Eighteenth-Century Studies, Summer 2018
While there’s plenty to relish in the latest issue of ECS, I’m glad to highlight, in particular, this important article by Paris Amanda Spies-Gans. I’ve also listed all three single title book reviews; while none of them deal specifically with the visual arts, it’s easy to see (perhaps particularly with the first two) points of methodological relevancy for art history. –CH
Eighteenth-Century Studies 51.4 (Summer 2018)
A R T I C L E S
• Paris Amanda Spies-Gans, “Exceptional, but not Exceptions: Public Exhibitions and the Rise of the Woman Artist in London and Paris, 1760–1830,” pp. 393–416.
From 1760 to 1830, more than 1,300 women exhibited more than 6,000 works of art in London and Paris’ premier art exhibitions—an unprecedented surge in female artistic activity and its public reception. This article traces that transformation, which strikingly mirrors the progress of the French Revolutionary Wars, and contends that the Revolutionary era opened vital opportunities for female artists on both sides of the Channel despite cultural differences. It thus argues for a recasting of period’s historical narrative to integrate women’s omnipresence in the public, professional art world, and a reevaluation of their hitherto dominant categorization as ‘amateur’ artists. It also challenges the historiographical argument that the Revolutionary era was principally a defeat for women in Britain and France.
R E V I E W S
• Kristina Straub, Review of Susan Lanser, The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 (The University of Chicago, 2014), pp. 479–82.
• Renee Bryzik, Review of Katrin Berndt, Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760–1830 (Routledge, 2017), pp. 483–85.
• Nancy Vogeley, Review of Jonathan Israel, The Expanding Blaze: How the American Revolution Ignited the World, 1775–1848 (Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 485–87.
New Book | Visualizing Disease
From The University of Chicago Press:
Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Visualizing Disease: The Art and History of Pathological Illustrations (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-0226110295, $55.
Visual anatomy books have been a staple of medical practice and study since the mid-sixteenth century. But the visual representation of diseased states followed a very different pattern from anatomy, one we are only now beginning to investigate and understand. With Visualizing Disease, Domenico Bertoloni Meli explores key questions in this domain, opening a new field of inquiry based on the analysis of a rich body of arresting and intellectually challenging images reproduced here both in black and white and in color.
Starting in the Renaissance, Bertoloni Meli delves into the wide range of figures involved in the early study and representation of disease, including not just men of medicine, like anatomists, physicians, surgeons, and pathologists, but also draftsmen and engravers. Pathological preparations proved difficult to preserve and represent, and as Bertoloni Meli takes us through a number of different cases from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century, we gain a new understanding of how knowledge of disease, interactions among medical men and artists, and changes in the technologies of preservation and representation of specimens interacted to slowly bring illustration into the medical world.
Domenico Bertoloni Meli is provost professor of history and philosophy of science and medicine at Indiana University, Bloomington.
C O N T E N T S
Preface
Introduction: Bodies, Diseases, Images
1 Visualizing Disease in the Early Modern Period
2 ‘Sic nata est anatome pathologica picta’: The Diseases of Bones
3 Preserved Specimens and Comprehensive Treatises
4 Intermezzo: Identifying Disease in Its Inception
5 The Nosology of Cutaneous Diseases
6 Morbid Anatomy in Color
7 Comprehensive Treatises in Color
Concluding Reflections
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Exhibition | Peintures des lointains
Now on view at the Musée du Quai Branly:
Paintings from Afar: The Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac Collection
Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, 30 January 2018 — 6 January 2019
Curated by Sarah Ligner
For this initial exhibition devoted to the painting collection at the quai Branly, Paintings from Afar (Peintures des lointains) brings together nearly two hundred canvases and graphic works selected from among the five hundred works in the entire collection and dating from the late 18th century to the mid-20th century. It is a composite and largely unknown collection, where Ange Tissier’s odalisque sits alongside portraits of American Indians by George Catlin and scenes of day-to-day life in Cairo by Émile Bernard stand shoulder to shoulder with prints and drawings of Tahiti by Matisse and Gauguin.
