Exhibition | Bologna during the Enlightnement
Now on view the Fesch Museum:
Bologne au siècle des Lumières: Art et science, entre réalité et théâtre
Palais Fesch, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Ajaccio, Corsica, 29 June — 30 September 2024
Attributed to Giacomo Boni, The Triumph of David, oil on canvas (Ajaccio, Palais Fesch, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 852.1.967).
Cette nouvelle exposition sur la peinture, la sculpture et les objets de curiosité, faite en collaboration avec la Pinacoteca Nazionale, les Musei Civici et la fondation de la Cassa di Risparmio de Bologne (CARISBO), s’inscrit dans le prolongement des précédentes expositions du musée d’Ajaccio portant sur l’art italien des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Si le XVIIe siècle bolonais, celui des Carracci, de Reni et de Guercino, est bien connu en France, l’exposition permettra au public de découvrir une période moins familière de ce centre artistique.
Le XVIIIe siècle bolonais s’ouvre avec la fondation de l’Istituto delle Scienze et de l’Accademia Clementina, nés de la volonté du général Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, avec le soutien d’intellectuels inspirés des Lumières et l’approbation du Sénat. Les deux institutions bénéficient de la protection du pape Clément XI, le souverain qui a fait rentrer la ville dans le giron des États de l’Église.
Tandis que l’Istituto delle Scienze, réglé sur les dernières avancées scientifiques européennes, se propose de rendre son prestige à la cité, siège de la plus ancienne université, l’Accademia Clementina vise à retrouver les fastes du siècle d’or de la peinture célébré par la Felsina pittrice de Carlo Cesare Malvasia (1678) et lié aux noms des Carracci, de Reni et de Guercino. Le siècle naissant voit s’achever les carrières de peintres tels que le néo-carracesque Domenico Maria Viani, Benedetto Gennari, neveu de Guercino, rentré à Bologne après un long séjour en Angleterre, Giovanni Gioseffo dal Sole, dernier interprète des finesses de Guido Reni, et Carlo Cignani, prince à vie de l’Accademia Clementina, représentant d’un classicisme teinté de souvenirs corrégiens.
Dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle, l’opposition entre les deux champions de la peinture, Donato Creti et Giuseppe Maria Crespi, est radicale et irréductible. Les recherches du premier aboutissent à un classicisme élégant et raffiné, lumineux et incorruptible, alors que le second affiche au contraire un naturalisme agressif et prosaïque aux accents ironiques, d’un caractère presque populaire. Dans le même temps, la culture littéraire de l’Arcadia inspire, avec Marcantonio Franceschini, peintre européen cher aux princes de Liechtenstein, un purisme qui évolue vers un barocchetto atténué, habile et léger, apprécié des milieux aristocratiques et de l’autorité religieuse. Si les solennels tableaux d’autels répondent aux exigences du décorum et de la commande officielle, les grandes peintures destinées aux palais visent à célébrer, avec des allégories et l’évocation des gloires antiques, les familles sénatoriales, soutiens de l’autorité pontificale dans le gouvernement de la ville.
La ville pullule de petites comme de grandes collections. Ce sont non seulement les palais de l’aristocratie, mais aussi les habitations de la bourgeoisie ou des artisans qui se couvrent de peintures, disposées sous les fresques où se déploie la virtuosité perspective des peintres de quadratura.
Trompe-l’œil, dilatations spatiales et illusions théâtrales allant jusqu’à l’invraisemblable rendent les scénographes bolonais célèbres dans les théâtres européens, grâce aux succès de la famille Bibiena, dans le sillage des expériences passées d’Angelo Michele Colonna et d’Agostino Mitelli, appelés, au-delà des cours italiennes, jusqu’en Espagne et en France. Autour de l’Accademia Filarmonica, fréquentée entre autres par des personnalités telles que le chanteur Carlo Broschi, dit Farinelli, le compositeur Johan Christian Bach, le musicologue Charles Burney—à laquelle se sont joints des chanteurs, des compositeurs et des instrumentistes, sous l’œil attentif du célèbre père Giambattista Martini, qui fut le maître du Mozart lorsque celui-ci avait quatorze ans—se développe une intense activité mêlant architecture, peinture, musique et poésie, tandis qu’est inauguré en 1763 le Teatro Comunale avec le Triomphe de Clelia de Christoph Willibald Gluck, sur des textes de Métastase.
Une peinture légère opère la mutation de la solide tradition du XVIIe siècle vers le rocaille. Ses interprètes sont Francesco Monti, Giuseppe Marchesi dit Sanson, Vittorio Maria Bigari, Giuseppe Varotti et Nicola Bertuzzi, rejoints, en parfaite harmonie, par les sculpteurs et modeleurs Giovan Battista Bolognini, Francesco Jannsens, Angelo Piò et son fils Domenico, qui, à partir de l’exemple de Giuseppe Maria Mazza, donnent aux figures de stuc et de terre cuite un élégant mouvement tout en courbes et une grâce pleine de séduction.
