Print Quarterly, September 2023
The long eighteenth century in the latest issue of Print Quarterly:
Print Quarterly 40.3 (September 2023)
a r t i c l e s
• Vitalii Tkachuk, “Averkiy Kozachkovskyi and Western Sources of Kyiv Prints, 1720s–40s,” pp. 265–86.
This article features the oeuvre of the Ukrainian engraver Averkiy Kozachkovskyi (active 1721–46), whose illustrated output by the press of the Orthodox monastery Kyiv of the Caves (Kyiv Pechersk Lavra) numbers about forty engravings. He primarily produced book illustrations, but also illustrated printed oaths taken by new members of the local student confraternity. His sources derived largely from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Catholic imagery from German, Flemish, and French schools, several of which are discussed in detail throughout the article, especially the compositions of Peter Paul Rubens. Such borrowings testify to the willingness of Orthodox recipients to accept imagery—unaltered in iconography or style—stemming from other denominations and cultures. The paper contributes to our knowledge of Ukrainian engraving and to the study of the global transfer of images during the early modern period.
• Nicholas J.S. Knowles, “Thomas Rowlandson’s The Women of Muscovy and Other Russeries after Jean-Baptiste Le Prince,” pp. 287–301.
This article discusses a previously unidentified series of prints by Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827), after Jean-Baptiste Le Prince (1734–1781), mentioned only as a single lot in the sale of his art collection and studio contents. No definitive set of these “Various Dresses of the Women in Muscovy” has been found, but the author has identified several substantial groups in public and private collections; the largest of these, with twenty-two prints, is in the British Museum. Most of these Rowlandson impressions reside among Le Prince originals and have previously been catalogued as by or after Le Prince. As a series overall, five hundred and forty impressions are claimed to have been produced in the lot description. The article continues with an in-depth discussion of the series and its context. An appendix lists all known impressions of Rowlandson’s Women of Muscovy prints and their location.
n o t e s a n d r e v i e w s
• Mark McDonald, Review of Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture (The University of Chicago Press, 2020), pp. 322–25. This book explores the significance of ruins in Western art and literature, paying close attention to the evidentiary role of prints and how the printmaking process parallels the ruinous lifecycle of its subject matter. In the review, Piranesi is cited as a fascinating example of creating trompe l’oeil in his prints, while later discussions focus on the discovery and metaphorical associations of Rome’s antique ruins in the eighteenth century.
• David Bindman, Review of the exhibition catalogue, Edina Adam and Julian Brooks, William Blake: Visionary (Getty Publications, 2020), pp. 330–31. This brief review pertains to a previously rescheduled, now forthcoming, exhibition on William Blake at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The author examines the collecting of Blake in America and some of the curatorial choices for this anticipated show.
• Patricia Mainardi, Review of Pascal Dupuy and Rolf Reichardt, La caricature sous le signe des révolutions. Mutations et permanences, XVIIIe–XIXe siècles (Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2021), pp. 331–34. This book and review introduce the origins and rapid development of caricature during the French Revolutionary period, focusing on how topical imagery and signs manifested into an accessible visual language capable of being understood by ordinary citizens at the time. More importantly, many of these signifying tropes, such as severed heads and raids on government buildings have become universally recognisable up to the present day.
• Mark Bills, Review of Tim Clayton, James Gillray: A Revolution in Satire (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2022), pp. 353–57. This extensive review of the latest monograph on James Gillray highlights the British artist’s unique achievements in the world of graphic satire. The book bravely tackles some of his previously neglected areas, such as very early and pornographic prints, or previously unpublished ones that can now be contextualised. The same is true of Gillray’s interplay of word and image (his titles, conversations and commentary of the images), which the author believes is Clayton’s most original piece of scholarship in this book.
• Jeannie Kenmotsu, Review of the exhibition catalogue, Hans Bjarne Thomsen, ed., Japanische Holzschnitte: Aus der Sammlung Ernst Grosse / Japanese Woodblock Prints: From the Ernst Grosse Collection (Michael Imhof Verlag, 2018), pp. 357–60. This review recognises the value of this catalogue in bringing Ernst Grosse and his collecting practices to a larger audience, especially since the Museum Natur und Mensch’s collection of Japanese woodblock prints was a historically important case of intersection between European japonisme and ethnological approaches to non-Western cultures. Most of Grosse’s acquisitions were made through the art dealer Hayashi Tadamasa.
