Enfilade

Exhibition | In Vino Veritas, 1450–1800

Posted in exhibitions by Editor on August 6, 2025

Abraham Bosse, The Prodigal Son: Riotous Living, 1635, etching, platemark: 26 × 32.5 cm
(The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1929.560.2)

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Opening next month at The Cleveland Museum of Art:

In Vino Veritas (In Wine, Truth)

The Cleveland Museum of Art, 7 September 2025 — 11 January 2026

For millennia, wine has played a significant role not only in the human diet but also in cultural myths, rituals, and festivities. As a result, wine—its ingredients, making, drinking, and effects on the human body and mind—has been a constant muse for artistic creation. The exhibition In Vino Veritas (In Wine, Truth), a phrase coined by the Roman polymath Pliny the Elder, celebrates the presence and meaning of wine in prints, drawings, textiles, and objects made in Europe between 1450 and 1800. Drawn from the museum’s collection, more than 70 works by artists from throughout Europe explore wine’s myths, symbols, and stories. These images reveal how diverse cultures and religions ascribed meaning and transformational properties to the so-called nectar of the gods.

Marcantonio Raimondi, after Raphael, The Wine Press, ca. 1517–20, engraving, sheet: 18.6 × 14.7 cm (The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1922.479).

The ancient Greeks believed that the god Dionysus (in Rome, Bacchus) lived within wine: to drink wine was to partake of the god’s power. Fascinated by ancient culture, Italian Renaissance artists, such as Andrea Mantegna and Raphael, imagined scenes of boisterous festivals, or bacchanalia, along with the exploits of Bacchus and his coterie of satyrs, nymphs, and fauns. In Northern Europe, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and later Jean-Honoré Fragonard, transformed bacchanalia into raucous peasant festivals and sensuous garden parties fueled by wine, at times tinged with moral judgment. Simultaneously, wine played a critical allegorical role in images made within the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Old Testament and Hebrew Bible traced wine’s invention to Noah. Numerous stories from these texts, portrayed by Lucas van Leyden and others, leveraged wine as an important plot element, with the ability to unify and enlighten, or to incapacitate and deceive. Many artists, such as Albrecht Dürer, used wine, grapes, and the vine to symbolize the Catholic rite of the Eucharist and its origin in Christ’s Last Supper. Throughout the exhibition, wine appears in scenes of devotion, harvest, celebration, music making, and transgression, signaling community cohesion as well as the pleasures—and hazards—of surrendering to one’s senses.

At Auction | La Malouinière du Bos: A French Passion

Posted in Art Market by Editor on August 5, 2025

Attributed to the architect Bullet de Chamblain, La Malouinière du Bos, 1715–17, on the River Rance, near Saint-Malo.

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From the press release for the sale:

La Malouinière du Bos: Une Passion Française, Sale 6370

Artcurial, Paris, 23 September 2025, 2.30pm

On September 23rd, 2025, alongside FAB Paris, Artcurial will host the auction of the collection from La Malouinière du Bos, an elegant 18th-century residence nestled on the banks of the River Rance, near Saint-Malo. Around 280 lots—including Old Master paintings, sculptures, furniture, and silverware—reflect thirty years of discerning passion. For over thirty years, the current owners have carefully restored both the interior and exterior of the Malouinière, showcasing their refined taste and incorporating treasures mainly acquired at public auctions. This sale reflects their desire to undertake major renovation work, after which they look forward to breathing new life into the house, redecorating and refurnishing it with the same elegance and attention to detail.

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Allegory of Poetry, oil on canvas 80 × 65 cm. Estimate: €80,000–120,000.

Reflecting a marked appreciation for French artists of the 17th and 18th centuries, the Old Master paintings collection includes several exceptional works. Among them, an Allegory of Poetry by Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, destined for the 1774 Salon of the Académie de Saint-Luc, stands out for its delicate brushwork and luminous palette. The painting features a refined portrayal of a young woman, her graceful back subtly revealed as she gazes upward in a moment of inspiration. Equally striking is Une jeune espiègle painted by François-Hubert Drouais, exhibited at the 1771 Salon (no. 61). This tender evocation of the lightness of childhood was a theme cherished by 18th-century French painters from Antoine Watteau to Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

The fertile period of the early 17th century is represented by two remarkable paintings. An oil on canvas attributed to Paul La Tarte depicts a lively market scene, illustrating the influence of the Caravaggesque movement on painters from the Lorraine region. Meanwhile, a Magdalene with the Crucifix (French School, 17th century, workshop of Georges de La Tour) offers valuable insight into a lost original by Georges de La Tour and serves as an important stylistic milestone in the study of his series of Magdalene paintings.

Italian painting will also be prominently featured, with a large history painting by Andrea Casali depicting Moses Saved from the Water, and Madonna in busto by Sassoferrato. Among the works on paper, a charming portrait of Louise Vernet, born Pujol, delicately rendered in black chalk and watercolor by her father-in-law, Carle Vernet will also be offered for sale.

François-Hubert Drouais, La jeune espiègle, oil on canvas, oval format
54 × 46 cm. Estimate: €100,000–150,000

The selection of furniture reflects a sophisticated blend of the finest French craftsmanship of the 18th century and a distinct appreciation for English cabinetmaking of the same period. Noteworthy pieces include a set of four fauteuils à la reine stamped by Claude Chevigny, an elegant pair of monumental Louis XIV giltwood girandole chandeliers, and a restrained George III mechanical architect’s desk attributed to Gillows.

