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.

The unique arts-and-crafts tradition of the American Southwest illuminates this economic and social history of colonial New Mexico, casting new light on the development of New Mexico's Hispanic community and its changing relationship with Pueblo Indians. Ross Frank's analysis of Pueblo Indian pottery, Pueblo and Spanish blankets, and Spanish religious images - or santos - links economic change to social and cultural change in this region. Using these cultural artifacts to gauge shifts in power and status, Frank charts the creation of a culturally innovative and dominating Hispanic settler - or vecino - community during the final decades of the eighteenth century. Contrary to previous views of this period as an economic backwater, Frank shows that Spanish New Mexico instead experienced growth that tied the region closely to colonial economic reforms of the Spanish empire. The resulting economic boom dramatically altered the balance of power between the Spanish settlers and the Pueblo Indians, giving the vecinos the incentive and the means to exploit their Pueblo Indian neighbors. Frank shows that the vecinos used different strategies to take control of the Pueblo textile and pottery trade. The Hispanic community began to define its cultural identity through the economic and social subordination of the Pueblo Indians. Connecting economic change to powerful cultural and social changes, Frank provides a new understanding of this 'borderlands' region of northern New Spain in relatoin to the Spanish colonial history of Mexico. At the same time, "From Settler to Citizen" recovers the previously unexplored history of an important Hispanic community.

Starting with Brunelleschi’s invention of perspective and Galileo’s invention of the telescope—two inaugural moments in the history of vision, from two apparently distinct provinces, art and science—this volume of essays by noted art, architecture, science, philosophy, and literary historians teases out the multiple strands of the discourse about sight in the early modern period. Looking at Leonardo and Gallaccini, at botanists, mathematicians, and artists from Dante to Dürer to Shakespeare, and at photography and film as pointed modern commentaries on early modern seeing, Vision and Its Instruments revisits the complexity of the early modern economy of the image, of the eye, and of its instruments. The book explores the full range of early modern conceptions of vision, in which mal’occhio (the evil eye), witchcraft, spiritual visions, and phantasms, as well as the artist’s brush and the architect’s compass, were seen as providing knowledge equal to or better than newly developed scientific instruments and practices (and occasionally working in conjunction with them). The essays in this volume also bring a new dimension to the current discourse about image production and its cultural functions.

In Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome, Frances Gage undertakes an in-depth study of the writings of the physician and art critic Giulio Mancini. Using Mancini’s unpublished treatises as well as contemporary documents, Gage demonstrates that in the early modern world, belief in the transformational power of images was not limited to cult images, as has often been assumed, but applied to secular ones as well. This important new interpretation of the value of images and the motivations underlying the rise of private art collections in the early modern period challenges purely economic or status-based explanations. Gage demonstrates that paintings were understood to have profound effects on the minds, imaginations, and bodies of viewers. Indeed, paintings were believed to affect the health and emotional balance of beholders—extending even to the look and disposition of their offspring—and to compel them to behave according to civic and moral values. In using medical discourse as an analytical tool to help elucidate the meaning that collectors and viewers attributed to specific genres of painting, Gage shows that images truly informed actions, shaping everyday rituals from reproductive practices to exercise. In doing so, she concludes that sharp distinctions between an artwork’s aesthetic value and its utility did not apply in the early modern period.

In this groundbreaking book, James Cahill expands the field of Chinese pictorial art history, opening both scholarly studies and popular appreciation to vernacular paintings, 'pictures for use and pleasure'. These were works commissioned and appreciated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the non-elites of Chinese society, including women. Traditional Chinese collectors, like present-day scholars of Chinese painting, have favored the 'literati' paintings of the Chinese male elite, disparaging vernacular works, often intended as decorations or produced to mark a special occasion. Cahill challenges the dominant dogma and doctrine of the literati, showing how the vernacular images, both beautiful and appealing, strengthen our understanding of High Qing culture. They bring to light the Qing or Manchu emperors' fascination with erotic culture in the thriving cities of the Yangtze Delta and demonstrate the growth of figure painting in and around Beijing's imperial court. They also revise our understanding of gender roles and show how Chinese artists made use of European styles. By introducing a large, rich body of works, "Pictures for Use and Pleasure" opens new windows on later Chinese life and society.

