The Poverty of Ornament
The exhibition’s global scope is commendable, but, in spite of itself, all roads in “Clamor” lead west.
Martin Schongauer, Querfüllung auf hellem Grund (Horizontal Ornament), c. 1470. Engraving on white paper, 2 5/16 x 2 15/16 inches (5.9 x 7.4 cm). Museum purchase in memory of George Campbell Cooper, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution.
The Clamor of Ornament: Exchange, Power, and Joy from the Fifteenth Century to the Present was open at the Drawing Center from June 15 to September 18, 2022.
In Palermo, Sicily, there is a palace chapel, the Cappella Palatina, that presents a remarkable clamor of stylings: Norman architecture, Byzantine saint mosaics, Islamic muqarnas with distinctly secular figuration. To the modern eye, each motif could be isolated and, alone, be cause for fascination. But their meaning lies in their improbable unity. Having conquered the island and its Muslim population in 1091, the Normans commissioned this cut-and-paste chapel in 1140 to contain the contradictions of their conquest and legitimize their upstart presence in the Mediterranean. The ornamentation, nodding to the great empires of the Byzantium to the north and Fatimids to the south and the local descendants of a prior Abbasid conquest, establishes the political diplomatic function of the structure. Ornament, inseparable from architecture and civic life, has a role to play. It is embedded in s…
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