Exhibition | Liotard and The Lavergne Family Breakfast

The exhibition opens this fall at The National Gallery (with the press release available here) . . .
Discover Liotard and The Lavergne Family Breakfast
The National Gallery, London, 16 November 2023 — 3 March 2024
In the second of our ‘Discover’ exhibitions, which explore well-known paintings through a contemporary lens, we reunite for the first time in 250 years Swiss painter Jean-Étienne Liotard’s pastel and oil versions of The Lavergne Family Breakfast. With the pastel and oil works side by side, the exhibition presents a rare opportunity to compare the difference in technique and effect between the two.

Jean-Etienne Liotard, The Lavergne Family Breakfast, 1754, pastel on paper stuck down on canvas, 80 × 106 cm (London: National Gallery, accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by HM Government from the estate of George Pinto, 2019, NG6685).
Long regarded as Liotard’s masterpiece, The Lavergne Family Breakfast (executed in Lyon in 1754) is the artist’s largest and most ambitious work in pastel. Despite the medium’s notorious delicacy, Liotard skilfully reproduced complex textures: the sheen on the metal coffee pot, the shiny ceramic jug, the silky fabrics and reflections, in the black lacquer tray. Liotard was extremely versatile, producing works in pastel, oil, enamel, chalk, and even on glass. Highly unusually, he returned to The Lavergne Family Breakfast 20 years later to make an exact replica in oil.
Liotard (1702–1789) worked across the length and breadth of 18th-century Europe. Following four years in Constantinople, he grew a long beard, adopted Turkish dress, and nicknamed himself ‘the Turkish painter’. The exhibition showcases the raw materials used to make pastels as well as drawings, paintings, and miniatures that seek to bring this idiosyncratic artist to life.
Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, with contributions by Iris Moon, Discover Liotard & The Lavergne Family Breakfast (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), 120 pages, ISBN: 978-1857097023, $20.
Exhibition | Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave

Katsushika Hokusai, Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave), from Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji, late 1831, color woodblock print (London: The British Museum, acquired with the assistance of Art Fund and a contribution from the Brooke Sewell Bequest, 2008,3008.1).
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Opening in October at the Bowers Museum:
Beyond the Great Wave: Works by Hokusai from the British Museum
The British Museum, London, 25 May — 13 August 2017
Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, California, 21 October 2023 — 7 January 2024
Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849) is the renowned artist behind The Great Wave, one of the most iconic prints ever made. Originally part of the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, this seminal vision of man in nature is just one of the estimated 30,000 prints that Hokusai designed over his 70-year career. This exhibition includes a beautiful early example of The Great Wave and ventures beyond to feature a broad selection of works that Hokusai produced right up to his death at the age of 90.
Visitors will be able to examine Hokusai’s personal beliefs through more than 100 paintings, drawings, woodblock prints, and illustrated books that speak to his early career, rise to fame, interest in the natural and supernatural worlds, personal life, and search for immortality. Distinct from the art of his Japanese contemporaries, Hokusai’s work is intensely individual, subjective, energized, and sublime; and the exhibition will provide a powerfully emotional and spiritual experience.
Hokusai never left Japan, but his work traveled around the globe to inspire many European artists and collectors such as Monet and Van Gogh. The exhibition includes biographical portraits of six individuals who helped build the Hokusai collection at the British Museum and shows how these scholars and proponents of Japanese art understood and appreciated Hokusai’s genius, skill, and invention.
The presentation of this exhibition is a collaboration between the British Museum and the Bowers Museum.
Timothy Clark, ed., Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0500094068, $65.
Exhibition | William Blake: Visionary
Opening this fall at The Getty:
William Blake: Visionary
Getty Center, Los Angeles, 7 October 2023 — 14 January 2024
A remarkable printmaker, painter, and poet, William Blake (1757–1827) developed a wildly unconventional world view, representing universal forces of creation and destruction—physical, psychological, historical—through his own cast of characters. By combining his poetry and images on the page through radical graphic techniques, Blake created some of the most striking and enduring imagery in British art. This major international loan exhibition explores the artist-poet’s imaginative world through his most celebrated works.
Organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum in cooperation with Tate.
Edina Adam and Julian Brooks, with an essay by Matthew Hargraves, William Blake: Visionary (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2020), 168 pages, ISBN: 978-1606066423, $35.
Celebrated for his boundless imagination and unique vision, William Blake (1757–1827) created some of the most striking and distinctive imagery in art, often combining his poetry and visual images on the page through innovative graphic techniques. He has proven an enduring inspiration to artists, musicians, poets, and performers worldwide and a fascinating enigma to generations of admirers. Featuring over 130 color images, this catalogue brings together many of Blake’s most iconic works. Organized by theme, it explores Blake’s work as a professional printmaker, his roles as both painter-illustrator and poet-painter, his relationship to the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque artists that preceded him, and his legacy in the United States. It also examines his visionary prophetic books, including all eighteen plates of America a Prophecy.
A specialist in works on paper, Edina Adam is assistant curator of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Julian Brooks is senior curator and head of the Department of Drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum and is the author of many books, most recently The Lure of Italy: Artists’ Views (Getty Publications, 2017) and Andrea del Sarto: The Renaissance Workshop in Action (Getty Publications, 2015). Now the director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Matthew Hargraves was previously chief curator of art collections and head of collection information and access at the Yale Center for British Art.
Exhibition | Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance

Barbara Walker, Vanishing Point 29 (Duyster), 2021 / © Barbara Walker, 2023.
More information on the Vanishing Point series is available here»
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Opening soon at The Fitzwilliam:
Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 8 September 2023 — 7 January 2024
Curated by Jake Subryan Richards
A landmark exhibition exploring the impact of the Black Atlantic staged in the Museum’s historic Founder’s Galleries, which were built using the profits from enslavement and exploitation.
Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance brings together significant national and international loans with collections from across the University of Cambridge’s museums, libraries, and colleges to tell both a Cambridge story and a global one. Using as its starting point the story of the Museum’s founder, Viscount Richard Fitzwilliam, whose family wealth came in part from the South Sea Company and East India Company, the exhibition charts a history from pre-colonial Africa and the Caribbean, the rise and racialisation of Atlantic enslavement, and histories of resistance by enslaved people and their allies. Artworks and other objects illustrating the financial, scientific, and commercial transformations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain that came about because of enslaved labour are shown in dialogue with modern and contemporary artworks by artists including Donald Locke, Barbara Walker, Keith Piper, and Jacqueline Bishop that respond to hidden histories and reveal stories of courage, resistance, hope, and repair.
Black Atlantic is curated by Dr Jake Subryan Richards, acclaimed early career historian of law, empire, and the African diaspora in the Atlantic world at the London School of Economics. It is the first in a series of exhibitions and gallery interventions planned for 2023–2026.
The catalogue is published by Bloomsbury:
Victoria Avery and Jake Subryan Richards, eds., Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance (London: Philip Wilson Publishing, 2023), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1781301234, £30 / $40.
Published to accompany the landmark exhibition on view at the Fitzwilliam Museum in autumn 2023, the catalogue contains contributions by curators, historians, and artists.
Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance brings together significant national and international loans with exhibits from the Fitzwilliam’s collection and from other University museums, colleges, and libraries. Objects and artworks illustrating the financial, scientific, and commercial transformations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain that came about because of enslaved labour are shown in dialogue with modern and contemporary artworks by artists including Donald Locke, Barbara Walker, Keith Piper, and Jacqueline Bishop that respond to hidden histories and reveal stories of courage, resistance, hope, and repair.
