Carmontelle's landmark publication, Garden at Monceau, beautifully reproduced to show the Parisian garden's artistic and cultural importance before the French Revolution. Originally published in 1779, Garden at Monceau is a richly illustrated presentation of the garden Louis Carrogis, known as Carmontelle, designed on the eve of the French Revolution for Louis-Philippe-Joseph d'Orleans, duc de Chartres. With its array of architectural follies intended to surprise and amaze the visitor, the garden was a setting for ancien regime social life. Carmontelle's portrayal of his work in Garden at Monceau therefore serves as an expression of a key moment in the history of European landscape design, garden architecture, and social history. This facsimile edition, with its English-language text and reproductions of the original engravings, is accompanied by essays that interpret the landscape design and examine Carmontelle's larger career as a painter and theater producer.

This richly illustrated book focuses on the extraordinary international networks resulting from the diaspora of more than 200,000 refugees who left France in the late 17th century to join communities already in exile spread far and wide. First-generation Huguenot refugees included hundreds of trained artists, designers, and craftsmen. Beyond the French borders, they raised the quality of design and workshop practice, passing on skills to their apprentices; sons, godsons, cousins, and to successive generations, who continued to dominate output in the luxury trades. Although silver and silks are the best-known fields with which Huguenot settlers are associated, their significant contribution to architecture, ceramics, design, clock and watchmaking, engraving, furniture, woodwork, sculpture, portraiture, and art education provides fascinating insight into the motivation and resolve of this highly skilled diaspora. Thanks to a sophisticated network of Huguenot merchants, retailers, and bankers who financed their production, their wares reached a global market.

Martin Lister, royal physician and fellow of the Royal Society, was an extraordinarily prolific natural historian with an expertise in shells and molluscs. Disappointed with the work of established artists, Lister decided to teach his daughters, Susanna and Anna, how to illustrate the specimens he studied. The sisters became so skilled at this that Lister entrusted them with his great work, 'Historiae Conchyliorum', assembled between 1685 and 1692. This first comprehensive study of conchology consisted of over 1,000 copperplates of shells and molluscs collected from around the world. 'Martin Lister and his Remarkable Daughters' reconstructs the creation of this masterwork, from the identification of the original shells to the drawings themselves, and from the engraved copperplates to the draft prints and final books. Susanna and Anna portrayed the shells not only as curious and beautiful objects, but also as specimens of natural history rendered with sensitivity and keen scientific empiricism. Beautiful in their own right, these illustrations and engravings reveal the early techniques behind scientific illustration together with the often unnoticed role of women in the scientific revolution.

Entrepreneurial science is not new; business interests have strongly influenced science since the Scientific Revolution. In Commercial Visions, Daniel Margocsy illustrates that product marketing, patent litigation, and even ghostwriting pervaded natural history and medicine - the "big sciences" of the early modern era - and argues that the growth of global trade during the Dutch Golden Age gave rise to an entrepreneurial network of transnational science. Margocsy introduces a number of natural historians, physicians, and curiosi in Amsterdam, London, St. Petersburg, and Paris who, in their efforts to boost their trade, developed modern taxonomy, invented color printing and anatomical preparation techniques, and contributed to philosophical debates on topics ranging from human anatomy to Newtonian optics. These scientific practitioners, including Frederik Ruysch and Albertus Seba, were out to do business: they produced and sold exotic curiosities, anatomical prints, preserved specimens, and atlases of natural history to customers all around the world. Margocsy reveals how their entrepreneurial rivalries transformed the scholarly world of the Republic of Letters into a competitive marketplace. Margocsy's highly readable and engaging book will be warmly welcomed by anyone interested in early modern science, global trade, art, and culture.