This collection tells the story of an encounter with the Other and the Elsewhere, questioning the evolution of the artistic perspective of the unknown. In a rapidly expanding colonial Europe, Western art takes different paths when faced with the shock of a world that welcomes it in, first succumbing to the temptation of exoticism, where the exaltation of colour and light fuels dreams of a luxurious and exquisite Eastern world, before later coming to represent a more realistic, ethnographic perspective that is mindful of the Other. From oneirism and naturalism, fantasy to documentary and romanticism to colonial propaganda, the collection offers a reflection of artistic and political history.
The exhibition is curated by Sarah Ligner, Head of the Historic and Contemporary Globalisation Heritage Unit at the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac.
The Art Bulletin, June 2018
In the current issue of The Art Bulletin 100 (June 2018):
Oliver Wunsch, “Watteau, through the Cracks,” pp. 37–60.
Antoine Watteau’s paintings decayed rapidly. Soon after his death, his contemporaries bemoaned the cracks ravaging his works. They regarded the problem as the product of Watteau’s restless character, noting that his shortsighted personality led him to paint improperly. A deeper explanation situates Watteau’s impatient attitude and impermanent techniques within an emerging culture of ephemeral consumption. An examination of the afterlife of Watteau’s decaying work in the form of reproduction points to an alternative understanding of permanence based less on material immutability than on commercial dissemination. Permanence has a history, and Watteau offers insight into a crucial transition.
Holly Shaffer, “‘Take All of Them’: Eclecticism and the Arts of the Pune Court in India, 1760–1800,” pp. 61–93.
At the peshwa’s court in the western Indian city of Pune in the late eighteenth century, the powerful minister Nana Fadnavis deliberately formulated an eclectic aesthetic. From soliciting Mughal and Rajput paintings at North Indian imperial centers such as Delhi and Jaipur to employing painters from South India and the painter James Wales from Britain, Fadnavis sought entry into a worldly artistic culture. Yet he balanced his cosmopolitan ambitions with emphasis on local devotional traditions. The resultant eclecticism would transform the nature of human and divine representation at the court, and it offers a model for investigating this period today.
Getty Foundation Launches ‘Conserving Canvas’
Left: Examination of François Boucher’s Vertumnus and Pomona (1757) in the conservation studio at the de Young Museum. Right: A detail of the back of the painting shows a seam in the lining canvas. Images from the Getty’s blog, The Iris.
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Press release (1 August 2018) from The Getty:
The Getty Foundation announced today the launch of Conserving Canvas, a new initiative that aims to ensure that critical conservation skills needed to care for paintings on canvas do not disappear. Conserving Canvas will keep much-needed skills alive through a number of grants that support the conservation of paintings, workshops, seminars, training residencies, and a major symposium. The initiative’s initial projects support the study and conservation of world-renowned works on canvas, including Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy (1770), Anthony van Dyck’s Equestrian Portrait of Charles I (1637–38), and François Boucher’s Vertumnus and Pomona (1757). The inaugural Conserving Canvas grantees include The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA; the National Gallery, London; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Statens Historiska Museer, Sweden; Stichting Restauratie Atelier Limburg, the Netherlands; University of Glasgow, Scotland; and Yale University.
“Through extensive consultation with specialists in the conservation field including experts at the Getty, we heard that there is a growing skills gap between senior conservators who learned treatments of paintings on canvas decades ago and newer museum conservators who need to address pressing problems for paintings in their own collections,” says Deborah Marrow, director of the Getty Foundation. “Conserving Canvas creates opportunities for international collaboration among conservation professionals, so that critical knowledge can be shared, discussed, and disseminated.”
Canvas supports became popular at the end of the 15th century, and have continued to be the primary material on which painters create their work. For centuries, it was common for restorers and conservators to protect these paintings by backing or lining them with another canvas to add general structural strength or repair rips and tears. As these linings age, some can create strains on the original canvas that cause the paint layer to separate and ‘cup’ away from the fabric support. In other instances bubbles can form, often significantly disfiguring the painted image.
