ORNAMENT. When the decorative artist seeks to produce his effect not by recourse to the repre sentative arts of painting and sculpture. but by the harmony. rhythm, balance, and contrast of lines. light- and shades, and colors, dissociated from pictorial purpose. his work falls into the category of ornament Ornament may be defined as the combination of lines, colors, or forms ac •ording to a predetermined system, for decorative effect. When certain elementary forms recur again and again in a regular sequence or system. they are called motives. and the larger system or combination of motives is called a pattern. Orna ment is said to be naturalistic when it employs forms directly derived or imitated from nature, as in rugs, wall-papers. or carpets adorned with flowers and foliage in their natural colors. It is called eonrentional when the designer makes use of purely arbitrary forms, coined in the mint of his own imagination or derived from tradition : such are the familiar Greek fret or meander. the auilloche or interlaced hands, and the geometric intricacies of Mohammedan ornament. But the largest proportion of ornament consists of a third and intermediate class of forms, derived from nature but subjected to modifications de signed to adapt them to their purely decorative function Icy the suppression. exaggeration. and
regularization of the natural details. and their re sult is called conrentionalivition; so that we may say that the largest part of all ornament consists of conventionalized natural forms. Such are all grotesques. wreaths and festoons. rosettes, acanthus-leaves, anlhernions. and foliated scrolls. It is out of the queslion to attempt. even the brief est sketch of the historic development of orna ment. We can only observe that it has in almost all ages been dominated by the master-art of architecture, so that its successive styles have been parallel to those of architecture.
The highest field for the application of orna ment is that of architecture: and such of its forms and developments as belong to the adorn ment of buildings are called architectural orna ment. Decoration applied to movable objects is called industrial ornament. When the ornament is an essential part of the building or object to which it belongs—inwrought into its fabric. as it were—it is called structural ornament: when executed upon the surface of the completed object it is called applied ornament. These characteri zations are also, in a measure, applicable to deco rative painting and decorative sculpture similarly employed.