Enfilade

This critical catalogue of Princeton’s Spanish drawings was reviewed by Zahira Véliz Bomford for The Burlington Magazine 156 (April 2014): 244–45. From Yale UP:

Lisa A. Banner with contributions by Jonathan Brown, Robert S. Lubar, and Pierre Rosenberg, Spanish Drawings in the Princeton University Art Museum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-0300149319, $40.

The Princeton University Art Museum’s collection of Spanish drawings includes masterworks by artists such as Jusepe de Ribera (1591–1652), Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682), Francisco Goya (1746–1828), Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), and Salvador Dalí (1904–1989). Although many of the drawings in the collection relate to celebrated paintings, commissions, and other works by these artists, they remain largely unknown. Most have not been published previously and many are attributed here for the first time.

In Spanish Drawings in the Princeton University Art Museum, preeminent scholars enrich the growing corpus of work on Spanish drawings with original research. Each of the 95 drawings is reproduced in color, often accompanied by comparative illustrations. Watermarks have been documented with beta radiography and are included in an appendix. Provenances and
artist biographies round out this detailed record of one of the
most important collections of its kind.

Lisa A. Banner has written extensively on Spanish baroque art and has contributed to exhibition catalogues, symposia, and conferences throughout the world, most recently co-curating The Spanish Manner at The Frick Collection (2010–11).

From The Old School Press:

John Sutcliffe, The Colours of Rome: An Examination of the Use of Colour on the Façades of Today’s Rome, with Historical and Other Notes, and a Selection of Colours Copied on Site (Bath: The Old School Press, 2013), 32 pages, ISBN: 978-1899933334 (standard edition), £185 / $350.

John’s vision for this book was a survey of the city’s colourscape, a palette of colours so different from that of, say, Venice, Tuscany, or Palermo, and a palette that is today in a period of great change. His new essay traces the history of that palette and the influences that have led it to its state today.

To illustrate the essay John made several trips to Rome, returning finally with twenty sheets of colours copied directly from the buildings themselves. His carefully chosen selection is designed to demonstrate the diversity of the palette and also to draw together two very different strands of tradition that have created the appearance of the streets of Rome today. Each of the twenty colours is illustrated with a large painted patch applied directly onto its own sheet of Magnani wove using water-based paints. These sheets are loose in a wallet within the cased sleeve that holds the book, thus making it possible for the reader to explore the colours in different combinations just as they appear in Rome. A swatch card of chips of the twenty colours is also included in the wallet.

The wallet in the sleeve contains the paint-outs for the twenty colours that John Sutcliffe has chosen as representative of the colours of Rome. They are accompanied by a swatch card summarising the full set.

The text is printed in 14pt Dante on a large page of Magnani hand-made laid paper, with headings printed from wood-letter. The book is bound in full cloth and is protected by the sleeve inside which the wallet of paint patches is attached. In addition to the standard edition of ninety-nine copies there were twenty-five de luxe copies (ALL SOLD) that take the form of a solander box containing, as well as the standard edition book, bottled samples of nine of the most important pigments, mostly earths, in powdered form. The book is 323mm by 235mm (about 12.75 inches by 9.25 inches); the solander box is slightly larger and 92mm deep (3.75 inches). The price is £185 (euro235, US$350) for a standard copy (and was £350 (euro435, US$580) for a de luxe copy). Trade discount is one quarter. Postage and packing are charged as usual at cost.

If you know our books you will know we love colour, so this was a project that appealed from the outset. If Rome, architecture, and the way our cities change interest you, this book will appeal, and we hope that the production qualities will enhance your enjoyment. Uniquely, it is the only record of the most characteristic colours to be seen in Rome today, perhaps the only such survey of any city.

John Sutcliffe knows about colour. A former regional curator at the National Trust and now active as a decorative painter, his expertise in the topic, in particular in an architectural setting, was extensively used by Farrow & Ball, a company that will surely be known to many, at the time when they were first building up their reputation for traditional paints and hand-produced wallpapers. For many years John’s interest in colour has taken him to the Mediterranean, to Italy, and in particular to Rome. The buildings of Rome’s centro storico carry on their walls many layers of coloured limewash and distemper, layers that have both accumulated and decayed over time, thereby capturing the changing fashions in colour.

