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Opening eyes surely is the goal of every book published about architecture and design; or at least it should be. In the case of An Encyclopaedia of Colour Decoration from the Earliest Times to the Middle of the 19th Century, one can be assured that orbs around the world were suitably widened. ‘Many of the designs were specially procured for this book, and have not hitherto been reproduced, at least in colour,’ Dr Helmuth Theodor Bossert, a German art historian and archaeologist, explains in his prefatory remarks. ‘The other illustrations have been culled from the great monographs on the subject, some of which will no doubt be familiar to many readers, though it is hardly likely that any reader will have them all in his permanent possession.’
Published in Berlin by Ernst Wasmuth in 1928 – and blessedly, for the purposes of the followers of Aesthete's Library, in English, too – An Encyclopaedia of Colour Decoration is ostensibly about murals. Figurative subjects, though, are almost entirely avoided. Bossert's focus is on repetitive motifs, just the sort of thing that decorators and artisans, especially decorative painters, rely on to animate floors, walls and ceilings. The impressively credentialed author – his CV would go on to include the consequential rediscovery of Karatepe, a Hittite fortress in southern Turkey, from 1947 – reaches right back to ancient Egypt for the forms of his polychrome panoply. From hypnotic whorls daubed on to the ceiling of a tomb in pharaonic Thebes to a Ukrainian peasant
woman's hand-painted wallpaper border depicting feathery flowers a millennium later, the book delivers much that is delectable, abstract as well as naturalistic.
It would not be incorrect to put Bossert's work in the category of pattern books, since he certainly refers to those DIY guides in his explanation. An Encyclopaedia of Colour Decoration presents endless possibilities to those of us who are handy with a paintbrush or who have access to can-do craftspeople. One creamy page after the next reveals zigzags and pinwheels, starbursts and chequerboards, graceful garlands and basic lines jazzily crisscrossed with animated spikes. All bear witness to Bossert's scholarly appreciation of untutored folk art, whether found in Anatolia or in Africa, which is also evidenced in his other well-illustrated books. Ancient-world locations are inventively mined for the encyclopaedia, including Asia Minor, Crete, Assyria, Pompeii and the Greek island of Delos. So are later European sources. Many of these are ecclesiastical in origin, because, as Bossert painfully notes, 'more sacred than profane edifices have been preserved from destruction'. Still, it comes as a surprise to find our oracle of ornamentation sailing across the Atlantic to explore the United States. There, among a handful of New England wonders, he reproduces a Connecticut bedroom brightened by an 1830s mural of stylised flowers and leaves that suggests the space is wrapped in a finely appliquéd quilt.
‘Men and women of the people decorate their walls without a preliminary sketch or the use of a stencil,' Bossert wonderingly observes in this volume, ‘and they display so much taste, sense of colour and imagination, and so much skill in spacing the surface that we do not know which to admire more: the vivid creative power or the force of tradition.’ Those words hearten
the artistically untalented me. A primitive trompe-l'oeil evocation of draped and fringed fabric – identified as an ADC750 carpet frieze at Rome's Santa Maria Antiqua, the oldest Christian house of worship in the Forum – is so shockingly uncomplicated that even I just might be able to recreate it across my entrance hall over the winter months. If I manage to do so, and without the assistance of mechanical aids, as did the original painter, I'll be sure to post the results on the website of this fair publication.
A version of this article appears in the November 2023 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
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