Call for Articles | Anachronisms in Art History
From the Call for Papers / Appel à contributions:
Anachronisms in Art History / Anachronismes en histoire de l’art
Special issue of Perspective: Actualité en histoire de l’art
Edited by Thomas Golsenne, Hélène Leroy, and Hélène Valance
Proposals due by 17 June 2024, with finished articles due by 1 December 2024
Perspective will explore, in its 2025.2 issue—co-edited by Thomas Golsenne (INHA), Hélène Leroy (Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris), and Hélène Valance (université Bourgogne-Franche-Comté/InVisu)—the question of anachronisms in art history.
Since at least the 1960s, a number of critical approaches have emerged with regard to sweeping Western approaches that classified artworks and artists in successive stylistic periods, and even based the discipline on these temporal and formal categories. They made it possible to call into question the 19th-century ‘historism’ that confused the scholars’ temporal categories with the historical phenomena themselves, just as they have redefined periods as designations of time, objects of history. In practice, however, it is clear that the period remains more than ever the temporal unit within which we conceive art history and study it. Even if the subject of anachronism in art history emerged much earlier, for reasons that merit further consideration, it genuinely became worthy of interest for the epistemology of the historical sciences at the turn of the 21st century. What about art history?
To this end, three main topics emerge for proposed articles:
1 Disciplinary Anachronisms
2 Methodological Anachronisms
3 Historical Anachronisms
Additional information (including a bibliography) is available from the full Call for Papers»
Taking care to ground reflections in a historiographic, methodological, or epistemological perspective, please send your proposals (an abstract of 2,000 to 3,000 characters/350 to 500 words, a working title, a short bibliography on the subject, and a biography limited to a few lines) to the editorial email address (revue-perspective@inha.fr) no later than 17 June 2024.
Perspective handles translations; projects will be considered by the committee regardless of language. Authors whose proposals are accepted will be informed of the decision by the editorial committee in July 2024, while articles will be due on 1 December 2024. Submitted texts (between 25,000 and 45,000 characters/ 4,500 or 7,500 words, depending on the intended project) will be formally accepted following an anonymous peer review process.
Published by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) since 2006, Perspective is a biannual journal which aims to bring out the diversity of current research in art history, highly situated and explicitly aware of its own historicity.
Call for Articles | Fall 2025 Issue of J18: Clean
From the Call for Papers:
Journal18, Issue #20 (Fall 2025) — Clean
Issue edited by Maarten Delbeke, Noémie Etienne, and Nikos Magouliotis
Proposals due by 1 October 2024; finished articles will be due by 1 April 2025
This issue of Journal18 asks: what we might see if we regard the eighteenth century as possessed by a cleaning frenzy? Cleaning, as a process of removing excess matter to get to the essential or the original, engaged an eighteenth-century obsession with origins and etiology. This type of removal took place in a time of formulations and nebulous debates about race, class, and ethnicity and intersected with attempts to ‘purify’ the urban and rural environment as well as society itself. Cleanliness suggested a particular aesthetic that resonated with the tenets of neoclassicism but also with racialized notions of whiteness, as the opposite of ‘impure’, non-white races, cultures, and objects. In the increasingly disenchanted worldview of elites, cleaning artworks was also a way to annihilate any living presence connected to these objects, from bugs and microorganisms to ancestral spirits to immanent beliefs.
In eighteenth-century Europe, political, cultural, and religious authorities sought to clean artworks and monuments from anything that ‘soiled’ them, whether that was actual dirt, natural traces of use and time, or (hu)man-made ephemera, immaterial rituals, and ideological beliefs. These actions were symptoms of a power struggle between religious institutions and the state and between different cultures and countries, but also between local populations and an increasingly centralized administration. Even when presented as neutral measures of maintenance, such acts of cleaning often led to conflict. This was the case, for example, in late eighteenth-century Naples, when the German painter Jacob Philip Hackert was accused by local artists of disrespecting a number of Italian paintings he had cleaned. What for one cultural milieu diminished artistic value could be, for another, an integral part of the artwork.
