Emily Engel, Pictured Politics: Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections, Austin, TX, University of Texas Press, 2020, ISBN 978-1-4773-2059-4 Portraiture has provided intellectual fodder for art historical inquiry since the discipline’s inception and has bridged different geographic, material, and temporal fields. Dedicated to paintings by Renaissance titans, like…
Jason Nguyen The National Maritime Museum in London houses thousands of artifacts from British nautical history. Among these items is a small handheld globe from 1719 by the British cartographer Herman Moll (Fig. 1). These popular commodities, made of papier-mâché and plaster and wrapped in printed and hand-colored paper, functioned…
Camille Mathieu In a famous 1720 portrait of Scottish financier John Law, founder of France’s first bank (1716) and the Company of the West (1717), he stands in courtly dress in front of a well-manicured, formal French lawn (Fig. 1).[1] His dignified attire matches that of the orderly garden; his…
William N. Goetzmann and Darius A. Spieth In an influential study of the mechanisms of absolutist power, Louis Marin compared the icon of Jansenism, Philippe de Champaigne’s Christ on the Cross (Fig. 1), to the Sun King’s official state portrait by Hyacinthe Rigaud (Fig. 2): Compare two figures of the…
Oliver Wunsch Among the many allegorical representations of the “four continents” created by European artists, Rosalba Carriera’s contribution stands out (Figs. 1-4). Little is known about the circumstances of the commission, though art historians suspect that the Venetian pastellist created her series sometime after her formative trip to Paris in…
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…