The Façade (Fr.) is the exterior front or face of a building. This term, although frequently restricted to classic architecture, may be applied to the front elevation of a building in any style. It is, however, generally used with reference to buildings of some magnitude and pretension; thus, we speak of the front of a house, and the façade of a pal. ace. The back elevation of an important building is called the rear façade, and a side elevation the lateral façade. The sides of a court, or cortile are also called façades, and are distinguished as north, south, etc., façades.

Relief, as distinguished from "sculpture in the round," is one of the oldest forms of mural decoration, and in many cases is a subordinate department of architectural art rather than a branch of sculpture proper. It is low relief (bas-relief, basso-rilievo), middle (mezzo-rilievo), and high relief (alto-rilievo) according as the carved figures project very little, in a moderate degree, or in a very considerable degree from the background. The ancient Egyptians practiced a peculiar kind of low relief and intaglio combined. The wall-sculptures of Assyria and Babylonia are mostly in very low relief.

Dissolving views are pictures painted upon glass, and made to appear of great size and with great distinctness upon a wall by means of a magic lantern with strong lenses and an intense oxyhydrogen light, and thenby removal of the glass from the focus, and gradual increase of its distance-apparently dissolved into a haze, through which a second picture is made to appear by means of a second slide, at first with a feeble, and afterwards with a strong light. Subjects are chosen to which such an optical illusion is adapted, such as representations of the same object or landscape at different periods.

The art of painting manuscripts with miniatures and ornaments termed "illumination," is one of the most remote antiquity. The Egypian papyri containing portions of the Ritual or "Book of the Dead" are ornamented with veritable drawings and colored pictures. Except these papyri, no other manuscripts of antiquity were, strictly speaking, illuminated; such Greek and Roman manuscripts of the first century as have reached the present day being written only. It was in the middle ages, and in the hands of ecclesiastical scholars or copyists, that the art of illumination touched its highest development.

The Elgin Marbles are a celebrated collection of ancient sculptures, brought from Greece by the seventh Earl of Elgin, then ambassador to the Porte, and acquired from him by the nation for the British Museum in 1816 at the sum of $175,000. Early in the century he obtained a firman to examine, measure, and remove certain stones with inscriptions from the Acropolis of Athens, then a Turkish fortress. His agents, on the strength of this firman, removed the so-called Elgin Marbles, packed before Elgin's recall in 1803, but not finally conveyed to England till 1812. They are said to have cost the ambassador upwards of $370,000.

THE LARGEST STATUE ON RECORD.

"Liberty," Bartholdi's statue, presented to the United States by the French people in 1885, is the largest statue ever built. Its conception is due to the great French sculptor whose name it bears. It is said to be a likeness of his mother. Eight years were consumed in the construction of this gigantic brazen image. Its weight is 440,000 pounds, of which

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146,000 pounds are copper, the remainder iron and steel. The chief part of the iron and steel was used in constructing the skeleton frame work for the inside. The mammoth electric light held in the hand of the giantess is 305 feet above tide-water. The height of the figure is 152%1⁄2 feet; the pedestal 91 feet, and the foundation 52 feet and 10 inches. Forty persons can find standing-room within the mighty head, which is 142 feet in diameter. A six-foot man, standing on the lower lip, could hardly reach the eyes. The index finger is 8 feet in length and the nose 334 feet. The Colossus of Rhodes was a pigmy compared with this latter day wonder.

SOME MARVELOUS PAINTINGS.

The following brief notes on a few wonderful creations of the brush will be perused with general interest:

Quentin Matsys, the Dutch painter, painted a bee so well that the artist Mandyn thought it a real bee and proceeded to brush it away with his handkerchief.

Parrhasios painted a curtain so admirably that even Zeuxis, the artist, mistook it for real drapery.

Zeuxis, a Grecian painter, painted some grapes so well that birds came and pecked at them, thinking them real grapes.

Apelles painted Alexander's horse Bucephalus so true to life that some mares came up to the canvas neighing, under the supposition that it was a real animal.

