ok-arts

Belluschi, Pietro

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Belluschi, Pietro (1899-1994), Italian-born American architect, whose innovative work established a northwestern regional style. His planned community (1942) at McLaughlin, Washington, included the first modern shopping center, and his Equitable Savings and Loan Association Building (1948) in Portland, Oreg., was the first postwar curtain-wall skyscraper.

(August 18, 1899 - February 14, 1994) was an architect, a leader of the Modern Architecture movement, and responsible for the design of over one thousand buildings. He was a principal at the Portland, Oregon office of the Chicago architecture firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill.

His designs include:

the Bank of America Center in San Francisco,
the Juilliard School within the Lincoln Center,
the Equitable Building in Portland, Oregon, a building in the International style which was the first sheathed in aluminum and first with a completely sealed air-conditioned environment,
the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption in San Francisco, California (collaborating with Pier Luigi Nervi),
the Pan Am Building in New York City (with Walter Gropius),
the campus of the Portsmouth Abbey School, and
the Portland Art Museum.

He also served as dean of the M.I.T. School of Architecture. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects in 1972.

Folk Art

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Folk Art, carvings, paintings, needlework, decorated utensils, and other artifacts created by artists and artisans—often anonymous—who have no formal academic training in the arts. Folk art has existed in every culture, past and present. Of necessity, this article is restricted to folk art in North America produced by colonists and émigrés from Europe and Africa and by native Americans working in European styles. For the folk art of other cultures, see African Art and Architecture; Native Americans: Crafts and the Arts; Furniture; Glass; Inuit; Lace; Log Cabin; Mask; Needlework; Oceanian Art and Architecture; Pottery; Quilting; Silhouette; Stencil; Tattooing; Wood Carving.

Carved Native American Figure This figure of a Native American trapper was carved from a single pine log (about 1850-1890). The figure is not that of the typical “cigar store Indian.” The unknown artist chose to dress his trapper in the buckskin pants, suspenders, shirt, and hat commonly worn by white trappers and frontiersmen. The decorative wooden pieces attached to the figure’s legs and arms were originally plugs for bottles and jugs.Smithsonian American Art Museum/Art Resource, NY

The Western world has long distinguished between the highly structured teachings of the academies that produce the fine arts and the orally transmitted traditional arts, created by and for the artistically less sophisticated. In the conservative view held by many folklorists, for a work to qualify as folk art it must be part of a long-standing tradition, must be learned from an active practitioner, and its genre, style, and technique should be those of an isolated culture, such as that of the Amish or whalers.

In fine art the idiosyncratic is admired, whereas anonymity of style is characteristic of folk art...

In the United States and Canada the concept of folk art is far less restrictive. In the normal usage of museums, dealers, collectors, and the general public the key word is nonacademic—art that has developed outside, but not necessarily uninfluenced by, the arts taught in art schools. In fine art the idiosyncratic generally is admired, whereas anonymity of style is characteristic of folk art, in that it expresses an aesthetic for a specific group that includes the artist and the artist’s immediate audience.

Included in this broader concept current in America are such products as were created by teams of workers: circus-wagon carvings, carousel figures, and manufactured weather vanes. Paintings by artists of little or no training are included; many of the paintings in collections of folk art, however, are by artists with an awareness of academic mannerisms either through prints, an occasional viewing of an academic painting, or chapbooks (small books or pamphlets) on painting, such as those written by Rufus Porter (see below). Also included in the broader concept are the works that were produced by young people in seminaries and academies, such as memorials, needlework pictures, and calligraphic pictures.

An inclusive definition, then, of what is generally understood to be folk art in North America includes both traditional folk arts handed down from one individual to another—such as frakturs (illuminated writings), quilts, and scrimshaw—and other nonacademic objects that might be called associative folk arts. Such nonacademic objects have been included, for all practical purposes, in the literature and in the exhibitions of folk art for more than half a century. Often in this latter group are portraits sometimes designated as provincial, naive, or vernacular.

Another distinction is that between folk art and craft. If the utility of a work predominates, then it is a craft object; if decoration predominates, then it is an example of folk art.

II CANADIAN FOLK ART

In general, the same types of folk art are found on either side of the Canadian-U.S. border. There are differences, however, in style and emphasis that are derived from the differences in historical development.

A French-Canadian Folk Art

Obviously, the oldest traditions are in Québec and other French communities. As early as 1670, under the sponsorship of Bishop François de Laval, a school was founded near Québec where carving, painting, and other crafts were taught to the sons of the habitants (French settlers). Although its primary purpose was to provide art for the churches, it seems to have nurtured a carving tradition that survives to this day.

The predominant theme in Canadian folk carving is religious, especially the crucifix intended for the family shrine, but there is a considerable body of minisculpture, predominantly of birds and animals. The carving of animals may well have derived from the animals made for the crèches that were popular both inside and outside the homes. One ubiquitous figure is, of course, the beaver, symbol of Canada, which appears as a decorative element on a wide variety of objects and as a subject of carving in life-size. Carvings, usually of pine, were often painted in bright colors, reflecting the exuberant use of color inside and outside the French-Canadian home. In contrast, the figures on the crucifixes were often painted with a white finish similar to enamel.

... wide woven belts that young Native American women were taught to weave by Ursuline nuns.

The weather vane is still seen on country churches and barns. Most often it is in the form of a cock, either of wood or tin, but made in the round rather than in flat profile. Three other forms of folk art are common and characteristically French-Canadian: the small carved wooden pipes that go back to the days of the voyageurs; the carved molds for maple sugar, with such designs as maple leaves, snowshoes, and abstractions; and the handsome flèches—wide woven belts, colored by natural dyes, that young Native American women were taught to weave by Ursuline nuns. The overall spirit of French-Canadian folk art is colorful, happy, and, at the same time, devout.

B Anglo-Canadian Folk Art

The English tradition in the Maritime provinces is strong in the decoration of utilitarian objects, in graining, marbling, and incising, and in ship carvings (both figureheads and stern-board decorations). The emigration to Canada of many New Englanders during and after the American Revolution led to interesting similarities between eastern Canadian and New England arts, not only in ship carving but also in quilt patterns, hooked rugs, and full-scale sculptures. Such sculptures have been an especially strong tradition in Nova Scotia, continuing to the present time. The Anglo-Canadian Atlantic seaboard also seems to have produced a livelier painting tradition—mostly seascapes and ship portraits—than did French Québec.

C Swiss and German Folk Art

Ontario received many Empire Loyalists at the time of the Revolution, and they were soon followed by Swiss and German immigrants, mostly members of Amish, Mennonite, and other austere sects. Some came from Pennsylvania, but others came directly from Europe. In either case, they kept their own carefully circumscribed cultures intact, continuing and developing the colorful creation of frakturs of all types—birth and wedding certificates, religious texts, and merit awards—which were hardly known to the outside world until recently. They also kept alive a vigorous needlework tradition, including quilting and crocheting.

D Other European Folk Art

Like the western U.S., the Prairie provinces of Canada were settled late. They attracted not only Anglo-Canadians but also a wide variety of peoples from central and eastern Europe: Russian Doukhobors in Saskatchewan and Ukrainians throughout the Prairie provinces. Among these 20th-century pioneers a sprightly painting tradition developed, some of it depicting memories of earlier times in Europe, but far more often depicting the vast prairies and pioneer life. These paintings, naive and explicit, have a direct and sometimes powerful impact.

Derived from many ethnic groups and extending over three centuries, Canadian folk art is varied and handsome. The collection and exhibition of folk art has only recently come into its own in Canada, and it is likely that much Canadian folk art remains to be discovered.

III U.S. FOLK ART

Folk art created by settlers in the U.S. distinctly reflects the cultures of at least eight European countries—England, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Moravia, Norway, Sweden, and Spain—and of many nations on the African continent (see American Art and Architecture).

A English Influences

Painted Wood Figurehead This is a painted wood figurehead from early 19th-century England and was probably used on a military vessel. This piece and others like it had an influence on the figureheads made in the United States, although this one is much more elaborate than its American counterparts.

Although the history of English and Scottish folklore collecting dates from Samuel Pepys in the 17th century, and folklore was vigorously collected throughout the 19th century, almost no attention was paid to British folk art until recently. As a result, few collections of folk art are available in Great Britain with which to make comparisons to American colonial folk art. Such items as trade signs—both two-dimensional paintings and polychromed carvings—were a commonplace in Great Britain in the 17th century and were well established in the American colonies by the 18th century. The English tobacco-shop “black boys” are known to have influenced the early tobacco trade signs in America. Figureheads were a commonplace in Europe, but the predominance of British shipping in American ports unquestionably influenced U.S. wood sculptors who made stern-board carvings and figureheads. By the 19th century, American and British ship carvings were sometimes indistinguishable except for the figureheads depicting national heroes, and the American tendency toward greater simplicity.

... the women’s carved wooden busks (corset stays) were the undoubted precursors of...

British sources are easily recognizable in household folk art. Stenciling and an occasional fully painted wall were known in rural England, and the women’s carved wooden busks (corset stays) were the undoubted precursors of American scrimshaw busks of the great days of whaling. Carved buttermolds and some carving on other household utensils were part of the British tradition, but such carvings were better known on the Continent. British women coming to America brought needlework techniques that influenced their quilting, knitting, and crewel work. The rash of memorial pieces, both in needlework and watercolor, that sprang up after the death of George Washington in 1799 utilized motifs—the urn, the weeping willow, the church, and the mourning family—that had already been popular in Great Britain for some time. From the evidence currently available, the British seem not to have had a strong folk tradition of either portrait or genre painting; their influence was primarily in woodcarving and needlecrafts.

B Dutch Influences

The Dutch in the upper Hudson Valley brought with them the enthusiasm for painting that had made 17th-century Dutch art one of the cultural achievements of the age.

In the first half of the 18th century merchant families happily patronized provincial painters of Dutch and English origin for portraits. The names of the 150 or so sitters for these portraits have been known for many years, but the names of the artists are only just now beginning to surface: They include John Heaton, Nehemiah Partridge, and Pieter Vanderlyn, among others as yet unidentified. In many cases the poses and the decorative elements are borrowed directly from English mezzotints of the works of court painters of the previous century. The result, however, is anything but courtly: The portraits have a blunt directness about the faces, a joy in bright colors, a woodenness of the figures that mark them as the work of painters operating outside the fine-arts tradition.

Presumably, some of these same painters turned out the religious paintings, based on woodcuts in Dutch family Bibles, that were noted by several 18th-century visitors to the Albany region. Today, 38 such paintings have come to light, and for about half of these, the source is known.

The contribution of the Dutch to American folk art lay primarily in their enthusiasm for painting and their encouragement of colonial artists.

C “Pennsylvania Dutch” Influences

Pennsylvania Dutch Watercolor This Pennsylvania Dutch watercolor was painted about 1800 by an anonymous artist. It was probably intended to be a fraktur, or a reward-of-merit card given to students to commend academic merit or good behavior. The bird was most likely based on real birds that the artist saw every day.Scala/Art Resource, NY

The “Pennsylvania Dutch” were actually Germans, Swiss, Hollanders, and Moravians of German stock. Although many were members of pietistic sects—Amish, Mennonites, Dunkers—others were orthodox Lutherans. Industrious and pious, they secluded themselves (the pietists in particular) from external social and political affairs, followed their traditional ways, and maintained and nourished the folk arts they brought from Europe. Perhaps more than any other immigrant group they fulfilled the folklorists’ vision of an isolated people maintaining their own folkways against all inducements to do otherwise.

The common denominator among most of the Pennsylvania Dutch folk arts is a strong delight in color. Their fraktur manuscripts were painted in bright greens, yellows, oranges, Prussian blues, and reds. The same colors dominated their quilts, pottery, toleware, barn signs, and painted chests; even their delicious traditional foods were brightly colorful. Only their graceful metalwork lacked color—a deficit amply compensated for by strength of design.

Throughout these arts is woven a body of visual symbolism derived from the Bible, hymns, and sermons: the Tree of Life, the phoenix to symbolize death and resurrection, the self-sacrificing pelican (representing Christ), the tulip, the unicorn, hearts, parrots, peacocks, and symbols representing the sun. Typically associated with frakturs, many of these motifs also appear on quilts, on marriage chests, and in the carvings on domestic implements, creating a lively sense of image and color. The European art of wood carving flourished not only among the 18th-century Pennsylvania settlers and their descendants, but also among the immigrants of the following century. Among the latter were two carvers who came to be widely appreciated long after they were dead: Wilhelm Schimmel, admired for his whittled eagles, and John Scholl, a house carpenter, whose freestanding colorful celebrations are unique in the U.S.

D Norwegian and Swedish Influences

Despite the vigorous folk-art traditions in Scandinavia, the overall impact on American folk art of immigrants from northern Europe was relatively slight. Only recently have institutions such as the Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum in Decorah, Iowa, and the Bishop Hill State Historic Site at Bishop Hill, Illinois, offered insight into these transplanted cultures. Each has added the name of one master to the list of American folk artists.

Lars Christenson arrived from Norway as a pioneer settler in Swift County, Minnesota, cleared his own land, built his own homes, served as a government employee, and helped to found the local Lutheran church. Like so many of his compatriots, however, his greatest satisfaction came from carving. He carved boxes and furniture for his own house, but in 1897 he began work on an intricately carved altarpiece (Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum), 365.7 cm (12 ft) high by 304 cm (10 ft) wide. Using a great variety of woods, which he left unpainted, he merged his boyhood memories of Viking and Norwegian design with simplified versions of the French artist Gustave Doré’s biblical scenes. Like its counterparts in many churches on the west coast of Norway, it is a tripartite and tiered altar, embellished with carved flowers and angel heads. The Last Supper (after Leonardo da Vinci) and a crucifix with the two thieves occupy the center. This is one of the masterpieces of religious folk art made in America, symbolizing not only the religious sincerity of the carver but also the tradition of Scandinavian carving from which it derives.

Olaf Krans was born in Sweden and came to Bishop Hill, Illinois, with his parents in 1850. There they joined a religious commune of other Swedes. During his youth Krans watched (and remembered) how the prairie was broken, how the men and women sowed and reaped, how the settlers created a special enclave of their own on the rolling, fertile prairies. The paintings he began to create in his 50s are a remarkable record of one of America’s many utopian settlements in the years of its original enthusiasm. The long rows of planters and sowers, of reapers and gatherers, convey a sense of unity and dedication. Krans also did a gallery of portraits of the original settlers. Most are based on photographs, but he imparted to each portrait an insight drawn from his recollections and far surpassed the photograph in depiction of character.

Krans’s paintings are outside the mainstream of Swedish immigrant folk art, which, like that of the Norwegians, stressed woodcarving. Essentially this was a domestic art, its practitioners creating fine carved spoons, chairs, cupboards, and wooden boxes. Genre scenes in minisculpture reflect the life of the farm or lumber camp but were intended for the carver’s own home.

E Hispanic Influences

Wooden Polychrome Crucifix Many folk art expressions of Hispanic origin or influence are religious in character and exhibit similar distinctive features. The basic stylistic characteristics of the 17th-century wooden polychrome crucifix shown here, for instance, are typical of Hispanic folk art. The figure is elongated and simplified, and strong graphic details define the face, which effectively conveys emotion.Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

The Hispanic traditions come from two directions, the Southwest and Puerto Rico, and their most striking products are religious. New Mexico was generally neglected by Mexico after 1750, as routes going north bypassed it. It was then that local santeros (“saint carvers”) began to carve holy figures, bultos, for the isolated churches of the countryside. At the same time painters were developing a characteristic style of retablos (“altar paintings”). Stylistically, the carvings reverted to the first half of the 17th century, echoing the works of Andalusian followers of the Spanish sculptors Juan Martínez Montañés and Pedro de Meña. The bultos were of wood, the figures elongated, with strong graphic devices in faces and bodies. They convey an intensity of feeling that, even at a much later date and in a different culture, are gripping.

The retablos, although less impressive, are aesthetically attractive. Flatness characterizes them—little attempt is made to convey any sense of depth or roundness. The spaces are filled in with decorative details, and frequently the frame is painted. The aesthetic sources for the retablos are a century more recent than those of the bultos; they can be traced back to the followers of the Spanish master Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, painters who turned out devotional images for the New World.

Puerto Rico has a tradition of life-size religious figures, but more typical are the santos for the house shrine. Representing a person’s birth saint or the patron saint of a village, these figures are seldom more than 30 cm (12 in) high and are often smaller. They were made either by professional santeros or by the most skilled member of a family, and the carver invested meticulous care to ensure that the saint’s identifying symbol was made clear.

Although the santos were originally polychromed, many of the older ones that have long been handled and cherished have lost their paint and grown dark with age.

F African Influences

... veins of African culture: basketry, musical instruments, quilts, ceramics, wood sculpture...

The earlier assumption that when slaves were brought to the United States from Africa they came culturally empty-handed has now been exploded. The contributions of African tradition in work songs, blues, jazz, in certain musical instruments (the banjo, for example), and in folk narrative were beginning to be recognized in the 1930s. Only in the ‘60s and ‘70s, however, were the more subtle relationships to African visual arts identified. This recognition came partly as a result of long-overdue unified study of the areas of American folk art that most clearly reveal veins of African culture: basketry, musical instruments, quilts, ceramics, wood sculpture, ironwork, and grave decorations.

Of these, certainly woodcarving is the most widespread. Carved canes with snakes and alligators climbing up toward the handle, which was frequently a human head, are popular and are still being made. Plenty of other examples of carved figures and architectural carvings that spread across the South are also available: a cigar-store figure dated about 1800, a carved “throne” for a Presbyterian church, and any number of examples of minisculpture. They add up to a distinctive segment of American folk art, and all contain strong African echoes.

IV FORMS OF FOLK ART

North American folk art was expressed in a variety of forms: painting, in both portraiture and landscape; carving, in stone, wood, metal, and ivory; pottery in profusion; and needlework, ranging from quilts and samplers to embroidered pictures.

A Painting

Ever since the first major museum exhibits of American folk paintings and sculptures, in the 1930s, nearly all collections of American folk art have included both paintings and three-dimensional materials. (In a few collections, the paintings are classified under the labels naive or primitive instead of being identified as folk art.)

A1 Portraiture

Mrs. Elizabeth Freake and Baby Mary Few American artists of the 1600s are known by name. One talented but unknown painter produced this portrait of maternal concern, Mrs. Elizabeth Freake and Baby Mary, in Massachusetts about 1674.Burstein Collection/Corbis

Because portraits were associated with family-oriented antiques and genealogy, they attracted attention long before other types of folk art. As early as the 1670s, New England portraitists, often called limners, were painting in an English vernacular style that dated from Tudor times. The best examples are those by the Gibbs and Mason limner (flourished late 17th century), who painted stiff representations of little girls and boys; and the Freake limner (flourished late 17th century), who painted the double portrait, Mrs. Elizabeth Freake and Baby Mary (circa 1674, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts), both beautifully gowned in a manner quite contrary to the popular conception of Puritan dress.

Only after the American Revolution, however, did American portraiture—both academic and nonacademic—flourish. In the 60 years between the end of the American Revolution and the importation of photography to America, the London studio of the American expatriate painter Benjamin West became the great center for the training of American academic painters. For every American who went abroad to study, however, scores of sign painters, decorators, and glaziers in the U.S. felt their craftmanship entitled them to try their hands at portraits. With limited awareness of the traditions of academic portraiture, they set out to solve in their own ways such technical and aesthetic problems as perspective, proportion, and composition, often with inventive and striking results. Their emphasis was on the face, and they sought above all to achieve an accurate likeness.

Portrait of a Young Man This watercolor, Portrait of a Young Man, was painted in the 18th century, before the American Revolution. The artist may have been Robert Peckham, of Massachusetts. The style is closer to folk art than to the more sophisticated works of many of the painters of the Hudson River valley, and in fact it may have been created by a self-taught artist.Art Resource, NY

Many of these portrait painters were itinerants who went from one small town to another, putting up for a few days at a local inn. Because some of them repeatedly used the same pose and may have carried a handsome dress to lend their sitters, the misconception arose and was supported by early writers that in the winter artists painted bodies and then, when they found a client, added the head to the unfinished work. No canvas with a headless body has yet come to light, however, and no mention of such has appeared in any inventory of an artist’s estate.

New England, especially Connecticut, seems to have led in this popular movement to “get one’s likeness taken,” which soon spread to the mid-Atlantic states, although it was never popular in the South. The usual explanation is that the South never developed a significant middle class—the primary clientele of these nonacademic painters. With the invention of photography in 1839 and its immediate appearance in the U.S., came a rapid decline in portrait painting; a photograph was quicker and cheaper. Many of the painters became photographers themselves.

Limited space prohibits a catalog of the leading folk portraitists, but brief information about several can suggest how varied a group they were. For example, Joshua Johnston was one of the few black artists of the time; Ruth Henshaw Bascom was a clergyman’s wife; Deborah Goldsmith was a central New York itinerant who eventually married one of her sitters. John Brewster was a deaf mute, and Joseph W. Stock lived his adult life in a wheelchair but managed a wide-ranging itinerant career. James Sanford Ellsworth worked mostly in watercolor miniatures, with little clouds of glory behind the heads of his sitters, and, like a number of American folk artists, died in an almshouse. Finally, Ammi Phillips, who worked in the Hudson Valley, western Massachusetts, and Connecticut, developed at least three successive styles to meet the changing taste of his time; ironically, single paintings by Phillips today bring sums far larger than he earned in a long and arduous career.

A2 Landscapes

Portraiture was the most rewarding practice financially, but artists also painted landscapes, scenes of everyday life, and historical and religious subjects. The majority of folk painters of landscapes were copyists, using prints as their models, but other itinerants—such as Paul Seifert and Fritz G. Vogt—specialized in farm scenes, or, more accurately, in portraits of farms. Joseph Hidley was a genuine landscapist who painted charming scenes of his own village of Poestenkill, New York, and of neighboring towns. The great religious painter, Edward Hicks, depicted again and again (about 40 versions are extant) his sermon of the lion and lamb lying down together—his famous Peaceable Kingdom paintings—despite the negative attitude of his fellow Quakers toward art.

A3 Genre Scenes

School Scene, Pennsylvania Folk artists often create genre scenes, or images of everyday life. This genre painting, depicting children at a schoolhouse, was painted around 1920 by American folk artist J. C. Huntington. It is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.Smithsonian American Art Museum/Art Resource, NY

The tendency of the naive artist to depict everything in great detail is of especial value when the genres, the scenes of everyday life, are considered. Often the paintings become historical documents filling in the lacunae left by the historian. Linton Park’s logging scenes and his Flax Scutching Bee are invaluable for conveying not only the facts but also the spirit of simple work situations. The black painter Clementine Hunter reflects far more than life on a cotton plantation; she conveys the moods of such a place. Another contemporary, Queena Stovall, depicts the seasons, the labors, and the rites of passage on a Virginia Piedmont farm as she experienced them.

A4 Decorative Painting

Many of the portraitists who started out as decorators and sign painters were multitalented artisans. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, decorative stencils were used on the walls of rooms, floors, and furniture. Graining and marbling made simple pine look like far more expensive materials such as mahogany, oak, or imported marble. Most elaborate were the murals that covered all the walls of a room, with high mountains, ship-filled rivers, waterfalls, and companies of militia. Rufus Porter, a man of many skills, wrote a booklet on how to do all these things. When he founded the publication Scientific American in 1846, he expanded his earlier work to a series of 31 instructional articles; they covered everything from carriage painting to “Landscape Paintings on the Walls of Rooms.” Porter’s approach was neither aesthetic nor philosophical, but down-to-earth, to help his readers make a good living.

B Carving

America’s first sculptors... carved thedeath’s-heads, angels, and hearts and flowers on early gravestones.

Folk artists worked in many other media besides paint, the earliest being stone. America’s first sculptors were the stonecutters who carved the death’s-heads, angels, and hearts and flowers on early gravestones. With the exception of the religiously inspired carver William Edmondson, most later folk carvers have worked in wood.

B1 Wood Carving

All along the northern coast where ships were built, wood carvers, working closely with the ship architects, designed, carved, and painted the figureheads that gave each ship its individuality. As wooden ships disappeared from the seas, the carvers turned to making trade signs, especially tobacco signs—life-size Native Americans, Scots, ladies of fashion, and the like. By the last half of the 19th century these and the elaborate figures for circus wagons were being carved in large establishments where the product was no longer the creation of one carver but of many. For that reason, the later carvings are regarded as examples of associative folk art rather than of traditional folk art.

The same change in manufacture took place with weather vanes. The early examples in wood or metal were the products of one person’s imagination and skills, but by the end of the century they were produced by industrial plants; the only part of these later weather vanes that could be considered traditional folk art would be the original carvings from which the molds were cast. The most popular subjects for weather vanes were, again, Native Americans, but also horses, fish, and other animals, including, of course, roosters in all shapes and sizes.

B2 Scrimshaw

Scrimshaw The art of scrimshaw originated with sailors who employed this pastime to while away their spare time at sea. This piece depicts a whaling scene, a common motif in this folk art. Scrimshaw involves engraving a design on polished ivory with a sharp tool and then filling in the lines with ink. Today, scrimshanders, as they are called, use only fossilized ivory, and the industry is carefully monitored to make sure no one is using ivory from endangered species.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

By and large, the metal objects of folk art were utilitarian, but with strong decorative elements: implements with incised designs, lighting fixtures, and the weather vanes. The medium that really permitted the imagination of the folk artist to explode was work in ivory—the teeth and bones of whales—called scrimshaw. In moments of leisure aboard ship, whalers incised whale teeth with a wide variety of images and sentiments, patriotic, religious, erotic. They made scenes of their hazardous occupation on both teeth and bones; they also made busks for their women to wear inside their chemises, and thousands of pie crimpers, birdcages, clothespins, toys, swifts (yarn reels), walking sticks, and many other objects of use and beauty.

C Pottery

Although potteries were primarily engaged in turning out everyday ceramics for dining or storage, a small percentage of items exist in which the decorative elements outrank the utilitarian. For example, the redware dishes in the Pennsylvania Dutch German tradition, were enlivened with slipware designs and mottoes. Many of the stoneware potters painted blue designs on their jugs, jars, and coolers, offering two sources of pleasure in the shape of the object and in its decoration. The face jugs—black with white teeth and eyes—have recognizable African roots and often were made by black potters. Both supporters and opponents of the temperance movement expressed their points of view with jugs on which snakes had been molded before firing. Quite recently, individualized sculptural ceramics from sewer-tile factories have been discovered in Ohio, Michigan, and New York. These pieces should not be confused with those ceramic pieces from a mold, on which the touch of the artist is obscured.

D Needlework

Few women were portrait painters, but many were taught theorem and fancy painting in female seminaries. Women’s major contribution to American folk art, however, was in the realm of needlework.

D1 Samplers

In the colonial and early national periods girls were taught at a very early age a variety of stitches, including embroidered letters; these stitches, formed into a sampler, a kind of needlework diploma, proved the skills learned, with the name of the pupil and the date completed.

D2 Quilting

Welsh Patchwork Quilt This patchwork, or pieced, quilt from Wales was made in the early 19th century. The process involves sewing pieces of cloth edge to edge and then sewing the resulting piece to several other layers of cloth using a quilting stitch. The use of geometric design was common, and these patterns had to be planned out mathematically. Quilts made in the United States were often signed by the quilter.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Women also cut and sewed the pieces of colored cloth that formed the designs of quilts. This work involved considerable mathematical comprehension and understanding of the nature of textiles, especially for the pieced quilt, in which the pattern was built up entirely from small bits of cloth (in contrast to the appliquéd quilt, in which a large cloth served as a ground for stitched-on patterns). During a time when all art was representational, women in rural America were creating thousands of examples of abstract art that can compete admirably with the abstract paintings of the present time. Since the early 1970s, many museums and art galleries have exhibited quilts as abstract art, thereby emphasizing the similarity in artistic aim.

D3 Embroidered Pictures

The needlework pictures that schoolgirls and young women created between the Revolution and the 1840s were often biblical scenes or memorials, generally embroidered in silk. Most of the picture was usually created with colored threads, with some details, such as faces, added in watercolor.

V SIGNIFICANCE

The thousands of Americans in Canada and the U.S. who have created this great body of aesthetically pleasing nonacademic art have left those countries greatly in their debt. Not only for their contemporaries but also for later generations, their works have amply fulfilled their primary objective—to give pleasure.

Major collections of folk art are at the Museum of Man in Ottawa, Ontario; the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center in Williamsburg, Virginia; the New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, New York; and the Museum of American Folk Art, New York City. So-called primitive or naive paintings from a major collection, the Garbisch Collection, are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

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Glass

2007-02-15T20:38:00.000+03:00

Glass, an amorphous substance made primarily of silica fused at high temperatures with borates or phosphates. Glass is also found in nature, as the volcanic material obsidian and as the enigmatic objects known as tektites (see Tektite). It is neither a solid nor a liquid but exists in a vitreous, or glassy, state in which molecular units have disordered arrangement but sufficient cohesion to produce mechanical rigidity. Glass is cooled to a rigid state without the occurrence of crystallization; heat can reconvert glass to a liquid form. Usually transparent, glass can also be translucent or opaque. Color varies with the ingredients of the batch.

Tiffany Vase American designer Louis Comfort Tiffany helped popularize the art nouveau style with its elongated, curving, plantlike forms, in the United States in the late 19th century. This vase is an example of Favrile glass, a silky, opalescent glass that Tiffany developed.Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Molten glass is plastic and can be shaped by means of several techniques. When cold, glass can be carved. At low temperatures glass is brittle and breaks with a shell-like fracture on the broken face. Such natural materials as obsidian and tektites (from meteors) have compositions and properties similar to those of synthetic glass.

Glass was first made before 2000 bc and has since served humans in many ways. It has been used to make useful vessels as well as decorative and ornamental objects, including jewelry. Glass also has architectural and industrial applications.

II MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES

The basic ingredient of glass compositions is silica, derived from sand, flint, or quartz.

A Composition and Properties

Silica can be melted at very high temperatures to form fused silica glass. Because this glass has a high melting point and does not shrink or expand greatly with changing temperatures, it is suitable for laboratory apparatus and for such objects subject to heat shock as telescope mirrors. Glass is a poor conductor of both heat and electricity and therefore useful for electrical and thermal insulation. For most glass, silica is combined with other raw materials in various proportions. Alkali fluxes, commonly the carbonates of sodium or potassium, lower the fusion temperature and viscosity of silica. Limestone or dolomite (calcium and magnesium carbonates) act as stabilizers for the batch. Other ingredients such as lead and borax give to glass certain physical properties.

A1 Water Glass and Soda-Lime Glass

Glass of high soda content can be dissolved in water as a syrupy fluid. Known as water glass, it is used commercially for fireproofing and as a sealant. Most manufactured glass is a soda-lime composition used to make bottles, tableware, lamp bulbs, and window and plate glass.

A2 Lead Glass

Sayings of Confucius The Sayings of Confucius (1956), a contemporary glass sculpture by Donald Pollard and Cho Chung-Yeng, was produced by the Steuben Glass Company. This sculpture echoes the shapes of natural crystal, as well as the shapes of Chinese fans. The Chinese characters are etched into the glass.John White/Cooper Hewitt/National Museum of Design/Smithsonian/Art Resource, NY

The fine-quality table glass known as crystal. is made from potassium-silicate formulas that include lead oxide. Lead glass is heavy and has an enhanced capacity to refract light, which makes it suitable for lenses and prisms, as well as for imitation jewels. Because lead absorbs high-energy radiation, lead glasses are used in shields to protect personnel in nuclear installations.

A3 Borosilicate Glass

Borosilicate glass contains borax as a major ingredient, along with silica and alkali. Noted for its durability and resistance to chemical attack and high temperatures, borosilicate glass is widely employed for cooking utensils, laboratory glassware, and chemical process equipment.

A4 Color

Impurities in the raw materials affect the color of glass. For a clear, colorless substance, glassmakers add manganese to counteract the effects of iron traces that produce greens and browns. Glass can be colored by dissolving in it metallic oxides, sulfides, or selenides. Other colorants may be dispersed as microscopic particles.

A5 Miscellaneous Ingredients

Typical glass formulas include broken waste glass of related composition (cullet), which promotes melting and homogenization of the batch. Fining agents such as arsenic or antimony are often added to cause the release of small bubbles during the melting.

A6 Physical Properties

Depending on the composition, some glass will melt at temperatures as low as 500° C (900° F); others melt only at 1650° C (3180° F). Tensile strength, normally between 280 and 560 kg per sq cm (4000 and 8000 lb per sq in), can exceed 7000 kg per sq cm (100,000 lb per sq in) if the glass is specially treated. Specific gravity ranges from 2 to 8, or from less than that of aluminum to more than that of steel. Similarly wide variations occur in optical and electrical properties.

B Mixing and Melting

After careful preparation and measurement, the raw materials are mixed and undergo initial fusion before being subjected to the full heat needed for vitrification. In the past, melting was done in clay pots heated in wood- or coal-burning furnaces. Pots of fireclay, holding from 0.5 to 1.5 metric tons of glass, are still used when relatively small amounts of glass are needed for handworking. In modern glass plants, most glass is melted in large tank furnaces, first introduced in 1872, that can hold more than 1000 metric tons of glass and are heated by gas, oil, or electricity. The glass batch is fed continuously into an opening (doghouse) at one end of the tank, and the melted, refined, and conditioned glass is drawn out the other end. In long forehearths, or holding chambers, the molten glass is brought to the correct working temperature, and the vitreous mass is then delivered to the forming machines.

C Shaping

When working glass in its plastic state, five basic methods are employed to produce an almost limitless variety of shapes: casting, blowing, pressing, drawing, and rolling.

C1 Casting

In this process, known to the ancients, molten glass is simply poured into a mold and allowed to cool and solidify. In modern times centrifugal casting processes have been developed in which the glass is forced against the sides of a rapidly rotating mold. Capable of forming precise, lightweight shapes, centrifugal casting is used for the production of television-tube funnels.

C2 Glassblowing

Creating Glass Vessels These men are using the method of glassblowing to create glass vessels. The man on the left is sitting in a chair with a support for his blowpipe. He has already created the initial rough shape and is now refining the molten glass, using a pair of tongs, or jacks. The process he is using is called necking, the technique by which the glassblower creates the neck of a bottle or vase.Roger A. Clark, Jr./Photo Researchers, Inc.

The revolutionary discovery that glass could be insufflated and expanded to any shape was made in the third quarter of the 1st century bc, in the Middle East along the Phoenician coast. Glassblowing soon spread and became the standard way of shaping glass vessels until the 19th century. The necessary tool is a hollow iron pipe about 1.2 m (about 4 ft) long with a mouthpiece at one end. The glassblower, or gaffer, collects a small amount of molten glass, called a gather, on the end of the blowpipe and rolls it against a paddle or metal plate to shape its exterior (marvering) and to cool it slightly. The gaffer then blows into the pipe, expanding the gather into a bubble, or parison. By constantly reheating at the furnace opening, by blowing and marvering, the gaffer controls the form and thickness. Simple hand tools such as shears, tongs (pucellas), and paddles are used to refine the form, often while the glassblower sits in the special “glassmaker's chair,” one with extended arms to support the blowpipe. Blown glass can also be shaped with molds: Part-size molds pattern the gather, which is then removed and blown to the desired size. Full-size molds into which the gather is entirely blown impart size, shape, and decoration. Additional gathers may be applied and manipulated to form stems, handles, and feet, or they may be trailed on and tooled for decoration. A shaped bubble can be “flashed” with color by dipping it into molten glass of contrasting color. To make cased glass, a gather is placed within, and fused to, one or more layers of differently colored glass. For finish work and fire polishing at the mouth of the furnace, the gather is transferred to a solid iron rod called a pontil, applied opposite the blowpipe, which is then removed. When the pontil is cracked off it leaves a “pontil mark” that may be later ground or polished away.

In 1903 a fully automatic blowing machine was perfected, thereby making mechanical glassblowing possible.

C3 Pressing

Some pressing was involved in the production of ancient cast wares to ensure that the glass had full contact with the mold. Islamic artisans used simple handpresses to form glass weights and seals. European manufacturers rediscovered the technique in the late 18th century, using it to make decanter stoppers and the bases of stemmed tableware. In the 1820s patents were taken out, particularly in the U.S., that led to the development of fully mechanical pressing. In this process, a gather of glass is dropped into a mold, and a plunger then squeezes the glass between itself and the outer mold and forms the final shape. Both the mold and the plunger may be patterned to impart decorative design to the object being made.

C4 Drawing

Molten glass can be drawn directly from the furnace to make tubing, sheets, fibers, and rods of glass that must have a uniform cross section. Tubing is made by drawing out a cylindrical mass of semifluid glass while a jet of air is blown down the center of the cylinder.

C5 Rolling

Sheet glass, and plate glass in particular, was originally produced by pouring molten glass on a flat surface and, with a roller, smoothing it out prior to polishing both its surfaces. Later it came to be made by continuous rolling between double rollers.

D Lampworking

Lampworking consists of the reworking of preformed and annealed glass, generally to produce scientific laboratory equipment and decorative toys and figures. Rods and cylinders are reheated by air-gas or oxygen-gas flames and refashioned by hand or machine.

E Annealing

After being formed, glass objects are annealed to relieve stresses built up within the glass as it cools (see Annealing). In an oven called a lehr, the glass is reheated to a temperature high enough to relieve internal stresses and then slowly cooled to avoid introducing new stresses. Stresses can be added intentionally to impart strength to a glass article. Because glass breaks as a result of tensile stresses that originate across an infinitesimal surface scratch, compressing the surface increases the amount of tensile stress that can be endured before breakage occurs. A method called thermal tempering introduces surface compression by heating the glass almost to the softening point and then cooling it rapidly with an air blast or by plunging it into a liquid bath. The surface hardens quickly; the subsequent contraction of the slower-cooling interior portions of the glass pulls the surface into compression. Surface compressions approaching 2460 kg per sq cm (35,000 lb per sq in) can be obtained in thick pieces by this method. Chemical strengthening methods also have been developed in which, through an ion-exchange process, the composition or structure of the glass surface is altered and surface compression introduced. Strengths exceeding 7000 kg per sq cm (100,000 lb per sq in) can be attained by chemical strengthening.

F Decoration

Decorating Glass There are many different techniques for decorating glass. Some of these, such as cutting or engraving, are more often used on three-dimensional pieces. Painting or etching are usually used for flat glass, such as decorative windows or plates. Other techniques include gilding and sandblasting. The pieces here are an etched glass plate (left), a faceted cut glass vase (center), and a painted glass roundel (right).Victoria & Albert Museum, London;Beniaminson/Art Resource, NY;Aldo Tutino/Art Resource, NY

After annealing, a glass object may be embellished in a number of ways. Some of them are as follows:

In cutting, to produce cut glass, facets, grooves, and depressions are ground into the surface with rotating disks of various materials, sizes, and shapes and a stream of water with an abrasive. The steps are marking the pattern, rough cutting, smoothing, and polishing.

Designs are engraved by means of a diamond point or a metal needle, or with rotating wheels, generally of copper.

In the etching process intaglio decoration is achieved with acid, the results varying from a rough to mat finish.

In sandblasting, fine grains of sand, crushed flint, or powdered iron are projected at high speed onto the glass surface, leaving a design in mat finish.

In cold painting, lacquer colors or oil paints are applied to glass but are not affixed by firing.

In enamel painting, enamel colors are painted and then fused onto the surface in a low-temperature firing.

In gilding, gold leaf, gold paint, or gold dust is applied to glassware and sometimes left unfired; low-temperature firing, however, is necessary for permanency.

III GLASS AS AN ART FORM

Archaeological evidence indicates that glass was first made in the Middle East, sometime in the 3rd millennium bc.

A Ancient Glass

The earliest glass objects were beads; hollow vessels do not occur before about 1500 bc. Asian artisans may have established the glass industry in Egypt, where the first vessels date from the reign (1479-1425 bc) of Thutmose III. Glass production flourished in Egypt and Mesopotamia until about 1200 bc, then virtually ceased for several hundred years. In the 9th century bc, Syria and Mesopotamia emerged as glassmaking centers, and the industry spread throughout the Mediterranean region. In the Hellenistic era, Egypt, because of the glassworks at Alexandria, assumed a leading role in supplying royal courts with luxury glass. It was on the Phoenician coast, however, that the important discovery of glassblowing occurred in the 1st century bc. In the Roman period glassmaking was undertaken in many areas of the empire, from Rome to Cologne.