Volume III in the 'Studies in the History of Collection' series, published in association with the Beazley Archive in the University of Oxford. 14 papers on The Mechanisms of the Art Market 1660-1830 presented at a symposium at the Wallace Collection, London in December 2003. Contents: Introduction (Neil De Marchi); 1) The Art Trade and its Urban Context: England and the Netherlands compared, 1550-1750 (David Ormrod); 2) The Auction Duty Act of 1777: the beginning of institutionalisation of auctions in Britain (Satomi Ohashi); 3) The Almoneda: the second-hand art market in Spain (Mari-Tere Alvarez); 4) The Market for Netherlandish Paintings in Paris, 1750-1815 (Hans J. Van Miegroet); 5) Le tableau et son prix a Paris, 1760-80 (Patrick Michel); 6) The System Governing Appraised Value in Ancien Regime France (Alden R. Gordon); 7) The Marquis de Vasse Against the Art Dealer Jacques Lenglier: a case-study of an eighteenth-century Parisian auction (Francois Marandet); 8) Pierre Sirois (1665-1726): le premier marchand de Watteau (Guillaume Glorieux); 9) The Purchase of the Past: Dr Richard Rawlinson (1690-1755) and the collecting of history (John Cherry); 10) John Anderson and John Bouttats: picture dealers in eighteenth-century London (David Connell); 11) Sir Godfrey Copley as Patron and Consumer, 1685-1705 (David Mitchell); 12) The Rise and Fall of a British Connoisseur: the career of Michael Bryan (1757-1821), picture dealer extraordinaire (Julia Armstrong-Totten); 13) 'In Keeping with the Truth': the German art market and its role in the development of connoisseurship in the eighteenth century (Thomas Ketelsen); 14) Abraham Hume e Giovanni Maria Sasso: il mercato artistico tra Venezia e Londra nel settecento (Linda Borean).

" A]n impressive and original work of synthetic scholarship that one hopes will be emulated by others." Phillip B. Wagoner, Wesleyan University

" A]n excellent and important work... with] a wonderful sophistication of method." Padma Kaimal, Colgate University

The patrons and artists of Bijapur, an Islamic kingdom that flourished in the Deccan region of India in the 16th and 17th centuries, produced lush paintings and elaborately carved architecture, evidence of a highly cosmopolitan Indo-Islamic culture. Bijapur s most celebrated monument, the Ibrahim Rauza tomb complex, is carved with elegant calligraphy and lotus flowers and was once dubbed "the Taj Mahal of the South." This stunningly illustrated study traces the development of Bijapuri art and courtly identity through detailed examination of selected paintings and architecture, many of which have never before been published. They deserve our attention for their aesthetic qualities as well as for the ways they expand our understanding of the rich synthesis of cultures and religions in South Asian and Islamic art."

Contrary to twentieth-century criticism that cast them as misguided dabblers, English virtuosi in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were erudite individuals with solid grounding in the classics, deep appreciation for the arts, and sincere curiosity about the natural world. Reestablishing their broad historical significance, "The English Virtuoso" situates this polymathic group at the rich intersection of the period's art, medicine, and antiquarianism.
At the heart of this profoundly interdisciplinary study lies the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, which from its founding in 1660 served as the major professional organization for London's leading physicians, many of them prominent virtuosi. Craig Ashley Hanson reveals that a vital art audience emerged from the Royal Society--whose members assembled many of the period's most important nonaristocratic collections--a century before most accounts date the establishment of an institutional base for the arts in England. Unearthing the fascinating stories of an impressive cast of characters, Hanson establishes a new foundation for understanding both the relationship between British art and science and the artistic accomplishments of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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.

