Books by Elisabeth Fraser
Mediterranean Encounters: Artists Between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1774-1839, 2019
Contents
Part I: Power in Question
- Chapter 1 Reading Choiseul in the Gaps of the Oriental... more Contents
Part I: Power in Question
- Chapter 1 Reading Choiseul in the Gaps of the Orientalist Archive
- Chapter 2 In the Shadow of les Grands: Cassas’s Orientalist Self-Fashioning
Part II: Ottoman Culture Abroad
- Chapter 3 The Translator’s Art: Mouradgea d’Ohsson, Ottoman Dragoman in Paris
- Chapter 4 Miniatures in Black and White: Melling’s Istanbul
Part III: Contradictory Contact
- Chapter 5 Skin of Nation, Body of Empire: Louis Dupré in Ottoman Greece
- Chapter 6 A Painter’s Renunciation: Delacroix in North Africa
Mobility of People and Things in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Art of Travel, 2020
For centuries artists, diplomats, and merchants served as cultural intermediaries in the Mediterr... more For centuries artists, diplomats, and merchants served as cultural intermediaries in the Mediterranean. Stationed in port cities and other entrepôts of the Mediterranean, these go-betweens forged intercultural connections even as they negotiated and sometimes promoted cultural misunderstandings. They also moved objects of all kinds across time and space. This volume considers how the mobility of art and material culture is intertwined with greater Mediterranean networks from 1580 to 1880. Contributors see the movement of people and objects as transformational, emphasizing the trajectory of objects over single points of origin, multiplicity over unity, and mutability over stasis.
A 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
In this volume, Elisabeth Fraser shows that artists a... more A 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
In this volume, Elisabeth Fraser shows that artists and the works they created in the Mediterranean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were informed by mutual dependence and reciprocity between European nations and the Ottoman Empire. Her rich exploration of this vibrant cross-cultural exchange challenges the dominant interpretation of European relations with the East during the period, revealing a shared world of fluid and long-sustained interactions.
Voyagers to and from the Ottoman Empire documented their journeys in prints, paintings, and lavishly illustrated travelogues; many of these helped define Europe’s self-identified role as heir to Ottoman civilizations and bolstered its presence in the Islamic Mediterranean and beyond. Fraser finds that these works illuminate not only how travelers’ experiences abroad were more nuanced than the expansionist ideology with which they became associated, but also how these narratives depicted the vitality of Ottoman culture and served as extensions of Ottoman diplomacy. Ottomans were aware of and responded to European representations, using them to defend Ottoman culture and sovereignty. In embracing the art of both cultures and setting these works in a broader context, Fraser challenges the dominant historiographical tradition that sees Ottoman artists adopting European modes of art in a one-sided process of “Europeanization.”
Theoretically informed and rigorously researched, this cross-cultural approach to European and Ottoman art sheds much-needed critical light on the widely disseminated travel images of the era—important cultural artifacts in their own right—and provides a fresh and inviting understanding of the relationships among cultures in the Mediterranean during an era of increasing European expansionism.
ISBN: 978-0-271-07320-0
Contents:
Part I: Power in Question
- Chapter 1 Reading Choiseul in the Gaps of the Orientalist Archive
- Chapter 2 In the Shadow of les Grands: Cassas’s Orientalist Self-Fashioning
Part II: Ottoman Culture Abroad
- Chapter 3 The Translator’s Art: Mouradgea d’Ohsson, Ottoman Dragoman in Paris
- Chapter 4 Miniatures in Black and White: Melling’s Istanbul
Part III: Contradictory Contact
- Chapter 5 Skin of Nation, Body of Empire: Louis Dupré in Ottoman Greece
- Chapter 6 A Painter’s Renunciation: Delacroix in North Africa
Art and Patrimony argues that Delacroix’s painting was implicated in issues of cultural inheritan... more Art and Patrimony argues that Delacroix’s painting was implicated in issues of cultural inheritance and the politics of memory and forgetting in the volatile context of post-revolutionary France. Exploring historian Lynn Hunt’s theory of the political family romance in the cultural realm, my book addresses social, legal, and artistic constructions of inheritance and lineage; gender and the family as a subtext in Delacroix’s art and as a political emblem; private art collecting as a model of activist citizenship; and the notion of the king’s body as symbolic of the public sphere in Delacroix’s painting, popular prints, and court ceremonies.