La Malouinière du Bos—built between 1715 and 1717, likely by architect Bullet de Chamblain for Pierre Le Fer de la Saudre and his wife, a member of the renowned Magon shipowners’ family—embodies all the defining features of the grand malouinières of the 18th century. Its classical façade, constructed in finely dressed Chausey granite, is marked by a harmonious and majestic symmetry, animated by a slightly projecting central pavilion. Noble and imposing, the residence overlooks a vast jardin à la française that unfolds toward a bend in the Rance River. All the essential elements of a traditional malouinière are fully preserved at Le Bos: an intact enclosing wall, a chapel, extensive outbuildings, and a landscaped park adorned with sculptures and architectural ornaments.

Built for the greatest shipowners of Saint-Malo, who amassed their fortunes through trade with the East and privateering wars, these pleasure residences served as austere yet majestic settings for their treasures. Jean Bart, Duguay-Trouin, and Surcouf conjure the romantic world of corsairs, where speed, cunning, and flair often triumphed over sheer firepower and heavy artillery. For three centuries, the scent of salt, the sun, and the wind have breathed life into Le Bos. The thunder of cannon fire is recalled by an early 19th-century naval gun brought back from the Far East, inscribed in Chinese characters with the evocative phrase ‘To Split the Mountain’. The clash of boarding and the ring of iron are revived through a group of ceremonial and boarding weapons, their mysterious past hinting at remote isles and marvelous forgotten treasures.

The esprit malouin, a spirit resolutely turned toward the open sea and the discovery of the world, is evoked through a selection of scientific instruments designed to measure space and time. Among them, a mid-19th-century English pair of globes, one terrestrial, the other celestial and a Scottish telescope by Thomas Morton from the same period. The memory of long voyages is suggested by a group of Chinese porcelain plates from the East India Company, as well as by striking imagery such as Eugène Isabey’s During the Storm (1849), where the air, saturated with iodine, conveys the unleashed fury of the elements. In gentle contrast, the painter Arthur David McCormick offers a full-length portrait of a serene sailor, reading a letter, perhaps a romantic one on the quay, moments before setting sail aboard the Invincible.

Exhibition
September 19, 20, and 22 | 11am–6pm
September 23 | 11am–2.30pm

Exhibition | Framed! European Picture Frames

Posted in exhibitions by Editor on August 4, 2025
Willem van de Velde the Younger, Two Dutch Vessels Close-Hauled in a Strong Breeze, 1672, oil on canvas (Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, 1917, Cat. 591).

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Now on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Lynn Roberts includes a helpful interview at The Frame Blog with the show’s curator Tara Contractor and conservator Nicolette Absil) . . .

Framed! European Picture Frames from the Johnson Collection

Philadelphia Museum of Art, 21 December 2024 — November 2025

Curated by Tara Contractor

The installation highlights picture frames as works of art in their own right, exploring their shifting forms and functions from the altar-like frames of the Renaissance to the experimental, artist-designed frames of the late 1800s. It includes thirteen frames from the Johnson Collection, which, together, express the craftsmanship and variety of European frames through the centuries.

The Magazine of the Decorative Arts Trust, Summer 2025

Posted in books, catalogues, exhibitions, journal articles by Editor on August 3, 2025

The Decorative Arts Trust has shared select articles from the summer issue of their member magazine as online articles for all to enjoy. The following articles are related to the 18th century:

The Magazine of the Decorative Arts Trust, Summer 2025

• “Time Travel in the Thames Valley: Ham House and Osterley Park” by Megan Wheeler Link»
• “Whose Revolution at the Concord Museum” by Reed Gochberg Link»
• “Fighting for Freedom: Black Craftspeople and the Pursuit of Independence” by William A. Strollo Link»
• “Decorative Arts Shine at the Reopened Frick” by Marie-Laure Buku Pongo Link»
• “A Room of Her Own: New Book Explores the Estrado” by Alexandra Frantischek Rodriguez-Jack Link»
• “Luster, Shimmer, and Polish: Transpacific Materialities in the Arts of Colonial Latin America” by Juliana Fagua Arias Link»

The printed Magazine of the Decorative Arts Trust is mailed to Trust members twice per year. Additional membership information is available here.

Pictured: The magazine cover depicts the Entrance Hall at Osterley Park showcasing Robert Adam’s signature Neoclassical style. The apsidal end features plasterwork by Joseph Rose and contains statues of Apollo and Minerva. The marble urns are attributed to Joseph Wilton. Decorative Arts Trust members visited the house during the Thames Valley Study Trip Abroad tours in May and June 2025.

Exhibition | Fighting for Freedom

Posted in books, catalogues, exhibitions by Editor on August 2, 2025

Now on view at the DAR:

Fighting for Freedom: Black Craftspeople and the Pursuit of Independence

Daughters of the American Revolution Museum, Washington, DC, 25 March — 31 December 2025
Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, Summer 2026 — Spring 2027
Historic New Orleans Collection, Summer — Fall 2027
Tennessee State Museum, Nashville, Winter — Spring 2028
Museum of the Shenandoah Valley, Winchester, Summer — Fall 2028

The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) Museum is proud to present the exhibition Fighting for Freedom: Black Craftspeople and the Pursuit of Independence, in collaboration with the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive. This exhibition seeks to embrace the stories of all those who pursued independence by centering on the lives and experiences of Black craftspeople and artisans from the 18th and 19th centuries. It highlights the creations, contributions, and legacies of African Americans as they fought for freedom from the earliest calls for American independence and beyond. Fighting for Freedom spans the war years of the Revolution through the present, as African Americans have sought to pursue agency and liberty through craft. The underpinning idea of African American craft as a catalyst for freedom-seeking displays itself in a host of ways in this exhibition, encompassing furniture, metals, ceramics, textiles, art, tools, and personal accessories.

