Lecture | Tobias Locker on ‘Rococo for the Spanish Court’
Tomorrow at the BGC:
Tobias Locker, Rococo for the Spanish Court:
The Interiors of Mattia Gasparini in the European Context
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 4 May 2016
Mattia Gasparini (design), José Canops (execution): (one of two) Chest of drawers (with secret compartments), HWD 94.5 x 95.3 x 45.3 cm, 1760/65, different exotic marquetry woods (partly sculpted) and engraved brass marquetry on mahogany, gilt bronze mounts and marble top (Palacio Real Madrid).
The presentation focuses on the person and the production of Mattia Gasparini, who worked for Charles III of Spain in Madrid. Its research follows three axis. A first focus is set on Gasparini and the creation of his Spanish Rococo interiors, that is the reconstruction of workshops and working practice on the basis of written sources and selected furniture—as objects as well as documents show manifold connection to the French capital (French workforce, technical and stylistic aspects). A second is set on distinguishing the French influence of the furniture by way of comparison with Parisian examples. Finally, the presentation contextualizes the interiors through comparison of the above mentioned aspects (style, technique, knowledge and provenance of workforce, quality) with the interiors at Potsdam/Prussia and Schönbrunn/Austria.
Tobias Locker is Adjunct Lecturer of Art History, Pompeu Fabra University and Visiting Fellow, Bard Graduate Center.
Coffee and tea will be served; attendees are welcome to bring their own lunch. RSVP is required. Please click on the registration link or contact academicevents@bgc.bard.edu. The event will also be live-streamed.
Wednesday, May 4, 2016, 12:00–1:30pm
Bard Graduate Center (38 West 86th Street)
New Book | Exuberant Apotheoses
From Brill:
Daniel Fulco, Exuberant Apotheoses—Italian Frescoes in the Holy Roman Empire: Visual Culture and Princely Power in the Age of Enlightenment (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 600 pages, ISBN: 978-9004308046, €181 / $234.
From the late seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries, large-scale Italian frescoes soared in popularity as nobles in the German principalities of the Holy Roman Empire constructed new palaces at an unprecedented rate. They competed with one another to produce lavish decorative schemes that expressed their claim to princely power and political authority. Whereas previous art historians have primarily focused on iconographic and stylistic issues and generally treated these programs as individual commissions of regional courts, this book places the works of art within their broad cultural and historical contexts during the Enlightenment. This monograph explains how rulers gradually shifted from emphasizing military heroism to stressing their cultivation of the arts and sciences, and addresses how expressing membership in a specifically European civilization emerged as an integral visual theme and a key ambition of the German nobility.
Daniel Fulco, Ph.D. (2014), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is an independent scholar of 17th- and 18th-century European art. His research also engages with 19th-century painting and the exhibition of Islamic art in fin-de-siècle Europe.
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C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 The Aftermath of Military Conflict: A Rise in Princely Visual Culture (1648–1710)
2 War and International Politics: The Staircase Frescoes of Schloss Bensberg (1710–1714)
3 Dynasticism and Cultural Philanthropy: The Pictorial Program of Schloss Bensberg’s State Rooms (1710–1714)
4 The Blue Elector’s Aeneas: Jacopo Amigoni’s Images of War and Triumph at Schloss Schleissheim (1724–1726)
5 Ducal Power and Munificence: Carlo Innocenzo Carlone’s Frescoes in Schloss Ludwigsburg (1731–1733)
6 Prince-Episcopal Patronage and World Civilization: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Apollo and the Four Continents in the Würzburg Residenz (1751–1753)
Excursus: Italo-Germanic Artistic Exchange and Collaboration
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
Conference | Imagining Apocalypse
John Martin, The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, 1822
(London: Tate)
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From the conference website:
Imagining Apocalypse
Radcliffe Humanities Building, University of Oxford, 18 June 2016
Organised in collaboration with Dr Catherine Redford, the theme of this year’s RECSO conference is Imagining Apocalypse and will be held on 18th June. 2016 is a key anniversary for scholars studying long eighteenth-century depictions of apocalypse as it marks two hundred years since the famous ‘year without a summer’ of 1816, when the skies went dark and there was widespread speculation that the end of the world was nigh. This conference will allow a varied group of scholars working in the field of long eighteenth-century apocalypse studies to share their current research, giving them the chance to consider collaboratively current trends and research in apocalypse studies and to look forward to future projects. The project will ultimately encourage a more interdisciplinary approach to apocalypse studies.
