Interior of
the Hagia Sophia under renovation, showing many
features of the grandest Byzantine architecture.
The apse of
the church with cross at Hagia Irene. Nearly all the decorative surfaces
in the church have been lost
St Mark's Basilica in
Venice, where imported Byzantine mosaicists were succeeded by Italians they had
trained
Byzantine
Some of the
most detailed and elaborate acanthus decoration occurs in important buildings
of Byzantine
architecture,
where the leaves are undercut and drilled and spread over a wide surface. Use
of the motif continued in Medieval art, particularly in
sculpture and wood carving and in friezes, though it is
usually stylized and generalized, so that one doubts that the artists connected
it with any plant in particular. After centuries without decorated capitals,
they were revived enthusiastically in Romanesque
architecture,
often using foliage designs, including acanthus. Curling acanthus-type leaves
occur frequently in the borders and ornamented initial letters of illuminated
manuscripts,
and are commonly found in combination with palmettes in woven silk textiles. In the Renaissance classical models
were followed very closely, and the acanthus becomes clearly recognisable again
in large-scale architectural examples. The term is often also found describing
more stylized and abstracted foliage motifs, where the similarity to the actual
species is weak.The relationship between acanthus ornament and the acanthus plant has been the subject of a long-standing controversy. Alois Riegl famously argued in his Stilfragen that acanthus ornament originated as a sculptural version of the palmette, and only later began to resemble Acanthus spinosus.
BYZANTINE ORNAMENT
Selected plates from The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones, 1856:
