Enfilade

Distributed by ACC Art Books:

Carole Blumenfeld, Marguerite Gérard, 1761–1837 (Montreuil: Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2018), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-2353402731, £45.

Often dismissed merely as Fragonard’s sister-in-law, Marguerite Gérard (1761–1837) was in fact one of the major artists working in France in the late eighteenth century. Initially Fragonard’s pupil, then his assistant and finally his collaborator, she found success as an artist in her own right, becoming known for her portraits and sometimes voluptuous genre scenes. The only female genre artist of her time, she excelled in the treatment of reflections and surfaces, in the rendering of flesh, and in domestic scenes of daily life.

Standing alongside Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun and Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Marguerite Gérard is another in the distinguished company of French female artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries whose major talents and formidable characters are now being rediscovered.

One of a series of seven volumes on the ‘Cultural History of the Senses’, the volume addressing the Enlightenment, edited by Anne Vila, first appeared in 2014. It, along with the entire series, is now available in paperback from Bloomsbury Academic. More information (including a discounted offer) is available on the flyer for the series:

Anne Vila, ed., A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1350077911, £25 / $35.

This volume examines the varied ways in which the senses were perceived afresh during the Enlightenment. In addition to introducing new philosophical and scientific models which sometimes upended the classic hierarchy of the senses, this period witnessed major changes in living and working habits, including urbanization, travel and exploration, the invention of new sonic and visual media, and the rise of comfort and pleasure as values that cut across a range of social classes. As this volume shows, those developments inspired a wealth of sensorially stimulating styles of design, art, music, poetry, foodstuffs, material goods and modes of worship and entertainment.

The volume also demonstrates the period’s countervailing concern with managing the senses, evident in fields like natural philosophy, medicine, education, religion, and public hygiene. Finally, it explores some of the Enlightenment’s desensualizing tendencies, like the separation of sensuous body from discerning mind in certain arenas of science and manufacturing, and the late 18th-century shift away from a politics of publicity, or intense visual and aural scrutiny, toward the secret ballot. A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment presents essays on the following topics: the social life of the senses; urban sensations; the senses in the marketplace; the senses in religion; the senses in philosophy and science; medicine and the senses; the senses in literature; art and the senses; and sensory media.

Anne C. Vila is Professor of French in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-century France (1998), as well as many articles on the body in the culture of the Enlightenment. She is currently completing a book entitled Singular Beings: Passions and Pathologies of the Scholar in France, 1720–1840.

From Archaeopress Archaeology:

John Boardman, Julia Kagan, and Claudia Wagner, with contributions by Catherine Phillips, Natter’s Museum Britannicum: British Gem Collections and Collectors of the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Archaeopress Archaeology, 2018), 316 pages, ISBN: 978-1784917272, £55 / $110.

The German gem-engraver, medallist, and amateur scholar Lorenz Natter (1705–1763), was so impressed by the size and quality of the collections of ancient and later engraved gems which he found in Britain that he proposed the publication of an extraordinarily ambitious catalogue—Museum Britannicum—which would present engravings and descriptions of the most important pieces. He made considerable progress to this end, producing several hundred drawings, but in time he decided to abandon the near completed project in the light of the apparent lack of interest shown in Britain. Only one of the intended plates in its final form ever appeared, in a catalogue which he published separately for Lord Bessborough’s collection.

On Natter’s death the single copy of his magnum opus vanished mysteriously, presumed lost forever. All hope of recovering Natter’s unpublished papers seemed vain, and their very existence had come to be doubted. Yet they were to be found more than two hundred years after his death, in spring 1975, when the classical scholar and renowned expert in gems, Oleg Neverov, chanced upon them at the bottom of a pile of papers in the archives of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Neverov and his colleague Julia Kagan carried out the initial research on the Hermitage manuscripts and produced the first published account of this archival treasure.

The present volume builds upon their earlier work to produce the first comprehensive publication of Museum Britannicum, offering full discussion in English and presenting Natter’s drawings and comments alongside modern information on the gems that can be identified and located through fresh research. This book is the result of a ten-year collaboration between scholars on the Beazley Archive gems research programme at Oxford’s Classical Art Research Centre and the State Hermitage Museum. It fulfills Natter’s vision for the Museum Britannicum—albeit two and a half centuries late—to the benefit of art historians, cultural historians, curators, and gem-lovers of today.

Sir John Boardman, FBA, is Emeritus Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art in the University of Oxford. His many books include Greek Gems and Finger Rings (2001), The Greeks Overseas (1999), Greek Art (2016), The History of Greek Vases (2006), and The World of Ancient Art (2006).

Julia Kagan is the Curator of post-Classical engraved gems in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. She has contributed to the history of glyptics in Great Britain with major publications, such as Gem Engraving in Britain from Antiquity to the Present (2010) and curated important exhibitions, such as the gem collection of the Duc D’Orleans in Paris (2001).

Claudia Wagner is Director of the gems databases at the Beazley Archive in the University of Oxford and Senior Research Lecturer at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She is joint author, with John Boardman, of seven books devoted to the study and publication of ancient gems, including The Guy Ladrière Collection of Gems and Rings (2015) and The Beverley Collection of Gems at Alnwick Castle (2016), both written with Diana Scarisbrick.

C O N T E N T S

Preface

Part One
1  An Anglo-Russian Project
2  Lorenz Natter: Early Career
3  Natter in Britain
4  Natter in Russia
5  The Museum Britannicum Rediscovered
6  Afterword

Part Two
7  The Museum Britannicum: The Catalogue and Drawings
8  The Collectors and Their Gems
9  Lorenz Natter’s Own Collection
10  Natter’s Index of the Museum Britannicum
11  Natter’s Treatise and Miscellaneous Drawings

Index of Gem Subjects
Index of Inscriptions
General Index

The original German edition Der Diener: Mediengeschichte einer Figur zwischen König und Klient appeared in 2011; the English translation was published in June by Yale UP:

Markus Krajewski, The Server: A Media History from the Present to the Baroque, translated by Ilinca Iurascu (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 456 pages, ISBN: 978-0300180817, $50.

Though classic servants like the butler or the governess have largely vanished, the Internet is filled with servers: web, ftp, mail, and others perform their daily drudgery, going about their business noiselessly and unnoticed. Why then are current-day digital drudges called servers? Markus Krajewski explores this question by going from the present back to the Baroque to study historical aspects of service through various perspectives, be it the servants’ relationship to architecture or their function in literary or scientific contexts. At the intersection of media studies, cultural history, and literature, this work recounts the gradual transition of agency from human to nonhuman actors to show how the concept of the digital server stems from the classic role of the servant.

Markus Krajewski is professor of media history at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He is the author of numerous articles and several books, including Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs, 1548–1929 and World Projects: Global Information Before World War I, which was awarded the 2007 Prize of the German Society for the History of Medicine, Science and Technology. He also works as a software developer and maintainer of his bibliography software Synapsen: A Hypertextual Card Index (www.synapsen.ch). Ilinca Iurascu is assistant professor of German at the University of British Columbia, specializing in nineteenth-century cultural studies and media theory.

C O N T E N T S

Ilinca Iurascu, Introduction to the English Edition: Jeeves Transatlantic

Introduction: Listen, James

Part One: Objects Assistants, Analog
1  Masters / Servants: Everyone is a Subaltern
2  The Servant as Information Center
3  In Waiting

Part Two: The Interregnum of the Subject
4  Holding the Reins: On Demons and Other Ministering Spirits of Science
5  Channel Service
6  At the Stove

Part Three: Diener, Digital
7  Agents: The Lord of (the) Things

Epilogue: Idle Time

Notes
Bibliography
Index