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Giffin, Erin ORCID: 0000-0003-1237-5654 (1. March 2021): “Pietro Paolo Drei’s Flower Mosaics Revealed in Print”. In: Print Quarterly, Vol. 38
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Abstract

Uninterpreted inscriptions incised across a pair of etchings by the Flemish artist Pieter de Bailliu reveal an ephemeral, decorative tradition once practiced in the heart of Rome. These prints, together with a third by de Bailliu, shed light on the ephemeral flower mosaics from which the artist worked. This paper revises preconceived notions regarding the little-understood early modern decorative tradition and the artistic oeuvre of Benedetto and Pietro Paolo Drei. De Bailliu’s prints reveal the large-scale ephemera once decorating the seventeenth-century floors of new Saint Peter’s Basilica, and the debt modern scholarship owes to prints that reconstruct lost, altered, or striped early modern interiors.