Chapters:
Introduction: Delacroix, the Bourbons, and the Problem of Inheritance
Chapter one: Choosing Fathers: Dante and Virgil
Chapter two: Family as Nation in the Massacres of Chios
Chapter three: Contesting Paternal Authority: Delacroix, the Private Collector, and the Public
Chapter four: Sardanapalus: The Life and Death of the Royal Body
Epilogue: Gender and the Family Politics of the Restoration
Appendix A: correspondence within the Ministry of Fine Arts and to the king concerning the controversial purchase of Delacroix’s Massacres of Chios in 1824
Appendix B: letter written by the Minister of Fine Arts in 1828 requesting that the artist’s Death of Sardanapalus be removed from the Grand Salon
Articles and chapters by Elisabeth Fraser
Journal18, 2020
As global art history looks beyond traditional frameworks like the nation-state, it has also turn... more As global art history looks beyond traditional frameworks like the nation-state, it has also turned away from static notions of the work of art as rooted in time and space. Along with these fundamental shifts, global art history has enthusiastically embraced material culture. The study of mobile material culture—the object in motion—has the potential to radically redefine the nature of art history, overturning canons, divisions between disciplines and between disciplinary subfields, cultural boundaries, rigid style categories, and hierarchies defined by medium. What are the advantages and what are the pitfalls of this approach?
Part of a roundtable discussion with Jeffrey Collins, Elizabeth Mansfield, Amelia Rauser, Kristel Smentek & Wendy Bellion, Paris Spies-Gans, Nancy Um, Amy Freund.
https://www.journal18.org/4933.
The Mobility of People and Things in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Art of Travel (Routledge), 2020
The Ottoman costume album served as a vital agent of contact in the early modern world. Conceive... more The Ottoman costume album served as a vital agent of contact in the early modern world. Conceived and collected through the movement of people in the greater Mediterranean, bound, rebound, sold, gifted, copied and reworked, Ottoman costume albums, produced from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, are mobile objects constituted by a flexibility that lends itself to reinvention and reconfiguration. The costume album transcended geographic points of origin, connecting artisans of the book and diverse audiences across time and space in unforeseeable ways. Composed of individual sheets, each bearing a single costumed figure representing variously the Ottoman court, military, professions, and civil society, a costume album was custom made and inflected according to the interests of the owner. The Ottoman costume album is defined by an essential mutability. This chapter explores these ideas in relation to one particular eighteenth-century album, Costumes turcs, now in the British Museum. Costumes turcs exemplifies the kind of accidental cross-cultural collaboration typical of costume books: as it moved from Istanbul to Berlin to London, it was elaborated by successive owners, who added to its material state and reinterpreted and redefined it.
Rauch and Stiening, eds., Heinrich Friedrich von Diez (1751-1817): Freethinker, Diplomat, Orientalist. Berlin: DeGruyter., 2020
In 1858 the British Museum purchased an album of Ottoman costume paintings that reportedly had at... more In 1858 the British Museum purchased an album of Ottoman costume paintings that reportedly had at one time belonged to Heinrich Friedrich von Diez, Prussian ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1784 to 1790. "Costumes turcs" contains 264 colorful paintings (on paper) produced in Istanbul, in two bound volumes, representing Ottoman dress. According to an English inscription in the album, it was acquired by Diez during his diplomatic residence in Istanbul. An intriguing object in its own right, it has received scant attention from scholars. But was it in fact Diez who brought the paintings forming "Costumes turcs" from Istanbul to Berlin? Material evidence supplied by the album itself suggests that there may well have been a link between "Costumes turcs" and Diez and the Prussian diplomatic milieu. This essay looks in particular at the close relationship between this album and two other costume albums from the late eighteenth century, both now in France. Remarkably all three albums share the same English watermark and were apparently made from the very same batch of paper exported to Istanbul in the 1780s. A comparison of the quite different contents, image sequences, and thematic emphases of the three albums reveals the unusually elaborate and even official aspect of "Costumes turcs," befitting an honorific object. The dating of the paper, combined with the German origin of the leather binding and the use of paper for the binding from a mill near Berlin, place the book with near certainty in the diplomatic and royal milieu of the Prussian capital in the late eighteenth century.
Zanardi and Klich, eds., Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Practices and Global Contexts (New York: Routledge, 2018).
