Print Quarterly, December 2022
The long eighteenth century in the latest issue of Print Quarterly:
Print Quarterly 39.4 (December 2022)
A R T I C L E S
• Antony Griffiths and Giorgio Marini, “Some Italian Importers of British Prints in the 1780s,” pp. 412–22.
“There is little evidence of interest or awareness of British printmaking in Italy before the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In those years, however, things began to change with remarkable speed. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to five importers of British prints—Molini in Florence, Micali in Livorno (Leghorn), Montagnani in Rome, and Viero and Wagner, both in Venice—all of whom produced catalogues of their imported stock within the five years between 1785 and 1789. When considered as a group, these catalogues give evidence of how quickly dealers were able to import newly published stock and how varied tastes were in these years” (412).
N O T E S A N D R E V I E W S
• Giorgio Marini, Note of the exhibition catalogue Delfín Rodríguez Ruiz and Helena Pérez Gallardo, eds., Giovanni Battista Piranesi en la Biblioteca Nacional de España (Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, 2019), pp. 444–46.
• Laurence Lhinares, Note on the Print Collection of Horace His de La Salle (1795–1878), occasioned by the exhibition Officier et Gentleman: La Collection Horace His de La Salle (Louvre, 2019–20) and the recent purchase by the Fondation Custodia of a copy of the 1856 sale catalogue of the collector’s prints, pp. 446–50.
• Paul Coldwell, Note on Elizabeth Jacklin, The Art of Print: Three Hundred Years of Printmaking (Tate, 2021), pp. 450–51.
• Rachel Sloan, Note on Kinga Bódi and Kata Bodor, eds., The Paper Side of Art: Eight Centuries of Drawings and Prints in the Collections of the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest (2021), pp. 451–52.
• Anne Leonard, Review of the exhibition catalogue, Rena Hoisington, Aquatint: From Its Origins to Goya (National Gallery of Art / Princeton University Press, 2021), pp. 466–71. The catalogue won the 2022 IFPDA book award and discusses many notable innovators in the aquatint medium, including Giovanni David and Maria Catharina Prestel.
New Book | Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique
Published by Zone Books and distributed by Princeton UP:
Anthony Cascardi, Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique (New York: Zone Books), 376 pages, ISBN: 978-1942130697, $40 / £30.
Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique probes the relationship between the enormous, extraordinary, and sometimes baffling body of Goya’s work and the interconnected issues of modernity, Enlightenment, and critique. Taking exception to conventional views that rely mainly on Goya’s darkest images to establish his relevance for modernity, Cascardi argues that the entirety of Goya’s work is engaged in a thoroughgoing critique of the modern social and historical worlds, of which it nonetheless remains an integral part. The book reckons with the apparent gulf assumed to divide the Disasters of War and the so-called Black Paintings from Goya’s scenes of bourgeois life or from the well-mannered portraits of aristocrats, military men, and intellectuals. It shows how these apparent contradictions offer us a gateway into Goya’s critical practice vis-à-vis a European modernity typically associated with the Enlightenment values dominant in France, England, and Germany. In demonstrating Goya’s commitment to the project of critique, Cascardi provides an alternative to established readings of Goya’s work, which generally acknowledge the explicit social criticism evident in works such as the Caprichos but which have little to say about those works that do not openly take up social or political themes. In Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique, Cascardi shows how Goya was consistently engaged in a critical response to—and not just a representation of—the many different factors that are often invoked to explain his work, including history, politics, popular culture, religion, and the history of art itself.
Anthony J. Cascardi is the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of numerous books, including The Consequences of Enlightenment; Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics; The Subject of Modernity; and The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and Philosophy.
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
1 Secularization and the Aesthetics of Belief
2 A Promise of Happiness?
3 Goya, Modernity, Aesthetic Critique
4 The Limits of Representation
5 Conflicts of the Faculties: Goya and Kant
6 Extremities
7 Freedom and the Face of Darkness
8 Beauty and Sympathy
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Image Credits
Call for Papers | Shaped by Greed
From the Call for Papers:
Shaped by Greed: Reflections and Impacts of Environmental Exploitation in European Visual Cultures, 1200–1900
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, 8–9 June 2023
Proposals due by 22 January 2023
How have environmental exploitation, industrialization, and urbanization shaped late medieval and modern visual cultures, landscapes, environments, and the built environment in Europe (and beyond)? An international conference hosted by the Art History Department of Masaryk University in Brno, 8–9 June 2023, organized by Tomáš Valeš, Jan Galeta, Martin F. Lešák, and Veronika Řezníčková as 3rd Biennale of the University’s Centre for Early Modern Studies.
During the Anthropocene, the planet Earth has witnessed several environmental shifts, closely affecting not only the current existence of living species but also the overall future of the planet. The exploitation of the environment creates wealth and simultaneously leads to the various ecological, social, economic, and humanitarian crises that contemporary societies are forced to address, especially in reaction to climate change. In the past centuries, the extraction of precious materials (silver, gold, coal, pearls, coral, whale bones, ivory, or even wood) financed the running of states, cities, churches, monasteries, influential families, and clergy who, in turn commissioned luxurious art and opulent buildings, using the mined materials themselves. Industrialization and urbanization had a tremendous impact on the environment and landscape. Currently, these issues also resonate in the field of art history, or rather eco-art history, for example, in connection with groundbreaking studies and edited volumes, such as those by Sugata Ray (Climate Change and the Art of Devotion Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550–1850), Andrew Patrizio (Ecological Eye: Assembling an Ecocritical Art History), and Karl Kusserow (Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective). Following this line of research, the conference’s main aim is to tackle a broad spectrum of relevant questions that have not yet been asked.
We intend to investigate the interconnections between the environment, its exploitation, art, architecture, and urbanism in a broader European frame with global overlap between 1200 and 1900 (thus taking a longue durée perspective). This explicitly includes the transformation of raw mined materials into luxurious objects; sumptuous and prestigious artistic and urbanistic projects financed by the wealth raised by exploiting nature; iconographies that reflect how the environment was treated, shaped and used in late medieval and modern times.
We are particularly interested in bringing together scholars specialized in different academic areas to confront the human impact on past environments and connect it with the sometimes somewhat self-righteous world of art and beauty. Ultimately, the aim is to explore future perspectives of environmental approaches in art history and lay the foundations for further cooperation between researchers from diverse academic backgrounds.
Possible topics may include but are by no means limited to such issues as:
1. The role of industrialization and urbanization and their foot prints on the landscape, environment, and built environment.
2. Visual representation of human impact on the natural world, e.g., mining, logging, whaling, etc.
3. The mechanisms of exploitation of natural resources in connection to artistic production, e.g., in the case of ivory, coral, or various building materials.
4. Appropriation of nature for collecting purposes or personal representation (taxidermies, live specimens, parts of animal bodies, herbariums, portraits of animals, menageries and zoos, etc.)
5. The origins of appreciating wild nature and the reflection of this appreciation in visual culture, e.g., the beginning of mass tourism, scientific research of nature or how travellers mediated non-European nature in their homelands.
The keynote lecture of the conference will be given by Dr. Hannah Baader (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut).
We invite proposals for papers (in English) from senior as well as junior scholars and advanced PhD candidates; presentations will be 20 minutes. Please submit your proposals of around 200–300 words, accompanied by a short CV, by 22 January 2023 to brno.conference.2023@gmail.com. Notification of acceptance of proposals will be issued before 22 February 2023. Selected papers will be published in an edited volume with Brepols publishing house (Belgium).
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