Lecture | Peter Burke on the Invention of Connoisseurship
From BGC:
Peter Burke | The Invention of Connoisseurship
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 6 September 2023, 6.00pm
Carlo Maratti, Padre Sebastiano Resta Examining a Folio of Drawings (The Devonshire Collections). The drawing was included in the exhibition Lines of Beauty: Master Drawings from Chatsworth, on view in the fall of 2021 at The Lightbox in Woking, Surrey.
Connoisseurship—a bundle of practices combining a sense of the quality of works of art, the ability to attribute them to their makers, and to discriminate between originals, copies, and forgeries—is a contested term with a contested history. In this lecture, Peter Burke argues that the ‘invention’ of connoisseurship happened gradually rather than suddenly and took place in the West neither, as has sometimes been argued, in the nineteenth century, nor—perhaps surprisingly—in the Renaissance, but in the seventeenth century when treatises on the subject begin to appear.
Registration is available here»
Peter Burke is a cultural and social historian who was born in 1937, studied at Oxford (1957–62), and taught at the Universities of Sussex (1962–78) and Cambridge (1979–2004). He is a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College. His publications have focused in turn on historiography, the Renaissance, popular culture, and the history of knowledge, including the distinctive roles of exiles and polymaths. His latest book is a history of ignorance, and his next will be a history of connoisseurship.
Chris Schüler on the Wood that Built London
An evening lecture at the Society of Antiquaries:
Chris Schüler, The Wood That Built London
In-person and online, Society of Antiquaries of London, 12 October 2023, 5pm
Drawing on historic documents, maps and environmental evidence, The Wood That Built London charts the fortunes of the Great North Wood that once covered much of what is now South London [‘north’ relative to Croydon]. It records its botany, ecology, ownership and management, the gradual encroachment of the metropolis, and the battles fought by locals and the London Wildlife Trust to save what remained.
The lecture will discuss the documentary research into historic land ownership and management in the medieval and early modern periods that informed the book, which draws on a wide range of primary sources, some never previously cited. These include 16th-century Court of Exchequer depositions in a dispute over land ownership in the National Archives at Kew; Archbishop Morton’s 1492 survey of the Manor of Croydon and a 1678 plan of the Archbishop’s woods in Croydon Museum; Archbishop Cranmer’s 1552 survey of the Manor of Croydon in the Bodleian Library; estate maps in the British Library and London Metropolitan Archives; parish accounts; and records of woodland management in Dulwich College Archive and Lambeth Palace Library. Considered together, these scattered records combine to create a picture of the former extent of the wood, which stretched from Deptford to Croydon, its ownership by religious bodies such as Bermondsey Abbey and the Archbishopric of Canterbury, and its management by rotational coppicing, which generated income for its owners over several centuries. Tudor Acts of Parliament and the publications of 16th– and 17th-century agronomists such as Thomas Tusser and Barnaby Googe are examined to provide insight into the theory and practice of woodland management at this period.
The book also records how that income dwindled as the Industrial Revolution rendered many woodland products obsolete, leading landowners to grub up coppices, at first for farmland and then, as the railways brought the area within commuting distance of London, for housing development, to the fury of commentators such as John Ruskin and John Stuart Mill.
Presented both in-person at Burlington House and online, the event is free and open to the public. Please reserve tickets here.
Museum Tour | Art and Aroma at the Met: 18th-C. France
François Boucher, The Toilette of Venus, detail, 1751, oil on canvas
(New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
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From Eventbrite:
Jessica Murphy, Art and Aroma at the Met: 18th-Century France
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Saturday, 9 September 2023, 2.00–3.30pm
Engage your senses of sight and smell in a gallery tour that explores the history of French perfumery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Sophisticated … seductive … classic. The phrase ‘French perfume’ often evokes these ideas. But how did France become known as the center of Western perfumery? This genre-blending gallery tour will illustrate France’s fragrant history in the 1700s through works of art and design in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, spotlighting some of the events and individuals behind perfume’s ascendance as one of France’s signature luxury goods. Experiencing these spaces and objects as a small group, we’ll sample and sniff aromatic materials while we simultaneously educate our eyes and noses. A ticket for this 90-minute gallery tour ($45) includes access to the rest of the Met after the event. Please arrive 30 minutes early to allow time for security checkpoints and weekend crowds.
