Enfilade

From Toronto UP:

Joseph Monteyne, Media Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches, Scraps, and Spectres (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022), 316 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1487527747, $75.

In the late 1790s, British Prime Minister William Pitt created a crisis of representation when he pressured the British Parliament to relieve the Bank of England from its obligations to convert paper notes into coin. Paper quickly became associated with a form of limitless reproduction that threatened to dematerialize solid bodies and replace them with insubstantial shadows. Media Critique in the Age of Gillray centres on printed images and graphic satires which view paper as the foundation for the contemporary world. Through a focus on printed, visual imagery from practitioners such as James Gillray, William Blake, John Thomas Smith, and Henry Fuseli, the book addresses challenges posed by reproductive technologies to traditional concepts of subjective agency.

Joseph Monteyne shows that the late eighteenth-century paper age’s baseless fabric set the stage for contemporary digital media’s weightless production. Engagingly written and abundantly illustrated, Media Critique in the Age of Gillray highlights the fact that graphic culture has been overlooked as an important sphere for the production of critical and self-reflective discourses around media transformations and the visual turn in British culture.

Joseph Monteyne is an associate professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Making and Unmaking the Paper World

1  Dark Media and the Materiality of Nothing
Dark Media and Graphic Materiality
Smoked Images and Night Pieces: Touching Nothing
Form and Formlessness in Blake’s Embedded Media

2  Haunted Media
Conjuring Dead Painters
The Baseless Fabric of Print
Dematerializing Media

3  Good Copies, Bad Copies
Counterfeit Masks
Repetition with Difference
Pairs of Portraits

4  Social Detritus, Paper Detritus
Blind Beggars and Printed Images
Cobbling, Patching, Translating
The Gatherer of Scraps

Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Yale UP:

Benjamin Carp, The Great New York Fire of 1776: A Lost Story of the American Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 360 pages, ISBN: 978-0300246957, $30.

Who set the mysterious fire that burned down much of New York City shortly after the British took the city during the Revolutionary War?

New York City, the strategic center of the Revolutionary War, was the most important place in North America in 1776. That summer, an unruly rebel army under George Washington repeatedly threatened to burn the city rather than let the British take it. Shortly after the Crown’s forces took New York City, much of it mysteriously burned to the ground. This is the first book to fully explore the Great Fire of 1776 and why its origins remained a mystery even after the British investigated it in 1776 and 1783. Uncovering stories of espionage, terror, and radicalism, Benjamin L. Carp paints a vivid picture of the chaos, passions, and unresolved tragedies that define a historical moment we usually associate with “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Benjamin L. Carp is professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America and Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution. He lives in New York City.

From Editoriale Artemide and GRHAM:

Noémi Duperron, Barbara Jouves-Hann, Maxime Georges Métraux, Marc-André Paulin, and Bérangère Poulain, eds., Décoration intérieure et plaisir des sens, 1700–1850 (Rome: Artemide edizioni, 2022), 168 pages, ISBN: 978-8875754204, €30. With contributions by Muriel Barbier, Élisabeth Caude, Christina Contandriopoulos, Aurélien Davrius, Joséphine Grimm, Johanna Ilmakunnas, Olivier Jandot, Desmond-Bryan Kraege, Ulrich Leben, Frédéric Leblanc, and Erika Wicky.

Dès le début du XVIIIe siècle, l’idée de plaisir—comme recherche de sensations agréables—devient une composante essentielle et constante de la société. Selon l’historien Paul Hazard, la sensation permet alors à l’individu de prendre conscience de l’existence du monde qui l’entoure, et devient une préoccupation centrale pour les hommes de lettres et les artistes. Dans les espaces intérieurs, ce nouveau rapport de proximité entre l’homme sensible et les murs, le mobilier ou les objets du décor se ressent au travers des interrogations sur la place du plaisir sensoriel dans la distribution, l’ameublement et l’ornementation.

Ce paradigme est au cœur des articles présentés dans cet ouvrage. Focalisés sur la production européenne entre 1700 et 1850, leurs auteurs examinent les sensations sous l’angle de la culture matérielle, des normes sociales ou de l’usage des différentes pièces du logement, que celui-ci ait été édifié, théorisé ou simplement imaginé. En s’appuyant sur des méthodologies variées, les différentes études montrent le rôle central joué par le plaisir, le confort, la commodité ou encore l’agrément dans la conception des intérieurs à cette période. Affectant toutes les échelles de l’habitat, de la construction du bâtiment à la décoration de ses recoins les plus intimes, les sens du toucher, de l’odorat, de la vue ou de l’ouïe sont autant d’éléments auxquels les architectes, les artistes et les artisans devaient prêter attention pour satisfaire les exigences de leurs utilisateurs aux perceptions aiguisées.

