Fancy In Eighteenth Century European Visual Culture

Fancy in the eighteenth century was part of a rich semantic network, connecting wit, whimsicality, erotic desire, spontaneity, deviation from norms and triviality. It was also a contentious term, signifying excess, oddness and irrationality, liable to offend taste, reason and morals. This collection of essays foregrounds fancy - and its close synonym, caprice - as a distinct strand of the imagination in the period. As a prevalent, coherent and enduring concept in aesthetics and visual culture, it deserves a more prominent place in scholarly understanding than it has hitherto occupied. Fancy is here understood as a type of creative output that deviated from rules and relished artistic freedom. It was also a mode of audience response, entailing a high degree of imaginative engagement with playful, quirky artworks, generating pleasure, desire or anxiety. Emphasizing commonalities between visual productions in different media from diverse locations, the authors interrogate and celebrate the expressive freedom of fancy in European visual culture. Topics include: the seductive fictions of the fancy picture, Fragonard and galanterie, fancy in drawing manuals, pattern books and popular prints, fans and fancy goods, chinoiserie, excess and virtuality in garden design, Canaletto's British 'capricci', urban design in Madrid, and Goya's 'Caprichos'.

This study joins the resurgent scholarship presently redressing the neglect of eighteenth-century visual culture since the beginning of the twentieth century. This volume offers nine contextual and cross-disciplinary essays that engage with a rich panoply of discourses ranging from art criticism to biography, to collecting and the art market, to art theory and practice and the institutions that shaped them, to beauty and fashion, sociopolitical and philosophical issues, gender studies, patronage, iconography, and print culture.

In 17th and 18th century Europe, folding fans were important, socially-coded fashion accessories. In the course of the 18th century, painted and printed fan leaves displayed an increasing variety of visual motifs and artistic subject matter, while many of them also addressed contemporary political and social topics. This book studies the visual and material diversity of fans from an interdisciplinary perspective. The individual essays analyze fans in the context of the fine and applied arts, discussing the role of fans in cultures of communication and examining them as souvenir objects and vehicles for political and social messages.

Reassessing key intellectual and cultural traditions using an interdisciplinary approach, this book examines the legacy of the Baroque, the dynastic past in visual culture and the concurrence of different artistic styles in Germany during the eighteenth century, such as the Italianate, Francophile and Anglophile within the courtly sphere. The following arenas of enquiry represent organizing strands; courtly society and employment practices; court and artist, and print culture. The study addresses how elite patronage and Princely taste impacted the social formation of artistic culture at courts in northern and central Germany, Austria, and England. Contributions drawn from a variety of disciplinary perspectives in the arts and fine arts including visual culture, philosophy and comparative literature discuss the volume's theme in a series of focused case studies by experts in these distinctive fields. As such, the volume fills an important gap in English language scholarship on courtly Germany and Austria. Although previous publications have addressed patronage in the eighteenth-century Austro-German context, major questions relating to artistic influence, changing contexts of viewing and the employment of itinerant musicians and artists in eighteenth-century German courts still remain unaddressed. To address this, the book offers an interdisciplinary perspective, and gathers its conclusions from the interrelated fields of philosophy, visual culture, literature and print culture. Through its specific case-focused approach, the volume makes a departure from prior scholarship by identifying these as mutually exclusive fields. Topics discussed include discourses of luxury and sumptuary excess, changing contexts of viewing, the advent of universal collections, and the lure of the classical past. In literature, patron-author relationships were informed by contemporary ideas of 'genius' together with the reality of changing readerships. Connecting artistic forms to social formation in particular, case studies address the transmission of taste through aristocratic family networks, the creation of new audiences for art through print culture, and the permeation of courtly values into bourgeois cultural forms during the late eighteenth century. The book is aimed at a wide interdisciplinary audience, (history, philosophy, European studies, art history and comparative literature) and will also be of interest to specialist scholars, graduate students, and academic libraries.

Poets, painters, philosophers, and scientists alike debated new ways of thinking about visual culture in the “long eighteenth century”. The essays in The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture demonstrate the extent to which Goethe advanced this discourse in virtually all disciplines. The concept of visuality becomes a constitutive moment in a productive relationship between the verbal and visual arts with far-reaching implications for the formation of bourgeois identity, pedagogy, and culture. From a variety of theoretical perspectives, the contributors to this volume examine the interconnections between aesthetic and scientific fields of inquiry involved in Goethe’s visual identity. By locating Goethe’s position in the examination of visual culture, both established and emerging scholars analyze the degree to which visual aesthetics determined the cultural production of both the German-speaking world and the broader European context. The contributions analyze the production, presentation, and consumption of visual culture defined broadly as painting, sculpture, theater, and scientific practice. The Enlightened Eye promises to invest new energy and insight into the discussion among literary scholars, art historians, and cultural theorists about many aspects of visual culture in the Age of Goethe.

This survey explores the history of nineteenth-century European art and visual culture. Focusing primarily on painting and sculpture, it places these two art forms within the larger context of visual culture including photography, graphic design, architecture, and decorative arts. In turn, all are treated within a broad historical framework to show the connections between visual cultural production and the political, social, and economic order of the time. Topics covered include The Classical Paradigm, Art and Revolutionary Propaganda In France, The Arts under Napoleon and Francisco Goya and Spanish Art at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century. For art enthusiasts, or anyone who wants to learn more about Art History.

This book reveals a new history of the imagination told through its engagement with the body. Even as they denounced the imagination’s potential for inviting luxury, vice, and corruption, American audiences avidly consumed a transatlantic visual culture of touring paintings, dioramas, gift books, and theatrical performances that pictured a preindustrial—and largely imaginary—European past. By examining the visual, material, and rhetorical strategies artists like Washington Allston, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, and others used to navigate this treacherous ground, Catherine Holochwost uncovers a hidden tension in antebellum aesthetics. The book will be of interest to scholars of art history, literary and cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, and media studies.