Exhibition | Canova: The Sign of the Glory
I’ve long admired Lucy Vivante’s blog Vivante Drawings. I rarely reference the site here simply because entries tend to address the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But Enfilade readers may be interested in Vivante’s coverage of the Canova exhibition now on display in Rome (another description in English is available here). I include the exhibition press release (4 December 2012) below.
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Canova, Il Segno della Gloria: Disegni, Dipinti e Sculture
Museo di Roma Palazzo Braschi, 5 December 2012 — 7 April 2013
Curated by Giuliana Ericani
Sarà il Museo di Roma Palazzo Braschi ad ospitare dal 5 dicembre 2012 al 7 aprile 2013 la mostra Canova. Il segno della gloria. Disegni, dipinti e sculture. I 79 disegni sono stati selezionati dai 1800 circa che costituiscono la più grande raccolta al mondo di disegni di un artista, donata a metà Ottocento all’appena inaugurato Museo Civico di Bassano da Giambattista Sartori Canova, fratellastro dell’artista ed erede universale. I disegni sono accompagnati da 15 acqueforti delle opere realizzate, 6 modelli originali in gesso, da 4 tempere, un dipinto ad olio, due terrecotte e due marmi che consentono di visualizzare il passaggio dalla fase ideativa alla realizzazione dell’opera. Una scelta che offre un quadro storico ineguagliabile dell’Europa tra Settecento ed Ottocento, chiarendo il ruolo di Canova come primo artista della modernità.
Una mostra – promossa da Roma Capitale, Assessorato alle Politiche Culturali e Centro Storico – Sovraintendenza ai Beni Culturali e dal Comune di Bassano del Grappa con la cura di Giuliana Ericani, Direttrice del Museo Biblioteca Archivio di Bassano del Grappa e organizzata da Metamorfosi e Zètema Progetto Cultura – che affronta per la prima volta lo studio del disegno di Canova da due punti di vista: quello stilistico, affrontando le sue caratteristiche e il rapporto con gli artisti contemporanei e quello di prima idea per l’opera realizzata. Metamorfosi, nel suo lavoro di qualità di affiancamento di prestigiose istituzioni culturali, con questa mostra inizia una collaborazione con Museo Civico di Bassano del Grappa, volto a valorizzare lo straordinario patrimonio culturale lì conservato.
Una prima sezione della mostra seleziona dall’intera produzione grafica di Antonio Canova fogli che raccontano perfettamente la varietà del suo segno e dei metodi di progettazione. Partendo poi dal disegno, l’esposizione individua due principali percorsi di lettura dell’opera canoviana: il rapporto con la scultura antica delle collezioni romane e con i personaggi storici e della cultura del suo tempo. Qui sarà possibile ammirare i disegni per i monumenti e le sculture di Clemente XIV, Napoleone Bonaparte, Maria Luisa d’Asburgo, Maria Cristina d’Austria, Carlo III e Ferdinando I di Borbone, George Washington, Vittorio Alfieri, Orazio Nelson, e Paolina Borghese Bonaparte e opere commissionate da Giorgio IV re d’Inghilterra e Joséphine de Beauharnais Bonaparte. In questa sezione sono accostate le incisioni fatte eseguire da Canova per offrire l’immagine dell’opera realizzata ed alcune opere, cinque bozzetti in gesso e in terracotta e due dipinti, parte integrante dell’iter della realizzazione. Completano e arricchiscono la mostra i disegni per tre importanti opere realizzate, la Venere Italica, il Creugante e Damosseno per Pio VII e l’Ercole e Lica per il banchiere Torlonia.
Canova “solea gittare in carta il suo pensiero con pochi e semplicissimi tratti, che più volte ritoccava e modificava”: nelle parole dello storico dell’arte Leopoldo Cicognara si misura l’urgenza della trasposizione del pensiero e dell’immagine sulla carta e la funzione personale e segreta di questi segni, indice di una modernità esistenziale e di prassi esecutiva che crea continuamente sorpresa e meraviglia in chi vi si accosta. Nel 1858 il bassanese Gian Jacopo Ferrazzi, nel commemorare il donatore sottolineava la grande eredità canoviana del Museo di Bassano e il ruolo che il disegno aveva avuto nell’iter realizzativo delle sue sculture: “Noi siamo gli avventurati possessori della storia del suo pensiero.” Ed è proprio l’identificazione del disegno con il pensiero che viene ripetutamente riproposta dalle fonti contemporanee. “Pensieri delineati a lapis,” la sintetica ma efficace descrizione dei disegni dell’illustre fratello da parte di Giambattista Sartori, interpreta i tratti canoviani come la prima fase dell’ ”invenzione” e consente di seguire attraverso la loro lettura tutte le fasi della nascita delle opere. Il ruolo del disegno nella sua opera è segnalato dal suo biografo, Melchior Missirini (1824) come pari allo scalpello, quali “istrumenti che guidano all’immortalità.”
