Divide the inside of a dome into coffers that shrink in step with the meridians as they rise, so that their perspective deepens the dome and draws the eye to the light of the lantern.
Rules · Optics · Site · Theory
Frame the view like the wings of a stage
Close the picture at one side, or at both, with a dark mass near at hand (a building, a ruin, a clump of trees or a ship), as the painted wings of a stage close its scene; set a feature in the middle distance; and open the centre on a bright distance across water.
In Saint Ursula the round temple fills the left side of the picture, cut off by its frame at the balustrade, and a clump of trees and the moored ships fill the right. The palace and its tower lead the eye down the left of the harbour; the galleon stands in the middle distance; and the centre opens on the sea under the sun. The same arrangement recurs in almost every seaport, and in the landscapes with trees in place of the buildings.
The English landscape gardeners took the arrangement over. Kent and Hoare framed their views of a temple across water with clumps of trees at the sides, as Claude framed his (The garden as a picture).
Related rules
Hold that the beauty of the orders comes from fixed proportions that please by nature, as consonances do in music; where the ancients differ, the differences answer to circumstances such as distance and height.
Make the parterre oblong rather than square, since figures somewhat oblong look better on the ground than square ones; later practice made it as broad as the front of the house and about twice as long.
parterre oblong; later practice: width ≈ house front, length ≈ 2 × width
Proportion the width of an allée to its length: a walk of about 100 toises (some 200 m) should be 5 or 6 toises wide, one of 200 toises 7 or 8, and so on, so that a long walk does not seem to narrow to a slot in the distance.
100 toises long → 5–6 wide · 200 → 7–8 · 300 → 9–10 · 400 → 10–12 (1 toise ≈ 1.95 m)
Organise the whole garden on one axis from the centre of the house to the horizon; lay out the parts symmetrically about it, and use water, slopes and hidden changes of level so that the view along it reveals the garden by stages.
In place of a wall, bound the garden with a ditch whose side towards the garden is a vertical retaining wall and whose other side slopes up to the field, so that cattle are kept out and the view from the house runs on uninterrupted into the park.
ditch c. 1.5–2 m deep: wall on the garden side, turf slope on the park side
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Frame the view like the wings of a stage”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/claude-framing-wings. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.