Online Talks from The Library Company of Philadelphia
Two upcoming online events from the Visual Culture Program of The Library Company of Philadelphia:
Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States, 1789–1828
A book talk by Dr. Allison Stagg
Friday, 20 October 2023, 1.30pm ET
Prints of a New Kind details the political strategies and scandals that inspired the first generation of American caricaturists. It examines the caricatures that mocked events reported in newspapers and politicians, the reactions captured in personal papers of the politicians being satirized, and the lives of the artists who satirized them.
Allison M. Stagg is a specialist in 18th- and 19th-century American and British visual culture and has published widely on the subject of American historical caricature. She was the Library Company 2017–18 William H. Helfand Fellow in American Visual Culture.
More information and registration details are available here»
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
The Complexities of Phillis Wheatley’s Portrait
A guest lecture by Dr. Jennifer Chuong
Wednesday, 25 October 2023, 1.00pm ET
In the fall of 1773, Phillis Wheatley became the first Black woman to publish a book in the transatlantic world. Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral features an engraved frontispiece portrait of the author. This portrait aimed to portray an enslaved person who, by virtue of her intelligence, erudition, and imagination, exploded slavery’s foundational claim that enslaved persons were objects to be bought and sold. This talk explores how the portrait both supports and undercuts this aim.
Jennifer Y. Chuong is an art historian whose research centers on the art, architecture, and material culture of the transatlantic world in the 18th and 19th centuries as they relate to histories of environment and race.
More information and registration details are available here»
Exhibition | Fantastic Animals
Now on view at Lens:
Fantastic Animals / Animaux Fantastiques
Musée du Louvre-Lens, 27 September 2023 — 15 January 2024
Curated by Hélène Bouillon, with Jeanne-Thérèse Bontinck, Caroline Tureck, and Yaël Pignol
Johann Heinrich Füssli (Fuseli), Thor Fighting the Midgard Serpent, 1790, oil on canvas (London: Royal Academy of Arts).
Dragons, griffins, sphinxes, unicorns, phoenixes: present as early as Antiquity, fantastic animals inhabit the tiniest recesses of our contemporary world, from films and cartoons to everyday objects. By turns images of terror or admiration, expressions of our hidden unconscious and our anxieties, these often hybrid creatures contain within them a fundamental ambiguity. Who are they? Where do they come from? What do they mean?
They share with real fauna the power to fascinate people. We confer on them a closeness to nature, a wildness mingled with wisdom. Yet these are no ordinary animals. They differ in their appearance. Gigantic, excessive and deformed, their bodies adopt the characteristics of several animals, such as a horse’s body with the wings of a bird or an eagle with a lion’s head. This extraordinary physiognomy is a reflection of their supernatural powers. Fantastic animals embody the elementary forces of nature: stormy waters and choleric gusts of wind, as well as tranquil streams and the nourishing earth. They represent their immensity, their violence, their beauty, and above all their excesses. Some of them have a face and hands and legs, which link them to the world of humans while evoking distance and danger.
Featuring more than 250 works—sculptures, paintings, and objets d’art, as well as films and music—from Antiquity to the present day, the exhibition offers a journey through time and space, retracing the history of the most famous of these animals through their legends, their powers, and their habitats. It explores our passionate relationships with these creatures whose unreal presence seems more than ever necessary.
Hélène Bouillon, ed., Animaux fantastiques: Du merveilleux dans l’art (Ghent: Snoeck Publishers, 2023), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-9461617873, €39.
Conference | Decorative Arts of the Middle East and North Africa
From ArtHist.net:
Interiors Reconfigured: Changing Materiality and Craftsmanship in the Decorative Arts of the Middle East and North Africa, 18th–20th Centuries
Vitrocentre Romont, Switzerland, 3–4 November 2023
Organized by Francine Giese, Sarah Keller and Mercedes Volait
This international conference is dedicated to the decorative arts of the Middle East and North Africa with a special focus on material aspects and local practices. In the course of profound changes since the 18th century, local tastes and craftmanship began to mutate under Ottoman and Western influence. The conference will address these changes and emphasise the growing importance of material-based analysis in the field of Middle Eastern and Maghrebi décors. Participation is free of charge; registration is required by 30 October 2023 at claudine.demierre@vitrocentre.ch.
