Medieval Ornament

950 Illustrations

Karl Alexander von Heideloff

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780486285788
• eBook ISBN: 9780486155647
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

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.

Publisher’s Note

Karl (or Carl) Alexander von Heideloff (1789–1865) was principally an architect, although his talents also included painting, sculpture and engraving. As an architect he was chiefly involved, from at least 1816, with the restoration of Romanesque and Gothic buildings in Germany and in the design of new buildings in the Neo-Gothic style that was popular there throughout the nineteenth century. (Since the 1770s the Gothic style had been considered peculiarly, nationalistically German, and the Romantics had celebrated things medieval as a patriotic contrast to the Italian- and French-inspired Baroque, Rococo and Neo-Classical styles that had immediately preceded.) Heideloffs center of operations was Nuremberg, where for some three decades he was curator of municipal art monuments and instructor at the Polytechnic.

Among Heideloff’s numerous publications, the present collection of 200 copperplate engravings (apparently all drawn by him, although engraved by several hands) is outstanding, but rather hard to date (all encyclopedia references we have seen are obviously wrong if the dates engraved on the plates are to be trusted). The source of this Dover edition is a two-volume set titled Carl Heideloff’s Ornamentik des Mittelalters: 200 Kupfertafeln mit erklärendem Text [Carl Heideloffs Ornament of the Middle Ages: 200 Copperplates with Explanatory Text], published in Nuremberg by C. Geiger without a printed date. There is no introductory text, only several pages of descriptions of the plates, which were obviously written by someone other than Heideloff, and which read in several places as though he were already dead (although he died ten years later than the last date engraved on any plate).

From the numbering of the plates (which corresponds to the printed descri...

Table of contents

• DOVER PICTORIAL ARCHIVE SERIES
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Publisher’s Note