Velasquez painted a Spanish admiral so true to life that when King Felipe IV entered the studio, he mistook the painting for the man, and began reproving the supposed officer for neglecting his duty, in wasting his time in the studio, when he ought to have been with his fleet.

Apellês, being at a loss to paint the foam of Alexander's horse, dashed his brush at the picture in a fit of annoyance, and did by accident what his skill had failed to do.

The same tale is told of Protogenês, who dashed his brush at a picture, and thus produced "the foam of a dog's mouth," which he had long been trying in vain to represent.

STORY OF THE "ART DIVINE."

The cradle of the divine art was Egypt. The Hebrews took with them to Palestine the songs they had learned there, and many of the hymns of the early Christian Church were necessarily old Temple melodies. Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan (374), and after him Pope Gregory the Great (590), were the fathers of music in the Western Church. Harmonies were introduced in the ninth century; the present musical notation was invented by Guido Aretino (d. 1055); counterpoint was perfected by the Belgian Josquin Despres (d. 1521) and the Italian Palestrina (1555); and Italian opera was founded in 1600. The influence of the Italian school spread all over Europe; but in the sixteenth century England had a national school of her own, comprising such names as Tallis, Farrant, and Orlando Gibbons. Among the great composers of the seyenteenth century were Monteverde in Italy, Lully in France, and Purcell in England. In the eighteenth century music made enormous advances, especially in Germany. Church music attained to its highest development under Bach, the oratorio under Handel (1685-1759), the opera under Mozart and Gluck, and orchestral music under Haydn and Beethoven

(1770-1827). The nineteenth century has been illustrated by such names as Mendelssohn, Weber, Meyerbeer, Auber, Schubert, Spohr, Schumann, Chopin, Rossini, Bellini, Verdi; and in England, Sterndale, Bennett and Macfarren. Of the later German school the chief exponents have been Wagner (1813-83) and Liszt (d. 1886). Other leading composers are Gounod, in France; Boito, in Italy; Rubinstein and Brahms, in Germany; Dvorák, in Bohemia, Grieg, in Scandinavia, and Sullivan, Mackenzie, Stanford and Cowen, in England.

THE PORTLAND VASE.

The Portland Vase was a celebrated ancient Roman glass vase or cinerary urn found during the pontificate of Urban VIII. (1623-44) in a marble sarcophagus (of Alexander Severus, it is thought, and his mother Mammæa) in the Monte del Grano, near Rome. It was at first deposited in the Barberini Palace at Rome, and hence it is sometimes called the Barberini Vase. It was bought in 1770 by Sir William Hamilton, and in 1787 by the Portland family, who in 1810 deposited it in the British Museum, where it is now shown in the "Gold Room." The ground of the Portland Vase is of dark blue glass, and the figure subjects which adorn it are cut in cameo style in an outer layer of opaque white glass. In the official British Museum Guide (1890) it is stated that the composition is supposed to represent on the obverse Thetis consenting to be the bride of Peleus, in the presence of Poseidon and Eros; on the reverse, Peleus and Thetis on Mount Pelion. On the bottom of the vase is a bust of Paris. The vase was broken to pieces by a lunatic in 1845, but the fragments were very skillfully united again. The Portland Vase is ten inches high, and is the finest specimen of an ancient cameo cut-glass vase known. There are only two others of similar character which approach it in beauty-viz. an amphora in the Naples Museum and the Auldjo Vase. But fragments of the same kind of glass exist with work upon them quite as fine. In the end of the eighteenth century Josiah Wedgwood, the famous potter made fifty copies in fine earthenware of the Portland Vase, which were originally sold at twenty-five guineas each. One of these now fetches $1,000.

THE IMPRESSIONISTS.