A1 Early Techniques

Phoenician Glass Flask This Phoenician glass unguent flask from the 5th century bc was made using the core technique, which preceded glassblowing. A mixture of clay and dung was attached to a rod and formed into the shape of the flask. Hot threads of glass were wound around the form, smoothed, reheated, then wound with more glass. This process was repeated until the vessel was finished, and handles, a foot, and a lip were added. The rod, along with the core material, was then removed.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Before the invention of the blowpipe, several methods existed for shaping and embellishing objects of colored glass, both translucent and opaque. Some articles were carved from solid blocks of glass. From potters and metalworkers glassmakers adapted casting processes, pouring molten glass into molds to produce inlays, statuettes, and open vessels such as jars and bowls. Preformed rods of glass could be heated and fused together in a mold for a “ribbon” glass. Patterns of great complexity were achieved by a mosaic technique, in which elements, fused in a rod, together made a design in cross section. Slices of such rods could be arranged in a mold to shape a vessel or plaque and then heated to fusion. “Gold band” glasses featured irregular bands of different colored glass, with gold leaf embedded in one translucent band.

The majority of pre-Roman glasswares were fashioned by the core technique. A mixture of clay and dung was fixed to a metal rod and given the internal shape of the desired vessel. It was dipped into a crucible of molten glass or was wound with threads of glass. The object was constantly reheated and smoothed on a flat stone. Threads of different colored glass were trailed on and combed, creating striking feather patterns, as seen on Egyptian glass of the 18th and 19th dynasties. Handles, feet, and the neck were added and the object cooled. The rod was withdrawn and the core material picked out. Only vessels of limited size, such as cosmetic containers and small vases, could be made this way. Later core-formed articles from the 6th century bc closely followed the forms of Greek pottery (see Pottery).

A2 Roman Glass

Roman Glassware These examples of early Roman glassware date from the 1st and 2nd centuries, when colorless glass had become more popular than opaque and colored styles. The four pieces on the left are burial pieces; the piece on the right was probably used as a jug for water or wine.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Glassblowing, a less expensive and time-consuming method of manufacture, spread from Syria to Italy and other parts of the Roman Empire, gradually superseding the old techniques. A new taste in glass styles developed: The earlier manufacturing processes emphasized color and pattern; blowing enhanced the thin, translucent qualities of the material. Also, by the end of the 1st century ad, colorless glass supplanted colored glass as the most fashionable sort. Glassblowing made large-scale production possible and changed the status of glassware to an everyday material, used for windows, drinking vessels, and containers of all kinds.

The structure of the empire doubtless fostered the extraordinary developments in glassmaking that occurred in this period. Most of the known decorative techniques were invented by artisans of the Roman era. Blown glasswares were patterned in part and full-size molds. Such molds enabled novelty items such as head-shaped flasks to be produced in quantity. A delicately patterned ewer (1st century ad) in the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, is one of a remarkable group of mold-blown objects that bear the names of their makers. Some Roman glass has elaborately threaded and tooled decoration. Glasswares could be painted with religious and historical scenes, or could feature designs in gold leaf pressed between two layers of clear glass. Ancient glassmakers adapted lapidary skills to make lathe-cut, carved, and engraved glass of considerable beauty. In cameo glass, layers of different colored glass were fused together and then carved so as to leave contrasting motifs in relief. Best known of Roman cameo glass is the Portland Vase (1st century ad, British Museum, London), which depicts the myth of Peleus and Thetis. Delicate effects were achieved in the diatreta, or caged cups, in which great portions of the outer surface were cut away, leaving an intricate openwork frame that appears to stand almost free of the vessel within. The famous Lycurgus Cup (4th century ad, British Museum) epitomizes this practice.

B Western Glass

The manufacture of household glass suffered a general decline in the West with the fall of the Roman Empire.

B1 Medieval Glass

Rose Window, Notre Dame The north rose window of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris, was built by Jean de Chelles from 1240 to 1250. It is 129 m (43 ft) in diameter and consists of brilliantly colored pieces of glass with lead around each piece, held in an iron framework. The details in the religious scenes are painted on the glass.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Under Frankish influence glassmakers in northern Europe and Britain continued to produce utilitarian vessels, some of new, robust forms. The decoration of these objects was limited to simple molded patterns, threading, and applied ornaments such as prunts (blobs of glass). Mostly green in color, the glass was at first a soda-glass composition made with ashes of marine plants imported from the Mediterranean, as they had been during Roman times. By the late Middle Ages, however, soda was no longer available, and northern glassmakers turned to the wood ash from their own wood-fired furnaces as a flux, for a potash-lime glass. Because the glasshouses were situated in the forests that provided fuel and ash, the glass made was called forest glass, waldglas. Common glass in the waldglas style continued to be made in the lesser European factories until modern times.

The glory of Western glassmaking in the medieval period, through patronage of the church, was mosaic glass in Mediterranean Europe and stained-glass windows in the north (see Mosaics; Stained Glass). Mosaics were made of small glass cubes, or tesserae, embedded in cement. The tesserae, cut from solid cakes of glass, could be extremely elaborate, with gold and silver lead inlaid. Little is known of the production of mosaic glass before the 14th century.

Glass windows in churches are mentioned in documents as early as the 6th century, but the earliest extant examples date from the 11th century. The finest windows are considered those from the 13th and 14th centuries, primarily in France and England. Glasshouses in Lorraine and Normandy (Normandie) may have provided much of the flat glass for medieval cathedral windows. The glass was colored, or flashed with color, and then cut into the shapes required by the design. Details were painted into the glass, often with a brownish enamel. The pieces were fitted into lead strips and set in an iron framework. The art declined in the late Renaissance but was revived in the 19th century.

B2 Renaissance to the 18th Century

Venetian Glass Ewer This fanciful boat-shaped ewer is an example of Venetian glass from the mid-16th century. It is made of cristallo glass, which gets its name from its resemblance to rock crystal. The design of this piece is attributed to Armenia Vivarini and combines blue glass with stamped designs and gold work.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Although glassmaking was practiced in Venice from the 10th century on, the earliest known Venetian glassware dates from the 15th century. Concentrated on the island of Murano, the Venetian industry dominated the European market until 1700. The major contribution of the Venetians was the development of a highly refined, hard-soda glass of great ductility. Colorless and highly transparent, the glass resembled rock crystal and was known as cristallo.

The first cristallo wares were simple forms, often embellished with jewel-like enamel designs. Objects were also blown of colored and opaque glass. By the late 16th century, forms became lighter and more delicate. The blowers exploited the workable nature of their material to produce fanciful tours de force. A type of filigree glass was developed in Venice and widely imitated. With lacelike effect, opaque white threads were incorporated in the glass and worked into intricate patterns. Some vessels were blown entirely of opaque white glass and painted with enamels in the manner of Chinese porcelain. Novelties made of lampworked glass were made at Murano, but Nevers, France, became most famous for this type of ware by the 17th century. Particularly suited to soda glass was the practice of diamond-point engraving, a technique favored in the 17th century by Dutch artisans. By hammering the diamond-point stylus for a stippled effect, they created ambitious pictorial designs.

Glass manufacturers throughout Europe tried to copy the Venetians in their production methods, materials, and decorative vocabulary. Knowledge was spread through the glasswares themselves, through the Art of Glass (1612) by Antonio Neri, and through Venetian glassblowers. Although forbidden by law to leave Venice and to divulge the secrets of their craft, many Murano glassmakers left Italy to set up glasshouses elsewhere in Europe. Each country developed its own façon de Venise, as nationalistic preferences for certain forms or decorations tempered the Venetian model. Italy's influence was ultimately weakened in the 17th century by the development of new glass recipes in Germany and England.

Germany's potash-lime glass, thicker and harder than cristallo, was well suited to wheel-engraved decoration. Caspar Lehmann, at the court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, was largely responsible for the development of engraving in the early 1600s. Glass cutters and engravers in Nürnberg and Potsdam became famous for skillfully executed designs in the baroque manner. At the same time, the Germanic glasshouses continued their tradition of enameled and cold-painted glass.

The other improvement in glass that served to diminish Europe's reliance on Venice was the lead-oxide glass formulated (circa 1676) by George Ravenscroft in England. Softer, more brilliant, and more durable than the brittle cristallo, English lead glass was considered the finest glass of the 18th century. English table glass dominated the European and colonial markets and became a model for Continental production. English innovations of the mid-18th century were glasses with air or opaque-enamel twists encased in the stems. Among the most prestigious forms of the period was the English cut-glass chandelier. Lead glass, especially suited to cutting, reached its full potential in the neoclassical wares of the Anglo-Irish period (1780-1830).

B3 American Glass

Glassmaking was the first manufacture undertaken in America, with a glasshouse built at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1608. The first commercially successful glassworks was that of Caspar Wistar in Salem County, New Jersey, between 1739 and 1777. Immigrant German artisans there and at other factories produced bottles, windowpanes, and some table glass in Germanic styles. Henry William Stiegel sought to imitate English imported lead glass at his factory in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, from 1763 to 1774. The most important glassworks built after the American Revolution was that of John Frederick Amelung in Frederick County, Maryland, which was in operation from 1784 to 1795.

B4 19th and 20th Centuries

Art Glass by Dale Chihuly Dale Chihuly, a leader in the art-glass movement in the United States, created these decorative glass pieces: Niijima Floats: Garnet Black and Mint Green Float with Dimple (1991); Niijima Floats: Snow White and Gold Leaf (1991); and Niijima Floats: Mottled Blue Black Float with Silver Leaf (1992). All are in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C.Smithsonian American Art Museum/Art Resource, NY

The stylistic history of glass in the 19th century is dominated by rapid advances in glass technology and by the rediscovery and adaptation of older methods.

Mechanical pressing, introduced in the U.S., was a cheap, fast means of production that greatly expanded the role of glass in the home and in industry. Before 1850, wares were pressed in intricate lacy designs that offset a cloudiness in the glass caused by contact with the cooler mold. Simpler designs popular from the 1840s on, known as pressed pattern glass, were available in many forms. The more expensive cut glass declined in favor because of the competition from pressed glass. Only about 1880 did cut glass regain some of its earlier popularity with the elaborate “brilliant” patterns, examples of great technical virtuosity that exploited the refractive properties of quality glass.

Beginning in the late 18th century, a number of Roman glassmaking techniques were revived and modified to suit neoclassical taste. Continental glass factories made a version of laminated gold-leaf glass, called zwischengoldglas. Cameolike effects were attained with encrusted sulphides, and actual cameo engraving and cutting were practiced by artisans beginning in midcentury, culminating in the work of Thomas Webb and Sons (founded 1837), a glasshouse in Stourbridge, England. Paperweights, popular from about 1845, were often made in a millefiori (thousand flowers) design recalling the mosaic glass of ancient times. Renaissance rock crystal inspired a technique of polished engraved glass in the late 19th century.

Bohemia continued to excel in wheel-engraved decoration with the work of such artisans as Dominik Biemann. Other methods, such as cased glass, were practiced in Bohemian factories and copied throughout Europe and the U.S. Chemical advancements led to new opaque colored glass such as lithyalin, which resembled semiprecious stones. Transparent enamels and stains were applied to vessels, paralleling the revival of stained-glass windows.

Inspired by the revivals of historical glassworking methods and spurred by the capabilities of improved chemical technology, glassmakers by 1880 were creating new styles of handworked glass, generally called art glass. These were mostly decorative and novelty forms, made in reaction to mass-produced wares. Between 1890 and 1910 the most fashionable styles reflected the international art nouveau movement. Louis Comfort Tiffany in the U.S., and Émile Gallé and the firm of Daum Frères (founded 1889) in France, were the leading proponents of the style. They produced glasses of naturalistic shapes, sinuous lines, exotic colors, and unusual surface effects, such as Tiffany's iridescent Favrile glass.

After World War I new interests in texture and formalized decoration emerged, seen in the designs of René Lalique and Maurice Marinot. Beginning in the 1930s, exquisitely clear, colorless lead glass, often engraved, was popularized by several Scandinavian and American firms.

A new era in glassmaking began in the early 1960s with the studio glass movement, led by the Americans Harvey Littleton and Dominick Labino. With small tank furnaces in studio settings, artisans explore glass as an artistic medium. Innovative sculptural forms and decorative techniques are being developed at workshops in the U.S. and around the world.

C Non-Western Glass

Glassmaking was not as strong a tradition in Islamic and Far Eastern countries as it was in the West. Forms and techniques developed that closely reflected their individual cultures; these, in turn, influenced Western forms.

C1 Islamic Glass

Mosque Lamp This mosque lamp from the early 14th century is an example of the kind of glasswork that had been produced in Islamic countries for 500 years. This piece features enameled decoration and is inscribed with three quotations from the Koran. It is dedicated to Beybars II.

The history of glass from the 8th through the 14th century focuses on the Islamic world of the Middle East. Earlier Sassanian traditions of carved glass were continued by Muslim artisans, who made high-relief cut (hochschnitt) vessels, many with animal subjects. Quality colorless glass with fine wheel-engraved designs was also produced. The possibilities for decoration were expanded with the introduction of fired-on enamel colors and gilding, techniques for which the glasshouses at ?alab (Aleppo) and Damascus were famous. From Egypt came the discovery of luster stains, which created lustrous metallic effects in browns, yellows, and reds on both pottery and glass. Mosque lamps, bowls, beakers, and bottles were painted in the rhythmic, geometric patterns of Islam. Their shapes and decorations influenced later Western production, particularly in Venice and Spain.

C2 Indian Glass

Glass was made in India as early as the 5th century bc, but the industry was not established until the Mughal period, and particularly in the 17th century. Forms included hookah bases, sprinklers, and dishes, usually gilded or enameled in floral patterns. In the 18th century the English East India Company sold quantities of English glass to the Indian market, some of which was then wheel-engraved by Indian artisans.

C3 Far Eastern Glass

Giant Carved Bottle, Ch'ien Lung Dynasty This bottle from the Ch’ien Lung Dynasty (1736-95) is typical of the style being produced at that time in China. It features a simple shape, with intricate scenes of Chinese life carved in red glass on top of the white glass surface. The elaborate design is a reaction to the simplicity of the Sung style that preceded it.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Chinese-made glassware in the distinctive “eye bead” form, with inlays resembling eyes, has been excavated from Zhou (Chou) dynasty sites (1045?-256 bc). Early glass objects, often melted from imported preformed glass cakes, were small and were carved in close imitation of gemstones. The use of glass to simulate semiprecious stones for jewelry and later for snuff bottles is a recurring theme in Chinese glass. Few vessels of glass are known before the glassworks at the Beijing Imperial Palace was erected in 1680. Under the influence of the Jesuits at the Beijing court, blown glass vessels in Western European styles were produced. Glass in the Chinese idiom dominated 18th- and 19th-century production, however, featuring richly colored objects with carved and enameled decoration. The Chinese mastered the art of cameo cutting in glass. Chinese glass vessels are characteristically of simple, porcelain-inspired shapes, with thick, often multilayered walls and a waxy surface sheen.

No evidence exists of glass made in Japan before 200 bc. Some glass vessels in the forms of Buddhist relic bottles and cinerary urns are believed to date from the Asuka/Nara periods (ad 552-784), but glassmaking apparently ceased in the 13th century. The craft was revived about 1750.

IV TYPES OF COMMERCIAL GLASS

The wide range of uses of the material has resulted in the development of a number of different types of glass.

A Window Glass

Window glass, in use since the 1st century ad, was originally made by casting, or by blowing hollow cylinders that were slit and flattened into sheets. The crown process was a later technique, in which a gather of glass was blown and shaped into a flattened globe or crown. The pontil rod was attached to the flat side, the blowpipe removed. By spinning the reheated crown on the rod, the hole left by the blowpipe enlarged, and eventually the disk, through centrifugal force, flapped out in a large circular sheet. The pontil rod was cracked off, leaving a scar, or bull's-eye. Today, nearly all window glass is made mechanically by drawing glass upward from a molten pool fed from a tank furnace. In the Fourcault process the glass sheet is drawn through a slotted refractory block submerged in the surface of the glass pool, into a vertical annealing furnace from which it emerges to be cut into sheets.

B Plate Glass

Ordinary drawn window glass is not entirely uniform in thickness because of the nature of the process by which it is made. The variations in thickness distort the appearance of objects viewed through panes of the glass.

The traditional method of overcoming such defects has been the use of ground and polished plate glass. Plate glass was first produced at Saint Gobain, France, in 1668, by pouring glass into an iron table and rolling it flat with a roller. After annealing, the plate was ground and polished on both sides. Plate glass is now made by rolling the glass continuously between double rollers located at the end of a forehearth. After the rough sheet has been annealed, both sides of it are finished continuously and simultaneously.

Grinding and polishing are now being supplanted by the cheaper float-glass process. In this process flat surfaces are formed on both sides by floating a continuous sheet of glass on a bath of molten tin. The temperature is high enough to allow the surface imperfections to be removed by fluid flow of the glass. The temperature is gradually lowered as the glass moves along the tin bath, and the glass passes through a long annealing oven at the end.

Unpolished rolled glass, often with figured surfaces produced by designs incised in the rolls, is used architecturally. Wire glass, made by introducing wire mesh into the molten glass before it passes between the rollers, is used to prevent the glass from shattering if it is struck. Safety glass, for automobile windshields, is made by laminating a sheet of transparent polyvinyl butyral plastic between two sheets of thin plate glass. The plastic adheres tightly to the glass and holds the broken shards in place even after hard blows.

C Bottles and Containers

Bottles, cosmetic jars, and other glass containers are produced by an automatic process that combines pressing (to form the open end of the container) and blowing (to form the hollow body of the container). In a typical automatic bottle-blowing machine, a gob of molten glass is dropped in a narrow, inverted mold and forced down by an air blast into the lower portion of the mold, which corresponds to the neck of the finished bottle. A baffle then drops over the top of the mold, and a blast from the bottom, up through the neck, partly forms the bottle. The half-formed bottle, called a parison, is held by the neck, inverted, and then lowered into a second finishing mold, in which another air blast blows it out to its finished dimensions. In another type of machine, used for large-mouthed containers, the parison is simply pressed in a mold by a plunger before being blown in a finishing mold. Shallow jars, such as those used for cosmetics, are merely pressed.

D Optical Glass

Most lenses used in eyeglasses, microscopes, telescopes, cameras, and certain other optical instruments are made from optical glass (see Lens; Optics). Optical glass differs from other glass in the way in which it bends, or refracts, light. The manufacture of optical glass is a delicate and exacting operation. The raw materials must be of the highest purity, and great care must be taken so that no imperfections are introduced in the manufacturing process. Small air bubbles and inclusions of unvitrified matter will cause distortion on the surface of the lens. Striae, the streaks caused by incomplete chemical homogeneity in the glass, will also cause serious distortion, and strains in glass caused by improper annealing will further impair optical qualities.

Optical glass was originally melted in pots for prolonged periods, during which it was constantly stirred by a refractory rod. After a lengthy annealing, the glass was broken into pieces. The best fragments were further reduced, reheated, and pressed into the desired forms. In recent years a method has been adopted for the continuous manufacture of glass in platinum-lined tanks, using platinum-lined stirrers in the cylindrical end chambers (or homogenizers). This process produces greater quantities of optical glass that are cheaper and superior to glass produced by the earlier method. (Plastics are increasingly used in place of optical glass for simple lenses: Although not as durable and scratch resistant as glass, they are strong and lightweight and can absorb dyes.)

E Photosensitive Glass

Photosensitive glass is similar to photographic film in that gold or silver ions in the material will respond to the action of light. This glass is used in printing and reproducing processes. Heat treatment following an exposure to light produces permanent changes in photosensitive glass.

Photochromic glass darkens when exposed to light but fades to its original clear state when the light is removed. This behavior is achieved by the action of light on extremely small silver chloride or silver bromide crystals distributed throughout the glass. Photochromic glass finds a natural use in spectacle lenses that darken into sunglasses when in the sun and lighten again when removed from sunlight. The field of electronics also finds uses for this kind of glass.

F Glass Ceramics

Glass containing certain metals will form a localized crystallization when exposed to ultraviolet radiation. If heated to high temperatures, the glass will convert to crystalline ceramics with mechanical strength and electrical insulating properties greater than that of ordinary glass. Such ceramics are now made for such uses as cookware, rocket nosecones, and space-shuttle tiles. Other metallic glasses—including alloys of pure metals—can be magnetized, are strong and flexible, and prove very useful in high-efficiency electrical transformers.

G Glass Fibers

It is possible to produce fibers that can be woven or felted like textile fiber by drawing out molten glass to diameters of a few ten-thousandths of an inch. Both long, continuous multifilament yarns and short-staple fibers 25 to 30 cm (10 to 12 in) long may be produced.

Woven into textile fabrics, glass fibers make excellent drapery and upholstery materials because of their chemical stability, strength, and resistance to fire and water. Glass fabrics alone, or in combination with resins, make excellent electrical insulation. By impregnating glass fibers with plastics, a composite fiberglass is formed that combines the strength and inertness of glass with the impact resistance of the plastic.

H Miscellaneous Types of Glass

Fiber Optic Strands A strand of fiber optic cable reflects the light that passes through it back into the fiber, so light cannot escape the strand. Fiber optic cables carry more information, suffer less interference, and require fewer signal repeaters over long distances than wires.James L. Amos/Corbis

Glass bricks are hollow construction blocks with ribbed or patterned sides that can be laid in mortar and used for exterior walls or interior partitions.

Foam glass, used in floats or as insulation, is made by adding a foaming agent to finely ground glass and heating the mixture to the softening point. At that point the foaming agent releases a gas that produces a multitude of small bubbles within the glass.

In the 1950s glass optical fibers (see Fiber Optics) were developed that have many uses in science, medicine, and industry. High-refractive-index glass fibers, laid parallel to one another and separated by thin layers of low-refractive-index glass, can be optically worked as a lens. Fiberscopes incorporating such bundles can transmit an image through acute angles, thus easing the examination of normally inaccessible sites. Such solid fiber-optics applications as magnifiers, minifiers, and faceplates also improve viewing. When used in conjunction with lasers, optical fibers are also proving important in the development of various communications systems (see Telephone). A new kind of glass called halide glass, discovered in the 1970s, may prove especially useful for this application. It is made of a halide, such as fluorine, combined with a heavy metal, such as zirconium, barium, or hafnium.

Laser glass is doped, or mixed, with several percent of neodymium oxide and is capable of emitting laser light if the glass is pumped and assembled in the proper device. It is considered a good laser source because of the relative ease with which large, homogenous specimens of the glass can be obtained for extremely high-powered generation.

Double-glazing cells are units in which two sheets of plate or window glass are sealed together at their edges, leaving an air space between. Various types of seals and spacing materials may be used in their construction. As windows they provide superior heat insulation and will not cloud over in moist air.

A method for making large glass structures without using high temperatures was developed in the 1980s at the University of Florida. Called the sol-gel technique, it mixes water with a chemical such as tetramethoxysilane to produce a silicon oxide polymer; a chemical additive slows down the condensation process and allows the polymer to build up uniformly. The method may prove useful for making large, complex shapes with specific properties.

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Ceramics

2007-02-15T18:27:00.000+03:00

Ceramics (Greek keramos, "potter's clay"), originally the art of making pottery, now a general term for the science of manufacturing articles prepared from pliable, earthy materials that are made rigid by exposure to heat. Ceramic materials are nonmetallic, inorganic compounds—primarily compounds of oxygen, but also compounds of carbon, nitrogen, boron, and silicon. Ceramics includes the manufacture of earthenware, porcelain, bricks, and some kinds of tile and stoneware.

Ceramic products are used not only for artistic objects and tableware, but also for industrial and technical items, such as sewer pipe and electrical insulators. Ceramic insulators have a wide range of electrical properties. The electrical properties of a recently discovered family of ceramics based on a copper-oxide mixture allow these ceramics to become superconductive, or to conduct electricity with no resistance, at temperatures much higher than those at which metals do (see Superconductivity). In space technology, ceramic materials are used to make components for space vehicles.

The rest of this article will deal only with ceramic products that have industrial or technical applications. Such products are known as industrial ceramics. The term industrial ceramics also refers to the science and technology of developing and manufacturing such products.

II PROPERTIES

Ceramics possess chemical, mechanical, physical, thermal, electrical, and magnetic properties that distinguish them from other materials, such as metals and plastics. Manufacturers customize the properties of ceramics by controlling the type and amount of the materials used to make them.

A Chemical Properties

Industrial ceramics are primarily oxides (compounds of oxygen), but some are carbides (compounds of carbon and heavy metals), nitrides (compounds of nitrogen), borides (compounds of boron), and silicides (compounds of silicon). For example, aluminum oxide can be the main ingredient of a ceramic—the important alumina ceramics contain 85 to 99 percent aluminum oxide. Primary components, such as the oxides, can also be chemically combined to form complex compounds that are the main ingredient of a ceramic. Examples of such complex compounds are barium titanate (BaTiO3) and zinc ferrite (ZnFe2O4). Another material that may be regarded as a ceramic is the element carbon (in the form of diamond or graphite).

Ceramics are more resistant to corrosion than plastics and metals are. Ceramics generally do not react with most liquids, gases, alkalies, and acids. Most ceramics have very high melting points, and certain ceramics can be used up to temperatures approaching their melting points. Ceramics also remain stable over long time periods.

B Mechanical Properties

Ceramics are extremely strong, showing considerable stiffness under compression and bending. Bend strength, the amount of pressure required to bend a material, is often used to determine the strength of a ceramic. One of the strongest ceramics, zirconium dioxide, has a bend strength similar to that of steel. Zirconias (ZrO2) retain their strength up to temperatures of 900° C (1652° F), while silicon carbides and silicon nitrides retain their strength up to temperatures of 1400° C (2552° F). These silicon materials are used in high-temperature applications, such as to make parts for gas-turbine engines. Although ceramics are strong, temperature-resistant, and resilient, these materials are brittle and may break when dropped or when quickly heated and cooled.

C Physical Properties

Most industrial ceramics are compounds of oxygen, carbon, or nitrogen with lighter metals or semimetals. Thus, ceramics are less dense than most metals. As a result, a light ceramic part may be just as strong as a heavier metal part. Ceramics are also extremely hard, resisting wear and abrasion. The hardest known substance is diamond, followed by boron nitride in cubic-crystal form. Aluminum oxide and silicon carbide are also extremely hard materials and are often used to cut, grind, sand, and polish metals and other hard materials.

D Thermal Properties

Most ceramics have high melting points, meaning that even at high temperatures, these materials resist deformation and retain strength under pressure. Silicon carbide and silicon nitride, for example, withstand temperature changes better than most metals do. Large and sudden changes in temperature, however, can weaken ceramics. Materials that undergo less expansion or contraction per degree of temperature change can withstand sudden changes in temperature better than materials that undergo greater deformation. Silicon carbide and silicon nitride expand and contract less during temperature changes than most other ceramics do. These materials are therefore often used to make parts, such as turbine rotors used in jet engines, that can withstand extreme variations in temperature.

E Electrical Properties

Ceramic Circuit Package A technician’s gloved fingers hold a small semiconductor microchip housed in a ceramic package. The dark ceramic holds the gold-colored microchip at the center of the unit. This ceramic is a good electrical insulator and can conduct away heat generated by the microchip. Ceramic material separates the gold metal connections from one another so that electric signals stay on the correct path from the chip through the wire to the pin.Michael Rosenfeld/Tony Stone Images

Certain ceramics conduct electricity. Chromium dioxide, for example, conducts electricity as well as most metals do. Other ceramics, such as silicon carbide, do not conduct electricity as well, but may still act as semiconductors. (A semiconductor is a material with greater electrical conductivity than an insulator has but with less than that of a good conductor.) Other types of ceramics, such as aluminum oxide, do not conduct electricity at all. These ceramics are used as insulators—devices used to separate elements in an electrical circuit to keep the current on the desired pathway. Certain ceramics, such as porcelain, act as insulators at lower temperatures but conduct electricity at higher temperatures.

F Magnetic Properties

Ceramics containing iron oxide (Fe2O3) can have magnetic properties similar to those of iron, nickel, and cobalt magnets (see Magnetism). These iron oxide-based ceramics are called ferrites. Other magnetic ceramics include oxides of nickel, manganese, and barium. Ceramic magnets, used in electric motors and electronic circuits, can be manufactured with high resistance to demagnetization. When electrons become highly aligned, as they do in ceramic magnets, they create a powerful magnetic field which is more difficult to disrupt (demagnetize) by breaking the alignment of the electrons.

III MANUFACTURE

Industrial ceramics are produced from powders that have been tightly squeezed and then heated to high temperatures. Traditional ceramics, such as porcelain, tiles, and pottery, are formed from powders made from minerals such as clay, talc, silica, and feldspar. Most industrial ceramics, however, are formed from highly pure powders of specialty chemicals such as silicon carbide, alumina, and barium titanate.

The minerals used to make ceramics are dug from the earth and are then crushed and ground into fine powder. Manufacturers often purify this powder by mixing it in solution and allowing a chemical precipitate (a uniform solid that forms within a solution) to form. The precipitate is then separated from the solution, and the powder is heated to drive off impurities, including water. The result is typically a highly pure powder with particle sizes of about 1 micrometer (a micrometer is 0.000001 meter, or 0.00004 in).

A Molding

After purification, small amounts of wax are often added to bind the ceramic powder and make it more workable. Plastics may also be added to the powder to give the desired pliability and softness. The powder can then be shaped into different objects by various molding processes. These molding processes include slip casting, pressure casting, injection molding, and extrusion. After the ceramic is molded, it is heated in a process known as densification to make the material stronger and more dense.

A1 Slip Casting

Slip casting is a molding process used to form hollow ceramic objects. The ceramic powder is poured into a mold that has porous walls, and then the mold is filled with water. The capillary action (forces created by surface tension and by wetting the sides of a tube) of the porous walls drains water through the powder and the mold, leaving a solid layer of ceramic inside.

A2 Pressure Casting

In pressure casting, ceramic powder is poured into a mold, and pressure is then applied to the powder. The pressure condenses the powder into a solid layer of ceramic that is shaped to the inside of the mold.

A3 Injection Molding

Injection molding is used to make small, intricate objects. This method uses a piston to force the ceramic powder through a heated tube into a mold, where the powder cools, hardening to the shape of the mold. When the object has solidified, the mold is opened and the ceramic piece is removed.

A4 Extrusion

Extrusion is a continuous process in which ceramic powder is heated in a long barrel. A rotating screw then forces the heated material through an opening of the desired shape. As the continuous form emerges from the die opening, the form cools, solidifies, and is cut to the desired length. Extrusion is used to make products such as ceramic pipe, tiles, and brick.

B Densification

The process of densification uses intense heat to condense a ceramic object into a strong, dense product. After being molded, the ceramic object is heated in an electric furnace to temperatures between 1000° and 1700° C (1832° and 3092° F). As the ceramic heats, the powder particles coalesce, much as water droplets join at room temperature. As the ceramic particles merge, the object becomes increasingly dense, shrinking by up to 20 percent of its original size . The goal of this heating process is to maximize the ceramic’s strength by obtaining an internal structure that is compact and extremely dense.

IV APPLICATIONS

Ceramics are valued for their mechanical properties, including strength, durability, and hardness. Their electrical and magnetic properties make them valuable in electronic applications, where they are used as insulators, semiconductors, conductors, and magnets. Ceramics also have important uses in the aerospace, biomedical, construction, and nuclear industries.

A Mechanical Applications

Industrial ceramics are widely used for applications requiring strong, hard, and abrasion-resistant materials. For example, machinists use metal-cutting tools tipped with alumina, as well as tools made from silicon nitrides, to cut, shape, grind, sand, and polish cast iron, nickel-based alloys, and other metals. Silicon nitrides, silicon carbides, and certain types of zirconias are used to make components such as valves and turbocharger rotors for high-temperature diesel and gas-turbine engines. The textile industry uses ceramics for thread guides that can resist the cutting action of fibers traveling through these guides at high speed.

B Electrical and Magnetic Applications

Ceramic materials have a wide range of electrical properties. Hence, ceramics are used as insulators (poor conductors of electricity), semiconductors (greater conductivity than insulators but less than good conductors), and conductors (good conductors of electricity).

Ceramics such as aluminum oxide (Al2O3) do not conduct electricity at all and are used to make insulators. Stacks of disks made of this material are used to suspend high-voltage power lines from transmission towers. Similarly, thin plates of aluminum oxide , which remain electrically and chemically stable when exposed to high-frequency currents, are used to hold microchips.

Other ceramics make excellent semiconductors. Small semiconductor chips, often made from barium titanate (BaTiO3) and strontium titanate (SrTiO3), may contain hundreds of thousands of transistors, making possible the miniaturization of electronic devices.

Scientists have discovered a family of copper-oxide-based ceramics that become superconductive at higher temperatures than do metals. Superconductivity refers to the ability of a cooled material to conduct an electric current with no resistance. This phenomenon can occur only at extremely low temperatures, which are difficult to maintain. However, in 1988 researchers discovered a copper oxide ceramic that becomes superconductive at -148° C (-234° F). This temperature is far higher than the temperatures at which metals become superconductors (see Superconductivity).

Thin insulating films of ceramic material such as barium titanate and strontium titanate are capable of storing large quantities of electricity in extremely small volumes. Devices capable of storing electrical charge are known as capacitors. Engineers form miniature capacitors from ceramics and use them in televisions, stereos, computers, and other electronic products.

Ferrites (ceramics containing iron oxide) are widely used as low-cost magnets in electric motors. These magnets help convert electric energy into mechanical energy. In an electric motor, an electric current is passed through a magnetic field created by a ceramic magnet. As the current passes through the magnetic field, the motor coil turns, creating mechanical energy. Unlike metal magnets, ferrites conduct electric currents at high frequencies (currents that increase and decrease rapidly in voltage). Because ferrites conduct high-frequency currents, they do not lose as much power as metal conductors do. Ferrites are also used in video, radio, and microwave equipment. Manganese zinc ferrites are used in magnetic recording heads, and bits of ferric oxides are the active component in a variety of magnetic recording media, such as recording tape and computer diskettes (see Sound Recording and Reproduction; Floppy Disk).

C Aerospace

Aerospace engineers use ceramic materials and cermets (durable, highly heat-resistant alloys made by combining powdered metal with an oxide or carbide and then pressing and baking the mixture) to make components for space vehicles. Such components include heat-shield tiles for the space shuttle and nosecones for rocket payloads.

D Bioceramics

Certain advanced ceramics are compatible with bone and tissue and are used in the biomedical field to make implants for use within the body. For example, specially prepared, porous alumina will bond with bone and other natural tissue. Medical and dental specialists use this ceramic to make hip joints, dental caps, and dental bridges. Ceramics such as calcium hydroxyl phosphates are compatible with bone and are used to reconstruct fractured or diseased bone (See Bioengineering; Dentistry).

E Nuclear Power

Engineers use uranium ceramic pellets to generate nuclear power. These pellets are produced in fuel fabrication plants from the gas uranium hexafluoride (UF6). The pellets are then packed into hollow tubes called fuel rods and are transported to nuclear power plants.

F Building and Construction

Manufacturers use ceramics to make bricks, tiles, piping, and other construction materials. Ceramics for these purposes are made primarily from clay and shale. Household fixtures such as sinks and bathtubs are made from feldspar- and clay-based ceramics.

G Coatings

Because ceramic materials are harder and have better corrosion resistance than most metals, manufacturers often coat metal with ceramic enamel. Manufacturers apply ceramic enamel by injecting a compressed gas containing ceramic powder into the flame of a hydrocarbon-oxygen torch burning at about 2500° C (about 4500° F). The semimolten powder particles adhere to the metal, cooling to form a hard enamel. Household appliances, such as refrigerators, stoves, washing machines, and dryers, are often coated with ceramic enamel.

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Tapestry

2007-01-12T22:46:00.000+03:00

Historically, a handwoven textile or cloth weave, typically decorated with figures, and used as a wall hanging, curtain, carpet, or furniture covering. The term tapestry has also been used to identify any pictorial weaving. Since the 18th century, however, the technical definition of tapestry has been narrowed to include only heavy, reversible, patterned or figured handwoven textiles.

Bayeux Tapestry One of the most famous tapestries in the world is the Bayeux Tapestry (1073-83), which depicts the Norman conquest of England and events leading to it. The piece is actually embroidered wool on linen rather than a true tapestry. The inscriptions worked into the design help to describe the action, and the depictions of costume, arms, and other details are faithful to reality.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

TECHNIQUES AND MATERIALS

Tapestry differs from other forms of weaving in having no weft, or horizontal thread, that is carried the full width of the fabric. Discontinuous colored wefts are used in limited areas to produce patterns. The construction of tapestry weave is such that the wefts are much more numerous than the warps, or vertical threads, which are not visible in the finished tapestry.

As in plain cloth weaving, the weft threads pass over and under alternate warp threads with each passage, or pick. After each pick the wefts are beaten tightly together by battens, reeds, combs, or other devices. The thickness of the warp determines the thickness of the fabric. In 14th-century Europe tapestries were woven with about 5 threads per cm (about 12 threads per in). By the 19th century the royal French factory at Beauvais produced works with as many as 10 to 16 threads per cm (25 to 40 per in). Silk tapestries made in China commonly have as many as 24 threads per cm (60 per in). The grain of tapestries is also determined by the materials used—usually silk or wool, but also linen (see Flax), cotton, and metallic threads.

Weaves

Tapestry involves discontinuous wefts that can meet or join in several ways. The simplest treatment is a slit in which two wefts coming from opposite directions wrap and turn around adjacent warps, leaving an open space. This slit may be left open, as in the Chinese k'o-ssu or the kilims of the Middle East, or it may be sewed up after the tapestry is removed from the loom. A second technique is called dovetailing, in which wefts turn over a common warp. Dovetailing is easily recognized by the blurred or saw-toothed outline that makes the fabric heavier at this joining; it is found in 16th-century Persian tapestry rugs, pre-Columbian Peruvian tapestries, and contemporary Navajo blankets and rugs. Interlocking, introduced in the Gobelins factory in the 18th century, involves adjacent wefts looped through each other between two warps, giving a more continuous surface much prized by French weavers. Another tapestry technique is twill, in which the weft is floated over two or more warps, then under one or more warps to form a diagonal ribbing; introduced into Kashmir from Iran in the 16th century, it was used to make the famed Kashmir shawls (see Cashmere). In contemporary tapestries, eccentric wefts are beaten into curved shapes and packed more tightly in some areas.

Looms

Traditional European tapestry is woven either on a vertical loom (high warp, or haute-lisse) or a horizontal loom (low warp, or basse-lisse). A vertical loom has two horizontal rollers, top and bottom, between which the warps are stretched. Each warp is caught in a loop (heddle or lisse), which is fastened to one of two bars. One bar is attached to the even-numbered threads and the other bar is attached to the odd-numbered threads. The weaver pulls the bars forward alternately to pass the wefts between the warps. The more commonly used low-warp loom has rollers that stretch the warp horizontally. Odd- and even-numbered warps are attached to poles connected to treadles that are depressed by foot to open the warp. No matter which loom is used, the weaver always works from the back, or “wrong,” side.

Cartoons

In the Western tapestry tradition a preparatory drawing, or cartoon, usually was traced or colored by a painter on a canvas the size of the tapestry to be woven. The weavers used this as a model, placing it behind the warp; thus, the finished tapestry was a mirror image of the cartoon.

EASTERN, ASIAN, AND PRE-COLUMBIAN TAPESTRIES

From Bulfinch’s Mythology: Minerva (Athena)
Minerva, the Roman counterpart of the Greek goddess Athena, was the patron deity of the arts and trades. In later Greek mythology she was also the goddess of wisdom. This deity was one of the most important figures in both Greek and Roman mythology. In this excerpt from Bulfinch’s Mythology, 19th-century American writer and mythologist Thomas Bulfinch retells the story of how Arachne, a girl who possessed great talents in weaving, pridefully challenged Minerva to a weaving competition. Bulfinch also gave examples of references to Minerva in English literature.
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The earliest known tapestry weaving was done by the Egyptians in the 15th century bc. Linen fragments were found in the tombs of Thutmose IV and Tutankhamun, preserved by the dry desert climate. Scholars surmise that the ancient Egyptians learned the art of tapestry from the peoples of Mesopotamia. In the 4th century ad the Christian Copts began weaving wool and linen tapestry embellishments for garments.

Greek and Roman tapestries are known primarily from literary sources such as Homer and Ovid and from such historians as Herodotus.

