Ornament (art)

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Design of a classic ornament


Rose wood carvings on ceiling, Hindu temple in Hyderabad, India


Wood panel carved with arabesque motifs in the Great Mosque of Kairouan (also called the
Mosque of Uqba), in Tunisia.
For other uses of the term, see: Ornament
In architecture and decorative art, ornament is a decoration used to embellish parts of a building
or object. Large figurative elements such as monumental sculpture and their equivalents in
decorative art are excluded from the term; most ornament does not include human figures, and if
present they are small compared to the overall scale. Architectural ornament can be carved from
stone, wood or precious metals, formed with plaster or clay, or painted or impressed onto a
surface as applied ornament; in other applied arts the main material of the object, or a different
one such as paint or vitreous enamel may be used. A wide variety of decorative styles and motifs
have been developed for architecture and the applied arts, including pottery, furniture,
metalwork. In textiles, wallpaper and other objects where the decoration may be the main
justification for its existence, the terms pattern or design are more likely to be used.
In a 1941 essay,
[1]
the architectural historian Sir John Summerson called it "surface modulation".
Decoration and ornament has been evident in civilizations since the beginning of recorded
history, ranging from Ancient Egyptian architecture to the apparent lack of ornament of 20th
century Modernist architecture.
Contents
1 History
2 Pattern books
3 Modern ornament
4 See also
5 Notes
6 References
History
The detailed study of Eurasian ornamental forms was begun by Alois Riegl in his formalist study
Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Problems of style: foundations
for a history of ornament) of 1893, who in the process developed his influential concept of the
Kunstwollen.
[2]
Riegl traced formalistic continuity and development in decorative plant forms
from Ancient Egyptian art and other ancient Near Eastern civilizations through the classical
world to the arabesque of Islamic art; while the Kunstwollen has few followers today, his basic
analysis of the development of forms has been confirmed and refined by the wider corpus of
examples known today.
[3]
Jessica Rawson has recently extended the analysis to cover Chinese
art, which Riegl did not cover, tracing many elements of Chinese decoration back to the same
tradition; the shared background helping to make the assimilation of Chinese motifs into Persian
art after the Mongol invasion harmonious and productive.
[4]

Styles of ornamentation can be studied in reference to the specific culture which developed
unique forms of decoration, or modified ornament from other cultures. The Ancient Egyptian
culture is arguably the first civilization to add pure decoration to their buildings. Their ornament
takes the forms of the natural world in that climate, decorating the capitals of columns and walls
with images of papyrus and palm trees. Assyrian culture produced ornament which shows
influence from Egyptian sources and a number of original themes, including figures of plants and
animals of the region.
Ancient Greek civilization created many new forms of ornament, with regional variations from
Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian groups. The Romans Latinized the pure forms of the Greek
ornament and adapted the forms to every purpose.
Pattern books


Illustration from Meyer's Ornament


Colored plate from The Grammar of Ornament
From the 15th to the 19th century, "Pattern books" were published in Europe which gave access
to decorative elements, eventually including those recorded from cultures all over the world.
Andrea Palladio's I quattro libri dell'architettura (Four Books on Architecture) (Venice, 1570),
[5]

which included both drawings of classical Roman buildings and renderings of Palladio's own
designs utilizing those motifs, became the most influential book ever written on architecture.
Napoleon had the great pyramids and temples of Egypt documented in the Description de
l'Egypte (1809). Owen Jones published The Grammar of Ornament in 1856 with colored
illustrations of decoration from Egypt, Turkey, Sicily and Spain. He took residence in the
Alhambra Palace to make drawings and plaster castings of the ornate details. Interest in classical
architecture was also fueled by the tradition of traveling on The Grand Tour, and by translation
of early literature about architecture in the work of Vitruvius and Michelangelo.
During the 19th century, the acceptable use of ornament, and its precise definition became the
source of aesthetic controversy in academic Western architecture, as architects and their critics
searched for a suitable style. "The great question is," Thomas Leverton Donaldson asked in
1847, "are we to have an architecture of our period, a distinct, individual, palpable style of the
19th century?".
[6]
In 1849, when Matthew Digby Wyatt viewed the French Industrial Exposition
set up on the Champs-Elyses in Paris, he disapproved in recognizably modern terms of the
plaster ornaments in faux-bronze and faux woodgrain:
[7]

Both internally and externally there is a good deal of tasteless and unprofitable ornament... If
each simple material had been allowed to tell its own tale, and the lines of the construction so
arranged as to conduce to a sentiment of grandeur, the qualities of "power" and "truth," which its
enormous extent must have necessarily ensured, could have scarcely fail to excite admiration,
and that at a very considerable saving of expense.
Contacts with other cultures through colonialism and the new discoveries of archaeology
expanded the repertory of ornament available to revivalists. After about 1880, photography made
details of ornament even more widely available than prints had done.
Modern ornament
Modern ornaments are made of wood, plastic etc. They come in many different colours and
shapes. Modern architecture, conceived of as the elimination of ornament in favor of purely
functional structures, left architects the problem of how to properly adorn modern structures.
[8]

