New Book | Early Modern Media and the News in Europe
From Brill:
Joop W. Koopmans, Early Modern Media and the News in Europe: Perspectives from the Dutch Angle (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 262 pages, ISBN: 978-9004379329, €140 / $169.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dutch Republic was one of the main centers of media in Europe. These media included newspapers, pamphlets, news digests, and engravings. Early Modern Media and the News in Europe brings together fifteen articles dealing with this early news industry in relation to politics and society, written by Joop W. Koopmans in recent decades. They demonstrate the important Dutch position within early modern news networks in Europe. Moreover, they address a variety of related themes, such as the supply of news during wars and disasters, the speed of early modern news reports, the layout of early newspapers and the news value of their advertisements, and censorship of books and news media.
Joop W. Koopmans is Senior Lecturer of Early Modern History at the University of Groningen. He has published on early modern Dutch history in a European context, including the Historical Dictionary of the Netherlands.
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Storehouses of News: The Meaning of Early Modern News Periodicals in Western Europe
Restricted Access: The Presentation of News in the Europische Mercurius, 1690–1756
The Glorification of Three Prussian Sovereigns in the Europische Mercurius, 1690–1756
Politics in Title Prints: Examples from the Dutch News Book Europische Mercurius, 1690–1756
Publishers, Editors, and Artists in the Marketing of News in the Dutch Republic, ca. 1700: The Case of Jan Goeree and the Europische Mercurius
Research in Digitized Early Modern Dutch Newspapers and the News Value of Advertisements
Anything but Marginal: The Politics of Paper Use and Layout in Early Modern Dutch Newspapers
A Sense of Europe: The Making of This Continent in Early Modern Dutch News Media
Supply and Speed of Foreign News to the Netherlands during the Eighteenth Century: A Comparison of Newspapers in Haarlem and Groningen
The Early 1730s Shipworm Disaster in Dutch News Media
The Varying Lives and Layers of Mid-Eighteenth-Century News Reports: The Example of the 1748 Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in Dutch News Media
The 1755 Lisbon Earthquake and Tsunami in Dutch News Sources: The Functioning of Early Modern News Dissemination
Wars in Early Modern News: Dutch News Media and Military Conflicts
Dutch Censorship in Relation to Foreign Contacts, 1581–1795
Spanish Tyranny and Bloody Placards: Historical Commonplaces in the Struggle between Dutch Patriots and Orangists around 1780?
Bibliography
New Book | Becoming Property
From Yale UP:
Katie Scott, Becoming Property: Art, Theory, and Law in Early Modern France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-0300222791, $75.
This original and relevant book investigates the relationship between intellectual property and the visual arts in France from the 16th century to the French Revolution. It charts the early history of privilege legislation (today’s copyright and patent) for books and inventions, and the translation of its legal terms by and for the image. Those terms are explored in their force of law and in relation to artistic discourse and creative practice in the early modern period. The consequences of commercially motivated law for art and its definitions, specifically its eventual separation from industry, are important aspects of the story. The artists who were caught up in disputes about intellectual property ranged from the officers of the Academy down to the lowest hacks of Grub Street. Lessons from this book may still apply in the 21st century; with the advent of inexpensive methods of reproduction, multiplication, and dissemination via digital channels, questions of intellectual property and the visual arts become important once more.
Katie Scott is Professor of History of Art and Architecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Exhibition | Sidesaddle, 1690–1935
Johan Zoffany, The Drummond Family, detail, ca. 1769, oil on canvas, 41 × 63 inches
(New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)
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On view at the National Sporting Library & Museum:
Sidesaddle, 1690–1935
National Sporting Library & Museum, Middleburg, VA, 8 September 2018 — 24 March 2019
Curated by Ulrike Weiss and Claudia Pfeiffer
In art and sport, the poised equestrian riding aside embodies the essence of elegance, power, and grace. Hidden beneath the flowing skirts of the rider is the sidesaddle, the design of which has evolved dramatically in response to the physical demands of sporting women (and sometimes men) requiring a firm seat as they began to meet the challenges of jumping and galloping across the countryside.
