**Networks and Practices of Connoisseurship in the Global Eighteenth Century**

Valérie Kobi, Kristel Smentek, Chonja Lee (Eds.)

# **Networks and Practices of Connoisseurship in the Global Eighteenth Century**

Published with the support of the Faculty of Letters and Humanities of the Université de Neuchâtel and MIT's Open Monograph Fund.

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ISBN 978-3-11-099695-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-098508-5 DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110985085

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© 2024 the author(s), editing © 2024 Valérie Kobi, Kristel Smentek, Chonja Lee, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. This book is published with open access at www.degruyter.com.

Cover image: Kubo Shunman, Illustrated compendium of *Kenchō-ji Temple Treasures* (*Kenchō-ji hōmotsu enkan*), from the series *Chronicles of Kamakura, made by Shunman* (*Kamakura shi Shunman sei*), ca. 1804–18, woodblock-printed surimono, ink, color, embossing, and mica on paper, 21 × 18.5 cm, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge MA; Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1933.4.1389 Cover design: Rüdiger Kern Typesetting: 3w+p GmbH, Rimpar Printing and binding: Beltz Grafische Betriebe GmbH, Bad Langensalza

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#### Contents

#### Acknowledgments 1

Valérie Kobi and Kristel Smentek Introduction: Connoisseurship in the Networked Eighteenth Century 3

Kit Brooks

Tactile Simulacra: Japanese Still Life Surimono as Artifacts of Eighteenth-Century Treasure Gatherings 15

Maureen Cassidy-Geiger Tout Rome veüt vendre: The Collection of Cardinal Filippo Antonio Gualtieri in Rome and in Dresden 29

Émilie Roffidal

The Connoisseurship Practices of a "Levantine" of Marseille or When Trade Meets Art 53

Friederike Weis A Crouching Woman at Her Toilette: Venus or Radha? Cross-Cultural Connoisseurship of an Indian Album Motif 69

Caitlin Karyadi

Japan's Southern Schools: Imported Painting, Chinese Criticism, and the Contours of Connoisseurship in Eighteenth-Century Japan 87

Mrinalini Sil

Jean-Baptiste Gentil's "Mughalesque" Albums: A Study in the Visual Nodes and Aesthetic Modes of Firanghi Paintings in Eighteenth-Century India 101

Maria Gabriella Matarazzo Accommodating Contours: Vicente Victoria on Chinese Printmaking 121

Gabriel Batalla-Lagleyre

The Practice of Drawing as a Tool of Connoisseurship in Eighteenth-Century Europe 155

Julia Kloss-Weber

Fragonard's Companion Pieces for the Marquis de Véri: The Art of Pendants or a Transcultural Narrative of Modern French Painting 171

VI Contents

Domenico Pino

Breaking Grounds: Print Connoisseurship and Resurfacing Antiquities in Naples 189

Emily Teo

Duke August's Chinese Cabinet at Gotha: Authenticity and Connoisseurship of Asian Objects in Germany 203

Charlotte Guichard

Asymmetries of Connoisseurship in a Globalizing World: The Geopolitics of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century Paris 221

Biographies of Authors and Editors 243

Image Credits 247

### Acknowledgments

Networks and Practices of Connoisseurship in the Global Eighteenth Century brings together the papers presented during a three-day conference held at the Warburg-Haus, Hamburg, in June 2022. We are immensely grateful to the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, the Hamburgische Wissenschaftliche Stiftung, and the Universität Hamburg for their generous financial support of this event. We are equally grateful to our speakers for the quality of their work, for the wonderfully stimulating conversations that ensued, and for their forbearance at a time when international travel proved particularly challenging. We would like to offer special thanks to Ramin Massoum, whose expert assistance during the preparation of the Hamburg conference and during the meeting itself was invaluable. The conference in Hamburg was preceded by a panel with the same title we organized for the 51st Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) in 2021. Warmest thanks are due to our speakers at this online event, Ünver Rüstem, Elizabeth Saari Browne, and Michele Matteini, who helped us to think through our ideas at an earlier stage of this project, but who, each for different reasons, ultimately could not contribute to this volume.

We are delighted that this scholarly book is available in an open access version, which generous subventions from MIT's Open Monograph Fund and the Université de Neuchâtel have made possible. We warmly thank our editors at De Gruyter, Anja Weisenseel and David Fesser, for their support of this publication and for shepherding the book into production, our copyeditor, Jessica Buskirk, and most of all, Chonja Lee, who joined this book project in its later stages and whose organizational and editorial skills were essential to its timely publication.

Valérie Kobi and Kristel Smentek

### Valérie Kobi and Kristel Smentek Introduction: Connoisseurship in the Networked Eighteenth Century

A gathering of three scholars, each accompanied by attributes of the approaches to knowledge they represent, is prominently depicted in Shiba Kōkan's (1747–1818) late Edo period scroll (fig. 1). At left, a Chinese literatus sits on a stool covered with an animal skin; a closed handscroll and ruyi scepter sit on the table before him. At right, a European man, likely Dutch, wearing a wig and a robe and seated on an upholstered, backed chair, holds a treatise on anatomy opened to a print of a human skeleton. Between them, a Japanese samurai, holding a fan and with a snake, or snake-like bracelet, encircling his wrist, contemplates the medicinal plants in the vase in front of him. Above them, teams of Chinese, European, and Japanese firefighters use their respective technologies to douse the flames consuming a large temple.

The scroll is complex, even polemical, in its comparison of different models of learning.¹ For our purposes, however, the painting bears witness to the growing exchange of knowledge between Asian polities and between Asia and Europe in the eighteenth century. Shiba Kōkan, a Japanese painter, etcher, and scholar of Rangaku (Dutch studies), was an early exponent of Western-style painting in Japan. His oeuvre exemplifies the Eurasian flows of cultural influence and the circulation of artworks facilitated by eighteenth-century networks of scholars, travelers, traders, East India Company operatives, and collectors. Though medicine (an empirical, diagnostic process not unlike art connoisseurship²) is the subject of the meeting around the table on Shiba Kōkan's scroll, the artist's pictorial placement of China, Japan, and Europe on equal terms thematizes the multiplying transformative and destabilizing encounters with other peoples and unfamiliar forms of knowledge and art in an increasingly connected century. In this respect, the scroll illustrates the ambitions of our volume. In contrast to local or national approaches to art connoisseurship, we focus on the transnational: on the networks through which artworks moved beyond their places of production and the variable impacts of these artworks on connoisseurial practices in their new contexts of reception.

<sup>1</sup> Our discussion of the painting is indebted to Federico Marcon, "The 'Book' as Fieldwork: 'Textual Institutions' and Nature Knowledge in Early Modern Japan," BJHS Themes 5 (2020): pp. 131–48, here, pp. 131–34, and Giovanni Tarantino, "Identities on Fire: East Meets West on the Palette of Shiba Kōkan (1738–1818)," Occasion 13 (2022), https://arcade.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/article\_pdfs/Occa sion-v13-Tarantino.pdf. On Rangaku and for further discussions of Shiba Kōkan's works, see Timon Screech, The Lens within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002). On Rangaku, see also Kit Brooks's contribution to this volume.

<sup>2</sup> On the links between these different areas of expertise, see Carlo Ginzburg, "Clues: Roots of a Scientific Paradigm," Theory and Society 7, no. 3 (May 1979): pp. 273–88.

Fig. 1: Shiba Kōkan, A Meeting of Japan, China, and the West, late eighteenth–early nineteenth century, hanging scroll, ink and color on silk, 101.6 × 49.53 cm (image), Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, 2013.29.158

The contributors to this book investigate the intricate cultural, social, and economic transactions through which connoisseurial knowledge of art was generated in Asia and in Europe during the long eighteenth century. As is well-known, this period was the age par excellence of the connoisseur, the disciplined interpreter and assessor of artworks whose claim to authority, like that of the natural philosopher, was founded on his (more rarely her) sustained visual analysis of physical things. An era of accelerating trade and imperial conquest, the eighteenth century was also a period of an expanding global consciousness. The concept that brings these two themes together—the emergence of the connoisseur and an increasing engagement with artworks from afar—is the network: the structures that made connoisseurial exchange within and between continents possible, including the construction and implementation of communication channels, the social dynamics of connoisseurial practices, and the constellation of commercial and political institutions that facilitated their development.

Little, however, has been written about the connoisseurial networks of this period, and a broader reflection on the encounters they enabled with artistic practices from different regions of the globe has yet to appear. Historians of science have demonstrated that almost every advance in botanical knowledge made in the eighteenth century was embedded in a network of international information and specimen exchange.³ Yet, studies of eighteenth-century connoisseurship in Europe have generally stayed local, focusing, for instance, on an individual and his or her web of social relations.⁴ Others have tended to examine the connoisseurship of Western European or Chinese art, for instance, to the exclusion of works from unfamiliar artistic traditions to which eighteenth-century art experts, collectors, and colonial administrators were increasingly exposed. Building upon recent scholarship on the impacts of cultural contact on artmaking and on comparative considerations of antiquarianism, this volume takes a more expansive view of connoisseurship, one that integrates the overlapping networks of trade and conquest that increasingly linked parts of Europe to each other and Europe

<sup>3</sup> See, among others, Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the 'Improvement' of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Regina Dauser, Stefan Hächler, Michael Kempe, Franz Mauelshagen, and Martin Stuber, eds., Wissen im Netz. Botanik und Pflanzentransfer in europäischen Korrespondenznetzen des 18. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008). The interest of historians of science in network studies developed during the 1990s largely in response to Bruno Latour's "Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands," Knowledge and Society 6 (1986): pp. 1–40. For an analysis of this shift, see Emma C. Spary, "Botanical Networks Revisited," in Wissen im Netz, pp. 47–64.

<sup>4</sup> See, for example: Isabelle Tillerot, Jean de Jullienne et les collectionneurs de son temps: un regard singulier sur le tableau (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 2010); Kristel Smentek, Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Farnham, VT: Ashgate, 2014); Valérie Kobi, Dans l'œil du connoisseur. Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774) et la construction des savoirs en histoire de l'art (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017); Thomas Ketelsen and Martin Schuster, eds., Carl Heinrich von Heineken in Dresden auf Schloss Altdöbern (Dresden: Sandstein, 2018).

to Asia into an analysis of its practices and transregional synergies and dissonances.⁵ Our contributors ask how social, institutional, and commercial networks of connoisseurship were built and evolved over time. What were the channels through which encounters with art from afar were made possible? What methods were used to categorize art from other parts of the globe? And how might a recognition of the conventionality of artmaking have shaped local definitions of art and artistic quality in Asia and in Europe?

Over the chapters of this book, our authors present in-depth investigations of the different processes through which eighteenth-century connoisseurs in China, France, Germany, India, Italy, and Japan generated knowledge about art, negotiating the unfamiliar conventions of art from elsewhere and posing questions about the specificities and the categorization of local artistic traditions. Our collective goal is not to posit universals about art connoisseurship and its effects in this formative period. Indeed, the Americas and Africa, critical geographies in the networked eighteenth century, are not represented in this volume although we hoped they might be. Instead, through our case studies of eighteenth-century Eurasian connoisseurial connections and dislocations, our ambition is to defamiliarize the familiar, to bring into view objects and practices that cross national boundaries and disciplinary specializations, and to be open to the alternate histories of art and its reception that they propose.

We came to our interests in the transnational dimensions of eighteenth-century connoisseurship because of our respective research on Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694– 1774), a celebrated French collector and, for many scholars, the paradigmatic eighteenth-century European connoisseur, of the graphic arts. Our readers will encounter him again in Émilie Roffidal and Gabriel Batalla-Lagleyre's contributions to this volume. In her text, Roffidal demonstrates how closely connoisseurship was linked to trade—on a national and especially an international level—through her analysis of the activities of a Levantine network in Marseille, including the wealthy merchant

<sup>5</sup> On artistic impacts, see, for example: Screech, The Lens within the Heart; Mary D. Sheriff, ed., Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Nebahat Avcıoğlu, Turquerie and the Politics of Representation, 1728–1876 (Farnham, VT: Ashgate, 2011); Natasha Eaton, Mimesis Across Empires: Artworks and Networks in India, 1765– 1860 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Ning Ding, eds., Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges between China and the West (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2015); Elizabeth A. Fraser, Mediterranean Encounters: Artists Between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1774–1839 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017); Liza Oliver, Art, Trade, and Imperialism in Early Modern French India (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019); Holly Shaffer, Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760–1910 (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2022). On comparative antiquarianisms, see Peter N. Miller and François Louis, eds., Antiquarian and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012); Alain Schnapp, ed., World Antiquarianism: Comparative Perspectives (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2013); Charlotte Guichard and Stéphane Van Damme, eds., Les Antiquités dépaysées: histoire globale de la culture antiquaire au siècle des Lumières (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022).

Pierre-Augustin Guys (1721–99). Following his return to his hometown after spending over ten years in Constantinople, Guys became a recognized art connoisseur and an active member of the local Académie des sciences et belles-lettres. As such, he leveraged his mastery of the logistics of Mediterranean trade to ship prized antiquities to collectors and connoisseurs in France and consolidate his own reputation in the process. A similarly close connection between trade and connoisseurship characterizes Mariette's career. In addition to his collecting and scholarly activities, he ran an internationally-renowned book and print shop in Paris and possessed an extensive business network that enabled his exchanges with connoisseurs across the continent.

Mariette's career and practice exemplify the consolidation, in eighteenth-century Europe, of the connoisseur as a social type and as an especially discerning judge whose authority was founded on extensive, first-hand, comparative analysis of works of art. As Pascal Griener has pointed out, comparative observation was a central tool of the connoisseur in the age of Enlightenment.⁶ It was through the practice of comparative visual investigation that knowledge about art and of attributions was incrementally built. Julia Kloss-Weber's contribution foregrounds—through the example of two paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1738–1806) commissioned by the Marquis de Véri (1722–85), a Parisian collector primarily engaged by the modern French school —the importance of this approach, and the theoretical significance that the art of pendants, that is, the bringing together of paintings conceived from the beginning as a pair, could imply. Fragonard's canvases not only testify to the Marquis de Véri's status as a connoisseur but also make a strong claim for the painter himself as a connoisseur. In the pendants Fragonard proclaims himself an artist-connoisseur keenly attuned to the nuances of Dutch and Italian art who, in his painterly practice, simultaneously accentuates and sublimates these regional differences into a new, modern art at once transcultural and distinctively French.

Like Véri and Fragonard, Mariette was principally interested in European art; the vast majority of the over 9400 drawings and 1000s of prints he owned documented the styles and history of the Italian, French, Dutch, German, and Spanish schools. This focus on the graphic arts within European connoisseurial circles was widespread. As Gabriel Batalla-Lagleyre shows here, prints and drawings were not only the primary material foundation of the connoisseur's acquisition of knowledge about art, but many eighteenth-century collectors and connoisseurs practiced drawing and etching themselves as part of a process of understanding and appropriating the distinctive operations of an individual artist's hand. These techniques were tools to train their own hands and eyes as well as to faithfully record artistic particularities; Batalla-Lagleyre links this development to the use of drawing by such early modern astronomers as Galileo Galilei (1565–1642) and Johannes Hevelius (1611–87).

<sup>6</sup> Pascal Griener, La République de l'œil. L'Expérience de l'art au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010).

Mariette had especially wide-ranging interests in the history and art of printmaking (interests no doubt motivated in part by his business), and his collection included works on paper from China.⁷ The latter comprised only a fraction of his holdings, but their presence in his cabinet testifies to the increasing circulation of works from Asia and their very different aesthetics in eighteenth-century Europe. It also evidences the ambivalent attention directed towards these imports by European experts as well as the curiosity these works stimulated about the origins of the graphic medium. A compelling example of this curiosity is the case study addressed by Maria Gabriella Matarazzo. Her exploration of Vicente Victoria's (1650–1709) early eighteenth-century research on the history of printmaking reveals an awareness of China's possible priority in the invention of this technique. Victoria's speculations were prompted by his first-hand study of the Tianzhu jiangsheng chuxiang jingjie (Illustrated Explanation of the Incarnation of the Lord of Heaven) a Life of Christ illustrated with woodblock prints published in China in the early seventeenth century, which he claimed to have in his collection in Rome. As Matarazzo argues, Victoria was both admiring and conflicted about the graphic art from China he discussed. His mixed response was conditioned by negative European commentaries on Asian art but also shaped by his own direct encounter with prints from Imperial China, works which were themselves the products of an intercultural encounter between Jesuit missionaries and Chinese printmakers in Beijing.

One of the sets of prints from China in Mariette's collection can be identified. This is the Gengzhi tu (Illustrations of Tilling and Weaving), a series of forty-six images illustrating the cultivation of rice and the making of silk commissioned by the Kangxi Emperor, first printed in China in 1696, and reissued periodically during the Qing dynasty.⁸ According to the catalog of his estate sale, published in 1775, the set in Mariette's possession was bound with a lengthy manuscript description, in his hand, of the plates and of the process of rice production which twenty-three of the prints depicted. To our knowledge, neither the woodblock prints from Mariette's collection nor his accompanying manuscript have been located, so what, if anything, he might have written about their style and technique, described in the sale catalog as executed with "neatness and detail," is unknown.⁹ From the attention to rice cultivation in the manuscript, however, we can reasonably infer that Mariette's interest in the prints straddled the artistic, the technical, and the ethnographic, and that the documentary evidence of the plates took precedence over, or was at least in tension with, their representational

<sup>7</sup> Mariette's Chinese albums are listed in Pierre-François Basan, Catalogue raisonné des différens objets de curiosities dans les sciences et les arts qui composoient le cabinet de feu M. Mariette (Paris: G. Desprez, 1775), p. 221, no. 1449 and 1450.

<sup>8</sup> Based on Basan's description and a thumbnail sketch of it in the margins of Gabriel de Saint Aubin's copy of the Mariette sale catalog, no. 1449 is almost certainly the Gengzhi tu. For Saint-Aubin's sketch see, Pierre Rosenberg et al., La vente Mariette: le catalogue illustré par Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (Milan: Electa, 2011), p. 211, sketch beside no. 1449.

<sup>9</sup> "beaucoup de netteté & de précision," Basan, Catalogue raisonné, p. 221, no. 1449.

conventions. As Emily Teo indicates in her contribution, a similar tension between the artistic and the ethnographic characterized the contents of Duke August of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg's (1772–1822) Chinese Cabinet at Friedenstein Palace in Gotha later in the century. The duke's cabinet was close to his library, and the geographic provenance of his collected artefacts was central to their value; in addition to their aesthetic qualities, they provided material corroboration of information contained in printed sources. Through the example of life-size Chinese mannequins and other imports kept in this collection, Teo shows how malleable constructs of authenticity could be. In Duke August's practice, as in that of other connoisseurs, authenticity was constructed in a circuit that unfolds between the object, the written document, and the expert's judgment.

Contacts with Indo-Persianate collecting and connoisseurial traditions also accelerated in the eighteenth century, with muraqqaʿ, or bound collections of calligraphy, drawings, and paintings, circulating between Persia, the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire, and Europe. In these different contexts, the effects on the connoisseurs who encountered such albums were varied. In ca. 1736, Mariette examined a Persian muraqqaʿ which had entered the collections of the Royal Library in Paris in 1727 (fig. 2). The French connoisseur was initially drawn to the Safavid codex because of the presence of two sixteenth-century German engravings among the many calligraphy specimens and Persian tinted drawings it contained. His short but informative note describing his encounter with the album, however, betrays a surprised recognition of similarity in difference: Persian connoisseurs were as careful about the conservation of works on paper and as considered in their display as Mariette was about his own collection of prints and drawings. What is more, Mariette's admiration for the album's beautifully framed pages may well have been a catalyst for the ornamental paper mounts the French collector devised for the drawings he had begun amassing by the 1730s (fig. 3). Though some aspects of his mounts were indebted to Italian precedents, Mariette's presentation of his drawings with multiple colored paper borders and rulings was distinctive for its time in Europe.¹⁰

The muraqqaʿ Mariette saw was an unusual purchase for the French Royal Library in the 1720s, but later in the century, as Friederike Weis, Mrinalini Sil, and Charlotte Guichard show, Europeans would become more familiar with the genre. Men like Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier (1741–95) and Jean-Baptiste Gentil (1726–99), who operated within English and French India Company networks, collected and also commissioned Indo-Persianate bound collections during their time on the subcontinent, bringing them home to Europe for collective viewing by their own social networks, or gifting them, as Gentil did in 1785, to the Royal Library in Paris. Weis investigates Mughal albums made for Polier in order to illustrate networks of exchange among connoisseurs

<sup>10</sup> On Mariette's encounter with this album, see Kristel Smentek, "From Europe to Persia and Back Again: Border-Crossing Prints and the Asymmetries of Early Modern Cultural Encounter," in Prints as Agents of Global Exchange, 1500–1800, ed. Heather Madar (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), pp. 107–25.

Fig. 2: Unknown artist(s), Tinted drawing of a seated dervish, late sixteenth century, mounted on fol. 6v in Persan 129, département des Manuscrits, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

in India and in Europe and to consider the volumes' audiences in light of contrasting and complementary Indian and European tastes, as well as European antiquarianism and reading habits. Mrinalini Sil reveals how Jean-Baptiste Gentil's collections of Indian paintings were embedded in transregional art networks and power dynamics that extended across cultural and political differences in eighteenth-century India. The contents of Gentil and Polier's albums connected the regional styles and connoisseurial practices of the subcontinent with the tastes and preconceptions of recently arrived Europeans. Despite appreciation for muraqqaʿ in their contexts of origin, Charlotte Guichard traces how little consideration Gentil's albums received once they arrived in French institutions. Though the muraqqaʿ were vital aspects of Gentil's self-fashioning as a connoisseur in India, he was never really recognized at home during his lifetime for his connoisseurial knowledge and expertise, and the collections he formed were

Fig. 3: Cavaliere d'Arpino (Giuseppe Cesari), Allegorical figure of fame, ca. 1590, graphite and red chalk, highlighted with white gouache, on light brown paper, 25 × 15.9 cm (drawing), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1986.318

largely ignored until quite recently. As Guichard shows, Gentil's failed attempts to build a reputation for himself in France expose the geopolitical forces, the asymmetries, and the exclusionary understandings of good taste entrenched within European connoisseurial practices of the time.

Much like the French connoisseurs who paid no attention to Gentil's Indian paintings, Mariette had nothing to say about the actual images in the muraqqaʿ he saw. He did not comment upon them in his note, and there is no trace of his encounter with them in any of his publications. He may have recognized a kinship between himself and the Persian compiler of the album he saw, but he seems to have rejected its images as worthy of connoisseurial attention. The muraqqaʿ arriving in France from Persia and India, the prints from China that Victoria and Mariette studied, and Duke August of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg's Chinese imports attest to the ways in which works from afar often hovered at the edges of eighteenth-century European connoisseurial attention. Art from Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean provided direct, visual evidence of other modes of artmaking. It challenged the uniqueness of European art by exposing the conventionality of European artistic practice. At the same time, for many European viewers, the perceived lack of perspective and modeling in Persian and Chinese art helped to shore up convictions about the superiority of European art and claims for the progress made by European artists. In Asia, such confrontations between visual cultures also unsettled proven connoisseurs. Caitlin Karyadi examines inter-Asian art and knowledge transfer, and especially the challenges Chinese painting and Chinese art theories posed to long-established connoisseurial practices in eighteenth-century Japan. In response to this "epistemic collision," and to critique local practice by way of Chinese art, Japanese connoisseurs reshuffled established categories of classification and, not unlike Duke August in Gotha, were strategically flexible about authenticity. The (re) shaping of an artistic canon thus involved constant visual and theoretical negotiations between the objects at hand and individual interpretations of them. As several of our authors demonstrate, despite connoisseurial claims to objectivity, genuine appreciation of imported artworks and the development of new critical categories in response to them was frequently constrained by local art theory, inherited antiquarian learning, and preconceptions about, or projections onto, other cultures.¹¹

The recurrent references to the works of the past and to their predecessors by the Japanese critics Karyadi discusses highlight the extent to which connoisseurs across Eurasia depended on existing knowledge as well as on their own social and intellectual networks to extend their fields of expertise. Mariette was no exception to this dynamic. Without his relationships with the influential antiquarian, the Comte de Caylus, or Italian scholars such as Giovanni Gaetano Bottari (1689–1775), he would never have been able to develop his eye, gather the collections, and publish the works that established him as one of the leading connoisseurs of his time. These networks were essential and were based on the exchange of information, books, objects, and other items. Facts were consolidated as artefacts were sent back and forth between correspondents, sometimes at a significant distance from one another, and compared, corrected, and complemented until a consensus was reached within the scholarly community. This collective process of knowledge formation and its specific temporality directly contributed to the definition of private connoisseurial expertise. As such, the circulation of things and production of knowledge within connoisseurial networks occasioned a multifaceted apparatus of instruments and techniques, including the production of written texts, prints, copies, and occasionally, fakes that were meant to facilitate scientific exchange, and test expert knowledge.

These practices transformed communication into a multimedia affair as Maureen Cassidy-Geiger shows in her analysis of the archival traces of the purchase made for King August II the Strong (1670–1733) by his agent, Raymond LePlat (1664–1742), at the sale of Cardinal Filippo Antonio Gualtieri's (1660–1728) collection in Rome in the late 1720s. While working for the sovereign in the Eternal City, LePlat sent descriptions,

<sup>11</sup> See also Craig Clunas, "The Art of Global Comparisons," in Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Maxine Berg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 165–76.

drawings, and even architectural elevations to Dresden in order to inform the king of his undertakings and fully render the effect of the coveted artworks. Sometimes these elements even filled the same sheets of paper, spilling over into the margins and versos of his letters; these drawings thus transformed the correspondence into a rich source that evolved at the frontier of text and image.

Such exchanges could also be local. Through her study of the short-lived phenomena of takara awase (treasure-viewing gatherings) in the city of Edo, Kit Brooks emphasizes the collective dimension of knowledge creation about prized antiquities and imported artefacts during these events, which combined the production of poetry and images centered on objects. Surimono—the luxurious, non-commercial printed still life imagery generated during these gatherings—testified to the common experience of viewing valued objects and composing verse together. The makers of surimono manipulated pigments, printing technologies, and the qualities of paper to replicate the textures of the treasures they reproduced; the woodblock prints thus materially capture the role of touch, in addition to vision, in connoisseurial practice. Back in Europe, the discovery of major archaeological sites, such as Herculaneum and Pompeii, also prompted reflections on ancient objects and their rendering through engravings. By focusing on the Stamperia Reale in Naples, a press founded by King Charles of Bourbon (1716–88) in 1748, Domenico Pino demonstrates how fine prints illustrating and documenting these archaeological finds were used to transfer new knowledge onto paper, sometimes through highly innovative techniques. In this respect, the plates of Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte (The Antiquities of Herculaneum Unveiled, Naples: Stamperia Reale, 1757–92) proposed original solutions for the reproduction of antiquities. Instead of completing the fragmented originals, the printmakers filled the gaps with strokes and dashes. This approach created an interesting visual consequence: by contemplating these voids the viewer became aware of the historical temporal distance that separated him or her from the classical past. It thus left room for personal interpretation but also for discussion and debate among scholars.

Debate is the theme of the hanging scroll with which we began. Though the gathering of scholars seems amicable, historians have argued that, in the context of the late Edo period, the contrasting approaches to knowledge production the three men represent and the varying effectiveness of the firefighting teams depicted above were controversial commentaries on the state of learning in Japan. In this sense, the painting exemplifies the complexity that characterizes the transcultural exchanges analyzed by the contributors to this volume. As they show, the eighteenth-century construction of knowledge about art at a transnational level was uneven. While some collectors and connoisseurs were fully engaged by the alternative forms of art and connoisseurial practice they encountered, others were selective, ambivalent, or dismissive, and their aesthetic assumptions remained unchanged or were reinforced. Connoisseurial knowledge in the networked, but geopolitically asymmetrical eighteenth-century world was forged through a series of productive connections and equally generative misunderstandings, each born of cultural negotiations between the self and the other, between the local and the global.

#### Kit Brooks

### Tactile Simulacra: Japanese Still Life Surimono as Artifacts of Eighteenth-Century Treasure Gatherings

The medium of deluxe, independently sponsored and circulated woodblock prints known as surimono is remarkable for the preponderance of still-life subjects, a genre that is otherwise sparsely represented in Japan prior to the adoption of a Western-style art school curriculum in the 1880s.¹ One plausible contributing factor to that development is the connection between surimono and the short-lived phenomena of takara awase (treasure-viewing gatherings) held by the comic verse community during the 1770s and 1780s in the city of Edo (pre-modern Tokyo). The objects shared at the takara awase were intended to serve as prompts for the participants to compose poetry of the irreverent kyōka (crazy verse) style. Although there appear to have been only two recorded instances of these events, they were of vital importance to the material focus of early kyōka gatherings, and their concentration on specific objects would come to bear pictorially in still-life surimono commissioned by later kyōka poets. Unlike commercial prints, which were sold in stores to consumers on the street, surimono combined poems with elegant imagery that deployed luxurious print effects such as metallic pigments and embossing. Although surimono have mostly been regarded in the literature as an outgrowth of material excess among wealthy urban commoners and without much art-historical significance beyond their aesthetic appeal, the prevalence and character of the still life imagery in these works demonstrates an emphasis on simulating the textures of actual objects in the print medium, a legacy that can be meaningfully traced to the takara awase and other community gatherings that were similarly object-focused.

Takara awase were a comedic reimagining of temple airings, kaichō, where Japanese temples put their art collections on public display for a tightly limited period. The ostensible goal of this practice is to check the condition of the artworks for insect damage, but kaichō also serve to generate income. These events still occur at temples in Japan today and can precipitate crowds of thousands wishing to take advantage of the opportunity to see rarely exhibited, sacred works. The first of the takara awase events, in 1773, was held at the Ekōji temple in Ushigome, a neighborhood in north-

<sup>1</sup> In a broad overview of the genre that is not limited to the tastes of particular collectors and the compositions of their collections, Asano Shūgo estimates still life to be the most numerous category of surimono. See Asano Shūgo, "'Edo no surimono' ten no tenji ni sokushite," in Edo no surimono: suijintachi no okurimono (Chiba: Chiba-shi Bijutsukan, 1997), pp. 5–24, here p. 8. For the purposes of this essay, "still life" refers to works whose depicted subject is of inanimate matter, predominantly humanly made craft objects such as ceramics, lacquerware, armor, and textiles.

west Edo.² Ushigome was a hub of scholarly activity at this time, with well-known local intellectuals basing their gatherings in this area and discoursing on a variety of subjects, from natural sciences and mathematics to art, history and poetry. Unlike a regular temple kaichō, where treasured artworks are brought out from storage, the works that were displayed at both takara awase were not sacred or ancient things, but ordinary objects, with fascinating, outrageous—and purely fictional—histories, such as the bowl that once caught a fish painted by the Chinese Emperor Wu of Han (156–87 BCE), so realistic that it jumped off its hanging scroll (fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Kitao Masayoshi, Recorded Crazy Writings of the Treasure Viewing (Kyōbun takara-awase no ki), vol. 1, 1783, woodblock-printed book, ink on paper, 2 vols., 29.9 × 16.1 cm, National Institute of Japanese Literature, Tokyo

The first event was billed and enacted as though it were a regular temple kaichō, with lacquered boxes marked with the character for "treasure" (takara) carried ceremoniously into the premises. The details of the event were recorded by one of the participants, the accomplished public intellectual Ōta Nanpo (1749–1823). Nanpo describes how ordinary bystanders who were unaffiliated with the proceedings were naturally

<sup>2</sup> The event was held on the 4th day of the 2nd month of the second year of the An'ei era (1772–81), or February 24, 1773, in the Gregorian calendar. The temple is now known as the Zuikōji.

curious about this solemn procession of treasures but became visibly disappointed when the contents of the boxes were revealed to be simple, quotidian things.³ This type of reaction was surely part of the joke, as the takara awase had been arranged for the objects to serve as inspiration for the composition of comedic kyōka poetry. The irreverent nature of the ordinary objects used at the takara awase gatherings fits perfectly with the essential value of kyōka, which is the elevation of the ordinary to the elegant through an ancient verse structure and the allusions to poems by past masters. Text descriptions, illustrations of the objects, and the names of the participants who brought them were recorded by the proprietor of a bookstore in the Ichigaya area of Edo, Bun'ya Yasuo (dates unknown).⁴ Ten years later in 1783, a second takara awase was hosted by the author Morishima Chūryō (1756–1810) at the Kawachiya restaurant in Yanagi-bashi, Edo.⁵ The 110 objects presented at that takara awase are documented in Recorded Crazy Writings of the Treasure Viewing (Kyōbun takara-awase no ki, 2 vols., 1783). The slim first volume contains images of the works supplied by the ukiyo-e artist Kitao Masayoshi (1764–1824), with the constructed histories provided in the second. Taken together, these two events and their related publications brought together multiple individuals from the network of communities surrounding gesaku (light comic fiction) and ukiyo-e, who were active in early kyōka gatherings.⁶

Far removed from the pervasive image of a Romantic poet composing their verses in solitude, traditional Japanese poetry is an intrinsically social activity. Further, the takara awase clearly articulate a connection between the composition of kyōka

<sup>3</sup> Nanpo recorded the takara awase in his ca. 1818 volume The Swordsman Kite (Yakko dako), reproduced in Nihon zuihitsu taisei, vol. 14 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1972), pp. 173–96. Though the event was sponsored by Sakanoue no Jukune (a poetic sobriquet of Shimada Sanai (1725 –84) meaning "sound asleep after drinking"), it has been suggested that the event was actually organized by Nanpo himself; see Gerald Groemer, "A Retiree's Chat (Shin'ya Meidan): The Recollections of the Kyōka Poet Hezutsu Tōsaku," Japan Review, no. 34 (2019): pp. 5–42, here p. 11.

