Finish the walls in the colours of the period: drab, olive and stone colour on the panelling of the early eighteenth century; stone colour and white, with crimson or green damask in the state rooms, under the Palladians; silks and papers with white and gilt woodwork in the Rococo; pale green, pink, lilac and blue under Adam; stripes and strong reds, yellows and greens in the Regency; stone colours with grained woodwork in the Greek Revival.
The colours are known from the houses themselves, from the paint found under later layers and from accounts and inventories. Halls were often lined and jointed in imitation of stone, or painted to look like marble; the best rooms were hung with silk, damask or velvet stretched within a gilt fillet; paper, at first imitating those hangings, became the ordinary finish of the lesser rooms after the middle of the century.
The particular colours given to each room here are chosen from each period’s range by the room’s use: the choice is editorial.
Front a basilican church with two storeys of the order: the lower as wide as nave and chapels, the upper as wide as the nave alone, joined by scrolls and crowned by a pediment.
Il Gesù (reconstructed): lower ≈ 34 m wide, upper ≈ 20 m; scrolls fill the difference
Mark the main door by setting a segmental pediment inside a larger triangular one, or by breaking the pediment open to hold a cartouche or statue.
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.
Make the architrave round a door or window as wide as a sixth part of the opening’s breadth, and dress the openings of the principal floor more richly than those of the storeys above and below, with a frieze and cornice, and on the grandest a pediment.
architrave = ⅙ × width of the light
Break the architrave of a door or window with blocks of plain stone laid across it, alternately larger and smaller, and set a keystone in the middle of the head.
Rusticate the lowest storey or the basement, its stones marked by deep joints, as the plainest and strongest part of the building; keep the dressed stone, the orders and the ornament for the storeys above.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The colours and hangings of each period”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/period-colours. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.