New Book | Protestant Relics in Early America
From Oxford UP (use code AAFLYG6 for a 30% discount) . . .
Jamie Brummitt, Protestant Relics in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2025), 560 pages, ISBN: 978-0197669709, $149.
In Protestant Relics in Early America, Jamie L. Brummitt upends long-held assumptions about religion and material culture in the early United States. Brummitt chronicles how American Protestants cultivated a lively relic culture centered around collecting supernatural memory objects associated with dead Christian leaders, family members, and friends. These objects materialized the real physical presences of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and souls of the dead on earth.
As Brummitt demonstrates, people of nearly all Protestant denominations and walks of life—including members of Congress, college presidents, ministers, mothers, free Black activists, schoolchildren, and enslaved people—sought embodied and supernatural sense experiences with relics. They collected relics from deathbeds, stole relics from tombs, made relics in schools, visited relics at pilgrimage sites like George Washington’s Mount Vernon, purchased relics in the marketplace, and carried relics into the American Revolution and the Civil War. Locks of hair, blood, bones, portraits, daguerreotypes, post-mortem photographs, memoirs, deathbed letters, Bibles, clothes, embroidered and painted mourning pieces, and a plethora of other objects that had been touched, used, or owned by the dead became Protestant relics. These relic practices were so pervasive that they shaped systems of earthly and heavenly power, from young women’s education to national elections to Protestant-Catholic relations to the structure of freedom and families in the afterlife.
In recovering the forgotten history and presence of Protestant relics in early America, Brummitt demonstrates how material practices of religion defined early American politics and how the Enlightenment enhanced rather than diminished embodied presence. Moreover, Brummitt reveals how the secular historical method has obscured the supernatural significance of relics for the Protestants who made, collected, exchanged, treasured, and passed them down. This book will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early American history, religion, politics, art, and popular culture.
Jamie L. Brummitt is an Associate Professor of American religions and material culture at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Brummitt earned her PhD from Duke University. In 2017, Brummitt was the recipient of the Anthony N. B. and Beatrice W. B. Garvan Research Fellowship in American Material Culture at The Library Company of Philadelphia. She is also a past fellow of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon; Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library; the Filson Historical Society; and the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction: The History and Presence of Protestant Relics
1 From ‘Memorials and Signs’ to ‘Art That Can Immortalize’: The Evangelical Enlightenment’s Influence on Real Presence in Protestant Relic Culture
2 The ‘Precious Relict[s]’ of George Whitefield: Collecting the Supernatural Memory Objects of a Dead Minister and the Spread of Masculine Mourning in Late Eighteenth-Century Evangelicalism
3 The ‘Invaluable Relique[s]’ of George Washington: Sensing the Heavenly Presence of America’s Savior and the Politics of Protestant Relics in the Early Republic
4 ‘The Reign of Embroidered Mourning Pieces: The Rise and Decline of Handmade Relics in Young Protestant Women’s Education and the ‘Feminization’ of Mourning
5 ‘A Sacred Relic Kept’: The Evangelical ‘Good Death’ Experience and Protestant Relics in the Marketplace
6 ‘Protestant Evidence on the Subject of Relics: Catholic Encounters with Protestant Relic Practices and the Christian Roots of American Civil Religion
7 ‘I Was Not a Slave with These Pictured Memorials’: Supernatural Deathbed Experiences as Justifications for Slavery and the Work of Protestant Relics in Black Liberation
8 The Deaths and Afterlives of Protestant Relics: Or, Why Enlightened People Forgot the History and Presence of Protestant Relics
Notes
Bibliography
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Online Talk | Protestant Relics in Early America with Jamie Brummitt
The Library Company of Philadelphia, Thursday, 20 November 2025, 7pm (ET)
Virtual Event | Free
Registration is available here»
New Book | Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collector
Coming soon from Lund Humphries (with a related online talk scheduled for October 21) . . .
Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth, Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collector (London: Lund Humphries Publishers, 2025), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1848226814, £40.
This book emphasises Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812–1895)—also known as Lady Charlotte Guest, née Bertie—as one of the most significant women in the history of collecting. An extraordinary collector, historian, and philanthropist, Charlotte subverted gendered norms and challenged Victorian conventions. This new study establishes Charlotte’s contribution to ceramic history and cultural education, and demonstrates her influential role in transnational artistic networks. Charting Charlotte’s eventful life, McCaffrey-Howarth focuses on her identity as a renowned connoisseur, whose donation of thousands of objects to the Victoria & Albert Museum and the British Museum marked a pioneering move for a female benefactor. Lady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collector presents unique insight into the social and cultural world of Victorian England and the role of women within this.
Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth is Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. She was previously Curator of Ceramics and Glass at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Curator of The Chitra Collection.
c o n t e n t s
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction: China-Hunting with Charlotte
1 ‘A Man’s Education’
2 A Welsh Heiress
3 Becoming a Collector
4 ‘Our Ceramic Chasse’
5 English Ceramic Art
6 Collecting World History
7 ‘My Adieux to the Collection’
Conclusion: ‘Old Life Reminiscences’
Bibliography
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Online Talk | Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth on Lady Charlotte Schreiber
Tuesday, 21 October 2025, 14.00–15.30 GMT-4
Part of the series Victorians in the Bookshops, organized by The Victorian Society
Registration is available here»
Conference | Sacred Ceramics
Johann Joachim Kaendler, Crucifixion Group, detail, Meissen, 1743
(Porzellansammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden; photo by Adrian Sauer)
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Registration is open for this conference, with a limited number of bursaries available for early career scholars (online registration is available here):
Sacred Ceramics: Devotional Images in European Porcelain
Online and in-person, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 30 September 2025
Organized by Matthew Martin and Rebecca Klarner
Was eighteenth-century European porcelain just a ceramic material to be moulded into useful objects—or could it mean more? This conference explores what European porcelain might have communicated when it was used to create devotional objects.
This conference explores the phenomenon of religious sculpture produced in European porcelain in the eighteenth century. Sculptures on religious subjects represent some of the most ambitious and complex productions in European porcelain of the period, yet they remain relatively understudied. Meissen, Doccia Vienna, Höchst, Fulda, Nymphenburg—all these factories produced devotional images in porcelain. Even factories in mid eighteenth-century Protestant England—Chelsea and Derby—produced sculptures employing Catholic devotional imagery. In each instance, cultural-political motives for the creation of these images can be reconstructed.
The 1712 letter penned by the Jesuit Father François Xavier d’Entrecolles not only conveyed to Europe first-hand knowledge of Chinese porcelain production at Jingdezhen, but it also construed access to this knowledge as a triumph of the Jesuit global mission—the successes of the Jesuits in China made the secret of kaolinic porcelain available to the Catholic princes of Europe.
Porcelain’s alchemical heritage was also not without significance: success at the alchemical enterprise had always been deemed dependent on divine favour. These factors could lead to porcelain assuming a sacral character in Catholic court contexts. Devotional images in European porcelain exploited these cultural associations of the medium itself.
This international conference will explore the religious production of European ceramic factories and consider questions such as: Who were the artists and patrons involved in these sculptures’ creation? How did these sculptures function in private and public contexts? What significance lay in the use of porcelain to create devotional images?
A small number of early career bursaries to attend the conference will be available (including a contribution towards travel cost), generously funded by the French Porcelain Society. To apply, please email fhrlmk@leeds.ac.uk by 5 September 2025, outlining in 150 words or less how you would benefit from attending this conference.
Generously supported by the French Porcelain Society
s c h e d u l e
10.00 Museum Opens / Registration
10.30 Welcome
10.45 Introduction — Julia Weber (Director, Porcelain Collection, Staatliche Kunstsammlung Dresden)
11.00 Catholic China: Porcelain, the Jesuits, and Counter-Reformation Propaganda — Matthew Martin (Senior Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship, The University of Melbourne)
11.20 Religious Sculpture in Meissen Porcelain — Maureen Cassidy-Geiger (Independent Curator and Scholar)
11.40 Break
11.55 Marian Figures in Meissen Porcelain: A Female Body between a Catholic Court and a Protestant State — Rebecca Klarner (Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Researcher, University of Leeds/V&A and Assistant Curator, V&A Wedgwood Collection)
12.15 The Divine Mission of Du Paquier: Grace, Virtue, and Propaganda in the Context of Habsburg Piety — Claudia Lehner-Jobst (Director and Collections Curator, Augarten Porcelain Museum, Vienna)
12.30 Q&A
12.40 Lunch Break
13.30 Handling Session | Ceramics, Terracotta, and Ivory — Simon Spier, (Curator Ceramics & Glass 1600–1800, V&A) and Kira d’Alburquerque, (Senior Curator Sculpture, V&A), places are limited; please sign up during registration.
14.10 Handling Session Repeated
14.50 A Reliquary Made by the Imperial Vienna Porcelain Manufactory — Manuel von Aufschnaiter (Postgraduate Student, Art History, University of Vienna)
15.10 The Influence of Religious Patronage on European Porcelain Commissioning: Investigating the Rarest Monumental Sacral Porcelain Ensembles and the Ritual Use of the Porcelain Objects in European Ecclesiastical Rites — Carina Nathalia Madonna Visconti Paff (Art Historian, Licensed Art Expert and Embassies Art Advisor)
15.30 St Augustine’s Church at Hammersmith: A Contemporary Ceramic Commission for a Catholic Church — Julian Stair (Ceramic Artist, Academic, and Writer)
15.45 Q&A
15.55 Tea and Coffee Break
16.20 Piety and Politics in Italian Porcelain — Errol Manners (Historic Ceramics Specialist)
16.40 Reflections on the Devotional Sculpture from Buen Retiro — Félix Zorzo (Assistant Curator European Decorative Arts, National Museums Scotland)
17.00 Porcelain for the Pope: Sacred Ceramics in Eighteenth-Century France — Susan Wager (Assistant Professor of Art History, University of New Hampshire, Durham)
17.15 Q&A and Closing Remarks
Abstracts for papers are available here»
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Note (added 28 September 2025) — The posting was updated to included the online registration link.
