House <y Garden 
dismiss at once as obviously absurd from 
either the architectural or the pictorial point 
of view; but I believe there are instances, in 
Roman work, of pictorial floors in mosaic. 
That material makes this kind of decoration 
a trifle less frankly ridiculous than painting 
proper would be, but the essential absurdity 
of a penetration in the place where the spec¬ 
tator is to stand, or of a picture laid down to 
be walked over, is not much lessened. The 
hearth-rug of our childhood, in which a would- 
be realistic tiger prowled through a would-be 
realistic jungle, was hardly worse. The pave¬ 
ment of the Cathedral of Sienna contains a 
great number of pictorial compositions. These 
must be in an awkward position to look at; 
but at least they are perfectly flat, without 
modellingandpracticallywithoutcolor. There 
can be no doubt, however, that the decora¬ 
tion of a floor in whatever material should be 
made up of pure ornament of a very flat, 
formal and conventional order. 
The pier, if it have broad flat surfaces, 
may be tempting from the painter’s point of 
view. Its surfaces are upright, well within 
the range of vision, and generally fairly well 
lighted. The inappropriateness of a simu¬ 
lated penetration in the main supporting 
member of the architecture is, however, so 
obvious that it would seem difficult to believe 
that anyone had ever contemplated it, were it 
not for some existing examples. Where- 
ever else one should place pictorial decorations 
one would say it should not be on the pier. 
T he best treatment of the pier, if it is to 
be painted at all, is to paint it with pure 
ornament. The Pompeian figure, which is 
not seen through the wall but is on or floating 
in front of it, is tolerable, and has been well 
employed by Mr. Maynard in the Library of 
Congress. The simulated niche, while open 
to the objection to all simulated architectural 
features, is at least not inconsistent with the 
function of the pier itself. But in one of 
the great halls of the Paris Hotel de Ville 
the surface of the great isolated piers which 
support the vaulting is used, with only a 
narrow edge of gold moulding, for the display 
of landscape paintings typical of the various 
provinces of France. To place landscape, 
the art of space par excellence, in the one place 
where a penetration is inconceivable, this is 
surely the best example of what not to do. 
Ceilings may be domed, vaulted or flat. 
In the domed or vaulted ceiling, it is plain 
that a penetration might be conceived of in 
the centre of the dome, or between the ribs 
of the vaulting, without entirely destroying 
the structure of the ceiling itself. On the 
other hand the pendentives are bad places 
for pictorial treatment. In early work the 
tendency was to treat the whole ceiling with 
ornament only, and in any case, to preserve 
strong ribs, whether projecting or painted, 
between the pictures. In the ceiling of the 
Stanza della Segnatura, Raphael following 
Sodoma’s scheme, has confined the pictorial 
decorations to small medallions, and in the 
square decorations in the pendentives, has 
avoided depth by means of a background 
simulating gold mosaic. The penetrations 
are small and inconspicuous, and the sense of 
a vaulted ceiling is retained. Michel Angelo 
was the first man to cover a ceiling entirely 
with figure painting; but his infraction of 
the rule that pictures should be confined 
to conceivable penetrations is less real than 
apparent. He was sculptor and architect, as 
well as painter, and the ceiling of the Sistine 
Chapel is to be properly regarded as a great 
scheme of simulated architecture and colored 
sculpture rather than as a painting. He came 
in to create an architectural setting, which the 
architect had failed to provide; and the main 
parts of his decoration, in which backgrounds 
are painted and into which the element of 
depth enters, are certain comparatively small 
panels between strong simulated vaulting ribs. 
Even in the gorgeous Venetian ceilings, which 
are flat and without vaulting, the painted sur¬ 
face was limited and was contained within 
enormous gilded frames of heavy carving. 
This alone rendered the full pictorial treat¬ 
ment tolerable, and maintained the sense of 
construction. Correggio was the first to treat 
the whole surface of a dome pictorially, cut¬ 
ting away construction altogether, and I think 
it was not until Tiepolo’s time that the same 
thing was done with a flat ceiling. In 
Raphael’s frescoes in the Farnesina the frame¬ 
work is reduced to the smallest possible ves¬ 
tige. From the painter’s point of view a 
ceiling, flat or curved, is a bad place for pic¬ 
torial treatment because it is overhead and 
therefore difficult to see ; because it is often 
not a plane surface and has no natural 
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