The historical trajectory of decadent culture runs from ancient Rome, to nineteenth-century Paris, Victorian London, fin de siecle Vienna, Weimar Berlin, and beyond. The first of these, the decline of Rome, provides the pattern for both aesthetic and social decadence, a pattern that artists and writers in the nineteenth century imitated, emulated, parodied, and otherwise manipulated for aesthetic gain. What begins as the moral condemnation of modernity in mid-nineteenth century France on the part of decadent authors such as Charles Baudelaire ends up as the perverse celebration of the pessimism that imperial decline, whether real or imagined, involves. This delight in decline informs the so-called breviary, or even bible, of decadence from Joris-Karl Huysmans's A Rebours, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Aubrey Beardsley's drawings, Gustav Klimt's paintings, and numerous other works. In this Very Short Introduction, David Weir explores these conflicting attitudes towards modernity present in decadent culture by examining the difference between aesthetic decadence - the excess of artifice - and social decadence, which involves excess in a variety of forms, whether perversely pleasurable or gratuitously cruel. Such contrariness between aesthetic and social decadence led some of its practitioners to substitute art for life and to stress the importance of taste over morality, a maneuver with far-reaching consequences, especially as decadence enters the realm of popular culture today. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

In this, the first comprehensive study of post-Reformation provincial English portraiture, Robert Tittler investigates the growing affinity for secular portraiture in Tudor and early Stuart England, a cultural and social phenomenon which can be said to have produced a 'public' for that genre. He breaks new ground in placing portrait patronage and production in this era in the broad social and cultural context of post-Reformation England, and in distinguishing between native English provincial portraiture, which was often highly vernacular, and foreign-influenced portraiture of the court and metropolis, which tended towards the formal and 'polite'. Tittler describes the burgeoning public for portraiture of this era as more than the familiar court-and-London based presence, but rather as a phenomenon which was surprisingly widespread, both socially and geographically, throughout the realm. He suggests that provincial portraiture differed from the 'mainstream', cosmopolitan portraiture of the day in its workmanship, materials, inspirations, and even vocabulary, showing how its native English roots continued to guide its production. Innovative chapters consider the aims and vocabulary of English provincial portraiture, the relationship of portraiture and heraldry, the painter's occupation in provincial (as opposed to metropolitan) England, and the contrasting availability of materials and training in both provincial and metropolitan areas. The work as a whole contributes to both art history and social history: it speaks to admirers and collectors of painting as well as to curators and academics.

Black Milk is the first in-depth analysis of the visual archives that effloresced around slavery in Brazil and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In its latter stages the book also explores the ways in which the museum cultures of North America and Brazil have constructed slavery over the last hundred years. These institutional legacies emerge as startlingly different from each other at almost every level.
Working through comparative close readings of a myriad art objects - including prints, photographs, oil paintings, watercolours, sculptures, ceramics, and a host of ephemera -- Black Milk celebrates just how radically alternative Brazilian artistic responses to Atlantic slavery were. Despite its longevity and vastness, Brazilian slavery as a cultural phenomenon has remained hugely neglected, in both academic and popular studies, particularly when compared to North American slavery. Consequently much of Black Milk is devoted to uncovering, celebrating, and explaining the hidden treasury of visual material generated by artists working in Brazil when they came to record and imaginatively reconstruct their slave inheritance. There are painters of genius (most significantly Jean Baptiste Debret), printmakers (discussion is focused on Angelo Agostini the "Brazilian Daumier") and some of the greatest photographers of the nineteenth century, led by Augusto Stahl. The radical alterity of the Brazilian materials is revealed by comparing them at every stage with a series of related but fascinatingly and often shockingly dissimilar North American works of art. Black Milk is a mold-breaking study, a bold comparative analysis of the visual arts and archives generated by slavery within the two biggest and most important slave holding nations of the Atlantic Diaspora.

