Back
to Artist-Blacksmith.org Back
to What's New?
Quatrefoils
by George Dixon
From The Artist-Blacksmith Quarterly
 |
|
The concept of luck or merit associated with four-leaf clover traces back at least to preRoman Celtic Europe. The Celtic priestly class, the Druids, enshrined an older veneration of four-leaf clover as a charm within Celtic religious practice as they had done with mistletoe and oak trees. The four ideas conveyed by the four leaves stood for faith, hope, love, and luck. The shamrock is a trefoil or three-leaf plant which has the assigned meanings of the Christian Trinity now, but which also traces its importance to the preChristian veneration of the number 3 in Celtic and post Celtic religions. A later example would be the preChristian Viking veneration of the number 3 (10 was described as three 3's plus 1). So it was that a plant with three leaves became all the more important when it occasionally (1 in 10,000) generated a fourth leaf, becoming a "quatre foille". The rare fourth leaf was seen as an indication of "God's Grace" or "affirmation", with "God" being relative to the culture, while the positive concepts spanned both time and cultures. Luck to the finder. |
 |
Square with the frame or on-the-diamond, the orientation of a quatrefoil affects how large it must be to fill an architectual space. |
There are many variants on the theme of the quatrefoil. However, if one groups quatrefoils by how they are made then the variants narrow considerably. To understand making quatrefoils one first needs to be familiar with their parts. There are two parts to every quatrefoil, the foils which are the rounded elements and the cusps which are the pointed elements. While the foils can be round or elliptical, the greatest number of variants stem from the decorative work done to the cusps. Quatrefoils can be made from one piece of bar stock folded at measured increments, brought round and joined, then formed. The cusps may be as simple as a fold or they can be built up in mass by welding after folding followed by forging into a decorative cusp. Quatrefoils can be made of multiple pieces with separate cusp elements which are either collared or welded to the foil segments. Quatrefoils can also be the result of piercing sheet or they can be made by suggestion. The latter is found in examples of quatrefoil forms which are indirectly made by arranging elements in a work piece so the negative space (the places where metal isn't) looks like a quatrefoil surrounds it (right). Lastly, a quatrefoil can have four even foils or it can have two different sized pair of foils. |
|
|
|
Before a quatrefoil is made it should be designed. Unless the quatrefoil is to be a trivet it is a part of a larger work. It is usually the case that a group of quatrefoils will comprise a grid based on squares which the quatrefoils will occupy. The grid square (either a real frame or a drawn layout line) size is the starting point for calculating the amount of material required for each quatrefoil. More on calculations later. The next issue to settle is what the individual quatrefoils will look like, which in turn takes one to the issue of how the look will be achieved. Will the cusps be separate pieces? Where will the joinery take place? When the quatrefoils are still in the pencil consider two additional design ideas. First is the overall look of the quatrefoil when it is one of many. The size, shape and cusps of the individual quatrefoil will also have a visual impact on the viewer when they are grouped. How they look as a group and how the space between each quatrefoil looks as a pattern defined by the outside of the quatrefoil will usually be the first glance they get. If this overall assembly of the individual quatrefoils is pleasing to the eye, then the details of the quatrefoils will get closer notice. The second design consideration addresses the closer notice. To have an assembly of quatrefoils look good they should be of equal size and shape, spaced evenly. This does not mean that they all have to be identical in detail, just identical in the amount of space they take up. A design trick for quatrefoils is to make them all appear the same from a distance but to have the cusps of each individual quatrefoil be different in detail while uniform in size throughout. This approach rewards the person who takes a second, closer look. Samuel Yellin used this approach often. His Children's Chapel Gate at the National Cathedral has different animal heads as the cusp decorations for each quatrefoil. The Samuel Yellin passage gate pictured here has an illusory quatrefoil design which incorporates cusp decorations that are different in each of the grid squares which make up the gate.
|
   
|
||
|
Starting on page 4 of the Artist-Blacksmith Quarterly and over the next few issues we will work through each of the major variants of quatrefoil forging as well as various ways to make, affix and decorate cusps. How to make one-piece, four-piece, eight-piece and twelve-piece quatrefoils as well as uneven (asymmetrical) and illusory (suggested) quatrefoils will be shown in this series. In conjunction with this will be a look at arches and foils other than quatre; trefoil, sexfoil, multifoil and how they are laid-out and made. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|