Exhibition | So Far, So Close: Guadalupe of Mexico in Spain
José Juárez, The Virgin of Guadalupe with Four Apparitions, detail, 1656, oil on canvas, 251 × 293 cm
(Ágreda, Soria: Monasterio de Concepcionistas Franciscanas)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From the press release for the exhibition:
So Far, So Close: Guadalupe of Mexico in Spain
Museo Nacional del Prado, 10 June — 14 September 2025
Curated by Jaime Cuadriello and Paula Mues Orts
So Far, So Close: Guadalupe of Mexico in Spain casts an unprecedented gaze on the artistic dialogue between Latin America and Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, showing how the Virgin of Guadalupe was reinterpreted, reproduced, and venerated on both continents, emerging as a transatlantic devotional and political icon. The exhibition offers a new perspective on the role of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a miraculously created image, an object of worship, and symbol of identity in the Hispanic world. Through nearly 70 works, including paintings, prints, sculptures and books, the exhibition shows how this manifestation of the Virgin, which first appeared on the Cerro del Tepeyac or Tepeyac Hill in 1531, transcended the borders of New Spain to become a powerful presence in the Spanish collective imagination. The project, curated by the Mexican professors Jaime Cuadriello (UNAM) and Paula Mues Orts (INAH), is the result of years of research and collaboration between institutions. The exhibition is structured into eleven thematic sections, combining small and large-format works that range from the earliest depictions of apparitions of the Virgin to the sophisticated vera effigies reproduced for devotional or political purposes.
Attributed to Joaquín Villegas (act. ca. 1713–53), The Eternal Father Painting the Virgin of Guadalupe, ca. 1740–50, oil on canvas (México City, INBAL/Museo Nacional de Arte, Donación FONCA, 1991).
The exhibition begins with a visual cartography that charts the surprising density of the presence of images of the Virgin of Guadalupe across all of Spain. This dissemination reflects economic, social and political factors such as trade with the Indies, mining and the movement of viceregal officials. These works reflect both devotion and the concerns of communities, artists, merchants, the nobility, and the clergy, who together made the Virgin a shared devotional cult. Themes covered in the exhibition’s different sections include the transmission of the Guadalupe story through standardised narrative and visual models; the formal genealogy of the image and its connection with European Marian icons such as the Immaculate Conception and the Tota pulchra; its status as a ‘painting not made by human hand’, which relates to the concept of the Deus pictor; and the sacredness of the Virgin’s mantle, conceived as a living relic and object of veneration. A comparison is also made with Iberian painting of the same period, revealing stylistic affinities and differences with schools such as Madrid and Andalusia.
Of particular interest are the sections dedicated to the vera effigies, which are exact copies or modified versions of the original, reproduced using specialised artistic techniques. Also notable is the presence of exotic materials, such as mother-of-pearl, ivory and brass, which arrived on the Manila Galleon, demonstrating the global reach of the cult of Guadalupe and its integration into transoceanic networks of cultural exchange. The exhibition includes masterpieces by artists from New Spain and the Iberian Peninsula, including José Juárez, Juan Correa, Manuel de Arellano, Miguel Cabrera, Velázquez, Zurbarán, and Francisco Antonio Vallejo. Together they trace an artistic and symbolic map of the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe which lasted from the 17th to the early 19th century.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the Fundación Casa de México in Spain is collaborating on an extensive cultural programme that focuses on the symbolic and artistic dimension of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The programme includes lectures by the curators, a cycle of historical and contemporary films, informational capsules and workshops on traditional Mexican crafts taught by masters from Michoacán and Chiapas. These activities, taking place at the Museo del Prado and at the Fundación’s venue in Madrid, will offer participants a wide-ranging experience that interweaves history, art, and living tradition.
Jaime Cuadriello and Paula Mues Orts, eds., Tan lejos, tan cerca: Guadalupe de México en España (Madrid: Prado, 2025), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-8484806325, €32.
New Book | Beyond Adornment: Jewelry and Identity in Art
From The Getty:
Yvonne Markowitz and Susanne Gänsicke, with contributions by Emily Stoehrer, Beyond Adornment: Jewelry and Identity in Art (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2025), 184 pages, ISBN: 978-1606069622, $40.
