At Auction | Gold Laurel Leaf from Napoleon’s Crown
Martin-Guillaume Biennais, gold laurel leaf from the crown made for the coronation of Napoleon, 1804.
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At Fontainebleau on November 19, Osenat plans to auction a gold laurel leaf from the crown made by Martin-Guillaume Biennais for Napoleon’s 1804 coronation, estimated to sell for 100,000 and 150,000 euros ($118,000 to $177,000). As reported by Agence France-Presse, via Art Daily (12 October 2017) . . .
The French leader crowned himself emperor at the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris in 1804, famously taking the Roman-style laurel wreath and putting it on his own head, instead of letting Pope Pius VII do the honours. But at a fitting for the crown in the days leading up to the spectacular event, the ‘little Corsican’ had complained that it was too heavy, the Osenat auction house said. So goldsmith Martin-Guillaume Biennais took six large leaves out of the crown, later giving one to each of his six daughters. . . .
The original wreath was melted down after Napoleon’s fall in the wake of the Battle of Waterloo. . . . [It] had 44 large gold laurel leaves and 12 smaller ones. It cost him 8,000 francs, a considerable fortune at the time, with the box it was stored in setting him back a further 1,300 francs. . .
The full article is available here»
Jacques-Louis David, The Coronation of Napoleon in the Cathedral of Notre Dame; oil on canvas, 1805–07 (Louvre, Paris).
New Book | The Cinematic Eighteenth Century
From Routledge:
Srividhya Swaminathan and Steven Thomas, eds., The Cinematic Eighteenth Century: History, Culture, and Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2018), 196 pages, ISBN: 978 11386 33995, $150.
This collection explores how film and television depict the complex and diverse milieu of the eighteenth century as a literary, historical, and cultural space. Topics range from adaptations of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (The Martian) to historical fiction on the subjects of slavery (Belle), piracy (Crossbones and Black Sails), monarchy (The Madness of King George and The Libertine), print culture (Blackadder and National Treasure), and the role of women (Marie Antoinette, The Duchess, and Outlander). This interdisciplinary collection draws from film theory and literary theory to discuss how film and television allows for critical re-visioning as well as revising of the cultural concepts in literary and extra-literary writing about the historical period.
Srividhya Swaminathan is Professor of English at LIU Brooklyn in New York. Her primary field of research is the rhetoric of eighteenth-century slavery studies and social movements. Her monograph, Debating the Slave Trade (Ashgate 2009), and co-edited collection, Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination (Ashgate 2013), engage with slavery in a transatlantic context.
Steven W. Thomas is Associate Professor of English at Wagner College in New York, where he teaches American literature, theory, and film studies. He has published several scholarly essays about the transatlantic eighteenth century and in 2016, he was a Fulbright Scholar in the graduate film program at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia.
C O N T E N T S
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Srividhya Swaminathan and Steven Thomas, Introduction: Representing and Repositioning the Eighteenth Century on Screen
1 Ula Lukszo Klein, Fashionable Failures: Ghosting Female Desires on the Big Screen
2 Dorothée Polanz, Portrait of the Queen as a Celebrity: Marie Antoinette on Screen, a Disappearing Act, 1934–2012
3 Elizabeth Kraft, The King on the Screen
4 Jennifer Preston Wilson, ‘I Have You in My Eye, Sir’: The Spectacle of Kingship in The Madness of King George
5 Sarah B. Stein and Robert Vork, Blackadder: Satirizing the Century of Satire
6 Colin Ramsey, Disney’s National Treasure, the Declaration of Independence, and the Erasure of Print from the American Revolution
7 Courtney A. Hoffman, How to Be a Woman in the Highlands: A Feminist Portrayal of Scotland in Outlander
8 Kyle Pivetti, The King of Mars: The Martian’s Scientific Empire and Robinson Crusoe
9 Srividhya Swaminathan, The New Cinematic Piracy: Crossbones and Black Sails
10 Jodi L. Wyett, Sex, Sisterhood, and the Cinema: Sense and Sensibility(s) in Conversation
11 Steven W. Thomas, Cinematic Slavery and the Romance of Belle
List of Contributors
Index
Enfilade 
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