400 Traditional Tile Designs in Full Color

Carol Belanger Grafton

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780486319759
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Decorative Arts

During the Victorian and Edwardian eras, elaborately tiled walls and floors were revived as an essential element of interior decor. Now scores of richly decorative tile designs of the period have been reproduced in this permission-free collection, reprinted in beautiful full color from the plates of rare nineteenth and early twentieth century manufacturers' catalogs.
The origins of these designs lie in the decorative-arts traditions of the civilizations of Islam, Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, among others. Through the centuries, designers have produced variations on early prototypes found in Roman and Pompeiian villas, Arab mosques, Moorish palaces, and other historic structures. More than 400 spectacular examples inspired by over 2,000 years of the most imaginative and artistic approaches to tile design are contained in this magnificent collection — one of the largest single-volume sources of decorative tile designs in color.
Artists, designers, interior decorators, and craftspeople will find here a rich source of inspiring and instructive design. General readers interested in the arts will enjoy browsing through this treasury of intriguingly beautiful motifs.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The grand style of public, palatial and ecclesiastical architecture has long entailed the use of decorative floor and wall tiling, which still today strikingly enhances the effects of splendor and permanence integral to the architectural conception.

Decorative tiles were first used in the Middle East some 4000 years ago, and gradually spread throughout the region and to the southern Mediterranean. They seem to have appeared in Europe only early in the current millennium (centuries after the arrival of mosaic), when they reached Spain via the Moors.

The principles of Islamic design have tended to prevail ever since. The motifs are generally abstract (reflecting a religious tradition prohibiting artistic representa...