Yvan Loskoutoff on the Medallic History of the Sun King
A lunchtime lecture at the Society of Antiquaries:
Yvan Loskoutoff, The Medallic History of the Sun King
In-person and online, Society of Antiquaries of London, 7 November 2023, 1–2pm
The Sun King and his councilors considered his medals as the summit of his propaganda. The reason is simple: they thought that, like Roman coins, the medals would last more than other media to perpetuate the royal memory. More than 300 were coined to celebrate the great events of Louis XIV’s reign (1638–1715), and a luxurious folio book was printed by the Royal Press in two editions of 1702 and 1723 (the lecturer being happy to own a duplicate copy of king George III, 1702, he might bring it to show, provided there are no customs problems). A group of about ten scholars, writers, and artists—the so-called Small Academy—looked after the medals and the book. From 1694 to 1702, they gathered twice a week in the palace of the Louvre dealing only with this subject. The proceedings of their meetings are preserved in the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. This lecture will address the Small Academy, the medals, and the book. Most medals were inspired by Imperial Roman coins. Some of them deal with events in relation with the United Kingdom (which produced satirical medals as an answer). A set of the medals is owned by the British Museum and another one by the Duke of Northumberland. Presently the leading specialists on the subject are English: Sir Mark Jones FSA for the medals and Professor James Mosley (Reading University) for the book. Professor Loskoutoff has directed two volumes on the subject in which they participated (Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre in 2016 and 2023).
Presented both online and in-person at Burlington House, the event is free and open to the public. Please reserve tickets here.
Workshop | Images in Comparative Anatomy, 1500–1900
Next month at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, as noted at ArtHist.net:
Drawing Comparisons: Images in Comparative Anatomy, 1500–1900
In-person and online, Bibliotheca Hertziana, Villino Stroganoff, Rome, 20 October 2023
Comparison of the skeleton of a bird and a man; from Pierre Belon, Histoire de la nature des oyseaux (Paris: Guillaume Cavellat, 1555).
The history of art and the practice of anatomy have long depended upon similar acts of comparison: identifying, visualizing, and describing likenesses. This workshop investigates the role of images in developing comparative anatomy—the study of anatomy across species—in early modern Europe.
Visual or formal analysis entails a search not only for forms but for likenesses. To look closely is, in other words, to look across. Anatomy, likewise, depends upon comparison. From Leonardo to Linnaeus, early modern anatomical knowledge materialized through bodies conceived as similar. The discipline of comparative anatomy emerged, specifically, as generalizations occurred across the human/nonhuman divide. The history of the anatomical image is also a history of violence, as those anatomical procedures allowing comparison (dissection and vivisection) often proceeded through the forceful manipulation, observation and depiction of the (non)human body. Scholars from various disciplines (history of art, history of science and medicine, philosophy, fine arts, paleontology) will consider the use of images in generating comparison and in both formulating and challenging comparative anatomical knowledge.