Online Talk | Alexandra Kirtley on the Work of Black Artisans
As noted at Events in the Field, administered by The Decorative Arts Trust:
Alexandra Kirtley | Thomas Gross in Context: Black Artisans in Early Philadelphia
Online, DAR Museum, 9 September 2025, noon (Eastern Time)
Thomas Gross Jr., Double Chest (Chest-on-Chest), made in Philadelphia, 1805–10, mahogany, tulip poplar, and yellow pine with brass, 83 inches high (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1983-167-1a,b).
The work of cabinetmaker Thomas Gross (1775–1839) provides the centerpiece to the study and understanding of Black artists and artisans who contributed to the fabric of the prolific art community in early Philadelphia. This richly illustrated talk will share the documentary evidence of the names of those people as well as the work they made, from silversmiths, upholsterers, potters, and cabinetmakers to painters like David Bustill Bowser and his seamstress wife Elizabeth Harriet Stevens Gray Bowser.
Please note that this event is taking place online only; Alexandra Kirtley will not be present at the DAR Museum.
Registration is available here»
Alexandra Kirtley is the Montgomery-Garvan Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Workshop | Art and Conflict in Times of Climate Change
From the conference programme:
Art and Conflict in Times of Climate Change
Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, 17–18 July 2025
Organized by Emily McGiffin, Feng Schöneweiß, T Pritchard, and Antonio Montañes Jimenez
A British Academy SHAPE Research Project in collaboration with the 4A_Lab (KHI in cooperation with Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz) and the Forum Transregionale Studien.
Climate change has happened more than once in the histories of planet Earth and those of human beings. Notably more recent, and historically documented, occurrences include the so-called Medieval Climate Anomaly (ca. 950–1250 CE), the Little Ice Age (ca. 1300–1850) and indeed the contemporary Anthropogenic climate crisis in times of the Anthropocene. From the Russian famine at the beginning of the 17th century following severe winters triggered by volcanic eruptions in Peru, to severe flooding in Kenya, Tanzania and Burundi displacing almost a million people, such climatic shifts have affected and are affecting enormous numbers of people around the planet.
Unsurprisingly, endemic to the periods of climate changes are conflicts. These conflicts drastically affect human lives, thus we find both conflicts and the climatic shifts that precipitated them reflected in and entangled with cultural productions. One example is the paintings created by Dutch masters of people ice-skating and revelling on frozen rivers and enjoying the curious prosperity brought by conflict with Spain. Another is from Song-dynasty China: Facing deforestation and military conflicts with northern Jurchen powers, metropolitan regions of the Song increasingly shifted from firewood to coal as energy source, which corelated with producing some of the finest porcelain glazes in Chinese history. These historical instances resonate strongly with the contemporary music of Syrian activists, who are grappling with the effects of drought and Civil war. In multifaceted ways, the making of arts, broadly defined as the cultural expression of human lived experience, has been entangled with both the violent forces of climatic change, conflicts, and crises.
To examine the complex connections and correlations between art and conflict in times of climate change, this workshop focuses on (1) how cultures have been shaped by the concurrent forces of war and changing environments, and (2) how these lived experiences are expressed through art and literature. Researchers will contribute works-in-progress across disciplinary boundaries, including anthropology, art and cultural history, environmental and digital humanities, postcolonial literature, besides film and media studies. Taking a necessarily planetary perspective, the workshop will interrogate and explore artistic creation and armed conflicts in historical and contemporary climate changes, and will explore pertinent and indeed timely topics across historical and geographical boundaries.
Core questions
• How was/is artistic creation, and cultural expression in general, conditioned and/or oriented by non-human beings and beyond-human factors, such as deforestation, ocean currents, monsoon, El Niño, orbital facing, and volcanic activities?
• How have these factors been represented, and what are the complexities of representing and recording such profound cultural memories?
• How were/are violence and environmental disruption intertwined within cultural memories, and constituted in material, oral, visual and textual cultures?
• What methodologies could contemporary researchers use and develop to address the aforementioned questions from interdisciplinary perspectives?
• How could formats of interdisciplinary collaboration, such as this workshop, enhance academic research on common questions, further knowledge transfer across sectors, and enable actions for positive changes?