<sup>4</sup> Copies of Bun'ya's volume were scarce, and it was reprinted during the late 1830s as the Illustrated Record of the Takara Awase (Takara awase zusetsu), and again in 1930 with the same title published by Yoneyamadō.

<sup>5</sup> Both takara awase are discussed in Nobuhiro Shinji, ed., "Kyōbun takara awase no ki" no kenkyū (Tokyo: Kyūko Shoin, 2000), pp. 290–94. The Kawachi-ya restaurant continued to be used for gatherings to examine objects, as pictorialized in the ca. 1838–40 series Famous Restaurants of Edo (Edo kōmei kaitei zukushi) by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), where three male figures are shown examining paintings.

<sup>6</sup> For example, the well-known artist Kitagawa Utamaro (ca.1753–1806) participated in 1773 in a takara awase using the pseudonym "Fude no Ayamaru", see Suzuki Jūzō, "Utamaro ehon no bunseikiteki kōsatsu," in Ehon to ukiyo-e: Edo shuppan bunka no kōsatsu (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1979), pp. 407–31, here p. 408. The gesaku authors present at this event later incorporated some of these objects into their published stories, and other volumes were produced in the same vein, such as Shikitei Sanba's (1776–1822) 1813 Gleanings from the Copybook Storehouse (Kanadehon kuraishō), a pseudo-historical compilation of facsimile documents related to the events of the kabuki play Treasury of Loyal Retainers (Kanadehon chūshingura). These included a love letter by the main villain, complete with stimulated wormholes to provide a patina of authenticity.

poems in a group setting and the specific material subjects viewed by that group. Due to limited space, only a few other examples can be provided here; however, similar occasions for kyōka poets to take direct inspiration from objects also included gatherings for those interested in Dutch studies (Rangaku), who circulated rare foreign items for conversation and inspiration.⁷ One such category of treasured objects frequently depicted in surimono is Western timepieces. For example, a surimono with a design of a European watch demonstrates the capacity of surimono to mimic the texture and surface complexity of the depicted object (fig. 2).⁸ To imitate the rounded edges of the gold watch, black has been overprinted onto brass, and the outlines deeply impressed into the paper. The inscription on the watch face provides calendrical information for the sixth year of the Bunsei era (1823), and the character for "spring" in the eight o'clock position provides a link between the image and the referent of the poems. The first poem reads:


—Shihan Hōhi

In posing this question, the poem references a classic verse by the tenth-century Chinese poet Su Shi (1037–1101), "Poem of a Spring Night," a pair of couplets that reflects upon the invaluable worth of one moment of a spring evening:

春宵一刻值千金,花有清香月有陰。歌管樓亭聲細細,秋千院落夜沈沈。

One moment of a spring night is worth a fortune in gold The pure scent of the flowers under the light of the moon. The sound of the flute played on the terrace is delicate and fine The swing in the courtyard falls into the deepening night.

Su Shi's poem is not included on the surimono itself but was so embedded within the cultural memory of the poetry community that an explicit reference would be unnecessary. Where the first kyōka poem reiterates Su Shi's timeless philosophical question —how one might measure the worth of a passing moment—the second provides a humorous answer by offering the subject of the image, a heavy and expensive imported watch.

<sup>7</sup> The Rangaku movement also led to the publication of several specialist texts, including the 1786 Red-Haired Miscellany (Kōmō zatsuwa), a five-volume work by Morishima Chūryō—the host of the 1783 takara awase.

<sup>8</sup> For further analysis of this print and its poems, see Kit Brooks, "Something Rubbed: Medium, History, and Texture in Japanese Surimono" (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2017), pp. 203–7.

<sup>9</sup> All translations are by the author.

Fig. 2: Utagawa Hiroshige, A European Watch, 1823, woodblock-printed surimono, ink, color, embossing and silver on paper, 21 × 19.2 cm, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge MA


—Hachijintei Katashiro

The print itself confronts us with its solidity; the heaviness of the paper, the metallic pigments, and the palpable textures of the different materials represented provide a direct challenge to the earlier poems' philosophical questions of immateriality.

A sense of collective identity for the surimono's community of producers is telegraphed by the character "no" on the key fob, indicating the No-group (No-gawa) as the kyōka group responsible for the print's creation. The kyōka poems commemorate the voluntary association between the individuals involved in the decision to commission the print, and through the connection to the poet Su Shi, to a literary lineage extending across centuries that connects the concerns of the past with those of the present.¹⁰ It seems probable that the model for the watch was a real object in the possession of the print's commissioner, who perhaps lent it to the artist for the purposes of the composition, as it is signed with the character utsusu (copied by), rather than the more common hitsu or ga, (drawn/painted by). The absence of a ground plane or background elements means that the object exists in a suspended state, a simulacrum for the original object that can be similarly held and manipulated.

It is the subset of still life surimono exemplified by this print that makes the most compelling case for the capacity of surimono to generate surface qualities that evoke the aura and texture of specific objects. The artist who exploited these properties to their fullest extent was Kubo Shunman (1757–1820). Shunman was born into a family of lacquerers and eventually operated his own studio devoted exclusively to surimono production, the Shōsadō, which printed surimono designed both by himself and other artists.¹¹ A fertile series for the connection between contemporary antiquarianism and surimono still lives of specific, textured objects is Shunman's Celebrated Products: Inrō and Netsuke (Meibutsu kusa dō inrō dō netsuke) (fig. 3). Several of the objects have adjoining inscriptions ending with the character saku (made by) following the name of an artisan—an indication that the depicted pieces are representations of physical works, rather than mere decorative or compositional elements. Indeed, each of the eight designs features two or more objects that are direct citations from the 1781 text Strange and Wonderful Sword Fittings (Sōken kishō), an ambitious seven-volume compendia of biographic information for craftsmen of various kinds, as well as reproductions of their works, arranged as illustrative line drawings (fig. 4). Poets from at least three different poetry groups contributed verses based on the sentiments evoked by the depicted objects.¹² Whereas many European still lives include artful arrangements of nature's bounty as a primary subject, surimono still lives overwhelmingly feature objects crafted by human hands. Celebrated Products: Inrō and Netsuke combines selec-

<sup>10</sup> Aside from the objective value of their materials, surimono as a media form problematize the standard view of ukiyo-e prints as ephemera, as their essentially commemorative aspect serves to crystallize a moment for future reflection, to prevent it from passing away unrecognized and simply being forgotten.

<sup>11</sup> Himself an accomplished kyōka poet, Shunman's print output is largely devoted to surimono, with an estimate of thirty to forty commercial prints compared to around 400 surimono. See John Carpenter, "Textures of Antiquarian Imagination: Kubo Shunman and the Kokugaku Movement," in The Commercial and Cultural Climate of Japanese Printmaking, ed. Amy Reigle Newland (Amsterdam: Hotei, 2004), pp. 77–113, here p. 78.

<sup>12</sup> The influence of Strange and Wonderful Sword Fittings among the ukiyo-e community appears not to have been limited to this surimono series, as a design in the commercial print series by Keisai Eisen, Eight Trysts with Escorts features a clear citation of the "Doll-Pattern Chinese Gold Leather" from Strange and Wonderful Sword Fittings.

tions that include ivory, metal, lacquer, and textiles, surrounded by blank space as if floating in air. However, rather than simply replicating the line illustrations of the book, the surimono exploit the properties of the thick paper and printing technologies to show the items as tactile objects. For example, ivory pieces, such as the netsuke of the Chinese immortal Li Tieguai on the right of figure three are delineated only through embossing, or karazuri, a technique whereby wet paper is forced into the recesses of an un-inked woodblock so that it holds the shape without the interruption of pigmented lines.

Fig. 3: Kubo Shunman, Inrō and Netsuke, from the series Celebrated Products: Leather, Inrō and Netsuke (Meibutsu kusa dō inrō dō netsuke), ca. 1804–18, woodblock-printed surimono, ink, color, metallic pigments, and embossing on paper, 13.7 × 18.4 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York NY

That Shunman was acknowledged as an expert in simulating texture is indicated by a unique term used to describe his work in a contemporary compendium of artist biographies, Further Various Thoughts on Ukiyo-e (Zoku ukiyo-e ruikō) by Keisai Eisen (1790–1848). An artist himself, Eisen's text was an expansion on a manuscript begun ca. 1790 by Ōta Nanpo—the architect-observer of the earlier takara awase—which was subsequently edited and enlarged by successive generations of gesaku authors and ukiyo-e artists as it circulated among those networked communities. Eisen describes Shunman as "skilled at shashin-zuri-no-ga," a term that can be translated as

Fig. 4: Inaba Shin'emon, Strange and Wonderful Sword Fittings (Sōken kishō), vol. 6, 1781, woodblock-printed book, ink on paper, 7 vols., H. 23 cm, National Institute of Japanese Literature, Tokyo

"true-to-life printed pictures."¹³ Although no definition is provided, in modern Japanese shashin is used to describe photographs, and its premodern usage denotes a type of work that embodies a relationship of fidelity between the depiction and its subject.¹⁴ As this term is used only for Shunman, we can surmise that it is being used to describe his specialty in the context of print culture: surimono.¹⁵ Shunman's study of lacquer techniques at a young age may have shaped his interest in replicating the textured surfaces of manmade objects, as lacquer craftsmen also paid a great deal of attention to crafting the represented surfaces, which could also include inlaying other materials such as wood, coral, and mother-of-pearl, to achieve a high degree of textural verisimilitude. As with surimono, this is not the same type of ocular illusionism to which Western still life painting so often aspires, but instead aims to achieve a sense of the tactile plausibility of the depicted textures. The focus of certain still life

<sup>13</sup> This part of Eisen's description reads: 写真摺の画に妙なり.

<sup>14</sup> For a discussion of "shashin-zuri" and some related terms, see Brooks, "Something Rubbed," pp. 211–17.

<sup>15</sup> Nanpo's notes in the Ukiyo-e kōshō erroneously state that Shunman only produced print designs for kyōka surimono (狂歌すり物の絵のみをかく), though Shunman had produced commercial designs by his time of writing.

surimono on specific, named objects suggests that a recognition of the original is a key component of viewing and handling the print, engaging a faculty of tactile connoisseurship across different media.

An unequivocal example of a surimono that incorporates this element of sensitivity to textural verisimilitude while explicitly referencing the practice of viewing treasured objects is Illustrated Compendium of Kenchōji Temple Treasures (Kenchōji hōmotsu enkan), from the series Chronicles of Kamakura, Made by Shunman (Kamakura shi Shunman sei).¹⁶ One print from this series reproduces an actual temple treasure from the Kenchōji in Kamakura with close attention to the details of its material surface and a proximal recreation of the embodied physical and spiritual experience of handling the object (fig. 5).¹⁷ It depicts the tripod-shaped Chinese mirror named "Enkan" once owned by the founder of the Kenchōji, the Chinese émigré monk Lanqi Daolong (ca. 1213–78). Although the mirror itself was ordinary, after Lanqi's death the Kamakura military regent Hōjō Tokimune (1251–84) had a dream about the monk, who told him to gaze into the mirror if he wished to meet. When Tokimune woke up, he looked into the mirror and saw an image of the Bodhisattva Kannon, realizing in that moment that Lanqi was a manifestation of the deity. Shunman's surimono evokes this experience, as when perceived in raking light, as the highly pigmented mirror reveals an incised outline of Kannon appearing as an apparitional image floating on the mirror's surface.

The surimono is not only remarkable for its heavy use of metallic pigment, but also for the highly unusual shape of the mirror in Shunman's design. Surrounded by a purplish-brown protective cloth wrapping, the mirror is shown simultaneously from multiple angles—the front reveals Kannon, with the rear of the mirror showing a pattern of stylized waves and plum blossom.¹⁸ The thick paper of the surimono invites the viewer to hold and manipulate the print, as though viewing and handling the physical mirror itself. This sense of the mirror's true physicality is further conveyed by the line drawing of the mirror in the upper right, which precisely lists its various dimensions.¹⁹ Although it is difficult to discern in reproduction, the mirror's outlines are printed with a light, glittery pigment that lifts the object off the paper. Aside from an emphasis on a

<sup>16</sup> The surimono series of which this print is part also demonstrates a knowledge of classical texts, as it was based on a 1685 historical treatise, Chronicles of Kamakura: New Edition (Shinpen Kamakura-shi). 17 Another surimono series evoking the practice of takara awase by the surimono specialist Totoya Hokkei (1780–1850) is explicitly titled Takara awase. Dating to the early nineteenth century, this series features figural subjects in combination with objects, and requires further study.

<sup>18</sup> The pattern of raised dots on the rear of the mirror above the water's edge (achieved in the print through embossing) resemble the hammered "fish roe pattern" (nanako moyō) often found on early metalwork, adding to the print's tactile veracity. I'm grateful to Yukio Lippit for bringing this detail to my attention.

<sup>19</sup> The dimensions are listed according to the premodern measurement system of sun and bu, where 1 sun equals 30.3 mm and 1 bu equals 3.3 mm. The height of the mirror is thus given as approximately 107.4 mm with a width of 90.9 mm. The aperture at the top of the mirror is labeled 46.8 mm with the height of the handles as 40.2 mm.

Fig. 5: Kubo Shunman, Illustrated compendium of Kenchō-ji Temple Treasures (Kenchō-ji hōmotsu enkan), from the series Chronicles of Kamakura, made by Shunman (Kamakura shi Shunman sei), ca. 1804–18, woodblock-printed surimono, ink, color, embossing, and mica on paper, 21 × 18.5 cm, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge MA

physical experience, the inscribed poem also hints as the supernatural experiences tied to the mirror, and the mysterious reality revealed through its veiled surface:


— Kyūkenkyōku

With all these elements combined, someone holding the surimono is able to approximate the full experience of gazing into the original treasured mirror. The physicality of the surimono and its reception within a small group of aficionados replicates the appreciation of such valuable objects among connoisseurs with antiquarian pursuits, and the surimono itself becomes a textural surrogate for these esteemed pieces.

This attention paid to replicating the crafted surfaces of objects in surimono still lives makes them productive candidates for consideration alongside the category of "rhonography" as proposed by Norman Bryson in his analysis of how the success of the still life genre relies on the prior bodily experience of the viewer.²⁰ Bryson defines rhonography as the depiction of commonplace objects such as drinking glasses, which have historically prompted "tactile familiarity" in the viewer. Through the recognition of items similar to those that they have previously handled, a viewer is unconsciously stimulated to bodily apprehend the feeling of the objects in the scene depicted. In Bryson's analysis, this tactile familiarity is a factor in why still life paintings of recognizable objects and their textures—ceramics, glass vessels, fruits—can be so realistically illusionistic. Further, Bryson raises the example of Caravaggio's (1571–1610) Basket of Fruit (ca. 1599), in which the central subject is surrounded by a blank expanse, which seems to project it out towards the viewer in real space.²¹ This compositional device is comparable to the negative space that surrounds the objects in many surimono still lives.

In fact, given that surimono are of a small scale that can be held and manipulated, surimono still lives go further than the illusionism envisioned by Bryson, and are more closely aligned with an analysis of holograms recently provided by Zsofi Valyi-Nagy in her study of holographic artworks by the Australian artist Paula Dawson (b. 1954).²² Dawson's holograms are still life tableaus: arrangements of discarded glasses, bottles, and other paraphernalia positioned across different surfaces to replicate the scene in the aftermath of a party. Valyi-Nagy contends that the hyperrealism [of holograms] amplifies the effects of rhonography to "activate the tactile impulse in real space."²³ It can be argued that the verisimilar tactilic depiction of man-made objects in still life surimono generates a quality of experience that is intended to invoke the practice of viewing and handling such objects in group settings. The recipients of the privately circulated surimono would likely have been other members of the commissioning poetry circle, who may have handled the depicted object for themselves in a group setting, or at the very least have attended such a gathering in the past. The practice of connoisseurship as developing a cultivated sensitivity is here applied to a recognition of texture and the embodied experience.

<sup>20</sup> See Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 85.

<sup>21</sup> Collection of Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan.

<sup>22</sup> See Zsofi Valyi-Nagy, "Feeling into Paula Dawson's Holograms," Art Journal 81, no. 1 (2022): pp. 14–26. 23 Ibid., p. 25.

As the products of group activity at every stage of their conception, execution, and appreciation, surimono are the artifacts of gatherings and voluntary associations. The collaborators involved in the production of a surimono were the same social subset that gathered to appreciate the kinds of antiquarian or crafted objects depicted in the prints themselves. It was not only the works that were experienced, but the act of gathering to view them and composing poetry together. The materiality of the experienced objects is made manifest in the final, textured appearance of the printed surimono. That the resulting media is printed matter is not incidental. Although nuanced textural effects can also be displayed through the inventive employment of different pigments and layering effects in painting or lacquerware, those are singular objects, and therefore cannot be distributed amongst a multiplicity of group members in the same manner as a printed surimono. The group nature of their conception is carried through by their production in multiples, whereby members of the commissioning poetry group were able to each possess an iteration of the artwork whose construction they participated in.

This emphasis on tactile and experiential verisimilitude also prompts a reconsideration of the history of the still life genre as it is understood in Japan. The term used in modern Japanese is seibutsu-ga (pictures of stilled objects) a close rendering of its etymological origins in the Dutch word stilleven, or the related German-language Stilleben. Those terms suggest that the original references were not merely representations of inanimate objects, but once living things now deceased and depicted in a state of rest. However, seibutsu-ga is a modern coinage, only entering the Japanese lexicon in the 1910s and without a premodern equivalent. In so far as surimono participate in the history of the still life genre in Japan, it is on altogether different terms, that is, as shashin-zuri-no-ga, whereby the printed work resembles the tactile and experiential qualities of the object depicted, which is overwhelmingly an artifact of human manufacture.²⁴ Although this novel term was only used for Kubo Shunman, who is unquestionably the foremost practitioner of works of this type, its use and the sensibility it represents demonstrate that visuality of surimono was being assessed by different indexes. A study of shashin-zuri surimono reveals a still-life tradition independent of Western standards of ocular realism: the exceptional qualities of surimono challenge what it means to call a representation "life-like," though they initially appear flat and two-dimensional, without a unified perspective, and rarely utilize foreshortening techniques anticipated by viewers from the European tradition. It is perhaps preferrable to retain the use of shashin-zuri to refer to the printing of these images, as the continued use of seibutsu-ga (still life) exposes a fundamental assumption operating within the Westernization theory of still life in Japan.

In the examples considered above, the surimono medium was used to provoke an experience that went beyond the purely visual, by generating surface qualities that

<sup>24</sup> There are a small number of late surimono that depict dead animals, though the subject is rare, and generally thought to have been avoided due to its inauspicious nature.

evoke the aura of specific objects, historical circumstance, and visual texture for an encounter that is almost haptic in quality. Like the takara awase gathering themselves, surimono were never singular acts, although this status has been somewhat obscured by their conventional treatment in the art-historical literature. Surimono are most often catalogued according to the artist who designed the pictorial element, leaving aside or making secondary the broader historical context and the other figures involved in commissioning the print. The limited, non-commercial circulation of surimono has frequently resulted in their misleading characterization as "private" prints, though the medium as a whole can only be understood by its currency with a full community of poetic and antiquarian publics.²⁵ Such a characterization continues to perpetuate the narrative that surimono are divorced from the broader dialogue happening among ukiyo-e practitioners. Although never defining ukiyo-e itself, the various recensions of the Ukiyo-e ruikō, beginning with Nanpo's original manuscript, start with a list of print categories that fall under the ukiyo-e umbrella. Notably, this includes surimono, which should not be treated as a separate sphere of activity. Many of the same publishers and artists responsible for commercial prints were also involved in surimono production, circulating ideas, images, and objects, though operating under sobriquets that can cloud these connections.

Analyses that interpret surimono primarily as a sequence of literary references accompanied by elegant imagery fail to account for the physicality of the medium, both of the surimono itself and what is depicted. The subjects of surimono still lives are not merely emblematic of the group's activities, but point to the level of physical engagement that members had with the objects depicted. Although these tendencies were first exercised in early object-centered poetry gatherings, such as the takara awase, their materialization in artworks would reach full maturation in the surimono of the early nineteenth century. The thick mulberry paper used for surimono is capable of withstanding sophisticated printing techniques and metallic pigments, enabling the print to become an experiential simulacrum of an existing object. This level of technical refinement came at a higher cost than was viable for commercial production, but was made possible by surimono being financed through private sponsorship. Although the events of the takara awase were meticulously recorded in a manner that does not seem to have been sustained, the emphasis on objects is a recurrent motive for later print projects. The verisimilar tactile depiction of surface textures in surimono animates their depicted objects by implying the temporal process of touch, bodily experience, and community. Difficult to capture in reproduction, these qualities are manifest in the surimono as object, and upon handling, may be activated once again.

<sup>25</sup> For example, the title of the most recent surimono catalogue in English: Sadako Ohki, The Private World of Surimono: Japanese Prints from the Virginia Shawan Drosten and Patrick Kenadjian Collection (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2020).

### Maureen Cassidy-Geiger Tout Rome veüt vendre: The Collection of Cardinal Filippo Antonio Gualtieri in Rome and in Dresden

In a letter from Rome Dec. 4, 1728, Baron Raymond LePlat (1664–1742) remarked to King August II the Strong (1670–1733) that "Tout Rome veüt vendre" (all of Rome wants to sell), in reference to the concurrent offers of works of art from the Chigi, Albani, Lercari, and other great Roman clergy-collections, to foreign buyers in the 1720s.¹ While LePlat was present in Rome, Cardinal Filippo Antonio Gualtieri (also Gualterio, 1660–1728) died unexpectedly, in April 1728, and rather quickly his collection came onto the market as well.² This included an amethyst bust of Venus, one of four "highlights" indicated by LePlat in his extensive correspondence with the king. On the basis of the baron's various pitches and powers of persuasion, not to mention his ability to negotiate a good price, the bust was acquired for eight hundred scudi, apparently a

<sup>1</sup> I would like to acknowledge Virginie Spenlé, who has published extensively on the acquisitions of paintings for the Dresden court by LePlat and others; Eliana Fileri, a longtime Gualtieri scholar; Sascha Karnsteiner, Sebastian Hierl, Alessio Assonitis, and Andrew Moore. Despite ample evidence of LePlat's activities in Dresden and elsewhere, a thorough study of the royal architect-agent to King August II and King August III is lacking.

The Flemish-born LePlat was Ordonneur de cabinet (interior architect) to August II and acted as the king's agent in Paris and Rome, traveling as well to other Italian states, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, and Bohemia. The primary documentation for this essay is found in Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden, 10026 Geheimes Kabinett, Loc. 380/4, Lettres du Baron Leplat pendant son voyage pour Rome, concernant l'achât des statues en 1716–1730. et sans date. This volume is comprised of almost three hundred pages; the quote is on fol. 115. Besides dealing with the acquisition of Roman ancient and modern sculptures, and the dispersal of the Gualtieri collection, the LePlat papers encompass the presentation and/or purchase of French tapestries, Asian porcelain, small bronzes, paintings, and other works of art, as well as commissions for paintings, hence they have been utilized by curators and scholars in various disciplines. Despite the impressive evidence of 174 antique sculptures on offer to the king from the Lercari collection in Rome, presumably formed by Cardinal Nicola-Maria Lercari (1675–1757), the collection is apparently entirely unknown.

<sup>2</sup> For further background, see Eliana Fileri, "Piacere, prestigio, erudizione: Le collezioni di antichità del cardinale Filippo Antonio Gualterio," in Maria Celeste Cola, Mostrare il sapere: Collezioni scientifiche, studioli e raccolte d'arte a Roma in età moderna, vol. 3 (Vatican: Collana Dentro il Palazzo, 2022), pp. 69–100, and Fileri, "La 'stanza delle terracotta' del museo del Cardinale Gualtieri," Archeologia Classica 52 (2001): pp. 343–84. To date, neither Fileri nor I have been able to consult Gualtieri's papers in the British Library.

For LePlat's activities, see Virginie Spenlé, "Sächsische Gesandte als Kunstagenten in der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts," Neues Archiv für sächsische Geschichte 82 (2011): pp. 255–63, and Spenlé, Die Dresdner Gemäldegalerie und Frankreich. Der "bon goût" im Sachsen des 18. Jahrhunderts (Beucha: Sax-Verlag, 2008).

coup (fig. 1). In 1733, it was inventoried in the Grünes Gewölbe, successor to the renaissance Kunstkammer (Cabinet of Curiosities):

At the third window in this room . . . and in the middle of this window one finds: a table on a gilded stand with carved feet, the table top of Saxon marble. On this table one finds: a portrait bust in amethyst of a woman, whose robe is of gilded bronze, the pedestal of green Oriental marble, and the amethyst was damaged, but has been restored.³

The contents of this legendary museum were installed in a series of vaulted rooms on the ground floor of the royal residence; emptied of its treasures during World War II, the castle was destroyed in the bombing of 1945, restored after the reunification of Germany in 1989, and the Grünes Gewölbe reopened to the public in 2006. Hence, the bust was returned to its original position on a table by the window, where it sat alone, in 1733 and now, which speaks to its distinction as a collector's item; the modern marble tabletops were also acquired by LePlat in Rome. The inventory said nothing about the provenance of the piece, however, and by the GDR-era, it was considered the product of a Dresden workshop.⁴ Yet there was even a sketch of the bust in the margins of a letter from LePlat, unique among his letters from Rome to the king (fig. 2); these are held by the Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv in Dresden and are not unknown, nor untapped, even if this bit of marginalia was overlooked by scholars over the years. Typically, LePlat would supply drawings or designs on separate pieces of paper, and sketches like this were not embedded in the letters themselves. Some of the loose drawings remain in the archives (fig. 3), while others are found in the Kupferstich-Kabinett of the Staatliche

<sup>3</sup> "Am dritten Fenster dieses Zimmers . . . und zwar in der Mitte dieses Fensters ist befindlich: Ein Tisch auf vergoldten Gestelle mit Bockfußen, Bildhauer Arbeit, das Tisch Blatt von Sächß. Marmor. Auf diesem Tisch befindet sich: Ein Bildniß en Buste Amethisten, so ein Frauenzimmer vorstellet, deren Gewand von vergoldten Meßing, das Postament von grünlicht orientalischen Marmor ist, und ist dieser Amethist zwar schadhafft gewesen, aber wieder repariret." (All translations are by the author unless otherwise noted.) Jutta Kappel and Dirk Syndram, Deutsche Steinschneidekunst aus dem Grünen Gewölbe zu Dresden (Dresden: Deutsches Edelsteinmuseum, 1998), exh. cat., pp. 172–73. See as well Wolfram Koeppe and Anna Maria Giusti, eds., Art of the Royal Court: Treasures in Pietre Dure from the Palaces of Europe (New York and New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 256–57, and Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, "'Un Buste de Venus d'un Amethiste ancienne:' Discovering the Italian Origins of an Object in the Grünes Gewölbe in Dresden," The Burlington Magazine 157 (June 2015): pp. 391–93, https://www.burlington.org.uk/archive/back-issues/201506 (the online edition provides transcriptions that were not published in the magazine). The Strasbourg organ builder Johann Andreas Silbermann (1683–1753) mentioned the bust in the journal of his visit to Dresden in 1741, where he toured the Green Vaults on May 15, SLUB, Mscr. Dresd.App.3091, https://digital.slub-dresden.de/werkansicht/dlf/ 111740/8# (unpaginated; page 162 of the PDF): "Ein BrüstBild von einem FrauenZimmer mit postament 1 ½ Ellen hoch und ist von einem richtigen Amatist ausgearbeitet Als eine Kostbare raritat."

<sup>4</sup> The uncertain origins of a piece can occupy a curator for some or all of their professional career, and then, suddenly, the answer emerges from an unanticipated source or irrefutable evidence, as happened with the Rospigliosi cup in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (acc. Nr. 14.40.667), once considered a Mannerist masterpiece by Benvenuto Cellini until it was found to be a product of the mid-nineteenth century by Reinhold Vasters (1827–1909).

Fig. 1: Francesco Ghinghi, Bust of Venus, ca. 1717–19, amethyst, tufa, verde antico, and gilt-bronze, hight 55.5 cm, Grünes Gewölbe, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, inv. no. V 592

Kunstsammlungen Dresden (fig. 4).⁵ LePlat even wrote that he was sending elevations of the Gualtieri "museum" to the king, together with handwritten room-by-room descrip-

<sup>5</sup> See Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, "Drawings for Silver in the Hauptstaatsarchiv in Dresden," The Journal of the Silver Society 33 (2016/17): pp. 5–9, and Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon and Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, eds., Splendeurs de la cour de Saxe, Dresde à Versailles (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2006), exh. cat., p. 222, cat. no. 144–45.

tions; further, he acknowledged the relevance of the organization and display in Rome to the king's museological ambitions for the royal collections in Dresden. While the annotated plans have survived, one set by LePlat and a second by a secretary, the associated elevations are unfortunately lost or unrecognized (fig. 5 and 6).

Fig. 2: Letter from Raymond LePlat to King August II, Oct. 30, 1728, with a sketch of the Gualtieri bust of Venus, ink on paper. Lettres du Baron Leplat pendant son voyage pour Rome, concernant l′achât des statues en 1716–1730. et sans date, Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Dresden, Loc. 380/4, fol. 82v

According to LePlat's description of room seven, where the bust was exhibited, it was created in the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence and modeled after the famous Venus de Medici, known to the king from a copy in the Große Garten in Dresden:

Fig. 3: Unknown probably French artist(s), Design for a wine cooler with the Orléans arms, early eighteenth century, with notations by Raymond LePlat, pencil and ink on paper, Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Dresden, 10006, Oberhofmarschallamt, Plankammer, 2.2.1 (Cap. 8, no. 5b)

He says there is, in the seventh room, which is filled with all sorts of galanteries (precious items), some of ivory, as well as miniature paintings, there is an item, of amethyst, after the Venus de' Medici or after a Greek bust, extending to the wrap on one side and the breast on the other side. The stone was found this way, and a drapery was added, which covers the other breast. The late Grand Duke of Florence commissioned it, and it must be a little smaller than the copy in marble, which Your Majesty has in the garden of Old Dresden. It has been valued at 800 Roman Scudi, and he will try to extract this piece from the others items, since Your Majesty has enough of them.⁶

Years later, in 1753, its maker, Francesco Ghinghi (1689–1765), communicated to Anton Francesco Gori that Cardinal Gualtieri had purchased the rough amethyst in Rome in 1717 and entrusted it to the ducal workshops thanks to Grand Duke Cosimo III de Medici (1642–1723), that it was fabricated between 1717 and 1719, and was briefly exhibited

<sup>6</sup> "Il dit qu'il-y-a, dans le Septieme Cabinet qui est remplie de toutes sortes de galanteries tant d'yvoire, que des tableaux de mignature, une piece, qui est un amathist, dont on a fait la Venus du Medicis ou de Grecque en buste, jusques au feston d'une côte et de l'autre un teton. / La pierre l'etoit trouve ainsi, et on y eut adjouté une draperie, qui couvroit l'autre teton. Le grand Duc defunt de Florence a faire faire et elle doit etre un peu moins grande que la Copie de marbre, que Votre Majesté a dans le jardin de vieux Dresde. On l'estimoit à 800. Scudi Romain, et il tacheroit de tirer celle Price hors de ce Cabinet, car toutes les autres choses Votre Majeste eut en quantité." Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden, 10026 Geheimes Kabinett, Loc. 380/4, Lettres du Baron Leplat . . ., fol. 86r.-v.