Oriental Tapestries

Silk tapestries called k'o-ssu have long been produced in China, and the earliest surviving examples come from the Tang (T’ang) dynasty (ad 618-907). The word k'o-ssu means broken or cracked silk and refers to the tiny slits formed along the design edges. In the late 15th or early 16th century the tapestry technique was brought from China to Japan. In Kyoto weavers produced a cotton-warp silk-weft tapestry called tsuzure nishike, or “fingernail tapestry,” so called because the weavers worked the weft with their long, specially grooved fingernails (see Chinese Art and Architecture; Japanese Art and Architecture).

Islamic Tapestries

The majority of Islamic tapestries were produced in Egypt after the Muslim invasion in ad 640 (see Islamic Art and Architecture). As a continuation of the earlier Coptic tradition, bands of tapestry garment trimming of wool and silk, occasionally enriched with metal thread, were produced. Islamic motifs usually consisted of interlacing geometric designs, often enclosing inscriptions or small, highly stylized plant and animal forms.

Peruvian Tapestries

Tapestry first appeared in Peru about 900 bc. It was either all cotton or had cotton warp and a weft of cameloid wool (llama, guanaco, alpaca, or vicuña). Finely woven tapestries (60 to 100 threads per cm/152 to 254 per in) could be made on a loom without heddles, employing interlocking, slit, and eccentric weft techniques. Tapestry weaving was used primarily to make garment decorations.

EUROPEAN TAPESTRIES

Tapestry weaving may have been practiced in Europe as early as the 8th century, although no examples remain. Western European tapestry reached its greatest development between the 14th and 18th centuries. During the 19th and 20th centuries, however, revivals of the tapestry tradition occurred.

Paris Workshops

The Lady with the Unicorn The Lady with the Unicorn is the name of a series of Franco-Flemish tapestries executed in the late 1400s that constitute an allegory of the five senses. Woven of silk and wool with silver threads, they are remarkable for their profusion of realistic detail. This panel, the sixth, is called “À mon seul désir” (“To my only desire”) after the words written at the top of the tent. The tapestries are in the Cluny Museum in Paris.Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

In the 14th century the tapestry industry was centered in Paris and Flanders. The most famous Parisian example of this period is the Angers Apocalypse, now in the Musée des Tapisseries, Angers, France. A religious narrative of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, it was woven by Nicolas Bataille in the 1370s. The original set contained seven pieces, each approximately 5 m (about 16.5 ft) high and 24.3 m (80 ft) long. From the same workshop came the Nine Heroes set (Metropolitan Museum, The Cloisters, New York City).

Arras Workshops

Arras, in Flanders, was the other great center of the tapestry industry in the 14th century; the word arras became synonymous with tapestry. Arras regained its supremacy in the 15th century as the Parisian workshops began to fail. Woven on high-warp looms, its luxurious tapestries depicted classical themes, chivalrous romances, and instructive allegories.

Tournai and Brussels Workshops

Other important tapestry centers in the 15th century include the Flemish cities of Tournai and Brussels. Monumental tapestries produced at Tournai are typical of a heavily outlined and solemn Gothic style. By midcentury Brussels led the industry with its reproduction of famous religious paintings by Flemish masters that were commissioned by the papacy and the royal houses of Spain and Austria. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries Brussels also became famous for its tapis d'or, or golden carpets, so called because of their profusion of gold threads. Also about this time the first marks identifying the workshop were woven into the tapestries.

Gobelins, Beauvais, and Aubusson

Tapestry Valence Hunting is the theme of this section of a tapestry valence made in early 17th-century England. Although the tapestry industry was centered in France at this time, good work was being done in other parts of Europe. This piece shows a hunter with his dogs retrieving a rabbit he has shot. The design is simple, but it is visually striking.

The 17th century marked the end of the predominance of the Flemish centers as religious persecution drove Protestant weavers from their homes. The industry shifted to France when Henry IV established workshops in the Louvre in Paris and encouraged the immigration of Flemish weavers. In 1662 the Gobelins workshop was officially established under King Louis XIV's finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Shortly after the Gobelins factory was opened, another major state-subsidized but private factory was established at Beauvais in 1664; this factory made tapestries for the nobility and rich bourgeoisie. Beauvais developed two types of decorative panels: verdures, or landscapes with vegetation, and grotesques, or decorative architectural compositions with small figures. The neighboring town of Aubusson became famous for genre scenes on themes of romantic love derived from India, China, South America, and Africa. In the 18th century, French tapestry became more decorative, adapted for the smaller rococo salon. Classical and contemporary military themes and pastoral scenes were popular. Toward the end of the century the art declined until its revival in the late 19th century.

19th-Century Revival as an Art Form

During the 19th century, for the first time, most tapestries were machine woven and reproduced paintings or previously woven designs for the new middle-class market. Late in the century, however, a genuine revival in tapestry was spearheaded by the English poet and artist William Morris, who, as the leader of the Arts and Crafts movement, reacted to English industrialism. For 15 years Morris operated a factory that produced handwoven tapestries at Merton Abbey near London.

20th-Century Revivals

Followers of Morris were influential in the tapestry revival in 20th-century France. After World War I (1914-1918) the tapestry industry at Aubusson was revitalized. In the 1930s most tapestries were copies of works by contemporary artists, but a few were specially designed as tapestries by such artists as Jean Lurçat. Another, quite different direction for modern tapestry began with the creation of the design school of the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, in 1919; Anni Albers combined craft and technology in abstract compositions designed for industrial production.

Contemporary Tapestries

Tapestries considered truly modern emerged beginning in the 1950s. Their monumental size and bulky nontraditional materials clearly relate to the austerity and scale of modern architecture. A contemporary tapestry may be constructed with many different techniques: It may be woven on or off a loom; or it may be knotted, knitted, or crocheted, among other techniques. Twentieth-century textiles are recognized as individual creations along with painting and sculpture.

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WESTERN POTTERY

2007-01-02T20:57:00.000+03:00

Mesopotamian Pottery

The historical styles of Western pottery include those of the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean as well as those of the medieval Muslim world and medieval and modern Europe.

Ancient Middle East

Iznik Ware Thrives in Turkey

The earliest Middle Eastern pottery yet discovered comes from Çatal Hüyük, in Anatolia, and dates from 6500 bc. In addition to terra-cotta cult statues and painted clay statuettes, the ware from this site (near modern Çumra, Turkey) includes pieces painted in red ocher on a body covered with cream slip. Other pottery was monochromatic—buff, light gray, beige, or brick red. It was coil built and paddled, then burnished; some pots were incised with simple horizontal lines. The ware was fired either in a bread oven or in a closed kiln with a separate firing chamber. Other Neolithic pottery from the Middle East, primarily from Syria, had impressed designs or was combed with the edge of a cardium shell. See Iranian Art and Architecture; Mesopotamian Art and Architecture.

Persia and Mesopotamia

The earliest painted ceramics of northern Mesopotamia date from just before the 5th millennium bc. At Samarra’, stylized human and animal figures were painted with colors ranging from red to brown and black on a buff background. Shortly thereafter, polychrome pottery of higher quality was made at Tell Halaf, where potters had learned more thorough control of their kilns.

At about the same time, Persian potters painted geometric designs on pots covered with light-colored slip. By the 4th millennium the potter's wheel was in use. People from the north migrated to Persia and introduced red and gray monochromatic pottery. At the height of the Ubaid period (4th millennium bc) a pottery industry around Susa produced many drinking vessels and bowls from refined clay. Coated with a greenish-yellow slip, they were decorated in a free style with painted geometric shapes, plants, birds, other animals, and stick-figure people.

Glazed pottery began to be produced about 1500 bc. The finest Mesopotamian ceramic work was not in domestic pottery, but rather in glazed brickwork used for architectural ornamentation. The tradition began in the 3rd millennium at Erech (Uruk), where columns and niches were covered with a geometric mosaic of colored nail-like ceramic cones. In Babylonia during the Kassite rule (mid-2nd millennium bc), unglazed terra-cotta was used to face temples and palaces. During the 8th century bc, at Khorsabad, the capital of the Assyrian monarch Sargon II, a temple entrance was decorated with molded glazed brickwork depicting animals in procession. This tradition reached its climax in Babylon in the 6th century bc. There the famous processional way was lined with glazed bricks on which more than 700 bulls, dragons, and lions were carved and molded, then glazed in a palette ranging from white to yellow to brownish-black against a blue or greenish-blue ground. The facade of the royal throne room was decorated with lions on walls and with columns crowned and surrounded by stylized palmettos and lotus buds.

Egypt
Egyptian Pottery Pottery was one of the earliest art forms undertaken by the ancient Egyptians. This piece from the Predynastic period (5000 bc-3000 bc) is decorated with ostriches, boats, and geometrical designs.Art Resource, NY

In the 5th millennium bc Egyptian potters made graceful, thin, dark, highly polished ware with subtle cord decoration. The painted ware of the 4th millennium, with geometric and animal figures on red, brown, and buff bodies, was not of the same high standard. Dynastic Egypt was famous for its faience (to be distinguished from the later European ceramics of that name). First made about 2000 bc, it is characterized by a dark green or blue glaze over a body high in powdered quartz, somewhat closer to glass than to true ceramics. Egyptian artisans made faience beads and jewelry, elegant cups, scarabs, and ushabti (small servant figures buried with the dead).

Mediterranean, Greece, and Rome

Pottery from the islands of the Mediterranean and Aegean during the late Bronze Age (1500-1050 bc) and early Iron Age (1050-750 bc), especially from Crete (Kríti) and Cyprus, showed great imagination on the part of the artists, who painted bichrome ware with geometric, abstract, and figurative designs. At times, pottery shapes were fanciful and seemingly nonfunctional; at other times, in vessels used for ointments and cosmetics, the shapes were quite delicate. See Aegean Civilization; Greek Art and Architecture; Roman Art and Architecture.

Greece
Northampton Vase The Northampton Vase is an example of Greek vase painting from the late 600s and early 500s bc. The shape of this vase is known as an amphora, one of six standard shapes used in pottery at that time. The mythological creatures and delicate, floral designs reflect the Greek interest in Oriental imagery, and these forms are augmented with white and brown highlights.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

The fashioning and painting of ceramics was a major art in classical Greece. Native clay was shaped easily on the wheel, and each distinct form had a name and a specific function in Greek society and ceremonial: The amphora was a tall, two-handled storage vessel for wine, corn, oil, or honey; the hydria, a three-handled water jug; the lecythus, an oil flask with a long, narrow neck, for funeral offerings; the cylix, a double-handled drinking cup on a foot; the oenochoe, a wine jug with a pinched lip; the crater, a large bowl for mixing wine and water. Undecorated black pottery was used throughout Greek and Hellenistic times, the forms being related either to those of decorated pottery or to those of metalwork. Both styles influenced Roman ceramics.

Even in the Bronze Age, the Greeks took advantage of oxidizing and reducing kilns to produce a shiny black slip on a cream, brownish, or orange-buff body, the shade depending on the type of clay. At first, decorative designs were abstract. By the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1500 bc), however, stylized forms from nature appeared. By the Late Bronze Age, plants, sea creatures, and fanciful animals were painted on pots of well-conceived shape by the Mycenaeans, who were initially influenced by Cretan potters. Athenian geometric style replaced the Mycenaean about 1000 bc and declined by the 6th century bc. Large craters in the Geometric style, with bands of ornament, warriors, and processional figures laid out in horizontal registers, were found at the Dipylon cemetery of Athens; they date from about 750 bc.

Attic potters introduced black-figure ware in the early 6th century. Painted black forms adorned the polished red clay ground, with detail rendered by incising through the black. White and reddish-purple were added for skin and garments. Depictions of processions and chariots continued; animals and hybrid beasts were also shown (particularly in the Orientalizing period, roughly 700 to 500 bc), at times surrounded by geometric or vegetal motifs. Such decoration was always well integrated with the vessel shapes, and the iconography of Greek mythology is clear. Beginning in the 6th century, the decoration emphasized the human figure far more than animals. Favorite themes included people and gods at work, battle, and banquet; musicians; weddings and other ceremonies; and women at play or dressing. In some cases, events or heroes were labeled. Mythological and literary scenes became more frequent. Potters' and painters' names and styles have been identified, even when they did not sign their works.

Red-figure pottery was invented about 530 bc, becoming especially popular between 510 and 430. The background was painted black, and the figures were left in reserve on the red-brown clay surface; details on the figures were painted in black, which allowed the artist greater freedom in drawing. The paint could also be diluted for modulating the color. Secondary colors of red and white were used less; gold sometimes was added for details of metal and jewelry. Anatomy was rendered more realistically, and after 480, so were nuances of gesture and expression. Although Athens and Corinth were centers for red-figure pottery, the style also spread to the Greek islands. By the 4th century bc, however, it declined in quality. Another Greek style featured outline drawing on a white ground, with added colors imitating monumental painting; these vessels, however, were impractical for domestic use.

Rome

The Romans admired highly polished red-gloss earthenware—possibly in reaction against Greek and Hellenistic black pottery. The red-gloss technique developed in the eastern Mediterranean in the late Hellenistic period (323-31 bc). This ware was made by dipping the pot in a suspension of fine particles of high-silica clay (which gave a higher gloss when polished) and firing it in an oxidizing kiln. Decoration was in raised designs: The pots were formed in clay molds that had been impressed along the edges with roulettes in repeat motifs, stamped with other designs and figures, and given further details that were hand-carved in the mold—hence the term terra sigillata (“stamped earth”) for this ware. (The term is often also applied by extension to the clay suspension in which the pots were dipped.) Many designs and shapes were inspired by metalwork and cut glass. Arretium (modern Arezzo) was the center for red-gloss ware with relief decoration, and the best of this pottery, from the 1st centuries bc and ad , is thus called Arretine ware. Several areas of the Roman Empire made Arretine ware, but as manufacture moved farther from the capital, the quality of the red-gloss ware declined. The best was from southern France from the 1st century ad.

The BLAck-gloss ware that the Greeks had made also spread through the Roman Empire. In England it resembled Celtic metalwork. At times the wet clay was pinched out to create a dotted effect; other pots were decorated with white slip or pigment. Roman potters also made lead glazes, a procedure that enabled them to add metal oxides for color. Lead-glazed earthenware became the major pottery of medieval Europe.

Islamic Pottery

The first Muslim potters of the Umayyad dynasty (ad 661-750) inherited the traditions of the Middle East: the blue- and green-glazed quartz fritwares known in Egypt since Roman times; the alkaline-glazed pottery of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Iran, known since Achaemenid times (7th-4th century bc); and the Roman lead-glazed ware, continued by Byzantine potters. Three successive waves of Chinese influence inspired change in Islamic pottery: from the 9th century to 11th century, Tang stoneware; from the 12th century to 14th century, Song white ware; and from the 15th century to 19th century, Ming blue-and-white ware. See Islamic Art and Architecture.

Medieval Arabic Styles

In the 9th century, caliphs of the Abbasid dynasty encouraged local artisans to imitate imported Tang pottery with local clay and glazes. The Arab potters soon developed their own style—first in unglazed pottery with molded, stamped, and applied-relief decoration, then in underglaze sgraffito designs and in opaque white tin-glazed bowls with painted flowers and inscriptions, and finally in luster painting. Lusterware was earthenware with an opaque white tin glaze, fired once, then painted with metallic pigments and refired in a reduction kiln. The designs reflected metallic hues of red, bronze, lime, and yellow.

When potters emigrated from Iraq to the western Muslim world in the 10th century, the luster technique moved with them. As with tin glazes, lusterware ultimately influenced Europe by way of the Arab residence in Spain. It was also popular in Fatimid Egypt (969-1171) and Iran.

Iran and Turkey
Turkish Mug This mug was made in 16th-century Turkey during the Ottoman Empire. It is earthenware, with a white underglaze and blue, purple, and red overglazes. The floral and calligraphic designs are similar to those found in most Islamic art. This piece is part of the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

The Seljuk dynasty that ruled Iran, Iraq, Asia Minor, and Syria in the 12th and 13th centuries found substitutes for porcelain, and the Iranian cities of Rayy and Kashan became centers for this white ware. Another fine Seljuk type was Mina'i ware, an enamel-overglaze pottery that, in its delicacy, imitated illuminated manuscripts. Kashan potters, after the 13th-century Mongol conquests, used green glazes influenced by Chinese celadons. Cobalt-blue glazes appeared in Iran in the 9th century but later fell out of use. They were taken up again in the 14th to the 18th century in response to the popularity of blue-and-white ware with Chinese and European clients.

Iznik was the center for Turkish pottery. There slip-painted pieces influenced by Persian and Afghanistani ware predated the Ottoman Turks' conquest of the region. Later, between 1490 and 1700, Iznik ware displayed decorations painted under a thin transparent glaze on a loose-textured white body; in its three stages the designs were in cobalt blue, then turquoise and purple, then red.

During the Safavid dynasty, Kubachi ware, contemporary to Iznik pottery, was probably made in northwestern Iran, and not at the town of Kubachi where it was found. Characteristic Kubachi pieces were large polychrome plates, painted underneath their crackle glazes. Gombroon ware, exported from that Persian Gulf port to Europe and the Far East in the 16th and 17th centuries, featured incised decorations on translucent white earthenware bodies. Copper-colored Persian lusterware was fashionable in the 17th century, as was polychrome painted ware.

In general, Islamic pottery was made in molds. Shapes were either Chinese inspired or were the basic shapes of metalwork. In addition to lusterware, the most creative work was the manufacture of tiles for mosques.

Europe to 1800

Islamic tin-glazed pottery and lusterware became the ceramics of Spain from the 13th through the 15th century. At times called Hispano-Moresque ware, it had its center of manufacture at the Valencian town of Manises. It was exported from Mallorca, and thus the extremely popular Italian Renaissance ceramics that it influenced were known as maiolica, from the Italian name for Mallorca.

Maiolica, Faience, and Delftware
Delftware Plate This plate, based on an Italian folk design, is an example of delftware, which was popular in England in the mid-1700s. It comes from the English town of Lambeth. Delftware features bright colors painted over a white glaze previously fired.

In maiolica, painting over the white glaze was further developed, in yellow, orange, green, turquoise, blue, purplish-brown, and black. Frequently a transparent overglaze was added, as well as incised and molded-relief decoration. Made in many Italian cities in the 15th to 16th century, this ware bore little resemblance to its Spanish namesake. After 1600 the name faience was applied to the French variation of this tin-glazed ware, as well as to 16th- and 17th-century French and Belgian majolica-influenced pottery. In Germany, where it flourished until the 18th century, it was called fayence. After the center of its manufacture shifted from Antwerp to Delft in the mid-17th century, the name delftware, even for its English variation, came into use. The English delftware was made in London, Liverpool, and Bristol and in Dublin, until creamware (see Stoneware and Lead-Glazed Earthenware, below) began to replace it in the 1770s.

Tin-glazed ware remained popular in Europe until the early 19th century. It was made by dipping the biscuit-fired pot into a basic lead glaze to which tin oxide (an opacifier and whitener) had been added. This produced a dense white that completely covered the color of the clay body, providing a surface for painting any glaze color successful at moderate to high earthenware temperatures. Silver and gold were used for Spanish lusterware, painted over the fired glaze and refired in a low-temperature reduction kiln. In the 18th century, the fired tin glaze was painted with overglaze enamels and the pottery refired in a muffle kiln.

The full impact of Ming porcelain was felt throughout Europe in the first half of the 17th century, particularly in the golden age of delftware (1630-1700). The pottery became thinner, its decoration more delicate. Manganese purple outlines were drawn on the clay before the biscuit firing; then the underglaze blue and the final lead-and-tin glaze were applied. Tiles, plates, jugs, and vases were made, and the different Delft factory marks were imitated, even by the Chinese.

Stoneware and Lead-Glazed Earthenware
Wedgwood Vase This vase was designed by the English sculptor John Flaxman for Josiah Wedgwood in about 1780. It is made of Jasperware, with neoclassical scenes from Greek mythology molded in relief in white.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

European stoneware was developed in Germany at the end of the 14th century. It was salt-glazed: Common salt (an alkali) was thrown into the kiln, and soda from the salt created a glassy layer on the pot's surface. Hafner ware, a lead-glazed earthenware, was popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, with many vessels imitating metal jugs and tankards. Traditional English earthenware was decorated with slips and lead glazed, as was central European peasant pottery, taken to America by emigrants.

English stoneware was made on a large scale only after the late 17th century. The best of Staffordshire white salt-glazed stoneware was made between 1720 and 1760. Staffordshire was also a center for creamware, a popular lead-glazed earthenware made of Devonshire white clay mixed with calcined flint. In 1754 the English ceramist Josiah Wedgwood began to experiment with colored creamware. He established his own factory, but often worked with others who did transfer printing (introduced by the Worcester Porcelain Company in the 1750s). He also produced red stoneware; basaltes ware, an unglazed black stoneware; and jasperware, made of white stoneware clay that had been colored by the addition of metal oxides. Jasperware was usually ornamented with white relief portraits or Greek classical scenes. Wedgwood's greatest contribution to European ceramics, however, was his fine pearl ware, an extremely pale creamware with a bluish tint to its glaze.

European Porcelain

Sèvres Porcelain Cup Sèvres is a type of French porcelain noted for its richly colored backgrounds and white panels decorated with birds. Made in the town of the same name in France, it gained popularity after 1706. The factory owed its prosperity in large part to the patronage of emperor Napoleon I and his wife, Josephine, whose portrait appears on this two-handled cup.Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

The first soft-paste porcelains, cream rather than white in color, were made in Italy in the 16th century. The technique of making hard-paste porcelain was developed by the German ceramist Johann Friedrich Böttiger in 1708 or 1709. A factory was established in Meissen, Germany, in 1710. Because Böttiger did some of his early work near the city of Dresden, Meissen porcelain is sometimes known as Dresden porcelain. The early success of Meissen was due in part to the high artistic level of its decoration. Meissen was the preferred European porcelain until about 1756, when Sèvres became increasingly popular. Sèvres, the most celebrated French porcelain, was first produced in Vincennes in 1738. Through the influence of Madame de Pompadour, mistress of King Louis XV, the factory was moved from Vincennes to Sèvres in 1756. Sèvres porcelain is renowned for its richly colored backgrounds and white panels decorated with birds. The production of hard-paste porcelain began in Limoges in 1771, when deposits of kaolin were discovered near that city. In 1784 the Limoges factory became a subsidiary of the royal factory in Sèvres.

The best early English porcelain was made in Chelsea in 1745. After its factory was sold to one in Derby in 1769, neoclassical style dominated domestic ware and figurines. In the 1740s a patent was taken out by porcelain makers at Bow in London, using bone ash in the clay body. The Lowestoft factory in Suffolk (established about 1757) used a similar formula. Glassy soft-paste porcelain was made in Staffordshire in the 18th century; Josiah Spode of that town was credited with having introduced the Staffordshire variety of Bow bone china.

19th and 20th Centuries

Stoneware Vase by Bernard Leach British potter and ceramist Bernard Howell Leach, influenced by his studies in Japanese ceramic traditions, inspired a revival of artistic pottery making in the 20th century. This vase, from 1957, shows the subtle tones and abstract decoration typical of Leach’s works.Peter Kinnear/Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Inexpensive transfer-printed wares for mass sale were popular in 19th-century England and on the Continent, as were relief-decorated wares. These spread to the United States, along with the manganese-brown Rockingham glazes developed in England in the early 19th century; the latter were popular with New Jersey and Ohio potteries. Mass-produced ware gradually displaced the dominant U.S. folk pottery, a vigorous salt-glazed stoneware.

Commercially produced ceramics after 1860 were of high quality. Some of the finest were and still are made by the Royal Porcelain factory in Copenhagen. The introduction of the art nouveau style, the Paris Exhibition of 1900, and the ideals of the Bauhaus school in the 1920s all influenced industrial ceramic design.

The individual studio or artist potter has been as important to the history of modern pottery as the industrial potter. The English Arts and Crafts movement of the 1860s influenced such potters as William De Morgan and (after 1871) the salt-glazed stoneware of the Doulton factories in Lambeth. In the United States the Rookwood factory (1880, Cincinnati, Ohio), the Grueby Faience Company (1897, Boston), and the Pewabic Pottery Works (1900, Detroit) brought prestige to the artist-potter. The international reputation of the English potters Bernard Leach—trained in Japan and inspired by Japanese and English folk potters—and Michael Ambrose Cardew—a leader in the 20th-century revival of pottery—further enhanced the contemporary tradition of the artist-artisan in clay. Pottery is also produced for a wide range of industrial purposes, including for use as plumbing fixtures and aerospace components.

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PRE-COLUMBIAN AMERICAS

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Ancient American pottery—put to ritual, funerary, and domestic use—developed distinctive, sophisticated shapes and decorative styles, wholly unrelated to those of the Old World and executed on a high artistic level. Pots were built by coiling, hand modeling, and molding; the potter's wheel was unknown. Painted decoration was in clay slips colored with vegetable and mineral pigments. See Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture.

South America

Moche Stirrup-Spout Portrait Bottle Portrait bottles such as this were unique to the Moche culture of Peru. Produced during the 5th and 6th centuries, they were generally hand built and used a two-colored slip for the glaze. The images represented either warriors or priests. The stirrup-spout was also used on other types of jars and bottles.

Moche Pottery Vessel Three fanged deities emerge from a bundle of corn cobs in this Moche vessel from the 5th or 6th century. Made of terra-cotta, this bottle was undoubtedly used for ceremonial purposes, as was most of the pottery produced by this Andean culture.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Pottery from about 3200 bc has been found at Ecuadorian sites, but the foremost styles appeared in Peru. There, the Chavín style (which reached its height from about 800 bc to about 400 bc), with its jaguar motifs, was succeeded in the Classic period (1st millennium ad) by one of the finest pre-Columbian potteries, that of the Mochica culture of the north coast. Molded buff-colored vases were painted in red with vivid narrative scenes; portraitlike jars were modeled in relief with great subtlety. Both had the characteristic Peruvian stirrup spout, a hollow handle with a central vertical spout. To the south the Nazca culture produced double-spouted polychrome jars with complex stylized animal motifs. The later Tiahuanacu and Inca polychrome styles were well crafted but were less dazzling.

Middle America
Maya Ceramic Figure The Maya of pre-Columbian America depended on maize for their subsistence. This ceramic figure made about ad 600-800 is a representation of a maize god with jewelry made of kernels and an elaborate headdress. The piece was originally brightly colored. The stylized form of the figure is characteristic of Maya ceramic work.

The earliest domestic Mexican ceramics date from the Formative period (1500-1000 bc) in the Valley of Mexico. On the Gulf coast the Olmec culture produced hollow, naturalistic figurines. During the Classic period (ad 300? to 900?), pottery figurines from the east showed lively freedom of expression; those from the west were often grouped in impressionistic scenes of daily life. At Teotihuacán in the central plateau, polychrome three-footed vessels were produced in molds. In the Post-Classic era the Toltecs occupied the central plateau, producing typical ceramics painted red on cream or orange on buff. Later, the Aztecs first assimilated earlier abstract decoration, then turned to red and orange bowls ornamented with birds and other life forms (see Aztec Empire:Tools and Crafts). Farther south, the Zapotecs and Mixtecs resisted Aztec influence. Besides modeled animals, humans, and gods, they made a highly burnished polychrome ware that influenced later Mexican pottery.

Moche Artists Create Pottery Sculptures

Maya ware attained a variety and quality unique in Mesoamerican ceramics. Maya ware of the Classic period included delicate figurines, polychrome cylindrical vases with scenes and glyphs resembling those in Mayan manuscripts, and plaques containing whistles, with molded and modeled scenes of everyday life.

North America

Zuñi Storage Jar Pottery making is an old and respected tradition among the Zuñi people of North America. This storage jar from the early 1900s was made using the “coil” method, in which long, thin coils of clay are formed around a flat, circular base and built up to create the shape of the jar, then smoothed and glazed. The white background with black and brown geometric designs is characteristic of Zuñi pottery.

Anasazi Pottery Bowl The Anasazi culture of North America flourished in the 1st millennium ad. This bowl, with its dark-on-light geometric designs, is typical of Anasazi pottery, which is highly valued.Buddy Mays

In the Mississippi Valley the Mound Builders of the 1st millennium bc produced painted, modeled, and incised ware. In the Southwest, fine pottery was made by the ancestors of the Pueblo peoples—notably the red-on-buff ware (ad600?-900?) of the Hohokam and the polychrome ware (1300 and later) of the Anasazi, both adorned with human and animal figures; and the delightful, distinctive Mimbres pottery (1000-1200) of the Mogollon culture, with black-on-white geometric designs, birds, bats, frogs, and ceremonial scenes. The ancient tradition has been carried on into modern Pueblo pottery, notably in the work of Maria Martinez, who is widely known for her burnished black ware.

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Pottery-East Asia

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EAST ASIA

The leading pottery centers in East Asian history were China, Korea, and Japan. See Japanese Art and Architecture; Chinese Art and Architecture; Korean Art and Architecture.

China

Neolithic Chinese Jar This jar from Gansu in north central China is dated about 2500 bc. It is a very early wheel-thrown piece and features geometric designs in black and reddish-brown on a buff-colored body. This piece may have been used as a burial urn.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

In Neolithic China, pottery was made by coil building and then beating the shapes with a paddle; toward the end of the period (2nd millennium bc) vessels were begun using the handbuilt technique, then finished on a wheel. At Gansu, in northwestern China, vessels from the Pan-shan culture, made from finely textured clay and fired to buff or reddish-brown, were brush painted with mineral pigments in designs of strong S-shaped lines converging on circles. They date from 2600 bc. The early Chinese kiln was the simple updraft type; the fire was made below the ware, and vents in the floor allowed the flames and heat to rise. Lung-shan pottery, from the central plains, was wheel made. Chinese Neolithic vessels include a wide variety of shapes—tripods, ewers, urns, cups, amphorae, and deep goblets.

The Shang Period

The Neolithic prototypes became the basis for bronze vessels during the Shang period (1570?-1045? bc), and Shang ceramic molds for bronze casting, made of high-quality clay, have been found. Shang pottery had four basic types, most of them found at the capital at Anyang, in present-day Henan (Ho-nan) Province. The first continued the Neolithic functional tradition in coarse gray clay, decorated with impressed cords or incised geometric patterns; the second consisted of dark gray imitations of bronze vessels; the third, white pottery with finely carved decoration resembling bronze designs; the last, glazed stoneware.

Zhou Period Through the Six Dynasties

Soldiers of the Imperial Bodyguard These life-sized terra-cotta figures are a small part of the more than 6000 figures and horses that were made for the tomb of Emperor Qin Shihuangdi of the Chinese Qin dynasty in 210 bc. They were originally painted in bright colors. The burial mound, in the northern province of Shaanxi, was discovered in 1974.

Except for the white pottery, all the Shang types continued in the Zhou period (1045?-256 bc). Coarse red earthenware with lead glazes was introduced in the Warring States era (403-221 bc); this ware also resembled bronzes. In the south, stoneware with a pale brown glaze was fashioned into sophisticated shapes.

The discovery in 1974 of the terra-cotta army of Shihuangdi (Shih-huang-ti), the first emperor of the Qin (Ch’in) dynasty (221-206 bc)—an imperial legion of more than 6000 life-size soldiers and horses buried in military formation—added new dimensions to modern knowledge of the art of the ancient Chinese potters. These handsome idealized portraits, each with different details of dress, were modeled from coarse gray clay, with heads and hands fired separately at high earthenware temperatures and attached later. Afterward, the assembled, fired figures were painted with bright mineral pigments (a procedure called cold decoration), most of which have now flaked.

Tomb figures and objects with molded and painted decoration continued to be made in the Han dynasty (206 bc-ad 220); these included houses, human figures, and even stoves. Bricks sometimes were decorated with scenes of everyday animal and human activity. Gray stoneware with a thick green glaze and reddish earthenware were also produced.

During the Six Dynasties period (ad 220-589), celadon-glazed stoneware, a precursor of later porcelain celadons, began to appear. (Celadons are transparent iron-pigmented glazes fired in a reducing kiln that yield gray, pale blue or green, or brownish-olive.) Called Yüeh (or green) ware, they were less influenced than earlier pottery by the shapes of cast bronzes. Jars, ewers, and dishes became more delicate of line and classical in contour, and some had simple incised or molded ornamentation.

Tang (T’ang) and Song Dynasties

Tang Pottery Camel This standing camel was made during the Tang dynasty (618-906) in China. It is probably a tomb figurine, many of which were made at that time. The glazes were made of lead, and the colors were originally vivid. Tang potters took advantage of properties inherent in the medium of clay. Up to that time sculptors working in clay tended merely to imitate existing bronze pieces.

Tomb figures and stoneware continued to be made during the Tang dynasty (618-907) and display stylistic influences from Central Asia. Bowls and basins with carved decoration were exported to India, Southeast Asia, and the Muslim Empire. Two important ceramic types characterized this period. One was a fine white earthenware covered with a lead glaze of glowing yellow and green tints, often in mottled patterns. The other, the most significant innovation of the Tang potters, was porcelain—made into thin, delicate bowls and vases with clear, bluish or greenish glazes.

Porcelain was further refined in the Song dynasty (960-1279), the age in which all art flourished, and the greatest era of Chinese pottery. Potters became adept at controlling glazes, a trend that began in the Tang period. Vessels were elegantly shaped. Decoration—molded, carved, or painted—included dragons, fish, lotuses, and peonies. These were scholarly subjects of the court painters and each represented a virtue. Kilns were established throughout China, each kiln site having its own style.

In the Northern Song, three outstanding styles emerged: Ting, Ju, and Chün. Ting ware was decorated with the previously mentioned motifs and covered with a smooth ivory glaze. It was admired by courtly patrons but was also used as everyday pottery. Ju was a coarse stoneware covered with a celadonlike light bluish-gray glaze with a subtle crackle. Chün glazes, thickly applied, ranged from blue to lavender, with added splashes of copper red or purple. Later, in the 12th century, Northern Song celadons reached their height, with a gray stoneware body covered in transparent olive or light brown. Tz'u-chou, a popular stoneware used by all social classes, combined transparent glazes with bold slip painting, sgraffito, carving, incising, impressing, and molding, as well as polychrome overglaze enameling, all in a great variety of motifs. The Lung-ch'üan celadons of the Southern Song—white porcelain with light bluish-green jadelike crackled glazes—were of even higher quality. The shapes were varied, some inspired by ancient bronzes, some by Middle Eastern metalwork and glass. Many were exported. Other famous wares were Chi-chou, white porcelain with a slightly bluish or greenish glaze (similar to the white Ch'ing-pai made later in the Song era), exported to Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines; and Chien ware, dark-bodied stoneware with a blackish-brown glaze scattered with metallic blue and black spots.

Yuan and Ming Dynasties

Ming Dynasty Pottery The pottery produced in China during the Ming dynasty is among the finest in the world. The multiple colors used in this vase from the 15th century are unusual for Ming pottery, which is generally blue and white. The imagery is a combination of floral designs and fantastic creatures depicted in classic Chinese style.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

The Mongol conquests of the mid-13th century brought new foreign influences. Under the Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) potters adjusted to produce for an expanding export market. The size of vessels increased, and potters experimented with bright enamel overglaze colors. Ch'ing-pai and Lung-ch'üan wares became heavier. White porcelain vases with blue underglaze painting were produced.

Three Ming Vases These three vessels date from the Ming dynasty in China. The two vases with covers are formal in design, while the wine ewer in the shape of a mandarin duck with a baby on its back is more playful but still elegant. All three pieces are porcelain with blue glaze underneath and, in the case of the wine ewer, some additional goldwork. The blue glaze came from a cobalt-oxide medium developed in Iran.

This blue-and-white ware became a major export item in the Ming period (1368-1644). Under its clear glaze the porcelain body was painted with designs of great vigor and freedom of line in cobalt oxide (imported from Iran until a local source was substituted). These pieces became the favorites of 16th-century Europe, although Ming potters also made polychrome stoneware and monochromatic and white wares. New in the Ming era was the delicate Tou-ts'ai ware, a glassy porcelain with overglaze enamel painting. The court provided potters with a wide variety of new designs: scrolls, fruit, flowers, and scenes with people. Pottery was marked with dates of the emperors' reigns; the marks of successful pieces were imitated in later times.

Export to Europe reached its height in the late 17th century, when artistic standards were still high. A new enamel style, introduced from Europe and called famille rose, had as its principal color a delicate opaque pink, the metallic pigment for which was derived from colloidal gold. The famille rose colors could be mixed for shading and allowed miniature precision in drawing.

Qing Period

A vast number of fine porcelain vessels were produced in the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), for both domestic and foreign markets, with potters concentrating on the refinement of glazes. Popular polychrome enamel styles were famille verte (green, yellow, and aubergine purple) and its derivatives, famille noir (black ground) and famille jaune (yellow ground). Monochromatic copper red glazes popular in Ming—both oxblood (sang de boeuf) and the paler peach bloom—were revived, as were Song celadons. In the 18th century, European collecting of Chinese porcelain was at its peak. By the end of the century, however, the endless repetitions of old motifs and forms led to sterility, and the Chinese could no longer compete with European mass-produced porcelain.

Korea

Korean Pottery, Choson Dynasty This ceramic vase dates from the Choson dynasty (1392-1910) of Korean history. The vase exhibits the blue and white style characteristic of traditional Choson pottery. Noted for its elaborate decoration, Choson pottery ranks as some of the most beautiful in the world.Philadelphia Museum of Art/Continuum Productions Corporation

Chinese pottery and porcelain always exerted a strong influence in Korea, but Korean potters introduced subtle variations on Chinese models. Gray stoneware, found in tombs, was typical of the Silla dynasty (4th to 10th century ad ). Song-influenced celadons characterize pottery of the Koryo dynasty (918-1392). Later work, although less refined, was admired for its straightforward dignity. Koreans, in turn, introduced Korean and Chinese pottery into Japan.

Japan

The earliest ceramics of Neolithic Japan, those from the Jomon period (10,000?-300? bc), were shaped by hand, usually by the coil method. Decorated with impressions of cords and mats, they were baked in an open fire at a low temperature. Colors were reddish or ranged from gray to black. Some cult figures and utilitarian vessels were highly burnished or covered with a red iron oxide. The pottery of the Yayoi culture (300? bc-ad 250?), made by a Mongol people who came from Korea to Kyushu, has been found throughout Japan. The Yayoi used the wheel for their yellow and light brown earthenware, the smooth surface of which was at times painted bright red.

Two basic kiln types—both still in use—were employed in Japan by this time. The bank, or climbing, kiln, of Korean origin, is built into the slope of a mountain, with as many as 20 chambers; firing can take up to two weeks. In the updraft, or bottle, kiln, a wood fire at the mouth of a covered trench fires the pots, which are in a circular-walled chamber at the end of the fire trench; the top is covered except for a hole to let the smoke escape.

From the later Kofun, or Tumulus (Grave Mound), period (about ad 300 to 552), pottery was found in the enormous tombs of the Japanese emperors. Called Haji ware, it resembled Yayoi pottery. More truly unique were the haniwa, delightful unglazed reddish earthenware figures that surrounded the tombs—houses, boats, animals, women, hunters, musicians, and warriors. Although the haniwa lack the grandeur of the Qin emperor's army, they compensate for it with their rustic vitality. Sué was another pottery of this period, a gray stoneware fired in a climbing kiln and decorated with a natural ash glaze (formed during the firing as ash from the wood fuel fell on the pots). Originating in Korea, the natural ash glaze became characteristic of later Japanese wares made at Tamba, Tokoname, Bizen, and Shigaraki. Jars, bottles, dishes, and cups were made, some with sculpted figures. Sué ware continued to be made in the Asuka period (552-710), when Chinese cultural and religious influences were just beginning.

Nara Through Kamakura Periods

With the Nara period (710-784), Japan's first historical epoch, the full impact of Tang China ware became obvious in Japan's production of high-fire pottery. Some glazes were monochromatic green or yellowish-brown; some were two-color, green and white; a few had three of these colors on rough grayish bodies. The glaze patterns were streaks and spots, not quite as refined as Tang ceramics. Most examples of this work are preserved at the Shosoin imperial treasury at Nara.

