Katie Scott, Becoming Property: Art, Theory and Law in Early Modern France, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2018, ISBN 9780300222791 In Becoming Property: Art, Theory and Law in Early Modern France, Katie Scott examines the relationship between intellectual property and the visual arts in France from the sixteenth…
Caroline Vout, Classical Art, A Life History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), ISBN 9780691177038 The title given to the review of Vout’s book in the TLS (January 4, 2019), “Crafting a Canon,” is somewhat misleading. The author, in fact, does not discuss precisely what has…
“The atmosphere of this cabinet is one of order, neatness and beauty.” That is how Johann Christian Fabricius described the museum of the Scottish physician and obstetrician William Hunter (1718-1783) when he visited it in 1784.[1] The same words might apply to the exhibition of Hunter’s collection, William Hunter and…
The Smell of Success: Gerard & Cornelis van Spaendonck, Painters of Flowers in Paris is at Het Noordbrabants Museum in ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands from 26 April to 25 August 2019. It is accompanied by Paul Huys Janssen, De geur van succes. Gerard & Cornelis van Spaendonck, bloemenschilders in Parijs (Zwolle:…
LEFT: Juliette Trey and Hélène Grollemund, Inventaire général des dessins du musée du Louvre. Edmé Bouchardon (1698-1762), Paris : Musée du Louvre, 2016, ISBN 9782350315515 RIGHT: Édouard Kopp, The Learned Draftsman: Edme Bouchardon, Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017, ISBN 978-1-60606-504-4 The exhibition dedicated to the eighteenth-century French sculptor Edmé Bouchardon (at the…
Amy Freund and Michael Yonan Painted cats are strange. Such a blanket statement may strike the reader as an obvious exaggeration, but a quick survey of cats in art lends conviction to the claim. Let us take a famous example, one from a canonical eighteenth-century painting, Jean Siméon Chardin’s The…
Catherine Girard In the burgeoning field of the “global” eighteenth-century, extensive work remains to be done on the experience of contact from Indigenous perspectives.[1] Because the repression of such voices has been used as a colonial strategy, it is crucial that scholars of cultural contact and circulation attend to this…
Daniel M. Greenberg The Compendium of Birds (鳥譜, niaopu)[1] is an important encyclopedia of bird species produced for the eighteenth-century Chinese court that has received little scholarly attention. Built upon a rich tradition of Chinese flower and bird painting and bestiaries but also in dialogue with early modern European natural…
Patricia Simons Isabelle Pinson’s Fly Catcher (L’attrapeur des mouches) seems at first glance a charming genre scene of a child at play (Fig. 1), a safe, inconsequential picture of innocence, and thus a suitable subject for a female artist to paint in 1808. But there is more than meets the…
Stephanie Triplett The Tieranatomisches Theater (animal dissection theater) in Berlin designed by Carl Gotthard Langhans (1732-1808) and built in 1790 as part of the newly founded Prussian veterinary school features an elaborate decorative program of trompe l’oeilgrisaille friezes encircling the central dome (Fig. 1). In these frescoes, the commonplace activities…