Enfilade

From The Historical Journal:

David Gilks, “Attitudes to the Displacement of Cultural Property in the Wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon,” The Historical Journal 56 (March 2013): 113-43.

Abstract: The French state expropriated an enormous quantity of cultural property from across Europe during the Wars of the Revolution and Napoleon, but much was returned in 1815 after the fall of the Empire. This article examines contemporary attitudes to the displacement of works of art, antiquities, scientific specimens, and rare books. The seizures were controversial: since they occurred at a time when plundering the vanquished was already considered questionable behaviour, they attracted opposition and needed to be justified. The article identifies the resulting repertoire of attitudes, arguing that this repertoire evolved with changing circumstances and was more varied than hitherto maintained. By situating this repertoire in a larger historical context, the article also reassesses the extent to which attitudes were derivative and innovative. It contends that the disputation as a whole did not amount to a decisive rupture in the treatment of foreign cultural property during wartime, but that it was nevertheless remarkable in two respects: concepts from hitherto unrelated subjects were applied to considerations about cultural property; and the perceived conditions under which cultural property could be legitimately transferred were revised.

The eighteenth century in the current issue of Renaissance Quarterly:

Paula Findlen, “The 2012 Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture: The Eighteenth-Century Invention of the Renaissance: Lessons from the Uffizi,” Renaissance Quarterly 66 (Spring 2013): 1-34.

This essay explores the role that the eighteenth-century Uffizi gallery played in the invention of the Renaissance. Under the Habsburg-Lorraine rulers, and especially during the reign of Grand Duke Peter Leopold (r. 1765–90), changes to the Medici collections and the gallery’s organization transformed an early modern cabinet of curiosities, paintings, and antiquities into a space in which a historical narrative of art, inspired by rereadings of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives, became visible in a building he designed. A succession of Uffizi personnel was increasingly preoccupied with how to see renaissance, and more specifically Tuscan rinascita, in the collections. The struggles between the director Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni and his vice-director Luigi Lanzi highlight how different understandings of the Renaissance emerged in dialogue with antiquarianism and medievalism. At the end of the eighteenth century the Uffizi would definitively become a museum of the Renaissance to inspire new forms of historical writing in the age of Michelet and Burckhardt.

The eighteenth century in the March 2013 issue of the Journal of the History of Collections:

A R T I C L E S

Linda Bauer and Nello Barbieri, “Forming a Collection of Paintings in Late Baroque Siena,” Journal of the History of Collections 25 (2013): 45-57.

By the time of his death in 1727, the Cavaliere Marcello Biringucci possessed some 600 paintings. A group of unpublished documents, mainly forty-two sheets in the Archivio di Stato in Siena offers unusual insight into this Sienese nobleman’s collecting activities. The papers – memoranda, lists, invoices, orders for payment, receipts, accounts of expenses – many in the Cavaliere’s own hand, illustrate the range of sources he drew upon, not only geographical but those in the secondary art market. He employed agents, purchased from the estates of other collectors, acquired art at auctions, and even redeemed the pawn of a debtor. The documents include the names of artists – many well known – with prices or values for some works, and by reference to the largely unpublished inventory of his estate, give some indication of which works in the documents Biringucci acquired and how his taste conformed to the prevailing trends of the period. Online appendices to the paper, at http://www.jhc.oxfordjournals.org, reproduce the 1727 inventory, working papers, and a selection of letters.

Ellen Adams, “Shaping, Collecting and Displaying Medicine and Architecture: A Comparison of the Hunterian and Soane Museums,” Journal of the History of Collections 25 (2013): 59-75.

Collections played a critical role as teaching tools for particular disciplinary doctrines in Enlightenment Britain, including medicine and architecture. The two protagonists examined here are the architect Sir John Soane and surgeon John Hunter, whose museums now face one another across Lincoln’s Inn Fields in central London. Skeletons, body parts and artistic models illustrated and explained the workings of the body, while architectural pieces and casts, together with interior design and furnishings, supplied inspiration for architects. These collections dissect, respectively, bodies and buildings in order to build new schools of thought. Hunter’s and Soane’s original house museums were both designed to promote particular disciplinary practices and to impress polite society, through various kinds of representations and methods. They differ, however, in the use of the classical tradition. Hunter strode forwards, leaving this legacy behind, while Soane stood Janus-like, interweaving past and present into a multi-layered narrative.

Elena Dmitrieva, “On the Formation of the Collection of Gem Impressions in the State Hermitage Museum,” Journal of the History of Collections 25 (2013): 77-85.

This article deals with the history of the State Hermitage Museum’s collection of gem casts [initiated in the eighteenth century by Catherine the Great}, with a focus on the dactyliotheca stored in the Department of Classical Antiquity containing over 25,000 pieces and currently kept in storage. This collection of plaster impressions has never been displayed to the public and its contents have not yet been published. Nevertheless, it forms a unique example of a collection of casts made from cameos and intaglios, both antique and modern. It is important in a number of ways, including its usefulness in studying the evolution of engraving techniques and its value in contributing to the repertoire of images encountered on gems. It is also an important resource for the study of gems that have not survived in original form to present day.

R E V I E W S

Christian Tico Seifert, Review of Christien Melzer, Von der Kunstkammer zum Kupferstich-Kabinett: Zur Frühgeschichte des Graphiksammelns in Dresden, 1560-1738 (Zurich: Georg Olms Verlag, 2010), 821 pages, ISBN: 978-3487143460, €75, Journal of the History of Collections 25 (2013): 140-41.