In the early Heian period (794-894), natural ash glazes were further developed, and celadons were introduced to Japan. Then, because of disruptions in relations with China in the late Heian, or Fujiwara, period (894-1185), the quality of the pottery declined. Once contact with Song China was renewed in the Kamakura period (1185-1333), the ceramics industry flourished, this time centered at Seto, near Nagoya. Ki-seto, or yellow Seto—still made today—was influenced by the popular Song celadons; the Japanese equivalents, however, were fired in oxidizing kilns, which gave their glazes yellow and amber hues. Tokoname, a rustic pottery for everyday use, was also made in the Fujiwara period, as were other types that retain their primitive appeal.

Muromachi and Momoyama Periods

Tea Jar and Vase The tea ceremony became popular in Japan in the Muromachi (1338-1573) and Monoyama (1573-1603) periods. This created the desire for vessels such as this tea jar and vase. Dating from the late 16th century, they are in the Seattle Art Museum in Seattle, Washington.Seattle Art Museum/Corbis

Although the Ashikaga shoguns of the Muromachi period (1338-1573) did not encourage ceramic arts, the Chinese-influenced tradition of the tea ceremony, which began at that time, stimulated the manufacture of the beautiful vessels used in this elaborate ritual. The tea cult spread to the military and merchant classes in the Momoyama period (1573-1603). Its stoneware and porcelain implements reflected the tasteful, subtle beauty and elegance of the ceremony. Each shape had a specific function and name.

One sought-after variety of stoneware tea bowl, related to the Chien ware of China, was temmoku, with a thick purplish-brown glaze that is still popular. Seto kilns produced such fine pottery that the works of other kilns also came to be called Seto ware. Even more famous were the Raku wares, still made today by the 14th generation of the same family. Raku ware—tea-ceremony vessels, other pottery, and tiles—is shaped by hand; its irregular forms follow a prescribed aesthetic of asymmetry. The glaze is brushed on in several thin layers, and the pot is fired at low temperatures. When the glaze is molten, the pot is pulled from the kiln with tongs; it cools quickly, and the glaze crackles under the thermal shock. Raku ware is admired by potters throughout the world for its rugged shapes and soft, somber lead glazes that sometimes drip downward in globs. Also prized for the tea ceremony was Oribe ware, typified by brown iron-oxide painted designs derived from motifs of textile decoration, juxtaposed with an irregular splash of runny, transparent green glaze.

Another Momoyama ware was Karatsu, influenced by Korean Choson ware. In e-Karatsu, or picture Karatsu, freehand geometric patterns, grasses, and wisteria were painted in iron oxide on a whitish slip. Karatsu ware had several other styles, with different kinds of decoration. Bizen ware was at its best in the Momoyama period. Still made, it is a hard stoneware, basically brick red, but subject to irregular changes of color resulting from alternating oxidation and reduction in the firing. It is unglazed except for glaze formed by falling ash or by ash or straw packed around the pots in the kiln.

The Edo Period and After

At the beginning of the Edo period, kaolin was discovered near Arita, in northern Kyushu, which is still a major pottery center. This discovery enabled Japanese potters to make their own hard, pure white porcelain. One type, Imari ware (named for its port of export), was so popular in 17th-century Europe that even the Chinese imitated it. Its bright-colored designs were inspired by ornate lacquerwork, screens, and textiles. By the late Edo period (1800-1867) Imari ware declined. Kakiemon (persimmon) porcelain, made in Arita, was a far more refined, classically shaped ware, even when its motifs were similar to Imari ware. Both wares used overglaze enamels. Nabeshima ware, also of high quality and similar to silk textiles in its designs, was reserved for members of that family and their friends; only in the Meiji era (1868-1912) was it sold commercially and imitated. The designs were first drawn on thin tissue, and then in underglaze blue lines; the enamel colors were added and heat-fused after the glaze firing. In eastern Japan in the Edo period, Kutani was the porcelain center. Kutani vessels were grayish in color because of impurities in the clay, and their designs were bolder than those of Arita and Imari wares. Kyoto, formerly a center for enameled pottery, became famous for its porcelain in the 19th century. In the Edo period, some 10,000 kilns were active in Japan.

Contemporary taste esteems the utilitarian works of folk potters as highly as the export items of earlier centuries. New influences from Europe came with the Meiji pottery, but native folk traditions were still appreciated within the country. Potters at the old centers remain active in the 20th century, working in the same styles as their ancestors, with the same local clays. Japan's most famous 20th-century potter is Hamada Shoji, important not only for his pottery but also as a forceful figure in the revival of folkcraft. Hamada favored iron and ash glazes on stoneware, producing shades of olive green, gray, brown, and black, and did not sign his pots (although he signed their wooden containers). In 1955 the Japanese government declared Hamada an Intangible Treasure of the country.

Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia. All rights reserved.

Pottery

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Pottery, clay that is chemically altered and permanently hardened by firing in a kiln. The nature and type of pottery, or ceramics (Greek keramos, “potter's clay”), is determined by the composition of the clay and the way it is prepared; the temperature at which it is fired; and the glazes used.

TYPES, PROCEDURES, AND TECHNIQUES

Celadon Ware Dish This dish from the Song dynasty, China (960-1279), is made of stoneware that has been stamped and incised with a delicate floral design. The dish was glazed with a transparent, iron-pigmented glaze known as celadon and then fired in a reduction kiln. The result is a subtle color that pools at the edges of the design, creating a shaded effect. Celadon ware was popular in China from the Zhou period through the Song dynasty.

Earthenware is porous pottery, usually fired at the lowest kiln temperatures (900°-1200° C/1652°-2192° F). Depending on the clay used, it turns a buff, red, brown, or black color when fired. To be made waterproof, it must be glazed. Nearly all ancient, medieval, Middle Eastern, and European painted ceramics are earthenware, as is a great deal of contemporary household dinnerware. Stoneware—water-resistant and much more durable—is fired at temperatures of 1200°-1280° C (2191°-2336° F). The clay turns white, buff, gray, or red and is glazed for aesthetic reasons. (Pottery fired at about 1200° C/2192° F is sometimes called middle-fire ware; its earthenware or stoneware traits vary from clay to clay.) Stoneware was made by the Chinese in antiquity and became known in northern Europe after the Renaissance (14th century to 17th century). Porcelain is made from kaolin, a clay formed from decomposed granite. Kaolin is a white primary clay—that is, a clay found in the earth in the place where it was formed and not transported there by rivers; secondary clays, borne by rivers to the site of deposit, contain impurities that give them various colors. Porcelain is fired at 1280°-1400° C (2336°-2552° F); it is white and often translucent. Porcelaneous ware was first made in China, hence its common name china. Chinese porcelain is less vitrified (and therefore softer) than its modern European counterpart, which was developed in Germany in the early 18th century. European imitations of Chinese porcelain are also made; called soft-paste or frit porcelains, they are fired at about 1100° C (about 2012° F). In the mid-18th century, English potters invented bone china, a somewhat harder ware that gained whiteness, translucency, and stability through the inclusion of calcium phosphate in the form of calcined (fired, chemically altered) oxbones.

Preparing and Shaping the Clay

Creating a Bowl on a Potter's Wheel These photographs show how a bowl is created using a potter’s wheel. The potter begins by centering the clay (top left). He does this by placing a lump of clay in the approximate center of the wheel, then pulls and pushes the clay into a cylindrical shape, keeping it in the exact center of the wheel. Next, he inserts his thumb in the top of the cylinder, creating a hole that he continues to expand while pulling up the sides of the piece (top center). Now he begins to shape the bowl, keeping the walls thick to allow room for widening and shaping (top right). In the next step, he begins to form the lip, using one hand on either side of the edge (bottom left). Next he smoothes and finishes the lip. When the bowl is complete, it is removed from the potter’s wheel by running a thin wire under the foot of the bowl (bottom center). In the last image we see the completed bowl, which will now be fired in a kiln (bottom right).

The potter can remove some of the coarse foreign matter natural to secondary clays, but coarse matter can also be used in varying quantities to achieve particular effects. A certain amount of coarse grain in the clay helps the vessel retain its shape in firing, and potters using fine-grained clays often “temper” the clay by adding coarser materials such as sand, fine stones, ground shells, or grog (fired and pulverized clay) before kneading the clay into a workable condition. The plasticity of clay allows pottery to be shaped in several traditional ways. The clay can be flattened and then shaped by being pressed against the inside or outside of a mold—a stone or basket, or a clay or plaster form. Liquid clay can be poured into plaster molds. A pot can be coil built: Clay is rolled between the palms of the hands and extended into long coils, a coil is formed into a ring, and the pot is built up by superimposing rings. Also, a ball of clay can be pinched into the desired shape. The most sophisticated pottery-making technique is wheel throwing.

Potter's Wheel Invented

The potter's wheel, invented in the 4th millennium bc, is a flat disk that revolves horizontally on a pivot. Both hands—one on the inside and the other on the outside of the clay—are free to shape the pot upward from a ball of clay that is thrown and centered on the rotating wheel head. Some wheels are set in motion by a stick that fits into a notch in the wheel (often activated by an assistant); called a handwheel, this is the classical wheel of Japanese potters. In 16th-century Europe, with the addition of a flywheel separate from the wheel head and mounted in a frame, the potter could control the wheel by kicking the flywheel. A kick bar, or foot treadle, was added in the 19th century. In the 20th century the electric wheel with a variable-speed motor allowed greater and better regulated rotating speed.

Drying and Firing

Kiln Artist Arnaldo Miniati prepares to fire pottery in a kiln at his studio in Florence, Italy, in 1955. A kiln uses extremely high heat to harden clay into earthenware or stoneware. The type of clay used and the effects desired by the artist determine the temperature at which the pottery is fired. David Lees/CORBIS-BETTMANN

To fire without breaking, the clay must first be air dried. If the clay is thoroughly dry, porous and relatively soft, the pottery can be baked directly in an open fire at temperatures of 650°-750° C (1202°-1382° F); primitive pottery is still made in this way. The first kilns were used in the 6th millennium bc. Wood fuels—and, later, coal, gas, and electricity—have always required careful control to produce the desired effect in hardening the clay into earthenware or stoneware. Various effects are achieved by oxidizing the flames (giving them adequate ventilation, to produce a great flame) or by reducing the oxygen through partially obstructing the entrance of air into the kiln. For example, a clay high in iron will typically burn red in an oxidizing fire, whereas in a reducing fire it will turn gray or black; chemically, in reduction firing the clay's red iron oxide (FeO2, or with two molecules, Fe2O4) is converted to black iron oxide (Fe 2O3) as the pot gives up an atom of oxygen to the oxygen-starved fire.

Decoration

Late Minoan Vase This vase, from the island of Thfra (formerly Santoríni) near Crete, was made during the Late Minoan period (circa 1600-1500 bc.) The vase, which may have been used for water, is decorated with a stylized image of a dolphin, an image that was used repeatedly in pottery and frescoes of the Minoan civilization.Nimatallah/Art Resource, NY

A pot can be decorated before or after firing. When the clay is partially dry and somewhat stiffened (“leather hard”), bits of clay can be pressed into the pot; the body of the vessel can be incised, stamped, or pressed with lines and other patterns; or clay can be cut out and the body pierced. The vessel walls can be smoothed by burnishing, or polishing, so that rough particles are driven inward and the clay particles are aligned in such a way that the vessel surface is shiny and smooth. (Some clays can be polished after firing.) Slip (liquefied clay strained of coarse particles) may be used: The bone-dry (completely dry) or partially dry pot can be dipped into slip of creamy consistency (to which color is sometimes added); or the slip can be brushed on or trailed on with a spouted can or a syringe. Designs can be drawn with a pointed tool that scratches through the slip to reveal the body, a technique known as sgraffito.

Glazes

Faience Jar This ceramic jar, attributed to Jan van Bogaert, is dated 1562. Faience is a kind of earthenware in which elaborate designs are applied to the surface and then covered with a solid-colored glaze. This jar has a pewter device that allows the cap to be opened and closed with the thumb while holding the handle.

Historically, unglazed pottery has always been more common than glazed pottery. Glaze is a form of glass, consisting basically of glass-forming minerals (silica or boron) combined with stiffeners (such as clay and fluxes) and melting agents (such as lead or soda). In raw form, glaze can be applied either to the unfired pot or after an initial unglazed, or biscuit, firing. The pot is then glaze fired; the glaze ingredients must melt and become glasslike at a temperature that is compatible to that required for the clay. Many kinds of glazes are used. Some heighten the color of the body; others mask it. Alkaline glazes, popular in the Middle East, are shiny and frequently transparent. These glazes are composed mostly of silica (such as sand) and a form of soda (such as nitre). Lead glazes are transparent, with traditional types made of sand fused with sulfide or oxide of lead. These glazes were used on earthenware by Roman, Chinese, and medieval European potters and are still used on European earthenware. Tin glazes, opaque and white, were introduced by medieval Islamic potters and were used for Spanish lusterware, Italian majolica, and European faience and delftware. Eventually the Chinese and Japanese made such glazes for the European market.

Chinese Create First True Porcelain

Metal oxides give color to glazes. Copper will make a lead glaze turn green and an alkaline glaze turquoise; a reduction kiln will cause the copper to turn red. Iron can produce yellow, brown, gray-green, blue, or, with certain minerals, red. Feldspars (natural rocks of aluminosilicates) are used in stoneware and porcelain glazes because they fuse only at high temperatures. The effects of specific glazes on certain clay bodies depend both on the composition of each and on the potter's control of the glaze kiln.

Underglaze and Overglaze Decoration

Pottery can also be painted before and after firing. In Neolithic times, ochers and other earth pigments were used on unglazed ware. Metal oxides used in or under glazes require somewhat higher temperatures in order to fix the colors to the glaze or body—they include copper green, cobalt blue, manganese purple, and antimony yellow. If enamels (fine-ground pigments applied over a fired glaze) are used, the pot must be refired in a muffle (covered, indirect-flame) kiln at low temperatures to fuse the enamel and glaze. Decals and transfer prints (designs printed on paper with oxides and, while wet, transferred to the pot, the paper burning away in the firing) are often used to decorate commercially manufactured pottery. In the 18th century the print plate was hand engraved, but now lithography and photography are used.

Potters' marks have been used to identify ware in China since the 15th century, and in Europe since the 18th century, and famous pottery marks have always been easily forged. Greek potters and painters signed their work, as is true of a few Islamic potters and most 20th-century potters.

History of Furniture

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Reconstruction of the prehistoric house with any certainty is impossible, although all indications are that it contained furniture. A history of furniture begins with a discussion of the oldest surviving examples: those from the 4th Dynasty (2575-2467 bc) to the 6th Dynasty (2323-2152 bc) of Old Kingdom Egypt.

Egyptian Furniture

Egyptian Bed Carriage Some of the earliest and most elaborate examples of furniture have survived because they were preserved in ancient Egyptian tombs. This bed carriage resembling a cow is from the tomb of King Tutankhamun. It is in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Egypt.Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

The dry Egyptian climate and elaborate burial procedures are in part responsible for the survival of pieces, which include stools, tables, chairs, and couches. In addition, wall paintings give insight into the design of Egyptian furniture. With respect to both design and construction, the methods used in ancient Egypt are followed wherever furniture is made today. For large pieces, particularly seating and tables, the mortise-and-tenon construction familiar in ancient Egypt is still in use, although the tenon may be replaced by a dowel to expedite production. The sides of more delicate boxes and chests were joined by dovetailing, a technique that persists in contemporary work. One ancient Egyptian stool illustrated on a wooden panel (2800? bc, Egyptian Museum, Cairo) from the tomb of Hesire has animal legs as the supports. It does not differ much from a chair (1325? bc, Egyptian Museum) from the tomb of the New Kingdom pharaoh Tutankhamen

A chair, table, couch, and canopy (2550? bc, Egyptian Museum) from the tomb of the 4th Dynasty queen Hetepheres at Giza were reconstructed from remnants of their original gold sheathing. They have animal legs, a solid chair back, and arm supports of openwork panels in papyrus patterns. The bed, higher at the head, has a headrest and a footboard. The relief decoration on some of the furniture consists of symbols of gods and scenes of religious significance. Other surviving tables and stools are restrained in design, with legs that are beautifully made but plain. It is conceivable that the pieces were originally ornamented with stamped metal sheathing, but wall paintings also illustrate simple upholstered pieces.

Extant examples and illustrations from wall paintings suggest the broad scope of decoration used on furniture. Gold sheets were applied to legs of chairs and tables; inlays of ivory and other materials were employed on panels of chests and other surfaces. The motifs of forms with legs as anthropomorphic and of storage pieces as buildings in miniature were popular in ancient Egypt and in succeeding cultures. See Egyptian Art and Architecture.

Mesopotamian Furniture

... tables and thrones supported on trumpet-shaped and animal-form legs...

Although virtually no examples have survived, inlays and reliefs provide an idea of what furniture from the Tigris-Euphrates Valley looked like. Tables, stools, and thrones are illustrated in works from about 3500 to 800 bc. A Sumerian standard—a box on a pole (3500?-3200? BC, Iraq Museum, Baghdad)—has shell inlays that illustrate very simple chairs and thrones. Also surviving is a Sumerian harp (2685? bc, University of Pennsylvania Museum, Philadelphia) that has rich, colorful inlays and a bearded bull’s head carved in the round and covered in gold foil. A stele, or carved stone slab, made about 2300 bc shows a backless throne that appears to have been elegantly upholstered but had very plain straight legs. The furniture shown in a relief (9th century bc, British Museum, London) of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II and his queen is more elaborate, with tables and thrones supported on trumpet-shaped and animal-form legs and embellished with relief decoration. See Mesopotamian Art and Architecture.

Minoan and Mycenaean Furniture

Examples of furniture in the Bronze Age cultures at Mycenae on mainland Greece and in the Aegean Islands (see Minoan culture) are equally difficult to find. Relief representations on Minoan rings and small bronze and terra-cotta representations provide most of the evidence. One splendid exception, the gypsum throne in the Throne Room at Knossos (1600?-1400? BC), suggests that function and materials were more important than design in the Aegean Islands, because the basic designs are less stylized on both the throne and the small terra-cotta pieces. The extant examples—stools, chairs, couches, benches, and chests—do not suggest the use of much elaborate decoration. One or two tablets have been discovered, however, that make reference to inlays and gold embellishments on furniture. A single extant ivory leg from Thebes is also elaborately ornamented. See Aegean Civilization.

Greek Furniture

... the Greek couch and the Egyptian bed serve markedly distinct purposes.

Greek furniture, like Mesopotamian, is best known from paintings and sculpture, as few specimens have survived intact. Details on vase paintings and grave stelae (tombstones) tell a good part of the story, but the frieze from the Parthenon and a group of miniature seated figures in terra-cotta and in bronze help fill in the gaps. A few marble thrones have survived, as have isolated wooden elements from actual Greek pieces. The available evidence suggests that Greek designers did not follow the free forms of the earlier Aegean examples; their tendency to base furniture ornament on architectural decoration, and the general symmetry and regularity of overall design, appear instead to follow Egyptian precedent. Nevertheless, although they resemble each other, the Greek couch and the Egyptian bed, for example, serve markedly distinct purposes. Used for eating as well as resting, the Greek couch was made with the horizontal reclining area at table height, rather than low and at an incline. The headrest was often curved to support pillows and no foot rest was used. Although the animal-form leg is seen occasionally, legs more often were a trumpet form or a rectangular design based on a columnar form. Stools were made in a variety of configurations. Folding stools with X-shaped legs and stationary stools with straight legs were made at least from the 6th century bc to the Hellenistic age (323-31 bc).

Both functional and plain examples as well as more elaborate models were created. A distinctive innovation of Greek designers is the chair known as a klismos, a light (or easy) chair with a back. Comfortable and very popular, it was used most in the Archaic and Classical periods (7th century to 4th century bc). The klismos is essentially plain, with legs curving out from the seat and a back support consisting of a simple rectangular panel curved inward from sides to center. Tables pictured in paintings are generally small. Rectangular tops appear to have been the more popular type, with support that consisted most often of three legs—mostly simple and curved but sometimes carved in animal forms—that were at times reinforced with stretchers near the top. Literary references and illustrations suggest that typical tables were light. They were moved in to serve individuals at a dinner and removed after the meal to allow space for entertainers to perform. Round tables of Greek origin were made in the Hellenistic period.

Chests in ancient Greece varied in size from those built on a miniature scale to monumental examples and in design from those with plain flat tops to the more architectural style with gabled lids. They were made variously of wood, bronze, and ivory, with architectural decoration. The traditional configuration of chests is a long-lived phenomenon; it is first found in ancient Egypt and remains evident in 19th-century folk examples. See Greek Art and Architecture.

Roman Furniture

Reconstructed Roman Couch Ancient Roman furniture design was influenced by the Hellenistic furniture of Greece, as exemplified by this reconstructed couch, made of bronze. The cast sculptural pieces and inlay work are elaborately detailed. Couches such as this served as models for the chaise longue of the 18th century.

At first glance, Roman furnituredesign appears to have been based on Greek prototypes. In the first century AD opulent Roman design reflected strong Greek influence. The ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum provide clear evidence of handsome domestic architecture and show the settings that required furniture. Pompeiian frescoes illustrate the use of furniture and suggest that a wider variety of forms was known. The source and date of new storage pieces that had been introduced in Hellenistic Greece are questionable. No secure evidence confirms the theory that cupboards were introduced during this period. Examples of cupboards on Roman frescoes may be copies of Greek paintings, but a cupboard from the house of the Lararium in Herculaneum has survived.

Extant examples indicate that the Romans made more marble and bronze furniture than Greeks did; also, the Roman designs were more complex, even though they employed the same basic vocabulary of ornament. In addition to the small tables common in Greece, larger, rectangular tables and round tables of various sizes were used. More practical designs were also introduced: There were tables that could be taken apart and others with folding bases. The richness of elegant inlays and elaborate work in ivory, bronze, marble, and wood are mentioned in Roman literature, and enough fragments exist to corroborate the early descriptions. See Roman Art and Architecture.

Byzantine and Early Medieval Furniture

Throne of Bishop Maximian Although few examples of Byzantine furniture survive, the intricately detailed ivory carving on the Throne of Bishop Maximian may indicate what other pieces looked like. Carved in the mid-6th century, the throne is in the Museo Arcivescovile in Ravenna, Italy.Scala/Art Resource, NY

Although other surviving artifacts are abundant, there is strangely little evidence of furniture from Early Christian (3rd century to 7th century ad) and Byzantine (5th century to 15th century) periods, either in the East or the West. Byzantine art has been much admired. The richness of imperial churches in Istanbul, Turkey, and in Ravenna, Italy, indicates that there must have been a parallel magnificence in the furnishings of the palatial homes of ruling families. Byzantine mosaics suggest that, although classical ornament may have become stylized, it was still used between about ad 400 and 1000. A single Byzantine monument, the Throne of Bishop Maximian (550?, Archiepiscopal Museum, Ravenna), a masterpiece of ivory relief sculpture completely covering a wooden frame, was designed for ecclesiastical use. The throne nevertheless reveals the rich, stylized ornament of the period, and it suggests the manner in which secular Byzantine furniture design must have been conceived. See Byzantine Art and Architecture.

... there is strangely little evidence of furniture from Early Christian and Byzantine periods.

The so-called Throne of Dagobert I (600?, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris), a bronze folding stool, has animal legs familiar from Roman examples but rendered far more boldly. Manuscripts and an occasional mosaic from the 5th century to the 9th century provide further evidence that, although Roman influence persisted, changes in taste inspired artisans to render detail more abstractly and simply. Flat patterns replaced the high relief of Roman times. Stylistic conservatism, pronounced in the illuminated manuscripts of the period, was also evident in its furniture.

The 11th and 12th centuries—the Romanesque period—are known for the regeneration of spirituality and for the large number of new churches built in western Europe, but little evidence exists of the furniture of the period. Romanesque furniture design is best known from the assortment of 12th-century representations in French sculpture, in which simplified, schematic interpretations of Greco-Roman ornament are used. A few surviving turned-post (lathe-turned) chairs from 12th-century Scandinavia are Romanesque in spirit. Wooden chests, made somewhat later, are carved in schematic, geometric patterns that continue the Romanesque style. See Romanesque Art and Architecture.

Gothic Furniture

Gothic architecture involved the use of pointed arches, flying buttresses, and other dramatic innovations to create spectacular spatial effects, but 12th-century furniture design was not influenced by the novel style. The new cathedrals were expressions of affluence, but for their interiors the rich patrons of the church appear to have favored simple, functional oak furniture enriched with tapestries and metalwork. The decorative elements of the Gothic, particularly the pointed arch, were not employed in furniture ornament until about 1400. Then, for more than a century, tracery and arches were carved on the panels of chairs, on chests, and on tables of every size.

In the 15th century a few new forms were introduced. One was a type of sideboard with a small storage area set on tall legs; it had display space on the top of the enclosure as well as on a shelf below it. Cupboards were made with either one or two tiers of storage areas enclosed with doors. Another important storage piece was the armoire, with tall doors enclosing an area of 1.5 m to 2 m (4 ft to 6 ft). Along with such architectural motifs as arches, columns, and foliate patterns appeared decorative carving based on hanging textiles, a motif known as linenfold. As a primarily northern European style, Gothic remained influential in furniture design into the early 16th century. See Gothic Art and Architecture.

Renaissance Furniture

Renaissance painting, sculpture, and architecture developed in Italy before 1425, but Italian furniture design in the 15th century tended to be simple and functional. See Renaissance Art and Architecture.

Italy
Italian Renaissance Cassone The cassone was an Italian marriage chest popularized during the Renaissance. This example is 16th-century Venetian and features relief carvings of classical scenes. The winged figures on the corners are called caryatids, and the feet of the chest are carved in a shape known as paw feet.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

The first innovation in Italian Renaissance furniture was the cassone, a chest with elaborate carved or stucco decoration and gilt or painted finish; the designs were based on classical prototypes. Cassone forms were inspired to some degree by Roman sarcophagi; some early examples, however, had scenes illustrating the international Gothic romance, Le Roman de la Rose. Interiors in 15th-century paintings, such as those in the Dream of St. Ursula (1490-1495, Accademia, Venice) by Vittore Carpaccio and the Birth of the Virgin (1485-1494, Santa Maria Novella, Florence) by Domenico Ghirlandaio, suggest the restraint of Italian furniture design before the High Renaissance at the end of the 15th century.

Portable folding chairs were revived, with seats of tapestry or leather.

Rich marquetry, imaginative carving, and the use of walnut in place of oak (which had been preferred for earlier work) characterized the more flamboyant efforts of the 1500s. A greater variety of forms and richer ornament were employed than in earlier periods. Portable folding chairs were revived, with seats of tapestry or leather. New solid-backed side chairs were developed that had carved backs and, instead of legs, solid carved panels as supports.

France

Even richer decoration is found on the French furniture of the 1500s that reflected Renaissance influence. The courts of Francis I and his son Henry II employed Italian artists who brought the Renaissance to France. During the reign of Henry II, designs by the architect Jacques du Cerceau were adapted for furniture. His complex juxtapositions of classical motifs were used for decorating carved furniture panels in the new Renaissance taste. The cabinetmaker Hugues Sambin, a major figure, published an influential folio of designs that featured works richly carved in ingenious designs. Distinctive examples reveal a profound understanding of the new classicism.

The impetus of the designers working in the 16th century carried the style into the 17th century. Characteristic tables with thin columnar legs and chairs with paneled backs, first made in the 1560s and 1570s, continued to be made after 1600. In the first decades of the 17th century, changes in design became subtle. During the reign of Louis XIII, from 1610 to 1643, furniture forms followed 16th-century models, but with greater delicacy and with an increased use of rare ebony and rich tortoiseshell veneers instead of carving.

England

Oak continued to be the predominant furniture wood in England in the 16th century.

English Renaissance design was essentially simpler than that of France. Less elegant carved detail, simpler decoration in turned parts, and flatter, more stylized foliate motifs were characteristic. Oak continued to be the predominant furniture wood in England in the 16th century. As in France, the interest in Renaissance design persisted until about the mid-17th century in England.

The Netherlands

This general interest in Renaissance forms is documented in several 17th-century publications. Two books of designs influential in the early 17th century were published in Amsterdam by Jan Vredeman de Vries and Crispin van de Passe. Dutch cabinetmakers created furniture closer in spirit to English designs than to those of the French. The Dutch were conservative, and Renaissance designs were still popular in the 1650s and later. One special form—the armoire, with a bold overhanging cornice and with doors made three-dimensional by the application of projecting moldings—is characteristically Dutch and was used over a long period by Dutch settlers in North America. Dutch influence—probably because of the design books—can be seen in other northern European furniture, although each area developed distinctive designs for popular forms.

Spain

Although Spain had long been deprived of direct connections with the East, the delicate patterns...

In Spain, influences were more varied. The new ideas of the Renaissance affected design, but so did a long local Moorish tradition. Although Spain had long been deprived of direct connections with the East, the delicate patterns on tiles and leather, and the bold combinations of wood, iron, and gold (or gilding) that remained popular there in the 16th and 17th centuries, demonstrated the continuing Moorish influence.

I Chinese Furniture of the Ming Dynasty

The 17th century was a period of growing cosmopolitanism. Maritime trade routes had opened a century earlier and were becoming a medium for new ideas and new materials. The 16th and 17th centuries were an ideal time for the West to discover Chinese furniture, for during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) Chinese furniture making was at its height. Tall cabinets, graceful tables, chairs, and benches were made in subtle designs. Straight legs on tables and chairs often were finished with delicately curved edges. Brackets and stretchers used as reinforcements also functioned as decorative elements; these were restrained but showed to advantage the cabinetmaker’s understanding of the beauty of wood. Asian decoration was well known in Europe in the 17th century and was probably an important influence on later Western design. Imported Chinese and Japanese lacquer chests were used extensively in Western settings, beginning in the 17th century. A number of examples have gilt stands, which were made in the West to adapt the lacquer chest to Western interiors. See Chinese Art and Architecture; Lacquerwork.

Baroque Furniture
Baroque Antwerp Cabinet This tortoiseshell and ebony veneered cabinet-on-stand was made in Antwerp in the late 17th century. Pieces like this were designed as showpieces, and evolved from small boxlike cabinets meant to sit on separate tables or stands. The convex oval shapes fronting the drawers are called bosses; their purpose is decorative.

Baroque design is most evident in furniture of the late 17th century, decades after the Italian baroque architects Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini had first introduced their innovative approaches in Rome. In the early part of the century the new style had influenced surfaces but not shapes. In the last quarter of the 17th century, however, a growing number of changes took place. Among these was an increased use of caryatids, or supports in the form of female figures, along with scroll-shaped and spiral-turned legs that were different from the earlier Renaissance models.

... an increased use of caryatids, or supports in the form of female figures...

At the very end of the 17th century, curved fronts were first used on large case pieces such as wardrobes and chests of drawers, reflecting the new baroque architecture. In chairs, rich carving on new high-backed forms came into fashion. Both English and Continental examples were made with caned seats and backs as an alternative to upholstery. Simple variations of these chairs were made with turned parts in place of the carved areas, but the same tall backs were used. See Baroque Art and Architecture.

French Baroque
Commode, Palace of Versailles Shown here is a chest of drawers made in 1708 by French furniture designer André Charles Boulle for King Louis XIV’s bedroom at Versailles. One of the few surviving works definitely attributed to Boulle, the ebony chest shows the ornate metal inlay on tortoiseshell that typifies his style and became known as Boullework or Buhlwork.Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

The most elegant and elaborate furniture of the day was made for the court of Louis XIV in France. The outstanding craftsperson André Charles Boulle created unusual forms and embellished them with inlays combining metal (pewter, gilt, bronze, or silver), tortoiseshell, and ebony in designs that were imaginative juxtapositions of classical motifs. These sometimes look as if the basic inspiration was ancient Roman fresco. Columnar legs, handsomely gilded, were used to support tables, chairs, and stands for chests.

English and American Colonial Baroque
Variations made in other countries limited the gilding and emphasized the new shapes. In England the influence is most easily seen in work from the reign of William and Mary, when marquetry was used most freely. On the North American continent, Renaissance design was still important in the late 17th century. American artisans used Elizabethan and Tudor models as partial inspiration for distinctively American “Pilgrim-style” efforts in oak, updated by being stained a walnut color. See Elizabethan Style; See Tudor Style.

Rococo Furniture

The baroque was popular in many areas until about 1730, when fashions changed, first in Paris and then in the rest of the Western world. The new style, now known as the rococo see Rococo Style, called for greater delicacy in the scale of objects and a more intimate connection of furniture and people. Architectural ornament was less relevant, as pieces in Parisian interiors were conceived to be in scale with people rather than with rooms. See Rococo Style.

French Rococo
French Rococo Commode This parquetry commode, circa 1770, is an example of Louis XV-XVI furniture. The piece features panels of three-dimensional diamond trellis, gilt-bronze mounts, and a marble top. In 18th-century France, a guild system was in place for craftsmen. A maker of veneered furniture was known as an ébéniste; the ébéniste of this commode was J. G. Schltig.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

French sources were of primary importance and influence and their results were the most elegant. Rococo began in the reign of Louis XIV and flourished during the reign of Louis XV. The French version included ambitious designs in a variety of materials that required great skill to execute. These were characterized by complex, sinuous forms that curved in every direction. Fanciful patterns were inlaid on layers of veneer that, in turn, were framed with ormolu (gilded bronze) outlining the legs, edges, and drawer fronts of a piece. Columnar legs were replaced by animal-form legs in a variety of curved shapes.

English Rococo
Mahogany Chair This mahogany chair built in 1760 shows the elaborate ornamentation combined with structural solidity favored by Thomas Chippendale. The English furniture designer opened his factory in London in 1749 and soon established a far-reaching reputation. The chair is in a private collection.Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

In England the rococo was much more restrained. Inlays were used rarely because cabinetmakers favored the use of walnut and mahogany veneers, which were handled with great skill to exploit graining. English designers—and those who were inspired by them—introduced cabriole (curved) legs with claw-and-ball feet for chairs, tables, and chests. This foot must have been inspired by the claw and ball known from Chinese bronzes (but not from Chinese furniture prototypes); it represents a popularization of Asian design. Toward the end of the rococo period in England, the London cabinetmaker Thomas Chippendale published a book of designs, The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director (1754), in which he presented the English interpretation of the rococo style. He was the first to categorize the varieties of rococo as French, Chinese, or Gothic and offered samples of each approach. Innovative French designs of the 1750s were translated by Chippendale into engraved designs of elaborately carved examples without the French use of ormolu or inlays. The element of the rococo emphasized by Chippendale and by most English artisans was its air of whimsy, achieved in French examples by a novel use of classical motifs. In the Director, Chinese and Gothic designs were included as additional ways of achieving whimsy; moreover, these designs could be executed more easily than those based on French sources.

From about 1740 to 1760, English designers worked consistently on a small scale. Some, however, chose to follow designs that were classical and more in keeping with an architectural style called the Palladian, in which Renaissance designs of the Italian 16th-century architect Andrea Palladio were scaled to 18th-century taste. The London cabinetmaker William Vile, who was employed by the Crown in the 1750s and 1760s, made some classical furniture along with rococo work. In the American colonies, the lightly scaled classical was as important as the pure rococo in furniture made between 1740 and 1780.

English and American chair designs are the exception to the rule of continuing classical emphasis. Fashionable designers in London developed elegant side and armchairs with wooden backs, a basic form different from the upholstered-back chairs favored on the Continent. At first, the backs were made with solid splats as the central support, framed by curving rails and stiles in a design that was a very free adaptation of Chinese chairs. Later, the frame was yoke-shaped, and the splat was executed in one of a large repertoire—rococo in spirit—of pierced-work designs.

In the English approach to furniture design, woods were handled with an appreciation of their distinctive qualities, and American cabinetmakers chose to follow the same path. In Europe, cabinetmakers were more intent on creating the appropriate rococo fantasies, using paint where inlays and ormolu might prove too expensive. Italian, German, Scandinavian, and even provincial French cabinetmakers followed this Continental manner of executing rococo design.

Neoclassical Furniture

Neoclassicism, a reaction against the rococo in favor of classicism, was a movement that began while the rococo was still at its height. The designers who initiated it advocated a return to ancient Greco-Roman sources rather than to the Renaissance. To suit 18th-century taste, however, they adapted the ancient models by scaling down the ornament to a delicacy that appealed to those bored with the rococo.

The question of who was responsible for this revolution in design is a disputed one. Robert Adam, the English architect, introduced the first of his neoclassical designs before 1760. Across the English Channel in Paris, however, an important collector, La Live de Jully, had furnished a room “à la grecque,” or in the neoclassical style, at about the same time. Artists of English, French, and other nationalities were finding the ruins of Rome and Athens worthy of study and were becoming aware of the place of history in the study of design. Neoclassicism was the first conscious effort to revive a style, rather than to use elements of a past style as inspiration for new designs. The earliest efforts were less Roman than its designers seemed to believe, but the change to purer historicism occurred in a relatively short time. See Neoclassical Art and Architecture.

French Neoclassicism

In France the first phase of neoclassicism is called the Louis XVI style, although his reign began in 1774 and prime specimens were made earlier. The classicism of this style manifested itself in a whole vocabulary of motifs derived from Greco-Roman sources, but the overall shapes also reflected the new style. Furniture shapes were simple and geometric: Rectangular, circular, and oval forms rested on straight, tapering legs that were either square or round in cross section. Garlands of flowers or drapery, architectural motifs such as paterae (medallions), dentils, Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian moldings, and related details were used as ornaments on neoclassical pieces.

English Neoclassicism

In England painted furniture became popular, and interest in inlaid decoration, which had all but disappeared in the rococo era, enjoyed a revival. The new neoclassical high style was appealing to a growing number, and design books communicated suggestions for new furniture forms, shapes, and decorations. The posthumously published Cabinet Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide of 1788 by George Hepplewhite adapted some French and some traditional English designs to the needs of cabinetmakers seeking neoclassical suggestions. The most famous part of the book is the section on chairs that describes a number of shield-shaped backs, but Hepplewhite’s repertoire was much broader (see Hepplewhite Style). Popular neoclassical design in England is generally regarded as being inspired by Hepplewhite or by Thomas Sheraton, whose first book, the Cabinet Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing Book, appeared, in part, in 1791. Sheraton’s complete work, published in 1802, included designs that were more literally classical, but what is popularly considered Sheraton are the rectangular chair backs shown in his first book.

Empire Furniture
Empire Hall Bench This hall bench (1810) is an example of the Empire style, also known as Regency and Biedermeier, which was popular in the 19th century. The work was influenced by ancient Greek and Roman furniture. This piece features simulated lapis inlay. The simplicity of the design is almost abstract and points to the emergence of the Art Nouveau style.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

The use of archaeologically inspired design increased in the late 18th century, and it appears to have influenced furniture made both in England and in Europe. This new emphasis marks a second phase of neoclassicism, called the Empire style because it was first identified with Napoleon’s imperial efforts. Although the tendency to design furniture in ancient Roman style had begun before the French Revolution (1789-1799), Napoleon’s designers, Charles Percier and Pierre François Léonard Fontaine, were the most innovative. A collection of their designs for furniture and interiors was published in Paris in 1801. Beginning in 1796, designs inspired by Percier and Fontaine were also published in the Journal des Modes of Pierre de La Mésangère, which helped make the style international. The furniture plates in La Mésangère’s journals appear to have been appropriated by Rudolph Ackermann for use in his London-based journal, Repository of Arts, Literature, and Fashions, which began in 1809. German-language publications disseminated versions of the Empire style throughout the Continent and Scandinavia.

More careful investigation, however, reveals special distinctive sources in each country. In England—where the style was called Regency —Henry Holland, architect to the Prince of Wales beginning in the 1780s, designed furniture in the Empire spirit for royal residences and major country houses. Thomas Hope, a collector and connoisseur with great enthusiasm for the classical, was the author of Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1807), which illustrates his conception of a classical style in which Greek and Egyptian influences predominate.

Empire became an international style, with Scandinavian, German, Italian, Russian, and American interpretations. The basic concept was constant, with ancient prototypes adapted to 19th-century taste. The major change, besides the increase in archaeological influence, was in scale. Designers were attempting to regain the sense of monumentality that had been lacking since the beginning of the 18th century, when it was diminished to achieve the human scale then desired. In the German-speaking areas, the style, recognized as typically middle class, has been called Biedermeier (see Biedermeier Style), after a comic character who was supposed to satirize middle-class tastes. The name was applied as the style was going out of fashion in about 1850. Under whatever name, Empire was a lasting style; introduced before 1800, it did not disappear completely until the middle of the 19th century. In the United States, one cabinetmaker, the New Yorker Duncan Phyfe, who had begun activity in the 1790s, did not close his shop until 1847. His output included a grand variety of neoclassical designs, although he is best known for distinctive work made between about 1800 and 1820, in which light proportions and archaeologically correct details were integrated.