What role did visual artists play in the emergence and spread of nationalism and a sense of national identity? Focusing on late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Britain and France, this original study in the historical sociology of nations and nationalism analyses the contributions of artists in these and other West European countries to the creation of memorable images of the abstract concept of the nation. By employing different modes of depiction for conveying moral lessons, evoking the atmosphere of the homeland, and commemorating the fallen in battle, David, Ingres, Turner, Constable, and Friedrich, as well as a host of lesser artists, were able to make the national idea appear palpable and accessible, and the abstract concept of the nation seem 'authentic' and 'real'. After a brief description of the main themes of the visual record of Dutch nation-building in the seventeenth century, Anthony D. Smith presents an original comparative analysis of the rise of 'national art' in eighteenth-century Britain and France. Subsequent chapters address the emblems and oath-swearing ceremonies of the citizen nation, the evocation of native poetic landscapes, the exempla virtutis of national heroes, ancient and modern, and the funerary memorials of martyrs and soldiers who sacrificed themselves for the nation in Britain and France. The conclusion highlights the common elements and the main differences in the French and British trajectories of artistic and national development. Illustrated with striking images, The Nation Made Real offers a new interpretation of the role of visual culture in the formation of nations and national identity among the educated classes in Western Europe.

This book presents the Gianfranco Luzzetti collection housed in the historic complex of the former convent of the Clarisse in Grosseto, a new museum in the city. The collection is the result of the donation to the Municipality, in 2018, of over 60 works from the personal heritage of Luzzetti, an antiquarian from Grosseto, deeply linked to his land. The paintings, of great quality, trace Italian art from the 14th to the 19th century, with particular attention to Florentine art of the 17th century. The collection includes masterpieces by Antonio Rossellino, Giambologna, Rutilio Manetti, Passignano, Niccolo di Pietro Lamberti, Corrado Giaquinto, Camillo Rusconi, Pier Dandini and Giovanni di Tano Fei, as well as important works by Donatello and Beccafumi and works already donated to the Municipality of Grosseto in past years, of Santi di Tito and Cigoli. This volume, with introductory texts regarding the history of the site, the birth of the Museum and the Collection, is complemented by an anthology of writings by Luzzetti and bibliographic apparatuses. Research and texts: Sandro Bellesi, Marco Ciampolini, Roberto Contini, Elena Dubaldo, Lucia Ferri, Claudia Ganci, Cecilia Luzzetti, Gianfranco Luzzetti, Andrea Marchi, Mauro Papa, Marcella Parisi, Francesca Perillo, Gianluca Sposato, Angelo Tartuferi. Italian edition, with English translation in the appendix.

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.

Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole shows that the Gothic style in architecture and the decorative arts and the tradition of medievalist research associated with Horace Walpole (1717–1797) and his circle cannot be understood independently of their own homoerotic culture. Centered around Walpole’s Gothic villa at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, Walpole and his “Strawberry Committee” of male friends, designers, and dilettantes invigorated an extraordinary new mode of Gothic design and disseminated it in their own commissions at Old Windsor and Donnington Grove in Berkshire, Lee Priory in Kent, the Vyne in Hampshire, and other sites. Matthew M. Reeve argues that the new “third sex” of homoerotically inclined men and the new “modern styles” that they promoted—including the Gothic style and chinoiserie—were interrelated movements that shaped English modernity. The Gothic style offered the possibility of an alternate aesthetic and gendered order, a queer reversal of the dominant Palladian style of the period. Many of the houses built by Walpole and his circle were understood by commentators to be manifestations of a new queer aesthetic, and in describing them they offered the earliest critiques of what would be called a “queer architecture.” Exposing the role of sexual coteries in the shaping of eighteenth-century English architecture, this book offers a profound and eloquent revision to our understanding of the origins of the Gothic Revival and to medievalism itself. It will be welcomed by architectural historians as well as scholars of medievalism and specialists in queer studies.

Samuel Richardson's novels have always been a particularly fertile seam for literary study, and in recent years they have been the subject of a whole range of different approaches, from the political and feminist, to those concerned with formal questions such as genre and epistolary technique. Richardson has also attracted considerable interest from an interdisciplinary perspective, with studies focusing on the pictorial and spatial elements of his works, and the illustrations he commissioned for Pamela. This extensively-illustrated monograph takes this approach one step further, and looks at issues of visual and verbal representation in Richardson from the perspective of eighteenth-century portraiture.
Richardson first became conversant with the conventions of contemporary portraiture in the wake of the phenomenal success of Pamela. It was then that he commissioned his first portrait, and became involved in the process of producing illustrations for the lavish sixth edition of the novel. This study makes the case that these two events combined to give Richardson a new vocabulary for the depiction of individual character, and the articulation of power, affection, and control within the family, and between men and women. We can see the first signs of this in Pamela II, which is so often dismissed and so little read, but it reaches its full maturity in the rich three-dimensionality of Clarissa. Moreover it is Richardson's use of the conventions of contemporary portraiture in Sir Charles Grandison that explains many of the tensions and inconsistencies within that text, and makes the reader's response to Richardson's 'good man' so ambivalent.

