Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward: Historical and Global Perspectives ed. by Reva Wolf and Alisa Luxenberg

Abstract

Reviewed by: Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward: Historical and Global Perspectives ed. by Reva Wolf and Alisa Luxenberg Denise Amy Baxter Reva Wolf and Alisa Luxenberg, eds., Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward: Historical and Global Perspectives (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020). Pp. 286; 16 color and 106 b/w illus. $150.00 cloth; $35.95 paper. Despite a wonderful collection of essays on the subject by scholars such as Margaret C. Jacob, Janet M. Burke, and Robert Beachy published in the Winter 2000 issue of this journal, Freemasonry does still mystify, if not historians, then art historians, or, at least many of them, or maybe just me.1 Yet, I contend that this is not surprising. Freemasonry is chronologically, geographically, and organizationally diffuse, with individual orders and rites and lodges, and it is, explicitly, secretive. Nonetheless, Freemasonry surrounds us on a daily basis. Even if with our increasingly cashless society I less frequently encounter the all-seeing eye of the national seal on the one-dollar bill, I pass both a Masonic Lodge and a billboard for Scottish Rite for Children Orthopedic Hospital on my daily commute. And it is exactly these historical though contemporary, completely encompassing visual and material aspects of Freemasonry that is the topic of Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward: Historical and Global Perspectives. The scope of this fascinating volume, ably brought together by art historians Reva Wolf and Alisa Luxenberg, is simply the "centrality of the arts to the history of Freemasonry, and conversely, Freemasonry's significance for the history of art from the 1720s forward" (1). After reading the volume's essays you may well also experience the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or frequency bias, and see Masonic imagery and influence everywhere you look. But, in this case, it really was already there. The introductory chapter, co-authored by Wolf and Luxenberg, points to the volume's overarching goal of the "Mystery of Masonry Brought to Light," whetting the reader's suspicions that indeed we are, and have been, surrounded by Masonic imagery in media ranging from architecture to porcelain, city planning to paintings, and in sites starting in the early eighteenth century, such as the Grand Lodge of England, to contemporary Haitian Vodou visual and material culture. In addition to the case studies, the editors have generously provided the reader with an extended bibliography of the kind so frequently missing in anthologies. The [End Page 327] volume's essays were sourced from a College Art Association session chaired by Reva Wolf in 2016 and a set of three sessions on Freemasonry and the Visual Arts at the Second World Conference on Fraternalism, Freemasonry, and History in 2017 at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. It would appear that the combination of sources contributed to the disciplinary and geographic range of the authors. The scope of the volume is ambitious, especially its additional claim of not only a historical but a global perspective. That said, it is important to note that the contributions are explicitly the particular interests of the authors; they are selected case studies. The volume does not comprise chapters commissioned to cover the entire scope of the relationship between Freemasonry and the visual arts, nor, as these selections indicate, could any single volume contain that totality. Organized chronologically, five of the eleven case studies are situated in the long (and broad) eighteenth century, and it is these on which I focus. In the first of these, art historian David Martín López asks the question of what would change if we were to posit that noted Portuguese Enlightenment politician, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, Marquis of Pombal and Count of Oeiras, was a Freemason? How would this alter our interpretations of the Marquis of Pombal and, more discretely, how would his architectural projects in Lisbon following the devastation of the 1755 earthquake be alternatively understood through this lens, and, conversely, how might an analysis of the architecture and urban planning spearheaded by the Marquis of Pombal provide evidence for his affiliation with Freemasonry? Biographical evidence, including the Marquis of Pombal's friendship with known...