The Hunt after Jeanne-Antoinette de Pompadour

The Hunt after Jeanne-Antoinette de Pompadour

Author: Rosamond Hooper-Hamersley

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2011-05-31

Total Pages: 415

ISBN-13: 0739149652

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This book recasts the import of Mme de Pompadour as a political and artistic patron at the court of Versailles in mid-eighteenth centery France. Pompadour's visual record is lush and the memoirs, diaries, correspondence, and political records are fecund examples of the weight she carried. In them she dazzles and impresses, offering both a passionate and intellectual view of the tumult that characterized pre-revolutionary France. This extensive body of evidence supports the argument that her place on the balance sheet has been overlooked. We find Pompadour simultaneously in multiple spheres of influence including the political arena, the Frence Academy of Painting and Sculpture and the larger art public, and, finally, within the Enlightenment, advocating the ideas expressed by its principal proponents. In 1745 Pompadour reigned as the new Favorite of Louis XV and kept company with him as a mistress for nearly five years. She was beset by physical infirmities and exhausted by the king's insatiable appetite. Pompadour instituted a striking transition in 1750 from mistress to friend, effecting and iconographical rehabilitation and positioning herself as an indispensable power broker within political and cultural spheres until her death in 1764. This book stimulates the audience to sit up and take notice of Pompadour's worth and measure. She is a fabulously engaging and magnetic individual whose particular influence contributed to the shifting landscape of France inching slowly toward revolution. This work overturns prevailing views of Pompadour's detractors who blind us to her import as an agent, not an object of change. Here we find a nuanced image of Pompadour through a careful examination og archival and printed sources and the art that she patronized, collectively revealing the charismatic breadth of her contributions. As she declared unapologetically, 'I am stubborn in the service of the King and I won't hold back in anything.' The historical timeline of France from 1745 to 1764 bears the unforgettable imprint and face of Pompadour.


The Creation of the French Royal Mistress

The Creation of the French Royal Mistress

Author: Tracy Adams

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2020-03-24

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0271086440

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Kings throughout medieval and early modern Europe had extraconjugal sexual partners. Only in France, however, did the royal mistress become a quasi-institutionalized political position. This study explores the emergence and development of the position of French royal mistress through detailed portraits of nine of its most significant incumbents: Agnès Sorel, Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly, Diane de Poitiers, Gabrielle d’Estrées, Françoise Louise de La Baume Le Blanc, Françoise Athénaïs de Rochechouart de Mortemart, Françoise d’Aubigné, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, and Jeanne Bécu. Beginning in the fifteenth century, key structures converged to create a space at court for the royal mistress. The first was an idea of gender already in place: that while women were legally inferior to men, they were men’s equals in competence. Because of their legal subordinacy, queens were considered to be the safest regents for their husbands, and, subsequently, the royal mistress was the surest counterpoint to the royal favorite. Second, the Renaissance was a period during which people began to experience space as theatrical. This shift to a theatrical world opened up new ways of imagining political guile, which came to be positively associated with the royal mistress. Still, the role had to be activated by an intelligent, charismatic woman associated with a king who sought women as advisors. The fascinating particulars of each case are covered in the chapters of this book. Thoroughly researched and compellingly narrated, this important study explains why the tradition of a politically powerful royal mistress materialized at the French court, but nowhere else in Europe. It will appeal to anyone interested in the history of the French monarchy, women and royalty, and gender studies.


Picturing Marie Leszczinska (1703-1768)

Picturing Marie Leszczinska (1703-1768)

Author: JenniferG Germann

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 135155414X

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Portraits of Queen Marie Leszczinska (1703-1768) were highly visible in eighteenth-century France. Appearing in royal ch?aux and, after 1737, in the Parisian Salons, the queen's image was central to the visual construction of the monarchy. Her earliest portraits negotiated aspects of her ethnic difference, French gender norms, and royal rank to craft an image of an appropriate consort to the king. Later portraits by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Carle Van Loo, and Jean-Marc Nattier contributed to changing notions of queenship over the course of her 43 year tenure. Whether as royal wife, devout consort, or devoted mother, Marie Leszczinska's image mattered. While she has often been seen as a weak consort, this study argues that queenly images were powerful and even necessary for Louis XV's projection of authority. This is the first study dedicated to analyzing the queen's portraits. It engages feminist theory while setting the queen's image in the context of portraiture in France, courtly factional conflict, and the history of the French monarchy. While this investigation is historically specific, it raises the larger problem of the power of women's images versus the empowerment of women, a challenge that continues to plague the representation of political women today.


The Routledge History of Monarchy

The Routledge History of Monarchy

Author: Elena Woodacre

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-06-12

Total Pages: 1031

ISBN-13: 1351787306

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The Routledge History of Monarchy draws together current research across the field of royal studies, providing a rich understanding of the history of monarchy from a variety of geographical, cultural and temporal contexts. Divided into four parts, this book presents a wide range of case studies relating to different aspects of monarchy throughout a variety of times and places, and uses these case studies to highlight different perspectives of monarchy and enhance understanding of rulership and sovereignty in terms of both concept and practice. Including case studies chosen by specialists in a diverse array of subjects, such as history, art, literature, and gender studies, it offers an extensive global and interdisciplinary approach to the history of monarchy, providing a thorough insight into the workings of monarchies within Europe and beyond, and comparing different cultural concepts of monarchy within a variety of frameworks, including social and religious contexts. Opening up the discussion of important questions surrounding fundamental issues of monarchy and rulership, The Routledge History of Monarchy is the ideal book for students and academics of royal studies, monarchy, or political history.


