This collection of essays seeks to challenge the notion of the supremacy of the brain as the key organ of the Enlightenment, by focusing on the workings of the bowels and viscera that so obsessed writers and thinkers during the long eighteenth-century. These inner organs and the digestive process acted as counterpoints to politeness and other modes of refined sociability, drawing attention to the deeper workings of the self. Moving beyond recent studies of luxury and conspicuous consumption, where dysfunctional bowels have been represented as a symptom of excess, this book seeks to explore other manifestations of the visceral and to explain how the bowels played a crucial part in eighteenth-century emotions and perceptions of the self. The collection offers an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective on entrails and digestion by addressing urban history, visual studies, literature, medical history, religious history, and material culture in England, France and Germany. -- .

Despite the importance of Chen Hongshou (1599-1652) as an artist and scholar of the Ming period, until now no full length study in English has focused on his work. Author Tamara H. Bentley takes a broadly interdisciplinary approach, treating Chen's oeuvre in relation to literary themes and economic changes, and linking these larger concerns to visual analyses. Considering Chen's paintings and prints alongside Chen's romance drama commentaries and prefaces and his collected writings (particularly poetry), Bentley sheds new light not only on Chen, but also on an important cultural moment in the first half of the seventeenth century. Through analysis of Chen's figure paintings and print designs, Bentley examines the artist's engagement with the values of "authenticity" and "emotion," which were part of a larger discourse stressing idiosyncrasy, the individual voice, and vernacular literature. She contrasts these values with the commercial aspects of his production, geared at an expanding art market of well-to-do buyers, excavating the apparent contradiction inherent in the two pursuits. In the end, she suggests, the emphasis on the "authentic" voice was marketed to a broad field of anonymous buyers. Though her primary focus is on Chen Hongshou, Bentley's investigation ultimately concerns not only this individual artist, but also the effect of early modern changes on an artist's mode of working and his self-image, in the West as well as the East. The study touches upon expanding international trade and the rise of middle class art markets (including print markets), not only in China but also in the Dutch Republic in circa 1630-1650. Bentley investigates the specific rhetoric of different categories of images, including Chen's non-literal figurative works; literal commemorative portraits; his printed romance-drama illustrations; and his printed playing cards. Bentley's investigation takes in issues of studio practice (including various types of image replicati

The painters of the Dutch Golden Age have a reputation for favoring a dark, serious aesthetic and subdued, everyday scenes over the bravado of their Catholic counterparts. But in fact, Dutch paintings of this period often contain witty visual puns and a fierce vibrancy in their choice of color and subjects. No one more exemplifies this lushness and vividness more than Frans Hals.This richly illustrated volume considers Hals's lively brush strokes and distinctive handling of paint within the context of Dutch Golden Age painting as a whole, and itprovides powerful insight into his influence during his own time and for generations afterward. Christopher D. M. Atkins looks at the world in which Hals lived, mining the Dutch economy, as well as Hals's relationships with clients, pupils, and assistants, in order to gain a fuller grasp of the evolution of Hals's instantly recognizable style. A thoughtful study of the commercial and artistic concerns that shaped Hals's work, this book reflects on ideas of authorship, consumption, and subjectivity in early modern Europe. Combining smart historical analysis and a deep understanding of Dutch consumer culture with a strong sense of Hals as an artist, "The Signature Style of Frans Hals "offers a wholly new understanding of both the painter and his world.With discussions of two of Hals's most famous paintings, "The Laughing Cavalier "and "The Gypsy Girl," this book is required reading for scholars of economic history, art historians, and anyone interested in gaining a deeper insight into life and times of this Dutch master.

By examining their production practices in a variety of genres"including manuscript illustration, glass painting and staining, tapestry manufacture, portrait painting, and engraving"this book explores how Netherlandish artists migrating to England in the early modern period overcame difficulties raised by their outsider status. This study examines, for the first time in this context, the challenges of alien status to artistic production and the effectiveness of cooperation as a countermeasure. The author demonstrates that collaboration was chief among the strategies that these foreigners chose to secure a position in London's changing art market. Curd's exploration of these collaborations primarily follows Pierre Bourdieu's model of "establishment and challenger" in which dominance in a field of cultural production depends upon how much cultural, political, and economic capital can be accumulated and the effectiveness of the strategies used to confront competition. The analysis presented here challenges received opinion that a collaborative work is only a joint effort of artists working together on a single monument by demonstrating that the participation of patrons and middlemen can also shape the final appearance of a work of art. Furthermore, this book shows that the strategic use of collaboration served the goal of competition by helping to establish foreign artists in the London art market and suggests that their coping strategies have implications for the study of immigrant behaviors today.

