New Book | The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island
Released in December from U of Pennsylvania Press:
Jonathan Conlin, ed., The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 352 pages, cloth ISBN 978-0812244380 / ebook ISBN 978-0812207323, $70 / £46.
Summers at the Vauxhall pleasure garden in London brought diverse entertainments to a diverse public. Picturesque walks and arbors offered a pastoral retreat from the city, while at the same time the garden’s attractions indulged distinctly urban tastes for fashion, novelty, and sociability. High- and low-born alike were free to walk the paths; the proximity to strangers and the danger of dark walks were as thrilling to visitors as the fountains and fireworks. Vauxhall was the venue that made the careers of composers, inspired novelists, and showcased the work of artists. Scoundrels, sudden downpours, and extortionate ham prices notwithstanding, Vauxhall became a must-see destination for both Londoners and tourists. Before long, there were Vauxhalls across Britain and America, from York to New York, Norwich to New Orleans.
This edited volume provides the first book-length study of the attractions and interactions of the pleasure garden, from the opening of Vauxhall in the seventeenth century to the amusement parks of the early twentieth. Nine essays explore the mutual influences of human behavior and design: landscape, painting, sculpture, and even transient elements such as lighting and music tacitly informed visitors how to move within the space, what to wear, how to behave, and where they might transgress. The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island draws together the work of musicologists, art historians, and scholars of urban studies and landscape design to unfold a cultural history of pleasure gardens, from the entertainments they offered to the anxieties of social difference they provoked.
Jonathan Conlin is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Southampton and author of Civilisation and The Nation’s Mantelpiece: A History of the National Gallery.
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C O N T E N T S
Introduction
Jonathan Conlin 1
Chapter 1. Theaters of Hospitality: The Forms and Uses of Private Landscapes and Public Gardens
John Dixon Hunt 29
Chapter 2. Pleasure Gardens and Urban Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century
Peter Borsay 49
Chapter 3. Guns in the Gardens: Peter Monamy’s Paintings for Vauxhall
Eleanor Hughes 78
Chapter 4. Performance Alfresco: Music-Making in London’s Pleasure Gardens
Rachel Cowgill 100
Chapter 5. Pleasure Gardens of America: Anxieties of National Identity
Naomi Stubbs 127
Chapter 6. Pleasure Gardens in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: ”Useful for All Classes of Society”
Lake Douglas 150
Chapter 7. Night and Day: Illusion and Carnivalesque at Vauxhall
Deborah Epstein Nord 177
Chapter 8. ”Strange Beauty in the Night”: Whistler’s Nocturnes of Cremorne Gardens
Anne Koval 195
Chapter 9. Edwardian Amusement Parks: The Pleasure Garden Reborn?
Josephine Kane 217
Notes 247
Select Bibliography 299
List of Contributors 303
Index 307
Acknowledgments 315
Exhibition | A Handsome Cupboard of Plate: Early American Silver
From ACC Distribution:
A Handsome Cupboard of Plate Early American Silver in the Cahn Collection
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1 December 2012 — 24 March 2013
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 20 April — 3 November 2013
Missouri History Museum, St Louis, 23 November 2013 — 2 March 2014
The DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, Colonial Williamsburg, 3 May 2014 — 25 May 2015
Deborah Dependahl Waters, A Handsome Cupboard of Plate Early American Silver in the Cahn Collection (Cambridge: John Adamson, 2013), 128 pages, ISBN: 978-1898565116, $40.
Strength in design and fineness of craftsmanship unify the early American domestic and presentation silver assembled by Paul and Elissa Cahn and published together for the first time. Beginning in Boston with a caudle cup marked by Jeremiah Dummer, America’s first native-born silversmith, and objects from the shop of patriot silversmith Paul Revere, the book then focuses on New York, where a distinctive style reflecting the Dutch heritage of that region emerged, and afterward on Philadelphia, where generations of the Quaker Richardson family supplied goods of the “best sort, but plain.”
Pride of place is given to the work of New York Jewish silversmith Myer Myers and his shop, including a presentation waiter made for Theodorus Van Wyck. Accompanying a touring exhibition of the Cahn collection, the book encapsulates some of the ethnic, religious, and political diversity of early America and sets
the silver in its social and historical context.