Melzer’s book is a major publication on the history of collecting prints and drawings in Central Europe. The results of her study, a Ph.D. dissertation written under the supervision of Bruno Klein (Dresden) and Michel Hochmann (Paris), go far beyond tracing the history of the Dresdner Kupferstich-Kabinett (Print Room) from the sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. She combines thorough research on a huge amount of graphic art, treatises and archival material (much of it hitherto unpublished) with theoretical reflection on collecting and the development of classifications and display of collections, a field that has received enormous attention over the past two decades. . .

Mia Jackson, Review of Abigail Harrison Moore, Fraud, Fakery and False Business: Rethinking the Shrager v. Dighton ‘Old Furniture Case’ (London and New York, Continuum, 2011), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1441115751, £65, Journal of the History of Collections 25 (2013): 143-44.

Abigail Harrison Moore weaves together a rich variety of sources in this account of the infamous ‘Old Furniture Case’, which preoccupied the British media and antiques trade in 1923. Adolph Shrager, a Jewish immigrant from Germany, brought a case of fraud against a prominent London firm of antique furniture dealers, Dighton & Co., in regard to a large quantity of furniture purchased from them between 1919 and 1921. In these two years, Shrager bought over 500 pieces to furnish his new house in Kent. The pieces were largely purported to be English eighteenth-century, and he spent in excess of £111,000. Shrager ran into financial difficulty and ill-health in 1921, and, unable to settle his account with Dighton, who were also feeling the pinch, decided to sell some of his burgeoning collection. The first suspicion that all was not as it might have appeared was raised by Dighton’s pessimism in reply to Mrs Shrager’s suggestion that they sell at Christie’s a suite of furniture for which Mr Shrager had paid £3,000 cash. ‘There is little chance of selling your suite of Chippendale furniture’, came the reply, ‘as there is practically no business’. Shrager called in an expert, (later, and under duress, revealed to be Frederick Litchfield), to advise him on which pieces he could sell ‘so as not to spoil the collection’, and received the devastating judgement that ‘some ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent of them could not be described as genuine antique pieces of furniture of the highest class’. . .

Ethan W. Lasser, “Selling Silver: The Business of Copley’s Paul Revere,” American Art 26 (Fall 2012): 26-43.

John Singleton Copley, Paul Revere, 1768. Oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Joseph W., William B., and Edward H. R. Revere (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

. . . Few examples of colonial American painting have been studied as extensively as Copley’s Paul Revere. Scholars have argued that the portrait depicts Revere in his workshop as he pauses while engraving a silver teapot and have proposed a range of explanations to account for this subject matter. They have analyzed Copley’s sources, searched for (and ultimately uncovered little) information about the commission of the portrait, and speculated about the connection between the painting and Revere’s radical politics[note 2]. But interpreters have yet to consider seriously the connection between the portrait and the increasingly dire state of Revere’s financial affairs. Though Copley depicted the silversmith plying his trade, the bottom-line realities of this trade have been left out of the story of this iconic painting [p. 27]. . . .

My interpretation will draw on two different types of evidence. First is the portrait itself. Paul Revere is a far richer and more singular work than past scholars have acknowledged. While many writers have discussed the subject matter of the painting, few have seriously explored the portrait’s exceptional
composition. . . .

Since this is an image of a craftsman that emphasizes artisanal practice, questions about the processes of making, raising, and decorating silver teapots will also figure centrally in my account. In the period when Copley painted Paul Revere, elites grew increasingly interested in and familiar with artisanal materials and techniques [p. 28]. . . .

In proposing Paul Revere as such a strategic image, my argument locates the portrait within a broader field of eighteenth-century painting that functioned to promote the wares of particular retailers and artisans. This field includes genre paintings like Jean-Antoine Watteau’s iconic Shop Sign [p. 29] . . .

The full article is available here (J-Stor subscription required)

In the current issue of the Oxford Art Journal:

Clare Walcot, “Hogarth’s The South Sea Scheme and the Topography of Speculative Finance,” Oxford Art Journal 35 (December 2012): 413-32.

William Hogarth’s elaborate graphic satire The South Sea Scheme (1721) stages a moral tale of speculation run riot and a capital in thrall to ‘mony’s magick power’. Published in response to the failure of the eponymous scheme, Hogarth offers a satirical commentary on all forms of government-sanctioned speculation and illicit gambling. The scene is set in an imagined topography comprised of London landmarks, public buildings and temporary structures; places of authority, commerce and finance. His rearrangement of the Monument to the Great Fire and Guildhall brings into conjunction sites of cultural memory, which allude to the tense relationship between City and Crown during the post-Restoration period and rebuilding of the capital after 1666. Hogarth draws on the links these sites have with the theatre of the street, in the form of popular protest and pageantry, as it appeared on the ground and on paper. This essay examines the spectacular use of urban space and how it shaped Hogarth’s early graphic satire, as well as continental imports adapted to a London market, such as Bernard Baron’s (after Bernard Picart) A Monument Dedicated to Posterity (1721), often taken to be the model for The South Sea Scheme.

Clare Walcot’s research interests focus on financial innovation in the eighteenth century and its impact on the visual arts, and develop out of her PhD thesis entitled ‘Figuring Finance: London’s New Financial World and the Iconography of Speculation, c. 1689–1763’ (University of Warwick, 2003).