New Book | Fragonard: Painting Out of Time
From Reaktion Books and the University of Chicago Press:
Satish Padiyar, Fragonard: Painting Out of Time (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), 248 pages, ISBN: 978-1789142099, £35 / $55.
At the time of his death in 1806, the rococo artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard had not painted for two decades. Following a period of huge public success, the painter’s reputation fell. Fragonard: Painting Out of Time takes this prolonged artistic silence as a point of departure to investigate the maverick personality of Fragonard within the lively society of eighteenth-century France. Personally secretive, Fragonard nevertheless created revealing images that undermined a normal sense of space and time. Satish Padiyar investigates the life and work of the last of the libertine painters of the ancien regime, a contemporary of Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and presents dramatic new perspectives on works such as The Progress of Love, painted for Madame du Barry, the infamous The Bolt, and the ever-popular The Swing.
Satish Padiyar is Honorary Research Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art. His previous publications include Chains: David, Canova, and the Fall of the Public Hero in Postrevolutionary France (2007).
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
1 Secrets
2 Surprise
3 Dreams
References
Select Biography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index
Call for Papers | AAH 2021, Online
From AAH:
Association for Art History (AAH) Conference
Online (University of Birmingham), 4–17 April 2021
Proposals due by 2 November 2020
After much discussion and deliberation the Association for Art History has decided to convert the 2021 Annual Conference from a hybrid event to a fully virtual event. Our decision comes on the back of ongoing uncertainty regarding COVID-19 and follows the UK government’s recent announcement to remain working from home for the next six months, where possible. Our primary focus is the safety and well-being of conference participants, prospective delegates, and staff. Whilst it’s disappointing not to be able to bring people together in person to share research and exchange ideas, we are very excited about doing this virtually instead. We are looking forward to hosting an expanded event and engaging with even more people and even more international research.
The 2021 Annual Conference was expanded to a four day event to accommodate sessions from this year’s conference which was cancelled. The 2021 conference will still take place over four days, 14–17 April; and we will continue to work with the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham and with museums and galleries in Birmingham. Session Convenors and speakers will be invited to participate and present their papers digitally, and participate in digital session discussions and debates on-screen, using a secure virtual event platform that will allow delegates maximum access to papers and discussions. Session and paper formats will remain the same, and the four-day programme will continue to offer a range of additional workshops, virtual tours, keynote lectures and networking opportunities for delegates to engage with. We will be conscious of international time differences and screen-fatigue, but aim to offer delegates the same quality of content and experience that people have come to expect, respect and enjoy at an Association for Art History Annual Conference. In light of this decision, we have extended our Call for Papers by two weeks to Monday, 2 November 2020.
Please email your paper proposals direct to the session convenor(s). You need to provide a title and abstract (250 words maximum) for a 25-minute paper (unless otherwise specified), your name and institutional affiliation (if any). Please make sure the title is concise and reflects the contents of the paper because the title is what appears online, in social media and in the printed programme. You should receive an acknowledgement of receipt of your submission within two weeks.
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The following sessions will likely be of interest to Enfilade readers; be sure, however, to check the AAH website for the complete Call for Papers.
Displaying Art in the Early Modern Period, 1450–1750: Exhibiting Practices and Exhibition Spaces
Pamela Bianchi (Paris 8 University), pamelabianchi1@gmail.com
Over the years, despite the increased interest in spatial issues and some iconic studies (Luckhurst, Haskell, Koch), little attention has been paid to the long-term history of the exhibition space and exhibition-making practices. Before the appearance of the first painting exhibitions and the spaces specially designed to show collections, the idea of showing art was mainly related to the habit of dressing up spaces for political and religious commemorations, cultural festivals and marketing strategies. Thus, various venues (palaces, cloisters, façades, squares, pavilions, auction houses, fairs, shops and so forth), where sociability was performed and experienced, ended up becoming temporary and privileged platforms of exhibiting.
What were those places and events? What aesthetic, cultural, social and political discourses intersected with the early idea of exhibition space? How did showing art shape a new vocabulary within these events and, vice versa, how did these occasions condition exhibiting practices? Who were the producers, actors and spectators of these processes, devices and spaces? How can we relate early exhibition logic with art history and exhibition design theories? Which kinds of sources (treatises, depictions) are involved?
The panel proposes to reconsider those events and habits that contributed to defining exhibition-making practices and to shaping the imagery of the exhibition space in the early modern period (1450–1750). Also, it seeks to define a new geography of exhibiting, not limited to Europe but expanded to include exhibiting practices in the early modern Americas, Africa and Asia. It encourages connections between art history, exhibition studies and architectural history, and studies crossing micro-histories and long-term changes, in order to open new perspectives of study and to foster historiographical research through an interdisciplinary approach.
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Reanimating the Past: Embodied Knowledge as Art-Historical Method
Juliet Bellow (American University), bellow@american.edu
Meredith Martin (New York University), msm240@nyu.edu
This session will explore how embodied knowledge can open up new avenues of art-historical inquiry by offering unique insights into the past. In recent years, this interest in the body as a research method and a pedagogical tool has led to a wide range of new practices, among them staging dance performances in museums; reenacting historical events or postures; and learning about artists’ processes by remaking lost pigments or other materials. We aim to discuss what is to be gained from these efforts—how embodied knowledge might expand our understanding of art history as a discipline. Conversely, what does art history have to teach us about the experience and the history of embodiment?
