Thursday, June 15, 2017

Design Work - mid-16th century through mid-18th century

Giulio Romano
Design for Salt-cellar
ca. 1524-46
drawing
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
drawing formerly owned by Jonathan Richardson, Senior

Perino del Vaga
Design for Inkstand with Figures of Philosophers
ca. 1540
drawing
Royal Collection, Windsor

Inigo Jones
Design for Temporary Arch
 with Allegorical Figures of Music and War

ca. 1622
drawing
Yale Center for British Art

"The pathological element in the notion of "culture" comes vividly to light in the effect produced on Raphael, the hero of The Wild Ass's Skin, by the enormous stock of merchandise in the four-story antique shop into which he ventures.  "To begin with, the stranger compared . . . three showrooms – crammed with the relics of civilizations and religions, deities, royalties, masterpieces of art, the products of debauchery, reason and unreason – to a mirror of many facets, each one representing a whole world. . . . The young man's senses ended by being numbed at the sight of so many national and individual existences, their authenticity guaranteed by the human pledges which had survived them. . . . For him this ocean of furnishings, inventions, fashions, works of art, and relics made up an endless poem. . . . He clutched at every joy, gasped at every grief, made all the formulas of existence his own, and . . . generously dispersed his life and feelings over the images of that empty, plastic nature. . . . He felt smothered under the debris of fifty vanished centuries, nauseated with this surfeit of human thought, crushed under the weight of luxury and art. . . ."

 text by Honoré de Balzac, as quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin for Harvard University Press, 1999

Domenichino
Design for Vault Fresco at
 Sant'Andrea della Valle, Rome

ca. 1624
drawing
British Museum

Alessandro Algardi
Design for the Catafalque of Ludovico Fachinetti
(side elevation)

1644
drawing
British Museum

Johann Paul Schor
Design for Coach Ornamentation
1650s
drawing
British Museum

"Critical remarks on technical progress show up quite early.  The author of the treatise On Art (Hippocrates?): "I believe that the inclination . . . of intelligence is to discover any one of those things that are still unknown, if indeed it is better to have discovered them than not to have done so at all."  Leonardo da Vinci: "How and why I do not write of my method of going underwater for as long as I can remain there without eating: if I neither publish nor divulge this information, it is because of the wickedness  of men who would avail themselves of it to commit murder at the bottom of the sea  by staving in ships and sinking them with their crews."  Bacon: "In The New Atlantis he entrusts to a specially chosen commission the responsibility for deciding which new inventions will be brought before the public and which kept secret."  "The bombers remind us of what Leonardo da Vinci expected of man in flight: that he was to ascend to the skies 'in order to seek snow on the mountaintops and bring it back to the city to spread on the sweltering streets in summer."  Pierre-Maxime Schuhl, Machinisme et philosophie (Paris, 1938)." 

 passage of quotations by Walter Benjamin from The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin for Harvard University Press, 1999

Antonio Gentile
Design for the base of a Silver Crucifix
for the High Altar at St Peter's, Rome

1670-72
drawing
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Ciro Ferri
Designs for Fresco in Spandrel
before 1689
drawing
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Louis Laguerre
Design for Staircase Wall, Devonshire House
Abduction of Proserpine 
ca. 1704
oil on canvas
Yale Center for British Art

Étienne-Maurice Falconet
Project for a Fountain
ca. 1740-50
drawing
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Jean Mondon
Rocaille design with choinoiserie figure
1736
engraving
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous Italian artist
Theatrical Set-design with Roman Monuments
ca. 1740
drawing
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Rienk Keyert
Design for Wall Decoration
Triumph of Neptune
1751
watercolor, gouache
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

François Boucher
Design for Spandrel Decoration
Fame and Truth applauding Louis XV

1753
drawing
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

"To grasp the significance of nouveauté, it is necessary to go back to novelty in everyday life.  Why does everyone share the newest thing with someone else?  Presumably, in order to triumph over the dead.  This only where there is nothing really new."

 Walter Benjamin, from The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin for Harvard University Press, 1999