New Book | Rediscovering Architecture: Paestum
From Yale UP:
Sigrid de Jong, Rediscovering Architecture: Paestum in Eighteenth-Century Architectural Experience and Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0300195750, $85.
The 18th-century rediscovery of the three archaic Greek-Doric temples in Paestum in southern Italy turned existing ideas on classical architecture upside down. The porous limestone temples with rough, heavy columns were entirely unlike the classical architecture travelers to the site were familiar with. Paestum, exceptional in the completeness of its ruins, came to fascinate architects, artists, writers, and tourists alike, who documented the site in drawings and texts. In Rediscovering Architecture, Sigrid de Jong analyzes extensive original source material, including letters, diaries, drawings, paintings, engravings, and published texts, which are attractively reproduced here. The book offers new insights on the explorations of the site, the diverse reactions to it, and their dramatic and enduring effect on architectural thought, as they influenced intellectual debates in England, France, and Italy during the long 18th century. This unique study of the experience of architecture reconstructs Paestum’s key role in the discourse on classical architecture and its historiography, primitivism, the sublime and the picturesque, and the growing importance of science and history in architectural thought.
Sigrid de Jong is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at Leiden University.
Call for Papers | CAA 2016 Session, Eros and Enlightenment
An addition to the CAA 2016 sessions:
ASECS Panel on Eros and Enlightenment at the
104th Annual Conference of the College Art Association
Washington, D.C., 3–6 February 2016
Proposals due by 31 May 2015
Session Chairs:
Nina Dubin, University of Illinois at Chicago (dubin@uic.edu)
Hérica Valladares, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (herica.valladares@gmail.com)
What would it mean to consider the eighteenth century through the lens of its evolving discourse on love? The explosion of a novel-reading public; the Enlightenment’s often nervous inquiry into love’s place among the ‘moral sentiments’ and its status in relation to the equally unstable category of friendship; the expansion of epistolary culture and the attendant vogue for love letter pictures; the libertine conceptualization of love as a ‘commerce’; homoeroticism as a cultural leitmotif; the ubiquitous presence of Cupid, even in such unexpected contexts as financial literature; the fixation on ancient notions of eros, from Ovid’s persistently popular Ars Amatoria to the unearthed remains of erotic frescoes: these and other phenomena suggest that love played a central yet complicated role in period self-imaginings, in ways that iconographic accounts of the era’s visual arts have perhaps not fully registered. This ASECS-sponsored panel seeks papers on all aspects of visual and material culture that expand, challenge, and enliven our understanding of eros in the eighteenth century.
Please email a title, abstract (1–2 pages, double-spaced) and brief CV (1–2 pages) to the panel chairs by May 31.
Call for Papers | Visual Print Culture in Europe, 1500–1850
From the University of Warwick:
Visual Print Culture in Europe, 1500–1850: Techniques, Genres, Imagery, and Markets
University of Warwick at Palazzo Pesaro Papafava, Venice, 5–6 December 2015
Proposals due by 1 June 2015
Under Napoleon’s Empire we find London acting as a hub for printing caricatures of Napoleon in a range of languages, and with a number of distinctive styles. The print Die Universalmonarchie (pictured to the right) claims, for example, to have been published by Boydell & Co. in London in 1815, but the Boydells were based at Cheapside, not—as the print states—at Pall Mall (once the location of the late Josiah Boydell’s famous Shakespeare Gallery). The publication information would seem to be spurious, and the British Museum suggests that it was likely published in Paris. Is this print, then, German, French, or even possibly English? Who exactly is its market? How far is its imagery tailored to a particular ‘national’ audience and in what ways might it be distinctively comprehensible to such an audience? Besides London, what other European hubs were important, at what moments and why?
Visual Print Culture in Europe 1500–1850 aims to draw together scholars with a range of disciplinary skills to discuss the methods, representational forms, and distribution of and audience for visual print media in Europe between 1500 and 1850. Its seeks to de-nationalize the study of visual print culture, and to explore the extent to which interactions between engravers and printers, artists and consumers in Europe, and a range of common representational practices produced a genuinely European visual print culture—with local modulations, but nonetheless with a common core.
Papers can draw on a range of disciplinary backgrounds in exploring the exchange of techniques and processes, the analysis of imagery, and the identification of markets, and in analysing the conditions under which particular generic forms crossed or failed to cross national boundaries. Although the emphasis is on European visual print culture, the impact of that culture on, and its interaction with, the wider world is also of interest. The conference language will be English. The conference may be able to provide some financial assistance to those whose home institutions are unable to support their attendance, especially postgraduate students.
The conference organisers—acting under the European History Research Centre—are Mark Philp (History, EHRC Director, Warwick mark.philp@warwick.ac.uk), Kate Astbury (French Studies, Warwick), Mark Knights (History, Warwick), and David Taylor (English, Warwick). Proposals for papers should be submitted to t.smith.2@warwick.ac.uk by June 1st 2015, but please feel free to contact Mark Philp in advance with any queries.
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