CORNICE. - The frame, besides being a decorative complement to an object and particularly to a painting, is also, according to a more strictly aesthetic purpose, an enclosure intended to delimit its field of gravitation in space as well, and to insist upon the figurative reality of the work. In architecture, it is a crowning member of an architectural organism (v. ARCHITECTURAL ORDERS).
The first frames isolating Byzantine icons were mostly of often precious metals, partaking more directly of goldsmithing than of the craft of carving. The use of wooden frames became established in the late Middle Ages, when triptychs, polyptychs, and altarpieces had frames richly carved from the same wood on which the painter then painted his figurations, with profiles varying according to the module and taste of the workshop, the artist, or the patron himself. During the Gothic period the frame adapted to the international style prevailing in architecture and was most ornate, with spires, pinnacles, etc., and almost always gilded. Sometimes the profile was obtained by applying pastiglia to the wood, and cases were not rare (especially in Sienese and Venetian polyptychs) of fully round sculpture included in the small tabernacles and on the little pilasters that framed the painted compartments. The great Spanish retablos carried this use to an extreme, alternating carved compartments with painted ones within the rich frames.
Simpler were the lines of Renaissance frames, mostly with sober decorations featuring motifs of garlands and festoons of flowers and fruit; the use of round frames was also introduced, of which there are famous examples in works by Botticelli and Michelangelo. A type much in use in Venice throughout the sixteenth century was the so-called Sansovinian one, with a decoration of volutes at the top and with caryatids and lateral festoons.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the sumptuousness of the Baroque imposed upon frames too the richest and most complicated profiles, and production was very extensive, especially in Venice, Genoa, and Bologna, whence it then spread to southern Germany, Spain, and France; here an orderly system arranged a succession of forms, linked like other furnishings to the changing taste of the time.
In the last century profiles were brought back to a lesser decorative commitment, thus preparing the modern appearance which, having abolished gold, resorts rather to a simple isolation of the work from its surrounding environment. - See plate XXIII.
Bibliography3 works
Giovanni Carandente