The Carthusian monks at San Martino began a series of decorative campaigns in the 1580s that continued until 1757, transforming the church of their monastery, the Certosa di San Martino, into a jewel of marble revetment, painting, and sculpture. The aesthetics of the church generate a jarring moral conflict: few religious orders honored the ideals of poverty and simplicity so ardently yet decorated so sumptuously. In this study, Nick Napoli explores the terms of this conflict and of how it sought resolution amidst the social and economic realities and the political and religious culture of early modern Naples. Napoli mines the documentary record of the decorative campaigns at San Martino, revealing the rich testimony it provides relating to both the monks' and the artists' expectations of how practice and payment should transpire. From these documents, the author delivers insight into the ethical and economic foundations of artistic practice in early modern Naples. The first English-language study of a key monument in Naples and the first to situate the complex within the cultural history of the city, The Ethics of Ornament in Early Modern Naples sheds new light on the Neapolitan baroque, industries of art in the age before capitalism, and the relation of art, architecture, and ornament.

This book examines the links between the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain and eighteenth-century theories of the sublime. Edmund Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), in particular, is shown to have directly or indirectly challenged visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and visual media such as panoramas and book illustrations, by arguing that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork. -- .

The painting La Surprise by Jean Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) belongs to a new genre of painting invented by the artist himself-the fete galante. These works, which show graceful open-air gatherings filled with scenes of courtship, music and dance, strolling lovers, and actors, do not so much tell a story as set a mood: one of playful, wistful, nostalgic reverie. Esteemed by collectors in Watteau's day as a work that showed the artist at the height of his skill and success, La Surprise vanished from public view in 1848, not to reemerge for more than a century and a half. Acquired by the Getty Museum in 2017, it has never before been the subject of a dedicated publication. Marking the three hundredth anniversary of Watteau's death, this book considers La Surprise within the context of the artist's oeuvre, and discusses the surprising history of collecting Watteau in Los Angeles.

Redefining Eclecticism in Early Modern Bolognese Painting. Ideology, Practice, and Criticism focuses on the unique nature of early modern Bolognese painting that found its expression in stylistic diversity. The flourishing of different stylistic approaches in the Mannerist paintings of the previous generation evolved, at the turn the seventeenth century, in the work of the Bolognese painters into an approach best described as eclecticism, characterized by the combination of two or more styles in a single work of art. Eclectism was a major innovation and major contribution to the history of art. But it then also became a critical term that suffered much negative press. The book therefore also traces the role of ecclecticism as a concept in the evolution of criticism and scholarship about the Bolognese school of painting over 250 years, showing how the dramatically vacillating attitudes towards this concept shaped the historical view of the Bolognese painters, ultimately having a tremendous dampening impact on our understanding of seventeenth-century art.

These rare 17th-century views of celebrated Roman fountains and gardens constitute some of the finest and most accurate landscape drawings of the Italian Baroque period. The only edition in print, this compilation of outstanding engravings will be of immense interest to architectural historians as well as travelers to Rome and lovers of art and architecture.

Empire to Nation offers a new consideration of the image of the sea in British visual culture during a critical period for both the rise of the visual arts in Britain and the expansion of the nation's imperial power. It argues that maritime imagery was central to cultivating a sense of nationhood in relation to rapidly expanding geographical knowledge and burgeoning imperial ambition. At the same time, the growth of the maritime empire presented new opportunities for artistic enterprise. Taking as its starting point the year 1768, which marks the foundation of the Royal Academy and the launch of Captain Cook's first circumnavigation, it asserts that this was not just an interesting coincidence but symptomatic of the relationship between art and empire. This relationship was officially sanctioned in the establishment of the Naval Gallery at Greenwich Hospital and the installation there of J. M. W. Turner's great Battle of Trafalgar in 1829, the year that closes this study. Between these two poles, the book traces a changing historical discourse that informed visual representation of maritime subjects Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Winner of the Prix de la Confédération des Negociants en Oeuvres d'Art, this book examines the evolution of narrative styles of French 18th-century paintings: the stories paintings tell, the ways they communicate information, the techniques of presenting the body as an instrument for incorporating textual messages.

