IndexStyle

A dictionary of design styles, written from the works themselves.

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Cyberfeminism — Old Boys Network, 100 Anti-Theses of Cyberfeminism, 1997 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0 · © Sollfrank, Cornelia & Old Boys Network ed. 1998. First Cyberfeminist International. Hamburg: obn

Cyberfeminism

サイバーフェミニズム / 1991–2000s / Aesthetic / Digital Art

A movement the Australian collective VNS Matrix claimed for itself in 1991, and which the theorist Sadie Plant named independently in Britain at the same moment. Its manifesto travelled by fax, by mail, as a wheatpaste poster, as a billboard, and as an online post. Against a computer culture that wanted to leave the body behind, it put slime and sex back at the centre.

Heavy sans lines warped over a spherical bulge, each line set at a different size / A two color sheet, black on pale pink, with a white circle punched through the middle / A tiled border of eye like organic forms fringed with radiating hairs / The group's name embedded as one line of the text rather than signed at the bottom

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Chinese Blue-and-White Porcelain — Blue-and-white foliate-rim dish with rocks, flowering plants and melons, Yuan dynasty, 14th century — Wikimedia Commons / CC0

Chinese Blue-and-White Porcelain

青花（中国の染付） / 14th century– / Style / Ceramic Styles

Cobalt blue brushed onto a white porcelain body, sealed under a clear glaze and fired once. Potters at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi established it during the Yuan dynasty by adding kaolin to the clay and improving their firing technology. Because the palette is held to a single colour, every gradation has to come from thin and thick washes and from shapes reserved in white.

One blue on a white porcelain ground, with no second colour anywhere / A dark outline drawn first, then filled with paler washes that grade like ink painting / Motifs reserved in white against a densely painted blue ground / The painting sits under the glaze, so the surface stays smooth and no brushstroke stands proud

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Famille Rose — Famille rose bowl with lotus scroll, Qing dynasty, Qianlong era, 1736-1795 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0

Famille Rose

粉彩（ファミーユ・ローズ） / 1720s– / Style / Ceramic Styles

An overglaze enamelled porcelain style that began in China and is built on an opaque enamel running from pink to purplish rose. The pigment is Purple of Cassius, made from colloidal gold, and it reached China with Jesuit missionaries around 1685. The style peaked under the Yongzheng reign of 1723 to 1735 and afterwards was produced largely for export to Europe.

An opaque enamel from pink to purplish rose carries the strongest colour on the piece / The enamel is opaque, so the white porcelain body does not show through the painted areas / Painted over the glaze, so decorated areas and the plain white reserve catch light differently / The same style turns up on French, German and English wares, where only the brushwork gives the origin away

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Blanc de Chine — Dehua ware white porcelain standing Guanyin, second half of the 17th century — Wikimedia Commons / CC0

Blanc de Chine

ブラン・ド・シーヌ（徳化白磁） / Ming dynasty– / Style / Ceramic Styles

Blanc de Chine is the European name for the white porcelain fired at the Dehua kilns in Fujian. Nothing is painted on it, so the whole effect rests on a milky, faintly bluish glaze and on bodies pressed in piece moulds with details modelled separately and applied by hand. Guanyin figures and libation cups copied from carved rhinoceros horn became its signature pieces.

No painted decoration anywhere, so the surface stays a single white / A thick glaze that shifts from milky to faintly blue, translucent where it thins / Seams where separately modelled hands, fingers or drapery were pressed onto a moulded body / Libation cups with a wide mouth and narrow base, copying a section of carved horn

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Goryeo Celadon — Goryeo celadon incense burner, 12th century — National Museum of Korea; photo: Steve46814 (alternative high-resolution example) — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0

Goryeo Celadon

高麗青磁 / 918–1392 / Style / Ceramic Styles

The main ceramic style of Korea's Goryeo dynasty, built around glazes that range from green to bluish, the finest of which was called bisaek, or jade colour. The clay body carries traces of iron and fires a grayish white, which sets it apart from the pure white porcelain of the same centuries. Because the glaze stays translucent, inlaid decoration cut into the body and filled with white and red slip reads as if held under water.

A translucent glaze running from green to bluish over a grayish white body / Inlaid lines of white and red slip sitting visibly below the glaze surface / Incising, relief carving and openwork used together on one vessel / Small passages of iron or copper pigment painting, dark brown or red, on the green ground

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Buncheong — Buncheong jar with sgraffito peony design, Joseon dynasty, second half of the 15th century — Wikimedia Commons / CC0

Buncheong

粉青沙器 / 14th–16th century / Style / Ceramic Styles

Buncheong is Korean stoneware whose bluish grey body is covered with white slip, and its name shortens a phrase used by the art historian Go Yuseop. The group is sorted by how the slip is applied, through inlay, stamping, sgraffito, incising, iron painting, brushed slip and dipped slip. Because the coating is never even, the marks of the hand stay on the finished pot.

