Eighteenth-century Art Research Articles

Authorship as a determinant of art prices and auction settings in eighteenth-century Paris

Abstract In the context of a booming art market in Paris, eighteenth-century art dealers began to exploit authorship as a value-enhancing strategy. Using Jean-Baptiste Pierre Lebrun’s business as a case study, we show that art dealers purposefully used a firm scale of authentication to create product differentiation and to boost auction dynamics and revenues by reordering the lots before the sale in leaflets known as feuilles de vacation. Our empirical findings support the hypothesis of the development of a market driven by the quest for the artist’s hand in pre-revolutionary Paris, with differential use of connoisseurial knowledge, depending on buyers’ profiles.

A Certified Copy: Translating Images in the Eighteenth-Century French Print Market

In an era before the invention of photography, fine art prints based on famous paintings dominated the eighteenth-century art market, inviting a common comparison between engravers and translators. At a time when writers and scholars placed much value on the closeness of translations to their original texts, such comparisons reflected a subordination of the skills of technical engravers to the assumed genius of painters. However, careful examination of the copy-prints reveals that loyalty to originals was not the primary interest of these visual translators. Instead, these translators saw themselves as active mediators. This essay reconsiders acts of eighteenth-century visual translation to reframe the practice of engraving during the period and to establish a new understanding of the movement from one visual artistic language to another. The case study of Nicolas de Launay, one the most successful engravers in eighteenth-century France, is selected for scrutiny and contextualized within historical debates around translation. The final aim is to illuminate important tensions between the disciplines of painting and engraving, as well as the complex process by which engravers strove to remain simultaneously loyal to the painters, to their audience, and to their own artistic identity.

Recentring Peripheral Queerness and Marginal Art in Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)

This essay examines the ways in which Céline Sciamma’s 2019 film Portrait de la Jeune Fille en Feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) looks to centralise onscreen homosexual experience through engagement with, and queering of, eighteenth-century art practices and the discourse surrounding them. From its reception of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to ideas espoused by the eighteenth-century art critic and philosopher Denis Diderot, Portrait looks to traditionally peripheral spaces, or edgelands, and the visual and embodied consequences of transcending them. Engaging closely with eighteenth-century processes of artmaking, the film transforms sketches on paper, paint applied to canvas and wood, miniatures held close to the body and erotica annotated in the margins into queer-coded sites used to reflect and document the developing relationship at its heart.

Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self. Dustin Friedman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+234.

<i>Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self</i>. Dustin Friedman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+234.

Absent Look. Edouard Manet and Timothy Clark’s Theory of Modernism

The paper considers issues of interpretation of Edouard Manet’s oeuvre in the context of the Modernist theory of art. The focus is on the Anglo-American theoretical tradition. The author traces the evolution of Modernist conceptions in the American study of art (from Formalism to “New Art History”). Emphasis is given to Timothy Clark’s “Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers” (1984) and its evaluation from the Post-Structuralist point of view. The author concentrates on the key metaphors and mythological constructs of Clark’s text (flatness, literalness, the society of the spectacle, ideology, class, uncertainty, and resistance to interpretation). T. J. Clark’s theory of modernism is analyzed in connection with reductionist and negativist strategies in the modern humanities. T. J. Clark’s attitude to theFormalist tradition and Clement Greenberg’s heritage is examined. The main Marxist conceptions, developed in the works of Marx, Benjamin, and Adorno (alienation, reification, fetishism), have their analogies in aestheticism, formalism and modernism. This is the reason why Clark’s interpretation quite naturally supplements the existing scientific literature on the subject. Specific attention is given to the semiotic element in Clark’s Marxism. The author speaks of the advantages of Manet’s interpretation in Jacques Derrida’s vocabulary of notions (absence / presence, differance, and deconstruction). Particular importance is paid to Manet’s links to Primitivist strategies and eighteenth-century art. The author comes to the conclusion that Marxism can be interpreted as a cultural phenomenon and Modernist hypertext. According to this logic, Clark transforms Marxist theory into a system of metaphors projecting it onto concrete artistic material. The paper is part of the author’s project investigating the origins of modernist / avant-garde art.

