In thinking about our class objective, I began to focus on the importance of Diderot’s encyclopedie plates to the Tésse Room in terms of the greater understanding of and about 18th Century French decorative arts. The more I focused on ideas surrounding linking plates of the encyclopedie to, say, the Marie Antoinette lacquer furniture set (in the Tésse Room at the Met), the more I found myself dwelling on the materials used to construct the furniture and interior accoutréments my peers and I are dealing with; it is, above all, the values, hues, and tones of materials used that strike chords to the visual senses (at least for me) when observing the period rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (and elsewhere). So the more I thought about material’s importance to the treasures we are aiming to make easily accessible on a virtual platform, the more I thought of color and its’ importance to the Tésse Room in particular and 18th Century decorative arts, on the whole.

To tie such things together (materials and color) my project objective is to code and digitally construct two navigable bars for our class site—one for colors and one for materials.

For the color bar I want to focus on the colors invented by the Sévres Porcelain factory in France during the 18th Century; making the bar about “the colors of the century.” In terms of ‘how the bar will work’—when a visitor clicks on a particular color, I want the interface to change to a new page that loads with all material objects related to the Tésse Room that poses said color (carpet, furniture, clothing, porcelain, the snuff box, writing paper, etc.). I will have to speak with my peers further to understand their individual projects…but ideally once this ‘color interface’ has loaded, I hope to have prominent Tésse Room objects to be clickable//linked to the projects of those analyzing the Marie Antoinette furniture pair, or the fashion histories etc.

The materials bar will be clickable just as the color bar will be and each material (ebony wood, holly wood, tulipwood, rosewood, mahogany, lacquer, gilt-bronze, marble, gilt-wood) navigation function will take our visitors to a new page loaded with Diderot’s plates relating to the guilds that worked with said material as well as most prominent tool plates associated with said material. So too in this material interface, I envision all material objects possessing each material denoted to be listed as images with textual descriptions—all of which hopefully will be able to be clicked on and linked to the specialty ‘project interfaces’ of my peers’ work.

I wish to have my color and materials bar at the forefront of our class website home page that then theoretically extends infinitely outward to link all the projects to material and color as a way of alternatively accessing material objects in the Tésse Room. In other words, there will most likely be direct ways (from our class website homepage) to access say the Marie Antoinette Lacquer furniture pair…but I want it to be that a visitor to our site, who is unaware of the enormity and fame of the lacquer set or even that it exists inside our room, can find it by trolling through colors they are interested in learning more about or materials they are interested in exploring.

In terms of design innovation during the 18th Century, the materials that guilds imported from all over the world are, it can be argued, what make the marquetry so exquisite. Same, I believe, can be said of the Sévres new invention of their rose-pompadour, bleu de roi, turquoise, pea green, and jonquil yellow pigments. The ideology behind my wanting to forefront materials and colors on our class homepage is to bring the materials and colors of the 18th century the credit and glorification they rightly deserve; as again, the objects we intend to present in a new way to the public would not be what they are without such colors or materials.