In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy (with a focus on Kant), nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world.

The volume examines the mutually constitutive relationship between the materiality of objects and their aesthetic meanings. Its approach connects material culture with art history, curation, technologies and practices of making. A central dimension of the case studies collected here is the mobility of objects between Europe and China and the transformations that unfold as a result of their transcultural lives. Many of the objects studied here are relatively unknown or understudied. The stories they recount suggest new ways of thinking about space, cultural geographies and the complex and often contradictory association of power and culture. These studies of transcultural objects can suggest pathways for museum experts by uncovering the multi-layered identities and temporalities of objects that can no longer be labelled as located in single regions. It is also addressed to students of art history, of European and Chinese studies and scholars of consumer culture. " This eagerly awaited volume offers deep and extensive insights into the fast-growing field of material culture studies. Its fresh approach to Eurasian objects and materialities will serve as useful reading for all scholars interested in transcultural and global studies. A very helpful introductory essay. " Sabine du Crest, University of Bordeaux Montaigne, Former Fellow, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

This handsome catalogue accompanies an exhibition celebrating the bicentenary of the 60-year reign of King George III. It presents one mezzotint portrait for each year of his reign. Mad about Mezzotint traces the history of mezzotint in the reign of King George III by looking at three aspects of the art form: the astonishing method of mezzotint, the absorbing history of the form in the late eighteenth century and Regency period and the endless fascination with London as a subject. Although the mezzotint originated in Germany as early as 1642, its golden age came in England in the eighteenth century. Its beauty lay in its ability to create the subtlety of tone found in an oil painting. Crowds marvelled at the new technique and seized upon the opportunity to popularize their work and disseminate their images more widely. Conditions in eighteenth-century London were ripe for this revolution in printing. England had a new king and queen on the throne, an ever-expanding court and flourishing commercial interests overseas. The city of London was expanding at an astonishing rate and money was pouring into the capital. This fully illustrated publication includes an introduction on the history of mezzotint and full catalogue of the works, as well as indexes of artists and persons depicted. Artists featured include Valentine Green, John Hoppner, John Jones, Joshua Reynolds, George Romney and Charles Turner. People depicted include King George, George, Prince of Wales, the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, Admiral Horatio Nelson and Earl and Lady Spencer.

By the early 17th century the Scientific Revolution was well under way. Philosophers and scientists were throwing off the yoke of ancient authority to peer at nature and the cosmos through microscopes and telescopes. In October 1632, in the small town of Delft in the Dutch Republic, two geniuses were born who would bring about a seismic shift in the idea of what it meant to see the world. One was Johannes Vermeer, whose experiments with lenses and a camera obscura taught him how we see under different conditions of light and helped him create the most luminous works of art ever beheld. The other was Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, whose work with microscopes revealed a previously unimagined realm of minuscule creatures. By intertwining the biographies of these two men, Laura Snyder tells the story of a historical moment in both art and science that revolutionized how we see the world today.

Fancy in the eighteenth century was part of a rich semantic network, connecting wit, whimsicality, erotic desire, spontaneity, deviation from norms and triviality. It was also a contentious term, signifying excess, oddness and irrationality, liable to offend taste, reason and morals. This collection of essays foregrounds fancy - and its close synonym, caprice - as a distinct strand of the imagination in the period. As a prevalent, coherent and enduring concept in aesthetics and visual culture, it deserves a more prominent place in scholarly understanding than it has hitherto occupied. Fancy is here understood as a type of creative output that deviated from rules and relished artistic freedom. It was also a mode of audience response, entailing a high degree of imaginative engagement with playful, quirky artworks, generating pleasure, desire or anxiety. Emphasizing commonalities between visual productions in different media from diverse locations, the authors interrogate and celebrate the expressive freedom of fancy in European visual culture. Topics include: the seductive fictions of the fancy picture, Fragonard and galanterie, fancy in drawing manuals, pattern books and popular prints, fans and fancy goods, chinoiserie, excess and virtuality in garden design, Canaletto's British 'capricci', urban design in Madrid, and Goya's 'Caprichos'.

