New Book | Il Disegno nell’Europa del Settecento
Available from Artbooks.com:
Piera Giovanna Tordella, Il disegno nell’Europa del Settecento: Regioni teoriche ragioni critiche (Florence: Olschki, 2012), 284 pages, ISBN: 978-8822262332, $65.
The book follows the theoretic and critical evolution of European drawing and of its complex configuration in the eighteenth century, with the aid of texts by German, French, English, Dutch and Italian authors. The theme is naturally variegated and connects the activity of intellectuals, philosophers, writers, poets, artists, connoisseurs and collectors. The scene is often animated by original interpreters that crossed conceptual and aesthetic horizons populated by acclaim and disapproval.
Exibition | Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment
From The Hunterian:
Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment
The Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, 13 September 2013 — 5 January 2014
Allan Ramsay, Lady Anne Campbell, Countess of Strafford, 1743 (Glasgow: The Hunterian)
In 2013 The Hunterian will stage a major new exhibition dedicated to one of Britain’s most accomplished 18th-century painters. Allan Ramsay (1713-1784) is best known as a portrait painter whose elegant style set him apart from other portraitists of the time. Born in Edinburgh, his career took him from a small Scottish clientele to the Hanoverian court of King George III. Away from his studio, Ramsay was in close contact with a number of influential figures, and his published writing includes works on taste, politics and archaeology. The exhibition centres on a selection of portraits from across Ramsay’s thirty years as a painter and also features drawings, watercolours, published books, pamphlets, letters and other materials which demonstrate Ramsay’s fascinating place in the intellectual and cultural life of Edinburgh, London, Paris and Rome in the mid 18th century. The exhibition also includes key loans from UK public and private collections and new research, examining the intellectual context in which Ramsay painted a number of his most important portraits, including that of Hunterian founder Dr William Hunter.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From ArtBooks.com:
Mungo Campbell, ed., Allan Ramsay: Portraits of the Enlightenment (New York: Prestel, 2013), 200 pages, ISBN: 978-3791348780, $60.
Allan Ramsay’s accomplished canvases and refined drawings offer us some of the defining portraits of the Enlightenment. He was as well equipped to offer a deep sense of engagement with his Enlightenment sitters through his intellectual and cultural upbringing as he was trained to create elegantly constructed paintings through his extended education as a painter in Italy. Establishing himself in London and Edinburgh, Ramsay was admired for his understanding of contemporary political, cultural, and intellectual issues, as well as for his portraits of key protagonists in these debates. This beautiful volume brings together Ramsay’s most celebrated sitters, such as Rousseau, Hume, and William Hunter, along with numerous drawings and prints to consider his critical role in the British Enlightenment. Many of the artist’s rarely seen portraits of women are included. Alongside exquisite reproductions, the volume presents fascinating new research exploring the unique sensitivity of Ramsay’s
painting, the development of his technique, and
familial influences on his work.
Call for Papers | Visions of Enchantment
From the conference website:
Visions of Enchantment: Occultism, Spirituality and Visual Culture
University of Cambridge, 17-18 March 2014
Proposals due by 31 October 2013
This two-day event is a collaboration between the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge and the Arts University Bournemouth and is organised in association with the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism. The conference seeks to investigate the formative role that occultism and magic have played in Western and non-Western visual and material culture. It aims to present original research in this field as well as to establish a productive dialogue between academics with a particular research interest in occultism and visual
culture.