This issue of Journal18 invites essays on acts of and discourses around cleaning in the long eighteenth century, particularly cases that address issues of authority and ownership. Who was entitled to touch, handle, modify, or clean an artwork, relic, building, or monument? What/who was allowed to reside within such buildings and objects, and what/who had to be erased or exterminated? What was the significance of defining the ‘pure’ or ‘original’ state of such artworks? What line of separation did actors draw between cleaning and destruction? Was cleaning gendered, and, if so, how? Who was expected to do the cleaning, and who was allowed to produce dirt? What are the connections between racialized ideologies that led to the devastations of ethnic cleansing and eighteenth-century aesthetics of cleaning and cleanliness? Is there a way to contrast the ‘messiness’ of the early modern multi-modal ‘entangled’ historiography with the streamlined ‘cleanliness’ of eighteenth-century historical writing?
Proposals for issue #20 Clean are now being accepted. The deadline for proposals is 1 October 2024. To submit a proposal, please send an abstract (250 words) and brief biography to editor@journal18.org and nikolaos.magouliotis@gta.arch.ethz.ch. Articles should not exceed 6000 words (including footnotes) and will be due by 1 April 2025. For further details on submission and Journal18 house style, see Information for Authors.
Issue Editors
• Maarten Delbeke, ETH, Zurich
• Noémie Etienne, University of Vienna
• Nikos Magouliotis, ETH, Zurich
Print Quarterly, March 2024
The long eighteenth century in the latest issue of Print Quarterly:
Print Quarterly 41.1 (March 2024)
a r t i c l e s
• Przemysław Wątroba, “Jacques Rigaud’s Drawings in Warsaw of the Residences of Louis XIV,” pp. 23–32.
“In the collection of the last king of Poland, Stanisław August Poniatowski (1732–98), kept in the Print Room of the University of Warsaw Library, there is a renowned volume titled Recueil choisi des plus belles vues des palais et maisons royales de Paris et des environs containing a series of 106 engravings by Jacques Rigaud (1681–1754). . . . A set eight hitherto unpublished drawings by Rigaud [also in Warsaw and] formerly kept in Portfolio 174 are here presented as designs” for eight of the prints (23, 25).
n o t e s a n d r e v i e w s
Seven Creamware Plates, ca. 1808–36, diameters 20–23 cm, transfer-printed with various scenes, clockwise from top: Defoe’s Robinson, Choisy factory; Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Montereau factory; Perrault’s Fairies, Montereau factory; Fontaine’s Fable of the Fox and Grapes, Sèvres factory; Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Judgement of Midas, Choisy factory; Chateaubriand’s Atala Found with Chactus by Father Aubry, Choisy factory; and at centre, Cottin’s Matilda Saved by Malek Adhel, Choisy factory (Germany, Peter-Christian Wegner Collection).
• Marzia Faietti, Review of Heather Madar, ed., Prints as Agents of Global Exchange: 1500–1800 (Amsterdam UP, 2021), pp. 37–39.
• Sheila McTighe, Review of Francesco Ceretti and Roberta D’Adda, eds., Immaginario Ceruti: Le stampe nel laboratorio del pittore (Skira, 2023), pp. 42–43. This catalogue accompanied an exhibition that explored the work of the painter Giacomo Ceruti (1698–1767) and his reliance on printed images. “A complementary show of Ceruti’s paintings, Miseria & Nobiltà: Giacomo Ceruti nell’Europa del Settecento was also held in 2023 at the Museo Santa Giulia in Brescia, followed by a reduced version at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles during the second half of that year, Giacomo Ceruti: A Compassionate Eye” (42).
• Natasha Ruiz-Gómez, Review of Rebecca Whiteley, Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body (University of Chicago Press, 2023), pp. 43–45.
• Antony Griffiths, Review of Chiara Travisonni with Luca Fiorentino and Andrea Muzzi, Pietro Giacomo Palmieri (Edifir, 2023), pp. 45–46. This monograph on the draughtsman and printmaker, Pietro Giacomo Palmieri (1737–1804), “will become the definitive source of information” for the artist and his work (46).
• Patricia Ferguson, Review of Peter-Christian Wegner, Literatur auf französischen Steingut-Tellern des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts (Georg Olms, 2022), pp. 46–47. Wegner addresses the popularity of subjects drawn from French literature for transfer-printed ceramics, starting in 1808. “While we await a larger in-depth survey of this engaging material, Wegner’s publication is a huge contribution to its appreciation” (46).
