Eighteenth-century Painting Research Articles

The Afterlife of Early Modern Images of Jews

Early modern copperplate engravers, painters, and printers produced an increasing number of images that depicted Jewish individuals or more often groups of Jewish men and women. Many of these images sought to present an ideal type, displaying (allegedly) typical Jewish dress and outward appearance. Some of these images saw adaptations already during the eighteenth-century, but all were photographed, reprinted, adapted, and altered from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. This article choses three images – an engraving of a Jewish man and woman from an early-eighteenth century costume book, the depiction of a Jewish couple from a late eighteenth-century painting, and the painting of Bertha Pappenheim posing as early modern Jewish merchant Glikl bas Judah from the early twentieth century – and follows their adaptations over time. I analyze how these adaptations were (re)used in different contexts and the problems they may create for historians as well as for (non-professional) observers interested in the history of early modern European Jewry. The afterlife of these early modern images is often framed in a discourse of Jewish belonging and identity. Especially popular adaptations are characterized by an uncritical and sometimes ahistorical approach to these images.

Remarks on the Anonymous Collective Sponsorships in Post-Byzantine Epirus (Greece): The Case of an Eighteenth-Century Painting Workshop

Co-operative patronage is based on the joint effort of individuals, lay or clerical, couples, families, colleagues, ecclesiastical and military authorities, or fellow citizens. Through the donor inscriptions are revealed the different categories of such co-operative patronage in Byzantine and Post-Byzantine society. In the Greek-speaking Post-Byzantine world, such types of anonymous groups of donors and benefactors most often came from a community as a whole, or certain inhabitants of a region, while collective donations by groups of monks were also widespread. The present paper examines the practice of anonymous collective sponsorships in Post-Byzantine Epirus, presenting the surviving monuments from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century and, in detail, the cases of anonymous collective sponsorships in a specific painting workshop of the eighteenth century, that of the so-called Kapesovite painters. In Post-Byzantine period the special privileges from the Ottomans and the development of trade, contributed to the Epirus’s cultural development. The tectonic transformations in the residential network of Epirus began in the late sixteenth century and increased after the seventeenth century. During the eighteenth century, the flourishing of Post-Byzantine art is a fact, indicating the gradual rise to prevalence of the parishes and the communities over the monastic establishments and individual donors. The financial and commercial privileges, especially after the treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca (1774), contributed decisively to religious monuments’ construction or renovation. The financial circumstances and the social cohesion of the Orthodox Christians in Epirus favored the increase of anonymous collective sponsorship in the eighteenth century. The monuments of that period evidence a significant amount of co-operative patronage, in which “anonymity” starred among the donors. The anonymous collective sponsorships indicates the community’s cohesion and the benefactor’s desire to create a legacy for future generations.

François Soyer. Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World: Narratives of Fear and Hatred. Leiden: Brill, 2019. xvi + 315 pp.

Among the many myths spurred by the Covid-19 emergency is the false claim that Jews caused this pandemic to secretly dominate the world.1 Soyer's book confirms how often conspiracy theories entail a perception of Jews—whether openly professing or “hidden,” through religious conversion or assimilation—as quintessential conspirators. In this vitriolic leaflet, Quevedo explicitly invoked “the correspondence between the Jews of Spain and the Jews of Constantinople” to denounce Portuguese conversos as a dangerous fifth column in Iberia, although he expressed doubts regarding the authenticity of that epistolary exchange, as if anticipating sympathetic future readers of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.5 In chapter 2 (54–92) and in the epilogue (275–81), Soyer painstakingly probes the origins of these forged letters, which were initially used by Archbishop of Toledo Juan Martinez Siliceo (1477–1547) to support anticonverso exclusionary laws of “purity of blood.” [...]without attempting to show an organic continuity, Soyer demonstrates that the (alleged) epistolary exchange between deceitful Iberian conversos and open Jews living in the Ottoman Empire was recycled through subsequent antisemitic reverberations. 8 It is worth mentioning that for Soyer, Iberian anticonverso conspiracy myths were not exclusively a top-down phenomenon: “The existence of a ‘Jewish plot’ to destroy the Church and Christian community was seemingly accepted as an incontrovertible fact by members of all social ranks” (137). [...]among the many fascinating examples sprinkled throughout the book, the author refers to an anonymous eighteenth-century painting of an alleged flagellation of a crucifix by Portuguese