p r o g r a m m e
10.30 Introduction
• Alejandro Nodarse (Bibliotheca Hertziana / Harvard University) A Guide to Looking Across
11.00 Session One | Drawing Order
• Martin Clayton (Royal Collection Trust, Windsor Castle), ‘Describe the Jaw of a Crocodile’: Leonardo da Vinci’s Animal Anatomies
• Katrina van Grouw (University of Cambridge) Linnaeus Organized: Illustrating Convergence in Comparative Anatomy
12.30 Lunch Break
13.30 Session Two | Languages of Likeness
• Maria Conforti (Sapienza Università di Roma), Fruits, Mushrooms, and Trees: Botanical Imagery in Early Modern Surgery and Anatomy
• Paul North (Yale University), Likeness Looks Both Ways
15.00 Coffee Break
15.30 Session Three | Violence in the Comparative
• Thomas Balfe (Courtauld Institute), Skin Deep? Visualizing Human and Animal Violence in Early Modern Still Life Painting
• Rose Marie San Juan (University College London), Anatomical Violence and the Pain of Resemblance
17.00 Pause
17.15 Roundtable Discussion
Call for Papers | Art in Times of War and Peace
From the Call for Papers:
Art in Times of War and Peace: Legacies of Early Modern Loot and Repair
Bibliotheca Herztiana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome, 8–10 May 2024
Organized by Julia Vázquez and Francesca Borgo
Proposals due by 15 December 2023
A category of objects that exists entirely as a function of violence, the term ‘loot’ describes a relationship of possession, if not more specifically of dispossession. Neither an historically nor materially specific typology of artifacts, loot is instead primarily a legal category that cuts across place and time. And while it is also not an art-historical classification, it is one with which the discipline of art history must constantly contend, given its repercussions for what is accessible, where, and in what condition. This international, interdisciplinary conference invites papers addressing the ways in which conflict and its resolution have historically moved, modified, and reclassified art objects in the long early modern period. We invite contributions on the material, ethical, legal, political, and narrative implications of the claiming and reclaiming of objects in times of war and peace, as well as the ongoing resonance of these issues today, particularly for institutions that are their present-day repositories.
Studies on looting have a tendency to focus on canonical episodes, most often drawn from Roman, Napoleonic, and Nazi-era plunder. But the early modern period saw the steady transfer of booties, trophies, and spoils over the European continent and across the Atlantic and the Pacific. In Europe, this transfer triggered a moral, theological, and legal debate around property rights, as well as the development of codified criteria governing correct modes of wartime conduct, regulating who was permitted to plunder, what, when, and from whom. The act of looting was itself a strategy of violence, especially in the colonial context; but looted objects themselves were also particularly susceptible to damage, neglect, and even deliberate melting down. Moreover, although often thought of as an entirely modern phenomenon, the return of seized objects was also first theorized in this period as a tool of diplomacy and cultivated alongside a nascent legislation for the protection of art against damage, destruction, or unlawful export.
This conference revisits the early modern origins of the discourse around cultural property with an eye to the challenges facing museums today. Recently, scholarly meetings including Plunder: An Alternative History of Art (panel, Annual Meeting of the Association for Art History, 2022) and The Material Cultures of War and Emergency (conference, University College London and Oxford University, 2023) have brought attention to the long history of the taking away of things as a result of conflict. We hope to continue this conversation, expanding its purview beyond the object’s capture, to its framing, display, and possible restitution, while spotlighting medieval and Renaissance loot and its contemporary stakes.
This conference is organized by Julia Vázquez and Francesca Borgo. Following Wastework in 2023, this is the second yearly conference convened by the Lise Meitner Research Group “Decay, Loss, and Conservation in Art History” at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, furthering the Research Group’s ongoing inquiry into the consequences that different forms of loss, disappearance, and degradation bear for the discipline. For more information, see our webpage. A series of special presentations and pre-conference visits to local collections will launch the event. Travel and accommodation costs will be covered for speakers. Proposals will be considered for inclusion in an edited volume on loot and its recovery in the early modern period. To submit a proposal, please send your CV (including current position and affiliation), a 250-word abstract, and paper title to john.rattray@biblhertz.it by 15 December 2023.
Keynote speakers will include Ananda Cohen-Aponte (Cornell University) and Erin Thompson (CUNY).
New Book | The Future Future
Adam Thirlwell, The Future Future: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0374607616, £19 / $28.
A wild story of female friendship, language, and power, from France to colonial America to the moon, from 1775 to this very moment: a historical novel like no other.
It’s the eighteenth century, and Celine is in trouble. Her husband is mostly absent. Her parents are elsewhere. And meanwhile men are inventing stories about her—about her affairs, her sexuality, her orgies, and addictions. All these stories are lies, but the public loves them and spreads them like a virus. Celine can only watch as her name becomes a symbol for everything rotten in society. This is a world of decadence and saturation, of lavish parties and private salons, of tulle and satin and sex and violence. It’s also one ruled by men—high on colonial genocide, natural destruction, crimes against women, and, above all, language. To survive, Celine and her friends must band together in search of justice, truth, and beauty. Fantastical, funny, and blindingly bright, Adam Thirlwell’s The Future Future follows one woman on an urgently contemporary quest to clear her name and change the world.
