The Arts of Living explores the range, depth and beauty of the V&A's European collections from 1600-1815, the period that laid the foundations for the world we know today. At the heart of the book is in investigation into the objects of everyday life, and the ways that art and design both reflected and changed how people lived. The works of art and manufactured goods with which men and women surrounded themselves defined their identity and role in society - from monarchs to merchants, craftsmen to housewives. Singular masterpieces by painters and sculptors including Boucher and Bernini, along with the work of such leading manufacturers as the Gobelins, Boulle and Meissen, illustrate a great diversity of subjects, from Louis XIV and Catherine the Great to male adornment and fashionable silks, from Jewish traditions and the Dutch interior to the East India trade and Africans in European art.

In Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France, Julie Anne Plax engages in an interdisciplinary examination of several categories of Watteau's paintings--theatrical, military, fetes, and the art dealer. Arguing that Watteau consistently applied coherent strategies of representation aimed at subverting high art, she shows how his paintings toyed ironically with conventions and genres and confounded traditional categories. Plax connects these strategies to broader cultural themes and political issues that Watteau's art addressed throughout his career, thereby revealing the substantial unity of his oeuvre.

First published in 2000, this is an examination of the collection of art works through an anthropological study of modes of exchange and the social roles of material culture. Focusing on the figure of Sebastiano Resta, Genevieve Warwick brings to light a shadowy, yet crucial chapter in the history of collecting, that of the great migration of art objects out of Italy to northern Europe in the early eighteenth century. Her study pins the history of collecting to broader changes in European economic history and analyzes the epistemological frameworks for viewing that accompanied this transfer of artistic wealth. Warwick also demonstrates how early modern art collecting was shaped by the social mores of elite 'arts of love'.

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.

1999 marks the 350th anniversary of the execution of Charles I, and this volume deals with the crisis the execution provoked in the representation of the monarchy. It looks at both sympathetic and hostile representations of Charles I, and addresses not only the period of mid-century crisis but also the earlier years of his reign and the afterlife of his royal image. It will appeal not only to literary scholars but also to historians, art historians and musicologists.

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.

From Still Life to the Screen explores the print culture of 18th-century London, focusing on the correspondences between images and consumer objects. In his lively and insightful text, Joseph Monteyne considers such themes as the display of objects in still lifes and markets, the connoisseur's fetishistic gaze, and the fusion of body and ornament in satires of fashion. The desire for goods emerged in tandem with modern notions of identity, in which things were seen to mirror and symbolize the self. Prints, particularly graphic satires by such artists as Matthew and Mary Darly, James Gillray, William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, and Paul Sandby, were actively involved in this shift. Many of these images play with the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, self and thing. They also reveal the recurring motif of image display, whether on screens, by magic lanterns, or in "raree-shows" and print-shop windows. The author links this motif to new conceptions of the self, specifically through the penetration of spectacle into everyday experience. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The value of inventories in charting how houses were arranged, furnished and used is now widely appreciated. Typically, the listings and valuations were occasioned by the death of an owner and the consequent need to deal with testamentary dispositions. That was not always so. The inventory for Castlecomer House, Co. Kilkenny, for example, was drawn up to make a claim following the house's devastation in the 1798 uprising. Mostly hitherto unpublished, the inventories chosen give new-found insights into the lifestyle and taste of some of the foremost families of the day. Above stairs, the inventories show the evolving collecting habits and tastes of eighteenth-century patrons across Ireland and how the interiors of great town and country houses were arranged or responded to new materials and new ideas. The meticulous recording of the contents of the kitchen and scullery likewise sheds light on life below stairs. Itemized equipment required for the brewhouse, dairy, stables, garden and farmyard reflects the at times significant scale of the communities the houses supported and the remarkable degree of self-sufficiency at some of the demesnes. A comprehensive index facilitates access to the myriad items forming the inventories, while the books listed at three of the houses are tentatively identified in separate appendices. A foreword together with short preambles to the inventories set the households in their historical context. Illustrated with contemporary engravings of the houses and with portraits of the owners of the time, the inventories will appeal to country-house visitors, historians of interiors, patronage, collecting and material culture as well as to scholars, curators, collectors, creative designers, film directors, bibliographers, lexicographers and novelists. The eighteenth century is the period onto which the Knight of Glin directed his penetrating gaze as art historian. The book is dedicated to his memory.

This collection of essays explores the rise of aesthetics as a response to, and as a part of, the reshaping of the arts in modern society. The theories of art developed under the name of ‘aesthetics’ in the eighteenth century have traditionally been understood as contributions to a field of study in existence since the time of Plato. If art is a practice to be found in all human societies, then the philosophy of art is the search for universal features of that practice, which can be stated in definitions of art and beauty. However, art as we know it - the system of ‘fine arts’ - is largely peculiar to modern society. Aesthetics, far from being a perennial discipline, emerged in an effort both to understand and to shape this new social practice. These essays share the conviction that aesthetic ideas can be fully understood when seen not only in relation to intellectual and social contexts, but as themselves constructed in history.