White slip lies over a bluish grey body, and the unevenness of the coating is the pattern / On brushed pieces the bristle tracks run in one direction as a white band / On stamped pieces small chrysanthemums are pressed edge to edge and filled with white slip, leaving rows of white dots / On dipped pieces one hard line marks how deep the pot went into the slip, with grey body showing below it

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Kakiemon — Kakiemon-style enamelled dish, Arita, c. 1675-1725 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Kakiemon

柿右衛門様式 / 17th century– / Style / Ceramic Styles

Porcelain from the Arita district of Hizen, painted with bright enamels laid over the glaze on a fine white body. The name comes from a family of decorators said to have brought overglaze enamelling to Arita in the 1640s. Wide areas of the white body are left bare and the painting is pushed to one side of them.

The enamel sits on top of the glaze, so only the painted areas stand slightly proud and catch the light / Thin red, green and blue lines with gilding, drawing prunus, bamboo, birds and figures / More bare white body than painting, with the centre left open and the motif pushed to an edge / Figures of people and animals as well as vessels, painted in the same enamels and gilding

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Oribe Ware — Oribe square bowl, Mino ware, Edo period, 17th century — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Oribe Ware

織部 / Momoyama period– / Style / Ceramic Styles

A stoneware style fired in the Seto and Mino kilns from the Momoyama period into the early Tokugawa years, centred on utensils for the tea gathering. Surfaces stay rough and the glazes are few, simple and warm in colour. Copper green covers only part of the pot, and the reserved body carries iron brushwork.

Copper green covers only one side of the pot and stops at a visible line / The unglazed reserve carries brushed iron lines and geometric motifs / The surface stays rough and never reaches the smoothness of porcelain / Few colours are in play: the green glaze, the warm grey white body and the brown black of iron

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Raku Ware — Hon'ami Kōetsu, white Raku tea bowl named Fujisan, 17th century — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Raku Ware

楽焼 / 16th century– / Style / Ceramic Styles

Raku is pottery covered with a lead glaze and fired at a very low temperature, with the piece pulled from the kiln while still hot and left to cool in open air. The glaze never fully levels and the body stays soft and porous, so no two pieces from one firing carry the same surface. The Getty vocabulary lists the Japanese process and the wider technique as two separate entries.

Glaze that pools thickly and crawls to a stop short of the rim / A fine crackle across the whole glazed surface, left by the sudden cooling / Bare foot rings and bases where the soft porous body shows through unglazed / Colour variation that lands in a different place and amount on every piece from one firing

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Istoriato — Urbino workshop, footed dish with Abraham and Isaac, 16th century — Wikimedia Commons / CC0

Istoriato

イストリアート / c. 1500– / Style / Ceramic Styles

A way of painting maiolica in which the whole face of a dish becomes one picture, carrying a historical, mythological, Biblical or allegorical scene in colour all the way to the rim. It first appears around 1500 and is associated with Urbino. The vessel stops being a decorated object and turns into a support for painting.

One continuous scene from well to rim, with no decorative band cutting it off / Polychrome painting in yellow, blue, green and brown over a white tin glaze / Figures set inside a receding landscape or architecture, the composition borrowed straight from painting / The scene carrying on across the curved rim, so the image distorts with the vessel's form

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Talavera Poblana — Talavera jar, 18th century, Museo Franz Mayer — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 · © AlejandroLinaresGarcia

Talavera Poblana

タラベラ・ポブラーナ / 16th century– / Style / Ceramic Styles

Talavera is the tin-glazed earthenware that Spanish potters' technique became in and around Puebla, painted over a thick milky white glaze. Local potters borrowed the blue-and-white schemes of Chinese porcelain that crossed the Pacific and passed through the city, then mixed in local figures such as the quetzal and the double-headed eagle. That crossing is what separates it from the Spanish maiolica it started from.

A thick milky white glaze covers the whole piece and pools into a visible step at rim and foot / Compartmented borders painted in a single blue run all the way around the rim / Among Chinese style flowers and rocks sits one local figure, such as a quetzal or a crowned double-headed eagle / Tiles repeat one design across a whole wall, and no two carry the same brush pressure

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Studio Pottery — Hans Coper, spade form vase, 1968 — Wikimedia Commons / CC0

Studio Pottery

スタジオ・ポタリー / 1920s– / Style / Ceramic Styles

Ceramics made by individual artist potters in their own workshops, where one person carries a pot from forming through glazing to firing. It emerged in the early twentieth century as part of a wider revival of crafts and is deliberately non industrial. The Leach Pottery, opened at St Ives in Cornwall in 1920, became its best known centre.

