As the holidays draw near and decorations go up we begin to see the traditional hues of red and green, and their counterparts, silver and gold, appear around every corner. In accordance with this timing, it is appropriate to examine wallpapers that really exemplify this vein. Ceiling papers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth...

The stylistic revolution engineered by the architectural partnership of Robert (1728-1792) and James Adam (1732-1794) transformed British and Irish domestic interiors from the late 1750s to the close of the eighteenth century. Opposed to the architectonic Palladian classicism fashionable in early Georgian Britain, the Adam classical style was characterized by an eclectic and inventive use...

Have we fallen down? What is going on here? The perspective in this late 17th-century Italian drawing is so strange because it is meant to be viewed from below. This drawing was done in preparation for a painted ceiling, a frequent feature of the sumptuous palaces and grand churches built in Italy in the 16th-19th...

This drawing is a design for a spandrel, the roughly triangular space between the left or right exterior curve of an arch, by the French academician and painter François Boucher.  The drawing is executed with black chalk, pen, brown ink and wash and represents the personification of truth and fame honoring Louis XV. In the...