What a shock it must have been for the Utrecht painters Hendrick ter Brugghen, Gerard van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen when they first encountered the breathtaking and unconventional paintings of Caravaggio in Rome. This volume shows impressively how the young artists individually explored this role model and thereby developed their own individual style. In around 1600 Rome was the centre of the world. Attracted by Caravaggio's spectacular success, young artists from all over Europe converged on the bus tling metropolis. The up-and-coming painters studied the same works, discussed matters with each other and used Caravaggio's style to develop their own individual pictorial language. Tracing the careers of the three most important Utrecht Caravaggists, the authors describe the atmosphere of this artistic mood of renewal. Only in a comparison with their European fellow artists does it become evident how strongly the Dutch tradition, with its love of merciless realism, influenced the creative work of the Utrecht painters.

Realist novels are celebrated for their detailed attention to ordinary life. But two hundred years before the rise of literary realism, Dutch painters had already made an art of the everyday--pictures that served as a compelling model for the novelists who followed. By the mid-1800s, seventeenth-century Dutch painting figured virtually everywhere in the British and French fiction we esteem today as the vanguard of realism. Why were such writers drawn to this art of two centuries before? What does this tell us about the nature of realism?

In this beautifully illustrated and elegantly written book, Ruth Yeazell explores the nineteenth century's fascination with Dutch painting, as well as its doubts about an art that had long challenged traditional values.

After showing how persistent tensions between high theory and low genre shaped criticism of novels and pictures alike, "Art of the Everyday" turns to four major novelists--Honore de Balzac, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Marcel Proust--who strongly identified their work with Dutch painting. For all these writers, Dutch art provided a model for training themselves to look closely at the particulars of middle-class life.

Yet even as nineteenth-century novelists strove to create illusions of the real by modeling their narratives on Dutch pictures, Yeazell argues, they chafed at the model. A concluding chapter on Proust explains why the nineteenth century associated such realism with the past and shows how the rediscovery of Vermeer helped resolve the longstanding conflict between humble details and the aspirations of high art."

This anthology presents classic and recent scholarship on Italian art from 1600-1750, highlighting the key debates with which art historians continue to grapple.
Explores themes including: style or the visuality of art; artistic practices and production; artistic communication as projected and experienced; and artists' interactions with the ancient world and with the new sciences
Examines the work of key painters, architects and sculptors from this period, including Caravaggio, Bernini, Guarini and Poussin
Published in the expanding "Blackwell Anthologies in Art History" series

These ground-breaking essays, all based on original archival research, consider the evolving interest in Bolognese art in seventeenth-century Italy, particularly focusing on the period after the death of Guido Reni in 1642. Edited by Bolognese specialists Raffaella Morselli and Babette Bohn, the studies collected here focus on the taste for Bolognese art within Bologna itself and in other parts of the Italian peninsula, including Mantua, Ferrara, Rome, and Florence. Essays examine the roles of gender, class, and the social status of the artist in early modern Bologna; approaches to exhibiting artworks in noble Bolognese collections; the reputations of local women artists; the popularity of Bolognese quadratura painting; and the relative success of both contemporary and earlier Bolognese artists with Italian collectors.

The essays in this volume show that Versailles was not the static creation of one man, but a hugely complex cultural space; a centre of power, but also of life, love, anxiety, creation, and an enduring palimpsest of aspirations, desires, and ruptures. The splendour of the Château and the masterpieces of art and design that it contains mask a more complex and sometimes more sordid history of human struggle and achievement. The case studies presented by the contributors to this book cannot provide a comprehensive account of the Palace of Versailles and its domains, the life within its walls, its visitors, and the art and architecture that it has inspired from the seventeenth century to the present day: from the palace of the Sun King to the Penthouse of Donald Trump. However, this innovative collection will reshape—or even radically redefine—our understanding of the palace of Versailles and its posterity.

