Lecture | Tracy Ehrlich on Carlo Marchionni and the Art of Conversation
From the flyer:
Tracy Ehrlich, Carlo Marchionni and the Art of Conversation:
Architectural Drawing and Social Space in Eighteenth-Century Rome
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, 3 November 2017
Carlo Marchionni, Design for a Doorway in the Villa Albani, Rome, 1755–56; pen and brown ink, brush with brown and grey wash, graphite on cream laid paper, 417 × 289 mm (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Museum; photo by Matt Flynn).
In the 1750s the Roman architect Carlo Marchionni (1702–1786) produced a set of highly finished drawings for the villa of the noted collector Cardinal Alessandro Albani. Marchionni’s renderings feature sophisticated figures in fashionable dress conversing and gesticulating at the thresholds of the grand gallery. The figures yield little if any technical information; yet in these drawings the bodies are as architectonic and expressive as the building itself, perhaps even more so. Marchionni’s work diverged from contemporary conventions for architectural drawings, offering his patron not simply a design for a pleasure casino but a distinctive cultural argument that may be traced to models of civility. An eloquence of the body, a sociable kind of living, in short, the art of civil conversation, marks the drawings of Carlo Marchionni.
Tracy Ehrlich, Faculty member, MA in the History of Design & Curatorial Studies Parsons School of Design, The New School, and Smithsonian Institution, Senior Fellow, 2016–17
3 November 2017 at 1:00pm, Lower Level Lecture Hall, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum
Enfilade 
leave a comment