Rome Awards: Fake inscriptions and the eighteenth-century art market

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Blackness and lines of beauty in the eighteenth-century Anglophone Atlantic world

ABSTRACTThis essay recalibrates the visual signifier of blackness in eighteenth-century art to the period’s adjoining theories and visual aesthetics of lines. The uneven archive of eighteenth-century Anglophone materials – comprised of visual representations of black subjects and written works by black subjects – invites readers of the present to move between, at least, visual and textual modes of interpretation. Building from the scholarship of David Dabydeen and the work of eighteenth-century Londoner, grocer, critic and free black artist Ignatius Sancho, this essay argues that the interplay of visual and textual lines renews readings of eighteenth-century representations of blackness. On the one hand, readings around this interplay open up a recognition of the interrelatedness of literary production, like the rise of the English novel, and the Caribbean plantation system; on the other, these readings gesture at the submerged relationships between eighteenth-century black subjects in the Anglophone Atlantic world.

Mary Sheriff and ASECS

Mary Sheriff and ASECS Jennifer Germann (bio) and Michael Yonan (bio) Mary D. Sheriff (1950-2016) was well-known to the ASECS community. Perhaps her most prominent role in the organization was as co-editor of this journal, a responsibility she shared with James Thompson between 1993 and 1998. Some may remember the brilliant Clifford lecture she delivered at the 2009 annual conference in Richmond, Virginia, a version of which was later published in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture.1 These highlights were only part of her longtime participation in ASECS, a history that dates back to the late 1970s. Mary also produced numerous doctoral students in her role as Kenan Distinguished Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Many of her students are now regulars at ASECS and their number includes the two of us. But Mary's legacy with ASECS is more than just that of an enthusiastic participant. It is a special relationship indeed, one that has important implications for the development of eighteenth-century art history in the United States and that requires explanation in order for its full significance to be understood. Colleagues in the other disciplines represented at ASECS—Literary Studies, History, and Philosophy especially—are often surprised to learn that Art History traditionally hasn't had much to say about eighteenth-century art. Prior to the 1970s, the subject was mostly ignored at American universities, with few art historians willing to confess an interest in its visual culture. English-language scholarship remained surprisingly sparse even into the 1980s, certainly when compared to the flood of scholarship on Renaissance and modern art. The reasons for this imbalance are complex. Art History has tended to privilege art that reflects straightforwardly [End Page 151] the social characteristics of its historical moment. It also has a predilection for celebrating art that offers observers profound psychological revelations in aesthetic form. These are qualities that can be assigned to a few eighteenth-century artists, David and Goya notably, but it is difficult to characterize much eighteenth-century art in such terms. The foundational methodological approaches of art history predisposed art historians to find eighteenth-century art lacking. This was especially so for rococo art, as Dena Goodman and Melissa Hyde discuss in their contributions to this forum. The seductive surfaces of rococo painting, its playful subject matter, its delight in whimsy and surprise, and what many critics saw as its femininity, made it a hard sell to scholars trained to regard Michelangelo and Picasso as the pinnacles of Western artistic achievement. Much the same could be said of pastels, Enlightenment religious imagery, and late Revolutionary history paintings, the subjects of the essays by Kathleen Nicholson, Christopher Johns, and Tili Boon Cuillé respectively. Mary Sheriff recognized the potential of ASECS to build the field of eighteenth-century art history in North America. She was not alone in this, for sure; she belonged to the pioneer generation of art historians (many still active in ASECS's conferences) who understood the organization's potential to enliven this underdeveloped area of art history. Yet Mary was among its most enthusiastic champions. She loved eighteenth-century art and was unafraid to say so. In a late-career essay she remarked that some of its imagery is so beautiful that it can move you to tears.2 But she also saw in this beautiful art the potential for major disciplinary revision, a golden opportunity to knock down old assumptions about what makes art important and to build a more diverse and vibrant art history. It was not through the College Art Association, the major American venue for art-historical scholarship, that such revision would be possible, since too many old biases lingered there. That's where ASECS entered the picture. At its conferences she and her cohort found a community of scholars from other fields who valued the period and wished to see sophisticated thinking brought to its art. They began to propose papers, chair panels, and otherwise create a community of scholars who took eighteenth-century art seriously. And since ASECS is an interdisciplinary organization, the cross-pollination of ideas across disciplinary boundaries became an essential quality of...

