Four Wisconsin artists, Martha Glowacki, Mark Lorenzi, Natasha Nicholson, and Mary Alice Wimmer, are passionate collectors who use objects from their own collections to inform their individual artwork. This catalog documents an installation by each of the four artists that is reminiscent of the 16th- and 17th- century "Wunderkammer," or cabinet of wonders, private collections of natural and man-made objects.
Distributed for the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison

In 1775 Prince Marcantonio Borghese IV and the architect Antonio Asprucci embarked upon a decorative renovation of the Villa Borghese. Initially their attention focused on the Casino, the principal building at the villa, which had always been a semi-public museum. By 1625 it housed much of the Borghese's outstanding collection of sculpture. Integrating this statuary with vast baroque ceiling paintings and richly ornamented surfaces, Asprucci created a dazzling and unified homage to the Borghese family, portraying its legendary ancestors as well as its newly born heir.
In this book, Carole Paul reads the inventive decorative program as a set of exemplary scenes for the education of the ideal Borghese prince. Her wide-ranging essay also situates the Villa Borghese among the sumptuous palaces and suburban villas of Rome's collectors of antiquities and outlines the renovated Casino's pivotal role in the historic transition from the princely collection to the public museum. Rounding out this volume is a catalog of the Getty Research Institute's fifty-nine drawings for the refurbishing of the Villa Borghese and Alberta Campitelli's discussion of sketches for the short-lived Museo di Gabii, the Villa's other antiquities museum.

Renowned for her majestic beauty and impassioned performances, the English actress Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) revolutionized the aesthetics of eighteenth-century theater while inventing a complex public persona to promote her fame. Her flair for self-presentation was matched by the showmanship of the many artists who portrayed her.
Here three lively essays--by Robyn Asleson, Shelley Bennett, Mark Leonard, and Shearer West--explore Siddons's life and career, as well as her relationships with a number of artists. Notable among them was Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose masterpiece Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse became an icon of this great actress at the peak of her career. This lavish volume also brings together fifty-five other portraits of Siddons including works by Thomas Gainsborough, George Romney, Thomas Lawrence, and Gilbert Stuart.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini was the greatest sculptor of the Baroque period, and yet--surprisingly--there has never before been a major exhibition of his sculpture in North America. Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture--on view from August 5 through October 26, 2008, at the J. Paul Getty Museum and from November 28, 2008, through March 8, 2009, at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa--showcases portrait sculptures from all phases of the artist's long career, from the very early Antonio Coppola of 1612 to Clement X of about 1676, one of his last completed works. Bernini's portrait busts were masterpieces of technical virtuosity; at the same time, they revealed a new interest in psychological depth. Bernini's ability to capture the essential character of his subjects was unmatched and had a profound influence on other leading sculptors of his day, such as Alessandro Algardi, Giuliano Finelli, and Francesco Mochi. Bernini and the Birth of Baroque Portrait Sculpture is a groundbreaking study that features drawings and paintings by Bernini and his contemporaries. Together they demonstrate not only the range, skill, and acuity of these masters of Baroque portraiture but also the interrelationship of the arts in seventeenth-century Rome.

Takes a scholarly approach to bring Denon to life and to the attention of contemporary readers. To make his acquaintance is to recapture the aristocracy and the world of art and letters at the turn of the 19th century in several European capitals.

Winterthur Museum is world renowned for its decorative arts collections and its exceptional educational programs. Adapted from the training materials developed at the museum, the revised and enhanced Early American Decorative Arts, 1620-1860: A Handbook for Interpreters is an indispensable guide for anyone involved with interpretation of decorative arts collections. Early American Decorative Arts, 1620-1860 elucidates the principles of public interpretation, explains how to analyze objects, and defines the concept of style. Eighteen chapters provide comprehensive descriptions of decorative arts including furniture, ceramics, textiles, paintings and prints, metalwork, glass, and other objects. Many museums and historic sites display such collections to thousands of visitors annually. Guides, interpreters, educators, and collection managers will find this book a helpful summary and a guide to further research. This enhanced edition includes now includes a CD featuring beautiful color images of the more than 170 black-and-white photographs in the book, bringing the Winterthur collections to life on your computer and in your classroom. Published in cooperation with Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library.