The Founders’ cries for liberty from tyranny and oppression resonated with African Americans and were embraced by Black craftspeople, both free and enslaved. “The Founding Fathers, while enslaving tens of thousands of people, unintentionally created a ripple effect,” states exhibition co-curator and founder of the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive Dr. Tiffany Momon, “and we hope that visitors will see just how important those cries for liberty were to Black craftspeople and how they pursued it despite being marginalized.”

Fighting for Freedom features more than 50 objects from public and private lenders and includes objects made by both free and enslaved craftspeople. With artifacts from the 18th, 19th, and 21st centuries, this exhibition tells the stories of countless known and unnamed figures whose skills and commitment created not only objects but independence in many forms.

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From UNC Press:

Torren L. Gatson, Tiffany N. Momon, and William A. Strollo, eds., Fighting for Freedom: Black Craftspeople and the Pursuit of Independence (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2025), 176 pages, ISBN: 978-1469686257, $35. Contributors include Lauren Applebaum, Robell Awake, Lydia Blackmore, Aleia M. Brown, R. Ruthie Dibble, Philippe L. B. Halbert, Jennifer Van Horn, Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley, and Susan J. Rawles.

Delving into diverse narratives of creativity, resilience, and triumph in the quest for freedom, this book underscores the evolution of freedom through the lens of material culture—by exploring how the very concept of freedom was shaped and redefined by enslaved and free craftspeople who relentlessly fought for their rights and the recognition of their humanity. Featuring ten essays by leading historians, museum curators, and material culture scholars and more than seventy color photographs of Black artistry, including paintings, metalwork, woodwork, pottery, and furniture, this book vividly illustrates how Black men and women persistently sought tangible expressions of liberty which have endured as symbols of their creators’ legacies in the ongoing struggle for freedom.

New Book | The Painter’s Fire

Posted in books by Editor on August 1, 2025

From Harvard UP:

Zara Anishanslin, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2025), 400 pages, ISBN 978-0674290235, $33.

book coverTold through the lives of three remarkable artists devoted to the pursuit of liberty, an illuminating new history of the ideals that fired the American Revolution.

The war that we now call the American Revolution was not only fought in the colonies with muskets and bayonets. On both sides of the Atlantic, artists armed with paint, canvas, and wax played an integral role in forging revolutionary ideals. Zara Anishanslin charts the intertwined lives of three such figures who dared to defy the British monarchy: Robert Edge Pine, Prince Demah, and Patience Wright. From London to Boston, from Jamaica to Paris, from Bath to Philadelphia, these largely forgotten patriots boldly risked their reputations and their lives to declare independence.

Mostly excluded from formal political or military power, these artists and their circles fired salvos against the king on the walls of the Royal Academy as well as on the battlefields of North America. They used their talents to inspire rebellion, define American patriotism, and fashion a new political culture, often alongside more familiar revolutionary figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Phillis Wheatley. Pine, an award-winning British artist rumored to be of African descent, infused massive history paintings with politics and eventually emigrated to the young United States. Demah, the first identifiable enslaved portrait painter in America, was Pine’s pupil in London before self-emancipating and enlisting to fight for the Patriot cause. And Wright, a Long Island–born wax sculptor who became a sensation in London, loudly advocated for revolution while acting as an informal patriot spy.

Illuminating a transatlantic and cosmopolitan world of revolutionary fervor, The Painter’s Fire reveals an extraordinary cohort whose experiences testify to both the promise and the limits of liberty in the founding era.

Zara Anishanslin is Associate Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware. She is the author of the award-winning Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World and has served as a historical consultant for the Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as Hamilton: The Exhibition.

Online Talk | Alexandra Kirtley on the Work of Black Artisans

Posted in online learning by Editor on July 30, 2025

As noted at Events in the Field, administered by The Decorative Arts Trust:

Alexandra Kirtley | Thomas Gross in Context: Black Artisans in Early Philadelphia

Online, DAR Museum, 9 September 2025, noon (Eastern Time)

Thomas Gross Jr., Double Chest (Chest-on-Chest), made in Philadelphia, 1805–10, mahogany, tulip poplar, and yellow pine with brass, 83 inches high (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1983-167-1a,b).

The work of cabinetmaker Thomas Gross (1775–1839) provides the centerpiece to the study and understanding of Black artists and artisans who contributed to the fabric of the prolific art community in early Philadelphia. This richly illustrated talk will share the documentary evidence of the names of those people as well as the work they made, from silversmiths, upholsterers, potters, and cabinetmakers to painters like David Bustill Bowser and his seamstress wife Elizabeth Harriet Stevens Gray Bowser.

Please note that this event is taking place online only; Alexandra Kirtley will not be present at the DAR Museum.

