The anonymous drawing above (from the Metropolitan Museum) offers two different design-options for a potential door-frame in an unknown and possibly imaginary Italian palace. The design on the left-hand side and the quite different one on the right-hand side have been cleverly merged by the early 18th-century draftsman as if together they might be built as seen and achieve a newly extreme elaboration of baroque exuberance in their asymmetric grandeur.
The 18th-century drawings that follow could all be said to share a similar, backward-looking aspiration to a similarly heightened level of pictorial drama, reflecting the lingering force of 17th-century practice.
Charles Antoine Coypel River God 18th century |
Gabriel François Doyen Allegory of Seasons 1760s |
Giovanni Battista Natali III Design for Mirror c. 1720-40 |
Pietro Jacopo Palmieri Trompe l'Oeil 1766 |
Pietro Jacopo Palmieri Trompe l'Oeil 1766 |
Hubert Robert St. Peter's, Rome c. 1758 |
Antoine Watteau Studies of Women c. 1717-18 |
Filippo Juvarra Architectural Study c. 1710 |
William Blake Satan Exulting over Eve 1795 |