Costume albums and books depicting the diverse peoples of the Ottoman Empire were produced by Ott... more Costume albums and books depicting the diverse peoples of the Ottoman Empire were produced by Ottomans and Europeans respectively as early as the sixteenth century, defining geography, ethnicity, religion, occupation, and gender in the Ottoman Empire through costume. Mobile objects, costume collections circulated through transimperial networks in the Mediterranean. Long understood as an enticing example of cross-cultural exchange, these costume compendia have nonetheless been interpreted in a lopsided way. Despite the early appearance of Ottoman produced
costume miniatures, most of the still embryonic writing on images of Ottoman costume assumes the priority of European print examples. But European artisans of the book were not without knowledge of Ottoman work: Ottoman-produced costume miniatures circulated in Europe beginning already in the sixteenth century, and increasingly through the seventeenth and especially eighteenth centuries. My essay explores how a consideration of the materiality of the costume book and album – specifically texture, touch, and the practice of hand-coloring – shapes a cross-cultural reading of them, a reading that is reinforced by early modern cultural
constructions of color, especially in relation to textile and dress. This investigation defines cultural mediation as layered, discontinuous, and resulting from a multiplicity of points of contact and exchange.
Ars Orientalis, 2011
An Ottoman Armenian dragoman (interpreter) active in Constantinople, Mouradgea d’Ohsson (1740–180... more An Ottoman Armenian dragoman (interpreter) active in Constantinople, Mouradgea d’Ohsson (1740–1807) traveled to Paris in 1784 to publish a historical overview of the Ottoman Empire. Writing in a fraught political context following the Russian defeat of the Ottomans, Ohsson forthrightly cast his publication as a defense of Islam and the Ottoman Empire. More than a textual apology, his illustrated book embodies a supreme act of cultural crossing. Written by an Ottoman, the book continues an Ottoman tradition of illustrated historiography, but it was published in French and produced by a large French team of artists and artisans of the book trade, who interpreted and transformed its Ottoman elements, creating a heterogeneous object. Borrowing the rhetorical concept of “markedness” from translation theory, I contend that, far from abandoning Ottoman conventions in order to embrace European idioms, Ohsson’s book bears signal traces of Ottoman culture, ones that were carefully preserved and even crafted by his French artist-translators. Ohsson’s book bridges and blurs French and Ottoman cultures, suggesting their contingency and entanglement. Moreover, the process of making this book was itself a cultural encounter for those who were involved, an encounter whose traces remain visible in the final product for the viewer-reader to experience. The cumulative effect of these crossings is to see Ottoman and French forms as connected across a continuum of visual possibilities; the heterogeneity of Ohsson’s book served as an allegory of entanglement, interrelation, and alliance in the very moment when they were politically contested.
Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration (Mary Sheriff, ed.), 2010
In 1832 Eugène Delacroix travelled to North Africa for six months as part of an official French m... more In 1832 Eugène Delacroix travelled to North Africa for six months as part of an official French mission, recording his encounter in numerous drawings and notebooks. I argue that these drawings differ from his other orientalist imagery, revealing the pressures and ambiguities of observation and representation in the “contact zone.” This ambiguity is manifest in the contradictory strategies of the notebooks, which show the artist coming to terms with a world in which he had little control.
Art History, 2008
From about 1780 a thriving publishing industry for travel accounts developed in France, but its r... more From about 1780 a thriving publishing industry for travel accounts developed in France, but its rich visual component has not been closely analysed. Taking Auguste de Forbin's Voyage dans le Levant and Marie-Gabriel de Choiseul-Gouffier's Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce as paradigmatic examples, I reconsider illustrated travel books in light of new theories of reading generated by historians of the book. The multifarious nature of these books – juggling word and image, and coordinating the work of a large number of writers, researchers, artists and print-makers – provides a radically alternative model for interpreting travel representation in the age of expansion.
in Représentation et pouvoir : La politique symbolique en France (1789-1830), Natalie SCHOLZ and Christina SCHRÖER, eds., 2007
Volume now open access, Presses universitaires de Rennes: https://books.openedition.org/pur/6455
in: Paris 1820: L'affirmation de la génération romantique, 2005
French Historical Studies, 2003
Depicting the charged theme of a king’s imminent death, Delacroix’s work issued from a visual cul... more Depicting the charged theme of a king’s imminent death, Delacroix’s work issued from a visual culture in which representation of the royal body was highly susceptible to attacks, slanderous interpretations, and seditious acts. The artist’s choice of the legendary last king of Assyria, famous for his sensual indulgence, suggestively conjured up a carnal ruling body, not the sacral body envisioned by the Bourbons. More specifically, French literary and political texts had long explicitly defined princely misrule as “sardanapalien.” Delacroix’s image drew on traditional tropes of anti-royal protest evoking a disordered, irrational, perverse and gender-confused royal body, tropes that were revived in the Restoration, particularly during the crisis of Charles X’s reign.