We seek papers covering a variety of chronological periods, geographical areas, cultural traditions and media; we particularly encourage presentations that directly incorporate embodied practices. Presenters may focus on artworks with an embodied dimension, or those for which bodies and movement may reanimate still objects (through tactics such as tableaux vivants). We also welcome papers that relate embodied knowledge to congruent or contiguous methodologies, such as material culture studies, that seek to understand and awaken the haptic or affective dimensions of artworks. Ultimately, we are interested in ways that embodied practices in the present can add new layers of meaning to historical images, objects and texts or, by employing new movement vocabularies, can reveal aspects of artworks that have been hitherto hidden or latent.
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Race and Representation in the French Colonial Empire
Susannah Blair (Columbia University), seb2210@columbia.edu
Stephanie O’Rourke (University of St Andrews), so38@st-andrews.ac.uk
This session will consolidate new research on the visual culture of race in France and its colonies during the 18th century and into the 19th century. It will be oriented around two key terms, ‘representation’ and ‘possession’, and their many resonances—artistic, political, legal and relational. Papers will be invited to explore how art objects articulated, contested and disseminated changing notions of racial identity and citizenship in France and its global networks.
Over the past several years, scholars have examined the role of pictorial representation in shaping ideas of race, identity, indigeneity and slavery in the context of the British Empire. Bringing together new scholarship that builds upon these precedents, we aim to address a deliberately expansive geographical notion of French visual culture, one that includes the Caribbean, New France, North Africa, Canada and the Indian Ocean in addition to sites within the ‘metropole’ such as Paris and Nantes. Fostering a dialogue between art history, indigenous studies and critical race theory, our panel will provide a crucial scholarly platform for research that can inform pedagogy, curatorial practice and future scholarship.
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Smell and Stereotype in 18th- and 19th-Century Visual Culture
Ersy Contogouris (University of Montreal), ersy.contogouris@umontreal.ca
Érika Wicky (Université Lumière Lyon 2 / LARHRA), erika.wicky@univ-lyon2.fr
Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, L’Odorat, 1774 (London: The British Museum).
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the ‘olfactory revolution’ that reoriented conceptions of smell led to renewed meanings and functions of this sense in social life. The epistemological shift that strongly linked olfaction with the nervous system, the development of hygiene as a science, and the flourishing of the perfume industry contributed to transforming the significance of smell. The act of smelling thus became involved in many identity constructions such as nation, race, gender and class. Olfaction came to be gendered; for instance, as specific smells became associated with women, the act of smelling was seen as pertaining to the feminine by means of objects such as scent bottles that performed women’s supposed extra-sensitivity to smells, and perfume was increasingly used to bolster the association between women and flowers. At the level of nations, the high proportion of Italian and French perfumers in England contributed to the construction of national stereotypes.
This session seeks to examine ways in which visual culture expressed and reinforced the role of the sense of smell in the construction of stereotypes. Graphic satire, for example, abundantly challenged the invisibility of smell, often representing stench and fragrance in order to express political criticism, reinforce social hierarchies or identify censorious behaviour. Caricaturists, such as Gillray, Boilly and Daumier greatly contributed to stereotyping in allegories, expressions of disgust provoked by miasmas, and representations of effeminate characters such as fops, macaronis, muscadins and dandies. By examining these and other issues related to the representation of smell in the creation and circulation of stereotypes, this session seeks to provide a cross-disciplinary contribution to both the history of visual culture and the history of the senses.
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The Space Between Non-Arts and Fine Arts: Confronting Gender and the Decorative Arts, 1500–1800
Samantha Chang (University of Toronto), Samantha.chang@mail.utoronto.ca
Lauryn Smith (Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Museum of Art), Lauryn.smith@case.edu
The decorative arts are not easily defined and have long occupied the shifting space between the non-arts and the fine arts. During the early-modern period, prominent women, such as Catherine de’ Medici and Amalia van Solms-Braunfels, were at the forefront of amassing impressive collections of decorative objects. Limoges enamel pieces created by Susanne de Court and embroideries fabricated by Katharina Rozee were highly sought after by collectors throughout Europe. Recent exhibitions and publications highlight early-modern women as participants in the creating, cultivating and collecting of decorative objects; however, the examination of women’s agency and visibility is still limited.
In this session, we seek papers that confront the impact of early-modern women instigators as conscious creators or collectors of everyday and luxury objects. What role does gender play in the creation of decorative works and the cultivation of a collection? To what extent can a collection reflect its individual users, and what agencies do the objects retain? We invite proposals that address issues including, but not limited to: women as cultural agents; interrelationships among gender and collecting; issues of class and accessibility to resources; and strategies of display. We welcome proposals from a wide variety of disciplines, including art history, material culture, global studies, cultural studies, history, literature and race studies, as well as papers that take a global or transcultural approach and focus on under-researched media.
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Visual Art and the Middlebrow
Michael Clegg (Art History, Curating and Visual Studies, University of Birmingham), mjc7691@gmail.com
Rebecca Savage (Art History, Curating and Visual Studies, University of Birmingham), RXS411@student.bham.ac.uk
As a scholarly concept, the middlebrow has proved fruitful within literary studies. It has stimulated historical research (Faye Hammill, Nicola Humble, Kristin Bluemel, Emma West and others) into the struggle for cultural authority that marked the mid-20th century ‘battle of the brows’ and provided critical distance on the modernist canon that emerged triumphant within the academy. It has also enabled theoretical work (Beth Driscoll and others) that relates to a range of periods and analyses issues including the construction of cultural hierarchies in the context of class, the gendering of cultural forms, the instrumental use of culture, and the positioning of art in opposition to commerce.
The idea of the middlebrow has had less impact on art history, despite encouragement (notably by Hana Leaper) for scholarship addressing intersections of modernism and the middlebrow. Why this has been the case is open to debate, perhaps indicating limited information on art’s audiences and the tendency to treat art markets as a specialist area of study, as well as the grip of existing modernist historiography. Yet, as theoretical concept and historical topic, the middlebrow has the potential to open new perspectives on received art histories, questioning inherited hierarchies and unmooring assumed chronologies.