In The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment Christopher Johns addresses the reforming impulse of the Catholic Church in the middle decades of the eighteenth century and its impact on art and visual culture, broadly defined. Until relatively recently, most scholars considered the notion of a Catholic Enlightment either oxymoronic or illusory, since received wisdom was that the Catholic Church was a tireless and indefatigable enemy of modernist progress. According to Johns, however, the eighteenth-century Papacy recognized many of the advantages of engaging certain aspects of enlightenment thinking and many in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, both in Italy and abroad, were sincerely interested in making the Church more relevant in the modern world and, above all, in reforming the various institutions that governed society. Johns presents the visual culture of papal Rome as a major change agent in the cause of Catholic enlightenment while assessing its continuing links to tradition. The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment sheds substantial light on the relationship between eighteenth-century Roman society and visual culture and the role of religion in both.

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.

Since the Renaissance, art in Belgium and the Netherlands has been known for its innovations in realistic representation and its fluency in symbolism. New market forces and artistic concerns fueled the development of landscape as an independent genre in Belgium in the sixteenth century, and landscape emerged as a major focus for nineteenth-century realist and symbolist artists. Nature's Mirror, and the exhibition it accompanies, traces these landmark developments with a rich array of seldom-seen works. Nature's Mirror presents its collection of prints and drawings in chronological order, exploring the evolving dialogue between subjective experience and the external world from the Renaissance through the First World War. Essays by American and Belgian specialists examine artists within the regional, political, and industrial contexts that strongly influenced them. Featuring more than one hundred works, many from the leading private collection of Belgian art in America, the Hearn Family Trust, Nature's Mirror explores the evolution of Belgian art in this fruitful period with remarkable lucidity and detail.

In “When All of Rome Was Under Construction,� architectural historian Dorothy Metzger Habel considers the politics and processes involved in building the city of Rome during the baroque period. Like many historians of the period, Habel previously focused on the grand schemes of patronage; now, however, she reconstructs the role of the “public voice� in the creation of the city. She presents the case that Rome’s built environment did not merely reflect the vision of patrons and architects who simply imposed buildings and spaces upon the city’s populace. Rather, through careful examination of a tremendous range of archival material—from depositions and budgets to memoranda and the minutes of confraternity meetings—Habel foregrounds what she describes as “the incubation of architecture� in the context of such building projects as additions to the Palazzo Doria-Pamphili and S. Carlo ai Catinari as well as the construction of the Piazza Colonna. She considers the financing of building and the availability of building materials and labor, and she offers a fresh investigation of the writings of Lorenzo Pizzatti, who called attention to “the social implications� of building in the city. Taken as a whole, Habel’s examination of these voices and buildings offers the reader a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the shape and the will of the public in mid-seventeenth-century Rome.

In the latter half of the 18th century, Johannes Wiedewelt (1731-1802) played a pivotal role in introducing an early form of Neoclassicism into Danish sculpture by creating a large number of monuments for many different purposes. In the 1750s, he studied in Paris and Rome, where he became part of an international network of pioneering artists and scholars, including J.J. Winckelmann. In Denmark, Wiedewelt endeavored to translate the ancient idiom in statuary and monuments into an 'eternal' national monument style. This volume reassesses Wiedewelt's role in the service of art, art theory, academic education, design, etc. Special emphasis is placed on his studies of Classical Antiquity and Danish prehistoric and medieval monuments, which makes him particularly interesting for the history of archaeology. This is the first book-length study of Johannes Wiedewelt in English.

This pioneering book chronicles the transformation of public art in eighteenth-century France. As royal and ecclesiastical authority waned under the rule of Louis XV, there emerged nascent democratic institutions, a new metaphysics, and a radical political consciousness--a paradigm shift that profoundly marked the forms that commemorative sculpture and architecture took. As a French Catholic heritage gave way to more civic-minded and secular views of posterity, how was the monument reinterpreted? How did works by Clodion, Jean-Antoine Houdon, Augustin Pajou, Marie-Joseph Peyre, and Jacques Germain Soufflot, among others, speak to the aesthetic philosophies of Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire? Analyzing an extraordinary range of artistic projects--from unrealized plans for a Bourbon memorial to the sculptural program for the Pantheon--Erika Naginski appraises how the Enlightenment art of res publica intersected with historical forces, social movements, and continental philosophies that brought Western culture to the cusp of modernity.

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.