Printed artworks were often ephemeral, but in the early modern period, exchanges between print and other media were common, setting off chain reactions of images and objects that endured. Paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, musical or scientific instruments, and armor exerted their own influence on prints, while prints provided artists with paper veneers, templates, and sources of adaptable images. This interdisciplinary collection unites scholars from different fields of art history who elucidate the agency of prints on more traditionally valued media, and vice-versa. Contributors explore how, after translations across traditional geographic, temporal, and material boundaries, original 'meanings' may be lost, reconfigured, or subverted in surprising ways, whether a Netherlandish motif graces a cabinet in Italy or the print itself, colored or copied, is integrated into the calligraphic scheme of a Persian royal album. These intertwined relationships yield unexpected yet surprisingly prevalent modes of perception. Andrea Mantegna's 1470/1500 Battle of the Sea Gods, an engraving that emulates the properties of sculpted relief, was in fact reborn as relief sculpture, and fabrics based on print designs were reapplied to prints, returning color and tactility to the very objects from which the derived. Together, the essays in this volume witness a methodological shift in the study of print, from examining the printed image as an index of an absent invention in another medium - a painting, sculpture, or drawing - to considering its role as a generative, active agent driving modes of invention and perception far beyond the locus of its production.

Colouring the Caribbean offers the first comprehensive study of Agostino Brunias's intriguing pictures of colonial West Indians of colour - so called 'Red' and 'Black' Caribs, dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles, and people of mixed race - made for colonial officials and plantocratic elites during the late-eighteenth century. Although Brunias's paintings have often been understood as straightforward documents of visual ethnography that functioned as field guides for reading race, this book investigates how the images both reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by eighteenth-century Britons, helping to construct racial categories while simultaneously exposing their constructedness and underscoring their contradictions. The book offers provocative new insights about Brunias's work gleaned from a broad survey of his paintings, many of which are reproduced here for the first time. -- .

Originally published in 1929, this book contains an edited collection of the letters of the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. The letters included cover the period between October 1740 and November 1791, and Hilles includes an appendix at the back of letters that he was not able to include in the collection. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the life of one of Britain's most famous painters.

While the connected, international character of today's art economy is well known, the 18th century too had global systems of artistic production and consumption. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds is the first book to create a global map of the art world of the 18th century. Fourteen case studies from distinguished experts explore both cross-cultural connections and local specificities of art production and consumption in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The result is an account of a series of interconnected and asymmetrical art worlds that were well developed in the 18th century. Capturing the full material diversity of 18th-century art, this book considers painting and sculpture alongside numerous prints and decorative objects. Analyzing the role of place in the history of 18th-century art, it bridges the disciplines of art history and cultural geography, and draws attention away from any one place as a privileged art-historical site, while highlighting places such as Manila, Beijing, Mexico City, and London as significant points on a global art map. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds combines a broad global perspective on the history of art with careful attention to how global artistic concerns intersect with local ones, offering a framework for studies in global art history.

Originally published in 1945, this book contains a comprehensive list of the portraits executed by engraver Jean Morin. Morin's subjects included such celebrated figures as the French kings Henri II and IV, as well as Cardinal Richelieu, and Hornibrook and Petitjean note the various states of the engraving plates, as well as a note on the watermarks on the paper that Morin used. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the works of this little-known artist.

Originally published in 1940, this book charts the origins and evolution of academies of art from the sixteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. Pevsner expertly explains the political, religious and mercantile forces affecting the education of artists in various countries in Western Europe, and the growing 'academisation' of artistic training that he saw is his own day. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the various historical schools of art instruction and the history of art more generally.

In this book, Caroline van Eck examines how rhetoric and the arts interacted in early modern Europe. She argues that rhetoric, though originally developed for persuasive speech, has always used the visual as an important means of persuasion, and hence offers a number of strategies and concepts for visual persuasion as well. The book is divided into three major sections - theory, invention, and design. Van Eck analyzes how rhetoric informed artistic practice, theory, and perception in early modern Europe. This is the first full-length study to look at the issue of visual persuasion in both architecture and the visual arts, and to investigate what roles rhetoric played in visual persuasion, both from the perspective of artists and that of viewers.