This session will invite papers related to any period or geography. These might focus on devalued forms or media (didactic works, illustration, works for children, and so forth), studies of audience or dissemination, questions of disputed value, or any other use of the middlebrow to reframe art history.
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Why Trompe l’Oeil? The Art of Deception across the Boundaries of Time and Space
Stacey Pierson (SOAS University of London), sp17@soas.ac.uk
Chih-En Chen (SOAS University of London), c_chen@soas.ac.uk
Trompe l’oeil, meaning ‘deceiving the eye’, describes works of art and objects with illusionistically beguiling surfaces and forms. Production of such works can now be identified as a global historical phenomenon, with a broad array of examples ranging from the familiar Palissy wares, to Edward Collier’s painting of writing implements, to Chinese jade cabbages that have been challenging the material experience of visuality and countervisuality for hundreds of years. However, despite its long history of production, the ontology of trompe l’oeil artistic production and the reasons behind this illusory invention remain unexplored. Engaging with the concept of trompe l’oeil in expanded art-historical and visual fields of inquiry, across time and space, would allow us to probe the evolution of the pursuit of deceptive visual representation and the consumption of deceitful things in relation to both heuristic and contextual frames such as politics, religion, society and the economics of production.
Accordingly, ‘Why trompe l’oeil?’ will be the fundamental question addressed in this session. Papers might explore how different types of global trompe l’oeil art production have shaped the ways in which such art is produced, dispersed, consumed and conceptualised. Moreover, other artificial approaches to representing reality that developed alongside the concept of trompe l’oeil, such as Skeuomorphism, Cubism, Indeterminism and Naturalism, might also be considered. The primary aim of the session is to expose the rationale and motivation for trompe l’oeil art production by considering its different forms from a trans-historical and trans-spatial perspective and we invite papers that explore this through a range of different perspectives and methodological approaches.
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Note (added 17 October 2020) — The original version of this posting did not include the session on Race and Representation in the French Colonial Empire.
New Book | The Wig: A Hairbrained History
From Reaktion Books and the University of Chicago Press:
Luigi Amara, The Wig: A Hairbrained History, translated by Christina MacSweeney (London: Reaktion Books, 2020), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1789143461, £15 / $23.
Whether in a court room or a dressing room, wigs come in many forms, and represent many things: from power, to sexuality, to parody, to health, to self-identity, to disguise. Wigs are present at parties and in chemotherapy rooms, in pop music and contemporary art. In this witty and eloquent book, Luigi Amara reflects on the curious history of the wig, and along the way takes a sideways look at Western civilization. Amara illuminates how the wig has starred throughout history, from ancient Egypt to the court of Louis XIV, and from British courtrooms to drag shows today. Containing many striking and unusual images, the book appeals to a wide audience, from those interested in the history of fashion to philosophy, art, culture, and aesthetics.
Luigi Amara is the author of many poetry collections, essays, and children’s books, including Nu)n(ca, winner of the International Poetry Prize in Spanish, and The School of Boredom. He lives in Mexico City. Christina MacSweeney is an award-winning literary translator specializing in Latin American fiction.
C O N T E N T S
An Otherworldly Prologue
A Theory of Disguise
Casanova, Wigs and Masks
The She-wolf of the Night: Messalina
The Rage Called Wig
Samson at the Roland-Garros
The Counter-philosophy of the Wig
The Future Was a Purple Wig
The Mannequin and the Dark Object of Desire
Andy Warhol’s Wig
The Hemisphere in a Wig
On the Other Side of the Mirror of Horror
Music Curls
Capillary Plagiarism
The Indiscreet Charm of Hair
On Remains and Other Relics
Dressing Up Justice
Towering Hairdos
Abbé de Choisy or the Inner Woman
Cindy Sherman in Simulationland
Death Will Come and Shall Be Wearing a Wig
A Bald Wig in Search of a Head
In and Out of the Theatre
Stony Hair
Wigs at the Extremes of Crime
On Nudity or Venus in a Wig
Reinvention by Hair
Devotional Hairstyles
The Chimeric Wig
That Old Camp Stridency
The Tangled Mop of Fetish
A Knife Named Guillotine
The Discourse of False Hair
Bedside Reading
Photo Acknowledgements
Call for Essays | Transitioning Historic Houses to a Virtual Experience
From ArtHist.net (8 October 2020). . .
Edited Volume, History Dis-placed: Transitioning Historic Houses to a Virtual Experience
Proposals due by 30 November 2020; final papers will be due by 15 June 2021
History Displaced: Transitioning Historic Houses to a Virtual Experience concentrates on the unique histories and challenges of house-museums. In addition to being historic landmarks, house-museums can be sites of civic engagement and reflection; centers for activism and cultural discourse; and places for public events and gatherings. In the digital age, house-museums have had to renegotiate these identities and interactions with contemporary audiences through innovative practices. This was further challenged when museums across the globe were suddenly forced to pivot to, for many, an unfamiliar online discourse during the 2020 Covid-19 crisis. Many of the educational tropes utilized to great affect by house-museums—including living history and other direct contact strategies with an active audience—had to be jettisoned for online engagement. Museum staff were challenged to create content, develop educational recourses, and provide access to collections with little preparation and amidst severe budget cuts. There has, perhaps, never been a greater challenge to museums around the globe, and historic homes are among the hardest hit in these unprecedented times.
