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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1600 to 1800
In the late 18th century, as a wave of English nationalism swept
the country, the printseller John Boydell set out to create an
ambitious exhibition space, one devoted to promoting and fostering
a distinctly English style of history painting. With its very name,
the Shakespeare Gallery signaled to Londoners that the artworks on
display shared an undisputed quality and a national spirit.
Exhibiting Englishness explores the responses of key artists of the
period to Boydell's venture and sheds new light on the gallery's
role in the larger context of British art. Tracking the shift away
from academic and Continental European styles of history painting,
the book analyzes the works of such artists as Joshua Reynolds,
Henry Fuseli, James Northcote, Robert Smirke, Thomas Banks, and
William Hamilton, laying out their diverse ways of expressing
notions of individualism, humor, eccentricity, and naturalism.
Exhibiting Englishness also argues that Boydell's gallery radically
redefined the dynamics of display and cultural aesthetics at that
time, shaping both an English school of painting and modern
exhibition practices. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for
Studies in British Art
In “When All of Rome Was Under Construction,” architectural
historian Dorothy Metzger Habel considers the politics and
processes involved in building the city of Rome during the baroque
period. Like many historians of the period, Habel previously
focused on the grand schemes of patronage; now, however, she
reconstructs the role of the “public voice” in the creation of
the city. She presents the case that Rome’s built environment did
not merely reflect the vision of patrons and architects who simply
imposed buildings and spaces upon the city’s populace. Rather,
through careful examination of a tremendous range of archival
material—from depositions and budgets to memoranda and the
minutes of confraternity meetings—Habel foregrounds what she
describes as “the incubation of architecture” in the context of
such building projects as additions to the Palazzo Doria-Pamphili
and S. Carlo ai Catinari as well as the construction of the Piazza
Colonna. She considers the financing of building and the
availability of building materials and labor, and she offers a
fresh investigation of the writings of Lorenzo Pizzatti, who called
attention to “the social implications” of building in the city.
Taken as a whole, Habel’s examination of these voices and
buildings offers the reader a deeper and more nuanced understanding
of the shape and the will of the public in mid-seventeenth-century
Rome.
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