Exhibition | UFO 1665
So Sehr War Nei Erzürnet Gott / Never Was God So Full of Wrath, detail, emblematic representation from Daniel Meisner, Politica – Politica, Newes Emblematisches Büchlein, I–VIII (Nürnberg, ca. 1700), engraving (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek).
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I was fortunate to see this exhibition a few weeks ago and can’t recommend it highly enough: it’s thoughtfully conceived, brilliantly installed, incredibly engaging, and deeply satisfying. It’s also just a lot of fun! A model for how to make the history of visual conventions (overlapping with history of ideas generally) broadly accessible (my thirteen-year-old daughter was riveted). It’s a reminder of how many of our categories for making sense of the world emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The catalogue is certainly worth ordering. –CH
UFO 1665: The Air Battle of Stralsund / Die Luftschlacht von Stralsund
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 5 May — 3 September 2023
Curated by Moritz Wullen
In April 1665, six fishermen witnessed an unexplained celestial phenomenon: an aerial battle in the skies above the Baltic Sea near Stralsund. As evening broke, a dark-grey disk appeared high above the city centre. UFO 1665 is the first exhibition of its kind to focus on this historical UFO sighting. With reference to contemporaneous visual and textual sources, the exhibition reconstructs the way this event was portrayed in the media and exposes certain paradigms and communications strategies that are still used today to determine how we report on ‘unexplained aerial phenomena’ (UAPs).
The exhibition takes visitors on an expedition into a strange and unfamiliar world of images that otherwise remains concealed from the museum’s general audience in archives or between the pages of old books. Those who are familiar with 17th-century art only from the grand galleries of paintings may be taken aback: upon entering the exhibition space, visitors might feel they are entering a baroque parallel universe with strange symbols in the sky, airships, space rockets, and flying saucers. Everything is centred around one of the most spectacular celestial phenomena of the modern era: at 2pm on 8 April 1665, six men fishing for herring off the coast of Stralsund watch as great flocks of birds in the sky morph into warships and engage in a thunderous air battle. The decks teem with ghostly figures. When, at dusk, “a flat, round shape like a plate” appears above the St. Nicholas Church, they flee. The following day, they find that they are trembling all over and complain of pain.
Media Transformation
The media spread the news like wildfire, with the publishers of various leaflets and newspapers locked in fierce competition with each other to concoct the most colourful versions and interpretations of events. It was religious convictions in particular that were most responsible for determining how the event was transformed by the media. The general public could not have known that what had actually been witnessed was an atmospheric reflection of a sea battle that was raging just beyond the horizon. Instead, they were convinced that the universe was ruled by a god who had the power to project visions of impending disaster into the sky. The air battle was likewise perceived as a prodigium (Latin for ‘omen’ or ‘portent’).
The visual themes of the 17th century were likely also decisive in terms of determining how the media shaped depictions of the air battle, with futuristic visions of airships—which the people of the 17th century were incredibly enthusiastic about—playing a special role. More than 100 years before the first manned hot air balloon flight was conducted, Francesco Lana Terzi (1631–1687) had published his design for a flying boat borne aloft by vacuum spheres, which caused a great sensation throughout Europe. The fact that the project could never actually be realised did little to detract from the general fervour. Humankind continued to dream of conquering the skies.
The Power of Myths
Another theme of the exhibition is the power of myths: when, on 19 June 1670, lightning struck—of all places—the St. Nicholas Church, the building above which the grey disc had loomed so ominously five years earlier, the celestial phenomenon was subsequently interpreted as a sign of God’s wrath. The descriptions and accounts of the day invoked a mystical link to the destruction of Babylon at the hands of a great millstone, as it is described in the Book of Revelation. However, the popular perception of the air battle over Stralsund was not only shaped by the media, beliefs, designs, and myths of the baroque era; it also reveals the kinds of things that humans of the era were unable to envisage and comprehend. There are no 17th-century sources, for example, that mention extraterrestrials in connection with the unexplained aerial phenomena. Yet at the same time, the human imagination was already so far advanced that it could well conceive of expeditions to other inhabited planets and the kinds of propulsion systems that would be required to carry these out. Why nobody considered for a moment that extraterrestrials might appear in our skies with their own flying machines is one of the many mysteries this exhibition endeavours to solve.