The Erotics of Looking: Early Modern Netherlandish Art presents a collection of provocative essays that explore the material qualities of early Dutch art to reveal ways new forms of visual imagery solicit a beholder s involvement. * Explores how descriptive pictures during the early modern Dutch art period operated as social things and were designed to pleasurably engage the eye and prompt discussion and debate * Shows how these works potentially raised ethical and political questions about the interconnectedness of engaging with pictures and the material world * Represents a major contribution to the field of early modern Netherlandish art and to general debates about the status and functions of descriptive art * Features essays addressing a variety of aspects of the field, from the historiography of Dutch art to closely attentive readings of particular works * Crafts an original theoretical framework by applying recent insights about the making of early modern publics and the study of material things to the analysis of Netherlandish art

First published in 1977. The purpose of this study is to locate the sources for the American style of painting characterised by measure and design - the representation of the specific and familiar according to principles of pictorial order. The reader shall see that there were a variety of conventions available to the artist and that his selection of one or another of them depended upon pragmatic, philosophical, and aesthetic considerations.

Universally regarded as the father of French painting, Nicolas Poussin is arguably the greatest of all painters of that school. Yet Poussin's reputation has been founded more on the intellectual and philosophical qualities of his art than its sheer visual beauty. In Poussin as a Painter: From Classicism to Abstraction, Richard Verdi redresses the balance, describing and analyzing Poussin's outstanding gifts as a pictorial storyteller, designer and colourist - in short, on the purely aesthetic (and often abstract) aspects of his art that have inspired so many later painters, from Cezanne to Picasso. The book features more than 220 fine illustrations, the majority in colour, and encompasses all aspects of Poussin's art from the mid 1620s to his death in 1665. This ground-breaking study gives new insight into Poussin, and is essential reading for all who admire this seminal French painter.

Over the course of the long 18th century, many of England’s grandest country houses became known for displaying noteworthy architecture and design, large collections of sculptures and paintings, and expansive landscape gardens and parks. Although these houses continued to function as residences and spaces of elite retreat, they had powerful public identities. Increasingly accessible to tourists, and extensively described by travel writers, they began to be celebrated as sites of great importance to national culture. Touring and Publicizing England's Country Houses in the Long Eighteenth Century examines how these identities emerged, repositioning the importance of country houses in 18th-century Britain and exploring what it took to turn them into tourist attractions. Drawing on travel books, guidebooks, and dozens of tourists’ diaries and letters, it explores what it meant to tour country houses such as Blenheim Palace, Chatsworth, Wilton, Kedleston and Burghley in the tumultuous 1700s. It also questions the legacies of these early tourists: both as a critical cultural practice in the 18th century, and an extraordinary and controversial influence in British culture today, country-house tourism is a topic of rich debate for students, scholars and patrons of the heritage sector.

A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art provides a diverse, fresh collection of accessible, comprehensive essays addressing key issues for European art produced between 1300 and 1700, a period that might be termed the beginning of modern history. * Presents a collection of original, in-depth essays from art experts that address various aspects of European visual arts produced from circa 1300 to 1700 * Divided into five broad conceptual headings: Social-Historical Factors in Artistic Production; Creative Process and Social Stature of the Artist; The Object: Art as Material Culture; The Message: Subjects and Meanings; and The Viewer, the Critic, and the Historian: Reception and Interpretation as Cultural Discourse * Covers many topics not typically included in collections of this nature, such as Judaism and the arts, architectural treatises, the global Renaissance in arts, the new natural sciences and the arts, art and religion, and gender and sexuality * Features essays on the arts of the domestic life, sexuality and gender, and the art and production of tapestries, conservation/technology, and the metaphor of theater * Focuses on Western and Central Europe and that territory's interactions with neighboring civilizations and distant discoveries * Includes illustrations as well as links to images not included in the book

