Enfilade

Forthcoming from Penn State UP:

Ignacy Potocki, Remarks on Architecture: The Vitruvian Tradition in Enlightenment Poland, edited and translated by Carolyn C. Guile (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 176 pages, ISBN: 978-0271066288, $75.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the authors of Poland’s 3 May 1791 Constitution became the heirs to a defunct state whose territory had been partitioned by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. At this moment of intensive national postmortem, Ignacy Potocki, an eminent statesman and co-author of the Constitution, composed an architectural treatise. One of the best-preserved examples of early modern Polish architectural thought, published and translated here for the first time, the Remarks on Architecture announces itself as a project of national introspection, with architecture playing a direct role in the betterment of the nation. In it, Potocki addresses his remarks to the contemporary Polish nobility and conveys the lessons of a Vitruvian canon that shaped Continental classical architectural theory and practice throughout the early modern period. He argues that architecture is a vessel for cultural values and that it plays an important part in the formation and critique of broader national traditions. In her introduction, Carolyn Guile further explores Polish Enlightenment architectural writing as an example of cultural exchange, inheritance, and transformation.

Carolyn C. Guile is Assistant Professor of Art History at Colgate University.

From The Royal Swedish Academy:

Antti Matikkala and Staffan Rosén, eds., Perspectives on the Honours Systems: Proceedings of the Symposiums Swedish and Russian Orders 1700–2000 and the Honour of Diplomacy (Stockholm: The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, 2015), 322 pages, ISBN: 978-9174024302, 311SEK.

Perspectives on the Honours Systems opens new multidisciplinary avenues for research on both historical and current methods by which monarchs, heads of state and governments have honoured individuals in different contexts, primarily in the Nordic countries and Russia. The essays are mostly based on papers given at two symposiums (in Stockholm 2009 and in Helsinki 2011).

The essays have been arranged in six thematic and broadly chronological parts. The first part analyses the foundation of the Swedish orders of knighthood and the background debates beginning in the 1690s. The second part looks at the orders of knighthood as instruments of diplomacy from the late Middle Ages mostly up to the Napoleonic period, while the third part approaches the material aspect of honours. The fourth part is chronological, concentrating on the first half of the twentieth century from the perspective of diplomacy as well as the wearing of orders and decorations. The fifth part, with emphasis on the Far East, discusses honorific contacts with Denmark and Russia. The sixth and last part describes the current diplomatic use of Finnish and Swedish orders as well as the Russian award system of today.

By taking a long perspective, 14 historians, archivists, museum curators, officers of orders and diplomats address fundamental questions related to honours: why honours systems have been established, what kind of role they have played in different historical situations and their current relevance in modern societies.

Antti Matikkala is a historian specializing in the honours systems. He was Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki, 2009–2012.

Staffan Rosén is Vice Chancellor and Secretary of the Swedish Royal Orders of Knighthood. He is retired Professor of Korean Studies at Stockholm University and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.

From Rowman & Littlefield:

Timothy Erwin, Textual Vision: Augustan Design and the Invention of Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2015), 310 pages, ISBN: 978-1611485691 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1611485707 (ebook), $95 / £60.

A stylish critique of literary attitudes towards painting, Textual Vision explores the simultaneous rhetorical formation and empirical fragmentation of visual reading in enlightenment Britain. Beginning with an engaging treatment of Pope’s Rape of the Lock, Timothy Erwin takes the reader on a guided tour of the pointed allusion, apt illustration, or the subtle appeal to the mind’s eye within a wide array of genres and texts, before bringing his linked case studies to a surprising close with the fiction of Jane Austen.

At once carefully researched, theoretically informed and highly imaginative, Textual Vision situates textual vision at the cultural crossroads of ancient pictura-poesis doctrine and modernist aesthetics. It provides reliable interpretive poles for reading enlightenment imagery, offers vivid new readings of familiar works, and promises to invigorate the study of Restoration and eighteenth-century visual culture.

Timothy Erwin is professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

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C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations and Short Titles

Introduction: Image, Ekphrasis, and Verbal Coloring
1  Bold Design in Alexander Pope
2  Promise and Performance in Johnson’s Life of Savage Plates Gallery
3  Visual Discourse in Hogarth, the Early Novel, and History
4  Picturing Jane Austen

Bibliography
Index

Published by Museum Tusculanum Press and distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

John Erichsen and Mikkel Venborg Pedersen, The Danish Country House (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2014), 253 pages, ISBN: 978-8763543064, 51€ / $80.