• Elizabeth Savage, Review of Christien Melzer and Georg Josef Dietz, Holzschnitt: 1400 bis heute (Hatje Cantz, 2022), pp. 48–50. This is the catalogue for an exhibition that “featured more than 100 prints from the Kupferstichkabinett [in Berlin], as well as what was effectively the first large-scale display of woodblocks from its enormous yet relatively little-known collection” (50).
Johann Christoph Weigel, Sheet for Découpage with Figures on Cloudlike Landscapes and a Fantastical Bird, c. 1700–25, from album Inventions Chinoises V, handcoloured engraving, 216 x 151 mm (Dresden, Kupferstich-Kabinett).
• Brief notice of Katy Barrett, Looking for Longitude: A Cultural History (Liverpool UP, 2022), p. 76. Rather than a retelling of the familiar story of accurately calculating longitude, this book “is a remarkably well-researched account of the ways in which this long-running sage impacted on many areas of public discourse, thought, and imagery” (76).
• Emanuele Lugli, Review of Miriam Vogelaar, The Mokken Collection: Books and Manuscripts on Fencing before 1800 (MMIT Publishing, 2020), pp. 88–92.
• Nadine Orenstein, Review of Maureen Warren, ed., Paper Knives, Paper Crowns: Political Prints in the Dutch Republic (Champaign: Krannert Art Museum, 2022), 92–96. “Never have these prints been so lavishly presented. The beautifully produced catalogue, winner of the 2023 IFPDA Book Award, exceptionally allocates plenty of space to the images. It allows the reader to see entire works along with accompanying text and provides space for multi-plate productions” (93).
• Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, Review of Cordula Bischoff and Petra Kuhlmann-Hodick, eds, La Chine: Die China-Sammlung Des 18. Jahrhunderts Im Dresdner Kupferstich-Kabinett (Sandstein Verlag, 2021), 97–103. This “is the catalogue of an exhibition at the Dresden State Museum devoted to the Chinese works on paper and European chinoiserie prints acquired by the Saxon Electors before 1750” (97). It “was an ambitious project that took many years to come to fruition and required collaboration between colleagues in different disciplines with different working languages” (102).
Oxford Art Journal, December 2023
The 18th century in the latest issue of the Oxford Art Journal:
Oxford Art Journal 46.3 (December 2023)
a r t i c l e s
• Aaron Wile, “Absolutism, the Royal Body, and the Origins of Mythologie galante: Charles de La Fosse at the Trianon,” pp. 327–55.
Charles de La Fosse, The Rest of Diana, 1688, oil on canvas, 128 × 160 cm (Versailles, Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon).
Mythologie galante, a sensual mode of mythological painting that is one the defining developments of eighteenth-century French art, is usually associated with aristocratic resistance to Louis XIV. This article examines three mythological paintings created by Charles de La Fosse for one of the king’s pleasure palaces in 1688, long identified as a major turning point towards mythologie galante, in order to reassess the origins and meaning of the genre. Situating the paintings within the long arc of Louis XIV’s representational politics, I propose that the collapse of the fiction of the king’s two bodies during the second half of his reign and the subsequent redefinition of the king’s public and private spheres allowed La Fosse to develop a new mythological idiom based in touch, intimacy, and sentiment. The resulting works contravened painting’s traditional role under absolutism to form royal subjects, redefining it as a medium of sympathetic encounter. La Fosse’s paintings open up, from this perspective, an alternate account of modern art and subjectivity—one that took shape not in opposition to absolutist culture but from its very heart.
• Robert Jones, “Joshua Reynolds and Deafness: Listening, Hearing, and Not Hearing in Eighteenth-Century Portraiture,” pp. 357–77.
Angelica Kauffman, Portrait of Joshua Reynolds, 1767, oil on canvas, 127 × 102 cm (National Trust, Saltram).
This article examines the significance of deafness in painting and proposes a new trope for the form of picturing undertaken by eighteenth-century art, ‘the listening portrait’. As a first step it recovers and explores the significance of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s own deafness, as represented by his self-portraits as well as images by Nathanial Dance, Angelica Kauffman, and Johan Zoffany. Sound is necessarily absent from painting, audible speech impossible. Having explored these apparent limits (found in eighteenth-century theorizations of art) the essay asks more fundamentally what work is done by the representation of someone striving to listen. By considering this question, it is possible to understand these images as engaging in a more sensitive ethical enquiry concerned with what an aural impairment might mean, and how it is distinct from a refusal or unwillingness to listen. Deafness is consequently shown to be not merely something that paintings show, rather the issue of hearing or not hearing frames their pictorial and moral purpose. Throughout the article recognition of the specificity of Georgian sociability on the one hand, and eighteenth-century artistic theory and practice on the other, seeks to enable the claims of Medical Humanities to recognize previously hidden narratives.
r e v i e w s
• Andrew McClellan, “Purpose, Power, and Possibility: A History of Museums Past and Present,” pp. 493–501.
