New Book | Seeing Satire in the Eighteenth Century
From the Voltaire Foundation:
Elizabeth C. Mansfield and Kelly Malone, eds., Seeing Satire in the Eighteenth Century, SVEC 2013:02 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013), 320 pages, ISBN-978-0729410632, £65 / €80 / $106.
A moment in history when verbal satire, caricature, and comic performance exerted unprecedented influence on society, the Enlightenment sustained a complex, though now practically invisible, culture of visual humor. In Seeing Satire in the Eighteenth Century contributors recapture the unique energy of comic images in the works of key artists and authors whose satirical intentions have been obscured by time.
From a decoding of Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s Livre de caricatures as a titillating jibe at royal and courtly figures, a reinterpretation of the man’s muff as an emblem of foreignness, foppishness and impotence, a reappraisal of F. X. Messerschmidt’s sculpted heads as comic critiques of Lavater’s theories of physiognomy, to the press denigration of William Wilberforce’s abolitionist efforts, visual satire is shown to extend to all areas of society and culture across Europe and North America. By analysing the hidden meaning of these key works, contributors reveal how visual comedy both mediates and intensifies more serious social critique. The power of satire’s appeal to the eye was as clearly understood, and as widely exploited in the Enlightenment as it is today.
Elizabeth C. Mansfield’s research encompasses modern and early modern European art. Her publications include an award-winning book on the classical legend of Zeuxis ‘Selecting Models’. She is currently Vice-President of Scholarly Programs at the National Humanities Center. Kelly Malone is a scholar of the literature and culture of eighteenth-century England. She is currently Associate Professor of English at Sewanee, the University of the South.
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C O N T E N T S
Introduction, Elizabeth C. Mansfield and Kelly Malone — Seeing satire in the Age of Reason
1. Emmanuel Schwartz — Satire unmasked by reading
2. Eric Rosenberg — The impossibility of painting: the satiric inevitability of John Singleton Copley’s Boy with a Squirrel
3. Julie-Anne Plax — Watteau’s witticisms: visual humor and sociability
4. Emily Richardson — ‘Tu n’as pas tout vü!’: seeing satire in the Saint-Aubin Livre de Caricatures
5. Melissa Lee Hyde — Needling: embroidery and satire in the hands of Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin
6. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell — ‘He is not dressed without a muff’: muffs, masculinity, and la mode in English satire
7. Trevor Burnard — ‘A compound mongrel mixture’: racially coded humor, satire, and the denigration of white Creoles in the British Empire 1784-1834
8. Reva Wolf — Seeing satire in the peepshow
9. Steven Minuk — Swift’s satire of vision
10. Michael Yonan — Messerschmidt, the Hogarth of sculpture
11. Katherine Mannheimer — Anatomizing print’s perils: Augustan satire’s textual bodies
12. Marcus C. Levitt — ‘Women’s wiles’ in Mikhail Chulkov’s The Comely Cook
List of illustrations
Summaries
Bibliography
Index
Master Drawings New York, 2013
Press release (October 2012) from Master Drawings New York:
Master Drawings New York, 2013
New York, 25 January — 2 February 2013
The highly acclaimed Master Drawings New York returns to Manhattan where dealers from around the world are holding coordinated exhibitions in art galleries located on New York’s Upper East Side. This annual event, which has attracted four new international dealers this year, enables both collectors and curators to view a broad range of master works dating from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Exhibitors hail from the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, and the USA. During this week, their finest drawings are all displayed within walking distance of each other, allowing connoisseurs to buy drawings across a broad range of prices, styles, and centuries. A preview at all galleries on Friday January 25 from 4 to 8 pm enables collectors to view the exhibitions before the opening weekend.
New York dealer Les Eluminures are exhibiting the intensely colourful Presentation in the Temple (ca. 1520/30) by Netherlandish artist Simon Bening (1483/4–1561). The vibrancy of expression with which Bening depicts these biblical characters lends the work, almost 500 years old, a remarkable vitality. Fellow New Yorker Margot Gordon, who organises the event with London-based Crispian Riley-Smith, is showing a 17th-century study for the ‘Sala di Apollo’ at the Palazzo Pitti by Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669), which highlights the movement and dynamism of the artist’s work.
Antonio González Velázquez, The Apparition of the Virgin del Carmen to Saint Simon Stock, black chalk, sepia ink and brown wash on laid paper, 1780
18th- and 19th-century European drawings are one of the strengths of the 2013 edition of Master Drawings New York. Madrid based dealer José de la Mano Galería de Arte is bringing The Apparition of the Virgin del Carmen to Saint Simon Stock (1780), a stately biblical scene depicted in black chalk, sepia ink and brown wash on laid paper by Antonio González Velázquez (1723–1793). The drawing reveals Velázquez’s subtlety of stroke and includes fascinating sketches around the border. Paolo Antonacci from Rome, a first time exhibitor at Master Drawings New York, brings Paolo and Francesca Surprised by Giangiotto Malatesta by Giuseppe Cades (1750–1799) in ink and brown wash on paper while Crispian Riley-Smith is exhibiting a pencil and watercolour by Cornelia Maris Haakman (1787–1834) of Tulips, Carnations, Blue Bells in a Vase with a Still-Life of Butterfly and Snail (1806). London dealer James Mackinnon is bringing a pencil and watercolour drawing of The Monastery Cloister at Amalfi (1840) by Achille Vianelli (1803–1894). The roof of the cloisters vaulting above the habited monks creates an atmosphere of peace and contemplation in an Italian midday heat. Parisian dealer Laura Pecheur is bringing a vibrant pencil and watercolour on paper signed by Lorenz Frölich (1820–1908), of a Fisherman from Capri (ca. 1850).
Giuseppe Cades, Paolo and Francesca Surprised by Giangiotto Malatesta, ink and brown wash on paper
Moving into the 20th century, London dealer Stephen Ongpin Fine Art is bringing The Sleeping Child, a dream-like watercolour sketch by French symbolist Odilon Redon (1840–1916). The blooming, cloud-like forms and feverish colours of the sketch typify Redon’s drawings, described by Huysmans as, “[defying] classification; unheeding, for the most part, of the limitations of painting.” New York dealer Sigrid Freundorfer Fine Art is exhibiting an ink on paper sketch of Albert Einstein drawn by his friend Josef Scharl (1896–1954) in Princeton in 1950, which is signed by both Scharl and Einstein. Moeller Fine Art, also from New York, is showing The Academician (The Poet) (1954), a colourful oil pastel and ink on paper by Richard Lindner (1901–1978). Described by Claude Clement as “full of urban energy, and driven by weird eroticism,” Lindner was also in Einstein’s circle and an eminent academic until his death in 1978.
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