Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century

Jennifer Milam, Nicola Parsons, Jennifer Milam, Nicola Parsons

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781644532331, 9781644532324
• eBook ISBN: 9781644532355
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This volume considers how ideas were made visible through the making of art and visual experience occasioned by reception during the long eighteenth century. The event that gave rise to the collection was the 15th David Nichol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies, which launched a new Australian and New Zealand Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Two strands of interest are explored by the individual authors. The first four essays work with ideas about material objects and identity formation, suggesting how the artist's physical environment contributes to the sense of self, as a practicing artist or artisan, as an individual patron or collector, or as a woman or religious outsider. The last four essays address the intellectual work that can be expressed through or performed by objects. Through a consideration of the material formation of concepts, this book explores questions that are implicated by the need to see ideas in painted, sculpted, illustrated, and designed forms. In doing so, it introduces new visual materials and novel conceptual models into traditional accounts of the intellectual history of the Enlightenment.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: The Potential Visibility of Ideas in Enlightenment Art and Aesthetics
• Chapter 1. A Good Address: Living at the Louvre in the Eighteenth Century
• Chapter 2. Inventing Artifice: Francois Boucher’s Collection at the Louvre
• Chapter 3. Continental Porcelain Made in England: The Case of the Chelsea Porcelain Factory
• Chapter 4. Planting Cosmopolitan Ideals: Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest
• Chapter 5. Growing Old in Public in Eighteenth-Century France: Marie-Therese Geoffrin and Marie Leszczynska
• Chapter 6. French Funerary Monuments of the Ancien Regime as the Product of Individual Artistic Solutions
• Chapter 7. Meeting the Locals: Mythical Images of the Indigenous Other in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
• Chapter 8. Infernal Machines: Designing the Bomb Vessel as Transnational Technology
• Notes on Contributors
• Index