Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors

ISBN-13: 9780754666509 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 288 str.

Martin, Meredith

Opis

"Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors" explores how a diverse, pan-European group of eighteenth-century patrons - among them bankers, bishops, bluestockings, and courtesans - used architectural space and decor to shape and express identity. Eighteenth-century European architects understood the client's instrumental role in giving form and meaning to architectural space. In a treatise published in 1745, the French architect Germain Boffrand determined that a visitor could 'judge the character of the master for whom the house was built by the way in which it is planned, decorated and distributed'. This interdisciplinary volume addresses two key interests of contemporary historians working in a range of disciplines: one, the broad question of identity formation, most notably as it relates to ideas of gender, class, and ethnicity; and two, the role played by different spatial environments in the production - not merely the reflection - of identity at defining historical and cultural moments. By combining contemporary critical analysis with a historically specific approach, the book's contributors situate ideas of space and the self within the visual and material remains of interiors in eighteenth-century Europe. In doing so, they offer compelling new insight not only into this historical period, but also into our own.

Spis treści

Contents: Introduction: constructing space and identity in the 18th-century interior, Denise Amy Baxter; Section I Crossing Boundaries, Making Space: The ascendancy of the interior in 18th-century French architectural theory, Meredith Martin; 'Très belle, agréable, et bien meublée': the Electoral palace at Saint-Cloud in the early 18th century, Max Tillman; In the right place at the right time: political propaganda in the Archiepiscopal palace of Würzburg, Csongor Kis; Getting plastered: ornamentation, iconography, and the 'desperate faction', Katherine R.P. Clark. Section II The Interior as Masquerade: Salon as stage: actress/courtesans and their homes in late 18th-century Paris, Kathryn Norberg; Fashioning bluestocking conversation: Elizabeth Montagu's Chinese room, Stacey Sloboda; The space of the mask, from stage to ridotto, Marc J. Neveu. Section III The Politics of Display: Improving taste in the private interior: gentlemen's galleries in post-Napoleonic London, Anne Nellis Richter; A nation of statues: museums and identity in 18th-century Rome, Jeffrey Collins; (Re)constructing an 18th-century interior: the value of interiority on display, Daniel Brewer; Bibliography; Index.

O autorze

Denise A. Baxter is an Assistant Professor in the School of Visual Arts at the University of North Texas, USA. Meredith S. Martin is Assistant Professor of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Art in the History of Art Department at Wellesley College, USA.