In Pygmalion in Bavaria, Christiane Hertel introduces the sculptor Ignaz Gunther, placing him in the historical context of Bavarian Rococo art and Counter-Reformation religious visual culture. She also considers the remarkable aesthetic appeal of Gunther's oeuvre--and connects it to the eighteenth-century art theory that focused on sculpture and the creative paradigm of Pygmalion. Through this interweaving of contexts and discourses, Hertel offers insights into how Rococo art's own critical dimension positions it against the Enlightenment and introduces a particular notion of subjectivity.

Between 1740 and 1780, Empress Maria Theresa governed the Habsburg Empire, a multilingual conglomeration of states centered on Austria. Although recent historical scholarship has addressed Maria Theresa's legacy, she remains entirely absent from art history despite her notable role in shaping eighteenth-century European diplomatic, artistic, and cultural developments. In Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art, Michael Yonan explores the role that material culture--paintings, architecture, porcelain, garden sculpture, and decorative objects--played in forming the monarchical identity of this historically prominent woman ruler.

Maria Theresa never obtained her power from men, but rather inherited it directly through birthright. In the art and architecture she commissioned, as well as the objects she incorporated into court life, she redefined visually the idea of a sovereign monarch to make strong claims for her divine right to rule and for hereditary continuity, but also allowed for flexibility among multiple and conflicting social roles. Through an examination of Maria Theresa's patronage, Michael Yonan demonstrates how women, art, and power interrelated in an unusual historical situation in which power was legitimated in women's terms.

Richard L. Feigen has amassed a collection of Italian paintings that is widely admired for its depth and quality, especially for the works it features by the principal masters of the early Italian Renaissance. This beautifully illustrated catalogue of the complete collection presents rare masterpieces by artists from Bernardo Daddi to Fra Angelico, Orazio Gentileschi's Danae, Annibale Carracci's Virgin and Child, and precious, small-scale coppers by major Mannerist and Baroque masters. Italian Paintings from the Richard L. Feigen Collection catalogues more than fifty major works from the 14th to the 17th century, and is the first publication of this remarkable and important collection. Published in association with the Yale University Art Gallery Exhibition Schedule: Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (5/28/10-9/12/10)

Bringing into relief the singularity of Barry's unswerving commitment to his vision for history painting despite adverse cultural, political and commercial currents, these essays on Barry and his contemporaries offer new perspectives on the painter's life and career. Contributors, including some of the best known experts in the field of British eighteenth-century studies, set Barry's works and writings into a rich political and social context, particularly in Britain. Among other notable achievements, the essays shed new light on the influence which Barry's radical ideology and his Catholicism had on his art; they explore his relationship with Reynolds and Blake, and discuss his aesthetics in the context of Burke and Wollstonecraft as well as Fuseli and Payne Knight. The volume is an indispensable resource for scholars of eighteenth-century British painting, patronage, aesthetics, and political history.

Painting and Politics in Northern Europe offers a chronological account of political engagement in works by the early modern Northern European painters Jan van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, and Frans Snyders. Offering fresh interpretations of canonical paintings, Margaret Carroll illustrates how these artists registered their pictorial responses to the political events and debates of their day. The imagery of gender and power was often intertwined with these debates. Considering a range of works, including Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, Bruegel's Netherlandish Proverbs, and Rubens's Life of Marie de Medicis series, Carroll examines the ways in which these Netherlandish painters seized on that imagery and creatively transformed it into the materials of art.

The narrative follows the way painters responded to the emergence of "modern" theories of politics and natural law from the classical and medieval tradition. Carroll begins by addressing paintings that identify the natural order with consensual social relations in a stable political hierarchy, then turns to paintings that stress the struggle for mastery in a perilous and unstable world. These paintings may be valued not merely as historical artifacts of a bygone era but as interventions in a cultural discourse that continues to this day.

From the neoclassicism of Thomas Jefferson's design of Monticello and sketches of the White House, to "al'italiana" gardens and parks, to the strong Roman classicism of the Jefferson Memorial, to Constantino Brumidi's frescoes in Congress and the National Library, to the striking composition of Luigi Moretti's Watergate Complex--America's capital is infused with the influences of a culture that laid the foundations of Western society. Extensively illustrated with both archival black and white photos, drawings, and sketches, as well as new photographs by Max Mackenzie, this book is an homage to this strong and still alive relationship and essential reading for all those interested in architecture and the visual arts.

