Chapter Twenty-Nine

THE IGNORED FINE ARTS

FIREWORKS AND ILLUMINATION; COSTUME;
THE DANCE; STAGE SETTING

N this chapter must be mentioned very briefly
some arts which are not often recognized
as fine arts at all, but in which a distinct

artistic quality is visible.

SECTION I.

Decoration by Artificial Light; Fireworks and Illumination. The statement insisted on above (see Chapters XXVI, XXVII, and XXVIII) that these non-manual arts are chiefly the work of the director — the designer the person who

conceives a general scheme involving the work of others to perfect it, is true of festal illumination. Thus, when the famous annual lighting of the great church of St. Peter at Rome used to be carried out with thousands of lamps, there was nothing in each paper lantern or in each flaring oil-flame to affect the design of the "silver" illumination or the "golden" one which followed it. Everything depended upon the general layout, the decision of the final authority that certain lines of the cupola and certain lines of the body of the church were to be accentuated in lights,

and that a certain order should be observed in the

starting of all these flames. On the night of Easter Sunday, as darkness fell, the whole outline of the enormous building, visible for miles over the Campagna, and every important detail, were seen drawn in lines of white fire upon the darkness. This was succeeded, as the bells struck the hour, by the golden illumination, which seemed to burst from the cross, four hundred and fifty feet above the square below, and flash down the outlines of the cupola and down the great columns of the front and the flanks of the church. The golden illumination had this peculiarity, that it was fluctuating and flickering, because the burning oil in the basins was not protected from the wind. A display such as this was only achieved at a heavy cost in money and at much risk of life and limb to the men who lighted the lamps. The perfection with which it was carried out came from years of experience and careful timing of the work to be done.

Now it is evident that the artistic thought in these matters is an appeal to that natural instinct which makes people admire the rows of lights along a quay or a bridge, doubled by their reflection in the water, and which causes our admiration for the starry sky, — except in so far as this last excites awe, — and which brings up our sentimental thoughts about the moon, when seen without the evidently beautiful setting of the clouds which she

DECORATIVE ILLUMINATION

lights up to such tenderness of gradation. Probably it is all akin to the staring of a baby at the lamp. We do like a bright light, and more especially a group or a row of lights; and it is the business of the artist in illumination to appeal to an enlarged and developed form of that natural

taste.

Such illuminations are now made easy by means of electricity. Every one of the great national exhibitions during the last dozen years of the nineteenth century and since that time have been marked by electric illumination of exteriors and interiors alike. an extraordinary interior effect was produced by the lighting electrically of a vaulted hall of no great size, the walls of which were lined with. mirrors. The space of the hall was divided into vaulting squares, and the intersection of every four squares was supported by a pier composed in part

At the Paris exhibition of 1900

of a group of round-shafted columns. If there were six such piers there would be twelve vaulted chambers, twelve spaces covered each by a groined vault, which were of course indefinitely increased in apparent number, as were the piers, by reflection. The spectators, admitted into a wholly dark room, saw the building taking tangible shape in lines of pale red which grew constantly more and more intense, and was suddenly enhanced and made brilliant by a still more fiery glow. This was succeeded by a pale blue light which filled

the whole space and seemed to come from the surface of the vaulted roof; and a moment later it was seen that the columns themselves were giving out light, for the visible shafts were composed of glass and their illumination came from within. In this way the effect of colored light playing on varied surfaces and multiplied by reflection was varied continually and with extraordinary brilliancy of effect for twenty minutes, and then a bright light from ordinary yellowishwhite incandescent bulbs showed that normal conditions had returned and that the exhibition was over. There is of course no visible limit to what may be done in these ways by the use of electricity acting with glasses of different colors and with metals of different colors upon which the light may play. A different scheme, but one equally attractive, is that shown in certain electrical illuminations from without, of moving, or at least not perfectly quiescent bodies; as when a fountain is lighted in its different parts by green, blue, crimson or golden colored lights, or as when a dancer or a group of dancers, elaborately robed, do their posturing under a similar varying illumination. There is infinite opportunity for the display of good taste and of a delicate ingenuity; but it will be noted that here, as in ordinary decorations of interiors and the like, for which see Chapter XXVII, the work of the artist with his own hands hardly comes into the account. It is still the director who

THE NATURE OF SUCH DESIGN

stands at a distance and gives hints and corrects errors, he having previously given his general orders. And this art differs from the manual arts very greatly in its physical conditions. Thus the matter of size is comparatively independent of and apart from the amount of artistic skill displayed. It will require no more refined judgment, taste, and initiative to do such work on a vast scale than to properly illuminate a chamber of very moderate size; in fact, the doing of this on a small scale may be much the more difficult; whereas it is notorious and is easily seen how vastly the difficulty of a manual artist's work increases with the scale of his undertaking. Nor is "difficulty" quite the word. The kind of design and the nature of the mental power which grapples with a vast wall surface to be painted, and that which, on the other hand, makes a delicate flower-study on a paper four by six inches, are so different that the man may excel greatly in the one and be inefficient in the other. Nothing of the kind is to be predicated of those arts of a broader and bolder adornment produced by means of fire.

The use of transparent signs, lanterns with pictures or legends painted upon them, and such devices are of course wholly apart from the art of illumination. In so far as the coloring of a lantern is important to the general scheme of colored lights in combination, it concerns our present subject; but the display of an emblem or