Ornamentation

“ In the shape which an object intended for ornament should assume, or in the style of its decoration, there is, as we have seen, no absolute rule. Individual taste is paramount, since ornaments are intended mainly to administer to the pleasure of the possessor, but one rule may be considered universal in regard to the decoration. If the object be a vase intended to brighten a house, then its ornamentation should never be of such an order that its greatest and best effect is perceived when it stands alone. ”

“ Ornamentation is therefore the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art. ”

“ Yet, of this pure and graceful ornamentation, Professor Willis says, “a practice more destructive of architectural grandeur can hardly be conceived:” and modern architects have substituted for it the ingenious ornament of which the reader has had one specimen above, Fig. ”

“ Compare with the chair, Example 97
61Ornamentation is both inventive and imitative. An ornament purely inventive or one purely imitative is seldom artistic. A child may make a jumble of lines that altho original means nothing; when it is older it may draw a flower so realistic and imitative that little is left to the imagination. When a flower or plant is used as a model in designing an ornament it is “conventionalized,” that is, it is blended with its environment. ”

“ The force of custom and education would be a powerful motive, and no other style of ornament was then known to the people, who were accustomed to and well understood these endless intricacies which appear to us a mass of confusion ”

“ It is verily surprising what an important element ornament is in life. Is it, then, wonderful that man, striving everywhere to please the same eye by lines, should occasionally invent, independently, similar ornamental forms, or that decorative art should, in its beginning, evolve in the same direction in different countries? ”

“ As decoration we can but admire the masterly way in which the ornament is distributed, the refined sense of scale and proportion, and the skilful and subtle treatment of light and shade, even if the detail of the ornament itself is crude and archaic. ”

“ The question now before us—"What ornament is fit and right for a garden?"—of itself implies a tendency to err in the direction of ornament. We see that on the face of it the transposition of the simple of Nature into the subtle of Art has its dangers. ”

“ Nor let any one scoff at the interest, which I venture to express in the ornament even of a cottage wall. Ornament is the crown of art. Taste is thought. Elegance is the refinement of civilization. The study of beauty, grandeur, and truth, in History and in Nature, is the most practical education of man! ”

“ In all cases we find the lines radiating from a parent stem, as we may see exemplified in Nature by the human hand, or in a leaf. We are never offended, as in modern practice, by the random introduction of an ornament set down without a reason for its existence. ”

“ The rigid lines of architecture should act as a foil to the graceful curves of ornament, and the plain faces should not only set off fretted surfaces, but make the undulations of carved ornament precious. When I speak of ornament, I include the highest form of it, the human figure, and I may point to the Doric frieze of the Greeks as a brilliant example of success. This conjunction of ornament and architecture, however, demands high qualities in the ornament, and insight in the artists as to what is wanted for mutual contrast or emphasis ”

“ Ornament is the means by which Beauty or Significance is imparted to Utility. It is either Symbolical or Aesthetic. Symbolic ornament consists of elements or forms chosen for the sake of their significance—Aesthetic ornament consists of forms or elements chosen for their Beauty alone, or their power of appealing to the senses.
Of the historic styles of ornament, the Egyptian, Assyrian, Byzantine, Scandinavian, Persian, Indian, Gothic, Polynesian, and much of the Chinese and Japanese are symbolical, having elements and ornamental details chosen for their significance ”

“ What ornament is, will without difficulty be determined by the application of the same test. It must consist of such studious arrangements of form as are imitative or suggestive of those which are commonest among natural existences, that being of course the noblest ornament which represents the highest orders of existence. Imitated flowers are nobler than imitated stones, imitated animals, than flowers; imitated human form, of all animal forms the noblest. ”

“ Prominent among the subjects shown by the reliefs, serving the purposes of mural decoration, is the so-called tree of life, a symbol not adequately explained, a plant form woven in ribbons and anthemions to an ornamental play of lines, before which stand sacrificing figures or winged genii with eagle-heads, holding in the one hand a basket, in the other a species of pine-cone, or in the one a lotos-flower or a scourge, and in the other a gazelle or a small lion. ”

“ Certain forms of flowers and leaves are also suitable for ornament expressed in a certain way, and when this harmony occurs the representation of nature is satisfactory as ornament; but the reverse is very often shown to be the case in work of a more modern type, in which the design is based on the dictum that the copying of natural forms will produce ornament. ”

“ Much better keep to simple mouldings and plain painting than bring in ornament which has no character or meaning of its own. We must not confuse the mere spreading of ornament with decoration in its true sense, for Design in all its forms may be said to be governed by an architectural instinct of its own, which makes it a harmonious part of the building with which it is united, and which unites it, and puts it in harmony with itself. ”

“ One thing is certain, that the ‘million’ are better satisfied with floral forms than any other class of ornament, and the more loosely treated these are, or the further they are from ornament, the more pleasing they are to those uninitiated in the beauty of line, wanting which no ornamental forms can be pleasing to those educated in art. ”

“ PERSISTENT PATTERN PLANS, RECTANGULAR BASIS.
Nothing has degraded the form of common things so much as a mistaken love of ornament. The production of things of beauty for ordinary use has declined with the gradual separation of artist and craftsman. Decoration, or ornament, we have been too much accustomed to consider as accidental and unrelated addition to an object, not as an essential expression and organic part of it; not as a beauty which may satisfy us in simple line, form, or proportion, combined with fitness to purpose, even without any surface ornament at all. ”

“ We decorate and ornament by putting on some adjunct which is attractive or beautiful, and which serves to heighten the general effect. Thus, a lady's head-dress may be ornament or decorated with flowers or jewelry; a hall may be decorated or ornament with carving or gilding, with wreaths of flowers, or with hangings. Ornament is used in a wider sense than decorate. To embellish is to beautify or ornament richly, not so much by mere additions or details as by modifying the thing itself as a whole. ”

