Ornament (art)

18th-century Rococo balcony, Bavaria. The form is itself ornamental, and further decorated in painted plasterwork.

Ming dynasty Jingdezhen dish with dragon

Northern Mannerist architectural pattern book by Wendel Dietterlin, 1598

Arabesque ornament on a Turkish dagger hilt

For other uses, see Ornament (disambiguation).

oration used to embellish parts of a building or object.
In architecture and decorative art, ornament is a dec- Large gurative elements such as monumental sculpture
1

HISTORY

Where the potters 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.

Islamic geometrical ornament on an Egyptian door

Ornament implies that the ornamented object has a function that an unornamented equivalent might also fulll.
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 ne arts and
applied or decorative arts has been applied (except for architecture), with ornament mainly seen as a feature of the
latter class.

1 History

Khmer lintel in Preah Ko style, late 9th century, reminiscent of

later European scrollwork styles

The history of art in many cultures shows a series of wavelike trends where the level of ornament used increases
over a period, before a sharp reaction returns to plainer
forms, after which ornamentation gradually increases
again. The pattern is especially clear in post-Roman European art, where the highly ornamented Insular art of
the Book of Kells and other manuscripts inuenced continental Europe, but the classically inspired Carolingian
and Ottonian art largely replaced it. Ornament increased
over the Romanesque and Gothic periods, but was greatly
reduced in Early Renaissance styles, again under classical inuence. Another period of increase, in Northern
Mannerism, the Baroque and Rococo, was checked by
Neoclassicism and the Romantic period, before resuming in the later 19th century Victorian decorative arts and
their continental equivalents, to be decisively reduced by
the Arts and Crafts movement and then Modernism.

and their equivalents in decorative art are excluded from

the term; most ornament does not include human gures, 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 dierent one such as paint or vitreous enamel
The detailed study of Eurasian ornamental forms was
may be used.
begun by Alois Riegl in his formalist study Stilfragen:
A wide variety of decorative styles and motifs have been Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik
developed for architecture and the applied arts, includ- (Problems of style: foundations for a history of ornament)
ing pottery, furniture, metalwork. In textiles, wallpaper of 1893, who in the process developed his inuential conand other objects where the decoration may be the main cept of the Kunstwollen.[2] Riegl traced formalistic conjustication for its existence, the terms pattern or design tinuity and development in decorative plant forms from
are more likely to be used. The vast range of motifs used Ancient Egyptian art and other ancient Near Eastern civin ornament draw from geometrical shapes and patterns, ilizations through the classical world to the arabesque of
plants, and human and animal gures. Across Eurasia and Islamic art. While the concept of the Kunstwollen has few
the Mediterranean world there has been a rich and linked followers today, his basic analysis of the development of
tradition of plant-based ornament for over three thousand forms has been conrmed and rened by the wider coryears; traditional ornament from other parts of the world pus of examples known today.[3] Jessica Rawson has retypically relies more on geometrical and animal motifs.
cently extended the analysis to cover Chinese art, which
In a 1941 essay,[1] the architectural historian Sir John Riegl did not cover, tracing many elements of Chinese
Summerson called it surface modulation. The earliest decoration back to the same tradition; the shared backdecoration and ornament often survives from prehistoric ground helping to make the assimilation of Chinese mocultures in simple markings on pottery, where decora- tifs into Persian art after the Mongol invasion harmonious
tion in other materials (including tattoos) has been lost. and productive.[4]

3
Styles of ornamentation can be studied in reference to the
specic culture which developed unique forms of decoration, or modied ornament from other cultures. The
Ancient Egyptian culture is arguably the rst 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 orna- A detail from the margin of a page of a Late Gothic manuscript
ment which shows inuence from Egyptian sources and
a number of original themes, including gures of plants
Germany, and played a vital role in the rapid diusion of
and animals of the region.
new Renaissance styles to makers of all sorts of object.
Ancient Greek civilization created many new forms of As well as revived classical ornament, both architectural
ornament, with regional variations from Doric, Ionic, and and the grotesque style derived from Roman interior decCorinthian groups. The Romans Latinized the pure forms oration, these included new styles such as the moresque, a
of the Greek ornament and adapted the forms to every European adaptation of the Islamic arabesque (a distincpurpose.
tion not always clear at the time).

Ornament prints and pattern

books

As printing became cheaper, the single ornament print

turned into sets, and then nally 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 Palladios I quattro libri dell'architettura
(Four Books on Architecture) (Venice, 1570),[5] which
included both drawings of classical Roman buildings and
renderings of Palladios own designs utilizing those motifs, became the most inuential 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 denition 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]

Elaborated versions of Greco-Roman classical architectural ornaments in Meyers Ornament

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

Both internally and externally there is a

good deal of tasteless and unprotable 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