The Enterprisers

The Enterprisers

Author: Igor Fedyukin

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-04-30

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0190845023

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The Enterprisers traces the emergence of the "modern" school in Russia during the reigns of Peter I and his immediate successors, up to the accession of Catherine II. Creation of the new, secular, technically-oriented schools based on the imported Western European blueprints is traditionally presented as the key element in Peter I's transformation of Russia. The tsar, it is assumed, needed schools to train officers and engineers for his new army and the navy, and so he personally designed these new institutions and forced them upon his unwilling subjects. In this sense, school also stands in as a metaphor for modern institutions in Russia in general, which are likewise seen as created from the top down, by the forceful state, in response to its military and technological needs. Yet, in reality, Peter I himself never wrote much about education, and while he championed "learning" in a broad sense, he had remarkably little to say about the ways schools and schooling should be organized. Nor were his general and admirals, including foreigners in Russian service, keen on promoting formal schooling: for them, practical apprenticeship still remained the preferred method of training. Rather, as Fedyukin argues in this book, the trajectories of institutional change were determined by the efforts of "administrative entrepreneurs"-or projecteurs, as they were also called-who built new schools as they sought to achieve diverse career goals, promoted their own pet ideas, advanced their claims for expertise, and competed for status and resources. By drawing on a wealth of unpublished archival sources, Fedyukin explores the "micropolitics" behind the key episodes of educational innovation in the first half of the eighteenth century and offers an entirely new way of thinking about "Petrine revolution" and about the early modern state in Russia.


The Portrait Bust and French Cultural Politics in the Eighteenth Century

The Portrait Bust and French Cultural Politics in the Eighteenth Century

Author: Ronit Milano

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-02-24

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9004276254

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In The Portrait Bust and French Cultural Politics in the Eighteenth Century, Ronit Milano probes the rich and complex aesthetic and intellectual charge of a remarkably concise art form, and explores its role as a powerful agent of epistemological change during one of the most seismic moments in French history. The pre-Revolutionary portrait bust was inextricably tied to the formation of modern selfhood and to the construction of individual identity during the Enlightenment, while positioning both sitters and viewers as part of a collective of individuals who together formed French society. In analyzing the contribution of the portrait bust to the construction of interiority and the formulation of new gender roles and political ideals, this book touches upon a set of concerns that constitute the very core of our modernity.


Guibert

Guibert

Author: Jonathan Abel

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2016-09-13

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 0806156910

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If there was one man, other than Napoleon himself, who determined the course of the Napoleonic Wars, it was Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, comte de Guibert, the foremost military theorist in France from 1770 to his death in 1790. Taking in the full scope of the times, from the ideas of the Enlightenment to the passions of the French Revolution, Jonathan Abel’s Guibert is the first book in English to tell the remarkable story of the man who, through his pen and political activity, truly earned the title of Father of the Grande Armée. In his Essai général de tactique, published in 1771, Guibert set forth the definitive institutional doctrine for the French army of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. But unlike many other martial theorists, Guibert, who served in the French Ministry of War from 1775 to 1777 and again from 1787 to 1789, was able to put his ideas into practice. Drawing on a wealth of primary source documents—including Guibert’s own papers and the letters and memoirs of his friends and associates—Jonathan Abel re-creates the temper of an era of great turbulence and remarkable creativity. More than a military theorist, Guibert was very much a man of his day; he attended salons, wrote poetry and plays, and was inducted into the Académie française. A fiery figure, he rose and fell from power, lived and loved fiercely, and died swearing that he would “find justice.” In Abel’s account, Guibert does at last receive a measure of justice: a thorough, painstakingly documented picture of this complex man in the thick of extraordinary times, building the foundation for Napoleon's success between 1796 and 1807—and in significant ways, changing the course of European history.


Dress Codes

Dress Codes

Author: Ruth Rubinstein

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-05-04

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0429974914

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Rich with illustrations, this revised and updated second edition of Dress Codes systematically analyzes the meaning and relevance of clothing in American culture. Presented here is an up-to-date analysis of images of power and authority, gender, seduction (the sexy look, the alluring look, the glamorous look, the vulnerable look), wealth and beauty, youth and health, and leisure and political hierarchy. Taken together, the chapters offer to the student and the general reader a complete "semiotics of clothing" in a form that is highly readable, very entertaining, and thoroughly informative. The illustrations provide fascinating glimpses into the history of American fashion and clothing-along with their antecedents in Europe-as well as a fine collection of images from the more familiar world of contemporary America.Rubinstein has identified six distinct categories of dress in American society, upon which Dress Codes is based. "Clothing signs" were instituted by those in authority, have one meaning, indicate behavior, and are required attire (police uniforms, or the clothing of ministers and priests); ?clothing symbols," on the other hand, reflect the achievement of cultural values?wealth, beauty, you and health. The wearing of clothing symbols?designer clothing or jewelry?may have several meanings; '`'clothing tie-signs,? which are specific types of clothing that indicate membership in a community outside mainstream culture (Hasidic, Amish, or Hare Krishna attire). They were instituted by those in authority, have one meaning, they indicate expected behavior, and are required attire; clothing tie symbols emanate from hopes, fears, and dreams of particular groups. They include trendy styles such as hip-hop, hippie, and gothic. Another category, contemporary fashion, reflects consumer sentiments and the political and economic forces of the period. Personal dress, refers to the "I" component we bring in when dressing the public self (bowtie, dramatic, or artistic attire). Many of these images have their roots in the collective memory of western society. Written in a lively and entertaining style, Dress Codes will fascinate both general readers and students interested in the history of fashion and costume, fashion design, human development, and gender studies.


A History of Human Beauty

A History of Human Beauty

Author: Arthur Marwick

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2007-08-30

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1847250505

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A look at outstanding physical attractiveness as a quality or possession, comparable to power, intelligence, strength, wealth, education or family.