"The First Panoramas" is a cultural history of the first three decades of the panorama, a three-hundred-sixty-degree visual medium patented by the artist Robert Barker in Britain in 1787. A towering two-story architectural construction inside which spectators gazed on a 10,000-square-foot painting, Barker's new technology was designed to create an impression of total verisimilitude for the observer.
In the beautifully illustrated "The First Panoramas," Denise Blake Oleksijczuk demonstrates the complexity of the panoramas' history and cultural impact, exploring specific exhibits: "View of Edinburgh and the Adjacent Country from the Calton Hill" (1788), "View of London from the Roof of the Albion Mill" (1791), "View of the Grand Fleet Moored at Spithead" (1793), and the two different versions of "View of Constantinople" (1801). In addition to the art itself, she examines the panoramas' intriguing descriptive keys--single-sheet diagrams that directed spectators to important sites in the representation, which evolved over time to give the observer greater perceptual control over the view.
Using the surviving evidence, much of it never published before, on the early exhibitions of these massive installations, Oleksijczuk reconstructs the relationships between specific paintings, their accompanying printed guides, and the collective experiences of different audiences. She argues that by transporting its spectators to increasingly distant locations, first in the city and country and then in the world beyond Britain's borders, the panorama created a spatial and temporal disjunction between "here" and "there" that helped to forge new national and social identities.

Handsomely designed and richly illustrated, this publication surveys the magnificent spectrum of projects undertaken by French architect and interior designer Charles Percier (1764-1838). After gaining an illustrious reputation for supervising the scenery at the Paris Opera during the French Revolution, Percier was later appointed by Napoleon Bonaparte. With the Emperor's support, he developed the opulent versions of neoclassicism closely associated with the Napoleonic era, and now known as Directoire style and Empire style. Percier worked on the renovation or redecoration of many of France's royal palaces, including the Louvre, the Tuileries, and the chateaux of Malmaison, Saint-Cloud, and Fontainebleau. The full scope and variety of Percier's design projects are revealed in this book, which also includes archival material detailing Percier's relationships with patrons and peers. Published in association with Bard Graduate Center Exhibition Schedule: Bard Graduate Center (11/18/16-02/15/17) Chateau de Fontainebleau (03/18/17-06/19/17)

Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869)--court physician to the king of Saxony--was a naturalist, amateur painter, and theoretician of landscape painting whose Nine Letters on Landscape Painting is an important document of early German romanticism and an elegant appeal for the integration of art and science.
Carus was inspired by and had contacts with the greatest German intellectuals of his day. Carus prefaced his work with a letter from his correspondence with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was his primary mentor in both science and art. His writings also reflect, however, the influence of the German natural philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, especially Schelling's notion of a world soul, and the writings of the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Carus played a role in the revolution in landscape painting taking place in Saxony around Caspar David Friedrich. The first edition appears here in English for the first time.

Die Frage, wie der Romantik Gestalt verliehen werden koenne, forderte bildende Kunstler im Laufe des 19. Jahrhunderts immer wieder heraus. Sie rekurrierten in ihren Werken verstarkt auf die fiktive Genoveva von Brabant, da es insbesondere diese literarische Figur erlaubte, abstrakte Ideen der romantischen AEsthetik- und Kunsttheorie zu visualisieren. Die Studie gibt erstmalig einen Gesamtuberblick uber dieses beliebte Thema in Graphik, Malerei und Skulptur. Beispielhaft lassen sich so die Umsetzung, der Wandel, aber auch die Kontinuitat romantischer Kunstkonzeptionen im deutschsprachigen Raum zwischen 1800 und 1914 nachvollziehen.

"Nervous Reactions considers Victorian responses to Romanticism, particularly the way in which the Romantic period was frequently constructed in Victorian-era texts as a time of nervous or excitable authors(and readers) at odds with Victorian values of self-restraint, moderation, and stolidity. Represented in various ways--as a threat to social order, as a desirable freedom of feeling, as a pathological weakness that must be cured--this nervousness, both about and of the Romantics, is an important though as yet unaddressed concern in Victorian responses to Romantic texts. By attending to this nervousness, the essays in this volume offer a new consideration not only of the relationship between the Victorian and Romantic periods, but also of the ways in which our own responses to Romanticism have been mediated by this Victorian attention to Romantic excitability. Considering editions and biographies as well as literary and critical responses to Romantic writers, the volume addresses a variety of discursive modes and genres, and brings to light a number of authors not normally included in the longstanding category of "Victorian Romanticism": on the Romantic side, not just Wordsworth, Keats, and P. B. Shelley but also Byron, S.T. Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Mary Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft; and on the Victorian side, not just Thomas Carlyle and the Brownings but also Sara Coleridge, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Archibald Lampman, and J. S. Mill.