Jessica Murphy is a museum professional with a passion for perfume. She holds a PhD in art history and has worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum. Meanwhile, she has also been writing about fragrance since 2007 at Now Smell This and her own blog Perfume Professor. Since 2015 she has taught and lectured about the history and culture of fragrance through venues including the Brooklyn Brainery, the Institute for Art and Olfaction, the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the Timken Museum, and the Fashion Institute of Technology. You can follow her on Instagram @tinselcreation.
Lecture | Alessia Attanasio on Neapolitan Art in English Collections
Pietro Fabris, The Bay of Naples from Posillipo, detail, ca. 1770, oil on canvas, 75 × 128 cm
(Compton Verney, Warwickshire)
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From The Wallace Collection:
Alessia Attanasio, The Fortunes of Baroque Neapolitan Art in English Collections during the Grand Tour, 1680–1800
Wallace Collection Seminars on the History of Collections and Collecting
Online and in-person, The Wallace Collection, London, Monday, 26 June 2023, 5.30pm
This talk aims to provide an overview of the history of collecting Baroque Neapolitan art in England from 1680s to 1800s, a period when many English artists and collectors travelled to Naples during the Grand Tour. Based on Alessia Attanasio’s PhD research, it will introduce artists from the Kingdom of Naples who enjoyed considerable success among English patrons, demonstrating how the Grand Tour influenced the market for Baroque Neapolitan art—not just for the newly discovered antiquities in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae.
Today, Baroque Neapolitan paintings form a significant part of private and public English art collections; yet there is no publication exploring the significance of these collections as a whole. Therefore, the lecture aims to fill this gap by identifying and locating Neapolitan art in public and private English collections, now disclosed in an up-to-date database. The database will include images, references, notes on subject, author, and context, as well as acquisition and provenance details, providing the first comprehensive view of Neapolitan paintings in England. Alessia will focus on specific private British collections held in country houses such as Compton Verney, with the new redisplay of its unique Neapolitan collection, and Holkham Hall, which owns several Neapolitan paintings, both of which reflect the changes in art collecting in England. The lecture will bring together different fields of study, from the history of art to the art market, and shed new light on the material conditions that made art collecting possible.
Alessia Attanasio is a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham, focusing on Baroque Neapolitan art that was collected in England during the Grand Tour (1680s–1820s), with particular interests in country houses, history of collecting, and museum studies. Alessia’s interest in museums is supported by eight years of experience working in museums as an assistant curator and museum educator, including Capodimonte Museum in Naples, and the Royal Collection Trust in London. Most recently, Alessia has been undertaking research into Baroque artworks in the Neapolitan Collection of Compton Verney, contributing to the curation of its permanent redisplay, Sensing Naples.
New Book | Media and the Mind
To mark the book’s launch, Matthew Eddy will give a 45-minute talk this Friday (16 June, 5pm) at the University of Edinburgh Main Library to mark the book’s launch; there will also be on view a small exhibition of student manuscripts that Eddy used in writing the book. From The University of Chicago Press:
Matthew Daniel Eddy, Media and the Mind: Art, Science, and Notebooks as Paper Machines, 1700–1830 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023), 512 pages, ISBN: 978-0226183862, $65.
A beautifully illustrated argument that reveals notebooks as extraordinary paper machines that transformed knowledge on the page and in the mind.
Information is often characterized as facts that float effortlessly across time and space. But before the nineteenth century, information was seen as a process that included a set of skills enacted through media on a daily basis. How, why, and where were these mediated facts and skills learned? Concentrating on manuscripts created by students in Scotland between 1700 and 1830, Matthew Daniel Eddy argues that notebooks functioned as workshops where notekeepers learned to judge the accuracy, utility, and morality of the data they encountered. He shows that, in an age preoccupied with ‘enlightened’ values, the skills and materials required to make and use notebooks were not simply aids to reason—they were part of reason itself.