“ Much of this work is flabby or wire-drawn, and often omits the highest beauty of the plants it uses, but even when the beauty of the plant is not left out, the ornament is infinitely below the highest flights of former art, in which the artist had absorbed the graces of floral growth and had properly applied them. The highest ornament, by its abstraction, is closely allied to architectural art, while all its higher achievements are in conjunction with architecture ”

“ Decoration In Painting. Sibyls, Muses, and Virtues. Roman Ideas Absorbed from the Greek. Concerning the Birth of Genius. Frescoes by Raphael. Ideal Woman In Modern Decoration.
To whatever age, tribe, or country we look for the beginnings of art, we find symbolic decorations. It has been practiced by all peoples in response to universal instinct. Decoration needs a motif, a subject or figure singly or in repetition, be it to grace the family soup bowl of the aborigine, or to add a fearsome and compelling expression to his copper countenance. ”

“ Always, in studying a Gothic tapestry, we find flowers. The flowers of nature, they are, a simple nature at that, and never to be thought of in the same day as the gorgeous, expansive, proud flowers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century decoration. Those splendid later blossoms flaunt their richness with assured swagger and demand of man his homage, quite forgetting it is the flower’s best part to give. ”

“ Contrast comes next, as the mere alternation of upright and horizontal lines form a contrasted ornament | —— | —— | —— | Symmetry perhaps comes next, and is the repetition of any form on its axis; even the rudest blot so doubled makes ornament. Radiation alone is the basis of much ornament, and directly we get as far as the scroll, we must have tangential junction, for broken-backed curves are hardly ornament. Next comes Repose: any decoration that seems to crawl is not pleasing but distressing. As we advance we want Variety and Subordination. ”

“ The rites, emblems, and mysteries of religion; national achievements, eccentric masks, and the capricious visions of fancy, have been wrought by the hand of the sculptor on the temple, the altar, or the tomb; but plants, their foliage, flowers, or fruits, as the most graceful, varied, and pleasing objects that meet our view, have been more universally the object of design, and have supplied the most beautiful, and perhaps the earliest, embellishments of art. ”

“ In the same way, our more extended and more intimate knowledge of the animal and vegetable kingdom ought to furnish us with an immense variety of new and beautiful forms of ornament—we do not mean of mythic or fanciful ornament, but of that highest and best kind of decoration, absolute, and yet partial, imitation of nature. Thus, for example, have we a blank space, extending horizontally to a long distance, which we desire to cover with enrichments. ”

“ XVI. What is the place of ornament? Consider first that the characters of natural objects which the architect can represent are few and abstract. The greater part of those delights by which Nature recommends herself to man at all times, cannot be conveyed by him into his imitative work. He cannot make his grass green and cool and good to rest upon, which in nature is its chief use to man; nor can he make his flowers tender and full of color and of scent, which in nature are their chief powers of giving joy. ”

“ Realistic decoration was the earliest form of all art, as we find it in the etchings on the bones drawn by the prehistoric cave-dwellers; but ornamental design or pattern drawing is a kind of invention which implies the orderly decoration of architectural forms and other objects, and is generally applied to such objects with the view of adding some enrichment that shall make them more pleasing to the sight. ”

“ The ornamented parts of the Greek and Roman Orders, figure sculpture apart, show how two cognate nations, each with transcendent abilities but of an entirely different range, abstracted the beauties of plants, and conferred them on stone and marble to emphasize and adorn the rigid forms of Architecture ”

“ Neither the purposes of decoration nor the conditions of production allow great scope for naturalism in ornament. Its forms are derived from nature, more or less; but repose is best secured by some removedness from nature—necessitated also by the due treatment of material after its kind and according to its fashioning. In the case of recurring ornament it is inept to multiply natural flowers, &c., which at every repetition lose something of their natural attraction. The artist in ornament does not imitate natural forms. ”

“ A work on Art, I think, bears less of ornament than any other kind of book (non bis in idem is a good motto) ; again, a book that must have illustrations, more or less utilitarian, should, I think, have no actual ornament at all, because the ornament and the illustration must almost certainly fight.” He designed all his ornaments with his own hand, from the minute leaves and flowers which took the place of periods on his page, to the full-page borders, titles, and elaborate initials. ”

“ Decorations.
A tenet of Delsartean art asserts that, “A decoration is to make something else beautiful and must not assert, but sacrifice itself. Ornament that has no use whatever is never, in any high sense, beautiful.” ”

“ Fig. 138.—Mediæval and Oriental root forms.
As a rule, all redundances, excrescences, and accidental waywardness of growth, that might be interesting to a botanist, ought to be avoided in the decorative rendering of plant form; the average form and the higher beauties should alone be expressed. Though this may seem a paradox, the less realistic{111} we make our designs, the more nature we put into them. We should strive to put the most perfect forms of nature into our ornament, avoiding those that are poor and stunted, as well as over-nourished and rank ones, though nature abounds in both. ”

“ It is only in the minute and delicate parts of the work, that any kind of ornament is attempted with propriety; and whenever ornaments exceed in size, in their quantity of matter, or in the prominence of their relief, that proportion which, in point of lightness or delicacy, we expect them to hold with respect to the whole of the building, the imitation of the most beautiful vegetable forms does not preserve them from the censure of clumsiness and deformity. ”

“ Second, history, for by the study of the ornament of past ages we will not only become acquainted with the highest developments of which ornamental art is capable, but will moreover broaden our views as to its object and scope, and will stimulate our own imagination and invention, by leading us to the contemplation of the myriad beautiful and protean forms it has assumed, when surrounding conditions, such as religion, climate, temperament, nationality, etc., have been different. ”