Impressionism made its first public appearance in the Salon of 1867. Founded, it is claimed, by Edouard Manet, its aim is to rid art of the trammels of tradition and to look at nature-and to portray her-in a fresh and original manner. Therefore conventionalities in lighting, grouping, etc., are carefully avoided, while personal and immediate "impressions" of nature must be rendered with absolute truth. In the words of one of their ablest exponents, they hold that the eye of the painter "should abstract itself from memory, seeing only that which it looks upon, and that as for the first time, and the hand should become an impersonal abstraction, guided only by the will, oblivious of all previous cunning." In the works of most of the impressionists little selection of subject or care for beauty of color, form, or expression is visible; and their art, touching as it would seem by an instinctive preference on some of the most unlovely aspects of the nineteenth century existence, dealing with the life of the jockey and the ballet-girl, and portraying the worst atrocities of modern costume, has frequently fallen into dire depths of

ugliness and vulgarity. Certain points of resemblance to the aims and methods of the impressionists are to be found in the works of such able painters as J. M. Whistler and J. S. Sargent, and still more distinctly in those of several of the younger Paris-trained English painters who have exhibited in the Suffolk Street Gallery and in the Nineteenth Century Art Club.

THE GREAT MASTERS AND GREAT SCHOOLS.

The chief schools of painting are the Florentine, founded on the Byzantine school, its principal painters being Cimabue (1240-1300), Giotto (1276-1336), Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1520), Michael Angelo Buonarotti (1474-1564), Carlo Dolci (1616-86); the Flemish -J. Van Eyck (1366-1441), Quentin Matsys (1460-1529), Breughel (1565-1625), P. P. Rubens (15771640), Vandyck (1599-1641), Snyders (1579-1657), Hobbima (1611-70), Tenniers, jun., (1610-94), Rosa Bonheur (1822), the Umbrian, its chief exponent being P. Perugino (1446-1524); the Venitian—Giorgione (1477-1511), Sebastian del Piomno (1485-1547), Titian (1477-1576), Paul Veronese (153288), Tintoretto (1512-94); the Roman-Raphael (1483-1520), Paolo Perugino (1446-1524), Giulio Romano (1492-1546), Canaletti (1697-1768); the German-Hans Holbein (1495-1543), Sir Peter Lely (1617-80), Sir Godfrey Kneller (1648-1723), P. von Cornelius (1787-1867), F. Overbeck (1789-1869), W. Kaulbach (1805-74); the Lombardian-Correggio (1494-1534), Permegiano (1503-40), Annibal Caracci (1568-1609), Guido (1575-1642), the Bolognese-Domenicho (1581-1641), Guercino (1590-1666); the Dutch-Both (1600-50), Paul Potter (1625-54), A. Cuyp (1606-72), A. Van der Velde (1635-72), Rembrandt (1606-74), G. Douw (1630-80), Mieris (1635-81), Ruysdael (1636-81), I. Van Ostade (1621-49), A. Van Ostade (1610-85), Berghem (1624-85), Wouvermans (1620-88), W. Van der Velde (1633-1707), Huysum (1682-1749), and more recently L. Alma Tadema (1836), Schotel, Scholfhart, Van Os, Van Stry, Ommeganck, Josef Israels, Mesdag, Maris and others; the English-Walter Dobson (1610-46), Sir J. Thornhill (1676-1732), William Hogarth (1697-1764), J. Mortimer (1739-79), R. Wilson (1714-82), Gainsborough (1727-88), Sir J. Reynolds (1723-92), Romney (1734-1802), George Morland (1763-1804), Barry (1741-1806), Opie (1761-1807), Benjamin West (1738-1820), H. Raeburn (1786-1823), J. Ward (1779-1859), Fuseli (1741-1825), J. Constable (1776-1837), D. Wilkie (1785-1841), Haydon (17861846), Collins (1788-1847), Etty (1787-1849), Turner (1775-1851), Mulready (1786-1863), Sir C. L. Eastlake (1793-1865), T. Creswick (1811-69), Maclise (1811-70), Sir G. Hayter (1792-1871), Sir E. Landseer (1802-73), E. M. Ward (1816-79), R. Redgrave (1804), W. P. Frith (1819), J. Faed (1820), T Faed (1826), H. S. Marks (1829), J. E. Millais (1829), Sir F. Leighton (1830), Vicat Cole (1833), G. D Leslie (1835), E. J. Poynter (1836), E. Armitage (1817), Edwin Long (1839-91), P. H. Calderon (1833), T. S. Cooper (1803), F. Holl (1845), F. Goodhall (1822), Birket Foster (1812), Sir John Gilbert (1817), H. Herkomer (1849), J. C. Horsley (1817), W. Q. Orchardson (1835), W. W. Ouless, (1848) G. F. Watts (1820), Marcus Stone (1840), John Pettie (1839), E. J. Gregory (1850), J. Mac Whirter (1839), C. Val Prinsep (1836), J. S. Lucas (1849), B. W. Leader (1831). Among English painters the Pre-Raphaelite movement, which commenced in 1849, as a protest against conventionalism in idea as well as execution in art, numbered among its principal exponents J. E. Millais, Holman Hunt (1827), G. D. Rossetti (1828-82), F. Madox Brown (1821), McNeil Whistler (1834), and E. Burne-Jones (1833); the French-Jean Cousin (1501-89), LeSeur (1617-55), N. Pousin (1594-1665), Claude Lorraine

