Quid est secretum? Visual Representation of Secrets in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 is the companion volume to Intersections 65.1, Quid est sacramentum? Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1700. Whereas the latter volume focused on sacramental mysteries, the current one examines a wider range of secret subjects. The book examines how secret knowledge was represented visually in ways that both revealed and concealed the true nature of that knowledge, giving and yet impeding access to it. In the early modern period, the discursive and symbolical sites for the representation of secrets were closely related to epistemic changes that transformed conceptions of the transmissibility of knowledge. Contributors: Monika Biel, Alicja Bielak, C. Jean Campbell, Tom Conley, Ralph Dekoninck, Peter G.F. Eversmann, Ingrid Falque, Agnes Guiderdoni, Koenraad Jonckheere, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Stephanie Leitch, Carme Lopez Calderon, Mark A. Meadow, Walter S. Melion, Eelco Nagelsmit, Lars Cyril Norgaard, Alexandra Onuf, Bret L. Rothstein, Xavier Vert, Madeleine C. Viljoen, Mara R. Wade, Lee Palmer Wandel, and Caecilie Weissert.

This is an accessibly written, illustrated biography of Venetian painter Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757), one of the most famous women artists in 18th-century Europe. It presents an overview of her life and work, considering Carriera's miniatures alongside her better-known, larger-scale works. Focusing on interpretation of her paintings in the historical context of her life as a single woman in Venice, the book offers an easy guide through Carrieras life, the people she met, her clients and her artistic approach. The author's new iconographic analysis of some of Carriera's works reveals that she was an erudite painter, drawing on antiquity as well as the work of Renaissance virtuosos such as Leonardo da Vinci and Paolo Veronese.

Elisabetta Sirani of Bologna (1638-1665) was one of the most innovative and prolific artists of the Bolognese School. Not only a painter, she was also a printmaker and a teacher. Based on extensive archival documentation and primary sources — including inventories, sale catalogues and her work diary — Elisabetta Sirani provides an overview of the life, work, critical fortune and legacy of this successful Baroque artist. Placing her within the context of the post-Tridentine society that both inhibited and supported her, Modesti examines Sirani's influence on many of the artists studying at Bologna's school for professional women artists, as well as her significance in the professionalisation of women’s artistic practice in the seventeenth century. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Elisabetta Sirani focuses on women’s agency. More specifically, it explores Sirani’s identity as both a woman and an artist, including her professional ambition, self-fashioning and literary construction as Bologna’s pre-eminent cultural heroine.

Building or rebuilding their houses was one of the main concerns of the English nobility and gentry, some might say their greatest achievement. This is the first book to look at the building of country houses as a whole. Creating Paradise shows why owners embarked on building programmes, often following the Grand Tour or excursions around other houses in England; where they looked for architectural inspiration and assistance; and how the building work was actually done. It deals not only with great houses, including Holkham and Castle Howard, but also the diversity of smaller ones, such as Felbrigg and Dyrham, and shows the cost not only of building but of decorating and furnishing houses and of making their gardens. Creating Paradise is an important and original contribution to its subject and a highly readable account of the attitude of the English ruling class to its most important possession.

Fuseli's Milton Gallery challenges the antipictorial theories and canons of Romantic period culture. Between 1791 and 1799 Swiss painter Henry Fuseli turned Milton's Paradise Lost into a series of 40 pictures. Fuseli's project and other literary galleries developed within an expanding market for illustrated books and a culture of anthologization used to reading British and other 'classics' in terms of the visualization of key moments in the text. Thus transformed into repositories of virtual pictures literary texts became ideal sources of subjects for painters. Illustrating British literature was a way of inventing a national 'grand style' to fit the needs of a consumer society. Cale calls into question the separation of reading and viewing as autonomous aesthetic practices. To 'turn readers into spectators' meant to place readers and reading within the dizzying world of associations offered by an emerging culture of exhibitions. Attending to the energized reading effects developed by Fuseli's Gallery we rediscover a new side of the Romantic imagination which is not the solitary mentalist experience preferred by Wordsworth and Coleridge, nor divorced from the senses, let alone a refuge from the crowded public spaces of the Revolutionary period. Rather, Fuseli's embodied aesthetic exemplifies the associationist psychology espoused by the radical circle convening around the publisher Joseph Johnson, including Joseph Priestley and Mary Wollstonecraft. This book analyses exhibitions as important sites of Romantic sociability and one of many interrelated mediums for the literature, debates and controversies of the Revolutionary period.

