Enfilade

New Book | Battlefield Emotions, 1500–1800

Posted in books by Editor on February 1, 2017

From Palgrave Macmillan:

Erika Kuijpers and Cornelis van der Haven, eds., Battlefield Emotions, 1500–1800: Practices, Experience, Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 303 pages, ISBN: 978  1137  564894, $109.

41p1kfbmxul-_sx351_bo1204203200_This book explores changes in emotional cultures of the early modern battlefield. Military action involves extraordinary modes of emotional experience and affective control of the soldier, and it evokes strong emotional reactions in society at large. While emotional experiences of actors and observers may differ radically, they can also be tightly connected through social interaction, cultural representations and mediatisation. The book integrates psychological, social and cultural perspectives on the battlefield, looking at emotional behaviour, expression and representation in a great variety of primary source material. In three steps it discusses the emotional practices in the army, the emotional experiences of the individual combatant and the emotions of the mediated battlefield in the visual arts.

Erika Kuijpers teaches cultural history at VU University, the Netherlands. Her previous work concerned the social history of early modern migration and labour relations. From 2008 to 2013 she worked at Leiden University, researching memories of the Dutch Revolt, as part of the VICI research project Tales of the Revolt: Memory, Oblivion and Identity in the Low Countries, 1566–1700. She is co-editor of the volume Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (2013) and is working on a monograph about the way early modern witnesses and victims of war dealt with traumatic memories.

Cornelis van der Haven is a literary historian who has published on Dutch and German theatre and literature in the 17th and 18th centuries, with a strong focus on the role of literary texts in shaping cultural and social identities. He lectures at the Literary Department of Ghent University, Belgium.

C O N T E N T S

1  Erika Kuijpers and Cornelis van der Haven, Battlefield Emotions 1500–1800: Practices, Experience, Imagination
2  Cornelis van der Haven, Drill and Allocution as Emotional Practices in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Poetry, Plays, and Military Treatises
3  Andreas  Bähr, Magical Swords and Heavenly Weapons: Battlefield Fear(lessness) in the Seventeenth Century
4  Bettina Noak, Emotions, Imagination, and Surgery: Wounded Warriors in the Work of Ambroise Paré and Johan van Beverwijck
5  Ilya Berkovich, Fear, Honour and Emotional Control on the Eighteenth-Century Battlefield
6  Johan Verberckmoes, Early Modern Jokes on Fearing Soldiers
7  Brian Sandberg, ‘His Courage Produced More Fear in His Enemies than Shame in His Soldiers’: Siege Combat and Emotional Display in the French Wars of Religion
8  Marian Füssel, Emotions in the Making: The Transformation of Battlefield Experiences during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63)
9  Ian Germani, Mediated Battlefields of the French Revolution and Emotives at Work
10 Mary Favret, Whose Battlefield Emotion?
11 Lisa De Boer, The Sidelong Glance: Tracing Battlefield Emotions in Dutch Art of the Golden Age
12 Valerie Mainz, Deflecting the Fire of Eighteenth-Century French Battle Painting
13 Philip Shaw, Picturing Valenciennes: Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg and the Emotional Regulation of British Military Art in the 1790s
14 Dorothee Sturkenboom, Battlefield Emotions in Early Modern Europe: Trends, Key Issues, and Blind Spots

 

Save

New Book | Days of Glory? Imaging Military Recruitment

Posted in books by Editor on February 1, 2017

From Palgrave Macmillan:

Valerie Mainz, Days of Glory? Imaging Military Recruitment and the French Revolution (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 298 pages, ISBN 978  1137  542946, $90.

51qsjnxehkl-_sx352_bo1204203200_This book examines a range of visual images of military recruitment to explore changing notions of glory, or of gloire, during the French Revolution. It raises questions about how this event re-orientated notions of ‘citizenship’ and of service to ‘la Patrie’. The opening lines of the Marseillaise are grandly declamatory: Allons enfants de la Patrie/le jour de gloire est arrivé!  or, in English: Arise, children of the Homeland/The day of glory has arrived! What do these words mean in their later eighteenth-century French context? What was gloire and how was it changed by the revolutionary process? This military song, later adopted as the national anthem, represents a deceptively unifying moment of collective engagement in the making of the modern French nation. Valerie Mainz questions this through a close study of visual imagery dealing with the issue of military recruitment.  From neoclassical painting to popular prints, such images typically dealt with the shift from civilian to soldier, focusing on how men, and not women, were called to serve the Homeland.

