HIST 358: Libertinage and Liberty (HC): Images and Art

Donatien Alphonse François de Sade (1740–1814) completely transformed the history of both literature and the arts, first as an underground writer, and later by becoming a veritable legend in his lifetime. The Divin Marquis's work is a radical questioning of issues of limits, proportion, excess, notions of beauty, ugliness, the sublime and the body image. This exhibition catalog explores the way Sade changed our view of things.

This is a catalog from a recent art exhibit at the Grand Trianon. The Versailles website describes the show in this way:
"In addition to rulers from Queen Maria-Theresa of Austria to Empress Eugénie of France, portraits of women in the royal or imperial family – mothers, sisters, daughters and granddaughters – are on display in the gallery. Beside them, you can see paintings of women whose lives were interwoven with power – princesses and royal favourites – and of lesser-known figures: ladies of the royal court and women in the service of queens and empresses. A procession of three centuries of women in French history streams past the eyes of visitors, who can observe changing tastes in fashion and portraiture in famous works by Gobert, Rigaud, Nattier, Gérard, Gros and Winterhalter."

Fragonard, perhaps the most significant French painter of the eighteenth century, was condemned first as a purveyor of luxury items and later as an artist who abandoned noble subjects for the erotic genre. In this revisionist, art-historical study, Mary D. Sheriff challenges such pejorative views of Fragonard by arguing that he is better understood as an artist whose unsurpassed technical skill and witty manipulation of academic standards established a dynamic relation with the audience his art both courted and created.

Borin, Françoise. "Judging by Images."

Directing his pointed wit at the upper echelons of 18th-century British society, William Hogarth, a painter, printmaker, and social critic, mocked the politics and customs of his day. His series of satirical paintings and engravings, which still absorb viewers after nearly three centuries, record human vice and folly with a sharp eye and cutting intelligence. This compelling book, with an accompanying DVD narrated by Alan Bennett, examines Hogarth's best-known series of paintings,Marriage A-la-Mode, and unlocks many mysteries that have surrounded this gripping artistic commentary.

A richly illustrated literary anthology that explores the fantasies, seductions, and intrigues of the eighteenth-century French lover. This sumptuous volume presents more than eighty selections from eighteenth-century French literature, each concerning some facet of the game of love as practiced by the libertine, or the freethinking aristocratic hedonist, a type that flourished-not least in literature-in the declining years of the Ancien Regime. Each selection is illustrated by well-chosen period artworks, many rarely seen, by Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, and numerous others.

The Renaissance woman, whether privileged or of the artisan or the middle class, was trained in the expressive arts of needlework and painting, which were often given precedence over writing. Pens and Needles is the first book to examine all these forms as interrelated products of self-fashioning and communication.

From the beginning of the 18th century, authors celebrated the idea of a hideaway in the country where sophisticates could devote themselves to Libertine pleasures. This study includes many plans and drawings for these popular pavilions.

The rich collections of paintings and sculptures in the Louvre, Versailles, Fontainebleau are featured. The female artists were active from 1750 through 1848. Published to accompany a major exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, this beautifully illustrated book examines eighteenth-century French theories of sexual difference and their influence on the 'woman-artist question'; paradoxical Revolutionary attitudes toward women artists, who encountered as many new limitations as opportunities; and the complex ways that women marketed their reputations and managed their cultural positions in France's intricate social and artistic hierarchy.

In this unusual and original study, Marcia Pointon examines the cultural effects and consequences of the participation by women in acts of representation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She explores their lives and work, and a cultural environment in which images of female saints and goddesses established indices of femininity in the homes of wealthy men. Did the women portrayed also possess artifacts, and did they use the power of gifts and bequests to determine social relations? Did they themselves participate in the processes of creating images of the seen world? Pointon sets out to answer some of these questions through a series of novel and vividly recounted case studies of women such as Emma Hamilton (wife and mistress), Mary Moser, the artist, and Dorothy Richardson, the antiquarian.

Seduction and eroticism were central themes of 18th Century French art. This book draws from the collection of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg to illustrate this theme.