Contacts
Feng Schöneweiß, 4A_Lab Postdoctoral Fellow, feng.schoeneweiss@khi.fi.it
Antje Paul, 4A_Lab Program Coordinator, antje.paul@khi.fi.it
t h u r s d a y , 1 7 j u l y
9.30 Welcome by Georges Khalil (Forum Transregionale Studien) and Hannah Baader (4A_Lab / Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut)
9.50 Welcome by Feng Schöneweiß (4A_Lab)
10.00 Concept Note by T Pritchard (The University of Edinburgh)
10.20 Keynote
• Katrin Kleemann (German Maritime Museum – Leibniz Institute for Maritime History) — Climate History Perspectives: Echoes of Conflict and Culture
11.00 Coffee Break
11.30 Panel 1 | Extraction, Transition, and Repair
Chair: T Pritchard (The University of Edinburgh)
• Rebecca Macklin (University of Aberdeen) — Visualising Relations in the Tar Sands: Extraction, Aesthetics, and Repair
• Emily McGiffin (The University of Warwick) — ‘God has riches, I have cows’: Field Notes on Cultural Heritage in the Bauxite Zone
12.30 Lunch
13.30 Panel 2 | Anthropologies of Collaboration and Conflicts
Chair: Christopher Williams-Wynn (Freie Universität Berlin)
• Antonio Montañes Jimenez (University of Oxford) — Scarcity, Family Memories, and Conflict: Methodological Notes and Collaborative Insights
• Freya Hope (University of Oxford) — Anarchy, Art, and Alternative Worldmaking: New Travellers’ Historicity of Resistance
14.30 Coffee Break
15.00 Film Screening (work in progress) and Discussion (hybrid)
Film and presentation: Matthias De Groof, University of Antwerp / University of Amsterdam
Discussants: Antonio Montañes Jimenez, Rebecca Macklin, Emily McGiffin, and Feng Schöneweiß
16.30 Coffee Break
17.00 Lecture (online and in-person)
Chair: Hannah Baader (4A_Lab / KHI)
• Sugata Ray (UC Berkeley) — Das Paradies: The Anthropocene Extinction in the Early Modern World
f r i d a y , 1 8 j u l y
9.30 Panel 3 | Climate and the Arts of Change
Chair: Parul Singh (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut)
• Tenaya Jorgensen (Trinity College Dublin) — Climatic Stress and Political Fragmentation: Environmental ‘Pull Factors’ in Viking Raiding Strategies in Ninth-Century Francia
• Feng Schöneweiß (4A_Lab) — Celadon Aesthetics, Gunpowder, and Energy Transition in Song-dynasty China
• T Pritchard (The University of Edinburgh) — ‘As if the world should straight be turn’d to ashes’: Comprehending Climate Change and Conflict in the Early 17th Century
11.00 Coffee Break
11.30 Panel 4 | Resilience and Memories (hybrid)
Chair: Mahroo Moosavi (4A_Lab)
• Ammar Azzouz (University of Oxford) — A Revolution of Art
• Rebecca Hanna John (Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte) — Preservation and Extinction: On the Entanglement of Ecological and Decolonial Perspectives in Jumana Manna’s Artistic Practice
12.30 Lunch
13.30 Roundtable Discussion
15.00 Concluding Remarks by Emily McGiffin and Feng Schöneweiß
Symposium | Culture and Heritage in Napoleonic Spain
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Así sucedió (This is How It Happened), from Los desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of War), 1810–14
(Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado)
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From The Prado:
Cultura y Patrimonio en la España napoleónica:
Expolio, protección y transformación
In-person and online, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 22–23 September 2025
En los últimos años han sido numerosos los estudios que han valorado con mayor perspectiva el gobierno de José I (1808–1813) y la España napoleónica, entendiéndola como un periodo de plena correspondencia con la crisis general del entorno europeo. Se trataría no tanto de un periodo de ‘gobierno intruso’, sino del reflejo del orden napoleónico que trataba de imponerse en Europa y que suponía, también para nuestro país, una iniciativa reformadora que acababa definitivamente con el Antiguo Régimen, lo que motivó que contara con firmes defensores. Sus iniciativas culturales y artísticas tuvieron igualmente gran repercusión, por más que el desarrollo de la guerra dificultara su realización. La eliminación de las órdenes religiosas liberalizó un gran patrimonio artístico que, aunque se trató de vehicular en iniciativas tan novedosas como el llamado Museo Josefino, en ocasiones terminó siendo motivo de expolios y destrucciones. En este simposio se estudiarán estos fenómenos complejos y su repercusión, contemplándolos en relación al entorno europeo contemporáneo. El simposio se vincula temáticamente a la Cátedra del Prado 2024, que impartió la profesora Bénédicte Savoy, si bien atiende prioritariamente al específico caso de lo ocurrido en España con las políticas napoleónicas que afectaron al patrimonio cultural.
Es posible la asistencia presencial a las sesiones hasta completar el aforo, así como la asistencia en línea, mediante el enlace a la plataforma Zoom que se facilitará a los inscritos. Al realizar la inscripción es necesario escoger una modalidad de asistencia. Las ponencias se impartirán en la lengua en la que aparecen enunciados sus títulos. Habrá traducción simultánea. Contacto: centro.estudios@museodelprado.es.
Actividad realizada en colaboración con el proyecto de I D I Bellas artes, cultura e identidad nacional. La construcción del relato artístico entre la Ilustración y el Liberalismo. Textos e imágenes (PID20222-136475OB-I00), financiado por el Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación y de la Fundación Séneca, proyecto 21936/PI/22, titulado Cultura y nación. Las bellas artes entre la Ilustración y el Liberalismo.
