1848.] 



THE CIVIL ENCrNEER AND ARCHITECT'S JOURNAL. 



B sin a cos B — f/sinO A cos 



Aa Vl-r sin {0 — 0) 



b cot n tan * 



sin (e 



~S~ 



A ,S 



[a- a) '■•'"'' 



(a a) 



b cot n tan 4, nearly, since the 



difference of and 9 is always very small. 



Hence, whether the "section on the square" be circular or elliptic, 

 at the point b make the angle,/'iC = 90 — n; and at the point yj 

 where 6./'meets Co, make the angle C./'O n ♦, the angle of the 

 extrados ; the point O %i here. /O meets 6 C produced is the focus 

 to which the joints on the elevation converge. C O = Cy'tan ^ = 

 C B tan (90 — il) tan* = 6 cot n tan * 



If the section perpendicular to the a.\is be circular,/ will be the 

 focus of the ellipse o'6o, and may be readily found by describing 

 from the centre i, with radius Co, an arc of a circle which will cut 

 Cn in./", the focus of the ellipse a'ba. If we had considered this 

 case alone, the preceding calculations would have been much sim- 

 plified, for then A = B = R ; a = 6 = r ; A E = ttR ; oE = irr ; 



S = Re ; s — re ; and CO = — r cot n tan * — j^ — . 



(0-e) 



The line/O may be readily and accurately drawn by setting off 

 with any scale of equal parts fh — axial length, and erecting a 

 perpendicular hk equal the semicircle or semi-ellipse in which a 

 plane perpendicular to the axis cuts the extrados. 



F. Bashfobth. 



CANDIDUS'S NOTE-BOOK. 

 FASCICULUS LXXVII. 



'* I nnist have liberty 

 Witlial, OS large a charter a" tlie winds. 

 To blow on whom I please." 



I. I must confess to being completely disappointed by Hay's 

 book on the "Laws of Harmonious Colouring;' nor at all the less 

 so for its having reached a sixth edition, when had reviewers re- 

 ported of it conscientiously at first, its futility for any purpose of 

 real instruction would have been pronounced long ago. It is not 

 to be denied that it contains some useful information in regard to 

 the colours — that is the pigments, employed in house-painting ; 

 which may ha\e caused a demand for the book among the opera- 

 tives in that humble branch of art. But as to any direct insight 

 which it affords into the theory and principles of artistic colouring, 

 as one main auxiliary to architectural design and effect, it is alto- 

 gether null. Or, at the very best, it merely affords a faint glim- 

 mering here and there of something like approximation to the 

 subject promised by the title-page. Possibly, Mr. Hay is fully 

 capable of clearly explaining to others the doctrine which, it may 

 be prestimed, he has satisfactorily established for himself. Never- 

 theless, he has thrown very little, if any, light upon the matter. 

 To say the truth, his book shows no disposition to communicate 

 more than he can possibly help ; in which respect, however, he is 

 by no means singular, there being many other books of a similar 

 description, in which the information' is studiously concealed, — 

 either evaded, or else wrapped up in oracular brevity, or in ver- 

 biage overclouded by more than oracular obscurity. Had iMr. Hay, 

 instead of theorizing so much, ins b/ane, as the Germans say, con- 

 descended to exemplify harmony of colouring in decoration by a 

 few positive instances — both such as were distinguished for the 

 observance, and others which proved its value by showing the 

 errors arising from neglecting it — he would have supplied his 

 readers with some really useful lessons ; whereas now he leases 

 them entirely to themselves to take their chance for making out 

 what he, as their professed instructor, should have carefully ex- 

 plained step by step Where he ought to have been most of all 

 full and explicit, he is more vague and brief than elsewhere. On 

 the other hand, he is somewhat loquaciously prolix in regard to the 

 work done by him at Abbotsford, notwithstanding that it does not 

 in the slightest degree serve to illustrate the Laws of Harmonious 

 Colouring, the painting being there confined to the mere imitation 

 of oak and wainscotting. In short, the book is a rather humbug- 

 ing affair, for the light which Mr. Hay has thought proper to afford 

 us amounts to no more than "darkness visible,""and there he leaves 

 us to grope about 



II. The fresco scheme for the decoration of the Palace of West- 

 minster does not, it seems, answer expectation, — at least so does 

 not what has been done in the House of Peers, where the experi- 

 ment has been first of all made, instead of the artist actjuiring 

 proficiency in that mode of painting, by being employed in less 

 important parts of the building before touching that which ought 

 to display, not the efforts of " 'prentice hands," but the mastery 

 acquired by matured jiroficiency. Among other defects and over- 

 sights complained of, it is now discovered that, partly owing to the 

 profusion of gilding and vivid colours of the other decorations, the 

 frescoes do not produce the anticipated eft'ect, they being in a great 

 measure overpowered and eclipsed by %vhat is mere embellisliment. 