We Animals

Book Review| April 01 2018 We Animals We Animals. By Jo-Anne McArthur. (New York, NY: Lantern Books, 2014. 206 pp. with color photographs. Hardback. $40. ISBN: 978-1-59056-426-4.). Linda M. Johnson Linda M. Johnson University of Michigan-Flint Linda M. Johnson is visiting professor of art history at the University of Michigan-Flint and a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. Publications include “A Pre-Millennial Portrait During the Revocation of the Massachusetts Charter” in American Literature and the New Puritan Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and “Animal Experimentation in Eighteenth Century Art: Joseph Wright of Derby” (Journal of Animal Ethics, 2016). Research interests include art history, environmental humanities, and animal ethics. Email: linjohdr@umich.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Animal Ethics (2018) 8 (1): 111–113. https://doi.org/10.5406/janimalethics.8.1.0111 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Linda M. Johnson; We Animals. Journal of Animal Ethics 1 January 2018; 8 (1): 111–113. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/janimalethics.8.1.0111 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of Animal Ethics Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

The pollen of metaphor: Box, cage, and trap as containment in the eighteenth century

This article uses the concept of “the pollen of metaphor” to discuss three forms of non-human animal containment in the eighteenth century: François Huber's Leaf or Book Hive bee box first described in his Nouvelles Observations sur les Abeilles (1792, English translation 1806), Sarah Trimmer's bird cages in her didactic children's book, Fabulous Histories; Or, The Story of the Robins (1786), and a mouse trap in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s 1773 poem, “The Mouse's Petition, found in the trap where he had been confined all night by Dr. Priestley, for the sake of making experiments with different kinds of air.” All three works highlight the eighteenth-century art of observation. The inherent commitment to relationships in the observation process suggests that interpreting ocular evidence involves “plausible relations,” metaphor and/or “productive analogy.” The article teases out subtle differences between the ways that each author uses containments and concludes that while Huber seeks to circumscribe non-human animal behavior within the bounds of ‘reasonable’ animal husbandry to better serve human needs, Trimmer goes further to connect ‘appropriate’ non-human animal containment to moral strictures governing humans. Barbauld's intervention using a literate, speaking animal subject confronts such moral governance to argue for equal rights based on principles of true equality rather than what is observed to be ‘reasonable’ and/or ‘moral.’

El desaparecido retablo mayor de la iglesia de San Luis Obispo de Madrid, obra del escultor Juan de Villanueva

Based on information obtained from several unpublished documents and a photograph kept in the Moreno Archives –until now unnoticed by scholars–, a thorough historical and artistic study of the main altarpiece of the Madrid church of San Luis Obispo (Saint Louis Bishop) and its sculptural decoration (destroyed in 1936) is presented in this article. This is one of the most outstanding works by the sculptor Juan de Villanueva, a distinguished representative of eighteenth-century baroque art in Madrid, produced between 1734 and 1740, at the height of his creative career.

