ART AND UTILITY.

Western Star, Issue 859, 12 July 1884, Page 1 (Supplement)

ART AND UTILITY.

Let us consider the original utility of a few artistic things. Blue ware was originally made blue probably because blue was simple and cheap ; but it is now prized and imitated for more fanciful reasons. Statuary was at first an essential part (a figured column) of architecture, and the most elaborate architecture was the outcome of the simple need of a building. Climate, too, has been a more active designer than man. It decreed flat roofs where people wanted to sleep in the open; narrow streets where people needed shade, as in Italy ; and angular roofs where snow aud rain had to be manoeuvred. Small dim-religious-light windows were once made small because larger ones could not so well be made, and were, in fact, then more ideal than real; but windows are now made small for artistic sympathies so sensitive that even the green bull’s eye is centered in the pade—not on economical grounds as heretofore, when every inch of glass was a luxury, but for decorative,purposes in an age when we can hit in daylight by the square yard. The niceties of jewellery that we now show as art-curiosities in museums are made for very practical daily use. The coins we, copy and reiterate in brooches, bracelets, and solitaires, were as utilitarian as our coins are now. The common alphabet out of which we in the name of art elaborate so many varieties of form in public petitions and addresses, no doubt received the first variety of form through the uncompromising necessity that- there should be distinctions between one letter and another. Monks decorated their books, not for decorations and as decoration only, but as a beautiiful offering to their faith; but it was an offering and prayer first; it was truly a devotion, not to art as art, but through art to the deity. The statues devoted to Greek temples had the utilitarian character of offerings or expressions of worship. The marble figures we so much admire as figures in the church of Santa Croce and Florence were not executed and erected as to be admired figures only, but primarily, for the £very utilitarian purpose of commemorating the worth —-of Dante, Michael Angelo, and others. Monks, poets, musicians, and actors have kept clean-shaven faces—as an indication of a certain religious order with the monk, necessity with the actor, and personal comfort as an innate sense of the fittest with the poet and musician ; and yet clear-cut, clean-shaven faces are often depicted by artists in their portraitures of ideal or conceived characters. Men of rapid and passionate thought, in the necessity of expression, evolve a form of handwriting which other people with no very rapid or passionate thought try to imitate; they are attracted by the aggregate beauty of form which this perfectly utilitarian writing presents. Finally, as a matter of honour, some American Indians retained a long lock of hair on the top of their skulls to aid the process of scalping should they fall victims to opposing tribes; and the fashion not long ago decreed something very similar, either direct from this or the Chinese pig-tail, to 'ornament the humanity of civilisation 1 .---T’/ie Magazine of Art.