More information is available here»

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

As described by Martin Gayford for The World of Interiors (May 2014), p. 50:

[The book] is a work of decorative art in itself, elegantly printed and bound by a private press in a limited edition. . . . In the course of his investigations, Sutcliffe made a discovery. His initial assumption was that the shades he saw had been used since the days of ancient Rome. This turned out to be completely wrong. . . . Tastes in colour in the age of Michelangelo, Bernini, and the Grand Tour were all different, both from each other and from what can be seen today. In earlier centuries, Rome would have looked lighter and bluer. . . . The dramatically dark walls Sutcliffe loves date back only to the late 19th century and the Mussolini regime. In recent decades, these have begun to be replaced by a new fashion for ‘old colours’—that is, 17th- and 18th-century hues rediscovered by careful scraping of old paintwork. The colours of cities seem, like most things, to fluctuate through time.

David Watkin likewise praises the “beautifully produced book,” in his review for TLS, “Raw and Burnt,” (7 March 2014): 22.

From Thames & Hudson:

Diana Scarisbrick and Benjamin Zucker, Elihu Yale: Merchant, Collector & Patron (London: Thames & Hudson, 2014), 288 pages, ISBN 978-0500517260, £25.

There can be few educational institutions named after a man with the force of character, powers of leadership, business acumen, and variety of intellectual and spiritual interests of Elihu Yale. His career, which spans Puritan New England, Mughal India, and the London of the English Enlightenment, throws light on the religious, political, social, commercial, scientific, and cultural circumstances of the world of the later Stuarts and early Hanoverians.

Elihu Yale (1649–1721) is famous for the name of Yale University, of which he was an early benefactor. He made his fortune in India, trading in diamonds. Arriving there in 1672, he rose through the East India Company from clerk to governor. When he returned to London in 1699 he brought with him gems, furniture and textiles. In the milieu of portrait painter Sir Godfrey Kneller and physician Sir Hans Sloane he established a fashionable household where he had assembled some ten thousand items.

Yale’s collection was dispersed after his death and the catalogues of the sales survive, providing information about the 18th-century London art market. The Yale sales prove to be a landmark in the history both of collecting and of auctioneering. Analyses of the categories throw light on Yale’s personality and interests: he is revealed as a Fellow of the Royal Society, churchman and a philanthropist, totally in tune with the English Enlightenment.

The authors explore Yale’s life in Madras and London and his interests, including musical and scientific instruments and books, and then turn to Yale as a dealer and a collector of diamonds and jewelry and works of art. The story is one with many appeals: the East India Company and early 18th-century London; furniture, both Indian and English; the fashion for things Oriental in the West; gemstones and jewelry; and collecting works of art.

Diana Scarisbrick is a historian specializing in jewelry and engraved gems. She has curated exhibitions in the UK and abroad and has written many books, including Rings: Jewelry of Power, Love and Loyalty and Portrait Jewels: Opulence and Intimacy from the Medici to the Romanovs. She is a Research Associate at the Beazley Archive, Oxford, and recently collaborated with Professor Sir John Boardman on The Marlborough Gems.
Benjamin Zucker, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, is one of the world’s leading gem dealers, based in New York. He has written extensively on gemstones, coloured stones and the history of ring collecting

From the University of Texas Press:

James M. Córdova, The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico: Crowned-Nun Portraits and Reform in the Convent (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-0292753150, $55.

In the eighteenth century, New Spaniards (colonial Mexicans) so lauded their nuns that they developed a local tradition of visually opulent portraits, called monjas coronadas or ‘crowned nuns’, that picture their subjects in regal trappings at the moment of their religious profession and in death. This study identifies these portraits as markers of a vibrant and changing society that fused together indigenous and Euro-Christian traditions and ritual practices to construct a new and complex religious identity that was unique to New Spain.