Noémi Duperron est assistante diplômée à l’Université de Genève où elle enseigne l’histoire de l’art de la période moderne. Elle conduit une thèse de doctorat sur les représentations et les interprétations de l’Iliade d’Homère dans les arts français et britanniques au XVIIIe siècle sous la direction des Professeurs Jan Blanc et Christian Michel. Elle a conduit ses recherches portant essentiellement sur les échanges franco-britanniques, la peinture d’histoire et la réception de l’Antiquité grecque dans différentes institutions comme la Wallace Collection, la Biblioteca Herziana – Max Planck Institut für Kunstgeschichte ou encore le Warburg Institute.

Barbara Jouves-Hann est ingénieure de recherche, chargée du projet « Recherche et Restauration » pour le DIM PAMIR, Région Île-de-France. Elle est également responsable des études et de la recherche chez Madelénat Architecture et enseigne à l’Université Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne ainsi qu’à l’Institut national du patrimoine. Sa thèse de doctorat, exécutée sous la direction du Professeur Thierry Lalot, a été soutenue à l’Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne en 2019 sous le titre La conservation et la restauration des tableaux des collections privées à Paris entre 1789 et 1870 (à paraître aux Éditions de la Sorbonne).

Maxime Georges Métraux est historien de l’art, membre de l’équipe de la galerie Hubert Duchemin et chargé d’enseignement à l’Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne. Il a été commissaire scientifique de l’exposition Chic Emprise : Cultures, usages et sociabilités du tabac à l’époque moderne (2019, La Rochelle, musée du Nouveau Monde). Il a dernièrement publié dans le catalogue de l’exposition Les Animaux du Roi (2021, Versailles, château de Versailles) et Renoir, Monet, Gauguin. Images of a Floating World – The Kojiro Matsukata and Karl Ernst Osthaus collections (2022, Essen, Museum Folkwang).

Marc-André Paulin est restaurateur du patrimoine en ébénisterie et responsable de l’atelier de restauration mobilier au Centre de recherche et de restauration des Musées de France. Il prépare actuellement une thèse de doctorat à l’université de Lille sur l’ébéniste Jean-Henri Riesener.

Bérangère Poulain est maître-assistante en histoire de l’art de la période moderne à l’Université de Genève. Sa thèse de doctorat, exécutée sous la direction du Professeur Jan Blanc et la codirection du Professeur Christian Michel, a été soutenue à l’Université de Genève en 2020 sous le titre «Nouvelles couleurs, nouvelles jouissances». La polychromie des boiseries françaises au siècle des Lumières.

S O M M A I R E

Avant-Propos — Noémi Duperron, Barbara Jouves-Hann, Maxime Georges Métraux, Marc-André Paulin et Bérangère Poulain

I. En quête de sens : théorie et imaginaire 
• Blondel et l’architecture dans le ‘goût moderne’ : la machine à habiter au service du plaisir des sens au XVIIIe siècle — Aurélien Davrius
• Fraicheur, senteurs et procédés rédactionnels : Le génie de l’architecture de Le Camus de Mézières à la lumière de la théorie des jardins — Desmond-Bryan Kraege
• La rhétorique des sens : la visite de Madame de Maisonneuve au Dôme des Invalides — Christina Contandriopoulos

II. Plaisir des sens : de l’objet à l’espace
• Formes, matérialité et usages du mobilier en France au XVIIIe siècle — Ulrich Leben
• Le cabinet particulier du roi Louis XIV à Versailles : secrets autour des transformations d’un bureau — Élisabeth Caude et Frédéric Leblanc
• « Une tente sous laquelle on dort » : l’alcôve et le lit d’alcôve dans la chambre au XVIIIe siècle — Muriel Barbier
• Construire le boudoir idéal : état de l’influence réciproque de la littérature sur les traités d’architecture au XVIIIe siècle — Joséphine Grimm

III. Les sens en éveil : pratiques et usages
• L’odeur des vernis ou la toxicité du confort au XVIIIe siècle — Erika Wicky
• Le confort thermique, l’ordre spatial et les objets dans les demeures suédoises au XVIIIe siècle — Johanna Ilmakunnas
• Le feu caché. Introduction du confort thermique et métamorphoses de l’économie des sens (France, 1700–1850) — Olivier Jandot

Résumés
Index

Johann Christoph von Naumann, Hubertusburg, begun in 1721 under Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland; it then served as the residence of his son Augustus III. The palace was site of the signing of the 1763 Treaty of Hubertusburg that ended the Seven Years’ War (Wikipedia entry; photo from Wikimedia Commons, May 2013).

