Search results

When Louis XVI was guillotined on January 21, 1793, vast networks of production that had provided splendor and sophistication to the royal court were severed. Although the king's royal possessions-from drapery and tableware to clocks and furniture suites-were scattered and destroyed, many of the artists who made them found ways to survive. This book explores the fabrication, circulation, and survival of French luxury after the death of the king. Spanning the final years of the ancien regime fro...

The literature and art of the French Enlightenment is everywhere marked by an intense awareness of the moment. The parallel projects of living in, representing, and learning from the moment run through the Enlightenment's endeavors as tokens of an ambition and a heritage imposing its only and ultimately impossible cohesion. In this illuminating study, Thomas M. Kavanagh argues that Enlightenment culture and its tensions, contradictions, and achievements flow from a subversive attention to the pr...

Drawing on recent research by established and emerging scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art, this volume reconsiders the art and architecture produced after 1563 across the conventional geographic borders. Rather than considering this period a degraded afterword to Renaissance classicism or an inchoate proto-Baroque, the book seeks to understand the art on its own terms. By considering artists such as Federico Barocci and Stefano Maderno in Italy, Hendrick Goltzius in the Netherlan...

The discovery of an unknown collection of old master paintings is today a rare occurrence. This volume catalogues and illustrates more than sixty Italian, French, German, and Netherlandish paintings of outstanding quality from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries (including several masterpieces by major Baroque artists, such as Guido Reni, Carlo Maratta, and Luca Giordano). The provenance of many of these previously unpublished paintings was the distinguished Barberini collection.The a...

Joachim Tielke was an outstanding instrument maker in the Baroque period who is famous above all for his elaborately decorated works. The book presents new instruments made by him that have only recently become known. This has made it possible to expand on various aspects of his work and to clarify questions regarding dating more precisely. This book provides new insights into Tielke's work and supplements the extensive volume Joachim Tielke. Kunstvolle Musikinstrumente des Barock (2011).

In Painting as Medicine in Early Modern Rome, Frances Gage undertakes an in-depth study of the writings of the physician and art critic Giulio Mancini. Using Mancini's unpublished treatises as well as contemporary documents, Gage demonstrates that in the early modern world, belief in the transformational power of images was not limited to cult images, as has often been assumed, but applied to secular ones as well. This important new interpretation of the value of images and the motivations und...

The first complete monograph of the extraordinarily inventive work of Luigi Valadier, arguably the greatest silver- and goldsmith in eighteenth-century Italy. Luigi Valadier (1726–1785) was an extraordinarily inventive Roman metalsmith, talented draughtsman, and maker of both table decorations and objects in gilt bronze, marble, and hard stone. His exquisite table centrepieces - produced for popes, royalty, and aristocrats, in Rome, as well as in France, England, Spain and Portugal - were cons...