Noemie Etienne - Böcker

The decades following the 1973 publication of Alessandro Conti's Storia del Restauro have seen considerable scholarly interest in the development of restoration in France in the second half of the eighteenth century. A number of technical treatises and biographies of restorers have offered insight into restoration practice. The Restoration of Paintings in Paris, 1750-1815, however, is the first book to situate this work within the broader historical and philosophical contexts of the time.Initial chapters present the diversity of restoration practice, encompassing not only royal institutions and the Louvre museum but also private art dealers, artists, and craftsmen, and examine questions of trade secrecy and the changing role of the restorer. Following chapters address the influence of restoration and exhibition on the aesthetic understanding of paintings as material objects. The book closes with a discussion of the institutional and political uses of restoration, along with an art historical consideration of such key concepts as authenticity, originality, and stability of artworks, emphasising the multi-layered dimension of paintings by such important artists as Titian and Raphael. There is also a useful dictionary of the main restorers active in France between 1750 and 1815.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, foreign material culture was introduced into France and Switzerland and integrated into European interiors and decorative arts. Scholars have emphasized this era’s emerging taste for the exotic in order to explain the unprecedented craze for lacquer, porcelain, and textiles that imitated non-Western techniques and iconography. Yet what constituted the exotic during the age of Enlightenment? How was the place of foreign material culture negotiated? And how did it impact European identities? Exotic Switzerland? moves from questions about the nature of exoticism to explore exoticism in practice. The physical relocation of material fragments in European interiors is the core of this volume. Finally, the contributors also explore the rise of disciplines such as anthropology and ethnology through collection, publication, and print culture.

Zirkulation und Nachahmung haben einen wesentlichen Einfluss auf die Gestaltung der materiellen Welt. Die Beiträge des Bandes untersuchen, wie technisches Wissen, immaterielle Wünsche und politische Agenden die Produktion und Rezeption der visuellen und materiellen Kultur im Wandel der Zeit und Orte prägten. Sie gehen den Wanderungen von Kulturgütern unter besonderer Berücksichtigung ihrer Entstehungskontexte nach. Mit dem Begriff des „rhapsodischen Objektes" werden dabei die vielschichtigen, nicht immer in einem Zusammenhang stehenden Erzählungen der Objekte angesprochen.

Dioramas are devices on the frontier of different disciplines: art, anthropology, and the natural sciences, to name a few. Their use developed during the nineteenth century, following reforms aimed at reinforcing the educational dimension of museums. While dioramas with human figures are now the subject of healthy criticism and are gradually being dismantled, a thorough study of the work of artists and scientists who made them helps shed light on their genesis. Among other displays, this book examines anthropological dioramas of two North American museums in the early twentieth century: the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the New York State Museum. Sites of creation and mediation of knowledge, combining painting, sculpture, photography, and material culture, dioramas tell a story that is always political.