The anonymous drawing above (from the Metropolitan Museum) offers two different design-options for a potential door-frame in an unknown and possibly imaginary Italian palace. The design on the left-hand side and the quite different one on the right-hand side have been cleverly merged by the early 18th-century draftsman as if together they might be built as seen and achieve a newly extreme elaboration of baroque exuberance in their asymmetric grandeur.
The 18th-century drawings that follow could all be said to share a similar, backward-looking aspiration to a similarly heightened level of pictorial drama, reflecting the lingering force of 17th-century practice.
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| Charles Antoine Coypel River God 18th century |
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| Gabriel François Doyen Allegory of Seasons 1760s |
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| Giovanni Battista Natali III Design for Mirror c. 1720-40 |
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| Pietro Jacopo Palmieri Trompe l'Oeil 1766 |
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| Pietro Jacopo Palmieri Trompe l'Oeil 1766 |
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| Hubert Robert St. Peter's, Rome c. 1758 |
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| Antoine Watteau Studies of Women c. 1717-18 |
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| Filippo Juvarra Architectural Study c. 1710 |
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| William Blake Satan Exulting over Eve 1795 |