Alicia Caticha Among the many enduring myths surrounding Marie Antoinette is the bucolic fantasy of the extravagant queen dressing up as a milkmaid at her Hameau, a model village and farm on the grounds of the Château de Versailles. Central to this fiction was Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s scandalous 1783…
Christelle Lozère During the eighteenth century, two seemingly contradictory models of sociability emerged in France and Britain. Libertinage, whose sensual and philosophical stakes were perhaps most memorably explored in the writings of the Marquis de Sade, thrived in some aristocratic circles. By contrast, Jean-François Marmontel’s “Moral Tales” of 1761 reflected…
Íris Kantor Milena Natividade da Cruz In April 1754, the French literary gazette Mercure de France announced the publication of five large mural maps made by the geographers Jean Janvier and Sébastien-G. Longchamps, comprising a mappa mundi and additional large maps dedicated to the four continents: America, Asia, Africa, and…
J. Cabelle Ahn From whatever country moral lessons should come to us, it is always welcome; but should we have to turn to the Savages to seek lessons in paternal and maternal tenderness?—Anonymous, Galimatias: anti-critique des tableaux du Salon (1781) [1] At first glance, the Salon of 1781 of the…
Katherine Calvin While describing Senegal in his 1797 illustrated book, Tableaux des principaux peuples de l’Europe, de l’Asie, de l’Afrique, de l’Amérique, et les découvertes des capitaines Cook, La Pérouse, etc., the white, Montreal-born author, artist, and former diplomat Jacques Grasset de Saint-Sauveur (1757-1810) explicitly condemns Europeans’ brutal treatment of…
Les Animaux du Roi, Château de Versailles, Versailles, France, October 12, 2021 – February 13, 2022. Curated by Alexandre Maral and Nicolas Milovanovic. Scenography: Guicciardini & Magni Architetti. Lighting: Lionel Coutou. You are allowed to enjoy this exhibition. Cast off your critical baggage and just relax. It’s okay. Forget your…
Exhibition: In Sparkling Company: Glass and the Costs of Social Life in Britain During the 1700s, Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, May 22, 2021 – January 2, 2022. In Sparkling Company, a ground-breaking exhibition curated by Christopher Maxwell at the Corning Museum of Glass, invites us into the…
Sussan Babaie This essay focuses on the representations of architecture from the lands of Islam in two picture-rich narratives of the history of architecture and on their historiographic significance. One is a picture book, first published in 1721 in Vienna, by Fischer von Erlach (1656–1723), Entwurf einer historischen Architektur in…
Andrei Pop One way to formulate the question of a “long” eighteenth century, one not just stretching to include the Napoleonic Wars, but to claim eighteenth-century influence on later history, is not in terms of quantity (what’s a good stopping point?) or explanatory power (is this an “eighteenth-centuryish” development?) but…
Meredith Gamer The Past—or, more accurately, pastness—is a position.Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past.— Michel-Rolphe Trouillot, Silencing the Past (1997)[1] On December 1, 1783, London’s Gentleman’s Magazine presented its readers with a precisely executed picture of the city’s newest execution machine (Fig. 1). Jutting out…