Two exhibitions installed across the Seine from each other this past summer used versions of the same artworks—two eighteenth-century French tapestries from the royal series known as the Nouvelles Tentures des Indes— to tell very different stories about European legacies of race, slavery, and colonialism. One version, from a set…
Angela Oberer, The Life and Work of Rosalba Carriera. The Queen of Pastel (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). 326 pages. ISBN: 9789462988996 Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757) is a celebrated name in the eighteenth-century art world, with a well-established place in Grand Tour mythology for attracting clients to sit for their portraits…
On the 26th of January 2021, as a pandemic-wracked India held muted celebrations of the anniversary of its constitutional founding, a group of farmers protesting recently introduced farm laws veered from their permitted routes towards the Red Fort in the heart of the Old City of Delhi. Staid images from…
Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), ISBN: 978-0-2264-8520-1 Zeynep Çelik Alexander’s Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design offers a new account of German modernism told through the history of its preoccupation with bodily experience from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth…
Susanna Caviglia, History, Painting, and the Seriousness of pleasure in the age of Louis XV (Oxford: Liverpool University Press on behalf of Voltaire Foundation, University of Oxford, 2020). 330 pages, 87 illustrations (63 black and white, 24 colorplates) In this fascinating and important book, Susanna Caviglia invites us to reconsider new contexts and…
The Palace of Versailles remains a subject of interest and fascination for scholars and curators alike. Recent exhibitions and publications reveal that there are still new angles to explore of this already much-studied seat and symbol of power. The Versailles Effect: Objects, Lives, and Afterlives of the Domaine (New York:…
In a 1994 interview with Jerome Brooks for The Paris Review, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe reflected on his impetus to write: There is that great proverb—that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until…
On March 1, 1720, the London theater entrepreneur and critic Richard Steele wrote of an opera rehearsal in an essay for his journal The Theatre: “At the Rehearsal on Friday last, Signor Nihilini Beneditti rose half a Note above his Pitch formerly known. Opera Stock [climbed] from 83 and a…
Marking Time: Objects, People, and Their Lives, 1500-1800, ed. by Edward Town and Angela McShane (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and the Yale Center for British Art, 2020). 512 pages, 460 color + b-w illus., $65. With essays by Glenn Adamson, Justin M. Brown, Edward S. Cooke Jr.,…
Exotic? Switzerland Looking Outward in the Age of Enlightenment, Palais de Rumine, Lausanne, September 24, 2020 – February 28, 2021. Curated by Noémie Etienne, Claire Brizon, and Chonja Lee in collaboration with Etienne Wismer and Sara Petrella. Scenography: Atelier Frédéric Dedelley in collaboration with Jocelyne Fracheboud. Interactive visit of the…