{% for press in publication.publisher %}
-**Published by the {{ press.name }}, {{ press.location }}**
{{ press.address | markdownify }}
{% endfor %}
diff --git a/content/acknowledgements.md b/content/acknowledgements.md
index 934d555..675e773 100644
--- a/content/acknowledgements.md
+++ b/content/acknowledgements.md
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ layout: page
order: 302
---
-This project owes debts to many kinds of things.
+**This project owes debts to many kinds of things.**{.large-opener}
To the pounds and pence and the dollars and cents generously put in our pockets over more than a decade by the academic institutions at which our project emerged, was nurtured, and finally completed. Thank you to the Courtauld Institute of Art, London; St John’s College, University of Oxford; the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; and Queen Mary University of London.
diff --git a/content/intro.md b/content/intro.md
index 7e59b0c..3a7ef30 100644
--- a/content/intro.md
+++ b/content/intro.md
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
---
title: Introduction
layout: essay
-class: page-one
+class: page-one quire-essay
order: 13
contributor:
- id: "kscott"
diff --git a/content/owners.md b/content/owners.md
index 0907411..3955bb9 100644
--- a/content/owners.md
+++ b/content/owners.md
@@ -19,7 +19,7 @@ order: 10
{% for owner in uniqueThingOwners %}
{% unless owner == '' %}
-
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/content/pdf-epub-copyright.md b/content/pdf-epub-copyright.md
index 28afefa..e6a0c51 100644
--- a/content/pdf-epub-copyright.md
+++ b/content/pdf-epub-copyright.md
@@ -1,11 +1,12 @@
---
-layout: base.11ty.js
+layout: page
+class: copyright-page
order: 4
-class: backmatter about-copyright-page
+toc: false
+menu: false
outputs:
- - epub
- pdf
-toc: false
+ - epub
---
{{ config.quire_credit_line | markdownify }}
@@ -21,7 +22,6 @@ First edition, {{ publication.pub_date | date: "%Y" }}
{% for press in publication.publisher %}
-**Published by the {{ press.name }}, {{ press.location }}**
{{ press.address | markdownify }}
{% endfor %}
diff --git a/content/taxonomies/chronology.md b/content/taxonomies/chronology.md
index 5cd6b8a..e7b79c1 100644
--- a/content/taxonomies/chronology.md
+++ b/content/taxonomies/chronology.md
@@ -6,19 +6,19 @@ class: taxonomy
---
{% capture tableRows %}
-{% for page in collections.thing %}
-{% for entity in page.data.owner %}
-{% if entity.sort_years or entity.years %}
+{%- for page in collections.thing -%}
+{%- for entity in page.data.owner -%}
+{%- if entity.sort_years or entity.years -%}
diff --git a/content/taxonomies/index.md b/content/taxonomies/index.md
index 90c1d53..f60cee9 100644
--- a/content/taxonomies/index.md
+++ b/content/taxonomies/index.md
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
---
title: Taxonomies
-layout: page
+layout: splash
order: 200
#outputs: none
---
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/content/things/almanac.md b/content/things/almanac.md
index fa7385f..e721156 100644
--- a/content/things/almanac.md
+++ b/content/things/almanac.md
@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@ owner:
last_name: Vernet
years: 1714–89
type: [Instrument]
-theme: [Everyday, Travel]
+theme: [Everyday, Louvre, Travel]
material: [Synthetic Materials | Paper]
mentions: [watch, order book, journal, snuffbox, sword, umbrella, wig]
contributor:
@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@ To suggest such a division is to ask whether Vernet’s experience of time, the
Insofar as art has traditionally been defined as task oriented, historians presume that artists were spared the pain of the temporal transformation brought about by modernity’s disciplines. We rarely question the time *of* painting in the early modern period, as opposed to time represented *in* paintings, subject matter that Vernet made his own: at the Salon of 1763 he exhibited *Four Times of Day*, four overdoors painted the previous year for the dauphin’s library at Versailles. Of *Night* ({% ref 'fig-002' %}) Diderot marveled, “everywhere it is night-time and everywhere it is day.”[^15] He continued: the moonlight “illuminates and colors the world” like sunlight, and “blends with the firelight” that clarifies the daily tasks of night. Across all four paintings time is flexible; the moments of the day stretch and extend into one another, creating through modulated light, patterns of repetition and renewal at odds with the unidirectional, dark linearity of the almanac and its continuous sequence of rigidly plotted points. It is rather in the participation of artists in print culture and their exploitation of reproduction in all its forms that art historians recognize the modernity of eighteenth-century art: modernity as commoditization and commercialization, not industrialization.[^16] Such a view fits neatly with alternative theories of modern time. According to Jan de Vries, the eighteenth century experienced not an industrial revolution but an industrious one.[^17] He identifies change not in the regularity of work time but in its intensity. He argues that increases in work discipline were not imposed by capitalists but self-imposed by workers motivated to work more competitively in order to be able to buy from an expanding range of consumer goods: in Vernet’s case in the year 1763, prints à la grecque, a guitar, a cushion for his sedan chair, and a world of goods that at his death encompassed also a {% thing 'snuffbox' %}, a {% thing 'sword' %}, an {% thing 'umbrella' %}, and a {% thing 'wig' %}, all things in this book. By such an argument Vernet bought his almanac in order to enjoy a sophisticated, expert timepiece (in place of his plain, generic ledgers), and to delight in its ornaments.
-{% figure 'fig-002' %}
+{% figure 'fig-002' 'is-pdf-float-top' %}
To propose such an interpretation presumes the correlation of historical change and individual time. However, the exact timing of Vernet’s purchase perhaps indicates something else. In July 1762, Vernet and his family arrived in Paris to take up lodgings at the Louvre after a decade of moving from point to point along France’s Mediterranean and Atlantic seaboards following the prescribed itinerary of the painter’s royal commission of 1753: to paint twenty ports of France. Vernet had first broached the matter of a Louvre *logement* in December 1759, after six years of “traveling for the king” and shortly after the birth of his second son, Carle.[^18] The father Vernet wanted to synchronize the family clock, shaped by socially constructed expectations of settled domesticity, with the external meter of work time. He was initially rebuffed by the marquis de Marigny, the *directeur des bâtiments du roi* (director of the king’s buildings), in whose gift a *logement* (lodgings) rested, and in whose view the end of migration and the end of the job were necessarily temporally related.[^19] It was not until April 1762 that Marigny relented and allowed the claims of Vernet’s family and his children’s education to override the king’s command.[^20] It is possible that the delay and frustration Vernet suffered in setting up a permanent home made the painter especially conscious of his late transition to fatherhood, and that he marked this turning point in his life’s course by purchase of an almanac for the year in which he moved into the Louvre and had his name painted on the door.[^21]
diff --git a/content/things/armchair.md b/content/things/armchair.md
index a8c6783..466e37e 100644
--- a/content/things/armchair.md
+++ b/content/things/armchair.md
@@ -20,7 +20,7 @@ contributor:
Fragonard’s professional pivot from painter to arts administrator kept him in the same cultural sector—working for the Commission du Muséum Central to establish France’s first national museums—but involved a dramatic change in daily activities: from the tasks of the studio (grinding pigments, preparing canvases, sketching compositions, charging and cleaning {% thing 'palettes' %}, creating works of art); to the tasks of the cabinet (reading and writing, and more reading and writing). As human activity exists in an inextricable relationship with things, Fragonard’s career change also necessitated a shift in his material environs: a redelineation of his space, a demotion (perhaps even discarding) of previously essential tools, acquisition of new items to enable new activities, and a changing relationship with the old. Among the many things in Fragonard’s possession involved in this moment of transition was his armchair ({% ref 'fig-004' %}).[^3]
-{% figure 'fig-004' 'is-indented-2x' %}
+{% figure 'fig-004' 'is-indented-2x is-pdf-float-top' %}
A cane *fauteuil* with a continuous back and armrests and an upholstered leather seat, Fragonard’s armchair has certain decorative details (like its turned front legs), but other aspects suggest a privileging of functionality over aesthetics (like the single cane layer that makes it somewhat less elegant from behind). In an effort to define chairs, Denis Diderot described them rather self-evidently as “an article of furniture upon which one sits,” but the furniture makers of eighteenth-century Paris assured far more specification of use and activity within this generic category of object.[^4] There exists, as Mimi Hellman has articulated, a mutually defining relationship between bodies and furniture.[^5] Every chair allows its user to sit, but each chair accommodates that operation differently, ensuring a particular corporeal position, subtly directing comportment and behavior, and physically delimiting a range of actions and gestures. Any given chair will facilitate some activities, but in turn make others more challenging. In the increasingly literate world of Enlightenment Paris, furniture designed specifically for reading and writing became an important business. Chairs could be optimized for the physical actions of intellectual labor, like, at the more customized end of the spectrum, the *fauteuil* designed for Voltaire by the *menuisier* Charles-François Normand ({% ref 'fig-005' %}): on one side, an adjustable stand for books or papers to read; on the other, a flat surface for writing (if left-handed) that doubled as a container for storage; and casters on the feet so the chair could be wheeled at whim to a more amenable position.[^6] For other readers and writers, who unlike Voltaire were less averse to stationary deskwork, the chair of choice might be a *fauteuil de cabinet* ({% ref 'fig-006' %}), with its central leg at the front and its rounded seat cut away at the sides to ease pressure on the thighs. According to the *menuisier* André-Jacob Roubo, this assured a commodious experience for those required to sit for long periods leaning forward, “as all those who write do.”[^7] As a desk-dwelling administrator, Fragonard would have shared such requirements, but his armchair was not designed with quite the same degree of specification.
diff --git a/content/things/baptism-certificate.md b/content/things/baptism-certificate.md
index 1a7972e..4fe14ab 100644
--- a/content/things/baptism-certificate.md
+++ b/content/things/baptism-certificate.md
@@ -29,7 +29,7 @@ For the most part, this legal registering of baptisms actually took a different
Robert’s requirements for a baptism certificate occurred, as the document reveals in its issue date, on 15 April 1760, about a month before his twenty-seventh birthday. As a material thing, Robert’s baptism certificate thus has little connection with his actual baptism. The document was produced nearly three decades after the sacrament was administered, by a priest who performed no role in the rite. Its current location (in the Archives Nationales) reveals why it was sought in the first place, for it is to be found attached with a piece of notary’s string to a contract outlining a *tontine* ({% ref 'fig-009' %}).[^5] This was an early modern speculative investment scheme in which subscribers would pay an initial amount and then receive a life income via an annuity. Participants in the *tontine* were divided into age groups, and over time, as others died, shares were redistributed to surviving members, leaving the last one standing as the recipient of a substantial fortune.[^6] Hubert Robert was a *pensionnaire* at the Académie de France in Rome when this *tontine* was drawn up, but his share was purchased by his father, Nicolas, who seems to have made this investment in his son’s favor as a paternal gesture to assure a financial income for the young painter.[^7] Nicolas paid 1,000 livres in order for Hubert to receive a *rente viagère* (life annuity) with a principal of 80 livres plus interest, which, for a twenty-six-year-old man with a normal life expectancy, would have looked like a secure and profitable investment. Given the importance of age to a *tontine*, baptism certificates were required to provide proof of a participant’s date of birth.[^8] Thus, on the final page of the contract, the notary confirmed that the extract from the baptismal register of Saint-Sulpice had been supplied; a note was added to the back of that certificate indicating that it had been “certifié véritable” (certified as true); and the small piece of paper was tied in perpetuity to this financial deal.
-{% figure 'fig-009' 'is-indented-2x' %}
+{% figure 'fig-009' 'is-indented-2x is-pdf-float-top' %}
Through the baptism certificate’s passage from parish register to investment contract we not only encounter two distinct moments of Robert’s life—the infant of 1733 and the young artist of 1760—we also find a connection between the seemingly disparate spaces of religion and finance. Given the moral qualms about speculative financial ventures, especially for a scheme in which participants benefited from the deaths of others, one might envisage an uncomfortable discord between what this piece of paper represented and how it was used: that is, between the holy sacrament that turned Hubert Robert into a child of God, and the worldly business deal that brought him fiscal return. Yet this document proffers a material trace of the more symbiotic relationships between religion, law, and finance that existed in the lived experience of eighteenth-century France. {% contributors context=pageContributors format='symbol' %}
diff --git a/content/things/bath.md b/content/things/bath.md
index f0f8594..183d78e 100644
--- a/content/things/bath.md
+++ b/content/things/bath.md
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ owner:
- first_name: Joseph-Siffred
last_name: Duplessis
years: 1725–1802
-type: [Commodity, Furniture]
+type: [Commodity, Furniture, Instrument]
theme: [Everyday, Health/Medicine, Invention, Louvre, Luxury]
material: [Metal | Copper]
mentions: [key, bed, glasses]
diff --git a/content/things/bed.md b/content/things/bed.md
index 8192f15..ebbc417 100644
--- a/content/things/bed.md
+++ b/content/things/bed.md
@@ -10,19 +10,19 @@ owner:
years: 1694–1752
type: [Furniture, Ritual Thing]
theme: [Family, Identity, Memory, Louvre, Luxury]
-material: [Plant Matter | Wood, Synthetic Materials | Paint/Pigment, Textile | Cotton, Textile | Linen, Textile | Silk, Textile | Wool]
-mentions: [picture, journal, teacup, carriage]
+material: [Plant Matter | Wood, Synthetic Materials | Paint/Pigment, Textile | Cotton, Textile | Silk, Textile | Wool]
+mentions: [journal, teacup, carriage]
contributor:
- id: "kscott"
---
**Charles-Antoine Coypel’s bed does not survive,** or not as a bed. What remains is a picture ({% ref 'fig-010' %}), oil on canvas, 190 by 135 centimeters, which originally served as the backboard for a *lit à la Polonaise*.[^1] Such beds stood sideways against the wall and were distinguished by two *chevets,* or bed ends. Rarely did they incorporate large decorative paintings. However, a preparatory drawing by Coypel ({% ref 'fig-011' %}), a history painter and a royal academician, establishes *Painting Awakening Genius* in its original function as furniture. Information about the dimensions, materials, and exact form of the bed to supplement the evidence of the drawing, alas, is not to be had because, by the time of the painter’s death, bed and picture had parted company; this bed is not the one inventoried with his effects.[^2]
-{% figure 'fig-010' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-010' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
At some point before 1752, the painting had been relegated to the studio, where it was itemized unframed with a miscellany of other paintings, plaster casts, prints, drawings, and other paraphernalia. Meanwhile, Coypel’s bed had returned to the norm.[^3] It was, according to his inventory, dressed with a base valence of old, jonquil-colored damask and hung with yellow serge curtains. On the frame were three differently stuffed mattresses piled with bolsters, cushions, and horsehair pillows. Coverlets and various fur foot warmers were scattered upon it. It was valued for probate at 300 livres and was the most expensive single item in the room, which was otherwise furnished with armchairs, a settee, assorted tables, a chest of drawers, two corner cupboards, and a desk, and was decorated with seven mirrors and over fifty pieces of Chinese and European porcelain, some of them mounted on gilded sconces.[^4] The beds had, nevertheless, dominated the scene.
-{% figure 'fig-011' 'is-offset' %}
+{% figure 'fig-011' 'is-offset is-pdf-side-caption is-pdf-float-top' %}
Henri Havard, in *Dictionnaire de l’ammeublement et de la décoration* (1894), assembled a vast primary literature on the bed, culled from inventories, letters, {% thing 'journals' %}, plays, novels, and the first newspapers, which testify to the cultural and social significance of beds in France from the thirteenth century to the end of the ancien régime. He notes not only that beds hosted the most important moments in the lives of their owners, he establishes also that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, beds were exchanged to commemorate those events. His examples are mostly drawn from the history of the king and his court, but he cites, from the history of art, a four-poster bed with gray serge curtains that the painter Pierre Mignard brought to his marriage in 1656, and a bed with curtains and a counterpane in “yellow tabby,” or silk taffeta, that Nicolas Fouquet provided for Charles Le Brun to seal his contract for work at Vaux-le-Vicomte.[^5] This suggests that the history of Coypel’s bed was closely entangled with the story of his life and in ways, moreover, not all envisaged by Havard, because Coypel invented as well as owned and used his bed.
@@ -42,7 +42,7 @@ Bed and bedroom, object and space are not as idiosyncratic as they perhaps at fi
It invites us to compare *Painting Awakening Genius* not with the father’s scenes of Aeneas’s tragedy but rather with its travesty: the son’s Don Quixote series. In 1727 Charles-Antoine painted for the Gobelins the cartoon for the last scene in his set of *The Adventures of Don Quixote* ({% ref 'fig-012' %}), in which Quixote, asleep in his bedroom, is visited in his dreams by Minerva, who by her wisdom cures him of his chivalric illusions embodied by Folly, who beguilingly flutters by the bed, her drapery merging with the bed hangings.[^26] The same model appears to have served Coypel for the blonde female figures of Folly and Painting. Insofar as Painting is also Folly’s familiar, we can consider the possibility that the parade of the bedchamber was semiseriously and semiconsciously staged by Coypel as a fantasy—that his bed was his castle in the air.
-{% figure 'fig-012' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-012' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Among Coypel’s high-born friends was the marquis de Calvière, an aristocrat and courtier, for whom Coypel wrote an epistle, published in the *Mercure de France* in 1724.[^27] A lyrical letter on the subject of friendship and the importance of truth in the commerce between true friends, the poem betrays Coypel’s fear of ridicule for aspiring to mix in company socially and in virtue above his own. The not-quite-rightness of Coypel’s bed, its artistic misprision of noble design, manifests the difficulty of steering a social course that balances prerogatives of distinction while politely appearing not to believe oneself deserving of them. That Coypel eventually dismantled his bed and put the painting into storage in the studio suggests he came later to regret his *levée* as an overreach of the claims of his talent. {% contributors context=pageContributors format='symbol' %}
diff --git a/content/things/book.md b/content/things/book.md
index 2b62a13..06ab9b2 100644
--- a/content/things/book.md
+++ b/content/things/book.md
@@ -8,9 +8,11 @@ owner:
- first_name: Gilles-Marie
last_name: Oppenord
years: 1672–1742
- - first_name: Gabriel
- last_name: de Saint-Aubin
+ - first_name: Gabriel de
+ last_name: Saint-Aubin
years: 1724–80
+ sort_years: 1724–1780
+type: [Companion]
theme: [Education, Leisure, Studio]
material: [Synthetic Materials | Ink, Synthetic Materials | Paper]
mentions: [color box, red lake]
@@ -44,13 +46,13 @@ Saint-Aubin read with a different kind of independence. His most consistent and
However, in the accompanying annotations, Saint-Aubin’s reading urges him beyond illustrative repetition. It prompts in him the recollection and articulation of another discourse on color—everyday, concrete, retail talk of suppliers and prices. He takes a virtual tour of Paris to the best shops for {% thing 'red lake' %}, orpiment, ultramarine, umber, and ivory black.[^14] He measures the rise and fall in prices over time. If we can assume that the paintbrush preceded the pen in this independent reading, we can infer that Saint-Aubin’s autonomy was secured above all by the materiality of the text: by the layout of the page, by the gutter and margins. It was these physical properties that led to samples, and from samples to geography and accountancy. The marbled endpapers were further grist to Saint-Aubin’s private milling of the text ({% ref 'fig-016' %}). At the front, easy to overlook, is a figure of a boatman curled into a landscape.
-{% figure 'fig-016' %}
+{% figure 'fig-016' 'is-pdf-float-top' %}
Oppenord and Saint-Aubin responded quite differently to the circle. Oppenord works around the circles of Ripa’s emblems ({% ref 'fig-017' %}), treating them as fixed features of the page, as monuments in a paper setting. He does not frame them, in the sense of setting them off with more of the same; he offsets them, throwing into relief their difference. Insofar as they are appropriated, it is as found objects, not designs or signs. Saint-Aubin, by contrast, invades the page; his filling figure recasts the marbled paper as background. His is the reading response advocated by Leonardo (and I paraphrase):
> [L]ook upon an old wall covered with dirt, or the odd appearance of some streaked stones and in them you will discover landscapes, battles, clouds, uncommon attitudes, funny faces, draperies, etc. Out of this confused mass of objects, the mind will be furnished with an abundance of designs and subjects perfectly new.[^15]
-{% figure 'fig-017' 'is-offset has-1x-padding-bottom' %}
+{% figure 'fig-017' 'is-offset has-1x-padding-bottom is-pdf-side-caption is-pdf-float-top' %}
Where Oppenord’s independent reading pursues and demonstrates learning, erudition, and intellect in the same humanist terms as Ripa’s *Iconologie*, Saint-Aubin’s strategies of reading and response reveal objectives quite at odds with those of Pernéty. They were at once more banal (the price of paint and canvas) and more inspired.
diff --git a/content/things/burin.md b/content/things/burin.md
index 520e272..6ff60ba 100644
--- a/content/things/burin.md
+++ b/content/things/burin.md
@@ -20,7 +20,7 @@ contributor:
Burins consist of a square shaft that tapers toward a diamond- or lozenge-shaped cutting face ({% ref 'fig-018' %}). They were supplied in a variety of sizes by the capital’s master needlemakers and were later fitted with wooden handles furnished by its master turners.[^4] These were not generic tools. Rather, they were made to the engraver’s specification, in relation to hand size and with regard to habits of practice. Some engravers favored long burins, others short, some diamond-tipped, others lozenge.[^5] Of whatever kind, a burin did not become a tool, properly speaking, however, until it had been remade in the printmaker’s workshop.[^6] The handle was cut away and flattened in a line perpendicular to the cutting face, and the point was further shaped, sharpened, and refined on an oil stone. The burin was therefore a highly individualized thing that belonged to its owner not only as property but as an extension of the body (hand and lower arm) and of thought: it prefigured the character of the line—bold, fine, etc.—that she envisaged and intended to cut.[^7]
-{% figure 'fig-018' 'is-indented-2x' %}
+{% figure 'fig-018' 'is-indented-2x is-pdf-float-top' %}
The burin was put to work on a copper plate bought ready-made from a master coppersmith.[^8] Figures 1 and 2 of plate 11 of Charles-Nicolas Cochin’s 1745 revised edition of *De la manière de graver à l’eau-forte et au burin* (see {% ref 'fig-018' %}) depicts how to hold the burin and put it to the plate: not grasped like a {% thing 'quill' %} or {% thing '*crayon*' %}, but rather with thumb and forefinger on the belly of the tool to guide the point, and the other fingers tucked up so that none come between the burin and the cutting surface. Cochin admitted that plates and description were not alone sufficient to understand fully the techniques of engraving, such was the range of pressure and the manifold subtleties in manipulation of the angle of the point to produce a flowing line to the desired width and depth.[^9] A tacit form of knowledge, engraving was only fully revealed in the workshop.[^10] Learned by doing, that is, by watching the master work and replicating his efforts in the presence of his example, engraving was a skill acquired slowly, through practice over time.[^11]
@@ -32,13 +32,13 @@ Her husband, Lépicié, was not a publisher and printseller with a large commerc
Her first commercial efforts in the mid-1730s were portraits for the printseller Michel Odieuvre’s down-market series *Les portraits des personnes illustres* (1735). Next, she published with her husband’s publisher, Louis Surugue, engravings of *Sight* ({% ref 'fig-019' %}), *Taste,* and *Smell* for a set of *The Five Senses* (ca. 1741), which resemble more-or-less formal demonstrations of skill, chefs-d’oeuvre in the guild sense. Her prints, produced alongside those of *Touch* and *Hearing* by her exact contemporary Pierre-Louis Surugue *fils*, are literal copies of Jan Saenredam’s engravings after Henrick Goltzius (ca. 1595), and sought to rival the originals in that beauty and softness for which Goltzius’s burin was renowned.[^19] Three years later, in 1744, she replicated her husband’s engraving after Chardin’s *Le Bénédicité* (1740), the work that sealed Lépicié’s reputation as an engraver, matching it faithfully line for line.[^20] Surugue *fils* had meanwhile been made an *agréé* (provisional member) of the Académie in 1742, where he exhibited another print after Goltzius at the Salon. In 1744 he also engraved a Chardin: *The Card Game* (now lost), after the original painting, however, not another’s print. In 1747 he was elected a full academician. Marlié’s talent brought her no comparable independent public recognition. In 1737 Lépicié had been appointed the secretary of the Académie. His elevation can only have deepened her burdens as helpmeet in the studio.
-{% figure 'fig-019' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-019' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Her comparative invisibility as an engraver-wife, compared to Surugue’s prominence as *fils* of a lineage of engravers, is partly explained by cultural notions of appropriate womanly work. The burin’s line was associated with masculine values of strength, precision, and boldness.[^21] The resistance of the tool on the plate, metal to metal, required that the lines, swelling with the push, and tapering with the release of controlled and skillfully directed muscle power, were laid in systematically and evenly, creating a “net of rationality” not, it was generally thought, afforded by womanly work.[^22] Contra such prejudice, in *Sight* (see {% ref 'fig-019' %}) Marlié reproduces the almost geometric precision of Saenredam’s lines: the faces of the protagonists are rendered in swinging parallel arcs (the woman’s cheek) and in contrary motions of curves and counter-curves (the man’s jaw and brow) whose flat abstraction is relieved just enough with dots and cross-hatching to render the effect representational. In praising Saenredam’s engraving for its “softness,” François Basan applauded not his feminine sensibility but his virtuosic mastery of the manual challenges presented by the burin and the hard obduracy of the engraver’s medium.[^23] Though the amateur Claude-Henri Watelet acknowledged that engraving was not as physically demanding as received wisdom supposed, his account did nothing to overturn the general presumption that engraving is an art unfit for a woman.[^24] Women like Marlié challenged the idea of the burin and the category of woman; the meaning of one or the other had to change when she picked up her tool and engraved a line.
By the end of the seventeenth century the status of engraving was under assault. According to the publisher Charles-Antoine Jombert, the engraved line expressed, in the eyes of the modern viewer, not strength but “rigidity,” not clarity but “coldness.”[^25] Cochin alleged that engravers like Goltzius had turned virtuoso performance with the burin into an end in itself. Such self-reflexive displays of facility, he argued, undermined the proper purpose of engraving: to imitate the expressiveness, chiaroscuro, and *coloris* of drawings and paintings.[^26] For reproduction he promoted the more flexible technique of etching. Cochin’s criticism could well have been leveled at Marlié’s 1756 engraving after Carle Van Loo’s *The Marriage Contract* (1736) ({% ref 'fig-020' %}), a painting in La Live de Jully’s collection, and described in the collection’s catalog as “in the taste of Rembrandt,” a “pastiche” of the Dutchman’s art.[^27] Only the really attentive viewer appreciates Marlié’s efforts to find with her burin a cut to correspond to the loose, broken paintwork of Van Loo’s brush and the rich tenebrism of his glazes. Even so, “Rembrandesque,” it is not. For such failings Cochin downgraded engraving to the secondary role of reinforcing etching’s finer line work, of adding mere accent and finish. Arduousness, in the sense of drudgery and routine, was the salient feature of engraving in this redefined role, a value that the woman might embody, but without artistic credit.
