Page:The Building News and Engineering Journal, Volume 22, 1872.djvu/352

 332 THE BUILDING NEWS. Aprit 26, 1872. enn, from the furnace would increase its action. Fresh air might be acmitted by means of Sherringham’s ventilators, or my own simple balanced slides. Eyery washing stand should be a fixture, hot and cold water Jaid on thereto, and waste titerefrom. The bath I would raise on a plat- form, so that a waste pipe might be connected therewith, and I would haye a tap with cold water laid on. The waste and supply might have guttapercha tubing to enable the bath to be removed to different parts of the room. Or the platform might be omitted, and the waste-pipe taken through the thickness of the floor. Nore.—Ingenuity will be required to mass the pipes together, and so place them that they may be easily accessible. They should be also so placed as to receive some heat from flues to prevent them bursting in case of frost. Dirt and dust have much to do with want of health. The doctors making strong statements of the great injury to health from this cause, I would suggest that nmrrors form part of wall as on the Continent, no ornamental gilded frames, but simple bead in ebony, gilt wood, or Keene’s cement. Again, cupboards in bedrooms should be nmrade like wardrobes and properly fitted. The following suggestions may appear trivial, bat really they are not so. Towel-horses should be part of the wash- stand. Window frames should be made with pro- vision for the window-blind roller, so that no eutting of beads may be requisite as at present. Some provision should be made in walls, by letting in slips of wood, or in some other way, so that nails may be driven for hanging pictures. Skirtings should be so made that they protect the walls from chairs. Provision should be made so that bell-wires and pipes may be easily attended to. Speaking tubes may be introduced with advantage, though here a difficulty, may present itself, as sometimes sound does pass from the one room to the other, the disadvantage whereof, more than exceeds the benefit ; such work therefore, requires to be well done. The foregoing may afford hints as to what should be the house of the future with regard i sanitary conveniences and comfort. B. EF. > ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION. T the usual fortnightly meeting of this Associa- tion, on-Friday evening last, Mr. G. H. Birch, Vice-President, occupied the chair. Messrs. P. J. Woolland, G. F. Haynes, and T. Coy were efected members of the Association. On the motion of Mr. B. A. Paice, a unanimous vote of thanks was accorded to the Vicar of Croydon, for allowing the members of the Association to visit a church at Peddington now in course of erection from the designs of Mr. Joseph Clarke. Mr. Boyes, the Librarian, announced several donations to the Library, and Mr. Florence gave notice that a water- eolour class will be commenced in May in connec- tion with the Association, under the direction of Mr. Naftel, of the Old Water Colour Society. Mr. Florence also called attention to the Elementary €lass of Design, and strongly urged the younger members of the Association to join it in greater numbers than at present. Mr. Lacy W. Ringer, A.R.I.B.A., Past President e! the Association, then read a paper on REREDOSES. After some introductory remarks, in which he said tiiat it was with its modern limitation as applied in eonnection with the altar that he used the word “reredos,” Mr. Ridge remarked that into what- eyer classes the Medieval specimens of reredoses might be resolved, it did not appear that any of them had furnished the type on which most of our modern examples have been founded, and hence one Yeoked, perhaps, with less respect on these works than on those other parts of our ecclesiastical archi- tecture to which ancient tradition imparted an almost overwhelming presumption that they were probably right. This might give us an inclination to treat with insufficient respect the works of archi- tects of our own day, and make us captious in criticism. Mr. Ridge proposed, therefore, to be silent on all individual specimens, leaving it to his hearers, after the study of the few scraps that remained to us from antiquity, to ask whether we appeared to be travelling on the right road in this important par- ticular. Firstly, it was necessary to form a distinct idea of the object of a reredos. There had been ordained in the Christian Church two ceremonies which stood on higher authority than any others. One of these was special to the individual, and formed rather an accident in than a material part of common worship. The other, which was continuously repeated, formed from the very first, and still formed, as it were, the centre of Christian worship. For the celebration of this Act the altar was appro- priated, and it thus became the material centre of the temples of Christianity, round which everything else was arranged, and up to which the architecture led. Now the altar was, from the necessities of the case, an object of comparatively small dimensions. It must bear something like a fixed proportion to the size of the human being. In a small village church it could not with propriety be very consider- ably diminished, while in a vast cathedral the pos- sible increase of size bore no kind of relation to the magnitude of the church. ‘To give, therefore, emin- ence to that which, by itself, might be in danger of becoming insignificant, was the great object of the reredos. By means of that feature, which was capable of the greatest possible elasticity, both as to treatment and dimensions, according to the special circumstances of each individual case, which gave also scope for the most symbolic decora- tion, attention was called to and centred on the altar, which thereby attained an importance which, especially in the more extensive buildings, it might otherwise fail to reach. In the earliest ar- rangement of Christian churches, or rather, of the cathedral or larger churches, of which alone we could now speak with certainty,the bishop and clergy were arranged round the apse, the bishop facing the people and being behind the altar. With such an arrangement baldachinos were possible, but reredoses quite inadmissible. When, however, the science of church building advanced, this arrangement, pro- bably of purely accidental introduction, yielded to the more appropriate plan, in which all alike, the bishop and his people, bowed together in common humiliation before the altar of their God. Then at once the eye had to be arrested at the altar, and the attention directed thereto alone, and fer this the reredos was introduced. At first it was probably in the form ofa retable, and this feature reappeared, and in fact was incorporated, in many of the large examples. A familiar specimen was the Westminster retable, discovered some years ago in Westminster Abbey, and now framed and glazed and hung in the