KEYWORDS:
Early modern ART
ornament prints
Remediation & Material Translation
Practical knowledge
DIGITAL ART HISTORY
Launching
FALL 2025
Ornament : Design : Translation
An open-access web resource for the study of early modern European ornament prints and the remediation of design
Since 2022, the O:D:T Project has been collecting, cataloging, and annotating early modern ornament print series and their title pages (ca. 1540–ca. 1620).
O:D:T in the Media
Ornament : Design : Translation
Project Resources
O:D:T leverages the power of digital art history to ask new questions of an understudied historical source: ornament prints
Explore the prints
Navigate dozens of series and hundreds of prints, filtering by ornamental motif, artist’s name, and rhetorical devices.
Understand ornament prints as technical texts
Like artisanal treatises, recipe books, and theaters of machines, ornament prints encode practical knowledge.
Students: Ornament motif identifier
Follow the question tree to identify your ornamental motif and its ID tag.
FAQs
What is an ornament print?
Ornament prints include woodcuts, engravings, and etchings of
creative designs for embellishing objects and expressing an artist’s
powers of invention. This new genre of imagery flourished across
Renaissance Europe, and the designs were often inspired by the art and ruins of ancient Greece and Rome.
Who bought ornament prints?
Little is known for certain. They were certainly collected by art lovers and pasted into albums or bound as little booklets. They were also likely purchased by artists to use as models, patterns, and inspiration for their own work.
What is O:D:T trying to accomplish?
The project is trying to assemble a never-before studied corpus of ornament prints and make it widely available for study and use by scholars and artists. Through its image annotation and user interface, O:D:T will make it possible to compare the text and images of ornament print series and link those works to artistic professions who might have found them most useful.
Why is this project important?
O:D:T is helping us understand how ornament prints might have been read and used by a variety of early modern artists, from painters and woodcarvers to embroiders and goldsmiths.
Ornament : Design : Translation 