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…
Angela Delaforce, The Lost Library of the King of Portugal (London: Ad Ilissvm/Paul Holberton Publishing, 2019), ISBN: 978191268156 In The Lost Library of the King of Portugal Angela Delaforce invokes in vivid detail the material dimensions of early modern libraries. Libraries, she reminds us, are both collections of books and…
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…