Nothing excited early modern anatomists more than touching a beating heart. In his 1543 treatise, Andreas Vesalius boasts that he was able to feel life itself through the membranes of a heart belonging to a man who had just been executed, a comment that appears near the woodcut of a person being dissected while still hanging from the gallows. In this highly original book, Rose Marie San Juan confronts the question of violence in the making of the early modern anatomical image. Engaging the ways in which power operated in early modern anatomical images in Europe and, to a lesser extent, its colonies, San Juan examines literal violence upon bodies in a range of civic, religious, pedagogical, and “exploratory” contexts. She then works through the question of how bodies were thought to be constituted—systemic or piecemeal, singular or collective—and how gender determines this question of constitution. In confronting the issue of violence in the making of the anatomical image, San Juan explores not only how violence transformed the body into a powerful and troubling double but also how this kind of body permeated attempts to produce knowledge about the world at large. Provocative and challenging, this book will be of significant interest to scholars across fields in early modern studies, including art history and visual culture, science, and medicine.

In Absolutist Attachments, Chloe Hogg uncovers the affective and media connections that shaped Louis XIV's absolutism. Studying literature, painting, engravings, correspondence, and the emerging periodic press, Hogg diagnoses the emotions that created absolutism's feeling subjects and publics. Louis XIV's subjects explored new kinds of affective relations with their sovereign, joining with the king in acts of aesthetic judgment, tender feeling, or the "newsiness" of emerging print news culture. Such alternative modes of adhesion countered the hegemonic model of kingship upheld by divine right, reason of state, or corporate fidelities and privileges with subject-driven attachments and practices. Absolutist Attachments discovers absolutism's alternative political and cultural legacy-not the spectacle of an unbound king but the binding connections of his subjects.

In 1643/4 the once-famous Francis Cleyn painted the unhappy young heir of Corfe Castle, John Bankes, and his tutor, Dr Maurice Williams. The painter is now almost forgotten,the painting much neglected, and the sitters themselves have left little to mark their lives, but on the table of the painting lies a book, open to an immediately identifiable and very significant page. The representation omits the author's name and the book's title; it sits there as a code, as only viewers who had encountered the original and the characteristic figures on its frontispiece would have known its significance. The book is Galileo's Dialogue on the two chief world systems (1632), the defence of Copernican cosmology that incited the infamous clash between its author and the Church, and its presence in this painting is no accident, but instead a statement of learning, attitudes, and cosmopolitan engagement in European discourse by the painting's English subjects. Grasping hold of the clue, John Helibron deciphers the significance of this contentious book's appearance in a painting from Stuart England to unravel the interlocking threads of art history, political and religious history, and the history of science. Drawing on unexploited archival material and a wide range of printed works, he weaves together English court culture and Italian connections, as well as the astronomical and astrological knowledge propagated in contemporary almanacs and deployed in art, architecture, plays, masques, and political discourse. Heilbron also explores the biographies of Sir John Bankes (father of the sitter), Sir Maurice, and the painter, Francis Cleyn, setting them into the narrative of their rich and cultured history.

During Qing dynasty China, Italian artists were hired through Jesuit missionaries by the imperial workshops in Beijing. In The Shining Inheritance: Italian Painters at the Qing Court, 1699-1812, Marco Musillo considers the professional adaptations and pictorial modifications to Chinese traditions that allowed three of these Italian painters -- Giovanni Gherardini (1655- ca. 1729), Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766), and Giuseppe Panzi (1734-1812) -- to work within the Chinese cultural sphere from 1699, when Gherardini arrived in China, to 1812, the year of Panzi's death. Musillo focuses especially on the long career and influence of Castiglione (whose Chinese name was Lang Shining), who worked in Beijing for more than fifty years. Serving three Qing emperors, he was actively engaged in the pictorial discussions at court. The Shining Inheritance perceptively explores how each painter's level of professional artistic training affected his understanding, selection, and translation of the Chinese pictorial traditions. Musillo further demonstrates how this East-West artistic exchange challenged the dogma of European universality through a professional dialogue that became part of established workshop routines. The cultural elements, procedures, and artistic languages of both China and Italy were strategically played against each other in negotiating the successes and failures of the Italian painters in Beijing. Musillo's subtle analysis offers a compelling methodological model for an increasingly global field of art history.