Recent decades have seen the field embrace minimal intervention for paintings on canvas—altering an existing artwork as little as possible—as best practice, but this comes at a price. Today many paintings in museum collections around the world that were lined—and now have structural failures—are not being treated, largely because conservators feel insufficiently experienced with existing practices for safe intervention. While this loss of ‘bench skills’ is a concern for the field-at-large, it is particularly pressing for the care of paintings on canvas. There are thousands of old master paintings on fabric supports that were lined in the past, and these works are now beginning to need re-treatment. In addition, modern and contemporary paintings—especially larger works—tend to be more delicate due to the often experimental nature of artist’s materials and techniques. If the issue is not addressed, several generations of conservators are at risk of not being prepared to care for masterpieces on canvas in collections worldwide.
Conserving Canvas will foster inter-generational and inter-organizational sharing of information and best practices by creating opportunities where conservators can regain knowledge about past conservation techniques, work together to make decisions, and experience hands-on training. To this end, a major symposium that addresses the state of the field, the first such meeting since 1974, will be held at Yale University in October 2019.
“For years museum conservators have adopted a ‘wait and monitor’ approach to any major structural intervention on canvas paintings. But the danger is that once treatment can no longer be delayed, the experts with direct knowledge of lining and re-lining won’t be there to offer help,” says Antoine Wilmering, senior program officer at the Getty Foundation. “The field will benefit when conservators are aware of the full range of treatment options available for canvas paintings, whether that is lining or re-lining the canvas, removing a lining and its adhesives, tear mending or re-weaving losses in a canvas, or any other type of intervention. Conserving Canvas will provide international dialogue and opportunities to see these techniques in action so that professionals can advance their practice before it’s too late.”
More information about Conserving Canvas can be found here.
Grants Awarded
Thomas Gainsborough, The Blue Boy, 1770 (San Marino: The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens).
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino
Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy is the most famous painting in the Huntington’s collection, having been on display for nearly 100 years without interruption. Despite the best of care, conservation treatment is now necessary to address lifting and flaking paint, the separation of the canvas from its support lining, and the accrual of layers of varnish on the painting’s surface. A grant is allowing the Huntington to bring together highly respected experts in the conservation of 18th-century British canvas paintings in order to finalize the treatment plan for addressing the structural concerns. A cohort of conservators is gaining valuable experience by participating in the decision-making process and structural intervention of this highly significant and celebrated canvas painting. During the year-long conservation treatment, The Blue Boy is remaining largely on public view in order to educate vast audiences about the field of preservation. Grant awarded: $150,000 (2018).
The National Gallery, London
With Getty support, the National Gallery, London is undertaking a major conservation treatment of one of the most prominent canvas paintings in its collection, Anthony van Dyck’s Equestrian Portrait of Charles I (1637–38). Since its acquisition in 1885, the monumental work—which depicts the king as the divinely chosen ruler of Great Britain—has rarely been off view. While the painting is in relatively good condition, the present lining is failing, and the original canvas is too weak to hold the painting up by itself. Old tears are lifting at the edges, and a network of surface cracks (which indicate the painting has been rolled in the past) disrupt the image. Additionally, the picture surface is somewhat rippled in parts from earlier structural treatments. Led by National Gallery conservators, a complex conservation intervention will remove the current lining and apply a new one. Visiting conservators will receive training in the techniques and complex logistics of relining a large and fragile painting, an undertaking in which the National Gallery’s conservation department has particular expertise. A culminating workshop will share the project results with a larger group of 20–30 specialists in the field. Grant awarded: £70,800 (2018).
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
François Boucher’s Vertumnus and Pomona (1757) is one of the largest paintings in the European collection of the Legion of Honor, which together with the de Young museum compose the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. For many years, the painting was the focal point of a large gallery devoted to 18th-century French and Italian art; however, upon the gallery’s reinstallation in 2013, the painting was removed from display due to its appearance. The work had become increasingly compromised by canvas distortions, a failing lining, yellowed surface varnish, and discolored retouching. Led by senior conservators, the Getty grant-funded conservation treatment will create the opportunity for a group of visiting museum conservators to develop hands-on skills in lining and canvas repair, while also engaging in dialogue about surface aesthetics and treatment methodology. A related technical study will address long-standing questions about the painting’s early history. Grant awarded: $129,000 (2018).