Review: Renaissance Architecture, by Christy Anderson

Christy Anderson Renaissance Architecture Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 258 pp., 151 color illus. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 9780192842275 We are all familiar with the narrative of Italian Renaissance architecture: Filippo Brunelleschi produced a series of technically and stylistically innovative structures in Florence in the first half of the fifteenth century that are taken as the starting point of a new kind of architecture. This foundation gave way to Leon Battista Alberti’s buildings and writings in the next generation, then in turn to Giuliano da Sangallo, Donato Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo, Vignola, and Palladio. Other architects are usually included, as are excursions to Urbino, Milan, Mantua, and Venice. This progression has served as the spine of a series of important surveys by Peter Murray, Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich and Wolfgang Lotz, and Christoph Luitpold Frommel, which has introduced two generations of undergraduate students to Renaissance architecture, forming their view of the material.1 In Anglophone architectural history, this account of Italian Renaissance architecture has often represented the development of building in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries more generally. In Architecture of the Renaissance , published in a series on world architecture, Peter Murray expands this narrative by appending a short closing section on buildings in France, Spain, the Low Countries, Germany, and England.2 A relatively small group of scholars have championed architecture elsewhere, but even these accounts have often been presented as something of an adjunct to the Italian Renaissance. For example, Anthony Blunt’s essential survey of French art and architecture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries opens with an account of King Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy in 1494, and its cultural effects. Much …

Beauty and the Beast: Animals in the Visual and Material Culture of the Toilette

Beauty and the Beast: Animals in the Visual and Material Culture of the Toilette Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell (bio) In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the toilette evolved from a single object, the petit toile that covered the dressing table, to a set of objects, and from a set of objects to a daily ritual, synonymous with the morning hours.1 The highly codified rites of the toilette were re-enacted over and over again in eighteenth-century art, not only by beautiful women, but also by monkeys and butterflies.2 Indeed, animals played a central role in the visual and material culture of the toilette. Both exotic and domestic creatures were depicted as frequent witnesses to—and sometimes anthropomorphic participants in—the toilette. Animals lurk in corners and chairs and under tables in so many toilette scenes that they cannot be dismissed as mere props or accessories; the symbiotic connection between beauty and the beast demands further investigation. Although ostensibly private, the toilette was, in practice, extremely public. Louis XIV and his mother, Anne of Austria, had instituted the custom of dressing—or, rather, being dressed—in front of privileged courtiers.3 This royal ritual was imitated by women (and men) of the nobility and haute bourgeoisie, who transformed it from an exercise in political power and proximity into a domestic celebration of taste and sociability, one frequently depicted in genre scenes and portraits. Not only the carefully choreographed event itself, but its elegant accoutrements, were calculated to impress and entice. [End Page 147] Just as the toilette transitioned from a royal to a bourgeois pastime, so did keeping pets. As Glynis Ridley has observed, “the eighteenth century was a time not only of rapid expansion of the natural world but also of rapidly changing relationships between human and non-human animals.”4 New species were being discovered and classified at an unprecedented rate; once-exotic animals were becoming familiar sights in Europe. It has been well documented—notably by Louise E. Robbins—that pets of all kinds grew more common in homes at all levels of French society during the eighteenth century: dogs, cats, monkeys, parrots, cockatoos, canaries, finches, and, occasionally, small rodents.5 Although there were a number of male pet owners, in art and literature pets were associated with women and girls almost exclusively. Robbins attributes this to “the romantic and erotic connotations aroused by the close physical and emotional bonds between owner and animal,” and argues that at a time when wealth was beginning to replace birth in determining social status, pets—and especially exotic pets—were a desirable form of conspicuous consumption.6 The same can be said of the toilette. Although men and women alike held toilettes attended by friends, family members, clergymen, servants, and tradesmen, it was the female toilette that became a recurring theme in French art and print culture. Like female pet ownership, the female toilette carried connotations both erotic and economic. The taste for toilette scenes spanned history painting, genre scenes, and portraits, combining the ancient vanitas tradition with the ultramodern tableau de mode. Pets lent these scenes credibility and visual interest, but they also functioned as convenient symbols, whether of status, sexuality, exoticism, or human foibles. Indeed, artists were attracted to their human characteristics as much as their distinctively bestial colors and textures. Birds—especially parrots—flock to toilette scenes. Parrots were not only rare, beautiful, and expensive, but they could mimic human speech, which made them good companions as well as handy human surrogates in art. The parrot’s splendid plumage came at a price; the gaudier the parrot, the more expensive it was.7 However, like mirrors and burning candles, parrots were traditional emblems of mortality in addition to being a standard components of toilette tables, providing a reminder of the fleeting nature of beauty and the futility of attempting to mask the ravages of time. Equally exotic if less colorful and loquacious, the cockatoo is distinguished by its crest of curled feathers, which can be raised or lowered at will. In François Boucher’s painting Le Matin: La Dame à sa Toilette (now lost, it survives as an engraving by Gilles-Edmé Petit), the...