In 1600, Peter Paul Rubens left his home in Antwerp to travel to Italy and study the Italian masters. Eight years later, he returned to Belgium and quickly established himself as one of the foremost painters in Western Europe. This book explores Rubens' work from 1609 until 1621 and how, acutely aware of the possibilities for commercial success, he rose to fame by establishing a "brand" and promoting himself. He created multiple versions of paintings with subjects that had proven to be successful, used similar subject matter to that used by famous artists in the past, and sought collaborators to create more ambitious works than he could have done alone. He also created a studio and workshop with numerous students and assistants, the most famous being Anthony van Dyck who frequently collaborated with Rubens. Through paintings, drawings, and prints, this book shows how a desire for commercial success influenced and changed Rubens' artistic style. Essays delve into Italy's effect on Rubens, on the narrative aspect of his paintings, and how he managed commissions from famous patrons. Filled with new insights on the most fruitful phase of Rubens' career, this book offers a refreshing look at one of the most influential Baroque artists.

Art is often appreciated for its ability to delight our eyes and refresh our minds. But it can also serve as a powerful vehicle for exploring darker emotions, such as fear, sadness, and grief. And while these themes have an artistic history dating back to the ancients, the ways in which they have been represented in art have changed dramatically over time. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art, "The Tragic Muse: Art and Emotion, 1700-1900" draws on the work of several distinguished scholars to examine the richly varied representation of tragedy in the European artistic tradition over the course of two centuries. This catalog is generously illustrated with full-color reproductions of all the works contained in the exhibition, and the fascinating contributions offer new insights into the approaches taken by the visual arts, as well as literature and drama, in expressing and eliciting strong emotions.

Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo documents an important collection of master drawings donated by an individual to the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, including five drawings by the celebrated Venetian genius Giambattista Tiepolo and sixteen drawings by his most famous son, Domenico Tiepolo. Twelve of the sixteen form part of Domenico's most important drawing series-his exhaustive visual exploration of the New Testament. Also included are two drawings discovered after the 2006 publication of Domenico Tiepolo: A New Testament and seen here for the first time. Gealt and Knox are world-renowned experts on the Tiepolos and this book will serve as a useful reference to understanding their work as draftsmen. This beautiful illustrated volume will appeal to art lovers, biblical scholars, and those who value the unique work of the Tiepolos.

The popularity of the comic performers of late-Georgian and Regency England and their frequent depiction in portraits, caricatures and prints is beyond dispute, yet until now little has been written on the subject. In this unique study Jim Davis considers the representation of English low comic actors, such as Joseph Munden, John Liston, Charles Mathews and John Emery, in the visual arts of the period, the ways in which such representations became part of the visual culture of their time, and the impact of visual representation and art theory on prose descriptions of comic actors. Davis reveals how many of the actors discussed also exhibited or collected paintings and used painterly techniques to evoke the world around them. Drawing particularly on the influence of Hogarth and Wilkie, he goes on to examine portraiture as critique and what the actors themselves represented in terms of notions of national and regional identity.

As the most important Danish history painter, Nicolai Abildgaard (1743-1809) worked in a century that saw marked shifts in the styles of painting, from the late Baroque via Rococo to Neoclassicism, as well as the emergence of art academies throughout Europe as the prevalent factor in the training of young artists. This book presents results of a paint technical study of his oeuvre, from early student paintings to mature works from his late years. As a result of the composite nature of his training in Copenhagen as well as in Rome in the 1760s and 70s, a number of factors in Abildgaard s formative years were influential in shaping his painting methods and choice of materials. Though his practice may at times appear unorthodox and inconsistent, most of its separate components are found in works by his contemporaries, making his technique a reflection of different characteristic currents in eighteenth-century painting.

In "Mimesis Across Empires," Natasha Eaton examines the interactions, attachments, and crossings between the visual cultures of the Mughal and British Empires during the formative period of British imperial rule in India. Eaton explores how the aesthetics of Mughal "vernacular" art and British "realist" art mutually informed one another to create a hybrid visual economy. By tracing the exchange of objects and ideas--between Mughal artists and British collectors, British artists and Indian subjects, and Indian elites and British artists--she shows how Mughal artists influenced British conceptions of their art, their empire, and themselves, even as European art gave Indian painters a new visual vocabulary with which to critique colonial politics and aesthetics. By placing her analysis of visual culture in relation to other cultural encounters--ethnographic, legislative, diplomatic--Eaton uncovers deeper intimacies and hostilities between the colonizer and the colonized, linking artistic mimesis to the larger colonial project in India.