From c.1750 to c.1810 the paths of music history and the history of painting converged with lasting consequences. The publication of Newton's Opticks at the start of the eighteenth century gave a 'scientific' basis to the analogy between sight and sound, allowing music and the visual arts to be defined more closely in relation to one another. This was also a period which witnessed the emergence of a larger and increasingly receptive audience for both music and the visual arts - an audience which potentially included all social strata. The development of this growing public and the commercial potential that it signified meant that for the first time it became possible for a contemporary artist to enjoy an international reputation. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the career of Joseph Haydn. Although this phenomenon defies conventional modes of study, the book shows how musical pictorialism became a major creative force in popular culture. Haydn, the most popular living cultural personality of the period, proved to be the key figure in advancing the new relationship. The connections between the composer and his audiences and leading contemporary artists (including Tiepolo, Mengs, Kauffman, Goya, David, Messerschmidt, Loutherbourg, Canova, Copley, Fuseli, Reynolds, Gillray and West) are examined here for the first time. By the early nineteenth century, populism was beginning to be regarded with scepticism and disdain. Mozart was the modern Raphael, Beethoven the modern Michelangelo. Haydn, however, had no clear parallel in the accepted canon of Renaissance art. Yet his recognition that ordinary people had a desire to experience simultaneous aural and visual stimulation was not altogether lost, finding future exponents in Wagner and later still in the cinematic arts.

The relationship between music and painting in the Early Modern period is the focus of this collection of essays by an international group of distinguished art historians and musicologists. Each writer takes a multidisciplinary approach as he or she explores the interface between music performance and painting, or between music and art theory. The essays reflect a variety and range of approaches and offer methodologies which might usefully be employed in future research in this field. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Franca Trinchieri Camiz, an art historian who worked extensively on topics related to art and music, and who participated in some of the conference panels from which many of these essays originate. Three of Professor Camiz's own essays are included in the final section of this volume, together with a bibliography of her writings in this field. They are preceded by two thematic groups of essays covering aspects of musical imagery in portraits, issues in iconography and theory, and the relationship between music and art in religious imagery.

The eighteenth century is recognized as a complex period of dramatic epistemic shifts that would have profound effects on the modern world. Paradoxically, the art of the era continues to be a relatively neglected field within art history. While women's private lives, their involvement with cultural production, the project of Enlightenment, and the public sphere have been the subjects of ground-breaking historical and literary studies in recent decades, women's engagement with the arts remains one of the richest and most under-explored areas for scholarly investigation. This collection of new essays by specialist authors addresses women's activities as patrons and as "patronized" artists over the course of the century. It provides a much needed examination, with admirable breadth and variety, of women's artistic production and patronage during the eighteenth century. By opening up the specific problems and conflicts inherent in women's artistic involvements from the perspective of what was at stake for the eighteenth-century women themselves, it also acts as a corrective to the generalizing and stereotyping about the prominence of those women, which is too often present in current day literature. Some essays are concerned with how women's involvement in the arts allowed them to fashion identities for themselves (whether national, political, religious, intellectual, artistic, or gender-based) and how such self-fashioning in turn enabled them to negotiate or intervene in the public domains of culture and politics where "The Woman Question" was so hotly debated. Other essays examine how men's patronage of women also served as a vehicle for self-fashioning for both artist and sponsor. Artists and patrons discussed include: Carriera; Queen Lovisa Ulrike and Chardin; the Bourbon Princesses Mlle Clermont, Mme AdelaA-de and Nattier; the Duchess of Osuna and Goya; Marie-Antoinette and Vigee-Lebrun; Labille-Guiard; Queen Carolina of Naples, Prince Stanislaus Poniatowski of Poland and Kauffman; David and his students, Mesdames Benoist, Lavoisier and Mongez.

Once described as 'England's Apollo' James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos (1674-1744) was an outstanding patron of the arts during the first half of the eighteenth century. Having acquired great wealth and influence as Paymaster-General of Queen Anne's forces abroad, Chandos commissioned work from leading artists, architects, poets and composers including Godfrey Kneller, William Talman, Sir John Vanbrugh, Sir James Thornhill, John Gay and George Frederick Handel. Despite his associations with such renowned figures, Chandos soon gained a reputation for tasteless extravagance. This reputation was not helped by the publication in 1731 of Alexander Pope's poem 'Of Taste' which was widely regarded as a satire upon Chandos and Cannons, the new house he was building near Edgware. The poem destroyed Chandos's reputation as a patron of the arts and ensured that he was remembered as a man lacking in taste. Yet, as this book shows, such a judgement is plainly unfair when the Duke's patronage is considered in more depth and understood within the artistic context of his age. By investigating the patronage and collections of the Duke, through an examination of documentary sources and contemporary accounts, it is possible to paint a very different picture of the man. Rather than the epitome of bad taste described by his enemies, it is clear that Chandos was an enlightened patron who embraced new ideas, and strove to establish a taste for the Palladian in England, which was to define the Georgian era.

