Exhibition as Decontextualization
above
Tunic Fragment with Geometric Motifs
Egypt
ca. 300–700 CE
Wool
Jefferson University, T&CC 1987.1.27
at right
“Byzantine No. 3,” from Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, Plate XXX (London, 1856)
Paper with ink, leather, cloth, gold-leaf
Bryn Mawr College, NK1510.J73
The British advocate and theorist of design, Owen Jones, published The Grammar of Ornament in 1856. In this famous study, he reproduced images of artistic patterns from around the world and throughout history. The book was intended to help educate artists and the general public, and to inspire good design in nineteenth-century England. Although many of Jones’s designs came from three-dimensional works of art and architecture, they were reproduced in the book as flat images, divorced from their original contexts. The unique properties of the original works were obscured in the process, and their socio-historical significance was ignored in Jones’s study. The Early Byzantine textile on the right includes design elements that echo those in Jones’s illustrations of “Byzantine” works of art. The comparison demonstrates how the three‑dimensional details of an object—like the raised twining and interlace patterns of the textile—were lost.