This is the first illustrated scholarly work devoted to the reception and reputation of Edinburgh's premier Enlightenment portrait painter. Sir Henry Raeburn (1756-1823) is especially well known in Scotland as the portrait painter of members of the Scottish Enlightenment. However, outside Scotland, the artist rarely makes more than a fleeting appearance in survey books about portraiture. Ten international scholars recover Raeburn from his artistic isolation by looking at his local and international reception and reputation, both in his lifetime and posthumously. It focuses as much on Edinburgh and Scotland as on metropolitan markets and cosmopolitan contexts. Previously unpublished archival material is brought to light for the first time, especially from the Innes of Stow papers and the archives of the dukes of Hamilton. It features 14 chapters, each looking at different aspects of Raeburn's professional career. There are international scholars contributing to Raeburn studies for the first time. It offers interdisciplinary perspectives setting a new agenda for Raeburn studies. It has traditional art analysis integrated with cultural, social, political and economic history. It includes much unpublished archival material.

This is as the favoured artist of an enterprising Parisian elite, Robert is a prophetic case study of the intersection between aesthetics and modernity's dawning business culture. In this provocative study, Hubert Robert's paintings of urban ruins are interpreted as manifestations of a new consciousness of time, one shaped by the uncertainty of an economy characterized by the anxiety-inducing expansion of credit, frenzied speculation on the stock market, and foolhardy ventures in real estate. At the centre of this lively narrative lie Robert's depictions of the ruins of Paris - macabre and spectacular paintings of desolation - on the eve of the French Revolution. Drawing on a vast range of materials, Futures & Ruins interprets Robert's artworks as harbingers of a modern appetite for self-destruction: the paintings are examined as expressions of the pleasures and perils of a risk economy.

The first in-depth study of the Utrecht artist to address questions beyond connoisseurship and attribution, this book makes a significant contribution to Ter Brugghen and Northern Caravaggist studies. Focusing on the Dutch master's simultaneous use of Northern archaisms with Caravaggio's motifs and style, Natasha Seaman nuances our understanding of Ter Brugghen's appropriations from the Italian painter. Her analysis centers on four paintings, all depicting New Testament subjects. They include Ter Brugghen's largest and first known signed work (Crowning with Thorns), his most archaizing (the Crucifixion), and the two paintings most directly related to the works of Caravaggio (the Doubting Thomas and the Calling of Matthew). By examining the ways in which Ter Brugghen's paintings deliberately diverge from Caravaggio's, Seaman sheds new light on the Utrecht artist and his work. For example, she demonstrates that where Caravaggio's paintings are boldly illusionistic and mimetic, thus de-emphasizing their materiality, Ter Brugghen's works examined here create the opposite effect, connecting their content to their made form. This study not only illuminates the complex meanings of the paintings addressed here, but also offers insights into the image debates and the status of devotional art in Italy and Utrecht in the seventeenth century by examining one artist's response to them.

The turn of the eighteenth century was a period of transition in France, a time when new but contested concepts of modernity emerged in virtually every cultural realm. The rigidity of the state's consolidation of the arts in the late seventeenth century yielded to a more vibrant and diverse cultural life, and Paris became, once again, the social and artistic capital of the wealthiest nation in Europe. In Sheltering Art, Rochelle Ziskin explores private art collecting, a primary facet of that newly decentralized artistic realm and one increasingly embraced by an expanding social elite as the century wore on. During the key period when Paris reclaimed its role as the nexus of cultural and social life, two rival circles of art collectors--with dissonant goals and disparate conceptions of modernity--competed for preeminence. Sheltering Art focuses on these collectors, their motivations for collecting art, and the natures of their collections. An ambitious study, it employs extensive archival research in its examination of the ideologies associated with different strategies of collecting in eighteenth-century Paris and how art collecting was inextricably linked to the shaping of social identities.

Meditations on the paradoxes generated around the ending of western slavery. In his tour-de-force ""Blind Memory"", Marcus Wood read the visual archive of slavery in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and Britain with a closeness and rigor that until then had been applied only to the written texts of that epoch. ""Blind Memory"" changed the way we look at everything from a Turner seascape to a crude woodcut in a runaway slave advertisement. ""The Horrible Gift of Freedom"" brings the same degree of rigor to an analysis of the visual culture of Atlantic emancipation. Wood takes a troubled and troubling look at the iconography inspired by the abolition of slavery across the Atlantic diaspora. Why, he asks, did imagery showing the very instant of the birth of black slave freedom invariably personify Liberty as a white woman? Where did the image of the enchained kneeling slave, ubiquitous in abolitionist visual culture on both sides of the Atlantic, come from? And, most important, why was freedom invariably depicted as a gift from white people to black people? In order to assess what the inheritance of emancipation imagery means now and to speculate about where it may travel in the future, Wood spends the latter parts of this book looking at the 2007 bicentenary of the 1807 Slave Trade Abolition Act. In this context a provocative range of material is analyzed including commemorative postage stamps, museum exhibits, street performances, religious ceremonies, political protests, and popular film. By taking a new look at the role of the visual arts in promoting the 'great emancipation swindle', Wood brings into the open the manner in which the slave power and its inheritors have single-mindedly focused on celebratory cultural myths that function to diminish both white culpability and black outrage. This book demands that the living lies developed around the memory of the emancipation moment in Europe and America need to be not only reassessed but demolished.