Statens Historiska Museer, Stockholm
Sweden’s National Historical Museums is organizing a 13-day collections-based seminar for up to 16 conservators and curators to study canvas paintings at Skokloster Castle in Sweden. The seminar provides a hands-on introduction to the mechanical behavior of paintings on cloth supports, the deterioration of materials such as canvas and adhesives, and the aesthetic impact of different canvas conservation treatment methods. A workshop on tear mending is offering conservators the chance to learn a newer, less invasive repair technique, while case studies involving three 17th-century paintings from the collection—including Jacob Jordaens’s The Return of the Holy Family from Egypt—promote problem-solving skills. The Skokloster collection is especially well-suited for training exercises given its lack of climate control over the centuries; trainees can witness firsthand the effects of uncontrolled climate conditions on the collection’s lined and unlined paintings and discuss possible conservation treatments. Grant awarded: 1,130,000 kr (2018).
Stichting Restauratie Atelier Limburg (SRAL), Maastricht
A Getty grant is supporting an advanced conservation workshop on mist lining, a minimally invasive technique developed to stabilize paintings on canvas. The practice, which was developed in the 1980s, involves the application of minimal amounts of adhesive, heat, and pressure to join a lining canvas to the reverse of the original painting. Since mist lining is still a relatively new technique and not yet a part of many conservators’ ‘toolkit’, the advanced workshop is especially timely for the field. The workshop will consist of a two-phase program. A group of selected practicing mid-career conservators will be invited to SRAL for a week-long workshop outlining the technique and its variables. Follow-up residencies of two weeks will allow the same conservators to put new skills and acquired knowledge into practice. These slightly longer, bench-skill workshops involve the actual treatment of paintings requiring lining. This format will ensure the promotion of in-depth learning about this particular conservation approach and promote a collaborative network able to further disseminate this technique. Grant awarded: €234,000 (2018).
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Lady Maynard, ca. c.1759–60 (Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow).
University of Glasgow
A Getty grant is bringing pairs of conservators-curators to the College of Arts and The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow for training workshops related to the conservation of five canvas paintings from The Hunterian and the National Galleries of Scotland, including Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Lady Maynard (c.1759–60). The workshops, which focus on the interdisciplinary involvement of both curators and conservators, are conceived around the principle that canvas conservation is part of a holistic process which interrelates all aspects of the condition, aesthetic, interpretation, and presentation of the painting. Participants will research the evolution of lining materials and techniques, and review how past structural treatments affect a painting’s appearance. They will also examine the visual presentation of paintings with different approaches to treatments with reference to the collections at The Hunterian, National Galleries of Scotland, Glasgow Museums, and Yale University. Afterwards they will complete individual month-long residencies in Scotland to treat the five selected paintings. Grant awarded: £115,000 (2018).
Yale University, New Haven
The Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage at Yale University is organizing an international symposium on the conservation of canvas paintings to be held in October 2019 for conservators, conservation scientists, and curators. This will be the first major international gathering on the subject since 1974. The symposium will address historical approaches to the structural treatment of canvas paintings; current methods, materials, and research; and the challenges facing the structural conservation of modern and contemporary works. With today’s field embracing minimal-intervention techniques and maintaining differing opinions on the efficacy of more invasive approaches, the symposium will provide a long overdue forum to reevaluate historical and current practices as well as inform future directions for the conservation of canvas paintings. Grant awarded: $212,000 (2018).
Call for Articles | Special Issue of ‘Perspective’ on Multiples
Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1864), Shokunin (Artisans), 1857, woodblock, triptych, mitate
(London: The British Museum, 1907,0531,0.204)
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From the English Call for Papers (with the French version available here). . .
