Italy

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Image features a charcoal and white gouache drawing showing an open market in a city square with canvas awnings strung over the stalls. A male figure is seated before an easel in the foreground. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Hop Smith in Venice
Writer and illustrator Francis Hopkinson Smith did not publish his first work until he was almost 50 years old.  Trained as an engineer, he spent the first part of his career in construction and is credited with designing the foundation for the Statue of Liberty. He made charcoal drawings and watercolors throughout his life and...
Image features a pitcher composed of a globular, translucent green glass body with a cylindrical neck covered in silver-plated metal with an inverted U-shaped handle, short spout, and an inset circular lid. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
“Without Light Everything is Lifeless”
Designer Massimo Vignelli was known for the sense of sophistication and refinement he brought to the product, graphic, and furniture design that he produced first in Italy, and later in the U.S. working with his wife Lella, also a designer.  While a student at the School of Architecture in Venice, Vignelli learned about glass from architect and glass...
Image features a lamp composed of a curved, white translucent shade on a segmented stainless steel column with a white base. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
The Pipistrello Lamp
By the 1960s, it could be argued that lighting design had come of age. This was influenced by several factors—booming post-war economic growth, the emergence of a new youth market eager to challenge established ideas about modern style, and the continuing development of lighting technologies and new plastics that encouraged greater experimentation with form and...
Image features a group five floor lamps in the shape of giant pills, each with a white top and a base in a different color: yellow, white, green, red, and blue. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Popping Pills
Revealing the importance between Pop Art and design, Cesare Casati and Emanuele Ponzio’s Pillola lamps designed in 1968, are representative of Italy’s anti-design movement of the mid-1960s and 1970s. Challenging notions of “good design,” the anti-design movement took its cues from Pop Art’s use of bright colors and banal subject matter. The Pillola lights culturally...
Images features the Virgin Mary, seated in a stable, holding the infant Jesus, who emits a radiant light. The pair are surrounded by a group of adoring angels and shepherds, while above, the rafters open to a heavenly scene of clouds and putti. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this image.
Brighter Than The Sun
In the late fourteenth century, an elderly nun named Bridget experienced a mystical vision.  Born in Sweden in 1303, Bridget (now St. Bridget) was nearly seventy when she made a pilgrimage to Bethlehem, and witnessed a holy sight.  In her account of what transpired, St. Bridget describes a vision of the birth of Jesus in...
Image features a drawing in pen and brown ink, bistre wash, and charcoal on laid paper. Five men are seated astride crocodiles. Two of the crocodiles are in the Nile and three of them are at the bank on the left. Two more heads of crocodiles emerge from the water. One spectator stands at left under a tree. More people are shown on the other bank. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Crocodile Hunt
How to catch a crocodile? In this drawing, the Flemish artist Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus (1523 —1605) shows us one particularly bold method. Hunters sit astride their prey, forcing long sticks between the crocodiles’ snapping jaws; companions armed with clubs wait nearby, ready to bludgeon the overpowered reptiles. The image isn’t based on...
Image features short glass vase of of campana-urn form, the interior of copper-toned aventurine the exterior with blue, white and yellow florette murrines; C-form handles on left and right. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
Frozen in Time
This urn-shaped vase represents important historic glass making techniques whose possibilities were expanded during the revival of glass production in late 19th-century Venice. The form features two spectacular variations of glass for the viewer to enjoy and ponder. At first glance, the most eye-catching feature is the inner layer of avventurina (also known as aventurine), the metallic copper-toned...
Pen and brown ink drawing of a woman seated on an octagonal platform, painting at an easel. She is encircled by eight columns supporting a cupola above.
Elisabetta Sirani, “Gem of Italy”
On November 14, 1665, the Basilica of San Domenico in Bologna was crowded with mourners. They were gathered to remember a young female artist, Elisabetta Sirani (1638 – 1665), who had died suddenly the previous August.[1] Although only 27 at the time of her death, Elisabetta was already an acclaimed painter, draftsman, and printmaker—a contemporary...
Image features nude man, seated, seen from behind, rendered in green and black ink. Please scroll down to read the blog post about this object.
A Renaissance Chiaroscuro Woodcut
This print, with its striking green hue, is the result of an innovative collaboration between two Italian Renaissance artists. Working together in Bologna in the late 1520s, the painter Francesco Mazzola (called Parmigianino, 1503-1540) and the printmaker Antonio da Trento (1508-1550) were early adopters of a new technique that allowed for the production of multicolored...