Enfilade

Camilla Smith, “Between Fantasy and Angst: Assessing the Subject and Meaning of Henry Fuseli’s Late Pornographic Drawings, 1800-25,” Art History 33 (June 2010): 420-47.

Abstract: This article examines four sexually violent drawing by Henry Fuseli, assessing how they functioned as personal fantasies and vehicles for institutional criticism It relates Fuseli’s images to the libertine fiction of Sade and London’s illicit underworld, arguing that the artist’s works can be located alongside growing libertine tendencies in a pan-European market. The exquisite dress, nudity, and physical power displayed by his protagonists, combined with pseudo-religious rituals of circumcision, reveal a complex relationship with institutional modes of control and regulation, developed during his ministerial training in Zurich. The restraints as a Royal Academician appear tantamount to the severity of Zurich’s seminary thirty years earlier, and both prove to be factors in shaping his illicit material. Fuseli’s pornographic drawings were not a public, rebellious descent into Sadean nihilism; rather, they exemplify a type of ‘revolt without revolt’ as remote, experimental products of a privileged individual only discovered after
his death in 1825.

On the 250th anniversary of William Beckford’s birth, Bet McLeod writes in the June 2010 issue of Apollo Magazine about the collector’s acquisitions at the 1842 sale of the contents of Strawberry Hill:

John Hoppner, "Portrait of William Beckford," ca. 1800 (City of Salford Art Gallery)

Horace Walpole (1717–97) and William Beckford (1760–1844), two of the most prominent and well-known collectors, builders and authors of the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain, are inextricably linked. Both had a passion for the past and an uncanny ability to recreate a highly imaginative version of that past. The comparisons between their renowned Gothic residences (Strawberry Hill and Fonthill Abbey) and novels (Castle of Otranto, 1764, and Vathek, 1786) have invited much debate, as have the parallels between their patterns of collecting, their acquisitions, and the arrangement of the collections in their residences. Much interest has also been paid to the on-site public auctions of both their collections, the production of the sale catalogues and the intense public interest that the auctions generated, manifested in the enormous number of visitors and extensive print coverage.

This year sees a celebration of both of these complex and contradictory individuals. It marks the 250th anniversary of Beckford’s birth, which will be commemorated by several publications and a special exhibition at Beckford’s Tower in Bath. It is also the year in which the first large-scale exhibition devoted to Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill is on view in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum, having opened at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, in October 2009. Taking as its basis Beckford’s own words as selected from his correspondence, this article provides some insight into his reactions to and acquisitions of decorative works of art and sculpture at the 1842 sale of the contents of Strawberry Hill, which took place over 24 days. . . .

For the full article, click here»

A selection of articles of in the forthcoming issue of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 40 (Spring 2011), edited by Lisa Forman Cody and Mark Ledbury:

• Shelley King, “Portrait of a Marriage: John and Amelia Opie and the Sister Arts”
• Mary Sheriff, “The King, the Trickster, and the Gorgon: On the Illusions of Rococo Art” (2009 Clifford Lecture)
• Josephine Touma, “From the Playhouse to the Page: Some Visual Sources for Watteau’s Theatrical Universe”

Pre-order yours through the Johns Hopkins University Press (800.748.1784).

In addition to various articles and reviews related to the eighteenth century from the May 2010 issue of The Burlington Magazine (focused on the theme of British art), the editorial usefully addresses the expansion of online art historical resources and the attendant challenges, particularly in light of a symposium held in Leuven this past spring (23 March 2010). Excerpts are provided below, and the symposium schedule is available as a PDF file.

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Articles

Book Reviews

Simon Watney, “A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors In Britain 1660–1851 by I. Roscoe, E. Hardy and M.G, Sullivan”

Ann V. Gunn, “The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment by J.M. Kelly”

Martin Postle, “Johan Zoffany: Artist and Adventurer by P. Treadwell”

Brian Allen, “Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 by H. Hoock”

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Editorial: The Baroqueness of www

In August 2009 we reported on new online resources, prefacing the Editorial with the remark that ‘art historians have been relatively slow to adapt to the changes being wrought on their discipline by automation and to take full advantage of the benefits that it offers’. They may have been slow to adapt, but there is now certainly a steady stream of new initiatives. To name just three very recent examples: a few weeks ago CERES was launched, an online catalogue of Spanish museum collections; the Warburg Institute in London officially announced that it has put material from its archive, library and iconographic collections online; and the Getty has made it known that it has now made the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) freely available on its website, having already recently put online a database providing access to the Goupil Gallery stock books kept at the Museum, including high-­resolution photographs of every page.