Sidesaddle, 1690–1935 presents a revealing perspective on the history and culture of women as equestrians, their depictions in sporting art, and the evolution of sidesaddle tack and attire represented in British, Continental, and American art from the 17th to the 20th centuries. The exhibition showcases over sixty paintings, works on paper, and sculptures on loan from museums and private collections. Co-curators Dr. Ulrike Weiss, Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and Claudia Pfeiffer, the George L. Ohrstrom, Jr. Curator of Art at NSLM, are contributing essays to the accompanying catalog.
Ulrike Weiss and Claudia Pfeiffer, Sidesaddle, 1690–1935 (Middleburg: National Sporting Library & Museum, 2018), ISBN: 978-0996890540, $25.
New Book | Chinese Porcelain in Colonial Mexico
From Palgrave Macmillan:
Meha Priyadarshini, Chinese Porcelain in Colonial Mexico: The Material Worlds of an Early Modern Trade (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 198 pages, ISBN: 978-3319665467, £79 / $99.
This book follows Chinese porcelain through the commodity chain, from its production in China to trade with Spanish Merchants in Manila, and to its eventual adoption by colonial society in Mexico. As trade connections increased in the early modern period, porcelain became an immensely popular and global product. This study focuses on one of the most exported objects, the guan. It shows how this porcelain jar was produced, made accessible across vast distances and how designs were borrowed and transformed into new creations within different artistic cultures. While people had increased access to global markets and products, this book argues that this new connectivity could engender more local outlooks and even heightened isolation in some places. It looks beyond the guan to the broader context of transpacific trade during this period, highlighting the importance and impact of Asian commodities in Spanish America.
Meha Priyadarshini is Fellow at the Sciences Po Europe-Asia Programme in Le Havre, France. Her research and teaching interests include global history, material culture studies, colonial Latin American history, and art history. She earned her PhD from Columbia University and has held fellowships at the Getty Research Institute, the European University Institute, and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence.
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
Crafting a Global Brand: Jingdezhen and Its Artisans in the Early Modern World
From Junk to Galleon: Commercial Activity in Manila
A Parián in the Plaza Mayor: Making Space for Asia in Colonial Mexico
Blue-and-white Chocolateros: Crafting a Local Aesthetic in a Colonial Context
Conclusion: Themes from a Connected World
Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding’s review of the book for J18 (October 2018) is available here.
Exhibition | Piqué at the Court of Naples
Giuseppe Sarao, Piqué Table, ca. 1730s
(Saint Petersburg: The Hermitage)
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From Galerie Kugel:
Piqué: Gold, Tortoiseshell, and Mother-of-Pearl at the Court of Naples
Complètement Piqué! Le fol art de l’écaille à la Cour de Naples
Galerie Kugel, Paris, 12 September — 8 December 2018
Galerie J. Kugel presents the first exhibition devoted to the art of piqué, which flourished in Naples during the first half of the 18th century. The technique combines lavish inventiveness, virtuoso skill, and astonishing opulence. These extraordinary objects bring together three precious materials: tortoiseshell, gold, and mother-of-pearl. According to Nicolas Kugel: “This fascinating combination is sublimated by light, which makes the gold shimmer, reveals the iridescence of the mother-of-pearl, and penetrates even the diaphanous darkness of the tortoiseshell.”
Piqué chest with chinoiserie details and four turtle-shaped feet, eighteenth century.
The exhibition includes over 50 objects created between 1720 and 1760 for connoisseurs and the court, particularly for Charles of Bourbon, who became king of Naples in 1734 and made his court one of the most splendid and cosmopolitan in all Europe. The artisans who created these masterpieces were known as Tartarugari. Giuseppe Sarao, the most famous among them, had a workshop adjoining the walls of the royal palace. Several of the pieces in the exhibition were made by Sarao, including a table—the ultimate piqué masterpiece—here lent, for the first time, by the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.
These talented artists were able not only to join and mold the tortoiseshell using boiling water and olive oil, but also inlaid gold and mother-of-pearl into the still-soft tortoiseshell. They created the most extravagant shapes, which they adorned with fashionable piqué decors such as singeries (scenes where monkeys engage in human activities), chinoiseries, and grotesques.
