Ornament in art

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. The vast range of motifs used in ornament draw from geometrical shapes and patterns, plants, and human and animal figures. Across Eurasia and the Mediterranean world there has been a rich and linked tradition of plant-based ornament for over three thousand years; traditional ornament from other parts of the world typically relies more on geometrical and animal motifs.

In a 1941 essay, the architectural historian Sir John Summerson called it “surface modulation”. The earliest decoration and ornament often survives from prehistoric cultures in simple markings on pottery, where decoration in other materials (including tattoos) has been lost. Where the potter’s wheel was used, the technology made some kinds of decoration very easy; weaving is another technology which also lends itself very easily to decoration or pattern, and to some extent dictates its form. Ornament has been evident in civilizations since the beginning of recorded history, ranging from Ancient Egyptian architecture to the assertive lack of ornament of 20th century Modernist architecture.

Ornament implies that the ornamented object has a function that an unornamented equivalent might also fulfill. Where the object has no such function, but exists only to be a work of art such as a sculpture or painting, the term is less likely to be used, except for peripheral elements. In recent centuries a distinction between the fine arts and applied or decorative arts has been applied (except for architecture), with ornament mainly seen as a feature of the latter class.

For other uses, see Ornament (disambiguation).
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. The vast range of motifs used in ornament draw from geometrical shapes and patterns, plants, and human and animal figures. Across Eurasia and the Mediterranean world there has been a rich and linked tradition of plant-based ornament for over three thousand years; traditional ornament from other parts of the world typically relies more on geometrical and animal motifs.

In a 1941 essay, the architectural historian Sir John Summerson called it “surface modulation”. The earliest decoration and ornament often survives from prehistoric cultures in simple markings on pottery, where decoration in other materials (including tattoos) has been lost. Where the potter’s wheel was used, the technology made some kinds of decoration very easy; weaving is another technology which also lends itself very easily to decoration or pattern, and to some extent dictates its form. Ornament has been evident in civilizations since the beginning of recorded history, ranging from Ancient Egyptian architecture to the assertive lack of ornament of 20th century Modernist architecture.

Ornament implies that the ornamented object has a function that an unornamented equivalent might also fulfill. Where the object has no such function, but exists only to be a work of art such as a sculpture or painting, the term is less likely to be used, except for peripheral elements. In recent centuries a distinction between the fine arts and applied or decorative arts has been applied (except for architecture), with ornament mainly seen as a feature of the latter class.

Ornaments differ from images in the classical sense in that their narrative function takes a back seat to the decorative ones. They do not create an illusion neither in time nor in the spatial depth. Ornaments do not tell continuous action and are limited to the surface. Nevertheless, ornaments may be naturalistic and sculptural, or individual objects, such as vases, may be used ornamentally if they decorate as a major function.

Figurative and plastic ornaments contrast with abstract or stylized ones. The stylization may concern individual elements or forms or, as in the arabesque, the movement guidance. The more abstract an ornament is, the stronger the reason appears as an independent pattern. In addition to their degree of abstraction, ornaments differ in their relationship to the carrier. Ornaments can accentuate (rosettes), divide (ribbons, strips in architecture), fill and frame. The wearer can determine the ornament or, conversely, be dominated by the ornament. Intensity and density also determine the relationship with the wearer.

Ornaments are examined not only as an art genre , but also in their stylistic development and in the context of human perception . The latter approach attempts to base the study of ornamentation on findings of psychology. The fascination of man with simple geometrical elementary forms is explained by the need to choose from the multitude of chaotic image stimuli. In addition, to be aesthetically pleasing , ornaments have to bring along a certain complexity with this approach. Otherwise, they are sorted out as expected.

The style history of the ornament deals with the temporal development of ornamental motifs and their design and was founded by Alois Riegl at the end of the 19th century. If another culture takes on a motive, so that it loses or changes its original meaning , or if medium or production technology change, for example through mass production and automated production, motifs develop further. Different cultures or local currents interact and influence each other. Sometimes certain ornaments of an ornament are so typical of an epoch , a place or a single artist that they are used to determine the origin.

The discussion about ornaments has always been determined by the principle of decorum , which, when applied to ornamentation, states whether the location or the design fits. This includes whether an ornament is perceived as cheesy or overweight. What a society feels is fitting strongly depends on its norms. Since ornaments may mask the perhaps lesser value or functionality of their wearer, history has often called for sober, so-to-speak classical ornamentation in the name of natural beauty and grace .

In addition to art, the ornament appears in music as a possibly freely improvised ornamentation or in rhetoric , where it is understood to mean an exaggerated visual or rhythmic language. In addition, ornamental elements emerge in classical painting , for example in the rhythmic folds of fabric or in the winding representation of figures .

History
Antiquity
Ancient Orient
In the Middle East simple geometric ornaments go back to 10,000 years, obtained on tools, clay pots or cave walls. Palmette and rosette, spiral and line patterns are already several millennia BC. Used for decoration. Two common plant motifs in ancient Egypt are the lotus in its manifestations as a leaf, bud or as a flower and the papyrus as a flower. In addition, the ornamental motifs in ancient Egypt include animals (such as Bukranien ), people, characters and geometric patterns. The motifs are lined up, alternated or connected with lines (like spiral lines ). Other motifs that have been used before classical antiquity include pine cones and pomegranates . The Triplespirale and the Triskele are motifs of the past. The vortex wheel a modification of the swastika is added later.

