Defining ornament.

THE ORDER OF ORNAMENT, THE STRUCTURE OF STYLE: THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

By Debra Schafter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. [pounds sterling]60

Debra Schafter, Assistant Professor in the Visual Arts and Technology Department of San Antonio College in Texas, has written a short and intensive survey of some aspects of the decorative arts in architecture from Pugin to the outbreak of the First World War. She concentrates specifically on Ruskin, Owen Jones, Semper and Riegl, and in general builds a parallel between the reference to ornament by architectural writers, and the development of modern linguistics. So she uses the terminology of the latter to define the former, in terms of emblem, symbol, sign or signifier; or, later, of mimesis, analogy and emulation.

As academic attitudes to language structure and origins shifted throughout the nineteenth century, architectural analysis followed suit; and Shafter compares the two: Jones, for example, thought that ornament represented natural forms, in the way that word use represents natural needs; whereas Semper saw it as part of a primal expression of human creativity. In general, as the search for the underlying sources of language went back beyond the Greek and the Latin, so designers reached back to earlier civilizations in their search for an elementary architectural style; and as architecture 'conquered' the applied arts, so ornament began to be limited to an imitation of geometrical forms. Shafter illustrates her ideas with some well-chosen examples, particularly from the work of Klimt and Otto Wagner, and is at her most interesting when concerned with the truly architectural phenomenon where ornament defines and determines form, rather than being applied to it.

This book originated in Schafter's doctoral dissertation at the University of Texas, and has that dense quality associated with academic theses. The themes are analysed by investigating the reaction of her four heroes to them, one by one, in the same order, over and over again; and various complex related issues, such as the development of comparative linguistics contemporary to her period, are pressed into service in an extremely concentrated fashion. A more relaxed style might have resulted in a more useful publication, but there is no doubt that The Order of Ornament marks the debut of a thoughtful and capable historian.