Review of Krzysztof Pomian, Le musée, une histoire mondiale, 3 volumes (Paris: Gallimard, 2020–22), volume 1: Du trésor au musée, 687 pages, ISBN: 978-2070742370, €35; volume 2: L’ancrage européen, 1789–1850, 546 pages, ISBN: 978-2072924705, €35; volume 3: À la conquête du monde, 1850–2020, 936 pages, ISBN: 978-2072982781, €45.
The Magazine of the Decorative Arts Trust, Winter 2023–24
The Decorative Arts Trust has shared select articles from the winter issue of their member magazine as online articles for all to enjoy. The following articles are related to the 18th century:
The Magazine of the Decorative Arts Trust, Winter 2023–24
• Catherine Carlisle , “Inspiring Thomas Jefferson: Art and Architecture in France” Link»
• Matthew A. Thurlow, “Papered and Painted in Providence” Link»
• Charles Dawson, “The Finest Regency Porcelain Painter: Thomas Baxter in Worcester” Link»
• Philip D. Zimmerman, “Historic Odessa Collections Published” Link»
• Reed Gochberg, “Interwoven: Women’s Lives Written in Thread” Link»
• Kaila Temple, “‘A Place to Cultivate Her Mind in by Musing’: New Exploration of Anne Emlen’s 1757 Shellwork Grotto” Link»
• Laura Ochoa Rincon, “A Million Hidden Stories: Uncovering Materials at the New Orleans Museum of Art” Link»
• Laura C. Jenkins, “French Interiors for an American Gilded Age” Link»
• Alyse Muller, “18th-Century Marine Imagery in the Sèvres Archive” Link»
The printed Magazine of the Decorative Arts Trust is mailed to Trust members twice per year. Memberships start at $50, with $25 memberships for students.
Pictured: The magazine cover features the front parlor of the Rhode Island Historical Society’s John Brown House, which contains a Providence-made nine-shell desk and bookcase (1760–80) flanked by variants of Providence-made Neoclassical side chairs (1785–1800). The wallpaper is a 1975 reproduction by the Birge Co. of Buffalo, NY, based on a 1790s French example.
Exhibition | Indian Skies: The Howard Hodgkin Collection
An Elephant and Keeper, India, Mughal, ca. 1650–60, opaque color and gold on paper
(New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Howard Hodgkin Collection, 2022.187)
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Opening next month at The Met:
Indian Skies: The Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian Court Painting
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 6 February — 9 June 2024
Over the course of sixty years, British artist Howard Hodgkin (1932–2017) formed a collection of Indian paintings and drawings that is recognized as one of the finest of its kind. A highly regarded painter and printmaker, Hodgkin collected works from the Mughal, Deccani, Rajput, and Pahari courts dating from the 16th to the 19th centuries that reflect his personal passion for Indian art. This exhibition presents over 120 of these works, many of which The Met recently acquired, alongside loans from The Howard Hodgkin Indian Collection Trust.
The works on view include stunning portraits, beautifully detailed text illustrations, studies of the natural world, and devotional subjects. The exhibition will also display a painting by Hodgkin, Small Indian Sky, which alludes to the subtle relationship between his own work, India, and his collection. This exhibition is accompanied by an issue of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin.
The Burlington Magazine, December 2023
The eighteenth century in the December issue of The Burlington, which focuses on Spain:
The Burlington Magazine 165 (December 2023)
Francisco de Goya, Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta, 1820, oil on canvas, 115 × 77 cm (Minneapolis Institute of Art, 52.14).
a r t i c l e
• Mercedes Cerón Peña, “Goya’s Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta,” pp. 1300–04.
