Enfilade

From Cambridge UP:

Thora Brylowe, Romantic Art in Practice: Cultural Work and the Sister Arts, 1760–1820 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-1108426404, $105.

Exploring the relationship between visual art and literature in the Romantic period, this book makes a claim for a sister-arts ‘moment’ when the relationship between painting, sculpture, pottery, and poetry held special potential for visual artists, engravers, and artisans. Elaborating these cultural tensions and associations through a number of case studies, Thora Brylowe sheds light on often untold narratives of English labouring craftsmen and artists as they translated the literary into the visual. Brylowe investigates examples from across the visual spectrum including artefacts, such as Wedgwood’s Portland Vase, antiquarianism through the work of William Blake, the career of engraver John Landseer, and the growing influence of libraries and galleries in the period, particularly Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. Brylowe artfully traces the shifting cultural connections between the imaginative word and the image in a period that saw new print technologies deluge Britain with its first mass media. Part of the Cambridge Studies in Romanticism series.

Thora Brylowe is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

C O N T E N T S

List of Figures
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Sister-Arts Moment
1  Original Copies: Wedgwood’s Portland Vase in Paint and Poem
2  William Blake, Antiquarians, and the Status of Copy
3  Literary Galleries and the Media Ecology: Painting for Print in the Age of Anthologies
4  Poetry against the Wall: The (Sister) Arts in Crisis
5  Crossing the Line: Engraving, John Landseer, and the Aftermath of the Shakespeare Gallery
6  Ravaged brides: Grecian Urns on Romantic Paper

Notes
Bibliography
Index

McKitterick is especially interested in how the idea of ‘rarity’ emerged as a part of a selection process in the face of the plenitude of print. As a secondary (maybe tertiary) theme, he also considers how books, especially during the eighteenth century, came to be regarded as rare alongside other “material relics of the past,” in part thanks to shared “aspects of connoisseurship both in sculpture and in painting, and even in old buildings” (23). The other crucial text, as noted repeatedly by McKitterick, is Kristian Jensen, Revolution and the Antiquarian Book: Reshaping the Past, 1780–1815 (Cambridge UP, 2011). –CH

From Cambridge UP:

David McKitterick, The Invention of Rare Books: Private Interest and Public Memory, 1600–1840 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 460 pages, ISBN: 978-1108584265, $63.

When does a book that is merely old become a rarity and an object of desire? David McKitterick examines, for the first time, the development of the idea of rare books, and why they matter. Studying examples from across Europe, he explores how this idea took shape in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how collectors, the book trade and libraries gradually came together to identify canons that often remain the same today. In a world that many people found to be over-supplied with books, the invention of rare books was a process of selection. As books are one of the principal means of memory, this process also created particular kinds of remembering. Taking a European perspective, McKitterick looks at these interests as they developed from being matters of largely private concern and curiosity, to the larger public and national responsibilities of the first half of the nineteenth century.

David McKitterick, FBA, was for many years Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Honorary Professor of Historical Bibliography at Cambridge. His previous publications include the three volume A History of Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, 1992–2004), Cambridge University Library: A History, Volume 2: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986), Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge, 2003), and most recently Old books, New Technologies (Cambridge, 2013). Professor McKitterick is one of the general editors of the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

Prologue
1  Inventio
2  Books as Objects
3  Survival and Selection
4  Choosing Books in Baroque Europe
5  External Appearances (1)
6  External Appearances (2)
7  Printers and Readers
8  A Seventeenth-century Revolution
9  Concepts of Rarity
10  Developing Measures of Rarity
11  Judging Appearances by Modern Standards
12  The Harleian Sales
13  Authority and Rarity
14  Rarity Established
15  The French Bibliographical Revolution
16  Books in Turmoil
17  Bibliophile Traditions
18  Fresh Foundations
19  Public Faces, Public Responsibilities
20  Conclusion

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

From Yale UP:

David Francis Taylor, The Politics of Parody: A Literary History of Caricature, 1760–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-0300223750, $50.

This engaging study explores how the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, and others were taken up by caricaturists as a means of helping the eighteenth-century British public make sense of political issues, outrages, and personalities. The first in-depth exploration of the relationship between literature and visual satire in this period, David Taylor’s book explores how great texts, seen through the lens of visual parody, shape how we understand the political world. It offers a fascinating, novel approach to literary history.

David Francis Taylor is associate professor of eighteenth-century literature at the University of Warwick and the award-winning author of Theatres of Opposition: Empire, Revolution, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

C O N T E N T S

Preface

Part One: Prints, Parody, and the Political Public
1  The Literariness of Graphic Satire
2  Looking, Literacy, and the Printshop Window

Part Two: Plotting Politics
3  The Tempest; or, The Disenchanted Island
4  Macbeth as Political Comedy
5  Paradise Lost, from the Sublime to the Ridiculous
6  Gulliver Goes to War
7  Harlequin Napoleon; or, What Literature Isn’t

Appendix: Dramatis Personae
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index

Distributed by ACC Art Books:

Carole Blumenfeld, Marguerite Gérard, 1761–1837 (Montreuil: Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2018), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-2353402731, £45.

Often dismissed merely as Fragonard’s sister-in-law, Marguerite Gérard (1761–1837) was in fact one of the major artists working in France in the late eighteenth century. Initially Fragonard’s pupil, then his assistant and finally his collaborator, she found success as an artist in her own right, becoming known for her portraits and sometimes voluptuous genre scenes. The only female genre artist of her time, she excelled in the treatment of reflections and surfaces, in the rendering of flesh, and in domestic scenes of daily life.

