Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-century Art and Culture


Book Description

Focusing on the visual arts and written texts, this book explores the nature of femininity and masculinity in 18th-century Britain and France. The activities and collective conditions of women as producers of art and culture are investigated, together with analysis of representation and the ways in which it might be gendered. This illustrated book should make an important contribution to debates on representation, constructions of sexuality and women as producers.




Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe


Book Description

Annotation. Eighteenth-century Europe witnessed monumental upheavals in both the Catholic and Protestant faiths and the repercussions rippled down to the churches' religious art forms. In this major new study, Nigel Aston chronicles the intertwining of cultural and institutional turmoil during this pivotal century. The sustained production and popularity of religious art in the face of competition from increasingly prevalent secular artworks lies at the heart of this book. Religious art staked out new spaces of display in state institutions, palaces and private collections as well as taking advantage of state patronage from monarchs such as Louis XIV and George III, who funded religious art in an effort to enhance their national projects and monarchial prestige. Aston explores the motivations of private collectors and how they exhibited their artworks, and analyses changing Catholic and Protestant attitudes toward art. He examines purchases made by corporate patrons such as charity hospitals and religious confraternities, and considers what this reveals about the changing religiosity of eighteenth-century Europe. An in-depth historical study, Art and Religion in Eighteenth-century Europewill be essential for art history and religious studies scholars alike.




Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century


Book Description

"This volume considers how ideas were made visible through the making of art and visual experiences occasioned by reception during the long eighteenth century. Contributors consider the approach taken by individual artists and the material formation of concepts in different contexts by asking new questions of artworks that are implicated by the need to see ideas in painted, sculpted, illustrated, designed, and built forms. The first four essays work with ideas about material objects and identity formation, while the last four essays address the intellectual work that can be expressed through or performed by objects. Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century thus introduces new visual materials and novel conceptual models into traditional accounts of the intellectual history of the Enlightenment."--Cover page 4.




Performing the "everyday"


Book Description

This interdisciplinary anthology explores the representation of everyday life across several disciplines in a century known for its interest in individual experience of the mundane as well as the heroic. Comprised of essays by established and emerging scholars of literature, art, and music history, the volume explores not merely the range of performances under the banner of the everyday, but also the meanings inherent in these attempts to create art out of the experience of the real. In this collection, the authors attempt to provide a wide-ranging picture of the many ways in which the notion of the everyday is a valuable conceptual frame through which the eighteenth century may be apprehended, as this critical term allows for issues of gender, race, and class to come into focus. Alden Cavanaugh is Associate Professor of Art History at Indiana State University.




Art and Culture in the Eighteenth Century


Book Description

This study joins the resurgent scholarship presently redressing the neglect of eighteenth-century visual culture since the beginning of the twentieth century. This volume offers nine contextual and cross-disciplinary essays that engage with a rich panoply of discourses ranging from art criticism to biography, to collecting and the art market, to art theory and practice and the institutions that shaped them, to beauty and fashion, sociopolitical and philosophical issues, gender studies, patronage, iconography, and print culture.




The Pleasures of the Imagination


Book Description

The Pleasures of the Imagination examines the birth and development of English "high culture" in the eighteenth century. It charts the growth of a literary and artistic world fostered by publishers, theatrical and musical impresarios, picture dealers and auctioneers, and presented to th public in coffee-houses, concert halls, libraries, theatres and pleasure gardens. In 1660, there were few professional authors, musicians and painters, no public concert series, galleries, newspaper critics or reviews. By the dawn of the nineteenth century they were all aprt of the cultural life of the nation. John Brewer's enthralling book explains how this happened and recreates the world in which the great works of English eighteenth-century art were made. Its purpose is to show how literature, painting, music and the theatre were communicated to a public increasingly avid for them. It explores the alleys and garrets of Grub Street, rummages the shelves of bookshops and libraries, peers through printsellers' shop windows and into artists' studios, and slips behind the scenes at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. It takes us out of Gay and Boswell's London to visit the debating clubs, poetry circles, ballrooms, concert halls, music festivals, theatres and assemblies that made the culture of English provincial towns, and shows us how the national landscape became one of Britain's greatest cultural treasures. It reveals to us a picture of English artistic and literary life in the eighteenth century less familiar, but more suprising, more various and more convincing than any we have seen before.




