IT may not be amiss to point out the advantages of studying ornamental art even to those who do not mean to be artists. The course to be adopted, after acquiring the necessary geometry, is to draw or model plants and to learn their anatomy. This will make the student accurately acquainted with the forms of plants and of their parts, and as he progresses he will find out beauties which have escaped him in a cursory view; the further he proceeds, the more his admiration will be excited by those subtle beauties he finds so hard to render and so easy to miss. The student will then notice, how many illustrations of plants are near enough to the originals to be unmistakable, but that the grace of the plants has evaporated. As soon as he is sufficiently advanced to study with advantage the best examples of ornamental art, he will find out the difficulties the great ornamentalists have overcome in applying the beauties of nature to works of art; and will then take a deeper interest in these masterpieces, and receive a corresponding delight. He will learn from these studies to reverence the artists and to admire the nation that produced them; for “art is the mirror of a nation’s civilization.”

I have spoken only of floral ornament, though the highest ornament is the human figure, and after that animal forms. The severity, however, of the requisite studies to become a figure draughtsman, which demand a knowledge of the skeleton and of the muscles, unfortunately deters amateurs, and not unfrequently ornamentalists, from learning to draw the figure, so that their works fall short of the excellence of the Greeks and Italians, who were above all things figure draughtsmen. Amateurs too will greatly aid the art, for as a rule excellence is only attained when there are many educated lovers of it, who can appreciate a beautiful creation, and reward the artist by their judicious admiration.

For twenty years I have pointed out that Nature offers her beauties gratuitously to mankind for its solace and delight; perhaps, however, the following words of Emile de Laveleye, in his book on Luxury, will have more weight:—

“Might not the man of the people, on whom the curse of matter weighs with so heavy a load, find the best kind of alleviation for his hard condition, if his eyes were open to what Leonardo da Vinci calls la bellezza del mondo—‘the beautiful things of the earth’?... Pindar says, ‘In the day when the Rhodians shall erect an altar to Minerva, a rain of gold will fall upon the isle.’ The golden rain which falls on any people when literature and the fine arts are encouraged ... is a shower of pure and disinterested delights.”

I am tempted to say something on the prospects of ornamental art. Nothing in this world can be had without paying for it, but though we must all live, those who have devoted their lives to the creation of the beautiful, look more to the delight they give and the admiration they excite, than to mere pecuniary rewards. No art will ever flourish unless there are educated and enthusiastic admirers of its masterpieces. The artist will never devote his talents to an art, and undergo the ceaseless toil requisite to create beauty, unless he be rewarded by the praise of real judges. I fear we cannot as yet make the Greek boast “that we love the beautiful”; but until we do love it, we can hardly expect to rival those who did.

The whole ornamental art of the world is now before us, and it is not to be believed that artists would not elaborate something new and beautiful from all the knowledge they have gained, if there were a passionate desire for it among the people. This can never be so long as the public is content with paraphrases of deceased art, or merely asks for a jumble of discordant scraps. Novelty we must needs have, for this generation does not inherit the precise tastes of former days, not even those of its immediate predecessor, and it is this generation that wants to be charmed: it is true that it gets novelty, but it should want beautiful novelty, and not that which is commonplace or ugly. Novelty in art is not an absolute difference from what has gone before, for that is sure to be bad, but only that difference and that improvement which one instructed generation can give to the past excellence it builds on. It is therefore necessary for the student who is born an artist, and hopes to create new loveliness, to be steeped in the beauties of nature and of art. To attain this a profound study of nature and the masterpieces of former art are wanted, for, as Sir Joshua Reynolds said, “Invention is one of the greatest marks of genius, ... and it is by being conversant with the inventions of others that we learn to invent”; while to express our knowledge and invention admirable draughtsmanship is requisite.

We have a novel phase of ornament, which consists in twisting or arranging certain plants into the shape required, to make them fit their places. Much of this work is flabby or wire-drawn, and often omits the highest beauty of the plants it uses, but even when the beauty of the plant is not left out, the ornament is infinitely below the highest flights of former art, in which the artist had absorbed the graces of floral growth and had properly applied them. The highest ornament, by its abstraction, is closely allied to architectural art, while all its higher achievements are in conjunction with architecture; consequently there should be a harmony between the decoration and the framework. Natural foliage arranged on a geometrical basis makes a poor contrast to noble architecture.

