In visual art, horror vacui (literally: fear of empty spaces, also known as cenophobia) is the filling of the entire surface of an artwork with detail.
The term is associated with the Italian critic and scholar Mario Praz, who used it to describe the suffocating atmosphere and clutter of interior design in the Victorian age. Older, and more artistically successful examples can be seen on Migration period art objects like the carpet pages of Insul...
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In visual art, horror vacui (literally: fear of empty spaces, also known as cenophobia) is the filling of the entire surface of an artwork with detail.
The term is associated with the Italian critic and scholar Mario Praz, who used it to describe the suffocating atmosphere and clutter of interior design in the Victorian age. Older, and more artistically successful examples can be seen on Migration period art objects like the carpet pages of Insular illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells. Moving east, this feeling of meticulously filling empty spaces permeates Arabesque Islamic art from ancient times to the present. Another example comes from ancient Greece during the Geometric Age (1100 - 900 BCE), when horror vacui was considered a stylistic element of all art. The mature work of the French Renaissance engraver Jean Duvet consistently exhibits horror vacui.
Many examples of horror vacui in art come from, or are influenced by, the mentally unstable and inmates of...
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