Adam Thirlwell was born in London in 1978. He is the author of four novels, and his work has been translated into thirty languages. His essays appear in The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and he is an advisory editor of The Paris Review. His awards include a Somerset Maugham Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2018 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He has twice been selected by Granta as one of its Best of Young British Novelists.
New Book | Goya and the Mystery of Reading
From Vanderbilt University Press:
Luis Martín-Estudillo, Goya and the Mystery of Reading (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2023), 268 pages, ISBN: 978-0826505330, $120 / ISBN: 978-0826505323 (paperback), $50. Also available as an ebook.
Spanish artist Francisco de Goya (1746–1828) lived through an era of profound societal change. One of the transformations that he engaged passionately was the unprecedented growth both in the number of readers and in the quantity and diversity of texts available. He documented and questioned this reading revolution in some of his most captivating paintings, prints, and drawings. Goya and the Mystery of Reading explores the critical impact this transition had on the work of an artist who aimed not to copy the world around him, but to see it anew—to read it. Goya’s creations offer a sustained reflection on the implications of reading, which he depicted as an ambiguous, often mysterious activity: one which could lead to knowledge or ecstasy, to self-fulfillment or self-destruction, to piety or perdition. At the same time, he used reading to elicit new possibilities of interpretation. This book reveals for the first time the historical, intellectual, and artistic underpinnings of reading as one of the pillars of his art.
Luis Martín-Estudillo is a professor and Collegiate Scholar at the University of Iowa. His previous books include The Rise of Euroskepticism, winner of an NEH Open Book Award. He is executive editor of the Hispanic Issues series.
c o n t e n t s
Author’s Note
Introduction: Francisco de Goya and the Reading Revolutions
1 Reading and Politics
2 Reading and the Self
3 Reading, Leisure, and Sensuality
4 Reading and the Contours of the Human
Afterword: Words Written at the Edge of Shadows
Notes
Bibliography
Image Credits
Index
SAAM Fellowships for American Art History
From the Smithsonian American Art Museum:
SAAM and its Renwick Gallery invite applications to its premier fellowship program, the oldest and largest in American art. Scholars from any discipline who are researching topics relating to U.S. art, craft, and visual culture are encouraged to apply, as are those who foreground new perspectives, materials, and methodologies. Fellowships are residential and support full-time research. SAAM is devoted to advancing inclusive excellence in the discipline of art history, and therefore encourages candidates who identify as members of historically underrepresented groups to apply.
Each fellow is provided a carrel in SAAM’s Research and Scholars Center. There, they have access to the museum’s collection of over 45,500 works, specialized study collections and databases, the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and an 180,000-volume branch library specializing in American art. The Research and Scholars Center is a short walk from other Smithsonian museums and libraries, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the National Gallery of Art. Regular workshops, seminars, and lectures provide a forum for lively scholarly exchange and professional advancement.
Candidates may apply to one or more of the following three opportunities:
• SAAM and SIFP Fellowships — SAAM hosts fellows through the Smithsonian Institution Fellowship Program (SIFP), and also awards a number of named fellowships to graduate, predoctoral, postdoctoral, and senior candidates from this general pool. Deadline: 1 November 2023.
• The Betsy James Wyeth Fellowship in Native American Art — This joint fellowship at SAAM and the National Museum of the American Indian is awarded for a twelve-month term at the predoctoral level or a nine-month term at the postdoctoral or senior level. Deadline: 1 December 2023.
• The Audrey Flack Short-Term Fellowship — One fellowship is awarded at the predoctoral, postdoctoral, or senior level for a one-month term. Deadline: 1 February 2024.
