The enormous diversity and enduring beauty of ornamental ironwork is celebrated in this singular sourcebook. Sixty antique plates showcase metal doors, balconies, window arches, gates, corner pieces, decorative embellishments, and more, many wrought with gargoyles, human figures, and florals. An accurate and invaluable reference for art historians, architects, and designers.

Elaborately wrought designs for gates, fences, finials, banisters, window grilles, bedsteads, cathedral screens, other architectural and decorative appointments, Gothic to Art Nouveau — meticulously rendered in black-and-white drawings reprinted from vintage publications.

More than 4,500 objects on 415 plates illustrate a remarkable variety of decorative ironwork from Roman times to the 19th century. Drawn from a rare 1924 source by a noted scholar and collector, it runs the gamut from door knockers and grilles to jewelry and religious symbols.

Artists, illustrators, architectural and art historians, restorers, dealers, collectors--anyone interested in historical ironwork--will welcome this magnificent treasury of decorative designs produced between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. Over 400 illustrations on 86 plates, reprinted from a rare nineteenth-century French volume of copperplate engravings, reveal a remarkable variety of decorative and utilitarian objects. Focusing primarily on German Gothic ironwork designs that embellished palaces, cathedrals, castles, houses, and other structures, the plates depict hinges ornamented with mythical sea creatures and dragons, door knockers decorated with female figures and human heads, keyhole plates wreathed in foliage, chests reinforced with iron bands displaying elaborate artwork, intricately laced metalwork on screens and grilles, elaborately designed keys, finials, candle stands, and a host of other architectural and ornamental elements. Notes to the plates identify the objects and provide, when available, a source and date for each. A splendid record of the inspired decorative flourishes of the past, these beautifully detailed plates will also serve as a lavish source of inspiration for today's designers. Dover (1996) republication of the plates from "Serrurerie, ou les Ouvrages en Fer Forgedu Moyen-Age et de la Renaissance, " published by Librairie Tross, Paris, 1870.

Over 1,500 attractive black-and-white illustrations — drawn from balconies, gates, grilles, stair railings, and elsewhere — incorporate floral and foliate designs, human and animal figures, musical motifs, heraldic crests, mythological figures, geometrics, more.

Invaluable source of information for art historians, craftspeople, dealers, collectors, and preservationists includes hundreds of finely detailed illustrations of garden seats, candelabras, moldings, gates, balcony grilles, vases, crosses, funerary ornaments and monuments, finials, doorknobs and many other ornamental features. A rich source of inspiration and royalty-free graphics, as well, for commercial artists and designers.

Forty plates of meticulously rendered hinges, grilles, railings, latches, door knockers, and more — selected from English chapels, tombs, castles, and other structures — span more than 600 years of metalworking history.