The recent news about Hagia Sophia’s reconversion from a museum to a mosque has generated a flood of commentaries and discontent. This is not the first time that Istanbul’s architectural treasure has been treated as a vector of contemporary ideology (Fig. 1). Yet both the national and international media ignore…
Confronted with mass Black Lives Matter protests locally and internationally, Virginia governor Ralph Northam announced in early June 2020 that the state would remove the statue of Robert E. Lee on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, a late nineteenth-century real-estate scheme built around a series of memorials to Confederate heroes (Fig. 1).…
The year 2018 marked the 250th anniversary of the departure of the ship Endeavour from British shores, on course to circumnavigate the globe. In 1768, the Tahiti-bound vessel carried Captain James Cook and his crew of naturalists, cartographers, astronomers, and—unprecedented for this time—professional artists. These milestones were marked by three…
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,…
Katie Scott, Becoming Property: Art, Theory and Law in Early Modern France, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2018, ISBN 9780300222791 In Becoming Property: Art, Theory and Law in Early Modern France, Katie Scott examines the relationship between intellectual property and the visual arts in France from the sixteenth…
Caroline Vout, Classical Art, A Life History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), ISBN 9780691177038 The title given to the review of Vout’s book in the TLS (January 4, 2019), “Crafting a Canon,” is somewhat misleading. The author, in fact, does not discuss precisely what has…