18th-Century Hearth Cooking at the Queens County Farm Museum
From Eventbrite and Queens County Farm Museum:
Chris Lord-Barry, 18th-Century Hearth Cooking
Queens County Farm Museum, Floral Park, New York, Saturday, 4 November / 11 November 2023, 11am — 2pm
Join us in the kitchen of the Adriance Farmhouse at Queens County Farm Museum to learn how settlers prepared food over an open hearth.
Original 18th-century recipes, seasonal ingredients, traditional cooking utensils, and the warm embers of the fire will bring history to life as participants assist in preparing and sampling several delightful dishes. Participants will receive modern adaptations of all recipes to try at home. Advance online tickets ($53) are required as space is limited. The class is part of the Public Education Program at Queens Farm and is open to ages 18 and up. In the fall the session is offered on November 4 and then repeated on November 11.
Chris Lord-Barry is an educator with over 20 years of experience, who specializes in teaching 18th-century cooking. Over the past 10+ years, she has studied historic cookery and foodways specific to early America and has designed this popular class to share her passion for early American recipes with others.
The Queens County Farm Museum is a New York City Landmark, is on the National Register of Historic Places, and is a member of the Historic House Trust of New York City. Dating back to 1697, it occupies New York City’s largest remaining tract of undisturbed farmland and is one of the longest continuously farmed sites in New York State. The site includes historic farm buildings, a greenhouse complex, livestock, farm vehicles and implements, planting fields, an orchard, and an herb garden. Queens Farm connects visitors to agriculture and the environment through the lens of its 47-acre historic site, providing learning opportunities and creating conversations about biodiversity, nutrition, health and wellness, climate change and preserving local history. The centerpiece of the farm complex, the Adriance Farmhouse was first built as a three-room Dutch farmhouse in 1772. The house and surrounding area mirror the evolution of this unique tract of land from a colonial homestead to a truck farm that served the needs of a growing city in the early twentieth century. . .
Exhibition | Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave
Katsushika Hokusai, Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave), from Thirty-Six Views of Mt Fuji, late 1831, color woodblock print (London: The British Museum, acquired with the assistance of Art Fund and a contribution from the Brooke Sewell Bequest, 2008,3008.1).
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Opening in October at the Bowers Museum:
Beyond the Great Wave: Works by Hokusai from the British Museum
The British Museum, London, 25 May — 13 August 2017
Bowers Museum, Santa Ana, California, 21 October 2023 — 7 January 2024
Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849) is the renowned artist behind The Great Wave, one of the most iconic prints ever made. Originally part of the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, this seminal vision of man in nature is just one of the estimated 30,000 prints that Hokusai designed over his 70-year career. This exhibition includes a beautiful early example of The Great Wave and ventures beyond to feature a broad selection of works that Hokusai produced right up to his death at the age of 90.
Visitors will be able to examine Hokusai’s personal beliefs through more than 100 paintings, drawings, woodblock prints, and illustrated books that speak to his early career, rise to fame, interest in the natural and supernatural worlds, personal life, and search for immortality. Distinct from the art of his Japanese contemporaries, Hokusai’s work is intensely individual, subjective, energized, and sublime; and the exhibition will provide a powerfully emotional and spiritual experience.
Hokusai never left Japan, but his work traveled around the globe to inspire many European artists and collectors such as Monet and Van Gogh. The exhibition includes biographical portraits of six individuals who helped build the Hokusai collection at the British Museum and shows how these scholars and proponents of Japanese art understood and appreciated Hokusai’s genius, skill, and invention.
The presentation of this exhibition is a collaboration between the British Museum and the Bowers Museum.
Timothy Clark, ed., Hokusai: Beyond the Great Wave (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-0500094068, $65.