Un fondo, quello bassanese, costituito da 10 grandi album e 8 taccuini non omogenei nella struttura, comprendenti fogli di differenti dimensioni, da più di 500 ad una decina di millimetri, disegni finiti di accademia e schizzi di getto, progetti interi e parziali per bassorilievi in gesso e grandi sculture a tutto tondo.
Il disegno come “pensiero” dell’opera realizzata ma anche come “ricordo” di esperienze di vita, di studio e di lavoro, si trasforma nella mostra in strumento percomprendere la complessità della personalità e dell’opera di questo grande scultore veneto, che si formò nelle terre della sua nascita per affermarsi poi nella culla della scultura classica e barocca, a Roma, in un periodo storico di grandi cambiamenti che introduce all’Età moderna.
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From Palombi Editori:
Catalogue: Giuliana Ericani and Francesco Leone, Canova, Il Segno della Gloria: Disegni, Dipinti e Sculture (Rome: Palombi Editori, 2012), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-8860604897, €29.
Dall’ispirazione all’opera. é un percorso sulle tracce dell’idea quello della mostra dedicata ad Antonio Canova. Viaggio nell’intuizione estetica del genio e nella sua realizzazione, ma anche nella percezione che di quelle stesse concretizzazioni ha poi il genio stesso, a lavoro finito. Questione di studio prima, di documentazione poi. Nel mezzo, l’emozione dell’opera. L’esposizione capitolina dunque punta l’attenzione sulla “costruzione” delle opere da parte di Canova, attraverso disegni, modelletti in terracotta, calchi e modelli originali in gesso, dipinti, marmi e acqueforti, selezione d’eccellenza nella ricchissima raccolta di disegni – circa 1800 – che tra il 1849 e il 1857 fu oggetto di una donazione da parte del fratellastro dell’artista, Giovan Battista Sartori Canova.
Call for Articles | The Discourses of Anger
Brill’s series seems to define the early modern period as ca. 1450/1500 to ca. 1700. Still, for those of you working at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this might be relevant. . .
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The Discourses of Anger in the Early Modern Period
Edited by Karl A.E. Enenkel and Anita Traninger
Proposals due by 1 March 2013
Intersections is a peer-reviewed series on interdisciplinary topics in Early Modern Studies published by Brill (Leiden/Boston). Contributions may come from any of the disciplines within the humanities, such as history, art history, literary history, book history, church history, social history, cultural history, and history of ideas. Each volume focuses on a single theme and consists of essays that explore new perspectives on the subject of study. The series aims to open up new areas of research on early modern culture and to address issues of interest to a wide range of disciplines.
We are inviting proposals for contributions to a volume on discourses of anger in the Early Modern Period to be published in the series Intersections. The volume will be edited by Karl A.E. Enenkel (Münster University) and Anita Traninger (Freie Universität Berlin).
Emotion, the perceived counterpoint to reason, has received intense attention in the humanities and the social sciences in recent decades. Anger, however, has traditionally been conceived as pertaining to both reason and passion, since it involves complex mechanisms of rational judgment of social situations but is at the same time characterized by untamed/violent emotional repercussions. Aristotle held that anger was the morally justified seeking of revenge following the incurrence of a slight. Being thus conceived of as a social emotion, anger has since been construed as being composed of sadness and hope, as involving social and moral categories, and as mediating between the past and the future.
Even though anger is characterized as a just reaction to social misdemeanor, it has not been acknowledged universally as a socially beneficial reaction. The Stoics insisted that it was necessary to suppress it at the first showing of angry symptoms in order to achieve freedom from the disturbance of emotions which forms the basis of the good life; Christianity, where Stoic views were adopted very early on, found it difficult to reconcile the idea of anger as the just reaction of a virtuous man with its ideals of passivity.