Oxford Art Journal, 1998
Delacroix's controversial Massacres of Chios provoked internal conflicts in the Restoration arts ... more Delacroix's controversial Massacres of Chios provoked internal conflicts in the Restoration arts administration, which nonetheless bought the painting in 1824, in an irregular and politically risky procedure, without the King's official approval. This essay argues that the apparent urgency of this acquisition reveals the regime's attempted management of a volatile public sphere, as it sought to reinvest culture with the royal authority of the prerevolutionary period.
Podcasts by Elisabeth Fraser
Ottoman History Podcast, 2020
Interviewed by Emily Neumeier, https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/08/fraser.html
interview on New Books Network, 2019
Talks by Elisabeth Fraser
Ottoman costume albums – bound volumes of costume paintings made in Istanbul -- served as mobile ... more Ottoman costume albums – bound volumes of costume paintings made in Istanbul -- served as mobile agents of contact in the early modern world. In Europe, the circulation of Ottoman albums was further extended when they were translated and reinterpreted in European print costume books. One of the most influential of these European books, the "Recueil de cent estampes représentant différentes nations du Levant," was based on costume paintings commissioned by French ambassador Charles de Ferriol in Istanbul. Published in Paris in 1714 and widely circulated throughout Europe, the "Recueil Ferriol" is now better known for the turquerie fashion it spawned than for its own masterful prints. Its depictions of Ottoman society were extensively mined by European painters, costume and theatre designers, and porcelain manufacturers. The prints were openly copied, appearing in numerous illustrated volumes. Much of the scholarship on the "Recueil" traces its use as source material. Though it has long been acknowledged that the prints were based on paintings made in Istanbul, the work continues to be seen as embodying European perspectives and prejudices. Looking at the inception and production of the "Receuil Ferriol" and setting it in comparative relationship to both the Ottoman and European contexts, I consider the ways the book straddles these worlds, bringing its Ottomanizing elements more clearly into view. With a particular focus on the representation of women, I argue that the sequence, typology, appearance, and many themes of the French engravings reveal the origins of the "Recueil" in Ottoman visual culture.
Travel images give us a way to complicate ideas about French Orientalism – the idea that European... more Travel images give us a way to complicate ideas about French Orientalism – the idea that European engagement with Islamic cultures is always about exoticizing and miscomprehension. I look at travel images instead for signs of cultural exchange and interaction. I take artist Louis Dupré’s Voyage à Athènes et à Constantinople as a fascinating example of a travel book that reveals the inherent contradictions in the work of traveling artists, and urges new readings of this corpus. Assuming the form of a costume album, it is based on notes and drawings made during the artist’s voyage in the Ottoman Empire in 1819. However, the book was produced in France from 1825 to 1839, after the outbreak of Greek insurrections against Ottoman rule in 1821, a popular cause in France. This contextual gap between the moment of travel and the moment of production accounts for the work’s contradictory aspects. In conventional Orientalist manner, Dupré’s text is overtly philhellenic, taking the side of the Greek rebels in their conflict with the Ottomans, seeing in the insurgence a revival of ancient ideals and culture. Yet key aspects of the work, particularly its costume images, tug against and undermine its underlying turcophobia and, ultimately, its nationalist, essentialist message of Hellenic regeneration. Dupré’s colorful plates are striking and even hauntingly memorable, arresting the viewer’s attention, and drawing us into the rich and cosmopolitan world of empire his philhellenic discourse occludes. Despite himself Dupré allows us to glimpse the eastern Mediterranean world before the formation of nations we now take for granted. In its contradictory representations, Dupré’s work, to borrow and recontextualize Benedict Anderson’s phrase, is an example of the tight skin of nation being stretched over the gigantic body of empire.
This term’s Visiting Expert series is a joint collaboration with Professor Mary Roberts (Universi... more This term’s Visiting Expert series is a joint collaboration with Professor Mary Roberts (University of Sydney) and Professor Elisabeth Fraser (University of South Florida). This series of events was curated by The Courtauld Institute of Art’s Dr Sussan Babaie. Whilst our Visiting Experts are here, we will reflect upon the 40th anniversary of the publication of Edward Said’s seminal text ‘Orientalism’. Please note this event consists of two separate lectures, with details outlined below.