To discover why crowned-nun portraits, and especially the profession portrait, were in such demand in New Spain, this book offers a pioneering interpretation of these works as significant visual contributions to a local counter-colonial discourse. James M. Córdova demonstrates that the portraits were a response to the Spanish crown’s project to modify and modernize colonial society—a series of reforms instituted by the Bourbon monarchs that threatened many nuns’ religious identities in New Spain. His analysis of the portraits’ rhetorical devices, which visually combined Euro-Christian and Mesoamerican notions of the sacred, shows how they promoted local religious and cultural values as well as client-patron relations, all of which were under scrutiny by the colonial Church. Combining visual evidence from images of the ‘crowned nun’ with a discussion of the nuns’ actual roles in society, Córdova reveals that nuns found their greatest agency as Christ’s brides, a title through which they could, and did, challenge the Church’s authority when they found it intolerable.

James M. Córdova is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he teaches pre-Columbian and colonial Latin American art.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1. Women’s Religious Pathways in New Spain
2. New Spanish Portraiture and Portraits of Nuns
3. Euro-Christian Precedents in the Crowned-Nun Image
4. Indigenous Contributions to Convent Arts and Culture
5. The Profession Portrait in a Time of Crisis
6. Colonial Identity Rhetorics
Epilogue
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography

Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Junko Aono, Confronting the Golden Age: Imitation and Innovation in Dutch Genre Painting 1680–1750 (Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-9089645685, $99.

Dutch genre paintings of the period between 1680 and 1750 have historically been cast as uninspired repetitions of art from the mid-seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age. In Confronting the Golden Age, Junko Aono reconsiders these oft-dismissed paintings, repositioning them as dynamic works that played an instrumental role in the canonization of the art of the Golden Age.

Drawing on archival documents, sales catalogs, and other texts, Aono closely analyzes a range of genre paintings—many of them handsomely reproduced in this volume. In the process, she deepens our understanding of these works and reveals how they illuminate the relationships among painters, collectors, and the dominant artistic currents of the time.

Junko Aono is associate professor of art history at Kyushu University, Fukuoka in Japan.

C O N T E N T S

I. Confronting the Heritage of the Golden Age: The Situation around Dutch Genre Painting 1680–1750

Introduction
1.  Painter and collector in transition: the search for a new relationship
2. The collector ’s taste: in praise of seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting
3. Popular subject matter of genre painting in eighteenth-century collections
4. The painter ’s choice: updating seventeenth-century genre painting

II.  Reproducing the Golden Age: Copies after Seventeenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century

1. Commercial misuse of copies: discussion between Johan van Gool and Gerard Hoet
2. Copies as substitutes for seventeenth-century painting
3. The painter ’s choice: in search of a favorite painte and subject matter
4. Case study: the candlelight scene as popular subject
5. The function of copying: looking back to the Golden Age

III. Emulating the Golden Age: The Painter’s Choice of Motifs and Subject Matter in Dutch Genre Painting of the First Half of the Eighteenth Century

1. The painter ’s choice of subject matter
2. Competing with the ‘old masters’: pendants by Gerard Dou, Willem van Mieris and Hieronymus van der Mij
3. ‘Pleasurable enjoyment of dissimilar similarity’

IV. Ennobling Daily Life: A Question of Refinement in Early Eighteenth-Century Dutch Genre Painting

1. Gerard de Lairesse’s attempt to ennoble genre painting
2. The painter ’s practice of idealizing figures in genre painting
3. To meet new demands of collectors: seeking ideal versatility

From Pickering & Chatto:

Susan Barton and Allan Brodie, eds., Travel and Tourism in Britain, 1700–1914, 4 volumes (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2014), approximately 1600 pages, ISBN: 978-1848934122, £350 / $625.

The British led the way in holidaymaking. During the eighteenth century travel was only available to the wealthiest people, but from the 1830s the railways brought a transport revolution, opening up the chance for travel to all classes. As tourism grew in popularity, a whole new industry developed. Many new large, lively towns grew up around spas and at the seaside to meet the needs of visitors. Guidebooks were produced, aimed at all sorts of holidaymakers and the first travel agencies emerged.

