The Principles of Ornament

by James Ward

I will now revert to the book, and confine myself to such remarks as I hope may be useful to those who study it. The student, when he has learnt and comprehended the laws, should observe growing plants, and notice that every plant illustrates some, and mostly many, of the laws; and when he has clearly distinguished them, he should examine the best ornament of antiquity and the Renaissance, and satisfy himself that the laws, involved in the particular example he is studying, have been followed. When he has done this, he should note any divergence from the laws and endeavour to understand the reason for it. To ensure the effect they intend, great artists sometimes ignore the ordinary laws.

It is well that he should consider that the main object of every plant is to live and propagate itself: to live it wants air, moisture, and nourishment, and mostly sunshine, and it must strive to get these necessaries amidst a crowd of competitors. In this struggle the plant is often dwarfed or distorted, and still more frequently some of its parts are deformed; its flowers must attract insects by their colour or scent, and must allure the insects by the honey they distil to fertilize them; so that beauty, except in the colour of the flowers, is for the plant a secondary consideration.

In ornament, on the contrary, beauty is the only consideration, except perhaps in mnemonic and symbolic ornament; and these must have beauty, or they cease to be ornament.

Ornament has also to be portrayed on some material, or carved in it; it should conform to the shape of the object, be governed by the quality of the material, and by the use to which the object is to be put—e.g. a leaf may be carved in certain woods, almost of the thinness of the real leaf, but then it must be preserved in a glass case. This thinness is not to be got if the leaf be carved in stone; the artist must therefore see what beauties he can abstract from the plant he has chosen or from floral growth generally, so that it can be carved. He should in all cases know that his design can be expressed in the material to be used, that it will ornament the object, will not be easily destroyed, and will not interfere with the use of the object. If he succeeds in doing this, his skill, taste, and judgment will be admired. This necessary abstraction we unfortunately call convention, and when it makes good ornament, and shows the characteristic beauty and vigour of plant form, it is of the highest sort; this is found in the best Greek, Roman, and Renaissance ornament, while when a coarse and clumsy imitation of nature is made, with all the beauty left out, it is the lowest sort of convention.

Any cheap speculative houses that have carving upon them, will afford ample illustrations of contemporary convention in its worst form.

Gothic ornament was quite new; for no sooner did the architects, carvers, masons, carpenters, and others find that they had surpassed the old world in constructive skill, than they looked down on all the old world arts, and would not be beholden to them. They were determined to begin afresh; they had human beings, animals, trees, plants, and flowers, as well as the Romans and Byzantines; why should they not make as good statues and ornament? There is much to be said in favour of this contention, for every one must desire to see his house, his town-hall, and his church ornamented with the flowers and plants that he knows and loves, instead of with the conventionalized plants of other countries that he does not know, or that he has gazed on to satiety. But it is one thing to have a longing, and another to be able to bring plants, leaves, and flowers into the domain of high art. The early Gothic sculptors did give a certain crispness, and in some cases even a monumental air to their carved flora, and sometimes they got that mysterious look of infinite complexity that is found in nature, and they had invention to a marvellous degree. From the sculptors working on the spot, and being able to see each figure and piece of ornament in its place, they never missed their effect. All their ornament answered its main end, of giving a broken mass of light and shade to contrast with plain surfaces, mouldings, or shafts, while much of it was vigorous; but some of the early Gothic foliage has no grace, is often destitute of floral character, and might be mistaken for hanks of string on pieces of firewood, or worm-eaten wigs. The first touch of the Renaissance brought a sweetness of proportion to architecture and a grace to floral ornament that is most striking.

Good traditional ornament has these inestimable advantages, that it has been treated for ages by skilful men, so that its faults have been corrected, new graces have been added to it, and it has been fitted to properly fill the requisite shapes. From the first, the artist must have noticed some special beauties and fitness in the plant he chose, and the ornament must have had some striking qualities to make it popular; for why else should it have been preferred and persisted in, when so many other plants had great beauty? There is, however, some ornament that, after it has once been perfected, seems incapable of further improvement. The egg and tongue may be cited as an instance. It has never been improved since the perfecting of Greek architecture, nor has any good substitute for it been found. A coarse caricature of it is still the most popular ornament of the ovolo. The Romans converted it into a floral form at the Temple of Jupiter Tonans, with marked want of success.

The Greek honeysuckle and the acanthus are the most striking examples of good traditional ornament. To take the acanthus first, it was started by the Greeks, continued by the Romans, and used by the Byzantines with a different character, then adopted by the Renaissance artists, and has been treated in an entirely novel way by Alfred Stevens in our own day. Stevens has given a peculiarly plastic character to its leafage in the Wellington monument. That form of it which is used in the Corinthian capital has had such an infinity of pains bestowed on it, that improvement on the old lines is scarcely to be expected, though new floral capitals may be invented. Every portion of the leaf, down to its rafflings, has been perfected to the end the Romans destined it to fulfil, though, as in all human inventions, something was sacrificed to attain it. The Greek capital was rather deficient in outline, but it was possessed of the most exquisite floral grace, and this was sacrificed by the Romans to attain distinctness, strength, and dignity; these qualities being particularly necessary when it was used in colossal monuments. Even when it was on a smaller scale, we can see the advantages of the change. In some Byzantine buildings, old Greek and Roman Corinthian columns have been used together. As an isolated ornament the Greek capital is greatly to be preferred, but when the two are seen in conjunction as parts of the building, the Roman capital is clear, distinct, and dignified, while the Greek one is a confused mass.

In their colossal capitals, the Romans mostly substituted the olive-leaf for the natural raffle, and used but four or five in each leaflet; though the oak-leaf, the parsley, and the endive were occasionally used. Each raffle of the olive-leafed variety is hollowed by a curve without ribs, the only lines being those made by the edges of the hollows, and each leaflet is hollowed out like a cockle-shell as well. In the best examples, the upper edges of each leaflet are mostly clear of the one above or overlap it; in the first case they are thrown up by the shadow behind, in the latter the edges of the raffles are bright against the half light of the leaflets above, and are also thrown up by the shade in their points. The top of the complete leaf curls over, and thus throws its shadow on the part below, so there is the contrast between masses of light, graduated shade, and graduated shadow. The back of the leaf was used to get a wide stem, and this stem tapers upwards, while the pipes, that come from the eyes between the leaflets, taper downwards, are nearly parallel with the stem, and are deeply undercut, thus making the whole leaf distinct and vigorous ([Fig. 110]). If examples are compared, the superiority of the parallel pipes over those that run into the stem is at once seen. The lower leaves are cut through horizontally in the middle, and come straight down on to the necking, which gives much more vigour to the capital, than when the bell turns inwards above the necking.

The student will do well to carefully draw a good example, then model it, and then carve it, for it has been the type from which most good floral capitals have been derived. The acanthus and other floral ornament used by the Italian Renaissance artists deserve quite as much attention as the Roman; for though their ornament was not on the same colossal scale, it was done by excellent figure sculptors who had studied ornament, and were of finer artistic fibre than the Romans, besides having the best Roman examples for their models. The Italian artists were, too, nearly as fond of the human figure as the Greeks, and introduced it wherever they could do so appropriately.