You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
"Explores the intersections between monarchy, gender, and art through an investigation of the visual and architectural culture of the eighteenth-century Habsburg empress Maria Theresa"--Provided by publisher.
While the connected, international character of today's art world is well known, the eighteenth century too had a global art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds is the first book to attempt a map of the global art world of the eighteenth century. Fourteen essays from a distinguished group of scholars explore both cross-cultural connections and local specificities of art production and consumption in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The result is an account of a series of interconnected and asymmetrical art worlds that were well developed in the eighteenth century. Capturing the full material diversity of eighteenth-century art, this book considers painting and sculpture alongside far...
This volume represents the first move towards a comprehensive overview of the place of antiquity in Enlightenment Europe. Eschewing a narrow focus on any one theme, it seeks to understand eighteenth-century engagements with antiquity on their own terms, focusing on the contexts, questions, and agendas that led people to turn to the ancient past. The contributors show that a profound interest in antiquity permeated all spheres of intellectual and creative endeavour, from antiquarianism to political discourse, travel writing to portraiture, theology to education. They offer new perspectives on familiar figures, such as Rousseau and Hume, as well as insights into hitherto obscure antiquarians and scholars. What emerges is a richer, more textured understanding of the substantial eighteenth-century engagement with antiquity.
Shapely Bodies is the first study of the politics behind the making of porcelain’s fashionable image in eighteenth-century France.
A first of its kind, A Merchant of Ivory invites readers to enter an object-filled world of the past through a transcription and annotated translation of a Parisian inventory belonging to a remarkable artisan of the 16th century.
Playful, useful, decorative, revolutionary: small things possess a rich array of meanings, from the ordinary to the extraordinary.
A groundbreaking approach to Rococo religious d?r and spirituality in Europe and South America, The Spiritual Rococo addresses three basic conundrums that impede our understanding of eighteenth-century aesthetics and culture. Why did the Rococo, ostensibly the least spiritual style in the pre-Modern canon, transform into one of the world?s most important modes for adorning sacred spaces? And why is Rococo still treated as a decadent nemesis of the Enlightenment when the two had fundamental characteristics in common? This book seeks to answer these questions by treating Rococo as a global phenomenon for the first time and by exploring its moral and spiritual dimensions through the lens of pop...
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the first modern, public museums of art—civic, state, or national—appeared throughout Europe, setting a standard for the nature of such institutions that has made its influence felt to the present day. Although the emergence of these museums was an international development, their shared history has not been systematically explored until now. Taking up that project, this volume includes chapters on fifteen of the earliest and still major examples, from the Capitoline Museum in Rome, opened in 1734, to the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, opened in 1836. These essays consider a number of issues, such as the nature, display, and growth of the muse...
The interplay between nature, science, and art in antiquity and the early modern period differs significantly from late modern expectations. In this book scholars from ancient studies as well as early modern studies, art history, literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science, explore that interplay in several influential ancient texts and their reception in the Renaissance. The Natural History of Pliny, De Architectura of Vitruvius, De Rerum Natura of Lucretius, Automata of Hero, and Timaios of Plato among other texts reveal how fields of inquiry now considered distinct were originally understood as closely interrelated. In our choice of texts, we focus on materialistic theories of nature, knowledge, and art that remain underappreciated in ancient and early modern studies even today.
This book examines a famous series of sculptures by the German artist Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783) known as his "Character Heads." These are busts of human heads, highly unconventional for their time, representing strange, often inexplicable facial expressions. Scholars have struggled to explain these works of art. Some have said that Messerschmidt was insane, while others suggested that he tried to illustrate some sort of intellectual system. Michael Yonan argues that these sculptures are simultaneously explorations of art’s power and also critiques of the aesthetic limits that would be placed on that power.