R Taws

After Prometheus: art and technology in early modern Europe

The writing of art’s histories rests substantially, if for the most part tacitly, on an underlying account of technological change and development. This volume embarks on a history of that technological substrate as it pertains to the making and viewing of art in early modern Europe, c. 1420–1820. It examines artists’ instruments, tools, devices, machines, technologies, crafts, materials, skills, and techniques in their historic applications, to consider how they shaped the course of early modern art. Probing both the category of technology and the broader implications of technological shifts on the history of visual cultures, the volume maps the multiple histories of visual instrumentation devised for the making and viewing of art, to consider early modern technology’s relationship with a theoretical conceptualization of ‘art’ in the wider visual field.

The Dauphin and his Doubles: Visualizing Royal Imposture after the French Revolution

The dauphin Louis-Charles, son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, died aged ten in 1795, yet rumors soon spread that he had been freed in a royalist plot, and for the next century false dauphins appeared around the world. Images of the dauphin were used as evidence to assess the authenticity of pretenders claiming to be the prince. The practice of comparing paintings, prints, and photographs representing royal impostors to eighteenth-century images of the dauphin intersected with debates about the relative truthfulness of competing media in the nineteenth century, and with attempts to come to terms with Frances revolutionary past.

Material futures: Reproducing revolution in P.-L. Debucourt's Almanach national

Philibert-Louis Debucourts 1790 Almanach national, intended to serve as a frame for a pasted calendar for the subsequent year, is a unique combination of allegory and everyday scene. Dominated by a bas-relief representing the National Assembly, the image presents responses to the French Revolution organized in terms of race, age, and social class and features a singular representation of a female newspaper vendor at work. Debucourts image effectively mobilizes print to conceptualize the reproduction of Revolution across temporal and national boundaries, providing a means of thinking about the relation between Revolutionary time and the materiality of the image.