Valerie Mainz is Senior Lecturer in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, UK, having previously worked in both the commercial and subsidised sectors of the theatre. She has curated exhibitions on the French Revolution at the University Gallery, University of Leeds in 1998, at the Musée de la Révolution française, Vizille in 1999 and, together with Richard Williams, at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds in 2006.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
Signing Up before the Revolution
Transforming
Recruitment and Revolution before Thermidor
Fighting Women
Fame’s Two Trumpets

New Book | Staging Blackness and Performing Whiteness

Posted in books by Editor on January 30, 2017

From Routledge:

Wendy Sutherland, Staging Blackness and Performing Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century German Drama (New York: Routledge, 2016), 272 pages, ISBN: 978  14094  24024, $150.

9781409424024Focusing on eighteenth-century cultural productions, Wendy Sutherland examines how representations of race in philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, drama, and court painting influenced the construction of a white bourgeois German self. Sutherland positions her work within the framework of the transatlantic slave trade, showing that slavery, colonialism, and the triangular trade between Europe, West Africa, and the Caribbean function as the global stage on which German bourgeois dramas by Friedrich Wilhelm Ziegler, Ernst Lorenz Rathlef, and Theodor Körner (and a novella by Heinrich von Kleist on which Körner’s play was based) were performed against a backdrop of philosophical and anthropological influences. Plays had an important role in educating the rising bourgeois class in morality, Sutherland argues, with fathers and daughters offered as exemplary moral figures in contrast to the depraved aristocracy. At the same time, black female protagonists in nontraditional dramas represent the boundaries of physical beauty and marriage eligibility while also complicating ideas of moral beauty embodied in the concept of the beautiful soul. Her book offers convincing evidence that the eighteenth-century German stage grappled with the representation of blackness during the Age of Goethe, even though the German states were neither colonial powers nor direct participants in the slave trade.

Wendy Sutherland is Associate Professor of German at New College of Florida.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
Race in Eighteenth-Century Germany
Slavery, Colonialism, and the Eighteenth-Century Global Stage
‘Looking at the Overlooked’: Stage Properties and the Table in Karl Lessing’s Die Mätresse (1780)
Excursus: The Court Moor and Eighteenth-Century Court Painting
The Construction of Whiteness in the Traditional German Bourgeois Drama
Race, Doubles, and Foils: Staging Blackness in Friedrich Wilhelm Ziegler’s Die Mohrinn (1801)
Race, Homosocial Desire, and the Black in Ernst Lorenz Rathlef’s Die Mohrinn zu Hamburg (1775)
Reading in the Dark? Racial Hierarchy and Miscegenation in Heinrich von Kleist’s Die Verlobung in St. Domingo (1811) and Theodor Körner’s Toni (1812)
Epilogue

Bibliography
Index

Save

Save

Save

New Book | Artistes femmes

Posted in books by Editor on January 26, 2017

From CNRS:

Séverine Sofio, Artistes femmes: La parenthèse enchantée, XVIIIe–XIXe siècles (Paris, CNRS, 2016), 384 pages, ISBN: 978  2271  091918, 25€.

cjyilnbugaa6egzEntre 1750 et 1850, l’univers des beaux-arts connaît de profondes mutations, dont l’une des conséquences est la banalisation d’une image positive de la dame artiste. Progressivement, des barrières s’abaissent, des contraintes se desserrent et la pratique de la peinture est rendue plus accessible aux femmes. S’ouvre alors une période de créativité foisonnante associée aux noms—parfois oubliés aujourd’hui—d’Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Marguerite Gérard, Constance Mayer, Victoire Jaquotot, Lizinka de Mirbel, Rosa Bonheur…

Pourquoi les artistes femmes, à ce moment précis de l’histoire, ont-elles bénéficié de l’intérêt de leurs contemporains et de conditions de travail relativement égalitaires ? Pour saisir ce phénomène, Séverine Sofio réintègre les artistes des deux sexes dans la réalité quotidienne de leur travail de création.

Ni recueil d’analyses d’œuvres, ni histoire des femmes dans l’art, cet ouvrage traite de la pratique des beaux-arts, de son organisation et de ses réalités professionnelles, institutionnelles et économiques. Cette suspension relative de l’infériorisation des femmes dans les beaux-arts n’en demeure pas moins provisoire : si la parenthèse s’ouvre timidement dans les dernières décennies de l’Ancien Régime, elle se referme progressivement avant le milieu du siècle suivant.

