Object Lessons in Cambridge

 

This year Cambridge's Early Modern French Seminar, convened by Jess Goodman and Tim Chesters, is inspired by objects held in the Fitzwilliam Museum. As described on the CEMFS website: "Each talk takes as its starting point an artefact held in the museum, ranging from cabinets to paintings to duelling pistols. Our exciting line-up covers the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and includes specialists in literature and art history, as well as representatives from the Fitzwilliam itself." It sounds like a lovely idea for a seminar series and I'm only sorry I can't attend them all, but I am delighted to be contributing one of the talks.

For more information about the talks and speakers, along with links to the objects in the Fitzwilliam that will be the focus of each talk visit: www.cemfs.org.uk/termcard.

 

 

Louvre II: Another excursion into artistic collaboration in 18th-century Paris... this time in LA

I have been very slack on the blogging even though lots has been happening (probably *because* lots has been happening) but this has wooed me back (hopefully to stay).

When the call for papers for ASECS (American Society for Eighteenth-century Studies) Annual Conference 2015 came out recently, Mia Jackson and I were delighted to see that Dena Goodman had proposed a session to allow the conversations from our The Louvre Before the Louvre conference of July 2013 to continue and to move off in exciting new directions. Beyond our original interest in artists, artisans, and academicians, Goodman's session extends to include scientists in the mix as yet another category of person who inhabited the palace throughout the eighteenth century. The session will also move beyond the space of the Louvre to consider other spaces in the city in which collaborations across the arts and between the arts and sciences could develop, and to examine what form those collaborations took, and what they produced.

Here is the description of the session to be held at ASECS 2015 in Los Angeles. For more information about the conference visit the association website: asecs.press.jhu.edu.

Scientists, Artists, and Artisans in the Eighteenth Century

Session Convener: Dena Goodman

In the eighteenth century, scientists, artists, and artisans, worked, lived, and interacted together in a variety of ways and spaces. This seminar aims to explore the spaces, practices, products, and implications of those interactions. We are inspired by a symposium held at the Wallace Collection (London) in 2013 on the “Louvre before the Louvre,” in which historians of art and architecture explored the Louvre as space of family, work, and sociability in the two centuries before it became a museum. We propose to expand their inquiry to include two other groups, artisans and scientists, who also lived and worked in the Louvre, and to ask what other spaces in Europe (and the Americas) fostered interactions among them. We encourage papers that focus on the interactions among two of these groups (artists and scientists, scientists and artisans, artisans and artists) rather than on one or the other of them. We recognize also that the lines among these professional classifications and identities were in the process of being drawn in the eighteenth century and hope to stimulate discussion about the changing meanings of art, science, artisanship, technique, and labor and how they were achieved through interaction and in practice through this seminar.