Bringing together academics from across English, History, History of Art, Modern Languages, and Theology, the conference will introduce participants to the richness of apocalypse studies across a range of disciplines, both enhancing their research and laying the foundations for future projects, publications, and collaborations. A plenary lecture will be given by Professor Fiona Stafford (Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford). Following the conference, a showcase of musical and literary performances will take place at St George’s Crypt, Oxford Castle. Registration is now open; see the conference website for further details.
Romanticism and Eighteenth-Century Studies Oxford (RECSO) is a graduate-led initiative for scholars across the Humanities Division. Our aim is to provide a platform for graduates and academics from various disciplines to discuss and share their research into the long eighteenth century. It also facilitates the development of projects, workshops and larger events, as well as providing a physical meeting space for RECSO’s growing body of members.
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P R O G R A M M E
9.30 Registration
10.15 Welcome and introduction by Catherine Redford and Emily Knight, University of Oxford
10.30 Morning Session
Panel A: The Eighteenth-Century Apocalyptic Imagination: The Interpretative Landscape
Chair: Amelia Greene
• Jonathan Downing, University of Bristol: ‘The Commentators’ Apocalypse: The Interpretation of Biblical Eschatology in Eighteenth-Century Popular Commentaries’
• Stephen Bygrave, University of Southampton: ‘Improvement and Apocalypse: Joseph Priestley’s Rhetoric in the 1790s’
Panel B: The Last Man
Chair: Eva-Charlotta Mebius
• Claire Sheridan, University of Greenwich: ‘Apocalypse as Domestic Melodrama: Dibdin Pitt’s The Last Man; or, the Miser of Eltham Green’
• Audrey Borowski, University of Oxford: ‘The Strange Indetermination of Cousin de Grainville’s “Last Man”’
• Adrian Tait, Independent Scholar: ‘Intimations of Apocalypse: From Mary Shelley’s The Last Man to M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud’
12.00 Lunch
12.45 Afternoon Session, Part I
Panel A: Revelation/Revelations
Chair: Christian Zolles
• Natasha O’Hear, University of St Andrews: ‘Four Become One: The Preoccupation with the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse in the Eighteenth Century’
• Joanna Raisbeck, University of Oxford: ‘The Post-Kantian Apocalypse: Revelatory Visions in Jean Paul and Karoline von Günderrode’
• Randall Reinhard, University of Edinburgh: ‘The Revelation of Edward Irving: The Apocalypse as Social Criticism’
Panel B: Secular Apocalypse: Nature and the Human
Chair: TBC
• Amelia Greene, City University of New York: ‘Uncovered Earth: Scaled Apocalypse in John Clare’
• Lucia Scigliano, Durham University: ‘“What faith is crushed, what empires bleed”: Apocalypse and Nature in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Hellas’
• Adam D. J. Laity, University of the West of England: ‘The Last Man, the Rückenfigur and Mad Max: Romantic Subjectivism and “the human” within the Apocalyptic Sublime Landscape’
2.15 Tea and coffee
2.45 Afternoon Session, Part II
Panel A: Ruin and Catastrophe
Chair: Audrey Borowski
• Jessica Stacey, King’s College London: ‘Apocalypse of Meaning: Catastrophes of Language in Eighteenth-Century France’
• Thomas Moynihan, University of Oxford: ‘Human Extinction and Romanticism: The Intellectual Discovery of the End of Thought’
• Helen Slaney, University of Oxford: ‘Original Ruins’
Panel B: Apocalyptic Afterlives
Chair: TBC
• Christian Zolles, University of Vienna: ‘Modern Apocalypse in Reverse: Edgar Allan Poe’s Dialogue The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion (1839)’
• Tom Bromwell, University of York: ‘A Sublime Armageddon: First World War Artists and the Burkean Sublime’
• Catherine Redford, University of Oxford: ‘From Mary Shelley to H. G. Wells: The Romantic Last Man Reimagined’
4.15 Plenary lecture
• Fiona Stafford, University of Oxford: ‘Barkless, branchless, blighted: Alpine Apocalypse in 1816’
5.15 Closing remarks; walk to Oxford Castle
6.15 Showcase in St. George’s Crypt, Oxford Castle: A selection of musical and literary imaginings of the Last Man on earth from the Romantic period.
7.00 Dinner
Enfilade 
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