Fig. 4: Unknown artist(s) after Giovanni Battista Metellino, Crystal dish standing on a dolphin's head, 1724, watercolor, ink and pencil on paper, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kupferstich-Kabinett, inv. no. C 1968–127

in the Uffizi, before finally arriving in Rome in 1719.⁷ Indeed, it was witnessed at Gualtieri's residence, Palazzo Manfroni, by Anton Francesco Marmi (1665–1736), according to a letter he sent to Alessandro Gregorio Capponi (1683–1746) in Florence, dated

<sup>7</sup> The amethyst itself is considered by some to be a product of Saxon mines, notably from a deposit in Schlottwitz, south of Dresden, indicating the trade in Saxon hardstones extended to Italy.


Fig. 5: Raymond LePlat, Plan of the Gualtieri collection in Palazzo Manfroni in Rome, 1728, pencil and ink on paper. Lettres du Baron Leplat pendant son voyage pour Rome, concernant l′achât des statues en 1716– 1730. et sans date, Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Dresden, Loc. 380/4, fol. 154v.–155r

March 21, 1719, which already names Ghinghi as the creator of this "true rarity."⁸ In hindsight, one wonders how the Florentine and Roman histories of such a distinguished object could have been forgotten after its arrival in Dresden, especially when it held pride of place in the Grünes Gewölbe in 1733.

<sup>8</sup> Discussed by Fileri, "Piacere, prestigio, erudizione." Alessio Assonitis, Director of the Medici Archive Project, has not yet found corresponding evidence.

Fig. 6: Memoire de ce qui est contenu dans chaque Cabinet du Palais du defunt Cardinal Gualtieri, 1728, pencil and ink on paper. Lettres du Baron Leplat pendant son voyage pour Rome, concernant l′achât des statues en 1716–1730. et sans date, Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Dresden, Loc. 380/4, fol. 178v–179r

King August II, Cardinal Gualtieri, and Raymond LePlat, were contemporaries, and were also recognized by their generation, and even now, as men of taste, albeit with a traditional or baroque taste perhaps, for Kunstkammer objects and curiosities, as well as books, prints and drawings, paintings, and medals. August II made a Grand Tour in 1687–89, stopping in Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Barcelona, Turin, Milan, Florence, Venice and Vienna, though his itinerary did not bring him to Rome. Cardinal Gualtieri was posted to Paris from 1700–06; on his return, he functioned as a French representative in Rome, as well as protector of the English pretender James II, leading one author to call him a Francophile/Anglophile Italian. LePlat entered the king's service in 1698 and as architect, agent and tastemaker to the monarch, he crisscrossed the continent for thirty years, identifying artworks and artists for Dresden, and even accompanied the future August III to Paris in 1714–15.

Gualtieri apparently settled into Palazzo Manfroni in around 1712, where he installed his library and Kunstkammer in twenty-nine rooms. The collection was deliberately displayed according to medium and type, and quickly became a must-see for Grand Tourists to Rome, according to contemporary guidebooks and diaries; these include François Deseine's Rome moderne of 1713, Il mercurio errante of 1715, which was dedicated to the cardinal, and Edward Wright's Observations of Traveling in Italy, published in 1722. Wright devoted pages 299–301 to:

The Palace of Cardinal Gualtieri, tho' not very remarkable upon other accounts . . . is a Magazine of Learning and Curiosities. Besides the Library, which consists of four large Rooms, there is a Suite of eighteen more fill'd with Variety of curious things of several sorts.⁹

He singled out the four highlights acknowledged by LePlat, including the "antique Venus, in Amethyst; 'tis a bust, sixteen Inches high, twelve broad."¹⁰ The cardinal, or his collections, were also noted several times by Francesco Valesio, in the Diario di Roma. The diary of a Grand Tour undertaken by "three Flemish gentlemen," namely Luc-Joseph van der Vynckt (1691–1779), Adrien-Xavier de Ghellinck (1702–79) and a third person named du Bois, in the years 1724–25 indicates they visited Palazzo Manfroni: "There are beautiful libraries and cabinets in Rome, but I won't speak of them ; I won't say more than a word about what we saw at Cardinal Gualtieri's which surpasses the others by far."¹¹

Thomas Coke (1697–1759), 1st Earl of Leicester, evidently knew the collection well, having visited twelve times between 1714 and 1717. Its fame was surely amplified and extended by word of mouth, such that it appears in a footnote to a multi-page survey of a French private collection "of interest to the connoisseur," published in Mercure de France in June 1717. The author names the Gualtieri and Athanasius Kircher collections in Rome, plus three others formed by clergy-collectors of the sort that flourished around the turn of century in France and Italy.¹² It is striking that many of the guidebooks and memoirs present the same sort of room-by-room descriptions that LePlat sent to the king, suggesting visitors were provided with an annotated plan onsite, which later formed the basis for their often quite lengthy and detailed reports.¹³

<sup>9</sup> Edward Wright, Observations of Traveling in Italy (London: T. Ward and E. Wicksteed, 1722), p. 299. 10 Ibid.

<sup>11</sup> "Il y a de belles bibliothèques et de beaux cabinets à Rome, mais je n'en parlerai pas; je ne dis qu'un mot de ce que nous avons vu chez le Cardinal Gualteri qui surpasse de loin tous les autres." Charles Terlinden, "Voyage en Italie de trois gentilshommes flamands 1724–25," Bulletin de l'Institut Historique Belge de Rome 30 (1957): pp. 215–536, here pp. 411–12.

<sup>12</sup> Mercure de France (June 1727): pp. 1295–330, here p. 1327: "(a) La Gallerie du Pere Kircher à Rome. Le Cabinet du Cardinal Gualtieri à Rome. Celui de Setalli à Milan. Celui de Sainte Geneviéve à Paris. Celui de l'Abbé Fauvel à Paris."

<sup>13</sup> Handwritten guidebooks were provided to some visitors to the Capitoline, for example; see Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, "Bringing Rome Home: Gifts and Souvenirs Acquired by Crown Prince Friedrich Christian of Saxony/Poland During his Sojourn in the Eternal City, 1738–39," (forthcoming).

It seems Gualtieri employed the preeminent antiquarian Francesco Ficoroni (1664–1747) as his agent and advisor beginning in 1688, when he acquired forty Greek vases from the famous Valletta collection in Naples; this acquisition demonstrates the cardinal's early interest in collecting excavated antiquities.¹⁴ By his death in 1728, he owned 154 Etruscan vases, some of which ended up in the Papal collection, in Dresden, and elsewhere. The antiquities were an acknowledged strength of the Gualtieri collection and were published during his lifetime, in Thomas Dempster's De Etruria of 1720 (fig. 7) and Bernard de Montfaucon's L'antiquité expliquée of 1724 (fig. 8), in plates that were even captioned with his name. One might suggest that Ficoroni was the connoisseur and Gualtieri the collector, notwithstanding individual preferences and conditions. After all, it was the agent who found objects, negotiated for them, traded or sold them at times, and perhaps helped in their display; the collector trusted his agent, and the fame of the Gualtieri pieces acquired via Ficoroni was cemented by their inclusion in Dempster and Montfaucon's books.

While LePlat's role as art agent and advisor was somewhat similar to that of Ficoroni's, it extended well beyond the acquisition of antiquities, to the purchase of modern works of art, notably porcelains, tapestries, small bronzes, objets d'art, paintings; the design of princely interiors; and vetting artists for the court. LePlat oversaw the redecoration of the state apartments and was intensively involved in the breakup of the renaissance Kunstkammer, leading to the creation and installation of a series of museums in and around the palace, where works of art and naturalia were organized and displayed according to medium and type. The king himself even drew plans for his ideal museums; hence, it is likely the two men communicated with one-another directly at times and had a shared understanding of the desired results.

According to the archival evidence, LePlat corresponded with the king obsessively, in letters that he himself penned in a kind of phonetic form of French, befitting a native of Belgium who perhaps spoke a local dialect before learning French; he eschewed punctuation as much as possible. As mentioned previously, drawings were sometimes sent with the letters, usually on loose sheets of paper, so the king could visualize what was for sale. Unlike the margin sketch of the amethyst bust of Venus, the loose designs were by unnamed artists and LePlat simply added his own notations to the pages, or translated the artist's remarks (fig. 3 and 4). In this way, he could present the merits of an object with absolute clarity, in word and image, in the hopes of winning the king's approval for acquisitions he judged to be worthy investments for posterity. This seems a very sophisticated selling style, especially where foreign or unfamiliar works of art were involved. Whether beguiling or perfunctory, the drawings probably spoke louder than words. Indeed, the letters from LePlat to the king were densely written and hard to decipher, so a secretary was often called upon to summarize the contents in a sep-

<sup>14</sup> Gualtieri was himself an agent in the dispersal of Queen Christina's collection after the death of Livio Odeschalchi in 1713, buying a few pieces for his own collection while working on behalf of the French regent, the Duc d'Orleans.

Fig. 7: Thomas Dempster, De Etruria Regali (1723–24), vol. 1 (Florence: apud J.C. Tartinium, 1723), p. 266, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

arate document, to save the monarch from the minutiae, as much as from the erratic misspellings (see appendix). Which begs the question: Did the king ever see LePlat's originals or was he only given the secretary's summaries? None of the drawings are notated "AR," as if he approved the item for acquisition.

Fig. 8: Unknown artist(s), Vases hetrusces, engraving, plate 31, in: Bernard de Montfaucon, L'antiquité Expliquée . . ., Supplement, vol. 3 (Paris: Chez Delaulne and others, 1724), Universitätsbibliothek, Heidelberg

The Recueil des marbres antiques qui se trouvent dans la Galerie du Roy de Pologne à Dresden (Collection of Antique Marbles in the Gallery of the King of Poland in Dresden), was published by LePlat in 1733 and celebrated the antiquities and the modern Roman works that were assembled largely with his guidance and agency. Overtly a monument

to the king as collector and connoisseur, LePlat himself clearly shared in the glory. When the king unexpectedly died before the book appeared, the dedication was changed to recognize the late monarch's "Gout & Connoissance des beaux Arts" (taste and knowledge of the fine arts) and the public mission of the Recueil, which was to encourage appreciation for these rarities in the North. Some of the Roman acquisitions were incorporated into the frontispiece, notably a sarcophagus, a Greek vase, a mummy, and an oval mosaic portrait of the king from the Vatican workshops, that was sent with the Albani and Chigi purchases (fig. 9). Yet the provenance of the pieces included in the Recueil is neither identified in the index, nor on the two hundred thirty plates. Among the most famous acquisitions from the Gualtieri collection were the mummies on plate 197 (fig. 10), which were acquired in Egypt in 1615 by Pietro delle Valle, who published them in 1650 in his travelogue; they later appeared in the third volume of Athanasius Kircher's Odeipus Aegyptiacus (1654), before they were acquired by the cardinal; Winckelmann restored the delle Valle provenance to the mummies in 1756, as noted in the 1765 inventory of the Antikensammlung, but there is no mention of Gualtieri.¹⁵ Equally important were the Etruscan vases on plates 179–82, which at the time were little known beyond the regions where they were excavated.¹⁶ Several were acquired by LePlat for Dresden, who bought most of them with cash on-hand, before he even had the king's approval. The Gualtieri provenance is not given in the Recueil, however, which reminds us that the provenance of the amethyst bust was also lost by 1733.

In 1833, in the published guide to the Antikensammlung, the Verzeichniss der alten und neuen Bildwerke, we find the provenance for most of the pieces has been recognized, with the exception of the Gualtieri pieces.¹⁷ One finds the names Chigi, Albani, and those of other Romans, but for the Etruscan vases and the mummies, Gualtieri's name is lacking. Yet LePlat had provided exhaustive documentation for the Gualtieri property, including the handwritten lists that survive, and the elevation views that are lost. Further, LePlat kept augmenting and amplifying his recommendations to suit the king's accelerating interest, while also advising him on the highlights, condition, pricing strategies, and the competition. He claimed to have special access due to an introduction by retired general and Venice-based collector Count Johann Matthias von Schulenburg (1661–1747), which was perhaps the kind of namedropping

<sup>15</sup> For a background and discussion, see Stephanie Zeach et al, "Decorated Bodies for Eternal Life: A Multidisciplinary Study of the Late Roman Period Stucco-Shrouded Portrait Mummies from Saqqara (Egypt)," PLoS ONE 15 (November 2020): e0240900, https:/doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0240900.

<sup>16</sup> Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden, 10026 Geheimes Kabinett, Loc. 380/4, Lettres du Baron Leplat . . . fol. 205: "Ces vases Etrusques sont fort rares en Italie. On n'en trouvera gueres en Allemagne, et par là ils meritant d'etre places dans le Cabinet d'un Roi aussi bien que les medailles Etrusques où la plupart des Savans ne comprenant rien."

<sup>17</sup> Likewise, in the 1875 guidebook, Die Bildwerke der Königlichen Antikensammlung zu Dresden, Hermann Hettner jumps from naming Chigi, Albani, and LePlat to the acquisition of the "three Herculaneum women" from the collection of Prince Eugene in 1736, while the name Gualtieri is entirely lacking. The Albani provenance is also noted a century earlier by Thomas Nugent, The Grand Tour. A Journey through the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France, vol. 2 (London: Dr. Browne et al, 1756), p. 264.

Fig. 9: Johann Bernigeroth after Anna Maria Werner, Untitled, frontispiece, engraving, in: Baron LePlat, Recueil des Marbres Antiques qui se trouvent dans la Galerie du Roy de Pologne à Dresde (Dresden: Imprimerie de la Cour chez la Veuve Stöffel, 1733), Universitätsbibliothek, Heidelberg

that would quicken the king's appetite or reassure him of the merits of the investment, since he'd just spent over 34,000 scudi on the Albani and Chigi pieces. LePlat likewise included the name of Henry Somerset (1707–45), third Duke of Beaufort, as a possible competitor; Beaufort sent home 96 crates of souvenirs from the Grand Tour. The baron even wondered why Cardinal Albani wasn't buying from the Gualtieri sale, since he would have had the funds, following the sale of the family's masterpieces to the king. It's possible these were simply well-practiced strategies to heighten the king's interest while validating the quality of the collection. LePlat was, after all, the king's eyes and ears, since the king had not traveled abroad since 1689, with the exception of visits to Berlin in 1709 and 1728 and his sojourns in Poland.

Fig. 10: Christian Raimund Thomann von Hagelstein after Anna Maria Werner, Momies d'Egypte, engraving, plate 197, in: Baron LePlat, Recueil des Marbres Antiques qui se trouvent dans la Galerie du Roy de Pologne à Dresde (Dresden: Imprimerie de la Cour chez la Veuve Stöffel, 1733), Universitätsbibliothek, Heidelberg

Another of LePlat's tactics was to suggest the appropriateness of certain "cabinets" of items for the king's envisioned museums. He therefore promoted the naturalia for the Naturalienkammer being planned for the Zwinger, an orangerie and festival complex opposite the royal palace, since the range and quantities of rare specimens amassed by Gualtieri were unparalleled in northern Europe (and the prices were very low.) These specimens were indeed acquired, but any traces were lost around 1900 or before WWII. LePlat likewise promoted the Etruscan vases and the mummies in a similar fashion, emphasizing the rarity of these sorts of collector's items in the North, while stating for added effect, that they were truly the prerogative of kings, and that the Gualtieri heirs were soliciting buyers at the courts of France, Spain, Portugal and England. Whether Ficoroni in any way influenced LePlat is unknown, but it is certain that the king listened to LePlat, who also had the Albani, among others, to turn to. In comparison to the Chigi and Albani acquisitions, what the king bought from the Gualtieri collection was not a big-ticket transaction for the Gualtieri heirs, whose greatest asset was perhaps the library, with 32,000 volumes, which sold to Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini (1652–1740), later Pope Clement XII, for 14,000 scudi, and remains in Rome, in Palazzo Corsini, home to the Accademia dei Lincei.¹⁸

Ultimately, LePlat identified for the king a handful of key items, namely the amethyst bust of Venus, an alabaster Pluto, a bronze of king Pyrrhus, ancient arms, and various Etruscan vases. One way or another, we know what was acquired, notably the mummies, several important Greek vases, the bust of Venus, and many items for the natural history museum. Many of the acquisitions were discounted, and some were simply cheap. The Gualtieri pieces were probably crated and shipped to Dresden with the Albani and Chigi sculptures, arriving in Dresden in 1729, though we don't find the name Gualtieri in the shipping manifests and maybe the Gualtieri items lost their provenance already en route to Dresden.

In fact, the Gualtieri collection did not sell as quickly as his heirs had hoped or LePlat had anticipated; many of the leftovers were ultimately acquired by Ficoroni who sold them to Grand Tourists. The rest he consigned to his partner, Bernardo Sterbini, for a sale in London in 1733, whence they ended up in the collection of Sir Hans Sloane, who left them to the British Museum.¹⁹ Eliana Fileri has succeeded in tracing a few recognizable items from the Gualtieri dispersal, notably two of the highlights cited by LePlat: the petrified skull pierced by a sword, which was acquired by Hans Sloane and donated to the British Museum, and the figure of Pyrrhus in bronze, which was bought for Castle Howard and even published as property of Cardinal Gualtieri, but was lost in the 1920s.²⁰ The alabaster Pluto has not been traced as yet.

Certainly, Raymond LePlat was a connoisseur and tastemaker who had a vision for a visionary monarch, and sold his vision to the king, while educating his client to the potential for glory, in the present and for posterity, by embracing the past as well as the present, in works of art and architecture. Where the Gualtieri collection is concerned, it seems remarkable that this name and distinguished provenance were lost either when the pieces left Rome, or on arrival in Dresden. Apparently, LePlat's eye and connoisseurship, his ability to judge and interpret and 'sell' a work of art, in a fairly selfless way, reflects a confident art world insider with a practiced eye and an eager client who was not interested in provenance, but in grandeur.

<sup>18</sup> Remarkably, the first library formed by Cardinal Gualtieri in Paris was lost on its way to Rome in a shipwreck.

<sup>19</sup> A Catalogue of Signor Sterbini's Curious Collection Lately brought from Rome, London, March 13–15, 1733, auctioned by Mr. Cock; for further background, see Tamara Griggs, "The Local Antiquary in Eighteenth-Century Rome," The Princeton University Chronicle 69, no. 2 (Winter 2008): pp. 280–314.

<sup>20</sup> Jan van Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, Being an Exhibition of a Great Variety of Antiquities and Natural Curiosities Belonging to the British Museum . . . (London: John Moore, 1791), "Incrustated Scull and Sword," p. 10 and plate 3 On the British Museum website, the search term "Gualtieri" yields dozens of objects with this provenance, ranging from Renaissance maiolica to ancient ceramics.

### Appendix

Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden, Loc. 380/4, Lettres du Baron Leplat pendant son voyage pour Rome, concernant l'achât des statues en 1716–1730. Et sans date

[note: transcriptions retain the original inaccuracies and misspellings of the original]

#### Document 1

[fol. 69] Extrait de la lettre du Baron leplat, datée de Rome du 16. Octobr : 1728. [LePlat's letter of that date is fols. 63–64v.]

. . .

2. Il envoyé à Votre Majesté un petit memoire des curiosités, qui sont à vendre dans le palais du defunt Cardinal Gaultieri. Il y a joint un plan, où il montre une enfilade des Cabinets, qui Suivent à la Bibliotheque, laquelle contient 9. Grandes chambres, il a marqué de côté du plan, ce qui se trouve dans chaque cabinet, et dit que cette collection fut sans pareille.

3. Il mande, qu'on lui a fait esperer un ample memoire, ou tout seroit Specifié par piece. [fol. 69v.]

4. Qu'il y eut une chambre remplie des Vases Etrusques, dont il eut acheté quelques unes.

5. En statues et tableaux il n'y eut rien d'extraordinaire, tout consistant en petites pieces de cabinets, livres, desseins, medailles d'or et argent, des choses touts tres propres pour le Zwinger.

...

#### Document 2

[fol. 86r] Extrait De la lettre de Baron le Plat datée de Rome du 30. Octobr : 1728. [LePlat's letter of that date is fols. 81–82v.]

1./ Il dit qu'il a envoyé dans la precedente les desseins de trois Cabinets, et il joint dans celle cy trois autres ou Votre Majesté verroit quantite des armoirs ouvertes avec des gatters, dans lesquelles rangé toutes sortes d'Idoles Egiptiennes et animaux, qui à ce qu'on disoit avoient servi aux Egiptiens et Greques

2./ Les tableaux qu'on y voioit etoient à la mosaique contrefaits des portraits des hommes illustres.

3./ Il parle du Cabinet, qui est garny de Porcelaine de faÿence pint dans le gout de Raphael, mais il n'y trouve rien d'extraordinaire.

4./ Il dit qu'il-y-a, dans le Septieme Cabinet, qui est remplie de toutes sortes de galanteries [fol. 86v] tant d'yvoire, que des tableaux de mignature, une piece, qui est un amathist, dont on a fait la Venus du Medicis ou de Grecque en buste, jusques au feston d'une côte et de l'autre un teton.

La pierre l'etoit trouve ainsi, et on y eut adjouté une draperie, qui couvroit l'autre teton. Le grand Duc defunt de Florence a faire faire et elle doit etre un peu moins grande que la Copie de marbre, que Votre Majesté a dans le jardin de vieux Dresde. On l'estimoit à 800. Scudi Romain, et il tacheroit de tirer hors de ce cabinet, car toutes les autres choses Votre Majeste eut en quantité.

4./ [sic] On etoit après pour faire l'estimation de chaque cabinet et on [fol. 87] pretendoit de les vendre chaqu'un entier. Les extraits etoient envoyés en France, Angleterre, Espagne, et Portugal.

6./ Il dit qu'il n'a pas voulu prendre les deseins des autres cabinets, ne meritant pas beaucoup d'attention.

...

[fol. 87v] 10./ Il envoÿe la figure d'Amathist en desein et il-y a fait des remarques. Il en enverra la mesure par l'ordinaire prochaine.

...

#### Document 3

[fol. 143]

Le Roy ayant ouy les Rapports qui luy ont esté faits des Relations du Baron le Plat 1 o . sur le marché qu'il a conclu pour la galerie du Prince Chigy

2o . sur les offres qu'il a faittes au Cardl . Alexandre Albani pour quelques Vues de Ses statues suivant la specification

3o . sur les curiosités de toutte Espece a vendre aprez la mort du Cardl . Gaulthieri Sa majesté en Reponse . . .

[fol. 146]

ad: 3um sa majesté ayant Examiné le Recueil des Curiosités du Card<sup>l</sup> . Gualthieri trouveroit un infinité de choses de son gout . . .

[fol. 146v] Elle voudroit estre plus distinctement informée de ce qui est contenu dans les Cabinets No. 1: 2: 3: 5: 20: 19: 18: 17: Et specialement sur le fait des Coraux, comme le Baron le Plat le verra par le Plan cyjoint ou ces articles sont barrés [?]. Sa majesté demande la dessus Et sur les Prix le plus ample éclaircissement.

...

#### Document 4 [text on fig. 5, written by LePlat]

[fol. 154v–55r]

La Bibliotecque contient 9 piesse grande chambre oú calque [ie. quelque] sont Remplie Et traittent des Differente matiere calcunne [ie. quelqu'une] dans Leur genre.

N<sup>o</sup> 1 contient aux dehir de calque armoires a medaillie des inscriptions En table de marbre greqx, Egiptien Etrusque Et toutte sorte de momie Et Raÿnes degipte, Et plusieurs anticquites Vasses urnes Et autres En grand nombre

N. 2. contient, toutte Sorte didolle Et figures de bronse divinites Egitieme Et Etrusque Et grecque, Et de toutte Sorte d'animaux antique En petit figure Et bronze

N<sup>o</sup> 3. contient Toutte Sorte des instrumens a Sacrifice antique momies Egiptieme, Urnes, Vasses a metre Landre Enseignes militaires Et autres

N<sup>o</sup> 4 contient toutte Sorte de Vasses Eutrusque de Terre aveq figures antiennes pot antique Et grecque a metre sendre et ossemens

N<sup>o</sup> 5. contient garnÿ de boucellie [bouclier] masse darmes Et instrument de guerre de l'antiens Et petitte Statüe

N<sup>o</sup> 6. iemme Cambre contient toutte Sorte de plat assiettes bassins vasses Urnes tout fayiennse pint sur le dessin, Et intentions de Raphael Et Jülle Romanis

N<sup>o</sup> 7. la chambre contient des ouvrages de sire [cire] Le presepio où La naissanses du Cris en figure Relief ouvrages d'Ivoir basrelief de bronses de sculpture de pinture tapisseries En Relief &c.

N<sup>o</sup> 8. contient des ouvrages chinoisses vernÿ En boÿ indienne Et autres de toutte Les Sorte

N<sup>o</sup> 9. contient Et tout garni des pagodes chinoisse de porcelaine de boÿs des indes Et figures de Specksteyn Et autres

N<sup>o</sup> 10 Et toutte garnÿ de toutte Sorte de porselaine celle de Japon Et des indes Et la chine &c.

No . 11 Toutte sorte de modelle de l'architecture civille Et militaire Dessins d'Architecture Tablaux mouvens modelle de Artillaire de toutte sorte ...a canon mortiers . . . N<sup>o</sup> 12 Toutte Sorte d'instrumens de matematiques machines orloges solaires Spheres solaire machines a toutte sorte du sage Et metodes &c. Lunettes a observations

N<sup>o</sup> 13. Toutte sorte de Globes Emisperes globes Celeste Et terestre modelles sur Les deferen sisteme de touttes Les astrologiques antiens Et modernes Et toutte les deseins Et Estampes de la . . . sisteme

N<sup>o</sup> 14 Dans Le cabinet sont toutte sorte de cartes de 4 partie du monde carte generaelle particuliere Les miroirs ardens les chambre noire lanternes magicque . . . toutes Ce sortes

N<sup>o</sup> 15 Dans le cabinet sont les figures anatomies, demonstrations sur le corps humain des Squelette En Relief Et En dessins Estampes Et platres des Ecorches

N<sup>o</sup> 16. Cabinet a tourner où sont touttes les instrument de tour toutte Les Epreuves de toutte Sorte du boÿ. Epreuves fait aux tour de toutte sorte de machines concernant le tour

N<sup>o</sup> 17 Dans se cabinet sont Le naturallia consiste En toutte Sorte d'animaux monstrieux Et autres &c cocodrillus Et toutte Les sortes

N<sup>o</sup> 18. Coquiliage de toutte Les Sortes dont plusieurs armoires sont Remplie Et garnÿ En plein Tiroirs

N<sup>o</sup> 19. Cabinet où sont toutte Sorte des Epreves de pieres de toutte genre Epreuves de toutte sorte de boÿ des . . . Et de Catre parties du monde

N<sup>o</sup> 20. Cabinet de toutte Sorte &c mineraux Et petrifications de toutte Les Sortes

#### Document 5 [text on fig. 6, written by a secretary]

fol. 178v–79r

Memoire de ce qui est contenu dans chaque Cabinet du Palais du defunt Cardinal Gualtieri.

No . 1. Contient des Statues et des Bas-reliefs curieux anciens. Des Metailles de bronse, des plombs anciens, et des Bustes anciens. Des pierres gravées en grand nombre, des Cames, des Scarabes, amuletti, et abraxaxi fort curieux. Des petites Idoles d'argent, des petites statuës d'alabastre oriental avec des bustes de cristal de roche, et des petits animaux de pierres dures. Deux beaux tableaux d'Ivoire et d'autres belles curiosités, le tout anciens. Des metailles d'or, d'autres d'argent des Empereurs, et de quelques illustres Familles. Il y a aussi des quinaires, des pates, et des vitres anciens, et des modernes que le Roi de Italie a fait graver.

1./ 25860 Scudi 57.

No . 2. Des Idoles de bronse Egyptiennes, de Toscane, et de Rome, et plusieurs animaux du même metal.

2./ 4699 [Scudi]. 40

No . 3. Des fragmens de bronse, des Vases, des Lampes, Tripadi, Listeres, Instrumens, qui servoient aux Sacrifices, des Pateres, des Priapis, Tous les ornaments d'un Char de triomphe, et des Mumies. Toutes les metailles d'argent de Louis XIV. des monnoyes d'or et d'argent de plusieurs Princes, et des Metailles des mêmes metaux de Princes, et hommes illustres. Douze boëtes en forme de livres, remplies de monnoyes d'argent des Princes d'Italie defunts, dont les Maisons sont éteintes.

3./ 4774 [Scudi].95

No . 4. Des Vases de Toscane fort grands, des Vases de vitre anciens, qui servoient à y conserver les os et les cendres des Morts, et des Lacrimatoirs. Des Idoles d'Egypte emaillés. Des petit portraits peints, et gravés sur le vitre, et d'autres de mosaique. Des Sepulcres de terre avec des bas-reliefs. Des Lampes perpetuelles, des petites Statuës, et des masques de terre. Des tableaux et des bas-reliefs, Le tout ancien.

4./ 2646 [Scudi].10 No . 5. Des tableaux, des petites statues de metaux divers, et de pierre avec des armes, et des Ecussons, des armoires d'Ivoire, et d'autres curiosités.

5./ 998 [Scudi].60

No . 6. Des Plats peints avec la molure de l'ecole de Raphaël. Plusieurs vases d'un bon dessein, et des Plats peints de terre de divers Païs.

6./ 2267 [Scudi].30

No . 7. Plusieurs tableaux, miniatures, Bas-reliefs, marbres, et d'autres ouvrages en bois, en Ivoire, en broderie, et en tapisserie. La naissance de Sauveur en belles figures de cire. Quantité d'ouvrages d'ambre, de Coral, d'acier, d'Ivoire, de bois, et de bronse. Des Orloges, de tabatieres d'or, et d'argents; des Tasses, et autres vases d'agathe Calcedoine, de Cristal de roche, et d'autres pierres. Des Cames modernes, et un beau buste presque en naturel d'amatiste, et un Christ à la colonne d'un seule piece d'ivoire, haut trois palmes Italiens.

7./ 4898 [Scudi].

No . 8. Plusieurs vases, tasses, ecuelles de la Chine, et d'autres ouvrages de bois peints. 8./ 788 [Scudi].30

No . 9. Quantité d'Idoles Chinoises, ouvrages de pierre, vases, et d'autres curiosités de la Chine, avec des belles peintures de ce Païs là.

9./ 1456 [Scudi].

No . 10. Quantité de belles porcellaines.

10./ 1259 [Scudi].50

No . 11. Des cartes d'architecture du S<sup>r</sup> . Vignoli, et d'autres bons autheurs; et plusieurs autres pieces, models et instrumens pour l'architecture civile, et militaire, avec un tableau mouvant.

11./ 1898 [Scudi].30

No . 12. Des Cartes de Mathematique, et beaucoup de beaux instrumens pour cette Science.

12./ 406 [Scudi].60

No . 13. Plusieurs Cartes, Globes, et autres beaux ouvrage d'astronomie, et d'optique. 13./ 569 [Scudi].20

No . 14. Quantité de cartes imprimées, et en miniature qui representent les plus beaux oiseaux, plantes, animaux et coquillages qu'il y ait dans le monde. Il y a aussi des miroirs ardens de diverses grandeurs, et de diverses matieres; des Microscopes, des Chambres optiques, des pierres daimant, et autres belles curiosités.

14./ 988 [Scudi].15

No . 15. Des Cartes d'anathomie, et plusieurs models, et instruments pour l'exercice de cet art.

15./148 [Scudi].85

No . 16. Quantité de monstres peints au naturel.

16./ 30 [Scudi].–

No . 17. Un grand nombre de choses naturelles, de momies, papillons, Cornes, et autres curiosités.

17./ 385 [Scudi].—

No . 18. Contient quantité de beaux corals blancs et rouges.

18./ 663 [Scudi].35

No . 19. Des pierres precieuses ; des marbres fort rares, et des ouvrages de bois.

19./ 1002 [Scudi].85

N°. 20. Des diverses mineraux.

20./ 896 [Scudi].40

Biblioteque de 3000. Volumes en 9. Chambres [in ascending order]

9. Des livres fort rares de Mathematique, de Philosophie, de Geographie, d'Astronomie, d'Architecture Civile et Militaire, d'Anatomie, et de botanique.

8. Contient aussi beaucoup de livres rares, qui traitent des Sciences Sacrees.

7. Des livres de Metailles et d'Inscriptions anciennes, et d'autres de Cronologie de Genealogies, et de Peinture.

6. Quantité de desseins rares, des Estampes de plus celebres autheurs, beaucoup de Manuscrits anciens et modernes, et un grands nombre d'autres livres tres rares.

5. Quantité de livres de diverses matieres, et toute sorte de Dictionaires Biblioteques. etc:

4. Des Livres de Medecine de Chirurgie et de Pharmacie

3. / 2. / 1. Quantité de differens Livres, de droit de Politique, et de Cavallerie, Comedies, Poesies etc.