Covering a rich selection of material and visual media ranging from hand-stitched bindings to watercolor paintings, the book problematizes John Locke’s comparison of the mind to a blank piece of paper, the tabula rasa. Although one of the most recognizable metaphors of the British Enlightenment, scholars seldom consider why it was so successful for those who used it. Eddy makes a case for using the material culture of early modern manuscripts to expand the meaning of the metaphor in a way that offers a clearer understanding of the direct relationship that existed between thinking and notekeeping. Starting in the home, moving to schools, and then ending with universities, the book explores this argument by reconstructing the relationship between media and the mind from the bottom up.
Matthew Daniel Eddy is professor and chair in the history and philosophy of science at Durham University. He is the author and editor of numerous works on the cultural history of Britain and its former empire.
C O N T E N T S
Bibliographic Note
Prologue
Introduction
1 Recrafting Notebooks
The Tabula Rasa and Media Interface
Notebooks as Artifacts
Notekeeping as Artificing
Notekeepers as Artificers
Thought as a Realtime Activity
Science as a System
Book Outline
Part I | Inside the Tabula Rasa
2 Writing
Writing as a Knowledge-Creating Tool
The Place of Writing within Literacy
Script and Observational Learning
Grids and Verbal Pictures
Copies and the Exercise of Memory
3 Codexing
Paper Machines as Material Artifacts
Paper as an Informatic Medium
Quires and Knowledge Management
Books and Customized Packaging
4 Annotating
Revisibilia Made through Annotation
Marginalia as Scribal Interface
Paratexts and Editorial Training
Ciphers and the Acquisition of Numeracy
Part II | Around the Tabula Rasa
5 Categorizing
Headings as Realtime Categories
Headings as Mnemonic Labels
Headings as Visual Cues
Headings as Coordinates for Scanpaths and Sightlines
6 Drawing
Description and Movement across a Page
Learning to Draw a Picture
Figures as Developmental Tools
Scenes as Observational Training
Observation and the Utility of Perception
7 Mapping
Mapkeepers and Knowledge Systems on Paper
Map-Mindedness and Embodied Experience
Desk Maps as Crafted Constructions
Field-Mindedness in the Classroom
Field Maps and Visualized Data
Maps as Mnemonic Devices
Part III | Beyond the Tabula Rasa
8 Systemizing
The Syllabus as a System and a Machine
Lecture Notebooks and Knowledge Formation
The Syllabus and Its Organizational Technologies
Scroll Books and the Strategies of Realtime Learning
Transcripts and the Extension of Memory
Lines and the Media of the Mind
9 Diagramming
Paths and Diagrammatic Knowledge
Schemata as Useful Mnemonic Aids
Shapes as Repurposed Perceptual Devices
Pictograms and Visual Judgment
Tables as Kinesthetic Diagrams
Traces and Realtime Observation
10 Circulating
Local and Global Networks
Personal and Institutional Libraries
Commodities within Knowledge Economies
Courts of Law and Public Opinion
Conclusion
11 Rethinking Manuscripts
The Tabula Rasa and Manuscripts
Manuscripts as Dynamic Artifacts
Manuscript Skills as Artifice
Manuscript Keepers as Artificers
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Abbreviations
Primary Sources
Manuscripts and Ephemera
Printed Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Index
Exhibition | A Very Strong Likeness of Her: Portraiture and Identity
Opening this month at the Milwaukee Art Museum:
A Very Strong Likeness of Her: Portraiture and Identity in the British Colonial World
Milwaukee Art Museum, 23 June — 22 October 2023
Francis Cotes, Portrait of Miss Frances Lee, 1769, oil on canvas. 36 × 28 inches (Milwaukee Art Museum: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. William D. Vogel, M1964.5; photo by Larry Sanders).
