Enfilade

This afternoon, from Monticello:

Linda Binsted, Brick Palladian Architecture: Jefferson’s Transformation of Stone to Clay
Online, 21 September 2021, 4.00pm (Eastern Time)

Join the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello for a virtual Fellow’s Forum with architect and architectural historian, Linda Binsted. Click here to join us on Zoom on Tuesday, 21 September at 4.00pm.

Thomas Jefferson’s international travels took him to the cities and countryside of England and France but not to Italy, the birthplace of Palladian design. His travels never took him to Rome and its classical buildings, nor did he see any works by Palladio firsthand. Yet, through architectural treatises, the prevalent pattern books of the 18th century, visits to architecturally significant structures in America, England, and France, and the intellectual thoughts of the day, he came to produce some of the most influential Palladian designs in the still young United States.

Palladio’s villas are visions of smooth planar beauty, crisp whiteness in the Italian piedmont sun. Jefferson’s Palladian work in the Virginia piedmont—Monticello, Poplar Forest and the University of Virginia—are clothed in molded red brick and striped with sand mortar. Other builders and architects of the era studied the same sources as Jefferson and used the same materials to produce worthy Palladian-inspired plans and volumes; however, their detailing of the façade merely replicated the prevalent Georgian and Federalist manner. This presentation examines the pathway Jefferson travelled and the methods he employed to purify the brick edifice to better attain the planar volumes depicted in Palladio’s folios.

Linda Binsted is a practicing architect working in Washington, DC. Her architectural designs have garnered design awards and appeared in local and national publications. She has conducted seminars focused on the intersection of the design, technology, and history of building materials including brick and concrete as well as mid-century urban renewal at American Institute of Architects (AIA) conferences including AIA Washington Chapter’s Design DC and Virginia AIA ArchEx. She is also a graduate of the University of Virginia’s Master’s program in architectural history. As an architectural historian, she has presented her preliminary findings on Jefferson’s brickwork design at the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH) regional conference in 2017 and the New Discoveries of Thomas Jefferson’s Architecture and Design symposium sponsored by the University of Virginia in 2018.

Russia in Europe / Europe in Russia: Cross-Cultural Connections in a Recentered Art World
Rosalind Polly Blakesley, Catherine Phillips, Emily Roy, Margaret Samu, and Zalina Tetermazova
Online, 23 September 2021, noon (Eastern Time)

HECAA is pleased to announce the next installment in our Zoom event series. Please join us on Thursday, 23 September 2021 for Russia in Europe / Europe in Russia: Cross-Cultural Connections in a Recentered Art World. The roundtable will take place at the following times: 9.00 Los Angeles, 12.00 New York, 17.00 London, and 19.00 Moscow.

Registration is available here»

Follower of Rembrandt (1606–1669), The Centurion Cornelius (The Unmerciful Servant), ca. 1660, oil on canvas
(London: The Wallace Collection)

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From the seminar flyer:

Andrea Morgan, Collecting and Displaying Rembrandt’s Pictures in 18th- and 19th-Century England: Charles Jennens of Gopsall Hall and the ‘Rembrandt Room’ at Stowe
Wallace Collection Seminars on the History of Collections and Collecting
Online, Monday, 27 September 2021, 5.30pm

The history of collecting paintings attributed to Rembrandt in eighteenth- century England is especially rich. The English developed such a passion for the Dutch artist by the second half of the century that it led the Reverend Matthew Pilkington to worry in 1770 that “the genuine works of this master are rarely to be met with, and whenever they are to be purchased they afford incredible prices.” This talk will focus on two private collections of paintings attributed to Rembrandt that were formed beginning in the eighteenth century.

Charles Jennens is best remembered as the librettist to the composer George Frederic Handel, but he also owned a massive art collection. Among Jennens’s collection by the 1760s and hanging at his now lost estate, Gopsall Hall, formerly in Leicestershire, were six paintings attributed to Rembrandt and one contemporary copy. The copy was a painting by Pieter Tillemans after Rembrandt’s celebrated picture of Belshazzar’s Feast that was in the eighteenth century owned by the Earl of Derby at Knowsley Hall. While Jennens’s ‘Rembrandt’ pictures have since lost their attribution to the master, I propose some reasons why Jennens in particular might have had a special interest in Rembrandt’s painted oeuvre.

One of the largest but heretofore neglected English collections of paintings attributed to Rembrandt was formerly held at Stowe House, Buckinghamshire, having been amassed by various members of the aristocratic Temple-Grenville family. The first picture was recorded at Stowe as early as 1724, but by 1838 there were a total of ten paintings attributed to the Dutch artist at the estate, along with three said to be by artists in Rembrandt’s circle. I trace the history of this collection and conclude with a discussion of the aptly called ‘Rembrandt Room’ at Stowe.

