Spatial Imageries in Historical Perspective – serie

This book examines ephemeral exhibitions from 1750 to 1918. In an era of acceleration and elusiveness, these transient spaces functioned as microcosms in which reality was shown, simulated, staged, imagined, experienced and known. They therefore had a dimension of spectacle to them, as the volume demonstrates. Against this backdrop, the different chapters deal with a plethora of spaces and spatial installations: the Wunderkammer, the spectacle garden, cosmoramas and panoramas, the literary space, the temporary museum, and the alternative exhibition space.

Made up of both material and symbolic elements, the urban space is always dynamic and transitional; it brings together or separates the past and the present, the public and the private, the center and the periphery. The present volume focuses on the interaction between the social processes and spatial forms that shape the identity of Italian cities. Using both canonical and less well-known texts along with cultural artifacts, the essays in the volume deprovincialize the Italian city, interpreting the material and symbolic practices that have made it into a unique entity whose enduring influence extends far outside Italy.

Challenging the established historiography that frames the French picturesque garden movement as an international style, this book contends that the French picturesque gardens from 1775 until 1867 functioned as liminal zones at the epicenter of court patronage systems. Four French consorts—queen Marie-Antoinette and empresses Joséphine Bonaparte, Marie-Louise and Eugénie—constructed their gardens betwixt and between court ritual and personal agency, where they transgressed sociopolitical boundaries in order to perform gender and identity politics. Each patron endorsed embodied strolling, promoting an awareness of the sentient body in artfully contrived sensoria at the Petit Trianon and Malmaison, transforming these places into spaces of shared affectivity. The gardens became living legacies, where female agency, excluded from the garden history canon, created a forum for spatial politics. Beyond the garden gates, the spatial experience of the picturesque influenced the development of cultural fields dedicated to performances of subjectivity, including landscape design, cultural geography and the origination of landscape aesthetics in France.

This book examines the impact of space on the perception of art and visual culture in early nineteenth-century Paris. It turns its attention to the way in which space determines the understanding and the development of visual culture. The abundance of images, their status, and their employment alike offer a means to grasp the extent of the development of an approach to art which further involved the spectator. Space is here conceived as a multifaceted entity, spanning architectural, scholarly, artistic, and visual dimensions. These various aspects offer means to consider the way in which images work and are consumed, and the individual experience they represent. Space works as a link and a connecting tool between different intellectual and visual categories, and this study examines how this interaction applies to works of art as well as everyday objects.

This book explores ephemeral exhibition spaces between 1750 and 1918. The chapters focus on two related spaces: the domestic interior and its imagery, and exhibitions and museums that display both national/imperial identity and the otherness that lurks beyond a country’s borders. What is revealed is that the same tension operates in these private and public realms; namely, that between identification and self-projection, on the one hand, and alienation, otherness and objectification on the other. In uncovering this, the authors show that the self, the citizen/society and the other are realities that are constantly being asserted, defined and objectified. This takes place, they demonstrate, in a ceaseless dynamic of projection versus alienation, and intimacy versus distancing.

Before the first purpose-designed exhibition spaces and painting exhibitions emerged, showing art was mainly related to the habit of dressing up spaces for political commemorations, religious festivals, and marketing strategies. Palaces, cloisters, façades, squares, and shops became temporary and privileged venues for art display, where sociability was performed, and the idea of exhibition developed. What were those places and events? What aesthetic, cultural, social and political discourses intersected with the early idea of exhibition space? How did displaying art shape a new vocabulary within these events, and conversely, how have these occasions conditioned exhibiting practices? This book traces the origins of the exhibition space by studying its visual and written imagery in the early modern period. It reconsiders events and habits that contributed to shaping the imagery of the exhibition space, and to defining exhibition-making practices, exploring micro-histories and long-term changes.|Table of Contents,Acknowledgments, 1. INTRODUCTION, 1.1 Reasons for a Research, 1.2 Topics, Frames and Methodology, 2. Main Topics, 2.1 The Topoi of the Exhibition Space, 2.2 From the Act of Showing to the Idea of Exhibiting, 2.3 Depicting the Exhibitions, 2.4 Early Exhibition Design Precepts and Treatises, 3. (Domestic) Interiors, 3.1 Dressing Up Environments. From Representative Spaces to Exhibition Rooms, 3.2 Aesthetic Promenades in Italian Noble Palaces, 3.3 Dutch and Venetian Burghers' Dwellings, 3.4 A Proper Place for Artefacts, 3.5 Setting-Up the Collections, 3.6 Directing the Viewers' Gaze,*Spaces in Between,*Ubi Papa, Ibi Roma. Furniture and Display Apparatus, 4. (Public) Exteriors, 4.1 Gardens, Outer Loggias and Inner Galleries, 4.2 The City: a Stage to Display Ceremonies, 4.3 Religious Spaces for Early Exhibitions, 4.4 Transitional Space for Exhibition Fairs in Florence and Venice, 4.5 Other Venues of Exhibiting. Italian Botteghe and Northern Panden, 4.6 Alternative Exhibition Spaces: Eighteen-century Paris, 5. Conclusion, 5.1 The psychology of the display, Bibliography,List of Illustrations, Index.|1.The originality of the subject: No research until now has ever devoted a volume to the origins of the exhibition space in the early modern era. 2.Interdisciplinary approach: The study makes use of a wide range of contextual and theoretical resources and combines art history with the history of exhibitions, collections and architecture, placing the research in the social and cultural context of the time. Such an approach portrays a complex framework and demonstrates how the issue of the exhibition space is not simply attributable to a problem of contexts, but to a multiple and polyphonic research field which contributes to highlighting its scientific interest. 3.Contemporary methodology: While focusing on the early modern period, my research takes advantage of a contemporary methodology of analysis and a vocabulary that not only takes the book away from the typical volume of art history but sets the question within a current problem instead, such as that of the exhibiting, making places of art theoretical means for analysis and understanding of art history.