Registration is available here»

Alexandra Kirtley is the Montgomery-Garvan Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Call for Papers | Religious Enlightenments: Spirituality and Space

Posted in Calls for Papers by Editor on July 29, 2025

This session is part of next year’s EAHN conference; the full Call for Papers is available here:

Religious Enlightenment(s): Spirituality and Space in the Long Eighteenth Century

Session at the Conference of the European Architectural History Network, Aarhus, 17–21 June 2026

Chair: Demetra Vogiatzaki

Proposals due by 19 September 2025

In recent decades, the traditional view of the Enlightenment as a period of radical secularization and material monism has been substantially revised. Scholars such as David Sorkin, Jonathan Israel, Catherine Maire, Paschalis Kitromilides, and Robert Darnton have emphasized the enduring and multifaceted role of religion and spirituality—across both institutional and popular expressions—in shaping the politics, culture, and everyday life of the long eighteenth century. Architectural surveys of the period, however, have often lagged behind this historiographical turn, overlooking the importance of religion and spirituality in the shaping of Enlightenment culture, limiting their scope to a strictly formal analysis, or dismissing non-sanctified spaces and experiences of spirituality as anomalies in the progressive, inevitable ‘disenchantment’ of the world.

This session invites papers that explore the political, social, and aesthetic resonances of sacred space in the Enlightenment. From little studied state-sponsored and public programs, all the way to local, vernacular and/or intimate expressions of sacrality, how did architecture and the built environment broad-writ reflect or resist evolving religious identities, dogmatic debates, and communal rituals? Following the lead of such studies as Karsten Harries’ work on Bavarian Rococo Churches, or Ünver Rüstem’s reading of Ottoman Baroque forms and their entanglement with local Christian and Islamic traditions, the goal is to integrate formal analysis with socio-politically embedded approaches, foregrounding spatial practices that have often been overlooked in dominant narratives of Enlightenment architecture.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:
• Patronage networks and sacred architecture in diasporic or commercial communities, as in the port towns of the Mediterranean.
• Reused or re-interpreted religious sites in post-Jesuit or post-missionary contexts (i.e. in the Ethiopian highlands).
• Syncretic religious spaces shaped by colonial conquest and negotiation, as for example, in and around the settlements of New France.
• Ephemeral structures associated with pilgrimage, mourning, or ritual performance.
• Staged sacred environments in Enlightenment theatre, festivals, and visual culture.
• Interfaith collaborations and architectural vocabularies in multi-confessional settings.

We particularly encourage proposals that attend to sacred experiences and spatial practices beyond the bounds of formal religious architecture, and that consider the ways in which spiritual expression operated through, and resisted Enlightenment-era aesthetics. Abstracts are invited by 19 September 2025, 23.59 CET. Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted directly to the chair, along with the applicant’s name, email address, professional affiliation, address, telephone number, and a short curriculum vitae.

Chair
Dr. Demetra Vogiatzaki, gta/ETH Zurich
vogiatzaki@arch.ethz.ch

The Burlington Magazine, July 2025

Posted in books, catalogues, exhibitions, journal articles, reviews by Editor on July 28, 2025

The long 18th century in the July issue of The Burlington:

The Burlington Magazine 167 (July 2025)

e d i t o r i a l

Maria van Oosterwijck, Vanitas stilleven, ca. 1675, oil on canvas (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum).

• “The Gallery of Honour,” p. 635. The gallery of honour in the heart of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, has recently welcomed an impressive painting to its walls: Vanitas still life by Maria van Oosterwijck (1630–93). In a compelling sense the artist has long had a place in galleries of honour, as works by her were acquired by Emperor Leopold I, Louis XIV of France, and Cosimo III de’ Medici of Tuscany.

r e v i e w s

• Christian Scholl, “Germany’s Celebration of Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th Anniversary,” pp. 694–701.
In Germany, the 250th anniversary of Caspar David Friedrich’s birth was celebrated with a series of exhibitions. Key among them were those organised by the three museums with the most extensive holdings of the artist’s work: the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. All three focused on stylistic, iconographic and technical aspects of the artist’s work rather than on Friedrich’s life, and each in its own way has thrown fresh light on his complex and enigmatic art.

Luis Egidio Meléndez, Still Life with Figs, ca. 1760, oil on canvas (Paris: Musée du Louvre, on view at the Musée Goya, Castres).

• Robert Wenley, Review of the exhibition Wellington’s Dutch Masterpieces (Apsley House, London, 2025), pp. 713–15.

• Christoph Martin Vogtherr, Review of the exhibition Corot to Watteau? On the Trail of French Drawings (Kunsthalle Bremen, 2025), pp. 715–18.

• Elsa Espin, Review of the exhibition Le Louvre s’invite chez Goya (Musée Goya, Castres, 2025), pp. 718–20.

• John Marciari, Review of the exhibition Picturing Nature: The Stuart Collection of 18th- and 19th-Century British Landscapes and Beyond (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2025), pp. 720–22.

• Kee Il Choi Jr., Review of the exhibition Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, pp. 722–25.

• Deborah Howard, Review of Mario Piana, Costruire a Venezia: I mutamenti delle tecniche edificatorie lagunari tra Medioevo e Età moderna (Marsilio, 2024), pp. 732–33.

• Isabelle Mayer-Michalon, Review of Christophe Huchet de Quénetain and Moana Weil-Curiel, Étienne Barthélemy Garnier (1765–1849): De l’Académie royale à l’Institut de France (Éditions Faton, 2023), pp. 737–39.