-{% figure 'fig-020' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-020' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Marlié’s print was advertised in the *Mercure de France* in November 1756.[^28] Having praised the print in generic terms for capturing the “beauties” of Van Loo’s “Drawing” and the “vigor” of his “*Coloris*,” the writer of the ad concluded by saying that the print “pays tribute also to M. L’Epicié, deceased, who knew how to leave us a second self . . . by resurrecting his talents” in his wife. The compliment was backhanded. It implied that although Marlié signed her work in her own name, nevertheless, under Lépicié’s training, she had not developed an independent artistic voice.[^29] Not a compliment, it was, in Lépicié’s case, also not a figure of speech. His purpose had indeed been to create a second, indistinguishable self, to share the labor of printmaking by “finishing” his work to preserve by her burin his etched *disegno* from the wear and tear of printing, thus increasing the size of the edition that could be pulled from the workshop’s copper plates and consequently the profitability of the business. In an invoice in the form of a poetic writ, addressed by Lépicié to the Fermiers généraux in June 1738, the engraver observed that the print they had commissioned from him after Hyacinthe Rigaud’s *Portrait of Philibert Orry*, had taken two years of “painful and continuous labor,” during which “Patience” had been his soul’s only condition and “Migraine” his only companion.[^30] Marlié was that patience personified. So close is her technique to his that connoisseurs find it impossible to untangle their work.
diff --git a/content/things/camera-obscura.md b/content/things/camera-obscura.md
index 0d3df22..d56ca84 100644
--- a/content/things/camera-obscura.md
+++ b/content/things/camera-obscura.md
@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ contributor:
**A *chambre noire*, or camera obscura,** in a case was inventoried in the studio of the battle painter and academician Charles Parrocel at his death in 1752.[^1] The camera obscura is an optical instrument that by alignment of a biconvex lens with a mirror projects a righted image of objects in the sunlit world onto a two-dimensional surface in a darkened “room.” Parrocel’s camera was itemized as “for drawing,” and it was very likely of the desktop variety illustrated as figure 2 in plate V of “Drawing,” in Diderot and d’Alembert’s *Encyclopédie* ({% ref 'fig-021' %}).[^2] The text of the plate itemized the components of the instrument but provided no instructions for use, observing only that, contrary to the reader’s expectation, the view seen by the projectionist lies behind and not in front of them. The surprise that the writer anticipated this revelation would provoke suggests that although the camera obscura was a familiar object in scientific circles in mid-eighteenth-century France, it was still something of a novelty in the art world.[^3]
-{% figure 'fig-021' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-021' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
The camera obscura is not, it is true, generally associated with the French school and with traditions of academic art. Rather, art historians have researched the origins of its use as an instrument for perfecting the exact imitation of nature in Renaissance Italy and seventeenth-century Holland.[^4] It is no surprise to learn from the abbé Gougenot’s Life of Jean-Baptiste Oudry, an artist whose work was profoundly informed by northern practices of painting, that this still-life and landscape painter used a camera obscura.[^5] By contrast, Parrocel’s ownership of one poses a dilemma. The camera is not mentioned in any other contemporary source on Parrocel. His biographers unite, in fact, in characterizing his talent in terms of imagination, invention, and genius, skills that notionally render the resources of the camera obsolete.[^6] How do we explain this omission and make sense of the camera’s presence in Parrocel’s studio? Is the inborn secretiveness of artists about their methods to blame, as David Hockney alleges?[^7] Did Parrocel use it only exceptionally, for specific works? Or was the utility of the camera obscura not what we think it was, that is, not just a machine for copying? Answers to these questions in the context of things inevitably directs us to focus less on the newness of the technology and more on its significance in relation to alternatives embodied in the old tools of the early modern workshop.[^8]
@@ -26,16 +26,20 @@ Estate inventories cannot tell us when things were acquired, but they do tell us
A preparatory drawing for the *Reception of the Turkish Ambassadors at the Tuileries* ({% ref 'fig-022' %}), a work commissioned from Parrocel by the crown in 1727, exhibits the technique of perspectival construction using the conventional tools of geometry (compass, ruler, and setsquare).[^13] The drawing is divided by color into black-chalk figures and sanguine setting. The disjunction between the even and exactly measured red space, mapped from a point of central perspective by a compass and ruler, and the mottled and mobile impression of events unfolding in that gridded locale under the differential pressure of the chalk’s painterly point, could not be more apparent. The perspective and the figures belong to different worlds. It appears, moreover, that the Turkish envoys and the Parisian crowds were drawn first, in space minimally ordered by a vanishing point, on which perspective’s rigid order was later imposed (red over black, in the lines of the steps) and into which the sharply foreshortened architecture was inserted, very possibly by another hand. That Parrocel struggled with the perspective is evident in the corrected positioning of the vanishing point: the eye from which black orthogonals tentatively radiate was removed by the red hand to a lower position.[^14] The clash between the propositional statements of geometry about space in the abstract, and the gestural marks provoked by concrete things—the sheen of a skirt, the curved rump of a horse, the assorted pitches of rifles on shoulders and swords on hips—are irreconcilable, and pull the image in opposite directions, breaking it apart.[^15]
-{% figure 'fig-022' %}
+{% figure 'fig-022' 'is-pdf-float-top' %}
The projection of the camera obscura healed that rift. It enabled the artist to transpose the relative position and size of objects in a scene, freehand, onto the two-dimensional surface.[^16] The locus of scientific knowledge shifted from paper work to camera work; focused projection relied on exact calculation of the optimum distance between the lens and its objects, and on the informed choice of aperture in relation to light conditions.[^17] On the page, meanwhile, figure and ground, objects and space were created in a single gestural practice, paradoxically closer to the sketch than the mechanical copy. In *Cavalry Engagement*, for instance, a pen-and-brown-ink drawing with brown and gray wash ({% ref 'fig-023' %}), the energetic, almost continuous flow of Parrocel’s inky line feels its way with squiggles and accents toward the “real” of a scene of conflict, working with wash to create space both on the material surface of the drawing and in the picture plane. A camera obscura was obviously not used to make this drawing; rather, the drawing helps us see how the camera afforded a new experiential understanding of perception, one that enabled artists to work in practice back and forth across drawing and painting, or *disegno* and *colore*, domains that academic art theory had enshrined in the seventeenth century as cognitively distinct.
The Académie in 1700 was not, however, the same institution it had been at the height of Charles Le Brun’s influence, when a rationalist order of painting, based in line and narrative, was dominant. Camilla Pietrabissa has shown that, by the turn of the century, a more empirical approach was developing at the Académie school. Louis Joblot, the professor of perspective, introduced the camera obscura to teaching.[^18] Students, of which Parrocel was almost certainly one, were given a comprehensive course in optics, starting with the anatomy of the eye, followed by lessons in the science of light and color, and ending with instruction on how to build basic optical instruments.[^19] But, though Joblot encouraged students to take the camera obscura into the countryside to draw, there is no evidence that he promoted it as a means to achieve a heightened form of naturalism. A tiny ornamental dragon ({% ref 'fig-024' %}) is the object of the eye’s attention in his design for a magnifying glass published in 1718 in his book on microscopy.[^20]
+
+
In the years Joblot was teaching, the art theorist Roger de Piles was giving lectures on art theory, published in 1708. In his *Cours*, de Piles advocated use of optical instruments, specifically mirrors, not in the context of imitation but as an aid to composition—in relation, that is, to invention. He argued that by looking in a convex mirror, which increases the force of central focus, the painter can understand better how to order his or her composition to achieve the “unity of effect” that is, he argues, crucial to satisfying the eye at a single glance, and thus to fulfilling the primary purpose of painting: the illusion of perception.[^21] The camera obscura is no different. Its lens only brings into view that which is directly in its line of sight and upon which it is focused; that which is not is registered is seen, if at all, with the progressively diminishing sharpness of peripheral vision. Unless the camera is refocused for each object in a scene, it will impose, like the history painter, an order on the world by the honor of its attention, and by consigning lesser things to the indistinctness of the edge.[^22] Joblot’s innovative teaching with the camera obscura did not of itself revolutionize the paradigms of pictorial representation at the Académie. Indeed, so natural seeming was ideal nature that the camera’s projections appeared artificial to some. Fifty years later, in *Méthode pour apprendre le dessein*, Charles-Antoine Jombert criticized as unnatural and exaggerated the contrast of light and shadow and the brightness of color projected by the camera.[^23] He cautioned restraint in the imitation of its “piquant” illusions and advised artists to check them against the “real” of unaided vision.
In light of this review of early eighteenth-century academic theory and pedagogy, the presence of a camera obscura in Parrocel’s studio appears less odd, less contradictory. Optical instruments were not reserved for imitation, they were also tools of invention and imagination. A reading, thus contextualized, of the Lives of Charles Parrocel for what they say about his art in relation to the tradition of battle painting and to the manner of his masters—his father the battle painter Joseph Parrocel, and the history painters Charles de La Fosse and Bon de Boullogne—may now indicate some material impacts of the technology on his practice.
diff --git a/content/things/carriage.md b/content/things/carriage.md
index 1c25e20..11f0a10 100644
--- a/content/things/carriage.md
+++ b/content/things/carriage.md
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ owner:
type: [Vehicle]
theme: [Travel]
material: [Plant Matter | Wood, Synthetic Materials | Glass, Synthetic Materials | Paint/Pigment, Textile | Silk]
-mentions: [almanac, teacup, shell]
+mentions: [teacup, shell]
contributor:
- id: "kscott"
---
@@ -24,13 +24,13 @@ Although, as Nicolas Clément has noted, Pigalle’s journeys all date from the
Perronneau and Cochin, though they were using different kinds of transport—public and private, scheduled and unscheduled—both traveled in an open-ended manner, one that Tim Ingold calls “going along.”[^12] As they drove or were driven, both were alert, it seems, to the opportunities of the road, living it as they moved along. Perronneau, as Francesca Whitlum-Cooper has shown, scanned the markets at Lyon, Bordeaux, and Orléans for openings to paint, matching his movements to the economics of his environment, and Cochin, at leisure, looked for occasions to renew acquaintances and to visit places of interest.[^13] Pigalle’s journeys, whether undertaken by *diligence* or in his own carriage, were, by contrast, almost always determined in advance.[^14] They were oriented toward a precise destination in fulfillment of a specific goal; with few exceptions, immediate return followed.
-{% figure 'fig-025' 'is-offset' %}
+{% figure 'fig-025' 'is-offset is-pdf-float-top is-pdf-side-caption' %}
Travel for Pigalle was a matter of itinerary, not geography. An itinerary is a list of points or places through which to pass in order to reach your destination.[^15] By the mid-eighteenth century, such itineraries could be bought as single sheets for a few sous from book and map sellers. Some were no more than a sequence of place names in geographical sequence, but by the mid-eighteenth century the cartographers Claude Sidone Michel and Louis-Charles Denos were publishing *L’Indicateur fidèle,* strip maps that outlined itineraries along a single route.[^16] Sheet number 4, the route from Paris to Lyon ({% ref 'fig-025' %}), depicts two roads, the older, slower road for goods and local traffic along the Loire, and the new, fast, metaled “Route de la Diligence,” for quick transit across the Île-de-France and the Nivernais to the Burgundy capital. The topography of the wider landscape is reduced to a minimum—just enough for the traveler “to see all the places through which he must pass.”[^17] It represents, in a sense, the view from the carriage window.[^18] Such was the speed of traveling by post, according to Arthur Young in 1787–89, that one saw “nothing”[^19]—nothing, that is, but the “milestones,” or rather the *toise*-stones that, with a fleur-de-lis, punctuated the distance traveled from Paris in units of a thousand *toises* ({% ref 'fig-026' %}). Carriage and itinerary isolated travelers perceptually and socially from the environment: it enabled them, as Michel and Denos proudly noted, to journey from point to point without having to scan the horizon for landmarks or stop and ask the way,[^20] just follow their map with a finger.
Both carriage and map were agents of speed and mobility. Speed is also a leitmotif of contemporary accounts of Pigalle’s journey to Ferney. According to baron Grimm, the sculptor promised to leave for the environs of Geneva “immediately” after the famous dinner chez Mme Necker in April 1770, at which the specifics of the Voltaire monument were decided, and the Swiss artist Jean Huber described with astonishment the speed with which the sculptor modeled Voltaire’s likeness and then left, according to Grimm, without stopping to say goodbye.[^21] Such accounts not only gloss over the practical difficulties that Pigalle must have faced on this trip, especially on the last leg from Lyon to Ferney, off the *grands chemins*, they also imply that the time of travel between points was dead time. Only destination mattered.
-{% figure 'fig-026' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-026' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Can we conclude that Pigalle embraced a modern mode of travel, one structured by ends and made efficient by the *routes royales* built by the king’s engineers at the Ponts et Chaussées, and by carriages designed for speed and long distance? In the case of *Voltaire nu*, such a conclusion would align developments in infrastructure with the expansion of the public sphere through the increased circulation of people, objects, and enlightened ideas.[^22] However, the history of the maréchal de Saxe monument tells a different story. Commissioned in 1753 by the king, it was ready for installation by 1771. Saxe, the hero of Fontenay and victor of Louis XV’s campaigns in Flanders during the War of the Austrian Succession (1744–48), was Protestant and could not be interred in a Catholic church, and therefore not in Paris. The mausoleum was destined for the church of Saint-Thomas at Strasbourg, part of the Alsatian lands conquered by France at the end of the seventeenth century and still predominantly Lutheran. The logistics of the tomb’s transfer from Paris to Strasbourg were hugely complex. From the sources published by Jules Guiffrey in 1891 emerges a picture of energetic, efficient administration headed by the *directeur des bâtiments du roi,* the comte d’Angiviller, who between March 1775 and July 1776 secured the preparation of the site and the safe delivery and installation of the mausoleum.[^23] He contracted hauliers for the medium-weight packing cases,[^24] commissioned the design of special wagons for the heaviest from the king’s mechanic, Antoine-Joseph Loriot,[^25] organized passports for the convoys to exempt their loads from entry duties as they crossed into Alsace,[^26] and generally coordinated the arrival of information, works, and personnel in good order and at the right time.[^27] In d’Angiviller’s bureaucratic imagination, space was abstract extension, and executive power radiated from its nodal point, Paris, along geometric lines to its destination.
diff --git a/content/things/color-box.md b/content/things/color-box.md
index e0b9696..3894a24 100644
--- a/content/things/color-box.md
+++ b/content/things/color-box.md
@@ -18,11 +18,11 @@ contributor:
**Upstairs in the Villa-Musée Fragonard,** in the southern French town of Grasse, where Jean-Honoré Fragonard was born, there is a shallow wooden box ({% ref 'fig-028' %}). Inside, its colorful contents immediately convey its function. Divided into nine compartments, the box is home to eighteen cork-stoppered glass bottles, slightly varied in shape, each filled with a different ground pigment and labeled by hand: Prussian blue, burnt sienna, carmine, etc. Along with the colors, the three compartments at the front are designed to house tools, with central dividers carved to a curve, so utensils can rest without rolling away. The bits and pieces left include an ebony stick, some well-worn blending stumps, and a fine brush darkened at the tip. Covered in marks and stains, this unassuming box is thought to have belonged to one of the best- and least-known painters of eighteenth-century France.[^1] Celebrated for the distinctive painterly canvases that have secured his place in the canon of European art, Fragonard is nevertheless still surprisingly enigmatic as a person.[^2] The color box thus presents a compelling material trace, promising a personal connection otherwise limited by archival sources. Now residing in a museum installed in the house of Fragonard’s cousin, where the painter lived for a year in the 1790s, the color box offers vivid insights into the practicalities and economics of eighteenth-century art making and an alternative view of the materiality of Fragonard’s painterly practice.
-{% figure 'fig-028' %}
+{% figure 'fig-028' 'is-pdf-float-top' %}
Of all the painter’s tools, the {% thing 'palette' %} might be the most symbolically recognizable, but color boxes were just as ubiquitous amid the paraphernalia of the eighteenth-century studio. In the imagined composite studio offered as initial vignette to the *Encyclopédie*’s plates on “Painting” ({% ref 'fig-029' %}), color boxes indeed become a defining feature of the space. Most evident is the *grande boîte à couleurs* in the foreground near the history painter’s steps. More elaborate than a mere container, this genre of color box was a piece of furniture, with additional drawers for storage, and legs that made it a commodious height for use in the studio (handy for placing a brush or hanging a {% thing 'handkerchief' %}). Fragonard’s box, meanwhile, was a simpler kit, closer in form to that on the far left beside the portraitist, or that in the center beside the copyist scaling down a canvas. Without legs or drawers, this type was less furniture than storage case, not as capacious but eminently more transportable than its cumbersome legged relative. The *Encyclopédie*’s vignette suggests a taxonomy of color boxes in which size was related to specialization, as though painters of lesser genres required lesser tools. But the form of the box was actually more related to specification, that is, the context of its use. As a history painter Fragonard likely kept a *grande boîte à couleurs* in his studio, but this smaller version was a tool customized for use outside that space.
-{% figure 'fig-029' 'is-indented-2x' %}
+{% figure 'fig-029' 'is-indented-2x is-pdf-float-top' %}
The eighteenth century was not yet the era of plein-air painting, but it was a period when artists traveled. Whether on the short cross-town trip of a portraitist visiting an important client for a sitting, or longer journeys for out-of-town commissions or a European grand tour, artists often needed to transport their tools. From the physical evidence of use, Fragonard’s box certainly did not lead a life confined to the studio. Punched through the lid are two metal clips or fasteners that once attached a leather handle (now perished) so it could be carried without upsetting the contents. Nevertheless, traces of bright-red pigment indelibly staining the wood inside the lid betray a mishap, perhaps a jostled explosion of vermilion. Another accident of transit is recalled in the splintered wood and detached joint at one corner of the lid, while chips and scratches all over the exterior bear witness to a peripatetic life.
@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@ If the box as container indicates the mobility in Fragonard’s artistic practic
When it comes to the question of procurement, we do not know where exactly Fragonard bought his colors. But eighteenth-century Paris had no shortage of suppliers from which to choose. This was the period when the specialized trade of *marchands de couleurs* (color merchants) began to develop, emerging on one side through the *épicier* (grocery) trade and on the other through guild artists, who were more able than academicians to supplement their incomes through commercial ventures. One grocer-cum-color merchant from the beginning of the century, Louis Picard, referred to himself generically as a *marchand épicier*, but his trade card shows that his shop—*Au Mortier d’Or* (At the Golden Mortar)—specialized in artists’ supplies ({% ref 'fig-030' %}). The trade card evokes a shop counter adorned with a garland of palettes, brushes, and pig-bladder pouches (used for preserving premixed paints) hung over the eponymous golden mortar in which the pigments were ground. Behind are dozens of drawers where the raw pigments were stored, many with legible labels familiar from Fragonard’s box (“blanc de plomb,” “cendre bleu,” etc.). Located near the Châtelet, Picard’s shop was in one of the areas of Paris’s Right Bank that became something of a color quarter. Along with numerous shops on or around Rue Saint-Denis—including *À la Momie* (named after the Egyptian brown pigment), *Le Bon Broyeur* (The Good Grinder), and *Le Gros Mailletz* (The Big Mallet)—this area extended up to the Porte Saint-Martin, a part of the city dense with both guild artists and color merchants (who were sometimes both).[^12]
-{% figure 'fig-030' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-030' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Expansion of the color trade offered artists a greater range of materials, and also a change in the practicalities of their own profession. A price list published by Jean-Félix Watin, a color merchant in the 1770s, suggests the choices between labor and economy now open to painters.[^13] Take yellow, Fragonard’s signature color: stil de grain was 2 livres per pound if bought “en pierre” (as stones or fragments), but double if bought finely preground; a cheaper option was yellow ocher, which was only 2 sols per pound “en pierre,” and 4 sols when ground. Some pigments could even be bought already suspended in a binder, prepared for different uses: “blanc de céruse” mixed for laying undercoats, or “blanc de plomb” mixed for finishing. Many artists still preferred to grind and mix their own pigments, giving them more control over quality. But the process was labor intensive. To prepare the pigments found in Fragonard’s color box, the basic tools required were a *molette* (muller) and a marble or porphyry slab (both visible in the *Encyclopédie* vignette near the *grande boîte à couleur*, see {% ref 'fig-029' %}). Raw materials had to be ground on the slab using the *molette* with small amounts of solvent (water, oil, or turpentine) to limit the dust. Once ground, the residue was left to dry on paper while all the equipment was thoroughly cleaned before the next color to avoid contamination.[^14] Dried pigments could be stored in airtight containers, like Fragonard’s cork-stoppered bottles, until needed, when they would be mixed with oil (usually linseed or walnut). But mixed pigments had a limited life, so all these operations were being performed constantly, sometimes with the aid of apprentices or assistants. As each pigment had its own properties and peculiarities, this required a complex body of tacit knowledge, secret recipes, and jealously guarded procedures, passed from master to student in that alternative pedagogic space of the studio. Fragonard’s training with François Boucher is frequently acknowledged, but we seldom envisage that relationship in terms of a transfer of practical know-how, instead focusing on a more creative lineage of style and subject matter, as though the two were not inherently linked.
diff --git a/content/things/crayon.md b/content/things/crayon.md
index 7bc9a79..1c2924e 100644
--- a/content/things/crayon.md
+++ b/content/things/crayon.md
@@ -18,13 +18,13 @@ contributor:
***Crayon* is a generic term for a commonplace object** found in every eighteenth-century studio.[^1] In spite of its ubiquity, we know little about it. We grasp the *crayon* only indirectly, through its products: the mass of sketches, studies, and drawings it drew forth. However, a set of four chalk head studies by the painter Jean-Baptiste Huët, reproduced by Louis-Marin Bonnet sometime after 1780 ({% ref 'fig-032' %}), allows us to begin to understand the *crayon* from the other end. The prints inform the viewer that the specific *crayons* used by Huët had been manufactured by André Nadaux, whose shop was located on the Rue de la Vieille Draperie, Île de la Cité.[^2] They were sold in packets of a dozen, wrapped in blue paper and sealed with wax stamped with a fleur-de-lis.
-{% figure 'fig-032' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-032' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Nadaux, a printmaker, draftsman, and natural scientist, was also a shopkeeper and specialist supplier of artists’ crayons.[^3] In 1780 he bought the exclusive rights to the “secret” of his *crayons de composition* from Gabriel Dumarest, a “draftsman” on the Pont Notre-Dame. From the contract of sale between the two tradesmen we learn that for an annuity of 200 livres, Dumarest agreed to provide Nadaux with recipes for assorted crayons and a written explanation of the techniques necessary to their production.[^4] In addition, he consented to assist Nadaux practically in mastering the “secret,” time and inclination permitting. Before Conté, it seems, therefore, *crayons* were produced on a small scale and that the integrated process could only be fully transferred by demonstration.[^5]
Dumarest had built up his business in the 1750s supplying the Académie and its members, a market that Nadaux hoped to take over, notwithstanding the fact that in the deed of sale Dumarest expressly declined to recommend Nadaux’s *crayons* to his former clients. Undaunted, Nadaux presented a copy of the notarized contract to the Académie in April 1780 in order to obtain its imprimatur and formal recognition of himself as Dumarest’s legitimate successor.[^6] In October, he successfully petitioned the Maison du Roi for the title of *Fabrique Royale de crayons de composition*, and at the very end of the year he published an account of his success together with a full description of his products in a pamphlet for which he designed an ostentatious frontispiece ({% ref 'fig-033' %}).[^7] Where, as Charlotte Guichard has argued, Bonnet’s prints after Huët sought to attract the attention of amateurs, Nadaux’s pamphlet strongly suggests that his crayons were primarily things for professional use.[^8] Indeed, such allegedly was his concern for the Académie and its members that he promised to discount the price of his crayons for its students.[^9]
-{% figure 'fig-033' 'is-offset' %}
+{% figure 'fig-033' 'is-offset is-pdf-side-caption is-pdf-float-top' %}
Intimately associated with the conceptual dimension of art, with the contours of thought, how can we understand the thingness of this thing, that which emerges only in practice? Nadaux was not willing to divulge his secret; the matter and composition of his crayons remains unknown.[^10] However, if we divert our attention from the mystifications of his publicity and redirect it at his critique of conventional drawing materials, his crayon will become historically present to us in new ways. Nadaux stressed the flaws in naturally occurring red and black chalk and in charcoal. He described the ways in which impurities interrupt the flow of the drawing line and how the frangibility of some minerals compromised both the permanence and price of the *disegno*. When natural sanguine is too soft, the pencil point breaks; when it is too dry and hard, it “skins” the support.[^11] Dry charcoal is, he notes, unstable, and lines drawn using it often detach themselves from the paper; meanwhile, the vitriol in oiled charcoal attacks the paper, and the linseed oil with which it is infused can turn black lines a brassy yellow.[^12] In these instances of breakdown, we momentarily glimpse the thingness of crayon;[^13] simultaneously, we are also made aware of the socially and culturally encoded values attributed to the properly functioning object. That is to say, that the qualities that Nadaux singled out as virtues of his alternative, “chemically” produced compounds were those that, metaphorically speaking, were also said to define properties of rational thinking: firmness, clarity, integrity, coherence, stability, and permanence. The challenge is to find the materiality in this (drawing) instrument, which seems precisely to disavow it.
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ Nowhere was the conceptual thinking associated with drawing made more explicit t
If we can say that the material properties of drawing media enabled and furthered the development of cognitive thinking, that thinking nevertheless returns to the body, both the physical and the social body. Not just in the anecdotal, everyday sense that *crayons* were often pocket objects for artists,[^16] doubly intimate, by physical proximity and by association with bread (*crayon*’s eraser), but also because in terms of art’s objects, the body was not only its greatest challenge, it was also its most familiar and intimate subject: experienced and known from the inside. Calculation of shape and size were made in relation to the artist’s own (generally male) body, and in relation to the drawing tools that did its duty.[^17] In Charles Natoire’s depiction of the life school ({% ref 'fig-035' %}), a student in a black hat, on the far right, raises his pencil to measure the proportions of the models before him. *Crayon* holders ({% thing '*porte-crayons*' %}) were, according to Claude-Henri Watelet, a standard size: a demi-pied (half foot).[^18] Units of measure in the eighteenth century were based on the body: thumbs, hands, feet, stride. For the eighteenth-century artist, the body was by default the site of skilled perception, or what Jombert termed “*justesse*” (accuracy).[^19]
-{% figure 'fig-035' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-035' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
That mathematical and geometrical sensibility was not developed in isolation and alone but in the thick of the drawing school: with others. The arrangement of the benches and desks in tiers and in a semicircle around the model, as shown in Natoire’s watercolor, served to activate the young draftsman’s proprioception and allowed him to learn from his awareness of his own body’s position in relation to those of others, as well as from the object of his task. Above–below, near–far, greater–smaller, before–behind were experienced as the material conditions of perception as well as the syntax of visual representation.
diff --git a/content/things/decoration.md b/content/things/decoration.md
index 76d7fa4..56635e0 100644
--- a/content/things/decoration.md
+++ b/content/things/decoration.md
@@ -18,10 +18,14 @@ contributor:
**It is not often that we know the exact moment an artist acquired a possession.** At the end of January 1776, three months after Joseph-Marie Vien moved to Rome to become director of the Académie de France, a courier arrived from Paris bearing a package.[^1] Inside was an item that Vien had been anticipating for months—his official regalia as a *chevalier* in the Order of Saint Michel—an honor he had been granted before he left for Italy. Proudly displayed in his portrait by Duplessis painted a decade later ({% ref 'fig-036' %}), the decoration that Vien received in that package consisted of the usual two parts: a black riband to be worn as a sash across the body and, hanging from it, a gold badge with the insignia of the order. The insignia’s design dated from the 1660s, when this late medieval chivalric order had been revived by Louis XIV, and consisted of a Maltese cross outlined in white enamel, with four gold fleurs-de-lis at the angles, and a central gold oval with a partially enameled relief of Saint Michel, or the Archangel Michael ({% ref 'fig-037' %}).[^2]
+
+
In a book filled with tools and other active objects busily working, enabling, and creating, Vien’s chivalric decoration might seem like a thing that *did* very little. Even as an item of clothing, it was more accessory than garment, an auxiliary addition that performed no protective or practical service and was, perhaps not surprisingly, usually categorized as an item of *bijoux* (jewelry) in estate inventories.[^3] But for some things, purpose lies more in meaning than action. And it would be difficult to find in these pages a more semantically charged item than this wearable insignia, whose principal function was, after all, significance itself.
The semantic operations of Vien’s decoration reside in its very name. *Décoration* was a word that, as Katie Scott has argued, carried two distinct but entwined meanings in eighteenth-century France: a “mark of honor” indicating rank or title, and an “embellishment [or] ornament” that enhanced a space or, in this case, a person.[^4] As a mark of honor, Vien’s decoration conveyed his specific chivalric title through the insignia’s symbolic details, from the fleur-de-lis of the House of Bourbon to the iconography of Michael slaying Satan in the form of a dragon. But when worn on the person as an embellishing accessory, this decoration served as a marker of elite status long before such specific detail could be appreciated. Its functionality in this regard stemmed precisely from its lack of function. As an ornamental addition, it was an item of apparel designed for a socially restricted sartorial circuit, where superfluity was both affordable and necessary. In other words, only someone with a status to convey required an item whose sole purpose was to convey status.