Why do people wear jewelry? What meaning does it hold for the wearer? And what does the wearer hope it will convey to those they encounter—or to someone viewing their image decades, even centuries, later?
Artistic renderings of the human figure—in portraiture, sculpture, and other media—in a range of allegorical, historical, and religious images often showcase jewelry. The ornaments depicted in such designs offer an abundance of information that not only heightens our understanding of the subject but also provides insights into the imagination of the artist. Jewelry enhances our enjoyment of works of art because it is visually compelling, sensuous, and laden with an array of associations and symbolic meanings. Bringing together spectacular and significant art objects depicting figures wearing sumptuous personal adornments that define who they are within the specific milieus in which they lived, this richly illustrated and accessible volume represents a novel, interdisciplinary approach to the ways in which jewelry can be studied and understood.
Susanne Gänsicke is senior conservator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Yvonne J. Markowitz is the Rita J. Kaplan and Susan B. Kaplan Curator Emerita of Jewelry at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
c o n t e n t s
Timothy Potts — Foreword
Introduction — Yvonne Markowitz and Susanne Gänsicke
1 Susanne Gänsicke — Projecting a Powerful Presence
2 Susanne Gänsicke — In Search of the Spiritual
3 Yvonne Markowitz — For Those We Love and Mourn
4 Susanne Gänsicke — An Illustrious Past Serving the Present
5 Yvonne Markowitz — Fantasizing the Present
Emily Stoehrer — The Theater of Everyday Life: Dressing the Part
About the Authors
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
Index
The Burlington Magazine, May 2025
The long 18th century in the May issue of The Burlington:
The Burlington Magazine 167 (May 2025) | French Art
e d i t o r i a l
• “Fashionistas,” p. 427.
The costume institute and its annual gala in May at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (the Met), have become fixtures on the museum world’s map and calendar. Whether you delight in them or are bemused by the spectacle they provide, or indeed try and take no notice at all, they are hard to ignore. The alignment they represent between fashion history, contemporary celebrity and the gravitas of a major museum is immensely beneficial in terms of fundraising and profile.
l e t t e r
• “A Sleeping Apostolado at Wentworth Woodhouse,” pp. 428–29.
We are launching an appeal for the conservation, reframing, and rehanging of an important set of seventeenth-century paintings. We are making this appeal in honour of the art historian Alastair Laing, who died aged seventy-nine in 2024. It was he who identified the artist of this series as the Flemish painter Gérard Seghers (1591–1651). . . . By 1870 the thirteen paintings were framed in groups and fixed against the walls, as they are now, probably to give a more church-like feel to the simple prayer-book chapel of 1736, with its panelling and gallery of craved, unstained oak.
a r t i c l e s
• Yuriko Jackall, John Delaney, and Michael Swicklik, “Friendship Tokens: Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Paintings for Madame de Pompadour,” pp. 438–49.
Greuze’s paintings, known for their sentimentality and charm, were lauded by the artist’s contemporaries. Two early compositions, Simplicity and Young Shepherd Holding a Flower, were part of the collection of Madame de Pompadour; stylistic and technical analysis of them, in conjunction with another version of Simplicity, expands their early provenance.
• Humphrey Wine, “Napoleon Crossing the Alps: British Press Reaction to the London Exhibitions of David, Lefèvre, Wicar, and Lethière,” pp. 450–59.
Paintings by notable French artists were exhibited in Britain during the first third of the nineteenth century. Reactions to these works published in British newspapers and journals between 1814 and 1830 were often negative in tone and politically motivated. Despite this criticism, these accounts provide a valuable perspective on the art of the period that was shipped across the Channel.
• Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide, “Bravery, Ingenuity, and Aerial Post: An Enamelled Bowl by Joséphine-Arthurine Blot,” pp. 470–77.
During the height of the Franco-Prussian War, Gaston Tissandier made a perilous balloon journey from Paris to deliver correspondence from the besieged city. The flight is commemorated in a small bowl by Joséphine-Arthurine Blot, a technically accomplished yet little-known enamellist. Her bold design celebrates Tissandier’s bravery as well as French resistance and resourcefulness.
r e v i e w s
• Alice Minter, Review of Christophe Huchet de Quénetain, Nicolas Besnier (1686–1754): Architecte, orfèvre du roi et échevin de la Ville de Paris (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2024), pp. 516–17.