The Artist and the State, 1777-1855: The Politics of Universal History in British & French Painting is the first book-length study to examine political uses of 'universal history', or the philosophy of history, in European art from 1777 to 1855. Daniel R. Guernsey discusses a range of mural paintings and sculptural works produced in England and France between the American Revolution and the Universal Exposition of 1855, comparing the ways artists such as James Barry, Eugene Delacroix, Paul Chenavard, David d'Angers, and Gustave Courbet expressed linear or cyclical histories of progress and decline. By considering the work of these important European artists together, he reveals not only the rich artistic interaction that took place between England and France - as well as Germany - at this time, but also how the notion of 'universal history' was to become a major preoccupation in the work of these individual artists, each one participating in shaping a highly significant mode of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political art.

"Style" has been one of the cornerstones not only of the modern discipline of art history but also of social and cultural history. In this volume, the writers consider the inadequacy of the concept of style as essential to a person, people, place, or period. While the subject matter of this book is specific to religious practices and artifacts from New Mexico between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the implications of these investigations are far reaching historically, methodologically, and theoretically.

The essays collected here explore the Catholic instruments of religious devotion produced in New Mexico from around 1760 until the radical transformation of the tradition in the twentieth century. The writers in this volume make three key arguments. First, they make a case for bringing new theoretical perspectives and research strategies to bear on the New Mexican materials and other colonial contexts. Second, they demonstrate that the New Mexican materials provide an excellent case study for rethinking many of the most fundamental questions in art-historical and anthropological study. Third, the authors collectively argue that the New Mexican images had, and still have, importance to diverse audiences and makers.

The distinctiveness of New Mexican santos consists not only in their subjects (which conformed to Catholic Reformation tastes) but also in elements that may appear to have been "merely decorative" graphically striking and frequently elaborate abstract design motifs and landscape references. Despite their anonymity, the images are, as a group, readily distinguished from local products anywhere else in the Spanish colonial world. This distinctiveness suggests that we should inquire not so much about the individual identities of their makers as about the collective identity of the society and place that produced and used them.

For half a century after its introduction in Europe, printmaking remained the province of a specially trained group of professionals. What changed this situation was the invention of etching, which allowed for print designs to be drawn directly onto a plate so that any competent draftsman could try his hand at it. Many artists did, and as a result, we now have a wide-ranging corpus of major Renaissance and Baroque graphics made by artists who, though famous in other fields, were novices in the print medium.

Featuring essays by Michael Cole, Larry Silver, Susan Dackerman, Graham Larkin, and exhibit co-curator Madeleine Viljoen, The Early Modern Painter-Etcher spans three centuries, roughly from the time of Durer to that of Goya, and looks at works executed by some seventy painters for whom printmaking was primarily an experimental field. The book accompanies an exhibition that opened in April 2006 at the University of Pennsylvania and will travel to the Ringling Museum of Art and to the Smith College Museum of Art.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) proudly described his monumental painting Prometheus Bound as first among "the flower of my stock." This singular work demonstrates how Rubens engaged with and responded to his predecessors Michelangelo and Titian, with whom he shared an interest in depictions of physical torment. The Wrath of the Gods offers an in-depth case study of the Flemish artist's creative process and aesthetic, while also demonstrating why this particular painting has appealed to viewers over time. Many scholars have elaborated on Rubens's affinity for Titian, but his connection to Michelangelo has received far less attention. This study presents a new interpretation of Prometheus Bound, showing how Rubens created parallels between the pagan hero Prometheus and Michelangelo's Risen Christ from the Sistine Chapel's Last Judgment. Christopher D. M. Atkins expands our understanding of artistic transmission by elucidating how Rubens synthesized the works he saw in Italy, Spain, and his native Antwerp, and how Prometheus Bound in turn influenced Dutch, Flemish, and Italian artists. By emulating Rubens's composition, these artists circulated it throughout Europe, broadening its influence from his day to ours. Published in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Philadelphia Museum of Art (09/12/15-12/06/15)

