This is an in-depth study of the intellectual, technical, and artistic encounters between Europe and China in the late eighteenth century, focusing on the purposeful acquisition of information and images that characterized a direct engagement with the idea of "China." The central figure in this story is Henri-Leonard Bertin (1720-1792), who served as a minister of state under Louis XV and, briefly, Louis XVI. Both his official position and personal passion for all things Chinese placed him at the center of intersecting networks of like-minded individuals who shared his ideal vision of China as a nation from which France had much to learn. John Finlay examines a fascinating episode in the rich history of cross-cultural exchange between China and Europe in the early modern period, and this book will be an important and timely contribution to a very current discussion about Sino-French cultural relations. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, visual culture, European and Chinese history.

The nation's premier private collection of Rookwood art pottery featuring American Indian portraiture is on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum from October 2007 to January 2008. "Rookwood and the American Indian: Masterpieces of American Art Pottery from the James J. Gardner Collection" is a remarkable exhibition catalogue that will be of interest well beyond the exhibition because of its unique subject matter. Fifty-two pieces produced by the Rookwood Pottery Company are showcased, many accompanied by black-and-white photographs of the American Indians portrayed by the ceramic artist. In addition, the catalogue includes a brief biography of each artist as well as curators' comments about the Rookwood pottery and the Indian apparel seen in the portraits.
The catalogue also presents two essays. The first, "Enduring Encounters: Cincinnatians and American Indians to 1900," by ethnologist and co-curator Susan Labry Meyn, describes American Indian activities in Cincinnati from the time of the first settlers to 1900 and relates these events to national policy, such as the 1830 Indian Removal Act. Rookwood and the American Indian, by art historian Anita J. Ellis, concentrates on Rookwood's fascination with the American Indian and the economic implications of producing that line.
Rookwood and the American Indian blends anthropology with art history to reveal the relationships between the white settlers and the Native Americans in general, between Cincinnati and the American Indian in particular, and ultimately between Rookwood artists and their Indian friends.

Following the destruction of Kyoto during the civil wars of the late fifteenth century, large-scale panoramic paintings of the city began to emerge. These enormous and intricately detailed depictions of the ancient imperial capital were unprecedented in the history of Japanese painting and remain unmatched as representations of urban life in any artistic tradition. Capitalscapes, the first book-length study of the Kyoto screens, examines their inception in the sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries, focusing on the political motivations that sparked their creation. Close readings of the Kyoto screens reveal that they were initially commissioned by or for members of the Ashikaga shogunate and that urban panoramas reflecting the interests of both prevailing and moribund political elites were created to underscore the legitimacy of the newly ascendant Tokugawa regime. Matthew McKelway's analysis of the screens exposes their creators' masterful exploitation of ostensibly accurate depictions to convey politically biased images of Japan's capital. His overarching methodology combines a historical approach, which considers the paintings in light of contemporary reports (diaries, chronicles, ritual accounts), with a thematic one, isolating individual motifs, deciphering their visual language, and comparing them with depictions in other works. McKelway's combined approach allows him to argue that the Kyoto screens were conceived and perpetuated as a painting genre that conveyed specific political meanings to viewers even as it provided textured details of city life. Students and scholars of Japanese art will find this lavishly illustrated work especially valuable for its insights into the cityscape painting genre, while those interested in urban and political history will appreciate its bold exploration of Kyoto's past and the city's late-medieval martial elite.

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.

This title was first published in 2002: Draw ing on extensive primary research, Greg Smith describes the shifting cultural identities of the English watercolour, and the English watercolourist, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. His convincing narrative of the conflicts and alliances that marked the history of the medium and its practitioners during this period includes careful detail about the broader artistic context within which watercolours were produced, acquired and discussed. Smith calls into question many of the received assumptions about the history of watercolour painting. His account exposes the unsatisfactory nature of the traditional narrative of watercolour painting's development into a 'high' art form, which has tended to offer a celebratory focus on the innovations and genius of individual practitioners such as Turner and Girtin, rather than detailing the anxieties and aspirations that characterized the ambivalent status of the watercolourist. The Emergence of the Professional Watercolourist is published with the assistance of the Paul Mellon Foundation.