Throwing rings, or the seams of coils and slabs, left visible instead of smoothed away / High temperature glazes: ash, celadon and tenmoku, returning again and again to brown black and grey green / Streaked copper red and purple glazes that ran in the kiln and stayed as unplanned marks on the wall / Incised lines inlaid with coloured slip under a white glaze, with a different glaze at rim and foot alone

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Cloisonné — Cloisonné panel with dragons, Ming dynasty, late 16th–early 17th century, The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Wikimedia Commons / CC0

Cloisonné

七宝（クロワゾネ） / ancient– / Technique / Vessel and Craft Techniques

A technique of enamelling in which thin metal strips are laid on a metal or porcelain ground to form chambers, and vitreous enamel paste is packed into each chamber. The strips survive the firing as visible metal lines, so every area of colour stays closed inside a line. Getty files it under processes rather than styles.

Every area of colour is fenced by a thin metal line, and the lines divide the whole design without a break / No two colours bleed into each other / Only the lines give back the light of metal rather than of glass / The ground is metal or porcelain, so the design wraps a curved vessel instead of sitting on a flat panel

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Kintsugi — Ko-Karatsu tea bowl repaired with kintsugi — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0 · © Jean-Pierre Dalbéra

Kintsugi

金継ぎ / 15th century– / Technique / Vessel and Craft Techniques

Kintsugi is the Japanese craft of repairing broken ceramics with urushi lacquer and gold or silver, so the mend is shown rather than hidden. The Getty vocabulary files it under repairing, as a restorative process rather than a style. The break decides where the metal lines run, so one vessel can never produce the same drawing twice.

Thin gold or silver lines that follow the break exactly / Line width that varies, widening into filled areas where a chip was lost / A trace of dark lacquer showing at the edge of the metal / Metal lines crossing the vessel's original painted decoration without regard for it

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Maki-e — Nakayama Komin, sweetmeat container with insect-cage maki-e decoration, 19th century, Tokyo National Museum — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Maki-e

蒔絵 / Heian period– / Technique / Vessel and Craft Techniques

A family of Japanese decorating techniques in which powdered gold, silver or coloured pigment is sprinkled onto lacquer while it is still damp. The name means sprinkled picture, and by the Heian period these techniques had become the dominant way of decorating Japanese lacquerware. Tone is built from how coarse the powder is and how densely it falls, not from mixing colour.

Gold imagery that appears to sit below the surface of a black lacquer ground / The same gold reading as visible grain where the powder is coarse and as a smooth sheet where it is fine / Motif edges formed by a change in powder density rather than by a drawn outline / Flat passages of gold from applied kirikane foil set among the sprinkled areas

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Mokume-gane — Hamano Masanobu, sword guard (tsuba) with hawk and sparrows, 1836, Walters Art Museum — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Mokume-gane

木目金 / 17th century– / Technique / Vessel and Craft Techniques

Mokume-gane is a Japanese metalworking process that bonds layers of different metals into one billet, then cuts and rolls it so the surface takes on a pattern like wood grain. The figure is a cross section of the stack rather than a decoration laid on top, so filing or polishing cannot remove it. It began as a way of decorating sword fittings.

The stripes close into rings and whorls that read like the end grain of a log / Reddish copper, white silver and darkened layers sit directly against one another / No two pieces from the same workshop carry the same figure, even at the same shape / The stripes do not stop at the edge; they continue through the thickness of the sheet

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Cameo Glass — Cup with Bacchus and Ariadne, Rome, c. 25 BC–AD 25, Getty Villa — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 · © sailko

Cameo Glass

カメオ・グラス / Roman era– / Technique / Vessel and Craft Techniques

Cased glass built from two or more layers in contrasting colours, where the outer layer is carved, cut or engraved away so the design stands out from the ground. Getty classifies it as a material rather than a period style. The image is not painted but left behind, and the thickness left standing is what decides how opaque it reads.

A pale image standing up in relief over a darker ground / Where the cut runs deep the ground colour shows through and the image sinks; only the thickest passages go fully opaque / The ground is one even colour and all the tonal range sits in the image / Edges are steps rather than drawn lines, so raking light throws a shadow off the image itself

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Venetian Glass — Betrothal cup with enamel and gilding, Venice, 1475–1500 — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0 UK · © David Jackson

Venetian Glass

ヴェネツィアン・グラス / 13th century– / Style / Vessel and Craft Techniques

The glass made on Murano in Venice, and the forms that its material dictates. Soda glass is light and highly malleable, so shapes are drawn, twisted and applied while hot rather than cut away when cold. Opaque white lattimo and threaded filigrana run inside the body, while gilding and enamel painting sit on the surface.