Le succès de l’Accademia Clementina, dû au zèle de son secrétaire Gianpietro Zanotti, amène le remplacement progressif de la formation traditionnelle au sein des ateliers par des enseignements codifiés, l’institution officielle de prix dans les différentes branches artistiques et l’ouverture de l’Accademia del nudo. Dans ce contexte vont émerger les deux principales personnalités de la seconde moitié du siècle, les frères Ubaldo et Gaetano Gandolfi, chez qui la tradition s’est régénérée au contact fructueux de la culture picturale vénitienne, freinant l’avancée du néoclassicisme.
En 1796, à l’arrivée des troupes napoléoniennes, Gaetano Gandolfi pourra assister à l’effondrement de l’Ancien Régime, et aux bouleversements socio-politiques qui vont en découler : le renversement du pouvoir pontifical, la suppression des ordres religieux et des confréries laïques avec la confiscation de leurs biens. En remplacement de l’Accademia Clementina, la création de l’Accademia di Belle Arti, accompagnée de la naissance de la moderne Pinacoteca, inaugure cette nouvelle ère.
Bologne au siècle des Lumières: Art et science, entre réalité et théâtre (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2024), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-8836658527, €33.
Exhibition | What is Enlightenment?
Anatomical Eye Model, eighteenth century
(Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
As renovation work continues at Berlin’s Zeughaus into 2025, the Deutsches Historisches Museum continues to mount exhibitions in the Pei Building. Opening this fall at the DHM:
What is Enlightenment?: Questions for the Eighteenth Century
Was ist Aufklärung? Fragen an das 18. Jahrhundert
Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, 18 October 2024 — 6 April 2025
Curated by Liliane Weissberg
“What is Enlightenment?” asked pastor Johann Friedrich Zöllner in 1783, writing for the Berliner Monatsschrift. The editors of the monthly magazine picked up on this question and put it to their readers, thus igniting a debate that would shape the course of philosophy.
The exhibition What is Enlightenment? Questions for the Eighteenth Century likewise explores this term from many sides. It concentrates on the most important debates of that era, taking its contradictions and ambivalence into account by revealing conflicts over concepts and demands, rather than presenting the Enlightenment as a homogeneous, progressive undertaking. In doing so, it also aims to make clear that the ideas of equality and tolerance prevalent then do not correspond to those held today and, moreover, were often not implemented in practice. The Enlightenment is often referred to in current debates about the social issues of today and about democracy as a form of government. The exhibition is meant to provide a historical context for these conversations.
Examining the so-called ‘long eighteenth century’ from an international perspective, the range of topics includes, among other things: the search for knowledge and a new kind of science, debates about religion, the equality and liberty of mankind, the demand for civil rights, mercantilism, and cosmopolitanism. The collections of the DHM will provide many of the objects on display alongside loans from other museums and archives in Germany, as well as France, Great Britain, Austria, and the United States. The exhibition will take an inclusive and accessible approach. Multimedia and interactive elements will expand upon the exhibition themes and actively involve the visitors. There will also be a children’s tour, showing that questions about the Enlightenment can also be relevant to them. A broad-based accompanying programme is currently being planned.
The exhibition is curated by Professor Liliane Weissberg.
New Book | The End of Enlightenment
Curiously, this trade book has not (yet?) been properly published in the United States. The American version of the Penguin Random House website doesn’t list it, and it’s available through Barnes & Noble only as an ebook and audiobook (at Amazon, hardback copies are available from third-party vendors). In Britain, the book was widely reviewed in popular outlets by critics who didn’t typically engage the larger historiographical debates about the Enlightenment as a conceptual category. Among the more helpful is Linda Colley’s review for the Financial Times (13 December 2023). –CH
From the UK Penguin site:
Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis (London: Allen Lane, 2023), 496 pages, ISBN: 978-0241523421, £30.
The Enlightenment is popularly seen as the Age of Reason, a key moment in human history when ideals such as freedom, progress, natural rights, and constitutional government prevailed. In this radical re-evaluation, historian Richard Whatmore shows why, for many at its centre, the Enlightenment was a profound failure.