In 1820 Goya painted a portrait of himself as he had appeared during his serious illness of the year before, attended by his doctor, Eugenio García Arrieta. Newly discovered biographical information about Arrieta suggests that the painting’s red and and green colour scheme may allude to the political views he shared with Goya.
r e v i e w s
• Michael Hall, Review of the new Galería de las Colecciones Reales (Royal Collections Gallery) in Madrid (opened 28 June 2023), pp. 1339–43.
• Stephen Lloyd, Review of the exhibition Return of the Gods (World Museum, Liverpool, (April 2023 — February 2024), pp. 1343–45. “Britain’s largest assemblage of Classical sculpture outside London belongs to National Museums Liverpool . . . In 1959 Liverpool City Council and its museums were gifted the entirety of the Ince Blundell collection—approximately six hundred heavily restored Roman marbles . . . collected by . . . Henry Blundell (1724–1810), a wealthy Catholic landowner, between 1776 and 1809.”
• Humphrey Wine, Review of the catalogue raisonné by Joseph Assémat-Tessandier, Louis Lagrenée, dit l’Aîné (1725–1805) (Arthena, 2022), pp. 1364–65.
Louis-Michel van Loo, Portrait of Isabel Farnese, 1737, oil on canvas, 341 × 264 cm (Madrid: Galería de las Colecciones Reales).
• Rebeka Hodgkinson, Review of Stephanie Barczewski, How the Country House Became English (Reaktion, 2023), pp. 1370–71.
• Peter Humfrey, Review of Eveline Baseggio, Tiziana Franco, and Luca Molà, eds., La chiesa di Santa Maria dei Servi e la comunità veneziana dei Servi di Maria, secoli XIV–XIX (Viella, 2023), pp. 1374–75. “The demolition of the great fourteenth-century church of the Servi in about 1812–13 represents one of the most grievous of the many losses suffered by Venice’s artistic heritage during the Napoleonic period.”
o b i t u a r y
• Saloni Mathur, Obituary for Kavita Singh (1964–2023), pp. 1379–80.
Professor of art history and Dean of the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Kavita Singh became internationally known for her publications on the history and politics of museums and the pre-modern art of South Asia. An authority on Indian court paintings, she was an inspiring colleague and teacher who publicly championed both her university and the study of Mughal art in the subcontinent.
Journal18 | Pendant Essays on Paint Boxes
Left: Partial view of the contents of Charlotte Martner’s paint box (Private collection; author’s photograph). Right: Caspar Schneider, Paint box on stand, ca. 1789, mahogany on oak structure, 75 cm high (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art).
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Recent pieces from J18′s Notes & Queries:
Conceived as pendants, these two essays by David Pullins and Damiët Schneeweisz unpack two paint boxes that belonged to Marie Victoire Lemoine (1754–1820) and Charlotte Daniel Martner (1781–1839), bringing out how these boxes tie the material history of painting to gender, colonialism, and enslavement.
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David Pullins, “Contained Assertions: Marie Victoire Lemoine’s Paint Box,” Journal18 (December 2023).
Marie Victoire Lemoine, The Interior of a Woman Painter’s Atelier, 1789, oil on canvas, 116.5 × 88.9 cm (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art).
Holding a loaded palette, brushes and maulstick, a standing woman represents the art of painting, while a second woman seated on a low stool embodies the foundational art of drawing (Fig. 1).[1] Their practices converge in the canvas underway on an easel, depicting a priestess presenting a young woman to a statue of Athena, goddess-protectress of the arts, in which chalk outlines have begun to be fleshed out in color. But the allegory has been dressed in contemporary terms, pointedly situating Marie Victoire Lemoine’s The Interior of a Woman Painter’s Atelier in the year it was executed, 1789, and boldly taking on the language of genre painting that was used more often to critique than to promote women artists. Michel Garnier’s A Young Woman Painter from the same year offers a counter-image (Fig. 2). A painter sets her canvases aside (literally turned to the wall, her easel reflected distantly in the mirror), while she is distracted by love (signaled by the dove, flowers, and book propped on an insubstantial table easel). In contrast to Lemoine’s somber, antique mise-en-abyme, Garnier chooses an unfinished “Greuze girl” as his gloss. . . .
The full essay is available here»
David Pullins is Associate Curator in the Department of European Paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Damiët Schneeweisz, “Laboring Likeness: Charlotte Daniel Martner’s Paint Box in Martinique (1803–1821),” Journal18 (December 2023).
