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June 2006

Vol. 148 | No. 1239

Decorative arts and design

Editorial

What a performance

Free review

Ornament as system: Chinese bird-and-flower design

By Jessica Rawson

The Eurasian land mass is home to two of the most enduring complexes of ornament the world has seen: the Classical European and the Chinese. In both Europe and the Far East, the visual motifs employed and the rules governing their organisation yielded easily recognisable coherent systems. Durable and also highly flexible, these encompassed the embellishment of dress, artefacts and buildings.They embraced a huge variety of patterns in two and three dimensions as well as representational images embedded within larger ornamental programmes.

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  • Fig1 View of Nostell Priory

    Ornament as system: Chinese bird-and-flower design

    By Jessica Rawson
  • Rediscovering a sixteenth-century Burgundian cabinet at the J. Paul Getty Museum

    By Arlen Heginbotham,Jack Hinton
  • An unknown cameo of James I and the Order of the Garter

    By Jørgen Hein
  • The contract for King Philip II’s tapestries of the ‘History of Noah’

    By Iain Buchanan
  • John Hayes (1929-2005)

    By Hugh Belsey