Some years ago, David Freedberg opened a dusty cupboard at Windsor Castle and discovered hundreds of vividly coloured, masterfully precise drawings of all sorts of plants and animals from the Old and New Worlds. Coming upon thousands more drawings like them across Europe, Freedberg finally traced them all back to a little-known scientific organization from 17th-century Italy called the Academy of Linceans (or Lynxes). Founded by Prince Federico Cesi in 1603, the Linceans took as their task nothing less than the documentation and classification of all of nature in pictorial form. In this first book-length study of the Linceans to appear in English, Freedberg focuses especially on their unprecedented use of drawings based on microscopic observation and other new techniques of visualization. Where previous thinkers had classified objects based mainly on similarities of external appearance, the Linceans instead turned increasingly to sectioning, dissection and observation of internal structures. They applied their new research techniques to an incredible variety of subjects, from the objects in the heavens studied by their most famous (and infamous) member, Galileo Galilei - whom they supported at the most critical moments of his career - to the flora and fauna of Mexico, bees, fossils and the reproduction of plants and fungi. But by demonstrating the inadequacy of surface structures for ordering the world, the Linceans unwittingly planted the seeds for the demise of their own favourite method - visual description - as a mode of scientific classification. Profusely illustrated and engagingly written, "The Eye of the Lynx" uncovers a crucial episode n the development of visual representation and natural history. And perhaps as important, it offers readers a dazzling array of early modern drawings, from magnificently depicted birds and flowers to frogs in amber, monstrously misshapen citrus fruits and more.

G. B. Piranesi is one of the most inventive artists of the eighteenth century. The Carceri, or Prisons, are a set of etchings believed by many to be Piranesi's most original work. The extraordinary evocative power of the Carceri has fascinated many writers. Some have interpreted the Carceri as dreams, as nightmares, as disturbing allegories of human life. In this book, mostly through an analysis of the Latin quotations contained in the etchings, it is argued that Piranesi grants a metaphorical meaning to the Carceri in order to imprison those he saw as obstructing the Arts and threatening his own freedom. Italian text. Silvia Gavuzzo-Stewart graduated from the University of Rome La Sapienza. She has taught Italian language and literature at the Universities of London and Reading. In Reading she was in charge of teaching history of art in the Department of Italian Studies. She is now an Honorary Fellow of Reading University.

This is the first multi-disciplinary study of the dissemination of Italian culture in northern Europe during the "long eighteenth century" (1689-1815). The book covers a diverse range of important artists such as Amigoni, Canaletto and Rosalba Carriera, as well as opera singers, commedia dell'arte performers and librettists who left Italy to seek work beyond the Alps. It also considers key themes such as social networks, the relationships between court and market cultures, the importance of religion and politics to the reception of culture, and the evolution of taste.

The Kunstkammer in Dresden's Royal Palace houses a fascinating variety of collected objects from the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods. It owes its unique collection of plain and ornate tools, for example, to the founder of the Kunstkammer, Elector August (1526-1586). They range from gardening equipment to goldsmithing, carpentry and ironworking tools and even to so-called Brechzeugen (tools for prising or breaking things open). In addition, the museum guide presents elaborately decorated art-room cabinets, two richly embellished Augsburg cabinets, tables inlaid with iridescent mother-of-pearl, precious board games, and musical instruments alongside filigree woodturned pieces, items of decorative art, and objects from distant cultures. Numerous previously unpublished masterpieces from the Kunstkammer in Dresden's Royal Palace

Things change. Broken and restored, reused and remade, objects transcend their earliest functions, locations, and appearances. While every era witnesses change, the eighteenth century experienced artistic, economic, and demographic transformations that exerted unique pressures on material cultures around the world. Locating material objects at the heart of such phenomena, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century expands beyond Eurocentric perspectives to discover the mobile, transcultural nature of eighteenth-century art worlds. From porcelain to betel leaves, Chumash hats to natural history cabinets, this book examines how objects embody imperialism, knowledge, and resistance in various ways. By embracing things both elite and everyday, this volume investigates physical and technological manipulations of objects while attending to the human agents who shaped them in an era of accelerating global contact and conquest. Featuring ten essays, the volume foregrounds diverse scholarly approaches to chart new directions for art history and cultural history. Ranging from California to China, Bengal to Britain, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century illuminates the transformations within and between artistic media, follows natural and human-made things as they migrate across territories, and reveals how objects catalyzed change in the transoceanic worlds of the early modern period.