Charlotte Martner, Self-Portrait with Four People, 1805, watercolor on ivory and cardboard, 14.5 × 11.5 cm (Private collection).
In Charlotte Daniel Martner’s self-portrait miniature (1805), the classical tendencies of French eighteenth-century portraiture collide with a distinctive burgeoning Antillean visual culture of the early nineteenth century (Fig. 1).[1] The miniature is a contrast in colors: the artist’s luminous pale white skin and Empire dress, emanating from the portrait’s ivory ground like moonlight, set against the darker skin tones of the man, women, and child that surround her, each dressed in dulled shades of red, orange, blue, and beige. The precise status of the four Black individuals within this household is unclear, and they are yet to be identified, but their placement, each suspended in an act of domestic labor, suggests that perhaps they depict those then enslaved in Martner’s home. At the center of the portrait is a brisk loss, as if someone has pressed their thumb to the watercolor and swept away Martner’s features, leaving only a set of auburn eyes, the contours of a nose, dark-brown eyebrows, and loose curls pinned back with a bejeweled comb. . .
The full essay is available here»
Damiët Schneeweisz is a PhD Candidate at The Courtauld Institute of Art currently on Doctoral Placement at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
Journal18, Fall 2023 — Cold
The latest issue of J18:
Journal18, Issue #16 (Fall 2023) — Cold
Issue edited by Michael Yonan
Feeling cold is increasingly a privilege in our warming world. Regions of the world known for temperate, moderate climates are becoming accustomed to erratic weather. Cooler areas of the globe are warming, and warmer areas becoming too hot to occupy. Accompanying these climatological transformations are humanity’s attempts to control temperature, led by the invention of technologies (most prominently air conditioning) which help us live comfortably, but which come with substantial human, economic, and environmental costs. By creating pleasant temperatures in which to live and work, we exacerbate the problem that makes human intervention into the climate more urgent.
The cause of these changes is the consumption of fossil fuels, which transformed human life profoundly in the pursuit of modernity. The origin of this transformation falls squarely within the long eighteenth century. The established scientific terminus post quem for measuring human effects on global temperatures is the year 1800. Moreover, the 1700s were the final century of the Little Ice Age, a climatological phenomenon characterized by lower global mean temperatures. With these conditions in mind, might temperature play a greater role in our discussion of eighteenth-century art? For this issue of Journal18, I have invited scholars to address this possibility. My goal is to encourage reflection on how eighteenth-century art might engage the scholarly literatures on historical climatology and the history of the senses. Do the conditions of eighteenth-century life, as filtered through artistic production, help us understand why the world became warmer? Can we find in the eighteenth century’s ideas about temperature the roots of our current beliefs, and perhaps locate in art ways of rethinking or undoing the assumptions that have brought us to this place?
The essays offered here address these concerns from multiple perspectives, engage varied works of art, and do so in diverse regions of the globe. Jennifer Van Horn examines an eighteenth-century plate warmer, made circa 1790, owned by George Washington and used in his residences, to reveal its place within a racially determined temperature-scape. She achieves this by analyzing not only how it mediated temperatures for its socially prominent owners, but also how it reveals the experiences of the enslaved individuals who tended it during dinners. She thereby locates the warmer’s effect on bodies, its thermoception, within the “complex entanglements of cold, race, unfreedom, and materiality” of early America to produce a “racialized thermal order.”
Sylvia Houghteling’s essay takes us to a different region of the globe, South Asia, and to a different problem, namely creating cool temperatures for inhabitants of a hot climate. Houghteling shows that South Asian societies produced sophisticated systems of cooling long before colonial occupation, but these early techniques often relied on creating the psychological effect of cold by stimulating other senses, notably smell and sight. She thereby produces a synesthetic framework for temperature modification, one in which the senses interconnect. This approach offers insight into how to produce art history that is sensually engaged, not just in an erotic dimension, but in the ability to imagine complex sensual entanglements through the past’s material remains.
Alper Metin leads us to the Ottoman Empire, where he investigates the history of a warming device appreciated across the world: the fireplace. Eighteenth-century Ottoman patrons adapted fireplace designs from Western models, and in so doing responded to substantial socioeconomic and cultural changes in Ottoman society. These included the desire for increased comfort in domestic interiors and the need to display wealth and sophistication through a fireplace’s decoration. Metin reflects on the Ottoman Turkish terminology for fireplaces, revealing both gendered and socio-ethnic dimensions to its language, and on morphological changes to fireplace design. Fireplaces emerge as more than just warming devices, but rather as creations that express changing conditions and mentalities in a society rethinking its international place.
