ABSTRACT
Art historians of western art have traditionally focused their attention on the centre of pictures, on those narrative elements which are understood to be the sole carriers of meaning. Ornamentation – frames, margins, and in general non-narrative elements – was usually considered to be meaningless from the point of view of iconography. In his The Sense of Order, Ernst gombrich investigated this tradition and explored the psychology of decorative art, attributing the duality in art between verbal and non-semantic elements to the beholder’s perception.1 In recent years, the canonical opposition between narrative as carrier of meaning, and ornamental elements as untouched by it, has been challenged. In a groundbreaking study, Oleg grabar reviewed Ernst gombrich’s earlier discussion on the matter of ornament in art and, taking the art of Islam as a starting point, questioned the wisdom of classifying only representational elements as semantic while understanding all ornamental elements as decorative.2 He argued instead for the ‘performative’ value of ornament, an element that enhances the performance of an object. Others, namely Baschet, Bonne, dale, Osborne, Kupfer and Mitchell, have investigated the tension between ornamentation and narrative in medieval monumental paintings.3