(1600-82), Le Brun (1619-90), Watteau (1684-1721), C. J. Vernet (1714-89), David (1748-1825), A. C. H. Vernet (1758-1836), J. E. H. Vernet (17891863), De la Croix (1798-1863), Géricault (1774-1829), J. D. A. Ingres (17811367), Scheffer (1795-1858), Paul Delaroche (1797-1856), Decamps (180366), Corot (1796-1875), Millet (1815-75), Regnault (1843-71), B. Lepage (184884), Meissonier (1815-91), Gerome (1824), Bougereau (1835), Constant (1845), Gustave Doré (1833-83); the Spanish-Velasquez (1599-1660), Murillo (1618-85); the Neapolitan-Salvator Rosa (1615-73), and the American--Malbone (1777-1807), Copley (1738-1815), C. W. Peale (1741-1827), Gilbert C. Stuart (1756-1828), J. Trumbull (1756-1843), W. Allston (17791843), Thomas Cole (1801-48), Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860), W. M. Hunt (1824-79), W. Page (1811-85), D. Huntingdon (1816), S. R. Gifford (1823-80), Eastman Johnson (1824), Elihu Vedder (1836), Bierstadt (1830). Russian art, dormant since the Byzantine period, has during the last forty years produced Swedomsky Verestchagin (1842) and Kramskoë. Scandinavian art has been represented in modern times by Uhde and Edelfeldt.

THE SYMBOLISM OF COLORS.

White was the emblem of light, religious purity, innocence, faith, joy and life. In the judge, it indicates integrity; in the sick, humility; in the woman, chastity.

Red, the ruby, signifies fire, divine love, heat of the creative power, and royalty. White and red roses express love and wisdom. The red color of the blood has its origin in the action of the heart, which corresponds to, or symbolizes, love. In a bad sense red corresponds to the infernal love of evil, hatred, etc.

Blue, or the sapphire, expresses heaven, the firmament, truth from a celestial origin, constancy and fidelity.

Yellow, or gold, is the symbol of the sun, of the goodness of God, of marriage and faithfulness. In a bad sense yellow signifies inconstancy, jealousy and deceit.

Green, the emerald, is the color of the spring of hope, particularly of the hope of immortality and of victory, as the color of the laurel and palm. Violet, the amethyst, signifies love and truth, or passion and suffering. Purple and scarlet signify things good and true from a celestial origin. Black corresponds to despair, darkness, earthliness, mourning, negation, wickedness and death.

THE ORGAN IN AMERICA.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century little interest was taken in organ-building in America. The erection of the great organ in the Music hall, Boston, by a German builder, Walcker, of Würtemberg, gave the first impetus to public interest in the matter. There are now several good organ-makers, and one of them, Roosevelt, has invented "the automatic adjustable combination," which enables the player to place any required combination of stops under immediate control, and to alter such combinations as frequently as desired. By his construction of the wind-chest, also, each pipe has its own valve, actuated by compressed air. Among the largest organs in America are the organ of the Catholic cathedral, Montreal, of the cathedral of the Holy Cross, Boston, which possesses eighty-three stops; the Music Hall, Cincinnati, with ninety-six stops and four manuals, and the Tremont Temple, Boston, with sixty-five stops.