Printed images were ubiquitous in early modern Britain, and they often convey powerful messages which are all the more important for having circulated widely at the time. Yet, by comparison with printed texts, these images have been neglected, particularly by historians to whom they ought to be of the greatest interest. This volume helps remedy this state of affairs. Complementing the online digital library of British Printed Images to 1700 (www.bpi1700.org.uk), it offers a series of essays which exemplify the many ways in which such visual material can throw light on the history of the period. Ranging from religion to politics, polemic to satire, natural science to consumer culture, the collection explores how printed images need to be read in terms of the visual syntax understood by contemporaries, their full meaning often only becoming clear when they are located in the context in which they were produced and deployed. The result is not only to illustrate the sheer richness of material of this kind, but also to underline the importance of the messages which it conveys, which often come across more strongly in visual form than through textual commentaries. With contributions from many leading exponents of the cultural history of early modern Britain, including experts on religion, politics, science and art, the book's appeal will be equally wide, demonstrating how every facet of British culture in the period can be illuminated through the study of printed images.

Guercino's Paintings and His Patrons' Politics in Early Modern Italy examines how the seventeenth-century Italian painter Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (better known as Il Guercino) instilled the political ideas of his patrons into his paintings. As it focuses on eight works showing religious scenes and scenes taken from Roman history, this volume bridges the gap between social and cultural history and the history of art, untangling the threads of art, politics, and religion during the time of the Thirty Years' War. A prolific painter, Guercino enjoyed the patronage of such luminaries as Pope Gregory XV, Cardinals Serra, Ludovisi, Spada, and Magalotti, and the French secretary of state La Vrilliere. While scholarly research has been devoted to Guercino's oeuvre, this book is the first to place his works squarely in the context of the political and social circumstances of seventeenth-century Italy, stressing the points of view and agendas of his powerful patrons. What were once meanings only apparent to the educated elite"or those familiar with the political affairs of the time"are now scrutinized and clarified for an audience far from the struggles of early modern Europe.

Focusing on four Rubens paintings created between 1610 and 1620 - Prometheus Bound, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, Juno and Argus, and The Finding of Erichthonius - this book re-examines the artist's approach to classical mythology. These theoretically-informed readings provide a fuller understanding of the dynamics of Rubens's copious visual language, and can serve as methodological templates for looking at, and reading of, many other of his complex inventions. Even by the standards of erudition commonly applied to Rubens's oeuvre as a whole, these four paintings were created during a period characterized by a particularly intense engagement on his part with questions of artistic originality and ideal style. Furthermore, the learned themes of these images clearly point to a rarefied audience that could appreciate the intertextual qualities of ancient myths. Like the artist himself, these ideal beholders cultivated a mode of viewing steeped in classical and renaissance theories of literary and rhetorical composition. Thus through these close readings, the author illuminates the manner in which the rhetorical and poetic conventions of the period, as well as the growing appreciation for the various allegorical layers of fables, lead to a better understanding of Rubens's pictorial archaeology of classical myths.

The startling conclusion of The Late Paintings of Velazquez is that Diego Velazquez painted two of his most famous works, The Spinners and Las Meninas, as theoretically informed manifestos of painterly brushwork. As a pair, Giles Knox argues, the two paintings form a learned retort to the prevailing critical disdain for the painterly. Knox presents a Velazquez who was much more aware of the art theory of his era than previously acknowledged, leading him to reinterpret Las Meninas and The Spinners as representing together a polemically charged celebration of the "handedness" of painting. Knox removes Velazquez from his Iberian isolation and seeks to recover his highly self-conscious attempt to carve out a place for himself within the history of European painting as a whole. The Late Paintings of Velazquez presents an artist who, like Annibale Carracci, Poussin, Rembrandt, and Vermeer was not only aware of contemporary theoretical writings on art, but also able to translate that knowledge and understanding into a distinctive and personal theory of painting. In Las Meninas and The Spinners, Velazquez propounded this theory with paint, not words. Knox's rethinking of the dynamic relationship between text and image presents a case, not of writing influencing painting, or vice versa, but of the two realms being inextricably bound together. Painterly brushwork presented a challenge to writers on art not just because it was connected too intimately with the base actions of the hand; it was also devilishly hard to describe. By reading Velazquez's painterly performance as text, Knox deciphers how Velazquez was able to craft theoretical arguments more compelling and more vivid than any written counterparts.

