) parts of
the frame and the neutral fillings, whose activities (warping and shrinking)
are not useful and are therefore denied. The size of the fields and the relation
of individual fields to the whole is determined partly by the nature of the
wood, partly by the proportions of the surface to be dressed. The nature of the
material usually prescribes maximum limits, such that small surfaces should
be divided into fewer fields than larger ones (with the same ratio of height to
width). Although any child could see this, “grown men” in the trade refuse to
cease imitating colossal models on a reduced scale.
Framed units must not differ in size too much to be evenly worked.
A well-fitted frame, in combination with similar units, gives the entire
wood surface more absolute strength against external influences and also
combats warping.’

The disadvantages of shrinking are also partly alleviated if free play is allowed
within the plane of the properly designed panel, one set with its edges loose in
the grooves of the frame.
Yet surface continuity will be disturbed, at least on the outside, if the panel
is of the same thickness as the frame. Recessing the panel or, better still, rein-
forcing the frame, which has already been recommended for structural rea-
sons, also helps to conceal the shrinkage of the panel. This can be achieved
even more effectively if the angle formed by the projection of the frame is fit-
ted with a profiled bead.
This was the antique practice, and it produced a rich system of surface
decoration, which monumental art later transferred to other materials.?
In modern joinery the panel is sometimes tongue-and-groove, so that the
framing timbers project beyond both surfaces of the panel, and sometimes lap
jointed, so that the panel is recessed on one side and projects beyond the
framing timbers on the other. It is easy to make the latter construction water-
proof, and thus it does not require such strong framing timbers. The recessed
side of the panel is then used for decoration. Instead of using mounted beads
or fillet joints, the beads of smaller frames are generally eased, that is, notched
out of the framing wood. This is particularly justified when panels are subject
to weathering, but the frame is then weakened at the very point where a cor-
rective to warping is most needed.
A third process employs a double application of the framing principle, as is

656
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

seen very clearly on the ancient door of the church of Santi Cosimo e Damiano
(see p. 330). Here a profiled framing strip mediates between the actual outer
frame and the panel. This avoids weakening the main frame so a very strong
profile can be used. It is not just applied but one with the construction.
In these and every other combination using wood, the raw material’s natu-
ral dimensions and those customarily found in practice must be taken into
account as much as possible.
One should never allow the unusual proportions of a large work to lead
one to use dimensions that may be appropriate to the latter but not to the
nature of the material. Nor should one try to make things small or thin,
because here too solidity prescribes certain limits. This is true for the work as
a whole and for its details. Timbers that are too thick are not just costly, they
also crack, warp, shrink, and pull lighter parts away with them.!° Moreover,
they contradict the character of a true wood style. This at once rules out the
use of proportions that belong not to the timber style but to the stone style.
But when an architect is forced to follow tradition or considerations of econ-
omy, he should at least construct his false stone ledge on the principles of
equal distribution of masses and in a manner appropriate to the above-
mentioned properties and the customary dimensions of wood.
The inconveniences and disadvantages resulting from wood’s inclination
to warp, dry out, and then swell again are reduced and can almost be elimi-
nated if a diverse and balanced interaction of forces is attained in all direc-
tions —not just within one plane but also perpendicular to it. This led the
ancients to frequent use of the lattice and to a very methodical development
and use of the process of gluing thin sheets of wood over each other so that
their annual growth rings crossed. The arts of inlaid work, intarsia, and
veneers are closely related to this.

Pliny dedicates an entire chapter to this industry and to his age’s degener-
ate luxury in glued and veneered marquetry work.!! Some thin wooden leaves
from the Crimea provide proof of the highly refined taste with which the
Greeks conceived and executed this luxury.”

Sie)7/
 Semper

Greek veneers from the Crimea

It remains to be determined whether the ancient practice — familiar to even

the most savage tribes—of inlaying weapons and vessels with shells, bones,
and so on led to marquetry work and the veneering of wooden articles. It is
also possible that the idea of cutting different kinds of wood into pieces and
sheets so that they could be glued together again first arose from a correct
insight into wood’s deficiencies as a tectonic material; it was motivated by
structural ends and took beauty into account only as a secondary matter. In
any event, the harmony here between the technical and the artistic tasks is
once again striking.
Thus the timber style owes some of its richest motives to the deficiencies of
wood rather than to its remarkable properties.
Here we have another intersection of textiles and tectonics where inven-
tion may add its ideas. Textile motives of the sort we already know will also
be appropriate — mutatis mutandis — for inlaid work in wood and for domes-
tic furnishings made of planks or sheets of wood.

§ 141 Metal Bar Construction (Iron)

We will consider this theme only briefly here, as it is covered under metallurgy
as well.
In principle, there is no difference in construction between solid wooden
planks and bars of iron or any other metal. The only difference lies in the pro-
portions and dimensions of the constructional parts, corresponding to the
well-known physical differences between the two materials. It should also be
noted that metal does not share all of wood’s deficiencies as a tectonic mate-
rial, or at least does so to a lesser extent. It is not hygroscopic; it does not
warp, shrink irregularly, or stretch.
Yet metal bars, unlike wood, have the disadvantage of excessive flexibility
and elasticity, and cast iron is very brittle.8
This comparison shows that metal-bar construction is infinitely more dis-
tant from monumental art than wood construction is. Here, much more strongly
than with wood, the proportions appropriate to absolute stability contradict
the proportions appropriate to the mechanical activities of the parts.
At the same time, all the formal motives that arise from the deficiencies of
wood disappear.
Certainly the use of certain motives unique to metal-bar construction for
formal ends can be defended, such as the motives of fitting things together

658
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

and the ligatures found in the joints. But on the whole this is infertile ground
for art. It is not possible to speak of a monumental metal-bar style or cast-
iron style; their ideal is invisible architecture! For the thinner the metal tissue,
the more perfect it is.
Things are different when metal is used either for tubular construction (a
form with which we are familiar from the first volume) or for lattice construc-
tion (which in principle is close to the former). Both are equally important to
our theory of style (see “Metallurgy”).
If metal bars are less suitable as an architectural material, this makes them
all the more suited to the tectonic tasks that we have recognized as contrary to
the monumental—namely, the most delicate and light utensils and domestic
furnishings, where they find their own niche.
In volume 1 it was shown that metal bars were, along with wood, the
material the ancient Egyptians preferred for domestic furnishings, war chari-
ots, shipbuilding, and without doubt for outfitting the massive stone pal-
aces —in short, for every kind of transitional form between furniture and solid
construction.
The unprejudiced Greeks, who were receptive to the beautiful and the
appropriate in equal measure, and their kindred race in Italy could not fail to
recognize the real meaning of and province for metal-bar construction. They
brought its true style to a conclusion. Even if none of these costly utensils
had survived, we would know the extent to which all technical means were
consciously and artistically exploited, if only from reports that have been
passed down to us,!4 such as Pausanias’s account of the iron base of a krater
in Delphi, the work of Glaucos of Samos.
Metal-bar construction was congenial to so-called Gothic architecture,
which explains why medieval smiths also offer highly instructive examples of
the genuine style of this branch of the tectonic arts.

§ 142 Hollow Lattice Construction (Wood and Metal)

We attempted in volume 1 to demonstrate the existence of an ancient tradi-
tion of dressing among all peoples of Indo-Germanic descent— both on actual
structural elements of architecture and as spatial enclosures. We showed how
a kind of tubular tectonics corresponded to these traditions and was devel-
oped further along the same lines, paving the way for the monumental stone
architecture of antiquity.
A tubular, or rather a hollow-body tectonics predominated in domestic
furnishings as well as in architecture from the earliest times. It held its own, at
least, alongside actual bar tectonics, from which it differs on one point of
great importance to our aesthetic-stylistic considerations. Because of the
rigidity of the elements from which it is constructed, and in accordance with
basic structural laws and material efficiency, a hollow-metal vertical support
no longer needs (and in fact must reject) those diagonal braces and reinforce-
ments without which solid construction (if consistently developed according
to its own principles) cannot even exist —in neither real nor aesthetic-formal

659
 Semper

terms (that is, for the eye). In recent times the principle of hollow construction
has been taken up in bridge building and even in civil architecture.'6 Thus far
it has been taken up only in a technical sense and spirit, but it might be pos-
sible to pin our hopes for the future of art on it. Our building style will once
again meet the standards of monumental forms; the latter will no longer be
mere lies, and the old Indo-Germanic traditions in art will once again be
understood.
Yet this will hardly affect our tubular and truss railway bridges in the near
future, although much could be done if all their elements were used correctly
to develop the form. So far all they offer are naked constructional schemes
that draw rigid, none-too-fortuitous lines across the landscape. The netted
walls, which in themselves have great aesthetic potential, lack articulation and
alternation. The piers that support them are nothing but raw, unfinished
masses. They need to be imbued with life as organisms following the antique
idea once again, made to function eurythmically, and their profiles should be
regulated to the load (see “Metallurgy” below).

§ 143 Stone Tectonics

This discussion appears here only to serve as the necessary conclusion, as the
last and highest task of this technique, yet it also belongs within the scope of
stereotomy. Stone’s technical properties must be considered before we can
deal with the stylistic-formal aspects of stone tectonics — the monumental tec-
tonics proper that forms the basis of ancient art. It is the result of everything
that has gone before and of what is still to come under stereotomy.
For this, therefore, we refer to “Stereotomy.” We will conclude “Tectonics”
with a historical sketch of domestic furnishings and timber construction.

§ 144 Greco-Italic Tectonics: Domestic Furnishings!”

The parallel established in “Ceramics” between this technique and the archi-
tecture of the ancient peoples pointed to the intimate rapport between those
two arts that lasted through every period of ancient art history.
The interrelations between classical architecture and tectonics, applied to
domestic furnishings, would be equally obvious if we were as well informed
about the furniture of the ancients as we are about their vessels. Still, enough
relics of domestic furnishings, usually metal ones, and other documentary evi-
dence of them (images on vases and reliefs, ancient authors) have survived to
make this link clear.

Archaic Style
On first looking at Assyrian war chariots made of sheets of embossed metal
riveted together or the (closely related) earliest metal utensils, found in the
grotto tombs of Etruria (in Perugia, Caere, Vulci, and elsewhere), we see pre-
Hellenic or Pelasgian art. Those strangely decorated embossed bronze sheets
are the models for the remarkable marble strips that dressed the entrance to
the tomb of Atreus.'8

660
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

Etruscan furniture in the earliest style

The couches often displayed on archaic vessels also belong, to a certain

extent, to this very ancient, heavy dressing style. They use certain architec-
tural forms, such as the Ionic capital, but only in their original function as
crowns or terminations for an upright element, as a vegetal ornament.

Second or Early Doric Style

The invention of the potter’s wheel resulted in a revolution in ceramics, in
which pure form won out over the more ancient decorative-plastic richness of
surface and paved the way for the Doric style. It also found an echo in tecton-
ics, where the role of the potter’s wheel was played by the vertical turner’s
wheel. The latter was first used for the supporting elements of domestic fur-
nishings, and it was the instrument whose material influence ushered in the
new style of architecture.!? The Hellenic wood-turner style, however, always
remained a modified potter’s style. The forms of pottery produced on the hor-
izontal wheel from a soft paste were hollow forms— full, free, supple—and
they remained the turner’s models. He only elaborated the given motive in
accordance with his tool and the material with which he had to deal. To this
period belong the most beautiful works of the art of Etruscan and Greek fur-
niture in the hollow-body style.2° Incrustations, inlaid work, and chasing
replaced the plastic abundance of archaic hollow-embossed work.
Sculpture no longer covers everything but was allotted particular areas in
which to unfold, where the purpose of the work as a whole and its parts moti-
vated its use. Only thus did it acquire esteem and significance.
(For the retention of this ancient principle of wood-turning among the
Hindu peoples, see “Enamel Work” in “Metallurgy.”)

Third or Delicate (So-Called Severe) Style

In tectonics this style is characterized by procedures previously unknown to
the Greco-Italic people and not introduced until about the thirty-fifth to the
fiftieth olympiad: metal casting; construction with thin, solid metal bars; and
soldering. Typical products of this style, corresponding to this technique as
much as to the gracefully conventional social customs of the age of tyrants,
are light, spare, capriciously but gracefully curved furnishings and utensils,
sometimes with Egyptian traits.*! They never fully renounced their origins in
the most ancient, solid wooden supports covered with metal or in the hollow-
body construction that forms the mediating element.

661
 Semper

Fourth or Perfect Style

The rise of Hellenic art to its most noble heights was not the culmination of
the artistic conditions that immediately preceded it but the result of a (politi-
cal and social) revolution that —curiously —is epitomized by the readoption
of the oldest forms and traditions.22 Even marble sculpture was a reaction
against spare, delicate, groomed and chased bronze casting, which, at this
stage of ancient technology, had to restrict itself to moderate dimensions. The
readoption emerged even more decisively and confidently in chryselephantine

Hh |

SS eSSaill

Marble throne (classical period)

sculpture, which was apparently a spiritualized regeneration of archaic empaes-

tics and a return to ancient colossal sculpture.*3
Through the use of marble and ivory on temple implements, furnishings
also underwent a change in design along the same lines as the ancient Asiatic
technique of empaestics. Candelabras, thrones, kraters, and tripods were
executed in these materials (beginning with the seats and socles of colossal
statues). At a time when higher art no longer derived its motifs and art-forms
from the applied arts (as it had originally) but on the contrary kept the latter
subordinated (as, for instance, vases were in relation to vase painting), it
seems doubtful that these pure concepts of high art would lead to a funda-
mental change of style in secular furniture as well. It is in keeping with the
free spirit of the Hellenes (the only people to grasp the true relation of the arts
to one another) that they retained the contrast between furnishings and mon-
umental art and allowed light secular furniture to retain the bar-construction
character proper to it. Yet at the same time it saw monumentality’s climax in
furniture and clung to long-standing and sacred traditions: the style that
emerged from rectangular, metal-encrusted, wooden stands was employed

662
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

only for thrones and other consecrated furnishings, raising them to the hier-
atic and official style.
This same spirit still spoke in the bronze implements of Magna Graecia
(coming mainly from Pompeii and Herculaneum) that adorn the Bourbon
Museum in Naples —even though these did not belong to the perfect style but
to a later period. It is more or less possible to recognize an architectural com-
position in them, but the architectural motives are in a highly spirited way
demonumentalized for their less elevated purpose. Suitability to purpose is the
first principle guiding their form, to which material, construction, and use
had to conform.

Pompeian houseware

Alexandrian-Roman Style
The period of the Diadochi, with its Asiatic leanings and its addiction to sump-
tuousness and extravagant effects, inevitably brought about major changes of
taste in domestic furnishings as well. Indeed we read about the most magnifi-
cent purple-covered couches of embossed silver and gold or fitted with very
costly incrustations, about thrones and baldachins, about golden gazebos in
place of baldachins —all following Assyrian and Persian models (see woodcut
on p. 664).

663
 Semper

Assyrian couch

Yet once again the Hellenic principle held its own against barbarism.
Perhaps the Egyptianizing tendency of Ptolemaic art brought about a
benign reaction against Oriental formal bombast and luxury, to the benefit
of the lighter furnishings tending more to bar construction. At least some
of the above-mentioned household objects from Magna Graecia were exe-
cuted in the lightest and most delicate style. Those in wall and vase paintings
are similar. The remarkable relics of joinery from Panticapaeum also belong
to this period. They still breathe an entirely Hellenic spirit, even though
some elements (for example, the division of the surfaces into figurative
friezes one above the other) are an Asiatic return to the most ancient artistic
traditions.
Even from the first centuries of the Republic, under the influence of Greek
culture (which was, incidentally, simply rediscovering its own traditional
bases), the Romans were the true guardians of ancient motives for domestic
furnishings until the period of the migration of the peoples and beyond, and
their style changed only in keeping with the naturalism and earthiness charac-
teristic of Roman art.
Many works of Roman art in this genre have survived, largely in white
marble; they are admirable for the splendor of their style and the richness of
their ornament. The influence of metallurgy can be seen here, particularly in
the treatment of vegetal ornament. A very instructive example, one of many
objects in a similar style, is a white marble biga [two-horse chariot], appar-
ently a copy of a bronze version.24 Roman acanthus fronds on such objects
were taken as models by Renaissance masters, whose peculiar conception of
the acanthus also recalls the metal style. The Renaissance was naturally thus
inclined as a result of the influence of the goldsmith’s art and the craft of forg-
ing weapons (see “Metallurgy”).
A remarkable artwork from the last period of the declining West Roman
Empire, the so-called throne of Dagobert in cast metal (a clay base was added
later), shows the final ossification of the antique art of implements.25

664
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

Byzantine Furniture Style

The relapse into Asiatic barbarism was complete only in the lavish courts of
the East Roman Emperor and his Byzantine grandees. It affected clothing and
implements, as well as furnishings, which again relapsed into the heavy,
rectangular, gold-sheet empaestics of the ancient Assyrians, though with an
extravagant use of inset gems, pearls, and enamels that was unknown to the
Assyrians.
Later the framework of couches, thrones, and armchairs disappears com-
pletely under rich upholstery and purple covers embroidered with gold. The
Oriental divan conceals the last traces of antique furniture.
In the seventh or eighth century Byzantine fashion also became dominant
in the West, not just for the sacred implements and utensils of the church but
also for important domestic furnishings.?¢
Precious metal and other costly dressing materials were used for furniture
and utensils in the most primitive way, just as in the earliest premonumental
times. Heavy wooden frames of the most basic construction were covered
with bronze and encrusted. Long after this style in secular domestic furnish-
ings gave way to another, it remained the hieratic church style.2” Among the
most famous and valuable such objects to have survived (crucifixes, censers,
book bindings, and sacred utensils) are the sacred sacrificial tables —altars
surrounded with portable, gold-mounted panels, the so-called antependiums,
on which the art of Byzantine enamelers and goldsmiths unfolds to its greatest
height.28
With these, ancient art comes full circle; its swaddling clothes have become
its shroud. At its end it returns to the incunabula of its beginning.

§ 145 Greco-Italic Tectonics: Timber Architecture

The Primitive Hut

For the Greco-Italic peoples the mystical-poetic and artistic motive for the
temple, though not its material model or scheme, was the leaf-covered hut—
the protective roof supported by tree trunks, covered with straw or reeds, and
enclosed with woven mats. According to Vitruvius, the marble temple is in
fact nothing more than a petrified primitive hut, whose whole and parts mate-
rially arose or were directly derived from the basic elements of a wooden hut.
Opponents of this homebred theory, in their zeal for the immediacy of the
stone temple, nevertheless have to return to the (as they call it) hieratic alle-
gory or symbol of the sacred arbor (oxnvn). And even though this may be a
late poetic creation, perhaps first completely developed by dramatists in the
golden age of Athens and placed onstage before the Athenians, it remains as
such a very important element in the history of style. The architecture of a
period that produced such theories was necessarily influenced by them to a
greater or lesser extent.
Having said this, the author does not wish to be misunderstood when he
places before the reader—as the equivalent of the Vitruvian primitive hut in

665
 Semper

all its elements —not a figment of the imagination but a highly realistic example
of a wooden structure taken from ethnology.
This is an illustration of a model of a Caribbean bamboo hut displayed at
the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. It shows all the elements of antique
architecture in their pure and most original form: the hearth as the center-
point, raised earth as a terrace surrounded by posts, the column-supported
roof, and the mat enclosure as a spatial termination or wall.

AS
‘Ee
4Z{

+0
pa
FEM bee
my TeiMt
Wes
ZR =
e=2
RK
C\
IRCAPXKN
Teo
sn
BIG
SO

Caribbean hut

§146 Tuscan-Roman Timber Architecture

We do not wish to return again to the archaic wooden temple of Greece, the
last remnants of which Pausanias saw toward the end of the second century
A.D., but let us linger for a while on the Tuscan temple, which we know a little
more accurately from Vitruvius’s description. It was a mixed construction in
wood and stone, and here too wood had only an indirect influence on its
tectonic design. This influence was principally expressed in the wide columni-
ation arising from the high double oak epistyles. We must, however, in con-
formity with the probability derived from analogous cases, also think of this
timber architrave as dressed. In Vitruvius’s exact words, the beam ends of the

666
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

ceiling were covered with antepagments on their front surfaces (in eorum
frontibus). In other words, they no longer appeared materially as beam ends
but formed a continuous cornice.
This passage in Vitruvius about the beam ends has been interpreted to sug-
gest that they projected excessively beyond the epistyle, namely, by a quarter of
the height of the columns. That would represent a second important demon-
stration of the material dependency of the form of the temple roof on wood,
except that this interpretation of the Roman author’s unclear words is dubious
to say the least. This interpretation corresponds as little to the antique way of
feeling in general as it does in specifics to the surviving examples of Roman
and southern Italic temples, which —though otherwise faithful to the Etruscan
canon— have very high friezes rather than entablatures without friezes.29
Nevertheless, a highly projecting entablature may have been characteristic
of dwellings in the old Italic period, just as it was popular in Greece. The bod-
ies of small children were buried under the projecting roof (subter subgrundas
[under the gutters]). Such a protective roof over a doorway is precisely described
in an ancient inscription from Puteoli, dating from the Roman year 647.3°
Proof that the Etruscans treated their roof beams decoratively is also found
in stone imitations and in simple paintings in the hypogeum.:!
This old-Italic preference for decorative timber construction in dwellings
has led to the assumption that the Etruscans were related as a tribe to the
inhabitants of ancient Rhaetia. It has even been suggested that Rhaetian tim-
ber dwellings of the kind still found today were the model for the Etruscan
temple and that the Etruscans brought their style to Italy from their earlier
dwellings in the Rhaetian Alps. I have no doubt that the two peoples were
originally related (which is indicated by shared elements in their oldest build-
ing traditions), but I also share Miiller’s belief that the rural construction style
of southern Germany may owe several of its characteristics to the influence of
late Italic colonization.%?
Another interesting passage in Vitruvius tells us that timber architecture
combined with stone construction was used for monumental purposes as late
as the imperial period. The basilica at Fano, built by Vitruvius and described
in the fifth book of his work, the main roof of which was supported by
Corinthian stone columns, had an epistyle assembled from several beams that
was quite similar to that of Tuscan temples. On this epistyle were placed
square masonry piers (pilae, a kind of triglyph) above each column. Only
three feet high and four feet wide, they supported a timber framework of dou-
ble two-foot beams lying side by side, which in turn supported the ceiling
joists with their paneled roof truss.33 Around it ran a two-story gallery, the
joists and roof of which were also supported by wooden frames set on projec-
tions (parastades) rising from the columns and walls. This arrangement, in
which the columns were intersected by a mezzanine, was very similar to that
of the mesodmai and hyperoai of the hero’s megaron and to that of the
ancient Italic atrium. The clerestories (opae) above the roofs of the side aisles,

667
 Semper

between the capitals of the columns in the main aisle, were a traditional
Greco-Italic motive as well.
One contemporary use for this antique combination of stone columns
with timber beams and trusswork is shown by the (in this regard at least) clas-
sical lunatic asylum in Charenton (published in C[ésar] Daly’s Revue
[générale de l’architecture] 10). It is a true model for the monumental treat-
ment of a simple functional building. It is indeed executed in a truly antique
spirit, that is, with simple grandeur. Is there anything in these antique motives
that we would be less justified in calling our own than the Gothicizing deco-
rative treatment of timber architecture now favored?

§ 147 The Interior Structure

The opus intestinum [inlaid work], the interior timber architecture of antiq-
uity, used especially for the furnishing and decoration of atria, is without
doubt a very important theme in classical architecture but one that, unfor-
tunately, has so far been scarcely explored. There is more to be found on
the ancient Greco-Italic motive of spatial distribution that the Greeks called
melathron and the Italic peoples atrium (perhaps with the same significance
to the name, namely, that it was blackened by soot?) in Homer’s songs than
in all later Greek and Roman writers or even in the remains of antique
dwellings, which leave us in the dark on precisely this point.
The atrium was a high, broad space that was enclosed by walls, that
passed through all the floors, and that was wholly or partly covered —a hall
that one should think of as originally undivided. It contained built-in ele-
ments for every kind of domestic purpose, which, originally at least, were
light wooden structures that did not disturb the unity of the atrium. They
were pegmata:+ gates, backdrops, and galleriess5 suspended between the
columns and walls.
The most important such backdrop was the tabulinum or tablinum,°¢ orig-
inally a raised platform with a baldachin, a parlor by the rear wall of the
atrium where the master sat during business hours and received his clients.
Old plans of Egyptian dwellings, as found on the tomb walls at Beni Hasan
and elsewhere, all contain a lightly constructed tablinum of this sort in the
back of the courtyards. Audience cabinets of this kind (so-called mandarahs)
are still common in Egypt and all over the Orient.
In Homer the same arrangement in the heroic dynast hall is called a mychos.
It was a tribune at the rear of the hall and also served as an entrance to the
women’s quarters.
All this is evidence of a very rich and uniquely developed timber architec-
ture in the interior of antique dwellings, of which unfortunately nothing has
survived. Yet its spirit speaks to us from the wall decorations of Pompeii, albeit
in a somewhat garbled manner.
Another feature here is the arca, the structure for the skylight, which was
dependent on the height of the stillicidium [the slope of the roof needed to

668
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

throw off rain] with its garland, terra-cotta cornices attached with nails, water
spouts, mutule heads, and rich polychromy. The roof beams were also part
of it, dressed with beautifully articulated tabulatum galleries. The whole was
completed by rich purple draperies below the skylight opening and by the
flowing curtains of the doors, galleries, and hallways.37
It is a wonderful, richly articulated, and yet unified work, whose overall
effect we are able to conjure up in our imagination but with the details
blurred.38 Such echoes, indeterminate in their details, of a beauty that no
longer exists are what most stimulates free creativity and inspires us toward
new inventions. If the Renaissance masters had studied and attempted to
reproduce antique models with the same critical spirit shown by the neo-
Gothic school as it pursues its own direction, we should have had no Bra-
mante, no Michelangelo, not even a Palladio—although the last-named, by
the way, best understood and exploited the antique atrium.3?
Architectural joinery proper—that is, in place of windows, doors, and so
on— was sometimes replaced by curtains. In general, their principles were the
same as ours, as can be seen from Vitruvius’s well-known passage on doors.?°
We can see this as well from ancient doors and windows that were painted,
sculpted in stone or stucco, or made of bronze —all of their parts are modeled
on timber construction.*!
The door with its frame and crown, the whole thyroma, was always
treated as opus intestinum, as part of the interior dressing, even on public
monuments and temples. Even when it was executed in a monumental way,
the motive was provided by the ancient bronze cover.
The absence of stone door jambs on all Doric temples and the traces of fas-
tenings for no longer extant dressings (as on the five gates of the Propylaea)
lead us to conclude that the strict Doric style retained the ancient bronze door
dressing.
Ionic and Corinthian temples, by contrast, often still have well-preserved
stone doorframes.*?
Even if the door jambs, lintel (supercilium), and crown (hyperthyron) were
made to stand out through the choice of materials and through art, they
merely formed the frame for even more richly furnished door wings with their
intricate latticework transoms.
The most ancient examples were not yet in the joinery style proper but
simply boards nailed together, reinforced with metal coverings and overlaid
moldings, very simple motifs executed with decorative richness.
Very old representations of doors in stone, which must have been chiseled
according to all the rules of joinery —their frame sides (scapis), tops (impa-
gibus), and panels (tympanis) — point to the early development of this build-
ing craft in its most characteristic technique.
As with everything else, the Italic peoples long remained faithful to the old
tradition. [Marcus Furius] Camillus decorated his house with the booty he
had stolen from Tyrrhenian door dressings. Tufa imitations of these were used

669
 Semper

to seal tomb chambers (pp. 373-74). The gates of Jupiter Capitoline were still
covered with ancient empaestics and gold foil in Stilicho’s time.
Residential buildings as well had wooden thyromata and prothyra that
were the decorative focus of their otherwise simple exteriors. Effectively they
were the rebords — that is, the cuffs— of the interior.*3
Consequently, the encaustic paint on them is frequently mentioned. They
were also decorated with trophies and family coats of arms, and on feast days
they were hung with garlands and festoons, motifs that were in turn incorpo-
rated into the permanent decoration.
Pictorial and plastic decoration, too, responded to the transitions that
architectural styles in general passed through. Previous to and at the time of
Polygnotos the principal decoration for doors was painted. An epigram attrib-
uted to Simonides names Cimon of Cleonae and Dionysius of Colophon as
painters of a temple door (the former was a founder of the historical school
of painting, the second a contemporary of Polygnotus).44 The liberation of
Melanippe was painted on the exterior of the doors of the Temple of Apollo
in Cyzicus.
Town gates also received painted adornment: a full figure of Athena as
Polias, ruler of the city.45 The same was true of private houses.*¢
In the golden age of art, very ancient metal dressings and the painting
that marked the middle period of Greek art were replaced by chryselephan-
tine art and other costly ornate dressings for wood construction. The doors
of the Temple of Athena in Syracuse, so highly praised by Cicero, were of
this kind. They had rich metal fittings, on which the range of ancient litera-
ture is extensive.
This new luxury of dressing reached its apogee under the Ptolemies, when
the most valuable materials again disappeared under a decorative crust.47
The veneer work from Kerch mentioned above illustrates the degree of
overrefinement that the art of gluing and veneering had reached by this period
and would later among the Romans. Book 16 of Pliny, which is crucial to our
subject, provides further evidence. This author, moreover, presents us with a
striking report about three different joinery styles (“fabricae artis genera”):
Greek, Campanian, and Sicilian.48 Unfortunately he provides no details about
the differences.
Metal doors in the cast-metal style, which were imitations of chiseled car-
pentry work, seem not to have found acceptance until the imperial period.
They replaced the oldest metal-covered doors.
Also noteworthy are the reappearance of the old contrast between the
sheet-metal covered carpentry of the oldest Christian church doors and chis-
eled carpentry work, which starts to be imitated again, and the return of cast
metal. As early as the eleventh century an excellent school of metal casting
appeared in Germany under the Saxon emperors, and it competed with the
widespread Byzantine sheet-metal style. But the new genus was not to become
dominant until three or four centuries later, with the famed casters of the
Renaissance.

670
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

§ 148 Medieval Tectonics: Domestic Furnishings‘?

The remarkable Byzantine-Oriental reactionary return to the oldest, heavy,
rectangular, metal-dressed wooden frames had already given way to a new
fashion under the first Capets. At first the new style took hold only in the lux-
ury goods of the upper class, as the church retained its adopted Oriental
dressing style for sacred utensils.
On miniatures we see depictions of the first kings of the Third Dynasty
receiving tributes while seated on folding chairs that resemble those that
served a similar purpose at the time of the Merovingians. Perhaps the Third
Dynasty wanted to restore links to the old traditions of the Frankish empire
by dispensing with the Byzantine thrones of the Carolingians, which were
covered with gold and set with precious stones and enamels. But these neo-
Frankish utensils already exhibit, in their treatment of figure and ornament, a
strangely barbarian principle that is contrary to antique art. This principle
had already appeared alongside antique ornamentation in seventh-, eighth-,
and ninth-century miniatures and that sometimes combined with the latter to
create a third, mixed style—the Romanesque vegetal and animal arabesque—
composed of antique and barbarian elements.
The origin of this interlaced design of dragons and creepers, so strangely
independent of the classical tradition, is puzzling. It occurs at the same time
and in almost the same way in Ireland, in the far north of Scandinavia, in
Frankish Gaul, and in the eastern areas of the Danube as wood carvings,
stone reliefs, gold and metal plate decorations, and finally as the calligraphic
adornment of manuscripts. The Mongols too were skilled in carving wood in
this way; it even has a certain Chinese air about it.
Could it be that this barbarian artistic tradition of the Celts, Teutons, and
Slavs brought to Europe a reminiscence of their common high Asian origins
and cradle in the form of wooden implements and portable timber houses?
This wood-carving style was especially well developed by the Irish, who
transformed it into that remarkable calligraphic treatment of the human fig-
ure also found in ancient Irish manuscripts. It appeared in a freer and more
fantastic form in Old Norse domestic furnishings and in the well-known tim-
ber churches of Norway, where it followed not a calligraphic-monastic con-
vention but degenerated into a bombastic baroque style.5°
Still, there are two other elements (apart from ornamental ones) character-
istic of medieval art in general and deviating from the antique artistic direc-
tion that appear more clearly for the first time in these old items: first, the way
the wooden framework is laid bare and the ornament merely carved into it;
second, the use of architectural motives for ornamental purposes. Illustrated
here is a church pew from Bo, whose design imitates the low galleries or pas-
sageways that ran round the naves of churches in the Nordic tradition.*!
From this point until the sixteenth century medieval furnishings were noth-
ing more than rough wooden structures assembled from rectangular posts and
transverse timbers; scarcely an attempt was made to enliven the rigid structural
scheme in an organic way or to make it into a more comfortable piece of

671
 Semper

Pew from Bé (side view)

672
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

furniture by introducing curves. There is no trace of that fine symbolism that

ancient art used to sheathe its structures and to represent the purpose and
function of its components.52 Form as such no longer has anything to do with
art, which acts only externally by beveling or grooving sharp edges, filling in
gaps between the sections of the structure with carved boards, or perhaps
trimming the lower edges of a transverse timber with pierced beading.53
If the dominant principle evident has—not without grounds, to be sure—
been criticized here, it should be all the more readily acknowledged that those
medieval masters of wood carving skillfully found their style as such, that is,
within the direction that had already been taken. Despite the material and
structural constraints within which it moved, their artistic sensitivity was
often more bold than ancient principles of representation would have allowed.
This was true especially of secular furnishings in the (Gothic) Middle Ages;
unfortunately only a few have survived. Readers seeking illustrations of such
medieval furnishings in order to form their own views about what has been
said are referred to the collections cited above, in particular to Viollet-le-Duc’s
book, which has excellent woodcuts.

Gothic Ecclesiastical Furnishings

The church also replaced Byzantine empaestic work and its stone imitations
with carved woodwork. Although the framework of ecclesiastical furnishings
was wrapped in a rich architectural decoration—dependent as it was on the
hierarchical system of Gothic architecture, which developed its severity to the
full in churches — it nevertheless expresses monumentality. The framework fol-
lows a principle similar to that of secular utensils in that it consists of straight
rectangular frames with inset panels. Episcopal thrones, choir stalls with
carved wooden baldachins, prie-dieus, lecterns, pulpits, tabernacles, organs,
and above all the upright altarpieces (retables) that were first introduced in the
fifteenth century became complete monuments, executed according to this
principle and with the full constructional apparatus of the pointed-arch style.
Admittedly, in the later stages of its development this style had absorbed a
great deal that belonged more to the realms of joinery and furniture than to
stone architecture, which eliminated the contradictions to a certain extent. Thus
the sharp distinction between movable and monumental structure that ancient
art retained as so significant had now completely lost its validity. In principle
the monument became furniture, and in form furniture became monument.

§ 149 Medieval Tectonics: Timber Architecture

The skill European barbarian tribes showed in timber construction was praised
even by the ancients.
Caesar describes and praises the construction of Gallic ramparts made of
beams and ashlar.*4
Vitruvius describes the Gauls, Spaniards, and Lusitanians as skilled in
timber-frame construction, the Colchians as experienced in joining logs.
Tacitus alludes to the Germans’ richly decorated (polychrome) architecture.

673
 Semper

The conquests of the Germanic tribes in the territories of the Roman empire
were accompanied in the provinces by a revolution in social forms and in
building methods, which can be explained only by assuming that there was a
conscious and active resistance to extant political and architectural principles
in the aging Roman civilization.
Gregory of Tours, the historian of the Merovingian kings, frequently alludes
to a building method peculiar to the Franks, with art-forms borrowed from
timber construction. The royal residence was an open farm, surrounded by
porticoes in carefully smoothed, finely carved woodwork, executed in an orig-
inal but by no means inelegant style.55
Although classical art retained its validity even when it declined to its
lowest point and while its principal elements accepted by the barbarians were
susceptible to the effects of luxury and good living, these elements were com-
pletely transformed — partly under the influence of the different social forms
of the north, and partly thanks to the more particular influences of Nordic
craft, which retained its traditions to some extent.
This is true of both secular and ecclesiastical architecture in the early
Nordic Middle Ages. Old Nordic building traditions, closely linked with the
old Nordic way of life, were by no means insignificant.
If it is certain that most of the earliest Christian churches built in the bar-
barian and barbarized transalpine countries immediately after the conversion
of the pagans were timber structures, and were the work of missionaries from
the north (mostly Scots and Irish) who brought their traditions with them,
then there can be no doubt that these buildings should belong to a certain
type that held its own against the perennially dominant influence of general
ecclesiastical tradition. There is equally little doubt that this type must, to
some extent, have carried over to the stone churches that replaced their tim-
ber models a few centuries later.
We want to try to describe these influences in more detail, but first we must
turn to the scant information available about the old Nordic building tech-
niques used in the centuries immediately before and during the introduction of
Christianity, and to the remains of earlier timber architecture in the north.

§ 150 The Scandinavian Manor

The original forms of old Teutonic cultural conditions persisted longest in the
far north, where Teutonism was less exposed to the currents of history and
therefore developed with a minimum of disturbance. The north is also the
only unadulterated source of old Teutonic lore.
In the north the Teutons appeared as an aristocratically constituted commu-
nity whose conditions were not dissimilar to those of the heroic age in Greece.
This similarity is most striking in the domestic arrangements of the two
groups, in the layout of the old Nordic dynastic hall, and, to be sure, in a way
that one cannot help but think of other connections between these two Indo-
Germanic peoples—the Hellenes and the Teutons—that are not based on a
direct relationship.

674
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

Like the dynastic house described by Homer, the Nordic version stood in
a fenced or, often, walled courtyard. Its ring wall was strong enough to serve
as a defense against raids.
The courtyard had two parts: the outer courtyard and the residential
courtyard proper. The former was for barns and stables, the latter for living
accommodations.
The principal dwelling resembled the Homeric megaron, a rectangular hall
divided into three aisles by a double row of timber columns (setstokkar). In
the middle of the southern or eastern row of piers was the patriarch’s seat, the
seat of honor (ondvegi).5° Opposite this, on a slightly lower dais, was the sec-
ond seat of honor. There were benches on both sides of these raised seats, and
they were placed higher on the side of the first seat of honor and lower on the
other side. The intervening space was wide enough for a fire to be built with-
out obstructing the men from going about their business.
The four columns set around the raised seat were taller than the others;
they towered above the roof and each was decorated at the top with a carved
head of Thor. Between them a window frame (briindss) was placed at the
roof’s highest point, admitting light and allowing smoke to escape. It could be
closed with a shutter. The rafters were supported on this frame (the arca [sky-
light] of the Roman cavaedium [inner court]) and the roof was not pointed
but flattened at the top. Thus the hall filled the building to its full height,
including the roof space, and had no side windows.57
At the end of the hall a raised panel, called a cross bench, ran across the
width of the building, creating seats for women (Homer’s mychos). This wide
stage was enclosed by a lattice, behind which the women did their work. At the
same time, they overlooked the men’s hall and were involved in conversations.
The hall’s side aisles were usually given over to sleeping enclosures; some-
times these were omitted and replaced by seats (handridar) to allow for more
intimate conversation. The space between the women’s tribune and the last
piers formed a kind of transept with storage areas (afhus, klofan) that pro-
truded beyond the main walls of the hall.
In front of the hall, opposite the women’s tribune, was the [staf ]golf, the
vestibule with a low stone hearth (skorstein). The [staf|golf was open to the
hall and somewhat higher, so that one descended into the hall.
Two outside entrances that led into the [staf]go6lf were placed opposite
each other on the two long sides. In front of each door was a porch, again
with a door (the outer door). There were also side doors.
The porches were large enough to be used as storage spaces for firewood
and beverages.
The plan of the main building was much articulated and made up of many
juxtaposed units. In its elevation it presented itself as such, as we will see.
First, we must discuss the principle of separation that characterizes Scan-
dinavian architecture, both for this central building and for those others that
surrounded it.
First, the residential buildings. These include the skali (chalet), originally a

675
 Semper

wooden hut that later assumed huge dimensions. One skdli is described as
twenty-five fathoms long, thirteen ells wide, and thirteen ells high. Another
known example is forty ells long and nineteen ells wide, and paneled through-
out. It was heated, had side rooms and a loft (/opt), and served various
domestic purposes. Primarily it may have served as accommodations for the
numerous commoners who were members of the retinue. There were, then,
separate rooms, parlors, rooms for the retinue, bathrooms, living rooms, and
female housing. These included the skemma (kemenate in German), the work-
room for the women.
Some buildings had an upper story —accessible from outside via an open
staircase — which led to an open gallery (a later structure) running along the
wall. A trapdoor (/#ka) on the inside provided access to a lower level.
The sleeping hall contained nothing but bedchambers. An especially beau-
tifully arranged sleeping hall is described in the saga of Saint Olaf. Four outer
doors were set in the four walls of the square building; a double row of
bronze-covered wooden pillars led from each to the center. This produced
four squares within the hall, which low board dividers turned into separate
rooms. At the intersection of the four passages was the host’s bed on a plat-
form surrounded by benches.
There were also earth houses (cellars), some under the halls, others in the
open air. The latter were connected to the halls by underground passages for
rescue from fire or enemy activities.
The distance between the rooms needed for the household proves the
kitchen too was a separate building; and separate, in turn, were the bake-
house and the larder (stokkabur), which was placed on piles and isolated.
Then there were arsenals and exterior houses for the storage of weapons and
equipment. The toilets were also separate buildings, often of a large size.°8
So much for the residential buildings. The same isolating system is found
in work buildings. The drying house, malt house, barns (grain barns, storage,
straw barns), cattle stalls: each was separate and had its own roof.
In elevation the Nordic style follows the same principle of isolation: each
element of the plan is articulated in elevation with its own roof. Thus the
whole building forms a group of spaces arranged around a main roof, unified
according to the rule of subordination in multiplicity.
This residential system was by no means governed by climate; in fact it is
clear that in the far north—in Iceland and Norway— it must have caused much
discomfort. It demonstrates, rather, an architectural tradition imported from
elsewhere, reminiscent partly of northern Asia and China, partly of the oldest
Greco-Italic building practices. It contrasts sharply with the ancient Saxon
approach, in which everything — people, cattle, and crops — was protected by
a single massive roof. The latter system could evolve from the social condi-
tions originally found in the north; the former must have been imported fully
formed. This proves the later immigration of the Scandinavian tribes, which
lingered longer in Asia than kindred tribes in the south. Perhaps they also trav-
eled along a different route that brought them into contact with northern Asia.

676
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

The latter point is borne out especially by Nordic timber construction,

which is closely related to the Chinese-Mongol system. Although log framing
occurs elsewhere, a characteristic feature of Nordic timber buildings is the
tongue-and-groove wall boards set between vertical columns.5? The roof is

A\
N j

not connected to the walls, so that it can be taken down with a certain amount
of force. It is covered with shingles or birch bark and hung very low. The
gables are covered with carved boards and decorated.
Nordic wood carving, not the least remarkable feature of these timber
structures, also goes back to East Asian motives but curiously has not been
further developed. “Wood is the true Germanic building material.” In wood-
works we meet old Nordic art on its own turf. This tradition, like others
already alluded to, was pursued before the medieval stone style.°°
Carving (always polychrome) is especially common on projections (beam
ends, rafter heads), which conclude in every kind of eccentric animal shape
and band loop. But door frames, columns, and wall panels as well were often
covered with shallow carving, as if with tapestry.°! Sagas extol the fame of
such work. Most famous were the wall and ceiling panels in the house of Olaf
the Peacock, “whose carving was more beautiful than an embroidery,” as the
skald Ulfr Uggason sang in a special poem about the carvings. The name of a
famous carver has come down to us, that of Thord Hraeda, who decorated
his own house on Iceland most wonderfully with his art; some fragments sur-
vived until the sixteenth century.®2
Figurative representations in these oldest of carvings probably had scarcely
detached themselves from ornament. They may have resembled the oldest sur-
viving carvings from Norwegian timber churches, which have already been

Plan of church in Borgund, after [Johan Christian Clausen] Dahl

677
 Semper

mentioned. It is difficult to prove, in a convincing way, the contribution made

by genuine Nordic tradition in these carvings versus the contribution made by
the Byzantine elements mixed in, but we may well find here more that is
derived from Asia than is usually accepted.
The comparison of carving with tapestry in old sagas takes us back to the
often discussed stylistic relation between these two artistic activities. It also
proves that the luxury of tapestries was enjoyed in houses and sacred places.®
The floor was made of pounded clay and strewn with straw or rushes, but
on special occasions it was laid with fabrics and the walls received costly
hangings, usually dark blue, but also even more costly ones with embroidered
depictions of history and heroic figures—all created by women’s skillful
hands.** After the introduction of Christianity, embroidery in the national
style was replaced with Byzantine images of saints. This luxury in drapery
also extended to furniture: to beds, benches, chairs, and later to clothing.

§ 151 The Scandinavian Timber Church

We had to reconstruct the old dynastic house from sagas, but the church can
still be seen in well-preserved examples, and it wonderfully confirms the char-
acterization of Nordic architecture we gave in the preceding section.
We will not dwell on the remarkable correspondence between the church’s
floor plan and that of the Nordic dynastic hall, although this fact proves the
originality of both (the Byzantine influence has been seen in these churches as
well). We are more concerned to underline that the fundamental principle of
the independence of the spatial units composing a church is so evident that
virtually no doubt can remain that a certain architectural-aesthetic awareness
was active here.
These churches were not centrally planned buildings in the Byzantine man-
ner; they were much more like a shortened basilica in floor plan. They were
centrally planned, however, in the sense of spaces freely grouped around a
dominant but by no means subjugating main space, and in the sense of a
painterly principle. This was transferred to the stone style (secular and ecclesi-
astical) and maintained itself in the north, although during the development
of the Romanesque basilica at the end of the first millennium awareness of it
was dim. Thus it traditionally continued to assert itself only in the civil build-
ings of the Middle Ages, which derived only their decorative forms from the
Gothic style. The painterly grouping of masses and the lively outlines of our
medieval cities are old Nordic and Romanesque, not Gothic. The Gothic style
passed them by, and its pointed roofs harmed rather than embellished them.
Few would find it easy to see a correspondence between the giant Gothic
basilicas and the sea of houses out of which they rise like whales; few would
acknowledge in this a painterly or even an architectural effect from a distance.
The delightfully grouped central buildings of the Lower Rhine, however, once
more present themselves as the results of a conscious adherence to and artistic
elaboration of the painterly, spatial-architectural principle outlined above.
The same principle celebrated a second victory in the domed buildings of the

678
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

Renaissance, but the Renaissance, strikingly enough, dropped this principle

almost completely in its secular buildings. At least this was true of the palaces
in Italy’s main cities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Of course
the painterly element in architecture appeared in different combinations in the
south and in the north, but in any case Renaissance palatial architecture had a
serious flaw in this respect. The French Renaissance attempted to correct it in
its own way, admittedly often at the expense of repose and scale.
And yet this task of architecture was satisfied neither by the examples
listed nor otherwise. A solution had to await the future.
The Cologne churches of Sankt Maria im Kapitol, Sankt Aposteln, Sankt
Gereon, and Sankt Martin, and related buildings on the Rhine that are still
standing or stood in the area where the Carolingians once ruled, are descen-
dants and lapidary expressions of an architectural idea that was already clearly
present in the timber churches of the northern missionaries, on the sites of
which these churches were built after the end of the first millennium.®
When we look further we see that many of the characteristic details of the
Romanesque style of the Lower Rhine have been directly influenced by timber
construction and certain peculiarities of old-Nordic timber architecture. For
instance, it seems that the low arbors or passageways of Nordic churches,
half-closed and supported by wooden balusters, are not copies of Byzantine
or Romanesque arcaded galleries but just the opposite. As they appear most
frequently and probably earliest on the Rhine and in Lombardy or upper
Italy, they must have inspired those Byzantine and Romanesque examples.
The low, widely spaced pier is entirely appropriate to the timber style and dis-
tinguishes itself as such already in Egyptian images of the most ancient wooden
colonnades.
It is true that the shape of the arch that appears so frequently in Nordic
timber construction could be cited here as evidence of Romanesque or Byzan-
tine influence on the emergence of these wooden galleries. But arbors with
straight architraves are not rare and it is by no means rare in the history of art
for an arch to appear earlier as a purely decorative shape, before it becomes
an expression or imitation of a similarly formed vault structure.®
This idea is hardly far-fetched. Nothing is easier than cutting out or board-
ing up a wooden lintel stiffened with angle bands in the shape of an arch.
If it were conceded that the latter was a foreign element, then the broad-
columned low wooden arbor of the Nordic wooden churches as a spatial
motive is still the undisputed property of the north.
The influence of very developed and early timber architecture on the stone
architecture of northern countries may also be demonstrated by other means:
we have already indicated, for example, the unmistakable mixture of antique
and Nordic elements in Romanesque ornament.§”

§ 152 Half-Timber Buildings of the Middle Ages**

Essentially there are only three systems for constructing buildings in wood.
The first is the so-called plankwork described earlier: a horizontal frame with

679
 Semper

upright columns and between them tongue-and-groove walls made of boards

or planks (posts) sometimes jointed horizontally and sometimes vertically.
This is the Asiatic-Chinese system and probably should be considered the old-
est (most original) in the Indo-Germanic building tradition. Reminiscences of
it can be discerned on the stone facades.of most ancient Egyptian tombs and
on the mosaic-dressed earthen walls of Chaldean and Assyrian fortresses (see
§§ 69, 75 of vol. 1). The most primitive huts of all, such as the Caribbean ver-
sion shown above on page 666, are part of the Asiatic-Chinese system if the
woven mats between the columns are substituted for the tongue-and-groove
boards.
The second genus of timber construction is half-timber, which seems to be
less primitive than the first and should be seen as a combination of masonry
and carpentry.
The basis of this system is the lattice, and therefore the abstract formal
rules about the lattice given in the previous section are applicable here.
The half-frame wall consists of posts (vertical columns) mortised vertically
into a sill that has been suitably insulated from the ground on stone founda-
tions. The posts are connected together with horizontal crossbars and rein-
forced with diagonal struts according to the principle of triangular bracing.
The spaces created by this plank construction serve in part for entrances and
illumination; elsewhere they are filled in with light stone or brick walls. The
rich range of technical and decorative aids that this inevitably provides can
be seen both in the contrast of the two structural elements — timber and
masonry —that are to be mediated and in the infinite alternation of rectangles
and triangles, openings and fillings, that the timber connections permit. A
third additional feature is the carving, which in combination with painted
decoration had such an impact on the first kind of timber construction that
had been considered.
At the same time, however, one sees why this building system cannot be
raised to a monumental level (because the structural components lack inde-
pendence and appear only as elements of a pegma) and why therefore it is
preferable that it should follow the stylistic principles applicable to domestic
furnishings. Yet it offers a broad and attractive area for artistic development if
its particular characteristics and the resources available to it are conscien-
tiously exploited.
In this regard the half-timber system is more limited than the plankwork
system considered earlier, which was enhanced by antique architectural sym-
bolism to become the analogue or type of the monumental temple.
Just as log construction (along with plankwork) was invented by the
Scandinavians (while the Alemanic Swiss brought it to a remarkable artistic-
formal development)®? so was half-timber construction dominant throughout
western Germany, northern France, Belgium, Holland, and England. In
Carinthia and Tirol, and throughout the lower reaches of the Danube, it was
handled in a different way suitable for southern mountainous regions. Both
approaches will be considered separately.

680
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

§ 153 West Germanic Half-Timber Building

To follow the early historical development of half-timber building is impos-
sible because of the ephemeral nature of wood and the lack of historical infor-
mation or even mythological leads.7°
The oldest surviving medieval half-timber buildings date from the end of
this historical period; most belong to the Renaissance. The reason is that this
tendency in the arts to emulate antiquity was first able to make its impact in
the northern countries, to apply its rich decorative resources precisely in tim-
ber building and the carving associated with it. It managed this so felicitously
that it gave the appearance of simply retaking territory that had originally
belonged to it, and it reprised some of the oldest Romanesque motives that
had long been suppressed by the Gothic style and that unmistakably recur in a
more refined form in the earlier and better works of this period.
The oldest timber buildings in certain southern Germanic countries (Tirol
and Switzerland), which admittedly date no earlier than the fifteenth century,
exhibit no specifically Gothic elements, whereas motives in which the roman-
esque tradition seems to have been retained, mixed with Italian pseudo-antique
influences, are widespread. This supports my earlier assertion that, artistically
speaking, medieval timber construction underwent no fundamental change
after the Romanesque period, that the Gothic style had as little influence on it
as it did on secular building of the Middle Ages in general: it was fundamen-
tally organic but only superficially so, and in a most unfortunate way, to be
sure. This was partly due to its excessively dry approach to the structural ele-
ments of decoration— handled not in an antique or symbolic way, but accord-
ing to a literal technical spirit—and partly, though to a greater degree, a result
of transferring motives that originated in the vaulting system of stone church
naves to secular buildings and light timber frameworks.

Half-timber building in western Gemany is characterized especially by its divi-

sion into stories. In its peculiar way, it could have originated only under
crowded conditions, as a result of town life, although an even older motive
may be found in the wooden tops of solid towers, which already existed in
Germany in Roman times.
In timber construction the projection of stories above each other not only
provided additional space and protection for the lower parts but also had
structural and aesthetic advantages.
Given narrow frontages and the confining effect of the street’s alignment,
cantilevering the girder for each story provides more depth. The supplemen-
tary constructional advantage can be seen from the drawing below: the weight
of the walls countered the load of the floor.
Most important were the aesthetic idea expressed in this arrangement and
the exploitation of the arrangement.
The projecting girders (a) rested on beams (b) that connected the support-
ing posts (c); at their ends they supported the upper sill, whose load was

681
 Semper

transferred from the girder heads through the wooden consoles (e) to the ver-
tical posts. When the cantilever was large, the consoles were replaced with
genuine braces. The space between the girder heads, the vertical column, and
the sill was filled with diagonal screening boards (later by an intermediate
sill). Above the beam heads were the upper vertical columns with their lattice-
work and fillings.

Construction detail of half-timber cantilever71

These are the components of the construction, whose exploitation con-

forms to the principles stated in the previous section. The girder heads were
active, first, as representatives of the internal beamed ceiling, second, as head-
pieces (terminations), and, finally, as horizontal bearers. Their symbolism
should have been based on this. In the Middle Ages they remained girder
heads in the simplest sense; they were beveled, profiled (probably even trans-
versely) with crockets and ogees. Often heads were carved out of them but
without an awareness of the functional-structural symbolism of this motive.
As had been done in antiquity, the Renaissance treated these girder ends —
perhaps harking back to the Romanesque timber style—as idealized vegetal
forms striving forward horizontally and assuming a load (volute consoles).
The second supporting member, the console or brace, was likewise active
and serving. In the Gothic Middle Ages it was often just grooved along its full
height, except for a half or even full relief carving (a saint under a baldachin,
an arms bearer, a simple coat of arms, etc.).
Here too the Renaissance avoided anything tendentious and returned to the
antique manner of bringing this part’s functional-dynamic expression to life.
It therefore treated this projection as if it were a console, but in the sense
of compressive resistance (not relative, as in the case of the girder end).
The supporting brace was set against the front surface of the lower post,
which was therefore suitably decorated on the outside with a candelabra-like
montans or similar motifs where the external pressure was applied.

682
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

These are the supports and beams to which the upper floor and its repre-
sentative, the upper sill, correspond as something borne. Once again, the
Gothic period treated them more materially and technically, often with very
tasteful and free use of the carpentry processes of beveling, grooving, and the
like for plastic-decorative purposes. A steeply sloping crocket often served as
a crown, and inscriptions or a Gothic arched frieze ran along the sill. Some-
times the sill was cut into a pointed arch or a zigzag from beam to beam.
Often it looks as though it had simply been replaced and the upper column set
directly on the girder head.
The Renaissance returned to the form of the antique architrave and treated
the sill appropriately as a continuous frame and supporting girth.
Above the sill came the upper story’s supporting posts with their lattice.
In the Gothic period those posts, in accordance with their tendency, were
often in the shape of a prototypical flying buttress, or at least they echoed it:
crockets, recesses, statue niches with consoles, and baldachins to receive
wooden statues, hatches, gargoyles, coats of arms, and so on. The lattice
spanning between them either was simply constructional (such as a diaper lat-
tice, more or less varied with dentils, cutouts, and replacements) or followed
the principle of subordination found in Gothic tracery (richly profiled inter-
mediate posts and intermediate sills, diaper lattices within the subdivisions of
the articulated main field). In the later period the diagonal lattice was hidden
behind wooden panels; these were covered with pleated parchment rolls, per-
forations borrowed from stone balustrades, and other late Gothic motifs.
This trend of partly concealing the diagonal spars of the lattice and partly
dissolving them into decorative motifs (so that their antimonumental effect no
longer makes itself felt) gained the upper hand during the Renaissance.
The roof was the last and most expressive movement in this rich fugue. It
appeared as either a hip roof or gable roof. The (older) hip beams projected
in just the same way as those of the various stories; the roof surface was
enlivened by oriels built according to the same system. The gable, floating on
plates and consoles and projecting considerably, was the hegemon or procer
[leader] of the interior roof construction. Its field was a continuation of the
lower story.
The intermediate fields contrasted with the structural frame.72 As noted,
this contrast should be emphasized. Since these intermediate fields were not
dynamically active, they formed restful areas and were effectively panels for
the development of a freely decorative and tendentious art that had no rela-
tion to structural activity. This contrasted with the supporting, bearing, and
borne parts of the timber structure, mentioned first, whose decoration could
and should have emphasized and plastically represented their activity and
purpose.
The Gothic style seldom took this into account. It preferred tendentious
motifs for enlivening the structural parts; its pure ornament derived more from
craft concerns than from the plastic representation of functional-dynamic
effects. In contrast, the filling was usually either empty or filled with pointless

683
 Semper

Yani
im,

— |=

lr
i

Hi
\\i Ei

Gabled houses in Rouen

plankwork. But this reproach applies less to the early Gothic style (which was
still half Romanesque) than to the later style, to which almost all the timber
buildings in this style belong.”3
The Renaissance reawakened an artistic awareness of antiquity and, remark-
ably, it is in this popular timber architecture that it appeared first and with the
least inhibitions.
From that point on, the free art of the sculptor and painter returned to
the filler surfaces. The decoration of framing parts returned to the old tradi-
tion (never completely forgotten by the people) of plastically representing the
dynamic activities of these parts.”4

684
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

§ 154 Half-Timber Building in Southeastern Germany

Urban civil construction here, as elsewhere, was obliged to adopt Gothic nov-
elties, as it was precisely the bourgeoisie who most strongly supported and cul-
tivated them in the construction of magnificent cathedrals and urban rectories.
By contrast, the Gothic movement had no particular success in medieval
rural construction. Most likely it never gained acceptance in the isolated
mountainous areas of southern Germany, because otherwise there would cer-
tainly have been remnants and traces of Gothic taste in the Tirolean and
Styrian country houses that are otherwise so interesting. Yet this is not the
case. Certainly one finds timber houses decorated in the Gothic style in the
towns of southern Germany, and they are fundamentally no different from
those in northwest Germany, but there is hardly a trace of this in the country-
side. Is nothing left of country houses from the Gothic period? Or did the
profoundly conservative peasants of these mountainous areas develop so pas-
sionate a taste for the Renaissance when it was introduced that they com-
pletely forgot the Gothic forms that had previously been used?
Neither assumption is sufficient to explain the facts. Closer examination
shows that neither the building style of these country houses nor the art-forms
exploited in their construction belong to the Renaissance; rather, the ancient
traditions that occur here are either late Roman (Romanesque) or even (per-
haps more accurately) Greco-Italic. This does not refer exclusively to the dec-
orations; rather, the southern German timber house represents a Greco-Italic
type in its whole appearance: a shallow gable roof that cantilevers consider-
ably, with a purlin structure, a tabulatum that runs round the house or at least
around several sides (reminiscent of the mesodme and pergula of the Hellenic
and Roman house). The mixture of stone construction with timber structure,
especially the principle of dressing that occurs here, of boarding and beading
wall surfaces and door and window frames, as well as the antepagments on
the facings of purlins and beams, the adornment of which is more painterly-
polychrome than sculptural —all of this combines to make plausible the sug-
gestion already made by Leo von Klenze that in these buildings an ancient
building tradition has been retained in a relatively pure form.
To prove this point we present an illustration of the front of a house in the
Bavarian Tirol, with all the relevant details.
It consists of a ground floor built of rubble stone and a timber-frame
upper story. The floor beams cantilever considerably (about four feet), but
unlike those in urban dwellings they do not support the upper wall at their
ends, but simply a light gallery.
The roof purlins and rafters project twice as much as the floor beams and
are supported by tie beams and braces (angle bands) thrust beneath them. The
tie beams, as in antiquity, are cut in console form; the braces are enlivened
with light notching and curves.
Instead of Nordic carving, the simple forms are given a decorative variety and
richness simply by making incisions in the wood and painting it appropriately.
The lattice work on the compartments appears only on the gable and even

685
Semper

AHHH
tH

Bavarian-Tirolean house

686
Tectonics: Technical-Historical

ead =

687
 Semper

there in a more playfully decorative way; otherwise the wall construction is

entirely concealed behind board panels. Likewise, the roof edge is concealed
with double boarding, and the outer one is decorated on its underside with
carving that is rather like lace. On its upper surface a woven band runs up
both sides, clearly showing its function according to the antique principle.
The top concludes in a carved profile of a horse’s head. Apart from this, every
purlin has a fascia board carved with an antique pattern. The ridge pole fascia
rises as an acroterion between the two horses’ heads in the form of a triple
cross.
All carvings and moldings are antique — ogees, panels, fillets, egg-and-
dart, and dentils— all somewhat lean, with a broad sweep, entirely appropri-
ate to the timber style. There is not the slightest reminiscence of Gothic crockets
or fluting, nor anything in the spirit of the Renaissance. But it is strikingly
evocative of the profiling of certain Italian monuments.”> These moldings
have remained the same up to the present day in Tirol and Switzerland.
A curious feature is the balcony parapets, made up of notched boards
pushed together in graceful patterns. The more original patterns are not arbi-
trary but reproduce the outlines of a balustrade.
So much for these remarkable timber buildings, which may serve as illus-
trations of the abstract-formal principles given in the previous section. Similar
timber construction can be found in Switzerland, especially in the western
cantons, where it is combined with a peculiar arrangement of the window
shutters. On the outside the windows are protected by shutters set in grooves,
some of which can be pushed upward and some laterally. The fields within
which they move are framed with delicately perforated moldings. My col-
league in Zurich, Professor Gladbach, has collected some fine examples of
these and other Swiss buildings and is preparing an edition of them. To him I
owe the adjacent example (see figures below and on opposite page).

Le on o a

Mill at Effretikon near Zurich

688
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

mu
AHN TE 4 mie

Details of the mill

§ 155 Log Construction: The Swiss House’¢

Log construction contends even with plankwork for the honor of being the
older method, but is really a technical invention of inhabitants of mountain-
ous areas rich in the conifers they used as motives in house building, that is, as
reminiscences of older social conditions already established before they immi-
grated.”” This may explain the great similarity between peasant houses in
Styria and Switzerland, even though constructionally they are so different.
In essence, what was said of the former also holds for the latter, namely,
that they do not show any trace of Gothic influence; everything about them
points not to the late Renaissance but partly to Romanesque and partly to
even earlier building methods.
The differences between them are actually only those that emerge from
their different approaches to construction. The distribution of the windows

689
 Semper

should be particularly noted: in Styria, Upper Bavaria, and Tirol they are usu-
ally set individually at regular intervals, as a consequence of the timber-frame
system. In Switzerland they are clustered in a few groups so as not to weaken
the log construction.
The antique, low, cantilevered purlin roof with its stone-weighted wood
shingles, likewise the galleries underneath them, are common to both, as are
the projecting beams supporting them, but the type of support differs for
structural reasons.
In the case of the Swiss house, the wooden dressing is restricted to individ-
ual parts: window and door frames, the parapet walls of the galleries, and the
gable edge, because log walls form their own surfaces. Moldings are executed
in accordance with the same antique profiling principle discussed above; here
too there is no trace of a Gothic reminiscence.
The lattice construction of the Tirolean house cannot be applied to the
Swiss house. This is just as well since the latter is richly endowed with carved
and painted ornament, the character of which is more Romanesque than late
Italian; again, nothing in it suggests even the slightest reminiscence of the
architectural style of the thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth century.”8
The occurrence of very rough so-called Staffeln or stables built from round
logs should not fool us into seeing them as the origin of this style. In its prin-
cipal features it certainly had already been established abroad and may have
suffered no fundamental changes for thousands of years. Then, as now, stables
were built more roughly than dwellings.”
Having already highlighted its similarities with other timber buildings, in
what follows we will restrict ourselves to a short description of the identifying
characteristics of the stylistically perfected Swiss house and to what distin-
guishes it from other timber buildings.
Logs cut into square trunks about seven inches thick are set on rubble-
stone foundations. The trunks are laid transversely one on top of the other
and jointed very carefully at the ends with an abbreviated flattened area, so
that they fit very snugly. The beam heads project from the wall.
These beam heads are used to support the galleries and projecting roof
purlins.8° The upper beam projects beyond the lower one and supports the one
above it, which projects even farther, until the required cantilever for the last
supporting beam is achieved. Through carving, the gradual increase in the pro-
jection of the beams becomes an articulated console system. The most com-
monly used patterns correspond to antique precedents.®! Because the partition
walls of the house’s interior are constructed in the same way as the outer walls,
their beam ends form just as many pilasterlike projections on the outer wall
and they determine the number of supports. These pilaster strips, arising from
the construction, and from which the supports for the suspended parts boldly
develop, are articulated by the thicker and somewhat more projecting girders,
which have a running groove intended to support the floorboards. On their
faces these girders have their own steeply rising console profiles. Thus, unlike
timber-frame construction, the wall timbers are the supporting elements for

690
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

the floors. It is a well-conceived system completed by its characteristic orna-

mentation. The ornamentation is threefold in nature and origin.
First, the already noted board panels over window frames and door-
frames, the parapets, the edging of the gable, and so on. They are decoratively
carved in the manner of Tirolean houses and frequently form very tasteful
frames, following the strictest principles of dynamic symbolism. This orna-
ment also includes the applied beading and the crowning cornice.®2
Second, the carving of beams. In addition to the console form given to
their ends, mentioned above, they are also decorated — often excessively—
along their length with carvings, as with an architrave. Inadvertently this
suggests an imitation of earlier board cladding and at the same time of the
ancient antepagment. The profile of such carved beams is, in principle, identi-
cal with the ancient architrave, even though the details are more Romanesque.
They are, however, by no means Gothic and hardly cinquecento.
The lower part of the beam is cut back, often in two or three stages. The
uppermost part is usually carved like an arch frieze with slightly projecting
consoles; the central zone consists of a creeper or other vegetal ornament of a
very conventional nature, which heeds the native flora as little as it does a
Renaissance prototype. The sequence of frieze decorations is quite varied,
though it is by no means unusual for the individual zones to be separated by
very shallow ogee strips. Similarly their cornices often consist of several very
shallow moldings in an antique style.
Usually a rich system of many such zones comprises a whole sequence of
beam layers between the stories, from window to window; it forms a broad
band around the building, interrupted only by gallery parapets of the same
height, which, though different, are decorated just as richly.
Apparently a secondary intention here was to hide the wind shakes and
even the horizontal joints in the logs, or rather to neutralize them aestheti-
cally. This is a principle contrary to the Gothic style.
Some of the ornaments occurring here are simple notches that cumula-
tively resemble wickerwork. The Romanesque stone style obviously adopted
this motif from timber architecture.
Beveling, the origin of so many Gothic ornaments, found only limited use.
The sharp edges of facing timbers are usually provided with rows of notches
in the shape of an arch.
The rich plastic decoration is complemented in the third place by painting.
The beautiful hue of the local spruce seems to have been retained as a base,
although it is difficult to determine whether this was the earliest approach.
The carved ornaments were painted with flat, usually secondary tones (green
and violet). The smooth intervening friezes were white with black inscriptions.
The harmonious combination of these curious timber buildings with the
magnificent landscape of the Alps, the soil out of which they seem to grow,
has quite rightly been much emphasized. In fact, harmonizing with nature is
architecture’s only solution to being obliged to work within such overwhelm-
ing surroundings. For architecture to compete with nature, to set itself against

691
 Semper

nature effectively, is impossible. And yet here too contrasting effects can be
discerned: the low squat proportions, the shallow roof, the warm color, the
comfortably cramped family quarters, all serving as a foreground for the
noble but somewhat cold natural scene climbing toward the heavens.
Gothic pinnacles are as out of place at the foot of the Alps as are domes,
nor will they flourish there.

§ 156 The Medieval Timber Ceiling

Nowhere will one find sure evidence of the antique, that is, Greco-Roman ori-
gin of visible rafters — neither on monuments nor in ancient reports.
Indeed such evidence would have contradicted the monumentality found
in all other parts of the temple and in other works of strict architecture; there-
fore temple ceilings consisted of paneling, which either was entirely indepen-
dent of the roof structure (like the surviving stone ceilings of several temples)
or at least covered the rafters and hid them from view. Occasionally the timber
beams of the actual temple roof may have served as ceiling supports, but more
often there was a low intermediate floor between the ceiling and the roof tim-
bers, which could be used as a hiding place and secret passage.*3
Also paneled were basilicas, such as the one by Vitruvius at Fano and
Trajan’s Ulpia. The same is true of the enormous baths that were covered
with iron gridded ceilings extensively filled in with mortar, or even properly
vaulted. If visible roof trusses had been customary, they would certainly have
been used for public rooms of unusual span.
Whether it was adopted for civil buildings remains unclear. While ceilings
with diagonal beams do appear on wall paintings, to the best of my knowl-
edge there is no example of a complete system of rafters treated decoratively.
The roofs of Roman basilicas, now visible, were also originally covered
with coffering —consider the one that now spreads like a magnificent velum
over the nave of Santa Maria Maggiore (though it was renovated later).84
We may therefore see the decorated roof truss as a medieval invention, or
rather, as a motive foreign to the antique store of forms. It was taken up in the
early Middle Ages and remained in favor for domestic buildings, markets,
courtrooms, and above all for castle halls and chapter houses, into the late
Middle Ages and the modern period —despite much progress in the art of
vaulting.
The oldest surviving roof truss intended for architectural effect is, to the
best of my knowledge, that of Messina Cathedral, which was built quite early,
in the eleventh century.’5 Some of the detailing is Arabic, which proves that it
is original and really dates back to the Norman period. The extremely elemen-
tary construction is here in every respect sensibly, clearly, and tastefully trans-
formed into an art-form simply by the use of colored ornament, without
relying on carving. Despite the apparently primitive simplicity of the motives
used here to such effect, they are nonetheless clearly recognizable as simplifi-
cations of the antique principle of paneling.
The double casing above the roof slats was turned into a double-sloped

692
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

coffered ceiling by carving stars into the lower layer of boards at regular inter-
vals. Even more clearly, the narrow ceiling strip suspended under the ridge of
the rafters presents itself and its rich Arabic coffering as, so to speak, a rem-
nant and truncated representative of the missing cased ceiling of old, upon
which the ceiling remained stylistically dependent.8¢
Far less dependent on this antique tradition is the well-known roof truss of
San Miniato in Florence, which an inscription records as having been built in
13577:
It provides an excellent illustration of what was said in chapter 7 on the
decorative treatment of tectonic connections, for which reason my own draw-
ing of it is appended here.8” The lively color of the pure ornament without
tendentious accessories stands out against the somberly dark ground of the
wood, playfully alluding to its dynamic effect.
Color plates 21 and 22 show two examples of a type of decorative treat-
ment frequently applied to rafters in the early Gothic period, which in only a
few cases has survived in its original form and polychrome completeness.%8
They are the rafters of the churches of San Zeno and Santi Fermo e Rustica in
Verona. The former is perhaps not much later than the church itself (eleventh
century); it crumbled into dust and was removed shortly after the drawing
presented here was made, in the summer of 1835. The second is probably not
much older than the fourteenth century, but was doubtlessly intended, like the
first, to be decorated with stars on blue fields.
The motive is a kind of barrel vault, produced by coffered panels sus-
pended from the roof’s rafters and collar beams. It also retains the old tradi-
tion of the ceiling with fields.
Are what we find here really only wooden surrogates of the vaulted
church nave ceilings that could not be made for structural reasons or because
of inadequate resources? Or are these forms uninfluenced by such imitative
intentions, occurring for quite different reasons? I believe that the latter is the
case, since we know that the ancients liked to have curved ceilings with fields
(testudines) in their tabernacles, tablina, halls, and so on. According to
Vitruvius, the roof truss of his basilica in Fano was covered with an arch in
the same way. This system corresponded to the antique principle of con-
cealing the artificial elements of a structure in monumental building and
exploiting them decoratively only in light movable supports and in the design
of furniture.
Still, the Gothic style may have taken up the traditional motive on its own
terms. In the northern countries, where it came to predominate in the middle
of the twelfth century, this style abandoned the simple antique system of roof
construction, in part because strong timbers became rare and expensive, in
part for reasons of weight.
This resulted in new and more artful combinations and also led to steeper
roofs. For churches the principle of boarding up to the collar beam was
retained, though in the form of vaults.8? Only the main beams and suspended
posts (decorated with beveling and every kind of carving) remained visible.

693
 Semper

Alongside this an additional and more distinctive system of artistic carpen-

try arose, corresponding more to the general tendency of Gothic. It too shared
the fate that was rapidly to befall that style, namely, that of destroying itself
through its own consistency and logic.
The artful structure of the roof was completely revealed to the eye and nat-
urally was very quickly subjected to excessive decorative artifice. In the same
way, the refined lever-and-spring system found in door locks was put to simi-
lar decorative purposes and left open—to the delight of thieves and lovers,
who were given a perfect opportunity to study the system to their advantage.
The most important and most interesting of the surviving works of this
sort of decorative carpentry are to be found in England, where it has survived
in civil architecture until the present day, or rather, has once more found its
imitators. Yet Norman-English roof timbering differs fundamentally from
that of the continent. The latter, in spite of all the changes it underwent,
remained essentially faithful to the antique Greco-Italic construction system,
in that two rafters were fastened at their ends by a tie beam, and thus were
prevented from moving.
Norman-English roof construction is of the ancient Scandinavian type, a
kind of ship construction applied to the roof in reverse. In this system, the
beam is not a tie beam intended to hold the rafters together but where it
occurs it is simply a collar beam intended to brace the walls and prevent them
from being pushed inward. In certain cases it also supports the ceiling, pre-
cisely as in shipbuilding.

Interior of the church in Borgund, after [Nicolay] Nicolaysen

694
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

The appended woodcut of the interior of the church at Borgund (after

Nicolaysen) clarifies what has been said and is at the same time one of the
oldest surviving examples of this remarkable method of construction.®° One
can see how such a roof could without too much difficulty be pushed to one
side by men laying siege to a hall —as related in ancient songs, this did happen
once in a while. The strength of this system lies in the keel connection, or in
this case the ridge connection, which ensures that the two rafters are rigid.

The forces acting on short lever arms here, intended to overcome forces thrust-
ing against them on very long levers, are very large and can be handled only
by using very large dimensions for the individual parts and by most careful
joining.7!
Otherwise, these Nordic roofs, because of their purlin construction, are
more closely related to southern roofs than to those of central Europe, which
generally abandoned this technique in the twelfth century. The purlins, how-
ever, are not laid on the rafters (an antique southern system inappropriate to
shipbuilding); they are pushed through like crossbars and combined with the
rafters to form a lattice.
The undecorated, purely functional construction of old Norwegian church
roofs, the carvings of parts in arched forms that cannot have any aesthetic sig-
nificance in themselves, and other characteristics, all prove that the later
wooden casing that now conceals them was always part of the design.
By adopting the Gothic system, Norman carpentry freed itself from this,
experiencing its heyday in those countries that had become Norman (Nor-
mandy, Sicily, England).%2
The beautiful roof construction of Ely Cathedral (late fourteenth century)
shows this style at its peak of perfection and in its most magnificent application.
Another outstanding example is the roof of Westminster Hall in London,
which Viollet-le-Duc describes in detail in the “charpente” article in his Dic-
tionnaire. In this magnificent example of decorative tectonics, perforated
tracery became a new decorative element. At the same time, it served to con-
solidate, replacing the earlier use of planks to bridge the structural parts. The

695
 Semper

overuse of tracery, along with the extravagant use of such late-Gothic devices
as notches, circular rods, and crockets—all of which weaken the wood —are
merely external symptoms of the decline of these splendid decorative tecton-
ics. Gothic increasingly alienated itself from its own principle and ended up
by sacrificing itself entirely to mere surface ornament.”
As a result of the Norman conquest, the Scandinavian roof found its way
into France as well. Witnesses to this are the timber-frame houses of Norman
towns, where the gables show the Norman frame system even on the exterior.”
But more significant buldings, like those found in England, are very rare and
never seem to occur without the admixture of heterogeneous elements.>
Examples are even rarer in Germany, if they occur at all. Perhaps their
introduction was prevented by the need to consider climate, perhaps also by a
preference for the classical tradition, which in Germany expressed itself from
the time of the Saxon emperors and never quite expired.
All the basilicas from that period in Lower Saxony, all the halls of princes
and aristocrats (for instance, the hall of the Wartburg) are or were outfitted
with beamed ceilings harking back to the antique style.
In civil building this principle was generally adhered to throughout the
Middle Ages, but the less active the principle of Gothic style became here, the
more important became the introduction of Gothic details (like tracery, con-
structional ornament, coats of arms) —a trend that escalated ever more ques-
tionably up to the sixteenth century. Thus in this area and in German civil
architecture the Renaissance had no principle to conquer; it only needed to
purify the ancient system.Ӣ
Whereas Germany strove for classicism under its first great imperial houses,
Italy was simultaneously barbarized by pressure from the north.
As the level of artistic activity in Italy slipped into nearly complete dor-
mancy, Nordic ways and traditions found their way into the arts. Yet here too
the northern influence, or at least the late medieval kind, was mainly external.
It was in civil building that a nondecorative Gothic principle operated least of
all; on the other side of the Alps it had never and nowhere been anything
other than decorative. Still, this happened even more superficially in the south
than in the north. At the same time, the technical origin of Gothic decorative
forms was forgotten, and Gothic ornament was once more applied and dis-
tributed in the antique way.

§ 157 Medieval Paneling

Stylistically, wood paneling belongs in the section on dressing, a topic dis-
cussed in great detail in volume 1. We may therefore state briefly that the
decorative richness found in the paneling of the oldest surviving wooden
monuments, namely the Norwegian churches, develops itself particularly in
the paneling and is admirably true to style, both in itself and in its choice of
motifs.
Nearly all of the variations on Romanesque architecture, as well as on the
Byzantine and Arabian styles, follow the same correct principle of tapestrylike

696
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

surface decoration in their paneling, whether in wood, stone, or tile.

The Gothic style took this field in a new direction, in line with that which,
as pointed out above, it took in general. Filling, framing, and beading —in
short, the elements of paneling and additional metal sheathings used in con-
struction — were from that point on the most important motives and focal
points of decoration.
So this view of the task is fully justified. Only by this means can real justice
be done to the material metamorphosis of the wall dressing into wood panel-
ing. As in all artistic activities, the basic type must retain its full significance
throughout all of the transformations that it undergoes in the later stages of
its development. The framework and plankwork should never overwhelm the
panel itself, that is, the filling. The latter should be the main thing, the actual
motive, and thus should develop in an appropriately tapestrylike and rich
manner. The enclosing structural motives should serve it without dominating
it. If the latter happens, the basic motive changes into something quite differ-
ent and the paneling becomes a lattice. As the extremes meet, the multiplied
grids ultimately become the most primitive wall decoration, but also the most
abstract —the slatted wickerwork.
On the whole, early Gothic architecture kept within the limits of its struc-
tural principle: the significance of wall dressings and choir enclosures is still as
fillers. They fully assert their ancient privilege as resting places where the
structure can accommodate independent and tendentious sculpture and paint-
ing. This holds true for the enclosure of the choir of Notre Dame de Paris and
of the perfectly preserved choir of Amiens Cathedral with its rich cycle of
images. It was also true of the wall panels formed within the arches of the
Sainte-Chapelle, among many other examples that could be cited here.
But on doors, shrines, and other woodwork (at this time not proper mor-
tised joinery but tongue-and-groove carpentry), surfaces that are often
splendidly embellished with painting are also thoughtlessly pierced with iron
fittings whose (certainly tasteful) decorative appearance challenges the exis-
tence of the paintings.”
In the fourteenth century true mortised joinery replaced the earlier and
cruder tongue-and-groove method. Now the fillings were only a single board
in width (between eighteen and twenty-five centimeters) and were mortised
between projecting frames. This revolution in joinery, pursued to extremes,
had a very negative effect on every aspect of architecture in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries: the wall, which the dissolution of masonry into clusters of
piers had reduced nearly to nothing, was covered with endless tracery in
accordance with the principle of filling joinery, completely destroying its char-
acter as a wall. Thus the painting and sculpture found on ecclesiastical monu-
ments, and to some extent on public monuments as well, lost the last refuge
where they might appear independently. The hierarchic-structural tyranny of
the system would finally have subjugated these—the freest of the arts—as
they did all the others, had not another spirit seized the people, and painting
and sculpture first among the arts. Painting in Belgium and France toward the

697
 Semper

end of the thirteenth century, and more decisively in the fourteenth century,
recognized in parchment images (manuscript illustrations) both the material
and the occasion for independent effects, which it seized with the most rapid
success.°8 Lively descriptions by medieval poets were an excellent stimulus to
illustrators, encouraging a freer way of presenting images. Already by the end
of the fourteenth century we find among miniature artists a fresh striving for
painterly effects, naturalism, a genuine expression of feelings, and even for
composition and action, combined with a real taste and sense for the absolute
beauty of lines and forms.
Similarly, sculpture found a way of operating more independently in the
decorative arts: in goldsmithery, book covers, artistic vessels, furniture, and
domestic furnishings. During the heyday of the Gothic system both arts—
painting and sculpture — had to obey the strict rules of the dominant architec-
ture and levy its structural forms for decorative purposes. This was also true
for these decorative arts, which now offered art a field for freer activity.
Having become more independent, however, artists learned how to remodel
and put to imaginative use these same forms, working purposefully in a
painterly and sculptural way to create a mood, even if monumental practical-
ity was understandably not taken into account.
At about the same time, altarpieces (retables) were introduced that had not
been part of the previous tradition, to a certain extent as compensation for
divorcing wall surfaces from the arts. A richly framed proscenium was meant
to reproduce plastically on its panels the sacred drama of the mass. It was a
splendid idea, which the now somewhat freer arts of painting and sculpture
seized with enthusiasm, all the more so since they felt cramped and confined
by the architectural network of tracery and window leading.
Pulpits, tabernacles, portals, organs, choir screens, fonts, even church towers
fell more and more into the hands of painters and sculptors. At the same time,
their painterly and plastic treatment of the old structural elements — entirely
arbitrarily and without any regard for monumental practicability—was now
actually accepted into the architecture and fully realized. The principle itself,
interpreted with the utmost sophistry, encouraged the greatest arbitrariness;
in its dotage the system became comical and played humorous games with its
own nature!
And as it denied its own nature, the principle of order—architecture itself —
seized the choral leadership of this fantastic dance, and even as the Gothic sys-
tem was facing a sudden end of its reign it once more experienced a brilliant
upturn.
Where this self-destruction did not lead art to a magnificent and genuinely
artistic end worthy of its former greatness and wonderful for all times, a less
glorious end meant ossification into schematism and tediousness!

Requiescat in pace!

698
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

§158 The Renaissance: General Remarks

Rome more Gothic than Rouen, Bruges not as Gothic as Siena!

Mr. Didron selected this motto for his wonderful reports about the Gothic
Italy that he had discovered.?
Not a discovered Italy, but an annexed Italy! At the same time, an assault
on the whole great Sturm und Drang period of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. A surprise assault vindicating for the Gothic system everything
connected with the powerful social upheavals that moved this period to and
fro and which erupted from Italian soil with unusually productive force—
even though it was precisely in Italy that this system foundered on a power
stronger there than any system, namely, the power of the individual who will
never, for the sake of rules, neglect the legitimacy of his own existence but as
an independent power will enter the arena to join the debate over principles
and fight for what is dear to it: individual and civil freedoms. It is in this sense
that we should understand the always changing support for a pope or an
emperor, understand the related tendencies of expanding cities which alter-
nately incline toward antiquity and the Gothic but always remain indepen-
dent, understand Italy’s poets and artists during the struggles between
spiritual and secular dominance.
Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, the cathedral in Pisa, San Miniato in
Florence —all Gothic! Giotto a Goth, Dante a Goth!!0° The author of the
Divine Comedy, which was from beginning to end a protest against the sys-
tem by the poet, the patriot, and the individual!
Opposed to the system whose leader may have been enthroned in Italy, but
whose true champions were foreigners: chiefly the Gauls who, accustomed to
hierarchy from Druidic times, showed themselves more suited to monastic
and military ecstasy and discipline than any other people. Among the Gauls
organizational talent!®! is innate in almost every individual, and everyone
finds the greatest satisfaction to his self-esteem in being part of a great com-
munity and seeing himself powerfully and gloriously represented.
In Norman Gaul, and occasionally elsewhere, the system had almost
unconsciously expressed itself architecturally as early as the eleventh cen-
tury!02— before it emerged more self-consciously as the perfected Gothic style,
at the same time as the bloody crusades against heretics.
By contrast, in Germany it made a hesitant entrance only after the down-
fall of the last representatives of the Roman imperial idea. It appeared first in
the Rhineland. Simultaneously, the Romanesque style produced its most beau-
tiful flowering wherever the old imperial idea was still rooted, chiefly in the
Saxon lands.?° In Italy, as I have said, it was in principle never recognized nor
even understood.
Thus two principles confronted each other for a long time, and the medi-
eval world was divided into two camps, each with its own architectural sym-
bol. Yet there was conflict even within those camps: a revolt by the high arts

699
 Semper

soon made itself felt, especially within the victorious Gothic system.
On the west portal of Chartres Cathedral rise up stiffly hieratic, finely
draped statues, bound and stretched like columns. They blend perfectly into
their surroundings —the bundles of Gothic columns.!°4 Their majestic rigidity
makes them the well-considered product of a system that strove through strict
schematism to break the (earlier and contemporary) Romanesque upswing in
sculpture and to incorporate sculptural form into the architectural organism.
True Gothic sculpture was a deliberate, tendentious, backward step. But soon
afterward sculpture revolted against the principle. The noble, reemancipated
sculpture on the main portal of the same Chartres Cathedral, those of Senlis,
Paris, Reims, and elsewhere rebelled against the Gothic system and are
Romanesque through and through. They are free of the influences of the sys-
tem that tried to repress the Romanesque artistic tradition. They are almost as
free of that system as are those masterly sculptures on the late Romanesque
golden door in Freiberg, just as free as works by the masters Nicola and
Giovanni Pisano, and Orcagna.!05
Nevertheless, sculpture could not flourish for long under that system. It
was subjugated a second time: those warped and ugly figures of the period
(the fourteenth century) when Gothic architecture ruled almost everywhere.
At the same time, painting was trapped within the mesh of leaded windows
and was completely fettered to architecture, finding no decorative arts where
it might move more freely. In the decorative arts, however, a reaction to the
system appeared around the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, to a
system that, although still active in individual Romanesque forms, had been
powerful and ruled ecclesiastical and secular utensils and domestic furnish-
ings with these forms much earlier. This resistance is readily apparent in the
best art objects and furniture produced in this period. Examples: some beauti-
ful thirteenth-century censers;!°¢ the bronze candelabra of the Blessed Virgin
in Milan Cathedral;!°” others in the same organic plant style in Brunswick,
Prague, and other places; and many other utensils and pieces of furniture that
have survived from this early Gothic period or are depicted on contemporary
miniatures. Here a spirit of freedom and resistance to the dominance of archi-
tecture moves by deliberately avoiding structural forms. It is an independent
trajectory that goes almost as far in rejecting architecture’s basic principles. If
one compares these works with earlier ones from the Romanesque period that
served the same or a similar function, in which, however, the system was
already being prepared, one cannot doubt that this spirit exerted its influence,
that there is a conscious struggle for emancipation from the predominant
influence of architecture (whose pressure on the decorative arts and the closely
related independent arts of sculpture and painting is already apparent).
Although these works date from the twelfth or thirteenth century, they are
nevertheless anti-Gothic, because they contradict the principle of the period
that was beginning its reign over architecture. In fact they are already a kind
of pre-Renaissance, in that one can see in them a readoption of old traditions,
an antique sense of art, and antique techniques.

700
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

This is also true of the form, material, and applied techniques of a few
pieces of contemporaneous secular domestic furniture, which were produced
in greater quantities than at any other time. Whereas some light tectonic
objects already show a strict architectural form, others lack it completely.
Turned-wood pieces, richly enameled and embossed hollow metal construc-
tion, and to a large extent the stick construction used for chairs, thrones, bed-
steads, lecterns, and other utensils —all are partially treated according to
antique principles that do not contradict the more Oriental tendencies assert-
ing themselves at the same time. The two are very compatible because the
Orient remained forever faithful to antique tradition, at least in terms of its
superficial artistic techniques.198
It serves to confirm what has been said above about resistance toward the
(so-called Gothic) system in Germany and Italy —that remnants and traces of
this independent striving in the decorative arts usually take us back to these
two countries. Thus the unfavorable judgment about medieval furniture tech-
nique expressed at the end of § 157 does not apply to objects that bear this
stamp.
The Renaissance was, so to speak, latent in these late Romanesque, Ghibel-
line works of the decorative arts, sculpture, and painting, which have been
erroneously assigned to the Gothic style. The Renaissance very quickly became
aware of this striving, in a country where traditions had partly preserved
antique art types and the procedures belonging to antique techniques through-
out the period of deepest barbarism. Apart from numerous examples of
extant antique art, the land’s classical style and its lineaments protested every-
where and forever against the Gallic system. Progress in the old Romanesque
direction happened of its own accord once the intruding foreign fashion — the
play with construction — had been overcome. !°

§ 159 Renaissance Furniture

Thus in furniture design the era of the Renaissance began as early as the
twelfth century, principally in Italy.“° Sculpture and especially painting were
deeply involved. The panels of large wall cupboards and chests were deco-
rated with scenes from the Bible, from history, and from fable. Beds and
chairs were decoratively painted. Painters and other craftsmen involved in fur-
niture making were taken into the Florentine fellowship of San Luca in 1349.
The same happened in other cities, in Venice for example, where they later
had difficulty in expelling saddlers, shieldmakers, and sackmakers from the
painting academy.
Still, in the early fifteenth century excellent painters, like the Florentine
Dello [di Niccold Delli], were involved in this branch of the arts and acquired
fame and fortune by practicing it.!!!
In addition to painting, the antique technique of inlaid woodwork, so-
called intarsia, seems to have survived in Italy. It later drove painting almost
completely out of furniture making, as it came to appear only in association
with carving and gilding. Until the late fourteenth century, marquetry consisted

701
 Semper

of simple geometric patterns of black-and-white inlaid wood, occasionally

with ivory. From the early fifteenth century, this technique entered the field
occupied by painting: interiors, historical scenes, and landscapes were exe-
cuted with the aid of artificially stained wood and with all the effects of linear
and atmospheric perspective. In addition, at least for the structural parts,
there was all the richness of wood carving, which very quickly abandoned the
briefly (fourteenth century) dominant Gothic architectural motives. This it
did partly to return to the true principles of structural symbolism and the tra-
ditions of antiquity, which at the same time were treated in a most imagina-
tive, free, and tasteful manner and surrounded with a Romantic magic absent
in antiquity. It was also done partly to replace Gothic motives and other kinds
of false architecture by romantically treating them in a free antique style. If
these processes, if the columns, ancient entablatures, balustrades, niches, and
arches used as decoration on cupboards, choir stalls, and other kinds of furni-
ture are no more justified in principle than the ornamental use of Gothic con-
struction, progress has nonetheless taken place since decoration was no
longer provided by the bare structure but by an already symbolic structure.
Yet it must be admitted that even less attention was paid to harmonizing the
decorative structure with the actual structure than in the Gothic period.
Even so, this can be considered an aberration or a Gothic resurgence dur-
ing the early Italian Renaissance, as it usually appears only on the lattices that
also form wall panels and are part and parcel of the architecture, principally
in the chapels, choirs, and sacristies of churches. Strict architectural forms
are less often found in furniture that can actually be moved; there it is enough
to decorate the framing and paneling, supports, and lattices. Where the style
follows architectural motives, at least it avoids the playful imitation of real
buildings.
It is telling that such motives tended to be popular in countries where
Gothic had actually been dominant, especially in Germany and France. One
need only compare Germany’s so-called artistic cupboards and the somewhat
less affected “cabinets” made in France under the Valois with earlier and con-
temporary Italian cabinetmaking (see woodcut)!
The reputation of Italian cabinetmakers was such that their names (even
the less important ones), as well as their works and the personal commitment
that each had invested in his work, had by this time already spread across
the whole of civilized Europe, as art history shows.! According to Vasari,
Matthias Corvinus commissioned Benedetto da Maiano to make two magnif-
icent marquetry chests, which the latter then accompanied to Hungary him-
self to ensure that they were correctly assembled and situated. Indeed, the
reputation of Italian cabinetmakers spread to India and the Great Mogul.
They were responsible for introducing there the marquetry style used to make
inlaid patterns and arabesques on small Indian ivory boxes; the style is quite
reminiscent of Giotto and his time.!3
The Renaissance decorative style—so unusually cheerful and yet delicate,
lively, and elegant — was influenced not only by wood carving and inlaid work

702
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

Italian cabinet

but also by metal techniques, which provide the sharpness and refinement
which were a characteristic of the early Renaissance and so natural and appro-
priate to its style. The use of metal for utensils was an established tradition,
but was given a particular boost by the culture of defensive weapons, which
reached a peak at that time. As a result, the achievements of Italian armorers
(principally Lombards) were even greater than those of Oriental armorers,
even greater than antique metallurgy. Richness of invention, the freedom to
exploit all the decorative and formal means available to metal, the mastery of
those means, and perfection in technical execution combined in their work
with the most exquisite taste and the most rigid stylistic correctness.
I will have more to say about them and their work in the section on metal-
lurgy. Here let it be noted that they are the true inventors of the Renaissance
arabesque, in which Oriental foliage patterns are so gracefully combined with
the Greek acanthus. Thus the antique principle of dressing suddenly and of its
own accord (through the mediation of iron dressing) won back its ancient
influence. This is a very remarkable event in the history of art.
The sixteenth century was so monumental in character that the decorative
arts, which flowered in the fifteenth century, inevitably felt the deleterious
effect of a newly independent painting and sculpture. Monumental architec-
ture, however, suffered most of all, as has been true for all periods in which
art has reached a high level of development. Yet this dependence was a matter
of naturally drawing from the masterworks of high art and not from the
obsession with hierarchy found when Gothic dominated the decorative arts.

703
 Semper

Soon this dependence provoked a striving for greater freedom and originality,
a trend that led many decorative artists to treat architectural forms in the
most arbitrary way. All the means available to wood carving, metal casting,
and all other refined techniques were completely exhausted, and formal limits
were almost completely abandoned. This ushered in the Baroque style with its
projections, moldings, niches, cartouches, hanging fruit, masks, satyrs,
volutes, shells, and so on. This led to a second reaction in the decorative arts,
and especially in artistic joinery, against the excessive weight monumental
structure applied. In short, at this stage the latter was again under the influ-
ence of the decorative arts, as it became corrupted by all that it had acquired
during its purely decorative application in joinery. Even that which belonged
exclusively to the field of the decorative arts was now transferred to monu-
mental architecture in the most arbitrary manner.
This influence affected the charmingly arbitrary late Renaissance architec-
ture of the north in a particularly characteristic way. Perhaps the older parts
of Heidelberg castle provide the most beautiful and richest example of this: a
kind of furniture architecture, and to be sure a mixed one, with late-Gothic
joinery style peering through the Renaissance, its antique forms fantastically
transformed by carving and inlaid work. While Gothic forms were adopted at
an earlier stage in Italy (even though antique motives always dominated), the
reverse now happened in France, Germany, and Belgium. Here the motives
remained Gothic for a long time; they were simply dressed with antique forms.
In Italy the Renaissance ended even less happily. Around the turn of the
seventeenth century tall architectural altarpieces were taken up — gigantic
picture frames outfitted with column orders that had already been reduced
schematically to fixed canons, heavy monumental entablatures combined
with incrustations of hard stone (jasper, agate, and lapis lazuli), Florentine
mosaic paintings, embossed metal panels, thick gilded fluting —in short, with
every conceivable decorative device. The motive, so impoverished in and of
itself, permits no simple columnar rhythm, which is absolutely necessary if the
column order is to appear as a decorative element. Therefore one fell into cou-
pling and grouping columns in the most arbitrary way to force this rhythm.
This soon led to curved surfaces and to curved entablatures and pediments.14
In the seventeenth century this wretched dresser style was transferred to
palatial facades and Jesuit monasteries and churches and began to dominate
all architecture. But the cold columnar scheme was not enlivened by the arbi-
trariness of their arrangement. Nor did the projections and moldings, the
panel architecture, and the massive baroque sculptures still suffice to animate
proportions and surfaces with their ever increasing material mass. The Renais-
sance was once again suppressed by a system, this time by a profoundly super-
ficial and empty one.
But this is too early a turn to architecture, as more agreeable things are yet
to come in the field that is the real subject of this section, namely, movable
domestic furnishings such as tables, benches, armchairs, candelabras, etc.15
Because of its architectonic rigidity, Gothic furniture (in the narrower

704
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

sense of the word: chairs, tables, etc.) was not actually furniture. It stood fixed
by the wall and, when used, was covered with movable cushions and drapery.
A revolution in domestic furnishings must have happened as soon as they
became movable again. The cushions and draperies had to be securely nailed
to the furniture so as not to fall off when it was moved. This led to the devel-
opment of the upholstered chair, which—as is known from all the master-
pieces of the period’s great painters — retained its simple, noble, but somewhat
stiff character into the seventeenth century." It has vertical legs in delicate
turned work, a slightly bent back, a simple velvet covering with gold tacks,
gold trim, and tassels.
Two trends followed in the subsequent period: the baroque carved style
and, by contrast, the complete dressing of a simple wooden frame with splen-
did silk fabrics (see figures below). A combination of the two is shown in the
figure, bottom right.