No literary figure of the 18th century was more esteemed than the poet Alexander Pope, and his sculpted portraits exemplify the celebration of literary fame at a period when authorship was being newly conceived and the portrait bust was enjoying new popularity. Accompanying an exhibition at Waddesdon Manor (The Rothschild Collection), this publication explores the convergence between authorship, portraiture, and the sculpted image in particular, by bringing together a wide range of works that foreground Pope's celebrity status. Pope took great pains over how he was represented and carefully fashioned his public persona through images, published letters, and the printed editions of his works. Eaxmined alongside some of the most celebrated painted portraits of the poet, will be a selection of the printed texts which Pope planned with meticulous care. The core of the publication will consist of eight different versions of the same portrait bust by the leading sculptor of the period, Louis Francois Roubiliac. The marble bust had long been seen as a form appropriate for the celebration of literary fame and Pope's bust in part imitates those of classical authors whose works he both translated and consciously imitated in his own poems. More than any other sculptor, Roubiliac reqorked the conventions of the bust, transforming it into a genre that was considered worthy of close and sustained attention. Nowhere is this seen more tellingly than in his compelling and intense portraits of Pope. Based on a vividly modelled clay original, the variant marble versions were carved with arresting virtuosity, recalling Pope's own phrase,"Marble, soften'd into Life". At the same time, the image was reproduced by both the sculptor himself and by others, in a variety of materials. Multiplied and reproduced throughout the 18th century, Pope's bust was the most familiar and visible sign of his authorial fame. At the same time, it was also used as a way of articulating friendship - a constant theme in Pope's verse - and all the early versions of Roubiliac's bust were probably executed for Pope's closest friends. By bringing together the eight versions thought to have been executed by Roubiliac and his studio, and a number of other copies in marble, plaster, and ceramic, this publication will offer the opportunity to explore not only the complex relationship between these various versions but the hitherto little-understood processes of sculptural production and replication in eighteenth-century Britain.

In the eighteenth century, New Spaniards (colonial Mexicans) so lauded their nuns that they developed a local tradition of visually opulent portraits, called monjas coronadas or “crowned nuns,� that picture their subjects in regal trappings at the moment of their religious profession and in death. This study identifies these portraits as markers of a vibrant and changing society that fused together indigenous and Euro-Christian traditions and ritual practices to construct a new and complex religious identity that was unique to New Spain. To discover why crowned-nun portraits, and especially the profession portrait, were in such demand in New Spain, this book offers a pioneering interpretation of these works as significant visual contributions to a local counter-colonial discourse. James M. Córdova demonstrates that the portraits were a response to the Spanish crown’s project to modify and modernize colonial society—a series of reforms instituted by the Bourbon monarchs that threatened many nuns’ religious identities in New Spain. His analysis of the portraits’ rhetorical devices, which visually combined Euro-Christian and Mesoamerican notions of the sacred, shows how they promoted local religious and cultural values as well as client-patron relations, all of which were under scrutiny by the colonial Church. Combining visual evidence from images of the “crowned nun� with a discussion of the nuns’ actual roles in society, Córdova reveals that nuns found their greatest agency as Christ’s brides, a title through which they could, and did, challenge the Church’s authority when they found it intolerable.

Der Band eroeffnet einen neuen Zugang zur Paragone-Debatte der Fruhen Neuzeit im Sinne eines produktiven Mitstreitens. Dies betrifft im Speziellen die Rolle zwischen Malerei und Skulptur, im Allgemeinen das Verhaltnis zwischen Natur und Kunst. Deren Beziehung soll als eine osmotische verstanden werden, wie sie sich etwa in der Kunstkammer verkoerpert. Wenn sich in visuellen Bildformen koerperlich-haptische Eigenschaften einschreiben, Farbe als bildhauerisches Mittel verwendet oder Skulptur zum Bild wird, ikonographische und stilistische Zitate eingesetzt oder kunstlerische Stile weiterentwickelt werden, beschreibt dies immer auch ein Ringen um die adaquate Ausdrucksform. Die Erganzungserscheinungen der Gattungen verweisen auf eine Praxis, die Bilder stets plurimedial versteht.