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showing 328 library results for 'drawing'

The invention of pastel painting / Thea Burns. "Chalks and pastels are particularly appropriate materials for portraits because they appear effortlessly to convey the warm tones and soft, matte velvety surface of skin. Portraits and head studies therefore figure prominently in histories of pastel. The Invention of Pastel Painting describes the relatively sudden emergence in the later seventeenth century of sets of friable pastel sticks and a new artistic practice of painting in pastel. The author reconsiders the use of natural and fabricated drawing sticks as tools, firmly locating their use in the context of historical function. 'Artistic techniques have a social history; they are signs endowed with cultural meaning by society.' The visual, documentary and etymological evidence does not support the concept of a narrative history of pastel gradually progressing from a 'simple' original state in the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, Jean and Francois Clouet and the Dumonstiers to an increasingly richly coloured and technically complex visual record in the paintings of Robert Nanteuil, Joseph Vivien and Rosalba Carriera, and then continuing to evolve through the nineteenth century. In considering the history of chalk and pastel, the author argues that the change is aesthetic, not formal, and is grounded in social function and technical response. She has drawn not only on artists' letters and accounts, documents, critical and theoretical writings, and, broadly, the secondary literature, but also on close visual examination and scientific analysis of selected chalk drawings and paintings in pastel, particularly those created between 1500 and 1750."--Provided by the publisher. 2007. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 741.235
Inigo Jones's "Roman sketchbook" / [introduction and notes by] Edward Chaney. "The modest, vellum-bound notebook now known as the Roman Sketchbook and catalogued at Chatsworth House as 'Album 6' was probably acquired early in the New Year of 1614, within days Inigo Jones's of arrival in Rome with the Earl of Arundel. Begun as a self-improving notebook in Rome on 21 January 1614, Jones soon seems to have put the Sketchbook aside while he explored Rome with his patron. A month later Jones began paraphrasing Palladio's Antichitáa di Roma but then seems to have abandoned his notebook and was not to return to it for at least two decades. Then, in his sixties, he decided to fill in many of the pages he had left blank with more pen and ink notes and drawings. Both were derived from books or prints with varying degrees of literalness; the Italian prose being translated and paraphrased or abridged; the visual material being inevitably filtered through his own artistic experience but usually repeated in more or less directly derivative form. Both notes and drawings were inserted in the manner of one compiling a visual commonplace-book in which the drawings are related to many similar but scattered drawings done in the same period. Now, more than his own education, he seems to have had that of his own pupil, John Webb in mind and through and beyond him, his own immortality. Published previously only in a very rare lithographic facsimile in 1831 this is the first scholarly publication of the Roman Sketchbook. The text has been fully reproduced in photographic facsimile and accurately transcribed by Professor Chaney for the first time. The sources of Jones's designs, mostly Italian prints of the sixteenth century have been identified, with supporting illustrations, and in a lengthy introduction Professor Chaney explores the place the Sketchbook fills in both Jones's life and his legacy."--Provided by the publisher. 2006. • BOOK • 2 copies available. 7JONES