m o n d a y , 2 2 s e p t e m b e r
9.00 Acreditación de asistentes
9.30 Inauguración y Presentación
• Javier Arnaldo (Museo Nacional del Prado)
• David García López (Universidad de Murcia)
10.00 Sección 1 | Expoliaciones artísticas en la época napoleónica
Modera David García López
• Pillage et appropiations d’art à l’époque napoléonienne en Allemagne et en Autriche (Expolios y apropiaciones de arte durante la época napoleónica en Alemania y Austria) — Bénédicte Savoy (Technische Universität Berlin)
• La ocupación napoleónica y la usurpación de los bienes artísticos — Manuel Moreno Alonso (Universidad de Sevilla)
• El expolio artístico del Mariscal Soult en España y el saqueo sevillano — Ignacio Cano Rivero (Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla)
• Las colecciones reales durante el periodo napoleónico — Virginia Albarrán Martín (Patrimonio Nacional)
13.00 Debate
16.00 Sección 2 | Espacios para la protección de las artes
Modera: Joaquín Álvarez Barrientos
• El Museo Josefino: una institución cultural en su contexto nacional y europeo — Pierre Géal (Université Stendhal)
• El museo napoleónico en el Real Alcázar de Sevilla — Rocío Ferrín Paramio (Patrimonio Nacional, Reales Alcázares de Sevilla)
• La Academia de San Fernando como instrumento del poder napoleónico en las políticas culturales — Itziar Arana (Museo Nacional del Prado)
• El tráfico de pinturas en el Madrid josefino — David García López (Universidad de Murcia)
18.30 Debate y fin de la jornada
t u e s d a y , 2 3 s e p t e m b e r
10.00 Sección 3 | Transformaciones y nuevos horizontes de las políticas relativas a los bienes culturales
Modera: Javier Arnaldo
• Le Musée Napoléon, aux sources du mythe du musée universel (El Museo Napoleón, los orígenes del mito del museo universal) — Philippe Malgouyres (Musée du Louvre)
• Debates artísticos y sus consecuencias en la restauración de las obras requisadas durante las campañas napoleónicas — Ana González Mozo (Museo Nacional del Prado)
• La política cultural de José I, proyectos y consecuencias — Joaquín Álvarez Barrientos (CSIC)
• Le Gallerie private romane all’inizio dell’Ottocento: dispersioni, riorganizzazioni, riallestimenti (Las galerías privadas en Roma al inicio del siglo XIX: dispersiones, reorganizacines y reordenamientos) — Giovanna Capitelli (Università Roma Tre)
• La nascita delle Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia negli anni del Regno d’Italia, 1805–1814 (El nacimiento de la Galería de la Academia de Venecia durante los años del Reino de Italia, 1805–1814) — Giulio Manieri Elia (Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia)
13.30 Debate y conclusiones finales
Online Event | 18th-C American Furniture from The Met
From The Met:
Alyce Perry Englund | Art History Study Group: 18th-Century American Furniture
Online, Wednesday, 16 July 2025, 3–4:30 pm
Join curator Alyce Perry Englund, Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts of the American Wing, to talk about The Calculated Curve: Eighteenth-Century American Furniture and delve into a pivotal moment in American furniture design from 1720 to 1770. Take a closer look at the materials, ergonomics, and sculptural expression embedded in furniture design during a critical age of global exchange and social stratification. This live event will take place on Zoom. Space is limited, and advance registration is required. Registration closes Tuesday, July 15, or when registration is full. Fee: $40.
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition The Calculated Curve: Eighteenth-Century American Furniture.
Lecture | Mei Mei Rado on French Tapestries at the Qing Court
From the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History:
Mei Mei Rado | From France to the Qing Court: Tapestries as Cross-Cultural Textiles
Online and in-person, Villino Stroganoff, Rome, 24 June 2025, 11am
Left: The Indian Hunter, from the second set of the Tenture des Indes, detail, 1689–90, the Manufacture royale des Gobelins, tapestry, wool and silk (Paris: Mobilier national). Right: Yu Sheng and Zhang Weibang, “Cassowary,” in Manual of Birds (Niaopu), detail, 1774, album leaf, ink and colors on silk (Beijing: Palace Museum).
Large-scale pictorial tapestries ranked among the most precious art forms in the early modern period. While their circulations and functions among European courts have been well studied, less known are their journeys to China and subsequent roles in stimulating new developments in Qing imperial arts.
The first part of this talk uncovers the history of French tapestries that entered the Qing court during the eighteenth century as diplomatic gifts and trade goods, including the first and second Tentures chinoises woven by the Beauvais Manufactory and the Tenture des Indes made by the Gobelins Manufactory. Their trajectories reconstructed from both the French and Qing sides offer a window into the complexity of global networks and contingency of cultural encounters. These tapestries’ themes, marked by idealized exoticism compressing distance and time, functioned as a kind of diplomatic lingua franca adaptable to express divergent cultural and political visions. The second part of this presentation examines how European tapestries gave rise to a new type of textile art form in the Qing imperial workshops and an innovative mode for furnishing the palace interiors. The medium’s architectonic tension and interactive visual potential enabled the Qianlong emperor to envision his own physical presence in relation to the tapestry in space and offered him new ways to reenact narratives charged with imperial significance.
The event will be available online through the Bibliotheca Hertziana’s Vimeo Channel»
Mei Mei Rado is assistant professor at Bard Graduate Center. Her research and teaching focus on the history of textiles, dress, and decorative arts in China and France from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, especially on Sino-French exchanges. Previously she held curatorial and research positions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Palace Museum, Beijing. She is the author of The Empire’s New Cloth: Cross-Cultural Textiles at the Qing Court (Yale University Press, 2025). Next spring she will be an invited researcher at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris, where she will work on a new project on the adaptations of baroque and rococo ornament in Qing arts.