Victorian Eclectic Furniture

Concurrent with the neoclassical revival in the first half of the 19th century were revivals of other styles.

Gothic Revival
Gothic-Style Birdcage This birdcage, made of mahogany and sheet metal in 1765, was designed to resemble a Gothic gazebo, with its pointed arches and elaborately detailed carving. It is part of the collection of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.Aldo Tutino/Art Resource, NY

The Gothic, which Chippendale had used as a source of ornamental motif, was also of interest to Sheraton and a few later designers. In George Smith’s Collection of Designs for Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1808), a few Gothic designs are shown along with the predominantly neoclassical work. By the 1830s, interest in the Gothic was more profound. The Gothic was admired by some as a delightful reaction against the classical, while others regarded it as a Christian style to be preferred over the pagan. On the one hand, romantic enthusiasm favored ruins and asymmetry; on the other, there was a strong desire for design inspired by faith. Whatever the impetus, the Gothic Revival flourished on both sides of the Atlantic, in England as well as on the Continent. Research into Continental aspects, however, is far behind that of English historians, who have discovered the accomplishments of two generations of Pugins—the father, Augustus Charles Pugin, and his son Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. Essentially, revival of the Gothic involved the use of Gothic architectural ornament on 19th-century forms. Closely associated with the Gothic Revival is what Americans call the Elizabethan Revival, inspired by 16th-century and 17th-century English designs.

Rococo Revival

A completely different approach was taken by the designers who strove for a return to elegance. Beginning in the 1820s, the 18th-century rococo was the inspiration for a revival—actually a reinterpretation—of Parisian rococo design. The rococo revival was popular in England, on the Continent, and in the United States. The American rococo revival, which flourished between about 1840 and 1860, is possibly responsible for the most distinctive furniture. One New York manufacturer, John Henry Belter, obtained four patents for improvements in production that enabled the Belter shop to make flamboyantly carved work curved to the extreme by using laminated wood. Belter and contemporaries in Europe as well as in the United States found inspiration in baroque as well as rococo ornament.

Renaissance Revival

By the 1860s the rococo fad had subsided and Renaissance Revival became fashionable. Renaissance was defined very broadly, because the revival style included neoclassical motifs as well as those based on French Renaissance models. A revival of Louis XVI design was favored by some, but in general the new style was characterized by large, straight-lined forms veneered in dark woods and decorated with inlays, low relief, and incised linear decoration. French, English, and Continental examples include a broad range of decoration that is more elegant than that on most American examples.

The Revolt Against Mass Manufacture

The striving for elegance inspired a certain amount of fakery. Veneers were used to cover up cheap woods, and both the carving and inlays that embellished low-priced stylish furniture were poorly executed.

Arts and Crafts Furniture
Three Arts and Crafts Chairs These three chairs are examples of the kind of work turned out by the artisans in the Arts and Crafts movement in England (circa 1896). Through simplicity of line and the cane or rush seats, these craftsmen attempted to reproduce the forms of traditional country furniture.

In reaction to mass-produced sham, the Arts and Crafts movement was established in 1861 by the English poet and designer William Morris. Along with such associates as the architect Philip Webb and the Pre-Raphaelite painters Ford Madox Brown and Edward Burne-Jones (see Pre-Raphaelites), Morris sought a return to medieval handcraft traditions. Together, the group produced designs for every branch of the decorative arts, with the intent of elevating them to the level of the fine arts. Their products, including furniture, were much admired for their beauty and consummate craftsmanship and were widely copied. By the 1890s, the movement had spread to the Continent and North America. The influence of Morris and his followers was enormous; their designs are often considered the wellspring of modern furniture design. Morris’s ideas were popularized by the English architect and writer Charles Eastlake in his hugely successful Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery and other Details (1868). Eastlake advocated a return to simple, rectilinear designs inspired by country work, executed in oak and various fruitwoods. In the United States, where Eastlake’s book became a decorating bible, the simplicity was often embellished with such luxurious additions as ebonized wood, gilding, and inlays.

Art Nouveau Furniture
Table by Charles Rennie Mackintosh This table was designed by the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1918. It is made of stained pine with mother-of-pearl inlay. The simplicity of the design is characteristic of the Arts and Crafts movement and its leader, William Morris, whose influence can be seen in this piece.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Directly fostered by the Arts and Crafts movement was the style called art nouveau, which flourished between the 1890s and 1910 in all of the arts. Art nouveau may be characterized as a style derived from organic forms that convey a sense of movement, exemplified by the famous “whiplash” curve found in many art nouveau works. In furniture, its early exponents were the Belgian architects Henry van de Velde and Victor Horta, who furnished the interiors of their buildings with pieces designed to complement the sinuous forms of the architectural settings. In France, the architect Hector Guimard, creator in 1900 of the graceful Métro (subway) stations in Paris, also designed similarly asymmetrical, heavily carved free-form furniture. The noted glassmaker Émile Gallé also designed some of the most opulent art nouveau furniture, in which plant and flower motifs predominate. Louis Majorelle produced luxurious furniture, again inspired by forms from nature, and went on to become a notable art deco designer after World War I (1914-1918). The Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh produced, in his unique interpretation of art nouveau, chastely beautiful furniture. Characteristic pieces are of oak painted white, with elegant inlays and appurtenances of metal or stained glass in curvilinear, abstracted plant forms.

20th-Century European Furniture

Reform and revolution in the arts, including furniture design, marked the turn of the century. Prominent among the leaders of the revolt was the Austrian architect and designer Josef Hoffmann, who, with other architects and artists, founded the Vienna Sezession (see Sezessionstil) in 1897 and the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) in 1903. The Werkstätte produced, among other types of decorative arts, furniture in cubicular forms that contrasted radically with the art nouveau obsession with curvilinear forms. They are reminiscent of Mackintosh’s restrained designs, which were much admired by the group. The right angle was used consistently, and detailing was rigidly austere. Sezessionstil was the precursor of two major 20th-century styles: the German Bauhaus and the French art deco.

Bauhaus Furniture
Wassily Chair Hungarian-American designer and architect Marcel Breuer revolutionized contemporary chair design by creating the first chairs suitable for mass production. In 1925 he designed one of his most famous chairs, the Wassily armchair, shown here, made of chrome-plated steel tubing and canvas. Breuer studied and later taught at the Bauhaus school of design in Weimar, Germany, and his furniture designs reflect the Bauhaus principle of achieving a functionalist balance between technology, purpose, and aesthetics to yield simple, practical pieces different from traditional styles of furniture.Ken Kirkwood/Arcaid

The Bauhaus, founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, by the architect Walter Gropius, was a comprehensive school of art and architecture that proved to be one of the most influential forces in the development of 20th-century art. Classic contemporary furniture, still being manufactured, was designed by its most renowned architects, Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Breuer designed his “Wassily” armchair, of chrome-plated steel tubing and canvas, in 1925 and his much-imitated cantilevered side chair, of tubing with wood-framed cane seat and back panels, in 1928. Mies created his world-famous Barcelona chair, a masterpiece consisting of two elegantly curved X-frames of chromed steel strips supporting rectangular leather cushions, in 1929. The aim of both architects was to devise aesthetically pleasing furniture for mass production.

Art Deco Furniture
Art Deco Table This ebony and brass table was designed by Jacques Émile Ruhlmann in about 1931 in the art deco style. The table’s simple, elegant shapes are characteristic of art deco design.

Art deco, although its name is derived from the 1925 Paris exposition of decorative arts, can be traced back to the first decade of the 20th century, especially to the sharply defined geometric forms of the Sezessionstil. The Bauhaus concern with the use of new materials also had its influence. The art deco style persisted through 1939 and has had a revival of interest and even imitation in the 1970s and 1980s. The most accomplished art deco designers were French: Louis Majorelle, André Groult, Pierre Chareau, and Jacques Émile Ruhlmann. Their pieces have a streamlined richness that owes as much to superb handcrafting—lustrously finished rare woods with inlays of such exotic materials as ivory in angular, abstract designs—as to their daring geometric shapes. The style was rapidly debased, however, by shoddy mass-produced pieces.

Scandinavian Furniture

Some of the most widely admired contemporary furniture originated in Scandinavia, especially in the years following World War II (1939-1945). To name two of a host of designers, the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto and the Danish designer Arne Jacobsen created laminated wood furniture of exquisite proportions and eminent practicality for mass manufacture.

20th-Century American Furniture

Until 1946, furniture designers in the United States were, with few exceptions, overshadowed by their European counterparts and were heavily influenced by them.

American Furniture to 1939

American arts-and-crafts movements led at the turn of the century to the establishment of numerous ateliers and small factories, such as that of Gustav Stickley. Stickley created the mission style, ostensibly based on old Spanish furniture in the California missions. His carefully constructed oak furniture, made between 1900 and 1913, was rectilinear, simple, and utilitarian, with decoration limited to the handsomely crafted hardware. American mass manufacturers took up the mission style with a will and produced great quantities of ponderous imitation Stickley.

With the exception of the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany, who designed furniture primarily for his own use, the United States produced no outstanding art nouveau furniture. Art deco flourished in the United States, mostly in mass-produced furniture of lesser quality. A notable exception is the work of the studio of Donald Deskey, which in 1932 created the palatial art deco interiors and the furniture of Radio City Music Hall in New York City. The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright also designed furniture, but its idiosyncratic appearance defies categorization, since the furniture design was entirely subordinated to the design of the building; the same motifs appear in both. Wright consistently favored built-in furniture, which tended to merge with the architecture.

Contemporary American Furniture

Knoll Armchair This armchair was designed by the 20th-century furniture designer Warren Platner for the Knoll Company of New York City. The chair, created in 1965, is made of bronzed steel wire and nylon. It is a direct descendant of the chairs designed by Bauhaus innovators such as Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Child's Chair by Bertoia This chair was designed for a child by the 20th-century Italian-born American furniture designer and sculptor Harry Bertoia. It was made about 1955 of enameled steel with wool upholstery. This was one of a series of chairs designed by Bertoia using welded steel.

In the decade following World War II, many American furniture designers came to prominence. Among the best known were the architects Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen. Adapting wartime technology in the use of wood, metals, and plastics, they collaborated on the design of the so-called Eames chair and ottoman, constructed of subtly curved molded plywood with deeply padded leather upholstery, set on a metal pedestal base. In 1956 Saarinen designed an entire range of pedestal furniture in molded plastic and metal; the white chairs, in silhouette resembling a wineglass, have loose cushion seats in bright fabrics; the tables, ranging in size from side tables to conference tables, have tops of either marble or wood. These, like many other well-designed modern pieces, have been copied extensively by mass manufacturers. Other gifted designers included the sculptor Harry Bertoia, who in 1952 produced the lightweight wire mesh chair that bears his name, manufactured by Knoll Associates; Florence S. Knoll, like Eero Saarinen and Bertoia a graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and later president of Knoll International, New York City; and Paul McCobb, who based his widely marketed Planner group on simple and functional 18th- and 19th-century Shaker furniture.

... the white chairs, in silhouette resembling a wineglass, have loose cushion seats in bright fabrics...

By the 1990s furniture styles had proliferated to such a degree that literally hundreds of examples existed. The positive aspect of this stylistic glut was the enormous range of choice it offered, from classic modern pieces still in manufacture to “high-tech” medical and industrial furnishings, from antiques of any period (or costly reproductions of them) to inexpensive do-it-yourself unassembled furniture in any style desired.

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Furniture

2006-12-22T13:32:00.000+03:00

Furniture, the usually movable articles in a room that equip it for use. The most common pieces of furniture are beds, chairs, tables, and chests.

MATERIALS AND DESIGN

Florentine Cabinet-on-Stand This elaborate bureau is a Florentine ebony cabinet-on-stand, made about 1708. The designer, Giovanni Battista Foggini, trained as a sculptor in Rome. The piece features pietre dure panels, gilt-bronze mounts, and red marble pilasters.

Historically, the most common material for making furniture has been wood, but other materials, such as metal and stone, have also been used. Furniture designs have reflected the fashion of every era from ancient times to the present. Whereas in most periods a single style dominated, a wide variety of old and new styles influences current design. Some of the most highly prized pieces of furniture used in contemporary homes, however, are antiques—pieces anywhere from 50 to 300 or more years old. Today the most astute designers are eclectic, and furniture ranges from innovative designs to adaptations of historical models for special needs, including carefully made reproductions based on early examples.

Some surviving ancient Egyptian examples are elaborate and were originally sheathed in gold...
Even the basic requirements of furniture design are complex, for appearance has always been as important as function, and the general tendency has been to design furniture to complement architectural interiors. Indeed, some furniture forms were conceived architecturally, with legs designed as columns; others were at least in part anthropomorphic, with legs in animal forms. Furniture design ranges from simple to elaborate, depending on the pieces’ intended use rather than on the period in which they were made. The earliest records, such as ancient Mesopotamian inventories, describe richly decorated interiors with gold cloth and gilded furniture. Some surviving ancient Egyptian examples are elaborate and were originally sheathed in gold, but many very plain pieces were also made in ancient times. In the history of furniture, however, the elegant work takes precedence because in general it has been the best preserved. In addition, elaborate designs reveal the most about a period because high style changes more frequently than other styles to reflect new ideas. The simplest work, made for the farmer or laborer, tends to be more purely functional and timeless; tables and chairs used by working people in 1800 bc are surprisingly like tables and chairs in farmhouses of ad 1800. Dutch genre paintings of the 1600s and early 19th-century American paintings depict rural interiors that often look remarkably similar.
Bed (furniture), platform designed for rest or sleep. Today, a bed usually consists of a bedstead, or supporting frame, a spring, and a mattress. Substantial evidence exists that beds were popular among the ruling classes of Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia. After the 7th century bc Greek bedsteads and couches were inlaid or veneered with ivory, tortoiseshell, and precious metals, and sometimes provided with feet of solid silver or gold. Luxurious beds, similar to those in Greece, were made by the Etruscans. Two funeral bedsteads, veneered in ivory, were found by archaeologists in Etruscan tombs of the 4th and 3rd centuries bc. The beds of the Romans were characterized by extreme simplicity until the dissolution of the Republic. Thereafter they surpassed in splendor those of the Persians, Greeks, and Etruscans.

Beds of bronze tubing, similar to the brass beds of a later era, were made in the 8th century during the time of Charlemagne. During the 12th and 13th centuries virtually all baronial mansions and castles were equipped with beds, which steadily increased in size and luxury. By the 15th century, beds, notably those used by royalty, attained enormous proportions. Immense canopies, suspended over the beds from the ceilings or walls, became popular. Subsequently, the canopies were attached to columns affixed to the corners of the bedsteads, a modification that led to the four-poster of later times. In the 17th and 18th centuries, during the reigns of the French kings Louis XIV, who owned 413 beds of all types, and Louis XV, the art of fine bed construction reached a peak, combining graceful design, fantastic ornamentation, and beautiful coloring. The extreme ostentation that characterized the beds of former times gradually disappeared as mass production made beds available to all classes, effectively ending their fashionableness. Although elaborate beds, such as four-posters, are still in use, the beds of today generally are constructed for comfort and simplicity of design.

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1938: Painting And Sculpture

2006-12-15T18:12:00.000+03:00

1938: Painting And Sculpture
Art in the United States.

In 1938 the United States Government continued to act as chief patron of the arts in America. The art projects of the Works Progress Administration and of the Treasury Department continued their programs, employing several thousand artists and bringing art before an increasingly large public all over the country.

Artist groups were very active during the year, organizing many exhibitions in New York and elsewhere. The American Artists' Congress, which held its second annual congress in December 1937, has scheduled its third congress for the spring of 1939. Its second annual membership exhibition, dedicated to "Peace, Democracy and Cultural Progress," was held in May 1938. The Congress now has approximately 900 members. Interest in abstract art continued to be strong, particularly among the younger artists. The 48 members of the American Abstract Artists, an organization which was formed late in 1936, exhibited together again in 1938. As part of a campaign for better housing, the artist members of An American Group organized an art exhibition called "Roofs for 40 Million." The formation of the Sculptors' Guild and the exhibitions which it organized will be discussed here under the heading of Sculpture.

A number of artist groups were interested during the year in presenting bills to the Congress of the United States for the establishment of a permanent bureau of fine arts. The so-called Coffee-Pepper Bill calling for a Federal Art Bureau within the Department of the Interior was voted down, but permanent Government sponsorship of the arts is still strongly advocated by many artist groups. Although the Section of Painting and Sculpture of the Procurement Division of the United States Treasury was made a permanent department of the Treasury to be known as the Section of Fine Arts, artists still feel that this does not adequately meet the problems which were raised during the discussion of the bill for a bureau of fine arts.

The Artists' Union, active in the United States for several years past, became affiliated in 1938 with the United Office and Professional Workers of America, a C.I.O. union. Mural painters organized under the United Scenic Artists of America, an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor.

The Collectors of American Art is a non-profit organization, founded along the lines of the old American Art Union of the mid-19th century,to encourage the distribution of art in America and to bring into a more adequate ratio the supply and demand in contemporary art. During 1938, its first season, it distributed more than 200 works of art among its members.

New York's Municipal Art Committee sponsored the third annual National Exhibition of American Art, for which works of art were selected by committees appointed by the Governor of each State.

The two great expositions to be held in 1939, the New York World's Fair and the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, have given commissions for mural paintings and sculpture to many artists. The New York World's Fair invited 33 artists to execute a series of mural commissions, some consisting of a number of panels so that in all 105 mural paintings were involved. Similarly, 39 sculptors were given commissions involving 102 figures or groups. In addition, many murals and sculptures have been commissioned by private exhibitors at the Fair. The Golden Gate Exposition announced contracts for $40,000 worth of mural decorations. The Exposition has planned an old-master exhibition with many important loans from European museums, especially in Italy.

Both fairs organized exhibitions of contemporary American art. San Francisco's will consist of approximately 350 paintings selected by Roland J. McKinney. The contemporary art exhibition at the New York World's Fair, directed by Holger Cahill, set up a democratic method of selection in which every American artist community was invited to participate, an innovation in the selection of world's fair exhibits. Local committees all over the country composed of artists or other professionally concerned with art will select the paintings, sculpture and graphic art to be sent to the exhibition at the Fair, where a committee of nine artists and a governing committee of five persons will have final charge of the exhibition.

Museum Exhibitions.

A review of the activity of the art museums during the past year reveals an increase in the number of important exhibitions of American art, both of the past and present. Other trends which may be noted were an unusual and marked increase of activity in the field of sculpture; growing interest in the work of "primitive" or popular artists; and in the field of the art of the past, much interest in the Baroque period and in Chinese art.

America's early tradition in painting enjoyed an unusually brilliant season, the outstanding event of which was the exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of John Singleton Copley. This exhibition illustrated the entire career of the great Colonial painter, from his early primitive beginnings in America to the late historical and allegorical subjects which he painted in England, with special emphasis, however, on the American paintings as revealing his true personality. Harvard University portraits by predecessors and contemporaries of Copley, the earliest example dating from around 1700, were shown at the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University. The Philadelphia Museum of Art held the first comprehensive exhibition ever assembled either in America or Europe of the work of Benjamin West, the Pennsylvania Quaker who went to England and who at the age of 45 succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as president of the Royal Academy in London, a position which he held until his death in 1820. Like Copley, West was born in 1738, and this exhibition celebrated the bicentenary of his birth. In honor of the Swedish-American tercentenary celebrations held in the summer of 1938, the Philadelphia Museum arranged the first showing of the paintings of Gustavus Hesselius (1682-1755). Hesselius was one of the founders of American painting, the first formally-trained painter to arrive in America. He came from Sweden in 1712 and worked mainly in Philadelphia and Maryland. The first exhibition surveying the work of another early American painter, Rembrandt Peale, was held at the Municipal Museum of Baltimore, an institution which Peale founded in 1814. At Kingston, N. Y., in the historical Senate House, about fifty works by the painter John Vanderlyn, a native of Kingston, were brought together. This exhibition included a number of locally owned canvases which had never before been publicly shown. A general exhibition surveying 200 years of American painting was held at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York arranged an extremely interesting exhibition, "A Century of American Landscape Painting" (1800 to 1900), which was shown later at the Springfield (Mass.) Museum of Fine Arts. Paintings by Frank Duveneck, one of the most popular American painters of the late 19th century, were lent by the museum of his native city, Cincinnati, for exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York. Carnegie Institute recognized Pittsburgh's local tradition in art with an exhibition of the work of 19th century artists who worked around Pittsburgh, including such well known names as Audubon, Chester Harding and David Blythe.

In the field of contemporary American painting several notable one-man shows were held in museums. Inclusive retrospective exhibitions of the work of William Glackens (who died in the summer of 1938) and of John Sloan were assembled respectively at the Whitney Museum in New York and the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Andover Academy, Andover, Mass. The Addison Gallery also arranged a showing of paintings and decorative carvings by the brothers Maurice and Charles Prendergast. Glackens, Sloan and Maurice Prendergast were all members of the group known as "The Eight" or the "Ashcan School," which thirty years ago aroused such a storm of protest with their realistic paintings of everyday American life. The work of "The Eight" was shown again as a group this year at the New York gallery where in 1908 they had their first and only other exhibition. The memory of Walter Gay, expatriate American who died in Paris in 1937, was honored by an exhibition of his paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Other contemporary Americans who were given one-man exhibitions in museums were Charles Burchfield, at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh; Franklin C. Watkins, at the Smith College Museum of Art; George Grosz, at the Art Institute of Chicago; Peppino Mangravite at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and the Denver Art Museum; and B. J. O. Nordfeldt at the Denver Art Museum.

Many annual exhibitions of contemporary American art were held as usual in 1938. Of these may be mentioned the annual events at the Whitney Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the City Art Museum of St. Louis, the Worcester Art Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Colorado Springs' fourth annual, "Artists West of the Mississippi," was this year sent on to New York where it was shown at the Whitney Museum. The South came into national prominence this year with the inauguration, at Richmond's Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, of the First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting. For this exhibition 1,550 paintings were submitted from 42 states to a jury of five artists; 183 works were selected and shown, and two were purchased. Another exhibition of great significance for the South, also held at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, was the "preview" show for the New York World's Fair, 1939. Several of these previews will be held throughout the country, and from them works will be selected for the contemporary art exhibition at the Fair. The Albright Art Gallery of Buffalo, N. Y., plans to make a biennial event of its exhibition, "Artists of the Great Lakes Region," held this year for the first time. The Art Institute of Chicago and Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh held their annual international exhibitions, which of course include the work of Americans.

Aside from the annuals, many group exhibitions of contemporary American art were held, of which the following may be mentioned: at the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art in Kansas City, five painters, each represented by at least ten paintings, the exhibition thus constituting a series of one-man shows; the artists included were Jon Corbino, Sidney Laufman, Reginald Marsh, Waldo Peirce and Frederic Taubes; American watercolor shows at the Toledo Museum of Art and the Denver Art Museum; at the Art Institute of Chicago, a large exhibition of the work of Chicago artists on the WPA Federal Art Project; an exhibition of painting and sculpture entitled "Labor in Art" at the Baltimore Museum; and at the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, the Artists' Union's National Exhibition in which eleven unions collaborated — the first time a major museum has given organized artists an opportunity to present their work on a comprehensive scale.

An important museum event of the past year was the opening of The Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in the new building in Fort Tryon Park which was presented by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The Cloisters is the name given to one of the finest collections of medieval art, chiefly sculpture and architecture, in the world. It was assembled by the late George Grey Barnard and was purchased for the Metropolitan Museum in 1925 by Mr. Rockefeller, who in 1938 made many other additions to the collection including the finest known series of 15th century tapestries, the Hunt of the Unicorn. During the first three weeks after the opening over 75,000 people visited the Cloisters.

In the field of the art of the European masters, various museums showed an unusual interest in Venetian art. One of the outstanding events of the year was the great loan exhibition of Venetian paintings, from the fifteenth through the eighteenth century, at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. A small but choice group of Venetian paintings, including a Titian and a Carpaccio never before seen in America, was exhibited at the Columbus (Ohio) Gallery of Fine Arts. Two important exhibitions of paintings by the great 18th century Venetian, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, took place: in New York the Metropolitan Museum's "Tiepolo and His Contemporaries," an exhibition occasioned by the acquisition in 1937 of the Marquis de Biron collection of Tiepolo drawings; and at the Art Institute of Chicago, an exhibition of the paintings of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and of his son Giovanni Demenico Tiepolo. The Springfield Museum of Fine Arts held the first exhibition of the great 18th century Baroque master, Alessandro Magnasco, with loans from eleven major museums and five private collections.

A survey of British painting from 13th century manuscript illuminations to the contemporary period was arranged at Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford had an exhibition of still life painting over four centuries, and Dutch paintings of the 17th century were shown at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. The art and culture of France during ten centuries from Carolingian to Napoleonic times were illustrated at the Morgan Library in New York by manuscript illuminations, drawings and objects of art, as well as historical letters and manuscripts.

Among exhibitions of French painting of the 19th and 20th centuries, several were outstanding. At the San Francisco Museum of Art "The Impressionists" stressed Monet, Pissarro and Sisley, admirably illustrating the whole movement. The work of Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, the so-called "intimists" who have won increasing recognition in this country in recent years, was gathered from American collections for a showing at the Art Institute of Chicago. The later phases of the work of Renoir from 1900 to 1919 were shown at the Philadelphia Museum in 50 small canvases from a private European collection. An unusual exhibition, "Courbet and the Naturalistic Movement," was arranged at the Baltimore Museum on the occasion of a three-day symposium dealing with the subject of Naturalism in literature, painting, drama, music and politics. As a contrast to the Courbet exhibition, the Walters Art Gallery of Baltimore arranged a show of French academic art of the Second Empire — the art which gave Naturalism its impetus. Another unusual exhibition, illustrating the relationship between French literature and painting in the 19th century, was held at the Columbus (Ohio) Gallery of Fine Arts.

Interest throughout the country in modern European painting was evidenced by several important shows and many minor ones. The Toledo Museum of Art arranged a survey of 20th century European painting. German 20th century paintings were shown at Columbus, Ohio, and contemporary painting and sculpture of Italy at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The international shows at the Art Institute of Chicago and Carnegie Institute have already been mentioned. The Detroit Institute had an international watercolor exhibition.

A type of painting never shown comprehensively in America before was brought before the public at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This exhibition, "Masters of Popular Painting," consisted of the work of naive or "primitive" painters of whom the Douanier Rousseau is the most widely recognized master. The European section of the show was selected from an exhibition called "Maitres Popularies de la Réalit‚" held in Paris in 1937; centering around the work of Rousseau, it contained paintings by eight contemporary Europeans, most of them French. The American section included such well known painters as Kane, Canadé, Branchard and Lebduska: several "discoveries" from New Mexico, West Virginia, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Canada, and examples by Edward Hicks and Joseph Pickett, whose paintings have become familiar in exhibitions of the earlier American folk art. Popular art has had a strong influence in European countries and in Mexico, and is beginning to enter the consciousness of artists and public in America, where the rich native tradition has not yet been deeply probed.

In the field of Oriental art two great exhibitions of Chinese painting and of Chinese bronzes at the Metropolitan Museum in New York were of paramount importance. The Chinese painting exhibition was the first event in America in any way comparable to the great Chinese exhibition at Burlington House in London several years ago. The 400 ancient Chinese bronzes assembled from American collections were a revelation of the wealth of American-owned examples in this field. Remarkable exhibitions of Chinese art were also held at galleries of several New York dealers.

Exhibitions in Dealers' Galleries.

During the past season art dealers' galleries in New York offered the usual rich opportunity to see works of French masters of the 19th century, particularly Cézanne, von Gogh, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec; and of the 20th century, Picasso, Matisse, Rouault, Derain and other leading contemporaries. The French Impressionists of the 1870's received an unusual amount of notice. Although French art continued to predominate over other fields, American art was very extensively displayed, and there were also a number of old master exhibitions of great interest in the dealers' galleries. The bringing together of seven paintings by the Florentine, Piero di Cosimo (1462-1521), was of surpassing interest to the New York art public. The work of this rare and comparatively little known master of Renaissance Italy has been increasingly valued in recent years by artists and connoisseurs, who welcomed this exhibition as the first opportunity to see so many of his works together. This was made possible by the loan of two important paintings by Piero which last year entered American collections: The Discovery of Honey, from the Worcester Art Museum, and Vulcan and Æolus as Teachers of Mankind, from the National Gallery of Canada in Ottowa; to these were added The Finding of Vulcan lent by the Wadsworth Athenuem, Hartford, three pictures from private collections in New York, and one from London. Another impressive show was a loan exhibition of some 20 Venetian paintings, dominated by Titian and Tintoretto, and including Jacopo and Giovanni Bellini, Antonello da Messina, Mantegna, Crivelli, Palma Vecchio, Andrea Solario, Veronese, and the earlier Vivarini. Other noteworthy exhibitions in the galleries were: 17th century Dutch paintings; Colonial American portraits; the French Romantic painters, Grosé Géricault and Delacroix; paintings and drawings of Claude Lorrain (1600-1682); Trompe l'Oeil in early and modern art; "Great Portraits from Impressionism to Modernism"; watercolors and pastels by James A. McNeill Whistler.

The number of one-man exhibitions given contemporary American artists increases enormously each year, and during 1938 the number was little short of amazing. The names which follow represent only a part, possibly about two-thirds, of the number of contemporary American painters who enjoyed the privilege, some for the first time, of one-man showings in New York in 1938: Charles Aitken, Josef Albers, M. Azzi Aldrich, Vera Andrus, Rifka Angel, Revington Arthur, Milton Avery, Gifford Beal, Ben Benn, Virginia Berresford, Henry Billings, Richard Blow, Henry Botkin, Louis Bouché, Emile Branchard, Judson Briggs, Ann Brockman, Florence Cane, John Carroll, Jean Charlot, Nicolai Cikovsky, Paul Lewis Clemens, Mary D. Coles, John Steuart Curry, Nassos Daphnis, A. Mark Datz, Randall Davey, Adolf Dehn, Charles Demuth, Edwin Dickinson, Phil Dike, Thomas Donnelly, Arthur G. Dove, Elsie Driggs, Guy Pène du Bois, Arthur Emptage, Stephen Etnier, Philip Evergood, Lyonel Feininger, Lauren Ford, Joseph Foshko, Robert Francis, David Fredenthal, A. E. Gallatin, Emil Ganso, Frank di Gioia, Anne Goldthwaite, Adelaide de Groot, William Gropper, Louis Guglielmi, Pop Hart, Leon Hartl, Marsden Hartley, Eugene Higgins, Carl Holty, Walter Houmère, Iskantor, Morris Kantor, Richard Lahey, Ernest Lawson, Jonas Lie, Loren Maclver, Gus Mager, Reginald Marsh, Paul Meltsner, Kenneth Hayes Miller, Maud Morgan, Thomas Nagai, Fred Nagler, B. J. O. Nordfeldt, Eliot O'Hara, Georgia O'Keeffe, Cathal O'Toole, Honoré Palmer, William C. Palmer, John Pellew, Marc Perper, John Pike, Hobson Pittman, Henry Varnum Poor, O. A. Renne, Umberto Romano, Doris Rosenthal, Gordon Samstag, George Schreiber, Zoltan Sepeshy, Millard Sheets, Anatol Shulkin, André Smith, Jacob Getlar Smith, Issac Soyer, Raphael Soyer, Everett Spruce, William Starkweather, Gail Symon, Frederic Taubes, Manuel Tolegian, Tromka, Tschacbasov, Stuyvesant Van Veen, Coulton Waugh, John Whorf, Robert Jay Wolff, Henrietta Wyeth, John Xcéron.

Paintings by the following contemporary Europeans were seen in one-man exhibitions in New York: Mariano Andreu, Balthus, Max Beckmann, Georges Braque, Carlo Carrà, Marc Chagall, Raoul Dufy, Russell Flint, Othon Friesz, Xaver Fuhr, Juan Gris, Jean Hélion, Karl Hofer, Wassily Kandinsky, Moïse Kisling, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, Fernand Léger, Léonid, Renè Magritte, Henri-Matisse, Joan Miro, Jules Pascin, Max Pechstein, Pablo Picasso, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Gino Severini, Maurice de Vlaminck.

Sculpture.

In America the year 1938 brought a tremendous increase in activity in the field of sculpture. A great many young artists are turning to sculptural expression, contemporary sculpture has been extensively exhibited, and several sculptors' organizations have been formed. The growing public awareness of the possibilities of sculpture as a contemporary art form may well be owing to the activities of the art projects of the United States Government, which for several years past have given unprecedented support to the art of sculpture, as well as to mural painting.

The functionalist trend in modern architecture has turned again to the use of sculpture in relation to building — another factor in the new interest in monumental sculpture.

The Government took the lead in employing sculptors, but during 1938 private organizations sponsored several important sculpture competitions, open to all professional sculptors. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company offered a commission of $8,000 for a sculpture representing the American family, to be shown in the Company's exhibit at the New York World's Fair of 1939. This competition was won by Thomas LoMedico. Another important competition was sponsored by Rockefeller Center, Inc., which offered a $7,500 commission for a 20 by 18 foot bronze panel over the entrance of the Associated Press Building in Rockefeller Center. This was the first open competition sponsored by Rockefeller Center, and the winning model was that of Isamu Noguchi, with second and third prizes going to John Tatschl and Joseph Fleri. A competition was held for a $2,500 monument to the young farmers of America for the Art Building of the Los Angeles County Fair. In Oakland, Cal., the Brotherhood of Longshoremen and Auto Truck Drivers commissioned two sculptors, Warren Cheney and Elliott Sandow, to decorate its new meeting hall with sculptures expressive of the purpose of the Brotherhood. In Philadelphia the program of the Samuel Memorial in Fairmount Park is going forward. When completed the Memorial will comprise 18 figures or groups by nationally known sculptors illustrating American history. Figures of a Miner by John B. Flannagan and of a Ploughman by J. Wallace Kelly and a group, Spanning The Continent, by Robert Laurent were set up in the past year. Other figures, by Hélène Sardeau, Maurice Sterne and Heinz Warneke, are in various stages of completion.

The Sculptors' Guild, an organization of some 50 sculptors, formed in July 1937, held two exhibitions in 1938, a program which it intends to continue each year. The first of these was held out-of-doors in a vacant lot on Park Avenue at 39th Street, New York. This was a new idea in showmanship and it proved extremely popular, attracting an attendance of 40,000 in three weeks. The second exhibition was held in the Brooklyn Museum and contained some 110 sculptures. The formation of the Sculptors' Guild and the success of its exhibitions are indicative of the increasing interest in sculpture in this country.

Several other museums throughout the country held exhibitions of sculpture. The Whitney Museum in New York put on its annual show. Carnegie Institute asked 36 living sculptors to send three works each to the first general exhibition of sculpture held in Pittsburgh in ten years. The Rochester (N. Y.) Memorial Art Gallery showed modern German sculpture. The most brilliant early sculpture exhibition of the year was that of the Detroit Institute of Arts. This was a survey of Italian sculpture from the late Romanesque period through the Gothic period to the end of the early Renaissance. All loans for this exhibition were drawn from American collections, showing the wealth of important examples now in this country.

The number of contemporary American sculptors who had one-man exhibitions in or around New York during 1938 nearly trebled the number in 1937; a considerable proportion of these sculptors had not had one-man shows before. A partial list follows: Russell Barnett Aitken (ceramics), Margo Allen, Saul Baizerman, Stuart Benson, Cornelia Van A. Chapin, Nathaniel Choate, José de Creeft, Jo Davidson, William Edmondson (a "primitive" shown at the Museum of Modern Art), John Ferren, John B. Flannagan, Genevieve Karr Hamlin, Malvina Hoffman, Isabella Howland (caricatures in sculpture), Mario Korbel, Boris Lovet-Lorski, Liza Monk, John Rood, Charles G. Shaw (abstract panels), David Smith, Justin Sturm, Lillian Swann, Allen Townsend Terrell, Lawrence Tompkins, Polygnotos Vagis, Bessie Potter Vonnoh, Carl Walters (ceramics), Nat Werner, Anita Wechsler, Wheeler Williams, Arline Wingate, Mahonri Young. Foreign sculptors whose work was given one-man showings were: Alexander Archipenko, Ernst Barlach (memorial exhibition, Barlach died in 1938), George Kolbe, Henri Laurens, Maryla Lednicka, Aristide Maillol, Mirco, Chana Orloff, Renée Sintenis.

Among contemporary sculptors whose work was acquired by American museums in 1938 are: Constantin Brancusi, Ernst Barlach, Jacob Epstein, Gerhard Marcks, Gaston Lachaise, Reuben Nakian, John B. Flannagan, Minna Harkavy, Heinz Warneke, José de Creeft. A number of important examples of European and Oriental sculpture also entered American museums.

The will of the distinguished American sculptor, George Grey Barnard, who died in 1938, asked that his memorial arch, depicting the futility of war and dedicated to the Gold Star Mothers of America, be executed in marble and erected. Barnard left a 100-foot model of the arch and 50 full-sized plaster models for figures for it, on which he had worked the last 18 years of his life.

United States Government Art Projects.

The Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture continued to function during 1938. The WPA Federal Art Project, which was set up three and one half years ago to employ jobless professional mural and easel painters, sculptors, art teachers, and other art workers, has operated in 41 States, the District of Columbia, and New York City. At its peak it employed 5,212 artists; at the end of December 1938 it was employing 4,079. Effective Jan, 15, 1939, this figure will be reduced to 4,700 persons. The WPA Federal Art Project has done great service in bringing art to the people, particularly people who have had the desire but not the opportunity to enjoy art. It has been the opinion of those responsible for the WPA art projects that in the American people as a whole the desire to enjoy art, to take part in some form of art activity, lies close to the surface and that the desire has not heretofore been satisfied. The Federal Art Project has done much to open the way for the great popular consumption of art of which America is undoubtedly capable.

The drift of talent away from home communities all over the country toward the great cities has been counteracted for the first time in the history of American art. The community art center program has enabled the WPA art project to carry art into parts of the country, especially in the South and West, where opportunities in the arts have been completely lacking. Sixty-two Federal-sponsored community art centers have been established in 19 states, the District of Columbia and New York City. Plans are now being completed for art centers in five other states. The interest of the communities in which these centers have been established is shown by the fact that over $300,000 has been contributed toward the program by the communities themselves. In two years more than 11,000,000 persons have participated in WPA art center activities, which include free instruction in the creative arts and the crafts, lectures, demonstrations, and exhibitions.

In the past three years more than 100,000 works of art have been produced by artists employed by the WPA Federal Art Project. These works of art are actually being put to public use: in other words, these murals, paintings, sculptures and prints have been allocated to schools, libraries, hospitals, airports, court-houses, and other tax-supported public institutions. Works of art for which they have contributed the material and other non-labor costs — a fact which testifies to their desire to receive them — have been given to 13,458 such institutions. Besides works of creative art, project workers have produced 450,000 posters, 35,000 maps and diagrams, 350,000 photographs, 45,000 craft objects, 550 dioramas and models, and 10,000 lantern slides and other types of visual aids, all of which are being put to public use. For every worker now employed on the program the public has received 200 works of creative and applied arts.

Over 10,000 plates for the Index of American Design have been completed. This is the great pictorial record of indigenous American decorative arts from the earliest Colonial period to the end of the 19th century, which is being compiled by the WPA Federal Art Project. A number of educational institutions and other organizations are interesting themselves in plans for the publication of the Index of American Design in a series of color portfolios.

The Section of Painting and Sculpture of the Treasury Department continued its basic program of decorating Federal buildings with murals and sculpture. By June 30, 1938, 243 painting and sculpture projects had been completed since the Section was organized in 1934. The Section of Painting and Sculpture conducted national competitions for sculpture and mural paintings for the United States Government Building at the New York World's Fair of 1939. The WPA Federal Art Project is executing a series of murals for both the New York World's Fair and the Golden Gate Exposition.

Museum Acquisitions.

