Enfilade

From Penn State UP:

Sarah Betzer, Animating the Antique: Sculptural Encounter in the Age of Aesthetic Theory (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0271088839, $125.

Framed by tensions between figural sculpture experienced in the round and its translation into two-dimensional representations, Animating the Antique explores enthralling episodes in a history of artistic and aesthetic encounters. Moving across varied locations—among them Rome, Florence, Naples, London, Dresden, and Paris—Sarah Betzer explores a history that has yet to be written: that of the Janus-faced nature of interactions with the antique by which sculptures and beholders alike were caught between the promise of animation and the threat of mortification.

Examining the traces of affective and transformative sculptural encounters, the book takes off from the decades marked by the archaeological, art-historical, and art-philosophical developments of the mid-eighteenth century and culminates in fin de siècle anthropological, psychological, and empathic frameworks. It turns on two fundamental and interconnected arguments: that an eighteenth-century ontology of ancient sculpture continued to inform encounters with the antique well into the nineteenth century, and that by attending to the enduring power of this model, we can newly appreciate the distinctively modern terms of antique sculpture’s allure. As Betzer shows, these eighteenth-century developments had far-reaching ramifications for the making and beholding of modern art, the articulations of art theory, the writing of art history, and a significantly queer Nachleben of the antique.

Bold and wide-ranging, Animating the Antique sheds light upon the work of myriad artists, in addition to that of writers ranging from Goethe and Winckelmann to Hegel, Walter Pater, and Vernon Lee. It will be especially welcomed by scholars and students working in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art history, art writing, and art historiography.

Sarah Betzer is Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia and the author of Ingres and the Studio: Women, Painting, History, also published by Penn State University Press.

From Routledge:

Kristoffer Neville and Lisa Skogh, eds., Queen Hedwig Eleonora and the Arts: Court Culture in Seventeenth-Century Northern Europe (New York: Routlege, 2021), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-1472489609 (hardback), $160 / ISBN: 978-1032097244 (paperback), $49.

As queen consort and dowager, Hedwig Eleonora (1636–1715) held a unique position in Sweden for more than half a century. As the dominant collector and patron of art and architecture in the realm, she left a strong mark on Swedish court culture. Her dynastic network among the Northern European courts was extensive, and this helped to make Sweden a major cultural center in Northern Europe in the later seventeenth century. This book represents the first major scholarly publication on the full range of Hedwig Eleonora’s endeavours, from the financing of her court to her place within a larger princely network, to her engagements with various cultural pursuits, to her public image. As the contributors show, despite her high profile, political position, and conspicuous patronage, Hedwig Eleonora experienced little of the animosity directed at many other foreign queens and regents, such as the Medici in France and Henrietta Maria in England. In this way, she provides a model for a different and more successful way of negotiating the difficulties of joining a foreign court; the analysis of her circumstances thus adds a substantial dimension to the study of early modern queenship. Presenting much new scholarship, this volume highlights one extremely significant early modern woman and her imprint on Northern European history, and fosters international awareness of the importance of early modern Scandinavia for European cultural history.

Kristoffer Neville is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Riverside. Lisa Skogh is Project Co-Investigator in the Research Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

C O N T E N T S

1  Kristoffer Neville (University of California, Riverside) and Lisa Skogh (Victoria and Albert Museum), Introduction: Queen Hedwig Eleonora and the Arts
2  Jill Bepler (Herzog August Library, Wolfenbüttel), ‘The Queen of the North’: Hedwig Eleonora and Her German Family in Paint and Print
3  Gabriele Ball (Herzog August Library, Wolfenbüttel), Queen Hedwig Eleonora’s Societal Network within the Tugendliche and the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft
4  Björn Asker (National Archives, Stockholm), Hedwig Eleonora as Dowager Queen and Administrator
5  Lisa Skogh (V&A Museum), The Pretiosa Cabinet at Ulriksdal Palace
6  Kjell Wangensteen (Princeton University), Hedwig Eleonora as Patron of David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl
7  Mikael Ahlund (Uppsala University Art Museums), The Wilderness inside Drottningholm: David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl and the Northern Nature at the Court of Hedwig Eleonora
8  Lars-Olof Larsson (Christian-Albrecht-University, Kiel), David Klöcker Ehrenstrahlʼs Portraits of Hedwig Eleonoraʼs Siblings: Invention and the Presentation of the Family
9  Lars Ljungström (Royal Collections, Stockholm), Hedwig Eleonora and Building as a Princely Pursuit
10  Kristoffer Neville (University of California, Riverside), Hedwig Eleonora and the Practice of Architecture
11  Anders Jarlert (Lund University), Hedwig Eleonora, Lund University, and the Learned
12  Mara Wade (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Ballet, Kunstkammer, and the Education of Princess Hedwig Eleonora at the Gottorf Court
13  Maria Schildt (Uppsala University), Hedwig Eleonora and Music at the Swedish Court, 1654–1726
14  Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (Oxford University), Hedwig Eleonora in Print: From ‘Citronat’ to ‘Wundermutter’

A book that I should have noted several years ago; the ebook appeared in 2021. –CH. From Penn State UP:

Kristoffer Neville, The Art and Culture of Scandinavian Central Europe, 1550–1720 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0271082257, $90.

Politically and militarily powerful, early modern Scandinavia played an essential role in the development of Central European culture from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. In this volume, Kristoffer Neville shows how the cultural ambitions of Denmark and Sweden were inextricably bound to those of other Central European kingdoms. Tracing the visual culture of the Danish and Swedish courts from the Reformation to their eventual decline in the eighteenth century, Neville explains how and why they developed into important artistic centers. He examines major projects by figures largely unknown outside of Northern Europe alongside other, more canonical artists—including Cornelis Floris, Adriaen de Vries, and Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach—to propose a more coherent view of this part of Europe, one that rightly includes Scandinavia as a vital component. The seventeenth century has long seemed a bleak moment in Central European culture. Neville’s authoritative and unprecedented study does much to change this perception, showing that the arts did not die in the Reformation and Thirty Years’ War but rather flourished in the Baltic region.

Kristoffer Neville is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Nicodemus Tessin the Elder: Architecture in Sweden in the Age of Greatness and coeditor of Queen Hedwig Eleonora and the Arts: Court Culture in Seventeenth-Century Northern Europe.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction
1  Gothicism in Germania
2  Reform and Reformation
3  Frederik II and the Arts in Denmark in the Later Sixteenth Century
4  Christian IV
5  Minerva’s World
6  Two Queens
7  Absolutism
Epilogue: The Romantic North

Notes
Bibliography
Index