Jacques Réda's ‘Le Noir et l'or de Dresde’: Ethics and Aesthetics in War's Wake

In ‘Le Noir et l'or de Dresde’ ( Europes, 2005), Jacques Réda's quixotic project is to excavate a Dresden that is no more. Fully aware of this paradoxical aim as he walks through its martyred cityscape ‘vers la Dresde du XVIIIe siècle en sachant qu'elle n'existait plus’, he reflects on images present and past: sun-drenched spires remembered from eighteenth-century paintings that stand as witness to what no longer exists, the brutal bombings by American and British forces during the Second World War, and the commercialized aftermath of German reunification. As Réda moves beyond assessing tragedy through a historical lens, his poetic prose commemorates trauma by accentuating chromatic, lexical and aural textures and intensities in order to open avenues towards shared subjectivity. He establishes an ethical and aesthetic trajectory that responds creatively to war's destruction, and concludes by reframing the city's heraldic colours, black and gold, within sunset's unifying transit across a poetically reconstructed skyline

The Length in Six Strokes

The Length in Six Strokes Sharbari Zohra Ahmed (bio) Shalini is about to leave the office when her editor, Reza, who is nine years younger than she is, slaps a slim book with a black cover down on her desk and grins at her. "I need this reviewed by the end of the week. It's short and shitty but I'm curious what you think," he says. Shalini is a fiction writer working as a columnist for the literary supplement of a young newspaper called the Dhaka Chronicle in Dhaka, Bangladesh. After a divorce, installing her son in college, and three decades abroad, she moved here from New York to watch her alcoholic father die slowly, whittling away her mother's spirit in the process. Shalini's career, once filled with promise, is stalling. Her ambivalent agent keeps sending her novel back to be tweaked, and her story collection, which came out with a small publisher four years ago, was a mere blip in the literary firmament. Her advance paid barely half a month's rent in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She had moved there after her divorce, a quixotic decision that left her feeling even more isolated and older, as she was surrounded by hip young mothers with tattoos and biracial children. Ironically, she had both the tattoo and the biracial child herself by the late nineties, when she was labeled a rebel. In Bangladesh, Shalini is a minor celebrity because of this collection, which was well received whenever anyone decided to receive it. In New York she had to beg independent bookstores door-to-door to stock her book. But as she likes to quip, "I killed in Dhaka." Sometimes she has to explain where Dhaka is, which significantly deflates the joke. Reza looks fetching today, in a fitted black V-neck tee, jeans, and red Puma sneakers. She is distracted by his finely shaped forearms and the edges of collarbone, jutting out slightly through the V. She has a minor, ongoing flirtation with Reza, who once professed to having sexual fantasies about her. He has not brought it up recently, though, and Shalini never tries to jog his memory. "Shalini apa?" His use of the formal "big sister" snaps her back to the book on her desk. She frowns and turns it over to a photo of the author, Anira Ali, a slim, attractive young woman in a sleeveless blouse and diaphanous cotton sari. Anira sits cross-legged on the floor next to a set of tablas and a sitar, suggesting eighteenth-century paintings of Mughal courtesans. Shalini shakes her head. "Nothing doing," she says. "I know her." [End Page 104] Reza frowns. "Of course, you do. We all do. Dhaka is incestuous." "She's almost a friend," Shalini says. "In the Dhaka sense. She teaches hot yoga at the American club. I want to take that class once I'm off the waiting list." Reza pulls a chair up next to her desk, uncomfortably close, making Shalini self-conscious. She is wearing wide-legged palazzo pants that hike up when she is sitting, revealing that she has not shaved her legs above the calves, one of her personal "life hacks" that has more to do with her functioning depressive state than living efficiently. She depilates only as far up as a pair of pants or dress requires her to. Once she gets the hang of wearing a sari every day, she will dispense with hair removal altogether. She has managed in the eight months of living in Dhaka to grow a fine mat of bristly black hair on each upper leg and an enviable thatch under each arm. She doesn't have the toned arms required to wear a sleeveless blouse like Anira Ali. She tries to tuck her legs underneath her. Her editor's eyes are on her face, which is also discomfiting. "I was going to promote you," he says, smiling. Shalini snorts. "Bullshit," she says. "No, really. I think you should run this supplement as co-deputy editor. We need the support." "Oh, Naila will love that," Shalini says, shaking her head. Naila, a twenty-six-year-old columnist and editor, has...

