William Breazeale and Anke Fröhlich-Schauseil, The Splendor of Germany: Eighteenth-Century Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2020) Only those fortunate enough to live in or visit Sacramento, California, will have had the pleasure of browsing the collection of the Crocker Art Museum—a cultural hub of the…
The recent news about Hagia Sophia’s reconversion from a museum to a mosque has generated a flood of commentaries and discontent. This is not the first time that Istanbul’s architectural treasure has been treated as a vector of contemporary ideology (Fig. 1). Yet both the national and international media ignore…
Confronted with mass Black Lives Matter protests locally and internationally, Virginia governor Ralph Northam announced in early June 2020 that the state would remove the statue of Robert E. Lee on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, a late nineteenth-century real-estate scheme built around a series of memorials to Confederate heroes (Fig. 1).…
The year 2018 marked the 250th anniversary of the departure of the ship Endeavour from British shores, on course to circumnavigate the globe. In 1768, the Tahiti-bound vessel carried Captain James Cook and his crew of naturalists, cartographers, astronomers, and—unprecedented for this time—professional artists. These milestones were marked by three…
Sarah Grandin “Through his hands man establishes contact with the austerity of thought.” — Henri Focillon, In Praise of Hands[1] Père Sébastien Truchet (1657-1729) sought mathematical solutions to morphological problems. Whether his duty was to manage royal forests, design timepieces, or improve numismatic storage methods, his working notes are dominated by ruled…
Irene Choi Korea’s cultural contact with Europe in the eighteenth century was largely mediated through its two East Asian neighbors, Japan and China. During the reigns of Qing emperors Kangxi (r. 1654-1722), Yongzheng (r. 1723-1735), and Qianlong (r. 1736-1795), Korean artists, scholars, and envoys were part of the same environment…
Laurel O. Peterson A ceiling painting dominates the first room that a visitor encounters on the top floor of Chatsworth house (Fig. 1). The blue sky teems with figures. Towards the top of the composition, a rainbow arcs across the ceiling, and warm golden light from the sun suffuses the…
Jennifer Y. Chuong Though its exterior is characterized by a straightforward neoclassical regularity (Fig. 1a), little about Philadelphia cabinetmaker John Davey’s Desk-and-Bookcase (1805-1810) is as it initially appears.[1] The mirrored doors are also the backs of bookshelves; the paired drawer pulls misleadingly adorn a single hinged panel; and the lower…
Jeffrey CollinsElisabeth FraserElizabeth MansfieldAmelia RauserKristel Smentek & Wendy BellionParis Spies-GansNancy UmAmy Freund “Art and Architecture in the Long Eighteenth Century: HECAA at 25” was a conference held at Southern Methodist University, Dallas TX, November 1-4, 2018. This is a ‘roundtable’ of reflections from conference participants. Cultural Geographies, Geographical Cultures Jeffrey…
In one of the opening sequences of Ashutosh Gowarikar’s Panipat (2019), a group of eighteenth-century Maratha sardars or chieftains assemble in the famed Shaniwarwada, the audience hall of the Peshwa or Maratha leader in Pune, to celebrate a recent victory. They break out in a song sequence with the words…