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Article

Anhtoni [Anthonij], Giovanni  

Torbjörn Fulton

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

[Johan]

(fl Narol, 1663; d Stockholm, 1688).

Italian stuccoist active in Sweden. He collaborated with Hans Zauch on ceilings in Skokloster Castle, Uppland (1663–4), and he created the ceiling in the great hall in Djursholm Castle (1668), near Stockholm. At Skokloster he may have executed two ceilings (1663–4) alone, in the antechambers of the apartment of Carl Gustaf Wrangel (1613–76) and his wife in the east wing. These ceilings are dominated by figurative motifs—flying putti in one ceiling, representatives of the Four Seasons in the other. The latter especially is marked by its somewhat naive but fine modelling and has lyrical scenes, such as the heavily clad young man warming his hands by a fire, typifying winter.

E. Andrén: Skokloster (Stockholm, 1948) S. Karling: ‘Les Stucateurs italiens en Suède’, Arte e artisti dei laghi lombardi, ed. E. Aslan (Como, 1964), pp. 291–302 G. Beard: Stucco and Decorative Plasterwork in Europe...

Article

Anse de panier  

Gordon Campbell

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 October 2008

Article

Antimacassar  

Gordon Campbell

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 October 2008

Covering placed on the backs or arms of upholstered sofas and chairs to protect them from grease in the hair, or other soiling, or merely as an ornament. The term, which became popular in the last half of the 19th century, derives from Macassar, the proprietary name of a kind of hair-oil. In American English of the same period, an antimacassar is called a ‘tidy’....

Article

Apron piece  

Gordon Campbell

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 October 2008

Article

Arabesque style  

Hans Ottomeyer

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

Term used, mainly in France, to describe painted ornament in the late 18th century incorporating grotesques, Strapwork and the foliate scrollwork enriched with grotesque figures. Contemporaries referred to the style, which was in evidence from 1775 and developed until the collapse of the ancien régime, as ‘goût étrusque’ (see Etruscan style) or ‘genre arabesque’, or sometimes used the double appellation ‘goût arabesque et étrusque’. It derives in part from surviving examples of the grotesque in Rome (see Grotesque) and is characterized by naturalistically shaped ornamental motifs, which pivot on a central axis to form a mirror image (see Arabesque). The principle of composition of the style lies in the curvilinear Acanthus scroll, symmetrically aligned on an axis and rolling up to form a spiral. Spirals are also found in the scroll friezes, in scroll motifs turning in on themselves to become spirals and in flutings. This naturalistic imagery is diametrically opposed to the heavy forms, sober abstract friezes and the severe and solemn pictorial inventions of early Classicism and the ...

Article

Arad, Ron  

Gordon Campbell

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 October 2008

(b Tel Aviv, 1951).

Israeli designer, active in Britain. In 1981 Arad founded, with Caroline Thorman, One Off Ltd, a design studio, workshops and showroom in Covent Garden, London. In 1989, again with Caroline Thorman, he founded Ron Arad Associates, an architecture and design practice in Chalk Farm. In 1994 he established the Ron Arad Studio in Como (Italy). His most famous design is the Rover Chair, which recycled used Rover car seats. He has long had an interest in the use of steel, and the Bookwork bookshelves (...

Article

Arbalète  

Gordon Campbell

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 October 2008

Article

Armada chest  

Gordon Campbell

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 October 2008

Heavy iron or iron-bound coffer made in Germany and Flanders from the 16th century to the 18th, when they were supplanted by the safe. The chests had a dummy keyhole in the front and were fastened by a lock on the underside of the lid. The word ‘Armada’ may allude to the Spanish Armada, but there is no historical connection with the chests of the Armada....

Article

Armadio  

Gordon Campbell

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 October 2008

Italian cupboard, used in the 15th century to denote a Cassone with doors instead of a lid, and thereafter a large two-storeyed cupboard. An example from the 1730s in the oratory of S Giuseppe in Urbino is decorated with a thickly impastoed imaginary landscape by Alessio de Marchis (1684–1752...

Article

Armoire  

Gordon Campbell

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 October 2008

[Fr.: ‘cupboard’]

Cupboard or ambry. In medieval usage the term denotes any large cupboard for storage, and in the 16th and 17th centuries it often denotes a large cupboard decorated with architectural motifs such as pilasters. In the 1740s the same term was used to denote a type of secrétaire (now known as a ...