C O N T E N T S
Foreword by Kaywin Feldman, Director and President, Minneapolis Institute of Arts
The Cahn Collection of Early American Silver – An Appreciation by David L. Barquist, The H. Richard Dietrich Jr. Curator of American Decorative Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art
A Handsome Cupboard of Plate: Early American Silver and Silversmiths – An Introductory Essay
Catalogue
I: Boston
II: New York
III: Philadelphia
Frequent Bibliographical References and Note on Digital Resources
Index
Deborah Dependahl Waters is an independent historian of American decorative arts, specializing in silver and furniture of the Mid-Atlantic region. Since 1987 she has been a member of the part-time teaching faculty for the Parsons-Cooper-Hewitt M.A. Program in the History of Decorative Arts and Design, and is currently president of New York Silver Society, Inc. She is the editor and an author of Elegant Plate: Three Centuries of Precious Metals in New York City (2000), and a contributor to Art in the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861 (2000), and Silversmiths to the Nation: Thomas Fletcher and Sidney Gardiner, 1808-1842 (2007), as well as lead author of The Jewelry and Metalwork of Marie Zimmermann (2011).
Exhibition | Charles Jennens: The Man behind Handel’s ‘Messiah’
From The Handel House Museum:
Charles Jennens: The Man behind Handel’s Messiah
The Handel House Museum, London, 21 November 2012 — 14 April 2013
Curated by Ruth Smith
In a major new exhibition the Handel House Museum explores the life, work and character of Handel’s great collaborator Charles Jennens.
An enigmatic character, Jennens had an enormous influence on Handel’s life and work. As librettist for the oratorios Saul and Belshazzar, he provided the composer with words that inspired some of his most challenging and exciting music. His carefully chosen scripture selection for Messiah was to inspire Handel to even greater creative heights, and together these two men created one of the greatest musical works of all time.
The exhibition examines this relationship in detail, alongside other elements of Jennens’s life as a great landowner; the builder of a fine country house with extensive grounds; a major art collector; a Christian philanthropist; a devout defender of revealed religion; an encourager of other authors and composers; a loyal friend; and a forward-looking editor of Shakespeare.
Bringing together exhibits from throughout the UK and beyond, for the first time this landmark exhibition unites all known oil portraits of Jennens to stand beside Handel House’s own magnificent portrait by Thomas Hudson.
The exhibition’s curator is Dr Ruth Smith, author of Handel’s Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge University Press), who has made a particular study of the life and work of Charles Jennens.
Ruth Smith, Charles Jennens: The Man behind Handel’s Messiah (London: Gerald Coke Handel Foundation, 2012), 71 pages, ISBN: 978-0956099822, £8.50.
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Jonathan Keates provides a review for the TLS (11 January 2013):
. . . Unfolding the mystery of Charles Jennens for us, this fine new exhibition, which also has a related walking tour and a series of talks and concerts, is the best so far within the Handel House’s limited space; it was mounted under the guidance of Ruth Smith, whose illuminating survey of his achievement accompanies the show. Besides evoking our admiration for him as aesthete, connoisseur, charitable patron, landscape gardener or devoted friend, she celebrates his work as the earliest variorum editor of Shakespeare’s plays. . . .
New Book | Atlas De Wit City Atlas of the Low Countries, 1698
From ACC Distribution:
Marieke van Delft and Peter van der Krogt, Atlas De Wit City Atlas of the Low Countries, 1698 (Tielt: Lannoo Publishers, 2013), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-9401401890, $175.
Discover the Google Earth of the Dutch Golden Age
• A historical atlas from 1698 with 151 city maps from the Northern and Southern Netherlands, from Groningen to Lille
• A book of great cultural and artistic importance. Only 5 copies of the original atlas are known worldwide
• Contains beautiful, originally hand-colored maps, drawn from a bird’s eye view
• A facsimile on true scale with a new introduction and a detailed description per map by Marieke van Delft and Peter van der Krogt
Atlas De Wit is a unique, historical atlas of cartographer Frederick de Wit with 158 city maps, city views and engravings from the Northern and Southern Netherlands (today’s Netherlands, Belgium and French Flanders). This facsimile contains full-size images of the beautiful, original hand-colored cards, which are drawn in perspective. The maps provide a visual perspective on the history of the 17th century, from Groningen to Cambrai. This title is completed with introductory and detailed descriptions that make this historical atlas map accessible to all lovers of history and old maps. Text in English, French & Dutch.