Denmark’s many manors are a treasure trove of natural and cultural riches. As well as the scenic beauty and magnificent architecture they have to offer, they also stand as monuments to more than five centuries of Danish history. The landscapes and buildings of Denmark’s manors form a fascinating universe and a key part of the country’s cultural heritage. Denmark’s famous fairytale author Hans Christian Andersen and the internationally renowned storyteller Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) were both fascinated by the unique atmosphere of the Danish country house, which—as their fairy tales and stories reveal—was a lasting source of inspiration in their writings. Also today, the cultural and natural environment of the manor appeals to the heart and soul. This book provides the reader with the key to understanding and experiencing this cultural heritage. More than one hundred of Denmark’s 700 manors are now partially or wholly open to the public. This book is your guide to them all.

John Erichsen, M.A. in History and Art History, is the former director of The Museum of Copenhagen and Vice Director of The National Museum of Denmark. Since 1997 he has run the cultural history research and publishing company HISTORISMUS. He has published extensively, also on the cultural history of the manor.

Mikkel Venborg Pedersen, PhD and DPhil. in European Ethnology and Cultural History. Senior researcher at The National Museum of Denmark. He has worked professionally with both elite and mass culture in Early Modern Europe, and has published extensively on cultural history, as well as on ethnological and historical theory and methodology.

First published in 2013, Studies in Ephemera was recently released in paperback:

Kevin Murphy and Sally O’Driscoll, eds., Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2015), 318 pages, ISBN: 978-1611484946 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1611486612 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1611484953 (ebook), $90 / $45.

Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print brings together established and emerging scholars of early modern print culture to explore the dynamic relationships between words and illustrations in a wide variety of popular cheap print from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. While ephemera was ubiquitous in the period, it is scarcely visible to us now, because only a handful of the thousands of examples once in existence have been preserved. Nonetheless, single-sheet printed works, as well as pamphlets and chapbooks, constituted a central part of visual and literary culture, and were eagerly consumed by rich and poor alike in Great Britain, North America, and on the Continent. Displayed in homes, posted in taverns and other public spaces, or visible in shop windows on city streets, ephemeral works used sensational means to address themes of great topicality. The English broadside ballad, of central concern in this volume, grew out of oral culture; the genre addressed issues of nationality, history, gender and sexuality, economics, and more.

Richly illustrated and well researched, Studies in Ephemera offers interdisciplinary perspectives into how ephemeral works reached their audiences through visual and textual means. It also includes essays that describe how collections of ephemera are categorized in digital and conventional archives, and how our understanding of these works is shaped by their organization into collections. This timely and fascinating book will appeal to archivists, and students and scholars in many fields, including art history, comparative literature, social and economic history, and English literature.

Kevin D. Murphy is professor and executive officer in the PhD Program in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture, and Community on the Eastern Frontier (2010), as well as articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century subjects in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Winterthur Portfolio, and the Journal of Urban History.

Sally O’Driscoll teaches English at Fairfield University. Her work on eighteenth-century literature and culture has appeared in such journals as Signs, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation.

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C O N T E N T S

Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1  Introduction — ‘Fugitive Pieces’ and ‘Gaudy Books’: Textual, Historical, and Visual Interpretations of Ephemera in the Long Eighteenth Century, Kevin D. Murphy and Sally O’Driscoll

Part I: Definitions and Categorizations
2  Of Grubs and Other Insects: Constructing the Categories of ‘Ephemera’ and ‘Literature’ in Eighteenth-Century British Writing, Paula McDowell
3  Digitizing Ephemera and Its Discontents: EBBA’s Quest to Capture the Protean Broadside Ballad, Patricia Fumerton
4  What Gets Printed from Oral Tradition: Anna Gordon’s Ephemeral Ballads, Ruth Perry
5  Approaches to Ephemera: Scottish Broadsides, 1679–1746, Adam Fox
6  Ephemera at the American Antiquarian Society: Perspectives on Commercial Life in the Long Eighteenth Century, Georgia Barnhill

