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From monumental battle paintings to the public display of archaeological spoils to the decoration of urban vistas, visual culture promoted modern French imperialism. So argues Todd Porterfield in this provocative look at the forces of art and politics in France's military conquest of the Near East. In challenging the conventional wisdom that France happened into imperial venture, Porterfield explores interactions among artists, generals, journalists, curators, and politicians from the time of Napoleon's Egyptian campaign to the invasion of Algeria during the Restoration and July Monarchy. Together they forged an official culture that provided a rationale for imperialism--based on images of F...
This is a critical study of French and British art and written texts (poetry, literature, travel accounts, art criticism) -- orientalist works about the harem produced in the period from 1800-1875. Original readings are provided for over 150 harem pictures, from well-known salon paintings to rarely published erotic popular prints and book illustrations. Multiple Wives, Multiple Pleasures examines these works closely, often establishing fresh contexts for many of the more well-known nineteenth-century harem pictures, and often providing a consideration of lesser-known harem pictures that have been rarely published until now.
In an unprecedented collaboration, two scholars investigate these masterpieces in their broad cultural context. This book is an illustrated, extensively documented, analytical tour de force.
Searing disputes over caricature have recently sparked flames across the world¿the culmination, not the beginning, of the story of one of modernity's definitive artistic practices. Modern visual satire erupts during a period marked by reform and revolution, by cohering nationalisms and expanding empires, and by the emerging discipline of art history. This has long been recognized as its Golden Age. It is time to look anew. In The Efflorescence of Caricature, 1759-1838, an international, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational team of scholars reconfigures the geography of modern visual satire, as the expansive narrative reaches from North America to Europe, to China and the Ottoman Empire....
The Roman Empire has been a source of inspiration and a model for imitation for Western empires practically since the moment Rome fell. Yet, as Julia Hell shows in The Conquest of Ruins, what has had the strongest grip on aspiring imperial imaginations isn’t that empire’s glory but its fall—and the haunting monuments left in its wake. Hell examines centuries of European empire-building—from Charles V in the sixteenth century and Napoleon’s campaigns of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to the atrocities of Mussolini and the Third Reich in the 1930s and ’40s—and sees a similar fascination with recreating the Roman past in the contemporary image. In every case—particularly that of the Nazi regime—the ruins of Rome seem to represent a mystery to be solved: how could an empire so powerful be brought so low? Hell argues that this fascination with the ruins of greatness expresses a need on the part of would-be conquerors to find something to ward off a similar demise for their particular empire.
Focusing on images of or produced by nineteenth-century European women, this volume explores genteel femininity as resistant to easy codification vis-à-vis the public. Attending to various iterations of the public as space, sphere and discourse, sixteen essays challenge the false binary construct that has held the public as the sole preserve of prosperous men. By considering works in a range of media by an array of canonical and understudied women artists, they demonstrate that definitions of both femininity and the public were mutually defining and constantly shifting.
Hailed as one of the key theoreticians of modernism, Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc was also the most renowned restoration architect of his age, a celebrated medieval archaeologist and a fervent champion of Gothic revivalism. He published some of the most influential texts in the history of modern architecture such as the Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle and Entretiens sur l’architecture, but also studies on warfare, geology and racial history. Martin Bressani expertly traces Viollet-le-Duc’s complex intellectual development, mapping the attitudes he adopted toward the past, showing how restoration, in all its layered meaning, shaped his outlook. Through his life journey, we follow the route by which the technological subject was born out of nineteenth-century historicism.
While inquiries into early encounters between East Asia and the West have traditionally focused on successful interactions, this collection inquires into the many forms of failure, experienced on all sides, in the period before 1850. Countering a tendency in scholarship to overlook unsuccessful encounters, it starts from the assumption that failures can prove highly illuminating and provide valuable insights into both the specific shapes and limitations of East Asian and Western imaginations of the Other, as well as of the nature of East-West interaction. Interdisciplinary in outlook, this collection brings together the perspectives of sinology, Japanese and Korean studies, historical studie...
Defining the Others, “them”, in relation to one’s own reference group, “us”, has been an essential phase in the formation of collective identities in any given country or region. In the case of Russia, the formulation of these binary definitions – sometimes taking a form of enemy images – can be traced all the way to medieval texts, in which religion represented the dividing line. Further, the ongoing expansion of the empire transferred numerous “external others” into internal minorities. The chapters of this edited volume examine the development and contexts of various images, perceptions and categories of the Others in Russia from the 16th century Muscovy to the collapse of the Russian empire.