Sociologue, diplômée de l’École du Louvre, Séverine Sofio est chargée de recherche au CNRS. Elle a notamment co-dirigé, avec Wenceslas Lizé et Delphine Naudier, Les Stratèges de la notoriété. Intermédiaires et production de la valeur dans les univers artistiques (2014).

New Book | Tudor Place: America’s Story Lives Here

Posted in books by Editor on January 20, 2017

1024px-tudor_place_north_facade

The north facade and back gardens of Tudor Place, Washington, D.C. (Georgetown). The house was built in 1816–17 by Thomas and Martha Parke Custis Peter with William Thornton (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, December 2011).

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

From The White House Historical Association:

Leslie Buhler, ed., with photography by Bruce White, Tudor Place: America’s Story Lives Here (Washington, D.C., The White House Historical Association, 2016), 304 pages, ISBN: 978  1931  917568  $50.

tudor-place-coverReleased to mark the bicentennial of Tudor Place, this new title is the first comprehensive record of this important National Historic Landmark in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Two grand houses were under construction in the young Federal City in 1816: one the President’s House, reconstructed after it was burned by the British in 1814, and the other Tudor Place, an elegant mansion rising on the heights above Georgetown. The connection between these two houses is more than temporal, as they were connected through lineage and politics for generations. The builders of Tudor Place were Thomas and Martha Parke Custis Peter, Martha Washington’s granddaughter. In the 1790s George Washington had been a frequent guest at the Peters’ townhouse when he was in the nascent Federal City, attending to its planning and selecting sites for the U.S. Capitol and the President’s House. In 1817, when President James Monroe moved back into the reconstructed President’s House following the fire of 1814, the Peters were completing their own grand home, Tudor Place, designed in concert with their friend, Dr. William Thornton, architect for the first U.S. Capitol Building. The White House and Tudor Place each represent the spirit and aspirations of the early Republic. Little more than two miles apart, each survives as a national architectural landmark. While the White House is perhaps the most well known building in the world, Tudor Place remained a family home until 1983 and very private, although the Peters welcomed some of the nation’s foremost leaders as their guests and were themselves guests at the White House.

Now a historic house and garden museum (open to the public since 1988), the house remains as the Peters lived in it, preserving spaces and belongings of many eras while adapting their home and landscape to contemporary fashion and functions. This year, as Tudor Place turns 200, this lavishly illustrated book—the first definitive history of the house and its collection—takes us into the house to explore its rooms, gardens, archival collections, and such rare artifacts as one of only three surviving letters from George to Martha Washington.

Leslie L. Buhler served as Executive Director of Tudor Place for 15 years, retiring in 2015.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

C O N T E N T S

• Joseph Ellis, Introduction
• Leslie Buhler, The Custis-Peter Family of Georgetown
• William C. Allen, An Architectural History of Tudor Place
• Patricia Marie O’Donnell, The Landscape of Tudor Place
• Erin Kuykenall and Leslie Buhler, Living at Tudor Place

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

New Book | Black Georgetown Remembered

Posted in books by Editor on January 20, 2017

From Georgetown UP:

Kathleen Menzie Lesko, Valerie Babb, and Carroll R. Gibbs, Black Georgetown Remembered: A History of Its Black Community from the Founding of ‘The Town of George’ in 1751 to the Present Day (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2016), 232 pages, ISBN: 978  1626  163263, $28.

19c9b413-ee5a-41ef-8939-dbc9ff45412e_1-90794f88ce752cbf86cf923d701e5fd0First published in 1991, Black Georgetown Remembered chronicles and celebrates the rich but little-known history of the Georgetown black community from the colonial period to the present. Drawing on primary sources, including oral interviews with past and current residents and extensive research in church and historical society archives, the authors record the hopes, dreams, disappointments, and successes of a vibrant neighborhood as it persevered through slavery and segregation, war and peace, prosperity and depression.

This 25th anniversary edition of Black Georgetown Remembered—with a new introduction by Kathleen Menzie Lesko and a foreword by Maurice Jackson—is completely redesigned and features high-quality scans of more than two hundred illustrations, including portraits of prominent community leaders, sketches, maps, and nineteenth-century and contemporary photographs. Kathleen Menzie Lesko’s new introduction describes the impact of this book.

