The Term “Ornament” in the Baroque
Filippo Baldinucci, an art theorist and biographer of artists, wrote in his “Vocabolario Toscano dell’arte del Disegno”, which was published in Florence in 1681: “Abellimento, e dicesi propriamente dicose materiali, che si aggiungiono intorno che che sia, per farlo vage e belle” (“I call it ornamentation when materials are added to what is given, in order to make it beautiful and unique”).
In France the term ornemens was used synonymously with the Latin ornamentum and appeared in literature about art from the 16th century until the early 19th
century.
In the German-speaking countries, the terms Zierrat, Zierung and Beizier (all of which mean ornamentation or decoration) were used until well into the 19th century, for example in the first German translation of Vitruvius by Walter Rivius (also Ryff, entitled “Vitruvius Teutsch”, published in Nuremberg in 1548) and in the most important German encyclopedia of the Baroque, Johann Heinrich Zedler’s “Grosses vollständiges Universal Lexicon Aller Wissenschafften und Künste”
(1732, Vol. 35, column 471).
In the critical European debate on ornamentation in the 18th century, which was carried on mainly by the various academies, ornaments were conceded to have an intrinsic value, which finally freed them from their former role as a rather subordinate artistic genre.
Bernd Evers, Rainald Franz
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