INTERIOR DESIGN ARCHITECTS AND CRAFTSMEN AND FINELY CARVED STAIR PARTS
AND ARCHITECTURAL FITTINGS

For we may discover a love for carved stair parts architectural fittings in many different ways. It could come to some persons, from village churches in any part of England; from the great mansions of Somerset in the buttercup meadows, or from the carved and painted rood lofts of the Devon churches; from the flint churches of East Anglia and the gilt "angel" ceilings; from Norman columns, or from the fan vaulting of the Perpendicular. From the abbeys and cathedrals. Or it can begin abroad, and come home, at last, to England. It could have its origin from the stiff sculptures and stained glass of Chartres; or from the figures of stone oxen on the towers of Laon; from the white vessel of the church of Vezelay, with its carved capitals and portals, and the Church of Saint-Pere, at foot of the hill, with its open porch and the stone archangels blowing into their trumpets at the corners of the tower. Or it could begin from Giotto's tower; from the facade of San Miniato in coloured marbles; from the dome of Brunelleschi; from the Palazzo Vecchio and its tower shaped like an iris or a lily. Thence, to the world of the Roman basilicas. To St Mark's in Venice, and to Sant' Ambrogio in Milan. To the golden mosaics in the covered atrium before the heavy doors are opened. To the court of Sant' Ambrogio with the fountain in its midst. To that mystic marriage of the East and West, for the form is Roman, but the style Byzantine. And for ourselves, we remember for its intoxication when ten years old our first sight of the pair of columns on the molo of the Piazzetta above the lifting gondolas, granite columns brought from Syria or Constantinople, with upon the one, the winged lion of St Mark, and i3pon the other, St Theodore and his Egyptian crocodile, both facing to San Giorgio Maggiore and the Adriatic Sea. And at twenty, or soon after, the wonders of Ravenna; the mosaics of San Vitale, the marble columns with their basket capitals, and the com­posite capitals of the women's galleries. The gaunt but glorious impression of Sant' Apollinare in Classe fuori, in the marsh beyond Ravenna, with its mosaic and the twenty-four huge columns of Proconnesian marble. A grandeur in desolation of a watery splendour, for the basilica is as though submerged. It is as if under the green wave, and there are marks of water upon the marble pillars. That is how it seems; and once the Pineta, the pinewood, was all round it, sighing in the Adriatic wind.

But the later architectural design in carved stair parts architectural fittings throws its spell upon us. It may begin with Spain, not Italy, and we may find that the Spaniards were greater builders, even, than the Italians. There is nothing in Italy to compare with the cathedrals of Toledo, Leon, Burgos, and Seville. There are no abbeys can pa-able to Poblet and Santas Creus. We may love the Alhambra and its stalactites and honeycombs, and the courts of orangn of carved stair parts architectural fittings lie trees at Cordoba and Seville. But the fantasy deepens, grows more extravagant.in the desig Where is there another town to compare with Avila and its walls and towers? Or another palace-monastery like the Escorial? What could be more Spanish than the church of La Magdalena at Valladolid, which has a facade formed entirely from the coat of arms of the founder, Don Pedro de la Gasca? We have reached the haughty Spanish decadence; the West facade, El Obradoiro, of  Santiago da Compostela, which is like a Hindu temple, but for the snapdragons growing from its towers, but for its flights of steps; the interior of  Los Santos Juanes at Valencia, with its ceiling-painting by Palomino; the fountains of La in Granja and palace rooms in which the greatest of  human singers, the castrato Farinelli sang nightly, the same four songs to soothe the King's melancholy, while his Queen, the dwarf Infanta Barbara of Portugal, sat at the harpsichord with the incomparable Domenico Srarlatti, who was her music master, and may have been her lover.