We invite proposals from a variety of disciplines and perspectives, provided that they present innovative insights into visual, symbolic or material aspects of the esoteric tradition. Acceptable topics may include, but are by no means limited to, the following areas:
• Alchemy and Hermetic symbolism
• Astrology and astrological illustrations
• The visual and material culture of witchcraft, black magic and sorcery
• Talismans, totems, fetishes and other apotropaic objects
• Occult and spiritual aspects of Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Hindu art
• Theosophy and modern visual culture
• The visual and material culture of other occult movements and societies
• Surrealism and the occult
• The influence of occultism and the spiritual on other avant-garde movements
• Occult art, counter-culture and radical/subversive politics
• Women artists and the occult
• Gendered, sexual and ‘queer’ ramifications of esoteric art
• Photography, spiritism, séances and automatic drawings/paintings
• The supernatural in performance, cinema, experimental film and video-installations
• Occultism and magic in contemporary visual culture
Papers should be 20 minutes in length and will be followed by a 10-minute Q&A session. Abstracts of no more than 500 words and a short bio-sketch of no more than 150 words should be sent as a single Word.doc to
enchantment2014@gmail.com by 31 October 2013. Early applications are encouraged.
We plan to publish the proceedings of this conference. Please indicate therefore whether you would be interested in further developing your paper for a publication of collected essays after the event.
Confirmed keynote speakers:
M. E. Warlick (University of Denver)
Emilie Savage-Smith (University of Oxford)
Marco Pasi (University of Amsterdam)
Sarah Turner (University of York)
For more information, please visit www.visionsofenchantment.com.
New Book | Delftware in the Fitzwilliam Museum
From Philip Wilson’s current catalogue:
Michael Archer, Delftware in the Fitzwilliam Museum (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2012), 464 pages, ISBN: 978-1781300022, £55 / $95.
This complete catalogue of the English and Irish delftware in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, reveals much that is beautiful and unusual. The greater part of the collection was bequeathed by Dr J.W.L. Glaisher in 1928, and much of it is little known. A detailed publication has long been overdue, and 588 items are illustrated here in colour, many with multiple views. The strength of Dr Glaisher’s collection is the English earthenware of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly delftware: no better assemblage has ever been made by a single collector. He amassed objects with great academic rigour over a period of more than thirty years, concentrating particularly on dated pieces while always exercising a discriminating and aesthetical eye. Michael Archer’s catalogue provides details of date and place of manufacture, size, body, glaze, decoration and provenance with a full discussion where appropriate.
Julia Poole has contributed a fascinating chapter with much new material on Dr Glaisher’s life and the extraordinary breadth of his collecting interests. There is also a general introduction to delftware, including a description of the manufacturing process; further sections give indexes and exhaustive information on all the works. This book is an essential addition to the library of all scholars, collectors,auction rooms and dealers in the field and invaluable to those members of the public with an interest in the history of English pottery generally and delftware in particular.
Michael Archer, O.B.E, M.A., F.S.A. is a former Keeper of the Ceramics Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum where he becamethe acknowledged expert on English delftware. He has written numerous articles and books on ceramics, culminating in Delftware: The Tin-Glazed Earthenware of the British Isles, a catalogue of the collections inthe Victoria and Albert Museum, published in 1997.
AHRC Studentship | The Art of Longford Castle
From Birkbeck College:
Patronage, Acquisition and Display: Contextualising the Art
Collections of Longford Castle during the Long Eighteenth Century
AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, The National Gallery and Birkbeck College
Applications due by 5 July 2013
Applications are invited for an AHRC-funded PhD studentship researching the collecting and patronage of the Radnor family at Longford Castle during the long eighteenth century, drawing on both the collection itself and previously untapped archival material, largely housed at the Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office. The National Gallery enjoys a unique relationship with Longford Castle, which has made full access to these resources newly possible. This project will make a significant contribution to the history of taste, collecting and the country house
in the long eighteenth century.
The studentship funding is subject to final confirmation by the AHRC but will be fully funded for three years full-time (or five years part-time) and will begin in October 2013. This project will be supervised by Dr Kate Retford, Senior Lecturer in History of Art (Birkbeck College, University of London) and Dr Susanna Avery-Quash, Research Curator in the History of Collecting at the National Gallery.
More information is available here»
Symposium | The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century
This fall at Dumbarton Oaks (as noted by Courtney Barnes at Style Court) . . .