The global porcelain scene is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the International Ceramics Fair and Seminar, which was founded by Brian Haughton and his wife, Anna, in London in 1982. That was just the beginning: further fairs and accompanying symposia on design, jewellery, and antiques in New York and Dubai were to follow, becoming important venues of exchange, not just for trade but for the academic world too. To mark this anniversary, more than 40 renowned scholars were asked to write about selected European ceramics that had been traded in Brian Haughton's gallery and that he had been particularly passionate about. This publication is a wonderful kaleidoscope of unique ceramics from the 18th and 19th centuries, released as a homage to Brian Haughton, The Man with the Butterfly Tie.

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.

The seventeenth century witnessed a radical and far-reaching transformation in English architecture, as new and purer forms of classical design became firmly established, sweeping away earlier fashions. How this dramatic change came about at local level has never been fully understood. Using Hertfordshire as a case-study, this ground-breaking, interdisciplinary book reconstructs the complete built landscape-not just houses but churches, momnnuments, and almshouses-to reveal a competitive and visually sensitive environment in which people at all social levels exploited architectural display to enhance their personal image. New fashions were an important weapon in this struggle. Because only the county elite possessed the necessary contacts and resources to obtain the latest classical designs, such patterns became badges of status, symbols not just of cultural aspirations but of social ambition. Paul Hunneyball demonstrates that classical architecture caught on at local level less because it was aesthetically superior than because its advocates were socially superior.

This book illuminates the original meanings of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century mural paintings in Britain. At the time, these were called 'histories'. Throughout the eighteenth century, though, the term became directly associated with easel painting and, as 'history painting' achieved the status of a sublime genre, any link with painted architectural interiors was lost. Whilst both genres contained historical figures and narratives, it was the ways of viewing them that differed. Lydia Hamlett emphasises the way that mural paintings were experienced by spectators within their architectural settings. New iconographical interpretations and theories of effect and affect are considered an important part of their wider historical, cultural and social contexts. This book is intended to be read primarily by specialists, graduate and undergraduate students with an interest in new approaches to British art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

By the end of the eighteenth century a distinctly modern vision of life was emerging. The revolutions in America and France revealed new beliefs about human nature, rights and duties, the natural and material worlds, and a new faith in science, technology and the idea of progress. As people began to change the way they thought about themselves and the world around them, a whole new way of thinking developed, which still has an overwhelming impact two centuries on.
The Enlightenment brings together the work of major Enlightenment thinkers to illustrate the full importance and achievements of this period in history. Extracts are gathered thematically into sections on such aspects of the Enlightenment as political theory, religion and belief, art and nature. In each section, the texts are introduced and a final section on 'Critical Reflections' provides a selection of modern critical opinions on the period.

Art in Theory (1648-1815) provides a wide-ranging and comprehensive collection of documents on the theory of art from the founding of the French Academy until the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Like its highly successful companion volumes, Art in Theory (1815-1900) and Art in Theory (1900-1990), its' primary aim is to provide students and teachers with the documentary material for informed and up-to-date study. Its' 240 texts, clear principles of organization and considerable editorial content offer a vivid and indispensable introduction to the art of the early modern period.
Harrison, Wood and Gaiger have collected writing by artists, critics, philosophers, literary figures and administrators of the arts, some reprinted in their entirety, others excerpted from longer works. A wealth of material from French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Latin sources is also provided, including many new translations.
Among the major themes treated are early arguments over the relative merits of ancient and modern art, debates between the advocates of form and color, the beginnings of modern art criticism in reviews of the Salon, art and politics during the French Revolution, the rise of landscape painting, and the artistic theories of Romanticism and Neo-classicism.
Each section is prefaced by an essay that situates the ideas of the period in their historical context, while relating theoretical concerns and debates to developments in the practice of art. Each individual text is also accompanied by a short introduction. An extensive bibliography and full index are provided.
For more details of our book and journal list in Art, visit http: //www.blackwellpublishing.com/arttheory

This book examines the sociocultural networks between the courts of early modern Italy and Europe, focusing on the Florentine Medici court, and the cultural patronage and international gendered networks developed by the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Vittoria della Rovere. Adelina Modesti uses Grand Duchess Vittoria as an exemplar of pan-European 'matronage' and proposes a new matrilineal model of patronage in the early modern period, one in which women become not only the mediators but also the architects of public taste and the transmitters of cultural capital. The book will be the first comprehensive monographic study of this important cultural figure. This study will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, Renaissance studies and seventeenth-century Italy.