A large number of paintings by European masters entered the collections of American museums during the past year but only a few can be noted here. Probably the outstanding acquisition was the gift to the Metropolitan Museum in New York of the great painting Venus and Adonis by Rubens, a magnificent late example of c. 1635 which had been on loan in the museum since 1920. The Metropolitan Museum also acquired its first example by Fragonard, the Lady with a Dog, c. 1767-70. The Frick Collection in New York acquired a great portrait by Tintoretto, a Venetian Senator, and the Cleveland Museum of Art a famous Watteau, the Minuet in a Pavilion, c. 1717-18. A painting by Hieronymous Bosch, Christ Taken in Captivity, c. 1500, entered the San Diego Fine Arts Gallery. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts acquired a recently discovered Rubens portrait of Isabella Brant of c. 1618. Two paintings by Karel and Barent Fabritius were the first examples by these pupils and associates of Rembrandt to come to America: St. Peter's Escape from Prison, c. 1650, to the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, and Eli and Samuel to the Art Institute of Chicago. The Tiepolo Madonna and Child with Adoring Figure, c. 1721, went to the Detroit Institute of Arts. Two eighteenth century works, The Wash Women by Fragonard and The Dovecote by Boucher, entered the City Art Museum of St. Louis. Paintings by three eighteenth century Italian Baroque masters, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Sebastiano Ricci and Guiseppe Maria Crespi, were acquired by the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts. The Detroit Institute of Arts acquired examples by several early painters of the Netherlands: Hercules Seghers (1590-1640), Joos van Cleve (active 1530-1550), Pieter Huys (active 1545-77), Frans van Mieris (1635-1681), Roelandt Savery (1576-1639), and others. Two Monks in a Landscape, c. 1645, by Murillo, and several early Italian paintings from the Martin Ryerson Collection were added to the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The Baltimore Museum of Art received a bequest of paintings from the Mary Frick Jacobs collection, chiefly by eighteenth century French and English masters, but also including examples by Perugino, Luini, Rubens, Hals, Rembrandt, Ruysdale, Murillo, and others.

The Samuel H. Kress Foundation continued its generous policy of giving works of art to small museums throughout the country. Museums or colleges in New Orleans, San Antonio, Memphis, Savannah, Montgomery, Macon, Charlotte, Wichita, Phoenix, Seattle, received paintings by old masters from the Kress Foundation.

In the field of modern art some important nineteenth century works acquired were as follows: an early painting by Corot, Hagar in the Wilderness, 1835, by the Metropolitan Museum of Art; a Cézanne of 1883-85, Chestnut Trees at Jas de Bouffan, by the Frick Collection; a Cézanne of 1904-06, Mont Sainte Victoire, and Reverie by Gauguin, by the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery in Kansas City; by the Art Institute of Chicago, an important Winslow Homer, The Herring Net, and several French pictures: Corot, View of Genoa; Manet, Young Woman in Round Hat; Degas, La Toilette and Dancer in the Wings; Redon, Woman among Flowers; Renoir, Lady at Piano and Artist's Son Jean As a Child.

Among twentieth century works acquired were: Picasso's The Mirror of 1932, La Coiffure, 1906, Seated Woman and Guitar and Fruit of 1927, and examples by Derain, Bonnard and Utrillo, given to the Museum of Modern Art, New York; abstract works by Hans Arp, Georges Vantongerloo, Theo Van Doesburg, and others, by the Gallery of Living Art of New York University. The following acquired works by contemporary American painters: Boston Museum; San Francisco Museum; Addison Gallery; Denver Art Museum; San Diego Fine Arts Academy; Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum, New York; Carnegie Institute; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; City Art Museum of St. Louis; University of Nebraska; Sweet Briar College; Los Angeles Museum; William Rockhill Nelson Gallery; Brooklyn Museum; and many others.

The New York Historical Society purchased the contents of Mr. and Mrs. Elie Nadelman's Museum of Folk Arts at Riverdale-on-Hudson. This unique collection, containing almost 15,000 objects of European and American origin, will be installed in the new building of the New York Historical Society.

Art in Europe.

The tenseness of the political situation in Europe during 1938 was reflected in the art world in the decrease in major art expositions; a few were noteworthy, however. In Paris the most comprehensive survey of British art ever shown in France was exhibited at the Louvre. An exhibition of the paintings of Edouard Vuillard at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris aroused great interest. A large and comprehensive exhibition of American art, which had never before been adequately presented in any city of Europe, was sent to Paris at the invitation of the French Government. This was selected with the collaboration of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was shown at the Musée du Jeu de Paume. Entitled "Three Centuries of Art in the United States," the exhibition included paintings, sculpture, graphic art, folk art, architecture, photography and motion pictures. At the Orangerie in Paris thirty paintings of first quality by Goya were shown. These were selected from museums and private collections of France only, since it was impossible to draw upon the collection of the Prado in Madrid as was originally planned. Also shown in Paris during the year were a large Surrealist exhibition and a comprehensive collection of the work of Juan Gris, the Spanish Cubist painter who died in 1927.

In London at Burlington House "Seventeenth Century Art in Europe," a loan exhibition drawn with but one exception from collections in the British Isles, was one of the most significant exhibitions yet held of the work of the great Baroque masters. The Tate Gallery showed "A Century of Canadian Art." Picasso's great mural painting Guernica was exhibited in London, together with 60 preparatory paintings and drawings, to aid the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief. This work had been exhibited in the Spanish Pavilion at the International Exposition, Paris, 1937. Works by 53 of the internationally known artists who were included in Nazi Germany's exhibition of "degenerate art" in Munich in 1937 were brought to London for exhibition. At London art dealers' galleries an important exhibition of 74 paintings of the School of Paris, and an American exhibition consisting of 51 canvases by 42 contemporary painters were held.

In Rotterdam at the Boymans Museum the "Masterpieces of Four Centuries," an important loan exhibition of 300 paintings and drawings from private collections in the Netherlands, showed the art of the Low Countries from 1400 to 1800. Naples had an exhibition of the work of painters of Naples from 1600 to 1900.

Sales.

The most important event in art markets since J. P. Morgan sold part of his collection at auction in 1935 was an announcement that William Randolph Hearst would dispose of his famous collection by sale and gift. The Hearst collection is one of the largest and most varied in history and is valued at some $15,000,000. The bulk of the collection of the late Mortimer L. Schiff was sold in London, bringing a total of £101,949, (over $500,000), the biggest event in a London salesroom for several years. The most important item in this sale was the painting by Roger van der Weyden, Scenes from the Life of Pope Sergias I, which brought 14,000 guineas ($70,000).

1944: Painting And Sculpture

2006-12-15T17:07:00.000+03:00

Art and the War.

The fate of the art treasures and historic monuments of Europe has been the most vital interest of the art world during 1944. Preliminary reports on the European situation have come from newspaper correspondents, from the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives officers attached to the various armies, and from the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas. While the destruction of the art heritage of Europe has been appalling, it is nonetheless remarkable how much these losses have been reduced by the intelligent policy of the Allied armies. General Eisenhower's order of Dec. 29, 1943, to all Allied commanders in Italy regarding the protection of historic monuments was made public by President Roosevelt on Feb. 16, 1944, following the destruction by the American Fifth Army because of military necessity, of the Abbey of Monte Cassino southeast of Rome. General Eisenhower said: "Today we are fighting in a country which has contributed a great deal to our cultural inheritance, a country rich in monuments.... We are bound to respect those monuments so far as war allows. If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men, then our men's lives count infinitely more and the buildings must go. But the choice is not always so clear-cut as that. In many cases the monuments can be spared without any detriment to operational needs...
It is a responsibility of higher commanders to determine through AMG officers the locations of historical monuments, whether they be immediately ahead of our front lines or in areas occupied by us. This information, passed to lower echelons through normal channels, places the responsibility on all commanders of complying with the spirit of this letter."

These orders were carried out in all European war theaters by Allied commanders in the field and by Civil Affairs officers attached to Allied headquarters. They were the result of a plan worked out through the Army's initiative by such groups as the Harvard Group of American Defense which was asked by the Army as early as December 1942 to list sites of artistic and historic importance in the Mediterranean area. The lists made at Harvard became the basis of an extensive mapping of Europe, begun in 1943 by the Committee for the Protection of Cultural Treasures in War Areas, set up by the American Council of Learned Societies. Under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation this Committee was enlarged in June 1943 to include museum heads, teachers of art history, archeologists, archivists and librarians. Two months later President Roosevelt set up his Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas under the chairmanship of Justice Roberts, including in its membership many of the committee members mentioned above. Through the activities of these various groups the location of every historic monument, art gallery or museum, library or archive in the war theaters was clearly mapped so that these areas might be avoided and protected. Many historic sites were saved through brilliant artillery direction and precision bombing guided by these maps. Advisers on Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives were sent into the field to aid in the salvage of monuments and to enlist the help of local experts and custodians wherever they can be found in the war areas. The same care will be exercised for the preservation of monuments within Germany.

Reports from Europe.

In spite of these efforts the damage in many areas has been severe and in some such as Florence and Pisa, Rouen and Caen, it is tragic and irreparable. In October 1944 the Office of War Information issued a report based on information secured by Francis Henry Taylor of the President's Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas. The report indicates that, proportionately, England has suffered more loss in the cultural field than either France or Italy. London has taken more battering from the air than any other European capital, with the exception of Warsaw and possibly Berlin. Some 4,000 historic churches in England have been damaged and 2,800 of them destroyed beyond repair. Damage to museums, libraries, and universities has been widespread, not only in London, but throughout England and in Scotland. Exeter Cathedral, one of the finest examples of Middle Gothic architecture, was severely damaged. Canterbury and Wells to a lesser extent. In London the churches of Sir Christopher Wren, rebuilt by him after the Great Fire of 1666, have been damaged and many of them destroyed. Hundreds of other historic buildings in England have been lost.

In France the section of Normandy around Calais, Cherbourg and Rouen has been devastated, although a few of the famous buildings such as Bayeux Cathedral and the two great abbeys built by William the Conqueror at Caen have escaped serious damage. Rouen Cathedral was very severely hurt and the town has suffered much. At Chartres, the damage to the Cathedral, which is situated only 500 metres from one of the great airfields of France which was bombed repeatedly by the Allies, was limited to the old South tower, and some surface damage from snipers' bullets during the liberation. Mont St. Michel, in the area of St. Malo where the fighting was heavy, was unharmed. Paris was practically untouched. The Luxembourg Palace, which became a military objective when Goering made it the headquarters of the Luftwaffe, was the only historic monument wrecked. The state art collections from the Louvre and other museums of France were stored in 1939 in 70 depositories, chiefly the cellars of chateaux south of the Loire River. It appears that during the first two years of occupation these depositories were protected by the Nazis and as a whole did not suffer looting. During the latter part of the period of occupation increasing pressure was put upon French museum officials to release important works of art for "cultural exchange" with Germany. Jacques Jaujard, director of the National Museums of France, is reported to have been clever and courageous in stalling Nazi attempts to exchange minor German works for important French ones. The most notorious case of looting in France was that of the Ghent altarpiece, The Adoration of the Lamb by the brothers Van Eyck, one of the most famous paintings in the world, which had been sent to the Louvre for safekeeping by the Belgian government. This painting was removed from its depository at Aix-en-Provence on an order signed by Abel Bonnard, Vichy Minister of Education, and presented to Hermann Goering as a birthday gift. This theft was violently protested by Jacques Jaujard. The protest brought about Jaujard's dismissal from his post, whereupon the entire staffs of all the French museums resigned in a body, forcing Vichy to reinstate Jaujard. Another prized art treasure, the Bayeux Tapestry, was about to be shipped to Germany when the Allied armies entered Paris. Early in the war this 11th century work, depicting the conquest of England by William the Conqueror, had been stored in the Chateau de Sourches near Rennes. The Vichy government gave the Nazis permission to remove the tapestry and it had been taken to Paris for shipment to Germany. Reports from Allied headquarters in France indicate that while there had been comparatively little looting of French national art treasures, private collections, and especially those owned by Jews, had fared badly. Many of these had either been confiscated or acquired by fictitious sale and placed in the Jeu de Paume Museum where agents of Hitler, Himmler, and Goering (mostly leading German art scholars) came to select the most valuable items.

The record of destruction in Italy is one of irreparable loss to the world. Many of the most beautiful buildings which have come down to us from the Medieval and Renaissance periods no longer exist. Florence and Pisa suffered the most tragic and extensive damage. At Florence on Aug. 4 the Germans destroyed the Arno bridges and the surrounding medieval palaces with a violence and thoroughness that went far beyond military necessity. The only bridge which was spared was the Ponte Vecchio with its old craftsmen's shops, but whole streets along the river at both ends of the Ponte Vecchio were destroyed instead, and 13th and 14th century houses with their irreplaceable furnishings and libraries were reduced to rubble. Among the most tragic losses were those of the Ponte di Santa Trinità, built in 1569, of which nothing remained except two pylons; and the Palazzo di Parte Guelfa, a 14th century structure decorated by Brunelleschi and Vasari. Some ancient manuscripts, books and objects of art, especially those of the Società Colombaria, have been found in the rubble, and fragments of the sculptural ornament of the Santa Trinità Bridge have been recovered from the Arno.

In 1942 Florence's great treasures of Renaissance painting and sculpture were gathered from museums and palaces and stored throughout the Tuscan countryside in the cellars of villas, castles and convents. All but two of these depositories known to the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Commission are now in Allied hands. Reports indicate that most of these works of art are safe; but it appears that at least two of the Tuscan depositories were looted by the Germans of many cases of paintings and sculptures. Possibly as many as 500 to 600 works of art are missing, famous among them being Raphael's Veiled Woman, Botticelli's Minerva and the Centaur, Michelangelo's Bacchus, and Donatello's St. George. The great paintings by Uccello from Santa Maria Novella have been reported somewhat damaged, but the Medici Chapel sculptures by Michelangelo and famous works by Donatello, Andrea Pisano and Luca della Robbia, stored in the same depository, are reported safe.

The picturesque medieval city of Pisa suffered greater destruction than any of the other important Tuscan cities. Pisa, which was a veritable gold mine of art treasures scattered through every part of the city, was battered in many Allied raids and fought over by land armies from July 24 to September 3, 1944. It is virtually in ruins. Hundreds of buildings which had escaped bombs and shells were mined by the Germans. In the Campo Santo, which is part of that famous group of buildings including the Leaning Tower, cathedral and baptistry, the world of culture has suffered one of the greatest losses of the war. This building contains precious fresco paintings by Benozzo Gozzoli and the great masterpiece, the Triumph of Death fresco ascribed to Andrea Orcagna and painted about 1350. Though ravaged sections of these paintings still remain, they are damaged beyond repair. The destruction took place at a time when the American Fifth Army on the south bank of the Arno faced the Germans on the north bank. Four shells from an American gun hit the roof of the Campo Santo and fired it, and melted lead and blazing timbers fell all night on the fresco paintings and on the collections of Etruscan, Roman and Medieval sculpture within the building. Even more dreadful damage to the frescoes, however, occurred in the weeks that followed when the strong Italian sun beat down upon what remained of the paintings and robbed them of their color. When the Fifth Army finally captured the north side of Pisa, immediate steps were taken to roof over the building and to protect and salvage what remained of the Campo Santo.

Many towns on the way to Rome, especially Benevento with its great Romanesque church, were terribly hurt. St. Thomas' Cathedral in Ortona was deliberately blown up by the Germans. Certain of the Italian hill towns were miraculously saved. Assisi was one of these. In Perugia the Germans mined the Renaissance bridges but the rest of the town escaped serious damage. At Orvieto the priceless Last Judgment frescoes by Signorelli were intact; and at Arezzo the cathedral church with its great frescoes by Piero della Francesca was unharmed, in spite of bomb damage in the town. Siena was saved any but minor losses. The Germans had mined Siena before withdrawing, but the plan was found and the mines removed in time; and the French general whose troops took the city spared it from artillery fire. San Gimignano was wantonly shelled by the Germans after their withdrawal and there was considerable damage there. The frescoes by Barna da Siena in the Collegiata were hit, but the Ghirlandaio and Benozzo Gozzoli frescoes were not touched; the sculptures by Benedetto da Maiano and Jacopo della Quercia also escaped damage. At Viterbo and Pienza terrible damage was done to churches and other historic buildings.

Except for minor damage to the Church of San Lorenzo, Rome escaped. Great numbers of art treasures from the museums of Venice, Naples, Milan, Urbino and other Italian cities were sent for safekeeping to the Vatican. The presence in Rome of these works of art from various parts of Italy, late in the year, led to an important exhibition, held in response to the requests of Allied troops to be allowed to visit the art galleries in Rome. This special exhibition was organized at the Palazzo Venezia by the Division of Fine Arts of the Allied Military Government. Similar exhibitions for the Allied troops are being planned in Florence and Siena. There is little direct evidence, but there appears to have been extensive German theft of works of art from the collections of the great Italian galleries. German propaganda made much of the fact that the cases containing masterpieces from the Naples National Gallery, which had been stored in the Abbey of Monte Cassino, were turned over to the Vatican by the Germans for safekeeping before the Allied bombings. It was found, however, that 15 of these cases never arrived at the Vatican, and that others had been opened and important contents removed. Among the works of art which disappeared in this way were Titian's Danae and another Titian, a Raphael, a Claude Lorrain and a famous Breughel, The Blind Leading the Blind, all from Naples. A very great loss was the burning of the National Library at Naples. Classical remains in Italy and Sicily suffered less damage than was expected, though at Pompeii the new excavations were seriously hurt. In Greece the Germans carried out extensive archeological excavations.

There have been no official reports on the fate of the art of the Low Countries. The director of the Belgian Royal Museum was quoted as believing, at the time of his return to Belgium after its liberation, that Belgian art collections had suffered no more serious loss than had those of France. It is known, however, that the Germans have stolen three of Belgium's greatest treasures, the Virgin and Child by Michelangelo from Bruges, the Louvain altarpiece by Roger van der Weyden, and the Ghent altarpiece by the van Eycks, mentioned above. A chalk cave near Maastricht, The Netherlands has been revealed as the depository for a large number of masterpieces from the great museums of Holland. The great Isenheim altarpiece by Matthias Gruenewald from the Colmar Museum, which was thought looted, was found in a castle near Colmar by an American officer. With the liberation of Paris the American art world received news of the many renowned French artists who with the rest of Paris had been cut off during the four years of German occupation. Pablo Picasso, greatest living figure in the arts, has been prominent in these news stories, and his reputation has been further enhanced by his record during the occupation. In a report on Picasso Alfred H. Barr, Jr., of the Museum of Modern Art, says: "... his position in the Resistance Movement is of unique importance. Though not a Frenchman he stayed in Paris, when a good many leading French artists spent the war working quietly in the provinces, left the country entirely ... or in a few shameful cases remained to collaborate with the Germans. Picasso's presence must have disquieted the Germans for he was conspicuously anathema to Hitler. For many years he had been in Nazi eyes the most formidable master of degenerate art ...; he was said to have Jewish blood; in his Dreams and Lies of Franco he had savagely lampooned Hitler's faithful Spanish ally; he had accepted an official appointment, the directorship of the Prado, from the Spanish Republican government, the first victim of the Axis; and he had painted Guernica. Yet he returned to Paris after the summer of 1940 and lived there for four precarious years under German rule without recantation or compromise and protected only by his greatness as an artist.... Oct. 6 the Salon d'Automne opened. Ordinarily this is the most important of the big annual Paris exhibitions. But the Salon d'Automne of 1944 was uniquely significant. Held just six weeks after Aug. 25, it became the Salon de la Libération, the first great public manifestation of painting in France after four years of German domination. Though organized and controlled by French artists the place of honor was given to the Spaniard, Picasso, who alone had the privilege of a large one-man show — 74 paintings and five pieces of sculpture, all of them done since the occupation of 1940. No greater tribute could be paid the artist who had been for so long a symbol of the Resistance." Other prominent exhibitors in the Salon were Bonnard, Braque, Matisse, Dufy and Lhote; excluded were the distinguished French artists known as "collaborators": Vlaminck, Derain, Friesz, Segonzac and Despiau. Two days after the exhibition opened a demonstration against Picasso's paintings took place in which 15 of his works were torn from the walls. The reasons are not known but it is thought that it may have been done by a group of reactionary young art students. No damage was done. Rouault, Lurcat and other well-known men have carried on in Paris and worked hard. Matisse, who is over 75 years old, is very ill near Nice, but he continues to paint while lying in bed. Pierre Bonnard, 77 years old and living in Cannes, is painting with great vigor and has become the spiritual leader of a younger generation of painters whose work has developed since 1940. Among them are Leon Gischia, Francis Tailleux, Georges Singier, Talcoat, André Fougeron, Robin, and Maurice Estève, and work by some of them has been seen in a color portfolio published during the occupation by Editions du Chêne. Three other portfolios in the series were devoted to the wartime paintings of Picasso, Bonnard and Matisse. number of world-renowned artists died in 1944. Aristide Maillol, possibly the greatest of 20th century sculptors, was killed at the age of 82 in a motor accident near his home at Banyuls, France. Edvard Munch, the great Norwegian forerunner of 20th century Expressionism, died at 80 in Norway. Vassily Kandinsky, Russian painter and theorist, died in Paris at the age of 77. Piet Mondrian, painter of pure abstraction and one of the pioneer spirits of 20th century art, who had lived in New York since 1940, died in New York at 72. The death of Chaim Soutine in France in 1943 was confirmed this year; Maurice Denis also died in 1943. most important activity undertaken by American museums in 1944 concerned the return of major works of art from the storage places in which they had been secreted against possible damage by bombing. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York made public the fact that its most valuable paintings had been stored at Whitemarsh Hall, Whitemarsh, Pa. The gradual return of these works of art to the Metropolitan was begun in the early spring and the painting galleries of the museum, completely redecorated, were opened to the public in May. At this time the Metropolitan also installed the Jules S. Bache collection. Early in 1944 announcement was made that the trustees of the Bache Foundation planned to make the Metropolitan the permanent home of this noted art collection. The National Gallery of Art in Washington also began to return to its walls major paintings from the Mellon and Kress collections which had been stored at the start of the war in Biltmore House, Biltmore, N. C. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, New York's Morgan Library, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York likewise removed their most valued possessions from war storage and placed them again on exhibition. Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, which in 1943 became a part of the Metropolitan Museum by action of the trustees of both institutions, reopened its building in September with the announcement of a program of exhibitions carrying through the season until June 1945. Announcement was made in 1944 that the Museum of Costume Art, founded in New York in 1937 by the late Irene Lewisohn, had been incorporated into the Metropolitan Museum. The collection of the Museum of Costume Art, comprising some 7,000 items, will eventually be installed in the Metropolitan with its own collections of dress and textiles. The American Museum of Natural History completed an elaborate reorganization of its hall of Mexican and Central-American Archeology. This new installation is most welcome not only to archeologists but to art lovers, since this Pre-Columbian collection contains some superb examples of Mayan and Aztec sculpture, undoubtedly one of the great artistic traditions of the world. The Museum of Modern Art in New York established a Department of Manual Industry, which will parallel the museum's Department of Industrial Design established in 1940 to cover the field of mass-produced objects. The National Gallery of Art in Washington established an Inter-American Office, created by a grant-in-aid from the Department of State, to act as the Government's official clearing-house for the exchange of information concerning art activities in the American Republics. The Museum of Non-Objective Art in New York announced that it would erect a building to be designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Museum of Modern Art announced that, during the fiscal year July 1, 1943-June 30, 1944, it had circulated 131 exhibitions to 622 institutions in 235 cities. It also prepared at the request of U.S. Government agencies two exhibitions for London, one for Sydney, Australia, one for Cairo, one for Stockholm, and two for South America. Museums throughout the country have been active in using their resources to further the war effort. The Museums Council of New York City had set up in 1943 a Committee on Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation, composed of Richard F. Bach of the Metropolitan Museum, Charles Russell of the American Museum of Natural History, and James T. Soby of the Museum of Modern Art, to study the methods by which museums can assist, by extra-mural and intra-mural work, in the greatly increasing activity in the field of occupational therapy. American museums have also cooperated very extensively with the Arts and Skills Unit of the American Red Cross, which was organized in 1942 to supply craftsmen and artists on a volunteer basis to act as instructors in therapy for recreational purposes in military hospitals. The museums, particularly in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, have helped supply artist personnel for the Arts and Skills Unit, and have provided advisory committees, meeting rooms, and art materials; and, as in the case of the Chicago Art Institute, have established recreational therapy centers in the hospitals. The Museum of Modern Art set up in 1944 a War Veterans' Art Center, providing day and evening classes in the arts and crafts for recreational and pre-vocational training. Certain museums have been able to supply special information and services for war use. The American Museum of Natural History has written sections of military handbooks dealing with the natives and geography in war areas, and has made a great many portable exhibits for the Army dealing with racial identification. The Metropolitan Museum has supplied thousands of color reproductions and prints to hospitals. Many museums have presented shows dealing with the arts in therapy, to inform the public of work in this field. museums maintained active and varied exhibition programs in spite of transportation problems and the difficulty of obtaining loans of works of art. In the old-master field there were no loan exhibitions of major importance. Apart from new installations in large Eastern museums of their masterpieces brought back from war storage, the most important exhibition of the art of the past held during 1944 was that of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts collection of Chinese painting, shown as a whole for the first time. This collection was formed from about 1890 on under the scholarly direction of the late Ernest Fenellosa and the late Denman Ross, and ranks as one of the most important in the Asiatic field. The Baltimore Museum of Art organized an exhibition of unusual interest, which was also shown at the St. Louis City Art Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Art. This comprised the works available in American collections by three late Baroque masters, Strozzi, Crespi and Piazzetta. The Art Institute of Chicago assembled a large group of paintings, sculpture, ceramics, and other objects of art dating from Assyrian to modern times, under the banner Art of the United Nations. Toledo's Museum of Art showed 16 old masters from the celebrated Cook collection of England, which had been sent to the United States for safe storage during the war. Museum of Modern Art celebrated its 15th anniversary with an exhibition of broad scope covering every phase of this museum's interest: the art of the late 19th and 20th centuries in Europe and America, modern architecture, industrial design, photography, films and theatre design. This museum also arranged an exhibition of Modern Drawings, bringing together over 300 excellent examples from the 19th and 20th centuries. In San Francisco the California Palace of the Legion of Honor marked its 20th anniversary with a Renoir exhibition, Sculpture by Rodin was assembled at the Columbus (Ohio) Gallery of Fine Arts. The Philadelphia Museum placed on exhibition an extended loan of some 300 items from the collection of Alfred Stieglitz, dean of American photographers. These paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures and fine photographs, acquired over a long period, serve to sum up the career and ideas of a man who has had great influence in the American art world. The Cincinnati Art Museum attempted to reassemble the works of art which made up the celebrated Armory Show of 1913, the most famous exhibition of modern art ever held in America. While many works from the Armory Show are still well-known, a large number of them could not be traced. Both the Dayton (Ohio) Art Institute and the Boston Institute of Modern Art organized exhibitions on the theme of Religious Art Today. art of the 19th century received considerable attention in museum exhibitions. The Philadelphia Museum of Art did honor to that city's most distinguished painter, Thomas Eakins, in a large show marking the centennial of his birth. The National Gallery of Art held a loan show called American Battle Art in which paintings and drawings of American war subjects from the Revolution to World War I were assembled for the first time. This was later shown in part at the Museum of Modern Art. A correlated exhibition of prints, maps and political cartoons was held at the Library of Congress. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston organized an exhibition, largely of 19th century work, around the theme Sport in American Art. Some 65 of Winslow Homer's less familiar oils and watercolors were assembled at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, as a sequel to the larger Homer exhibition there in 1936. The Philadelphia Art Alliance showed the work of the 19th century American painter, Eastman Johnson. art had several notable showings in the United States in 1944. The Art Institute of Chicago brought to this country a comprehensive exhibition, organized in 1943 by the Mexican government, of the work of José Guadelupe Posada (1852-1913), the great printmaker to the Mexican people and forerunner of Mexico's revolutionary art. Following the showing in Chicago, this exhibition was seen at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Another, completely different forerunner of the modern Mexican school, José María Velasco (1840-1912), was the subject of a comprehensive exhibition organized by the Philadelphia Museum, which was also later shown at Brooklyn. Velasco was the outstanding landscape painter of the 19th century in Mexico but his work has been neglected here. At the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876 a large landscape by Velasco won first prize, and at the Paris World's Fair of 1889 he showed 68 paintings. Modern painting in Cuba, where very lively developments are taking place in the arts, was introduced in the United States by the Museum of Modern Art in a showing in New York, followed by a tour of museums in other cities. leading American painters were given comprehensive one-man retrospectives in museums: at the Museum of Modern Art, the late Marsden Hartley, who developed a personal kind of expressionism in his paintings of the sea coast and mountains of his native Maine; and Lyonel Feininger, who lived abroad for nearly 50 years, and who expressed his romantic love for the sea and for the old Gothic towns and churches of Germany in an art stemming mainly from cubism. The Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, N. Y., arranged the most comprehensive showing yet seen of Charles Burchfield's paintings with their nostalgic interpretation of the American scene. An outstanding survey of American art in the 19th and 20th centuries was placed on exhibition by the Newark (N. J.) Museum to celebrate its 35th anniversary. All of the 275 paintings and sculptures shown belong to its own collection. The Metropolitan Museum gave exhibition space to a contemporary American show, entitled Portrait of America (see Artists and American Business). The Detroit Institute of Arts chose 21 artists for an exhibition called Advance Trends in Contemporary American Art. One hundred American artists contributed portraits of one man, the painter Abraham Walkowitz, to an exhibition held at the Brooklyn Museum. American museums continued to hold their annuals of contemporary American art, although wartime shipping problems have transformed them from jury shows to "invitation" shows. Notable among the large annuals in 1944 were those at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Dallas Art Museum, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. the field of graphic arts, the Posada show at Chicago and the exhibition Hayter and Studio 17 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York were the major museum presentations. Studio 17 was started in Paris in 1927 by a young Englishman, Stanley William Hayter, whose brilliant technical experimentation and revival of the neglected art of line engraving brought many distinguished artists to his workshop. During 13 years in Paris such men as Chagall, Picasso, Lipchitz, Miro, Ernst and Calder worked with Hayter in some of the most vital researches in 20th century graphic art. In 1940 Studio 17 was transplanted to the New School for Social Research in New York, where many well-known American artists have been working with Hayter, along with an interesting group of younger talents. H. Kress further enriched the collection of the National Gallery in Washington by a gift of 71 Italian Renaissance paintings and 26 pieces of sculpture. Included in the group are Raphael's Bindo Altoviti; St. John in the Desert by Domenico Veneziano; a rare painting, Circe and Her Lovers in a Landscape (1514) by Dosso Dossi; and works by Botticelli, Filippino Lippi and Giovanni Bellini. (See also Sculpture, below.) Mr. Kress also gave the National Gallery nine important French paintings of the 18th century, including the great Watteau Italian Comedians, and works by Fragonard, Boucher, Drouais and others. The Metropolitan Museum has added to its painting galleries the noted Bache collection of old masters, which is to become the permanent property of the museum. Outstanding acquisitions made by the Metropolitan were Rubens' Atalanta and Meleager; and an English picture of exceptional quality, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, and Sir John Harrington, painted by an unknown master in 1603. The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery in Kansas City added to its collection an important Madonna and Child Enthroned by Memling painted about 1450-60. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts acquired an early Claude Lorrain, The Mill, of 1631; and a Rubens landscape. The Frick Collection in New York acquired an outstanding portrait by Goya, The Duke of Osuna; an important Gothic bronze (see Sculpture, below); and works by Constable, Rembrandt, Reynolds and Greuze. Other old masters which were acquired during the year were: a Corneille de Lyon and a Hobbema from the Morgan collection, by the John Herron Art Institute, Indianapolis; the Elizabeth Prentiss collection of over 130 items, including Lancret's Declaration of Love and paintings by French, Italian and English masters, by the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Rubens Tribute Money, by the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco; Jacques Louis David's Portrait of Pierre Desmaison, by the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, N. Y.; a Veronese, Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine, a Rubens, and a Jacob Cornelisz, by the Detroit Institute of Arts; paintings by the Baroque masters, Strozzi and Crespi, by the City Art Museum of St. Louis, a Madonna and Child by Francesco Pesellino, by the Toledo Museum of Art, a Cosimo Tura and a Jacopo Bellini, by the San Diego Gallery of Fine Arts; the Balch collection including works by Petrus Christus, Terborch, Pieter de Hooch, and other Dutch and Flemish masters, by the Los Angeles County Museum; and the Crozier collection of Chinese art, by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. American 19th century paintings entering museum collections were Thomas Eakins' The Dean's Roll Call, for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; two examples by Washington Allston, for the Detroit Institute of Arts; Winslow Homer's Girl with Lobster, for the Cleveland Museum of Art; two paintings by George Caleb Bingham, The County Election and The Jolly Flatboatmen, for the City Art Museum of St. Louis; examples by Doughty, Whittredge, Bierstadt and others, for the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass.; and works by Gilbert Stuart, Rembrandt Peale, Inness, and Robert L. Newman, for the Virginia Museum, Richmond. In the French 19th century field Cleveland got Gauguin's L'Appel; the Joslyn Memorial in Omaha, Neb., Renoir's Two Young Girls at the Piano, of 1883; the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, a Renoir landscape; the Museum of Art of the Rhode Island School of Design, examples by Géricault, Manet and Cézanne; the Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, a Vuillard, and the Springfield (Mass.) Museum of Fine Arts, a Monet and a Carrière. The National Gallery received from Chester Dale two paintings by George Bellows, his best (though not his most famous) prize fight, Both Members of This Club, and his portrait of Mrs. Dale. of the great collections of 20th century art, formed over a quarter of a century by the poet and scholar, Walter Conrad Arensberg of Hollywood, Calif., will pass to the University of California in Los Angeles. This collection of over 1,200 items boasts fine examples by the leaders of contemporary European art, as well as many Americans, and a recently added group of Pre-Columbian sculptures from Central America, including the famous Stone of Chiapas. Especially notable is the group of 15 sculptures by Brancusi, and the celebrated "shocker" of the Armory Show of 1913, the Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp. The University will build a modern museum to house the Arensberg collection after the war. The Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the City Art Museum of St. Louis, and others made acquisitions in 20th century European art. Contemporary American art offered the most fertile field for museum acquisition this year. Among institutions which added extensively to their American collections were the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Newark Museum; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; the Baltimore Art Museum; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond; and the New Britain (Conn.) Institute. Artists whose work was acquired by these institutions include Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, Lyonel Feininger, Karl Zerbe, George Bellows, Charles Burchfield, Charles Sheeler, Milton Avery, Peppino Mangravite, Walter Stuempfig, Jack Levine, William Gropper, Ben Shahn, Edward Hopper, Franklin Watkins, Stuart Davis, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jacob Lawrence, and Alexander Calder. foregoing lists are far from complete but give an indication of the broad scope of American museum acquisitions during this war year. In England museums also enriched their collections in spite of the war. The Tate Gallery in London toward the end of the year held an exhibition of nearly 100 of its wartime acquisitions, the second such exhibition since the outbreak of war. The National Gallery in London purchased four panels by Giovanni di Paolo from the J. P. Morgan collection in England. The Glasgow Art Gallery received the gift of the great Burrell Collection, consisting of some 4,000 items and including Degas' Portrait of Duranty and Daumier's Le Meunier, Son Fils et L'Ane. Constable's Vale of Dedham was purchased from the Neeld Collection for the National Gallery of Scotland for £20,000. America entered the war the activities of artist societies have been united in one organization known as Artists for Victory, Inc. In 1944 Artists for Victory organized a "good will" exhibition of contemporary American art to be sent to England and Scotland. It opened at the National Academy in Edinburgh, where it had 4,000 visitors in the first two days. London's Central Institute of Art and Design in turn sent to the United States an exhibition of contemporary British art, which was shown first at the National Academy in New York and then started a tour. Through the U.S. Office of War Information and the War Artists' Advisory Committee of Britain, exhibitions of war paintings by artists of the two countries were exchanged. To date, the work produced by British artists under the sponsorship of the War, Navy and Air Ministries seems far superior as artistic expression to the more reportorial work of the American artist-correspondents. New York artist societies which held their annual membership exhibitions in 1944 were the National Academy, the Society of Independent Artists, the Sculptors' Guild, An American Group and the American Abstract Artists. increasingly intelligent and successful use of art in American advertising has been an interesting development of the last two or three years. In 1944 such firms as Standard Oil, Abbott Laboratories, American Locomotive, Shell Oil, Container Corporation of America and others have given a great many commissions to artists well-known in the museum world. magazine continued to send artist-correspondents into battle areas in Europe and the East to record the war for its pages. Of the many artists so employed for Life, the 30-year-old David Fredenthal produced by all odds the most vital work of the year. Fortune magazine, Colliers and others also gave commissions to artists. Standard Oil of New Jersey commissioned four painters, Adolf Dehn, David Fredenthal, Reginald Marsh and Millard Sheets, to paint pictures illustrating the role played by oil in the war. These were exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum. The Metropolitan Museum showed Naval Aviation in the Pacific, a group of paintings by seven artists commissioned by the Abbott Laboratories in 1943 and donated to the Navy. Pepsi-Cola Company achieved prominence in art circles this year by inaugurating a nation-wide competition for 12 paintings to be reproduced in color on the pages of a calendar which they will issue in 500,000 copies for free distribution. Pepsi-Cola offered $11,000 in prizes and Artists for Victory, Inc. sponsored and ran the competition. Some 3,000 American artists responded with 5,000 submissions of paintings. A jury of artists selected 150 paintings from these for an exhibition called Portrait of America at the Metropolitan Museum, and a separate jury selected the 12 prize-winners for the calendar. The winners of these handsome prizes were Waldo Peirce, Philip Evergood, Louis Bosa, Joseph de Martini ($2,500 to $1,000), and Vincent Spagna, Sol Wilson, Arthur Osver, Lucille Corcos, Xavier Gonzales, Louis Guglielmi, Stuart Davis and Philip Reisman ($500 each). The first four prize-winning pictures, and later 14 other pictures, were purchased by the Pepsi-Cola Company for its permanent collection of American art. A total of $34,535 worth of pictures, which includes the Company's purchases, was sold during the showing at the Metropolitan. The exhibition will tour the museums of Springfield, Mass., Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas and Kansas City. The Pepsi-Cola Company, following up the publicity it received as an art patron, has announced even bigger plans for next year's Portrait of America competition. has been aroused also in the collection of 20th century American art which has been formed during 1944 by the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The collection now numbers 116 paintings and more are to be added. It will be shown early in 1945 at the Art Institute of Chicago and will tour other museums. most important of these presentations during the year was that of the paintings and drawings of the great French Romantic, Eugène Delacroix. This was shown in New York. No comparable exhibition of Delacroix' work has been held in the United States. American painting of the 19th century enjoyed a great revival of interest and was shown repeatedly in New York galleries and purchased by museums and private collectors. Forgotten paintings are being brought to light and many neglected reputations have become the object of research, all of which will be of genuine value in rounding out and strengthening the American tradition in the arts. A group of paintings by Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910), shown by a dealer, were of interest in this connection. Among other exhibitions of note in dealers' galleries were Five Centuries of Ballet, Abstract and Surrealist Art in America, The Blue Four, Four Hundred Years of French Drawings, Thomas Eakins, and The Imagery of Chess, all held in New York; The Peales of Philadelphia, held in a Philadelphia gallery; and Contemporary Negro Art, organized by a Washington, D. C. gallery and shown also at the Baltimore Museum and Hampton Institute. work of the following modern European painters was shown in one-man exhibitions in New York: Hans Arp, Marc Chagall,* Raoul Dufy, James Ensor, Max Ernst,* Juan Gris,* Jean Hélion,* Fernand Léger,* André Masson,* Edvard Munch, Chaim Soutine and John Tunnard. All except Gris, Munch and Soutine are living; those starred (*) are at present living in the United States. The usual large number of American exhibitors crowded the dealers' galleries in New York with one-man showings, among them some interesting new-comers. Most successful shows were those of John Atherton, Milton Avery, William Baziotes, Louis Bouché, David Burliuk, Arthur B. Carles, Nicolai Cikovsky, Julio de Diego, Arthur G. Dove, Philip Evergood, Lyonel Feininger, Ernest Fiene, David Fredenthal, William Gropper, Morris Hirshfield, Hans Hofmann, Carl Holty, Walter Houmère, Peter Hurd, Frank Kleinholz, Karl Knaths, Walt Kuhn, Peppino Mangravite, Jan Matulka, George L. K. Morris, Robert Motherwell, Georgia O'Keeffe, Waldo Peirce, I. Rice Pereira, Horace Pippin, Hobson Pittman, Henry Varnum Poor, Ben Shahn, Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, Harold Sterner, Byron Thomas, Mark Tobey, Albert Urban and Max Weber. Noteworthy among Latin-American exhibitors in the galleries were Mario Carreño and Wilfredo Lam (Cuba), Maria (Brazil) and Carlos Merida (Mexico).of the most ambitious sculptures of our times reached completion in New York in 1944. This is the great Prometheus which the Brazilian Government commissioned of the distinguished French-Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, who has been living and working in the United States since 1941. The sculpture represents Prometheus struggling with the vulture, and it will decorate an immense exterior wall of the Ministry of Education in Rio de Janeiro, a building designed by Oscar Niemeyer which has been called the most advanced public architecture in the world. Lipchitz worked out the conception in a model seven feet high, then cast it in plaster for shipment to Brazil, where, under his supervision, it will be enlarged to 20 feet and cast in bronze. general there was little activity in the field of sculpture in the United States, and a notable absence of important private commissions, government-sponsored decoration of public buildings, and large museum exhibitions. That American sculptors continued to work, however, was proved by the usual number of one-man exhibitions held in dealers' galleries during 1944. The exhibitors in New York were Alexander Archipenko, Alexander Calder, Mary Callery, Rhys Caparn, José de Creeft, Wharton Esherick, Alfeo Faggi, Peter Grippe, David Hare, Maria, Louise Nevelson, John Rood, Sally Ryan, Hélène Sardeau, Mitzi Solomon, Turku Trajan, Nat Werner, and Ossip Zadkine.
only large sculpture exhibitions were the Whitney Museum's annual event, in which chiefly New York sculptors were represented. The Sculptors' Guild, which has a membership made up almost entirely of New Yorkers, also held its annual exhibition, considerably smaller than in previous years. splendid group of 26 Italian Renaissance sculptures, with works by Donatello, Verrocchio, Ghiberti, Jacopo della Quercia, Benedetto da Maiano, Antonio Rossellino, Pollaiuolo, Desiderio and others, was included in the impressive collection of Italian art given to the National Gallery in Washington this year by Samuel H. Kress. Two exceedingly rare Greek marble sculptures of the late 4th or early 3rd century BC and showing the influence of Praxiteles were acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most important single sculpture acquisition made this year was the Frick Collection's purchase of the late 15th century Gothic bronze known as L'Ange de Lude by Jean Barbet de Lyon, from the J. P. Morgan collection. Until the time of the French Revolution this sculpture formed a pinnacle of the Ste.-Chapelle in Paris. Important modern sculpture by Archipenko, Brancusi, Calder, Despiau and Lipchitz was added to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. The Arensberg collection, which has been given to the University of California in Los Angeles, is rich in sculpture, both modern and ancient (see Museum Acquisitions, above). year 1944 was a big one in New York galleries. The auction firm of Parke-Bernet reported at the end of June 1944 an unprecedented total of $6,156,632 for the year's sales; this nearly doubled the total for the preceding year, which in turn was the second highest in 10 years past. Gimbel Brothers announced that the combined sales of the Hearst collection and the Kende auction galleries had totalled $4,100,000. Prices in general showed an increase of 30 per cent to 50 per cent over the season before. Highest price paid for a painting at auction was $127,000 for the Frans Hals Merry Lute Player from the John R. Thompson collection. The dealers' art galleries reported a very lively season with many new collectors buying.
stir was caused by the decision of three prominent museums to sell at auction certain works of art from their collections in order to raise funds for future purchases. The museums which carried through this plan were the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an unnamed "midwestern educational institution" and the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, N. Y. (The M. H. De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco had the year before sold unneeded items from its collection and purchased a Rubens with the proceeds; in the past several large museums have disposed of works which were outmoded or which duplicated others in its collection.) The sale held by the Museum of Modern Art included works by Cézanne, Seurat, Matisse, Derain, Despiau; the "midwestern institution" sold chiefly works of the French Impressionists. The Albright Gallery was bitterly blamed in the press for selling at a fraction of their former value certain unfashionable pictures by American painters who were still alive.