Walls stay thin, and stems and handles arrive as drawn out lines / Threads of opaque white glass run through the clear body as nets and stripes / Cut engraving is rare, and the ornament instead sits on the surface as gilding and enamel / Small discs sliced from patterned canes are scattered across the wall

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Biedermeier — Biedermeier sofa, Austria, c. 1815–1825, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Biedermeier

ビーダーマイヤー / 1820s–1850s / Style / Furniture and Interiors

Biedermeier is a satirical label pinned on Central European art and interiors of the 1820s to the 1850s, which then stuck as the name of the style. The Getty vocabulary ties it to middle class taste, to uncomplicated and modest forms, and to emotional depictions of people and nature. The name came from those mocking the taste rather than from anyone who made the work.

Furniture whose outline stays simple, with no carving or inlay laid over it / Plain figured wood facing forward, standing in for ornament / Subjects drawn from people close at hand and from nature, treated with feeling / Modest sizes made for a citizen's room rather than a court hall

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Chippendale — Side chair (one of a pair), Britain, c. 1755, Metropolitan Museum of Art — Wikimedia Commons / CC0

Chippendale

チッペンデール / 1750s–1760s / Style / Furniture and Interiors

English furniture of the 1750s and 1760s, made to the designs of the cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale, whose name then became the name of the style. Getty also records it as the Director Style. The framework stays largely Rococo, and what identifies a piece is openwork and ornamental carving gathered into the chair back and the legs.

Chair backs pierced with openwork rather than left as solid splats, so the wall shows through / Carved ornament gathered along edges and legs, leaving few flat surfaces / Rococo curves carried through the legs and top rail instead of square corners / Ornament cut out of the thickness of the wood, not applied to its face

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Empire Style — Jacob workshop, Joséphine's chair with swan-shaped arms, c. 1804, Château de Malmaison — Wikimedia Commons / CC0

Empire Style

アンピール様式 / 1804–1814 / Style / Furniture and Interiors

Empire is the style of interiors, furniture and dress that spread out of France during and after Napoleon's empire of 1804 to 1814. Large plain veneered surfaces carry gilt metal mounts placed as isolated points rather than as continuous carving. Lions' paws, winged sphinx heads, lotus and round rosettes arrive in symmetrical pairs, which is what makes it read heavier than the neoclassicism before it.

Gilt mounts sit as evenly spaced points on plain mahogany surfaces / Front legs end in a lion's paw below and a winged sphinx head above, which carries the arm / A row of round rosette mounts runs along the lower rail of the back at equal spacing / Chairs come in matched pairs, with seat and wall covered in the same dark silk

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Aesthetic Movement — James McNeill Whistler, The Peacock Room (Harmony in Blue and Gold), 1876–77, Freer Gallery of Art — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0 · © Votpuske

Aesthetic Movement

唯美主義運動 / 1870s–1880s / Style / Furniture and Interiors

A British and American movement of the 1870s and 1880s that ran through painting, furniture, textiles and architecture alike. Following art for art's sake, it put beauty and the independent value of art above didactic purpose, narrative content or weighty subject matter. Ornament therefore says nothing, and every decision is settled on the harmony of the surface.

Sunflowers and lilies recurring in the same form on ceramics, on textiles and in the room itself / A palette pulled toward olive green and yellow, with dark red and cream set against black grounds / Japanese motifs flattened into repeats: circular bamboo, stylised rosettes and trailing leaves over a lozenge patterned ground / Blue and white Chinese porcelain arranged in the room, the vessels themselves treated as part of the decoration

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Craftsman Style — Gustav Stickley (United Crafts), armchair, 1901, Art Institute of Chicago — Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 3.0 · © Sailko

Craftsman Style

クラフツマン様式 / 1870s–1920s / Style / Furniture and Interiors

A style of architecture, interior design and decorative arts that prevailed in the United States from about 1870 to about 1925. It follows the English Arts and Crafts movement in rejecting historical styles for plain simplicity, but its carriers included social reformers, educators and women's organisations as well as architects. It appears most often in modest houses such as bungalows, where materials are treated simply and left visible.

Beams and brackets stay exposed rather than being boxed in / No capitals, scrolls or other parts borrowed from historical styles / It works at the scale of a modest house such as a bungalow, not a mansion / Wood and stone are left unpainted, so surfaces are made of grain and natural colour

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Eastlake — Eastlake-style armchair, Missouri History Museum — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Eastlake

イーストレイク様式 / 19th century– / Style / Furniture and Interiors

Eastlake is the name given to a decorative and architectural style in nineteenth century America, tied to the furniture designs of Charles Locke Eastlake. Its architecture borrows the vocabulary of furniture directly, with columns that resemble table legs, curved brackets, spindles, and knobs of various shapes made of circular perforations.

Columns shaped like thickened table legs / Curved brackets repeating at even intervals under eaves and porch roofs / Lathe-turned spindles filling railings and the head of a porch / Knobs pierced with circular perforations set where members meet

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Editorial policy

IndexStyle is not a list of every term used around design. An independent entry must describe a visual language that can be recognised, reproduced and distinguished from its neighbours. Editorial standard

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