Wednesday, July 10, 2024

Ornamental Objects

Anonymous German Artist 
Model for an Altar devoted to St Castulus
ca. 1740
carved and painted wood
Harvard Art Museums

Anonymous German Artist
Reliquary Statuette of St Agnes
ca. 1520
silver (partly gilded)
Münster Cathedral

Edward Burne-Jones (designer) for Morris & Co.
Janus and Dido
ca. 1860-70
glazed earthenware tiles
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Gino Severini
Still Life with Doves and a Mask
1929
mosaic
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Wiener Kunstkeramische Werkstätte
Woman with Heart
ca. 1910
glazed earthenware
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Meissen Manufactory (Dresden)
Bacchus
ca. 1858-64
porcelain
Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio

Doccia Manufactory (Florence)
Shepherd and Shepherdess
ca. 1760
porcelain
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Chelsea Porcelain Manufactory (London)
Tyrolean Dancers
ca. 1755-58
porcelain
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Anonymous Italian Artist
Dragon
18th century
bronze
(originally a support-piece for a casket or urn)
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Anonymous German Artist
Goblet - Façon de Venise
17th century
blown glass
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Hubert de Givenchy
Evening Gown (detail)
1963
cotton embroidered with coral and glass beads
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Alexander Calder
Four Arches
ca. 1975
lithograph
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Bruno Romanelli
Boxed VIII
2000
glass
Nottingham City Museums & Galleries

Roman Empire
Bottle
1st-3rd century AD
glass
(excavated in Paris)
Musée Carnavalet, Paris

Pablo Picasso
Nymphs and Satyrs
1964
glass
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York

Valentina Gonzalez Wohler
Prickly Pair Chair - Gentleman Style
2009
painted wood and upholstery
Denver Art Museum

Green Quinces

Ripening there
among the entanglement of leaves
that share their colour –
green quinces:
fragrantly free
from the contaminations
of daily envy,
the sight and suddenness
of green unknot
all that which thought
has ravelled where it cannot span
between the private and the public man –
between the motive
and the word:
the repeated and absurd 
impulse to justify
oneself, knows
now its own 
true colours:
it was the hardest-to-be-
put-down
vanity –desire
for the regard
of others. And how wrong
they were who taught us
green was the colour
should belong
to envy: they envied green.

– Charles Tomlinson (1972)