Paintings of Flower, Vegetable, and Fruit from the Late Joseon Period: Focusing on Sim Sajeong and Gang Sehwang

This essay explores new aspects of paintings of flower, vegetable, and fruit that Sim Sajeong (1707~1769), Gang Sehwang (1713~1791), and their artistic circle escalated into one of the major pictorial genres in the late Joseon dynasty. Falling into a conventional category Bird-and-Flower painting, this branch of painting has hitherto been studied only in the context of an individual artist’s development without receiving a proper recognition as a sign of a new pictorial trend of the period. The rise of the novel genre and its characteristics will shed a new light on the eighteenthcentury painting. The late Joseon period witnessed growing interests in pragmatic horticultural knowledge beyond a tradition of associating plants with idealistic virtues or subjective sentiments. Also a cultural phenomenon of appreciating and favoring flowers and trees has developed into extreme aestheticism and an extravagant pastime. Gardening books and related materials from the Ming and Qing dynasties were widely read, including painting manuals that inspired Kim Ingwan’s (act. fl. early 18th century) Landscape, Fish and Crab, Flower and Insects. The artistic currents, which Sim and Gang channeled into new heights, feature an increase of a single plant motif, the growth of paintings combining flowers and garden rocks, and the emergence of new subject-matters (e.g. begonias, rose mallows, lilies, hydrangeas, red plum blossoms, and narcissi). In addition, new pictorial modes settled, the kernels of which lie in the Idealistic inkmonochrome method or color-washed boneless manner. As such it made solid its status as a subject of privileged scholar-artist paintings. Although Sim and Gang display pictorial modes and subjects in common, their styles differ according to their social standings (Sim as a semi-professional literati painter, while Gang an amateur scholar painter). Sim sought rich and animated brushworks, a sophisticated composition inviting birds and worms against a garden background, and the picturesque. On the contrary Gang liked to employ somewhat monotonous ink tonalities, calligraphic strokes, concise structures, and blandness. Sim’s combined application of light-color washes and vivid paints contrasts with Gang’s nearly exclusive use of limpid color washes. Whereas Sim had an eclectic tendency to derive visual constituents from various painting manuals, Gang deliberately pursued the flatness of the prints. Those who shared subjects, modes, and styles with Sim and Gang are Choe Buk (1712~ca. 1786), Jeong Chungyeop (1725~after 1800), Ryu Sin (1748~1790), Jang Siheung (act. late 18th century), Kim Deokhyeong (act. late 18th~early 19th century), and Yi Bang-un (1761~after 1815). Their individual styles and brushworks based on sketching from life contributed not only to the proliferation of paintings of flower, vegetable, and fruit but also to the enrichment of late Joseon art world.

Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns by Lisa Voigt

Portuguese Studies vol. 34 no. 1 (2018), 119–32© Modern Humanities Research Association 2018 Reviews Lisa Voigt, Spectacular Wealth: The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016). 237 pages, 5 b/w photos. Print and e-book. Hardcover and paperback. Reviewed by Barbara Alge (Goethe University, Frankfurt) Public festivals have had an important function in promoting imperial expansion since the beginning of the colonization of the Americas. They were used to commemorate religious and political events, from important Catholic feast days to political acts such as the entrance of important authorities into colonial towns or weddings of the court. Spectacular Wealth, written by Lisa Voigt, complements the vast literature on festivals in eighteenth-century mining towns in colonial South America. While Voigt cites this literature, the novelty of her Spectacular Wealth lies, first, in the ‘mining’ (p. 8) of festival accounts, and, second, in the comparative approach — not only looking at festivals in Spanish and Portuguese America side-by-side, but also working out links, similarities and differences between these two regions. Drawing on archival research, Voigt examines festival accounts and the festive participation of diverse inhabitants in the silver-mining town of Potosí (viceroyalty of Peru) and in the gold-mining towns of Minas Gerais (Brazil). She not only bridges written texts and performances, but brings the festivals to life by giving a voice to different ethnic and social groups involved in the organization and performance of the festivals, as well as to those writing about the festivals in mining boomtowns, mostly for a metropolitan readership. WhilethefestivalsservedtheChurchandtheCrownforostentationinthefirst instance, they also offered an opportunity to Amerindians, Afro-descendants, Europeans and creoles to display their social capital and cultural practices in spectacular performances. Festivals were used to redefine the reputation of these groups, and to celebrate their cultural, spiritual and intellectual wealth. Tracing the multiple meanings and messages of civic festivals and religious feast days, Voigt highlights the conflicting agendas at work in the organization, performance and reporting of festivals. The book is divided by theme and approach rather than geography and corpus: Part I analyses and interprets specific texts on festivals in the Villa Imperial de Potosí (Chapter 1) and on festivals in colonial Minas Gerais (Chapter 2); Part II uses those and other texts to take a closer look at the celebrants of the festivals, with a focus on the natives in Potosí (Chapter 3), and on Afro-Brazilians in Minas Gerais (Chapter 4). Each chapter finishes Reviews 120 with a helpful summary of the main points. Extensive notes, well indicated in relation to pages, complement the information given in each chapter and five figures in black-and-white reproduced from eighteenth-century paintings and manuscripts illustrate Voigt’s observations. A conclusion tops off the complex narrative. In the introduction, Voigt presents a description of the play of the Real tragicomedia del descubrimiento y conquista del Oriente, performed at a Jesuit college in Lisbon in 1619, to outline the main themes of the book, that is, ‘the festive display of mineral wealth; of the feats and fruits of evangelization; of royal authority and ethnic difference, both feigned and real; of intergroup competition and rivalry (again, both feigned and real)’ (p. 11). The description of this play by Mimoso (Lisbon, 1620) serves as an example of what Voigt calls the ‘ambiguous genre’ of festival accounts, lying between the narrative of a performed event and their own rhetorical performances, and as such derived from other texts and oral accounts as well as the performance itself. The introduction further contextualizes the silver rush in Potosí and the gold rush in Minas Gerais historically, and provides insights into the social make-up of the mining towns, composed of those who profited from the minerals, and those who suffered from exploitation working in the mines. Voigt also mentions the writers in Portuguese and Spanish America, who play a role throughout the book, such as Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa and Andre João Antonil. She turns her attention to the physical and symbolical presence of different racial and ethnic groups in the festival performances. Chapter 1 focuses on three festive occasions that Arzáns uses to showcase...

Symbolika obrazu «Alegorii Bożej Opatrzności» z klasztoru Sióstr Wizytek w Krakowie

There is an eighteenth-century painting depicting Allegory of Divine Providence in the convent of the Sisters of the Visitation in Krakow. The iconography is unique. In addition to figures of people and animals abandoning themselves to the care of Divine Providence, it also shows the seven archangels. Although the Catholic Church only recognizes three Archangels (Gabriel, Michael and Raphael), portrayals of seven archangels appeared in European art at the end of sixteenth century and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which also showed figures representing Uriel, Barachiel, Sealtiel and Jehudiel. The Reverend Ignacy Tluczynski also mentions them in a book—on to the subject of angels and the care which angels and heavenly spirits provide to people—published in Krakow in 1677. It would be impossible to have a full understanding of the message conveyed in the Krakow painting without having knowledge of Polish eighteenth-century religious songs devoted to Divine Providence. The dominant motif—which also appears on other Polish paintings depicting Divine Providence—is the portrayal of people and animals together, to whom Providence is offering various gifts.

