This document is a CD-ROM containing information about Hellenic ornamental motifs. It includes sections on Cycladic, Minoan, Mycenaean, Geometric, Classical, Hellenic, Byzantine, and Folk art motifs. It provides illustrations and descriptions of motifs from each period and culture. It was produced by the Hellenic Organization of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises and Handicrafts (HOSMEH) with funding from the European Commission.
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Foreword
“Tradition is not stagnant, immobile, compartmentalised and
repetitive. Still less is it a compulsory repertoire of forms and methods
which have established themselves over time.
”Tradition is a perpetual process of evolution achieved either with
the reshaping of existing forms or with the introduction of new ones.
The new elements do not remain interpolations which stand out
forever as foreign bodies. Little by little, they are worked on,
assimilated, adapted, and undergo basic change.
”The Hellenic tradition is like a sea into which flows the fresh water
of thousands of rivers but which never itself becomes less salty.”
Kitsos Makris,
The Hellenic Artistic Tradition and Modern Handicrafts, 1981
These are characteristic Hellenic decorative themes taken from
ceramics, wall-paintings, woven goods, jewellery, commemorative
plaques, priestly vestments and ecclesiastical vessels, embroideries,
wood-carvings and paintings. They are collective, successive
creations, unique replies in space and time to the global and eternal
demand for use and beauty to be blended. Each item has its own
emotional charge, its own content of meaning.
They were presented to the public for the first time in 1961, by
what was then the Hellenic National Handicrafts Organization, in a
book entitled Hellenic Ornamental Motifs. The book was reprinted in
1972 and 1983.
Now they are being issued again in electronic form because today,
perhaps more than at any other time, it is essential that we build
the future knowing, and utilising, all the things which the sanctified
toil of past generations has handed down to us.
H.O.S.M.E.H. 1999
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