The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, D.C., 4–5 October 2013
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
This two-day symposium will bring together an international body of scholars working on botanical investigations and publications within the context of imperial expansion in the long eighteenth century.
The period saw widespread exploration, a tremendous increase in the traffic in botanical specimens, significant taxonomic innovations, and horticultural experimentation. We aim to revisit these developments from a comparative perspective that will include Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Africa, Asia, and the Americas.
Main themes for discussion are global networks of plant discovery and transfer; the quest for medicinal plants and global crops such as ginseng, tea and opium; the economies of gift, trade, patronage, and scientific prestige in which plants circulated; imperial aspirations or influences as reflected in garden design; and visual strategies and epistemologies. Individual papers will explore the contributions of naturalists such as William Bartram (North America), Paul-Émile Botta (Levant), and François Le Vaillant (South Africa).
The symposium is timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Rare Book Room at Dumbarton Oaks, and will feature an exhibit of botanical works from our collections [with an online sample already available]. Registration for the symposium is now open.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From the program:
Notice sur un Voyage dans L’Arabie Heureuse: Politics and Scientific Authority in the Work of Paul-Emile Botta
Sahar Bazzaz, College of the Holy Cross
Thomas McDonnell’s Opium: Circulating Plants, Patronage and Power in Britain, China and New Zealand, 1830s-1850s
James Beattie, University of Waikato
Botanical Conquistadors: Plants and Empire in the Hispanic Enlightenment
Daniela Bleichmar, University of Southern California
Bricolage of Flowers and Gardens: Agents of Early Modernization in Ottoman Istanbul
Deniz Çalış-Kural, Istanbul Bilgi University
On Diplomacy and the Botanical Gift: France and Mysore in 1788
Sarah Easterby-Smith, University of St. Andrews
François Le Vaillant: Accidental Botanist
Ian Glenn, University of Cape Town
The Geography of Ginseng and the Strange Alchemy of Needs
Shigehisa Kuriyama, Harvard University
Humboldt’s Gifts and a Bountiful Harvest from the Tropical Lowlands of Western South America
Colin McEwan, Dumbarton Oaks
William Bartram’s Drawing of a New Species of ‘Arethusa’ (1796): The Portrait of a Life
Amy Meyers, Yale Center for British Art
Emblems of the Creation and Destruction of All Things: The Lives and Deaths of Robert Thornton’s Medical Plants
Miranda Mollendorf, Harvard University
Making ‘Mongolian’ Nature: Medicinal Plants and Qing Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century
Carla Nappi, University of British Columbia
Ornamental Exotica: Transplanting the Aesthetics of Tea Consumption
Romita Ray, Syracuse University
Visions of Empire: Eighteenth-Century Western Accounts of Chinese Gardens
Bianca Rinaldi, University of Camerino
Echoes of Empire: Redefining the Botanical Garden in Eighteenth-Century Tuscany
Anatole Tchikine, Dumbarton Oaks
New Strategies of Vision in Botanical Illustration and Botanical Art in the Eighteenth Century
Lucia Tongiorgi, University of Pisa
Colonial Williamsburg and MESDA Form Collaboration
As noted at Art Daily (4 June 2013) . . .
The two leading decorative arts institutions in the South are embarking on a new level of collaboration between their organizations. The Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg [in Virginia] and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) at Old Salem Museums & Gardens [in North Carolina] have entered a five-year agreement between the museums for reciprocal extended loans. The museums have already collaborated on the recently opened exhibition, Painters and Paintings in the Early American South at the Arts Museums of Colonial Williamsburg. With nine major paintings MESDA is the largest single lender to the exhibition, while select objects from the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg are already on display at MESDA.