Focusing on a singular work from the Museum’s collection, A Very Strong Likeness of Her explores the challenging and sometimes conflicting histories that an artwork can represent. On its surface, the English artist Francis Cotes’s (1726–1770) portrait of Miss Frances Lee is a charming image of a young girl and her napkin-turned-rabbit companion. The exhibition’s close study of the painting, however, reveals a complex story of identity, family dynamics, and British colonialism in Jamaica. A Very Strong Likeness of Her employs a range of materials to bring to life the underlying narratives in this deceptively simple painting.
Lecture by Mia L. Bagneris
Thursday, 27 July, 6.15pm
Learn about race and class status in colonial Jamaica through the story behind the portrait of Miss Frances Lee. Mia L. Bagneris, associate professor of art history and Africana studies and director of the Africana Studies Program at Tulane University, details this complex history.
Gallery Talk with Tanya Paul
Thursday, 10 August, noon–1pm
Tanya Paul is the Museum’s Isabel and Alfred Bader Curator of European Art.
Exhibition | Visions in Porcelain: A Rake’s Progress
Opening this week at the Soane Museum:
Visions in Porcelain: A Rake’s Progress
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 7 June — 10 September 2023
Bouke de Vries’ latest work—beautifully displayed in the Museum’s Foyle Space— responds to William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress.
Inspired by Hogarth’s series of original paintings at the Soane Museum, de Vries draws on his love of storytelling, and talent for symbolism through ceramics, with eight newly created porcelain vases presented in various states of (dis)repair. Starting with an immaculate celadon vase, de Vries treats the following seven increasingly deteriorating vases with a variety of restoration processes and glazes, which parallel the moral and physical degeneration of Hogarth’s anti-hero Tom Rakewell. Cracks appear in the surface, the vessels slump and implode—with obvious and drastic methods of repair failing to save the vase or Rake from their ultimate demise.
Originally working in fashion before retraining as a restorer, Bouke de Vries began creating his works of art in 2008. He has since gained a significant following and now has work in an impressive range of international public collections, including the National Museum of Scotland; the National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design in Oslo; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. De Vries sees an inherent value in the discarded objects he reinvents, giving a new lease of life to a broad spectrum of ceramics otherwise destined to be thrown away.
Bouke de Vries in Conversation with Louisa Buck
13 June 2023, 7pm BST
To celebrate the opening of his new exhibition Visions in Porcelain: A Rake’s Progress, ceramic artist Bouke de Vries will discuss his latest work with Louisa Buck, a contributing editor and London contemporary art correspondent for The Art Newspaper and a regular reviewer and commentator on BBC radio and TV. The evening includes an exclusive out-of-hours viewing of the exhibition and the opportunity to view Hogarth’s paintings that inspired the series in the Picture Room.
Book tickets here»
Lecture Series | Peter Miller on Conservation as a Human Science
From the Warburg:
Peter Miller, On Conservation as a Human Science
E. H. Gombrich Lecture Series
In-person and online, Warburg Institute, London, 13, 14, 15 June 2023
‘Conservation’, ‘preservation’, ‘care’—these words are frequently used today, but by different people, speaking to different audiences. On Conservation as a Human Science makes the case for treating conservation as a single human activity with an intellectual history of its own. Then, focusing more particularly on the kind of conservation done to man-made things it explores the entwined relationship between conservation and history. Like archaeology, to which it bears a close resemblance, conservation explores the depth of time stratigraphically to answer questions about what was in the past from what survives into our present. But, turned around, history, too, can function as a form of conservation—indeed, this was an initial self-definition that persisted into the age of modern, academic history. The ambition of this project is to shift how we understand conservation for a twenty-first century in which climate change will make the task of conservation and the challenge to conservation a more urgent part of public and private life. Moreover, rethinking conservation as a human science also opens up a new perspective on the organization of knowledge at a time when inherited distinctions between disciplines and fields and ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ learning, like those between the ‘head’ and the ‘hand’, are being reconsidered.
Lecture 1 | Tuesday, 13 June, 5.30–7.00pm
In Search of Conservation’s History
Lecture 2 | Wednesday, 14 June, 5.30–7.00pm
Conservation as History
Lecture 3 | Thursday, 15 June, 5.30–7.00pm
History as Conservation
Free and open to all with advance booking, in person at the Warburg Institute, or online via Zoom.
