The decorative style of that period is sometimes called the Arabesque,
and sometimes the Grotesque. The fashion was really copied from the
excavated palaces and tombs of the best Roman era. Raphael admired,
and caused his pupils to imitate and copy them; and they influenced
all decorative art for a considerable period. As long as beautiful
forms of flowers, fruit, birds, and animals were adhered to, the
Arabesque was a charming decoration, gay and brilliant; but when the
beautiful was set aside, and the ugly ideas were reproduced, the style
became the Grotesque, which word only means the grotto, cave, or tomb
style, and is as undescriptive to us as the word Arabesque, which has
nothing to do with the Arabs or their arts.

It would appear that if the beautiful only is permissible in
decorative art, and that if without beauty there is no reason that it
should exist at all, then the Grotesque should not be allowed, except
as a scherzo of the pencil; to be relegated, like all other
caricatures, to the portfolio.

A grotesque is something startling, laughable, perhaps ridiculous. A
woman with the head of a goose and a flowery tail may be a symbolical,
but it never can be an agreeable object. When the idea conveyed is a
great one, then it is excusable. The Ninevite bull, with a human head
and five legs, is a grotesque, but it is also a symbol of majesty and
might. A Satyr is a grotesque, but he has been so long recorded and
accepted that he has ceased to surprise us; and the Greeks spent so
much genius in making him a graceful creature, that he has become
picturesque, if not beautiful.

Arabesques and Grotesques have now so long prevailed in decoration,
that we have ceased to criticize them on principle, and accept them
gratefully, in proportion to the gay fancy and reticent genius of the
designer. Most Arabesques are, in fact, only graceful nonsense.

[Illustration: Pl. 9.
Spanish Coverlet, from Goa. Velvet and gold, Plateresque style,
seventeenth century.]

Vitruvius (writing first century B.C.) says, that "in his time, on the
covering of the walls were painted rather monstrosities than images
of known things. Thus, instead of columns you will see reeds with
crisp foliage, and candlesticks supporting temples; and on the top of
these there are rods and twisted ornaments, and in the volutes
senseless little figures sitting there; likewise flowers with figures
growing out of their calyxes. Here a human head