Examining the literary career of the eighteenth-century Irish painter James Barry, 1741-1806 through an interdisciplinary methodology, The Writings of James Barry and the Genre of History Painting, 1775-1809 is the first full-length study of the artist's writings. Liam Lenihan critically assesses the artist's own aesthetic philosophy about painting and printmaking, and reveals the extent to which Barry wrestles with the significant stylistic transformations of the pre-eminent artistic genre of his age: history painting. Lenihan's book delves into the connections between Barry's writings and art, and the cultural and political issues that dominated the public sphere in London during the American and French Revolutions. Barry's writings are read within the context of the political and aesthetic thought of his distinguished friends and contemporaries, such as Edmund Burke, his first patron; Joshua Reynolds, his sometime friend and rival; Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, with whom he was later friends; and his students and adversaries, William Blake and Henry Fuseli. Ultimately, Lenihan's interdisciplinary reading shows the extent to which Barry's faith in the classical tradition in general, and the genre of history painting in particular, is permeated by the hermeneutics of suspicion. This study explores and contextualizes Barry's attempt to rethink and remake the preeminent art form of his era.

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

"An enchanting history of Japanese geometry--of a time and place where 'geometers did not cede place to poets.' This intersection of science and culture, of the mathematical, the artistic, and the spiritual, is packed, like circles within circles, with rewarding Aha! epiphanies that drive a mathematician's curiosity."--Siobhan Roberts, author of "King of Infinite Space"

"Teachers will welcome this remarkable collection of mathematical problems, history, and art, which will enrich their curriculum and promote both logical thinking and critical evaluation. It is especially important that we maintain an interest in geometry, which needs, and for once gets, more than its share."--Richard Guy, coauthor of "The Book of Numbers"

"This remarkable book provides a novel insight into the Japanese mathematics of the past few hundred years. It is fascinating to see the difference in mathematical style from that which we are used to in the Western world, but the book also elegantly illustrates the cross-cultural Platonic nature and profound beauty of mathematics itself."--Roger Penrose, author of "The Road to Reality"

"A significant contribution to the history of mathematics. The wealth of mathematical problems--from the very simple to quite complex ones--will keep the interested reader busy for years. And the beautiful illustrations make this book a work of art as much as of science. Destined to become a classic!"--Eli Maor, author of "The Pythagorean Theorem: A 4,000-Year History"

"A pleasure to read. "Sacred Mathematics" brings to light the unique style and character of geometry in the traditional Japanese sources--in particular the "sangaku" problems. These problems range from trivialto utterly devilish. I found myself captivated by them, and regularly astounded by the ingenuity and sophistication of many of the traditional solutions."--Glen Van Brummelen, coeditor of "Mathematics and the Historian's Craft"

Examining colonial art through the lens of transculturation, the essays in this collection assess painting, sculpture, photography, illustration and architecture from 1770 to 1930 to map these art works' complex and unresolved meanings illuminated by the concept of transculturation. Authors explore works in which transculturation itself was being defined, formed, negotiated, and represented in the British Empire and in countries subject to British influence (the Congo Free State, Japan, Turkey) through cross-cultural encounters of two kinds: works created in the colonies subject over time to colonial and to postcolonial spectators' receptions, and copies or multiples of works that traveled across space located in several colonies or between a colony and the metropole, thus subject to multiple cultural interpretations.

This is the second volume of Friedell's monumental "A Cultural History of the Modern Age." A key figure in the flowering of Viennese culture between the two world wars, this three volume work is considered his masterpiece. The centuries covered in this second volume mark the victory of the scientifi c mind: in nature-research, language-research, politics, economics, war, even morality, poetry, and religion. All systems of thought produced in this century, either begin with the scientifi c outlook as their foundation or regard it as their highest and fi nal goal.

Friedell claims three main streams pervade the eighteenth century: Enlightenment, Revolution, and Classicism. In ordinary use, by "Enlightenment" we mean an extreme rationalistic tendency of which preliminary stages were noted in the seventeenth century. Th e term "Classicism," is well understood.

Under the term "Revolution" Friedell includes all movements directed against what has been dominant and traditional. Th e aims of such movements were remodeling the state and society, banning all esthetic canons, and dethronement of reason by sentiment, all in the name of the "Return to Nature." Th e Enlightenment tendency might be seen as laying the ground for an age of revolution. Th is second volume continues Friedell's dramatic history of the driving forces of the twentieth century.

