There is a peculiar cruelty in the modern commandment to simplify. Strip away the ornament, we are told. White space is virtue, decoration is sin. I spent last winter in the Pre-Raphaelite galleries, standing before paintings where every copper curl carries the weight of a sonnet stanza, and came away convinced this orthodoxy is spiritually impoverished. These painters knew what we have aggressively forgotten — that meaning lives in the details.
Every Curl a Sonnet Stanza
Consider how the Pre-Raphaelites treated a single strand of hair. Each copper curl was painted individually — not as decoration but as devotion. The designer who strips surfaces to bare elements believes meaning survives such extraction. It does not. When we eliminate ornament, we destroy the vessel through which meaning travels to the waiting eye.