Although women painters and sculptors have often been the focus of academic research, they have not been fully integrated into traditional lower-division art history surveys. Politically Incorrect: Women Artists and Female Imagery in Early Modern Europe celebrates women who met the challenge of being female professionals and succeeded as artists at a time when such accomplishments were not expected or encouraged. Concentrating on social history as well as the history of art, the book inspires students to think about the context in which the women of Early Modern Europe lived. Part I focuses on creativity and the creative process. Part II is chronologically based and examines women artists of the latter Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, and 18th century. Part III is thematically constructed and investigates female imagery and how women were perceived. Developed and class-tested for 30 years, the materials in the text enhance and amplify views of women and female artists. Politically Incorrect can be used as the basis for art history courses of the Renaissance and Baroque. It can also be employed at higher levels as an introduction to more scholarly research on the topic. Additionally, the book is an excellent supplement to many women's studies, gender studies, and early modern European history courses.

Salomon de Caus has been viewed as, variously, a Protestant martyr, the unsung inventor of the steam engine, one of the most important early hydraulic engineers, and a garden designer whose work was influenced by astrology and hermeticism. The first comprehensive book on this protean figure, Nature as Model sifts through historical material, Caus's own writings, and his extant landscape designs to determine what is fact and what is fiction in the life of this polymathic and prolific figure. In doing so, it clarifies numerous hitherto unresolved problems in his biography and historiography. As Luke Morgan shows, Caus made important contributions to some of the most significant landscape projects of his period, including the gardens of Coudenberg Palace in Brussels, Richmond Palace, Hatfield House, Somerset House, Greenwich Palace in London, as well as, most famously, the Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg, which he designed for the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, and his wife, Elisabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England. In his work, Caus drew on his intimate knowledge of the late sixteenth-century Italian garden, and through his commissions the design principles and motifs of the late Renaissance garden were transmitted across Europe. The book is a masterful exercise in historical reconstruction, showing how Caus has been read by subsequent generations intent on nationalism, romance, or magic. Morgan investigates the ways in which the early modern garden actually generated meaning through conventional motifs rather than through esoteric narrative programs.

In The Portrait Bust and French Cultural Politics in the Eighteenth Century, Ronit Milano probes the rich and complex aesthetic and intellectual charge of a remarkably concise art form, and explores its role as a powerful agent of epistemological change during one of the most seismic moments in French history. The pre-Revolutionary portrait bust was inextricably tied to the formation of modern selfhood and to the construction of individual identity during the Enlightenment, while positioning both sitters and viewers as part of a collective of individuals who together formed French society. In analyzing the contribution of the portrait bust to the construction of interiority and the formulation of new gender roles and political ideals, this book touches upon a set of concerns that constitute the very core of our modernity.

Disillusioned with London life and struggling to make a living, Blake and his wife Catherine went in 1800 to live at the coastal village of Felpham, which the artist soon described as "the sweetest spot on earth". Providing his principal encounters with both English rural life and the coast, the artist's three years "on the banks of the ocean" informed his two greatest illustrated epic poems, Milton and Jerusalem, and continued to be refl ected in his work for the rest of his career: "In Felpham", claimed Blake, "I saw and heard Visions of Albion". In addition to the work associated with Felpham, this publication considers the collections of nearby Petworth House, which include three major paintings by Blake - otherwise unrepresented in other grand houses of Britain - along with related prints, books and archival material. The authors will examine the relationships formed by Blake in Sussex, particularly with the poet William Hayley, the sculptor John Flaxman, the 3rd Earl of Egremont (one of the great collectors of contemporary art in the early 19th century) and his estranged wife Elizabeth Ilive, who commissioned two of the three paintings now in Petworth. Blake's work for Hayley, often dismissed as illustrative and decorative, will be reappraised, and other projects he worked on in Sussex - including remarkable biblical watercolours produced for his great London patron, Thomas Butts - will be celebrated. Blake's infamous arrest and trial for sedition - chief among the events profoundly aff ecting him in Sussex - will be discussed. It is not widely known that Blake was tried fi rst in Petworth, where he was vouched for by the 3rd Earl.