Perspective: actualité en histoire de l’art 2019.2
Special Issue on Multiples
Proposals due by 24 September 2018; full texts due by 30 April 2019
Using the notion of multiples, the next thematic issue of Perspective: actualité en histoire de l’art (2019.2) will examine the issue of mechanical reproduction. Though the phrasing inevitably refers to Walter Benjamin and his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935–36), this call for papers does not intend to limit the scope of contributions to the mass reproduction pertaining to the advent of photography and cinema, but to embrace all the means of reproduction, ranging from the most traditional, such as bronzes, terracottas, and coins, to the most contemporary related to the rise of new technologies, while not neglecting engraving, screen printing, or lithography. The aim is to analyze the ways in which reproductive techniques influence the production of works of art, while disturbing ontological presuppositions that oppose the original to its copy, the aura to inauthenticity, ritual value to exhibition value.
Starting from Walter Benjamin’s statement that “in principle the work of art has always been reproducible,” this propensity for multiplication, which may appear to be a work of art’s vital principle, does not signify the same reality in different geo-cultural periods and areas. Furthermore, is the distinction between the original and its copy a fact of modern Western culture which, since the eighteenth century and the rise of the art market, has celebrated the gure of the author and invented the notion of genius? A series of questions emerges and among them, to list just a few at random: To what needs—aesthetic, historical, anthropological, political, economic, etc.—does this propensity for multiplication that is a characteristic of artworks respond? What are the different modalities of the dialectical relationship between the original and its reproduction? Can we distinguish different phases within the history of reproduction? In what way does the advent of mass reproduction techniques constitute a turning point in the production and dissemination of artworks? Does the successive appearance of different techniques that rely on an increasingly complex apparatus which downgrades the hand in favor of the eye necessarily lead to the disappearance of the craft? Can we imagine the very existence of the aura outside of techniques of mass reproduction?
Furthermore, this issue will focus on all possible forms of multiples produced by means of mechanical reproduction processes, from the most rudimentary to the most elaborate, within a broader theoretical and geographical perspective that will give full weight to the periods preceding our own, as well as non-Western production. Though the journal is dedicated to artworks, heritage, history of architecture and urbanism, archeology, or museography, it also welcomes articles on photography, cinema, performance, dance, design, music, theater, and all forms of hybridization that the encounters of these different media can produce, provided that they are considered through the lens of visual history. Regardless of the subject proposed, contributions should follow the editorial guidelines of Perspective which publishes articles (25,000 or 45,000 characters) offering historiographical surveys of fundamental questions and/or which embody current trends in the discipline within the proposed topic.
Please submit your proposals (2,000–3,000 character summary and a 2–3 line biography) to the editorial address (revue-perspective@inha.fr) by Monday, 24 September 2018. The journal will take responsibility for translations if necessary. Proposals will be examined by the editorial committee of the issue, regardless of the language of submission. Authors of selected articles will be informed of the committee’s decision in October 2018 while full texts of accepted contributions will be due by the end of April 2019.
New Book | La scuola ascolana di pittura tra XVII e XVIII secolo
An account of painters in Ascoli working after Carlo Maratti, from Il Lavoro:
Valentina Coccia, Una Città, un’Accademia e l’Eredità Marattesca: La scuola ascolana di pittura tra XVII e XVIII secolo (Ancona: Il Lavoro Editoriale, 2018), 234 pages, ISBN: 9788876638602, $50.
Era il 1834 quando Amico Ricci, con le sue Memorie storiche, aprì per la prima volta uno squarcio sulla realtà pittorica ascolana tra XVII e XVIII secolo, facendo riferimento all’Accademia aperta nella città di Ascoli Piceno da Ludovico Trasi, primo pittore di cultura barocca presente sul territorio e precoce divulgatore del linguaggio marattesco. Questo volume raccoglie il prezioso spunto offerto dallo studioso andando ad analizzare quel nutrito gruppo di artisti, finora pressoché ignoti, che aderirono a questa scuola (Luca Vitelli, Silvestro Mattei, Carlo Palucci, Giuseppe Angelini e Biagio Miniera), erroneamente considerati minori e secondari, in realtà laboriosi tessitori di quella fitta trama di sperimentazioni stilistiche, linguaggi e modelli sulla quale sono nate ed evolute le personalità più note—dal Trasi stesso, al Nardini, fino a Nicola Monti. Lo studio va dunque ad illuminare questa scuola pittorica—una scuola in dialogo costante con Roma e capace perciò di assorbirne i vitali impulsi figurativi—con numerose novità relative ai pittori e al loro operato, colmando il vuoto lasciato dalla letteratura artistica esistente in materia. Una scuola nella quale l’arte di Carlo Maratti risulta agire come una sorta di forza invisibile, che con maniacale operosità va ad insinuarsi nelle fessure di ogni tela, lungo lo scorrere di ogni pennellata, sin nelle più profonde trame del malconcio intreccio del più dimenticato stendardo processionale, riemergendo con sorprendente forza a rivendicare tutto il suo, indiscusso, primato.