Week-Long Courses at The Courtauld, Summer 2025
Jean-Baptiste Raguenet, A View of Paris from the Pont Neuf, 1763, oil on canvas, 46 × 84 cm
(Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 71.PA.26)
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From The Courtauld, with a few of the 20 offerings noted below (there also are 5 online courses available) . . .
Summer School at The Courtauld
The Courtauld, London, June — July 2025 (each class lasts one week)
Each in-person Summer School course is full-time, and while you can take only one course per week, you are able to pursue a particular interest in a period or theme across two or more weeks. The teaching day generally lasts from 10:00 to 16:30, with registration from 9:30 on the first day. Morning or afternoon classroom sessions are complemented by object-focused study in London’s museums, galleries, printrooms, churches, and other sites. We benefit greatly from The Courtauld Gallery. It features as a teaching resource in many of our courses, and is the venue for post-graduate talks introducing aspects of our collections and for our Summer School party. The fee for all Summer School on-campus courses is £645 (each online course is £395).
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#6 Harvey Shepherd | Rococo to Revolution: French Art and its Geographical Contexts, 1700–1789
In-person, 23–27 June 2025
This course will examine the ever-changing roles of French art during the turbulent eighteenth century, from the later years and death of Louis XIV to the Revolution of 1789. Students will consider the role that French art played in forming identities and tastes across the world; from shaping desirable aristocratic luxury to envisaging radical futures.
French art and taste of the eighteenth century will be encountered through a series of ever-widening geographical contexts. The opening classes will examine the political and economic centres of France, looking at the Château de Versailles, as well as the artistic culture of Paris and its society during the Enlightenment and the early years of the French Revolution. Alongside the court and the capital, we will consider France’s periphery and its neighbours, examining interactions with cities like Lyon and Marseille, and both peacetime connections and wartime rivalries with European states such as Great Britain, The Netherlands, and the Holy Roman Empire. Lastly, the course considers the wider global contexts of French art as it was both collected and sent abroad, examining the colonial and imperial interactions of France in an increasingly connected world, from the court of Qing China to Senegal, India, and the Caribbean.
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#7 Nicola Moorby | Travelling Light: Turner, Constable, and the Shape of British Art
In-person, 23–27 June 2025
This course will explore a fascinating aspect of British art history, the parallel careers of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. Between them, these giants of landscape painting revolutionised the status of their genre, transforming the depiction of place through empirical experience and emotive response.
However, their approaches were very different. Turner roamed throughout Britain and the Continent in search of inspirational scenery, combining observation of nature with literary and historical references. By contrast, Constable nurtured his vision at home, rooting himself in the familiar and the everyday. As well as comparing differences and similarities within their works, we shall examine the wider cultural contexts pertinent to their careers: the reproductive print market, the nineteenth-century experience of travel, and particularly the role of the Royal Academy in London, the arena where their robust professional rivalry was played out. We shall also look closely at the artists’ materials and techniques, particularly their innovations with oil paint, watercolour and their use of sketchbooks. The course culminates with a discussion of their respective artistic legacies and their changing reputations through the twentieth century and beyond.
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#13 Kyle Leyden | Constructing the Heart of Empire: London’s Public Architecture
In-person, 30 June – 4 July 2025 (the course is booked, but there is a waiting list)
Architecture is the art form whose presence, symbolic message and socio-political legacy cannot be avoided. The construction of great buildings is an undertaking imbued with significant symbolic and political currency which continues to have an unavoidable resonance with those who continue to interact with these spaces today.
Through an overview of key historical moments and an examination of several major architectural projects, this course will present London as a city in which architecture was consciously deployed as a potent device through which the changing essential values of, and core political vision for, the British Empire were communicated to Londoners, the wider British population and to foreign observers. It will also consider current debates about how post-imperial societies can and ought to deal with the highly contested legacies of these prominent urban spaces.
Engaging with diverse issues and concepts, the course gives students an opportunity to gain a solid understanding of the social and artistic history of London and its critical role as a stage for the theatre of Empire. It features visits to major public buildings and royal palaces and includes spaces that are otherwise inaccessible to the general public including the Royal Apartments of the Palace of Westminster, and the spectacular interiors of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
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#17 Giulia Martina Weston | Beyond Artemisia: Italian Women Artists in the Long 17th Century
In-person, 7–11 July 2025
Over the last decade a conspicuous number of monographic exhibitions has been devoted to Italian women artists of the early modern period, paving the way for notable scholarly findings, chief rediscoveries and newly emerged research avenues. Focusing on the careers and production of a selected group of artists, this course will unveil the most significant discoveries gathered so far, aiming to engage its attendees in a rich exchange on the roles played by these extraordinary women in their society as well as consider what lesson can be drawn today from their experiences.
