Summary: In this paradigm shifting study, developed through close textual readings and sensitive analysis of artworks, Clare Lapraik Guest re-evaluates the central role of ornament in pre-modern art and literature. Moving from art and thought in antiquity to the Italian Renaissance, she examines the understandings of ornament arising from the Platonic, Aristotelian and Sophistic traditions, and the tensions which emerged from these varied meanings. The book views the Renaissance as a decisive point in the story of ornament, when its subsequent identification with style and historicism are established. It asserts ornament as a fundamental, not an accessory element in art and presents its restoration to theoretical dignity as essential to historical scholarship and aesthetic reflection

Contents: 1. Kosmos 2. Rhetoric and Illusion ; 3. Cosmic Décor ; 4. Architecture and the City ; 5. Garland and Mosaic in literary Humanism ; 6. Topics and Style ; 7. Ornament and Disegno, Colour and Perspective ; 8. The City recovered, Triumph and Time ; 9. The Emblematic Continuum ; 10. Spolia and Ornamental Design ; 11. The Grottesche Part 1. Fragment to Field ; 12. The Grottesche Part 2. Signs, Topography and the Dream of Painting. (Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, 245)

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