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New Book | Seeing Satire in the Eighteenth Century
From the Voltaire Foundation:
Elizabeth C. Mansfield and Kelly Malone, eds., Seeing Satire in the Eighteenth Century, SVEC 2013:02 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013), 320 pages, ISBN-978-0729410632, £65 / €80 / $106.
A moment in history when verbal satire, caricature, and comic performance exerted unprecedented influence on society, the Enlightenment sustained a complex, though now practically invisible, culture of visual humor. In Seeing Satire in the Eighteenth Century contributors recapture the unique energy of comic images in the works of key artists and authors whose satirical intentions have been obscured by time.
From a decoding of Gabriel de Saint-Aubin’s Livre de caricatures as a titillating jibe at royal and courtly figures, a reinterpretation of the man’s muff as an emblem of foreignness, foppishness and impotence, a reappraisal of F. X. Messerschmidt’s sculpted heads as comic critiques of Lavater’s theories of physiognomy, to the press denigration of William Wilberforce’s abolitionist efforts, visual satire is shown to extend to all areas of society and culture across Europe and North America. By analysing the hidden meaning of these key works, contributors reveal how visual comedy both mediates and intensifies more serious social critique. The power of satire’s appeal to the eye was as clearly understood, and as widely exploited in the Enlightenment as it is today.
Elizabeth C. Mansfield’s research encompasses modern and early modern European art. Her publications include an award-winning book on the classical legend of Zeuxis ‘Selecting Models’. She is currently Vice-President of Scholarly Programs at the National Humanities Center. Kelly Malone is a scholar of the literature and culture of eighteenth-century England. She is currently Associate Professor of English at Sewanee, the University of the South.
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C O N T E N T S
Introduction, Elizabeth C. Mansfield and Kelly Malone — Seeing satire in the Age of Reason
1. Emmanuel Schwartz — Satire unmasked by reading
2. Eric Rosenberg — The impossibility of painting: the satiric inevitability of John Singleton Copley’s Boy with a Squirrel
3. Julie-Anne Plax — Watteau’s witticisms: visual humor and sociability
4. Emily Richardson — ‘Tu n’as pas tout vü!’: seeing satire in the Saint-Aubin Livre de Caricatures
5. Melissa Lee Hyde — Needling: embroidery and satire in the hands of Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin
6. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell — ‘He is not dressed without a muff’: muffs, masculinity, and la mode in English satire
7. Trevor Burnard — ‘A compound mongrel mixture’: racially coded humor, satire, and the denigration of white Creoles in the British Empire 1784-1834
8. Reva Wolf — Seeing satire in the peepshow
9. Steven Minuk — Swift’s satire of vision
10. Michael Yonan — Messerschmidt, the Hogarth of sculpture
11. Katherine Mannheimer — Anatomizing print’s perils: Augustan satire’s textual bodies
12. Marcus C. Levitt — ‘Women’s wiles’ in Mikhail Chulkov’s The Comely Cook
List of illustrations
Summaries
Bibliography
Index
Exhibition Review | Versailles and the Antique
Reviewed for Enfilade by Hélène Bremer
Versailles et l’Antique
Château de Versailles, 13 November 2012 — 17 March 2013
Curated by Alexandre Maral, Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, Jean-Luc Martinez, and Nicolas Milovanovic, with scenography by Pier Luigi Pizzi
Galerie de Pierre basse (Room 1) Versailles et l’Antique
© EPV / Th. Garnier
The entrance through the Gallerie de Pierre Basse (Room 1) of the Palace of Versailles has been changed dramatically for the exhibition Versailles and Antiquity. The public is usually barred from this part of the palace, allowed only to peek down a rather dark hallway containing a collection of sculpture dedicated to heroes of French history. Instead, for now, these statues are discretely draped with white tissue, and the public enters alongside a selection of masterpieces from Louis XIVth’s sculpture garden. The finest marble sculpture from the collections of the French court, now in the collections of the Louvre and the Palace of Versailles, suggest a new Rome, created at Versailles by the Sun King and presently revived by the exhibition curators. This exceptionally ambitious show brings together not only marbles, but also bronzes, tapestries, paintings, drawings, decorative and ephemeral objects to explore the relationship between Versailles and Antiquity.