• Céline Cachaud, Review of La Tabatière Choiseul: Un monument du XVIIIe siècle, edited by Michèle Bimbenet-Privat (Éditions Faton, 2025), pp. 519–20.
• Mark Evans, Review of Ulrike Müller, Private Collectors in Brussels, Antwerp, and Ghent, ca.1780–1914: Between Public Relevance and Personal Pleasure (Brepols, 2024), pp. 521–22.
o b i t u a r y
• Christopher Baker and Stephen Duffy, Obituary for Rosalind Joy Savill (1951–2024), pp. 526–28.
An immensely successful director of the Wallace Collection, London, and a pre-eminent scholar of eighteenth-century Sèvres porcelain, Rosalind (‘Ros’) Savill had a profound and enduring impact both on the museum and the research she cared passionately about.
New Book | The Writer’s Lot
From Harvard UP:
Robert Darnton, The Writer’s Lot: Culture and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2025), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0674299887, $27.
A pioneering social history of French writers during the Age of Revolution, from a world-renowned scholar and National Book Critics Circle Award winner.
In eighteenth-century France, writers emerged as a new kind of power. They stirred passions, shaped public opinion, and helped topple the Bourbon monarchy. Whether scribbling in dreary garrets or philosophizing in salons, they exerted so much influence that the state kept them under constant surveillance. A few became celebrities, but most were hacks, and none could survive without patrons or second jobs.
The Writer’s Lot is the first book to move beyond individual biography to take the measure of ‘literary France’ as a whole. Historian Robert Darnton parses forgotten letters, manuscripts, police reports, private diaries, and newspapers to show how writers made careers and how they fit into the social order—or didn’t. Reassessing long-standing narratives of the French Revolution, Darnton shows that to be a reject was not necessarily to be a Jacobin: the toilers of the Parisian Grub Street sold their words to revolutionary publishers and government ministers alike. And while literary France contributed to the downfall of the ancien régime, it did so through its example more than its ideals: the contradiction inherent in the Republic of Letters—in theory, open to all; in practice, dominated by a well-connected clique—dramatized the oppressiveness of the French social system.
Darnton brings his trademark rigor and investigative eye to the character of literary France, from the culture war that pitted the ‘decadent’ Voltaire against the ‘radical’ Rousseau to struggling scribblers, booksellers, censors, printers, and royal spies. Their lives, little understood until now, afford rare insight into the ferment of French society during the Age of Revolution.
Robert Darnton is the author of numerous award-winning books on French cultural history, including The Revolutionary Temper. A MacArthur Fellow, chevalier in the Légion d’honneur, and winner of the National Humanities Medal and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Darnton is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library, Emeritus, at Harvard University.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction: Paths to Grub Street
1 Careers: The Ancien Régime
2 The Facts of Literary Life
3 Contemporary Views
4 Careers: Revolutionary Denouements
Conclusion
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
New Book | Women Artists & Designers at the National Trust
From the National Trust:
Rachel Conroy, with an introduction by Sandi Toksvig, Women Artists & Designers at the National Trust (National Trust, 2025), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0707804699, £15.
From the magnificent gardens created by Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst to a striking self-portrait by Angelica Kauffman, the elegant, mass-produced ceramics of Susie Cooper and a model of a Palmyran temple by lady’s maid Elizabeth Ratcliffe, this beautifully illustrated book explores the lives and work of women whose creativity has shaped the National Trust’s collections and, often, the experience of visitors to its places. Spanning six centuries, this book takes a closer look at some of the many women artists and designers whose lives are connected to National Trust places or whose work is represented in its vast collections. The selection features both talented amateur artists and professionals who have shaped the art-historical canon—such as Eileen Agar, Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, Rosalba Carriera, and Barbara Hepworth—focusing on their unique contributions and achievements across a range of disciplines, including garden and interior design, photography, illustration, enamelling, fine art, studio pottery, and textiles.
Rachel Conroy is a Senior National Curator at the National Trust and loves telling stories through objects. She has worked as a curator specialising in British decorative arts since 2004, curating many exhibitions and displays. Having contributed articles to numerous specialist journals, Rachel recently co-authored a book on historic Welsh ceramics.
