Ontwerp voor een kerklamp met rechtsboven een doorsnede van het bovenaanzicht 1773

Luigi Valadier made this church lamp design using pen and brown ink in eighteenth-century Italy. Valadier was a celebrated Roman silversmith and bronze worker who inherited his family workshop, a firm which supplied luxury objects to elites across Europe. This drawing gives us a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the world of highly skilled artisans in eighteenth-century Rome, in which the production of luxury goods was still organized through the guild system. Guilds were associations of craftsmen that controlled production and set standards for quality. As the son of a silversmith, Valadier would have been intimately familiar with this system, but as a luxury craftsman serving an international market, he may have had an uneasy relationship to these established practices. To fully understand this drawing, we can consult period treatises on design, guild records, and business papers to better understand the economic and social conditions that shaped its production. This design offers a fascinating insight into a crucial transitional moment in the history of European manufacture.