‘An Argument in Paint’: Reynolds and Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy

Following the work of such important scholars as John Barrell, Stephen Copley and David Solkin, discussion of eighteenth-century art has tended to focus on a dual narrative of civic humanism and Mandevillian economics. This article argues that such a focus has been to the detriment of a third ‘Augustan’ discourse, proposed by Paul Fussell in the 1960s as being evident in the writings of Sir Joshua Reynolds. Through focusing anew on Reynolds’ well-known portrait of David Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy, this article investigates the tensions inherent in the painting, and highlights the Augustan imagery that was visible in Reynolds’ portraits as well as his writing. The Augustan discourse becomes evident when Reynolds’ literary and artistic productions are considered in tandem and in the context of his intellectual and political milieu, influenced by his friends in ‘the Club’, especially Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke. Within this discourse man is depraved and fallen, the victim of his dual nature, split between reason and imagination. Such duality captures him between outer appearance and inner morality, and particularly vulnerable, therefore, in the eighteenth century, which prioritized ‘polite,’ fashionable concerns. In discussing the portrait of Garrick, pulled between Tragedy and Comedy, this article highlights an eighteenth-century discourse of Augustan, ‘Ancient’ moral concerns that has been obscured by our contemporary debt to the ‘Modern’ attitude, which was its enemy.

From Exquisite to Transgressive Moderns? The Goncourt's "Decadent" Eighteenth-Century Art Revival

As avid collectors of French eighteenth-century art, the Goncourts' contribution to its nineteenth-century history is well-known. This article, however, explores a less welldocumented aspect of their L'Art du dix-huitième siècle (1858-1875): that is, its articulation of an art of latency and decadence prior to the term's fin-de-siècle association with explicitly transgressive cultures of modernity. Indeed, the paper argues that the Goncourts were amongst the first writers of their age to use the art of an age linked with political and cultural decay, to foreground latently decadent tendencies in mid nineteenth-century French art and culture. In so doing, they were to produce a paradigm of "decadence" defining not decline, but a new and highly modern artistry of heightened aesthetic expression. The article will explore these ideas in two principal ways. First, it considers neglected relations between the Goncourts' and Taine's ideas on art, and specifically, the Goncourts' use and exploitation of Tainean indicators of decadence, broached in Taine's study on La Fontaine (1861), for opposing artistically and culturally productive ends. Second it develops these ideas in a discussion of the three artist-studies in L'Art du dixhuitième siècle in which the Goncourts' developing theme of "decadence" is articulated with especial force and prescience: in "Boucher" (1861), "Greuze" (1863) and ‘Fragonard' (1864). These, as the paper argues, suggest particularly defined channels for the Goncourts' engagement with key Tainean ideas of the period, offering related opportunities for their promotion of corruption, vice and decline as aesthetically and culturally compelling. In repositioning Boucher's sensualism as "indécence", Greuze's "innocence" as "perverse" and Fragonard's Italianate expressivity as "impure", the Goncourts not only situate their "histories" in the vanguard of a new, transgressive aesthetic understanding of eighteenth-century art, they re-appropriate its Romantically exquisite aspects as emblems of an art of exquisite corruption and as triggers for recreation.