Late Eighteenth-century Music and Visual Culture


Book Description

The late eighteenth century witnessed a flourishing exchange between music and visual art which was expressed in the creative as well as commercial cultures of the time. Nevertheless, there has been relatively little research to actively consider and thoroughly examine the symbiotic relationship between looking and listening during the period. In this volume, nine prominent scholars employ a set of interdisciplinary methodological tools in order to come to a comprehensive understanding of the rich tapestry of eighteenth-century musical taste, performance, consumption and aesthetics. While the link between visual material and musicological study lies at the heart of the research presented in this collection of essays, the importance of the textual element, as it denoted the process of thinking about music and the various ways in which that was symbolically and often literally visualized in writing and print culture, is also closely examined. Through a critical analysis of a number of important contemporary sources as well as current scholarship and research, the authors draw conclusions that extend well beyond the scope of their immediate material and closely-formulated questions. The conversation opened up in the chapters of this volume will hopefully break new ground on which the interrelationship between art and music, and more broadly between visual art and other forms of creative practice, may be studied and debated.




Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France


Book Description

Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France examines how new and often contradictory ideas about friendship were enacted in the lives of artists in the eighteenth century. It demonstrates that portraits resulted from and generated new ideas about friendship by analyzing the creation, exchange, and display of portraits alongside discussions of friendship in philosophical and academic discourse, exhibition criticism, personal diaries, and correspondence. This study provides a deeper understanding of how artists took advantage of changing conceptions of social relationships and used portraiture to make visible new ideas about friendship that were driven by Enlightenment thought. Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture Distributed for the University of Delaware Press




Shapely Bodies


Book Description

Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France constructs the first cultural history of porcelain making in France. It takes its title from two types of “bodies” treated in this study: the craft of porcelain making shaped clods of earth into a clay body to produce high-end commodities and the French elite shaped human bodies into social subjects with the help of makeup, stylish patterns, and accessories. These practices crossed paths in the work of artisans, whose luxury objects reflected and also influenced the curves of fashion in the eighteenth century. French artisans began trials to reproduce fine Chinese porcelain in the 1660s. The challenge proved impossible until they found an essential ingredient, kaolin, in French soil in the 1760s. Shapely Bodies differs from other studies of French porcelain in that it does not begin in the 1760s at the Sèvres manufactory when it became technically possible to produce fine porcelain in France, but instead ends there. Without the secret of Chinese porcelain, artisans in France turned to radical forms of experimentation. Over the first half of the eighteenth century, they invented artificial alternatives to Chinese porcelain, decorated them with French style, and, with equal determination, shaped an identity for their new trade that distanced it from traditional guild-crafts and aligned it with scientific invention. The back story of porcelain making before kaolin provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of artisanal innovation and cultural mythmaking. To write artificial porcelain into a history of “real” porcelain dominated by China, Japan, and Meissen in Saxony, French porcelainiers learned to describe their new commodity in language that tapped into national pride and the mythic power of French savoir faire. Artificial porcelain cut such a fashionable image that by the mid-eighteenth century, Louis XV appropriated it for the glory of the crown. When the monarchy ended, revolutionaries reclaimed French porcelain, the fruit of a century of artisanal labor, for the Republic. Tracking how the porcelain arts were depicted in documents and visual arts during one hundred years of experimentation, Shapely Bodies reveals the politics behind the making of French porcelain’s image. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.




Women and the Art and Science of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century Europe


Book Description

Through both longer essays and shorter case studies, this book examines the relationship of European women from various countries and backgrounds to collecting, in order to explore the social practices and material and visual cultures of collecting in eighteenth-century Europe. It recovers their lives and examines their interests, their methodologies, and their collections and objects—some of which have rarely been studied before. The book also considers women’s role as producers, that is, creators of objects that were collected. Detailed examination of the artefacts—both visually, and in relation to their historical contexts—exposes new ways of thinking about collecting in relation to the arts and sciences in eighteenth-century Europe. The book is interdisciplinary in its makeup and brings together scholars from a wide range of fields. It will be of interest to those working in art history, material and visual culture, history of collecting, history of science, literary studies, women’s studies, gender studies, and art conservation.