@@ -36,7 +40,7 @@ With so much semantic ambiguity in every direction, one might imagine some retic
Whatever Vien lacked in noble blood, he certainly made up for in the eighteenth-century’s emergent metric of success, and given the political events to come soon after his ennoblement, success would certainly prove the more valuable currency. It would actually be difficult to imagine a more successful artistic career than Vien’s, with his ascent to the top steadily passing every rank and role in the art world. Admitted by the Académie in 1754, he was elected *adjoint à professeur* only three months later and then *professeur* in 1759, thus reaching career grade by the age of forty-three.[^18] After that he began climbing his way through prestigious administrative posts, first securing the directorship of the Académie’s École des Élèves Protégés (1771) and then the directorship of the Académie de France in Rome (1775).[^19] Even from Italy, he managed to continue his promotion in absentia through the Académie’s internal ranks, being elected *Adjoint à recteur* (1778) and then *recteur* (1781) so that upon his return from Rome he was poised to make his final ascent.[^20] Named *chancelier* of the Académie in 1785, he eventually reached the peak in 1789, when he was elected *directeur* of the Académie and made *premier peintre* (first painter) to the king.[^21]
-{% figure 'fig-038' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-038' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Vien’s was undoubtedly a superlative career, but timing could have been his downfall, for he claimed the summit of those institutional structures right as they were about to crumble, only two months, in fact, before the storming of the Bastille. Yet though Vien remained the king’s man, leading the Académie Royale until its final demise in 1793, the Revolution did not mark the end of Vien’s success.[^22] Indeed, Vien’s greatest skill of all perhaps was his ability to work a system, and once a system was reestablished in Napoleon’s First Empire, Vien found himself redecorated in the regalia of a new regime. Like the counterpoint to Duplessis’s portrait of 1785 (see {% ref 'fig-036' %}), Gabrielle Capet’s group portrait of 1808 shows Vien in this fresh guise ({% ref 'fig-038' %}), dressed as a member of France’s new order of nobility—an imperial count—and on his chest, where he once wore his Order of Saint Michel, a flash of red ribbon draws the eye to his new decoration: *commandeur* in Napoleon’s Légion d’honneur.[^23] What is perhaps most interesting in this coda is not that Vien survived the rupture, but rather that—as these decorations suggest—rupture is not always the best way to understand this moment of French history. After all, the Order of Saint Michel had become an order of merit long before the Légion d’honneur, and despite the different systems they represented, an ancien régime *chevalier* and an imperial *commandeur* might have more in common than their accessories. {% contributors context=pageContributors format='symbol' %}
diff --git a/content/things/document box.md b/content/things/document-box.md
similarity index 100%
rename from content/things/document box.md
rename to content/things/document-box.md
diff --git a/content/things/dog.md b/content/things/dog.md
index 00bff52..ba859e4 100644
--- a/content/things/dog.md
+++ b/content/things/dog.md
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ Duplessis may have been more dependent on his dog than some people, but he was f
{% figure 'fig-043' 'is-indented' %}
-{% figure 'fig-044' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-044' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
As source proved more important than suitability for Duplessis, in this instance, choice of breed reveals less about the painter’s lifestyle and more about his relationship with the *directeur général des bâtiments*. For as much as this is a story about a man and his dog, it is also a story about an artist and his patron. At the very end of his letter, Duplessis makes quite overt how entwined the two relationships were, adding a final rhetorical flourish to drive home his request: “If I got it [the dog] from you, I would love it even more, and I could say in truth that I do not possess anything—not even my dog—that was not a kindness from you.”[^12]
diff --git a/content/things/dressing-up-box.md b/content/things/dressing-up-box.md
index e5d74d0..992d893 100644
--- a/content/things/dressing-up-box.md
+++ b/content/things/dressing-up-box.md
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ owner:
- first_name: Jean-Antoine
last_name: Watteau
years: 1684–1721
-type: [Container, Tool]
+type: [Container, Prop, Tool]
theme: [Education, Making, Studio]
material: [Textile | Canvas, Textile | Silk]
mentions: [mannequin, sketchbook, palette, écorché, wig]
@@ -48,10 +48,14 @@ Directly transposing figure and figure groups from sketchbook to canvas and work
Meanwhile, what of the behaviors of cloth, the folding noticed by Caylus? Watteau was, his works suggest, fascinated by the myriad creases, crumples, wrinkles, rumples, tucks, pleats, and gathers “expressed” by cloth, his attention trapped by the curious, often complex shapes it folded and wrapped.[^34] An unexplained rumple in Vleughels’s cloak (see {% ref 'fig-048' %}) creates a puzzling trapezoid shape across the lower body. The cloak–rifle–man assemblage sketched on a sheet of studies of a soldier (Courtauld Institute of Art, London), configures, through the cloak’s wrapping action, a strange polygonal shape comprised of two unequal triangles, the bases of which sit and hang on the diagonal of the gun.[^35] A later study of a man in a cape ({% ref 'fig-050' %}), likewise withholds information about the body beneath the wrap and gather of silk. It tells, rather, of the folds the silk itself knots, folds that, like the damp patches on walls, invite imaginative projection: here, the features perhaps of a grotesque face.[^36]
+
+
This focus on the collection of apparel, a collection that Watteau began to assemble at the beginning of his career and very likely kept to the end, has revealed when, where, and how it oriented his artistic practice, how it anchored his knowledge of the dressed body (like the {% thing 'écorché' %} grounded knowledge of the nude), and how it stimulated his imagination. License so to reconstruct the collection’s functions is given by the sources, the works, and also recent scholarship that emphasizes the lack of conventional fit between the costumes and the social identities of the persons wearing them in the fêtes galantes. What was so transgressive about Watteau’s portrayal of the dressed figure is that, whatever the figure is wearing—haute couture, yesterday’s fashions, theatrical dress, rustic rags—they appear to be no one other than themselves, though themselves dressed up almost to the point of disguise. Identity, by this account, was constructed on the surface, through artifice, and not conferred by blood, birth, or sensibility. According to Caylus, Watteau was once bewitched by a {% thing 'wig' %}. Brought to his studio by a barber client, Watteau was enchanted by its perfect “imitation of nature.”[^37] Apparel was to him, apparently, no less natural than the body. {% contributors context=pageContributors format='symbol' %}
[^1]: Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières, comte de Caylus, “La vie d’Antoine Watteau,” in Pierre Rosenberg, ed., *Vies anciennes de Watteau* (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1984), 78.
diff --git a/content/things/ecorche.md b/content/things/ecorche.md
index e10f37a..f92db8e 100644
--- a/content/things/ecorche.md
+++ b/content/things/ecorche.md
@@ -8,8 +8,8 @@ owner:
- first_name: Jean-Antoine
last_name: Houdon
years: 1741–1828
-type: [Artwork]
-theme: [Death, Education, Health/Medicine, Louvre, Luxury, Making, Studio, Tool, Travel]
+type: [Artwork, Tool]
+theme: [Death, Education, Health/Medicine, Louvre, Luxury, Making, Studio, Travel]
material: [Metal | Bronze, Mineral | Clay, Synthetic Materials | Plaster]
mentions: [model, mannequin, modeling stand, armchair, table]
contributor:
@@ -18,15 +18,15 @@ contributor:
**Houdon’s écorché is a thing with many stories,** not least because the thing known as “Houdon’s écorché” is actually many things existing in many forms.[^1] This anatomical {% thing 'model' %} of a flayed human figure exists in two distinct versions: one with arm extended, one with arm raised. Both versions exist in life-size and reduced-scale formats. Each version and format were executed in different materials, mostly plaster or bronze, but also terracotta. And the dates of production extend from 1767 right into the nineteenth century, with Houdon producing numerous casts throughout his life, and copies continuing to be made after his death in 1828. In fact, versions of Houdon’s écorché are still being sold today, such is its enduring appeal as an aesthetic object and its value as an educational tool for artists: the two qualities for which it was prized from the very moment of its creation.[^2]
-{% figure 'fig-051' 'is-indented-2x' %}
+{% figure 'fig-051' 'is-indented-2x is-pdf-float-top' %}
-The écorché’s story begins in the 1760s in Rome, where it was created almost by accident. At the age of twenty-three, having won the Académie’s *grand prix* for sculpture, Houdon traveled to Italy to complete his training at the Rome branch of the institution (then in the Palazzo Mancini).[^3] Embarking on the life of a *pensionnaire*, Houdon spent his days attending drawing classes, copying great works of art, and creating his own. He was also one of only two students in his cohort who took anatomy classes, setting out at dawn with his colleague, Johann Christian von Mannlich, for the hospital of Saint-Louis-des-Français, where the professor of surgery, Monsieur Séguier, taught them human anatomy by dissecting fresh cadavers.[^4] It was amid these encounters with corpses that Houdon’s first écorché ({% ref 'fig-051' %}) began to take shape. At the time, he was working on a sculpture of Saint John the Baptist and, according to Mannlich, “had the idea to make the model in clay, first in the form of an écorché, and each day used our anatomy lessons . . . to make a thorough study of the muscular system.”[^5] The young sculptor’s experimental plan was to create a life-size model for his sculpture, building it up from the inside out, to produce an anatomically correct figure.[^6]
+The écorché’s story begins in the 1760s in Rome, where it was created almost by accident. At the age of twenty-three, having won the Académie’s *grand prix* for sculpture, Houdon traveled to Italy to complete his training at the Rome branch of the institution (then in the Palazzo Mancini).[^3] Embarking on the life of a *pensionnaire*, Houdon spent his days attending drawing classes, copying great works of art, and creating his own. He was also one of only two students in his cohort who took anatomy classes, setting out at dawn with his colleague, Johann Christian von Mannlich, for the hospital of Saint-Louis-des-Français, where the professor of surgery, Monsieur Séguier, taught them human anatomy by dissecting fresh cadavers.[^4] It was amid these encounters with corpses that Houdon’s first écorché ({% ref 'fig-051' %}) began to take shape. At the time, he was working on a sculpture of Saint John the Baptist and, according to Mannlich, “had the idea to make the model in clay, first in the form of an écorché, and each day used our anatomy lessons . . . to make a thorough study of the muscular system.”[^5] The young sculptor’s experimental plan was to create a life-size model for his sculpture, building it up from the inside out, to produce an anatomically correct figure.[^6]
-Houdon’s teachers and fellow students in Rome were so struck by the model that they encouraged him to take a mold of the skinless body before making any further additions, and this incidental object became the first version of the écorché. Its extended-arm pose was thus not chosen for any scientific reason, but rather determined by the baptizing gesture of the saint. Charles Natoire, the Rome Académie’s director at the time, was so taken with Houdon’s anatomical model that he requested a plaster cast for the school, declaring that the *squelette* (skeleton) would be an invaluable tool for instructing students.[^7] Houdon obliged, and the cast remains at the Rome Académie today (now in the Villa Medici) (see {% ref 'fig-051' %}). Perhaps the most intriguing point to note from the écorché’s origins (other than the fact that Natoire clearly did not have a word for it, calling it a “skeleton” despite the complete absence of any bones) is that this object, which would go on to become such a fundamental tool in academic teaching, was made neither as a tool nor by a teacher. Rather, it was made by a student and began life as the experimental preparatory stage of an artwork. The écorché’s accidental making and enthusiastic reception also reveal a great deal about the role of anatomy in art education at this moment. Indeed, it is telling that when Houdon took his Roman anatomy classes, he was very much in the minority. But less than a decade later, anatomy had become a compulsory part of the *pensionnaire* curriculum, in part thanks to Houdon’s écorché. When Joseph-Marie Vien, as the new director, rewrote the school’s regulations in 1775, anatomy classes were fixed in the rules, and so too was their principal object of instruction: “Article 2: Among the studies that student painters and sculptors must follow in Rome are anatomy and perspective. . . . Anatomy will be taught using the écorché that M. Houdon made for the Académie.”[^8]
+Houdon’s teachers and fellow students in Rome were so struck by the model that they encouraged him to take a mold of the skinless body before making any further additions, and this incidental object became the first version of the écorché. Its extended-arm pose was thus not chosen for any scientific reason, but rather determined by the baptizing gesture of the saint. Charles Natoire, the Rome Académie’s director at the time, was so taken with Houdon’s anatomical model that he requested a plaster cast for the school, declaring that the *squelette* (skeleton) would be an invaluable tool for instructing students.[^7] Houdon obliged, and the cast remains at the Rome Académie today (now in the Villa Medici) (see {% ref 'fig-051' %}). Perhaps the most intriguing point to note from the écorché’s origins (other than the fact that Natoire clearly did not have a word for it, calling it a “skeleton” despite the complete absence of any bones) is that this object, which would go on to become such a fundamental tool in academic teaching, was made neither as a tool nor by a teacher. Rather, it was made by a student and began life as the experimental preparatory stage of an artwork. The écorché’s accidental making and enthusiastic reception also reveal a great deal about the role of anatomy in art education at this moment. Indeed, it is telling that when Houdon took his Roman anatomy classes, he was very much in the minority. But less than a decade later, anatomy had become a compulsory part of the *pensionnaire* curriculum, in part thanks to Houdon’s écorché. When Joseph-Marie Vien, as the new director, rewrote the school’s regulations in 1775, anatomy classes were fixed in the rules, and so too was their principal object of instruction: “Article 2: Among the studies that student painters and sculptors must follow in Rome are anatomy and perspective. . . . Anatomy will be taught using the écorché that M. Houdon made for the Académie.”[^8]
Back in Paris, anatomy had been nominally part of the Académie’s curriculum since its founding in 1648, with a professor of anatomy employed especially for the purpose. Nearly always a surgeon (with the exception of the history painter Jacques-Antoine Friquet de Vauroze), these medical men were something of an incursion of science into the arts.[^9] This was evident in the things they used to teach, which included an actual human skeleton, casts of body parts taken from skinned cadavers, and medical treatises.[^10] While anatomical knowledge was generally accepted as an important skill for history painters and sculptors, science and art did not coexist without friction. There was a disconnect between the surgeons’ interest in the human body (a pathologized machine to be healed) and the artists’ interest in the human form (an aesthetic object to be represented). Houdon understood this disjunction implicitly, as he explained in a letter written in 1772, a few years after his return to Paris: “Surgeons, as skilled as they may be, are not draftsmen, and draftsmen are not surgeons. In my view, the skilled surgeon must study nature, as defective as one may find it, in order to be able to treat every infirmity. But we must study it differently. It is nature in all her nobility, her perfect state of health, that we are seeking.”[^11]
-{% figure 'fig-052' 'is-offset' %}
+{% figure 'fig-052' 'is-offset is-pdf-side-caption is-pdf-float-top' %}
Houdon was not the first to articulate this problem, and his écorché was not the first attempt at a solution.[^12] Already a hundred years earlier, Roger de Piles and François Tortebat had produced their *Abrégé d’anatomie accommodé aux arts de peinture et de sculpture* (1667). Made in the tradition of Vesalius, this was a medical textbook for artists, complete with straightforward tables and illustrative engravings of skinless bodies set incongruously in Italianate landscapes ({% ref 'fig-052' %}).[^13] According to de Piles, its intention was to provide the detailed knowledge of the body required by artists, without the “infinity of useless things” that normally cluttered medical books.[^14] Yet despite such efforts to tailor anatomy for artists, there remained an ambivalence in the early eighteenth century.[^15] Scientific interests in observing the human body still seemed anathema to the aesthetic goals of perfecting the human form. In the second half of the century, however, anatomy made an academic comeback.
@@ -36,10 +36,14 @@ This was entirely different from the lack of fanfare that had greeted an earlier
Simultaneously tool and artwork, the écorché’s distinctive scientific and artistic qualities gave it broad appeal. By the 1770s plaster copies had been acquired not only by the Paris and Rome academies, but also by those of Toulouse, Bordeaux, and Flanders. At the same time, it was beginning a life beyond institutional bounds, becoming a sought-after object of curiosity at foreign courts in Poland, Parma, Russia, and Gotha.[^20] Its appeal was so great that Houdon’s fellow academicians soon wanted copies for themselves. But a life-size sculpture is a difficult thing to accommodate in most domestic spaces, so Houdon was encouraged by his colleagues to create smaller copies that would be both “less expensive” and “more convenient” for individual ownership.[^21] In its new reduced format, Houdon’s écorché became an object for personal use, to be found standing on the desks of amateurs, residing on the shelves of collectors, and taking on practical roles in artists’ studios, as a tool to be used alongside live models and {% thing 'mannequins' %} to guide the composition of human forms.[^22]
+
+
With increasing demand and expanding production in the 1770s, Houdon created his second version of the écorché: its right arm raised overhead, thumb and finger pressed together, and mouth closed ({% ref 'fig-054' %}). The sculptor never recorded a definitive explanation for the changed pose, but it was likely in pursuit of both scientific value and economic potential. Unlike the first version, originating as a study for a specific artwork, the second was an anatomical model from the outset. Free of compositional constraint, the new pose demonstrated a more complete range of muscle movement across the body, from fully flexed to entirely relaxed. On the practical front, it was also more compact and less vulnerable to accidental breakages, crucial for the friable plaster versions, and more straightforward to fire in bronze. As bronze casts could travel more easily, while also attracting a higher price, the second écorché thus greatly increased the potential for circulation and commercial revenue.
Over time, Houdon certainly found ingenious ways to profit from his écorché’s success. In 1790 he announced that he wanted to donate a new écorché to the Académie so the school could possess one in each pose.[^23] Casting a life-size version in bronze was a tricky business, so when the planning was complete, he decided to turn the firing into a promotional gathering. The event was by invitation only, with those lucky enough to receive *billets* (tickets) making their way on a Sunday evening out to Houdon’s studio and foundry at the Roule, on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.[^24] One attendee declared that the crowds were so intense that “truth be told, one could not see much of the founding at all,” but no matter, for there was other entertainment.[^25] Upon arrival, Paris’s high society was met with a vast room where Houdon had installed an exhibition of his sculptures, all lit strikingly from above. It seems this one-man showcase was the real purpose of the event, with the écorché merely serving as headline act to fill the house.
diff --git a/content/things/gaming-set.md b/content/things/gaming-set.md
index a175a17..7b187bc 100644
--- a/content/things/gaming-set.md
+++ b/content/things/gaming-set.md
@@ -18,15 +18,15 @@ contributor:
**Jean-Étienne Liotard’s gaming set is an exquisite Chinese box,** by origin and operation: an exotic luxury object that entices at every layer of its unboxing ({% ref 'fig-060' %}).[^1] Kept in storage in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Liotard’s hometown of Geneva, the set still resides in its original traveling box, made to measure from rough wooden boards, painted black on the outside, with the artist’s initials, JEL, still legible on a handwritten label in the corner. Protected inside is the set’s principal container: a sumptuous black and gold lacquer box, decorated all over with botanical designs and Liotard’s initials again, this time more formally painted in a cartouche on the lid. Opening that lid, the unpacker is greeted by five smaller lacquer boxes nestled perfectly within, decorated in a similar fashion to the main box, complete with initialed cartouches, but each one slightly individualized by the form or placement of a leaf or stem. With the final layer of boxes reached, the next mystery is their contents. Two of the small boxes are empty, presumably left so in order to accommodate two decks of cards, which would fit comfortably in their confines. The other three together contain the ultimate treasure trove: 140 mother-of-pearl counters—20 oval, 40 round, and 80 shuttle-shaped—each incised with more decorative designs, and every single one bearing the artist’s initials in the center ({% ref 'fig-061' %}).
-{% figure 'fig-060' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-060' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
-{% figure 'fig-061' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-061' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Accepting this object’s ineluctable invitation to open, touch, and admire, a close encounter with its materiality reveals much about the gaming set’s function but somewhat less about its actual use, because its pristine condition points more to inactivity than vigorous play—a gaming set that did not see much gaming. Yet it is perhaps more accurate to think of this as an object whose history of use merely differed from its intended function, for even unused things are functional in other ways. And Liotard’s gaming set certainly served many purposes in its far-from-sedentary life, as an item of international trade, a munificent gift, and a luxurious thing of beauty.
Liotard’s gaming box may not suffer the telltale scuffs and chips of a well-worn set, but it definitely bears traces of playful interaction. Sets like this were not games in their own right (like chess or backgammon sets), but rather counters that facilitated a variety of card games. Card playing took off dramatically in the eighteenth century at every social level, from the bawdy gambling spaces of taverns and fairs to the decadent salons and *soirées* of the aristocracy, where games of whist, piquet, réversis, or quadrille could bring hours of amusement. Liotard’s set belonged to the latter world, even if Liotard himself did not. Tucked into the box, there are two additional items that bear witness to the set’s ludic activities. One is a hemmed square of silk—red on one side, blue on the other—large enough to be thrown over a table to ready it instantly for gaming purposes, providing a soft, silky surface to lay cards and toss counters. The other is a scoring card for a game called *Boston russe* ({% ref 'fig-062' %}).
-{% figure 'fig-062' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-062' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Devised in France in the 1770s, Boston was a trick-taking game (similar to whist or quadrille) in which players placed bids for the number of tricks they could win. The highest bidder then sought to achieve their tally, either alone or in a pair, while the others thwarted the mission.[^2] Named after the American Revolutionary War (1775–83), Boston had a specific terminology inspired by transatlantic events, like bids known as a “Philadélphie” or an “Indépendence.” *Boston russe* (Russian Boston) was not a Russian version but rather a variant in which diamonds were the top suit (as opposed to the usual hearts), and it had its own quite complicated scoring system, detailed in the two tables pasted to either side of Liotard’s scoring card. Upon successful fulfillment of a bid, this card would be used to determine the player’s reward, to be then paid out in those mother-of-pearl counters, each shape representing a different amount. Boston may have been Liotard’s game of choice or merely a new fad that passed his way, but the presence of the card suggests it was certainly a game enjoyed at some point by the artist, in a leisurely moment with friends or family.
diff --git a/content/things/glasses.md b/content/things/glasses.md
index b18e87c..d8789a7 100644
--- a/content/things/glasses.md
+++ b/content/things/glasses.md
@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ contributor:
**It is difficult to take one’s eyes off François-André Vincent’s glasses.** In his portrait, at forty-nine, painted by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard—a lifelong acquaintance who would become his wife five years later—Vincent’s glasses are a conspicuous accessory ({% ref 'fig-065' %}).[^1] They occupy only a fraction of the canvas’s surface area, but their location over the eyes of the sitter—where the beholder’s own eyes are inevitably drawn and redrawn—ensure that this optical device becomes the focus of everyone’s gaze. Yet what is perhaps most distracting about Vincent’s glasses is less their lenses than their arms. Compositionally and formally, these insistent appendages demand attention, with their sudden stark linearity amid the soft contours of his face, with the darkness of the metal against his pale skin and gray hair, and with the quietly observed detail of their engineered construction. The lug and hinge at the front, where the arm meets the frame, is a regular feature of spectacles to this day; but far less familiar to the modern eye is the other end, where instead of curving gently around the ear, the arm bends abruptly at a sharp angle behind Vincent’s head. This tiny detail may also have caught the attention of Vincent’s contemporaries, though for entirely different reasons. For what appears today as a cumbersome, outmoded feature was, in the eighteenth-century, the height of optometric technology.
-{% figure 'fig-065' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-065' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
By the time Vincent was sporting his spectacles in the 1790s, lens technology was long-established (dating back at least to the thirteenth century), but the development of the arm had been one of the eighteenth century’s major design innovations.[^2] For an artist like Vincent, or indeed anyone who required glasses in their work, the invention of the arm as a means of securing lenses to the face had been a liberating convenience. Before these lateral appendages, lenses either had to be attached to headwear—like Anna-Dorothea Therbusch’s reading monocle in her *Self-Portrait* ({% ref 'fig-066' %})—strapped to the head with cords or ribbons, or clamped to the nose—like Jean-Siméon Chardin’s precarious *besicles*, worn in his *Self-Portrait* ({% ref 'fig-067' %}), which pinched so tightly that they restricted breathing. But at midcentury, a renowned Parisian *lunetier*, or eyeglass maker, Marc Mitouflet Thomin, advertised for sale in his shop “glasses with silver or steel arms,” whose major selling points were that they “cling to the temples” and “do not impede respiration.”[^3] A pair of this first generation of armed spectacles were sketched by Vincent in Rome, clasped to the head of his fellow *pensionnaire* Pierre-Charles Jombert ({% ref 'fig-068' %}), revealing their rounded ends, which were sometimes padded with velvet to alleviate pressure on the side of the head. But Vincent’s glasses were an example of the next advancement—the double-hinged side ({% ref 'fig-069' %}). No longer constraining breathing or pressing on the temples, these modern spectacles were specially designed with elongated and articulated arms to wrap neatly and lightly around the wigged head of the wearer.[^4]
@@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ By the time Vincent was sporting his spectacles in the 1790s, lens technology wa
{% figure 'fig-067' 'is-paired' %}
-Technologies of design no doubt influenced Vincent’s decision in his acquisition of this latest development in eyewear. But while arms were important, it was the lenses that were crucial; remaining comfortably attached to the face was a desirable quality for a pair of glasses, but their principal function was correcting vision. As sight was an indispensable sense for an eighteenth-century painter, correcting its deterioration or dysfunction was essential for continued professional activity. Indeed, the *lunetier* Mitouflet Thomin considered artists among those “who have the greatest need to spare and fortify their sight with the aid of . . . glasses,” and he described many items in his shop as being of particular use to the artistic professions.[^5] Most of these instruments were made using lenses ground precisely from glass into one of three main types: concave lenses for correcting shortsightedness; convex lenses for correcting longsightedness; and double-sided convex lenses for the intense magnification required in items like telescopes and microscopes.[^6] Aside from spectacles, these were the kinds of optical devices that Mitouflet Thomin envisaged for his artist customers: magnifying glasses and handheld microscopes for painters and engravers; lenses that shrunk objects, for the use of miniature painters; glass prisms with which painters could learn about color; and {% thing 'camera obscuras' %} for “drawing with no master.”[^7]
+Technologies of design no doubt influenced Vincent’s decision in his acquisition of this latest development in eyewear. But while arms were important, it was the lenses that were crucial; remaining comfortably attached to the face was a desirable quality for a pair of glasses, but their principal function was correcting vision. As sight was an indispensable sense for an eighteenth-century painter, correcting its deterioration or dysfunction was essential for continued professional activity. Indeed, the *lunetier* Mitouflet Thomin considered artists among those “who have the greatest need to spare and fortify their sight with the aid of . . . glasses,” and he described many items in his shop as being of particular use to the artistic professions.[^5] Most of these instruments were made using lenses ground precisely from glass into one of three main types: concave lenses for correcting shortsightedness; convex lenses for correcting longsightedness; and double-sided convex lenses for the intense magnification required in items like telescopes and microscopes.[^6] Aside from spectacles, these were the kinds of optical devices that Mitouflet Thomin envisaged for his artist customers: magnifying glasses and handheld microscopes for painters and engravers; lenses that shrunk objects, for the use of miniature painters; glass prisms with which painters could learn about color; and {% thing 'camera obscuras' %} for “drawing with no master.”[^7]
{% figure 'fig-068' 'is-offset' %}
diff --git a/content/things/handkerchief.md b/content/things/handkerchief.md
index 3493a13..f0c12db 100644
--- a/content/things/handkerchief.md
+++ b/content/things/handkerchief.md
@@ -8,9 +8,10 @@ owner:
- first_name: Charles-Nicolas
last_name: Cochin
years: 1715–90
-type: [Apparel, Commodity, Companion, Gift]
+ sort_years: 1715–1790
+type: [Apparel, Commodity, Companion, Gift, Tool]
theme: [Death, Everyday, Friendship, Health/Medicine]
-material: [Textile | Cotton]
+material: [Textile | Cotton, Textile | Linen]
mentions: [decoration, snuffbox, '*robe de chambre*', palette, red lake]
contributor:
- id: "kscott"
@@ -22,11 +23,11 @@ Of the importance of the commission to Cochin there can be no doubt. He was emba
Cochin was not wrong in thinking that Rouen was better placed than Orléans to meet his needs. Cloth had been an important industry in that city and its hinterland since the seventeenth century. In 1737, when Louis-François-Armand Du Plessis, duc de Richelieu, was collecting samples of French stuffs for his library scrapbooks, Rouen’s weavers were producing handkerchiefs in a range of stuffs, some cotton, others mixes (notably of cotton and linen) and in a range of colors and patterns, at prices starting at 36 livres and rising to 39 livres per dozen ({% ref 'fig-070' %}). Annual output from the city’s workshops in 1737–38 was, according to the Richelieu albums, in excess of 30,000 pieces: the smallest were 18 centimeters square, the largest 860 centimeters.[^7] Fifty years later, a memorandum on Rouen’s cloth industry drawn up for the Bureau of Trade and Industry estimated that the 1,250 master weavers of Rouen and its environs were producing cotton goods to the value of 50 million livres per annum, of which handkerchiefs continued to form a significant proportion.[^8]
-{% figure 'fig-070' 'is-indented-2x' %}
+{% figure 'fig-070' 'is-indented-2x is-pdf-float-top' %}
Cochin told Descamps he was prepared to pay top price for such “beautiful” handkerchiefs as were to be had at Rouen: 36 livres for a dozen small ones and 48 livres for large ones.[^9] He was evidently not too particular about size, but he was exigent about stuff and color. His preference, against general consumer trend, was for linen not cotton, for a robust handkerchief whose softness was countered by stoutness and absorbency. As to color, his first choice was for red ones, but he also countenanced brown. By the 1780s, so-called Turkey red, a saturated hue, had successfully been introduced at Rouen’s dyeworks and was replacing the traditional darker, duller madder.[^10] It provided precisely the strong color of handkerchief that Cochin was after and that is depicted in Jacques-Louis David’s portrait of Jacobus Blauw ({% ref 'fig-071' %}).