Call for Papers | CAA 2026, Chicago

Posted in Calls for Papers by Editor on July 27, 2025

I’ve highlighted here a selection of panels related to the eighteenth century; but please consult the Call for Papers for additional possibilities. –CH

114th Annual Conference of the College Art Association

Hilton Chicago, 18–21 February 2026

Proposals due by 29 August 2025

Architectural Utopias Redux
Chair: Demetra Vogiatzaki (ETH Zurich)

Can utopia still be a meaningful framework for researching and teaching architecture in a time of ecological and political crisis? Since the Enlightenment, architectural utopias have often shed their emancipatory potential, functioning instead as instruments of capitalist expansion, settler colonialism, and modernist abstraction–so Manfredo Tafuri and Anthony Vidler, among other architectural historians, have claimed. Yet beneath the failed promises of the architectural ‘avant-gardes’ lie counter-histories of resilience—’rear-guard’ efforts that challenged dominant spatial paradigms while restoring equity in their present. This panel invites a rethinking of architectural utopianism by turning attention to those who resisted, subverted, or reconfigured utopian ideals from the margins. What insights can be gained by examining utopia not as a formal project of radical innovation, but as a practice of community endurance and revolt?

We welcome papers that explore the spatial practices of feminist, decolonial, spiritual, and other collectivist movements challenging the exclusions embedded in dominant utopian narratives. These may include intentional communities, grassroots infrastructures, pedagogical experiments, or speculative practices grounded in marginalized worldviews. Submissions may address any historical period, but special attention will be given to work that situates premodern, early modern, or underrepresented geographic contexts within broader debates on utopianism. We also encourage contributions proposing alternative methodologies for teaching utopias in architecture—through archives, oral histories, literary or material culture. By centering the ‘rear-guard’ of architectural history—those whose visions have often been erased, or dismissed—we hope to reimagine utopia not as an unreachable blueprint, but as a lived and ongoing project of resistance.

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Art and Architecture vs. Environment: Failure, Redesign, and Innovation in the Early Modern Iberian World (Society for Iberian Global Art)
Chairs: Rebecca Yuste (Columbia University) and Amy Chang (Harvard University)

The history of the early modern Iberian world is strewn with stories of architectural ambition and engineering innovation that seek to defy, overcome, or restructure extant environmental conditions. Land-reclaiming and flood-controlling projects represent a major thematic in this period, from Regi Lagni in Naples to the desagüe of Mexico City, as do seismic-responsive architectures such as the famous Earthquake Baroque in the Philippines and Guatemala, and as well as post-earthquake architectures in Sicily and Lisbon. Early modern architecture and engineering is often characterized by new boldness of ambition in responding to, attempting to overcome, or intending to change environmental conditions, it often yields cycles of loss, failure, and reiteration, until new technics are achieved.

This panel seeks to learn from stories of architectural and infrastructural failure, innovation, and redesign, especially as it relates to practices of colonialism, from across the Iberian world. We invite papers that seek to complicate the narrative of architectural domination on the land and landscape and search for cases that focus on moments of disjunction and defeat in the face of environmental factors, and the struggle to respond. Papers may examine the consequences of incomplete knowledge of landscapes, ecologies, and materials, and the cases under consideration may be architectural works that were unfinished, hypothetical, never realized, or rebuilt after confronting natural disasters and misunderstandings of ground conditions. We also welcome papers on artworks representing knowledge of materials and environments; moments of disaster, engineering, and rebuilding; or changes in understandings of nature and environment.

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Bad Government: Art and Politics in the Eighteenth Century (American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies)
Chair: Amy E. Freund (Southern Methodist University)

How did art, architecture, and visual and material culture in the long eighteenth century perpetuate or resist objectionable forms of government? This panel will consider how the arts were weaponized both by political leaders to shore up their regimes and by their critics to bring those regimes down. Potential topics include but are by no means limited to: the arts of the eighteenth century’s revolutions and counterrevolutions, the enlistment of the visual arts to justify, perpetuate, and resist colonialism, popular media and propaganda, the building and destruction of palaces, monuments, and other public-facing forms of art, artists as political actors, private and domestic forms of artistic control and contestation, portraits of rulers and political figures, sacred art in the service of secular struggles, and the mobilization of scientific illustration for political ends.

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Centering the Margins: Art and Identity beyond the Colonial American Metropoles
Chairs: JoAnna Reyes (Arizona State University) and Carlos Rivas (The Ohio State University)

This panel investigates the rich artistic traditions of colonial cities in the Americas that developed outside imperial capitals. While metropolitan centers such as Mexico City and Lima have long dominated narratives of colonial art, cities like Antigua (Guatemala), Ouro Preto (Brazil), Cuzco (Peru), and Popayán (Colombia) cultivated distinctive visual cultures that reflected complex interactions among European, Indigenous, African, and mestizo communities. These extra-metropolitan locales were not peripheral but central to the formation of regional artistic identities, often serving as hubs of innovation, adaptation, and resistance.

Panelists will explore how visual culture and aesthetic preference were transformed in these cities through localized interpretations, responding to local materials, labor networks, and spiritual traditions. Religious architecture and devotional arts—especially those commissioned for monasteries, cathedrals, and mission churches—may serve as a lens to examine both the imposition and reinterpretation of colonial ideologies. The panel also considers the importance of artisan networks and the movement of artists, artworks, and raw materials across colonial territories, illuminating the transregional dynamics that shaped local production.

In tracing these developments, the panel foregrounds how artistic production in these cities negotiated colonial authority while fostering creole and Indigenous expressions of identity. By centering these often-overlooked locales, this panel seeks to expand the geographies of colonial art history and enrich our understanding of artistic agency in the Americas.

