Enfilade

From TORCH:

Neoclassicism, Race, and Empire
Online, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, March 2022

Charmaine Nelson (NSCAD University)
Wednesday, 2 March, 4.00–5.30pm GMT (11am EST), register here»

Anne Lafont (L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales)
Wednesday, 16 March, 4.00–5.30pm GMT (12pm EST), register here»

Louis Nelson (University of Virginia)
Wednesday, 30 March, 4.00–5.30pm BST (11am EST), register here»

This three-part series examines the intersection between neoclassicism and questions of race, colonisation, empire-building, and national identity. With a focus on the British and French Atlantic worlds from the eighteenth century onwards, but with attention to a broader geographical field, we will ask how classical ideas and forms were invoked in art, architecture, and aesthetics in ways that intersected with colonial expansion, the assertion of imperial power, and the development of racial ideologies. Through a series of seminars led by pioneering scholars in this field—Charmaine Nelson, Anne Lafont, and Louis Nelson—we will explore the stylistic phenomenon of ‘neoclassicism’ within its broadest political and cultural contexts, while discussing the longer historiographical legacy of self-consciously classical art made in the modern age of empire. Registration is required for each online talk.

Please note that in the USA and Canada, the session on 16 March starts an hour later than the others, because the clocks go forward on different dates.

Tomorrow (Thursday) from BGC:

James Middleton | ‘But She’s Wearing It Backwards’: Understanding and Misunderstanding an Eighteenth-Century Mexican Court Gown
Online (Zoom), Bard Graduate Center, New York, 3 February 2022, 12.15 (ET)

Museo Nacional de Historia. Photo by Omar Dumaine.

This talk will explore the history of a late eighteenth-century Mexican gown since its donation to Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Historia in 1900. The opulent, deep green silk-velvet and ivory satin dress with lavish silver embroidery has long been recognized as one of the most elaborate garments surviving from the colonial Americas, but has only recently been identified as a traje de corte—a court gown, one of four extant New Spanish garments to be so identified—made according to the etiquette requirements of the Spanish royal court. It has been exhibited in many guises, with and without its stomacher and/or train, and paired with radically different pannier and hoop variations. The genesis of the talk’s title is the gown’s first published appearance, in the 1988 book, La historia de Mexico a través de la indumentaria, in which it was correctly identified as a court gown, but misidentified as a Velázquez-era infanta dress and photographed worn backwards by a live model.

Middleton will be using this extant dress, as well as other extant garments in paintings, as a means of reflecting on some of the questions posed by the existence of court clothing in Spanish America. Who wore gowns like this? Were they required for functions of the viceregal court of Mexico City as they were for the court of Madrid, or were they aspirational garments worn for social display by the nouveau riche nobles of New Spain? The presentation will consist of photographs and analyses of extant and painted garments, as well as contemporary texts that document New Spanish tailoring practices and textile commerce, to investigate the little-understood phenomenon of court culture in the Americas.

James Middleton is an independent scholar working on dress in the Spanish-Colonial Americas circa 1520–1820. He has lectured and published on the subject in the US (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, et al.), Mexico (Museo Nacional de Historia, Museo Nacional de Arte), Colombia (Universidad de los Andes), and England (Society of Dress Historians). His particular interest in this subject dates from the early 1990s, when he first saw the dress that is this presentation’s focus in the conservation lab of the Museo Nacional de Historia, two weeks after having bought a copy of La historia de Mexico a través de la indumentaria.

This event will be held via Zoom. A link will be circulated to registrants by 10am on the day of the event. This event will be live with automatic captions. Registration is available here.

Next month from BGC:

Sarah Cohen | Sugar, Silver, and the Bourbon Sucriers: Sweetening Slavery in 18th-Century France
The Françoise and Georges Selz Lectures on 18th- and 19th-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture
Online (Zoom), Bard Graduate Center, New York, 10 February 2022, 12.15 (ET)

Inseparable from the rise of sugar within the economies of international trade in eighteenth-century Europe was the Caribbean slave trade: in France, whose primary source of sugar for local consumption and re-export was its principal colony of Saint Domingue, the trade in enslaved persons swelled directly in tangent with the sugar business throughout the 1730s and beyond. But because all of the steps in harvesting and producing sugar, apart from some of the most elaborate refining processes, were carried out in the distant island colonies, such interdependency, to say nothing of the coerced labor it entailed, was invisible on the French dining table.

Paire de sucriers à poudre : esclaves chargés de cannes à sucre, 1730s (Paris: Musée du Louvre, photo by Daniel Arnaudet).

A startling exception to this submersion of the harsh facts of how sugar cane was harvested is found in a pair of silver sugar casters (sucriers) that depict a man and woman laboring beneath bundles of sugar cane, as if physically ‘delivering’ their sweet crystals for the elite dessert. Almost certainly made by the royal silversmith Claude II Ballin on commission for Louis-Henri, duc de Bourbon, the casters would have appeared among the duke’s many other worldly goods on display at the château of Chantilly in the 1730s. The harvesters would have been identifiable as an African woman and man through their carefully modelled physiognomies, which reflect incipient French understandings of racial type. Their bodies are cast in glistening, solid silver, while their hollowed burdens of bundled cane detach to dispense the powdered sweetener. Departing notably from typical examples of this type of luxury dispenser, whose baluster design references its placement and use on the table, rather than the sourcing of the product itself, the two large figures were also designed to occupy their own, unique place on a dessert or collation table. Cohen’s talk will explore the diverse implications of the sucriers within the context of international trade; the physical and cultural interconnections of sugar and slavery; and elite French practices of dining and festive entertainment in the early eighteenth century.

