Enfilade

As recently noted on the website of Amadeus Mozart, various examples of eighteenth-century prophylactics have been recreated and are now available from Dr. Roberts. Details can be found at his site, Tempus Fugit: An Account of the Activities & Adventures of a Gentleman Physician.

These are reproductions of the offerings of Mrs. Phillips in her shop at Orange Court in London. She designed them from sheep or goat’s gut, pickled, scented and delicately fashioned on glass moulds by the hands of the proprietress herself. I will be providing the standard “Baudruches fines,” and for the more cautious customers, the “Superfine Double” which was made from two superimposed and gummed caecums, the blind end of a sheep’s bigger gut. They are to be Five dollars a piece. Contact me straight away to place your order before they run out!

Johan Zoffany’s 1779 Self Portrait in the National Gallery at Parma includes a pair of such sheaths [see William Pressly, “Genius Unveiled: The Self-Portraits of Johan Zoffany,” Art Bulletin 69 (March 1987): 88-101.] Any other relevant examples come to mind?

As noted by Jason Kelly at H-Albion (and then picked up on C-18L), JSTOR is piloting an online storage bank of auction catalogs, currently ranging from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. The following description comes from the beta site:

JSTOR is collaborating with the Frick Collection and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a pilot project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to understand how auction catalogs can be best preserved for the long-term and made most easily accessible for scholarly use. Auction catalogs are vital for provenance research as well as for the study of art markets and the history of collecting.

This prototype site is open to the public through June 2010. If you are interested in this content and the importance to art research, we encourage you to try the site and take the brief survey linked below. In June, we will evaluate use of the content and the feedback we have received in order to help determine the future of the resource.

For more information, click here» And by all means, feel free to chime in with observations here in the ‘Comments’ section.