Carved stair parts fig 1 

   carved stair parts fig 2  

carved stair parts fig 3

INTRODUCTION TO CARVED STAIR PARTS AND ARCHITECTURAL FITTINGS

Hence, as the appetite grows for carved stair parts architectural fittings, of the design to the colonnades and Roman fountains of Bernini. And down to Naples; to Santa Chiara in the middle of the town, now utterly destroyed and gone, with its cloister of the Poor Clares, its walls and benches of majolica and trellised vines; to San Gregorio Armeno and its black and red nuns behind their gilded lattices; to the great monastery of San Martino, high above the town, where our first taste of the South, of the Parthenopean city and the Bay of Sirens, comes from the flashing and brilliant architecture of Cosimo Fansaga. Here, out in the bay, lies Capci as Claude painted it, and you may row at foot of the cliffs and gather the narcissus and the violet in your hand. Here are Sorrento and Posilippo. Here are terraces of oranges and lemons. Here the zampognari come­ down at Christmas and play their pastoral bagpipes when the frost in on the tangerine.1 In the distance lies forgotten Calabria; and over the spangled seas to Sicily, to the chapels of Serpotta and the balconies of Noto.

The style of carved stair parts architectural fittings is continued into Catholic Germany, where lie the extreme of the Rococo. To the Benedictine abbeys of Ottobeuren and Zwiefalten and their fantastic altars. To their lacquer and coral, and to their skeleton of saints wearing Court dresses of Spanish fashion, and glittering with diamonds. To the silver and blue pavilion of the Amalien­burg, now gone, by the Court dwarf Cuvillies, of Walloon descent. To the works of the brothers Cosmas Damian and Egid Quirin Asam. To the chapel of the Ursuline nuns at Straubing, on the Danube, its scarlet curtains of stucco with inlays of mirror, and pilasters with capitals of vivid scarlet. To Frauenzell, in the forest, its balconies for the nuns, like opera boxes, and its painting ceiling. To Osterhofen and its six side altars, each with its robed skeleton, where Duke Odo of Bavaria kneels at the high altar, and from the wife of Duke Heligo smiles at him behind her fan. To Weltenburg, upon the Danube, its ceiling painted with the heavens, and its baldacchino of four high Salomonic pillars, linked together with chains of gilded flowers. Under that, St George, a knight in golden armour on a silver stallion, rides into the light to slay the dragon. He wears the plumed helmet of a horseman in a masquerade. At his feet, a golden goose hisses with outsketched neck at the serpent. Andromeda, or the maiden, dressed like a peasant girl, holds up her hand before her eyes. St Martin in golden robes takes off his biretta in homage; St Maurus points to the audience in the body of the church. But there are the churches of other architects; diessen, on the Ammer-See, by J. M. Fischer, where the Augustinian canons ordered altar paintings by Tiepolo and Piazzetta; and the pilgrimage church of Wies, by Domenikus Zimmermann, an interior in white and different shades of gold, but of a lightness and fantasy that cannot be described in words. Last, to Wurzburg, with its staircase ceiling painted by Tiepolo with Olympus and the Four Continents; to the Kaiser-Saal frescoed by the same hand with the Marriage of Barbarossa; to the incredible card-room of green lacquer with gilt stucco; the mirror room; and the tapestries of Italian comedians and the carnival of Venice.

