With any given series of designs it is possible to begin at either end—in the one case there is an ascending evolution, in the other a degeneration. Students of the biological method of treating decorative art will recognise that the latter is by far the most general order in the evolution of patterns, and by adopting it in this case Professor Goodyear has been able to demonstrate the life-history of this pattern to the satisfaction of many students.

In Fig. [89], A, we have a typical lotus flower and bud pattern or Greek pattern from Rhodes; the same design occurs in a simplified form on a fragment of Greek pottery from Naukratis (Fig. [89], B),[89] in which the lotus flower is now a lotus trefoil; and in Fig. [89], C, the pattern is disrupted.

Fig. 89.—Hypothetical derivation of the “egg-and-dart” moulding from a lotus pattern; according to Goodyear.

In Greek vases we usually find that decoration has been made with a fine feeling for appropriateness; thus the erect anthemion occurs when the vase is swelling, but where it is contracting an inverted anthemion is placed, because the decorative lines thus widen to correspond with the expansion of the vase. Again, in Egyptian tomb ceilings the bordering lotus pattern is inverted, as the base line of the design naturally is made to correspond with the peripheral line of the ceiling—in other words, the lotus anthemion was inverted.

We have then a painted lotus bud and trefoil pattern which was often inverted and as often a simple design. According to this view, the egg of the egg-and-dart pattern is simply a semi-oval left between two lotus trefoils, the dart being the central sepal. When this design came to be incised in stone, the new technique very slightly modified the pattern, and the flat oval areas necessarily came to be carved as rounded or leaf-shaped projections. On these latter occasionally appear reminiscences of the intervening buds, as on the Erechtheium leaf-and-dart moulding. Many variants occur in this device, especially in Roman sculpture.

Professor Goodyear points out that the egg-and-dart moulding as such is unknown to Egyptian patterns, owing to the almost entire absence in Egyptian art of carved or incised lotus borders of any kind, a preference for flat ornament in colour being the rule. Stone carved patterns of any kind in Egyptian art are quite rare before the Ptolemaic period. In Greek art the absence of patterns in projected carving is also a general rule down to the time of the Erechtheium. In Greek art also colour decoration on flat surfaces was the rule in architecture for earlier periods; for example, a leaf-and-dart pattern was painted on a Doric capital in Ægina.[90]

“The Ionic capital, the ‘honey-suckle,’ the egg-and-dart moulding, the meander, the various forms of spiral ornament, the guilloche and the rosette, and some few other motives, belong to one ornamental system, and have never been used in Europe, apart from historic connections with their original system, since the Greeks, and have never been used in Europe since prehistoric ages, without distinct dependance on the Greeks. As found with the Greeks they can all be traced back to Egyptian sources; except the guilloche, which is only the later variant of the spiral scroll. The guilloche pattern has been found in Egypt on pottery dated to the Twelfth Dynasty (2700 B.C.), which was probably made by foreigners resident in the country, but it may easily be an Egyptian pattern which has not yet been specified as such.