Ornamental Prints/Ornamentstiche/Ornamentální rytiny [antikvár]

Moritz Wullen Foreword The Art Library of the National Museums in Berlin possesses an ornamental prints collection that is unique in Germany. The only comparable collections in the Central European region are located in Vienna and in Prague. While each of these three f ' collections is a treasure in itself, when taken together the combined collection as- j' sumes an international status of enduring significance. The EU project "Ornamental Prints" utilizes this synergy. In a concerted action, the Art Library in Berlin, ^ UPM - Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague and the MAK - Austrian Museum ' of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art in Vienna they have seized the opportunity to , . inspire the public and the art research community with enthusiasm for the fascina- " ' tion of their collections. ^ ; This commitment to the subject of ornament may seem surprising. After all, so far the study of ornament has been more or less a niche discipline within traditional ^ / art history. A possible explanation for this circumstance may be the basic philological character of the field of art history, which tends to favor pictorial information that can be traced back to language-related content. Design formations which emerge, as it were, spontaneously and which - like leaf shapes in nature, for instance - evolve into a variety of differentiated forms on their own momentum from one period to another, do not seem to offer much food for discussion from a philological point of view, and thus have been only of marginal interest up to now. However, precisely this non-literary character appears to be an essential feature of J ornament. Researchers such as Günter Irmscher even speak of an "inherent sys- J tem of logic" in ornament which cannot be grasped by means of conventional S hermeneutic methods. For example, applicable language-related analogies for the | crocket, an element of ornament of the late Gothic era, can only be found in the period in question by the most circuitous methods. It is certainly much easier to discover how a certain way of portraying the Virgin Mary in art derives from mystic literature. But even if the philological properties of art history research offer an explanation for the marginal position of the history of ornament within this field, they far from justify it. In point of fact, this recalcitrant pictorial form called "ornament" has al- i ways taken a lion's share in the visual communication of human beings. It has per- ^ vaded almost everything: architecture, objects used in daily life, fashion, the print ^ media and even the human body, from hairstyles to tattoos. It comprises an almost endless cosmos of design formation, whose laws of development can scarcely be ^ adequately described using the traditional methods of art history. We are far more likely to succeed using analogies from fields of the natural sciences, for instance from morphology, phylogenetics or evolutionary biology A new or at least a different kind of art history is required here