Enfilade

The keynote talk for this year’s New York Workshop of Etruscan Art, given by Maurizio Harari, addresses reception history, including the eighteenth century:

Maurizio Harari, Imagining the Etruscans: Modern European Perceptions of an Ancient Italian Civilization
Online, Thursday, 29 April 2021, noon (ET)

Since the late rise of humanism and through a real crescendo in the 18th to 20th centuries, the Etruscans, an ancient people of pre-Roman Italy, became (and remain) a subject of lively discussions among scholars, as they saw a wide popularity in pseudo-scientific exploration and publication. This lecture aims to explore the ideological features of the foundation process of a highly specialized, but often self-referential discipline, so-called ‘Etruscology’, which only saw its real scholarly development in the first half of the 20th century. In that context, this major branch of scholarship was created with its roots in the rather complicated connections between the Italian territorial situation of Etruscan civilization and the European dimension of its reception and popularization.

Maurizio Harari is Professor of Etruscan and Italic Archaeology and Director of the Archaeological Museum at the University of Pavia, Italy. Author of over 200 publications, his reach focuses on Etruscan and Italic art and archaeology, especially issues of image making and meaning, wall painting, Etruscans of the Po-River region, and the sacred and political institutions of Etruscan cities. Co-Director of excavations at the Italian site of Verucchio since 2011, he is also a specialist in the historiography of Etruscology and its situation within the archaeological disciplines of Europe and the Mediterranean. He has collaborated widely across Europe, including with the European Research Council and on publication of the Enciclopedia dell’arte antica classica e orientale and the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, and he is fellow and member of multiple institutions, including the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Etruschi ed Italici.

The New York Workshop of Etruscan Art is an initiative promoted jointly by Columbia University and New York University. The ambition of the workshop is to advance our understanding of the artistic and visual dimensions of pre-Roman Italy by promoting discussion and sustained reflection on their role within the field of Etruscan studies, but it does not prescribe a specific intellectual agenda. This year, the workshop will: advance discussion of buildings, their roofs and decoration and the avenues they provide to investigate production processes, networks of interaction and creation, the sacred image and the porousness of Italic arts; reflect on the impact of 3D-modeling and reconstructions on our understanding of Etruscan aesthetics; present new findings from the Corpus Speculorum Etruscorum; present unpublished bronze figurines of subordinate characters; explore the relation with comedy of the imagery of Praenestine cistae.

Please join us for the keynote talk of this year’s New York Workshop of Etruscan Art given by Maurizio Harari. The event will be live-streamed; RSVP to receive the webinar link.

François-Joseph Bélanger, Château de Bagatelle, 1777, Bois de Boulogne, Paris.

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This upcoming talk is the final installment of the Attingham Trust Spring Lecture Series. Annabel Westman—after more than 40 years of being involved with Attingham—recently announced that she is retiring from her position as executive director, to be succeeded by Helen Jacobsen. (You’re able to stage a virtual passing of the baton by watching a recording of Annabel’s March 8 talk for the lecture series— “What tone is salmon-coloured? Interpreting documentation in historic textile furnishing schemes” —just before you tune in for Helen’s.)

Helen Jacobsen, The Château of Bagatelle: The Story of a Remarkable House and Its Collections
Online, Wednesday, 28 April 2021, 6pm (BST)

Helen Jacobsen, the Director of the Attingham French Eighteenth-Century Studies course, looks at the absorbing story of the Château of Bagatelle, the former hunting lodge in the Bois de Boulogne that was transformed into a jewel of French neoclassicism as the result of a bet between Marie-Antoinette and her brother-in-law, the Comte d’Artois. Much more than a plaything, Bagatelle survived the Revolution and became the much-loved home of two more of the greatest patrons of French art, the 4th Marquess of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace. Helen, who is also the Curator of French 18th-century decorative art at the Wallace Collection, will chart the life of the house under all three owners, and investigate the continuing connections between Bagatelle and Hertford House.

HECAA Emerging Scholars Showcase
Online, Saturday, 17 April 2021, 2:00–3:30pm (EST)

Our next HECAA Emerging Scholars Showcase is on Saturday, April 17, 2–3:30pm EST. Please join us via zoom to hear our final seven emerging scholars present their research. Each participant will present for 3–5 minutes, and after the presentations, we will host a question-and-answer session. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Dani Ezor (dezor@smu.edu).

Best regards,
HECAA Board

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Zoom: https://smu.zoom.us/j/96125021098

• Carla Hermann (Rio de Janeiro State University), Robert Barker’s Panoramas and Virtual Images of Places
• Chih-En Chen (SOAS, University of London), Trompe l’Oeil Porcelain and Feminine Space in High Qing China
• Jed Surio (Tulane University), A Kingdom of Curious Beasts: Charles Le Brun’s Drawings from the Royal Menagerie
• Megan Baker (University of Delaware), Crayon Rebellion: The Politics of Pastel Portraits in Colonial North America
• Tori Champion (University of Washington), Pinceau à la main: The Intertwined Lives and Careers of Madeleine Françoise Basseporte and Marie-Thérèse Reboul Vien
• Kaitlin Grimes (University of Missouri-Columbia), The Material Politics of Ivory in Early Modern Europe
• Aleksander Musiał (Princeton University), Immersion: Classical Reception and Eastern-European Transformations of Hygiene Architecture, 1680–1830

Next month from Waddesdon Manor, from the programme flyer:

Juliet Carey, Storing and Staging: Baron Edmond’s Boxes
Online, Monday, 10 May 2021, 6pm

Join Senior Curator Juliet Carey to explore the surprising, beautiful boxes in which some of Waddesdon’s most precious objects live when out of the public eye.