This edited volume asks for submissions that address, but are not limited to, the tactics taken by house-museums after February 2020, when it was clear that closing was imminent and re-opening in the near future was not an option. How do museums that strive to bring in-person encounters to life continue to do so through an online presence? How can these site-specific museums re-create or re-produce an aura or indexicality of space and place—a interaction that differs somewhat from other types of museums? What types of decisions need to be made when re-creating the museum collection for online perusal, which, for most house museums, are traditionally and fully experienced through the domestic spaces in which the collection is housed and the site-specificity of the museum? How do those at house-museums envision these decisions to move content online affect the future engagement of the museums with visitors and educators?
We invite submissions for scholars, students, and those personally involved with the day-to-day operations of a house-museum that reflect upon of the strategies undertaken for both historical and financial survival in the precarious position that house-museums find themselves during and after 2020.
Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words to Karen Shelby (karen.shelby@baruch.cuny.edu) and Emily Stokes-Rees (ewstokes@syr.edu) by 20 November 2020 with the subject heading “House Museum Submission.” Abstracts and a two-page CV should be sent as one PDF and titled with the author’s last name. Editors will respond to submissions by 15 December. Final papers will be due 15 June 2021. Papers should be 6,000–8,000 words in length.
Exhibition | Promoting America: Maps
A MAP OF NORTH AMERICA; Henry Schenck Tanner, cartographer, engraver, and publisher; Philadelphia, 1822; line engraving on laid paper with hand-coloring (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1997-5).
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Press release (8 September 2020) from Colonial Williamsburg for the exhibition:
Promoting America: Maps of the Colonies and the New Republic
DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, Williamsburg, Virginia, 17 October 2020 — 27 March 2022
Curated by Margaret Beck Pritchard and Katie McKinney
Ever since the first attempts by the English to colonize America, artists and mapmakers used maps as a savvy marketing tactic to portray the New World as both abundant and rich in land and resources, often portraying America as a latter-day Garden of Eden. A new exhibition, Promoting America: Maps of the Colonies and the New Republic will open on 17 October 2020, at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, one of the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg, and will shed new light on this topic. Through 21 extraordinary objects, including maps (several of which have never before been exhibited in Colonial Williamsburg and a few of which are recent acquisitions), prints, glass transfers, books and more, visitors will gain insights into how the promise of a good and prosperous life in the New World was communicated. The exhibition, the first in a new gallery dedicated to maps, prints, and drawings in the recently expanded Art Museums building, will remain on view through 27 March 2022.
“More than cartographic records, early maps are often pieces of propaganda,” said Roald L. Hurst, the foundation’s Carlisle H. Humelsine chief curator and vice president for museums, preservation, and historic resources. “This exhibition allows guests to see how subtle messages were embedded into these everyday objects.”
Adriaen Collaert, after Maerten de Vos, America, from the Four Continents, late sixteenth century, engraving.
At first, mapmakers included iconographic images of the flora, fauna as well as images of the native population of America as decorative elements to promote the promise of a life of opportunity there. By the 17th and 18th centuries, however, mapmakers used a variety of visual strategies to promote ideas and values intended to encourage laying claim to land in the New World.
“My favorite maps in the collection are the ones that tell us a much larger story rather than those that simply record the geography of a particular region. Each of the maps chosen for this exhibition was designed either to encourage immigration to America or to promote the vastness of America’s natural resources,” said Margaret Beck Pritchard, deputy chief curator at Colonial Williamsburg.
Among the highlights of the exhibition is a map of New England by Captain John Smith, its cartographer, and William Hole, its engraver. Originally published in 1616, this line engraving on laid paper was printed in London in 1624. After charting the New England coastline, Smith returned to England with valuable geographic information and great enthusiasm for establishing a colony at Plymouth. As English interests had moved from one of discovery and exploration of the New World to establishing settlements and claiming land there, Smith labeled this map with recognizable English names rather than meticulously identified Indian towns as he used six years earlier in his map of Virginia (also included in the exhibition). Instead of illustrations of Natives as seen in the Virginia map, this chart of New England featured an impressively large self-portrait of Smith.
“The decorative details on these maps sometimes contradict the conflicted and often violent colonization of North America, but they made Europeans familiar with and curious about the “New World,” encouraging settlement and investment,” said Katie McKinney, Colonial Williamsburg’s Margaret Beck Pritchard assistant curator of maps and prints. “The evolution of the symbols over time tells a powerful story about how iconography can reflect and embody cultural ideas and ambitions.”
Another featured map in Promoting America is Herman Moll’s A New and Exact MAP of the DOMINIONS of the KING of GREAT BRITAIN on ye Continent of NORTH AMERICA, published after 1753, and first published by Thomas and John Bowles in 1715. Map decoration was often used to reflect the economic potential for prospective settlers through depiction of America’s abundant natural resources. From the early 17th century, beaver pelts were the primary commodity for trade and a main source of competition between the French and the English in America. Moll’s illustration of the Industry of ye Beavers promoted American settlement. Since industry was known to create wealth and beavers were known to be industrious, the animals represented the potential for American success with “great order and wonderfull Dexterity.” The scene also features an early view of Niagara Falls, which would come to symbolize pride in America’s vast untamed wilderness and promote a vision for its future. After the American Revolution, the falls became a nationalistic symbol for the New Republic.
A MAP of the BRITISH EMPIRE in AMERICA with the FRENCH and SPANISH SETTLEMENTS adjacent thereto; Henry Popple, cartographer; Bernard Baron, William Henry Toms, and Richard William Seale, engravers; London, 1733; line engraving on laid paper with hand-coloring; pasted to linen and attached to a roller and ledge (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1955-408).
