Ball 18th-19th century

Curator: Here we have an object titled simply "Ball," made sometime in the 18th or 19th century. The medium is glass, and it’s currently held in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Editor: Ah, yes, it looks like something you’d find at the bottom of the sea. All smooth and round and cobalt blue. Gives me a wistful feeling, like a memory you can't quite grasp. Curator: Notice how the spherical form dictates the light and shadow. The specular highlights define its roundness, almost creating a sense of idealized perfection, only disturbed by that small, broken neck at the top. Editor: Broken, exactly! A perfect, unbroken sphere wouldn't have nearly the same character. That imperfection tells a story, don’t you think? A life lived, perhaps dropped and rescued… Curator: In purely formal terms, the chromatic intensity is central. The depth of blue contributes significantly to the sense of volume, of contained space, while the gradient suggests density and mass. Editor: Mass indeed, I bet that sucker is heavy! It's also funny how that blue, seemingly uniform, shifts in tone depending on the light, kind of like the ocean...but it could hold memories. Maybe hopes or maybe dreams. Silly isn’t it? Curator: Silly, perhaps. Yet, such anthropocentric projections are precisely what a formalist approach resists. Better to focus on what the object *is*: a testament to glassmaking techniques and aesthetic preferences. Editor: Fair enough! But even acknowledging the skill, my brain goes wild with possibilities. To each their own rabbit hole, I suppose! Anyway, next one!