This monograph examines the most prestigious political paintings created in Britain during the High Baroque age. It investigates a period characterized by numerous social, political, and religious crises, in the years between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy (1660) and the death of the first British monarch from the House of Hanover (1727). On the basis of hitherto unpublished documents, the book elucidates the creation and reception of nine major commissions that involved the court, private aristocratic patrons, and/or civic institutions. The ground-breaking new interpretations of these works focus on strategies of conflict resolution, the creation of shared cultural memories, processes of cultural translation, the performative context of the murals and the interaction of painted images and architectural spaces.

Master Carver Grinling Gibbons (1648-1721) is famous for his breathtakingly delicate, intricate and realistic carvings, both in wood and stone. Tantalising cascades of fruit and flowers, puffy-cheeked cherubs, crowds of figures and flourishes of architecture are all trademark features of his energetic, animated carvings that grace stately homes, palaces, churches and colleges across the country. His work can be found in some of Britain's most beloved buildings, including St Paul's Cathedral and Hampton Court Palace. From his early work in the Low Countries to his 'discovery' by the diarist John Evelyn in London, and his appointment as the king's Master Carver, this book celebrates Grinling Gibbons' unequalled talent, his visionary genius, and his ability to transform humble pieces of wood into some of the most exquisite artworks of his day.

Rembrandt, Hals and Vermeer are still household names, even though they died over three hundred years ago. In their lifetimes they witnessed the extraordinary consolidation of the newly independent Dutch Republic and its emergence as one of the richest nations on earth. As one contemporary wrote in 1673: the Dutch were 'the envy of some, the fear of others, and the wonder of all their neighbours'. During the Dutch Golden Age, the arts blossomed and the country became a haven of religious tolerance. However, despite being self-proclaimed champions of freedom, the Dutch conquered communities in America, Africa and Asia and were heavily involved in both slavery and the slave trade on three continents. This substantially revised second edition of the leading textbook on the Dutch Republic includes a new chapter exploring slavery and its legacy, as well as a new chapter on language and literature.

This book explores how the Medici Grand Dukes pursued ways to expand their political, commercial, and cultural networks beyond Europe, cultivating complex relations with the Ottoman Empire and other Islamicate regions, and looking further east to India, China, and Japan. The chapters in this volume discuss how casting a global, cross-cultural net was part and parcel of the Medicean political vision. Diplomatic gifts, items of commercial exchange, objects looted at war, maritime connections, and political plots were an inherent part of how the Medici projected their state on the global arena. The eleven chapters of this volume demonstrate that the mobility of objects, people, and knowledge that generated the global interactions analyzed here was not unidirectional-rather, it went both to and from Tuscany. In addition, by exploring evidence of objects produced in Tuscany for Asian markets,this book reveals hitherto neglected histories of how Western cultures projected themselves eastwards.

Writing the Lives of Painters explores the development of artists' biographies in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. During this period artists gradually distanced themselves from artisans and began to be recognised for their imaginative and intellectual skills. The development of the art market and the burgeoning of an exhibition culture, as well as the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, all contributed to redefining the rank of artists in society. This social redefinition of the status of artists in Britain was shaped by a thriving print culture. Contemporary artists were discussed in a wide range of literary forms, including exhibition reviews, art-critical pamphlets, and journalistic gossip-columns. Biographical accounts of modern artists emerged in a dialogue with these other types of writing. This book is an account of a new literary genre, tracing its emergence in the cultural context of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It considers artistic biography as a malleable generic framework for investigation. Indeed, while the lives of painters in Britain did not completely abandon traditional tropes, the genre significantly widened its scope and created new individual and social narratives that reflected and accommodated the needs and desires of new reading audiences. Writing the Lives of Painters also argues that the proliferation of a myriad biographical forms mirrored the privileging of artistic originality and difference within an art world that had yet to generate a coherent 'British School' of painting. Finally, by focusing on the emergence of individual biographies of British artists, the book examines how and why the art historiographic model established by Georgio Vasari was gradually dismantled in the hands of British biographers during the Romantic period.