This collection brings together art historians, museum professionals, conservators, and conservation scientists whose work involves Rembrandt van Rijn and associated artists such as Gerrit Dou, Jan Lievens, and Ferdinand Bol. The range of subjects considered is wide: from the presentation of convincing evidence that Rembrandt and his contemporary Frans Hals rubbed elbows in the Amsterdam workshop of Hendrick Uylenburgh to critical reassessments of the role of printmaking in Rembrandt's studio, his competition with Lievens as a landscape painter, his reputation as a collector, and much more. Developed from a series of international conferences devoted to charting new directions in Rembrandt research, these essays illuminate the current state of Rembrandt studies and suggest avenues for future inquiry.

In the mid- to late seventeenth century, a number of Dutch painters created a new type of refined genre painting that was much admired by elite collectors. In this book, Angela Ho uses the examples of Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, and Frans van Mieris to show how this group of artists made creative use of repetition-such as crafting virtuosic, self-referential compositions around signature motifs, or engaging esteemed predecessors in a competitive dialogue through emulation-to project a distinctive artistic personality. The resulting paintings enabled purchasers and viewers to exercise their connoisseurial eye and claim membership in an exclusive circle of sophisticated enthusiasts-making creative repetition a successful strategy for both artists and viewers.

As queen consort and dowager, Hedwig Eleonora (1636-1715) held a unique position in Sweden for more than half a century. As the dominant collector and patron of art and architecture in the realm, she left a strong mark on Swedish court culture. Her dynastic network among the Northern European courts was extensive, and this helped to make Sweden a major cultural center in Northern Europe in the later seventeenth century. This book represents the first major scholarly publication on the full range of Hedwig Eleonora's endeavours, from the financing of her court to her place within a larger princely network, to her engagements with various cultural pursuits, to her public image. As the contributors show, despite her high profile, political position, and conspicuous patronage, Hedwig Eleonora experienced little of the animosity directed at many other foreign queens and regents, such as the Medici in France and Henrietta Maria in England. In this way, she provides a model for a different and more successful way of negotiating the difficulties of joining a foreign court; the analysis of her circumstances thus adds a substantial dimension to the study of early modern queenship. Presenting much new scholarship, this volume highlights one extremely significant early modern woman and her imprint on Northern European history, and fosters international awareness of the importance of early modern Scandinavia for European cultural history.

The first genuinely interdisciplinary study of creativity in early modern England In the seventeenth century, the concept of creativity was far removed from most of the fundamental ideas about the creative act - notions of human imagination, inspiration, originality and genius - that developed in the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries. Instead, in this period, students learned their crafts by copying and imitating past masters and did not consciously seek to break away from tradition. Most new material was made on the instructions of apatron and had to conform to external expectations; and basic tenets that we tend to take for granted-such as the primacy and individuality of the author-were apparently considered irrelevant in some contexts. The aim of this interdisciplinary collection of essays is to explore what it meant to create buildings and works of art, music and literature in seventeenth-century England and to investigate the processes by which such creations came into existence. Through a series of specific case studies, the book highlights a wide range of ideas, beliefs and approaches to creativity that existed in seventeenth-century England and places them in the context of the prevailing intellectual, social and cultural trends of the period. In so doing, it draws into focus the profound changes that were emerging in the understanding of human creativity in early modern society - transformations that would eventually lead to the development of a more recognisably modern conception of the notion of creativity. The contributors work in and across the fields of literary studies, history, musicology, history of art and history of architecture, and their work collectively explores many of the most fundamental questions about creativity posed by the early modern English 'creative arts'. REBECCA HERISSONE is Head of Music and Senior Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Manchester. ALAN HOWARD is Lecturer in Music at the University of East Anglia and Reviews Editor for Eighteenth-Century Music. Contributors: Linda Phyllis Austern, Stephanie Carter, John Cunningham, Marina Daiman, Kirsten Gibson, Raphael Hallett, Rebecca Herissone, Anne Hultzsch, Freyja Cox Jensen, Stephen Rose, Andrew R. Walkling, Amanda Eubanks Winkler, James A. Winn.

The papers in this volume offer a wide range of examples of how historians, writers, playwrights, and painters in the early modern period focused on classical antiquity as a source from which they could recreate the past as a way of understanding and legitimizing the present. This publication has also been published in hardback, please click here for details.