An Excursion into the Present
This cultural and media-historical investigation culminates in an excursion into the present, which focuses on the videos and accounts of sightings of mysterious ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ (UAPs) made by the US military that went viral in 2019 and even made their way onto the front cover of an issue of Der Spiegel two years later. The sightings in question have given rise to a maddeningly broad spectrum of interpretations. Are they physically explicable natural phenomena, sophisticated high-tech drones made in China or Russia, extraterrestrials, or even visitors from the future? Even NASA and the Pentagon seem completely baffled. We can, however, be sure of one thing: the factors that were so crucial to the media success of the UFO of 1665 lack none of their that same potency today.
The exhibition is curated by Moritz Wullen, director of the Kunstbibliothek.
Moritz Wullen, UFO 1665: The Air Battle of Stralsund / Die Luftschlacht von Stralsund (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 2023), 112 pages, ISBN 978-3868327502 (bilingual edition, German and English), €24.
New Book | Piranesi’s Candelabra and the Presence of the Past
From Oxford UP:
Caroline van Eck, Piranesi’s Candelabra and the Presence of the Past: Excessive Objects and the Emergence of a Style in the Age of Neoclassicism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-0192845665, £70 / $90.
Near the end of his life, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) created three colossal candelabra mainly from fragments of sculpture excavated near the Villa Hadriana in Tivoli—two of which are now in the Ashmolean Museum, with the other one in the Louvre. Although these objects were among the most sought-after and prestigious of Piranesi’s works and fetched enormous prices during his lifetime, they suffered a steep decline in appreciation from the 1820s onwards, and even today they are among the least studied of the artist’s works. Piranesi’s Candelabra and the Presence of the Past uncovers the intense investment around the start of the nineteenth century—by artists, patrons, collectors, and the public—in objects that made Graeco-Roman antiquity present again. Caroline van Eck’s study examines how objects make their makers, or viewers feel that they are again in the presence of antiquity, that not only antiquity has been revived, but that classical statues become alive under viewers’ gaze. The book considers the three candelabra in depth, providing the biography of these objects, from the excavation of the Roman fragments to their entry into private and public collection. Van Eck considers the context that Piranesi gave them by including them in his Vasi, Candelabri e Cippi (1778), allowing us to rethink the processes that led to the development of neoclassicism from the perspective of the objects and objectscapes that came into being in Rome at the end of the eighteenth century.
Caroline van Eck studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, and classics and philosophy at Leiden University. She obtained a PhD in aesthetics at the University of Amsterdam in 1994. She has held teaching positions at the Universities of Amsterdam, Groningen, and Leiden, where she was appointed Professor of Art and Architectural History in 2006. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art at Yale University, a Visiting Professor in Ghent, Yale, York, and the Ecole Normale Supérieur in Paris, and in 2018 held the Panofsky Chair at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. In September 2016, she was appointed Professor of Art History at the University of Cambridge. She delivered the 2017 Slade Lectures in Oxford.
c o n t e n t s
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1 ‘A Neoclassical Dream and an Archaeologist’s Nightmare’: Piranesi’s Colossal Candelabra in the Louvre and Ashmolean Museum
2 Candelabra in Antiquity, Their Rediscovery, and Reception
3 Making Antiquity Materially Present
4 Animal Features
5 Animation, Immersion, and the Revival of Antiquity
6 Movement, Animation, and Intentionality
Conclusion: ‘Antiquity Is Only Now Coming into Being’. The Origins of the Style Empire and the Turn towards the Object, 1770–1820
References
Index
Exhibition | Making Her Mark
Opening this fall at the BMA:
Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400–1800
Baltimore Museum of Art, 1 October 2023 — 7 January 2024
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 30 March — 1 July 2024
Curated by Andaleeb Badiee Banta and Alexa Greist
For centuries, women artists in Europe were considered rare and less talented than their male counterparts. Women who achieved professional artistic careers were deemed anomalous or exceptional, while those who engaged in creative pursuits in the home were dismissed as amateurs, and their works were categorized as material culture rather than art.
Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400–1800, the BMA’s much anticipated major exhibition opening 1 October 2023, aims to correct these broadly held but mistaken beliefs through more than 200 works of diverse media and scale. From royal portraits and devotional sculptures to embroidered objects, tapestries, costumes, wax sculptures, metalwork, ceramics, graphic arts, furniture, and more, Making Her Mark will feature objects from the 15th to 18th centuries that reflect the multifaceted and often overlooked ways that women contributed to the visual arts of Europe.
The exhibition’s focus on displaying exclusively objects made by women or toward which women contributed their labor distinguishes this project by putting women makers of all social levels in conversation with each other through their works. Examples by artistic heroines such as Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Leyster, Luisa Roldán, Rosalba Carriera, Rachel Ruysch, and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun will join exceptional products of female artisanal collectives and talented amateurs who operated outside of the male-dominated professional arena and often remained anonymous in the historical record. Further, sublime examples of ceramics, metalwork, and cabinetmaking from this era will reflect women’s involvement in major manufactories and workshops.
Organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Making Her Mark is curated by Andaleeb Badiee Banta, Senior Curator and Department Head, Prints, Drawings & Photographs at the BMA, and Alexa Greist, Curator and R. Fraser Elliott Chair, Prints & Drawings at the AGO. The exhibition is generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and Sheela Murthy/MurthyNAYAK Foundation.
Andaleeb Badiee Banta and Alexa Greist, with Theresa Kutasz Christensen, Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400–1800 (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions, 2023), 264 pages, ISBN: 9781773103181, $60.
Call for Applications | Making Her Mark: Exhibition Study Day
From the Call for Applications:
Making Her Mark: Exhibition Study Day
Baltimore Museum of Art, 23 October 2023
Applications due by 6 September 2023
The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario are delighted to be co-organizing the exhibition Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400–1800, scheduled to run from 1 October 2023 to 7 January 2024 in Baltimore and from 30 March until 1 July of 2024 in Toronto. Curated by Andaleeb Badiee Banta, BMA Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs, and Alexa Greist, AGO Associate Curator and R. Fraser Elliott Chair, Prints & Drawings, this exhibition presents a feminist revision of early modern European art. An invitational study day will be held in the exhibition galleries at the BMA, where scholars and the exhibition curators will facilitate discussions around the themes and objects on display. Advanced graduate students and early career professionals from diverse humanistic disciplines are invited to apply to participate. Up to 10 selected participants will receive a $250 travel stipend, made possible by a generous grant from the Kress Foundation, to offset travel costs.
As the first North American exhibition in over forty years to stage such an expansive woman artist-centered approach to Renaissance, Baroque, and 18th-century European art, Making Her Mark will be unique in its presentation of a wide range of materials, media, and scale, foregrounding quality works made by women, many of whom remain largely unfamiliar to general and specialist audiences. Exemplary works by well-known artistic ‘heroines’ such as Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Leyster, Luisa Roldán, Rosalba Carriera, and Rachel Ruysch will join exceptional products of women-led workshops, female artisanal collectives, and talented amateurs who operated outside of the male-dominated professional arena. Expanding beyond the traditional focus on the ‘major arts’ of large-scale painting and sculpture, Making Her Mark aims to be a bold corrective to the historical assumption that women artists and makers of this period were rare and relatively untalented. This presentation will consider the entire European continent and seeks to subvert the typical monographic format, identifying it as an inherently sexist critical apparatus that encouraged the classification of women artists as anomalous.
The exhibition’s scope is purposefully broad, both temporally and geographically, in order to allow for differences in individual social circumstances, power dynamics, and cultural context, and to address the careers of women artists who had transnational reputations and relationships. Bringing together such varied objects will present them through a wider lens, one that includes creative production by female practitioners who did not or could not subscribe to male-determined criteria for what constituted important or legitimate art. Thematic groupings on the themes of power, faith, interiority, scientific documentation, empire, professional pathways, and entrepreneurship guide visitors through a wide variety of media exploring women’s contributions to the early history of botany, zoology, and epistemology; book arts; religious and history subjects; print culture; textile production; ceramics; wax modeling; metalwork; and courtly and private portraiture. A diverse presentation of works brilliantly illuminates the fact that women were involved with all manner of artistic production and contributed to nearly every aspect of early modern visual culture, even if their names were not recorded for posterity.
