Enfilade

From Wiley-Blackwell:

Linda Walsh, A Guide to Eighteenth-Century Art (Hoboken, Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 288 pages, (hardcover) ISBN: 978-1118475577, $90 / (paperback)  ISBN: 978-1118475515, $40.

A Guide to Eighteenth-Century Art offers an introductory overview of the art, artists, and artistic movements of this period, and the social, economic, philosophical, and political debates that helped shape them. It uses an innovative framework to highlight the roles of tradition, modernity, and hierarchy in the production of artistic works during this influential era.

The book spans a broad range of topics from the trade and craft of art; the hierarchy of genres; and the emerging public for artistic works; through to the relationship of art to wider cultural developments of the Enlightenment; art and morality, and much more. It also explores the relationship between western art and the growth of colonialism. In examining the art of the period, Walsh reflects the latest research and insights from contemporary scholars. Complete with numerous illustrations and supported by online resources, A Guide to Eighteenth-Century Art offers illuminating insights into the dramatic artistic achievements that transpired between the waning days of the Baroque and the Age of Revolution.

Linda Walsh is a former Senior Lecturer in Art History at the Open University. An established scholar of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century art, Walsh is the author of numerous articles and chapters on topics that include Canova and neoclassical theory; paintings by David, Watteau, and Chardin; eighteenth-century academies; art criticism; and British landscape art.

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C O N T E N T S

List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Companion Website

Introduction: Style, Society, Modernity
1  Institutional Hierarchies: Art and Craft
2  Genres and Contested Hierarchies
3  Markets, Publics, Expert Opinions
4  Taste, Criticism, and Journalism
5  Seeking a Moral Order: The Choice between Virtue and Pleasure
Conclusion

References
Index

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From Distributed Art Publishers:

Joanna Ebenstein, The Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death & the Ecstatic (New York: DAP, 2016), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1938922916, $35.

Of all the artifacts from the history of medicine, the Anatomical Venus—with its heady mixture of beauty, eroticism and death—is the most seductive. These life-sized dissectible wax women reclining on moth-eaten velvet cushions—with glass eyes, strings of pearls, and golden tiaras crowning their real human hair—were created in eighteenth-century Florence as the centerpiece of the first truly public science museum. Conceived as a means to teach human anatomy, the Venus also tacitly communicated the relationship between the human body and a divinely created cosmos—between art and science, nature and mankind. Today, she both intrigues and confounds, troubling our neat categorical divides between life and death, body and soul, effigy and pedagogy, entertainment and education, kitsch and art. The first book of its kind, The Anatomical Venus, by Morbid Anatomy Museum cofounder Joanna Ebenstein, features over 250 images—many never before published—gathered by its author from around the world. Its extensively researched text explores the Anatomical Venus within her historical and cultural context in order to reveal the shifting attitudes toward death and the body that today render such spectacles strange. It reflects on connections between death and wax, the tradition of life-sized simulacra and preserved beautiful women, the phenomenon of women in glass boxes in fairground displays, and ideas of the ecstatic, the sublime and the uncanny.

Joanna Ebenstein is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, writer, lecturer and graphic designer. She originated the Morbid Anatomy blog and website, and is cofounder (with Tracy Hurley Martin) and creative director of the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, New York.

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