#### Document 6

#### [204r] Monsieur

Il est vrai que le Cabinet de Gualtieri est un des plus beaux qu'il y ait à Rome, et je m'estime tres heureux de l'avoir souvent visité par la recommendation de Monsieur Le Feldmarschal Schulenbourg auprès de cette Eminence. Autant que je m'en souviens, les marbres qu'il renferme sont tres curieux par leurs inscriptions, et les bas-reliefs, et ils meriteroient d'etre recherchés, si l'on etoit bien sûr qu'ils sont originaux.

Il n'y ai pas vu beaucoup de Statues, mais il y a quantité d'Idoles d'Egipte qui meritent de l'atention, quoi que je ne puisse pas dire qu'elles soient les meilleures. Il y avoit aussi plusieurs Momies qu'on estimoit beaucoup. Nous avions deja vu ailleurs des ustanciles de Sacrifices, mais nous en avons trouvé depuis dans ce ca-binet [fol. 204v.], qui paroissoient rares: je ne les saurois specifier.

Nous nous etions souvent entretenus avec quelques Savans de Rome sur les vases de Meŭrrhe, que les Romains estimoient audessus de l'Or dans l'etat florissant de leur Empire. Je n'en ai point rencontré ailleurs que dans ce Cabinet.

Il y avoit aussi beaucoup de Vases grecs et Etrusques de trois diferentes especes qui embelliroient fort une Galerie par leur rareté. On les prefere aux Antiquités Romains par ce qu'ils sont plus anciens, et demontrent souvent l'origine des usages des Romains, soit pour leur Religion, soit pour leurs Augures, et autres choses, comme Ciceron lui même en convient; quoi qu'il n'y ait eu personne qui ait pu les expliquer, excepté en dernier liëu Philipe Bloemaroti, qui en a pu achever [fol. 205] achever un Alphabet, comme il me l'a dit lui même à florence. Ce même Savant s'est servi de la Collection de Gualtieri pour examiner les Antiquités Etrusques.

Ces vases Etrusques son fort rares en Italie. On n'en trouvera gueres en Allemagne, et par là ils meritant d'etre placés dans le Cabinet d'un Roi aussi bien que les Medailles Etrusques oú la plupart des Savans ne comprenent rien.

Il y avoit aussi une layette fort considerable par ses Peintures anciennes et tres rare; on n'en trouve queres ailleurs. J'en ai pourtant vu dans le Cabinet Farnese à Parme, et à Rome dans le Palais des Maximorum.

Je n'ai pas vu autrepart une Collection si rare de Casques, d'Epées, de Piques, et autres armes Gothiques et Allemandes; ce qui m'a beaucoup servi [fol. 205v] servi depuis, pour entendre les anciens auteurs.

Pour ce qui regarde les productions naturelles, principalement en fait de Corail et de Plantes Marines, elles doivent etre considerables dans ce cabinet de Gualtieri, puis qu'il a la preference à Rome et en Italie à cet egard, et qu'on en a fait venir de toutes parts à grands frais, et la quantité qu'il y en a, aussi bien que la diversité des choses, meritent assurement l'admiration.

Il y auroit beaucoup à dire au sujet des medailles, et principalement des Medaillons, parmi lesquels il y en a de fort rares: mais il n'en est pas de même des marbres et des Statües, si le Pape d'aujourd'hui vient à mourir.

Ainsi que je l'ai dit ailleurs on estime beaucoup une Epée avec son foureau petrifiés, un Platon d'Albâtre, un Roi [fol. 206] Roi Pyrrhus de Bronze, et un Buste de Venus d'un Amethiste ancienne, des boucliers anciens, diverses Urnes et autres choses.

S'il m'est parmis d'ajouter à ce que je viens de dire, on fait beaucoup mieux à Rome de ne pas laisser remarquier de quelles pieces on auroit envie, par ce qu'alors on les tient plus cheres: c'est pour cela qu'on y a coutume d'acheter en partie; sur quoi on peut faire beaucoup de profit. On peut aussi bien gagner en faisant marchander par des particuliers, honêtes gens, et des interessés. C'est ainsi que Sa Majesté Imperiale a fait acheter le celebre Cabinet de Medailles des Chartreux par un particulier, à un prix fort modique. Il sufit à Rome qu'on sache qu'un Grand Seigneur a envie de quelque chose pour qu'on en double le prix, par ce qu'il le peut paier, et que ces ocasions [fol. 206v.] ocasions ne ses presentent pas souvent cet avis ne sera pas inutile, puisqu'on doit vendre quelques parties du Cabinet de Gualtieri. Ainsi il faudroit demander le prix de chaque partie en particulier, sans laisser apercevoir du laquelle on a envie. Je crois que par là on poura profiter beaucoup.

Je serois fort surpris, si le Cardinal Albani n'en avoit pas déjà aquis une bonne partie sous main, atentif comme il est à ces sortes d'antiquités.

A l'entrée de la Bibliotheque de Gualtieri, à main gauche, il y a quelques Bustes de marbre, qui ont eté vendus autrefois au Cardinal pour antiques, ce qu'il apeloit lui même son Noviciat, par ce qu'il avoit eté obligé de payer ainsi son aprentissage.

Je me souviens aussi que dans ce Tresor de Gualtieri, tant en Medailles qu'en autres choses, il y a bien des pièces [fol. 207] pieces suposées, quoi qu'elles paroissent Antiques à bien des gens. Car on a fait copier beaucoup de pieces rares qui ressemblent fort aux Originaux, et que l'on a donnée en conservant ceux ci, comme les Romains me l'ont dit en confidence, et s'en s'ont bien divertis les premiers. On y emploie bien des finesses, et il faut user de beaucoup de precaution pour n'etre pas trompé. C'est à quoi vraisemblablement on ne manquera pas ./.

a Wittenberg le 25 Novem&. 1728.

N'y auroit il rien à faire prasentement à Florence. On n'y travaille plus à augmenter la ∙ Gallerie ∙ au contraire, on en tire sus main plusieurs pieces que l'on vend, le Grand Duc d'aujourdhui aimant beaucoup d'argent. Nous n'avons pas pu voir beaucoup de pieces celebres dans ce Cabinet de Medicis; peut etre y auroit il [fol. 207v.] il quelque chose à faire par la raison que je viens de dire.

Je souhaite que la personne en question soit heureuse à Rome. Elle ne peut pas compter sur Ticorn et sur le Baron de Stoss, par ce quils se sont soivent moqués de lui: un homme qui ne s'y entend pas est trompé. Outre cela les françois ne sont point du tout aimés à Rome par les Itailens, et ceux ci sont charmés, quand ils peuvent les tromper, et se moquer d'eux.

Il est presque incroiable combien les Romains sont adrois et atentifs à ces sortes de fraudés. On est prevenu à Rome que ceux de delà les Alpes n'entendent rien à ces sortes de choses, et que c'est pour aux qu'il faut faire des copies, et les leur envoier pour des Originaux, et qu'il faut aussi que les Etrangers paient aumoins [fol. 208] aumoins le double de ce qu'un autre qui est present et connoisseurs doit paier.

Monsieur Winckler de Leipsig quoi qu'ami du Baron Stoss en a eté trompé, en achetant de lui un Herode de Bronze Soixante Ecus Romains dont l'autre disoit que le Cardinal Albani lui avoit fait présent; cependant ce n'etoit qu'une copie, et la tromparie aiant eté decouverte, on n'en fit que rire, et l'argent ne fut point rendu. Cela sapelle Cuionium, sans qu'on pretende par là insulter les gens, et les Antiquaires en font gloire surtout à l'egard de ceux qui pretendent etre bons connoisseurs. En voilà assez pur une personne sage comme vous etes. Tout cela entre nous. &c.

#### Document 7

[fol. 208v.] Concernant Gualtieri [fol. 209]


### Émilie Roffidal The Connoisseurship Practices of a "Levantine" of Marseille or When Trade Meets Art

Will you allow me, Sir, to tell you that ... you seem to surrender too easily to Mr. Mariette. His authority may impose itself on those who can only see through his eyes, but you are not destined to keep quiet before him, and in your mouth the αὐτὸς ἔφα would be too modest.¹

These few words addressed by Abbé May to the Marseille merchant Pierre-Augustin Guys (1721–99), in an unpublished letter dated April 10, 1771, compare him with the great connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette, and even place him higher in importance in a way.² Referring to the autos epha, equivalent to the Latin ipse dixit (he said it himself ), confirms the authority of his knowledge and suggests that it applied particularly to the "Greek" world.³ This admiration was made public by Abbé May three years later when he dedicated his own book Les temples anciens et modernes "to M. Guys, a merchant of the Academy of Marseille." This tribute to Guys is a confirmation of his reputation as a connoisseur of the Ottoman world in general and of Greece more specifically. Friederich-Melchior Grimm also referred to him in these words: "M. Guys has resided for a long time in Constantinople, he has more judgement in his little finger than M. de Tott [François de Tott who was an advisor to the Sultan Mustapha III at the time] has in his whole skull."⁴ These few quotations illustrate the personality of a merchant, provided by two different sources, Marseille and the Échelles du Levant, French outposts in the Levant.

Although Guys' profile might be considered unusual, he was nevertheless part of a milieu, that of wealthy Marseille merchants who had acquired considerable fortunes,

<sup>1</sup> "Me permettrez vous, Monsieur, de vous dire que . . . vous paroissez rendre trop facilement les armes à Monsieur Mariette. Son authorité peut en imposer à ceux qui ne peuvent voir que par ses yeux, mais vous n'êtes pas fait pour vous taire devant lui, et dans votre bouche l'αὐτὸς ἔφα seroit trop modeste." Letter from Abbé May to Guys, April 10, 1771, Marseille, Archives de la Chambre de Commerce, Série L XI, Fonds de Barbarie, no. 14 (All translations from French to English are by the author and Jane Mac-Avock).

<sup>2</sup> The Abbé May (Mai), whose real name was Louis Avril, a former professor of rhetoric at the Collège de la Flèche, was chaplain (aumônier) to the Carmelites of Saint-Denis, in the convent that Louise de France, Louis XV's youngest daughter had just entered.

<sup>3</sup> This expression marking a person's authority was used with reference either to Pythagoras or Aristotle, depending on the philosophical school. In connoisseurs' circles, it referred to the most competent authority. See Les Auctoritates Aristotelis, leur utilisation et leur influence chez les auteurs médiévaux. État de la question 40 ans après leur publication, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse and José Meirinhos (Barcelona: Brepols, 2017).

<sup>4</sup> Félix-Sébastien Feuillet de Conches, "La marquise de Créquy d'après des documents inédits," Le correspondant. Recueil périodique 130 (1883): pp. 549–65, here p. 562, note 1.

especially through trade with the Levant. Louis-Joseph Borély, owner of the château of the same name in Bonneveine, was also one of them, as was Antoine Bourlat de Montredon, who attended auctions in Paris with his friend Mariette.⁵ As arts lovers and cultured men, members of local academies, they all built up diverse collections, rich in paintings, sculptures, and drawings by old masters or living artists, but also Egyptian, Roman, and Greek antiquities. Among his colleagues and friends, reputed amateurs and collectors, Guys had the distinction of being considered a connoisseur. From this point of view, he is an interesting persona⁶ at the intersection of several fields: that of trade, which is the basis of the individual's fortune, that of art as a practice of connoisseurship, bringing together knowledge and competence in judging works, and that of the art market with its problems of identification, origin, and transport of works.

Studying this personality of the Marseille world of commerce, who had broad international trading relationships, provides an opportunity to examine the integration within the art world of individuals who were primarily active outside the major European capitals and who succeeded in constructing their status of connoisseur precisely due to this distance. In this process of "elevation," several factors appear essential such as the progressive and methodical construction of a network, which allowed him to acquire theoretical knowledge and learning practices in situ. The circulation of this knowledge through publications was also a factor and was the supreme consecration for connoisseurs seeking recognition. Beyond the process of acquiring this status, the question posed here is how connoisseurs maneuvered at the intersection of the arts, archaeology, classical literature, and ethnology, considering intermediary spaces that are neither fully European nor fully Oriental. Eighteenth-century Greece, which had no individual existence because it was part of the vast Ottoman Empire, nevertheless constitutes a space of the mind as the cradle of European art, an imaginative place that had to be distinguished from a "vulgar" modern reality. For this reason, military men and administrators of all kinds who were sent on missions to different parts of

<sup>5</sup> For the milieu of connoisseurs in Marseille, see especially the exhibition catalogue, Marseille au XVIIIe siècle, 1753–1793. Les années de l'Académie de peinture et de sculpture de Marseille (Musée de Marseille: Somogy éditions d'art, 2016), and also Émilie Roffidal, "Marseille, contacts et relations inter-académiques: les liens entre l'Académie des sciences, arts et belles-lettres et l'Académie de peinture et de sculpture," in Les papiers d'ACA-RES, (Rouen: Hôtel des Sociétés Savantes 2019), https://acares. hypotheses.org/files/2019/06/roffidal-2019.pdf. For Parisian amateurs generally and Mariette more specifically, see: Kristof Pomian, Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVIe –XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Gallimard, 1987); Charlotte Guichard, Les amateurs d'art à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2008); Patrick Michel, "Curieux, amateurs, 'faux connaisseurs:' le débat sur la connaissance," in Peinture et plaisir. Les goûts picturaux des collectionneurs parisiens au XVIIIe siècle (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010), pp. 17–28; Kristel Smentek, Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); Valérie Kobi, Dans l'œil du connaisseur: Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774) et la construction des savoirs en histoire de l'art (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017).

<sup>6</sup> For this concept, see Lorraine Daston and Otto Sibum, "Introduction: Scientific Personae and Their Histories," Science in Context 16 (2003): pp. 1–8, here p. 2.

the world were curious and attentive to all its wealth. With figures such as Pierre-Augustin Guys, the trade milieu seems to have played an active role in the construction of artistic knowledge in a global eighteenth century.⁷

#### Intermediality as a Method of Acquiring the Status of Connoisseur

In the case of Pierre-Augustin Guys, the question of geography and space is essential for understanding the construction of his status as a connoisseur.⁸ Guys was a trader, a traveler who voyaged widely throughout Europe (France, Italy, Denmark, and the Netherlands), and the Ottoman Empire,⁹ an area that corresponds to present-day Turkey, Bulgaria, Syria, and Greece. Abbé May insists on this aspect of Guys' character in the preface to his book Les temples anciens et modernes. He writes that Guys was on the spot for his observations, in direct contact with what he described and studied. His two anchorage points were Marseille and Constantinople: both cosmopolitan port cities that were reciprocal points of contact between East and West. Historically and symbolically, their two regions were also linked. In fact, the eastern part of the Mediterranean is considered the source of the city of Marseille, which was founded around 600 BC by inhabitants of Phocaea, an ancient city not far from Smyrna.

In Smyrna, and particularly in Constantinople where Guys arrived in 1740 to be trained in international trade by his uncles, he educated his eye and expanded his network over the following years. There, he came into contact with a cosmopolitan society in addition to the large community from Marseille; he was acquainted with Turks,

<sup>7</sup> For the voyage to Greece in particular, see Olga Augustinos, French Odysseys: Greece in French Travel Literature from the Renaissance to the Romantic Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Odile Cavalier, La Grèce des Provençaux au XVIIIe siècle. Collectionneurs et érudits (Avignon: Musée Calvet, 2007). I am very grateful to Odile Cavalier for her explanations.

<sup>8</sup> For Guys, see Henri Guys, "Notice biographique et littéraire sur Pierre-Augustin Guys," Répertoire des travaux de la Société de statistique de Marseille 21 (1858): pp. 32–67; H. Barré, Voyageurs et explorateurs provençaux (Marseille: Barlatier, 1905), pp. 110–18; Jacques de Maussion de Favières, Des matelots de l'archipel aux pachas de Roulémie. La vie quotidienne en Grèce au XVIII<sup>e</sup> siècle vue par Pierre-Augustin Guys (Paris: Kimé, 1995); Roger Milliex, "De l'ancien et du nouveau. Sur les deux voyages (1741–1751 et 1789–1799) de l'académicien marseillais Pierre-Augustin Guys (1721 à Marseille–1799 à Zante)," Mémoires de l'académie de Marseille (1989): pp. 139–53; Cavalier, La Grèce des Provençaux, pp. 60–72; Alain Messaoudi, "Pierre-Augustin Guys," in Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française, ed. François Pouillon (Paris: Karthala éditions, 2008), pp. 473–74.

<sup>9</sup> Pierre-Augustin Guys,Voyage littéraire de la Grèce, 3rd ed. (Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 1783): "Journal d'un voyage de Constantinople à Sophie, avril–juin 1744" (vol. 2: pp. 245–318); "Voyage de Marseille à Smyrne et de Smyrne à Constantinople, janvier–février 1748" (vol. 2: pp. 215–44); "Voyage en Hollande et en Danemarck, mars–juin 1762" (vol. 3: pp. 75–102); "Journal d'un voyage fait en Italie, mai–novembre 1772" (vol. 3: pp. 103–237). From 1789 and for several years, Guys accompanied Octave Choiseul-Gouffier, the son of the French ambassador to Troy, Athens, and Ithaca. See Iphigénie Anastassiadou, "Les russo-Turcs à Zante en 1798 (d'après un manuscrit inédit de P.A. Guys)," Balkan Studies 14 (1973): pp. 12–46.

Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, and also European merchants, representatives of different nations, passing adventurers, artists, and scientists.¹⁰ In Constantinople, Guys made strong friendships, including with the French consul Charles de Peyssonel from Marseille,¹¹ who was a kind of mentor to him. He was also in close contact with the French ambassador Charles Gravier, Count of Vergennes,¹² the Dutch ambassador Cornelis Kalkoen, with whom he made a long journey to Sofia,¹³ the English ambassador Everard Fawkener, also a merchant,¹⁴ the Count of Bonneval, the famous Ahmet Pasha,¹⁵ without forgetting Louis de Chénier, and the latter's wife Elisabeth Santi Lomaca, the author of Greek Letters.¹⁶

Guys obviously drew from this cultured and curious milieu, which adopted some of the codes of Turkish society, as seen in Jean-Étienne Liotard's famous painting, which Guys owned, showing the English merchant M. Levett and Ms. Glavani, a daughter of the former French consul in the Crimea, dressed in Turkish style in a house on the Bosporus strait (fig. 1).¹⁷ The archival sources reveal above all a stimulating and exciting environment in which questions of trade and geo-political relations, which were particularly tense between the Ottoman Empire and Russia, were regarded as the "hard bread" (pain grossier) of state duty compared to the "sweet treats of antiquity" (friandises de l'Antiquité), as Charles Peysonnel put it.¹⁸ In this quest for direct contact with antiquities, Constantinople also served as a basis from which to radiate throughout the Ottoman Empire. Constantly for twelve years, and then more occasionally, Guys travelled extensively in this part of the world, gathering local experiences, as well as a general and practical knowledge of local life.

Like his compatriots from Marseille, while building his knowledge of the terrain, Guys remained in close contact with his home city as exchanges were frequent and the

<sup>10</sup> The two European sections of Constantinople were separated by the Golden Horn, the old quarter of Seraglio of the Bazaar, opposite Pera and Galata, the residences of ambassadors and merchants.

<sup>11</sup> See the chapter "Charles Peysonnel (1701–1757), 'l'antiquaire français'," in Cavalier, La Grèce des Provençaux, pp. 52–55.

<sup>12</sup> Charles Gravier de Vergennes (1719–87) was the French ambassador in Constantinople from 1756 to 1768, before becoming Louis XVI's foreign affairs minister.

<sup>13</sup> Cornelis Kalkoen (1696–1764) travelled with Guys from Constantinople to Sofia. See Pierre-Augustin Guys, Voyage littéraire de la Grèce, vol. 2 (Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 1776), pp. 213–87.

<sup>14</sup> Everard Fawkner was portrayed by Jean-Étienne Liotard, around 1740. See Anne de Herdt, Dessins de Liotard (Paris: RMN, Musée du Louvre/Musée d'art et d'histoire, 1992), p. 66.

<sup>15</sup> Claude-Alexandre de Bonneval (1675–1747) had an adventurous life and converted to Islam. Guys included one of his letters in his publication. See Guys, Voyage littéraire de la Grèce, vol. 1, (Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 1776), pp. 476–79.

<sup>16</sup> Louis de Chénier (1722–96) and Elisabeth Santi Lomaca (1729–1808) parents of the poet Louis Chénier.

<sup>17</sup> Paris, Musée du Louvre, département des peintures, inv. no. RF 1995 14, around 1740.

<sup>18</sup> Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Nouv. Acq. Fr., 6834, letter July 10, 1737, quoted by Cavalier, La Grèce des Provençaux, p. 52.

Fig. 1: Jean-Étienne Liotard, Monsieur Levett et Mademoiselle Hélène Glavani en costume turc, ca. 1740, oil on canvas, 25 × 36 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. no. RF 1995 14

postal system between Marseille and Constantinople well organized.¹⁹ When he moved back to Marseille in 1752, Guys easily reintegrated into a society that he had never really left. Yet, distinguished by the prestige of those who had lived and travelled for a longtime in Greece's ancient territory, he confirmed his status as an amateur and connoisseur of antiquities. He continued to build his knowledge in Marseille since he was, as in the Levant, in direct contact with archaeological discoveries. Founded by the ancient Greeks, Marseille belonged to the cradle of antiquity in France, and antiquities were regularly uncovered there, even if in limited numbers. Excavation was a common practice, either during development works in the city or by private individuals on their properties. The collections of local scholars, such as those of Félix Cary, François Michel de Léon, and Jean-Baptiste Grosson, provided many opportunities to examine and compare objects coming from a wide Mediterranean territory.²⁰ Guys himself gathered an impressive, apparently famous collection in his country house in Marseille. Visitors

<sup>19</sup> Post and correspondence left twice a month, as indicated in the Almanach de Marseille, and was deposited in two post-boxes, one of which was at the Chamber of Commerce on the port. See Jean-Baptiste Grosson, Almanach de la ville de Marseille (Marseille: J. Mossy, 1777), p. 291.

<sup>20</sup> See Émile Perrier, Les bibliophiles et les collectionneurs provençaux anciens et modernes (Marseille: Barthelet & Cie imprimeur, 1897).

could enjoy a tour by someone who had experienced the context for, and extraction of, objects from Smyrna, Athens, and elsewhere.²¹ The philologist Jérémie-Jacques Oberlin describes in his travel notes some of the objects from this collection that were placed in the gardens, including the Funerary Relief of Ursulus, an inscription mentioning the Nemesis competition, now in the Musée Calvet in Avignon, and a large statue of the Empress Julia Domna as a priestess of Isis, now in the Louvre (fig. 2).²²

In Marseille, Guys also found an intellectually stimulating environment, especially among members of the Académie des sciences et belles-lettres who were passionate about numismatics, ancient Greek philology, and local history. Through academic conferences and publications, members of this institution reflected on the Greek heritage of Marseille, the first ancient city in France. This was the case for Félix Cary, who published Dissertation sur la fondation de la ville de Marseille [et] sur l'histoire des rois du Bosphore in 1744,²³ or Jean-Baptiste Grosson, who published a Recueil des antiquités et monuments marseillois qui peuvent intéresser l'histoire et les arts in 1773; the latter text made abundant reference to the Comte de Caylus and sought to follow in the footsteps of his Recueil d'Antiquités.²⁴ Guys found his path in local academic circles, and soon became a member of the Marseille Académie de peinture et de sculpture and the Académie des science et belles-lettres, where he took on the role of director in 1754 and then again in 1772.²⁵ These institutions provided him with recognition and official distinction, as well as a place to publish his own work.

Strengthened by his Marseille and Levantine networks, Guys gradually forged links with Parisian connoisseurs and amateurs, as these different circles were closely interrelated; Bourlat de Montredon, Guys' lifelong friend with whom he had "spent the best days of [his] life]" in the Levant, and for whom he was the executor, was an intimate of Mariette. The Abbé Barthélémy,²⁶ keeper of the king's cabinet of medals and antiques

<sup>21</sup> Jean-Dominique Cassini reports in this terms: "[S]on cabinet . . . ainsi que sa personne n'anoncent [sic] aucune pretention [sic]. Cette simplicité me revint en faveur de M. Guys et je trouvai effectivement beaucoup plus de choses encor [sic] dans sa tête que dans son cabinet. C'est le contraire de ce qu'on rencontre tous les jours chez les pretendus scavans [sic] et amateurs dans ce genre. M. Guys a voyagé en Grèce ou il a fait d'excellentes recherches sur les antiquités de ce fameux pays." Jean-Dominique Cassini, Récit d'un voyage fait en Italie, 1775, f° 51–52, L'Armarium, https://www.armarium-hautsdefrance.fr/ document/19567.

<sup>22</sup> Avignon, Musée Calvet, Relief funéraire d'Ursulé, marbre, Smyrne, inv. no. E 15 and Inscription du concours des Némésis, marbre, Smyrne, inv. no. E 23; Paris, Musée du Louvre, département des Antiquités grecques, étrusques et romaines, Statue de Julian Domna, marbre, Athènes, inv. no. Ma 1090. 23 Félix Cary, Histoire des rois de Thrace et de ceux du Bosphore cimmérien, éclaircie par les médailles (Paris: Desaint et Saillant, 1752).

<sup>24</sup> Jean-Baptiste Grosson, Recueil des antiquités et monuments marseillais qui peuvent intéresser l'histoire et les arts (Marseille: Mossy, 1773). Nevertheless, the mediocre quality of the prints in this publication should be noted.

<sup>25</sup> He was also chancellor of the institution in 1757, 1766, 1780, and then perpetual secretary from 1781 to 1784.

<sup>26</sup> The Abbé Jean-Jacques Barthélémy (1716–95), numismatist and philologist, is the author of the Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (Paris: chez De Bure, 1788).

Fig. 2: Unknown artist, Julia Domna, ca. 193/209 CE, marble, 202 x 72 × 47 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. no. LL 36

and a native of the Marseille area, was close to Caylus, but also to Peysonnel, Bourlat de Montredon, and Félix Carry who had trained him and whose editor he became. Guys, who corresponded with Abbé Barthélémy, was also in contact with Caylus; Caylus, for his part, was an associate-amateur of the Marseille Academy, and procured antiques from Abbé Barthélémy, and so forth. These examples, which could be added to infinitely, make it very clear that we are looking at a close-knit network united by antiquity, located between Marseille, Paris, and the Levant.

Within this network, Guys' advantage was to combine connoisseurial qualities with logistical facilities linked to his activity as a trader. He had outposts in many cities in the Levant and in Europe, storage space in ports, and ships in the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic. His own travels by sea and land provided opportunities to obtain sculp-

tures, paintings, prints, and drawings. In this way, he made himself essential as a supplier to a number of individuals and institutions, particularly for influential personalities such as the Comte d'Angivillier, director of the king's buildings, who asked him, for instance, to receive a case of works of art from Rome in Marseille.²⁷ Simon-Charles Boutin, a tax official and administrator of the royal treasury in the Navy, a great collector of Joseph Vernet, was another of the beneficiaries of his assistance.²⁸ Boutin who had total confidence in Guys' "taste, judgement and opinion" (goût, jugement et opinion) received art works and antiquities from him.²⁹ With young Prince Charles-Augustus of Weimar,³⁰ Guys extended his field of action into eastern Europe. It was his friend Jean-Baptiste Ansse de Villoison, the knowledgeable publisher of Homer's Iliad, who introduced him as a supplier, praising his qualities and experience in the field.³¹ For Charles-Augustus, Guys delivered Greco-Egyptian antiquities. In 1775, he sent a marble bust of Serapis, two bronze statuettes, and a bust of Jupiter Ammon "truly ancient, found in the ruins of Alexandria," where Guys had a trading post. A basalt statue of the god of the Nile holding a crocodile was probably delivered later.³² It should be noted that Marseille, as a port open to the Mediterranean and a place of where antiquities were excavated, was a trading hub for antiquities. Several antiquarians were active there, such as Jean Guérin, who supplied Esprit Calvet and the Comte de Caylus, obtaining stock essentially in Smyrna and around Athos.³³ In the same way, Charles Peysonnel's shipments on behalf of the king in 1749, including many marbles from Athens, Cyzicus, and Symrna, passed through Marseille.³⁴

Alongside this role of supplier which brought him into contact with major European collectors, Guys continued to increase his network, integrating experts on antiquity from all over Europe. In addition to his connections with the Abbé Barthélémy, the Abbé May, Jérémie-Jacques Oberlin, and the new generation of Hellenist scholars,

<sup>27</sup> Letter from Guys to d'Angiviller, April 2, 1777, in Les ressources d'ACA-RES, fonds d'archives, Nakalona/show/294, Paris, Archives Nationales, O/1/1933/B, dossier 6, doc. 59.

<sup>28</sup> Simon Charles Boutin (1720–94), cf. Philippe Cachau, Le fabuleux ensemble de M. Boutin, rue de Richelieu (1738–1740), 2016, http://www.philippecachau.fr/medias/files/texte-illustre.pdf.

<sup>29</sup> Letters from Boutin to Guys, June 7, 1784; November 13, 1784; December 20, 1784; August 11, 1786. Marseille, Archives de la Chambre de Commerce, L XI 13. These letters also refer to drawings by Puget, paintings by Vernet and Greuze being sent.

<sup>30</sup> Charles-Augustus of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (1757–1828) reigned at the time over a duchy whose capital was called the "New Athens."

<sup>31</sup> Jean-Baptiste Ansse de Villoison (1750–1805), see Charles Joret, L'Helléniste d'Ansse de Villoison et la Provence (Paris: A. Picard et fils, 1906).

<sup>32</sup> Heinrich Duntzer, Zur deutschen Literatur und Geschichte. Ungedruckte Briefe aus Knebel's Nachlass, vol. 1 (Nürnberg: Bauer und Raspe, 1878) p. 97.

<sup>33</sup> The "négociant" or merchant Guérin was the first deputy of the French nation in Smyrna in 1720–30. He lost his licence as antique dealer to the King. See Cavalier, La Grèce des Provençaux, pp. 20–22. 34 Several of these antiquities appear in Caylus's Recueil d'Antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises,7 volumes, (Paris: Desaint & Saillant, 1752–67).

such as Jean-Baptiste Ansse de Villoison,³⁵ he corresponded with Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the great theoretician of Greek art and architecture, who himself never travelled to Greece. In his correspondence, Winckelmann mentions "a young and wealthy merchant from Marseille . . . who wrote to him continually praising the beauties of Greece and expressing his desire that he should see them for himself."³⁶

### Knowledge of the Terrain as a Prerequisite to Becoming a Recognized Connoisseur

Guys' strength was the conjunction of theoretical knowledge linked with his great expertise of the terrain, facilitated by his mastery of the so-called "vulgar" Greek language, which was quite remarkable for his time.³⁷ He was in a position that allowed him to interact directly with the inhabitants, developing an approach that came as close as possible to the objects and monuments, and combined issues of aesthetics and especially use: "For this, I saw, I read, I compared, I took notes about everything," he writes.³⁸ His Voyage littéraire de la Grèce, published in 1771 by the Veuve Duchesne in Paris was the result of decades of observation. This book allowed him to demonstrate his cultural knowledge by citing many modern authors (including Jacob Spon, David Hume and Montesquieu) and also the strength of his network through the acknowledgments at the start of his publication, addressed in particular to Ansse de Villoison, M. de Saint-Priest, who was the king's ambassador in Constantinople, and also the famous Hellenist Guillaume Dubois de Rochefort, who was a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. "The list of my Benefactors honours me as much as it flatters me," he writes at the start of his text .³⁹

For the previous twenty years, Greek art and architecture had led to many famous publications, including those of Winckelmann, the Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce by Julien-David Le Roy, winner of the Grand Prix in architecture, and the first volume of the Antiquities of Athens by James Stuart and Nicolas Revett. In this way, Eu-

<sup>35</sup> Marie-Renée Diot-Duriatti, ed., Gelehrtennetzwerke in Straßburg am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts: Jérémie-Jacques Oberlin – Jean-Baptiste-Gaspard d'Ansse de Villoison (Réseaux savants strasbourgeois à la fin du XVIIIe siècle) (Leipzig: Leipziger Univ.-Verl., 2007).

<sup>36</sup> "Un jeune et opulent marchand de Marseille . . . qui lui écrivait continuellement pour lui vanter les beautés de la Grèce et lui faire part de son désir [qu'il les] voie par [lui]-même." David Constantine, Early Greek Travellers and the Hellenic Ideal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 148. 37 For Guys, modern Greek was a "...langue défigurée en apparence, et souvent par des expressions turques qu'on ne peut s'empêcher d'adopter, mais qui conserve tout le fond, toute la richesse et toute la douceur de l'ancienne." Guys, Voyage littéraire de la Grèce, vol. 1, p. 98. See on the topic Patrice Brun, Charles-Sigisbert Sonnini, Voyage en Grèce et en Turquie fait par ordre de Louis XVI et avec l'autorisation de la cour ottomane (1801) (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1997), p. 14.