By the early eighteenth century, hope was widespread that Enlightenment could be coupled with toleration, the progress of commerce, and the end of the fanatic wars of religion that were destroying Europe. At its heart was the battle to establish and maintain liberty in free states—and the hope that absolute monarchies such as France and free states like Britain might even subsist together, equally respectful of civil liberties. Yet all of this collapsed when states pursued wealth and empire by means of war. Xenophobia was rife, and liberty itself turned fanatic. The End of Enlightenment traces the changing perspectives of economists, philosophers, politicians, and polemicists around the world, including figures as diverse as David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Mary Wollstonecraft. They had strived to replace superstition with reason but witnessed instead terror and revolution, corruption, gross commercial excess, and the continued growth of violent colonialism. Returning us to these tumultuous events and ideas, and digging deep into the thought of the men and women who defined their age, Whatmore offers a lucid exploration of disillusion and intellectual transformation, a brilliant meditation on our continued assumptions about the past, and a glimpse of the different ways our world might be structured—especially as the problems addressed at the end of Enlightenment are still with us today.
Richard Whatmore is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and co-director of the Institute of Intellectual History. He is the author of several acclaimed contributions to intellectual history and eighteenth-century scholarship, including The History of Political Thought (2022), Terrorists, Anarchists and Republicans (2019), and Against War and Empire (2012).
Call for Papers | The Useful Enlightenment
From the Call for Papers:
The Useful Enlightenment: Theories, Practices, and Representations of Usefulness
Martin-Luther-Universität, Halle-Wittenberg, 26–27 June 2025
Organised by Jean-Alexandre Perras
Proposals due by 31 December 2024
Clément-Pierre Marillier, Jean-François de Troy, Allégorie de l’enseignement des Arts (Château de Pau).
“What’s the use?” is often the very first question asked of a scientific endeavour. Indeed, the notion of utility has come to dominate our understanding of knowledge in the humanities as well as in the practical and fundamental sciences. It also furnishes the criterion by which we regularly assess the relevance of scientific research, where utility is often linked to potential applications and their economic benefits. This close relationship between knowledge, utility, technological improvement, and economic advantage dates back to the Enlightenment. This period saw not only the flowering of reason and human rights but also the beginning of the industrial exploitation of natural resources and the development of the logistical and economic infrastructures necessary to profit from the forced labour of displaced populations. As this conflict suggests, the question of utility has never had a simple answer, insofar as it requires us to consider for whom something is useful and to what ends.
This conference invites researchers from a wide range of historical disciplines (including the history of philosophy, literature, institutions, economics, and the sciences) to explore the many aspects encompassed by the notions of utility, usefulness, and usage over the course of the long eighteenth century. The aim is to reconsider how the circulation of various conceptions of utility shaped the relationship between knowledge, technology, politics, and the economy and how this relationship gave rise, in turn, to the concept of ‘useful knowledge’, whose links with the historiographical idea of the ‘industrial revolution’ and the accompanying rise of capitalism have been strongly emphasised through the notion of the ‘knowledge economy’ (Mokyr 2002). This follows research over the last twenty years that has challenged these intrinsic relationships, whether by applying a gender perspective (Serrano 2022; Maerker, Serrano, and Werrett 2023), by framing approaches in the global context of the circulation, exchange, or appropriation of knowledge and commodities (Schäfer and Valeriani 2021; Berg and Hudson 2023), or by focusing on the long-term transmission of practices and knowledge (Nigro 2023).
In the wake of this research, the conference will question the special relationship that developed during the eighteenth century between utility and value, be that economic, scientific, artistic, moral, or literary. Contributions will thus shed new light on the emergence of utility as a criterion for evaluating knowledge, goods, and cultural production. Particular attention will also be paid to the relationship between utility and improvement, how this was translated into the implementation of social, agricultural, or industrial reform, and the conditions of such practical application.
During the eighteenth century, the increasing valorisation of ‘useful’ knowledge, that is to say, practical, experimental and innovative knowledge, challenged the former hierarchy between the ‘liberal’ and the applied, ‘mechanical’ arts. This shift caused significant disruption in how the sciences were viewed in relation to nature and society. It also had a significant impact on both nature and society themselves, creating new means of exploiting human and natural resources according to such new criteria as not only utility but also productivity, efficiency, and progress. These changes gave rise to the debates that animated the political and intellectual reforms of the Enlightenment in the areas of slavery, luxury, and the control of wheat prices—to name but a few examples.
If, in the course of the century, utility did indeed become a central value in the construction of modern Western societies, it is essential to question the causes of this valorisation and relativise its supposed universality, particularly from extra-European points of view or by considering dissident voices, victims, and those excluded, who have questioned or suffered from the growth model centred on the politics and economy of useful knowledge.
Contributions may focus on issues such as the following:
• The relationship in eighteenth-century thought between the notions of interest, profit, or efficiency and those of utility, usefulness, and use.
• The different criteria used to assess utility in various fields of economics, literature, science, technology, or morality and the expertise or institutions needed to carry out such assessments.
• How the usefulness of certain types of knowledge, technologies, or reform projects was evaluated, for whom they were deemed useful, and how this evaluation was carried out.
• The role of learned societies such as academies and economic, patriotic, agricultural, or improvement societies in defining, disseminating, and implementing useful knowledge.
