bly
met--or rather _might_ be.

When, in the sixteenth century, the Renaissance spread from south
to north, color was practically eliminated from architecture. The
Egyptians had had it, hot and bright as the sun on the desert; we
know that the Greeks made their Parian marble glow in rainbow tints;
Moorish architecture was nothing if not colorful, and the Venice
Ruskin loved was fairly iridescent--a thing of fire-opal and pearl.
In Italian Renaissance architecture up to its latest phase, the color
element was always present; but it was snuffed out under the leaden
colored northern skies. Paris is grey, London is brown, New York is
white, and Chicago the color of cinders. We have only to compare them
to yellow Rome, red Siena, and pearl-tinted Venice, to realize how
much we have lost in the elimination of color from architecture.
We are coming to realize it. Color played an important part in the
Pan-American Exposition, and again in the San Francisco Exposition,
where, wedded to light, it became the dominant note of the whole
architectural concert. Now these great expositions in which the
architects and artists are given a free hand, are in the nature of
preliminary studies in which these functionaries sketch in transitory
form the things they desire to do in more permanent form. They are
forecasts of the future, a future which in certain quarters is
already beginning to realize itself. It is therefore probable that
architectural art will become increasingly colorful.

The author remembers the day and the hour when this became his
personal conviction--his personal desire. It happened years ago in
the Albright Gallery in Buffalo--a building then newly completed, of a
severely classic type. In the central hall was a single doorway,
whose white marble architrave had been stained with different colored
pigments by Francis Bacon; after the manner of the Greeks. The effect
was so charming, and made the rest of the place seem by contrast so
cold and dun, that the author came then and there to the conclusion
that architecture without polychromy was architecture incomplete. Mr.
Bacon spent three years in Asia Minor, and elsewhere, studying
the remains of Greek architecture, and he found and brought home a
fragment of an antefix from the temple of Assos, in which the applied
color was still pure and strong. The Greeks were a joyous people. When
joy comes back into life, color will come back into architecture.

Ceramic products