Graffiti

“ Much of the public hated graffiti because it obliterated legitimate communication and a sense of neatness and order that literacy continuously reinforced. But many also enjoyed it. Rap music is the musical equivalent of graffiti. Gang rituals and fights are a continuation of these. Messages exchanged on the data highways-from e-mail to Web communication-often display the same characteristics of aphasia. Concreteness is obsessively pursued. ”

“ These “graffiti,” either scratched on stone or plaster by a sharp instrument such as a nail, or, more rarely, written in red chalk or black charcoal, are found in great abundance, e.g. on the monuments of ancient Egypt. The best-known “graffiti” are those in Pompeii and in the catacombs and elsewhere in Rome. They have been collected by R. Garrucci (Graffiti di Pompei, Paris, 1856) , and L. Correra (“Graffiti di Roma” in Bolletino della commissione municipale archaeologica, Rome, 1893; see also Corp. Ins. Lat. iv., Berlin, 1871) . ”

“ These, however, are for the most part mere graffiti, ill drawn and carelessly sculptured. The records they illustrate are chiefly votive. The passer-by adores the gods of the cataract, implores their protection, registers his name, and states the object of his journey. ”

“ Glass being fragile and diamonds being relatively rare, it is not surprising that few examples of graffiti produced by the method employed by Moll and her lover are known to us today. Interestingly enough, we do, however, have available to us a variety of Renaissance and eighteenth-century written materials suggesting that the practice of using a diamond to write ephemeral statements on window glass was far less rare in those periods than we might expect. ”

“ As drawing we must also count incised or engraved work of all kinds representing merely the outlines of objects and not their modellings, as for instance the graffiti on Greek and Etruscan mirror-backs and dressing-cases; while raised work in low relief, in which outlines are plainly marked and modellings neglected, furnishes, as we have seen, a doubtful class between sculpture and painting. In all figures that are first modelled in the solid and then variously coloured, sculpture and painting bear a common share ”

“ It has no beauty of material like glass, no mystery of surface like mosaic, no pre-eminence of subtly-woven tone and colour like tapestry; yet it gives freer play to line than any of these mentioned fields of design, and a cartoon for sgraffito can be executed in facsimile, undeviated by warp and woof, and unchecked by angular tesserae or lead lines. True, hardness of design may easily result from this aptitude, indeed is to a certain extent inherent to the method under examination, but in overcoming this danger and in making the most of this aptitude is the artist discovered. ”

“ In fresco painting a damp plaster ground is prepared on the wall, upon which the moist colors are painted. These colors become fixed as they dry, and appear to be a part of the wall. The work must be done while the plaster is damp, so the painter prepares only that part of the wall which he expects to cover that day. As it cannot be used after it is dry, he must scrape away all that is left and prepare a new background the next day. If the artist wishes to change any part of his picture, he must scrape off the ground and repaint the entire picture. ”

“ THE Italian words Graffiato, Sgraffiato, or Sgraffito, mean "Scratched," and scratched work is the oldest form of graphic expression and surface decoration used by man.
The term Sgraffito is, however, specially used to denote decoration scratched or incised upon plaster or potter's clay while still soft, and for beauty of effect depends either solely upon lines thus incised according to design, with the resulting contrast of surfaces, or partly upon such lines and contrast, and partly upon an under-coat of colour revealed by the incisions ”

“ The distinction between fresco and wall-painting is frequently forgotten. Most of the early specimens of this art are monochromes, but subsequently the painters used polychrome, which signifies surface colouring in which various colours are employed. The vaulted ceilings, the timber roof, the screens and canopies, the monuments with their effigies, as well as the surface of the walls, were often coloured with diaper-work. Colour and gilding were marked features in all mediaeval buildings, and even richly carved fonts and sculptural monuments were embellished with this method of decoration. ”

“ Now whenever you feel inclined to speak so of a sculptured drapery, be assured, without more ado, the sculpture is base, and bad. You will merely waste your time and corrupt your taste by looking at it. Nothing is so easy as to imitate drapery in marble. You may cast a piece any day; and carve it with such subtlety that the marble shall be an absolute image of the folds. But that is not sculpture. That is mechanical manufacture.
No great sculptor, from the beginning of art to the end of it, has ever carved, or ever will, a deceptive drapery. He has neither time nor will to do it. ”

“ A finished coloured drawing or painting of the design, to a smaller, or even to the same scale as the fresco painting, must be prepared, and the artist should endeavour to make an exact copy of this on the plaster surface, as there is no time to experiment in colour schemes, or to make alterations from the original coloured design in the short period that is at the disposal of the painter when he is at work on the wet plaster. ”

“ There is little or nothing to be done in the decoration of windows by photography. Of course, transparencies will immediately suggest themselves, but they, like 263modern glass painting, are false art. The first requisite of glass painting is that all the light possible shall pass through the pane, and that the colours shall be flat. Modern window-painters overstep the limits of the art, and try to render tone as well, the result being bad artistically and bad decoratively, as utility is affected. ”

“ These wall paintings are executed in the water-glass method of fresco. As wall decorations they are too pictorial in design, and the treatment, in the matter of colouring {108}and technique, lacks simplicity. They are over-modelled in their light and shade, and the colouring presents too many violent contrasts, which greatly injures their value as monumental examples of legitimate wall decoration. Wherever white or light yellows occur in the work, these parts of the painting have evidently become disintegrated, and at present show a disagreeable chalkiness or bloom. ”