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Freedom, Fugitivity, and Revolt in the Global Netherlandish World, 1500–1800
Chairs: Arianna Ray (Northwestern University) and Kathleen DiDomenico (Washington University in St. Louis)

This session explores the distinct but related notions of freedom, fugitivity, and revolt in art of the global Netherlandish world, ca. 1500–1800. Freedom, understood as the state of being unencumbered by restrictions, restraints, or oppression, is often seen as a defining feature of the early modern Netherlands, where political revolt, religious reform, economic endeavor, and artistic experimentation resulted in newfound freedoms for certain populations. But alongside these often precarious freedoms, there remained hierarchies of power that kept people locked in systems of repression, subjugation, and exploitation. In response, historical subjects turned to strategic practices of fugitivity and revolt, both overt and subtle, in an effort to resist domination and create alternative spaces of personal and collective liberty. This panel will examine concepts of freedom/unfreedom capaciously, as a labor status, an artistic practice, and a theoretical question. We build upon the insights of scholars within and beyond art history, including Saidiya Hartman, Neil Roberts, and Tina Campt, among others. We welcome interdisciplinary and methodologically innovative approaches, particularly those engaging with Black studies, Indigenous studies, gender and queer theory, and decolonial critique.

Potential topics include:
• Depictions of forced labor including slavery, serfdom, and indentured servitude
• Depictions of fugitives, maroons, revolutionaries, and diasporic communities
• Representations of individual and collective acts of resistance
• Mapping spaces/sites/locations of freedom, fugitivity, and revolt
• Objects made by forced laborers or those who achieved freedom
• Visual culture around rebellions and uprisings
• Artistic freedom and creativity
• Coded imagery and subversive aesthetics
• Absences in the archive and/as fugitivity

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Garden and its Discontents / Discontents in the Garden
Chairs: Xiaoyao Guo (Princeton University) and Chenchen Yan (Princeton University)

As locus amoenus and paradise lost, the garden has been a place of ambivalence since the start of human civilization. Positioned uneasily between landscape and architecture, it is also one of the most powerful topoi through which to tame, emulate, and (re)construct nature. This panel revisits the long and rich histories of the garden and investigates its ambivalence, here reformulated as “discontents,” through various cultural historical mediations.

Motivated by Sigmund Freud’s famous essay “Civilization and its Discontents” on the irreconcilable clash between individual instincts and societal regulations, this panel aims to reread the garden into its concrete sociohistorical textures. Furthermore, drawing from the precise translation of the essay’s original title, “The Discontent in Civilization,” this panel approaches the garden as a contested site between ideologies, discourses, and sensibilities in which contradictions and antagonisms are inherently constitutive of its construction. From the Venetian terraferma to the Japanese bonsai, from the English picturesque to the American wilderness, the garden addresses specific questions of its times, and challenges its presumed harmony and unity: What are the discontents housed within the seemingly serene Elysium? What perceptual and conceptual tensions need to be identified, what hierarchies undone? We welcome submissions on the discontents of/in the garden across cultures and histories. This “comparative-global” approach, we hope, would highlight in turn the cultural-specificity and social constructedness of the garden. Articulating these discontents, then, would offer valuable insights into the binaries of art-science, nature-culture, self-other urgent to today’s ecologically conscious world.

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Hybridity, Adaptability, and Exchange during the Long Eighteenth Century: Producing Global Aesthetics in Decorative Art and Design (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture)

Chairs: Zifeng Zhao (University of Cambridge) and Alisha Ma (London School of Economics and Political Science)

Over the long eighteenth century (c. 1689–1815), the decorative arts and design underwent profound change via global diffusion of objects, techniques, and knowledge. Although global artistic exchange has shaped cultural landscapes for centuries, this particular period saw the creation of new aesthetic paradigms and fostered cultural discourses regarding notions of cultural agency, identity, and authenticity. This session examines the making of global aesthetic traditions and practices in the long eighteenth century by closely interrogating the dynamics of cross-cultural hybridity, adaptability, and exchange along with their usefulness as art historical concepts. Furthermore, the session will illustrate how the evolution of artistic traditions shaped visual, material, sensorial, and political landscapes across the early modern world.

We invite contributions that address how individuals and collectives responded to cross-cultural interactions, creatively adapting and transforming these influences into novel, hybrid forms. We welcome papers from diverse geographies that consider how decorative art and design functioned as crucial contact zones where local traditions were continuously reimagined through exchange as well as resistance. For example, Indian artisans adapted traditional cotton textile designs for European tastes, while European potters such as the Delft and Meissen factories experimented with new technologies to produce ceramics in competition with Chinese porcelain. Meanwhile, Colonoware pottery was produced by enslaved Africans in North America from a combination of African traditions, local resources and practical demands. Ultimately, this discussion will deepen scholarly understanding of the role played by the decorative arts in producing global visual and material cultures during the long eighteenth century.

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Is There a Native American Art History Canon? Is It a Good Idea?
Chairs: Karen Kessel and Alicia Lynn Harris (University of Oklahoma)

While the framing of art history survey courses has gradually shifted from a core focus on Western Civilization emanating from Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean regions to a more global view, the North American continent remains marginalized. Some American art history texts now incorporate Native American works into their narrative, but do Native Americans identify with being part of the United States’ cultural history? Current textbooks for Native American art focus disproportionately on the post-contact era with minimal coverage of the millennia that came before. Why? Archaeologists, who do not generally prioritize artistic achievement in their research, have been the main contributors to studies of the pre-contact era in North America. Given recent contributions to the field from an increase in Native scholars working in museums and academic institutions, this panel seeks to understand and help define the current best practices for teaching Native American art history. We invite papers that assess what can and should be shared, when, and who has authority over cultural domains, along with consideration of what themes, ideas, artworks, and frameworks are currently considered best practices to enhance the appreciation and understanding of Native American art history.