southern aisle of the choir. In the centre isa figure of our Lord in a niche, withS. Mary and S. John in attendant niches. Then came on each side geometric patterns with subjects from the life of Christ introduced, and at one end a niche with a figure of S. Peter, the corresponding figure on the other side being obliterated. The dimensions were 10ft. 1lin. by 3ft. lin.; and the retable was thus of unusually low and long proportion. Mr. Burges, by whom this work was described in Mr. Scott’s ‘Gleanings from Westminster Abbey,” pronounces the jewels with which the work was adorned to be false, and he doubts whether it pertained to the high altar or not. The uncertainties attending the study of this type of subject were fairly illustrated by the fact that Mr. Micklethwaite, in a paper in the Sacristy, expressed an opinion that the work was a frontal and not aretable, and that M. Viollet le Due calmly pronounced it to be a French work, which Mr. Burges indignantly denied. M. Viollet le Due, under the article “re-table,” illustrated an early carved stone specimen from the Church of Carriere S. Denis, near Paris. In the centre is the Virgin and the infant Christ under a canopy of elaborate design, which rose very slightly above the top bounding line of the parallelogram. At South Kensington Museum is acast of the * Pala D'Oro,” a retable belonging to S. Mark’s, at Venice, though now at Aix-la- Chapelle. In the centre, in a vesica, was a figure of Christ in majesty. At the sides thereof, on the right and left respectively, were S. Mary and 8. Michael. The emblems of the Evangelists occupied four circles introduced at the junctions of the straight lines dividing the panels. The cast gave some idea, buta poor one, of the very beautiful metal-work of the original. The retable was higher and consider- ably shorter than the Westminster specimen, and was, of course, very muchearlier in date. The re- mains of a reredos at the east end of the aisle of Worstead Church, Norfolk, show a space extending the length of the altar, and separated therefrom by a row of tracery panels, said to have been occupied by a picture of the martyrdom of &. John the Baptist. There might have been figures in niches at the ends of the picture and other architectural accompaniments, but the retable must always have been the important point in the composition. Of exactly opposite character were the reredoses of the nine altars at Durham.* They were formed by adapting the architectural arcade which runs round this part of the church to the special purpose of a reredos. No doubt the panels thus formed glowed with colours, and told each the tale specially appro- priated to the dedication of its particular altar. Somewhat similar were the reredoses of the side chapels of the nave of Chichester Cathedral, except that here the arcades were appropriated each to the individual design, and did not form a part of any general system of arcade. One reredos only remained complete and visible—viz., that at the east end of the northern aisle. One similar, but of different design, had recently been discovered on the southern side, behind a huge Classic monument of an ancient alderman of the name of Harris. There were remains of two screen walls on the north side and and one on the south, used for separating the other chapels, and all of them showed in the jambs of the present opening the commencement of arcaded reredoses, in some cases of somewhat later date than the one which remained entire. Unfortunately, as a perfectly futile attempt to set up a claim for the cathedral of being a five-aisled church, the interme- diate screens, with their reredoses, have been removed, so that enough did not remain to enable us to compare the different designs. We might, however, note the constancy with which the piscina was in all cases placed on the south side of the altar, although the aumbry occurred in the external wall indiffer- ently on either side, according to the circumstances. The arcade was worth some consideration ; looked at simply as an architectural arcade the widening of the centre panel was a mistake, but the moment it was conceived of filled with painting the anomaly ceased, and it was felt that the centre panel, that which gave the keynote to the others and set forth whatever might be the particular lesson this side altar was from its dedication intended to convey, had its proper pre-eminence. That which as archi- tecture was anomalous, as a reredos, combining archi- tecture with painting, seemed eminently satisfac- tory. The author here mentioned, as bearing some- what on the: subject, the small stone corbels which ocenrred so often in early village churches. One of them, with the hole caused by the cramp by which the figure or whatever else stood on the corbels was attached to the wall, was to be seen in the south aisle. If these stones carried figures there must either have been a far more extensive array of sculpture than one commonly imagined in the village churches, or they must have looked somewhat detached and peculiar in effect. Mr. Ridge next proceeded to notice the screens which, during the later part of the Medieval period, were erected in some of our larger minsters. Commencing again with Westminster, he said that the sereen of to-day on the side towards the altar was a_ resto- ration guided by a previous restoration (undertaken after the coronation of George IV.) in artificial stone of theremains of the ancient reredos discovered on the removal of the marble reredos of Classic taste, erected in the time of Queen Anne. It had, however, the advantage that the ancient reversed side of the screen remained nearly complete. The height and general proportion, the cornice, doors, and niches were practically of the ancient design, and very thoroughly they seemed to answer their purpose. Of the centre panel, apart from its subject, the same could not be said. If the very large space over the altar was anciently given up as one panel to be filled by the retable or reredos properly so called, it must have been one designed on the principles of that close by which we have already been considering—i.e., divided into panels and forms of a size proportionate to the architecture, and not left as a huge hole in the de- sign, which it now appears to be, the general effect being but little less gloomy than if an oil painting of the school of Benjamin West had been introduced. As to figures, if they bore any resemblance to their predecessors, the Medieval sculptors must for this occasion only have forgotten all the rules of their art, which somehow or other guided them in spite of incorrect proportions and indifferent anatomy to true and characteristic results, which all the mechanical and academical correctness of to-day could not in any degree attain unto. In spite, however, of these great drawbacks, there remained le eS SS =
 * See Billing’s Sketch-book, Vol. II.