[Illustration:  FIG. 6.]

In the case in point, the study of the first group of artistic forms that have been elaborated by Western art leads to definite results, because the execution of the forms in stone can be followed on monuments that are relatively not very old, that are dated, and of which the remains are still extant.  In order to follow the development, I ask your permission to go back at once to the very oldest of the known forms.  They come down to us from the golden era of Greek decorative art—­from the fourth or fifth century B.C.—­when the older simple styles of architecture were supplanted by styles characterized by a greater richness of structure and more developed ornament.  A number of flowers from capitals in Priene, Miletus, Eleusis, Athens (monument of Lysicrates), and Pergamon; also flowers from the calathos of a Greek caryatid in the Villa Albani near Rome, upon many Greek sepulchral wreaths, upon the magnificent gold helmet of a Grecian warrior (in the Museum of St. Petersburg)—­these show us the simplest type of the pattern in question, a folded leaf, that has been bulged out, inclosing a knob or a little blossom (see Figs. 3 and 4).  This is an example from the Temple of Apollo at Miletus, one that was constructed about ten years ago, for educational purposes.  Here is the specimen of the flower of the monument to Lysicrates at Athens, of which the central part consists of a small flower or fruits (Figs. 5 and 6).

[Illustration:  FIG. 7.]

The form passes over into Roman art.  The larger scale of the buildings, and the pretensions to a greater richness in details, lead to a further splitting up of the leaf into acanthus-like forms.  Instead of a fruit-form a fir-cone appears, or a pine-apple or other fruit in an almost naturalistic form.

In a still larger scale we have the club-shaped knob developing into a plant-stem branching off something after the fashion of a candelabrum, and the lower part of the leaf, where it is folded together in a somewhat bell-shaped fashion, becomes in the true sense of the word a campanulum, out of which an absolute vessel-shaped form, as e.g. is to be seen in the frieze of the Basilica Ulpia in Rome, becomes developed.

[Illustration:  FIG. 8.]

Such remains of pictorial representation as are still extant present us with an equally perfect series of developments.  The splendid Graeco-Italian vessels, the richly ornamented Apulian vases, show flowers in the spirals of the ornaments, and even in the foreground of the pictorial representations, which correspond exactly to the above mentioned Greek relief representations. [The lecturer sent round, among other illustrations, a small photograph of a celebrated vase in Naples (representing the funeral rites of Patroclus), in which the flower in question appears in the foreground, and is perhaps also employed as ornament.] (Figs. 7 and 8.)

The Pompeian paintings and mosaics, and the Roman paintings, of which unfortunately very few specimens have come down to us, show that the further developments of this form were most manifold, and indeed they form in conjunction with the Roman achievements in plastic art the highest point that this form reached in its development, a point that the Renaissance, which followed hard upon it, did not get beyond.