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Landscape, Materiality, and Representation in the Long Nineteenth Century
Chair: Noam Gonnen (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

This session invites contributions that investigate the entangled relationships between landscape, materiality, and representation in the long nineteenth century. While landscape has often been examined through symbolic, nationalistic, or pictorial frameworks, this panel foregrounds its material dimensions—both as subject and substance—and asks how they shaped artistic and cultural production during this transformative period. How did the physical qualities of land, earth, and environment inflect visual representation? What tensions emerged between landscape as material presence and landscape as mediated image?

Bridging art history, material and visual culture, human geography, and environmental humanities, this session seeks to integrate phenomenological approaches (Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Casey), material and object-oriented ontology (Bennett, Harman), and geographical theory (Ingold) with close visual and historical analysis. We are particularly interested in how the materiality of land—its textures, substances, and transformations—was registered, abstracted, or resisted in the practices of representation across diverse geographies, media, and artistic traditions during this period.

Contributors might consider:
• The material construction of landscape images: grounds, supports, pigments, and surfaces
• Representing geological time, land use, or extraction industries
• Earth as medium: pigment, sediment, and organic matter in artistic practice
• Artistic responses to ecological degradation
• Indigenous and non-Western modes of representing land and territory
• The role of materiality in 19th-century cartography or land surveys
• The visual rhetorics of land ownership, enclosure, and displacement
• Intersections of land, labor, and class in visual culture
We welcome proposals engaging with both canonical and understudied works that rethink landscape through its material and representational operations.

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Let’s Get Metaphysical: Rethinking the Empiricism of British Art (Historians of British Art)
Chair: Douglas R. Fordham (University of Virginia)

Histories of British art rarely ask metaphysical questions. More common are narratives in which the empiricism of Locke and Newton inspired artists to draw and paint the material world “after the life”. But how feasible was it for British artists to bracket metaphysical questions out of their work? As Eugene Thacker noted, “‘Life’ is a troubling and contradictory concept…. Every ontology of ‘life’ thinks of life in terms of something-other-than-life [which] is most often a metaphysical concept, such as time and temporality, form and causality, or spirit and immanence.”

What, if anything, enabled British art to transcend its base materiality? Should paintings ever be more than mimetic ‘pictures’ of the material world, and if so, what beliefs, ideas, or eternal propositions did they invoke? We have grown accustomed to thinking of British artists as post-Reformation iconoclasts who embraced an empirical view of the world. Painting is treated like a mode of critique in which artists contributed to the disenchantment of the modern world. This panel is interested in British art, in any medium and from any period, that refused to settle for mimetic realism. While altarpieces, funerary monuments, and the spiritual visions of William Blake immediately come to mind, papers could interrogate the ‘naturalism’ or ‘lifelikeness’ of J.M.W. Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, Walter Sickert, and a great deal more.

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Materiality and the Reception of Ancient Objects
Chairs: Stephanie Rose Caruso (The Art Institute of Chicago) and Andrea Morgan (The Art Institute of Chicago)

Ancient Mediterranean objects typically survive in a fragmented state, and their reception, particularly sculpture, has shifted over time. Seventeenth-century artists worked to return fragmented ancient sculptures to a ‘whole’ or ‘complete’ state. Yet, in 1803, Antonio Canova refused Lord Elgin’s proposal to restore the Parthenon marbles, fearing it would damage their original condition. Thus, there was an eventual shift in the perception of the fragment—no longer ‘incomplete’, it possessed an “age value” as Alois Riegl later theorized. With the discovery of ancient textiles in Egypt in the second half of the nineteenth century an opposite approach to the fragment developed. Despite the fact that one might discover a ‘complete’ ancient textile, it was rarely retained; rather, it was cut into as many pieces as possible. Not perceived as fine art, their value instead stemmed from their ability to transmit patterns.

This panel aims to explore the reception, manipulation, restoration, or destruction of ancient objects from the Renaissance through the end of the nineteenth century. We invite papers that investigate whether the specific materiality of ancient objects makes them more vulnerable or resistant to later intervention. Topics can include the exploration of the concept of in/completeness in relation to changing tastes and theoretical divisions between the fine and applied arts; in/completeness and restoration in relation to aesthetic and historical integrity; and the exploration of pastiches. We seek contributions that look closely at surviving objects to extrapolate new ways of thinking about the reception of ancient art.

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Modes of Inscription
Chairs: Erica DiBenedetto (The Museum of Modern Art) and Charles Kang (Rijksmuseum)

Adding language to an object takes many forms and has a long history. It can be done, for example, by the maker of an object as an integral part of generating a work. It can be done by others–and often at a later date–as an addition, an intervention, or even an accident irrelevant to the work. While the modes of inscription might differ from case to case, the voice behind the inscription can bestow a sense of authority in the life of an object. It can also trouble its interpretation. Rather than framing the idea of inscription in terms of word/image relations, this CAA session understands the act of adding language to an object fundamentally as a mediation. Although found across many periods, geographies, and mediums, the practice of inscription has not received sufficient attention from a global and transhistorical perspective. Panelists are therefore invited to examine instances of inscription specific to their respective fields, using their expertise to offer new questions and theoretical considerations about the phenomenon. The common aim will be to consider how such mediations help us think differently about conceptions of authorship, meaning, and possession across time and space.