Sandi Toksvig OBE is a comedian, broadcaster, campaigner, and author. Her broadcasting career has included QI, The Great British Bake Off, The News Quiz, and Call My Bluff. An activist for gender equality, Sandi co-founded the Women’s Equality Party in 2015. She is a Bye-Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, where she has delivered lectures on women in art.
New Book | Neighbours and Rivals
Published by Pallas Athene and distributed by Simon & Schuster:
Louis-Sébastian Mercier, Neighbours and Rivals: An Eighteenth-Century Journey between Paris and London, translated by Laurent Turcot and Jonathan Conlin (London: Pallas Athene, 2025), 284 pages, ISBN: 978-1843682707, £25 / $33.
The great French journalist Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s descriptions of an optimistic, utopian 18th-century London, translated by Laurent Turcot and Jonathan Conlin.
Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740–1814) first traveled to London and began recording his impressions in 1780. An exemplar of a new form of journalistic, reflective literature, his account presents emotive representations of the city as collections of experiences, habits, and personalities. And differently from Dickens’s London or Baudelaire’s Paris, with their contrasts of opulence and misery, Mercier describes a less familiar urban environment—more optimistic, perhaps even utopian. His version of London is, in fact, a projection of his philosophical imagination—not simply a rounded portrait but also a reflection of what he hoped Paris could become. For this first publication in English, Laurent Turcot and Jonathan Conlin’s translation preserves the life and humor of Mercier’s text. It is illustrated with contemporary images, with an emphasis on Thomas Rowlandson and Gabriel-Jacques de Saint-Aubin, the first Parisian flâneur-artist.
Jonathan Conlin, a senior lecturer at the University of Southampton, specializes in modern British cultural history from the 18th century to the present, with a focus on urban history. His previous books include The Nation’s Mantelpiece, Evolution and the Victorians, and Civilisation. Laurent Turcot is a professor of history at l’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, specializing in the 16th to the 19th century, particularly urban culture and leisure.
Exhibition | Picturing Nature: British Landscapes
John Robert Cozens, View of Vietri and Raito, Italy, ca. 1783, watercolor over graphite on cream laid paper (The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Stuart Collection, museum purchase funded by Francita Stuart Koelsch Ulmer in honor of Dena M. Woodall).
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Now on view at the MFAH:
Picturing Nature: The Stuart Collection
of 18th- and 19th-Century British Landscapes and Beyond
The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 12 January — 6 July 2025
Featuring more than 70 works of art in a variety of media, Picturing Nature: The Stuart Collection of 18th- and 19th-Century British Landscapes and Beyond explores how the genre of landscape evolved during an era of immense transformation in Britain. This diverse collection of watercolors, drawings, prints, and oil sketches traces the shift from topographical and picturesque depictions of the natural world to intensely personal ones that align with Romantic poetry of the period. The exhibition spotlights the Stuart Collection, built over the past decade in collaboration with Houstonian Francita Stuart Koelsch Ulmer. This exceptional collection includes standout works by notable artists such as John Constable, John Robert Cozens, Thomas Gainsborough, J.M.W. Turner, and Richard Wilson, whose innovative approaches to watercolor raised its status as an art form and heralded a golden age for the medium.
Through the work of these luminaries and their contemporaries, Picturing Nature reveals how landscape emerged as a distinct artistic genre in England in the late 1700s, then reached its greatest heights the following century, attracting international response and inspiring both artists and collectors at home and abroad. Period publications and artist’s supplies, including drawing manuals and a mid-19th-century Winsor & Newton watercolor box, further illustrate the flowering of the landscape tradition.
Dena M. Woodall, Picturing Nature: The Stuart Collection of 18th- and 19th-Century British Landscapes and Beyond, $35. The online catalogue of the Stuart Collection is available here.
New Book | The Education of Things
From the University of Massachusetts Press:
Elizabeth Massa Hoiem, The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children’s Literature, 1762–1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2024), 328 pages, ISBN: 978-1625347565 (hardback), $99 / ISBN: 978-1625347558 (paperback), $31.