Art, Theatre, and Opera in Paris, 1750-1850: Exchanges and Tensions maps some of the many complex and vivid connections between art, theatre, and opera in a period of dramatic and challenging historical change, thereby deepening an understanding of familiar (and less familiar) artworks, practices, and critical strategies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Throughout this period, new types of subject matter were shared, fostering both creative connections and reflection on matters of decorum, legibility, pictorial, and dramatic structure. Correspondances were at work on several levels: conception, design, and critical judgement. In a time of vigorous social, political, and cultural contestation, the status and role of the arts and their interrelation came to be a matter of passionate public scrutiny. Scholars from art history, French theatre studies, and musicology trace some of those connections and clashes, making visible the intimately interwoven and entangled world of the arts. Protagonists include Diderot, Sedaine, Jacques-Louis David, Ignace-Eugene-Marie Degotti, Marie Malibran, Paul Delaroche, Casimir Delavigne, Marie Dorval, the 'Bleeding Nun' from Lewis's The Monk, the Comedie-Francaise and Etienne-Jean Delecluze.

Portraits of Queen Marie Leszczinska (1703-1768) were highly visible in eighteenth-century France. Appearing in royal chateaux and, after 1737, in the Parisian Salons, the queen's image was central to the visual construction of the monarchy. Her earliest portraits negotiated aspects of her ethnic difference, French gender norms, and royal rank to craft an image of an appropriate consort to the king. Later portraits by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Carle Van Loo, and Jean-Marc Nattier contributed to changing notions of queenship over the course of her 43 year tenure. Whether as royal wife, devout consort, or devoted mother, Marie Leszczinska's image mattered. While she has often been seen as a weak consort, this study argues that queenly images were powerful and even necessary for Louis XV's projection of authority. This is the first study dedicated to analyzing the queen's portraits. It engages feminist theory while setting the queen's image in the context of portraiture in France, courtly factional conflict, and the history of the French monarchy. While this investigation is historically specific, it raises the larger problem of the power of women's images versus the empowerment of women, a challenge that continues to plague the representation of political women today.

The study of the creation of canine breeds in early modern Europe, especially Spain, illustrates the different constructs against which notions of human identity were forged. This book is the first comprehensive history of early modern Spanish dogs and it evaluates how two of Spain's most celebrated and canonical cultural figures of this period, the artist Diego VelA!zquez and the author Miguel de Cervantes, radically question humankind's sixteenth-century anthropocentric self-fashioning. In general, this study illuminates how Animal Studies can offer new perspectives to understanding Hispanism, giving readers a fresh approach to the historical, literary and artistic complexity of early modern Spain.

This study provides a new analysis of the pictorial ensemble of the Torre de la Parada, the hunting lodge of King Philip IV of Spain. Created in the late 1630s by a group of artists led by Peter Paul Rubens, this cycle of mythological imagery and hunting scenes was completed by Diego Velazquez. Despite the lack of a written program, surviving works provide eloquent testimony of several basic themes that embody neo-Stoic ideals of self-restraint and prudent governance. While Rubens set the moral tone through his serio-comic Ovidian narratives, Velazquez added an important grace note with his portraits of ancient philosophers, and royals and fools of the court. This study is the first to consider in depth their joint artistic contributions and shared ambition. Through analysis of individual works, the authors situate these pictorial inventions within broader intellectual currents in both Spanish Flanders and Spain, especially in the advice literature and drama presented to the Spanish king. Moreover, they point to the lasting resonance of Torre de la Parada for Velazquez, especially within his late masterworks, Las Meninas and The Spinners. Ultimately, this study illuminates the dialogical nature of this ensemble in which Rubens and Velazquez offer a set of complementary views on subjects ranging from the nature of classical gods to the role of art as a mirror of the prince."

