Tong Su The eighteenth-century Qing court is renowned for its extensive array of colorful artifacts, reflecting a deep-rooted fascination with color that is mirrored in the Manchu language. This attention also extends to color’s absence. Within the Manchu linguistic paradigm, numerous adverse conditions are linked to the loss of color.…
Melissa Hyde “Why am I Mr. Pink?” — Reservoir Dogs (1992) Pink was a color so fashionable and beloved in the eighteenth century—in painting, dress, decorative arts, and even literature—that it has been said to have been invented by that century.[1] In France, it was the color par excellence of…
Tori Champion When the French artist Catherine Perrot authored Les leçons royales (The Royal Lessons), her treatise on the art of painting in miniature, in 1686, she became one of the only known women in the early modern period to publish a technical manual on art theory or practice (Fig.…
Philippe Colomban While much scholarly attention has been paid to the early modern European quest to discover and master the technologies of Chinese porcelain, Chinese attempts to mimic European surface effects remain relatively unexamined. Within this complex technological competition, China became the “workshop of the world” for producing enameled objects…
A functional truism of eighteenth-century French cartography is that it enshrined a topographical way of understanding space—that it mapped with growing precision the features and dimensions of land surfaces.[1] The famous Cassini Map, under way for much of the century, was the first project to use triangulation to survey all…
In recent years, many American museums and their staff have staged revisionist interventions, urging general visitors and scholars to reframe, reimagine, and reinterpret European collections. In “Re-Presenting Art History: An Unfinished Process,” art historian Cristina Baldacci ruminates on the prefix “re-” as a hermeneutic tool strategically employed by curators to…
Jennifer Van Horn The bitter cold at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, during the Continental Army’s winter encampment of 1777–1778 has become part of American mythology. That brutal chill, borne by George Washington and the soldiers whom he commanded in the American Revolution, was immortalized as bodily sacrifice for the cause of…
Sylvia Houghteling In his dictionary of Persian words, written in Delhi around 1745, the writer and lexicographer Anand Ram Mukhlis pauses on the entry for takhta-i yakh, a word that means a “sheet of ice” (with takhta often referring to a flat plane, board, or surface and yakh meaning ice).…
Kaitlin Grimes As the official coronation chair of the Oldenburg monarchy, the Anointment Chair of Absolutism sits regally at the end of a grand hall at Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen, surrounded with rich tapestries, sumptuous velvets, and opulently ornamented walls and ceilings (Fig. 1). Attributed to Bendix I Grodtschilling (1620–1690),…
Alper Metin Throughout the early modern period, wealth and the desire for domestic comfort shaped an intensely intertwined yet intricate set of concepts centered on the hearth. For Western Europe, scholars have investigated quite thoroughly the increasing demand for warmth and the evolution of heating systems.[1] The situation in the…