Jonathan Richardson (1667-1745) was one of 18th-century England's most significant cultural figures. A leading portrait painter and influential art theorist, he also amassed one of the period's greatest collections of drawings. But there was another, highly unusual dimension to his pursuits. In 1728, at the age of 61 and shortly before his retirement from professional life, Richardson began to create a remarkable series of self-portrait drawings. Not intended for public display, these works were unguarded explorations of his own character. In one of the most astonishing projects of self-examination ever undertaken by an artist, for over a decade Richardson repeatedly drew his own face. His self-portrait drawings are usually dated precisely, and they document, from month to month, his changing state of mind as much as his appearance. Many were drawn in chalks on large sheets of blue paper, from his reflection in the mirror. Some of these are bold and psychologically penetrating, while others, in which he regards his ageing features with gentle but unflinching scrutiny, are deeply touching. A further group of self-portraits is drawn with graphite on small sheets of fine vellum, and in these Richardson often presents himself in inventive and humorous ways, such as in profile, all'antica, as though on the face of a coin or medal; or crowned with bays, like a celebrated poet. Sometimes, too, he copies his image from oil paintings made decades earlier, in order to recall his appearance as a younger man. In this extraordinary series of self-portraits, Richardson offers a candid insight into his mind and personality. Together, these drawings create nothing less than a unique and compelling visual autobiography. This publication - which accompanies the first ever exhibition devoted to Richardson's self-portrait drawings, held in the new Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery at the Courtauld - tells the story of these remarkable works Jonathan Richardson (1667-1745) was one of 18th-century England's most significant cultural figures. A leading portrait painter and influential art theorist, he also amassed one of the period's greatest collections of drawings. But there was another, highly unusual dimension to his pursuits. In 1728, at the age of 61 and shortly before his retirement from professional life, Richardson began to create a remarkable series of self-portrait drawings. Not intended for public display, these works were unguarded explorations of his own character. In one of the most astonishing projects of self-examination ever undertaken by an artist, for over a decade Richardson repeatedly drew his own face. His self-portrait drawings are usually dated precisely, and they document, from month to month, his changing state of mind as much as his appearance. Many were drawn in chalks on large sheets of blue paper, from his reflection in the mirror. Some of these are bold and psychologically penetrating, while others, in which he regards his ageing features with gentle but unflinching scrutiny, are deeply touching. A further group of self-portraits is drawn with graphite on small sheets of fine vellum, and in these Richardson often presents himself in inventive and humorous ways, such as in profile, all'antica, as though on the face of a coin or medal; or crowned with bays, like a celebrated poet. Sometimes, too, he copies his image from oil paintings made decades earlier, in order to recall his appearance as a younger man. In this extraordinary series of self-portraits, Richardson offers a candid insight into his mind and personality. Together, these drawings create nothing less than a unique and compelling visual autobiography. This publication - which accompanies the first ever exhibition devoted to Richardson's self-portrait drawings, held in the new Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery at the Courtauld - tells the story of these remarkable works and puts them into the context of his other activities at this period of his life - in particular the self-searching poems he wrote during the same years and often on the same days as he made the drawings. An introductory essay is followed by focused discussions of each work in the exhibition. This part of the book explores the materials and techniques Richardson used, whether working in chalks on a large scale or creating exquisitely refined drawings on vellum. It will also reveal how Richardson modeled some of his portraits on old master prints and drawings, including works in his own collection by Rembrandt and Bernini. The publication brings together the Courtauld Gallery's fine collection of Richardson's drawings with key works in the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Fitzwilliam Museum.

In the past decade, there has been a surge of Anglophone scholarship regarding Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which has led to a reframing of the discourses around Spanish culture of this period. Despite this new interest-in which painting, in particular, has been singled out for treatment-a comprehensive study of sculpture collections and the status of sculpture in Spain has yet to be produced. Sculpture Collections in Early Modern Spain is the first book to assess the phenomenon of sculpture collecting and in doing so, it alters the previously held notion that Spanish society placed little value in this art form. Di Dio and Coppel reveal that, due to the problems and expense of their transport from Italy, sculptures were in fact status symbols in the culture. Thus they were an important component of the collections formed by the royal family, cultivated noble collectors, humanists, and artists who had pretensions of high status. This book is especially useful to specialists for its discussion of the typologies of collections and objects, and of the mechanics of state gifts, transport, and collection display in this period. An appendix presents extensive archival documentation, most of which has never before been published. The authors have uncovered hundreds of new documents about sculpture in Spain; and new documentary evidence allows them to propose several new identifications and attributions. Firmly grounded in extensive archival research, Sculpture Collections in Early Modern Spain redefines the socio-political and art historical importance of sculpture in early modern Spain. Most importantly, it entirely transforms our knowledge regarding the presence of sculpture in a wide range of Spanish collections of the period, which until now has been erroneously characterized as close to non-existent.

