Enfilade

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

From Taylor & Francis:

Daniel Maudlin, The Idea of the Cottage in English Architecture, 1760–1860 (New York: Routledge, 2015), 212 pages, ISBN: 978-1138793873, $160.

From Ashgate:

Bert De Munck and Dries Lyna, eds., Concepts of Value in European Material Culture, 1500–1900 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 304 pages, ISBN: 9781472451965, $135.

In contemporary society it would seem self-evident that people allow the market to determine the values of products and services. For everything from a loaf of bread to a work of art to a simple haircut, value is expressed in monetary terms and seen as determined primarily by the ‘objective’ interplay between supply and demand. Yet this ‘price-mechanism’ is itself embedded in conventions and frames of reference which differed according to time, place and product type. Moreover, the dominance of the conventions of utility maximising and calculative homo economicus is a relatively new phenomenon, and one which directly correlates to the steady advent of capitalism in early modern Europe. This volume brings together scholars with expertise in a variety of related fields, including economic history, the history of consumption and material culture, art history, and the history of collecting, to explore changing concepts of value from the early modern period to the nineteenth century and present a new view on the advent of modern economic practices. Jointly, they fundamentally challenge traditional historical narratives about the rise of our contemporary market economy and consumer society.

Bert De Munck is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. He is a member of the Centre for Urban History at the same university and Director of both the interdisciplinary Urban Studies Institute and the Scientific Research Community (WOG) ‘Urban Agency. Setting the Research Agenda of Urban History’. His publications include Innovation and Creativity in Late Medieval and Early Modern European Cities (2014, co-edited with Karel Davids); Gated Communities? Regulating Migration in Early Modern Cities (2012, co-edited with Anne Winter); Technologies of Learning: Apprenticeship in Antwerp from the 15th Century to the End of the Ancien Régime (2007); and Learning on the Shop Floor: Historical Perspectives on Apprenticeship (2007, co-edited with Hugo Soly and Steven L. Kaplan).

Dries Lyna is an Assistant Professor of History at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. His areas of interest include the history of urban economies, material culture and art markets of the Low Countries, from the late seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. He has received fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Commission, the Getty Research Institute, the International Economic History Association and the Belgian American Educational Foundation. His publications include Art Auctions and Dealers: The Dissemination of Netherlandish Art during the Ancien Régime (2009, co-edited with Filip Vermeylen and Hans Vlieghe) and Art Crossing Borders: The International Art Market in the Age of Nation States, 1760–1914 (forthcoming, co-edited with Jan Baetens).

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C O N T E N T S

1  Locating and Dislocating Value: A Pragmatic Approach to Early Modern and Nineteenth-Century Economic Practices, Bert de Munck and Dries Lyna

Part I  Expanding Markets and Market Devices
2  Labelling with Numbers? Weavers, Merchants and the Valuation of Linen in Seventeenth-Century Münster, Christof Jeggle
3  Words of Value? Art Auctions and Semiotic Socialization in the Austrian Netherlands (1750–1794), Dries Lyna
4  From a ‘Knowledgeable’ Salesman towards a ‘Recognizable’ Product? Questioning Branding Strategies before Industrialization (Antwerp, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries), Ilja Van Damme
5  Golden Touchstones? The Culture of Auctions of Paintings in Brussels, 1830–1900, Anneleen Arnout

Part II  Conventions, Material Culture, and Institutions
6  The Justness of Aestimatio and the Justice of Transactions: Defining Real Estate Values in Early Modern Milan, Michela Barbot
7  Vehicles of Disinterested Pleasure: French Painting and Non-Remunerative Value in the Eighteenth Century, Tomas Macsotay
8  Usefulness, Ornamental Function, and Novelty: Debates on Quality in Button and Buckle Manufacturing in Northern Italy (Eighteenth to Nineteenth Centuries), Barbara Bettoni

Part III  The Old and the New
9  Façon de Venise: Determining the Value of Glass in Early Modern Europe, Corine Maitte
10  The Veneer of Age: Valuing the Patina of Silver in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Helen Clifford
11  The Value of a Collection: Collecting Practices in Early Modern Europe, Adriana Turpin

Index