We invite applications from advanced graduate students as well as early career scholars who are no more than five years out from degree conferral. The ideal applicant will be engaged with the study of early modern women and materiality. We welcome applications from scholars working in disciplines outside of art history. In order to minimize the cost of attendance, we are pleased to offer accepted applicants free entrance to the exhibition and a $250 travel stipend, generously provided by the Kress Foundation.
To be considered for participation and the travel grant, please submit a one-page CV. Additionally, please provide a brief summary (not to exceed 250 words) of your interest and how this experience in the exhibition will benefit your current work. Application materials should be sent to Theresa Kutasz Christensen at TChristensen@artbma.org. We cannot consider applications received after Wednesday, September 6th. Selected applicants will be notified of their acceptance by September 22nd.
Exhibition | Ingenious Women, 16th to 18th Centuries
Angelika Kauffmann, Clio, Muse of History, detail, ca. 1770–75 (Augsburg: Schaezlerpalais–Deutsche Barockgalerie; photo by Andreas Brücklmair).
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Opening this fall at the the Bucerius Kunst Forum:
Ingenious Women: Women Artists and Their Companions
Geniale Frauen: Künstlerinnen und ihre Weggefährten
Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg, 14 October 2023 — 28 January 2024
Kunstmuseum Basel, 2 March — 30 June 2024
With the exhibition Ingenious Women: Women Artists and Their Companions, the Bucerius Kunst Forum traces the careers of outstanding women artists (Künstlerinnen) from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. For the first time, the family context in which the women artists pursued their careers is addressed and made visible through juxtaposition with works by their fathers, brothers, husbands, and fellow painters. Today often forgotten, female artists of their time were able to achieve extraordinary success in a wide variety of family constellations: they became court painters, teachers, entrepreneurs, and even publishers and were awarded the highest honours.
The exhibition presents around 140 works by 26 women artists, including Sofonisba Anguissola, Judith Leyster, Marietta Robusti (Tintoretto’s daughter), and Angelika Kauffmann. Masterful portraits, still lifes, and historical scenes in painting, along with drawings and prints from across Europe, ranging from the Renaissance and Baroque periods to early Neoclassicism, will be brought together in Hamburg. For the first time, works by women artists will be juxtaposed with those of their male colleagues in such a pointed way that both formal and stylistic similarities and differences will come to the fore.
In the early modern period it was not altogether impossible for women to pursue a career as an artist, but it was definitely outside the norm and therefore always subject to special challenges. Anyone wishing to practice a freelance profession had to join a guild, but some regions denied membership to women, and in others it entailed considerable hurdles and costs. A conspicuous number of women artists of this period came from or married into artistic families. They worked for their fathers, brothers, and husbands, and often in secret. At the royal courts of Europe, the situation was different: with an open mind to artistic achievement—regardless of origin or gender—women were able to work openly as artists at court. Women such as Lavinia Fontana, Anna Dorothea Therbusch, and Rachel Ruysch asserted themselves against social norms, capturing the attention and earned the esteem of their contemporaries. The fact that they fell into oblivion is also due to the history of art scholarship, in which a male gaze dominated until the advanced twentieth century.
The exhibition shows the unique careers of these pioneering women artists and offers new insights into their lives and work, as well as thought-impulses on contemporary issues such as equality and the reconciliation of work and family.
Bodo Brinkmann and Katrin Dyballa, eds., with contributions by Beiträge von B. Brinkmann, K. Dyballa, S. Engel, A. Mensger, R. Müller, S. Salomon, A. Tacke, S. Pisot, I. Wenderholm, and S. Werthemann, Geniale Frauen: Künstlerinnen und ihre Weggefährten (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2023), 300 pages, ISBN: 978-3777442365, €45.
Exhibition | Out of the Shadows: Women Artists
Installation view, Out of the Shadows: Women Artists from the 16th to the 18th Century, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister at Dresden’s Zwinger, 2023.
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This installation on view at the Zwinger closes in a few weeks:
Out of the Shadows: Women Artists from the 16th to the 18th Century
Aus dem Schatten: Künstlerinnen vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Zwinger, Dresden, 12 May — 20 August 2023
With this cabinet exhibition, the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister turns its attention to women artists (Künstlerinnen) from the 16th to the 18th century, who for a long time have been overshadowed by the ‘Great Masters’ of art history. With their works represented in the collection, they are a minority, and to this day their names are far less familiar than those of their male counterparts. This is not due to inability, but to a structural discrimination that is perpetuated in art historiography.