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Books by Elisabeth Fraser
Part I: Power in Question
- Chapter 1 Reading Choiseul in the Gaps of the Orientalist Archive
- Chapter 2 In the Shadow of les Grands: Cassas’s Orientalist Self-Fashioning
Part II: Ottoman Culture Abroad
- Chapter 3 The Translator’s Art: Mouradgea d’Ohsson, Ottoman Dragoman in Paris
- Chapter 4 Miniatures in Black and White: Melling’s Istanbul
Part III: Contradictory Contact
- Chapter 5 Skin of Nation, Body of Empire: Louis Dupré in Ottoman Greece
- Chapter 6 A Painter’s Renunciation: Delacroix in North Africa
In this volume, Elisabeth Fraser shows that artists and the works they created in the Mediterranean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were informed by mutual dependence and reciprocity between European nations and the Ottoman Empire. Her rich exploration of this vibrant cross-cultural exchange challenges the dominant interpretation of European relations with the East during the period, revealing a shared world of fluid and long-sustained interactions.
Voyagers to and from the Ottoman Empire documented their journeys in prints, paintings, and lavishly illustrated travelogues; many of these helped define Europe’s self-identified role as heir to Ottoman civilizations and bolstered its presence in the Islamic Mediterranean and beyond. Fraser finds that these works illuminate not only how travelers’ experiences abroad were more nuanced than the expansionist ideology with which they became associated, but also how these narratives depicted the vitality of Ottoman culture and served as extensions of Ottoman diplomacy. Ottomans were aware of and responded to European representations, using them to defend Ottoman culture and sovereignty. In embracing the art of both cultures and setting these works in a broader context, Fraser challenges the dominant historiographical tradition that sees Ottoman artists adopting European modes of art in a one-sided process of “Europeanization.”
Theoretically informed and rigorously researched, this cross-cultural approach to European and Ottoman art sheds much-needed critical light on the widely disseminated travel images of the era—important cultural artifacts in their own right—and provides a fresh and inviting understanding of the relationships among cultures in the Mediterranean during an era of increasing European expansionism.
ISBN: 978-0-271-07320-0
Contents:
Part I: Power in Question
- Chapter 1 Reading Choiseul in the Gaps of the Orientalist Archive
- Chapter 2 In the Shadow of les Grands: Cassas’s Orientalist Self-Fashioning
Part II: Ottoman Culture Abroad
- Chapter 3 The Translator’s Art: Mouradgea d’Ohsson, Ottoman Dragoman in Paris
- Chapter 4 Miniatures in Black and White: Melling’s Istanbul
Part III: Contradictory Contact
- Chapter 5 Skin of Nation, Body of Empire: Louis Dupré in Ottoman Greece
- Chapter 6 A Painter’s Renunciation: Delacroix in North Africa
Chapters:
Introduction: Delacroix, the Bourbons, and the Problem of Inheritance
Chapter one: Choosing Fathers: Dante and Virgil
Chapter two: Family as Nation in the Massacres of Chios
Chapter three: Contesting Paternal Authority: Delacroix, the Private Collector, and the Public
Chapter four: Sardanapalus: The Life and Death of the Royal Body
Epilogue: Gender and the Family Politics of the Restoration
Appendix A: correspondence within the Ministry of Fine Arts and to the king concerning the controversial purchase of Delacroix’s Massacres of Chios in 1824
Appendix B: letter written by the Minister of Fine Arts in 1828 requesting that the artist’s Death of Sardanapalus be removed from the Grand Salon
Articles and chapters by Elisabeth Fraser
Part of a roundtable discussion with Jeffrey Collins, Elizabeth Mansfield, Amelia Rauser, Kristel Smentek & Wendy Bellion, Paris Spies-Gans, Nancy Um, Amy Freund.
https://www.journal18.org/4933.
costume miniatures, most of the still embryonic writing on images of Ottoman costume assumes the priority of European print examples. But European artisans of the book were not without knowledge of Ottoman work: Ottoman-produced costume miniatures circulated in Europe beginning already in the sixteenth century, and increasingly through the seventeenth and especially eighteenth centuries. My essay explores how a consideration of the materiality of the costume book and album – specifically texture, touch, and the practice of hand-coloring – shapes a cross-cultural reading of them, a reading that is reinforced by early modern cultural
constructions of color, especially in relation to textile and dress. This investigation defines cultural mediation as layered, discontinuous, and resulting from a multiplicity of points of contact and exchange.
