, its
decorative use as a pattern was Egyptian, and so returned to India.
Both accepted it as their "sunflower."[101]

[Illustration: Pl. 12.
1. Indian Rolling Lotus Pattern.
2, 3. Indian Lotus Patterns.
4, 5. Egyptian Lotus Patterns.
6. Sacred Convolvulus. Indian (seventeenth century).]

[Illustration: Pl. 13.
1, 2. Indian Designs of Assyrian Daisy and Egyptian Lotus.
3. Vitruvian Scroll. Vignola. Architecture.]

Can it be our Aryan descent which induces in us the earnest adoration,
in our art of to-day, of our northern prototype of the sun's emblem? I
fear that we must acknowledge that our aesthetic worship of our
sunflowers is somewhat false and affected. AEstheticism is not art.
Sunflowers, painted or embroidered as decoration, do not "take" if
they are ordered and ranged, and reduced to a pattern like those of
Egypt. They must be naturalistic, and, if possible, remind us of a
disorderly cottage garden; whereas in India they were adapted
from nature on fixed principles, which immediately reduced them to
the conventional.

[Illustration: Sunflower pattern, R. S. A. N.
XIX. Century]

I give an illustration of a Gothic sunflower resembling a transfigured
rose; and another of an ordered naturalistic sunflower pattern, from a
design of the Royal School of Art Needlework. (Plate 14.)

[Illustration: Fig. 9.
Gothic Sunflower. From Christ's College Chapel, Cambridge.]

I have given this account of the patterns founded on the lotus, as we
can almost from this distance of time take a bird's-eye view of its
rise in naturalism, its spread, dispersion, and its crystallization
into conventional forms; also we can trace how the lotus patterns of
Indian art have resulted, when accepted in Europe, in nothing but the
rolling wave, carrying flower forms which no longer represent a lotus;
and how the lotus bud and flower pattern has become in time the
classical "egg and tongue;" which, however, may have resulted also
from a combination of other motives.

Representations of animal forms are sometimes very remarkable in
phases of naturalism. The few remains of Celtic art that have survived
are entirely animal, or very nearly so. In their stone, gold, silver,
and bronze work, and in illuminated MSS., we meet with only animal
forms; never a flower or a leaf.

Besides the Indo-Chinese patterns in Celtic art, which suggest the
Chinese lattice-work (so strongly insisted on by Semper as a