CARVED STAIR PARTS ARCHITECTURAL FITTINGS BY BRITISH ARCHITECTS AND CRAFTSMEN

This account may be a personal trajectory, but it is better to come back to England primed with other architectural instances in carved stair parts architectural fittings. Nearly every one of our great architects, except Wren, travelled to Italy and saw the wonderful spectacle of Venice; while Wren himself had his meeting with Bernini. We would judge of our architecture, not as we would treat our painters, who are good in themselves but cannot bear comparison with the great masters of Italy or France. For the English architects from Inigo Jones down to the first quarter of the nineteenth century reflect the prosperity and the naval or martial pre-eminence of England. They are no more inferior to those of the rest of Europe than was our reputation as an independent kingdom. That is to say, they are not provincial. The beauty of an old building in Portugal, in Baltic Germany, or in Sweden, may be precisely because it is so distant from the centres of control. Our Elizabethan architects were naifs, according to that meaning. Their touch was not certain. It was good, or bad. They were under French, Italian, Dutch, and German influences. And the latter part of the sixteenth century, we should add, was not a good period in architecture, or in painting. The great Italian masters of the Renaissance were dead, and the Baroque had not begun. It was an interregnum. It would even be possible to call the whole of the Renaissance in France, from the reign of Francois premier to that of Louis treize, a period of exuberant and incessant, visual ugliness. The Elizabethan architects were new, and ugly, when they copied the wrong models, as at Wollaton; but the breath and poetry of genius could transform a bad en­graving from a book of patterns into a beautiful modelling in stucco. The engravings of Martin de Vos are nothing in themselves, as works of art, but they inspired the coloured hunting frieze at Hardwick, in probably the most beautiful room of the whole Renaissance in Europe.

Perhaps the sure sign of genius in Inigo Jones in is designs for carved stair parts architectural fittings is that he is not provincial. From the first moment of his appearance on his return from Italy, Inigo Jones is the great master. The Banqueting House at Whitehall and the Queen's House at Greenwich are neither Italian completely, nor copied from the Italian, but they converse in the language of great architecture. This, in spite of the fact that in Italy Inigo Jones would have been considered academic and not building according to the fashion of his day, for Italian work contemporary with Inigo Jones belonged to the freakish style favoured by the Medicean Grand Dukes of Tuscany. It is this, and not the work of the Englishman returned from Italy, that has become local and provincial. Where we see it in Florence it is characterized by the typical broken pedi­ment over doors and windows that seems to derive from a bat's wing, and that attaches the reigns of Cosmo II and Ferdinando II so closely, in spirit, to the engravings of Jacques Callot and Stefano della Bella. Of this, again, there are traces in Inigo Jones where he is working for the theatre, but not in his architecture.

The most fortunate occurrence in the history of the art in England is that Inigo Jones should have been followed, in the next generation, by Sir Christopher Wren. And the problem, one of a pair of mysteries in our carved stair parts architectural fittings in architecture, is the emergence of this scientist and mathematician into an artist. The only explanation is that Wren was a man of the Renaissance, and that the Renaissance came anything from a hundred to two hundred to England. Let us remind ourselves that Wren was born in 1632, and that such typical figures of the Italian Renaissance as Leon Battista Alberti and Francesco di Giorgio were born, respectively, in 1404 and 1439. We will take another instance. The little model Renaissance town of Pienza, in Tuscany, built by Pope Pius II (Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini) with churches and palaces by the Florentine Bernardo Rossellino, dates 1462, two hundred years and more before Wren's earliest building, the Sheldonian Theatre, and was the work of an architect born as far as 1409. It is true that the literary Renaissance came earlier to England, and that its great period was over before Wren was born. But it is true also that Italian literature cannot compare with that of England. Their genius in designlay in painting and in the arts of hand. It is probably the immortal generation of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, and the others, that has made the world think that poetry is the only art of England, flowering, in contradiction, in a material soil where only sport and commerce flourish, and the arts are stillborn or die at birth.