The renowned opera-stage-designer Pier Luigi Pizzi is responsible for the scenography of the installation. He has described the exhibition as a play in which the works of art are the characters and the stage breathes the spirit of the seventeenth-century French court. The subject of the play is the taste of the insatiable collector, Louis XIV. Within the spaces of the palace, Pizzi has managed to accommodate these ‘actors’, which here communicate with each other and invite visitors to follow along, from one spectacular scene to the next (though I imagine many may fail to appreciate the full production with not a single explanatory panel to be found in the whole exhibition).
In early modern Europe, all important courts collected antiquities in order to suggest their magnificence. Materials like porphyry, marble, alabaster, and bronze enhanced the prestige of such collections while tapestries and paintings comparing sovereigns with Classical gods and goddesses symbolized the court’s power.
In France this mode of collecting began with François I. After he failed to acquire the Laöcoon group in 1515 (and again in 1520) from Pope Leo X, his agent Francesco Primaticcio finally gained permission to make casts from the work, and a bronze copy was made for the Palace at Fontainebleau. The French collection of antiques grew only slowly under Henry II, who received the sculpture of Diane chasseresse from Pope Paul IV in 1556 (it serves as the emblem of the exhibition), and subsequent sovereigns largely lost interest altogether. In the seventeenth century, however, cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin assembled large collections of antiquities, most of which eventually entered the collection of Louis XIV. While the king had long been interested in collecting antiquities (under the guidance of Mazarin), his ambitions were fueled by a remark made by Bernini in 1665 during the sculptor’s visit to France. After Louis XIV showed him the royal collection, Bernini judged that it consisted of “ornaments for ladies.” Embarrassed, the king hurried to improve the collection, adding important, large, masculine (read powerful) sculpture. At the time it was not necessary to display genuine antique marbles; but instead, reassembled works and contemporary sculpture inspired by the antique could do as well. Within a short time, the collection at Versailles grew steadily, and the newly built Hall of Mirrors was adorned with gods and goddesses in marble, vases in porphyry as well as with classically-themed ceiling and wall paintings. References to antiquity intensified among all art forms, with Versailles celebrated as the new Rome.
Salle du Maroc (Room 3) Versailles et l’Antique
© EPV / Th. Garnier
This exhibition claims to reconstruct a Versailles not seen since the French Revolution. On offer is not, however, a display of antiquities as they appeared at the court of Louis XIV, but the creation of an ambiance. Walking from the sculpture garden in the Gallerie Basse up the stairs to the Salle de Constantine (Room 2) with its reconstructed Palais de Soleil would have been a rather different experience in the seventeenth century. The importance of antiquity is nonetheless clear from the enormous quantity of objects on display. Using the rooms of the palace instead of temporary exhibition spaces preserves the court’s atmosphere. One wanders from intimate cabinets (Rooms 4 and 5) filled with precious objects and paintings, into a light-filled sculpture gallery dedicated to the gardens of Marly (Room 6), to rooms containing mythological paintings (Rooms 7 and 8). The exhibition includes a historical sequence, and dixhuitièmists will be especially interested in the Quatrième Salle de Crimée (Room 8) dedicated to the persistence of antiquity in the eighteenth century. In particular, the room examines eighteenth-century taste through paintings by Nattier and Drouais of court ladies disguised as Diana or Flore, along with the changing relationship between politics and aesthetics.
Quatrième salle de Crimée (Room 8) Versailles et l’Antique
© EPV / Th. Garnier
Near the show’s conclusion (Room 9), the presentation of the grand projet to reconstruct the palace during the eighteenth century is interesting for its references to the antique (especially to the monuments of Rome), but this architectural departure is probably a bit much for the average visitor at the close of such an extensive exhibition (180 of the 200 objects on display have already asked a lot of viewers’ attention). Showing this material in a separate venue may have helped insure it receives the attention it merits.