c o n t e n t s
Contributor Biographies
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Luke Syson
Introduction
Section 1 | Before Atlantic Enslavement
• Africa: Akan Region
• Indigenous Islands in the Caribbean Sea
• Europe: Slavery before Racism, Blackness before Slavery
Section 2 | Cambridge Wealth from Atlantic Enslavement
• Royal Patronage
• Making Money: Dutch Connections
• Technology for the Transatlantic Trade
• Warfare between the British, Dutch, and Spanish Empires
Section 3 | Fashion, Consumption, and Racism
• Blackness in European Art
• Enslavement and Fashion
Section 4 | Plantations: Production and Resistance
• Production, Knowledge Generation, and Exploitation
• Plantation Violence
• Remembering
Further Reading
Image Credits
Index
Exhibition | Portraits of Dogs

Jean-Jacques Bachelier, Dog of the Havana Breed, detail, 1768, oil on canvas, 70 × 91 cm
(The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, BM 913)
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For anyone celebrating, a very happy National Dog Day to you and yours! Now on at The Wallace Collection:
Portraits of Dogs: From Gainsborough to Hockney
The Wallace Collection, London, 29 March — 15 October 2023
The exhibition Portraits of Dogs: From Gainsborough to Hockney explores our devotion to four-legged friends across the centuries. Through carefully selected paintings, sculptures, drawings, works of art and even taxidermy, the exhibition highlights the unique bond between humans and their canine companions. Dog portraiture developed as an artistic genre contemporaneously with its human counterpart—dogs are represented in the earliest cave paintings alongside humans—and it flourished, particularly in Britain, from the 17th century onwards. More than any other nationality perhaps, the British have both commissioned and collected portraits of dogs. Bringing over 50 works of art to Hertford House, Portraits of Dogs presents a broad range of portraiture showing dogs in all their different shapes and sizes, with each painter or sculptor challenging themselves how best to represent mankind’s most faithful and fearless friend.
From Giles:
Xavier Bray and Bruce Fogle, Faithful and Fearless: Portraits of Dogs (London: Giles, 2021), 160 pages, ISBN: 978-1913875015, £25 / $35.
Throughout history, dogs and humans have had a special relationship based on trust, loyalty, and friendship—a relationship frequently immortalised in art. Faithful and Fearless: Portraits of Dogs features 50 works of art depicting the bond between people and their beloved pet—from members of the British Royal Family, to artists themselves. Organised in a series of thematically grouped sections—the dog as hero, as a companion to royals, aristocrats and artists, or as an allegory of the human condition—the book explores the canine portrait in its many guises and features dogs belonging to many celebrated figures, including Queen Victoria’s Tilco, Lucian Freud’s Pluto, and David Hockney’s portraits of his dachshunds, Stanley and Boodgie. The pieces are all drawn from major British collections including the Royal Collection, the V&A, Tate Britain, the British Museum, and a wealth of regional museums and private collections. In “A Vet’s Point of View,” renowned clinical veterinarian Bruce Fogle examines the many reasons for the extraordinary bond between dogs and their owners. At a time of rising dog ownership, this enchanting volume is a welcome reminder of our devotion to our four-legged friends.
c o n t e n t s
Director’s Foreword
Faithful and Fearless: Portraits of Dogs by Xavier Bray
Catalogue: Introduction
• The Aristocratic Dog
• The Royal Dog
• Kylin and AhCum: Two Pekinese
• The Artist’s Dog
• The Allegorical Dog
• The Heroic Dog
• The Dog Immortal
• Until Death
A Vet’s Point of View by Bruce Fogle
Notes
Index
Photo credits
New Book | Drawn from Nature: The Flowering of Irish Botanical Art
The related exhibition was on view in Dublin at the National Gallery of Ireland in 2020. Forthcoming from ACC:
Patricia Butler, Drawn from Nature: The Flowering of Irish Botanical Art (Woodbridge: ACC Art Books, 2023), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1788842365, £35 / $40.

For centuries, artists of all disciplines have expressed delight in nature through the highly skilled and captivating medium of botanical art. The distinguished contributions of Irish botanical artists include records of plants from 17th-century Ireland, early illustrated floras, and botanical art found in the field of design. Drawn from Nature: The Flowering of Irish Botanical Art also covers the importance of botanical art to the Ordnance Survey of Ireland during the 19th century, as well as the vital plant portraits produced by Irish women. These portraits assisted generations of botanists in understanding and describing the natural world but received scant recognition. Published for the first time, these outstanding examples of Irish botanical art, from both public and private collections, demonstrate a shared desire by botanical artists to observe, illuminate, and record Ireland’s unique flora. This book finally affords them the recognition they deserve.
Patricia Butler is an art historian and gardener. The author of Irish Botanical Illustrators & Flower Painters (2000), she curated the exhibition Drawn from Nature: Irish Botanical Art, on view in Dublin at the National Gallery of Ireland in 2020. She owns the historic garden at Dower House, Rossanagh, Ashford, Co Wicklow.
