New York City.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art is pleased to present “Pastel Portraits: Images of 18th Century Europe” until August 14th in the 2nd floor Drawings, Prints, and Photographs Galleries. By 1750, almost 2,500 professional artists and amateurs were working in pastel in Paris alone. Portraits in pastel were commissioned by all ranks of society, but most enthusiastically by the royal family, members of the court, and the wealthy middle classes. Eighteenth-century pastels are brightly colored, highly finished, often of large dimensions, and elaborately framed, evoking oil painting, the medium to which they were invariably compared. The powdery texture of pastel and its diffuse, velvety quality were particularly suited to capturing the fleeting expressions that characterize the most life-like portraits. Pastel Portraits: Images of 18th-Century Europe includes some forty pastels, belonging to the Metropolitan Museum and, with important exceptions, to museums and private collections in the New York area. It presents Italian, French, and English works, supplemented by several German, Swiss, and American examples.
After signing the United States Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress approved a much less famous resolution that appointed Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, to design the Great Seal of the United States of America.
Modernity, Regionalism, and Art Nouveau at the Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, 1909
Modernity, Regionalism, and Art Nouveau at the Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, 1909
by Peter Clericuzio
Upon visiting the city of Nancy in 1909 for the Exposition Internationale de l’Est de la France, the critic Max Durand wrote:
This summer, Nancy is a favorite destination for pilgrimage and excursion. One comes to learn, to be amused, to enjoy the natural beauty of a marvelous country, and to admire the fruits of its artistic, commercial, [and] industrial efforts.
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Annibale Carracci’s ceiling frescoes in the Palazzo Farnese are considered by many to be one of the most influential Renaissance commissions in Rome. When the Bolognese artist’s love-themed cycle was unveiled in 1600 it was hailed as a masterpiece. Carracci’s mix of northern Italian naturalism and Roman idealism laid the foundation for Baroque art. Now, thanks to the combined efforts of the World Monuments Fund, the French Embassy in Italy (which occupies the palace along with the Ecole Française de Rome) and the Paris-based Fondation de l’Orangerie pour la Philanthropie Individuelle, around €1m has been allocated for the restoration of the “Carracci Gallery” frescoes. Work is expected to begin this year.
The Aesthetic Movement used sensual, exotic art and interior design to declare its opposition to vulgar materialism. Now a new V&A show examines this revolution in our ideal of beauty. Martin Gayford reports.
By Martin Gayford
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He was very happily married, and never went mad or broke. No wonder his paintings were so twisted…
By Nina Caplan
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In order to consider the future of Victorian literary studies within the long nineteenth century, we must go back to that earlier ‘period’ of the nineteenth century, and the French Revolution of 1789. During the Napoleonic wars, two British women poets published extensive poems that addressed the impact of the revolutionary crisis on Britain’s future empire: Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) and Anne Grant’s reply, Eighteen Hundred and Thirteen (1814).1 Barbauld warned her fellow citizens that Britain’s imperial ambitions and social injustices could lead to her ruin, while Grant assured them that a future global British empire would look back to counter-revolutionary Britain with gratitude: ‘On every faithful soul, and generous breast,/ This glorious era shall be deep imprest,’ Grant wrote.2 Both poets’ keen sense of the significance of their historical moment, evident in their titles and emphasized throughout the poems, are instances of what James Chandler has argued is the distinctively Romantic-era preoccupation with the problem of historical specificity: as the ‘age of the spirit of the age,’ the Romantic period is ‘the period when the normative status of the period becomes a central and self conscious aspect of historical reflection.’3 Informed by Scottish Enlightenment stadial theories of history, Barbauld saw 1811, when the war was going badly for Britain, as a crisis from which the nation may not recover, but instead begin its irreversible decline.
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Dear friends, take a look at this wonderful web site.
It is the electronic journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art. Every summer and winter, the journal publishes issues of peer-reviewed articles that focus on art produced in the Netherlands (north and south) during the early modern period (c. 1400-c.1750), and in other countries and later periods as they relate to Netherlandish art. Submissions are encouraged on painting, sculpture, graphic arts, tapestry, architecture, and decoration, from the perspectives of art history, art conservation, technical studies, museum studies, historiography, and collecting history.
http://www.jhna.org/
Dramatic illustrations of saintly deaths, as well as elaborate tombs featuring portraits of the deceased, were among the most powerful and persistent images in medieval Byzantium from the ninth to the fifteenth century. Such artistic monuments expressed both individual and communal ideas about death, and life after death. Byzantine Christians believed in the soul’s gradual separation from the earthly body after dying, led forth by the archangel Michael. This separation of the soul from the flesh happened over the course of three days and concluded ultimately, at the end of time, in the Last Judgment, a belief held commonly by medieval Christians in both East and West. At the Last Judgment, the individual soul was either eternally condemned to hell or placed among the saved in the gardens of Paradise.
In Classical Greece, young girls usually grew up in the care of a nurse (25.78.26) and spent most of their time in the gynaikon, the women’s quarters of the house located on an upper floor. The gynaikon was where mothers nursed their children and engaged in spinning thread and weaving (31.11.10). In addition to childbearing, the weaving of fabric and managing the household were the principal responsibilities of a Greek woman. Young women, however, had some mobility in antiquity. For example, retrieving water from the local fountain house was considered not only a woman’s task, but it also offered a woman the opportunity to socialize with other women outside of the house. It was also the responsibility of women to visit the tombs of family members. Typically, they brought offerings and tied sashes around the grave stelai, a custom that is well attested on a number of white-ground Greek lekythoi. Women could attend public speeches and visit certain sanctuaries, such as those of Artemis at Brauron and the Sanctuary of the Nymph at the foot of the Akropolis. However, during any occasion outside of the house, a young woman was expected to be inconspicuous and to be covered around the head to obscure most of her face and neck.
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