In the early 18th century, English concern over French exploration of the Mississippi Valley encouraged new North American map production as officials and colonists alike needed accurate records of the continent’s land, waterways, forts, and settlements. Maps were also essential for domestic political reasons because they delineated and legitimized boundaries and helped to define British economic interests. Illustrating these points in the exhibition is A MAP of the BRITISH EMPIRE in AMERICA with the FRENCH and SPANISH SETTLEMENTS adjacent thereto made by London cartographer Henry Popple in 1773. Several features of Popple’s map reveal the motivation behind its production. The sheer size of the map suggested England’s dominant role in America. It was the largest printed map of North America made before the Revolution. The title appears to be etched onto a stone tablet upon which British holdings were identified as part of her “empire,” but French and Spanish holdings were described as “settlements.” The Native American on the left of the decorative cartouche points to the title as if to confirm the assertion that the area represented belonged to Britain, while the figure on the right points to the thriving commercial activity along the shore.
The latest dated map in Promoting America is another highlight of the exhibition: Henry Schenck Tanner’s A MAP OF NORTH AMERICA, made in Philadelphia in 1822. This map, considered to be the most significant of the American West produced during the early 19th century, incorporated information from discoveries made by Merriwether Lewis and William Clark (1804–06), Zebulon Pike (1806), and Stephen H. Long (1819–20). The Lewis and Clark expedition following the purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803, and Thomas Jefferson’s commission for the men to map the region and find a route across the continent furthered the belief that success of the new nation was tied to exploration and cultivation of the frontier. As Herman Moll’s decorative details in his map of North America showed a century earlier, by early in the 19th century, natural wonders were regarded as symbols of Americans’ national pride. The cartouche on Tanner’s map combined images of both Niagara Falls and Virginia’s Natural Bridge along with other symbolic forms of American fauna such as a rattlesnake, a beaver, and an eagle.
Promoting America: Maps of the Colonies and the New Republic is co-curated by Ms. Pritchard and Ms. McKinney. It will be on view in the The Michael L. and Carolyn C. McNamara Gallery and was generously funded by Rex and Pat Lucke.
Colonial Williamsburg reopened at reduced capacity and has followed site-specific safety guidelines as part of the foundation’s COVID-19 business resumption plan and in accordance with the state’s plans for reopening. During Colonial Williamsburg’s reopening, most interpretive programming has been moved outdoors. For the safety of employees and the public, ticketed guests can expect limited interaction with interpretive staff. Site entry is limited by state-mandated capacity guidelines for social gatherings, and guests are encouraged to proceed quickly through interpretive sites to accommodate as many visitors as possible. Face coverings are required while inside foundation-owned buildings and their use is encouraged outdoors as well. Guests are also asked to adhere to social distancing guidelines during their visit to Colonial Williamsburg sites, when walking along Duke of Gloucester Street and in other publicly accessible areas. Most doors, faucets and other high-traffic touchpoints are now touchless, and there are significantly enhanced cleaning protocols throughout the foundation’s open locations.
New Book | The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps
From the University of Chicago Press:
Jessica Maier, The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0226591452, $40.
One of the most visited places in the world, Rome attracts millions of tourists each year to walk its storied streets and see famous sites like the Colosseum, St. Peter’s Basilica, and the Trevi Fountain. Yet this ancient city’s allure is due as much to its rich, unbroken history as to its extraordinary array of landmarks. Countless incarnations and eras merge in the Roman cityscape. With a history spanning nearly three millennia, no other place can quite match the resilience and reinventions of the aptly nicknamed Eternal City.
In this unique and visually engaging book, Jessica Maier considers Rome through the eyes of mapmakers and artists who have managed to capture something of its essence over the centuries. Viewing the city as not one but ten ‘Romes’, she explores how the varying maps and art reflect each era’s key themes. Ranging from modest to magnificent, the images comprise singular aesthetic monuments like paintings and grand prints as well as more popular and practical items like mass-produced tourist plans, archaeological surveys, and digitizations. The most iconic and important images of the city appear alongside relatively obscure, unassuming items that have just as much to teach us about Rome’s past. Through 140 full-color images and thoughtful overviews of each era, Maier provides an accessible, comprehensive look at Rome’s many overlapping layers of history in this landmark volume.
The first English-language book to tell Rome’s rich story through its maps, The Eternal City beautifully captures the past, present, and future of one of the most famous and enduring places on the planet.
Jessica Maier is associate professor of art history at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of Rome Measured and Imagined: Early Modern Maps of the Eternal City, also published by University of Chicago Press.
C O N T E N T S
Introduction: Rome as Idea and Reality
Further Reading
1 Rome Takes Shape
Rome before Rome
A Walled City
Urban Districting
Further Reading
2 Rome of the Caesars
Destination Rome
An Incomplete Puzzle
Making Sense of the Shattered Past
Filling in the Gaps
A Model City
Further Reading
3 Rome of the Popes
Sacred Buildings and Secular Symbols
The Medieval Cityscape
Pathos and Wonder
Further Reading
4 Rome Reborn
A City Ready for Its Close-Up
The City Seen through a Wide-Angle Lens
The City Measured
A Panoramic View of Urban Revitalization
Further Reading
5 Rome of the Scholars
Archaeology in Its Infancy
An Ancient Roman Theme Park
A Ghostly Fantasy
Further Reading
6 Rome of the Saints and Pilgrims
The Way of the Faithful
Scenes from a Pilgrimage
A Pilgrimage Map for the Modern Era
Further Reading
7 Rome of the Grand Tourists
Rome as Theater
The Origins of the Tourist Plan
Rome Surveyed
A Panoramic Vision
Further Reading
8 Rome of the Mass Tourists
The Guidebook Impresario’s Rome
Rome for a Rather Important Woman Traveler
Rome in Your Pocket
Rome for Italian Tourists
Further Reading
9 Rome Enters the Modern Age
2,500 Years in, a Master Plan for Rome
When Trams Ruled Rome
An Olympic City, and a New Beginning
Further Reading
10 Rome Past, Present, and Future
Rapid Transit for a Rapidly Changing City
A Master Plan for the Third Millennium: (Un)sustainable Rome
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Index
Exhibition | The Piranesi Principle
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Colosseum in Rome, Bird’s Eye View from the North, ca. 1760–70
(Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek / Dietmar Katz)
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A very brief posting appeared here at Enfilade in February. Here’s the expanded version; from the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin:
The Piranesi Principle: Marking the 300th Birthday of the Great Italian Master
Das Piranesi-Prinzip: Zum 300. Geburtstag des großen italienischen Meisters
Kunstbibliothek, Berlin, 4 October 2020 — 7 February 2021
Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) was one of the great polymaths of the 18th century. He carved out an international career as an archaeologist, artist, collector, designer, publisher and author. The principle behind his success was to grasp the multifaceted nature of reality and transform it into something new. He found inspiration everywhere: in the artifacts of bygone epochs and faraway regions, in images from science, technology and opera, and even in denunciations and defeats. This exhibition celebrating the 300th anniversary of his birth brings this Piranesi principle back to life in all its creativity. It is centred around Piranesi’s masterpieces of engraving, his books, pamphlets, satirical illustrations, and drawings from the collections of the Kunstbibliothek and the Kupferstichkabinett, some of which are being shown for the very first time.
