HISTORIES of ORNAMENT FROM GLOBAL TO LOCAL Edited by GÜLRU NECIPOĞLU and ALINA PAYNE With contributions by María Judith Feliciano Alina Payne Michele Bacci Finbarr Barry Flood Antoine Picon Anna Contadini Jonathan Hay David Pullins Thomas B. F. Cummins Christopher P. Heuer Jennifer L. Roberts Chanchal Dadlani Rémi Labrusse David J. Roxburgh Daniela del Pesco Gülru Necipoğlu Hashim Sarkis Vittoria Di Palma Marco Rosario Nobile Robin Schuldenfrei PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Anne Dunlop Oya Pancaroğlu Avinoam Shalem Princeton and Oxford Marzia Faietti Spyros Papapetros and Gerhard Wolf Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu {~?~Jacket/cover art credit here, if needed} All Rights Reserved Library of Congress CataLoging-in-PubLiCation Data Histories of Ornament : From Global to Local / Edited by Gulru Necipoglu and Alina Payne ; With contributions by Michele Bacci, Anna Contadini, Thomas B.F. Cummins, Chanchal Dadlani, Daniela del Pesco, Vittoria Di Palma, Anne Dunlop, Marzia Faietti, Maria Judith Feliciano, Finbarr Barry Flood, Jonathan Hay, Christopher P. Heuer, Remi Labrusse, Gulru Necipoglu, Marco Rosario Nobile, Spyros Papapetros, Oya Pancaroglu, Alina Payne, Antoine Picon, David Pullins, Jennifer L. Roberts, David J. Roxburgh, Avinoam Shalem, Hashim Sarkis, Robin Schuldenfrei, and Gerhard Wolf. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-691-16728-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Decoration and ornament, Architectural. I. Necipoglu, Gulru, editor. II. Payne, Alina Alexandra, editor. NA3310.H57 2016 729.09—dc23 2015022263 British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Vesper Pro Light and Myriad Pro Printed on acid- free paper. ∞ Printed in China 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Publication of this book has been supported with a subvention from the AgA KHAN PROGRAM FOR ISLAMIC ARCHITECTURE, DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY and with the contribution of the KUNSTHISTORISCHES INSTITUT IN FLORENZ / MAX PLANCK INSTITUT CONTENTS Introduction 1 güLru neCiPoğLu anD aLina Payne Part I Contemporaneity of Ornament in Part III Medieval Mediations Architecture ChaPter 8 ChaPter 1 Vesting Walls, Displaying Structure, Ornament and Its Users: From the Crossing Cultures: Transmedial and Vitruvian Tradition to the Digital Age 10 Transmaterial Dynamics of Ornament 96 antoine PiCon gerharD WoLf ChaPter 2 ChaPter 9 A Natural History of Ornament 20 Gothic- Framed Byzantine Icons: Italianate Vittoria Di PaLma Ornament in the Levant during the Late Middle Ages 106 ChaPter 3 miCheLe baCCi Inscription: On the Surface of Exchange between Writing, Ornament, and Tectonic ChaPter 10 in Contemporary Architecture 34 Timurid Architectural Revetment in hashim sarkis Central Asia, 1370– 1430: The Mimeticism of Mosaic Faience 116 DaViD J. roxburgh Part II Ornament between Historiography and Theory Part IV Early Modern Crosscurrents ChaPter 4 Ornament as Weapon: Ballistics, Politics, ChaPter 11 and Architectural Adornment in Semper’s Early Modern Floral: The Agency of Treatise on Ancient Projectiles 46 Ornament in Ottoman and Safavid Visual sPyros PaPaPetros Cultures 132 güLru neCiPoğLu ChaPter 5 The Passage of the Other: Elements for a ChaPter 12 Redefinition of Ornament 62 Ornamental Defacement and Protestant Jonathan hay Iconoclasm 156 ChristoPher P. heuer ChaPter 6 The Invention of Mudejar Art and the ChaPter 13 Viceregal Aesthetic Paradox: Notes on the Migration of Techniques: Inlaid Marble Reception of Iberian Ornament in New Floral Decoration in Baroque Naples 166 Spain 70 DanieLa DeL PesCo maría JuDith feLiCiano ChaPter 14 ChaPter 7 Innovation, Appropriation, and The Flaw in the Carpet: Disjunctive Representation: Mughal Architectural Continuities and Riegl’s Arabesque 82 Ornament in the Eighteenth Century 198 finbarr barry fLooD ChanChaL Dadlani Part V Ornament between ChaPter 22 Figuration and Abstraction Wrapped in Fabric: Florentine Façades, Mediterranean Textiles, and A- Tectonic ChaPter 15 Ornament in the Renaissance 274 Ornament, Form, and Vision in Ceramics aLina Payne from Medieval Iran: Reflections of the Human Image 192 ChaPter 23 oya PanCaroğLu Threads of Ornament in the Style World of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries 290 ChaPter 16 anna ContaDini Variety and Metamorphosis: Form and Meaning in the Ornament of Amico Aspertini 204 marzia faietti Part VII Internationalism of Ornament and Modernist Abstraction ChaPter 17 Images as Objects: The Problem of ChaPter 24 Figural Ornament in Eighteenth- Century The Currency of Ornament: Machine- France 216 Lathed Anticounterfeiting Patterns and the DaViD PuLLins