Part 8 (1/2)
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The Palace of Fine Arts at Close Range
The path leading to the northern end of the colonnade attracted us It brought us to the beautiful little grove of Monterey cypress that McLaren had saved from the old Harbor View restaurant, for so many years one of the most curious and picturesque of the San Francisco resorts, one of the few on the bay-side Though the architect frankly admired Paul Bartlett's realistic ”Wounded Lion,” the pieces of sculpture set out on the grass bothered hi there He wanted the ”I think I can see what the purpose was in putting them here, to provide decoration that would be unobtrusive But some of these pieces, like Bartlett's, stand out conspicuously and deserve to be treated with er of weakening a glorious conception like Maybeck's by putting tooan artistic confusion”
We began to see how the colonnade in Geroine two chariots tearing along here, between the columns, after the ancient fashi+on And those bushes, to the right, rising on the loall, between the vases, surely had the character of over-growth They carried out Maybeck's idea of an abandoned ruin
The architect pointed to the top of the wall: ”The little roof-garden on the edge of the upper wall gives the Egyptian note in the architecture that many people have felt and it is emphasized by the deep red that Guerin has applied, the shade that's often found in Egyptian ruins”
Above the main entrance of the palaceLentelli's ”Aspiration,”
that had been the cause of sothe first feeeks of the Exposition ”Lentelli had a hard tiure It drove hiht have solved the probleure seem to float; but I doubt if it could have been solved by anyone The foot-rest they finally decided to put under it didn't help the situation h pedestal, stood Charles Grafly's monumental statue of ”The Pioneer Mother” ”I suppose the obvious in sculpture has its place,” the architect reroup will appeal to popular senti a type of wonition than she has received in the past Most of the glory of the pioneer days has gone to the round, had to share in the hardshi+ps and often did a large part of the work It's a question in orous type that came over the plains in the prairie schooner However, just as she is, she is fine, and she has a strong hand that looks as if it had been ave her that kind of head-covering
She e bare-headed The children are excellent Observe the bright outlook of the boy and the tiirl There's a fine tenderness in the care the girl is getting fro roup has nobility and it's worthy of being a permanent monument for San Francisco By the way, there's the old Roain, at the base of the group It has a very happy application here It reet the Easterners out to California in the old days before the railroads A good many of them must have dropped in their tracks and left their skulls to bleach in the sun”
The other ornan we found very appropriate and direct, as we studied the pedestal There was the shi+p that used to go round the horn, with the torches that suggested civilization, and, at the back of the pedestal, the fla sun that celebrated the Golden Gate
In the rotunda we found Paul Bartlett, represented again by the equestrian statue of Lafayette, in full unifornificent setting, though it suffered by being surrounded by sointerests ”The director of the Fine Arts Departure to have it duplicated for the Exposition It's a good example of the old-fashi+oned heroic sculpture, where the subjects take conventional dra of the rotunda displayed those much-discussed murals by Robert Reid Up there they seemed like pale reflections ”You should have seen thenificent But the instant they were put in place it was plain that the effect had been , they show up better Judged by thes, they are full of inspiration and poetry Only aand with a fine color-sense could have done them But in all this splendor of architecture they are lost”
On exa them in detail we found that they covered an extraordinarily wide range of fancy, graceful and dramatic, even while, save in one panel, they showed an indifference to story-telling One group celebrated ”The Birth of European Art,” with the altar and the sacred flauardian and three helpers, and with afrom his chariot to seize the torch of inspiration and to bear it in triuh the world, the future intimated by the crystal held in the hands of the woman at the left Another, ”The Birth of Oriental Art,” told the ancient legend of a Chinese warrior who, seated on the back of a dragon, gave battle to an eagle, the sy inspiration froht forward more or less familiar types: the Madonna and the Child, Joan of Arc, Youth and Beauty, in the figure of a girl, Vanity in the Peacock, with round, the tender of the sacred flame and the bearer of the palm for the dead, and the laurel-bearer ready to crown victory ”The Inspiration in All Art” revealed the figures of Music, Architecture, Painting, Poetry and Sculpture Four other panels glorified the four golds of California, gold, wheat, poppies and oranges, a happy idea, providing opportunities for the splendid use of color
”It's a pity those murals couldn't have been tried out up there and then taken down and done over,” said the architect ”But so, perhaps in one of our San Francisco public buildings They're too good not to have the right kind of display”
”The Priestess of Culture,” by Herbert Adaht tihtful place up there and blended into the general architectural scheht have been left out with advantage
Through the coluroups of colu about this palace is the way it grows on you The more familiar you are with it the more you feel the charht when they can get just the effect he intended In all the Exposition there's no other spot quite so roht have been built for lovers”
XI
At the Palace of Horticulture
At the Palace of Horticulture the architect said: ”Here is the Mosque of Ahmed the First, taken from Constantinople and adapted to horticulture and to the Exposition It has a distinct character of its own It even has teive the iy and dull They are like the people thatBut here is use that expresses itself in beauty and adorns itself with appropriate decoration”
When Itoo ornate, the architect replied:
”There's an intimate and appropriate relation between the ornament and the architecture Personally I shouldn't care to see just this kind of building in the heart of the city, where you'd have it before your eyes every day But for the Exposition it's just right And how fitting it is that the splendid do that is really an indoor garden and that the reen, nature's favorite and most joyous color Some joker,”
he went on, ”says that this Exposition is doood many people have here, that there are toopictorial effect, and they hareneral spirit of the architecture And as for this doreatest in the world See how cleverly the architects, following the spirit of the French Renaissance, have used those ornamental shafts The only criticism that can be made on theht, of course, always to be inti fro, they are put on from outside Now, in the mosque they were very important in their service They were the minarets where the Muezzins used to stand in order to call the faithful to prayer Thoseon the dome motive, on the corners of the walls of the main palaces are much closer to the old idea”
Our talk turned to the subject of doeneral The idea had come from the bees, from the shape of their hives Prehistoric -place a hut shaped like a hive, as well as an imitation of a bird's nest In formal architecture, the dome showed itself early The Greeks knew it; but they didn't use it reatest users of the dome were the Byzantines It was all dome with them The first important dome was built in Rome in the second century, to crown the Pantheon Of all the do historically was St
Peter's, the work of several architects It was the inspiration of the dolish architect, Sir Christopher Wren Architecturally theof the domes was Brunelleschi's, built for the Florence Cathedral in the fifteenth century, known throughout the world by the Italian name for Cathedral, the Duomo
It was in connection with the Duomo that the architect reminded me of the celebrated story about Brunelleschi When the Florentine church authorities decided to build the Duohty a dome should be developed So they invited the architects to appear before them in competition, and to present their ideas One architect, Donatello, explained that, if he secured the commission, he should first build a mound of earth, and over it he would construct his doreat labor and expense in taking the earth out He said that he would put coins into the earth and, by this means, he would very quickly have the earth removed by the people When Brunelleschi was asked hoould build his do stand on end?” They didn't kno, and he showed the it down at one end, an idea like the one that occurred to Christopher Columbus about fifty years later