Questioning the ornament through a morphological approach to the visible
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54103/2039-9251/16938Keywords:
Ornament, morphology, images, economy of visible forms.Abstract
The paper investigates the question of the ornament starting from a parallelism between biological- architectural ornaments and decorative-artistic ones. The element of innovation and the emergency of the ornament allow to consider images as if they were living organisms and to highlight their becoming through new forms. Starting from a morphological point of view, from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to the contemporary morphology, the ornament is strictly connected to the dynamics of forms and to a particular approach to the visible. The ornamental dynamics, according to the binomial form-function, open the dimension of the visible to new perspectives and foreshadow potentially infinite changes. The essay analyzes the consequences in the production of visible forms and in the attribution of meanings, but also the political function of images, with particular reference to the idea of an economy of visible forms.
References
Carboni, M., L’ornamentale tra arte e decorazione, Jaca Book, Milano, 2001.
Focillon, H., Vita delle forme seguito da Elogio della mano (1934), tr. it. di S. Bettini e E. De Angeli, Einaudi, Torino, 2002.
Goethe, J. W. von, Scritti sull’arte e sulla letteratura, ed. it. di S. Zecchi, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino 1992.
Goethe, J. W. von, La metamorfosi delle piante e altri scritti sulla scienza della natura, ed. it. di S. Zecchi, Guanda, Milano 2005.
Gould, S. J., Lewontin, R. C., I pennacchi di San Marco e il paradigma di Pangloss. Critica del programma adattazionista (1979), tr. it. di M. Ferraguti, Einaudi, Torino 2001.
Mondzain, M. J., Immagine, icona, economia. Le origini bizantine dell’immaginario contemporaneo (1996), tr. it. di A. Granata, Jaca Book, Milano 2006.
Mondzain, M. J., Confiscation des mots, des images et du temps. Pour une autre radicalité, Les Liens qui Libèrent, Paris 2019a.
Mondzain, M. J., Le commerce des regards, Points, Paris 2019b.
Vercellone, F., Il futuro dell’immagine, Il Mulino, Bologna 2017.
Vercellone, F., Tedesco, S. (ed. by), Glossary of Morphology, Springer, Cham 2020.
Weizsäcker, V. von, Forma e percezione, ed. it. di V. C. D’Agata e S. Tedesco, Mimesis, Milano 2011.
Sitografia
Mondzain, M. J., Saxifraga politica. Pour proposition, 2005, http://www.formes-vives.org/saxifrage.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
The authors who publish in Itinera are required to accept the following conditions:
1. The authors retain the rights on their paper and lincese the journal the right of first publication. The paper is also licensed under a Creative Commons License, which allows others to share it, by indicating intellectual authorship and its first publication in Itinera.
2. Authors may adhere to other non-exclusive license agreements for the distribution of the published version of the paper (ex. deposit it in an institutional archive or publish it in a monograph), provided that its first publication in Itinera is indicated.
3. Authors can disseminate their paper online (ex. in institutional repositories or on their website) before and during the submission process, since this can lead to productive exchanges and increase quotations of the published work (See “The Effect of Open Access”).