Sy
OS
SV SN
SSN
=
SSSSSS
SoS

Baroque chairs (seventeenth century)

705
 Semper

Venice seems to have set the standard for luxurious furniture in the late
seventeenth century. This was the time of the splendid but overly decorative
tables, mirrors, and gueridons completely covered with embossed silver. They
are remarkable examples of the influence that the technical processes of an
increasingly dominant industry can have on the taste of the period. Although
the ronde-bosse and the art of stamping metal brought about quite different
and much more beautiful results in the work of fifteenth- and sixteenth-cen-
tury armorers, they are both results of this technique and each possesses an
individual style. This extravagant use of precious metals for furniture and
utensils reached its peak during the first great period of Louis XIV. Facing
impecuniousness he later had all of his silver furniture melted down to show
his courtiers and aristocrats how ready he was to make sacrifices. In fact, rela-
tively few pieces in this fine baroque style have survived.
The second Louis XIV period shows an affected classical taste, in which,
as Viollet-le-Duc correctly says, breadth is confused with size. The style of this
period, however, does possess truly grand features, which will not be over-
looked by anyone who impartially considers the arts and sciences of this most
glorious period of French history.
For a time the dominant furniture style involved metalwork cut out and
then inlaid on a tortoiseshell ground and vice versa (a readoption of principles
described already by Pliny). It is fairly well known by the name of its inventor
[André-Charles] Boulle. Closely examined, it reveals a large number of
nuances and substyles, from heavy metal coverings and high relief (mixed
with surface ornaments) to the willful dalliance of the rococo period proper.
The sense of formal appropriateness was much cultivated at this time
through the example of the court of Versailles, where French spirit sur-
rounded itself with Spanish grandeza. One knew how to exploit everything:
what it was suited for and where it belonged. Thus Boulle’s invention was
applied to tables, dressers, clock cases, coffers, and so on. The bed, the sofa,
and the armchair were left to the upholsterer, who either reigned supreme in
his domain or called upon wood carvers and gilders. In the end, the uphol-
sterer managed to dominate his field of endeavor to such an extent that there
was nothing left for others to do. In the case of bed canopies, for example, not
only did the frame disappear, but even the headboards (vases and the like)
were made of velvet and passementerie.
After Louis XIV comes the spirited and exuberant period of the Regency
and Louis XV. Furniture now fully emancipated itself from the laws of the
architectural tradition. Only through absolute appropriateness to purposes
which, to be sure, were often frivolous and capricious, and by the properties
of materials did it remain bound to form. In this respect it is unique in the his-
tory of art. This style developed first in the most essential furniture, that is,
tables and chairs, but when subsequently applied to cupboards and paneling
it also gained a foothold in architecture,!!”? where the ancient tradition of
column orders was nearly ousted by the curved frame of the joiner, which
increased its dominance and was transposed into a stone style. The organic

706
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

Rococo commode

enlivening of the frame as a substitute for the now rare cornices, pilasters, and
columns can be seen as an ingenious innovation hitherto unknown to the
antique building tradition. Possibly it still stands a chance of redemption
without being so specifically bound to the period of its invention. It is possible
that it will be rediscovered when architecture again finds its sense of humor.
Another return to the antique tradition ensued; its initial appearance was
only a timid one, and this moderation and a mixture of rococo with antiquity
are very charming.!'8 This time the new impulse came from architecture. The

Louis XVI furniture, earliest style

Petit Trianon at Versailles is just such a work, extremely graceful and a transi-
tion from rococo to the style of the last years of the monarchy. The latter style
is perhaps most purely expressed in the Garde Meuble, Place de la Concorde,
which no longer shows any trace of rococo forms. Gradually the rococo dis-
appeared from furniture. It was followed by every kind of cornice, straight
form, caryatid, acanthus, appliqué, and profiles in ormolu, in addition to

707
 Semper

porcelain panels with painted pastoral scenes and bouquets of flowers, porce-
lain cameos, glass, and so on, and so on.
The most famous furniture maker of that period, Gauthier, entirely elimi-
nated curved rococo forms in the 1780s, but used purely architectural arrange-
ments with rather too much dryness and consistency. His decorative forms, while

Cupboard with ormolu; fittings by Gauthier

they are also too architectural and marked by a certain coquettish austerity of
style, are peculiarly elegant and marked by impeccable technical perfection.
This taste is uncommonly appealing because of its relative chastity of form,
contrasting with the superannuated coquetry that it replaced. The sharpness
and thinness from which it suffers are partly consequences of the process of
cast-metal appliqué, which had almost completely replaced wood carving. It
is also a sign of the time that embraced it, the simple appeal of whose clothing
likewise contained something of bridal death and sacrificial decoration. The
Louis XVI style will retain this tragic solemnity forever.
It was followed almost without transition by the most repugnant of all
tastes: the antique formalism of the imperial period, about which nothing
need be added (see the section on porcelaine dure, in “Ceramics”).
The nineteenth century is still trying too hard to reconcile its trends and
claims for it to be possible, or at least advisable, to make any statements
about the direction of our time in matters of taste.1!9

708
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

§ 160 Renaissance Timber Architecture

We can keep this section short, as previous ones have already touched upon and
dealt with important points in this field. Thus the Renaissance influence on
the style of Nordic timber architecture has already been discussed, and in the
last chapter we alluded to the link between furniture tectonics and the archi-
tecture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance—about which much could
still be said if the space set aside for this section on style theory permitted.
We cannot speak of a true Italic exterior timber architecture as we would
of Nordic timber structures, although there are isolated combinations of wood
in Italy (usually also combined with stone) in which antique traditions can
again be recognized.
Before we deal with these, I should like to consider southern Tirol, which
is more Latin than Germanic, the seat of a distinctive timber architecture
modified by the stone style. There—in the region of Merano, Bolzano, and
Rovereto —the multistory building is often solid, while the roof with its gable
forms a decorated timber structure arranged so that a broad unglazed opening
provides illumination from the side for a covered atrium at the house’s center.
It certainly represents an antique tradition: the Egyptian malkaf, a windscreen
that helped to block the sun and at the same time admitted a cool breeze into
the interior courtyard of the house. Predecessors appeared as early as the wall
paintings on Old Kingdom tombs. Atria lit in this way, covered with very artful
and visible roof trusses that support each floor, contain the open stairs and the
galleries needed to connect the rooms (see § 147 above on the atrium).
To the best of my knowledge this very remarkable building tradition has
never been paid the attention it deserves.
Tuscany also offers many interesting motives in exterior timber architec-
ture, which are part of the most ancient traditions of this country. The
Etruscans were praised as very skillful timber architects.
The most famous, relatively early example of a very sophisticated roof
structure (obviously antique in inspiration, as it is entirely reminiscent of the
already noted portal roof mentioned in a Latin building inscription) is the
bracket roof of the Bigallo in Florence, presumably a work of Orcagna and
thus dating from the latter half of the fourteenth century.!2° This is not an iso-
lated example, as similar projecting roofs can often be found above old door-
ways (entrances to monastery gardens), chiefly to protect the paintings that
decorate the upper masonry above the door arch.
Another remarkable feature is the widely projecting wooden cornices with
multiple repeating bracket supports on various Tuscan palaces. In a sense they
anticipate the powerful Tuscan stone console, which would probably not have
been so readily attempted without this precedent.

Interior Timber Construction

Decorated open rafters in churches have already been mentioned as a motive
that is probably not antique but early medieval. The Gothic period also intro-
duced the decoration of beams in domestic architecture. In northern and

709
 Semper

southern Italy, in Siena and in Palermo, this form of ceiling decoration seems
to have predominated for several centuries. The Renaissance did away with it
and returned to the antique ceiling, using all the means provided by a very
rich composite technique (stucco, painting, gilding) with the freedom and
confidence that can come only as a result of emancipation from the fetters of
strictly structural architectural principles, so that the structural law is no
longer materially but symbolically fulfilled. It was only by dressing ceilings
and walls with stucco that the Renaissance reached perfection, for this tech-
nique, as has been shown in other places, is eminently antique. Already the
interior of the old palace in Mantua and other works of the first early Renais-
sance testify to the mastery of truly antique principles in handling stucco
work, principles that Michelangelo, Giulio Romano, Pirro Ligorio, and other
later masters did not always take into account.
Cast gypsum was used very rarely, if at all; it has not been found in
Pompeii either. The known processes were freehand stucco modeling; the hol-
low mold, in which the ornaments were impressed on the fresh lime stucco;
and the use of a rotating template to draw profiles in straight lines or regular
curves. These processes determined the division of ceilings and walls, the
ornamentation with regard to projections, the underwork, sequence, and
composition. As a rule, what was most easily executed was best. Today com-
mon cast gypsum and the equally flat carton-pierre lead to all sorts of mon-
strosities which, already repugnant in themselves, thanks to their multiplication
and market forces are accelerating the vulgarization of decorative art and
preparing the way for its certain ruin.
The stucco worker was still a free artist in the final years of the last century
and ceilings have survived from the late rococo period that can be considered
artistic masterpieces of their kind. At least we have no right to pull them
down.
In addition, there are places where authentic wood paneling continues to
be used for ceilings and walls. It remained popular in northern Italy, particu-
larly in the Venice area, which is related to the northern Italian school of
painting’s predilection for panel work. Fancy painting on oak paneling seems
to have spread via Venice to Augsburg and Nuremberg, and at the same time
or even earlier to France (Fontainebleau, Louvre, palais du Luxembourg).!2!
The magnificent period of wall paneling is that of rococo taste, in which
the frame becomes an organism and starts to replace all other traditional
forms of architecture.!22 The frame embraces the panel like a plant, so to
speak, wrapping its tendrils around it as though imbued with organic life and
so losing the crystalline and eurythmic qualities it had before.
The pegma dissolves into vegetal elements that are fluid, as it were, con-
flicting with strict regularity.
This is the true idea of rococo, for which we found a word, or so we flatter
ourselves. Out of it one could essentially construct this style, but it by no
means follows that everything that may yet be developed out of it and advanced
into the phenomenal world must belong unconditionally to the rococo style.

710
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

Notes
1. Although in its essentials antique architecture entirely emancipated itself from
timber construction, it still made use of it to resolve tasks related to domestic furnish-
ings, that is, for interior design. The principle just described of suspending timber struc-
tures was much applied, in particular for those passages (galleries, corridors) that,
following an age-old tradition going back to the heroic period, ran all around the walls
inside the atria and peristyles of dwellings. Such structures were also suspended from
the beams of the roof trusses to divide the intercolumniation into several zones, corre-
sponding to floors and mezzanines (Hesych{ius], [Lexicon 1414]: tévtnkov Td péo05-
Lov TohVoTHYyov). These walkways or galleries (Greek: mesodmai, rhogai, anterides;
Latin: pergulae, maeniana, tabernae, coenacula, deversoria) were protected by a high
latticework parapet (kavd80poc peaod5un), which also lent rigidity to the suspended pan-
eling (tabulatum, climax, stegae). Similarly, the staircase that led to them was enclosed
in a lattice cage that lent additional rigidity and made it possible to use the staircase
without being seen. Climax refers both to this staircase and to latticework in general,
the structural importance of which the Greeks knew perfectly well. This is especially
clear from the passage in Arrian in which he says that a pontoon bridge was enclosed
on either side by a lattice structure, to ensure the safety of horses and draft animals but
also to connect the bays of the bridge (Arrian, Alex[androu Anabasis, emendatam et}
exp|licatam], ed. [Karl Wilhelm] Krfiger], [5.7]: Wo otvSeon0c tod Cevypatoc).
Galleries and their latticework had been the object of rich architectural decoration
as early as the heroic period, as is clear from various indications in Homer. All of the
relevant references to ancient authors are found in [Jacob] Rumpf, De interioribus
aedium Homericarum partibus, “Dissert[atio] se[con|da.” The clearest traces of such
galleries were found in the peristyle of the so-called barracks in Pompeii (see the recon-
struction in [Charles] Mazois). Galleries were also attached to facade exteriors, at least
in Rome (Pliny, H[istoria] n[aturalis| 21.[6]: Fulvius e pergula sua in forum prospexisse
dictus [Fulvius is said to have looked out onto the forum from his gallery]). Such struc-
tures were called maeniana (corner galleries) or chalcidica. They were even more suitable
for shipbuilding: a double gallery ran round three sides of Philopater’s Thalamegos, the
lower part of which was mostly an open hall (tepiotudoc) [peristyle], while the upper
part was closed (kpvmTn) with grilles and doors (Athen[aeus] 1.38.204). Roman crypto-
portica were latticed in a similar way.
In the Middle Ages they were called pensiles, camerae pendentes, from which the
old German Pysel ([French:] poéle) derives—though this may perhaps be more cor-
rectly associated with the hollow walls of the ancient heating chamber. In some parts of
Italy, Tirol, and Switzerland, low galleries with high parapets suspended from the roof
beams are still very common. The same is true of Chinese and Indian civil architecture
and of shipbuilding. What a wealth of motives this latticework, now highly esteemed
again, can provide in these and similar cases for the future development of timber
architecture!
2. Nor should the eye be caught up anywhere, but it should be allowed to rest
where and when it wishes.
3. In every age painting in color (polychromy) was inseparable from timber archi-
tecture. Only the most recent age has failed to appreciate here again this means, which

WMA
 Semper

almost naturally suggests itself for the fullest artistic effect. Now wood is painted the
color of wood, so that it looks unpainted and therefore frail and bare, exposed to the
elements. A mistaken principle! It would be better to paint it with translucent tar (or
lacquer), so that the gloss relieves the eye of any doubt about the protective material
used, and the charm of natural wood is retained, indeed enhanced. The natural color of
wood, enhanced by varnish in this way and taken into the realm of art, is unsurpassable
as the basic shade for an ornamental color scheme. American Indians are masters of the
art of colorfully decorating their leather, bark, and wood products while retaining the
natural reddish brown shade of these materials. They use unmixed colors: white, black,
blue, and red, omitting yellow, as it is contained in the basic shade. Yet all the peoples
of the ancient world used the opposite system, completely hiding even the noblest
species of wood under coatings of a contrasting color. This includes the Egyptians,
whose well-preserved timber structures (household implements, musical instruments,
coffins, and sarcophagi) almost always carry traces of having been completely painted.
Likewise, the remarkable fragments of Greek joinery from Panticapaeum, dating from
the finest period, were completely painted, even though they were made of the finest
cypress wood. Admittedly, the painting was superb. So were Roman and Tuscan timber
works and, according to Tacitus, old Teutonic huts. So were Byzantine and old Nordic
timber structures. So were the Slavic works on Lake Tollense, for which we have sur-
viving evidence of brightly colored painting and gilding. Indian, Moorish, Tartar, and
Chinese woodworks are also completely covered with paint. The Middle Ages, and
even the early Renaissance, followed the same system. Oak ceilings did not become
more general until the height of the Renaissance, though the panels were predominately
colored. See the color prints for this chapter; [Johan Christian Clausen] Dahl, Denk-
male einer ausgebildeten Holzbaukunst aus den friihesten Jahrhunderten in Norwegens,
bk. 3, pl. 8, and accompanying text; [Ludwig Rudolf] Stiirler and [Carl Adolf de]
Graffenried, Architecture suisse; [Jules] Gailhabaud; and many other works.
4. In an age such as ours, almost all-powerful thanks to progress in the exact sci-
ences and in mechanics, the nature of nearly every material can be subjected to arbitrary
needs or to the whims of fashion. We have been successful in bending straight timber
into shapes at will, eliminating the disadvantages mentioned in the text that arise when
curved forms are cut from straight planks (the Thonet brothers in Gumpendorf, near
Vienna, make furniture from bent wood). But is it not more intelligent and just as pow-
erful to dominate the material while respecting its intractability, that is, if one makes it
serviceable in a way in keeping with its own nature, without coercion? So thought the
joiners in the old pharaonic industrial state! They separated the necessarium [necessary]
from the commodum [convenient], allowing this dualism to express itself most lucidly
in the furniture’s shape. In a way quite analogous to Egyptian architecture, the core
scheme is clearly visible behind and alongside the artistic appearance (“Egypt,” § 75,
pp. 345 ff.).
Isn’t this harmony, which runs through the whole of Egyptian cultural life in objects
large and small, amazing? Consider the chairs illustrated here. The legs are angular and
vertical, following the principle of plank construction. They end in lion’s paws, but
these allow the actual structural core to show at the bottom. The extension of the back
legs, the framework of the back, is also vertical; consequently the wood is not put

TAZ.
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

Egyptian chairs

under any stress and it remains unweakened. Against this framework leans the back
proper: an obliquely placed board gently curved to follow the line of the human back.
To this, which is not part of the structure, the decorations have been assigned: smooth
inlaid work without reliefs, because the uneven spots would chafe the sitter. The other
decorations (spurs and chevrons on the vertical and horizontal parts of the structure,
panels decorated with reliefs, etc.) are entirely appropriate to the principles expressed
in the previous part and elsewhere. The upholstery simply completes the idea already
expressed in the pegma.
5. Moreover, it does so unevenly, depending on the length of the fibers and the
diameter of the trunk; it does so unevenly in all three dimensions if cut into sheets.
6. This expression is explained below.
7. Dahl, passim.
8. It is not fully secured against this, however, because the parts of the frame are
themselves prone to warping. To achieve this end completely, it is necessary to balance
against each other the tendencies of the material elements to change shape. See below
under gluing and opus intersectile [joining work].
As not every aspect of joinery can be detailed here, I recommend for the layman in
carpentry and building construction a small, useful handbook: Der Bautischler, vol. 3
of [Franz] Fink’s Schule der Baukunst (Leipzig: Spamer).
9. The Greeks, like the Egyptians, were familiar only with flush and recessed panel-
ing. Their joinery work was very simple, almost rough; panels were only mortised in
the recessed edges and framed with a riveted molding. Thus all the moldings on the oft-
cited sarcophagus of Panticapaeum are riveted. Generally, the oldest principle of con-
structional dressing is preserved on all parts of this piece of joinery, which probably
dates from Alexandrian times.
By contrast, the two cast-metal Roman doors discussed in volume 1 (pp. 329-31)
show a more advanced joinery exactly like our own.
10. The same care must be taken here that the potter takes to prevent uneven
shrinkage in the kiln.
11. Pliny, H[istoria] n[aturalis| 16.[83}.

Zs
 Semper

12. See the veneers illustrated here from the oft-cited Antiquités du Bosphore, pls.
79 and 80.
13. In addition to other deficiencies of metal as a building material that are not
directly of a constructional nature.
14. Including the inscriptions concerning the Parthenon treasure.
15. See the sections on toreutics and forging in “Metallurgy.”
16. In England the massive bearing walls of residential buildings that are com-
pletely pierced on the ground floor are without exception supported on tubular archi-
traves constructed of sheet iron. The tubular system and the lattice were also used in
antiquity for purely structural works and for magnificent waterworks, as indicated in
the passage from Arrian cited above. Old Gothic churches sometimes have roof trusses
built on a lattice system.
17. For tectonics as practiced by the most ancient civilized peoples—the Assyrians,
Egyptians, and eastern Asians —see volume 1 and “Stereotomy,” which shows how the
stone orders of architecture relate to the oldest motives of timber tectonics.
18. Examples of Assyrian tectonics have already been mentioned. We insert here a
few examples of Etruscan furniture in the most ancient style. Because so much material
has to be dealt with in a limited space, we will refer mainly to museums and existing
illustrated works. See in particular Layard and Botta on Assyria; Museum gregoriano;
Micali, pl. 16, nos. 1, 2; Vermiglioli, Saggio di bronzi Etruschi trovati nell’agro Peru-
gino; [Francesco] Inghirami, ser. 3, pls. 23 ff.
19. Column drums, Doric capitals, even bases were turned, following antique artis-
tic practice.
20. See the woodcuts on pages 338 and 456, as well as the candelabra on page 639,
right. We have illustrated our text indiscriminately with Etruscan and Greek domestic
objects, as they are both part of the same Greco-Italic art, which reached a high level of
development under the Etruscans in particular. Critias, the finest Attic art connoisseur,
acknowledged that Etruscan bronze housewares were superior even to Greek. The
Greeks judged their Italian cousins rather less harshly than our connoisseurs are prone
to do and admired them for their superior artistic skills.
21. The invention (or introduction) of cast metal is attributed to the old Samian
master Rhoecus, son of Philes, who is said to have worked between the thirty-fifth and
the fortieth olympiad. He was followed by his son Theodoros, who cast statues in
bronze (forty-fifth olympiad), and his brother Telekles. A son of Telekles, the second
Theodoros, made a silver krater for Croesus (fifty-fifth to fifty-eighth olympiad), and a
gold one for the palace of the Persian kings. The latter was only a metalworker; the oth-
ers were also architects and worked on the Temple of Hera on Samos.
Glaucus of Chios is mentioned as the inventor of soldering and iron construction.
His masterpiece was reportedly a richly chased iron stand for a krater offered at Delphi
(Pausanias 10.16.1). He was a contemporary of Alyattes (olym. 40, 4—olym. 55, 1). More
about this way of working in metal and its allegedly Greek inventors in “Metallurgy.”
22. See volume 1, “Hellenic Style” and passim.
23. Descriptions of these works, though detailed, are not sufficient to permit their
reconstruction, and so all such attempts have proven unsatisfactory. See Quatremére de
Quincy, Jupiter olympien, 196, 384, and passim; [Karl Otfried] Muller, Commentatio

714
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

de Phidia, 2:11. See also the section on toreutics in “Metallurgy.”

24. Found in the Vatican Museum, universally known thanks to numerous copies
and illustrations.
25. Allegedly a work by Saint Aloysius, dating from the seventh century A.D. Its
folding chair form is an apt symbol of the camp life of the Frankish rulers who ruled
the neo-Gallic empire in their unstable fashion.
26. Charlemagne’s furniture reportedly included silver tables with inlaid maps—
Saracen work. Carolingian thrones and domestic furnishings are illustrated in [Nicholas]
Willemin. The throne on which Charlemagne’s body was seated when discovered in his
tomb at Aachen was a square wooden frame covered with gold and precious stones. See
[Christoph Gottlieb] von Murr, Die kaiserlichen Ornamente zu Aachen.
27. The style was also imitated again in marble, exactly as it had been in ancient
Greek art. Examples include the old bishops’ thrones in Bari (seventh century), Canossa,
Palermo, and elsewhere. Throne of Sant’Ambrogio in Milan.
28. In his Ornamentik, [Carl Alexander von] Heideloff shows a small hand altar
from the Carolingian period. It is a wooden frame, thickly dressed with lead and gold
sheets, with inlaid silver figures and ornaments. The Palliotto d’Oro in Sant’ Ambrogio
in Milan, a work by the German artist Volvinius (835 A.D.), and the Palla d’Oro in San
Marco in Venice (see [Giulio] Ferrario’s monograph on Sant’Ambrogio, Rumohr’s
Forschungen, d’ Agincourt, and [Leopoldo] Cicognara).
29. On Tuscan temples, see:
[Pedro José] Marquez, Ricerche dell’ordine dorico.
[Christian Ludwig] Stieglitz, Arch[aeologie] der Baukunst, 2:14 ff.
Afloys] Hirt, Baukunst [nach den Grundsatzen] der Alten, 47, 70, 88.
[Aloys Hirt,] Geschichte der Baukunst, 1:251.
Leo Klenze, Versuch der Wiederherstellung des toskanischen Tempels.
[Karl] O[tfried] Miller, Die Hetrusker, 5:229.
[Friedrich Wilhelm von] Thiersch, “Ueber das Erechteum,” 2d article.
An explanation of Vitruvius’s text and a reconstruction of the Etruscan temple by
the author appear in an essay in [Deutsches] Kunstblatt (1855) of Berlin. See also color
plate 13 in this book.
30. Piranesi, Magnificenze di Roma, pl. 37.
Marquez, Ricerche, pl. 10.
T[homas] Leverton] Donaldson on doorways.
31. Mon{umenti] ined{iti], passim; [Antonio Francesco] Gori, M[useum] E|truscum],
vol. 3, diss. 2, pls. 6, 7; Micali, pl. 51, no. 1.
32. See below for Rhaetian and Helvetian timber building.
33. See the note on this in § 156, on medieval timber ceilings.
34. Auson{ius], Epigr|ammata] [45.9]: ceris inurens ianuarum limina et atriorium
pegmata [painting the doorways and ceilings of the atria with waxes (i.e., encausti-
cally)]. Varro, [De] I[ingua] I[atina] [5.162] (Biplontium ed.]): Circum cavum aedium
erant uniuscuiusque rei utilitatis causa parietibus dissepta [Around the inner court were
walled enclosures for any purpose].
35. Tabulata [stories], bmepwa [upper stories]. Might not Vitruvius’s alae [wings],
with their trabes liminares [portal beams], be these galleries? The trabes liminares are

HAG
 Semper

the mesodmai of the hall of heroes, used by the heroines of tragedy to hang themselves.
36. Varro, in Non{ius Marcellus] 2: Ad focum hieme ac frigoribus coenitabant;
aestivo tempore in propatulo, rure in corte, in urbe in tablino, quod moenianum pos-
sumus intelligere tabulis fabricatum [During the winter and in cold weather they would
dine near the hearth; in summer, in the open part of the house; in the country, in the
courtyard; in the city, in the tablinum, which we can understand as a veranda made
from platforms].
37. Let me take this occasion to elaborate upon the remark on page 286, where I
said that the Vitruvian interpensiva were not substitute beams but the parapetasma
[draperies] of the skylight. In fact, the entire load suspended from the beams beyond
the transfer point, principally the galleries (tabulata) and draperies hung from the
beams, was part of the interpensiva. This load was transferred to the columns, where
present, as in the Corinthian atria of the basilica at Fano. Vitruvius 6.3, 5.1.
38. There is not even agreement about the nature of the whole. Even in its major
points, antique art still remains a riddle to be solved. See [Berardo] Galiani, [José
Francisco] Ortiz [y Sanz], [August] Rode, Stieglitz, Mazois, [Johann Gottlob] Schneider,
Hirt, [K.] O. Miller, and [Luigi] Marini, on the one hand, and [William] Newton,
[Claude] Perrault, [Simone] Stratico, and [Wilhelm] Becker, on the other. The latter
assume a separate atrium as well as the cavum aedium [inner court]. This question, and
the atrium as a whole, will be discussed further in part 2.
39. If the present book stimulates now and again as intended and provides the
artistically minded youth with some hints for his own work, its most important pur-
pose will have been fulfilled.
40. Vitruvius 4.6. See Donaldson on doorways.
41. See pages 329 ff.
42. These represent the last phase of the stone metamorphosis and a historical con-
firmation of the view proposed on pages 329 ff. about the emergence of the lapidary
art-forms. See also the relevant sections in “Stereotomy.”
43. Cratinus, in [Julius] Poll[ux], Onom|[asticon] 7.122: tapaotddac Kal mpd8upd
Bovdet troktha [(He) wishes the vestibules and portals painted]. Corpus T. 22.97:
Eykavols TOV Bupav [encaustic painting of the doors]. Beautifully painted portals at
Tanagra. [August] Buttmann, Ouaestiones de Dicaercho, 25. Letronne, Lettres d’un
antiq(uaire], 345. Raoul-Rochette, Peintures a[ntiques] inédites, 125.
44. [Brunck,] Analecta 1:142; Pliny, [Historia naturalis| 35.34; Aelian, [Varia his-
toria] 8.8.
45. Aeschylus, Septem adviersus| Th{ebas] 150.
46. Lycophron, on Aeschylus, Septem a[dversus| Th{ebas| [386].
47. Athenaeus, [Deipnosophistai] 5.205b, chap. 38, p. 290 ([ed.] Schw[eighauser]);
Diodorus Siculus, 5.46.
48. Pliny, [Historia naturalis| 16.[82] (ed. Dalechamps).
49. Willemin, Monuments francais inédits; [Nicolas-Marie-Joseph] Chapuy, Le
Moyen-Age pittoresque...; [Alexandre] du Sommerard, Les arts au Moyen Age; [Paul]
Lacroix and [Ferdinand] Seré, Le Moyen Age et la Renaissance; Heideloff, Sammlung
arch. Ornamente des Mittelalters; and among many other works, principally: Viollet-
le-Duc, Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier frangais de l’époque carlovingienne a la

716
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

Renaissance, pt. 1, “Meubles,” 1 vol. ([Paris:] Bance).

50. The library of Saint Gall is the richest source of Irish miniatures and carvings
(on book covers).
Among Scandinavian examples, the oldest parts of the (restored and mutilated)
church at Urnes in the Bergen diocese ([Johan Christian] Dahl, bk. 3, pls. 1-4), with
clearly pagan motives, are the earliest and purest. One is illustrated on page 156 in
“Textiles.”
51. A pew of the same kind is illustrated in plates 2 and 6 of [Nicolay Nicolaysen],
Foreningen til Norske fortidsmindersmerkers bevaring (Christiania).
52. Pictorial indications of the activity of a structural member are frequent in
Gothic architecture, but the depiction is quite different and more external.
53. A regression is unmistakable if one compares the most ancient medieval house-
hold ware with that of later centuries. Thus, for example, every old Scandinavian pew
still has a certain organic life and a kind of comfort in the gentle curve of the front and
back, as well as in the hollowing of the armrests. Gothic furniture seldom displays such
signs of life.
54. Blellum] g{allicum] 7.23.
55. See Augustin Thierry, [Récits des temps mérovingiens, précédés de considéra-
tions sur I’|histoire de France, beginning of vol. 1.
56. The houses were sometimes oriented west-east, sometimes north-south. In the
former case the throne of honor was placed to the south, in the latter to the east, always
against the light. See K[arl] Weinhold, Altnordisches Leben—an excellent book from
which most of what is said here is taken.
57. A similar arrangement can still be found in some northern farmhouses today.
Beamed ceilings were occasionally installed as early as fairly ancient times. As a result,
the houses had side windows and the roof space was separated.
58. The “secret house” in Olaf Tryggvason’s farmstead had two rows of eleven
seats each. See the plan of the monastery of Saint Gall, in Switzerland, published by
[Ferdinand] Keller.
59. Dahl, pl. 8, from which the detail on page 677, top, is taken. The assemblage a
grain d’orge was used on furniture until the late Middle Ages.
60. Weinhold, 418.
61. The oldest remnants date from the tenth century: a few boards from the oak
grave chamber of Queen Thyri Danabét of Denmark, carved and painted (an oil paint-
ing in red, yellow, and black). Other fragments, some of which had not abandoned
paganism, are in the museum in Copenhagen.
62. Weinhold, 422; [Jens Jacob Asmussen] Worsaae, Afbildninger, 110.
63. The Bayeux tapestry, a genuine Nordic embroidery of this kind although from
a somewhat later period, was produced under the influence of Frankish culture.
64. See especially Dahl, Denkmale; [Paul] Gaimard, Voyages en Scandinavie, en
Laponie (a work that I have not been able to use); [Nicolay] Nicolaysen’s essays in the
publications of the Association for the Preservation of Ancient Monuments, in Chris-
tiania. The illustrated plan of the church in Borgund would be the same as that of the
ancient Norwegian dynastic hall if the side entrances led not into the church but into a
holm or porch; note that this feature is still latent in the western porch as well. Even the

TEsked
 Semper

atrial arrangement of the roof is still expressed in the lantern in the middle of the main
roof, which should be seen as a later modification of the original motive
—a skylight. All
oriel windows are said to be later additions, so in all likelihood the light originally
came in from the roof.
65. More faithful expressions of these models than the Aachen Cathedral and
other works like it from the time of the Frankish emperors, who inclined toward
ancient and Byzantine styles, although essentially those works follow the same idea.
66. In India and on the most ancient Egyptian and pre-Hellenic monuments.
67. Striking in this respect is the example of stone tracery on the Saxon tower at
Earls Barton in Northamptonshire ({Karl Julius Ferdinand] Schnaase, Geschlichte]
dler] b[ildenden] K{tinste], vol. 4, pt. 2, p. 383).
68. See A. W. Pugin, Details of Antient Timber Houses of the 15th and 16th Cen-
turies: Selected from Those Existing at Rouen, Caen, [Beauvais, Gisors,| Abbeville,
Strasbourg, quarto (London, 1836).
69. Here perhaps a Celtic legacy.
70. The sagas of Old French and Old German poetry have come down to us in a
form that originated in a period when castles and churches were already built of stone.
The hall or palace in the Nibelungenlied was in stone; only the ceiling was made of
wood. The same is true for other sagas. Nowhere does one find the original condition
of the old Nordic peoples.
71. From [A. Essenwein, “Die Entwickelung der mittelalterlichen Baukunst mit
Riicksicht auf den Einfluss der verschiedenen Baumaterialien,”] Mittheilungen der k.k.
[Central-]|Commission zur Erforschung und Erhaltung der Baudenkmale 3 (February,
1858).
72. In addition to the panels, this includes the diagonal boards used to dress the
gaps between the purlins and the upper threshold.
73. Viollet-le-Duc gives a rare thirteenth-century example in his Dictionnaire, s.v.
jcharpentewsS:oo:
74. See various works on German and French medieval timber architecture, partic-
ularly the work by Pugin mentioned above and Architecture civile [et domestique au
Moyen Age et a la Renaissance] by [Aymar] Verdier and [Francois] Cattois. The classic
French cities for such panel-work architecture are Orléans and Rouen, more or less like
Brunswick in Germany. :
75. Examples: the temple at Kori; the Bibulus monument in Rome; the Doric
temple in Pompeii with its surrounding portico; the gates of Perugia.
76. Graffenried and Stiirler (architects), Architecture suisse; ou, Choix de maisons
rustiques des Alpes du canton de Berne (Paris & Bern: Eisenlohr, 1844).
77. As even today the sons of overcivilized Europe build in the log-cabin style when
they end up in America’s forests.
78. Although most Swiss houses date from the early years of the previous century,
some have survived from the mid-sixteenth century. Gothic reminiscences might be
expected here, but their ornament is exactly the same as that found on later ones. There
is an old barn in Interlaken that still has Romanesque iron fittings.
79. Houses of more recent vintage, from the 1830s or 1840s, are structurally and
decoratively exactly the same as those two hundred years old, with the exception of

718
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

isolated disfigurements, such as cladding gables with timberwork carved into arches,
broken or hipped gables, and other modern nonsense (Graffenried and Stiirler, pls.
30-32). This observation confirms our view that the origin of these building traditions
antedated the cinquecento.
80. The galleries are primitive, as are, of course, the roofs; the structure lent a dif-
ferent support to the former than would have been offered otherwise.
81. The better, older way always selected the profiles of the cuts so that they
crossed the joints at right angles and were concealed above. This also avoided exces-
sively deep channels and stilted forms. Sometimes metal girders appeared as the last
spurs and supports for the lowest console projection.
82. As I am obliged to be thrifty with my illustrations, I will not reproduce the
familiar Swiss houses considered here. They are excellently illustrated in the works
cited; the reader is referred to those works.
83. Euripides, Orestes 1371. “I fled across the cedar ceiling of the porch and through
the Doric triglyphs.” Pausan[ias] 5.20, where the decorated ceiling of the Temple of
Hera makes a clear contrast with the tiled roof: | és etmpétera atéyn A dvexovoa
TOV Képajov K.T.A. [(between) the decorated roof and the tiled portion]. See also Tacitus,
Annales 4.69.
84. A gift from Alexander VI, executed by Giuliano da Sangallo, probably from a
model of the old ceiling.
85. See the polychrome presentation by [Matthieu-Prosper] Morey, La charpente
de la cath{édrale] de Messine. The author was in Sicily with Morey and [Jules] Goury,
and participated in the labors of these artists.
86. The roof systems in the twelfth-century Arab-Norman style found in Palermo
and Monreale are similar, but decorated even more richly.
87. Color plates 17 and 18.
88. Viollet-le-Duc mentions some such “charpentes apparentes” in the entry for
“charpente” in his Dictionnaire, but they have been robbed of their original decoration
and only their structures remain.
89. Civil architecture also practiced the same system of paneling in vault form, in
France at least.
90. The age of the church in Borgund has not been precisely established, but the
style of its timber sculpture suggests that, while older than the church at Urnes, it is
more recent than that in Tind, which was, according to an inscription, built in the late
twelfth century.
91. In its simplest form, the problem is to make the two triangles A and B, which
are connected by their shortest sides, completely and inseparably rigid, thereby counter-
acting the horizontal forces working at C and E.
92. Conceived along ancient lines, Sicily’s open truss roofs are, to be sure, quite
different but the way in which they are exposed is Norman.
93. Examples are the ceiling of the chapter house at Exeter Cathedral ({John]
Britton), and many excessively decorated hall roofs in Oxford, Cambridge, and else-
where ([Augustus Welby Northmore] Pugin).
94. See vignette on page 684.
95. Viollet-le-Duc mentions the roof of the little church in Hargnies (north), but it

TBS.
 Semper

needed intermediate ties shortly after completion because it was thrusting outward. It
too is clad. The same is true of a similar roof, that of the Saint-Quentin town hall.
96. The first architectural works of the northern Renaissance were ceilings and
other interior features. Patrician houses in Nuremberg, also in Brunswick, Augsburg,
Liibeck, and Danzig.
97. As confirmation, see the cupboard in Bayeux Cathedral, dating from the early
thirteenth century and both reproduced and described in Daly, [“Armoire peinte du
Xllle siécle,”’] Revue [générale] de l’architecture [et des travaux publics] 10 [(1852)):
130. Likewise, the piece in the treasury of Noyon Cathedral, dating from the late
thirteenth century (Didron’s Annales [archéologiques| 4 [1846]: 369; Viollet-le-Duc,
Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier francais, vol. 1, s.v. “armoire”).
98. Previously Gothic calligraphy had been influenced by glass painting and had
been practiced mainly by monks.
99. Didron’s Ann[ales archéologiques] 14 [1854]: 341; 15 [1855]: 51, 171 bottom,
and following.
100. Didron’s [Annales archéologiques| 17 [1857]: 243.
101. What the French mean by organization is well known. This word is to be
understood in the same way as preeminently organic, the definition of the Gothic style
offered by its proponents.
102. The Normans, whose nature was militantly systematic, were more sympa-
thetic to the Gauls than were the Franks and melded more quickly with them. They
were everywhere the pope’s best soldiers.
103. The art and poetry created under Hohenstaufen colors contrasted with the
Gothic. Das Nibelungenlied protests against the victorious tendencies of the Middle
Ages even more decidedly than does Dante’s Divine Comedy.
104. Similar ones at Corbie, Saint-Loup, and Rampillon.
105. There is a rebellious idea as well in colossal sculpture, as is still occasionally
seen in early works of Gothic architecture, for example, on the portals of Amiens. Strict
Gothic precluded colossal statues.
106. An example is shown on page 494.
107. Didron’s Annales] arch{éologiques}, vols. 13, 14, 15, and so on.
108. See, in the Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier francais, pt. 1 (“Meubles”), the
beautiful woodcuts in the following articles: chaise (43-44 ff.), forme (115), lit (172-73,
175), réchaud (206), reliquaire (218, 221), retable (234), table (256, 260), tréne (285).
Most of these illustrations are taken from a twelfth-century German manuscript in the
Strasbourg library. Many of the other objects cited here are likewise of German or
Italian origin.
109. How would world history have run if the Athenians had lost the Battle of
Salamis? Which way would it have gone if Hannibal had conquered Rome, and not
Scipio Carthage? What would have happened to western Europe if the medieval
struggle between pope and emperor had ended with the victory of the latter? Science
views such questions as idle. But is it not more in the spirit of science to see a necessity
in every historical fait accompli and to see in those earlier things that are defeated and
destroyed the previous existence and, as it were, the embryonic stage of the victorious
thing growing on the ruins of the old? This is what the archaeology of medieval times is

720
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

doing when it treats the Romanesque style as a transition to Gothic, when in fact it was
rather the architectural expression of those two mighty opposites that in the Middle
Ages fought each other on all fronts and in all circumstances. The pursuit of this great
drama in the field of art through all its turns and complications would be a worthy task
for a nontendentious art history.
110. Perhaps just as much in Germany. The German monk Theophilus tells us that
in his time people did not restrict themselves to decorating the panels of carved furni-
ture with paint, that the structural parts were also painted with figures, animals, leaves,
and all manner of ornaments, and that this painting was often on a gold ground.
111. Vasari, Lives, q.v. Dello.
112. Didron derides the vanity of Italian craftsmen and artists, who were always
concerned to preserve their names for posterity. Yet such vanity is just as typical of an
art that ceases to serve and becomes an end in itself as the disappearance of personali-
ties in the Egyptian, Assyrian, even Roman and medieval periods is typical of the oppo-
site attitude.
113. We do not have a comprehensive history of the decorative arts in Italy, despite
their importance and their powerful influence on the course of higher art history. We
are therefore all the more impatiently awaiting the history of the Italian Renaissance by
Professor Jacob Burckhardt of Basel. The author’s Cicerone—a travel guide that con-
tains many important hints and valuable facts about the decorative arts—has already
suggested the importance of the work. Unfortunately, Burckhardt’s writings are caviar
to the multitude, as he is not fluent in the so-called popular style, that is, the butter-
and-bread style [Butterbemmenstil] for those too idle to think. [Ludwig] Gruner’s
[Specimens of |Ornamental Art gives some Italian woodcuts and intarsias. Excellent
illustrations of Italian and Belgian wood paneling, as well as other relevant material,
are in Jules Gailhabaud’s L’architecture du Vme au XVIIme siécle et les arts qui en
dépendent. Stefano da Bergamo’s wood carvings in the choir of San Pietro in Perugia
were published in Rome in 1845.
Of the early Gothic period, the choir stalls in Orvieto Cathedral are certainly not
the oldest, but they are the most remarkable because of their inlaid work and half-
figures (see Gailhabaud).
During the Renaissance, monasteries and guilds competed with each other in the
fields of secular and ecclesiastical joinery. Pews, pulpits, candelabras, lecterns, organ
screens, wall cupboards, doors, ceilings, and paneling were produced on which carving
was usually confined to the structural parts and intarsia to the panels. Giuliano da
Maiano (died 1450), his journeymen Giusto and Minore, his nephew Benedetto da
Maiano, Baccio Cellini, and Girolamo delle Cecca are cited by Vasari as the most skill-
ful marquetry workers. Even Brunelleschi and Donatello were perfectly happy to apply
their art to joinery. (Paneling in the sacristy of Santa Croce, of which Burckhardt
remarks that nowhere else was intarsia handled with such a refined awareness, from
the finest, almost calligraphic band to the richly moving main frieze. Relief is restricted
to pilasters and to the main elements of the cornice.) Baccio d’Agnolo concludes the
century. He was responsible for the choir stalls in Santa Maria Novella.
Cabinetmaking in northern Italy was perhaps even more brilliant than that in
Florence: in Venice ({Santa Maria Gloriosa] dei Frari church, half-Gothic, by Marco da

721
 Semper

Vicenza, 1468; San Zacharia; choir of San Stefano; ceilings in Doges’ Palace; academy;
picture frames), in Padua (choir stalls in Santa Giustina; chapel of San Prosdocimo), in
Verona (choir of Santa Anastasia; fine work by Fra Giovanni da Verona in the church
of his monastery of Santa Maria in Organo, where there are also wooden candelabras,
rood screens, and other ecclesiastical furniture by him, all published by Gailhabaud), in
Parma (half-Gothic stalls dating from 1473 by Master Cristoforo; picture frames on the
altar panel in the baptistery and in the chapels of San Giovanni; cathedral door), in
Brescia (choir of San Francesco, half-Gothic; also magnificent picture frames). In Siena
Baldassare Peruzzi lent his architectural genius to artistic joinery. His pupils were
the two Barili (1500). In Perugia are the famous paneling and stalls of the Cambio,
the work of Stefano da Bergamo (1535; seat backs inlaid, the rest strongly carved). In
Rome Giuliano da Maiano was responsible for the wooden ceiling of San Marco,
Giuliano da Sangallo for that of Santa Maria Maggiore with its simple division and
gold decoration on white. In Florence Michelangelo did the ceilings of the Bibliotheca
Laurenziana and of the Benedictines. But most famed of all are the delightful intarsias
by Fra Damiano da Bergamo (1530) and Fra Raffaele da Brescia: the former in the
choir of San Domenico in Bologna, the latter in San Petronio, eighth chapel on the
right. Also by Fra Damiano are the beautiful rear stalls in the choir of Santa Maria
Maggiore. By the middle of the sixteenth century Italian joinery had already begun to
indulge in excesses, which will be detailed in the text.
In France, Germany, and especially in Belgium this period produced excellent
wood-carvers. The Belgian Alberto di Brule decorated the choir of San Giorgio Mag-
giore in Venice with richly carved histories and lavish ornament. Master Johan van
Oudenaarde worked for his native city and elsewhere in Belgium. See the altar decora-
tion in the choir of the church of Notre Dame in Halle and another decorated with
caryatids in the parish church of Braine-le-Comte in Belgium (Gailhabaud).
114. The curving of wall surfaces in timber structures is certainly not reprehensible
in principle, as furniture definitely calls for curved forms. Disaster strikes only in the
monumental treatment of this motive suited to wood, which, when applied to cup-
boards, commodes, tables, and chairs during the Baroque and rococo periods, fur-
thered and developed that supple and movable independence of furniture.
115. Viollet-le-Duc shares this preference for the furniture from the Renaissance to
the eighteenth century, compared with Gothic, at least late Gothic. This architect, with
whom I agree on many points, will forgive me if I quote the relevant part of his book
here (part 1 of Mobilier francais, 287):

The luxury of the court of the duke of Burgundy during the fifteenth century is well
known. The splendor of the French court came to surpass anything previously wit-
nessed once Charles VIII returned from his Italian expedition. From the tramontane
it borrowed notions of grandeur that influenced architecture, furniture, clothing,
and ceremony. During the fifteenth century the excessively refined taste that came
to dominate made everything from earlier periods appear emaciated and poor, no
matter how rich those paintings, sculptures, and fabrics were. That changed quickly
under Charles VIII. In particular, furniture and its upholstery assumed more gener-
ous proportions. The technical proficiency of French artisans was applied to the

722
 Tectonics: Technical-Historical

new styles. Changes in scale were subordinate to perfect execution: this change in
taste first became apparent in furniture for the court. Such pieces acquired a certain
grandeur that was not immediately adopted in architecture. Preserved in the paint-
ings, vignettes, and engravings of the end of the fifteenth century and the sixteenth
century, these stately furnishings certainly outstrip the Gothic furniture made under
Charles VII and Louis XI in terms of their general arrangement, their generous
proportions, and their understanding of effect. The picturesque arrangement of
draperies and their abundance indicate an understanding of true luxury. From this
perspective, we have much to learn from the works of this period, and even those of
the seventeenth century are instructive models in this respect. Stately furnishings
today are so foreign to our habits that we tend to view them as either stingy or the-
atrical; they complement neither our tight-fitting clothing nor our bourgeois habits;
they are covered with ornaments whose purpose and symbolism we do not under-
stand; their upholstery rarely attests to a creative idea but all too often to the avari-
cious hand of the mercer chary of his valuable goods. For luxury furniture to seem
truly rich and grand, its construction must be clear and simple; its richness results
not from recherché combinations but from generous proportions and judicious
arrangement of its decorated elements. There must be no mistaking of the large for
the grand; the exaggeration of those things suitable for details must not be mistaken
for magnificence or majesty. A shortcoming of the large when applied to ceremonial
furnishings is that it diminishes the principal object, namely, the person.
The furniture of the early Renaissance admirably did away with the insipid dec-
oration of the late Gothic as well as the exaggerations and heaviness of the time of
Louis XIV. Just so, the hideous clothing of the mid-fifteenth century yielded to the
elegant and capacious clothing of the early Renaissance, which left the body a great
liberty of movement. The same was true of furnishings. Their construction had
been simplified and had submitted to need, indicating it clearly; their readily appre-
ciated decoration and their generously arranged upholstery harmonized with the
comfort and the generous proportions of clothing.

116. Example: Pope Leo X’s chair in his portrait by Raphael.

117. See the illustrated rococo commode.
118. See the illustration of furniture in the early style.
119. Some of the illustrations for this chapter are taken from a collection of photo-
graphs of furniture shown at an exhibition in Gore House in Kensington, London, in
the summer of 1853. It was curated by Mr. Thompson, son of the famous xylographer,
for the directors of the school of art and practical science.
The catalog for this exhibition, with an interesting introduction by R. Redgrave and
notes by J. C. Robinson, can be found in the First Report of the Department ofScience
and Art (1854), 300.
120. Gailhabaud, L’architecture.
121. The late Gothic style, in France and elsewhere, has already produced some
magnificent ceiling panels —in the courtroom of Rouen city hall, for example.
122. It is already known that we understand this differently from the exponents of
the neo-Gothic, for whom everything that shows structural logic is organic.

123
 a = ih
—4 + = "aay
Big
hat ll. oP

a=
a eatin aaa so
mp
PySo otal had: ev ‘s oh
| a .
_ iis my ali hl

- Pa peHoew > oa

“ » he wht ur a ° ee,
te oe ae iy
a2He BHP on, ets CAE
ina vs 'Ourrrti >
P » fi hen var =
SU ee os ee
Pep hy =pple pele Ps
ih raga » > wT CA we

poe, tet geri. ore th us La

i ie ‘9? (PrP e ae; ane tsiarny all

5 ar mgt oP ST Bae
Lav dll a ‘operas iwi: a

ret tfee ee
haa ett ey Sea
ed » rw peat ey aA he \
«4° He ot

aya ban a hla Nabe daa cent

Dee er © cae See 7°). Par Jee beg
se eo ee, 4, ing eae vad bing ole enon =
TY t Nere mas ub eg, / “ t1'6 Lae oo

: @=> iis aa ear) nee at Tai 4 J

—_ (aes ies

(Sek Vera 6e™ — 4 & ee ee eee

Ww == = - 62a 6. (es) & ~A&e— Ali

| 6 = Fee & s 66 a) Sai@S) > 4 a ee

i dnp 6 2806 2022 (ee
qeiaiveier wena 4
Saget eee we O20 6 ot wv tis4fqm=p
var toons
a eal ah. tyes Read) Pho belartarw an Sei reaver ee
bbe boing le. ran gi Vat he peer 28 slr

i} —-
paces 9 yh Prepay 0b gta) er, ~ TAA Si de Bp shecrms li”
i ands meine es, sa emaped bef: i stud olin Pesimu® 34 int iw
| o% Se G8 1G nl GX
peagae re ies
: jim wader oO: hd Ve? cogeterathx ~iats Soe eeti

{ Jgrmaia v= fel v
wire ad" Oy one vay eee
Awd
ia Gime: ON Wind
Ole 7 ye a Ay
i : ; i > é a3 raeae
 CHAPTER NINE

Stereotomy (Stone Construction)

A. Aesthetic-Formal

§ 161 Introduction
In keeping with the discussion of the four categories of the technical arts
presented in chapter 2 of volume 1, the field of stereotomy comprises those
arts whose technical challenge is the exploitation of those raw materials that
strongly resist crushing and cracking because of their hard, thick, and homo-
geneous aggregate composition, and thus have significant compressive strength.
When parts of the mass are removed, what remains can be worked into any
required shape and then reassembled — they come to serve as regular pieces in
strong systems relying on compressive strength as the most critical construc-
tional principle.
According to this definition, the field of stereotomy is a very broad and
general one, and its techniques may be applied to almost all conceivable spa-
tial-formal purposes. Stone masonry and mosaic ceiling work, both examples
of stereotomy, also fall within the domain of that extensive and important
technique examined in volume 1 of this work. Glyptics (the art of cutting
stone) takes stereotomy into the additional realm of ceramics. The Hellenic
marble temple is an example of stereotomy following the principles of tecton-
ics. Marble and ivory sculpture, toreutics (metalwork), scalpture (the art of
cutting gems), and all other techniques are stylistically related to sculpture,
empaestics, and the arts of embossing and casting metal.! In all these cases
stereotomy is —strictly considered —a secondary technique, that is, its materi-
als are not those in which the pure functional-formal theme was originally
and primarily embodied. In this respect, then, stereotomy is linked to con-
straints on style that owe their origin to other materials and to the entirely
different technical procedures that derive from them.
The ideas expressed by stereotomy in these applications had to some
extent already found formal expression earlier in other materials and in
accordance with the stylistic requirements of those materials. It accepts them,
so to speak, secondhand. Stereotomy is a monumental technique proper
because its materials give the greatest possible guarantee of durability and
because it offers a means for the creation of large works, especially large and
spacious buildings. This field is almost limitless, as ultimately these materials
(principally the softer kinds of stone used in stone masonry, including marble)
preserve the dimensions of their structural parts to ensure proper statics and
mass resistance. These dimensions also correspond to the laws of absolute

TS
 Semper

stability, which affect the monumentality of a work, as was shown earlier for
tectonics (§ 137, p. 645).
Thus the technique with which we are concerned would seem to lack its
own distinct domain for its most frequent and most important applications. If
this were true it would be difficult to keep to the sequence observed up to
now, according to which questions about absolute functional-formal matters
are dealt with first, and technical-historical matters follow. But did stereotomy
in fact have no domain original to it? If one could be identified, or attributed
to it with some justification, that would provide a starting point that would
justify abandoning the sequence of ideas we have followed until now.

§ 162 The Hearth

If we define building up a turf mound or leveling an irregularly shaped rock
as stereotomic labor, then the oldest and noblest symbols of society and civi-
lization —the hearth, or the highest expression of the same cultural idea, the
altar — may serve us as that starting point.
The raised earthen plateau of the hearth represents the ideal type of the
mounding of earth that people everywhere have done since the beginning of
civilization. It has been prepared or built up so that it may be used, as it were,
to detach something from the earth and the world as a whole: a consecrated
place dedicated to some entity. As such, the site for the object placed on it is
representative of the strong ashlar of the earth. Figuratively, it represents the
whole world, in that this bearer of form contrasts with the agalma proper (the
consecrated object) resting upon it, and at the same time it works it into a
whole (completes it) by detaching it symbolically from the world.2
Thus the Romans retained that ancient and sacred symbol, the caespes (a
built-up wall of turf), and used it when founding cities and consecrating tombs.
On the oldest monuments of which traces have survived (in Egypt, Assyria,
Phoenicia, and Judaea), stone construction as such, that is, where its charac-
teristic properties are exploited formally and decoratively, is found only in the
structure of the foundation. Everything that is placed on it, although no less
stereotomic in a technical sense, does not directly acknowledge its structural
origins but rather is dressed in art-forms that belong either partly to textiles
or partly to tectonics or that were significantly influenced by ceramics.
This is true even of those massive ashlar mountains—the pyramids. It is
well known that they were covered with a carpetlike crust of polished stone.
Observations of the monuments made on-site are confirmed by pictorial rep-
resentations. Assyrian citadels, depicted on the well-known alabaster wall
panels, often have decorative and highly emphasized joints between the stone
blocks of their foundations, while at the top of the edifice everything has been
kept smooth or is dressed with pilaster strips in the timber style. We know
that these walls were colorfully dressed inside and out in a style based on that
of carpets.
The most beautiful and mightiest stone joints of antiquity —those of
Phoenicia-Judaea — were used only for the great terraces on which temples

726
 Stereotomy: Aesthetic-Formal

and other works were erected. These massive buildings disappeared behind
wall dressings or did not present themselves as ashlar work. The same is true
of the Persian palaces at Parsagadae and Persepolis, with their mighty founda-
tions of regular stone blocks, some of them rusticated.
Even the Parthenon is set on a solium [seat] of rusticated, regularly jointed
stone, but the consecrated parts of the shrine itself —although or rather
because it was solidly built of the most perfect isodomic masonry— deny their
structural origin as something put together stereotomically from many pieces.
The same is true of other surviving Greek monuments with substructures,
such as the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the Choragic Monument of Lysi-
crates in Athens. The same holds for early Roman works.
We assume that artistic sensitivity led the ancients to see cut stone as the
characteristic decoration for this type of construction and that they raised it
to an artistic type; as substantiation let us cite the monolithic altars and deco-
rative substructures whose sides are frequently decorated with regular ashlar
joints—that is to say, in a purely decorative way.3 Altars appearing in vase
paintings are usually decorated with ashlar as well (see examples below).

Altars from vase paintings

Thus stone masonry, when treated as such on monumental altars and

shrines —this application is the first and most important topic for the tech-
nique with which we are now concerned — was entirely valid, and the abstract
formal principle that guided it can be proven; as we consider the technique
that forms the subject of the present section this application will serve as our
primary topic.

§ 163 Stone Masonry

The compressive strength of the materials used in masonry is their most
important attribute.
In addition, cohesion (that is, relative strength or resistance to vertical
forces directed at a right angle to the longitudinal axis of the structural ele-
ments) is a second structural factor that is generally considered. The most

Ul
 Semper

common masonry materials possess this attribute only to a limited extent,

and cohesion very often exists in an inverse relation to compressive strength,
because of the brittleness and the grainy texture of these materials. Cohesion
is usually affected by the so-called bond, that is, the linkage between the
structural parts that creates a solidly jointed whole along which the load is
evenly distributed; bonds enhance the compressive strength of the parts that
would otherwise be overloaded at specific points.
Yet the relative strength of masonry need not necessarily determine its
structural utility, and it is certainly no coincidence that the oldest masonry,
which relied on a system less dependent on the relative strength of its materi-
als, was assembled from stone that was hard and dense but brittle, whereas in
areas where tough scaly bedrock was readily available, building with ashlar
had been customary from the earliest times.*
All stone structures as such (namely, those we described earlier, found in
foundation walls and employing a style proper to them) have in common that
they are divided into many parts while remaining unarticulated.s In this
respect there is no difference between square and polygonal masonry. Both
consist of many identically or similarly shaped pieces jointed and linked
together according to a defined canon. The activities of these structural parts
are the same and indeed are purely mechanical: namely, pressure and counter-
pressure. Given this combination, the forces permit nothing but a structural-
mechanical formal expression. Though it is executed stereotomically, this
amounts to a clear departure from tectonic construction, where articulation
of the different parts has resulted from a very different kind of activity. Artisti-
cally enlivened, supporting elements become organisms, and frame and roof
supports are expressed collectively and purely mechanically: they are the load
needed to activate the life inherent in the column. At the same time, the frame
and its supports are in themselves variously articulated and seem to be striv-
ing and essentially alive in their individual parts.
The lifeless, crystalline-mineral quality® that characterizes the foundation
wall makes it a formal manifestation of stone construction; its nature corre-
sponds completely to what is placed on top of it. The two combine to form a
self-contained whole, what one might call a representative of a crystalline uni-
verse. Stone turns eurythmically inward on all sides and denies any external
existence. We cannot contemplate it except as a regular and complete form.
As a result, the law of eurythmy (see the prolegomena) dominates stone
construction as such and is expressed in three ways: first, in the structural
parts or elements considered in themselves; second, in the relation of these
parts to one another and to the whole, and in the principle of their bonding;
and third, in the general shape of the foundation as a whole.

§ 164 1. Constructional Elements Considered in Themselves

It follows from the preceding that formal regularity corresponds equally to
the mathematical-eurythmic principle and to structural necessity. The stereo-
tomic shape of the element and the planimetric form of its visible surfaces must

728
 Stereotomy: Aesthetic-Formal

both be crystalline and regular. The way in which this principle manifests
itself is governed by the properties of the building materials used and the pur-
pose and scale of the foundation; especially important are customs and building
traditions, as well as many other factors. Compact forms that are nearly regu-
lar on all sides (like the cube and the polyhedron) are best in terms of absolute
resistance, but extended forms offer greater advantages in bonding.
With these two things in mind, the two principal canons of antique foun-
dation construction that will be considered in aesthetic-formal terms can be
viewed as opposites: (1) foundations built of polygonal or so-called cyclopean
blocks, and (2) foundations built of regular rectangular ashlar work. The for-
mer responds to the first concern: the regularity of its elements, although
imperfect, is present at least in principle in the most perfect works from this
canon. In this canon, which uses the load’s lateral pressure and its coun-
terthrust as a means of assembly, rather than exploiting the relative resistance
of the materials to vertical pressure as a means of bonding, the form and mass
of the elements used are determined by: the pursuit of polygonal regularity;
avoidance of sharp, even rectangular edges, which tend to give way under
pressure; a desire for the broadest possible planes of contact; the exclusion of
horizontal and vertical joints; and a lack of tension.
Regular longitudinal ashlar, with its abutting and bearing surfaces
enclosed at right angles both vertically and horizontally, accords, as a struc-
tural element, less well with the functional need than with the aesthetic. The
relation to the ground upon which the monument stands is expressed most
clearly in the foundation by the horizontal disposition of its layers, by the per-
pendicular lines of its abutting joints, and by the bonding of rectangular struc-
tural units into a hard and indissoluble stone pattern.
The front face of the ashlar is rectangular—a regular frame—and is for-
mally treated as such. If it is to be partly decorated according to a structural-
symbolic scheme, the scheme should follow the oft-cited eurythmic principle:
edging, concentration of the expression of force and resistance toward the
center, without forgetting the special condition that ashlar’s dynamic activi-
ties — pressure and counterpressure — function only vertically and exert no
force in a horizontal direction.
The oldest, simplest, and most expressive ashlar decorations are an edging
consisting of a smoothly chiseled hem along edges of sufficient width to reveal
the sharpness of the joint and the rough broken surfaces preserved in the
middle of this edging. The most powerful examples of this treatment have
already been mentioned: they are the colossal foundations of Syria-Phoenicia,
which make even Roman works look small, approaching the limits of what is
permissible and possible in terms of modern building conditions, and proba-
bly in terms of reason as well. The great early Renaissance masters, especially
Brunelleschi and his school, modeled their massive palace facades on Roman
examples and revived in splendid fashion the principle of exposing the ashlar
structure, a practice that had almost disappeared during the Middle Ages.
Certainly they often strayed beyond its natural domain and even crossed over

129
 Semper

into tectonics, here too following (late) Roman precedents. As with column
orders, they recognized that the motive could be endowed with multiple mean-
ings, making it a malleable symbol of every nuance of architectural character
and expression. Under these builders, ashlar work assumed Tuscan, Doric,
Ionic, Corinthian, and composite forms more or less consciously and accord-
ing to the more or less correctly perceived analogies offered by the symbolism
of the five column orders.
The transition from fortresslike strength and rustic roughness to graceful
lightness and princely pomp is achieved first in the dimensions and propor-
tions of the ashlar elements in themselves, as well as in their relations to one
another, in the rhythm of their arrangement, in the type of technical execu-
tion, in the absence or presence of architectural articulation, and even in
sculptural decoration.

TNT
NCU nee estaN

Ashlar on the Pitti Palace in Florence

 Stereotomy: Aesthetic-Formal

In accordance with our plan, the first of these methods will be considered
later, as here we are concerned merely with the elements themselves and not
with the effect they make collectively. Nonetheless, one remark is still appro-
priate here. It is true that in absolute terms an ashlar block with a square face
looks more powerful than a rectangular one with the same surface area, but
the attributes of the material, the size of the units, and other factors also
determine the formal character. Ashlar made up of small units approaching a
square looks more powerful, but nothing exceeds the magnificence of Phoe-
nician, Italian, and (modern) Tuscan works, which consist of extremely oblong
but massive ashlar.”
The visible part of ashlar consists of two formal elements: the edge and the
face. The latter is framed; the former is the frame. Both the face and the frame
are structurally active in their own way —namely, outwardly, unlike the pan-
els of tectonic frames, which are active only inwardly and reflect back on
themselves. This external activity is at its most powerful in the face, the sup-
port point, so to speak, for the two vertical forces, pressure and counterpres-
sure. Therefore the (very ancient) invention of so-called rusticated ashlar
resulted not only from concerns with economy and solidity, but also from aes-
thetic considerations that more or less clearly became conscious. An ashlar
block with a sunken face —an ashlar filling — would be stylistic nonsense. On
the other hand, an ashlar block with a raised face expresses resistance more

PN
—
commen T
| ae Nltmm stivi mM

cn =e
i nT wnwD,

P
2|
= Hl ee
ih ui
AANA

Ashlar on the Dresden Museum

clearly than a smooth one, and this expression intensifies, at least within cer-
tain limits, as the projection is increased.’ An ashlar block expresses the rus-
ticity and strength of a fortress if the roughly broken surface is left as it is, or
if, after being roughly split with a punch, it is bordered by a deep, rectangular,

Vil
 Semper

recessed seam or edge. A similar effect can be achieved by giving the stone’s
edges a so-called diagonal beveling, which produces triangular joints. Here
the bossage blends more with the seam to form a unit. A third way of edging
the bulge involves combining the rectangular seam with the beveling. This
produces the coarsest ashlar, which can be varied in a number of ways. For
example, the face can be given four sharp edges along the diagonals of its four
right angles by sloping it toward the center from all sides. An even more elo-
quent approach, probably, would involve beveling from only the two horizontal
joints, because the swelling of the face, characteristic of pressure and counter-
pressure, has no motivation whatsoever in a horizontal direction.’ Inciden-
tally, this treatment of the rough face is one of the refinements in the handling
and technical presentation of the two formal components of ashlar, giving its
natural coarseness a certain degree of elegance and art. In principle none can
object to taming this coarse natural motive, which, as has been shown, is so
typical of the substructure as a representative of the macrocosmic element of
overall form— because art transforms everything at some point. Indeed it
almost becomes a matter of necessity when ashlar as such is also used for for-
mal or decorative purposes on other, nonfoundational parts of the building.
The rough bulge of the face is transformed (with the aid of a tool finer
than the splintering pick) into a surface that while still rough is regularly
grained. In the same way the bands of joints between the bulges acquire a reg-
ular “beat,” whose rhythm has a decorative effect and which emphasizes the
surface of the face, with its contrasting treatment. The same effect is achieved
by the careful smoothing of the joint surfaces. Thus rustic coarseness can be
clad in a certain manly elegance, lending it an expression similar to the sym-
bolism of the Doric order.
One should, however, guard against confusing bombast with power,
breadth with scale, and should keep to antique models or to those of Brunel-
leschi, [Michele] Sanmicheli, or Palladio. One should also avoid the fake and
stuffy bombast of modern cushion ashlar. Among the more artful forms, dia-
mond ashlar is worth mentioning because it expresses the crystalline-mineral
law active in the masonry in a way that is artful yet conforms to natural laws.
To my knowledge it was not known to the ancients. The early Renaissance
knew how best to exploit it.
In the case of the so-called cushion faces that slope on all sides in accor-
dance with a specific pattern, the profiles extend too far and seem to swell too
softly. Instead of symbolizing tension, as they should, they suggest that the
stone is yielding like a cushion, squashed as it were between the load and the
foundation. The same is true of the Doric echinus, whose principles and his-
tory are worthy of consideration here (see below, in the discussion of Ionic
capitals).
Flat, completely smooth faces with beveled side surfaces meeting at the
joints are related to diamond ashlar, but are less expressive.
Smooth faces are more effective if they are zot beveled and their projecting
surfaces meet the wall surface straight on, because of the strong shadow that

TSZ
 Stereotomy: Aesthetic-Formal

they throw. The Greeks and Romans generally used them for works of higher
architecture—for temples and houses—and High Renaissance masters also
showed a preference for this simple scheme.
Ashlar is made even richer and more decorative by profiling, that is, by
integrating decorative types already known from weaving, pottery, and tec-
tonics. Such types have been employed in architecture from time immemorial
and have acquired structural-symbolic importance. The most common is the
quarter round (echinus swell), used as an enclosing part of the face and contin-
ued to the joint surface as a molding. The face is completely framed by this dec-
oration, which at the same time serves as the medium through which pressure
and counterpressure from above and below are transferred to the face, and the
face’s profile and its sculptural or painted finish must take their direction from
this decoration as well. Yet the matter can be viewed conversely, as well, for
which reason decorative forms that express a simultaneous upward and down-
ward effect are perhaps the most suitable here (see § 6, p. 115).
A cavetto can also be used as a frame instead of the quarter round. The
same is true of the wave molding, which can be used in two ways already
mentioned above —as a rising or a falling wave (kornies). Nor should it lack a
small connecting molding, which may be given the profile and decoration of a
bead molding. This molding is attached at the point where the main cavetto
rests, either on the face or along the wall surface. If the main cavetto is active
both inward and outward, it should be framed with two small connecting
moldings.
It is the decoration of ashlar’s face that lends it the greatest richness it can
acquire. This means was already known to the ancients and we know that at
the least they used it on interior ashlar, as can be seen from numerous examples
decorated with ornaments and sometimes with painting. So far was this prac-
tice taken that it borrowed from gem working: ivory, metal, glass, and cut
stones were used. But such luxuries belong to the period of the decline of
antique art.!! The decoratively inclined Lombard artists of the Renaissance, as
well as the French masters from the same school, permitted themselves great
liberties in the decorative treatment of parts naturally uncongenial to adorn-
ment. The Tuileries, the chateau at Fontainebleau, and many other luxurious
buildings of the French Renaissance period still standing or preserved in
engravings illustrate, in their fondness for ornament, these sorts of excesses.
Art that is daring and capable of anything can justify itself even here if it
proceeds with spirit, taste, and in accordance with the laws of stylistic logic,
all of which it did during its finest periods. Still, ashlar surfaces riddled with
worm holes or strewn with drill holes, as well as icicle ashlar and other simi-
larly fraudulent natural motives, are dangerous models, although I would not
absolutely reject them in all cases. Icicle and stalactite ashlar, for example,
lend a grotto a certain character.
The late Renaissance produced a kind of damascened face using shallow
relief patterns combined with gem ornaments, enriched by painting and gild-
ing. Perhaps this motive of ashlar decoration, which employs sculpture and

W333
 Semper

color, is one of the most felicitous. Painted and carved face decoration is with-
out question justified when the two forces active within it (pressure and coun-
terpressure) are either nonexistent or barely significant, as in floor or wall
paneling, or on tiled stoves. Further details will be provided below.

Joint Decoration
The ancients often used color to distinguish joints from faces, and the former
were sometimes even gilded. Pliny’s description of gold-framed ashlar in a
cella wall in Cyzicus is well known, although unclear. The joint may be deco-
ratively treated as a band, a hem, or a seam—as a meander or running guil-
loche, for example (see vol. 1, § 6 and §§ 19-22).
If a binding agent (lime mortar) is used to cement blocks, this too can take
a decorative form. Thus, for example, the Dutch and the Low Germans use
trowels to produce, rather artfully, a white-lime molding in the joints of their
carefully laid brickwork.

Ashlar Anchoring
This too can be given a decorative treatment, as evidenced by many fine medi-
eval examples. The relevant principle is easily grasped. As I have shown, the
ancients avoided this kind of wall decoration, which suggests that it was not
entirely imperishable.

§ 165 2. Relation of Parts to One Another and to the Whole: The Principle of
Their Bonding

a. Relation of Parts to One Another

The inorganic law operating in masonry is revealed as art exploits structural
necessity and local conditions in accordance with beauty.
Gravity and the material’s resistance to it are the most immediate and the
most active powers in effect here. It is clear that their activity intensifies the
more the load increases, and therefore that their activity intensifies from top
to bottom.
Thus the gradual reduction of constructional mass from bottom to top,
always practiced in the more artistic examples of ashlar construction, corre-
sponds at the same time to the principles of beauty and dynamics.
This is followed by another principle relevant to both construction and
aesthetics: the identity of elements that are active in identical or similar ways.
Thus when dimensions are reduced in stages, every stage must have the same
or similar elements, as much as possible.
According to this law, the so-called pseudisodomon masonry of Greece,¥
consisting of alternating tall and short layers of the same ashlar material, is
stylistically wrong. In fact it occurs only on later Greek works (from Alexander’s
time): an example is the pedestal in front of the Propylaea of the Acropolis. In
a polylithic version it became a favorite motive in early Middle Ages decorative
construction, principally in Byzantium, from which it spread east and west

734
 Stereotomy: Aesthetic-Formal

(Venice, Messina, Pisa, Florence).!4 Pseudisodomon masonry seems more jus-

tified in the polylithic version, because changes in color indicate the different
kinds of stone with, presumably, different load-bearing capacities. Hard
stones are generally dark, and so when working in stone there is the instinct
to use dark stone for narrow layers. The converse is true with mixed brick-
and-stone walls.
The same law insists that ashlar blocks of the same height should have the
same length at each stage, and the rule is borne out for ashlar masonry of the
best periods.
Yet the necessity of binding the ashlar, which is felt particularly acutely
in the ancient system, in which hollow ashlar walls are filled with poured
masonry, makes it more difficult to keep the faces the same length. Indeed, in
this case it is not even stylistically correct, as the internal linkage of the ash-
lar blocks may at the very least indicate the mixed construction. Moreover,
the richer rhythmical canon that this alteration naturally suggests cannot be
rejected out of hand, since without it the symbolism of stone construction is
not especially rich in characteristic motives.
Straight lintels and sills for openings in masonry (doors and windows)
should, to the extent that they interrupt the ashlar bond and are not especially
represented as framed pieces, respect the model of the adjacent ashlar, which
in turn should acknowledge the width of the openings. If, for example, unusu-
ally long stones are needed, there should be two layers of them.
Voussoirs should approximate the dimensions of the surrounding ashlar in
their average thickness and height. Still, the width of the vaulted opening is a
controlling factor here as well.
The keystones should be treated as headers. Voussoirs can be considered in
the same way (see below on headers and stretchers).

b. Relation of Parts to the Whole

The customary sizes of masonry units depend on the geological properties of
the land inhabited by the people, on cultural development, and on the most
ancient and most diverse architectural traditions. These sizes provide the most
reliable insights into the particular characteristics of every architectural style,
and into the cultural conditions of peoples and times as reflected or symbol-
ized in their monuments.
The hands of a million slaves have left their marks on the sixty-foot stone
blocks of Syrian bulwarks, and on the pyramids and other Egyptian works.
The limited but perfect isodomon dimensions of Greek masonry, ideal in
size and in spatial-material limits, were an expression of the Hellenic mind.
The mighty Romans were not hampered by worries about resources and
space, displayed thrift by rejecting everything that lacked purpose, and sys-
tematically applied the means and methods that led most directly and rapidly
to their goals. The result was a very grand, spatially defined conception of stone
construction, a character also visible in a more superficially decorative way in
the display of joints cut powerfully but at the same time quite practically.

735
 Semper

Depopulation, poverty, decaying roads and waterways, the loss of ancient

building traditions and engineering skills led, in the early Middle Ages, to
simple ashlar work with thick lime joints. Once again, this is a vital key to
understanding medieval building methods and the characteristics of the age.
Nevertheless, this theme belongs to the section devoted to the technical-
historical aspects of stereotomy, and even more to volume 3, which will deal
with architectural styles.
The size of masonry pieces is important not only for the general type of
architectural style (which has a defined norm), but also for the character and
expression of the different kinds and classes of architectural works — regard-
less of style. This question is to a certain extent independent of material-
historical matters and is entirely appropriate here.
In general, when a whole is made up of visibly small units they make it
seem large, up to a certain limit at least. Beyond that limit they are no longer
distinguishable from the viewpoint most favorable to taking in the whole, and
lose, in part, their quantitative value as independent units.
As a result, reducing standard unit size to make the whole look bigger has
visual limits in the case of large monuments.
Yet with small monuments the size is limited only by the minimum norm
imposed by the nature of the materials.
In addition, units do not induce visual effects merely as geometric entities
but also as masses in a dynamic sense; they work on the mind through the
eyes. Such impressions can be significantly enhanced by the formal treatment
applied and by the way in which the units are assembled.
Visual and dynamic effects do not go hand in hand; rather, they form con-
trasts whose mediation leads to the correct proportions of the unit size as it
relates to other units and to the whole.
It is not just proportions as such but also the laws that govern them that
change according to the absolute size and the character of the buildings where
they are used. The number of musical intervals and keys could have been infi-
nite if art had not reduced them to a number that could be controlled; like-
wise, architecture has established certain canons of proportion more or less
arbitrarily. They apply not only to tectonics but also to the cutting of joints,
and they obey the harmonic law that permeates and binds all of the elements
assembled in a building.
The norms for ashlar blocks were linked, in accordance with a certain
ratio, with the modules and norms of the column orders, which in turn corre-
spond to the character and content of the building, or to the building parts on
which the ashlar appears.16

c. The Principle of the Linkage of the Structural Parts

Solid masonry (composed entirely of ashlar), and stone architecture more gen-
erally, developed only gradually from the much older incrustation of ramparts
or clay tile walls, where stone was first used in making terraces.!7 These stone
dressings were stylistically dependent on the art of wall finishing (textiles):

736
 Stereotomy: Aesthetic-Formal

first in a quite general-formal sense as covers (see § 9), second in a technical-

historical sense, because the symbolism of any cover, following the most
ancient tradition, derived from or conformed with decorative forms that came
from processes such as weaving, plaiting, embroidery, and edging.
In addition, the bonding of the elements that make up every well-constructed
wall amounts, in reality, to a kind of fabric or — following another principle of
construction—to a kind of plaiting; this accounts for its appearance.
Almost everything that can be said about this law of artistically and for-
mally bonding masonry stones can be found in chapters 3 and 4 of volume 1,
and all the thoughtful reader need do is apply these rules to our present sub-
ject—which we cannot do because of the quantity of material still to be dis-
cussed. But certain relations are different here and suggestions regarding them
have already been provided above. The principle of binding and bonding
operates only from top to bottom and vice versa, not horizontally. This condi-
tion influenced the decorative treatment of construction. For example, a hem
for ashlar masonry cannot be done the same way as a cover. Neither should
the upper hem be the same as the lower one, nor the side hem the same as
either. While the upper hem is a crown, the lower is a base supporting the
whole, and is thus thicker and more powerful, and is made of a stronger
material. The two side hems are not necessary at all. If they occur, they should
emphasize the contiguous masonry surfaces and present themselves as rein-
forcements of the masonry, or elements resisting the pressure of the earth wall
from within.
Ashlar masonry evenly hemmed on all sides — following the principle of
the filling and the frame —looks weak and is stylistically incorrect. It should
even be avoided in undressed brick construction. Fillings and frames permit
only paneling, which may certainly be done in stone, though in that case the
joints should not be emphasized. Because of the connection with other issues
concerning the wall as a whole, other relevant material may follow later.
The simplest ashlar bond consists of identical pieces that meet symmetri-
cally over the center of the piece directly beneath them. All three vertical
joints are set perpendicularly.
If the ashlar blocks are very long, only the fourth or perhaps the fifth joint
is set perpendicularly, which prevents the blocks from splitting if the founda-
tion settles. The aesthetic eye also requires this security.
If tall courses alternate with low ones in the same kind of stone, the lower
blocks should be shorter than the upper ones.'8
When the respective heights have been established, the lengths should be in
proportion to the squares of the heights. For example, if the lower layer is half
the height of the upper, the length of the smaller block would equal the length
of the larger one divided by four. If this length is twice the height of the larger
block —in other words four times the height of the smaller block —the length
of the smaller block will equal the height of the larger block. Whatever the
proportions of the larger block, four blocks of half its height will fall along its
length.

US
 Semper

The rhythm of the ashlar pattern is constructionally enriched through the

addition of alternating stretchers and headers. The faces of the latter are usu-
ally roughly square. These inwardly binding elements enhance the activity of
the wall’s internal structure, and visual symbols of these elements lend it a cer-
tain liveliness. If any application of decorative marks to ashlar can be justi-
fied, these header stones would seem to be the place for it. The ancients were
well aware of this, as can be seen from some surviving painted ashlar walls
with decorated block faces. They may be considered as the heads (prokrossoi)
of an internal lattice and treated as such (see § 136). Corner reinforcements of
ashlar walls are similar to these facing blocks and may be treated as an ascend-
ing sequence of the same kind, which in reality they are. Sapienti sat [suffi-
cient for the wise] —it is left to the reader to pursue these suggestions at will.
More complex patterns for ashlar walls remain to be mentioned, any num-
ber of combinations of which are possible. The choice one makes can enhance
or destroy the character of a building. Here once again the ancients showed
their sense for simple rhythms. More recent styles, however, betray here, as
they do in similar cases, a more romantic musical inclination for a richer
alternation of rhythmic cadences, intervals, caesuras, and so forth (see the
prolegomena, p. 86).
We should also include in this section the whole range of wall dressings
with inlaid or applied mosaic-like stone or tile, as well as floor panels and
even the roof with its imbricate pattern—as they are all stereotomic works.
Yet everything relevant to our topic has already been set forth in the discus-
sion of textiles, to which the reader is referred. It should simply be observed
that bonding the elements in these dressings by staggering the joints is not a
structural necessity. The ancients recognized this distinction and emphasized
it—for instance, they never laid their large, usually rectangular floor slabs
(used in marketplaces, temple precincts, etc.) in a bonded pattern, but used
continuous joint lines in both directions. The same is true of paneled wall
dressings and roof tiles, which the ancients are known to have arranged in
rows, never in a bond.

§ 166 3. The Shape of the Substructure as a Whole

I want to reiterate that traditionally the construction principle under discus-
sion was first applied in formal terms only to the foundation, because this was
the field on which it could be independently represented. We have seen this in
terms of the form and bonding of the building elements. The question now
facing us is the extent to which it is expressed in the work itself, considered as
a whole.
Certainly the foundation is constructed according to the purpose and form
of what it supports, and in this regard it follows from the structure indepen-
dent of the main form. But the actual object —the building —could and must
have been influenced by the constructional requirements of the foundation
and had to be modeled on them. The effect of that same influence must have
been even more immediate on the form of the building. The inorganic design

738
 Stereotomy: Aesthetic-Formal

principle inherent to masonry construction naturally led to regular forms,

that is, those designed in a crystalline-eurythmic manner: the circle, the poly-
gon, and the rectangle.

1. The Circle
The most primitive monuments, though not the oldest, confirm what seems
true a priori—that the circular plan was the earliest. The oldest foundation
was certainly the heap of earth, which assumes a circular form of its own
accord; this form also survives best and longest. Indeed, over time nature
turns all building forms into a rubble cone with a circular or oval base, as is
splendidly shown by the countless ruins of Chaldean and Assyrian citadel ter-
races, which were originally rectangular.
The ancient royal tombs on Sifnos associated with the earliest Pelasgian-
Hellenic tradition were originally circular in shape. The same is true of the
tombs of Ajax, of Achilles, and of the rulers of Sardis. The surviving sacrificial
altars built of polygonal masonry on Mount Athos on Aegina and Mount
Lycaeus in Arcadia are circular. The same form is found in simple northern
tomb tumuli and in the artfully done conical tombs at Corneto, Chiusi, Vol-
terra, on the island of Sardinia, as well as many other places—to say nothing
of the famous tholoi from Greece’s heroic period and other prehistoric circu-
lar buildings.

2. The Polygon
The polygonal plan is a transitional form that would seem to belong within
the canon of cyclopean masonry, as its basic form generally contains the
obtuse angles that correspond to that canon.
Although there is no evidence, to my knowledge, that any regular polygo-
nal buildings belong to this canon, the irregularities seem to result largely
from functional concerns, whereas the dominance of obtuse angles is due to
considerations of solidity and the principle inherent in the canon of polygonal
building. Examples are the citadels at Tiryns, Mycenae, and Argos. Similar
ones are found in Tavium in Asia Minor, and elsewhere.

3. The Rectangle
The close relation between a building’s plan and the way its structure is exe-
cuted is even more strikingly evident in the case of parallelepiped units and
the rectangular plan.
It began with the invention of the clay brick but only really came into its
own with ashlar. It is strikingly visible in works whose uses are not bound to
any particular plan and those traditionally associated with the circle. Tomb
mounds are definitely part of this group: they abandon the round shape only
in countries where brick and ashlar construction are practiced, such as in
Chaldea and Egypt, where they adopted a square plan and in elevation substi-
tuted the pyramid for the cone.
Moving forward, we must return once more to a very remarkable and often

739
 Semper

noted phenomenon in cultural and architectural history —the prehistoric tra-

dition of building according to the principle of dressing. According to this
principle, the building consists of two components: the shell and the filling.
This contrast had, to some degree, already emerged as a necessity of nature
in the simplest, most ancient structures — for example, the earth mound dressed
with grass to lend strength to it.
We do not intend to consider all of its consequences here, only its immedi-
ate and most direct effects on constructional form.
A wall dressing of dressed stone secures the core, but it needs to be secured,
in turn, against the thing it is intended to protect. The earliest experience
showed this.
A means of decreasing the pressure of the earth while reinforcing the crust
against external influences was found in cellular construction, that is, dividing
the filling mass, which exerts a lateral pressure, into smaller masses by means
of cuts through the core in several places.
In the case of centrally planned structures (among which the square can be
included), the filling mass can be divided in either of two ways: concentrically
or through the use of radial dividing walls. There are very old and instructive
examples of both systems. The so-called Tomb of Tantalus near Tmolus illus-
trates both systems at the same time.!? The tomb at Volterra, illustrated here,

Interior structure of a tomb at Volterra

is constructed purely according to the concentric system, as is the citadel at

Tiryns. The remarkable construction of the Egyptian pyramids, a series of
crusts laid around a core, represents the last stage in the development of this
scheme.

740
 Stereotomy: Aesthetic-Formal

In structures with a rectangular plan and extended front walls, the radial
cellular system is transformed into a parallel one, creating the remarkable
syringes (pipes, that is, passages)? characteristic of all ancient substructures,
such as the similar substructures in the citadels and tomb pyramids of Assyria,
the temple at Jerusalem, the Temple of the Sun at Baalbek, and the Peisistratid
Temple of Olympian Zeus at Athens. They also form the foundation of the

Substructure of the Temple of Olympian Zeus at Athens (drawing by author)

Capitoline Temple, dating perhaps from the most ancient pre-Roman times.
They strike a keynote in the Tabularium, in the cavea foundations of Roman
theaters, in praetoriums, and even in the design of baths and of vaulted
(Romanized) basilicas, where they give structural-formal expression to the
spatial idea. One might even say that the essence of the magnificent Roman
style—with which architecture set off down a completely new path, whose
end it has yet to reach, the Middle Ages and even the Renaissance being
merely byways —lies in an architectonic and spatial application of the hollow
structure of the foundation to the aboveground parts of the building. This
principle, which developed in response to pressures exerted by the earth, man-
ifests itself overall in the same way it does in individual features. For example,
the rubble wall, the so-called emplecton (a type of genuine Roman masonry
work that remained the same throughout the Middle Ages), is a result of this
principle and should be judged and treated accordingly.*!
A type of construction as unusual as cellular masonry was bound to express
itself on the exterior. This is true of the temple terraces of the Hellenes, who
knew how to give the fullest possible formal expression to the construction
principle they embody.22 One example is the Peisistratid substructure of the
Temple of Olympian Zeus (see above), which consists of a series of vaulted

741
 Semper

passages and is built of rubble-stone but dressed with ashlar. Each of the lat-
ter’s projections gives external expression to an inner partition of the tunnel
vault —they are definitely not buttresses (no more than the half-columns of
the Colosseum and other Roman works are, though Viollet-le-Duc erroneously
thinks otherwise and offers criticism on the basis of this assumption). They are
much more like offsets (prokrossoi, parastates), comparable to the beam ends
of shear walls in Swiss chalets, and were so conceived by the ancients.
For reasons that have already been discussed, ancient aesthetics could not
accept the representation of horizontal thrust, and when it was unavoidable
(owing to soil pressure or to vaulting) the ancients knew how to eliminate it in
the work itself and in formal and actual terms by means of spatial dispositions.
The basic principle of this aesthetic is to make absolute stability evident.
The principle is therefore sometimes found in the masonry as such, where it is
sometimes achieved through the effects of mass (in the overall impression as
well as in the shape and size of the blocks) and sometimes through a pyrami-
dal tapering of the rising mass. We find this tapering in the cyclopean walls of
Phoenicia, whose layers gradually recede in relation to one another. The same
phenomenon can be observed in Assyrian ashlar foundations (Nimrud). In
Egypt the terracing is transformed into a batter and asserts itself in a tangible
and realistic way well above the substructure, even in the aboveground parts
of the building. The Greeks followed the Phoenician-Syrian tradition in their
terrace walls; the substructures of the Olympic shrines in Agrigentum and
Athens are authentically ancient and magnificent examples of this. The Hel-
lenic temple wall inclines toward the Egyptian principle, yet its batter is so
slight that the wall appears to be vertical—and this imperceptible device only
adds to its autonomy in the viewer’s eye. The use of terracing and of pyrami-
dally tapering the substructure and walls, partly to increase the actual solidity
of a building, partly to make that solidity more evident, was retained even in
the Roman period and in the Middle Ages, but these periods did not exploit
them with the same level of refinement the Greeks did. The Renaissance also
adopted this ancient building tradition by using tapering walls for visual ends
more than structural, although this style is also capable of emphasizing the
power and character of a wall with strong slopes and batters.3
But this touches upon the more general field of architectural theory, and
that need not concern us here.
At the beginning of this chapter we described masonry walls as mineral
(namely, inorganic) and lifeless, therefore unarticulated. Neither ashlar as a
part of the wall nor quoins and parastades (whether ribs or projecting ends)
that break up its unity are articulations proper. Even less are they organisms
existing in their own right, like columns. They contain and express only the
mineral law of the plan and in this regard are comparable with certain periph-
eral and radial formations in crystals (see the prolegomena, p. 84).
As something upright, the masonry wall is, however, subject to the general
law of proportional development in that it consists of three parts: the base,
the torso (or trunk), and the crown.

742
 Stereotomy: Aesthetic-Formal

In a rough scheme the base consists of a high, strongly projecting layer of

stone, which Vitruvius calls the guadra, known as a plinthus in Greek; the
torso (truncus) is made of the ashlar masonry discussed above; the crown
(corona) consists of a protective projecting slab. As it came to develop decora-
tions for the connecting parts, the mason’s art saw the need to borrow its
analogies from the three previously mentioned arts. Thus the trunk is firmly
attached to the plinth (the quadra of Vitruvius) by a band (torus, spira).
Another transition binds it to the cornice (corona), which supports a conclu-
sion, a resolution (/ysis). There is also the stylobate in the form of a step or,
when more richly developed, as a continuous column pedestal in preparation
for the building proper.24 All that architecture has invented in this respect
draws upon the most ancient symbols, which allude to a few basic ideas that
we have already discussed on numerous occasions.?5
Certainly, the substructure (podium) obtains its formal idea by analogy to
the base of a vase or utensil.
There is a remarkable temple substructure in Khorsabad whose crown
consists of an Assyrian cavetto with a fillet and plate. The same features are to
be seen on the substructures of Egyptian pyramids, temples, sacella, and so
forth.

yyy]

a, mT

Assyrian crown for a temple substructure (Khorsabad)

Etruscan tomb cones are surrounded below with a stone wreath, whose
profile is taken from the chalice-shaped movement of a leaf turned outward.
The coronas of some ancient Hellenic temple bases are similarly formed: one
example is the raised platform of the Temple of Olympian Zeus at Agri-
gentum. In these cases there is no articulation of the socle corresponding to
the crowning element, which consists of a simple quadra. In the perfected
Hellenic style the components of the stereobate or podium and their propor-
tions follow the analogy and canon of the column orders. The cornice of a
stone temple (the corona with its crowning and supporting elements) is a
model masonry wall crown, more or less simplified and modified to allow for

743
 Semper

Etruscan examples

the different constraints. It corresponds to the simple Doric quadra without

articulation or to the more Ionic or Corinthian linking of the quadra to the
truncus with a powerful spira, together with a molding and a riser. Frequently
the inverted ogee is used at the bottom. The Romans used the same analogies,
though with a certain originality (see the appended examples of Greek, Italic,
and Roman foundation profiles).

Caryatid porch, Athens Monument of Lysicrates, Athens

Campanian examples

744
 Stereotomy: Aesthetic-Formal

S
Roman examples

Even medieval architectural styles are traditional, though their art-forms

depart considerably from tradition and their conventional symbols seem to
have arisen from necessity. This is true of crowning elements as well as those
base elements that conclude a structure or part of a building. The crowning
Gothic drip with cavetto and ovolo moldings is the Syrian-Egyptian leaf device
with its astragal. The prototype from which developed almost all articulations
intended as downward conclusions is the Attic column base. Here I may be
permitted to observe that in the Middle Ages the contrast between substruc-
ture and the upper part of the building emerges less clearly than in antiquity.
On many medieval works it is altogether absent. Renaissance architecture, on
the other hand, enjoyed stacking several bases and podiums on top of one
another as transitions to the upper part of the building. This process corre-
sponded to the wealth of ideas produced in the flowering of the early Renais-
sance, and it permitted contrasts to be accentuated, more strongly emphasized,
or, if the work called for it, moderated to the appropriate degree.
The High Renaissance followed a different path in its search for a richness
of architectural expression; through a study of Vitruvius and ancient monu-
ments, it came back to the antique treatment of this particular contrast, which
consisted in accentuating it once or at most twice. Podiums and pedestals
become integral parts of the five column orders; their relative proportions and
their relation to what was supported were modeled on these orders.?¢
However justified the laws implied by the five orders may be, universally
valid rules of proportion, complete with numbers and sizes, do not exist,
making it impossible to follow the laws unconditionally and, as it were, to the

745
 Semper

letter. Thus only general statements can be made about the relation of the sub-
structure to the upper part of the building.
First of all, the two integral parts of the form that we have been discussing
should not be uniform. In the case of a simple columnar work, the podium
forms the base, and it corresponds to the entablature as to a lighter dominant
juxtaposed with it. Thus the podium should exceed the entablature, if not in
height then in expressive force and mass. Its mass and height, however, should
not detract from the role played by the supporting columns as the upward-
striving element of the total form. A similar point can be made about multi-
story buildings, without neglecting to consider whether they should soar
upward like a tower or develop in breadth.
In any style, whether it is Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Gothic, or something
else, the cardinal rule for multistory buildings is that the substructure and
(uppermost) crowning section must depend above all on the building as a
whole for their proportions, as if the whole building were tripartite, consist-
ing (1) of the substructure; (2) of the crown appropriate to the substructure
and to the building as a whole; and (3) of what lies between the two, what is
supported and crowned, respectively, by them. At the same time, harmony
should prevail among the subunits (the stories and their articulations), both in
relation to one another and in relation to this main tripartite division. This is
one of the architect’s hardest tasks, but we will not consider it here in further
detail as it is a general architectural problem.

Notes
1. For the relation of carved images with sculpture and the art of embossing (which
is perhaps more independent than assumed here), see the article on toreutics in
“Metallurgy.”
2. We need not say any more about the need for this contrast and will simply refer
the reader to what was said earlier, in particular the explanation of certain aesthetic-
formal concepts in the prolegomena (p. 75).
3. A famous votive gift, the golden lion offered to Delphi by Croesus, had a base
built of golden plinths (ashlar). Herodotus 1.46-50. Aelian, V[aria] h[istoria] 12.62.
Essay by Botticher in Arch|dologische] Zeitung 136 (April [recte: May/June] 1860).
4. The so-called cyclopean walls seem to have been restricted to some areas of

Cyclopean masonry (Argos)

746
 Stereotomy: Aesthetic-Formal

Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy, although ancient cyclopean work has recently been
found in the Nile Delta as well. Similar works in Mesopotamia are more like rubble-
stone masonry than polygonal construction. Obviously the principle of the vault is
latent in developed cyclopean masonry; one can break through it at any point, and if
one does so an arch forms above the breach, resisting the collapse of the masonry above
it. This drawing of a polygonal wall at Argos is a perfect example of this technique: if
the stone with hatching is removed from the structure, the rest would remain standing.
A similar gap in ashlar work would inevitably cause its collapse. There is no doubt that
the Leleges and Pelasgians, or whichever peoples first used this cutting process, were led
to this invention through concerns about fortification and structure, and not through
ignorance of the spirit level or the plumb line. Still, the ancient Phoenicians were no less
correct in building their bulwarks of enormous limestone ashlar blocks laid length-
ways, rather than polygonal walls, for the slopes of Lebanon offered them a stratified
material in an ashlarlike form, which could not be cut into cubic or polygonal blocks of
equal size. Again, as with any prehistoric human achievement, it would be foolish to
ascribe the invention of ashlar masonry exclusively to this or that ancient race, just as it
would be to make any assumptions about such inventions. But the Syrians and Phoe-
nicians certainly deserve credit for having achieved the greatest perfection in ashlar
building.

Mycenae

747
 Semper

The unbelievably large cut-stone walls (each stone bossed in the middle of the face
and edged) of the Syrian-Phoenician substructures at Baalbek, Jerusalem, Tyre, Byblos,
Arwad, Marathus, and at other ancient Phoenician settlements, surpass anything else in
their grandiose rhythm and the technical perfection of their workmanship. According
to [Louis-Félicien Joseph Caignart de] Saulcy, the oldest part of the temple terrace at
Baalbek consists of three layers of ashlar blocks. Each is fourteen feet high and from
sixty-two to sixty-eight feet in length; both their size and the ratio of their height to
their length (one to six) are astonishing (Saulcy, Voyage autour de la mer Morte,
2:626):
Ancient writers attribute the invention of cyclopean masonry to the Phoenicians,
who perhaps took it up in areas they colonized in lieu of their own gigantic ashlar
blocks, adapting to the properties of the local building materials. There is only one
trace of this in Syria and Phoenicia themselves, not far from Acre, at a place called Om
el-Amid (Mother of the Columns). If Phoenician influence on the construction of Tiryns,
Argos, and Mycenae could be proven, it would follow that polygonal building was
invented J/ater and ashlar building earlier. Examples of the concurrent use of both styles
can be found in Caria: there, a wall’s lower part tended to be built of ashlar, while the
upper part was made of polygonal blocks. The part of the foundation walls of the
Temple of Jerusalem illustrated here is taken from the Entretiens of Viollet-le-Duc, after
a photograph by Saulcy.

Ashlar wall in Jerusalem

5. Upright substructures possess a certain articulation (see below), but they do not
display the contrasts between living and mechanical activity employed by upright artic-
ulation to express inner life, like something that has grown.
6. To give an example of a concept opposite to what the author understands by
organic in att.

748
 Stereotomy: Aesthetic-Formal

7. Height-to-length ratio is determined partly by the nature of stone and partly by

the size of the ashlar blocks, because relative strength increases not directly but in pro-
portion to the square of the height. Only massive dimensions or very tough stone per-
mits proportions like those of Phoenician ashlar, whose length is up to six times its
height. Old Roman works and even Florentine ones are similar. In Sicily and Magna
Graecia the porous shelly limestone allowed only average dimensions; it was brittle, so
the typical ratio found in ashlar blocks was only 1:2. The Eleusinian limestone ashlar
blocks used in the terrace of the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens are 0.606 meters
high and 2 meters long, thus 1:3. The limestone walls of Mycenae, from the time of
Epaminondas, show ratios of 1:2 (0.7:1.47). White marble ashlar from the best Athenian
period had a ratio of 1:2.5, or a slightly lower ratio (Temple of Theseus: 0.51:1.335 m,
Parthenon: 0.53:1.223 m, Erechtheum: 0.485:1.3 m). In Asia Minor the norm seems to
have been 1:2 (Priene). In the Middle Ages small stones were used, and thus the height-
to-length ratio is almost even. The exposed surfaces become square. Examples are the
decorative ashlar substructures of the most ancient Venetian palaces. Others are found
in Spain and elsewhere. In the Gothic style ashlar loses its decorative and formal signif-
icance even on the substructure.
8. By contrast, if one were to aim at such an effect in metal, then a recessed filling
would make stylistic sense.
9. But one should avoid false consistency, or rather the use of false techniques.
Take for example the ashlar work one finds on modern buildings
— and sometimes on
older ones—where only the horizontal joints are marked, giving the surface the weak
and unmonumental look of board cladding.
10. The terraces built by Cyrus at Pasargadae are in smooth, sharply edged ashlar,
quite like the substructure of the Parthenon in Athens. Even here false joints are some-
times found. Later, under the dynasty founded by Darius, the Greek canon was again
abandoned and blocks laid on their cleaving grain were used, albeit of varied size, with
some oblique joints and without bossage (Persepolis).
11. See § 83 of volume 1, a discussion closely related to the current chapter. § 82
also contains relevant matter.
12. The white limestone found around Paris that serves as the city’s usual building
material is extremely plastic but somewhat dead. Thus local and, to an extent, structural
influences contribute to the reprehensible French addiction to decoration in building.
13. I think that Vitruvius (and probably Pliny after him) erred in applying this
Greek term of art to the type of masonry under discussion. Pseudisodom was probably
an apparent (false) isodomon, a filled wall dressed with ashlar such as is found at the
Eleusinium and in the substructure of the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens. It
would thus mean the same as emplecton.
14. At the corners of Pisa Cathedral the lower layers of ashlar are more badly dam-
aged by the weight of the walls than the higher ones; this also occurs at many other
places, confirming statements made in the text.
15. In the cella walls of the Parthenon, which are made up of three rows of ashlar,
the spaces between the headers are equal to the thickness of the whole wall, but they do
not appear as such from the outside because the headers are the same length and, of
course, the same height as the other ashlar blocks.