Black Georgetown Remembered is a compelling and inspiring journey through more than two hundred years of history. It invites readers to share in the lives, dreams, aspirations, struggles, and triumphs of real people, to join them in their churches, at home, and on the street, and to consider how the unique heritage of this neighborhood intersects and contributes to broader themes in African American and Washington, DC, history and urban studies.

Kathleen Menzie Lesko is a former scholar-in-residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library and current research scholar at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
Valerie Babb is the Franklin Professor of English and director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Georgia.
Carroll R. Gibbs is a professional historian, lecturer, and author of numerous works on African American history.

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save

New Book | Les progrès de l’industrie perfectionnée

Posted in books by Editor on January 19, 2017

This collection of essays grows out of the conference 2014, Workshops and Manufactures in the Years between the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, 1789–1815. From PUM:

Natacha Coquery, Jörg Ebeling, Anne Perrin Khelissa, Philippe Sénéchal, eds., «Les progrès de l’industrie perfectionnée»: Luxe, arts décoratifs et innovation de la Révolution française au Premier Empire (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Midi, 2017), 200 pages, ISBN: 978  28107  04835, 22€.

arton1740-abfa8À la charnière entre les XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, entre la réunion des États généraux et la fin du Premier Empire, vingt-cinq ans s’écoulent pendant lesquels bouleversements politiques, économiques, sociaux et culturels créent un contexte d’instabilité pour le secteur du luxe et du demi-luxe français. Les ateliers et les manufactures sont confrontés à des conditions matérielles et organisationnelles difficiles. Le manque de matières premières, la détérioration des finances et la diminution du personnel en raison du départ des jeunes hommes aux armées ont un impact négatif sur la production artisanale. L’incertitude générale que représente cette période d’instabilité politique et de conflits armés n’empêche pourtant pas l’émergence de modes. De nouveaux marchés s’ouvrent et offrent de riches opportunités aux artistes et artisans pour diversifier et élargir leurs créations.

Souvent considérée comme un temps de rupture, en particulier dans le domaine du luxe dont elle remet en cause les fondements, la Révolution française apparaît au contraire comme le ferment d’une évolution vers l’innovation et l’industrialisation. Pluridisciplinaire, croisant l’histoire de l’art, l’histoire sociale, l’histoire économique, l’histoire culturelle et l’histoire des techniques, le présent ouvrage explore les conditions du changement et offre une approche plurielle des arts du décor.

T A B L E  D E S  M A T I È R E S

Remerciements

Introduction générale, Jean-François Belhoste, Philippe Bordes, Natacha Coquery, Jörg Ebeling, Anne Perrin Khelissa et Philippe Sénéchal

Partie I | L’État: Rôle et intervention
• Thomas Le Roux, La chimie, support du développement de l’industrie perfectionnée sous la Révolution et l’Empire
• Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère, Le luxe sous l’Empire, ou la question des matières premières « indigènes »
• Camilla Murgia, The Crafty Link: Fine Arts and Industrial Exhibitions under the Consulate and the Empire
• Justin Beaugrand-Fortunel, Le mobilier de campagne de Napoléon ier: L’artisanat au service de l’Empereur

Partie II | Les secteurs de production: Organisation et fonctionnement
• Marie-Agnès Dequidt, L’horlogerie parisienne pendant la Révolution et l’Empire: Continuer à tourner dans un monde en bouleversement
• Élodie Voillot, Des canons aux statuettes: Les fabricants de bronze parisiens au début du xixe siècle
• David Celetti, Filer le luxe. Travail domestique, manufactures et usines dans la France révolutionnaire
• Stéphane Piques, L’organisation de la production dans l’industrie céramique sous la Révolution et l’Empire: La nébuleuse faïencière de Martres-Tolosane (Haute-Garonne)

Partie III | Les œuvres et les décors: Création et aménagement
• Bernard Jacqué, Des décors de luxe en papier peint pendant la Révolution française
• Valeria Mirra, Labor omnia vincit: La manufacture Piranesi de vases et ornements en terre cuite de Mortefontaine
• Iris Moon, Immutable Décor: Post-Revolutionary Luxury in the Platinum Cabinet at Aranjuez
• Ludmila Budrina, Lapidaires parisiens au service de Nicolas Demidoff: La collection d’objets en bronze doré et malachite avec mosaïques en relief de pierres dures réalisés par Thomire (d’après des documents inédits et les collections européennes)
• Hans Ottomeyer, Innovation by Design as Strategy for Luxury Goods