Please note that this seminar will take place on Zoom and YouTube, and will not be held at the Wallace Collection. Admission is free, and registration is required. More information and details of future seminars can now be found here.

Online this Sunday from the French Porcelain Society:

Alessandro Biancalana, European Porcelain at Villa Cagnola
FPS Living Room Lecture, 5 September 2021, 18.00 (BST)

The French Porcelain Society is delighted to continue its online lectures with a very special private tour of Villa Cagnola, north of Milan. Alessandro Biancalana will discuss some highlights from the vast collection of European porcelain in the villa, including Doccia, Meissen, and Capodimonte. He will be joined during the Q&A session by director Don Eros Monti and curator Andrea Bardelli. We hope you can join us. For free links, please email FPSmailing@gmail.com.

“I would define Villa Cagnola not as a house museum in the strictest sense of the term, but rather as a Wunderkammer. Among its numerous treasures, including naturalia, porcelain plays a leading role: it is a composite collection, which has the eighteenth century as leitmotif, bringing together pieces from different manufactories all of them of high quality. Walking along Villa Cagnola’s rooms and looking at the showcases full of objects fascinates the visitor who travels between decorative systems and shapes that are different from each other: the most important European centres of production are represented with Meissen, Doccia, and the most relevant Venetian factories. I hope our journey is stimulating and a source of curiosity.” –Alessandro Biancalana

From the registration page: 

Ana Mónica da Silva Rolo and Noé Conejo Delgado, A Dactyliothec from Pietro Bracci in the Portuguese Royal Family’s Collections
Wallace Collection Seminars on the History of Collections and Collecting
Online, Monday, 26 July 2021, 17.30

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in Europe, the versatile education of erudite elites was indispensable to and synonymous with social distinction. In this cultural frame, travels through Europe, in the style of the Grand Tour, became especially appreciated among European aristocratic youth. At the same time, interest in Classical antiquity and collecting antiques was enhanced, giving rise to a flourishing activity of replica production and trade, especially in Italy.

The dactyliothec by the Italian artist Pietro Bracci (1700–1773) in the collections of the Museum-Library of the House of Bragança (Vila Viçosa, Portugal) illustrates eighteenth- and nineteenth-century taste, shared by the last generations of the Portuguese Royal House. The set presented is composed of 2,350 plaster moulds of gems and cameos, organized in three thematic series. The first and largest series is dedicated to emblematic pieces of ancient art and the Italian Renaissance. The second series is composed of a selection of reproductions of the best carvings originally made by eighteenth-century craftsmen, like Giovanni or Luigi Pichler and Natal Marchant. The third and last series brings together a total of 180 cameos dedicated to Emperors of Europe. Dated between the end of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth century, this dactyliothec reflects the importance that such casts assumed as souvenirs of Classical art and history for collectors and travellers, as well as their use as an educational resource in the academic training of young aristocrats.

You can register to view this talk via Zoom here, or plan to watch via The Wallace Collection’s YouTube channel.

Ana Mónica da Silva Rolo and Noé Conejo Delgado are both based at the Archaeology Centre UNIARQ of Lisbon University.

From the Attingham Summer Lecture Series:

David Adshead, Pompeii and All That: Reimagining Ancient Worlds
Online, Wednesday, 14 July 2021, 6.00pm (BST)

Wilhelm Zahn, Die schönsten Ornamente und merkwürdigsten Gemälde aus Pompeji, Herculanum und Stabiae (Berlin, 1828).

David Adshead, Co-Director of the Attingham Summer School and Director of the London House Course, will look at the cultural impact of the discovery of Herculaneum and Pompeii. News of the excavation of these ancient Neopolitan cities sent an electric shock of excitement across Europe and beyond and served as a stimulus to the nascent Neoclassical movement. Grand Tourists, artists, and architects flocked to see the statuary, wall paintings, and other artefacts that emerged unscathed from their volcanic overburden. Illustrated publications followed. These cities also caught the attention of philhellenes at a time before travel to Greece and, modern day, Turkey was common, for they had been Greek colonies before they were Roman. The discovery at Pompeii of a temple dedicated to the goddess Isis, decades before Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, also triggered a fascination in all things Egyptian. Aspects of collecting, design, and decoration were all directly or indirectly influenced as a result.

Registration is available here»

Kyungmi Shin, Lunch on the Grass, 2020. The work layers an image of a picnic from 1960s Korea (an image which includes Shin’s father, a Protestant pastor) on top of an image of François Boucher’s Chinese Garden from around 1742. The oil painting by Boucher is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon. For more information on Shin, see Susan Stamberg’s piece for NPR, “An Artist Explores What ‘Crosses the Ocean’ in Porcelain and Painted Collage,” (12 November 2020), produced in response to the exhibition Kyungmi Shin: Father Crosses the Ocean on view at the Orange County Museum of Art in Santa Ana, California from 24 September 2020 until 21 February 2021.