Exhibition | Seduction and Power

Now on view at Marly:
Séduction et Pouvoir: L’art de s’apprêter à la Cour
Musée du Domaine royal de Marly, 14 April — 27 August 2023
Curated by Anne Camilli and Karen Chastagnol
Une exposition consacrée à l’art du paraître aux 17e et 18e siècles.
Se vêtir et accessoiriser sa tenue révèle les usages sociaux et politiques des élites. Si l’usage de la parure et l’envie d’embellir le corps sont présents dans toutes les sociétés et à toutes les époques, il s’accompagne sous Louis XIV d’une véritable stratégie d’affirmation du pouvoir motivée par la centralisation politique. Le règne du Roi-Soleil se caractérise par un souci de l’apparence et de la représentation. L’accessoire, tout comme le vêtement, contribue à la nécessité de paraitre et de tenir son rang.
Qu’on les appelle ornements ou encore parures, les accessoires du vêtement, de la coiffure et de la beauté deviennent les outils d’une communication non verbale entre les individus et le lieu d’un investissement symbolique. Ces ornements et ces parures reflètent les courants de la mode mais témoignent également des valeurs et des préférences de la société française de l’époque.
Chaque accessoire, chaque geste, chaque attitude répond à des normes, à des codes qui ne cessent d’évoluer attestant ainsi des changements de modes et de mœurs. Cette construction de l’apparence requiert de connaître les usages et les règles et de s’y conformer pour bénéficier de la faveur royale et attester de son identité sociale.
Aussi, cette culture du paraître s’accompagne d’une parfaite maîtrise de soi et des expressions du visage : fards, poudres, mouches et parfums concourent à une monotonie d’apparence. L’impératif de séduction s’inscrit dans un double mouvement : un mimétisme envers le roi et le pouvoir d’une part, et la nécessité de s’en affranchir pour se faire remarquer et mieux révéler son rang d’autre part. Le corps se pare alors de divers artifices : perruques, maquillage, bijoux, parfums, dentelles, et objets de poche et de galanterie. Les costumes sont complétés par différents atours : broderies, dentelles, rubans qui rivalisent de sophistication et de raffinement.
Objets luxueux, réalisés par des métiers d’art, ces accessoires subliment le vêtement, deviennent des objets de distinction et s’accompagnent pour certains d’une gestuelle propre qui révèle un langage codifié et marquent le corps modifiant la posture, le déplacement, la prestance du courtisan. Qu’elles soient rhétoriques ou esthétiques, ces armes de séduction servent l’esprit d’une société élitiste où se mêlent des enjeux amoureux, politiques et religieux.
L’exposition vous emmène à la découverte de ces objets qui participent à ce jeu de la séduction et du pouvoir à la cour. Éléments de la mise en scène du théâtre de la cour, les accessoires de mode, les produits de beauté et l’art du parfum révèlent les attentes des femmes et des hommes nobles tout au long des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Le visiteur découvre les œuvres dans un parcours qui évoque de la tête au pied les différents objets auquel recourt le courtisan et reflète les évolutions de ces accessoires au cours des règnes successifs de Louis XIV, Louis XV et Louis XVI, période d’activité du château de Marly, instrument de la politique royale.
Anne Camilli and Karen Chastagnol, eds., with additional contributions by Alice Camus, Georgina Letourmy-Bordier, Grégory Maugain, and Corinne Thépaut-Cabasset, Séduction & Pouvoir: L’art de s’apprêter à la Cour (Fine éditions d’art, 2023), 104 pages, ISBN: 978-2382031179, €25.