Article

Arroyo (Castillo), Miguel  

Jorge F. Rivas Pérez

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
09 July 2020

(Gerónimo)

(b Caracas, Aug 29, 1920; d Caracas, Nov 3, 2004).

Venezuelan designer, potter, educator, curator, and museum administrator. Arroyo was one of the first professional designers in Venezuela. He graduated in drawing and painting from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Artes Aplicadas de Caracas in 1938. From 1938 to 1940 Arroyo lived in New York City, where he worked at the Venezuelan pavilion at the New York World’s Fair (1939–1940) and assisted Luis Alfredo López Méndez with painting La Vida Venezolana on the ceiling of the canopy of the pavilion. Back in Venezuela, from 1940 to 1946, Arroyo taught art at the Liceo de Aplicación in Caracas. During this period, he taught and also worked as an interior designer (Librería Magisterio (1944) and Gran Exposición Nacional de Industria y Comercio de Maracaibo (1945)). From 1946 to 1948 he studied design and pottery at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, PA.

In 1949...

Article

Art Deco  

Suzanne Tise

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

Descriptive term applied to a style of decorative arts that was widely disseminated in Europe and the USA during the 1920s and 1930s. Derived from the style made popular by the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925, the term has been used only since the late 1960s, when there was a revival of interest in the decorative arts of the early 20th century. Since then the term ‘Art Deco’ has been applied to a wide variety of works produced during the inter-war years, and even to those of the German Bauhaus. But Art Deco was essentially of French origin, and the term should, therefore, be applied only to French works and those from countries directly influenced by France.

The development of the Art Deco style, or the Style moderne as it was called at the time, closely paralleled the initiation of the 1925...

Article

Art Deco in the USA  

Richard Guy Wilson

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 September 2015

Richard Guy Wilson

Stylistic term applied to architecture and decorative arts of the 1920s and 1930s whose origin partially lies with the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris (see Art Deco). The term was invented in 1966 and initially applied just to French 1920s design but shortly thereafter grew to encompass a wide variety of modernist architecture and design that displayed decorative traits that stood in contrast to the more austere Modern style sometimes known as Functionalism, Bauhaus style, or International Style. Synonyms for Art Deco have included Style moderne, Art Moderne, Modernistic, Cubistic, Manhattan style, skyscraper style, setback style, zigzag style, streamlined, stripped Classicism, Greco Deco, and others.

The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held in Paris in 1925 was a lavish spectacle of pavilions and exhibits that showcased the latest modern tendencies in French and foreign design. Originally scheduled for ...

Article

Art Nouveau  

Michèle Lavallée

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

[Fr.: ‘new art’]

Decorative style of the late 19th century and the early 20th that flourished principally in Europe and the USA. Although it influenced painting and sculpture, its chief manifestations were in architecture and the decorative and graphic arts, the aspects on which this survey concentrates. It is characterized by sinuous, asymmetrical lines based on organic forms; in a broader sense it encompasses the geometrical and more abstract patterns and rhythms that were evolved as part of the general reaction to 19th-century historicism. There are wide variations in the style according to where it appeared and the materials that were employed.

Art Nouveau has been held to have had its beginnings in 1894 or 1895. A more appropriate date would be 1884, the year the progressive group Les XX was founded in Belgium, and the term was used in the periodical that supported it, Art Moderne: ‘we are believers in Art Nouveau’. The origin of the name is usually attributed to ...

Article

Artesonado  

Basilio Pavón Maldonado

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

Spanish term for a type of intricately joined wooden ceiling in which supplementary laths are interlaced into the rafters supporting the roof to form decorative geometric patterns (see fig.). Artesonado ceilings were popular in the Islamic architecture of North Africa and Spain from the 13th to the 15th century and were also used widely in Jewish and Christian architecture. They continued to be popular into the 16th century when they were effectively integrated with Renaissance motifs.

Artesonado ceilings developed from horizontal coffered ceilings, which were used in Spanish Islamic architecture as early as the 10th century ad (see Islamic art, §II, 5(iv)). The Umayyad caliph al-Hakam II (reg 961–76) ordered a carved and painted coffered ceiling for the Great Mosque of Córdoba (see Córdoba, §3, (i), (a)). It was suspended from the ceiling joists and tie-beams of the pitched roofs covering the aisles. The halls of ...