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From The Getty:

Mercedes Dorame, Kori Newkirk, and Kyungmi Shin
Beyond the Frame: Pushing Boundaries of Photo-Based Work
Online, The Getty, Tuesday, 20 July 2021, 5pm (Pacific Time)

In this conversation, multidisciplinary artists Mercedes Dorame, Kori Newkirk, and Kyungmi Shin discuss how their approaches to art making and activism push the boundaries of photography, transforming it beyond its perceived objectivity and conventional format. Their work is featured in the exhibition Photo Flux: Unshuttering LA, which disrupts the privileging of white narratives in photography by celebrating the diverse, dynamic practices of contemporary Los Angeles artists. The event is free, though advance sign-up is required.

From The French Porcelain Society:

Gabriel Wick and John Whitehead | Angiviller, Rambouillet, and ‘Etruscan’ Taste
Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue Memorial Lecture
FPS, Online, Sunday, 11 July 2021, 18.00 (BST)

The French Porcelain Society is delighted to host the Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue Memorial Lecture with Gabriel Wick, curator of the exhibition Vivre à l’Antique, who will explore the fascinating history of Rambouillet, a château associated with the avant-garde ‘Etruscan’ taste championed by the comte d’Angiviller. John Whitehead will discuss the Sèvres-porcelain service created for its dairy. We hope you can join us!

FPS members will receive an email invitation with instructions on how to join the online lecture. If you want to join, please contact us for more details on FPSenquiries@gmail.com. This will be the last Living Room Lecture until Sunday, 5 September 2021.

Rambouillet, 30-miles southwest of Paris, is the most recent and the least-known of France’s royal palaces. Acquired by Louis XVI as a domaine privé only six-years before the Revolution, it served successive sovereigns and presidents as a hunting lodge and rustic retreat until 2009, when it was entrusted to the care of the Centre des Monuments Nationaux and opened to the public. In the second half of the 1780s, the king’s de facto minister of the arts, the comte d’Angiviller, developed a number of remarkable projects for the domain—a proposal for the reconstruction of the château à l’antique, a model farm, extensive plantations of American trees, and the menagerie and dairy. The last of these, conceived as a theatrical evocation of the arts and rituals of the Etruscans, benefitted from contributions by Hubert Robert, Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, Georges Jacob, and the Sèvres manufacture (which Angiviller directed since 1783).

From the program flyer:

New Approaches to Piranesi: A Virtual Roundtable
Online, Friday, 16 July 2021

Organized by Jeanne Britton and Zoe Langer

Join us for a roundtable of lightning talks on interdisciplinary approaches to the works of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). Recent scholarship by Heather Hyde Minor, Carolyn Yerkes, and Susan Dixon, as well as the current bestselling novel Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, have started to open the field of Piranesi Studies to new avenues of research and potentially wider audiences. This roundtable consists of two panels of short presentations of 5–7 minutes followed by ample time for discussion. Papers engage with a wide range of disciplinary fields and methods including globalism, reception, collecting, virtual reality, exhibition curation, book history, archaeology, history of design, and architecture. We hope the themes and format of the roundtable will encourage lively conversation and prompt new critical perspectives that will continue to broaden the interpretation of Piranesi’s works.

Organized by Jeanne Britton and Zoe Langer, Digital Piranesi, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina
Sponsored by Historians of Eighteenth Century Art and Architecture (HECAA)

Panel 1: 10.00–11.30am (EST)
• Hélène Bremer (Art Historian and Independent Curator), For the Love of the Master, 25 Artists Fascinated by Piranesi
• Erik Herrmann (Ohio State University), Another Campo Marzio
• Mireille Linck (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), Watermark Research: The Beginning of a Research Tool
• Ari Lipkis (Tyler School of Art & Architecture), Imprisoned in the Fold: Piranesi and the Video Artist
• Jason Porter (University of South Carolina), The Virtual Piranesi: New Methods of Immersive Literacy
• Carla Scagliosi (Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria), Exploring ‘the Dark Brain of Piranesi’

Panel 2: 1.00–2.30pm (EST)
• George Dodds (University of Tennessee), Giambattista Piranesi, Modernity, and the Continuous Avant-Garde
• Sara Hayat (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), What We Can Learn from 18th-Century Global Histories of Architecture
• Helen Marodin (University of South Carolina), The Magnificence of Rome in the Carceri: Flashes of Light into Piranesi’s Shadowy Prisons
• Thomas Mical (India), Scanning for Duration and Intensity in Piranesi’s Carceri
• Aleksander Musial (Princeton University), Beyond the Capriccio: Piranesi’s Candelabra, Classical Transgression, and their Reception in Warsaw and St. Petersburg
• Kate Retford (Birkbeck, University of London), Piranesi and the Print Room
• Betsey Robinson (Vanderbilt University), Tunnel Visions: Rendering Conventions and Process at the Alban Lake