Index général
Bibliographie
Présentation des auteurs

New Book | A Taste for Luxury in Early Modern Europe

Posted in books by InternRW on January 17, 2017

Due out in June from Bloomsbury Publishing:

Johanna Ilmakunnas and Jon Stobart, eds.,  A Taste for Luxury in Early Modern Europe: Display, Acquisition, and Boundaries (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 304 pages, ISBN: 978  14742  58234, $112.

A Taste for Luxury in Early Modern EuropeIn the 18th century, debates raged about the economic, social and moral impacts of luxury, whilst taste was viewed as a refining influence and a marker of rank and status. This book takes a fresh, comparative approach to these ideas, drawing together new scholarship to examine three related areas in a wide variety of European contexts. First, the deployment of luxury goods in displays of status and how these practices varied across space and time. Secondly, the processes of communicating and acquiring taste and luxury: how did people obtain tasteful and luxurious goods, and how did they recognise them as such? Thirdly, the ways in which ideas of taste and luxury crossed national, political and economic boundaries: what happened to established ideas of luxury and taste as goods moved from one country to another, and during times of political transformation? Through the analysis of case studies looking at consumption practices, material culture, political economy, and retail marketing, A Taste for Luxury in Early Modern Europe challenges established readings of luxury and taste.

Johanna Ilmakunnas is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Jon Stobart is Professor of Social History at the University of Northampton, UK and Founding Editor of the new journal History of Retailing and Consumption.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

C O N T E N T S

I. Displaying Taste and Luxury
1  The Fabric of a Corporate Society: Sumptuary Laws, Social Order and Propriety in Early Modern Tallinn – Astrid Pajur (Uppsala University)
2  New and Old Luxuries Between the Court and the City: A Comparative Perspective on Material Cultures in Brussels and Antwerp, 1650–1735 – Bruno Blondé and Veerle de Laet (University of Antwerp)
3  Luxury and Taste in Eighteenth-Century Naples: Representations, Ideas and Social Practices at the Intersection Between the Global and the Local – Alida Clemente (University of Foggia).
4  What About the Moorish Footman? Portrait of a Dutch Nabob as a Dedicated Follower of Fashion– Yme Kuiper (University of Groningen)
5  Fashion and Luxury in Eighteenth-Century Germany – Michael North (University of Greifswald)

II. Making and Acquiring Taste
6  Taste Inequalities in the Art Consumption of Prince Nicolaus I Esterházy ‘the Magnificent’ – Kristof Fatsar (Corvinus University of Budapest)
7  Making an English Country House: Taste and Luxury in the Furnishing of Stoneleigh Abbey, 1763–1765 – Jon Stobart (Manchester Metropolitan University)
8  Between the Exotic and the Everyday: Sabine Winn at Home, 1765–1798 – Kerry Bristol (University of Leeds)
9  Books, Wine, and Fine China: Consumption Patterns of a Brukspatron in Early Nineteenth-Century Sweden – Marie Steinrud (Stockholm University)
10 To Buy a Plate: Retail and Shopping for Porcelain and Faience in Stockholm During the Eighteenth Century – Sofia Murhem and Göran Ulväng (Uppsala University)

III. Crossing Boundaries of Taste and Luxury
11 A Taste for French Style in Bourbon Spain: Food, Drink and Clothing in 1740s Madrid – Nadia Fernández-de-Pinedo (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Corinne Thépaut-Cabasset (V&A Museum and Château de Versailles)
12 French Fashions: Aspects of Elite Lifestyle in Eighteenth-Century Sweden – Johanna Ilmakunnas (University of Helsinki)
13 English Luxuries in Nineteenth-Century Vyborg – Ulla Ijäs (University of Helsinki)
14 Luxury Goods Beyond Boundaries: The Parisian Market During the Terror – Natacha Coquery (University of Lyon 2)

Bibliography
Index

Save

Save

New Book | Britannia: Icon on the Coin

Posted in books by Editor on January 16, 2017

From The Royal Mint (at Llantrisant, just outside of Cardiff), which incidentally just this past year opened to the public with a new visitor’s center.