f r i d a y , 3 n o v e m b e r 2 0 2 3
9.30 Opening Remarks
• Francine Giese (Vitrocentre Romont) and Mercedes Volait (CNRS/InVisu)
9.45 Keynote Lecture
• The Manifold Dynamics of Domestic Space and Architectural Fashion: Glimpses from Beirut, Sidon, and Cairo between the 18th and 20th Centuries — Ralph Bodenstein (German Archaeological Institute Cairo)
10.45 Coffee
11.15 Transformations
Chair: Francine Giese (Vitrocentre Romont)
• Cairene Interiors as Dynamic Spaces: The Successive Refurbishments of Manzil al-Sadat in the 19th Century — Mercedes Volait (CNRS/InVisu)
• Réorientaliser l’architecture « mauresque »: Intérieurs algériens recomposés aux XIXe et XXe siècles — Claudine Piaton (CNRS/InVisu)
• Ramsès Wissa Wassef et la rénovation de la kamariya — Leïla el-Wakil (University of Geneva)
13.00 Lunch
14.15 Materiality
Chair: Doris Behrens-Abouseif (SOAS University of London)
• A Changing Preference for Textile in Ottoman Interiors, 1705–1755 — Nazlı Songülen (Kadir Has University)
• Furnishing Fabrics: The Qalamkar Textiles in the Domestic Interiors of the Qajar, Iran — Fahimeh Ghorbani (University of Toronto)
• The Materiality of Stucco-Glass Windows in 19th-Century Egypt — Francine Giese, Sarah Keller, and Sophie Wolf (Vitrocentre Romont)
• Technical Heritage of Making Stucco and Glass Lattice Works in Iran — Amir-Hossein Karimy and Afsaneh Sobhani (Art University of Isfahan)
16.15 Coffee
16.45 Reconstructions
Chair: Sarah Keller (Vitrocentre Romont)
• František Schmoranz in Budapest: Reconstructing the Interior of the Oriental Pavilion at the 1885 National Exhibition in Budapest — Péter Nagy (Qatar Museums, Doha) and Ajla Bajramović (University of Vienna)
• The Railway Station of Bosanski Brod: A Historical and Visual Reconstruction of a Major Work of Orientalist Design in the Balkans — Maximilian Hartmuth (University of Vienna) and Malka Dizdarević (Vienna University of Technology)
• 3D Restitution of Saint-Maurice Residence in Cairo: 3D as a Tool to Monitor and Study Architectural Reuses — Vincent Baillet (Archeosciences Bordeaux)
s a t u r d a y , 4 n o v e m b e r 2 0 2 3
9.00 Nationalism, Part I
Chair: Nadia Radwan (University of Bern)
• The Reception of Glass Stucco Windows as Vernacular Element of «Turkish» Interior Decoration — Franziska Niemand (Vitrocentre Romont/University of Fribourg)
• The Bait Al-Naboodah in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates: A 19th-Century Pearl Merchant’s House between Tradition and Globalisation — Martin Nixon (Zayed University, Dubai)
10.00 Coffee
10.30 Nationalism, Part II
Chair: Ralph Bodenstein (German Archaeological Institute Cairo)
• Variations sur céramiques bleues: Concevoir l’intérieur oriental — Nadia Radwan (University of Bern)
• A Tale of Three Perspectives: Local Authenticity, Colonial Interference, and Hybridity within the Construction Methods of at-Tastīr – Moroccan Geometric Arts — El Fasiki (Craft Draft)
• Back to the Future? The 1927 ‹Arab Style› Interior of Hoda Shaarawy’s ‹House of the Egyptian Woman› as a Display of the Nation — Philipp Zobel (University of Regensburg)
12.15 Lunch
13.00 Presentation of Original Documents at Vitromusée Romont
• La Maison Tarazi: A Family-Run Furnishing Company from Beirut — Camille Tarazi (Maison Tarazi)
Exhibition | Liotard and The Lavergne Family Breakfast
The exhibition opens this fall at The National Gallery (with the press release available here) . . .
Discover Liotard and The Lavergne Family Breakfast
The National Gallery, London, 16 November 2023 — 3 March 2024
In the second of our ‘Discover’ exhibitions, which explore well-known paintings through a contemporary lens, we reunite for the first time in 250 years Swiss painter Jean-Étienne Liotard’s pastel and oil versions of The Lavergne Family Breakfast. With the pastel and oil works side by side, the exhibition presents a rare opportunity to compare the difference in technique and effect between the two.