The first major English-language biography of Francisco Goya y Lucientes, who ushered in the modern era The life of Francisco Goya (1746-1828) coincided with an age of transformation in Spanish history that brought upheavals in the country's politics and at the court which Goya served, changes in society, the devastation of the Iberian Peninsula in the war against Napoleon, and an ensuing period of political instability. In this revelatory biography, Janis Tomlinson draws on a wide range of documents-including letters, court papers, and a sketchbook used by Goya in the early years of his career-to provide a nuanced portrait of a complex and multifaceted painter and printmaker, whose art is synonymous with compelling images of the people, events, and social revolution that defined his life and era. Tomlinson challenges the popular image of the artist as an isolated figure obsessed with darkness and death, showing how Goya's likeability and ambition contributed to his success at court, and offering new perspectives on his youth, rich family life, extensive travels, and lifelong friendships. She explores the full breadth of his imagery-from scenes inspired by life in Madrid to visions of worlds without reason, from royal portraits to the atrocities of war. She sheds light on the artist's personal trials, including the deaths of six children and the onset of deafness in middle age, but also reconsiders the conventional interpretation of Goya's late years as a period of disillusion, viewing them instead as years of liberated artistic invention, most famously in the murals on the walls of his country house, popularly known as the "black" paintings. A monumental achievement, Goya: A Portrait of the Artist is the definitive biography of an artist whose faith in his art and his genius inspired paintings, drawings, prints, and frescoes that continue to captivate, challenge, and surprise us two centuries later.

Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing re-examines the early graphic practice of the preeminent northern Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577-1640) in light of early modern traditions of eloquence, particularly as promoted in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Flemish, Neostoic circles of philologist, Justus Lipsius (1547-1606). Focusing on the roles that rhetorical and pedagogical considerations played in the artist's approach to disegno during and following his formative Roman period (1600-08), this volume highlights Rubens's high ambitions for the intimate medium of drawing as a primary site for generating meaningful and original ideas for his larger artistic enterprise. As in the Lipsian realm of writing personal letters - the humanist activity then described as a cognate activity to the practice of drawing - a Senecan approach to eclecticism, a commitment to emulation, and an Aristotelian concern for joining form to content all played important roles. Two chapter-long studies of individual drawings serve to demonstrate the relevance of these interdisciplinary rhetorical concerns to Rubens's early practice of drawing. Focusing on Rubens's Medea Fleeing with Her Dead Children (Los Angeles, Getty Museum), and Kneeling Man (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), these close-looking case studies demonstrate Rubens's commitments to creating new models of eloquent drawing and to highlighting his own status as an inimitable maker. Demonstrating the force and quality of Rubens's intellect in the medium then most associated with the closest ideas of the artist, such designs were arguably created as more robust pedagogical and preparatory models that could help strengthen art itself for a new and often troubled age.

"The behind-the-scenes story of the world's most famous palace, painting a picture of the way its residents truly lived and examining the palace's legacy, from French history through today
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The story of Versailles is one of historical drama, under the last three kings of France's old regime, mixed with the high camp and glamour of the European courts, all in an iconic home for the French arts. The palace itself has been radically altered since 1789, and the court was long ago swept away. "Versailles" sets out to rediscover what is now a vanished world: a great center of power, seat of royal government, and, for thousands, a home both grand and squalid, bound by social codes almost incomprehensible to us today.""

Using eyewitness testimony as well as the latest historical research, Spawforth offers the first full account of Versailles in English in over thirty years. Blowing away the myths of Versailles, he analyses afresh the politics behind the Sun King's construction of the palace and shows how Versailles worked as the seat of a royal court. He probes the conventional picture of a "perpetual house party" of courtiers and gives full weight to the darker side: not just the mounting discomfort of the aging buildings but also the intrigue and status anxiety of its aristocrats. The book brings out clearly the fateful consequences for the French monarchy of its relocation to Versailles and also examines the changing place of Versailles in France's national identity since 1789.