Registration is available here»

Sarah R. Cohen is Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is also a joint Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on the body and sensory experience in art and culture from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, with a special emphasis on early modern France. Her books include Art, Dance and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime (2000) and Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art: Sensation, Matter, and Knowledge (2021). A third book, Picturing Animals in Early Modern Europe: Art and Soul, is forthcoming in 2022.

The sale of the Casino di Villa Ludovisi (Villa Aurora) has—understandably—generated lots of media attention (see the full announcement for press links), and at least some of the finds have involved the eighteenth century . . .

T. Corey Brennan, Inside the ‘World’s Most Expensive Home’: A Decade of Rutgers Research at the Villa Aurora in Rome
Online, 20 January 2022, noon (EST)

The Villa Aurora in Rome—for precisely 400 years the home of the papal Boncompagni Ludovisi family—will go on auction this month with an asking price of $532 million dollars. Called by one leading art historian a “sort of seventeenth-century Sistine Chapel,” the Villa Aurora boasts famous mural art by more than a dozen major artists, including a unique 1597 ceiling painting by Caravaggio. In this richly illustrated talk, Professor Corey Brennan will discuss this landmark sale, his decade-long collaboration with the owners—†HSH Prince Nicolò and HSH Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi—and the discoveries inside the Villa made with over two dozen Rutgers undergraduate students. This virtual presentation, open to the public, will take place on Thursday, 20 January 2022, 12:00–1:00pm (EST). Registration information is available here.

Left: André-Charles Boulle, detail of a table, veneered in turtleshell and brass, with gilt-bronze mounts, ca. 1705 (London: The Wallace Collection, F56). Right: Abraham Bosse, ‘Cette figure vous montre comme on Imprime les planches de taille douce…’, 1642, etching (London: British Museum, R,8.15).

◊   ◊   ◊   ◊   ◊

This Sunday from The Furniture History Society:

Mia Jackson | André Charles Boulle as a Maker, Designer, and Publisher of Prints
The Furniture History Society Online Lecture, 5 December 2021,7pm (GMT) / 2pm (EST)

André-Charles Boulle, table, veneered in turtleshell and brass, with gilt-bronze mounts, ca. 1705 (London: The Wallace Collection, F56).

André-Charles Boulle’s interest in print-making was not limited only to his vast collection of works on paper. The cabinet-maker also designed, made, and sold prints and used print-making techniques in the workshop. Drawing on her doctoral research, Mia Jackson will explore Boulle’s role in print-making, print-publishing, and print-selling. She will discuss Boulle’s series of prints of furniture designs, which her research into publishing history allows her to date more precisely. She will also discuss Boulle’s print design for the Confraternity of St Anne at Carmes-Billettes, and the numerous copperplates that he owned and from which he sold impressions. Dr Jackson’s talk is free to members and £5 for non-members (via this link with code AVUJEN).

Mia Jackson (@theboullelady) has been Curator of Decorative Arts at Waddesdon Manor since 2017. She studied French and Philosophy at Oxford University and then earned an MA in eighteenth-century French decorative arts at the Courtauld Insitute of Art. Her doctoral thesis entitled “André-Charles Boulle (1642–1732) and Paper: Prints and Drawings in the Workshop of an Ébéniste du Roi” was completed at Queen Mary University of London in 2016. She previously worked in the Prints and Drawings Department at The British Museum, at The Wallace Collection, and at English Heritage. She worked on the Riesener Project with The Wallace Collection and the Royal Collection, and is currently preparing a series of exhibitions on Alice de Rothschild with her colleagues at Waddesdon Manor.

From Penn Museum:

Patty Gerstenblith | Imperialism, Colonialism, Reparations, and the ‘Universal’ Museum
Penn Cultural Heritage Center Lecture
Thursday, 2 December 2021, 12.30–2.00pm (ET)

In this virtual lecture hosted by the Penn Cultural Heritage Center, Patty Gerstenblith will discuss the concept of the ‘universal’ museum and its historical underpinnings. Dr. Gerstenblith will explore its origins across the arc of the 19th century, the inequities of the international legal system and its shortcomings, and the continuing justifications for the retention of looted cultural objects by European and North American museums and collectors.

The notion of the ‘universal’ museum developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the context of the founding of the British Museum, the Napoleonic Wars, European imperialism and colonialism, and the mantra of the rescue narrative, which justified the removal of cultural artifacts first from the Mediterranean region and later sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. Evaluating the right to cultural heritage through a human rights perspective, this lecture will analyze the process and elements of reparations and will propose a paradigm for the restitution of cultural objects that fall outside of the legal and ethical frameworks.

Patty Gerstenblith, Ph.D., J.D., is distinguished research professor at the DePaul University College of Law in Chicago and faculty director of its Center for Art, Museum and Cultural Heritage Law. She was appointed by President Clinton to serve on the President’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee in the Department of State and later by President Obama as its chair. She publishes and lectures widely on the protection of cultural heritage during armed conflict and the interdiction of trafficking in archaeological materials. Her casebook Art, Cultural Heritage, and the Law is now in its fourth edition.