DECORATED STYLE. scnted by such buildings as Amiens, Rlieims, Saint Denis, etc., and it is the sane.st and best bahmced English style. Certain characteristics of Xoruian work retained in the Early English style, such as large triforiuni galleries, heavy moldings, broad unbroken wall spaces, are strongly modified in the ell'ort to attain greater lightness and riclier decoration, while others, like the zigzag, are totally abandoned. The single or grouped lancet windows are largely replaced by broader windous with mullions and tracery. Con- sult the bibliography given under the title Eably English. • DECORATION DAY, or Mesioriai. Day. A day ( May 30) set apart each year by the various Morthern States for the purpose of decorating the graves in the national cemeteries and of com- memorating tile soldiers who during the Civil War lost their lives for the Union cause. It is a legal holiday in all the States and Territories of the Union except Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana. Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia. Some of the Soutliern States have also set apart a day for the commemoration of the Confederate soldiers who fell during the war. DECORATIVE ART. Art in general may be defined as Hie interpretation of sentiment through form and color. Poetry and music, which cypress sentiment through sound-forms, painting, which employs color, and sculpture and architecture, which employ plastic forms, are all independent arts, producing works which have intrinsic artistic value apart from their use or environment. The term decorative art is applied to that subordinate phase of artistic design in form and color Avhicli has for its purpose the beautifying of objects primarily useful, by such modifications of their form, surface, or color as shall introduce new elements of harmony, rh;-tlim. lialance, and contrast pleasing to the eye and mind. In each of the independent fine arts these elements of decorative effect, although pres- ent, are incidental to the higher artistic purpose of the work. In decorative art these elements become supreme, although the object into which they are introduced or to which they are applied is itself independently complete without them. A vase, chair, hlank wall, or temple pediment may perform its primary function while still una- dorned by the decorator. Architecture combines the characteristics of both the independent and decorative arts: it is a combination of the use- ful art of construction with the decorative art of ornamental structural design. Painting and sculpture, ordinarily independent arts, may be employed to decorate buildings; and in (iropor- tion as they are subordinated to the structure they adorn, they take their place among the deco- rative rather than the independent arts. Decorative P.vixtixo. The decorative arts may be classified in various ways. The broadest division is that between decorative painting and sculpture applied to buildings on the one hand and what is technically known as ornament on the other. The art of decorative painting has for its object the adornment of certain defined spaces on the walls and ceilings or vaults of buildings by paintings, which serve the double purpose of pictorial representation — allegorical, historical, religious, or other — and of embellishing a surface otherwise bare and uninteresting. In Egypt, 52 DECORATIVE ART. walls and columns, internal and external, were covered with pictures deeply incised by the chisel and richly painted. The Romans covered the walls of their chambers, courts, and banquet rooms with painted decorations in which pictures of mythological beings and of familiar scenes were mingled with landscape and fantastic architecture. (See Po.vipeii.) The Byzantine artists adorned the walls and apses of their churches with highly decorative pictures on a gold ground, executed often in glass mosaic: in these the drawing and coloring, forsaking the pursuit of natural realism, were controlled by purely decorative considerations. The gi-eatest schools of decorative painting were those which grew up in Italy in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the earlier having its chief centre in Florence, with Giotto as its greatest master, the second reaching its highest development in Rome between 1515 and 1500 under Raphael and ilichelangelo, and a little later in Venice, where Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese attained an extraordinary pitch of sensuous splendor of color. But no decorative painter of any age ever equaled the sublimity of conception and grandeur of execution of ilichelangelo's decorations for the vault of the Sistine Cliapel in the Vatican at Rome. In modern decorative painting the French are the leaders: in the United States it is only in recent years that the art has found ojiportu- nity for development. Lack of space forbids en larging further on this phase of decorative art; the inquirer is referred to text-books on painting and to the articles on the great artists in this Encyclopaedia. Decokative ScttPTURE. The work of the sculp- tors has in all ages been considered an essential adjunct to noble architecture. In Egjpt he co- operated with the painter in producing the pic- tures already mentioned and carved the effigies of the King and of the god Osiris against the pylons and piers of the temples. It was, however, the Greeks who lifted decorative sculpture out of the trammels of sacerdotal tradition and ex- alted it into one of the highest and noblest of all forms of expression of religious and national aspirations. The friezes, metopes, and pediment groups of their temples were not merely unequaled as sculpture, but superb as decorations for the archilecture to which they were affixed. In creating them, the sculptor, while he sought to embody the poetic and patriotic ideals of the Greek mythology which inspired him, was at the same time solicitous so to dispose the masses of light and shade, so to combine and arrange every outline and detail of the composition, that Ihey should harmonize with the dominant lines of the architecture and produce that plc:ising effect of harmony, rhythm, balance, and contrast which is the chief source of an enjoyment of all decorative design. The Romans made far less use of decora- tive sculpture than the Greeks, but developed a remarkable system of ornamental car'ing in re- lief, in which symbolic figures, grotesque, and convent iimal foliage were blended in a manner to enrich with a wonderful play of light and shade the friezes, pilasters, and panels to which they were applied. In the ^tiddle .ges the build- ers of abbeys and cathedrals in Europe, especially in France, adorned their buildings with sculpture, both of figures and of symbolic grotesques, every- where pervaded with religions meaning, but mnr- velously adapted to the exigencies of the architec-
