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KERAMIC STUDIO 
THE APPLICATION OF ORNAMENT 
A. G. Marshall 
SECOND PArER. 
) NDER the general designation of ornament, 
two great classes of design are included. 
The most primitive in idea and use is the 
geometric or purely inventive ornament. 
This form is also the structural basis or 
groundwork of all repeating patterns of the later and more 
highly developed class, where motives are natural forms more 
or less conventionalized. A third class, the purely naturalistic, 
is sometimes included as ornament, signifying statuary pictures 
and imitative carvings when designed to occupy special places 
in architectural, cabinet work or landscape gardening schemes. 
But this stretching of the term is quite apart from our present 
subject which is applied ornament, the decoration existing for 
the sake of the thing decorated instead of being the chief 
consideration, like the sacred statue in the temple or the picture 
in the gallery built to receive it. 
Good inventive ornament is based upon geometrical laws 
and proportions, and it is a brilliant illustration of the survival 
of fine things and types that even its most primitive designs 
have never been and never will be out of vogue. We may 
consider them commonplace because familiar, yet they are 
always satisfying and in good taste. The reason for this is 
simply that such designs follow the lines of the most funda- 
mental laws of our being as naturally as we build the floors of 
our houses flat and the walls upright. Fig. i shows some 
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typical primitive ornaments invented by savage and barbarian 
decorators and transmitted to succeeding races. The curved 
forms seem to have been developed latest. There is, however, 
a very definite limit to geometric or purely inventive orna- 
ment which is soon reached by fertile designers. We can 
quickly exhaust all the positions in which two straight lines 
can be placed with respect to each other, as in Fig. 2. Now 
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while the combinations of all possible lines and angles and 
curves are probably infinite, yet the arrangements which are 
effective for ornament can be in time quite worked out, and 
perhaps were so exhausted by the Arabian and Moorish 
designers, in their wonderful textiles, carvings and mosaic 
patterns, their religion forbidding the representation of any 
natural form, even conventionalized, and confining their art to 
geometrical figures. Other peoples, not so hindered by reli- 
gious scruples, early adopted hints from nature and developed 
the conventional idea. It is an interesting speculation to the 
decorator to-day whether natural leaves and flowers first sup- 
plied the motives, the original conventionalization being an 
imperfect attempt at the imitation of sacred plants, trees, 
etc., or whether, as is far more likely, the early artist, struck 
with the suggestion in such inventive forms as the waved line 
with added branches in Fig. 1, made with a hired point, and 
the so-called primitive lotus as in Fig. 3, made with a brush, 
referred to the natural vine and flower and developed the 
" acanthus" and " lotus" ornaments from which have descended 
an inexhaustible line of decorative enrichment. Mr. Frank 
G. Jackson in his lessons on decorative design, quite con- 
vincingly illustrates this probable origin of conventional 
designs from the inventive type. 
Conventionalization is a veiy bioad lei in, including at its 
extremes such rigid, almost geometric forms as the olive 
branch, Fig. 4, from an early Greek vase, and the close 
approach to realistic treatment shown in the same motive, 
Fig. 5, as handled in a late Roman carving. In the early 
example the type can barely be recognized ; in the other it 
comes dangerously near the exact imitation of nature. Figs. 
6 and 7, from modern designs, illustrate better conventional- 
ization, Fig. 6 being as naturalistic as is often desirable, and 
Fig. 7 as conventional as may be without risk of losing the 
natural motive. The Japanese, with much more freedom of 
treatment, still keep their decorative suggestions far from the 
imitation of nature. 
rig. r. 
[TO BE CONTINUED,] 