Despite the tremendous number of studies produced annually in the field of Dutch art over the last 30 years or so, and the strong contemporary market for works by Dutch masters of the period as well as the public's ongoing fascination with some of its most beloved painters, until now there has been no comprehensive study assessing the state of research in the field. As the first study of its kind, this book is a useful resource for scholars and advanced students of seventeenth-century Dutch art, and also serves as a springboard for further research. Its 19 chapters, divided into three sections and written by a team of internationally renowned art historians, address a wide variety of topics, ranging from those that might be considered "traditional" to others that have only drawn scholarly attention comparatively recently.

As a result of Napoleon's campaigns in Italy, Old Master art flooded into Britain and its acquisition became an index of national prestige. Maureen McCue argues that their responses to these works informed the writing of Romantic period authors, enabling them to forge often surprising connections between Italian art, the imagination and the period's political, social and commercial realities. Dr McCue examines poetry, plays, novels, travel writing, exhibition catalogues, early guidebooks and private experiences recorded in letters and diaries by canonical and noncanonical authors, including Felicia Hemans, William Buchanan, Henry Sass, Pierce Egan, William Hazlitt, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Anna Jameson, Maria Graham Callcott and Samuel Rogers. Her exploration of the idea of connoisseurship shows the ways in which a knowledge of Italian art became a key marker of cultural standing that was no longer limited to artists and aristocrats, while her chapter on the literary production of post-Waterloo Britain traces the development of a critical vocabulary equally applicable to the visual arts and literature. In offering cultural, historical and literary readings of the responses to Italian art by early nineteenth-century writers, Dr McCue illuminates the important role they played in shaping the themes that are central to our understanding of Romanticism.

The essays in this collection range across literature, aesthetics, music and art, and explore such themes as the dynamics of change in eighteenth-century aesthetics; time, modernity and the picturesque; the function of graphic ornaments in eighteenth-century texts; imaginary voyages as a literary genre; the genesis of children's literature; the Italian opera and musical theory in Frances Burney's novels; Italian and British art theories; and patterns of cultural transfers and of book circulation between Britain and Italy in the eighteenth century. Collectively they epitomise the concerns and approaches of scholars working on the long eighteenth century at this challenging and exciting time. In the absence of universally agreed, overarching interpretations of the cultural history of the long eighteenth century, these papers pave the way for the ultimate emergence of such explanations.Authors discussed here include Margaret Cavendish, David Russen, Francis Hutcheson, Reverend Gilpin, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Dugald Stewart, Dorothy Kilner, Frances Burney, Anna Gordon Brown, Saverio Bettinelli, Henry Ince Blundell, Francesco Algarotti, Ugo Foscolo and Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi.

Hitherto relegated to the closets of art history and literary studies, book illustration has entered mainstream scholarship. The chapters of this collection offer only a glimpse of where a complete reconfiguration of the visual periphery of eighteenth-century texts might ultimately take us. The use of the gerund of the verb "to reconfigure" in the subtitle of this collection, instead of the corresponding noun, underlines the work-in-progress character of this interdisciplinary endeavour, which aims above all to discern new vistas while charting or revisiting landmarks in the rich field of eighteenth-century book illustration. The specific interpretive lenses through which contributors to this collection re-evaluate the visual periphery of the text cover an array of disciplines and areas of interest; among these, the most prominent are book history and print culture, art history and image theory, material and visual culture, word and image interaction, feminist theory and gender studies, history of medicine and technology. This spectrum could have been even less restrictive and more colourful if it were not for pragmatic and editorial considerations. Nonetheless, its plurality of vision provides a framework for an inclusive and multifaceted approach to eighteenth-century book illustration. Perhaps these essays are most valuable in the practical models they provide on how to tackle the interdisciplinary challenge that is the study of the eighteenth-century illustrated book. The collection as such is the first formal step in an effort to rethink or reconfigure the visual periphery of eighteenth-century texts. It has become clear that the study of the illustrated book of the Age of Enlightenment has the potential of yielding multiple findings, perspectives and discourses about a society immersed in visual culture, skilled in visual communication and reflected in the visual legacy it left behind.