 Thus they are in a manner converted fi-om principal objects as 

 works of art, into quite secondary ones as regards the general 

 ensemble, — a serious defect, that will be further increased when all 

 the windows shall have been filled with stained glass, whose bril- 

 liant hues will ine\itably cause the frescoes to appear, by contrast, 

 feeble and faded, more especially as the windows occupy so very 

 large a proportion of surface. "The only remedy which is now left, 

 is to moderate the scheme of colouring for the windows, by exe- 

 cuting them nearly entirely in chiaro-scuro, with only a few touches 

 of positive colour here and there. Yet even this would be unsatis- 

 factory in another respect, because such sparing application of 

 colour in the glass would be out of keeping with the showiness in 

 regard to colour of much of tlie ornamental work. The fact is, 

 the decorations of the " House" have been studied only piecemeal, 

 and those employed upon them have considered no more than their 

 own particular share, without at all calciilatiug tlie general effect. 

 As far as the frescoes are concerned, it would surely have been 

 easy enough to ascertain their effect beforehand, by filling in all 

 the six compaitinents with the cartoons for the respective subjects. 

 Yet, obvious and simple as such mode of preparatory trial was, it 

 seems, somehow or other — perhaps owing to tlie fatality which 

 hangs over all our public undertakings in art- — to have been over- 

 looked. Bold as it may be thought to say so, a determined system 

 of blundering seems to be established for them. Certainly not the 

 slightest pains are taken to prevent blunder, by proper exjieriment 

 previous to the work being actually commenced. On the contrary, 

 the chief precaution taken is to keep matters entirely in the dark, 

 until some irreparable mischief has been committed ; and the only 

 satisfaction left us is to amuse ourselves by wondering that they 

 should have been managed so perversely. 



III. Of so-called religious subjects in painting, some are auda- 

 ciously profane, others the most trivial in matter, and one and all 

 equally fabulous ; giving us only the fancies of artists for the re- 

 presentations of historical e\ents. Religion may have been the 

 patron of art, but art has been but a very questionable, if not posi- 

 tively treacherous, ally to religion. It served Popery during the 

 middle ages, for the impostures of the one were in keeping with 

 the impostures of tlie other. But for pure Christianity, art can 

 do just as much and no more than it can for the advancement of 

 pure mathematics. There is a great deal of very palpable and 

 maudlin cant afloat in regard to religious art. Hardly were any of 

 the great masters inspired ; on the contrary, many of them w"ere 

 anything but exemplary in their lives, and exercised their pencils 

 on the lewd traditions of pagan mythology with quite as much 

 gusto as they did on the traditions of the Church. Medijeval art 

 has, besides, contributed not a little to that fundamental supersti- 

 tion of popery, Monolatry, against which worship of the pretendeil 

 " Queen of Heaven," the Salic law ought to be enforced amongst 

 Catholics. 



IV. Notwithstanding their piddling and minikin pedantry, ar- 

 chitectural writers are apt to be exceedingly careless in their lan- 

 guage, frequently emjiloying expressions and terms after a truly 

 nonsenical fashion. They will speak, for instance, of an order as 

 being " of colossal /»-o^jo?'^jo««" .' the proportions being all the while 

 precisely those which are generally followed for the particular 

 order in question. Of course, they mean "dimensions" or "scale;" 

 therefore, to use the other term, betrays strange confusion of ideas 

 and the meaning of words. Nothing, again, is more common than 

 the truly barbarous solecism — one for which a schoolboy would be 

 corrected as a dunce— of employing the term " Intercolumniation, 

 not in its own proper sense, but in that of " Intercolumn ;" which 

 is nothing less than marring technical language, and doing away 

 with those distinctions in it which are essential to its accuracy. 

 If there be anything that can excuse such a truly vulgar blunder, 

 it is the authority it receives from our architectural-dictionary- 

 raakers, some of whom among their other qualifications seem to 

 have been totally ignorant of the languages from which most of 

 the terms of the art have been borrowed for our own. The con- 

 founding together the terms " Intercolumniation" and " Inter- 