The question whether or not seventeenthcentury painters such as Rembrandt and Rubens created the paintings which were later sold under their names, has caused many a heated debate. Much is still unknown about the ways in which paintings were produced, assessed, priced, and marketed. For example, did contemporary connoisseurs expect masters such as Rembrandt to paint their works entirely by their own hand? Who was credited with the ability to assess paintings? How did a painting's price relate to its quality? And how did connoisseurship change as the art market became increasingly complex? The contributors to this essential volume trace the evolution of connoisseurship in the booming art market of the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries. Among them are the renowned Golden Age scholars Eric Jan Sluijter, Hans Van Miegroet and Neil De Marchi. It is not to be missed by anyone with an interest in the Old Masters and the early modern art market.

Once described as 'England's Apollo' James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos (1674-1744) was an outstanding patron of the arts during the first half of the eighteenth century. Having acquired great wealth and influence as Paymaster-General of Queen Anne's forces abroad, Chandos commissioned work from leading artists, architects, poets and composers including Godfrey Kneller, William Talman, Sir John Vanbrugh, Sir James Thornhill, John Gay and George Frederick Handel. Despite his associations with such renowned figures, Chandos soon gained a reputation for tasteless extravagance. This reputation was not helped by the publication in 1731 of Alexander Pope's poem 'Of Taste' which was widely regarded as a satire upon Chandos and Cannons, the new house he was building near Edgware. The poem destroyed Chandos's reputation as a patron of the arts and ensured that he was remembered as a man lacking in taste. Yet, as this book shows, such a judgement is plainly unfair when the Duke's patronage is considered in more depth and understood within the artistic context of his age. By investigating the patronage and collections of the Duke, through an examination of documentary sources and contemporary accounts, it is possible to paint a very different picture of the man. Rather than the epitome of bad taste described by his enemies, it is clear that Chandos was an enlightened patron who embraced new ideas, and strove to establish a taste for the Palladian in England, which was to define the Georgian era.

Examined here is the historical figure and architectural patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan, the young mother of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV, who for most of the latter half of the seventeenth century shaped the political and cultural agenda of the Ottoman court. Captured in Russia at the age of twelve, she first served the reigning sultan's mother in Istanbul. She gradually rose through the ranks of the Ottoman harem, bore a male child to Sultan Ibrahim, and came to power as a valide sultan, or queen mother, in 1648. It was through her generous patronage of architectural works-including a large mosque, a tomb, a market complex in the city of Istanbul and two fortresses at the entrance to the Dardanelles-that she legitimated her new political authority as a valide and then attempted to support that of her son. Central to this narrative is the question of how architecture was used by an imperial woman of the Ottoman court who, because of customary and religious restrictions, was unable to present her physical self before her subjects' gaze. In lieu of displaying an iconic image of herself, as Queen Elizabeth and Catherine de Medici were able to do, Turhan Sultan expressed her political authority and religious piety through the works of architecture she commissioned. Traditionally historians have portrayed the role of seventeenth-century royal Ottoman women in the politics of the empire as negative and de-stabilizing. But Thys-Senocak, through her examination of these architectural works as concrete expressions of legitimate power and piety, shows the traditional framework to be both sexist and based on an outdated paradigm of decline. Thys-Senocak's research on Hadice Turhan Sultan's two Ottoman fortresses of SeddA1/4lbahir and Kumkale improves in a significant way our understanding of early modern fortifications in the eastern Mediterranean region and will spark further research on many of the Ottoman fortifications built in the area. Plans and elevations of the fortresses are published and analysed here for the first time. Based on archival research, including letters written by the queen mother, many of which are published here for the first time, and archaeological fieldwork, her work is also informed by recent theoretical debates in the fields of art history, cultural history and gender studies.

Art in Britain 1660-1815 presents the first social history of British art from the period known as the long 18th century, and offers a fresh and challenging look at the major developments in painting, drawing, and printmaking that took place during this period. It describes how an embryonic London art world metamorphosed into a flourishing community of native and immigrant practitioners, whose efforts ultimately led to the rise of a British School deemed worthy of comparison with its European counterparts. Within this larger narrative are authoritative accounts of the achievements of celebrated artists such as Peter Lely, William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, and J.M.W. Turner. David H. Solkin has interwoven their stories and many others into a critical analysis of how visual culture reinforced, and on occasion challenged, established social hierarchies and prevailing notions of gender, class, and race as Britain entered the modern age. More than 300 artworks, accompanied by detailed analysis, beautifully illustrate how Britain's transformation into the world's foremost commercial and imperial power found expression in the visual arts, and how the arts shaped the nation in return.

