224 ON TASTE IN ORNAMENTAL DESIGN. Paet II. 



copy from nature, of which the idea alone should be 

 taken; and this is the more to be urged at the present 

 moment, as some still maintain that natural objects should be 

 chiefly selected for decorative art, and that workmen 

 should be furnished with casts from real leaves, &c. in order 

 that they may imitate them in architectural mouldings and 

 ornamental work, — an error, as I have already shown, not 

 committed by the Greeks and others most remarkable for 

 good taste. 



This ornamental work is of course distinct from subjects 

 adapted to the higher branches of sculpture and bas-relief,] 

 and the remark applies to what is mere ornamentation. It is 

 even better that the figures of animals, when merely orna- 

 mental accessories of architecture, and not forming part of a 

 bas-relief, nor intended to represent a reality, should have a 

 conventional form; and the quaint lions we admire in mediaeval 

 churches supporting columns, as in other un-leonine occupa- 

 tions, would be intolerable if they exactly represented real life. 

 But the human figure should not be degraded by convention- 

 alism, except in arabesques. It should be as true to the reality 

 as high art can make it, even when employed in ornamentation. 

 Nowhere does the inferiority of mouldings directly imitating 

 natural objects, compared to conventional ones, appear more 

 evidently than when they are placed near to sculptures of 

 human figures ; and what should we think of a metope of the 

 Parthenon, or any Greek sculpture surrounded by an imitation 

 of real flowers ? The festoons of fruit and flowers in Kenais- 

 sance buildings are only an exaggerated application of this 

 false principle ; and a similar meretricious taste induced 

 some Dutch, and other, artists, to paint a wreath round land- 

 scapes and portraits. Among the many reasons why natural 

 objects ought not to be preferred for ornamentation, one impor- 

 tant one is, that a building is a work of art, and is not copied 

 from nature. The parts of it are also conventional, and one 



