The Airs of Early Modern Ornament Prints

Abstract

The second plate in the 1635 Liure de toutes sortes de feuilles servant a l'orpheurerie (Book of all Kinds of Leaves Suitable for Silver and Goldsmiths' Work) pictures a sturdy man with a hefty bundle of ornamental floral motifs tied to his back (Fig. 1). Bowing slightly under its weight, the figure leans on a rustic stick and holds a large bunch of onions and turnips in his right hand. The man is bespectacled, moustached with extravagant handlebar whiskers and clad in an enormous ruff, a tall hat, and a sumptuous brocaded coat with pantaloons from which the hilt of a sword protrudes. Needless to say, the figure's flashy, swashbuckling attire, and other attributes seem ill suited to the task of bearing a large pack of blossoms and leaves. Odder still, a boy holding a pair of bellows aimed at the man's rear crouches in the shadow of the huge parcel behind him. The bellows, the prints suggest, fan or else discharge the lush bouquet at the man's back. Undeniably quirky, the print is not, however, unique in depicting ornament as the product of airy emanations. This paper will show that a large and diverse number of ornament sheets in fact engaged contemporary ideas about aria in the widest possible sense of the term – including bellows, farts, steam, smoke, bubbles, and fumes – to make specific claims about their creators' inventions and to give expression to what made their works of art unlike other images. Fashions for decorative embellishment may come and go, yet the idea that ornament prints were full of air in one way or another remained remarkably consistent, well into the early nineteenth century.