An 18th-C. Japanese Shōya House Arrives at The Huntington
Shōya House, ca. 1700, moved to The Huntington from Marugame, Kagawa prefecture, Japan
(San Marino: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, from Los Angeles residents Yohko and Akira Yokoi)
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Opening next month at The Huntington, from the press release (25 July 2023) . . .
Japanese Shōya House
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, opening 21 October 2023
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens will offer visitors a unique opportunity to see a restored residential compound from 18th-century rural Japan. Opening 21 October 2023, the Japanese Heritage Shōya House, a 3,000-square-foot residence built around 1700, served as the center of village life in Marugame, Japan. The compound has been reconstructed on a 2-acre site, which includes a newly constructed gatehouse and courtyard based on the original structures, as well as a small garden with a pond, an irrigation canal, agricultural plots, and other landscape elements that closely resemble the compound’s original setting. Visitors will be able to walk through a portion of the house and see how inhabitants lived their daily lives within the thoughtfully designed and meticulously crafted 320-year-old structure.
Illustrated aerial view of the Shōya House.
Los Angeles residents Yohko and Akira Yokoi offered their historic family home to The Huntington in 2016. Huntington representatives made numerous visits to the structure in Marugame and participated in study sessions with architects in Japan before developing a strategy for moving the house and reconstructing it at The Huntington. Since 2019, artisans from Japan have been working alongside local architects, engineers, and construction workers to assemble the structures and re-create the traditional wood and stonework features, as well as the roof tiles and plaster work, prioritizing the traditions of Japanese carpentry, artisanship, and sensitivity to materials.
“The new Japanese Heritage Shōya House will offer a glimpse into rural Japanese life some 300 years ago and provide insights into that culture and its sustainability practices,” Huntington president Karen Lawrence said. “We are very grateful to the Yokoi family for giving The Huntington the opportunity to tell this important story as an immersive experience for visitors.”
The historic house was the residence for successive generations of the Yokoi family, who served as the shōya, or village leaders, of a small farming community near Marugame, a city in Kagawa prefecture, Japan. Chosen by the feudal lord, a shōya acted as an intermediary between the government and the farmers. His duties included storing the village’s rice yield, collecting taxes, and maintaining census records, as well as settling disputes and enforcing the law. He also ensured that the lands remained productive by preserving seeds and organizing the planting and harvesting. The residence functioned as the local town hall and village square.
Sustainability is a major theme of the interpretive scheme. “We aim to present a working model of Edo period permaculture and regenerative agriculture,” said Robert Hori, the gardens cultural curator and programs director at The Huntington. “It represents real-life circumstances. An authentically constructed Japanese house using natural materials, combined with careful attention to agricultural practices, will demonstrate how a community became self-sufficient. We will show how emphasis was placed on reducing waste and repairing items so they could be reused or repurposed. Visitors will see how this 18th-century Japanese village maintained a symbiotic relationship between humans and the surrounding landscape.”
The compound occupies a recently developed area along the north end of The Huntington’s historic Japanese Garden. While the garden has featured an iconic Japanese House for the last 100 years, this new structure and surrounding elements will provide visitors with a fully immersive experience, allowing them to walk through it and learn about 18th-century rural Japanese life.
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The landscape surrounding the Japanese Heritage Shōya House is based on rural Japan in the preindustrial, mid–Edo period (1700–1760). Before arriving at the main house, visitors will pass through a small orchard of persimmon, citrus, and mulberry trees and a formal gatehouse, featuring black clay roof tiles and exterior walls adorned with a lattice design made of plaster. The original Shōya House was surrounded by solid walls, and the gates were locked at night for privacy and to shield the residents from a possible attack. Most villagers lived outside the gates and would pass through the gatehouse for community gatherings or business dealings with the shōya. The gatekeeper lived in one of the rooms in the structure. Servants and horses occupied the other spaces. A typhoon in the 1970s destroyed the majority of the original gatehouse, so The Huntington re-created the structure, which, in its new iteration, includes office space for Shōya House staff and docents, as well as public restrooms.
