Recueil de questions proposées à une société de savans, qui par ordre de Sa Majesté Danoise font le voyage de l'Arabie
This is a French questionnaire printed in 1774 by Johann David Michaelis, a German orientalist, for the Danish expedition to Arabia, with prompts drawn up for a team of scholars travelling on the king's commission. Its three pictures are engraved ornaments rather than scenes: a rococo cartouche of scrolls and flowers, a central floral vase framed by acanthus scrollwork, and a classical strip with a roundel between foliate panels. A designer could take from them the asymmetric C-scroll and shell-and-acanthus vocabulary of eighteenth-century ornament, useful for decorative borders and frames.