In total, 40 objects from MESDA are on loan to the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg and, conversely, 30 objects from the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg to MESDA. These objects range from clocks and high chests to paintings and silver coffee pots. The collaboration is part of a five-year agreement between the museums for reciprocal extended loans. Many of the MESDA objects on loan to Colonial Williamsburg will be featured in a new, long-term exhibition opening at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, one of the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg, in January 2014. A Rich and Varied Culture: The Material World of the Early South will feature furniture, silver, ceramics, textiles and costumes, tools, machines, architectural elements and other materials made in or imported to the South before 1840. (more…)
New Book | The Diary of Constantijn Huygens
From Brill (with thanks to Hélène Bremer for noting it — chapter 7 addresses Huygens as an art connoisseur) . . .
Rudolf Dekker, Family, Culture, and Society in the Diary of Constantijn Huygens Jr, Secretary to Stadholder-King William of Orange (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 195 pages, ISBN: 978-9004250949. €98 / $136.
Based on analysis of a diary kept by Constantijn Huygens Jr, the secretary to Stadholder-King William of Orange, this book proposes a new explanation for the invention of the modern, private diary in the 17th century. At the same time it sketches a panoramic view of Europe at the time of the Glorious Revolution and the Nine Years’ War, recorded by an eyewitness. The book includes chapters on such subjects as the changing perception of time, book collecting, Huygens’s role as connoisseur of art, belief in magic and witchcraft, and gossip and sexuality at the court of William and Mary. Finally this study shows how modern scientific ideas, developed by Huygens’s brother Christiaan Huygens, changed our way of looking at the world around us.
Rudolf Dekker taught history at Erasmus University Rotterdam and directs the Institute for the Study of Egodocuments and History, Amsterdam. He is the author of several books, including Humour in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age (Palgrave 2001). With Arianne Baggerman he wrote Child of the Enlightenment: Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary (Brill 2005).
New Book | Newton and the Netherlands
From The University of Chicago Press (with thanks to Hélène Bremer for noting it) . . .
Eric Jorink and Ad Maas, eds., Newton and the Netherlands: How Isaac Newton was Fashioned in the Dutch Republic (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2012), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-9087281373, $37.
The Dutch Republic proved to be extremely receptive to the groundbreaking ideas of Isaac Newton (1643-1727). Dutch scholars such as Willem Jacob Gravesande and Petrus van Musschenbroek played a crucial role in the dissemination of Newton’s work, not only in the Netherlands, but also in the rest of Europe. With Newton and the Netherlands, editors Eric Jorink and Ad Maas collect a variety of essays that seek to contextualize Newtonian ideas within Dutch intellectual history and examine Newton’s powerful influence on his contemporaries in the Netherlands.
Eric Jorink is researcher at the Huygens Institute for Netherlands History (Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences). He is the author of Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575-1715 (Leiden 2010). Ad Maas is curator at the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden.
Call for Papers | Digital Art History Workshop
From the University of Leipzig:
Workshop | Art History: Research and Teaching Going Digital
University of Leipzig, 22 July — 2 August 2013
Proposals due by 15 June 2013
The 2013 European Summer School in Digital Humanities, focusing on Culture & Technology, is taking place at the University of Leipzig, 22 July-2 August 2013. It includes a workshop on “Art History: Research and Teaching Going Digital” organized by Elli Doulkaridou (PhD candidate in art history at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and a research assistant at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art) and Elaine Hoysted (doctoral candidate at University College, Cork). This joint workshop aims to question research and teaching practices in the field of art history in the digital age.
The first part of this course will be dedicated to investigating the challenges and opportunities that have emerged in the digital realm for scholars in art history. The second half will focus on an analysis of how these resources can be utilized as effective teaching and learning tools within the academic system. The fact that this is going to be a
joint course will allow us to focus on each theme but also bring them together during the collective discussions that will accompany the end of each course.
This workshop does not intend to propose technical training in the use of dedicated tools or encoding languages. Its purpose is to foster a collaborative reflection, in matters of art historical research and teaching methodology. We will be questioning the notion of digital art history through the study of various digital corpora, produced in different fields of art history, such as image databases, digital catalogs, scholarly critical editions, etc. Part of the course will also be dedicated to the commentary and collective debate of recent studies. (more…)
Enfilade 
leave a comment