Classical Antiquity
In Greek antiquity , tendril snapping and filling, as well as acanthus and palmette develop into their classical form. It gives characteristics such as half-palm and circumscribed palmette, and as a connecting element, the free wave tendril, which later unfolds spatially. In contrast to the ancient Egyptian ornamentation, the motifs are not only arranged strictly orthogonal, but quite diagonally. Ornaments are seen in their relation to the content, for example as frames for representations on vases . Relatively early comes the ivy leaf, later the acanthus leaf as an ornament, the latter in connection with the Corinthian order (see column order and capital ).

In Hellenism and Roman antiquity v. a. in the west, spatial-naturalistic tendencies in ornamentation; Human and animal representations are piling up ( putting , fantasy or birds). The late antiquity leads on the one hand to a further naturalization and lush surface filling, what v. a. to serve the representation of wealth. However, the motifs are often used relatively freely, almost stylized. For example, the non-free acanthus leaf comes on, whose connecting vine continues at its tip. Especially in the East, a more abstract style develops. Other motifs typical of Roman antiquity are laurel, grapes and leaves . The column loses its exclusively load-bearing function and is used ornamentally.

Europe
Middle Ages
The Carolingian art took over 800 from the late centuries only a few centuries ago the palmette and the acanthus . In addition, the native of Celtic and Germanic tradition animal and Flechtbanddekor held. Both influences were still effective in Romanesque . The foliage of the capital jewelery made use of the more or less classical acanthus. The building ornament preferred geometric shapes, such as tooth cut , pointed ribbon or round arch frieze . In the borders and initials of the illumination are predominantly vegetable elements, developed from palmette and acanthus, but – in contrast to the Gothic – are still limited by field separations and frames.

Completely independent of ancient models, the tracery develops the most important ornamental genre of Gothic . Originated as an architectural element for structuring and structurally coping with large glass window surfaces, these motifs, easily transferable in their linearity, became independent decorative elements such as carved retabels , gilded monstrances or painted book pages. The vertical directionality of the tracery finds a variant in the radially arranged pointed arches of the rose window . In contrast to this geometrical and abstract characteristic of the tracery, in Gothic there is an almost naturalistic ornamentation of plants. At the capital, it initially varies and then displaces the classical acanthus, replacing it with vine leaves and the foliage of native plants. Typical of Central European foliage ornamentation in Central Europe are hunched leaves in the 14th century and then, in the late 15th century, thistle-like tendrils. Just as its entanglements become more and more complex, so does the tracery, and the pointed arches are flamboyantly bent, as shown by the three- nut- nose composed of three fish-bubbles .

Renaissance
For Leon Battista Alberti , ornament plays an important role in the definition of beauty (pulcritudo). The beauty, says Alberti, is an ideal condition in which nothing can be removed or added to the building without diminishing its beauty. Since this condition is not achieved in reality, the ornament is applied to the outside of the building to underline the advantages of the building and to conceal the defects (Alberti: de re aedificatoria, Venice 1485, Book VI, Chapter 2) ,

The most important application of this dualistic scheme of beauty and ornament can be found in the theatrical motif , which became the most important structure for building cracks during the Renaissance.

Modern ornament
Modern millwork ornaments are made of wood, plastics, composites, 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. 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 Gaudí. 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.

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.

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.

Ornament prints and pattern books

Elaborated versions of Greco-Roman classical architectural ornaments in Meyer’s Ornament

A detail from the margin of a page of a Late Gothic manuscript
A few medieval notebooks survive, most famously that of Villard de Honnecourt (13th century) showing how artists and craftsmen recorded designs they saw for future use. With the arrival of the print ornament prints became an important part of the output of printmakers, especially in Germany, and played a vital role in the rapid diffusion of new Renaissance styles to makers of all sorts of object. As well as revived classical ornament, both architectural and the grotesque style derived from Roman interior decoration, these included new styles such as the moresque, a European adaptation of the Islamic arabesque (a distinction not always clear at the time).

As printing became cheaper, the single ornament print turned into sets, and then finally books. From the 16th 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), 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 of the Islamic ornaments there, including arabesques, calligraphy, and geometric patterns. 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?”. In 1849, when Matthew Digby Wyatt viewed the French Industrial Exposition set up on the Champs-Elysées in Paris, he disapproved in recognizably modern terms of the plaster ornaments in faux-bronze and faux woodgrain:

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.

Criticizing the Ornament
Modern architecture and product design developed a widespread skepticism and rejection of ornamentation. Instead, the formula ” form follows function ” was promoted. Particularly popular was the 1908 published book by Adolf Loos ornament and crime , in which he scourged the use of ornament and decor and described as superfluous.

For the physician Hans Martin Sutermeister the ornament was a recovery regression: The “magic of the ornament” is based “on its affective resp. suggestive effect, which is due to the fact that […] rhythmical external stimuli increasingly affect the [depth] layers of our psyche. ” The ornament can thus be used, similar to rhythmic music, to attract the viewer (or listener) to influence.

Source From Wikipedia