With many illustrations and diagrams, Images of Thought provides easy to follow ways in which to read Indian, Persian and European paintings in terms of composition, proportion, colour symbolism and references to myth. Yet it also provides the intellectual contexts of Islamic cultures which inform our perceptions of how this visual language works. The author uses salient aspects of critical theory, anthropology and theology to sensitise viewers to the diversity and difference of cultural readings but never loses sight of the primacy of the visual and formal characteristics, gestures, geometrical structures and their cooperation with myths and theologemes. The book provides access to one of the world's major visual traditions whose characteristics continue to inform and elucidate Indian and Islamic contemporary thought today. Images of Thought is a major, scholarly and provocative contribution not only to our understanding of cultural individuality but it offers important examples of how to engage in transcultural understanding and ways of seeing.

A visionary new approach to the Americas during the age of colonization, made by engaging with the aural aspects of supposedly "silent" images Colonial depictions of the North and South American landscape and its indigenous inhabitants fundamentally transformed the European imagination-but how did those images reach Europe, and how did they make their impact? In Sound, Image, Silence, noted art historian Michael Gaudio provides a groundbreaking examination of the colonial Americas by exploring the special role that aural imagination played in visible representations of the New World. Considering a diverse body of images that cover four hundred years of Atlantic history, Sound, Image, Silence addresses an important need within art history: to give hearing its due as a sense that can inform our understanding of images. Gaudio locates the noise of the pagan dance, the discord of battle, the din of revivalist religion, and the sublime sounds of nature in the Americas, such as lightning, thunder, and the waterfall. He invites readers to listen to visual media that seem deceptively couched in silence, offering bold new ideas on how art historians can engage with sound in inherently "mute" media. Sound, Image, Silence includes readings of Brazilian landscapes by the Dutch painter Frans Post, a London portrait of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison's early Kinetoscope film Sioux Ghost Dance, and the work of Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of American landscape painting. It masterfully fuses a diversity of work across vast social, cultural, and spatial distances, giving us both a new way of understanding sound in art and a powerful new vision of the New World.

Portraits have a long history in royal courts as a way of communicating the monarch's status, rulership, and even piety. This anthology places such art works studied in the context of their commission, production, and display. Artists use different representational strategies to convey important information about the sitter. These aspects combined with patronage, location and use of the work form a departure point from which to address portraits comprehensively. The intersection between artist, the portrayed and audience with the additional layer of formed identity allows the portrait to hold a special place as popular genre of Spanish art. The relationship between the use of the work and its context is key to understanding better the cultural and social norms of Spanish aristocracy and what they reveal about Spanish identity in general. Used to solidify governance, lineage, and marriage, portraits legitimized the negotiation of status, power, and social mobility.

This book is the first complete study of the life and work of the 17th century Dutch painter Pieter Codde (1599-1678). Alongside Rembrandt, Codde was active in Amsterdam, the largest and busiest city of the Netherlands. Codde belonged to the first generation of painters who took part in the cultural phenomenon known as the Dutch Golden Age and therefore this monograph makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the early stages of development of the Dutch school of painting and its influence on later developments. The book includes a biography of the painter as well as a systematic and comparative iconographical and stylistic study of his work with an attached extensive critical oeuvre catalogue. This book is an important tool for both art enthusiasts and collectors as well as art professionals such as students, scholars, auctioneers and art dealers.

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

This collection of essays seeks to challenge the notion of the supremacy of the brain as the key organ of the Enlightenment, by focusing on the workings of the bowels and viscera that so obsessed writers and thinkers during the long eighteenth-century. These inner organs and the digestive process acted as counterpoints to politeness and other modes of refined sociability, drawing attention to the deeper workings of the self. Moving beyond recent studies of luxury and conspicuous consumption, where dysfunctional bowels have been represented as a symptom of excess, this book seeks to explore other manifestations of the visceral and to explain how the bowels played a crucial part in eighteenth-century emotions and perceptions of the self. The collection offers an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective on entrails and digestion by addressing urban history, visual studies, literature, medical history, religious history, and material culture in England, France and Germany. -- .

Both ornate and majestic, the various formats of royal court paintings of Korea have been exhibited all over the world and include folding screens, murals, paper sliding doors, and government records. Crafted by the best painters of the era, the works exhibit a refined level of artistic skill and are rich with symbolism, even in the tiniest details, having adorned spaces that were occupied by the highest authorities. The vivid colors and fastidious minutiae of Joseon court paintings, with their intriguing iconography and ornamentation, are sure to introduce any viewer to a startling new world.