Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Preparatory Designs for European Ceilings

Luca Cambiaso
Apollo driving the chariot of the rising sun
1550s
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

In Frescoes of the Veneto (New York : Vendome Press, 2009) Filippo Pedrocco lists some of the patterns he has observed on the decorated walls and ceilings of early modern palaces. "Frescoes generally appear within painted faux-architectural structures, their themes ranging from celebration of a family's accomplishments and some of its most distinctive members to mythological and historical scenes. ... The connecting thread among such disparate works is the extremely high quality of the painting."

Orazio Samacchini
Study for the decoration of a vault
ca. 1570
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Paolo Veronese
Study for a Figure of Moderation
16th century
drawing
British Museum

Federico Zuccaro
Time rescuing Truth from Calumny
16th century
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Angelo Michele Colonna and Agostino Mitelli
Ceiling design for Buen Retiro Palace, Madrid
ca. 1659
oil on canvas
Prado, Madrid

Pietro da Cortona
Landing of the Trojans at the mouth of the Tiber
1651-54
ceiling fresco
 Palazzo Pamphilij, Rome

Francesco Maffei
Design for a ceiling panel
17th century
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Carlo Maratta
Virtue crowned by Honor
ca. 1670-76
drawing for a pendentive
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Antoine Coypel
Figure of Renown
17th century
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

17th-century ceiling-painters, according to Steffi Roettgen, "freed themselves of the constraints of painted architecture to claim the ceiling as the exclusive playground of a world of figures with its own rules. What mattered were distance from the viewer, spatial relationships within the composition, the play of light and shadow, and atmospheric and coloristic perspective. Their renunciation of the organizing framework of painted architecture was only suitable, however, for scenes taking place in the heavenly sphere, indicated by banks of cloud and spiral or concentric configurations."  from Italian Frescoes : the Baroque Era (New York : Abbeville Press, 2007)

Antoine Coypel
Composition with ascending figures
17th century
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Antoine Dieu
Fame bearing a portrait of Louis XIV
17th century
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

"Angels do not need bodies for their own sake but for ours  coming into our human world and speaking with human beings, they give us a foretaste of that spiritual intercommunication which we look forward to having with them in a future life."  St Thomas Aquinas, quoted in Baroques by Giovanni Careri (Princeton University Press, 2003)

attributed to Benedetto Luti
Fall of Satan
17th century
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

Benedetto Luti
Bound Satyr
1693
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Louis Laguerre
Study for The Creation of Pandora
ca. 1720
oil sketch
Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Corrado Giaquinto
Birth of the Sun & Triumph of Bacchus
ca. 1761
oil on canvas
Prado, Madrid

Giambattista Tiepolo
Cherub with-Wreath of Lilies
ca. 1767-69
fragment, oil on canvas
Prado, Madrid

"He [Tiepolo] embraced Sebastiano Ricci's luminosity, taking up again Veronese's sun-filled fields and rediscovering the cinquecento technique of painting canvases and frescoes over white primer that allows light to shine through."  Daniela Tarabra in European Art of the Eighteenth Century (Getty Museum, 2006)