In The Portrait Bust and French Cultural Politics in the Eighteenth Century, Ronit Milano probes the rich and complex aesthetic and intellectual charge of a remarkably concise art form, and explores its role as a powerful agent of epistemological change during one of the most seismic moments in French history. The pre-Revolutionary portrait bust was inextricably tied to the formation of modern selfhood and to the construction of individual identity during the Enlightenment, while positioning both sitters and viewers as part of a collective of individuals who together formed French society. In analyzing the contribution of the portrait bust to the construction of interiority and the formulation of new gender roles and political ideals, this book touches upon a set of concerns that constitute the very core of our modernity.

Pierre Julien: Sculptor to Queen Marie-Antoinette is a scholarly study of the artist (1731-1804) who rose from humble beginnings, the son of an illiterate carpenter, to become professor at the Paris Académie and director of the sculptural decoration at Marie-Antoinette's dairy at Rambouillet (1785-87), a surprise gift from Louis XVI. A moderate during the Revolution, Julien became one of the original members of the Institut National (1795). He executed life-size marble statues, part of the Great Men series, small works in terra cotta, and mythological figures such as Ganymede, Narcissus, and Cupid. His masterpieces are Amalthea, or Girl with Goat, the centerpiece at Rambouillet, and two statues in the Louvre: the Dying Gladiator, his reception-piece to the Académie, and Jean de La Fontaine, a statue of the author of Fables. The first major study of Pierre Julien in a hundred years, Pierre Julien: Sculptor to Queen Marie-Antoinette celebrates the 200th anniversary of the sculptor's death and coincides with the exhibition in Le Puy, France (Spring 2004). This volume is indispensable to art historians and anyone interested in the colorful period in French history between the age of Louis XV and the rise of Napoleon.

The celebrated French artist Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762) is primarily known as a sculptor today, but his contemporaries widely lauded him as a draftsman as well. Talented, highly innovative, and deeply invested in the medium, Bouchardon made an important contribution to the European art and culture of his time, and in particular to the history of drawing. Around two thousand of his drawings survive—most of which bear no relation, conceptual or practical, to his sculpture—yet, remarkably, little scholarly attention has been paid to this aspect of his oeuvre. This is the first book-length work devoted to the artist’s draftsmanship since 1910. Ambitious in scope, this volume offers a compelling narrative that effectively covers four decades of Bouchardon’s activity as a draftsman—from his departure for Rome in 1723 as an aspiring student to his death in Paris in 1762, by which time he was one of the most renowned artists in Europe. His accomplished and dynamic style is analyzed and copiously illustrated in a series of five interrelated chapters that serve as case studies, each of which focuses on a coherent group of drawings from a particular period of Bouchardon’s career.

Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France examines how new and often contradictory ideas about friendship were enacted in the lives of artists in the eighteenth century. It demonstrates that portraits resulted from and generated new ideas about friendship by analyzing the creation, exchange, and display of portraits alongside discussions of friendship in philosophical and academic discourse, exhibition criticism, personal diaries, and correspondence. This study provides a deeper understanding of how artists took advantage of changing conceptions of social relationships and used portraiture to make visible new ideas about friendship that were driven by Enlightenment thought. Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture Distributed for the University of Delaware Press

"13 heliotype illustrations by the Heliotype Printing Co., Boston, from photographs of sculpture." -- Hanson collection catalog, p. 72.

This beautiful book features masterpieces of sculpture in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum dating from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. Celebrated works by the great European sculptors - including Luca and Andrea della Robbia, Juan Mart©Ưnez Monta©ł©♭s, Gianlorenzo Bernini, Jean-Antoine Houdon, Bertel Thorvaldsen, Antoine-Louis Barye, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Rodin- are joined by striking new additions to the collection, notably Franz Xaver Messerschmidt's remarkable bust of a troubled and introspective man. The ninety-two selected examples are diverse in media (marble, bronze, wood, terracotta, and ivory) and size - ranging from a tiny oil lamp fantastically conceived and decorated by the Renaissance bronze sculptor Riccio to Antonio Canova's eight-foot-high Perseus with the Head of Medusa, executed in the heroic Neoclassical style. Incorporating information from the latest scholarly research and recent conservation studies, sculpture specialist Ian Wardropper discusses the history and significance of the highlighted works, each of which is reproduced with glorious new photography.

European sculptors of the Neoclassical period often modelled their works in clay before producing finished pieces in marble. This book offers a comprehensive overview of Neoclassical terracotta models by European artists, featuring the works of0. Pajou, Houdon, and Canova, among many others.

Among the finest examples of European craftsmanship are the clocks produced for the luxury trade in the eighteenth century. The J. Paul Getty Museum is fortunate to have in its decorative arts collection twenty clocks dating from around 1680 to 1798: eighteen produced in France and two in Germany. They demonstrate the extraordinary workmanship that went into both the design and execution of the cases and the intricate movements by which the clocks operated. In this handsome volume, each clock is pictured and discussed in detail, and each movement diagrammed and described. In addition, biographies of the clockmakers and enamelers are included, as are indexes of the names of the makers, previous owners, and locations.

Focusing specifically on portraiture as a genre, this volume challenges scholarly assumptions that regard interior spaces as uniquely feminine. Contributors analyze portraits of men in domestic and studio spaces in France during the long nineteenth century; the preponderance of such portraits alone supports the book's premise that the alignment of men with public life is oversimplified and more myth than reality. The volume offers analysis of works by a mix of artists, from familiar names such as David, Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Rodin, and Matisse to less well-known image makers including Dominique Doncre, Constance Mayer, Anders Zorn and Lucien-Etienne Melingue. The essays cover a range of media from paintings and prints to photographs and sculpture that allows exploration of the relation between masculinity and interiority across the visual culture of the period. The home and other interior spaces emerge from these studies as rich and complex locations for both masculine self-expression and artistic creativity. Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789-1914 provides a much-needed rethinking of modern masculinity in this period.