749
 Semper

16. If the constraints imposed by column orders are rejected, another canon has to
be created or architecture will be denied its character and its subjective expression and
will be allowed only general-typical content. Unfettered art disintegrates into formless
and meaningless willfulness.
In the end, the presumed inventor of a new canon will, at best, have deceived only
himself —the nature of the old canon will not have changed. But if he has succeeded in
doing this, his reward will be sole possession of his art, for no one but he will be as
quick to understand it. In this way architecture is as inflexibly conservative as music.
17. More on this subject below.
18. Following the formula

ne
mf
44
in which h and | are the dimensions of the lower ashlar and h’ and I’ those of the upper.
For example, if I’ = 2(1), the ratio of the heights is not 1 to 2, but 1 to 2.
19. The plan of the Ajax mound on the plain of the Scamander is similar.
20. Latin: favissae.
21. A passage in Vitruvius (2.8), unfortunately very corrupt, sheds some light on
this. He was apparently familiar with the two canons of stone building, since he dis-
cusses first the two types of structures common in his day that conform to the cyclopean
or (according to Euripides) Phoenician canon, namely the so-called opus reticulatum
and the opus antiquum, also called incertum. Both are reductions or contractions of
polygonal building style. Only after that does he go on to opus quadratum. Network
masonry (opus reticulatum: small cubic tufa stones, set along a diagonal to dress a cast
core) was customary under the first emperors and was wrongly faulted by Vitruvius and
Pliny for being unsolid, since it is precisely these Roman structures, which are never found
without the necessary frame of horizontally layered masonry, that are best preserved. Like
rubble-stone construction, which Vitruvius calls opus incertum or antiquum, these
buildings follow the cyclopean canon and in principle offer the same advantages it does
(see above, p. 728), in that the binding force of excellent pozzolana replaces gravity, the
only binding force in massive ancient polygonal buildings. The hollow spaces within the
walls built in this way are usually untidily crammed full of stones and chalk (calcata),
but it is better to fill them with bricks or alternating layers of stones (silicibus ordinariis)
and bind them with anchors. Next Vitruvius turns to the Greek canon. He says that
rubble-stone walls built of soft stone and stucco were not customary among the Greeks,
but unadulterated work was—courses laid in rectilinear patterns, of either ashlar or
small hard stones. This means that walls tend to be either massive (made only of cut
blocks) or filled. The former is called isodomon (courses of equal thickness) and there
are two different kinds: a distinction is drawn between isodomon masonry and that in
which high and low courses alternated; the latter was called pseudisodomon.
But this name would be more suitable for so-called emplecton or filled masonry,
which is only apparently isodomon. It was used by both the Greeks and the Romans,
but the Greeks constructed it more carefully, binding the three masonry slices very
tightly, partly by very carefully filling in the layers and partly by using binders. In Greek
emplecton these binders not only penetrate deep into the filler in certain gaps, they also

750
 Stereotomy: Aesthetic-Formal

periodically run through the whole wall, presenting ashlar faces on both sides (diatoni,
or tie ashlars). Isodomon is obviously the /ater, perfected method, and dressing the filler
with ashlar is the original, traditional method. The latter was not introduced into
Rome until the time of Augustus.
Yet another passage from Vitruvius is noteworthy here, namely his description of
the construction of ramparts (aggeres) in chapter 5 of book 1:

Once the trench has been dug to the greatest possible width and depth, the founda-
tion of the wall is to be carried down into the hollow of the trench, of sufficient
thickness to withstand the pressure of the earth. In addition, one should lay the
foundation of an inner wall at such a distance from the outer as needed for the
deployment of troops along the crest of the wall. Next one should connect the two
foundation walls with other stone walls, arranged in a comb or sawtooth fashion.
In this way the mass of earth is dispersed into small parts and is resisted by the total
load pressing against or pushing out the substructure of the wall.

Everywhere the same principle, clearly expressed here, dominates the whole antique
constructional system. This sense underlies even the words struere and instruere. They
were used first to refer to filling the hollow spaces in the walls, only secondly to refer to
constructing or raising the walls. Thus in Vitruvius (2.8): Medio cavo servato...ex
rubro, saxo quadrato, aut ex testa, aut ex silicibus ordinariis struat bipedales parietes...
ita enim non acervatim sed ordine structum opus [Reserving a middle cavity, fill (struat)
it with red stone, squared stone, or brick, or ordinary rocks to make two-foot walls...
not in heaps, but filled in (structum) systematically]. Shortly before, he says that both
retaining walls and rubble-stone walls should be filled with small stones (instruenda).
See [Luigi] Marini on Vitr[uvius] 2.8.5, p. 93 n.
22. The sense of style that moved them to make the wall’s internal structure visible
on the terraces also led them to remove even the slightest reminiscence of it when it
could not be represented, especially in actual temple construction; this was done by dis-
guising the filled wall of the cella with solid ashlar or with isodomon.
23. The fortifications of Verona and Venice (by [Michele] Sanmicheli), the citadel
of Civitavecchia, and many other Renaissance creations are unsurpassable models for a
manly warrior style.
24. See Vitruvius 3.4 and Marini’s annotations. Botticher calls the substructure the
stereobate, on which the stylobate becomes the seat for the columns. Both compose the
crepidoma, the sole of the building.
25. See §§ 6-7 on weaving, § 110 on pottery, and § 137 on carpentry.
26. Given how many readily available illustrated works there are on medieval and
Renaissance architecture, column orders, and so on, we do not feel compelled to pro-
vide more examples of medieval and Renaissance podiums than already given.

Tow
. a Sime ty
ae < 7 - 7 a
aSe =
~~

a - ae =
a nnn inp
2 sate hatin Been al

= oe
OO SG)y FOr:
ati =A rg
oe ay ee ad Vo
we
rei pe. Pe 48,Syl nappa : 7
' ant aed, ean ow setae
aS pan). “te howl ib ders 7 7

at car eg a ee | = ;
ee hey ene wl! 6a) Conus
PO wis, wtyandé eo 7A oe
Metal, Am 0 6 Oh tiree: 6 Eee 7
Pog <P@s sacra (4 0 Tes corer:
Sings renee que eoed-ol © eo. rtp ear ee

Gye© O22) © > ems tee Age cine ~

Cees aanpe (oF oho cobs Be — :

ey Bidet P< = aP®
1 er, eye
a ee eee ee ee ——
AE OA Bg re A i Gwe 8 ee ee"): | © 2
PG
GOATOOn
AR 1 fe! oe ot ay.
Se ST aGiinice <9ee) > rere asieinets
ale hemes salle bine bet ahr 3 ems bed et « —
GreeRinwtnw e241 4@ ped me saretee
@il ida
. een ee PEs ee ogi 0 we, © A HET)
~ a shule) ou ao = @& aan :
a
PRs & ome ee ee ee ; :
ee er a OAs) ety SS ee rear ——.
er _ ; othe Gre memge eles
Oe ee ee ee ee i a
Jip asset Marte le
@imaahmwe Oe 9 tdeagy whe 2 Dol)Ma
ee ee ee ee ee ss oe
on one Ake Uh WE we eealhas jhaneeaGd
-hhr - 7 5
an Onsba a eo ee Ven wall >| guai> ies _ 7
a ns > ae

—ipee Goi “aser)|

pe =e

> Ga al " Qe

= Sell) 02 OAe TS 7

L_eean Ves 6 i
 CHEAP
IE Re EN

Stereotomy
B. Technical-Historical

§ 167 Introduction
As has already been shown, the formal area of stereotomy to be considered next
is narrowly delimited and strictly speaking should be restricted to masonry
substructures. But the broader sphere of its function and stylistic influence as
a monumental technique is more comprehensive because, even if the concrete
form of the spatial idea did not derive from stereotomy, it was the means by
which the spatial idea achieved the expressiveness of an art-form of the high
style. We will now consider it from this angle, limiting ourselves, in accor-
dance with the plan of this book, to architectural stereotomy or to the art of
the mason and stone carver as a monumental technique.!
Because this technique, unlike those branches of technology already dis-
cussed, achieved its position only very slowly and after several transitions, and
because it always changed with time and prevailing circumstances, it is per-
fectly legitimate to place what now follows in stereotomy’s technical-historical
section and comfortably follow the plan thus far observed.

§ 168 The Two Main Factors in the History of Stone Construction

All events throughout architectural history can be divided into two major
groups defined by the manner and extent to which stone construction embod-
ied an architectural-spatial idea.
The first group is stone architecture that merely employs the cutting of
stone. Following the oldest tradition shared by all peoples of ancient heritage,
the role assigned to stereotomy (and, in the final analysis, stone cutting) was
only subservient —sometimes for the monumental production of the wall
dressing, sometimes for producing a monumental (tectonic) framework in
stone. In cultural-historical terms, this represents the earliest starting point for
monumental art—even if it was its most perfect conclusion as well. In this
sense, it came closest to the idea of perfection, which is the starting point and
goal of all art.
The second group consists of architectural works in which the spatial idea
is directly expressed through stone construction — works in which the spatial
idea is conditioned a priori by the influence of stone, from which the archi-
tect’s mental conception of space essentially emanated.
This happened when joint cutting, the arch, and especially the vaulted ceil-
ing were added to the store of architectural art-forms. This occurred only

Pos:
 Semper

after a protracted period during which these things failed to be taken into
consideration for the expression of the spatial idea or, rather, were excluded
from it in principle.
The new architectural principle this step created was to a certain extent in
conflict with tradition and with the older types shared by monumental archi-
tecture and the other arts —although these types had so powerful an inner
truth and were so deeply rooted in general architectural consciousness that
they could never quite lose their validity. As these older types entered into new
combinations thanks to the new principle, their continuity suffered somewhat
and their original meaning became obscured. In compensation for this and
the loss of ancient melodic clarity and plasticity, however, it was only by
means of these combinations that architecture obtained the true means for
developing that most magnificent symphony of mass and space toward which
it had probably been striving since the earliest times (consider, for example,
the Egyptians and probably also the Assyrians). Architecture had been denied
this achievement because the material limits of stone tectonics were too con-
fining before the adoption of the vault.

§ 169 Course of Development of Antique Stone Architecture

as Found in Monuments

A. The Stone Wall

After everything that has already been said in volume 1 and elsewhere in this
book, there is no need to return to the origins of the principle of dressing in
our presentation of the spatial idea as expressed through the wall and the
masonry strengthening it.

CHALDEA AND ASSYRIA

What we find in the remarkable encrusted earth ramparts of Chaldea is not
the oldest monumental embodiment of the spatial idea in terms of time but it
is the most original in terms of cultural-historical considerations. Stone was
not used at all, but the clay brick walls were given a dressing of stucco or fired
brick.2
Chaldean architecture took another step toward stone construction after it
spread to the more rocky areas of upper Mesopotamia: walls’ lower parts
came to be made of alabaster or basalt panels.3 Their decorative treatment
was sculptural—it was not influenced by the stone style at all. The subjects
represented and the manner and style of their representation were identical to
the embroidered tapestries whose place these stone panels occupy in a more
architectonically permanent way.
Thus in material terms the latter was certainly a significant step toward the
introduction of stone construction into architecture, but in terms of artistic
symbolism these panels keep even more decisively within the limits of the old
artistic tradition than even the Chaldean-Babylonian clay cone mosaics in
Warka and other places.

754
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

PERSIA, JUDAEA, PHOENICIA

The Persian monuments of Murgab and Istakhr move one step closer to the
stone wall.
Like the Assyrian walls on which they are modeled, Persian walls were
built of air-dried brick, but only some marble corner reinforcements, door-
jambs, and window posts have survived, along with some monolithic niches.
All are still standing undisturbed in their original locations and clearly reveal
the alignment of the no longer extant walls.
The ornamental treatment of all these parts still followed the old Assyrian
carpet panels, but here the material was not flat stone plates but cut stone of
enormous size, precisely jointed — monoliths were often used instead of flat
stones. And this very massiveness clearly contradicts the original and model,
for the cut stones are in fact fragments of a kind of stone framework, inter-
nally cut and hollowed out to receive the earth wall they were intended to
protect and reinforce.
I will touch only in passing on the unclear descriptions of the Mosaic tem-
ple and its walls decorated with alternating layers of ashlar and timber friezes,
which seem to represent another step toward ashlar wall construction. The
Syrian-Phoenician preference for checkered and bordered ashlar may well
have manifested itself very early in other places besides the substructures of
monuments, but this is attested by no reliable informants. As I have already
noted, the Tyrians were considered to be the inventors of colored polylithic
ashlar (see p. 354).

EGYPT
Egyptian stone walls in temples, pyramids, and so on represent a third step
toward completely regular ashlar construction, evidence for which can be
found in existing architectural monuments. Egyptian stone structures are for
the most part completely solid, that is, built of ashlar without masonry filler
or stone dressing. Although they are squared and leveled with great precision,
the stones are not laid in layers of the same thickness but vary in accordance
with the stone masses used. Given the otherwise careful and pedantic nature
of the priestly builder caste, this can be explained and justified only once one
understands that Egyptian walls were never without a dressing. Often this
was a true stone dressing, as on the pyramids and certain older temple ruins,
but usually it was a stucco or paint coating that was always used to conceal
the joints.
Here too, then, stone construction did not yet function directly as an artis-
tic element, any more than it did in Assyria and Persia, though it had made
very significant progress. It did, however, indirectly influence the formal
appearance of Egyptian building. Though the masonry is massive and resem-
bles original Nile mud construction (still the vernacular practice today)—
a resemblance due more to willfully archaic inclinations than to tradition, in
all probability —it led to slenderer and lighter masses than clay structures
did. Hence one of the most important distinctions between the Assyrian and

755
 Semper

Egyptian styles: the appearance of the latter is chiefly lapidary and light-
hearted, whereas the earthen walls of the former suggest a gloomy mood and
are evocative of the underworld.4
Because their mass is loose and not very strong, earthen walls require heav-
ier proportions than those needed for absolute stability; stone walls, by con-
trast, in accordance with the greater strength and weight of the material, may
be built to proportions that are very close to those required for absolute stabil-
ity. In the case of a material of even greater compressive strength, such as metal,
only a hollow structure could guarantee stability and ensure the reduction of
the sectional surface area to the minimum required by the resistance of metal.
For this reason stone construction is especially monumental, although this
was not the field where architecture first assumed an independent existence.

THE GREEKS
Only with Hellenic isodomic ashlar did monumental form finally liberate
itself from its material through complete technical mastery, that infallible
tool. As has been shown elsewhere, even as the constructional (stereometric)
principle passed through this purest phase in its development—the Hellenic
temple wall, which was assembled entirely from identical elements — the
ancient wall dressing asserted itself not just in its colored decoration but also
in the technical treatment of its ashlar blocks. These were, so to speak, hollow
bodies touching each other only at the edges and not in the middle; at the
same time, panels were also used in certain parts of the construction. Because
this, and everything related to it, is already familiar (see §§ 79 ff.), we need
only allude to it here.

THE ROMANS
In contrast to the revolutionary Hellenes, the Romans were in customs, reli-
gion, and art the conservative supporters and preservers of everything ori-
ginally Greco-Italic. They were late in borrowing the system of full ashlar
construction, and so the magnificent development of the singularly Roman
way of building proceeded undisturbed. Isodomon had been the hieratic priv-
ilege of the Hellenized temple, but Roman work proper, the idea of world
domination expressed in stone, found a more suitable concrete form (indeed
the only permissible one) in a kind of hollow construction—the poured wall
with an ashlar crust and related masonry processes. It was necessary to trans-
fer the concameration—the vaulted cell system that had been known since
ancient times but had been used only for substructures —to aboveground con-
struction. This was a new use for hollow construction and represented a solu-
tion to the problem of how to create from the surrounding rooms themselves
the supports and abutments necessary to vault even massive central halls
while expending a minimum on material and in labor and obtaining the largest
possible space.
The Romans were in no way the inventors of this mighty spatial art, which
would have related to Greek architecture as a symphony concert does to a

756
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

hymn accompanied on the lyre, had it been developed to the same level of per-
fection as was Greek architecture. It had been in preparation for a long time
and had its own priests and prophets before the Alexandrian period, among
them Hippodamos and other founders of Asian cities, active as early as
Athens’s golden age. One can discern its dark seeds in tholoi, crypts, nuraghi,
and other mysterious works of those early mystic inhabitants of the Medi-
terranean lands who worshiped the cult of the earth spirit. One can only spec-
ulate about the way in which Chaldean-Assyrian architecture related to
Alexandrian-Roman buildings in this regard —that is, to what extent earlier
tectonics was displaced from its old areas of application by the vault and
dome. Any such speculations call to mind the semimythical accounts left by
later writers, as well as the authentic representations of extensive domed
structures that appear on Assyrian and Lycian relief panels, and above all

Assyrian domes (wall relief)®

Parthian and Sassanian ruins, calculated entirely according to the Roman

vaulting principle and also closely related in plan to ancient Assyrian layouts.
These connections seem only dimly illuminated when considered alongside
related matters in other fields of cultural history. For example, the Egyptians,
Assyrians, and Persians produced early on a detailed system for conducting
mass warfare but they were not strategists; conversely, subjective Hellenism
could not imagine a system of massive military subordination. The nature of
strategy was first fully understood and raised to the status of art by Epaminondas
and Pelopidas, further developed by Alexander and his successors, and per-
fected by the Romans, the heirs to the Alexandrian idea of world dominance.
Roman building methods related to the massive structures of Egypt, Assyria,
and Persia in the same way that Alexandrian-Roman strategy related to the
barbarian use of mass warfare.
This is not the place to pursue further the history of masonry construction,
which virtually amounts to a history of architecture because of the vault’s vic-
tory over the straight tectonic ceiling and roof structure paired with its colum-
nar apparatus. We will defer that to volume 3, where justice will be done to
medieval masonry as it relates to the medieval style, a most powerful factor in
its development. The same may be said for Renaissance masonry.
The introduction of the carved ashlar joint for ornamental use was roughly
contemporaneous with the rise and growth of the new architectural principle
discussed above. This point was also covered, for the most part, in §§ 81-82
of volume 1, to which I now refer (see also §§ 164-65 in this volume).

Day
 Semper

§170 B. Stone Tectonics

CHALDEA, ASSYRIA, PERSIA, AND EGYPT

The most important information about the origin and early development of
the motives used in stone tectonics again comes from the remarkable ruins of
Chaldean-Assyrian architecture that lie on this side of the great Asian plain
and in an adjacent area in Persia. They should be considered in association
with other physical and literary evidence of monumental ruins in Egypt, Asia
Minor, Italy, and Greece. These are sufficient to lay completely to rest the
ingenious fiction of an alleged absolute, monumental, and specifically Hel-
lenic stone tectonics “fashioned” in accordance with the nature of stone.
After everything that has been written about this topic in the articles on
Chaldea, Assyria, Egypt, Persia, India, and Asia Minor in both of our vol-
umes, we need not further justify the claim that the tradition of dressing
wooden frameworks with additional materials (metal, terra-cotta, wood) pro-
vided all ancient civilized peoples with a common direction and sense of form
as far as the monumental framework is concerned. It is also possible that this
appreciation of fuller forms than those permitted by a bare wooden frame-
work itself led to the use of dressings for aesthetic-dynamic reasons. Perhaps
both views are correct, since both lead to the same conclusion, namely, that
traditional art-forms and proportions established before stone tectonics
required only minor adjustments upon the introduction of stone to do justice
to the properties of this new material. The study of monuments, however,
teaches us at the same time about the difficulties inherent to this task, which
seems so simple after they have been solved. It also offers historical confir-
mation of the late adoption of pure stone tectonics in every country except
Egypt, where a solution had been found a millennium earlier —albeit one so
peculiarly restricted by law that the country remained completely isolated on
this matter as well: the Egyptian solution is of significance largely because of
the contrasts that it offers.
Authors date the construction of the oldest Greek temples to the time of
the fortieth olympiad, but it is possible that none of the surviving structures
made entirely of stone dates from that time. All of them, however, right down
to the flowering of Greek art, show a striking uncertainty and a tendency to
go from one extreme to the other—a search for the proportions appropriate
to a stone style. In addition, very few of them can be called completely pure
stone structures, since most lack the ultimate consequence of the idea behind
it: the stone-joist ceiling.
We will return to these structures, but first we will cover some older
cultural ground to glean some information about the development of stone
tectonics.
Amid the rubble of Chaldean-Assyrian palaces we find only a few isolated,
uncertain traces of stone tectonics, although several stone bases have been
found with missing shafts, doubtless because they were made of wood dressed
with metal.6 Fragments have been found on various sites, some from the

758
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

dressings and some from the decorative elements of this sort of column,
dressed with embossed bronze. We also know from contemporary representa-
tions that the columnar framework was a prominent part of the Chaldean-
Assyrian style in both temples and civil structures: its disappearance without a
trace can be explained only through the hypothesis articulated above. In addi-
tion, the use of sheathed wooden columns is explicitly mentioned by Strabo
and other ancient authors as a characteristic of Babylonian architecture. If we
consider the most remarkable columnar system of Persia it may shed a bit
more light on conjectures about Chaldean-Assyrian tectonics considered in
isolation (addressing the principle and the arrangement of the system), as the
former is obviously a further development of the same principle applied to the
stone style. We also know from the previously cited description of the palace
of Deioces in Ecbatana that those who next inherited Chaldean-Assyrian cul-
ture —the Medes—continued to use wood dressed with embossed gold for
their tectonic supports.”
The move to a stone style seems to have been made very late, probably by
Cyrus (the founder of the Persian empire) under Hellenic influence.’ However
late it may have come in a chronological sense, this transition loses none of its
importance in the history of style, as the conditions must have been similar in
other places where the same transition occurred earlier.
On the site of his victory over the Medes at Murgab, Cyrus built a royal
palace on the Babylonian model but with the addition of completely new
motives.
While the gigantic seven-tiered tower that epitomized the defiant Baby-
lonian citadel received only the most modest acknowledgment under Cyrus—
a purely symbolic allusion in his tomb—a triumphant counterpart is found
at the summit of Kih-i Rahmet in the natural, proud, yet modest rulers’
tombs built for the dynasty of Darius, who set his new castle at the foot of the
mountain.
The bold Assyrian terrace system has been scaled down, but the construc-
tion in precise marble ashlar is faithful to the Greek manner.
The use of marble for the palace walls and the column supports may have
been inspired by Asia Minor and Greece, as the catastrophic subjugation of
the Greek cities of Asia Minor by Cyrus [the Great] and his generals coincided
with a spiritual upsurge (especially in the fine arts) in the same cities. Traces
of the influence of a Greek architecture, already free from the influence of
barbarism, on the Asian style can be found only in works commissioned by
the founder of the Persian empire.? Perhaps the contrast between Hellenism
and barbarism was equally recognized by both sides and consciously retained.
Perhaps Egyptian influence was also at work; for example, one might be
tempted to trace back to Egypt the magnificent stone door frames and niches,
noted earlier, with their studded posts, lintels, and cavetto cornices, were not
such forms also present in ancient Assyria, ancient Phoenicia, and the Greece
of the ancient Pelasgians.
The stone columns of the Persian style’s second period are more important

Bos)
 Semper

than these door frames and niches, as they are the lapidary successors to
Babylonian-Assyrian bronze-dressed timber columns, which in themselves are
more or less monumental tent poles. Yet the metamorphosis does not go
beyond the columns, for the entablature is still the old dressed timber. The
broad spacing of the supports proves this, as do the famous royal tombs,
which exhibit their order in its fully developed form. In principle this order is
Asian-Ionic: the tripartite antepagment of the epistyle that directly supports
the framework of the ceiling, indicated externally with mutules and cornices,
and the column itself, which is two-sided (front and side) and originally intended
not for peripteral but only for hypostyle and diastyle use. These elements are
also based on the Ionic style, but wherever we encounter the Ionic order on
monuments it has graduated completely to the stone style. Here it is only semi-
lapidary, because of its wide intercolumniation, the candelabra-like or utensil-
like unmonumentality of the stone columns, and especially its realistic repro-
duction of the metal style.1°
The Persian solution exhibited a genuinely Zoroastrian spirit of function-
ality. It was a step backward when compared to the (probably far more ideal-
ized) Assyrian approach to the monumental framework, even though the
Assyrians had not yet proceeded to the stone style. Whether because of pri-
mordial relations between the peoples or because of later exchanges, the
Assyrians came very close to the Greco-Italic formal tradition, evidenced by
the variably developed Ionic and Corinthian orders we find on Assyrian reliefs.
We might also consider the Doric-Assyrian gabled temple, with its heavy
baseless columns (which also occurs), were it not possible that this was a
reproduction of a foreign shrine. On the other hand, there is no trace in
Assyria of a forked capital, that item closer to furniture than to the stone col-
umn, much like a tent pole, rendered utterly realistically and without a trace
of monumentality. Tectonic structures achieve monumentality only through
emancipation from structural-material realism, through a symbolic spiritual-
ization of their functional expression. It was, as we have said, quite Persian to
translate the Assyrian-Babylonian column into stone and at the same time to
relinquish the expression of high monumentality that it had already acquired,
uncongenial to the rationalism of the new political and religious regime. Is
not the same spirit found in Persian sculpture? There is significant artistic-
technical progress and a complete impoverishment of the motive; rather than
continuing to struggle they were content to have self-imposed limits.
So stone tectonics arrived at a dead end; among Zoroastrians it had no
more future than did the arts in general.
For the art of Egypt, which was made to serve in a different way, we refer
the reader to § 75 of volume 1. There the structure was certainly a sufficiently
monumental, genuinely pure stone tectonics; there all the technical properties
of stone were fully considered, at least from one perspective. Yet the ornatus
[decoration] was peeled off of the design and its pictorial language did not
enliven an impression of mass—at least this was not its most essential and
immediate purpose, although it served other purposes. The beginnings of a

760
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

more organic development of stone tectonics were quickly pushed aside by the
ruling hierarchy. No historical connection between that older Egyptian style
and the Doric has been demonstrated (see §§ 75-76 and § 172).

§ 171 Beginnings of Greco-Italic Stone Tectonics

We now enter the sphere of true stone tectonics, where the forms of Asiatic
dressing and construction mandated by mechanical necessity are transformed
into organic forms. It animates them and either rejects or assigns to neutral
ground anything that is foreign or hostile to the purely formal idea."!
It is regrettable that the earliest examples of pre-Hellenic stone tectonics
have disappeared into the darkness of mythical times: no authentic examples
have survived, other than the portal to the so-called Tomb of Agamemnon at
Mycenae, whose ruins, however, are insufficient to provide a reliable recon-
struction of its context. A very naive imitation of metal tectonics made during
the heroic period has already been discussed elsewhere in this book (§ 78).
Even the famed Lions Gate itself, so named because of its stele guarded
by lions, has been boldly cited as an example of the oldest form of columnar
building —an entire heroic column system has been developed from it.!2 How-
ever inaccurate the hypothesis, this ancient stele and others (some painted on
vases, some concretely extant) are of major significance in the effort to deter-
mine the morphology of Hellenic stone frameworks. I believe that I have
shown clearly enough in the section on ceramics and tectonics that the indi-
vidual column—the stele on which a consecrated object is borne —was the
model for the row of stone columns, and this fact alone suffices to sweep
away any number of false theories and aesthetic reservations.
Deprived as we are of authentic works from the earliest days of Greco-
Italic stone tectonics, the Tuscan canon of temple construction transmitted to
us by Vitruvius is of great interest (see color plate 13).
A mixed canon, it certainly conforms to the oldest Greco-Italic building
tradition. We can assume that only the framework’s supporting elements are
made of stone; the supported parts are made of timber dressed and covered
with stone. The columns are widely spaced, of average height (seven diame-
ters), and strongly tapered; the base and capital the same as those of later
Roman Doric columns, or nearly. The entablature is half the height of the col-
umn, with a high fastigium above it. As a transitional scheme, it provides a
starting point for the history of the Doric style.
Scarcely less important to our understanding of the early period of Greco-
Italic columnar construction are the oldest vase paintings on which buildings
appear. A comparison of these images with the sculptures on the oldest stone
temples could easily lead one to believe that many of the paintings are older
than the sculptures. The buildings depicted reveal a mixture of Greek formal
elements, many of which survived; at the time the drawings were made no
established rule regulated the selection of the elements that were eliminated.3
For example, there are Ionic columns with Doric triglyph entablatures and
vice versa, and an Egyptian cavetto corona instead of a cornice. The most

761
 Semper

important parts of the building —such as the Doric echinus, the Ionic volute
capitals, the column bases, and the Doric folded leaves —all vary in their
forms and proportions. The large spaces between the fairly tall columns (some
highly tapered toward the top) are typical of all such architectural representa-
tions, which we rightly take to be the oldest. It is even possible that these are
not stone monuments but simply a mixed style like the Tuscan temple, or made
entirely of wood.
Because of this uncertainty, it is probably not permissible to use them to
disprove the law arbitrarily established by archaeologists that asserts that pre-
cisely the opposite qualities of Greek stone temples are considered proofs of
their antiquity — but they do point in this direction.
The prevailing thinking has it that the temple in Corinth, the Temple of
Artemis in Syracuse, and related Doric temples (characterized by narrow
intercolumniations, by short and massively stout columns, by heavy entabla-
tures, and by the absence of ostensibly foreign elements) are the oldest. We
hold, though, that the peculiar nature of the columnar buildings depicted on
the oldest vases (which turn out to resemble monuments) is the surest sign of
the greater age of buildings of that type.
It is appropriate at this point to inquire into the transition from mixed to
full stone construction, from ceilings and roofs made of wood to those made
of stone. In our view the change first took place monolithically on tomb
facades hewn out of cliffs,!4 and in places where geological properties required
it, such as in Egypt, Asia Minor, Arabia, India, and many parts of Italy. Many
of these rock monuments are without any doubt older than any built stone
framework, even those in Egypt. The question asked and the answer given are
by no means idle: if the answer is well founded, then the assertion we made
above seems entirely justified. The faithful imitation of the proportions of tim-
ber beams is easily discerned in those carved in natural rock. Initial attempts
had to follow these proportions, since in the old tradition transitional works
survived for a long time, that is, until there was a radical change—a change
from the extremes of heaviness and squatness, a reaction triggered by experi-
ence or by shifting tastes. Yet this is only the second period of stone tectonics
in general and of Hellenic tectonics in particular.
Only the advent of a third period brought clearly differentiated types and
true proportions and principles for stone tectonics as dictated by materials.
Finally, the fourth period was that of schematism, of the impoverishment of
art-forms through technical routine, their corruption by the quest for novelty,
following a trajectory that had already produced its greatest achievements.
This not only violates archaeological precepts but also opposes the specu-
lative art historian’s dream of an ideal Doric schema, not a historical forma-
tion, so it is said, but a mystical and miraculous birth, rendered vaguer and
less comprehensible by the passage of time. It is said that here too appears a
contrast between the Doric and the Ionic; the latter style became aware of
its true “essence” only through further development in the late summer of
Hellenism, and so on, and so on.5

762
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

Such a hypothesis is confirmed neither by a study of monuments from our

current perspective nor by common sense, which would suggest that the clari-
fication and artistic exploitation of this contrast must coincide for both orders
with the height of Hellenic greatness.
This by no means denies a certain early political-religious and social move-
ment that took shape formally as Doricism, and, like any new politico-social
regime, sought out its own monumental expression. But as this new state
principle became self-aware it created its monumental style not endogenously
but synthetically; to this end, to achieve higher artistic perfection, Doricism
had to begin by overcoming the barbarian-tendentious. Rather than walk
along this path, it bounded, moving from one extreme to the other before
finding its true expression. Moreover, Doricism needed the contrast of
Ionicism to bring self-awareness to its formal existence; the elements of the
latter had existed much earlier, but Ionicism came into existence as such only
through Doricism. This contrast permitted Ionicism and Doricism to achieve
clarity of expression through a perfect antiphony, in the same way and at the
same time. The Attic style was ultimately a synthesis of these two contrasts:
their reconciliation heightened the expression of Hellenism.

§ 172 Doric
It seems to me that it would not be difficult to prove a certain congruence
between the developmental principle of the Greek stone framework described
earlier and equivalents produced elsewhere, in Egypt for example. Let us
briefly consider the latter: in the Old Kingdom we have the affectation of the
light ceiling supports in the rock grottoes, while in the New Kingdom we have
something that approaches this in some of the dynasty’s oldest buildings.
Then we have the stocky columns placed close together and heavy ceiling
beams—new formal elements combined with reminiscences of old ones (the
style of the first half of the Eighteenth Dynasty; older parts of the temples in
Karnak and Luxor; Memnonium; the Temple of Madinat Habu; the pier peri-
style at Eileithyia, now gone; two others on the island of Elephantine with
even more slender proportions).
The second half of this period is the golden age of Egyptian architecture
under Amenhotep III (temples at Soleb and Sedeinga). The proportions reach
equilibrium at the midpoint between the oldest and the middle period. The
forms become purer.!6 There was no period of decline, since the golden age
came to a rapid and violent end during the interregnum of a series of rulers
who were averse to the old religious basis of Egyptian culture (Amenhotep IV,
his new residence near Tell el-Amarna in central Egypt).!”
This violent interruption was followed by the rule of the Sesostrises,
expressed in the grandest spatial monumental style: it has spoken to millennia
and will continue to speak to millennia to come. Their works belong to a
quite different cycle that will not be pursued here. They relate to earlier archi-
tecture as Roman architecture does to Greek. The principle first proclaimed
here is that of the most gigantic and imperishable lapidary tectonics.

763
 Semper

Thus distant Egypt provides reliable information confirmed by contempo-

rary written reports about the general physis of stone construction, whereas
the period that falls just before the greatest successes in the history of Greek
monuments — so close to our own artistic traditions —is shrouded in a dense
fog. We have no precise information about the dates and circumstances of the
creation of the monuments found in Sicily and southern Italy, or those of any
temple or other architectural remnant in Asia Minor, nor can any correspon-
dence be proven to exist between these works and any work mentioned, how-
ever fleetingly, by ancient writers. The same is true of the ruins of Greek art in
Hellas itself, with the exception of a few whose identification as the highly
distinguished work of the Periclean age is beyond doubt.'8
Even during Greece’s golden age contemporaries displayed the greatest
possible confusion about the origin and history of their architecture. Instead
of definite information, they for the most part provide us only with fables,
artistic novellas, and idle speculation about the invention and meaning of var-
ious traditional forms.
Unfortunately we have valued these far too highly and taken many things
seriously that the ancients themselves considered to be only artistic fictions.
Many errors have come down to us (and are still placidly passed on in our
textbooks) from ancient times, which has led to great confusion about Greek
styles and their history. One such error inherited from antiquity is related to
the (Doric) Hellenic temple plan and thus to the most basic question about
the nature of the Doric style.
Artistic types with rules dating from the most ancient times (extending
well beyond the age of monumental art) were ripped from earlier contexts
complete in themselves, thrown together willy-nilly, and roughly treated with-
out a trace of respect in the late awakening of Doric-Hellenic culture. They
had to be sundered from all previous associations to be free to enter into new
combinations around a new core of thought.2°
This new idea was the peripteral temple, the column-borne gabled roof,
the monumental hut (skene). It contrasted with the plain old Greco-Italic (or
Pelasgian-Achaean, in Thiersch’s terminology) sekos, the oblong chamber
(cella) enclosing the cult image. This chamber was completely overwhelmed
by the bare outline of the mighty cyclopean foundations of the sacrificial altar
behind or on top of which it was placed; it was devoid of any independent for-
mal meaning, even though it contained the essence and the quintessence of the
whole cultic apparatus.
The idea of giving the small and bare cella the authority it lacked led to the
building of a temple for it, that is, a consecrated and covered square precinct
(temenos) whose columnar roof did not replace the cella (which retained its
ancient sanctity)—it was simply intended to receive it, and often was struc-
turally quite independent, like the sanctuary for the Egyptian sekos or the
Jewish temple for the ark of the covenant. A monumental enclosure for the
shrine — but an open enclosure, the adytum, or rather its immediate cover,2!
the cella —did not conceal it but left it visible while offering protection. Above

764
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

all it emphasized and increased its authority both spatially and symbolically.
It was a powerfully monumental canopy (baldachin), the most ancient symbol
of heavenly power and sovereignty.
Thus, contrary to the suggestions of Vitruvius and every art historian who
followed him, the origins of the Doric temple did not lie in the temple in antis,
the cella with open porch whose lintel was supported by the antas of the wall
projections and the columns between them. It lay, rather, in the fully
peripteral plan: the columnar roof open on all sides, the full expression of the
new Doric temple, a principled and positive contrast to the temple in antis,22
of which only a few late Doric specimens occur.23 These are Asiatic or pre-
Hellenic in origin, and like the modified forms —the Etrusco-Roman prostyle
and amphiprostyle (with portico and rear hall) cella—are more or less a com-
bination of pre-Hellenic and Doric motives.
The earliest form of the Doric principle is thus found in schemes basically
peripteral and marked by an emphatic separation of the cella from the column
supports; these illustrate very clearly the mutual spatial and structural inde-
pendence of the two parts. Examples include the Selinus temples, the oldest of
which proclaim their great antiquity through other features as well, especially
their plastic decoration, reinforcing earlier statements. Such temples, whose
cella walls are recessed so far behind the columns of the peristyle that there is
room for a second row of columns, are called pseudodipteral by Vitruvius and
his successors, and are described as inventions of a later and already refined
period —even though the oldest motives present in Selinus were readopted
only in the (Ionic) pseudodipteral.4
This would make the so-called pseudodipteral the oldest Doric scheme: a
peripteral with a subordinate cella, which enlarged itself over time and with
the increasing size of the cult image, combined with the columnar building,
from which the later peripteral emerged. The dipteral (with a facade of eight
columns and a double pteron around the cella) and the decastyle (with ten
columns) are apparently late extensions of the original Doric hexastyle plan,
usually executed in the Ionic or Corinthian manner.
The great Doric building idea, a sublime and light contrast to the gloomy
pre-Hellenic, Achaean, or Greco-Italic foundation, is thus entirely indepen-
dent of stone tectonics, even though it acquires its genuine formal expression
only through those practices. It is therefore possible to think of the Doric
principle embodied in the peripteral temple roof as a momentary inspiration,
immediately complete and without historical development, but unlike Pallas
Athena, born without a complete armament. We will never accept the idea
that it could acquire a completely clear artistic expression and a harmony of
parts without transitional stages. It is much more likely that it was conceived
amid a confusion of formal elements— which were separated only later, in
various ways— before the introduction of the stone framework into Greece.
Thus it also appeared before the Doric canon conditioned by the stone style
became entrenched.
This belief certainly opposes accepted views of art history and leads to

765
 Semper

results that again and again contradict traditional assumptions about the
development and respective ages of surviving remnants of Greek architecture.
We want to use it as a basis for our views about the development of Greek
stone tectonics, about its various manifestations, and about the respective
ages of the monuments. We encourage the reader who is so inclined to reread
§§ 77-82 of volume 1 and §$§ 118-24 of the present volume, paying particular
attention to their treatment of the influence of pottery on Greek architecture
and of the remarkable historical connection between the two.
A method used in what follows to summarize certain characteristic differ-
ences in the orders’ basic proportions is simply a means of comparison and
should definitely not be seen as a canon imposed upon the ancients —even
though in some cases a surprising number of basic proportions overlap with
what is found on existing monuments.
If we take three unit measurements, each the average distance from col-
umn axis to column axis, as the basis of a rectangle whose vertical sides are
equal to the height of the order (calculated from the edge of the last step of
the stylobate to the upper edge of the cymatium of the cornice, excluding any
drip stone), this forms what we call the normal rectangle or simply the norm.
The unit of measurement here is half the diameter of the lower part of the col-
umn, or the module.

766
Stereotomy: Technical-Historical
 Semper

The four vertical lines running through the interior are the column axes;
the horizontal line shows the ratio of the height of the entablature to the
height of the columns. Thus the norm contains and shows the principal pro-
portions and measurements of the system. First there is the general ratio
between the height and width of the norm, which is longitudinal or square or
upright, depending on the differences in style and artistic period. Second there
is the ratio expressed in modules, of the thickness of the columns to the inter-
columniations, to the column height and to the height of the entablature. The
norm of a temple can thus be expressed in three ways, for example:

Oldest temple at Selinus 16.5 (no. 2 on preceding table)

(9 + 4.55) = 13.5

Temple at Segesta 13 (no. 7 on preceding table)

(OLS # Se) lsh?

Southernmost temple 12D) (no. 8 on preceding table)

on Selinus acropolis (9 + 4.5) = 13.5

Parthenon 14 (no. 12 on preceding table)

(11.8 + 3.7) = 15.5

Next we want to examine the most important Doric temples that illustrate the
six principal moments of the history of the Doric style—noting that there
were a number of intervening transitional stages. They are
1. the pre-Doric style;
. the oldest, lax archaic-Doric style (seventh century);
. the second, severe Doric style (sixth century, age of tyrants);
. the third, developed Doric style (fifth century);
. the Attic-Doric style (fifth century, age of Pericles);
WN
kW
Nn. the late Doric or Macedonian style (fourth century and later).

1. The Pre-Doric Style

There is no doubt that these columnar buildings were dressed in artistic forms
even before and during the great migrations of peoples, which took place dur-
ing the four or five darkest millennia of Hellenic history, and that among
these buildings (as well as others) were some appropriated by Doricism and
developed in its spirit because they were more suited than others for peripteral
use —in other words, for expressing the basic idea of Doric temple architec-
ture. Thus the echinus capital with the square abacus showing a face on every
side is in fact the capital that seems to have been invented above all for this
purpose, although it had undoubtedly existed long before as a valid art-form
with a related (and also, as it were, peripteral) purpose as the head of an
entirely freestanding isolated stele, a support for the sacred crown. Likewise,
the tripartite division of the entablature had been established before the Doric
period, had mixed with other forms that were later abandoned, and had been

768
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

traditionally transmitted decoratively as triglyphs, mutules, guttae, and so on.

This is true even if their origins and their functional-structural purpose — if
they ever had one—may well have slipped into obscurity or been completely
forgotten.
It is difficult to say whether those times also produced pure stone frame-
works, as opposed to rock tombs, but in any case certain proportional rules
had yet to be established and different types of columnar construction had yet
to be invented.26
The forms that resembled the Doric during this early period of Hellenic
stone tectonics, as far as can be judged from the minute available evidence,
shared the following particular features:
1. Tall columns only slightly tapered along a straight line, entirely without
or with very little fluting, set wide apart, with or without an archaic base.
2. Capitals slightly projecting, sometimes with a circular abacus and a
steep, high echinus. The latter is rigid, as if turned, without any swelling, and
attached to the shaft either directly through the use of fillets or with channels
(scotias), which lends the profile of the capital an ogival shape. The channels
are attached to the shaft by an astragal (beading). Plastic decoration on
the entablature and capitals, even on the shafts and bases, the last of which
have not yet been entirely eliminated. Heavy entablature (one-half or more of
the column height); general uncertainty of proportions; arbitrariness in the
sequence and distribution of the moldings (moulures) and other artistic ele-
ments, as though they were pottery or utensils. Awareness of monumentality
not yet completely awakened; only Jater, with the transformation of these old
traditional types into a functional-structural lapidary tectonics, would it stir.
The cornice is still just a general expression of a wreath, still without the
corona and the beamlike supports that serve as specifically tectonic attributes
of the cornice. The triglyph, where it appears, neither supports the cornice nor
does it transfer its load to the center of the column; rather, it is an attached
dressing and therefore laid out not according to the Doric doctrine but —as
remained the custom in Rome—with straight lines and without such later
perceptible refinements as scallops on the upper edges of the triglyphs, among
other designs.
3. Frequent appearance of metal or ceramic sheathings (or even imitations
of them in stone), plastic-decorative adornments, colored decorations along
the principles of the oldest terra-cotta painting and of metallurgy. Decora-
tively, no definite sign distinguishing between the structurally active and pas-
sive elements of the system; therefore one finds historical-symbolic sculpture
and painting on those structural parts that, according to Hellenic principles,
were suited only to ornamental decoration, and vice versa.”

A. SURVIVING STELES
Certain remnants of Etruscan and Greek columns and steles whose style
reveals them to be the precursors of Doric columns are the first to be of signif-
icance here. Some taper toward the bottom, like a herm, have round plinths

769
 Semper

and a transitional member as a base, may or may not have a capital, and
sometimes have a fillet running round the shaft near the top.28 Others have an
entasis that curves sharply out toward the bottom, flutes, capitals that are
usually Ionic, and circular plinths as a base. Two unfluted and slightly tapered
memorial columns with very primitive, somewhat Doric capitals (round aba-
cus with steep, conically straight echinus), simple and roughly executed with
ancient inscriptions, were dug out of the rubble of the shrine of Artemis
Brauronia on the Athenian Acropolis. See also the depictions of such steles
frequently found on vases.??

B. ROCK FACADES
Those of Norcia in Etruria, their Doric forms —in combination with others—
decorated with great willfulness, columns broken off, very wide intercolumni-
ations, high tympana, cavetto molding runs with unrolled ceiling cornices.3°
In its overall proportions an Etruscan temple facade. The somewhat Doric
rock tomb near Nikoleia in Phrygia, with notably dry and strange detailing,
which by no means contradicts the extremely early date assigned it. Steep,
only slightly curved echinus with three fillets on the shaft. Cornice without
mutules, ogival, similar to the Doric work at Kardaki. Columns smooth.
Another tomb hewn out of the rock, with ancient sculptures, without
inscriptions (like the previous tomb), near Telmessus in Lycia. Entablature
Doric, supported at the corners (as in the earlier examples) by somewhat
Ionic parastades. The door is entirely framed by the antepagment.?!

C. BUILT STONE MONUMENTS

Probably none of the surviving ruins of built stone monuments can be reliably
dated earlier than the seventh century. But some of them are closely related to
the stone monuments already mentioned in that their stone frameworks lack
the distinction between supported and supporting parts, and thus effectively
look like lapidary wooden frames. Some details in no way contradict the idea
that these were the very beginning of the transition to true Doricism; these
details tend to be assigned far too confidently to the late period, whereas the
study of monuments leads to the very probable conclusion that later builders
actually returned to such forms only as a reaction against a contrary direction.
First the remarkable columnar building at Kardaki on the island of Corfu,
whose great age was revealed by finds made at the time of its discovery (tiles
with very old inscriptions, scarabs, and so on). The columns are slender, mod-
erately tapered (their tops one-fourth of the lower diameter), with protruding
capitals. Echinus of moderate height, curved but by no means bulging profile,
with peculiar and somewhat dry decoration on the necking. A single sinkage.
The columns are placed extraordinarily far apart, almost like the rock facades;
the entablature is strange and lacks a triglyph frieze; the cornice is almost
identical to the one on the rock portal in Nikoleia. The interior ceiling struc-
ture is still not represented externally in any way. High gable, as on the Etruscan
temple. Very shallow fluting on the columns. I also find the plastic decoration

770
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

of the architectural members very archaic, exactly resembling the austere

sculptural decorations of the Heraeum in Samos, in the ruins of which I like-
wise recognize a mixed pre-Doric approach.32
Except for this puzzling remnant —it remains uncertain whether it was
part of a temple or a fountain shelter (the place is still used today by sailors in
need of fresh water)—I would not dare to assign any existing built column
work to this pre-Doric period.
Perhaps some of the smaller monuments on the islands of the archipelago
belong to the period, although [Ludwig] Ross, adopting the traditional argu-
ment based on the presence of certain mixed forms, assigns them to the period
when the Greek arts declined, in the first centuries A.D.33

2. The Oldest, Lax Archaic-Doric Style

On the whole, our critical judgment in matters of art is more sharply attuned
to sculpture and painting than to architecture, so we are inclined, in the
absence of information from archives and texts, to base our estimates of the
age and origin of buildings on the plastic works that appear on them. When
such superficial (and often misleading) characteristics are lacking, we immedi-
ately betray our own critical insecurity.
For this reason, one of the temples at Selinus (the third one from the sea on
the acropolis) has been declared the oldest of the group because of its very
barbarian and indeed almost Phoenician sculpture. Even so, the neighboring
temple on the inland side shows clear signs of greater antiquity; it may be the
oldest monument in which the Doric canon is definitely expressed.
Its norm34 places it midway between the building on Corfu whose columns
display a notable affectation and the above-mentioned temple with archaic
sculptures, with which it also shares a primitive floor plan35 (narrow cella, tri-
partite, no antas, and so on—see above; columns shorter but much more
strongly tapered,3¢ both the capital abacus and the gaps between the columns
somewhat wider in the more recent one).
In the older building the echinus is no higher but has a rounder profile and
is less austere with a very deep channel molding, whereas in the more recent
building this feature is almost an apophyge. The more recent temple already
has three sinkages under the capital (the earliest example of this, which is oth-
erwise peculiar to the style of decorations developed for Doric columns); the
older temple has only one.
Each of the outer columns of the older temple has twenty flutes (the inner
ones only sixteen), and those of the other temple have sixteen.37
The entablature of the older temple is slightly more than half as tall as the
columns, and the entablature of the more recent one slightly less.
The Doric foliated crown (cymatium) is rounded in both cases but is
lighter than in temples of a later style.
There are two puzzling columnar works that I would certainly place in this
group or even in the oldest period—cum nondum esset symmetriarum ratio
nota [as at that point the mathematical ratio of symmetries was not yet

Tala
 Semper

known] —if the proportions of their norm, which they share with later works,
did not cause me doubts. First the small (as it is called) Temple of Demeter in
Paestum, whose entablature certainly contains the Doric structural idea but
expressed in a most insecure fashion.38 It is blurred in part by many plastically
decorated mediating members (which the Doric style first had to reject). It has
a frieze with inserted triglyphs,?? and on the architrave, instead of taeniae
and Doric guttae it has a much articulated and sculpted Ionic epicranitis.
Above the entablature is an unusually high, almost Etruscan fastigium (the
height of the triangle is greater than one-seventh of the base). The supporting
columns are no less strange, with a curved, strongly projecting yet rising
echinus, a deep and plastically treated scotia with an egg-and-dart molding
on the necking, and a short shaft with strong entasis. The prostyle columns
of the cella have twenty-four flutes, a scotia, and a round plinth as a base.
The cella layout is still the oldest form, restricted and tripartite, without
opisthodomos.
As I have said, those doubts that arise about assigning this building and its
neighbor to the most ancient group are simply due to its short and thick
columnar norm, which would suggest a period when the Doric style had been
further developed.?°
In any case, the suggestion of a very late origin (around the birth of Christ,
according to Kugler) is untenable, but it could be an example of late barbar-
ian and Italic influence.*!
The so-called Basilica, a unique type simply because of its plan, has a
single row of columns running through the (wide) cella, perhaps as a roof
support instead of the (later?) double row in the so-called hypaethral temple.
Columns more significantly tapered than in the Temple of Ceres; capitals less
projecting but with very softly bulging echinus profile; heavy architrave, topped
with a strong torus rather than the Doric taenia; smooth frieze, without tri-
glyphs; cornices no longer extant but probably similar to those of the Temple
of Ceres. Echinus scotia was even more richly decorated with small ornaments.

TEMPLE IN ASSOS, ASIA MINOR

Already discussed earlier (p. 372), it is considered very ancient and Asiatic in
style because of its sculptures and their locations. Thus the proportions and
the artistic sensibility expressed in its architectural forms are its principal
characteristics.42, Columns set wide apart with marked entasis and tapering
(one-third of the lower diameter), only sixteen flutes. Capitals are similar to
the one in Kardaki and have a sharp curve, though they project strongly.
Abacus approximately equal to the intercolumniations.

THE TAVOLE PALADINE IN METAPONTUM

The remarkable and extremely ancient terra-cotta dressings of the temple
ruins known as the Chiesa di Sansone should confirm that it was built before
the end of the sixth century, although the proportions and details of the sec-
ond columnar building there, which is unfortunately in far worse condition,

Ye
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

show that it is much older. Thus we can definitely place it in the seventh cen-
tury and the period of lax archaic-Doric art.*3
Frieze and cornice missing. Abacus is almost equal to the intercolumnia-
tions. Shaft tapers two-sevenths (thus upper diameter: 0.7143 of the lower).

3. Severe Archaic Style

The conventional and decoratively severe art of the age of tyrants (late sev-
enth century and sixth century) is represented by monuments, two of which
can be documented by their sculptures — namely, one temple from the eastern
group at Selinus and the temple on Aegina. Just as these temples’ sculptures
(only superficially related) are almost opposite in some important features, so
are the styles of the monuments to which they belong just as different from
each other. Moreover, the sculptures at Selinus are absolutely consistent with
their building, whereas those in Aegina do not accord at all with the much
freer, almost overly ornate style of their architectural surroundings. The Asiatic
treatment of hair and beard, the shape of the faces, and the symmetrical folds
in the gowns of the Selinus sculptures place them closer to the reliefs of the so-
called Harpy Tomb in Lycia than to the sculptures from Aegina, which are
predominantly nude and show very clearly the influence of gymnastics on
plastic art. The Selinus sculptures are ancient in the truest sense, but in the
works from Aegina it seems as though the artist had heeded hieratic precepts
and customs while at his work. It is as though the severity of his chisel betrayed
an archaistic will.
Thus I consider the Selinus building to be archaic,44 whereas the temple on
Aegina is already in the developed Doric style, albeit with a specific local col-
oring shared with all Doric works in Greece proper, about which more will be
said below.

SELINUS TEMPLE
Outer columns straight, abacus strongly projecting and high, one-sixth wider
than adjoining space. Echinus austere and shallow (low), finely curved, with
scotia under the fillets into which the flutes of the shaft run. Only one fine
sinkage. Columns in the pronaos with sixteen Ionic flutes. Echinus taller on
the outer columns, similar to the structure at Kardaki. Upper diameter of
exterior columns 0.685 of the lower; entasis definite but severe, with the same
feeling shown on severe-style vases. Interior columns taper much more than
outer ones.
The older part of the largest columnar building at Selinus, the massive
Temple of Zeus, is closest to this temple. Its norm no longer corresponds with
the archaic scheme.
Next came the temple at Metapontum known as the Chiesa di Sansone, in
the ruins of which were found strictly stylized terra-cottas as well as mosaic
reliefs in the same style. Its character is formally related to that of the great
Temple of Zeus at Selinus (see above).45 The old Hecatompedon in Athens,
destroyed by the Persians, belonged to this period, though its norm can no

ULES
 Semper

longer be established. Its entablature followed the heavy proportions of the

old canon.
Then there was evidently an upheaval in the principles of stone tectonics,
probably triggered by necessity in the first place and also by the colossal
building projects of the opulent cities of Magna Graecia and Doric Sicily. But
striving for a colossal building style was itself the consequence of a more gen-
eral and more profoundly justified change. Ionic-Asiatic influence came into
play here: the reputation of the gigantic and miraculous temple at Ephesus
and other works of Jonian architecture had spurred the Doric tribes to com-
pete in the creation of colossal works. This influence even extended as far as
contemporary Rome, where the reputation of Ephesian building had aroused
local ambitions to construct buildings in the grandest style.
This new impulse soon led to exaggeration, in keeping with human nature.
This explains such things as what is presumed to be a Temple of Artemis at
Syracuse, a specimen of the most exaggerated Doric weight and power. The
height of the columns and the relation of the entablature to the columns are
still as they used to be, but the centers of the columns have pressed as close to
each other as possible. The tapering of the column is reduced to a minimum,
but the capitals nevertheless project considerably, with a high, powerfully
bulging echinus and a diminutive abacus that almost touches its neighbor.
Thus the idea of being self-supporting has almost completely disappeared.
The norm is no longer a horizontal parallelogram, but a parallelogram that
rises vertically at a right angle—in other words the opposite of the earlier
scheme.*¢
The same contradiction of the old norm can be seen in a quite different way
in another famed columnar building, the ruined temple at Corinth. Unfor-
tunately the upper parts of the entablature are also missing here, but we may
assume the old proportions (half the column height), which would be consis-
tent with the weight of the supporting structure. Then its norm is

14
CAB a es

Thus the canon of the horizontal parallelogram with reduced distance between
column centers was achieved by the unusual approach of shortening the
columns.47

4. Developed Doricism
All the works of this period manifest the influence of an artistic objectivity
toward understanding the social principle that claimed to have derived from
the traditions of the Doric people and claimed that the monumental, lapidary
artistic expression of this idea (column roof in stone that protects the sanctu-
ary) had been discovered, or rather, decreed. The scheme now needed only to
develop and purify itself in terms of individual forms and the relation of the
various parts to each other. Although the goal and the means of achieving it
had been essentially recognized, many swings from one extreme to its oppo-

774
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

site would be needed before a serious Doric Grace could extricate itself from
all this turmoil.48
One may describe the horizontal, more or less widely extended parallelogram
as the archaic norm, but the entire period of developed Doricism was dominated
by a tendency toward a squared normal form. The unsteady, heavy-headed
look of the archaic building was eliminated by placing the supports closer
together and by reducing the load. After much searching Doricism arrived at a
ratio that perfectly expressed it and the conditions of stone tectonics.
Doricism expressed itself in the restraint with which parts worked together
in the tectonic system. It sought to enhance this expression by minimizing the
use of the traditional forms of pottery and the art of utensils transposed into
architecture. Because these formal types make something whole —an individ-
ual—out of the past to which they belong, when they are absent they are sym-
bols of the reverse. Doricism tended toward absolute monumentality, which it
strove to achieve not merely through the size and massive strength of its stone
structures but also through indirect means: the monumental pegma lacked the
connections and connecting symbols that traditionally characterize something
movable (see “Tectonics,” § 137).
It follows from this that Doricism, having achieved self-awareness, needed
the contrast provided by Ionicism, that its nature was dependent on this con-
trast and could be grasped only through it.
This explains the almost complete disappearance of all of those architec-
tural elements with which pre-Doric and even archaic-Doric stone monu-
ments had been rather richly outfitted. No longer did columns have the pre-
Doric base that remained customary in Italy; it was replaced by a general
stepped plinth connecting the columns, which grow from the plinth like the
prongs of a rake. Apart from the abacus, the only indispensable mediating ele-
ment between the supporting columns and the supported framework of the
ceiling and roof beams was still the echinus, concluding and linking at the
same time. It made its appearance connected directly to the column’s tapered
collar by three or four sharply undercut fillets, without a mediating cavetto
molding and without a Pelasgian astragal, which had been abandoned earlier.
At the same time it became more powerful, first of all through an exaggerated
bulging and soft swelling (an unhappy attempt as it was too material an
expression of the conflict of forces in play here); with time, as a sense of form
matured, it displayed that noble muscularity, vigorous and masculine, that is
nowhere more beautifully demonstrated than in the late temples of this period.
By the time of the celebrated Attic-Doric monuments this feeling had already
begun to ossify.
The energy of the Doric echinus is further enhanced by the multiple repeti-
tion of circular sinkages that cut into the column a little below the point at
which the flutes conclude; they offer the eye a restful caesura without disturb-
ing the upward striving of the flutes. These two or three sinkages in the hypo-
trachelium are sure indicators of the group that concerns us here and are
unique to it alone.*?

aie
 Semper

Apart from the echinus, the developed style features only the carved wreath,
which was permitted to dominate the cornice because it symbolized corona-
tion.5° The same wreath decorated the capital of the antas. This mediating
element was not used in the oldest Doric temples but was first taken up out of
a desire for a stronger architectural connection between the (originally iso-
lated) cella and the columnar peristyle. Together with the carved crowning
wreath below the abacus, it distinguished works of this period from earlier
ones. We also find the carved Doric wreath used elsewhere for the same pur-
pose, but only on parts of the interior: for instance, to crown the entablature
and the cella walls under the ceiling joists of the peristyle and similarly on the
joists as an upper termination.
Here too, as is almost always the case, abuse triumphed over wise modera-
tion. Carved wreaths that are inordinately heavy or large, or too frequently
employed, are signs that distinguish the oldest examples of this group from
later ones, on which the same leaf form is reduced to the light Doric cymatium.

SURVIVING WORKS FROM THIS PERIOD

This style begins with the ponderous works of Doric art mentioned above. I
am thinking of the temple in Corinth and the Temple of Artemis in Syracuse.
They have been defined above as transitions or preparatory jumps.

TEMPLE OF ZEUS, SELINUS

Although still archaic in plan and detailing (which is why it was mentioned
earlier), it belongs to this group because of its norm. Tapering very marked
(upper diameter: 0.65 of the lower). Abaci very wide (2.7 modules), so the
spaces between them are only a little more than half their width (1.85 mod-
ules), though the columns are widely spaced. The echinus is strictly archaic,
still shallow, although already taller than the abacus, with deep flutes and one
sinkage. Still some Ionic details inside.5!

TEMPLE OF HERCULES, AGRIGENTUM

Cella already developed, columns markedly tapered, as in the Temple of Zeus,
but with almost no entasis. Abacus: 2.5. Echinus high, with a tight profile,
although still with archaic vaulting. Only two fillets, no cavetto, only one
sinkage.

TEMPLE OF ZEUS, AGRIGENTUM*®?

Colossal, pseudoperipteral, with strictly hieratic atlantes inside as ceiling sup-
ports. Very similar to the previous temple in its details, although the inade-
quacy of the material used for such a colossal building had a deleterious
effect.
Column tapering one-quarter (upper diameter: 0.75). Abacus not wide,
thus the echinus is very high and steep with four fillets, without cavetto or
sinkage.

776
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

TEMPLE OF POSEIDON, PAESTUM4

Marked tapering, almost without entasis. Abacus strongly projecting; its
height one-sixth of width. Echinus not high (including fillets: height of aba-
cus), noble, elastic, but curved, without cavetto, with three sinkages and four
downward-profiled fillets. Twenty-four flutes, no longer archaically shallow
but deep. Developed cella plan. Peculiarly shaped wreath, more like cavetto.
In the interior are found cavetti and egg-and-dart moldings.

TEMPLE OF ATHENA, SYRACUSE°®

Marked tapering, little entasis. Although the abacus projects considerably, it
is narrower than the lower diameter. Height is one-sixth of width. Echinus
(without the fillets) higher than the abacus, less nobly profiled than in the
Temple of Poseidon. Four blunt fillets, three sinkages. Twenty flutes. Anta
capitals very clumsy. Developed cella plan, therefore peripteral. Entablature
mutilated, cornice missing.

TEMPLE OF JUNO LACINIA, AGRIGENTUM°$§

Echinus powerful and very nobly profiled. Three sinkages at the column neck-
ing. Entablature mutilated, with predominant architrave. Norm old-fashioned,
average height, with large intercolumniation. Probably older than the above
temples.

TEMPLE OF CONCORDIA, AGRIGENTUM (FROM MY OWN MEASUREMENTS)9°7

Columns only slightly tapered, without marked entasis, abacus not very wide,
tightly profiled echinus of the same height as the abacus, calculated to the ring
garland. No sinkages. Space between capitals: width of abacus. Mature cella
layout. Norm medium high and columns widely spaced with heavy entabla-
ture, therefore still archaic.

TEMPLE AT SEGESTA
Imperfect, but with the most noble proportions. Capitals powerful, striking
a happy medium between excessive ornateness and stiffness. Fillets rather
marked and too high up. Uncertain how many sinkages. Abacus moderate.
Tapering slight. Cella no longer known but was probably peripteral. Norm
square, midway between the archaic norm and the norm typically found in
the transition to the developed style (temples of Artemis and Athena in
Syracuse, Neptune in Paestum, and others).58

SOUTHERN TEMPLE ON THE WESTERN HILL, SELINUS*?

Fully developed style. Slightly tapered columns, moderate abacus. Echinus:
height of the abacus including the first fillet. Tightly and steeply profiled.
Only three fillets and two sinkages, below which the fluting is shallow at the
top but becomes deeper. Little or no entasis. Entablature unusually heavy for
this period. Gable height one-eighth of base.
 Semper

SOUTHERN TEMPLE ON THE EASTERN HILL, SELINUS®

Again fully developed Doricism. Tapering even less marked, abacus wider,
echinus with four fillets and only one gorge, not as high as the last described
temple, very tightly profiled, almost straight with a slightly truncated curve.
Foliated capital in the antas still heavy. Entablature lighter, columns some-
what taller, distance between the columns only slightly larger. Gable height
one-eighth of base of triangle.

TEMPLE ON AEGINA
This building and the few other surviving examples of pure Doric temples on
the mainland of Greece (not Ionicizing Attic) share an archaic norm with
widely spaced columns, although the proportions of the lower parts of the
buildings relate to each other quite differently.°' The differences in their indi-
vidual detailing are equally marked, and this shows most clearly in the capi-
tals, the most characteristic feature of the buildings.
Thus the Aeginetan temple has archaic, widely spaced columns, but the
column heights are greater than anything we have encountered so far (with
the exception of the enigmatic structure on Corfu). Equally new is the rela-
tively diminutive entablature, compared to the columns. The high heavy echi-
nus with a moderately wide abacus is also new. The carved wreath, where it
occurs (on the anta capitals as a crowning for the cornice), has already shrunk
to a Doric cyma, although it is still heavy.°2

TEMPLE OF ZEUS, OLYMPIA (FROM MY OWN MEASUREMENTS)

Widely spaced columns, marked tapering, broad abacus, echinus gently but
nobly proportioned, with four Attic fillets and three sinkages.
Height of columns uncertain, but probably considerable; light entablature.
The foliate wreath on the anta capitals has a strange ogeelike curve with a
cavetto above it (see woodcuts).

Column and anta capitals at Olympia (my own measurements)

TEMPLE AT BASSAE (PHRYGIA)

Built by Ictinus, thus Ionic-Attic but with old-Doric elements. Here too the
entablature approaches a proportion of one-third of the column height, devi-
ating from the heavier norm of Magna Graecia. Abacus narrow (only two

778
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

modules) and high; echinus light, rising almost in a straight line, with four
Attic fillets and three Doric sinkages. Carved wreath similar to that of the
Temple of Zeus, with crowning cavetto. Interior predominantly Ionic.

5. Attic-Doric Style
In the developed Doric style, the norm oscillates around a square with a
twelve-module baseline, so to speak; in the case of the Attic-Doric style, vari-
ations around a fifteen-module square can be observed. Early on, when the
height of the developed Doric order is divided by the length of the lower line
of the architrave, the ratio of the sections is 2:1 (later it climbs higher). Just so,
the Attic norm gradually approaches a ratio of 3:1 for the parts mentioned;
indeed in early works the large part is somewhat smaller and the small part
larger than this ratio suggests. Without this distinction the Attic norm would
be archaic-Doric.
Similarly, there is also a partial return to the oldest traditions. For instance,
instead of the significant swelling of the markedly tapering Doric shafts and
of the cushion capitals, we find less significantly tapered columns, scarcely
deviating from a straight line; they are active only in that they enliven things.
We also find the readoption of many mediating elements abandoned by severe
Doricism, such as egg-and-dart moldings, rising and falling waves (ogees),
cavetti, circular moldings complemented by and ornamented with sculpture
and color, and other things.
The reconciliation of the two opposite extremes of the Greek national con-
sciousness — lending spirit to Doric power and the regularity of types to Ionic
grace and individual expression — required that the material serve as a media-
tor, and only white marble could do this.
This noblest of building materials, used earlier for Ionic temples in Asia
Minor, was probably first introduced by Peisistratus for the design of an
essentially Doric work, the Temple of Zeus in Athens. The properties of this
stone —its strength and fine grain, its homogeneity —did not merely permit
subtler and more precise detailing, they also allowed a return to a longer
architrave span and more open intercolumniation, corresponding to the Ionic
spirit. The properties of porous limestone —the primary Doric building mate-
rial—may not have necessitated the compactness and closely spaced columns
of the pure Doric temple, but they did motivate the change. Pure Doric tem-
ples are in the poros style, and Attic-Doric ones are in the marble style.
The poros style not only led to closer column spacing but also affected the
width of the abacus. This was not simply because the points of support for the
abacus were pushed closer together,’ but because the style gave the abacus
the required thickness (or rather, the thickness necessary for the eye, given the
height and length of the architrave), which in turn determined how far the
capital projected. At the outset the Ionic-Doric marble style required that its
spans be broader, then that the lintels’ visible underparts be narrower, and as
a result it demanded smaller capitals with steeper supporting profiles. In addi-
tion, stone coffered ceilings with their boldly spaced joists resulted from the

US,
 Semper

material and therefore were chiefly Ionic. We know that the ceilings and roofs
in severe Doric temples were not made of stone but of terra-cotta with a tim-
ber frame. In the choice of marble as a building material I also see a return to
old abandoned traditions, since this material was used in Pelasgian times, at
least for decorative purposes (and even for columns). The art produced during
the Attic golden age, as has often been noted in this book, often involved the
revival of old and abandoned traditions because such traditions provided the
desired basis for a more idealized conception and helped to transcend the real-
ism of the present.®°
I will now simply list the most distinguished of the surviving Attic monu-
ments, without pursuing their characteristics in detail and without going into
unnecessary new ecstasies about their grandeur and beauty, as so much that is
sublime and profound (but also much that is long and shallow) has already
been written about them and can be read in our art books.
Temple of Theseus, built by Cimon shortly after the Persian wars.°7
So-called Temple of Themis, Rhamnus; the restoration by the Society of
Dilettanti shows a temple in antis, walls made of polygonal marble blocks,
probably older, pronaos added.°8
So-called Temple of Nemesis, Rhamnus. Building period unknown.°?
Athenian Parthenon, under Pericles.”°
Temple at Sunium, building period unknown. This remarkable building,
whose proportions are even lighter than those of the Parthenon, also shows
archaic features in some details, which persuaded Ross to treat it as very
ancient (even pre-Homeric!).”7! This would mean that its character has been
completely falsified by the restoration, which is quite possible.72

6. Alexandrian Doricism
The Doric style reached its limits in Atticism and could develop no further in
that direction. It also ceased to be a truly hieratic temple style even before
the Macedonians achieved hegemony and tended to serve only profane art.
As this meant that this system of stone tectonics developed for the temple
had to be adapted to secular building, the expression of sublimity associated
with typical monumentality had to be sacrificed to an extent. In return it
gained the suppleness architecture needs as it moved toward a more distinc-
tive multiplicity of expression. This opened a new path of architectural
development stressing light decoration and graceful charm, a path by which
architecture returned to its origins and became once more what it had been
for the Pelasgians and Etruscans, namely, a tectonics of mixed timber and
stone. In the Greco-Italic cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, the Doric was
still the dominant style for secular buildings, but only one Doric temple
(which was already in ruins at the time of the destruction of Pompeii) has
been found so far.
With the exception of the ruins of a Doric temple at Pompeii that can no
longer be reconstructed, perhaps the only late specimens of the Doric temple

780
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

style worth mentioning are the ruins of the Temple of Zeus at Nemea and
those of a small Temple of Nike near the stadium in the new capital of Messene,
founded by Epaminondas.73
The Corinthian order had already taken over from the Doric; in fact it can
be seen as a realistic and Asiatic modification and in a certain sense a further
development of the Doric (see under “Corinthian”).

Doric Examples from the Late Period

Temple of Zeus at Nemea.’4 Date not confirmed. Unusually slender columns,
light entablature, details already shallower, thus correctly ascribed to the late
period.
Temple of Nike in Messene.’5 The surviving fragments are insufficient to
reconstruct the system. Intercolumniation about five modules. Abacus crowned
with a molding. Steep, straight echinus. Three shallow fillets, no sinkage.
Insignificant column tapering. Sunken guttae.
Portico of Philip on Delos. Similar.
Portico of the peribolos of the Doric temple in Pompeii. Entablature with
timber architrave underlay. Strange profiling, markedly Ionic with deeply
hollowed scotia and fillets. It remains to be seen whether this and other Pom-
peian cornices in the older style (very similar ones have also been found in
Sicily, for instance in Segesta and Acri) took their shapes from technical con-
cerns, such as the need to fix the obligatory stucco covering to the stone
core. The latter is often found covered with two and even three layers of
stucco, and the patterns were changed for each dealbatio (following the taste
of the times).76
It is characteristic of the cited temple norms that the archaic horizontal
parallelogram defined by the norm gradually assumed a form closer to a
square as the Doric style developed; in Magna Graecia and Sicily the change
came about by shortening the horizontal axis, while in Morea and Attica it
came about by extending the vertical axis.
If we take three very ancient temples—one at Assos and two at Selinus—
as starting points and average their very closely related norms, we have the
following norm for the archaic scheme:

15.5
9.11 + 4.57 = 13.68

A comparison of the Doric temples of Magna Graecia and Sicily shows that
despite all sorts of variations they increasingly approached a square norm
with sides of about 13.5—in other words, approximately the height of the
archaic norm. On the other hand, the Doric order in Greece proper aimed for
an equally square norm; while its sides did not correspond to the height of the
archaic norm, they did to its width, or nearly. With this not insignificant
observation of artistic statistics we conclude the section on the Doric stone
framework.

781
 Semper

§ 173 Ionic

Introduction
As the most recent research has quite rightly sought to prove that a pre-Doric
column and the associated stylistic elements existed before they were estab-
lished among the Hellenes, and as the true standpoint from which a perfect
Doricism can be understood is possible only by returning to its material and
formal origins, to the incunabula of conditions (in contrast to the theories
disseminated about it by antique and modern formalists), we must logically
follow this approach for the Ionic style as well—to cope with those, for
example, who see the Ionic column only as a kind of coiffured and adorned
Doric column, a toilet item for the civilized tribes of Asia, invented to provide
a contrast between the feminine Ionic grace and the masculine Doric grace.
It is probably impossible to deny the early influence of speculative formal-
ism on the further development of the most ancient art types passed down by
tradition and suited to the Ionic order. All the magic of the universally victori-
ous Graces of Hellenic art would be required to transport the realistic para-
phrases of certain ideas contained in the oldest formal types—some of which
are quite matter-of-fact or even tasteless—out of prose and back into the
realm of idealism.”” Only because these fictions had so early and so large an
influence on the development of the Ionic order can we be certain that they
were inspired and created by older and more naive expressions of the same
idea. The importance of grasping this will not be doubted by any able to per-
ceive how the perfect art of the Greeks (in Attica) consciously turned back
from the symbolic braid to the oldest types of art, taking them up again
through a purified conception and in a more elevated way. This general ten-
dency of Attic art is expressed especially clearly in the Attic-Ionic column.

The Ionic Standing Column (Stele)

The Ionic order also begins with the stele, the single standing column used as
a vase base, a candelabra, or an altar. Beyond some surviving stone steles with
volute capitals of distinctly ancient shape, there are numerous representations
of such memorials in Assyrian, Persian, Etruscan, and Hellenic wall paintings
and vase paintings.
If we compare these individual columns to movable supports of similarly
ancient shape, and if we then consider examples in which the Ionic column is
already a part of an immovable structural pegma, any doubts about the origin
of the typical formal parts of the Ionic order vanish. It arose from the crowning
concluding palmette (in other words, from a purely decorative form symboliz-
ing upward termination) and from the gradual reshaping of the volute chalice
(bearing at first only a light palmette) into a column capital bearing a beam.
How far these forms originally were from the pillows of the baroque is evi-
dent from the often extremely arbitrary variety in the use of the spiral as a
capital decoration on Assyrian wall panels and Hellenic vases, including
Persian volute capitals, to which we can add Persian volute capitals, as well.

782
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

UY

Stele from the shrine of Artemis Limnatis

For all of their variety, none even remotely suggests a rolled and bound cushion.
And there are many capitals in the old Greek style that show no trace of it
either.78 Therefore some of our number (that is, scholars of art) have too
hastily declared them to be monstrosities, late instances of bad taste. Examples
include the volute capital whose appearance is the same on all four sides; it is
called Roman even though it appears on very old Greek works, such as the
so-called Monument of Theron at Agrigentum.”? Its motifs suggest that it was
probably among the very earliest variations on this art-form, an attempt to
shape the Ionic column for peripteral use, a scheme to which it is unquestion-
ably better suited than is the cushion capital more commonly found on Greek
buildings and originally devised only for hypostyle and metastyle use. We
will return to this matter shortly. Here it should just be noted that according
to that loftiest and noblest conception of this motif, namely, the Attic, the
tucked-up cushion disappears again and is replaced by the spiral, an abstract
expression of supple and elastic strength: it offers resistance without violence,
yields and returns, always bearing its burden, repeated many times, next to
and inside of one another.®°

783
 Semper

It is worth noting that this Attic readoption of the volute decoration’s

obviously older shape —which had been superseded for a time by the foppish
cushion idea—coincides with what we see on Assyrian metal structures and
on the Persian columns that imitate them. Those Attic volutes, as well as the
Persian-Assyrian ones, are to a certain extent empaestic works —at least their
articulation and connections fully correspond to the techniques of beating
and soldering metal (see pp. 328 ff.).
In the case of the Ionic and Doric orders, there is now absolutely no doubt
that their formal parts originated before the introduction of monumental
stone tectonics. It is equally certain that the transition to the latter was medi-
ated by the same transitional members, partly via the mixed style (wooden
entablature supported by stone columns), partly via grotto architecture, where
the problem of the stone roof borne by columns was initially solved only in a
sculptural sense.

The Mixed Style

We do not, it is true, have the sort of documentary evidence for the mixed
stone-and-timber Ionic style that Vitruvius’s comments on the Etruscan temple
canon provide for the pre-Doric mixed style. Nevertheless, the actual surviv-
ing remnants of mixed tectonic systems bear the same relation to the Ionic
order that the affected Etruscan column style does to the Doric. This is a ref-
erence to the Persian columns we have already mentioned, which are of great
significance to our consideration of this issue, principally because they were
undoubtedly used as supports for wooden ceilings in hypostyle and metastyle
buildings, but zot in peripteral ones. It is clear from the rooms in which they
were used that they were intended to bear and support the interior ceiling tim-
bers of a hall or (almost the same function) to support the joists of a porch.
But even if their context leaves us uncertain about their nature, their form—
particularly the form of their capitals — dispels any doubts. This forked capital
states clearly that the scheme was not peripteral, that is, it lacked a circling
activity that returns upon itself. The dominant feature is a radial effect or a
related straight-line and parallel effect. Even without considering its formal
symbolism, the function of these Persian capital forms would lead us to the
same conclusion. Moreover, in Achaemenid rock tombs, at least, they are clearly
intended for metastyle use.*!
Ionic volute capitals express the very same thing: their basic idea is the
same as that of Persian capitals. There is no doubt that the Ionic order, like its
barbarian-realistic variant in Assyria and Persia, is by nature hypostyle and
metastyle, mot peripteral.82
The old-Ionic entablature without a frieze also suggests this interior func-
tion: a supporting beam added after the development of the capital volutes
and functioning as the support for the transverse joists, which are expressed
externally on the front side of the metastyle columnar hall as joist heads
(mutules; later, dentils).83

784
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

IONIC ROCK FACADES

The pre-Ionic, essentially Asiatic motive just described, like its pre-Doric
equivalent, most probably became a part of the complete lapidary style when
it was combined with sculpture to outfit rock tombs with decorative column
portals. We do not wish to return to the often cited royal tombs at Persepolis,
and we will also pass over the tombs in the Kidron valley near Jerusalem,
hewn from a lively limestone, even though they display a remarkable mixture
of Doric, Ionic, and barbarian elements, and even though the strangely con-
fused metallic style of their decorative fittings is of great relevance to the ques-
tions that concern us here. We will pass them over because their great age has
not yet been adequately confirmed. Instead we will give our undivided atten-
tion to the Ionic stone monuments of Lycia, to which more careful scrutiny
has recently been encouraged by Fellows, Texier, and [Edward] Falkener,
among others. They are perhaps the only surviving early Ionic monuments.
Apart from a few remnants of the Samian sanctuary of Hera, probably none
of the Ionic monuments so far discovered precedes the fifth century, and the
heyday of this style began as early as the end of the seventh century.
The Lycian rock facades at Telmessus, Antiphellos, and Myra are Ionic as
far as certain characteristic formal elements, but these features appear in con-
junction with other elements that were either abandoned by the Ionic style or
completely transformed by it. At first glance their uneasy proportions and the
handling of their individual forms suggest /ate reminiscences created through
a faulty understanding of craftsmanship (rough barbarian imitations of Greek
Ionic models), but on closer examination quite the contrary is true: they
betray the most distinct features of an originality that—combined with
archaic and foreign admixtures and the still Asiatic character of some of their
sculptural and pictorial elements—compels us to view them as examples of
early Ionic building.

Tonic Stone Tectonics

Early on, it seems, unmixed stone tectonics proper was used on an enormous
scale in the Ionic colonial states of Asia Minor. The oldest known information
about this is linked to the design of colossal temples whose building history
was allegedly communicated to posterity by the architects themselves. Although
none of these writings has come down to us, some important notes have
survived through later writers, particularly Vitruvius. They supply us with
the names of builders, the buildings’ general plan, and even with individual
details of their construction, although these are usually confined to technical
matters and give no information about proportions or decorations.*4
Vitruvius relates a dark and somewhat confused tale of the construction of
a common shrine by the Ionic colonies on the coast of Ionia shortly after their
foundation.
He says it was built according to the “genus” that was first used by chance
in the (old) Temple of Hera in Argos and later became general in Achaea,
before the introduction of a definite law for column orders (cum etiam num

785
 Semper

non esset symmetriarum ratio nota [as at that point the mathematical ratio of
symmetries was not yet known]). Yet in this case the Jonians had themselves
invented the lacking column proportions they needed to build this Doric tem-
ple, taking the proportions of a (six-foot-tall) man as the norm and giving the
column a height of six times its lower diameter. They named this order Doric.
Later, when building the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, a new approach was
tried, analogous to its predecessor except that female proportions were used
and the column height was equal to eight times its diameter.85 The base was
dressed with a spira (as if with a shoe) and the capital was decorated with
volutes (like bound braids of hair) and adorned in a feminine way with deco-
rated cymatia (like cowlicks), but the shaft of the column was fluted to sug-
gest a matronly pleated garment.
Thus the orders (or modes) were conceived as contrasting male strength
and simplicity with female grace and delicacy. Later the proportions of both
orders were rendered lighter and more delicate. Among other changes, the
height of the Doric column was revised to equal seven diameters, the Ionic
nine, and so on.
As to the formal symbolism woven into this myth, let us acknowledge it
and let it pass (having conceded above its undeniable influence on the further
development of existing architectural forms). Let us instead emphasize the
following as the most important lessons:
Myth ascribes the invention of a certain genus of temple building to the
Dorians of the Peloponnese and, in the genus of the Doric temple, the estab-
lishment of columnar orders is ascribed to the Jonians of Asia.
What should we understand here by the genus doricum, that “chance”
Doric invention? It cannot be the Doric column with its triglyph entablature,
because the one thing the Ionians did not have for this was a model. Left to
their own devices in reproducing the Doric genus and choosing the columns
necessary for it, they used it in the Ionic manner, even later on. Furthermore,
the genus doricum could have referred only to a particular type of building, a
specific temple form. This turns out to have been the case, as the roof of the
genus doricum is that of the peripteral Hellenic-Doric temple, which we have
already described (§ 172) as the core and essence of Hellenic architecture.
At the same time, the legend contains a suggestion of an especially slender
Doric column used by the Ionians before the adoption of the Ionic volute col-
umn, and we may consider the regenerated Attic-Doric column as its succes-
sor. The famous Temple of Hera on Samos was presumably still faithful to
this early Ionic canon with Doricizing details. Vitruvius expressly describes it
as Doric, but modern scholars will not accept this and because a column with
an old-Ionic base has survived they impugn his ancient authority. But the cap-
ital of this column has a powerful Doric echinus (though with plastic egg-and-
dart decorations) that seems far too strong to take an Ionic cushion; it
probably carried a square Doric abacus, whose existence can unfortunately
no longer be proven. Otherwise we would surely see the ruins of this Samian
building as an example of the old Ionic-Doric temple style.86

786
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

This temple, probably pseudodipteral,8” was built somewhat earlier than

the more famous Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, where Theodorus, the second
architect of the Temple of Hera on Samos, was called in as an adviser at its
foundation.’8 This temple was completely Ionic and was probably the first in
which volute columns and their entablature (originally the interior column
norm) were used peripterally; it may also have been the first temple with stone
ceiling joists. For this reason it was considered necessary to abandon the old
pseudodipteral layout (intended to support a wooden ceiling, not stone joists)
and to take up the dipteral form by interposing a second inner row of col-
umns. The process of carving and transporting the massive stone beams,
which were probably used for the first time in this temple,®? rightly became
the subject of detailed technical discussion.?° Such a discussion would cer-
tainly have taken place in connection with the Temple of Hera—which was
older and not much smaller —if a stone ceiling had been used for its pteron.
Alterations were made to this ancient Ephesian shrine even before the
Herostratid fire. After this fire it was completely rebuilt to the Alexandrian
taste, which is confirmed by a comment of Strabo’s that the old columns were
sold and the proceeds contributed to the building fund. But this Alexandrian
work has also disappeared from the face of the earth without a trace.
Probably much of the uncertainty associated with the Lycian tombs, and
even with the so-called Harpy Tomb in Xanthus, also surrounds the propor-
tions and detailing of the ancient temple.*! Short and strongly tapered columns
placed far apart, with tall and heavy bases and heavy volute capitals; probably
also a friezeless entablature with dense rows of cornice supports that looked
like beam ends.?2
Just as we do not have sufficient grounds for judging these most ancient
works (the few that can be counted as belonging to this period), so is it diffi-
cult, working from surviving works, to pursue the Ionic order through its
later transitional stages as we did the Doric.*3
For most of the Ionic works in Asia Minor, whose system is still recogniz-
able, are of late origin, in fact Alexandrian or even Roman. The Attic and
Peloponnesian examples form a distinct group that, just like the Doric order,
follows the older canon toward an ennobled development and refinement.
Ionic marble tectonics had to create for itself a norm different from that
used in Doric poros tectonics. Broader and lighter epistyles, which led to more
slender supports set farther apart, were just as necessary for the material as
they were appropriate to its inner spirit.
The corresponding development took place not suddenly but gradually,
and based on the existing monuments (notwithstanding their incompleteness)
we believe we can trace these gradual transitions from the old Doric norm
through a middle Ionic to a late Ionic.
For the first, the distance between the first and third columns in a row, cal-
culated from center to center, is equal to the average height of the order from
the stereobate (base) to the upper edge of the cornice’s cymatium.%* The stone
monuments of Lycia, the Harpy Tomb, and some ancient variations on the

787
 Semper

Ionic style in Sicily and Magna Graecia conform to this norm. It reappears in
the Attic-Ionic order.
In the second norm, four intercolumniations are equal to the average dis-
tance between the base and the uppermost edge of the cymatium. The temples
on Samos, at Priene, Teos, and Ephesus, and other works of the Ionic golden
age, approximate this canon.
In the late-Ionic canon, five intercolumniations serve as the average height
of the system. This is honored in Alexandrian and in most Roman works.
It is important to note here that if the intercolumniations of the Ionic order
are larger than the Doric (taking the module or lower radius of the column as
the unit), this relation is reversed if the height of the column is taken as the
unit of measurement.®5 This explains why, although the Ionic order does actu-
ally have columns farther apart than the Doric does, those dating from the
period in which they were fully developed appear to be closer together.
We will provide a number of the characteristics of the most important
Ionic works for which more or less complete data are available. The group of
Attic-Ionic monuments in which we recognize a revival and refinement of the
oldest forms, remains isolated.

Oldest Doric-Ionic Norm

A. IONIC ROCK TOMB PORTALS

Tomb of Amyntas at Telmessus in Lycia”®

Rock niche on whose smooth rear surface the portal in antis appears to have
been elaborated sculpturally.
Three steps, above them the stereobate, upon which is the portico. Two
columns between antas with crowning tympanum. Behind a blind door still
treated as a whole frame (the threshold is the lower lintel of the antepagment)
with panels, nails, and hardware carved in stone.

Norm follows Doric canon: 3x7=21

(17 + 4.2) = 21.2
Special features: Columns taper, losing about one-seventh of diameter, appar-
ently without entasis.
Base is heavy (two modules), Attic, but with a strongly dominant trochilus.
Capital heavy, two modules high, three modules wide, with deeply grooved
but straight volute band, and already bound with a string like a cushion.
Doricizing profile on the antas. Entablature without frieze; architrave with
only two zones, concluding in a Doric cymatium and molding. Above this
strong rafter heads, cornice, and crowning molding. Elements dully profiled,
which is explained by the awkwardness of sculpting the rock, which would
have been stuccoed and painted.

788
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

Second Rock Portal at Telmessus

Probably older than the first. Only two steps, no stereobate, otherwise very
similar.

Norm follows Doric canon: 3x 7.58 = 22.74

(19.5 + 4.9) = 24.4

Special features: Nonfluted columns taper by about one-seventh. Column

base precisely two modules with high plinth, steep trochilus, weak torus with-
out molding, and hypotrachelium. Capitals heavy, two modules high and 3%
wide, without plastic detailing, intended for painted decoration. Antas as
above, base profiled only at the front (as in some vase paintings) with Doric
capitals. Cornice as above. High gable decorations, palmettes only painted.

Rock Portal at Antiphellos

Among other extremely old rock monuments, an especially noteworthy gable
wall with two Ionic corner columns about twenty-one modules apart.

Norm follows Doric canon: 3x7 = 21

(16 + 4.55) = 20.55

Special features: Columns strongly tapered with only fourteen (Ionic) flutes.
Plinthless base, low, strongly projecting. Capitals very ancient with curved
volute band lower in the middle, as well as palmette decoration (see figure).
Architrave unarticulated with simple ovolo molding as conclusion. Above a
cornice with dentils and cavetto cymatium.

lonic order on a tomb at Antiphellos

789
 Semper

Large Rock Portal at Myra

Freely hewn gable beam, like a baldachin, supported on two columns at the
back. To the left and right of the center are two pilasterlike steles with lion
heads above them. These and all other sculptures in archaic Asiatic manner
(with the exception of a relief above the entrance, which probably dates from
later).

Norm follows Doric canon: DS

(16 + 5) =21

Height of (Attic) base one module. Height of capital two modules. The spiral
dips in the center, in archaic fashion.

B. BUILT MONUMENTS

So-Called Harpy Tomb at Xanthus in Lycia

Tetrastyle peripteral on a high stylobate. Module = 7.109 English inches.
About 6.5 modules between the columns.
The data needed to determine the norm for this tomb are lacking, thanks
to the incomplete condition of the writings mentioned earlier.

ieee eee aes

Gee ee
ey e

Special features: Columns very far apart and short. Heavy Ionic base
almost one diameter high; also clumsy capitals with double spiral bending
downward and strap cushion, in the manner of the (later) Attic columns of the
Erechtheum. Shafts strongly tapered with entasis running to one-sixth of an
inch (English). Entablature without frieze, very similar to the epistyles of the
Lycian rock facades, coffered ceiling with strangely naturalistic (painted)
ornamentation. Architrave covered with sculpture like that on the Doric temple
at Assos.

Heroon at Selinus (According to Hittorff)*”

Tetrastyle prostyle.

Norm: 17S)
(14.5 + 4.3) = 18.8

790
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

Special features: Attic base one module high, without plinth. Columns very
strongly tapered, between one-fourth and one-fifth. Capital with sunken spi-
ral, without the motive of the bound cushion. Only indicated, as it would have
been painted. Doric entablature with triglyph frieze.

Monument to Theron at Agrigentum

Doric entablature supported by four engaged Ionic columns on a high stereo-
bate.

Norm: 15
(12 + 4) = 16

Special features: Columns strongly tapered. Attic base, capitals without cush-
ions, the same on all four sides, with sweeping spirals.

So-Called Heroon of Phalaris at Agrigentum

Norm: 16
(14.3 + 4.3) = 18.8

Special features: Column details uncertain. Doric entablature.

Doric-lonic-Corinthian Temple at Paestum

Tetrastyle prostyle.

Norm: 20
(14+ 5)=21

Special features: Very ancient base with cushion and cavetto underneath as
trochilus. Round abacus beneath this.

eS

Stereobate of temple at Paestum

Capitals Ionic-Corinthian with busts between the corner volutes. Doric entab-
lature.
 Semper

Tay OF SSS
= Teo ies rin “a
OTT LGA
NAIL TILIA OI MNT MW
ILSOI,

UT
DLEPERPLLDLG,

a ———
pagaragayngng

Composite temple at Paestum

C. OLDER (LARGE-SCALE) TEMPLES FOLLOWING THE FIRST IONIC CANON?8

Temple of Hera on Samos

Probably still pseudodipteral with wooden entablature panels. Column diam-
eter 1.96 meters. Column height no longer known. Entablature no longer
extant. Columns 5.246 modules apart.

Norm: 20.984
(16 + 4.5)? = 20.5

Special features: Ancient high base with dominant richly fluted trochilus (see
figure). Shaft not fluted, strongly tapered. Capitals still Doric; echinus with
plastic egg-and-dart molding, still shallow and severe.9? Other ornamental
details likewise in severe style.

you | i
UD
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

Temple of Artemis in Ephesus

Octastyle dipteral.
Width of the temple (according to Pliny) 220 feet
Length 425 feet
Height of column shafts 60 feet
This is the measurement of the column-shaft monolith —about four modules
should be added for the base and capital. Overall the column height is eight
diameters, thus column thickness is around ten feet. If one subtracts one col-
umn width from the temple’s width of 220 feet, this gives seven intercolumni-
ations or 210 feet —thirty feet (six modules) each. 1!

Probable norm:1! 4x6=24

(16 + 5)? =21

Special features: High base, probably with dominant trochilus, as on the

Samian temple. Shafts in part monolithic. Depictions of the shafts on old
medallions indicate that a ring divided them at a point one-third of the way
along the shaft.!°3 Volute capitals with sunken spirals probably still heavy, as
on the Xanthus monument.
The norm of this temple shows it to be transitional between the Doric and
the first Ionic canon. Because of its boldness, a colossal stone framework with
such widely spaced columns was bound to be considered a wonder of the
world, and for the same reason it also leaves one’s sense of proportion unsat-
isfied. The proportions are more like those of a rock portal or a limited heroon
and had yet to achieve harmony with the colossal nature of the building.

Temple of Athena in Priene

Hexastyle peripteral.
Column diameter 4 feet, 8.2 inches (English).
Entablature uncertain.

Norm of facade, approximately:

4x 4.825 = 19.30
(16 + 4?) = 20.5

PIE:
 Semper

Special features: Base finest Ionic. Upper diameter: 0.754 of the lower column
thickness. Capitals very finely shaped, still with sunken volutes, but already
with bound cushions.

Propylaeum of This Temple

Probably a later work, but follows the old norm. Tetrastyle prostyle.

Norm:19 4.x 6.63 =26.6

(18 + 4) = 22

Special features: This building’s generous intercolumniation is due to its func-

tion as an entrance portal and its moderate proportions. The details suggest
that it was built in the Alexandrian period.

D. IONIC WORKS FOLLOWING THE SECOND IONIC NORM

BASIC SQUARE WITH SIDES OF FIVE INTERCOLUMNIATIONS

Didymaeum near Miletus‘

Decastyle dipteral; according to Strabo the grandest of all temples.!° Building
period unknown. Architects: Daphnis of Miletus and Paeonius of Ephesus.
Width of facade from the axis of one corner column to that of the other:
48.555 meters. Diameter of columns: 2.1 meters.
Entablature uncertain; only the very low architrave of the inner row of
dipteral columns has survived. The outer architrave was probably higher.

Probable norm, following the new canon:107

SYNC Soll = W7S)-S3539)

(19 RA i= 2355

Special features: All parts fully developed. Ionic base with high plinth over
one module high. Column slightly tapered. Cushion capitals, without sunken
spiral, already follow new canon, lower than the old.

Temple of Aphrodite at Aphrodisias

Octastyle peripteral.
Building period unknown.
Width of facade: 18.5 meters.
Column thickness: 1.123 meters.
Height of entablature not established.
198

Probable norm: 5 x 4.707 = 23.53

(20 + 42) = 24

Special features: Attic base with plinth. The peculiar profiling of the torus
points to the Alexandrian period. Column tapered less than one-sixth. Capi-
tals richly decorated with peculiarly shaped egg-and-dart molding.

794
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

Temple of Panhellenic Zeus at Aezani

The temple, an octastyle pseudodipteral with fifteen columns on its flanks, stands
ona broad platform! surrounded by a magnificent second inner peribolus.

Width: 20 meters calculated from axis to axis

Length: 34.5 meters of the former columns

Column thickness (bottom): 0.977 meters

Column thickness (top): 0.873 meters
Column height: 9.504 meters
Additionally, column height: ca. 19.5 modules
Entablature height: 3.7 modules

Front norm, following the old canon:

4x 5.85 = 23.4
(DLS ds Sh) Deh”

Side norm, following the new canon:

Sees
(1955 397)12103.2

Base of the temple at Aezani Leaf frieze on the

temple at Aezani

Special features: Base Ionic, with profile suggesting the late period.!!° Shaft
tapers very little. Capitals richly decorated with acanthus, over one module
high. Extraordinarily rich entablature, acanthus frieze, cornice with dentils,
and modillions above them.
The composite columns on the pronaos seem to indicate the Roman period,
but the treatment is still pure Greek.

US
 Semper

E. SOME ROMAN EXAMPLES

Temple near San Nicola in Carcere

Follows the first lonic norm almost exactly, namely:!!!

4x5.5=22
(19 + 4) = 23

Second Temple on the Same Site

Follows the second Ionic norm, namely:

S36 Dosh HGho)

(21 +5) =26

Temple of Fortuna Virilis

Norm: 5x 4.5 =22.5

(16 + 4) = 20

If it followed the old Ionic canon, it would be:

4x 4.5
= 18
(16 + 4) = 20

Temple of Saturn

Second canon, namely: 5x 4.8 = 24

(IDES. 9) = 22.9

F. ATTIC-IONIC ORDER

Temple on the Ilissus (According to Stuart)

Norm approaches the Attic-Doric canon, that is:

3 x 6.24 = 19.72
(16.5 + 4.5) = 21

Special features: High Attic base without plinth. The last step of the stylobate
serves as the base for all columns. The upper torus is horizontally fluted and
dominates the lower one.
Shaft slightly tapered, by not quite one-seventh. Capitals with sunken
spiral but with bound cushion, though not treated very realistically. Entab-
lature with frieze and high unarticulated architrave. Cornice without dentils,

796
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

but with subsidiary features (circular molding and wave) carved upon it.
Cymatium gone.

