[72 
PLANT FORMS IN DESIGN? 
It is probable that the western rose window of the Cathedral 
of Chartres embodies the largest design based upon a plant form 
ever produced, its diameter over all being nearly forty-four feet. 
To a modern American this ought surely to be an interesting fact, 
for is it not an American trait to determine value by size? It is 
outside the scope of this brief article to show why the marvelous 
beauty of this rose window is not due to its size, or indeed how it 
challenged the utmost skill of the architect to keep the window 
beautiful while making it large enough to iluminate the unusually 
lofty vault of the cathedral. 
It may seem naive indeed for a mere botanist to make the flat 
statement in the bulletin of an art museum that the rose window 
of a cathedral, as its name implies, derives its form from the 
flower. But though all artists know this,? many laymen do not, 
so greatly does the design depart from the rose motive in some 
instances. In the cathedrals of the twelfth century, for example, 
as at Beauvais, rose windows were sometimes treated quite defi- 
nitely as wheels. 
This leads us to a fundamental principle—that imitation is not 
art. “The more closely nature 1s copied,” said Owen Jones, “ the 
farther we are removed from producing a work of art.”* In his 
Proposition 13 he stated that ‘“ Flowers or other natural objects 
should not be used as ornaments, but conventional representations 
founded upon them, sufficiently suggestive to convey the intended 
image to the mind, without destroying the unity of the object they 
are employed to decorate.” * And then he added, in italics: “ Uni- 
versally obeyed in the best periods of Art, equally violated when 
— 
pinch 
Art declines.” 
Possibly we find in Proposition 13 one reason why the Indian- 
corn column and capital which Latrobe designed for the lower 
vestibule of the Senate wing of the Capitol at Washington were 
never generally accepted by architects. So far as the writer 
1 Reprinted, slightly altered, with permission, Bee the Bulletin of the 
ey Mecaus of Art, 28: 126-127. July, 193 
2 Sot istorians of art, to be sure, deny that the ae of the so-called 
“rose ” rie was derived from the rose 
8 The Grammar of Ornament, p. 154 
4QOp. cit., p. 6 