<sup>38</sup> "Pour cela j'ai vu, j'ai lu, j'ai comparé, j'ai fait des notes de tout." Guys, Voyage littéraire de la Grèce, vol. 1, p. 2.

<sup>39</sup> "La liste de mes Bienfaiteurs, m'honore autant qu'elle me flatte." (Ibid., p. ii).

ropean elites of the 1750s and 1760s had access to depictions of antiques in their natural context; they had also been marked by the success of the "Greek" tastes and by experiments with ancient artistic practices, such as encaustic painting encouraged by Caylus, who had himself travelled to Constantinople in his youth.⁴⁰ With his Voyage, Guys contributed a different approach to knowledge of the ancient world; he was certainly interested in the monuments and objects of antiquity but through the question of everyday activities, using a method that could be described as ethnographic. For him, Greek architecture had been studied sufficiently—"I will not report about the monuments that survive what has already been said before me."⁴¹ Instead, he proposed a new approach while also updating travel journals from the Levant that had been produced in large numbers in the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century.⁴² He participated in a renewal that is also present in the work of his contemporary Johann Hermann von Riedesel, who expressed his desire to "know the modern Greeks & to remember the ancients for comparison" in his Remarques d'un voyageur moderne au Levant, also in 1771.⁴³ As Marc Fumaroli writes, "the French want to relive antiquity itself, men want to feel and act like Plutarch's heroes, women like Livy's vestals."⁴⁴

The forty-six letters that structure Guys' book describe modern Greek customs and propose parallels with ancient Greece. The aim is to show that in their daily practices, eighteenth-century Greeks were the direct descendants of the ancient Hellas in terms of their habitat, hygiene, clothing, betrothal customs, funerals, dance, music, and so on. Guys treats all these themes seeking to balance the two temporalities: antiquity and the

<sup>40</sup> For a general overview, see the exhibition catalogue, Le goût à la grecque. La naissance du néoclassicisme dans l'art français (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2009), especially the essays by Marie-Laure de Rochebrune, Alain Pasquier, and Vincent Droguet; Jackie Pigeaud and Jean-Paul Barbe, La redécouverte de la Grèce et de l'Égypte au XVIIIe siècle et au début du XIXe siècle, Entretiens de la Garenne Lemot (Paris-Nantes: IUF/CRINI, 1997), pp. 9–16. For Caylus's voyage to the Levant, see François Queyrel, "Le voyage de Constantinople du comte de Caylus en 1716–1717," in Manuel Roya, Martine Denoyelle et al., Du voyage savant aux territoires de l'archéologie. Voyageurs, amateurs et savants à l'origine de l'archéologie moderne (Paris: De Boccard, 2012), pp. 11–36.

<sup>41</sup> "Je ne rapporterai pas sur les monumens qui nous restent, écrit-il, ce que d'autres ont dit avant moi." Guys, Voyage littéraire de la Grèce, vol. 1, p. 4.

<sup>42</sup> In particular Jacques-Paul Babin (1674), Jacob Spon (1678), Guillaume-Joseph Grelot (1680), Corneille Le Brun (1700), Paul Lucas (1704), Jean Chardin (1711), Corneille de Bruyn (1714), Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717).

<sup>43</sup> "Connaître les Grecs modernes, & de [se] rappeller en comparaison les Anciens." Johann Hermann von Riedesel, Remarques d'un voyageur moderne au Levant . . . (Amsterdam: n.p., 1773), p. 2. The first section of the publication was conceived as a traditional travelogue, describing the various sites (Chapters 1 to 7), then about thirty pages are devoted to the comparison of the modern Greeks to the ancient, before "réflexions" are developed about different aspects of Turkey and the Levant.

<sup>44</sup> "Les Français veulent revivre l'Antiquité elle-même, les hommes veulent sentir et agir en héros de Plutarque, les femmes poser en vestales de Tite-Live." Marc Fumaroli, "Retour à l'Antique: la guerre des goûts dans l'Europe des Lumières," in L'Antiquité rêvée, innovations et résistances au XVIII<sup>e</sup> siècle (Paris: Louvre, Gallimard, 2010), pp. 23–55, here p. 23. See also: Renaud Serrette and Gabriel Wick, Vivre à l'antique de Marie-Antoinette à Napoléon Ier (Saint-Remy-en-l'Eau: Éditions Monelle Hayot, 2023).

eighteenth century. He constantly swings between literary travel, which refers to the great authors of ancient literature such as Pindar, Pausanias, Homer, and Virgil, and real travel, that of a merchant who is also a scholar and meets the inhabitants of other countries, proposing to study their "character" and describe their customs. Guys paints vivid pictures that recreate local dialogues, attitudes, and ways of life, transcended by the heroic dimension of ancient grandeur. Hence, in the letter devoted to Greek funerals, Mademoiselle Tigoniti, "the most beautiful Greek" (la plus belle des Grecques), is presented in the guise of an eighteenth-century Antigone burying her brother.⁴⁵

Regarding objects, Guys draws close parallels in their functions and uses over centuries. Based on his experience, on direct comparison with the materiality of objects in their original location, he points out, for instance, that Greek and Armenian tombs are often marked by "small funerary columns" (petites colonnes sépulcrales) and are decorated with abalone shells, as was the case during antiquity, with reference to Homer.⁴⁶ Describing the interiors of houses, the layout of rooms, and the choice of furniture, such as braziers placed in the centre of a room and sofas presented as small antique beds are all likewise seen as references to antiquity.

From the second edition, published in 1776, engravings enhanced the text. These were supervised by Charles-Louis Clérisseau, who had won the Grand Prix in architecture for 1746, and designed the chateau of Guys' friend Louis-Joseph Borély in Marseille, and at the same time was preparing the publication of his first volume of the Antiquités de la France.⁴⁷ Clérisseau was a member of Guys's circle, as were the draftsmen associated with the project, who included Antoine de Favray, another Levantine, also a draftsman for Caylus, Joseph-Antoine David, known as David de Marseille, a former student of the city's Académie de peinture et de sculpture , and Jean-Pierre Hoüel known for his views of Italy and Sicily.⁴⁸

The images seem to have gradually become associated with the text as the drawings by the various artists became available. They are not the result of a commission but rather were collected, which is indicated by their unequal distribution in the book, as well as their heterogeneous character: the reader passes from illustrations

<sup>45</sup> Guys, Voyage littéraire de la Grèce, vol. 1, p. 282.

<sup>46</sup> Ibid., p. 308.

<sup>47</sup> Charles-Louis Clérisseau, Antiquités de la France. Monuments de Nismes (Paris: Imprimerie Philippe-Denys Pierres, 1778).

<sup>48</sup> See especially Augustin Boppe, "Antoine de Favray, chevalier de Malte et peintre du Bosphore (1706– 1792)," in Les peintres du Bosphore (Courbevoie: ACR Edition, 1911), pp. 57–67; Stephen Degiorgio et al., Antoine de Favray, a French artist in Rome, Malta and Constantinople (Valetta: Fondazzioni Patrimonju Malti, 2004); for Joseph-Antoine David (1725–89), see the exhibition catalogue Madeleine Pinault, Houël. Voyage en Sicile. 1776–1779 (Paris: RMN, 1990); Madeleine Pinault-Sorensen, Jean Hoüel, (Rouen, 1735– Paris, 1813). Collections de la Ville de Rouen (Rouen: Musée des beaux-arts, 2001).

of Ottoman women,⁴⁹ to genre scenes (Noce champêtre; Pleurs sur les tombeaux), and then to images of monuments such as the Fontaine de Saint-Élie, or the section, elevation, and plan of an aqueduct (Bourgas), with varying formats taking up a full page or pages that fold out (fig. 3 and 4). Finally, no significant "antiquities" are illustrated, but it is also true that the text does not deal with the heart of ancient Greece.

Fig. 3: David de Marseille, "Noce champêtre," engraving, in: Pierre-Augustin Guys, Voyage littéraire de la Grèce, vol. 1 (Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 1783) Pl. 13, Bibliothèque Méjanes, Aix-en-Provence

In reality, this book is like a voyage to the Greek countryside with its habits and customs, its costumes and everyday objects. Although it is in harmony with the poetry of ruins that was fashionable in the second half of the eighteenth century, leading to the description of scattered stones as the "magnificence of an ancient building" (magnificence d'un ancien edifice) and arousing meditation on the destructive effects of humans and time,⁵⁰ the aim was above all to illustrate "tableaux vivants." The frontispiece

<sup>49</sup> For the treatment of Oriental costume in French travelogues, see Irini Apostolou, "L'apparence extérieure de l'Oriental et son rôle dans la formation de l'image de l'autre par les voyageurs français au XVIIIe siècle," Cahiers de la Méditerranée 66 (2003): pp. 1–14.

<sup>50</sup> Guys, Voyage littéraire de la Grèce, vol. 1, p. 323.

Fig. 4: Unknown artist(s), "Plan, Elévation et Profils d'un ancien Acqueduc situé près du village de Bourgas . . .," engraving, in: Pierre-Augustin Guys, Voyage littéraire de la Grèce, vol. 1 (Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 1783) p. 6, Bibliothèque Méjanes, Aix-en-Provence

of the 1776 edition, which shows Guys writing "to put on paper the thoughts that filled [his] mind" (pour jeter sur le papier les pensées qui remplissoient [son] esprit),⁵¹ while his companion the painter Jean-Pierre Houël, is drawing the ruins around them, shows his desire to place himself as a direct witness of what he discusses in the text (fig. 5). The bucolic setting in a single image which concentrates several elements of Greek architecture—the columns of a temple, the arena of an amphitheatre, the remains of an aqueduct—constitutes a context favourable to writing a text in situ that concentrates above all on the "ancient and modern Greeks, with a parallel of their morals" (Grecs anciens et modernes, avec un parallèle de leurs mœurs), as the book's subtitle reiterates.

For Guys, ancient Greece lived on in its inhabitants more than in its monuments, many of which had been destroyed and in the signs of transmission, of ways of being and doing that had travelled down through the centuries. This sensitivity to the living character of antiquity has a lot to do with his connection to Marseille. However, in reality, the material heritage of Greece in Marseille, the only Greek city of France, was limited, and the traces collected were always modest, confirmed by the Recueil des antiquités et monumens marseillois by his friend Grosson, also published during the 1770s. The fact that his interest in living antiquity was really the driving force of his approach was confirmed by the publication of a new book, Marseille ancienne et moderne a few years later. In this publication, Guys applied the same recipe for his success, intending to find evidence of ancient Greece and particularly of Athens among the Marseillais; this time, the Greek city was at the heart of his study.⁵²

The publication of the Voyage littéraire de la Grèce played a fundamental part in Pierre-Augustin Guys' acquisition of the status of connoisseur. In the avertissement of the first edition, which was not illustrated, Guys did not address amateurs first, but "Gens de lettres" (intellectuals). He did not seek to seduce but to convince. In doing this, he sought to confirm his position in the world of érudits, those who did not sequester their knowledge acquired over a long period of time by study and praxis, but who communicated it and to exposed themselves to possible criticism from their peers. Guys' critics were fulsome: several periodicals devoted enthusiastic reviews to his work, including Le Journal des Savants, L'Année littéraire and L'Esprit des journaux. They all emphasized the successful combination of fieldwork and theoretical knowledge. The text, translated into German and English and republished in French in revised and expanded editions in 1776 and then in 1783, was truly successful. It was then revived at the end of the century by Octave Choiseul-Gouffier's famous Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (published about ten years later) which underlines the author's "extensive knowledge" and the "long stay in Greece."⁵³

Through the trajectory of Pierre-Augustin Guys, a change of paradigm over the second half of the eighteenth century took shape: the connoisseur was no longer simply

<sup>51</sup> Ibid., p. 325.

<sup>52</sup> See Pierre-Augustin Guys, Marseille ancienne et moderne (Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 1786).

<sup>53</sup> Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul Gouffier, Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce, vol. 1 (Paris: n.p., 1782), p. 49.

Fig. 5: Jean Hoüel, "J'écris, tandis que mon compagnon dessine," frontispiece, engraving, in: Pierre-Augustin Guys, Voyage littéraire de la Grèce (Paris: Veuve Duchesne, 1783), Bibliothèque Méjanes, Aix-en-Provence

someone who gathers material for their study in their cabinet, they were also in the field, differentiated from the simple traveller through their assiduous devotion to their subjects of study over the course of years. Guys described himself almost as an antiquary ethnologist in proposing an analogy from the point of view of method; as an antiquarian is interested in a copper medal in bad condition in order to discover the relief decorating it under the dross, Guys finds the ancient Greeks by the careful observation of the modern Greeks.⁵⁴ This status of direct witness, searching and analytical, ensured him a recognized place in the Republic of Letters and Arts. Voltaire himself, celebrated him as the "eyes" of those who could not make the mythical journey to Greece:

Alas, I must die / Without having seen the home / Of the Virgils and the Platos. / At last, he believes himself on the shore / Consecrated by these demi-gods; / He recognises them much better / Than if he had made the journey, / For he has seen them through your eyes . . .⁵⁵

This passionate and obsessive approach to ancient Greece that was still operating at his time, is underpinned by a notion of energy that was very successful during the final third of the eighteenth century.⁵⁶ Guys himself cites it about twenty times in his book. Probably one should understand this energy, which transcended the usual transmission channels, as motivating Guys's interest in the most contemporary artistic production,⁵⁷ especially in artists who had assimilated and revisited the themes and codes of classical antiquity. These artists included Clérisseau, of course,⁵⁸ but also the sculptor Jacques Saly, whom he had brought to the Académie of painting and sculpture of Marseille and whose Goddess of Youth he owned,⁵⁹ the sculptor Étienne d'Antoine and his Sitting Life Size Minerva,⁶⁰ and also the draftsman David de Marseille, for whom he acted as an unpaid agent, introducing him to Parisian art lovers. For him, finally, these artists were animated by the same energy that had been present many centuries earlier in Greece. Antiquity still lives among its successors.

<sup>54</sup> Guys, Voyage littéraire de la Grèce, vol. 1, pp. 383–85.

<sup>55</sup> "Hélas ! Il faut donc que je meure / Sans avoir pu voir la demeure / Des Virgiles, & des Platons. / Enfin, il se croit au rivage / Consacré par ces demi-Dieux ; / Il les reconnoît beaucoup mieux / Que s'il avoit fait le Voyage, / Car il les a vus par vos yeux," Réponse à Ferney le 22 décembre 1776, in Pierre-Augustin Guys, Essai sur les Élégies de Tibulle, auquel on a joint quelques Poësies Légères (La Haye: Veuve Duchesne, 1779), pp. 161–62.

<sup>56</sup> See Alain Delon, L'idée d'énergie au tournant des Lumières (1720–1820) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988).

<sup>57</sup> For example, he commissioned a head from Jean-Baptiste Greuze through Bourlat de Montredon, as intermediary. Greuze promised to create the head as soon as he had finished a painting for the Comtesse du Barry. See Letter from Bourlat to Guys, September 19, 1771, Marseille, Archives CC, L XI 13. 58 In addition to his involvement in the illustration of the Voyage littéraire de la Grèce, Clérisseau shipped a trunk to Guys before his departure for London.

<sup>59</sup> Étienne Parrocel, Histoire documentaire de l'Académie de peinture et de sculpture de Marseille, vol. 2 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1889–90), p. 312.

<sup>60</sup> Ibid, p. 191.

Friederike Weis

### A Crouching Woman at Her Toilette: Venus or Radha? Cross-Cultural Connoisseurship of an Indian Album Motif

When the Franco-Swiss architect-engineer Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier (1741–95) returned to his hometown of Lausanne in September 1788 after thirty years in Mughal India, he brought twenty-five cases of personal belongings with him.¹ These probably contained the thirty-five Indian albums (muraqqaʿ) assembled under his supervision between ca. 1773 and 1785 in Faizabad, Delhi, and Lucknow.² Seventeen of the albums have survived; ten are now preserved in the Berlin museums of Islamic and Asian art.³ The content of the albums—Indian paintings, as well as Persian and Arabic calligraphy —suggests they were primarily intended for an Indian audience of Persian-speaking connoisseurs. However, Polier's albums also conform to European tastes, since their page layout differs notably from the classical Mughal muraqqaʿ format, in which two pages of calligraphy would face each other alternating with two pages of facing paint-

Note: This article is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), project number 416816602. I wish to thank Kristel Smentek for her meticulous reading and thoughtful comments.

<sup>1</sup> These were followed by separate shipments of many trunks and crates containing merchandise and furniture. See Pierre Morren, La vie lausannoise au XVIIIe siècle: D'après Jean Henri Polier de Vernand, Lieutenant Baillival (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1970), p. 286; William Hauptman, "Beckford, Brandoin, and the 'Rajah': Aspects of an Eighteenth-Centrury Collection," Apollo 143, no. 411 (1996): pp. 30–39, here p. 35 and note 56; Béatrice Veyrassat, De l'attirance à l'expérience de l'Inde: Un Vaudois à la marge du colionalisme anglais, Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier (1741–1795) (Neuchâtel: Editions Livreo-Alphil, 2022), p. 183. 2 The thirty-five albums are mentioned in a letter by the Swiss painter Michel-Vincent Brandoin, quoted below. All or most of these albums appear to have remained in Polier's possession, even after his move to France (where he was murdered on February 9, 1795), as Veyrassat, De l'attirance à l'expérience de l'Inde, pp. 137–38, has assumed on the basis of the "Inventaire après décès d'Antoine Polier" of March 5, 1795 (Archives départementales de Vaucluse, 3 E 11/259, fols. 54–55). The inventory includes ninety-one "in folio" volumes and "manuscrits orientaux" (p. 53) and several other folio volumes or folders, covered "en peau de l'inde rougeatre" or "etoffe de l'inde," containing a total of 510 pieces (p. 54).

<sup>3</sup> In October 1882, the Prussian State purchased 692 manuscripts, including twenty Indian albums from the collection of the twelfth Duke of Hamilton; see Volkmar Enderlein, "Zur Geschichte der indischen Sammelalben im Berliner Museum für Islamische Kunst," in Indische Albumblätter: Miniaturen und Kalligraphien aus der Zeit der Moghulkaiser, ed. Regina Hickmann (Leipzig: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1979), pp. 5–9, here pp. 7–8. Seven of the Hamilton Polier albums are now in the Museum für Islamische Kunst (I. 4593–99), three in the Museum für Asiatische Kunst (I 5005, I 5062 und I 5063). Another four Polier albums are housed in London (British Museum, 1920,0917,0.133–53 and 1920,0917,0.76–111; British Library, Or. 4769 and Or. 4770); another two in the John Rylands Library, Manchester (Indian Drawings 12 and 13); and one was auctioned off in single pages (from the collection of Thomas Phillipps, MS 6730; Sotheby's, London, November 27, 1974, lots 723–69).

ings.⁴ By contrast, in the Polier albums, each page of calligraphy is paired with a picture page (see, e. g., fig. 4). Such heterogeneous juxtapositions invite viewers to seek relationships between text and image or at least aesthetic connections.⁵ Indeed, the artists and bookbinders at Polier's Indian workshop⁶ paid attention to this issue, to be discussed below. The present essay seeks to shed light on the similarity-based, cross-cultural recognition of the Roman goddess Venus and the Indian model-devotee Radha in one recurrent album motif of a woman at her toilette. There are several other motifs in eighteenth-century Indian albums that might have likewise lent themselves to crosscultural reception, such as paintings showing the Sufi hermit Ibrahim ibn-i Adham (d. ca. 782) served by angels, which is reminiscent of images of angels ministering to Jesus in the wilderness.⁷

<sup>4</sup> For Mughal albums' classical format, see Elaine Wright, "An Introduction to the Albums of Jahangir and Shah Jahan," in Muraqqaʿ: Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library Dublin, ed. Elaine Wright (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International), pp. 38–53.

<sup>5</sup> See also Friederike Weis, "Von zwei Seiten betrachtbar: Indische Alben für Antoine Louis Henri Polier," in Ordnen—Vergleichen—Erzählen. Materialität, kennerschaftliche Praxis und Wissensvermittlung in Klebebänden des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Elisabeth Oy-Marra and Annkatrin Kaul-Trivolis (Freiburg i.B.: ad picturam, forthcoming). The juxtaposition of paintings with calligraphies also (and perhaps for the first time) is found in four albums compiled for Polier's friend Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gentil (1726–99) in Faizabad between 1763 and 1775 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, département des Estampes et de la photographie, Réserve Od 43, 49, 50 and Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, département des Estampes et de la photographie 60), https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b55003376f (Od 43); https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b550033750 (Od 49); https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148btv1b550072985 (Od 50); https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b55003374j (Od 60), accessed February 23, 2023. On Gentil's collecting in India, see also Charlotte Guichard's and Mrinalini Sil's contributions to this volume and Roselyne Hurel, Miniatures & peintures indiennes: Collection du département des Estampes et de la Photographie de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, vol. 1 (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2010), pp. 32–38 and cat. nos. marked as "1785, don du colonel Gentil."

<sup>6</sup> For Polier's own workshop, which he ran during the years he spent in Faizabad (1773–75), Delhi (1776–80) and Lucknow (1780–88) and which was headed by the Indian artist Mihr Chand (fl. ca. 1759–86), see Almut von Gladiß, Albumblätter: Miniaturen aus den Sammlungen indo-islamischer Herrscherhöfe (München: Edition Minerva, 2010), pp. 8–12 and Weis, "Von zwei Seiten betrachtbar," based on Polier's Persian letters to the artists in his service. For an English translation of the letters written in 1773–76, see Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi, A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The Iʿjāz-i Arsalānī (Persian Letters, 1773–1779) of Antoine-Louis Henri Polier (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). On the establishment of minor studios by European residents in India (of which the earliest was run by Gentil), see Malini Roy, "Origins of the Late Mughal Painting Tradition in Awadh," in India's Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow, ed. Stephen Markel and Tushara Bindu Gude (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2010), pp. 165–85, esp. pp. 175–76.

<sup>7</sup> For the parallels of this standard composition to Christian depictions of Jesus served by angels, see, e. g., Almut von Gladiss, "Ibrahim ibn Adham – Darling of the Angels," in Facts and Artefacts: Art in the Islamic World; Festschrift for Jens Kröger on his 65th Birthday, ed. Annette Hagedorn and Avinoam Shalem (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 305–312, esp. pp. 308–309; see also Friederike Weis, "Cruel Conquerors and a Solomonic Saint: European Collectors' Interests in Indian Muraqqaʿs," in Manuscript Albums and Their Cultural Contexts: Collectors, Objects, and Practices, ed. Janine Droese and Janina Karolewski (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming).

### The Reception of Polier's Indian Albums in Lausanne

In order to understand how educated European contemporaries, whom Polier received at his Lausanne residence, perceived his Indian albums, one may quote from two sources. During her Swiss journey, the German author Sophie von La Roche (1730–1807) visited the "Obrist [Colonel] Polier des Indes" some time prior to his move to France in November 1792. Her memoirs describe the "beautiful East-Indian things that the colonel had collected at Delhi" (schöne ostindische Sachen, welche der Obrist in Dehli gesammlet hatte):

. . . many albums with pictures of the palaces, temples, gardens, portraits of the imperial family, the most distinguished of the court at that time; the processions, feasts, representations of how noblemen in Delhi amuse themselves and host each other; pictures of how ladies entertain themselves, illustrations of plants, birds, etc. and all this in the most splendid colors of the Orient, painted with the indescribable charm and accuracy of Indian artistry in Indostan.⁸

Von La Roche does not mention the pieces of calligraphy, but expresses her admiration for the splendour of the Mughal court, as depicted in the paintings. Similarily, the Swiss painter Michel-Vincent Brandoin (1733–90) enthusiastically summarizes Polier's thirtyfive albums in a letter, dated March 20, 1789, to the wealthy English writer William Beckford (1760–1844), who would later purchase several of Polier's albums:⁹

I have never set eyes on his treasures without thinking of you. He [Polier; called "the Rajah" by Brandoin] has 35 books, each more beautiful than the others . . . Some of the precious pages of his books are honored with the writing by the Mogul himself with borders worthy of adoration —others contained the portraits drawn from life of all the Mogul princes up to our days, including

<sup>8</sup> ". . . viele Folianten mit Bildern der Paläste, Tempel, Gärten, Portraite der Kaiserfamilie, der Vornehmsten des Hofes seiner Zeit; die Auszüge, Feste, Vorstellungen wie große Herren in Dehli sich belustigen und einander bewirthen; Bilder wie die Damen sich unterhalten, Abbildungen von Pflanzen, Vögel u.s.w. und dies alles in den prächtigsten Farben des Orients, mit der unausprechlichen Nettigkeit und Genauigkeit des indischen Kunstfleißes in Indostan gemalt." (translated by the author) Sophie von La Roche, Erinnerungen aus meiner dritten Schweizerreise: Meinem verwundeten Herzen zur Linderung vielleicht auch mancher trauernden Seele zum Trost (Offenbach: Ulrich Weiß und Carl Ludwig Brede, 1793), pp. 69–70. I thank Béatrice Veyrassat for bringing this source to my attention which is partly translated into French in Veyrassat, De l'attirance à l'expérience de l'Inde, p. 183, note 340.

<sup>9</sup> Beckford presumably acquired many of Polier's albums in Lausanne in 1802, from Polier's underage children through their guardian (cf. Veyrassat, De l'attirance à l'expérience de l'Inde, p. 138). After Beckford's death, several of those albums came into the possession of Alexander Marquis of Douglas and Clydesdale (1767–1852) the tenth Duke of Hamilton, the husband of Beckford's daughter Susan Euphemia (1786–1858).

the great Oreng Zeb, others of natural history, others of customs, others of women, of the mythology of the Hindus, etc.¹⁰

Brandoin, unlike von La Roche, treats the albums in their entirety, mentioning also their "writing by the Mogul himself" (calligraphy) and the beautiful decorative borders. Both authors also explicity refer to the portraits of women in the albums. In contrast to earlier Mughal albums focusing on portraits of emperors, princes, courtiers, and mullahs, alongside paintings of Indian fauna,¹¹ the eighteenth-century muraqqaʿ indeed increasingly features images of women at their leisure, female Hindu ascetics, and women representing rāgiṇīs—that is, modes of Hindustani music (Rāgamālā illustrations).¹² However, since Indian elite women lived in seclusion, their representation was almost always a product of male imagination.

#### An Imaginary Courtesan Modelled on the Crouching Venus

Within these albums, the motif of a crouching Indian woman at her toilette while holding a veil above her head and back—often identified as an "Imaginary Courtesan" in scholarly literature¹³—was very popular. The motif appears in albums owned by many collectors including Polier (fig. 4); Archibald Swinton (1731–1804), a Scottish surgeon and interpreter (fig. 7); Sir Elijah Impey (1732–1809), the first Chief Justice of the new Supreme Court in Bengal from 1774 to 1783;¹⁴ and Richard Johnson (1753–1807), an

<sup>10</sup> "Je n'ay jamais jetté les yeux sur ses riches sans penser à Vous. Il [Polier; called "le Rajah" by Brandoin] a 35 livres plus beaux les uns que les autres . . . Quelques unes des feuilles précieuses de ses livres sont honorés de l'écriture même du Mogol avec les bordures à se mettre à genoux – d'autres renfermaient les portraits d'après nature de tous les princes mogols jusqu'à nos jours, entre autres le grand Oreng Zeb, d'autres d'histoires naturelle, d'autres des usages, d'autres des femmes, de la mythologie des Indous, &c &c &c." (translated by the author) Quoted in Hauptman, "Beckford, Brandoin, and the 'Rajah'," Appendix, p. 35.

<sup>11</sup> For an overview of seventeenth-century Mughal albums, see Wright, ed., Muraqqaʿ.

<sup>12</sup> For the increased production of Rāgamālā illustration sets in the eighteenth century, see Tushara Bindu Gude, "Between Music and History: Rāgamālā Paintings and European Collectors in Late-Eighteenth-Century Northern India" (PhD diss., University of California, 2009). For women in eighteenth-century albums, see also Friederike Weis, "Confident Women in Indo-Persianate Albums: Visual Metaphors or Ethnography?" in Motion: Transformation. 35th Congress of the International Committee of the History of Arts, Florence, September 1–6, 2019, ed. Marzia Faietti and Gerhard Wolf, vol. 1, (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2021), pp. 93–98.

<sup>13</sup> See, e. g. the description of "Paintings of a Courtesan and a Gazelle," ed. Royal Collection Trust, https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/30/collection/1005069-ar/paintings-of-a-courtesan-and-a-gazelle;

J. P. Losty and Malini Roy, Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire: Manuscripts and Paintings in the British Library (London: The British Library, 2012), fig. 131 (An Imaginary Courtesan).

<sup>14</sup> University of Manchester, Rylands Library, Indian Drawings 11, fol. 19v; inscribed zan-i hind (Indian woman).

entrepreneur and Resident at various Indian courts in service of the British.¹⁵ The motif was also included in earlier Mughal albums.¹⁶ In a late-eighteenth-century Mughal muraqqaʿ bearing the seal of the Nawab Asaf al-Dawla (r. 1775–97), the Mughal governor of Awadh (today's Uttar Pradesh) at Lucknow, a painting of the imaginary courtesan is juxtaposed with a representation of another Indian woman (fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Unknown Mughal painters (reconstruction of the original double-page spread), Two Indian Women in Different Poses, late eighteenth century, opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 32.7 × 22.2 cm (per folio), in: Mughal album formerly owned by Nawab Asaf al-Dawla (r. 1775–97), Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, RCIN 1005069.ar–aq, fols. 43r–42v

Both were probably understood to be Hindu women, as shown by their long black hair, henna-tinted toes and fingertips, jewelry, and especially the white flower garland around the neck of the woman depicted on the left and the bindī (colored dot) between the eyebrows of the woman on the right. The latter is sitting in "Indian" posture, stretching her arms above her head in a manner reminiscent of a codified Indian

<sup>15</sup> British Library, Johnson Album 66, 2, signed by Mihr Chand and inscribed on the upper margin as taṣvīr-i khiyāl (picture of an apparition), reproduced in Losty and Roy, Mughal India, fig. 131.

<sup>16</sup> We find evidence for this in the Nasir al-Din Shah Album, Tehran; see Yedda A. Godard, "Un album de portraits des princes timurides de l'Inde," Athār-é Īrān: Annales du service archéologique de l'Īrān 2 (1937): pp. 179–275, plate 4, fig. 66 (Femme nue soulevant un voile). The album was presumably compiled in Iran from folios that Nadir Shah (1688–1747) looted from the Mughal court in 1739. Hence, the motif probably had already emerged at the imperial workshop in the 1720s or 1730s.

dance movement called karkaṭa-hasta (literally, "crab's gesture," with the hands joined over the head). Her Indian pose clearly differentiates her from the imaginary courtesan type on the left.¹⁷ Emily Hannam has interpreted this figure as "A Nayika waiting for her lover." Nāyikā denotes a group of eight idealized heroines, described in Sanskrit treatises on Indian performing arts. As nāyikā, she could have been intended to evoke the mood of śṛṅgāra rasa, a concept in Indian aesthetics to denote the erotic "essence" or "flavor" (rasa) of an artwork.¹⁸ By contrast, the courtesan figure on the left is obviously modelled on a Greco-Roman representation of Venus at her Bath, more specifically the Crouching Venus, conventionally attributed to Doidalsas, a Greek sculptor from Bithynia, active in the mid-third century BCE. From the early sixteenth century onwards, this motif circulated widely via engravings and other portable art objects, some of which must have reached India through trade.¹⁹ Venus surprised after or during her bath was a popular theme in Hellenistic and Roman art.²⁰ At least forty antique marble versions based on Doidalses' protoype have survived.²¹ The most common type, also reproduced by Flemish engraver Robert van Audenaerde (1663 –1748) for a 1704 book on statues published by Domenico de Rossi (fig. 2),²² shows Venus crouching with her right knee close to the ground, her left forearm on the left upper thigh, and her right arm trying to cover her breasts, or perhaps grasp a lock of hair.²³ It is from this type that the eighteenth-century Indian versions of the imagined courtesan

<sup>17</sup> This gesture is typical for the musical mode Deśavairāṭī Rāgiṇī, illustrating a "feeling of comfort, and of amorous desire for her lover"; see Ernst and Rose-Leonore Waldschmidt, Miniatures of Musical Inspiration in the Collection of the Berlin Museum of Indian Art, Part II: Rāgamālā-Pictures from Northern India and the Deccan (Berlin: Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 1975), § 73, pp. 141–45.

<sup>18</sup> Emily Hannam, Eastern Encounters: Four Centuries of Paintings and Manuscripts from the Indian Subcontinent (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2018), cat. no. 44.