Piranesi’s Rome
The exhibition begins with a trip back through time to Piranesi’s Rome. While today’s tourists marvel at the city’s ancient ruins in an urban setting, in the 18th century the Venetian-born artist lived and worked in a city surrounded by a landscape of ruins, in which monuments overgrown by plants protruded from the ground. It was in this context that Piranesi found the motifs for his images and architectural visions, collected artefacts for his ‘Museo’, and conducted research into art and architectural history—the results of which he published in monumental works such as the Antichità Romane (1756). And it was here that he found his clientele and his audience: artists, art scholars, archaeologists, antiques and art dealers came from all over the world to make their fortune in the ‘eternal city’—or, like Piranesi himself—to earn their immortality.
Piranesi’s Stage
Opera and theatre have been influential mass media since the Baroque era. Performances took place not only in private residences, but also on the street and in public squares, where religious festivities were staged as elaborate spectacles. In the 18th century, theatre was a big business, for which artists designed stage sets and decorations, and in doing so revolutionised the viewing habits of their audiences. Piranesi, who had already become acquainted with this scene in Venice, picked up on these ideas and used them to dramatise his compositions. Both his Vedute (Views) and his famous Carceri (Prisons) largely owe their magic to the influence of the theatre of the time.
Piranesi’s Laboratory
As well as the dream factory of theatre, the technical imagery of the sciences was another a source of great fascination for Piranesi. Imagining his workshop as a laboratory, he experimented with creating futuristic images in order to find ways to communicate the findings of his research on archaeology and art with scholars and the public alike. In the section Piranesi’s Laboratory, the exhibition focuses on the monumental display panels, reconstructions and maps that made him famous within the sciences far beyond Italy, and saw him named a member of the Society of Antiquaries in London in 1757 and an honorary member of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome in 1761. His images are ground-breaking and ahead of their time above all because of their resemblance to a computer desktop featuring a multitude of windows open simultaneously. They succeeded in sealing Piranesi’s status as a pioneer of visual communication.
Piranesi’s Palazzo
This section takes viewers to the central site of his work: Palazzo Tomati, not far from the Spanish steps, where Piranesi resided from 1761 onwards, ran a large workshop, and opened his ‘Museo’ (a warehouse of antiques and self-manufactured objects) to tourists and art scholars. The drawings by Piranesi that are held by the Kunstbibliothek, including his renowned fireplace designs, provide important information about his work process. Piranesi was open to everything: he drew on both Roman and Egyptian antiquity, Etruscan and Greek art, and often came up with daring hybrid forms. Even the wastepaper in his studio provided points of departure and stimulus for his creative processes. Recycling and re-using were part of his daily routine in the workshop, especially as paper was a valuable resource. The exhibition makes evident how the recto and verso of his prints, drawings and notes were used over and over again for new sketches.
Piranesi’s Arena
Finally, in the section Piranesi’s Arena, the exhibition presents Piranesi as a polarising figure in the international art scene. Four people in his life are presented to exemplify this tension, beginning with fellow Venetian Pope Clement XIII (1693–1769), who was particularly important due to his role as a patron, and then looking at three antagonists who infuriated Piranesi to such an extent that he resorted to unusual artistic weapons. He dedicated an entire publication to taking down the argument of French art scholar Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774), who had questioned the significance of Roman antiquity, with words and pictures. The name of his Irish patron, Lord Charlemont (1728–1799), who had withdrawn funding for one of his largest projects, was visually erased from public memory. And to express his displeasure in a dispute with French archaeologist Bertrand Capmartin de Chaupy (1720–1798), he produced a detailed and masterfully elaborate depiction of his own excrement.
An exhibition of the Kunstbibliothek – Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, in cooperation with the Kupferstichkabinett – Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin
The exhibition and catalogue were jointly conceived by students, curators, and researchers at the Kunstbibliothek and the Department for Art and Visual History at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. An exhibition catalogue, edited by Georg Schelbert and Moritz Wullen, will be published by E.A. Seemann Verlag, Leipzig, 144 pages, 135 colour illustrations, ISBN 978-3865024435 (German edition), 978-3865024442 (English edition), €27.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Vignette: Satire targeting Bertrand Capmartin De Chaupy, 1769
(Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek / Dietmar Katz)
Online Conference | Ecologies of Paper
From The Huntington:
Ecologies of Paper in the Early Modern World
Online, 5-6 November 2020
Registration due by 30 October 2020
Presented by The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, Ecologies of Paper in the Early Modern World will explore the transmutation, preservation, and loss of paper as a cycle of archiving and forgetting that defined early modern artistic practice, economic transaction, and political statecraft. Speakers will map paper’s various guises, its ability to retain meanings associated with its material origins, as well as its desire to conceal its former states or to encourage belief in a value beyond its material reality. Charting the journeys of early modern paper in drawing, print, and document, this program will not only restructure our understanding of paper’s importance in early modern artistic practice and political life but also reconstruct the governing roles of environment, place, and origin in modes of making and address. If you would like to receive a copy of the speakers’ papers for this event, please register here by October 30. All times are Pacific Standard Time (PST).