Alexis Kugel explains: “The exhibition will allow visitors to discover both the incredible inventiveness of the artists and the extraordinarily keen interest this art sparked among 19th-century collectors, including several members of the Rothschild family. Many pieces boasting that prestigious provenance will be presented.”
The extraordinary table from the Hermitage Museum is the greatest masterpiece to have been created using the pique technique. It is also the only table to have retained its original legs. The triangular shape of the legs is also present in the cabinet from the Royal British Collections. The extraordinarily inventive and elaborate tabletop is adorned with over a hundred chinoiserie figures, while countless animals, monkeys, insects, birds, and dragons also inhabit the space. The six main medallions depict Chinese couples in gold and mother-of-pearl, two of which are also found on the turtle casket. The compartments are decorated with small Chinese figures made of cut out and engraved gold. In the centre, four gold vases symbolise the seasons; the figures between refer to the same theme. The centre is adorned with a small cartouche in which two figures rock back and forth on a seesaw. The Chinese theme continues on the legs and stretcher. Underneath the medallion with the Chinese couple there is the monogram SfN (Sarao fecit Napoli). In 1886 Baron Stieglitz purchased the table from the Frankfort antique dealer Goldschmidt, one of the main suppliers to Mayer Carl de Rothschild, also a great connoisseur of tortoiseshell piqué. It was no doubt the death of Mayer Carl that same year (1886) that allowed Stieglitz to acquire the table. It stood in the Stieglitz Museum of Applied Arts and was transferred to the Hermitage after 1924.
The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, offering the first complete study of the subject. The French version will be published by Monelle Hayot and the English version by Rizzoli.
Nazanin Lankarani wrote about the exhibition for The New York Times (7 September 2018).
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From Rizzoli:
Alexis Kugel, Piqué: Gold, Tortoiseshell, and Mother-of-Pearl at the Court of Naples (New York: Rizzoli, 2018), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-8891820617, $60.
The first volume dedicated to the most complete and outstanding collection of piqué objects ever assembled, a number of which have never been published before. The volume is dedicated to the art of piqué, created in Naples during the first half of the eighteenth century, a technique that combines remarkable inventiveness, virtuoso skill, and astonishing opulence. These extraordinary objects are made of three precious materials: tortoiseshell, gold, and mother-of-pearl. These pieces were made between 1720 and 1760 for the public and the court, especially for Charles de Bourbon, King of Naples. The authors of these creations were known as tartarugari. Among the most famous tartarugari was Giuseppe Sarao, whose studio was next to the walls of the Royal Palace and who created some of the pieces presented in this book. Also included is an extraordinary table from the Hermitage Museum, considered to be the greatest masterpiece created using the piqué technique, and still retaining its original legs. The catalogue will allow readers to discover both the incredible inventiveness of the artists and the extraordinarily keen interest this art sparked among nineteenth-century collectors, including several members of the Rothschild family. The volume presents more than fifty objects, representing the masterpieces of this technique. The objects are introduced by a study of the subject and a text explaining the historical context.
Alexis Kugel is a member of the fifth generation of a family of antiques dealers whose company was founded in Russia at the end of the eighteenth century. Based in Paris since 1924, they expanded the business of silver and jewelry to deal in fine furniture, works of art and sculpture, Kunstkammer objects, ivories, Renaissance jewelry, and scientific instruments.
Exhibition | Fuseli: Drama and Theater
Now on view at the Kunstmuseum Basel:
Fuseli: Drama and Theatre
Kunstmuseum Basel, 20 October 2018 — 2 October 2019
Curated by Eva Reifert
Thirteen years after the last major presentation of his work in Switzerland, at the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Kunstmuseum Basel mounts a comprehensive monographic exhibition of the work of Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), a native son of Zurich who rose to fame in Rome and London. One of the most inventive and unconventional innovators in late-eighteenth-century art, Fuseli stood on the threshold between classicism and nascent Romanticism. His oeuvre bears eloquent witness to the competing artistic paradigms in the waning decades of the Age of Enlightenment.
