Art in the Age of Enlightenment: Home

With this widely acclaimed work, Fried revised the way in which eighteenth-century French painting and criticism were viewed and understood. "A reinterpretation supported by immense learning and by a series of brilliantly perceptive readings of paintings and criticism alike. . . . An exhilarating book."—John Barrell, London Review of Books

The Academy and the Limits of Painting in Seventeenth-Century France is the first study in over a century devoted to the creation of one of the most important European institutions of art, the French Académie Royale. Founded in the mid-1660s, the Academy institutionalised the discourse around painting and thus had an immediate impact on the making of art in France, becoming a decisive influence on painting until the close of the nineteenth century. In the process of forging an identity for itself, the Academy redefined almost every aspect of art - the nature of art training, the sources of patronage, the social standing of the artist, and the place of the arts in national life.

The most student-friendly, contextual, and inclusive art history survey text available.

Over thirty pieces by seminal thinkers and writers from Winckelmann, Kant, and Hegel to Foucault, Carol Duncan, and Mary Kelly on such subjects as aesthetics and anthropology, postmodern automatons, semiotics and iconography, performative acts, the museum as ritual, digital art, and many others. Each of the book's eight thematic sections offers an introduction providing background information, further reading, and critical commentary on the issues at stake. This edition has been updated and expanded to include sixteen new selections by key figures from Giorgio Vasari to Walter Benjamin and Satya Mohanty, a new concluding essay from Donald Preziosi on the tasks of the art historian today, and an entirely new section on Globalization and Its Discontents.

Hogarth himself brought modern life into painting and treated it with high moral seriousness disguised as satire. Ramsay, Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Lawrence revolutionized portraiture, introducing a new authority and sensibility. The unconventional genius of Blake gave form to a unique mystic vision, while Constable explored nature in a new manner, encouraging developments that were to lead to Impressionism. Finally, Turner took painting into a realm of sublime grandeur, expressing the age of Romanticism as vividly as Byron, Shelley, and Keats were doing in poetry. William Vaughan analyzes the class structure and political background that made British art so distinctive. Using up-to-date research and critical theory, he shows us the colorful world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when British art was richer and more influential than at any time before or since.

"Makers of nothing, sellers of everything" is how official records define the marchands merciers of eighteenth-century Paris. These merchants were centered around the rue St. Honore, identified then, as now, with the luxury trades for which Paris was already internationally famous. They established trading rights in items like fans, wigs, mirrors, and even ink, all of which were supplied to markets that were fashion-driven and likely to expand rapidly. Through an examination of inventories and other records, Sargentson offers a new perspective on the history of consumption, painting a fascinating picture of the marketplace for luxury goods during the fifty years that preceded the Revolution. Her text raises important questions about the life cycle of objects and the way they were valued; the trading options of merchants who operated within narrow margins of credit and cash flow; and the relations between the different groups jostling for position and advantage."

This work offers an account of the forms and functions of interior decoration in Parisian domestic architecture during the first half of the 18th century - the period generally known as the rococo. It charts the rapid and sometimes dramatic changes in both the style and the imagery of the art of that time, and explores the relationship between social status and the consumption and display of decoration in public and private interiors.

Art history as a field has kept pace with debates over globalization and other social and political issues in recent years, this book consists of essays that cover a wide variety of "loaded" terms in the history of art, from sign to meaning, ritual to commodity. Each essay explains and comments on a single term, discussing the issues the term raises and putting the term into practice as an interpretive framework for a specific work of art.

The Dictionary of Art examines important art forms and key issues of design, taste, function, and patronage, illuminating them in light of the cultural context in which they developed.