5 NOTES
fail to excite admiration, and that at a very considerable saving of expense.

At the same time, the unwritten laws against ornament

began to come into serious question. Architecture has,
with some diculty, liberated itself from ornament, but it
Contacts with other cultures through colonialism and the has not liberated itself from the fear of ornament, Sumnew discoveries of archaeology expanded the repertory merson observed in 1941.
of ornament available to revivalists. After about 1880,
The very dierence between ornament and structure is
photography made details of ornament even more widely
subtle and perhaps arbitrary. The pointed arches and
available than prints had done.
ying buttresses of Gothic architecture are ornamental
but structurally necessary; the colorful rhythmic bands
of a Pietro Belluschi International Style skyscraper are
3 Modern ornament
integral, not applied, but certainly have ornamental effect. Furthermore, architectural ornament can serve the
Modern millwork ornaments are made of wood, plastics, practical purpose of establishing scale, signaling entries,
composites, etc. They come in many dierent colours and aiding waynding, and these useful design tactics had
and shapes. Modern architecture, conceived of as the been outlawed. And by the mid-1950s, modernist gureelimination of ornament in favor of purely functional heads Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer had been breaking
structures, left architects the problem of how to prop- their own rules by producing highly expressive, sculptural
erly adorn modern structures.[8] There were two available concrete work.
routes from this perceived crisis. One was to attempt to
The argument against ornament peaked in 1959 over disdevise an ornamental vocabulary that was new and escussions of the Seagram Building, where Mies van der
sentially contemporary. This was the route taken by arRohe installed a series of structurally unnecessary vertichitects like Louis Sullivan and his pupil Frank Lloyd
cal I-beams on the outside of the building, and by 1984,
Wright, or by the unique Antoni Gaud. Art Nouveau,
when Philip Johnson produced his AT&T Building in
for all its excesses, was a conscious eort to evolve such
Manhattan with an ornamental pink granite neo-Georgian
a natural vocabulary of ornament.
pediment, the argument was eectively over. In retroA more radical route abandoned the use of ornament al- spect, critics have seen the AT&T Building as the rst
together, as in some designs for objects by Christopher Postmodernist building.
Dresser. At the time, such unornamented objects could
have been found in many unpretending workaday items of
industrial design, ceramics produced at the Arabia manu4 See also
factory in Finland, for instance, or the glass insulators of
electric lines.
Bronze and brass ornamental work
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
5 Notes
which he declared that lack of decoration is the sign of
an advanced society. His argument was that ornament is
economically inecient and morally degenerate, and [1] Summerson, John (1941) printed in Heavenly Mansions
1963, p. 217
that reducing ornament was a sign of progress. Modernists were eager to point to American architect Louis [2] Tabbaa, 74-75
Sullivan as their godfather in the cause of aesthetic simplication, dismissing the knots of intricately patterned [3] Rawson, 24-25; see also "Styleor whatever, J. Duncan Berry, A review of Problems of Style by Alois Riegl,
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 eectively ostracized for departing from
the aesthetic rules.

The New Criterion, April 1993

[4] Rawson, the subject of her book, see Preface, and Chapter
5 on Chinese inuences on Persian art.
[5] The Center for Palladian
Inc.,Palladio and his Books.

Studies

in

America,

[6] quoted by Summerson

[7] Second Republic Exposition
[8] Sankovitch,
Anne-Marie
(12/1/1998).
Structure/ornament and the modern guration of
architecture. The Art Bulletin. Archived from the
original on November 7, 2007. Retrieved 2007-11-13.
Check date values in: |date= (help)

19th-century compendiums of
ornament
Dolmetsch, Heinrich (1898). The Treasury of Ornament. (s:de:Heinrich Dolmetsch)
Owen Jones (1856) The Grammar of Ornament.
Meyer, Franz Sales, (1898), A Handbook of Ornament
Speltz, Alexander (1915). The Coloured Ornament
of All Historical Styles.

References
Lewis, Philippa; G. Darley (1986). Dictionary of
Ornament. New York: Pantheon. ISBN 0-39450931-5.
Rawson, Jessica, Chinese Ornament: The lotus and
the dragon, 1984, British Museum Publications,
ISBN 0-7141-1431-6
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

8 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

8.1

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Ornament (art) Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ornament_(art)?oldid=745031192 Contributors: Heron, Hyacinth, Bevo, Topbanana, Wetman, Golbez, Erauch, BillC, Je3000, Holek, Mandarax, BD2412, Amerique, Rjwilmsi, Lockley, SchuminWeb, Nihiltres,
Bgwhite, Jpfagerback, Occono, Sandstein, SmackBot, Arnd69, Yamaguchi , Hmains, Chris the speller, Donbas, Sadads, Oatmeal batman,
JonHarder, Just plain Bill, Dineshkannambadi, Dogears, SashatoBot, Plumb pudding, Vanisaac, CmdrObot, Bons, Mcginnly, Ntsimp, Mattisse, Nick Number, Alphachimpbot, JAnDbot, VoABot II, JNW, L Trezise, Gwern, Nikpapag, KTo288, Johnbod, Idioma-bot, VolkovBot,
TXiKiBoT, Jkeene, Steven J. Anderson, SieBot, JohnManuel, Prof saxx, Doirfa na, Isocephaly, Niceguyedc, DragonBot, Estirabot, F222,
7&6=thirteen, SilvonenBot, Addbot, Haruth, Kasjanek21, Lightbot, Kiril Simeonovski, Beren, Luckas-bot, Yobot, Nallimbot, Bembo
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8.2

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