Fuseli styled himself as a painter of Dark Romanticism and ‘Gothic horror’, and that aspect of his oeuvre is still most familiar to audiences today. Shifting the focus, the exhibition demonstrates that drama and theater were no less vital to his artistic vision: the erudite artist’s creations almost invariably draw on literary motifs, quoting ancient mythology, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, or the recently rediscovered Nibelungen saga. After his return from Rome to London in 1779, Shakespeare’s plays become another major source of motifs in his art, as his contributions to John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery illustrate. Drama and Theater—the title captures the interest in the themes from literary and stage works chosen by Fuseli that animates the exhibition, but it also describes his dynamic compositions and constellations of characters and the ‘theatrical’ devices that often enliven his depictions.
Like Fuseli’s art itself, Drama and Theater is hardly subtle. The artist’s seven paintings in the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel, the municipal art collection of Basel, are complemented by works generously provided on loan by the Kunsthaus Zürich and other international museums and private collections. Reflecting on the conjunction of literature, theater, and visual art from another angle, Thom Luz, resident director at Theater Basel, will enhance the exhibition by bringing his contemporary theatrical practice into the gallery. The installation is realized in collaboration with the video artist Jonas Alsleben.
Eva Reifert, ed., Fuseli: Drama and Theatre (London: Prestel, 2018), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-3791357584, £45 / $60.
New Book | Telling Objects
In addition to Telling Objects, the latest output from the Marrying Cultures project, previous publications include:
• Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly and Adam Morton, eds., Queens Consort, Cultural Transfer, and European Politics, 1500–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2016), 274 pages, ISBN: 978-1472458384, $160. With more information here»
• Almut Bues, ed., Frictions and Failures: Cultural Encounters in Crisis (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2017), ISBN 978-3447107365, $75. With more information here»
• Elise Dermineur, Queen Luise Ulrike: Gender and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Sweden (New York: Routledge, 2017), 254 pages, ISBN: 978-1472476661, $150. With more information here»
From Harrassowitz Verlag:
Jill Bepler and Svante Norrhem, eds., Telling Objects: Contextualizing the Role of the Consort in Early Modern Europe (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2018), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-3447109352, 68€.
The idea for this volume originated from discussions at the first international conference of the HERA project Marrying Cultures. Colleagues from museums, galleries, and university contexts were asked to focus not on the figure of the early modern consort herself but on specific objects or genres of objects associated with her. When a royal bride moved from one territory to another, she transported quantities of furniture, books, paintings, clothes, or jewelry to her new home. In later life, she often continued to acquire things from her native country or via her dynastic networks or she could serve as a conduit through which objects were ‘exported’.
Two introductory essays look at patterns of exchange and inheritance. The case studies of objects that follow reveal general patterns of cultural exchange set in motion by royal consorts, in several cases focusing on relatively under-studied courts and dynasties. East and west, north and south were interconnected by objects and people through physical travel and via letters and in print. Gifts, trade, or inheritance played a part in moving objects over space and time. These essays give examples of how objects on the move could transfer value (symbolic, dynastic, or financial) and how the perception of these objects, many of which have become part of contemporary national heritage, changed across generations along with the impact they had, both culturally and politically.
C O N T E N T S
Jill Bepler and Svante Norrhem, Introduction
Cultural Transfer and Exchange
• Volker Bauer, Connecting Courts, Castles, Capitals: Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Society of Princes
• Almut Bues, Inventories and the Movement of Objects
Genres and Materials
• Catharine MacLeod, Facing Europe: The Portraiture of Anne of Denmark (1574–1619)
• Margherita Palumbo, ‘I was much courted by the entire English nation’: The English Books Owned by Sophie of the Palatinate, Electress of Hanover
• Adelina Modesti, ‘Nelle mode le più novelle’: The Latest Fashion Trends (Textiles, Clothing and Luxury Fabrics) at the Court of Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere de’ Medici of Tuscany
Individual Objects Transformed
• Ewa Kociszewska, Devotion and Unbelief of the Gonzaga Sisters: The Relic of the True Cross in Poland and France
• Mara Wade, Princess Magdalena Sibylle’s Golden Horn: Dynastic Women and Cultural Transfer between Denmark and Saxony
Gift Culture
• Katrin Keller, Tulips, Tobacco, and Parrots: Consorts and Their Role in the Transfer of Animals and Plants in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century
• Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, Gender, Dynasty and the Politics of Porcelain: The Fact and Impact of Meissen Gifts to Royal Women, ca. 1714–50
• MarÍlia dos Santos Lopes, A Personal Gift – A Part of Cultural Heritage: The Coach Brought to Lisbon by Maria Anna of Austria
• Joanna Marschner, The Ivory Egg: Elisabeth Charlotte, Princess Palatine’s Gift to Caroline of Ansbach
About the Authors
Index
New Book | The Agency of Display
The essays in this edited volume originated from the conference Collections, Displays and the Agency of Objects (Cambridge University, 20–22 September 2017), which was part of the project ‘Parerga and Paratexts – How Things Enter Language: Practices and Forms of Presentation in Goethe’s Collections’. From Sandstein Verlag:
Johannes Grave, Christiane Holm, Valérie Kobi, and Caroline van Eck, eds., The Agency of Display: Objects, Framings, and Parerga (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2018), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-3954984169, 38€.