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From Sax-Verlag and Sachsen.de:

Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Sachsen, ed., Schloss Hubertusburg / Band I: Essays / Band II: Katalog der Architekturzeichnungen, Reihe Arbeitshefte des Landesamtes für Denkmalpflege Sachsen, Band-Nr. 30 (Markkleeberg: Sax-Verlag, 2022), 1240 pages, ISBN 978-3867292825, €40.

Schloss und Garten von Hubertusburg in Wermsdorf gelten als größte barocke Residenzanlage in Sachsen und gehören zu den spektakulären Bau- und Kunstdenkmälern von internationaler Bekanntheit.

Trotz des kontinuierlichen Bauunterhalts durch den Freistaat, vier großer Ausstellungen der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden in den letzten Jahren, dem Wirken eines lokalen engagierten Fördervereins sowie zahlreicher Veranstaltungen fristet Schloß Hubertusburg sowohl in der Öffentlichkeit als auch im wissenschaftlichen Kontext immer noch ein randständiges Dasein.

Mit dem Arbeitsheft 30 liegen in dem ausführlichen Katalogband erstmals sämtliche, zum heutigen Zeitpunkt verfügbare Bau- und Gartenpläne aus dem 17. Jahrhundert bis zum Jahr 1945 zu Hubertusburg vor, aus bedeutenden sächsischen und europäischen Sammlungen, wissenschaftlich erschlossen und aufbereitet. Neben einer fotografischen Bestandsaufnahme werden neue Erkenntnisse zur Bau- und Gartengeschichte, zur ursprünglichen Raumausstattung wie der Königlichen Gemäldegalerie, Hof-Konditorei und Hofkellerei vorgestellt, gartenarchäologische Methoden sowie kunsthistorische Betrachtungen zur Schlosskapelle, aber auch restauratorische und denkmalpflegerische Fragen thematisiert. Die beiden zusammengehörigen Bände werden in einem Schutzschuber geliefert.

I N H A L T

Band I

Geleit- und Vorworte

• Louise Walleneit — Wände, die ausatmen
• Ingo Fischer — Zwei Schlösser in Einem
• Tim Tepper — Wandel und Spuren. Zur Geschichte von Hubertusburg und denkmalpflegerische Schlussfolgerungen für eine zukünftige Nutzung
• Hartmut Ritschel — Die Kapelle von Schloss Hubertusburg
• Michael Lange — Giovanni Battista Grone – das Deckenbild in der Kapelle von Schloss Hubertusburg
• Ralf Witthaus / Text: Barbara Rübartsch — Der Garten in mir – Ein Aktionskunstwerk im Sommer 2019
• Henrike Schwarz — Prachtgarten, Pachtland, Patientengarten und was bringt die Zukunft? Eine Würdigung des Schlossgartens Hubertusburg
• Hartmut Olbrich — Der Schlossgarten zu Hubertusburg. Archäologie zum Verständnis einer komplexen Anlage
• Eduard Wätjen — Das Kupferstichwerk zu Schloss Hubertusburg von Johann Christoph Naumann
• Thomas Liebsch — Die Gemäldegalerie König Augusts III. von Polen in der Jagdresidenz Hubertusburg
• Tobias Knobelsdorf — Die Plünderung von Schloss Hubertusburg im Frühjahr 1761 in zeitgenössischen Berichten
• Maureen Cassidy-Geiger — K. H. C. H.: The Königliche Hof-Conditorei Hubertusburg
• Johannes Wolff und Martin Kornek — Die Hofkellerei in Schloss Hubertusburg
Gernot Klatte, Die Büchsenkammer des Kurprinzen Friedrich August auf Schloss Hubertusburg
• Mike Huth — Quellenverzeichnis Schloss Hubertusburg

Bibliografie
Verwendete Dokumentationen
Abkürzungen
Abbildungsnachweis
Autoren

Band II

Vorwort

1  Altes Schloss Wermsdorf mit Fasanengarten
2  Weitere Gebäude in Wermsdorf
3  Jagdanlagen im Wermsdorfer Forst

4  Schloss Hubertusburg, 1. Bauphase 1721–1733: Vermessungspläne
5  Das Hubertusburger Jagdrevier 1723–1942
6  Schloss Hubertusburg, 1. Bauphase 1721–1733: Vorentwürfe zum Hauptpalais
7  Schloss Hubertusburg, 1. Bauphase 1721–1733: Grundrisse Hauptpalais
8  Schloss Hubertusburg, 1. Bauphase 1721–1733: Außenbau Hauptpalais
9  Schloss Hubertusburg, 1. Bauphase 1721–1733: Innenräume
10  Schloss Hubertusburg, 1. Bauphase 1721–1733: Nebengebäude
11  Schloss Hubertusburg, 1. Bauphase 1721–1733: Wachthäuser und Kasernen
12  Schloss Hubertusburg, 1. Bauphase 1721–1733: Lust- und Küchengarten
13  Schloss Hubertusburg, 1. Bauphase 1721–1733: Ziegelscheune

