Architect of Empires: Highlights from the Library of Pierre Fontaine opens tomorrow. We’re exc

Architect of Empires: Highlights from the Library of Pierre Fontaine opens tomorrow. We’re excited to announce a public program being held in conjunction with this exhibition, Percier & Fontaine: A Master Class in Architectural Prints and Drawings, which will take place at 6:00 on Thursday, February 8.

Join Iris Moon, assistant curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum, for the illustrated talk “Building between the Leaves: The Post-Revolutionary Architectural Interior in the Books of Percier and Fontaine.” Following the talk meet in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries to view and discuss the exhibition Architect of Empires: Highlights from the Library of Pierre Fontaine and to look at additional library materials with our speaker and the exhibition curator, Alyse Muller, research associate in the Department of European Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. Then proceed to the Print Studio of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for a demonstration of printing techniques by Shaurya Kumar, associate professor in the Department of Printmedia, to learn how the illustrations in the books of Percier and Fontaine were created.

Registration is required for the library and print studio portions of the event. To register, please email [email protected].

Here you see two plates from Percier and Fontaine’s Recueil de décorations intérieures… (Paris: Chez les Auteurs, 1812.), as well as an image of Louis Messidor Lebon Petitot’s painted plaster sculptures,  Bust of Pierre François Leonard Fontaine (1839) and Bust of Charles Percier(1838).