There were two available routes from this perceived crisis. One was to attempt to devise an
ornamental vocabulary that was new and essentially contemporary. This was the route taken by
architects like Louis Sullivan and his pupil Frank Lloyd Wright, or by the unique Antoni Gaud.
Art Nouveau, for all its excesses, was a conscious effort to evolve such a "natural" vocabulary of
ornament.
A more radical route abandoned the use of ornament altogether, as in some designs for objects
by Christopher Dresser. At the time, such unornamented objects could have been found in many
unpretending workaday items of industrial design, ceramics produced at the Arabia manufactory
in Finland, for instance, or the glass insulators of electric lines.
This latter approach was described by architect Adolf Loos in his 1908 manifesto, translated into
English in 1913 and polemically titled Ornament and Crime, in which he declared that lack of
decoration is the sign of an advanced society. His argument was that ornament is economically
inefficient and "morally degenerate", and that reducing ornament was a sign of progress.
Modernists were eager to point to American architect Louis Sullivan as their godfather in the
cause of aesthetic simplification, dismissing the knots of intricately patterned ornament that
articulated the skin of his structures.
With the work of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus through the 1920s and 1930s, lack of decorative
detail became a hallmark of modern architecture and equated with the moral virtues of honesty,
simplicity, and purity. In 1932 Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock dubbed this the
"International Style". What began as a matter of taste was transformed into an aesthetic mandate.
Modernists declared their way as the only acceptable way to build. As the style hit its stride in
the highly-developed postwar work of Mies van der Rohe, the tenets of 1950s modernism
became so strict that even accomplished architects like Edward Durrell Stone and Eero Saarinen
could be ridiculed and effectively ostracized for departing from the aesthetic rules.
[citation needed]

At the same time, the unwritten laws against ornament began to come into serious question.
"Architecture has, with some difficulty, liberated itself from ornament, but it has not liberated
itself from the fear of ornament," Summerson observed in 1941.
[citation needed]

One reason was that the very difference between ornament and structure is subtle and perhaps
arbitrary. The pointed arches and flying buttresses of Gothic architecture are ornamental but
structurally necessary; the colorful rhythmic bands of a Pietro Belluschi International Style
skyscraper are integral, not applied, but certainly have ornamental effect. Furthermore,
architectural ornament can serve the practical purpose of establishing scale, signaling entries, and
aiding wayfinding, and these useful design tactics had been outlawed. And by the mid-1950s,
modernist figureheads Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer had been breaking their own rules by
producing highly expressive, sculptural concrete work.
The argument against ornament peaked in 1959 over discussions of the Seagram Building, where
Mies van der Rohe installed a series of structurally unnecessary vertical I-beams on the outside
of the building, and by 1984, when Philip Johnson produced his AT&T Building in Manhattan
with an ornamental pink granite neo-Georgian pediment, the argument was effectively over. In
retrospect, critics have seen the AT&T Building as the first Postmodernist building.
[citation needed]

See also
Bronze and brass ornamental work
Ornament and crime
Three hares
Notes

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Meyer's Ornament.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Building ornaments.
1. Summerson, John (1941) printed in Heavenly Mansions 1963, p. 217
2. Tabbaa, 74-75
3. Rawson, 24-25; see also "Styleor whatever", J. Duncan Berry, A review of Problems
of Style by Alois Riegl, The New Criterion, April 1993
4. Rawson, the subject of her book, see Preface, and Chapter 5 on Chinese influences on
Persian art.
5. The Center for Palladian Studies in America, Inc.,"Palladio and his Books."
6. quoted by Summerson
7. Second Republic Exposition
8. Sankovitch, Anne-Marie (12/1/1998). Structure/ornament and the modern figuration of
architecture. The Art Bulletin. Archived from the original on November 7, 2007.
Retrieved 2007-11-13.
References
Dolmetsch, Heinrich (1898). The Treasury of Ornament.
Owen Jones (1856) The Grammar of Ornament.
Lewis, Philippa; G. Darley (1986). Dictionary of Ornament. New York: Pantheon.
ISBN 0-394-50931-5.
Meyer, Franz Sales (1898). A Handbook of Ornament.
Rawson, Jessica, Chinese Ornament: The lotus and the dragon, 1984, British Museum
Publications, ISBN 0-7141-1431-6
Speltz, Alexander (1915). The Coloured Ornament of All Historical Styles.
Tabbaa, Yasser, The transformation of Islamic art during the Sunni revival, I.B.Tauris,
2002, ISBN 1-85043-392-5, ISBN 978-1-85043-392-7, google books
James Trilling The Language of Ornament
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