One of the most creative and accessible periods of art the world has ever known, the Golden Age is brought to life in an unprecedented series of biographies of the artists active in the Netherlands during the 17th-century. Painters in the Dutch Republic specialized in portraits, domestic genre scenes, still-lives, and landscapes--metaphors of the tiny new country's immense pride and wealth. This book features biographies on all the great masters from Frans Hals to Vermeer to Rembrandt. There are entries on more than 220 artists.

This unprecedented book draws together biographies of artists who worked in one of the most exciting and dramatic political eras in France, when Paris became the artistic capital of Europe. It features in-depth studies of such well-known Neo-classical artists as Jacques-Louis David, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the artist most revered by his fellow countrymen. Also included are artists of the Romantic Movement, like Delacroix and Gericault, as well as the painters of the Barbizon School, whose plein-air landscapes anticipated those of the Impressionists.

The Grove Art series, focusing on the most important periods and areas of art history, is derived from the critically acclaimed and award-winning The Grove Dictionary of Art. First published in 1996 in 34 volumes, The Dictionary has quickly established itself as the leading reference work on the visual arts, used by schools, universities, museums, and public libraries throughout the world. With articles written by leading scholars in each field, The Dictionary has frequently been praised for its breadth of coverage, accuracy, authority, and accessibility.

Bibliophiles in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century began to take a serious interest in the manuscripts of the Middle East and the paper on which they were written. Perhaps the most important of these men were C.-M. Briquet working in Geneva, and J. Wiesner and J. von Karabacek working in Vienna. All three were concerned with the burning topic of the moment: Was oriental paper made of cotton? Within the space of two years these three writers published seminal articles for the European study of Arab paper. Das Arabische Papier is one of those articles. The late Don Baker's inspiration to set about the translation and interpretation of this work was 'simply the desire to know the contents of this much quoted article'. Students, historians, curators, collectors, conservators and all those interested in the historical development and spread of papermaking will realise why Don Baker wished to make this important text available to English readers. This Archetype edition is a revised edition of the volume, which Don Baker produced in 1991.

The historiography of timekeeping is traditionally characterized by a dichotomy between research that investigates the evolution of technical devices on the one hand, and research that is concerned with the examination of the cultures and uses of time on the other hand. Material Histories of Time opens a dialogue between these two approaches by taking monumental clocks, table clocks, portable watches, carriage clocks, and other forms of timekeeping as the starting point of a joint reflection of specialists of the history of horology together with scholars studying the social and cultural history of time. The contributions range from the apparition of the first timekeeping mechanical systems in the Middle Ages to the first evidence of industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Sculptor, architect, painter, playwright, and scenographer, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) was the last of the great universal artistic geniuses of early modern Italy, placed by both contemporaries and posterity in the same exalted company as Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. And his artistic vision remains palpably present today, through the countless statues, fountains, and buildings that transformed Rome into the baroque theater that continues to enthrall tourists today. It is perhaps not surprising that this artist who defined the baroque should have a personal life that itself was, well, baroque. As Franco Mormando's dazzling biography reveals, Bernini was a man driven by many passions, possessed of an explosive temper and a hearty sex drive, and he lived a life as dramatic as any of his creations. Drawing on archival sources, letters, diaries, and - with a suitable skepticism - a hagiographic account written by Bernini's son (who portrays his father as a paragon of virtue and piety), Mormando leads us through Bernini's many feuds and love affairs, scandals and sins. He sets Bernini's raucous life against a vivid backdrop of baroque Rome, bustling and wealthy, and peopled by churchmen and bureaucrats, popes and politicians, schemes and secrets. The result is a seductively readable biography, stuffed with stories and teeming with life - as wild and unforgettable as Bernini's art. No one who has been bewitched by the baroque should miss it.