T H U R S D A Y , 5 N O V E M B E R 2 0 2 0
9:00 Welcome and Introduction
• Steve Hindle (The Huntington), Shira Brisman (University of Pennsylvania), and Caroline Fowler (Clark Art Institute)
9:15 Session 1: Documents and Foundations
• Asheesh Kapur Siddique (University of Massachusetts-Amherst), Documenting the Body of State: Paper, Early Modernity, and the Matter of the U.S. Constitution
• Cheryl Finley (Cornell University and the Atlanta University Center Collective for the Study of Art History & Curatorial Studies), Paper, Print, and Activism
• John Gagné (University of Sydney), Toward a History of the Conservation of the Premodern Documentary Heritage
10:30 Break
10:45 Session 2: Backgrounds and Foregrounds
• Jennifer Chuong (Harvard University), Overmarbling and Paper’s Disorderly Metamorphoses
• Iris Brahms (Freie Universität Berlin), Blue Paper as Metaphor and Efficient Solution
• Caroline Fowler (Clark Art Institute), The Matrix and The Mould: Counter-Histories of Reproduction
• Heather Wolfe (Folger Shakespeare Library), Interpreting the Materiality of Paper through Digital Images
12:15 Discussion, led by Shira Brisman (University of Pennsylvania)
F R I D A Y , 6 N O V E M B E R 2 0 2 0
9:15 Session 3: Scarcity
• Joshua Calhoun (University of Wisconsin-Madison), The Transformation of a Plant; or, Rags Do Not Make Paper
• Shira Brisman (University of Pennsylvania), Contriving Scarcity in Early Modern Art and Law
10:15 Break
10:30 Session 4: The Paper Age
• Esther Chadwick (The Courtauld Institute of Art), Material Sinews of the Paper Age
• Nina Dubin (University of Illinois-Chicago), Rags to Riches: Paper Culture in the Age of Bubbles
• Richard Taws (University College London), Laissez-passer: Afterimages of Revolutionary France
11:45 Break
12:30 Discussion, led by Caroline Fowler (Clark Art Institute)
New Book | Women and the Art and Science of Collecting
From Routledge:
Arlene Leis and Kacie Wills, eds., Women and the Art and Science of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Routledge, 2020), 212 pages, ISBN 978-0367856663, $160.
Through both longer essays and shorter case studies, this book examines the relationship of European women from various countries and backgrounds to collecting, in order to explore the social practices and material and visual cultures of collecting in eighteenth-century Europe. It recovers their lives and examines their interests, their methodologies, and their collections and objects—some of which have rarely been studied before. The book also considers women’s role as producers, that is, creators of objects that were collected. Detailed examination of the artefacts—both visually, and in relation to their historical contexts—exposes new ways of thinking about collecting in relation to the arts and sciences in eighteenth-century Europe. The book is interdisciplinary in its makeup and brings together scholars from a wide range of fields. It will be of interest to those working in art history, material and visual culture, history of collecting, history of science, literary studies, women’s studies, gender studies, and art conservation.
Arlene Leis is an independent art historian who received her PhD from the University of York. Kacie L. Wills received her PhD in English from the University of California, Riverside, and is Assistant Professor of English at Illinois College.
C O N T E N T S
Part I: Artificialia and Naturalia
1 Anne Harbers and Andrea Gáldy, Science, Gender and Collecting: The Dutch Eighteenth-Century Ladies’ Society for Physical Sciences of Middelburg
2 Irina Schmiedel, Between Art and Science: Portraits of Citrus Fruit for Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici
3 Kelsey Brosnan, Anne Vallayer-Coster’s Still Life with Sea Shells and Coral
Part II: Travel, Borders, and Networks
4 Katharina Schmidt-Loske, Maria Sibylla Merian: A Woman’s Pioneering Work in Entomology
5 Erica Hayes and Kacie L. Wills, Sarah Sophia Banks’s Coin Collection: Female Networks of Exchange
6 Lizzie Rogers, Conversing with Collecting the World: Elite Female Sociability and Learning through Objects in the Age of Enlightenment
7 Maria Antonietta Spadero, Portrait of Charlotte de France: from Naples to Sicily, a Collection in Transit
8 Charis Ch. Avlonitou, The Collecting Activity of Catherine II in Eighteenth-Century Russia: Pioneering Action or Sheer Demonstration of Power?
Part III: Displaying, Recording, and Cataloguing
9 Madeleine Pelling, ‘I made memorandums’: Mary Hamilton, Sociability, and Antiquarianism in the Eighteenth-Century Collection
10 Nicole Cochrane, Eleanor Coade, John Soane, and the Coade Caryatid
11 Ryna Ordynat, Anne Wagner’s Album (1795–1805): Collecting Feminine Friendship
12 Hanneke Grootenboer, An Art Cabinet in Miniature: The Dollhouse of Petronella Oortman
Part IV: Beyond the Eighteenth Century
13 Anna Frances O’Regan, Collection, Display, and Conservation: The Print Room at Castletown House
14 Arlene Leis, Olivia Lanza di Mazzarino (1893–1970): A Lady’s Collection of Eighteenth-Century Folding Fans
Online Talks | Riesener at The Wallace
This fall at The Wallace Collection (the Riesener project has been underway since June 2012 as curators and conservators at The Wallace Collection have worked alongside colleagues from Waddesdon Manor and the Royal Collection to better understand these extraordinary objects).