In the Early Modern period, this already ambiguous conception was complicated by a changing intellectual framework. The Early Modern period sees long-term shifts between traditional systems of thought: a mounting criticism of Aristotelianism, a forceful contestation of Scholasticism, the factioning of religious belief and the emergence of contesting theologies along with moral canons, the rediscovery and transformative appropriation of Stoic and Sceptic doctrines, to name but a few. We are interested in how the notion of anger is informed by these developments.
Despite the recent surge in research on the history of emotions, there is no comprehensive, interdisciplinary account of notions of anger in the early modern period. There is a host of studies on ‘ancient anger’, and the Middle Ages have also received due attention, but the early modern period has been neglected in this regard, despite a wealth of sources and despite the fact that wide-spread speculation about the emotions in general emerged in Early Modern times.
Thus in our volume, we ask contributors to discuss the fate of anger with a view to the tensions between these developments. Contributors to the volume are invited to trace the framing of anger in various discourses in the Early Modern period, including theology, philosophy, literature, medicine, law, political theory, and the arts, as well as
to account for changes in the discourses of anger in this era. We would like to see discussions of anger as a contested field, one that is goverened and defined in various ways by various discourses which may nevertheless converge in literary and non-literary texts, images, religious practice, scholarly debates, etc. (more…)
December 2012 Issue of the ‘Oxford Art Journal’
In the current issue of the Oxford Art Journal:
Clare Walcot, “Hogarth’s The South Sea Scheme and the Topography of Speculative Finance,” Oxford Art Journal 35 (December 2012): 413-32.
William Hogarth’s elaborate graphic satire The South Sea Scheme (1721) stages a moral tale of speculation run riot and a capital in thrall to ‘mony’s magick power’. Published in response to the failure of the eponymous scheme, Hogarth offers a satirical commentary on all forms of government-sanctioned speculation and illicit gambling. The scene is set in an imagined topography comprised of London landmarks, public buildings and temporary structures; places of authority, commerce and finance. His rearrangement of the Monument to the Great Fire and Guildhall brings into conjunction sites of cultural memory, which allude to the tense relationship between City and Crown during the post-Restoration period and rebuilding of the capital after 1666. Hogarth draws on the links these sites have with the theatre of the street, in the form of popular protest and pageantry, as it appeared on the ground and on paper. This essay examines the spectacular use of urban space and how it shaped Hogarth’s early graphic satire, as well as continental imports adapted to a London market, such as Bernard Baron’s (after Bernard Picart) A Monument Dedicated to Posterity (1721), often taken to be the model for The South Sea Scheme.
Clare Walcot’s research interests focus on financial innovation in the eighteenth century and its impact on the visual arts, and develop out of her PhD thesis entitled ‘Figuring Finance: London’s New Financial World and the Iconography of Speculation, c. 1689–1763’ (University of Warwick, 2003).
Call for Papers | Financial Crisis of 1720 and John Law’s Legacy
From Le Blog de l’ApAhAu:
Le Système de Law: Représentations, discours et fantasmes du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours
Université de Montpellier 3, IRCL, 4-5 October 2012
Proposals due by 15 July 2013
Dans les périodes de bulles et de crises financières, John Law et son système sont volontiers évoqués dans le discours médiatique en tant que paradigme et exemple historique de l’une des premières crises financières d’origine spéculative. Les références ou allusions qui y sont faites n’examinent cependant pas les spécificités d’une bulle qui ne fut pas uniquement française mais concerna également l’Angleterre et la Hollande, les pays d’Europe les plus engagés dans l’émergence d’un capitalisme financier au XVIIIe siècle.