In the rural plateaux of northern Ethiopia, one can still find scattered ruins of monumental buildings that are evidently alien to the country's ancient architectural tradition. This little-known and rarely studied architectural heritage is a silent witness to a fascinating if equivocal cultural encounter that took place in the 16th-17th centuries between Catholic Europeans and Orthodox Ethiopians. The Indigenous and the Foreign in Christian Ethiopian Art presents a selection of papers derived from the 5th Conference on the History of Ethiopian Art, which for the first time systematically approached this heritage. The book explores the enduring impact of this encounter on the artistic, religious and political life of Ethiopia, an impact that has not been readily acknowledged, not least because the public conversion of the early 17th-century Emperor SusA-nyus to Catholicism resulted in a bloody civil war shrouded in religious intolerance. Bringing together work by key researchers in the field, these studies open up a particularly rich period in the history of Ethiopia and cast new light on the complexities of cultural and religious (mis)encounters between Africa and Europe.

16 essays by a group of internationally acclaimed authors help contribute to a clearer perception of the complex facets of Jacob Jordaens' oeuvre -- and moreover to distinguish it from the works of Rubens, van Dyck, and his contemporaries. The title "Genius of Grand Scale" refers to the spectrum from history to genre as well as to Jordaens' preference for large formats. The greatness of the artist Jacob Jordaens needs to be emphasized, since even though he outlived Rubens for four whole decades, he was never able to escape from under his shadow. By reference to iconographic and iconological studies, single works are identified and presented in a broad review and the long, in many aspects fragmentary reception of his artistic work also forms a large part of the interpretations presented here. Furthermore, technical examinations of paintings assist in defining more precisely how they were generated.This overdue volume presents essential reading for anyone interested in Jacob Jordaens.

The relationship between music and painting in the Early Modern period is the focus of this collection of essays by an international group of distinguished art historians and musicologists. Each writer takes a multidisciplinary approach as he or she explores the interface between music performance and painting, or between music and art theory. The essays reflect a variety and range of approaches and offer methodologies which might usefully be employed in future research in this field. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Franca Trinchieri Camiz, an art historian who worked extensively on topics related to art and music, and who participated in some of the conference panels from which many of these essays originate. Three of Professor Camiz's own essays are included in the final section of this volume, together with a bibliography of her writings in this field. They are preceded by two thematic groups of essays covering aspects of musical imagery in portraits, issues in iconography and theory, and the relationship between music and art in religious imagery.

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.

Weyerman's collection of artists' biographies (1729) is exceptional for three reasons. Firstly, he includes a great number of painters not mentioned elsewhere. Secondly, he does not limit his selection to good artists only; he also discusses failed painters and their abortive careers. Thirdly, he writes as an art critic who does not hesitate to pass judgments, sometimes severe, on his chosen subjects. In the process, Weyerman provides much information on the social and economic circumstances of art production. He found that a bohemian lifestyle was pernicious to a painter's career, and argued that artists should live and think as merchants. In addition to analyzing Weyerman's art critical terminology and his ideas on art theory, De Vries includes translations of two full chapters along with the original Dutch.

The term 'versified prints' is used to describe images that are accompanied by poetic explanatory text. They were immensely popular and diffused throughout Europe in the eighteenth century, and many were shown at the Salon du Louvre. Although not all print verses are signed, their authors include occasional poets and members of the Academie Francaise. These prints remain among the most accessible documents for the study of art and society, but have never been examined before for their historical and cultural context.

With 112 full-page reproductions, Versified Prints offers an engaging and informative introduction to these intriguing works. W. McAllister Johnson's guide discusses print production, the nature of sources, and the relationship and transformations in both text and images. Proposing a typology and methodology for this artistic phenomenon, Versified Prints enhances our knowledge of this fascinating new area of research and lays the groundwork for future studies.

The fruits of knowledge--such as books, data, and ideas--tend to generate far more attention than the ways in which knowledge is produced and acquired. Correcting this imbalance, "Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe" brings together a wide-ranging yet tightly integrated series of essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit.
Composed by scholars in disciplines ranging from the history of science to art history to religious studies, the pieces collected here look at the production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within many different communities. They focus, in particular, on how the methods employed by scientists and intellectuals came to interact with the practices of craftspeople and practitioners to create new ways of knowing. Examining the role of texts, reading habits, painting methods, and countless other forms of knowledge making, this volume brilliantly illuminates the myriad ways these processes affected and were affected by the period's monumental shifts in culture and learning.

