The large and varied corpus of works that fall under the rubric of “ornament prints”, “Ornamentstiche” or “Ornamentale Vorlageblätter” have been variously catalogued and recorded since the early nineteenth century. These important studies give us a general overview of when and where the prints were made, the artists who made them and their probable functions. Many critical questions remain, however, not least the fundamental problem of what constitutes the genre itself. Rudolf Berliner’s notion of the ornament print as a template, for example, has proven to be overly one-dimensional and not representative of historic practice. Is it possible to define or formulate specific parameters for the genre as a whole? This session invites papers that take a wide view on the theme of non-architectural ornament prints from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. Questions and topics to be considered could include:

• what is an ornament print?
• the origins of the genre
• the imagery of ornament prints
• the relationship of ornament prints to the other arts
• the creators of ornament prints, e.g. the goldsmith-printmaker
• the purpose and utility (or lack thereof) of ornament prints
• early collectors of ornament prints
• copying versus ownership of design