Synonymous with finely crafted wood engravings of the natural world, Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) perfected an instantly recognisable style which was to influence book illustration well into the nineteenth century. Begun in November 1822, at the behest of his daughter Jane, and completed in 1828, Bewick's autobiography was first published in 1862. The opening chapters recall vividly his early life on Tyneside, his interest in the natural world, his passion for drawing, and his apprenticeship with engraver Ralph Beilby in Newcastle, where he would learn his trade and then work in fruitful partnership for twenty years. Later passages in the work reveal Bewick's strongly held views on religion, politics and nature. The work also features illustrations for a proposed work on British fish. Bewick's General History of Quadrupeds (1790) and History of British Birds (1797-1804), the works which secured his high reputation, are also reissued in this series.

First published in 1909, this illustrated study considers the work of the artist and satirist William Hogarth (1697-1764), focusing on his depiction of London and its inhabitants. A devoted Londoner, Hogarth won great acclaim in his lifetime for the wit displayed in his many paintings and engravings. His work explored the many facets of London life, from the highest to the lowest social classes, from scenes of politics and business to churches, hospitals and prisons. Bibliographer, editor and prolific author, Henry Benjamin Wheatley (1838-1917) places Hogarth's work in the context of the artist's background and early life. Wheatley's attention to detail complements the selected examples of Hogarth's work, providing a portrait of eighteenth-century manners as seen through the eyes of one of the most acute observers of the age. Several of Wheatley's other works, including London Past and Present (1891), are also reissued in this series.

Few British artists have ever achieved such a wide range of style in oil painting, watercolour, drawing and engraving as J. M. W. Turner. He had a precocious gift that was developed over a lifetime of experiment and innovation. This classic book in the World of Art series traces the artist's career - from youthful pictureseque views and watercolours of 'Gothic' ruins to the romantic landscape and historical compositions of his maturity, and the astonishing art of his later years. In these late paintings Turner's tragic sense of life is stated most profoundly and the work was unintelligible to his contemporaries - but his reputation as the greatest British painter now rests on our understanding of these as pioneering explorations of abstraction, prefiguring the art of the 20th century. Graham Reynolds weaves together the artist's biography with sensitive criticism of his work, through all phases of his career, in this classic work - first published in 1969 - that has long served as an outstanding introduction to Turner's life and art. It has now been revised and updated by the curator of the Turner Bequest at Tate, David Blayney Brown, to reflect recent discoveries and interpretations, and the illustrations are in full colour for the first time. It will serve as the best available study of this perennially popular artist for a new generation of readers.

During the seventeenth century, Dutch portraits were actively commissioned by corporate groups and by individuals from a range of economic and social classes. They became among the most important genres of painting. Not merely mimetic representations of their subjects, many of these works create a new dialogic relationship with the viewer. Ann Jensen Adams examines four portrait genres - individuals, the family, history portraits, and civic guards. She analyzes these works in relation to inherited visual traditions, contemporary art theory, changing cultural beliefs about the body, about sight, and the image itself, as well as to current events. Adams argues that as individuals became unmoored from traditional sources of identity, such as familial lineage, birthplace, and social class, portraits helped them to find security in a self-aware subjectivity and the new social structures that made possible the 'economic miracle' that has come to be known as the Dutch Golden Age.

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'.

This is the first biography and reference book dedicated to Samuel Percy, a modeller who produced an impressive oeuvre of wax portraits and tableaux in the mid-to-late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Based in part on the author's own substantial collection of Percy waxes, this book follows Percy from his beginnings in Dublin, at the Dublin Society Drawing Schools, working with the famed statuary John Van Nost; to England, where he journeyed from town to town, putting advertisements in regional newspapers. These revealing advertisements have been gathered here for the first time, in order to track his travels. Whether taking the likeness of Princess Charlotte of Wales, or falling victim to a highway robber in Birmingham, these fragments of Percy's history paint a fascinating picture of his life as a wandering artisan. As well as a chronological narrative of Percy's life, this book commits an entire chapter to an area of his work that has never been studied before: his miniature tableaux. These portray various subjects, both religious and secular, from Christ on the Cross to playing children. They are catalogued in an appendix, and almost thirty are illustrated. Based entirely on original research, Mr. Percy: Portrait Modeller in Coloured Wax features over a hundred illustrations, celebrating both Percy's accomplishments and the works of other modellers for comparison.