14  Schloss Hubertusburg, 2. Bauphase 1733–1763: Gesamtpläne
15  Schloss Hubertusburg, 2. Bauphase 1733–1763: Vorhof
16  Schloss Hubertusburg, 2. Bauphase 1733–1763: Kopfbauten im Vorhof
17  Schloss Hubertusburg, 2. Bauphase 1733–1763: Rundflügel
18  Schloss Hubertusburg, 2. Bauphase 1733–1763: Projekt zum Umbau des Stallhofs 1756
19  Schloss Hubertusburg, 2. Bauphase 1733–1763: Küchenhof
20  Schloss Hubertusburg, 2. Bauphase 1733–1763: Hundeställe und weitere Nebengebäude
21  Schloss Hubertusburg, 2. Bauphase 1733–1763: Gartenpläne
22  Schloss Hubertusburg, 2. Bauphase 1733–1763: Opernhaus 1741
23  Schloss Hubertusburg, 2. Bauphase 1733–1763: Wasserleitungen
24  Schloss Hubertusburg, 2. Bauphase 1733–1763: Vorentwürfe zum Umbau des Hauptpalais
25  Schloss Hubertusburg, 2. Bauphase 1733–1763: Grundrisse des Hauptpalais
26  Schloss Hubertusburg, 2. Bauphase 1733–1763: Ansichten des Hauptpalais
27  Schloss Hubertusburg, 2. Bauphase 1733–1763: Innenräume

28  Schloss Hubertusburg nach 1763: Hauptpalais
29  Schloss Hubertusburg nach 1763: Nebengebäude
30  Schloss Hubertusburg nach 1763: Lagepläne des 19. Jahrhunderts
31  Schloss Hubertusburg nach 1763: Lagepläne des 20. Jahrhunderts
32  Schloss Hubertusburg nach 1763: Vermessungskampagne Friedrich Carl Preßler 1830/31
33  Schloss Hubertusburg nach 1763: Umbauprojekt H. L. Otto 1835

34  Der Planschrank im Archiv des Fachkrankenhauses Hubertusburg

Anhang
Planmaterial zu Schloss und Garten Hubertusburg in historischen Planverzeichnissen
Gebäudebestandsplan und Gebäudenutzung in der Hubertusburger
Schloss- und Gartenanlage seit 1721
Abkürzungen
Abbildungsnachweis

From Penn State UP:

Cécile Fromont, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-0271092188, $110. Also available as an ebook.

Early modern central Africa comes to life in an extraordinary atlas of vivid watercolors and drawings that Italian Capuchin Franciscans, veterans of Kongo and Angola missions, composed between 1650 and 1750 for the training of future missionaries. These ‘practical guides’ present the intricacies of the natural, social, and religious environment of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century west-central Africa and outline the primarily visual catechization methods the friars devised for the region. Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola brings this overlooked visual corpus to public and scholarly attention.

This beautifully illustrated book includes full-color reproductions of all the images in the atlas, in conjunction with rarely seen related material gathered from collections and archives around the world. Taking a bold new approach to the study of early modern global interactions, art historian Cecile Fromont demonstrates how visual creations such as the Capuchin vignettes, though European in form and crafstmanship, emerged not from a single perspective but rather from cross-cultural interaction. Fromont models a fresh way to think about images created across cultures, highlighting the formative role that cultural encounter itself played in their conception, execution, and modes of operation. Centering Africa and Africans, and with ramifications on four continents, Fromont’s decolonial history profoundly transforms our understanding of the early modern world. It will be of substantial interest to specialists in early modern studies, art history, and religion.

Cécile Fromont is Professor in the History of Art department at Yale University. She is the author of the award-winning book The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (2014) and the editor of Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions (2019), the latter also published by Penn State University Press.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgements

Introduction
1  ‘Nonsense’: Capuchin Images of Kongo and Angola Against Italian Preconceptions
2  Practical Guides to the Mission: The Capuchin Central-African Corpus
3  Images and Devotion
4  Images as Method
5  Images against Idolatry
6  With ‘the Consent of the People, and the Secular Arm of the Prince’
7  Penned by Encounter: Capuchins, Central Africans, and the Making of a Cross-Cultural Discourse
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

From Bloomsbury:

Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek, eds., Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility, and Change (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1350259034, $115. Also available as an ebook.