We still use the boxes that Baron Edmond de Rothschild (1845–1934) commissioned for the storage of Sèvres porcelain and small sculptures and antiquities. Their unusually sophisticated fabrication relates to bookbinding, the covers of scientific instruments, etuis for princely treasures, and longstanding Parisian expertise in the protection and transportation of precious things. Far from being neutral or invisible spaces, Edmond’s boxes construct new ways of experiencing their contents—from those that help one to study and categorise vases, Roman glass, and even furniture, to a box that transforms into a stage, creating a private drama of enclosure and revelation around a little marble nymph.

For all their aesthetic and tactile appeal, the protective role of these boxes is underlined by the turbulence of the times that they survived, from revolutions and siege in 19th- century Paris to the Nazi occupation. A recent work by Edmund de Waal responds to this history and provides an intriguing postscript.

Standard registration is £10. Students, please email enquiries@waddesdon.org.uk from your academic email to register for a free place. A zoom link will be emailed to participants 24 hours before the event.

From the roundtable flyer:

Teaching the ‘Long’ 18th Century
Online, Friday, 23 April 2021, 9–11am (EST)

Organized by Sarah Betzer and Dipti Khera

After Thomas Baldwin, A Balloon-Prospect from above the Clouds, plate from Thomas Baldwin, ‘Airopaidia’ (London, 1786), opposite p. 154.

Roundtable featuring:
• Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Princeton University
• Nebahat Avcıoğlu, Hunter College, City University of New York
• Emma Barker, The Open University, London
• Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Cornell University
• Prita Meier, Art History and Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
• Nancy Um, Binghamton University, State University of New York
• Stephen Whiteman, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London

This roundtable brings together scholars from a broad array of geographical foci and institutional perspectives who have been at the forefront of efforts to rethink approaches to thinking, researching, and, crucially, teaching the art and material culture of an interconnected ‘long’ eighteenth century. Convened in conjunction with a session at the 2021 College Art Association conference, the roundtable will appear in distilled form in a dedicated issue of Journal18, forthcoming in Fall 2021. Two key aims animate the roundtable and its afterlife in Journal18: 1) to reflect upon teaching the ‘long’ eighteenth century, particularly in light of renewed debates on the reparation of objects, revision of histories, and inclusion of colonized and enslaved voices in museums, plantation sites, and public squares; and 2) to compile a list of resources and open-access supporting materials that are pragmatically useful for colleagues engaged in teaching the ‘long’ and ‘broad’ eighteenth century.

Organized by Sarah Betzer, University of Virginia, and Dipti Khera, Art History and Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Register here»

Trade Card of J. F. Lacourt (Leeds University Library, MS 2241 John Evan Bedford Library of Furniture History).

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From The Furniture History Society:

‘Pattern Books, Early Trade Catalogues, and Many Other Rarities’: The John Evan Bedford Library of Furniture History
The Furniture History Society Online Lecture, Wednesday, 24 March 2021, 18.00 (GMT)

Members of the Bedford project team from Special Collections at the University of Leeds will highlight some of the rare books and ephemera in the John Evan Bedford Library of Furniture History and explain more about the ambitions of the cataloguing project. Chaired by Mark Westgarth, the presentations will be followed by a discussion with the Bedford team and an opportunity to ask questions about the project.

When the art and antique dealer John Bedford died in February 2019 he gifted a remarkable collection of rare books, manuscripts, artworks, and objects to the University of Leeds. Assembled over almost half a century, the John Evan Bedford Library of Furniture History is an exceptional resource covering all aspects of the English home, from interiors and furnishings to lighting and metalwork, drapery and upholstery to architectural and garden design. Comprising over 3,000 printed items, many of them extremely rare, and in some cases unique, the collection includes furniture pattern books, designs for ornament, and inventories of country houses. The books, which also touch on household life and management, date from the seventeenth century onwards. The archive is also rich in rare ephemera including trade cards, labels, and pamphlets, many of which are unknown outside this collection. The John Victor Bedford Will Trust, with great generosity and vision, is funding a cataloguing project based in Special Collections at the University of Leeds to make the collection fully searchable and accessible.

This event is free for FHS members and £5 for non-members. If you are a non-member and would like to attend, please click here. Contact events@furniturehistorysociety.org to register interest.

Mark Westgarth is Associate Professor in Art History and Museum Studies at the University of Leeds and also Director of the Centre for the Study of the Art & Antiques Market. He has been instrumental in developing antique dealer collections at Leeds; Mark is a Council Member of the FHS.

Rhiannon Lawrence-Francis, Collections and Engagement Manager, has operational oversight of the project to catalogue the John Evan Bedford Library of Furniture History. She visited John at his Guernsey home a few weeks before he died, and planned and managed the transfer of his collection to Leeds. A medievalist by background she is responsible for the rare book collections in the University Library and has a special interest in incunabula, early modern printing, provenance, and bookbindings.

Rachel Eckersley, Rare Book Specialist, is responsible for cataloguing the pre-1851 books, researching provenance, and promoting the collection. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at The Centre for the Comparative History of Print (also at Leeds), a library digitisation assistant at the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge, and a research fellow in book history at Queen Mary University of London.

Rosie Dyson, Collections Officer, is currently researching trade cards and ephemera. She is undertaking work to catalogue, digitise, and repackage John’s collection of trade cards and associated ephemera and has written several articles on her findings so far. Her background is in photography and digitisation.

Illustration from Jean-Baptiste Pillement, The Ladies Amusement: Or, the Whole Art of Japanning Made Easy, second enlarged edition, ca. 1762 (Leeds University Library, MS 2241 John Evan Bedford Library of Furniture History). This is the only known complete and coloured copy.