Mechthild Fend, Fleshing out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1650-1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 352 pages. Understanding and depicting the anatomy and physiology of the human body was of great importance to both visual artists and medical men in the early modern period. In her new book,…
Editors’ Note: Mary D. Sheriff, one of the most brilliant and beloved scholars of eighteenth-century European art, died on October 19, 2016. Among her last essays was a playful and erudite encounter with Casanova’s memoirs, seen through the prism of eighteenth-century European painting. She originally wrote it for the catalogue…
Jacqueline Riding, Basic Instincts: Love, Passion, and Violence in the Art of Joseph Highmore (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2017), 128 pages. At every turn, contingencies pervaded London’s Foundling Hospital. Dedicated to “the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children,” the institution was, after years of debates, granted a…
Wolf Burchard, The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Image of Louis XIV (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2016), 287pp. This impressive new study of Charles Le Brun (1619-1690) argues that the artist was not only responsible for the elaboration of the image of Louis XIV as the absolute monarch,…
The Golconda Coverlet, produced in the dyeing and painting workshops of the Coromandel Coast of southeastern India during the seventeenth century, presents a glimpse into the unique cosmopolitan world of the early modern Deccan (Fig. 1).[1] The term Deccan indicates the plateau in South India surrounded by the Malabar Coast…
Revolution confronted the visitor in “Reigning Men: Fashion in Menswear, 1715-2015,” an exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that was on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum from June 25 to September 17, 2017 (Fig. 1). In the first gallery, a mannequin holding the French…
World on the Horizon: Swahili Arts Across the Indian Ocean is on display at the Krannert Art Museum (KAM), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, from August 31, 2017 to March 24, 2018. It will travel to the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, between May 9…
Displaying historical works in contemporary art museums is a risky – yet potentially rewarding – business. Case in point: Dioramas, an exhibition curated by Claire Garnier, Laurent Le Bon, and Florence Ostende that just closed at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and will have a second venue starting…
In the summer of 1815, Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s older brother and dethroned king of Spain, fled Europe and arrived in New York under the assumed name of the comte de Survilliers. He brought with him a veritable art museum, far beyond anything that had been seen before in the Americas.…
Combine lime and gypsum with water, then add stone dust or sand and animal hair to strengthen it: this modest, somewhat dubious-sounding recipe produces stucco. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, stucco was used to create massive illusionistic interior architecture, to frame paintings with anything from gambolling cherubs to modest…