Fig. 487.—Design painted upon pottery.
A characteristic painted design from the interior of an ancient bowl is shown in Fig. 487, in which merely a suggestion of the radiation is preserved, although the figure is still decorative and tasteful. This process of modification goes on without end, and as the true geometric textile forms recede from view innovation robs the design of all traces of its original character, producing much that is incongruous and unsatisfactory.
The growth of decorative devices from the elementary to the highly constituted and elegant is owing to a tendency of the human mind to elaborate because it is pleasant to do so or because pleasure is taken in the result, but there is still a directing and shaping agency to be accounted for.
I have already shown that such figures as the scroll and the guilloche are not necessarily developed by processes of selection and combination of simple elements, as many have thought, since they may have come into art at a very early stage almost full-fledged; but there is nothing in these facts to throw light upon the processes by which ornament followed particular lines of development throughout endless elaboration. In treating of this point, Prof. C.F. Hartt[2] maintained that the development of ornamental designs took particular and uniform directions owing to the structure of the eye, certain forms being chosen and perpetuated because of the pleasure afforded by movements of the eye in following them. In connection with this hypothesis, for it is nothing more, Mr. Hartt advanced the additional idea, that in unison with
the general course of nature decorative forms began with simple elements and developed by systematic methods to complex forms. Take for example the series of designs shown in Fig. 488. The meander a made up of simple parts would, according to Mr. Hartt, by further elaboration under the supervision of the muscles of the eye, develop into b. This, in time, into c, and so on until the elegant anthemium was achieved. The series shown in Fig. 489 would develop in a similar way, or otherwise would be produced by modification in free-hand copying of the rectilinear series. The processes here suggested, although to all appearances reasonable enough, should not be passed over without careful scrutiny.
Fig. 488.—Theoretical development of fret-work.
Taking the first series, we observe that the ornaments are projected in straight continuous lines or zones, which are filled in with more or less complex parts, rectilinear and geometrically accurate. Still higher forms are marvelously intricate and graceful, yet not less geometric and symmetrical.