The tale of the shepherd girl Radha and the Hindu god Krishna is probably the most famous love story in India. Written by Jayadeva at the end of the twelfth century, the Gitagovinda narrates the highs and lows of Radha and Krishna's relationship. As a vivid metaphor for the human yearning for god, the work is today closely associated in India with the religiosity of Krishna. In the eighteenth century, in the former princely residence of Guler, the artist family of Nainsuhk and Manaku created the outstanding picture series of the second Guler Gitagovinda of 1775/80, which recounts the love story with an unparalleled elegance. This book retells the story using selected pieces from this series (printed in original size) and whisks the reader off into the atmospheric world of Indian miniature painting and poetry. This book accompanies an exhibition at Museum Rietberg, Zurich, 24 October 2019 - 16 February 2020. Text in English and German.

In Absolutist Attachments, Chloé Hogg uncovers the affective and media connections that shaped Louis XIV's absolutism. Studying literature, painting, engravings, correspondence, and the emerging periodic press, Hogg diagnoses the emotions that created absolutism's feeling subjects and publics. Louis XIV's subjects explored new kinds of affective relations with their sovereign, joining with the king in acts of aesthetic judgment, tender feeling, or the “newsiness� of emerging print news culture. Such alternative modes of adhesion countered the hegemonic model of kingship upheld by divine right, reason of state, or corporate fidelities and privileges with subject-driven attachments and practices. Absolutist Attachments discovers absolutism's alternative political and cultural legacy—not the spectacle of an unbound king but the binding connections of his subjects.

During the early modern period sculptors experimented with forms, typologies, and materials of their art in unprecedented ways. Sculpture was at the center of theoretical debates concerning the relative merits of the different arts, the differences between ancient and modern art, and the relationship between art and nature. Rome was a major center for these theoretical debates, as well as a locus for patronage and collecting. Sculptors from all over Europe came to Rome to study the remains of the antique past and to practice their art. Critical Perspectives on Roman Baroque Sculpture stakes out a new frontier of research on seventeenth-century sculpture in Rome-a frontier that looks well beyond attributional and technical questions, instead focusing on questions of historical context and criticism including the interaction of sculptural theory and practice; the creative roles of sculptors and their patrons; the relationship of sculpture to its antique models and to contemporary painting; and problems of contextual meaning and reception. Aside from the editors, the contributors are Michael Cole, Julia K. Dabbs, Maarten Delbeke, Damian Dombrowski, Maria Cristina Fortunati, Estelle Lingo, Peter M. Lukehart, Aline Magnien, and Christina Strunck.

This accompanying publication will explore the development and diversity of this legendary dynasty of Flemish painters over four generations and 150 years. From the proverb pictures and peasant festivals of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his eldest son Pieter Brueghel the Younger to the exquisite flower pieces of Jan 'Velvet' Brueghel and the captivating cabinet paintings of Jan van Kessel, the book will unravel the mysteries of the dynasty, and will explore how Bruegel's sons were able to emulate their father's model despite having no access to his paintings. The book will turn the spotlight on to the major Bruegel holdings in UK collections for the first time, telling the story of the dynasty through masterpieces from British public collections and a number of previously unseen works from private collections.

"Printing the Grand Manner" illuminates an extraordinary moment in the intertwined history of painting and printmaking in Europe. The brilliant age of Louis XIV saw the creation of a group of unusually large prints--some of which measure a fantastic five feet by three feet when assembled--that reproduced works by the French king's remarkably inventive court painter, designer, and arts administrator, Charles Le Brun (1619-1690).
The two essays and the catalogue entries in this volume focus on eleven of these monumental reproductive engravings. The authors not only relate the fascinating story of the production of these prints but also explore their role in the glorification of Louis XIV and in forming critical opinion of Le Brun as an artist and as an advocate of history painting in the Grand Manner.
This volume accompanies the exhibition "Printing the Grand Manner: Monumental Prints in the Age of Louis XIV" held at the Getty Research Institute from May 18 to October 17, 2010.

