Antonio Canova and the Politics of Patronage in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe
Antonio Canova and the Politics of Patronage in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe

Author: Christopher M. S. Johns

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1998-01-01

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9780520212015

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The sculptor Antonio Canova was the most celebrated artist of a perilously protean and fractious era. In revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe, while other artists bent to the will of the political powers that commissioned their work, producing art in the service of the state, Canova managed to resist both threats and blandishments. Although he held strong opinions on the issues of his day, he avoided direct political or ideological engagement in his sculpture. Christopher M. S. Johns presents the first sustained study of Canova's career in relation to his patrons and contemporary politics. In it he enlarges our understanding of an artist whose work is crucial to the evaluation of European art and political history.

Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Author: Melissa Hyde

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 479

ISBN-13: 1351871722

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The eighteenth century is recognized as a complex period of dramatic epistemic shifts that would have profound effects on the modern world. Paradoxically, the art of the era continues to be a relatively neglected field within art history. While women's private lives, their involvement with cultural production, the project of Enlightenment, and the public sphere have been the subjects of ground-breaking historical and literary studies in recent decades, women's engagement with the arts remains one of the richest and most under-explored areas for scholarly investigation. This collection of new essays by specialist authors addresses women's activities as patrons and as "patronized" artists over the course of the century. It provides a much needed examination, with admirable breadth and variety, of women's artistic production and patronage during the eighteenth century. By opening up the specific problems and conflicts inherent in women's artistic involvements from the perspective of what was at stake for the eighteenth-century women themselves, it also acts as a corrective to the generalizing and stereotyping about the prominence of those women, which is too often present in current day literature. Some essays are concerned with how women's involvement in the arts allowed them to fashion identities for themselves (whether national, political, religious, intellectual, artistic, or gender-based) and how such self-fashioning in turn enabled them to negotiate or intervene in the public domains of culture and politics where "The Woman Question" was so hotly debated. Other essays examine how men's patronage of women also served as a vehicle for self-fashioning for both artist and sponsor. Artists and patrons discussed include: Carriera; Queen Lovisa Ulrike and Chardin; the Bourbon Princesses Mlle Clermont, Mme Adélaïde and Nattier; the Duchess of Osuna and Goya; Marie-Antoinette and Vigée-Lebrun; Labille-Guiard; Queen Carolina of Naples, Prince Stanislaus Poniatowski of Poland and Kauffman; David and his students, Mesdames Benoist, Lavoisier and Mongez.

Political Censorship of the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Political Censorship of the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Author: Robert Justin Goldstein

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-09-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1137316497

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In this comprehensive account of censorship of the visual arts in nineteenth-century Europe, when imagery was accessible to the illiterate in ways that print was not, specialists in the history of the major European countries trace the use of censorship by the authorities to implement their fears of the visual arts, from caricature to cinema.

Hersilia's Sisters
Hersilia's Sisters

Author: Norman Bryson

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2023-07-25

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1606067710

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Political and cultural history and the arts combine in this engaging account of 1790s France. In 1799, when the French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) exhibited his Intervention of the Sabines, a history painting featuring the ancient heroine Hersilia, he added portraits of two contemporary women on either side of her—Henriette de Verninac, daughter of Charles-François Delacroix, minister of foreign affairs, and Juliette Récamier, a well-known and admired socialite. Drawing on many disciplines, Norman Bryson explains how such a combination of paintings could reveal the underlying nature of the Directoire, the period between the vicious and near-dictatorial Reign of Terror (1793–94) and the coup in 1799 that brought Napoleon to power. Hersilia’s Sisters illuminates ways that cultural life and civil society were rebuilt during these years through an extraordinary efflorescence of women pioneers in every cultural domain—literature, the stage, opera, moral philosophy, political theory, painting, popular journalism, and fashion. Through a close examination of David’s work between The Intervention of the Sabines (begun in 1796) and Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (begun in 1800), Bryson explores how the flowering of women’s culture under the Directoire became a decisive influence on David’s art. With more than 150 illustrations, this book provides new and brilliant insight into this period that will captivate readers.

