Intentions

Wiener Porzellanmanufaktur
Design for Tea Bowl and Saucer
ca. 1815
watercolor and gouache on paper
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Matteo Florimi
Lace Patterns
1593
woodcut (book illustration)
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Melchior Michael Steidl
Design for Two-Part Mirror-Frame
ca. 1700
drawing, with added watercolor
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Jacopo Ligozzi
Study for Epitaph Frame
ca. 1578
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Daniel Marot the Elder
Garden Plan for Huis ten Bosch
1732
drawing, with added watercolor
Paleis Huis ten Bosch, The Hague

Pietro Novelli (il Monrealese)
Design for Archway
before 1647
drawing
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Antonio Joli
Masque Design for Barque, with Crowning of Saxony
1740
watercolor on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Johann Paul Schor
Design Elements for State Coach
before 1674
drawing
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

workshop of Francesco Salviati
Design for Candlestick with Animal Elements
ca. 1550
drawing
Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna

Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi
Design for Candelabrum
ca. 1650
drawing
Morgan Library, New York

Gianlorenzo Bernini
Sketches for Tabernacle for St Peter's Basilica, Rome
before 1680
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Peter Flötner
Design for Cradle
before 1546
woodcut
Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich

Erasmus Horninck
Pattern Sheet for Hat-Pins and Badges
ca. 1575
etching
Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig

Anton Hanak
Study for Monument to Beethoven
ca. 1928-33
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Aristide Maillol
Study for Monument to Cézanne
1914
lithograph
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Christo
56 Barrels
1977
acrylic paint over photograph mounted on paper
(design sketch for installation)
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

In his charming autobiography, the German illustrator Ludwig Richter relates how he and his friends, all young art students in Rome in the 1820s, visited the famous beauty spot of Tivoli and sat down to draw.  They looked with surprise, but hardly with approval, at a group of French artists who approached the place with enormous baggage, carrying large quantities of paint which they applied to the canvas with big, coarse brushes.  The Germans, perhaps roused by this self-confident artiness, were determined on the opposite approach.  They selected the hardest, best-pointed pencils, which could render the motif firmly and minutely to its finest detail, and each bent down over his small piece of paper, trying to transcribe what he saw with the utmost fidelity.  "We fell in love with every blade of grass, every tiny twig, and refused to let anything escape us.  Every one tried to render the motif as objectively as possible."  

Nevertheless, when they then compared the fruits of their efforts in the evening, their transcripts differed to a surprising extent.  The mood, the color, even the outline of the motif had undergone a subtle transformation in each of them.  Richter goes on to describe how these different versions reflected the different dispositions of the four friends, for instance, how the melancholy painter had straightened the exuberant contours and emphasized the blue tinges.  We might say he gives an illustration of the famous definition of Emile Zola, who called a work of art "a corner of nature seen through a temperament."

It is precisely because we are interested in this definition that we must probe it a little further.  The "temperament" or "personality" of the artist, his selective preferences, may be one of the reasons for the transformation which the motif undergoes under the artist's hands, but there must be others – everything, in fact, which we bundle together into the word "style," the style of the period and the style of the artist.  When this transformation is very noticeable we say the motif has been greatly "stylized," and the corollary to this observation is that those who happen to be interested in the motif, for one reason or another, must learn to discount the style.  This is part of that natural adjustment, the change in what I called "mental set," which we all perform quite automatically when looking at old illustrations. 

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960).