Enfilade

From Ashgate:

Andreas Gestrich and Michael Schaich, eds., The Hanoverian Succession: Dynastic Politics and Monarchical Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-1472437655, $135.

The Hanoverian succession of 1714 brought about a 123-year union between Britain and the German electorate of Hanover, ushering in a distinct new period in British history. Under the four Georges and William IV Britain became arguably the most powerful nation in the world with a growing colonial Empire, a muscular economy and an effervescent artistic, social and scientific culture. And yet history has not tended to be kind to the Hanoverians, frequently portraying them as petty-minded and boring monarchs presiding over a dull and inconsequential court, merely the puppets of parliament and powerful ministers. In order both to explain and to challenge such a paradox, this collection looks afresh at the Georgian monarchs and their role, influence and legacy within Britain, Hanover and beyond.

Concentrating on the self-representation and the perception of the Hanoverians in their various dominions, each chapter shines new light on important topics: from rivalling concepts of monarchical legitimacy and court culture during the eighteenth century to the multi-confessional set-up of the British composite monarchy and the role of social groups such as the military, the Anglican Church and the aristocracy in defining and challenging the political order. As a result, the volume uncovers a clearly defined new style of Hanoverian kingship, one that emphasized the Protestantism of the dynasty, laid great store by rational government in close collaboration with traditional political powers, embraced army and navy to an unheard of extent and projected this image to audiences on the British Isles, in the German territories and in the colonies alike. Three hundred years after the succession of the first Hanoverian king, an intriguing new perspective of a dynasty emerges, challenging long held assumptions and prejudices.

Andreas Gestrich is Director of the German Historical Institute London. His present research interests comprise the history of family, childhood and youth, the history of poverty and poor relief, media history and the social history of religious groups. His publications include, among others, Absolutismus und Öffentlichkeit: Politische Kommunikation in Deutschland zu Beginn des 18. Jahrhunderts (1994), Familie im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (1999) and (ed. with Christiane Eisenberg) Cultural Industries in Britain and Germany: Sport, Music and Entertainment from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century (2012).

Michael Schaich is Deputy Director of the German Historical Institute London. His current research focuses on the symbolic representation of the British monarchy and state during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His publications include Staat und Öffentlichkeit im Kurfürstentum Bayern der Spätaufklärung (2001), (ed.) Monarchy and Religion: The Transformation of Royal Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2007) and (ed. with R.J.W. Evans and Peter H. Wilson) The Holy Roman Empire, 1495–1806 (2011).

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C O N T E N T S

1  Introduction, Michael Schaich

I. Dynastic Legacies
2  The Hanoverian Monarchy and the Legacy of Late Stuart Kingship, Ronald G. Asch
3  The House of Brunswick-Lüneburg and the Holy Roman Empire: The Making of a Patriotic Dynasty, 1648–1714?, Martin Wrede.

II. Representing Protestantism
4  George I, the Hanoverian Succession, and Religious Dissent, David Wykes
5  Hanover-Britain and the Protestant cause, 1714–1760, Andrew C. Thompson
6  The Hanoverians and the Colonial Churches, Jeremy Gregory

III. Image Policies
7  The Hanoverian Monarchy and the Culture of Representation, Tim Blanning
8  ‘Every Inch Not a King’: The Bodies of the (First Two) Hanoverians, Robert Bucholz
9  Monarchy, Affection and Empire: The Hanoverian Dynasty in Eighteenth-Century America, Brendan McConville
10  Visions of Kingship in Britain under George III and George IV, G.M. Ditchfield

IV. Contested Loyalties
11  The Hanoverian Succession and the Politicisation of the British army, Hannah Smith
12  Jacobitism and the Hanoverian Monarchy, Gabriel Glickman
13  The Alternative to the House of Hanover: The Stuarts in Exile, 1714–1745, Edward Corp
14  Radical Popular Attitudes to the Monarchy in Britain during the French Revolution, Amanda Goodrich

Index

From the University of Minnesota Press:

Jill H. Casid, Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 328 pages, ISBN: 978-0816646692 (cloth), $83 / ISBN: 978-0816646708 (paper), $28.

Theorizing vision and power at the intersections of the histories of psychoanalysis, media, scientific method, and colonization, Scenes of Projection poaches the prized instruments at the heart of the so-called scientific revolution: the projecting telescope, camera obscura, magic lantern, solar microscope, and prism. From the beginnings of what is retrospectively enshrined as the origins of the Enlightenment and in the wake of colonization, the scene of projection has functioned as a contraption for creating a fantasy subject of discarnate vision for the exercise of ‘reason’.