Temple of Nike in Front of the Acropolis

Probably the oldest surviving specimen of the Attic-Ionic order. Its norm is
still midway between those of the Doric and of the first Ionic canon.

Norm following Doric canon:

3x 5.98 = 17.94
(164525 Vie 24:25

Norm following old Ionic canon:

4x 5.98 = 23.92
(16 + 5.25) e015

Special features: High base, protruding little, without its own plinth, varying
between old-Ionic and Attic-Ionic shape, related to Samian base.
Shaft markedly tapered, around two-elevenths of the lower diameter.
Capitals similar to the previous example (the temple on the Ilissus). Entabla-
ture plain, without dentils, with dominant figured frieze. Ogee cymatium still
in existence.

Inner Order of the Temple near Phigalia

Follows the oldest (Doric) norm, that is:

So =
(16.8 + 3.6) = 20.4

Special features: Although it is the work of Ictinus and comes from the Peri-
clean period, it shows the ancient spirit of the order.

TW
WL \:

Base of the most ancient type, with the trochilus in cavetto form. Columns
short and markedly tapered, by about one-fifth of the diameter. Capitals
heavy, widely protruding, with a rising, outward-curving spiral. Above the
spiral, rather than an abacus to support the epistyle there is a scamillus."2 The
cushion motive is absent, or rather the capital is the same on all sides.18

UDI
 Semper

Propylaea in Athens, Interior Order

Following the Doric canon and norm:!!4

a7 Sal

ise ak

Special features: Base Attic, slightly projecting, upper torus fluted. It is sup-
ported by a circular trochilus, in the manner of the Samian base. Column
shaft finely shaped, moderately tapered, with moderate entasis. Capital with a
marked spiral, following the Asiatic-Ionic order (with cushion motive). Over
each set of three columns was an isolated architrave that did not project from
the walls. Above it, in an admirably wide span, the ceiling supports and rich
stone paneling.

Erechtheum, North Portico

Following the Attic-Doric canon, that is:!9

3 x 7.354 = 22.06
(19.5
+4.5) =24

East portico, following the oldest Ionic canon, that is:!"6

4x 5.988 = 23.952
(GSS) chA BY) Aa?

West portico, also following the old-Ionic canon, that is:

4x 5.988 = 23.952
(18 + 4.7) = 22.17

Special features of the Erechtheum orders. Attic bases without their own
plinths, joined by a shared threshold of steps. Rich torus decoration, partly
sculptural, partly painted and inlaid. Tapering and entasis of columns differ,
strongest on the half-columns of the west front. Capitals have deeply carved
double spirals. The cushion motive is almost abandoned here,!"” but is felici-
tously replaced by a strong torus, like strapwork, layered between the volutes
and the egg-and-dart echinus. Rich anthemion band under the pearl molding

798
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

of the neck."'8 Entablature without dentils, in the Attic manner, as in earlier

cited examples. Cymatium no longer extant. Rich stone ceiling panel on the
north portico.

This comparative survey should only be applied to the history of style cau-
tiously, since the proportions of stone tectonics in general, and those of mar-
ble tectonics in particular, are functions of absolute measures. For instance,
intercolumniations of less than three modules, which occur for the first time
on the magnificent temple in Priene, can no more be justified for small Ionic
monuments on technical grounds than they could for their function or beauty.
Thus the comparison of various norms shows us that the tight intercolumnia-
tion required by colossal dimensions was not initially recognized (Ephesus
and Samos); the norms were used in combination with the old height propor-
tions, which gave the system an almost Doric character (Priene). It was only at
a very late stage (Didyma, Aphrodisias, Aezani) that it was combined with
more slender column proportions and a lighter entablature (both as appropri-
ate to colossal marble construction as to close intercolumniation).
None of the Attic-Ionic works is colossal, and therefore the retention of
the ancient Ionic norm for their construction is proof of the high artistic spirit
of the Athenians, just as the closely placed columns of many fairly small
Roman monuments betray the misguided taste of those times.
Since we will return elsewhere (in volume 3) to the contrast between Dori-
cism and Ionicism, as expressed in the two main orders of ancient stone tec-
tonics, here we will restrict ourselves to summing up points made earlier. In
the Doric style the parts are absolutely dependent upon one another and on
the whole of the quite monumental stone pegma that the style demands; this
leads to the use, on the smallest details, of ancient linking and dividing sym-
bols borrowed from pottery and decorative wood tectonics. On the other
hand, other features are retained and modified in accordance with the spirit of
the style; they better express the uniformity and indissolubility of the system
(triglyphs with the guttae of the architrave that preceded them, and the joist-
heads that the triglyphs preceded in turn). The Ionic style also chose to use
and remodel some of these old traditional features in a monumental sense,
but taking into account the greater independence and right to individual exis-
tence of those parts that combine only willingly, as it were, to make a stone
pegma. They are not absolutely fixed but are characterized by their symbol-
ism as well. Thus the Ionic order is no less appropriate than the Doric to the
monumental concept, but its appropriateness is different; the Ionic is better
suited to a more refined material, such as marble, and above all to individual
development, a fundamental inclination of the Ionic.

§ 174 The Corinthian Style

This style too is ancient and prehistoric in its most evident characteristic
—the
bell capital with its surrounding carved wreath that seems to sustain the abacus

UD
 Semper

elastically and at the same time serves to crown the column as a whole. The
abacus also starts to introduce what is being supported by the column and, as
it were, represents it. This bell capital relates to the Doric kettle-shaped echi-
nus capital as the Doric cymatium (bent leaf) relates to the ovolo molding
with egg border; both express the same thing and both probably have their
origin in ceramics dating from the most ancient period of cultural history.
Only the former —the bell capital — adheres in a fairly realistic way to its most
ancient ceramic origin among decorative plastic forms. The Doric kettle capi-
tal, on the other hand, developed earlier into a strictly monumental structural
symbol set on the stone pegma (perhaps through the mediation of the potter’s
wheel).
In what is probably its most ancient form—the single or double carved
wreath without volutes —the Corinthian capital seems (like the Doric) to have
been created for peripteral use, although both were probably invented only to
crown an isolated stele or the base of a vessel.
The bell capital did not lose this peripteral character when the Corinthian
volute was invented. The latter proclaimed itself a somewhat Ionic hybrid
alongside the pure bell scheme, although it too may considerably antedate all
authenticated art history.2°
In this already composite form, the Corinthian capital probably found gen-
eral acceptance in Greece only in the time of Alexander or somewhat later, but
it remains to be seen whether we encounter more original, if not later examples
of this combination, in the well-known Italic terra-cotta capitals of this order,
or even in the stone capitals of various Roman temples of the republican
period. The great preference of the Romans for the Corinthian order appears
actually to depend in part on an older affinity for the tradition, to which they
invariably remained faithful in plastic decorative pottery. To be sure, it can also
be explained by the fact that it fully accorded with the practical-functional
and at the same time grandiose Roman manner, in the universalism of this
imperial nation— because of its realistic splendor, yet chiefly because it effort-
lessly transcended certain difficulties and stylistic limits associated with the
two older orders.
Indeed this is the actual Roman order, aithough generally only one variety
carries this name. It shows both Doric and Asiatic characteristics, like Rome
itself, for the latter is cosmopolitan Doric. It is a modification (carried out by
the refined taste of the late period of Hellenic culture) of the most ancient
building traditions still alive in the people’s consciousness; rapidly readopted
by the peoples that Rome subjugated, these traditions even survived, at least
in their formal elements, through the Middle Ages, albeit partly concealed
and alienated from their true meaning. This modification also permitted that
architectural sensibility — originally Indo-Germanic —still slumbering in the
people to rediscover itself for the first time: it was reawakened in the great
period of the Renaissance. By studying Roman antiquities, this new art grew
by handling antique models with a refreshing freedom, until it accumulated
its own wealth of ideas and acquired a brilliance that put even ancient art to

800
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

shame. Perhaps this freedom, which determined the very existence of Renais-
sance art, would already have been endangered if it had received its first impe-
tus from the purer but more exclusive forms of the Greek temples in Paestum

Detail of the temple at Patara

and Sicily, or if it had developed from the ruins of Athens or Asia Minor. For
architecture has indeed lost its creative inhibition by parroting those classical
works of ancient art and the art criticism that clings to them.
Vitruvius, in chapter 3 of book 4, states that some ancient architects rejected
the Doric order as mistaken and inconvenient, among them Arcesius, the
architect of the Temple of Asclepius at Tralles; Pythius, the builder of the
Temple of Athena in Priene and the Mausoleum in Halicarnassus; and Her-
mogenes, the famed architect of the Magnesian Temple of Artemis Leuco-
phryene and the Temple of Bacchus in Teos. In fact he says that Hermogenes
went so far as to modify materials prepared for a Doric temple in Teos and
built in the Ionic style, “not because the Doric lacks beauty or dignity, but
because it creates many difficulties in the spacing of the triglyphs and metopes.”
Although this note refers only to temples in Asia, the remnants, admittedly
rare, of buildings on ancient Hellenic soil dating from shortly before and dur-
ing Macedonian rule (the period into which the activities of these architects
fall) prove that at this time the Doric order was being retained only superfi-
cially. Thus the structural restrictions that it imposed no longer seemed intrin-
sically justified, soon seemed pointless and tiresome, and had to be sacrificed
to the spirit of the time.

801
 Semper

While the constraints imposed on the replacement were no fewer, they

were different —namely, because of the contradictions that arose from the
peripteral use of the Ionic columnar frame, originally without frieze and
hypostyle, a problem that the Greeks never overcame, even in their highest
art.22 And thus once the contrasts between Doricism and Ionicism had lost
their political-ethical significance, sentence was also passed on the Ionic order
on the same grounds of functionality. The above-mentioned masters of the
Ionian school were probably already aware of this, because their work includes
the first Greek examples of mixed Corinthian and Ionic details.!23
And thus this period saw not the invention but the definitive establishment
and spread of the actual ratio generis Corinthii—the Corinthian order—
which, as we have said, was based on things that had long existed, to the same
extent as its Doric and Ionic predecessors.
Among surviving early Corinthian works none is as important and instruc-
tive as the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens. The physiology of
this order can be so clearly read here that it appears to be, so to speak, a lap-
idary treatise on the subject, and it may well be that its creator had something
of the sort in mind!
The key to this monument is the crowning Corinthian element surmount-
ing the work: the omphalos, the middle support for the sacred tripod, for
which the whole monument serves as only a splendid base. 124
This crown contains the Doric-Corinthian leaf covering— an expression of
upward-striving tensile force!25 — intensified and repeated many times upward
and downward, ultimately as the most luxuriant acanthus foliage rampaging
out on every side between the three feet of the (missing) consecration vessel. It
is quintessentially the peripteral column in its plastic Corinthian conception.
The ideas contained in its base, shaft, and capital are summed up in this
column in a realistic and luxurious way appropriate to the spirit of the Alex-
andrian age. The monument’s individual columns are in complete harmony
with the work’s ingenious crown. They are the most lucid symbols of what
has often been described in this book, in that we recognize that they were
modeled on dedicatory columns and vase supports—in other words, modifi-
cations of the same basic idea contained in the omphalos on the roof. The
stalks of the shafts splay out like reeds under the capitals, a motif that is also
found in the Doric column, most clearly in its oldest form.
A second leaf covering is attached to this first one, and the acanthus foli-
age of the bell capital grows out of it just as on the top of the monument. But
for all the richness of inspiration shown by this monument as far as the new
order is concerned, it does not by any means appear perfect in itself. Apart
from much that is hesitant in the treatment of the leaf ornament and other
things (its framework is still the Ionic denticulated entablature, with slight
changes to the details), it does not relate in any way to the principle contained
in the supports, except through the theme and the bold treatment of the
sculpted Dionysiac frieze.
And this seems to have been the main difficulty in creating the new order,

802
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

as there is the greatest possible willfulness and insecurity in the treatment and
characteristics of the Corinthian entablature. Those who strove to transform
the Ionic into the Corinthian tried to achieve their goals through richer articu-
lation and sculptural abundance. They even thought of decorating the leaf
consoles, sometimes along with the Ionic dentils, sometimes without. Still,
everything was simply added arbitrarily to the old style and grew out of or
was conditioned by the new idea only indirectly.
Only one invention emerged entirely from the Doric-Corinthian idea, an
innovation (like so much that is quite justified) that again failed to find favor
in the eyes of our high judges of art, but has been condemned as a monstrosity
of late willfulness and appalling lack of taste. I mean the readoption of the
Doric idea of treating the frieze as a dynamically active element; in keeping
with the Corinthian spirit this means treating the frieze as a slightly project-
ing carved wreath striving elastically upward, as a slightly curved rising wave
that resiliently sustains the load of the roof framework and transfers it to the
epistyle. In this regard the recently discovered Temple of Zeus at Aezani, in
fact still Ionic but already tending markedly toward the Corinthian, is a valu-
able document for the history of style. As a columnar building it dates from
the good period, in which this motive was developed with the most decided
clarity and unparalleled splendor and beauty (see figure, p. 795, right).2° A
related example, which is probably still Alexandrian, is the remarkable colum-
nar building at Thessaloniki, whose frieze, in ogee form, consists of continu-
ous reedlike pipes.!27 If this treatment of the frieze, which appealed to the
Romans, can be called genuinely Corinthian, then so, conversely, can the
frieze this idea probably inspired, which takes the form of a continuous shal-
low torus. On it are depicted horizontal garlands of leaves, hanging fruit, and
the like, making it similar to the horizontal spiral of the Ionic cushion or the
braided torus of the Attic-Ionic capital, which is genuinely (if late) Ionic. Even
if mistakes and aberrations of taste in the use of these motives are all too fre-
quent, this cannot be blamed on the inventors, who were both ingenious and
directed by a correct sense of style. Certainly they were not surrendering to an
undefined desire for magnificence and innovation but clearly understood
their task.
Tall column proportions and a richly developed entablature are appropri-
ate to the magnificently sensual and grandiose Corinthian order, as is a cer-
tain functional breadth in the spacing of columns. These conditions explain
the order’s easily perceived return to the old-Ionic norm (appropriately modi-
fied in its internal articulation), which following the (ideal) scheme is:

4x 6.25 =25
(20
+ 5) =25

In keeping with the procedure established for the Doric and Ionic orders, we
provide the norms for some of the most important Corinthian systems and
their special features.

803
 Semper

Greek Examples

CHORAGIC MONUMENT OF LYSICRATES. BUILT AFTER 433 B.C.

A regular hexagon. Sides: 6.2 modules. Column: 20, entablature: 4.69.

Norm follows ancient-Ionic canon:

4x 6.2 = 24.8
(20 + 4.69) = 24.69

Special features: Circular pseudoperipteral. Attic base on a continuous grooved

socle. Character of acanthus sharp, thistlelike, somewhat dry. The same is true
of the profiling of the entablature. See page 802, above.

TEMPLE OF OLYMPIAN ZEUS IN ATHENS. BEGUN UNDER THE DIRECTION

OF THE ROMAN COSSUTIUS, CONTINUED BY ANTIOCHUS EPIPHANES
(176-164 B.C.), BUT ONLY COMPLETED UNDER HADRIAN
Total width of base (according to Stuart): 171 feet, 1.89 inches
Total length of same: 354 feet, 2.7 inches
Diameter of column: 6 feet, 6.85 inches
Distance between columns about 5% modules
Height of columns still unmeasured
Entablature no longer intact

Approximate norm: AX = 22.0

(19472 Su oie

Special features: Decastyle dipteral. Ionic base, shafts slightly tapered. Power-
fully modeled acanthus, sharp and broad-leaved. Abacus with pointed cor-
ners. Capital still low. Closeness of columns caused by colossal proportions.28

THE SO-CALLED INCANTADA AT THESSALONIKI

Probably the inner order of a building much like a basilica. Column diameter
only 2 feet, 4 inches.

Norm following the Doric canon:

3x 8.8 = 26.4
(18.5 + 4.5) = 23

Special features: Base Attic, shaft unfluted, capitals Greek, architrave with
three zones growing from bottom to top, simply crowned. Frieze in fluted
ogee form (see above, p. 803). Cornice with light denticulations. In the
entablature a cube over every column with caryatid figures. The large interco-
lumniation is explained by the monument’s function as a stoa and also is in
keeping with its smallness.

804
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

Roman Examples

REPUBLIC

So-Called Temple of Vesta, Tivoli

Round Peripteral with Eighteen Columns
Diameter through the center of columns: 11.974 meters
Lower column diameter: 0.756 meters
Upper column diameter: 0.650 meters

Norm: 4x 5.5 = 22.0

(20.730 + 3.355) = 24.085

Special features: Tufa work. Base Ionic, given a peculiar rectangular-angular

treatment, obviously only the stone skeleton for the stucco in which the form
was first fully expressed. The same condition explains many other features of
Italian tufa structures. Shaft fluted, tapers only one-seventh but with strong
swelling. Capital still in the terra-cotta style, curled leaf decoration (see p. 801).
Rich frieze with festoons and bucrania.

AUGUSTAN PERIOD

So-Called Temple of Vesta in Rome

Round Peripteral with Twenty Columns
Lower radius of columns: 0.478 meters
Upper radius of columns: 0.41 meters
Height of columns: 10.388 meters
Radius of the circle of the column centers: 7.889 meters

Presumed norm following Ionic canon:

SX L6i= 25.80
(21.73 + 4.07) = 25.80?

Special features: Marble. Base Ionic, shaft fluted. Capital copied from Greek
acanthus. Date uncertain. The closeness of its columns may indicate the post-
Augustan period.

Temple of Augustus at Pola

Tetrastyle Prostyle
Column thickness: 2 feet, 3 inches (Eng.)

Norm: 4x 6.125 = 24.5

(20.833 + 4.666) = 26

Special features: Marble. Bases Attic, with plinth. Shafts not fluted. Leaf deco-
ration curled in the Augustan style.

805
 Semper

Portico of the Pantheon in Rome

Octastyle, columns of granite. Capitals, bases, and entablature marble. Col-
umn thickness 4 feet, 6 inches.

Norm: 4 x 6.75 =27.00

(19.55 + 4.54) = 24.09

Special features: Attic base, columns unfluted, leaf decoration already dis-
tinctly Roman.

REIGN OF NERO: THE GOLDEN AGE OF ROMAN ART

So-Called Frontispiece of Nero?

Column thickness: 6 feet
Column spacing: 6.3 modules°

Norm: ASCOrS =e
(20 + 4.875) = 24.875

Special features: Luna marble. Base Attic, unfluted columns, tapering one-
seventh. Capital with developed Roman acanthus. Entablature in the noblest
style, simple and powerful; acanthus meander in the frieze. Otherwise, only
the parts are decorated.'!

FLAVIAN PERIOD

The Three Columns at the Foot of the Palatine

(Usually Described as Remnants of the Temple of Jupiter Stator)
White marble. Diameter of columns: 4° 5’ 9” (Berl.)

Following the new Ionic canon, namely the norm:

5 x 5.166 = 25.830
(ORS 225) = 25.225

Special features: Stylobate under the columns. Richest acanthus plant ara-
besques, twining around each other, as on the Monument of Lysicrates.
Architrave with rich palmette band in the middle zone. Frieze vertical and
undecorated, cornice already overladen with dentils, modillions, fluted corona.
Cymatium smooth but with lions’ heads.
The new Ionic norm seems to dominate in Rome from this time on, espe-
cially in temples of a significant scale. Thus the Temple of Vespasian in the
Forum follows the norm:

5x 4.8 =24
(20 + 4) =24

806
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

and the adjacent Temple of Concord:

5x5 =25

G07 s'e 05
Under Hadrian a basic change took place. Because of the emperor’s eclectic
dilettantism, Roman architecture once more came under direct Greek influ-
ence. The widely spaced columns of the Temple of Venus and Rome, designed
by the emperor himself, can probably be attributed to this. Yet this influence
was not lasting and in the works built under Antoninus a return to the new-
Ionic norm may be discerned. The Temple of Antoninus and Faustina follows
the norm:

5 x 5.042 = 25.21
(9224S) = 2.7,

After this time the architectural forms purified by Hellenism and removed
from ancient traditions and tectonics began their irresistible degeneration and
decline, and there is little point in pursuing them here.

§ 175 The Roman Triumphal Column

The idea for the combination of the Doric-Corinthian bell shape with the
Ionic volute form of the capital—the outstanding characteristic of the so-
called composite or Roman triumphal order—is to be found in some of the
oldest examples of Ionic columns known to us. Even in the Athenian Erech-
theum the anthemion decoration of the column’s lightly curving neck, under
the echinus of the Ionic volute capital, differs from the Corinthian acanthus
decoration that appears in the same place and in the same combination,
except that the former is severely stylized and the latter is realistic and more
luxuriant. But both express the same thing.
Just as ancient is the climbing spiral that curves outward equally on all
sides and is usually found on the composite capital. It was probably one of the
first attempts to adapt the Ionic (originally hypostyle) column to peristyle use.
Similar capitals found on monuments in Asia Minor that still show an
entirely Greek sense of form could scarcely be translations of a Roman idea
back into a Greek one. Even though they were probably built under Roman
rule, they are probably imitations of older Alexandrian models. For this great
Macedonian had already created a unified Greco-Asiatic art-form to suit his
idea of world domination, realized only by the Romans. It was inherited by
his successors and adopted from them by imperial Rome, which was also
pleased to borrow from this source the architectural symbol of royal majesty
and sovereignty —the composite columnar structure. In this sense the order
usually appears only in combination with the Roman mass-construction, serv-
ing as a stay or support for their splendidly Asiatic decorative dressing. When
used in this way, the rhythm of the peristyle columns usually dissolves and the
column appears either alone or in groups in front of the mass to which it is
indissolubly joined.

807
 Semper

In principle there is no reason not to use it peripterally and enclosed,

as can also be shown by antique examples. According to [Luigi] Canina,
the Temple of Juno within the Portico of Octavia was a hexastyle Roman-
Corinthian prostyle. Here the old-Ionic canon seems to have dominated as the
one most appropriate to the character of this mode. A beautiful Greek
example (although it was built under Roman rule) of a closed triumphal order
that has survived in excellent condition—the scaenae [backdrop] dressing at
Myra in Lycia—comes very close to this canon. Its norm is:/32

4x6=24

18+4=22

It was the large, full, and surging proportions and details of this splendid
order that Michelangelo’s mighty Roman spirit laid claim to, because they
offered him the traditional elements necessary for his wonderfully bold, indi-
vidual, and free efforts, as he strove for painterly effects of mass and decora-
tive-plastic abundance.
The triumphal columns are more manly, sturdier, and yet more sumptuous
than Corinthian columns. They taper slightly with only a slight bulge, and
while their entablature is among the richest it is not necessarily overloaded, in
principle no different from the Corinthian type.

It is now time to bring to a close this chapter on stereotomy, whose borders

we have probably crossed from time to time, passing into the field of general
architectural theory. The nature of Hellenic architecture in its antique and
modern branches is so intimately bound up with stereotomy and with the his-
tory of its development, and with stone tectonics in particular, that we will in
any case find it necessary to return once more to this material in the relevant
chapters of volume 3.
When we recognize that each of the three orders belongs almost exclu-
sively to certain periods and regions of the classical world, when we see that
they appear in combination only in works in which the interior hypostyle
order is Ionic and the exterior Doric (this in fact only in Attic-Doric works),
then we cannot but pose the question: where and when first arose the theory,
already fully articulated in Vitruvius, of the meaning of the three styles for the
character and even the expression of the individual in architecture?
For as long as the typical meaning of the different orders grew naturally
out of the historical development of different aspects of the Hellenic nature
(these became the signs permitting their recognition and distinction), architec-
ture could not develop a specific and individual character based on these.
Indeed architecture might never have reached the stage of wishing to achieve
something of the kind. Hermogenes, already fairly late, rejected the Doric
design for the Temple of Dionysus in Teos and built it in the Ionic style—not
because it was more appropriate to the lyrical-Asiatic cult of Bacchus but (at
least ostensibly) because of certain superficially technical advantages that this

808
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

order had over the Doric. In truth it was probably because the Ionians felt an
affinity with it and were familiar with it.
Only after their historical and subjective-typical validity had been extin-
guished was it possible to view the three (or four) orders, to master them
objectively, to exploit them symbolically, to strive more clearly toward archi-
tectural character and individual expression. In this they were comparable
with the three modes in ancient music, whose distinctions originally arose
from and corresponded to local differences.
This most significant of all turning points in architectural history was
already latent in the Macedonian period but assumed a definite form with
the consolidation of Roman world domination. Only when ancient art awoke
from a long winter’s sleep did it achieve the most complete objectivity and
freedom in the symbolic exploitation of the most ancient types purified by
Hellenism. It seems to me that this contributes in a fundamental way to our
appreciation of why we find Renaissance art so magnificently superior to
everything that had gone before, including even the highest art of the Greeks.
And yet this art has not yet reached its goal. It was probably only halfway
along the path of its development when the disfavor of the modern zeitgeist
permitted it to be overtaken by music, its macrocosmic sister art, which left it
hopelessly behind.

Notes
1. Sculptures made of hard materials are also discussed in the chapter on metal-
lurgy (see under toreutics).
2. See §§ 69-70 of volume 1.
Substructures are not considered here since they were covered previously.
A contrast evident everywhere in both nations.
Layard, 2d series, pl. 17.
We have found remnants of brick columns and fragments of a pair of stone
columns in the rubble of a Babylonian pyramid. Found in a ruin at Warka, the presum-
ably Seleucid remnants of a column in a style resembling the Corinthian order have
been illustrated on page 307.
7. Polybius 10.[27].
8. History has proven through numerous examples that the originators of new
sociopolitical principles were always concerned about giving them a systematic archi-
tectural expression. One very often errs in assuming that a new form undergoes a slow,
so-called historical development. But it always turns out to be a restoration, assembled
from earlier traditions, a symbol that grasps what already exists in a new way.
9. Of Cyrus’s old royal palace only a few wall posts and a single column remain
upright. The column, Ionic in its proportions, is not fluted. Its base is the Ionic torus,
the spira, with circular moldings above. It seems that it was only under Darius that
slender columns fourteen times the height of their diameter began to be used. The tomb
of Cyrus is entirely Greek both in detail and in feeling. See Flandin and Coste, Voyage
en Perse.

809
 Semper

10. This realism is strikingly demonstrated, for example, in the fluting of columns.
The number of grooves increases in exact proportion to the (material) surface area
of the shaft, because the fluting of a metal sheet depends only on the attributes and
strength of its surface area. This means that if the surface area changes, while the width

Persian columns

of the grooves remains the same, the number of grooves must either increase or
decrease. The columns with forked capitals at Istakhr are 64 centimeters in diameter
and 7.82 meters high, with 32 flutes. Similar columns at Persepolis are 1.585 meters
in diameter and 19.5 meters high, with 48 flutes. Others, in between, have 40 flutes.
Furthermore, that rich interior column looks as though it were made of sheet metal
assembled around an inner shaft and soldered, does it not? Is it not the work of a tin-
smith? We have already come across models for this (metal sheathings and struts) in
ancient Nimrud (vol. 1, § 70, esp. pp. 341 and 329 ff.). The base even has an element so
close to furniture that stone tectonics rejects it entirely, or retains it only as a slight hint,
namely, the vase base in the form of a richly decorated and downward-running cyma,
upon which rests the actual foot or base. If the rich interior order is reminiscent of an
embossed metal column, then the slender unarticulated shaft of the exterior order,
which probably replaced the wooden support sheathed in sheet metal because it was
more durable, is reminiscent of a cast column. The Jewish temple had embossed work
in the interior, but the pair of columns on the porch was cast.
11. Chapter 4 dealt extensively with this theme and spares us much repetition.
12. Thiersch, “Ueber das Erechtheum auf der Burg von Athen,” 149 ff.
13. These illustrations may be clumsy and their details may be inaccurate, but they
capture the general type of the subject represented, particularly in the case of the oldest
illustrations. They are distinguished by the great care taken in the treatment of acces-
sories, which are known to have overshadowed the perfected style.
14. This by no means contradicts what was said earlier (p. 265), namely, that ash-

810
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

lar construction (Hindu) is older than both monolithic and grotto construction. This
is the case in the West as well, but it does not mean that ashlar facilitated the transition
to freestanding stone frames. The latter always began as a monolithic-sculptural struc-
ture in both India and Egypt, as well as elsewhere.
The rock facades mentioned in the text are equally significant to the birth of the
Doric and Ionic styles. The evident combination of both styles in the facades and the
addition of the quite foreign elements both styles had rejected attest (in the absence of
authentic reports about their origin) more to their high antiquity than to the contrary.
Without the lawlessness that opposes certain processes, nothing that can be described
as a modus [method] or an ordo [order] is conceivable.
The mixed orders found on tombs and monuments whose dates are doubtful or
unknown have already been discussed.
Among the rock facades that teach us about the origins of the Doric order, first
mention should go to the so-called proto-Doric grotto entrances at Beni Hasan, which
were in the style of Old Kingdom Egypt. And if its great age is confirmed by the unstyl-
ish drawings available or by other data, we should note a certain grotto entrance with
Doric columns in antis and a Doric entablature, but crowned with a cavetto—the so-
called Tomb of Jacob near Jerusalem. The same is true of other rock facades in the
Kidron valley.
Then there is a tomb in Phrygia among the remarkable tapestry-decorated rock mon-
uments of the old Midas dynasty. Four unfluted columns six and one-half diameters high
are arranged in antis, in such a way that the central space is the same width as the height
of the columns, although the two side spacings are narrower, as is true of the portal of
the Tuscan temple. The capitals are steep, with three squared fillets, and the base of the
anta has the ancient scotia as a drip under the spira, as on the portal of the Tomb of
Atreus. The capital of the anta has a Doric wave under a crowning cavetto and plate.
The triglyph frieze with a profiled cornice is almost the same as the one on the extremely
ancient temple at Kardaki.
Other mixed Doric and Ionic tombs are found in Lycia. Tombs at Cyrene. Etruscan
tomb facades, elements that the Doric took over (triglyphs, echinus capital) combined
with Ionic denticulation, Asiatic-Egyptian cavettos, volutes, and high pediments. We
glimpse the earlier version of the Ionic order on Lycian tombs: short, widely spaced,
and strongly tapering columns, heavy bases and capitals —still a wavering expression of
the late Ionic type in both—architrave with two or three zones and no frieze, cornice
with powerful mutules. Rock tombs at Cyaneae and Myra, with ancient carvings still
tending to the Asiatic, without inscriptions.
15. Botticher, Tektonik [der Hellenen], passim.
16. Lepsius, Briefe [aus Aegypten, Aethiopien und der Halbinsel des Sinai], 256-57.
17. Lepsius, Denkmdaler |aus Aegypten und Aethiopien], vol. 1, pl. 64, and vol. 3,
pl. 106.
18. Even in the case of the Temple of Theseus we do not know whether it really is
the Cimonian building it is generally held to be, or whether it is in the Attic-Doric style
of the period immediately after the Persian wars.
19. Thus, for example, Euripides, who was occasionally guilty of a little showiness,
liked to treat his stage sets with an antiquarian feeling that is almost modern and gave

811
 Semper

his tragic heroes speeches about their scenographic subtleties. Are we therefore justified
in using his theatrical fiction of a Doric frieze with windows between the triglyphs
(instead of metopes) as the basis for reconstructing a primeval Doric temple? Can we
even assume that his text has been correctly interpreted? Besides, he perceived this
arrangement of triglyphs as barbarian-heroic, not Hellenic.
Through such an approach we are by no means denying the influence of such poetic
and mystagogic fantasy images on the transformation of certain traditional forms,
whose origin and original meaning were lost and in later use were given a new sense.
This may also have been the case for the metope and triglyph frieze, which until the
Doric canon achieved perfection was not conceived in a tectonic-structural sense, and
then probably on the basis of a fiction repeated by Euripides. Originally it had nothing
to do with construction, but probably was drawn from textile work and represented a
zigzag trimming, a hem. At the same time I conclude from this that where the triglyphs
are purely decorative rather than structural, this motive appears not simply in keeping
with its older but its most antiquated conception: consider, for example, the small
temple at Paestum, which archaeologists have reliably placed in the first century B.C.
Likewise, since triglyph decoration appears on buildings in combination with Ionic and
Corinthian elements, this decoration was definitely not a characteristic or symbol of
the Doric entablature at the time of construction.
20. Compare it with the old traditional type of torus depicted on the oldest pottery
in the early stages of Hellenic mythical-historical representation.
21. Which the idea of the temple itself already contained in its older embodiment —
an inner housing for the adytum.
22. For this reason the old Doric style rejects the anta and the column in antis even
in the cella of peristyle temples, though later it took them up again. The oldest temple
cellas in Selinus, Paestum, Kardaki, and Assos have no antas and no columns between.
They occur only as later additions.
23. I doubt that even one has been proven to be a temple.
24. The noted temple cellas in Selinus are unrelated to the lines and proportions of
the exterior architecture, both in plan and in elevation, and indeed the disassociation of
the two formal elements appears more clearly and abruptly in the oldest monuments.
This is obviously the calculated expression of a division that could not be accomplished
practically or structurally, as the cella walls are needed to support the roof. The interi-
ors of the oldest temple cellas (Kardaki, Selinus, Paestum) are still entirely Asiatic with
a porch, a sanctuary, or an adytum for the simple wooden cult image, the bretas. The
artistic enhancement of the latter, which ultimately led to the colossal chryselephantine
statue, made it necessary to remove the adytum and extend the cella. Thus arose the
peripteral temple with cella, developed from the form quite illogically called pseudo-
dipteral. The continued expansion of the cella finally led to the pseudodipteral form, as
in the Temple of Zeus in Agrigento.
25. The intercolumniations are not equal: the corner columns are closer to each
other for visual reasons and because of the distribution of the triglyphs. Often, above
all in older works, the intercolumniations shrink more the farther they are from the
middle, and the gap nearest the center is significantly larger than the others. Thus a cer-
tain average distance has to be determined.

812
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

The diagrams show the norms for the following temples:

Temple at Kardaki on Corfu

. Oldest temple at Selinus
. Temple at Selinus in severe style
. Temple of Ceres, Paestum
. Temple of Artemis, Syracuse
Temple at Corinth
Temple at Segesta
. Southernmost temple on the western hill at Selinus
WN
So. Temple on Aegina
HAAR
ON
— =) . Temple of Apollo, Phigalia
== . Temple of Theseus, Athens
12. Parthenon, Athens
13. Temple on the Sounion promontory
14. Temple at Nemea
15. Portico at Pompeii

Their proportions are given in the text.

26. As Vitruvius himself expressed it (4.1): cum etiamnum non esset symmetriarum
ratio nata [(as at that point the mathematical ratio of symmetries had not yet been
born)].
27. This confusion may simply be a characteristic of a period of transition to a new
art, as previously the sculptural-representational element was entirely absent from dec-
oration, or at best appeared very timidly, until instinct found the right place for it. Bas-
relief above the gate at Mycenae.
28. The shape of these steles, which taper toward the bottom, has been interpreted
as a rough imitation of a mummy, also recalled by the hieratic statue.
29. See illustrations on pages 643-44.
30. Mon|umenti] ined{iti,] vol. 1, pl. 48.
31. Texier, Asie Mineure. The significance of Lycian Ionic rock portals for the early
history of the Ionic style can no longer be denied, but Doric tomb facades are of similar
interest for the development of this order, although they have not yet received the same
attention.
32. The norm for this columnar building is: 21%
(11% + 3%) = 15
33. Ross, Inselreisen, vol. 1, p. 152. Idem, “Ueber Anaphe,” Abhandlungen of the
Akademie [der Wissenschaften] in Munich, cl[ass] 1, vol. 2, sec. 11, p. 409.
34. Norm of the oldest temple:
16.5
(9 + 4.55) = 13.55
Norm of the next oldest:
iS
(9.33 + 4.66) = 14
35. A prostyle cella porch with half-columns does not seem to have been the
original plan.

813
 Semper

36. Upper column module of the oldest temple equals 0.60; that of the next oldest
equals 0.84 of the lower.
37. Dating columns by the number of their flutes is now a favorite activity among
archaeologists. We do not grant it that degree of significance. Perhaps before the Doric
canon was established the flutes were calculated according to the Persian principle, in
terms of the circumference of the column. This meant that small columns had only
eight to sixteen flutes, average ones twenty, and large ones twenty-four or more. The
large temple at Paestum has twenty-four flutes on exterior columns, only twenty inside,
and only sixteen on the upper interior order.
38. The cornice with a weakly projecting corona, below incised panels instead of
mutules and guttae, as in carpentry.
39. These seem to me not to have been part of the original plan, but a later addi-
tion. A comparison with the very similar smooth frieze of the so-called Basilica, which
neighbors it, strengthens this assumption.
40. Norm of the Temple of Ceres:
12
8:25 +3267 = 11.92
Norm of the Basilica:
12.24
(8.8 + 4.2?) = 13?
Upper diameter of the columns:
Temple of Ceres: 0.818
of the lower
Basilica: 0.77

41. Nor can I agree with [Charles-Ernest] Beulé’s view that the entire entablature is
a later (Roman) restoration (Revue [générale] de l’arch{itecture 16] <1858>:8).
42. Norm: 15
(9 + 4.5) = 13.5
Almost identical with the norm of the Selinus temple with archaic sculpture:

(533+400
(9.33 + 4.66) = 14 =)
43. Norm: 16
(9.18 + 4.59?) = 13.77?
44. Its norm: iS)
(10 + 4.8) = 14.8
45. Norm of the Chiesa di Sansone:
13.24
(9+ 4) =13
Norm of the Temple of Zeus (Selinus):
12
(93554233) =115233)
46. Norm of the Temple of Artemis at Syracuse:
11.6
(9.143 + 4.572?) = 13.715?

814
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

Only the architrave exists, but it is so heavy that the assumption of maximum entab-
lature height (one-half of the column) gains credibility. Column taper one-seventh.
Sixteen flutes. Echinus almost horizontal with light cavetto, sharply undercut fillets, no
fluting gorges.
47. This building is generally considered to be the oldest Doric work, but its highly
developed details betray a later sensibility, suggesting that it should be dated to the
middle Doric period. The three gorges under the capital are also fairly safe signs of a
developed Doricism. I do not think it is much earlier than the temple on Aegina.
Architrave very high, almost two modules. Upper radius: 0.744, abacus: 2.644
modules. Height only one-seventh of width. Echinus heavy and high. Four deeply
undercut fillets. Three gorges.
48. It also had to emerge victorious from the very system that it was trying to
enslave, a system to which I have already referred. Fully developed Doricism began only
after this hierarchical influence had been removed.
49. The only exception is the temple at Selinus with archaic metopes (see above).
50. It replaces the older Egyptian-style concave molding.
51. Norm: 13.65
(9.2 + 4.5) = 13.7
(See Gailhabaud, Mon[uments anciens et modernes}, vol. 1 and Beulé, Revue [géné-
rale| de l'arch\itecture|, 1858).
52. Norm: 12.8
(9.2 + 3.5) =12.7 (according to [C.R.] Cockerell)
53. Norm: 12
(8.8 + 4) = 12.8
54. Norm: 13
(8.5 + 3.5) = 12
Upper diameter: 0.696 of the lower. Abacus: 2.642 modules.
55. Norm: IDL
(8.624 + 3.576?) = 12.2?
Upper diameter: 0.58 of the lower. Abacus: 2.44 modules. While examining and
measuring the temple, I took no notes about the allegedly Etruscan bases of the pronaos
columns —therefore I doubt their existence.
56. Norm: 14
(9.6 + 4?) = 13.6
57. Norm: 14.3
(9.8 + 4) = 13.8
Upper column diameter 0.83 of the lower. Abacus = 2.45 modules.
58. Norm: 13
(OSceiSe = NS2
Upper column diameter 0.804 of the lower. Abacus = 2.348 modules.
59. Norm: 12)
(9 + 4.5) = 13.5
Upper column diameter 0.7883 of the lower. Abacus: 2.42 modules; spacing: 1.666
modules.

815
 Semper

60. Norm: 12.333

(9.1666 + 4.1) = 13.2666
Upper column diameter 0.813 of the lower. Abacus = 2.866 modules; spacing only
265:
61. For the Doric building at Corinth, see above, page 774, where it was described
as an attempt to break with old traditions.
62. Norm: 15
(10.5 + 4) = 14.5
Upper column diameter: 0.742 of the lower. Abacus: 2.44 modules; ratio of width
to height 1:6. Four rather small Attic fillets. Three sinkages.
63. Probable norm following Pausanias’s dimensions:
WETS
(13 + 4) = 15
Upper column diameter: 0.69. Abacus: 2.7 modules. Light, height is one-seventh of
width.
64. Norm: 15
(10.66 + 3.59) = 14.25
Upper column diameter: 0.8. Abacus: 2.15 modules. Ratio of width to height 1:5.6.
65. That would have been conceiving it falsely and without regard for the con-
struction.
66. The same is true of the selection of old heroic and mythological material for
Athenian drama.
67. Norm: 16
(41.25 + 4.1)=45.35
Upper column diameter: 0.78 of the lower. Abacus: 2.3 modules. Height of abacus
over one-sixth of width.
68. Norm: 15
(10.34 + 3.5) = 13.84
Upper column diameter: 0.756. Abacus: 2.66 modules. Height of abacus something
more than one-sixth of width.
Echinus taut, with three fillets, same height as the abacus if calculated to the upper
edge of the third fillet. One gorge. Anta capitals still heavy, with high leaf crown.
Twenty shallow flutes with reglets. If not older, then more archaic than the Temple of
Theseus.
69. Norm: 15.6
(11.0166 + 3.833) = 15
Upper column diameter: 0.764. Abacus: 2.06; height 1/5.66 of width.
Echinus three fillets, only one gorge, shallower than the abacus. Foliated crown still
robust. Anta capitals with plastically decorated egg-and-dart and pearl molding. Twenty
shallow flutes with narrow reglets.
70. Norm: 14
(11.8 + 3.7) = 15.5
Upper diameter: 0.78 of the lower. Abacus: 2.17 modules. Height of abacus some-
thing more than one-sixth of the breadth (1/5.8).
71. [Ross,] Inselreisen, vol. 2, letter 15.

816
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

72. I cannot offer an opinion, having been unable to investigate the building
myself. The columns have only sixteen flutes: this is probably amply explained by their
slenderness, combined with visual-aesthetic concerns.
Norm: 14.7
(12.666 + 2.833) = 15.5
Upper diameter: 0.8. Abacus: 2.1666 modules. Height somewhat less than one-
sixth the width. Echinus only three fillets, one gorge, finely profiled. Anta capitals
strongly Ionic in character with plastic heart-leaves and pearls.
73. We do not intend to give figures for such Eleusinian antiquities as the unfin-
ished porch of the Eleusinium and its propylaeum—the former was perhaps built under
Demetrius of Phaleron, while the latter dates from the time of Cicero. They have no
fixed character and are probably only imperfect copies of the Attic-Doric order.
74. My own measurements. Neither the floor plan nor the details of this temple are
given correctly in published works.
Norm: 14.38
(12.63 + 3.344) = 15.674
Upper diameter: 0.809. Abacus: 2.16 modules; height only one-seventh of width.
Echinus low and almost a straight line. Four weak and widely spaced fillets, only one
sinkage.
75. Norm: 20.71
(12.15 + 4.05) = 16.2
Upper diameter: 0.82 of the lower. Abacus: 2.08 modules. Its height two-fifteenths
of its width. Echinus straight and taut, with four thin fillets, only one gorge. Twenty
flutes, the bottom third of the column simply smoothed into a polygon. Entablature
with Ionic mediating elements.
76. Norm: 24
(14.28 + 3.43) = 17.7
Upper diameter: 0.857 of the lower. Abacus: 2.145 modules. Height of abacus less
than one-seventh of its width. Four metopes between the centers of any two consecu-
tive columns. No entasis, twenty flutes.
77. For example, seeing the roll capital of the later Ionic column as a soft cushion
rolled up at both ends and gathered with a cord or belt, a fairly coarse and therefore
false embodiment of the dynamic idea contained in abstracto in the spiral. A cushion
under pressure represents this idea not through springiness but through a gentle bulge.
Thus also the plaited hair, the flowing locks, the sandals, and the flowing Ionic
gown of byssus that Vitruvius sees in Ionic column elements, or Thiersch, who sees
columns as priestesses with long, loose sacrificial taeniae!!
78. See Hittorff, [Restitution du temple d’Empédocle a Sélinonte}, figs. 2, 3, 4 on
pl. 6.
79. See the extremely archaic stele on page 783.
80. Specifically, enhancing the expressiveness by arranging a number of spirals
inside one another preserves the frontal view of the capital, but lowering the spirals
toward the center of the abacus obviously opposes the cushion idea by symbolizing the
resilience of the curves. Enhancing the expressiveness by arranging a number of spirals
next to each other preserves the side view of the capital; this view conveys no sense of

817
 Semper

gathering in but rather of a series of contiguous spirals connected by pearl molding.

81. The Assyrian order, which includes a fully developed spiral capital, appears
quite frequently in images, but omly in a metastyle fashion.
82. On this point, too, my view is not that of the art historians. The learned author
of Tektonik der Hellenen, for example, asserts exactly the opposite; for him the Ionic
order is the peristyle order par excellence, in contrast to the Doric, which he says was
originally metastyle. See his book.
83. I will not return to the subject of how this structural schema had already been
transformed into an art-form by traditional dressing principles (through the antepag-
ment, etc.) before stone tectonics took over the schema and developed it in its own way.
84. It follows that the lost reports on the buildings were genuine and date from the
time the temple was built, as a monumental marble technique had to be based on regu-
lations and rules—such a practical-structural canon would correctly have been consid-
ered most worthy of transmission. Without this contemporary information, we would
know no more about the architects of Asian Ionic temples and their activities than we
do about the origin and authorship of so many Doric temples from earlier times.
To conclude that the Greeks knew nothing of stone tectonics before these remark-
able works were built, simply because these old building reports were essentially techni-
cal in nature, would be untenable. What we have here is an extended use on a colossal
scale of a new and suitable material: white marble.
85. Novi generis speciem [in the manner of a different plan]. Vitruvius distin-
guishes temples according to three issues: the genus refers to the plan, whether in antis,
peripteral, dipteral, etc., etc. The species is related to the norm of the columns, whether
closer or farther apart, pycnostyle, systyle, diastyle, etc. The ordo is the order, whether
Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian (see Marini’s comment on Vitruvius, 3.2, n. 1). Yet
Vitruvius is not always consistent in making these distinctions.
86. Perhaps the temple on Cape Sounion also corresponds to the old Doric-Ionic
temple canon, but through a later Attic-Doric readoption and development.
87. Like the Temple of Olympian Zeus at Selinus and the oldest of the other tem-
ples there.
88. Thiersch, on the basis of a comment in Pliny, dated the activity of the architects
Rhoecus and Theodorus to a period long before the thirtieth olympiad, in other words
to the beginning of the Herculean period. But Welcker and [Enrico] Brunn later contra-
dicted this and dated the building of the temple in Ephesus to the period just before
Croesus (ca. fiftieth olympiad). See Welcker’s comment on Philostrat[us,] [Ismagines],
196. Brunn, Gesch[ichte] der grliechischen| Kiinstler, 1:32.
89. Not architraves, which had been built of stone earlier.
90. If these memoirs, as is suspected, are not by the temple architects (Chersiphron
and Metagenes) themselves but were written some time later, this would only make all
the more probable the assumption that the Ephesian building was the first to have a
stone entablature.
91. The restoration of this monument by Fellows—and differently by E. Falkener—
unfortunately does not guarantee correctness. See Fellows, Account of the lonic Trophy
Monument ...; Falkener, Museum of Classical Antiquities, 256.
92. No certain signs of a frieze were found at Priene or among the temple ruins at

818
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

Didyma, and the nature of the existing parts of the architrave and ceiling of this temple
seem to exclude the possibility here as well. The epistyle of the Xanthus monument
serves only to support a rich sculptural garland —there is no actual frieze. Probably the
memory of the old hypostyle origin of the Ionic column, as far as it is expressed in the
lack of a frieze on its entablature, did not disappear until the Hellenic golden age. At
that time a more refined sense of style demanded part of the structure serve as a sup-
port, receiving the higher plastic-tendentious art; thus was born the animal-bearing
wall garland (zoophorus, also called toichos, the wall par excellence), the so-called
frieze.
93. Apart from the Harpagus Monument, mentioned earlier, some remnants of the
early Ionic order have been found on Sicily and in Magna Graecia, but attempts to link
them to particular orders have been less than completely convincing.
94. That is to say, the average heights around which the height ratios of the indi-
vidual works belonging to this norm vary.
95. This ratio is approximately 1:/2 in the Doric and 1:¥3 in the perfected Ionic
style.
96. For this and the following, see Texier, Asie Mineure, vol. 3, pls. 169 ff.
97. Hittorff, L’architecture polychrome, pls. 2 ff. The presence of certain Ionic
details in this and the so-called Heroon of Phalaris is denied by the duke of Serradifalco
but confirmed by other travelers.
98. According to which, four intercolumniations are the basis of the square. It was
immediately necessary to abandon the old canon because of the use of marble and the
desire —awakened in Asia Minor at a very early stage
—for greater effects of space and
mass in architecture. The sequence we have adopted in describing the temples does not
necessarily express our definite view of the buildings’ relative age. The small columnar
building naturally remained true to the old norm for a longer period (see p. 799).
99. As in the old Doric building at Kardaki on Corfu.
100. It is uncertain whether the measurements given by Pliny refer to the old temple
or the Alexandrian temple, but presumably he took them from the memoirs of the
architect of the old temple.
101. Thirty feet is also given by Pliny as the measurement of the monoliths from
which the beams were worked.
102. Following the Doric canon, it is: 18
ey
103. Donaldson, Architectura numismatica.
104. According to the Doric canon, the norm for this tetrastyle is: 19.95
Pe
It is thus midway between the Doric and the old Ionic canon.
105. According to Texier, A[sze] M[imeure].
106. But its colossal dimensions were considerably exceeded by the Artemisium
and by the temples of Zeus at Selinus and Agrigentum.
107. According to the old canon, the norm would be:
20.444
(19 + 4.5) = 23.5

819
 Semper

108. Only the architrave has survived: 1.3 modules.

109. 146.46 m. by 162.96 m.
110. See figure.
111. [Luigi] Canina, [Gli edifizj di Roma antica, cogniti per alcune reliquie,] vol. 2,
pl. 38.
112. A shelf, a simple stone ledge to support the architrave.
113. See [Otto Magnus Freiherr von] Stackelberg, Der [Apollo|tempel zu Bassae.
114. Calculated to the ceiling panels.
115. The norm follows the canon precisely, if the distance from the corner columns
to the outer limits is taken as the side of the basic square.
116. The square is almost complete if the columns’ shared sole (crepis) is added to
their height.
117. See above, pages 782-83.
118. This anthemion decoration, half Corinthian in style, otherwise occurs only on
some capitals found on the Acropolis and attributed to the Temple of Artemis Brau-
ronia, and on other such capitals found in Rome of uncertain but probably late origin.
119. With a column thickness of two feet, this ratio would give a space of scarcely
three feet.
120. The well-known artist’s fiction that makes the artist Callimachus (who
appeared late) the inventor of the Corinthian volute capital is refuted first by extant
volute capitals from an earlier period, and second by references in ancient authors to
older Corinthian works.
121. The temple at Praeneste, the (probably contemporary) Temple of Vesta at
Tivoli, the Basilica, and other old Corinthian work in the same style at Pompeii. The
leaf formations of the Augustan period are related to these, even though they are mod-
eled on the Greek acanthus. They are followed by the soft and naturalistically treated
silphium found on monuments of the middle imperial period.
122. The sources of information one had to consult in order to fit the volute capital
to the exterior peripteral and to the peristylar inner corner column have all disap-
peared, as have similar ones. See Carl Botticher, Ionica, pp. 99 ff., also pls. 29 and 33.
123. The oldest reference to Corinthian columns relates to the Temple of Athena in
Tegea, which was rebuilt by Scopas after the old one burned down around the second
year of the ninety-sixth olympiad (Pausanius 8.45.3-4). The text discusses only extant
remnants of Corinthian buildings. These would include, to be sure, a Corinthian-style
capital from the interior of the temple in Phigalia that is still very undeveloped, perhaps
from the Periclean period.
124. See woodcut on page 643, top, of “Tectonics.”
125. Which forms a contrast with the Ionic horizontal spiral as an expression of
the same tensile force.
126. An inscription suggests that this temple is a work of the kings of Pergamum.
127. See also the cornice of the temple at Patara on page 801.
128. The length of the architrave is already about eighteen feet without this.
129. This very fine example of the Roman columnar style cannot possibly be, as
Kugler asserts, from the late Aurelian period, but is probably a genuine fragment of
Nero’s Golden House.

820
 Stereotomy: Technical-Historical

130. If six of the modules between the modillions are considered to equal 31.5
times the distance between column centers.
131. The fragment of this magnificent building that has survived includes only
ornamental parts, but in their economy and rhythmic distribution and in the noble sim-
plicity of the fragment’s proportions it is an unsurpassed model, and the Renaissance
masters who repeatedly copied it considered it such.
132. Texier, A[sie] M[ineure].

821
 ae eS ape ys' : es % : 9 ; : 7

Ge6 MPP ese t a : . . > a 7

FT -De ¢ =\¢ = = ‘ a é

_ wt f lp 4 _—— - 2 =e :

De oa a
\ tee ste oy maw
et
ee
ad a,
ee arly: 1) teary (Os 7
eh “ - Fe
mpi@> 14s @ > ‘i.che © iim a
6 Ww Ose ences a? a ieee 4 + <
i> nisi ait ¢ : ¢ v
is ahaa bas w thw ail ue | eeepeidty ok. ne
+ » - ia 2) © hea iggaye 01 ia
ue. is ari @ F 1 . Cee Nes Pan ar ng

- = and 4‘ nel pe) Sears

lee wer = @ oe Paw f ee
_ a :
CHAPTER ELEVEN

Metallurgy (Metalwork)

Works on Metallurgy and Its History

Purely Technical:
Theophilus, Diversarum artium schedula, with French translation by Count
Charles de |’Escalopier. Paris.
[Thomas Phillips,] Mappae clavicula, treatise on the decorative arts of the
Middle Ages, twelfth century. (Archaeologia [32 (1847)].)
[Berengarius,] Lumen animae, fourteenth-century compilation. Printed in
1477.
Benvenuto Cellini, Autobiography and treatise on the goldsmith’s art.
Mathurin Jousse, Le théatre de l’art. La Fléche, 1623.
Winckelmann, De la méthode antique de graver sur pierres fines.
Adam [von] Bartsch, Anleitung zur Kupferstichkunde.
[Didier-Frangois d’Arclais] de Montamy, Traité des couleurs pour la peinture
en émail.
Brongniart, “Traité pratique sur la préparation des couleurs d’émail,” Revue
scientifique et industrielle. December 1844-January & February 1845.
[Jean-Michel] Papillon, Traité de la gravure en bois.
Doppelreiter [recte: Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr], on metalworks.
Nuremberg.
Dr. Mille, on the same topic. Vienna.
A series of treatises by the Académie royale des sciences.

Historical and Technical:

Jules Labarte, “Introduction historique” in his catalog of the Duménil
collection.
Abbé [Jacques-Rémy-Antoine] Texier, Histoire de l’orfevrerie au Moyen Age.
Paris.
Abbé Texier, Essai sur les émailleurs de Limoges. Poitiers, 1843.
[Toussaint-Bernard] E[méric-|David, Histoire de la gravure. Paris.
[Johann Gottlob] v[on] Quandt, [Entwurfzu einer] Geschichte der
Kupferstecherkunst. Leipzig.
[Louis] Dussieux, Recherches sur l’histoire de l’émail. Paris.
[Jean-Baptiste-Louis] Carré, Traité de la panoplie.
Willemin and Pottier, Monuments frangais.... Paris, 1790-98.

823
 Semper

Le Moyen Age pittoresque: Monumens, meubles et décors du Xe au XVIle

siecle; dessiné d’aprés nature par M. Chapuy, avec texte par M. Moret.
Paris, 1837-40, in fol. 180 pls.
Paul Lacroix [and Ferdinand Seré], Le Moyen Age et la Renaissance, histoire
et description des moeurs et usages, du commerce et de l’industrie, des
sciences, des littératures et des beaux-arts en Europe. Paris.
Didron ainé, Annales archéologiques. Paris.
Cicognara, Storia della scultura. 3 vols. fol. Venice, 1830.
[Alexandre] du Sommerard, Les arts au Moyen Age. Paris. Idem, album.

Other writings and books on specialized areas are cited in the text. Relevant
passages in [K.] O. Miiller’s Handbuch der Archdologie der Kunst should be
consulted for ancient metalwork, collections, and so on.

§ 176 Introduction
Metalwork was promised a heading of its own, to come at the conclusion of
volume 2, even though it is not possible to define a separate formal field for it.
As no fifth field can be added to the topics of weaving, pottery, carpentry, and
masonry, we must now abandon the order followed so far. There is no need
for a special chapter on general-formal matters, because everything contained
in chapters 3, 5, 7, and 9 is also relevant to the metalworker’s art. The flexi-
bility of his material embraces all branches of technology, which the metal-
worker simply handles in his own way, conditioned by the material.
Thus stylistic questions of a material-historical nature are all we have to
consider in this field. We can also deal with this as briefly as possible, given
the limits of our book and its purpose (which is aesthetic rather than techno-
logical), and by referring the reader to earlier material.
To begin, what was said about glass as a plastic material in § 129 (“Ceramics”)
can be applied to metal almost verbatim. Metal, like glass, is used as a mate-
rial in three states: first as a hard, very strong, homogeneous, and dense body
that can be given a desired shape by removing parts; second as a molten 1D)
mass poured into molds and fixed to them as it cools; and third as a tough,
extremely ductile substance that can be given a suitable form for various pur-
poses by hammering, pressing, and other procedures. The difference
is that in the case of metal we have to change the sequence of the three pro-
cedures, for it is appropriate to the history of metal manufacture to consider
first the /ast-mentioned procedure of beating, stretching, bending, and so
on. And even if the stereotomic treatment of metal for industrial and artis-
tic purposes cannot be proven to be an older invention than metal casting,
here we will deal with it second and casting last. The reason is that the order
we have chosen provides the context within which transitional procedures
between hammering and the stereotomic treatment of our material enjoy
the most natural links. Also, in the field of metallurgy the two procedures
often operate jointly.

824
 Metallurgy

§ 177 Metal as a Ductile Material

1. Sheet Metal
Gold is certainly not the only metal that nature produces in a pure form, but
none of the other metals appears so pure and unmixed and in such large
pieces. None is so generally distributed over the diluvial land allotted to the
human race as its home, and none is so easy to extract and prepare.
It is therefore highly probable that the metalworker’s art made its first
attempts in gold, a fact not without significance in considering the relations
between the arts. For nothing is invented that is absolutely new and entirely
independent of earlier influences; everything harks back to earlier times.
If gold was the first metal to be used for technical purposes, it is possible
to conclude, given what has been said, that the properties of gold most often
encountered were also those that were first exploited technically for other
metals.
It is also scarcely to be doubted that the sunny sheen of gold was the first
property of this metal to be recognized; it inspired people to seek it out for
jewelry, which was probably the oldest metalwork.
The extraordinary ductility of gold must also have been recognized at an
early stage, as it could be exploited technically with the simplest resources.
Thus the earliest technical process applied to gold was undoubtedly the prepa-
ration of gold sheets; the process of drawing out gold threads is closely related
to this.
It was these properties of metals (first and chiefly those of gold) that guided
human artistic sensibilities (which were originally more sensory) to using sheet
metal as decoration. It led to the metallic dressing of utensils, weapons, and
other objects, thereby elevating their stature. A great richness in metallic orna-
mentation, extending to covering works completely with metal, is thus a gen-
eral characteristic of the art of peoples in the infancy of cultural development.
Yet ductility does not acquire its full stylistic significance until it is com-
bined with the more solid properties of metals, namely with strength, hardness,
impenetrability, and durability — properties that no other material combines
with the same degree of malleability and suppleness.
These advantages made it the most important material for defensive dress-
ing, that is, for protection not against inclement weather and cold but against
violent external effects, protection that maintains the rigidity of what is dressed
and is at the same time decorative. These properties alone require a special
style of dressing, one that has to be infinitely different from that of soft-fiber
fabrics, for example. An even more distinct feature of this style is that our
material, although it is the most suitable for the purpose mentioned, does not
fully satisfy all needs because it lacks these properties as such and thus needs
artful assistance. And there are also certain other circumstances that are limit-
ing as far as this purpose is concerned. Chief among them is the important
specific density of metals, which makes it more difficult to handle them tech-
nically and makes them less viable for dressings in many cases. Then there is

825
 Semper

the difficulty of fitting together many pieces to form a strong and uniform
protective covering, a practice which often occurred in the infancy of metal-
lurgy and metal technology (the most important period for the development of
this art’s style), and which was more significant than in more advanced periods
of culture and art. This was especially the case in movable systems — that is,
those with joints, such as those intended to cover the human body, where the
necessary rigidity and impenetrability of the protective covering contradicted
its equally necessary flexibility, a contradiction that art had to mediate.
The rarity, costliness, and difficulty of extracting pure metals in larger
quantities could also be cited as negative properties, that is, as a want that
makes its more difficult— were it not true that it was precisely these factors
that in barbarian times gave the initial impetus to the most enormous waste of
metals in the arts.
The oldest works in metal are the simplest and stylistically most proper
extrapolations of these and other more functional and local premises. First we
will consider objects made of gold sheets because they can be the oldest (since
the material does not decompose), and because they actually bear the signs of
greatest age or of the most primitive art.
Certain adornments are still quite flat and have at most a few lightly
engraved or stamped ornaments; here we find some of the earliest uses of sheet
gold, to judge from the style. Decorative objects of this kind, sometimes of
large size, come from the oldest tombs in Egypt and Etruria.! Similar items
have been found in Celtic, Teutonic, and Finnish tombs. The similar gold deco-
rative plates of the Indians became the rich booty of the discoverers of America.
A splendid gold breastplate was found in Bartlow (Essex), which was
probably used as a dressing for a metal breastplate.? Its origin and period are
entirely uncertain; it is decorated with stamped knobs and indentations whose
“corrugations” are apparently meant to stiffen the surface.
There are also some remarkable gold masks that we can include among
these earliest gold dressings. They have preserved faithful portraits of the
most ancient kings of Chaldea and Egypt.
During the entirety of antique cultural life goldsmiths preferred the sheet
style. (It was, incidentally, accompanied from the earliest times by a very dif-
ferent style of goldsmithery, like textiles; this will be discussed later.) It became
ennobled only at the time of its zenith. Surviving examples from the last period
include gold votive garlands, some of which are among the most exquisite
items the decorative arts ever produced. The famous chryselephantine statues
by Phidias and Polyclitus represented the high point of this long-revered tech-
nical tradition, the acme of its artistic purity and refinement.* The splendid
material now served art as an underlayer and background, perfectly calcu-
lated to mute its splendor and to moderate the quantity used. This contrasted
with the emphasis barbarians placed on sensory stimulus and brilliance, a
goal of the undeveloped artistic sense before it awakened to formal and abso-
lute beauty. It saw gold as a means to embellish, not as beauty itself.
If we rapidly survey the broader history of gold dressing, the Macedonian

826
 Metallurgy

return to barbarian delight in the excessive use of gold for art stands out.
Gold-plated festival frameworks and funeral pyres already in Alexander’s
time, the gold-plated Temple of Zeus in Antioch. The Romans heirs to the
Alexandrian luxury of gold. The late empire, Byzantium, the whole of the
early Middle Ages, and Arabic art all swim in gold. The new style (the Gothic)
initially followed the established trajectory, only to see it broken by a com-
bination of zealotic and monastic influences and by a structural system of
architecture that was averse to dressing. Resistance to the Gothic system first
emerged in the decorative arts, which the Gothic system also held in check.
Bronze artists and goldsmiths also found a new life. Here too we can make out
a return to the most ancient traditions, as in every artistic renaissance. Byzan-
tine altarpieces were taken as models for those of San Giovanni in Florence
and San Giacomo in Pistoia, which the great early Renaissance masters glori-
fied with their new art.5 During the High Renaissance this taste for goldsmith-
ery was abandoned once more, and the period became aware of how to go
about properly moderating the charms of the metallic gleam. Toward the end
of this glorious period of artistic blossoming, the pomp of barbarian metal
dressings reappeared (in Venice and France under Louis XIII and Louis XIV).°

The ages of gold and silver were followed by that of bronze. The original
sheet style predominated there as well, but the relation between the covering
and the covered changed. No longer was the underlay a necessary support for
gold incrustation, which was weak and yielding by itself; instead, a bronze
dressing, stronger and thicker, functioned largely to protect and reinforce the
softer core. Metallurgy broadened its scope, now emphasizing function more
than pure decoration. It deviated from the older tradition to the extent that the
harder material and functionality demanded, evolving its appropriate type for
itself from the less easily mastered technical requirements of the more brittle
material. The significance of this type has often been stressed —not only gen-
erally for this field of metallurgy, but for the art of all ages.
Most of the objects this technique yielded were weapons, both offensive
and defensive. I will add only a few words, to what this book contains on the
subject, both in the preceding section and elsewhere.
Once again, the oldest application of metal to offensive purposes is with-
out a doubt metal sheathing: wooden clubs, arrows, spears, and so on. Offen-
sive weapons were sheathed to make them sharper, heavier, more destructive,
and at the same time more indestructible. Mixed with stone utensils and
~ weapons, they have been found even among Stone Age remains, evidence of
the transition from that period to the subsequent Bronze Age. They are of
interest because here for the first time a metal cladding that originally served a
purely decorative function is used to reinforce the object it covers.
But even more important for our purpose are defensive bronze weapons,
because the object covered was articulated and the weapons were intended to
combine the greatest resistance with the least weight and the greatest possible

827
 Semper

suppleness. They were the source of many metallurgical processes in the arts
that generally retained a universal significance, in part realistically structural
and in part symbolically structural.
We can distinguish four different functional systems based on metal:
1. The chain-mesh system;
2. The metal-scale system;
3. The ring system: a series of rings partially covering each other; wire
spirals were also used to protect certain parts of the body;
4. The tubular or hollow-plate system.
The first two systems were customary in the Orient from time immemorial,
but the Greeks and Romans replaced them with the next two systems at an
early date. We are concerned here only with the latter two, as the former two
come under a different metallurgical heading.
Like the chain-mesh and scale systems, when the ring system receives a
powerful blow or pressure it does not in itself protect the body sufficiently
against the transmission of that impact —a padded lining is needed to absorb
it. In this respect the ring system already forms a transition to the hollow-
plate system, which is strong in itself. The ring system is, so to speak, still a
cladding (empaestics) applied to the body as if to a core, but the hollow-plate
system belongs to the field of hollow embossed work (sphyrelaton).”
Probably the oldest type of ring protection is the remarkable wire spirals,
although they actually belong in the following sections. They were used to
protect and decorate the chest, neck, wrists, and ankles. Their springiness
gives them the suppleness necessary for this purpose, combined with quite sig-
nificant resistance. These properties were put to use in the early period with a
correct sense of style, as numerous finds of this sort have demonstrated. These
items and their technical treatment were almost the same for nearly all tribes
familiar with the use of bronze. Their actively structural essence was recog-
nized, as was their more passive essence, that is, their covering and protecting
properties. Wire spirals have been used for clasps and hooks, for connecting
and fastening garments —in a word, for connecting parts of all kinds. Another
device made from them is our women’s corsets, which restrain the breasts
even as they protect them.8
We have dealt with these types in somewhat greater detail because we
can trace back to these developments—or at least connect to them— many
examples of the most ancient (and even advanced) art. These types were
retained by art and applied everywhere in keeping with their original spirit, in
part unconsciously.
The spiral is the surface ornament common to all peoples, who used it in
early times in almost the same way to decorate their metal vessels, pots, wall
panels,? and even their own skin (it was the formal basis for tattooing). The
origin of this pattern has been sought in nature, which certainly produces a
rich abundance of most beautiful models for it, but the most ancient decora-
tive motives were vot derived from nature: their origins were technical.!° Only
later did art find analogies in nature corresponding to the technical types

828
 Metallurgy

already formulated, thereby imbuing them with greater expressiveness and

new charm. For example, the spiral, whether a true hook or merely an expres-
sion of that idea, serves as a link where a pot’s handles and other parts are
attached to its body. Only later does it take the form of loose vegetal braiding.
The hooks and pods on Assyrian metal utensils are also attributable to
ancient technical symbolism, even though there the motive seems already to
have metamorphosed halfway to the vegetable world.!! The same is true even
of the spiral on the Ionic capital (see § 173).!2
Another means of protection is the metal belts that partially cover and
overlap one another: such straps are meant to protect body parts and are
attached to metal sheets running either horizontally or vertically, depending
on the circumstances. One example is the lorica of the Roman legions, thanks
to which the world was subjugated. It was inherited from the Etruscans and
yet older traditions. Its stylistic relation with other, so to speak, loricated
objects, such as shields —those found in the oldest Etruscan tombs are dressed
with straps or zones of bronze—cannot be doubted.'3 All bronze-clad vases
and chests of the most ancient style were loricated, as were gates and chariots
(the antepagments of the former were also loricated) and even the ancient
Ionic epistyle. From where did this impulse spring? If for cultural and philo-
sophical reasons a sense of beauty had to arise before one took to decorating
one’s own body, and if, furthermore, weapons are actually male adornments,
then we may assume that the application of this dressing method in artisti-
cally decorative ways to fields that dominated all branches of the most ancient
technology and art sprang from the venerable guild of armorers, who at the
time were still sheet-metal smiths.
The Greeks partially abandoned this kind of protective weaponry at an
early stage, replacing it with the solid-metal garments. Likewise the Celts
largely gave up armor mesh, that most ancient protection, adopting instead
tubular bronze coverings; their armor did include those remarkable, bulging,
barrel-shaped bronze rings, worn to protect the elbows and ankles. They were
also familiar with gold-plated breastplates. From this point forward the art of
weaponry had to follow principles that were quite new, so that the essentially
rigid systems made entirely of metal could be made as strong as possible while
minimizing the amount of the heavy material used. The means for joining these
parts, which were no longer movable, had to be stronger and could not be
articulated in a ring form; instead it took the direction of proportional devel-
opment from top to bottom—in other words, in seams, as in garments (see
§ 20) —and their decorative treatment also followed this approach (see § 19).
Also, the idea of bulging arose in response to concerns about the strength of
the weapon, and this led to a new stylistic factor in metallurgy. Yet its stylistic
value probably did not clearly emerge until the method of armament under
discussion had been fully accepted. The circular Argolic shield, curved like a
kettle, is a most simple and pure product of this structural principle. The
cuirass was modeled on the vaulted shape of the breast, with vertical joints or
seams fastened under the arms with hooks. The same was true of the greaves;

829
 Semper

by hugging the body’s form they found the curve that was most favorable to
the required purpose (namely, greatest possible rigidity).
During the waning Middle Ages, as it struggled desperately against the
annihilating force of gunpowder, the armorer’s art should have put that of the
ancients to shame. In the second half of the thirteenth century Asiatic chain
mail (introduced early by the Nordic peoples) began to be reinforced with sets
of individual solid-metal plates; then the early fourteenth century went over
to the corselet and the completely enclosed helmet with visor. Full armor,
made completely of flat iron, did not appear until the very late fourteenth or
early fifteenth century. This was, in fact, the technical-functional high point of
modern full armor, but the principle was still applied purely schematically.
The armor was sharp, strongly curved, and fluted, with everything well calcu-
lated to deflect blows and offer resistance. Curves, edges, and fluting were still
undisguised technical reinforcements; the Gothic principle of exposed struc-
ture still prevailed. Any decorative impulse was subordinated to this or was
dominated by technical motives. It was not until the second half of the fifteenth
century that individual parts began to undergo technical enrichment: the
tubular structure already perfected in the scheme came to be expressed figura-
tively and with artistry. From that point on the various branches of metallurgy
worked together to raise weapons of war to the level of artistic masterpieces.
The horse’s steel jacket, no less than the rider’s helmet, shields, cuirass, and
the guards for his arms, legs, and neck, with their well-understood frame-
work, were covered with arguments, arabesques, and decorative forms of
every kind. These were well distributed in a stylistically appropriate way:
some were embossed, some chased, some damascened or given to some other
surface ornament. Often the grim suit of armor turned out to be entirely gold-
smith’s work.'4
As a result of the change in materials —as the hardest metal, steel, increas-
ingly drove out the more supple copper alloys—there was a parallel increase
in the number of procedures that made up the armorer’s art, and their rela-
tionships to each other changed. Only with difficulty could strong bullet-
proof steel plates be cold embossed. That process developed into the produc-
tion of wrought work, a related process that at the same time belongs to
stereotomy. The purely stereotomic process of chasing—the imparting or
perfecting of form by removing parts of a solid mass with the aid of gravers,
chisels, files, and other carving tools —is inseparable from this. On the other
hand, the hard material favors surface decoration, deep engraving, damascen-
ing, niello, inlaid work, etching (using etching acid to carve out certain sec-
tions), plating, gilding, enameling, and so on. The use of steel and the requi-
site technical procedures led to a gradual shift in armor types away from the
hollow-metal style to a Roman system of lorication. In fact, the striped steel
band-armor dating from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
(the striping was not horizontal like the Roman version, but vertical —at least
partly) contrasts with the splendid full armor done in the tubular style, which
had reached its apogee a century earlier.

830
 Metallurgy

§178 Metal as a Ductile Material

2. Metal Wire, Lattice, Weaving, Grating, Bars, Chains

Gold, as the most ductile and elastic metal of all, is also the original material
for this chapter, which begins by presenting ornamentation as the immediate
reason for drawing wire. Filigree from the most ancient times: Egyptian,
Etruscan, Assyrian, Greek. Its character is the same as that of jewelry custom-
arily found in the conservative folk regions: Genoa, Rome, Venice, the canton
of Zug. Hairpins, brooches, earrings, all in the most ancient style.
The common subject matter and basic idea that connect everything in this
chapter can be best understood using the example of these artistic products,
which are either actually primeval or primeval in motive. They express in its
simplest form the principle of binding or encircling, that is, the interaction of
elastic metal threads: the dynamic arrangement of threads is outwardly active,
in contrast to the internally active—and therefore seemingly inactive —static
uniformity, if one can call it that, of the metal covering discussed above.
Anything straining to move outward cannot stand alone as a form; it can-
not even be stable. To do so it needs the object of this straining, or at least a
formal representation of it, a complement. This irrefutable stylistic theorem is
expressed somewhat abstractly (and at first characteristic only of itself) by the
mounted jewel, by the whole higher order that comes into being when some-
thing costly (a precious stone, a pearl, an artificially carved gem, or an expen-
sive memento) is raised from its thetically immediate existence to a synthetic
existence by a contrast between that costly thing and its setting.’

For this expression of higher unity to satisfy completely, the straining of the
thing encircled must not be uneven but instead complete in itself; the euryth-
mic law must dominate within it. Ancient filigree jewelry fulfills this condi-
tion in every way; at the same time it confirms the comment in the previous
chapter about the purely technical and at the same time dynamic-functional
origin of ancient artistic types, which never arose directly from imitation or
from a symbolic conception of certain concrete natural forms.’

831
 Semper

Etruscan jewelry

We could in addition demonstrate how a string of such jewels in a setting

(each jewel already a synthetic unit), following the same now transcendental
law, may, as something that encircles, point to a higher central point of refer-
ence lying outside form —that is, to the object it adorns. We could also point
out how the raising of this principle contained within the jewel to a higher
power yields an infinitely greater wealth of relations among the assembled
parts, more than if a single jewel were considered alone. But this route brings
us back to the subject of chapter 3, namely, the abstract-formal elements of
textiles, and to observations that are dispersed through other parts of the
book (see in particular §§ 5-8, 19-21, 48-57, among others).!”
Filigree work is a rigid arrangement of threads, and in this regard it con-
trasts with supple, yielding textile threads. As a result, the threads are usually
interlaced and joined according to very different principles. Indeed in many
cases the band they produce is intended to be absolute, that is, the combina-
tion of parts makes a strong system that is in itself fixed. The selected (metal)
material should, through the interlacing and knotting of threads, show its
more or less imperfect rigidity to the greatest possible advantage for the
required purpose. This applies principally to the wire as such, which can be
stiffened by special treatment. Here its cross section has to be considered; the
rigidity and the stability of the wire increase when a star-shaped cross section
is adopted —a radial formation with three or four (or more) points. Flat wire
can be made significantly stiffer by twisting. Filigree workers of ancient times
were entirely familiar with all these facts, and they also knew how to exploit
them best for decorative purposes.
How an arrangement of wire is handled also depends on the principle to
be expressed, as does the shape of the wire itself. The simplest wire arrange-
ment is the spiral, already mentioned in the previous section; its expressive-
ness lies in its elasticity. Correct style promotes this activity, while incorrect

832
 Metallurgy

style weakens it. A spiral can be stabilized by the ancient process of welding
and soldering; the spirals on extremely ancient jewelry have undergone this
process.
In the case of plaited wire, the knots should be made so that damaging one
mesh will not undo the whole system (§ 52). The knotted work should be
secured by technical means largely unique to metallurgy (riveting, welding,
soldering). The rigidity of the seam or of the setting should also be reinforced
by the curvature of these connecting parts, which on the whole should not
be planimetric, as the corresponding connections in textiles are. Although
plaited wire generally serves as a framing (enclosing) element for synthetic
form, it can also assume a closed form itself and as such also fulfill a binding
function. In such cases a change of roles takes place: the core becomes active
while the frame becomes a passive element of the synthetic unit (see the Celtic
gold decorations adjacent).

Celtic filigree

In this type of activity the plaited wire becomes a clasp, a hook, a sleeve,
and so on.!8 After all that has already been said on the subject, the significance
of these parts for a general symbolism of antique art need not be repeated.
The splendid luster and richness of gold thread led to its early artistic use
in embroidery and weaving." In addition to those material properties already
mentioned, its very metallic stiffness was also a factor, since this quality is
both favorable and beneficial to the style of certain festive dressings and fin-
ery. Thus gold and silver stuffs should, to a certain extent and depending on
circumstances, be made intentionally stiff. A mature taste will recognize the

833
 Semper

dangers of using gold threads for embroidery and weaving in this context,
especially when dealing with actual garments rather than draperies and wall
dressings. For this use of metal wire, see § 44.
This one extreme in the artistic exploitation of metal wire corresponds to
its opposite — metal tectonics using the principle of latticework. We will not
return here to its significance for the arts in general or to its aesthetic exploita-
tion as such, as we can refer back to earlier remarks.2° Only one comment
need be made about the stylistic and artistic weight of the lattice (which is
acquiring considerable significance in our day). For the example of the jewel
in its setting we have shown the differences between thetic and synthetic
unity. We have also provided illustrations showing how a synthetic unit can
consist of a thesis and an antithesis, both of which are types of lattices. These
examples of the goldsmith’s art in high antiquity express the richest law per-
taining to the stylistic-decorative treatment of lattice construction: the synthe-
sis of two entities meeting as thesis and antithesis, as something expressing
inward and outward activity, and yet at the same time complementary in their
activity. Both can be lattices, but one of them—either the setting or the set
object—can belong to another system (for example, plate construction).
There is another kind of synthesis, the best example of which is the horizontal
girder constructed from sticks (for example, a lattice bridge), where relative
stability is almost the only concern. This is the synthesis that is also contained
and expressed in the Greek architrave, with its three fascias or zones one above
the other. It involves layering several systems that are active in the same way,
so that together they form an antithesis whose activity balances an external
thesis. The directions of these zones should run counter to each other for both
structural and decorative reasons. A crown set atop a lattice beam composed
of zones could offer a means for aesthetically completing the system, by serv-
ing as a representative and symbolic expression of the thesis (the course of the
path) whose antithesis is the lattice. It also offers considerable technical advan-
tages. Alternating runners or some other suitable termination below would
have to conform to the crown and complete the whole as something upright
and soaring.*! Finally, it scarcely needs to be stressed again that in a well-styled
lattice frame the allotted activity of every part must make itself evident by its
position, thickness, shape, and decoration. The section on absolute-formal tec-
tonic considerations should be consulted in this context. The same is true of
composite lattice systems, that is, those assembled from wood and metal.
There are a number of transitional forms between light wire weaves and
the tectonic latticework and their architectural application is quite varied; the
reader should also consult the section on “Tectonics.”
Given the great variety in both the uses of metal lattices and the conditions
that produce them, it is possible to make only a general point about coloring
them —that is, in cases where the metal itself does not show to advantage in
its natural color. If, for example, iron is painted, then such dark shades as
bronze, rust,?2 and black are most suitable stylistically. In such decorative
works a partial or complete gilding is always most advisable. This question

834
 Metallurgy

will be touched upon again in a special chapter on the processes used in

metallic surface decoration.
Chains. Chains are a quite particular species of the metal products in this
category. One might call them the necessary result of two elements of design
that are in conflict but have nevertheless been harmonized by art. Their task is
to create from a hard mass a nonductile band that is as strong and flexible as
possible. The material is to be treated as if devoid of ductility, flexibility, and
elasticity, or at least as if these things affected the design only in a negative
sense.?3 Generally, the only formative factor of any real importance is abso-
lute strength.
The solution to this task lies in articulation, the essence of any chain. A
perfect chain is a series of solid elements or links whose connection along the
direction of the series is absolute but does not exist at all for external effects
that operate in a different direction. Chains that only half fulfill the last con-
dition, that is, those that are absolutely flexible only in one direction, are
called band chains. They were used from the earliest times in the technical
arts, alongside those that flex in every direction. They have always been (and
still are) important components of military equipment: belts, shoulder pieces,
gorgets, sword belts, and many other things. The clasps on band chains —in
other words, the pair of concluding elements used to fasten them — were from
time immemorial the object of special artistic and decorative attention (see the
adjacent illustrations of ancient Italic clasps).

Greek band chain

If we consider the fragment of a Greek band chain, illustrated here, the

single link is representative of the whole (probably a belt): an elongated rec-
tangular shallow ring curving outward along the radius of the belt’s circle,
with a hinge on the one side and a receiving mortise on the other. It is simple

835
 Semper

and stylistically correct in every detail. The ring member is either a ring or a
frame, and therefore everything that has been said earlier about frames applies
to it (see prolegomena, p. 86, and §§ 133-35 under “Tectonics”).
Considered in itself as a link in the chain, the ring is a simple (thetic) unit.
It is natural, however, to raise it to a synthetic unit by imparting to the frame
(the ring mount) a corresponding enclosure (a jewel). This enhances the asso-
ciations and significance of not only the link itself but the chain as a whole,
which consists of a number of units, alternately identical to and different from
the link considered.
Thus we come back to material already discussed and can understand why
the band chain has always been considered the richest artistic motive among
decorations. Used in this way, it offers an inexhaustible wealth of the richest
and most charming inventions; there is much we might say about them if we
were not compelled by an overwhelming wealth of material to confine our-
selves to essentials. We will restrict ourselves to remarking that the significance
of those band chains, with their hooks and buckles, extends well beyond their
own field to include all branches of art, that, for example, the Greek meander—
that constantly recurring band ornament — is directly connected with them in
concept and style.
General flexibility is achieved when every link in the band chain is given a
twist, lending the chain a spiral form. If every link is identical but turned at
right angles to its neighbors, the chain will more readily flex (under otherwise
equal circumstances) than would a chain consisting of equally bent links, but
it will be less universally flexible.
Rings linked to one another not at right angles but at equal acute angles
form chains that fall midway between these two types. They form a spiral
along their length, as above.
The beauty (or the artistic style) of such rings lies more in the regular
structure of their rhythmic articulation than in the development of the units
as such.
They are also used extensively in the art of decoration—on their own and
in combination with individual, richly decorated bands.
There is a distinction between linear chain arrangements and planimetric
ones, whose style allies them more closely with textile materials. The contents
of §§ 52-54 in volume 1 apply to them, but mutatis mutandis, as here we are
dealing with a plaiting consisting merely of independent knots (rings) —this
distinction is especially apparent in the decorative patterning of such chains.
One can alternate variously shaped members or change the ways in which
they meet; one can produce them out of different materials and vary the color
and luster of the links, or use both means at the same time. The art industry of
Asia (and especially of India) has perhaps wrought the greatest achievements
in this field—both for women’s toilet items and for warriors’ implements.
Women’s chain collars from India in the Kensington Museum, London. Indian
chain mail there and in the royal weapons collection in Windsor. Similar
Egyptian ones in various museums and in Egyptian wall paintings.

836
 Metallurgy

§ 179 Metal as a Hard and Dense Body, and as a Stereotomic Material

General Remarks
No other material is better suited to stereotomic treatment than metal, since it
possesses hardness and homogeneity and also a certain toughness and mal-
leable suppleness. The first property, hardness, can be mitigated before shap-
ing by softening processes, afterward intensified to the maximum degree by
hardening processes. This maximum depends on the metal used and is one of
the elements governing its suitability for certain purposes. This material is
also particularly important for stereotomy, because without metal utensils
and tools this important branch of technology would never have surpassed a
certain level of development.
It is completely in keeping with the last-mentioned fact that sculpting hard
materials (glyptics, scalptura) is one of the oldest arts and was practiced
before the use of metals, but it was one of the last processes to be elevated to
an art. It was applied to nonmetallic bodies at an earlier stage, before metal
became its material of choice, but as we have seen metal served as a sculptural
material in a different way. Metal is not the proper medium for glyptics, and
for this reason metal engraving is dependent on nonmetallic engraving and
never denies its secondary lapidary lineage.
From time immemorial, glyptics or scalpture in hard stone was customary
in the Orient, particularly in Egypt. It was used for small articles of jewelry
and seals, as well as colossal figures in granite, porphyry, and obsidian.
This difficult branch of art, linked with the traditions of the Stone Age of
cultural history, has a particular style. It is, so to speak, an agreement between
the soft human hand—along with the simple tools available to it—and the
untamable hardness of the material.Itlimited
is to what is most necessary; in
trying to produce the desired result, the attitude toward resources is sparing
and is necessarily associated with a linear, shallow, and sharp treatment. This
leads to a type most clearly expressed in Egyptian sculpture and art, although
here too it is affected by other influences.?4
Scalpture has the same character in its later application to metals, although
it is significantly modified and mitigated because most metals are relatively
easy to handle. At the same time scalpture is usually an auxiliary technique
used to perfect and complete certain forms that arise from other processes
and whose main features are stylistically fixed. Yet it does have its own, as it
were, inherited field, the independence of which gained it a certain renown
during a variety of art historical periods.
Its limits are not easy to define, and yet a distinction is immediately neces-
sary as quite different considerations have to be addressed, depending on
whether toreutics is seen as a principal or an auxiliary technique. If the for-
mer, it is the actual technical factor in style; if the latter, it can only modify,
complete, and accompany what is otherwise required.
In the first instance one need not classify metalwork in advance according
to the nature and degree of involvement of this technology in its formation to

837
 Semper

justify the generally valid pronouncement that in every case the character of a
work (both in general and as it has been conditioned by the properties of the
material and the technology used) must express itself as purely and decisively
_as
as possible. A work of beaten metal must be hammered out with the least pos-
‘sible use of chasing; a statue cast in bronze is all the more perfect if its cast
skin is touched by chisel, burin, and file as little as possible. A work by a met-
alworker of artistry should not need to be touched up by a chaser; it should
still produce a cloud of sparks, as it were; the echo of the anvil should be
‘damped only slightly by the screech of the file. Similarly a properly toreutic
work should express itself purely; it must seem to have been carved from
something solid. Anything prepared through other metallurgical means to
facilitate the process should not be conspicuous or it should appear as a sec-
ondary element in the form. A chased silver krater, for example, should not be
thin like a beaten one, nor should its general profile betray its molten origin]
Rather, it should show. that iit would be difficult to make it or to reproduce it
exactly by any other means. It was created thanks to the potter’s wheel, to
“carving and drilling instruments, and to the file.
So much for general remarks.
It is more difficult to discuss those cases in which the various processes
work together for artistic purposes. In principle, such combinations are prob-
ably justified, but only when subordination is maintained. In other words, one
technique sets the tone and the others serve as accompaniment. The distribu-
tion of roles should be carefully considered in this regard.
Further details are given in what follows. Suffice it to say here that the
contrasts between the active and passive parts of a structure—enclosing and
enclosed, decorating and decorated —are important in the distribution of
these roles, and that in most cases where toreutics has only an auxiliary func-
tion it is assigned the active, enclosing, decorative role.

§ 180 Scalpture in Metal as an Independent Technique

Coinage
The oldest scalpture, at least in hard stone, initially served decorative pur-
poses. It served as the setting for a jewel and contented itself at first with
enhancing the beauty of the gem by providing shape and polish (Pliny: “gemma
intacta illibataque” [the gem untouched and undiminished]). Later, where the
use of seals was widespread, it was used to incise signs and figures (intaglio),
and elsewhere it was used to raise them in relief (ectypa scalptura, cameo).
Examples of gemlike carved bronze and Egyptian, Assyrian, and Etruscan
metalwork in [Joseph] Strutt’s Dictionary.
Though it was a known practice, scalpture (hence toreutics too) did not
develop plastically in Greece for a long time. This is proven by the frequent
finds of Egyptian and Assyrian carvings among Hellenic and Italic antiquities,
for example among the ruins of the temple at Kardaki (Corfu), and by the
absence of anything other than smooth gems in Greco-Italic jewelry. It is

838
 Metallurgy

not until the fiftieth olympiad that we find isolated reports of contemporary
Greek gem carvers and their work: Mnesarchos, father of Pythagoras; Theo-
dorus, creator of the celebrated ring of Polycrates, which Pliny described as
intact and uncarved in his own day.?5
The first Greek stamped coins date from the same period (seventh century
B.C.). At first a hammer and anvil were used to stamp them with nothing but
a sign that indicated their value (quadratum incussum [stamped square]).?¢
The first properly stamped coins were ordered by Pheidon, tyrant of Aegina,
in 600 B.C.
Early development of this die-cutting art in Syracuse and Macedonia,
500 B.C.
The punch was made of bronze, for which hardening techniques were
available; only after Constantine was it made of steel. In preparation and use
this was fundamentally no different from stamping hard stone, thus the style
of antique coinage is practically identical to the intaglio style.
Yet as coinage developed it acquired certain properties suited to stamping:
stronger relief without undercutting, edges blending gently with the hollowed
surface. The custom of representing heads frontally on coins seems to have
lasted only a short time — approximately to the mid-fourth century at the time
of Dionysius the Elder and Dionysius the Younger of Syracuse. Very beautiful
high-relief gold and silver coins from Syracuse and other Sicilian cities deco-
rated with Arethusa, Pegasus, and so on. Names of these coins’ die-cutters
established by Raoul-Rochette: Cimon, Euclidas, Evaenétos, Phrygillos, among
others.?7
On the representation of the essence and the summing-up of the most
important features as the foremost condition of the metal style, see my com-
ments in “Ceramics,” page 532.
On the significance for the study of monuments of such representations on
antique coins, see Donaldson’s Architectura numismatica.
The high point of Greek numismatics coincided with the renaissance of
gem carving, which cannot be said to have flourished on Greek soil from the
time of Polycrates to that of Alexander. Pyrgoteles, the privileged court gem
carver to Alexander; after him the only others mentioned are Apollonides,
Cronius, and Dioscorides, the court gem carver to Augustus. Gems have
survived that were carved by Dioscorides and his sons. Of the gem carvers
authenticated by inscriptions (those considered authentic), the finest are
Apollonius, Aspasios, and Hyllos.
For the forgery of ancient gems and the names inscribed on them, see
[Enrico] Brunn (vol. 2, pt. 2) and the literature on gems listed there. Likewise
[K.] O. Miller, [Handbuch der] Archdologlie der Kunst], § 315.
The Romans improved the tools and techniques used in striking coins, but
moved die-cutting as such backward rather than forward. But it was under
their rule that the use of commemorative coins (medallions) first became com-
mon, or at least became more general. This expanded the boundaries of die-
cutting. For Roman asses [coins of small value], family coins, imperial coins

839
 Semper

in gold, silver, and bronze (the last had three classes), imperial minimi, impe-
rial medallions in all metals, struck in Rome, Alexandria, or elsewhere in the
colonies —see [Joseph Hilarius von] Eckhel, Doctrina numorum veterum.
8 vols. in quarto.

MIDDLE AGES
With the migration of the Byzantine peoples, the sole preservers of ancient
tradition, gem carving and die-cutting continued along its path ({Seroux]
d’Agincourt, 2:96). Other nations used antique stones and medals as decora-
tions for sacred and profane purposes. Pépin’s seal was an ancient Indian
Bacchus; the seal of Charlemagne was a head of Sarapis. Old inventories of
kings, princes, and monasteries are filled with lists of ancient gems and
medallions, and even today reliquaries from that period are filled with them
(Schrein der heilligen] Elisabeth zu Marburg, edited by [Georg] Friedrich
Creuzer; Sammlung antiker Gemmen, welche den Schrein der h{eiligen] drei
K6énige zu Koln schmiicken, edited with essay by J. P. N. M. V[ogel]).
Glyptics showed no sign of renewed activity until the fourteenth century,
and then it was in Italy, probably under the influence of recent Greek refugees.
Numismatics was also at a low ebb at the time and had passed into a new
style: bracteates, sheet gold with barbarian (hollowed) impressions. It only
partially recovered in the Gothic period (but not to the same extent as the
other decorative arts), thus the significance of medieval coins and medallions
is to a large extent historical.

RENAISSANCE
The true rebirth of stone carving did not take place in Italy until the fifteenth
century, though from this time forward it perfected itself with incredible
rapidity. This art’s most important masters emerged in that same century:
Giovanni Maria da Mantua; Jacopo Tagliacarne; Leonardo da Milano; Fran-
cesco Nichini da Ferrara; Valerio [dei Belli, called Il] Vicentino; and others.
This, and related artistic activities in hard materials, had a powerful influ-
ence on the general direction of art, as the general style and character of early
Renaissance art is principally a lively and elegant pietra dura style.
The Italian free states competed with popes and princes to perfect the long
neglected art of numismatics. High offices in mints were awarded to the most
famous artists. Soon the fashion of striking medallions appeared, expanding
the field of this art. The oldest medallion, dating from 1363, is in the Marti-
nengo collection in Venice. Other early Renaissance medallions are in Vienna.
Dante’s portrait by Vittore Pisano is also there. Medallions of Paola Malatesta
(1410) and by Andrea Guazzalotti are in the library of Saint Mark’s in Venice.28
The most famous strikers of medallions: Franc[esco] Francia, Caradosso,
Aless[andro] Cesati (il Grechetto), Benvenuto Cellini, and many others.2?
Papal medallions from Paul II (1464) onward; the most interesting and
complete modern collection is in the Vatican. A splendid series of Medici
medallions (Uffizi).

840
 Metallurgy

During Caradosso’s era embossed gold medallions were in vogue, chiefly

for clasps on hats and coats; this constituted a remarkable intervention on the
part of stereotomy into the neighboring field of hammering. The older process
used by Caradosso was related to ancient empaestics, and Cellini’s new pro-
cess was pure sphyrelaton. For both, see Cellini, Arte dell’orfevreria, chapter
5 [recte: 12]. Clement VII’s scapular clasp was made by Cellini.
In France the art of the medallion was already flourishing by the time of
Charles VIII. Great medallion of Louis XII and his queen, Anne of Brittany,
struck in Lyon in 1455 [1499].
Médailleur [Guillaume] Dupré enjoyed a great and well-earned reputation
in the second half of the sixteenth century. This art found especial favor under
Louis XIV. The series of medals struck under him provides a complete history
of his reign.
The first medallion struck in England dates from the time of Henry VIII. It
is made of gold with an inscription on the reverse side. A series of corona-
tion medals begins with Edward VI. The republican medallions and those of
Charles II were struck by Master [Thomas] Simon and engraved by [George]
Vertue. Medallions from the subsequent period were by Dussier of Genoa.
A fourteenth-century medallion of David II exists in Scotland, made of
gold and modeled on the nobles of Edward III. There are numerous medal-
lions of Mary, Queen of Scots, and they are the most beautiful of the Scottish
royal series.
In Germany an old school of metal artists began cutting dies as early as the
eleventh century. Seal of Queen Richeza of Poland in the state archives in
Berlin, dating from 1054.
The first German medallions appeared under Ferdinand III in 1453. There
are numerous examples both from the Holy Roman Empire and from impe-
rial lands. But the most distinguished German artists carved their medallions
from hard wood or limestone and later cast them in metal. Hence the wealth
of wooden and limestone models found in the cabinets of Berlin, Vienna,
Nuremberg, and elsewhere. The most famous artists in this category include
Albrecht Diirer, Hans Schwarz, Heinrich Reitz from Leipzig, the Maler broth-
ers from Nuremberg, Constantin Miller from Augsburg, Jakob Galdhals of
Berlin, and Hans Petzold from Nuremberg.
The art of the médailleur flourished in Flanders and Holland as well. Dutch
medals are remarkable for the maps and plans depicted on them.
If we compare the works of modern glyptics summarized here with those
of antiquity, it reinforces our conviction that Renaissance art was superior to
that of the ancients.

For numismatics and its history, see the following works:

Eckhel, Doctrina numorum veterum. 8 vols. Quarto.
[John] Pinkerton, Essay on Numismatics.
[Ennio Quirino] Visconti, Iconographie grecque.
[Rogers] Ruding, on England.

841
 Semper

[Filippo] Argelati, on Italy.

[Johann] David Kohler, on Germany. 24 vols. Nuremberg, [1729-50].
[Claude] Bouteroue, on France.
[Anselmo] Banduri, Numismata imp|eratorum| Rom|anorum].
[Francois] Le Blanc, Traité [historique] des monnoyes de France.
[Wilhelm Ernst] Tentzel, Saxonia numismatica.
J. J. Bohl, Die trierischen Munzen.
[Enrique] Florez, on Spain.
[Philipp] Floravante, on papal coins.
Adrien de Longpérier, “Numismatique,” in Le Moyen Age et la Renaissance.
His essays in Revue archéologique.
Winckelmann, De la méthode antique de graver sur pierres fines.
[Philipp Daniel] Lippert, Dactyliothec.
A list of additional works on ancient gems is in Brunn, Geschichte der
griechischen Kiinst{ler].

