« Connoisseurship. Art and antiquities », The Saint-Aubin Livre de caricatures: Drawing Satire in eighteenth-century Paris, Colin Jones, Juliet Carey et Emily Richardson (dir.), Oxford, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 2012, p. 283-300. (original) (raw)

Repeat Offenders: Reprinting Visual Satire Across France's Long Eighteenth Century

RACAR, 2015

This article looks at two 18th century french caricatures which were restruck several times over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries: Triomphe des Arts Modernes ou Carnaval de Jupiteur and L'Assemblée de Brocanteurs attributed to the Comte de Caylus. Borrowing methods from material and visual culture studies, this article examines the importance of the editorial gesture of restriking these plates. After examining the dense iconography of both images and relating them to their different publishing contexts, this article mobilizes Miriam Hansen's interpretation of Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility" in order to assess the importance of the materiality of the prints in every new restrike.

Collections Curieuses: The Aesthetics of Curiosity and Elite Lifestyle in Eighteenth-Century Paris

Eighteenth-Century Life, 2005

In eighteenth-century Paris there existed a network of more than 450 private collections of this sort, "collections de diverses curiosités" in contemporary terminology, whose strangely heterogeneous spectrum of objects is reminiscent of the Borges-Foucaultian "Chinese encylopedia." This essay aims to understand the phenomenon of curiosité, with its entire spectrum of objects and its social practices, as a historical unit whose specific nature differs from the Kunst- und Wunderkammern. In this essay the Parisian collections curieuses will be anchored within a framework that, inspired by Pierre Bourdieu's work on the "cultural field," we will call the "field of curiosité." Its specific habitus, its showplaces, its protagonists, and the roles they assumed, its competitive dynamic, and its values will be described. What emerges is a historical configuration that does not fit into the usual dualisms of art/science, scientific/nonscientific, or professional/amateur. It will become clear that the field of curiosité was shaped by an aesthetic code whose criteria constituted the spectrum of objects in the collections curieuses, their presentation in the home, usually an hôtel, of their owner, and the social practices localized in the collection as a unit.

Caricature, Pedagogy, and Camaraderie at the French Academy in Rome, 1770–1775

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2019

Caricature's prominence in the visual culture of France during the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has gained the attention of art historians in the last decade. 1 These studies have tended to emphasize publicly circulated social and political caricature. However, by focusing on graphic satire intended for a wide audience, such discussions overlook other uses that the genre had for artists in the eighteenth century, which are inseparable from sociable practices of drawing. This essay considers the caricatures of the French history painter François-André Vincent and others like them produced by his fellow pensionnaires at the French Royal Academy in Rome between 1770 and 1775 as responses to their shared academic training, to eighteenth-century drawing pedagogy, and to the homosocial environment of Rome. The apparent lack of topical subject matter has relegated the pensionnaires' caricatures to mere examples of artistic versatility and humorous formal experimentation among more serious forms of artistic practice. 2 The caricatures were fundamentally an artistic pastime that resulted in valued mementos of the pensionnaires' experience abroad, and references to these drawings and etchings often include the word "friendship" to describe the relationship between the men involved in their creation. The inclination to situate these works within amicable relationships is understandable. The drawings and etchings represent a group of artists and were reproduced and exchanged amongst the individuals in the group, and thus the caricatures exist within a long tradition of portrait production and

The Portrait Bust and French Cultural Politics in the Eighteenth Century

The Portrait Bust and French Cultural Politics in the Eighteenth Century, 2015

The research project that culminated in the writing of this book was first conceptualized during my doctoral studies. I am immensely indebted to my dissertation advisor, Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, for her support during this process. Throughout my doctoral studies, and later as I wrote this book, I was blessed by her admirable wisdom, unrivaled perspicacity, and outstanding warmth, which have led me to view her as both a personal and a professional role model.

'A company of artists watching a mountebank show': studies in seventeenth-century caricature

Journal of Art Historiography, 2020

A Company of Artists Watching a Mountebank Show, a forgotten caricature of Annibale Carracci’s students and followers, represented as a crowd watching a street performance of mountebanks, is closely tied to different stages of the historiography of caricature. It follows the first accounts of its origins and strategies by the Seicento theorists, testifying to its centrality in the Carracci studio in Bologna. The drawing’s arrival in British collections coincided with the first Anglophone history of caricature, published by Charles Rogers in 1778, and, later, with the redefinition of caricature studies among the Warburg circle of scholars. This text is an inquiry into the subversive potential of caricature as a critical art form of early modernity. It argues that by adopting bodily deformation as its modus operandi, and by aligning artists with mountebanks, the drawing contributes to the reinvention of the codes of artists’ self-representation, renouncing the previous emphasis on their social status to privilege companionship and performativity.