A partir des pistes ouvertes par Paul Harsin qui donne une édition des oeuvres complètes de John Law en 1934 (ainsi qu’une première édition des écrits de Dutot, proche collaborateur de Law) et de l’ouvrage d’Edgar Faure (La Banqueroute de Law, 17 juillet 1720, Paris, Gallimard, 1977), historiens et historiens de l’économie ont délimité les différentes étapes et analysé l’enchaînement des faits qui conduisirent à une banqueroute de la première banque royale et à l’instauration d’une durable méfiance à l’égard de la finance et de la forme fiduciaire de l’argent. Si ces recherches ont permis d’établir une chronologie et de faire la lumière sur de nombreux aspects du Système (comme l’ont fait par exemple les recherches récentes de l’historien Antoin Murphy sur des écrits inédits de Nicolas Dutot), peu d’analyses ont pris en compte l’événement dans sa transversalité et sa globalité. Les spécialistes de littérature ont également bien identifié les allusions aux événements de 1720, de manière ponctuelle sous la forme de représentations plus ou moins allégorisées (comme dans les Lettres Persanes de Montesquieu) ou de manière plus diffuse en tant qu’effets sur la représentation de l’argent et des transactions par exemple (voir Martial Poirson, Spectacle et économie à l’âge classique, Garnier, 2011). En 2006, deux articles portant sur les représentations de la banqueroute de Law ont été publiés par des spécialistes de littérature qui s’emploient chacun à élaborer une lecture croisée des événements de l’histoire économique et des fictions qui leur sont contemporaines : Yves Citton procède à une relecture d’un texte de Jean-François Melon, un proche collaborateur de John Law, Mamhoud le Gasnévide, qui raconte sous une forme allégorique les événements financiers survenus sous la Régence (« Les comptes merveilleux de la finance : confiance et fiction chez Jean-François Melon », Fééries n°2, 2005-2006) ; Erik Leborgne s’attache à dégager les fantasmes sous-tendant les représentations de l’argent et de la spéculation dans des textes contemporains des événements (« Le Régent et le système de Law vus par Melon, Montesquieu, Prévost et Lesage »,Féeries n°3, 2006). Se situant dans le prolongement de ces travaux, le présent projet entend renforcer l’interdisciplinarité des approches du phénomène et faire le point sur ce qui peut être considéré comme un événement traumatique et structurant de la France moderne, en suggérant trois orientations non limitatives : (more…)
Latest Updates to the William Blake Archive
The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of an electronic edition of five of Blake’s tempera paintings on biblical subjects, eleven of his water color illustrations to the Bible, and one of his large color printed drawings, Hecate, or The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy. These works have been added to groups previously published. In addition, we have republished all the biblical temperas and water colors to add illustration descriptions and make their designs and inscriptions fully searchable.
William Blake, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, © Brooklyn Museum
The Bible had an enormous influence on Blake’s work as both artist and poet. His tempera paintings and water colors of biblical subjects, mostly created for his patron Thomas Butts beginning in 1799, are among Blake’s most important responses to that text. The tempera paintings now published are based on passages in the New Testament concerning the life of Jesus and his family. We are particularly pleased to include Christ Raising Jairus’s Daughter, a well preserved but little known work recently acquired by the Mead Art Museum of Amherst College. The new group of water colors ranges from Numbers (Moses Striking the Rock) to two of Blake’s most powerful explorations of the apocalyptic sublime, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun andThe Number of the Beast is 666, both based on Revelation. The Great Red Dragon from the Brooklyn Museum has received a good deal of contemporary attention because of its central role in Thomas Harris’s bestselling 1981 novel, Red Dragon, and the films of 1986 and 2002 based on it. The Archive now includes twenty-four tempera paintings and sixty-four water colors based on the Bible. All of Blake’s extant water color illustrations to Revelation are available.
The publication of Hecate from the National Gallery of Scotland completes our presentation of Blake’s large color printed drawings, considered by some to be his greatest achievements as a pictorial artist. The Archive now contains all thirty traced impressions of the twelve subjects portrayed in the large color prints.
This publication includes works from several collections not previously represented in the Archive. Accordingly, we are also publishing Blake collection lists for the Brooklyn Museum, Mead Art Museum (Amherst College), National Gallery of Scotland, Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, and Rosenbach Museum and Library. These lists include all original works by Blake in their respective collections, not just those published in the Archive.
With this publication we have also implemented a technical improvement that reflects the Archive’s commitment to open-source digital humanities principles. By clicking on the “View XML Source File” link on Electronic Edition Information pages, users can now view the XML source code for any work in the Archive.
As always, the William Blake Archive is a free site, imposing no access restrictions and charging no subscription fees. The site is made possible by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with the University of Rochester, the continuing support of the Library of Congress, and the cooperation of the international array of libraries and museums that have generously given us permission to reproduce works from their collections in the Archive.
Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick, and Joseph Viscomi, editors
Ashley Reed, project manager, William Shaw, technical editor
The William Blake Archive
Forthcoming | The Politics of the Provisional
From Penn State UP:
Richard Taws, The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2013), 232 pages, ISBN: 978-0271054186.
In revolutionary France, materiality was not easily achieved. The turmoil of war, shortages, and frequent changes in political authority meant that few large-scale artworks or permanent monuments to the Revolution’s memory were completed. On the contrary, as this book argues, visual practice in revolutionary France was characterized by the production and circulation of a range of transitional, provisional, ephemeral, and half-made images and objects. Addressing this mass of images conventionally ignored in art-historical accounts of the period, The Politics of the Provisional contends that widely distributed, ephemeral, or “in-between” images and objects were at the heart of contemporary debates on the nature of political authenticity and historical memory. Provisionality had a politics, and it signified less the failure of the Revolution’s attempts to historicize itself than a tactical awareness of the need to continue
the Revolution’s work.
Richard Taws is Lecturer in the History of Art, University College London. (more…)
Conference | Iconoclasm and Revolutions
From Le Blog de l’ApAhAu:
Iconoclasme et révolutions, XVIIIe-XXIe siècle
Petit Palais (Auditorium), Paris, 13-14 December 2012
Statues déboulonnées, portraits déchirés ou brûlés, emblèmes grattés ou barbouillés : ces gestes iconoclastes semblent indissociables des processus révolutionnaires, des révolutions atlantiques du XVIIIe siècle aux révolutions arabes contemporaines. Que se joue-t-il derrière ces gestes apparemment dérisoires, souvent ravalés à du « vandalisme » ? Comment penser, à partir de l’iconoclasme, une histoire des relations entre des sujets et des signes de pouvoir (politique, religieux, social) ? Tel sera l’objet de ce colloque international et pluridisciplinaire, qui réunira au Petit Palais historiens, historiens de l’art, anthropologues, spécialistes d’aires culturelles et de périodes différentes, de la France à l’Afghanistan, de la Chine à l’Amérique latine, de la Russie à l’Espagne… La réflexion portera notamment sur les « pouvoirs de l’image » et du signe, sur le rapport au visible et au sensible en situation révolutionnaire et sur la puissance de transformation du social attribuée aux gestes iconoclastes. Les formes prises par cette violence symbolique, ses cibles privilégiées, ses acteurs individuels et collectifs, sa liesse ou ses silences, ses liens avec la violence physique, ses seuils de tolérance et ses compromis (entre conservation et destruction) seront interrogés. Le colloque permettra d’éclairer les intentions des iconoclastes en révolution, explicitées ou non par eux : effacer une mémoire devenue intolérable, expurger une croyance, exprimer une opinion à la face de tous, s’approprier une souveraineté devenue disponible – sans que ces interprétations soient exclusives l’une de l’autre. Ces intentions seront rapportées à la réception et aux effets – tels qu’on peut les mesurer – des gestes de destruction. Toutes ces questions seront envisagées en situation, dans des contextes et des espaces singuliers, où les cultures visuelles, les formes d’expression politique, le rapport au sacré varient profondément.
The program is available here»
Holiday Gift Guide | More Books
From the University of Illinois Press:
Christoph Wolff and Markus Zepf, The Organs of J. S. Bach: A Handbook, translated by Lynn Edwards Butler (Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 2012), 240 pages, cloth ISBN: 978-0252036842, $80) / paper ISBN: 978-0252078453, $30.
The Organs of J. S. Bach is a comprehensive and fascinating guide to the organs encountered by Bach throughout Germany in his roles as organist, concert artist, examiner, teacher, and visitor. Newly revised and updated, the book’s entries are listed alphabetically by geographical location, from Arnstadt to Zschortau, providing an easy-to-reference overview.
Includes detailed organ-specific information:
• High-quality color photographs
• Each instrument’s history, its connection to Bach, and its disposition as Bach would have known it
• Architectural histories of the churches housing the instruments
• Identification of church organists
Lynn Edwards Butler’s graceful translation of Christoph Wolff and Markus Zepf’s volume incorporates new research and many corrections and updates to the original German edition. Bibliographical references are updated to include English-language sources, and the translation includes an expanded essay by Christoph Wolff on Bach as organist, organ composer, and organ expert.