Pygmalion in Bavaria: The Sculptor Ignaz Günther and Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Art Theory (review)

Reviewed by: Pygmalion in Bavaria: The Sculptor Ignaz Günther and Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Art Theory Michael Yonan Christiane Hertel, Pygmalion in Bavaria: The Sculptor Ignaz Günther and Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Art Theory (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2011). Pp. 270. $99.95. Ignaz Günther is a sculptor well known in his native Germany, but entirely unfamiliar outside of it. His elegant rococo compositions grace the interiors of several important Bavarian ecclesiastical spaces, and a few have found their way to American and British museums. In general, though, his name remains little known; therefore, Christiane Hertel’s book is a most welcome addition to the critical literature on eighteenth-century art. Incredibly, this is the first English-language study on Bavarian rococo art of any kind since Karsten Harries’s The Bavarian Rococo Church, published nearly three decades ago. Hertel’s book is no introductory monograph, however. It is a wide-ranging, ambitious, and intricately argued investigation of Günther’s work which posits commonalities between religious art and the widespread retheorization of sculpture that took place in late eighteenth-century philosophy. As such, it is a novel and surprising text quite without parallel in the critical literature. Hertel’s intent is less historical or biographical than it is theoretical, and her book contributes as much to the study of eighteenth-century art theory as it does to that of art itself. She employs a comparative method that alternates works by Günther with lengthy explorations of diverse texts, including works by such prominent thinkers as Winckelmann, Lessing, Hegel, Rousseau, Kant, and Herder, as well as more obscure personages like the historian Lorenz Westenrieder (1748–1829). Hertel is particularly interested in passages concerned with self-reflective perception and sensory experience, since she sees in Günther’s sculptures a visual and material examination of these processes. Her overarching point is that Günther theorized self-reflectivity, interiority, and sensation in his art, making sculptures that fulfilled devotional expectations while also silently critiquing or confusing those expectations. Commentators have long characterized Günther’s sculptures as psychologically expressive, but according to Hertel that expressiveness is the result of a palpable self-awareness on Günther’s part. She relates this self-awareness to the Protestant critique of idolatry, to sculpture’s ritual functions in Catholic religious culture, and to the spiritual meaning accorded to sculpture in eighteenth-century German aesthetics. After a brief biographical overview, Hertel introduces the Pygmalion theme in order to examine an unusual etching on the subject by Günther. This image, [End Page 457] Hertel claims, complicates notions of high and low art through its odd iconography, and she sees the Pygmalion story as both a model for sculptural practice generally and a theorization of religious sculpture especially—a fascinating suggestion. Then comes a chapter on Günther’s relationship to late eighteenth-century Bavarian religious culture. Here Hertel interprets Günther through wide-ranging comparanda, including the baroque devotional machina, the theatrical tableau vivant, and Andrea Pozzo’s writings on perspective, connections that Hertel forges associatively and nonlinearly. Hertel uses this moment to build on and partially rethink Harries’s observations on the rococo church as theatrum sacrum. Chapter three examines Günther’s angels, their locations in churches, and the effects they have on viewers and worshippers. Hertel concentrates on the multiple commissions Günther produced for the Augustinian church at Diessen, which she sees as partially subversive and potentially unruly through subtle distinctions in gender, age, pose, and position. Chapter five discusses Günther’s Kerkerheiland, a small freestanding sculpture of the flagellated Christ made in imitation of the sculpture that inspired the Wieskirche, one of Bavaria’s most celebrated ecclesiastical spaces. Hertel engages in a close visual analysis of this work to claim that it unites popular piety and institutionally sanctioned Counter-Reformational reform. The next chapter turns to the sculptural groups Günther made for the Church of Saints Peter and Paul at Weyarn, unusual objects that were intended for procession as well as for stationary display. She relates these works to the idea of sculptural vivification, for which she adopts the term Zusammensicht, or synthetic sight, an...