But the  career of Wren was the opportunity for great craftsmen in design in carved stair parts architectural fittings. This belated man of the Renaissance, though nothing is belated if it comes in time, grows more interesting, and less academic, the more we study him. We have said that Inigo Jones, greater artist though he was than any contemporary­ Italian, would have been thought old-fashioned in Italy and per­taining to the previous generation; but Wren, once he had developed, matured rapidly from the Sheldonian Theatre and Pembroke College Chapel, Cambridge, his first buildings, could be called the first architect after Bernini. But Bernini was sculptor more than architect; and, in architecture, he played with fire. His experiments were always dangerous, and in any case Bernini was an old man by now. We must not, however,  pretend to ourselves, for conscience' sake, that St Paul's Cathedral is not a building in Baroque style. For it is that, certainly, but in pure form, without the influence of the theatre. It is a great work of art that appeals more to the intellect than to the senses. It has none of the Jesuit imagery that inspired Bernini. And it is incredible when we turn from this evidence to the garden alcove or the Orangery at Kensington. This is an architect as diverse of talent as the Neapolitan. He is the master of brick as well as stone, and combines the two at Hampton Court on a large scale, and in little, at the Town Hall at Windsor. It could be argued that Bernini does not compose in colour; that he has the sculptural, but not our sense; that his magnificent Scala Regia in the Vatican is  a composition in light and shadow, like his Doric colonnades to St Peter's, or even his marble group of Apollo and Daphne at the Casino Borghese. But Wren is one of the great masters of colour in architecture; and if we compare him with Bernini he surpasses the Italian in other ways. Bernini embellished Rome with many fountains; but their easy, and not always exquisite invention is intellectually little, or nothing, beside the beauty and variety of Wren's London steeples. When we add to those the sum total of his City churches, the Englishman emerges as not inferior to the Italian.

DESIGN OF CARVED STAIR PARTS ARCHITECTURAL FITTINGS BY BRITISH ARCHITECTS
INTERIOR DESIGNERS AND CRAFTSMEN

Under Wren the great craftsmen assemble, and their continuity is established down to a hundred years ago. It is of no importance that Grinling Gibbons and Tijou, the two most famous names in carved stair parts architectural fittings, were foreigners and not Englishmen. So were Verrio and Laguerre, but our native Thorn­hillin of all the Baroque masters, forgotten in England and omitted, in ignorance, by foreign critics. Grinling Gibbons and Tijou, it is true, were never excelled in their respective spheres, but they were nearly approached. The incomparable silversmiths of Charles the Second's reign, the bookbindings of Samuel Mearne, the walnut furniture, the stucco ceilings, these are accompaniment to the architecture. No book that only concerns itself with buildings can give the picture of the age, or of subsequent generations down to the death of George the Fourth. But Wren lived to be so old, and altered so much in his work, that he is as typical of the reign of William the Third as of that of Charles the Second. Hampton Court, if we are not mistaken, could not be the palace of the Stuart. The Hampton Court Beauties by Lely already look a little out of place. That seraglio of young beauties is now middle-aged. We are arriving at Marlborough's wars, and the colonnade of the Clock Court is intended for Dutch William's grenadiers.

The other mystery of our architecture is the case of Vanbrugh. Here we are dealing, not with a scientist and mathematician unexpectedly, perhaps even to his own surprise, turned architect, but with a playwright and man of fashion, in whom architecture worked with all the fire and violence of a conversion to religion. Not, though, in his letters or, we are certain, in his conversation. In those he was unchanged; they were his nature. The matter is inexplicable, therefore, except as a case of genius. It must be understood that his talents in architecture were of no feminine order. We must not imagine, because he was a man of the theatre, that he was equivalent to the modern decorator, to the dressmaker, or fashionable photographer. Inigo Jones's Banqueting House at Whitehall, even many of Wren's buildings, look feminine beside his Roman or Ninevean grandeur. To deepen the mystery, Vanbrugh does not seem to have been in the least interesting or temperamental as a character. He remained the ordinary man of fashion. Even to a confirmed admirer of the Baroque style, Van­brugh transcends that, and is not culpable of its weaknesses. Or is he not Baroque in carved stair parts architectural fittings design at all? It is a difficult question to answer. His layout and planning are Baroque, so is his peculiar ornament. We are brought to the conclusion that he built in the Baroque, just as he used in his letters and conversation the fashionable jargon of the day, but that his inner purposes were different, and even grander or more serious. His houses, alone in architecture, are in an epic style; but influenced by what poetry or under the influence of which plays? We do not know. There is little or no evidence of his reading.