New Book | China and the Church: Chinoiserie in Global Context
From the University of California Press:
Christopher M. S. Johns, China and the Church: Chinoiserie in Global Context, Franklin D. Murphy Lectures (Los Angeses: University of California Press, 2016), 206 pages, ISBN: 978-0520284654, $50 / £35.
This groundbreaking study examines decorative Chinese works of art and visual culture, known as chinoiserie, in the context of church and state politics, with a particular focus on the Catholic missions’ impact on Western attitudes toward China and the Chinese. Art-historical examinations of chinoiserie have largely ignored the role of the Church and its conversion efforts in Asia. Johns, however, demonstrates that the emperor’s 1722 prohibition against Catholic evangelization, which occurred after almost a century and a half of tolerance, prompted a remarkable change in European visualizations of China in Roman Catholic countries. China and the Church considers the progress of Christianity in China during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, examines authentic works of Chinese art available to the European artists who produced chinoiserie, and explains how the East Asian male body in Western art changed from ‘normative’ depictions to whimsical, feminized grotesques after the collapse of the missionary efforts during the 1720s.
Christopher M. S. Johns is Norman and Roselea Goldberg Professor of History of Art at Vanderbilt University. He is author of Papal Art and Cultural Politics: Rome in the Age of Clement XI, Antonio Canova and the Politics of Patronage in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe, and The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment.
Call for Papers | The Royal Palace in the Europe of Revolutions
The Royal Palace in the Europe of Revolutions, 1750–1850
Centre André Chastel, Paris, 28–29 October 2016
Proposals due by 1 May 2016
Organized by Basile Baudez and Adrián Almoguera
Since the publication of Nikolaus Pevsner’s History of Building Types in 1976, architectural historians have been alert to the importance of typologies for rethinking their discipline. As analyzed by Werner Szambien or Jacques Lucan, thinking through types allowed for the articulation of concepts of convenance, character and composition in both public and private commissions. Along with metropolitan churches and royal basilicas, in ancien régime Europe princely palaces represented the most prestigious program an architect could expect. For a period in which the divine right of kings was being called into question, however, what happened to the physical structures of royal or princely power, symbol of political authority and dynastic seats? Did the national models of the Escorial, Versailles, Het Loo or Saint James palaces still hold, even in light of new models made available through the publication of archeological discoveries in Rome or Split? The second half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century represent a moment of intense construction or reconstruction of the principal European palaces, from Caserta to Buckingham Palace, Saint-Petersburg to Lisbon, Versailles to Coblenz. This trend, addressed by Percier and Fontaine in their Résidences des souverains de France, d’Allemagne, de Russie, etc. (1833), took place in a Europe that was undergoing political developments that altogether changed the nature and symbolic structure of princely power.
This symposium, focused on Europe from roughly 1750 to 1850, aims to interrogate the manner in which architects and their patrons integrated the changing concepts of character in architecture and symbolic place of dynastic palaces, reconciling them with theory and/or practice through rethinking issues of distribution, construction, environmental situation, décor, function, reuse of interpretations of printed or drawn sources.
Submissions of 500 words (maximum) should be sent before May 1, 2016 to basile.baudez@gmail.com and af.almoguera@gmail.com.
Enfilade 
leave a comment