Plunder
Plunder

Author: Cynthia Saltzman

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2021-05-11

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 0374710392

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One of The Christian Science Monitor's Ten Best Books of May "A highly original work of history . . . [Saltzman] has written a distinctive study that transcends both art and history and forces us to explore the connections between the two.” —Roger Lowenstein, The Wall Street Journal A captivatingstudy of Napoleon’s plundering of Europe’s art for the Louvre, told through the story of a Renaissance masterpiece seized from Venice Cynthia Saltzman’s Plunder recounts the fate of Paolo Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, a vast, sublime canvas that the French, under the command of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice, in 1797. Painted in 1563 during the Renaissance, the picture was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Veronese had filled the scene with some 130 figures, lavishing color on the canvas to build the illusion that the viewers’ space opened onto a biblical banquet taking place on a terrace in sixteenth-century Venice. Once pulled from the wall, the Venetian canvas crossed the Mediterranean rolled on a cylinder; soon after, artworks commandeered from Venice and Rome were triumphantly brought into Paris. In 1801, the Veronese went on exhibition at the Louvre, the new public art museum founded during the Revolution in the former palace of the French kings. As Saltzman tells the larger story of Napoleon’s looting of Italian art and its role in the creation of the Louvre, she reveals the contradictions of his character: his thirst for greatness—to carry forward the finest aspects of civilization—and his ruthlessness in getting whatever he sought. After Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington and the Allies forced the French to return many of the Louvre’s plundered paintings and sculptures. Nevertheless, The Wedding Feast at Cana remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly across from the Mona Lisa. Expertly researched and deftly told, Plunder chronicles one of the most spectacular art appropriation campaigns in history, one that sheds light on a seminal historical figure and the complex origins of one of the great museums of the world.

The Legacy of Empire
The Legacy of Empire

Author: Sharon Worley

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-11-14

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1527521613

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The shadow of Napoleon never left the nineteenth-century and continued to haunt the histories and wars that followed in curious and circuitous ways. The empires of Napoleon I and his nephew, Napoleon III, set the stage for the pendulum swing of time from revolution to its antithesis, empire. The Anglo-Italian style developed as a reaction to these empires, the widespread devastation caused by power, and the monuments it created. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Hosmer, William Wetmore Story, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and Vernon Lee responded to recurring themes in Italian Risorgimento politics and culture in the post-Napoleonic era and Second Empire periods. Many of them were ex-patriots, who adopted Italy as their new home. Their unique contribution aligns them with a style that is distinguished by the themes of national independence, feminism, the abolition of slavery and republicanism. They perceived their own time in terms of parallel dimensions in which the past and present converged in national histories at home, in America and England, and in Italy, their new ideal state. The language of their new nationalism evolved from the chronological study of Ancient Rome up to the Renaissance, and the style of both revolution and empire, neoclassicism, while their perspective was largely shaped by a reactionary contrast between the empires of Napoleon I and III, and an ideal state they envisioned for Italy.

Sculpture Collections in Europe and the United States 1500-1930
Sculpture Collections in Europe and the United States 1500-1930

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-04-26

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 9004458840

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Exploring the various forms taken by sculpture collections, this volume presents new research on collectors, modes of display, and the aesthetics of viewing sculpture, making a notable addition to the literature on the history of sculpture and art collecting as a cultural phenomenon.

Revolutionary Ideas
Revolutionary Ideas

Author: Jonathan Israel

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-09-22

Total Pages: 882

ISBN-13: 0691169713

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"Historians of the French Revolution used to take for granted what was also obvious to its contemporary observers--that the Revolution was caused by the radical ideas of the Enlightenment. Yet in recent decades scholars have argued that the Revolution was brought about by social forces, politics, economics, or culture--almost anything but abstract notions like liberty or equality. In Revolutionary Ideas, one of the world's leading historians of the Enlightenment restores the Revolution's intellectual history to its rightful central role. Drawing widely on primary sources, Jonathan Israel shows how the Revolution was set in motion by radical eighteenth-century doctrines, how these ideas divided revolutionary leaders into vehemently opposed ideological blocs, and how these clashes drove the turning points of the Revolution. Revolutionary Ideas demonstrates that the Revolution was really three different revolutions vying for supremacy--a conflict between constitutional monarchists such as Lafayette who advocated moderate Enlightenment ideas; democratic republicans allied to Tom Paine who fought for Radical Enlightenment ideas; and authoritarian populists, such as Robespierre, who violently rejected key Enlightenment ideas and should ultimately be seen as Counter-Enlightenment figures. The book tells how the fierce rivalry between these groups shaped the course of the Revolution, from the Declaration of Rights, through liberal monarchism and democratic republicanism, to the Terror and the Post-Thermidor reaction. In this compelling account, the French Revolution stands once again as a culmination of the emancipatory and democratic ideals of the Enlightenment. That it ended in the Terror represented a betrayal of those ideas--not their fulfillment."--book jacket.

State Succession in Cultural Property
State Succession in Cultural Property

Author: Andrzej Jakubowski

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0198738064

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Through a historical analysis of state dissolution and succession and its impact on cultural heritage from 1815 to present day, this book identifes guiding principles to facilitate the conclusion of agreements on the status of cultural property following the succession of states.