Our shorter notices take up these themes in further directions. Kaitlin Grimes shows how the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway incorporated narwhal ivory into conceptions of royal power that both supported and materialized its colonial project in the Arctic Atlantic. Etienne Wismer demonstrates that melting glaciers in Switzerland (much in the news today) fascinated Europeans in the years around 1800, spurring scientific investigations, inspiring interior decoration, and generating new health regimens. Both Grimes and Wismer explore the relationship between what Wismer calls a “biotope” and the human beings who inhabited it. I would add that art mediates the relationship between humanity and biotope, and that temperature is a central force constituting their interconnection.
Issue Editor
Michael Yonan, University of California, Davis
a r t i c l e s
• Jennifer Van Horn — Racialized Thermoception: An Eighteenth-Century Plate Warmer
• Sylvia Houghteling — Beyond Ice: Cooling through Cloth, Scent, and Hue in Eighteenth-Century South Asia
• Alper Metin — Domesticating and Displaying Fire: The Technical and Aesthetic Evolution of Ottoman Fireplaces
s h o r t e r p i e c e s
• Kaitlin Grimes — Narwhal Ivory as the Arctic Colonial Speciality of the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway
• Etienne Wismer — Making Sense of Ice? Engaging Meltwater in the Long Eighteenth Century in Switzerland and France
All articles are available here»
Call for Articles | Spring 2025 Issue of J18: Africa, Beyond Borders
From the Call for Papers:
Journal18, Issue #19 (Spring 2025) — Africa: Beyond Borders
Issue edited by Prita Meier, Hermann von Hesse, and Finbarr Barry Flood
Proposals due by 1 April 2024; finished articles will be due by 1 September 2024
Since the dawn of decolonization in 1950s and 1960s Africa, Africanist scholars have emphasized Africa’s connections to the rest of the world before the period of European colonialism. While such views have gained widespread currency among Africanists and some Africanist-adjacent scholars and journals, Africa, apart from the continent’s Mediterranean coast, is hardly discussed beyond these circles. Even when medieval and early modern (art)history and material culture studies claim to be global, Africa often remains on the periphery of the discussion of long-distance trade, artistic innovations, and material cultural exchange.
This special issue of Journal18 invites contributions that examine the confluence of the global, interregional, and local in shaping African arts, material culture, and sartorial practices. It seeks to shift standard accounts of globalization by decentering European empire-building and the colonial archive. The long eighteenth century saw the expansion of African polities and local networks of exchange flourished. Internal trade and migration were just as important as oceanic movements. Traders, merchants, and migrants constantly moved between different societies, actively facilitating the intermingling of diverse cultural forms across great distances. Artisans, both free and enslaved, were also highly mobile during this period. Archipelagic Africa, especially its port cities and mercantile polities, played a significant role in shaping the commodity networks of the entire world.
Among the questions that this issue seeks to address are: Can the discussions of African trade objects help us historicize intra-and inter-continental trade and cultural exchanges? How did African royals, travelers, enslaved, and free individuals engage with the foreign and the faraway? What can African artifacts tell us about religious, aesthetic, and cultural transformations in Africa and its internal or transregional diasporas before the colonial period? What can historic African art collecting tell us about African identities and transcultural negotiations? How did Africa inspire global artistic imaginations during this dynamic period?
We welcome proposals for contributions on related topics, including African architectural forms and notions of space; the visualization of race in pre-colonial Africa; cultures of making and their regional and transregional connections; the reception and reimagining associated with transregional or transcultural reception; African writing and graphic systems; the material cultures of enslaved/free Africans and their experiences of migration and diaspora; and the politics of eighteenth-century heritage conservation.
To submit a proposal, send an abstract (250 words) and brief biography to the following addresses: editor@journal18.org and spm9@nyu.edu, vonhesse@illinois.edu, fbf1@nyu.edu. Articles should not exceed 6000 words (including footnotes) and will be due by 1 September 2024. For further details on submission and Journal18 house style, see Information for Authors.
Issue Editors
Prita Meier, New York University
Hermann von Hesse, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Finbarr Barry Flood, New York University
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