Rococo Period Research Articles

The Evolution of Italian Painting: A Quantitative Investigation of Trends in Style and Content from the Late Gothic to the Rococo Period

The reported study tests the theory that the phenomenon of habituation pressures successive artists within any style to increase the impact value or arousal potential of their works. In most media, this is best accomplished by increases in the collative aspects of artworks (e.g. novelty, complexity, incongruity). These increases are achieved by movement toward more primary process cognition by successive artists during the inspirational stage of creation. When this becomes difficult, impossible or counterproductive, stylistic change occurs and the process begins anew. The theory was tested on a series of Italian paintings produced between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. Naive subjects rated color slides of the paintings on scales designed to tap the variables of theoretical interest. Results were in conformity with theoretical predictions.

Heat and Style: Eighteenth-Century House Warming by Stoves

SELDOM considered in the restoration of eighteenthcentury period furnishings is the role of heating.1 Most restorers do not realize that fireplaces alone were frequently inadequate in the northern climates and that stoves were in very common use, even in elegant parlors. American stoves were of decorated cast-iron plates; our knowledge of them is meager owing to their disappearance with the development of central heating in the nineteenth century. Actually, the heating of buildings was little understood until the eighteenth century. Draft chimneys did not even appear in Europe until the late middle ages. But from mediaeval times, at least in Germany and Scandinavia, simple heating stoves of tile or later iron plates were well known. By the Rococo period the big tile Ofen in German and Austrian interiors was a familiar piece of decorative furniture, its shape even enhancing the ornate architecture.

Grundtvigs salmer og deres melodier

Grundtvigs salmer og deres melodier

De nya porträttfynden i Västerås

Summary Some portraits recently found in Västerås. In the autumn of 1932 there was discovered on the loft of the Vâsterås Secondary School a considerable collection of pictures, about twenty in all. These pictures had for years past been in the possession of the Vâsterås College and School and had most probably been put away up on the loft as being worthless rubbish at the time when the new school building was completed in the 1850's. This collection, consisting almost entirely of the portraits of royalties, bishops and public bene‐factors, though varying considerably in artistic quality nevertheless includes some paintings of value both as a contribution to the history of art and from the biographical point of view. They comprise, inter alia, paintings of well‐known per‐sonalities of whom no portraits whatsoever had been known to exist before. Some of the more valuable are those of: 1) Bishop Johannes Rud‐beckius’ wife, Magdalena Hising, the painting dated 1643 and executed by a German‐Dutch artist; 2) the orientalist Joh. Gabriel Sparwenfeldt, Master of Ceremonies, painted in Rome in 1692 or 1693;3) Deputy Lord‐lieutenant Samuel Sernskjöld, donator of scholarships, painted by Olof Arenius; and 4) a citizen of Västeras famous as a topo‐grapher and genealogical writer, Abraham Abra‐hamson Hülphers in his younger days, a work that in its composition is reminiscent of Johan Henrik Scheffel, but which for certain. reasons may be presumed in all probability to have been executed by the above‐mentioned Olof Arenius. Both of these two latter portraits were manifestly created under the influence of the portraits painted by the then popular pastel artist Gustav Lundberg, and which reflected the spirit of the Rococo period.