Enchanted Islands: Picturing the Allure of Conquest in Eighteenth-Century France
- ISBN-10
- 022648324X
- ISBN-13
- 9780226483245
- Category
- Art
- Pages
- 416
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2018-08-16
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Author
- Mary D. Sheriff
Description
In Enchanted Islands, renowned art historian Mary D. Sheriff explores the legendary, fictional, and real islands that filled the French imagination during the ancien regime as they appeared in royal ballets and festivals, epic literature, paintings, engravings, book illustrations, and other objects. Some of the islands were mythical and found in the most popular literary texts of the day—islands featured prominently, for instance, in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso,Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, and Fénelon’s, Telemachus. Other islands—real ones, such as Tahiti and St. Domingue—the French learned about from the writings of travelers and colonists. All of them were imagined to be the home of enchantresses who used magic to conquer heroes by promising sensual and sexual pleasure. As Sheriff shows, the theme of the enchanted island was put to many uses. Kings deployed enchanted-island mythology to strengthen monarchical authority, as Louis XIV did in his famous Versailles festival Les Plaisirs de l’île enchantée. Writers such as Fénelon used it to tell morality tales that taught virtue, duty, and the need for male strength to triumph over female weakness and seduction. Yet at the same time, artists like Boucher painted enchanted islands to portray art’s purpose as the giving of pleasure. In all these ways and more, Sheriff demonstrates for the first time the centrality of enchanted islands to ancient regime culture in a book that will enchant all readers interested in the art, literature, and history of the time.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
Blue Book of Art Values: Artists & Their Works from Around the World
By William Edwin DayBlue Book of Art Values: Artists & Their Works from Around the World
-
New Deal Art in Alabama: The Murals, Sculptures and Other Works, and Their Creators
By Anita Price Davis, Jimmy S. EmersonPeter Jennings and Todd Brewster, The Century (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 154. 8. Time-Life Editors, This Fabulous Century, Vol. IV, 23. 9.
-
The World of Bob Timberlake
By Bob TimberlakeOffers a selection of eighty-seven full-color reproductions of Timberlake's paintings, with an introduction by the painter
-
The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop
By Karen L. Maness, Richard M. IsackesTHE FERRELL BROTHERS, WILBUR AND WARREN , in their own words "were not known as singular artists but a duo." Wilbur began his career as a motion picture ...
-
John Singer Sargent and His Muse: Painting Love and Loss
By Karen Corsano, Daniel WillimanAdelson, Warren, “John Singer Sargent and the 'New Painting,'” in Stanley Olson, Warren Adelson, and Richard Ormond, Sargent at Broadway: The Impressionist ...
-
The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop
By Karen L. Maness, Richard M. IsackesThis is a rich undiscovered history—a history replete with competing art departments, dynastic scenic families, and origins stretching back to the films of Méliès, Edison, Sennett, Chaplin, and Fairbanks.
-
Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History
By Karen LangThrough careful research, Carol Gibson-Wood exposes the mythology surrounding the Morellian method, especially the mythology of the coherence and primacy of his method of attribution. She argues that it “could also be said that Berenson ...
-
Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity
By Karen B. SternGibson translates from the Phoenician: “Beware! Behold, there is disaster for you ... !” (SSI 3, no. 5=KAI nr. 2). Examples from Cyprus include SSI 3, no. 12=KAI nr. 30. Gibson's translation of the Phoenician reads (SSI 3, ...
-
Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960
By Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Kevin Stayton, Brooklyn Museum of ArtExamines the emergence of abstract organic forms and their assimilation into the popular arts and culture of American life from 1940-1960, covering advertising, decorative arts, commercial design, and the fine arts.
-
Typography: A Very Short Introduction
By Paul Luna... S. Newman ACCOUNTING Christopher Nobes ADAM SMITH Christopher J. Berry ADOLESCENCE Peter K. Smith ADVERTISING ... ALGEBRA Peter M. Higgins AMERICAN CULTURAL HISTORY Eric Avila AMERICAN HISTORY Paul S. Boyer AMERICAN IMMIGRATION ...