Finally, the Salle de la Smalah (Room 10), dedicated to the Fêtes à l’antique, displays an impressive table ornament in the form of a antique colonnade in front of a sculpture of Apollo, in turn flanked by an enormous barometer made for Louis XV and XVI. Rather, however, than providing a satisfying finale to the proposed play, this last installation left me feeling oddly alone on the middle of the stage, longing for a re-enactment.
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Alexandre Maral and Nicolas Milovanovic, eds., Versailles et l’Antique (Paris: Artlys, 2012), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-2854955125, 49€ / $95.
Versailles was a new Rome in several ways: in its grandiose size, in its ambition to endure through the centuries, and in the many references to the great models of Antiquity. In the 17th century, Antiquity was an incomparable absolute, which the most ambitious sovereigns wished to rival: Louis XIV created Versailles as the seat of power to bring back the grandeur of Antiquity. The exhibition examines the presence of Antiquity in Versailles from two angles: the acquisition of antique fragments and commissions of copies by the kings, and the re-appropriation of antique models and figures by artists. It brings back to Versailles about fifty antiques that it possessed during the Ancien Régime. The interpretation of Antiquity and its mythology are evoked through about two hundred works from the principal French and foreign collections (the Louvre, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Besançon, Uffizi Gallery of Florence, Archaeological Museum of Naples, etc.): sculptures, paintings, drawings, engravings,
tapestries, pieces of furniture, objets d’art.
Available from ArtBooks.com»
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The website of the Palace of Versailles provides additional information, including a series of videos. Full descriptions of each section of the exhibition are available as a PDF file here»
New Book | Encountering China
From Bucknell University Press:
Rachana Sachdev and Qingjun Li, eds., Encountering China: Early Modern and European Responses (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012), 230 pages, ISBN 978-1611484823, $35.
Encountering China addresses the responses of early modern travelers to China who, awed by the wealth and sophistication of the society they encountered, attempted primarily to build bridges, to explore similarities, and to emulate the Chinese, though they were also critical of some local traditions and practices. Contributors engage critically with travelogues, treating them not just as occasional sources of historical information but as primary, literary texts deeply revelatory of the world they describe. Contributors reach back to the earliest European writings available on China in an effort to broaden and nuance our understanding of European contact with the Middle Kingdom in the early modern period. While the primary focus of these essays is the external gaze – European sources about China – contributors also tease out aspects of the Chinese world-view of the time, thus generating a conversation between Chinese literary and historical texts and European ones.
Rachana Sachdev is associate professor of English and coordinator of Asian studies at Susquehanna University. She has published several articles on early modern gynecological discourses; the most recent, “Of Paps and Drugs: Nursing Breasts in Shakespeare’s England,” appeared in English Language Notes 47, 2 (Fall/Winter 2009). Her current research project focuses on representations of infanticide and position of children in Asia in the European travel writing from the early modern era. A brief section of the chapter on Ming China, “Contextualizing Female Infanticide: Ming China in Early Modern European Travelogues” was recently published in ASIANetwork Exchange (Fall 2010).
Qingjun Li is Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Chinese Language at Belmont University. She holds her Ph.D. in English from Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU). She is also Associate Professor of English at Zhengzhou University, Peoples Republic of China, where she has been twice recognized as the Teacher of Excellence. She is author of three books and numerous articles, including her recent essay, “Pound’s Poetic Mirror and the China Cantos: The Healing of the West,” Southeast Review of Asian Studies 30 (2008). Her research interests are in Chinese American literature, women’s literature, and comparative literature.
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C O N T E N T S
Rachana Sachdev — Introduction
Rachana Sachdev — European Responses to Child Abandonment, Sale of Children and Social Welfare Policies in Ming China
Qingjun Li — Of Golden Lilies and Gentlewomen: Constructions of Chinese Women in Early Modern European Travel Narratives
Daniel Dooghan — Earlier Moderns: The Novel Form as National Development in China and Europe
Ning Ma — “A Strong Resemblance”: Samuel Richardson, Chinese Talent-Beauty Novels, and a Secret Origin of “World Literature”
Ronnie Littlejohn — “Magicians, Enchanters, and Professional Crooks”: Early Modern Understandings of Daoism
Terry Logan Mazurak — Buddhism and Idolatry
Bibliography
Index
About the Contributors
New Book | Daniela Bleichmar’s ‘Visible Empire’
From The University of Chicago Press:
Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-0226058535, $55.
Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 botanical illustrations. Yet these images have remained largely overlooked—until now.
In this lavishly illustrated volume, Daniela Bleichmar gives this archive its due, finding in these botanical images a window into the worlds of Enlightenment science, visual culture, and empire. Through innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that bridges the histories of science, visual culture, and the Hispanic world, Bleichmar uses these images to trace two related histories: the little-known history of scientific expeditions in the Hispanic Enlightenment and the history of visual evidence in both science and administration in the early modern Spanish empire. As Bleichmar shows, in the Spanish empire visual epistemology operated not only in scientific contexts but also as part of an imperial apparatus that had a long-established tradition of deploying visual evidence for administrative purposes.
Daniela Bleichmar holds a joint appointment in the Departments of Art History and History. She received her BA from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in History (History of Science) from Princeton University, where she trained as a cultural historian of early modern science, specializing in the history of visual culture and the natural sciences in Europe and the Spanish Americas in the period 1500-1800. Her research and teaching address the history of the Spanish empire, early modern Europe, visual and material culture in science, collecting and display, and the book, print, and prints.
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C O N T E N T S
Introduction: Natural History and Visual Culture in the Spanish Empire
1: A Botanical Reconquista
2: Natural History and Visual Epistemology
3: Painting as Exploration
4: Economic Botany and the Limits of the Visual
5: Visions of Imperial Nature: Global White Space, Local Color
Conclusion: The Empire as an Image Machine
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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“The history of late eighteenth-century Latin America is often told simply as the Creoles’ ever-increasing disenchantment with an unenlightened Mother Spain. Daniela Bleichmar’s remarkable book offers us a different history, one in which an Enlightenment study of natural history takes center stage. She casts before the reader passionate and dedicated men of learning and the arts who under Spanish royal sponsorship were entrusted to perform precise observation of the natural fruits of divine creation and render them into splendid and copious scientific illustrations; the results of ‘artful looking . . . a barometer of Enlightenment thought.’ Bleichmar provides more than just an account of these accomplishments; she wields an interdisciplinary brilliance that melds the best of the history of science, art history, and history and serves up a critical and fascinating examination of Linnean classification, scientific illustration, and their complex intersection, scientific and social, in recording the flora of South America.”—Thomas B. F. Cummins, Harvard University
Exhibition | Peru: Kingdoms of the Sun and Moon
Press release (26 October 2012) from the MMFA:
Peru: Kingdoms of the Sun and Moon: Identities and Conquest
in the Early, Colonial and Modern Periods
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2 February — 16 June 2013
Seattle Art Museum, 17 October 2013 — 5 January 2014
Curated by Victor Pimentel
Mochica, North Coast, possibly La Mina, Forehead ornament with feline head and octopus tentacles ending in catfish heads (100 – 800 A.D.), Gold, chrysocolla, and shells. 28.5 x 41.4 x 4.5 cm (Museo de la Nación, Lima. Photo: Daniel Giannoni)
Organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Peru: Kingdoms of the Sun and Moon will display an extensive collection of pre-Columbian treasures and masterpieces from the colonial era to Indigenism, including over 100 pieces that have never before been seen outside of Peru. With more than 350 works of art (paintings, sculptures, gold and silver ornaments, pottery, photograph, works on paper, and textiles) on loan from public and private collections in Peru, Canada, United States, France, and Germany, this exhibition covers roughly 3,000 years of history, including archaeological discoveries in recent decades.
“In conceiving this exhibition on the question of identity in Latin America following our exhibition Cuba! Art and History from 1868 to today presented in 2008, I was fascinated to discover the extent to which archaeology has revealed this birthplace of civilization – one of six such in the world – only recently in the course of the 20th century” explains Nathalie Bondil, Director and Chief Curator of the MMFA. “This exhibition demonstrates how the retrospective view of history shifted from a colonial interpretation to a new nationalist feeling in the course of the modern era. This complex project brings together numerous loans, both public and private, from Peru, some of which have not been exhibited before. Above all, the display features paintings of the era subsequent to the Spanish Conquest and, for the first time outside Peru, of the Indigenist period after independence. The constant elements of a civilization built up over millennia open up perspectives never before opened,” she added.