Cardinals occupied a unique place in the world of early modern Europe, their distinctive red hats the visible signs not only of impressive careers at the highest rank the pope could bestow, but also of their high social status and political influence on an international scale. Appointed for life, these princes of the Church played a key role in the dramatic events of a period in which both the power and the authority of the papacy were challenged.

Cardinals crossed the ambiguous boundaries then existing between religious and secular power. Granted unparalleled access to Church and private property, they spent considerable time, money, and effort on making the best collections of art and antiquities. Some commissioned artworks in churches that advertised their monastic or national connections, while others took Rome and the papacy abroad to enrich their own cities and countries. But theirs was a precarious dignity: while cardinals could thrive during one papacy, they could suddenly fall from power during the next. The new research represented by the sixteen case studies in The Possessions of a Cardinal reveals how cardinals used their vulnerable position and spent their often substantial wealth on personal and religious interests. As a result, the tensions inherent in their position between the spiritual and the worldly are underscored.

"Aux limites de l'imitation "pose une question audacieuse que les innombrables etudes existantes sur l'"ut pictura poesis" a l'age classique ont eu tendance a laisser dans l'ombre: celle de la matiere comme limite de l'imitation, suivant l'hypothese selon laquelle le surgissement du materiel est a l'origine du delitement de l'"ut pictura poesis" au cours de l'age classique. Les etudes reunies ici abordent cette question pour l'ensemble de l'age classique (allant du XVIe a la fin du XVIIIe siecle) ainsi que pour les principaux domaines artistiques que l'on peut distinguer (litterature, peinture, sculpture, musique, danse).

Faith and Power in Japanese Buddhist Art explores the transformation of Buddhism from the premodern to the contemporary era in Japan and the central role its visual culture has played in this transformation. Although Buddhism is generally regarded as peripheral to modern Japanese society, this book demonstrates otherwise. Its chapters elucidate the thread of change over time in the practice of Buddhism as revealed in temple worship halls and other sites of devotion and in imagery representing the religion's most popular deities and religious practices.

This new volume accompanies and complements the publication of the major new 2-volume catalogue the Brooklyn Museum's collection of American paintings by artists born before 1876. It provides a richly illustrated general survey of the Museum's most significant paintings by American artists. Each painting is illustrated in colour, many with accompanying colour details and comparative images. The selected works are arranged in four thematic sections: early American art, art of the 1830's to 50's, American painting in the Civil War Era, and painting of the late 19th and early 20th Century. Extended captions discuss the key features of each painting, information about the artist, and the wider artistic context of the work and the period in which it was produced. The volume features a Chronology, which focuses on wider key moments, movements and styles that developed in American art post-Independence. Special attention is also given to works by individual artists who heavily influenced the development of American painting, such as Copley, Cole and Eakins.

Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1826) has long been recognized as the greatest European portrait sculptor of the late eighteenth century, flourishing during both the American and French Revolutions as well as during the Directoire and Empire in France. Whether sculpting a head of state, an intellectual, or a young child, Houdon had an uncanny ability to capture the essence of his subject with a characteristic pose or expression. Yet until now, Houdon's exquisite sculptures have never been the subject of a major exhibition.
This lavish exhibition catalogue will immediately take its rightful place as the definitive work on Houdon. With more than one hundred color plates and two hundred black and white halftones, "Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sculptor of the Enlightenment "illustrates every stage of the sculptor's fascinating career, from his early portrayals of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to his stunning portraits of American patriots such as George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, John Paul Jones, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. Indeed the images we hold dear of legendary Enlightenment figures like Diderot, Rousseau, d'Alembert, and Voltaire are based on works by Houdon. More than mere representations, these sculptures provide us fascinating, intimate glimpses into the very core of who these figures were. Houdon's genius animated even his less illustrious subjects, like his portraits of his family and friends, and filled his sculptures of children with delicacy and freshness. Accompanying the images of Houdon's masterworks are four insightful essays that discuss Houdon's views on art (based in part on a newly discovered manuscript written by the artist) as well as his prominencein the highly varied cultures of eighteenth-century France, Germany, and Russia.
From aristocrats to revolutionaries, actors to philosophers, Houdon's amazingly vivid portraits constitute the visual record of the Enlightenment and capture the true spirit of a remarkable age. "Jean-Antoine Houdon" finally gives these gorgeous works their due.