Ornament in Europe: From Antiquity to the Twentieth Century

In this article ornament is defined as a decorative feature of objects and buildings, whereas decoration is used in the sense of the deployment of such forms, features, or shapes. Since ornament as it developed in Europe rests on a very particular set of definitions about its nature, and on the relation between the ornament and what is decorated by it, which are certainly not universal, this entry does not consider varieties of ornament developed in other parts of the world. Nevertheless, it does include scholarship on European ornament that originated in studies of ornament from other parts of the world, in particular from Islamic art history. The entry does not aim to give a historical overview of the development of ornament designs; rather, it treats theories of ornament and its historical development. Hence, the comparatively large space devoted to the 19th century, as this is the period in which the study of ornament took off on an unprecedented scale, partly as a result of the arrival of artifacts from all over the world in Europe, the development of global systems of classification in linguistics and anthropology, and the use of ornament in design disciplines as a marker of style and identity.