Martin Lister, royal physician and fellow of the Royal Society, was an extraordinarily prolific natural historian with an expertise in shells and molluscs. Disappointed with the work of established artists, Lister decided to teach his daughters, Susanna and Anna, how to illustrate the specimens he studied. The sisters became so skilled at this that Lister entrusted them with his great work, 'Historiae Conchyliorum', assembled between 1685 and 1692. This first comprehensive study of conchology consisted of over 1,000 copperplates of shells and molluscs collected from around the world. 'Martin Lister and his Remarkable Daughters' reconstructs the creation of this masterwork, from the identification of the original shells to the drawings themselves, and from the engraved copperplates to the draft prints and final books. Susanna and Anna portrayed the shells not only as curious and beautiful objects, but also as specimens of natural history rendered with sensitivity and keen scientific empiricism. Beautiful in their own right, these illustrations and engravings reveal the early techniques behind scientific illustration together with the often unnoticed role of women in the scientific revolution.

The authors in this illustrated volume explore how art historical and technical examination of 15th-18th century European paintings conducted in tandem not only address key subjects such as meaning, materials, and manufacturing techniques, but also allow fresh perspectives on the prevailing workshop practices of copying, replicating, and emulating paintings.

This was 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 artists, actors and musicians who left Italy during the eighteenth century to seek work beyond the Alps in locations such as London, St Petersburg, Dresden, Stockholm and Vienna. First published in 1999, the book investigates the careers of important artists such as Amigoni, Canaletto and Rosalba Carriera, as well as opera singers, commedia dell'arte performers and librettists. However, it also considers key themes such as social and friendship networks, itinerancy, the relationships between court and market cultures, the importance of religion and politics to the reception of culture, the evolution of taste, the role of gender in the reception of art, the diversity of modes and genres, and the reception of Italian artists and performers outside Italy.

This is the first complete translation of the biographies of fifteen artists, including Annibale Carracci, Caravaggio, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Poussin, written by the seventeenth-century antiquarian Giovan Pietro Bellori. Originally conceived as a continuation of Vasari's famous Lives, it is a fundamental source for seventeenth-century Italian art and artistic theory, providing detailed descriptions of extant and lost works of art, while casting light on the cultural politics of contemporary Rome and the relations between Rome and France. The importance of Bellori's Lives lies in the scrupulous documentation of artists, many of whom he knew personally; the author's detailed descriptions of their works; and his exposition of the classicist theory of art in the introductory lecture, the Idea. This volume contains the twelve Lives published in the original edition of 1672 and three Lives (Guido Reni, Andrea Sacchi, and Carlo Maratti) that survive in manuscript form and that were published for the first time in 1942.

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 volume deals with the crisis in the representation of the monarchy that was provoked by the execution of Charles I. 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. Besides courtly and popular literary representations, it examines Charles's visual image in paintings, sculpture, engravings and coins and considers the role of the King's Music in projecting a positive view of the monarch. The volume will appeal not only to literary scholars but also to historians, art historians and musicologists.

This bibliography provides a source for reviews of the state-sponsored Parisian exhibitions of painting and sculpture (Salons) held during the July Monarchy and Second Republic (1831-1851). It includes an extensive list of references, each presented in a standard format, with titles, dates and ordering codes based upon the holdings of the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris. It is indexed both by authors and by periodicals. The essays and articles that are catalogued are of fundamental importance in establishing a picture of contemporary reactions to art in mid-nineteenth-century France and yet the standard work by Maurice Tourneux, Salons et expositions d'art a Paris, 1801-1870, has been out of print for several decades. By incorporating and correcting the relevant material from Tourneux and adding new references gathered from unpublished nineteenth-century manuscript bibliographies and a broad sample of the periodical press, this work offers a substantial increase in the volume and range of criticism available for analysis by cultural and literary historians.