The display of artefacts always implies an external mediation that influences, and often codifies, the reception of the exhibits. Objects are manipulated, restored, appropriated, staged, in short displayed, through various representational strategies that include pedestals, labels, and showcases. These elements, which we could define as parerga, are often ignored because of their utilitarian function. Yet, they play an important role in the history of the artefacts and define the setting in which the objects can exert their agency. They not only shape their meaning, but also determine the effect that these artefacts have on their viewers. Framing devices create the conditions for interactions between the individual and the object to take place. This publication aims to explore the relation between artefacts and viewers as they are manifested in framing devices, and to develop a new theoretical framework for thinking about the power of objects on display.
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments
Johannes Grave, Christiane Holm, Valérie Kobi, and Caroline van Eck, The Agency of Display: Objects, Framings, and Parerga—Introductory Thoughts
1 Display Situations
• Ivan Gaskell, Display Displayed
• Elsie Van Kessel, The Street as Frame: Corpus Christi Processions in Lisbon prior to João V
• Hannah Williams, Staging Belief: Immersive Encounters and the Agency of Religious Art in Eighteenth-Century Paris
• Mechthild Fend, Order and Affect: The Museum of Dermatological Wax Moulages at the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris
• Cindy Kang, The Barnes Ensembles, Again
2 Parergonal Operations
• Dario Gamboni, Ready-Made Eye-Opener: Models, Functions, and Meanings of the Ironwork in Albert C. Barnes’s Displays
• Peter Schade The Reframing of Lazarus
• Diana Stört, Displaying Knowledge: Goethe’s Cabinets as Epistemic Furniture
• Angela Matyssek, Death by / Life by Wall Label
• Noémie Étienne, When Things Do Talk (in Storage): Materiality and Agency between Contact and Conflict Zones
Contributors
Picture Credits
Imprint
Exhibition | William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum
Press release (12 September 2018) for the exhibition:
William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum
The Hunterian, Glasgow, 28 September 2018 — 6 January 2019
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 14 February — 20 May 2019
Curated by Mungo Campbell with Nathan Flis and Lola Sánchez-Jáuregui
A major new exhibition at The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, will mark an important anniversary in the history of Scotland’s oldest public museum. William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum opens on 28 September 2018 and marks the William Hunter Tercentenary—300 years since the birth of Hunterian founder, Dr William Hunter (1718–1783). The exhibition not only offers a critical examination of Hunter—a man of exceptional vision who saw no boundaries between art and science, but explores his life, character, and career as well as his research, collection, and links to Glasgow.
Rhetenor blue morpho butterfly (Morpho rhetenor Cramer), 1775, Suriname (Hunterian, University of Glasgow).
Hunter’s original Enlightenment collection is a rare example which has survived largely intact and these objects and artworks are the foundation of The Hunterian collections today. William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum showcases this truly unique collection, encyclopaedic in nature and with its heart in the Scottish Enlightenment. The exhibition also offers a balanced account of the circumstances that made a collection like Hunter’s possible and examines the means by which it was amassed. Visitors will have the opportunity to see key items from Hunter’s collection, reunited for the first time in over 150 years and displayed to highlight the connections between them.
