Charles Darwin y la evolución de las especies ornamentales en la Alhambra de Owen Jones

Abstract

Three years before Darwin published his famous work on the Origin of the Species, Owen Jones published The Grammar of Ornament (1856). In this book –which was a reference handbook for the School of Design–, Jones stablished 37 laws that ruled over form and color in the «true beautiful» ornament, and he did so by applying a methodology similar to the one Natural Sciences were using at that moment. Jones searched for those principles which are present in every style of the History of the Ornament and he explained through them the metamorphoses of the decorative patterns. This paper finds that there are connections between the way Darwin explains the sequences of the evolution of the species and the way Jones describes the evolution of form in the ornament patterns.