Inspired by the recent identification of a third autograph version of Gainsborough's masterpiece The Cottage Door, this book examines the significance of the multiple versions of designs that the artist produced during the 1780s. It demonstrates that without the pressure of exhibiting his work annually at the Academy and without a string of sitters waiting for their finished portraits, Gainsborough's work became more personal, more thoughtful. This study of the last phase of the artist's work is a totally fresh interpretation of not only The Cottage Door but other key works such as Mrs Sheridan and Diana and Acteon. Gainsborough's creative energies changed around 1780. He became restless and wanted to promote his landscape painting more effectively. He started to paint coastal scenes using an innovative painting technique to depict the water and he embarked on a series of`fancy' pictures that he would position him as a descendant of an Old Master tradition. He was never happy with the constraints of the Royal Academy and he was at odds with the dictatorial opinions promoted by its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Removing himself from the Academy enabled him finally to do what he wanted. He began to turn to portrait compositions that he had developed and refined over a number of years. With subtle alterations they could be made suitable for a variety of sitters. The subtlety of his skilled observation was less easy to accommodate in standard-sized full-length canvases and in these portraits he sometimes resorted to rhetoric gesture that fought against the closely observed likenesses in his best portraits. The margin between`fancy' pictures and portraits became blurred and the categorization of some of these paintings changed while they were on the easel. Always finding composition difficult, rather than begin something new he often revisited earlier designs that had pleased him. He would paint them again and make slight changes of tone and emphasis that would radically change the concept and intention of the design. The subject matter in some of his late paintings veers towards the autobiographical and shows a certain rift between him and his family.

The DeMell Jacobsen Collection of paintings and sculpture—an assemblage rich in American cultural heritage—parallels the development of art in the United States. American Made features some of the country’s most recognized artists: Thomas Cole, John Kensett, Asher B. Durand and William Trost Richards, while works by Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam, Willard Leroy Metcalf and William Merritt Chase represent the Grand Tour and concepts gained abroad. Wonderful still lifes appear throughout the collection, including paintings by Severin Roesen, William Harnett and a late work by William Bailey. Portraiture is represented in stellar examples by members of the Peale family, Thomas Sully, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent and Edmund Charles Tarbell. Classically-inspired marble works from Hiram Powers and Randolph Rogers, bronze pieces from Paul Manship and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and a modern copper and bronze example from Harry Bertoia are highlights of the sculpture collection. Early modernist and interwar works by Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Emil Bisttram, Paul Cadmus and Joseph Stella explore colour, form and abstraction. Highlights of contemporary art include works by Frank Stella, Louise Nevelson and a recently acquired painting by Alexis Rockman. Fully illustrated—with several paintings including profiles of their appropriate period frames—each work of art features an extended entry with full specifications, information on style and stylistic influences, significance and social context.

The artist and scientist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) was born in Frankfurt, Germany, into a middle-class family of publishers and artists. With her meticulous depictions of insect metamorphosis, she raised the standards of natural history illustration and helped give birth to the field of entomology. At the age of fifty-two, Merian traveled with her younger daughter to Suriname, a Dutch territory in South America, to paint its exotic flora and fauna.
Many of the drawings produced by Merian in the South American jungle were later published as hand-colored engravings in her book Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname (1705), which brought her widespread fame. A copy of the second edition is held in the collections of the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute.
Insects and Flowers, a delightful gift book that reproduces vivid color details of sixteen plates from the Getty's copy, is a vibrant encapsulation of Merian's book and features an engaging essay on Merian's life and work as well as an insect and plant identification guide. An exhibition of Merian's work will be on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from June 10 through August 31, 2008.

By scrutinizing every possible Persian and European written source on the subject, Negar Habibi discusses the paintings known as farangi saz, and in particular those of 'Ali Qoli Jebadar, one of Iran's most important Safavid artists of the 2nd half of the 17th century. En resserrant plusieurs sources ecrites persanes et europeennes, Negar Habibi discute des peintures connues sous le nom de farangi sazi, specialement celles de 'Ali Qoli Jebadar, l'un des artistes emblematiques de la 2eme moitie du XVIIe siecle.

Hans Holbein the Younger's life is discovered through his artworks, his family, his patrons and the people who met him. Born into a family of talented artists, Holbein learnt to be a draughtsman, a painter, a portraitist, and a designer for woodcuts. What could not be taught was his remarkable skill as a portrait painter. From an Augsburg workshop as a youth, he would achieve high status as Painter to the King at the English court of Henry VIII. Holbein had a talent to engage with his clients, proven by repeated commissions. He could capture a moment in time, from Erasmus sitting in his study in Basel, to rich Hanseatic merchants seated in their London offices. His gift as a painter was grounded in a sound knowledge of pigments, practical costings and time required to complete a work. In his lifetime he created a unique portfolio of ground-breaking art, predominantly in portraiture. This glorious and comprehensive volume is both a biography and gallery of his work