Jean-Etienne Liotard, The Lavergne Family Breakfast, 1754, pastel on paper stuck down on canvas, 80 × 106 cm (London: National Gallery, accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by HM Government from the estate of George Pinto, 2019, NG6685).
Long regarded as Liotard’s masterpiece, The Lavergne Family Breakfast (executed in Lyon in 1754) is the artist’s largest and most ambitious work in pastel. Despite the medium’s notorious delicacy, Liotard skilfully reproduced complex textures: the sheen on the metal coffee pot, the shiny ceramic jug, the silky fabrics and reflections, in the black lacquer tray. Liotard was extremely versatile, producing works in pastel, oil, enamel, chalk, and even on glass. Highly unusually, he returned to The Lavergne Family Breakfast 20 years later to make an exact replica in oil.
Liotard (1702–1789) worked across the length and breadth of 18th-century Europe. Following four years in Constantinople, he grew a long beard, adopted Turkish dress, and nicknamed himself ‘the Turkish painter’. The exhibition showcases the raw materials used to make pastels as well as drawings, paintings, and miniatures that seek to bring this idiosyncratic artist to life.
Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, with contributions by Iris Moon, Discover Liotard & The Lavergne Family Breakfast (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), 120 pages, ISBN: 978-1857097023, $20.
Rosenberg Lecture | Aaron Wile on Inventing Genius
From the DMA:
Aaron Wile | Enlightened Inspiration: Inventing Genius in the First Age of Celebrity
Annual Rosenberg Lecture
Dallas Museum of Art, 2 November 2023, 7.00pm
François-André Vincent, Portrait of Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Choudard (called Desforges), 1789, oil on canvas (DMA, 32.2019.2).
In connection with the DMA’s annual Rosenberg Fête celebrating French painting and sculpture, Dr. Aaron Wile will present a lecture on Enlightened Inspiration: Inventing Genius in the First Age of Celebrity. Focusing on François André Vincent’s Portrait of Pierre-Jean-Baptiste Choudard (called Desforges), among other works in the Michael L. Rosenberg Collection, the talk will explore how the question “What does genius look like?” took on new urgency in the 18th century. It was during this period that our modern understanding of genius, as an individual endowed with exceptional powers of creativity and insight, emerged. Not coincidentally, it was also during this period that modern celebrity culture took shape. For the first time, thinkers, writers, and scientists became public figures, as new forms of mass media and consumerism fueled fascination with their lives and an unquenchable demand for their images. Artists responded by creating new kinds of portraits that helped define the attitudes and attributes of genius. Remarkably intimate images made for public consumption and scrutiny, these portraits raised new questions about the nature of authenticity, autonomy, and selfhood.
Aaron Wile is Associate Curator of French Paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. A specialist in 17th- and 18th-century French art, he earned his MA and PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University and has held fellowships from the Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art, the Frick Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities. His publications have appeared in several major journals and have received awards from the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Association of Art Museum Curators. He is currently working on an exhibition on the celebrity portrait in 18th-century London and Paris.
a d d i t i o n a l p r o g r a m m i n g
Art Activity in the Galleries
6.00–6.45pm, European Art Galleries, Level 2
Pick up a pencil and sketch pad and re-create your favorite work from the Rosenberg Collection of French painting and sculpture.
Opera in the Galleries
6.00–6.45pm, European Art Galleries, Level 2
As you browse the European Art galleries enjoy an opera performance of French arias and art songs by opera singer Amy Canchola and pianist Diane Camp.
Yvan Loskoutoff on the Medallic History of the Sun King
A lunchtime lecture at the Society of Antiquaries:
Yvan Loskoutoff, The Medallic History of the Sun King
In-person and online, Society of Antiquaries of London, 7 November 2023, 1–2pm
The Sun King and his councilors considered his medals as the summit of his propaganda. The reason is simple: they thought that, like Roman coins, the medals would last more than other media to perpetuate the royal memory. More than 300 were coined to celebrate the great events of Louis XIV’s reign (1638–1715), and a luxurious folio book was printed by the Royal Press in two editions of 1702 and 1723 (the lecturer being happy to own a duplicate copy of king George III, 1702, he might bring it to show, provided there are no customs problems). A group of about ten scholars, writers, and artists—the so-called Small Academy—looked after the medals and the book. From 1694 to 1702, they gathered twice a week in the palace of the Louvre dealing only with this subject. The proceedings of their meetings are preserved in the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. This lecture will address the Small Academy, the medals, and the book. Most medals were inspired by Imperial Roman coins. Some of them deal with events in relation with the United Kingdom (which produced satirical medals as an answer). A set of the medals is owned by the British Museum and another one by the Duke of Northumberland. Presently the leading specialists on the subject are English: Sir Mark Jones FSA for the medals and Professor James Mosley (Reading University) for the book. Professor Loskoutoff has directed two volumes on the subject in which they participated (Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre in 2016 and 2023).