Anonymous, Cuzco School, Virgen Niña Hilando (Young Virgin Spinning), second third of the 18th century, oil on canvas, gold leaf. 112.5 x 80.5 cm
(Lima: Museo Pedro de Osma. Photo: Joaquín Rubio)
Mythical Peru, cradle of Andean civilization, and its pre-Hispanic, colonial and modern history will be examined in the four sections of the exhibition as follows:
• Section 1 (introduction) will explain how archaeology rewrote the national history beginning with the discovery, in 1911, of Machu Picchu to the recent restitution of artworks.
• Section 2 will focus on the myths and rituals of the early civilizations of the Andes, highlighting their role in forming and shaping Peruvian identity during the pre-Columbian era.
• Section 3 will illustrate the perpetuation, concealment, and hybridization of the indigenous culture during the colonial period.
• The last section will highlight the rediscovery of this culture in the 20th century and the revalorization of ancient symbols of identity in contemporary Peruvian iconography.
Adds Exhibition Curator Victor Pimentel, Curator of Pre-Columbian Art at the MMFA, “Through the representation and reinterpretation of myths, rituals and other primordial symbols of identity captured by different artistic traditions, the exhibition will illustrate how the evocative power of images have influenced the history of pre-Hispanic, colonial and modern Peru.”
Illustrating the beliefs and rituals of pre-Columbian societies
The relationship with death, particularly the constant dialogue between the world of the living and the world of the dead, is an essential component of Andean spirituality. Among the Mochicas, ceremonial sacrifices contributed to the perpetuation of the supernatural and social orders, while ancestor worship held significant importance to the Lambayeque and Chimú cultures.
In order to illustrate the beliefs and rituals that dominated the life of pre-Columbian societies, the exhibition will focus on objects associated with the sacrificial ceremony of the Mochica people (200 B.C. to 800 A.D.) and the funerary rites of the Chimú and Lambayeque cultures (11th to 15th century A.D.), by presenting some of the most complete depictions of these rituals. On display will be important objects in gold, silver, and turquoise from the royal tombs of Sipán, discovered in 1987 by archaeologist Walter Alva, constituting the most significant find made in Peru since that of Machu Picchu. They include:
• A gold ear disc depicting the Lord of the place, the Mochica governor
• A Mochica ornament in the shape of a half-feline, half-octopus recently repatriated and exhibited for the first time
outside of Peru
• Funerary jewelry (crown, ear discs, necklace, pectoral and shoulder-pieces) including a masterpiece of Chimú gold work
• A rare headboard of a Lambayeque litter depicting figures officiating at a ceremony, unique in the complexity of its ornamentation
Religion in Many Forms
The Spanish conquest of Peru in the 16th century led to the hybridization of the Peruvian culture expressed through reinterpretations of mostly religious European art. Paintings of the School of Cuzco – established by the Spanish as a means of converting the Incas to Catholicism – showing Christ, miraculous Virgins, archangels and defenders of the Catholic faith, testify to the powerful role played by images in the campaign to evangelize the Native peoples of the Andes. Included among the examples of paintings mainly by Native artists resulted from this hybridization are:
A Nativity Chest dating from the 18th century, painted with a number of Biblical stories including Adam and Eve, the Annunciation, the Nativity and the visit of the Magi. This three-dimensional illustrated catechism was used to spread Catholicism throughout the Andes.
Among the ceremonial objects on view illustrating the importance of imagery relating to the celebration of the Eucharist in the Andes is a silver Eucharistic urn in the shape of a Pelican, a bird traditionally associated with Christ’s sacrifice. It is widely considered a masterpiece of the liturgical metalwork from the Latin-American Baroque period.
A particularly popular image in art during the Viceroyal period is that of the Virgin. Symbolic representations of the virtuous life of the Virgin Mary on view, such as Young Virgin Spinning, recalls the acllas, the Virgins of the Sun in the Inca empire, whose principal occupation was making garments for the Inca and for religious rites.
