Art Commerce And Scholarship In The Age Of Enlightenment

This dissertation analyzes the emergence of an art historical hermeneutic in Enlightenment Europe through an investigation of a celebrated, but poorly understood, eighteenth-century French print dealer, book publisher, and connoisseur of art and antiquities: Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774). Mariette was active in commerce, in the highest circles of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and in the international Republic of Letters, and his praxis elucidates the historically specific meanings of collecting and connoisseurship as forms of knowledge and social distinction. His ambivalence about the art market he helped usher in also illuminates the emergence of 'art' and 'aesthetics' as categories of intellectual inquiry, and the ideological opposition of both to commerce in an era of consumer revolution. Mariette spent over three decades in commerce, working as a book publisher, printer and print dealer. His successes as a businessman made it possible for him to collect and eventually to acquire the trappings of gentility, but it was also the knowledge economy of the marketplace that formed the basis of his scholarly work. His compilation of "ready-made" historical survey collections of prints for illustrious clients, for instance, provided the foundational historical framework for his writing on art. His status as a connoisseur was secured in 1750 when he left trade and was appointed an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. This was an unusual promotion for a former merchant, and it was made possible by eighteenth-century discourses on the empirical "science of the connoisseur" and the special status of drawings within them. Deemed to be purer, less mediated, examples of an artist's characteristic manner than paintings, drawings--a field in which Mariette's expertise was widely recognized--were the very foundation of a connoisseur's claims to knowledge. His ascension to the status of gentleman-connoisseur was, however, also the result of a discourse in which the skills of artists in matters of artistic judgment were demoted in favor of disinterested lay experts like Mariette. Mariette is most familiar today as a collector of drawings but his treatment of the old master drawings in his possession is radically at odds with modern norms. He cut them apart, reassembled them, and occasionally split recto-verso sheets into two separate papers. Far from being idiosyncratic, such interventions can be related to the widespread eighteenth-century preoccupation with ensuring the optimum conditions for the perception of works of art, a preoccupation conditioned by self-consciousness about the act of perception and the role of sensory experience in knowledge formation. Given the importance of sensory data in the acquisition of connoisseurial knowledge, the clarity of initial sense impressions was imperative; it was this clarity, I suggest, that Mariette sought to secure in the presentation of his drawings. Mariette's aim was to build an art historical and critical science from the object up. His methods and the historical, moral, and aesthetic goals of his connoisseurship are most completely articulated in his Traité des pierres gravées (Treatise on Engraved Gems), published in 1750. Far from ahistorical formalism, as connoisseurship is sometimes understood today, the Traité indicates that the ultimate ambition of Mariette's scholarly work was a developmental history of art grounded in stylistic analysis. Anchored by a belief, shared by many of his contemporaries, that he lived in a period when art had been demeaned by the effects of a too-extensive commercialization of artistic production, Mariette's goal was to regenerate contemporary art and taste through the establishment of an empirically-grounded canon of approved masters for artistic education and emulation. This agenda was shared by a pan-European network of scholars, collectors, and connoisseurs; from their efforts emerged the definitions of art ("Art" rather than "arts") and aesthetics that continue to structure art historical study today.

Consummate painter, draftsman, sculptor, and architect, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) was celebrated for his disegno, a term that embraces both drawing and conceptual design, which was considered in the Renaissance to be the foundation of all artistic disciplines. To his contemporary Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo was “the divine draftsman and designer” whose work embodied the unity of the arts. Beautifully illustrated with more than 350 drawings, paintings, sculptures, and architectural views, this book establishes the centrality of disegno to Michelangelo’s work. Carmen C. Bambach presents a comprehensive and engaging narrative of the artist’s long career in Florence and Rome, beginning with his training under the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio and the sculptor Bertoldo and ending with his seventeen-year appointment as chief architect of Saint Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican. The chapters relate Michelangelo’s compositional drawings, sketches, life studies, and full-scale cartoons to his major commissions—such as the ceiling frescoes and the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, the church of San Lorenzo and its New Sacristy (Medici Chapel) in Florence, and Saint Peter’s—offering fresh insights into his creative process. Also explored are Michelangelo’s influential role as a master and teacher of disegno, his literary and spiritual interests, and the virtuoso drawings he made as gifts for intimate friends, such as the nobleman Tommaso de’ Cavalieri and Vittoria Colonna, the marchesa of Pescara. Complementing Bambach’s text are thematic essays by leading authorities on the art of Michelangelo. Meticulously researched, compellingly argued, and richly illustrated, this book is a major contribution to our understanding of this timeless artist.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 1, 2013-January 5, 2014.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 1, 2013-January 5, 2014.

The Enlightenment was the age in which the world became modern, challenging tradition in favor of reason, freedom, and critical inquiry. While many aspects of the Enlightenment have been rigorously scrutinized—its origins and motivations, its principal characters and defining features, its legacy and modern relevance—the geographical dimensions of the era have until now largely been ignored. Placing the Enlightenment contends that the Age of Reason was not only a period of pioneering geographical investigation but also an age with spatial dimensions to its content and concerns. Investigating the role space and location played in the creation and reception of Enlightenment ideas, Charles W. J. Withers draws from the fields of art, science, history, geography, politics, and religion to explore the legacies of Enlightenment national identity, navigation, discovery, and knowledge. Ultimately, geography is revealed to be the source of much of the raw material from which philosophers fashioned theories of the human condition. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Placing the Enlightenment will interest Enlightenment specialists from across the disciplines as well as any scholar curious about the role geography has played in the making of the modern world.

During the 18th century, the arts of industry encompassed both liberal and mechanical realms--not simply the representation of work in the fine art of painting, but the skills involved in the processes of industry itself. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Celina Fox argues that mechanics and artisans used four principal means to describe and rationalize their work: drawing, model-making, societies, and publications. These four channels, which form the four central themes of this engrossing book, provided the basis for experimentation and invention, for explanation and classification, for validation and authorization, and for promotion and celebration, thus bringing them into the public domain and achieving progress as a true part of the Enlightenment.

In this book the eighteenth century Enlightenment receives an important reassessment, using an astonishing range of materials and objects drawn from Europe and beyond, including artefacts from India and China, West Africa and Polynesia. A series of authoritative essays written by experts in the field explores the full range of material culture in the long eighteenth century, raising crucial questions about notions of property and invention, homely and commercial lives. The book also includes a series of well-illustrated exhibits, a startling and provocative assemblage of objects from the Enlightenment world, each accompanied by expert commentaries. The collection of essays and exhibits is the result of collaborative debate by scholars from Europe and north America, who have together worked on the cross-disciplinary importance of material history in making sense of how past society was fundamentally transformed through the world of goods.