Women generally were not allowed formal academic training nor drawing from live (nude) models. Only a few women were lucky enough to grow up and be promoted in an artistic environment, so that institutional and social structures did not necessarily hinder their advancement. In many cases, they were the daughters of artists trained in their father’s workshop.
The cosmopolite Angelika Kauffmann (1741–1807) achieved widespread recognition in her lifetime and is also represented here with five works. In a time when only men were seen as true artists and women were credited, at most, with talent but never genius, the painter managed to assert herself by also being a shrewd strategist and self-promotor. She produced numerous history paintings with references to antiquity in which women take the leading roles.
Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) was one of the first women of the modern period to work as an independent artist. She painted numerous portraits and history paintings of mythological and biblical themes, some of them in large format. The devotional painting in Dresden, The Holy Family, is an early work by the Bolognese artist which, after undergoing restoration, will be included in the show in mid-August.
This concentrated presentation also features copperplate engravings by Diana Scultori from the holdings of the Kupferstich-Kabinett as well as paintings and prints by other noteworthy women artists such as Elisabetta Sirani, Barbara Longhi, Rachel Ruysch, Maria van Oosterwijck, and Theresa Concordia Mengs.
Stephan Koja and Iris Yvonne Wagner, Out of the Shadows: Women Artists from the 16th to the 18th Century (Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 2023), 144 pages, ISBN: 978-3954987559 (German edition) / ISBN: 978-3954987696 (English edition), €34.
Call for Essays | The Material History of the Visually Altered Book
Extra-illustrated copy of Johann Amos Comenius, Orbis Sensualium Pictus, translated by Charles Hoole, 12th edition, (London, 1777) in Bodleian Library, Vet.A6.e.2518.
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Extra Extra: The Material History of the Visually Altered Book
A collection of essays edited by Julie Park and Adam Smyth
Proposals due by 31 August 2023
Julie Park and Adam Smyth invite proposals for essays to be included in an edited collection on the long history of the extra-illustrated book. Extra-illustration had a vital flowering in late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century culture, but what are the earlier roots of this practice in medieval and early modern cultures and what are the legacies today? The editors welcome proposals by contributors from different backgrounds, career stages, disciplines, and fields (art historians, book historians, book artists, book sellers, curators and librarians, media studies scholars, and more) to consider the methods, materials, forms, and consequences of extra-illustration as a transhistorical medium and activity. Long before and well after Richard Bull’s pivotal act of reconstructing James Granger’s Biographical History of England (1769) by affixing engraved prints to illustrate its textual body, book readers and makers have added images to pre-existing works of writing, fundamentally altering their physical design and composition, and destabilizing categories of book, art and object in doing so. How might we consider, for instance, medieval books, continually modified by their owners with added images and text, or the contemporary artist’s book, frequently an alteration of a previously printed book object through added visual elements, as forms of extra-illustration?
How might we think of extra-illustration in terms of a series of tensions: between amplification (the book extrapolated) and destruction (the book blown up); between the classificatory logic of James Granger and chaos; between order and flux; between the iconophilic and the iconoclastic. Is extra-illustration an erotic, libidinal process? Is it a respectable activity for a quiet drawing room, or is it, in Holbrook Jackson’s words, “a singularly perverted idea”? What is the extra-illustrated volume’s relationship to the codex: tribute, or parody? What is the politics of extra-illustration? Is extra-illustration connected to retreat and consolation, or is it driven by a grasping, colonial ambition? Is it a radical upending of ideas of order and convention, or is it an assertion of hierarchy? How do we read—or how did readers read—these combinatory texts? And are there extra-illustrators who occupy a particularly important place in this tradition—figures like Charlotte and Alexander Sutherland, perhaps, or Richard Bull, or John Kitto?
Please submit proposals of 175–250 words, with a brief (one-page) CV, to Julie Park (jvp6261@psu.edu) and Adam Smyth (adam.smyth@ell.ox.ac.uk) by 31 August 2023.