Many books have told the stories of the royals and artists living in Versailles, but this is the first to turn its focus on the palace itself---from architecture and politics to scandal and restoration.

A stunningly illustrated look at how Blake's radical vision influenced artists of the Beat generation and 1960s counterculture In his own lifetime, William Blake (1757-1827) was a relatively unknown nonconventional artist with a strong political bent. William Blake and the Age of Aquarius is a beautifully illustrated look at how, some two hundred years after his birth, the antiestablishment values embodied in Blake's art and poetry became a model for artists of the American counterculture. This book provides new insights into the politics and protests of Blake's own lifetime, and the generation of artists who revived and reimagined his work in the mid-1940s through 1970, or what might be called the "long sixties." Contributors explore Blake's outsider status in Georgian England and how his individualistic vision spoke to members of the Beat Generation, hippies, radical poets and writers, and other voices of the counterculture. Among the artists, musicians, and writers who looked to Blake were such diverse figures as Diane Arbus, Jay DeFeo, the Doors, Sam Francis, Allen Ginsberg, Jess, Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt, Charles Seliger, Maurice Sendak, Robert Smithson, Clyfford Still, and many others. This book also explores visual cultures around such galvanizing moments of the 1960s as Woodstock and the Summer of Love. William Blake and the Age of Aquarius shows how Blake's myths, visions, and radicalism found new life among American artists who valued individualism and creativity, explored expanded consciousness, and celebrated youth, peace, and the power of love in a turbulent age. Exhibition schedule: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University September 23, 2017-March 11, 2018

The importance of the Anglo-Saxon past to England in the eighteenth century, politically and culturally, is here brought out. A valuable addition to both our understanding of Anglo-Saxonism, and of eighteenth-century culture. Eloquently written, the book will be the key reference for any future understanding of the way in which eighteenth-century culture received the Anglo-Saxon period. David Matthews, Professor of Medieval and Medievalism Studies, University of Manchester. Long before they appeared in the pages of Ivanhoe and nineteenth-century Old English scholarship, the Anglo-Saxons had become commonplace in Georgian Britain. The eighteenth century - closely associated with Neoclassicism and the Gothic and Celtic revivals - also witnessed the emergence of intertwined scholarly and popular Anglo-Saxonisms that helped to define what it meant to be English. This book explores scholarly Anglo-Saxon studies and imaginative Anglo-Saxonism during a century not normally associated with either. Early in the century, scholars and politicians devised a rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon inheritance in response to the Hanoverian succession, and participants in Britain's burgeoning antiquarian culture adopted simultaneously affective and scientific approaches to Anglo-Saxon remains. Patriotism, imagination and scholarship informed the writing of Enlightenment histories that presented England, its counties and its towns as Anglo-Saxon landscapes. Those same histories encouraged English readers to imagine themselves as the descendants of Anglo-Saxon ancestors - as did history paintings, book illustrations, poetry and drama that brought the Anglo-Saxon past to life. Drawing together these strands of scholarly and popular medievalism, this book identifies Anglo-Saxonism as a multifaceted, celebratory and inclusive idea of Englishness at work in eighteenth-century Britain.

As an aesthetic ideal, classicism is often associated with a conventional set of rules founded on supposedly timeless notions such as order, reason, and decorum. As a result, it is sometimes viewed as rigid, outdated, or stodgy. But in actuality, classicism is far from a stable concept throughout history, it has given rise to more debate than consensus, and at times has been put to use for subversive ends. With contributions from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explodes the idea of classicism as an unchanging ideal. The essays trace the shifting parameters of classicism from antiquity to the twentieth century, documenting an exhibition of seventy objects in various media from the collection of the Smart Museum of Art and other American and international institutions. With its impressive historical and conceptual reach from ancient literature to contemporary race relations and beyond this colorfully illustrated book is a dynamic exploration of classicism as a fluctuating stylistic and ideological category.