Designs of Desire: Architectural and Ornament Prints and Drawings (1500-1850)

Designs of Desire - Architectural and Ornament Prints and Drawings 1500-1850 is a fascinating survey, which introduces a wide selection of drawings and prints not associated with paintings and frescoes, but with architecture, sculpture, and the applied arts. Explored here is not just the world of elevations and plans for churches, palaces, and gardens, but also designs for temporary decorations for triumphal entries, firework displays, coronations, funerals, and many aspects of pageantry and feasting. Here are drawings for metalwork, textiles, books, ceramics, and glass and, above all ornament designs made expressly as sources for the most sophisticated craftsmen working within these disciplines. This helps to remind us that most artists, until comparatively recent times, were not concerned solely with painting but were commissioned by their patrons to produce designs for a very wide variety of their desires. Artists worked within certain recognisable and identifiable bounds that we now call 'fashion'. The greatest artists explored, developed, and sometimes even invented decorative art forms and styles, and the lesser artists mimicked aspects of their work.
Ornament, which has been with us as long as art, was the stylistic common language between the artists and the artefact. This book makes apparent that the language of ornament is strangely limited, and generations since classical antiquity - or even before, in much more primitive cultures - have tended to explore variations on themes rather than to create entirely new languages. Their designs were often astonishingly beautiful and witty, especially when the artists were real innovators. In addition to the designs for architecture, sculpture and ornament are those for metalwork, ceramics, stained glass, textiles and even utilitarian objects such as table cloths and egg cups. The source material provided here would have been used by craftsmen like goldsmiths, maiolica painters, and embroiderers, to guide them in creating the artefacts. The scope of this book begins with Albrecht Durer and his generation c.1500, and it ends in the mid-nineteenth century.