This four-volume primary resource collection brings together a diverse range of texts on the various forms of transport used by tourists, the destinations they visited, the role of entertainments and accommodation and how these affected the way that tourism evolved over two centuries. Case studies on specific towns—Bath, Cheltenham and Tunbridge Wells—illustrate the rise of spa tourism, then studies of Brighton, Margate, Blackpool and Scarborough are used to demonstrate the later dominance of the seaside resort. The collection will be of interest to social and economic historians as well as those researching print culture and the history of tourism.

• Contains over 200 rare primary resources
• Includes diaries, memoirs, guide books, journal articles, railways guides, handbills, trade directories, local newspaper articles and poems
• Editorial apparatus includes a general introduction, volume introductions, headnotes and endnotes
• A consolidated index appears in the final volume

Volume 1: Travel and Destination
Volume 2: Spa Tourism
Volume 3: Seaside Holidays
Volume 4: Seaside Resorts

Susan Barton is an honorary fellow at the International Centre for Sports History and Culture, De Montfort University. Allan Brodie is an architectural historian for English Heritage.

From Ashgate:

Tricia Cusack, ed., Framing the Ocean, 1700 to the Present: Envisaging the Sea as Social Space (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 302 pages, ISBN: 978-1409465683, £70 / $120.

Before the eighteenth century, the ocean was regarded as a repulsive and chaotic deep. Despite reinvention as a zone of wonder and pleasure, it continued to be viewed in the West and elsewhere as ‘uninhabited’, empty space. This collection, spanning the eighteenth century to the present, recasts the ocean as ‘social space’, with particular reference to visual representations. Part I focuses on mappings and crossings, showing how the ocean may function as a liminal space between places and cultures but also connects and imbricates them. Part II considers ships as microcosmic societies, shaped for example by the purpose of the voyage, the mores of shipboard life, and cross-cultural encounters. Part III analyses narratives accreted to wrecks and rafts, what has sunk or floats perilously, and discusses attempts to recuperate plastic flotsam. Part IV plumbs ocean depths to consider how underwater creatures have been depicted in relation to emergent disciplines of natural history and museology, how mermaids have been reimagined as a metaphor of feminist transformation, and how the symbolism of coral is deployed by contemporary artists. This engaging and erudite volume will interest a range of scholars in humanities and social sciences, including art and cultural historians, cultural geographers, and historians of empire, travel, and tourism.

Tricia Cusack’s publications include Art and Identity at the Water’s Edge (ed.) (Ashgate 2012); Riverscapes and National Identities (Syracuse University Press 2010); Art, Nation and Gender: Ethnic Landscapes, Myths and Mother-Figures (co-edited, Ashgate 2003), and numerous articles.

◊  ◊  ◊  ◊  ◊

C O N T E N T S

Introduction: Framing the ocean, 1700 to the present: Envisaging the sea as social space, Tricia Cusack

Part I Exploring the Ocean: Colonial Crossings
1. From Mare Tenebrorum to Atlantic Ocean: A cartographical biography (1470–1900), Carla Lois
2. The Old World anew: The Atlantic as the liminal site of expectations, Emily Burns
3. Second encounters in the South Seas: Revisiting the shores of Cook and Bougainville in the art of Gauguin, La Farge and Barnfield, Elizabeth C. Childs

Part II Ships as Microcosms of Society
4. The artist travels: Augustus Earle at sea, Sarah Thomas
5. Sailors on horseback: The representation of seamen and social space in eighteenth-century British visual culture, Geoff Quilley
6. The ‘other’ ships: Dhows and the colonial imagination in the Indian Ocean, Erik Gilbert
7. Representation, commerce, and consumption: The cruise industry and the ocean, Adam Weaver

Part III Narratives of Shipwrecks, Rafts, and Jetsam
8. Shipwrecks, mutineers and cannibals: Maritime mythology and the political unconscious in eighteenth-century Britain, Carl Thompson
9. The sea as repository: Tacita Dean’s Teignmouth Electron, 1999 and Sean Lynch’s DeLorean Progress Report, 2010, Kirstie North
10. Reconstructing the raft: Semiotics and memory in the art of the shipwreck and the raft, Yvonne Scott
11. Plastic as shadow: The toxicity of objects in the anthropocene, Pam Longobardi

Part IV Natural and Unnatural Histories: Oceanic Imaginings
12. A ‘dreadful apparatus’: John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark and the cultures of natural history, Emily Ballew Neff
13. Mermaids and metaphors: Dorothea Tanning’s surrealist ocean, Victoria Carruthers and Catriona McAra
14. ‘Something rich and strange’: Coral in contemporary art, Marion Endt-Jones
15. ‘No fancy so wild’: Slippery gender models in the coral gallery, Pandora Syperek

Index

Published by Campisano and available from ArtBooks.com:

Antonello Cesareo, Studi su Anton von Maron, 2001–2012 (Rome: Campisano Editore, 2014), 200 pages, ISBN: 9788898229239, 30€ / $59.

