The Art Bulletin

This paper examines the commission, execution, and reception of a series of exotic tapestry cartoons by Amedee Van Loo in the early 1770s. It was reported at the time that the former favorite, Mme du Barry, had been behind the commission, figuring in the cartoons as the ``French Sultana.'' Although this long-repeated tale appears false, it is useful nonetheless in establishing a political context in which the cartoons and their reception can be interpreted. Further, the markedly negative critical reception of the series offers a rich source for illuminating the reasons behind the decline and reformulation of exoticism late in the ancien regime.

In the course of the eighteenth century dealers became the essential middlemen in a rapidly expanding art market and public auctions emerged as a crucial site of exchange. Edme-Francois Gersaint (1694-1750), immortalized by Watteau’s famous shop sign, was among the first to define the business of art dealing and to forge a legitimate space for commerce within the art world. This essay examines Gersaint’s career and reputation through an analysis of his various forms of publicity, from shop signs and trade cards to press notices and sales catalogues. Finally, Gersaint’s marketing strategies are compared with those of later dealers.

This essay argues that the concentrated focus upon figural articulation in the drawings of Antoine Watteau invokes a pronounced appreciation in early eighteenth-century French culture for the construction of the body as spectacle. Referred to as ``character'' by dance theorists eager to promote the expressive possibilities of the body independent of narrative drama, corporeal spectacle extended across physical and graphic representational genres. While initial manifestations of ``character'' manipulated outward signs of status and identity, a newer trend--epitomized in Watteau’s nuanced figures--honed such social play to probe the very workings of the body as spectacle.

Upon his death in 1724, the London bookseller Thomas Guy bequeathed an enormous sum of money to the hospital which bore his name. For some contemporaries this represented the crowning glory of the life of a virtuous Christian; for others, the final vicious gesture of a self-serving and hypocritical miser. Between the 1730s and the 1770s the running battle over Guy’s reputation generated a significant constellation of sculptures, paintings, and prints--a field of conflicting representations that highlight some of the larger ideological dilemmas of an expanding commercial society.

By examining Rembrandt’s Homer Reciting Verses and other completed gift drawings, this study shows the origins of his late drawing style in established graphic traditions. The sheets in question demonstrate a fundamental principle underlying Rembrandt’s work: that even completed drawings should reveal the process of creation. The rough, unornamented manner that he developed to express this axiom, although departing from most graphic conventions canonized in art literature, was nevertheless grounded in contemporary Dutch thought. Analogues discovered in rhetoric, preaching, and philosophy suggest that in its time Rembrandt’s late drawing style was considered humble, spiritual, and truthful.

A series of prints by Jan van de Velde portrays a countryside market combined with scenes of bourgeois leisure. Numerous details of these superficially realistic images defy conventions of both real behavior and its pictorial representation. These incongruities are resolved through a reference to G. A. Bredero’s Spanish Brabanter, a play concerned with the falsity of appearances and the willingness of people to be deceived. The prints work to establish a separation between the new locale of the suburban park as a place of social deceptions, and the urban market where ``truth'' is guaranteed in the context of economic provisioning.

The Cardinal of Portugal Chapel in S. Miniato al Monte at Florence has been thought to be based solely on Brunelleschi’s architecture, a view which has left its lavish interior ornament a little understood anomaly. This essay demonstrates that richly decorated cruciform martyria and mausolea of the Early Christian period were sources for conception of the chapel. Its formal and symbolic assimilation with the church of S. Miniato is elucidated, and Brunelleschi’s influence is reassessed. The cardinal’s chapel emerges as a monument of key importance in the Early Christian revival in fifteenth-century Florentine art.