Standing alongside Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Marguerite Gérard is another in the distinguished company of French female artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries whose major talents and formidable characters are now being rediscovered.

One of a series of seven volumes on the ‘Cultural History of the Senses’, the volume addressing the Enlightenment, edited by Anne Vila, first appeared in 2014. It, along with the entire series, is now available in paperback from Bloomsbury Academic. More information (including a discounted offer) is available on the flyer for the series:

Anne Vila, ed., A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1350077911, £25 / $35.

This volume examines the varied ways in which the senses were perceived afresh during the Enlightenment. In addition to introducing new philosophical and scientific models which sometimes upended the classic hierarchy of the senses, this period witnessed major changes in living and working habits, including urbanization, travel and exploration, the invention of new sonic and visual media, and the rise of comfort and pleasure as values that cut across a range of social classes. As this volume shows, those developments inspired a wealth of sensorially stimulating styles of design, art, music, poetry, foodstuffs, material goods and modes of worship and entertainment.

The volume also demonstrates the period’s countervailing concern with managing the senses, evident in fields like natural philosophy, medicine, education, religion, and public hygiene. Finally, it explores some of the Enlightenment’s desensualizing tendencies, like the separation of sensuous body from discerning mind in certain arenas of science and manufacturing, and the late 18th-century shift away from a politics of publicity, or intense visual and aural scrutiny, toward the secret ballot. A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment presents essays on the following topics: the social life of the senses; urban sensations; the senses in the marketplace; the senses in religion; the senses in philosophy and science; medicine and the senses; the senses in literature; art and the senses; and sensory media.

Anne C. Vila is Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-century France (1998), as well as many articles on the body in the culture of the Enlightenment. She is currently completing a book entitled Singular Beings: Passions and Pathologies of the Scholar in France, 1720–1840.

From Archaeopress Archaeology:

John Boardman, Julia Kagan, and Claudia Wagner, with contributions by Catherine Phillips, Natter’s Museum Britannicum: British Gem Collections and Collectors of the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Archaeopress Archaeology, 2018), 316 pages, ISBN: 978-1784917272, £55 / $110.

The German gem-engraver, medallist, and amateur scholar Lorenz Natter (1705–1763), was so impressed by the size and quality of the collections of ancient and later engraved gems which he found in Britain that he proposed the publication of an extraordinarily ambitious catalogue—Museum Britannicum—which would present engravings and descriptions of the most important pieces. He made considerable progress to this end, producing several hundred drawings, but in time he decided to abandon the near completed project in the light of the apparent lack of interest shown in Britain. Only one of the intended plates in its final form ever appeared, in a catalogue which he published separately for Lord Bessborough’s collection.

On Natter’s death the single copy of his magnum opus vanished mysteriously, presumed lost forever. All hope of recovering Natter’s unpublished papers seemed vain, and their very existence had come to be doubted. Yet they were to be found more than two hundred years after his death, in spring 1975, when the classical scholar and renowned expert in gems, Oleg Neverov, chanced upon them at the bottom of a pile of papers in the archives of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Neverov and his colleague Julia Kagan carried out the initial research on the Hermitage manuscripts and produced the first published account of this archival treasure.

The present volume builds upon their earlier work to produce the first comprehensive publication of Museum Britannicum, offering full discussion in English and presenting Natter’s drawings and comments alongside modern information on the gems that can be identified and located through fresh research. This book is the result of a ten-year collaboration between scholars on the Beazley Archive gems research programme at Oxford’s Classical Art Research Centre and the State Hermitage Museum. It fulfills Natter’s vision for the Museum Britannicum—albeit two and a half centuries late—to the benefit of art historians, cultural historians, curators, and gem-lovers of today.

Sir John Boardman, FBA, is Emeritus Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art in the University of Oxford. His many books include Greek Gems and Finger Rings (2001), The Greeks Overseas (1999), Greek Art (2016), The History of Greek Vases (2006), and The World of Ancient Art (2006).

Julia Kagan is the Curator of post-Classical engraved gems in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. She has contributed to the history of glyptics in Great Britain with major publications, such as Gem Engraving in Britain from Antiquity to the Present (2010) and curated important exhibitions, such as the gem collection of the Duc D’Orleans in Paris (2001).

Claudia Wagner is Director of the gems databases at the Beazley Archive in the University of Oxford and Senior Research Lecturer at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She is joint author, with John Boardman, of seven books devoted to the study and publication of ancient gems, including The Guy Ladrière Collection of Gems and Rings (2015) and The Beverley Collection of Gems at Alnwick Castle (2016), both written with Diana Scarisbrick.

C O N T E N T S

Preface

Part One
1  An Anglo-Russian Project
2  Lorenz Natter: Early Career
3  Natter in Britain
4  Natter in Russia
5  The Museum Britannicum Rediscovered
6  Afterword

Part Two
7  The Museum Britannicum: The Catalogue and Drawings
8  The Collectors and Their Gems
9  Lorenz Natter’s Own Collection
10  Natter’s Index of the Museum Britannicum
11  Natter’s Treatise and Miscellaneous Drawings

Index of Gem Subjects
Index of Inscriptions
General Index