Early American painter Gilbert Stuart has long been mistakenly represented as a hard-drinking rogue, habitual liar, and inexplicable financial failure. To explain his stylistic unevenness as an artist, he is assumed to have had an inferior assistant, but the documentary evidence for an assistant who painted on his portraits is non-existent-in fact, there is evidence to the contrary. This ground-breaking study demonstrates that Stuart suffered from a hereditary form of manic depression, leading him to create pictures that contain peculiar lapses characteristic of a manic-depressive, or bipolar, artist. Using documentary and empirical evidence-from diaries and letters to x-radiographs of paintings-this book fills important gaps in our knowledge of Stuart, and connects the strange visual effects in some of Stuart's paintings with cognitive deficits attendant with the disorder. In addition to Stuart, other bipolar artists, including George Romney, Raphaelle Peale, Gilbert Stuart Newton, and William Rimmer, are discussed in relation to these deficits, revealing patterns which carry broader implications for all manic-depressive artists. This volume is a significant contribution not only to studies of Stuart and the four other painters but also to our understanding of the mind of a manic-depressive artist. It bridges the broad disciplines of art history and psychopathology.

Using Pieter de Marees' Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea (1602) as her main source material, author Elizabeth Sutton brings to bear approaches from the disciplines of art history and book history to explore the context in which De Marees' account was created. Since variations of the images and text were repeated in other European travel collections and decorated maps, Sutton is able to trace how the framing of text and image shaped the formation of knowledge that continued to be repeated and distilled in later European depictions of Africans. She reads the engravings in De Marees' account as a demonstration of the intertwining domains of the Dutch pictorial tradition, intellectual inquiry, and Dutch mercantilism. At the same time, by analyzing the marketing tactics of the publisher, Cornelis Claesz, this study illuminates how early modern epistemological processes were influenced by the commodification of knowledge. Sutton examines the book's construction and marketing to shed new light on the social milieus that shared interests in ethnography, trade, and travel. Exploring how the images and text function together, Sutton suggests that Dutch visual and intellectual traditions informed readers' choices for translating De Marees' text visually. Through the examination of early modern Dutch print culture, Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa expands the boundaries of our understanding of the European imperial enterprise.

This is the story of the forging of a national cultural institution in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. The Royal Academy of Arts was the dominant art school and exhibition society in London and a model for art societies across the British Isles and North America. This is the first study of its early years, re-evaluating the Academy's significance in national cultural life and its profile in an international context. Holger Hoock reassesses royal and state patronage of the arts and explores the concepts and practices of cultural patriotism and the politicization of art during the American and French Revolutions. By demonstrating how the Academy shaped the notions of an English and British school of art and influenced the emergence of the British cultural state, he illuminates the politics of national culture and the character of British public life in an age of war, revolution, and reform.

During the eighteenth century, porcelain held significant cultural and artistic importance. This collection represents one of the first thorough scholarly attempts to explore the diversity of the medium's cultural meanings. Among the volume's purposes is to expose porcelain objects to the analytical and theoretical rigor which is routinely applied to painting, sculpture and architecture, and thereby to reposition eighteenth-century porcelain within new and more fruitful interpretative frameworks. The authors also analyze the aesthetics of porcelain and its physical characteristics, particularly the way its tactile and visual qualities reinforced and challenged the social processes within which porcelain objects were viewed, collected, and used. The essays in this volume treat objects such as figurines representing British theatrical celebrities, a boxwood and ebony figural porcelain stand, works of architecture meant to approximate porcelain visually, porcelain flowers adorning objects such as candelabra and perfume burners, and tea sets decorated with unusual designs. The geographical areas covered in the collection include China, North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, Britain, America, Japan, Austria, and Holland.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn was the leading painter and graphic artist of the 'Golden Age of Dutch Art'. He excelled in imbuing his art with the 'deepest and most lifelike emotion', with rich detail and stunning lighting. This richly enjoyable book gives the reader an illuminating overview of the life, work and influences of the artist, before going on to showcase the most stunning and varied examples of his oeuvre, broken down into themes - Portraits, Landscape & Narrative, Self-portraits, and Etchings & Drawings. Discover his versatility in the range of works selected, from the electric The Storm on the Sea of Galilee to the treasured The Night Watch, with its triumph in chiaroscuro and energy. A visual feast, it will underline the artist's status as a true master.