The volume includes maps, a timeline of organ-related events, transcriptions of Bach’s organ reports, a guide to examining organs attributed to Saxony’s most famous organ builder Gottfried Silbermann, and biographical information on organ builders.
Christoph Wolff is Adams University Professor at Harvard University and director of the Bach Archive in Leipzig. Markus Zepf, a musicologist and organist, is on the staff of the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg. Lynn Edwards Butler, who has published numerous articles on the organ, is a practicing organist with special expertise in restored baroque organs in north and central Germany.
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From Rizzoli:
Jeremy Musson, English Country House Interiors, foreword by Sir Roy Strong, photographs by Paul Barker (Rizzoli, 2011), pages, ISBN: 978-0847835690, $60.
A highly detailed look at the English country house interior, offering unprecedented access to England’s finest rooms. In this splendid book, renowned historian Jeremy Musson explores the interiors and decoration of the great country houses of England, offering a brilliantly detailed presentation of the epitome of style in each period of the country house, including the great Jacobean manor house, the Georgian mansion, and the Gothic Revival castle. For the first time, houses known worldwide for their exquisite architecture and decoration–including Wilton, Chatsworth, and Castle Howard–are seen in unprecedented detail. With intimate views of fabric, gilding, carving, and furnishings, the book will be a source of inspiration to interior designers, architects, and home owners, and a must-have for anglophiles and historic house enthusiasts.
The fifteen houses included represent the key periods in the history of English country house decoration and cover the major interior fashions and styles. Stunning new color photographs by Paul Barker-who was given unparalleled access to the houses-offer readers new insights into the enduring English country house style. Supplementing these are unique black-and-white images from the archive of the esteemed Country Life magazine.
Among the aspects of these that the book covers are: paneling, textile hangings (silks to cut velvet), mural painting, plasterwork, stone carving, gilding, curtains, pelmets, heraldic decoration, classical imagery, early upholstered furniture, furniture designed by Thomas Chippendale, carved chimney-pieces, lass, use of sculpture, tapestry, carpets, picture hanging, collecting of art and antiques, impact of Grand Tour taste, silver, use of marble, different woods, the importance of mirror glass, boulle work, English Baroque style, Palladian style, neo-Classical style, rooms designed by Robert Adam, Regency, Gothic Revival taste, Baronial style, French 18th-century style, and room types such as staircases, libraries, dining rooms, parlors, bedrooms, picture galleries, entrance halls and sculpture galleries.
Houses covered include: Hatfield – early 1600s (Jacobean); Wilton – 1630/40s (Inigo Jones); Boughton – 1680/90s (inspired by Versailles); Chatsworth -1690/early 1700s (Baroque); Castle Howard – early 1700s (Vanbrugh); Houghton – 1720s (Kent); Holkham – 1730s-50s (Palladian); Syon Park – 1760s (Adam); Harewood – 1760s/70s (neo-Classical); Goodwood – 1790s/1800s (neo-Classical/Regency); Regency at Chatsworth/Wilton/C Howard etc – 1820/30s; Waddesdon Manor – 1870/80ss (French Chateau style); Arundel Castle -1880s/90s (Gothic Revival); Berkeley Castle – 1920/30s (period recreations and antique collections); Parham House – 1920s/30s (period restorations and antique collections). The range is from the early 17th century to present day, drawn from the authenticated interiors of fifteen great country houses, almost all still in private hands and occupied as private residences still today. The book shows work by twentieth-century designers who have helped evolve the country house look, including Nancy Lancaster, David Hicks, Colefax & Fowler, and David Mlinaric.
Jeremy Musson is a leading commentator and author on the English country house. He was architectural editor of Country Life from 1998 to 2007, for which he wrote hundreds of articles on country houses and is still a contributor. As a former National Trust assistant curator he redecorated state rooms at Ickworth Park and curated Anglesey Abbey. Musson is the author of several books including The English Manor House, Plasterwork, How to Read a Country House, The Country Houses of Sir John Vanbrugh, and Up and Down Stairs: The History of the Country House Servant. A contributor to World of Interiors, The British Art Journal, and Cornerstone, he has interviewed many figures in the world of heritage, arts, and interior design, and he co-wrote and presented The Curious House Guest, a BBC2 series on important country houses in 2005-2006. Art historian Sir Roy Strong is the former director of London’s National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Paul Barker is one of the U.K.’s leading architectural photographers.
