strapwork

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strapwork. Common Northern-European C16 and C17 ornament in the form of narrow bands or fillets, folded, crossed, cut, and interlaced, resembling narrow leather-straps or thongs. It occurred in an early guise in Mudejar decoration in C15 Spain, but evolved in its most usual forms in early C16 decorations in Tudor England and, especially, at Fontainebleau, France (1533–5). Strapwork became common in Flanders, where complex Mannerist designs were developed, later published by Dietterlin, Floris, de Vries, and in sundry pattern-books, and was much used in English Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture, especially on funerary monuments in churches. It was often decorated with jewels, lozenges, and roundels.

Bibliography

Ward-Jackson (1967)