Edward Morris (1940–2016)

Edward Morris, who died on 29 May 2016, was on the editorial board of this journal from its foundation in 1999 until 2001, and has earned himself a tribute in its pages, perhaps above all for his heroic efforts on behalf of the PMSA's National Recording Project. He was chair of the NRP editorial board virtually from the outset, and it was largely thanks to him that 17 volumes, including his own, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside (2012), have been published, and that several more are in preparation. This selfless editorial labour was not his only contribution to sculpture studies, and was itself a kind of coda to the art-historical and curatorial experiences of a lifetime. This is how it appears in retrospect, but it was hardly an outcome that those like myself, who knew him as a student at the Courtauld in the 1960s, or even Edward as a student, could have foreseen.The fact that he was born in the early stages of the Second World War, the son of an officer in the Royal Navy, may account for the deep-rooted sobriety of his character, offset, admittedly, by a fairly acute sense of the ridiculous in life generally. His education at first followed a standard patrician pattern of prep school, Rugby, and a BA in history at Peterhouse, Cambridge (1959). Between school and university he briefly taught English in Spain, and in the process improved his own Spanish. His interest in art appears to have grown during a five-year period spent working in the City. A college friend remembers their going together to Spain, and his being brought up to scratch on Romanesque architecture by Edward, who had read Kenneth Conant's recently published Pelican, Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture 800-1200. In 1964 Edward enrolled for an MA course at the Courtauld, and was perhaps upset to find that the institute's medievalists were not impressed by Conant. His courses there were on French eighteenth-century painting with Anita Brookner and seventeenth-century landscape with Michael Kitson and Anthony Blunt. In his conversation at that time he showed an awe-inspiring familiarity with nineteenth-century authors, from Stendhal to Henry James, through Ruskin and the less fashionable Thackeray.It was at the Courtauld that Edward met his wife, Penny, and both of them were lucky enough to find congenial work in Liverpool at the end of their courses in 1966. His grounding in nineteenth-century history and literature were excellent qualifications for work at the Walker Art Gallery, where he was to remain as curator up to his retirement in 1999. It was at this period that Mary Bennett was spearheading the exposure of Pre-Raphaelite painters at the Walker, but the gallery's holdings of nineteenth-century art were impressively international, and Edward took a special interest in the French paintings. Despite some recent efforts to bring this area into conformity with twentieth-century priorities, with purchases of works by Monet and Degas, Edward was not at all unhappy that the bulk of the collection still reflected the tastes of Liverpool's mercantile classes from the early days. His researches in this area were to culminate much later with the publication of his ambitious volume, French Art in Nineteenth Century Britain, published by Yale University Press in 2005. By this time substantial advances had been made in exploring the activities of French sculptors in Victorian Britain, and these contributed to the rich texture of the book. In 1994, the Walker Art Gallery, under Edward's watch, had acquired, with the assistance of the National Art Collections Fund, an important French sculpture executed for an English destination: Henri Chapu's marble effigy of the Duchess of Nemours (1883), from the Orleans family oratory in the church of St Charles Borromeo, Weybridge.With the man who was his boss in those crucial days, Timothy Stevens, Edward gave a detailed account of the extraordinary boom for Liverpool's museums and galleries in the late 1980s. …

Life Drawing and the Crisis ofHistoriain French Eighteenth-Century Painting

Art HistoryVolume 39, Issue 1 p. 40-69 Original Article Life Drawing and the Crisis of Historia in French Eighteenth-Century Painting Susanna Caviglia, Susanna CavigliaSearch for more papers by this author Susanna Caviglia, Susanna CavigliaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 02 December 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12206Citations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume39, Issue1February 2016Pages 40-69 RelatedInformation