All ornamental arts, that are not realistic imitations, must be founded on precedent art. We have only one complete system of decorative art that took an entirely new direction besides Gothic, and that harmonizes with its architecture—the Saracenic—and that art is not congenial to our taste, feelings, or desires. Gothic ornamental art is mostly too barbaric or too realistic to suit us, except when it is borrowed from Roman, Byzantine, or Saracenic sources; in fact, we have nothing but Roman, Byzantine, and Renaissance art to fall back on for ornament; of Greek ornamental art we have some carved stone-work, moulded metal-work, painting on vases, incised work, and the traces of painting. Little of secular Byzantine art remains, though it is not probable that it materially differed from the ecclesiastical art of its period; it was Roman art modified by the new religion and by Greek and Oriental taste, in which saints and martyrs, with their attributes or symbols, took the place of the antique gods and goddesses; while the Renaissance was an attempted revival of Roman.

We cannot expect to equal at once the masterpieces of Greek, Roman, or Renaissance art; we have neither the centuries of experience nor the cultivated public. Every artist, however, can, by the means before mentioned, be sure of having conquered the preliminaries of his art, and he can be sincere; he can give us those beauties from nature that have captivated him, and have been transfused into ornament by the alembic of his mind; such ornament will be sure to find some congenial spirits to admire it: and I think I may say that a public sufficiently cultivated to appreciate real art is gradually being formed. The highest art is undoubtedly that which is the simplest and most perfect, which gives the experience and skill of a lifetime by a few lines or touches; and this art is more calculated to captivate the best taste of the day than the complex or the intricate. However, there will even now be ample recognition of the creations of any skilled artist who is sincere, let his genius take him where it will. There is, too, this consolation for every true artist whose works remain: that if there are few judges of his work now, there may be more hereafter—judges who when they look at his work will say, this is the work of a true artist; and he may confer delight on unborn thousands, and direct attention, in after ages, to those beauties of nature that have been overlooked.

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.

There is perhaps but one other ornament that is worthy of the profoundest study, the radiating ornament of the Greeks, known as the Greek honeysuckle. This ornament is full of subtle devices, in the elegant graduation of its forms, in the proportioning of the masses, in its even distribution, and in the making of the different curves enhance the value of one another. There is often, too, a suggestion of horizontality or verticality introduced, that gives the highest value to the composition; all showing the intimate acquaintance with nature that the Greek artists possessed. Many of the Greek running patterns are both original and effective, and in some of them tangential junction is distinctly avoided, to attract attention to the ornament. The Greeks, too, were pre-eminent in knowing the use of restraint and the value of plainness. When the sculptor had carved his ornament on an architectural monument he seemed to say, “Better this if you can!”

The Byzantines understood the value of gradation, and when they wholly ornamented a profile, they made some parts in bold, some in low relief, and engraved or sunk other parts. The Saracens learned this art from them, and so improved on it, that the general effect of their best work resembles Greek art; at the proper distance the subordinate ornament looks like a mere difference of texture.

Saracenic ornament affords the only instances of complete floral decoration without the figures of man or animals; and although it is inclined to be monotonous, and geometrical forms are too predominant, it is, when coloured and gilt, saved from monotony by the magical change of the patterns on the beholder shifting his position. This effect is obtained by trifling differences of level in the planes of the ornament and by gilding. Its floral forms, however, are usually coarse and poor, and have no refined graces.

There are a few points not touched on in the book which it may be well to mention. One is a device that was, I think, only used by the Byzantines, i. e. bossing out ornament to catch the light. Constantine the Great, when he had the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem built, had the capitals of the sanctuary columns made of silver, and doubtless the silversmiths in working them hammered out some bosses to catch the light. This device was seized on by the sculptors of Sta. Sophia at Constantinople, and used in the marble capitals of its columns and pilasters (Figs. A and B).

I may also draw attention to another Byzantine device, which charmed Mr. Ruskin at St. Mark’s—the leaves of capitals caught by the wind and blown aside. Capitals with a similar device existed in Sta. Sophia at Salonica, some of which were partly calcined by the late fire. The propriety of using such an incident in the conventional stone ornaments of a supporting member may be doubted, still we must admire the observation and genius of the sculptor; and there are many opportunities of using such an incident when the ornament is not on a supporting member. I point it out to show what fresh resources for the ornamentalist are to be found in nature, when he has the industry to observe and the talent to create.

There are cases where architectural features have to be reduced, and at the same time to be emphasized too. No better example of this is to be found than in the Caryatid temple attached to the Erechtheum. Its entablature was below the main one, and so had to be smaller, and yet was wanted to be important

Figs. A and B.—Byzantine Capitals from Sta. Sophia at Constantinople, showing the bossing out of the ornament.