Bronze Engraving (Chalcography)

This is a strictly modern art, belonging only in a technical sense to the pure
field of scalpture. It is usually only imitative but can also be creative.
The medieval procedure of engraving metal plates and filling the lines with
dark inks (niello) gave Master Maso Finiguerra the idea of copper engraving
({Eméric-]David, Histoire de la gravure, and A[dam von] Bartsch, Le peintre
graveur).
The various methods of chalcography: (1) engraving with a burin; (2)
proper engraving with a cold needle; (3) etching; (4) finishing an etched plate
with a burin; (5) stippling with a stamp; (6) hatching or the black style, also
called mezza tinta; (7) the French style, imitation of chalk drawing; (8) the
English style (la maniére pointillée); (9) the style that attempts to imitate the
effect of bister and Indian ink drawings; (10) the watercolor style, polychrome.
Some of the processes are combined to complete each other.
We should have placed the art of woodcutting at the top of this list of
procedures, for it had been invented and practiced by Master Alessandro
Alberico Cuneo and his sister Isabella around 1270, two centuries before
[Tommaso di Antonio] Finiguerra’s invention, which prepared the way for
book printing.3°
There is a sense in which lithography belongs to the art under discussion
here, as it is technically based on engraving or etching.
What should we add about the style of these arts without going beyond
the permissible scope of this work? At least this much: it would have been bet-
ter if most of these procedures had not been invented, as they arose from a
misguided attempt to go beyond, even deny, the natural limits of wood, metal,
and stone printing. Thus we feel that many of the brilliant results of these
arts in modern times can be considered achievements or progress only to a
limited extent. The great Renaissance masters who made woodcuts and copper
engravings, especially those who practiced these arts and others in Italy and

842
 Metallurgy

Germany, are ten times better than today’s — despite our mechanical and chem-
ical advances. This is true of both the style and the spirit of their creations.
After having been forgotten for a long time, the woodcut came back into
favor only about twenty-five years ago and has since achieved wonderful tech-
nical results. So far it has proved less vulnerable to criticism than copper and
steel engraving, probably because it is more limited technically and materially,
both as a general technique and in the printing of books. Nevertheless the
very earliest modern woodcuts are the best, at least in terms of style.3! Their
excessive naiveté does little to detract from the impression they give of lively
freshness. Precisely this is lacking in more recent woodcuts, which frequently
display a false antiquarian simplicity and stiffness, accompanied by pietistic
grimaces. This makes them far less acceptable than the bravura pieces in
English and French illustrated newspapers.
Another concern is that xylography as a technique—namely, as a steno-
graphic technique for quick printing —soon makes great demands on the artist,
putting a stop to the free artistic process and creating a division of labor within
this limited field. By contrast, the highly inventive woodcut artists of the
Renaissance found time to be great painters, metalworkers, engineers, and all
other practices. Work is divided in that the woodcutter no longer does the
drawing, a fact that precludes all naive freshness. A preliminary drawing that
fixes every detail too precisely allows no freedom and leads to stiffness; if it is
left too sketchy and the woodcutter is artistically lacking, it leads to all sorts
of nonsense. Only rarely is the draftsman entirely familiar with the require-
ments and limitations of xylography, and equally rarely does a xylographer
translate a stylistically incorrect drawing into the woodcut style. Despite this,
some of the most recent illustrations are extremely pleasing (for example,
Viollet-le-Duc’s excellent illustrations of his own writings). So we repeat that
this art seems to be in a healthier state than many of its more highly esteemed
sisters.

Books:
Adam [von] Bartsch, Anl[eitung] zur Kupferstichkunde. Octavo. Vienna, 1808.
[Jean-Michel] Papillon, Traité [historique et pratique] de la gravure en bois.
Strutt, A Biographical Dictionary ofAll the Engravers, 2 vols., 1785-86.
von Quandt, [Entwurf zu einer| Geschichte der Kupferstecherkunst. Leipzig.

§ 181 Toreutics Proper

Ancient Art
The mythical period of Hellenic art history is filled with legends alluding to
the stereotomic arts, yet no mention is made of carved metalwork. Wood
carving is much more prominent, but often in combination with dressings
made up of real fabrics or sheet metal.32
Greek stereotomic metalwork is first mentioned only at the start of the his-
torical period. Glaucus, the Asiatic Greek from Chios or Samos, is the alleged

843
 Semper

inventor of welding and iron toreutics. Pausanias and Athenaeus give comple-
mentary descriptions of his most famous work: a silver stoup with an iron
stand that Alyattes dedicated to Delphi. It is a product of the smith’s art, a
bar construction in the form of a basket, curved at the top and bottom and
divided into transverse zones by bars. The fields or friezes between the ham-
mered33 (forged) iron bars of the frame are filled with animal friezes and
foliage and with every kind of insect, bird, and so on. On the steps or shelves
of the framework are vessels and other decorations. The bars are not riveted
or fastened to other ironwork but welded together. The whole thing is an
étagére, an embasis—not for the krater alone but for other votive gifts as
well. It is an instructive example of a toreutic composition at the very limits of
verifiable art history.34
During the subsequent period, which saw the beginnings of bronze cast-
ing, toreutics may have lost some of its independence, though we have many
remarkable reports about colossal vessels in gold, silver, and bronze, as well as
of carved and beaten works on the largest possible scale.
Rhoecus and Theodorus, Samian school (fiftieth to sixtieth olympiad).
Golden mixing vessels in the Persian royal palace (Athenaeus 12.[9.28,
Kaibel]). Similar ones in silver made from six hundred amphorae and offered
at Delphi by Croesus (Herodotus 1.5[1]). Gold vine with grapes made of
jewels, identified as the work of Theodorus (Athenaeus [12.9.24, Kaibel]).
The ring of Polycrates, a gem artfully set in gold (Strabo 14.[1.6]; Pausanius
8.14.[8]; Pliny 37.[2]; Herodotus 3.41).
On nearby Chios, a group of marble sculptors was operating at the same
time as these Samian metalworkers. While Pliny states that the marble work-
ers were already active during the thirtieth olympiad, there is no other record
of this sort of work at such an early date. The earliest work of which we have
certain knowledge is that of the period of Bupalus (ca. sixtieth olympiad). It
is remarkable that here the marble statue appears in the context of bronze
casting, and therefore also with sculpture. It is a plastic work perfected by
sculpture.35
A quite different school of sculptors, roughly contemporary and based on
the tradition of Daedalus, seems to have rejected bronze casting and worked
in cold metal as well as other materials, principally wood, ivory, and stone.
This is the Cretan (later Spartan-Doric) school, led by the artists Dipoenus
and Scyllis at its head. According to the principles and traditions of this
school, stereotomic work is not transposed sculpture, as Chian marble sculp-
ture is, but arose directly out of wood carving and metal dressing.
For this school and its activities, see Brunn, Gesch{ichte] dler] griech[ischen]
Kiinstler (introduction, p. 53). The famous work of Bathycles, the throne of
the Amyclaean Apollo, is an estrade for the (much earlier) hermlike statue of
Apollo, set behind richly worked gates. It may have been a polygonal or ash-
lar construction dressed with bronze (Pausanias 3.18.[9] ff.).
There were branches of the Samian school of plastic sculpture mentioned
above in Sicyon, Argos, and Corinth. They produced the great masters of

844
 Metallurgy

Hellenic-Attic sculpture, for the bronze sculptor Ageladas of Argos (seventi-

eth to eightieth olympiad) taught Phidias, Myron, and Polyclitus.
Legend even has it that sculpture (dibtades) was invented in Sicyon. Approx-
imately at the time of the fiftieth olympiad, when the Cretan Daedalids3¢
settled in Sicyon, it had long been the home of an ancient fraternity of metal
sculptors. Similarly, it seems that in Argos the influence of a school of stereo-
tomic sculptors from elsewhere left its impact on the native school. In Sicyon
the name Canachus represents a uniting of the contrasts between the two
schools, as does Ageladas (mentioned above) for Argos. Canachus’s most
famous works are his statues of Apollo in Miletus and Thebes: the former is
cast in bronze, the latter in wood, both in the same style, still strict but fuller
and softer than that of Aegina. In Corinth was a seated Aphrodite in gold and
ivory by Canachus. According to Pliny (36.42), he sculpted in marble as well.
Canachus did not found a school, but his brother Aristocles (seventieth
olympiad) may have done so. No details are known, however. Its sphere of
influence was principally athletic sculpture, therefore the nude.
At about the same time (after the fiftieth olympiad), the two opposites
(sculpture with bronze casting and stereotomy with beaten metalwork) under-
went a similar, albeit chronologically reversed, mediation in the ancient
seats of Daedalic art— Aegina and Athens. The former has been famed from
ancient times as the home to a native guild of artists who carved in wood and
ivory and at the same time produced embossed metalwork; they exhibited
great care in execution and clung to strict guild traditions in certain instances.
Smilis is the only name from this Aeginetan school to have survived, presum-
ably because he was the first to shift its direction, or at least the first to have
his name associated with this tradition. In this respect, at least, it is interesting
to hear about his contact with the alleged inventors of metal casting — the
Samians Rhoecus and Theodorus— with whom he is said to have built the
labyrinth at Lemnos.
Shortly after Smilis,37 and encouraged by the cult of athletics, nude sculp-
ture seems to have been enthusiastically taken up by the Aeginetans. By the
seventieth olympiad their reputation for this genre —it favored bronze casting
and brought the Aegenitans their earliest honor in this area—was recognized
and widespread. Glaucias of Aegina must have enjoyed a fine and extensive
reputation as a portrait sculptor. A contemporary of Gelon, tyrant of Syracuse
(seventieth to eightieth olympiad), he numbered among his clients Theagenes
of Thasus, Philon of Corcyra, Glaucus of Carystus (or their relations). His
countryman Callon was active in another direction: furnishing shrines with
ceremonial vessels. Onatas, also from Aegina, was famous for his colossal
sculptures in cast bronze. He and his contemporaries (seventy-fifth to eighti-
eth olympiad) applied the cast-metal style of the athletic statue to the repre-
sentation of gods and heroes, but they were not able to liberate themselves
from the twofold limits of ancient craft traditions so as to completely over-
come a lack of skill in metal casting (which did not correspond to that craft
tradition).38

845
 Semper

Aeginetan tympana from the time of Onatas give us an idea of his style.
They are renditions in marble of a cast-metal style before it was liberated from
the fetters of a technique and a tradition of representation that was alien to it.
At about the same time, cast metal was also accepted in Athens, the ancient
city of the widely disseminated Daedalid guild. Yet this did not threaten the
existence of the old school of carving and embossed work as it did in Aegina.
It is true that for a time the Athenian school, much like the Aeginetan school,
was constrained by the fetters of a conventional cast-metal style, and the
delightful Ionic softness of archaic Attic art did give way to an austere style.
Nevertheless, it was still a long way from the dry and angular manner of
Aegina: it appeared naiver, not the product of a clear conventional canon.
However close the connections between the old-Attic school of sculpture
from the Peisistratid era and the more familiar Aeginetan period, these move-
ments (in technical matters) arrived at quite different conclusions.?? The
Aeginetan school of artists (after the island had ceased to be independent,
around the eightieth olympiad) remained true to their old casting technique
and survived only in its very famous crafts industry. Athenian sculpture, thanks
to its wondrous advances exemplified by colossal statues dressed with ivory
and gold, started to renew its links with the most ancient customary and tech-
nical artistic traditions of carving and hammering.
This period not only validated toreutics as an independent art but also
saw all other sculptural arts subordinated to its style and influence, to some
extent. For this reason, Phidias is rightly called the founder of toreutics, hav-
ing brought the highest honor to this art; Polyclitus did likewise and devel-
oped it further. Myron, Calamis, and Callimachus were also called toreutic
artists, and justifiably so. This is true not only for the minor works of art
which they did not scorn to execute, but also for their larger works. Even their
works in cast bronze and in marble were toreutic.*°
Thus at that time all of sculptural art was actually part of a higher tore-
utics. But this general tendency was concentrated especially in certain works
on a limited scale: small ornaments, utensils, and vessels that were also pure
toreutic products, carved from a single piece almost without the assistance
of casting.
The great creator of the Olympian Zeus carved flies, cicadas, lizards, fish,
bees, and other small ornaments. The same is true of Myron, who covered
silver goblets and bowls with naturalistic and lively animals and human fig-
ures. Calamis, the great sculptor, made goblets that were copied fervently and
happily by Zenodoros, the maker of the Neronian colossus. Polyclitus also
worked as a goldsmith.
Others worked only in bas-relief: among them the most famous was Mentor,
whose works were consecrated in the temples (lived before the 106th olym-
piad). According to a passage from Propertius, he was more of an argumentar-
ius or a crustarius, as he practiced his art not on the enclosed and subordinate
arabesque, but on the figurative subject set within it.41 By contrast, Mys was
famous for his careful, meticulous, and sharp treatment of foliage on the

846
 Metallurgy

arabesque setting. Yet he also produced compositions and figurative friezes.

Callicrates and Myrmecides made microscopic ornaments: quadrigas drawn
by flies, and similar things.42

§ 182 Toreutics Proper

Byzantium and the East

Toreutics lost all of its creative independence during the reign of that old
Greek school of metal carvers and the antiquarian art connoisseurship of
the Romans. Pliny and even later writers provide ample evidence that Roman
goldsmiths continued to be very active into the second century,*? after having
lost some of the respect formerly paid them in the luxury market that had
been Rome’s most important commercial center. Rich Romans wanted to
drink not from old, worn-out items by Mentor, Mys, Boéthus, and Myron but
rather from carved gems and murrhine goblets. This vogue soon became
obsolete when the distribution and cheap local manufacture of glass —at first
esteemed almost as highly as crystal and carved onyx — made it common.
Glass caused even genuine crystal, murrhine work, and so on, to fall in repu-
tation, since it could so easily be used to counterfeit them. Authors from the
Constantinian and Theodosian periods, as well as the earliest Christian writ-
ers, tell us of a return to the ancient extravagance in precious metal vessels,
esteemed in the later periods not for their formal beauty and artistic treatment
but for the weight and magnificence of the precious material. The Liber pon-
tificalis of Anastasius Bibliothecarius sheds light on the scale of this luxury in
Rome under Constantine. According to this source, the emperor, before mov-
ing his capital to Byzantium, was swayed by Pope Sylvester [I]’s suggestion
that he should shower the Roman churches with lavish farewell gifts: golden
crosses weighing three hundred pounds, massive silver fonts, stoups, jugs,
chalices, altar cloths, lamps, ampullae, censers, and other objects. Sylvester’s
successors continued to foster the glory of the church triumphant, so that by
the late fifth century this extravagance had reached unbelievable heights under
Symmachus.
But Rome had been superseded by Constantine’s new capital as the center
of the world and all its splendors. Here, under the joint auspices of the church
and the Asiatic imperial court—and thanks to direct contact with the East—
the new art of the goldsmith first adopted what would become its fixed
Oriental type. Contemporary work in the West shows a general depravity of
taste and a degeneration of technique.*4
We will first deal briefly with the Byzantine type, partly because it showed
the first signs of a new form, partly because of the reference points it provides
for characterizing certain phenomena in the history of Western art, and partly
because of its connection with Oriental art, which is so important for the his-
tory of style.
The Byzantine style is an orientalized Greek and Roman style that has
reclaimed its Eastern origins after a rapid cycle of leaps and contrasts. It is a

847
 Semper

renaissance of the principles that served as a basis for the most ancient pre-
Hellenic art.
We cannot fully address this topic here. To do so we would need to con-
sider Byzantine art as a whole, as a product of the special conditions and ten-
dencies of the time, as well as all other essential contributory factors. We do
not want to abandon our material, but rather to show that the most impor-
tant material-technical aspects of Byzantine expression are the particular way
in which it was treated and that expression itself, to the extent that this man-
ner of treatment corresponded to its properties.
The high style of Phidias and Polyclitus was governed by both schools of
Hellenic sculpture —the plastic and the toreutic or stereotomic—and by a
higher view of both. Through this combination the Hellenic cultural idea
could achieve the purest and most satisfactory sculptural expression. Simi-
larly, the rise of the Christian-Byzantine style succeeded several centuries of
rule by the realistic and rich, highly plastic, Corinthian-Alexandrian-Roman
style, a late expression of the Hellenic cultural principle. Through it the cul-
tural idea composed of the Christian and the new Asiatic was to find its ade-
quate expression. It was expressed materially-technically as a toreutics carried
back by sculpture to the ancient pre-Hellenic plate style, as surface stereotomy.
This Byzantine change in taste was conditioned over a long period, as the
noble and simple Hellenic decoration was ousted by a fondness for the dress-
ing of gold and sheet metal on furniture and architectural parts, by an increas-
ingly widespread taste for gems and pearls (instead of the old plastic arguments),
by luxurious silk clothing and the Oriental sheathing of the human form, and
by overladen hangings with gold and precious stones in the sheet metal and
filigree style.
Soon this change in taste affected the nature of ancient art by removing it
from its plastic mode and inserting it into the sheet metal and dressing style.
In architecture this tendency was encouraged by reducing to a minimum
any consideration of the classical, structural-symbolic significance of tradi-
tional types derived from tectonics, by denying or forgetting their more plastic
significance, and by making richly ornamented structural parts of them. Thus
the Corinthian capital becomes a blunted stone cube covered with acanthus,
structurally a necessary base for the arch. The entablature either disappears
completely or survives only as a beveled corbel with the same rich surface.
The high symbol of the ancient temple —the fastigium—is completely aban-
doned or demoted to a simple gable. In short, all classical architectural forms
fall away or enter into quite new combinations, losing their tectonic meaning
and functioning stereotomically (and, to be sure, materially-technically). Vaults
and domes, covered with the richest surface claddings, replace the old colum-
nar roof. The comparison of Roman baths with (not at all structurally inno-
vative) Christian domes, and especially with the church of Hagia Sophia in
Constantinople, shows how little Byzantine art was simply a barbarized
Roman art and how suddenly a new and well-recognized principle came to be
followed. In the baths the old architectural symbols (the column orders) still

848
 Metallurgy

actively fulfill their old function; in the domes they do not fulfill this function
even as subordinate or subsidiary elements. They appear only in the new com-
bination and shape already described.
Sculpture, as such, also adopts new principles, partly following architec-
ture (which has once again taken it firmly in hand as it did in ancient times),
and partly to conform with the dominant surface toreutics that affect it. It
detaches itself from Hellenic traditions corrupted by the Etrusco-Roman pref-
erence for things soft and plastic, and consciously returns to the most ancient,
long forgotten, and reconstructed types. It is quite probable that the pointed,
dry acanthus formation and the sharp, toreutic treatment of ancient Byzan-
tine foliage, as seen on the rock tombs in the Kidron valley and elsewhere in
Judaea, were perceived as representing a deliberate return to the Phoenician-
Syrian artistic tradition.45
No matter what justifications are offered and no matter what false prem-
ises are set forth, it is quite impossible that the strictly stylized Byzantine
acanthus leaf came directly from the blunt, late-Roman softening of this orna-
ment, as it stands in the strongest possible contradiction to it.
Bronze casting, vessels, and actual statuary are also influenced by surface
stereotomy. We know, partly from records and partly from ancient Byzantine
sculpture, that in the early centuries of the Middle Ages bronze casting was by
no means left behind. Anastasius lists a large number of bronze objects pre-
sented to the church during the pontificate of Saint Sylvester. Later bronze is
mentioned less, and finally nothing is said about it at all. Yet in the ninth cen-
tury the Byzantines were still famous as casters and carvers of bronze. ‘Abd ar-
Rahman III had gilded bronze fountains made by Greeks for the tower in
Medinat az-Zahra. His palace in Cordova had iron doors with bronze fit-
tings;46 his courtyard was decorated with a fountain supported by twelve
lions, with figures and arabesques —all Greek work.47
Fountains and richly sculpted thrones are still the usual decoration for
palaces and gardens in Persia and India.
The style of these works is still evident on much of what has survived. In
such works the stereotomic surface treatment still dominates the cast metal
materially and stylistically. The latter is the preparatory process; toreutics per-
fected the form and established the style. Thus the surface has been reworked,
and the result is a shallow shape and form, sharply chiseled and chased, uni-
formly patterned, and strictly conventional—a type common to sculpture
throughout the Eastern lands.*8
Like its architecture and sculpture, Byzantine-Oriental painting was also
stereotomic in nature and style; it was, so to speak, inlaid work, either mosaic
or enamel, executed in color. In principle it was the opposite of Western
painting, which with its first wingbeats after a long hibernation instinctively
returned to its old plastic course.
Thus considered from every side and direction, from every point of view,
Byzantinism formed a clear contrast to Hellenic art. We have already described,
in § 15, a remarkable phenomenon that occurs as a result of this contrast

849
 Semper

(admittedly only with special reference to color harmony) —this permits us to

refer to that description here.
There I said that repose (a result of rapid vibration and uniform richness)
was the actual Oriental principle of ornamentation in both form and color—
the principle of even distribution, contrasting with the Hellenic principle of
order and authority. Just as in the Orient high art never actually crossed the
borders imposed by the first-named principle of decoration, form, and repre-
sentation, so did Byzantinism, as the renaissance of the Asiatic ideal, have to
direct ancient art back within the limits of the embroidery style.
The stylistic justification for toreutic embroidery, given the known proper-
ties of metals, is so great that it was quite natural for metal techniques under-
stood in this sense (as surface stereotomy in the embroidery style) to be well
suited to Oriental art in general. The greatest achievements to which it aspired
took place in this area. What we said in § 57 (p. 231) about Oriental art in gen-
eral is true of this style: that within the described limits surface toreutics and
the Oriental arabesque are models upon which we can practice our taste and
sense of style. This was recognized by the great masters of toreutics of the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries when they wove and curled their Oriental,
finely chased, or inlaid arabesques delicately and fantastically around their
classical products of higher toreutics.
Even as the whole of Oriental art was being conquered, as it were, by tore-
utics, the latter was losing its specialized field. The further it moved from
antiquity the more it established itself as an auxiliary procedure for surface
decoration. We will therefore encounter it once more, playing this part, in a
later chapter.

§ 183 Toreutics Proper

The West in the Middle Ages and Recent Times

The barbarism and unsystematic muddleheadedness of West Roman early
Christian art—in contrast with the foundation of laws adopted early on in
Byzantium — was, like Byzantine art, the consequence and result of general
religious, political, and social conditions; they had an unfavorable effect on
it. But at the same time, this breakdown made possible a reawakening. By
contrast, Oriental art, always paralyzed by the constraints imposed by the
statutes of craft, church, and court, could develop in one direction only —the
Asiatic-ornamental, fertilized by Islam, and cultivating new seeds that came
from within.
To the same degree as the arts, the entirety of the spiritually free culture of
the West managed to free itself from the general anarchy that threatened the
West. This lawlessness was the exact opposite of Byzantine paralysis; rather, it
was the same chaotic primeval slime from which, under quite similar circum-
stances and external influences, the beautiful world of Hellenism had taken
shape. During the same time, art encountered artistic traditions already half-
way to oblivion and deprived of a legal basis; it had effectively succumbed to

850
 Metallurgy

general softening and atomization. Hellenism had arisen from the seeds of a
new life, not the desiccated mummy of Egyptian art. But never would Greek
genius have become aware of its goal or have reached it without a fettered
Egypt as contrast—or without Egypt’s formal-lawful influence. Identical or
similar effects usually have identical or similar causes. In this case this is con-
firmed by the facts, as far as they can be ascertained.
When art and science had declined to their lowest levels, the increasing
barbarian addiction to pomp and circumstance meant that virtually the only
art esteemed in the western empire’s former provinces was goldsmithery. It
found particular support among the clergy and in monasteries, but it was also
practiced by and for an enthusiastic laity. Certain cities that may have been
centers for this industry in antiquity offered goldsmiths privileges in the early
Middle Ages. At the time those who worked in bronze and wrought iron were
also included. One such city was Limoges, where a certain Abbon enjoyed a
high degree of fame as master of metallurgy during the sixth century. He
taught Saint Aloysius [recte: Eloi] (588-659), who soon outshone his master
and was given important commissions by Chlotar II. He was promoted to
high secular and ecclesiastical offices by Chlotar’s successor, Dagobert II, and
soon he assumed a position from which he could successfully practice and
protect the arts. Of his works and those of his contemporaries virtually noth-
ing has survived, but we do have detailed lists of the works handed down by
Saint Ouen, biographer of Saint Aloysius, as well as by an anonymous histo-
rian from the monastery of Saint-Denis.4? The objects listed there included
some on a colossal scale: two gold thrones, the mausoleum of Saint-Denis (its
marble roof set with gold and precious stones), the chest of Sainte-Geneviéve,
the chest of Saint-Germain, and above all the precious gold chest of Saint-
Martin of Tours.
Of the general character and nature of these works it can be said first that
they corresponded to the contemporary taste for decoration with precious
stones and gold plating, but at the same time they were distinguished from
contemporary Eastern works by an exaggerated plasticity verging on the
baroque. They also represented a departure for goldsmiths and metalworkers
in general. Already shackled to architecture by the adoption of architectural
forms, they also tried to achieve the overall effect of architectonic monumen-
tality —one of the most important factors in the history of medieval architec-
ture and the decorative arts.
Under Charlemagne, Byzantine and Saracen influences seem to have been
strong and to have affected the area of metalwork. The preference for Oriental
fabrics,°° carpets, and metal goods was encouraged by lively trade and the
importing of these articles.
This period too is one from which very little has survived: the most impor-
tant exceptions are parts of the imperial coronation vestments and some
metal fittings for Aachen Cathedral.5! The former are entirely in the Byzan-
tine sheet-metal style; the latter show a more antique-plastic treatment with
ornamental parts suggesting Scandinavian influence. The emperor’s will (the

851
 Semper

text of which was saved by Einhard) mentions gold and silver utensils: its
rather sparse descriptions suggest they were inlaid Saracen work.°?
The bronze architectural parts of Aachen Cathedral, mentioned earlier, are
perhaps the earliest evidence of the revival of an old metalworkers’ guild —it
flourished mightily in the subsequent Saxon imperial period. What happened
to the northern arts in this remarkable period, under the sway of plastic metal
techniques, was nothing less than an early renaissance of ancient art, as early
as the eleventh or twelfth century. The superior classical education enjoyed by
German prelates and princes at that time is scarcely enough to explain this
phenomenon. This leads to the strong suspicion of the existence of at least
one ancient center of metallurgy, preserving antique artistic practices in the
formerly Roman provinces of Germany (Augsburg and Liége?), like Limoges
in the south of France.
The activities of the German-Latin school of sculptors of the eleventh,
twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, which can be clearly followed alongside a
contemporary Byzantine direction and another direction, entirely barbarian,
exhibit a stark contrast with Byzantinism wherever it appears (and its influ-
ence extends to all branches of art, to painting and to sculpture in stucco,
stone, and ivory). From the general dissolution of the antique circle of forms a
life full of passionate movement suddenly emerges, quite similar to the life
that can be found in early Greek art at the moment when it starts to free itself
from the Asiatic-Assyrian softening of forms. The outward agitation and the
fantastic elements in the composition and the treatment of the material are a
protest against Christian-Byzantine statutes; they are also significant as imme-
diate expressions of the individual spiritual activity of the creative artist,
which was beginning to rise above the material.%3
The beginning of the thirteenth century brought this early Nordic renais-
sance almost to maturity, in that external movement had been replaced by
self-confident and individual life. The spirit of Christianity had almost com-
pletely penetrated and magnificently reawakened antique form—and then a
new principle related to Byzantinism (but with much greater endurance) inter-
vened. It was the Gothic architectural system that limited its effectiveness,
inhibited its development, and in its most conscious activities set in the way a
strictly hieratic-architectural scheme of sculpture and painting.5+ Happily, this
was soon overcome (in all probability thanks to artists from Germany and
Belgium), and the Saxon-Romanesque renaissance unfurled its victorious
banners in place of the defeated Frankish bogeyman. But it paid for this vic-
tory with its independence, not by becoming a slave to Byzantium but by
becoming a vassal to this new system, which allows little or no room for uni-
fied composition, for an effect that is complete in itself, for the individual
striving of the artist. The renaissance slowly atrophied into a craftsman’s
style, except when it entered into open rebellion against the system (“Tec-
tonics,” §§ 148, 157-58).
Even the minor arts, and particularly goldsmithery and all types of metal-
work, were also subjugated by Gothic architecture, which is, incidentally,

852
 Metallurgy

stereotomic and thus is favorable to and furthers metallic stereotomy in cer-

tain respects.
Large bronze works from the Gothic period are rare but all the more sig-
nificant because of a certain independent, almost rebellious spirit, as if those
German and Belgian bronze artists of old were using them as their silent
protest against the dominant system and proof of the secret perpetuation of
the antique artists’ lodge.55
Ecclesiastical metalwork does not show the same independence or eleva-
tion above craft to artistry, although it is usually well styled with respect to
structure and richly decorated in its sculptural and artistic effects. The two
schools —the Walloon and the Augsburgian—can be distinguished by their
different technical treatment of their subject: the former being more stereo-
tomic, the latter more plastic (cast metal).
Ecclesiastical goldsmiths were, generally speaking, even less free; they fol-
lowed architecture in everything and imitated its forms. But it was not with-
out the skillful insertion of their own motifs that they did so, especially the
free and naturalistic use of flowers and arabesques, in which a certain thinly
delicate elegance can be detected, which seems entirely appropriate to the
metal style (see “Tectonics,” § 148, Gothic utensils). Instead of the Byzantine
sheet-metal style with inlaid stones, taste had drawn closer to a relieflike
treatment. Chased, enameled, engraved surfaces, and niello work framed and
held together by Gothic tracery were preferred to filigree work.*°

Tomb plate at Bruges

853
Semper

=t

ame hy

! Wii | i

» fF
4 My
n |
h |
i ‘
i} ) i

ii y \
‘ \ an
jf =f '
i i ,
ff 4
7r ¥¢ 44
eg Gi |
— —
2

Is
SSS
SSa
~—
a
=”

Late Gothic chandelier in Lubeck Cathedral

854
 Metallurgy

But the goldsmith’s art complied with the architectural-hierarchical system

only in ecclesiastical works; in the sphere of secular household goods it some-
times indulged in a contempt for tradition and a boundless arbitrariness.
Unfortunately, little or nothing of this has survived.‘7

ITALY
Barbarism and the decline both of the arts and of every kind of artistic skill
occurred more rapidly and more completely in Italy than in the most distant
provinces of the former Western empire. But this decadence was not so much a
sign of the extinction of all national and individual vitality and spiritual ability
among the various barbarian and native inhabitants of this country, as a ten-
dency unfavorable to the arts and the cultivation of the sciences. In the midst of
the surrounding world’s unheard-of confusion and woes, in a society that was
everywhere struggling to reshape itself amid the conflicts of a personal feeling
strongly developed during the long period of anarchy (in part the expressions
of a feeling that opposed it, in part the expressions of the all-powerful but at
the same time individualistic and unsystematic civic spirit manifesting itself),
amid the struggles between the still insecure papal hierarchy and the equally
changeable secular powers, during the dominance of a purely practical spirit
of trade and speculation in the free communities that were forming every-
where — during these troubled times people had better things to do than
address themselves to science and art. Yet the ferment of antique culture
latent in the people had preserved its dormant germ of life and needed only
external circumstances to reawaken it. Even in times of the most profound
decline in taste and the coarsest clumsiness in artistic practice, the technical
and formal traditions of antique art were not completely lost. For example,
the old contrast between Greco-Italic and Oriental views of art could still be
seen by comparing the depressed and abbreviated forms of the childish and
barbarian sculptures and metalwork of early medieval Italy with the elegant
but stiff and systematic character of contemporary Byzantine works.°8
The sudden and surprising upsurge in the arts during late-twelfth-century
Italy (from the profound depths to which they had sunk) was mainly a result
of a particular shift and a general intensification of the people’s spirit, but
here too, as during all times of spiritual uplift, external influences were at
work. Among the influences affecting Italy from every direction were foreign
artistic views, foreign examples and models, and even the personal influence
of outside protectors of art, the most important being artists and craftsmen.
A shortage of native artists, or their lack of skill, perhaps also a principled
or acquired preference on the part of some representatives of spiritual and
secular power for the social principle contained and symbolized in Byzantin-
ism, provided the Oriental artistic direction with access to—even a certain
temporary dominance over—the freer principle in the arts, which continued
to create only unconsciously, as it were. One turned to Constantinople when
the most important things had to be done, or one hired Byzantine workers to
carry them out.>?

855
 Semper

Desiderius, abbot of the monastery of Monte Cassino, had Greek mosaicists

decorate the vault above the main altar of the new monastery church. He had
these Greeks instruct the young monks because in Italy inlaid work had been
neglected, if not completely abandoned, during the previous five centuries.
Later, in the early thirteenth century —that is, just as artistic activity was
awakening in Italy —as a result of the Frankish conquest of Constantinople,
rich art treasures from this Eastern capital were taken as spoil to Venice, and
from there to other cities. Artists and craftsmen emigrated at the same time.
The effects of these influences were threefold. The first was the rapid reac-
ceptance and dissemination of technical advantages, procedures, and manual
skills as the first condition for any artistic improvement. Yet this effect was limi-
ted to isolated technical advantages, particularly to surface decoration, the art
of cutting metal and stone, glass work, mosaic work, related enamel work, and
so on. The second effect was an aesthetic one, a certain antique-traditional ele-
gance (certainly degenerate in manner) of outline and presentation. Needed to
help tame the Italians’ decadent formal sense and the remorseless advance of
sculptural activity that had suddenly been unleashed were the strictly ruled
Byzantine stylistic laws both mathematical-architectural and at the same time
hierarchic— just as Greek art needed the legislative check that it found in hier-
atic, Egyptianized, severe Doricism in order to reach its peak of development
and perfection. Third, Romanesque art could recognize itself and achieve full
awareness of its true mission and tendency only through a contrast with
Byzantinism —just as Greek Doricism came into existence only thanks to the
antithesis of Ionicism, finding its synthesis with the latter in Atticism. Half-
mythical artists on the borders of the new art history are supporters and, so to
speak, symbols of these two important elements of a mutually complementary
and at the same time separate principles of Eastern and Western art.®°
Whereas the effect of Byzantium operated from this direction, an entirely
opposite impulse came from beyond the Alps to Italy as early as the tenth cen-
tury. The Saxon early renaissance already discussed cannot have failed to
influence the art stirring in Italy, given the close political relation between
Italy and Germany. This older impulse (which was certainly more powerful
than is generally accepted and spread from Germany to France as well) must
be distinguished from the much later regressive effect of so-called German
high art—that is, Nordic art already partly mixed into the Gothic system.°!
And it was only when the powerful incendiary agent from the north had
caught fire that Italy’s enthusiasm for old art was awakened and her eyes
opened to antiquity, whose remnants were still strewn all over classical soil.
Thus the new sculpture came into being, and after it (in contrast to Byzantine
surface painting) came the glorious Italian (sculptural-plastic) school of paint-
ing, rising to heights and a perfection unknown even to the ancients.
Seen from our technical standpoint, the characteristic feature of the Italian
Renaissance was that it was plastic-stereotomic, in contrast to Byzantinism
and Orientalism, which I would call surface stereotomy. We have already
stressed the influence of toreutics on the style of Renaissance architecture and

856
 Metallurgy

sculpture. It is expressed clearly in Donatello’s almost steely, austere, and

richly inspired metal and stone sculptures. Even Michelangelo is at least as
much a toreutic artist as a sculptor. He created from whole stone blocks
through the use of small wax models or without any models at all, and fol-
lowed the direct genius of his mighty chisel. This was not a clay model trans-
lated into stone but genuine stone sculpture!
But even as the stereotomic element is recognized as the chief characteristic
of these masters, another sculptural tendency appears that is no less justified
and produces remarkable achievements. It emphasized the plastic element
more, and was followed by Lorenzo Ghiberti and Luca Della Robbia, and by
their schools. It reached its peak in Giovanni da Bologna, actually a Nether-
landish master.
And so here too a parallel can be established between antique art and the
Renaissance. Just as in the earliest history of antique art certain names sym-
bolize the two contrasting styles of ancient Greek sculpture (the plastic and
the stereotomic), and just as the blending of the two in various proportions
coincides with the development of sculpture, the same or similar tendency can
also be seen in the history of modern sculpture.
In the minor arts as well, particularly in those concerned with metal, new
life — everywhere individual and powerful —was stirring on Italian soil as a
result of that general upswing. In this regard certain carved ivory works on
diptychs, book covers, and other objects, and especially some metal ecclesi-
astical implements are important to the history of style. They are the first
offspring, as it were, of the marriage between the old-Nordic dragon inter-
lace and the antique but Romanesque conception of an entirely independent
acanthus tendril. Among the oldest and most beautiful examples of this
Romanesque-Nordic ornamentation are the ivory sculptures of Abbot Tuotilo
of Saint Gall (died 912), on which Romanesque acanthus work already appears
in fully developed form. The most famous and greatest such work is the finely
chased, seven-armed candelabra of Saint Mary in Milan Cathedral, cast in
bronze —but this is thirteenth-century work and probably a larger and more
beautiful replacement for an older piece pillaged during the sack of Milan in
1162. The latter was taken as booty by Duke Vladislav of Bohemia and pre-
sented to the older church of Saint Vitus he had built.62 Like the one in Milan,
its execution is rough, but this one may be considered a masterpiece of the
arts of metal casting and toreutics. Although it dates from the time when the
Gothic system was starting to exert pressure on the decorative arts, it shows
no trace of Gothic imitation or the decorative use of architectural forms. The
seven-armed candelabra grows as organically as an aloe stem from the dragon
pattern that encircles its roots. The figurative work, while it is full of noble
vigor and is kept elegantly naturalistic, nevertheless reveals a certain Byzantine
influence, but this was favorable because it curbed the sculptor’s naturalistic
tendencies and heightened the austere solemnity of the sacred object.®3
These and similar works clearly show the firmest possible opposition to the
Gothic system and its pressure. This partial independence from architecture

857
 Semper

of the decorative arts—and especially of decorative metalwork —continued

even after the Gothic style found greater acceptance in Italy through German
masters and the general taste of the times. At the end of the thirteenth century,
when Pisan masters such as Giotto rescued art partly from Byzantine paralysis
and partly from decadence, goldsmithery and decorative metal techniques
generally became plastic and sculptural. The greatest sculptors — Orcagna,
Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti— came out of the goldsmiths’ guild and were
themselves skilled goldsmiths. Around 1286 Giovanni Pisano decorated the
high altar of Arezzo Cathedral with enameled silver reliefs; Giovanni’s pupils,
the brothers Agostino and Agnolo, as well as Andrea Pisano (died 1345),
employed a number of goldsmiths and perfected the art of casting and chasing.
In 1316 Andrea [di Jacopo] d’Ognabene, a goldsmith in Pistoia, made a mag-
nificent antependium (upright altar panel) for the cathedral there. This ante-
pendium is decorated with six figures of apostles and prophets, in the finest
chased work with niello on an enamel ground; it also has fifteen bas-relief
panels. Two other goldsmiths from Arezzo, Pietro and Paolo, pupils of the
Pisan masters, made the rich silver reliquary for the head of Saint Donatus in
the same form.
It was only then that Gothic taste appeared for a brief period. Around this
time (1338), Ugolino [di Vieri] made the famous but somewhat inaccessible
reliquary in Orvieto, in the shape of the cathedral that contains it.¢¢ Master
Cione (Orcagna) created an admirably beautiful silver altar for the baptistery
in Florence, but this was destroyed as early as 1366; its splendid reliefs were
reused in the new altar. Cione’s pupils were no less skillful as goldsmiths. The
most important works in gold that survive were made during their time, some
by them, such as the altar of Saint James in Pistoia and the (new) altar in the
baptistery in Florence. The first goldsmiths worked on them for over 150
years; one even had a German name: Peter, son of Heinrich.
These works are purely sculptural in character. Sculpture had already ousted
the Gothic structural idea, although details of the form were still Gothic. This
was taken even further by Filippo Brunelleschi (1337-1446) and Luca Della
Robbia.
This was also a creative period for decorative bronze work. Lorenzo Ghi-
berti made a magnificent bronze chest for the silver head of Saint Zenobius, a
masterpiece by the Florentine Andrea Arditi. Even more famed are Ghiberti’s
bronze doors for the baptistery in Florence, which represent the high point of
this antique use of decorative metal sculpture, taken up again in Germany as
early as the tenth or eleventh century. Ghiberti worked on them for forty
years. But his large-scale works did not prevent him from displaying his skill
on a smaller scale as well. Vasari praises above all a seal handle in chased gold
in the shape of a dragon rising from ivy leaves. With wonderful artistry he
produced scapular buttons and miters for Popes Martin V (died 1431) and
Eugenius IV (died 1450).
Rich and delightfully charming Renaissance decoration was applied not
only to altars and doors but also to pulpits, choir stalls, rood screens, wells,

858
 Metallurgy

railings, candelabras, and especially grave decorations. Even though most are
marble, their style is, as it were, fettered to metal toreutics. Bronze tomb of
the Medicis in the sacristy of San Lorenzo by Verrocchio. Already somewhat
baroque, Ant[onio] Pollaiuolo’s Tomb of Pope Sixtus IV in his sacramental
chapel in Saint Peter’s in Rome.
Desiderio da Settignano, a chaser, kept more decisively to the toreutic
style: Tomb of Carlo Marsuppini in the left aisle of Santa Croce, bronze base
in the Uffizi, and other works of purest Florentine taste. His pupil Mino da
Fiesole took up the master’s style and spread it throughout Italy. The beautiful
pulpit and pulpit door of Santa Croce are by Benedetto da Maiano.
Beautiful decorative work in this genuinely toreutic early Renaissance style
is everywhere: pieces made in Siena by the Marzini brothers, Peruzzi, Lorenzo
[di Pietro] Vecchietta, Jacopo della Quercia, and others include basins, cibo-
ria, flag and banner holders, railings, marble pews, and so on.
In Rome Andrea Sansovino perfected this toreutic marble style on tombs
in the choir of Santa Maria del Popolo and brought it to a conclusion.
The style was taken to Naples by the Florentine Giuliano da Maiano,
whose great work (the triumphal arches of Alfonso of Aragon) has been emu-
lated by countless artists.
At the same time we can see in northern Italy a movement in bronze sculp-
ture and other hard materials that deviates somewhat from that in Florence. It
is less delicate, more luxuriant, and overpowers the architecture, which is
itself less firm and more fluid in its proportions. Arabesques in Santa Maria
dei Miracoli, choir pilaster, choir screen, rood screen; grand staircase in the
Doges’ Palace, among other things; Alessandro Leopardi’s pedestal for the
Colleoni equestrian statue. The candelabra-like flagpole holders for Saint
Mark’s in the genuine chased style, shallow and sharp. Fountains in the Doges’
Palace by [Niccolo dei] Conti and Alberghetti.
Candelabras with the richest arabesque and figurative decoration. One on
the altar of the Salute by Andrea Bresciano, together with six candlesticks.
The candlesticks in San Stefano and Santi Giovanni e Paolo, among others,
are already more baroque.
Padua is extremely rich in works in this style: tombs in II Santo. Fonts.
Andrea Riccio’s large candelabra.®> But the real treasure-house for this is the
Certosa di Pavia with its immeasurable wealth of finely chased metalworks
-and stone sculptures. The whole building can be considered a toreutic work.
Candelabra in the church’s choir. Font. Sacristy fountain. (See woodcut from
the author’s own drawing.)
In Germany, the country of early medieval metalwork, the Italian manner
was rapidly accepted although in a peculiarly mixed way. The style of Peter
Vischer, the famed artist of the Sebaldus Tomb, is still dry and half Gothic in
architectural details (although tending toward the antique) and no less so in
figurative work and reliefs. Freer and more naturalistic are his later works.
Sebaldus Tomb. Bas-relief in Regensburg Cathedral. King Arthur and other
figures on the Maximilian Monument in Innsbruck. Fountain in the courtyard

859
 Semper

Candelabra from the Certosa di Pavia

of the Stadthaus in Nuremberg. Other fountains in Nuremberg follow Italian

taste, with a Gothic admixture and some uncertainty in the handling of
antique architectural symbols. Fountain near Saint Lorenz by B[enedikt]
Wurtzelbauer (1589). Fountain for King Christian of Denmark by [Georg]
Labenwolf (illustrated in Doppelreiter). Fine Renaissance fountains in Prague
and Munich.
In France the Italian Renaissance developed in a quite different way. A
fine, soft, and highly elegant toreutic style! Fontainebleau school of artists,
mid-sixteenth century. Jean Goujon (died 1572), Fontaine des Innocents,
~ Louvre. Germain Pilon (died 1590), fountain of the Three Graces. Jean Cousin
(died 1589) and many others.
This general direction taken by sculpture and the massive boost given the
toreutic and stereotomic arts by the armor industry (then at its height) meant
that both toreutics and scalpture (cutting small luxury and art objects from
hard materials, particularly hard stones, metal, ivory, wood, and so on) came
into their own again. The sixteenth century had its modern Mentors, Myrons,
and Myses; its artistic luxury almost equaled that of the ancient Romans in its
esteem for toreutic masterworks. Michelangelo, Cellini, Filippo Negroli, and
others.

860
 Metallurgy

But the actual seat of toreutics in the stricter sense was Germany, and
Nuremberg and Augsburg competed for the palm in this painstaking art.
Statuettes, bas-reliefs, busts, medallions, goblets, in soapstone, wood, ivory,
and metal.
Chased work in iron and steel had a special style; the most important artis-
tic centers were Milan and Augsburg. They are the pride of our weapon
collections and museums. First, items of weaponry, sword handles, daggers,
battle-axes, sheaths of the most exquisite filigree. Tools and utensils of every
kind; also steel busts and statuettes. The masterpiece of Thomas Riicker (1574),
a throne presented to Emperor Rudolf II by the city of Augsburg, is now in
England.*¢ Gottfried Leygebe of Nuremberg, in Berlin from 1683, the most
famous toreutic artist of his period. Sword pommel with Hercules and cen-
taur, carved medallions, cases, and other objects by the same artist in the
Berlin Kunstkammer.
Belgians and Frenchmen also worked in the same way. Copé, called Il
Fiammingo (died 1610), an ivory carver; Francois du Quesnoy of Brussels
(1599-1644); Jakob Zeller, a Dutchman; van Opstal from Antwerp. Two beau-
tifully carved steel busts in the British Museum.
Many richly chased grilles and other building parts show that steel and iron
toreutics were also pursued with skill and care in France. Fireplace decorations
and fittings are a particularly rich source for this: andirons, shovels, tongs, bel-
lows. This art flourished longer here than elsewhere: iron-grille door to the
Galerie d’Apollon at the Louvre; two extremely artistic steel candelabras, now
in the library of the Ecole des arts et métiers (Louis XIV). Paris is still the only
place where steel and metal toreutics are considered a genuine art.°”
Although a fine, sharp, correct treatment of lines and outlines, a tight and
compact composition, and a particular dryness of style are necessary proper-
ties of steel toreutics and all hard materials, a contrasting principle can be jus-
tified. This is netlike filigree work—a certain daring and confused richness
found on German and Saracen steel celature. See the comments about dia-
tretron in the chapter on glass.

Saracen stirrup at Catania

861
 Semper

A bit more remains to be said about metal toreutics in the late Renais-
sance. Giambologna, the great bronze caster, followed the painterly-plastic
and naturalistic tendency, but sometimes slipped into stylelessness. His deco-
rative bronze sculptures were the beginning of the grotesque baroque style.
Masks, shells, broad festoons, strings of fruit, monsters, and grimacing faces
replace the fine arabesques and moderate arguments of the early Renaissance.
But this master was still spirited and tasteful despite all his plastic whimsy.*®

Bronze knocker from the Certosa di Pavia

His closest successors were Pietro Tacca, who was responsible for the fine
fountains in the Piazza dell’Annunziata in Florence, and Taddeo Landini,
whose Fonte delle Tartarughe in Rome has been wrongly attributed to Raphael.
Later the baroque style became shallow and ornate.
The grotesque style of sculptural and architectural decoration appears to
have had a new negative effect on high art in the second half of the sixteenth
century. It created a soldering style, similar to that characteristically found in
certain ancient Etruscan and southern Italic terra-cotta vessels (and bronze
utensils). The famed Benvenuto Cellini can perhaps be reproached with hav-
ing first consciously replaced the more stereotomic and toreutic style of the
cinquecento with this new decorative approach and for having introduced it
into monumental art. See the (not very numerous) silver and gold works he
made in connection with the pedestal of his Perseus, which is beautiful but
conceived and executed entirely according to the same formal sense.°?
In France metal celature was much used under splendor-loving King Louis
XIV. That period’s decorative style has already been discussed in “Tectonics”
and elsewhere. It is governed by the principle of putting the material prop-
erties of metal (particularly its sheen) to their most advantageous use in
decorative and rich painterly effects, as the work’s sculptural and spiritual
significance recede into the background.
Toreutics’ last period of general influence, which came toward the end of
the Bourbon reign, is remarkable and interesting for the history of style. It was
a reaction in the ancient sense to the rococo style.
The fine bronze chasing, structural members, fittings, festoons, emblems,
caryatids, and figurative friezes with which the delicate furnishings of that
period are decorated also define the character of the architecture; those deco-

862
 Metallurgy

rations are at the same time genuine and well-stylized products of toreutics.
This style is discussed in § 159.

§ 184 Forging and Welding

Realizing that metals can be softened and rendered more ductile by heating
did not require much intelligence, thus the art of forging”® is probably not a
much more recent invention than the cold hammering and beating of metal. It
occurred as early as the Bronze Age; the oldest forged bronze weapons and
the earliest folk legends and myths confirm this. Yet this invention did not
acquire major significance until hard and brittle iron began to replace bronze
for most technical purposes, especially for weapons and tools.
The properties of iron set technology a double task: first, the taming of its
hardness and brittleness to give form shape; second, the enhancement of the
same properties, along with their moderation and modification, to suit the
purpose and use of the product. We believe that in both areas more was
achieved with the simplest methods during the first prehistoric centuries in
which iron was widely available than during all of recorded history, including
that century so rich in inventions—our own. We believe this because the
Orient seems to provide examples of the art of forging that we have not
yet equaled. Certainly China has not made any progress for millennia: like
so much else that typifies the static condition of Oriental culture this is an
ancient, prehistoric tradition. The discovery that white-hot pieces of iron can
be permanently joined together by pressing and hammering (without the use
of other mechanical or chemical means) was also made in the most ancient
times and applied to industrial purposes in the most refined way.7!
We consider this discovery of the art of forging and its most ingenious use
by the inventive human spirit in prehistoric times to be most interesting for
the stylistic question under consideration. Thus we will look at it first and use
it as a reference for further stylistic observations.
In the Orient, welding is not just a means of fastening pieces of an iron sys-
tem together (rivets, hooks, bands, clasps, flaps, and other intermediate ele-
ments or connecting parts are commonly used); Oriental art, following the
oldest traditions and artistic symbolism, adhered to these means for practical,
aesthetic, and ornamental reasons.”2 Welding is rather a means of creating a
metal composition that couples the two seemingly exclusive properties of
hardness and suppleness, and at the same time makes a pleasant decorative
impression because of its artificially produced patterned texture. It is the same
lamination process that also plays such an important part in antique glass
manufacture; here it is probably both decorative and functional in origin.73 It
is used to produce a more supple mass assembled from different kinds of glass
(precisely because it is assembled from pieces), one less sensitive to tempera-
ture changes and shock than a more homogeneous glass mass.”4
The same variety and richness of invention that is found in surviving
shards of laminated glass can also be admired in laminated sword blades, dag-
gers, and other weapons of the Eastern peoples. Sometimes they are made up

863
 Semper

of metal bands; sometimes of an infinite number of pins made of the same or

different metals and welded together; sometimes they are assembled from dif-
ferently shaped elements. The variety of their decorative mosaic patterns 1s
endless. The oldest among them are the most excellent in terms of the richness
of the work and the care that went into it, and so here too it is possible to
infer the great antiquity of the invention.”5
The impermanence of iron is the reason that almost no ancient iron
weapons or tools have survived that could prove that the ancients were famil-
iar with lamination processes when making iron weapons.’6 We are, however,
convinced of it and even think that Glaucus’s highly praised invention was
nothing other than this. The spiral ornaments that dominate on the oldest
metal vessels, items of jewelry, and weapons and the filigree and wire forms in
bronze are pre-Hellenic indications of the same process, which acquired new
importance only in iron! It is hard to decide whether its application to glass or
iron came first.
Our admiration for genuine laminated steel blades, gun barrels, and the
like is based on their sharply expressed style, which is so appropriate to the
material and purpose of these objects. Likewise, we consider shallow and
styleless the method, now popular with European armorers, of using etched
patterns to make the flat surfaces of forged or cast iron and steel look as
though they are laminated.77 It is not possible to rail sufficiently against such
nonsense in the arts—it only shows the depths to which they have sunk. Yet
let us conclude these comments on this most important technique with the
remark that it becomes even more interesting as a result of the movement that
is under way everywhere for perfecting weapons, particularly firearms. It has
emerged from an idea that is all-important for this question, namely, the pro-
duction of an extremely strong and at the same time tough and elastic metal
wall with strong resistance that can be kept as thin (thus light and convenient)
as possible. What kind of steel and iron; their proportions; how they should
be welded together; whether other metals (copper, bronze, or silver) can be
added as wires, bands, or fine pins; what advantages that would bring; what
forms and combinations of material elements are most appropriate to its pur-
pose —these and other questions are certainly still partially open and pending.
But here again the author must be content to put his material into more expert
hands, with the wish that his opinions will at least prove stimulating.

§ 185 Weapons: Their Importance for Maintaining and Disseminating Correct

Principles of Design and Decoration
The first and probably the most important forged objects were tools of war
and the hunt. From the earliest times they were objects of careful functional
study and at the same time models of the highest decorative art. They were
always seen as both necessary tools and the most beautiful adornments— true
ornaments for men. Their decoration had to follow the rules of strict func-
tionality; it had, so to speak, to sprout up and grow out of it! This is why we
ascribe such importance to weapons in the study of art.

864
 Metallurgy

First, they are interesting and important because of the large number of
procedures and technical means used in their manufacture. These were first
fully developed in this field; no other branch of technology, not even the art of
the jeweler or goldsmith, offers a greater wealth of resources in this respect, or
needs more care and shrewdness in appraising its development.
Second, they are no less important for the study of style, that is, for the full
artistic exploitation of the means offered by a technical problem, at the same
time keeping within the bounds set by that problem and by the purpose of the
object.
Third, they are also important for the history of style because of the clarity
of expression with which they reflect the character and spirit of times and
peoples.
The most important thing, however, remains the noted practical question
of style. The armorer must follow the strictest requirements of purpose, as he
is responsible for the life, freedom, power, possessions, and all the highest
earthly goods of a person or a community. Thus there has been at all times a
certain pristine quality and purity of taste in weapons. Both in barbarian
times and in periods of flourishing civilization the armorers’ fraternity was
the asylum and nursery of the arts. The highest talents grew out of it and were
not ashamed to work for it. Even in opulent times, when principles of style
were generally disregarded and all other arts followed the extravagant trends
of the day, weapons displayed a relative purity of taste.78
A characteristic feature of weapons is that they are almost without excep-
tion independent of the laws of symmetry and dominated by directional unity,
which enlivens their forms and makes them so attractive to the vigorous war-
rior or hunter. This idea should provide a very useful basis for the artist
obliged to treat this rewarding material aesthetically.
Fortunately weapons provide us with a greater opportunity to study the
decorative arts than almost any other genre. While the weapons of the various
countries of our part of the world have been assembled into many splendid
collections, which offer us their treasures, they have remained almost unused
for our sort of purpose. In examining them the most important questions
have seldom been considered.”?
In spite of all of their technical perfection, modern weapons, particularly
firearms, have fallen short of their final practical-artistic expression. The prin-
cipal works on weapons are:

A. Jubinal, Description du Musée d’artillerie a Madrid.

[Jean-Baptiste-Louis] Carré, Traité de la panoplie.
Sir William [recte: Samuel] Rush Meyrick, A Critical Inquiry into Ancient
Armour. 3 vols. Quarto. London, 1824.
Idem, Engraved IIlustrations of Ancient Arms after the Drawings ofSir R. M.
Folio. London, 1830.
[Lacroix,] Moyen Age et Renaissance, article “Armures.”

865
 Semper

§ 186 Architectural Forging

Metal tectonics relies principally on blacksmiths, whose hammers and anvils
impart to iron bars the purity, toughness, and relative strength needed for tec-
tonic purposes. Smiths in this field often rose above craft to create as artists.
~ And yet this was only the case within certain limits and in the better times.
Iron fabrication as such was never monumental. The dangerous idea that
a new architectural style could emerge from the application of iron construc-
tion to monumental building has misled many a talented but artistically
estranged architect. Of course its use in monumental building can and must
have an effect on architecturatstyle, but not in the way that was assumed —in
other words, not by being visible. Roman baths and basilicas relied on very
artistic metal lattices, but only as skeletons for flat or vaulted ceilings. Here
metal was an auxiliary material and did not appear independent in either
a structural or formal sense.8° Still, we must allow that the spacious archi-
~ tecture of imperial Rome was able to develop more boldly as a result of the
assistance and influence of these invisible metal frames, and that this style is
thus partly governed or explained by iron construction. In this sense the idea
described above as dangerous is partially justified.
The Gothic structural system, like the Roman, is entirely lapidary,
although its use of iron connections is also not always justified and is too fre-
quent to be condoned. Fortunately, recent attempts at an iron Gothic have
been a total failure, providing hope that structural fanatics will cease to
mount this hobbyhorse in the future.8! Let us accept and praise the simple
iron roofs railway engineers made for station halls and other such sheds as
signs of their provisional nature. Yet let us not admire decorated iron
libraries, ballrooms, and the like!
Incidentally, chapters in “Tectonics” and at the beginning of “Metallurgy”
contain all that is essential for the aesthetic consideration of such iron struc-
tures. For the style, the symbolism, and the decorative exploitation of ligatures,
see §§ 6 and 19. In addition, we need not repeat what was said in “Ceramics”
and “Tectonics.”
Thus we should look for the smith’s true field not in monumental architec-
ture itself but in the related areas of interior finish and decoration, where it
has always deserved and found a great deal of respect. And it is right to recog-
nize that no period was more favorable to this than the Gothic. Therefore it is
much to the credit of those who have published on medieval antiquities—
Didron, Viollet-le-Duc, Gailhabaud, and others—that they have made gen-
erally available in fine reproductions a number of the most excellent works
of Gothic smiths, including grilles, door fixtures,’2 lecterns, candleholders,
catafalques, and other ecclesiastical implements. The splendors in this field
contributed by the early Renaissance can be seen as the legacy of those Gothic
centuries so favorable to the smith’s art. The new spirit of the Renaissance
speaks no less powerfully from the torchbearers, house lanterns, wall rings,
and knobby wreaths of Florentine and Sienese palaces than it does from those
massive ashlar walls decorated so richly, fully, and forcefully by such artists as

866
 Metallurgy

|
ee a

~ ay
il |
Ay

edt Hsin.
[ WA real |
AAG

Artistic forged metal

867
Semper

LAS, \i)/ iN
“sg \
\\\
i
hibl

i nine ii"

868
 Metallurgy

: vi
viotmuee
|

- JE-\__
ee A

[x}

a ie
Iss|
<<

Artistic forged metal, from Florence and elsewhere

869
 Semper

@ G

Brunelleschi, Michelozzo [di Bartolomeo], Cronaca, and Maiano. No longer

are they completely forged ornaments. The Gothic principle of decorating the
bare structure, still apparent in the oldest such palace decorations, makes
room again for antique, or rather, original Indo-Germanic artistic traditions
and the readoption of symbolic structural forms.®3
Less worthy of imitation are the highly artificial Renaissance and Gothic
locks with exposed mechanisms, the finest and richest of which are probably
to be found in Nuremberg as curiosities. We give two examples of these, one
in the Gothic and one in the German-ltalic style.84

870
Metallurgy

kl
(S]

a
IEEE
CJ
LIN

Nuremberg locks

871
 Semper

More justified are the artificial and decorative treatment of clock stands
and of the internal workings of clocks, whether they are tower clocks, tall-
case clocks, or pocket watches. These old mechanisms are very instructive
study objects for mechanics who do not regard as beneath them an aesthetic
approach to their challenges.5
The guild of smiths and locksmiths retained until very recently the fame it
had earned over a long period thanks to a most admirable independence of
taste and hard work: this is proven by much of the latticework of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries. Recent cast-iron copies of those works show
a contemptible poverty of thought and a confusion of taste. The free and
spirited movement of old craftsmen, even in smaller models, is shown every-
where by the door and window fittings and the other products made by lock-
smiths in times so often neglected now. See color plate 19 for some examples
of this kind.

§ 187 Some Metallurgical Procedures for Surface Decoration

We have selected the following as the most important; note that some of
them, when seen from a general point of view, belong to branches of metal-
lurgy that have already been discussed. Their use in surface decoration, how-
ever, should justify a special listing and consideration here.

A. EMBOSSED WORK
Already discussed above. As surface decoration it must be shallow. Most
Egyptian, Etruscan, and Greek embossed surface ornaments are of this kind.
Assyrian specimens are different, though very shallow as well: peculiar shal-
low forms, very sharply contoured with the graver or the punch, probably
filled with enamel coloring, which has since disappeared.
Byzantine and Oriental surface decoration on the principle of even dis-
tribution.
A richer alternation of flat and raised parts in Roman art. The same in the
Renaissance. In both styles the principle of subordination, which is opposed
to that of even distribution, is frequently transferred to the purely decorative
field. Danger of applying a principle valid in higher art to a lower one. The
ornamental rhythm should be very apparent in the whole. Otherwise there
will be confusion or a mitigation of the contrast between ornament and argu-
ment (see throughout various parts of this book).

B. EMBOSSING, STAMPING, OR PRESSING

Egyptian, Etruscan, and Greek pressed metal decorations, evidence of the
great antiquity of this cheaper surrogate for embossed work. Orient and
Middle Ages used this method.8¢ Renaissance less so. Return to it in the sev-
enteenth century. Silver sheets pressed over a wooden ground in Venetian lux-
ury furniture of this period. Pressed decorations on “cabinets” and other
products of the joiner’s art (corner reinforcements, plates, whole panels).
Splendid examples of cupboards decorated in this way, the work of Italian

872
 Metallurgy

and German masters, at the furniture exhibition in Gore House in London,

1854.
This process is based on a rich alternation of surfaces, calculated for
chiaroscuro effects. Undermining is to be avoided; the filigree process is easily
executed and results in an excellent effect if used with understanding. Such
tendentious arguments as are found on fabrics and wall hangings are dubious
but not absolutely reprehensible.”
This technique contributed considerably to the emergence of arbitrary
baroque forms: the leather style that first appeared toward the end of the fif-
teenth century on settings for shields and trays.

C. NOTCHED WORK
This consists of cutting out thin metal sheets and filling the notched areas
with other materials (metal, tortoiseshell, wood, and so on), thus producing
rich patterns and designs. This too is ancient. In the Middle Ages it was used
for cheap and popular luxury items.8 It reached its zenith in the later stages
of the reign of Louis XIV. [André-Charles] Boulle, inventor of the piece of
furniture named after him. The style of this method of surface decoration is
sharply defined as the serrated style! Long curves, a balance between what is
notched and what is not. Color contrasts. Curved surfaces. Metal decoration
and fittings to break up the dominant surfaces, and so on.8?

D. ENGRAVED WORK
To the extent that chased metal surfaces are close to raised work, we can refer
back to § 182 above, but another kind of toreutics is so decidedly ornamental
and so rich in its branches that it should not be omitted here. This is the
engraving method, that is, cutting drawings and recessed patterns into metal
surfaces.
Intaglio was a very common method of surface decoration from the oldest
times, even among the Egyptians and Assyrians. It occurs in the well-known
hieroglyphs and bas-reliefs of the former, as well as in some very remarkable
metalwork and the scratched embroidery and ornamental details on Assyrian
wall reliefs. Yet it remains doubtful whether the representational needs of all
shapes were satisfied by merely recessing them. It may be that the recesses
were filled with other materials (especially enamel) or that they were at least
intended to give sharper outlines to colored or gold decorations and bring
them into harmony with their shadows. The preservation of these forms and
images could have been another reason for setting them in recesses. This is
clear, at least, in hieroglyphic high reliefs (reliefs en creux).
Here we are following our general view of antique art, in that ancient
intaglio and painting were even less likely to be separated, in our opinion,
than ancient bas-relief and statuary were to be uncolored.
This view is confirmed by surviving engraved works in the Greco-Italic
style. Etruscan and Greek jewelry has lightly incised rings, wreaths, eggs, and
pearls, usually still with their filling. Metal mirrors and bronze cists, as well as

873
 Semper

vessels and implements in the same material, are covered with linear orna-
ments and figurative arguments reminiscent of the well-known images on
vases, which were also engraved in advance, justifying the assumption that
they are only the remaining outlines for a painting or incrustation that has
disappeared.%”
Later Greek and Roman metalwork used intaglio only for ornamental fit-
tings and almost always in conjunction with inlaid work (damascening). The
discus found near Paramythia in Epirus, most of the bronze implements from
Pompeii, and many other items of metalwork feature this sort of inlay, deco-
rated with gold and silver.”!
Pure intaglio was used only for seals, but it is clear that this occurred
because the imprint was the actual object of this artistic exercise.
It is hard to find evidence of intaglio as such, even on antique crystal and
glass. At least I can remember little antique glass that was treated in the man-
ner of engraved Venetian and Bohemian glass.°2
The Byzantines were faithful to the antique preference for inlaid work. As
far as I know, pure intaglio appears only as a preparation for an inlaid filling.
Recessed surface decoration was certainly predominant in the Orient, but
usually the ground was recessed below the surface, while the ornament and its
engraved details were raised. Moreover, these decorations on nonmetallic sur-
faces are always complemented with painting and are designed with this in
mind;%3 on metal surfaces something similar is achieved with plating, gilding,
enameling, or niello. It is not unusual for these fillings to render the surface
completely smooth (Hindu iron vessels with inlaid silver decorations).%4
The view of the process under discussion (recessed surfaces) held by the
Latin Middle Ages did not depart in principle from antique tradition, but it
was applied more freely, especially on weapons and jewelry. Intaglio no longer
served the principle of even distribution in the sense it had in Oriental surface
decoration, but frequently appeared as a mediating transitional part of a com-
position ordered according to the principle of subordination: it spun its light
arabesques around the key features of the composition and effectively recon-
nected them with the surface from which they had detached themselves. It
should be stated here that forging, which (as shown above) rose to become an
art in the Middle Ages and very strongly influenced design in this period, had
to broaden the field for recessed surface treatment in keeping with the tech-
niques at its disposal.
But not before the art of the Renaissance were final conclusions drawn
from a consideration of the inexhaustible wealth of all technical traditions. In
fact, intaglio work on hard stones and metal, as practiced in the sixteenth cen-
tury, shows this technique at the peak of its perfection. As before, it was
preparatory work for the enameler and the plater, but at the same time it
developed its own resources into an effective and completely self-contained
branch of toreutics or decorative glyptics.
It did not achieve full emancipation until it was used on crystal and glass.
Transparent material permits effective deep modeling, which is always severely

874
 Metallurgy

restricted on metal or other opaque materials. The limits imposed by this dif-
ference were quickly perceived and correctly exploited by Renaissance mas-
ters. Evidence of this is provided by their metal hatchings (which led to the
invention of copper engraving). Hatching of this kind would lack style if done
on glass or crystal.?5 The same would be true of deep modeling on iron, silver,
or bronze.
Note the connection of monochrome intaglio as a singular event with the
general monochromy of Renaissance architecture and sculpture.

E. NIELLO
Niello is a fluid metal alloy used to fill the engraved incisions on a heated
plate, thus in principle almost the same as enamel incrustation.
The process was known to the ancients (Mus[eo] borb[onico]) and was
widespread throughout the Middle Ages (East and West). It was described
by Theophilus, neglected and nearly forgotten after Finiguerra, then taken
up again by Cellini; Theophilus followed the ancient practices, which thus
remained the same for five or six centuries.%6
Splendid use of niello on brass tomb panels with engraved figures, from
thirteenth to early sixteenth century (see woodcut, p. 853). Otherwise only on
a small scale, in gold and silver work. Links between Oriental and medieval
art, encouraged by dealings with the Levant in wartime and times of peace.
Rapport between damask patterns and the “diaper” found on chased and
niello work in East and West.”

F. SMELTING (ENAMEL) ON METALS

In the broadest sense, enamels are colors that are set and fixed by softening
and liquefying through heat, in other words, encaustically. Hence wax paint-
ing, when produced encaustically, is similar to work produced by smelting
and should correctly be judged as such.
Most antique enamels were fluid, glassy materials with a high potash con-
tent and prone to decay, hence the difficulty of determining the nature and
limits of ancient enameling and encaustics.
Enameling has two quite different sources, as well as two quite different
paths that nevertheless cross repeatedly over the course of their history. One
tendency is the already mentioned colored surface dressing. The other is the
imitation, or rather artistic transformation, of precious stones; these have
been set and strung, worn, or sewn into the hems of garments as ornaments
from time immemorial.??
Enamel colors may be translucent or opaque.!°° Both were used by the
ancients, either separately or together for a mixed effect, following a fully
developed system whose details cannot be reconstructed and can only be
assumed (see above, vol. 1, pp. 397-98, 420).
The difference between translucent and opaque is not adequate for order-
ing and classifying Oriental, medieval, and modern enameling. Any classifica-
tion must derive from the distinction mentioned above.

875
 Semper

Accordingly, two kinds of enamel are applied to metal:

1. Enamel painting.
2. Applied and fixed enamel decoration (émaux d’applique or de plique).

1. Enamel painting has three manners:

a. Incrustation manner.
b. Translucent manner in relief.
c. Actual enamel painting.

a. Incrustation manner (émail champlevé). Grooves are engraved in a pattern

on the metal surface and filled with enamel. The remaining metal, in thin
strips, provides outlines and divisions for the painting.
It is difficult to understand how the high antiquity of this process could
be doubted, as there is sufficient proof that it was used by the Egyptians,
Assyrians, and Greco-Italians, and in the most extensive way! (Egyptian bronzes
and gold work with inlaid enamel; similar Etruscan and Greek work in the
British Museum and elsewhere.) The erroneous assumption arose because
antique enamels have been worn away by weather in most cases, and because
of a passage from Philostratus, who wrote fairly late,!°! in which he saw fit to
issue a brevet d’invention for this method to the barbarians of the North Sea
coast. It is true, however, that hard, fireproof enamel painting might not have
suited the genius of the Greeks, and thus it too was probably seen as a bar-
barian invention of the Romans. Extremely interesting finds in France and
England seem to confirm that the Gallo-Roman inhabitants of the North Sea
coast had a certain artistic fondness for enamel work in a peculiarly barbarian
style. 102
Perhaps this art industry vegetated as a craft in the Dark Ages until it
started to flourish again and took a magnificent upturn in the eleventh or
twelfth century in the old industrial town of Limoges in southern France and
along the Rhine (Dinant and Cologne), probably at the same time.
Early Limoges enamel is still related to the Gallo-Roman in style and char-
acter. It is based on the principle of encrusting whole surfaces with color:
therefore few articulated main forms, no sculpture or reliefs.!°3 The copper
ground is completely covered with enamel, with the exception of the seams or
metal that forms the outlines of the drawings. The enamel is hard in order to
last and thus limited to a small number of very incombustible colors.!°4 Each
cell contains only one color, rendering the effect mosaic-like or in the style of
the most ancient glass painting.
In the twelfth century the enamel became more finely grained. The individ-
ual cells were no longer filled with just one color but contained lights and
half-tints to provide modeling. This already mitigated the austerity of the
ancient style, which faded even more in the thirteenth and fourteenth cen-
turies. By that time the figures had lost their enameling, which was retained
only by the ground, whose dominant color was blue. The figures were either
slightly raised, with engraved details, or executed in half-relief and gilded.195

876
 Metallurgy

b. Translucent enamel painting over relief (émaux de basse taille). After the
Byzantine element had been overcome during Italy’s artistic revival, the old
clumsy and shallow enameling could no longer hold its own. It lost its former
esteem and survived only in the work of goldsmiths. This was due to the
arrival of a completely new technique, or rather a return to an ancient one,
probably borrowed by Italian master goldsmiths from certain remains of
Roman glassware, in which finely engraved and beaten gold could be seen
under the layer of glass.1%
Gold and silver surfaces beaten in very low relief and chased with the very
finest gravers were covered with translucent enamel, not evenly of course, but
with due consideration for the parts that shone through and with all the
refinement of sixteenth-century painting.!°7 The color range was much richer
and more florid than previously but was limited because opaque enamels
could not be used. This means producing flesh color by applying a light violet
shade to a silver ground, and so on.
Nicola Pisano and his son Giovanni brought about this revolution in
enameling.!08 They were then followed by all the great goldsmiths in Italy:
Agostino and Agnolo of Siena, Forzore [Spinelli], pupils of Orcagna; Lorenzo
Ghiberti’s brother Bartoluccio; Antonio Pollaiuolo; Fr[ancesco] Francia;
Ambrogio Foppa, called Caradosso; and B[envenuto] Cellini. It also enjoyed
success in France, Belgium, and Germany.

c. Enamel painting proper. The first Limoges school had been displaced by
the relief style; now a second school arose in retaliation in the same city.
Here again the thought was not a new one: fourteenth-century glass painting
reversed and applied to enameling: instead of transparent painting on a trans-
parent and colorless glass ground, opaque painting on a black enamel ground.
This kind of painting went through several stages before reaching perfec-
tion, after which it declined because it abandoned its basic idea.
First method. Rough, colored enamel paint fixed directly to the metal
ground.
Second method. Dark, thick outlines. Dark ground shining through the
opaque white paint in the half-tints. Gold lights in the garments.
Third method. Prepared ground, black or dark blue-green, opaque. Gri-
saille painting, chiaroscuro achieved by semitranslucent white over the ground.
Gold lights. Flesh tones lightly colored and modeled as if in relief; sometimes
the whole painting is covered with shining, colored, transparent varnishes.
Fourth method. Entire vessels and other objects produced by the art indus-
try: covered with enamel paint on a dark ground. Mixed technique. Influences
from both sides (basse taille and Toutin).
In the first half of the seventeenth century a new invention took the art of
enamel painting along a path that in some respects was the opposite of that
followed by the second Limoges school. Jean Toutin,!°? a goldsmith from
Chateaudun, is considered the inventor of painting with enamel paints on a
somewhat harder white enamel cover, with which the excipient (thin gold or

877
 Semper

copper sheet) is then evenly covered (1632). It comes close either to water-
color painting in that the white ground is left exposed for highlights or to oil
painting in that opaque white enamel is added to all the colors and impasto
patches of white are added for the light sections. A somewhat more fluid,
more transparent, and colorless enamel is used as a general binding agent.
Another lighter method is sous fondant enamel painting. A crust of transpar-
ent enamel fixes and protects the paint of the unprepared sheet-gold panel
(plaque). We will not pursue its development any further since enamel paint-
ing ceases to be a surface decoration here; the metal’s surface is now merely
the subordinate excipient of independent painting.
Its field is miniature painting. But like Limoges painting it also successfully
served to cover completely small gold items, boxes, coffee bowls, cases, per-
fume bottles, and so on with the most delicate encaustic painting. Also,
enamel leaves were often used with the most felicitous sense of style as jewels
for decorating gold and luxury objects. The list of artists who distinguished
themselves in this field in the late eighteenth century is almost endless. In
addition to the inventor Toutin, who has already been mentioned, the two
most famous names are [Jean] Petitot (born in Geneva, 1607) and [Jacques]
Bordier, who worked for Charles I of England, collaborating with the chemist
and physician [Theodore Turquet de] Mayerne.

2. Applied and fixed enamel decoration (émaux d’ applique or de plique). The

instinctual delight humans take in imitating nature’s offerings even as they
adapt them has already been discussed in the chapter on glass in the context
of artificial precious stones. Another manifestation of this instinct is enamel
jewels, or the so-called émaux d’applique. They are an Oriental invention.
They came to the West from Byzantium early in the Christian period and held
sway in the thirteenth century.
Every jewel serving as an adornment needs a setting and needs to contrast
with the object adorned. The adornment is detached from what is adorned
and has a distinct existence. This distinguishes it from decoration and orna-
ment, which function as organic parts of that which is being decorated. This
establishes the nature of the contrast between enamel painting and applied
enamel ornaments. Nowhere is it presented more clearly than in the elder
Theophilus’s simple and clear description of his enameling process, if we also
recall the types of enamel painting described above. Theophilus takes the
example of a gold chalice with two handles, whose manufacture he had previ-
ously described.

After this, take a thin piece of gold, fasten it to the upper edge of the vessel, and
measure from one handle to the other. The piece of gold must be as broad as the
stones that are to be set upon it are thick. Arrange the stones so that a stone with
four pearls is placed at the corners, then an enamel, then another stone with pearls,
then another enamel, taking care that stones are always placed by the handles.
Having finished this arrangement, solder the chambers and fields in the case of the

878
 Metallurgy

stones and the chambers in the case of the enamels [to the piece of gold]. Then fit
your small pieces of sheet gold into all the chambers intended for the enamels, and
once you have bent them into the right shape, take them out again. Then cut a small
strip from a somewhat thicker sheet of gold, after measuring with a ruler, and bend
it twice around the mouth with the set pieces, producing a small space between the
strips all the way around —this is called the enamel seam. Then cut other strips of
very thin sheet gold, after measuring with a ruler. Now use fine pliers to bend and
shape the outlines of the work that you wish to carry out in enamel, whether it is
circles or bows or little flowers or birds or animals or human figures. Arrange these
little pieces carefully and precisely, each in its place, and fasten them with flour
paste over a coal fire. After you have completed the interior of the set piece, solder
it with particular care, so that the delicate ensemble and the thin gold do not break
at the joints or melt. 1!

This is followed by a description of the process of filling the set-piece cells

with enamel dust and firing and smoothing the colored enamel.
Two main points in this description should be underscored. One point
concerns the general disposition and arrangement of the adornment: a rich
band around the mouth of the chalice, a gold ring as a setting for jewels,
alternating stones and enamels. These last are separate parts of the ring, an
adornment for it, and the ring as a whole is a separate part of the vase, an
adornment for it. The other point concerns the preparation of the individual
enamels. The first point distinguishes this enamel work from enamel paint-
ing, which is applied directly to the decorated object —it is the more impor-
tant point. Nevertheless, it is not recognized as such by writers on enamel
work, who always hold to the second point, even though it is by no means
crucial.
This is easily proven. First, if the network of cells in the set piece meant to
receive the enamels were produced differently, in the manner of champlevé
enamel, by engraving a piece of metal, the appearance of the work —its char-
acter — would remain unchanged. Second, Theophilus’s method of preparing
his cells can be and has been applied to works that, in their style and charac-
ter, resemble Gallo-Roman and Limoges enamel painting. This can be seen in
a type of surface decoration that is very common in the Orient (mostly on
vases), especially in China. It involves completely covering the object with a
layer of enamel whose patterns are separated by very fine gold wire, exactly as
in the Gallo-Roman and old Limoges champlevé enameling described. These
are not just related in style, they are the same, although the network of cells
on the surface of the objects is not engraved, but produced by soldered strips
of metal, following the method described by Theophilus.

One enameling method involved filling in a network of metal cells with trans-
lucent enamel. It could be used to make a Byzantine applied enamel adorn-
ment just as it could to make a Western-style enamel ornament.

879
 Semper

Examples of the first application are the weapons and items of jewelry
found in the alleged grave of Childerich near Tournai, now in the Louvre.
Also there is a golden bowl found near Gourdon (Haute-Sa6ne). Both are
adorned with inset filigree jewels and gems filled with translucent enamel.
Thus they are Byzantine in style and, probably, in origin.!2
An example of the second application comes to us from Benvenuto Cellini:
“The king [Francis I] showed me a drinking vessel without a base, made of fil-
igree and decorated with charming patterns of small leaves playfully arranged
in artfully drawn fields. The most admirable feature was that the artist had
filled the breaks in the fields and the spaces between the leaf patterns with
translucent enamels of different color.”!5 A beautiful Sassanian bowl with the
medallion of Khosrow (531-79) in the center, found in the Imperial Library in
Paris, is of the second kind.
Next, finally, we come to the painting of entire figurines with enamel and
work en ronde bosse, which came to the fore in Italy at the same time as
enamel de basse taille. It was very fashionable in the fifteenth century for
bijouterie, for decoration on crystal vessels, and for other similar purposes. It
was executed on a gold ground and only very thin coverings could be used, as
thick enamels rendered the forms imprecise. Thus the couverte is omitted and
the paint is applied directly. This method involves a skillful combination of
translucent and opaque enamels.!!4
The most famous such work is a “Pax” in the Treasury of the Madonna at
Arezzo. Trimmings on a crystal vase by Benvenuto Cellini in Florence. Trim-
mings on a variety of crystal and gem vases in Paris, Dresden, and Weimar.
We will conclude with a comment on Oriental enamels. Indian work
deserves particular consideration, as Chinese enamel (which is incidentally
quite late) has already been mentioned.
In Persia and India every kind of enameling mentioned above is still in use,
although there seems to be a general preference for thin enamel colors, some
opaque and some translucent. Certain Indian enameled works in embossed
silver are of particular interest. The grooves are shallow and not engraved,
but sunk with a punch, then filled with translucent enamel in blue, green, red,
violet. Sometimes the grounds, sometimes the designs are recessed and colored.
A kind of enamel de basse taille on a large scale. We consider this process to
be ancient and believe that the shallow reliefs on Assyrian bowls were enam-
eled in the same way. Something similar is found in Italy, except that opaque
enamels are used. Examples on the altar slabs at Pistoia and San Giovanni,
Florence. Silver bedstead exhibited in the Indian section of the London Exhi-
bition of 1852.
Recent and ongoing developments (mainly in France) in the history and
revival of the splendid art of enameling in all its branches deserve the fullest
and most joyous recognition. Influence of the Manufacture de Sévres and to
the credit of the talented artists and technicians who were and are active
there: Jules Diéterle, Klagmann, and [Jacob] Meyer.

880
 Metallurgy

G. DAMASCENING
The art of damascening consists of producing drawings and ornaments by fix-
ing gold or silver threads and leaves on a less shiny, darker metal ground.
There is also the damascening of silver on gold, and vice versa. The proce-
dures themselves are simple but require very precise execution. Most impor-
tant in enlivening a somewhat dead (because fully opaque) metal surface is a
tasteful application of this technique.
There are different procedures for steel, iron, bronze, brass, silver, and all
softer metals.
Procedure for damascening iron. This differs according to whether the
object has a smooth surface, a raised surface, or curved areas. In the first case
the entire surface to be damascened is covered with very fine engraving, like
the surface of a very fine file. Gold or silver filaments or strips are then laid on
this prepared surface in the desired pattern. The whole is then fixed by great
pressure or by hammering. Finally it is treated with a polishing iron, so that
the sliver or gold plating forms a single surface with the iron and no trace of
the engraving remains.
If the ground is uneven, bent, or curved, the drawings have to be incised
and the bottom of the grooves intended to take the damascening hatched.
Then gold or silver wires or strips can be carefully pressed in.
In the case of softer metals, the procedure is more difficult. The edges of
the incised patterns have to be deeply undercut so that, under the pressure of
a hammer or a polishing steel, a dovetail joint is produced, serving to hold the
filaments and surfaces that have been carefully inserted.
This is the simple antique method of inlaying or damascening metal and
generally speaking the West has followed it throughout all periods of art his-
tory. But the Orient invented a more refined method of damascening en relief.
The ground between the raised parts is cut out and the latter are densely cov-
ered with little grooves or holes with the aid of a fine steel punch. High pressure
makes the silver or gold stick to these. The European method is used for flat
damascening, which is often mixed with the former process.
The age of this technique is attested by Assyrian bronze slabs with inlaid
silver patterns and similar Egyptian metalwork."5
But the Greeks were the first to recognize the scope and limits of this art,
as can be seen from the surviving bronze figurines, disks, weapons, utensils,
and vases with inlaid silver and gold ornaments. They breathe the spirit of
Hellenic moderation and purity of taste. How splendid were Phidias’s and
Polyclitus’s colossal bronze statues with their inlaid gold and silver? It is not
yet known how far things developed, and whether the chrysographoi (gold
designer) decorated the accessories with inlaid arguments as well as with pure
ornament.!!¢
Inlaid work entirely conforms to Byzantine art. Ornaments and figures are
surrounded with silver threads on bronze works and partly completed with
silver plates. Gates of San Paolo fuori le mura in Amalfi, and many others.
[Seroux d’]Agincourt.

881
 Semper

Even in antiquity the metal sculpture of the Orient was dreamily fantastic
and inlaid work made an early and major contribution to it (Indian poly-
chrome reliefs in Philostratus’s Vita Apoll[onii], listed and described on
p. 269).
With the advent of Islam all that is sculpturally significant disappears and
surfaces are covered with flowery inlaid arabesques, interwoven with calli-
graphic-decorative banners.!!7 Yet India retains an illusionistic style that is
reminiscent of Greek art in its noble simplicity and even in the motifs of its
inlaid decorations."8
Medieval Europe did not use this type of inlaid metalwork. Theophilus
mentions it only in passing as an Arabian technique."!? Not until the fifteenth
century was it practiced in Italy again, in particular by the artistic armorers of
the north. In the sixteenth century the Venetians Paolo Azzimino and Paolo
Rizzo became famous as the most inventive and skillful artists in the lavoro
all’azzimina. And, similarly, there was a series of Milanese armorers, of
whom the most outstanding were Filippo Negroli, the Piccinino family, and
Romero. In Tuscany and Rome there arose another school that used the
ancient acanthus leaf, rather than the Moorish acanthus, as its principal vege-
tal motif. In this field as well, most of the surviving work is groundlessly
attributed to Cellini. Not only weapons but also cupboards, jewel cases, and
mirrors were made of steel in the most elegant shapes and damascened in
silver and gold.”° The character of these beautifully artful utensils corre-
sponds to the Henry II vases from the same period; the latter were discussed
in “Ceramics,” § 126. This refined steel style, with its delicate and yet rich ele-
gance, was received with boundless enthusiasm in the France of the Valois. It
influenced contemporary architecture, the fashion in dress and domestic fur-
nishings, and even people’s gait and posture. Yet by the time of Henry IV it
had degenerated into an excessive and mannered refinement. Still, Cousinet’s
elegant drawing and a new way of chasing the inlaid gold in the manner of a
relief brought the goldsmith considerable fame. Artists at the German gold-
smithing schools in Augsburg and Nuremberg worked with equal skill in
damascened steel, but here too the German Renaissance style was the most
unusual and capricious of all.!21

H. GILDING
The relevant questions relate to three points:
1. Criteria for selecting the parts to be gilded;
2. Gilding as such;
3. Coloring, polishing, and deadening the gilding, likewise the coloring
and oxidizing of the nongilded parts.
The first point is the most important and the most difficult. It is also the one
to which our technicians have given the least thought.
If an object is meant to look as though it were made entirely of gold, then
the central issue has been decided; but care must be taken beforehand that the
form, character, technical execution, and exactness displayed in the object

882
 Metallurgy

are appropriate to the exquisite but somewhat difficult metal that it imitates.
Most of the completely gilded bronze and silver works, and likewise the
silver-plated goods now mass-produced, are wrong in this regard and immedi-
ately betray their imitative nature through clumsiness, through excessively dry
or sharp treatment, or in some other way. I would even assert that one should
not gild or plate silver objects intended to be lifted by the hand—spoons, forks,
tobacco tins, and so on—as their relative density and feel immediately reveal
them to be imitations.
Gilding (or silver-plating) works of high art is even more dubious; the dan-
ger increases in proportion to the size and artistic value of the object. The
Greeks avoided this barbarian ostentation in their metal sculpture, but the
semibarbarian Romans felt its absence in Greek masterworks.22
If only parts of an object are to be gilded, the question is which ones?
It seems to us that the key here lies in the material making up the whole
object. If, for example, it is an artful porcelain or enameled vessel, the liga-
tures, handles, lips, feet, or their parts are most suitable for gilding. Thus the
body and its arguments become a piece of jewelry’s richly set gem whose set-
ting, supporting, and otherwise serving (active) parts may fittingly be made of
tough solid metal, or may seem to be. The fact that it is gold increases the
esteem in which a gem in a costly setting is held. Only one should take care
that it is not crushed by the brilliance and extent of its rich surroundings.
So here again the important principle of subordination shows the correct
and simple answer to the question.
The same principle applied to a bronze vessel of the same kind or similar
does not necessarily produce the same result. There is no doubt that a bronze
bowl can be treated in the same way as a porcelain vase: gild its accessories and
leave the object’s body bronze. In this case a materially emancipated art has to
make up for a lack of brilliance and richness, or direct attention away from
itself. The golden accessories become the magnificent frame for the artwork.
So the Greek sculptor adorned his bronze goddess with golden sandals,
crowned her with a golden diadem, and adorned her with golden attributes.
But does it contradict the principle of subordination if I use iron, bronze,
or silver as ornaments in a setting for soft, noble, distinguished gold? By no
means, but this is a less exalted way of honoring the principle, not an ideal
one but a material-technical one. It is correct only when the object framed by
higher formal and artistic content is not and cannot be so outstanding as to
make the first solution acceptable. A completely smooth silver samovar with
feet, handles, knobbed lid, spout, and tap, on a base with a spirit lamp, could
be partly gilded. What would be the best approach? In my humble opinion: let
the smooth, capacious body gleam with polished gold, but the chased outer
works and accessories should exhibit a surface partly of pure silver and partly
oxidized, matte, and dark.
There is a third way of solving the problem, which is bound to succeed if
used skillfully; it presumes the work is designed with this end in mind. If the
silver bowl illustrated were to be enriched with gilding, niello, and other

883
 Semper

Silver punchbowl (author’s design)

means, I would gild the tureen’s smooth body and the lid’s ground, plate the
frieze encircling the body (as a principal motive) and everything figurative on
the lid and base with oxidized silver, decorate the (silver) rising bows with
niello or inlaid gold, leave the leaf and tendril patterns on the base largely in
matte white silver, but with some gilding intermixed, as much as is needed to
prevent the golden body from looking too isolated. The lid and handles would
also be left a matte white silver, and only the gold ground of the body and lid
would be polished. Individual emblems (on the lid and base), coats of arms,
and legends could be enameled. Thus the tureen’s body would dominate,
through art and through the authority of the material.
But this system does not exclude another, which might be even better.
Questions like these are open to a whole range of solutions. The only neces-
sity is good taste and knowing what one wants! If you know the latter, then
you have a principle, namely, that of heightened effect (of authority or sub-
ordination), if not the Oriental principle of even distribution, though that
corresponds less to European artistic sensibilities and is applicable only to
unarticulated artworks. What is true for the whole is also valid for the detail.
A sculpted incrustation (emblem) fastened to a silver ground must as a rule
stand out dark and matte against it and must have a gold setting. The ground
should be only lightly decorated with shallow embossed work, niello, or inlaid
work, or left smooth. If the incrustation is not sculpted but smooth (a simple
boss or shield for an inscription), it should be gilded and the frame effectively
sculpted, the ground the same as above.
Given a gilded egg-and-dart molding, the question is whether I should dec-
orate the oval in the middle or leave it smooth. In the first case, I gild and pol-
ish the oval and leave the rest in silver or bronze. In the second, I leave the

884
 Metallurgy

embossed egg in matte or oxidized silver and gild the settings. Here too let us
repeat: sapienti sat [sufficient for the wise]!
Gilding as such. It is well known that technical procedures for gilding now
include a galvanoplastic operation, which is very important and very danger-
ous because it is so inexpensive. A basic restriction on its use is thus all the
more necessary for us.
The old methods were plating and gilding under fire, which imposed cer-
tain stylistic limits on technicians simply because they were so expensive and
presented so many difficulties. But let us pass over these purely technical mat-
ters—referring the reader to relevant writings and to practice—and turn at
once to the third and last question about the coloring, muting, and polishing
of gold (or silver).
Master Cellini devoted five chapters of his little treatise on goldsmithery to
the practice of painting gold, which shows how important this artist thought
it was. He was only following an ancient artistic tradition, since from time
immemorial painting has been inseparable from gold coverings.!23 It is only
we moderns who need the crude color of gold and the banal mirror-brilliance
of polished metal to stimulate our jaded senses, and who see it as the highest
aspiration of the gilder’s art.124
Gilding is applied (1) to make the whole work appear to be gold; (2) as a
ground for surfaces intended to take sculpted or painted themes; (3) as a
means for making such subjects stand out against a light or dark ground (of
any color) without the aid of paint; and (4) as a paint used for drawing the
outline of subjects, to add light, and for other conventional applications.
If the whole work is gilded, then the property of uniform diversity required
of every work of art can and should be enhanced by the skillful variation and
heightening of the sensory stimuli offered by gold.
We moderns are almost only aware of the use of the glow of gold to
heighten, and very frequently there is no real feeling for this among both artists
and the public. Our idea of perfection is the dictatorship of a glow with the
noble principles and procedures of bootblacking: the whole thing is to be
waxed, and if not, you wax as much as possible. Hence the law that applies
in art as well as in nature—according to which light and luster achieve their
full effect only through concentration against a preponderance of darkness—
certainly fails to be realized, because a completely polished metal surface is,
with the exception of the shiny parts, the darkest object. But these effects are
natural phenomena, much more general than those art counts among its
means. Wherever art wishes to use these effects as a principal motive, however,
it sets itself a task that is more difficult than most people would suspect, since
they rarely have any other motives than reasons of economy, clumsiness, lack
of taste, poverty of spirit, and laziness. The artist’s thoughts must be directed
toward this goal from the very moment of the work’s conception; every detail
must be calculated for its purely sensory effects of light and luster. Keeping
the brilliance uniform and coherent is the most difficult problem. The accom-
plished old masters recognized this difficulty and were much more careful in

885
 Semper

their use of the burnisher; they were usually content with the natural matte
glow of gold (and silver), and moved downward from this top note on their
scale of effects. They covered the metal with paints and varnishes and dead-
ened, shaded, and varied its glow according to the requirements of the task at
hand.!25
The burnisher was used only to heighten individual bright points and to
produce on a gold surface an arabesque and acanthus pattern by alternating
matte and gleaming areas.
Similar means were used to vary effects as well as to enhance them, using
red, brown, and green glazes on gold grounds, for they knew how to do so in
a way that would last. Silver, iron, and bronze were colored in the same way,
either on the surface or in the metal itself —that is, metals were sometimes
mixed in certain proportions to achieve a particular effect. This procedure is
equally incomprehensible to us from the point of view of science and our
inherited notions of beauty.2°
Gold used as a ground for sculptural and painterly effects must not shine;
it must harmonize with the coloring and demeanor of the objects upon it and
with the surrounding whole. The gold ground produces a solemn and peace-
ful effect whenever a natural sense of style or a master’s hand imposes the
requisite balance; some very prestigious and indeed highly praised modern
monstrosities born of tastelessness and fertilized by false classicism are, how-
ever, repulsive. !27
No less skill is needed with objects meant to stand out plastically or flat
against a particular ground. Important considerations here are the suitable
tinting of the ground, correct coloring of the gold, and the skillful distribution
of the polished parts. Under all circumstances a certain common tone must
serve to resolve the contrasts between the gold and its ground. For example, if
the ground is green, the gold should have an essentially greenish cast, or if the
gold is red, the gray ground must have a tinge of red, or in other words a
celadon or olive color. Because the color of wood is close to that of gold, it is
easy to achieve a felicitous combination of the two. The same is true of gilding
on a bronze ground. Despite this, great care is needed with these popular
combinations. False contrasts are to be particularly avoided, like greenish
gold on a reddish metal (or wood), or reddish gold on a green ground.28 A
very common combination is gold on silver or steel, and here too the strongest
possible contrasts are sought. In my view, a silver surface that is to be partially
gilded should be made with a slightly yellow alloy; for pure silver I would add
a lot of silver to the gold or color it blond.
The same care is needed with gilding on a white ground (walls, ceilings,
furniture, vases, and so on). A completely white ground never works well with
gilt. A greenish brown bister mixture, a celadon shade, or a different, suitable,
neutral shade is always necessary. One might risk much in this regard without
detriment to the overall white effect.!2°
Polished parts give the effect of the brightest light or deepest shade, accord-
ing to the direction of the light. They are therefore advisable only when the

886
 Metallurgy

illumination is fixed, and other circumstances should also be taken into

account, so that, for example, zones that must seem bright as an essential ele-
ment of the composition get polished. For this reason, I would polish only
quite conventional shapes — for example, eggs, pearls, ornamental leaf ribs, or
objects that do in reality shine, like stars, flowers, beetles, crowns, swords,
shields, buttons, and so on.
But one should never use matte gold or silver for so-called rehaussé, which
is always meant to seem bright, especially on cameos, colored pictures, and
arabesques. Hatching with a burnisher on matte gold is often highly effective.

§ 188 Cast Metal

The properties of metal make it more suitable for casting than any other
material, thus any form required by art, even sensually tangible nature, can be
represented in cast metal. Metal can also be hammered, used stereotomically,
and soldered. All of these possess properties that offer a greater wealth of
assistance for the further development of cast-metal products than for any
other material. A third advantage of metal as a material for casting is its plia-
bility and the great cohesion of its constituent elements, which again distin-
guishes it from other plastic materials. It leads to a certain lightness and
delicacy of character different from the plastic effects of clay, porcelain, glass,
and so on.
We have already considered the general historical significance of the con-
trast between cast and toreutic style in §§ 181-83, and refer the reader to
these sections for the most important material that is also relevant here.¥°
Some basic remarks about certain technical influences on the style of cast
wares are given in § 116 (“Ceramics”). For this reason, I will make only a few
further remarks about certain stylistic implications of metal casting that apply
to the art industry.

CAST-METAL VESSELS
Their characteristic feature is a certain boldness and vigor in their general
form; ancillary parts like handles, feet, or spouts may be relatively detached
from the body. In relation to the body (whose breadth and shape are princi-
pally governed by the purpose of the vessel), the ancillary parts can be far
lighter than would be permissible under other circumstances, and may be
combined with each other and with the body in a bolder fashion.
The ease with which plastic decoration is rendered and a broad choice of
other means of formal enrichment make it easy to explain why the art of cast-
metal vessels tends to the decorative.
The decorative or practical outfitting of metal vessels with riveted or sol-
dered accessories, '3!customary in the art of metal vessel making from earliest
times, defines this decorative direction even more precisely.32
Renaissance vessels have an even more markedly cast character than do
antique pottery and vase art; as I showed, the material had far less influence
on the style of the latter than on that of the Christian period! The rich and

887
 Semper

gracious cast-metal vessels of the Renaissance period, although sometimes

excessive, may be entirely justified, but at the same time the transfer of their
characteristic forms to other materials is one sign of approaching decline.

ARCHITECTURAL CAST METAL}3

The dynamic and technical properties of cast metals are very different from
those of hammered metals. They are brittler, easier to tear, with much less rel-
ative strength. On the other hand, their compressive strength is significantly
greater and they are less pliable. Both facts point to cast metal’s place in archi-
tecture and in the field of utensils.
Because of its brittleness, cast metal has something in common with stone
as a building material. Thus a construction made of pure cast iron can be con-
ceived and built according to the basic laws of stereotomy; the same goes for
cast bronze.
Examples: Former Pont du Jardin des plantes, Paris, built on the vault
principle, using hollow perforated coffers that are active only through their
compressive strength.
Dome of the Halle aux blés, Paris, built on the same principle.
Antique cast-metal grilles following the model of perforated antique stone
slabs, although lighter.
Grille around the altar of the Madonna in the church of Orsanmichele by
Orcagna. Cast-bronze Gothic rosettes with a white marble frame.
With mixed construction, cast metal should be given its proper role and it
should be treated artistically in accordance with its function (see chapter 7;
also § 178, § 186, and elsewhere).
Examples (not models): the Paris exhibition building; the new one in Lon-
don; the library of Sainte-Geneviéve, Paris; the roofs of many railway halls.

