The Illustrated Dioskourides Codices and the Transmission of Images during Antiquity

A parchment codex of the early sixth century a.d., now in Vienna, contains a remarkable series of nearly 400 full-page illustrations of individual botanical species. These illustrations accompany an alphabetical recension of a pharmacological treatise on the medicinal properties of plants written by Dioskourides of Anazarbos, a Greek author of the first century a.d. Both the date of the codex and the style of its botanical illustrations have encouraged suggestions that the latter were modelled somehow on classical archetypes. This article presents new observations in support of the classical archetypes theory, but questions the traditional view that these archetypes were transmitted by ‘illustrated texts’ or ‘pattern books’ executed in papyrus or parchment. What follows is a new hypothesis concerning the nature of the artistic intermediaries used by painters, mosaicists and sculptors during antiquity.

All the Folk Art News Fit to Print

Neo-nationalism was concerned with a new aesthetic, not just in the fine arts but also in the crafts, particularly needlework. One way that this aesthetic was disseminated for needle art was through publications—magazines, pattern books, how-to-manuals, guides for schools, and the like. Publications on needlework were produced throughout the nineteenth century, and their output increased toward the end of the 1800s, with many portraying peasant imagery and patterns associated with this new style of Neo-nationalism. This article explores how needlework publications propagated Neo-nationalist art to a broad audience and the key role they played in shaping the cultural milieu of the Russian late Imperial period.

Designing houses: the façade and the architecture of street and square

This chapter builds on a rich and complex history of the eighteenth-century urban house in the cities of Britain, Ireland and North America. Shifting emphasis away from construction, economic competence and labour organization – the predominant focus of academic studies devoted to this class of building producer – it investigates the artisan’s engagement with the processes and aesthetics of architectural design. With prominence given to the design of the house façade, topics include the emerging standardization in building construction; building regulations and the varying degrees of control exercised by landowners and city councils; and the responsibility of design to the urban milieu, specifically the requisite (ideal) interface between private concern (house) and public obligation (street). With reference to artisanal education through apprenticeship and builders’ academies, and the role of pattern books and drawing portfolios, this chapter argues that building tradesmen were concerned as much with making design (architecture) as with making profits (building).

Etchings of Ancient Ornamental Architecture (1800) e Designs for Cottages (1805)

Charles Heathcote Tatham and Joseph Gandy played important roles in early Nineteenth century British artistic world: Tatham for his contribution to the development of applied arts, Gandy for being John Soane’s projects graphic executor, as well as a truly eclectic artist, hard to classify in traditional canons. Apparently disconnected and distant from each other, the two architects shared the experience of the trip to Rome, which took place simultaneously in the years 1794-1796, but if they boarded the same ship, they also moved in two diametrically opposite directions once arrived in Rome. The letters sent home by the two young artists confirm this, telling two completely dissimilar experiences of the same Rome and the Ancient. After returning home, between 1800 and 1806, both architects published some illustrated publications strongly linked to the recent trip. In both cases they are architectural model albums: two series of ’didactic’ engravings by Tatham, and two pattern books for rural buildings by Gandy. They are two extremely different editorial cases, but both based on the ’re-use’ of the Italian experiences of the authors and their personal interpretation of their time’s cult of antiquity.

Steel and Ink

“Steel and Ink: The Printed City,” traces how, for over half a millennium, the printed page has informed the way we’ve imagined, designed, constructed, inhabited, administered, and navigated our cities. My exploration ranges from architectural treatises, maps, and pattern books to newspapers, contemporary niche periodicals, and new urban spaces for public reading.