With so many new projects, one can be forgiven for not being able to see the wood for the trees, although Teutonic thoroughness has provided a helping hand in the form of the German internet portal Arthistoricum,while a similar portal can be found on the Getty website. But the abundance of initiatives is daunting and organising online material does not come without its problems; this led to a timely and very useful symposium held in March in Leuven to ponder what it called the Baroqueness of the Web. This online extravaganza certainly has its positive sides: there is now an enormous quantity of primary and secondary sources available in full text, often also allowing users to flip virtually through the pages of a book; online image databases are getting more comprehensive by the day; and there are a good many periodical archives, as well as newly established e-journals, published exclusively online.

But problems remain. . . . Most people agree that in an ideal world all art-historical databases should communicate with each other and be accessible through one single portal, although how best to approach this mammoth task is less than straightforward. Efforts in the late 1990s and early 2000s to realise such a system did not fare well; the Van Eyck Project (Visual Arts Network for the Exchange of Cultural Knowledge), which was funded by Brussels, has in fact been put on hold. The Europeana website, launched with much fanfare in November 2008 and also funded by European money, has, after some teething problems, at least materialised and currently brings together some six million digital items from European institutions, including images, texts, sound and videos, but its intellectual framework is very meagre, largely due to the fact that Europeana works entirely from the top down by requesting material from institutions and throwing it into a huge melting pot.

If there was one overriding conclusion to the Leuven symposium, it was that, as long as the many initiatives that have sprung up and will spring up in the future adhere to standard technical specifications for online databases, their integration can always be achieved at a later date. This is not to say that there should be no collaboration, but for now it will have to be mainly a matter of good communication and sensible choices. For instance, it is impossible for the RKD in The Hague to scan and properly index all its photographic material, but it knows that its strengths lie in Dutch and Flemish art and has wisely decided to concentrate on those, at least for the present. Should the embattled Witt and Conway Libraries come to the conclusion that they need to bring their collections online, they would do well to adopt a similar ad hoc system and concentrate first and foremost on what is not available elsewhere, thus avoiding the trap of the ‘blanket approach’.

The above examples are of necessity only a very small selection of the topics that were discussed in Leuven. The realisation that integration is a future goal, not a starting point, certainly gives hope for the continuing flowering of all sorts of new projects, making the internet an ever more Baroque church for ideas and initiatives, and perhaps one day that church will have a more streamlined Neo-classical design. For now the Burlington will do its bit by providing on its new website, to be launched in the near future, a comprehensive survey of online art-historical databases.

The eighteenth century in a special issue of Art History on “Theatricality in Early Modern Visual Art and Architecture,” edited by Caroline van Eck and Stijn Bussels:

Sigrid de Jong, “Staging Ruins: Paestum and Theatricality,” Art History 33.2 (April 2010): 334-51.

Abstract: This article looks at the connection between architecture and theatre. By focusing on how eighteenth-century travellers experienced the Greek temples in Italian Paestum, it highlights the analogies between architectural experience and theatricality. Travellers at the time found it difficult to comprehend Paestum because the architecture of the temples was different from the classical architecture they had seen in Rome and illustrated in publications. Travellers, by using strategies of representation related to the theatre, tried to present this strange architecture of Paestum in an accessible way to their eighteenth-century public. It also shows how the various roles assumed by spectators or traveller-observers defined the way they experienced the architecture.

Bram van Oostveldt, “Ut pictura hortus / ut theatrum hortus: Theatricality and French Picturesque Garden Theory (1771-95),” Art History 33.2 (April 2010): 364-77.

Abstract: The picturesque vogue in French garden theory and practice from the second half of the eighteenth century drew on more than painterly examples. Theatrical strategies were equally important in attempts to stage the garden as a painting. However, in French theory and practice references to the theatre were often considered to be problematic. It was theatricality that posed the problem. The French followed a more general discourse on theatricality that, from the mid-eighteenth century on, was predominant in the arts and was constructed around questions of spectatorship. As the disapproved other of the natural, the theatrical in the arts referred to situations in which the beholder is made aware of the danger that the act of beholding threatened to destroy the imaginative and illusionistic power of art.

From last month’s issue of The Burlington Magazine 152 (April 2010):

• Ann V. Gunn, “Paul Sandby, William Pars and the Society of Dilettanti,” pp. 219-226.
• Owen Hopkins, review of Compass and Rule: Architecture as Mathematical Practice in England by A. Gerbino and S. Johnston, pp. 250-51.
• Robert J. Gemmett, review of William Beckford: A Bibliography by J. Millington, pp. 251-52.
• Vanessa Brett, review of British and Continental Gold and Silver in the Ashmolean Museum by T. Schroder, p. 252.
• Christoph Martin Vogtherr, review of the exhibition Jean Raoux, pp. 267-68.