Jill H. Casid demonstrates across a range of sites that the scene of projection is neither a static diagram of power nor a fixed architecture but rather a pedagogical setup that operates as an influencing machine of persistent training. Thinking with queer and feminist art projects that take up old devices for casting an image to reorient this apparatus of power that produces its subject, Scenes of Projection offers a set of theses on the possibilities for felt embodiment out of the damaged and difficult pasts that haunt our present.

Jill H. Casid is professor of visual studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Sowing Empire:
Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2005).

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction: Shadows of Enlightenment

1  Paranoid Projection and the Phantom Subject of Reason
2  Empire through the Magic Lantern
3  Empire Bites Back
4  Along Enlightenment’s Cast Shadows
5  Following the Rainbow

Conclusion: Queer Projection, Theses on the ‘Future of an Illusion’

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

From Archetype Publications:

Helen Evans and Kimberley Muir, eds., Studying 18th-Century Paintings and Works of Art on Paper (London: Archetype Publications, 2015), 172 pages, ISBN: 978-1909492233, £45 / $95.

Pre-Publication Discount Price: £35 + postage when ordered using a Visa/MasterCard from Archetype’s London office by sending an email by 22nd September 2015 to info@archetype.co.uk

This is the second CATS Conference Proceedings with papers from the international conference Technology & Practice: Studying 18th-Century Paintings & Art on Paper. The conference was organised by CATS in collaboration with Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Science in Helsinki, Finland; Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, Sweden; and University of Oslo, Norway. The conference focused on artists’ techniques and materials, source research, conservation science, the history of science and technology, trade and pharmacy during the 18th century. Speakers explored tradition and changes in artistic practices in the light of the establishment of a series of national Art Academies in Europe throughout the century. Papers include topics such as workshop practice and materials, art historical and technical approaches to documentary evidence and technical examination and the analysis of paintings and drawings. Also issues of trade, supply and questions concerning the demand for materials for diverse artistic expressions are analysed and discussed.

C O N T E N T S

Foreword
• Mikkel Bogh, Discipline and wonder: The 18th-century art academy and the invention of the artist as a free practitioner
• Loa Ludvigsen, Mikala Bagge and Vibeke Rask, The effect of Prussian blue on the technique of the Danish court painters Hendrik Krock and Benoît le Coffre
• Carol Pottasch, Susan Smelt and Ralph Haswell, Breaking new ground: Investigating Pellegrini’s use of ground in the Golden Room of the Mauritshuis,
• Leila Sauvage and Cécile Gombaud, Liotard’s pastels: Techniques of an 18th-century pastellist
• Tine Louise Slotsgaard, An investigation of the painting technique in portraits by Jens Juel
• Andreas Burmester and Stefanie Correll, 72 florin for colours, white and glue: The Tiepolos, the Veninos and Würzburg
• Piet Bakker, Margriet van Eikema Hommes and Katrien Keune, The coarse painter and his position in 17th- and 18th-century Dutch decorative painting
• Ige Verslype, Johanneke Verhave, Susan Smelt, Katrien Keune, Hinke Sigmond and Margriet van Eikema Hommes, A ‘painted chamber’ in Beverwijk by Jacobus Luberti Augustini: Novel insights into the working methods and painting practices in a painted wall-hanging factory
• Clara de la Peña Mc Tigue, 18th-century practices in the art academies in Spain: The use of paper in prints and drawings
• Ingelise Nielsen and Niels Borring, Nicolai Abildgaard: An 18th-century Danish artist and his paper
• Niels Borring, Semi-mechanical transfer methods in Nicolai Abildgaard’s drawings
• Troels Filtenborg, Canvas supports in paintings by Nicolai Abildgaard: Fabrics and formats
• Alexandra Gent, Rachel Morrison and Nelly von Aderkas, ‘1st olio after Capivi’: Copaiba balsam in the paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds
• Richard Mulholland, Ferdinand Bauer’s Flora Graeca colour code

From Ashgate:

Robert Wellington, Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV: Artifacts for a Future Past (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 286 pages, ISBN: 978-1472460332, $110.

Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV: Artifacts for a Future Past provides a new interpretation of objects and images commissioned by Louis XIV (1638–1715) to document his reign for posterity. The Sun King’s image-makers based their prediction of how future historians would interpret the material remains of their culture on contemporary antiquarian methods, creating new works of art as artifacts for a future time. The need for such items to function as historical evidence led to many pictorial developments, and medals played a central role in this. Coin-like in form but not currency, the medal was the consummate antiquarian object, made in imitation of ancient coins used to study the past. Yet medals are often elided from the narrative of the arts of ancien régime France, their neglect wholly disproportionate to the cultural status that they once held. This revisionary study uncovers a numismatic sensibility throughout the iconography of Louis XIV, and in the defining monuments of his age. It looks beyond the standard political reading of the works of art made to document Louis XIV’s history, to argue that they are the results of a creative process wedded to antiquarianism, an intellectual culture that provided a model for the production of history in the grand siècle.

Robert Wellington is a lecturer at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory, Australian National University.

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C O N T E N T S

Introduction: Medals and the Material Turn in the King’s History
1  Antiquarianism at Court
2  The Petite Académie and the histoire métallique of Louis XIV
3  The Cabinet des Médailles at Versailles
4  Images Inscribed and Described by the Petite Académie
5  The Antiquarian Origins of Louis XIV’s Medals Books
6  Portraiture, Physiognomy, and the Numismatic Sensibility
7  Numismatic Resonances: Le Brun’s Cycle for the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles

Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Scheduled for publication next month from Yale UP:

Edgar Peters Bowron, Pompeo Batoni: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings (London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2015), 2-volume boxed set, 750 pages, ISBN: 978-0300148169, $300.

This meticulously researched catalogue presents an authoritative assessment of the works of Pompeo Batoni (1708–1787), one of the 18th century’s most celebrated painters. Born in Lucca, Batoni established himself in Rome and received commissions from popes, princes, and British aristocrats on the Grand Tour. Batoni was highly sought after for his theatrical yet incisive—and often flattering—portraits. Connoisseurs and cognoscenti also prized his learned and technically brilliant allegorical, religious, and mythological compositions.

With entries on more than 480 paintings and 250 drawings, this magnificent two-volume set provides the most complete examination to date of Batoni’s entire oeuvre. Featuring beautiful, high-quality reproductions, the book provides thorough details on provenance and exhibition history as well as biographies of the portrait sitters. New analysis of the works, resulting from decades of research, reinterprets some of Batoni’s iconography, identifies new textual and visual sources of his imagery, and reveals insights gleaned from unpublished archival materials.

Edgar Peters Bowron is the former Audrey Jones Beck Curator of European Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Robert Harbison, Ruins and Fragments: Tales of Loss and Rediscovery (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-1780234472, $35.

What is it about ruins that are so alluring, so puzzling, that they can hold some of us in endless wonder over the half-erased story they tell? In this elegant book, Robert Harbison explores the captivating hold these remains and broken pieces—from architecture, art, and literature—have on us. Why are we, he asks, so suspicious of things that are too smooth, too continuous? What makes us feel, when we look upon a fragment, that its very incompletion has a kind of meaning in itself? Is it that our experience on earth is inherently discontinuous, or that we are simply unable to believe in anything whole?

Harbison guides us through ruins and fragments, both ancient and modern, visual and textual, showing us how they are crucial to understanding our current mindset and how we arrived here. First looking at ancient fragments, he examines the ways we have recovered, restored, and exhibited them as artworks. Then he moves on to modernist architecture and the ways that it seeks a fragmentary form, examining modern projects that have been designed into existing ruins, such as the Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy and the reconstruction of the Neues Museum in Berlin. From there he explores literature and the works of T. S. Eliot, Montaigne, Coleridge, Joyce, and Sterne, and how they have used fragments as the foundation for creating new work. Likewise he examines the visual arts, from Schwitters’ collages to Ruskin’s drawings, as well as cinematic works from Sergei Eisenstein to Julien Temple, never shying from more deliberate creators of ruin, from Gordon Matta-Clark to countless graffiti artists.

From ancient to modern times and across every imaginable form of art, Harbison takes a poetic look at how ruins have offered us a way of understanding history and how they have enabled us to create the new.

Until his retirement, Robert Harbison was professor of architecture at London Metropolitan University. He is the author of many books, including Reflections on Baroque and Travels in the History of Architecture, both also published by Reaktion Books.

C O N T E N T S

Prologue
1  Rough Edges
2  Fragmented Wholes
3  Modernist Ruin
4  Interrupted Texts
5  Ruined Narratives
6  Art and Destruction
7  Dreams of Recovery
Epilogue: Remembering and Forgetting

Notes
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index