A desire for intimacy in domestic spaces - motivated by a growing sense of individualistic expression, an incentive to conceal the labor or enslavement taking place, and an appetite for solace and comfort - led to interiors taking on more specific roles in the eighteenth century. By examining the architectural, visual, and material culture of eighteenth-century spaces, Intimate Interiors foregrounds the interrelated concepts of intimacy, privacy, informality, and sociability in order to show how these ideas played an increasingly integral role in the period's architectural and material design. Across eleven innovative chapters that explore issues of gender, politics, travel, exoticism, imperialism, sensorial experiences, identity, interiority, and modernity, this volume demonstrates how intimacy was a fundamental goal in the planning of private quarters. In doing so, the political nature of private spaces is uncovered, whilst highlighting the contradictions and complexities of these highly performative "private" interiors. Employing distinct methodological perspectives across various geographical sites, from Turkey to Versailles, Britain to Benin, Intimate Interiors draws as-yet untraced connections between Enlightenment Europe, imperial outposts, and major metropolitan centers across the globe.

This wide-ranging collection of scholarly essays explores the hybrid cultures, intellectual clashes, and dynamic exchanges of the transpacific region in the age of imperialism. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, competing European empires vied for commercial and political control of oceanic routes between Asia and the Americas. Transpacific Engagements addresses the resulting cultural and artistic exchanges with an emphasis on the Spanish and American enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region. This volume explores artistic expressions of imperial aspirations and imaginaries in the Philippines, Spain, Japan, and Hawaii; the transformations of texts, images, and culinary practices as they moved from one cultural context to another; and the movement of objects and people across the transpacific, with particular attention to the Manila Galleon trade that flourished from 1565 to 1815. Featuring contributions by art historians, anthropologists, historians, and cultural studies scholars, Transpacific Engagements gathers groundbreaking investigations of objects and histories to illustrate the role of East, South, and Southeast Asian polities and dynasties in these multilateral exchanges. Published by the Ayala Foundation, Inc. in association with the Getty Research Institute and Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institut).

In the seventeenth century many young artists from the north and south of the Netherlands gained experience in Rome. However, that Flemish artists in Genoa contributed to lively artistic exchange and trade is less known. In this book the author Alison Johnston Stoesser throws new light on their activities during that day and age, particularly on those of the brothers Lucas and Cornelis de Wael. As artists and dealers, the brothers had connections with many key figures in the Flemish and Genoese art world, including the painter Anthony Van Dyck. For forty years Cornelis, the youngest brother, enjoyed great successes with his painting of everyday scene, fairs and field and naval battles. In addition, the brothers sold the works of other artists as well as many other objects of devotion.

The rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the eighteenth century challenged European assumptions about ancient life; just as influential, if quieter, was the revolution caused by translations of Greek tragedy. Art of the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries dealt with the violence and seeming irrationality of tragic action as an account of the rituals and beliefs of a foreign culture, worshipping strange gods and enacting unfamiliar customs. The result was a focus on the radical difference of the past which, however, was thought to still have something to teach us: not how to live better, but that we live differently and should allow others to do so as well. In recognizing tragedy as an alien cultural form, modern Europe recognized its own historical status as one culture among many. Naturally, this insight was resisted. Greek tragedy was seldom performed. In painting, it lived a shadow existence alongside more didactic subject matter, emerging explicitly only in a corpus of wash drawings by Anglo-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), and an international circle of artists active in Rome in the 1770s. In this volume, Pop examines Fuseli as exemplary of a pluralist classicism, paying especial attention to his experiments with moral and aesthetic conventions in the more private medium of drawing. He analyses this broad view of culture through the lens of Fuseli's life and work; his remarkable acquaintances Emma Hamilton, Erasmus Darwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the great theorists of art and morals to whom he responded, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and David Hume, play prominent roles in this investigation of how antiquity became modern.

