226 ON TASTE IN ORNAMENTAL DESIGN. Paet II. 



if copied from the real flower. This may accord in form, 

 not in colour, with the position required ; and, besides, the 

 disproportionate quantity of green would he fatal to the 

 harmony of the design, and would at once introduce that 

 very fault, — a redundancy of green, which offends so much 

 in the works of a debased age. For these reasons, copies of 

 real plants are open to objection. They do not however 

 apply equally to human figures, as their colours can be varied 

 by the more arbitrary hues of dress ; though I do not by 

 this mean to advocate the use of human figures for mere orna- 

 mentation. Again, there is more play of light and shade, 

 and greater effect to be obtained by the conventional, than by 

 the natural, flower ; and the tracery of capitals and idealised 

 foliage of the 1200 are far more pleasing than the most care- 

 ful copies of real flowers, which gained ground in the Deco- 

 rated style, and became rampant amidst the overwrought 

 productions of the Eenaissance. The most varied and the 

 most beautiful specimens of ornament, which are those of the 

 ancient Greek, the Byzantine, the Saracenic, the Norman, 

 and the early Pointed, architecture, were conventional, not 

 direct, copies from nature ; and it is gratifying to find my 

 opinion accord with that of so competent an authority as 

 Mr. Wornum, who says, " in nearly all designs of this kind, 

 applied to useful purposes, you frustrate the very principle of 

 nature, upon which you found your theory, when you repre- 

 sent a natural form in a natural manner, and yet apply it to 

 uses with which it has, in nature, no affinity whatever." . . 

 " The details of all great styles are largely derived from nature, 

 but, for the most part, conventionally treated; and theory 

 and experience seem to show that this is the true system." 

 ("Analysis of Ornament," pp. 10, 15.) I am also glad to be 

 supported in this view by the valuable opinion of Mr. Owen 

 Jones, who observes, " that, in all the best periods of art, all 

 ornament was rather based upon an observation of the princi- 

 ples which regulate the arrangements of form in nature than 