-{% figure 'fig-071' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-071' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
In spite of the references to price and payment, the status of Cochin’s handkerchiefs as either commodities or gifts is not certain. They stand apart from the gifts of food (sweets and cherries), the small coin of social bonding, that Descamps sent Cochin from time to time, and from the drawings, prints, and texts that Cochin, for his part, gave his friend.[^11] The services required to unite Cochin with his new handkerchiefs involved, however, investments of time, attention, and personal care that are generally associated with gifts, the more so since, in order to avoid the custom duties of the *Grande Ferme*, Descamps had had to oversee the hemming and laundering of the handkerchiefs before their dispatch to Paris.[^12] When Cochin requested a final invoice from his friend, he was sensitive to say that had this hemming and washing been done by Descamps’s daughters, he would not insult them by offering wages, gallantly promising instead to send them an equal number of pairs of bedsheets in return.[^13] Thus, Cochin’s “small commission” for *petit linge* commodities was in its execution giftwrapped by the mutual regard of the parties for each other’s feelings; it was the occasion and site of shared intimacy.
diff --git a/content/things/harpsichord.md b/content/things/harpsichord.md
index 6f8f04d..f9ced20 100644
--- a/content/things/harpsichord.md
+++ b/content/things/harpsichord.md
@@ -11,6 +11,7 @@ owner:
- first_name: Louis
last_name: Tocqué
years: 1696–1772
+type: [Heirloom, Instrument, Prop]
theme: [Family, Gender]
material: [Animal | Feather, Plant Matter | Wood, Synthetic Materials | Paint/Pigment]
mentions: [marriage contract, quill, water fountain, table, glasses, modeling stand, bed, table]
@@ -28,11 +29,11 @@ Looking back, those particular events that the harpsichord witnessed—wives and
{% figure 'fig-074' 'is-indented' %}
-Nattier’s depiction of the family harpsichord is arresting, not least because eighteenth-century artists did not usually paint their possessions. Despite how it may appear in this book, with its many images of personal objects, the representation of ordinary things was actually quite controlled by the Académie’s hierarchy of genres and restrictions around subject matter. For the most part, everyday objects remained the preserve of still-life or genre painters, like Chardin, who painted his {% thing 'water fountain' %} (see {% ref 'fig-180' %}). Far fewer, for obvious reasons, crept into history paintings—David’s {% thing 'table' %} being an exception (see {% ref 'fig-163' %}). And while certain items did find their ways into portraits, these were usually sartorial accessories, like Vincent’s {% thing 'glasses' %} (see {% ref 'fig-065' %}), or professional tools, like Houdon’s {% thing 'modeling stand' %} (see {% ref 'fig-113' %}). Beyond its mere inclusion, however, what makes Nattier’s harpsichord even more striking is the prominence it is given. Compositionally, the instrument pushes into the foreground, demanding attention as part of the row of figures assembled before Nattier, almost like another member of the family in this lineup of his nearest and dearest. In its treatment too, it is painted more like the figures than the rest of the setting, with more detail and resolution than the chair or table. Moreover, it is given a commanding role, actively orchestrating both the fiction of the image and the reality beyond the object. The harpsichord is the ostensible focus of this gathering, as the erstwhile household enjoys Madame Nattier’s musical entertainments. But it is also the narrator of the family’s history, relating the deaths of the departed members in its two snuffed-out candles and telling the story of the painting itself in the inscription on its cheek: “painting from the studio of Jean-Marc Nattier . . . begun in 1730 and finished in 1762.”[^9] It might be going too far to describe this image as a portrait of the harpsichord, but the instrument has certainly become the voice of the painting. Imbued with so many memories, this thing seems to have been, for Nattier at least, a material reminder of the past in the present.
+Nattier’s depiction of the family harpsichord is arresting, not least because eighteenth-century artists did not usually paint their possessions. Despite how it may appear in this book, with its many images of personal objects, the representation of ordinary things was actually quite controlled by the Académie’s hierarchy of genres and restrictions around subject matter. For the most part, everyday objects remained the preserve of still-life or genre painters, like Chardin, who painted his {% thing 'water fountain' %} (see {% ref 'fig-180' %}). Far fewer, for obvious reasons, crept into history paintings—David’s {% thing 'table' %} being an exception (see {% ref 'fig-163' %}). And while certain items did find their ways into portraits, these were usually sartorial accessories, like Vincent’s {% thing 'glasses' %} (see {% ref 'fig-065' %}), or professional tools, like Houdon’s {% thing 'modeling stand' %} (see {% ref 'fig-113' %}). Beyond its mere inclusion, however, what makes Nattier’s harpsichord even more striking is the prominence it is given. Compositionally, the instrument pushes into the foreground, demanding attention as part of the row of figures assembled before Nattier, almost like another member of the family in this lineup of his nearest and dearest. In its treatment too, it is painted more like the figures than the rest of the setting, with more detail and resolution than the chair or table. Moreover, it is given a commanding role, actively orchestrating both the fiction of the image and the reality beyond the object. The harpsichord is the ostensible focus of this gathering, as the erstwhile household enjoys Madame Nattier’s musical entertainments. But it is also the narrator of the family’s history, relating the deaths of the departed members in its two snuffed-out candles and telling the story of the painting itself in the inscription on its cheek: “painting from the studio of Jean-Marc Nattier . . . begun in 1730 and finished in 1762.”[^9] It might be going too far to describe this image as a portrait of the harpsichord, but the instrument has certainly become the voice of the painting. Imbued with so many memories, this thing seems to have been, for Nattier at least, a material reminder of the past in the present.
It is possible that the harpsichord loomed so large in the Nattier-Tocqué family because it did so literally *and* figuratively, as significant in sheer size as it was in poignant associations. Nattier’s painting shows a double-manual harpsichord—with two keyboards and two choirs of strings—but it only reveals the tip of the iceberg in terms of the instrument’s dimensions. Some sense of its physical presence can be gleaned from an encounter with one of the only remaining Dumont double-manual harpsichords ({% ref 'fig-075' %}), now at the Philharmonie de Paris.[^10] At over two meters long, the instrument would have occupied the better part of all but the largest rooms in the Paris homes inhabited by the Nattier and Tocqué households, whether in the complex of the Templars in the Marais (where Nattier lived in the 1740s), or in Tocqué’s apartments on Rue du Mail, Rue de Clery, and off Rue Saint-Honoré, or even in the Louvre *logement* he was granted in 1760.[^11] Though numerous, most of these moves did not involve great distances, and certainly there would have been larger items to manage (like {% thing 'beds' %} or chests of drawers) and more fragile items to protect (anything made from porcelain or glass). But the harpsichord’s particular combination of size and delicacy would have made it a logistical challenge on every one of its moves, perhaps never more so than during its relocation after Tocqué’s death. Forced to leave her late husband’s Louvre *logement*, the widowed Madame Tocqué found first-floor rooms in the convent of Notre-Dame de Bon-Secours, which meant transporting her harpsichord all the way across Paris, right out to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.[^12]
-{% figure 'fig-075' %}
+{% figure 'fig-075' 'is-pdf-float-top' %}
Moving the harpsichord was facilitated by the instrument’s practical detachability from its stand. Though acquired as a complete item, a harpsichord was in fact composed of parts and created by a team of specialized trades. Within the restrictions of Paris’s guild system, the instrument makers, who made and sold harpsichords, were actually only responsible for constructing the case and musical mechanism, while all other elements and decorations were contracted out. A decorative painter was employed to paint the case (most commonly red or, as in this case, a green known as *merde d’oie*), to adorn the soundboard with floral designs, and sometimes to paint the lid with an Italianate landscape or pastoral scene (as in {% ref 'fig-075' %}).[^13] Meanwhile, a *menuisier* (carpenter) was commissioned to make the legs and frame of the instrument. While the instrument maker determined the harpsichord’s sound, these other agents were responsible for its look, giving it a visual aesthetic that resonated with its musical qualities and harmonized with contemporary domestic interiors.
@@ -44,7 +45,7 @@ On at least one occasion, however, the harpsichord broke free of its domestic in
diff --git a/content/things/hot-air-balloon.md b/content/things/hot-air-balloon.md
index 97e28d9..f5aa3f7 100644
--- a/content/things/hot-air-balloon.md
+++ b/content/things/hot-air-balloon.md
@@ -18,15 +18,15 @@ contributor:
**According to Denis Diderot,** the material conditions for something to be called “balloon” are that it is round and hollow, no matter how it is made, or what it is for.[^1] A balloon is an envelope, casing, or wrapper that encompasses something other. Does it qualify as a thing, specifically an artist’s thing? Should we not, rather, be indexing it by its contents? At the time of the *Encyclopédie*’s publication (1751–77) “balloon” was generally a glass object, a component in a scientific apparatus used in chemical and physical experiments to produce compound substances such as the pigments verdigris and orpiment.[^2] The printmaker Janinet’s balloon was, however, a different, inflatable type of thing, a hot-air balloon, the invention of which in 1783 was the by-product of the seventeenth century’s discovery of the materiality, that is the weight, of air. We have a scrap of the cerulean balloon that Janinet and the abbé Laurent-Antoine Miollan were primed to launch from the Luxembourg gardens on 11 July 1784 ({% ref 'fig-077' %}).
-{% figure 'fig-077' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-077' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Janinet and Miollan were not, of course, the inventors of the hot-air balloon. That honor goes to the Montgolfier brothers, who had successfully launched the first balloon at Annonay in June 1783 and had repeated the performance in front of Louis XVI and the court at Versailles in September of the same year.[^3] Their success in rendering “navigable the air” detonated an explosion of ballooning in Paris, which attracted huge crowds of curious onlookers from all ranks and professions, including artists.[^4] The German engraver Johann Georg Wille attended the Montgolfier launch at the Réveillon wallpaper factory in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine in October 1783 and the first manned assent in Paris at the Tuileries gardens in December, from which he returned home stunned, dizzy and unable to think of anything else, according to the late-night entry in his {% thing 'journal' %}.[^5] Ten days later he bought a silver medal to commemorate the Montgolfier invention ({% ref 'fig-078' %}), whose obverse bore the double profiles of genius, designed by the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. Wille added it to his collection of European medals illustrating the monuments of the modern age.[^6] Janinet, however, was not content to be a spectator, nor even an amateur scientist, for whom the market soon produced balloon kits for making and flying miniature model balloons.[^7] Hot-air balloons were not entertainment or toys to him; rather, the balloon was his thing, in the sense of his *métier*, in 1784.
-{% figure 'fig-078' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-078' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Janinet styled himself an artist-physicist. How, when, and where he acquired his science is uncertain; he may have attended the abbé Miollan’s public lectures on physics.[^8] Whatever the case, by February 1784 the two men were embarked on a joint venture to send up their own *montgolfière*, as the hot-air balloon was popularly called, and to that end they opened a subscription to finance the project and sold tickets.[^9] From the ticket etched by the “artist” Janinet (see {% ref 'fig-079' %}), the purchaser learned that the Miollan–Janinet flying machine was to consist of not one but three balloons, loosely tied together with string, and that an aerial rudder would be attached to the gondola. The authors explained in the prospectus that their prime objective was to be useful. Their balloon would be a flying laboratory, in which observations and demonstrations of “the density and qualities of the different layers of the atmosphere” could be made. The small upper balloon would rise above the other two because it was filled with hydrogen. The lowest balloon would sink below the two others because it was filled with cold air—a lesson for all to see in the relative densities of gasses and in the effects of heat upon them.[^10] The rudder and lateral vent in the big balloon, inferable from the ticket by the burst of radiating lines Janinet etched to represent escaping air, would demonstrate a combination of means to pilot the flying ship: by leverage and by propulsion. To date, no one had successfully devised a technology to steer balloons, which severely compromised the balloon’s perceived utility.[^11]
-{% figure 'fig-079' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-079' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
In the immense space of the heavens and relative to the globe, the balloon, blown by “long laughing winds” (*quousque iudibria ventis*), looks small and delicate, and yet it was then the largest balloon to have been launched aloft, a gigantic azure machine 100 feet high and 80 feet in diameter, on a scale and of a color, in fact, to equal the hue and cumuliform of Janinet’s skyscape. The creation of so large a thing apparently demanded an approach to production liberated from the traditional mindset of craft; Miollan and Janinet emphasized the modernity of their balloon’s technology in the press releases they regularly made to the newspapers.[^12] The design of the burner, for example, would be informed by Antoine Quinquet’s improvements to the oil lamp; the gondola would be built in the lightest of materials, a reinforced paper invented by the model maker Montfort and already in use for {% thing 'baths' %} and {% thing 'carriages' %}.[^13] The most expensive tickets bought not only the best seats for the launch but access also to the workshops in which the new technologies were being developed, and entry to the exhibition of the 1:10 maquette or {% thing 'model' %} of the balloon at the Grands Augustins on 31 March 1784, coincidentally at the same time and in the same place that Jean-Joseph Sue was giving a lecture to Académie students on the importance of the study of human anatomy to the practice of art.[^14]
@@ -34,11 +34,11 @@ After successful test flights of the full-scale balloon at the Observatoire in J
{% figure 'fig-080' 'is-offset' %}
-Had Janinet perhaps felt himself interpolated by Gudin de Brenellière’s rousing imperatives in the wake of the first balloon ascent,[^19] and published in the *Journal de Paris*, to “Follow Montgolfier . . . ,” to “Leave, fly, and discover air less even, purer horizons in these, our cerulean planes”? Had he thought that his practical knowledge specifically marked him out? He certainly saw no contradiction in principle between scientific and artistic ambition: in March 1784 he put an advertisement in *Annonce, affiches et avis divers* with news scrambled in a single paragraph both of his print after François Boucher’s *Toilette of Venus* ({% ref 'fig-080' %}) and of the subscription to launch the balloon.[^20]
+Had Janinet perhaps felt himself interpolated by Gudin de Brenellière’s rousing imperatives in the wake of the first balloon ascent,[^19] and published in the *Journal de Paris*, to “Follow Montgolfier . . . ,” to “Leave, fly, and discover air less even, purer horizons in these, our cerulean planes”? Had he thought that his practical knowledge specifically marked him out? He certainly saw no contradiction in principle between scientific and artistic ambition: in March 1784 he put an advertisement in *Annonce, affiches et avis divers* with news scrambled in a single paragraph both of his print after François Boucher’s *Toilette of Venus* ({% ref 'fig-080' %}) and of the subscription to launch the balloon.[^20]
The relic of his and Miollan’s attempted flight indicates a dense inner envelope of linen, possibly hemp, tough but not woven tightly enough to contain air. It was almost certainly covered with outer layers of paper, and varnish, materials common to the printmaker’s studio, in order to seal it properly. Moreover, Janinet had brought experimentation to his art. He had adapted the process of color printing using multiple plates, learned in the workshop of the pastel-manner etcher Jean-Claude Bonnet to the technique of acquatint, a development that had required experimental manipulation of varnishes (to protect the copperplate), acids (to bite the design), and inks, including indigo (to print the image). He could legitimately lay claim to a practical knowledge of chemistry that was there to be mobilized for the science as well as the arts of ballooning, including perhaps the making of hydrogen by the chemical reaction of acid on metal.[^21]
-{% figure 'fig-081' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-081' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
The thrust of the caricatures, satirical songs, and critiques that flooded the market in the immediate aftermath of the Luxembourg gardens fiasco was deflationary—an assault, that is, on the puffed and false science of Miollan and Janinet. Janinet was routinely portrayed as an ass. In *Les deux Midas* ({% ref 'fig-081' %}) his ears identify him as the left caryatid, tangled up with Miollan the cat, on the right, by a skein running along the top of the frame, their pursuit of scientific knowledge exposed as half-assed, as a pseudo, alchemical art that licenced renaming them “Midas.” Furthermore, the recorders (*flutes à bec*) that the two men have in their mouths by the wrong end illustrate the idiocy of those who pretend to experimentation without knowledge of scientific principles.[^22] This was satire by the elite against the pretentions of outsiders and against the opening up of science to a wider public of artisans and amateurs. In the middle of the bottom rail of the frame, the caricaturist had drawn a medal, “Project of a Monument,” around which runs the proverb: “To each his craft, and the cows will be well guarded.” Both the turn of events and such caricatures punctured Janinet’s sublime ambition, stayed his willingness to risk in order to be “king of the elements,” master of air. Provenance of the balloon fragment at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France is unknown, but we can be sure it was no souvenir of Janinet’s. Humiliated, both by public ridicule and, no doubt, by the pity of academic colleagues, this heaven-headed printmaker forgot the dreams that had inspired the design of his ticket and returned to the everyday, earth-bound business of earning a living.[^23] {% contributors context=pageContributors format='symbol' %}
diff --git a/content/things/index.md b/content/things/index.md
index 1ff9d27..a37ee05 100644
--- a/content/things/index.md
+++ b/content/things/index.md
@@ -1,7 +1,15 @@
---
title: "Things"
-layout: page
+layout: splash
order: 100
redirect: "/contents/"
-#outputs: none
----
\ No newline at end of file
+---
+
+{% assign thingPages = collections.thing %}
+
+
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/content/things/intaglio.md b/content/things/intaglio.md
index 53258f0..5bf1dbe 100644
--- a/content/things/intaglio.md
+++ b/content/things/intaglio.md
@@ -18,17 +18,21 @@ contributor:
**On 14 December 1778, the collection of the history painter** and director of the Académie de France à Rome, Charles-Joseph Natoire, was auctioned at the hôtel d’Aligre, Rue Saint-Honoré. Natoire had died in Italy after more than twenty-five years as director at the Palazzo Mancini, but his heirs decided that the collection would sell better in Paris than in Rome.[^1] Shipped back to France and cataloged by the auctioneer Alexandre Paillet, Natoire’s “*cabinet*” had contained, in addition to examples of his own paintings and drawings, “choice and distinguished works” by “Pierre Subleyras, Jean-Paul Panini, and other Masters.”[^2] Among those who attended the sale was the artist Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, whose marginal drawings in his copy of the sale catalog capture in quick, black, accented chalk strokes the salient features of many of the paintings, drawings, and sculptors’ {% thing 'models' %} for sale—a sale that ended with a handful of ancient and modern gems, and a crop of red wax sulphur pastes, cast from gems.[^3] We sense the ebbing of Saint-Aubin’s interest with the gems ({% ref 'fig-082' %}); his sketches become perfunctory, in some cases no more than the oval ghost of a form, and his record of the winning bids erodes as he grows distracted. Since that brief moment of his glancing attention, total silence has befallen the gems, as no art historian has reflected on their presence.[^4]
-{% figure 'fig-082' 'is-offset' %}
+{% figure 'fig-082' 'is-offset is-pdf-side-caption is-pdf-float-top' %}
Intaglios and cameos are gems, usually no larger than 1 inch (2.5 cm) in diameter, on which a design is recessed, embossed, engraved, or carved. Intaglios were used as seals; cameos were worn as jewelry. According to eighteenth-century antiquarians, both originated in ancient Egypt, from where the art of gem engraving spread throughout the Mediterranean, reaching a high point of noble simplicity and refinement in fifth- and fourth-century BCE Greece.[^5] In the Renaissance, examples of antique gems were collected by princes, nobles, and scholars alongside classical sculpture and antique medals, but by the early eighteenth century the taste for antiquities in France, particularly medals, was in decline. Krzysztof Pomian’s quantitative analysis of the contents of Paris auctions shows that, after 1750, antiquities were surpassed by {% thing 'shells' %} and natural history, as objects of desire.[^6] In partial explanation of this shift in taste, Pomian mapped its gradient onto changes in the social makeup of collectors: the market share of the nobility and clergy, who had dominated the art market to 1750, declined after midcentury in direct proportion to the rise in collecting by new money, that is, by financiers, merchant capitalists, and other professional classes, of which artists were by no means the least significant. In this context, important though Natoire’s *cabinet* is as an instance of the new economy of collecting, his intaglios appear to strike a false note, to be out of tune with modern trends. Was this, as Georges Brunel has suggested in relation to Natoire’s taste in paintings and drawings, because the painter was isolated in Rome, unaware of or unresponsive to developments in contemporary art and to fashions in curiosity? Should we interpret his intaglios as evidence of a reactionary taste in contrast to his contemporary François Boucher’s radical appetite for both contemporary Italian art (he owned 137 works by or after Giovanni Battista Tiepolo)[^7] and for {% thing 'shells' %}?
The answers may perhaps be found in Natoire’s collecting, not in his collection. This is to acknowledge that Natoire’s “collection” was at least partly the retrospective construct of Paillet’s cataloging. The dealer’s classification of the gems in the 1778 Paris sale implied that the painter had responded to them not individually as things but as examples of types of things: original or reproduction, ancient ({% ref 'fig-083' %}) or modern, and, if the latter, by Giovanni or Luigi Pichler ({% ref 'fig-084' %}) or Alessandro Cades.[^8] The fifteen engraved gems and ten sulphur pastes assume, in the catalog, the appearance of a bounded system whose meanings emerge from the relations between the different examples: by connecting and comparing a paste of an ancient gem of *Leda and the Swan* with Pichler’s carnelian intaglio, or contrasting Cades’s two versions of the bust of Antinous, or alternatively—for a study of youth and age—of reading the one *Antinous* mounted on a multifaceted seal (*cachet*) against a head of Homer, also by Cades, with which it was paired and with which it had been set for Natoire in a three-sided jewel.[^9]
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{% figure 'fig-083' 'is-paired' %}
{% figure 'fig-084' 'is-paired' %}
-Paillet’s description of the gems focuses primarily on the subject matter, but insofar as he identifies the minerals of which the gems were made, he also invokes their color—red (cornelian), brown (sardonyx), white (chalcedony), and the pure clarity of rock crystal (quartz). Moreover, in the case of the antique gems, he intersperses his description with observations—“one sees . . . ,” “one notices . . .”—observations that prioritize the experience of looking over the value of knowing.[^10] Paillet’s address to sight and his deft erudition removed Natoire’s gems from the domain of antiquarianism and aligned them with the paintings and drawings in the collection as instances of art and beauty. The reason for Paillet’s appeal to the senses may have been his lack of classical learning, but its effect was to assign autonomy to Natoire’s “collection,” to detach his gems from both their actual uses in antiquity and from their latent function as concrete witnesses of history. Parallels can be drawn with the new historiography of gems generated by connoisseurs like the comte de Caylus and Pierre-Jean Mariette in the 1720s and 1730s, and which culminated in 1750 with the publication of the catalog of the king’s gem cabinet, introduced by a *Traité des pierres gravées*, written by Mariette.[^11] Mariette’s *Traité* reinvented gems as objects of desire, by forgetting or largely ignoring questions of historical and local context in favor of properties of authorship and authenticity, that is, characteristics directly relevant to the exchange economy and the market for art.
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The physical property of pliability was thus crucial not only in the practice of sculpture but also, at a metaphysical level, to eighteenth-century ideas of creativity as the outflow of genius.[^9] Implicit in the comte de Caylus’s comparison of drawing and modeling as creative acts inserted in his *Life of Bouchardon* (1762) is the notion of unmediated artistic expression, or matter’s absolute passivity, its utter subsumption to the thrust of the artist’s thinking hand.[^10] He envisaged the {% thing '*porte-crayon*' %} and the *ébauchoir* (modeling tool) as instruments for giving immediate form to inner states. Bouchardon shared his view, to judge by the invoice he submitted to the *directeur des bâtiments du roi* in 1743 for a project that never progressed beyond the model stage.[^11] In justification of his claim of 210,000 livres in remuneration, a vast sum, Bouchardon enumerated his costs: (1) eight days of thought in preparation to meet the king’s order; (2) thirty-five years of study in France and Italy to satisfy the king’s standards of taste; (3) three months of working on “different ideas, both in chalk and modeled in wax, ideas made and remade a number of times, and vigorously subjected to artistic critique by the author.”[^12] Making was conceptualized as a movement outward from mind to world in the conduct of which the ideal model served as a transparent interface between conception and realization.
Gerold Weber, who inaugurated study of Bouchardon’s models, understood his task as one of reconstructing the linear sequence of the modeling operations. He naturalizes the trajectory from interior to exterior, imagination to world, by analogy to gestation. Like Caylus, he explains Bouchardon’s models as iterations of an idea, a progress of representation, in which the “first thought,” called a maquette, is superseded and surpassed by the second and more finished model, and so on, increasing in size and development until the end work becomes.[^13] Although Weber’s classification of the models depends on sequence, the models do not represent discrete stages of operation: rather, they are construed as a continuum of things, models all *of* an equestrian monument, or a fountain, or a tomb. However, models, in their difference from representations, are also models *for*, or things capable of intervening in the world.
@@ -58,7 +62,7 @@ Cochin’s anecdotes on Bouchardon’s life were written after the sculptor’s
[^5]: For Pierre-Jean Mariette, see Édouard Kopp, “Les Collectionneurs de Bouchardon,” in *Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762)*, 44–53. For the comte de Caylus, see Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières, comte de Caylus, *Vie de d’Edme Bouchardon, sculpteur du roi* (Paris: n.p., 1762).
-[^6]: See François Basan, *Catalogue des tableaux, desseins, estampes . . . modèles en cire et en plâtre laissés après le décès de M. Bouchardon* (Paris: de Lormel, 1762), lot 16.
+[^6]: See François Basan, *Catalogue des tableaux, desseins, estampes . . . modèles en cire et en plâtre laissés après le décès de M. Bouchardon* (Paris: de Lormel, 1762), lot 16.
[^7]: This is a representative sample of the models actually produced. For a wider canvas, see Guilhem Scherf, “La Fontaine de Grenelle,” in *Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762)*, 228–34.
@@ -70,7 +74,7 @@ Cochin’s anecdotes on Bouchardon’s life were written after the sculptor’s
[^11]: See *Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762)*, cat. 212, model for the Cardinal Fleury monument.
-[^12]: {% abbr 'AN' %}, AB/XIX/4228, dossier 10, *Mémoire des frais fait par E.B. . . . pour le mausolée de Son Emce le Cardinal de Fleury*, 24 May 1743. He gave four months’ anxiety and worry as his fourth and last reason. He received 4,000 livres for the work and kept the model.
+[^12]: {% abbr 'AN' %}, AB/XIX/4228, dossier 10, *Mémoire des frais fait par E.B. . . . pour le mausolée de Son Emce le Cardinal de Fleury*, 24 May 1743. He gave four months’ anxiety and worry as his fourth and last reason. He received 4,000 livres for the work and kept the model.
[^13]: Gerold Weber, “Dessins et maquettes d’Edme Bouchardon,” *Revue de l’art* 6 (1969): 39–50.
@@ -118,4 +122,4 @@ Cochin’s anecdotes on Bouchardon’s life were written after the sculptor’s
[^35]: Gilbert Simondon, *The Mode of Existence of Technological Objects* (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
-[^36]: Pierre Remy, *Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, bronzes, terres cuites, figures et bustes de plâtre . . . qui composent le cabinet de feu M. Cayeux* (Paris: Vente, 1769), lot 87.