The Burlington Magazine, June 2023
The eighteenth century in the June issue of The Burlington (with apologies for being so slow to post, –CH) . . .
The Burlington Magazine 165 (June 2023)
e d i t o r i a l
• “The Future of the RIBA Drawings Collection,” p. 583.
a r t i c l e s
• Tessa Murdoch, “Roubiliac and Sprimont: A Friendship Revisited,” pp. 600–11.
Recent research into the circles of Huguenot artists and craftsmen working in London in the mid-eighteenth century has provided new evidence about the friendship and working relationship between the sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac and the goldsmith Nicholas Sprimont. This lends weight to the belief that Roubiliac provided small models for casting in silver and bronze as well as for the porcelain manufactory co-founded by Sprimont in Chelsea in 1745.
• Perrin Stein, “Liotard and Boucher: A Question of Precedence,” pp. 612–19.
There has been much debate about whether Liotard or Boucher invented the motif of a woman in Turkish costume reading a book while reclining on a sofa, which appears in both their work in the 1740s. New evidence that resolves the question highlights the very different ways these two artists constructed exoticism.
• Ann Gunn, “Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda: A Missing Link in the Chain of Provenance,” pp. 620–22.
• Simon Spier and Judith Phillips, “Joséphine Bowes’s Gift to Napoleon III: Antoine-Jean Gros’s Napoleon Distributing the Cross of the Legion of Honour to Artists during His Visit to the Salon of 1808,” pp. 626–29.
r e v i e w s
• Alexandra Gajewski, “The New Museum in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris,” pp. 630–37.
When in 1995–98 the books of the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, were moved to their monumental new home in the west of the city, the library’s historic collections of antiquities, coins, medals, and other precious objects remained in the original complex of buildings in central Paris where they had been shown since the eighteenth century. Their reinstallation in the library’s newly restored museum rooms was opened last year.
• Kirstin Kennedy, Review of the exhibition Treasures from Faraway: Medieval and Renaissance Objects from The Schroder Collection (Strawberry Hill, 2023), pp. 641–43.
• Aileen Dawson, Review of the exhibition English Delftware (Bristol Museum and Art Gallery (from February 2023), pp. 652–54.
• Belinda Thomson, Review of the exhibition Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism (Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2023), pp. 654–57. [In Paris, the show is entitled Berthe Morisot et l’art du XVIIIe siècle: Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, Perronneau]
• J. V. G. Mallet, Review of Lilli Hollein, Rainald Franz, and Timothy Wilson, eds., Tin-Glaze and Image Culture: The MAK Maiolica Collection in its Wider Context (Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2022), pp. 660–62.
• Clare Hornsby, Review of Andrew Robinson, Piranesi: Earliest Drawings / I primi disegni (Artemide Edizioni, 2022), pp. 666–67.
• G. A. Bremner, Review of Gauvin Alexander Bailey, The Architecture of Empire: France in India and Southeast Asia, 1664–1962 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), pp. 667–68
o b i t u a r y
• Peter Hecht, Obituary for Ger Luijten (1956–2022), pp. 675–76.
s u p p l e m e n t
• Recent Acquisitions (2016–22) of European Works of Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts
Colloquium | A Multifaceted Rococo
From the conference programme:
A Multifaceted Rococo / Un Rococo Multiforme
Musée de Grenoble and MSH Alpes, Grenoble, 21-22 September 2023
Organized by Marlen Schneider and Michael Yonan, with Joëlle Vaissiere
Né à Paris sous l’Ancien Régime en réponse à la culture artistique du règne de Louis XIV, le rococo semble évocateur de toute une ère de l’histoire française : un art dédié aux surfaces et à la sensualité, doté d’une complexité formelle et visuelle et d’une abondance ornementale. Or, le rococo a eu un impact sur l’évolution de l’art du XVIIIe siècle à une échelle globale, et certaines nations ont même vu naître des variations capables de rivaliser avec les exemples parisiens. Le colloque permettra d’aborder à la fois le rococo dans sa dimension transnationale, mais aussi sa culture matérielle, prenant en compte les formes et usages multiples de l’art rocaille. Cette approche mettra en lumière un large éventail d’utilisations, d’expressions formelles, de choix stylistiques, de significations culturelles et de pratiques, qui dépassent grandement nos connaissances actuelles.