Winner of the 2025 Justin G. Schiller Prize for Bibliographical Work on Children’s Books from The Bibliographical Society of America
By the close of the eighteenth century, learning to read and write became closely associated with learning about the material world, and a vast array of games and books from the era taught children how to comprehend the physical world of ‘things’. Examining a diverse archive of popular science books, primers, grammars, toys, manufacturing books, automata, and literature from Maria Edgeworth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Anna Letitia Barbauld, The Education of Things attests that material culture has long been central to children’s literature. Elizabeth Massa Hoiem argues that the combination of reading and writing with manual tinkering and scientific observation promoted in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain produced new forms of ‘mechanical literacy’, competencies that were essential in an industrial era. As work was repositioned as play, wealthy children were encouraged to do tasks in the classroom that poor children performed for wages, while working-class children honed skills that would be crucial to their social advancement as adults.
Elizabeth Massa Hoiem is assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
c o n t e n t s
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction
1 What Children Grasp: The Tangible Properties of Objects
2 Moving Bodies: Manual Labor and Children’s Play in Mechanical Philosophy Books
3 ‘The Empire of Man over Material Things’: Children’s Books on Manufacturing and Trade
4 Self-Governing Machines: Automata and Autonomy in Maria Edgeworth’s Fiction
5 ‘Knowledge That Shall Be Power in Their Hands’: Radical Grammars for Working-Class Readers
Conclusion: William Lovett’s Case of Moveable Type
Notes
Index
New Book | The National Gallery: A History
Distributed by Yale UP:
Jonathan Conlin, The National Gallery: A History (London: National Gallery Global, 2025), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-1857097191, £35 / $45.
Published in the National Gallery’s bicentenary year, this is the story of how one of the world’s finest collections of paintings was formed by (and for) the people of Britain.
For two hundred years the National Gallery has been at the heart of the nation’s life. Established in 1824 and situated in the centre of London with a commitment to free admission, it was conceived as a gallery to be enjoyed by all, while also serving as a place of refuge in times of war and crisis. The National Gallery: A History tells the story of an institution that holds education, social cohesion, and national heritage at its core, and whose outstanding collection has shaped the art historical canon over two centuries. Special focus on fifteen highlight paintings affords an opportunity to explore changes in taste over the decades, as well as the reactions of visitors to the Gallery’s great works of art.
Jonathan Conlin is professor of modern history at the University of Southampton. His books include The Met: A History of a Museum and Its People (2024) and a cultural history of the 1969 BBC2 television series Civilisation (2009).
New Book | Rethinking the Republic of Letters
Previously, Scholten has spent considerable time addressing the 970-page travel journal of the Utrecht-born Joannes Kool (1672–1712). From Amsterdam UP:
Koen Scholten, Rethinking the Republic of Letters: Memory and Identity in Early Modern Learned Communities (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025), 442 pages, ISBN: 978-9048559855, €159.
This book offers a revisionist look at the historiography of the Republic of Letters and the community of learning in early modern Europe. It suggests a new approach, conceptualising the learned world as a web of imagined communities in which the members do not know all their peers. These communities formed through distinct memory cultures and the representation of and identification with collective identities. Rethinking the Republic of Letters looks at early modern biographical dictionaries (vitae), eulogies, letters, travelogues, and funerary monuments of early modern learned men to trace the (re)formation of these communities. It thereby offers a novel perspective on early modern learned communities—the many Republics of Letters.
Koen Scholten is a historian of science and published on memory and identity in scholarly and scientific communities. He edited Memory and Identity in the Learned World (Brill, 2022) and received his PhD from Utrecht University on a thesis on the formation of early modern communities in the world of learning in 2023.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction: The Republic of Letters as an Imagined Community
1 An Inventory of Scholarly Values and Virtues
2 Collective History and Geographical Inclusion in Vitae and Elogia
3 Collective Memory and Identity in Hugo Grotius’s Correspondence
4 The Peregrinatio Literaria: Experiencing, Representing, and Forming Learned Communities
5 The Basilica di Santa Croce: The Florentine Site of Learned Memory
6 The Pieterskerk: Representing the Learned Community of Leiden University
Conclusion
Bibliography
List of Abbreviations
Manuscript Sources
Printed Sources, Before 1800
Printed Sources, Modern
Secondary Literature
Appendix 1
Corpus and Keyword Analysis
Main Corpus
Reference Corpus
Acknowledgements
Enfilade 
leave a comment