On the edge of a grand formal garden, a man presents an elegant woman with the rose he has just gathered from a bush. They are dressed in expensive black fabrics, the woman pulling up her overgown to reveal her precious crimson skirt underneath.

At the center of this sweeping panorama of fields, mountains, coast and sea, Saint Jerome has thrown off his cardinal’s red hat and cloak and kneels, praying to a crucifix propped up in front of him.

Following its emergence in Italy in the early 16th century, the Mannerist style travelled to France through a group of Italian artists employed by King Francis I (1494-1547) to decorate his palace at Fontainebleau.

Ceramicist Elsa Rady was born in New York City to a family of artists. Her mother Lily Mehlman Rady had been a Martha Graham dancer, and her father, Simon Rady, was a record company executive and producer. From 1962 to 1966 she studied ceramics at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (now the California Institute of the Arts) with renowned ceramic artists Ralph Bacerra and Otto and Vivika Heino.

Elsa Rady's elegant ceramic works blur the line between sculptural art and functional design. Continually revisiting familiar forms - vases, bowls, and bottles - Rady creates recognizable objects that are not necessarily practical.

Born in Tokyo in 1934, Kuramata graduated from Tokyo polytechnic high school in 1953, where he studied woodworking before being employed by a furniture company. He subsequently enrolled at the Kuwasawa Design School in Tokyo, where he became familiar with Western concepts of interior design, including chairs and seating furnishings.

Trained in architecture (Fernando) and law (Humberto), the Campana brothers began to collaborate on small designs and “ready-mades” in the mid-1980s before developing a series of spiral-form metal chairs in 1988.

This conglomeration of stuffed panda bears, part of the Campana brothers’ series of furniture made from plush children’s toys, represents the most recent development of a type of chair conceived in 2003 as a realization of the designers’ interest in recycling mundane objects through both ha

Frank Gehry's design for the Superlight represents his most recent and successful effort to create a chair with lightweight, minimal construction which echoes his architectural work in both a technical and material sense.

Hans J. Wegner was a Danish furniture designer best known for his functional yet elegant chairs. Wegner was trained as a cabinetmaker before attending the Copenhagen School of Arts and Crafts from which he graduated in 1938.