<sup>19</sup> For the wide circulation of this motif in Europe since the sixteenth century, see Elena Ghisellini, "L'Afrodite accovacciata tipo Doidalses da San Casciano dei Bagni," in U pan ephēmeron: Scritti in memoria di Roberto Pretagostini, ed. Cecilia Braidotti, Emanuele Dettori, and Eugenio Lanzillotta, vol. 1, (Rome: Quasar, 2009), pp. 663–85, esp. pp. 665–67. For European artworks that reached India through trade or as gifts in diplomatic exchanges and left their imprint on Mughal art production, see, e. g. Mika Natif, Mughal Occidentalism: Artistic Encounters between Europe and Asia at the Courts of India, 1580–1630 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), esp. chapter 3 "European Articles in Mughal Painting," pp. 110–51. 20 For a possible mythological and narrative context of this iconographic pattern, see Antonio Corso, "The Theme of Bathing Aphrodites in Classical Greece: Birth of an Iconographic Pattern, Development, Success," Numismatica e antichità classiche 44 (2015): pp. 161–69.

<sup>21</sup> On the forty marble replicas and other versions in various formats and materials (bronze, terracotta, paintings, and coins), see Ghisellini, "L'Afrodite accovacciata," pp. 666–75 and notes 9–12; for reproductions of several antique marble versions, see Salvatore Settis, Anna Anguissola, and Davide Gasparotto, eds., Serial/Portable Classic: The Greek Canon and its Mutations (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2015), sc cat. nos. 11–16.

<sup>22</sup> Domenico de Rossi, ed., Raccolta di statue antiche e moderne data in luce sotto i gloriosi auspici della Santita di N.S. Papa Clemente XI. da Domenico de Rossi, illustrata colle sposizioni a ciascheduna immagine di Pavolo Alessandro Maffei . . . (Rome: Stamperia alla Pace, Gaetano Zainobi, 1704).

<sup>23</sup> For this type see also Ghisellini, "L'Afrodite accovacciata," p. 678, and Settis et al., ed., Serial/Portable Classic, sc cat. nos. 12, 15, and 16.

(figs. 1 left, 4, and 7 left) derived the right arm's protective gesture, with her right hand combing her hair or holding the golden edge of a veil between her fingertips.

Fig. 2: Robert van Audenaerde, Statua die Venere nata dalla spuma del mare, e posata sopra una conchiglia (Doidalsas' Aphrodite), 1704, engraving with some etching, in: Domenico de Rossi, ed., Raccolta di statue antiche e moderne data in luce sotto i gloriosi auspici della Santita di N.S. Papa Clemente XI. . . . illustrata colle sposizioni a ciascheduna immagine di Pavolo Alessandro Maffei... (Rome: Stamperia alla Pace, 1704), Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg

Fig. 3: Unknown Roman sculptor(s) (modelled on the prototype by Doidalsas), Crouching Venus, first century BCE, marble, height 100 cm, Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Altemps, Rome, inv. no. 8565

However, the Indian painters seem to have been inspired by a more adolescent-looking version of the Crouching Venus, whose slender body is further oriented towards the

viewer, the right knee firmly on the ground and one arm lifted above the head, as seen in a restored statue from around the first century BCE in the Museo Nazionale Romano (fig. 3). Since the late sixteenth century, Mughal painters often selected visual elements from European pictures to create their own compositions.²⁴ As inspiration for their adaptations of the Crouching Venus, which was one of the most-quoted antique motifs in seventeenth-century European art,²⁵ Indian artists probably relied on European prints (fig. 2) and adoptions of the motif in European paintings. In the Indian versions, the first of which can be dated to the 1720s–1730s,²⁶ the lifted arm always supports a veil—perhaps meant to protect against an illicit gaze—which, ironically, serves to highlight rather than conceal her nudity (figs. 1, 4, and 7). While the depiction of the Hindu woman on fol. 42v in Asaf al-Dawla's album would have been more familiar to local viewers, the imaginary courtesan figure facing it might have resonated more with a European audience. Deliberate juxtapositions of paintings associated with different regional idioms (Mughal, Deccani, Persian, Chinese, European) within a single page collage or an opening were quite common in previous Mughal and Persian albums.²⁷ These were meant to invite the viewer to compare and assess different visual languages and aesthetic concepts. So, here too the Mughal patron would have probably recognized the opposition of an Mughal-Indic and a Mughal-Europeanizing style.

Interestingly, Polier's version of the crouching Indian woman at her toilette is paired with a four-line poem from the Gulistān (Rose Garden) by the Persian poet Saʿdi (ca. 1210–92), from the third story in the chapter "The Character of Dervishes" (fig. 4):

With my face in the dust of helplessness I say every morning at dawn when the breeze comes,

<sup>24</sup> This field has been widely researched, see e. g. Natif, Mughal Occidentalism. For the selective use of resources and elements from "foreign" visual idioms and their repurposing by Mughal painters, see also Kavita Singh, Real Birds in Imagined Gardens: Mughal Painting between Persia and Europe (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2017), esp. pp. 1–11 and Monica Juneja, "Braided Histories? Visuelle Praktiken des indischen Moghulreiches zwischen Mimesis und Alterität," Historische Anthropologie, Kultur, Gesellschaft, Alltag 16 (2008): pp. 187–204.

<sup>25</sup> A famous example is Venus, Cupid, Bacchus and Ceres (Sine Baccho et Cerere friget Venus) by Peter Paul Rubens (1570–1640) ca. 1612, Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, Kassel, acc. no. GK 85, https://datenbank.museum-kassel.de/33902/0/0/0/s1/0/100/objekt.html.

<sup>26</sup> See note 16 above.

<sup>27</sup> For example, we can find a deliberate juxtaposition of two thematically related scenes showing an elderly scholar giving a lesson within a single album page in Jahangir's Gulshan album, one in an earlier Iranian style at the top (ca. 1555) and the other in a more realistic Mughal idiom (ca. 1605) placed beneath it. According to Milo Beach, the Mughal school scene was meant to "provoke comparison to the similar composition above." (Beach, "The Gulshan Album: Reading the Marginal Figures," Artibus Asiae 76, no. 1 (2016): pp. 5–36, here fig. 4 and pp. 8, 14–15. For meaningful pairings of Chinese and Persian paintings and drawings in a Safavid album compiled between 1543–45, see Friederike Weis, "How the Persian Qalam Caused the Chinese Brush to Break: The Bahram Mirza Album Revisited," Muqarnas 37 (2020): pp. 63–109, esp. figs. 7, 12, and 15.

O you whom I will never forget, Do you remember me [literally, "your slave"] at all?²⁸

Fig. 4: ʿAli, calligrapher (left) and unknown Mughal painter (right) (reconstruction of the original doublepage spread), Calligraphy in Nastaʿlīq of a Poem from the Gulistān (Rose Garden) by Saʿdi (left) and Crouching Woman at Her Toilette (right), ca. 1774–80, opaque watercolor, ink and gold on paper, 40.5 × 28.5 cm (per folio), in: Album assembled for Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier, Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin, I. 4598, fols 7v–8r

Although Indian viewers would have tended to consider both pages—the calligraphy, signed by "the poor" (al-faqīr) ʿAli, and the unsigned painting—as separate artworks to be viewed independently,²⁹ the woman coyly glancing to her right appears to invite the viewer to study the verses. Moreover, the colors and floral scrollwork on the margins match: the blue margin on the left with inner and outer borders in red is echoed

<sup>28</sup> Rūy bar khāk-i ʿajz mīgūyam / har saḥargah ki bād mī-āyad / Ey ki hargiz farāmusht nakunam / hīchat az banda yād mī-āyad. English translation by Wheeler M. Thackston, quoted from Shaykh Mushrifuddin Saʾdi, The Gulistan (Rose Garden) of Sa'di (Bethesda: Ibex Publishers, 2008), p. 47.

<sup>29</sup> The relative autonomy of each page in the Polier albums is stressed through the equally wide margins on either side of the central fields, as conforming to most eighteenth-century Indian albums. This contrasts with most seventeenth-century Mughal albums, where the gutter margin (on the binding's side) is usually half the width of the outer margin, so that two facing pages together evoke a sense of unity (because the two gutter margins together equal each outer margin's width). Cf. seventeenth-century album pages in Wright, Muraqqaʿ, except for the Salim Album; see Elaine Wright, "The Salim Album, c. 1600–1605," in ibid., pp. 54–67.

by the red margin with blue borders on the right. Strikingly, the movement of the woman's left arm not only corresponds to the diagonal direction in which the verses should be read, but also draws attention to the triangular section of the orange door behind her back. This peculiar feature echoes the triangular field in the calligraphy's upper right corner. The poem refers to the supplications of the Sufi dervish ʿAbdul-Qadir Gilani, who lay with his face on the gravel next to the Kaaba to express his shame and humility in front of God's mercy and believers more righteous than himself.³⁰ The ensuing verses further emphasize his humility: every single morning he considers himself a pitiful slave hoping to receive God's response. At first glance, ʿAbdul-Qadir's declarations show no obvious connection to the theme of the Indian nude. However, Polier and other European residents in India who were fluent in Persian, including his friends Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gentil (1726–99), Richard Johnson, Archibald Swinton and many others, might have interpreted this woman—despite her resemblance to a Western iconographic pattern—not as Venus, but as Indian courtesan, thereby creating moralizing associations with the ashamed "slave" (banda) of the poem.

### A Woman Longing for Her Beloved: Radha as Devotional Metaphor

What would an Indian viewer have made of this innovative double-page spread, which combines calligraphy and painting? First, they certainly would not have considered the painting an illustration of the verses, since even in Mughal manuscripts words and pictures never strictly matched. A miniature is not merely "illustrative," but often diverges from the accompanying text. Visual elements thus often provide interpretations rather than representations of a text.³¹ In contrast, there is no relation between texts and images in traditional Mughal albums, because image and text do not face each other; double-page spreads of calligraphies and double-page spreads of paintings alternate, as stated earlier. In Polier's album, the strategy of visual elements vaguely alluding to a text—a strategy borrowed from Mughal manuscripts—seems to be taken to another level; although Saʿdi's quatrain has no direct connection to the facing picture, it stresses the vulnerability and "helplessness" of the depicted woman who might be deep in thought about her absent lover. Secondly, a Hindu viewer might have identified the nude as Radha, the chief consort of God Krishna, who in contemporaneous Rajput painting was frequently depicted at her toilette—sometimes observed by Krishna him-

<sup>30</sup> Saʿdi introduces the above-quoted verses as follows: "Some people saw Abdul-Qadir Gilani in the sanctuary of the Kaaba with his face on the gravel, and he was saying, 'O lord, forgive me, but I am irretrievably worthy of punishment, on the day of resurrection resurrect me blind so that I won't have to be ashamed in the face of the good.'" Translation by Thackston in Saʾdi, The Gulistan, p. 47. 31 For three examples from seventeenth-century manuscripts clarifying this point, see Kavita Singh, "Mughal Chronicles: Words, Images and the Gaps In-between," in Reflections on Mughal Art and Culture, ed. Roda Ahluwalia (New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2021), pp. 16–37.

self.³² In one of Archibald Swinton's albums—which previously belonged either to the historian and diplomat Ghulam Husayn Khan (1727/28–ca. 80) or the Mughal officer Bayram Khan Bahadur (active 1740s–ca. 80), as testified by their seal impressions on several pages³³—we find a depiction of a half-naked woman at her toilette sitting "Indian"-style on a low square pedestal (chaukī), in a pose typical of Rajput representations of Radha, faced on the right by another Indian woman adoring a statue of Krishna playing the flute (fig. 5). Both were probably meant to represent Radha. The title inscribed on another version of the right-hand composition in an album once owned by Sir Elijah Impey (fig. 6) confirms this: "Radha worships Lord Krishna."³⁴

In the bhakti (devotional) movement of Vaishnavism, a branch of Hinduism that considers Vishnu—and his avatars—as the supreme deity, Radha figures as a married milkmaid (gopī) who becomes the beloved of Vishnu's ninth avatar Krishna during his time in Vrindavan among the cowherds. Radha has often been interpreted as "model devotee," who symbolizes the human soul longing for union with the god Krishna and as such epitomizes selfless true love (prema), in spite, or precisely because, of being an adultress. Her passionate, but shameful love and secret longing for Krishna in her separation (viraha) from him—a major theme in devotional poetry³⁵— matches the combination of a lonely Indian woman at her toilette and Saʿdi's verses in Polier's album.

The same Swinton album also includes another double-page spread featuring a pair of bathing Indian women (fig. 7). While a European viewer might have understood the woman on the left as an Indian Crouching Venus, a Hindu viewer would rather interpret her as Radha longing for Krishna. Here, her Indian character is accentuated by an orange-and-violet-colored veil, replacing the customary white cloth. In a similar solitary setting, the woman depicted on the right bathes outdoors.

<sup>32</sup> For an excellent example (a page from the Sat Sai of Bihari, with a painting attributed to the Guler artist Fattu and his workshop of ca. 1775), see J. P. Losty, A Mystical Realm of Love: Pahari Paintings from the Eva and Konrad Seitz Collection (London: Francesca Galloway, 2017), cat. no. 76. For the same composition, see also a less accomplished painting in the Victoria and Albert Museum, IM.158–1914, https:// collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O72908/krishna-and-radha-painting-unknown/.

<sup>33</sup> The album I. 4591 is dated ba-tārīkh-i hafdahum-i shahr-i ṣafar sana 1176 hijrī (September 7, 1762). It bears Ghulam Husayn Khan's seal impression on fol. 24v, dated 1155 (1742/43), and six seal impressions naming Bayram Khān Bahādur, Mīr-i Mīrān, 1168 AH (1754/55) on fols. 10v, 11r, 12v, 13r, 14r, 15v. Bayram Khan Bahadur was the grandson of Aurangzeb's (r. 1658–1707) paymaster Mir Bakhshi Ruhullah Khan (d. 1691/92). He was in the service of Ghaseti Begum (d. 1760), the widow of the Nawab of Bengal, and he also accompanied the army of ʿAli Gawhar (the future Shah ʿAlam II) who marched on Bihar and Bengal in 1759. I thank Will Kwiatkowski for this information drawn from various historical sources.

<sup>34</sup> Rādhā parastish-i Kishan-jyū mīkunand; Kishan being another name of Krishna and -jyū another form of the honorific suffix -jī in Mughal manuscripts. I wish to thank John Seyller for this information. 35 On the role of Radha's love for Krishna as devotional metaphor and the significance of selfless love (prema) and separation (viraha) within Krishna-devotion (bhakti) based on Sanskrit literature, see Tracy Coleman, "Rādhā: Lover and Beloved of Kṛṣṇa," in The Oxford History of Hinduism: The Goddess, ed. Mandakranta Bose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 116–46.

Fig. 5: Unknown Mughal painters (reconstruction of the original double-page spread), Radha at Her Toilette (left) and Woman Worshipping a Small Statue of Krishna (right), before 1762, opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 32.5 × 23.0 cm (per folio), in: Album formerly owned by Archibald Swinton, Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin, I. 4591, fols 17v–18r

#### "The Gods of Greece, Italy, and India"

Let us now return once more to the European perspective. What was the purpose of collecting these motifs? Did these foreign women represent the supposedly loose sexual morals of their culture?³⁶ Or would a European audience accept these eroticized fantasies as artworks akin to the Greek and Roman classical tradition? Pursuing this consideration somewhat further: could representations of the bathing Venus alias longing Radha serve as visual evidence for the shared roots of Indian, Greek, and Latin myth-

<sup>36</sup> For colonial assumptions about Indian women's sexual conduct, see some remarks by Alexander Dow (1735/36–79) a historian and former high-ranking officer of the East India Company, "Dissertation Concerning the Customs, Manners, Language, Religion and Philosophy of the Hindoos," (which was first published in 1768 in the first volume of his History of Hindostan) in The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Peter James Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 107–39, here pp. 117–18. Dow explains that Indian housewives would allow Hindu male ascetics (whom he calls "senasseys" [saṃnyāsīs], "Fakiers," or "naked philosophers") into their houses, ostensibly for "prayers," but actually for sex. He concludes that "the women think they derive some holiness to themselves, from an intimacy with a Fakier" (ibid., p. 118).

Fig. 6: Unknown Mughal painter, Woman Worshipping a Small Statue of Krishna, Inscribed as Radha, ca. 1774–83, opaque watercolor, ink and gold on paper, 31 × 23 cm (folio), in: Album formerly owned by Sir Elijah Impey, The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, Manchester, Indian Drawings 11, fol. 10v

ologies?³⁷ This might not be far-fetched. Indeed, the lawyer and linguist William Jones (1746–94), who became puisne judge (a judge of lesser rank than the Chief Justice) for

<sup>37</sup> There has been a long-standing tradition of comparative studies in Europe trying to establish links

Fig. 7: Unknown Mughal painters (reconstruction of the original double-page spread), Crouching Woman at Her Toilette (left) and Woman Bathing Outdoors (right), before 1762, opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 32.4 × 23.3 cm (left folio), 32.9 × 23.1 cm (right folio), in: Album formerly owned by Archibald Swinton, Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin, I. 4591, fols 3v–4r

the Supreme Court at Fort William in Calcutta in 1783, founded the Asiatick Society in Calcutta on January 15, 1784 and was a close friend of Polier, proposed such common ground for global polytheism in his seminal talk "On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India." Written in 1784, it was first read to the Society on March 24, 1785. In his opening paragraph, Jones states that the worship practices of Greco-Roman and Indian polytheism—implying the iconography of their gods—strongly resemble each other:

When features of resemblance, too strong to have been accidental, are observable in different systems of polytheism, . . . we can scarce help believing, that some connection has immemorially subsisted between the several nations, who have adopted them: it is my design in this essay, to point

between Egyptian, Greco-Roman, and Indian mythologies and the iconographies of their gods. For seventeenth-century forerunners of eighteenth-century scholarship on comparative mythology, such as Lorenzo Pignoria's edition of Vincenzo Cartari's Le vere e nove imagini degli dei delli Antichi (Padua: Stampa del Pasquati, 1615), the Viaggi di Pietro della Valle of 1657–63, Abraham Rogerius' De Open Deure tot het verborgen heydendom of 1651, and Athanasius Kircher's China Illustrata of 1667, see Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Chicago: Chicago U.P., 1977), chapter I, esp. pp. 27–31 and 51–67.

out such a resemblance between the popular worship of the old Greeks and Italians and that of the Hindus.³⁸

Similarly, the Irish surgeon John Zephaniah Holwell (1711–98), who until his return to England in 1760 worked for the East India Company in Bengal, published a work on "The Religious Tenets of the Gentoos [Gentiles]" in 1767.³⁹ There, he claimed, after having studied a "Gentoo Shastah" (an ancient Indian treatise called śāstra), that the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans were indebted to India:

I distinctly saw, that the mythology, as well as the cosmogony of the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, were borrowed from the doctrines of the Bramins [Brahmins (the priestly caste in Hinduism)]; contained in this book; even to the copying their exteriors of worship, and the distribution of their idols, though grossly mutilated and adulterated.⁴⁰

Jones is considered the founding father of comparative linguistics, because of his identification of the close relationship between Indo-European languages, such as Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, and Latin, as well as Celtic and Gothic languages.⁴¹ The development of such theories did not escape the attention of European connoisseurs and Orientalists.⁴² In his 1784 essay, Jones compares sculptures of Lakshmi, the Hindu Goddess of wealth and fertility, as well as consort of Vishnu, with figures of Ceres, the Roman Goddess of harvest and agriculture.⁴³ He also explains that "the mountain born goddess, or Parvati

<sup>38</sup> William Jones, "On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India," in The British Discovery of Hinduism, pp. 196–245, here p. 196. The text was originally published (along with ten other papers by Jones) in the first volume of Asiatick Researches: or, Transactions of the Society, Instituted in Bengal, for Inquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia (Calcutta: Manuel Cantopher, 1788). It contains fourteen engravings showing various Hindu gods and godesses and their distinctive attributes.

<sup>39</sup> This text was published in the second part of Holwell's large work Interesting Historical Events, Relative to the Provinces of Bengal and the Empire of Indostan . . . of which the first part was published in 1765.

<sup>40</sup> John Zephaniah Holwell, "The Religious Tenets of the Gentoos," in The British Discovery of Hinduism, pp. 45–106, here p. 45.

<sup>41</sup> William Jones, "The Third Anniversary Discourse Delivered 2 February, 1786, by the President," in Sir William Jones: Selected Poetical and Prose Works, ed. Michael J. Franklin (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995), pp. 355–67, here p. 361.

<sup>42</sup> For the impact of Jones' comparison of the Greco-Roman with the Hindu pantheon on nineteenthcentury British collectors, see Friederike Voigt, "Orientalist Collecting of Indian Sculpture," in India in Edinburgh: 1750s to the Present, ed. Roger Jeffery (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2020) pp. 47–72, esp. pp. 18–23.

<sup>43</sup> Jones, "On the Gods," p. 213: "It having been occasionally observed, that Ceres was the poetical daughter of Saturn, we cannot close this head without adding, that the Hindus also have their Goddess of Abundance,whom they usually call Lacshmi, and whom they consider as the daughter (not of Menu but) of Bhrigu, by whom the first Code of sacred ordinances was promulgated. . . . Besides, in very ancient temples near Gaya, we see images of Lacshmi, with full breasts and a cord twisted under her arm like a horn of plenty, which look very much like the old Grecian and Roman figures of Ceres."

[another name for Shiva's consort Durga] . . . has many properties of Juno."⁴⁴ Within this logic, Jones compares Bhavani (another name for Parvati or Durga) with Venus:

Mahadeva [another name for Shiva], the husband of Bhavani, whose relation to the waters is evidently marked by her image being restored to them at the conclusion of her great festival called Durgotsava: she is known also to have attributes exactly similar to those of Venus Marina, whose birth from the sea-foam and splendid rise from the Conch, in which she had been cradled, have afforded to many charming subjects to ancient and modern artists . . . . The identity of the trisula and the trident, the weapon of Siva and of Neptune, seems to establish this analogy.⁴⁵

Finally, Jones dwells on Krishna, the "Shepherd God," and the gopīs.⁴⁶ Due to Krishna's great beauty, "the . . . princesses of Hindustan, as well as the damsels of Nanda's [Krishna's foster-father] farm, were passionately in love with Crishna, who continues to this hour the darling God of Indian women."⁴⁷ Jones compares Krishna's features to those of Apollo,⁴⁸ but does not mention Radha as his favourite gopī. In the end, he expresses his uncertainty about the genesis of the Greco-Roman-Indian pantheon; he advanced a "parallel between the gods adored in the three nations, Greece, Italy, and India; but, which was the original system and which the copy, I will not presume to decide."⁴⁹

At the time when the Indian albums under discussion were assembled—namely, from the 1760s to the 1780s—Indology had not yet emerged as academic subject at European universities. Those studying the history and cultures of precolonial India enjoyed an almost complete freedom of interpretation.⁵⁰ To European collectors and connoisseurs eager to delve into the world of the Indian muraqqaʿ, this endeavor certainly opened up a wealth of visual and historical associations. The strength of their connoisseurial networks, which especially flourished during their common years spent in Awadh (Faizabad and Lucknow), was made apparent in their predilection for certain subject matter, their exchanges, and the commissioning of copies of standard compositions.⁵¹ The collected albums certainly had a high personal souvenir value, but they

<sup>44</sup> Ibid., p. 223: "Her majestick deportment, high spirit, and general attributes are the same; and we find her both on Mount Calisa, and at the banquets of the deities, uniformely the companion of her husband."

<sup>45</sup> Ibid., pp. 221–22.

<sup>46</sup> Ibid., pp. 230–34.

<sup>47</sup> Ibid., p. 231.

<sup>48</sup> Ibid., p. 234: "In this picture it is impossible not to discover . . . the features of Apollo, surnamed Nomios, or the Pastoral, in Greece, and Opifer in Italy; who fed the herds of Admetus, and flew the serpent Python; a God amorous, beautiful, and warlike: the word Govinda may be literally translated Nomios ...."

<sup>49</sup> Ibid., p. 239.

<sup>50</sup> See also the introduction in Marshall, The Discovery of Hinduism, pp. 1–44.

<sup>51</sup> For visual evidence of these exchanges, see, e. g. Malini Roy, "Some Unexpected Sources for Paintings by the Artist Mihr Chand (fl. ca. 1759–86), Son of Ganga Ram," South Asian Studies 26, no. 1 (2010): pp. 21–29 and Weis, "Cruel Conquerors and a Solomonic Saint."

also served as important, supposedly objective documents testifying to the Indian career of their owners and were therefore rarely sold upon their return to Europe.⁵²

<sup>52</sup> Collecting Indian albums was clearly not seen as a monetary investment by these men. For further information on the afterlife of the albums in Europe during their owners' lifetime, see ibid. and Weis "Von zwei Seiten betrachtbar."

#### Caitlin Karyadi

### Japan's Southern Schools: Imported Painting, Chinese Criticism, and the Contours of Connoisseurship in Eighteenth-Century Japan

In eighteenth-century Japan, preexisting knowledge about painting collided with objects, texts, and ideas recently imported from abroad. Chinese ships bound for Nagasaki carried in their hulls both paintings spuriously ascribed to past masters as well as recent texts that imposed new value judgements on a shared canon of artists. Adding to such diachronic entanglements, many of the selfsame names inscribed on newly arrived paintings and cited in imported histories had already accrued distinct legacies in Japan. Within local Japanese contexts of use and display, Chinese masters of previous centuries had developed separate associations from those operable in China. The influx of foreign materials that increasingly circulated through early modern networks of exchange inspired vehement debates on connoisseurship and taste as Japanese aesthetes attempted to reconcile past frameworks with newfound trajectories of imagemaking. In the face of a medley of imported visual references and art histories, Japanese painters cultivated divergent opinions on the standards and ideals of artistic practice. To stake their claims, these same practitioners granted authority to some Chinese texts and objects while disparaging others as spurious, undesirable, or, more simply, vulgar.

Central to this new aesthetic discourse in Japan were the writings of the Ming dynasty artist and critic Dong Qichang (1555–1636). Japanese painters first encountered Dong's theories through the widely circulated painting manual Mustard Seed Garden Manual (first published in 1679), but the scholar-artists featured in this essay also sought out other collections of his texts such as Huachanshi suibi (Notes from the Chan Studio of Painting, compiled in 1720) and Rongtai ji (Rongtai Collection, first printed in 1630). In his writings Dong expounded on the history of painting in China, dividing past painters into two discrete lineages of unequal merit known as the Northern and Southern Schools. Dong denigrated painters he grouped as part of the Northern School for their technical preoccupation with mimesis while he celebrated those of the Southern School for what he identified as their self-conscious engagement with painting as medium.¹ Dong's theories had profound implications for the history of Chinese painting—so much so that Chinese art historians continue to grapple with his terminologies and frameworks.

<sup>1</sup> For more on Dong Qichang, see Wai-kam Ho, ed., The Century of Tung Ch'i-Ch'ang (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1992); and Dong Qichang yanjiu wenji (Shanghai: Shanghai Shuhua Chubanshe, 1998).

Many of the painters Dong wrote about had also long featured within Japanese art histories. Beginning in the eighteenth century, Japanese aesthetes invoked Dong's division of Northern and Southern painting in their own texts, but their definitions of these categories followed different logics. Their purpose in citing Dong was not to merely broadcast his conclusions to a Japanese readership, but rather to repurpose the Northern-Southern paradigm to make new claims about painting as a larger enterprise that encompassed both Chinese and Japanese traditions. In other words, these writers did not passively receive Dong's theorems, but rather mobilized and transformed his language about past masters to promote new approaches to image-making.

This essay takes as its subject the polemicizing debates, aesthetic tensions, and art historical contradictions that emerged from eighteenth-century Japanese engagement with foreign theory. Through the example of three treatises that adopted the language of Dong, I explore how scholars negotiated imported theoretical frameworks in relation to extant knowledge and available painting. Previous studies have grouped these artists and the painters they wrote about into a post-facto genre known as "Nanga," shortened from nanshūga (Southern School painting).² But, while Nanga offers a convenient container to describe loose social affiliations and period interests in recent Chinese sources, the term also clouds the contrasting aims, interests, and understandings of its designated members. The following discussion will demonstrate just how variable Japanese criticism was—both contingent on affiliations, training, and motives as on the particular imported objects that comprised one's frame of reference. How and why did individual understandings diverge and converge? How did personal motivations and differential access to varying objects inform these conclusions? And what new possibilities for the history of painting emerged out of these epistemic collisions?

#### From East-West to North-South: Kuwayama Gyokushū's Realignment of East Asian Painting

Scholar and painter Kuwayama Gyokushū (1746–99) set out to redefine Japanese art history through his engagement with Chinese aesthetic theory. In 1790, he authored his first treatise, Gaen higen (Humble Words on the Garden of Pictures), which was later amended and published in 1799 as Kaiji higen (Humble Words on Painting). As one of the first Japanese texts to explore Dong's Northern-Southern dichotomy, Gyo-

<sup>2</sup> Tsuji Nobuo has written that painter Kurano Kōen (1827–1896) first coined the term "nanga" in Tetsuō gadan (Tetsuō's Discussion of Painting, 1883), but "nanga" also appears in an 1853 bulletin entitled Kokin nanga yōran (Past and Present Nanga Bulletin). Regardless, the term was not in widespread circulation until the late nineteenth century. Present-day art historians tend to use "Nanga" in place of the period term nanshūga as well as another term borrowed from Dong, "literati painting," or bunjinga. For more on the nuances of Nanga, nanshūga, and bunjinga, see Tsuji Nobuo, "Nihon bunjinga kō—sono seiritsu made," Bijutsushi gaku 7 (1985): pp. 1–30.

kushū's treatise attempts to align Chinese theorizations with Japanese precedents that do not always follow imported logic. The result, while marked by certain ambivalences, presents a biting critique of the inadequacies of painting practice in Japan.

Gyokushū opens Kaiji higen by recounting Japan's painting tradition, which he describes as having been the domain of the Kano and Tosa schools. By Gyokushū's time, both the Kano and Tosa had achieved preeminent status as celebrated ateliers with close ties to elite patrons. The Tosa specialized in painting modes developed in relation to the imperial court, while the Kano catered to the warrior elite through an integrated program that claimed both local Japanese and imported Chinese models. The Kano's flexible painting menu and connections to the ruling shogunate allowed their workshop to dominate the market and training programs for painting throughout the early modern period.³ Gyokushū laments that recent painters no longer studied accepted models but rather "imitated vulgar styles from abroad," artlessly turning to newly imported imagery with little understanding of existing tradition. His preoccupation with appropriate models continues throughout the text, whereby both the unschooled attraction to the new as well as the long-standing conventions of the Kano and Tosa receive his opprobrium.

After foregrounding his frustrations with the current artistic landscape, Gyokushū introduces the reader to his own awakening, one born out of the irreconcilable tensions among texts from different art historical traditions:

When I read the ancient histories of this realm, I encountered language associated with painting. I thereby began to harbor doubts. As I searched for a source [for my doubts], I read foreign painting books and records. I studied the claims of many generations of masters. These demonstrated such lofty pith that cannot be easily articulated by just anyone. Moreover, the lack of a division between wa and kan in the ancient records of this realm further proves as much.⁴

Gyokushū's "doubts" here arise from the inevitable mismatch among ancient histories, foreign painting principles, and existing Japanese practice. The terms wa and kan refer to an established dialectic of "Japanese" and "Chinese," whereby wa designates Japan, or local painting developments, and kan denotes the continent, being not necessarily limited to geographic China but conceptually anchored there.⁵ The Kano adopted both stylistic alternatives of wa and kan as part of their practice. In so doing, the

<sup>3</sup> For more on the significance of the Kano workshop in early modern Japan, see Yukio Lippit, Painting of the Realm: The Kano House of Painters in 17th-Century Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012).

<sup>4</sup> 其後本朝の旧史を読に、彼画事に及べる語も間見えたり、爰に於て亦狐疑を生じ、愈其淵源を 究んと、異邦の書画録をも見るに、世々名賢の論定する所詳にして、甚高妙の趣意有て庸人の容 易に論ずべきに非ず。且我朝の旧記に載る所、絵事に於て和漢の差別なきこと其證明か也。Sakazaki Shizuka, ed., "Kaiji higen," in Nihon garon taikan (Tokyo: Arusu, 1927–29), pp. 136–53, here p. 137. 5 For more on the wa/kan dialectic and its aesthetic synergies, see Melissa McCormick, "Purple Displaces Crimson: The Wakan Dialectic as Polemic," in Around Chigusa: Tea and the Arts of Sixteenth-Century Japan, ed. Dora C. Y. Ching, Louise Allison Cort, and Andrew M. Watsky (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 181–208.

