Enfilade

From the Royal Academy of Arts in London:

Royal Academy of Arts, Object of the Month — January 2011
Angelica Kauffman, Design, oil on canvas, 1778-80

Angelica Kauffman RA, "Design," oil on canvas, 1778-80 ©Royal Academy of Arts, London

. . . This painting is part of a set of the four ‘Elements of Art’ represented by female allegories of Invention, Composition, Design and Colour which were commissioned by the Royal Academy in 1778 to decorate the ceiling of the Academy’s new Council Chamber in Somerset House. The present painting shows the figure of Design as an imposing allegorical female dressed in white and pale red with a purple mantle, seated beside two Roman columns. The figure is copying a fragment of an Antique male nude statue, commonly called the Belvedere torso. The original statue was first documented in Rome in the 1430s and is now in the Vatican Museum, Rome. However a cast of this torso was in the Royal Academy’s collection at the time of Kauffman’s commission and was for the use of the students of the Royal Academy Schools.

This composition alludes to one of the cornerstones of artistic academic training at that period which focused on proportion, scale and form based on antique prototypes. This training was also echoed in Kauffman’s own study, which was based on copying Antique statues and the Renaissance great masters. . . .

The full essay is available here»

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Usually on display in the Front Hall of the Royal Academy, the painting can be seen until 6 March 2011 in the exhibition, Rome and Antiquity: Reality and Vision in the Eighteenth Century at the Museo of the Fondazione Roma.