Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. Year 1927. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> It is quite needless to-day to justify the age-old art of the plasterer even by the usual documented outline of Egypt Greece and Rome. The Vitruvian hut theory has paled before the earth-built and clay-loamed refuge of primeval ancestors. We know now how early on the scene came the wily grainer and marbler those artful ancestors of ours to whom we owe the recurrent “shams” that vexed the soul of the pious revivalists of the nineteenth century. No one nowadays will skin ancient walls in a fervour of misplaced righteousness or waste breath in denouncing vaultings in plaster that should never have been confounded with the constructions of brick and stone. A wide survey of architecture in all ages teaches us that forms once constructive pass into decoration and become part of the language of architecture. The use of derivative forms is governed only by the instinct of the architect and is not subject to theories based on irrelevant ethics. As Sir Joshua Reynolds has well said in the seventh discourse (the night of Sir John Soane’s Gold Medal December 10th 1776): “It must always be remembered that the business of a great painter is to produce a great picture; he must therefore take especial care not to be cajoled by specious arguments out of his materials.” It is strange but true that there is always room for a fresh survey even of the best known buildings. Accurate observation is a rare gift and there will always be some fresh point to be discovered. Mr. Laurence Turner has often remarked to me on the great difficulty of deciding the exact nature of the method employed in old ceilings and plasterwork. (OS)