Presented both online and in-person at Burlington House, the event is free and open to the public. Please reserve tickets here.
Workshop | Images in Comparative Anatomy, 1500–1900
Next month at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, as noted at ArtHist.net:
Drawing Comparisons: Images in Comparative Anatomy, 1500–1900
In-person and online, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Villino Stroganoff, Rome, 20 October 2023
Comparison of the skeleton of a bird and a man; from Pierre Belon, Histoire de la nature des oyseaux (Paris: Guillaume Cavellat, 1555).
The history of art and the practice of anatomy have long depended upon similar acts of comparison: identifying, visualizing, and describing likenesses. This workshop investigates the role of images in developing comparative anatomy—the study of anatomy across species—in early modern Europe.
Visual or formal analysis entails a search not only for forms but for likenesses. To look closely is, in other words, to look across. Anatomy, likewise, depends upon comparison. From Leonardo to Linnaeus, early modern anatomical knowledge materialized through bodies conceived as similar. The discipline of comparative anatomy emerged, specifically, as generalizations occurred across the human/nonhuman divide. The history of the anatomical image is also a history of violence, as those anatomical procedures allowing comparison (dissection and vivisection) often proceeded through the forceful manipulation, observation and depiction of the (non)human body. Scholars from various disciplines (history of art, history of science and medicine, philosophy, fine arts, paleontology) will consider the use of images in generating comparison and in both formulating and challenging comparative anatomical knowledge.
p r o g r a m m e
10.30 Introduction
• Alejandro Nodarse (Bibliotheca Hertziana / Harvard University) A Guide to Looking Across
11.00 Session One | Drawing Order
• Martin Clayton (Royal Collection Trust, Windsor Castle), ‘Describe the Jaw of a Crocodile’: Leonardo da Vinci’s Animal Anatomies
• Katrina van Grouw (University of Cambridge) Linnaeus Organized: Illustrating Convergence in Comparative Anatomy
12.30 Lunch Break
13.30 Session Two | Languages of Likeness
• Maria Conforti (Sapienza Università di Roma), Fruits, Mushrooms, and Trees: Botanical Imagery in Early Modern Surgery and Anatomy
• Paul North (Yale University), Likeness Looks Both Ways
15.00 Coffee Break
15.30 Session Three | Violence in the Comparative
• Thomas Balfe (Courtauld Institute), Skin Deep? Visualizing Human and Animal Violence in Early Modern Still Life Painting
• Rose Marie San Juan (University College London), Anatomical Violence and the Pain of Resemblance
17.00 Pause
17.15 Roundtable Discussion
Call for Papers | Art in Times of War and Peace
From the Call for Papers:
Art in Times of War and Peace: Legacies of Early Modern Loot and Repair
Bibliotheca Herztiana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome, 8–10 May 2024
Organized by Julia Vázquez and Francesca Borgo
Proposals due by 15 December 2023
A category of objects that exists entirely as a function of violence, the term ‘loot’ describes a relationship of possession, if not more specifically of dispossession. Neither an historically nor materially specific typology of artifacts, loot is instead primarily a legal category that cuts across place and time. And while it is also not an art-historical classification, it is one with which the discipline of art history must constantly contend, given its repercussions for what is accessible, where, and in what condition. This international, interdisciplinary conference invites papers addressing the ways in which conflict and its resolution have historically moved, modified, and reclassified art objects in the long early modern period. We invite contributions on the material, ethical, legal, political, and narrative implications of the claiming and reclaiming of objects in times of war and peace, as well as the ongoing resonance of these issues today, particularly for institutions that are their present-day repositories.
Studies on looting have a tendency to focus on canonical episodes, most often drawn from Roman, Napoleonic, and Nazi-era plunder. But the early modern period saw the steady transfer of booties, trophies, and spoils over the European continent and across the Atlantic and the Pacific. In Europe, this transfer triggered a moral, theological, and legal debate around property rights, as well as the development of codified criteria governing correct modes of wartime conduct, regulating who was permitted to plunder, what, when, and from whom. The act of looting was itself a strategy of violence, especially in the colonial context; but looted objects themselves were also particularly susceptible to damage, neglect, and even deliberate melting down. Moreover, although often thought of as an entirely modern phenomenon, the return of seized objects was also first theorized in this period as a tool of diplomacy and cultivated alongside a nascent legislation for the protection of art against damage, destruction, or unlawful export.