Front bumper of the Duke of Wellington’s hearse in Saint Paul’s in London, design
by the author (not built according to design owing to lack of time)

888
 Metallurgy

CAST-METAL FURNISHINGS
We believe that we have provided the necessary material on this in § 70, and
especially in §§ 141-44, where we discussed it along with embossed metal
domestic furnishings and indicated their differences and resemblances, as well
as their functionally conditioned similarities.
We may therefore conclude this chapter and the book about style in the
technical arts.

Notes
1. Brit[ish] Mus{eum] and the Louvre: tin plates engraved with hieroglyphs, divini-
ties in mummy cases. Mus[eo] gregor[iano etrusco].
2. Brit[ish] Mus[eum]. See Archaeologia 26 [(1836)]: 429.
3. For wreaths in Vienna, see Arneth, [Die antiken Gold- und Silber-Monumente].
From Kerch, see Antiquités du Bosphore Cimmeérien, etc.
4. Quatremére de Quincy, Le Jupiter olympien, etc.
5. For both, see Cicognara and Texier.
6. See § 159 of “Tectonics,” page 706.
7. For the two ways of treating metal that we have thus defined and distinguished,
see pages 250 ff., 329 ff.
8. This sort of breast ornament is, as a rule, found with the remains of female
corpses in Celtic and Finnish tombs. Clasps and spiral rings made of precious metals
were also tributes, bartering tools, a kind of coin. See Weinhold, Skandinavische Alter-
thiimer.
9. Treasury of Agamemnon, see pages 376-77. On pots and the like, see volume 2,
under “Ceramics.”
10. One thinks of the sea’s waves, the tendrils of certain plants, etc.
11. See pages 275, 337, and the whole of § 67 in volume 1.
12. But the Ionic volute decoration that involved cushion supports on couches (in
vase paintings) still seems to have functioned as a spring (see woodcut on p. 661).
13. The shields of Achilles and Diomedes (in Homer) and that of Hercules (in
Hesiod) were also loricated in this way.
14. These luxury items came principally from Italy, where armorers had consider-
able influence on the general course of Renaissance art: among many excellent masters
were Michelangelo (Benvenuto Cellini’s teacher); Filippo Negroli of Milan (armorer to
Charles V and Francis I); Antonio, Federico, and Lucio Piccinino (who worked for the
house of Farnese); and Romero (for Alfonso II of Este). The German guilds rivaled the
Italian; it may be that the achievements of Koloman Helmschmied of Augsburg out-
stripped those of any other armorer. His work is lavish but strictly stylized, predomi-
nantly in the character of embossed metalwork. Ceremonial armor for Christian II of
Denmark, in Dresden.
15. The brooch illustrated here (made to my design) may serve as an example.
16. Where the latter appears on ancient jewelry (as on the ancient Etruscan filigree
brooches on p. 832) or on works of art more generally, it is a sure sign that the art to
which these objects belong had reached an advanced stage. The realistic use of concrete

889
 Semper

natural forms in the arts rose to a certain point, after which the decline of those same
arts returned them gradually to the typical simplicity of their early stages. We should
like to emphasize expressly, so as not to appear to contradict what we have said earlier
(for instance, at the conclusion of § 4), that naive artistic activity, although it also
draws on nature and follows its general cosmic lawfulness, proceeds quite differently
from advanced art, which uses concrete, complete natural forms for its pictorial sym-
bolism. An example is the interwoven fibers visible everywhere in nature as a general
expression of binding, and the ivy tendril as a specific expression of the same; in addi-
tion, these are associated with other concepts.
17. See also my essay on adornment (Zurich: Meyer & Zeller, 1856).
18. Cf. the passage in [§§ 70-]74, pages 329-54.
19. For the difference between weaving and plaiting, see §§ 54 and 56.
20. Especially the chapters in “Tectonics.”
21. See §§ 9, 10, 11, and 22.
22. The Saynerhiitte near Koblenz is rust colored. We believe that the rust color
marble acquires was taken into account when the ancients gave their marble works a
polychrome treatment. See “Concluding Remarks,” page 423.
23. In the case of thick chains, the shape of the links is affected by the properties
mentioned: they are given inner ribs or have to be reinforced at the ends.
24. Egyptian and Babylonian-Assyrian works in carved stone are found in all
museums, although the latter are rarer. See [Joseph] Strutt, A Biographical Dictionary,
2 vols. (London, 1786).
25. Brunn, Geschichte der grliechischen] Kunstler, vol. 2, pt. 2, 467.
26. Ancient coins were sometimes cast. See [J.] Seitz, “[Essai] sur l’art de la fonte
des anciens...,” Mag[asin] encycllopédique] 6 ({December] 1806): 280.
27. [Raoul-Rochette,] Lettre a M. Schorn, 2d ed.
28. Certain medallion-shaped bas-reliefs by the master Donatello (born 1383 in
Florence) also belong in this category. The most famous is the Bacchic bronze patera in
Casa Martelli in Florence.
29. Cicognara, Storia della scultura.
30. Probably something of the kind was known to the Romans, as a passage in Pliny
about the duplication of certain portraits as vignettes for books seems to suggest. See
Pliny 35.2 and Martial 14.186. The woodcut is one of the oldest Chinese inventions.
31. For instance, the imaginative vignettes and illustrations by Jean Gigoux, [Auguste]
Raffet, Tony Johannot, and other artists of the 1830s and 1840s.
32. For Daedalus and the Daedalids, see Brunn, Geschichte der griechischen
Kiinstler, introduction. Contrast between Daedalus (the woodcutter) and Hephaestus
(the metalworker). Daedalus put forth a particularly Attic view of the origin and early
stages of the development of art; Hephaestus was a representative of the oldest Asiatic
and Egyptian views on the same point.
33. Greek: €\aova [beaten metal; metal plate].
34. In his introduction (p. 30), Brunn is mistaken when he refers to this work as
bronze. It was consecrated around the time of the forty-fifth olympiad, but could have
been old at that date. According to Eusebius [of Caesarea], Glaucus invented welding
as early as the twenty-second olympiad.

890
 Metallurgy

35. Scalptura in hard stones (sculptura in marble, wood, etc.) and toreutics in
metal; the latter expression is also applied inappropriately to the technique used when
working in ivory and gold.
36. Dipoenus and Scyllis began work on a group consisting of Apollo, Artemis,
Hercules, and Athena for the Sicyonian authorities but they left the city without com-
pleting it (probably as a result of intrigues against them by local sculptors). A pro-
nouncement by the Pythian oracle led to an offer of greater remuneration and other
inducements to return to the project.
37. The works attributed to him are still images of divinities, in accordance with
ancient techniques and the hieratic tradition.
38. On Onatas and the Aeginetans, see Brunn, introduction, 90 ff.
39. Two seated figures of Athena on the Acropolis, by the ancient Attic school and
unfortunately severely mutilated, are stylistically directly related to the ancient sculp-
tures of the Lycian Harpy Monument, hence indirectly to the most ancient Asiatic art.
The same is true of some smaller reliefs. The well-known archaic sculpture of a warrior
from Marathon (attributed to Aristocles) is as closely related to the Acropolis figures as
it is to the outwardly lively but spiritually barren Aeginetan pediment figures.
40. The colossal cast-bronze Athena Promachus, on the Acropolis in Athens, was
completed by Mys, using inlays and chasing. The shield, built according to designs by
Parrhasius, depicted fighting centaurs. Its toreutic element lay elsewhere: it accounted
for the work’s general appearance.
41. Prop[ertius] 3.[9.13] ff.
42. Fora list of surviving toreutic works, see Miller, [Handbuch der] Archdollogie},
§ 312.
43. Pliny (33.[49]) complains about changing fashions in silver vessels. Three dif-
ferent schools of silversmithery were in vogue in his day: the Furnian, Clodian, and
Gratian. Yet he does not give detailed information about them.
44. Little of it has survived: a silver vessel in the Christian Museum in the Vatican
Library; a rich treasury of silverware belonging to a Christian woman called Projecta
from the fourth or fifth century, now in the Schillersheim collection; some Gallo-
Roman and Anglo-Roman silver utensils. More ancient art shows barbarian tenden-
cies and has pagan emblems. [Ennio] Visconti, Lettere 34 su di una antica argenteria,
quarto (Rome, 1793). See also d’Agincourt and Cicognara. Certain Lombard and
Frankish antiquities also show the use of Byzantine-Oriental techniques: for instance,
the crown of Queen Theodolinda (died 616), a kind of band-chain set with cabochon
precious stones interspersed with embossed golden flowers; the crown of King Agilulf
of Lombardy, with fifteen small gold relief figures in the same number of dwarf arches;
the translucently enameled remnants of decorations said to be from the armor of King
Childeric, the father of Clovis, found in a tomb near Tournai. Magasin pittoresque [19,
no. 54] ([August] 1851), 272; Montfaucon, [Supplément au livre de L’antiquité).
45. Viollet-le-Duc, Entretiens, vol. 1. [Louis-Félicien Joseph Caignart] de Saulcy,
Voyage en Terre Sainte. Constantine [the Great] and his successors wrought magnifi-
cent building projects on the site of the Holy Sepulchre and elsewhere in the Holy Land;
these were supervised by Asian master builders, which could clearly explain the readop-
tion of ancient Syrian artistic traditions.

891
 Semper

46. Probably in the old Saxon manner: the framework in iron, the ceiling in cast
bronze.
47. The fountain basin that can be seen today in the Alhambra’s Lions Court is
probably a copy of the Cordoba fountain, although it is marble.
48. Dagobert’s famous chair in gilded bronze (perhaps not actually Byzantine, but
a Gallo-Roman work) was indeed cast, but was toreutic in its treatment, which was
consistent, uniformly sharp, and carved. The splendid lion in Brunswick, formerly
assumed to have been brought from Byzantium by Duke Heinrich (following [Wilhelm]
Libke, though it is in fact a cast Saxon work), is in the strictest chased style—a perfect
example of Byzantine sculpture. Many smaller works—architectural members, furni-
ture, door rings, grilles, altars, ampullae, and so on—confirm the influence of toreutics
on Byzantine style and design.
49. King Dagobert’s faldstool, allegedly the work of Saint Aloysius, is now in the
Hall of Sovereigns at the Louvre.
50. See “Tectonics,” § 148, for Carolingian taste in utensils.
51. See Murr, Die kaiserlichen Zierden zu Aachen; Arneth; Willemin.
52. Einhard, V[ita] Caroli M[agni], [33]. A rectangular silver table with a plan
view of Constantinople and a round one with a plan of Rome. A third was even finer
than these two in content and beauty: the whole world was delicately executed in
miniature, an orbis pictus [painted globe]. A fourth was made of gold. The wealth of
silver and gold in the churches of Rome during this period is beyond all belief. Ana-
stasius, Vitae Hadriani I et Leonis III [Liber pontificalis 97.45 ff., 98.69 ff.]; [Carl]
Bunsen, Beschreibung der Stadt Rom, 2:75 ff.
53. Eleventh century:
Bronze door of Hildesheim Cathedral. ({[Johann Michael] Kratz, Der Dom zu
Hildesheim.)
Doors of Augsburg Cathedral (see [Joseph Franz von] Allioli, Die Bronze-Thiire
des Domes zu Augsburg; Kugler, Kl[eine] Schriften, 1:149, 3:753).
Ivory carving with embossed gold frames in Essen (Kunstdenkmaler des christlichen
Mittelalters in den Rheinlanden, by E[rnst] aus’m Weerth, vol. 2, pt. 1).
Book cover from Bamberg, now in Munich. ({[Ernst Joachim] Forster, Denkmale,
vols. 1 and 2; Kugler, Kleine Schriften, 1:79).
Tomb plate of Rudolf of Swabia [recte: of Rheinfelden] (died 1080) in Merseburg
Cathedral ([Jakob Heinrich] v[on] Hefner[-Alteneck], Trachten, vol. 1, pl. 58; [Ludwig]
Puttrich, Denkm[ale| der Baukunst des Mittelalters in Sachsen).
Sculptures in the abbey church of Heckingen (Puttrich, pls. 31-33).
Some sculptures and monuments in Bamberg Cathedral, especially the tomb of
Suidger von Mayendorf, who died as Pope Clement II in 1047. The latter is said by
Schnaase and Kugler to be a thirteenth-century work. If they had said fifteenth or six-
teenth century rather than thirteenth, they could be more readily excused, because of
the appearance of this genuinely eleventh-century renaissance work.

Twelfth century:
The Dinant school.
Font of Lambert Patras in Saint-Barthélémy of Liége. Another in Osnabriick Cathe-

892
 Metallurgy

dral (Annales arch|éologiques| 5 [(1846)]: 21; 8 [(1849)]: 330; Kugler, Kleine Schriften,
2:499; [Wilhelm] Liibke, M[ittelalterliche| Kunst in West|falen], 417).
Extern stones near Horn, Westphalia ([Hans Ferdinand] Massmann, Der Egster-
stein in Westfalen; Forster, D[enkmale| dleutscher| Blaukunst,| Blildnerei und Malereil,
vol. 2; Liibke).
The plastic principle and the artistic tradition of antique Rome can also be seen in
the contemporary readoption of stucco sculpture, a convenient material for this spir-
ited and lively early renaissance in the north. The choir screens in the church at
Halberstadt, with figures of the Redeemer, the Virgin Mary, and the Apostles, have an
antique size, amplitude, and even grace. Late-twelfth-century choir screens in Saint
Michael’s in Hildesheim: an even livelier and richer style. Stucco sculpture in the
Chapel of Repentance of the Stiftskirche in Gernrode. The angels in the pendentives of
the church at Hecklingen, already noted (Puttrich 1:1; ser. Anhalt, pls. 22-29; Kugler,
Kleine] Schriften, 1:605).
This school reached its peak in the early thirteenth century: pulpit in Wechselburg,
golden door in Freiberg, altar in Wechselburg, tombstone of Duke Dedo IV in the same
place (Kugler, Kunstgesch[ichte], 2:258).
Even painting was influenced, though almost all traces of this have been destroyed
by the frenzied whitewashing of walls in modern times by those who avoid color. Wall
paintings at Schwarzrheindorf near Bonn, in Soest Cathedral, and elsewhere. (Liibke,
[Die mittelalterliche Kunst in Westfalen], 321; [idem], Denkmdler der K[unst], pl. 49A,
127)
54. The stiff column saints at Chartres, Saint-Denis, Mons, Bourges, etc.
55. Chased and inlaid tomb plates. The finest in Belgium, perhaps work from Dinant:
Tomb statue of Konrad von Hochstatten, Cologne.
Tomb statue of a crusader in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Bruges.
Equestrian statue of Saint George near Saint Vitus’s in Prague (Kugler, K/[eine]
Schriften], 2:493).
56. Walloon bronzes in chased and enameled work.
Augsburg work in cast metal.
Chandelier in Lorenzkirche in Nuremberg. Others in same area.
Utensils in the town halls of Liineburg and Ghent ({Lacroix,] Le Moyen Age et la
Renaissance.)
Late Gothic chandelier in Liibeck Cathedral dating from 1461 (see woodcut on
p. 854).
A survey of medieval ecclesiastical utensils in Didron’s Annales arch|éologiques| 19
[(1869)].
Goldsmiths’ work:
Shrine of Saint Eleutherius at Tournai. Thirteenth century. (Didron, Ann{[ales
archéologiques] 13 |(1853)]: 113; 14 [(1854)]: 114.)
Reliquary chest of Saint Patroclus in Soest, in the Berlin Museum.
Tower-shaped reliquaries in the treasury of Aachen Cathedral.
Censers in the same place.
Delicate work by goldsmiths in the town halls of Ghent, Liineburg, and elsewhere
(Moyen Age et Renaissance).

893
 Semper

The Limoges school of metalworkers in southern France also remained true to its
traditions in this period. Compact metal casting with very little or no raised work, but
with richly enameled surfaces. In 1267 Master Johann of Limoges made the tomb fig-
ure of Walter de Merton, bishop of Rochester. That of William de Valence (died 1296),
which still exists, a bronze cast covered with champlevé enamel, is probably also by
him (Jules Labarte, Description ..., 146; see also article on enamel work below).
57. There was no marked taste for secular gold and silver goods until the early
fourteenth century. But this luxury soon made such progress that legal steps were
taken. King John (of France), in his decree of 1356, forbade goldsmiths from working
on utensils and vessels heavier than a mark of silver or gold, except for ecclesiastical
purposes.
The following articles, among other bizarre gold and silver utensils, are described in
the inventory of [René,] duke of Anjou, king of Naples:
Pouring vessel (aiguiére): a man on a base; the base is blue enamel, with people on
foot and horseback hunting a stag. The man has an azure enameled cloak and is hold-
ing his cap in his right hand; its peak forms the spout.
A small golden jug with a spout in the shape of a rose; the mouthpiece is a dolphin
and the knob is a bud.
Saltcellar: a man on a gilded and chased base; the man has a felt hat on his head
and holds a crystal saltcellar with silver decoration in his right hand and in his left a
cherry tree complete with leaves, cherries, and birds hopping from branch to branch.
The finest items were the nefs, large containers in the form of ships for the king’s
cups and tableware. A large silver ship, gilded, on six lions, at each end a castle on
which was an angel, the hull with the French coat of arms in enamel (Labarte, 230,
where he lists the numbers of the relevant manuscripts in the Paris library).
58. Agilulf’s crown was decorated with fifteen seated figures en ronde bosse. The
paliotto d’oro in Sant’Ambrogio in Milan was commissioned in 835 by Archbishop
Angelbert II, executed by a certain “Wolfwin,” and gives a clear idea of the artistic
skills of this master, probably from Lombardy: gold sheets with enamel frames, each
panel contains relief figures in the lax Latin style. Illustrated in d’Agincourt, pl. 1;
[Alexandre] du Sommerard, [Les arts au Moyen Age,| album, ser. 10, pl. 18.
59. The Pala d’oro (antependium) in San Marco in Venice, tenth century, from
Constantinople, enamel painting on gold sheets. The bronze-plated door of San Paolo
fuori le Mure in Rome, a gift from Hildebrand, later Pope Gregory VII. The fields con-
tained shallow figurative scenes in inlaid silver with enamel work. Illustrated and
described in [Seroux] d’Agincourt. Others of the same kind in Venice, Amalfi, Salerno,
etc. Leo [Marsicanus] Ostiensis, [Chronicon monasterii Casinensis,| 3.29; Rumohr,
I{talienische] Florschungen], 287.
60. Bonanno [Pisano], who cast the rear bronze door in Pisa, and even more char-
acteristically Benedetto Antelami (1178), whose work in Parma Cathedral belongs
partly to the Byzantine and partly to the lively and moving Latin tendency. He evidently
swings between the two and therefore already has an idea of the contrast between
them, which is the main thing. If, contrary to our assumption, these quite different
works are not all by Master Benedetto, to whom written records attribute them, this
would prove all the more clearly that the name was intended as a symbol of this crisis.

894
 Metallurgy

In painting the crisis of which we are speaking did not come until later —with fresco
painting, as a substitute for hieratic mosaic decoration. Well-known symbolic painters
are Cimabue (1240-1300) in Florence, Duccio in Siena (where the new spirit was awak-
ened even before him by Guido da Siena), and Jacopo Torriti in Rome.
61. The older sculptural style of Nicola Pisano, which is rightly called an early
Renaissance, is closely related to the even earlier renaissance in the North under the
Saxon kings, but the later style of Giovanni and his school was already Gothic and had
half unwittingly recognized the architectural discipline of the system. It was a long time
before its inhibiting properties could be overcome, allowing sculpture to develop freely.
62. [Friedrich Heinrich von der] Hagen, Br[iefe] i[n] d[ie] Heimat, 1:11.
63. Illustrated in Didron’s Ann[ales archéologiques] Similar candelabras in Bruns-
wick Cathedral and elsewhere. Limoges candlesticks in a similar style in Didron’s
Ann|{ales], passim.
64. D’ Agincourt, Hist[oire] de l’art, vol. 6, Peinture, pl. 123. In Didron’s Annales
is another reliquary in the same style.
65. Illustrated in Gailhabaud.
66. At Longford Castle, Wiltshire. Published by [Charles James] Richardson in
[Studies from] Old English Mansions. Two fine examples of iron-chased steel chairs are
in the possession of Lord Ashburton.
67. I will mention here as an addendum that the ancients could acquire iron and
steel for fine art as readily as bronze, but they disliked them because of oxidization
problems. The ancient iron stand of Glaucus has already been mentioned. Kibyra in
Asia Minor was an important seat of the iron utensil industry. The iron statue of Theo-
dorus of Samos and iron figures of Hercules are mentioned by Pliny and Pausanias. The
steel helmet of Pyrrhus of Epirus was the work of Theophilus (Plutarch, Alex. 32).
The Saracens were skilled workers in embossed iron and filigree steel even in the
ninth century and probably even earlier. Several old pieces of Sicilian-Saracen embossed
steel from the time of the Norman Conquest can be seen in the museum of the Bene-
dictine monastery in Catania: signet rings, andirons, stirrups, and other objects (see
woodcut).
68. We provide the bronze knocker from the Certosa di Pavia as a simple and
beautiful example of this style.
69. Silver dish by Cellini in Paris. Saltcellar by the same artist in Vienna. Crystal
vases, enhanced by him, in Florence (now stolen?).
70. Latin: ducere; Greek: €datvetv.
71. It is not the soldering process but actual welding that the ancient writers under-
stood to be the invention of Glaucus of Chios, which they rightly consider to be of great
importance. Actual soldering using lead is mentioned by them separately as an incomplete
kind of welding (ferruminatio, xohAnots atSypou). For the Greeks, Glaucus was the
semimythical representative and patron of iron forgers. Therefore he was also, if not the
inventor, still the most prominent master of the art of softening and hardening iron
(Plutarch, De def [ectu] or{aculorum], 47). For the antique art of soldering, see Carlo Féa’s
Winckelmann, [Storia delle arti del disegno presso gli antichi,| chap. 5, 429 (Dresden).
72. See §§ 6 and 27 of volume 1 and other passages from the present book dealing
with this point.

895
 Semper

73. See “Ceramics,” § 129, pages 602-3.

74. For the homogeneity of ceramic masses, see § 116, page 560.
75. The imperial jewels (formerly in Aachen) included a Saracen saber said to date
from the time of Charlemagne. Other old Saracen and Moorish swords in the royal
armory collection in Madrid. See Murr, Die kaiserlichen Zierden zu Aachen, and
Achille Jubinal, Description du musée d'Artillerie de Madrid.
76. The iron swords with their iron-covered sheaths recently found in a pile dwelling
in Lake Neuchatel are neither Roman nor Celtic nor Saracen in their form and orna-
mentation, but follow a quite indefinably barbarian style. Their surviving surfaces have
fine patterns, some with shagreen grains, some with moiré patterns, which show with-
out any doubt that they were made by welding together fine steel needles and equally
fine steel wires. The publisher of these remarkable small antiques, Dr. Ferdinand Keller
of Zurich, believes these patterns were only etched, but there would certainly be no
traces of patterns left if a superficial acid treatment of this kind had been used. Only if
the iron was patterned right through could the internal texture still show traces after
being almost completely destroyed. See [Keller, “Die Pfahlbauten der Schweiz,” ]Mitthei-
lungen der Antiquar|ischen] Gesellschaft in Ziirich 12.
77. The process in question is commonly called damascing, from Damascus, which
is still the most famous source of laminated weapons. But we avoid this term because of
the confusion it causes with another metallurgical process with the same, or a similar,
name. See below, § 187, on damascening.
78. Examples include Louis XIV’s personal shotgun, made by [Bertrand] Piraube,
which is in Windsor [Castle]. It has rich chasing and inlaid work and is a model of the
application of ornamental art to firearms. The Suhl works by Master [Johann] Weiss,
which are also there, are in the most beautiful rococo style, which developed here
almost naturally from the curves of the modern gun.
79. Developed from this viewpoint, the author’s report on the collection of private
weapons of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor [Castle], dated 20 September 1852, was
published in the First Report of the Department of Practical Art (London, 1853).
80. We mean in this application. But for the ancients it is very often a principal
decorative material in surface dressing.
81. Rouen and Vienna.
82. See some Gothic door fixtures below.
83. Vasari, in his life of Cronaca, tells a number of delightful stories about the
willful, narrow-minded, but independent character of the old master Niccolé Grosso
[Caparra], to whom he attributes the decorations in the Palazzo Strozzi and a large
number of those of the period’s forgeries that could be called more architectural and
plastically decorated. Master Grosso did not stand alone, however, and many of his
rivals followed his example, sometimes to work in his style and sometimes to change it.
Like Cellini’s, his name is used for a whole group of artists.
84. The Cluny Museum in Paris contains remarkable artistic examples of medieval
metalwork. Alexandre Lenoir, Musée des monumens francais, 2:6. Beautiful examples
are in Mathurin Jousse, Le théatre de l’art; [Jousse, La fidelle] ouverture de l’art de ser-
rurier, La Fléche, 1623.
85. Examples: tower clock in Saint Mark’s Square, Venice; clock mechanism in

896
 Metallurgy

Strasburg by Konrad Dasypodius, 1573; table clock of Henry VIII, Windsor; fifteenth-,
sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century table clocks illustrated in [Lacroix,] Moyen Age et
Renaissance; pocket watches by Etienne Delaune, Theodore de Bry, and others, illus-
trated in the article “Horlogerie” in M[oyen] Al[ge] et R{enaissance].
My colleague Reuleaux, professor of mechanics at the Zurich Polytechnikum, con-
cludes his work on mechanics with a full article on the aesthetic question under consid-
eration here.
86. Theophilus [3.75], “De opere quod sigillis imprimitur” [Concerning embossed
work].
87. Two of the above-mentioned cupboards in Gore House had excellent sculptural
arguments on the panels and even in the pressed corner reinforcements. Photographs in
the above-mentioned Thompson collection. Copies by me in the Kensington Museum.
88. Theophilus [3.72], “Opus intersectile” [Joining work].
89. This process is not to be confused with actual inlaid work, which is to the for-
mer as stuffed pheasant is to salami. For this see what is said on veneers in “Tectonics.”
90. For a long time certain delicate outlines on Attic lecythi and marble panels
were considered complete in themselves, until they were convincingly shown to be pre-
liminary drawings for encaustic work that had disappeared.
91. For the Epirus discus (owned by an Englishman named Hawkins) see [“Gott-
ingen,” ]Gdttingische glelehrte| A[nzeigen] (1800): 1801. The barbaricarii of late antiq-
uity were the artists who carried out this inlaid work in gold and silver. Miller,
Archdologie, § 311 and note.
92. Ancient writers mentioned as curiosities works in glass whose opaque coating
was cut away to produce patterns.
93. Saracen and Moorish vases. Stucco walls, Alhambra.
94. See “Damascening” below.
95. As is shown by the cut glass with hatched landscapes from Karlsbad and
Toplitz.
96. Theophilus 3.[28]; Benv[enuto] Cellini, Oref[iceria], chap. 2. The compound
was made of one unit of silver, two of copper, three of lead, and four of sulphur.
97. Diaper, Latin diasprum, according to du Cange probably derived from iaspis
[jasper], because of the roughness of the metal surfaces. See the article “Damask” in
volume 1 of this book.
98. See the careful article “Emaillerie sur métaux” in the “Introduction historique”
to the Description de la collection Duménil by Jules Labarte.
Also [Louis] Dussieux, Recherches sur l’histoire de Ia peinture sur| émail, Paris.
Maurice Ardant, Notice historique sur les émaux, et les émailleurs, de Limoges.
Abbé Texier, Essai sur les émailleurs de Limoges.
[Didier-Francois d’Arclais dje Montamy, Traité des couleurs pour la peinture en émail.
Brongniart, Traité des arts céramiques, “Traité pratique sur la préparation des
couleurs d’émail,” in the Revue scientifique et industrielle, December 1844,
January and February 1845.
Much material about the relationship of ancient enamel painting to encaustics and
ancient polychromy, and to painting in general, is to be found in earlier sections of this
book.

897
 Semper

99. See the article on glass [§ 129] in “Ceramics.”

100. For technical preparation, see the sources mentioned above.
101. Philostratus, [Imagines,] chap. 28.
102. It is true that all the most recent finds of ancient enamel encrustation have
been in France and England, but this is not the case for earlier ones. [Anne Claude
Philippe] Caylus lists several such vessels in Recueil d’antiq{uités,| 2:91, 5:104, 6:85.
103. Nevertheless, both entire metal sculptures and parts of sculptures were enam-
eled by the champlevé method. Master John of Limoges incrusted the prone statue of
Walter Merton, bishop of Rochester (1267). The statue of William de Valence (died
1296) is probably by the same John.
104. According to Texier (Essai sur les émailleurs de Limoges), the following col-
ors were customary in the eleventh century: three shades of copper blue, semitranspar-
ent crimson, opaque red, blue-green, and celadon green. Violet, a kind of iron gray, and
yellow were added in the twelfth century. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the
same colors were used without the addition of any other shades.
105. Principal works: tomb plate of Saint Front in Périgueux, the remnants of
which are in Abbé Texier’s possession. According to him, it is the oldest known Limoges
work (1077).
Tomb plate of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, d. 1151 at [Le] Mans.
Two panels in the Hotel Cluny, parts of an altar in Grandmont from the period
1073-1188.
106. Buonarroti, passim.
107. Benvenuto Cellini describes his method very clearly; the principle of the older
method is the same.
108. Vasari, s.v. “Nicola and Giov. Pisani.”
109. The Limoges master Léonard [Limosin] (1532-74) had invented a kind of
sgraffito enamel long before him. A white covering on a black ground, outlines and
shade produced by hatching the white to reveal the black, finally a transparent, col-
ored, and shallow glaze.
110. Imitations of Chinese porcelain.
111. Theoph{ilus] [3.53].
112. Sixth-century Byzantine gold coins were found with the dish.
113. Tratt{ati] dell’oref iceria,| 3[:41].
114. Flesh, hair, and other parts are opaque; wings, leaf ribs, and occasionally gar-
ments, translucent.
115. The Tabula Isiaca is probably from the late period, but archaic. See Miiller,
Archdologie, § 230.1.
116. Passages in Homer and Hesiod about metal decoration on weapons and uten-
sils in various colors. [Aubin Louis] Millin, Minéralogie homérique. Miiller, Archdo-
logie, §§ 58-59 with notes.
Probably inlaying on a large scale was more customary in the heroic or early Hel-
lenic period, especially for weapons. But Phidias liked to go back to the most ancient
artistic traditions. The term barbaricarii for craftsman seems to indicate that this art
was practiced by foreign technicians in the later period, or that non-Greek taste had
taken root there.

898
 Metallurgy

117. Every kind of surface tectonics and inlaid work brought to their richest devel-
opment on some bell-metal vases, made principally in Mosul on the Tigris in the
Middle Ages. Vincennes vase, Louvre. A similar vase in the Br[itish] Mus[eum] (thir-
teenth century). Plate in the Imp[erial] Library, Paris, with relief damascening. Various
other such display vessels in the collections of the duke of Blacas, of Duménil (now
dispersed), in London, Saint Petersburg, and elsewhere. Labarte, [Description des
objets d’art,| 405. Reinaud, Mon[umens| arabes, persans et turcs, du cabinet de M. le
duc de Blacas, 1:26.
118. The Kensington Museum in London has a fine collection of Indian vessels,
smoking equipment, etc., in black turned cast iron with silver inlays.
119. Theophilus, preface. He calls this work opus interrasile [bas-relief work].
120. Damascening is done simply by etching the steel surfaces on many less artistic
products. The former Duménil collection has a number of the finest works of this
kind. Labarte, 617-20. Du Sommerard, atlas, chap. 20, pl. 3. [Chapuy,] Moyen Age pit-
toresque (Paris: Veith & Hauser, 1837-40).
121. Illustrations of German damascening in [Johann Gabriel] Doppelmayr, Histo-
rische Nachricht von den niirnbergischen Mathematicis, with copper plates (Nurem-
berg, 1730). Examples of such work by the German and French petits maitres. Litho-
chrome illustrations of French and German works of art in steel in Moyen Age et
Renaissance, under “Mobilier.”
122. Nero had gilded a statue of Alexander, a famous work by Lysippus, but the
public scandal unleashed by this act of vandalism obliged him to have the gilt scraped
off again. Pliny 34.8 (ed. [Jacques] Dalech[amps]).
I23essee page 292.
124. Read Brongniart’s views on this point (Traité des [arts] céramiques, 2:442 and
passim) and compare the gentleness and modesty of Oriental works of art, Chinese
porcelain and weapons, old Limoges enamels, work by medieval and Renaissance gold-
smiths, and even the goldsmiths of the sumptuous Baroque and rococo with the crude
and shameless golden ostentation of porcelain vases from the time of Napoleon I, and
specimens made today.
125. We know that Phidias covered the golden cloak of his Olympian Zeus with
colored designs. Gilded wall decorations in Roman baths are all matte and glazed. The
same is true of all Oriental gilding.
When the beautiful Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre was being restored according
to the procedure of Masters [Charles] Le Brun and [Jean] Berain, all the gold on the
grounds and building parts was very carefully glazed and shaded alternately brown and
green.
126. The Rhodian bronze caster and painter Aristonidas mixed bronze with iron to
express the madness of Athamas by the rust color of the iron shimmering through the
sheen on the bronze (Pliny 34.14 [ed. Dalechamps]). The sculptor Silanion mixed silver
into the bronze he used for the face of Jocasta to produce (through the pale shade of the
metal) the pallor of death.
127. Chalk white figurative friezes on a pure, shiny, ducat-gold ceiling gilded with
fire, and so forth. The fine tradition of gilding has survived only in France: even the
worst café wallpapers in the suburbs of Paris show better taste in the abuse of shiny

899
 Semper

gold than do the palaces of Germany, English chambers of state, and the unfortunate
and recent gingerbread style used in Italy to restore the monuments of its glorious past.
128. The dreadful neo-Italian gingerbread style mentioned above is a result of this.
129. The Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre, often mentioned, is essentially white
with gold. But the apparent white is muted by the addition of a great deal of asphalt.
This permits it to harmonize with the gold and the dark oil paint on the panels. For the
celadon shade of Chinese porcelain, see § 128.
130. An interesting parallel to this is provided by Vischer’s Sebaldus Tomb, which
keeps to the cast-metal style. Compare it with the purer but toreutic forms of the design
prepared by Veit Stoss for the same tomb (in Heideloff, Denkmdiler).
131. Emblems, incrustations, prokrossoi [projections], hooks, and so on.
132. We have shown in “Ceramics” how metal vessels exercised a remarkable
influence on the direction and style of clay and glass vessels, giving some ancient clay
and glassware a markedly metallic flavor.
133. Cast iron was not introduced into architecture until the late Gothic period.
Details in Nuremberg are the oldest known to me.

900
 Semper’s Table of Contents

Volume One
71 Prolegomena
103. Chapter One. Introduction
109 Chapter Two. Classification of the Technical Arts
113. Chapter Three. Textile Arts. General-Formal
113 Basic Objectives of This Technique
ti The String
116 The Band
123 The Cover
153 The Seam
167 Chapter Four. Textiles. Technical-Historical
170 Style as Conditioned by Raw Materials
173 Animal Skins (Leather)
180 Rubber
185 Lacquer
191 Flax
194 Cotton
196 Wool
200 Silk
218 Style as Conditioned by the Treatment of Materials
218 Bands and Threads
Zo The Knot
2A The Loop Stitch
pM | Plaiting
226 Weaving
228 Embroidery
232 Dyeing
237) Clothing
242 The Principle of Dressing in Architecture
254 New Zealand and Polynesia
255 China
264 India
271 Mesopotamia
349 Phoenicia and Judaea
354 Egypt: Old and New Kingdoms

901
368 Asia Minor
376 Greece
400 Rome
415 Christian Era (West)
419 Christian Era (East)
419 Renaissance
420 Concluding Remarks

Volume Two
467 Chapter Five. Ceramics (Pottery). A. Aesthetic-Formal
559 Chapter Six. Ceramics. B. Technical-Historical
623 Chapter Seven. Tectonics (Carpentry). A. General-Formal
651 Chapter Eight. Tectonics. B. Technical-Historical
725 Chapter Nine. Stereotomy (Stone Construction). A. Aesthetic-Formal
753 Chapter Ten. Stereotomy. B. Technical-Historical
823 Chapter Eleven. Metallurgy (Metalwork)

902
Plates
 Plates

Patel,

Antenkapital vom Theseustempel zu Athen.

PI. 1. Anta capital from the Temple of Theseus at Athens

J05
 Semper

Taf. I

|
(ea
ei

a Fal f= i
ies

| Aes eee Tes ee

i
zz
ae faene i ea i
Jee a 4 ae ——t | |kame Ee oe ee | ea

wei. ier |iaegire 6 RE atorst 7

SG |
SS
=
\\
//
Holzbekleidungen aus Terrakotta (Sicilien)
¢ \Ss IZ )

Farbig-gemalte Ornamente an dem Plafond

des Theseustempels zu Athen

Pl. 2. Colored painted ornaments on the ceiling of the Pl. 3. Terra-cotta dressings for wood (Sicily)
Temple of Theseus at Athens

906
 Plates

Taf. IV.

AD
a E
a GN cpsI ee AM

Indische Teppichmuster.
{ Mus. fur praktische Kunst u. Wissensch. London.)

P|. 4. Indian carpet patterns (Museum of Practical Art and

Science, London)

907
 Semper

Taf. V.

a
Sy

ee GN A AR ON MAR. AIR Gn dee

Sa
Ras

ae
at

a
Sy?

Bo oe
Pe

See
ee

Se
bee

as
aa

a
x

a
3

eS
=e RE
an
RS
ee
Rae
60)
on ee:

Win Feldder Decke des Theseustempels zu Athen

(Halbe Grofse 4.0.)

ki
s
i
od
3
a
a
3
ia
oS ‘a RS Dw aurasJ}
* le
é
G eM
w,

PI. 5. Ceiling field from the Temple of Theseus at Athens Pl. 6. Section, underside, and details of a truss of the
paneled ceiling of the Temple of Theseus at Athens

908
 Plates

Taf. Vil.

O- Gathering, Assisi.

Pl. 7. Ceiling painting from the Chapel of Santa Caterina, Assisi

909
 Semper

Tat Vii.

B Zant L

zu Athen
r
ra}

Pl. 8. Byzantine painting on a dome at Athens

910
 Plates

REC Se eres CSer

ercerererc
er eccercesecerrcercerer
(4 x ¥ ¥ es x a is 4 eg , P
SIS CES EO REE ES EEE

ee eee rere eee ee eecerceer

i ae m~—
x 1
a ee ee ee ee eee

ns

Proben indischer Lackarbeiten

(nach Redgrave)

j
|
f

ep
és

\
}
e |

Kronende Gheder des Architravs am Opistodom

des Theseustempels zu Athen

Pl. 9. Crowning ornaments of the architrave on the Pl. 10. Specimens of Indian lacquer work (after Redgrave)
opistodom of the Temple of Theseus at Athens
 Semper

OO
|
IY
SHOOK

A.
h2

tod
oa
YAY)
dhe
asa
ORO
PQA
erere
er
oreo
RAMS,
VRORE
eae
o

Tee $55] 0LE Fave = it iT

12.3.45.6. Aegyptische Ornamente an Decken u.Wanden
der Graber. 7 Skandinavisches Stickmuster.

Pl. 11. 1-6: Egyptian ornaments on ceilings and

walls of tombs; 7: Scandinavian stucco pattern

Qi 2
 Plates

vy
tA)
QW

a es,
ee NS eee ate as mare 8 ca wore

PSE x styl.
Aelterer

Assyrisch
Wandmaler
.

Styl.
Spaterer

P|. 12. Assyrian wall paintings

Top: Earlier style
Bottom: Later style
 Semper

Toscamscher Tempel nach Vitruv

Pl. 13. Tuscan temple after Vitruvius

914
 Plates

Alexandrimische (aéyptisirende) Wandverzierungen

in Pompeii.

P|. 14. Alexandrian (Egyptian-style) wall decorations in Pompeii

SHLS
 Semper

Wand aus der Casa di Salustio in Pompeji.

P|. 15. Wall of the house of Sallust in Pompeii

QS
 Plates

= ae -

Druck
v Gebruder Obpacher, Munchen
Antike Glaser.

Pl. 16. Ancient glass

QI
 Semper

stand
“WAX
TAX
7

Sotto
Rp
SYA
(| TOUOTP

upseap wogg
sanayyol
MEM]

ot!
V
ALNOW
YT
OWVININ'S

‘dod
GHOUIM

dop OJLYOS
“ZNGAMOTH
UAC

Ut
NIE STHOLSHOVG

Slo PpUTE
Loe

SdUTO
}yotsuy
NANAIO

~ WaT
SAM NAONAVUATZ
OA

ALOT)
Wop
SUE jdoxuayye g|

Pls. 17-18. Decoration on the open truss in San Miniato al Monte near Florence
Center: Side view of a truss in the nave of the church
Left detail: Beamhead in the choir
Right detail: Right-angle section of a rafter

SARS
 Plates

ULpue
WmnZ
doputg UWattld
TLNOW

WOA
}UAYOS You] = Wo
V
OWVININ
S AHOUIM

aS

O
WB]
“ZNAMOTM
WAC

“Ado
NI STHOLSHOVG

pure
1d

LOpurg,UWA
NON AAO

allaype
WIT

\
“WdyUN WOA

Uap

fa
4
fal
1
END
LePUrg
WOA
}YOISUY

‘ad0Y)
AAPULy
Uap
SND ipl
aSLL
is |

AoA
ZONO
Sud
{eyOQ

Pls. 19-20. Decoration on the open truss in San Miniato al Monte near Florence
Left: View from below of half, from one truss to another: truss from
the choir (top), truss from the nave (bottom)
Right: Longitudinal section from one truss to the other

VAS,
 Semper

sles ———=4
XXL. XXIl

5.ZENO IN VERONA

Anm: Diese Decke/ ist sect dem Sommer 1835 abgetragew.

HOLZ -DECKE IN DER KIRCHE § FERMO E.RUSTICO IN VERONA.

Anm. Diese Decke scheint der aus S. Zeno dhnlich bemalt gemesen xu sein

J
Iaith. Ansty. Gebruder Obpacher, Munchen

Pls. 21-22. Timber ceiling

Top: Church of San Zeno in Verona (this ceiling was removed in summer 1835)
Bottom: Timber ceiling in the Church of Santi Fermo e Rustico in Verona (this ceiling seems
to have been painted similarly to the one in San Zeno)

I210
Works Cited by Semper

Journals
Annales archéologiques (Paris, edited by Adolphe Napoléon Didron and Edouard
Didron)
Annali dell’Instituto di corrispondenza archeologica = Annales de l'Institut de
correspondance archéologique (Rome, Deutsches Archaologisches Institut)
Archaeologia; or, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity (London, Society of
Antiquaries of London)
Archaeological Journal (London, British Archaeological Association)
Archdaologische Zeitung (Berlin, Deutsches Archaologisches Institut)
Athenaeum (London)
Augsburger allgemeine Zeitung (Augsburg)
Bulletin de la Société d’encouragement pour l'industrie nationale (Paris)
Bullettino dell’ Instituto di corrispondenza archeologica = Bulletin de l'Institut de
correspondance archéologique (Rome, Deutsches Archdologisches Institut)
Deutsches Kunstblatt: Organ der deutschen Kunstvereine (Berlin)
Die Gartenlaube (Leipzig)
Illustrated London News
Journal des savants (Paris)
Kunstblatt (Stuttgart)
Magasin encyclopédique; ou, Journal des sciences, des lettres et des arts (Paris)
Magasin pittoresque (Paris)
Le moniteur universel (Paris)
Monumenti antichi inediti; ovvero, Notizie sulla antichita e belle arti di Roma (Rome,
edited by Giuseppe Antonio Guattani)
Monumenti inediti, pubblicati dall’Instituto di corrispondenza archeologica (Rome,
Deutsches Archaologisches Institut)
National-Zeitung (Berlin)
Polytechnisches Journal (Stuttgart, edited by Emil Maximilian Dingler)
Repertory of Patent Inventions, and Other Discoveries and Improvements in Arts,
Manufactures and Agriculture (London)
Revue archéologique (Paris)
Revue des deux mondes (Paris)
Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (London)
Wochentlich herausgegebener historischer Miinz-Belustigung (Nuremberg, edited by
Johann David Kohler and Johann Gottfried Bernhold)

921
 Works Cited by Semper

Books
Abel, Ambrose. “Das Glas.” Aus der Natur: Die neuesten Entdeckungen auf dem
Gebiete der Naturwissenschaften 12 (1859): 1-192.
Accademia ercolanese di archeologia. Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano e contornt incise
con qualche spiegazione. Edited by Ottavio Antonio Bayardi and Pasquale
Carcani. 5 vols. Naples: Regia Stamperia, 1757-79.
Achery, Luc d’, Louis-Francois-Joseph de La Barre, Edmond Marténe, and Etienne
Baluze. Spicilegium; sive, Collectio veterum aliquot scriptorum qui in Galliae
bibliothecis delituerant. 3 vols. Paris: Montalant, 1723.
Ainsworth, William. Travels and Researches in Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Chaldea,
and Armenia. 2 vols. London: John W. Parker, 1842.
Allioli, Joseph Franz von. Die Bronze-Thiire des Domes zu Augsburg, ihre Deutung
und ihre Geschichte: Eine im historischen Vereine des Kreises Schwaben und
Neuburg gelesene Abhandlung. Augsburg: Matth. Rieger, 1853.
Amati, Pasquale. Libellum de restitutione purpurarum. 3d ed. Cesena, Italy:
G. Blasinius, 1784.
Antichita di Ercolano. 8 vols. Naples: Regia Stamperia, 1757-92.
Antiquités du Bosphore Cimmérien conservées au Musée impérial de l’Ermitage.
2 vols. and atlas. Saint Petersburg: Académie Impériale des Sciences, 1854.
Appianus. Historia Romana. Edited by Immanuel Bekker. 2 vols. Leipzig: B. G.
Teubner, 1852-53.
Arclais de Montamy, Didier-Frangois d’. Traité des couleurs pour la peinture en émail
et sur la porcelaine: Précédé de Lart de peindre sur l’émail, et suivi de plusieurs
mémoires sur différents sujets intéressants.... Paris: G. Cavelier, 1765.
Ardant, Maurice. Notice historique sur les émaux, les émailleurs, leurs divers ouvrages
et les procédés de fabrication en usage a Limoges. Limoges: Chapouland, 1842.
Argelati, Filippo. De monetis Italiae variorum illustrium virorum dissertationes:
Ouarum pars nunc primum in lucem prodit. 6 vols. Milan: Palatinis, 1750-59.
Arneth, Joseph. Die antiken Gold- und Silber-Monumente des k. k. Miinz- und
Antiken-Cabinettes in Wien. Vienna: Braunmiiller, 1851.
Arnkiel, Troels. Giilden-Horn, 1639: Bey Tundern gefunden, aus dem darunter
verborgnem Heidenthumb unsrer Vorfahren cimbrischer Nation, als eine denck-
wiirdige Antiquitat.... Kiel: Joachim Reumann, 1683.
Arrian. Arrianou Alexandrou Anabasis, emendatam et explicatam. 2 vols. in 1. Edited
by Karl Wilhelm Kriiger. Berlin: Kriiger, 1835-48.
Athenaeus of Naucratis. Athenaiou Naukratitou Deipnosophistai = Athenaei
Naucratitae Deipnosophistarum libri quindecim. Edited by Isaac Casaubon and
Johann Schweighduser. 14 vols. Strasbourg: Societatis Bipontinae, 1801-7.
Aus’m Weerth, Ernst. Kunstdenkmaler des christlichen Mittelalters in den Rheinlanden.
2 vols. (text); 3 vols. in 2 of plates (atlas). Leipzig: T. O. Weigel, 1857-66.
Babin, Jacques-Paul. Relation de l’état présent de la ville d’Athénes, ancienne capitale
de la Gréce, batie depuis 3400 ans; avec un abrégé de son histoire et de ses anti-
quités. Edited by Léon, marquis de Laborde. Lyon: Loiiis Pascal, 1674.
Bamonte, Giuseppe. Le antichita pestane: Opera dedicata alle LL. AA. RR. il duca e la
duchessa di Calabria. Naples: Biblioteca Analitica, 1819.

922
 Works Cited by Semper

Bancroft, Edward. Experimental Researches Concerning the Philosophy of Permanent

Colours and the Best Means of Producing Them, by Dyeing, Calico Printing, etc.
2 vols. Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1814.
Banduri, Anselmo Maria. Numismata imperatorum Romanorum a Trajano Decio ad
Palaeologos Augustas: Accessit bibliotheca nummaria sive auctorum qui de re
nummaria scripserunt. 2 vols. Paris: Montalant, 1718.
Barth, Heinrich. Wanderungen durch das punische und kyrendische Kiistenland, oder
Mag’reb, Afrikia und Barkd. 2 vols. Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1849.
Bartsch, Adam von. Anleitung zur Kupferstichkunde. 2 vols. in 1. Vienna: J.B.
Wallishausser, 1821.
[ . Le peintre-graveur. See Passavant, Johann David, Adam Bartsch, and Jean
Duchesne. }
Bastenaire-Daudenart, F. L’art de la vitrification; ou, Traité élémentaire, théorique et
pratique de la fabrication du verre: Ouvrage dans lequel sont décrits avec précision
les divers procédés qu’on emploie pour se procurer toutes les espéces de verres et
cristaux colorés.... Paris: Bachelier, 1825.
[Bazin, Antoine-Pierre-Louis. See Pauthier, Jean-Pierre-Guillaume, and Antoine-Pierre-
Louis Bazin.]
Beauchamp, Joseph. “Mémoire géographique et historique du voyage de Constantinople
a Trébizonde.” In Jacques Morier, Voyage en Perse, en Arménie, en Asie-Mineure et a
Constantinople, fait dans les années 1808 et 1809, 2:261-320. Paris: Nepveu, 1813.
Becker, Wilhelm Adolph. Gallus; oder, Rémische Scenen aus der Zeit Augusts; zur
Erlauterung der wesentlichsten Gegenstande aus dem hauslichen Leben der
Romer. 2 vols. in 1. Leipzig: Friedrich Fleischer, 1838.
. Die rémische Topographie in Rom; eine Warnung; als Beilage zum 1. Theile
seines Handbuchs der rémischen Alterthiimer. Leipzig: Weidman, 1844.
Beckmann, Johann. Beytrage zur Geschichte der Erfindungen. 5 vols. Leipzig: Paul
Gotthelf Kummer, 1782-1805.
Bekker, Immanuel, ed. Anecdota Graeca. 3 vols. Berlin: Nauckium, 1814-21.
[Berengarius. See Bérenger.]
Bérenger, de Landorre, archbishop of Santiago de Compostela. Lumen animae. Edited
by Matthias Farinator. Augsburg: Anton Sorg, 1477.
Beulé, Charles-Ernest. “Uarchitecture au siécle de Pisistrate.” Revue générale de
Varchitecture et des travaux publics: Journal des architectes, des ingénieurs, des
archéologues, des industriels et des propriétaires 16 (1858): 8-25.
Birch, Samuel. History of Ancient Pottery. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1858.
Bock, Franz. Geschichte der liturgischen Gewdnder des Mittelalters; oder, Entstehung
und Entwicklung der kirchlichen Ornate und Paramente: In Riicksicht auf Stoff,
Gewebe, Farbe, Zeichnung, Schnitt und rituelle Bedeutung nachgewiesen. 3 vols.
Bonn: Henry & Cohen, 1859-71.
Bohl, J. J. Die trierischen Miinzen, chronologisch geordnet und beschrieben. Koblenz,
Germany: H. J. Hélscher, 1823.
Bontemps, Georges. “Exposé historique et pratique des moyens employés pour la fab-
rication des verres filigranés et du flint-glass et crown-glass.” Bulletin de la Société
d’encouragement pour l'industrie nationale 44 (1845): 183-95, 236-45.

92/3
 Works Cited by Semper

Botta, Paul-Emile, and Eugéne Flandin. Monument de Ninive. 5 vols. Paris:

Imprimerie Nationale, 1849-50.
Botticher, Carl Gottlieb Wilhelm. “Der goldene Plinthos.” Archdologische Zeitung,
May/June 1860, 71-72.
. Die Tektonik der Hellenen. 3 vols. in 2. Potsdam: F. Riegel, 1844-52.
Bottiger, Carl August. Die Aldobrandinische Hochzeit: Eine archdologische
Ausdeutung. Dresden: Walther, 1810.
. Ideen zur Archdologie der Malerei: 1. Theil, nach Maasgabe der
Wintervorlesungen im Jahre 1811. Dresden: Walther, 1811.
. Kleine Schriften archadologischen und antiquarischen Inhalts. Edited by Karl
Julius Sillig. 2d ed. 3 vols. Leipzig: Arnold, 1850.
. Sabina; oder, Morgenszenen im Putzzimmer einer reichen Romerin: Ein
Beytrag zur richtigen Beurtheilung des Privatlebens der Romer und zum bessern
Verstandniss der romischen Schriftsteller. 2 vols. in 1. Leipzig: G. J. Goschen, 1806.
, ed. Griechische Vasengemalde; mit archadologischen und artistischen
Erlauterungen der Originalkupfer. 3 vols. in 2. Weimar: Verlage des Industrie-
Comptoir, 1797-1800.
Bouteroue, Claude. Recherches curieuses des monnoyes de France depuis le
commencement de la monarchie. Paris: Sebastien Cramoisy & Sebastien Mabre-
Cramoisy, 1666.
Braun, Julius. Geschichte der Kunst in ibrem Entwicklungsgang durch aller Volker der
Alten Welt hindurch auf dem Boden der Ortskunde nachgewiesen. 2 vols.
Wiesbaden: Kreidel & Niedner, 1856-58.
Brongniart, Alexandre. Traité des arts céramiques ou des poteries, considérées dans
leur histoire, leur pratique et leur théorie. 2 vols. and atlas. Paris: Béchet jeune &
Augustin Mathias, 1844.
. “Traité pratique sur la préparation des couleurs d’émail.” See Brongniart,
Alexandre. “Traité pratique sur la préparation et l’emploi des couleurs.” |
. “Traité pratique sur la préparation et l’emploi des couleurs.” Revue scien-
tifique et industrielle 19 (1844): 367-400; 20 (1845): 50-99, 257-303.
Brongniart, Alexandre, and Denis Désiré Riocreux. Description méthodique du Musée
céramique de la manufacture royale de porcelaine de Sévres. 2 vols. Paris:
A. Leleux, 1845.
Brunck, Richard-Frangois-Philippe, ed. Analecta veterum poetarum Graecorum. 3 vols.
Strasbourg: I. G. Bauer, 1772-76.
Brunn, Enrico. Geschichte der griechischen Kiinstler. 2 vols. Brunswick:
C. A. Schwetschke & Sohn, 1853-59.
Bucher, Lothar. “Die Pariser Austellung.” National-Zeitung, 15 September 1855, 1.
[Bunsen, Carl. See Platner, Ernst, Carl Bunsen, Eduard Gerhard, and Wilhelm Réstell.]
Buonarroti, Filippo. Osservazioni istoriche sopra alcuni medaglioni antichi all’altezza
serenissima di Cosimo III, granduca di Toscana. Rome: Nella stamperia di
Domenico Antonio Ercole in Parione, 1698.
. Osservazioni sopra alcuni frammenti di vasi antichi di vetro ornati di figure
trovati ne’ cimiteri di Roma all’altezza reale di Cosimo III, granduca di Toscana.
Florence: Nella stamperia di S.A.R., per Jacopo Guiducci & Santi Franchi, 1716.

924
 Works Cited by Semper

. “Proemio.” See Buonarroti, Filippo. Osservazioni istoriche sopra alcuni

medaglioni.... |
Burckhardt, Jacob. Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke
Italiens. Basel: Schweighauser, 1855.
. Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. Basel: Schweighauser, 1860.
Buttmann, August. Ouaestiones de Dicaercho eiusque operibus quae inscribuntur bios
Hellados et anagrapho Hellados. Naumburg: C. A. Klaffenbachii, 1832.
Caesar, Julius. C. Julii Caesaris de bellis Gallico et civili Pompejano nec non A. Hirtii,
aliorumque de bellis Alexandrino, Africano, et Hispaniensi commentarii, ad
MSStorum fidem expressi. Edited by Frans van Oudendorp. 2 vols. Leiden:
Samuelem Luchtmans, 1737.
Cahier, Charles, and Arthur Martin. Mélanges d’archéologie, d’histoire et de littérature:
Collection de mémoires sur l’orfévrerie et les émaux des trésors d’Aix-la-Chapelle,
de Cologne, etc.; sur les miniatures et les anciens ivoires sculptés de Bamberg,
Ratisbonne, Munich, Paris, Londres, etc.; sur des étoffes byzantines, siciliennes,
etc.... 4 vols. in 2. Paris: Poussielgue-Rusand, 1847-56.
Canina, Luigi. Gli edifizj di Roma antica, cogniti per alcune reliquie, descritti e
dimostrati nell’intera loro architettura. 6 vols. Rome: Canina, 1848-56.
Capello, Giovanni Battista, “Appendix: De antiqua et nupera purpura dissertatio
Johannis Baptistae Capelli Veneti pharmacopolae.” In Pasquale Amati, Marco
Elephantutio ... Libellum de restitutione purpurarum tertio editum, emendatum,
et auctum Paschalis Amatius, CIV-CXXXI. Cesena, Italy: Gregorii Blasinii, 1784.
Translation of Giovanni Battista Capello, Dell’antica e della nuova porpora
(Venice: n.p., 1775).
Carlengas, Félix de Juvenel de. Essais sur l'histoire des belles lettres, des sciences et des
arts. New ed. 4 vols. Lyon: Fréres Duplain, 1757.
Carloni, Marco. Bassirilievi volsci in terracotta: Dipinta a varj colori trovati nella citta
di Velletri. Rome: Stamperia Salomoni, 1785.
Carré, Jean-Baptiste-Louis. Panoplie; ou, Réunion de tout ce qui a trait a la guerre,
depuis lorigine de la nation fran¢aise jusqu’a nos jours ... précédée d’une connois-
sance exacte du mode militaire ancien et actuel, et de toutes les milices qui ont
existé; ainsi que d’un grand vocabulaire.... 2 vols. Paris: Fuchs, 1797.
Cassius Dio Cocceianus. Cassii Dionis Cocceiani historiae romanae quae supersunt.
4 vols. Leipzig: Caroli Tauschnitii, 1829.
Catullus. Cajus Valerius Catullus et in eum Isaaci Vossii observationes. Commentary
by Isaac Vossius. Leiden: Danielem 4 Graesbeeck, 1684.
Caylus, Anne Claude Philippe de Pestels de Lévis de Tubiéres-Grimoard, comte de.
Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, et romaines. 7 vols. Paris:
Desaint & Saillant, 1752-67. Vols. 3-7 entitled Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes,
étrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises.
Cellini, Benvenuto. Opere di Benvenuto Cellini. 3 vols. Vols. 1-2, Vita di Benvenuto
Cellini: Orefice e scultore fiorentino da lui medesimo scritta. Vol. 3, Due trattati di
Benvenuto Cellini: Uno dell’oreficeria, altro della scultura. Milan: Classici
Italiani, 1806-11.

925
 Works Cited by Semper

Chambers, William. Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and

Utensils. London: published for the author, 1757.
Chapman, I. J. “Some Remarks upon the Ancient City of Anarajapura or
Anarddhepura, and the Hill Temple of Mehentélé, in the Island of Ceylon.”
Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 3 (1835):
463-95.
Chapuy, Nicolas-Marie-Joseph, and Philippe Moret. Le Moyen-Age pittoresque: Vues
et fragments d’architecture, meubles, armes, décors, etc. en Europe du Xe au
XVIle siécle. 5 vols. Paris: Veith & Hauser, 1837—40.
Chesney, Francis Rawdon. The Expedition for the Survey of the Rivers Euphrates and
Tigris, Carried on by Order of the British Government in the Years 1835, 1836,
and 1837.... 2 vols. and atlas. London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans,
1850.
[Chevreuil, Eugene. See Chevreul, Michel-Eugéne.]
Chevreul, Michel-Eugéne. Die Farbenharmonie. Stuttgart: Neff, 1840.
Cicognara, Leopoldo. Storia della scultura dal suo risorgimento in Italia fino al secolo
di Napoleone. 3 vols. Venice: Picotti, 1813-18.
Clarac, Charles Othon Frédéric Jean Baptiste, comte de, Alfred Maury, and Victor
Texier. Musée de sculpture antique et moderne; ou, Description historique et
graphique du Louvre et de toutes ses parties.... 6 vols. in 7 (text); 6 vols. of plates
(atlas). Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1826-53.
Claussen, Pierre. Der Flachsbau, seine nationale Bedeutung und Vortheile; nebst
Anweisungen zur Bereitung von Flachsbaumwolle und zur Cultur des Flachses.
Brunswick: Vieweg, 1851. Originally published as The Flax Movement; Its
National Importance and Advantages, with Directions for the Preparation of
Flax-Cotton, and the Cultivation of Flax (New York: Wiley, 1851).
Clement of Alexandria. Klementos Alexandreos Ta euriskomena = Clementis
Alexandrini opera quae exstant: Diuersae lectiones, et emendationes ... et indices
tres. Edited by Friedrich Sylburg. Heidelberg: Hieronymi Commelini, 1592.
[Cockerell, Charles. See Stuart, James, and Nicholas Revett.]
Creuzer, Georg Friedrich. Zur Gemmenkunde: Antike geschnittene Steine vom
Grabmahl der heiligen Elisabeth in der nach ihr genannten Kirche zu Marburg in
Kur-Hessen. Leipzig: Carl Wilhelm Leske, 1834.
Curtius, Ernst. “Artemis Gygaia und die lydischen Firstengraber.” Archdologische
Zeitung, December 1853, 148-62.
[d’Agincourt. See Seroux d’Agincourt, Jean Baptiste Louis Georges. ]
Dahl, Johan Christian Clausen, ed. Denkmale einer sehr ausgebildeten Holzbaukunst
aus den friihesten Jahrhunderten in den innern Landschaften Norwegens. Dresden:
n.p., 1837.
Daly, César. “Armoire peinte du XlIlle siécle.” Revue générale de l’architecture et des
travaux publics: Journal des architectes, des ingénieurs, des archéologues, des
industriels et des propriétaires 10 (1852): 130-34, pl. 8.
. “Maison de santé de Charenton.” Revue générale de l’architecture et des
travaux publics: Journal des architectes, des ingénieurs, des archéologues, des
industriels et des propriétaires 10 (1852): 384-95, pls. 28-34.

926
 Works Cited by Semper

Daniell, Thomas, William Daniell, and James Wales. Oriental Scenery. 6 vols. London:
Robert Bowyer, 1795-1808.
Davis, John Francis. The Chinese: A General Description of the Empire of China and
Its Inhabitants. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1836.
De la Beche, Henry, and Trenham Reeks. Museum of Practical Geology: Catalogue of
Specimens Illustrative of the Composition and Manufacture of British Pottery and
Porcelain, from the Occupation of Britain by the Romans to the Present Time.
London: George E. Eyre & William Spottiswoode, 1855.
Description de l’Egypte; ou, Recueil des observations et des recherches qui ont été
faites en Egypte pendant l’expédition de l’armée frangaise. 19 vols. in 21. Paris:
Imprimerie Impériale, 1809-28.
Diefenbach, Lorenz. Vergleichendes Wérterbuch der gothischen Sprache. 2 vols.
Frankfurt am Main: J. Baer, 1846-51.
Dio Chrysostom. Dionis Chrysostomi orationes. Edited by Johann Jacob Reiske.
2 vols. Leipzig: Viduae Reiskii, 1784.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Dionysii Halicarnassensis opera omni, quibus etiam acce-
dunt fragmenta. Edited by Angelo Mai. 6 vols. Leipzig: Carol Tauchnitz, 1829.
Donaldson, Thomas Leverton. Architectura numismatica; or, Architectural Medals of
Classic Antiquity: Illustrated and Explained by Comparison with the Monuments and
the Descriptions of Ancient Authors, and Copious Text. London: Day & Son, 1859.
. A Collection of the Most Approved Examples of Doorways, from Ancient
Buildings in Greece and Italy, Expressly Measured and Delineated for This Work,
Preceded by an Essay on the Usages of the Ancients Respecting Doorways.... 3 vols.
London: Bossange, Barthés, & Lowell, 1833.
Doppelmayr, Johann Gabriel. Historische Nachricht von den niirnbergischen
Mathematicis und Kiinstlern, welche fast von dreyen seculis her durch ihre
Schrifften und Kunst-Bemtihungen die Mathematic und mehreste Kiinste in
Niuirnberg.... Nuremberg: P. C. Monath, 1730.
Dubois Maisonneuve, A. Introduction a l’étude des vases antiques d’argile peints,
vulgairement appelés étrusques, accompagnée d’une collection des plus belles
formes ornées de leurs peintures, suivie de planches.... Paris: P. Didot, 1817.
Du Cange, Charles Du Fresne. Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae
Graecitatis.... 2 vols. Lyon: Anissonios, Joan. Posuel & Claud. Rigaud, 1688.
. Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinatis. 7 vols. Paris: Firmin Didot fratres,
1840-50.
Du Sommerard, Alexandre. Les arts au Moyen Age, en ce qui concerne principalement
le palais romain de Paris, ’hétel de Cluny, issu de ses ruines, et les objets d’art de
la collection classée dans cet hétel. 5 vols., atlas, and album in 2 vols. Paris: Hétel
de Cluny, 1838-46. Vol. 5 by Edmond Du Sommerard.
Dussieux, Louis. Recherches sur l’histoire de la peinture sur émail dans les temps
anciens et modernes, et spécialement en France. Paris: Leleux, 1841.
[Dyce, R. A. See Dyce, William]
Dyce, William. “Instruction in Practical Art in Foreign Schools; Extracted from the
Report of W. Dyce, Esq., R.A., on Foreign Schools of Design, Made in 1839.” In
Department of Practical Art, A Catalogue of the Articles of Ornamental Art,

DAY
 Works Cited by Semper

Selected from the Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in 1851, and
Purchased by the Government, 73-93. London: Chapman & Hall, [1852].
Eckhel, Joseph Hilarius von, Anton Steinbiichel von Rheinwall, Aubin Louis Millin,
and Emerich Thomas Hohler. Doctrina numorum veterum. 9 vols. Vienna: Josephi
Vincentii Degen, 1792-1839.
Einhard. Eginharti vita Caroli Magni. Edited by Gabriel Gottfried Bredow. Helmstedt:
C. G. Fleckeisen, 1806.
Eméric-David, Toussaint-Bernard. Histoire de la peinture au Moyen Age, suivie de
histoire de la gravure, du discours sur l’influence des arts du dessin, et du Musée
olympique. Paris: Charpentier, 1842.
“Essai sur l’architecture chinoise: Receuil.” 2 vols. Cotes Oe-13-Pet.fol., Oe-13a-Pet.fol.
Département des estampes et de la photographie, Division orientale, Bibliotheque
nationale, Paris.
Essenwein, A. “Die Entwickelung der mittelalterlichen Baukunst mit Riicksicht auf
den Einfluss der verschiedenen Baumaterialien.” Mittheilungen der k. k. Central-
Commission zur Erforschung und Erhaltung der Baudenkmale 3, no. 2 (1858):
29-41.
Ewald, Heinrich. Geschichte des Volkes Israel. 3 vols. in 5. G6ttingen: Dieterich,
1843-52.
Falcando, Ugo. Historia Hugonis Falcandi Siculi de rebus gestis in Siciliae regno. Paris:
Dupuys, 1550.
[Falcandus, Hugo. See Falcando, Ugo.]
Falkener, Edward. “On Some Egyptian-Doric Columns in the Southern Temple at
Karnak.” Museum of Classical Antiquities: A Quarterly Journal of Architecture
and the Sister Branches of Classic Art 1 (1851): 87-92.
, ed. The Museum of Classical Antiquities: A Series of Papers on Ancient Art.
2 vols. in 1. London: Triibner, 1855.
Fellows, Charles. An Account of Discoveries in Lycia: Being a Journal Kept during a
Second Excursion in Asia Minor. London: John Murray, 1841.
. Account of the Ionic Trophy Monument Excavated at Xanthus. London: John
Murray, 1848.
. A Journal Written during an Excursion in Asia Minor. London: John Murray,
1838.
Fergusson, James. The Palaces of Nineveh and Persepolis Restored: An Essay on
Ancient Assyrian and Persian Architecture. London: John Murray, 1851.
Ferrario, Giulio. Monumenti sacri e profani dell’imperiale e reale basilica di
Sant’ Ambrogio in Milano. Milan: Tipografia dell’autore, 1824.
Field, George. Chromatics; or, The Analogy, Harmony, and Philosophy of Colours.
New ed. London: Bogue, 1845.
Fink, Franz. Die Schule des Bautischlers: Ein praktisches Hand- und Hiilfsbuch fiir
Architekten und Bauhandwerker, sowie fiir Bau- und Gewerbschulen. Leipzig:
Otto Spamer, 1858.
Fioravante, Benedetto. Antiqui Romanorum, pontificum denarii a Benedicto XI ad
Paulum III una cum nummis S.P.Q.R. nomine signatis nunc primum prodeunt
notis illustrati. Rome: Bernabo, 1738.

928
 Works Cited by Semper

Fiorelli, Giuseppe. Notizia dei vasi dipinti rinvenuti a Cuma nel MDCCCLVI, posse-
duti da Sua Altezza Reale il conte di Siracusa. Naples: Gaetano Nobile, 1856.
[First Report of the Department of Practical Art. See Great Britain. Department of
Practical Art.]
Flandin, Eugéne, and Pascal Coste. Voyage en Perse de MM. Eugéne Flandin, peintre,
et Pascal Coste, architecte, attachés a Vambassade de France en Perse, pendant les
années 1840 et 1841.... 2 vols. and atlas. Paris: Gide & J. Baudry, 1851-54.
Florez, Enrique. Medallas de las colonias, municipios y pueblos antiguos de Espana:
Coleccion de las que se hallan en diversos autores, y de otras nunca publicadas,
con explicacion y dibujo de cada una. 3 vols. Madrid: Antonio Marin, 1757-73.
Floridi, Lucantonio. “Sopra il vaso, appellato dagli antichi craterem, e l’uso che ne
facevano.” In Domenico Orsini, Dissertazioni istoriche, geografiche, e critiche
sopra diversi soggetti d’antichita sagra e profana, con varie critiche osservazioni
sopra diversi punti di litteratura, 565-72. Naples: Stamperia Muziana, 1743.
Forster, Ernst Joachim. Denkmale deutscher Baukunst, Bildnerei und Malerei von
Einftihrung des Christenthums bis auf die neueste Zeit. 12 vols. Leipzig:
T. O. Weigel, 1855-69.
Forster, Johann Reinhold. Liber singularis de bysso antiquorum, quo, ex Aegyptia
lingua, res vestiaria antiquorum, imprimis in S. Codice Hebraeorum occurrens,
explicatur; additae ad calcem mantissae Aegyptiacae V. London: G. Bowyer &
J. Nichols, 1776.
Francisque-Michel [Francisque-Xavier Michel]. Recherches sur le commerce, la fabri-
cation et l’usage des étoffes de soie, d’or et d’argent et autres tissus précieux en
Occident, principalement en France, pendant le Moyen Age. 2 vols. Paris:
Crapelet, 1852-54.
Gage, John. “A Letter from John Gage, Esq. F.R.S., Director, to Hudson Gurney, Esq.
E.R.S., Vice-President, Communicating the Recent Discovery of Roman Sepulchral
Relics in One of the Greater Barrows at Bartlow, in the Parish of Ashdon, in Essex.”
Archaeologia; or, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity 26 (1836): 300-317.
. “A Letter from John Gage, Esq. F.R.S., Director, to Hudson Gurney, Esq.
F.R.S., V.P. etc. Containing an Account of Further Discoveries of Roman
Sepulchral Relics at the Bartlow Hills.” Archaeologia; or, Miscellaneous Tracts
Relating to Antiquity 28 (1840): 1-3.
. “A Letter from John Gage, Esq. F.R.S., Director, to Sir Henry Ellis, K.H.,
E.R.S., Secretary, Accompanying a Gold British Corselet Exhibited to the Society,
and Since Purchased by the Trustees of the British Museum.” Archaeologia; or,
Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity 26 (1836): 422-31.
Gailhabaud, Jules. L’architecture du Vme au XVIIme siécle et les arts qui en dépen-
dent: La sculpture, la peinture murale, la peinture sur verre, la mosaique, la
ferronnerie, etc. 4 vols. Paris: Gide, 1858.
. Monuments anciens et modernes, collection formant une histoire de l’architec-
ture des différents peuples a toutes les époques. 4 vols. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1857.
Gaimard, Paul, ed. Voyages de la commission scientifique du Nord, en Scandinavie, en
Laponie, au Spitzberg et aux Ferde, pendant les années 1838, 1839 et 1840. 2 vols.
in 4. Paris: A. Bertrand, 1843.

929
 Works Cited by Semper

Gerhard, Eduard. Etruskische Spiegel. Vol. 1. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1840.

. Kunstgeschichtliche Vasenbilder. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1841.
Gervase of Tilbury. Des Gervasius von Tilbury otia imperialia. Edited by Felix
Liebrecht. Hannover: C. Rimpler, 1856.
Gilroy, Clinton G. The History of Silk, Cotton, Linen, Wool, and Other Fibrous
Substances; Including Observations on Spinning, Dyeing and Weaving; also an
Account of the Pastoral Life of the Ancients, Their Social State and Attainments in
the Domestic Arts; with Appendices on Pliny’s Natural History.... New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1845.
Girault de Prangey, Joseph-Philibert. Essai sur l’architecture des Arabes et des Mores,
en Espagne, en Sicile et en Barbarie. Paris: A. Hauser, 1841.
Goguet, Antoine-Yves. De l’origine des loix, des arts et des sciences; et de leurs progres
chez les anciens peuples. 3 vols. Paris: Desaint & Saillant, 1758.
Gori, Antonio Francesco, and Giovanni Battista Passeri. Museum Etruscum, exhibens
insignia veterum Etruscorum monumenta aereis tabulis cc. nunc primum. 3 vols.
Florence: C. Albizinius, 1737-43.
Gorres, Joseph von, and Ferdinand Gloekle. Lohengrin, ein altdeutsches Gedicht.
Heidelberg: Mohr & Zimmer, 1813.
“Gottingen.” Gottingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, 13 November 1800, 1801-7.
Goury, Jules, and Owen Jones. Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Details of the
Alhambra: From Drawings Taken on the Spot in 1834. Translation of Arabic
inscriptions by Pasqual de Gayangos. 2 vols. London: O. Jones, 1842-45.
Graevius, Joannes Georgius, comp. Thesaurus antiquitatum Romanarum, in quo
continentur lectissimi quique scriptores, qui superiori aut nostro seculo Romanae
reipublicae rationem, disciplinam, leges, instituta, sacra, artesque togatas ac
sagatas explicarunt et illustrarunt. New ed. 12 vols. Venice: Bartholomaei
Javarina, 1732-37.
Grafenberg, Wirnt von. Wigalois, eine Erzahlung. Edited by Franz Pfeiffer. Leipzig:
Goschen, 1847.
Graffenried, Carl Adolf de, and Ludwig Rudolf Stirler. Architecture suisse; ou, Choix
de maisons rustiques des Alpes du canton de Berne. Bern: J. J. Burgdorfer, 1844.
Great Britain. Department of Practical Art. First Report of the Department of
Practical Art, Presented to Both Houses of Parliament by Command of Her
Majesty. London: George E. Eyre & William Spottiswoode, 1853.
Great Britain. Department of Science and Art. A Catalogue of the Museum of
Ornamental Art, at Marlborough House, Pall Mall... with Explanatory and
Critical Remarks and Appendices. 6th ed. London: George E. Eyre & William
Spottiswoode, 1854.
. First Report of the Department ofScience and Art. London: George E. Eyre &
William Spottiswoode, 1854.
Gregory of Tours. Zehn Biicher frankischer Geschichte. Translated by Wilhelm von
Giesebrecht. 2 vols. Berlin: W. Besser & F. Duncker, 1851.
Grimm, Jacob. Deutsche Grammatik. 4 vols. Gottingen: Dieterich, 1822-37.
Gruner, Ludwig, and August Emil Braun. Specimens of Ornamental Art: Selected from
the Best Models of the Classical Epochs. 2 vols. London: Thomas M’Lean, 1850.

930
 Works Cited by Semper

[Guattani, Giuseppe Antonio. Notizie sulle antichita e belle arti di Roma. See
Monumenti antichi inediti (in list of journals).]
Hagen, Friedrich Heinrich von der. Briefe in die Heimat aus Deutschland, der Schwiez
und Italien. 4 vols. Breslau: J. Max, 1818-21.
Hartmann, Anton Theodor. Die Hebrderin am Putztische und als Braut; vorbereitet,
durch eine Uebersicht der wichtigsten Erfindungen in dem Reiche der Moden bei
den Hebréerinnen, von den rohesten Anfangen bis zur tippigsten Pracht. 3 vols.
Amsterdam: Kunst- und Industrie-Comptoir, 1809-10.
Hartmann, Carl. Handbuch der Thon- und Glas-Waaren-Fabrikation; oder,
Vollstandige Beschreibung der Kunst Ziegel und Ziegelsteine...aus diesen ver-
schiedenen Materien Gegenstande der verschiedensten Art darzustellen und diesel-
ben durch Malerei usw. verzieren: Nach den besten Hilfsmitteln bearbeitet. Berlin:
Carl Friedrich Amelang, 1842.
Heber, Reginald. Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India, from
Calcutta to Bombay, 1824-1825 (with Notes upon Ceylon); an Account of a
Journey to Madras and the Southern Provinces, 1826; and Letters Written in
India. 3d ed. 3 vols. London: John Murray, 1828.
Heeren, Arnold Hermann Ludwig. Ideen iiber die Politik, den Verkehr und den
Handel der vornehmsten Volker der alten Welt. 6 vols. Géttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1824-26.
Hefner-Alteneck, Jakob Heinrich von. Trachten des christlichen Mittelalters: Nach
gleichzeitigen Kunstdenkmalen. 3 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Heinrich Keller,
1840-54.
Heideloff, Carl Alexander von. Die Ornamentik des Mittelalters: Eine Sammlung
auserwahlter Verzierungen und Profile byzantinischer und deutscher Architectur.
2d ed. 4 vols. in 2. Nuremberg: C. Geiger, 1852.
, ed. Die Kunst des Mittelalters in Schwaben: Denkmadler der Baukunst,
Bildnerei und Malerei. Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1855.
Hermann, Gottfried. De veterum Graecorum pictura parietum conjecturae. Leipzig:
Staritz, 1834.
Hermann, Karl Friedrich. Culturgeschichte der Griechen und Romer. Edited by Karl
Gustav Schmidt. 2 vols. in 1. Gottingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1857-58.
Hettner, Hermann. Griechische Reiseskizzen. Brunswick: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn,
1853.
Hirt, Aloys Ludwig. Die Baukunst nach den Grundsdtzen der Alten. Berlin:
Realschulbuchhandlung, 1809.
. Die Geschichte der Baukunst bei den Alten. 3 vols. Berlin: G. Reimer,
1821-27.
[Hirtius, Aulus. Bellum Alexandrinum. See Caesar, Julius.]
Historiae augustae scriptores VI: Aelius Spartianus, Vulcatius Gallicanus, Julius
Capitolinus, Trebellius Pollio, Aelius Lampridius, Flavius Vopiscus. Edited by
Isaac Casaubon, Claude Saumaise, Janus Gruterus, and Cornelis Schrevel. Leiden:
Francisci Hackii, 1661.
Hittorff, Jacques-Ignace. Restitution du temple d’Empédocle a Sélinonte; ou,
Larchitecture polychréme chez les Grecs. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1851.

SSul
 Works Cited by Semper

Hittorff, Jacques-Ignace, and Ludwig Zanth. Architecture antique de la Sicile; ou,

Recueil des plus interessans monumens d’architecture des villes et des lieux les plus
remarquables de la Sicile ancienne.... Paris: Renouard, 1827.
Hochgesang, Georg Ludewig. Historische Nachricht von Verfertigung des Glases.
Gotha, Germany: Ettinger, 1780.
Hoefer, Albert. Beitrage zur Etymologie und vergleichenden Grammatik der
Hauptsprachen des indogermanischen Stammes. Berlin: Voss, 1839.
{H6fer, Albert. Sprachwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen. See Hoefer, Albert. Beitrage
zur Etymologie.... |
Hudson, Octavius. “Report on Cotton Print Works and Lace Making.” In Department
of Practical Art, First Report of the Department of Practical Art, Presented to Both
Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty, 367-68. London: George E.
Eyre & William Spottiswoode, 1853.
Inghirami, Francesco. Monumenti etruschi o di etrusco nome. 7 vols. in 10. Fiesole:
Poligrafia Fiesolana, 1821-26.
Jahn, Otto. Beschreibung der Vasensammlung Konig Ludwigs in der Pinakothek zu
Munchen. Munich: Jos. Lindauer, 1854.
Jameson, Robert. “On the Manufacture of Glass, Porcelain and False Stones as
Known to the Ancient Egyptians.” Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal 25
(1838): 101-23.
John, Johann Friedrich. Der Malerei der Alten, von ihrem Anfange bis auf die
christliche Zeitrechnung ...nebst theoretischer und praktischer Untersuchung der
antiken Tafel-, Wand- und Vasenmalerei, der Enkaustik und dltesten Mosaik.
Berlin: L. Steffen, 1836.
Jollivet, Pierre Jules. “Du verre coloré dans l’antiquité.” Revue générale de l’architec-
ture et des travaux publics: Journal des architectes, des ingénieurs, des archéo-
logues, des industriels et des propriétaires 15 (1857): 237-44; pls. 16, 17.
Jones, Owen. The Alhambra Court in the Crystal Palace. London: Crystal Palace
Library, 1854.
. An Apology for the Colouring of the Greek Court in the Crystal Palace.
London: Crystal Palace Library, 1854.
Jorio, Andrea de. Description de quelques peintures antiques qui existent au cabinet
du royal Musée-Bourbon de Portici. Naples: Imprimerie Frangaise, 1825.
. Metodo per rinvenire e frugare i sepolcri degli antichi. Naples: Societa
Filomatica, 1824.
. Musée royal Bourbon: Guide pour la galerie des peintures anciennes. 2d ed.
Naples: Imprimerie Frangaise, 1830.
. Scheletri cumani. Naples: Stamperia Simoniana, 1810.
Josephus, Flavius. Flavii losephi iudaei opera omnia ad optimorum librorum fidem
accurate edita. 6 vols. in 3. Leipzig: Carol Tauchnitz, 1850.
[ . Jewish Antiquities. See Josephus, Flavius. Flavii losephi iudaei opera omnia.... |
Jousse de la Fléche, Mathurin. La fidelle ouverture de l'art de serrurier, ou l’on void les
principaulx préceptes, desseings et figures touchant les expériences et opérations
manuelles dudict art; ensemble un petit traicté de diverses trempes. La Fléche,
France: Georges Griveau, 1627.

IBZ
 Works Cited by Semper

. Le théatre de l'art de carpentier. La Fléche, France: Georges Griveau, 1627.

Jubinal, Achille. Les anciennes tapisseries historiées; ou, Collection des monumens les
plus remarquables de ce genre, qui nous soient restées du Moyen-Age, a partir du
Xle siécle au X Ve inclusivement. 2 vols. Paris: Editeur de la Galerie d’Armes de
Madrid, 1838.
. La armeria real; ou, Collection des principales piéces de la Galerie d’armes
anciennes de Madrid. 2 vols. Paris: A. Morel, 1839.
. Description du musée d'Artillerie de Madrid. See Jubinal, Achille. La armeria
real....|
[Julien, Stanislas. See Lan, Pu.]
Keller, Ferdinand. Bauriss des Klosters St. Gallen, vom Jahr 820. Zurich: Meier 8&
Zeller, 1844.
. “Die Pfahlbauten der Schweiz.” Mittheilungen der antiquarischen Gesellschaft
in Zurich 12, no. 3 (1858): 113-55 and plates.
Kircher, Athanasius. Musei Kircheriani in Romano Soc. Jesu Collegio aeres notis illus-
trata. 2 vols. Rome: Johannis Zempel, 1763.
Kittoe, Markham. “Notes on the Viharas and Chaityas of Behar.” Journal of the Asiatic
Society of Bengal 16 (1847): 272-79.
Klemm, Gustav Friedrich. Allgemeine Cultur-Geschichte der Menschheit. 10 vols.
Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1843-52.
Klenze, Leo Ritter von. Versuch einer Wiederherstellung des toskanischen Tempels
nach seinen historischen und technischen Analogien. Munich: Finsterling, 1821.
[Kohler, Johann David. See Wéchentlich herausgegebener historischer Miinz-
Belustigung (in list of journals).]
Kratz, Johann Michael. Der Dom zu Hildesheim. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1840.
Kugler, Franz. Geschichte der Baukunst. Vol. 1, Geschichte der orientalischen und
antiken Baukunst. Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1856.
. Geschichte der Baukunst. Vol. 2, Geschichte der romanischen Baukunst.
Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1857.
. Geschichte der Baukunst. Vol. 3, Geschichte der gothischen Baukunst.
Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1859.
—.. Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte. 3d ed. 2 vols. in 3. Stuttgart: Ebner &
Seubert, 1856.
. Kleine Schriften und Studien zur Kunstgeschichte. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Ebner &
Seubert, 1853-54.
. Ueber die Polychromie der griechischen Architektur und Sculptur und ihre
Grenzen. Berlin: Gropius, 1835.
Kunckel, Johannes, Antonio Neri, and Christopher Merret. Johann Kunckels voll-
standige Glassmacherkunst worinnen sowol dessen Erlauterungen. New ed.
Nuremberg: C. Riegel, 1785.
Labarte, Jules. Description des objets d’art qui composent la collection Debruge
Dumeénil, précédée d’une introduction historique. Paris: Victor Didron, 1847.
Laborde, Léon, marquis de. Athénes aux X Ve, X Ve et XVIle siécles. 2 vols. Paris:
J. Renouard, 1854.
Lacroix, Paul, and Ferdinand Seré. Le Moyen Age et la Renaissance, histoire et

933
 Works Cited by Semper

description des moeurs et usages, du commerce et de l’industrie, des sciences, des

arts, des littératures et des beaux-arts en Europe. 5 vols. Paris: Seré, 1848-51.
{Lan, Pu]. Histoire et fabrication de la porcelaine chinoise: Ouvrage traduit du
Chinois. Translated by Stanislas Julien. Paris: Mallet-Bachelier, 1856. Originally
published as Jingdezhen tao lu (n.p., 1815).
Lanzi, Luigi Antonio. Saggio di lingua etrusca e di altre antiche d'Italia, per servire
alla storia de’ popoli, delle lingue e delle belle arti. 2d ed. 3 vols. Florence: A.
Tofani, 1824-25.
Layard, Austen Henry. Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon; with Travels
in Armenia, Kurdistan, and the Desert: Being the Result of a Second Expedition
Undertaken for the Trustees of the British Museum. London: John Murray, 1853.
. The Monuments of Nineveh, from Drawings Made on the Spot. 4 vols.
London: John Murray, 1849.
. Nineveh and Its Remains; with an Account of a Visit to the Chaldaean
Christians of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or Devil- Worshippers; and an Enquiry
into the Manners and Arts of the Ancient Assyrians. Sth ed. 2 vols. London: John
Murray, 1850.
—.. Niniveh und seine Ueberreste; nebst einem Berichte tiber einen Besuch bei den
chaldaischen Christen in Kurdistan und den Jezidi oder Teufelsanbetern; sowie
Assyrier. Translated by Nicolaus Napoleon Wilhelm Meissner. Leipzig: Dyk, 1850.
. A Popular Account of Discoveries at Nineveh. London: John Murray, 1851.
. A Second Series of the Monuments of Nineveh: Including Bas-Reliefs from the
Palace of Sennacherib and Bronzes from the Ruins of Nimroud; from Drawings
Made on the Spot, during a Second Expedition to Assyria. London: John Murray,
1853.
Le Blanc, Francois. Traité historique des monnoyes de France, avec leurs figures,
depuis le commencement de la monarchie jusqu’a present.... Amsterdam: Pierre
Mortier, 1692.
Le Vieil, Pierre. Lart de la peinture sur verre et de la vitrerie. Paris: L.-F. Delatour,
1774.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von, ed. Scriptores rerum Brunsvicensium illus-
trationi inservientes, antiqui omnes et religionis reformatione priores.... 3 vols.
Hannover: Nicolaus Foerster, 1707-11.
Leng, Heinrich. Vollstandiges Handbuch der Glasfabrikation nach allen ihren Haupt-
und Nebenzweigen; oder, Theoretisch-praktische Anleitung zur vollkommensten
Darstellung aller moglichen Glasfabrikate. Weimar: B. F. Voigt, 1835.
Lenoir, Alexandre. Musée des monumens francais: Histoire de la peinture sur verre, et
description des vitraux anciens et modernes, pour servir a l'histoire de l'art, rela-
tivement a la France. Paris: Guilleminet, 1803.
Leo Marsicanus, cardinal-bishop of Ostia, and Petrus Diaconus. Leonis Marsicani et
Petri Diaconi monachorum Casinensium chronicon monasterii Casinensis et opus-
cula, accedunt Rodulfi abbatis S. Trudonis, gesta abbatum Trudonensium, necnon
Falconis Beneventani, Landulphi junioris chronica.... Edited by J.-P. Migne.
Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1854.
Lepsius, Richard. Briefe aus Aegypten, Aethiopien und der Halbinsel des Sinai,

934
 Works Cited by Semper

geschrieben in den Jahren 1842-1845, wahrend der auf Befehl Sr. Majestat des
Konigs Friedrich Wilhelm IV von Preussen ausgefiibrten wissenschaftlichen
Expedition. Berlin: W. Hertz, 1852.
. Denkmiailer aus Aegypten und Aethiopien: Nach den Zeichnungen der von
Seiner Majestat dem Konige von Preussen Friedrich Wilhelm IV nach diesen
Landern gesendeten und in den Jahren 1842-1845 ausgefuehrten wis-
senschaftlichen Expedition. 12 vols. in 2. Berlin: Nicolai, 1849-1856.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Hamburgische Dramaturgie. 2 vols. Hamburg: J. H.
Cramer, 1767-68.
Letronne, Antoine-Jean. Lettres d’un antiquaire a un artiste sur l'emploi de la peinture
historique murale dans la décoration des temples et des autres édifices publics ou
particuliers chez les Grecs et les Romains. 2 vols. Paris: Heideloff & Campé,
1836-37.
Lippert, Philipp Daniel. Dactyliothec; das ist, Sammlung geschnittener Steine der
Alten: Aus denen vornehmsten Museis in Europa zum Nutzen der schénen Kiinste
und Kiinstler. 3 vols. in 1. Leipzig: Bernhard Christoph Breitkopfs & Sons, 1767.
Lisch, Georg Christian Friedrich. “Ueber die Hausurnen.” Jahrbiicher des Vereins fiir
meklenburgische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde 21 (1856): 243-56.
Loftus, William Kennett. Travels and Researches in Chaldaea and Susiana, with an
Account of Excavations at Warka, the “Erech” of Nimrod, and Shush, “Shushan
the Palace” of Esther, in 1849-52. New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1857.
Longpérier, Henri-Adrien-Prévost de. “Explication d’une coupe sassanide
inédite.” Annali dell’ Instituto di corrispondenza archeologica 15 (1843): 98-114.
[Libke, Wilhelm. Denkmaler der Kunst. See Voit, August, Ernst Guhl, and Joseph
Caspar. ]
. Die mittelalterliche Kunst in Westfalen nach den vorhandenen Denkmalern
dargestellt. Leipzig: T. O. Weigel, 1853.
Luynes, Honoré-Théodoric-Paul-Joseph d’Albert, duc de. Description de quelques
vases peints étrusques, italiotes, siciliens et grecs. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1840.
[Magasin pittoresque. See “Tombeau de Childéric ler.”]
Mahanama. The Mahawanso in Roman Characters, with the Translation Subjoined;
and an Introductory Essay on Pali Buddhistical Literature. Edited and translated
by George Turnour. Ceylon: Cotta Church Mission Press, 1837.
[Maisonneuve, A. Dubois. See Dubois Maisonneuve, A.]
Marin, Carlo Antonio. Storia civile e politica del commercio de’ Veneziani. 8 vols.
in 4. Venice: Coleti, 1798-1808.
[Marini, Luigi. See Vitruvius Pollio.]
Marquez, Pedro José. Dell’ordine dorico: Ricerche dedicate alla Reale accademia di
S. Luigi di Saragoza. Rome: Salomoni, 1803.
Marryat, Joseph. Collections towards a History of Pottery and Porcelain, in the
Fifteenth, Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries; with a Description of
the Manufacture, a Glossary, and a List of Monograms. London: John Murray,
1850.
Massmann, Hans Ferdinand. Der Egsterstein in Westfalen. Weimar: Verlage des
Landes- und Industrie-Comptoirs, 1846.

939
 Works Cited by Semper

Mazois, Charles Francois, Charles Francois Gau, Artaud de Montor, and Antoine-
Chrysosth6me Quatremére de Quincy. Les ruines de Pompei. Edited by Louis
Barré. 4 vols. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1824-38.
Meierotto, Johann Heinrich Ludwig. Ueber Sitten und Lebensart der Romer, in ver-
schiedenen Zeiten der Republik. 2 vols. in 1. Berlin: Mylius, 1814.
[Memorie di varie antichita. See Roma antica distinta per regioni.... |
Meyrick, Samuel Rush. A Critical Inquiry into Antient Armour, as It Existed in
Europe, but Particularly in England, from the Norman Conquest to the Reign of
King Charles II.... 3 vols. London: G. Schulze, 1824.
Meyrick, Samuel Rush, and Joseph Skelton. Engraved Illustrations of Antient Arms
and Armour: From the Collection of Llewelyn Meyrick, at Goodrich Court,
Herefordshire. 2 vols. Oxford: J. Skelton & G. Schulze, 1830.
Micali, Giuseppe. Monumenti inediti a illustrazione della storia degli antichi popoli
italiani. Florence: Galileiana, 1844.
[Michel, Francisque-Xavier. See Francisque-Michel]
Middleton, Conyers. Germana quaedam antiquitatis eruditae monumenta; quibus
Romanorum veterum ritus varii tam sacri quam profani, tum Graecorum atque
Aegyptiorum nonnulli illustrantur, Romae olim maxima ex parte collecta. London:
R. Manby & H.S. Cox, 1745.
Millin, Aubin Louis. Galerie mythologique: Recueil de monuments pour servir a
Pétude de la mythologie, de ’histoire de Vart, de l’'antiquité figurée et du langage
allégorique des anciens. 2 vols. Paris: Soyer, 1811.
—.. Minéralogie homérique; ou, Essai sur les minéraux dont il est fait mention
dans les poemes d’Homere. 2d ed. Paris: C. Wasermann, 1816.
Millingen, James. Ancient Unedited Monuments. 2 vols. in 1. London: n.p., 1822-26.
Minutoli, Johann Heinrich Carl, Freiherr von. Reise zum Tempel des Jupiter Ammon,
in der libyschen Wiiste, und nach Ober-Aegypten in den Jahren 1820 und 1821.
Berlin: August Ricker, 1824.
. Uber die Anfertigung und die Nutzanwendung der farbigen Glaser bei den
Alten. Berlin: L. Steffen, 1836.
Moigno, Francois-Napoléon-Marie. “Nouvelles et faits divers; faits des sciences.”
Cosmos: Revue encyclopédique hebdomadaire des progres des sciences et de leurs
applications aux arts et a Vindustrie 10 (1857): 169.
Moll, C. L., and Franz Reuleaux. Constructionslehre fiir den Maschinenbau. 2 vols.
Brunswick: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, 1854.
Montfaucon, Bernard de. Supplément au livre de L’antiquité expliquée et représentée
en figures. 5 vols. Paris: Giffart, 1757.
Morey, Matthieu-Prosper. Charpente de la cathédrale de Messine. Paris: Firmin Didot,
1841.
Moses, Henry. A Collection of Antique Vases, Altars, Paterae, Tripods, Candelabra,
Sarcophagi, etc. from Various Museums and Collections. London: Henry G. Bohn,
1814.
[Le Moyen Age et la Renaissance. See Lacroix, Paul, and Ferdinand Seré.]
Miiller, Karl Otfried. De Phidiae vita et operibus commentationes tres. Gottingen:
Dieterich, 1827.

936
 Works Cited by Semper

—.. De tripode delphico dissertatio. Gottingen: H. Dieterich, 1820.