Ranging from the pioneering examples set by Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana to the versatile output of Artemisia Gentileschi and Giovanna Garzoni, our enquiry will look at specific geographical areas (such as the Bologna of Elisabetta Sirani and Ginevra Cantofoli) and consider a wealth of artistic media, from minute artworks on parchment to Plautilla Bricci’s grand architectural designs. Visits to the National Gallery and The Courtauld Print Room will allow us to gain first-hand knowledge of this exquisite group of artists, and to consider their legacy in dialogue with the predominant art-historical canon.
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#23 Sheila McTighe | Re-Imagining the Everyday: Genre Paintings and Prints in 16th- to 18th-Century Europe
In-person, 14–18 July 2025
The secular subject matter we now call ‘genre’ imagery grew steadily in popularity through the early modern period across Europe. From depictions of peasants at work or play to the erotic intrigues of the aristocracy, genre imagery explores the full range of human behaviours, sometimes imagined, and sometimes rooted firmly in real life. We shall investigate this subject matter and the artistic practices of naturalism or realism with which it was often allied in works by artists like Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Sofonisba Anguissola, Caravaggio, Jacques Callot, Diego Velazquez, Georges de La Tour, Judith Leyster, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Antoine Watteau, and Jean-Siméon Chardin.
In contemporary writings about art, genre painting was often decried as unworthy of an ambitious artist. However, primary sources show that such art was highly sought after, whether by elite patrons commissioning paintings or by ‘middling’ people buying images made for the marketplace. Printed images were a constant source of new subjects drawn from modern life, while prints reproducing paintings further expanded the range of genre art and reached a wide audience. Among other, we shall discuss what the functions of everyday imagery might have been for such a diverse body of people. Classroom sessions will be complemented by visits to London’s rich collections of paintings and prints.
Conference | Publics of the First Public Museums: Visual Sources
From ArtHist.net:
Publics of the First Public Museums, 18th and 19th Centuries: Visual Sources
Online and in-person, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 5–6 June 2025
Organized by Carla Mazzarelli and David García Cueto
The conference Publics of the First Public Museums, 18th and 19th Centuries: Visual Sources is an integral part of the research project Visibility Reclaimed: Experiencing Rome’s First Public Museums (1733–1870), An Analysis of Public Audiences in a Transnational Perspective (FNS 100016_212922) directed by Carla Mazzarelli. Marking the third of three encounters (following I. Institutional Sources and II. Literary Discourses), this workshop delves into the examination of visual sources, vital to understanding the forms of representation of early museums and their publics. We intend to investigate a vast range of visual sources, from views of internal and external spaces to architectural and display projects, from caricatures to illustrations published in catalogues, guidebooks, voyages pittoresques up to the (self)representation of publics, museum staff (directors, custodians, ciceroni), and artists within the museum.
Visual sources have long represented a privileged source for investigating the origins of the first public museums and the impact on their publics. However, in the light of recent studies aimed at deepening the material history of the museum and the encounter of the public with the institutions, these sources deserve a closer scrutiny in both methodological and critical terms. As museums sought to define and engage their publics, visual sources often became both a mirror and a mould; they reflect and shape institutional and societal perceptions, contributing to build up the idea of museum but also to give a depiction of practices of access to public and private collections in Europe and in the World. The Museo Nacional del Prado welcomes this initiative as it has been involved since its foundation in 1819 in the process that the conference analyzes. The well known paintings that represent the spaces of Museo Nacional del Prado, since its opening, such as those of Fernando Brambilla, are an important starting and comparison point for the theme at the center of the conference discussion. On the other hand, paintings depicting ‘quadrerie’ have been a codified genre at least since the 17th century. Such artworks have also been read as sources for the study of the evolution of the display during the early modern age, but they also represent reference models for artists on how to represent the interiors of museum spaces, their publics and staff.
Direction
Carla Mazzarelli (Università della Svizzera italiana, Accademia di Architettura, Istituto di storia e teoria dell’arte e dell’architettura)
David García Cueto (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado)
It is possible to attend the sessions until all seats are filled or to follow the congress on line through the link to the Zoom platform that will be provided for all those enrolled. When enrolling you must choose a type of attendance.