Entre les règnes de Louis XIV et de Louis XVI, Versailles puis Paris se disputent le titre de capitale de la mode. Entre désir de séduction, affirmation du pouvoir et désir de signifier un statut social, les accessoires de mode et de beauté viennent appuyer sous l’Ancien Régime une nouvelle mise en scène de soi. Chaque parure, chaque geste, chaque attitude répond à des codes qui ne cessent d’évoluer et accompagnent ainsi les modes et les mœurs. Le corps est paré de divers artifices qui rivalisent d’audace et de distinction. Quels rôles jouent ces ornements dans le contexte de la cour ? L’exposition du Musée du Domaine royal de Marly retrace les usages de ces objets, de la tête aux pieds : coiffes, perruques, maquillage, parfums, ornements du vêtement, bijoux, objets de galanterie, chaussures.
s o m m a i r e
• Introduction — Être et paraître : Accessoires de mode, parures & ornements — Karen Chastagnol
• Boucles, dentelles, bonnets et édifices de la mode capillaire — Corinne Thépaut-Cabasset
• Mouche et rouge : Les attributs de la mode et de la beauté — Corinne Thépaut-Cabasset
• L’apparat olfactif du courtisan — Alice Camus
• Orner le vêtement et ses accessoires à la cour : Dentelles, broderies et boutons — Géraldine Bidault
• Le bijou et la montre pour briller à la cour — Anne Camilli et Grégory Maugain
• La galanterie de poche — Anne Camilli et Georgina Letourmy-Bordier
• Le soulier et ses parures — Anne Camilli
Annexes
Notices des œuvres exposées
Sources & bibliographie
Crédits photographiques
Exhibition | UFO 1665

So Sehr War Nei Erzürnet Gott / Never Was God So Full of Wrath, detail, emblematic representation from Daniel Meisner, Politica – Politica, Newes Emblematisches Büchlein, I–VIII (Nürnberg, ca. 1700), engraving (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek).
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I was fortunate to see this exhibition a few weeks ago and can’t recommend it highly enough: it’s thoughtfully conceived, brilliantly installed, incredibly engaging, and deeply satisfying. It’s also just a lot of fun! A model for how to make the history of visual conventions (overlapping with history of ideas generally) broadly accessible (my thirteen-year-old daughter was riveted). It’s a reminder of how many of our categories for making sense of the world emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The catalogue is certainly worth ordering. –CH
UFO 1665: The Air Battle of Stralsund / Die Luftschlacht von Stralsund
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 5 May — 3 September 2023
Curated by Moritz Wullen
In April 1665, six fishermen witnessed an unexplained celestial phenomenon: an aerial battle in the skies above the Baltic Sea near Stralsund. As evening broke, a dark-grey disk appeared high above the city centre. UFO 1665 is the first exhibition of its kind to focus on this historical UFO sighting. With reference to contemporaneous visual and textual sources, the exhibition reconstructs the way this event was portrayed in the media and exposes certain paradigms and communications strategies that are still used today to determine how we report on ‘unexplained aerial phenomena’ (UAPs).
The exhibition takes visitors on an expedition into a strange and unfamiliar world of images that otherwise remains concealed from the museum’s general audience in archives or between the pages of old books. Those who are familiar with 17th-century art only from the grand galleries of paintings may be taken aback: upon entering the exhibition space, visitors might feel they are entering a baroque parallel universe with strange symbols in the sky, airships, space rockets, and flying saucers. Everything is centred around one of the most spectacular celestial phenomena of the modern era: at 2pm on 8 April 1665, six men fishing for herring off the coast of Stralsund watch as great flocks of birds in the sky morph into warships and engage in a thunderous air battle. The decks teem with ghostly figures. When, at dusk, “a flat, round shape like a plate” appears above the St. Nicholas Church, they flee. The following day, they find that they are trembling all over and complain of pain.
Media Transformation
The media spread the news like wildfire, with the publishers of various leaflets and newspapers locked in fierce competition with each other to concoct the most colourful versions and interpretations of events. It was religious convictions in particular that were most responsible for determining how the event was transformed by the media. The general public could not have known that what had actually been witnessed was an atmospheric reflection of a sea battle that was raging just beyond the horizon. Instead, they were convinced that the universe was ruled by a god who had the power to project visions of impending disaster into the sky. The air battle was likewise perceived as a prodigium (Latin for ‘omen’ or ‘portent’).
The visual themes of the 17th century were likely also decisive in terms of determining how the media shaped depictions of the air battle, with futuristic visions of airships—which the people of the 17th century were incredibly enthusiastic about—playing a special role. More than 100 years before the first manned hot air balloon flight was conducted, Francesco Lana Terzi (1631–1687) had published his design for a flying boat borne aloft by vacuum spheres, which caused a great sensation throughout Europe. The fact that the project could never actually be realised did little to detract from the general fervour. Humankind continued to dream of conquering the skies.
