Amy Freund and Michael Yonan Painted cats are strange. Such a blanket statement may strike the reader as an obvious exaggeration, but a quick survey of cats in art lends conviction to the claim. Let us take a famous example, one from a canonical eighteenth-century painting, Jean Siméon Chardin’s The…
Catherine Girard In the burgeoning field of the “global” eighteenth-century, extensive work remains to be done on the experience of contact from Indigenous perspectives.[1] Because the repression of such voices has been used as a colonial strategy, it is crucial that scholars of cultural contact and circulation attend to this…
Daniel M. Greenberg The Compendium of Birds (鳥譜, niaopu)[1] is an important encyclopedia of bird species produced for the eighteenth-century Chinese court that has received little scholarly attention. Built upon a rich tradition of Chinese flower and bird painting and bestiaries but also in dialogue with early modern European natural…
Meredith Martin In 1748, at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession, the city of Paris decided to erect a monument to Louis XV. The project spurred an unofficial competition to design a square for the statue, resulting in scores of proposals from architects and amateurs. By far…
Patricia Simons Isabelle Pinson’s Fly Catcher (L’attrapeur des mouches) seems at first glance a charming genre scene of a child at play (Fig. 1), a safe, inconsequential picture of innocence, and thus a suitable subject for a female artist to paint in 1808. But there is more than meets the…
Stephanie Triplett The Tieranatomisches Theater (animal dissection theater) in Berlin designed by Carl Gotthard Langhans (1732-1808) and built in 1790 as part of the newly founded Prussian veterinary school features an elaborate decorative program of trompe l’oeilgrisaille friezes encircling the central dome (Fig. 1). In these frescoes, the commonplace activities…
Alex Weintraub The best art critics tend to write with an unmistakable assuredness. Rarely do their essays betray the doubts and uncertainties of an original encounter with a work of art. Yet this certainty, as any student of art history will attest, is not exactly how aesthetic feelings are always…