More than 400 items will be on display including: fossils; anatomical specimens and preparations; paintings, drawings and prints; rare books and manuscripts; ethnographical objects; rocks and mineral specimens; coins and medals; shells, corals, beetles, butterflies and examples of taxidermy. The majority come from The Hunterian, and Archives and Special Collections at the University of Glasgow Library, where Hunter’s collection of books and manuscripts is kept.
Key loans include a life size écorché figure from the Royal Academy of Arts in London and Johan Zoffany’s painting William Hunter Lecturing that shows William Hunter delivering an anatomy class, on loan from the Royal College of Physicians in London.
Important conservation work has been carried out on a number of items from Hunter’s collection including paintings, frames, sculptures, textiles, books, works on paper and objects of decorative art.
Ferdinand Verbiest, Kunyu Quantu 坤輿全圖 (A Map of the Whole World),1674, woodblock print on paper laid down on cloth, in four parts (Hunterian, University of Glasgow).
Must see items include:
• Four of Hunter’s plaster cast models, now fully restored, which were used in preparation for his great publication Anatomia Uteri Humani Gravidi Tabulis Illustrate (Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Figures, 1774). A selection of related drawings, prints, and proofs are included, many of which have not been on display before. The casts show the various stages of the pregnant human womb in progressive states of dissection in graphic and stunning naturalistic detail.
• Our unique 17th-century Chinese map of the world, displayed in its entirety for the first time.
• Hunter’s complete collection of 88 gold Roman coins, issued by every Roman Emperor from 27BCE to 491CE. The Hunterian is one of only three places in the world where such a complete series can be seen.
• Hunter’s will — on loan from the National Archives of Scotland and on public display for the first time.
• The life-size écorché figure on loan from the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
• An exceptional and fully restored 18th-century Maori cloak from New Zealand made of flax and feathers.
• The Hunterian Psalter — usually housed in Archives and Special Collections at the University of Glasgow Library, this lavishly illuminated bound English manuscript is dated to 1170 and is considered the greatest treasure of William Hunter’s library.
William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum also reveals the contribution made by Hunter to the development of modern museums as we know them today, exploring the interplay between the arts and sciences in the pursuit of knowledge over the course of the 18th century.
Jean-Siméon Chardin, A Lady Taking Tea, 1735, oil on canvas (Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow).
The exhibition and publication William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum are the result of a five-year collaborative research project between The Hunterian and the Yale Center for British Art and showcase new research undertaken by an international team of scholars. The lead curator is Mungo Campbell, Deputy Director of The Hunterian; and the organizing curator at the Yale Center for British Art is Nathan Flis, Head of Exhibitions and Publications, and Assistant Curator of Seventeenth-Century Paintings. They are assisted by Lola Sanchez-Jauregui, William Hunter Tercentenary Curator at The Hunterian. A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue will be published by The Hunterian and the Center in association with Yale University Press.
Running in parallel with William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum are two exhibitions offering 21st-century responses to Hunter’s collections, life, and work. Strange Foreign Bodies and Rosengarten showcase the work of leading contemporary artists and writers including Claire Barclay, Christine Borland, Anne Bevan, and Janice Galloway.
Strange Foreign Bodies is a group exhibition of films, prints, and sculptural works by artists including Claire Barclay, Christine Borland, Sarah Browne, Alex Impey, and Phillip Warnell. Taking William Hunter’s Tercentenary as its point of departure, the exhibition offers a 21st-century perspective on Hunter’s Enlightenment project, with processes of mutation, metamorphosis, and technological transformation central to many of the works. We encounter the story of a woman who has turned into an octopus, the philosophical reflections of a heart transplant patient, and the simulated breathing of an animatronic medical mannequin. These ‘strange foreign bodies’ reflect the complexity of all human embodiment today.
Rosengarten is a unique installation that brings together the sculpture of Anne Bevan and the words of Janice Galloway, two of Scotland’s foremost artists in their fields. Inspired by obstetric implements and important historic medical collections, Rosengarten looks at the tools of birthing and powerfully reflects the human and tender emotions of mother and baby that run parallel to the hard and frequently interventive experiences associated with modern childbirth.