——.. Die Etrusker. 2 vols. Breslau: J. Max, 1828.
—.. Handbuch der Archdologie der Kunst. Breslau: J. Max, 1835.
Miller, Karl Otfried, and Friedrich Wieseler. Denkmdiler der alten Kunst. 2 vols. in 1.
Gottingen: Dieterich, 1832-56.
Miller, Peter Erasmus. Commentatio historica de genio, moribus et luxu aevi
Theodosiani. Copenhagen: Schultz, 1797.
Muratori, Lodovico Antonio. Antiquitates Italicae medii aevi; sive, Dissertationes
de... studiis literarum, artibus, lingua, militia, nummis, principibus, libertate,
servitute, foedoribus, aliisque faciem et mores Italici populi referentibus post decli-
nationem Rom. Imp. ad annum usque MD. 6 vols. Milan: Societatis Palatinae,
1738-42.
Murr, Christoph Gottlieb von. Beschreibung der ehemals zu Aachen aufbewahrten
drey kaiserlichen Kronungs-Zierden: Des lateinischen Evangelienbuches, des
arabischen Sabels Karls des Grossen und der Capsul mit der Erde worauf das Blut
des heiligen Stephans soll gestossen seyn. Nuremberg: Monath & Kussler, 1801.
[Museo borbonico. See Museo nazionale di Napoli. Real museo borbonico.]
Museo gregoriano etrusco. Musei etrusci quod Gregorius XVI pon. max. in aedibus
Vaticanis constituit: Monimenta linearis picturae exemplis expressa et in utilitatem
studiosorum antiquitatum et bonarum artium publici iuris facta. 2 vols. Rome:
Vatican, 1842.
Museo nazionale di Napoli. Real museo borbonico. 16 vols. Naples: Stamperia Reale,
1824-57.
Muspratt, Sheridan. Theoretische, praktische und analytische Chemie, in Anwendung
auf Kiinste und Gewerbe. Freely adapted by Bruno Kerl and Friedrich Stohmann.
3 vols. Brunswick: C. A. Schwetschke, 1856-60.
Natter, Lorenz. Traité de la méthode antique de graver en pierres fines, comparée avec
la méthode moderne et expliquée en diverses planches. London: J. Haberkorn,
1754.
Newton, Isaac. Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica. London: Joseph
Streater, 1687.
Nichols, John Gough, ed. Examples of Decorative Tiles, Sometimes Termed Encaustic,
Engraved in Facsimile, Chiefly in Their Original Size. London: J. B. Nichols & Son,
1845.
[Nicola, D. See Paolini, Roberto.]
Nicolaysen, Nicolay. Mindesmerker af middelalderens kunst i Norge. Christiania,
Sweden: Chr. Tonsborge, 1854.
. Norske bygninger fra fortiden = Norwegian Building from Former Times;
udgivne af Foreningen til norske fortidsminnesmerkers bevaring. 11 pts. in 1 vol.
Christiania, Sweden: C. C. Werner, 1860-80.
Oldham, Thomas. Antient Irish Pavement Tiles, Exhibiting Thirty-Two Patterns, Illus-
trated by Forty Engravings, after the Originals, Existing in St. Patrick’s Cathedral,
and Howth, Mellifont, and Newtown Abbeys. Dublin: John Robertson, n.d.
Gli ornati del coro della chiesa di S. Pietro dei monaci cassinesi di Perugia intagliati in
legno da Stefano da Bergamo sopra i disegni di Raffaelle Santi da Urbino, ora per

S)SH
 Works Cited by Semper

la prima volta tutti raccolti, incisi a contorno e pubblicati. Rome: Labate e monaci
di quel monastero, 1845.
Ortiz y Sanz, José Francisco. Abaton reseratum; sive, Genuina declaratio duorum
locorum cap. ult. lib. tert. architecturae M. Vitruvii Pollionis nusquam ad mentem
auctoris facta scilicet.... Rome: M. A. Barbiellini, 1781.
[Ostiensis, Leo Marsicanus. See Leo Marsicanus. |
Panofka, Theodor. Recherches sur les véritables noms des vases grecs et sur leurs dif-
férens usages, d’aprés les auteurs et les monumens anciens. Paris: De Bure fréres,
1829.
Paolini, Roberto. Memorie sui monumenti di antichita e di belle arti, ch’esistono in
Miseno, in Baoli, in Baja, in Cuma, in Pozzuoli, in Napoli, in Capua antica, in
Ercolano, in Pompei, ed in Pesto. Naples: Monitore delle Due Sicilie, 1812.
Papillon, Jean-Michel. Traité historique et pratique de la gravure en bois. 2 vols. Paris:
P. G. Simon, 1766.
Passavant, Johann David, Adam Bartsch, and Jean Duchesne. Le peintre-graveur:
Contenant V’histoire de la gravure sur bois, sur métal et au burin jusque vers la fin
du XVI siécle.... 6 vols. in 3. Leipzig: R. Weigel, 1860-64.
Passeri, Giovanni Battista. Histoire des peintures sur majoliques faites a Pesaro et dans
les lieux circonvoisins. Paris: Maulde & Renou, 1853. Translation by Henri
Delange of Istoria delle pitture in majolica fatte in Pesaro e ne’ luoghi circonvicini
(Pesaro: Stamperia Nobiliana, 1838).
. Picturae Etruscorum in vasculis nunc primum in unum collectae explication-
ibus et dissertationibus illustratae. 3 vols. Rome: Johannis Zempel, 1767-75.
Pausanias. Pausaniae descriptio Graeciae. Edited by Johann Heinrich Christian
Schubart. 2 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1853-54.
Pauthier, Jean-Pierre-Guillaume. Chine; ou, Description historique, géographique et
littéraire de ce vaste empire, d’apres des documents chinois. Premiere partie:
Comprenant un résumé de histoire et de la civilisation chinoises depuis les temps
les plus anciens jusqu’a nos jours. Paris: Firmin Didot fréres, 1837.
Pauthier, Jean-Pierre-Guillaume, and Antoine-Pierre-Louis Bazin. Chine moderne; ou,
Description historique, géographique et littéraire de ce vaste empire, d’aprés des
documents chinois. Premiere partie: Géographie, organisation politique et adminis-
trative de la Chine, langues, philosophie. Seconde partie: Arts, littérature, moeurs,
agriculture, histoire naturelle, industrie, etc. Paris: Firmin Didot fréres, 1853.
Phillips, Thomas. “Letter Addressed to Albert Way, Esq, Director, Communicating a
Transcript of a MS Treatise on the Preparation of Pigments, and on Various
Processes of the Decorative Arts Practiced in the Middle Ages, Written in the
Twelfth Century, and Entitled Mappae Clavicula.”” Archaeologia; or, Miscellaneous
Tracts Relating to Antiquity 32 (1847): 183-244.
Philostratus the Athenian, Philostratus the Lemnian, and Callistratus. Philostratorum
imagines et Callistrati statuae. Edited by Friedrich Jacobs and Friedrich Gottlieb
Welcker. Leipzig: Libraria Dyckiana, 1825.
Pinkerton, John. An Essay on Medals; or, An Introduction to the Knowledge of
Ancient and Modern Coins and Medals, Especially Those of Greece, Rome, and
Britain. 3d ed. 2 vols. London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1808.

938
 Works Cited by Semper

[ . Essay on Numismatics. See Pinkerton, John. An Essay on Medalls.|

Piranesi, Giambattista. Le magnificenze di Roma.... 2 vols. Rome: Giovanni
Bouchard, 1751.
. Vasi, candelabri, cippi, sarcofagi, tripodi, lucerne ed ornamenti antichi. 2 vols.
Rome: n.p., 1778.
[Pitture antiche d’Ercolano. See Accademia ercolanese di archeologia.]
Platner, Ernst, Carl Bunsen, Eduard Gerhard, and Wilhelm Rostell. Beschreibung der
Stadt Rom. 3 vols. Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1829-42.
Pliny the Elder. C. Plinij Secundi historiae mundi libri XXX VII: Opus omni quidem
commendatione maius ... satis unquam emaculatum fuerit. Edited by Jacques
Dalechamps. Geneva: I. Crispini, 1631.
Plutarch. Plutarchi Chaeronensis quae supersunt, omnia, Graece et Latine: Principibus
ex editionibus castigavit, virorumque doctorum suisque annotationibus instruxit.
Edited by Johann Jacob Reiske. 12 vols. Leipzig: Weidmann, 1774-82.
Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore. Designs for Gold and Silversmiths. London:
Ackermann, 1836.
. Details of Antient Timber Houses of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries:
Selected from Those Existing at Rouen, Caen, Beauvais, Gisors, Abbeville,
Strasbourg, etc. London: Ackermann, 1836.
Puttrich, Ludwig. Denkmale der Baukunst des Mittelalters in Sachsen. 2 vols. in 4.
Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1836-50.
Quandt, Johann Gottlob von. Entwurf zu einer Geschichte der Kupferstecherkunst
und deren Wechselwirkungen mit andern zeichnenden Kiinsten. Leipzig: F. A.
Brockhaus, 1826.
Quatremére de Quincy, Antoine-Chrysosthéme. Le Jupiter olympien; ou, L’art de la
sculpture antique considéré sous un nouveau point de vue, ouvrage qui comprend
un essai sur le goitt de la sculpture polychrome, l’analyse explicative de la toreu-
tique et l'histoire de la statuaire en or et en ivoire, chez les Grecs et les Romains.
Paris: De Bure fréres, 1815.
. Recueil de dissertations sur differens sujets d’antiquité. Paris: Imprimerie
Royale, 1819.
Raoul-Rochette, Désiré. “De la peinture sur mur chez les anciens.” Journal des savants,
June 1833, 361-71; July 1833, 429-40; August 1833, 486-91.
. Lettre a M. Schorn; supplément au catalogue des artistes de l’antiquité
grecque et romaine. Paris: Crapelet, 1845.
. “Mémoires d’archéologie comparée, asiatique, grecque et étrusque.”
Mémoires de I’Institut national de France 17, no. 2 (1848): 1-404.
. “Mémoire sur la peinture sur mur.” See Raoul-Rochette, Désiré. “De la pein-
ture sur mur chez les anciens.” |
. “Notice sur un tombeau découvert aux environs de Kertch, l’ancienne
Panticapée.” Journal des savants, June 1835, 333-44.
. Peintures antiques inédites, précédées de recherches sur l'emploi de la peinture
dans la décoration des édifices sacrés et publics, chez les Grecs et chez les Romains,
faisant suite aux Monuments inédits. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1836.
Rawlinson, H. C. “Researches and Discoveries in Assyria and Babylonia.” Journal of

939
 Works Cited by Semper

the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, July 1856, 478-91.
Redgrave, Richard. “Supplementary Report on Design.” In Great Exhibition of the
Works of Industry of All Nations, Reports by the Juries on the Subjects in the
Thirty Classes into Which the Exhibition Was Divided, 708-49. London: William
Clowes & Sons, 1852.
Reichensperger, August. Fingerzeige auf dem Gebiete der kirchlichen Kunst. Leipzig:
T.O. Weigel, 1854.
Reinaud, Joseph Toussaint. Description des monumens musulmans du cabinet de M.
le duc de Blacas. 2 vols. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1828.
Relation des entrées solemnelles dans la ville de Lyon, de nos rois, reines, princes,
princesses, cardinaux, légats et autres grands personnages, depuis Charles VI,
jusques a présent. Lyon: Aymé Delaroche, 1752.
Reynard, Ovide, ed. Recueil d’ornements des anciens maitres des X Ve, X Vle, XVIIe et
XVIIle siécles. Paris: P. Marie & A. Bernard, 1844.
Richardson, Charles James. Studies from Old English Mansions. Vol. 3, Third Series:
Their Furniture, Gold and Silver Plate, etc. London: Thomas McLean, 1845.
Ritter, Carl. “Uber die geographische Verbreitung der Baumwolle und ihr Verhaltniss
zur Industrie der Volker alter und neuer Zeit: Erster Abschnitt, Antiquarischer
Theil.” Abhandlungen der K6niglichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin
(1851): 297-359.
Roccheggiani, Lorenzo. Raccolta di cento tavole rappresentanti i costumi religiosi,
civili e militari degli antichi egiziani, etruschi, greci e romani, tratti dagli antichi
monumenti; per uso di’ professori delle belle arti. 2 vols. in 1. Rome: Giacomo
Raffaelli, 1804.
Roland de La Platiére, Jean-Marie. art du fabricant de velours de coton, précédé
d’une dissertation sur la nature, le choix et la préparation des matiéres, et suivi
d’un traité de la teinture et de impression des étoffes de ces mémes matieres.
Paris: Moutard, 1780.
Roma antica distinta per regioni, secondo l’esempio di Sesto Rufo, Vittore, e Nardini;
ornata di rami delle piu celebri fabbriche antiche diligentemente intagliate; coll’ag-
giunta dello stato di Roma nel secolo XII.... 2 vols. Rome: Fausto Amidei, 1741.
Romberg, Johannes Andreas, and Friedrich Steger. Geschichte der Baukunst von den
dltesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart. Leipzig: Romberg, 1844.
Rosa, Michele. Delle porpore e delle materie vestiarie presso gli antichi: Dissertazione
epistolare. Modena: Stamperia Ducale, 1786.
[Ross, Ludwig. Inselreisen. See Ross, Ludwig. Reisen auf den griechischen Inseln des
agdischen Meeres.]|
. Reisen auf den griechischen Inseln des agdischen Meeres. 3 vols. Stuttgart:
J. G. Cotta, 1840.
. “Ueber Anaphe und anaphaische Inschriften.” Abhandlungen der
philosophisch-philologischen Classe der Kéniglich Bayerischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften 2, no. 11 (1837): 401-50.
Rubens, Albert. De re vestiaria veterum, praecipue de lato clavo libri duo, et alia
eiusdem opuscula posthuma. Edited by Johannes Georgius Graevius. Antwerp:
Balthasar Moreti, 1665.

940
 Works Cited by Semper

Ruding, Rogers. Annals of the Coinage of Great Britain and Its Dependencies; from
the Earliest Period of Authentic History to the Reign of Victoria. 3d ed. 3 vols.
London: J. Hearne, 1840.
Rumohr, Carl Friedrich von. Italienische Forschungen. 3 vols. Berlin: Nicolaische
Buchhandlung, 1827-31.
Rumpf, Jacob Heinrich Samuel. De interioribus aedium Homericarum partibus.
Giessen, Germany: I. Ricker, 1858.
[Salmasius, Claudius, Isaac Casaubon, Jan Gruter, and Cornelis Schrevel. See
Historiae augustae scriptores VI.}
Salzenberg, Wilhelm. Alt-christliche Baudenkmale von Constantinopel vom V. bis XII.
Jahrhundert. Berlin: Ernst & Korn, 1854.
Saulcy, Louis-Félicien Joseph Caignart de. Voyage autour de la mer Morte et dans les
terres bibliques: Exécuté de décembre 1850 a4 avril 1851. 2 vols and atlas. Paris:
Gide & J. Baudry, 1853.
. Voyage en Terre Sainte. See Saulcy, Louis-Félicien Joseph Caignart de. Voyage
autour de la mer Morte et dans les terres bibliques.|
[Saxius, Christophorus, and Jacobus van Vaassen. See Vaassen, Jacobus van.]
[Scheletri cumani dilucidati dal canonico Andrea di Jorio. See Jorio, Andrea de.
Scheletri cumani.|
Schmidt, Wilhelm Adolf. Die griechischen Papyrusurkunden der K6niglichen
Bibliothek zu Berlin. Berlin: G. Fincke, 1842.
Schnaase, Karl Julius Ferdinand. Geschichte der bildenden Kiinste. 6 vols. in 7.
Diisseldorf: Julius Buddeus, 1843-61.
Schneider, Johann Gottlob. Scriptorum rei rusticae veterum Latinorum. 4 vols. in 7.
Leipzig: Casp. Fritsch, 1794-97.
Schilen, Maximilian Ludwig Christoph. Beytrage zur Dioptrik und Geschichte des
Glasses nebst beigefiigten Nachricht von einer am fixsternen Himmel wahrgenom-
menen dusserst merkwiirdigen Begebenheit. Nordlingen: Karl Gottlob Beck, 1782.
Seitz, J. “Essai sur l’art de la fonte des anciens, avec quelques remarques sur les
chevaux de Chio.” Magasin encyclopédique; ou, Journal des sciences, des lettres et
des arts, December 1806, 273-332.
Semper, Gottfried. “Briefe aus der Schweiz; Die neben den Propylaen aufgefundenen
Inschrifttafeln [pts. 1-6 (printed such that last two both numbered $)].” Deutsches
Kunstblatt 4 (1855): 332-33, 370-71, 377-81, 388-90, 397-98, 404-7.
. “Observations on Some of the Specimens of Metal Work.” In Department of
Practical Art, First Report of the Department of Practical Art, Presented to Both
Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty, 248-49. London: George E.
Eyre & William Spottiswoode, 1853.
. “On the Study of Polychromy and Its Revival.” Museum of Classical Antiquity
1 (1851): 228-46.
. Ueber die bleiernen Schleudergeschosse der Alten und tiber zweckmdassige
Gestaltung der Wurfk6rper im allgemeinen: Ein Versuch die dynamische
Entstehung gewisser Formen in der Natur und die Kunst nachzuweisen. Frankfurt
am Main: Verlag fiir Kunst & Wissenschaft, 1859.
. “Ueber die formelle Gesetzmassigkeit des Schmuckes und dessen Bedeutung

941
 Works Cited by Semper

als Kunstsymbol.” Monatsschrift des wissenschaftlichen Vereins in Ziirich 3, no. 1

(1856): 101-30.
. Die vier Elemente der Baukunst: Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Baukunde.
Brunswick: Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, 1851.
. Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst: Vorschlage zur Anregung nationalen
Kunstgefiihles, bei dem Schlusse der Londoner Industrie-Ausstellung. Brunswick:
Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, 1852.
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. L. Annaei Senecae ad Lucilium epistolae morales. Edited by
Johann Schweighauser. 2 vols. Strasbourg: Societatis Bipontinae, 1809.
Seroux d’ Agincourt, Jean Baptiste Louis Georges. Histoire de l’art par les monumens,
depuis sa décadence au IVe siécle jusqu’a son renouvellement au X Vle. Edited by
Léon Dufourny, T.-B. Eméric-David, and Laurent Francois Feuillet. 6 vols. Paris:
Treuttel & Wiirtz, 1810-23.
Serradifalco, Domenico Lo Faso Pietrasanta, duca di. Le antichita della Sicilia. 5 vols.
Palermo: Tipografia del Giornale Letterario, 1834-42.
Sickler, Friedrich Carl Ludwig. De monumentis aliquot Graecis, e sepulcro Cumaeo,
recente effosso, erutis, sacra Dionysiaca, a Campanis veteribus celebrata
horumque doctrinam de animorum post obitum statu illustrantibus commentatio.
Weimar: Landes-Industrie-Comtoir, 1812.
Sillig, Karl Julius. Catalogus artificum; sive, Architecti, statuarti, sculptores, pictores,
caelatores et scalptores Graecorum et Romanorum literarum ordine dispositi.
Dresden: Libraria Arnoldia, 1827.
(Skelton, Joseph. See Meyrick, Samuel Rush, and Joseph Skelton.]
Sophocles. Sophoclis tragoedie ad optimorum librorum fidem accurate editae. Leipzig:
Carol Tauchnitz, 1819.
Stackelberg, Otto Magnus, Freiherr von. Der Apollotempel zu Bassae in Arcadien und
die daselbst ausgegrabenen Bildwerke. Rome: n.p., 1826.
. Die Graeber der Hellenen. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1837.
Steinbiichel von Rheinwall, Anton. Sappho und Alkaios: Altgriechisches Vasen-
gemdahlde. Vienna: Strauss, 1822.
Stieglitz, Christian Ludwig. Archaeologie der Baukunst der Griechen und Romer.
2 vols. in 3. Weimar: Verlage des Industrie-Comptoirs, 1801.
Strutt, Joseph. A Biographical Dictionary; Containing an Historical Account ofAll the
Engravers, from the Earliest Period of the Art of Engraving to the Present Time;
and a Short List of Their Most Esteemed Works.... 2 vols. London: printed by
J. Davis for R. Faulder, 1785-86.
Stuart, James, and Nicholas Revett. The Antiquities of Athens. New ed. Edited by
William Kinnard. 4 vols. London: Priestly & Weale, 1825-30. Vol. 4 entitled
Antiquities of Athens and Other Places in Greece, Sicily, etc., Supplementary to
The Antiquities of Athens by James Stuart, ER.S. ES.A. and Nicholas Revett,
Delineated and Illustrated by C. R. Cockerell, A.R.A. E.S.A., W. Kinnard, T. L.
Donaldson, W. Jenkins, W. Railton, Architects.
Tentzel, Wilhelm Ernst. Saxonia numismatica lineae Ernestinae et Albertinae. 2d ed.
2 vols. Frankfurt: Sam. Tobiam Hocker, Ioh. Georg. Menzel, Horum Numismatum
Sculptorem, & Andr. Schall, ut et autorem ipsum, 1714.

942
 Works Cited by Semper

Texier, Charles Félix Marie. Description de l’Asie Mineure, faite par ordre du gouverne-
ment francais de 1833 a 1837...: Beaux-arts, monuments historiques, plans et
topographie des cités antiques. 3 vols. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1839-49.
Texier, Jacques-Rémy-Antoine. Dictionnaire d’orfévrerie, de gravure et de ciselure
chrétiennes ou de la mise en oeuvre artistique des métaux, des émaux et des pier-
reries. Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1857.
. Essai historique et descriptif sur les émailleurs et les argentiers de Limoges.
Poitiers: Saurin, 1843.
Theophilus, Presbyter. Diversarum artium schedula: Essai sur divers arts. Edited by
Charles de l’Escalopier. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1843.
Thierry, Augustin. Récits des temps mérovingiens, précédés de considérations sur
V’histoire de France. 2 vols. Paris: J. Tessier, 1840.
Thiersch, Friedrich Wilhelm von. “Ueber das Erechteum auf der Akropolis zu Athen.”
Abhandlungen der philosophisch-philologischen Classe der Kéniglich Bayerischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften 5, no. 3 (1849): 81-185.
. “Ueber das Erechtheum auf der Burg von Athen.” Abhandlungen der
philosophisch-philologischen Classe der K6niglich Bayerischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften 6, no. 1 (1849): 101-250.
. “Ueber die hellenischen bemalten Vasen.” Abhandlungen der philosophisch-
philologischen Classe der K6niglich Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 4,
no. 1 (1847): 3-96.
[Thomson, James. Dinglers polytechnisches Journal. See “Ueber den Byssus der
Alten:.... 7]
. “On the Mummy Cloth of Egypt; with Observations on Some Manufactures
of the Ancients.” London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of
Science, November 1834, 355-65, pl. 2.
Tischbein, Johann Heinrich Wilhelm. Homer nach Antiken gezeichnet. Gottingen:
Dieterich, 1801.
“Tombeau de Childéric ler.” Le magasin pittoresque, August 1851, 271-72.
[Turnour, George, Esq. The Mahawanso in Roman Characters. See Mahanama.]
“Ueber den Byssus der Alten und tiber die Unterscheidung leinener Zeuge von baum-
wollenen.” Polytechnisches Journal 56, no. 8 (1835): 154-55.
Ulrichs, Heinrich Nicolaus. Reisen und Forschungen in Griechenland. Vol. 1, Reise
itiber Delphi durch Phocis und Boeotien bis Theben. Bremen: Heyse, 1840.
Ure, Andrew. A Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines: Containing a Clear
Exposition of Their Principles and Practice. 4th American ed. 2 vols. New York:
D. Appleton, 1846.
. The Philosophy of Manufactures; or, An Exposition of the Scientific, Moral,
and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great Britain. London:
Charles Knight, 1835.
Vaassen, Jacobus van. Icti animadversionum historico-criticarum ad fastos
Romanorum sacros fragmenta lacobi van Vaasen. Edited by Christoph Gottlob
Saxe. Utrecht: B. Wild, 1785.
Vasari, Giorgio. Opere. Milan: Tip. de’ fratelli Ubicini, 1840.
Venuti, Curzio dei Marchesi. “Sopra un’antica pittura trovata nel territorio cortonese.”

943
 Works Cited by Semper

Saggi di dissertazioni accademiche, pubblicamente lette nella nobile Accademia

etrusca, dell’antichissima citta di Cortona 9 (1791): 221-67.
Verdier, Aymar. Architecture civile et domestique au Moyen Age et a la Renaissance.
Edited by Francois Cattois. 2 vols. Paris: Didron, 1855-57.
Vermiglioli, Giovanni Battista. Opuscoli di Gio. Battista Vermiglioli, ora insieme rac-
colti con quattro decadi di lettere inedite di alcuni celebri letterati Italiani defonti
nel secolo XIX. 4 vols. in 2. Perugia: Bartelle & Costantini, 1825-26.
. Saggio di bronzi etruschi trovati nell’agro perugino l'aprile del MDCCCXII.
Perugia: Francesco Baduel, 1813.
Viollet-le-Duc, Eugéne-Emmanuel. Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture francaise du
XIe au X Vie siécle. 10 vols. Paris: B. Bance & A. Morel, 1854-68.
. Dictionnaire raisonné du mobilier frangais de l’époque carlovingienne a la
Renaissance. Vol. 1, Meubles. Paris: Bance, 1858.
. Entretiens sur Varchitecture. Vol. 1. Paris: A. Morel, 1863.
Virgil. Publii Virgilii Maronis Georgicon libri quatuor = Des Publius Virgilius Maro
Landbau, vier Gesange. Translated and edited by Johann Heinrich Voss. Eutin,
Germany: bei dem Verfasser, 1789.
Visconti, Alessandro. Lettera del signor dottore Allesandro Visconti al signor
Giuseppe Carnevali di Albano sopra alcuni vasi sepolcrali rinvenuti nelle vicinanze
della antica Alba-Longa. Rome: Lino Contedini, 1817.
Visconti, Ennio Quirino. Iconographie grecque; ou, Recueil des portraits authentiques
des empereurs, rois et hommes illustres de l’antiquité. 3 vols. Milan: J. P. Giegler,
1824-26.
. Lettera di Ennio Quirino Visconti,... su di una antica argenteria, nuovamente
scoperta in Roma. Rome: Salomoni, 1793.
Vitalis, Jean-Baptiste. Cours élémentaire de teinture sur laine, sote, lin, chanvre et
coton, et sur l’art d’imprimer les toiles. Paris: Bossange pére, 1823.
. Manuel du teinturier, sur fil et sur coton filé: Ouvrage qui renferme un grand
nombre de procédés nouveaux, et dans lequel on traite spécialement, et dans le
plus grand détail, de tout ce qui concerne la teinture du coton en rouge dit des
Indes ou d’Andrinople. Rouen: Mégard, 1810.
Vitruvius Pollio. De architectura libri decem: Apparatu praemuniti, emendationibus et
illustrationibus refecti, thesauro variarum lectionum ex codicibus undique quaesitis
et editionibus universis locupletati, tabulis centum quadraginta declarati. Edited by
Luigi Marini. 4 vols. Rome: Ex typis eiusdem Marinii ad opus comparatis in
Pompeii Theatro, 1836.
[Vogel, J. P.N.M., ed. Sammlung antiker Gemmen, welche den Schrein der Heiligen
Drei Konige zu Kéln schmiicken. See Vogel, Johann Philip. Sammlung der prachti-
gen Edelgesteinen.... |
Vogel, Johann Philip. Sammlung der prachtigen Edelgesteinen womit der Kasten der
Dreyen Heiligen Weisen Konigen in der hohen Erz-Domkirche zu Kéln ausgezieret
ist, nach ihrem dchten Abdrucke in Kupfer gestochen. Bonn: Kurfiirstliche
Hofbuchdruckerey, 1781.
Voit, August, Ernst Guhl, and Joseph Caspar. Denkmdler der Kunst zur Ubersicht
ibres Entwickelungsganges von den ersten kiinstlerischen Versuchen bis zu den

944
 Works Cited by Semper

Standpunkten der Gegenwart. Edited by Wilhelm Liibke and Joseph Caspar.

2 vols. Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1858.
Volkel, Johann Ludwig. Archdologischer Nachlass. Géttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1831.
. Ueber den grossen Tempel und die Statue des Jupiters zu Olympia: Eine
Erlauterung der Beschreibung des Pausanias. Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1794.
Walpole, Robert, ed. Travels in Various Countries of the East; Being a Continuation
of Memoirs Relating to European and Asiatic Turkey, etc. London: Longman,
Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown, 1820.
Walz, Christian. “Schriften iber die Malerei der Alten von Semper, Kugler, Hermann,
Letronne, Raoul-Rochette, Wiegmann und John.” Heidelberger Jabrbiicher der
Literatur 30 (1837): 257-60.
Watson, Richard. Chemical Essays. 5 vols. London: J. Archdeacon, 1781-87.
Weinhold, Karl. Altnordisches Leben. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1856.
. Die deutschen Frauen in dem Mittelalter: Ein Beitrag zu den Haus-
alterthtimern der Germanen. Vienna: Carl Gerold, 1851.
[ . Skandinavische Alterthtimer. See Weinhold, Karl. Altnordisches Leben.]
Weiss, Hermann. Kostiimkunde: Handbuch der Geschichte der Tracht, des Baues und
des Gerdathes der Volker des Alterthums. Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1860.
Welcker, Friedrich Gottlieb. Alte Denkmaler. S vols. in 3. G6ttingen: Dieterich, 1849-64.
, ed. Sylloge epigrammatum Graecorum ex marmoribus et libris. Bonn: A.
Marcus, 1828.
Wernsdorf, Johann Christian, ed. Poetae Latini minores. 6 vols. in 10. Altenburg,
Germany: Ex Officina Richteria, 1780-99.
Wiegmann, Rudolf. Die Malerei der Alten in ihrer Anwendung und Technik, inbeson-
dere als Decorationsmalerei. Hannover: Haschen, 1836.
Wilkinson, John Gardner. Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, Including
Their Private Life, Government, Laws, Arts, Manufactures, Religion, and Early
History.... 3 vols. London: John Murray, 1837.
Willemin, Nicolas Xavier. Monuments francais inédits pour servir a ’histoire des arts,
depuis le VIe siécle jusqu’au commencement du XVIIe: Choix de costumes civils et
militaires, d’armes ... et de décorations intérieures et extérieures des maisons, dess-
inés, gravés et coloriés d’apreés les originaux. Edited by André Ariodant Pottier.
2 vols. Paris: Mlle Willemin, 1839.
Wilson, Horace Hayman, trans. Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus. 2d ed.
2 vols. London: Parbury, Allen, 1835.
[Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. De la méthode antique de graver sur pierres fines. See
Natter, Lorenz.]
. Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums. 2 vols. Vienna: Akademischen Verlag,
1776.
. Storia delle arti del disegno presso gli antichi. Translated by Carlo Féa. 3 vols.
Rome: Pagliarini, 1783-84.
Witte, Jean de. “Le Musée grégorien a Rome.” Revue archéologique, 15 April-15
September 1844, 308-13.
Worsaae, Jens Jacob Asmussen. Afbildninger fra det Kongelige museum for nordiske

945
 Works Cited by Semper

oldsager i Kjobenhavn. Copenhagen: Kittendorff & Aagaard, 1854.

[Wyatt, Matthew Digby. Ornamental Art in Metal. See Wyatt, Matthew Digby.
Specimens of Ornamental Art.... |
. Specimens of Ornamental Art Workmanship in Gold, Silver, Iron, Brass and
Bronze from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Centuries: Fifty Large Plates, in Gold
and Colours of the Choicest Examples, with a History of the Art in Italy, England,
France, Germany and Spain, Together with Its Theory and Practice. London: Day,
1852.
Xenophon and Arrian. Xenophontis opuscula politica, equestria et venatica, cum
Arriani libello de venatione. Edited by Johann Gottlob Schneider. Oxford:
Clarendon, 1817.
Yates, James. Textrinum Antiquorum: An Account of the Art of Weaving among the
Ancients. London: Taylor & Walton, 1843.
Zeising, Adolf. Aesthetische Forschungen. Frankfurt am Main: Meidinger, 1855.
Ziegler, Jules Claude. Etudes céramiques: Recherche des principes du beau dans
Varchitecture, l'art céramique et la forme en général; théorie de la coloration des
reliefs. Paris: Mathias & Paulin, 1850.

946
Selected Bibliography

Writings by Gottfried Semper

1833
“Scoprimento d’antichi colori sulla colonna di Trajano.” Bullettino dell’ Instituto
di corrispondenza archeologica 7:92-93. Translated as “Entdeckung alter
Farbenreste an der Trajanssaule in Rom,” in Gottfried Semper: Kleine Schriften,
ed. Hans Semper and Manfred Semper (Berlin: W. Spemann, 1884), 107-8.

1834
Vorlaufige Bemerkungen iiber bemalte Architectur und Plastik bei den Alten. Altona:
Johann Friedrich Hammerich. Translated as “Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome
Architecture and Sculpture in Antiquity,” in Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements
of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang
Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 45-73.

1843
“Unmassgebliche Vorschlage zur Erhaltung und Wiederherstellung des Domes in
Meissen.” Report, Meissen, 22 January. Published in Verdffentlichungen des
Meissner Dombauvereins 2 (1904): 8-11; reprinted in Zentralblatt der
Bauverwaltung 36 (1904): 229-30.

1845
“Noch etwas uber den St. Nikolai-Kirchenbau.” Neue hamburgische Blatter, 12 March,
n.p.
Uber den Bau evangelischer Kirchen. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner.

1849
“Farbiges Erdpech.” Zeitschrift fiir praktische Baukunst 9:526-28.
Das k6nigliche Hoftheater zu Dresden. Brunswick: Vieweg & Sohn. Reprint,
Brunswick: Vieweg & Sohn, 1986.
“Die Kunst unter der franzosischen Republik.” Zeitschrift fur praktische Baukunst
9:481-82.
“Reise nach Belgien im Monat Oktober 1849.” Zeitschrift fiir praktische Baukunst
9:501-14.
“Der Wintergarten zu Paris.” Zeitschrift fiir praktische Baukunst 9:516-26.

947
 Selected Bibliography

1850
“Wohnhaus in Paris in der rue St. George.” Zeitschrift fiir praktische Baukunst 10:13.

1851
“On the Study of Polychromy and Its Revival.” Museum of Classical Antiquity
1:228-46.
Die vier Elemente der Baukunst: Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Baukunde. Brunswick:
Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn. Translated as “The Four Elements of Architecture:
A Contribution to the Comparative Study of Architecture,” in Gottfried Semper,
The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis
Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989),
74-129,

1852
“Practical Art in Metals and Hard Materials; Its Technology, History and Styles.”
MSL/1863-1-3. National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst: Vorschlage zur Anregung nationalen Kunstgefiihles,
bei dem Schlusse der Londoner Industrie-Ausstellung. Brunswick: Friedrich Vieweg
& Sohn. Translated as “Science, Industry, and Art: Proposals for the Development
of a National Taste in Art at the Closing of the London Industrial Exhibition,” in
Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans.
Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1989), 130-67.

1853
Lecture, Department of Practical Art, London, 11 November. MS 122, Archiv gta
(Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur), ETH Honggerberg, Zurich. Published as
“London Lecture of November 11, 1853,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and
Aesthetics, no. 6 (1983): 8-22. Translated as “Entwurf eines Systems der ver-
gleichenden Stillehre,” in Gottfried Semper: Kleine Schriften, ed. Hans Semper
and Manfred Semper (Berlin: W. Spemann, 1884), 259-84.
Lecture, Department of Practical Art, London, 18 November. MS 129, Archiv gta
(Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur), ETH Honggerberg, Zurich. Published as
“London Lecture of November 18, 1853: ‘The Development of the Wall and Wall
Construction in Antiquity,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 11
(1986): 33-41. Translated as “Entwickelung der Wand- und Mauerkonstruktion
bei den antiken Volkern,” in Gottfried Semper: Kleine Schriften, ed. Hans Semper
and Manfred Semper (Berlin: W. Spemann, 1884), 383-94.
Lecture, Department of Practical Art, London, December. MS 138, Archiv gta
(Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur), ETH Hénggerberg, Zurich. Published
as “London Lecture of December 1853: ‘On the Origin of Some Architectural
Styles,” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 9 (1985): 53-60.
Translated as “Ueber den Ursprung einiger Architekturstile,” in Gottfried Semper:
Kleine Schriften, ed. Hans Semper and Manfred Semper (Berlin: W. Spemann,
1884), 369-82.

948
 Selected Bibliography

“Observations on Some of the Specimens of Metal Work.” In Department of Practical

Art, First Report of the Department of Practical Art, Presented to Both Houses of
Parliament by Command of Her Majesty, 248-49. London: George E. Eyre &
William Spottiswoode.
“A Plan of Instruction for the Metal and Furniture Classes.” In Department of
Practical Art, First Report of the Department of Practical Art, Presented to Both
Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty, 372-74. London: George E.
Eyre & William Spottiswoode.
“Report on the Private Collection of Arms at Windsor Castle.” In Department of
Practical Art, First Report of the Department of Practical Art, Presented to Both
Houses of Parliament by Command of Her Majesty, 364-67. London: George E.
Eyre & William Spottiswoode.

1854
Lecture, Department of Practical Art, London, autumn. MSS 141, 142; Archiv gta
(Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur), ETH Hoénggerberg, Zurich. Published as
“London Lecture of Autumn 1854: ‘On Architectural Symbols,” Res: Journal of
Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 9 (1985): 61-67. Translated as “Ueber architek-
tonische Symbole,” in Gottfried Semper: Kleine Schriften, ed. Hans Semper and
Manfred Semper (Berlin: W. Spemann, 1884), 292-303.
Lecture, Department of Practical Art, London, 29 November. MS 144, Archiv gta
(Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur), ETH Honggerberg, Zurich. Published as
“London Lecture of November 29, 1854: ‘On the Relation of Architectural Systems
with the General Cultural Conditions;” Res: Journal of Anthropology and
Aesthetics, no. 11 (1986): 42-53. Translated as “Ueber den Zustammenhang der
architektonischen Systeme mit allgemeinen Kulturzustanden,” in Gottfried Semper:
Kleine Schriften, ed. Hans Semper and Manfred Semper (Berlin: W. Spemann,
1884), 351-68.
“On the Origin of Polychromy in Architecture.” In Owen Jones, An Apology for the
Colouring of the Greek Court in the Crystal Palace, 47-56. London: Crystal
Palace Library.

1855
“Briefe aus der Schweiz: Die neben den Propylaen aufgefundenen Inschrifttafeln.”
Deutsches Kunstblatt 4:332-33, 370-71, 377-81, 388-90, 397-98, 404-7.

1856
“Ueber die formelle Gesetzmassigkeit des Schmuckes und dessen Bedeutung als
Kunstsymbol.” Monatsschrift des wissenschaftlichen Vereins in Ziirich 3, no.
1:101-30. Also published as Ueber die formelle Gesetzmdssigkeit des Schmuckes
und dessen Bedeutung als Kunstsymbol (Zurich: Meyer & Zeller, 1856).
Reprinted in Gottfried Semper: Kleine Schriften, ed. Hans Semper and Manfred
Semper (Berlin: W. Spemann, 1884), 304-43.

949
 Selected Bibliography

1859
Ueber die bleiernen Schleudergeschosse der Alten und zweckmassige Gestaltung der
Wurfkérper im Allgemeinen: Ein Versuch die dynamische Entstehung gewisser
Formen in der Natur und in der Kunst nachzuweisen. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag
fiir Kunst & Wissenschaft.

1860-63
Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kiinsten; oder, Praktische Aesthetik: Ein
Handbuch fiir Techniker, Kiinstler und Kunstfreunde. 2 vols. Vol. 1: Frankfurt am
Main: Verlag fiir Kunst & Wissenschaft, 1860. Vol. 2: Munich: F. Bruckmann,
1863. Reprint, Mittenwald: Maander Kunstverlag, 1977. 2d ed., Munich:
Friedrich Bruckmann, 1878. Excerpt translated into English as “Style in the
Technical and Tectonic Arts, or Practical Aesthetics,” in Gottfried Semper, The
Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis
Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989),
181-263. Partly (almost half of the original) translated into Italian as Lo stile
nelle arti tecniche e tettoniche, o, Estetica pratica: Manuale per tecnici, artisti e
amatori, ed. A. R. Burelli et al. (Rome: Editori Laterza, 1992).

1869
Ueber Baustyle: Ein Vortrag gehalten auf dem Rathhaus in Ziirich am 4. Marz 1869.
Zurich: Friedrich Schulthess. Translated by John Root as “Development of
Architectural Style,” Inland Architect and News Record 14, no. 7 (1889): 76-78;
14, no. 8 (1890): 92-94; 15, no. 1 (1890): 5-6; 15, no. 2 (1890): 32-33. Translated
as “On Architectural Styles,” in Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of
Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang
Herrmann (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), 264-84.

1884
Gottfried Semper: Kleine Schriften. Edited by Hans Semper and Manfred Semper.
Berlin: W. Spemann. Reprint, Mittenwald: Maander Kunstverlag, 1979.

1892
Die k. k. Hofmuseen in Wien und Gottfried Semper: Drei Denkschriften Gottfried
Semper’s. Edited by Hans Semper and Manfred Semper. Innsbruck: A. Edlinger.

1978
Gottfried Semper im Exil: Paris, London, 1849-1855: Zur Entstehung des “Stil,”
1840-1877. Edited by Wolfgang Herrmann. Basel: Birkhauser.

1981
Gottfried Semper: Theoretischer Nachlass an der ETH Ziirich: Katalog und Kommen-
tare. Edited by Wolfgang Herrmann. Basel: Birkhauser. Contains transcriptions
of the following manuscripts held by the Archiv gta (Geschichte und Theorie der
Architektur), ETH Honggerberg, Zurich: “Vorwort” (MS 55), “Einleitung” (MS

950
 Selected Bibliography

58), “10. Kapitel” (MS 58), and “Neue Einleitung” (MS 97) of “Vergleichende
Baulehre” (1850); “Vorwort” (MS 178) and “Einleitung” (MS 179) of “Theorie
des Formell-Schénen” (1851-52); draft opening of volume 3 (MS 283) of Der Stil.

Secondary Sources Focused on Gottfried Semper

Auer, Hans. “Die Entwickelung des Raumes in der Baukunst.” Allgemeine Bauzeitung
48 (1883): 65-74.
Baljon, Cornelis J. The Structure of Architectural Theory: A Study of Some Writings
by Gottfried Semper, John Ruskin, and Christopher Alexander. Leiden: C. J.
Baljon, 1993.
Bayer, Josef. “Gottfried Semper.” Zeitschrift fiir bildende Kunst 14 (1879): 293-306,
357-71.
Berry, James Duncan. “The Legacy of Gottfried Semper: Studies in Spathistorismus.”
Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1989.
. “Semper Fidelis.” Review of Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth
Century, by Harry Francis Mallgrave. New Criterion 15 (1996): 69-72.
Bletter, Rosemarie Haag. “Gottfried Semper.” In Adolf K. Placzek, ed.-in-chief,
Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architects, 4:25-33. London: Free Press, 1982.
. “On Martin Frohlich’s Gottfried Semper.” Oppositions 4 (1974): 146-53.
Cresti, Carlo, ed. Gottfried Semper: Aggiunte e digressioni. Florence: Angelo
Pontecorboli, 1995.
Davatz, Jiirg. “Die Rathauser des Landes Glarus.” Glarnerland, Walensee: Jahrbuch
des Kurgebietes Glarnerland und Walensee 1985: 33-39.
Eckhardt, Wolfgang. “Gottfried Sempers Planungen fiir ein Richard Wagner-Festtheater
in Miinchen.” Jahrbuch des Museums fiir Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg 2 (1983):
41-72.
Edlinger, A. “Schlusswort.” In Gottfried Semper, Die k. k. Hofmuseen in Wien und
Gottfried Semper: Drei Denkschriften Gottfried Semper’s, ed. Hans Semper and
Manfred Semper, 64-68. Innsbruck: A. Edlinger, 1892.
Eggert, Klaus von. “Gottfried Semper, Carl von Hasenauer.” In Renate Wagner-Kieger,
ed., Die Wiener Ringstrasse, Bild einer Epoche: Die Erweiterung der inneren Stadt
Wien unter Kaiser Franz Joseph, vol. 8, Die Bauten und ihre Architekten, 73-225.
Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1978.
Ettlinger, Leopold. Gottfried Semper und die Antike: Beitrage zur Kunstanschauung
des deutschen Klassizismus. Halle, Germany: Carl Nieft, 1937.
. “On Science, Industry and Art: Some Theories of Gottfried Semper.”
Architectural Review, July 1964, 57-60.
Franck, Bernd. Die Nikolaikirche nach dem Hamburger grossen Brand: Gottfried
Semper und die Entwurfsgeschichte ftir den Hopfenmarkt mit dem Kirchenbau,
1842-1845. Hamburg: Friedrich Wittig, 1989.
Frohlich, Martin. Gottfried Semper. Zurich: Verlag fiir Architektur, 1991.
. Gottfried Semper: Zeichnerischer Nachlass an der ETH Zurich. Basel:
Birkhauser, 1974.
. Sempers Hauptgebaude der ETH Ziirich. Basel: Gesellschaft fiir
Schweizerische Kunstgeschichte, 1979.

Sisyl
 Selected Bibliography

Gottfried Semper, 1803-1879: Baumeister zwischen Revolution und Historismus.

Exh. cat. Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 1979; Munich: Georg
D. W. Callwey, 1980. Originally published as Gottfried Semper zum 100. Todestag:
Ausstellung im Albertinum zu Dresden vom 15. Mai bis 29. August 1979.
Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, [1979].
Gottfried Semper, 1803-1879: Sein Wirken als Architekt, Theoretiker und revolu-
tiondrer Demokrat und die schépferische Aneignung seines progressiven Erbes:
Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium im Rahmen der Semper-Ehrung der DDR,
Technische Universitat Dresden, 15. und 16. Mai 1979. Dresden: Technische
Universitat Dresden, Sektion Architectur, 1979.
Gottfried Semper und die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts: Symposium vom 2. bis 6.
Dezember 1974. Basel: Birkhauser, 1976.
Graf, Otto Antonia. “Semper Augustus.” Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen
in Wien 88 (1992): 205-9.
Gurlitt, Cornelius. Das neue konigliche Hoftheater zu Dresden. Dresden: Hellerau,
1878. Reprint, Dresden: Hellerau, 1990.
Hansch, Wolfgang. Die Semperoper: Geschichte und Wiederaufbau der Dresdner
Staatsoper. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1986.
Harvey, Lawrence. “Semper’s Theory of Evolution in Architectural Ornament.”
Transactions ofthe RIBA, n.s., 1 (1885): 29-54.
Helas, Volker. Architektur in Dresden, 1800-1900. Dresden: Verlag der Kunst
Dresden, 1991.
. “Einige unbekannte Zeichnungen Gottfried Sempers.” Jahrbuch des Museums
fiir Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg 1 (1982): 31-38.
. Villenarchitektur Dresden/Villa Architecture in Dresden. Cologne: Benedikt
Taschen, 1991.
Herrmann, Wolfgang. Deutsche Baukunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Basel:
Birkhauser, 1977.
. Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984.
. Gottfried Semper: Theoretischer Nachlass an der ETH Ziirich: Katalog und
Kommentare. Basel: Birkhauser, 1981.
—. “Sempers Weg von der Mathematik zur vergleichenden Baulehre.” In Beat
Wyss, ed., Bildfalle: Die Moderne im Zweilicht, 73-81. Zurich: Verlag fiir
Architektur Artemis, 1990.
Hvattum, Mari. Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism. Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003.
. “Poetics and Practical Aesthetics in the Writings of Gottfried Semper.” Ph.D.
diss., Cambridge University, 1999.
Lasius, Georg. “Die Sternwarte in Ziirich: Ein Bau Gottfried Semper’s.” Die Eisenbahn
12, no. 13 (1880): 74-75.
Laudel, Heidrun. “Gottfried Semper (1803-1879): Architekt, Theoretiker und revolu-
tionarer Demokrat.” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Technischen Universitat
Dresden 2, no. 29 (1980): 569-76.
. Gottfried Semper: Architektur und Stil. Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1991.
—. “Gottfried Sempers Position im Streit um den richtigen Stil.” Wissenschaftliche

O52
 Selected Bibliography

Zeitschrift der Technischen Universitat Dresden 4, no. 34 (1985): 159-66.

Laudel, Heidrun, and Ronald Franke, eds. Bawen in Dresden im 19. und 20.
Jahrhundert. Dresden: Sandstein, 1991.
Lipsius, Constantin. Festschrift zur Erinnerung an die Enthiillungsfeier des Semper-
Denkmals in Dresden am 1. September 1892. Dresden: Verlag des Gesammt-
ausschusses fiir Enthiillung des Semper-Denkmals, 1892.
. Gottfried Semper in seiner Bedeutung als Architekt. Berlin: Verlag der
Deutschen Bauzeitung, 1880.
. “To the Memory of Gottfried Semper.” Inland Architect and News Record 20,
no. 6 (1893): 62-63.
Liibke, Wilhelm. “Das neue Museum zu Dresden.” Deutsches Kunstblatt 4 (1855):
29-32, 41-42.
Liitzow, Carl von. Review of Der Stil, by Gottfried Semper. Recensionen und
Mittheilungen tiber bildende Kunst 2, no. 5 (1863): 85-86.
Magirius, Heinrich. “Die bildkunstlerische Ausgestaltung von Gottfried Sempers
Gemaldegalerie in Dresden.” Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien
88 (1992): 71-87.
. “Die Gemaldegalerie in Dresden: Ein Bau von Gottfried Semper.” In Harald
Marx and Heinrich Magirius, Gemdldegalerie Dresden die Sammlung Alte Meister,
der Bau Gottfried Sempers, 29-62. Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1992.
. “Gottfried Semper in Dresden.” Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 57, no. 3
(1994): 480-511.
. Gottfried Sempers zweites Dresdner Hoftheater: Entstehung, Kiinstlerische
Ausstattung, Ikonographie. Vienna: Hermann Bohlau, 1985.
. “Das zweite Dresdner Hoftheater Gottfried Sempers und die Theatralisierung
von Architektur und Bildenden Kiinsten des spaten Historismus in Dresden.”
Dresdner Hefte 27, no. 9 (1991): 4-15.
Mallgrave, Harry Francis. “A Commentary on Semper’s November Lecture.” Res:
Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 6 (1983): 23-31.
. “Gustav Klemm and Gottfried Semper: The Meeting of Ethnological and
Architectural Theory.” Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 9 (1985):
68-79.
. “The Idea of Style: Gottfried Semper in London.” Ph.D. diss., University of
Pennsylvania, 1983.
, ed. Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Raiment of Modernity. Santa Monica,
Calif.: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1993.
Manteuffel, Claus Zoege von. “Die Baukunst Gottfried Sempers (1803-1879).” Ph.D.
diss., Universitat Freiburg, 1952.
Miller, Karl Otfried. Review of Vorlaufige Bemerkungen iiber bemalte Architectur
und Plastik bei den Alten, by Gottfried Semper. Géttingische gelehrte Anzeigen 2
(1834): 1389-94.
Miitterlein, Max Georg. Gottfried Semper und dessen Monumentalbauten am
Dresdner Theaterplatz. Dresden: Wilhelm & Bertha von Baensch, 1913.
Pecht, Friedrich. “Gottfried Semper.” In idem, Deutsche Kunstler des neunzehnten
Jahrhunderts: Studien und Erinnerungen, 1:149-94. Nordlingen: C. H. Beck, 1877.

958
 Selected Bibliography

Prinzhorn, Hans. Gottfried Sempers aesthetische Grundanschauungen. Stuttgart:

Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1909.
Pruscha, Carl, ed. Das Semper-Depot: Die Adaptierung des Semper’schen Kulissen-
depots in Wien zum Atelierhaus der Akademie der Bildenden Kiinste. Munich:
Prestel, 1997.
Quitzsch, Heinz. Die asthetischen Anschauungen Gottfried Sempers. Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 1962.
Raoul-Rochette, Désiré. Review of Vorlaufige Bemerkungen tiber bemalte Architectur
und Plastik bei den Alten, by Gottfried Semper. Journal des savants, November
1836, 667-85.
Richter, H. A. “Gottfried Semper und das Dresdener Materni-Hospital.” Deutsche
Bauzeitung, no. 22 (1888): 334-39.
Rykwert, Joseph. “Architecture Is All on the Surface: Semper and Bekleidung.”
Rassegna, no. 73 (1998): 20-29.
Semper, Hans. Gottfried Semper: Ein Bild seines Lebens und Wirkens. Berlin:
S. Calvary, 1880.
Semper, Manfred. Hasenauer und Semper: Eine Erwiderung und Richtigstellung.
Hamburg: Boysen & Maasch, 1895.
. Das Miinchener Festspielhaus: Gottfried Semper und Richard Wagner.
Hamburg: Conrad H. U. Kloss, 1906.
Sisa, Jozsef. “Gottfried Semper és Magyarorszag.” Muvészettorténeti értesito (Bulletin
of art history) 1, no. 2 (1985): 1-10.
Spelman, Elizabeth Rowe. “Gottfried Semper and the Profound Surface of
Architecture.” Ph.D. diss., Rice University, 1997.
Squicciarino, Nicola. Arte e ornamento in Gottfried Semper. Venice: Cardo, 1994.
Stock, Wolfgang Jean. “Semper-Depot in Wien.” Baumeister 94, no. 3 (1997): 26-33.
Stockmeyer, Ernst. Gottfried Sempers Kunsttheorie. Zurich: Rascher, 1939.
Vischer, Robert, et al. Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics,
1873-1893. Introduction and translation by Harry Francis Mallgrave and
Eleftherios Ikonomou. Santa Monica, Calif.: Getty Center for the History of Art
and the Humanities, 1994.
Wegmann, Peter. Gottfried Semper und das Winterthurer Stadthaus: Sempers
Architektur im Spiegel seiner Kunsttheorie. Winterthur, Switzerland: Stadt-
bibliothek Winterthur, 1985.
x.y.z. “Gottfried Semper: Als Mensch und Kistler.” Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 12
August 1879, n.p.