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From Yale UP:
Keith Thomson, Jefferson’s Shadow: The Story of His Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 336 pages, ISBN: 978-0300184037, $30.
In the voluminous literature on Thomas Jefferson, little has been written about his passionate interest in science. This new and original study of Jefferson presents him as a consummate intellectual whose view of science was central to both his public and his private life. Keith Thomson reintroduces us in this remarkable book to Jefferson’s eighteenth-century world and reveals the extent to which Jefferson used science, thought about it, and contributed to it, becoming in his time a leading American scientific intellectual.
With a storyteller’s gift, Thomson shows us a new side of Jefferson. He answers an intriguing series of questions—How was Jefferson’s view of the sciences reflected in his political philosophy and his vision of America’s future? How did science intersect with his religion? Did he make any original contributions to scientific knowledge?—and illuminates the particulars of Jefferson’s scientific endeavors. Thomson discusses Jefferson’s theories that have withstood the test of time, his interest in the practical applications of science to societal problems, his leadership in the use of scientific methods in agriculture, and his contributions toward launching at least four sciences in America: geography, paleontology, climatology, and scientific archaeology. A set of delightful illustrations, including some of Jefferson’s own sketches and inventions, completes this impressively researched book.
Keith Thomson is Executive Officer fellow at the American Philosophical Society and professor emeritus of natural history at the University of Oxford. He was for five years a visiting fellow of the International Centre for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, VA. He lives in Philadelphia.
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From Rizzoli:
Diane Dorrans Saeks, Ann Getty: Interior Style, photographed by Lisa Romerein (New York: Rizzoli, 2012), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-0847837915, $55.
The first-ever compilation of the luxurious interiors from the influential designer and philanthropist Ann Getty. For those who are passionate about fine interiors, the preservation of antiques, the highest level of craftsmanship, and respect for architectural integrity, this book offers an insider’s view of the exquisite designs of Ann Getty. Fluent in classical styles and periods and known for sourcing her vast array of objects and opulent materials from across the globe, Getty creates interiors that are steeped in historical style yet remain fresh and vibrant for today’s clientele. From the exceptional residence she and her music-composer husband, Gordon Getty, use for entertaining and displaying their world-class collection of art and antiques, to the comfortable yet elegant townhouse she designed for a stylish young family, the book showcases richly detailed interiors that are coveted by design enthusiasts and collectors. Featured are pieces from Getty’s successful furniture line of original designs inspired by the renowned Getty collection as well as her own extensive travel and design studies. This intimate look, Getty’s first-ever monograph, demonstrates how to combine objects from different time periods and styles in a sumptuous atmosphere rich in bold colors, vibrant textures, and classic elegance.
Diane Dorrans Saeks is a noted design lecturer, founder of the design/travel blog The Style Saloniste, and the best-selling author of more than twenty books. Lisa Romerein’s photographs have been featured in many books, including Michael S. Smith: Elements of Style, as well as C magazine, Town & Country, and Elle Decor.
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As Catherine Bigelow writes in her article, “Ann Getty’s ‘Interior Style’,” for SFGate (8 October 2012) . . .
Ann Getty’s San Francisco House. In the foyer, a vignette of Meissen figures sits beneath a painting by Canaletto. Photo: Lisa Romerein from Ann Getty: Interior Style. For more photos, available at Harper’s Bazaar, click on the image.
“All this time, people assumed Ann was having endless couture fittings in Paris,” said Saeks, a San Francisco design writer who has penned 21 Rizzoli titles. “But actually she was studying 18th-century French antiques and having private tours of hidden collections at the Louvre.”
In the ’60s, Getty studied paleoanthropology and biology at UC Berkeley, and she remains devoted to philanthropic support of science and academic research. But for more than 40 years, she has also been hands-on in designing and running her own well-appointed homes. The book features four, including her Willis Polk-designed Gold Coast manse and the first-ever peek at her childhood home, and most personal redesign, in Wheatland (Yuba County), where the Gilbert family still runs their decades-old walnut ranch.
In addition to her intuitive design sense, Getty also drew upon inspiration and early tutelage from storied designer Sister Parish, her late father-in-law and antiquities connoisseur J. Paul Getty, as well as collections within the Getty Museum. . .
