#writing table

[emaadsidiki]

National Gallery of Art 🎨 Washington D.C. Jean Francois Oeben 🪓 German Cabinetmaker 1721-63

[artschoolglasses]

Writing Table, made 1774-80 by David Roentgen

From the Victoria & Albert Museum

[blondebrainpowered]

Jane Austen's writing table, ca. early 1700s

This cherished item reflects the impeccable work of Jane Austen, a renowned English writer who created novels like Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.

[portrait-paintings]

Karl Friedrich Abel

Artist: Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727-1788)

Date: c. 1777

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA, United States

Description

Gainsborough portrays Karl Friedrich Abel in a moment of inspiration. He is seated at a writing table with his pen resting on the first bar of a new musical score. His viola da gamba rests against his thigh, as if he has just set it aside momentarily. Abel was a prolific composer, important performer, and one of Gainsborough’s closest friends.

[birds-and-manuscripts]

“The manuscript book isn’t only the necessary medium for the trasmission of ancient and medieval culture: it’s also a complex and dynamic object, which reflects, in its appearance and physical structure, the cultural, economical, social and political changes through the centuries.” - Marilena Maniaci.

Throughout history, humankind has always felt the need to communicate, and to fulfil that need has used a variety of recipients for their writing — organic, inorganic, of plant or animal origin… Before, and alongside, the well-known triptych of papyrus-parchment-paper were and are clay, shards of pottery, metals, fabrics, leaves, wood, bones…

Any writing, in its materiality, is a two-faced coin. One face is that which can be easily (or not) seen, such as the text and the images. The other face is all that is not seen, be it inside the writing, such as the material aspects, the structure, the techniques, or outside the writing, such as the culture or socio-economic situation.

While philology and palaeography study the text and images are the interest of art historians, that hidden other face is the subject of research of codicology, particularly in its acceptation of archaeology of manuscripts. Codicology is a relatively recent branch of studies, which originates as an ancillary science to philology and palaeography and as such still lacks a unified method or mission, but in the aforementioned meaning of the term and for what concerns us, it can be defined as the study of the history of codices (sing. codex).

Codicology, then, studies the codex in everything that isn’t text and writing, and partially images (although all of these things give contextual information, and are taken into consideration). But what, exactly, is a codex?

A codex isn’t a book, it’s not even a scroll - at least, not necessarily. As defined by Marilena Maniaci a codex is “a container of information, mostly textual, but also visual and musical, in which the dimension of immaterial ideas interacts, in different and complex ways, with the materiality of the object.” More simply, a codex is any object consisting of a material which has been written on or which was meant to be written on and which has been bound or could have been bound.

A scroll is a codex, a book is a codex, but also ostraka (pottery shards) which have been tied together through holes, or a single and quite big piece of vellum which has been folded.

The three following images are all codices, as different as they may seem!

Codicology studies the materials a codex is composed of, the way it was produced, used, re-used, its history throughout the years, in whose hands it ended up and how its “adventures” influenced its physicality. These informations, seemingly of secondary importance, can give us interesting insights on the times the codex “lived” through.

[blueiscoool]

Thomas Potter A George I burr walnut-veneered and walnut adjustable writing table, circa 1720-30

The quarter veneered hinged and folding top inset with a later gilt-tooled leather writing surface, with ratchet mechanism to underside, above a single drawer to each side, one fitted with compartments for inkwells and pens, the drawers retaining the Untermyer collection inventory number 64.101.1084 74.5cm. high, 38cm. wide, 48cm. deep (closed); 2ft. 5½in. 1ft. 3in., 1ft. 7in.

[acrosscenturiesandgenerations]

▪︎Combined music-stand and writing-table.

Place of origin: Paris

Date: ca. 1777-1785

Artist/Maker: Carlin, Martin (maker); Pafrat, Jean-Jacques (cabinet-maker)

Medium: Veneered in tulipwood, purpleheart, mahogany, sycamore and boxwood, on a carcase of oak; set with soft-paste porcelain plaque (Sèvres) and with gilt-bronze mounts.

[designobjectory]

c1760, Work and writing table (table en chiffonière), Bernard II van Risenburgh (ca. 1696–ca. 1767) Culture: French / MET