+[^36]: Pierre Remy, *Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, bronzes, terres cuites, figures et bustes de plâtre . . . qui composent le cabinet de feu M. Cayeux* (Paris: Vente, 1769), lot 87.
diff --git a/content/things/modeling-stand.md b/content/things/modeling-stand.md
index 6338b89..bafa3ea 100644
--- a/content/things/modeling-stand.md
+++ b/content/things/modeling-stand.md
@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ contributor:
**One of the more mundane objects on display at the Musée Carnavalet,** the museum of the history of Paris, is an eighteenth-century *selle* (modeling stand) ({% ref 'fig-111' %}) that once belonged to the sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon. Mundane as it is in the context of the Carnavalet’s collections, and also as an item of the sculptor’s equipment, this stand is, however, rare as a tool that survives from an eighteenth-century studio. There are few such others, and certainly none to compare to Jean Bourdelle’s at his house-museum near Montparnasse, or to the contents of Constantin Brancusi’s atelier reconstructed at place Georges Pompidou. Both Bourdelle and Brancusi bequeathed their tools to the public in the belief that these objects were uniquely placed to promote a better understanding of their work. That conviction was not shared by sculptors in the eighteenth century. Their tools, if not passed on to sons, pupils, or assistants, were sold in job lots in estate sales and have been lost to history. This object, like the {% thing 'palette' %} and the {% thing 'color box' %} in the case of painting, stands, therefore, as an example of a larger category of artists’ things: their tools—whose purpose was to assist, develop, and improve skills of making, and to make artists smarter and cannier.
-{% figure 'fig-111' 'is-offset' %}
+{% figure 'fig-111' 'is-offset is-pdf-side-caption is-pdf-float-top' %}
As an instance of stands more generally, Houdon’s *selle* is mundane, too, in the sense that the French anthropologist Pierre Lemmonier gives to the word: “not much to look at,” yet crucially important to the sculptor who used it, and a material anchor, potentially, for his conceptual thinking.[^1] Stands belong, in this sense, to that category of object whose origin is unknown and that appear timeless, part of culture, unlike novel or specialist sculptural tools such as the lathe and the well-tempered chisel, whose historicity is the more usual subject of art-historical inquiry: to understand both the creation of new forms and the materials whose working they newly made possible.[^2] Lemonnier characterizes “mundane objects” as a form of nonverbal communication, sometimes, indeed, the unique and only available expression of the structure and values of a social order. In the eighteenth century, however, language, and specifically technical discourse, was foregrounded as the new and progressive tool that exteriorized the embodied know-hows of the arts and trades and replaced craft secrets with rational knowledge and information. In 1765 the theorist and academician Michel-François Dandré-Bardon lamented that no author had yet taken up the task of describing the mechanics of sculpture.[^3] The same year also saw the publication of volume 14 of the *Encyclopédie*, which contained entries on “sculpture of all kinds,” but Diderot and d’Alembert’s commitment to making known the arts and trades notwithstanding, the tools and processes of modeling and carving were not, in fact, the primary concern of Étienne-Maurice Falconet’s definition in the text.[^4] It was only with the publication of the *Encyclopédie*’s plates in 1771 that enumeration and description of them was finally made fully known.[^5] These plates will help us understand Houdon’s modeling stand, but in the spirit of Lemonnier they will be read both with and against the grain of its technical discourse.
@@ -42,6 +42,12 @@ Before the 1770s, modeling was not a sign for the art of sculpture as a whole, a
Houdon, however, did not use clay for rough work, or, to be more exact, he buried his beginning in the finished work, rather than leaving it standing. Moreover, his exacting commitment to the perfect imitation of his sitters—in the busts that made his reputation and dominated his output—precluded the expression of his self on the surface of his forms through traces of his touch. However, his commissions did always begin with clay. Sometimes they also ended in terracotta. At others, the clay model led to a marble, or more rarely to a bronze, and almost invariably generated multiple plaster casts. In all cases he reserved the right to the “original.”[^26] The modeling stand thus anchored that point of origin of his *oeuvre*, in the formal sense of all the work he acknowledged, and in which he formally recognized himself as author. It speaks, therefore, to the social and ideological investments that artists had in this modern notion of authorship. Purchased after his death in 1828, a brass plaque was screwed to it that reads “SELLE DE HOUDON”: the stand had become an icon. {% contributors context=pageContributors format='symbol' %}
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+{% figuregroup '3' 'fig-093' %}
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[^1]: Pierre Lemonnier, *Mundane Objects: Materiality and Non-Verbal Communication* (London: Routledge, 2012), 13.
[^2]: See Joseph Connors, “Ars Tornandi: Baroque Architecture and the Lathe,” *Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes* 53 (1990): 217–36; and *Porphyre: La pierre pourpre des Ptolémées aux Bonapartes*, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2003).
diff --git a/content/things/nightingale.md b/content/things/nightingale.md
index 6fad6e6..5bfa725 100644
--- a/content/things/nightingale.md
+++ b/content/things/nightingale.md
@@ -34,13 +34,13 @@ Secondly, nightingales are not canaries. Indeed, the naturalist Georges-Louis Le
Finally, where canaries have a heart and form human attachments, nightingales are proud and solitary.[^28] So secretive are they, claimed Arnoult de Nobleville, that illustration of the bird in his treatise was justified, because its appearance, though lackluster, was virtually unknown.[^29] The bird is portrayed in the wild ({% ref 'fig-115' %}), the bloomy spray of its foliated perch serving as a synecdoche for nature, specifically silvan nature, the bird’s preferred habitat. Of human civilization there is no trace. We can infer from Catherine’s recommendation that Collot hang the nightingale outside her window, rather than inside her casement, and that the empress was aware of the limits to this songbird’s taming. The gift was an addition to Collot’s *logement*, not her household.
-{% figure 'fig-115' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-115' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Collot was not, however, without feeling for her songbird—“joy” at his arrival, “pity” for his injured wing—but hers (unlike Duplessis’s for his {% thing 'dog' %}) were emotions that emanated, according to Enlightenment thinking, from the soul and thus set her and humanity apart from the animal kingdom.[^30] If not a love object, what was the nightingale’s purpose and meaning? For an answer we should perhaps consider the recipient’s professional rather than her personal and domestic life. Catherine’s gift punctuated a stream of commissions issued with avowed impatience and at escalating pace. In her exchanges with Falconet on the subject of Collot’s work, nightingale and marble almost serve as counterpoints. Catherine cannot wait to see “a good and large body of marble between Collot’s hands,” begs her in July 1768 to take a “block” from the royal reserve, “marble” Collot quits carving in May the following year only “to jump for joy” at the prospect of the nightingale’s arrival.[^31] Catherine thus openly acknowledges the manual labor of carving, refuses to disguise sculpture’s rude materiality, and, contrary to convention, does not, on these grounds, deny the chisel to this woman, Collot.[^32] Instead she sends her a bird: not a canary to occupy her leisure, but a nightingale to afford her rest.
Birdsong was closely associated with repose. A commonplace, or “topic,” in French chamber music and opera, birdsong invoked pastoral’s idyll: at Delos in, for example, one of Elizabeth Jacquet de La Guerre’s “French” cantatas (ca. 1710), or at Diana’s grove, in Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera *Hippolyte et Aricie* (1733).[^33] In Collot’s case, the nightingale’s song may have opened her casement magically onto more recent, but no less ideal, times and spaces, onto recollections of the garden, Rue d’Anjou, where she and Falconet had shared a studio, and of times spent there among friends, memories stoked by Diderot’s reminiscences of their “cottage” in his letters to them.[^34] However, to interpret the nightingale as an instrument only of Catherine’s hospitality doesn’t seem fully yet to account for the choice and time of it as a gift for Collot.
-{% figure 'fig-116' 'is-offset' %}
+{% figure 'fig-116' 'is-offset is-pdf-float-top is-pdf-side-caption' %}
Regarded as the origin of music, birdsong symbolized freedom and imitation of nature as foundational principles of the fine arts.[^35] Such was the nightingale’s passion for liberty that it often broke its wings against the cage in its efforts to escape.[^36] Such was its pride in its song that its melodies were originals, the product of a creative or virile, and not a servile, imitation.[^37] It seems significant that Catherine chose to recognize Collot’s talent with a nightingale soon after gaining her consent to produce a pair of historical effigies. Portraits of the dead called, arguably, for genius that making a portrait from life did not. In May 1768 Catherine had asked Falconet whether Collot had ever “seen” Henri IV and Sully “en rêve,” that is, in her imagination.[^38] Falconet hastened to confirm that Collot was indeed “very dreamy,” that the idea of these Bourbon heroes would in fact probably prevent her from waking for some three or four days, and that the outcome would in fact be very happy.[^39] In the busts ({% ref 'fig-116' %}) Collot deftly combined naturalism (the sideways glance, the fleeting expression of animation) and historicism (the regal calm and seventeenth-century costume), elevating portraiture above mere likeness and demonstrating that the scope of a woman’s artistry extended beyond mere copying to invention. In recognizing the nightingale in Collot, in attending to his or her needs, and in thus favoring one “who dares to raise herself above her sex,” Catherine secured for herself not only Collot’s talents but the reputation of a patron and sovereign who, rather than oppressing genius, sets it free.[^40] {% contributors context=pageContributors format='symbol' %}
diff --git a/content/things/order-book.md b/content/things/order-book.md
index 2c90874..a42420b 100644
--- a/content/things/order-book.md
+++ b/content/things/order-book.md
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ An order book was a common object in eighteenth-century France. A kind of regist
Inside, the contents of Lagrenée’s 311-page book are composed of two main parts ({% ref 'fig-117' %}). The first is the more unexpected. Beginning on a recto numbered “1,” under the title “Recueil de sujets d’histoire” (Compendium of history subjects), Lagrenée neatly copied out over fifty stories to serve as potential themes for paintings, like the “Death of Cleopatra” or the “Battle of Alexander against Darius.” Separating his selections thematically—ancient history, Roman history, mythology, sacred subjects—Lagrenée also recorded his sources, for instance, his most frequent citation, Charles Rollin’s *Histoire ancienne* (1730–38), referenced impeccably with volume and page numbers. About two-thirds of the way through the book, on page 217, that compendium comes to an end, on a recto numbered 218 (he accidentally left out page 186, upsetting the numbers). A new title marks the beginning of the second part, more expected for an order book: “État des tableaux faits par Monsieur Lagrenée” (Register of paintings made by Monsieur Lagrenée).
-{% figuregroup '2' 'fig-118-a, fig-118-b' '**Fig. 118** Title pages to the two main parts, “Recueil de sujets d’histoire” (Compendium of history subjects) and “État des tableaux faits par Monsieur Lagrenée” (Register of paintings made by Monsieur Lagrenée), in Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée’s order book (*livre de raison*), ca. 1770–1805. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Ms. 50. (Photos: Bibliothèque de l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art.)' %}
+{% figure 'fig-118' %}
This register was a comprehensive record of the artist’s output. In a continuously numbered list, Lagrenée itemized every painting he produced: from no. 1, *Antiope Surprised by Jupiter*, the *agrément* piece he presented to the Académie in 1754; right up to no. 457, *Bellona Dragging Mars from the Arms of Venus*, painted toward the end of his life.[^5] With subheadings to structure the content, his productions were organized by time and place: first, “since his return from Rome,” meaning back in Paris after being a *pensionnaire* and joining the Académie (1754–60); next, “in Saint Petersburg,” where he served as imperial court painter (1760–62); then, “since my return from Saint Petersburg,” a long section that actually includes his directorate in Rome (1762–87); and finally, “Return from Rome,” which runs to the end (1787–1805). The register ends on page 298, with only a few pages left in the book, most of which are blank, apart from a four-page description of a “Subject of a Painting for the King,” and, on the final page, a small pencil outline of an antique urn—the only image in the entire book.
@@ -32,11 +32,11 @@ Lagrenée’s order book was a thing whose purpose was to reduce. To create orde
With the order book’s transition from historical compendium to register, its functionality became multipurpose: from product guide to stock list and accounting system. Each page of Lagrenée’s register followed a methodical layout ({% ref 'fig-119' %}). At the left margin, an item number; in the middle, title of the work and salient details (short descriptions, commissioners, locations); and at the right margin, price. At the top of each page, Lagrenée noted the total of prices from all previous pages, and at the bottom he added those from the current page, thus keeping a running calculation of the value of his production to date. He stopped including prices toward the end (from page 282, soon after his return from Rome as *directeur*), at which point his career total stood at 283,120 livres. This systematic register molded Lagrenée’s studio output into a neat chronological and financial record, organizing his career into chapters and keeping track of his income along the way. Yet as its title page has already revealed, the book’s apparent order belies the disorder of its making, with temporal disjunctions, retrospective fabrications, and nonsequential interventions.
-{% figuregroup '2' 'fig-119-a, fig-119-b' '**Fig. 119** “État des tableaux faits par Monsieur Lagrenée” (Register of paintings made by Monsieur Lagrenée), from Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée’s order book (*livre de raison*), ca. 1770–1805, 255–56. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Ms. 50. (Photos: Bibliothèque de l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art.)' %}
+{% figure 'fig-119' %}
What, then, do the pages divulge about the book’s life as an object? Based on medium and facture, it appears to be the product of two stages of making, but, intriguingly, not ones that align with its two parts. The first stage—and the book’s creation—took place all at once, during which Lagrenée composed the historical compendium and over a third of the register. Covering pages 1 to 256, this stage is characterized by remarkable consistency in the book’s production, not least in the calligraphic headings/painting titles and stylized handwriting (see figs. [118](#fig-118){.q-figure__modal-link}, [119](#fig-119){.q-figure__modal-link}). Then, from page 257, the inconsistencies and variations begin: first an ink change from brown to black; then page totals start appearing in pencil rather than ink; then come small lapses in style, until eventually the calligraphic features are abandoned entirely and the writing becomes quicker and messier ({% ref 'fig-120' %}). Clearly, somewhere around this point the book entered a second and much longer stage of making, which, unlike the first (contained at a single moment, with the register reconstituted retrospectively), unfolded in real time over the rest of his career.
-{% figuregroup '2' 'fig-120-a, fig-120-b' '**Fig. 120** “État des tableaux faits par Monsieur Lagrenée” (Register of paintings made by Monsieur Lagrenée), from Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée’s order book (*livre de raison*), ca. 1770–1805, 273–74. Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Ms. 50. (Photos: Bibliothèque de l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art.)' %}
+{% figure 'fig-120' 'is-pdf-float-top' %}
Once being formed in real time, the book also started to require corrections, from marks crossing out canceled items, to annotations noting changes and updates. On page 259, for instance, under the entry for *Diana and Acteon*, a succession of additional lines indicates the painting’s turbulent life: initially painted for the duc de Praslin, his exile prevented him from taking it; next, the work was sold to the comtesse du Barry for 720 livres, but she returned it; then, eventually, it went to Monsieur de la Borde. This sense of the book’s constant use and reuse is not limited to the register. Traces of revisits also punctuate the pages of the compendium, where Lagrenée would jot notes after painting the subjects described. On page 8, for instance, following the story of two widows vying to join their late husband on his funeral pyre (from a chapter on the successors of Alexander), Lagrenée noted, “I executed this subject in a drawing,” then later in a different ink and more tremulous hand “since as a large painting for the king in Rome in 1782.” The painting in question, *Two Widows of an Indian Officer* (1782, Dijon, Musée des Beaux-Arts), was exhibited at the Salon of 1783, and the explanatory text in the exhibition *livret* reads as though derived from the version in Lagrenée’s order book, suggesting yet another instance of reuse.[^6]
diff --git a/content/things/palette.md b/content/things/palette.md
index 19dab9f..7f5c648 100644
--- a/content/things/palette.md
+++ b/content/things/palette.md
@@ -24,31 +24,39 @@ Palettes, it would seem, were not always the innocuous objects they might first
As a tool, the palette was fundamental to the painter’s craft. Though extremely simple (a flat plank of wood), if made and maintained properly a palette was also an incredibly effective item of art-world technology. In terms of material, woods of choice for eighteenth-century palettes were apple or walnut, both hardwoods with tight grains that could be polished to a smooth finish, creating an ideal surface for mixing colors and for cleaning afterward.[^4] New palettes had to be prepared before they could be used, by coating the top numerous times with walnut oil until the wood could absorb no more.[^5] Without this preparation, the binder in mixed oil paints (usually linseed or walnut oil) would seep into the wood, leaving the paint to dry out and stain the palette’s surface.[^6] Designwise, there was a selection of shapes available, as illustrated in the plates of painters’ tools in the *Encyclopédie* ({% ref 'fig-122' %}). Most eighteenth-century painters, like Vigée-Lebrun, preferred an oval palette—certainly the most ubiquitous in artists’ portraits—but a minority opted for rectangular (among them, Louis-Michel Van Loo and Nicolas Bertin).[^7] No matter the shape, all palettes were engineered in a similar way to ensure the ergonomics of use. A bevel-edged thumbhole and a cutaway section on the palette edge (to accommodate a bunch of brushes and sometimes a *godet* (pot) for oil) permitted the painter to hold everything at the ready in their left hand, while the active right hand undertook the dexterous work of mixing and applying colors. For the minority of left-handed painters (among them, Nicolas Mignard), the configuration was reversed.[^8] Palettes were also designed to be thicker at the thumbhole side and thinner toward the “tail,” ensuring an efficient distribution of weight and a more commodious experience when working for lengthy periods.[^9]
-{% figure 'fig-122' 'is-offset' %}
+{% figure 'fig-122' 'is-indented' %}
Along with its physical optimization for being comfortably held, the palette’s design as a tool also supported its principal function as a “color laboratory,” to invoke Charlotte Guichard’s term for a space where scientific color theories were transformed into practical painterly substances.[^10] Though little more than a flat, unmarked piece of wood, for the trained painter a palette was far from a mere undifferentiated surface. Instead, it was divided invisibly into distinct zones, where colors were distributed in fixed patterns or one-off concoctions. At the top, a register of raw colors was arranged in a set scheme; then in the middle and bottom of the palette, those raw colors could be progressively mixed to achieve the range of tones and shades required for a particular artwork.[^11] Describing this practice in *Les premiers éléments de la peinture pratique* (1684), Roger de Piles included a diagram for the following top register of *couleurs capitales* (principal colors) ({% ref 'fig-123' %}): (1) lead white, (2) yellow ocher, (3) brown red, (4) {% thing 'red lake' %}, (5) stil de grain, (6) green earth, (7) umber, (8) bone black. In a second diagram, he included additional pigments that might be added below (e.g., vermillion (A), massicot (B), or ultramarine (D), and he showed how the artist used the palette surface systematically to create a spectrum of mixed tonal variations ({% ref 'fig-124' %}). Judging by the palettes represented in artists’ portraits, it would appear that the method de Piles described was largely adhered to throughout the eighteenth century, at least as a shared theoretical starting point. Most portrait palettes show a top register of whites, yellows, reds, browns, and blacks, arranged roughly lightest to darkest from thumbhole to tail. But painters also developed their own idiosyncratic palette habits to suit their style and subject matter. Thus, when it came to the number of principal colors and the actual pigments selected, there were as many variations as there were artists: Vien, for instance, began with a restricted set of seven principals (see {% ref 'fig-036' %}), while Vernet preferred a lavish array of eleven (see {% ref 'fig-183' %}).
+
+
Palettes in artists’ portraits prove intriguing evidence for exploring their use, but their presence in these artworks also draws attention to their roles beyond utility. So ubiquitous was the palette as a studio tool, so synonymous with the trade, and so personal to the artist, that, not surprisingly, this piece of wood also became the artform’s defining attribute. As a symbol, the palette performed both self-fashioning and allegorical services, whether as that traditional prop held in so many professional portraits, or in decorative allegories or still lifes, like Jean-Siméon Chardin’s *Attributes of the Arts* (1766, Minneapolis Institute of Art). More than any other material thing, the palette came to stand for both painting, as an art, and the painter, as its agent.
It is in this performative guise that we come face to face with the palette of Vigée-Lebrun in her celebrated *Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat* ({% ref 'fig-125' %}). Set unconventionally outdoors, the portrait places Vigée-Lebrun beyond any of those material markers of the studio described in Lemoine’s portrait (see {% ref 'fig-121' %}). In the absence of other signs, her palette deftly assumes full visual responsibility for signifying its bearer’s professional identity. Tilted forward to face the viewer and lit brightly from above, the palette’s indexical value is immediate, indicating categorically who Vigée-Lebrun is and what she does. Held so naturally on her thumb that it is practically worn over her arm, it becomes a corporeal extension, as much part of Vigée-Lebrun as the rest of her clothing. Yet it is the blobs of paint *on* the palette that make it such a potent “site of self-declaration,” to use Philip Sohm’s expression for when the portrayed palette serves as metacommentary on the image containing it.[^12] Emerging as the artwork’s captivating punctum, those blobs of paint pierce the divide between the fiction of the canvas and the reality of its making. For if the painted Vigée-Lebrun is a self-portrait of the maker, then the painted palette is likewise: a self-image of the surface bearing the principal colors that created it all, from the white collar to the black shawl, via the blue sky, soft pink dress, bright red flower, and even the warm brown of its own polished wood.
-{% figure 'fig-125' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-125' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Vigée-Lebrun’s self-reflexive engagement with her palette in her self-portrait underscores its complex role in the painter’s working life. As an intermediary surface in the stages of painterly creation—the space where color was workshopped before being applied to its next and final surface—the palette was different from most tools in the artist’s studio. Some tools, like easels or {% thing 'modeling stands' %}, were valuable mechanical aids, but not exactly indispensable; things intentionally designed to make easier, speed up, or simplify the practices of the studio. Others, like brushes or {% thing 'burins' %}, were more imperative to the actions and gestures of art making; things that served as extensions of the artist’s hand, enhancing its dexterity, precision, or facility. The palette, meanwhile, was both and more: a useful mechanical aid, an extension of the hand, and also an extension of the mind—an experimental space where ideas could be rehearsed and refined into material form. In this respect it was perhaps closer to the {% thing 'sketchbook' %}, though instead of investigating form and subject matter for future use, the palette concocted color in the moment, to be wiped clean afterward, ready for the next the experiment.
+
+
As a color laboratory, site of self-definition, and embodied extension of the creative agent, Vigée-Lebrun’s palette was, like that of every painter, perhaps the most representative possession in her working life. No surprise, then, that in death the palette became her commemorative marker. Her gravestone in the cemetery of Louveciennes is adorned with a tombstone maker’s crude line carving showing a palette resting atop a plinth: a memorial to the painter engraved into this memorial to the painter ({% ref 'fig-126' %}). This monumentalizing of the painter’s palette in death reaches its zenith in a very different commemorative object for one of Vigée-Lebrun’s contemporaries, Jacques-Louis David. Few eighteenth-century palettes have survived still attached in provenance to their owners, but, at the Musée de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris, David’s is now preserved in a quasi reliquary ({% ref 'fig-127' %}). Framed and encased under a glass dome, his palette is the centerpiece of an arrangement of items: a double *godet* clipped to its edge; a bunch of brushes and utensils suspended over the cutaway; and David’s {% thing 'decoration' %} as *commandeur* of the Légion d’Honneur (awarded by Napoleon in 1815) hanging through the thumbhole. An inscription affixed on a leather shield serves as tombstone, in both senses, a museum label with elegiac shades: “Palette, brushes, and palette knife of Jacques-Louis David, restorer of the French School.”[^13] Assembled sometime after his death in 1825, this object is a testament to David’s renown, and also to the cults of artistic celebrity that began emerging in the nineteenth century. Like Vigée-Lebrun’s grave, this was an honorific act of memorialization by an anonymous maker, but rather than remaining in the symbolic realm, this one transformed the palette itself into a {% thing 'relic' %}—a precious physical remnant of the great painter. {% contributors context=pageContributors format='symbol' %}
diff --git a/content/things/pastels.md b/content/things/pastels.md
index 9435ef7..4e6fa4b 100644
--- a/content/things/pastels.md
+++ b/content/things/pastels.md
@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ layout: thing
order: 135
tags: thing
owner:
- - first_name: Suzanne
+ - first_name: Marie-Suzanne
last_name: Giroust
years: 1734–72
type: [Tool]
@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ contributor:
**Clutching a tray of vibrantly colored pastel sticks,** Suzanne Giroust appears to have been searching for the right one ({% ref 'fig-128' %}). Seated before her easel, in the company of her husband, she is painting a pastel portrait of a family friend.[^1] Her {% thing 'color box' %} is open beside her, a white {% thing 'handkerchief' %} lies at the ready to wipe the constant chalky dust from her hands, and a knife rests nearby to sharpen a stick should finer lines be required. From her cluttered assortment of colors, Giroust has made her selection—a deep blue—now held lightly in her fingers and about to be deployed. But first she looks up, casting a final glance at her sitter to confirm her choice by scrutinizing his garment once more. As a representation of the studio setting, this portrait of Giroust by her husband, Alexander Roslin, offers some sense of the processes and substances of pastel painting: from the equipment and media required, to the patterns and activities of their employment. But there is a pervasive incongruity in this encounter. As a material experience, the art of pastel is presented to us here not actually *in* pastel, but in Roslin’s own preferred medium of oil.[^2] We find ourselves thus witness to an awkward moment of artistic tension, invited (ostensibly) to marvel at a celebration of pastel but instead facing an implicit declaration of oil’s superiority. While it plays out here in the domestic context of Roslin and Giroust’s relationship, pastel was a medium that, in the artistic hierarchies of eighteenth-century France, was quite habituated to underestimation, latent or otherwise.
-{% figure 'fig-128' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-128' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Pastel’s ambiguous position as a medium may have been due in part to the odd disjunction between its form and function; it looked like one thing but performed the artistic activities of another. As physical objects, pastels appear so similar to {% thing '*crayons*' %} (chalks) that one might wonder why this book needs an entry on the thingness of Giroust’s pastels when it already has one on Huët’s *crayons*. But in use, gesture, and even materiality, pastel was something else entirely. While *crayon* was the Académie’s medium of choice for drawing, pastel was a medium for painting, categorized and defined as such by Roger de Piles: a method by which “visible objects are rendered *through color* on a flat surface” (our italics).[^3] As Roslin’s portrait of Giroust suggests, this also made the actions and processes of pastel quite different from *crayon*. Rather than used horizontally on a drawing board, pastels were used upright at an easel, borrowing the apparatus of oil painting, and even to an extent simulating its support, as the paper was often pasted onto fabric stretched over a wooden strainer, making it easier to frame and glaze afterward.[^4] In general, however, the studio paraphernalia of a pastellist like Giroust was less extensive than for many of her painter colleagues, because as “things,” pastels were both medium and tool—an all-in-one device requiring no mechanical holder or applicator. Pastellists eschewed the draftsman’s {% thing '*porte-crayon*' %}, with all its promises of linear control, and had no use for the oil painter’s brush and {% thing 'palette' %}, because pastel colors could not be mixed in advance, their tonal nuances being achieved only in situ. Instead, pastel sticks were held directly in the hand, and fingers—embedded with dust—became an extension for blending color on the paper’s surface. While practical (if messy), a pastel’s very thingness thus made it something of a renegade. With its dependence on manual engagement and its emphasis on the representational force of color, pastel posed an inherent challenge to those entrenched academic hierarchies that privileged line over color and mind over hand.
diff --git a/content/things/picture.md b/content/things/picture.md
index cbde38b..981e8a3 100644
--- a/content/things/picture.md
+++ b/content/things/picture.md
@@ -5,20 +5,20 @@ layout: thing
order: 136
tags: thing
owner:
- - first_name: Nicolas
- last_name: de Largillière
+ - first_name: Nicolas de
+ last_name: Largillière
years: 1656–1746
type: [Artwork]
theme: [Identity, Religion]
material: [Metal | Gold/Gilding, Synthetic Materials | Paint/Pigment, Textile | Canvas]
-mentions: [model, armchair, bed, camera obscura, harpsichord]
+mentions: [model, armchair, bed, gaming set, lantern, camera obscura, harpsichord]
contributor:
- id: "kscott"
---
**Virtually all eighteenth-century artists owned pictures.** At his death in 1746, the ninety-year-old portrait painter and director of the Académie, Nicolas de Largillière, owned five hundred.[^1] His assemblage of pictures far exceeded that which is accounted for by the stock, {% thing 'models' %}, unfinished projects, and wastes of the busy studio. The sale in 1765 of the “cabinet of Monsieur de Largillière” might suggest that he combined painting with collecting, even, perhaps, picture dealing, were it not the case that, of the one hundred and fifty or so works to which attributions can confidently be made, the majority are to the artist himself.[^2] They consist of both pictures directly related to his portrait practice, and pictures not. Of the latter, a significant few were decorative, among them *Trompe l’Oeil with a Curtain,* *a Parrot, and a Cat* ({% ref 'fig-131' %}), today at the Louvre. It was painted to decorate a specific room and remained in place after Largillière’s death at the house built for him ca. 1713–16 at 7 Rue Geoffroy Langevin, and into which he removed with his family in the first year of the Regency.[^3] The picture thus asks to be understood in the context of the domestic interior and in relation to the host of things ({% thing 'armchair' %}, {% thing 'bed' %}, {% thing 'gaming set' %}, {% thing 'lantern' %}, etc., as well as pictures) by which space was experienced as privately owned, if not private per se. The question is: did this picture distinguish Largillière’s house as the house of the artist?