Exhibition | Fray Manuel Bayeu
Now on view in Huesca, with a 24-page press kit, which includes a checklist arranged according to the major sections of the exhibition, available as a PDF file here:
Friar Manuel Bayeu: Carthusian, Painter, and Witness of His Time
Sala de exposiciones de la Diputación Provincial de Huesca, 21 July — 4 November 2018
Curated by José Ignacio Calvo Ruata
Desde el año 2015 la Diputación Provincial de Huesca es propietaria de la cartuja de Nuestra Señora de las Fuentes (Sariñena, Huesca), declarada Bien de Interés Cultural y uno de los principales monasterios de Aragón. Aunque fundada en 1507, el monumento tal como hoy lo conocemos fue levantado de nueva planta en el siglo XVIII. Posee un extenso conjunto de pinturas murales que cubren los muros y bóvedas de sus dependencias más nobles, indisolublemente unidas a los valores arquitectónicos del monasterio. Fueron realizadas por el cartujo y pintor fray Manuel Bayeu Subías (Zaragoza, 1740–¿1809?). La revalorización que vive hoy la cartuja y el interés que suscita el pintor invita a acercarnos a su obra y a su figura a través de una exposición monográfica.
Hermano de los afamados pintores de cámara Francisco y Ramón Bayeu y cuñado del universal Francisco de Goya, Manuel se formó como ellos en el lenguaje del barroco tardío, que mantuvo dentro de un estilo personal bastante estable a lo largo de toda su producción. Una concisa selección de obras de aquellos artistas y de otros como José Luzán, Corrado Giaquinto, Manuel Eraso y Diego Gutiérrez nos hablan en la exposición de las raíces artísticas de Manuel Bayeu.
De la actividad del artista en la cartuja monegrina dan cuenta algunos bocetos preparatorios para los grandes murales con arreglo a una manera metódica de trabajar que era habitual en la época. También realizó para su casa de profesión numerosos cuadros de caballete, como los que ilustran la vida de san Bruno, fundador de la Orden Cartujana. Autor muy prolífico y con enorme capacidad de trabajo, acometió asimismo muchos encargos para el exterior, entre los que destacan varios lienzos para la catedral de Huesca y la iglesia de Chodes o la decoración del nuevo ábside mayor de la catedral de Jaca, de cuyas trazas arquitectónicas también se hizo cargo y cuyos bocetos se han conservado en su totalidad. De todas estas obras da cuenta la exposición.
El conocimiento que tenemos de Manuel Bayeu nos brinda un atractivo añadido que es su faceta personal. A través de los documentos se adivina que fue hombre campechano y expansivo, y su condición de hermano cartujo no le impidió viajar y entablar relaciones muy cordiales con gentes diversas. Especial mención merece su amistad con Martín Zapater, el rico comerciante zaragozano que fue íntimo amigo de Goya. Manuel Bayeu le escribió numerosas cartas que conserva el Museo del Prado, doce de las cuales han sido seleccionadas para la exposición para retratar su perfil más humano a través de multitud de asuntos y anécdotas. También se conocen testimonios de las relaciones que tuvo con los hermanos Comenge de Lalueza, generosos benefactores de la cartuja, con algunos canónigos de Jaca, con la familia Ric de Fonz y con las monjas de Sijena, entre otras. Sin olvidar que con motivo de su viaje a Mallorca para pintar en la cartuja de Valldemosa mantuvo afectuoso trato con Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, eminente figura de la Ilustración española. No son pocos los cuadros de tema religioso, retratos y pinturas de otros géneros que surgieron precisamente en el marco de las amistades cultivadas por el artista cartujo.