"Geography of the Gaze" offers a new history and theory of how the way we look at things influences what we see. Focusing on Western Europe from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, Renzo Dubbini shows how developments in science, art, mapping, and visual epistemology affected the ways natural and artificial landscapes were perceived and portrayed.
He begins with the idea of the "view," explaining its role in the invention of landscape painting and in the definition of landscape as a cultural space. Among other topics, Dubbini explores how the descriptive and pictorial techniques used in mariners' charts, view-oriented atlases, military cartography, and garden design were linked to the proliferation of highly realistic paintings of landscapes and city scenes; how the "picturesque" system for defining and composing landscapes affected not just art but also archaeology and engineering; and how the ever-changing modern cityscapes inspired new ways of seeing and representing the urban scene in Impressionist painting, photography, and stereoscopy. A marvelous history of viewing, "Geography of the Gaze" will interest everyone from scientists to artists.

From the 16th century until well into the 18th century, the commedia dell'arte, a popular Italian type of improvised comic theatricals, cast its spell on a large and diverse audience. Here an exuberant joy of living was reflected in a portrayal of all aspects of life exaggerated with pomposity and humour. No medium was better suited than precious porcelain to immortalise the vivacious performance of the comedians on the stage, let alone surpass their exaltation: No other subject produced a similar symbiotic relationship between the downright expressionist sculptures executed by the porcelain modellers and their heightening with brilliant colours by the porcelain painters in their astounding depiction of the costumes. Still today, these luxurious creatures enthral the observer with the splendour of the Baroque, with that particular joie de vivre of a grand poque. Delighted, we enter a bygone world where to enjoy life was the highest good. This publication is the first comprehensive survey of the commedia dellarte as a subject of the ceramic arts. Almost 400 objects from more than 45 European manufactories cover the period from the 18th to the 20th century.

The city of Venice holds a special place in the global imagination. This book explores the creation of one of its largest surviving depictions, which has remained almost unknown to the wider public since its creation exactly four centuries ago. Singed and dated 1611, the painting is the work of the notable early seventeenth-century Bolognese artist Odoardo Fialetti. His huge birds-eye view of the watery townscape is enlivened by tiny vignettes of Venetian life. Eight square meters in size, this remarkable painting is a tour-de-force among depictions of cities. In 1636 the painting was given to Eton College by the former British ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton. Over the centuries it was known only to pupils and masters at the school, its surface obscured by layers of grime. Restored in 2010-11, Fialetti's view has emerged as a striking work of real artistic merit. Its prominent position in the British Museum's Shakespeare exhibition in the summer of 2012 brought it to the attention of the general public for the very first time. This book takes a closer look at the remarkable picture and the context in which it was created. What kind of artist was Odoardo Fialetti, a Bolognese immigrant hoping to fill the shoes of the recently deceased great masters of the Venetian Renaissance? What image does it present of Venice? What sort of a figure was Henry Wotton, and informed connoisseur and a passionate playing the European politics, though not as diplomatic as perhaps he should have been? This is a relatively neglected period of both in Venetian art history and in British culture, the Jacobean prelude to the enthusiasm for Venetian art of Charles I's court. This beautiful commemorative volume is interdisciplinary in scope, involving history of art, political history, cartography, architectural history and English literature and bibliophilia, as well as a story of restoration and its techniques, drawn together by one of the most distinctive views ever inspired by the townscape of Venice.

This work, the fruit of more than ten years of research, consists of a systematic cataloguing of all Florentine painters, and of all the painters active over many years in the Tuscan city, between the early 17 th and the end of the 18 th Centuries. Alongside artists who have already won renown and about whom various monographic studies already exist, this publication shines a collateral light on relatively unknown personages who are worthy of more than a little interest. In some cases these are artists otherwise unknown to contemporary criticism. The intention is to make a significant contribution to art history and the work is in some cases decisive in its attributions of uncertain works that have hitherto been habitually associated only with the better-known names. The three volumes are accompanied by biographies and lists of paintings along with, as is to be expected, an ample selection of approximately 1,800 colour and monochrome photographic reproductions. Volume I (312 pages) Presentation and introduction by Mina Gregori Colour plates I-CVI Biographies of the artists and index of works Bibliography, index of artists in the catalogue, of names and place names Volume II (376 pages) Plates 1-824 (Allori - Guiducci) Volume III (392 pages) Plates 825-1,698 (Hugford - Zocchi)