Palladio minimus: a Georgian dollhouse and the eighteenth-century miniature world.(Report)

When dining with the queen of the Brobdingnagians, Lemuel Gulliver remarked that he "had an entire set of silver dishes and plates, and other necessaries, which, in proportion to those of the queen, were not much bigger than what 1 have seen in a London toy-shop, for the furniture of a baby-house."1 Diminutive himself in comparison to the giant Brobding nagians, Gulliver thus reveals the market among the British elite of the first half of the eighteenth century for miniature replicas of everyday objects. Baby houses, as dollhouses were known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, like the great houses they occupied, were both showpieces and containers. Children and ...