• The importance of non-Western knowledge in the development of a global economy in the eighteenth century.
• How the notion of utility can be used to reshape and reconceptualise the Enlightenment, particularly in terms of the relationship between centre and periphery.
• Voices against the valorisation of utility: scientists, gens de lettres, religious figures; those victimised or left behind by the implementation of public interest projects; those excluded from the determination of utility (colonisation, alternative conceptions of usefulness, criticisms of utility).
• The relationship between innovation, useful arts, science, and technology.
• The evolution of the notion of utile dulci in art and literary theory; the usefulness of rhetoric; fiction and representation; ‘useful’ passions; exemplarity and morality of the arts and literature.
• Growth, progress, sustainability, and usefulness: the agricultural Enlightenment; exploitation of resources and land; agrarian profitability and the acclimatisation of (useful) exotic plants in Europe and the colonies.
• Women and useful knowledge; women and the sciences; the usefulness of women’s labour; social reform projects aimed at women.
• Scientific research deemed futile: squaring the circle, metaphysics, alchemy, etc.
• Pedagogy and usefulness: educational programmes and reforms, popular schools and education and the ‘popular Enlightenment’.
• The utility of the Enlightenment in contemporary political, historiographical, or scientific debates.
Proposals, including an abstract and a short biography and list of publications, should be sent by 31 December 2024 to jean-alexandre.perras@izea.uni-halle.de.
Organised by Jean-Alexandre Perras, Humboldt Research Fellow, with the support of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, the IZEA (Martin-Luther-Universität, Halle-Wittenberg), the Voltaire Foundation (University of Oxford) and the Pôle Europe des Lumières (Sorbonne Université)
i n d i c a t i v e b i b l i o g r a p h y
Berg, M., and P. Hudson. (2023). Slavery, Capitalism, and the Industrial Revolution. Cambridge, Polity.
Böning, H., H. Schmitt and R. Siegert, eds. (2007). Volksaufklärung: eine praktische Reformbewegung des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Bremen: Edition Lumière.
Brockmann, S. (2022). The Science of Useful Nature in Central America: Landscapes, Networks, and Practical Enlightenment, 1784–1838. Cambridge University Press.
Burnard, T., and G. Riello. (2020). “Slavery and the New History of Capitalism.” Journal of Global History 15.2: 225–44.
Butterwick, R., et al., eds. (2017). Peripheries of the Enlightenment. Oxford, Voltaire Foundation.
Crogiez-Labarthe, M. and A. J.-M. S. Ibeas, A., eds. (2017). Savoir et civisme: les sociétés savantes et l’action
patriotique en Europe au XVIIIe siècle: actes du colloque de Berne. Geneve, Slatkine Érudition.
de Vries, J. (2008). The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge University Press.
Fox, C. (2009). The Arts of Industry in the Age of Enlightenment. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Hilaire-Pérez, L. (2000). L’invention technique au siècle des Lumières. Paris, Albin Michel.
Hilaire-Pérez, L., et al. (2016). L’Europe des sciences et des techniques, XVe–XVIIIe siècle: Un dialogue des savoirs. Presses universitaires de Rennes.
Holenstein, A., et al., eds. (2007). Nützliche Wissenschaft und Ökonomie im Ancien Régime. Akteure, Themen, Kommunikationsformen. Cardanaus. Jahrbuch für Wissenschaftsgeschichte 7. Heidelberg, Palatina Verlag.
Howes, A. (2023). Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation. Princeton University Press.
Jacob, M. C. (2014). The First Knowledge Economy: Human Capital and the European Economy, 1750–1850. Cambridge University Press.
Jones, P. (2016). Agricultural Enlightenment: Knowledge, Technology, and Nature, 1750–1840. Oxford University Press.
Khan, B. Z. (2020). Inventing Ideas: Patents, Prizes, and the Knowledge Economy. Oxford University Press.
Klein, U. and E. C. Spary (2010). Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe: Between Market and
Laboratory. University of Chicago Press.
Krueger, R. (2017). The Enlightenment in Bohemia. Oxford, Voltaire Foundation.
Kühn, S. (2011). Wissen, Arbeit, Freundschaft: Ökonomien und soziale Beziehungen an den Akademien in London, Paris und Berlin um 1700. Göttingen, V&R unipress.
Kwass, M. (2022). The Consumer Revolution, 1650–1800. Cambridge University Press.
Leckey, C. (2011). Patrons of Enlightenment the Free Economic Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia. Newark, University of Delaware Press.
Lehmbrock, V. (2020). Der denkende Landwirt: Agrarwissen und Aufklärung in Deutschland 1750−1820.
Gottingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Lilti, A. (2019). L’héritage des Lumières : ambivalences de la modernité. Paris, Le Seuil.
