Enfilade

SVEC 2014.02 from the Voltaire Foundation:

Tomas Macsotay, The Profession of Sculpture in the Paris ‘Académie’, SVEC (Oxford: Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2014), 360 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0729410793, £70 / €84 / $116.

The profession of sculpture was transformed during the eighteenth century as the creation and appreciation of art became increasingly associated with social interaction. Central to this transformation was the esteemed yet controversial body, the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. In this richly illustrated book, Tomas Macsotay focuses on the sculptor’s life at the Académie, analysing the protocols that dictated the production of academic art. Arguing that these procedures were modelled on the artist’s study journey to Rome, Macsotay discusses the close links between working practices introduced at the Académie and new notions of academic community and personal sensibility. He explores the bodily form of the morceau de réception on which the election of new members depended, and how this shaped the development of academic ideas and practices. Macsotay also reconsiders the early revolutionary years, where outside events exacerbated tensions between personal autonomy and institutional authority.

The Profession of Sculpture in the Paris Académie underscores the moral and aesthetic divide separating modern interpretations of sculpture based on notions of the individual artistic persona, and eighteenth-century notions of sociable production. The result is a book which takes sculpture outside the national arena, and re-focuses attention on its more subjective role, a narrative of intimate life in a modern world.

Tomas Macsotay is a research fellow at the Universitat Autònoma, Barcelona. He is currently researching the visual culture of Spanish academies and sculpture in transnational Rome, and has previously published articles on the history of eighteenth-century French, Dutch, and British art. Macsotay’s 2008 thesis The Human Figure as Method: Study, Sculpture and Sculptors in the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (1720–1765) was awarded the 2009 Prix Marianne Roland Michel.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1. The impossible originality of Falconet’s Milon
2. Sculptors’ morceaux between style and method
3. From shop floor to academic gallery
4. Guidance and autonomy: the role of Rome
5. Vleughels’s drawing sculptors
6. The order of figures: inert and moving
Epilogue. Of lions and cats: sociability and sculpture
Bibliography
Index

Macsotay offers a peak at the book’s argument with this posting at the Voltaire Foundation’s blog, “Sculptors in the Paris Académie’s mould, and how to (mis)understand them,” (17 February 2014).

From the University of California Press:

Jennifer L. Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0520251847, $60 / £42.

Transporting Visions follows pictures as they traveled through and over the swamps, forests, towns, oceans, and rivers of British America and the United States between 1760 and 1860. Taking seriously the complications involved in moving pictures through the physical world—the sheer bulk and weight of canvases, the delays inherent in long-distance reception, the perpetual threat to the stability and mnemonic capacity of images, the uneasy mingling of artworks with other kinds of things in transit–Jennifer L. Roberts forges a model for a material history of visual communication in early America. Focusing on paintings and prints by John Singleton Copley, John James Audubon, and Asher B. Durand—which were designed with mobility in mind—Roberts shows how an analysis of such imagery opens new perspectives on the most fundamental problems of early American commodity circulation, geographic expansion, and social cohesion.

Jennifer L. Roberts is Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. She teaches American art from the colonial period to the present, with particular focus on issues of landscape, expedition, material culture theory, and the history of science. Her book Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History was published in 2004 by Yale University Press.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Long-Distance Pictures
1. Dilemmas of Delivery in Copley’s Atlantic
2. Audubon’s Burden: Materiality and Transmission in The Birds of America
3. Gathering Moss: Asher B. Durand and the Deceleration of Landscape
Epilogue: Material Visual Culture
Notes
Selected Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index

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From The University of Chicago Press:

Adelheid Voskuhl, Androids in the Enlightenment: Mechanics, Artisans, and Cultures of the Self (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 296 pages, ISBN: 978-0226034027, $45.

The eighteenth century saw the creation of a number of remarkable mechanical androids: at least ten prominent automata were built between 1735 and 1810 by clockmakers, court mechanics, and other artisans from France, Switzerland, Austria, and the German lands. Designed to perform sophisticated activities such as writing, drawing, or music making, these ‘Enlightenment automata’ have attracted continuous critical attention from the time they were made to the present, often as harbingers of the modern industrial age, an era during which human bodies and souls supposedly became mechanized.