Marking a crucial turning point in Caravaggio's life and artistic development, the Crucifixion of Saint Andrew exemplifies the artist's famous tenebristic style, developed during his rise to fame in Rome, and simultaneously signals a new, grittier realism in his work. Inspired both by a Spanish patron and by the urban topography of Naples, a city three times the size of Rome in Caravaggio's day, the Crucifixion of Saint Andrew became a mobile portent of Caravaggio's stylistic revolution when the viceroy brought it with him to Valladolid in 1610. Recounting the complex history of this masterwork and its understudied position in Caravaggio's oeuvre, this book reveals the ways in which the Crucifixion of Saint Andrew functioned first as a devotional aid and subsequently as a harbinger of Caravaggism abroad.

In 1772, upon the death of her second husband, Mary Delany arose from her grief, picked up a pair of scissors, and, at the age of seventy-two, created a new art form: mixed-media collage. Over the next decade, Mrs. Delany produced an astonishing 985 botanically correct, breathtaking cut-paper flowers, now housed in the British Museum and referred to as the "Flora Delanica." As she tracks the extraordinary life of Delany--friend of George Frideric Handel and Jonathan Swift--internationally acclaimed poet Molly Peacock weaves in delicate parallels in her own life and, in doing so, creates a profound and beautiful examination of the nature of creativity and art. This gorgeously designed book, featuring thirty-five full-color illustrations, is to be devoured as voraciously as one of the court dinners it describes.

In the Catholic countries of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Europe, communities of monks and nuns were growing in number and wealth. They constructed vast buildings, dominated education, and played a large part in the practice and patronage of learning, music, and the arts. This lavishly-illustrated book offers a unique, comparative description of these communities--their wealth, growth, life, and importance--and then explains their catastrophic decline and fall between 1650 and 1815 by reforming rulers, the 'Enlightenment', and the French Revolution. Derek Beales, Professor Emeritus of Modern History, Cambridge, is a Fellow of both the Royal Historical Society and the British Academy. He has published numerous historical monographs including a book on musical history entitled, Mozart and the Habsburgs (Reeding, 1993) as well as articles in the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement.

Rembrandt's intriguing painting technique stirred the imaginations of art lovers during his lifetime and has done so ever since. In this book, now revised, updated, and with a new foreword by the author, Rembrandt's pictorial intentions and the variety of materials and techniques he applied to create his fascinating effects are unraveled in depth. At the same time, this "archaeology" of Rembrandt's paintings yields information on many other levels and offers a view of Rembrandt's daily practice and artistic considerations while simultaneously providing a more dimensional image of the artist.
"Copub: Amsterdam University Press "

This book examines a range of visual images of military recruitment to explore changing notions of glory, or of gloire, during the French Revolution. It raises questions about how this event re-orientated notions of 'citizenship' and of service to 'la Patrie'. The opening lines of the Marseillaise are grandly declamatory: Allons enfants de la Patrie/le jour de gloire est arrive! or, in English: Arise, children of the Homeland/The day of glory has arrived! What do these words mean in their later eighteenth-century French context? What was gloire and how was it changed by the revolutionary process? This military song, later adopted as the national anthem, represents a deceptively unifying moment of collective engagement in the making of the modern French nation. Valerie Mainz questions this through a close study of visual imagery dealing with the issue of military recruitment. From neoclassical painting to popular prints, such images typically dealt with the shift from civilian to soldier, focusing on how men, and not women, were called to serve the Homeland.

Im Mittelpunkt dieser Untersuchung steht die umfassende Analyse der Seebilder Jacob van Ruisdaels. Dabei wird die kunstlerische Leistung Ruisdaels unter dem Einfluss sowohl der Natur- und Kunstauffassung als auch der gesellschaftspolitischen Entwicklungen des Goldenen Jahrhunderts (der Niederlande des 17. Jh.) berucksichtigt. Gleichzeitig bietet diese Betrachtung einen Loesungsansatz fur die Interpretation bestimmter Bildmotive auf feste Sinnbilder, die in den Meereslandschaften anzutreffen sind. Die Gemalde enthalten emblematische Motive, ahnlich einem Gleichnis, so dass die Bildinhalte und ihre Bedeutung auf vielfaltige Weise interpretiert werden koennen. Daruber hinaus werden weitere spezifische Charakteristika der ruisdaelschen Marinen an den Gemalden selbst exemplarisch herausgearbeitet.