It’s an interesting moment to be a scholar of eighteenth-century art. A neglected field in English-language art history for most of the twentieth century, it is currently enjoying a boom. One can no longer rightly say that it is an understudied subject, the purview of a tiny community of specialists.…
L’étude et la représentation des musées disparus sont devenues un vrai sujet de recherche en muséologie et en histoire des musées. Il y a pour cela de bonnes raisons, puisque l’actualité muséographique a été marquée depuis plusieurs décennies par la multiplication des rénovations et des réaménagements de musées, mais…
William Blake explores crucial questions of time and historical transmission in the illustrations and text of his poem Milton, written at the turn of the nineteenth century (1804-1810). This work and a large number of Blake’s other original illuminated books, designs, engravings, and letters are now electronically available via…
Séverine Sofio, Artistes femmes. La parenthèse enchantée, XVIIIe – XIXe siècles (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2016), ISBN : 978-2-271-09191-8. Loin de négliger les obstacles, stigmatisations et autres marginalisations dont les femmes ont pu souffrir, Séverine Sofio prend le contrepied d’une historiographie qui a souvent insisté sur l’éviction des femmes du monde…
Darkened by aged varnish, with cracked paint peeling off like the bark of a plane tree, the small wooden panel stands out amongst the boldly-toned Ethiopian Orthodox paintings in Paris’ Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac (Fig. 1). Its softly shaded faces and unusually draped textiles suggest the court art…
Lately, numerous nation states have either advocated for or erected fortified borders to keep out refugees and migrants. In Europe, some states have even opted to leave the international negotiation table altogether in protest over the prospect of multilateral, cooperative solutions to border issues. As conflicts over Europe’s limits continue…
Anne Perrin Khelissa, ed., Corrélations: les objets du décor au siècle des Lumières, Études sur le XVIIIe siècle 43 (Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2015), ISBN: 978-2-8004-1585-7 In Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting, Norman Bryson examines still life—that much-maligned form of painting that art…
In an 1880 edition of L’art du dix-huitième siècle, Edmond de Goncourt mentioned a pair of allegorical pendants (1769; Figs 1 and 2) by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724-1780), which are now in the collection of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) in Salt Lake City.[1] Subsequent scholarship on the…
In his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire d’un genre de polype d’eau douce, or Memoirs Concerning the Natural History of a Type of Freshwater Polyp (Leiden, 1744), the Swiss naturalist Abraham Trembley (1710–1784) included a startling figure, one that is not immediately legible (Fig. 1). Plate 9 of his…
Resemblance—things that look like other things—has played a near universal role in global art and material culture. Gods have been conjured into the temporal realm by their likenesses; portraits of rulers have been revered in the absence of their physical presence. In those two examples, the power of semblance is…