Kano promoted their enterprise as a one-stop shop for both Japanese- and Chinesestyle painting, thereby positioning them to accept any commission for any occasion on any scale. Yet, unsurprisingly, neither ancient painting histories nor imported texts acknowledged the homegrown Japanese invention of wa/kan. Gyokushū therefore introduces a new heuristic, realigning painting from something either locally derived or imported to an evaluative rubric that can be applied to any image regardless of origin.

For Gyokushū, Dong's Northern-Southern binary provided an alternative to the wa/kan division over which the Kano claimed mastery. His treatise continues by listing the names of Chinese paragons upheld by the Kano as house models. For each of these Kano exemplars, Gyokushū culls a series of quotations from various Chinese sources that are meant to testify to the ineptitude of said master.⁶ He then concludes definitively by claiming that all Kano models are misguided:

As can be seen in the aforementioned passages by various sages, Ma Yuan, Xia Gui, Mu Qi, Sheng Mao, Zhao Chang, Qian Xuan, Yujian, and Yan Hui, who are studied by the Sumiyoshi, Kano, and other such houses of this realm, all belong to the Northern School and are therefore vulgar. This can be considered lamentable.⁷

In one fell swoop, Gyokushū leverages the "Northern School" to cast Chinese painters important to the Kano enterprise as "vulgar." Dong's Northern/Southern paradigm thereby offered language to discredit an entire system of art historical prestige that the Kano had built into the very foundations of their practice. Where painting under the Kano had been organized along a horizontal axis of wa and kan, Japan and China, near and far, Gyokushū rather integrates the two separate categories of Chinese and Japanese painting. He instead reorients them according to Dong's vertical order of Southern and Northern, elegant and vulgar. The gap between histories of painting in China and Japan created a space for Gyokushū to challenge Kano orthodoxy and instate a new framework to understand, organize, and ultimately stratify painting as a shared practice that spanned East Asia and beyond.

Gyokushū belonged to a network of aesthetes who exchanged both imported source material as well as their various interpretations. His original manuscript was, in fact, revised posthumously by the prominent collector and scholar Kimura Kenkadō (1736–1802), who also likely facilitated Gyokushū's access to Dong's writings.⁸ Yet,

<sup>6</sup> In addition to Dong Qichang's writings, Gyokushū also references Du Mu's (1458–1525) Yuyi bian (sixteenth century), Kaopan yushi (1590), Shen Hao's (1586–1661) Huachen (ca. 1650; republished in Japan by Kimura Kenkadō as Shinshi gajin, 1763), Huashi huiyao (1631), Shuidong riji (ca. 1490), and Tuhui baojian (1365), Huajian (fourteenth century), among others throughout his text. Sakazaki, ed., "Kaiji higen," pp. 138–41.

<sup>7</sup> 前文諸賢の説によりて見る時は、本朝の住吉狩野其外諸家にて学びたる、馬遠、夏珪、牧溪、 盛子昭、趙昌、舜擧、玉澗、顏暉皆北宗に属せる俗画なり、惜むべきことと思はる。Ibid., p. 141. 8 Kenkadō's changes to Gyokushū's manuscript were so significant that it might be more accurate to refer to him as co-author. For instance, Kobayashi Tadashi has claimed that Kenkadō added the famous

despite their shared interests, Gyokushū and Kenkadō sometimes found themselves at discursive odds. Almost twenty years prior to Gyokushū, Kenkadō invoked the Northern-Southern dichotomy in his preface to the painting manual Kenshi gaen (Master Takebe's Garden of Pictures, 1775). Like Gyokushū, Kenkadō employed the Northern-Southern theory as a rhetorical device to discuss painting in Japan, extrapolating Dong's paradigm to evaluate examples beyond the Chinese author's purview. In his preface, Kenkadō characterizes the Kano as Northern School foil. For the Southern School, however, he identifies the Chinese painter Shen Nanpin (1682–ca. 1760; also known as Shen Quan) as representative: "The painting of our country has begun to have two paths, and Shen Nanpin is the harbinger of that which is called the Southern School."⁹ Nanpin hailed from southern China and had, in prior decades, traveled to Japan where his renown grew rapidly. Back in China, however, Nanpin was a provincial painter little remarked upon in prominent Chinese sources. This left the criticism of his work up to the discretion of Japanese interlocuters. According to Kenkadō, only with the arrival of Nanpin did a Southern School begin to flourish in Japan.

Gyokushū did not regard Nanpin as highly. In Kaiji higen he allocates Nanpin's example to the Northern School:

While Nanpin's work is the best quality among visiting Chinese painters, it is Northern School. Moreover, most of the works in unofficial collections are fakes or painted on his behalf by others. It is difficult to find a true trace of the painter.¹⁰

Gyokushū and Kenkadō agreed on the Kano's classification as Northern School, but their understanding of Nanpin—and therefore the Southern School—was diametrically opposed. For both Gyokushū and Kenkadō, Dong's North-South binary provided a means to reshuffle entrenched painting practice in Japan into a more malleable hierarchy. From our historical perspective, Dong's Northern School signifiers of "form likeness" 形似 (Ch: xingsi, J: keiji) and "court painting" 院体 (Ch: yuanti, J: intai) more closely align with Nanpin's attributed body of work. Yet, Kenkadō's divergence from both modern scholars and Gyokushū was not the result of ignorance. Rather, this conceptual difference between two collaborators demonstrates just how porous Dong's paradigm was in its new context. Kenkadō chose to designate Nanpin as Southern School in an effort to elevate the subject of his preface: Takebe Ayatari (1719–74), a painter that cited

section that celebrates Tawaraya Sōtatsu (ca. 1570–1640) and Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716) as Southern School exemplars. For more on the relationship between Gyokushū's manuscript and later published treatise, see Kobayashi Tadashi, "Shahon 'Gaen higen' to 'Kaiji higen,'" Museum 197 (August 1967): pp. 27–30.

<sup>9</sup> 近世清人沈衡斎航海肇伝翎毛花卉之法、其名大振、鄭山如高其昌輩相継唱其業、而薄海之間、 文人穎士無不習肄其業、而吾邦之絵事始為両途、彼唱南宗者沈氏其蒿矢哉。Transcription available in Kondō Hidemi, "Shin Nanpin to Nagasaki-ka kei gafu," in Kinsei Nihon kaiga to gafu, edehon ten, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Machida Shiritsu Kokusai Hanga Bijutsukan, 1990), pp. 159–77, here p. 162.

<sup>10</sup> 南蘋は舶来第一の画品なれども北宗なり。又民間に蔵する所、多く贋作或は代筆にて真蹟至 て得難し。Sakazaki, ed., "Kaiji higen," p. 148.

Nanpin as a visual forerunner. In comparison, Gyokushū's expanded text was more preoccupied with dissecting the example of Dong's preferred Southern School paragons Mi Fu (1051–1107), Huang Gongwang (1269–1354), and Ni Zan (1301–74), among others.¹¹ The conflicting status of Nanpin underscores the rhetorical agency of both Gyokushū and Kenkadō in adapting the Northern-Southern paradigm to challenge preexisting frameworks and thereby promote their individual perspectives.

### Visualizing the Southern School: Nakabayashi Chikutō's Views of Painting

Dong's Northern School signifiers overlapped with the very painters the Kano upheld as foundational models—an equivalence that accounts for the Chinese critic's ready reception in Japan. Examples of work by Dong's Southern School exemplars, however, were not as easily available to Japanese viewers.¹² This absence prompted Kenkadō's and Gyokushū's opposing use of the category, leaving the identification of an ideal work open to interpretation. Many of Gyokushū's Southern School members follow Dong's chosen representatives. But, how to identity and emulate the "Southern School" qualities of these painters was more of an open question. Gyokushū laments that few visual references for Dong's Southern School masters circulated in Japan:

More and more in the case of paintings imported from abroad, important works are of course rare. Everything that currently circulates through popular channels is fake, and there is nothing that should be used as a teaching model. On rare occasions there are scrolls by Ming or Qing painters following the style of a Tang, Song, or Yuan master, and only these references should be considered. Thus, we are at a slight disadvantage when it comes to observing models as there is no standard that approaches that of ancient masters. I am of the opinion that currently those gentlemen

<sup>11</sup> While Gyokushū closely followed Dong's textual precedent, he also developed his own understanding of the Southern School. Building on Dong, Gyokushū anchors his Southern School in the notion of the "untrammeled" 逸 (Ch: yi, J: itsu). Yet, while Dong's definition of the untrammeled refers to a class of painting, Gyokushū revives the stylistic component of the untrammeled present in Tang and Song period histories such as Tangchao minghua lu (ca. 840) and Yizhou minghua lu (ca. 1006). For instance, he equates Dong's "untrammeled" rank with the "splashed ink" 潑墨 (Ch: pomo, J: hatsuboku) technique of Wang Mo (d. 805). This interpretation also colors his conception of paintings by Mi Fu, Huang Gongwang, and Ni Zan, leading him to emphasize abbreviating ink play.

<sup>12</sup> Dong also likely granted Southern School membership to early canonical exemplars based on later discursive reception. For instance, Dong probably never saw an actual work by Wang Wei (ca. 699–759) and rather cited him as the founding link of his Southern School lineage based on the favorable treatment of him by Mi Fu in Hua shi (twelfth century). Shih Shou-ch'ien, "Cong Xia Wenyan dao Xuezhou: Lun 'Tuhui baojian' dui shisi, shiwu shiji Dongya diqu de shanshui huashi lijie zhi xingsu," Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo jikan 81, no. 2 (2010): pp. 229–87, here p. 233.

with exceptional ability treat the theoretical doctrines of certain masters as teacher and study these principles in authentic works . . . .¹³

According to Gyokushū the fact that there were few authentic examples of Southern School painting posed a problem for aspiring painters looking for appropriate models to study.

For another contemporary, however, the problem of Southern School examples was not as debilitating. In 1802 a younger painter and scholar, Nakabayashi Chikutō (1776–1853), published an eponymously titled painting treatise, Chikutō garon (Chikutō's Exposition of Painting) that expounded on many of the same signifiers as Gyokushū and Kenkadō. Chikutō classified both the Kano as well as Shen Nanpin as belonging to the Northern School; unlike Gyokushū, however, he was not as stringent about one's Southern School models. Rather, he accepted that paintings in the style of a named artist, even outright fabrications, could still communicate much about that which they represented:

If you want to know what imagery Southern School refers to, for landscape it includes the likes of Shen Zhou, Wen Zhengming, Tang Yin, and Qian Gu; for figures, Wen Zhengming, Qiu Ying, and Chen Hongshou; for bird-and-flower painting, Zhou Zhimian, Lü Ji, Lin Liang, and Chen Chun. However, since true traces by these artists are quite scarce, closely study the style of Southern School painting. Even without [paintings by] a particular artist, if you come across a painting in that style, copy it part-for-part closely and consider the placement of the brushwork. Additionally, you can read painting and calligraphy manuals and essays to probe a work's significance. As you paint and advance in years and experience, there will come a time when you suddenly reach an understanding.¹⁴

For Chikutō, even spurious works had the potential to convey the visual significance of a distant master. Some of Chikutō's selected masters, such as Shen Zhou (1427–1509) and Wen Zhengming (1470–1559), follow Dong's prescription. Chikutō's other artists, however, were not only ignored by Dong but might rather be characterized as Northern School. Lü Ji (fl. ca. 1477–1505) and Lin Liang (ca. 1416–80), for instance, were two bird-and-flower court painters whose professional status would have put them at odds

<sup>13</sup> 増て海外に飄来せし所なれば、本朝に名跡の稀なるも理りなり、今民間に流転するものは盡 く贋作にて師法とすべき者更になし、稀に明清の人の唐宋元大家の格に倣ひたる幅を得て、其の 根據を想見するのみなり。故に其法覧する所も稍劣りて、終世古人の地に至るべき楷梯なし。嗣 粲窃に思ふに茲に妙才の士ありて諸賢の論訣を師とし、又真物に就て其理趣を察し、気韻を以て 画を求る時は、南宗に於て遺恨なきに至らんか、是古に遡り前賢と師を同する者なり。Sakazaki, ed., "Kaiji higen," p. 152.

<sup>14</sup> 南宗とは如何なる画をさしてかいふぞとならば、山水は石田、徵明、唐寅、錢叔寶の類、人 物は徵明、仇英、陳洪綬が輩、花鳥は周之冕、呂紀、林良、陳道復の類をいふ也。されどこれら の人の真蹟甚だ少なければ、只南宗の画風をよく見覚えて、たとへ名はなくとも此風の画にあへ ば、皆一々くわしく写し取りて粉本とし、其筆意位置を考ふべし、あるひは又書画譜等の論を読 みて其画意を求むべし、かくしつつ熟習年を積まば、豁然としてさとる時あるべし。Sakazaki, ed., "Chikutō garon," in Nihon garon taikan, pp. 200–19, here p. 214.

with Dong's ideal of a Southern School comprised of amateur literati landscape artists. Chikutō thus expanded the Southern School to encompass different artists and genres that at times conflicted with Dong's position. What then inspired his diverging interpretation?

For Chikutō, Dong's theory served as a springboard from which to make sense of the imported paintings he encountered as part of his study. While aware of the specific Tang, Song, and Yuan painters identified by Dong as Southern School, Chikutō chose to emphasize later Ming painters not explicitly cited in Dong's writings. Only Shen Zhou and Wen Zhengming had received Dong's official Southern School blessing. Chikutō's concentration on more recent painting reflected the Chinese works he would likely have had access to at this moment in Japan. In response to the problem of genuine models, Chikutō did not follow a strict authentic-fake binary. The objects that physically traveled to Japan from China were largely the product of southern Chinese workshops that shared both a regional art historical vantage as well as quality of materials. Therefore, the paintings encountered by Chikutō could be visually reminiscent in terms of both material and expression regardless of attribution. In fact, Shen Zhou and Wen Zhengming hailed from the Suzhou area, a region that by the eighteenth century had become a production center for works spuriously attributed to earlier masters, many of which were exported to Japan.¹⁵ Moreover, while Dong drew a categorical division between literati landscapists and professional bird-and-flower painters, the actual historical practices of his chosen patriarchs were much more fluid. Not only did Shen Zhou and Wen Zhengming have personal affiliations with many of Chikutō's other named artists (whom scholars might now identify as Northern School), but later examples of their attributed works could also intersect.¹⁶ A painting ascribed to any one of Chikutō's exemplars could potentially claim in its inscription to follow the style of Wen Zhengming or Shen Zhou. Furthermore, a landscape attributed to Tang Yin (1470–1524), for instance, could visually recall that of Wen Zhengming. And, in the case of bird-and-flower subject matter, imagery of plants, birds, or animals ascribed to Shen Zhou could resemble that of Zhou Zhimian (fl. ca. 1580–1610), whose range of attributed imagery also resonated with that of Lü Ji.

In his own artwork, Chikutō directly acknowledged many of these same Ming forebearers. Sugimoto Yoshihisa has demonstrated how Chikutō adapted subjects and compositional arrangements from imagery attributed to Lin Liang, Zhou Zhimian, and oth-

<sup>15</sup> These paintings are now referred to as Suzhou pian (Suzhou fakes). Paintings ascribed to Chikutō's named exemplar of Qiu Ying (1494–1552) also happen to comprise a majority of Suzhou pian examples. For more on Suzhou pian, see Wei hao wu: 16 zhi 18 shiji Suzhou pian ji qi yingxiang (Taipei: Guoli Gugong Bowuyuan, 2018).

<sup>16</sup> Modern-day art historians have grouped many of these artists as part of yet another "school," known as the Wu School and so named for the area around Suzhou. For a case study on the layered social obligations and painting practices of Suzhou painters, see Craig Clunas' monograph on Wen Zhengming: Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengming, 1470–1559 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004).

ers in his own paintings.¹⁷ In these examples, Chikutō closely followed the constituent motifs of his models but dramatically transformed their final presentations. Chikutō also frequently reprised the theme of doves in a garden throughout his career (fig. 1). This subject and composition—doves anchored stage right by a garden rock and flowers—correspond to work attributed to at least one of his chosen Southern School exemplars, Lü Ji (fig. 2). This same arrangement, however, could also be ascribed to Nanpin as well as the thirteenth-century painter Qian Xuan (figs. 3 and 4). Not only did Dong explicitly denigrate Qian Xuan as vulgar, but Chikutō himself also dismissed Nanpin as Northern School. In practice, however, the paintings of Qian Xuan, Lü Ji, and Shen Nanpin all featured subjects and styles associated with the Chinese court tradition of auspicious bird-and-flower painting. While Chikutō drew a distinction between Lü Ji and Nanpin, in China the legacy of these painters was very much intertwined. Given their imbricated associations, regional Chinese workshops at times recycled similar iconographic arrangements such as pigeons in a garden to create paintings attributed to any one of these artists.

Chikutō's understanding of Qian Xuan and Nanpin painting, however, was not informed by dove imagery. While in China the iconography associated with Qian Xuan, Lü Ji, and Shen Nanpin could overlap, in Japan viewers had different expectations for the attributed imagery of each master. Kano painters and appraisers had codified Qian Xuan as a master of finely detailed, polychromatic paintings of flowers and plants. This subject presentation developed through Qian Xuan's earlier reception in Japanese tea gatherings, whereby his small-scale attributed scrolls depicting lone flowers, plants, or floral baskets fit comfortably within the architecture and aesthetic valences of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century tearooms. As painters who served the same warrior elite that frequented tea gatherings, the Kano adopted and perpetuated this refined taste for Qian Xuan imagery. As for the case of Nanpin, in the decades following the painter's return to China, southern Chinese workshops produced attributed paintings en masse to satisfy Japanese demand. In the process, different combinations of animals, birds, plants, and flowers came to dominate the market for Nanpin painting, thereby codifying the possibilities for his attributed imagery. Apart the example shared above, doves did not become part of the suite of subject matter that defined Nanpin's visual expression in Japan.

Like that of many of his contemporaries, Chikutō's Southern School developed out of the complex interplay among his own motivations, prior understandings, and available referents produced according to the separate expectations of a Chinese context. He attempted to reconcile the tensions between the types of imported works available to him with theoretical rhetoric, which offered absolute judgements on certain masters but failed to mention the specific example of others such as Lü Ji or Nanpin. As a result, Chikutō's theorizations at times produce contortions when compared to their tex-

<sup>17</sup> Sugimoto Yoshihisa, "Nakabayashi Chikutō no sakuga to sono seishin," Kobunka kenkyū 1 (2002): pp. 1–53, here pp. 18–33.

Fig. 1: Nakabayashi Chikutō, Hollyhock and Pair of Doves (蜀葵双鳩図), 1842, ink and color on silk, 117 × 42.4 cm, unknown whereabouts

Fig. 2: Attributed to Lü Ji, Birds and Flowers (花鳥図), undated, one of four, ink and color on silk, 150.2 × 51.5 cm, unknown whereabouts

Fig. 3: Attributed to Shen Nanpin, Peonies and Rock Doves (牡丹双鴿図), 1730, ink and color on silk, 113.6 × 51.4 cm, Sen-oku Hakukokan Museum, Kyoto

Fig. 4: Attributed to Qian Xuan, Peonies and Turtledoves (牡丹斑鳩図), undated, ink and color on silk, 130.9 × 59.4 cm, unknown whereabouts

tual precedents. His Southern School contradicts the parameters of the concept as defined by Dong. For Chikutō, however, it was less important to blindly conform to Dong's construct than to explore the new possibilities afforded by recent Chinese texts and imagery on his own terms.

#### Lineal Echoes

Gyokushū, Kenkadō, and Chikutō used the Northern-Southern paradigm to promote particular lineages of ideal artistic models while disparaging other ubiquitous examples. Our current art histories, too, group the artist-critics introduced here with additional Japanese painters as part of an art historical genre known as Nanga. In its current definition, Nanga refers to a retrospectively constructed movement of artistic activity that flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Stylistically, it emphasizes Japanese interest in Ming and Qing landscape painting and other literati themes. This category now has the art historical heft of a bona fide lineage, a flavor of painting that is treated as equal and distinct from that offered by the Kano. Yet, while Gyokushū, Kenkadō, and Chikutō were among the first to theorize a Japanese Southern School, as their various texts show, their points of misalignment rival, if not surpass, those of consensus. Their Southern Schools little resemble our current application of Nanga and instead reveal the more nuanced preoccupations of its pioneering authors. By narrowing the lens to focus on how some of the first architects of Japan's Southern School specifically deployed this new concept, I have explored how and why these painter-scholars found meaning in the term, in the process framing their assertions in relation to discrete art historical precedents as well as textual and visual examples. While language might seem to offer a shared reference for both period authors and modern historians alike, meaning and significance necessarily shift across different temporal contexts. The Southern School is one such signifier that while anchored to specific names and examples eludes static encapsulation, transforming in relation to the period, place, and individual expectations of what a painting should and should not be.

Mrinalini Sil

### Jean-Baptiste Gentil's "Mughalesque" Albums: A Study in the Visual Nodes and Aesthetic Modes of Firanghi Paintings in Eighteenth-Century India

#### Introduction

The eighteenth century in India was characterized by two critical transitions which changed the structures of power and initiated important economic, social, and cultural reconfigurations. The first was the shift in the earlier half of the century from the Mughal political order to the regional political orders while the second saw the English East India Company steer its way to a position of political dominance in North India.¹ While this century was indeed marked by violence, it was also characterized by a great degree of political, economic, and cultural adjustment, and pragmatism. The realignment and reorientation of power in several pockets of the former Mughal Empire led to the emergence of several regional successor states, some of which like the Rajput kingdoms, Awadh, Hyderabad, and Bengal, gained a position of prominence by the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Contrary to the understanding of the period as one of anarchy and chaos, the eighteenth century in India ushered in a time of flexibility, mobility, and unprecedented dynamism that stimulated extensive painting and artistic activities in the Mughal center of Delhi as well as regions far from it.

Encompassing the passing of the Mughal empire and the advent of the British empire, the transitional period of the eighteenth century provides us with an excellent occasion to engage with shifting conceptions of legitimate authority which directly affected the complex social context of art production, and the networks of art patronage and art collection in South Asia. Marking a shift in art patronage from the imperial Mughal to regional courts, one of the new sources of patronage in art production at this time came through the pronounced increase in the presence of European officials in India. This was especially marked during the second half of the eighteenth century.² The eventual dominance of the British in India has shaped the dominant strands of art

<sup>1</sup> Acknowledgements: I am extremely grateful to Prof. Kavita Singh for reviewing my text and providing insightful comments and feedback. I am thankful to Dr. Parul Singh, Deepashree Dutta, Arkadeb Bhattacharya, and Amrita Chattopadhyay for their engaging discussions and reading through my drafts. All mistakes are my own.

Seema Alavi, ed., The Eighteenth Century in India: Debates in Indian History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 1.

<sup>2</sup> See Barbara Schmitz, ed., After the Great Mughals: Painting in Delhi and the Regional Courts in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2002).

history writing about this period such that there is a tendency to organize all paintings by Indian artists under the aegis of European patronage as firanghi (foreign) or "Company paintings," and without much interrogation of the conceptual and visual categories, artworks collected or commissioned by all Europeans have been broadly understood as constituting the practice of colonial collecting.³ The presence of Europeans in the service of Indian rulers, and the East India Companies founded by several other nations such as the French Compagnie des Indes Orientales (CDIO) should complicate our understanding of the period.⁴ By focusing on the collections of the French political operative Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gentil (1726–99), this essay highlights the complexities of European art patronage and collecting practices, and the transcultural art networks that were forged in early modern India, to lead away from the overly simplified model where Mughal patronage was seamlessly supplanted by a British "Company" school.

Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gentil, colonel of the French infantry, and knight of the Royal and Military Order of Saint-Louis, hailed from an ancient noble family with a long history of service in the French army. Reaching India in 1752, Gentil served with distinction in different capacities under the civil and military administrators Dupleix, de Bussy, Law de Lauriston, de Conflas and de Lally. After the English seized control of Pondicherry in 1761, Gentil crossed the peninsula to Bengal. This was a challenging time for the French in the subcontinent; with one setback following another, they were forced to surrender to the English in Bengal as well and retreat to Chandernagore. The desperate nature of French affairs in India acted as a catalyst for Gentil, who, failing to see any future for himself in the CDIO, made his way to the court of the Nawab of Bengal, Mir Qasim. This was a tumultuous political period in Bengal as well; a feud between the Bengal nawab and the English East India Company (EIC) initially ensuing from dissatisfaction over mercantile privileges enjoyed by the British in Bengal eventually led to the nawab declaring war on the British. The Battle of Buxar (October 23, 1764) fought between the EIC on one side and the allied forces of the Nawab of Bengal, Mir Qasim, the Nawab of Awadh, Shuja-ud-Daulah and the Mughal

<sup>3</sup> Mildred Archer's pioneering work of categorization and cataloguing of Indian paintings from the British Library's India Office Collection was the origin of the taxon "Company Paintings" where erstwhile court artists had had to adapt to their new patrons, that is the European aesthetic demands and standards of different East India Company officials in the face of dwindling Mughal and regional court patronage. This has remained the most common paradigm for understanding artistic collaborations between European patrons and Indian artists during the eighteenth century. See Mildred Archer, Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period (London: Victoria and Albert Museum Publications, 1992).

<sup>4</sup> This proposition has been debated by French scholars like Jean Marie Lafont who has pointed out how even Mildred Archer acknowledged the existence of a French "Company School of Painting'' at times interchangeably used with the term firanghi (foreign) paintings which is to be considered on its own terms. See Jean Marie Lafont, "Company Paintings or Firinghee Paintings? French Contribution to an Eighteenth-Century School of Painting in India," in Indika: Essays in Indo-French Relations, 1630– 1976 (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 2000), pp. 119–49, here p. 119.

Emperor Shah Alam on the other brought about a paradigmatic shift in the subcontinental balance of power. With the British victory resulting in the restoration of peace between the belligerent powers after the Treaty of Allahabad (1765), Gentil's political ambitions in Bengal ceased, and he migrated to the court of the Nawab of Awadh, Shuja-ud-Daulah. Shuja-ud-Daulah not only welcomed the French general but also bestowed upon him the responsibility of negotiating with the British, training the troops of Awadh in European discipline, and the overall administration of the province. As a close friend, confidante, and political advisor to the nawab, Gentil enjoyed a position of honor and prestige. Unfortunately for him, this privileged position was soon to be suspended after the death of Shuja-ud-Daulah. In 1775, Asaf-ud-Daulah's accession to the throne came with conditions of complete dependence on, and compliance with, the British, and Gentil was asked to take his leave from Awadh on British orders to the new nawab. Gentil left the court of Awadh to go to Chandernagore where he spent the last few years of his stay in India before returning to France in 1778.⁵

Like several other eighteenth-century European political agents in India, Jean-Baptiste Gentil was also an avid collector and patron of Indian arts, and his collecting and patronage patterns evolved during the course of his rather eventful career in India.⁶ In this essay, I chart this evolution by examining firstly an album of paintings of Hindu divinities that Colonel Gentil had commissioned during his stay in Bengal to explore how concurrent Western European antiquarian interests interacted with so called "Provincial Mughal" painting practices in early modern South Asia. I will then briefly discuss the nature of some muraqqaʿ (bound collections of calligraphy, paintings and drawings) acquired by Gentil to shed light on the material articulation of cultural belonging and his self-fashioning as an elite connoisseur in late Mughal India. Drawing upon Mughal conceptions of connoisseurship, yet traversing the boundaries between the Mughals, the Nawabs of Bengal and Awadh, the French, and the British, as patrons and collectors of art, the mobility of the albums enabled them to be reinterpreted in the diverse cultural and political landscapes of Gentil's different worlds. By highlighting the complexity of his patronage patterns and collecting practices, this chapter navigates a heteroglot art history of South Asia to highlight the various cultural agents and socio-political factors surrounding the making and collection of art in early modern India.

<sup>5</sup> Translated by the author from Jean-Baptiste Gentil, Mémoires sur l'Hindoustan ou Empire Mogol (Paris: Chez Petit Libraire de S.A.R Monsieur, et de S.A.S. Le Duc De Bourbon, Palais Royal Galeries de Bois, no 257, 1822), pp. 1–12.

<sup>6</sup> On Gentil's collections, see also Charlotte Guichard and Friederike Weis's contributions to this volume.

### The Visual Turn of French Antiquarianism and Mughal Connoisseurship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal

The long eighteenth century in France saw what has been described as a second Renaissance, an "Oriental Renaissance" that was ushered in by the arrival of South Asian texts and the diffusion of knowledge of Indian literature, culture, and religion in Europe.⁷ These manuscripts were often accompanied by albums of miniature paintings; some French antiquarians had a definitive interest in Indian paintings and the cultural environment in which they were produced.⁸ And yet, even with a higher circulation of texts including some written in Sanskrit and focused on Hinduism and Hindu manners and customs, there was no comprehensive or sustained effort to understand Hinduism as represented in Indian art in a systematic manner before the mid-eighteenth century. In France, such leading antiquarians as Pierre Sylvain Maréchal, Pierre François Hughes, and Charles Dupuis were the first antiquarian scholars to make serious attempts at gaining knowledge about Hinduism not solely from Indian literary sources but from the few known examples of Indian sculptures and paintings in European collections.

In 1754, the arrival of Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron in India was a milestone in the development of French Oriental studies. Anquetil laid the foundations of comparative philology, with his translations of the Zend Avesta (first published in 1771), and the Upanishads (published roughly between 1801–2) into French which remain his seminal contributions to the field. His lesser known but highly significant contribution was the systematic iconographic documentation of Hindu deities, especially those of Western India, which he carried out during his travels on the subcontinent. Anquetil-Duperron travelled extensively through South India, Bengal, Benaras, Gujarat, and Western India and spent a considerable time visiting the Ellora, Kanheri, Yogeshwari, and Mandapeshwar caves. Writing on Ellora, Anquetil-Duperron noted that the deities depicted there were also to be seen in the Indian paintings deposited in the Royal Library in Paris. He may have been referring to the earliest album executed by missionaries, Dieux des Indiens peints à gouache par les missionnaires (Indian Divinities Painted in Gouache by the Missionaries), a volume that has been dated to ca. 1725, and said to have been acquired by the Royal Library in 1763.⁹ The library also housed the multi-volume Recueil des dessins et enluminures des dieux de l'Inde, Dieux des Indiens par Sāmi

<sup>7</sup> Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art, 3rd ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 112.

<sup>8</sup> Lafont, Indika, p. 107.

<sup>9</sup> Dieux des Indiens peints à gouache par les missionnaires (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, département des Estampes et de la photographie, Ms. Od. 38). See Roselyne Hurel, Miniatures & peintures indiennes: Collection du département des estampes et de la photographie de la Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2010), cat. 309 and 312.

(Collection of Drawings and Illuminations of the Gods of India, by Sāmi (Svami)),¹⁰ and an elaborate four volume set titled Histoire et figures des dieux des Indiens ou theogenie des Malabariquois (History and Figures of Indian Gods or the Theogony of Malabar).¹¹ Anquetil-Duperron was well acquainted with the Royal Library; he repeatedly referenced the four volume set, which was produced under the direction of the commander of the CDIO, Abraham Porcher des Oulches in Tanjore.¹² These references suggest that Anquetil-Duperron had personally seen the albums, though whether on his return to France or during his time in India remains unclear.

Anquetil-Duperron crossed paths with Gentil while the colonel was serving in the Deccan.¹³ Although Gentil does not record this meeting in his memoir, he refers to Anquetil-Duperron as "his old friend and fellow traveller."¹⁴ One can conjecture that this meeting had a lasting impact on Gentil's career in the subcontinent. Though not a man of letters like Anquetil-Duperron, during his political and military operations in the subcontinent Gentil became well positioned to gather knowledge about Indian culture and religion, and especially Indian art.¹⁵ His intellectual aspirations motivated him to collect, commission, and acquire albums of Indian drawings and paintings, manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Bengali (or from Bengal), Malabari (or from Malabar), and Sanskrit. Further he bought objects of natural history, arms and armor, and medals from India; he donated all of his acquisitions to the Royal Library and the Cabinet of Natural History upon his return to France.

The first few paintings that I would like to discuss from Gentil's collection are a part of an album that was annotated by Gentil as "Theogenie indienne" meaning Indian theogony paintings.¹⁶ Currently housed in the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (BnF), this album of theogony paintings has been dated by Rosalyn Hurel to 1760 and was one of Gentil's earliest commissions in India when he was posted

<sup>10</sup> Recueil des dessins et enluminures des dieux de l'Inde, Dieux des Indiens par Sāmi (Od. 40–40a). See Hurel, Miniature et peintures indiennes, cat. 293 a + b, acquired by the Bibliothèque royale in 1767. 11 Histoire et Figures des Dieux des Indiens ou Théogonie des Malabariquois (Od. 39–39c). See Hurel, Miniature et peintures indiennes, cat. 296–299, acquired in 1767.