La exposición dedicada a fray Manuel Bayeu no se limita a una selección de lienzos, sino que incluye grabados, documentos, libros, esculturas y otros objetos al servicio de recrear un contexto que contribuye a ofrecer una visión globalizadora del personaje y a poner de relieve su cualidad de atento espectador del mundo que le tocó vivir, más allá de lo meramente artístico.
José Ignacio Calvo Ruata (Zaragoza, 1959), doctor en Historia del Arte. Dedicó su tesis al estudio de la vida y la obra del pintor fray Manuel Bayeu (Universidad de Zaragoza, 1998). Es especialista en pintura del siglo XVIII. Sus libros, artículos y conferencias abarcan también temas diversos de arte aragonés. Ha comisariado exposiciones, entre ellas las que llevan por título genérico Joyas de un patrimonio, dedicadas al patrimonio restaurado de la Provincia de Zaragoza, y recientemente la exposición Goya y Buñuel. Los sueños de la razón. Ha sido becario de investigación del Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses y profesor asociado de Historia del Arte de la Universidad de Zaragoza. Es Jefe de la Sección de Restauración de Bienes Muebles de la Diputación Provincial de Zaragoza, académico correspondiente de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Luis, Patrono de mérito de la Fundación Goya en Aragón, Director de Centro de Investigación y Documentación de la Fundación Goya en Aragón y miembro de Vestigium (grupo de investigación consolidado de la Universidad de Zaragoza).
José Ignacio Calvo Ruata, Elena Barlés Báguena, Carlos E. de Corbera y Tobeña, and Juan Carlos Lozano López, Fray Manuel Bayeu: Cartujo, pintor y testigo de su tiempo (Huesca: Diputación Provincial de Huesca, 2018), 300 pages, ISBN: 978-8492749676, 30€ / $70.
• Prólogo
• José Ignacio Calvo Ruata, Semblanza de fray Manuel Bayeu, cartujo y pintor
• Juan Carlos Lozano López, Pintar en los claustros (siglos XVII y XVIII)
• Elena Barlés Báguena, El siglo de oro de la cartuja de Nuestra Señora de las Fuentes
• José Ignacio Calvo Ruata, Fray Manuel Bayeu en la cartuja de Nuestra Señora de las Fuentes
• José Ignacio Calvo Ruata, El monasterio de Sijena y la familia Ric en las andanzas de fray Manuel Bayeu
• Carlos E. de Corbera y Tobeña, Heráldica y genealogía en la pintura de fray Manuel Bayeu
• José Ignacio Calvo Ruata, Obras de fray Manuel Bayeu en exposición
• Catálogo general de la exposición
• Bibliografía
New Book | The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries
From Taschen:
Massimo Listri, with an introductory essay by Georg Ruppelt and entries by Elisabeth Sladek, The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries (Cologne: Taschen, 2018), 560 pages, ISBN: 978-3836535243, $200.
From the mighty halls of ancient Alexandria to a camel bookmobile on the Kenyan-Somali border, human beings have had a long, enraptured relationship with libraries. Like no other concept and like no other space, the collection of knowledge, learning, and imagination offers a sense of infinite possibility. It’s the unrivaled realm of discovery, where every faded manuscript or mighty clothbound tome might reveal a provocative new idea, a far-flung fantasy, an ancient belief, a religious conviction, or a whole new way of being in the world. In this new photographic journey, Massimo Listri travels to some of the oldest and finest libraries to reveal their architectural, historical, and imaginative wonder. Through great wooden doors, up spiraling staircases, and along exquisite, shelf-lined corridors, he leads us through outstanding private, public, educational, and monastic libraries, dating as far back as 766. Between them, these medieval, classical, baroque, rococo, and 19th-century institutions hold some of the most precious records of human thought and deed, inscribed and printed in manuscripts, volumes, papyrus scrolls, and incunabula. In each, Listri’s poised images capture the library’s unique atmosphere, as much as their most prized holdings and design details.
