by Bruno Manfredini
With this book, Marco Lazzarato revives the tradition of repertories, widespread until the middle of the last century, that collected ornamental motifs from works of art from all periods, making them available to artists and scholars. The most distinguished example is The Grammar of Ornament, the monumental collection edited by Owen Jones in 1856, in the midst of the Victorian age and on the impetus of the newly born World Expos. At the time, there were two publishing models to conform to; either to anthologize, ordering them chronologically, the ornamental motifs of every time and country (this is the case with Jones’s book), or to privilege the author’s particular point of view, presenting his original inventions in a particular field, from marbles to textiles to wallpapers to typography.
Lazzarato chooses a third way, examining some ninety ornamental motifs with an extremely significant location; the floor of St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. And he pursues an ambitious, long-term didactic, pragmatic and philosophical at the same time. Pragmatic because it minimizes written indications, forcing the reader to look carefully at the images (not photographs but graphic diagrams that highlight the Marcian geometries, making them clearly legible), in order to deduce the ways through which to reproduce them or produce new ones. Philosophical because it becomes immediately clear that deciphering, understanding and making an ornamental motif is not a game or, if it is, it is a very serious game: a profound act of knowledge, going to the very heart of what we call “art.”
Between the lines of Lazzarato’s concise remarks, one senses the ability to use all tools without ever losing sight of the overall process, learning to compose individual problems into an unified vision, supported by an all-encompassing grid, which rationalizes the work. But here the explanations stop, and the author leaves it to the reader to scrutinize, conjecture and understand, becoming progressively autonomous.
Another aspect of the book (most evident in the preface signed by Terenzio Zanini, but also well present in Lazzarato’s text) concerns the deontological aspects of the “good”, harmoniously structured form, which, in today’s design culture, appears too often mortified. Resulting in a loss of identity and competitiveness for all those productive districts that, out of excessive prudence or laziness, prefer not to deal with it. The solution proposed here is that of a cultural and entrepreneurial strategy aimed at re-alphabetizing the system, starting precisely with those who imagine and design the form.
The book: M. Lazzarato, Le geometrie di San Marco. Le strutture compositive del pavimento della basilica, Tab edizioni, Rome 2024, pp. 130, euro 30.
Homepage; detail of floor mosaic with trompe-l'oeil motif, 11th century, Venice, St. Mark's Basilica.
Below; the book cover.
