Enfilade

Next month from BGC:

Sarah Cohen | Sugar, Silver, and the Bourbon Sucriers: Sweetening Slavery in 18th-Century France
The Françoise and Georges Selz Lectures on 18th- and 19th-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture
Online (Zoom), Bard Graduate Center, New York, 10 February 2022, 12.15 (ET)

Inseparable from the rise of sugar within the economies of international trade in eighteenth-century Europe was the Caribbean slave trade: in France, whose primary source of sugar for local consumption and re-export was its principal colony of Saint Domingue, the trade in enslaved persons swelled directly in tangent with the sugar business throughout the 1730s and beyond. But because all of the steps in harvesting and producing sugar, apart from some of the most elaborate refining processes, were carried out in the distant island colonies, such interdependency, to say nothing of the coerced labor it entailed, was invisible on the French dining table.

Paire de sucriers à poudre : esclaves chargés de cannes à sucre, 1730s (Paris: Musée du Louvre, photo by Daniel Arnaudet).

A startling exception to this submersion of the harsh facts of how sugar cane was harvested is found in a pair of silver sugar casters (sucriers) that depict a man and woman laboring beneath bundles of sugar cane, as if physically ‘delivering’ their sweet crystals for the elite dessert. Almost certainly made by the royal silversmith Claude II Ballin on commission for Louis-Henri, duc de Bourbon, the casters would have appeared among the duke’s many other worldly goods on display at the château of Chantilly in the 1730s. The harvesters would have been identifiable as an African woman and man through their carefully modelled physiognomies, which reflect incipient French understandings of racial type. Their bodies are cast in glistening, solid silver, while their hollowed burdens of bundled cane detach to dispense the powdered sweetener. Departing notably from typical examples of this type of luxury dispenser, whose baluster design references its placement and use on the table, rather than the sourcing of the product itself, the two large figures were also designed to occupy their own, unique place on a dessert or collation table. Cohen’s talk will explore the diverse implications of the sucriers within the context of international trade; the physical and cultural interconnections of sugar and slavery; and elite French practices of dining and festive entertainment in the early eighteenth century.

Registration is available here»

Sarah R. Cohen is Professor of Art History and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is also a joint Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on the body and sensory experience in art and culture from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, with a special emphasis on early modern France. Her books include Art, Dance and the Body in French Culture of the Ancien Régime (2000) and Enlightened Animals in Eighteenth-Century Art: Sensation, Matter, and Knowledge (2021). A third book, Picturing Animals in Early Modern Europe: Art and Soul, is forthcoming in 2022.

The sale of the Casino di Villa Ludovisi (Villa Aurora) has—understandably—generated lots of media attention (see the full announcement for press links), and at least some of the finds have involved the eighteenth century . . .

T. Corey Brennan, Inside the ‘World’s Most Expensive Home’: A Decade of Rutgers Research at the Villa Aurora in Rome
Online, 20 January 2022, noon (EST)

The Villa Aurora in Rome—for precisely 400 years the home of the papal Boncompagni Ludovisi family—will go on auction this month with an asking price of $532 million dollars. Called by one leading art historian a “sort of seventeenth-century Sistine Chapel,” the Villa Aurora boasts famous mural art by more than a dozen major artists, including a unique 1597 ceiling painting by Caravaggio. In this richly illustrated talk, Professor Corey Brennan will discuss this landmark sale, his decade-long collaboration with the owners—†HSH Prince Nicolò and HSH Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi—and the discoveries inside the Villa made with over two dozen Rutgers undergraduate students. This virtual presentation, open to the public, will take place on Thursday, 20 January 2022, 12:00–1:00pm (EST). Registration information is available here.