Article

Arts and Crafts Movement  

Alan Crawford

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

Informal movement in architecture and the decorative arts that championed the unity of the arts, the experience of the individual craftsman, and the qualities of materials and construction in the work itself.

The Arts and Crafts Movement developed in the second half of the 19th century and lasted well into the 20th, drawing its support from progressive artists, architects and designers, philanthropists, amateurs, and middle-class women seeking work in the home. They set up small workshops apart from the world of industry, revived old techniques, and revered the humble household objects of pre-industrial times. The movement was strongest in the industrializing countries of northern Europe and in the USA, and it can best be understood as an unfocused reaction against industrialization. Although quixotic in its anti-industrialism, it was not unique; indeed it was only one among several late 19th-century reform movements, such as the Garden City movement, vegetarianism, and folksong revivals, that set the Romantic values of nature and folk culture against the artificiality of modern life....

Article

Arts and Crafts, John Th. Uiterwijk & Co.  

Monique D. J. M. Teunissen

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

Dutch company of art dealers and interior design and furniture workshop. The Arts and Crafts interior design and furniture workshop was set up in The Hague in 1893. The Art Nouveau character of the furniture produced by the workshop set it very much apart from its competitors. Designs were produced by the artist Johan Thorn Prikker and the architect Chris Wegerif (1859–1920). During the early years of the workshop the Belgian artist Henry van de Velde exercised a strong influence on its designs. After 1900 the designs became more austere, any Art Nouveau character being confined to woodwork and batik upholstery fabrics. In order to ensure the unity of each interior, an effort was made to have all the objects designed by the same artist. The workshop fostered a close relationship with The Hague school of painting.

F. Netscher: ‘Arts and Crafts’, De Hollandsche Revue (1902), p. 211...

Article

Artschwager, Richard  

Marco Livingstone

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
2003

(b Washington, DC, Dec 26, 1924; d in Albany, NY, Feb 9, 2013).

American sculptor and painter . He studied art in 1949–50 under Amédée Ozenfant in New York. During the 1950s he designed and made furniture in New York, but after a fire that destroyed most of the contents of his shop in 1958 he turned again to art, initially painting abstract pictures derived from memories of the New Mexican landscape.

Artschwager continued to produce furniture and, after a commission to make altars for ships in 1960, had the idea of producing sculptures that mimicked actual objects while simultaneously betraying their identity as artistic illusions. At first these included objets trouvés made of wood, overpainted with acrylic in an exaggerated wood-grain pattern (e.g. Table and Chair, 1962–3; New York, Paula Cooper priv. col., see 1988–9 exh. cat., p. 49), but he soon developed more abstract or geometrical versions of such objects formed from a veneer of formica on wood (e.g. Table and Chair...

Article

Ash, Gilbert  

Gordon Campbell

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 October 2008

(b 1717; d 1785).

American furniture-maker whose New York workshop specialized in chairs in the Chippendale style. His reputation is largely based on attributed pieces, such as the sets of chairs made for Sir William Johnson (now divided, examples in Winterthur, DE, Dupont Winterthur Mus. and New Haven, CT, Yale U. A.G.) and for the Van Rensselaer family (New York, Met.)....

Article

Astrology in medieval art  

Sophie Page

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
16 September 2010

Astrology is the art of predicting events on earth as well as human character and disposition from the movements of the planets and fixed stars. Medieval astrology encompassed both general concepts of celestial influence, and the technical art of making predictions with horoscopes, symbolic maps of the heavens at particular moments and places constructed from astronomical information. The scientific foundations of the art were developed in ancient Greece, largely lost in early medieval Europe and recovered by the Latin West from Arabic sources in the 12th and 13th centuries. Late medieval astrological images were successfully Christianized and were adapted to particular contexts, acquired local meanings and changed over time.

Astrology developed into a scientific branch of learning in ancient Greece, but because of the opposition of the Church Fathers it was transmitted to early medieval Europe in only fragmentary form in technically unsophisticated textbooks and popular divinatory genres. Literary and scientific texts provided more general ideas about the nature and attributes of the planets which were influential on later iconography. The first significant astrological images appear in 11th-century illustrated astronomical texts (e.g. London, BL, Cotton MS. Tiberius BV), which were acquired and produced by monasteries to aid with time-keeping and the construction of the Christian calendar....