Lowood, H. (1991). Patriotism, Profit, and the Promotion of Science in the German Enlightenment: The Economic and Scientific Societies, 1760–1815. New York, Garland.
MacLeod, C. (2007). Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism, and British Identity, 1750–1914. Cambridge University Press.
Maerker, A., Elena Serrano, and Simon Werrett. 2023. “Enlightened Female Networks: Gendered Ways of
Producing Knowledge. 1720–1830.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 77: 225–34.
McClellan, J. E. and F. O. Regourd (2011). The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime. Turnhout, Brepols.
McClellan, J. E. and V. Saint-Louis (2010). Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime. University of Chicago Press.
McOuat, G. and L. Stewart (2022). Spaces of Enlightenment Science. Boston, Brill.
Nigro, G. (2023). Economia della conoscenza: Innovazione, produttività e crescita economica nei secoli XIII–XVIII Firenze University Press.
Melton, J. V. H. (2001). The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge University Press.
Menon, M. (2022). “Indigenous Knowledges and Colonial Sciences in South Asia.” South Asian History and Culture 13.1: 1–18.
Mokyr, J. (2002). The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy. Princeton University Press.
Mokyr, J. (2018). A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Princeton University Press.
Morel, T., et al., Eds. (2016). The Making of Useful Knowledge. Berlin, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
O’Brien, P. (2013). “Historical Foundations for a Global Perspective on the Emergence of a Western European Regime for the Discovery, Development, and Diffusion of Useful and Reliable Knowledge.” Journal of Global History 8.1: 1–24.
Paquette, G. B. (2009). Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and Its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750–1830. Farnham, Ashgate.
Rabier, C. (2007). Fields of Expertise: A Comparative History of Expert Procedures in Paris and London, 1600 to Present. Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars.
Raj, K. (2006). Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries. Delhi, Permanent Black.
Roberts, L., et al. (2007). The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation. Amsterdam, Koninkliijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen.
Roy, T. (2021). “Useful & Reliable: Technological Transformation in Colonial India.” Technology and Culture
62.2: 494–520.
Schäfer, D, and Simona Valeriani. 2021. “Technology Is Global: The Useful & Reliable Knowledge Debate.” Technology and Culture 62: 327–47.
Schilling, L. and J. Vogel (2019). Transnational Cultures of Expertise: Circulating State-Related Knowledge in the 18th and 19th Centuries. München, De Gruyter Oldenbourg.
Serrano, E. (2022). Ladies of Honor and Merit: Gender, Useful Knowledge, and Politics in Enlightened Spain. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Slack, P. (1999). From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England. Oxford, Clarendon Press.
Stapelbroek, K. and J. Marjanen (2012). The Rise of Economic Societies in the Eighteenth Century: Patriotic Reform in Europe and North America. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Statman, A. (2023). A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science. The University of Chicago Press.
Stuber, M., et al. (2009). Kartoffeln, Klee und kluge Köpfe: Die Oekonomische und Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft des Kantons Bern OGG, 1759–2009. Bern, Haupt.
Conference | Memory and Meaning in Southern Silver
From MESDA:
Memory and Meaning in Southern Silver
Online and in-person, Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Winston-Salem, NC, 20–21 September 2024
Silver and memory are deeply linked as individuals often commission pieces to mark significant moments in their lives and then pass those objects along to future generations. Please plan to join us on September 20th and 21st as we delve into the lives of southern silver makers and patrons who used silver to create memory and meaning in the early American South.
Featured speakers include Ben Miller of Shrubsole and the Magazine Antique’s Curious Objects podcast, author and scholar Catherine Hollan, and Colonial Williamsburg’s Erik Goldstein. In addition to an opening keynote and a day of dynamic lectures, attendees will also have an opportunity to examine MESDA’s silver collection up close during an open house in the MESDA study rooms.
Virtual registration is available for a suggested donation. In-person registration ($325, or $315 for Frank L. Horton Society Members) includes the keynote lecture and reception, one pastry breakfast, one coffee break, one lunch, all lectures proposed on the agenda, and an admission ticket to Old Salem Museums & Gardens. Attendees will also receive exclusive access to the recordings of the lectures for a limited period of time after the program concludes.
f r i d a y , 2 0 s e p t e m b e r
5.00 Opening Reception and Keynote by Ben Miller
s a t u r d a y , 2 1 s e p t e m b e r
9.15 Welcome
9.30 Catherine Hollan — Why Reassess Southern Silver Scholarship
10.15 Alexandra MacDonald — ‘To Brighten Every Painful Hour’: The Follet Family Sampler
10.35 Coffee Break
11.00 Erik Goldstein — Williamsburg’s ‘Madison’ Horse Racing Trophy
11.30 Cynthia Jenkins — Historic Beaufort’s ‘Hamar Cup’
12.00 Lunch
1.00 Charlotte Crabtree — Put the Lime in the Coconut: Silver and Coconut Drinking Vessels in the South
1.45 Emily Whitted — Wealth from the Water: Murky Metal in the Shadow of the Santee River, 1785–2003
2.10 Emily Campbell — Thomas Campbell, Winchester, Virginia Silversmith
3.00 Collection Open House in the MESDA Galleries
4.00 Closing Reception
Call for Papers | Visualizing Antiquity: Fake News? Fantasy Antiquities
From ArtHist.net (which includes the CFP in German). . .
