Mouldings of the six periods of british architecture

PROFESSOR WILLIS was the first to apply Colour to the ground-plans of churches, for the purpose of indicating the different Periods of their construction. He applied his colours indiscriminately, and simply with a view to distinguish one part of a building from, another.

It appeared to me, some time ago, that this use of colour might be usefully carried a point further, by attaching a fixed signification to the employment of different colours, and by causing a specific colour always to represent a specific Period of Architecture; and that no better basis could, in fact, be taken for such an application of colour than the Prismatic Spectrum itself, which, in a two-fold sense, is peculiarly adapted to represent the gradual progress of Art in the buildings of the Middle Ages ; first, because, as in the Prismatic Spectrum it is difficult to say where one colour ends and another begins, so in Church Architecture the course of transition was so regular and so gradual as to be almost imperceptible, and such as to render it difficult for us to draw any exact line of demarcation between the buildings of one style and those of another, or to permit us to say precisely, for example, where Norman Art ends, and where English Art begins; yet, inasmuch as we are obliged, for descriptive purposes, to call certain portions of that blended whole blue, green, yellow, and red, so are we, for the same reason, under the necessity of selecting and characterising in the same manner certain portions of the history of this continuous art, and of designating these parts by some such specific terms as those above proposed ; and, in the second place, this adaptation of the Prismatic Spectrum to our wants in this respect appears to me to be a peculiarly happy one, inasmuch as our National Architecture, rising out of the deep gloom of debased Pagan art in the dark age of barbarous invasion, is thus fitly represented as brightening gradually into the glory and refulgence of Christian Art in the Geometrical Period of the thirteenth century, and as deepening again in its descent through the three following centuries, into the dark age of Pagan revival in the seventeenth. I have, therefore, already for some time, for my own purposes, made use of the following selection of colours to indicate, on the ground plans of churches, the particular dates of the construction of their different parts; a mode of illustration which seems to recommend itself as particularly adapted to the subjects presented in the following pages.

In the selection, then, of the colours in which the Mouldings of the different Periods are printed in this work, the same sequence has been adopted as that in which they occur in the Prismatic Spectrum; so that a given colour not only indicates the Period to which the Moulding belongs, but also the relative historical position of the Period itself, as shown in the Plate which faces the Title Page.