The full article is available here»
Call for Articles | The Digital Turn
The Digital Turn
Special Issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (JEMCS)
Proposals due by 15 January 2013
It is well understood that ‘the digital turn’ has transformed the contemporary cultural, political and economic environment. Less appreciated perhaps is its crucial importance and transformative potential for those of us who study the past. Whether through newly—and differently—accessible data and methods (e.g. ‘distant reading’), new questions being asked of that new data, or recognizing how digital reading changes our access to the materiality of the past, the digital humanities engenders a particularized set of questions and concerns for those of us who study the early modern, broadly defined (mid-15th to mid-19th centuries).
For this special issue of JEMCS, we seek essays that describe the challenges and debates arising from issues in the early modern digital, as well as work that shows through its methods, questions, and conclusions the kinds of scholarship that ought best be done—or perhaps can only be done— in its wake. We look for contributions that go beyond describing the advantages and shortcomings of (or problems of inequity of access to) EEBO, ECCO, and the ESTC to contemplate how new forms of information produce new ways of thinking. We invite contributors to consider the broader implications and uses of existing and emerging early modern digital projects, including data mining, data visualization, corpus linguistics, GIS, and/or potential obsolescence, especially in comparison to insights possible through traditional archival research methods. Essays of 3000-8000 words are sought in .doc, .rtf, or.pdf format by January 15, 2013 to <jemcsfsu@gmail.com>. All manuscripts must include a 100-200 word abstract. JEMCS adheres to MLA format, and submissions should be prepared accordingly.
In addition, we would welcome brief reports (500-1500 words) that describe digital projects in progress in early modern studies (defined here as spanning from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries), whether or not these projects have yet reached completion. These reports, too, should be submitted in .doc, .rtf, or.pdf format, using MLA style, by 15 January 2013.
Please don’t hesitate to write me if you have any questions about this special issue. We look forward to reading your work in this area.
Devoney Looser
Co-Editor, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies
looserd@missouri.edu
Call for Papers | A Window on Antiquity: The Topham Collection
A Window on Antiquity: The Topham Collection at Eton College Library
The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 17 May 2013
Proposals due by 10 February 2013
To accompany the exhibition Paper Palaces: The Topham Drawings as a Source for British Neo-Classicism at Eton College Library, 9 May – 1 November 2013
Consisting of 37 volumes and more than 3,000 items, the collection amassed by Richard Topham (1671-1730) is one of the most significant resources for the history of antiquarianism and for the culture and industry of the Grand Tour in Europe. This collection of drawings, watercolours and prints after antique sculptures and paintings in Rome and Italy is the largest of its kind assembled in England, surpassing in both scale and breadth those collected by other celebrated antiquarians such as John Talman, Dr Richard Mead or Thomas Coke, 1st Earl of Leicester.
Since its arrival at Eton in 1736 the Topham Collection has fascinated and served archaeologists, researchers investigating collections of antiquities and scholars of the history and reception of the classical tradition. The drawings have also attracted the attention of art historians, as Topham managed to assemble an extraordinary range of works by some of the best Italian draughtsmen of the first half of the eighteenth century, such as Pompeo Batoni, Giovanni Domenico Campiglia and Francesco Bartoli, or by artists who later excelled in other fields, including the architect William Kent. More recently it has also emerged that Francesco Bartoli’s drawings of ancient ceilings and wall elevations in the collection were extensively copied and re-adapted by neo-classical architects such as Robert Adam, James Wyatt and Charles Cameron, becoming one of the most important sources for a decorative language that would spread over Europe.
However, despite the growing body of scholarship on the Topham Collection produced in recent decades, notably the work of the late Louisa M. Connor Bulman, a comprehensive study of the whole collection and of its role in eighteenth-century antiquarian culture is still wanting.
We invite proposals for papers on any aspect of the Topham Collection. Special consideration will be given to papers examining the Topham Collection in relation to British and European antiquarian and artistic culture. Cross-disciplinary and comparative studies are particularly welcome.
The conference, jointly hosted by Eton College, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and The University of Buckingham, will be held in London at The Paul Mellon Centre on 17 May, 2013. Selected papers may be published in an edited volume.
For further information please contact Dr Adriano Aymonino (University of Buckingham) or Lucy Gwynn (Eton College Library). Please email abstracts of no more than 300 words by 10 February, 2013 to:
adriano.aymonino@buckingham.ac.uk
l.gwynn@etoncollege.org.uk
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