In Androids in the Enlightenment, Adelheid Voskuhl investigates two such automata—both depicting piano-playing women. These automata not only play music, but also move their heads, eyes, and torsos to mimic a sentimental body technique of the eighteenth century: musicians were expected to generate sentiments in themselves while playing, then communicate them to the audience through bodily motions. Voskuhl argues, contrary to much of the subsequent scholarly conversation, that these automata were unique masterpieces that illustrated the sentimental culture of a civil society rather than expressions of anxiety about the mechanization of humans by industrial technology. She demonstrates that only in a later age of industrial factory production did mechanical androids instill the fear that modern selves and societies had become indistinguishable from machines.

Adelheid Voskuhl is associate professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: Androids, Enlightenment, and the Human-Machine Boundary
2 The Harpsichord-Playing Android; or, Clock-Making in Switzerland
3 The Dulcimer-Playing Android; or, Furniture-Making in the Rhineland
4 The Design of the Mechanics; or, Sentiments Replicated in Clockwork
5 Poetic Engagement with Piano-Playing Women Automata
6 The ‘Enlightenment Automaton’ in the Modern Industrial Age
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

From Duke UP:

Clare Haru Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Duke University Press, 2013), 448 pages, ISBN: 978-0822355137 (hardcover), $100 / ISBN: 978-0822355281 (paperback), $28.

In Old Regime France credit was both a central part of economic exchange and a crucial concept for explaining dynamics of influence and power in all spheres of life. Contemporaries used the term credit to describe reputation and the currency it provided in court politics, literary production, religion, and commerce. Moving beyond Pierre Bourdieu’s theorization of capital, this book establishes credit as a key matrix through which French men and women perceived their world. As Clare Haru Crowston demonstrates, credit unveils the personal character of market transactions, the unequal yet reciprocal ties binding society, and the hidden mechanisms of political power.

Credit economies constituted ‘economies of regard’ in which reputation depended on embodied performances of credibility. Crowston explores the role of fashionable appearances and sexual desire in leveraging credit and reconstructs women’s vigorous participation in its gray markets. The scandalous relationship between Queen Marie Antoinette and fashion merchant Rose Bertin epitomizes the vertical loyalties and deep social divides of the credit regime and its increasingly urgent political stakes.

Clare Haru Crowston is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791, also published by Duke University Press.

C O N T E N T S

Illustrations and Tables  ix
Money and Measurements  xi
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction  1
1. Credit and Old Regime Economies of Regard  21
2. Critiques and Crises of the Credit System  56
3. Incredible Style: Intertwined Circuits of Credit, Fashion, and Sex  96
4. Credit in the Fashion Trades of Eighteenth-Century Paris  139
5. Fashion Merchants: Managing Credit, Narrating Collapse  195
6. Madame Déficit and Her Minister of Fashion: Self-Fashioning and the Politics of Credit  246
7. Family Affairs: Consumption, Credit, and the Marriage Bond  283
Conclusion. Credit is Dead. Long Live Credit!  316
Notes  329
Bibliography  383
Index  407

Johann Gottfried Hänisch the Elder (German, Dresden, 1696–1778), Small Crossbow (Bolzenschnepper), probably for a Woman or a Child, 1738 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011.429), catalogue entry #15. Read more here»

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Distributed by Yale UP:

Dirk Breiding, A Deadly Art: European Crossbows, 1250–1850 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014), 160 pages, ISBN: 978-0300197044, $25.

The advent of the crossbow more than 2,500 years ago effected dramatic changes for hunters and warriors. For centuries, it was among the most powerful and widely used handheld weapons, and its popularity endures to this day. A Deadly Art presents a lively, accessible survey of the crossbow’s “golden age,” along with detailed descriptions of twenty-four remarkable examples.

Beginning in the middle ages, the European aristocracy’s enthusiasm for the crossbow heralded shooting competitions and pageants that featured elaborately decorated weapons bearing elegant embellishments of rare materials and prized artistry. In addition to being highly functional, these weapons were magnificent works of art.

Dirk Breiding is J. J. Medveckis Curator of Arms and Armor at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.