Katharine Eustace, Britannia: Icon on the Coin (Llantrisant: The Royal Mint Museum, 2016), 144 pages, ISBN: 978 18699 17029,  £35.

hisbrtbk_01_whiteAt a time when the idea of Britain is being debated more than ever, a book that reveals the rich history of British identity has been published. The story of Britannia on the coinage is also the story of Britain. Katharine Eustace charts Britannia’s history and explores the shifts in art and politics, technology and popular culture that have influenced the icon’s image. For two years, Eustace immersed herself in the subject of Britannia, and the result is a fascinating story revealed in this compelling new book. Her new history of Britannia on the coinage is an enlightening illustration of how studying one object can reveal a bigger picture. Britannia’s appearance on coins may have evolved over the centuries, but she has remained a popular symbol of the nation.

Katharine Eustace is an expert in eighteenth-century sculpture, with an extraordinary knowledge of decorative art and sculpture in Britain. She was a curator in the Ashmolean Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, and editor of the Sculpture Journal for ten years.

Christopher Eimer provides a helpful review at 3rd Dimension, the online newsletter of the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association.

Exhibition | The Pursuit of Immortality: Portrait Medals

Posted in books, catalogues, exhibitions by Editor on January 15, 2017

Opening in May at The Frick:

The Pursuit of Immortality: Masterpieces from the Scher Collection of Portrait Medals
The Frick Collection, New York, 9 May — 10 September 2017

Curated by Aimee Ng and Stephen Scher

9781911282068-frontcoverThe Frick Collection recently announced the largest acquisition in its history—a promised gift of approximately 450 portrait medals from the incomparable collection of Stephen K. and Janie Woo Scher. Representing the development of the art of the portrait medal from its inception in fifteenth-century Italy to the nineteenth century, the Scher collection is arguably the world’s most comprehensive and significant collection of portrait medals. Comments Director Ian Wardropper, “Henry Clay Frick had an abiding interest in portraiture as expressed in the paintings, sculpture, enamels, and works on paper he acquired. The Scher medals will coalesce beautifully with these holdings, being understood in our galleries within the broader contexts of European art and culture. At the same time, the intimate scale of the institution will offer a superb platform for the medals to be appreciated as an independent art form, one long overdue for fresh attention and public appreciation.”

To celebrate the promised gift, The Frick Collection will mount an exhibition this spring entitled The Pursuit of Immortality: Masterpieces from the Scher Collection of Portrait Medals. The exhibition will explore the flourishing of the medallic arts in major European centers of artistic production and will feature superlative examples by masters of the art such as Pisanello (Italy), Dupré (France), and Reinhart (Germany). Taking and fresh approach to the study of medals, which have often been viewed in the past as specialist objects closer to the field of numismatics, this exhibition will examine medals within the larger context of art, honoring them as a triumph of sculptural production on a small scale. Visitors to the show will encounter a number of renowned sculptors who were also masters of the medal.

The Pursuit of Immortality: Masterpieces from the Scher Collection of Portrait Medals is organized by Aimee Ng, Associate Curator at the Frick, and Stephen K. Scher, an esteemed art historian as well as a collector. Accompanying the exhibition is a richly illustrated exhibition catalogue including an essay by Aimee Ng. (In the spring of 2018, a catalogue of the entire Scher Collection will be published, featuring essays by leading medals scholars and illustrated entries about each of the almost one thousand medals in the collection.)

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

Aimee Ng, The Pursuit of Immortality: Masterpieces from the Scher Collection of Portrait Medals (London: Giles, 2017), 64 pages, ISBN: 978  19112  82068, £15 / $20.

Accompanying the exhibition is a richly illustrated exhibition catalogue including an essay by Aimee Ng. In the spring of 2018, a catalogue of the entire Scher Collection will be published, featuring essays by leading medals scholars and illustrated entries about each of the almost one thousand medals in the collection.

Aimee Ng is associate curator at The Frick Collection, New York, and a specialist in Italian Renaissance art. She has held curatorial and academic positions at the Morgan Library & Museum, where she was postdoctoral fellow at the Morgan’s Drawing Institute in 2014, and at Columbia University, where she earned her Ph.D. She was guest curator of The Poetry of Parmigianino’s ‘Schiava Turca’ (2014) and organizing curator of Andrea del Sarto: The Renaissance Workshop in Action (2015–16).