In the 2018 music video Apesh*t (Fig. 1), Beyoncé Knowles Carter and her husband Jay-Z move us through the tourist thoroughfares of the Louvre, all while rapping about their meteoric rise to fame.[1] The chorus, “I can’t believe we made it/This is what we’re thankful for,” is coupled with verses…
On October 16, 2019—two hundred and thirty years to the day she was guillotined—a new exhibition devoted to Marie-Antoinette opened at the Conciergerie in Paris. “Marie-Antoinette: Metamorphoses of an Image” presented a panoply of pictures of the doomed queen, from nostalgic celebrations to pornographic tirades, from a plumed Miss Piggy…
Anne Lafont, L’art et la race : L’Africain (tout) contre l’œil des Lumières, Dijon, Les presses du réel, 2019, ISBN: 9782378960162 Jean-Baptiste-André Dautier d’Agoty’s Portrait de Madame du Barry avec Zamore (1771) seems to engage with a reasonably familiar conceit in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European courtly portraiture (Fig. 1). An elegant,…
Tracy Ehrlich Born and raised in the artists’ quarter in Rome that stretched from the Piazza del Popolo to the Piazza di Spagna, Carlo Marchionni (1702-1786) was a student of the architect Filippo Barigioni. He won a first prize in architecture in the 1728 Concorso Clementino, and a first prize…
Kerstin Maria Pahl Introduction: Words and/as Images Portrayals take many forms. Take, on the one hand, a stipple engraving from 1724 by the artist and performer Matthias Buchinger (Fig. 1). It shows the physically disabled German, who was born without hands and legs, sitting on a cushion. An oval portrait…
Frédérique Baumgartner The identity of the aging man in profile, wrapped in a long grey coat, in the drawing entitled The Artist in His Cell (Fig. 1) cannot be mistaken.[1] The man’s receding forehead, advanced baldness, tuft of grey hair at the nape of his neck, and thick black eyebrow…
Séverine Sofio An insignificant self-portrait in a glorious studio scene? At the Salon of 1808, Gabrielle Capet exhibited a small painting originally entitled Portrait of the Late Madame Vincent (Fig. 1).[1] It is this title, more than the work’s densely populated fifteen-figure composition, which indicates that the painting’s real subject…
Susan Taylor-Leduc In 2014, on the occasion of the bicentenary of Joséphine Bonaparte’s death, an exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg summarized her compelling life story: She was not born a princess, nor even with the name of Joséphine, and still less was she destined to reign one day, but…
Susan M. Wager Madame de Pompadour died in 1764. The following year, Diderot measured the royal mistress’s artistic legacy against the political and economic havoc she wreaked on France: So, what remains of this woman, who drained us of men and money, deprived us of honor and energy, and devastated…
Paris A. Spies-Gans Mary Moser’s career has long been circumscribed by portraiture—a hemming in that dates almost exactly to her elevation as a founding member of London’s Royal Academy of Arts in 1768. A celebrated flower painter, Moser, later Lloyd (1744-1819), was one of only two women Academicians elected before…