Part II: Text and Image
7  Making Sense of Broadside Ballad Illustrations in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Alexandra Franklin
8  ‘A Battleground Around the Crime’: The Visuality of Execution Ephemera and Its Cultural Significances in Late Seventeenth-Century England, Tara Burk
9  From ‘The Easter Wedding’ to ‘The Frantick Lover’: The Repeated Woodcut and Its Shifting Roles, Theodore Barrow
10  What Kind of Man Do the Clothes Make? Print Culture and the Meanings of Macaroni Effeminacy, Sally O’Driscoll

Bibliography
Index

From Somogy:

Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, Les Chasseurs de Marly et les œuvres de Nicolas Coustou au musée du Louvre (Paris: Somogy éditions d’Art, 2015), 144 pages, ISBN: 978-2757207598, 19€.

Le sculpteur Nicolas Coustou a manifesté ses talents à la fin du règne de Louis XIV et au début du règne de Louis XV par de grands marbres, animés par un souffle épique ou par la grâce féminine. La plupart de ses œuvres destinées au parc de Marly sont désormais exposées dans la cour Marly au Louvre. Art royal, officiel, il est cependant traversé de touches personnelles, faites de dynamisme, et d’un sens puissant des volumes que magnifient des draperies volantes et des mouvements contrastés.

Le parc de Marly et son décor appartiennent aux grandes réalisations du règne de Louis XIV. C’est en effet sur cette colline, déjà habitée mais en lisière des grandes forêts de chasse, que Louis XIV a choisi de se faire construire, par Jules Hardouin-Mansart, une résidence plus intime que Versailles. Alors que les bâtiments ont été détruits à la Révolution, et que le parc reste seul à évoquer la grandeur passée, la sculpture a été transférée dès le XVIIIe siècle au jardin des Tuileries. Le musée du Louvre, gestionnaire du jardin, s’en trouve donc l’héritier et a entrepris depuis 1870 la sauvegarde et l’exposition des œuvres provenant du parc de Marly. En 1993, l’ouverture de la cour Marly qui présente la majeure partie des sculptures connues a été l’occasion de mettre en valeur les marbres les plus célèbres, dont les emblématiques Chevaux de Marly d’Antoine Coysevox et de Guillaume Coustou.

En 1703, une commande prestigieuse fut adressée à Nicolas Coustou, neveu d’Antoine Coysevox, celle de deux grands groupes en marbre, Méléagre tuant le cerf  et Méléagre tuant le sanglier, première œuvre d’envergure pour l’artiste. Dès 1706, les Chasseurs sont achevés et mis à une place d’honneur à proximité du Pavillon royal de Marly.

Le Louvre expose déjà dans la cour Marly l’ensemble des sculptures de la grande perspective du domaine de Marly : les chevaux de Coysevox, les groupes de fleuves, les statues de Neptune, Amphitrite, la Seine et la Marne, et les deux groupes de trois statues qui étaient situées non loin des deux Méléagre, Faune, Adonis et des Nymphes. Les deux Méléagre étaient les seules pièces manquantes à ce grand axe, rythmé par des statues qui se répondent deux à deux. Ils sont le complément du groupe d’Adonis et des Nymphes, pour évoquer la glorification de la nature sauvage qui est un thème majeur de l’iconographie du lieu, fait d’eaux et de bois.

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S O M M A I R E

Nicolas Coustou, dans le sillage de son oncle et de son frère

À Rome : la découverte de l’antique

Sous l’égide de l’Académie de peinture et de sculpture

Sous l’autorité de Jules Hardouin-Mansart
Jules César

Les œuvres de Nicolas Coustou dans le parc de Marly
Les premiers vases
Les vases de pierre
Les plombs dorés
Les groupes et les grands vases du bassin des Nappes
Les vases aux instruments de musique champêtre
La Seine et la Marne
Les deux groupes de Chasseurs
Le Chasseur et les Nymphes chasseresses
Apollon poursuivant Daphné

Sous la direction de Robert de Cotte

Monuments funéraires
Le Tombeau du prince de Conti

Les portraits
Portrait du Grand Dauphin
Louis XV en Jupiter

La cour Marly et les sculptures du parc de Louis XIV

Catalogue des œuvres de Nicolas Coustou au musée du Louvre

Bibliographie