This lavish archive of exquisite engravings and designs--originally created in the mid-nineteenth century for the professional artist and architect--contains some 200 splendid illustrations, expertly adapted from decorative as well as utilitarian features of medieval cathedrals, churches, tombs, houses, shops, public buildings, and other structures. Encompassing a wide variety of styles, the designs include finely detailed panels, gawking gargoyles, marvelously carved pillars and pedestals, exquisite ironwork patterns, decorative stonework, magnificent stained glass windows, moldings enhanced with intricately woven motifs, and much more. Artists, designers, and craftworkers will find wide use for these versatile, royalty-free illustrations. Students of architecture, art historians, and lovers of ornamental art will delight in the pure beauty of this magnificent collection.

The decorative arts of the Middle Ages — richly ornate, filled with religious and mythic symbolism — were especially remarkable for the complexities of their design and their inspired craftsmanship. This fascinating volume presents nearly 1,000 illustrations of medieval ornament, consisting mostly of architectural elements from German Romanesque and Gothic churches and other buildings. Originally compiled by the German architect, painter, and engraver Karl Alexander von Heldeloff (1788–1865) as a source of study and inspiration for practicing artists and architects, this grand pictorial archive has been exactingly reproduced from a rare original edition, complete with new English translations of the German captions. The book is filled with precisely detailed engravings of doors, windows, decorative stonework, columns, pedestals, and more. It remains a richly varied resource of authentic images of medieval ornament, ideal for students of architecture and the decorative arts and essential for graphic artists and designers in search of royalty-free illustrations.

Selected from 19th-century reprints of medieval manuscripts, 355 full-color illustrations depict a wide range of subjects — from birds, florals, animals, and geometrics to letters of the alphabet embellished with flowers and sinuous vines, mythical beasts, musicians, whimsical figures emerging from flowers, knights in battle, and much more.

Meticulously reproduced motifs from rare 1882 edition, with informative introduction and notes on original plates. Diaper patterns, medallions for ornamental devices, pillars and arch moldings, bands and borders, floral and foliated designs, alphabets, illuminated initials, much more. Royalty-free designs ideal for visual inspiration or immediate practical use. Introduction. Notes.

This is a complete reprinting of one of Beunat's later and more complete catalogs, showing and again making available over 900 individual ornaments and designs. There are many repeatable linear patterns, both horizontal and vertical, for frames, friezes, dividers, furniture decoration, figures and scenes based on mythological and biblical motives, plus many more forms.

The art of the object reached unparalleled heights in the medieval Islamic world, yet the intellectual dimensions of ceramics, metalwares, and other plastic arts in this milieu have not always been acknowledged. Arts of Allusion reveals the object as a crucial site where pre-modern craftsmen of the eastern Mediterranean and Persianate realms engaged in fertile dialogue with poetry, literature, painting, and, perhaps most strikingly, architecture. Lanterns fashioned after miniature shrines, incense burners in the form of domed monuments, earthenware jars articulated with arches and windows, inkwells that allude to tents: through close studies of objects from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, this book reveals that allusions to architecture abound across media in the portable arts of the medieval Islamic world. Arts of Allusion draws upon a broad range of material evidence as well as medieval texts to locate its subjects in a cultural landscape where the material, visual, and verbal realms were intertwined. Moving far beyond the initial identification of architectural types with their miniature counterparts in the plastic arts, Margaret Graves develops a series of new frameworks for exploring the intelligent art of the allusive object. These address materiality, representation, and perception, and examine contemporary literary and poetic paradigms of metaphor, description, and indirect reference as tools for approaching the plastic arts. Arguing for the role of the intellect in the applied arts and for the communicative potential of ornament, Arts of Allusion asserts the reinstatement of craftsmanship into Islamic intellectual history.