The struggles and achievements of forty-six notable women artists of the early modern period, as documented by their contemporaries, are uniquely brought together in this anthology. The life stories presented here are foundational texts for the history of art, but since most are found only in rare volumes and few have been translated into English, until now they have been generally inaccessible to many scholars. Originally published in biographical compendia such as Vasari's Lives of the Artists, the writings included here document not only the lives of relatively well known women artists such as Artemisia Gentileschi and Sofonisba Anguissola, but also those who have languished in obscurity, like Anna Waser and Li Yin. Each life story is preceded by a brief introduction to the artist as well as to her biographer, and the texts themselves are annotated to provide necessary clarification. Beyond their documentary value, these stories provide fascinating insight as to how men commonly characterized women artists as exceptions to their sex, and attempted to explain their presence in the male-dominated realm of art. The introductory chapter to the book explores this intriguing gender dynamic and elucidates some of the strategies and historical context that factored into the composition of these lives. The volume includes an appended index to women artists' life stories in biographical compendia of the period

As one of the first books to treat portraits of early modern women as a discrete subject, this volume considers the possibilities and limits of agency and identity for women in history and, with particular attention to gender, as categories of analysis for women's images. Its nine original essays on Italy, the Low Countries, Germany, France, and England deepen the usefulness of these analytical tools for portraiture. Among the book's broad contributions: it dispels false assumptions about agency's possibilities and limits, showing how agency can be located outside of conventional understanding, and, conversely, how it can be stretched too far. It demonstrates that agency is compatible with relational gender analysis, especially when alternative agencies such as spectatorship are taken into account. It also makes evident the importance of aesthetics for the study of identity and agency. The individual essays reveal, among other things, how portraits broadened the traditional parameters of portraiture, explored transvestism and same-sex eroticism, appropriated aspects of male portraiture to claim those values for their sitters, and, as sites for gender negotiation, resistance, and debate, invoked considerable relational anxiety. Richly layered in method, the book offers an array of provocative insights into its subject.

When the Jesuit missionaries ventured from Europe to newly discovered territories in Asia and Latin America, they brought with them the rich traditions of Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture. What happened to the artistic and social practices already thriving in the communities that the missionaries encountered is the story told by art historian and Jesuit specialist Gauvin Alexander Bailey.

The Jesuits, determined to convert both spiritually and culturally, put great effort into imparting their own artistic techniques and knowledge. At the same time they were unusually tolerant of the non-European cultures, making artistic accommodations in order to communicate with each particular society. The resulting hybridization was complex: German, Italian, and Flemish as well as the dominant Spanish and Portuguese idioms mingled with multiple Asian and Amerindian traditions.

Bailey argues that this cross-pollination of early modern art became the first truly global visual currency for cultural exchange. Through a sweeping look at Japan, China, Mughul India, and Paraguay, the author focuses on four of the most flourishing artistic encounters and discovers much unrecognized or misunderstood art. He overturns the simple thesis that art was imposed on subject cultures in favour of the more difficult paradigm of exchange. This meticulously researched book has over 100 beautiful illustrations and a thorough index.

Winner of the 2000 Roland H. Bainton Prize Winner for Art and Music History - Sixteenth Century Studies Conference

Portraits were the most widely commissioned paintings in 18th-century France, but most portraits were produced for private consumption, and were therefore seen as inferior to art designed for public exhibition. The French Revolution endowed private values with an unprecedented significance, and the way people responded to portraits changed as a result. This is an area which has largely been ignored by art historians, who have concentrated on art associated with the public events of the Revolution. Seen from the perspective of portrait production, the history of art during the Revolution looks very different, and the significance of the Revolution for attitudes to art and artists in the 19th century and beyond becomes clearer.

In early modern Europe, the visual image began to move, not only as it traveled across great distances but also due to the introduction of innovative visual formats that produced animation within the image itself. This book traces the arduous journeys of visual images through evidence of their use and reproduction along missionary routes from Europe to India, Japan, China, Brazil and Chile. It argues that missionary world travel was crucial to the early modern re-animation of the image through devices such as the reflection of the mirror, the multiple registers of vision of the anthropomorphic image, the imaginative and disorienting possibilities of the utopic image, and even the reconstitution of the sacred image with memories of the relation of travel to life and death. Within the journeys traced in the book, the visual image forged new connections between different locations and across different cultures, accumulating increasingly entangled histories. Even more intriguingly, these images frequently returned to Europe, changed but still recognisable, there to be used again with an awareness of their earlier travels. -- .

In a critical reassessment of chinoiserie, a style both praised and derided for its triviality, prettiness and ornamental excesses, Stacey Sloboda argues that chinoiserie was no mute participant in eighteenth-century global consumer culture, but was instead a critical commentator on that culture. Analysing ceramics, wallpaper, furniture, garden architecture and other significant examples of British and Chinese design, this book takes an object-focused approach to studying the cultural phenomenon of the 'Chinese taste' in eighteenth-century Britain. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the critical history of design and the decorative arts in the period, and students and scholars of art history, material culture, eighteenth-century studies and British history will find a novel approach to studying the decorative arts and a forceful argument for their critical capacities. -- .