This conference revisits the early modern origins of the discourse around cultural property with an eye to the challenges facing museums today. Recently, scholarly meetings including Plunder: An Alternative History of Art (panel, Annual Meeting of the Association for Art History, 2022) and The Material Cultures of War and Emergency (conference, University College London and Oxford University, 2023) have brought attention to the long history of the taking away of things as a result of conflict. We hope to continue this conversation, expanding its purview beyond the object’s capture, to its framing, display, and possible restitution, while spotlighting medieval and Renaissance loot and its contemporary stakes.
This conference is organized by Julia Vázquez and Francesca Borgo. Following Wastework in 2023, this is the second yearly conference convened by the Lise Meitner Research Group “Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History” at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, furthering the Research Group’s ongoing inquiry into the consequences that different forms of loss, disappearance, and degradation bear for the discipline. For more information, see our webpage. A series of special presentations and pre-conference visits to local collections will launch the event. Travel and accommodation costs will be covered for speakers. Proposals will be considered for inclusion in an edited volume on loot and its recovery in the early modern period. To submit a proposal, please send your CV (including current position and affiliation), a 250-word abstract, and paper title to john.rattray@biblhertz.it by 15 December 2023.
Keynote speakers will include Ananda Cohen-Aponte (Cornell University) and Erin Thompson (CUNY).
New Book | The Future Future
Adam Thirlwell, The Future Future: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0374607616, £19 / $28.
A wild story of female friendship, language, and power, from France to colonial America to the moon, from 1775 to this very moment: a historical novel like no other.
It’s the eighteenth century, and Celine is in trouble. Her husband is mostly absent. Her parents are elsewhere. And meanwhile men are inventing stories about her—about her affairs, her sexuality, her orgies, and addictions. All these stories are lies, but the public loves them and spreads them like a virus. Celine can only watch as her name becomes a symbol for everything rotten in society. This is a world of decadence and saturation, of lavish parties and private salons, of tulle and satin and sex and violence. It’s also one ruled by men—high on colonial genocide, natural destruction, crimes against women, and, above all, language. To survive, Celine and her friends must band together in search of justice, truth, and beauty. Fantastical, funny, and blindingly bright, Adam Thirlwell’s The Future Future follows one woman on an urgently contemporary quest to clear her name and change the world.
Adam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. He is the author of four novels, and his work has been translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an advisory editor of The Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of its Best of Young British Novelists.
New Book | Goya and the Mystery of Reading
From Vanderbilt University Press:
Luis Martín-Estudillo, Goya and the Mystery of Reading (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2023), 268 pages, ISBN: 978-0826505330, $120 / ISBN: 978-0826505323 (paperback), $50. Also available as an ebook.
Spanish artist Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) lived through an era of profound societal change. One of the transformations that he engaged passionately was the unprecedented growth both in the number of readers and in the quantity and diversity of texts available. He documented and questioned this reading revolution in some of his most captivating paintings, prints, and drawings. Goya and the Mystery of Reading explores the critical impact this transition had on the work of an artist who aimed not to copy the world around him, but to see it anew—to read it. Goya’s creations offer a sustained reflection on the implications of reading, which he depicted as an ambiguous, often mysterious activity: one which could lead to knowledge or ecstasy, to self-fulfillment or self-destruction, to piety or perdition. At the same time, he used reading to elicit new possibilities of interpretation. This book reveals for the first time the historical, intellectual, and artistic underpinnings of reading as one of the pillars of his art.
Luis Martín-Estudillo is a professor and Collegiate Scholar at the University of Iowa. His previous books include The Rise of Euroskepticism, winner of an NEH Open Book Award. He is executive editor of the Hispanic Issues series.
c o n t e n t s
Author’s Note
Introduction: Francisco de Goya and the Reading Revolutions
1 Reading and Politics
2 Reading and the Self
3 Reading, Leisure, and Sensuality
4 Reading and the Contours of the Human
Afterword: Words Written at the Edge of Shadows
Notes
Bibliography
Image Credits
Index
Enfilade 
leave a comment