Review: The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome by Heather Hyde Minor

Heather Hyde Minor. The Culture of Architecture in Enlightenment Rome . Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies series, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010, 312 pp., 36 color and 112 b/w illus. $95 (cloth), ISBN 9780271035642 Despite its importance as the focus of the Grand Tour, eighteenth-century Italy—especially papal Rome—has traditionally been perceived as a cultural backwater, remaining relatively unaffected by the engagement with Enlightenment thought that catalyzed the transformation from early modern to modern culture in northern European countries. Since at least the 1960s, scholars in various disciplines have been working to dispel that antiquated notion, and in her recent book, Heather Hyde Minor ambitiously strives to follow suit by illuminating the influence of enlightened ideas on seven important building projects, initiated by popes or their cardinal-nephews, that spanned the years 1730 to 1758, when Clement XII Corsini and Benedict XIV Lambertini reigned as the supreme pontiffs. Minor's handsomely produced, well-illustrated study is divided into three parts, the first examining ecclesiastical commissions: the new facades of S. Giovanni in Laterano and S. Maria Maggiore as well as other renovations at the latter and the building of the Corsini Chapel at the former. The second section concerns the enlargement of two types of papal palaces: the family home of the Corsini, constructed for the pope's nephew, Cardinal Neri Corsini, and the “official” palace complex built for the pontiffs on the Quirinal Hill. The last part considers two important kinds of public institutions of learning, the newly founded Capitoline Museum and the Corsini Library at the family palace. Minor is mostly able to show how these projects were influenced by new and enlightened notions, but her claim that they constituted a distinctive “culture of architecture” is less effectively demonstrated; it stands in for a more comprehensive and serious consideration of the ways in which the …

Slikar Filippo Naldi (II)

According to his own testimony, the painter Filippo Naldi was of Florentine origin. He lived and worked in Dalmatia in the mid-eighteenth century while serving in the Venetian army. He was mentioned in records as a port manager at Opuzen. In the wider Dalmatian area, Naldi painted a large number of religious works and several portraits. This paper attributes to him seven paintings in churches situated in the Dalmatian hinterland and the region of Poljica (at Zavojane near Vrgorac, Dobranje near Imotski, Kostanje at Poljica, Čaporice near Trilj and in the Franciscan monastery at Sinj). The author analyzes the characteristics of Naldi’s painting and his significance in eighteenth-century Dalmatian art and society.

Art History: Re‐Viewing Recent Studies

AbstractThis article reviews studies in the visual arts of the eighteenth century, with an emphasis on recent interest in display and reception. The exhibition ‘Art on the Line’, at the Courtauld Institute in 2001, is taken as the starting‐point for scholarship that has addressed the spaces and topographies of display, institutional, commercial and domestic, and the new publics constituted by and in these arenas. Of particular concern is how dominant narratives of eighteenth‐century art have been modified and reinforced by attendance to these issues as well as by studies focused on its relationship to commerce, trade, war and empire.

Venice: Canaletto and his rivals

View-painting in eighteenth-century Venice began with the emergence of Luca Carlevarijs and ended with the death of Francesco Guardi in 1793, followed by Napoleon's invasion and the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797. In between, a constellation of remarkable painters captured the city in dazzling pictures which are among the greatest achievements in eighteenth-century art. Canaletto may be the artist popularly associated with Venice, but he had many rivals who competed for commissions, often from foreigners whose patronage was to determine the later course of Venetian view-painting. All the major figures are represented here - Bellotto, Carlevarijs, Guardi, Joli, Marieschi and Vanvitelli - together with fascinating contemporaries such as Cimaroli and Tironi. Charles Beddington sets the scene with an overview of the artists then working in the city, and draws on the latest research and scholarship to illuminate the complex stylistic relationships between them. Succinct, lively biographies for each artist are followed by short introductions to the works, grouped chronologically by artist. Each painter saw the same topography with his own unique vision; this beautiful book demonstrates the varied responses to the cityscape, with its ever-changing light, as well as to its spectacles and ceremonies. It is published to accompany the exhibition at the National Gallery, London, 13 October 2010 - 16 January 2011 and at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, 20 February - 30 May 2011.