Visualizing Antiquity: On the Episteme of Early Modern Drawings and Prints —
Part IV: Fake News? Fantasy Antiquities
Bildwerdung der Antike: Zur Episteme von Zeichnungen und Druckgrafiken der Frühen Neuzeit — IV: Fake-News? Fantasie-Antiken
München, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, 14 February 2025
Organized by Ulrich Pfisterer, Cristina Ruggero, and Timo Strauch
Proposals due by 15 September 2024
The academy project Antiquitatum Thesaurus: Antiquities in European Visual Sources from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, hosted at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (thesaurus.bbaw.de/en), and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte Munich (zikg.eu) are organizing a series of colloquia in 2023–2025 on the topic Visualizing Antiquity: On the Episteme of Drawings and Prints in the Early Modern Period. The significance of drawings and prints for ideas, research, and the circulation of knowledge about ancient artifacts, architecture, and images in Europe and neighboring areas from the late Middle Ages to the advent of photography in the mid-19th century will be examined.
The three previous colloquia were dedicated to the topics of the ‘unrepresentable’ properties of the depicted objects and the documentation of various states and contexts of ancient objects from their discovery to their presentation in collection catalogues. The fourth and final event will examine the problem of invented or imitated antiquities.
In fact, all types of objects from the arts and crafts of antiquity—aegyptiaca, coins and gems, statuettes and statues, objects of everyday culture from jewellery to weapons and much more —were reproduced as real artefacts and/or in graphic illustrations on all kinds of different occasions over the centuries following antiquity. The father of modern ‘forgeries’ is undoubtedly Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), who knew how to create new objects (‘capricci’) from numerous ancient spolia, which were highly sought after, in particular by northern European collectors. But this is not about him.
In addition to the physical ‘fakes’ on the marketplace of the antiquities trade, their pictorial representations or even antiquities ‘invented’ solely on paper often played a decisive role in the dissemination of a partially distorted, tendentious or ‘false’ idea of past cultures and their materiality.
Starting from the counterfeit imitations of the early modern period, our colloquium is interested in a very broad spectrum of ‘fantastic’ antiquities or ‘forgeries’ of antiquities and their motivations. The following aspects are of particular interest, but other suggestions are also welcome:
• ‘Forgeries’ of ancient art in drawings and prints
• Historical backgrounds, intentions, and contexts of the illustrations
• Techniques and methods of ‘forgeries’ in drawing and printmaking
• The influence of ‘fakes’ on the reception of ancient art
• The role of printmaking in the dissemination of ‘fake’ antiquities
• The use of images of ‘forgeries’ in certain lines of argumentation
• The influence of images on the collective imagination of antiquity
• Debates about ‘forgeries’, their quality, and value
Solicited for the fourth colloquium are papers in English, French, German, or Italian, 20 minutes in length, ideally combining case study and larger perspective. Publication in extended form is planned. Proposals (max. 400 words) can be submitted until 15 September 2024, together with a short CV (max. 150 words) to thesaurus(at)bbaw.de keyword ‘Episteme IV’.
Hotel and travel expenses (economy-class flight or train; 2 nights’ accommodation) will be reimbursed according to the Federal Law on Travel Expenses (BRKG).
Call for Applications | Getty Residential Scholars: Repair
From ArtHist.net:
Getty Residential Scholars: Repair
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2025–26
Applications due by 1 October 2024
The Getty Research Institute is pleased to announce that the 2025–2026 application for residential grants and fellowships for pre-docs, post-docs, and scholars is open as of 1 July 2024. Applications are due by 1 October 2024 at 5pm PT.
For 2025–2026, Getty invites scholars and arts professionals to apply for a residential fellowship on the topic of repair, a theme that bridges time periods, world geographies, and professional practices. Situated between the forces of creation and destruction, the act of repair can be deeply transformative, with the potential to heal, alter, and renew the material environment. Scholars are asked to think critically about repair, questioning interpretive assessments about the ideal state of any object or site, in addition to querying what constitutes damage or whether to repair the ruined or the broken. Beyond such physical interventions, art and sites of commemoration are often mobilized to heal a fractured social fabric. Indeed, art itself may be offered as reparation to address past wrongs or to recuperate loss. The issue of repair has deep bearing for the arts, conceived in the broadest sense, and especially for institutions that aim to preserve and share global cultural heritage.
