DECORATIVE ART. Art in general may be defined as the interpretation of through form and color. Poetry and music, which sentiment through sound-forms, painting, which employs color, and sculpture and architecture. which employ plastic forms, are all independent arts, producing works which have intrinsic artistic value apart from their use or environment. The term deco•atire art is applied to that subordinate phase of artistic design in form and color which has for its purpose the of objects primarily useful, by such modifications of their form, surface, or color as shall introduce new elements of harmony. rhythm, balance, and contrast pleasing to the eye and mind. In each of the independent tine arts these elements of decorative effect. although pres ent, are incidental to the higher artistic purpose of the work. In decorative art these elements supreme, although the object into which they are introduced or to which they are applied is itself independently complete without them. A vase, chair, blank wall, or temple pediment may perform its primary function while still una dorned by the decorato•. Architecture combines the aaraeteristics of both the independent and decorative art;: it is a combination of the use ful art of construction with the decorative art of ornamental structural design. Painting and sculpture, ordinarily independent arts, may be employed to decorate buildings: and in propor as they are subordinated to the structure they adorn, they take their place among the deco rative rather than the independent arts.
PAINTINc. The decorative arts may be classified in various ways. The broadest division is that between decorative painting and sculpture applied to buildings on the one hand and what is teehnically known as ornament on the other. The art of iltwora ive painting has for its object the adornment of certain defined spaces on the walls and eeiliims or vaults of buildings by paintings. which serve the double purpose of
pictorial npresentat ion—allegorical. historical, religious, or other—and of embellishing a surface otherwise bare and uninteresting. In Egypt, walls and columns, internal and external, were covered with pictures deeply incised by the chisel and richly painted. The Romans covered the walls of their chambers, courts, and banquet rooms with painted decorations in which pictures of mythological beings and of familiar scenes were mingled with landscape and fantastic architecture. ( See Pomeml.1 The Byzantine artists adorned the walls and apses of their churches with highly decorative pictures on a gold executed often in glass mosaic: in these the drawing and coloring. forsaking the pursuit of natural were controlled by purely decorative considerations. The greatest schools of decorative painting were those which grew up in Italy in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the earlier having its chief centre in Florence, with Giotto as its greatest master, the second reaching its highest development in Rome between 1515 and I560 under Raphael and and a little later in Venice, where Titian, Tinto•etto. and Paolo Veronese attained an extraordinary pitch of sensuous splendor of color. But no decorative painter of any age ever equaled the sublimity of conception and grandeur of execution of Michelangelo's decorations for the vault of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican at Rome. In modern decorative painting the French are the leaders: in the United States it is only in recent years that the art has found opportu nity for development. Lack of space forbids en larging further on this phase of decorative art ; the inquire- is referred to text-books on painting and to the articles on the great artists in this Encyclowedia.