Chinese-Islamic studies have concentrated thus far on the arts of earlier periods with less attention paid to works from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912). This book focuses on works of Chinese-Islamic art from the late seventeenth century to the present day and bring to the reader's attention several new areas for consideration. The book examines glass wares which were probably made for a local Chinese-Muslim clientele, illustrating a fascinating mixture of traditional Chinese and Muslim craft traditions. While the inscriptions on them can be related directly to the mosque lamps of the Arab world, their form and style of decoration is characteristically that of Han Chinese. Several contemporary Chinese Muslim artists have succeeded in developing a unique fusion of calligraphic styles from both cultures. Other works examined include enamels, porcelains, and interior painted snuff bottles, with emphasis on either those with Arabic inscriptions, or on works by Chinese Muslim artists. The book includes a chapter written by Dr. Shelly Xue and an addendum written by Dr. Riccardo Joppert. This book will appeal to scholars working in art history, religious studies, Chinese studies, Chinese history, religious history, and material culture.

WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK BIOGRAPHY PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION Selected as a Book of the Year in the Herald In 1845, a Reading bookseller named John Snare came across the dirt-blackened portrait of a prince at a country house auction. Suspecting that it might be a long-lost Velazquez, he bought the picture and set out to discover its strange history - a quest that led from fame to ruin and exile. Fusing detection and biography, this book shows how and why great works of art can affect us, even to the point of mania. And on the trail of John Snare, Cumming makes a surprising discovery of her own. But most movingly, The Vanishing Man is an eloquent and passionate homage to the Spanish master Velazquez, bringing us closer to the creation and appreciation of his works than ever before.

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.

Have you ever thought of citrus fruits as celestial bodies, angelically suspended in the sky? Perhaps not, but J. C. Volkamer (1644-1720) did-commissioning an extravagant and breathtaking series of large-sized copperplates representing citrons, lemons, and bitter oranges in surreal scenes of majesty and wonder. Ordering plants by post mostly from Italy, Germany, North Africa, and even the Cape of Good Hope, the Nuremberg merchant Volkamer was a devotee of the fragrant and exotic citrus at a time when such fruits were still largely unknown north of the Alps. His garden came to contain a wide variety of specimens, and he became so obsessed with the fruits that he commissioned a team of copperplate engravers to create 256 plates of 170 varieties of citrus fruits, many depicted life size, published in a two-volume work. The first volume appeared in 1708, with the impressively lengthy title The Nuremberg Hesperides, or: A detailed description of the noble fruits of the citron, lemon and bitter orange; how these may be correctly planted, cared for and propagated in that and neighboring regions. In both volumes, Volkamer draws on years of hands-on experience to present a far-reaching account of citrus fruits and how to tend them-from a meticulous walk-through of how to construct temporary orangeries, glasshouses, and hothouses for growing pineapples to commentary on each fruit variety, including its size, shape, color, scent, tree or shrub, leaves, and country of origin. In each plate, Volkamer pays tribute to the verdant landscapes of Northern Italy, his native Nuremberg, and other sites that captured his imagination. From Genovese sea views to the Schoenbrunn Palace, each locale is depicted in the same exceptional detail as the fruit that overhangs it. We witness branches heavy with grapefruits arching across a sun-bathed yard in Bologna and marvel at a huge pineapple plant sprouting from a South American town. The result is at once a fantastical line-up of botanical beauty and a highly poetic tour through the lush gardens and places where these fruits grew.Few colored sets of Volkamer's work are still in existence today. This publication draws on the two recently discovered hand-colored volumes in the city of Furth's municipal archive in Schloss Burgfarrnbach. The reprint also includes 56 newly discovered illustrations that Volkamer intended to present in a third volume.

The French Revolution had a marked impact on the ways in which citizens saw the newly liberated spaces in which they now lived. Painting, gardening, cinematic displays of landscape, travel guides, public festivals, and tales of space flight and devilabduction each shaped citizens' understanding of space. Through an exploration of landscape painting over some 40 years, Steven Adams examines the work of artists, critics and contemporary observers who have largely escaped art historical attention to show the importance of landscape as a means of crystallising national identity in a period of unprecedented political and social change.

The reception of Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy from its origins to its appearances in contemporary visual culture reveals how its popularity was achieved and maintained by diverse audiences and in varied venues. Performative manifestations resulted in contradictory characterizations of the painted youth as an aristocrat or a "regular fellow," as masculine or feminine, or as heterosexual or gay. In private and public spaces where viewers saw the actual painting and where living and rendered replicas circulated, Gainsborough's painting was often the centerpiece where dominant and subordinate classes met, gender identities were enacted, and sexuality was implicitly or overtly expressed.

Every painted work that is on display in the Uffizi Gallery, The Pitti Palace, the Accademia, and the Duomo is included in the book, plus many or most of the works from 28 of the city's other magnificent museums and churches. The research and text are by Ross King (best-selling author), Anja Grebe (author or The Louvre and The Vatican), Cristina Acidini (former Superintendent of the public museums of Florence) and Msgr. Timothy Verdon (Director of the artworks for the Archdiocese of Florence).

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