“ But many schools of art affect for the most part one kind of texture only, and a vast quantity of the art of all ages depends for great part of its power on texture produced by multitudinous lines. Thus, wood engraving, line engraving properly so called, and countless varieties of sculpture, metal work, and textile fabric, depend for great part of the effect, for the mystery, softness, and clearness of their colours, or shades, on modification of the surfaces by lines or threads. Even in advanced oil painting, the work often depends for some part of its effect on the texture of the canvas. ”

“ XV. Evidently, then, painting, confessedly such, is no deception; it does not assert any material whatever. Whether it be on wood or on stone, or, as will naturally be supposed, on plaster, does not matter. Whatever the material, good painting makes it more precious; nor can it ever be said to deceive respecting the ground of which it gives us no information. To cover brick with plaster, and this plaster with fresco, is, therefore, perfectly legitimate; and as desirable a mode of decoration, as it is constant in the great periods. ”

“ Another peculiarity which we notice is that, with the exception of the space over the massive and elaborately carved black marble mantelpiece—which is occupied by an enormous mirror—the walls are almost entirely covered with pictures in oils, water-colours, crayons, photography, ay, and even in pencil; most of them bearing evidence in their execution that they are the productions of amateurs, although here and there the eye detects work strong enough to suggest the hand and eye of the veteran professional painter. ”

“ You see, a mural painting is not like your illuminations. You can keep a book safe in a chest. But a painting on plaster—or on a wooden panel—is besieged day and night by dampness, and dryness, and dust, and smoke, changes of heat and cold,—everything. The wall may crack. The roof may take fire,—especially when pigeons and sparrows nest in the beams. The mere action of the air on any painting must be proved by years. ”

“ Originally, undoubtedly, each bit of glass or stone was laid in the soft plaster of wall or floor; but now a more labour saving method has obtained; it is amusing to watch the modern rest-cure. Page 310 Instead of an artist working in square bits of glass to carry out his design, throwing his interest and personality into the work, a labourer sits leisurely before a large cartoon, on which he glues pieces of mosaic the prescribed colour and size, mechanically fitting them over the design until it is completely covered. ”

“ Decorative painting, in the usual sense, is first described as executed in monochrome for permanence on the façades of buildings, or for temporary purposes on triumphal arches and similar structures; and then follows a chapter on what is known as ‘Sgraffito’ work, or decoration in plaster of two colours, especially valuable as the first statement of the method and aim of this process, which had been evolved 20from pâte-sur-pâte pottery not long before Vasari’s time. ”

“ The most famous graffito yet discovered is that generally accepted as representing a caricature of Christ upon the cross, found on the walls of the Domus Gelotiana on the Palatine in 1857, and now preserved in the Kircherian Museum of the Collegio Romano. Deeply scratched in the wall is a figure of a man clad in the short tunica with one hand upraised in salutation to another figure, with the head of an ass, or possibly a horse, hanging on a cross ”

“ We talk glibly about good drawing, and forget altogether the much greater importance of good colour. At Leon the drawing is forgotten altogether, and I defy any one to be otherwise than charmed with the glories of the effect created solely by the colour. At present in England our glass is all but invariably bad—nay, contemptible—in colour; whilst the so-called good drawing is usually a miserable attempt to reproduce some sentimentality of a German painter. Two schools might well be studied a little more than they are ”

“ Wandering through a maze of long skylighted galleries where the master-works of Modern Art are conserved and cherished, he was to encounter the thought that haunted him in a myriad of images, wrought by the chisel, the brush, the burin, and the graving-tool in marble or bronze, upon canvas or panel, in ivory, or silver, or enamel, or gold. ”

“ In the former, pigments, mixed only with water, are laid on while the plaster is wet, and from this “freshness” of the ground the process is called by an Italian term, painting “a fresco” or “on the fresh,” though in ordinary parlance the word “fresco” has come to be used as a noun, as when we speak of the “frescoes” of Giotto. Furthermore, as “fresco” is the wall-painter’s process par excellence the word is unfortunately often employed inaccurately for any mural picture, though this may have been executed by quite a different process. ”

“ Far away, to the smallest figures in the smoke, and to one drowning under the distant arch of the bridge, all are wrought with a consummate skill in vulgar touch; there is no good painting, properly so called, anywhere, but of clever, dotty, sparkling, telling execution, as much as the canvas will hold, and much delicate gray and blue color in the smoke and sky. ”

“ The texture of silk, for example, is given by the glass painter perfectly; but, in the struggle for picturesque effects of light and shade, all consistency of treatment is abandoned. The painter is here let loose; and he can no more withstand the attractions of paint than a boy can resist the temptation of fresh fallen snow. The one must throw snowballs at somebody, the other must lay about him with pigment. ”

“ It was the corner where ordinarily an artist affixes his name. She rose and went to the heavy studio-easel, and looked again with her eyes close to the stretchers. The paint was evidently freshly applied to that corner of the canvas. To her peering gaze, it almost seemed that through the new coating of the background she could catch a faint underlying line of red, as though it had been a stroke in the letter of a name. Then, she noticed her father’s palette lying on a chair near the easel, and the brushes were damp. ”

“ My attempt is seen under every disadvantage; it is too near the eye and too near the light; and it is painted on a material which is most ungracious for the reception of colour. The minute undulations of marble always lose something in a plaster reproduction, but when the plaster has further to be painted with four coats of oil paint to stop the suction, it may readily be imagined how much the more delicate modulations of the surface will suffer. ”

“ When the artist wishes to compose a figure from these marbles he first prepares a cartoon in light and shade with the same tints, and that done, following the outlines of those medium and dark and pale tints, he fits together with great care in their proper places first of all in the middle, the light of that pure white marble, and then the half-tones and the darks beside them, according to the actual outlines that the artist has drawn in the cartoon. ”