954
Index
Page references to the color plates
and to the figures in the introduction
are in italic.
Aachen Cathedral, 851, 852
abacus: Corinthian, 799, 800; Doric,
LOMITA: TTS; TI6S7T ISG
Abbon (metalworker), 851
‘Abd al-Latif, 358
‘Abd ar-Rhaman III, emir and caliph
of Cérdoba, 849
Absalom, Tomb of (near Jerusalem),
375)
acerra, 491-94
Achilles Tatius, 600
Acropolis (Athens): Semper’s study of,
6, 22; stucco dressing on, 389. See
also specific edifices
acroteria, 29, 40, 44, 122, 123
actaea, 196
adamantine, 369
Adolph, Gustav, 589
Aegina, temple on, 388, 392, 778
Aeginetan school of sculpture,
845-46
Aeschylus, 240, 283
aesthetics, 32—42; idealist, 34-35;
speculative, 80-81, 97n.8
aetoma, 293, 626
agalmatolite, 584
Agamemnon, Tomb of (Mycenae),
761
Ageladas of Argos, 845
aggeres, 751n.21
agegry beads, 596
Agilulf, crown of, 891n.44, 894n.58
Agnolo di Ventura, 858
Agostino di Giovanni, 858
aiguieres, 511
alabaster: in Assyrian stone paneling,
30, 313; painting of, 325-26
alabastrum, 488-89
955
alae, 278
Alberghetti, Alfonso, 859
Alberto di Brule, 722n.113
alcarrazas, 472
Aleppo, castle of, 310
Alexander the Great, king of
Macedonia: Asian techniques
under, 395-400; carpets and, 283;
Corinthian capitals and, 800; and
funeral pyre of Hephaestion, 299;
gems under, 839; military strategy
of, 757; tent of, 294-96, 447n.194
Alexandrian Doric style, 780-81
Alexandrian-Roman style tectonics,
663-64
Alexandrian wall decorations, in
Pompeii, 915
Aloysius, Saint, 851, 892n.49
altarpieces: framed, 632, 704; upright
(retables), 673, 698
altars: early Greek, 644, 739, 764,
782; Renaissance, 827, 858-59;
stone, 554n.8, 726, 727, 739
Alyattes, Tomb of (Sardis), 369
amber pearls, 612n.25
Amenhotep III, king of Egypt, 763
Amiens Cathedral, 697
amita, 207, 216, 217
amphikypellon, 523, 524
amphora, 472-74, 548, 571
ampulla, 488-89, 506-8
Amyntas, Tomb of (Lycia), 788
Anastasius Bibliothecarius, 281, 847,
849
anchoring, ashlar, 734
ancone, 632
Andrea Bresciano, 859
Andrea di Jacopo d’Ognabene, 858
Andrea Guazzalotti, 840
Andrea Pisano, 858
Angelbert II, archbishop of Milan,
894n.58
animal masks, 174-75
animal motifs: in Assyrian furnishings,
342-44; in Assyrian wall paint-
ings, 319; on ceramics, 544, 565,
568, 575, 611n.19; on silk, 202,
203, 205, 206, 208; on tapestries,
276; in tectonics, 638, 671
animals: axes of movement and forms
of, 91-92; proportionality in,
90-91, 95; symmetry in, 89-90, 92
animal skins: leathers from, 176-80;
straps from, 218; tanning, dyeing,
or embossing of, 174-76, 232, 233;
vs. tree bark, 175-76. See also fur
animism, 39-42
ansa, 476
antepagment, 403-4, 632, 691
antependium, 665, 858
Antioch, architecture of, 401
Antiochus the Great, king of Syria,
280
Antiphellos, rock portal at, 789
antithesis, 834
Antoninus and Faustina, Temple of
(Rome), 807
Apaturius of Alabanda, 408
Aphrodite, Temple of (Aphrodisias),
794
Apollo: decoration of Dresden
Hoftheater and, 51, 66n.166;
statues of, 845
Apollonides (gem carver), 839
Apollonius (gem carver), 839
Apollonius of Tyana, 269, 508
apophyge, 541
aporrhanterion, 486
Apuleius, Lucius, 508, 556n.49
Apulian chalice, 528
Arabian lattice, 635
Arabian pitcher, 514
Arabic coffering, 693
Arabic use of gold, 827
 Index
arazzi fabrics, 320
arca, 668-69, 675
Arcesius (architect), 801
arch(es): absence of, in Greek archi-
tecture, 379; appearance of, in
stone architecture, 753; pointed,
249, 636, 673; Roman, 402-5;
in timber construction, 679, 683,
691, 693; triumphal, 288, 532,
859; vault and, 399-400
archaeology, Semper’s Style and,
21-32
archaic style pottery, 567-69
archaic style tectonics, 660-61
architectonic structure, 646
architecture: vs. archaeology, 21;
ceramics and, 44-45, 554, 575;
clothing and, 237-39, 248; color
and form in, 387-94, 427; influ-
ence of Style on, 43-53; problems
with history of, 103; as spatial art,
48-49; tectonics and, 328, 623.
See also stereotomy; specific coun-
tries; specific types
Ardea, temples at, 406
Arditi, Andrea, 858
Arezzo Cathedral, 858
argile figuline, 560, 579
argile plastique, 560, 580
Argolic shield, 829
Argos school of sculpture, 845
Aristonidas (metalworker and
painter), 899n.126
Aristophanes, 280, 424
Aristotle, 201
Arkesilaos vase, 612n.24
Arkwright, Richard, 194
armchairs, 665
armor, 826, 829, 830, 889n.14
Arneth, Joseph, 519
arris fillets, 655
art(s): higher vs. technical, 72-73;
language of, 103-4; religion and,
goals of, 98n.9
Artemis, Temple of (Ephesus),
423-24, 786, 787, 793
Artemis, Temple of (Syracuse), 762,
774, 814n.46
Artemis Brauronia, Temple of
(Athens), 820n.118
Artemis Leucophryene, Temple of
(Magnesia), 801
art-forms: classification of, 109;
evolution of, 103, 105-6; language
956
of, 104; technical arts’ influence
on, 106. See also specific types
art history, style theory vs., 277
articulation, 835; organic, 417
art techniques, motives associated
with, 13. See also specific tech-
niques
aryballos, 488-89
Ascelpius, Temple of (Tralles), 801
ashlar anchoring, 734
ashlar blocks, 41, 731, 735, 736, 737
ashlar joint, carved, 757
ashlar structure(s), 729-34; Assyrian,
315; decoration of, 729, 733-34,
738; Egyptian, 355-56, 755; ele-
ments of, 731-34; Gothic, 749n.7;
Greek, 756; height-to-length ratio
of, 737, 749n.7; hem for, 729, 737;
medieval, 734-35, 736, 749n.7;
Phoenician, 749n.7, 755; principles
of, 734; Renaissance, 729-30,
733; rhythm of patterns in, 738;
Roman, 735, 749n.7, 756; rusti-
cated, 41, 731
Ashur (Assyrian deity), 312
Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria, 325
Asia: influence on Greece, 395-400,
408; influence on Rome, 400-401;
lead glazing in, 576; leather in,
177, 179; pottery in, 566
Asia Minor: columns in, 371-72;
dressings in, 368-76; polychromy
in, 371; sculptures in, 372-75;
tombs in, 369-71; walls in, 369
Asian-Ionic columns, 760
Aspasios (gem carver), 839
asphalt, 311
Assos, temple at, 372-75, 772
Assyria, 312-46; archaeological study
of, 25-26, 28; color in, 318, 321,
325-27; influence on Semper,
28-31; layout of ruins of, 313-14
Assyrian architecture: Egyptian vs.,
378; influence of textiles on, 273
Assyrian art: Egyptian art and, 28,
271-73, 352; Greek art and, 28
Assyrian artifacts, discovery of, 24,
25-26, 247, 271, 273, 388
Assyrian bas-reliefs, 28-29, 30, 31,
325-26
Assyrian carpets, 138, 139, 143, 260,
324
Assyrian ceilings, 334
Assyrian citadels, 726
Assyrian clothing: chitons and shirts,
28, 241; headdresses, 29, 120, 121,
122, 174; knitted, 221; shawls,
240, 241; wraps, 241
Assyrian columns, 31-32, 47,
333-34, 346
Assyrian damascening, 881
Assyrian dome, 757
Assyrian embossed work, 251, 872
Assyrian engraved work, 139, 873
Assyrian floors, 316; ornamental
motifs in, 28, 138, 139, 143
Assyrian funeral pyres, 298
Assyrian furniture, 28, 333-46, 660,
664
Assyrian metal: bronze statues, 251;
dressing, on furniture, 336;
engraved work, 873; utensils, 828
Assyrian ornamental motifs: animal
forms as, 342—44; human forms
as, 345; vegetal, 28, 138, 139, 143,
153, 340-42
Assyrian roofing, 333
Assyrian stone tectonics, 304, 760
Assyrian substructures, 351, 741, 742,
743
Assyrian tents, 28, 293-94
Assyrian textiles, 273-77; bands in,
120, 121, 122; embroidery on, 230,
260, 275, 324; manufacture of cot-
ton fabrics, 195; silk, 201; tassels
and fringes, 28, 121, 126; wool, 197
Assyrian vessels: basketlike, 489;
bowls, 480-81, 555n.11; bronze,
272, 346; ceramic, glazes on,
609n.7, 620n.9; flasks, 515;
kraters, 477; lamps, 503, 506-7;
pails, 498; with tripods, 536-37
Assyrian wall dressings, 30, 313-32;
vs. Egyptian, 318, 324-25; glazed
tiles in, 306, 319-20, 322-23; mat
plaiting and, 226; metal, 328;
painted, 305-6, 318-20, 913;
polychromy of, 325-27; stone
paneling, 317-18, 324, 450n.231;
wood paneling, 317, 328
Assyrian walls, 305, 314, 754
Asterius, bishop of Amasea, 204
astragal, 117, 538, 769
Athena, Temple of (Priene), 793-94,
801
Athena, Temple of (Syracuse), 777
Athena, Temple of (Tegea), 820n.123
Athenaeus: on Greek clothing, 237,
 Index
240; list of vases by, 482; on metal
vessels, 517, 844; on wreaths
among Greeks, 161n.1
Athenian school of sculpture, 846
atlas. See satin
Atreus, Tomb of (Mycenae), 408,
811n.14
atria, 668, 709; Roman, 277-78
Attic-Doric style, 779-80, 786,
811n.18
Attic-Ionic style, 788, 796-99
Attic school of sculpture, 846, 891n.39
Attic style, 763, 783-84
Auer, Hans, 49
Augustus, Temple of (Pola), 805
aulaea, 273, 275, 281
auric textiles, 208
authority, principle of, and artistic
form, 92-96
aventurine glass, 621n.122
Avienus, Rufus Festus, 314, 449n.224
axis: proportional, 85; symmetrical, 85
Azzimino, Paolo, 882
Baalbek, temple at, 316, 741
Babel, Tower of (Babylon), 311,
449n.217
Babylonia: royal palace of, 320,
327-28; wall dressings in, 346-48;
wool industry in, 196
Babylonian architectural inscription,
347-48
Babylonian brick construction, 347,
449n.217
Babylonian columns: sheathed
wooden, 759; stone and wood,
809n.6
Babylonian domed ceiling, 163n.11
Babylonian embroidery, 431, 435;
cross-stitch, 53, 435; on leather,
177; in palaces, 279; on silk, 201;
on tapestries, 276; on wool, 196,
198. See also Babylonian textiles
Babylonian glyptics, 397
Babylonian inscriptions, 308, 309, 316
Babylonian mounds, 304. See also
Chaldean mounds
Babylonian palaces, 279, 320, 327,
508
Babylonian ramparts, 369
Babylonian sculpture: bronze, 251;
clay, 347
Babylonian textiles: carpets, 273,
286, 324; dyeing, 327; silk, 201;
Ney7
tapestries, 273, 276, 279. See also
Babylonian embroidery
Babylonian wall dressings: bitumen
and, 311; clay, 306; glaze in, 306,
347; in palaces, 279; paneling,
327, 347; stucco, 307; tile, 306,
SAD, SVL, Sek, SIA
Bacchic onyx vessel, 522
Bacchus, Temple of (Teos), 801
Bacchus, Theater of (Athens), 298
baldachin(s): Assyrian, 294; Baroque,
331; bearers of, 445n.287; Doric,
765; Egyptian, 284, 362; Gothic,
673; Ptolemaic, 408; Roman, 300;
thrones with, 452n.257
baldachinus, 208
balustrades, 635; decoration of, 87,
261; as decorative motive, 256,
683, 688, 702
Bamberg Cathedral, 892n.53
bamboo lattices, 258
band chains, 835-36
bands, 116-23; Assyrian, 120, 121,
122; fixed decorations on, 116-18;
fluttering decorations on, 118-23;
hems and, 160-61; materials for,
107; natural, 218; production of,
218; seams and, 118, 157, 159-60;
strength of, 116-17; uses for, 107;
in walls, 743; in wooden wainscot-
ing, 631
barbarians: art of, Greek admiration
for, 242-43; clothing of, 239-41;
use of term, 243
barbotine method, 613n.27
bark, tree, 175-76
Baroque furniture, 704, 705
base of vessels, 473, 534-40
Basilica (Rome), 814n.40, 820n.121
baskets, as archetypal form, 489-91
bas-reliefs, Assyrian, 28-31, 325-26
Bassae, temple at, 392, 778-79
baths, Roman, 417, 848-49, 866
bathtub, 486-87, 556n.32
Bathycles (sculptor), 844
battlements: Assyrian, 28, 126, 315,
316; Chinese, 261; Median, 348;
as motives, 28, 123, 125, 638
Bavarian-Tirolean house, 686-87
Bayeux Cathedral, 720n.97
beakers, 486, 487, 522
beam ends, 666-67
beam heads, 690
beams, 653, 681, 682-83
beauty: artistic enjoyment of, 82;
necessary conditions for, 83;
philosophical definition of, 80;
properties of formal, 72; Semper’s
definition of, 82-83; theory of,
vs. theory of style, 72
Bekleidung, viii, 12, 50, 65n.154, 155,
248
Belgium: lace in, 224; metallurgy in,
861; wood carvings in, 722n.113
bell capitals, 799, 800, 802
belluata tapetia, 273
belly of vessels, 525-34
belts: metal, 829, 835; textile, 117-18,
129, 160, 240-41
Benedetto Antelami, 894n.60
Benedetto da Maiano, 702, 859
Beni Hasan, columns at, 363, 365, 371
Berain, Jean, 150
Berlage, Hendrik, 49
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 331
Beulé, Charles-Ernest, 814n.41
beveling, diagonal, 732
biga, 664
binding(s): by bands, 116; by string,
116; on utensils and weapons, 172,
7S
Bir, fortress at, 310
Birch, Samuel, 272, 607n.1
biscuit porcelain, 594
bitumen, 311
black (color), use of, in Oriental
patterns, 136-37
blacksmiths, 866
blattin, 212
Blouet, Abel, 22
blowing, glass, 600-601, 602, 604-6
blowpipe, 600-601, 604-6
blue (color): and color contrasts,
163n.12; use of, in Oriental pat-
terns, 136, 163n.6
bobbin lace, 223
Bock, Franz, 203, 211, 215
Bodt, Jean de, 592
Bohemian glass, 599, 618n.92, 874
Bohnstedt, Ludwig, 48
bond, between structural parts, 728,
734-38
boot polish, 180
Bordier, Jacques, 878
bossage, 41, 42
Botta, Paul-Emile: on Assyrian stone
ramparts, 315; excavation of
Assyrian site (Khorsabad), 25-26,
 Index
Botta, Paul-Emile (continued)
247, 554n.8; image from, 30; opin-
ions on Assyrian art, 28, 31
Bottger, Johann Friedrich, 588, 589,
591, 592
Botticher, Carl Gottlieb Wilhelm,
39-40, 41, 374, 379
Bottiger, Carl August: on ancient tex-
tiles, 276, 277, 282; on Greek wall
painting, 245; writings of, 239
Boucher de Perthes, Jacques, 27
Boulle, André-Charles, 706, 873
Boutcher, William, 304
bow handle, 546
bowls, 480-86, 521, 542, 571
bow shapes, 551
Braun, Emil, 9, 13
breastplate, 826, 829
bretas, 812n.24
brick walls: Assyrian, 326, 755;
Babylonian, 347, 449n.217;
Chaldean, 304-6, 309, 312, 326,
739, 754; Chinese, 260-61; glazed,
incrustation of, 311; Greek, 380;
neo-Babylonian, 326, 449n.217;
Persian, 755
brocade, gold, 208-11, 433n.28
brocade-and-damask style, 209
broché fabrics, 320
Brongniart, Alexandre: on ceramic
glazes, 573, 576, 608n.7, 614n.60;
as curator of Sévres museum, 167;
on earthenware, 580, 582, 588,
614n.60; on gilded ceramics,
899n.124; on Greek pottery, 573,
610n.17; and soft-paste porcelain
manufacture, 594; on terra-cotta
as historical evidence, 554n.1;
writings of, 607n.1; Ziegler’s influ-
ence on, 45
bronze, 827; gilded, 883, 886; knowl-
edge of, among early Finns and
Celts, 104-5
Bronze Age, 27-28, 827
bronze candelabras, 562, 700, 857
bronze coins, 839, 840
bronze columns, 346, 396, 446n.186,
676, 759, 760
bronze doors, 669, 858, 894n.60; con-
struction techniques for, 328-30
bronze engraving, 842-43
bronze floors, 283
bronze roofs, 327, 331, 350-51,
446n.186
958
bronze statues: cast, 251-52, 714n.21,
844-46, 849, 859; early monu-
mental, 250-52; fifteenth-century,
213
bronze tombs, 446n.186, 859
bronze vessels: Assyrian, 272, 346;
bowls and dishes, 483, 484;
censers, 492, 493; Chinese, 258;
Etruscan, 714n.20; flasks and bot-
tles, 515, 516; kraters, 476-79;
lamps, 504; loricated, 829; pails,
499, 500; pitchers, 502, 512;
troughs and fonts, 486, 487; urns,
475
bronze wall dressings: Babylonian,
279, 369; Greek, 288, 376, 377,
396, 446n.186, 456n.304; Indian,
269; Ptolemaic, 414; Roman, 414,
446n.186
bronze weapons, 104, 551, 827-28,
829, 863
brooches, 831, 889n.15
brundss, 675
Brunelleschi, Filippo, 858
Brunn, Enrico, 818n.88, 890n.32,
890n.34
Brussels, lace in, 224
Bry, Theodore de, 897n.85
bucaros, 472
buccinum, dye from, 235
Bucher, Lothar, 182
buires, 511, 512-14, 557n.52
bulla, 517
Bulow, Cosima von, 10
Bunsen, Christian, 25
Burckhardt, Jacob, 1, 54n.4, 721n.113
burial rites. See funeral rites
Butades of Sicyon, 610n.14
buttresses, architectural, 416-17, 646,
683
Byblos, ruins at, 351
byssus, 430n.14
Byzantine architecture, 848
Byzantine embossed work, 872
Byzantine engraved work, 874
Byzantine furniture, 665, 671
Byzantine metallurgy, 827, 847-50,
894n.60
Byzantine painting, 849, 910
Byzantine sculpture, 849, 892n.48
caementa, 560
Caesar, Julius, 410
caespes, 726
Calamis (sculptor), 846
calcata, 750n.21
calices allassontes, 601
calices audaces, 597
Callimachus (sculptor), 820n.120, 846
Callixeinus of Rhodes, 284, 296
Calynda (Caria), 369
calyx columns, 363, 364-65
Cambyses II, Achaemenid king of
Persia, 349
camerae pendentes, 711n.1
Camillus, Marcus Furius, 669
camuci. See containers
Canachus (sculptor), 845
Canadian Indians, use of color by, 135
candelabra(s): constructional ideas
and, 456n.305, 639, 633, 648n.25;
depiction of, on Arch of Titus,
453n.275, 454; Italian
Renaissance, 857, 859, 860
cane, plaited, 225
Canina, Luigi, 808
canistrum, 489
canon, 728
canopic vessels: amphora, 473, 552;
urns, 474-75; vases, 473, 474
canopies, 281-82
cantharus, 520
cantilever, 682, 685
canvas embroidery, 232
caoutchouc. See rubber
capital(s): anta, from Temple of
Theseus, 905; Corinthian, 799,
800, 802; Doric, 769, 770, 771,
776, 779, 800; Ionic, 762, 782-83,
784, 786, 817n.77; proto-Ionic
Persian, 32, 33, 759-60
capitalism, and the fine arts, 75-76
Capitoline Temple (Rome), 741
capula, 488-89
Caradosso (Cristoforo Foppa), 841
Caribbean bamboo hut, 13, 14, 44,
666, 680
carpentry. See tectonics
carpets: direction in, 131, 138; pat-
terns from Indian, 907; spread of
use, 283; tapestries as, 282-83;
weaving of, 196, 275
carton-pierre, 710
Carus, Carl Gustav, 34
carved ashlar joint, 757
carved wood. See wood carving(s)
caryatid porch of the Erechtheum
(Athens), 744
 Index
cashmere shawls, 196, 197
cask of Diogenes, 472
cast columns, 810n.10
cast gypsum, 710
cast metal, 346, 887-89; architectural,
888; bronze, 251-52; Byzantine,
849; furnishings in, 889; invention
of, 714n.21; statues in, 845; vessels
in, 887-88
catapetasma, 278-80
catastrophe theory, 26
cathedrals. See specific cathedrals
catinus, 484
Catulus, Marcus, 410
cauldron, 476, 537, 538
cavaedium, 675
cavetto, 733
Caylus, Anne Claude Philippe, comte
de, 502
cedar, in Temple of Solomon, 352
ceilings, 130-31, 146-53; Assyrian,
334; Chinese, 262-63, 264; cof-
fered, 636, 692, 693; direction of
themes on, 147-53; Egyptian orna-
ments on, 912; Greek, 147, 148;
height of, 152-53; historical motifs
on, 149; paintings on, 150-52,
906, 909, 910; with rafters, 627;
relation to floor and walls, 146-47;
in Renaissance, 710; rib vaults and,
416-17; Roman, 147, 416-17;
stone, 762; timber, 334, 692-96,
920; vaulted, 753
celebe, 479
celebrations. See festive celebrations
Cellini, Benvenuto: process used by, in
metal, 841; style of, 862; surface
decoration and, 875, 880, 882,
885; vessels by, 478, 486, 495, 522
cellular construction, 740
Celtic filigree, 833
Celtic pots, 564
Celtic-Roman hydria, 502
Celtic weapons, 829
censers, 491-94
centrally planned structures, 740
centrifugal force, and glass blowing,
605
ceramic materials: homogeneity of,
560-61; malleability and plasticity
of, 559-60; strength and durability
of, 561-62; and style, 559-63
ceramic objects: decorative attributes
of, 529-34; forms of, 470,
959
471-524, 525-29; in funeral rites,
468, 475; motives of, 471; parts of,
524-53; prehistoric, 468; purpose
of, 470; significance of, 467-68.
See also specific objects
ceramics, 467-606; and architecture,
44-45, 554, 575; definition of,
109-10, 467; hearth making and,
13; materials in, 109-10; proce-
dures for, 608n.7; use of term, 467;
Ziegler on, 45. See also glazes;
pottery
Ceres, Temple of (Rome), 385, 772,
814n.40
Certosa di Pavia, 148, 859, 860
Ceylon, ancient brick buildings of, 267
Chadwick, Edwin, 13
chain mail, 830
chain-mesh functional system, 828
chains, 831-36
chairs: armchairs, 665; Assyrian, 337,
340; folding, 715n.25
chalcidica, 711n.1
Chaldea, early history of, 303, 312
Chaldean architecture, 273, 309, 326
Chaldean burial grounds, 307
Chaldean coffins, 304, 307-8, 311-12
Chaldean embroidery: influence on
dressing, 317; stone, 276; on tex-
tiles, 274, 324; on vessels and
utensils, 275
Chaldean monarchy, restoration of,
346-48
Chaldean monuments, 309; metal
dressing on, 447n.186
Chaldean mounds, 290, 304-14, 319,
739, 758
Chaldean stucco, 305, 306-7
Chaldean textiles, 273, 274, 276,
324; dyeing of, 233; embroidery
on, 274, 324
Chaldean wall dressings, 317; faience,
358; imitation of, 359, 454n.283;
stone, 312
Chaldean walls: brick, 304-6, 309,
312, 326; stone, 754
chalet, 675-76
chalice, 485-86, 521-24, 555n.30
chalice krater, 478
Chambers, William, 257, 264
chamois leather, 180
chamotte, 560
champlevé enamel, 876, 879, 894,
898n.103
Champollion, Jean-Francois, 21
Champollion-Figeac, Jacques-Joseph,
SSI
chandelier: in antiquity, 508; Gothic,
854, 893
chariots, battle: Assyrian, 335;
Egyptian, 335, 336
Charlemagne, king of the Franks and
emperor of the West, 199, 202,
715n.26
Chartres Cathedral, 700; veil of
Virgin at, 202-3
Cherestrates (potter), 610n.14
Chian marble sculpture, 844
chiaroscuro effect, 873
Chiesa di Sansone (Metapontum),
772, 773, 814n.45
China: rulers of, 255-56; use of color
in, 135
Chinese architecture, spatial enclosure
in, 257-62
Chinese ceilings, 262-63, 264
Chinese enamel decoration, 879, 880
Chinese furniture, 654
Chinese gold brocade, 209
Chinese lacquer, 185-88
Chinese lattice, 634
Chinese lead glazing, 576
Chinese paintings, 260
Chinese porcelain, 588, 590-91
Chinese roofing, 261, 263
Chinese tectonics, 262-64
Chinese textiles: cotton, 194; influ-
ence on architecture, 255-64;
satin, 211; silk, 200-201, 259,
432n.22
Chinese tiles, 587
Chinese vessels: bowls, 484; censers,
492; decoration of, 615n.66; dis-
play vases, 487, 615n.64; drinking
vessels, 524; earthenware, 586,
589; flasks, 516; pitchers, 514;
spouts of, 544
Chinese walls, 256-57, 260-62;
dressings on, 257, 259, 264; stucco
on, 260-61
Chios, walls of, 399
chitons, 241
Chlotar II, king of the Franks, 851
Choragic Monument of Lysicrates
(Athens), 537, 802, 804
Christian II, king of Denmark,
889n.14
Christian architecture: dressings in,
 Index
Christian architecture (continued)
415-19; intercalation in, 98n.10
chryselephantine sculpture, 244, 252,
826
chrysographoi, 881
churches: festive decorations in,
302-3; furniture in, 671-73, 674,
698; timber, 674, 677, 678-79;
timber ceilings of, 692-96, 920.
See also temple(s); specific cathe-
drals; specific churches
Churchill, John, 304
chytra, 476
Cicero, 279, 288, 331, 399, 483
Cimabue (painter), 895n.60
cinnabaris, 389
Cione, Andrea di (Orcagna), 858
circular plan, 739
circumlitio, 409-12
cistae, 490
cladding, 50, 828. See also dressing(s)
clay: as first plastic material, 467,
468; pipe, 580, 585; potter’s, 560,
579; sculptor’s, 560
clay modeling, in sculpture, 252-53,
269, 347
clay walls, incrustation with glazed
tiles, 319-23
Clearchus of Rhegium, 251
Clement of Alexandria, 279
clerestories, 667—68
climax, 711n.1
clocks, 872, 896n.85
clothing, 237-41; and architecture,
237-39, 248; bands on, 118-23;
basic forms of, 240-41; cotton,
194-96; flax, 192-94; Greek free
drapery vs. barbarian, 239-41;
origins of, 247; satin, 212; silk,
201, 204; wool, 196-200. See also
specific types
Cluny Museum, 896n.84
coffered ceiling, 636, 692, 693
coffins, Chaldean, 304, 307-8,
311-12. See also funeral pyres
cohesion: definition of, 727; of
masonry materials, 727-28
coinage, 838-43
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 200, 224
Cole, Henry, 9, 10, 13-15, 16
collar beam, 628, 694
color(s): architectural form and,
387-94, 427; of cotton, 194, 195;
in embroidery, 230; of floor dress-
960
ing, 134-38; instantaneous vs.
residual contrasts in, 163n.12; of
metal, 834; methods of combining,
135-38; through painting vs. dye-
ing, 327; of satin, 212-13; of silk,
208; of velvet, 215-16, 434n.37;
of wall dressings, 318; in weaving,
216, 230, 248, 275; of wool,
198-99, 234, 431n.20. See also
dyeing; polychromy
colored glazes, 582
colored paste, 582
column(s): in Asia Minor, 371-72;
Asian-lonic, 760; Assyrian, 31-32,
47, 333-34, 346; calyx, 363,
364-65; cast, 810n.10; Corinthian,
381, 389, 799-800, 802, 803,
820n.123; draperies on, 281;
Egyptian, 362-68; embossed
metal, 810n.10; Greek, 374, 379,
381; Ionic, 782-84, 786-87;
Median, 348-49; metal in, 376,
810n.10; in mixed style, 784-85;
painting of, 411, 423; paintings
between, 281, 443n.142;
peripteral, 802; Persian, 32, 33,
759-60; polychromy on, 423;
proportions of, 786, 803; proto-
Doric, 363-64; Roman triumphal,
287-88, 807-9; as support,
642-44; of Tabernacle, 292-93;
wood, 371, 653. See also Doric
columns
column axis, 765, 768
column-borne gabled roof, 764
column handles, 547
column orders, 785—86; definition of,
362
column-shaft monolith, 793
comets, 98n.13
composite handles, 547
compressed panels, 631
compressive strength: of stone, 727;
of wood, 652
conchylium colors, 235
Concord, Temple of (Rome), 807
Concordia, Temple of (Agrigentum),
WET
congruent motives, 630
conoid, 527, 528
Conrad de Huse, 521
consecration medallions, 298-99
consoles, 632, 682
Constantine the Great, Roman
emperor, 415, 847, 891n.45
containers, 470, 471-95; forms of,
472-95; in nature, 470-71; varia-
tions in, 472. See also specific
types
content authority, 96
conterie ware, 598
Conti, Niccolo dei, 859
contrasting effect, 631
cooling vessels, 487, 522
coppo. See containers
cordovan, 179
Corinthian abacus, 799, 800
Corinthian capitals, 799, 800, 802
Corinthian columns, 381, 389,
799-800, 802, 803, 820n.123
Corinthian crown, 800, 802
Corinthian monuments, 802, 804
Corinthian style, 799-807
Corinthian temples, 389, 804-5
Corinth school of sculpture, 845
cornice bearers, 639
cornice feet, 639
cornu, 517-18
Coroebas of Athens, 610n.14
corona, 536, 743
Correggio, 532
corsae, 632
corselet, 830
corsets, 828
cortina, 476, 537, 538
Coste, Pascal, 349
Cotta, Johann Friedrich, 25
cotton, 190-91, 193, 194-96
couches, 661, 665
counterpressure, 728, 729
courtyard walls, Chinese, 260-61
Cousin, Jean, 344, 860
cover(s), 123-53; ceilings as, 130-31,
146-53; development of principle
of, 352; earliest use of, 123; floor
dressings as, 130-46; general-
formal factors in, 124-27; purpose
of, 123; right and left of, 124; sur-
face of, 123-24; surface ornamen-
tation of, 127-30; top and bottom
of, 124; wall dressings as, 128-30.
See also specific types
cracked porcelain, 615n.66
Crassus, Lucius, 410
crepido, 632
Cretan school of sculpture, 844
crocheting, 221
Croesus, king of Lydia, 844
 Index
Cronius (gem carver), 839
crossbars, 641
cross bench, 675
crosscut fillets, 655
cross-stitch, 228, 229-30
crown (architectural): in ashlar struc-
ture, 737, 743; of Athenian archi-
trave, 911; Corinthian, 800, 802;
of doorframe, 669; Doric, 771; as
symbol, 630; of tripod, 640-41
crown (royal): of Agilulf, 891n.44; of
Theodolinda, 891n.44
Crystal Palace (London), 13, 14, 47
crystals, 596, 598, 599, 600; propor-
tionality in, 90
Ctesias (historian), 298, 312, 320
cucurbit, as basic form, 470-71
cuirasses, 220, 221, 830
culot, 538
Cuneo, Alessandro Alberico, 842
Cursor, Lucius Papirius, 285
curtains, 278, 669, 716n.37. See also
tapestry; textiles
Curtius, Ernst, 389
Curtius Rufus, Quintus, 269
cushion motive, 798, 817n.77
cut-glass vases, 597
Cuvier, Georges, 26
cyathus, 497, 524
cyclopean blocks, 729
cyclopean walls, 369, 742, 746n.4
cylinder, as ceramic form, 528
cymatium, 771, 786, 800
cymbium, 506-7
Cypselus, tyrant of Corinth, 490
Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, 759,
809n.9
Cyzicus, temple at, 388, 399, 734
cziro. See containers
Daedalid school of sculpture, 844
Daedalus (sculptor), 844, 890n.32
Dagobert, throne of, 664, 892n.48
Dagobert II, king of the Franks, 851,
892n.49
Daly, César, 668
damascened band glass, 603
damascening, 830, 874, 881-82,
896n.77, 899n.120
damask, 209
Damiano da Bergamo, 722n.113
Damophilos (sculptor and painter),
385
Daphnis of Miletus, 794
961
Darwin, Charles, 1, 27, 53, 57n.38
Dasypodius, Konrad, 897n.85
Davis, John Francis, 591
dealbatio, 781
decastyle plan, 765
decoration: continuous, 647n.10;
Renaissance, 701—4; surface,
872-87. See also specific types
decoration of vessels, 529-34; in
archaic style pottery, 568-69;
Chinese, 615n.66; figurative,
565-66, 610n.19; in Hellenic
style pottery, 571-72
defensive dressing, 825
defensive weapons, 827
deinos, 519-20, 556n.33
Deioces, king of the Medes, 348
De la Beche, Henry Thomas, 323
Delacroix, Eugéne, 150
Delaune, Etienne, 897n.85
Della Robbia, Luca, 323, 578, 579,
857, 858
Delli, Dello di Niccolo, 701
Delphi, temple at, 391, 392
Demeter, Temple of (Paestum), 772
Demetrius of Phaleron, 817n.73
Demetrius Poliorcetes, king of
Macedonia, 197
Democritus, 237
density, of metals, 825
Desiderio da Firenze, 487
Desiderio da Settignano, 859
Desiderius (abbot), 856
destination, framed image as, 632
determination, principle of, 626, 630,
631
Diadochi (successors of Alexander the
Great), 663
Diana, Temple of (Ephesus). See
Artemis, Temple of (Ephesus)
Diana, Temple of (Stymphalis), 391
diaphragmata, 634
diatoni, 751n.21
diatreta, 597, 603
Didron, Adolphe Napoléon and
Edouard, 494, 505, 699, 721n.112,
866
Didymaeum (near Miletus), 794
die-cutting, 839-40
Diéterle, Jules-Pierre-Michel, 45, 595
Dietrich, Johann Christian, 593
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 38-39
dimita, 216, 217
ding, 492
Dinocrates (architect), 401
Diodorus Siculus, 320, 347, 348
Diogenes, cask of, 472
Dionysius the Elder, 839
Dionysius the Younger, 839
Dionysus, decoration of Dresden
Hoftheater and, 51, 66n.166
Dionysus, Temple of (Teos), 808
Dioscorides (gem carver), 839
Dipoenus (sculptor), 844, 891n.36
dipteral plan, 765
directional unity, principle of, 545
direction of movement, 90-91; in ani-
mals, 92; authority of, 95-96; in
ceilings, 147—53; as condition for
beauty, 83; in floor dressings, 131,
138-46, 907; in seams, 159-60; in
wall dressings, 129-30
disci, 483
Doges’ Palace (Venice), 859
dolium, 472; handles of, 545; vs.
other vessel types, 472, 474, 476,
480, 585
Donaldson, Thomas Leverton, 421,
422, 423
Donatello, 484, 857, 858, 890n.28
door(s), 669-70; Chinese, 262; cur-
tains as, 278; frames, eurythmy of,
86; Greek, 331; metal, 328-32,
670, 858, 894n.60; Roman,
331-32; temple, 669, 670; wood,
metal dressing on, 328-32
Doric abacus, 769, 771, 773, 775,
776, 779, 786
Doric capitals, 769, 770, 771, 776,
779, 800
Doric columns: in Attic-Doric style,
779, 786; in developed Doric style,
775; features of, 769; fluted,
371-72; in lax archaic-Doric style,
771, 772; in pre-Doric style,
768-70; in proto-Doric style,
363-64; in severe Doric style, 773;
slender, 786
Doric crown, 771
Doric cyma, 40, 41
Doric echinus, 732, 762, 769, 770,
771, 773, 775, 786, 800
Doric guttae, 372, 769, 772, 781
Doric-Ionic-Corinthian temple, 791
Doric rock facades, 770, 811n.14
Doric rock tombs, 770, 811n.14,
813n.31
Doric seams, 159
 Index
Doric style, 763-81; Alexandrian,
780-81; in Asia Minor, 375; devel-
oped, 774-79; development of,
763-64; lax archaic, 771-73;
proportions in, 765—68; severe,
773-74. See also Attic-Doric style;
lonic-Doric style; pre-Doric style
Doric style tectonics, 661
Doric temples, 762, 765, 768-81,
818n.84
double glass, 603-4
dragons, in Chinese architecture, 263,
264
dragon’s blood (resin), 389, 422, 423,
459n.327
drama. See theaters
drapery (clothing): free, in Greece,
239-41; satin, 213. See also
clothing
drapery (furnishing), 273-303; in
China, 259; proportionality of,
130. See also tapestry
Dresden Gallery, 7, 8, 41, 42, 731
Dresden Hoftheater, 6, 7, 10, 51, 52,
66n.166
dressing(s): in Asia Minor, 368-76;
in Assyria, 312-46, 378; attached,
769; in Babylonia, 346-48; in
Chaldea, 303-12, 378; in China,
255-64; in Christian West,
415-19; defensive, 825; in East,
419; in Egypt, 354-68, 378; gold,
826-27; in Greece, 50, 368-400;
in India, 264-71; interior, 669;
in Judaea, 349-54; as mask, 50,
438n.85; meanings of term, 50; in
Media, 348-49; in Mesopotamia,
271-77; metallic, 825; in monu-
mental decoration, 288; in New
Zealand, 254-55; in Persia, 349;
in Phoenicia, 349-54; principle of,
243, 530, 740; principle of, influ-
ence on style in architecture and
arts, 242-429, 438n.85; in Renais-
sance, 419-20; in Rome, 400-415;
seams in, 155; Semper’s first artic-
ulation of, 12; Semper’s theory of,
vili, 49-50, 65n.154; stone,
736-37, 755; superfoetation of,
290; timber construction, 653. See
also floor dressings; wall dressings
drinking horns, 471, 517-18
drinking vessels, 470, 485, 487,
517-24
962
Droysen, Johann Gustav, 424
Dubois, Gilles, 593
Dubois, Robert, 593
Dubois Maisonneuve, A., 487
Duccio di Buoninsegna, 895n.60
ductility: of glass, 600; of metal,
825-36
Dufeu, Constant, 412
Dupré, Guillaume, 841
Diirer, Albrecht, 213, 841
Dutthagamani, king of Ceylon, 267
dwellings: Egyptian, 668; Greco-
Italic, 665-66; half-timber,
679-88; interior structure of,
668-69, 670; rubber as covering
for, 185; Scandinavian, 674-78;
Swiss, 689-92, 718n.78, 719n.82;
Tuscan-Roman, 667
dyeing, 232-36; ancient methods of,
234-36; chemistry of, 233; of cot-
ton, 195; of flax, 193-94; of hides,
232; of human skin, 171-72, 254,
255; marine organisms in, 235; vs.
painting, 327; plants in, 232, 236;
of rubber, 182, 184-85; of wool,
198-99, 234, 235
ear-shaped handles, 551, 558n.81
earthen walls, 756
earthenware, 563, 580-90, 614n.60
ébauchage, 608n.7
Ecbatana, citadel at, 348-49
ecclesiastical buildings. See churches;
temple(s); specific cathedrals
ecclesiastical furniture, 671-73, 674,
698
ecclesiastical metalwork, 853
echinus: Doric, 732, 762, 769, 770,
771, 773, 775, 786, 800; swell of,
733
edging: colors in, 137; with toothed
circular segments, 125-26
education, Semper’s discussion of,
73-75. See also Schools of Design
egg, as basic form, 470-71
egg-and-dart motif, 40, 41, 87, 116,
353
Egypt: archaeological study of, 21;
influence on Greece, 361-62;
influence on Rome, 400-401;
polychromy in, 366, 367
Egyptian animal masks, 174-75
Egyptian architecture: Mesopotamian
style and, 271-72; roofs in, 647n.1
Egyptian art: Assyrian art and, 28;
incrustation in, 244
Egyptian ashlar structure, 755
Egyptian column orders, 362-68
Egyptian damascening, 881
Egyptian dressings, 354-68, 378
Egyptian dwellings, 668
Egyptian embossed work, 872
Egyptian engraved work, 873
Egyptian furniture, 654, 712n.4, 713
Egyptian glaze, 608n.7
Egyptian masonry, 726
Egyptian monuments, canopies on,
281
Egyptian netting, 220-21
Egyptian paneling, 713n.9
Egyptian porcelain, 584
Egyptian pottery, 566
Egyptian pressed decorations, 872
Egyptian pyramids, 355-59, 726, 740
Egyptian sculpture: clothing and,
237-38; leather and, 176-77
Egyptian stone tectonics, 763
Egyptian stone walls, 755-56
Egyptian substructures, 742
Egyptian temples, motive of, 249
Egyptian textiles: cross-stitching of,
230; dyeing of, 233, 234;
embossed leather, 176-77; shirts,
241; silk, 201; tapestries, 279, 281;
wool, 196-97, 234
Egyptian tombs, 359-62, 912
Egyptian vessels: baskets, 489, 490;
earthenware, 586; flasks, 515;
kraters, 476, 477; lamps, 503-4;
lid of, 552; pitchers, 511; situla
(pail), 36, 37, 468-70, 488, 498;
spoons, 496-97; tubs, 486; urns,
474-75
Egyptian wall dressings, 360-61
Egyptian wreaths, 162n.1
Elers, David, 588
Elers, John, 588
El Hymer (near Babylon), 308
Ely Cathedral, 695
embasis, 844
emblems, 481, 483, 536
embossing: in architecture, 810n.10;
on enameled gold, 292, 447n.192;
of gold medallions, 841; of metal,
872-73; and pottery, 565; proper-
ties of metal and, 111. See also
empaestics
embroidery, 228-32, 833; base mate-
 Index
rial for, 230-31; canvas, 232; in
China, 259-60; colored, 230; defi-
nition of, 228; flat, 228, 259-60;
framing in, 286; free ornamental,
231; historical motifs in, 206; of
Mesopotamian textiles, 273-76;
vs. painting, 286-87; relief, 228;
satin as, 211; on silk, 206-7; of
tapestries, 275, 276; vs. weaving,
230
empaestics: and architecture, 328,
725, 784; and Assyrian furniture,
335, 337, 339, 665; and colossal
statues, 251-53; earliest uses of,
291, 292; in Mesopotamia, 335;
and the ring system, 828. See also
embossing
empathy, Semper’s influence on
theories of, 39
emplecton, 741, 749n.13, 750n.21
enamel coating, of ceramics, 579
enameling, 830, 875-80; vs. dyeing or
painting, 327; in Egypt, 367; gems
and, 397; on gold, 292, 877; on
silver, 367; wax, 322
enamel jewels, 878
enamel painting, 876-78
enamel vessels, 484, 612n.28,
616n.77
encaustics, 322, 609n.7, 875
encencier, 494
enclosure, spatial: in China, 257-62;
eurythmy and, 86; floors and,
130-31, 146; origins of, 247-48;
surface ornamentation and, 127,
152, 529; walls and, 130-31, 248
encrusted glass, 604
England: enamel decoration in,
898n.102; fur in, 178-79; metal-
lurgy in, 841; wool in, 200
engobage, 582
engobe, 608n.7
engraving, of metal, 830, 842-43,
873-75
Epaminondas (Theben general), 757
épaule, 542
epichysis, 512-14
epistyle(s): sculpture of, 372, 373,
374, 628; of Tuscan temple, 666,
667
Erechtheum (Athens), 798-99; cary-
atid porch of, 744
Eschenbach, Wolfram von, 212
étagére, 844
Nos:
etching, of metal, 830, 842, 864,
899n.120
Etruscan atrium, 627
Etruscan candelabras, 639
Etruscan couch, 634
Etruscan embossed work, 872
Etruscan engraved work, 873-74
Etruscan furniture, 338, 661
Etruscan jewelry, 832
Etruscan pressed decorations, 872
Etruscan reliefs, 373-74
Etruscan roofing, 667
Etruscan substructures, 744
Etruscan tomb cones, 743
Etruscan vessels: bowls, 482; flasks,
515; hydria, 469, 502; kraters,
476, 477; lamps, 504, 507-8; lids
of, 552; pails, 498, 500; urns, 474,
475
Etruscan weapons, 829
Etrusco-Roman well pail, 499
Ettlinger, Leopold, 25
Etudes céramiques (Ziegler), 527
Euripides, 279-80, 282, 294,
719n.83, 811n.19
eurythmy: authority of, 92-93; defi-
nition of, 86; modifications to,
86-87; in plants, 88-89; and stone
construction, 728, 729; symmetry
and, 86, 87, 92
Eusebius of Caesarea, 890n.34
Evans, John, 27
excipient, 877-78
fabrics. See textiles
faces, ashlar, 731-34
faience, 563, 578-80
faience fine, 580-84
Falcandus, Hugo, 207, 215, 217
Faraday, Michael, 422
Farnese bowl, 482
fasciae, 632, 633, 688, 834
fastigium, 626, 848
favissae, 315
feathers: headdress of, 29, 122, 123;
string of, 114
feldspar, 591, 594
Felkener, E., 818n.91
Fellows, Charles, 372, 818n.91
felt, 173, 226; woolen, 190, 197, 198,
199, 226
fence weaving, in New Zealand, 254
fercula, 287
Fergusson, James, 326
festive celebrations: in churches,
302-3; Greek, 284, 288; and mon-
umental art, 249, 284-85; Roman,
284-86, 288, 289; tapestries for,
283-302; tents at, 290-97;
theaters in, 297-98
feu de moufle, 583
fibers, 189-217; classification of,
189-90; cotton, 194-96; flax,
191-94; silk, 200-217; wool,
196-200; writings on, 191
Fiedler, Conrad, 49, 54n.3
filigree, 831-33, 861, 864, 873, 880
filigree glass, 601-2, 604, 620n.113
filling vessels, 470, 471, 517-24
Finiguerra, Maso, 842, 875
fireplace decorations, 861
firing: of ceramic objects, 562,
609n.7; original use of, 323-24
fish, proportionality of, 95
flags, 118, 119
Flaminius, Titus Quinctius, 289
Flanders, wool in, 199-200
Flandin, Eugéne, 325, 349; engraving
by, 30
flasks, 489, 514-17, 542, 544; lid of,
55)3)
flat stitch, 207, 211, 228-30
flax fibers, 191-94
flint glass, 618n.91
flint-glass glaze, 594
floats, paintings on, 286
floor beams, 685
floor dressings, 130-46; Assyrian,
138, 139, 143; carpets as, 131, 138,
282-83; ceilings and, 146-47;
centerpoint of, 131, 141-43, 144;
color of, 134-38; direction in, 131,
138-46, 907; Greek, 143-45;
hems in, 140—41; historical motifs
in, 143; imitative ornamental treat-
ment of, 132-34; marble, 410;
Roman, 145-46; tapestry as,
282-83; top and bottom in, 131,
138, 146; trim of, 141, 907, 909;
vegetal ornaments in, 132-34,
138-39
Floridi, Lucantonio, 480
flutes, on columns, 771, 773, 775,
810n.10, 814n.37
flying buttresses, 417, 683
folding, of metal, 338-39
folding chair, 715n.25
fondant, 591
 Index
forging: architectural elements and,
866-72; discovery of, 863-64;
properties of metal and, 111;
weapons and, 864-66
formation: determinants of, 83, 89;
principle of, 83-85
Fortuna Virilis, Temple of (Rome), 796
Forum (Rome), festive decorations at,
284-85
foundation, structural: canons of,
729; circular, 739; influences on,
738-39; polygonal, 739; rectangu-
lar, 739-46; structure of, 726; of
temples, 726-27
fountain bowls, 485
fountains, 849, 859-60, 862,
892n.47
fown, 217
frame(s): antepagment as, 404; in
ashlar structure, 731-34; with
corresponding filling, 624-26; in
embroidery, 286; eurythmy of, 86;
functional purpose of, 628, 632,
633; height and depth of, 633;
horizontal, 633; integrating with
supports, 646; as protection
against shrinking wood, 656-57;
as protection against warping
wood, 655-56; structural purpose
of, 628, 632, 633; upright rectan-
gular, 630-33; upright triangular,
626-30; vertical, 626-33. See also
lattice(s)
France: education in, 74; Gothic style
in, 702
French ashlar structure, 733
French cast metal, 888
French damascening, 882, 899n.121
French enamel decoration, 876,
877-78, 880, 894n.56, 898n.102
French furniture, 706, 707, 722n.115
French gilding, 899n.127
French metallurgy, 841, 860, 861, 862
French textiles: lace, 224; satin, 212;
wool, 200
French wood carvings, 722n.113
fringe, 126
frontispiece of Nero (Rome), 806
Fuhlrott, Johann Karl, 27
Fulvius Nobilior, Marcus, 289
funeral pyres: decoration of, 298-301;
of Hephaestion, 299, 315
funeral rites, ceramics used in, 468,
475
964
funnels, 470, 500-502, 517-24; bell-
shaped, 544; in nature, 471
fur: as floor dressing, 140; as raw
material, 173-75, 177-80; seams
on, 154-55; trade in, 178
furnishings: Assyrian, 333-46; cast-
metal, 889; Chinese, 654;
ecclesiastical, 671-73, 674, 698;
Egyptian, 654, 712n.4, 713;
Etruscan, 338; Gothic, 704-5,
722n.115; Greco-Italic, 660-65;
medieval, 671-73; metal in,
335-39; mobility of, 339-40, 343;
vs. monuments, 339; motives for,
336-39; movable domestic, and
monumental construction, 623,
624, 652; Renaissance, 701-8,
721n.113, 722n.115; secular, 673,
674; symbolism of, 337, 340-45.
See also specific types
furniture. See furnishings
futurists, 80-81
gable(s): Assyrian, 333, 379, 392,
760; Byzantine, 848; decoration
of, 392, 677, 690, 691, 789; Doric,
375, 645, 760; of rock portals,
789, 790; in temples, 392, 626,
760, 770, 777, 778; in timber
architecture, 684, 685, 696, 709;
as vertical triangular frame,
626-27, 628, 637
gable roofs, 333, 623, 627, 683, 685,
764
Gage, John, 484
Gagin, Philippe, 183
Gailhabaud, Jules, 866
Galdhals, Jakob, 841
Galerie d’Apollon (Paris), 150-51
galleries, in timber architecture,
711n.1, 719n.80
Gallo-Roman vessels: bowls, 483;
pails, 500; pitchers, 511
Gau, Franz Christian, 4, 21, 22, 103,
244
Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 4
Gauthier furniture, 708
geisiphores, 639
geisipodes, 639
gems, 396-97, 597, 598; carving of,
839-40
genus doricum, 786
Gerhard, Eduard, 501, 510
German armor, 889n.14
German damascening, 882, 899n.121
Germanic tribes, timber architecture
of, 673-74
German metallurgy, 841, 843, 852,
859-60, 861
German textiles: fur and leather, 177;
satin, 212; wool, 199, 200
German wood carvings, 722n.113
Germany: Gothic style in, 702;
half-timber buildings in, 681-88;
Renaissance in, 859-60;
Romanesque style in, 699
Gervase of Tilbury, 518
Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 857, 858
Giambologna. See Giovanni da
Bologna
Giedion, Sigfried, 49
gilding, 584, 882-87; Chinese,
615n.66; light, 616n.73; Roman,
411, 412, 899n.127
Giotto, 858
Giovanni da Bologna, 857, 862
Giuliano da Maiano, 721n.113, 859
Giza, pyramids of, 355-56, 357
Gladbach, Ernst Georg, 688
glass, 596-606, 917; blowing,
600-606; bubble, 619n.109,
620n.118; carving figures and
ornaments in, 598; chalices, 522,
523; cutting and grinding of, 597;
damascened band, 603; as decora-
tion, 596, 597; double, 603-4;
ductility of, 600; early use of, 596,
597; filigree work, 601; as hard
material, 596-99; mirrors,
618n.91; molded, 599-600, 604;
mosaic, 601; painting on, 603; and
popularity of precious metal vessels,
847; in Rome, 414; sky as, 163n.11;
as soft material, 600-606; stained,
417-18; threads, 601-2
Glaucias of Aegina, 845
Glaucus of Chios or Samos: as inven-
tor of soldering or welding, 338,
714n.21, 843-44, 864, 890n.34,
895n.71; krater by, 659, 714n.21,
844, 895n.67
glazes: on archaic style pottery, 568;
colored, 582; coloring over, 583;
coloring under, 582; of earthen-
ware, 586-87, 589, 608n.7;
Egyptian, 608n.7; flint-glass, 594;
in Hellenic style pottery, 569-70;
lead, 562, 575-77, 579, 581,
 Index
611n.20; of Roman pottery, 574;
stone, 584-85; on tiles, 319-23;
tin, 579, 580
glyptics, 397, 598, 725, 837, 840
gobblin, 487
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 34, 78
gold: damascening of, 881-82; dress-
ings of, 826-27; enameling of,
292, 367, 397, 603, 877, 878, 879;
properties of, 825-26, 831. See
also chryselephantine sculpture;
gilding
gold, as architectural dressing: in
Alexander’s tent, 294, 296, 396;
in Babylonia, 279, 314, 328; in
China, 261, 262, 263, 264; devel-
opment of, 396, 827; in Egypt, 414;
in India, 267, 269; in Media, 348,
759; medieval, 851; in Nero’s
Golden House, 399, 414, 446n.186;
in Rome, 331, 670; in Tabernacle
of Moses, 291, 292, 293; in
Temple of Solomon, 352-53, 391
gold breastplates, 291, 826, 829
gold brocade, 208-11, 216, 433n.28
gold coins, 839, 840
gold furniture: beds, 279; Byzantine,
665, 671, 848; coffins, 300, 663;
couches, 298, 663; thrones, 267,
300, 671, 851
gold jewelry, 308, 831, 833, 844
gold mask, 826
gold medallions, 841
goldplating, 291
gold saltcellars, 494, 495
goldsmiths: Byzantine, 665, 847, 848;
early Greek, 440n.89, 826, 846;
medieval, 851; Renaissance, 521,
853-54, 858, 877, 885, 893n.56;
Roman, 847; use of ceramic forms
by, 484, 487, 488, 521
gold thread: in architecture, 388, 399,
734; in ceramics, 367, 591; in
metalwork, 833, 881; in textiles,
137, 197, 198, 208-10, 211, 259,
433n.278, 834
gold utensils, 852, 894n.57
gold vessels: bowls, 519, 880; chalice,
878-79; colossal, 844; drinking
horns, 518; incense pan, 454; jug,
894n.57
gold votive garlands, 299, 826
Goller, Adolf, 38, 63n.116
Goodyear, Charles, 182
965
Gore House (London), 723n.19, 873, festive celebrations in, decorations
897n.87 for, 284, 288; incrustation in, 243,
Gorgasos (sculptor and painter), 385 378-79; influence on Rome, 400;
Gothic altars, 858 monuments plundered by, 289; old
Gothic ashlar structure, 749n.7 style in, 380-85; perfected style in,
Gothic chandelier, 854 385-94; polychromy in, 244,
Gothic churches, 678-79 245-46, 379, 394-400; potter’s
Gothic furniture, 673, 702, 704-5, wheel in, 566-67
T2205 Greek architecture: eurythmy in, 86;
Gothic incense pans, 494 tectonic principle of, 645
Gothic lamps, 508 Greek art: Assyrian art and, 28; bar-
Gothic lattice, 636, 683 barian art and, 242-43; dressing
Gothic metalwork, 853, 857-58, in, 243; incrustation in, 243; roots
866-72 of, 242
Gothic ornaments, 691 Greek ashlar structure, 756
Gothic rosette, 631 Greek band chain, 835
Gothic sculpture, 700 Greek canopies, 281-82
Gothic style: artistic forged metal in, Greek ceilings, 147, 148
866-72; cast metal in, 888; in Greek clothing, 159
Christian West, 416-19; in Italy, Greek coins, 839
699, 857-58; and neo-Gothic style, Greek columns, 374, 379, 381
78-79; paneling in, 697; and Greek damascening, 881, 882
Renaissance furniture, 702; and Greek doors, metal on, 331
rural construction, 685; and Greek drama, 50, 240, 279, 280
timber ceilings, 693-96 Greek dressings, 50, 368-400
Gothic substructures, 745 Greek embossed work, 872
Gothic use of gold, 827 Greek enamel painting, 876
Gothic weapons, 830 Greek engraved work, 873-74
Goujon, Jean, 860 Greek floors, direction in, 143-45
Goury, Jules, 22, 421 Greek furniture, 661-64
Gracchus, Tiberius Sempronis, 287 Greek gables, 626
grandeza, 706 Greek gilding, 883
granite: in Egyptian pyramids, Greek glass, 599
357-58; in temple at Karnak, 357 Greek interior structure, 668-70
Gravant, Francois, 593 Greek lattice, 634
gravity, 39, 91, 95, 734 Greek masonry, 727, 750n.21
Great Exhibition (London, 1851), Greek metallurgy, 838-39, 843-47
13-15; Caribbean hut at, 13, 14, Greek mythology, 368
44, 666; Crystal Palace of, 13, 14, Greek oligochrome pottery, 567-73
47; Indian windows at, 270; New Greek paneling, 713n.9
Zealand pas at, 255; textiles at, Greek pressed decorations, 872
254 Greek scalpture, 838-39
Greco-Italic pottery, 564 Greek sculpture, evolution of materials
Greco-Italic stone tectonics: begin- for, 251-53, 844-47
nings of, 761-63; Corinthian, Greek slingshot projectiles, 16, 45,
799-807; Doric, 763-81; Ionic, 46, 47
782-99; Roman triumphal, 807-9 Greek stone tectonics, 758. See also
Greco-Italic tectonics: and domestic Greco-Italic stone tectonics
furnishings, 660-65; and timber Greek stone walls, 756
architecture, 665-66 Greek substructures, 351, 741, 742
Greece: archaeological study of, Greek temples, 50, 279, 280, 743-44.
21-22; Asia Minor and, 368-76; See also specific orders; specific
Asian influence on, 395-400, 408; temples
Egyptian influence on, 361-62; Greek tents, 294-97
 Index
Greek textiles: free drapery, 239-41;
silk, 201-2; tapestries, 279-80,
281-82; wool, 197
Greek vessels: bases of, 535; bowls,
481-82, 485; decorative attributes
of, 530, 568-69, 571-72; flasks,
516; general character and form of,
568, 570-71; handles of, 548, 551;
hydria, 36, 37, 468-70, 501-2;
lamps, 503, 508; lids of, 552;
materials and techniques for,
567-68, 569-70; mouths of, 544;
necks of, 540-41; pails, 498-99;
pastes for, 562; pitchers, 513;
spoons, 496, 497, 498; tubs, 486,
487, 556n.32; urns, 475, 476
Greek wall paintings, 245-46,
385-86, 394-400
Greek weapons, 829
Greek wreaths, 161n.1
Gregory of Tours, 674
gres, 567
Grimm, Jacob, 53
Grosso, Niccolo, 896n.83
guilloche, 318, 628, 633
guipure lace, 223
gum elastic. See rubber
gussets, in knit garments, 221
guttae, Doric, 372, 769, 772, 781
guttus, 512-14, $57n.51
haematinum, 621n.122
Hagia Sophia (Istanbul), 331-32, 848
half-timber buildings, 679-88
Halicarnassus: mausoleum at, 801;
palace at, 388, 392
Hancock, Thomas, 182
handle(s): as accessory design motive,
471; of amphora, 474, 548; angle
of, 558n.82; bow, 546; composite,
547; ear-shaped, 551, 558n.81;
horizontal, 545, 547, 548, 549; of
kraters, 478, 547, 548; stirrup,
547; strut, 547; symmetrical, 545,
548; thumb support on, 558n.81;
vertical, 545, 546, 547, 548, 549;
of vessels, 545-52
hard-paste porcelain, 590-93
harmonia, 288
Harpagus Monument (Xanthus), 372,
819n.93
Harpy Tomb (Xanthus), 372, 773,
787, 790
Hasenauer, Karl von, 10
966
hatching, in metal, 842, 875, 887
Hawaiian textiles, and sculpture, 255
headdresses, of feathers, 29, 122, 123,
174
headpieces, 28, 29, 122, 140, 174, 682
hearth, 666, 675, 726-27; ceramics’
association with, 13; as elementary
motive, 12
Heber, Reginald, 270-71
Heeren, Arnold Hermann Ludwig, 4,
201
Hefner, Jakob Heinrich von, 213
hegemon, 627, 637, 683
Heideloff, Carl Alexander von,
715n.28
height-to-length ratio, of ashlar struc-
ture, 737, 749n.7
Heine, Heinrich, 81, 276
Hellenic style pottery, 569-72
helmets, 28, 29, 44, 122, 830,
895n.67
Helmschmied, Koloman, 889n.14
hem(s): for ashlar structure, 729, 737;
as bands, 117, 118; in floor dress-
ing, 140-41; functions of, 140,
160-61; lace as, 225; of lid, 553
hemp, for netting, 220
Hephaestion, funeral pyre of, 299, 315
Hephaestus (metalworker), 890n.32
Hera, Temple of (Samos), 375,
786-87, 792
Heraeum (Olympia), 381
Hercules, Temple of (Agrigentum),
776
Hermann, Hermann, 421
Hermes Trismegistus, 379
Hermogenes (architect), 801, 808
Herod, Temple of (Jerusalem), 351
Herodian (historian), 299
Herodotus: on Argolic kraters, 476,
637; on Asia Minor, 368, 369; on
clothing, 241; on Egypt, 354, 356,
366-67; on fabric, 175, 193, 196;
on Median architecture, 348; on
wall dressing, 323, 347, 348, 356,
424; writings of, Kugler on, 424
Heros Kantharos, 520
Hervée, bishop of Troyes, chalice of,
$21
Hesiod, 898n.116
Hettner, Hermann, 420-21, 422, 423
Heuser, Georg, 48
hexamita, 215, 216
hieroglyphics, in Egyptian tombs, 361
Hincks, Edward, 347
Hippodamus (architect), 401, 757
historical paintings, clothing in,
239-40
historicism, 78-79
Hittorff, Jacques-Ignace, 5, 245, 412,
424
HOfer, Albert, 164n.13
Holbein, Hans, 522
Holland, metallurgy in, 841
Hollar, Wenceslaus, 521
hollow construction, 756
hollow-plate functional system, 828,
829-30
holmos, 476
Homer: on architectural decoration,
376, 711n.1; on architecture, 668;
on ceramics, 524, 556n.45, 566;
concept of barbarian lacking in,
243; on metalwork, 251, 898n.116;
on textiles, 282
homogeneity, of ceramic materials,
560-61
Honor and Virtue, Temple of (Rome),
391
Honorius, Roman emperor, 155
horns, as vessels, 471, 517-18
Horolt, Johann Gregorius, 592
house. See dwellings
human figures, in furnishings, 345
humans, prehistoric, 26-28
human skin, 171-72
hut(s): Caribbean bamboo, 13, 14,
44, 666, 680; clay models of,
609n.8; Greek, 44, 266, 665, 764;
Scandinavian wooden, 676;
Vitruvian primitive, 103, 623,
665-66
hyaloceramics, 598
hydria, 468-70, 501-2, 571
hygroscopicity, 654
Hyllos (gem carver), 839
hyperboloid, in ceramics, 489, 527,
528, 537, 538
hyperthyron, 669
hypokraterion, 477, 487
Iasus, polygonal walls near, 369
Ictinus (architect), 778
idealism, of Semper, 20, 32-34, 53
idealist aesthetics, critique of, 34-35
Ilissus, temple on the (Athens),
796-97
impagibus, 669
 Index
imperial coins, 839
imperial coronation vestments,
851-52
imperial medallions, 840
Incantada (Thessaloniki), 804
Incarville, Pierre d’, 186
incensorium, 494
incitega, 473, 536
incrustation: in Assyrian art, 311-12;
of Assyrian walls, 317, 319-23;
of clay walls with glazed tiles,
319-23; of Egyptian pyramids,
355-58; in enamel painting, 876;
in Greek art, 243, 246, 378-79; in
Roman art, 290; with stone, 312
Indian carpet patterns, 907
Indian damascening, 882
Indian enamel decoration, 880
Indian lacquering, 188-89, 911
Indian netting, 221
Indian sculpture, 265-66
Indian textiles: cotton, 194, 195; fur
and leather, 177; influence on
architecture, 264-71; satin, 211;
silk, 201; spun yarn, 219; tree bark
and bast in, 175; wool, 197
Indian timber construction, 266
Indian vessels: bowls, 484; censers,
492; pipes, 492, 493; pitchers,
514; spouts of, 544
Indian wall dressings, 265-69
indicum, 389
individualization, principle of, 83
Indo-Germanic pottery, 564
Indo-Germanic tectonics, 659-60
industrial production, artists’ role in,
76
inertia, 91, 95
Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 45
Instituto di corrispondenza archeolo-
gica (Rome), Semper and, 5, 9, 22,
25
intaglio, 873-75
intarsia, 336, 701, 722n.113
intercalation: in Christian architec-
ture, 98n.10; in eurythmy, 87
intercolumniations: Attic-Doric, 779;
Doric, 762, 788; Ionic, 788, 799,
819n.98; as unit measure, 766,
812n.25
interior structure, 668-70, 709-10
intuitive thinking, direct, 73
Ionic capitals, 762, 782-83, 784, 786,
817n.77
967
Ionic columns, 782-84, 786-87
Ionic-Doric style, 784-85, 786,
788-99
Ionic monuments, 790-91
Ionic rock facades, 785, 811n.14
Ionic rock tomb portals, 788-90,
811n.14, 813n.31
Ionic style, 782-99; in Asia Minor,
371, 375
Ionic temples, 786-87, 792-96,
818n.84
Ireland: lace in, 224; wood carvings
of, 671
iron: artistic uses of, 866; damascen-
ing, 881; gilded, 886; properties of,
863; Semper’s views on the prob-
lem of, 47-48, 49; and spatiality,
48-49; weapons, 864, 896n.76;
welding, 863-64, 895n.71
Iron Age, 27-28
isodomon, 750n.21, 756
Italian armor, 889n.14
Italian cabinet, 702, 703, 721n.113
Italian damascening, 882
Italian enamel decoration, 877, 880
Italian lace, 224
Italian metallurgy, 840-41, 842,
855-63
Italic pottery, 574-75
Italy: Gothic style in, 699, 857-58;
Renaissance in, 701, 704, 856-57,
858-59; Romanesque style in, 856,
857
ivory, inlaid in wood, 336
Jacob, Tomb of (near Jerusalem),
811n.14
Jacopo della Quercia, 859
jade, ceramic imitation of, 591,
615n.65
Jaipur, palace of rajah in, 270-71
Japanese display vases, 615n.64
Japanese earthenware, 586
Japanese lead glazing, 576
Japanese porcelain, 590
jarre. See containers
Jenney, William Le Baron, 48
Jerusalem, temples at, 351, 352-54,
741
Jesuits: in China, 257; neo-Gothicism
and, 79
jewelry, 825, 831-36, 878
Jews: dressing of Tabernacle of Moses,
291-93; dressing of Temple of
Solomon, 352-54, 391, 764,
810n.10; leather manufacture by,
175-76; use of silk by, 201
Johann of Limoges, 894n.56,
898n.103
joint decoration, architectural: devel-
opment of, 398-99, 726-27, 734,
757; Roman, 399, 404, 405-6,
411, 735, 737, 757; of temple at
Cyzicus, 388, 399, 734
joint decoration, textile, 175, 180, 228
Jones, Harford, 347
Jones, Owen, 561, 635
Josephus, Flavius: on gold dressing,
292, 353, 391; on Roman wall
painting, 286; on Temple of
Herod, 351
Josias, Christian Carl, 5
Judaea: dressings in, 349-54; stone
walls in, 755
Julien, Stanislas, 200
Juno, temples to, in Rome, 385, 808
Juno Lacinia, Temple of
(Agrigentum), 777
Le Jupiter olympien (Quatremére de
Quincy), 243-44
Jupiter Stator, Temple of (Rome), 806
Juvenal, 288
kalasiris, 241
kalathos, 487
kalpis, 501, 528
Kandler, Johann Joachim, 592, 593
kaolin, 591, 594
Das Kapital (Marx), 1
Kapodistrias, Ioannis, 5
Kardaki, columnar building at, 770
Karnak, temple at: columns of, 282;
granite in, 357
Keller, Ferdinand, 27, 896n.76
Keller, Gottfried, 43
Kensington Museum (London),
54n.7, 615n.65, 836, 897n.87,
899n.118
keras, 517-18
kettles, 472, 476, 529
kettle capital, 800
Khorsabad: color in, 325; layout of,
313-14; temple in, 743; tiles in,
321-23; wall dressings in, 314-15,
321-23
Kinnard, William, 58n.41
Klagmann, Jean-Baptiste-Jules, 595
Klemm, Gustav, 7
 Index
Klenze, Leo von, 420-21, 422, 685
knitting, loop stitches in, 221
Knoffler, Gottfried, 592
knots, 155-57, 219-21
kornies, 733
Kos (island), silk on, 201, 203
kothon, 519
kotylos, 524
koupchin. See containers
kraters, 476-80, 542, 662; base of,
538-39; handles of, 478, 547, 548;
lid of, 553
kribanos, 497
krossoi, 637
Kublai Khan, Mongol ruler of China,
264
Kugler, Franz: on polychrome restora-
tion of the Parthenon, 326; theory
of ancient architectural polychromy,
7, 13; theory of ancient architec-
tural polychromy, Semper’s attack
on, 384, 389, 392, 420-21, 422,
423-24, 463n.383
Kunkel ruby glass, 621n.122
Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna),
40
Kuyunjik, layout of, 313-14
kylix, 485, 486, 497, 521, 542
Labarte, Jules, 607n.1
Labenwolf, Georg, 860
labrum, 486-87
labyrinths, 315, 628
lace, 223-24, 434n.46, 688
lacquer(ing): Chinese process for,
185-88; definition and uses of,
185; Indian, 188-89, 911; of
leather, 179-80; varieties of, 186
lamination, 603, 607n.2, 863-64,
896n.77
lamps, 503-9, 638, 646
Landini, Taddeo, 862
language of art, 103-4, 106, 248
Larissa (Nimrud), 315
larnax of Cypselus, 490
Lartet, Edouard, 28
lattice(s): angled or curved, 636;
Chinese, 258, 259; definition of,
634; diagonal, 648n.23, 683;
dressing principle and, 110; Gothic,
636, 683; in half-timber construc-
tion, 680, 685-88; horizontal,
636, 637, 638-39; importance of,
636; metal, 831-36; origin of, 634;
968
as ornamentation, 636; as protec-
tion against warping wood, 657;
Renaissance, 636, 702; in Swiss
house, 690; vertical, 636, 637,
638, 639
lattice construction, 659-60
lattice wall, 634
latticework: Chinese architectural,
257-59, 262; textile, 110, 224, 225
Laudel, Heidrun, 35
lax archaic-Doric style, 771-73
Layard, Austen Henry: on Assyrian
artifacts in the Egyptian style, 272;
on Assyrian tent, 293-94; on
Assyrian wall dressing, 314-15,
318, 326-27; excavation of
Assyrian sites (Nineveh and
Nimrud), 25-26, 247, 251, 328,
314-15; illustration from, 24; on
sculptures at Arban, 309-10
lead glaze, 562, 575-77, 579, 581,
611n.20
leathers, 176-80
leaves, wreath of, 114, 115, 161n.1
lebes, 476
Lebrun, Charles, 150
lecythi, 515-16, 544, 557n.53, 573,
612n.26
Leleges, cyclopean walls of, 369
Lenbach, Franz, 10
Lenoir, Alexandre, 484
Leopardi, Alessandro, 859
Lepsius, Richard, 356
Lesche of the Knidians (Delphi), 387
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 34, 35
Letronne, Antoine-Jean, 245-46, 394
leukoma, 568, 573, 612n.27
Leygebe, Gottfried, 861
Licinius (mathematician), 408,
462n.367
lid of vessels, 552-53; as accessory
design motive, 471
lime mortar, 734
limestone, 779
Limoges enamel, 876, 877, 878,
894n.56
Limosin, Léonard, 898n.109
Lindenau, Bernhard August, 26
line, as band, 117
linear chain arrangements, 836
linear symmetry, 90, 93-94
linens, 192-94; lace on, 223-24
linguistic research, 103-4, 106
Lions Gate (Mycenae), 376, 761
lip of vessels, 543-45; curved, 543;
projecting, 538, 543; and stopper,
553
Lipsius, Constantin, 48
lithography, 842
Livy, 285, 287, 288
locks, decorative, 694, 870-72
Loftus, William Kennett, 25, 304,
305, 306, 308
log-cabin style, 305, 371, 718n.77
log construction, 680, 689-92
Lohapasada (monastery in Ceylon),
267-68
loincloth, 240-41
Longpérier, Henri-Adrien-Prévost de,
483
loop stitch, 221
lorication, 830
lotus calyx columns, 364-65
Louis XIV: decorative metalwork
under, 862, 873, 896n.78; furni-
ture, 706, 707, 722n.115
Louis XV: and French porcelain, 593;
furniture, 706, 707
Louvre (Paris), Galerie d’Apollon of,
150
Lubbock, John, 27
Libke, Wilhelm, 53
Lucae, Richard, 48-49
Lucan (poet), 433n.22
Lucanian krater, 547, 548
Lucanian vases, 572
lucerna, 503
Lucian (satirist), 388, 425-26
Lucullus, Lucius Licinius, 289
Ludius (painter), 409
luka, 676
Liitzow, Carl von, 54n.3
lychnos, 503
lychnuct, 504
Lycian tombs, 249, 788
Lydia, architecture of, 369-70
Lyell, Charles, 26-27
Lynch, William, 304
Lysicrates, Monument of (Athens),
537, 727, 744, 802, 804
Lysippus (sculptor), 253, 899n.122
Lysistratus (sculptor), 253
maeniana, 711n.1
Maffer, Raffaele, 384
Magna Graecia, 663, 664
Mahabharata, architecture in, 264,
441n.111
 Index
Mahastupa (stupa in Ceylon), 267
majolica, 484, 578-80
Malatesta, Paola, 840
malkaf, 709
malleability: of ceramic materials,
559-60; of glass, 600
Mancinus, Lucius Hostilius, 285
Maori tribes, woven fences of, 15-16
marble: as building material, 390-93;
coating on, 409-10; plaster imita-
tion of, 407-8; polychromy on,
392-93, 410-13, 422-23; uses of,
390-92, 410
marble sculpture, 252, 662, 844
marble tectonics, 759, 779-80
Marcellus, Marcus Claudius, 289
Marduk-nadin-ahhe, king of
Babylonia, 322
Mariette, Auguste, 21
marine organisms, in dyeing, 235
Mark Antony, 298
marl, 560, 562, 579
Marlborough House (London),
“Chamber of Horrors” at, 133
marne, 560
marquetry, 701-2
Marryat, Joseph, 607n.1
Marsuppini, Tomb of Carlo
(Florence), 859
Martial, 280, 436n.55
Marx, Karl, 1
Marzini brothers, 859
mask(s): animal, 174-75; and artistic
creation, 438n.85; dressing as, 50,
438n.85, 551; gold, 826; as handle
of vessel, 502, 551
masonry. See stone masonry
mass, effect of, 91
material(s): change of (Stoffwechsel),
250; evolution of use of, 250-53;
overemphasis of, 77; properties of,
109; Semper’s definition of, 53;
and technical products, 107; treat-
ment of, impact on style, 218-36.
See also raw materials; specific
types
materialism: naturalism as, 78;
Semper’s critique of, 35-36,
77-78, 106-7
mathematics, application to natural
science, 80
mat plaiting, 225-26
Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary
and Bohemia, 702
969
Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, 801
Mausolus, Persian satrap of Caria,
palace of, 388, 392
Maximilian Monument (Innsbruck),
859
Mazois, Charles Frangois, 244
meander, as hem or band motive, 141,
143, 145, 734, 836
medallions: ancient, 593; medieval,
840; modern, vs. ancient coins,
532; Renaissance, 840-41;
Roman, 298-99, 839-40
Media, architecture of, 348-49
medieval ashlar structure, 734-35,
736, 749n.7
medieval damascening, 882
medieval engraved work, 874
medieval glass ceramics, 598
medieval lattice, 636
medieval metallurgy, 840, 850-63
medieval paneling, 696-98
medieval pottery, 575-77
medieval substructures, 741, 742, 745
medieval tectonics, 671-98
medieval timber ceilings, 692-96
medieval use of gold, 827
medieval vessels: baskets, 491; bowls,
484, 486; decorative attributes of,
530, 531; drinking vessels, 517,
524; earthenware, 587; flasks, 517;
kraters, 478; lamps, 505, 508;
materials of, 560; pails, 500;
pitchers, 511, 514; spoons, 497;
turibula, 492-93
medieval weapons, 830
megalography, 389
Meissen porcelain, 592
melathron, 668
Melophores, Hall of (Susa), 283
memorials, and authority, 93
Mengs, Anton Raphael, 151
Mentor (sculptor), 846
mesodme, 685
Mesopotamia: tapestries of, 273-76;
textiles’ influence on architecture
in, 271-77. See also Assyria;
Babylonia; Chaldea
Messala, Marcus Valerius Maximus,
285
Messina Cathedral, 692
metal: classification of, 110, 111;
color of, 834; as decoration, 825,
826; density of, 825; as ductile
material, 825-36; forging, 863-64,
866-72; as hard material, 837-38;
properties of, 110-11, 825-26;
scalpture in, 837, 838-43; states
of, 824; use of transparent coatings
on, 292; welding, 863-64; on
wood doors, 328-32, 670; wood
or stone covered with, 291. See
also cast metal; metallurgy; specific
metals
metal armor, 826, 829, 836, 889n.14
metal bar construction, 658-59
metal belts, 829, 835
metal bowls, 480-81, 483, 484-85
metal bows, 551
metal chains, 831-36
metal columns, 376
metal doors, 328-32, 670
metal dressing, examples of, 446n.186
metal flask, 516
metal furnishings, 335-39, 345-46
metal lattices, 831-36
metallic dressing, 825
metallurgy (metalwork), 823-89;
Belgian, 861; Byzantine, 847-50,
894n.60; Danish, 841; English,
841; French, 841, 860, 861, 862;
functional systems of, 828;
German, 841, 843, 852, 859-60,
861; Gothic, 853, 857-58; Greek,
838-39, 843-47; Italian, 840-41,
842, 855-63; materials in, 110-11;
medieval, 840, 850-63; on pottery,
550-51; Renaissance, 703,
840-43, 852, 858-59; Roman,
839-40, 847; technical processes
in, 110-11; techniques for surface
decoration, 872-87; works on,
823-24
metal masks, 826
metal-scale functional system, 828
metal sculpture, 251-52
metal urns, 475
metal utensils, 482, 828
metal vessels, 574
metal wall dressings: in Asia Minor,
369; Chinese, 264; Indian, 269;
on stone, 369; on Tabernacle of
Moses, 291
metal wire, 831-36; plaiting of, 222
metalwork. See metallurgy
Metapontum, ruins at, 381, 388, 389,
772, 773, 814n.45
Meton (architect), 401
Meyrick, Llewelyn, 505
 Index
mezza majolica, 578, 580, 613n.41
Michelangelo: as armorer, 889n.14;
ceiling painting, 151, 532,
722n.113; as toreutic artist, 857
Midas, Tomb of (Nikoleia), 370
Middle East, archaeological expedi-
tions to, 25-26
Milan Cathedral, 857
millefiori glass, 604
minerals: formation of, 83-84; pro-
portionality in, 84-85; symmetry
in, 85
miniature painting, 878
minimti, 840
Minio, Tiziano, 487
Mino da Fiesole, 859
Minton, Herbert, 16
Minutoli, Johann, 358
mirrors, 598-99, 618n.91
miters, 120, 121, 122
Mithradates VI Eupator, king of
Pontus, 298
mixing vessels, 476-80
Mnesarchos (gem carver), 839
modius, 489
moiré fabrics, 217
molded glass, 599-600, 604
moldings: architectural, and textiles,
238; bead, 86; egg-and-dart, 40,
87, 116
monile, 541
Monnoyer, Jean-Baptiste, 150
monolithic altars, 727
montans, 682
Montez, Lola, 43
Montreuil, Pierre de, 419
monument(s): Corinthian, 802, 804;
festive celebrations and, 249,
284-85; vs. furnishings, 339;
Ionic, 790-91; materials used in,
evolution of, 250-53; origins of,
248-49; plundering of, 289-90,
407; theater and, 50-51. See also
specific monuments
monumental hut, 764
monumentality, 725-26
Monuments of Nineveh (Layard), 318
Morey, Charles, 182
Morey, Mathieu-Prosper, 412
mosaic(s): Egyptian, 358-59; embroi-
dery as, 228; glass, 601; origins of,
311
Moses, Tabernacle of, 291-93
motives, architectural: congruent,
970
630; influence of, 43-45; Semper’s
theory of development of, 12-13;
spatial, 48, 679
mound(s): Agar Quf, 309; at Arban,
309-10; at Bouarieh, 304;
Chaldean, 290, 304-14, 319, 739,
758; as memorial, 93; at Nippur,
308; north of Babylon, 309; at
Qal’at ash-Shergat, 309, 315; at
Sankarah, 308; tomb, 739; at
Warka, 304; at Wuswas, 304-5;
at Zibleyeh, 308-9
mounding, as elementary motive, 12
mouth of vessels, 543-45, 605
movable support, 640-44
movement, speed of, 92. See also
direction of movement
Miller, Constantin, 841
Miiller, Karl Otfried, 4, 375, 480
Mummius, Lucius, 289
Munich Glyptothek, 420-21
Muratori, Lodovico Antonio, 209
Museo gregoriano etrusco (Vatican
City), 504; bronze lamp from, 504;
Etruscan pail from, 498
Museum of Practical Art and Science
(London), 133, 167, 434n.43, 907
Museum of Practical Geology
(London), 323, 516, 608n.7
music, eurythmy in, 86
muslin, 195
mussels, in dyeing, 235, 437n.59
mychos, 668, 675
Myra, rock portal at, 790
Myron (sculptor), 845, 846
Mys (painter and engraver), 846-47,
891n.40
nankeen, 195
Native American tribes: flat stitch by,
228; seams by, 154; tree bark used
by, 175
naturalism: definition of, 34; as mate-
rialism, 78; Schelling on, 34
Neanderthal man, 27
Nebuchadrezzar II, Chaldean king of
Babylonia: statue set up by,
452n.261; wall dressings under,
308, 322, 346-48, 449n.217
neck of vessels, 540-42, 605
needlepoint lace, 223
nefs, 894n.57
Negroli, Filippo, 860, 882, 889n.14
Nemesis, Temple of (Rhamnus), 780
neo-Babylonian architecture, 346-47;
brick construction in, 449n.217
neo-Babylonian silk style, 204-8
neo-Gothicism, 78-79
Neptune or Poseidon, Temple of
(Paestum), 777
Nero, 414, 899n.122; frontispiece of,
806
net ornament, 530
netting, 220-21
New Zealand, arts of, 254-55
Nibelungenlied, 718n.70, 720n.103
niello, 830, 875, 883-84
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 43, 51
Nike, Temple of (Athens), 797
Nike, Temple of (Messene), 781
Nikoleia, tombs in, 369-70, 770
Nikosthenes (potter), 544
Nile pail (situla), 36, 37, 468-70
Nimrud: color in, 325; layout of,
313-14; wall dressings in, 314-15,
319, 328; wood in, 328
Nineveh: establishment of, 312;
European “discovery” of, 24,
25-26; statues of, 251; tents in,
293-94; tiles of, 323; walls of,
320, 323. See also Assyria
Ninus (Assyrian hero), 312
Nordic churches, 678-79
Nordic dynastic hall, 674, 675
Nordic roofs, 694-96
Nordic wood carving, 677-78
Norman-English roof construction,
694-96
Norwegian church roofs, 695
notched work, as metal decoration,
873
Notre Dame (Paris), 697
numismatics, 839, 840
Nuremberg locks, 870, 871
obsidian glass sculpture, 618n.83
Octavia, Portico of (Rome), 808
oenochoe, 510
ointment vessels, 515-16, 541
Olaf the Peacock, Icelandic chieftain,
677
oligochrome pottery, 567-73
olpe, 510
Olympian Zeus, Temple of (Athens):
ashlar structure of, 749n.7,
749n.13; construction method
used in, 351; corona of, 743-44;
floor in, 142, 143, 144; marble in,
 Index
779; substructure of, 351, 727,
741-42; summary of features of,
804
olyphant, 518
omphalos, 537, 802
Onatas (sculptor), 845
ondvegi, 675
On the Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection (Darwin), 1, 27,
57n.38
onyx glass, 604, 620n.119
opae, 667-68
Opstal, Gerard von, 861
opus antiquum, 750n.21
opus incertum, 750n.21
Opus intersectile, 713n.8
opus Phrygionium, 230
opus Phrygium, 207
opus plumarium, 207, 211, 229,
259-60
opus plumarium continuum, 211
opus quadratum, 750n.21
opus reticulatum, 750n.21
Orcagna (Andrea di Cione), 858
orcia. See containers
organic articulation, 417
Oriental damascening, 881-82
Oriental embossed work, 872
Oriental enamel decoration, 879, 880
Oriental engraved work, 874
Oriental painting, 849
Oriental patterns, color combinations
in, 136-37
Oriental principles of ornamentation,
850
Oriental velvets, 215
ornament. See decoration
Orvieto Cathedral, 721n.113
Oudenaarde, Johan van, 722n.113
Ouen, Saint, 851
Ouseley, William, 348-49
Ovid, 236, 426
ovoid, 528
oxybaphon, 479
Paccard, Alexis, 421
Paeonius of Ephesus, 794
Paestum, temples at, 772, 777, 791
pails, 468-70, 498-500
paint, chemical analysis of, 422,
427-29
painterly principle, 678
painting(s): of alabaster, 325-26;
Alexandrian style, in Pompeii, 915;
O71
Assyrian, 913; Byzantine, 849,
910; on ceilings, 150-52, 906,
909, 910; clothing depicted in,
239-40; between columns, 281,
443n.142; of columns, 411, 423;
cross-stitching and, 230; decline
of, marble and, 410; decoration
by, 691, 697-98; on doors, 670;
vs. dyeing, 327; vs. embroidery,
286-87; enamel, 876-78; glass,
603; miniature, 878; on porcelain,
593; Renaissance, 701, 702; satin’s
influence on, 213; stucco and, 384;
and timber architecture, 711n.3;
wax, 875. See also panel paintings;
wall paintings
Palermo, silk factory in, 215, 217
Palissy, Bernard, 579
Panathenaic peplos, 280, 282,
438n.70, 443n.156
Panathenaic prize amphora, 473, 474
panel(s): Assyrian, 317-18, 324, 328,
450n.231; Babylonian, 327, 347;
bronze, 269, 288, 882; of ceiling,
692; compressed, 631; Egyptian,
713n.9; Greek, 713n.9; medieval,
696-98; raised, 675; in Renais-
sance, 710; in stone, 737
paneled roof truss, 667
panel joinery: lap, 656; tongue-and-
groove, 656, 677, 697
panel paintings: in Greece, 394-400;
materials for, 394-95; polychromy
of, 394-400; wall paintings and,
245-46, 394-400
Panhellenic Zeus, Temple of (Aezani),
WD)
Panofka, Theodor, 520, 556n.33
Pantheon (Rome): columns of, 411;
doors of, 330; portico of, 806;
tubular construction in, 330-31
Panticapaeum, coffin from, 625
papal coronation, 301-2
papier-maché, 188-89
paragnathides, 121
paraison, 620n.109, 620n.118
parapetasma, 280, 281, 282, 716n.37
Parian ware, 589
Parma Cathedral, 894n.60
Parrhasius (painter), 891n.40
Parthenon (Athens), 648n.18, 727,
749n.15, 780; paint on, 412; terra-
cotta in, 380; views of, 6, 23
Pasiteles (sculptor), 252-53
passementerie, 706
Passeri, Giovanni Battista, 576,
607n.1, 613n.39
paste(s), ceramic: colored, 582; of
earthenware, 586; for faience, 579;
for fine faience, 581, 582; glass,
599; mixing, 608n.7; for porcelain,
591, 594; properties of, 559-61
patellae, 482
patera, 482, 483-84
_ patinae, 482
patriarchy, 104, 278
Paulus, Lucius Aemilius, 289
Pausanias: on curtain dedicated to
Zeus, 280; on krater at Delphi,
659, 844; on larnax of Cypselus,
452n.251, 490; on statues, 251,
895n.67; on temples and monu-
ments, 381, 386, 391, 456n.304,
666
Paxton, Joseph, 47
pearls, string of, 114-15
pedestals, 539, 745 -
pegma, 623, 628, 680
pegmata, 286, 668; furnishings as, 334
Peintures antiques inédites (Raoul-
Rochette), 415
Peisistratid substructure, 351, 741-42
Peisistratus, Athenian tyrant, 779
Pelopidas (Theban general), 757
pendent lamps, 505-6
pennants, 118
Penrose, Francis Cranmer, 422
pensiles, 711n.1
peplos: Panathenaic, 280, 282,
438n.70, 443n.156; for temple at
Lacinium, 273, 275; uses of, 278,
281, 282, 284, 328
Percy, John, 323, 608n.7
pergula, 685
peripteral column, 802
peripteral temple, 764, 765
peristromata zodiata, 273
Persepolis, capital from, 32, 33,
759-60
Persian columns, 32, 33, 759-60
Persian dressings, 349
Persian enamel decoration, 880
Persian faience flasks, 516
Persian silk, 202, 205
Persian stone walls, 755
perspective curieuse, 149
Perugia, Etruscan reliefs and objects
from, 373
 Index
perula, 488-89
Peruzzi, Baldassare, 722n.113
peryrrhanterion, 486
Petitot, Jean, 878
Petronius, 409
petuntse, 591, 616n.68
Petzold, Hans, 841
pews, 671, 672
Pfawin, 217
Pfellel, 212
Phalaris, Heroon of (Agrigentum), 791
Pheidon, tyrant of Aegina, 839
Phidias (sculptor): as founder of toreu-
tics, 846; influences on, 414, 845,
848, 898n.116; Olympian Zeus by,
899n.125; Parthenon sculptures by,
439n.84; statuary with gold or
ivory by, 826, 881, 899n.125
Phigalia, temple near, 797
Philip, Portico of (Delos), 781
philosophy: application to art, 80;
beauty defined by, 80
Philostratus the Elder: on Babylonian
palaces, 279, 327-28, 508; on
bronze panels, 269, 288, 882; on
enameling, 398, 876; on Indian
temples, 269, 882
Phoenician ashlar structure, 749n.7,
TSS)
Phoenician dressings, 349-54
Phoenician walls, 747n.4, 755
Phrygia, tomb in, 369-70, 811n.14
Phylarchus, 283, 447n.194
Piazza dell’Annunziata (Florence), 862
pierced wall, 634
pietre dura style, 598
pile-supported woven fence, 634
Pilon, Germain, 860
pinakes, 286
Pindar, 426
pinecone, Assyrian, 342
pipe clay, 580, 585
Piranesi, Giambattista, 478
Piraube, Bertrand, 896n.78
Pisa Cathedral, 749n.14
Pisano, Bonanno, 894n.60
Pisano, Giovanni, 858, 877
Pisano, Nicola, 877, 895n.61
Pisano, Vittore, 840-41
pitchers, 502, 508-12, 587
pithos. See containers
Pitti Palace (Florence), 730
Pius, column of Antonius (Rome), 287
Place, Victor, 306
O72
plaited wire, 833
plaiting, 117, 221-26
planimetric chain arrangements, 836
planimetric symmetry, 89-90, 92-93
plank construction. See timber con-
struction
plankwork, 679-80
plant motifs: in Assyrian furnishings,
340; in embroidery, 231; in floor
dressing, 132-34, 138-39
plants: dyes from, 232, 236; eurythmy
in, 88-89; proportionality in,
90-91; as raw material, 175-76;
symmetry in, 88-89; threads from,
218
plasters, 407-8
plastic, use of term, 467
plasticity: loss of, in architecture, 754;
as property of ceramic pastes,
559-60, 563
plastic treatment of stucco, 384-85
platera, 473
platinizing, 584
plemochoé, 524
Pliny the Elder: on column dressing at
temple at Metapontum, 381; on
crystal, 596, 599; on dyeing of fab-
ric, 233, 234, 236; on Egyptian
metal polychromy, 367; on glass,
596; on marble, 391, 399, 410,
411; on marble workers, 844; on
marquetry, 657; on monument
dressing, 288, 381; on painted
tortoiseshell, 414; on painting in
Curia Hostilia, 285; on ring of
Polycrates, 839; on Roman ceram-
ics, 482; on Roman goldsmiths,
847; on Roman woodcutting,
890n.30; on scalpture, 838-39; on
silver vessels, 891n.43; on statuary
sculpture, 253, 895n.67; on stone
joint decoration, 734; on temple
at Cyzicus, 388; on temple at
Ephesus, 464n.390, 819n.100; on
textiles, 178, 198, 201, 275; on
wall dressing, 245, 285, 290, 380,
385, 388; on wall painting, 388,
394, 406, 410; on walls of Chios,
399
plundering, of monuments, 289-90,
407
plurality, and memorials, 93
Plutarch, 175, 289
Pococke, Richard, 310
podium, in architectural orders, 743,
745, 746, 751n.26
poison chalice, 522
Polemon (geographer), 275
polished earthenware, 585, 590
Pollaiuolo, Antonio, 859
Pollux, Julius, 425
Polo, Marco, 264
Polybius, 284, 289, 348
polychromy: in Asia Minor, 371; in
Assyria, 318, 321, 325-27; in
Christian era, 418-19; on columns,
423; debate over, 245-46, 420-27;
in Egypt, 366, 367; in engraving,
842; in Greece, 244, 245-46, 379,
394-400; on marble, 392-93,
410-13, 422-23; in Persia, 349; on
pottery, 567, 572-73; Quatremére
de Quincy on, 242; in Rome,
410-13, 414-15; Semper’s 1834
pamphlet on, 5-7; Semper’s Die
vier Elemente der Baukunst on, 13;
on stone walls, 388; on stucco,
384, 387-89; subordination in,
137-38; on wall painting vs. panel
painting, 394-400; on walls,
387-93. See also color(s)
Polyclitus (sculptor), 826, 845, 846,
848, 881
Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, 375, 839,
844
Polygnotus (painter), 385, 387, 406,
670
polygonal blocks, 729
polygonal masonry, 728, 729
polygonal plan, 739
polylithic decoration, 407-10
polymita, 216-17
Polynesian textiles, influence on archi-
tecture, 254-55
Pompeian lamps, 504
Pompeian wall, 916
Pompeian wall decorations, 915
Pompeii, 244-45; atria in, 278
Poppelmann, Matthaus Daniel, 592
porcelain: biscuit, 594; Chinese,
588, 590-91; cracked, 615n.66;
Egyptian, 584; hard-paste,
590-93; Japanese, 590; Meissen,
592; painting on, 593; soft-paste,
593-95
porcelaine dure, 594
porcelaine tendre, 589, 594
porcelain flasks, 516
 Index
poros tectonics, 779, 787
Portico of Octavia (Rome), 808
Portico of Philip (Delos), 781
portieres, 278
Portland vase, 588, 597, 619n.100
Poseidon or Neptune, Temple of
(Paestum), 777
posts: in stone architecture, 645; in
timber architecture, 653, 655, 680,
681, 682, 683
Postumius, Aulus, 385
potationis, 518
potter’s clay, 560, 579
potter’s wheel, 557n.67, 566-67, 574
pottery: forms in, 525-29; history of,
563-77; metallurgy on, 550-51;
monochrome, 570; oligochrome,
567-73; polychrome, 567, 572-73;
sediments of Earth’s crust and,
563; use of term, 467; wax paint-
ing on, 393. See also ceramics
pouring vessels, 470, 503-17; enam-
eled, 894n.57; in nature, 471; neck
of, 541; with spout, 512-14
praefericulum, 502, 508-12
prasinum, 585
Praxiteles (sculptor), 425-26
precious stones: in Asia and Greece,
396-97; in Rome, 414. See also
gems
pre-Doric style, 768-71
prehistoric humans, 26-28
Prichard, James Cowles, 26
probolai, 637
proceres, 637, 683
prochoos, 512-14
prochus, 483, 508-12
profiling, decorative, definition of, 733
projecting girders, 681, 682
projecting roof, 667, 690
projections, lattices and, 636-37, 638
projecturae, 632
prokrossoi, 637, 738, 742
Propertius, Sextus, 280, 846
proportional axis, 85
proportionality: in animals, 90-91,
95; authority of, 94-95; as condi-
tion for beauty, 83; eurythmy’s
relationship to, 87; in minerals,
84-85; in plants, 90-91; of wall
dressings, 129-30
Propylaea (Athens), 422, 798
prothyra, 670
proto-Doric columns, 363-64
973
protyrides, 632
pseudisodomon, 734-35, 749n.13,
750n.21
pseudodipteral plan, 765, 787
psykter, 487, 522, 556n.33
Ptolemy II Philadelphus, Macedonian
king of Egypt, 283, 296-97
Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore,
$21
Pulcher, Claudius, 285
punchbowl, Semper’s design for, 884
purists, 80-81
purlin roofs, 695
purpura, dye from, 235
purpurae dibaphae, 235
Puteoli, inscription from, 667
pyramidal tapering, 742
pyramids, Egyptian, 355-59
Pyrgoteles (stonecutter), 396-97, 839
Pysel, 711n.1
Pythagoras, 379
Pythius (architect), 801
pyxes, 491
Qal’at ash-Shergat (Mesopotamian
mound), 309, 315
quadra, architectural, 743-44
Quatremére de Quincy, Antoine-
Chrysosthéme, 31, 43-44, 242,
243-44, 390
queen’s ware, 581
Quintilian, 280
quiver, 489, 491
Raffaele da Brescia, 722n.113
rafters, decorative use of: in antiquity,
627, 692; by Chinese, 263; by
Etruscans, 627; in Gothic period,
692, 693, 695, 709
Ramayana: textiles in, 177, 197, 201;
architecture in, 264, 266
ramoth, 596
Raoul-Rochette, Désiré: on Greek
wall painting vs. panel painting,
246, 286, 384, 394, 398, 443n.142;
Semper on writings by, 245, 415
Raphael, 151, 532
Ra Ubn, Egyptian ruler, 272
Rawlinson, Henry, 304, 322, 323,
334, 347
raw materials: categories of, 109-11;
consistency of finished products
with, 170-71; properties of, 109.
See also specific types
rebords, 670
recessed surface decoration, 874
rectangle, normal, 765, 768
rectangular plan, 739-46
red (color): and color contrasts,
163n.12; use of, in Oriental pat-
terns, 136, 163n.6
Redgrave, Richard: on Indian lacquer,
188-89, 911; on textiles, 210, 227,
236, 436n.56; on wall dressings,
128
Regensburg Cathedral, 859
Reinaud, Joseph Toussaint, 479
reindeer pelts, 177
Reitz, Heinrich, 841
relative strength: of masonry, 728,
729; of wood, 652-53
reliefs: Chinese, 260; Etruscan,
373-74. See also bas-reliefs
religion, and art, 98n.9
reliquaries: forms of, 301, 487, 491;
gems and medallions in, 840;
specific, 301, 381, 858, 893n.55;
veils in, 195, 202
Rémi, chalice of Saint, 521
Renaissance altars, 859
Renaissance ashlar structure, 729-30,
733
Renaissance buildings, 709-10;
Germanic, 681, 683, 685;
Scandinavian, 679
Renaissance ceilings, 710
Renaissance dressings, 419-20
Renaissance furniture, 701-8,
721n.113, 722n.115
Renaissance lattice, 636, 702
Renaissance metallurgy, 703, 840-43,
852, 858-59
Renaissance paintings, 701, 702
Renaissance panels, 710
Renaissance sculpture, 701
Renaissance style: antiquity’s influence
on, 419-20; artistic forged metal
in, 866-72; decoration in, 701-4;
engraved work in, 874-75; in
Germany, 859-60; in Italy, 701,
704, 856-57, 858-59; Saxon, 852,
856, 895n.61; wood carvings in,
722n.113
Renaissance substructures, 741, 742,
745
Renaissance tectonics, 699-710
Renaissance use of gold, 827
Renaissance vessels: bowls, 484,
 Index
Renaissance vessels (continued)
485-86; cast-metal, 887-88;
chalice, 521, 522, 524; decorative
attributes of, 530, 531; encenciers,
494; flasks, 517; kraters, 478;
lamps, 508; materials of, 560;
pitchers, 511-12, 514; tubs, 487
renones, 177
rensa, 217
reservoirs. See containers
resistance, 734; absolute, 729;
relative, 729
retables, 698
Revett, Nicholas, 22, 23
Reymond, Pierre, 495
Reynard, Ovide, 521
rhabdoi, 641
Rhaetian timber dwelling, 667
Rhenish wine goblet, 523, 524
Rhoecus (metalworker and architect),
375, 714n.21, 818n.88, 844, 845
rhyton, 501, 518
Rich, Claudius James, 25
Ridgway, John, 594
ring functional system, 828-29
Riocreux, Denis, 167, 613n.37
rivet, and seam, 159
riveting, 338-39
Rizzo, Paolo, 882
rock facades: in Asia Minor, 370-71;
Doric, 770, 811n.14; Ionic, 785,
811n.14
rock tombs: Doric, 770, 811n.14,
813n.31; Ionic, 788-90, 811n.14,
813n.31
rococo style, 592-93, 707-8, 710
Roman arches, 402-5
Roman architecture: eurythmy in, 86;
spatial creation in, 48
Roman ashlar structure, 735, 749n.7,
756
Roman atria, 277-78, 282
Roman baths, 417, 848-49, 866
Roman ceilings, 147, 416-17
Roman coins, 839-40
Roman doors, metal on, 331-32
Roman dressings, 400-415
Roman enamel painting, 876
Roman engraved work, 874
Romanesque buildings: churches,
678-79; paneling in, 696-97;
rural, 685; Swiss, 689, 690, 691
Romanesque style: in Germany, 699; in
Italy, 856,857; and sculpture, 700
974
Roman floors, direction in, 145-46
Roman furniture, 664
Roman gables, 626, 627
Roman glass, 599
Roman hearth, 726
Roman incrustation style, 290
Roman interior structure, 668-70
Roman lattice, 634
Roman masonry, 741, 750n.21, 756
Roman metallurgy, 839-40, 847
Roman pottery style, 569. See also
Greco-Italic pottery
Roman roofing, 411
Roman stone tectonics. See Greco-
Italic stone tectonics
Roman stone walls, 756-57
Roman substructures, 351, 741, 742,
744, 745
Roman tectonics. See Greco-Italic
tectonics
Roman tents, 297
Roman textiles: draperies, 277-78,
282; wool, 198
Roman timber construction, 666-68
Roman triumphal columns, 287-88,
807-9
Roman vessels: bowls, 482, 483; dec-
orative attributes of, 531; flasks,
516; hydria, 502; lamps, 504;
pitchers, 511; rise in popularity of,
573-74; spoons, 498; tubs,
486-87
Roman wall dressings, 401-13, 414
Roman wall paintings, 290, 406,
407-9
Roman weapons, 829, 830
Rome: Asian influence on, 400-401;
in Christian era, 415-19; decline
of, 413-15; Egyptian influence on,
400-401; festive decorations in,
284-86, 288, 289; Greek influence
on, 400; historical periods of,
401-2; monuments plundered by,
289-90, 407; polychromy in,
410-15; as world conqueror,
407-13
ronde-bosse, 706
roof(s): Assyrian, 333; carpentry and,
13; Chinese, 261, 263; column-
borne gabled, 764; in Egyptian
architecture, 647n.1; as elementary
motive, 12; Etruscan, 667; of half-
timber buildings, 683, 685-88; hip
or gable roof, 683; imbricated, 185;
keel or ridge connection, 695;
Median, 348; Norman-English,
694-96; of primitive hut, 666;
projecting, 667, 690; purlin, 695;
Roman, 411; rubber in, 185; of
Scandinavian manor, 677; stone,
762; of Swiss house, 690
roof truss, 667, 692, 693, 918, 919
rope, plaiting of, 222
rosettes, 159, 628, 631
Ross, Ludwig, 371
Rottmann, Carl, 395
rubber, 180-85, 218
rubble-stone construction, 750n.21
rubble wall, 741
Rucker, Thomas, 861
Rufinus, Flavius, 414
ruins. See mound(s)
Rumohr, Carl Friedrich von, 34, 35,
53, 72, 439n.85
Russian leather, 179
rustication, of ashlar, 40, 41, 42, 727,
731
sacellum, 357-58
sacrificial basket, 489
sacrificial patera, 483-84
sacrificial pitchers, 511
sacrificial spoons, 496-97
sacrificial tables, 665
sagger box, 583
Saint-Denis, vase de, 522
Sainte-Chapelle (Paris), 419
Sallust, wall of his house in Pompeii,
916
Salmasius, Claudius (Claude de
Saumaise), 201
saltcellars, 490-91, 494-95, 894n.57
Salzenberg, Wilhelm, 332
Samian glaze, 574
Samian school of sculpture, 844-45
sandglasses, 494
sandstone vessels, 584
Sangallo, Giuliano da, 722n.113
San Giorgio Maggiore (Venice),
722n.113
Sankarah, ruins of, 308
San Miniato al Monte (Florence),
693, 699, 918, 919
San Nicola in Carcere (Rome), temple
near, 796
Sansovino, Andrea, 859
Santa Caterina, Chapel of (Assisi),
ceiling painting in, 909
 Index

Santa Croce (Florence), 721n.113, 859 screens, stone, 367-68 Severus, Lucius Septimius, 299-300
Santa Maria Maggiore (Rome), 692, screen walls, in China, 260, 261 sgraffito enamel, 898n.109
699, 722n.113 sculptor’s clay, 560 shagreen, 179
Santi Cosimo e Damiano (Rome), 657 sculpture(s): Babylonian, 347; bronze, shawls, 241; cashmere, 196, 197. See
Santi Fermo e Rustica (Verona), 693, 844, 845, 849, 859; Byzantine, also peplos
920 849, 892n.48; clothing’s relation sheet metal, 825-30
San Zeno (Verona), 693, 920 to, 237-38; cross-stitching and, Shelton, Henry, 594
sapphire, sky as ceiling of, 163n.11 230; Gothic, 698, 700; Greek, shield(s): of Aeneas, 426; of Athena
Saqqara, pyramids of, 355-56, 358 844-47; Italian, 857, 858, 860; Promachus, 891n.40; in Homer,
sarcophagus, 370, 475 marble, 662, 844; origins of, 311; 447n.190, 889n.13; leather, 177,
Sardis, grave mounds at, 369 Renaissance, 701; Romanesque, 873; metal, 269, 296, 426, 551,
Sassanian bowls, 483 700; satin’s influence on, 213; 829, 830
satin, 211-14 stone vs. clay, 269 shirts, 160, 196, 240, 241
Saturn, Temple of (Rome), 796 Scyllis (sculptor), 844, 891n.36 shoes, rubber, 182, 183, 184
sauceboats, 503 seam(s), 153-61; in Assyrian furniture, shoulder piece: on lintels, 632; of
Sautuola, Marcelino Sanz de, 28 338; bands and, 118, 157, 159-60; vessels, 542
Saxon Renaissance, 852, 856, direction of, 159-60; flat stitches Shun, emperor of China, 255-56
895n.61 in, 228; hems and, 160-61; lace Sibmacher, Johann, 232
Sayn-Wittgenstein, Princess Carolyne, as, 225; linguistics of, 153-54, Sicyon school of sculpture, 845
43 164n.13; loop stitches in, 221; Silanion (sculptor), 899n.126
scabella, 279 plaiting as, 222-23; structural silk, 200-217; animal motifs on, 202,
scale, and ornaments, 532 significance of, 153-57; symbolism 203, 205, 206, 208; Chinese,
scale system, 828 of, 155-59; and symmetry, 159; 200-201, 259, 432n.22; color of,
scalpture, 837, 838-43, 860, 891n.35 transparency of, 155 208; counterfeit, 209; embroidery
Scandinavian fur trade, 178 seaweeds, in dyeing, 235 on, 206-7; vs. flax, 192; gold
Scandinavian manor, 674-78 Sebaldus Tomb (Nuremburg), 859, brocade on, 208-11, 433n.28; his-
Scandinavian pots, 564 900n.130 tory of manufacture of, 200-208,
Scandinavian roof, 694-96 Segesta, temple at, 777 430n.20; neo-Babylonian style
Scandinavian stucco pattern, 912 sekos, 357-58, 764 of, 204-8; non-Greek style of,
Scandinavian timber church, 678-79 Selinus, temples at: cellas of, 388, 200-204; patterns on, 203-4;
scapis, 669 765, 812n.24; Doric principles in, properties of, 190-91; relics of,
Scaurus, Marcus Aemilius, 410, 414 771, 773, 776; heroon, 790-91; 202-3, 433n.24; rubber imitations
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm von, 34 polychromy in, 388; proportions of, 184; satin, 211-14; uses for,
schematists, 80-81 of, 768; sculpture in, 771, 773; 201; velvet, 214-16
Schiller, Friedrich, 51 southern temple on eastern hill, Silpasastra, 270, 441n.110
Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 5, 79, 427, 778; southern temple on western silver: damascening, 881-82; enamel-
428 hill, 777; Temple of Zeus, 776 ing of, 367, 511, 562, 603, 858,
Schmarsow, August, 49 selvage, 126 877, 880; gilded, 883, 886
schools: humanistic, 74; technical, Semiramis, Assyrian queen, 348 silver, as architectural dressing: in
73-74 Semper, Gottfried: life of, 3-10; Alexander’s tent, 296; in Baby-
Schools of Design (Britain), 13, 15, 16 sketches by, 6, 46; Speckter’s por- lonia, 279, 314, 328, 347; in China,
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 39 trait of, 2; views of buildings by, 6, 264; in Egypt, 414; in Media, 348;
Schopin, Frédéric, 240 8, 41, $2 in Orient, 279, 283; in Rome, 414;
Schréder-Devrient, Wilhelmine, 43 Semper, Johanna Maria Paap, 3 in Tabernacle of Moses, 291
Schwarz, Hans, 841 Semper, Wilhelm, 427, 428-29 silver coins, 839, 840
sciences: application to art, 77-83; Seneca the Younger, 409, 427, 601 silver furniture: beds, 279, 452n.252,
in education, 73; mathematics Serapeum (shrine at Alexandria), 414 880; coffin capsule, 301; couches,
applied to, 80 seraphim, on ceilings, 148 663; of Louis XIV, 706; throne,
Scipio, Lucius, 285 Seroux d’Agincourt, Jean-Baptiste- 267; Venetian, 706, 871
scooping vessels, 469, 470, 471, Louis-Georges, 487 silver jewelry, 833
495-502 serrated style, in metal, 873 silverplating, 584, 883
Scopas (sculptor), 393 Sesostris I, king of Egypt, 357, 763 silver thread: in metalwork, 328,
scotias, on pre-Doric columns, 769 setstokkar, 675 433n.28, 833, 881; in textiles, 137,
Scottish tartan, 129 severe Doric style, 773-74 209, 210, 211, 281, 433n.33

975
 Index
silver utensils, 852, 891n.44, 894n.57
silver vessels: ampulla, 508; chalices,
520, 521, 522, 540; changing fash-
ions in, 891n.43, 894n.57; colos-
sal, 844; krater, 838; pans, 483;
punchbowl, 884; samovar, 883;
stoup, 844; vase, 483
Simon, Thomas, 841
Simonides (poet), 670
simpulum, 496, 497
sinus pera, 488-89
siparia, 275
Sipylus, walls and tumuli at, 369
Sistine Chapel (Vatican City), ceiling
paintings of, 151
situla, 36, 37, 468-70, 488, 498
Sixtus IV, Tomb of (Rome), 859
skali, 675-76
skemma, 676
skene, 764
skin, human, painting or tattooing of,
171-72, 254055
skorstein, 675
skyphos, 519-20
Slavic pots, 564
sleeping hall, Scandinavian, 676
slingshot projectiles, Greek, Semper’s
analysis of, 16, 45, 46, 47
smelting, 875-80
Smilis (sculptor), 845
snowflakes, structure of, 84, 85
societies, evolution of, 104-5
Socrates of Rhodes, 298
soft-glazed lead pottery, 575-77
soft-paste porcelain, 593-95
soldering, 251, 338, 862, 895n.71
solid masonry, 736
solium, 596, 727
Solomon, Temple of (Jerusalem), 351,
352-54
southern Italic pottery, 574-75
Spanish lace, 224
spatial motive/spatial idea: in archi-
tecture, 734—46; in Chaldean or
Assyrian ramparts, 314, 754;
eurythmy and, 86; in Nordic
wooden churches, 679; Semper’s
concept of, 48-9, 248, 314
Speckter, Otto, portrait by, 2
speculative aesthetics, 80-81, 97n.8
sphere: as ceramic form, 527, 528;
as regular natural form, 84, 92
sphyrelaton: in architecture, 374, 377;
in Assyrian bronze vessels, 346;
976
Cellini’s process as, 841; as devel-
opment of empaestics, 251, 252,
292; hollow-plate system as, 828
spinning glass, 601
spira, 743, 744, 786
spirals, 828-29, 832, 864
splicing, 339, 340
Spode, Charles, 594
spoons, 495-500
spout, 512-14, 543-45, 558n.78
spun glass, 619n.100
stability: absolute, 652, 725-26; and
proportionality, 91; of wood, 652
stables, 675, 690
Stackelberg, Otto Magnus, Freiherr
von, 473
stained glass, 417-18
stamping: of ceramics, 565, 574,
608n.7; of glass, 606; of metal,
706, 839, 872-73
standing post, structural activity of,
629
stand of vessels, 476-77, 534-40;
as accessory design motive, 471
statuary art: chryselephantine, 826;
in metal, 250-53, 845
steel coins, 839
steel helmet, 895n.67
Steinbiichel, Anton von, 487
stele, cylindrical, 642-44. See also
column(s)
stephane, 536
stereotomy (stone construction),
725-809; canons of, 729, 750n.21;
combined with timber construc-
tion, 667-68; definition of, 110;
development of ancient, 754-61;
and durability, 725; eurythmic
principle of, 728, 729; factors in
history of, 753-54; metal in,
837-38; as secondary technique,
725. See also foundation, struc-
tural; Greco-Italic stone tectonics;
stone masonry
Stilicho, Flavius, 331
stillicidium, 668-69
stirrup, 547, 861
stitches, 228-32; cross-, 228, 229-30;
definition of, 228; flat, 207, 211,
228-30; loop, 221
Stoa Poecile (Athens), 386-87
Stoffwechsel, 250-53
stokkabur, 676
stome, 503
stone: compressive strength of, 727;
Cut, 753; 759; dark, 735310
Egyptian pyramids, 355-58; metal
covering for, 291; properties of,
660; in Temple of Solomon, 354;
walls incrusted with, 312. See also
gems
Stone Age, 27-28
stone beams, 787
stone ceilings and roofs, 762
stone columns. See column(s)
stone construction. See stereotomy
stone dressings, 736-37, 755
stone glazes, 584-85
stone masonry, 725, 727-28;
isodomon, 750n.21; mounding
and, 13; relative strength of, 728;
solid, 736. See also structural parts
stone paneling: as Assyrian wall dress-
ing, 313-19, 324; textile models
for, 324
stone screens, 367-68
stone sculpture, Indian, 265-69
stone tablets, as wall dressing, 310
stone tectonics, 626, 660, 758-61. See
also Greco-Italic stone tectonics
stone walls, 754-57; polychromy of,
388
stories, as characteristic of timber
construction, 681
stoups, 500, 844, 847
Strabo, 197, 297, 759, 794
straps: as band, 116, 218; leather, 170,
176, 218; metal, 829
strength: of masonry, 728; of stone,
727; of wood, 652-53
string, 113-16; wreath as, 114, 115
structural parts, 728, 729, 734-38
strut handles, 547
Stuart, James, 22, 23
stucco: in Assyria, 318-20; on ceil-
ings, 150, 710; in Chaldea, 305,
306-7; in China, 260-61; color
decoration on, 384, 387-89; in
Egypt, 360, 366; in Greece, 380,
383-85; in India, 266-69; and
painting, 384; panel paintings on,
395; plastic treatment of, 384-85;
Scandinavian pattern for, 912;
sculpture with, 266-69, 893n.53;
wall paintings on, 318-20
style: extrinsic and intrinsic factors in,
20, 51; Rumohr’s definition of, 34,
53; Semper’s definition of, 20, 53
 Index
Style in the Technical and Tectonic
Arts (Semper): aesthetics in,
32-42; archaeology in, 21-32;
architecture in, 43-53; conceptual
scheme of, 18-21; genesis of,
11-17; prolegomena of, 18; title of,
20, 32; title page of, 19; unfinished
third volume of, 17, 51-53
style theory, art history vs., 277
substructures: ancient, 351, 741-43;
shape of, 738-46. See also struc-
tural parts
Suchsland, Friedrich E., 20
Suger, abbé of Saint-Denis, 484
Suidas, 384
Sun, Temple of the (Baalbek), 351,
741
sun-baked vessels, 562
Sunium, temple at, 780
supercilium, 536, 538, 632, 669
“Supplementary Report on Design”
(Redgrave), 128, 210, 227, 236,
911
support: integrating with frame, 646;
vs. load, 39-40; tectonic, 639-46.
See also base of vessels
surface(s): cover as, 123-24; orna-
mentation of, on covers, 127-30
surface stereotomy, 848
Susa: marriage tent at, 397; palace at,
279, 283, 347; remains of city of,
349
Swiss houses, 689-92, 718n.78,
719n.82
Sylvester I, Pope, 847, 849
symmetrical axis, 85
symmetrical handles, 545, 548
symmetry, 87-90; in animals, 89-90,
92; authority of, 93-94; as condi-
tion for beauty, 83; determinants
of form, 89; eurythmy and, 86, 87,
92; laws of, and weapons, 865;
linear, 90, 93-94; in minerals, 85;
planimetric, 89-90, 92-93; in
plants, 88-89; seams and, 159;
stereometric, 92-93; strong and
weak, defined, 85
synthetic porcelain, 593-95
Syrian walls, 747n.4, 755
syringes, 315, 741
Tabernacle of Moses, 291-93
tablinum, 668, 693, 716n.36
tabulae, 286
Sei,
tabulatum, 669, 685
Tacca, Pietro, 862
Tacitus, Cornelius, 673
taenia, 117, 121
Tafelung, 286
Talos (inventor), 610n.14
tank of vessels, 525-34
tanning, 174-76, 232, 233
Tantalus, Tomb of (near Tmolus),
740
tapestry, 273-303; animal motifs on,
276; in antiquity, 277-303; in
Babylonia, 276, 279; as canopy,
281-82; embroidery of, 275, 276;
for festive celebrations, 283-302;
as floor covering, 282-83; of
Mesopotamia, 273-76; as motive
of wall dressings, 30, 312; in
theater, 279-80; as wall, 130,
277-82; wall paintings as, 387;
weaving of, 275
tapetia, 282
tapetia alexandrina, 273
tattooing, on human skin, 171-72,
254, 255
Tavole Paladine (Metapontum),
772-73
Taxila, temples at, 269
Taylor, Isidore-Justin-Séverin, 576
teardrop vessels, 488-89, 516
technical arts: classification of,
109-11; vs. higher arts, 72-73;
influence on fine arts of, 106;
material used for, 107; purpose of
products of, 107
technical schools, 73-74. See also
Schools of Design
techniques, art, motives associated
with, 13. See also specific tech-
niques
tectonics (carpentry), 623-710; ani-
mal motifs in, 638, 671; Chinese,
262-64; definition of, 110;
Egyptian stone, 763; formal lan-
guage of, 623-24; influence on
architecture, 328, 623; interior
structure, 668-70, 709-10; materi-
als of, 651-60; medieval, 671-98;
metal dressings on wood and, 336;
purposes of, 624-46; Renaissance,
699-710; roofing and, 13; and tex-
tiles, 624; Tuscan-Roman, 666-68.
See also Greco-Italic tectonics
Telekles (metalworker), 714n.21
Telmessus, rock portal at, 789
temple(s): Attic-Doric, 779-80,
811n.18; Attic-Ionic, 796-99;
Corinthian, 389, 804-5; doors
of, 669, 670; Doric, 762, 765,
768-81, 818n.84; Ionic, 786-87,
792-96, 818n.84; peripteral, 764,
765; stone foundation of, 726-27;
timber ceiling of, 692; Tuscan,
666-67, 761, 914; walls of, 742,
756; wooden hut and, 665. See
also churches; specific cathedrals;
specific temples
tendentious, Semper’s definition of,
342
tendril work: in architecture, 269, 318,
353, 416, 419, 638; in ceramics,
531, 533, 552, 566, 615n.66;
direction of carpets and, 138-39,
141; in stained glass, Semper’s use
of, 618n.87; in textiles, 158, 216,
231-32
tensae, 287
tents: ancient ceremonial, 283, 291,
293, 294, 296; ancient festive,
290, 293-97, 396-97, 400; as
prototype for Oriental architec-
ture, 103, 104
terrace complexes: in Assyria and
Mesopotamia, 273, 304, 308, 314,
315-16; as basic motive of west
Asian architecture, 273
terrace walls: Chinese, 256, 258, 261,
264; Greek, 742
terra-cotta: dressings, for wood, 906;
in Greece, 380-85; in Rome,
404-5
terra invetria, 578
terrenes, 236
testudines, 693
Teutonic pots, 564
Texier, Charles Félix Marie, 349, 371,
898n.104
textiles: and architecture, 242-429;
auric, 208; as band, 116-23; belts,
117-18, 129, 160, 240-41; clothing
styles, development of, 238-41;
clothing styles, relation to architec-
ture, 237-38; as cover, 123-53,
218; dyes for, 232-36; as earliest
artistic technique, 113; general-
formal discussion of, 113-61; at
Great Exhibition, 254; hem of,
160-61; language of, 248; linear
 Index
textiles (continued)
and planimetric forms of, 113; as
models for stone paneling, 324;
museums for, 167; objectives of,
113; of Pacific islands, 254-55;
products of bands and threads,
218-32; raw materials for,
170-217; seams of, 153-61; as
string, 113-16; technical-historical
discussion of, 167—429; and tec-
tonics, 624; walling and, 13,
247-48; writings on, 168-69. See
also specific countries; specific
types
theaters: drapery screens in, 279-80;
festive decorations in, 297-98;
Greek, 50, 240; monumental
architecture and, 50-51; Semper’s
work on, 51
Themis, Temple of (Rhamnus), 780
thensae, 287
Theodolinda, crown of, 891n.44
Theodorus (architect), 375, 787,
818n.88, 844, 845
Theodorus (metalworker), 714n.21,
839
Theophilus (metalworker), 895n.67
Theophilus, Presbyter: on artistic pot-
tery, 576; on glass vases, 598; on
incense containers, 493; on inlaid
metalwork, 882; metal enameling
technique described by, 878-79; on
niello, 875; on painted furniture,
721n.110
“Theorie des Formell-Schénen”
(Semper), 35
Theron, Monument to (Agrigentum),
783, 791
Theseus, Temple of (Athens): archi-
trave of, 911; capital of, 905; ceil-
ing of, 906, 908; paint on, 393,
412, 421-23, 427-29; style of,
780, 811n.18
Thibaut, Bernhard Friedrich, 4
Thiersch, Friedrich Wilhelm von,
by 5)
Thomsen, Christian Jiirgensen, 27
thread(s): as bands, 117; on human
skin, 172; knots in, 219; metal, vs.
textile, 832; natural, 218; produc-
tion of, 218; yarn as, 219. See also
gold thread; silver thread
throne(s): Byzantine, 665, 861; of
Dagobert, 664, 892n.48; Hellenic,
Es)
662-63; of marble, 662; of metal,
267, 300, 671, 849, 851, 861
thumb support on handle, 558n.81
Thutmose I, king of Egypt, 584
thyromata, 669, 670
thysanoi, 637
Tiberius, Roman emperor, 618n.84
tie beam, 685, 694
tiles, glazed, incrustation of clay walls
with, 319-23
Timaeus, 282
timber ceiling, 692-96, 920
timber churches, 674, 677, 678-79
timber construction: in Asia Minor,
371; Chaldean, 305; and column
architecture, 371; combined with
stone construction, 667-68;
Greco-Italic, 665-66; Indian,
266; interior, 668-70; medieval,
673-98; and painting, 711n.3;
properties of wood and, 651-58;
Tuscan-Roman, 666-68. See also
half-timber buildings
tinaja. See containers
tin enamel, 613n.41
tin glaze, 579, 580
Tirolean house, 686-87, 709
toichos, 819n.92
tomb(s): in Asia Minor, 249, 369-71,
770, 788, 811n.14; bronze,
446n.186, 859; in Egypt, 359-62,
912; at Volterra, 740. See also
specific tombs
tomb mounds, 739
tomb plate at Bruges, 213-14, 853
tomb pyramids, 741
tongue-and-groove panels, 656, 677,
697
toreutics, 251, 253, 843-63
Torriti, Jacopo, 895n.60
torus, 117, 543, 743
Toutin, Jean, 877
trabes liminares, 715n.35
Trajan’s Column (Rome), 287; color
on, 411-12, 428-29
tree(s): bark or bast of, 175-76;
sacred, 340
triangles: downward-pointing, 629;
isosceles, 125; pendent, 629, 630;
upward-pointing, 629
triglyph, 87, 125, 761, 769, 786,
811n.19
trim, direction of, in floor dressing,
141, 907
trimita, 216, 217
Trinidad, Caribbean hut from, 13,
14, 44, 666, 680
tripod(s), 536-37, 640-41, 642;
Assyrian, 334; metal, 476, 537,
540, 640, 644, 645, 651; stone,
537, 640, 644, 662; for vessels,
475, 476, 482, 536-37, 540;
wood, 476
trochilus, 643
troughs, 486-87
trousers, 129, 180, 199, 231, 241
trulla, 496, 497, 498
truncus, 743, 744
truss. See roof truss
truss post, structural activity of, 629
tubs, 486-87
tubular construction, 292; in Assyria,
47, 329-32, 334; of columns, 47;
development of, 292, 329; of
doors, 329-32; iron in, 47—48; of
metal, 828
tubular functional system, 828,
829-30
tubular reservoir, 488-89
tubular tectonics, 659-60
tumbler (vessel), 489
Tuotilo, abbot of Saint Gall, 857
turibulum, 491-94
Tuscan-Roman tectonics, 666-68
Tuscan temples, 666-67, 761, 914
Tuscan timber architecture, 709
tutelary gods, 611n.19
tympanis, 669
Tyrrhenian vases, 565
“Ueber Baustyle” (Semper), 51-53
Ugolino di Vieri, 858
Ulfr Uggason, 677
Ulrichs, Heinrich Nicolaus, 384, 392,
420, 423
United States rubber, 182, 183-84
uprightness: in ceramics, 525, 529;
direction of ornamental motifs
and, 138, 142; in natural organ-
isms, 91, 95; of surfaces, 124-27;
in tectonics, 626-33
Ure, Andrew, 190, 191
urns, 468, 474-76; lid of, 553
utensils: bindings on, 172, 173;
change in materials for, 456n.305,
481, 482, 827, 882, 891n.44
Uttmann, Barbara, 223
Utzschneider, Paul, 590
 Index
valances, 125, 126-27, 161, 276
vannus, 489
varnish(es): on ceramics, 562,
572-73, 583; in Chinese lacquer-
ing, 185-87; of granite colossus,
358; on metal, 877, 886; rubber as,
181; on silk, 190; of wall dressings,
326, 366, 394; on wood, 654
Varro, Marcus Terentius, 385, 497,
716n.36
Vasari, Giorgio, 858, 896n.83
vases. See amphora; specific vases
vault(s): in Assyrian architecture, 333;
in Gothic style, 416, 417, 418-19;
Greek exclusion of, 645; Greek use
of, 396, 399-400; principle of,
747n.4, 753, 756, 888; Roman
use of, 147, 331, 402, 413, 417,
756-57; in stone construction,
681, 741, 747n.4; in timber con-
struction, 679, 692-93
vaulted ceilings, direction of motifs
on, 147-53
vaulted passageways, 310, 334, 351,
741-42
vegetal motifs, 638, 671, 710
vehicles, drapery on, 287
velours, 215
velverets, 196
velvet, 214-16, 434n.37; rubber imi-
tations of, 184
velveteens, 196
Venetian furniture, 706, 721n.113
Venetian glass, 598, 601-2, 606, 874
Venetian mirrors, 598-99
Venetian palaces, 749n.7, 859
Venus and Rome, Temple of (Rome),
807
vermilion, in wall dressings, 389, 406,
407
Vernet (painter), 240
vernis, 608n.7
Verres, Gaius, 331
Verrocchio, Andrea del, 859
Vertue, George, 841
Vespasian, Temple of (Rome), 806
vessels. See ceramic objects; containers;
specific types
Vesta, Temple of (Rome), 805
Vesta, Temple of (Tivoli), 805,
820n.121
vestiari1, 277
Victoria and Albert Museum
(London), 54n.7, 56n.27
S79
Die vier Elemente der Baukunst
(Semper), 9, 13, 322
Vieweg, Eduard, as Semper’s pub-
lisher, 11, 12, 15, 17, 20, 34, 35
Viollet-le-Duc, Eugéne-Emmanuel:
article on “charpente,” 695,
719n.88; Dictionnaire raisonné,
1-3; on form of the column,
647n.2; illustrations by, 843, 866;
on style in the French court, 706,
722n.115; on Temple of Olympian
Zeus, 742
Virchow, Rudolf, 27
Virgil, 426
Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 42
Vischer, Peter, 343-44, 859
Vischer, Robert, 39, 43
vitrifiable colors, 582
Vitruvian wooden hut, 103, 623,
665-66
Vitruvius: on atria, 278, 282, 627;
classification of temples in,
818n.85; on doors, 669; Doric in,
375, 765, 784, 786, 801; Greek
formal-aesthetic concepts in, 86,
92, 749n.13, 813n.26; Ionic in,
784-86, 817n.77; on masonry
construction, 351, 388, 404, 405,
743, 750n.21; on polychromy,
384, 389, 407-9, 412, 426, 627;
Renaissance architecture and, 745;
on Roman wall dressings, 288,
290, 407-9; on roofing or ceilings,
380, 627, 647n.9, 667, 693,
716n.37; on Temple of Honor and
Virtue, 391; on timber architecture
and stone construction, 665,
666-67, 669, 743, 784; Tuscan
temple after, 761, 914; on Tuscan
wall dressings, 377, 380, 404, 408;
on wall dressing in palace at
Halicarnassus, 388
Volterra, 350; tomb at, 740
volutes: in Assyria and Mesopotamia,
340-42, 345, 782-84; in
Composite order, 807; of
Corinthian capitals, 800; of Ionic
capitals, 340, 375, 762, 782,
784-87
voussoirs, 404, 735
Wagner, Martin von, 388
Wagner, Richard, 7, 9, 10, 43, 51
wall(s): in Asia Minor, 369; Chinese,
256-57, 260-62; in Christian era,
416; corner reinforcements of,
738; cyclopean, 369, 742, 746n.4;
draperies as, 277-82; earthen, 756;
Egyptian ornaments on, 912; as
elementary motive, 12; etymology
of, 248; functions of, 247; Indian,
269; internal structure of, 738;
marble, 759; masonry, structural
parts of, 742-3; materials for,
260-61; origins of, 247-48; poly-
chromy on, 387-93; Pompeian,
916; rubble, 741; as spatial motive,
48; stone, 388, 754-57; of tem-
ples, 742, 756; terrace, 256, 258,
261, 264, 742; textiles and, 13,
247-48
wall dressings: Assyrian, 30, 313-32;
Babylonian, 347; ceilings and,
146-47; Chinese, 257, 259, 264;
color of, 318; cross-stitching in,
230; direction of, 129-30;
draperies as, 278; Egyptian,
360-61; embroidery of, 275;
Indian, 269; marble, 410-13;
metal, 264, 269, 291; Phoenician,
350-51; plaster in, 407; propor-
tionality of, 129-30; Roman,
401-13, 414; on stone, 738, 740;
stone paneling as, 313-19, 324;
stone tablets as, 310; tapestry as
motive of, 30, 312
wall paintings: Alexandrian style, in
Pompeu, 915; Assyrian, 318-20,
913; Greek, 385-86, 394-400;
origins of, 311; panel paintings and,
245-46, 394-400; polychromy
of, 394-400; Roman, 290, 406,
407-9; on stucco, 318-20; as tap-
estries, 387
Walton, W. L., engraving by, 24
Walz, Christian, 425
Warka, rubble mound at, 304-8, 319
warping wood, protection against,
655-56
water pipes (narghile), 492, 493
wax coating: of architectural dressing,
292, 322, 394, 409, 412; in lac-
quering, 186; on leather, 179; on
statues, 412
wax enamel, 322, 327, 422
wax encaustic, 327, 397, 875; on
ceramics, 585, 608n.7; on Greek
buildings, 367, 412, 585
 Index
wax figures or models, 253, 299, 857
wax painting, 612n.27, 875; on pot-
tery, 393, 573, 584
weapons, 827-30; bindings on, 172,
173; bronze, 827-28, 863; defen-
sive, 827; importance in study of
art, 864-65; iron, 864, 896n.76;
offensive, 827; works on, 865
weaving, 226-28; and architecture,
317, 361, 378, 733, 737; basket,
489; brocade, 210; of carpets, 196,
275; colored, 216, 230, 248, 275;
edgings derived from, 126; vs.
embroidery, 230; gold thread and,
833-34; lace, 223, 225; in New
Zealand, 254-55; origins and his-
tory of, 123, 175, 199-200, 203,
230, 247-48; satin, 212; of tapes-
tries, 275
Wedgwood, Josiah, 76, 581, 588-89
Weiss, Hermann, 239, 240
Weiss, Johann, 896n.78
Welcker, Friedrich Gottlieb, 487,
818n.88
welding: in ceramics, 594, 598; of
glass, 600, 602, 603, 606; inventor
of, 844, 890n.34; of metal, 111,
329, 833, 844, 863-64, 895n.71
Western empire, dressings in, 415-19
Westminster Hall (London), roof of,
695-96
white (color): Roman perceptions of,
426-27; use of, in Oriental pat-
terns, 136-37
wicker baskets, 489-91
will: in architectural forms, 39; in
natural organisms, 90-91
Willemin, Nicolas Xavier, 196, 202,
497
Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 34,
593, 618n.85
window fittings, 872
windows: and ceiling decoration, 150,
151; eurythmy of frames of, 86;
Indian, 267, 270; leaded, 698, 700;
proportions for, 631; stained glass,
158, 417-18, 618n.87; in stone or
masonry construction, 735, 755;
in timber construction, 675, 685,
688, 689, 690, 691
winged chariots, 96
winged circles, globes, or suns, 148,
272, 361, 366
980
winged creatures or figures, 148, 367, Zacharias, Saint, 281
373, 403, 568, 572, 511 Zeising, Adolf, 18, 34, 35
winged headpiece, 174 Zeller, Jakob, 861
wings: of atria, 278; of door, 300, Zenodoros (sculptor), 846
330, 669 Zeus, Temple of (Aezani), 795, 803
wire, 831-36; plaiting of, 222 Zeus, Temple of (Agrigentum), 776
wire spirals, 828-29 Zeus, Temple of (Antioch), 827
Wissenschaft, Industrie und Kunst Zeus, Temple of (Cyzicus), 388, 399,
(Semper), 9-10, 15 734
Wolfflin, Heinrich, 36-38, 43 Zeus, Temple of (Nemea), 781
wood: metal covering for, 291, Zeus, Temple of (Olympia), 778
328-32, 335-39, 345-46; panel Zeus, Temple of (Selinus), 773, 776,
paintings on, 245—46; properties 814n.45
of, 652-58, 712n.4; in Temple of Zeus, Temple of Olympian (Athens).
Solomon, 352; terra-cotta on, 380, See Olympian Zeus, Temple of
906 Zeus, Temple of Panhellenic (Aezani),
wood carving(s): in churches, 673; in 795
half-timber buildings, 688; Irish, Zeus Hypatos, statue of, 251
671; Nordic, 677-78; Renais- zhaopings, 261
sance, 722n.113; Swiss, 691 Ziegler, Jules, 45, 527, 529, 607n.1
wood construction. See timber con- zoophorus, 819n.92
struction Zurich, Lake, 27
woodcuts, 842-43
wooden hut(s), 103, 623, 665-66, 676
wood panels. See panel(s)
wood-turner style, 661
wool fibers: color of, 198, 234,
431n.20; dyeing of, 198-99, 234,
235; in embroidery, 232; in felts,
226; history of manufacture of,
196-98, 199-200; patterns in,
431n.20; preparation of, 198;
properties of, 190-91, 196, 198;
trade in, 199; uses for, 196-97
Worsaae, Jens Jacob Asmussen, 27-28
wraps (clothing), 240, 241
wreaths, 114, 115, 161n.1
Waurtzelbauer, Benedikt, 860
Wuswas (Assyrian mound), 304-6
Wyatt, Matthew Digby, 521
Xanthus, acropolis of, 372
Xenophon, 283, 315, 328
Xia dynasty, 255-56
xylography, 843
Yao, emperor of China, 256
yarn, 219; dyeing of, 233
yellow: as basic color in Oriental
patterns, 136, 163n.6; and color
contrasts, 163n.12
yu, 614n.63
Yu, emperor of China, 255-56
Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics
Gottfried Semper
Introduction by Harry Francis Mallgrave
Translation by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Michael Robinson

Harry Francis Mallgrave earned his doctorate from the University of Penn-
sylvania in 1983 with a dissertation on Gottfried Semper. He was a research
associate at the Getty Research Institute from 1986 to 1988 and has been a
visiting professor at several universities. His translation of Otto Wagner’s
Modern Architecture (1988) inaugurated the Getty Research Institute’s Texts
& Documents series, for which he has continued to serve as consultant and
editor. In 1997 his intellectual biography Gottfried Semper: Architect of the
Nineteenth Century (1996) won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award. His recent
translations include Walter Curt Behrendt’s The Victory of the New Building
Style (2000) and Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiq-
uity (2004), and his History of Modern Architectural Theory: 1671-1968 is
forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Michael Robinson received his bachelor’s degree in German with honors from
the University of Durham in 1963 and pursued a teaching career until 1984.
He then began a second career as a freelance translator and theater director.
His translation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Anatol was performed under his direc-
tion at the Gate Theatre in London in 1987 and subsequently broadcast on
BBC Radio and published by Absolute Press. Since then he has published
translations of a wide range of books on art, design, and architecture, as well
as additional works for the stage. His translation of Adolph Behne’s The
Modern Functional Building (1996) was published in the Getty Research
Institute’s Texts & Documents series.
Texts & Documents
A Series of the Getty Research Institute Publications Program

In Print
Otto Wagner, Modern Architecture: A Guidebook for His Students to
This Field of Art (1902)
Introduction by Harry Francis Mallgrave
ISBN 0-226-86938-5 (hardcover), ISBN 0-226-86939-3 (paper)

Heinrich Hiibsch, Rudolf Wiegmann, Carl Albert Rosenthal, Johann Heinrich Wolff,
and Carl Gottlieb Wilhelm Botticher, In What Style Should We Build? The German
Debate on Architectural Style (1828-47)
Introduction by Wolfgang Herrmann
ISBN 0-89236-199-9 (hardcover), ISBN 0-89236-198-0 (paper)

Nicolas Le Camus de Méziéres, The Genius of Architecture; or, The Analogy of

That Art with Our Sensations (1780)
Introduction by Robin Middleton
ISBN 0-89236-234-0 (hardcover), ISBN 0-89236-235-9 (paper)

Claude Perrault, Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the
Method of the Ancients (1683)
Introduction by Alberto Pérez-G6mez
ISBN 0-89236-232-4 (hardcover), ISBN 0-89236-233-2 (paper)

Robert Vischer, Conrad Fiedler, Heinrich Wolfflin, Adolf Goller,

Adolf Hildebrand, and August Schmarsow, Empathy, Form, and Space:
Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893
Introduction by Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou
ISBN 0-89236-260-X (hardcover), ISBN 0-89236-259-6 (paper)

Friedrich Gilly: Essays on Architecture, 1796-1799

Introduction by Fritz Neumeyer
ISBN 0-89236-280-4 (hardcover), ISBN 0-89236-281-2 (paper)

Hermann Muthesius, Style-Architecture and Building-Art: Transformations of

Architecture in the Nineteenth Century and Its Present Condition (1902)
Introduction by Stanford Anderson
ISBN 0-89236-282-0 (hardcover), ISBN 0-89236-283-9 (paper)

Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete (1928)

Introduction by Sokratis Georgiadis
ISBN 0-89236-319-3 (hardcover), ISBN 0-89236-320-7 (paper)

Hendrik Petrus Berlage: Thoughts on Style, 1886-1909

Introduction by Iain Boyd Whyte
ISBN 0-89236-333-9 (hardcover), ISBN 0-89236-334-7 (paper)

Adolf Behne, The Modern Functional Building (1926)

Introduction by Rosemarie Haag Bletter
ISBN 0-89236-363-0 (hardcover), ISBN 0-89236-364-9 (paper)
Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural
History of the European Renaissance (1932)
Introduction by Kurt W. Forster
ISBN 0-89236-537-4 (hardcover)

Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland (1902)

Introduction by Wolfgang Kemp
ISBN 0-89236-548-X (paper)

Walter Curt Behrendt, The Victory of the New Building Style (1927)
Introduction by Detlef Mertins
ISBN 0-89236-563-3 (paper)

Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, Précis of the Lectures on Architecture (1802-5)

with Graphic Portion of the Lectures on Architecture (1821)
Introduction by Antoine Picon
ISBN 0-89236-580-3 (paper)

Karel Teige, Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia and Other Writings (1923-30)

Introduction by Jean-Louis Cohen
ISBN 0-89236-596-X (paper)

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette; with

Opinions on Architecture, and a Preface to a New Treatise on the Introduction and
Progress of the Fine Arts in Europe in Ancient Times (1765)
Introduction by John Wilton-Ely
ISBN 0-89236-636-2 (paper)

Carl Gustav Carus, Nine Letters on Landscape Painting, Written in the Years
1815-1824; with a Letter from Goethe by Way ofIntroduction (1831)
Introduction by Oskar Batschmann
ISBN 0-89236-676-5 (paper)

Carol Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of
Edgar Degas (1991, reprint)
ISBN 0-89236-728-8 (paper)

Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist

Era (1991, reprint)
ISBN 0-89236-729-6

Julien-David Le Roy, The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece (1770)
Introduction by Robin Middleton
ISBN 0-89236-669-9 (paper)

In Preparation
Jacob Burckhardt, Italian Renaissance Painting According to Genres (1885-93)
Introduction by Maurizio Ghelardi
ISBN 0-89236-736-9 (paper)

Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity (1764)

Introduction by Alex Potts
ISBN 0-89236-668-0 (paper)
Designed by Bruce Mau Design Inc.,
Bruce Mau with Chris Rowat and Daiva Villa
Coordinated by Stacy Miyagawa
Type composed by Archetype in Sabon and News Gothic
Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, Inc., on Cougar Opaque and
Centura Matte
Color plates and cover printed by Transcontinental, Litho Acme, Montreal

Texts & Documents

Series designed by Bruce Mau Design Inc., Toronto, Canada
The Texts & DOCUMENTS Series brings to light
CWA al (are Molimel amelie Melcotall -vole-Mqatel¢
would otherwise be unavailable to students,
professionals, and the much larger general
readership with a serious interest in these fields.
The work of this series began with classic
European texts never before adequately trans-
lated into English, which were edited and
framed by contemporary scholars in ways
dakelmaliejalicelaiccxemaur-limmexeyaldiali(-omelllac-lilel miiolg
research and aesthetic interpretation. As
this work continues, the series will expand to
encompass reprints, new editions, and trans-
lations of recent books of the most adven-
turous modern scholarship, representative of
the best in the art history of our time, that
ako-Mave) Y(-1 amfolblacom (r-melEicelol idremel (re!
oVm alcimme (Vrel ii vmelire minaloceyacolaca-WmMal-y-10(-3
advances the overall aims of the Getty Research ©
Institute — fostering critical inquiry into the
rotc-Yoh (Cola Molaro Ma-re-1e)((e)i Me) MeliMcolguitme) mYtitle]
oldeamoyce)avoy due m=). <el-1e lanai col melire man li (gs
rol Xollo) Tale aymcr-s-co [cols Mmeltle me)el-tallae MUlal-> e\-ral (16)
oY =ValU(-t-Mo) MUlave(-1e-3 colle llaren
— Thomas Crow |
IDIYel(0)il €7-3 64 Research Institute
 » ans

The enduring influence of the

“Ce
; *

architect Gottfried Semper

(1803-79) derives |less from his.
ateyalvinarsyal ce! bui dings inDresden,”
Vienna
Zurich, and Vi
ienna2hthan from his
Stylein the Techrnical and Tectonic — ee mere

Arts (1860=63).
=€: Semper’ sland-
nak ser ofBethes giving
Z tise to 1e technicalarts(textiles,
ceramics, carpentry, masonry)
poche the s)yur
et

extended ir inquiry ‘into th> inner

principles of artistic form, this
work radically altered the intel-
lectual field for aesthetics and art
history and standsas a vital
document in the consolidation of
modern architect aod: SAAS ANS

ifrote tas
: 3i
a Hgts f Sfa

<7, 42
immi Getty Publications Yee sae
= eee tty.edu/publicatio Bares i i
4 0000
|
a