TERRA-COTTA, BRICK, ETC.
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United States Centennial Commission for exhibition in 1876, and to be afterwards deposited in the Permanent Museum.
The enamelled plaques, panels, pilasters, and fillets are beautiful. In the façade, door-jambs and window-casings of the new university buildings in Vienna, they have been freely used, with fine effect.
It is gratifying to note this modern revival of the ancient art, kept alive in the sixteenth century by the genius of Luca della Robbia, and now capable of almost indefinite expansion, since the knowledge of the composition of colored enamels is no longer a secret. Of the beauty of such enamelled terracottas there can be no question, and their durability is established by experience. Witness the ancient enamels of Assyria and Egypt, as well as the works of della Robbia, preserved in collections. The South Kensington Museum has more than fifty examples. One of the choicest specimens is the medallion, eleven feet in diameter, supposed to have been made in the year 1453. It bears the arms of King René of Anjou, surrounded by a massive border of fruit and foliage. It was exposed to the action of the weather for more than four hundred years, fixed in the front wall of a villa near Florence. Good specimens of the della Robbia ware are to be found also in the Athenæum in Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The terra-cotta ware, building ornaments, majolica, etc., of the Vienna Company is manufactured in a separate establishment at Inzersdorf. The clay of that locality produces a ware that not only has great strength and resists the weather, but has a pleasing stone color, which harmonizes so well with the usual tone of the buildings that the figures do not need coloring or painting.
The variety of the figures and decorative objects is very great. The sample-book contains 242 pages of closely printed lithographic designs, about 2,000 in number. The models, of which the company has a great number, are all made from drawings by the most eminent architects, and are exquisite in design. The possession of such a stock of patterns insures, practically, a monopoly of the business. A large proportion of the decorative figures seen in the façades of the splendid buildings adorning the Ring Strasse and over