Sophie Raux From the start of the sixteenth century until 1786, the Pont Notre-Dame in Paris was topped by two rows of houses. They were built to a standard design and marked out a paved and very busy street, lined with shops that were home to some sixty or…
Michael Simeone, Christopher Morris, Kenton McHenry, and Robert Markley The study of historical maps as a group or body poses interpretive challenges on a number of fronts: maps are representations of geophysical spaces, and yet they are also works of art, produced, exchanged, and viewed within the commercial and…
Mechthild Fend, Fleshing out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1650-1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 352 pages. Understanding and depicting the anatomy and physiology of the human body was of great importance to both visual artists and medical men in the early modern period. In her new book,…
Holly Shaffer Ta‘ziyas are ephemeral shrines made of bright paper and bamboo that South Asian artisans have been constructing from at least the eighteenth century (Fig. 1). They are modeled on monumental tombs built for Shi‘i Muslims who had died centuries before and thousands of miles away in distant…
Chelsea Foxwell “[T]he lilt of a flying wasp, the pitch of a flying duck, a mantis in fighting position, or a semi [cicada] toddling up a cedar branch to sing. All this art is alive, intensely alive, and our corresponding art looks absolutely dead beside it.” — Lafcadio Hearn,…
Lan Wu In 1808, a Tibetan Buddhist reincarnate (Tib. trülku, Mon. bla-ma, hereafter trülku) from the Labrang Monastery in northeastern Tibet named Jamyang Tubten Nyima (1779-1862) travelled to southern and eastern Mongolia (Fig. 1), where Tibetan Buddhism had flourished during the previous century.[1] On his trip, Jamyang Tubten Nyima,…
Imran bin Tajudeen The eighteenth century stands as a neglected period in the study of the mosques of Southeast Asia (Fig. 1). The major scholarly surveys of Southeast Asia’s mosque architecture that go beyond description either focus on examples from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries,[1] or restrict their analysis…
Valérie Kobi Natural history and medicine encountered, early in their histories, an interesting paradox: although sciences of the living, they nonetheless relied on the study of inanimate specimens. The proper conservation of anatomical remains, both human and animal, posed an ongoing problem for centuries, meaning that artificial substitutes were…
Eugenia Zuroski In A Description of the Villa… at Strawberry-hill, near Twickenham (1774), the catalogue of his famous collection, Horace Walpole lists among the contents of the Great North Bedchamber “a nautilus mounted in silver gilt, with satyrs and the arms of Paston” that once “belonged to the last…
Lihong Liu Fireworks in the early modern world paradoxically wedded a local experience of ephemeral sensations with an impulse to create patterns of perpetual motion. Exploring the custom of fireworks in China alongside their pictorial representations and decorative applications in a transcultural context during the long eighteenth century, this…