Furniture refers to objects intended to support various human activities such as seating, eating (tables), storing items, working, and sleeping. Furniture is also used to hold objects at a convenient height for work, or to store things. Furniture can be a product of design and can be considered a form of decorative art. In addition to furniture's functional role, it can serve a symbolic or religious purpose. It can be made from a vast multitude of materials, including metal, plastic, and wood. Furniture can be made using a variety of woodworking joints which often reflects the local culture.
An oil lamp is a lamp used to produce light continuously for a period of time using an oil-based fuel source. The use of oil lamps began thousands of years ago and continues to this day, although their use is less common in modern times. They work in the same way as a candle but with fuel that is liquid at room temperature, so that a container for the oil is required. A textile wick drops down into the oil, and is lit at the end, burning the oil as it is drawn up the wick.
Émile Gallé was a French artist and designer who worked in glass, and is considered to be one of the major innovators in the French Art Nouveau movement. He was noted for his designs of Art Nouveau glass art and Art Nouveau furniture, and was a founder of the École de Nancy or Nancy School, a movement of design in the city of Nancy, France.
The Republic of Venice or Venetian Republic, traditionally known as La Serenissima, was a sovereign state and maritime republic in parts of the present-day Italian Republic, Istria and Dalmatia that existed for 1,100 years from 697 until 1797. Centered on the lagoon communities of the prosperous city of Venice, it incorporated numerous overseas possessions in modern Croatia, Slovenia, Montenegro, Greece, Albania and Cyprus. The republic grew into a trading power during the Middle Ages and strengthened this position during the Renaissance. Most citizens spoke the Venetian language, although publishing in Italian became the norm during the Renaissance.
Ca' Rezzonico is a palazzo and art museum on the Grand Canal in the Dorsoduro sestiere of Venice, Italy. It is a particularly notable example of the 18th century Venetian baroque and rococo architecture and interior decoration, and displays paintings by the leading Venetian painters of the period, including Francesco Guardi and Giambattista Tiepolo. It is a public museum dedicated to 18th-century Venice and one of the 11 venues managed by the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia.
The Empire style is an early-nineteenth-century design movement in architecture, furniture, other decorative arts, and the visual arts, representing the second phase of Neoclassicism. It flourished between 1800 and 1815 during the Consulate and the First French Empire periods, although its life span lasted until the late-1820s. From France it spread into much of Europe and the United States.
The Bavarian National Museum in Munich is one of the most important museums of decorative arts in Europe and one of the largest art museums in Germany. Since the beginning the collection has been divided into two main groups: the art historical collection and the folklore collection.
Luristan bronzes are small cast objects decorated with bronze sculpture from the Early Iron Age which have been found in large numbers in Lorestān Province and Kermanshah in western Iran. They include a great number of ornaments, tools, weapons, horse-fittings and a smaller number of vessels including situlae, and those found in recorded excavations are generally found in burials. The ethnicity of the people who created them remains unclear, though they may well have been Iranian, possibly related to the modern Lur people who have given their name to the area. They probably date to between about 1000 and 650 BC.
Croatian art describes the visual arts in Croatia, and art by Croatian artists from prehistoric times to the present. In Early Middle Ages, Croatia was an important centre for art and architecture in south eastern Europe. There were many Croatian artists during the Medieval period, and the arts flourished during the Renaissance. Later styles in Croatia included Baroque and Rococo.
Egyptian revival decorative arts is a style in Western art, mainly of the early nineteenth century, in which Egyptian motifs were applied to a wide variety of decorative arts objects.
Islamic influences on Western art refers to the stylistic and formal influence of Islamic art, defined as the artistic production of the territories ruled by Muslims from the 7th century onward, on European Christian art. Western European Christians interacted with Muslims in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East and formed a relationship based on shared ideas and artistic methods. Islamic art includes a wide variety of media including calligraphy, illustrated manuscripts, textiles, ceramics, metalwork, and glass, and because the Islamic world encompassed people of diverse religious backgrounds, artists and craftsmen were not always Muslim, and came from a wide variety of different backgrounds. Glass production, for example, remained a Jewish speciality throughout the period. Christian art in Islamic lands, such as that produced in Coptic Egypt or by Armenian communities in Iran, continued to develop under Islamic rulers.
