Flowers and plants for designers and schools / photographed from nature by Henry Irving, with text and notes by Edward F. Strange.

  • Strange, Edward Fairbrother, 1862-1929.
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Flowers and plants for designers and schools / photographed from nature by Henry Irving, with text and notes by Edward F. Strange. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    subordination to more important matter. A modern instance of symbolical architectural ornament is to be seen in the Lady Chapel of the Benedictine Monastery at Downside, near Bath ; which is finely and poetically adorned with carvings based on the many old English flowers with which the name of Our Lady was once associated. About the middle of the fifteenth century we find a large increase of the use of fruit and flowers, treated with some realism, in Illuminated Manuscripts, chiefly in those of France and the Low Countries, but also, to a less extent, in Germany. This practice is not, as one might suppose, by any means restricted to the borders or marginal ornaments of romances; but appears in those of the Books of Hours and other works of private devotion, which are characteristic of the period, as well as in the larger and more sumptuous missals of the time. The strawberry—both flower and fruit—is an especial favourite. Pinks, roses, forget- me-nots, columbines, irises, daisies, pansies and lilies, also, are intermingled with great profusion, with purely conventional foliage and stems. They are drawn simply, biit not without skill both in delineation and in outline, and with a good deal of truth of colour. This simplicity of treatment, and the admixture of the conventional element in the best examples, overpowers the realization, and so avoids any resulting incongruity. But towards the end of the fifteenth and in the beginning of the six- teenth century—especially in Flanders, the naturalistic tendency gets more and more the upper hand. Butterflies and other insects and birds are introduced; and the borders become less an ornament to a page of fine writing than a series of disassociated little pictures ; which, in the end, draw to themselves far too much of that attention of the beholder, which is more properly due to the page as a whole and particularly to the contents of it. The result is bad art—a loss of dignity—a failure of design : the inevitable outcome of giving a preponderance too great to one factor in the scheme at the expense of the rest. During the later Middle Ages, design as applied to textile fabrics reached a height which has never been surpassed for