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Nature in Indigenous Arts of the Ancient and Colonial Americas
Chairs: James Cordova (University of Colorado Boulder) and Angélica J. Afanador-Pujol

The culture-nature divide inherent in European epistemologies and cosmologies contrasts sharply with Indigenous American perspectives, which emphasize interconnectedness over discordance between humans and the natural world. Before European colonization, Indigenous ontologies profoundly shaped the roles of the natural world in their artistic expressions. These beliefs are often evident in the materials chosen for creations, representations of plants, animals, deities, and other sentient beings, as well as the design and layout of cities. In addition to the colonial exploitation of Indigenous peoples and the natural world, the imposition of European epistemologies elicited diverse responses, ranging from outright resistance to selective appropriation, partial acceptance, and full assimilation. This session invites papers that examine the critical roles nature and the environment played in Indigenous creative expressions from ancient to colonial times (c. 1400 BCE – 1825 CE) across North America, Mesoamerica, the Caribbean, Amazonia, and the Andes.

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Pigments and Praxis in the Early Modern Period
Chairs: Annie Correll (New York University) and Gerrit Albertson (Art Institute of Chicago)

Early modern and contemporary sources alike have compared artists’ workshop practices with those of alchemists, as they ground and mixed their pigments with binding media, experimenting with additives and proportions to develop paints with particular viscosities and opacities. Technical studies have further proven the specialized attention that early modern artists paid to their pigments. Hendrick Avercamp used smalt between layers of lead white, diffracting and absorbing light to achieve icy, atmospheric skies in his winter scenes; Frans Hals experimented with indigo in the sashes of his 1627 Haarlem Civic Guard portraits despite contemporary concerns about its discoloration; and Rembrandt developed a signature lead-white paint, adjusting its rheological properties for use in his impasto. This panel seeks to bring together the technical and the art historical to consider pigments not just as agents for color, but for artistic experimentation and cultural significance. We especially welcome joint papers by early modern art historians and conservators or scientists.

Questions addressed may include:
• What can be revealed by tracing the trade routes along which pigments travelled?
• How did environmental or geological factors affect the raw materials of natural pigments? How were they harvested, processed, and made into paint?
• Who played a role in this process? What were the socio-economic or power dynamics at play?
• How did the use of pigments conform to or converge from art theory?
• How did artists experiment to achieve desired color, light, or textural effects?
• What can pigments tell us about the perceived value or purpose of a painting?

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The Margins and Backgrounds of Portraits
Chairs: Joseph Litts (Princeton University) and Michael Hartman (Dartmouth College – Hood Museum)

Portraiture studies have traditionally focused on faces, clothing, and accessories as sites of creating and stabilizing identity within art. Layers of oil paint, pastel dust, and engraved ink articulate race, gender, class, and kinship networks on a scale ranging from jewelry miniatures to life-size replicas. Scholars have demonstrated how these representations surrogated for distant power, how collections and exhibitions were political statements, and how portrait iconoclasm could be broadly ideological rather than personal.

However, what happens behind and around the body? This facet of portraiture remains an open field. Our panel thus invites papers that examine the margins and backgrounds of portraits. These spaces vary from roundels or planes of color, to classicizing scenes or imaginary gardens, to draperies or architectural structures. As much as standardized formulas and techniques have developed for the face itself, the (back)ground has been curiously resistant to such strategies. This panel asks what do these diverse environments—a visualized “habitus,” to borrow from Bourdieu—contribute to the portrait? How might painterly surroundings trouble notions of identity and modernity? For group portraits and conversation pieces, how does setting provoke or dismiss relationality? Do specific display or exhibition contexts become extended backgrounds for portraits, especially with sculptures? Ultimately, how do the edges, however they might be defined, (re)frame our understanding of the key genre of portraiture? In addition to paying close attention to the borders and liminal spaces of portraiture as traditionally understood, we also welcome papers that trouble the definitions of portraiture itself through close attention to context.

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Ungrading Art History
Chairs: Jessy L. Bell (Northwestern University) and Brian T. Leahy (Montana State University Billings)

The art history classroom has long been distinguished by harsh grading, steep learning curves, and high-stakes memorization. However, in the current era of generative AI and legislative attacks on the humanities, there is an urgent need for art history to reexamine its pedagogical foundations to better fulfill its most vital role: teaching critical thinking about images. Recent pedagogical movements variously called ungrading, contract grading, or de-grading, backed by research in the science of teaching and learning (Alfie Kohn, Susan D. Blum, Joshua R. Eyler, Jesse Stommel, and others) challenge the predominance of punitive strategies for evaluating student learning. Instead, these studies propose approaches that develop students’ intrinsic desires for learning through evaluative feedback, progress-based assessment, self-reflection, project-based learning, and other methods. This panel asks how art history might also reimagine its pedagogical and evaluative practices beyond grades—or conventional assessments more broadly—not only to deepen student engagement, but also to reclaim the radical potential of looking closely at images.

We invite papers that reconsider assessment in art history and architectural history at the university level. We welcome the results of classroom experiments and reflections, including but not limited to the alternative assessment methods mentioned above; new theoretical frameworks for teaching art history; experiments in student-centered approaches; historical perspectives on grading’s role in disciplining art historical knowledge; or collaborative redefinitions of assessment. Together, the panel asks: What is possible when our students approach art history not as a way to make the grade but as a tool to see the world anew?

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Note (added 18 August 2025)The posting was updated to include the session on “Materiality and the Reception of Ancient Objects.”