Page:Architectural Record 1920-08 Vol 48 Iss 2.djvu/32

 THE ARCHITEC nives, pediments and other carved work are of white marble, now stained a rich brown by action of time and weather; that the flat surfaces of the panels and frieze are of plaster; while the upper cornice between the interrupted ‘pedi- ments and the frieze, and also the top- most cornice beneath the eaves, are of stucco. Much of the color in the fres- coes, though not ali, is sadly dulled or even obliterated; windows from the house beyond have been cut through sev- eral panels, and against others pigeon boxes have been nailed ; the whole aspect is one of deplorable squalor. Neverthe- less, though the cortile may have lost its brilliance and glory, it retains a substan- tial residuum of its pristine dignity. Doubtless some, upon contemplating this cortile, will say, “Interesting, but de- cadent.” To which one might make the rejoinder, “What is decadence?” “A

falling away; incipient or partially ad- vanced decay; deterioration,” and so on, may do all very well for a dictionary defi- nition, but, in a case like this, it begs the question of relative values and a stan-

dard of comparison. What is to be the standard of comparison, and who is to determine it? After all, is it not largely a matter of personal taste and judg- ment, and, under such circumstances, who is to be the final arbiter? One per- son, upon being confronted with a weil matured piece of brie cheese, sniffs at it, will have none of it, and declares it “decadent,” only he will probably use a shorter and less polite word. Another will eat the cheese with relish and opine that it is just becoming properly ripe. In this case “decadence” is clearly a mat- ter of personal taste, of personal point of view, and depends upon what the state of the individual’s gustatory education and propensities may be.

In the same way, with reference to architecture or any other branch of art, for that matter, the existence of deca- dence, or its degree if present, will be judged according to the individual's pre- vious education and mental background and the attitude thereby engendered. If he be constitutionally a purist, endowed with a puritan type of mind, he will seek satisfaction for his conscience and for his

TURAL RECORD inelastic outlook by an unyielding in- sistence upon what he conceives to be the standards hallmarked by convention laste, decadent or correct as we may individually deem it, is in great measure a matter of purely personal preference, and either decadence or impeccable pur- ity can be rightly gauged only by con- sidering (1) the psychological forces prompting the several modes of expres- sion, and (2) the measure in which the modes of expression satisfy the require- ments imposed by those varied forces.

Examining the cortile of the Palazzo Peretti from a rigid purist’s point of view, there are sundry features of the design, quite apart from the general con- ception, that one would probably pick out as flaws and signs of decadence. To instance a few of them: There is the increasing weight of scale from the base upwards without any compensating bal- ance at the bottom. There is the mul tiplicity of cornices. There are the fre- quent breaks in the cornices, and es- pecially the short breaks above the pedi- ments. There is the whimsical form of the niches, in the lower stage on each side, where a structural principle is re- versed by the angular jogs, thus giving to a void instead of to a solid a stepped py- ramidal form. There is the equally whimsical dog-eared framing of the lower panels, where the head of the framing is deliberately interrupted and dropped down for the purpose of squeezing in irrelevant ornament. There are the scrolled and interrupted pedi- ments, a form in itself abhorrent to many, and here existing solely for deco- ration. There are the attenuated pro- portions at the spring of the arches, a fault visually accentuated by the dis- position of the mouldings. Besides all of which, there is the fact that every bit of the architecture is palpably em- ployed for decorative effect alone, and that the whole composition is over- wrought to satiety by a complex display of “architectural jewelry.”

But the application of purely abstract architectural logic may betray us into a false position. Before meting out the censure of academic logic to the cortile of the Palazzo Peretti, let us consider

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