GnosyArt Ltd

Currently there has been active research in the area of design and in order to appreciate the development of design it is interesting to appeal to the creativity of artists in the past. By analyzing their approach to design we might be able to get a better critical understanding of new trends in the world of design nowadays and at the same time learn the importance of the past.

A special place in this area belongs to the work of English artist and designer William Morris, (1834- 1896), who has played an appreciable role in the formation of principles of arts and crafts in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th of century.

In 1867 Zola started writing a series of articles on Manet that were ultimately published in a brochure for the personal showing of Manet’s works in the same year, 1867. Zola and Manet were good friends, but more than this, they were sharing the same battle for a new art. Each in his own way was trying to find a new style through which give form to the contemporary world. Manet had been rather successful in scandalizing the critics and the public, and Zola wants to help mitigate the problems of this situation.

One day of the early Spring of 1596 Caravaggio was walking down a small street in the center of Rome, at the time a dangerous, dirty, chaotic city. Just like now. It was swarming with peasants selling rotten fruits, workers carrying construction materials, butchers hanging their meat outside the shops, hungry poor eating boiled beans, dentists performing gruesome surgeries in the open. (fig. 1-3)