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| Wiener Porzellanmanufaktur Design for Tea Bowl and Saucer ca. 1815 watercolor and gouache on paper Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna |
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| Matteo Florimi Lace Patterns 1593 woodcut (book illustration) Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna |
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| Melchior Michael Steidl Design for Two-Part Mirror-Frame ca. 1700 drawing, with added watercolor Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna |
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| Jacopo Ligozzi Study for Epitaph Frame ca. 1578 drawing Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Daniel Marot the Elder Garden Plan for Huis ten Bosch 1732 drawing, with added watercolor Paleis Huis ten Bosch, The Hague |
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| Pietro Novelli (il Monrealese) Design for Archway before 1647 drawing Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
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| Antonio Joli Masque Design for Barque, with Crowning of Saxony 1740 watercolor on paper Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden |
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| Johann Paul Schor Design Elements for State Coach before 1674 drawing Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna |
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| workshop of Francesco Salviati Design for Candlestick with Animal Elements ca. 1550 drawing Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna |
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| Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi Design for Candelabrum ca. 1650 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
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| Gianlorenzo Bernini Sketches for Tabernacle for St Peter's Basilica, Rome before 1680 drawing Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Peter Flötner Design for Cradle before 1546 woodcut Graphische Sammlung, ETH Zürich |
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| Erasmus Horninck Pattern Sheet for Hat-Pins and Badges ca. 1575 etching Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig |
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| Anton Hanak Study for Monument to Beethoven ca. 1928-33 drawing Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Aristide Maillol Study for Monument to Cézanne 1914 lithograph Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts |
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| 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).
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