-{% figure 'fig-131' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-131' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
*Trompe l’Oeil with a Curtain* provides no easy answers. Largillière, as a native of Antwerp, would likely have known and admired the trompe-l’oeil grisailles of antique masterpieces that Rubens recreated on the exterior of his house in that city, to designate it the home of Mercury and Minerva, and he may have aspired similarly to mark his house as a locus of the liberal arts.[^4] But as a genre, still life spoke only indirectly to Largillière’s professional priorities.[^5] The technique of trompe l’oeil was marginal to portraiture and also to all the forms of painting taught at the Académie, notwithstanding the growing interest in optics and optical devices (see {% thing 'camera obscura' %}) at the turn of the seventeenth century. *Trompe l’Oeil with a Curtain* was, thus, at one level an incongruous thing. Tellingly, perhaps, it occupied a place in Largillière’s house not in or adjacent to the studio but rather in the space dedicated to sociability and private life.
@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ contributor:
The “why?” of *Trompe l’Oeil with a Curtain* seems obvious: to hijack by force of illusion the aristocratic discourse on the pastoral, and the associated ornaments of a noble rank to which Largillière was excluded by birth, though not by fortune.[^10] He had himself once painted a nearly identical trompe l’oeil at the country estate for one of his exalted patrons.[^11] This appropriation of genre and fictional things was seemingly multiplied in the overdoors, notably in *Music*, in which Largillière extended luxury’s scope from gold-trimmed curtains and richly tasseled lambrequin, to elaborately chased gold and silver vessels, blue-and-white Chinese porcelain, gold-tooled leather-bound books, and a string of pearls. Known from a studio copy ({% ref 'fig-132' %}), these things push forward in the painting and overwhelm the violin that gives the picture its ostensible emblematic meaning. They are painted, moreover, with an attention to texture and shine that belies the symbolic and bespeaks care and pride in possession.
-{% figure 'fig-132' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-132' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
During Louis XIV’s reign, nonnobles were prevented from buying many such luxury items not only by cost but by sumptuary law, which in March 1700 proscribed, for instance, the production and consumption of gold and silver vessels.[^12] In April that year, and when living in the Rue Saint-Avoye, Largillière had had to surrender those of his things that contravened the act.[^13] They included a {% thing 'harpsichord' %} on a gilded stand, two marquetry pedestals (*guéridons*) with gilded ornament, a marble-topped table on a gilt console, four armchairs, six chairs and four stools, all with frames of gilded wood, and an assortment of hearth furniture with gilt-bronze handles and ornaments. In the wake of this experience, and notwithstanding the eventual return of at least some of his costly furniture, Largillière appears to have chosen for the new Rue Geoffroy Langevin house decoration that, with the exception of the pictures, was comparatively plain and sober.[^14] Rooms were either simply paneled or dressed in plain fabrics (green and red damask, or yellow satin). The furniture was mainly ungilded. Ormolu was absent from the fire irons. Only the frames of the mirrors and easel paintings were edged with gold, a license admitted by the 1700 edict.[^15] By recourse to trompe l’oeil, Largillière apparently enjoyed that which he was denied by law.
@@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ Trompe l’oeil has a long, storied history in the life of the artist, beginning
In Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d’Argenville’s life of Largillière, the decorated room helps define the house as “beautiful,” or a place where beauty abides, but both d’Argenville and Pierre-Jean Mariette were more profoundly struck by the quantity and quality of the artist’s religious painting ({% ref 'fig-133' %}).[^23] Mariette noted that Largillière had “left his heirs” twelve paintings depicting scenes from the lives of Christ and the Virgin, of which a set of four depicting moments from the Passion warranted “particular attention” by their considerable size, complexity, and “surprising effects.” He singled them out as evidence of the “fecundity” of Largillière’s “genius”; they were proof of his “universal talent.”[^24] To the extent that Mariette and Dézallier d’Argenville measured Largillière’s achievements, they did so with reference, it would seem, to the hierarchy of genres rather than the ancien régime’s order of estates; they located nobility in history painting, not in the elite’s taste for decorative painting.
-{% figure 'fig-133' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-133' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
The performance of identity through and with things real and depicted was risky. There was a special risk in the gesture of trompe l’oeil. It depends on the readiness of the beholder to overlook contradictory contextual evidence, to stand still and transfixed and be willingly deceived. Largillière doubled that risk when he yoked his apparent desire for status and luxury to his self-reflexive performance of imitation, because the artistry of trompe l’oeil rests ultimately on knowing and valuing the gap between reality and illusion, between legitimate status and a play with—or is it for?—it. For the trompe-l’oeil project to succeed, other observers have to be enrolled in its performance and be persuaded that the illusion of luxe is equal to, if not better than, the stuff of status itself.
@@ -48,7 +48,7 @@ What of the religious pictures that weighed so heavily with Mariette and Dézall
[^1]: Georges de Lastic, “Nicolas de Largillière: Documents notariés inédits,” {% abbr '*GBA*' %} 98 (1981): 7, 23–27.
-[^2]: See *Catalogue de tableaux, estampes, desseins, bronzes, figures de marbre . . . provenant du cabinet de M. de Largillière* (Paris: Merigot, 1765).
+[^2]: See *Catalogue de tableaux, estampes, desseins, bronzes, figures de marbre . . . provenant du cabinet de M. de Largillière* (Paris: Merigot, 1765).
[^3]: On the provenance of the picture, see *Largillière (1656–1746)*, exh. cat. (Paris: Musée Jacquemart-André, 2003), no. 7. On the house, built on the site of a former tennis court, see Michel and Fabrice Faré, *La vie silencieuse en France: La nature morte au XVIIIe siècle* (Fribourg: Office du Livre, 1976), 58–60. From a *constitution de rente* between the Largillière and François Chaban-Delafosse we know that the Largillière family was living at the house by February 1716. See Mireille Rambaud, *Documents du Minutier central concernant l’histoire de l’art (1700–1750)* (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1964–71), 1:179.
diff --git a/content/things/porte-crayon.md b/content/things/porte-crayon.md
index 0e0c37d..986f410 100644
--- a/content/things/porte-crayon.md
+++ b/content/things/porte-crayon.md
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ owner:
- first_name: Jean-Baptiste
last_name: Perronneau
years: ca. 1715–83
- sort_years: 1715–83
+ sort_years: 1715–1783
type: [Companion, Tool]
theme: [Identity, Studio]
material: [Animal | Leather/Parchment, Metal | Silver, Mineral | Chalk]
@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ contributor:
- id: "kscott"
---
-**On 9 April 1767, the following ad appeared in the French newspaper** *Annonces, affiches et avis divers:* “Lost on the 25th March between the Stock Exchange and Château Trompette, *an emerald shagreen-covered CASE* [*ÉTUI*] *containing a pair of compasses, a porte-crayon and a* [folding] *set-square in silver, on which is inscribed “by Butterfield.”* The person who finds it is begged to return it to the hand of M. Perronneau, Peintre du Roi, Place du Marché Royal, at M. Lagarde’s. . . . [The finder] will receive a reward of 12 livres.”[^1] Never, arguably, had the *porte-crayon* (chalk holder) been more present to Perronneau than in its absence and more consciously tangible than in this moment of loss.[^2] Though translated above idiomatically as “to the hand of M. Perronneau,” literally, he begged for its return to “his grasp,” that he might hold it again. Perronneau, a Paris portrait painter in {% thing 'pastel' %} and in oil, was on a working tour to Bordeaux when his pencil case went missing. It was not his first trip to this thriving inland Atlantic city and port on the river Garonne in the southwestern province of Guyenne and Gascony. The port was second only to Nantes in the volume and importance of its trade in sugar, tobacco, and slaves with Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). The city had grown rapidly in the early eighteenth century, and the neighborhood between the medieval castle Trompette and Ange-Jacques Gabriel’s new Stock Exchange, where Perronneau lost his pencil case, was fashionable and home to the mansions of the city’s premier merchants. On the other side of the Exchange was the Place du Marché Royale, where Perronneau lodged; built in 1760, it was the focus of the similarly well-to-do *quartier* Saint-Pierre. The prosperity and salubriousness of the city notwithstanding, Perronneau was nevertheless perhaps more vulnerable to misadventure away from home, and certainly more sensitive to the pain of it.
+**On 9 April 1767, the following ad appeared in the French newspaper** *Annonces, affiches et avis divers:* “Lost on the 25th March between the Stock Exchange and Château Trompette, *an emerald shagreen-covered CASE* [*ÉTUI*] *containing a pair of compasses, a porte-crayon and a* [folding] *set-square in silver, on which is inscribed “by Butterfield.”* The person who finds it is begged to return it to the hand of M. Perronneau, Peintre du Roi, Place du Marché Royal, at M. Lagarde’s. . . . [The finder] will receive a reward of 12 livres.”[^1] Never, arguably, had the *porte-crayon* (chalk holder) been more present to Perronneau than in its absence and more consciously tangible than in this moment of loss.[^2] Though translated above idiomatically as “to the hand of M. Perronneau,” literally, he begged for its return to “his grasp,” that he might hold it again. Perronneau, a Paris portrait painter in {% thing 'pastel' %} and in oil, was on a working tour to Bordeaux when his pencil case went missing. It was not his first trip to this thriving inland Atlantic city and port on the river Garonne in the southwestern province of Guyenne and Gascony. The port was second only to Nantes in the volume and importance of its trade in sugar, tobacco, and slaves with Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). The city had grown rapidly in the early eighteenth century, and the neighborhood between the medieval castle Trompette and Ange-Jacques Gabriel’s new Stock Exchange, where Perronneau lost his pencil case, was fashionable and home to the mansions of the city’s premier merchants. On the other side of the Exchange was the Place du Marché Royale, where Perronneau lodged; built in 1760, it was the focus of the similarly well-to-do *quartier* Saint-Pierre. The prosperity and salubriousness of the city notwithstanding, Perronneau was nevertheless perhaps more vulnerable to misadventure away from home, and certainly more sensitive to the pain of it.
Although highly conventionalized forms of writing, lost-property ads are nevertheless first-person narratives. In this sense, they resemble the personal avowals of possession found in letters, {% thing 'journals' %}, and holograph {% thing 'wills' %}, rather than public statements of ownership made by notaries and dealers in inventories and sale catalogs. However, in contrast to Charles-Nicolas Cochin’s invocation of the ideal {% thing 'handkerchief' %} in his letters to a friend, Perronneau’s description is *d’après nature*, an immediate, detailed account of the salient features of that which was and was already his. Unlike Jean-Baptiste Massé’s {% thing 'will' %}, it frames his thing in a narrative of dispossession rather than voluntary separation or giving. He tells where and when he lost it but reveals nothing of the object’s biography and how the *porte-crayon* came to be his. A paradoxical genre, the lost-property ad combines anguished expression of displaced ownership with objective description of surface appearance. To reconnect the two, we first need to know more about this thing before, in a second move, reconstructing its value via the text’s discourse of possession and the particular circumstances of Perronneau’s life.
@@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ According to Patrick Rocca and Françoise Launay, silver drawing instruments wer
Inherently valuable, Perronneau’s set was also expertly made. “Butterfield” was Michael Butterfield, an Englishman who had moved to Paris in the mid-1660s to become, according to Anthony Turner, one of the most important scientific instrument makers in Paris in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.[^8] Inventor of the so-called Butterfield dial (a pocket sun dial) and supplier of astronomical instruments to the Royal Observatory, drawing instruments were the bread-and-butter business of his workshop ({% ref 'fig-134' %}).[^9] Since Butterfield died in 1724, Perronneau must have acquired his instruments second-hand.[^10] By contrast, the case in which he kept them was very likely new. Shagreen, or fish leather, scraped and dyed to reveal its characteristically dotted dermal pattern, only became fashionable in the 1750s, when developed and marketed by the Paris glover Jean-Claude Galluchat.[^11] Shagreen was pretty but valued also for its practicality. Tougher than animal leather and waterproof, it provided an ideal outer skin for containers of all kinds. Perronneau’s green speckled case may have been stock, but it was more likely bespoke because his instruments were few and the set incomplete; even the smallest sets included a ruler.[^12] In sum, though drawing sets were standardized commodities by the end of the seventeenth century, there was little that was standard about Perronneau’s.
-{% figure 'fig-134' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-134' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
The painter put a price on its return. What did 12 livres represent? Not the cost of replacement, to judge by the silver drawing sets made and sold by the Paris instrument maker Jacques Canivet on the Quai de l’École. The stock inventoried at his death in 1773 included sets of silver drawing instruments valued at half the price of Perronneau’s reward.[^13] Not its exchange value either, since used goods generally sold for less than new.[^14] What 12 livres represented had less to do with the market than with the material form of the currency. Rewards were paid in cash, and values were therefore determined by the denominations of coin. Twelve livres represented the account value of a demi-louis, the smallest of the gold coins in circulation in the eighteenth century. According to the *Affiches*, it potentially bought back pocketbooks, seals, walking sticks, and handbags.[^15] If the reward appears roughly commensurate with the value of things lost, it is, however, an illusion because, as Jonathan Lamb points out, “reward” is by definition excessive.[^16] Loss does not alienate property, and buying it back is a legal and commercial nonsense since ownership is not transferred. The value of the reward Perronneau promised the one who returned his pencil case thus indexed not its exchange value but the feelings he had for his drawing instruments, their sentimental value, and the desire he had for their restoration that he might enjoy holding them once again.
diff --git a/content/things/quill.md b/content/things/quill.md
index 2ef6723..b11054b 100644
--- a/content/things/quill.md
+++ b/content/things/quill.md
@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ owner:
- first_name: Étienne-Maurice
last_name: Falconet
years: 1716–91
+ sort_years: 1716–1791
type: [Commodity, Tool]
theme: [Friendship, Identity]
material: [Animal | Feather, Synthetic Materials | Ink, Synthetic Materials | Paper]
@@ -24,13 +25,13 @@ Why chose the sculptor Étienne-Maurice Falconet’s quill out of all the thousa
Falconet started writing around 1760. The lecture on sculpture he gave at the Académie in June 1760 was published as a pamphlet the following year.[^12] Five years later, in December 1765, it was republished in edited form as articles in the *Encyclopédie*, cementing both Falconet’s membership of the *philosophes*’ clan and his friendship with Denis Diderot.[^13] In the same month, Falconet and Diderot began an exchange of philosophical letters on the subject of posterity.[^14] Louis-Michel Van Loo’s portrait of Diderot ({% ref 'fig-137' %}), completed in 1767, is perhaps not coincidentally an epistolary one. Diderot sits at his desk replying to letters (recognizable among the papers by their characteristic folds),[^15] fictions, perhaps, of those missives actually sent by Falconet from Saint Petersburg in February and April that year.[^16] The portrait depicts not just letter writing; it also describes the paraphernalia necessary to it: ink, sealing wax, bell to summon the messenger, and, of course, (Diderot’s) pen.
-{% figure 'fig-137' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-137' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Thin bodied and black tongued, it appears to have submitted unreservedly to the flaying, cropping, lopping, picking, and splitting by which, as Jonathan Swift mockingly described, the gracefully fringed feather was brutally reduced to a writing implement.[^17] The goose’s reality, her personal stories of flight and float invoked in Buffon’s “eulogy,” were voided in Van Loo’s visual record. The once sensuous and multipurpose feather had been turned, by the “dutching” of industry[^18] and the cut of the user’s penknife, into a single-purpose thing, interchangeable with others of its kind: Van Loo depicted a second, virgin quill waiting on Diderot’s silver inkstand, ready should the first fur and fail to force forth his words. The implement of the professional writer is, as Van Loo depicts it, pure functionality.[^19] It lacks substance, body: a short white line tapering into translucency, it points to the black lines of writing and draws attention not to itself but to the ink held in reserve at its point for imminent notation.[^20]
It is tempting to paint a mirror image: Falconet sitting, writing at a desk at his house, Rue d’Anjou, in the northwest of Paris, diagonally opposite Diderot at his apartment, Rue Taranne, in the southeast of the city. Falconet reading letters and writing replies at one of the two desks listed in the inventory of his furniture drawn up in August 1766, shortly before his departure to Saint Petersburg.[^21] Falconet pressing Diderot to respond to his arguments, not selectively but point for point, and drafting his own replies, apparently, in between the lines Diderot had written to him.[^22] But this effort at dialogue notwithstanding, Falconet felt outmatched by Diderot’s literariness.[^23] In one of his letters he lamented the “dryness” and the “heaviness” of his own hand.[^24] Though it was his style not his handwriting, his phrasing not his pen, to which Falconet was ostensibly referring, fluidity and lightness—that is, the binary opposites of heavy and dry—were the very qualities that writing masters extolled in a good pen and a good hand, and that Van Loo attributed to Diderot: the point of Diderot’s pen hovers above the letter paper momentarily paused in flow.[^25]
-In Diderot’s view, Falconet’s writing was not heavy in the sense of crabbed, awkward or clumsy, but he did concur that Falconet landed points like blows. With some admiration he noted, “You turn with the wind, you make arrows from any wood. . . .Sometimes, facing forward, you lose your arrow with force; sometimes appearing to run away, you turn your bow back.”[^26] Diderot’s arrow metaphor draws on “graphien,” the Greek word meaning “to write,” or literally to pierce, score, or inscribe a surface. It confirms, rather than contradicts, Falconet’s perception of his writing as weighty, even penetrative, an intermittent jabbing characterized by lifts of the hand rather than fluid joins between marks. Diderot observed that Falconet’s writing was incoherent, the points scattered instead of arranged in constructive argument or pleasing digression.[^27]
+In Diderot’s view, Falconet’s writing was not heavy in the sense of crabbed, awkward or clumsy, but he did concur that Falconet landed points like blows. With some admiration he noted, “You turn with the wind, you make arrows from any wood. . . .Sometimes, facing forward, you lose your arrow with force; sometimes appearing to run away, you turn your bow back.”[^26] Diderot’s arrow metaphor draws on “graphien,” the Greek word meaning “to write,” or literally to pierce, score, or inscribe a surface. It confirms, rather than contradicts, Falconet’s perception of his writing as weighty, even penetrative, an intermittent jabbing characterized by lifts of the hand rather than fluid joins between marks. Diderot observed that Falconet’s writing was incoherent, the points scattered instead of arranged in constructive argument or pleasing digression.[^27]
In an earlier letter, Falconet had named his talent “Pegasus,”[^28] after the divine winged horse of Greek mythology whose attributes of boldness and grace were commonly confounded with those of the genius writer. Falconet was being ironic. “My Pegasus,” he confided to Diderot, “is not bold.” He was “solid,” a “carthorse” (*lourdier*), who, rather than deviating from the common track in Pegasus-like leaps of imagination, traveled “straight” and arrived at his mark by right reason.[^29] Like the self-deprecating description of his writing hand, the target of Falconet’s irony was himself, not the metaphor. Falconet set great store by his reason and by his historical and technical knowledge, resources with which he fully intended to win the debate with Diderot. Nevertheless, Pegasus stands for all that he found other and alluring in the pen.
@@ -110,7 +111,7 @@ This is not to say that Falconet aspired to the status of man of letters. On the
[^35]: Buffon, *Histoire naturelle*, s.v. “Cheval,” 4:174–77, 197. See Falconet’s extended critique of Pliny the naturalist by comparison to Buffon in *Traduction des XXXIVe, XXXVe, et XXXVIe livres de Pline*, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Monnier, 1773), 2:33–45.
-[^36]: Letter X and Letter XIX, in Benot, *Le pour et le contre*, 135, 212. See also Falconet, *Réflexions sur la sculpture*, “Avertissement”; *Traduction* *de* . . .*Pline*, 2:109; and Weinshenker, *Falconet*, 58–82. Falconet was contributing to a broader quarrel between artists and men of letters on who had the better claim to judge art. See Stéphane Peltier, “‘Les Misotechnites aux enfers,’ ou l’imposture de la critique selon Charles-Nicolas Cochin,” in *L’Invention de la critique de l’art*, ed. Pierre-Henry Frange and Jean-Marc Poinsot (Rennes: Presses Universaires de Rennes, 2002), 107–20.
+[^36]: Letter X and Letter XIX, in Benot, *Le pour et le contre*, 135, 212. See also Falconet, *Réflexions sur la sculpture*, “Avertissement”; *Traduction* *de* . . .*Pline*, 2:109; and Weinshenker, *Falconet*, 58–82. Falconet was contributing to a broader quarrel between artists and men of letters on who had the better claim to judge art. See Stéphane Peltier, “‘Les Misotechnites aux enfers,’ ou l’imposture de la critique selon Charles-Nicolas Cochin,” in *L’Invention de la critique de l’art*, ed. Pierre-Henry Frange and Jean-Marc Poinsot (Rennes: Presses Universaires de Rennes, 2002), 107–20.
[^37]: See Letters XV, XVII, XIX, in Benot, *Le pour et le contre*, in which Falconet sets the writings of the ancients, notably Pliny, against critique and example.
diff --git a/content/things/red-lake.md b/content/things/red-lake.md
index a555f9b..b1b1f69 100644
--- a/content/things/red-lake.md
+++ b/content/things/red-lake.md
@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@ owner:
last_name: Duplessis
years: 1725–1802
type: [Tool]
-theme: [Making, Studio]
+theme: [Invention, Making, Studio]
material: [Plant Matter, Synthetic Materials | Paint/Pigment]
mentions: [palette]
contributor:
diff --git a/content/things/relic.md b/content/things/relic.md
index b4005f2..456a728 100644
--- a/content/things/relic.md
+++ b/content/things/relic.md
@@ -8,8 +8,8 @@ owner:
- first_name: Hyacinthe
last_name: Rigaud
years: 1659–1743
-type: [Apparel, Commodity, Companion, Container, Gift, Heirloom, Ritual Thing, Symbolic Thing]
-theme: [Devotional Thing, Family, Luxury, Religion]
+type: [Apparel, Commodity, Companion, Container, Devotional Thing, Gift, Heirloom, Ritual Thing, Symbolic Thing]
+theme: [Family, Luxury, Religion]
material: [Metal | Gold/Gilding, Plant Matter | Wood]
mentions: [will, watch, handkerchief, almanac]
contributor:
@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ Yet the fact that an ordinary individual like Rigaud could *own* a relic, as tho
Aside from Rigaud’s revelation about wearing his relic, however, there is little to indicate precisely how he used it in his devotional life. Certainly there were particular feasts throughout the liturgical calendar in which Christ’s cross became a focus of veneration, not least Good Friday, the feast of Christ’s crucifixion, which was marked by an adoration of the Cross. There were also special feasts devoted to the True Cross, such as the Invention of the Cross, celebrated on 3 May, and the Exaltation of the Cross, celebrated on 14 September (both of them listed annually in the royal {% thing 'almanac' %}). But given its constant presence around his neck, Rigaud’s relic likely featured much more frequently in the artist’s private religious practices, which, based on the other items in his home, probably took place in his bedroom. According to his after-death inventory, all the objects in this room served a devotional purpose. Hanging on the wall, there was a small painting of the *Virgin and Child*, and a framed crucifix mounted on black velvet. Along with these, Rigaud also kept another crucifix: a gilded copper figure of Christ, mounted on a wooden cross, “with neither stand nor frame.”[^12] Comparable from its description to the handheld crucifix in Jean Restout’s portrait of the Jansenist Abbé Tournus ({% ref 'fig-139' %}), this was an object, like the relic pendant, intended for personal devotions and in particular for meditations on Christ’s suffering. Rigaud may indeed have used both objects together—the sculptural representation of the cross and the actual fragment of it—signifier and signified united, held in different hands, each intensifying the spiritual resonance of the other and creating a powerful material vehicle for daily prayers and devotional rites.
-{% figure 'fig-139' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-139' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Retrieving a sense of artists’ inner spiritual lives is an elusive challenge with a dearth of textual sources to explore them. But as Rigaud’s relic suggests, their material possessions can often fill in the gaps. Every artist at the Académie, according to the institution’s statutes, was supposed to be a professed Catholic (unless a foreigner granted exception by the king), and it is clear from Rigaud’s will that he dutifully performed the religious responsibilities of a devout believer, leaving money to his parish church for the poor, and requesting a requiem mass to be sung for the repose of his soul.[^13] But in a less public sense, the objects in his home grant insights into Rigaud’s more personal religious inclinations. His books, such as Louis-Isaac Lemaistre de Sacy’s translation of the Bible (1667–96) and Nicolas Letourneux’s *Année chrétienne* (1686), point compellingly to sympathies with Jansenism, a controversial doctrinal thread considered heretical in the Catholic Church, which nevertheless became a strong current of belief in France and especially in Paris.[^14] Among his artistic colleagues, Rigaud was not alone in sharing these theological inclinations. While declarations of Jansenist tendencies were seldom made overtly, many artists of the Académie were connected with the movement, most prominently the history painters Philippe and Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne, Jean Restout, and the engraver Charles-Nicolas Cochin.[^15] A doctrinal interest in Jansenism would certainly chime with Rigaud’s possession of the relic and his crucifixes, and with their Christocentric focus and their devotional functionality. In the absence of writings articulating his beliefs, contentious or otherwise, the material things in Rigaud’s life thus offer a tantalizing glimpse of the painter’s religiosity, in terms of both his ideas and their embodied practices: a sense of the theological tenets underlying his faith, and the ritual acts he may have performed to fulfil them. {% contributors context=pageContributors format='symbol' %}
diff --git a/content/things/robe-de-chambre.md b/content/things/robe-de-chambre.md
index 4587963..e26134e 100644
--- a/content/things/robe-de-chambre.md
+++ b/content/things/robe-de-chambre.md
@@ -48,7 +48,7 @@ At the time Louis-Michel painted his self-portraits, he was seeking appointment
diff --git a/content/things/shell.md b/content/things/shell.md
index c1b41aa..0a11b12 100644
--- a/content/things/shell.md
+++ b/content/things/shell.md
@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ More a “phase” than a property of things, commodity or exchange value was, a
Like Rémy, modern scholars contrast the auction and the *cabinet*, identifying the first with the commodity and the second with the gift. One of Boucher’s pupils recorded the pleasure and excitement his master experienced on receipt of a “gift” of minerals.[^18] Boucher “was delighted like a child,” apparently. That pleasure was, however, more calculating than the simile allows. Boucher reserved only two items from the consignment for his own collection; he set the rest aside as swaps. Auctions accentuated the commodity dimension of objects but it was by no means absent from shells in the *cabinet*. Boucher’s swaps functioned not unlike shells in the so-called cowrie zone of West Africa ({% ref 'fig-143' %}), a medium of exchange in the eighteenth-century slave trade, or wampum beads (made from the quahog clam shell) in North America, used in the same period by European coastal settlers to trade with the Iroquois, that is to say, they functioned *like* money, but as a limited, not a generalized, medium of exchange.[^19] To argue thus that Boucher sometimes mobilized the abstract exchange value of his natural things as the means of acquiring others is not to imply that he was insensible to their concrete form. Boucher’s thirty-five cowries (*porcelaines*) were, according to Rémy, each unique in size (“very big” to “small”), shape (“egg-shaped,” “shuttle-like,” “hump-backed,” etc.), color (“olive,” “mole,” “mouse gray,” “snow white,” etc.), and surface pattern (“tiger-skin,” “mottled,” etc.), each individual therefore capable of accumulating histories of where it had been, to whom it had belonged, to what purpose it had served. Each was the material object of Boucher’s desire.[^20] However, in the catalog, taxonomy serves to index value in lieu of history and provenance. Just one of Boucher’s cowries is credited with an origin: “from Panama.” Stripped in the discourse and practices of collecting and trade of their cultural fastenings, of traces of the social relations that constituted them as valuables or commodities, and often even of geographical knowledge, the shell’s exterior sign of visuality becomes generic glitter.[^21] Far from the *cabinet* having been a haven from trade, it was a place of greater market risk.
