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| Giulio Romano Design for Salt-cellar ca. 1524-46 drawing Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum drawing formerly owned by Jonathan Richardson, Senior |
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| Perino del Vaga Design for Inkstand with Figures of Philosophers ca. 1540 drawing Royal Collection, Windsor |
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| Inigo Jones Design for Temporary Arch with Allegorical Figures of Music and War ca. 1622 drawing Yale Center for British Art |
"The pathological element in the notion of "culture" comes vividly to light in the effect produced on Raphael, the hero of The Wild Ass's Skin, by the enormous stock of merchandise in the four-story antique shop into which he ventures. "To begin with, the stranger compared . . . three showrooms – crammed with the relics of civilizations and religions, deities, royalties, masterpieces of art, the products of debauchery, reason and unreason – to a mirror of many facets, each one representing a whole world. . . . The young man's senses ended by being numbed at the sight of so many national and individual existences, their authenticity guaranteed by the human pledges which had survived them. . . . For him this ocean of furnishings, inventions, fashions, works of art, and relics made up an endless poem. . . . He clutched at every joy, gasped at every grief, made all the formulas of existence his own, and . . . generously dispersed his life and feelings over the images of that empty, plastic nature. . . . He felt smothered under the debris of fifty vanished centuries, nauseated with this surfeit of human thought, crushed under the weight of luxury and art. . . ."
– text by Honoré de Balzac, as quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin for Harvard University Press, 1999
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| Domenichino Design for Vault Fresco at Sant'Andrea della Valle, Rome ca. 1624 drawing British Museum |
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| Alessandro Algardi Design for the Catafalque of Ludovico Fachinetti (side elevation) 1644 drawing British Museum |
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| Johann Paul Schor Design for Coach Ornamentation 1650s drawing British Museum |
"Critical remarks on technical progress show up quite early. The author of the treatise On Art (Hippocrates?): "I believe that the inclination . . . of intelligence is to discover any one of those things that are still unknown, if indeed it is better to have discovered them than not to have done so at all." Leonardo da Vinci: "How and why I do not write of my method of going underwater for as long as I can remain there without eating: if I neither publish nor divulge this information, it is because of the wickedness of men who would avail themselves of it to commit murder at the bottom of the sea – by staving in ships and sinking them with their crews." Bacon: "In The New Atlantis he entrusts to a specially chosen commission the responsibility for deciding which new inventions will be brought before the public and which kept secret." – "The bombers remind us of what Leonardo da Vinci expected of man in flight: that he was to ascend to the skies 'in order to seek snow on the mountaintops and bring it back to the city to spread on the sweltering streets in summer." – Pierre-Maxime Schuhl, Machinisme et philosophie (Paris, 1938)."
– passage of quotations by Walter Benjamin from The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin for Harvard University Press, 1999
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| Antonio Gentile Design for the base of a Silver Crucifix for the High Altar at St Peter's, Rome 1670-72 drawing Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Ciro Ferri Designs for Fresco in Spandrel before 1689 drawing Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Louis Laguerre Design for Staircase Wall, Devonshire House Abduction of Proserpine ca. 1704 oil on canvas Yale Center for British Art |
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| Étienne-Maurice Falconet Project for a Fountain ca. 1740-50 drawing Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Jean Mondon Rocaille design with choinoiserie figure 1736 engraving Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous Italian artist Theatrical Set-design with Roman Monuments ca. 1740 drawing Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Rienk Keyert Design for Wall Decoration Triumph of Neptune 1751 watercolor, gouache Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| François Boucher Design for Spandrel Decoration Fame and Truth applauding Louis XV 1753 drawing Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
"To grasp the significance of nouveauté, it is necessary to go back to novelty in everyday life. Why does everyone share the newest thing with someone else? Presumably, in order to triumph over the dead. This only where there is nothing really new."
– Walter Benjamin, from The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin for Harvard University Press, 1999