The Art Bulletin, June 2015
The eighteenth century in The Art Bulletin:
The Art Bulletin 97 (June 2015)
A R T I C L E S
Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Young Girl in Bed Making Her Dog Dance, ca. 1768 (Munich: Alte Pinakothek)
• Jennifer Milam, “Rococo Representations of Interspecies Sensuality and the Pursuit of Volupté,” pp. 192–209.
Enlightenment writers proposed the existence of an animal soul, refuting the Cartesian beast-machine. Arguments credit the caresses of a dog to its master as direct visual evidence of the capacity of an animal to feel and show emotion. A focus on paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard sets the Rococo representation of lapdogs within the context of changing ideas about the relationship between animal and human. Eroticized images of lapdogs are related to radical materialist theories that assert the role of physical pleasure in human motivation.
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R E V I E W S
• Vittoria Di Palma, Review of Hanneke Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures (The University of Chicago Press,
2013), pp. 229–30.
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