Processions also played an important role in the elaboration of a Peruvian identity both as a collective expression of Christian faith and as a means of reinforcing the socio-political positions of the participants. An 18th-century depiction of a splendid Corpus Christi procession, one of the first Christian celebrations to be performed in the colony and still performed to this day, attests to the multi-ethnic nature of the city of Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Inca empire. Coinciding with the celebration of the Inti Raymi, an Inca festival dedicated to the Sun God, Corpus Christi was the most important feast day in the colonial liturgical calendar.
Peruvian art in the 19th and 20th centuries
By 1821, Peruvians had achieved their independence and had formed an indigenous collective memory that combined the idealisation of the pre-Hispanic past, particularly the Inca Empire, with an interest in local subjects. A typical work of Peruvian art of the mid-19th century, Habitante de las cordilleras del Perú (Inhabitant of the Peruvian Highlands) by Francisco Laso, portrays the indigenous peasant as a national symbol for the new Peruvian republic, and heralds the direction that Peruvian cultural nationalism was to take in the next century.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Indigenism flourished as an artistic and intellectual movement based on revalorising and reaffirming Peru’s indigenous heritage. Paintings depicting scenes of Native life and the idyllic landscapes of the Peruvian countryside and highlands such as Pastoras (Shepherdesses) by Leonor Vinatea Cantuarias were to transform the visual culture of Peru in the modern era. This movement is represented in the exhibition by a wide selection of works by José Sabogal, Camilo Blas, Julia Codesido, and Enrique Camino Brent. Widely praised for his documentation of indigenous culture, the only Amerindian included among the major artists associated with the movement is the photographer and portraitist Martín Chambi. Works by Chambi on view include Tristeza andina, La Raya (Andean sadness, La Raya).
An exhibition checklist (PDF) is available here»
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From Abrams:
Victor Pimentel, ed., Peru: Kingdoms of the Sun and the Moon (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2013), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-8874396290, $65.
A new publication featuring essays by the foremost experts on the art of Peru The MMFA will produce an accompanying 384-page catalogue co-published in English and in French by the MMFA and 5 Continents Editions in Milan. This fully-illustrated volume (450 illustrations) comprises essays by eminent curators and specialists and interviews with leading figures and experts on Peruvian archaeology, art history, and literature such as the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa.
Victor Pimentel is curator of pre-Columbian art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
New Book | Modern Antiques: The Material Past in England
From Bucknell UP:
Barrett Kalter, Modern Antiques: The Material Past in England, 1660-1780 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2012), 249 pages, ISBN 978-1611483789, $80.
The recovery and reinvention of the past were fundamental to the conception of the modern in England during the long eighteenth century. Scholars then forged connections between linear time and empirical evidence that transformed historical consciousness. Chronologers, textual critics, and antiquaries constructed the notion of a material past, which spread through the cultures of print and consumption to a broader public, offering powerful–and for that reason, contested–ways of perceiving temporality and change, the historicity of objects, and the relation between fact and the imagination. But even as these innovative ideas won acceptance, they also generated rival forms of historical meaning. The regular procession of chronological time accentuated the deviance of anachronism and ephemerality, while the opposition of unique artifacts to ubiquitous commodities exoticized things that straddled this divide.
Inspired by the authentic products as well as the anomalous by-products of contemporary scholarship, writers, craftsmen, and shoppers appropriated the past to create nostalgic and ironic alternatives to their own moment. Barrett Kalter explores the history of these “modern antiques,” including Dryden’s translation of Virgil, modernizations of The Canterbury Tales, Gray’s Gothic wallpaper, and Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. Though grounded in the ancient and medieval eras, these works uncannily addressed the controversies about monarchy, nationhood, commerce, and specialized knowledge that defined the present for the English eighteenth century. Bringing together literary criticism, historiography, material culture studies, and book history, Kalter argues that the proliferation of modern antiques in this period reveals modernity’s paradoxical emergence out of encounters with the past.
Introduction: The Time Bound and the Modern Antique
Chapter 1 The “Cobweb-Law” and the Fundamental Law: History, Chronology, and Poetic License
Chapter 2 Chaucer Ancient and Modern: Standardization, Modernization, and the Eighteenth-Century Reception of The Canterbury Tales
Chapter 3 DIY Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medieval Revival
Chapter 4 Horace Walpole’s Fugitive Pieces: Collecting and Ephemerality
Conclusion
Barrett Kalter is Associate Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
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