Kwame "Almighty" Akoto, The Supernatural Eyes of God

During a trip to Ghana in May 2010, I visited the roadside shop and atelier of painter Kwame Akoto, alias “Almighty,” a name he adopted so as to praise the power of God. Approaching the venue, “Almighty God artworks” at Suame Junction, Kumasi, I saw from afar a large picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a painted remediation of Pompeo Batoni’s initial eighteenth-century painting that has been mass reproduced over and over again. In addition to engaging in the reproduction of well-known items of Christian visual culture, however, Almighty also produces compelling artworks that express his pious Christian attitude in his own original way. This remarkable creativity made him famous as a popular painter in art circuits outside of Ghana.

¿La pintura novohispana como koiné pictórica americana? Avances de una investigación en ciernes

Una de las preocupaciones básicas a lo largo de la historiografía sobre la pintura novohispana ha sido aclarar la relación de ésta con la pintura española. La mayor parte de escritos sobre este tema durante el siglo xix y gran parte del xx concluyeron que a partir de la llegada de los pintores europeos la pintura que se realizó en el territorio novohispano era española. La temprana pintura del siglo xvi tanto en murales como en códices presenta la dificultad de aclarar hasta dónde el sistema pictórico indígena siguió funcionado. Respecto a la pintura posterior, la conclusión de que era “española” hizo a un lado toda discusión a pesar de que la pintura del siglo xvii y xviii presenta una clara identidad frente a esta escuela europea que debe tener una explicación. A pesar de múltiples trabajos sobre la interacción del indígena en la pintura, es la hora en que deben ser revisados los criterios utilizados hasta hoy para determinar la identidad de la pintura novohispana en general. Para ello proponemos como auxiliar en esta tarea utilizar los esquemas de análisis que los lingüistas han utilizado para estudiar el español de América. Partiendo de la pregunta para la lengua de si el español utilizado en América es español de América o español en América, trasladamos esta discusión al terreno de la pintura preguntándonos si la pintura es “la pintura española en América” o “la pintura española de América”. A través de términos como sustrato, léxico, nivelación y koiné, intentamos encontrar explicaciones a la diversidad de esta pintura, considerando que ésta puede ser definida como una variedad dialectal de la pintura española, pero también revisando las habilidades artísticas y técnicas del mundo indígena intentando dar una explicación, no del rechazo o desaparición de todo un sistema de representación, como se ha querido ver, sino de su asimilación y ajustes estilísticos a una nueva realidad pictórica. Este avance de investigación sólo toma en cuenta el mundo formal dejando a un lado todo aquello que es del área del contenido y la iconografía.

Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past , and: Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (review)

