Eighteenth-century France witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of materially unstable art, from oil paintings that cracked within years of their creation to enormous pastel portraits vulnerable to the slightest touch or vibration. In A Delicate Matter, Oliver Wunsch traces these artistic practic...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Bibliographische Detailangaben

1. Verfasser:	Wunsch, Oliver (VerfasserIn)
Format:	Elektronisch E-Book
Sprache:	English
Veröffentlicht:	University Park, Pennsylvania The Pennsylvania State University Press [2024]
Schlagworte:	Geschichte 1700-1800 ART / History / Baroque & Rococo Kunst Frankreich
Online-Zugang:	DE-188 URL des Erstveröffentlichers
Zusammenfassung:	Eighteenth-century France witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of materially unstable art, from oil paintings that cracked within years of their creation to enormous pastel portraits vulnerable to the slightest touch or vibration. In A Delicate Matter, Oliver Wunsch traces these artistic practices to the economic and social conditions that enabled them: an ascendant class of art collectors who embraced fragile objects as a means of showcasing their disposable wealth.While studies of Rococo art have traditionally focused on style and subject matter, this book reveals how the physical construction of paintings and sculptures was central to the period's reconceptualization of art. Drawing on sources ranging from eighteenth-century artists' writings to twenty-first-century laboratory analyses, Wunsch demonstrates how the technical practices of eighteenth-century painters and sculptors provoked a broad transformation in the relationship between art, time, and money. Delicacy, which began the eighteenth century as a commodified extension of courtly sociability, was by century's end reimagined as the irreducible essence of art's autonomous value.Innovative and original, A Delicate Matter is an important intervention in the growing body of scholarship on durability and conservation in eighteenth-century French art. It challenges the art historical tendency to see decay as little more than an impediment to research, instead showing how physical instability played a critical role in establishing art's meaning and purpose
Beschreibung:	1 Online-Ressource (xii, 177 Seiten) Illustrationen
ISBN:	9780271096681
DOI:	10.1515/9780271096681