Alex Collins and Jurgen Huber | Riesener at The Wallace Collection
In conjunction with London Craft Week
Online, Thursday, 8 October 2020, 17.30–18.30 (BST)
Jean-Henri Riesener, along with Thomas Chippendale and David Roentgen, was one of the greatest furniture-makers of the eighteenth century. Born in Gladbeck, Germany, Riesener emigrated to Paris early in his career and became a highly successful cabinetmaker who supplied luxurious furniture to Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and the French court. Join this free online talk (via Zoom) during London Craft Week 2020 to explore the designs, materials, and techniques Riesener used to create his masterpieces. Please click here to register.
Alex Collins is the former Riesener Project Leverhulme Fellow at The Wallace Collection. Jurgen Huber is Senior Furniture Conservator at The Wallace Collection.
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Helen Jacobsen | Creating a Market: Dealers, Auctioneers, and the Passion for Riesener Furniture, 1800–1882
Seminar in the History of Collecting
Online, Monday, 30 November 2020, 17.30–19.00 (BST)
Jean-Henri Riesener, Secretaire, 1783, 140 × 81 × 42 cm (London: The Wallace Collection).
Jean-Henri Riesener (1734–1806), cabinetmaker to Louis XVI, was one of the most celebrated cabinetmakers of the French eighteenth century. He was also a phenomenon in the history of British art collecting, becoming a byword in the nineteenth century for all that was admired in French furniture. Before the French Revolution we have no evidence of a British patron, yet just fifty years later collectors like William Beckford, George IV and the 4th Marquess of Hertford had contributed to both his celebrity and the prices his furniture achieved. The nineteenth-century popularity of Riesener furniture was more than just an appreciation of the cabinetmaker’s designs and the quality of their execution; it was driven by a fascination for the ancien régime and romanticized views of the doomed Bourbon Court. It was also an indication of the resourcefulness of the innovative entrepreneurs and dealers in France and England who helped establish Riesener’s reputation in the decades following the Revolution. Through clever marketing techniques and a certain amount of ‘enhancement’, they educated a new generation of buyers and established Riesener’s name alongside that of André-Charles Boulle as being worthy of connoisseurs.
This paper will analyze the rise of Riesener’s celebrity and the dealers who made it happen. It will discuss the sales techniques of the early nineteenth-century auctioneers, the role played by connoisseurs such as Lord Hertford, and the democratization of Riesener furniture through the market for copies and reproductions. It will end with the Hamilton Palace sale of 1882, which opened up yet another new market for Riesener: the Americans.
Helen Jacobsen is Curator of French 18th-Century Decorative Arts at The Wallace Collection.
This seminar series in the History of Collecting was established in 2006 as part of the Wallace Collection’s commitment to the research and study of the history of collections and collecting, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Paris and London. The seminars, which are normally held on the last Monday of every month during the calendar year, excluding August and December, act as a forum for the presentation and discussion of new research into the history of collecting. Seminars are open to curators, academics, historians, archivists and all those with an interest in the subject.
This online seminar is also the first of three evening talks on Riesener held in collaboration with the Furniture History Society. Please click here to register.
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Rufus Bird, Mia Jackson, and Helen Jacobsen | Riesener Masterpieces: Royal Furniture in Britain
Online, Monday, 7 December 2020, 17.30–19.00 (BST)
Three of the most important collections of Riesener furniture in the world are in Britain. In the second talk in our series, speakers from the Wallace Collection, Royal Collection and Waddesdon Manor will discuss some of the 30 pieces in their care. These include celebrated works made for Marie-Antoinette, Louis XVI, and the French royal family that demonstrate the extraordinary levels of skilled craftsmanship achieved in the Riesener workshop and the design sophistication of which Riesener was capable. Our speakers will consider the popularity of French royal furniture in Britain in the 19th century and will illustrate the talk with stunning new photography from all three collections, revealing findings from the collaborative Riesener Project and shedding new light on both Riesener’s techniques and the provenance of some of the furniture.
Rufus Bird is Surveyor of The Queen’s Works of Art at The Royal Collection. Mia Jackson is Curator of Decorative Arts at Waddesdon Manor. Helen Jacobsen is Curator of French 18th-Century Decorative Arts at The Wallace Collection.
This online seminar is the second of three evening talks on Riesener held in collaboration with the Furniture History Society. Please click here to register.
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Alexander Collins | Mémoires for the Garde-Meuble: Riesener’s Perspective on Royal Furniture
Online, Monday, 14 December 2020, 17.30–19.00 (BST)
Riesener was court cabinetmaker for over ten years, supplying over 700 pieces to the French royal household. The details of these commissions were recorded in the Journal of the Garde-Meuble (the department of the royal household responsible for ordering and managing furnishings), as well as Riesener’s mémoires. These were invoices which contained detailed descriptions of the furniture, as well as the materials and techniques used to make them. Many of Riesener’s invoices survive and can be found in the collections of the Archives nationales and Bibliothèque nationale de France. This final talk in the series will explore a selection of invoices for pieces of royal furniture at Waddesdon Manor and the Royal Collection. They will tell us more about Riesener’s design and workshop processes, as well as the challenges he encountered during exceptionally ambitious projects.
Alexander Collins is the former Riesener Project Leverhulme Fellow at The Wallace Collection.
This online seminar is the third of three evening talks on Riesener held in collaboration with the Furniture History Society. Please click here to register.
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