Spaces of Belgian Culture explores Belgian cultural history through the lens of its spaces and spatial dynamics, situating the country as a unique cultural crossroads amid European modernity.Positioning Belgium as a case study of nineteenth-century cultural transformation, the chapters in this book bring together insights from various disciplines. Topics include the negotiation of identity in public and private realms, the role of architecture and interiority, and Belgium’s interaction with transnational influences. Contributions analyze spaces or spatial textures, such as the city and socio-cultural networks, the zoo, the artist studio, the cabaret, the embassy, associational buildings, the home, the museum, the exhibition space, and the colonizer’s house. These are revealing of the tensions between modernity, tradition, and the porous boundaries of Belgian culture.The book contributes to broader discussions on spatiality, identity, and cultural hybridity and will be of interest to researchers in the fields of art history and media studies, literature, and architecture.

This book examines ephemeral exhibition spaces from 1750-1918, focusing on domestic interiors and public exhibitions that displayed national/imperial identity alongside foreign otherness.

This book examines ephemeral exhibitions from 1750 to 1918. In an era of acceleration and elusiveness, these transient spaces functioned as microcosms in which reality was shown, simulated, staged, imagined, experienced and known.

This book explores the concept of critical interiority in literature, art, and architecture within European francophone culture, spanning the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries.As a lived, imagined, or conceptualized interior space, critical interiority initially suggests a duality between interior and exterior spaces. However, this division is simultaneously destabilized, to the point where the distinction between the two spatial categories nearly dissolves. This paradox forms a lens through which modern subjectivity is analysed as an interiority. By examining examples of critical interiority found in architecture, literature, and visual art, the chapters in this volume illuminate the fundamental tensions of modernity regarding the subject and its relationship to authenticity, gender, identity, memory, nature, privacy, sociability, and temporality.Set at the intersections of various critical frameworks, this book offers a unique and interdisciplinary perspective on space. It will be of interest to researchers in the fields of nineteenth-century literature and architecture, France and Belgium, general cultural history, domesticity and the city, art history and aesthetic theory, literary genres and comparative literature.

This book examines the impact of space on the perception of art and visual culture in early nineteenth-century Paris. It turns its attention to the way in which space determines the understanding and the development of visual culture. The abundance of images, their status, and their employment alike offer a means to grasp the extent of the development of an approach to art which further involved the spectator. Space is here conceived as a multifaceted entity, spanning architectural, scholarly, artistic, and visual dimensions. These various aspects offer means to consider the way in which images work and are consumed, and the individual experience they represent. Space works as a link and a connecting tool between different intellectual and visual categories, and this study examines how this interaction applies to works of art as well as everyday objects.

Challenging the established historiography that frames the French picturesque garden movement as an international style, this book contends that the French picturesque gardens from 1775 until 1867 functioned as liminal zones at the epicenter of court patronage systems.

Made up of both material and symbolic elements, the urban space is always dynamic and transitional; it brings together or separates the past and the present, the public and the private, the center and the periphery. The present volume focuses on the interaction between the social processes and spatial forms that shape the identity of Italian cities.