Portability of Value 308 Jennifer L. roberts ChaPter 18 Ornament and Vice: The Foreign, the ChaPter 25 Mobile, and the Cocharelli Fragments 228 Grammars of Ornament: Dematerialization anne DunLoP and Embodiment from Owen Jones to Paul Klee 320 ChaPter 19 rémi Labrusse Gilded Bodies and Brilliant Walls: Ornament in America before and after the ChaPter 26 European Conquest 238 Sober Ornament: Materiality and Luxury thomas b. f. Cummins in German Modern Architecture and Design 334 robin sChuLDenfrei Part VI Circulations and Translations of Ornament Notes 349 Acknowledgments 409 ChaPter 20 Bibliography 411 The Poetics of Portability 250 Contributors 443 Avinoam shaLem Index 445 ChaPter 21 Photo Credits 451 “This Is Babel”: Sicily, the Mediterranean Islands, and Southern Italy (1450– 1550) 262 marCo rosario nobiLe viii CONTENTS CHAPTER 11 EARLY MODERN FLORAL: THE AgENCY OF ORNAMENT IN OTTOMAN AND SAFAVID VISUAL CULTURES Gülru Necipoğlu he fascination with ornament as an abstract both human and nonhuman, in the production and con- language of form and color triggered an sumption of ornament, that is, the animate and inani- enthusiastic appreciation of the “arts of Islam” mate actors through which decorated objects become that became defined as “decorative” at the enmeshed in networks of intentionality.5 turnT of the twentieth century.1 Retrospectively search- The analysis of ornament as a field of cultural pro- ing for the “essence” of Islamic art in its formative duction and an active agent in the construction of tem- period, European theorists of ornament singled out its porality and spatiality entails considering its circulations principal characteristic as the much- admired ara- in multiple domains. With a few exceptions, studies besque, originating in late antique prototypes that were have tended to resist addressing the workings and effi- allegedly transformed by an antinaturalistic Arab spirit, cacy of Islamic ornament in particular times and places.6 compounded by the strictures of Islam against repre- The preference to classify segregated pattern types, sentational images.2 Taxonomic classifications sub- decontextualized from multimedia decorative ensem- sumed under the overarching category of the eternal bles, has directed attention away from the sensory, arabesque comprised four categories (vegetal, geomet- cognitive, and experiential affects of ornamented sur- ric, epigraphic, and figurative), with its stylistic varia- facescapes.7 The agency of ornament activates and tions attributed to the ethno- racial “character” of transforms interactions between humans, portable different schools: Arabian, Moresque, Persian, Turkish, objects, and built environments, thereby promoting and Indian.3 new kinds of perceptual and bodily experience that The still- prevalent fourfold formal taxonomy of complement rather than negate semiotic signification. ornament reflects an unabated desire to “define the Binding together communities of taste and at the same essential character of Islamic art”: a desire that masks time mediating transcultural exchanges through circu- the diversity, historicity, and potency of individualized lation, decorated artifacts often become extensions of regimes of visuality with their own distinctive orna- selfhood. By bringing the phenomenology and material- mental modes.4 These visual regimes simultaneously ity of objects to the center of art historical inquiry, provided a global sense of unity to the dār al- Islām “thing theory” therefore promises to counterbalance the (abode of Islam) and negotiated its shifting internal “power of images” with the potency of ornamented divisions marked by varying degrees of localism. The objects and built environments, capable of mediating taxonomic drive that has dominated most scholarship subject- object relations and constituting subjectivity.8 on Islamic ornament, with its encyclopedic connois- The essentialization of Islamic ornament through seurial agenda, generally seeks uniformity within vari- formal taxonomies of the timeless arabesque has failed to ety, rather than attempting to account for change, come to terms with transformations in early modern fracture, and discontinuity. Formalist approaches have ornamental aesthetics, characterized by an increasing also overlooked the complex interaction of agencies, dose of naturalism that marginalized former abstract 132 vegetal and geometric designs. This paradigmatic shift detested by sixteenth- century Vitruvian theorists and remained unnoted by the Viennese art historian Alois proponents of the Catholic Counter- Reformation. Natu- Riegl (d. 1905) and his followers who regarded the ara- ralistic floral designs and sensually appealing