Metalwork

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Metalwork, in the fine arts, objects of artistic, decorative, and utilitarian value made of one or more kinds of metal—from precious to base—fashioned by either casting, hammering, or joining or a combination of these techniques.

ORIGINS OF METALWORK

Metals have been used throughout recorded history for fine and decorative art. By the 1st century ad the metals in prime use today—iron, copper, tin, lead, gold, and silver—already had a long development that had begun some 10,000 years earlier with the working of copper. The distinction between precious metals (gold, silver, and—since the 18th century—platinum) and base metals (iron, copper, tin, and lead) dates from the ancient civilizations of the Middle East and prehistoric Europe. Gold and silver, sacred to worshipers of the sun and the moon, were at first reserved for ritual religious use, temple objects, and the jewelry and ceremonial accoutrements of semisacred figures such as the early Egyptian pharaohs, the Middle Eastern priest-kings, and the tribal chieftains of Europe from Spain to the Caucasus. As these rare materials became more plentiful, they proclaimed the status of a wider group, the elite in each society—its nobility and great warriors. The use of gold and silver was extended to personal adornment, to personal belongings, such as eating and drinking utensils, weapons and equipment, and even to such furnishings as mirrors, lighting stands, chairs, and beds. Gold and silver gradually acquired a quantitative value, which was ultimately expressed in the first coins, stamped gold and silver disks issued by the Lydians in Asia Minor during the early 7th century bc. The notion of coinage soon spread throughout the Middle East and into Greece, and ever since that time coins have retained the notion of beauty as well as value. The base metals iron and bronze were appreciated for their strength, especially for weapons and tools; copper, tin, and lead came to be used mainly for their utility or durability—for cooking, for storage, or for strengthening wooden constructions of many kinds. The particular property of metals—that they can be mixed or alloyed in various combinations and proportions to make better materials for particular purposes—was understood in the ancient world. Copper and tin produced bronze; lead and tin produced pewter. This property has been exploited with ingenuity and increasing scientific knowledge in the past 2000 years; thus, while the designations iron, copper, lead, silver, and gold are still commonly used, nearly every metallic product is, in fact, a highly complex and carefully formulated alloy. For the purposes of the fine and decorative arts, however, metals have been used either in their simple state or in uncomplicated alloys.

CHARACTERISTICS OF METALWORK

All metals share certain characteristics: a uniform smooth complexion;.. great strength and tenacity, but also easily worked surfaces; and malleability (their capacity to assume any desired shape). This inherent malleability of metals is exploited by pressure in its solid state or by molding when it is liquefied by heat. In addition, metals were the first reusable materials known (unlike stone, shell, or wood), since broken or obsolete metal objects can be melted down and the substance reused. This relative permanence came to be appreciated after the discovery of smelting in about the middle of the 5th millennium bc.

TECHNIQUES OF METALWORK

The techniques of working metal developed very slowly and for long only in connection with the progress of metallurgy itself—the mining of a mass of metal from the earth. Scholarly opinion now holds that the first steps were taken after the adoption of settled ways of life—represented by agriculture and stock breeding—in northeastern Iran, the first area in which this occurred. In this area were native copper, metal-bearing rocks, malachite, and abundant timber, which allowed a steady progress of discoveries to be made. The Iranians learned the essentials of metalworking by using native copper; variations of the techniques were applied to other metals as they were recognized. A diffusionist theory is now generally accepted: The techniques were developed in northeastern Iran, but the products, and possibly also the producers, gradually were carried by trade and emigration to other areas. They went to the valley civilizations of Mesopotamia, across western Persia and through the east Mediterranean littoral to Egypt, across North Africa, and on into Spain. A second route lay from western Iran into Anatolia and then across the Hellespont to Europe. This diffusion began in about the 5th millennium bc and was continued for over 2000 years.

Early Techniques

The earliest metalworking was of copper, perhaps as early as the 11th millennium, using small nuggets of native copper picked up in streams or from the ground. These nuggets were presumably at first considered a special kind of attractively colored stone, and by grinding and beating—methods already used for working stones, flints, and obsidian—they could be shaped into ornaments.

Annealing

The next step was the discovery, about 5000 bc, that these special stones could be worked on with repeated hammering if the mass was heated to a full red color and cooled from time to time, and that this kept the metal soft and workable. Ordinary wood fires produced sufficient heat for this process, called annealing. Repeated hammering without annealing will cause the metal to become too hard and brittle, with resultant jagged cracks.

Smelting

The next discovery came after the development of the closed two-chamber pottery kiln, which produced a far greater heat than the open fires adequate for the earlier low-fired pottery. This took place probably before 4000 bc and led, after some 500 years or so, to the smelting first of small pieces of native copper, malachite (which under certain conditions will render into copper), and finally large amounts of copper ores, in furnaces that initially resembled the two-chamber pottery kilns. It was not until copper ores were smelted that any significant increase in the supply of copper and copper products could take place.

Alloys

Early Bronze Disk This disk with the head of Acheloos, an Etruscan river god, was made of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, sometime in the early 5th century bc. It comes from the necropolis of Monte Quaglieri in Tarquinia. Alloys are made by smelting two different metals together.

Knowledge of smelting ultimately led to knowledge of mixing different ores together in the smelting process to produce simple alloys. This followed an intermediate period, about 3000 bc, when compound ores—rocks bearing one or two visibly different metallic particles—were observed to produce a superior metal. Copper produced by smelting continued to be shaped at first into small tools and ornaments by the grinding and beating methods long in use for working native copper. Weapons and tools dating to the late Predynastic period in Egypt (around 3000 bc) have been found, however, that were indubitably cast from smelted copper; at Ur of the Chaldees in Mesopotamia, in the royal graves of the 1st Dynasty (c. 3100-2907 bc) a profusion of beautifully worked objects in gold, silver, electrum (a natural alloy of gold and silver), copper, and even primitive bronze has been excavated, many made both by open-mold and lost-wax methods of casting.

Application of Techniques

By 2500 bc, at the least, all the main techniques for working metals had been very slowly pioneered in the treatment of copper over the preceding 3000 years. By that time these techniques were already being applied to other metals, such as silver, gold, and natural alloys of electrum and bronze. Techniques used for shaping were hot and cold forging or beating, which developed into hammering and raising techniques, using smooth hematite hammers; annealing; grinding, which led to the polishing and fine abrading used in the production of mirrors; piecing flat sheets of metal together with lapped seams or rivets and subsequently with solders; and casting. After the discovery of smelting, battering was used to flatten the cakes of metal into sheets; some form of battery continued to be necessary until the invention, in the late 17th century, of the rolling mill in which sheet metal was produced by mechanical means.

Joining, beating, annealing, raising, and casting were and remain the artistic methods used for shaping metals, although other methods, such as spinning, have been introduced for industrial shaping. The shaping methods were presumably first worked out by the late Neolithic farmers, who were also part-time miners, prospectors, and smelters in the hilly region of northeastern Iran.

Decorative Techniques

Most decorative techniques, on the other hand, were presumably worked out once the refined raw material had arrived by barter in the developed urban civilizations of southwestern Iran, Mesopotamia, and Egypt by individuals who gradually became a distinct class of worker—the goldsmiths and the silversmiths.

Repoussé

Vaphio Cups The Vaphio Cups (15th century bc) were found in a tomb at Vaphio, near Sparta. Their origins, which are not certain, are either Minoan or Mycenaean. They are made of two sheets of gold fastened together. One sheet is left smooth for the inside; the other is done in repoussé relief for the outside. The scenes on the cups depict a ritual involving bull catching.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Decoration relies on the relative softness of metals. The earliest in use probably derived from the same beating processes employed for shaping, for it is possible to furrow or ridge metal by blows upon the surface (or, with sheet metal, from the underside); this gives the pleasing effect of parallel ribs seen on copper cups and bowls, found, for instance, in the royal graves at Ur. More localized and selected hammering can raise anything from simple bosses to whole pictorial effects in relief. This technique, usually known as repoussé, has been used for over 4000 years; it reached its greatest elaboration in 16th- and 17th-century Europe on precious gold and silver utensils for church and domestic use.

Engraving and Chasing

Linear patterns can also be made on surfaces either by removing a narrow fillet of metal with a cutting or graving tool, or by depressing the surface with a blunt point and hammering along the line to be delineated without removing any metal. The former is called engraving and the latter chasing; these techniques are mostly reserved for precious metals.

Matting, Etching, and Oxidization

Another method of surface decoration is to impress it with repeating patterns of hatched lines (again, usually used on precious metals), thus matting or breaking up areas to contrast with other areas left polished and reflective. Yet another method of darkening selected areas is to etch them with acid, a technique mostly used on steel armor and the steel parts of weapons. In the 19th century a process called oxidization was devised; with it, a subtle darkening effect was achieved on polished silver surfaces with a pickling process using sulfur.

Gilding and Inlay

Luxurious decorative effects may be achieved by applying one metal to another or by inlaying a precious metal into a less precious one. Such, for instance, are the techniques of gilding or parcel-gilding silver, bronze, and steel objects and of inlaying silver and gold wires into brass and bronze. The latter was perfected in the Arab world in the Middle Ages; it is called damascening, after Damascus, a Syrian city particularly famous for such work. In the 1st millennium bc, Chinese ceremonial bronze vessels were exquisitely inlaid with gold and silver.

Granulation and Filigree

Other surface decoration techniques using metal on metal are granulation and filigree. Granulation, used for jewelry, is only possible with gold. In granulation, beads of gold are soldered onto gold surfaces; the finest of this work was produced by the Etruscans in the 6th and 5th centuries bc. The beads were so minute as to give the appearance of a bloom to the gold surface, rather than of a beaded surface. Filigree can be made of both gold and silver; openwork patterns are worked from minute cables made of two or three twined or braided gold or silver wires. Filigree was extremely popular in the 16th and 17th centuries to decorate vases and drinking vessels, especially in Italy and Germany, as well as in 18th- and 19th-century South America. In Russian and Scandinavian countries filigree has survived as a provincial craft and is used for boxes, mirror cases, and peasant jewelry. It is obviously fragile work and, except for jewelry, usually has a backing material.

Similar openwork effects are called ajouré, mostly used to ornament domestic silver and some jewelry, and are achieved by cutting or piercing patterns in the metal. Ajouré was most popular from the late 17th to the early 19th century. Conversely, raised patterns can be made by soldering small castings or cutout motifs onto a flat surface, a method of decoration in use for over 4000 years.

Embellishment with Other Materials

Frankish Jewelry These two fibulae, or decorative pins, from the 6th century were used to fasten clothing. They are about 10 cm (4 in) long, made of gold and bronze, and decorated with garnets and niello work. They were originally found in the Charente area in France and are now part of the collection of the British Museum, London.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Every civilization with a wealthy or high-status class has, for over four millennia, used decorative metalwork embellished with other materials. These include precious and semiprecious gemstones, enamels (including niello, a black finish), a variety of exotic substances such as rare woods, ivory, jade, and amber, and reverse-painted and gilded glass (verre églomisé). In ancient times ceremonial furnishings were almost as exotically decorated as personal jewelry and cult implements. In more recent times this type of decorative metalwork has tended to be reserved for personal objects, including jewelry.

Metalwork as Art

In considering the use of metals in art, it must be remembered that only since the Industrial Revolution has a clear distinction been made between machine-made useful objects and handcrafted fine and decorative art objects. For thousands of years, until the mid-18th century, everything was of necessity handmade; useful objects were almost always shaped and decorated to have aesthetic appeal, although pieces that might now be considered purely fine art—such as statues and jewelry—served deeply serious religious or ceremonial functions.

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Art Nouveau

2006-11-24T14:27:00.000+03:00

Art Nouveau (from French for “new art”), movement in Western art and design, which reached its peak during the 1890s. Hallmarks of the art nouveau style are flat, decorative patterns; intertwined organic forms such as stems or flowers; an emphasis on handcrafting as opposed to machine manufacturing; the use of new materials; and the rejection of earlier styles. In general, sinuous, curving lines also characterize art nouveau, although right-angled forms are also typical, especially as the style was practiced in Scotland and in Austria.

Art nouveau embraced all forms of art and design: architecture, furniture, glassware, graphic design, jewelry, painting, pottery, metalwork, and textiles. This was a sharp contrast to the traditional separation of art into the distinct categories of fine art (painting and sculpture) and applied arts (ceramics, furniture, and other practical objects).

The term art nouveau comes from an art gallery in Paris, France, called Maison de l'Art Nouveau (House of New Art), which was run by French dealer Siegfried Bing. In his gallery, Bing displayed not only paintings and sculpture but also ceramics, furniture, metalwork, and Japanese art. Sections of the gallery were devoted to model rooms that artists and architects designed in the art nouveau style.

Art nouveau flourished in a number of European countries, many of which developed their own names for the style. Art nouveau was known in France as style Guimard, after French designer Hector Guimard; in Italy as the stile floreale (floral style) or stile Liberty, after British art nouveau designer Arthur Lasenby Liberty; in Spain as modernisme; in Austria as Sezessionstil (secession style); and in Germany as Jugendstil (youth style). These diverse names reflect the widespread adoption of the movement, which had centers in major cities all over Europe—Paris and Nancy in France; Darmstadt and Munich in Germany; Brussels, Belgium; Glasgow, Scotland; Barcelona, Spain; Vienna, Austria; Prague, Czech Republic; and Budapest, Hungary.

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Donatello

2006-11-17T14:42:00.001+03:00

Donatello, real name Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi (1386?-1466), Italian Renaissance sculptor, who is generally considered one of the greatest sculptors of all time and the founder of modern sculpture.

Donatello was born in Florence, the son of a wool comber. When he was 17 years old, he assisted the noted sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti in constructing and decorating the famous bronze doors of the baptistery of San Giovanni, Florence. Later, Donatello was also an associate of the noted architect Filippo Brunelleschi, with whom he reputedly visited Rome in order to study the monuments of antiquity.

Donatello's career may be divided into three periods. The first and formative period comprised the years before 1425, when his work is marked by the influence of Gothic sculpture but also shows classical and realistic tendencies. Among his sculpture of this period are the statues St. Mark (Church of Or San Michele, Florence), St. George (Bargello, Florence), John the Evangelist (Opera del Duomo, Florence), and Joshua (campanile of the cathedral, Florence)

The second period (1425-1443) is generally characterized by a reliance on the models and principles of the sculpture of antiquity. From 1425 to 1435 Donatello worked with the Florentine sculptor and architect Michelozzo on a number of projects, including the monument to Bartolomeo Aragazzi (Cathedral of Montepulciano). In their joint work Michelozzo executed the architectural designs and also helped in the making of the bronze castings; Donatello executed most of the statues. From 1430 to 1433 Donatello spent periods in Rome, where he created a number of works, notably the ciborium in the sacristy of the Basilica of Saint Peter, decorated with the reliefs Worshiping Angels and Burial of Christ. It was in Florence, however, that he created the most noted work of this period—the bronze David (circa 1430-1435, Bargello), the first nude statue of the Renaissance.

In his third and culminating period, Donatello broke away from classical influence and in his work emphasized realism and the portrayal of character and of dramatic action. Notable examples of his sculpture of this period are Miracles of St. Anthony (Sant' Antonio, Padua); Gattamelata (in the square before Sant' Antonio), the first bronze equestrian statue since ancient times; and Judith and Holofernes (Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence).

The sculpture of Donatello influenced that of Florence and northern Italy in the 15th century. It was also a major stimulus on the development of realism in Italian painting, notably in the work of the great Paduan artist Andrea Mantegna. Donatello, who died on December 13, 1466, had many pupils, the most important of whom was Desiderio da Settignano.

Renaissance artists from Giotto to Michelangelo. Over the centuries, scholars have considered Vasari's engaging and anecdotal biographies an invaluable primary resource. His observations of the Florentine sculptor Donatello (1386?-1466) reveal a proud perfectionist whose many commissioned works and successful pupils demonstrated the esteem of contemporary patrons as well as his remarkable talent.

From Lives of the Artists: Donatello

By Giorgio Vasari

Donato, who was called Donatello by his relations and signed himself as such on several of his works, was born in Florence…He devoted his life to art,... and he proved himself an exceptional sculptor and a marvellous statuary as well as a skilled and competent worker in stucco, in perspective, and in architecture, for which he was highly regarded. His work showed such excellent qualities of grace and design that it was considered nearer what was done by the ancient Greeks and Romans than that of any other artist. He is therefore rightly recognized as the first to make good use of the invention of scenes done in low relief, which he executed with thoughtfulness, facility, and skill, demonstrating his intimate knowledge and mastery of the technique and producing sculptures of unusual beauty. He was superior not only to his contemporaries but even to the artists of our own times.

Donatello was brought up from early childhood in the household of Ruberto Martelli. His fine character and the way he applied his talents won him the affection of Ruberto and all his noble family. While still young he executed a number of works, so many, in fact, that they attracted little attention. He made his name, however, and showed himself for what he was, when he carved an Annunciation in grey-stone, which was put in Santa Croce at Florence, near the altar of the Cavalcanti Chapel. For this he made an ornament in the grotesque style, with a base of varied and intertwined work, surmounted by a quarter-circle, and with six putti [nude children]; these garlanded putti have their arms round each other as if they are afraid of the height and are trying to steady themselves. Donatello's ingenuity and skill are especially apparent in the figure of the Virgin herself: frightened by the unexpected appearance of the angel she makes a modest reverence with a charming, timid movement, turning with exquisite grace towards him as he makes his salutation. The Virgin's movement and expression reveal both her humility and the gratitude appropriate to an unexpected gift, particularly a gift as great as this. Moreover, Donatello created a masterly flow of folds and curves in the draperies of the Madonna and the angel, suggesting the form of the nude figures and showing how he was striving to recover the beauty of the ancients, which had been lost for so many years. He displayed such skill and facility that, to put it briefly, no one could have bettered his design, his judgement, his use of the chisel, or his execution of the work.

Below the screen in the same church, next to the scene by Taddeo Gaddi [a 14th-century Florentine painter and architect], he made a wooden crucifix over which he took extraordinary pains. When he had finished it, convinced that he had produced a very rare work, he asked his close friend, Filippo Brunelleschi [a Florentine architect], for his opinion. But Filippo, in view of what he had already been told by Donatello, was expecting to be shown something far better; and when he saw what it was he merely smiled to himself. At this Donatello begged him for the sake of their friendship to say what he thought of it. So Filippo, being always ready to oblige, answered that it seemed to him that Donatello had put on the cross the body of a peasant, not the body of Jesus Christ which was most delicate and in every part the most perfect human form ever created. Finding that instead of being praised, as he had hoped, he was being criticized, and more sharply than he could ever have imagined, Donatello retorted: `If it was as easy to make something as it is to criticize, my Christ would really look to you like Christ. So you get some wood and try to make one yourself.'

Without another word, Filippo returned home and secretly started work on a crucifix, determined to vindicate his own judgement by surpassing Donatello; and after several months he brought it to perfection. Then one morning he asked Donatello to have dinner with him, and Donatello accepted. On their way to Filippo's house they came to the Old Market where Filippo bought a few things and gave them to Donatello, saying: `Take these home and wait for me. I shall be along in a moment.'

So Donatello went on ahead into the house, and going into the hall he saw, placed in a good light, Filippo's crucifix. He paused to study it and found it so perfect that he was completely overwhelmed and dropped his hands in astonishment; whereupon his apron fell and the eggs, the cheeses, and the rest of the shopping tumbled to the floor and everything was broken into pieces. He was still standing there in amazement, looking as if he had lost his wits, when Filippo came up and said laughingly:

`What's your design, Donatello? What are we going to eat now that you've broken everything?'

`Myself,' Donatello answered, `I've had my share for this morning. If you want yours, you take it. But no more, please. Your job is making Christs and mine is making peasants.'…

For the main front of the Campanile of Santa Maria del Fiore Donatello made four marble figures, each ten feet high, of which the two in the middle were portrayed from life, one being Francesco Soderini as a young man and the other Giovanni di Barduccio Cherichini, now known as Il Zuccone. The latter was regarded as an outstanding work, finer than anything else he had ever made; and so whenever Donatello wanted to swear convincingly to the truth of anything he used to protest `by the faith I have in my Zuccone'.

And while he was working on this statue he would look at it and keep muttering: `Speak, damn you, speak!'

Over the door of the Campanile facing the Canon's house he represented Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac, with another of the prophets; and these figures were placed between two other statues.

For the Signoria of Florence Donatello made a casting in metal, showing Judith cutting off the head of Holofernes, which was placed in the piazza under one of the arches of their loggia. This is an excellent and accomplished work in which, by the appearance of Judith and the simplicity of her garments, Donatello reveals to the onlooker the woman's hidden courage and the inner strength she derives from God. Similarly, one can see the effect of wine and sleep in the expression of Holofernes and the presence of death in his limbs which, as his soul has departed, are cold and limp. Donatello worked so well that the casting emerged very delicate and beautiful, and then he finished it so carefully that it is a marvel to see. The base, which is a simply designed granite baluster, is also pleasing to the eye and very graceful. Donatello was so satisfied with the results that he decided, for the first time, to put his name on one of his works; and it is seen in these words: Donatello Opus.

In the courtyard on the palace of the Signoria stands a bronze statue of David, a nude figure, life-size; having cut off the head of Goliath, David is raising his foot and placing it on him, and he has a sword in his right hand. This figure is so natural in its vivacity and softness that artists find it hardly possible to believe it was not moulded on the living form. It once stood in the courtyard of the house of the Medici [the powerful Florentine banking and political family], but was moved to its new position after Cosimo's exile. [Cosimo de’ Medici, the director of the family’s banking interests, was exiled in 1433 but returned to Florence the following year.] In our own time Duke Cosimo had the statue moved again to make way for a fountain, and it is being kept for another large courtyard which he intends to build at the rear of the palace, where the lions used to stand. In the hall containing the clock of Lorenzo della Volpaia, on the left, there stands a very fine David in marble, straddling the head of the dead Goliath and holding in his hand the sling with which he killed him.…

It is said that a Genoese merchant ordered from Donatello a life-size head of bronze, a beautiful piece of work which was made very light, since it had to be carried a long distance, and that Donatello obtained the commission through Cosimo's recommendation. Now when the head was finished and the merchant wanted to pay for it, he objected that Donatello was asking too much. So the dispute was referred to Cosimo, who had the head carried to the upper court of the palace and placed between the battlements overlooking the street, where it could be better seen. Then, when Cosimo tried to settle the matter, he found what the merchant was offering a long way from what Donatello was asking, and so he remarked that in his opinion the offer was too small. And at this the merchant, who thought it was too much, complained that, since he had finished the work in a month or a little over, Donatello would be making over half a florin a day. Donatello considered himself grossly insulted by this remark, turned on the merchant in a rage, and told him that he was the kind of man who could ruin the fruits of a year's toil in a split second; and with that he suddenly shoved the head down on to the street where it shattered into pieces and added that the merchant had shown he was more used to bargaining for beans than for bronzes. The merchant at once regretted what he had done and promised to pay twice as much if Donatello would do the head again; but neither his promises, nor the entreaties of Cosimo, could persuade Donatello to do so.…

It happened that at that time, hearing of his fame, the Signoria of Venice sent for him to make the memorial for Gattamelata in the city of Padua. He went there very readily and executed the bronze horse which is on the piazza of Sant'Antonio: the horse is shown snorting and quivering, and Donatello has expressed very vividly the great courage and pride of its rider. Indeed, he proved himself such a master in the proportions and excellence of this huge cast that he challenges comparison with any of the ancient craftsmen in expressing movement, in design, skill, diligence, and proportion. The work astounded everyone who saw it then and it continues to astound anyone who sees it today. It induced the Paduans to do their utmost to make him take up citizenship and they used every kind of affectionate restraint to keep him with them. To this end, they commissioned from him some scenes from the life of St Anthony of Padua for the predella [altar rails] of the high altar of the church of the Friars Minor. These are in low relief and they show such discrimination that the best sculptors stand before them almost dumb with astonishment at their beautiful and varied composition, the great abundance of extraordinary figures, and the diminishing perspectives. Also very beautiful are the Marys that he made, lamenting the dead Christ, on the altar-dossal [ornamental hanging]. And in the house of one of the Capodilista counts he made in wood the skeleton of a horse (which can still be seen today, without its head) in which the parts are jointed with such method that anyone who studies the manner in which this work was made can appreciate Donatello's intellectual stature and ingenuity …

Donatello … left Florence for Rome in order to imitate as many as possible of the works of the ancient world. While he was studying there he made a stone tabernacle for the Blessed Sacrament, which is now in St Peter's. On his way back to Florence he passed through Siena, where he promised to make a bronze door for the Baptistry of San Giovanni. He made the wooden model and had almost finished the wax moulds and successfully covered them with the outer shell ready for casting, when a close friend of his, a Florentine goldsmith called Bernardetto di Mona Papera, came by on his way from Rome and was so persuasive in one way and another that, for his own purposes or other reasons, he got Donatello to return with him to Florence. So the door was hardly started, let alone finished. All that Donatello left behind in that city, in the Office of Works of the Duomo, was a bronze figure of St John the Baptist, with its right arm missing below the elbow; and this, it is said, was because he had not been fully paid for it.…

But whoever wanted to tell the full story of Donatello's life and works would have to write far more than I intend in narrating the lives of our artists; for apart from his major works, which I have noted in some detail, Donatello set his hand to the smallest things of his art. For instance, he made coats-of-arms to go on the chimney-pieces and fronts of town houses, a very fine example of which can be seen on the house of the Sommai opposite the tower of the Vacca. He also made, for the Martelli family, a wicker-work chest, shaped like a cradle, to serve as an urn; this is below the church of San Lorenzo since no tombs of any kind appear above, although one can see there the epitaph on Cosimo de' Medici's tomb, which, like the others, has its opening beneath.

It is said that after he had finished the model for the tomb of Pope Martin V, Donatello's brother, Simone, sent for him to see it before it was cast. So Donatello left for Rome, and he arrived there at the very time that the Emperor Sigismund went to be crowned by Pope Eugene IV. As a result, Donatello had to busy himself along with his brother in preparing the principal decorations for the festival, for which he won great honour and fame. In the wardrobe of the Lord Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino is a very beautiful marble head by Donatello which, it is thought, was given to the duke's ancestors by Giuliano de' Medici when he was received at that brilliant court.

In short, Donatello aimed so high and achieved so much that he may be said to have been one of the first in modern times to shed light, by his practice, judgement, and knowledge, on the art of sculpture and good design. He deserves all the more praise inasmuch as in his time no antiquities had been discovered and unearthed, apart from the columns, sarcophagi, and triumphal arches. And it was largely because of him that Cosimo de' Medici grew ambitious to introduce to Florence the antiquities which are still in the house of the Medici, all of which he restored with his own hand. Donatello was a man of great generosity, graciousness, and courtesy, more considerate towards his friends than towards himself. Nor did he ever set much store by money; what he had, he kept in a basket suspended by a cord from the ceiling, and all his workmen and friends could take what they wanted without asking. He was very happy in his old age, but when he became senile and was no longer able to work he had to be assisted by Cosimo and by other of his friends.

It is said that when Cosimo was about to die he recommended Donatello to the care of his son Piero, who, anxious to carry out dutifully what his father wanted, gave him a farm at Cafaggiuolo which provided an income on which he could live comfortably. This made Donatello very content, since it meant that he was at least saved from the prospect of dying of hunger. All the same he had not held it a year before he returned to Piero and publicly made the farm over to him again, insisting that he did not want to lose peace of mind by having to worry about running a household and being molested by the tenant, a peasant who was always getting in his way and complaining now because the wind had blown away the roof of his dovecot, now because his cattle had been confiscated by the Commune for taxes, or because a storm had destroyed his wine and his fruit. Donatello grew so sick and tired of all this that he said he would rather die of hunger than have to think about so many things. Piero laughed at his simplicity, and then, to free him from his torments, he accepted the farm, as Donatello insisted, and assigned him from his own bank an allowance worth at least as much as the farm had brought him, but paid in cash every week. Donatello was more than satisfied with this arrangement and, as a friend and servant of the Medici family, he lived carefree and happy all the rest of his life, although when he reached the age of eighty he became so palsied that he could no longer work at all, and he had to keep to his bed in a poor little house which he had in the Via del Cocomero, near the nunnery of San Niccolò. He grew worse from day to day and gradually wasted away until he died on 13 December 1466. He was buried in the church of San Lorenzo, near Cosimo's own tomb, as he himself had directed, so that just as he had always been near Cosimo in spirit while alive so his body might be near him after death.

Donatello's death plunged into mourning the citizens and artists of Florence and all who had known him. Honouring him more after his death than they did while he lived, they buried him honourably in San Lorenzo, and all the painters, architects, sculptors, and goldsmiths, the whole city almost, assisted at his funeral. And for a long time afterwards various verses in different languages were continually composed in his praise, as can be adequately seen in the few examples that I give below.

Before I come to these epitaphs, however, it would be wrong not to record the following. When Donatello was ill, shortly before he died, some relations of his came to see him. After the usual greetings and condolences they told him that it was his duty to bequeath them a farm that he owned at Prato; and although it was small and yielded very little they begged him for it very insistently. When he heard this Donatello, who had a great sense of fairness, said:

I am afraid I cannot satisfy you, because it seems only right to me to leave it to the peasant who has always worked it, and who has toiled there, rather than to you, who have not given anything to it but always thought that it would be yours, and now hope to make it so just by this visit. Now go away, and God bless you.

This is certainly the way to treat relations whose love is given only because of what they gain or hope to gain. Anyhow, Donatello called the notary and left the farm to the labourer who had always worked it and who had certainly behaved better towards him in his need than those relations had done.

Donatello left his professional belongings to his pupils. These were Bertoldo, a Florentine sculptor, who imitated his work very closely, as can be seen from a very fine bronze battle-scene of men on horseback that is now in Duke Cosimo's wardrobe; Nanni d'Anton di Banco [Italian sculptor, contemporary of Donatello], who died before him; Rossellino [one of an Italian family of sculptors and architects]; Desiderio [Italian sculptor Desiderio da Settignano]; and Vellano of Padua. But, indeed, it can be said that since Donatello's death anyone wanting to do good work in relief has been his pupil.

His draughtsmanship was strong and he made his designs so skilfully and boldly that they have no equal. This can be seen in my book of drawings, where I have both nude and draped figures drawn by his hand, various animals which astound anyone who sees them, and other beautiful things of the same kind.…

The world remained so full of Donatello's works that it may be said with confidence that no artist has ever produced more than he did. He delighted in everything, and so he tried his hand at everything, without worrying whether what he was doing was worthwhile or not. Nevertheless, this tremendous activity of Donatello's, in every kind of relief, full, half, low, and the lowest, was indispensable to sculpture. For whereas in the good times of the ancient Greeks and Romans sculpture was brought to a state of perfection by many hands, he alone by his many works restored its magnificence and perfection in our own age. Artists should, therefore, trace the greatness of the art back to him rather than to anyone born in modern times. For as well as solving the problems of sculpture by executing so many different kinds of work, he possessed invention, design, skill, judgement, and all the other qualities that one may reasonably expect to find in an inspired genius. Donatello was very determined and quick, and he executed his works with the utmost facility, always accomplishing much more than he promised.

All his work on hand he left to his pupil Bertoldo, chiefly the bronze pulpits in San Lorenzo, which were then for the greater part polished by Bertoldo and brought to their present state.

I must not omit to mention that the very learned and Very Reverend Don Vincenzo Borghini, whom I have mentioned in another connexion, having collected in a big book innumerable designs by outstanding painters and sculptors, ancient as well as modern, has very appositely written in the margin, where there are two pages facing each other with drawings by Donatello and Michelangelo Buonarroti, … two Greek phrases.… In Latin, they read as follows: Aut Donatus Bonarrotum exprimit et refert, aut Bonarrotus Donatum. And when translated, they run: Either the spirit of Donatello moves Buonarroti, or that of Buonarroti first moved Donatello

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Personal Arts

2006-11-03T10:11:00.000+03:00

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Renaisance Painting

2006-10-26T08:21:00.000+03:00

Masaccio’s Expulsion from Paradise Expulsion from Paradise (about 1427) is one of six frescoes painted by Masaccio for the Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence, Italy. The fresco was influential for its realism, especially the simplicity and three-dimensionality of the figures, and for the dramatic depiction of the plight of Adam and Eve.Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence/Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

The term Renaissance, meaning “rebirth,” describes the cultural revolution of the 15th and 16th centuries; it originated in Italy with the revival of interest in classical culture and a strong belief in individualism See Renaissance Art and Architecture. The achievements of antiquity were revered, but at the same time a virtual rebirth of human potential occurred when new authority was accorded the individual's direct observations. For example, in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence, Masaccio—one of the great innovators of the period—executed a remarkable series of frescoes in about 1427 that reveal his keen observation of human behavior and at the same time demonstrate his knowledge of ancient art. In the The Expulsion from Paradise, Masaccio's Adam and Eve truly mourn; Eve's pose,... arms attempting to hide her body, is based on a pose characteristic of classical sculpture, the so-called Venus Pudica (modest Venus) type.

In only a few years, from his start as a painter in 1422 until his death in about 1428 at the age of 26, the Italian master Masaccio was known as a great innovator. Along with the sculptor Donatello and the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, he split away from the prevailing, formalized Gothic conventions of the time. His groundbreaking use of mathematical perspective, as well as his use of light, shadow, and foreshortening, helped to give his works a naturalness and an illusion of weight and volume that were completely new. The following account of Masaccio’s life and work was written by 16th-century Italian artist and writer Giorgio Vasari as part of his Lives of the Artists (1550; revised 1568).

Masaccio’s Trinity
The Trinity (1425?, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Italy), by 15th-century Italian painter Masaccio, illustrates the early Renaissance fascination with classical architecture, geometrical composition, and the projection of space by means of perspective.Encarta EncyclopediaScala/Art Resource, NY

From Lives of the Artists: Masaccio
By Giorgio Vasari

The appearance of a man of outstanding creative talent is very often accompanied by that of another great artist at the same time and in the same part of the world so that the two can inspire and emulate each other. Besides bringing considerable advantages to the two rivals themselves, this phenomenon of nature provides tremendous inspiration for later artists who strive as hard as they can to win the fine reputation and renown which they hear every day attributed to their predecessors. How true this is we can see from the fact that in the same period Florence produced Filippo Brunelleschi, Donatello, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Paolo Uccello, and Masaccio, each of whom was an outstanding artist and through whose efforts the crude and clumsy style which had persevered up to that time was finally discarded. Moreover, their beautiful work so forcefully stimulated and inspired their successors that the techniques of art were brought to the greatness and perfection that we know today. So we are certainly deeply indebted to those innovators whose work showed us how to bring art to the summit of perfection. To Masaccio especially we are indebted for the good style of modern painting; for it was Masaccio who perceived that the best painters follow nature as closely as possible (since painting is simply the imitation of all the living things of nature, with their colours and design just as they are in life). Knowing this, and hungry for fame, Masaccio learnt so much from his endless studies that he can be numbered among the pioneers who almost entirely rid painting of its hardness, difficulties, and imperfections. He gave a beginning to beautiful attitudes, movements, liveliness, and vivacity, rendering relief in a way that was characteristic and natural and that no painter had ever before attempted.

Masaccio possessed extremely sound judgement, and so he realized that figures which were made to seem on tiptoe instead of being posed firmly with their feet in foreshortening on the level lacked all the basic elements of good style, and that those who painted like that had no understanding of foreshortening. Although Paolo Uccello had tackled this problem with a fair measure of success, Masaccio introduced many new techniques and made his foreshortenings, which he painted from every angle, far better than any done before. His paintings were remarkably soft and harmonious, and he matched the flesh-tints of his heads and nudes with the colours of his draperies, which he loved to depict with a few simple folds just as they appear in life. All this has been of great benefit to later artists, and indeed Masaccio can be given the credit for originating a new style of painting; certainly everything done before him can be described as artificial, whereas he produced work that is living, realistic, and natural.

Masaccio was born in the village of San Giovanni in the Valdarno, where, it is said, one can still see some figures that he made in early childhood. He was very absent-minded and erratic, and he devoted all his mind and thoughts to art and paid little attention to himself and still less to others. He refused to give any time to worldly cares and possessions, even to the way he dressed, let alone anything else; and he never bothered to recover anything owing to him unless his need was desperate. So instead of calling him by his proper name, which was Tommaso, everyone called him Masaccio [Silly Billy, or sloppy Tom]. Not that he was in any way vicious. On the contrary, he was goodness itself; and although he was extraordinarily neglectful, he was as kind as could be when it came to giving help or pleasure to others.

