Highly Ornamented
Works covered in decoration, from gilded carving and illuminated borders to surfaces where ornament is the whole point.
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About
Ornament is decoration added to a surface or structure: foliage carved on a capital, gilded scrolls on a mirror frame, vines and grotesques in the margin of a book. In highly ornamented works it spreads until little is left plain. The Parisian illuminator Jean Pucelle, working in the 1320s, filled page borders with ivy, drolleries and tiny figures, and Churrigueresque altarpieces in 18th-century Spain and Mexico pile gilded columns and scrolls into walls of gold.
Rococo France refined ornament into a courtly style: Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier designed silver and interiors swirling with shells and C-scrolls, and François Boucher's paintings belonged in such rooms. In Victorian Britain, William Morris revived dense, hand-made pattern for wallpapers and textiles. Early modernist architects campaigned against decoration, but it returned through Postmodernism and the Pattern and Decoration painters of the 1970s. Look for how ornament is organised, through symmetry, repetition and framing.
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