Under the umbrella of the annual theme, dedicated grants are available via the African American Art History Initiative (AAAHI).
Please find the full call for applications and theme text on the Scholars Program webpage.
Applicants need to complete and submit the online Getty Scholar Grant application form with the following:
1 Project Proposal (not to exceed five pages, typed and double-spaced): Each application must include a description of the applicant’s proposed plan for study and research (not to exceed five pages, typed and double-spaced). The proposal should indicate:
• how the project addresses the annual theme
• if applicable, how it would benefit from the resources at the Getty, including its library and collections.
• Applicants for AAAHI grants should additionally describe how their projects will generate new knowledge in the field of African American art history.
2 Curriculum Vitae
3 Optional Writing Sample
Applicants will be notified of their application outcome approximately six months after the deadline.
Contact
Email: researchgrants@getty.edu
Attn: Getty Scholar Grants
Call for Papers | EAHN 2025: Microhistories of Architecture, Zurich
From ArtHist.net:
Microhistories of Architecture: Conference of the European Architectural History Network
ETH Zurich, 12–15 June 2025
Proposals due by 15 September 2024
What can an idiosyncratic detail tell us about the history of an entire building or the people that built it? What is the importance of a single edifice for the history of a city? Can we rewrite the history of a canonical work of architecture by adopting the viewpoint of an anonymous craftsperson or a passer-by? More broadly, what does the life of one individual—perhaps an anonymous commoner, who lived centuries ago and left only scant evidence—matter for the grand narratives of history?
A few decades ago, such questions were at the centre of a historical method known as Microhistory. Microhistorians devoted their efforts to foregrounding the voices, subjectivities, mentalities and experiences of historical subalterns such as peasants, slaves or women. Around the same time, the Subaltern Studies group, pioneered by Ranajit Guha, sought ways to amplify such “small voices of history” in colonized and post-colonial contexts. The aim of all of these authors was to use marginal evidence and hyper-specific case studies as a lens through which to revisit larger historical narratives: to zoom in, in order to eventually zoom out again.
Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms, first published in 1976, is often seen as a foundational work of the microhistorical method. The book opens with the evocation of a poem by Bertold Brecht, in which a “literate worker” wonders: “Who built Thebes of the seven gates?” Ginzburg adds: “The sources tell us nothing about these anonymous masons, but the question retains all its significance.” Already from its start, the method of Microhistory offered itself for investigations in architecture: who was it that actually built the famous works of architecture that make up the historical canon? Who inhabited them and how? What did these people think of the famous monuments of antiquity or the works of famed architects? Did they leave their own marks on these monuments?
This EAHN Thematic Conference engages with the methodological tradition of Microhistory as a way to both interrogate our discipline’s capacity to rethink its own canons, and to question the historiographical challenges that come from applying the microhistorical method to architecture. At a time when architectural history joins the rest of the humanities in bringing to the fore marginalized, suppressed or minoritarian voices, such questions acquire new urgency.
Rather than limiting its scope to a particular theme, period, or geography, this conference instead places emphasis on a specific method. We ask historians of architecture, cities, and landscapes to come together to discuss the promise of Microhistory for our field and its particular relevance for the current moment. We invite our participants to bring their trifles, marginalia, and scant evidence and to use these to write architectural histories from perspectives, subjectivities, and mentalities that have hitherto been excluded from our accounts. We welcome papers on any geography and chronology, from antiquity to the very recent past, but we will prioritize those that focus on under-represented geographies and periods of history, or those that shed light on previously unknown aspects of canonical projects and topoi and bring them in contact with broader narratives and historiographical traditions.
Contributions may include
• Close examinations of architectural or material details (which contradict canonical typologies, stylistic and cultural taxonomies, or periodologies).
• Close readings of text sources on architecture beyond canonical architectural discourse: accounting books, minutes of trials, ownership records, correspondence, etc.
• Close readings of marginalized voices that were involved in the making of the built environment or specific buildings, as evidenced through archival sources, but also speculative or counterfactual history and critical fabulation (albeit on the basis of historical evidence and context).
• Histories of dissonant voices or of conflict within an architectural project or the life of a building or city (particularly if they can help de-centre the voice of the architect and the patron by bringing in those of the craftsperson, labourer, servant, etc.).
• Local, vernacular, indigenous and non-academic accounts of specific buildings and cities, including non-canonical archaeologies and uses of the past and its monuments (from vernacular spolia to popular lore).
• Depictions of canonical architecture from a lay-person’s or subaltern perspective, as well as depictions of the subaltern, or of subaltern architecture in canonical works of painting, literature and art in general.