Reviewed by: Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past, and: Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England Barrett Kalter (bio) Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg, eds. Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past. New York and London: Routledge, 2007. x+246pp. US$69.95. ISBN 978-0-415-94953-8. Amanda Vickery . Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. xviii+382pp. US$45. ISBN 978-0-300-15453-5. The twelve strong essays collected in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century illuminate the circuits of production and consumption that moved furniture and decorative objects from city to countryside, back and forth across the Atlantic, as well as the social pressures that imbued those objects with significance. The first of four thematically organized sections maps the global itinerary of materials and styles. Madeleine Dobie's terrific essay studies the use of luxury woods from French colonies in the West Indies to construct furniture in an Orientalist style. She argues that the exotic guise of the furniture concealed from metropolitan consumers the slave economy that supplied them. Chaela Pastore discusses the vogue for mahogany; though the wood grew in Saint Domingue, Creoles who bought mahogany furniture were criticized for mimicking the elites in France who wanted to monopolize this luxury as a token of national and racial purity. David Porter's chapter returns to the topic of Orientalism by way of a treatise on aesthetics by William Hogarth. Chinoiserie exemplified the features that Hogarth claimed had universal appeal (for example, novelty, asymmetry, and femininity), yet the style repelled him. Porter shows that the Chinese style was often satirized as a source of female pleasure that displaced men; its connotations thus undermined the heterosexual dynamic implicit in Hogarth's theory of beauty. While Pastore and Porter examine efforts to regulate fashion, the second set of essays profile people who carried fashions across [End Page 427] geographical and social boundaries. Natacha Coquery reconstructs the business of a Parisian upholsterer whose trade in second-hand goods broadened access to high-end fashions. With the help of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vermont woodworker James Wilson produced the first globes for sale in the new Republic. David Jaffee records Wilson's achievement as an instance of "Village Enlightenment," whereby cosmopolitan knowledge was introduced to the provinces by commerce (81). Jaffee complicates the centre-periphery model of diffusion, though, by showing how American artisans often adapted English styles to local tastes and thereby signalled their nation's independence. Kathryn Norberg analyzes the ways in which courtesans appropriated features from aristocratic interiors in order to create the novel and seductive environments in which they plied their trade. The third section of the volume continues this investigation of the domestic interior with Donna Bohanan's discussion of noble houses in provincial France. The decoration of these homes closely resembled those in Paris and Versailles, a consequence, Bohanan argues, of a change in laws that deepened the division between old and new aristocracy by taxing the latter more heavily. Goaded by this check to their aspirations, parvenus in the provinces embraced the elite style emanating from the court and city to assert the authenticity of their rank. Anyone who has ploughed straight through the museum galleries devoted to ceramic dinnerware, bored by so much sameness, should definitely read Mimi Hellman's compelling semiotic analysis of the matched set. Hellman argues that seriality would have been alluring prior to industrialization, given the difficulty of manufacturing apparently identical objects by hand. The matched set was priced beyond the reach of most consumers, but for those who could afford them, their multiplicity provided a pleasing sense of continuity and order. The meuble, a matched set of furniture, could unite a group of people while signalling differences in status among them, depending on the type of chair one sat on and its position in the room. Mary Salzman suggests that a pair of eighteenth-century paintings taught people to interpret interiors in just this way. Noting a standard reading of the objects in Jean-François de Troy's The Garter and The Declaration...

Falling in love with statues: artificial humans from Pygmalion to the present

If, as a child, you conducted conversations with beloved dolls, or if, as an adult, you have entered virtual worlds inhabited by digital humans who inspire devotion in real people, you have participated in one of humanity's most potent yet least explored traditions. Falling in love (and out of love) with statues, George L. Hersey reveals, has helped us since antiquity to understand, improve, and empower ourselves.Hersey's history of statue love begins in Cyprus, home of the legendary sculptor Pygmalion, who famously grew enamored of his own creation. Examining the island's prehistoric images of Aphrodite - the love goddess who brought Pygmalion's sculpture to life - Hersey traces the origins of statue love back to the Cypriot followers who adored her terra-cotta likenesses. He goes on to explore ideas about human replicas in the works of Empedocles, Aristotle, Lucretius, and Ovid, whose definitive account of the Pygmalion myth introduced the notion that statues have the potential to induce physical responses in their viewers. Finding avatars of Ovid's living image in everything from pagan idols and early Christian statuary to eighteenth-century painting to modern action figures and marionettes, Hersey concludes by investigating the concern that these automata will eventually replace humans.In the process, he narrates a powerful history of artificial life at a moment when - with the development of robot soldiers, ever-more-sophisticated genetic engineering, and a continually expanding digital universe - it seems more real than ever.

Art, Identity, and the Construction of the Church of Santo Domingo in Quito

The recent rediscovery of an early seventeenth-century mural painting hidden beneath an eighteenth-century painting on canvas on the nave crossing arch of the Church of Santo Domingo provides striking visual evidence of individual and corporate identities and shifting devotional contexts at the Dominican monastery. Complementing and clarifying the visual evidence in the paintings, recently recovered archival documents confirm the identities, roles, and activities of the major protagonists in the Dominican artistic and building campaigns of the early seventeenth century.