-{% figure 'fig-143' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-143' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
After his death, Boucher’s collection was sold at auction. The sum raised, 70 percent of the value of his estate, represented the bulk of the inheritance later divided among Boucher’s heirs.[^22] There had been no inventory, a remarkable omission considering the value of the estate and the number of parts into which it was to be divided. That omission is perhaps explained by the fact that Boucher had no landed property, no *rentes*, no securities, only *meubles* (movable property, things), the estimation and realization of the value of which required an expert and a dealer, but not a notary. That he should have sought to protect his fortune by collecting, rather than investing, suggests that although scientifically the shells, corals, and minerals were, as Pomian notes, comparatively “young”—had yet to earn themselves settled names and secure taxonomic classification—they were commercially mature in the sense that their exchange-value was known and relatively stable. In general, the arc of Boucher’s collecting, from modest beginnings in the early 1740s to important purchases in 1760s, mirrors the steady upward trajectory in shell values.[^23] To be more precise, the prices fetched indicate a marked correlation between size and price. His many spiny bivalves fetched sums between 9 and 18 livres, with a concentration at 12 to 15 livres.[^24] Notwithstanding Rémy’s prefatory claim that the painter was willful and impulsive, unable to deny himself the least thing beautiful, Boucher was not reckless. He calculated carefully and shrewdly.[^25] The 120,000 livres realized by his sale left his widow and children comfortable.
@@ -38,19 +38,23 @@ Such contemporary response to Boucher’s collection dates from the period after
Le Bret and Mniszech faulted Boucher’s collecting not because they detected in it conspicuous imitation of signs of noble rank but because they thought they recognized simple consumerism: a gross bourgeois accumulation of stuff like so much stock or a commodity of natural history objects. Visitors were offered neither a narrative of God’s creation nor a lesson in nature’s wondrous order, just the mundane store of Boucher’s possessions, all show and no tell. Collecting was traditionally justified in the case of artists by use. And for collecting to serve art it must precede and inspire creation, not succeed it and reward artistic labor. In a very literal sense, shells provided that support to genius ({% ref 'fig-144' %}). They were his everyday objects of the studio, his tools for holding water-based paints, their white, nacreous interiors, allowing the painter to anticipate the effect of the pigment on paper.[^34]
-{% figure 'fig-144' 'is-indented-2x' %}
+{% figure 'fig-144' 'is-indented-2x is-pdf-float-top' %}
In criticizing Boucher, Lempereur remarked the contrast in the lives and manners of Boucher and Bouchardon.[^35] According to François Basan, Bouchardon’s collection was a spur to emulation.[^36] The sculptor had bought pictures, drawings, books, and prints in order to succeed better in the greatness of his art. Boucher bought only for pleasure. Bouchardon’s virtue and Boucher’s vice is not explained by subject matter; the difference lies, rather. in ordering and arrangement. Certainly Bouchardon’s collection consisted predominantly in items directly connected to sculpture (see {% thing 'model' %}), but the sculptor also owned shells: there were four on the marble chimneypiece in his salon, along with a garniture of porcelain.[^37] In the studio, he had copies of the entomologist Maria Sibylla Marian’s publications, vellums by botanist Nicolas Robert, and a copy of the 1711 edition of Rumphius’s *Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet.*[^38] Bouchardon’s objects did not form a collection as such, insofar as they were not displayed for or visited by others. Boucher’s, on the other hand, were conspicuously staged. Sixteen glass-topped tables housed some of the shells; others were sheltered in a *coquiller* made by the *ébéniste* François Oeben and the *bronzier* Philippe Caffieri, and yet more were displayed under glass bells.[^39] Jessica Priebe has suggested that in Boucher’s frontispiece for Edmé Gersaint’s 1736 natural history sale we see something of the effect later created at the Louvre ({% ref 'fig-145' %}).[^40] The “mélanges,” or lots of mixed specimens in Boucher’s sale, were disposed, she argues, to form exactly this kind of confection of shells, corals, and sponges loosely piled around a vertical axis.
However, the interlacing of amateur and professional natural history, of luxury and learning, of the aesthetic and the scientific that such displays secured and celebrated in the 1740s was beginning to come undone by the 1760s. “Mixture” in Rémy’s catalog of Savalette de Buchelay’s collection qualifies not the display but denotes instead the relation of the mineral specimens to the jars of chemical preparations arising from them.[^41] Thus color, the distinguishing effect of Boucher’s *cabinet* by grace of scope and visual surprise,[^42] was the utility of Savalette’s: copper produced copper acetate or verdigris, iron generated the hydrated oxides red and yellow ochre, ferrous ferro-cyanide salts precipitated Prussian blue, from lead came the compound lead carbonate or flake white, and from mercury, apparently, orpiment—red, yellow, and orange.[^43] Meanwhile, in the case of shells, long before Rémy sharpened his {% thing 'quill' %} to describe Boucher’s *cabinet* in the terms in which it had been formed, those of exterior appearance—shape, color, pattern, and surface texture—other amateurs, such as Gabriel Bernard des Rieux, had begun to acknowledge the importance of the animal inside. Des Rieux had acquired anatomical preparations of shellfish by the scientist and academician Jean Méry to exhibit alongside his shells, and it was these, Dézallier d’Argenville admitted, that constituted proof that shells were not entirely “without purpose” (“*inutiles*”).[^44]
+
+
{% figure 'fig-145' 'is-paired' %}
{% figure 'fig-146' 'is-paired' %}
-In 1757 Michel Adanson published a powerful critique of the aesthetic that informed contemporary collection and display of shells: “this very beauty,” he wrote, “which attracts the eye to shells, has become a huge obstacle to the progress of science. . . . Up until now, molluscs have only been appreciated for their dress, their exterior envelope, the shell, and not the creatures that live inside them.”[^45] The result was a profound misunderstanding of the order of this branch of nature, which Adanson proposed to rectify with the help of illustration by the academician Marie-Thérèse Reboul-Vien ({% ref 'fig-146' %}). Drawing could enter the shell by section, could reinstate the lost animal. Bouchardon’s preference for illustrated books over specimens, and his own practice of drawing animals from life ({% ref 'fig-147' %}), bore witness to the kind of productive—and not consumerist—engagement with knowledge that was deemed proper to the artist.[^46]
+
+
+In 1757 Michel Adanson published a powerful critique of the aesthetic that informed contemporary collection and display of shells: “this very beauty,” he wrote, “which attracts the eye to shells, has become a huge obstacle to the progress of science. . . . Up until now, molluscs have only been appreciated for their dress, their exterior envelope, the shell, and not the creatures that live inside them.”[^45] The result was a profound misunderstanding of the order of this branch of nature, which Adanson proposed to rectify with the help of illustration by the academician Marie-Thérèse Reboul-Vien ({% ref 'fig-146' %}). Drawing could enter the shell by section, could reinstate the lost animal. Bouchardon’s preference for illustrated books over specimens, and his own practice of drawing animals from life ({% ref 'fig-147' %}), bore witness to the kind of productive—and not consumerist—engagement with knowledge that was deemed proper to the artist.[^46]
-{% figure 'fig-147' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-147' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Boucher’s shells may or may not have informed his artistic practice. Generic and specific shelly objects certainly feature in many of his designs for fountains, urns, and other decorative objects in the 1730s and 1740s, but their forms owe at least as much to ornament as to nature. Moreover, on the evidence of Boucher’s sale, the style denoted by shells, the *rocaille*, was not conspicuously present at his Louvre interior. The keynote there was struck by minerals, not shells: the gilt bronze of Caffieri’s “antique” lights, the marble tops of classic cabinets and consoles. It was, perhaps, the disconnection between Boucher’s art and his things that led Mniszech to describe his *cabinet* as a shop, as if, that is, the objects had no reason for permanent residence. They were “arranged only to catch the eye” and offered “no further thought,” for either the visitor or the artist.[^47] The themes of superfluity, appearance, and disorder encountered in the critique of amateur conchology were ones also present in the luxury debate at the midcentury.[^48] {% contributors context=pageContributors format='symbol' %}
@@ -128,7 +132,7 @@ Boucher’s shells may or may not have informed his artistic practice. Generic a
[^37]: François Boucher, “Inventaire après décès,” {% abbr 'AN' %}, {% abbr 'MC' %}/ET/LXXVI/384, 18 August 1762.
-[^38]: {% abbr 'AN' %}, {% abbr 'MC' %}/ET/LXXXVI/384, 18 August 1762; and Basan, *Catalogue . . . Bouchardon*, lots 163–64, 169, 171.
+[^38]: {% abbr 'AN' %}, {% abbr 'MC' %}/ET/LXXXVI/384, 18 August 1762; and Basan, *Catalogue . . . Bouchardon*, lots 163–64, 169, 171.
[^39]: See Rosemarie Stratmann-Dohler, *Jean-François Oeben, 1721–1763* (Paris: Amateur, 2002), 38, 134. For specimens under glass, see Rémy, *Catalogue Boucher*, lots 1716, 1785.
diff --git a/content/things/sketchbook.md b/content/things/sketchbook.md
index 075feb5..0109568 100644
--- a/content/things/sketchbook.md
+++ b/content/things/sketchbook.md
@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ contributor:
**Jean-Michel Moreau’s sketchbook does not really look like a sketchbook** ({% ref 'fig-148' %}).[^1] A small, leather-bound, hard-covered volume, with decorative tooling and gilding, and even its own title—“ETU/DES” (studies)—inscribed in a panel on the spine, Moreau’s sketchbook appears far more like a {% thing 'book' %} that might be at home on a shelf amid plays, poetry, treatises, and histories. More commonly in the eighteenth century, artists’ sketchbooks took the form of *carnets*, a kind of notebook (not unlike Johann Georg Wille’s {% thing 'journal' %} (see {% ref 'fig-086' %}), though with different paper) with fairly workaday binding that could be purchased from stationers’ shops or suppliers of artists’ materials. Jacques-Louis David, for instance, tended to shop for his sketchbooks near the Louvre, buying at least one from a color merchant on Rue du Coq Saint-Honoré and another from a paper merchant on Rue des Prêtres Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois.[^2] By contrast, Moreau’s sketchbook was an object that seemed to owe its materiality to the largely Left Bank world of bookbinders and booksellers, in which Moreau had been immersed since 1765, when he married the niece of a bookseller and printer.[^3] From the outside, Moreau’s sketchbook thus pulls us into the public spaces of the Paris book trade. But on the inside, its drawings evoke a far more private sphere of personal encounters and intimate sociability. Made in a period when the lines between professional and domestic were less distinctly drawn, this was a thing that embodied and navigated those mutable boundaries.
-{% figure 'fig-148' %}
+{% figure 'fig-148' 'is-pdf-float-top' %}
Moreau’s choice of word for the contents of his book, reiterated again in handwriting on the flyleaf (“Etudes de M. Moreau”), is also different from that selected by David or Hubert Robert, who used croquis (quick sketches) to describe the contents of their sketchbooks.[^4] One such *carnet*, kept by Robert in Rome, contains page after page of monuments, architectural spaces, antiquities, and figures—some hasty, some partial, some crammed together on shared sheets. Perhaps exactly what we might imagine an artist’s sketchbook to resemble, Robert’s *carnet* served as something between an album, storing images for reuse in future artworks (like the bound books of figure studies kept by Antoine Watteau to populate his fêtes galantes), and a travelogue, recording the encounters and experiences of his European voyage.[^5] Moreau’s sketchbook, meanwhile, contained a record of more local travels through the homes and spaces he frequented in Paris—salons, sitting rooms, parlors, studios, workshops, churches, and very occasionally a street or park. The drawings he made in these spaces were not sketches of sites but carefully composed studies of people, far more consistent in their form and subject matter than Robert’s random croquis, but far more ambiguous in their purpose than Watteau’s albums.
@@ -38,7 +38,7 @@ As a material thing and a used thing, Moreau’s sketchbook sits somewhere in be
diff --git a/content/things/snuffbox.md b/content/things/snuffbox.md
index 45079e1..5004983 100644
--- a/content/things/snuffbox.md
+++ b/content/things/snuffbox.md
@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ contributor:
**The still-life painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry took snuff.** The evidence for his habit is circumstantial. In the portrait of the artist painted by Jean-Baptiste Perronneau in 1753 ({% ref 'fig-152' %}), a red, white, and blue striped {% thing 'handkerchief' %} blooms from the sitter’s unbuttoned pocket. It is the kind of large, dark-colored utilitarian handkerchief that was known as a *mouchoir de tabac*, or snuff napkin (see {% ref 'fig-070' %}). The painted handkerchief therefore implies the presence of a snuffbox, if not in the same pocket then perhaps in the pocket of his white silk under-waistcoat, closer to the body for safer keeping. It could have been any one of the twenty different snuffboxes inventoried two years later at Oudry’s lodgings at the Galerie du Louvre, Rue des Orties.[^1] Given the studio context of the portrait’s fiction and the silhouette of the dog outlined in white on the canvas ready for work, the gold-lined, lacquered box (*boëte de vernis*) listed in the inventory and described as decorated on all sides with animals and hunting scenes, “painted by the late Mr. Oudry,” would have been particularly appropriate. It is this lost thing that our book aims to know better in order to understand how and why a snuffbox became an artist’s thing in the eighteenth century, precious (valued at 240 livres in the inventory) and doubly personal to Oudry for having been made for and, in part, by him.
-{% figure 'fig-152' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-152' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Inventory and portrait point to contexts for the interpretation of Oudry’s snuffbox. The dominant piece of case furniture inventoried in Oudry’s mezzanine *cabinet*, where the snuffboxes were found, was an “English” oak bureau-bookcase with multiple drawers and compartments in which the snuffbox was possibly kept when not on his person.[^2] Pockets and drawers have this in common: in them things are recessed and removed from view. In other ways, however, drawers and pockets differ. The sequestered world of the drawer created by new techniques of cabinetmaking that transformed old forms of case furniture like the coffer into new varieties, such as the chest of drawers and the bureau, reorganized domestic belongings by imposing on them systems of classification and valuation detached from use.[^3] Snuffboxes came under the category of *bijoux,* or jewels. As such, they were grouped with other luxuries, such as {% thing 'watches' %}, and were separated from clothes, on the one hand, and from papers and writing equipment (the things typically brought to order by the desk), on the other.[^4] In the space of the desk, each of Oudry’s snuffboxes would have assumed an identity in relation to all the others: as the round, oval, square, or oblong box; as the gold, turtle-shell, wood, lacquer, or porcelain box; as the snuffbox covered in shagreen, or decorated with rhinestone; as the portrait box, or the box with the medal on its lid, struck to commemorate the marriage in 1745 of the dauphin to the infanta of Spain.[^5] Their functionality was secondary to their variety—variety fostered by expansion of the overseas trade in tobacco. By the 1740s, the volume and value of France’s importation of Virginian tobacco via Britain exceeded that of every other nation.[^6] Completely indigenized as a commodity by travel literature, natural history texts, newspaper articles, and consumer literature, tobacco was, by 1700, poised to spread as a consumer item to all social classes and to stimulate in turn growth and diversity in the snuffbox.[^7]
diff --git a/content/things/sword.md b/content/things/sword.md
index bc17bf7..d5544e2 100644
--- a/content/things/sword.md
+++ b/content/things/sword.md
@@ -20,11 +20,11 @@ contributor:
Lemoyne’s sword no longer survives, but because of the task the painter gave it in those final minutes of his life, the object left an archival trace in a series of police reports.[^2] It makes its most detailed appearance in the police *commissaire*’s account of the crime scene (suicide still being a crime in eighteenth-century France), where his methodical description of the sword in situ gives a vivid sense of the last act it performed for its owner. Upon entering Lemoyne’s bedroom, the *commissaire* described encountering the painter’s blood-soaked body lying in the doorway, and then, casting his eye around the room, he noted first “the brown {% thing 'wig' %} of the deceased” flung on the floor near a {% thing 'table' %}, under which he then observed “the deceased’s sword,” where it had fallen after the deadly ordeal was over. Along with suggesting its recent actions, the report also indicated some of the sword’s physical characteristics, distinguishing it as “an *olinde* with guard and grip of gilt steel,” which, the *commissaire* noted with grisly accuracy, was at that point “almost entirely covered in blood, as was its naked blade.”[^3]
-{% figure 'fig-160' %}
+{% figure 'fig-160' 'is-pdf-float-top' %}
From the few lines describing Lemoyne’s sword in the police reports it is possible to extract a substantial amount of information. First, not surprisingly, we discover that Lemoyne’s sword was an *épée* or smallsword (similar to that in {% ref 'fig-160' %}), a light sword designed for dueling and thrusting and that was the most prevalent bladed weapon in eighteenth-century France. Next, more specifically, the *commissaire* provides some details about the sword’s two main parts: the hilt and the blade. The hilt of an *épée* was composed of several elements (guard, grip, and pommel) and was conventionally the most decorated area of the sword. Worn prominently at the front of the body (as modeled by Jean-Jacques Caffieri in his portrait; see {% ref 'fig-175' %}), the hilt could be an eminently fashionable commodity, made from precious metals by an *orfèvre* (goldsmith) and signifying wealth and status like other accessories (jewelry, shoe buckles, {% thing 'watches' %}, etc.). Lemoyne’s hilt, however, made from gilt steel rather than gold, was not such a high-end item and had likely been made by and acquired from a *fourbisseur* (swordsmith). The blade, meanwhile, was top of the line. The *commissaire* describes it as an “*olinde*,” a francophone corruption of the German town of Solingen (Solingue in French), which had a reputation for producing the finest-quality blades in Europe. (The sword in fig. 160 is also a Solingen blade mounted on a French hilt). The blade of Lemoyne’s sword features again in the autopsy report, written by the police surgeon, who observed that the cadaver’s wounds appeared to have been inflicted by a “*trois carré*” blade.[^4] This triangular-shaped blade—flat on one side and with two faces on the other, like those at the bottom of a plate from the *Encyplopédie* ({% ref 'fig-161' %})—was the lightest and swiftest of the regular blade types. Thus, on the scale from lethal weapon to luxurious accessory, Lemoyne’s sword—with its top-quality blade on a mid-range hilt—certainly came closer to the weapon side. While it is extremely unlikely that Lemoyne purchased his *épée* with any real intent to kill (himself or anyone else), the sword was, nevertheless, ideally suited to the deadly task it was given.
-{% figure 'fig-161' 'is-indented-2x' %}
+{% figure 'fig-161' 'is-indented-2x is-pdf-float-top' %}
Yet as lethal as Lemoyne’s sword was as a weapon, it was not an efficient tool for suicide. An *épée* was, after all, designed for dueling. Optimized to keep an opponent at a distance, the smallsword’s blade was intentionally longer than a human arm, making it a difficult instrument with which to self-inflict a stab wound. As a method of suicide, the sword therefore resulted in a death that was both extremely violent and logistically onerous, as Lemoyne repeatedly engineered the blade to pierce his body nine times—three times into his throat, then six times into his chest around and through his heart (five with enough vigor to drive right through his torso).[^5] While Lemoyne’s actions were, by this point, far from rational, the painful and protracted manner of his death calls into question the significance of the sword as the object chosen for the task. What did Lemoyne’s sword mean to its owner in life that he would select it as the instrument of his death?
diff --git a/content/things/table.md b/content/things/table.md
index efa9aa8..3978423 100644
--- a/content/things/table.md
+++ b/content/things/table.md
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ owner:
- first_name: Jacques-Louis
last_name: David
years: 1748–1825
-type: [Furniture, Prop, Symbolic Thing]
+type: [Furniture, Heirloom, Prop, Symbolic Thing]
theme: [Antiquity, Family, Louvre, Making, Studio]
material: [Metal | Bronze, Metal | Gold/Gilding, Plant Matter | Wood]
mentions: [palette, modeling stand, handkerchief, harpsichord, relic, key, mannequin, sketchbook, bed, camera obscura]
@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ As an aesthetic object, David’s table was a round mahogany pedestal table, dec
David’s table was not, however, designed with the explicit intent of revolutionizing aesthetic taste. Rather, it was an object purpose built for pictorial composition—an accessory for a painting—not unlike the {% thing 'mannequins' %}, armor, and faux-marble columns kept in Jean-Baptiste Le Prince’s studio for constructing his scenes. David began planning *Brutus* around 1785, laboring (as was his practice) over the setting, distribution of objects, and pose of figures.[^6] Through a series of preliminary compositional sketches, he settled on the structure of his interior—a spatial demarcation of public and private marked by fabric partitions and domestic furniture ({% ref 'fig-165' %}).[^7] At this stage, the table found its position within the scene, but not its final stylistic form. David next started working through the details, experimenting with the furniture’s size, shape, and decoration. In his hunt for archaeological accuracy, David’s earliest design for the table was a spindlier three-legged affair, taken from a {% thing 'sketchbook' %} probably made in Rome (Paris, Musée du Louvre, album 11, folio 21), and rehearsed in the Getty drawing. But in the end he found his model in an engraving of antiquities in the abbé de Saint-Non’s *Voyage pittoresque de Naples et de Sicile*.[^8] David sketched the table ({% ref 'fig-166' %}) and Jacob created it, the two working together to create a “modern pastiche” (as Gonzalez-Palacios puts it) of classical Rome.[^9]
-{% figure 'fig-165' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-165' 'is-pdf-float-top' %}
David and Jacob worked successfully to create several such pieces of “stage” furniture, including the {% thing 'bed' %} upon which Madame Récamier would later recline in her portrait (1800, Paris, Musée du Louvre). But while Récamier’s bed is almost as central to the composition as the sitter herself, what is perplexing about the table is the minimal role it eventually played. Indeed, it raises more questions about David’s practice than it answers. If, for instance, it was so important for David to have a quintessentially antique table for his image of Republican Rome, why invent a modern pastiche instead of replicating an original? Having taken such time, care, and expense in the design and production of the table, why cover all but its feet with a plain red cloth? And why did David even need an actual table, given that he had already designed it in the two-dimensional form required for his composition?
diff --git a/content/things/teacup.md b/content/things/teacup.md
index ba82e12..7c65d8f 100644
--- a/content/things/teacup.md
+++ b/content/things/teacup.md
@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@ owner:
last_name: Nattier
years: 1685–1766
type: [Collectible, Commodity, Intoxicant, Tableware]
-theme: [Food and Drink, Global Commerce, Luxury, Studio]
+theme: [Food and Drink, Global Commerce, Leisure, Luxury, Studio]
material: [Metal | Silver, Mineral | Clay]
mentions: [intaglio]
contributor:
@@ -20,11 +20,11 @@ contributor:
Description of the items in the catalog of Nattier’s sale in 1763 is so summary that we can only imagine what they may have looked like: possibly Kakiemon-style ({% ref 'fig-167' %}), since it was these white-bodied Japanese wares, typically decorated with vegetal ornament in bright enamel colors, that were most admired by Western consumers and were widely copied in Europe, especially by Meissen. They were sold with the rest of Nattier’s collection, which included Oriental vases, urns, jars, potpourris, and figurines, begs the question: What were the teacups for? Did a passion for porcelain lead Nattier to collect them for themselves, or did a taste for tea entail purchase of a tea set? To put it another way, was Nattier oriented toward his teacups as a functional part of his everyday life, or as an aesthetic diversion from it? How does the answer to this question inform, moreover, our understanding of Nattier’s encounter with cultures different from his own? Finally, how might the answer also explain the conspicuous lack of visual reference to porcelain in his paintings?
-{% figure 'fig-167' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-167' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Chinese and Japanese porcelain was being imported to France in quantity. It was retailed in Paris by luxury-goods merchants (*marchands merciers*) and was sold at auction.[^2] Nattier’s first purchases were made in the early 1720s. Sometime before 1722, he bought a garniture of Japanese porcelain for one of the chimneypieces at his lodgings, on Rue de Hasard.[^3] He was admiring and acquiring Asian porcelain, we can thus note, long before his contemporary François Boucher, with whom it is today more famously connected.[^4] If the name “Nattier,” inscribed in 1756 against lot 1043—a pair of ewers with blue painted flowers—in a copy of the catalog of the duc de Tallard’s sale, refers to Jean-Marc, he was, moreover, still augmenting his collection more than thirty years later.[^5] Between these dates, the painter was appointed artist in residence to the Grand Prieur of the Order of Malta and in 1735 moved into a suite of rooms at the Temple, an enclave of houses, workshops, and shops clustered around the Grand Prieur’s palace in Paris.[^6] It was there that Nattier assembled his collection and also, perhaps, there that he was introduced to the rituals of tea. The prince de Conti, who acceded to the office of Grand Prieur in 1748, and his mistress, the salonnière Marie-Charlotte, comtesse de Boufflers, were renowned for their tea parties, depicted by Michel-Barthélemy Ollivier ({% ref 'fig-168' %}), though not in sufficient detail to be absolutely certain whether the teacups are Asian or European.
-{% figure 'fig-168' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-168' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Nattier’s encounter with Japan and China via cups and tea was mediated by institutions of trade and sociability. In the literature of the sales rooms, “Japanese” denoted not an object’s place of origin but its excellence.[^7] “Japanese” teacups were of high quality, “old Japanese” teacups of the highest. When dealers like Pierre Rémy, who cataloged the Tallard sale, or François Joullain, who auctioned Nattier’s cabinet, qualified Japanese porcelain as “old,” they were unaware that porcelain was actually a modern art in Japan, introduced from China in the seventeenth century. Age for them was a synonym of rare—rare sometimes to the point of rendering an object virtually unique.[^8] “Old Japan” was thus a name, not a narrative. No scholarly discourse on porcelain equivalent to that on the history and theory of Western art and antiquities existed outside the trade. No Pierre-Jean Mariette wrote for porcelain the like of his treatise on engraved gems (see {% thing 'intaglio' %}). History in the case of the porcelain object only began when it arrived in Europe and acquired a biography in the form of provenance.[^9]
@@ -52,7 +52,7 @@ If we have come to know Nattier’s teacups better by this microhistory of their
[^4]: See Yohan Rimaud, “Les couleurs célèstes de la terre: La collection d’objets orientaux de François Boucher,” in *Une des provinces du rococo*, 62–75.
-[^5]: Pierre Rémy and Jean-Baptiste Glomy, *Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, sculptures . . . desseins et estampes, porcelains anciennes . . .qui composent le cabinet de feu M. le duc de Tallard* (Paris: Didot, 1756) (copy at {% abbr 'INHA' %}, Paris), lot 1043. There was a copy of the sale catalog in Nattier’s library, see [Nattier], *Catalogue*, 22: lot 44.
+[^5]: Pierre Rémy and Jean-Baptiste Glomy, *Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, sculptures . . . desseins et estampes, porcelains anciennes . . .qui composent le cabinet de feu M. le duc de Tallard* (Paris: Didot, 1756) (copy at {% abbr 'INHA' %}, Paris), lot 1043. There was a copy of the sale catalog in Nattier’s library, see [Nattier], *Catalogue*, 22: lot 44.