After visitors walk past the gatehouse, they will find themselves in a courtyard of compacted soil, where such life events as weddings, funerals, and annual celebrations would have been held; it was also where crops were dried before storage. The exterior of the home is made of wood and plaster that is punctuated by entryways and windows of glass and rice paper. The gradually sloping roof is adorned with clay tiles; around the edge of the roof are decorative tiles illustrated with a symbol representing a seed and sprout. On the corners of the roof, visitors can spot the Yokoi family crest, which includes sword blades and katabami, or wood sorrel, to symbolize their military might, abundance, and continued family line.
Exterior view of the Shōya House.
The house has two main entryways: The formal entrance on the left was originally for samurai and government officials, and the doorway on the right, which Huntington visitors will use, was for daily use by farmers and craftspeople. Inside the main house, visitors will first see the front rooms, which were used for official functions. The shoya carried out duties for the community, met with government officials, and hosted religious ceremonies and celebrations in these rooms. The house has multiple levels: The earthen-floored entryway was used by farmers as a workspace, while the higher levels were for more prestigious guests and used by the shōya for record keeping and tax payments. Sliding doors can divide the space into small rooms or be opened to create one large room.
The Shōya House experience will include interpretive materials, such as a video showing the disassembly and relocation of the house and its integration with the surroundings at The Huntington. In addition, visitors will be able to learn about the traditional skills and tools of Japanese carpentry, such as the wood joinery that was used in constructing the house.
Illustration looking down into the front rooms of the Shōya House.
Wide-open doorways toward the back of the house allow visitors to see the more private rooms where daily family life occurred; these spaces include a rustic kitchen and rooms used for eating, entertaining, and sleeping. Evidence of fine craftsmanship abounds throughout the house: Tatami mats, similar to those used in the original home, will cover the floors; decorative plates hide joinery; and ornate ranmas, or panels made of carved wood, are positioned to allow for ventilation in the home.
The room where special guests were once received, at the front west side of the residence, looks onto a formal garden containing carefully shaped pines and camellias, as well as cycads, a plant that was considered a symbol of luxury in 18th-century Japan. The rocks in the garden came directly from the original property and were placed in the exact same spots in relation to the house and a koi pond.
Outside of the house, visitors can peek into what was once the pit lavatory. A water drainage canal nearby will show how water runs from a reserve to the crops, which include rice, buckwheat, and sesame. Signage about traditional sustainable water systems will illustrate how the residential area connects to the surrounding agricultural plots.
Note: The Shōya House will be open from noon to 4pm.
Exhibition | Paintings in Print: Studying Art in China
Bitter Melon in Ten Bamboo Studio Collection of Calligraphy and Painting, ca. 1633–1703, woodblock-printed book mounted as album leaves, ink and colors on paper (multi-block technique), published in Nanjing (San Marino: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens).
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Opening next month at The Huntington:
Paintings in Print: Studying Art in China
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, 7 October 2023 — 27 May 2024
The exhibition Paintings in Print: Studying Art in China examines the ways painting manuals published in the 17th and 18th centuries used innovative printing methods to introduce the techniques, history, and appreciation of painting to widening audiences in early modern China.
In the 16th century, Chinese publishers began creating educational art manuals filled with colorful prints of paintings and texts on the history and methods of brush arts. The manuals were unprecedented because they taught aspiring painters and collectors from the growing merchant class how to create and appreciate literati art—a combination of painting, calligraphy, and poetry long practiced by elite scholars. Drawing from The Huntington’s collection, the exhibition focuses on two books: The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting and Ten Bamboo Studio Collection of Calligraphy and Painting. The books will be displayed together, in their entirety, for the first time in the United States. The texts will be presented in their original form as well as digitized to allow visitors to explore the materials more closely. They will be complemented with paintings—including recent donations from the Berman Foundation—that exemplify how artists studied manuals like these to learn the basics of their art.
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