William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum is at the Hunterian Art Gallery from 28 September 2018 until 6 January 2019 then at the Yale Center for British Art (Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA) from 14 February until 20 May 2019. The project has been generously supported by The Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Museums Galleries Scotland, and the Rev. Dr Donald McKellar Leitch Urie Bequest. Strange Foreign Bodies, also at the Hunterian Art Gallery, runs from 28 September 2018 until 13 January 2019. Rosengarten is now open at the Hunterian Art Gallery and runs until 20 January 2019. Purchased with funds from the National Collecting Scheme for Scotland and a grant from the Art Fund. Admission to all three exhibitions is free.
S E L E C T E D P R O G R A M M I N G
3 October 2018 — Mungo Campbell (The Hunterian), William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum: Curator’s Introduction
10 October 2018 — Christine Whyte (Lecturer in Global History, University of Glasgow), A Triangular Trade of Medical Knowledge: William Hunter, Enslaved Women, and Scottish Medical Expertise
William Hunter and Assistants, Anatomical Specimens: Arteries of the Intestine, 1746–83, portion of human gut with mesentery, turpentine and glass jar; portion of human gut and glass jar; portion of human gut with mesentery, turpentine and glass jar (Hunterian, University of Glasgow).
17 October 2018 — Paul Rea (Senior Lecturer in Human Life Sciences, University of Glasgow), Anatomy in the Digital Age
24 October 2018 — Dominic Paterson (The Hunterian), Strange Foreign Bodies
31 October 2018 — Jeanne Robinson (The Hunterian), ‘Mr Termite’: An Agent of Entomology and the Empire in 18th-Century Sierra Leone
7 November 2018 — Alicia Hughes (University of Glasgow), Title to be confirmed
14 November 2018 — Anne Dulau Beveridge (The Hunterian), The Curious Collector: What William Hunter’s Portraits Tell Us about the Man
21 November 2018 — Maggie Reilly (The Hunterian), Title to be confirmed
28 November 2018 — Michelle Craig (Leverhulme Trust Doctoral Scholar, University of Glasgow), The Curious Collector: Provenance in William Hunter’s Library
5 December 2018 — Matthew Sangster (Lecturer in 18th-Century Literature and Material Culture, University of Glasgow), Conceptions of Knowledge in William Hunter’s Library
12 December 2018 — Jesper Ericsson (The Hunterian), Title to be confirmed
19 December 2018 — Frances Osis (University of Glasgow), Title to be confirmed
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The catalogue is published by the Yale Center for British Art:
Edited by Mungo Campbell and Nathan Flis, with the assistance of María Dolores Sánchez-Jáuregui, William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art in association with The Hunterian, 2018), 440 pages, ISBN: 978-0300236651, $65.
Accompanying a groundbreaking exhibition, this publication is the first in 150 years to assess the contribution made by Hunter, the Scottish-born obstetrician, anatomist, and collector, to the development of the modern museum as a public institution. Essays examine how Hunter gathered his collection to be used as a source of knowledge and instruction, encompassing outstanding paintings and works on paper, coins and medals, and anatomical and zoological specimens. Hunter also possessed ethnographic artifacts from Spain, the Middle East, China, and the South Pacific, and was an avid collector of medieval manuscripts and incunabula; these were all located within one of the most important ‘working’ libraries of eighteenth-century London.