This book explores the rich but understudied relationship between English country houses and the portraits they contain. It features essays by well-known scholars such as Alison Yarrington, Gill Perry, Kate Retford, Harriet Guest, Emma Barker and Desmond Shawe-Taylor. Works discussed include grand portraits, intimate pastels and imposing sculptures. Moving between residences as diverse as Stowe, Althorp Park, the Vache, Chatsworth, Knole and Windsor Castle, it unpicks the significance of various spaces - the closet, the gallery, the library - and the ways in which portraiture interacted with those environments. It explores questions around gender, investigating narratives of family and kinship in portraits of women as wives and daughters, but also as mistresses and celebrities. It also interrogates representations of military heroes in order to explore the wider, complex ties between these families, their houses, and imperial conflict. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in eighteenth-century studies, especially for those studying portraiture and country houses. -- .

The fragments of Greek painted pottery making up the 115 catalogue entries in this volume come from vases that were once part of Sir William Hamiltons prized second collection. About one third of that collection was lost when the ship transporting it back to England, HMS Colossus, struck a reef and sank off the Isles of Scilly in December 1798. The recovery of what remained of those vases, after almost 200 years on the seabed, took place between 1975 and 1979. The surviving fragments were formally acquired by the British Museum in 1981.

Often understood as primarily moral works, William Hogarth's oeuvre is in truth made up of innumerable interwoven strands of significance. By focusing on Hogarth's four greatest series, 'A Harlot's Progress', 'A Rake's Progress', 'Marriage-a-la Mode', and 'Industry and Idleness', Soulier-Detis tugs at one of the least-studied of these half-hidden threads - Masonic symbolism. Hogarth's many classical and biblical references, whose ambiguity and apparently paradoxical relation with the eighteenth-century situations depicted have often been underlined, gain coherence and unity when they are analysed in the symbolic framework of freemasonry and alchemy Hogarth was busy both using and concealing in his prints. The coded meaning that emerges is often entirely at odds with that on the surface, a dissonance frequently suspected but never conclusively proved by critics. Beneath the author's incisive eye, a veritable secret language of imagery emerges to form a coherent whole, offering an entirely new perspective on so familiar an artist. An original and titillating book for academic and general audiences alike, "Guess at the Rest" fascinates as it explores Hogarth's intricate mythological, biblical and Masonic symbols and the hidden codes they form. Even as she unearths this particular reading of the great painter and engraver, however, Soulier-Detis ultimately reminds us that though we may wish to think we know Hogarth well, his dictum at the end of the caption to The South Sea Scheme will always hold true - "Guess at the Rest you find out more." About the Author: Elisabeth Soulier-Detis has just retired from chair of British Eighteenth-Century Literature at the Paul-Valery University of Montpellier. She was director for France of a research network on eighteenth-century Europe. Her major academic interests are eighteenth-century British novelists (Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne), as well as eighteenth-century British art. She also founded 'The European Spectator', a bilingual collection.

Covers approximately 250 sales of Old Masters since 1980, with an average of five listings from each sale. There are 2,700 signature examples of 1,700 artists. Three sections following the main body of this volume offer the researcher easy cross-referencing monograms and initials, symbols, and alternate names. The appendix includes supplemental signature information on additional artists whose actual signatures were not available, but whose importance could not be omitted.

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

From the mid-eighteenth century on, cultural life in the northern valley of the St John River blended the traditions of Acadian and French Canadian settlers with those of American immigrants. In the southern valley, Mi'kmaq interacted with American newcomers and Loyalist settlers, while the later influx of Scottish and Irish immigrants introduced more layers of cultural traditions. Using an impressively diverse combination of artifacts, artwork, maps, and primary literature from over sixty museum collections and archives, Cook addresses the experiences of immigrants and artisans and their influence on the cultural boundaries along one of eastern North America's most important rivers. She moves beyond a mere catalogue of objects to provide an important comparative analysis of material heritage, showing how furniture embodied the lifestyles of differing groups of settlers.

Examining their social, political, and economic contexts, McKay shows how the murals of this period glorified Canada as a modern nation state, extolled the virtues of commerce and industry, inculcated conventions of gender and race, and shared the intensity of nationalistic sentiment that led to the work of the more renowned painters of Toronto's Group of Seven. Bringing together for the first time a body of Canadian work - civic, commercial, religious, and private - that has been largely ignored by art historians, A National Soul challenges previous histories of Canadian painting. This generously illustrated book reproduces seldom-seen works from across the country, many of which have been moved or destroyed, and includes a comprehensive listing of all works from the period, their original and present locations, and their state of preservation.

Jan van Noordt created some of the most flamboyant and expressive paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. David de Witt untangles fact from fiction in this comprehensive study of the life and work of Jan van Noordt, offering a detailed biography based on a thorough review of the documentary evidence.