Contact
visibilityreclaimed@gmail.com
congreso.visibily@museodelprado.es
t h u r s d a y , 5 j u n e
10.15 Registration
10.45 Welcoming Remarks — Alfonso Palacio (Director Adjunto de Conservación e Investigación del Museo del Prado)
11.00 Session 1 | Museums and Audiences in Image: Frameworks and Methodologies
Chair: David García Cueto (Museo Nacional del Prado)
• Carla Mazzarelli (Università della Svizzera italiana) — Alle origini del pubblico “esposto”. Proposte di lettura e confronto delle fonti visive
• Daniela Mondini (Università della Svizzera italiana) — Visiting Sacred Spaces as ‘Museums’
• Luise Reitstätter (Universität Wien) — Museums Ego Documents as Visual Source: Imaging First Publics within Founding Missions
• Javier Arnaldo Alcubilla (Museo Nacional del Prado) — La bohemia en el Prado: entre fuentes visuales y literarias
12.45 Keynote Address
• Sebastian Schütze (Universität Wien) — Going Public: The Gallery Picture and its Agencies
13.30 Lunch Break
14.45 Panel 2 | Mirroring Museums: The Public in Photographic Archives and Digital Atlases
Chair: Daniela Mondini (Università della Svizzera italiana)
• Beatriz Sánchez Torija (Museo Nacional del Prado) — El Museo del Prado y el uso de la fotografía como enlace con el público en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX
• Irina Emelianova (Università della Svizzera italiana) — European Art Museums and Their Audiences through the Photographic Collection of the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg: Between the End of the 19th Century and the Beginning of the 20th Century
• Paola D’Alconzo (Università degli studi di Napoli Federico II), Donata Levi (Università degli studi di Udine), Martina Lerda (Università di Pisa) — Dall’Atlante digitale dei musei italiani (DAIM): Immagini del pubblico, immagini per il pubblico
16.15 Coffee Break
16.30 Panel 3 | Museums in Sight: Visual Records of Visit and Display
Chair: Christoph Frank (Università della Svizzera italiana)
• Barbara Lasic (Sotheby’s Institute of Art) — Visualising Museal Trajectories at the Garde-Meuble de la Couronne
• Luca Piccoli (Università della Svizzera italiana) — ‘The colours of them so chosen to carry the eye forward’: alle origini dell’esperienza di visita del Museo Pio Clementino tra rappresentazione e realtà (1770–1796)
• Julia Faiers (Independent Scholar) — Experiencing Medieval Art at Toulouse’s First Public Museums
17.50 Break
18.00 Keynote Address
Andrew McClellan (Tufts University) — Towards a Machine for Looking: Science, Psychology, and Visitor Experience at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1900
f r i d a y , 6 j u n e
10.00 Panel 4 | Strategies of Self-Presentation: Museums between Politics and Cultural Stereotypes
Chair: Chiara Piva (Sapienza Università di Roma)
• Benjamin Carcaud (École du Louvre / Ministère de la Culture) — Quelle image du visiteur les artistes ont-ils construite dans leurs œuvres? Les stéréotypes du visiteur de musée dans les salles du Louvre
• Adrián Fernández Almoguera (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid) — ¿Imágenes como estrategia? A propósito del Musée des Antiques en la cultura visual del Louvre imperial
• Cynthia Prieur (University of Victoria, British Columbia) — Shaping the Image of the Louvre Museum: Maria Cosway’s Prints of the Exhibitions of Looted Art
11.20 Coffee Break
11.35 Panel 5 | The Critical Eye: Museums and Publics Between Promotion and Satire
Chair: Stefano Cracolici (Durham University)
• Grégoire Extermann (Université de Genève) — Un caricaturista en París: el ginebrino Wolfgang Adam Töppfer y el público del Louvre imperial
• Ludovica Scalzo (Università Roma Tre) — Il pubblico dei musei nei primi periodici illustrati europei (1830–1850)
• Gaetano Cascino (Università della Svizzera italiana) — I musei di Roma e i loro visitatori in satira nella pubblicistica dopo l’Unità
13.00 Lunch Break
14.00 Panel 6 | The Public Image of the Private Museum
Chair: Carlos G. Navarro (Museo Nacional del Prado)
• Federica Giacomini (Istituto Centrale per il Restauro, Roma) — La Galleria Borghese in un’illustrazione de ‘Le Magasin Pittoresque’: per un’indagine del pubblico nell’Ottocento
• Kamila Kludwiecz (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań) Aldona Tolysz (the Office of the Provincial Conservator of Monuments in Warsaw) — Between Documentation and Self-Creation: The Role of Illustration in the Activities of Polish Private Museums in the 19th Century
15.00 Panel 7 | From National to Global Image: The Identity of the Museum and Its Audiences
Chair: Giovanna Capitelli (Università Roma Tre)
• Susanne Anderson-Riedel (University of New Mexico) Caecilie Weissert (Universität Kiel) Joelle Raineau-Lehuédé (Petit Palais) — A Global Public for France’s National Museum
• Elizaveta Antashyan (Sapienza Università di Roma) — Visibility Granted: The Hermitage Museum in the 19th Century and Its Representation in Contemporary Imagery
• Raffaella Fontanarossa (Indipendent Scholar) — Le muse in Oriente. I primi visitatori dei musei in Cina e Giappone attraverso le fonti visive
• Jonatan Jair López Muñoz (Univesidad Complutense de Madrid) — La imagen omnipresente. La representación regia en los museos nacionales del siglo XIX en España e Italia
16.45 Coffee Break
17.00 Panel 8 | A Museum for All? The Variety of Audiences on Display
Chair: Daniel Crespo Delgado (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
• Gemma Cobo (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid) — La mirada de la infancia: Nuevos museos y educación artística en la Europa de entresiglos, 1750–1850
• Anna Frasca-Rath (Friedrich-Alexander University) — Through the Eye of a Child? Visual Sources of/for Museum Publics in 19th-Century Vienna
• Marie Barras (Université de Genève) — See and Be Seen: Museums and Art Exhibitions as Fashion Stages, 1870–1900
18.20 Concluding Remarks by Carla Mazzarelli
Enfilade 
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