CFP: Dynamics of Ornament: Forms, Structures, Variations

Dynamics of Ornament: Forms, Structures, Variations
Edited by Elisa Bacchi, Antonio Branca, and Amalia Salvestrini

Call for Papers (Journal: Aesthetica Preprint 2027)

Since its earliest rhetorical conceptualization, the history of ornament has followed different paths, intertwining other fields of knowledge and art forms. It has appeared alternately as a dangerous illusion and as a mirror of truth. As a foundational issue that both opposes and entangles rhetoric and philosophy, ornament already assumes an ambiguous status in Plato. It is condemned as a device through which sophistic rhetoric conceals truth beneath an empty formalism of figures and sounds; yet it is also kósmos ‒ a term, as Semper noted, which in Greek means both "cosmos" and "ornament" ‒ included in the construction of the universe in the Timaeus, where the fifth solid appears not only to adorn and embellish but also to order the whole.

Ornament constitutes an essential polarity that this monographic issue aims to re-examine by testing a specific hypothesis:  the structural ambiguity of ornament allows it to be regarded both as adornment and as ordering principle ‒ structure and variation, as Giovanni Piana emphasized ‒ questioning and dynamizing any conceptual framework. It destabilizes static (not to say “dogmatic”) theories and outlines a form of sensitive thinking open to circumstance and kairos, which ‒ precisely because it does not renounce its ordering function ‒ must also retain foundational aspirations.

Ornament thus interests us because of its dynamic relationality, whereby ornamentation establishes an accidental yet constitutively appropriate relationship with what it adorns. In rhetorical discourse, from Cicero to Leon Battista Alberti, ornatus appears as a seemly ancillary element, which ‒ by contributing to persuasion and emotional resonance ‒ proves to be essential to the possibility of thinking the whole.

Whether in rhetoric, music, or the visual arts, ornament ripples, folds, and modulates both truth and its appearance, allowing for the establishing of forms and relationships. This is the case, for instance, with skiagraphía, that purely illusory technique of shadow projection Plato would have seen practiced in the workshops of painters commissioned to decorate objects in perspective. It is also true of Pliny’s account of drawing the outline of a shadow, which he identifies as the origin of painting itself.

In all these instances, ornament ‒ and the persistent effort to theoretically limit it ‒ raises issues because it addresses the senses. It shed light on the dynamic aspect of a corporeality that is both constituted and constituting, and fundamentally linked to the accidental development of the biological dimension. According to Alberti, ornament is the flower into which Narcissus transforms, disclosing the sensitive principle of the metamorphosis of forms.

Thus, rhetorical ornament becomes the fluttering garments, flying hair, drapes of fifteenth-century painting ‒ the starting point of Aby Warburg’s revolutionary critique of nineteenth-century art history. Warburg extricated art history from mere aesthetic contemplation and reconceived form as a dynamic process, pulsing with nonlinear temporality: appearances, latencies, reappearances, survivals. From this perspective, the flower results from a subterranean generative process, tied to the tangle of roots ‒ an unfolding in which structure exists only through the superabundance of germination.

According to this perspective, ornament can neither be reduced to a conception that regards it as mere embellishment ‒ a superfluous addition that obscures meaning and obstructs access to truth ‒ nor understood as an indispensable component of a once-and-for-all fixed structure in static relations, nor as mere functionality, where form always serves a specific purpose. Ornament resists both mechanized artifice and any notion that would define it as the sign of an externally imposed natural law (natura naturata); instead, it follows the generative unfolding of natura naturans, of morphogenesis as relational process.

This morphogenesis ultimately constitutes the pivotal concern of this issue, which aims to interrogate ornament through a wide range of perspectives.

With this aim in mind, we welcome contributions that focus primarily ‒ but not exclusively ‒ on the following areas:

1. The problem of ornament between rhetoric, philosophy, and visual arts, with particular attention to its Platonic origins, its development in the classical rhetorical tradition ‒ reworked by figures such as Augustine, William of Conches, and Bonaventure ‒ its modern redefinition in the work of Leon Battista Alberti, and its reassessment and critique in the thought of authors like Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch.
2. The function of ornament in music, addressing questions such as: How do the dynamics of ornament operate between the measurable, codifiable complex of rhythm and pitch we call "melody" and the "secondary" qualities of sound that define its dynamic variations and tone colour? How does the relationship between musical notation and performance practice evolve from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century? And how is it rethought and reconfigured in contemporary contexts?
3. Theories of ornament between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special focus on the time frame moving from Semper, Riegl, and Wölfflin to Warburg, and on its critical reappraisal in the writings of Sullivan, Root, and Loos.
4. The survival of ornament’s morphogenetic and dynamic function in the “postmodern” era and its forms of expression: What expressive and conceptual possibilities does ornament offer today? How does it inscribe itself in the contemporary redefinition of the relationship between art and nature?

Abstracts and full papers must be submitted to the following addresses:

[email protected]

[email protected]

[email protected]

Deadlines
Abstract submission deadline: 15 November 2025
(decisions on abstract will be communicated by: 30 November 2025)
Full paper submission deadline: 30 November 2026
Accepted languages: English, German, French, Italian.
Abstract length for proposal submission: max. 2,000 characters (including spaces)
Full paper length: max. 40,000 characters (including spaces and bibliography)

The final paper must include a short abstract in English and five keywords also in English.
Please prepare your submission for double-blind peer review.