The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s eighteenth-century period rooms not only display some of the most stylistically beautiful and technically innovative furniture, metalwork, porcelains and textiles ever designed, but also, through those objects, one of the most fund Enlightenment inventions: the domestic interior as we still know it, an interior predicated on individualism and global trade, created by artisans and managed by servants for a social elite.
The Met’s period rooms must, for conservation reasons, remain behind cordons, visible only at a distance and in gentle light. Digital technology has the potential to reveal hidden aspects of the Met’s treasures. Craft can be demonstrated with high-resolution details, function and motion can be explored in space, rooms can be re-populated with the people who made, served, and used their contents.
The course starts with common work on basic readings. A revolution in scholarship on the material world of the Enlightenment allows a new and deeper understanding of what have been called the decorative arts. Four seminar sessions, focusing on real objects and techniques, take place in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: two taught by Danielle Kisluk-Grosheide, curator of furniture, and two taught by Jeffrey Munger, curator of porcelain.
Meanwhile a laboratory, taught one hour a week in studio@Butler, begins with fundamental digital skills.
While continuing to meet and read all together, students begin, after a month, to work on digital projects about one of the Met’s period rooms, the Tessé room. Students will split into 3 groups of 4. While common reading assignments, and class discussions, continue to keep projects connected, reading assignments also become specialized according to the student’s part in their group project. One group will work on an exceptional furniture set commissioned from Riesener, one of the greatest furniture makers of all time, and used by Queen Marie Antoinette of France, made with lacquer imported from Japan inspired by gifts of lacquer from the Queen’s mother, Empress Teresa of Austria. A second group will study the space of the whole Tessé room, to show how its dimensions and new types of furniture represented egalitarian individualism, while still depending on servants. A third group will connect the crafts represented in the Tessé room to their artisanal sources, to their raw materials, and to the part of the world from which those materials came.
We hope to bring the Tessé room to life in a virtual way, and allow visitors to enter, virtually, through the Tessé room into the material world of the Enlightenment. This new, digital, knowledge will be given back to the public digitally. From the start, the process and challenges of the course will be recorded in a blog, to which all participants will contribute. Eventually, we hope to integrate the three course projects into a course website.