Enfilade

Distributed by Rutgers UP:

Jennifer Milam and Nicola Parsons, eds., Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2022), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1644532324 (cloth), $120 / ISBN: 978-1644532331 (paperback), $35. Also available as an ebook and PDF.

This volume considers how ideas were made visible through the making of art and visual experience occasioned by reception during the long eighteenth century. The event that gave rise to the collection was the 15th David Nochol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies, which launched a new Australian and New Zealand Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Two strands of interest are explored by the individual authors. The first four essays work with ideas about material objects and identity formation, suggesting how the artist’s physical environment contributes to the sense of self, as a practicing artist or artisan, as an individual patron or collector, or as a woman or religious outsider. The last four essays address the intellectual work that can be expressed through or performed by objects. Through a consideration of the material formation of concepts, this book explores questions that are implicated by the need to see ideas in painted, sculpted, illustrated, and designed forms. In doing so, it introduces new visual materials and novel conceptual models into traditional accounts of the intellectual history of the Enlightenment.

Jennifer Milam is the Pro Vice Chancellor (Academic Excellence) at the University of Newcastle in Callaghan, Australia. Her books on rococo art include Historical Dictionary of Rococo Art, Fragonard’s Playful Paintings, and an edited collection Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe.

Nicola Parsons is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Sydney in Australia. She is the author of Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Jennifer Milam (University of Newcastle) and Nicola Parsons (University of Sydney), Introduction: The Potential Visibility of Ideas in Enlightenment Art and Aesthetics
1  David Maskill (Victoria University of Wellington), A Good Address: Living at the Louvre in the Eighteenth Century
2  Jessica Priebe (University of Sydney), Inventing Artifice: François Boucher’s Collection at the Louvre
3  Matthew Martin (University of Melbourne), Continental Porcelain Made in England: The Case of the Chelsea Porcelain Factory
4  Jennifer Milam (University of Newcastle), Planting Cosmopolitan Ideals: Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest
5  Jessica L. Fripp (Texas Christian University), Growing Old in Public in Eighteenth-Century France: Marie-Thérese Geoffrin and Marie Leszczynska
6  Wiebke Windorf (University of Düsseldorf), French Funeral Monuments of the Ancien Régime as Products of Individual Artistic Solutions
7  Melanie Cooper (University of Adelaide), Meeting the Locals: Mythical Images of the Indigenous Other in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
8  Jennifer Ferng (University of Sydney), Infernal Machines: Designing the Bomb Vessel as Transnational Technology

Notes on the Contributors
Index