Visualizing a Colonial Peruvian Community in the Eighteenth-Century Paintings of Our Lady of Cocharcas

This essay reaches beyond traditional interpretations of the colonial significance of indigenous devotion to the Virgin Mary and exposes the vital role of ritual in the transculturation of Andean identity. Eleven known eighteenth-century Peruvian paintings of Our Lady of Cocharcas depict the titular sculpture of the Virgin, her sanctuary, and the pilgrimage devotion associated with her. Pilgrims have traveled for centuries, and continue to travel today, in order to pay homage at Cocharcas. This analysis of the paintings of Our Lady of Cocharcas highlights an example of the localization of a religious image through the process of pilgrimage. Our Lady of Cocharcas attracted a variety of devotees, including regional political and religious authorities and ethnically mixed highlanders. In this article, I suggest a dominant local agency in the process which “tolerated” or “suppressed” both pre-conquest and Christian religious practices, founding a powerful colonial ritual used by many different constituents. The multiplicity of the participants produced an equal variety of responses to the colonial Andean divinity; however, it also provided the forum for articulating a unified community of Spanish colonial subjects.

"An Air of Grandeur & Modesty": James Thornhill's Painting in the Dome of St. Paul's Cathedral

James Thornhill's eight New Testament scenes in the inner dome of St. Paul's Cathedral constitute one of the most ambitious displays of painting in British art. However, the scheme's "decorative" associations mean that it has consistently fallen between two disciplines—disliked by architectural historians and overlooked by historians of eighteenth-century painting in equal measure. Combining previously unpublished documentary evidence with a fresh analysis of Thornhill's painting, this essay proposes a new understanding of the later stages in the rebuilding and decoration of St. Paul's, and points to the pictorial sophistication behind the apparent simplicity of the artist's designs.

Religion and the Arts In Future Issues

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009 DOI: 10.1163/156852908X388214 Religion and the Arts 13 (2009) 180 www.brill.nl/rart RELIGION and the ARTS Religion and the Arts In Future Issues Buddhism and Literature , Special Issue, ed. James Najarian and J. Jeff rey Franklin Creation Myths and the Visual Arts: An Ongoing Dialogue between Word and Image , Special Issue, ed. Daniela Merolla Emily Engel, “Visualizing a Colonial Peruvian Community in the Eighteenth-Century Paintings of Our Lady of Coharcas” June-Ann Greeley, “‘Who Would Believe What We Have Heard?’: Chris- tian Spirituality and Images from the Passion in Religious Art of New Spain” Friedhelm

FRENCH GENRE PAINTING FOR THE KING: MASTERPIECES BY LANCRET AND WATTEAU IN PRUSSIAN PALACES

The Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg is preparing a catalogue of its French eighteenth-century paintings, which were collected by Frederick II. Particular emphasis is being put on the history of the collection, its presentation and restoration. Later changes and restoration of the paintings are of special interest and are being analysed by art historians, conservators, and scientists as a central part of the works' history and perception. In this paper two examples are presented where this inter-disciplinary approach has led to interesting results. The paintings The Dance in a Pavilion and The Moulinet by Nicolas Lancret were not – as has always been assumed – painted as a pair of pendants. The appearance of Antoine Watteau's The Shop-sign of Gersaint has also undergone changes. The painting was first made to be a plafond, its shape dictated by architectural conditions. Later, it was transformed into a common rectangular shape and cut into two pieces, serving the taste of art dealers and collectors.

Le 'Musee de marchandises': The origins of the Musee Cognacq-Jay

The Musee Cognacq-Jay, a collection of eighteenth-century painting, furniture and decorative arts, opened in Paris seventy-one years ago. For the self-made founder of one of the city's largest department stores, Ernest Cognacq (1839-1928), collecting did not represent a discrete area of activity. Indeed, a look at the history of this museum shows how the parameters in which the collection was displayed were continually shaped by the cultural pretensions of grand magasins. Culminating in a series of exhibitions held in Cognacq's Samaritalne between 1925 and 1927, this juxtaposition of fine art and luxury commodity seemed to Justify contemporaries' concerns at the end of high art's cordon sanitaire