Italian Rococo interior design refers to interior decoration in Italy during the Rococo period, which went from the early 18th century to around the 1760s.
The Hurrian foundation pegs, also known as the Urkish lions, are twin copper foundation pegs each in the shape of a lion that probably came from the ancient city of Urkesh in Syria. The pegs were placed at the foundation of the temple of Nergal in the city of Urkesh as mentioned in the cuneiform inscriptions on them. The inscription on the two pegs and the associated stone tablet is the oldest known text in the Hurrian language. One of the lions is now housed, along with its limestone tablet, in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. The second lion is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Venus and Cupid is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Lorenzo Lotto in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It has been dated to several periods, including the late 1530s and the early 1540s, but was probably created in the 1520s.
Enamelled glass or painted glass is glass which has been decorated with vitreous enamel and then fired to fuse the glasses. It can produce brilliant and long-lasting colours, and be translucent or opaque. Unlike most methods of decorating glass, it allows painting using several colours, and along with glass engraving, has historically been the main technique used to create the full range of image types on glass.
The Venetian Renaissance had a distinct character compared to the general Italian Renaissance elsewhere. The Republic of Venice was topographically distinct from the rest of the city-states of Renaissance Italy as a result of their geographic location, which isolated the city politically, economically and culturally, allowing the city the leisure to pursue the pleasures of art. The influence of Venetian art did not cease at the end of the Renaissance period. Its practices persisted through the works of art critics and artists proliferating its prominence around Europe to the 19th century.
The whiplash or whiplash line is a motif of decorative art and design that was particularly popular in Art Nouveau. It is an asymmetrical, sinuous line, often in an ornamental S curve, usually inspired by natural forms such as plants and flowers, which suggests dynamism and movement. It took its name from a woven fabric panel called "Coup de Fouet" ("Whiplash") by the German artist Hermann Obrist (1895) which depicted the stems and roots of the cyclamen flower. The panel was later reproduced by the textile workshop of the Darmstadt Artists Colony.
Italo-Byzantine is a style term in art history, mostly used for medieval paintings produced in Italy under heavy influence from Byzantine art. It initially covers religious paintings copying or imitating the standard Byzantine icon types, but painted by artists without a training in Byzantine techniques. These are versions of Byzantine icons, most of the Madonna and Child, but also of other subjects; essentially they introduced the relatively small portable painting with a frame to Western Europe. Very often they are on a gold ground. It was the dominant style in Italian painting until the end of the 13th century, when Cimabue and Giotto began to take Italian, or at least Florentine, painting into new territory. But the style continued until the 15th century and beyond in some areas and contexts.
The Treasury of St Mark's Basilica contains the church treasure or collection of sacred objects and reliquaries kept in St Mark's Basilica in Venice, Italy. The treasure constitutes the single best collection of Byzantine metalwork and enamels that survives, many of the items having been looted during the Fourth Crusade of 1204. The treasury also contains some significant artworks made for the basilica itself, but no longer used there.
Besides architecture, the Gothic Revival also manifested in furniture, metalworks, ceramics and other decorative arts during the 19th century. In France, it was the first reaction against the hegemony of Neoclassicism. At the end of the Restoration (1814–1830) and during the Louis-Philippe period (1830-1848), Gothic Revival motifs start to appear in France, together with revivals of the Renaissance and of Rococo. During these two periods, the vogue for medieval things led craftsmen to adopt Gothic decorative motifs in their work, such as bell turrets, lancet arches, trefoils, Gothic tracery and rose windows. This style was also as "Cathedral style" or "Troubadour style".