Organised by the Warburg Institute and sponsored by Princeton University Press, the E. H. Gombrich Lecture Series features prominent humanities scholars who address pressing concerns in art, literature, and ideas, across historical periods.
Peter N. Miller is Dean and Professor of Cultural History at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City, and incoming President of the American Academy in Rome. He is the author of a series of books on the early seventeenth-century antiquarian, Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, on the history of antiquarianism, and on the modern study of objects as evidence. He co-curated Dutch New York between East and West: The World of Margarieta van Varick (BGC, 2009); What Is the Object? (BGC, 2022); and Conserving Active Matter (BGC, 2022), the exhibition and website that concluded the ten-year long project he directed, “Cultures of Conservation,” funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His main current interest is in the how and why of research, whether done by professional historians or by curators, conservators or artists. He has been at Bard since 2001. He previously taught at the University of Cambridge, University of Chicago, and University of Maryland, College Park. He was a research fellow at the Warburg Institute, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Marseille and École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Online Talk | Kate Hunter on Three Maps
From the SHARP listserv and Eventbrite:
Kate Hunter | Unexpected Adventures Told in Three Maps: Western Australia, the Indian Ocean, and Captain James Cook’s First Voyage
Online, Thursday, 8 June 2023, 1pm (EDT)
Kate Hunter, Senior Specialist at Daniel Crouch Rare Books, in conversation with Arthur Dunkelman, Curator of the Jay Kislak Collection, University of Miami Libraries
The University of Miami Special Collections cordially invites you to a ‘Conversation on Cartography’. Kate Hunter will share stories about three maps. The first is a map of Western Australia, where she grew up. The second is a Dutch East India Company [VOC] 18th-century chart of the Indian Ocean on vellum that helped the company establish a trade route that netted a fortune. Last, Hunter will look at a silver punch bowl whose upside-down surface includes an engraved early rendering of Captain James Cook’s first voyage (1769–70).
Kate Hunter has helped private collectors and institutional libraries to acquire and catalog maps, globes, and atlases the world over. Currently, she is the senior specialist at the New York office of Daniel Crouch Rare Books. She is also consulting curator and cataloger for the Map and Atlas Museum of La Jolla, California. During her three-decade career, Hunter has witnessed great changes, from a landscape over-populated by independent bookshops, to one almost bereft of them. According to Hunter, much of today’s commerce takes place online, and that has transformed the way collectors collect—from compulsive completists focused with detailed wish-lists to trophy-hunting connoisseurs.
The program will be followed by an audience question and answer session. Free and open to the public, the event will be hosted via Zoom. It will also be streamed via Facebook Live. All events in this series will be recorded for on-demand access following the broadcasts.
Lecture | Michael Yonan on the Bavarian Rococo
This week in Chicago, at Northwestern:
Michael Yonan | The Bavarian Rococo, the Outlier of Eighteenth-Century Art
Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, Wednesday, 17 May 2023, 5pm
Wieskirche, designed by the Zimmermann brothers, near Steingaden, Germany, 1745–55, view toward altar (Wikimedia Commons, 2019).
Bavarian rococo art and architecture has long received both attention and derision from art historians. It is incredibly sophisticated in design and seemingly totally out of sync with the broader narrative of European art: backward-looking, regionally influential, and exuberantly unrestrained in its abundant use of ornamentation. As part of the Warnock Lecture Series, this talk will explore what we can do with this visually arresting art and suggest that it deserves a firmer place in art history.
Michael Yonan is Professor of Art History and Alan Templeton Endowed Chair in the History of European Art, 1600–1830, at the University of California, Davis. His areas of research are eighteenth-century European art, the decorative arts, material culture studies, and art historical historiography and methodology. He is the author of Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art (2011), Messerschmidt’s Character Heads: Maddening Sculpture and the Writing of Art History (2018), and with Stacey Sloboda is co-editor of Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art (2019). In 2022 he was visiting guest professor at the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, Sweden. He is currently writing a book on materiality in art history.
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