Splendor Of Marble

The first book to examine the many ways this beautiful stone can be incorporated into a home environment, describing the unique nature of marble and the leading role it plays in the best of interior design today. For spectacular drama, fabulous luxury, or simply the warm glow of organic textures, colors, and patterns, marble is like no other natural material. Marble has been favored by architects and designers for millennia, and as this book attests, the love affair with marble continues today. Featured are rooms showcasing marble by many of the world's most prominent decorators, including Kelly Wearstler, Vincente Wolf, Juan Pablo Molyneux, Bjarke Ingels, Ryan Korban, Martyn Lawrence Bullard, Robert Kime, the Haas Brothers, and Joseph Dirand, among many others. This is the first book that explores the many ways marble can bring color, pattern, and warmth to the home, as well as the vast array of beautiful types of marble that are available. It is a hugely popular material for home kitchens and bathrooms in particular, but it also is incorporated in outdoor patio spaces, hallways, and stairwells, even living rooms. All are featured here in gorgeous images, providing new inspiration for design lovers.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

"The Marble Faun " was sketched in Italy and prepared for publication mainly in Redcar, England, in 1859-60. The Castle of Monte Beni, the ancestral home of Donatello, the human faun, stands for Villa Montanto, where the author made his home for a time in the summer of 1858 ; and the original of Hilda's tower is described in the "French and Italian Note-Books,", May 15, 1858. This romance, which is generally held to be somewhat inferior to the novels of American life, though in an entirely different setting, does not differ greatly from them, or from some of the best short stories, in the nature of its topic and the handling of its characters. Like them it has for its theme a subject of conscience, — the influence of the consciousness of sin and its penalty, in elevating the life of a soul. Donatello's resemblance to the sculptured faun is typical of his spirit, unawakened, and looking neither before nor after, until his crime puts an end-forever to his joyous holiday existence, and remorse for it develops his intellect and his soul. Kenyon is a good type of a cultivated American, quietly enthusiastic, tolerant and not cynical, loving art and not despising America. Hilda is remarkable for the great moral strength united with her delicacy and sensibility. Her suffering on account of the crime of which she has been merely a witness is strongly contrasted with the attitude of Miriam, whose conscience needs to be brought to a full awakening even after participation in it; her free and strong nature having been bewildered in a maze of wrong, the one escape from which has offered itself in sudden temptation.

This volume translates and examines a rare conspectus of architectural and decorative taste published at the very end of the eighteenth century. Baron Joseph Friedrich zu Racknitz’s pioneering Presentation and History of the Taste of the Leading Nations in Relation to the Interior Decoration of Rooms and to Architecture (Darstellung und Geschichte des Geschmacks der vorzüglichsten Völker in Beziehung auf die innere Auszierung der Zimmer und auf die Baukunst) is little known today. Racknitz, a German aristocrat, traced an early global history of design and ornament through discussions of what he distinguished as twenty-four regional historical tastes. He included a diverse group of ancient classical civilizations, European nations and peoples, Eastern civilizations, and more exotic reaches of the world. This sensitive and informed translation by Simon Swynfen Jervis includes reproductions of the original color plates and essays on Racknitz’s biography, his publication, and the deeper German Enlightenment context, making this an essential volume for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture, decorative arts, and garden design.