Portrait Bust and French Cultural Politics in the Eighteenth Century

Dr. Ronit Milano is a faculty member in the Department of the Arts, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. She has published several articles on the French pre-Revolutionary portrait bust, and is currently writing a book on contemporary art installations in eighteenth-century sites.

"...this is a compelling book. Solidly researched and cogently argued, it provides an important corrective to the lacuna of scholarship on sculpted portrait busts in the modern era and stands as an excellent complement to recent publications on late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portraiture"Heather Belnap Jensen, Brigham Young University, in H-France 16.15, 2016(full review text: http://www.h-france.net/vol16reviews/vol16no15jensen.pdf)"The Portrait Bust and French Cultural Politics in the Eighteenth Century offers fresh and game-changing insights into the ways the conventions of the sculpted portrait reflected shifting values in the socio-political sphere of late eighteenth-century France. Like a skillful cryptographer, Milano has decoded the fascinating and revealing information embedded in eighteenth-century French portrait busts, long and mistakenly considered primarily decorative and descriptive. By organizing portrait busts into categories (age, gender, profession), Milano has identified subtle yet content-dense changes in portrait conventions and, more importantly, the ideas these transformations communicated to contemporary audiences. In this engagingly-written study, she clearly demonstrates that portrait busts embodied for contemporary viewers a wealth of ideas through which we can chart the dynamic development of Enlightenment thought." Michelle Facos, Indiana University-Bloomington

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1: “He is a Philosopher”: Individual versus Collective IdentityChapter 2: Decent Exposure: Bosoms, Smiles and Maternal Delight in Female PortraitsChapter 3: Between Innocence and Disillusion: Representations of Children and ChildhoodChapter 4: Transitional Identities: Family Structure, the Social Order, and Alternative Masculinities at the Dawn of ModernityChapter 5: The Face of the Monarchy: Court Propaganda and the Portrait BustConclusionBibliographyIndex