[^6]: Renard, *Nattier*, 58.
diff --git a/content/things/umbrella.md b/content/things/umbrella.md
index 247b445..6a7361b 100644
--- a/content/things/umbrella.md
+++ b/content/things/umbrella.md
@@ -8,8 +8,8 @@ owner:
- first_name: Jacques-Philippe
last_name: Le Bas
years: 1707–83
-type: [Instrument]
-theme: [Commodity, Community, Everyday]
+type: [Commodity, Instrument]
+theme: [Community, Everyday]
material: [Plant Matter | Wood, Textile | Canvas, Textile | Silk]
mentions: [snuffbox, teacup, watch, sketchbook, carriage, dressing-up box]
contributor:
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ When Joullain does invoke the semantic value of objects as signs of distinction,
What bearing does this have on Le Bas’s umbrella? It suggests that although the low cost of its materials and manufacture and the cheap market price qualified it as “populuxe” by Fairchilds’s criteria, its attraction for Le Bas was not necessarily its agency as an index of status. If the umbrella signified class, it is not clear that it did so unequivocally: Louis-Antoine, the marquis de Caraccioli, remarked in 1768 that in Paris the umbrella was “the sign of having *no* {% thing 'carriage' %}” and of having to walk on foot. Consequently, it was shunned by those of rank and title, who willingly took the risk of getting wet rather than be “confounded with the vulgar.”[^16] Joullain does not directly connect Le Bas and the umbrella, but he does associate him with the urban street, the prime location, as Le Bas’s own etching of a peddler ({% ref 'fig-172' %}) in François Boucher’s *Cris de Paris* indicates, of their sale and use.[^17] In one anecdote, Le Bas plays the jealous husband, pursuing his wife, whom he wrongly suspects of infidelity, in a taxi (*fiacre*); disillusioned and humiliated, he returns home in the rain, sopping and mud-spattered, presumably having left his umbrella in the cab, or forgotten it in his haste.[^18] Le Bas’s identity was, according to Joullain, grounded in the neighborhood street, specifically Rue de La Harpe, where he lived for forty-seven years, the address inscribed on the vast majority of the prints he published.[^19] “I have seen him,” writes Joullain, “magnificently dressed, stopping at the shop of a craftsman, or waylaying common folk in the middle of the road, either to buy from them things he did not need, and which he later gave away to others, or to ask them about themselves, their circumstances, their family, and their needs. [The street] provided him with manifold opportunities for benevolence.”[^20] Silver buckles, gold buttons, and a collapsible umbrella were not, in Joullain’s discourse, the glittery trappings of upward social mobility but symptoms of the generosity he extended to himself and to others.
-{% figure 'fig-172' 'is-indented-2x' %}
+{% figure 'fig-172' 'is-indented-2x is-pdf-float-top' %}
Joullain’s biographies of Le Bas manifestly draw on tropes and themes from the literature of *sensibilité*, and some of the things mentioned in the lives function as sentimental objects whose personal meaning transcends their material and economic value: the portrait of Le Bas’s mother, for example, before which, according to Joullain, Le Bas regularly shed the tears of a dutiful son throughout his life.[^21] However, what distinguishes Le Bas’s umbrella from things recorded and valued as commodities in his inventory, and also from those objects that manifestly serve as touchstones of private emotion in the biographies, is the umbrella’s materiality and dependence on the energy and interaction of the human body to bring it to life. Umbrellas require skill and dexterity. Once opened up, they invite the freedom to venture forth in all weather, the opportunity to extend relief and hospitality to others under the intimate circumference of their cover. Human and thing become entangled in networks of material and social relations.
@@ -56,7 +56,7 @@ It is of course possible that the confinement of the green parasol in Le Bas’s
[^8]: Le Bas, “Inventaire après décès.” Canes and especially stockings are identified by Fairchilds as “populuxe.”
-[^9]: See Hayot de Longpré, *Catalogue de tableaux, sculpture, desseins, estampes . . . provenant de la succession de feu M. Le Bas* (Paris: Clousier, 1783); and François-Charles Joullain, *L’oeuvre de Jacques-Philippe Le Bas, Graveur*, 5 vols. (1789), {% abbr 'BnF' %}, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie: (Ee11–Ee11d in-fol. See also Charles-Étienne Gaucher, “Nécrologie [de M. Le Bas],” *Journal de Paris,* 12 May 1783, 554–55.
+[^9]: See Hayot de Longpré, *Catalogue de tableaux, sculpture, desseins, estampes . . . provenant de la succession de feu M. Le Bas* (Paris: Clousier, 1783); and François-Charles Joullain, *L’oeuvre de Jacques-Philippe Le Bas, Graveur*, 5 vols. (1789), {% abbr 'BnF' %}, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie: (Ee11–Ee11d in-fol. See also Charles-Étienne Gaucher, “Nécrologie [de M. Le Bas],” *Journal de Paris,* 12 May 1783, 554–55.
[^10]: Joullain, “L’oeuvre,” “Avertissement,” n.p. See Lionel Gossman, “Anecdote and History,” *History and Theory* 42, no. 2 (2003): 143–68.
diff --git a/content/things/votive.md b/content/things/votive.md
index 990d730..6f5a9f8 100644
--- a/content/things/votive.md
+++ b/content/things/votive.md
@@ -18,10 +18,14 @@ contributor:
**“Pray to God for him.”** The words are easy to miss at first, nestled under a plant within the loose cross-hatched lines in the lower-right foreground of Pierre-Imbert Drevet’s engraving of *Christ’s Agony in the Garden* ({% ref 'fig-173' %}). From afar, they might be mistaken for an accident on the plate, an inconsistency in the engraver’s otherwise crisp, controlled handling delineating the varied textures, substances, and gestures of his subject. Upon closer inspection, though, the seemingly misplaced marks resolve into their intentionally lettered forms: “Gravé Par Pierre Drevet fils / Priez Dieu Pour Luy” (engraved by Pierre Drevet son / Pray to God for him) ({% ref 'fig-174' %}). Yet even once read, the words remain somewhat elusive in their legibility—never really clear, from no matter how close or what angle they are viewed. There is a persistent uncertainty about their place here. Discrete, but not hidden. Legible, but only just. Intentional, but somehow hesitant. Present, but out of place. Much like Drevet himself at the time he engraved this plate—the final artwork he would ever make—these words recall, in their meaning and their materiality, the desperate disquiet and spiritual suffering of their maker.[^1]
+
+
In 1739, the year Drevet finished engraving *Christ’s Agony*, he was experiencing his own anguishing torment in the form of a relapsing mental instability. For around ten years, Drevet had suffered intermittently from psychological episodes, difficult to diagnose retrospectively according to modern psychopathologies, but described variously by his contemporaries as: “*la démence*” (insanity); “*une faiblesse d’esprit*” (a weakness of the mind); “*le dérangement de son esprit*” (mental disturbance); and “*une maladie* [*qui l’empêche*] *de se gouverner*” (an illness that prevents him from controlling himself).[^2] Drevet was far from the only eighteenth-century artist who experienced such episodes, as attested, among others, by the tragic demises of his colleagues François Lemoyne (who committed suicide by his {% thing 'sword' %} in 1737) and later of André Rouquet (who died in an asylum in 1758).[^3] Artists’ lapses in mental stability were often attributed to “excessive work” (as some of Drevet’s relatives suggested), but Drevet believed his ill health was an act of God.[^4]
Writing to the *directeur général des bâtiments* in August 1738 after his father’s death (afraid that he might lose the Louvre *logement* they had shared), Drevet described his ongoing mental problems as “la maladie dont Dieu m’a affligé” (the illness with which God has afflicted me).[^5] His father, the engraver Pierre Drevet, had also considered his son’s psychological complaints to be a divine operation—“ayant plus à Dieu [de] l’affliger d’une faiblesse d’esprit” (having pleased God to afflict him with a mental weakness)—and made allowances in his will in case “le Seigneur” (the Lord) chose to strike him again. It was during one of these subsequent strikes predicted by his father that Drevet executed *Christ’s Agony*, channeling his faith and skill to create an exquisite votive—an object that might help bring an end to his suffering.
diff --git a/content/things/watch.md b/content/things/watch.md
index c373cee..546a2d9 100644
--- a/content/things/watch.md
+++ b/content/things/watch.md
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ owner:
- first_name: Charles-Antoine
last_name: Coypel
years: 1694–1752
-type: [Apparel, Collectible, Commodity, Gift, Heirloom, Instrument,]
+type: [Apparel, Collectible, Commodity, Gift, Instrument, Symbolic Thing]
theme: [Community, Invention, Louvre, Luxury, Money, Religion]
material: [Metal | Gold/Gilding, Mineral | Gem]
mentions: [shell, snuffbox, bed, handkerchief, sword, will]
@@ -44,7 +44,7 @@ Coypel and Artaud’s exchange was not a straightforward commercial transaction
The value of Coypel’s watch was increased (or at least disguised) in this exchange by its ambiguous position between various economies (commercial, social, and symbolic). And so it continued through the object’s life. When the notary itemized the watch in the inventory of Coypel’s possessions taken after his death in 1752, it was priced modestly at 1,000 livres, but it appears to have been worth more than that to Coypel. Another of the watches listed by the notary ended up in the sale of the artist’s possessions the following year, but this watch did not.[^16] Instead, it passed to his brother, Philippe, who inherited most of Coypel’s estate, apart from the few special bequests Coypel made in his {% thing 'will' %} to family and associates (including 1,000 livres to the *curé* of his own parish of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois).[^17] This luxury item stood out from many others Coypel had acquired, valued enough to be offered again rather than sold off for revenue. Passing through its varied economies, the object was imbued with new sentimental resonances: moving from the watch that Antoine Artaud gave Coypel for painting *Supper at Emmaus*, to become the watch that Coypel left his brother when he died. {% contributors context=pageContributors format='symbol' %}
-[^1]: “Une . . . montre à répétition faite à Paris par Julien Le Roy dans Sa boette d’or garny de Sa chaine d’or, deux cachets montés en Bague l’un d’une agatorin et l’autre de Cornaline, deux Batons de Brillants tant Sur l’eguille des heures que Sur celle des minutes dans Son Etuy de trousset Vert et garny d’or.” Charles-Antoine Coypel, “Inventaire après décès,” 25 September 1752, {% abbr 'AN' %}, {% abbr 'MC' %}/LXXVI/337, 11.
+[^1]: “Une . . . montre à répétition faite à Paris par Julien Le Roy dans Sa boette d’or garny de Sa chaine d’or, deux cachets montés en Bague l’un d’une agatorin et l’autre de Cornaline, deux Batons de Brillants tant Sur l’eguille des heures que Sur celle des minutes dans Son Etuy de trousset Vert et garny d’or.” Charles-Antoine Coypel, “Inventaire après décès,” 25 September 1752, {% abbr 'AN' %}, {% abbr 'MC' %}/LXXVI/337, 11.
[^2]: It was valued in the inventory at 1,000 livres; the other watches were 700 and 200 livres.
@@ -74,6 +74,6 @@ The value of Coypel’s watch was increased (or at least disguised) in this exch
[^15]: Coypel also donated an *Ecce Homo* for the church of the Oratoire in 1729. Lefrançois, *Charles Coypel*, 222–25.
-[^16]: *Catalogue des tableaux . . . de feu M. Coypel*, 100.
+[^16]: *Catalogue des tableaux . . . de feu M. Coypel*, 100.
[^17]: Will, Charles-Antoine Coypel, 13 June 1752, {% abbr 'AN' %}, {% abbr 'MC' %}/ET/LXXVI/335.
diff --git a/content/things/water-fountain.md b/content/things/water-fountain.md
index 9c72813..4939b9a 100644
--- a/content/things/water-fountain.md
+++ b/content/things/water-fountain.md
@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@ owner:
last_name: Chardin
years: 1699–1779
type: [Instrument]
-theme: [Everyday]
+theme: [Everyday, Family, Gender]
material: [Metal | Copper]
mentions: [table, dressing-up box, intaglio, snuffbox, sword, gaming set, umbrella, shell, teacup]
contributor:
@@ -18,11 +18,11 @@ contributor:
**1731 was an important year for the still-life painter Jean-Siméon Chardin.** He married Marguerite Saintard in January and set up his own household in five rooms sublet from his mother and carved out of the family’s home, a house on the corner of Rue du Four and Rue Princesse in the parish of Saint-Sulpice.[^1] A kitchen was installed on the third floor and furnished with a large copper water fountain (*fontaine de cuivre*) on an oak stand to supply the needs of his household, which included, in addition to his wife, their servant, Marie-Anne Cheneau, and, from November 1731, a son, the newborn Pierre-Jean.[^2] A second, “small” copper fountain, of the tabletop variety, illustrated alongside the “large” in volume 3 of the plates of Diderot and d’Alembert’s *Encyclopédie* ({% ref 'fig-179' %}), probably graced either the sideboard or the kitchen table. Both fountains were inventoried in 1737 following the untimely death of Saintard in February 1735. Such mundane things of ordinary consumption are present in countless artists’ inventories;[^3] only Chardin, however, made the water fountain the subject of his painting ({% ref 'fig-180' %}), thus providing us with a visual record of its existence.[^4] His studio was, according to Georges Wildenstein’s reconstruction of the layout of the third floor from land registry records, directly opposite the kitchen, on the other side of the central staircase and at the end of a short corridor.[^5] Art historians assume that either the fountain migrated to the studio or that the painter migrated to the kitchen for the realization of the Louvre’s small painting, executed on panel circa 1734, which was unsold in 1737 and inventoried in the studio along with two other pictures of kitchen utensils.
-{% figure 'fig-179' 'is-indented-2x' %}
+{% figure 'fig-179' 'is-indented-2x is-pdf-float-top' %}
What of the copper fountain itself? What kind of a thing was it and in what sense was it Chardin’s? It was not a prop or studio tool consciously devised to model for a painting, like Jacques-Louis David’s {% thing 'table' %}, or the costumes in Watteau’s {% thing 'dressing-up box' %}, so it cannot, therefore, be read as a mark of the painter’s dedication to verisimilar depiction. Nor was it a thing like an {% thing 'intaglio' %}, {% thing 'snuffbox' %}, or {% thing 'sword' %}, a sign more or less consciously acquired to denote personal taste and social distinction. Nor yet was it a novelty, like a {% thing 'gaming set' %} or an {% thing 'umbrella' %}, or a curiosity like a {% thing 'shell' %}, that is, a purchase apparently prompted by desire and the caprices of taste.
-{% figure 'fig-180' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-180' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Study of Chardin’s things has generally focused on the objects depicted in his still lifes of the 1750s and 1760s: the smoking box, the porcelain {% thing 'teacups' %}, and the glass.[^6] Scholars have argued that these things reflect Chardin’s rising standard of living after his second marriage and the consequent enlargement of his taste. Ordinary, mundane, utility wares like water fountains are, however, poorly captured by such economic and semiotic models of consumption because, as everyday necessities, neither personal choice nor symbolic value seems appropriately to describe ownership of them. They are not the kinds of goods that eighteenth-century Europe, envisaged as birthplace of the consumer society, and site of the industrious revolution, supposes. More promising are theorizations of consumption as practice. Prompted by the material turn, theories of practice focus not on the choice of the sovereign and expressive individual consumer; instead, they trace collective and customary practices of acquiring, appropriating, and using things, and analyze the effect, or doings, of those everyday things.[^7]
@@ -84,7 +84,7 @@ Chardin’s copper fountain challenges not interpretation of his still-lives as
[^20]: On the privacy of Chardin’s studio, see Lajer-Burcharth, *The Painter’s Touch*, 90–91.
-[^21]: The inscription reads: “Aquam a praefecto et aedilibus acceptam hic suis impensis, civibus fluere voluit Serenissima Princeps Anna Palatina, ex Bavarii . . . Anno Domini MD.CC.XV.”
+[^21]: The inscription reads: “Aquam a praefecto et aedilibus acceptam hic suis impensis, civibus fluere voluit Serenissima Princeps Anna Palatina, ex Bavarii . . . Anno Domini MD.CC.XV.”
[^22]: For a theorization of containers, see Jean-Pierre Warnier, “Inside and Outside: Surfaces and Containers,” in *Handbook of Material Culture*, ed. Chris Tilly et al. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2006), 186–95.
diff --git a/content/things/will.md b/content/things/will.md
index e569fa2..9fd99b7 100644
--- a/content/things/will.md
+++ b/content/things/will.md
@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ owner:
years: 1687–1767
type: [Document]
theme: [Administration, Death, Family, Friendship, Identity, Money, Religion]
-material: [Synthetic Materials | Ink, Synthetic Materials | Paper]
+material: [Animal | Leather/Parchment, Synthetic Materials | Ink, Synthetic Materials | Paper]
mentions: [quill, snuffbox, votive, picture]
contributor:
- id: "kscott"
@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ contributor:
**On 2 October 1765, the miniature painter Jean-Baptiste Massé** signed and dated his will, put his {% thing 'quill' %} down on the oval tray of his silver inkstand, depicted in a late red-chalk self-portrait ({% ref 'fig-186' %}), and stored the document for safe-keeping.[^1] He was seventy-eight years old and nearing the end of a successful professional career. The preparation and writing of this, his last will and testament, must have taken days. It runs to thirty-six closely written folio-size pages stitched together with thread. The solemn concluding act of Massé’s life was, however, not over. He continued to deliberate on the division of his estate. On 8 September 1766 and 1 May, 20 July, 5 and 17 September 1767, he added a succession of codicils modifying the original will and adding a further twenty-four pages secured at the center of the testament with blue ribbon. Ten days later the will was deposited with his notary, Maître Guillaume-Charles Bioche and is now filed with acts completed in September 1767 by Bioche et Dulion at the Archives Nationales.[^2]
-{% figure 'fig-186' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-186' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
Massé is little remarked today and unlikely to become more so because so little of his *oeuvre* as a miniaturist and enameler survives.[^3] However, thanks to Émile Compardon’s publication of Massé’s will in 1880, he continues to be remembered as an exceptional testator.[^4] The draftsman and printmaker Charles-Nicolas Cochin had, over a century earlier, cited Massé’s will in his eulogy to his dead friend for the evidence it provided of his good character. It was, Cochin recalled, full of the most gratifying expressions of friendship and the most flattering testimony of Massé’s attachment.[^5] The will interpolates forty-two heirs and legatees, in fact, an extraordinary number, between whom it divided the miniaturist’s things, distributing hundreds of objects between them, of which approximately sixty were works of art.
@@ -32,9 +32,9 @@ Attention to the indexical specificity of language is most acute and conspicuous
Bequeathing things depended not only on writing; it also required management and maintenance. In order to distribute his possessions appropriately and fairly, Massé needed a vantage from which to survey his stuff.[^15] His valet, Courcy, was charged with gathering and readying the contents of the library and cabinet for inclusion in the will.[^16] Things like the set of reproductive prints of Charles Le Brun’s great ceiling paintings in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles, to which project Massé had dedicated thirty years of his life and much of his capital, not only needed organizing into sets, but individual impressions also required attention in some cases.[^17] For example, those of one set of the total fifteen he gave to family and friends, and which he reserved for his friend Cochin, were not only personally “selected” by him but also “revised” by his hand.[^18] Likewise, the bound set destined for the Académie was to have been “repaired,” the imperfections of the printing made good, had Massé’s health only permitted.[^19] Testamentary giving was not so much a “leaving” as an active preparation of property for donation, which in Massé’s case, was a task not only scribal, organizational, and legal, but creative. Although, according to Cochin, he had stopped painting some twenty years before his death, the will brought him out of retirement, and in the three years before 1765 he conserved and painted a number of family miniatures for his heirs.[^20] The will was, in short, the labor of Massé’s last years; he renewed old things, bought and created new ones, and prepared all for their new lives with others.
-{% figure 'fig-188' 'is-offset' %}
+{% figure 'fig-188' 'is-offset is-pdf-float-top is-pdf-side-caption' %}
-The work was emotional as well as practical. The portfolios he organized for his prints, the shagreen cases and gold boxes he had made by the glover Jean-Claude Galluchat and the jeweler Pierre-François Drais, to reframe his miniatures, were gestures of love comparable to the loving words that enclose the donations denoted in the will. Massé does not so much describe his miniatures, in the way he did the clothes left to his servants, as wrap them in personal narrative. “To my dear niece Marie-Anne Massé, whose birth I saw and whom I have watched grow in grace and virtue, I give my self-portrait miniature, which I painted when she left for Amsterdam; it was then well received under the sign of love. I hope it will now be under that of friendship.”[^21] To his lifelong friend and former pupil, the “very worthy and virtuous” Madeleine Basseporte, he gave as “a token of memory,” a preparatory drawing by Charles Natoire of the *Apotheosis of Saint-Louis* ({% ref 'fig-188' %}). “The satisfaction I have in having this work under my eyes makes me wish to afford her . . . the same privilege, and that of feeling as much pleasure as I have always had at looking at this admirable drawing.”[^22] The emphasis, in both instances, is not on miniature or drawing as such; it is, instead, on the origin and history of the object’s association with Massé.[^23] Through these histories his niece and his friend were called actively to keep Massé’s memory alive by holding and looking at his gifts and integrating the story of the objects’ former lives into their own.
+The work was emotional as well as practical. The portfolios he organized for his prints, the shagreen cases and gold boxes he had made by the glover Jean-Claude Galluchat and the jeweler Pierre-François Drais, to reframe his miniatures, were gestures of love comparable to the loving words that enclose the donations denoted in the will. Massé does not so much describe his miniatures, in the way he did the clothes left to his servants, as wrap them in personal narrative. “To my dear niece Marie-Anne Massé, whose birth I saw and whom I have watched grow in grace and virtue, I give my self-portrait miniature, which I painted when she left for Amsterdam; it was then well received under the sign of love. I hope it will now be under that of friendship.”[^21] To his lifelong friend and former pupil, the “very worthy and virtuous” Madeleine Basseporte, he gave as “a token of memory,” a preparatory drawing by Charles Natoire of the *Apotheosis of Saint-Louis* ({% ref 'fig-188' %}). “The satisfaction I have in having this work under my eyes makes me wish to afford her . . . the same privilege, and that of feeling as much pleasure as I have always had at looking at this admirable drawing.”[^22] The emphasis, in both instances, is not on miniature or drawing as such; it is, instead, on the origin and history of the object’s association with Massé.[^23] Through these histories his niece and his friend were called actively to keep Massé’s memory alive by holding and looking at his gifts and integrating the story of the objects’ former lives into their own.
Massé made and gave such keepsakes inscribed with his memory, mainly to women, as these examples suggest. It was in keeping with his character, apparently; Cochin remembered him as “gallant.”[^24] His legacies to men were more formal and conventional. He originally left his nephew Renouard, his gold {% thing 'snuffbox' %}, shoe buckles, and garters, “wishing with all my heart that these bagatelles will be as useful to him as they have been to me,” but he later rescinded the gift, replacing it with a sum of money—the body ornaments, on reflection, too personal and perhaps too frivolous to be judged appropriate.[^25]
@@ -42,7 +42,7 @@ Sociologists Janet Finch and Jennifer Mason contrast keepsakes with heirlooms.[^
Massé’s will is described above as a legal instrument for the division and distribution of his estate, a document in which the voice of possession rings with enthralling frequency. It appears to confirm the findings of historians, according to whom eighteenth-century testamentary practice was, by contrast to that of earlier generations, conspicuously profane in its concern for family, not Christian fellowship, and for material, not spiritual goods.[^30] However, in Massé’s case, his sensibility for the stuff and meaning of his things was not developed at the expense of his spiritual aims. As a Huguenot, there was of course no place in his devotions for the kinds of {% thing 'votive' %} objects adored by Catholics such as Hyacinthe Rigaud, or for the crucifixes, rosaries, and sacred {% thing 'pictures' %} they used to orient their prayers. Nevertheless, it seems likely that Massé’s bequests to his servants of clothes, cutlery, beds, and bedlinen were spiritual as well as practical, prompted by a desire to extend God’s compassion by Acts of Corporal Mercy, specifically feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and sheltering the homeless.[^31] The *Seven Acts of Mercy* by Sébastien Bourdon, himself a Protestant, was one the few religious works Massé owned ({% ref 'fig-189' %}). Significantly, he willed the set of prints to nephew Pierre as treasured models of Christian duty, as heirlooms of the faithfulness of his ancestors to the reformed church, and as signs of the family’s identity.[^32]
-{% figure 'fig-189' 'is-indented' %}
+{% figure 'fig-189' 'is-indented is-pdf-float-top' %}
In his eulogy, Cochin was conspicuously silent about the state of Massé’s soul, though the spiritual portrait was a literary trope of many artists’ biographies. Having failed to execute Massé’s wish to be buried next to his father at the Catholic church of Saint-Barthélémy,[^33] Cochin endeavored in his eulogy to do justice instead to Massé’s memory by erecting a secular “monument” to the veteran academician. Gratitude and friendship were, he said, Massé’s defining virtues. He related how Massé had had a copy of the Académie’s *Portrait of the Marquis de Marigny* by Tocqué made to hang opposite his bed, in the place that is often reserved for the image of Christ, in order to have more frequently before him the likeness of him to whom so much gratitude was owed by the arts.[^34] The virtue of gratitude, not to be mistaken with simple politeness, was, according to moral philosophy, the origin of community and fellowship because it was a freely given response to the personal encounter with human need.[^35] It therefore begets charity and friendship.
diff --git a/content/things/wine.md b/content/things/wine.md
index 2e73d5d..548b4d1 100644
--- a/content/things/wine.md
+++ b/content/things/wine.md
@@ -24,10 +24,14 @@ Individual tastes in wine evidently varied, but its consumption was almost unive
Aside from suggesting its contents, the kind of receptacle in which artists stored their wine also gives some insight into their rate of consumption, or at least the size of their collection. Most wine in artists’ cellars was kept in *bouteilles* (bottles) or *carafons* (carafes) made from *gros verre* (rough glass) (as in {% ref 'fig-190' %}), which were vessels that could be brought directly to the table or decanted into finer glassware for more formal occasions (as in {% ref 'fig-191' %}). Along with the full ones, most also kept numerous empties (sometimes hundreds of them), which could be taken to the *marchand de vin* (wine merchant) for refilling, or, in some cases, refilled on the spot.[^9] For, space and budget permitting, some artists also kept much larger quantities of wine stored in various-size barrels or casks: Pierre, for instance, had three *feuillettes* (approximately 137 liters each) of red Burgundy, while Drouais had two larger *demi-queues* (approximately 213 liters each) of “vin rouge cru” from Mâcon.[^10] Le Prince, meanwhile, outdid everyone in quantity, though possibly not in quality. From the apparatus in the cellar of his country house (including two grape-picking baskets, a large vat, and a bucket with a funnel), it seems Le Prince engaged in some amateur winemaking activities, the results of which were presumably the substantial quantities (nineteen barrels) of “vin du pays” (local wine) stored in both his property at Lagny-sur-Marne and the cellar of his Louvre *logement*.[^11] Not surprisingly, the notaries valuing these artists’ wine collections proffered a higher price for Pierre’s Burgundy than for Le Prince’s countryside “vin du pays.”
+
+
Wine kept in a cellar, whether homemade or commercially bought, was consumed at meals within the home, even at breakfast (François Lemoyne’s servant noted that his master generally took wine, with bread and water, at 9 o’clock after a morning session in the studio with his students).[^12] But wine was also bought and consumed in spaces outside the home. Commercially, the wine trade was strictly controlled, divided between *marchands de vin* (some selling wholesale, others retail) who sold wine from shops to stock people’s cellars, and *taverniers* or *aubergistes*, who sold wine in taverns and inns for consumption on the premises.[^13] Such public establishments were important social spaces for artists, accommodating different kinds of interactions from those taking place in the relative privacy of the home or studio, or within the formalized structures of the Académie. Socializing in taverns and inns could be relatively sedate experiences, like the convivial meals with colleagues and family that Wille occasionally mentions in his {% thing 'journal' %}. But wine’s intoxicating effects could also lead to dangerous disorder, as during an infamous art-world drunken brawl in 1741. Following an afternoon of boozing at a cabaret near the Louvre called the Galerie d’Avignon, several artists (among them Charles Parrocel, Georges-Frédéric Schmidt, and the cabinetmaker Charles-André Boulle) witnessed an argument escalate to a street scuffle, during which Joseph-Ferdinand Godefroy, a picture dealer and restorer, was stabbed with a {% thing 'sword' %} and killed by the painter Jérôme-François Chantereau.[^14]
When it comes to drinking in taverns, the artist most associated with this side of the wine trade is without doubt Alexis Grimou. The portraitist had a direct connection to tavern life via his wife, Gabrielle Petit, niece of Francesco Procopio, proprietor of the Left Bank’s Café Procope, a renowned meeting place for *philosophes* and now reputedly the oldest Parisian café in continuous operation.[^15] More intriguing, however, is the intentional association with wine that Grimou created through his artistic practice, where that liquor flows with conspicuous abundance. Most striking is the unconventional series of self-portraits that Grimou painted throughout his career, including one in the guise of Bacchus, Roman god of wine (1728, Dijon, Musée Magnin), and at least two “as a drinker,” presenting himself at a tavern table partaking merrily in the fruits of the vine (see figs. [190](#fig.190){.q-figure__modal-link}, [191](#fig-191){.q-figure__modal-link}).
+