Things change. Broken and restored, reused and remade, objects transcend their earliest functions, locations, and appearances. While every era witnesses change, the eighteenth century experienced artistic, economic, and demographic transformations that exerted unique pressures on material cultures around the world. Locating material objects at the heart of such phenomena, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century expands beyond Eurocentric perspectives to discover the mobile, transcultural nature of eighteenth-century art worlds. From porcelain to betel leaves, Chumash hats to natural history cabinets, this book examines how objects embody imperialism, knowledge, and resistance in various ways.

By embracing things both elite and everyday, this volume investigates physical and technological manipulations of objects while attending to the human agents who shaped them in an era of accelerating global contact and conquest. Featuring ten essays, the volume foregrounds diverse scholarly approaches to chart new directions for art history and cultural history. Ranging from California to China, Bengal to Britain, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century illuminates the transformations within and between artistic media, follows natural and human-made things as they migrate across territories, and reveals how objects catalyzed change in the transoceanic worlds of the early modern period.

Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century is part of the Material Culture of Art and Design series, edited by Michael Yonan.

Wendy Bellion is Sewell C. Biggs Chair in American Art History and Associate Dean for the Humanities at the University of Delaware. Her research focuses on North American art and the Atlantic World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is the author of Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (2011) and Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment (2019).

Kristel Smentek is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research engages eighteenth-century European graphic and decorative arts in their transcultural contexts. She is the author of Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2014), co-editor of Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment (2022), and co-curator of the accompanying exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction, ‘Things Change’ — Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware and Kristel Smentek, MIT
1  ‘A Sort of Picture or Image of my Self’: Amoy Chinqua’s Almost Ancestral Portrait of Joseph Collet — Winnie Wong, University of California, Berkeley
2  Shooting for Freedom: Examining the Material World of Self-Emancipated Persons — Tiffany Momon, Sewanee: The University of the South
3  Something Old, Something New: Repurposing and the Production of Ephemeral Festival Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Paris — Matthew Gin, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
4  Botanical Fantasy in Silk: Transformations of a Rococo Floral Design from England to China — Mei Mei Rado, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5  Making Marble Edible: Madame de Pompadour, Friendship, and the Multiple Lives of Porcelain — Susan M. Wager, University of New Hampshire, Durham
6  The Sovereign Betel in Eighteenth-Century Bengal and Bihar — Zirwat Chowdhury, University of California, Los Angeles
7  Isaiah Thomas’s Stamp Acts at the Halifax Gazette: Printers and Tacit Protest in Revolutionary America — Jennifer Y. Chuong, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
8  Between Art and Nature: The Dauphin’s Treasure at the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid — Tara Zanardi, Hunter College, CUNY
9  California Indian Basket Weavers, Spanish Imperialism, and Eighteenth-Century Global Networks — Yve Chavez, University of California, Santa Cruz
10  British Prints between Caricature and Ethnography — Douglas Fordham, University of Virginia

Index

From Liverpool UP:

Katy Barrett, Looking for Longitude: A Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-1802070538, £76 / $130.

Why make a joke out of a niche and complex scientific problem? That is the question at the heart of this book, which unearths the rich and surprising history of trying to find longitude at sea in the eighteenth century. Not simply a history on water, this is the story of longitude on paper, of the discussions, satires, diagrams, engravings, novels, plays, poems, and social anxieties that shaped how people understood longitude in William Hogarth’s London. We start from a figure in one of Hogarth’s prints—a lunatic incarcerated in the madhouse of A Rake’s Progress in 1735—to unpick the visual, mental, and social concerns which entwined around the national concern to find a solution to longitude. Why does longitude appear in novels, smutty stories, political critiques, copyright cases, religious tracts, and dictionaries as much as in government papers? This sheds new light on the first government scientific funding body—the Board of Longitude—established to administer vast reward money for anyone who found a means of accurately measuring longitude at sea. Meet the cast of characters involved in the search for longitude, from famous novelists and artists, to almost unknown pamphleteers and inventors, and see how their interactions informed the fate of longitude’s most famous pursuer, the clockmaker John Harrison.

Dr Katy Barrett is an interdisciplinary curator, scholar, and writer focusing on interactions between art and science. Currently she works as Deputy Curator of Art and Head of Interpretation at the Houses of Parliament. She has previously worked as Curator of Art Collections at the Science Museum, London; Curator of Art, pre-1800, at Royal Museums Greenwich; and has held various posts in national and university museums. She has higher degrees in History of Art and History of Science and is active on social media as @SpoonsonTrays.