Designer Library 1: Speltz

Designer Library 1: Speltz

My October 20 post mused about the place of books in scenic design today, and proposed to look at the ones that have been most significant for me. I have a special fondness for five books, the first of which is a reprint of a fairly well-known text on historic ornament styles.

I don't remember my first contact with Alexander Speltz' 1906 The Styles of Ornament. I think it was in grad school. I had submitted a design for an assignment in which I had placed the show in a particular style era. I don't recall the show, but it probably was one in which I had moved the period, like a Shakespeare. I produced the ground plan and rendering, and presented it to my graduate project teacher and the senior designer. They asked me what I thought I was doing and I explained what I intended. They looked at each other and mumbled knowing and pitying comments to each other about my design and asked me some more questions. It soon became painfully obvious that I had not chosen my style particularly well, and that I had expressed it in a flawed and insecure way.

I had not taken any period style classes, but I had taken the required costume history courses and I thought I had a bit of a handle on it. I had begun to grasp the style but I didn't have the feel right and I was timid. I didn't get to the real conviction of statement. They mumbled more knowing things to each other and said, "I think you need to spend more time with Speltz."

Up to that point, I won't say I hated style, but I had been dismissive of it. In my naive way, I felt it was all too fussy and mostly irrelevant to real life. I thought I understood line and scale and texture, but I was impatient with arguments over style. It all just seemed too arcane to be understood easily, except by people who wanted to make a fetish of it. Certainly, I was wrong. It is that, but it is such an important tool of design and it communicates intensely.

I've never seen the original English edition of Speltz, which may have been distributed exclusively in Great Britain. The only copies widely available today are published by the reprint house Dover Publishing since 1959. My paperback copy cost all of $6.50 but now is listed at $14 on Amazon.

The book deals with the major strains geographically and by period, considering variations mostly among European cultures. There is Prehistoric and Primitive and a section on Antiquity. The section on The Middle Ages includes Early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque, Russian, Mahometan, Gothic, Chinese and Japanese ornament. The Renaissance and Modern Times section includes Renaissance and Later Renaissance, Rococo, Colonial, and Classical Revival. Because the book was originally published in Germany in 1906 it ends with sections on Empire, Biedermeier, and German Neogrec, but there are many available resources for later periods.

The fat 650-page book has very little text and is anything but academic. It is filled with exquisite plates of line illustrations of cornices, furniture, friezes, and architectural and personal objects that illustrate the styles of each period. The cover advertises 3765 illustrations. The plates are printed quite small in this 5-1/2"x 8" paperback edition, where the original must have been much larger. But they still are quite clear and visible for study. If it is a problem for particular images, enlarge them on a copier.

It has been my practice over the years to sketch my research. My sketchbooks have many pages of fragments of cornices and objects and floral motifs from Speltz, all abandoned half-complete because I felt I had "got it" about the style I was exploring and moved on. The idea is to train my eye and my hand to the style by sketching it, with particular attention detail. My purpose is to understand the qualities of mass, line, texture, shape, and color, and to develop a feel for the proportion and scale. I sketch many objects from Speltz, in additon to architectural ideas from other sources.

The result is that when I work on the show, I'm thinking about the style world of the play and working more closely to the aesthetic of the period. It is possible to be more confident about the sense of space, the character of the line and the density of detail in the period or style that I'm working in. These things have a subliminal effect and bring conviction to the feel and finish of the design of any show, not just period designs. They allow the designer to make a more finished statement through her choices. And they help the audience to feel confident that whatever is there, is there by choice for a purpose and makes an intentional statement.

Every designer should own this book.

It may be worth mentioning that Dover also has published a similar book since 1957, Handbook of Ornament by Franz Sales Meyer, with 3002 illustrations. This also is a good reference, but I have not found it as valuable as Speltz.

Next, my favorite book on scenic design.

Scenemaker
October 30, 2011