The Power of Myths
Another theme of the exhibition is the power of myths: when, on 19 June 1670, lightning struck—of all places—the St. Nicholas Church, the building above which the grey disc had loomed so ominously five years earlier, the celestial phenomenon was subsequently interpreted as a sign of God’s wrath. The descriptions and accounts of the day invoked a mystical link to the destruction of Babylon at the hands of a great millstone, as it is described in the Book of Revelation. However, the popular perception of the air battle over Stralsund was not only shaped by the media, beliefs, designs, and myths of the baroque era; it also reveals the kinds of things that humans of the era were unable to envisage and comprehend. There are no 17th-century sources, for example, that mention extraterrestrials in connection with the unexplained aerial phenomena. Yet at the same time, the human imagination was already so far advanced that it could well conceive of expeditions to other inhabited planets and the kinds of propulsion systems that would be required to carry these out. Why nobody considered for a moment that extraterrestrials might appear in our skies with their own flying machines is one of the many mysteries this exhibition endeavours to solve.
An Excursion into the Present
This cultural and media-historical investigation culminates in an excursion into the present, which focuses on the videos and accounts of sightings of mysterious ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ (UAPs) made by the US military that went viral in 2019 and even made their way onto the front cover of an issue of Der Spiegel two years later. The sightings in question have given rise to a maddeningly broad spectrum of interpretations. Are they physically explicable natural phenomena, sophisticated high-tech drones made in China or Russia, extraterrestrials, or even visitors from the future? Even NASA and the Pentagon seem completely baffled. We can, however, be sure of one thing: the factors that were so crucial to the media success of the UFO of 1665 lack none of their that same potency today.
The exhibition is curated by Moritz Wullen, director of the Kunstbibliothek.
Moritz Wullen, UFO 1665: The Air Battle of Stralsund / Die Luftschlacht von Stralsund (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 2023), 112 pages, ISBN 978-3868327502 (bilingual edition, German and English), €24.
Exhibition | Making Her Mark
Opening this fall at the BMA:
Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400–1800
Baltimore Museum of Art, 1 October 2023 — 7 January 2024
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 30 March — 1 July 2024
Curated by Andaleeb Badiee Banta and Alexa Greist
For centuries, women artists in Europe were considered rare and less talented than their male counterparts. Women who achieved professional artistic careers were deemed anomalous or exceptional, while those who engaged in creative pursuits in the home were dismissed as amateurs, and their works were categorized as material culture rather than art.
Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400–1800, the BMA’s much anticipated major exhibition opening 1 October 2023, aims to correct these broadly held but mistaken beliefs through more than 200 works of diverse media and scale. From royal portraits and devotional sculptures to embroidered objects, tapestries, costumes, wax sculptures, metalwork, ceramics, graphic arts, furniture, and more, Making Her Mark will feature objects from the 15th to 18th centuries that reflect the multifaceted and often overlooked ways that women contributed to the visual arts of Europe.
The exhibition’s focus on displaying exclusively objects made by women or toward which women contributed their labor distinguishes this project by putting women makers of all social levels in conversation with each other through their works. Examples by artistic heroines such as Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Leyster, Luisa Roldán, Rosalba Carriera, Rachel Ruysch, and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun will join exceptional products of female artisanal collectives and talented amateurs who operated outside of the male-dominated professional arena and often remained anonymous in the historical record. Further, sublime examples of ceramics, metalwork, and cabinetmaking from this era will reflect women’s involvement in major manufactories and workshops.
Organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Making Her Mark is curated by Andaleeb Badiee Banta, Senior Curator and Department Head, Prints, Drawings & Photographs at the BMA, and Alexa Greist, Curator and R. Fraser Elliott Chair, Prints & Drawings at the AGO. The exhibition is generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and Sheela Murthy/MurthyNAYAK Foundation.
Andaleeb Badiee Banta and Alexa Greist, with Theresa Kutasz Christensen, Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400–1800 (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions, 2023), 264 pages, ISBN: 9781773103181, $60.



















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