Podcasts by Elisabeth Fraser
Interviewed by Ricarda Brosch
Talks by Elisabeth Fraser
Part I: Power in Question
- Chapter 1 Reading Choiseul in the Gaps of the Orientalist Archive
- Chapter 2 In the Shadow of les Grands: Cassas’s Orientalist Self-Fashioning
Part II: Ottoman Culture Abroad
- Chapter 3 The Translator’s Art: Mouradgea d’Ohsson, Ottoman Dragoman in Paris
- Chapter 4 Miniatures in Black and White: Melling’s Istanbul
Part III: Contradictory Contact
- Chapter 5 Skin of Nation, Body of Empire: Louis Dupré in Ottoman Greece
- Chapter 6 A Painter’s Renunciation: Delacroix in North Africa
In this volume, Elisabeth Fraser shows that artists and the works they created in the Mediterranean during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were informed by mutual dependence and reciprocity between European nations and the Ottoman Empire. Her rich exploration of this vibrant cross-cultural exchange challenges the dominant interpretation of European relations with the East during the period, revealing a shared world of fluid and long-sustained interactions.
Voyagers to and from the Ottoman Empire documented their journeys in prints, paintings, and lavishly illustrated travelogues; many of these helped define Europe’s self-identified role as heir to Ottoman civilizations and bolstered its presence in the Islamic Mediterranean and beyond. Fraser finds that these works illuminate not only how travelers’ experiences abroad were more nuanced than the expansionist ideology with which they became associated, but also how these narratives depicted the vitality of Ottoman culture and served as extensions of Ottoman diplomacy. Ottomans were aware of and responded to European representations, using them to defend Ottoman culture and sovereignty. In embracing the art of both cultures and setting these works in a broader context, Fraser challenges the dominant historiographical tradition that sees Ottoman artists adopting European modes of art in a one-sided process of “Europeanization.”
Theoretically informed and rigorously researched, this cross-cultural approach to European and Ottoman art sheds much-needed critical light on the widely disseminated travel images of the era—important cultural artifacts in their own right—and provides a fresh and inviting understanding of the relationships among cultures in the Mediterranean during an era of increasing European expansionism.
ISBN: 978-0-271-07320-0
Contents:
Part I: Power in Question
- Chapter 1 Reading Choiseul in the Gaps of the Orientalist Archive
- Chapter 2 In the Shadow of les Grands: Cassas’s Orientalist Self-Fashioning
Part II: Ottoman Culture Abroad
- Chapter 3 The Translator’s Art: Mouradgea d’Ohsson, Ottoman Dragoman in Paris
- Chapter 4 Miniatures in Black and White: Melling’s Istanbul
Part III: Contradictory Contact
- Chapter 5 Skin of Nation, Body of Empire: Louis Dupré in Ottoman Greece
- Chapter 6 A Painter’s Renunciation: Delacroix in North Africa
Chapters:
Introduction: Delacroix, the Bourbons, and the Problem of Inheritance
Chapter one: Choosing Fathers: Dante and Virgil
Chapter two: Family as Nation in the Massacres of Chios
Chapter three: Contesting Paternal Authority: Delacroix, the Private Collector, and the Public
Chapter four: Sardanapalus: The Life and Death of the Royal Body
Epilogue: Gender and the Family Politics of the Restoration
Appendix A: correspondence within the Ministry of Fine Arts and to the king concerning the controversial purchase of Delacroix’s Massacres of Chios in 1824
Appendix B: letter written by the Minister of Fine Arts in 1828 requesting that the artist’s Death of Sardanapalus be removed from the Grand Salon
Part of a roundtable discussion with Jeffrey Collins, Elizabeth Mansfield, Amelia Rauser, Kristel Smentek & Wendy Bellion, Paris Spies-Gans, Nancy Um, Amy Freund.
https://www.journal18.org/4933.
costume miniatures, most of the still embryonic writing on images of Ottoman costume assumes the priority of European print examples. But European artisans of the book were not without knowledge of Ottoman work: Ottoman-produced costume miniatures circulated in Europe beginning already in the sixteenth century, and increasingly through the seventeenth and especially eighteenth centuries. My essay explores how a consideration of the materiality of the costume book and album – specifically texture, touch, and the practice of hand-coloring – shapes a cross-cultural reading of them, a reading that is reinforced by early modern cultural
constructions of color, especially in relation to textile and dress. This investigation defines cultural mediation as layered, discontinuous, and resulting from a multiplicity of points of contact and exchange.
Interviewed by Ricarda Brosch