Gipsmodellen voor een versiering van het Palais du Louvre door Leprêtre c. 1855 - 1857

Curator: It has the feel of blueprints or preliminary sketches for something grand. Editor: You’ve nailed it! We're looking at “Gipsmodellen voor een versiering van het Palais du Louvre door Leprêtre," from around 1855-1857. They're drawings of plaster models meant to adorn the Louvre. Curator: Oh, I see the Louvre now! There's a restrained, classical formality... but somehow, the pencil lines also hint at the laborious craft behind these ornamentation designs. It must've been extremely labour intensive for them! Editor: Precisely! Each design would necessitate meticulous planning, expert execution, and collaboration. Consider that labour itself and how the plaster models become commodities. Think about who makes those designs, who owns them, and ultimately, who gets to benefit from it Curator: It does bring to mind something that fades from focus if one only looks at the finished grandeur; I mean, you see the palace, the art, and the emperor's emblem "N"... you forget the artist, workers—the making! It is all lost in that overwhelming aura of wealth! It does highlight that loss rather poignantly now, and gives these pieces an inherent ghostliness. Editor: These drawings speak volumes about 19th-century production, about how architectural dreams are translated into reality—layer upon layer, each dependent on skilled hands and exploited bodies. The medium and art movements used speak about how much material, social class, gender were essential in those processes. And there is also the question if a picture is not a kind of material also. Curator: Thinking of those drawings and the final design together like that, makes one remember all the art and artisans we never see when walking through The Louvre! I appreciate how it prompts one to think a little more widely about things and make the invisible… visible. Editor: Exactly. These gypsum models, once crucial to crafting spaces of power, are distilled into sketches that reveal the underlying economic framework.