• Histories of Microhistory in architecture: how architectural writers and historians have tried to apply the method of Microhistory to the study of the built environment—whether successfully or not.
Proposals should include an abstract of no more than 400 words and an author bio (ca. 200 words per author). Abstracts will be evaluated primarily on the basis of the suggested method and their relevance to the conference theme, but also in terms of thematic originality and exploration of previously unknown or marginalized topics or perspectives. Contributions should be the result of original research and should not be previously published or in the process of being published elsewhere. Please send your abstracts and bios to gregorio.astengo@gta.arch.ethz.ch and nikolaos.magouliotis@gta.arch.ethz.ch by 15 September 2024. Authors will be notified of the committee’s decision by the end of December 2024.
The Descendants Project Purchases Woodland Plantation House
Woodland Plantation House, LaPlace, Louisiana, the oldest portions of which date to 1793. The Descendants Project purchased the house and four acres of land in January 2024 for $750,000. More information is available here»
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From National Public Radio:
Debbie Elliott, “Louisiana Plantation Where Historic Slave Revolt Started Now under Black Ownership,” NPR Morning Edition (9 July 2024).
Jo Banner is excited to show the newly acquired Woodland Plantation House near the banks of the Mississippi River.
“We have still a lot of work to do, but I think for the home to be from 1793, it looks rather good,” she beams.
The raised creole-style building has a rusty tin roof and a wide front porch. Forest green wooden shutters cover the windows and doors. The site is historically significant because this is where one of the largest slave revolts in U.S. history began. It’s also known as the German Coast Uprising because this region was settled by German immigrants.
“The start of the 1811 revolt happened here, on this porch,” Banner says.
Banner and her twin sister Joy are co-founders of the Descendants Project, a non-profit in Louisiana’s heavily industrialized river parishes—just west of New Orleans. Early this year, the group bought the Woodland Plantation Home, putting it in Black ownership for the first time [in its over 200-year history] . . .
“Our mission is to eradicate the legacies of slavery so for us, it’s the intersection of historic preservation, the preservation of our communities, which are also historic, and our fight for environmental justice,” says Joy Banner.
The full report is available here»
More information on the house is available at the Society of Architectural Historians’ Archipedia site»
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About The Descendants Project:
The Descendants Project is an emerging organization committed to the intergenerational healing and flourishing of the Black descendant community in the Louisiana river parishes. The lands of the river parishes hold the intersecting histories of enslavement, settler colonialism, and environmental degradation.
We are descended from the enslaved men, women, and children who were forced to labor at one or more of the hundreds of plantations that line the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. Starting in the 1970s, large industrial petrochemical plants began purchasing the land of these plantations still surrounded by vulnerable Black descendant communities. The region is now known as ‘Cancer Alley’ for the extreme risks of cancer and death due to pollution. The community faces many other problems such as food insecurity, high unemployment, high poverty, land dispossession, and health issues that stem from a culture of disregard for Black communities and their quality of life.
Through programming, education, advocacy, and outreach, The Descendants Project is committed to reversing the vagrancies of slavery through healing and restorative work. We aim to eliminate the narrative violence of plantation tourism and champion the voice of the Black descendant community while demanding action that supports the total well-being of Black descendants.
New Book | The Unnatural Trade
Forthcoming from Yale UP:
Brycchan Carey, The Unnatural Trade: Slavery, Abolition, and Environmental Writing, 1650–1807 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-0300224412, $65.
A look at the origins of British abolitionism as a problem of eighteenth-century science, as well as one of economics and humanitarian sensibilities
How did late eighteenth-century British abolitionists come to view the slave trade and British colonial slavery as unnatural, a ‘dread perversion’ of nature? Focusing on slavery in the Americas, and the Caribbean in particular, alongside travelers’ accounts of West Africa, Brycchan Carey shows that before the mid-eighteenth century, natural histories were a primary source of information about slavery for British and colonial readers. These natural histories were often ambivalent toward slavery, but they increasingly adopted a proslavery stance to accommodate the needs of planters by representing slavery as a ‘natural’ phenomenon. From the mid-eighteenth century, abolitionists adapted the natural history form to their own writings, and many naturalists became associated with the antislavery movement. Carey draws on descriptions of slavery and the slave trade created by naturalists and other travelers with an interest in natural history, including Richard Ligon, Hans Sloane, Griffith Hughes, Samuel Martin, and James Grainger. These environmental writings were used by abolitionists such as Anthony Benezet, James Ramsay, Thomas Clarkson, and Olaudah Equiano to build a compelling case that slavery was unnatural, a case that was popularized by abolitionist poets such as Thomas Day, Edward Rushton, Hannah More, and William Cowper.
Brycchan Carey is professor of literature, culture, and history at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne. He has published numerous books and articles on the cultural history of slavery and abolition.
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