Highlights Of The Untermyer Collection Of English And Continental Decorative Arts

Inspired by research undertaken for the new Medieval & Renaissance Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Re-thinking Renaissance Objects explores and often challenges some of the key issues and current debates relating to Renaissance art and culture. Puts forward original research, including evidence provided by an in-depth study arising from the Medieval & Renaissance Gallery project Contributions are unusual in their combination of a variety of approaches, but with each paper starting with an examination of the objects themselves New theories emerge from several papers, some of which challenge current thinking

First Published in 2005. Silver is unique among the decorative arts in that its raw material is both inherently valuable and infinitely reusable. Its ownership has been a social bench-mark and its form has exercised the skills of sculptors, designers, chasers and engravers, but ultimately it could be, and normally was, melted down and refashioned quite without sentiment. Because of this constant recycling, the survival of any individual object is quite random and unrelated to its uniqueness or otherwise in its period. Hitherto plate historians have focused on individual objects almost to the exclusion of the context - social or economic - from which they came but now that context is seen as crucial in understanding historic plate. So in the first section of this book each chapter considers contemporary attitudes and usage.

This beautifully produced volume is the first to survey the Metropolitan Museum's world-renowned collection of European furniture. One hundred and three superb examples from the Museum's vast holdings are featured. They originated in workshops in England, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Russia, or Spain and date from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century. A number of them belonged to such important historical figures as Pope Urban VIII, Louis XIV, Madame de Pompadour, and Napoleon. The selection includes chairs, tables, beds, cabinets, commodes, settees and sofas, bookcases and standing shelves, desks, fire screens, athéniennes, coffers, chests, mirrors and frames, showcases, and lighting equipment. There is also one purely decorative piece, a superb vase made for a Russian noble family who, according to one awestruck viewer, "owned all the malachite mines in the world." The makers of some of the objects are unknown, but most of the pieces can be identified by label, documentation, or style as the work of an outstanding European designer-craftsman, such as André-Charles Boulle, Thomas Chippendale, David Roentgen, or Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

This beautiful book features masterpieces of sculpture in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum dating from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. Celebrated works by the great European sculptors - including Luca and Andrea della Robbia, Juan Mart©Ưnez Monta©ł©♭s, Gianlorenzo Bernini, Jean-Antoine Houdon, Bertel Thorvaldsen, Antoine-Louis Barye, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Rodin- are joined by striking new additions to the collection, notably Franz Xaver Messerschmidt's remarkable bust of a troubled and introspective man. The ninety-two selected examples are diverse in media (marble, bronze, wood, terracotta, and ivory) and size - ranging from a tiny oil lamp fantastically conceived and decorated by the Renaissance bronze sculptor Riccio to Antonio Canova's eight-foot-high Perseus with the Head of Medusa, executed in the heroic Neoclassical style. Incorporating information from the latest scholarly research and recent conservation studies, sculpture specialist Ian Wardropper discusses the history and significance of the highlighted works, each of which is reproduced with glorious new photography.

"In the royal and princely courts of Europe, artworks made of multicolored semiprecious stones were passionately coveted objects. Known as pietre dure, or hardstones, this type of artistic expression includes?paintings in stone,? which were composed of intricately cut separate pieces that were made into magnificent tabetops, cabinets, and wall decorations. Other works included vessels and ornaments carved with virtuosic skill from a single piece of rare and brilliant lapis lazuli, chalcedony, jasper, or similarly prized substance; exquisite objects such as boxes, clocks, and jewelry; and portraits of nobles sculpted in variously colored stones. Derived from ancient Roman decorative stonework, the art of pietre dure was developed in Renaissance Florence, where the manufacture of such objects was enthusiastically sponsored by Medici princes. Ideally suited for ostentatious display, the works sent an unmistakable message of wealth and political might that was understood in centers of power everywhere. From Italy the medium spread across Europeto Prague, Madrid, Naples, Paris, and later Saint Petersburg. Precious and fragile, pietre dure objects are rarely brought together in large numbers. This richly illustrated catalogue contains more than 150 masterworks from across Europe, dating from five centuries, including almost every artistic use of semiprecious stone during this time as well as some of the finest examples of the medium. Eight essays by European and American experts discuss the individualized development of pietre dure in every European region, the latest developments in scholarship, the interrelationships between art and dynastic politics and between cultures, and a variety of techniques used to produce these luxurious masterworks."--Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

In 1963 there appeared a catalogue entitled English and Other Silver in the Irwin Untermyer Collection. This volume completed a series of six, each devoted to a different aspect of one of the world's great private collections of decorative arts. In the interim the silver collection has been enriched by many remarkable works of art, both English and Continental. This new publication, greatly enlarged and completely revised, differs significantly from the first edition of English and Other Silver in that the objects, which range from the Tudor period to the nineteenth century, are presented in chronological order rather than by type. As before, however, each of the pieces is fully illustrated, and its hallmarks are reproduced in photographic enlargements. Some of the splendid new acquisitions replace lesser examples acquired earlier and now no longer in the collection. These new additions allow one to trace more clearly than before the formation of distinctive English styles, as well as the artistic development of such silversmiths as Nelme, Platel, Willaumc, Mcttayer, Pantin, and Lamerie. Few other collections of English silver, private or public, offer comparable opportunities for the student and the connoisseur.