C O N T E N T S
Amy Meyers and Steph Scholten, Directors’ Foreword
Mungo Campbell and Nathan Flis, Acknowledgments
Contributors’ Biographies
Seren Nolan, William Hunter: A Chronology
Part I Physician, Anatomist, Collector
• Mungo Campbell, William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum: An Introduction
• Nathan Flis, Skeletons in Hunter’s Closet: James Douglas and the Fashioning of William Hunter
• Craig Ashley Hanson, A Motto for a Museum: William Hunter’s Inheritance from Richard Mead
• Matthew Sangster, Conceptions of Knowledge in William Hunter’s Library
• Meredith Gamer, Scalpel to Burin: A Material History of William Hunter’s Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus
• Dominik Hünniger, ‘Extolled by Foreigners’: William Hunter’s Collection and the Development of Science and Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Europe
• Nicholas Thomas, ‘A Great Collection of Curiosities from the South Sea Islands’: William Hunter’s Ethnography
• María Dolores Sánchez-Jáuregui, Anatomical Jars and Butterflies: Curating Knowledge in William Hunter’s Museum
Part II Catalogue of the Exhibition
• Mungo Campbell, Portraits and Papers
• Mungo Campbell, Pedagogy and Professional Practice
• Peter Black, Anatomical Illustration and the Practice of Anatomy
• Maggie Reilly and Stuart McDonald, Anatomical Preparations
• Mungo Campbell, The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus
• Peter Black and Anne Dulau Beveridge, Pictures
• Michelle Craig, The Library
• Donal Bateson, Coins and Medals
• Mungo Campbell, Pacific and Other ‘Curiosities’
• Maggie Reilly and Jeanne Robinson, Shells, Corals, Birds, Insects, and Other Preserved Animals
• John Faithfull and Neil Clark, Ores and Fossils
Appendices
1 Letter from William Hunter to William Cullen, 2–20 April 1765
2 Sale Catalogue of William Hunter’s Personal Effects, 1783
Selected Bibliography
Index
Photography Credits
New Book | Local Antiquities, Local Identities
From Manchester UP:
Kathleen Christian and Bianca de Divitiis, eds., Local Antiquities, Local Identities: Art, Literature, and Antiquarianism in Europe, c. 1400–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-1526117045, £80.
This collection investigates the wide array of local antiquarian practices that developed across Europe in the early modern era. Breaking new ground, it explores local concepts of antiquity in a period that has been defined as a uniform ‘Renaissance’. Contributors take a novel approach to the revival of the antique in different parts of Italy, as well as examining other, less widely studied antiquarian traditions in France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Britain and Poland. They consider how real or fictive ruins, inscriptions and literary works were used to demonstrate a particular idea of local origins, to rewrite history or to vaunt civic pride. In doing so, they tackle such varied subjects as municipal antiquities collections in Southern Italy and France, the antiquarian response to the pagan, Christian and Islamic past on the Iberian Peninsula, and Netherlandish interest in megalithic ruins thought to be traces of a prehistoric race of Giants.
Kathleen Christian is Senior Lecturer in Art History at The Open University. Bianca de Divitiis is Associate Professor in the History of Modern Art at the University of Naples Federico II.
C O N T E N T S
Kathleen Christian and Bianca de Divitiis, Introduction
1 Richard Schofield, A Local Renaissance: Florentine Quattrocento Palaces and all’antica Styles
2 Francesco Benelli, The Arch of Trajan in Ancona and Civic Identity in the Italian Quattrocento from Ciriaco d’Ancona to the Death of Matthias Corvinus
3 Kathleen Christian, Roma Caput Mundi: Rome’s Local Antiquities as Symbol and Source
4 Bianca de Divitiis, A Local Sense of the Past: Spolia, Re-Use, and all’antica Building in Southern Italy, 1400–1600
5 Oren Margolis, The Gaulish Past of Milan and the French Invasion of Italy
6 William Stenhouse, Reusing and Redisplaying Antiquities in Early Modern France
7 Fernando Marías, Local Antiquities in Spain: From Tarragona to Córdoba
8 Katrina Olds, Local Antiquaries and the Expansive Sense of the Past: A Case Study from Counter-Reformation Spain
9 João Figueiredo, Luís de Camões’s The Lusiads and the Paradoxes of Expansion
10 Edward Wouk, Semini and His Progeny: The Construction of Antwerp’s Antique Past
11 Krista De Jonge, Resurrecting Belgica Romana: Peter Ernst von Mansfeld’s Garden of Antiquities in Clausen, Luxemburg, 1563–90
12 Konrad Ottenheym, On Romans, Batavians, and Giants: The Quest for the True Origin of Architecture in the Dutch Republic
13 Barbara Arciszewska, The Role of Ancient Remains in the Sarmatian Culture of Early Modern Poland
14 Jenna Schultz, Inventing England: English Identity and the Scottish ‘Other’, 1586–1625
Index
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