Featured libraries include the papal collections of the Vatican Apostolic Library, Trinity College Library, home to the Book of Kells and Book of Durrow, and the priceless holdings of the Laurentian Library in Florence, the private library of the powerful House of Medici, designed by Michelangelo. With meticulous descriptions accompanying each featured library, we learn not only of the libraries’ astonishing holdings but also of their often lively, turbulent, or controversial pasts—like Altenburg Abbey in Austria, an outpost of imperial Catholicism repeatedly destroyed during the European wars of religion, or the Franciscan monastery in Lima, Peru, with its horde of archival Inquisition documents.
At once a bibliophile beauty pageant, an ode to knowledge, and an evocation of the particular magic of print, Massimo Listri, The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries is a cultural-historical pilgrimage to the heart of our halls of learning and the stories they tell. Text in English, French, and German.
Massimo Listri (b. 1953) is a Florence-based photographer whose work often presents interiors of great architectural and cultural importance. He has photographed ancient castles, villas, and palaces as well as hidden gardens, libraries, convents, monasteries, and universities. His photographs have been exhibited in numerous public and private institutions, including the Palazzo Pitti in Florence (2009), The Morgan Library and Museum in New York (2010), Vatican Museum in Rome (2014), Palazzo Reale in Turin (2014), and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Wien (2015). He has produced over 70 books.
After studying history, German language and literature, education and philosophy, Georg Ruppelt gained his PhD with a thesis on Friedrich Schiller. He subsequently worked as a librarian, becoming deputy director of the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel in 1987 and director of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek in Hanover from 2002 to 2016. Ruppelt has published over 400 essays and 40 monographs on the subject of books, library science, and cultural history.
Elisabeth Sladek studied Art History, Classical Archaeology, and Judaic Studies, writing her dissertation at the Max Planck Institute in Rome. Her field is the history of Baroque art and architecture, and she is an active researcher and teacher in Vienna, Rome, and Zurich.
Call for Papers | Architecture and Light
From the Call for Papers:
Architecture and Light
Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain Symposium
St George’s Bloomsbury, London, 22 June 2019
Proposals due by 7 January 2019
From the glittering windows of Hardwick Hall and the severe shadows of the Trellick Tower, to the poetry of Chandigarh and the brash neon of Las Vegas, light is a defining factor in any form of architectural design. This symposium will coincide with two exhibitions at Sir John Soane’s Museum: one on Soane and Light and another—as yet untitled—with a leading contemporary light artist working in sympathy with the spaces of the Museum (the symposium will conclude with a visit to the Museum). As such the theme of this symposium is ‘architecture and light’ and thereby focuses on the presence, use and meaning of light in architectural design across all periods and styles.
One important starting point will be the notion that, just as light is understood scientifically as a wave-particle duality, in architecture light exists and functions as both a natural and cultural phenomenon. While on the one hand, the way (sun)light falls over a building is arguably architecture at its most elemental, how we view those light effects is always culturally conditioned. The symposium will reflect, develop, and challenge this dualism.
We welcome speakers—both established and emerging—considering this subject in all aspects of architectural production. Some of the topics that papers might consider are:
• Light as a functional element in architecture and its interactions with different materials and construction methodologies.
• The meaning of light and how this is shaped by different forms, styles and contexts.
• The ways light is mediated in architecture, physically, such as with glazing and mirrors.
• The ways in which light is expressed in architectural drawings and other forms of representation.
• The relationship between natural and artificial light in/on architecture.
• The impact of developing glazing and lighting technologies upon architecture.
• The relationship between light and shadow in/on architecture.
• The politics of light, particularly in an urban setting.
• The methodological problems of analyzing light—by nature immaterial—in architectural history.
• What scientific studies of light can bring to our understanding of its effects in architecture.
If you are interested in contributing to the symposium, please submit an abstract of maximum 300 words and a biography of maximum 150 words to fsands@soane.org.uk by 10am on Monday, 7 January 2019. The SAHGB is not able to reimburse speakers for their travel/accommodation expenses, but the symposium registration fee will be waived and speakers will be invited to attend the symposium dinner on Friday, 21 June 2019.
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