t h u r s d a y , 2 1 s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 3
14.30 Accueil
15.00 Introduction — Michael Yonan (University of California) and Marlen Schneider (Université Grenoble Alpes/LARHRA)
15.30 Redéfinir le rococo
Modération: Marlen Schneider (Université Grenoble Alpes/LARHRA)
• Carl Magnusson (Université de Lausanne) — Réduire le foisonnement artistique du XVIIIe siècle en style
• Michael Yonan (University of California) — The Ecological Rococo of 18th-Century Bavaria
• Philippe Halbert (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art) — Canada’s Spiritual Rococo
f r i d a y , 2 2 s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 3
9.00 Accueil
9.15 Géographies du rococo
Modération: Michael Yonan (University of California)
• Philippe Bordes (Université Lyon II / LARHRA) — Du Rococo européen à Paris dans les années 1780: Johann Julius Heinsius et Gaetano Merchi
• Vladimir Simic (University of Belgrade) — Transcending Borders: Rococo Artistic Synthesis in Southeast Europe and the Habsburg Influence
• Marlen Schneider (UGA / LARHRA) — Le Rococo frédéricien fut-il français? Les sources et enjeux multiples de l’art de cour sous Frédéric II en Prusse
• Stacey Sloboda (UMass Boston) — Making Lines Matter: Carving in 18th-Century London
14.00 Matérialités
Modération: Sophie Raux (Université Lyon II / LARHRA)
• Thomas Wilke (Universität Greifswald) — Rocaille in the Making: François Antoine Vassé’s Designs for the French Navy
• Agata Dworzak (Jagiellonian University) — Expressive Rococo: Lviv Rococo Sculpture between Emotions and Form
• Sandra Costa Saldanha (Universidade de Coimbra) — The Rise of Rococo: Approaches on a Long-term Sensibility in 18th-Century Portuguese Sculpture
• Joana Mylek (Munich) — An Abundance of Everything: The Bohemian Rococo in the 19th Century
17.30 Conclusions
Call for Papers | Collecting and Knowledge Production through Travel
A reminder that a few sessions at RSA push the ‘Renaissance’ well into the early modern period. The full Call for Papers is available here.
Collecting and Knowledge Production through Travel (The Society for the History of Collecting)
Renaissance Society of America Conference, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, 21–23 March 2024
Proposals due by 8 August 2023
The importance of travel in the circulation of ideas and goods in the early modern period cannot be overemphasized. Travel—whether for commercial, private, or public purposes—was a source of information and experience, and travellers collected at every level, bringing back new and rare objects as well as commercially important goods. Travellers might return with works of art, which they then organised and arranged into their collections, while traders negotiated and acquired rarities to be sold on the European markets. However, collectors created imaginary worlds in their collections as they gathered information, ideas, descriptions, and literary texts from cultures other than their own, or employed ekphrasis to relate new narratives and new art works.
The proposed sessions at RSA 2024 aim to investigate the intellectual contexts in which objects were collected, the relationships between travel accounts, whether published or unpublished, and the creation of new understandings of worlds beyond the immediate world of the collector. We intend to explore the dynamic relationships between trade and collectibles, the perceptions created by travelogues and travel manuscripts, and travels of the imagination, which could transcend the voyages made and recounted. We invite new research into any aspect of these topics as we aim to recover the intellectual environment created by travel in early modern Europe that influenced collectors. Equally important were the networks created by travellers who voyaged to different centres in Europe and beyond, possibly through previous contacts but equally creating new contacts and new networks in which collections were discussed and exchanged. We are also interested in papers that delve into the question of travel from a non-European perspective.
As an associate organization of RSA, the Society for the History of Collecting can sponsor up to four sessions. Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers. They must include a title, an abstract of no more than 150 words, keywords, and a one-page CV (including PhD completion year or expected completion). Speakers will need to be members of RSA at the time of the conference, and we strongly encourage them to be members of the Society for the History of Collecting. Proposals should be sent to session convenors Sophia McCabe, Adriana Turpin, and Lisa de Zoete at info@societyhistorycollecting.org with the heading “RSA 2024 Proposal” by 8 August 2023.
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