Il volume racchiude gli scritti dedicati per più di un decennio da Antonello Cesareo ad Anton von Maron (1731–1808), sommo ritrattista Neoclassico, di cui l’autore ricostruisce la personalità e il catalogo delle opere. Grazie all’attenta analisi della sua produzione, rivivono le principali figure della storia politica e culturale del Settecento, dall’archeologo tedesco Johan Joachim Winckelmann agli Accademici di San Luca, dalle nobildonne e dai gentiluomini europei attori del Grand-Tour fino alla coppia imperiale austriaca. «La nobile semplicità dei suoi ritratti», come scrive lo stesso autore, è raggiunta «grazie ad una sapiente resa atmosferica che oltrepassa il modello batoniano, seppure dallo stesso Maron più volte ripreso, per giungere a definire un esempio che trascende la resa del personaggio incipriato nel massimo del suo splendore».

È l’Europa del Secolo dei Lumi a sfilare davanti a noi, ancora vivida e pregna di significato attraverso i volti dei suoi protagonisti.

Antonello Cesareo (L’Aquila 1971 – Trento 2013) si è laureato, specializzato e ha conseguito il titolo di dottore di ricerca presso l’Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza studiando artisti e collezionisti inglesi in Italia tra Seicento e Settecento, quali Gavin Hamilton e Thomas Howard secondo conte di Arundel. È stato autore di saggi e approfondimenti su artisti quali Thomas Jenkins, Marcello Bacciarelli e committenti come il cardinale Henry Stuart duca di York, il cardinale Ercole Consalvi e Angelo Maria Ricci. Nel 2012 ha dedicato un volume alla ricostruzione del fecondo rapporto di Antonio Canova con l’Accademia di San Luca, grazie al ritrovamento di numerosi documenti inediti, frutto di un triennio di studi trascorso come borsista presso la prestigiosa istituzione. Nel 2013 la commissione per l’Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale, riconoscendo l’alto valore innovativo dei suoi contributi, gli ha attribuito le funzioni di professore di II fascia.

S O M M A R I O

Hugh Honour, Prefazione
Alvar González-Palacios, Antonello
1. Nobile, fiero e di gentile aspetto: su di un Autoritratto giovanile di Anton von Maron; pubblicato in Neoclassico 20 (2001): 22–33.
2. ‘Valentissimo pittor divenuto…’: un Autoritratto di Anton von Maron; pubblicato in Bollettino del Museo Civico di Bassano 25 (2004): 251–68.
3. Anton von Maron: ‘The first portrait painter at present in Rome’; pubblicato in Antologia di Belle Arti, II (2007): 104–29.
4. ‘I cui nomi sono cogniti per ogni dove…’. A proposito di Caterina Cherubini Preciado e Theresa Mengs Maron; pubblicato in Les Cahiers d’Histoire de l’Art 6 (2008): 78–87.
5. Ancora su Anton von Maron ritrattista (pubblicato in Antologia di Belle Arti, III, 2009, pp. 62-93)
6. ‘Mein Lieber Meister…’. Appunti sulla bottega di Anton von Maron; pubblicato in Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte 101 (2010): 81–88.
7. Anton von Maron e l’Accademia di San Luca; pubblicato in Studi sul Settecento Romano 26 (2010): 201–34.
8. ‘Con maestra mano usa il pennello creando opere sublimi’. Anton von Maron ritrattista al servizio della corte austriaca; conferenza tenuta all’Accademia degli Agiati di Rovereto l’8 marzo 2012.
Bibliografia di Antonello Cesareo