ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the ways architectural and domestic ornament intersected with social, political, religious and intellectual life in sixteenth-century Northern Europe. It examines how the metaphor of ornament was central to contemporary definitions of human personality. The study of ornament has for some time not been at the forefront of art history. Its neglect for much of the twentieth century can be linked to the Modernist movement's celebration of purity of form and its explicit rejection of all forms of applied ornament. Heinrich Vogtherr's manual represents the concept of style as a language of surface ornament and applied decoration. The concept of the ornamented moral personality is vividly borne out in a didactic woodcut of the early 1540s by the Amsterdam artist, Cornelis Anthonisz, entitled The Wise Woman and Wise Man. It presents a very literal visual exposition of the idea of ornatus in order to illustrate the ideal moral economy of the home.