Masaccio began painting at the time when Masolino da Panicale was working in the Brancacci Chapel in the Carmelite Church at Florence. Although he was a painter, as far as possible he followed in the steps of Filippo and Donatello; and he always tried to express in his figures the liveliness and beautiful animation of nature itself. His outlines and his painting were so modern and original that his works can be favourably compared with modern work for their design and colouring. He was extremely painstaking in his paintings and in the studies he made of the problems of perspective, in which he achieved very competent and impressive results, as can be seen in one of the histories he did, which is today in the house of Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio. In this picture, as well as a representation of Christ liberating a man possessed by demons, there are some very fine buildings drawn in perspective; and one can see simultaneously both the interior and the outside, because he chose the point of view not of the front but over the angles, as being the more difficult. Masaccio also made more use than other artists of nude and foreshortened figures, which indeed had rarely been seen before. He worked with great facility and, as I said, his draperies were very simple.

There is a panel picture in tempera by Masaccio showing Our Lady on the lap of St Anne with her son in her arms; this picture is today in Sant'Ambrogio at Florence, in the chapel by the door leading to the nuns' parlour. And on the screen of the church of San Niccolò sopr' Arno there is another of his panel pictures, in which as well as showing the Annunciation, with the angel and Our Lady, he painted a building with many columns very finely depicted in perspective. Apart from his perfect rendering of the lines, he demonstrated his understanding of perspective by shading his colours in such a way that the building seems gradually to disappear from view. In the abbey at Florence, in the niche of a pillar opposite those supporting the arch of the high altar, he did a fresco painting of St Ives of Brittany, who is seen from below with his feet foreshortened. This had never been done so well before and it won him no little praise. Underneath St Ives, above another cornice, he painted the widows, orphans, and beggars being helped by the saint in their need.

Below the choir in Santa Maria Novella he painted a fresco showing the Trinity, which is over the altar of St Ignatius and which has Our Lady on one side and St John the Evangelist on the other, contemplating the crucified Christ. At the sides are two kneeling figures, which as far as one can tell are portraits of those who commissioned the work, although they can scarcely be made out as they have been covered over with gold ornamentation. But the most beautiful thing, apart from the figures, is the barrel-vaulted ceiling drawn in perspective and divided into square compartments containing rosettes foreshortened and made to recede so skilfully that the surface looks as if it is indented. In Santa Maria Maggiore, in a chapel near the side door which leads towards San Giovanni, Masaccio also painted a panel picture showing Our Lady, St Catherine, and St Julian, and on the predella he painted several little figures illustrating scenes from the life of St Catherine, and St Julian killing his father and mother; in the middle he depicted the Nativity of Jesus Christ with characteristic simplicity and liveliness.

In the Carmelite Church at Pisa, inside a chapel in the transept, there is a panel painting by Masaccio showing the Virgin and Child, with some little angels at her feet who are playing instruments and one of whom is sounding a lute and inclining his ear very attentively to listen to the music he is making. Surrounding Our Lady are St Peter, St John the Baptist, St Julian, and St Nicholas, all very vivacious and animated….

Later on, feeling rather discontented at Florence and prompted by his love and enthusiasm for painting, he determined to go to Rome in order to perfect his work and—as he succeeded in doing—make himself superior to all other painters. In Rome he became very famous, and he decorated a chapel for Cardinal San Clemente, in the church of San Clemente, painting in fresco the Passion of Our Lord, showing the crucified thieves and scenes of the martyrdom of St Catherine. He also painted a number of panel pictures in tempera, which were all either lost or destroyed during the troubles at Rome. He did another painting in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, in a little chapel near the sacristy: it shows four saints, so skilfully painted that they look as though they are in relief, with Our Lady of the Snow in the middle, and a portrait from life of Pope Martin, who is marking the foundations of the church with a hoe and near to whom stands the Emperor Sigismund II. One day after Michelangelo and I had been studying this work he praised it very highly and remarked that those men had been contemporaries of Masaccio.

Pisanello and Gentile da Fabriano shared with Masaccio some of the work they were doing on the walls of the church of San Giovanni for Pope Martin; but then he heard that Cosimo de' Medici (whose support and favour he enjoyed) had been recalled from exile, and so he returned to Florence where he was commissioned to decorate the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine, because of the death of Masolino da Panicale. Before he began this work, to show the progress he had made as a painter Masaccio painted the St Paul which is near the bell-ropes. And he certainly excelled himself in this picture, where one can see in the head of the saint (which is a portrait from life of Bartolo di Angiolino Angiolini) so awe-inspiring an expression that the figure needs only speech to be alive. Anyone knowing nothing of St Paul has only to look at this painting to understand his greatness as a citizen of Rome and his saintly force of will, utterly dedicated to the propagation of the faith. In the same painting Masaccio showed his knowledge of the technique of foreshortening figures from below in a way that was truly marvellous, as may be seen today from his successful rendering of the feet of the Apostle, in contrast to the crude style of earlier times which, as I said a little while earlier, depicted every figure as if it were standing on tiptoe. This style persisted uncorrected until Masaccio's time, and before anyone else he alone brought painting to the excellence we know today.

While he was engaged on this work it happened that the church of the Carmine was consecrated, and to commemorate this event Masaccio painted a picture of the entire ceremony as it had taken place, in chiaroscuro and terra verde, inside the cloister over the door which leads to the convent. He showed countless citizens following the procession and in their cloaks and hoods, among them being Filippo Brunelleschi, wearing wooden shoes, Donatello, Masolino da Panicale, who had been his own master, Antonio Brancacci, who commissioned Masaccio's work for the chapel, Niccolò da Uzzano, Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, and Bartolommeo Valori, all of whom are also portrayed by the same hand in a painting in the house of a Florentine gentleman, Simon Corsi. Masaccio also painted there a portrait of Lorenzo Ridolfi, who at that time was ambassador of the Florentine Republic in Venice. And he not only portrayed these noblemen from life but also painted the door of the convent just as it was, with the porter holding the keys in his hand.

There are many excellent qualities in this work, for Masaccio succeeded in showing these people, five or six in line together on the level of the piazza, receding from view with such proportion and judgement that his skill is indeed astonishing. Even more remarkable, one can see his perspicacity in painting these men as they really were, not as being all the same size but with a certain subtlety which distinguishes the short and fat from the tall and thin; and they are also posed with their feet firmly on one level, and so well foreshortened in line that they look the same as they would in real life.

After this, Masaccio started work again on the Brancacci Chapel, continuing the scenes from the life of St Peter which Masolino had begun and finishing some of them, namely, St Peter enthroned, the healing of the sick, the raising of the dead, and the restoring of the cripples as St Peter's shadow falls on them while he walks to the Temple with St John. The most notable among them, however, is the painting in which St Peter, in order to pay the tribute, at Christ's command is taking the money from the belly of the fish; for as well as being able to see in one of the Apostles, the last in the group, a self-portrait which Masaccio executed so skilfully with the help of a mirror that it seems to breathe, we are shown the bold way in which St Peter is questioning Our Lord and the attentiveness of the Apostles as they stand in various attitudes around Christ, waiting for his decision with such animated gestures that they look truly alive. St Peter is especially remarkable, as he flushes with the effort he is making in bending to take the money out from the belly of the fish; and even more when he pays the tribute, where we can see his emotion as he counts the money and the greed of the man who is receiving it and is looking at it in his hand with great satisfaction.

He also painted there the raising of the praetor's son by St Peter and St Paul; but he died before this work was finished, and it was subsequently completed by Filippino [Lippi, the son of Fra Filippo]. In the scene showing St Peter baptizing there is a figure of a naked man, who is trembling and shivering with cold as he stands with the others who are being baptized. This is very highly regarded, being executed in very fine relief and in a very charming style; it has always been praised and admired by artists.

Because of Masaccio's work, the Brancacci Chapel has been visited from that time to this by an endless stream of students and masters. There are still some heads to be seen there which are so beautiful and lifelike that one can say outright that no other painter of that time approached the modern style of painting as closely as did Masaccio. His work deserves unstinted praise, especially because of the way he formed in his painting the beautiful style of our own day. How true this is is shown by the fact that all the most renowned sculptors and painters who have lived from that time to this have become wonderfully proficient and famous by studying and working in that chapel: namely, Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, Fra Filippo [Lippi], Filippino (who finished the chapel), Alesso Baldovinetti, Andrea del Castagno, Andrea del Verrocchio, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Perugino, Fra Bartolommeo di San Marco, Mariotto Albertinelli, and the inspired Michelangelo Buonarroti. In addition, Raphael of Urbino found in the chapel the first inspiration for his lovely style. Masaccio has also influenced Granaccio, Lorenzo di Credi, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Andrea del Sarto, Rosso, Franciabigio, Baccio Bandinelli, Alonso the Spaniard, Jacopo Pontormo, Pierino del Vaga, and Toto del Nunziata. In short, all those who have endeavoured to learn the art of painting have always gone for that purpose to the Brancacci Chapel to grasp the precepts and rules demonstrated by Masaccio for the correct representation of figures. And if I have failed to mention many other foreigners and Florentines who have gone there to study, let me just say that where great artists flock so do the lesser.

Although Masaccio's works have always had a high reputation, there are those who believe, or rather there are many who insist, that he would have produced even more impressive results if his life had not ended prematurely when he was twenty-six. However, because of the envy of fortune, or because good things rarely last for long, he was cut off in the flower of his youth, his death being so sudden that there were some who even suspected that he had been poisoned.

It is said that when he heard the news Filippo Brunelleschi, who had been at great pains to teach Masaccio many of the finer points of perspective and architecture, was plunged into grief and cried: `We have suffered a terrible loss in the death of Masaccio.'

Masaccio was buried in the Carmelite Church itself, in the year 1443. During his lifetime he had made only a modest name for himself, and so no memorial was raised. But there were some to honour him when he died with the following epitaphs:

by annibal caro
I painted, and my picture was like life;
I gave my figures movement, passion, soul:
They breathed. Thus, all others
Buonarroti taught; he learnt from me.

by fabio segni
Invida cur, Lachesis, primo sub flore juventae
Pollice discindis stamina funereo?
Hoc uno occiso, innumeros occidis Apelles:
Picturae omnis obit, hoc obeunte, lepos.
Hoc Sole extincto, extinguuntur sydera cuncta.
Heu! decus omne perit, hoc pereunte, simul.*

*O jealous Fate, why doth thy finger fell
Asunder pluck the threads of youth's first bloom?
Countless Apelles this one slaying slays;
In this one death there dies all painting's charm.
With this sun's quenching, all the stars are quench'd;
Beside this fall, alas! all beauty falls.

Source: Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Artists. Translated by Bull, George. Penguin Books.

Masaccio
In only a few years, from his start as a painter in 1422 until his death in about 1428 at the age of 26, the Italian master Masaccio was known as a great innovator. Along with the sculptor Donatello and the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, he split away from the prevailing, formalized Gothic conventions of the time. His groundbreaking use of mathematical perspective, as well as his use of light, shadow, and foreshortening, helped to give his works a naturalness and an illusion of weight and volume that were completely new. The following account of Masaccio’s life and work was written by 16th-century Italian artist and writer Giorgio Vasari as part of his Lives of the Artists (1550; revised 1568).

An enormous body of Italian Renaissance painting can be seen in the churches and secular buildings of Italy and in museum collections throughout the world.

A Renaissance for Michelangelo
Although Michelangelo was reluctant to undertake the commission, his paintings on the ceiling and upper walls of the Sistine Chapel remain masterpieces that have captured the attention of art lovers ever since their completion in 1512. Modern-day restorers began work in the 1980s and faced a number of challenges in trying to bring the paintings back to their original state.

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Giotto

2006-10-26T08:11:00.000+03:00

Saint Francis Fresco Cycle In this fresco, one of a series of frescoes executed by 14th-century Italian artist Giotto in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence, Italy, Francis of Assisi receives papal confirmation for the rule of his Franciscan order. Giotto’s concern with the realistic depiction of human figures in sculptural, rounded forms marked a decisive break with medieval pictorial conventions. His altarpieces and church frescoes heralded some of the most important innovations of Florentine Renaissance painting.Scala/Art Resource, NY

By contrast, some 100 years earlier than the Limbourg brothers, the Italian painter Giotto had given a monumental scale and dignity to the human figure, making it the bearer of the drama. His work had thereby revolutionized Italian painting; eventually, his discoveries and those of other artists affected painting in the north. Giotto's superb frescoes of the lives of Christ and the Virgin, painted from 1305 to 1306, are in the Arena Chapel in Padua (Padova). In addition, Giotto painted large wood-panel altarpieces, as did several other late medieval painters.

Giotto di Bondone
Italian painter Giotto is held in high regard as the artist who moved away from the traditional medieval technique of portraying the human figure as a stiff, flat, two-dimensional character. An artist far ahead of his time, Giotto began to protray humans as rounded, proportioned, and naturalistic. His work influenced the development of Renaissance art more than a century after his death in Florence in 1337.

From Lives of the Artists: Giotto
By creating more natural, three-dimensional representations of space and the human form, the Italian painter Giotto (1267?-1337) made a dramatic break from the flat, stylized renderings typical of... Gothic and Byzantine art. In this passage from Italian writer and artist Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550, revised 1568), Vasari discussed Giotto’s early career. Vasari provided a description of some of Giotto’s works, including his frescoes in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence, and what were believed to be Giotto’s frescoes in the Upper Church of the Basilica of San Francesco at Assisi. The authorship of the frescoes in Assisi continues to be debated by art historians.
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By creating more natural, three-dimensional representations of space and the human form, the Italian painter Giotto (1267?-1337) made a dramatic break from the flat, stylized renderings typical of Gothic and Byzantine art. In this passage from Italian writer and artist Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550, revised 1568), Vasari discussed Giotto’s early career. Vasari provided a description of some of Giotto’s works, including his frescoes in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence, and what were believed to be Giotto’s frescoes in the Upper Church of the Basilica of San Francesco at Assisi. The authorship of the frescoes in Assisi continues to be debated by art historians.

From Lives of the Artists: Giotto

By Giorgio Vasari

In my opinion painters owe to Giotto, the Florentine painter, exactly the same debt they owe to nature, which constantly serves them as a model and whose finest and most beautiful aspects they are always striving to imitate and reproduce. For after the many years during which the methods and out-lines of good painting had been buried under the ruins caused by war it was Giotto alone who, by God's favour, rescued and restored the art, even though he was born among incompetent artists. It was, indeed, a great miracle that in so gross and incompetent an age Giotto could be inspired to such good purpose that by his work he completely restored the art of design, of which his contemporaries knew little or nothing. And yet this great man, who started life in the year 1276 in the village of Vespignano, fourteen miles out in the country from the city of Florence, was the son of a poor peasant farmer called Bondone, who gave him the name Giotto and then brought him up just like any other boy of his class.

By the time he reached the age of ten Giotto showed in all his boyish ways such unusually quick intelligence and liveliness that he delighted not only his father but all who knew him, whether they lived in the village or beyond. Bondone used to let him look after some sheep; and while the animals grazed here and there about the farm, the boy, drawn instinctively to the art of design, was always sketching what he saw in nature, or imagined in his own mind, on stones or on the ground or the sand. One day [the Italian painter] Cimabue was on his way from Florence to Vespignano, where he had some business to attend to, when he came across Giotto who, while the sheep were grazing near by, was drawing one of them by scratching with a slightly pointed stone on a smooth clean piece of rock. And this was before he had received any instruction except for what he saw in nature itself. Cimabue stopped in astonishment to watch him, and then he asked the boy whether he would like to come and live with him. Giotto answered that if his father agreed he would love to do so. So Cimabue approached Bondone, who was delighted to grant his request and allowed him to take the boy to Florence. After he had gone to live there, helped by his natural talent and instructed by Cimabue, in a very short space of time Giotto not only captured his master's own style but also began to draw so ably from life that he made a decisive break with the crude traditional Byzantine style and brought to life the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years. Although, as I said before, one or two people had tried to do this, no one succeeded as completely and as immediately as Giotto. Among the things that he did at this time was, as we can see today, a painting in the chapel of the palace of the Podestà at Florence, showing his dear friend Dante Alighieri, who was no less famous as a poet than he was as a painter. (We find Giotto being highly praised by Giovanni Boccaccio in the introduction to his story about Forese da Rabatta and Giotto himself.) In the same chapel are portraits by Giotto of Dante's master, Brunetto Latini, and of Corso Donati, an eminent Florentine citizen of those days.

Giotto's first paintings were done for the chapel of the high altar of the abbey of Florence where he executed many works which were highly praised. Among them, especially admired was a picture of the Annunciation in which he convincingly depicted the fear and trembling of the Virgin Mary before the Archangel Gabriel; Our Lady is so fearful that it appears as if she is longing to run away.

The panel painting over the high altar of the same chapel is also by Giotto, but this work has been kept there more from respect for anything by so great an artist than for any other reason. Four of the chapels in Santa Croce were also painted by Giotto, three of them between the sacristy and the main chapel and one on the opposite side of the church. In the first of the three, that of Ridolfo di Bardi where the bell-ropes are, is the life of St Francis. In this painting Giotto painted with great effect the tears of a number of friars lamenting the death of the saint. In the second, the Peruzzi Chapel, are two scenes from the life of St John the Baptist, to whom the chapel is dedicated: in these, Giotto has depicted in very lively fashion the dancing and leaping of Herodias and the prompt service given by some servants at table. In the same place are two marvellous scenes from the life of St John the Evangelist, showing him restoring Drusiana to life and then being carried up into heaven. In the third chapel, belonging to the Giugni family, and dedicated to the Apostles, Giotto has painted scenes showing the martyrdom of many of those holy men. In the fourth chapel on the other side of the church towards the north, belonging to the Tosinghi and the Spinelli families and dedicated to the Assumption of Our Lady, Giotto painted the Birth of Our Lady, her Betrothal, the Annunciation, the Adoration of the Magi, and the Presentation of the Christ-child to Simeon in the Temple. This is a beautiful work, for apart from the skill with which he has depicted the emotions of the old man as he takes Christ from His mother, the attitude of the child Himself, who is frightened of Simeon and all timidly stretches out his arms and turns towards his mother, could not be more moving or beautiful. Then in the painting showing Our Lady's death Giotto depicted the Apostles and a number of angels with torches in their hands, very beautifully executed.

In the Baroncelli Chapel of the same church there is a painting in tempera by Giotto, in which he has very carefully depicted the Coronation of Our Lady with a great number of small figures and a choir of angels and saints, finished with great care. On this work are Giotto's name and the date, in gold letters; and any artist who considers when it was that Giotto, without any enlightenment from the good style of our own time, gave the first impulse to the correct way of drawing and colouring, is bound to hold him in the greatest respect.

In the same church of Santa Croce there is also, above the marble tomb of Carlo Marsuppini of Arezzo, a Crucifixion, with the Virgin, St John, and the Magdalen at the foot of the cross. On the other side of the church, directly opposite this, above the tomb of Leonardo of Arezzo near the high altar, is an Annunciation; and this has been retouched by later painters, with results that show little judgement on the part of whoever was responsible. In the refectory [dining hall] there is a Tree of the Cross, with scenes from the life of St Louis and a Last Supper, all by the hand of Giotto; and on the presses of the sacristy there are a number of scenes, with small figures, from the lives of Christ and of St Francis.

The chapel of St John the Baptist in the Carmelite Church was also decorated by Giotto with four paintings tracing the life history of St Francis: and in the Guelph Palace at Florence there is by his hand a history of the Christian Faith, perfectly executed in fresco, containing the portrait of Pope Clement IV who established the Guelph magistracy and conferred on it his own coat-of-arms which it has held uninterruptedly ever since. When all this work was finished, Giotto left Florence for Assisi in order to finish the works which had been started there by Cimabue. On his way he decorated the chapel of St Francis, which is above the baptistry in the parish church of Arezzo, as well as painting from life portraits of St Francis and St Dominic, on a round column which is near a very fine, antique Corinthian capital, and also, in a little chapel of the Duomo outside Arezzo, executing the beautifully composed picture of the Stoning of St Stephen.

After this Giotto went on to Assisi in Umbria, having been summoned there by Fra Giovanni di Murro della Marca, who at that time was minister general of the Franciscans; and at Assisi in the Upper Church of San Francesco, on the two sides of the church under the gallery that crosses the windows, he painted thirty-two histories from the life and works of St Francis. There are sixteen frescoes on each wall, and they were so perfect that they brought Giotto tremendous fame. There is, indeed, wonderful variety not only in the gestures and attitudes of all the figures shown in the cycle but also in the composition of every single scene; moreover, it is marvellous to see the way Giotto painted the various costumes worn at that time and his observation and imitation of nature. One of the most beautiful scenes is of a man showing signs of great thirst kneeling down to drink eagerly at a fountain; the incident is conveyed so exactly and movingly that one might be looking at a real person. There are many other things in the cycle which demand our attention. For the sake of brevity I shall not dwell on them; it is enough to record that this work won tremendous fame for its author because of the excellence of the figures, and because of the liveliness, the ease, order, and proportion of Giotto's painting, qualities which were given him by nature but which he greatly improved by study and expressed clearly in all he did. As well as being naturally talented, Giotto was extremely studious; he was always going for new ideas to nature itself, and so he could rightly claim to have had nature, rather than any human master, as his teacher.

After the fresco cycle was finished, Giotto did some more work in the same place, but in the Lower Church, painting the upper part of the walls beside the high altar and all four angles of the vault, above where St Francis is buried, with scenes of great beauty, imagination, and inventiveness. In the first he depicted St Francis glorified in heaven, surrounded by the virtues necessary if one wants to be in a state of perfect grace before God. On one side there is Obedience, putting a yoke on the neck of a friar who kneels in front of her; the reins of the yoke are being drawn up towards heaven, and Obedience, a finger at her lips, is cautioning silence and turns her eyes towards the figure of Jesus Christ, whose side is flowing with blood. Standing among the various virtues are the figures of Prudence and Humility, intended to show that where there is true obedience there is always humility and always the prudence to make every action wise. Chastity is depicted on the second angle of the vault, standing secure in a strong castle and unmoved by the offers being made to her of kingdoms and crowns and palms of glory. At her feet is the figure of Purity, washing the naked and attended by Fortitude who is bringing people to be washed and purified. To the side of Chastity is the figure of Penitence, chasing away Cupid with the cord of discipline and putting Impurity to flight. On the third angle is Poverty, who goes in her bare feet trampling on thorns; there is a dog behind her, barking, and near at hand one naked boy throwing stones and another pressing thorns into her legs with a stick. We see this same figure of Poverty being wed by St Francis, with her hand held by Jesus Christ, in the mystical presence of Hope and Charity. In the fourth and last of the angles of the vault is St Francis, again in glory, clothed in the white tunic of a deacon; he stands triumphant in heaven in the middle of a great choir of angels, who bear a standard showing a cross and seven stars, and over above is the Holy Ghost. On each of these paintings are written some words in Latin, which explain their significance.

As well as the paintings on the vault, there are on the walls of the transepts some beautiful pictures which truly deserve to be held in great esteem, not only because they are perfect works of art but also because they were executed with such tremendous care that they are still as fresh today as when they were done. Among them is an excellent portrait of Giotto himself. And above the door of the sacristy there is another painting by Giotto, again in fresco, showing St Francis receiving the stigmata and displaying such devout emotion that it seems to me the finest Giotto did in that group, although all the paintings are really beautiful and praiseworthy.

When he had finally finished his work with the painting of St Francis, Giotto returned to Florence where, after his arrival, he did a panel picture to be sent to Pisa, showing St Francis standing on the fearful rock of La Vernia. He took extraordinary pains over this work, for as well as depicting a landscape full of trees and rocks, which was an innovation for that time, he showed in the attitude of St Francis, who is eagerly kneeling down to receive the stigmata, a burning desire to be granted it and a tremendous love for Jesus Christ, who is seen above surrounded by seraphim and who concedes it to him, showing such expressive tenderness that it is impossible to imagine anything better. On the predella of the same painting are three other scenes from the life of St Francis, all beautifully executed.

This painting, which can be seen today on a pillar at the side of the high altar in San Francesco at Pisa, where it is kept as a memorial of so great a man, was the reason why the Pisans, who had just finished the fabric of the Campo Santo according to the designs of Giovanni, the son of Nicolò Pisano … commissioned Giotto to paint some of the interior. They wanted the inside walls to be decorated with the most noble paintings, since the outside had been encrusted at very great expense with marbles and intaglios, the roof covered with lead, and the interior contained very many antique monuments and tombs from the times of the pagans which had been brought to Pisa from all parts of the world. So having gone to Pisa for this purpose, Giotto made a start on one of the walls of the Campo Santo with six great frescoes showing scenes from the life of the patient prophet Job. Now, very judiciously, Giotto took note of the fact that the marble in the part of the building where he had to work was turned towards the sea and therefore, being exposed to the sirocco, was always damp and tended to exude salt, just as do nearly all the walls in Pisa, with the result that colours and paintings are eaten into and fade away. So to preserve his work as long as possible, wherever he intended to paint in fresco he first laid on an undercoat, or what we would call an intonaco or plaster, made of chalk, gypsum, and powdered brick. This technique was so successful that the paintings he did have survived to the present day. They would be in even better condition, as a matter of fact, if they had not been considerably damaged by damp because of the neglect of those who were in charge of them. No precautions were taken (although it would have been a simple matter to have done so) and as a result the paintings which survived the damp were ruined in several places, the flesh tints having darkened and the plaster flaked off. In any case when gypsum is mixed with chalk it always deteriorates and decays, so although when it is used it appears to make an excellent and secure binding, the colours are invariably spoilt.

.Source: Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Artists. Translated by Bull, George. Penguin Books.

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International Gothic Style

2006-10-25T18:41:00.000+03:00

Saint George and the Princess of Trebizond Saint George and the Princess of Trebizond (about 1435, Pellegrini Chapel, Santa Anastasia, Verona, Italy) is a fresco by Italian painter Pisanello, who is considered a master of the International Gothic style. This style can be observed in the elegantly fluid lines of the work and its decorative tapestrylike quality. Despite this stylization, Pisanello studied the forms of animals and people from life so that his work never appears formulaic.Scala/Art Resource, NY

International Gothic Style, in the visual arts, a similarity of style in painting, manuscript illumination, sculpture, decorative arts manifested in different parts of Europe during the late 14th and into the 15th century. This style is noted for extreme linearity, giving the effect of elegance and refinement, and attention to decorative detail. Many of the works in the International Gothic style are devoted to secular themes. Because artists of the time often journeyed from one art center to another, it is difficult to date these works or to give their place of origin. For example, a French architect, Matthias of Arras, began building the Cathedral of Saint Vitus in Prague in 1344, and, upon his death in 1353, was succeeded by German architect Peter Parler. The renowned French manuscript, the Très riches heures du Duc de Berry (1413-1416, Musée Condé, Chantilly), was illuminated by the Limbourg brothers, natives of Flanders.

A merging of the artistic traditions of northern Europe and Italy took place at the beginning of the 15th century and is known as the International Gothic style. Among the many characteristics that define painting in this style is an attention to realistic detail that shows the artist's acute observation of human beings and of nature. In the early 1400s the Limbourg brothers moved from Flanders to France and created a magnificent Book of Hours, the famous Très riches heures du Duc de Berry (1413-1416, Musée Condé, Chantilly, France). One of the greatest works in the International Gothic style, this manuscript was done for their patron, Jean de France, Duc de Berry. Its remarkable calendar pages portray peasant life as well as that of the nobility, providing a brilliant record of the clothing, activities, and architecture of the times. Although these are full-page illustrations, they reflect an older medieval style, in that the figures are small and must vie for attention with other imagery.

Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry
This page from Les très riches heures du duc de Berry (The Book of Hours of the Duke of Berry) was produced by a family of Flemish illuminators, the Limbourg Brothers, around 1413. Each month of the year is represented in the book, showing activities associated with that season. The page shown here depicts the month of April, with members of the nobility enjoying themselves outdoors. It is in the Musée Condé, in Chantilly, France.Encarta EncyclopediaGiraudon/Art Resource, NY

Gothic Painting

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Rose Window, Notre Dame The north rose window of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris (1240-1250) was built by Jean de Chelles. It is designed in the Rayonnant Gothic style, named for the radiating spokes in this type of window. The center circle depicts the Virgin and Child, surrounded by figures of prophets. The second circle shows 32 Old Testament kings, and the outer circle depicts 32 high priests and patriarchs.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Christ Entering Jerusalem Pietro Lorenzetti and his brother, Ambrogio, were leading figures in the 14th-century Italian Sienese school of painting. This early 14th-century fresco from the lower Church of San Francesco in Assisi, Italy shows Christ entering the city of Jerusalem.Scala/Art Resource, NY

During the early Gothic period, as cathedral structure gave more emphasis to windows, stained glass occupied a more prominent role in the arts than did manuscript illumination. Lay artists now established workshops in Paris and other major centers,... producing elaborately illuminated manuscripts for royal patrons. Paintings of secular subjects also survive from this period, notably in Italy. Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted frescoes from 1338 to 1339 in the Palazzo Pubblico (Town Hall) in Siena, portraying 14th-century city and country life, and in the hall's Council Chamber, Simone Martini painted an equestrian portrait in 1328 of a local military hero, depicting his encampment against a landscape background. See Gothic Art.

Stained Glass, windows composed of small panels of dyed and painted glass, held in strips of cast lead and mounted in a metal framework. The art achieved its zenith in Gothic building, most notably in France from about 1130 to 1330.

MATERIALS AND TECHNIQUES

Two types of glass were used in Gothic stained glass—pot glass and flashed glass. Pot glass was of uniform color, which was achieved by adding oxides of iron (red), copper (green), or cobalt (blue) to the raw materials of glass, a transparent mixture of potash (later soda) and limestone. Flashed glass was made to prevent opaqueness by fusing a layer of deep color to a thicker layer of clear glass while both were still hot. In painting and mosaics, light is reflected off the surface, whereas light is transmitted through translucent stained glass; for this reason, the art of making stained glass is known as painting with light.

The artist began by sketching the window's design. This was enlarged to the actual size of the window on the cartoon, which was drawn with lead or tin point on a wooden board or table that was coated with chalk or white paint; late Gothic and Renaissance cartoons were made on parchment, cloth, paper, or cardboard. The lines representing the lead supports were drawn in black. Next, colored glass sheets were laid on a table and cut with an iron tool heated to incandescence. Lines of clothing, facial features, and small designs were drawn on the individual pieces with a black or dark brown enamel-like paint made of powdered glass, metallic salts such as iron and copper oxides, other minerals, and liquid. These lines were usually drawn on the inner side of the glass and were fused to the stained glass by firing it at a low temperature. The malleable double lead strips, shaped like an H in cross section in order to grasp the edges of the glass on both sides, were then cut and shaped. Units of lead and glass were fixed to the window's larger iron frame, or armature—an integral part of the design in early windows.

Gothic Art and Architecture, religious and secular buildings, sculpture, stained glass, and illuminated manuscripts and other decorative arts produced in Europe during the latter part of the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century). Gothic art began to be produced in France about 1140, spreading to the rest of Europe during the following century. The Gothic Age ended with the advent of the Renaissance in Italy about the beginning of the 15th century, although Gothic art and architecture continued in the rest of Europe through most of the 15th century, and in some regions of northern Europe into the 16th century. Originally the word Gothic was used by Italian Renaissance writers as a derogatory term for all art and architecture of the Middle Ages, which they regarded as comparable to the works of barbarian Goths. Since then the term Gothic has been restricted to the last major medieval period, immediately following the Romanesque. The Gothic Age is now considered one of Europe’s outstanding artistic eras.

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Medieval Painting

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Lindisfarne Gospels Illuminated manuscripts were showcases for the most skillful painting of medieval times. The Lindisfarne Gospels (about 698-721) are illuminated books produced by monks in Northumberland, England. This page shows the first initial to the Gospel According to Saint Matthew. The interlacing patterns decorated with fantastic creatures were taken from Viking art and became Irish and Anglo-Saxon motifs.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

The art of the Middle Ages—that produced outside the Byzantine Empire and within what had been the northern boundaries of the Roman world—can be categorized according to its distinctive stylistic traits. Anglo-Irish art, which flourished from the 7th to the 9th century in monasteries in various parts of the British Isles, was largely an art of intricate calligraphic designs (see Celts: Art; Irish Art; Calligraphy). Highly decorative illuminated manuscripts were produced, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels (698?-721, British Museum, London), which display flat, elaborate linear patterns combining Celtic and Germanic elements. In the Romanesque period, during the 11th and 12th centuries, no single style appeared in the manuscripts of northern Europe; some illuminations were of classical inspiration, while others show a new, highly charged, energetic drawing style (see Romanesque Art and Architecture). In the Gothic period that followed, from the later part of the 12th century to the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, a larger repertoire of media was introduced, and painting ceased to be entirely the product of the monasteries
Calligraphy, the art of fine writing or script. The term calligraphy is derived from the Greek kalligraphia, meaning “beautiful writing,” and is applied to individual letters as well as to entire documents; it also refers to an aesthetic branch of paleography. In Islamic countries and in India, China, and Japan, calligraphy is done with a brush and has been a highly respected art form for many centuries. In the West, calligraphy eventually evolved from the earliest cave paintings, such as those (35,000-20,000 bc) at Lascaux, France, into the abstractions that became the familiar letterforms of the alphabet.

Japanese Calligraphy This hanging scroll is an example of Japanese calligraphy. Although calligraphy is generally considered a form of lettering, it is also... a drawing style. The lettering and figure of a sage are done in ink, using a brush. The rectangular forms are made with stamps, using red ink.

Objects of Celtic Life Celtic objects found in archaeological digs indicate the Celts inhabited what is now France and western Germany in the late Bronze Age, around 1200 bc. The bronze helmet (top center) probably belonged to a high-ranking Celtic warrior. Its hollow horns were made of riveted sheets of bronze, and the helmet was probably more for display than battle. The shiny sheath (third from left) also was made from sheets of bronze riveted together and had a birch-bark lining.Dorling Kindersley

Gundestrup Cauldron The Gundestrup Cauldron is a relic of the Celtic world. Dating from about 100 bc, the silver vessel shows scenes from Celtic myth and religion whose meanings today are unclear. It is in the National Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark.Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

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History of Sculpture

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HISTORY

This article traces the history of Western sculpture from prehistoric times to the present day; for non-Western sculpture, see African Art; Chinese Art; Indian Art; Iranian Art; Islamic Art; Japanese Art; Korean Art; Oceanian Art; Pre-Columbian.

A. Prehistoric Sculpture

Venus of Willendorf This so-called Venus figurine from the area of Willendorf, Austria, is one of the earliest known examples of sculpture, dating from between 30,000 and 25,000 bc. The figure, which is carved out of limestone, is only 11.25 cm (4.5 in) high, and was probably designed to be held in the hand. It is believed the Venus may be a fertility symbol, which would explain the exaggerated female anatomy.

The earliest sculptured objects, cut from ivory, horn, bone, or stone, are 27,000 to 32,000 years old. A small ivory horse with graceful, curving lines is among the oldest of these objects; it was found in a cave in Germany. Also found on cave floors are little stone female figurines carved with emphasis on the reproductive organs, the breasts, and the buttocks. These figures are thought to represent fertility goddesses and therefore are given the name Venus. One such figure, the Venus figurine from the area of Willendorf, Austria (30,000?-25,000? bc, Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria), with bulbous proportions although a mere 11.5 cm (4.5 in) high, was painted red to resemble blood, thereby signifying life. In Jericho, human skulls covered with plaster were naturalistically rendered some 9000 years ago.

B. Egyptian Sculpture

Akhenaton and Nefertiti This painted limestone statuette depicts King Akhenaton and Queen Nefertiti, rulers of Egypt during the Amarna period. During this period, the Egyptians worshiped one god, Aton,... who embodied both the male and female principles of the universe. Artists therefore portrayed Akhenaton, who was the representative of Aton on earth, with characteristics they regarded as feminine, such as narrow shoulders, a high waist, and pronounced belly, buttocks, and thighs.Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Among the oldest Egyptian sculptures is a piece of slate carved in low relief, known as the Palette of King Narmer (3100? bc), Egyptian Museum, Cairo). It portrays the victory of Upper over Lower Egypt, depicting the kings, armies, servants, and various animals. The kings (pharaohs) were also commemorated in magnificent life-size statues, set in funerary temples and tombs (see Egyptian Art and Architecture). Not true portraits, these sculptures are idealized representations, immobile of features and always frontal in pose. Strong geometric emphasis was given to the body, with the shoulders and chest plane resembling an inverted triangle, as in a carved diorite sculpture (2500? bc, Egyptian Museum) of the pharaoh Khafre. During the reign of Akhenaton, greater naturalism of representation was attained, as seen in the exquisite painted limestone portrait bust (1350? bc, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) of his queen Nefertiti.

C. Mesopotamian Sculpture

Art of Sculpture Revitalized

Mesopotamian art includes several civilizations: Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian (see Mesopotamian Art and Architecture). About 2600 bc the Sumerians carved small marble deities noted for their wide, staring eyes. Other details—hair, facial expression, body, clothing—were schematically treated with little interest in achieving a likeness. These qualities remained characteristic of later Mesopotamian sculpture. The Mesopotamians were also fond of portraying animals and did so with great skill, as can be seen on palace gates and reliefs on walls during the Assyrian period (1000-612 bc, examples in British Museum, London, and Metropolitan Museum, New York City).

D. Aegean and Greek Sculpture

Nike of Samothrace Nike of Samothrace (also known as Winged Victory), created about 200 bc, is one of the most famous Greek sculptures from the Hellenistic period. The marble statue, which stands about 2.4 m (about 8 ft) high, was originally part of a much larger monument that featured a large sculpture of a warship with the goddess of victory on the prow. The monument also included a two-tiered fountain. Formerly located on the island of Samothráki (Samothrace), the sculpture is now part of the collection of the Louvre Museum, Paris, France.Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library, London/New York

Aegean art includes Minoan sculpture, such as terra-cotta and ivory statuettes of goddesses, and Mycenaean works, consisting of small carved ivory deities. The Greeks, masters of stone carving and bronze casting, created some of the greatest sculpture known. Working on a monumental scale, they brought depiction of the human form to perfection between the 7th and 1st centuries bc. In the earliest period, the Archaic, figures appeared rigid and bodies were schematized along geometric lines, as in Egyptian art. By the Classical period, in the 5th and 4th centuries bc, however, naturalism was attained; figures were well proportioned and shown in movement, although faces remained immobile. Gods and athletes were favorite subjects during this period; the most famous sculptors were Phidias, Polyclitus, Praxiteles, and Lysippus. Highly esteemed is the architectural sculpture made for the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens, such as Three Goddesses (British Museum), whose rhythmically swirling drapery clings to their reclining bodies. During the Hellenistic period (4th-1st century bc), works became increasingly expressive, as reflected in the facial features and complicated body positions. The Nike of Samothráki, or Winged Victory (190? bc, Louvre, Paris), is a highly dramatic masterpiece from this time. See Aegean Civilization; Greek Art and Architecture.

E. Etruscan and Roman Sculpture

She-Wolf of the Capitol Although She-Wolf of the Capitol (circa 500 bc) is actually an Etruscan sculpture, it is associated with Roman art. The bronze statue, which stands 85 cm (33 in) high, is the symbol of the city of Rome. The mythological Romulus and Remus were supposed to have been kept alive by a wolf in order to fulfill their destiny as founders of the city. The figures of the infants were created during the Renaissance, but the wolf is Etruscan.Capitoline Museums, Rome/Canali PhotoBank, Milan/SuperStock

The Etruscans, who inhabited the area of Italy between Florence and Rome from the 8th to the 3rd century bc, made life-size terra-cotta sculptures portraying the gods; they also depicted themselves, in reclining positions, on the lids of terra-cotta sarcophagi (coffins). Superb bronze sculptures were also created, such as the She-Wolf (500? bc, Museo Capitolino, Rome), which became the symbol of Rome.

Greek Artists Represent the Human Figure

The Romans were avid collectors and imitators of Greek sculpture, and modern historians are indebted to their copies for knowledge of lost Greek originals. Their distinctive contribution to the art of sculpture was realistic portraiture, in which they recorded even the homeliest facial details. The Romans' sense of the importance of historic events is evident in many sculptured commemorative monuments in Rome, such as the Arch of Titus (ad 81?), Trajan's Column (106?-113 AD), and the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius (175?); the last- named became the prototype for most later equestrian sculptures.

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