"Seventeenth-Century European Drawings in Midwestern Collections: The Age of Bernini, Rembrandt, and Poussin" brings together more than one hundred treasures of the Baroque age from museum collections throughout the Midwest. The volume presents a fascinating and representative selection of Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and French drawings in Midwestern repositories, offering new insights on many of these works of art. Many are relatively unknown, and some have never before been published.
Authored by major scholars in the field, the catalogue presents each drawing along with a concise description with full scholarly apparatus. Four essays, written by Babette Bohn, George S. Keyes, Kristi A. Nelson, and Alvin L. Clark, Jr., respectively, introduce the Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and French schools. The catalogue's introductory essay, by Shelley Perlove, places these works within the historical, iconographic, and stylistic currents of seventeenth-century art. The catalogue is designed to have widespread appeal for art historians, curators, artists, collectors, students, and general readers interested in art and cultural history. Moreover, "Seventeenth-Century European Drawings in Midwestern Collections "highlights the surprising number of institutions throughout the Midwest that have acquired distinguished European drawings from the seventeenth century worthy of full recognition by collectors and connoisseurs.

Providing the first thorough study of sculptural portraiture in 18th-century Britain, this important book challenges both the idea that portrait necessarily implies painting and the assumption that Enlightenment thought is manifest chiefly in French art. By considering the bust and the statue as genres, Malcolm Baker, a leading sculpture scholar, addresses the question of how these seemingly traditional images developed into ambitious forms of representation within a culture in which many core concepts of modernity were being formed. The leading sculptor at this time in Britain was Louis Francois Roubiliac (1702-1762), and his portraits of major figures of the day, including Alexander Pope, Isaac Newton, and George Frederic Handel, are examined here in detail. Remarkable for their technical virtuosity and visual power, these images show how sculpture was increasingly being made for close and attentive viewing. The Marble Index eloquently establishes that the heightened aesthetic ambition of the sculptural portrait was intimately linked with the way in which it could engage viewers familiar with Enlightenment notions of perception and selfhood. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Set against the backdrop of war, revolution, and regicide, and moving from London to Venice, Mantua, Madrid, Paris and the Low Countries, Jerry Brotton’s colourful and critically acclaimed book, The Sale of the Late King's Goods, explores the formation and dispersal of King Charles I’s art collection. Following a remarkable and unprecedented Parliamentary Act for ‘The sale of the late king’s goods’, Cromwell’s republican regime sold off nearly 2,000 paintings, tapestries, statues and drawings in an attempt to settle the dead king’s enormous debts and raise money for the Commonwealth’s military forces.

Brotton recreates the extraordinary circumstances of this sale, in which for the first time ordinary working people were able to handle and own works by the great masters. He also examines the abiding relationship between art and power, revealing how the current Royal Collection emerged from this turbulent period, and paints its own vivid and dramatic picture of one of the greatest lost collections in English history.

Luigi Valadier, son of the French-born Andrea, obtained his silversmith license in 1760 and became one of the most celebrated artists in Europe, working for the noble families of Rome (Borghese, Odescalchi, Chigi, Orsini), cardinals and popes and a broad international clientele which included the Duke of Northumberland, Madame du Barry, the Bali of Malta, Jacques-Laure Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, the King of Sweden, Karl Theodor, Elector of Bavaria, the Count of the North, heir to the Russian throne, etc. His workshop situated near Piazza di Spagna employed dozens of craftsmen and produced not only silverware but also bronze statues, often copies of ancient sculptures, magnificent clocks, vases in precious marbles, lamps, huge candelabras, furniture, desers, reliquaries and liturgical vessels, and much more. In 1785 while completing commissions for the Borghese prince and working on the cast of the enormous bell of St Peter's, he committed suicide by drowning in the Tiber river, possibly due to the severe economic challenges from which his extraordinary workshop was suffering.

Switzerland is well-known for its host of remarkable collections of 18th century European porcelain. Exemplary representatives include renowned collectors such as Dr Albert Kocher and Dr Marcel Nyffeler. A number of these magnificent collections can be found today - as a result of endowments or gifts - in Switzerland's renowned institutions. Today, the 'white gold' from Saxony still fascinates Swiss connoisseurs: this publication is dedicated to their passion for collecting and for exceptional treasures, and is enriched with articles by renowned art historians and porcelain experts. An impressive overview of the gems from the most sumptuous Meissen porcelain of the early period.

