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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 shaping 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 Sevres 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 backstory 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.

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. This text explores not merely the range of performances under the banner of everyday, but also meanings inherent in these attempts to create art out of experience of the ""real.

This book features an extraordinary album of ornament designs by the French architect Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672-1742). In charge of the buildings and grounds of Philippe, duke of Orlans, regent of France during the minority of Louis XV, Oppenord was at the center of the architectural practice of his time. As made evident by this album, his consummate draftsmanship, praised by his contemporaries and coveted by collectors, exceeded by far the practical demands usually required of architects. On a copy of the first French edition of Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, published by Jean Baudoin in 1636 with engravings by Jacques de Bi, Oppenord drew vignettes, head and tail pieces, borders and other ornamental motifs. For the first time, this publication reproduces Oppenord's album in its initial state. Today's reassembled and rebound album of sixty sheets bears little resemblance to Oppenord's original copy. A bibliographic analysis of the Ripa-Baudoin book, based on a copy kept at the Bibliothque nationale de France, and confirmed by a previously unnoticed numbering by Oppenord, guided this first reconstitution. In lieu of a haphazard succession of sketches, it reveals Oppenord's fascinating interplay between text, engraved and drawn images.

This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of Louis XIV's magnificent palace chapel at Versailles. The story of this carefully calculated dynastic shrine will interest all historians of the ancien regime.

This book is the first to examine the meaning encoded in the very form of caricature, a form of popular and polemical visual art that burst suddenly on the scene in late eighteenth-century England, and to explain its rise as a consequence of the emergence of modernity, especially the modern self. Caricature and the modern self developed in tandem: as the modern notion of selfhood_with its valorization of interiority, private authenticity, and consistency across time_rather suddenly replaced older, more flexible notions of identity, so caricature developed as a technology for representing this new self, making character visible on the surface of the body, unmasking the public role and revealing the authentic private self beneath. Through the detailed analysis of specific prints and a wide-ranging compilation of historical evidence, this book constructs a rich and precise cultural history of the conceptual shift that led to the explosion of caricature in late eighteenth-century England. Complemented with seventy-eight illustrations.

This book analyzes the genre subjects created by Jean Simeon Chardin in the 1730s and 1740s as exemplars of a period-specific aesthetic known as the gout moderne or Modern taste, a category shaped by the literary Quarrel of the Ancients versus the Moderns.

During the first two decades of the eighteenth century, two evolving dance-historical realms intersected-theory and practice. While the French produced works on notation, choreography, and repertoire, German dance writers responded with an important body of work on dance theory. This book examines the reception of French dance in Germany.

This book examines the Accademia degli Arcadi in its heyday, a little known phenomenon in Italian history in the first part of the eighteenth century. The Roman academy aimed for a peninsula-wide cultural renewal induced by literary reform. Operating within a papal court society, it eschewed extant patronage systems and social hierarchies and introduced enlightened ideas to its members. By attending to the institution's policies, Between the Real and the Ideal provides a rich understanding of the Arcadi's goals.

This book examines the first generation of artists in Britain to define themselves as history painters, attempting what then was considered to be art's most exalted category. These ambitious artists, including John Hamilton Mortimer, Henry Fuseli, Alexander and John Runciman, James Barry, James Jefferys, George Romney, John Flaxman, and William Blake, most of whom were born in the 1740s and 60s, were presented with the challenge of how best to compete with the continental old masters when they had only an impoverished native tradition on which to build. They cultivated the concept of the artist as an original genius, a psychological strategy born out of deep-seated anxiety. At the core of this identity formation was the artists' perception of William Shakespeare, whom they recast as the original genius incarnate. They strove to accomplish in art what they perceived he had accomplished in literature. Theseus's lines in A Midsummer Night's Dream, 'The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy' (V.i.12) personified for them the Shakespeare of their imagining, and this conception of fine frenzy became the touchstone for their artistic identities, profoundly influencing both their lives and their art. This book pays special attention to their self-portraits in which they proclaim this new identity, one that emphasizes the impassioned and extravagant nature of their personal vision and their claims to original genius. The book includes more than 120 black-and-white illustrations.