When Louis XVI was guillotined on January 21, 1793, vast networks of production that had provided splendor and sophistication to the royal court were severed. Although the king’s royal possessions—from drapery and tableware to clocks and furniture suites—were scattered and destroyed, many of the artists who made them found ways to survive. This book explores the fabrication, circulation, and survival of French luxury after the death of the king. Spanning the final years of the ancien régime from the 1790s to the first two decades of the nineteenth century, this richly illustrated book positions luxury within the turbulent politics of dispersal, disinheritance, and dispossession. Exploring exceptional works created from silver, silk, wood, and porcelain as well as unrealized architectural projects, Iris Moon presents new perspectives on the changing meanings of luxury in the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, a time when artists were forced into hiding, exile, or emigration. Moon draws on her expertise as a curator to revise conventional accounts of the so-called Louis XVI style, arguing that it was only after the revolutionary auctions liquidated the king’s collections that their provenance accrued deeper cultural meanings as objects with both a royal imprimatur and a threatening reactionary potential. Lively and accessible, this thought-provoking study will be of interest to curators, art historians, scholars, and students of the decorative arts as well as specialists in the French Revolution.

Engraved in the 19th century, these flamboyant ornamental designs are based on a wide variety of historical examples, dating back as far as the 1500s and including images by Watteau and Durer."

Federico Borromeo, Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan (1564 1631), is well known as a leading Catholic reformer and as the founder of the Ambrosiana library, art collection, and academy in that city. Less known is the fact that the institution's art museum was the culmination of many decades of reflection on the aesthetic qualities and religious roles of art. Borromeo recorded his reflections in two treatises.

De pictura sacra (Sacred Painting, 1624) laid out the rules that artists should follow when creating religious art. Borromeo touched on dozens of iconographical issues and in so doing drew on his deep knowledge not only of church fathers, councils, and scripture but also of classical art and literature. In Musaeum (1625) Borromeo showed a less doctrinaire and more personal side by walking the reader through the Ambrosiana and commenting on specific works in his collection. He offered some of the earliest and most important critiques to survive on works by artists such as Leonardo, Titian, and Jan Brueghel the Elder.

This volume offers, for the first time, translations of the treatises directly into English as well as freshly edited Latin texts, an introduction, extensive notes, and an appendix on the Academy of Design that was established in conjunction with the museum. These treatises will be of great interest to students of the history of art, museums, and religion.

This magnificent catalogue, in three volumes and with nearly 2,000 illustrations, will restore George Romney (1734-1802) to his long-overdue position - with his contemporaries Reynolds and Gainsborough - as a master of 18th-century British portrait painting. The product of impressive and thorough research undertaken over the course of 20 years, Alex Kidson asserts Romney's status as one of the greatest British painters, whose last catalogue raisonne was published over 100 years ago. In more than 1,800 entries, many supported by new photography, Kidson aims to solve longstanding issues of attribution, distinguishing genuine pictures by Romney from works whose traditional attribution to him can no longer be supported. The author's insights are guided by rich primary source material on Romney-including account books, ledgers, and sketchbooks-as well as secondary sources such as prints after lost works, newspaper reports and reviews, and writings by Romney's contemporaries. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Focusing on the interrelationship between Jacob van Loo's art, honor, and career, this book argues that Van Loo's lifelong success and unblemished reputation were by no means incompatible, as art historians have long assumed, with his specialization in painting nudes and his conviction for manslaughter. Van Loo's iconographic specialty - the nude - allowed his clientele to present themselves as judges of beauty and display their mastery of decorum, while his portraiture perfectly expressed his clients' social and political ambitions. Van Loo's honor explains why his success lasted a lifetime, whereas that of Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Vermeer did not. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book reinterprets the manslaughter case as a sign that Van Loo's elite patrons recognized him as a gentleman and highly-esteemed artist.

Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) was a French painter whose manner is distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism, as well as a prolific output - he produced more than 550 paintings.One of his most striking pieces, "The Fountain of Love", is part of a series of works known as the 'Allegories of Love' that display an exquisite sense and atmosphere of intimacy and eroticism. This lavishly illustrated volume presents a detailed and engaging comparison and analysis of the compositions, iconography, and sources of the Allegories in their historical and artistic context. It also discusses the transcendental aspect of love in the Allegories and the concept of Romanticism on the eve of the French Revolution. This volume accompanies Consuming Passion: Fragonard's Allegories of Love, an exhibition of the artist's work that opens at the J. Paul Getty Museum in February 2008.

This is as the favoured artist of an enterprising Parisian elite, Robert is a prophetic case study of the intersection between aesthetics and modernity's dawning business culture. In this provocative study, Hubert Robert's paintings of urban ruins are interpreted as manifestations of a new consciousness of time, one shaped by the uncertainty of an economy characterized by the anxiety-inducing expansion of credit, frenzied speculation on the stock market, and foolhardy ventures in real estate. At the centre of this lively narrative lie Robert's depictions of the ruins of Paris - macabre and spectacular paintings of desolation - on the eve of the French Revolution. Drawing on a vast range of materials, Futures & Ruins interprets Robert's artworks as harbingers of a modern appetite for self-destruction: the paintings are examined as expressions of the pleasures and perils of a risk economy.

In seventeenth-century northern Europe, as the Aristotelian foundations of scientia were rocked by observation, experiment, confessional strife, and political pressure, natural philosophers came to rely on the printed image to fortify their epistemologies—and none more so than René Descartes. In Skepticism’s Pictures, historian of science Melissa Lo chronicles the visual idioms that made, sustained, revised, and resisted Descartes’s new philosophy. Drawing on moon maps, political cartoons, student notebooks, treatises on practical mathematics, and other sources, Lo argues that Descartes transformed natural philosophy with the introduction of a new graphic language that inspired a wide range of pictorial responses shaped by religious affiliation, political commitment, and cultural convention. She begins by historicizing the graphic vocabularies of Descartes’s Essais and Principia philosophiae and goes on to analyze the religious and civic volatility of Descartes’s thought, which compelled defenders (such as Jacques Rohault and Wolferd Senguerd) to reconfigure his pictures according to their local visual cultures—and stimulated enemies (such as Gabriel Daniel) to unravel Descartes’s visual logic with devastating irony. In the epilogue, Lo explains why nineteenth-century French philosophers divorced Descartes’s thought from his pictures, creating a modern image of reason and a version of philosophy absent visuality. Engaging and accessible, Skepticism’s Pictures presents an exciting new approach to Descartes and the visual reception of seventeenth-century physics. It will appeal to historians of early modern European science, philosophy, art, and culture and to art historians interested in histories that give images their argumentative power.

Framed by tensions between figural sculpture experienced in the round and its translation into two-dimensional representations, Animating the Antique explores enthralling episodes in a history of artistic and aesthetic encounters. Moving across varied locations-among them Rome, Florence, Naples, London, Dresden, and Paris-Sarah Betzer explores a history that has yet to be written: that of the Janus-faced nature of interactions with the antique by which sculptures and beholders alike were caught between the promise of animation and the threat of mortification. Examining the traces of affective and transformative sculptural encounters, the book takes off from the decades marked by the archaeological, art-historical, and art-philosophical developments of the mid-eighteenth century and culminantes in fin de siecle anthropological, psychological, and empathic frameworks. It turns on two fundamental and interconnected arguments: that an eighteenth-century ontology of ancient sculpture continued to inform encounters with the antique well into the nineteenth century, and that by attending to the enduring power of this model, we can newly appreciate the distinctively modern terms of antique sculpture's allure. As Betzer shows, these eighteenth-century developments had far-reaching ramifications for the making and beholding of modern art, the articulations of art theory, the writing of art history, and a significantly queer Nachleben of the antique. Bold and wide-ranging, Animating the Antique sheds light upon the work of myriad artists, in addition to that of writers ranging from Goethe and Winckelmann to Hegel, Walter Pater, and Vernon Lee. It will be especially welcomed by scholars and students working in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art history, art writing, and art historiography.