<sup>12</sup> For further reference see the section "Ouvrages manuscrits apportés de Pondichéry," in Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, Voyage en Inde (1754–62): Relation de voyage en préliminaire à la traduction du Zend-Avesta, présentation, notes et bibliographie par Jean Deloche, Manonmani Filliozat, and Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat (Paris: École Française d'extrême-orient, Maisonneuve et Larose, 1997), pp. 286–87.

<sup>13</sup> About his visit to the Ellora caves on April 16/17, 1758, Anquetil-Duperron wrote that "M. Gentil had provided him his palanquin and he left for Ellora caves on the morning of 16th April." Anquetil-Duperron, Voyage en Inde, p. 272.

<sup>14</sup> "[A]ncien ami et camarade de voyage," Gentil, Mémoires sur l'Hindoustan, p. 434, translated by the author.

<sup>15</sup> Anquetil-Duperron was a member of the Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres in France which was a French learned society devoted to history. Founded in February 1663, the Academy's scope was the study of ancient inscriptions and historical literatures.

<sup>16</sup> As per the Oxford English Dictionary theogony is an account or theory, or the study of the genealogy or birth of the deities of pagan mythology.

in Chandernagore.¹⁷ Consisting of twenty-three images of Indian divinities, the album also contains fourteen equestrian portraits. All of the paintings are rendered in the same artistic style. The set of theogony paintings representing Hindu divinities is the main subject of our exploration here. At first glance these seem very strange and peculiar depictions with obscure iconographic forms of some Indian gods, mostly avatars of Shiva. Yet it is one of the most fascinating as well as perplexing corpora of visual materials that mediates between artistic knowledge systems and epistemologies of so-called "Provincial Mughal" paintings present in Bengal and French antiquarian perceptions of Hindu religion and mythology seen through the device of an already developed idea of syncretism and commonality of all ancient religions.¹⁸

The painting on folio four of the album (fig. 1) is a very unusual depiction of Shiva in the avatar of a yogi (ascetic).¹⁹ While he is identified by his skull necklace, damaru (drum), and trident, the curly depiction of his hair instead of the regular jata (bun), Europeanised facial features, and the horns are a very uncommon portrayal of the deity.²⁰ The other odd iconographic detail is the presence of the creature that resembles a gazelle placed on top of the damaru in his right hand. While the gazelle is routinely part of a Shaiva iconography in South India and the antelope is part of the Nataraja iconography of North India, here they are conflated. The painting would seem to be the work of an artist whose knowledge of the iconography of Hindu divinities was cursory. However, if we return to the antiquarian studies current in contemporary France, a more plausible explanation of this anomalous image emerges.

In his Origin of all Cultures or the Universal Religion (1794), Charles Dupuis had traced all religions back to basic human beliefs in the worship of the sun and stars on one hand and sexual organs on the other.²¹ In his philosophic system he equated Bacchus and Shiva which was easy to do because of the resonant bull symbolism they shared, among other things.²² The goat was also of great significance for Dupuis as it was concerned with fecundity and vegetation. Dupuis turned his attention once again to the missionary paintings of Indian gods in the Royal Library in Paris.²³ As Partha Mitter has noted, one of the paintings Dupuis had referred to depicted the god Isproun (Īśvara) with a goat in one hand descending to kill the demon Tiperant (Tripura). Similarly, another painting in the "Collection of drawings and illuminations of the Gods

<sup>17</sup> Hurel, Miniature et peintures indiennes, p. 197.

<sup>18</sup> Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, p. 86.

<sup>19</sup> See also, Hurel, Miniature et peintures indiennes, cat. 271-4 .

<sup>20</sup> A damaru is a small two-headed drum made typically of wood with two leather drumheads and can be considered similar to a pellet or rattle drum. In Hinduism it is known as the instrument of Shiva. 21 Charles Dupuis, Origine de tous les cultes ou la religion universelle (Paris: H. Agasse, 1794).

<sup>22</sup> Both the divinities of Bacchus and Shiva had the bull as their emblem. While the association of the bull and Bacchus goes back to remote antiquity and prevailed from pre-Hellenic Greece as the foremost symbol of creation, in Hindu mythology the bull is associated with Shiva as his Vahana i. e. his "vehicle" or "carrier" and could be read as the sign of the particular deity.

<sup>23</sup> Dieux des Indiens peints à gouache par les missionnaires (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, département des Estampes et de la photographie, Ms. Od. 38).

Fig. 1: Unknown Bengal artist(s), possibly from Chandernagore, Shiva Mahayogi, ca. 1760, opaque watercolor on Indian paper, 22.5 × 16.7 cm, donated by Colonel Gentil, 1785, département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Od. 52 4°, f 4

of India, by Sami" of the god Iogui-Hisper (Yogi Ishwar equals Shiva) represented him with a crescent moon on his forehead and a goat in his hand.²⁴ From these paintings Dupuis was convinced that a cosmogonic theme involving the goat was represented all over the world from Egyptian to Indian mythology.²⁵ Looking back to folio four in Gentil's album, the stylistic resonance of the creature in the hand of the ascetic Shiva to the so-called goat in the hand of Shiva destroying the demon from the Sami set (Od. 46) makes it seem very likely that knowledge of the missionary paintings and their iconographic interpretations was shared by French antiquarians of the time, including Anquetil-Duperron. It must have reached Gentil as well.

The artists commissioned by Gentil to work on his theogony paintings extensively cited existing representations. For eighteenth-century artists in India, copying from earlier works or combining parts of pre-existing works into a new composition was accepted procedure.²⁶ Thus, on folio four, the painters combined a few disparate elements, including an awkward drawing of a hexagonal seat resting on top of two tigers literally making it a singh-asana or a lion-throne, an unusual representation of Shiva which is most likely copied from the same source painting as one in the album Dieux des Indiens peints à gouache par les missionnaires (Gods of the Indians painted in Gouache by the Missionaries), and stock attendant figures which were a part of any eighteenth-century Indian artist's visual repertoire. Together, these elements give the painting a composite effect. The rendition of the landscape and the naturalistic details in the form of the curved horizon dotted with the bushes and shrubbery is a visual feature that is commonly found in eighteenth-century court paintings from Murshidabad. One can conjecture that the set may have been worked upon by artists trained in the court style of Murshidabad, who then migrated to different locations in India and worked for different patrons.

On folio seven of the same album (fig. 2) is a depiction of Saraba or Sarabamurti, a composite form of the Indian god Shiva, that further substantiates the practice of artists adapting to the patron's needs to deliver works to satisfy their aesthetic requirements.²⁷ Appearing in the therio-anthropomorphic form of a double-headed parakeet and a human torso with twelve hands and eight legs, Shiva had assumed this form to tackle a ferocious Narasimha after he had killed Hiranyakashipu. What makes this painting interesting is that it deviates from the standard iconography of a double-headed griffin which is part bird and part lion. There is evidence of abundant circulation of Saraba paintings from contemporary Bengal which adheres to the canonised iconogra-

<sup>24</sup> Dupuis' sources of the paintings holding the deer/goat in his hand are identifiable with paintings from the set of Indian gods drawn by Sami (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, département des Estampes et de la photographie, Od. 46). See, Hurel, Miniature et peintures indiennes, cat. 301. 25 Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, pp. 97–98.

<sup>26</sup> Robert J. Del Bonta, "Late or Faux Mughal Painting: A Question of Intent," in After the Great Mughals: Painting in Delhi and the Regional Courts in the 18th and 19th Centuries, ed. Barbara Schmitz (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2002), pp. 150–65, here p. 151.

<sup>27</sup> See also, Hurel, Miniature et peintures indiennes, cat. 271-6.

phy of the griffin; and yet that the artists chose to render an image that did not correspond to the dominant regional iconographic form helps in furthering the conjecture that it was under Gentil's specific directions and requirements that this folio was executed differently. Gentil sought to compile a "theogony album" the likes of which had become popular among antiquarian savants in France. Due to French political influence in Pondicherry, his models were paintings and copies of paintings from southern India which had travelled to France already. The artists working for Gentil in Bengal, however, seem to have been quite unfamiliar with the South Indian forms and icons of the divinities. Their depictions betray an awkwardness resulting from the artists' attempts to render these unfamiliar iconographies and their desire to satisfy the aesthetic requirements of their novel European patron.

Similarly, a third folio (fig. 3) from the album depicting a sacrificial ritual represents offerings of goat heads on a tray to Bhairava, another ferocious avatar of Shiva, who is portrayed here wearing a skull necklace and holding two human skulls in his hands.²⁸ In front of the temple, a priest is seen officiating the sacrificial ritual in the midst of slaughtered buffaloes, goats, and sheep. In one of his accounts Gentil had recounted a scene very similar to the one depicted in the Bhairava folio.²⁹ In the visual language of the Murshidabadi artists the fierce Bhairava in his shrine instead of being an impassive icon became a living human who is licking his lips in anticipation of eating the sacrifice. Traveling the length and breadth of the country, Gentil carried with him the idea of an India that had invariant traditions. Gentil sought to have artists make what he thought of as an "Indian iconography" of the divinities, but the artists were constrained by their regional specificities and localized traditions. While they tried to work with visual vocabularies unfamiliar to them, for the Murshidabad artists, the South of India was as foreign as France. In that scenario artists conceived these paintings as compound pictorial set pieces in which they amalgamated aspects of their own visual repertoire with the reference motifs their patrons directed them to include.³⁰ The result was the formation of an album of paintings demonstrating a pastiche aesthetic. However, if we examine the set of fourteen equestrian portraits in the same album, which represent men from various tribes, clans, and provinces of India, we find the artists rendering a more familiar iconography with greater ease.

In imperial Mughal visual language, equestrian portraits were the most effective way to portray an idealized image of an able and strong ruler and to evoke a sense of successful control and ability. The memory of Mughal visual culture lived on and was continuously re-invoked by the nawabs of successor states like that of Bengal who were attempting to forge continuity with, and seek legitimacy from, the Mughal

<sup>28</sup> Offrandes au dieu Bhairava, à Ujjain (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, département des Estampes et de la photographie, Od. 52 4°, f 12). Also see, Hurel, Miniature et peintures indiennes, cat. 271-12. 29 Gentil, British Library, OIOC, Orme Mss O. V. 217, IV, "Voyage en 1760 de St Thomé à Betiah," pp. 211–19. See also, Hurel, p. 199.

<sup>30</sup> Molly Emma Aitken, "Parataxis and the Practice of Reuse from Mughal Margins to Mir Kalan Khan," Archives of Asian Art 59 (2009): pp. 81–103.

Fig. 2: Unknown artist(s), possibly from Chandernagore, Saraba (Avatar of Shiva), ca. 1760, opaque watercolor on Indian paper, 23.2 × 17.1 cm, donated by Colonel Gentil, 1785, département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Od. 52 4°, f 6

Empire even as they broke away from it. The impression of continuity was further reinforced by the fact that the paintings were being made at Murshidabad by artists who had migrated from the imperial Mughal court. The widespread migration of artists

Fig. 3: Unknown artist(s), possibly from Chandernagore, Batuk Bhairava, Protector (Kotval) of Banaras (Avatar of Shiva), ca. 1760, opaque watercolor on Indian paper, 23.1 × 17.9 cm, donated by Colonel Gentil, 1785, département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Od. 52 4°, f 12

from Delhi to different regional courts resulted in the transfer of artistic styles and ideas from the former center to the erstwhile peripheries. In the folios depicting the portraits of men on horseback from different regions and clans like the Pathans, Jaths (fig. 4), Rohillas, and Rajputs, the Murshidabad artists simultaneously fulfilled two functions.³¹ First, they responded to an eighteenth-century Frenchman's observation and wish to document and preserve knowledge of India in a categorical and taxonomic manner. Second, by extending expressions of the political value and aesthetic sensibilities of an elite Mughal framework to a European patron, these cultural works enabled Gentil's assertion of his political relevance and socio-economic significance as firanghi or foreigner at home in the courts of India's regional rulers.

The album thus mediates between old and new painting practices. It merges dominant French epistemological concerns and existing Mughal visual codes operating in innovative ways in mid-eighteenth-century India. In a transcultural context, to those unfamiliar with Mughal visual language, Gentil's album could be read as a representation of Hindu divinities, a subject of particular interest to French antiquarians; for those who were initiated into late Mughal practices of cultural patronage, this album served as an assertion of connoisseurship and knowledge of the land, its religion, culture, and the arts. This album embodies a very interesting chain of transcultural communications and miscommunications. Gentil had a specific canon for what "India" was and wanted artists in northern India to replicate this canon for him. Engaging unfamiliar visual vocabularies especially from southern India, the eighteenthcentury Murshidabadi artists working on this album produced images that may seem odd and discrepant to an Indian viewer but were to be passed on as authentic knowledge and depictions of India in France. The actors in the drama, painters and patron, donned a series of roles in a complex game of information gatherer and information provider. This is a compelling entry point for us to understand how connoisseurship and collecting practices intertwined in eighteenth-century India. Shifting our focus from the album of theogony paintings, the next section will briefly discuss some of the other kinds of albums of paintings Gentil had collected during his sojourn in India. This brings us to a further manifestation of the Mughal Empire's functioning as a cultural exemplar: the maintenance of a library of valuable books, illustrated manuscripts, and albums of paintings that are better known in the Perso-Islamicate world as muraqqaʿ.

### Muraqqaʿ-e-Gentil: Visual nodes and Aesthetic Modes of "Mughalesque" Albums in Early Modern India

Muraqqaʿ, etymologically meaning patchworked, were albums composed of thematically diverse paintings and calligraphies bound together into a delicate objet d'art. The organization of these albums is understood to impose an order and interconnection on

<sup>31</sup> See also Hurel, Miniature et peintures indiennes, cat. 220-1.

Fig. 4: Unknown artist(s), possibly from Murshidabad, Equestrian Portrait Representing a Jath Horseman, 1760, opaque watercolor on Indian paper, 25.2 × 18.3 cm, donated by Colonel Gentil, 1785, département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Od. 52 4°, f 24

their heterogeneous content.³² The albums have thus often been spoken of as "curated" collections, and have been compared with the rare and exotic curios of the European Kunst und Wunderkammern (Cabinets of Curiosities). Between the passing of one empire and the emergence of another, the eighteenth century in India witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of albums due to the remarkable circulation of images, ideas, and individuals as well as the albums themselves throughout the Mughal empire and also beyond Mughal South Asia to Europe.³³

Imperial Mughal albums, the most famed of which was Emperor Jahangir's Gulshan Album,³⁴ testified not only to the emperor's interests, taste, and cultural contacts but to his status as a connoisseur. The courtly arts in Mughal India were part of a political culture associated with the state and the ruling class who embodied and or served it. With the decentralization of imperial Mughal power and the rise of the successor states, provincial Mughal rulers like the Nawabs of Bengal or Awadh and their political elites sought to demonstrate they were equal to the Mughals in any sphere. In terms of cultural patronage, this ambition led to burgeoning art commissions and collections that sought to reflect their patron's personal and cultural accomplishments as worthy of royalty and nobility. In his seminal work on Persian albums, which highlights the deeply social and socializing characteristic of muraqqaʿ, David Roxburgh defines them as "image bearing objects" whose contents, process of formation, and the network of relations that they embody "link the albums to contemporary cultural practices and systems of knowledge."³⁵ Part of courtly sociability and emblematic of the cultural currents which were shared by the nawabs of successor states, their political elites, and the different European Company nabobs, the visual language of eighteenth century muraqqaʿ reflected the aesthetic aspiration towards Mughal sophistication and connoisseurship of the arts.³⁶

Gentil's career as a political operative in the subcontinent saw him move swiftly between the courts of Bengal and Awadh, and in the varied employment of the

<sup>32</sup> For further reading on muraqqaʿ see David J. Roxburgh, The Persian Album 1400–1600 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Elaine Wright, Muraqqaʿ Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (Dublin: Art Services International, 2008); Natalia Di Pietrantonio, "Circuits of Exchange: Albums and the Art Market in 18th-Century Avadh," special issue, The Culture of Albums in the Long 18th Century: Journal18 6 (Fall 2018): https://www.journal18.org/2846. See also Friederike Weis's essay in this volume.

<sup>33</sup> Yael Rice, "Books that Bind: The Persianate Album and its Widespread Circulation," in Old Stacks, New Leaves: The Arts of the Book in South Asia, ed. Sonal Khullar (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023), pp. 129–54.

<sup>34</sup> On the Gulshan Album, see Milo C. Beach, "The Gulshan Album and the Workshops of Prince Salim," Artibus Asiae 73, no. 2 (2013): pp. 445–77.

<sup>35</sup> Roxburgh, The Persian Album, p. 32.

<sup>36</sup> The term nabob is an anglicized distortion of the term nawab. The term usually referred to British agents and officers who had amassed enormous personal fortunes in India through business or dispensation of other administrative functions in the name of the EIC and had adapted to a luxurious Indian way of life.

CDIO, the nawabs and the Mughal emperor as well. After successive French setbacks in Pondicherry and Bengal, seeing no future for himself with the CDIO as the French joined hands with Nawab of Bengal Mir Qasim to declare war on the EIC forces, Gentil made his way to the court of Mir Qasim. Gentil's political engagements and military experience helped him to win over the nawab's trust, and soon he became a close confidante and strategist who was part of the elite courtly circle of the Bengal Nawab. Gentil's proximity to the Nawab of Bengal facilitated his acquaintance with other influential courtiers such as Khawaja Gregory or Gurgin Khan, the Armenian commander in chief of the nawab, Ghulam Hussain Khan Tabatabai, the chronicler and historian of the nawab in the court of Murshidabad, and Dr. William Fullerton of Rosemount, a Scottish surgeon serving in the EIC among other important courtiers in the Bengal Nawab's court. In Awadh, where he served as Nawab Shuja-ud-Daulah's special advisor, he was part of an elite circle of European and Indian connoisseurs including Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier, Claude Martin, John Wombwell, and the nawab himself.³⁷ The political nexuses forged in early modern India also facilitated the operation of complex transregional art networks constituted by reaching across cultural and political differences. Manifesting the elite courtly culture that they all sought to represent, all of these men had formidable art collections of their own. Thus, not surprisingly, the elite circle in which Gentil managed to position himself offered the opportunity for him to amass a large collection of paintings, illustrated manuscripts, and, most importantly, albums of paintings or muraqqaʿ. While the album of theogony paintings gives us an insight into Gentil's artistic commission where he directed the artists to work with specific motifs to render the images of the Hindu divinities in accordance with concurrent French antiquarian references, the majority of the muraqqaʿ that he collected during his stay in the courts of Bengal and Awadh were typical of imperial Mughal albums in conception and format. While offering a systematic stylistic examination or codicological study of Gentil's extensive album collections is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is important to highlight the central organizing principles of the albums to underscore the connoisseurial practices embedded in them.

A preliminary examination of some of the Gentil albums like "Oriental Paintings," "Indian Princes and Lords," and "Writing Models: Adorned with Portraits, Costumes, Prophets of Indian and Persian Characters" reveals that these albums followed different types of arrangements. The two most common types of configuration were either two page openings having alternating text (calligraphy) and image arrangement or interchanging page spreads containing calligraphies with page spreads containing pictorial images. As Yael Rice points out, these different configurations of the muraqqa' encouraged its viewers to perceive the codex's contents as a series of intentionally paired juxtapositions.³⁸ Adhering to a canonization of what should constitute a Mughalesque

<sup>37</sup> See Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East 1750–1850 (New York: Vintage Books, 2005).

<sup>38</sup> Yael Rice, "Painters, Albums, and Pandits: Agents of Image Reproduction in Early Modern South Asia," Ars Orientalis, vol. 51 (2022): pp. 27–64, here p. 50.

album, the Gentil muraqqaʿ are also composed of a remarkable range of materials from older imperial Mughal painting: from portraits of emperors and elites, royal court and zenana scenes, Indian paintings inspired by European prints, and Persian or Persianate paintings to the portrayal of spiritual figures, battles scenes, occupational and courtly types, animal and floral studies, all representing the genres of paintings typically found in Mughal albums.³⁹ The presence of folios or copies made from important manuscripts like Layla-Majnun, Khamsa i Nizami, and Shahnameh, which were avidly sought after by Mughal emperors, demonstrates the kind of paintings deemed fitting of an elite aligned with the aesthetic choices and connoisseurial knowledge of the arts akin to the Mughals. Further, Gentil's albums are also frequently composed of contemporary paintings from the different provinces of Deccan, Awadh, and Bengal, where Gentil had served in different administrative and military capacities, that are interspersed with examples of calligraphy (historical as well as contemporary).

An opening from Gentil's album, Portraits, Costumes and Other Indian Paintings, is typical of the arrangement of a muraqqa' (fig. 5). Like any Arabic or Persian text, the muraqqa' was arranged in an order to be viewed from right to left. On the right is a calligraphy panel framed with a gold illuminated margin, set within a blue border ornamented with golden flower motifs. The folio on the left is a court portrait of Saulat Jang, nephew of the Nawab of Bengal Alivardi Khan (1671–1756) and a noble in the court of Murshidabad. The portrait has also been carefully set within a border of blue and gold to harmonize the two distinct folios into an orderly presentation of image, text, and ornamentation.

The heterogeneity in the composition of the muraqqa' with an apparent miscellany of styles and provenances of paintings that do not readily fit into well-established and clearly delineated taxonomies of styles and schools has been one of the major challenges in understanding and studying eighteenth-century albums. The other is integral to the album's function as a constantly mutable and ever provisional object. As Rice points out, over the course of the seventeenth through early nineteenth centuries the albums were regularly reconfigured by addition of new folios, remargining of pages, retouching of paintings and even wholesale removal of certain leaves to be reimagined and recombined subsequently in new codex configurations.⁴⁰ The court portrait of Saulat Jang in the Gentil album exemplifies this process. Attributed to the court style of Murshidabad during the reign of Nawab Alivardi Khan (ca. 1755), examination of the provenance of the painting reveals that it was acquired in London by one M. Techener in 1836.⁴¹ How and when the folio ended up in Paris and how it was added to the Gentil album of Portraits, Costumes and Other Indian Paintings remains a mystery. As Rice suggests, however, what we can highlight through this example is that muraqqa' were imbued with an innate invitation to disassemble, "the pages

<sup>39</sup> The Zenana is the secluded part of a Hindu or Muslim dwelling in India that was reserved for the women of the household.

<sup>40</sup> Rice, "Books that Bind," p. 135.

<sup>41</sup> Hurel, Miniatures & peintures indiennes, vol. 1, p. 143.

Fig. 5: Double-page spread from Jean-Baptiste Gentil's album Portraits, Costumes and Other Indian Paintings, right: Calligraphy, left: Portrait of Saulat Jang. Murshidabad, ca. 1755, opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 24.6 × 18.4 cm, acquired in London by M. Techener, 1836, département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Od. 42 pet.fol., f.1

were constantly joined, mended and worked out just as the initial makers made so many disparate parts coalesce."⁴²

Gifted to King Louis XVI for the Royal Library, the Gentil collection forms the core of the South Asian Collection in the Cabinet des Estampes of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris today.⁴³ Although reconfigured and re-contextualized, these albums retain their original paintings, calligraphies and borders not as individual dispersed folios but in the form of muraqqaʿ. They thus help us reconstruct the albums as repositories of tastes and meanings. The physical and cultural mobility of the albums enabled them to be multivalent and to represent different aesthetic concerns which could be reinterpreted in different political and cultural landscapes even at the time they were first made. Probably the best example is Gentil's famous album inspired by the Ain-i-Akbari that he had commissioned in 1774 during his stay in Faizabad in Awadh, and that is now housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.⁴⁴ Chanchal Dadlani has described the Gentil Album as "an object that embodies the intersec-

<sup>42</sup> Rice, "Books that Bind," pp. 132–33.

<sup>43</sup> The list of works donated by Gentil to the King in 1785 is kept in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, département des Estampes et de la photographie under the accession number Ye 62 4º. The document is transcribed in Hurel, Miniature et peintures indiennes, vol. 1, pp. 243–46.

<sup>44</sup> How and when the album traveled from Paris to London is unclear.

tion of systems of artistic production and epistemologies, including the manuscript culture of the later Mughal empire and the networks of early French Orientalism."⁴⁵

Consisting of fifty-eight folios depicting different aspects of the Mughal empire from courtly ceremonies and imperial regalia (fig. 6), to Indian ritual practices and belief systems, and Gentil's own diplomatic achievements in India, this album is quite unlike those we have discussed so far. Gentil had commissioned Indian artists like Nevasi Lal and Mohan Singh who were active in the court of the Nawab of Awadh Shuja-ud-Daulah to work on this album.⁴⁶ While documenting Mughal historical legacies, the painters in eighteenth-century Awadh were also perfectly poised to adhere to Gentil's European aesthetic requirements. Systematically rendering the trappings of the Mughal court, incuding the parasol, throne, figure of the emperor, and other royal insignias, they could represent it in a format that made the composition resemble a scientific diagram. Drawn against the blank ground, every person and thing was a specimen. There is no difference between the emperor and a parasol in the visual code of Enlightenment needs through which Gentil wanted to record the foreign culture and material goods to represent India. The album was thus conceived by Gentil in a manner that could speak across cultures and resonate with viewers in both Awadh and Paris. During his time in Awadh, in the court of Nawab Shuja-ud-Daulah, surrounded by other European nabobs like Antoine Polier and Claude Martin, the album was a visual testament to Gentil's status as a Mughalesque aristocrat in the courtly elite circles of late eighteenth-century India. Further, the paintings testified to his status as a special adviser to the ruler, for which he earned the lofty Persianate title Rafi 'al daula, nizam-i jang, bahadur, tadbir al-muluk (Uplifter of the State, Leader in War, the Valiant and the Counsel of Kings).⁴⁷ When Gentil gifted this album to King Louis XVI, the transcultural context transformed the Mughalesque muraqqaʿ into a product of European Enlightenment practices and an encyclopaedic impulse to collect and broaden epistemic understanding about the "Orient" through Indian art.

The Gentil albums were richly multilingual and multivalent objects. They engaged in established and emerging modes of visuality rooted in specific Mughal conventions but also incorporated their patron's closely interrelated interests in artistic production, documentation, and dissemination of knowledge about India. Positioned within an elite Mughal framework, the evolution of Gentil's model of collection building was facilitated by the dynamism and mobility of the art networks operational in eighteenthcentury India, networks that brought artists, courtiers, and scholars as well as objects,

<sup>45</sup> Chanchal Dadlani, "Transporting India: The Gentil Album and Mughal Manuscript Culture," special issue, Objects in Motion in The Early Modern World: Art History 38, no. 4 (2015): pp. 748–61.

<sup>46</sup> Dadlani, "Transporting India," pp. 748–61. Both artists were in the employment of Shuja-ud-Daulah and also worked on commissions for Gentil in Faizabad. Further, Mohan Singh was the son of Govardhan II, an artist in Mughal Emperor Muhammad Shah's atelier in Delhi who received training from the chef d'atelier Chitarman.

<sup>47</sup> This title was conferred on Gentil after he assisted Nawab Shuja-ud-Daulah in his negotiations with the English during the Treaty of Allahabad. Gentil, Mémoires sur l'Hindoustan, pp. 240–41.

Fig. 6: Unknown artist(s), recto: The Mughal Court, from Jean-Baptiste Gentil's album, verso: annotations made by Jean-Baptiste Gentil describing elements of the Mughal court along with a numerical key from the Gentil album, 1774, watercolor on paper, 37 × 53.5 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, IS 25– 1980 (1)

paintings, and texts together. The dynamic cosmopolitanism of late Mughal eighteenthcentury India made the time and place one of exceptional cultural efflorescence such that expressions of political relevance and social significance were customarily expressed through cultural works.

#### Conclusion

Through the different Gentil albums discussed in this essay, I have attempted to highlight the dynamic networks of exchange and circulation which are crucial to understanding art production and collection in eighteenth-century India. In early modern South Asia, circulation was as much a physical as it was a geographical fact involving people and objects that literally traveled across space. It was also an engine of conceptual change, since exposure to new places and people meant exposure to other ways of doing things, which liberated artists from their accustomed ways and transformed the former meanings of their products. Intermediaries like Jean-Baptiste Gentil, courtiers like Ghulam Husain Khan, or even regional rulers like the Nawab of Awadh Shuja-ud-Daulah were interlocutors between the regional and supralocal worlds who forged a visual communication that was multidirectional and induced by globalizing forces.⁴⁸ The lives, legacies and the arts discussed in this essay testify to patterns of synthesis and exchange that took place in the interstices between cultures, traditions, and people in the twilight of the Mughal Empire and the emergence of the British imperium. Suspending the usual, chronologically linear narratives of existing scholarship, and instead tracing multiple strands of art collection and art-making in which the same artists adapted to different demands and different patrons enables us to problematize limiting taxonomies like "Company paintings" or "Firanghi paintings." This in turn, helps us to sketch a picture of art production and circulation that reflects the complex, variegated nature of eighteenth-century Indian society, in its layering of classes and through its momentous historical changes.

<sup>48</sup> Nebahat Avcıoğlu and Finbarr Barry Flood, "Introduction. Globalizing Cultures: Art and Mobility in the Eighteenth Century," Ars Orientalis 39 (2010): pp. 7–38, here p. 32.

### Maria Gabriella Matarazzo Accommodating Contours: Vicente Victoria on Chinese Printmaking

And now, I, sinner, do not understand why there are many among you fathers who disagree with one another. China lies tens of thousands of li from the West; and the only thing in common is this holy catholic teaching. As for customs and ethics, logic and literature, they are different and cannot be made uniform. One must not try to change China into the West by endless discourse.¹

Qiu Sheng (before 1663–after 1706) was a Chinese scholar native to Fujian province who converted to Catholicism sometime in the late seventeenth century. Responding to the Chinese Rites Controversy (ca. 1582–1742)² he wrote an essay, entitled "Letter to the Various Fathers," to present his views on how to effectively carry out missionary work in the Chinese empire. As a new convert to Catholicism, Sheng highlighted the closeness of China and Europe in embracing the Christian doctrine, but at the same time, he also emphasized the irreconcilable differences between these two lands in terms of culture and worldview. Accordingly, he underscored China's cultural uniqueness and urged European Catholic missionaries to refrain from their efforts at "changing" it into "the West" through their long-practiced strategies of accommodation. In this way, Sheng's remarks participate in the larger early modern trend of European-Chinese reciprocal cultural "othering" and attempts at accommodation. The aim of this paper is to explore these complementary attitudes and practices within the context of European collecting of Chinese artifacts, through the case of Vicente Victoria (1650–1709), a Spanish artist, collector, and art historiographer who settled in Rome in the late seventeenth century and claimed to possess an illustrated Life of Christ printed in China, most like-

I owe a special debt of gratitude to Emese Muntán for her scrupulous reading of the manuscript and her perceptive comments. I am also thankful to Ovanes Akopyan, Daniel T. McClurkin, Marco de Michelis, Philippa Ovenden, Matteo Salvadore, and Lucia Simonato for fruitful discussions and insightful advice, and to the editors of this volume for their helpful suggestions and revisions.

Unless otherwise noted, all English translations are my own. All quotations from Vicente Victoria's "Indice dell'opere di Rafaello Sanzio d'Urbino" are taken from the manuscript now held at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence and are transcribed as closely as possible to the original text.

<sup>1</sup> Qiu Sheng, "Letter to the Various Fathers," edited and translated by Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, "Chinese Voices in the Rites Controversy: From China to Rome," in The Rites Controversies in the Early Modern World, ed. Ines G. Županov and Pierre Antoine Fabre (Leiden: Brill, 2018) pp. 29–49, here p. 44. I am grateful to Emese Muntán for bringing this passage to my attention.

<sup>2</sup> The Chinese Rites Controversy was a quarrel between (and within) different Catholic religious orders and the Papal Curia about whether Chinese converts to Catholicism were allowed to continue observing their local traditional rites. The literature on this topic is abundant. For recent discussions, see the essays by Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, Nicolas Standaert, and Michela Catto in The Rites Controversies, ed. Županov and Fabre, pp. 29–88.

ly Giulio Aleni's Tianzhu jiangsheng chuxiang jingjie (Illustrated Explanation of the Incarnation of the Lord of Heaven, 1637), as we shall see.

The study begins by sketching out Victoria's biography and introducing his art collecting and art history-writing projects, in order to situate his encounter with Chinese printmaking within his broader connoisseurial endeavor. In fact, his possession of an illustrated book produced in China led him to question the history and geography of printing technology, as demonstrated by his "Origin and Progress of Intaglio Printmaking," an early eighteenth-century manuscript about the history of printmaking. This paper analyzes significant passages from this work in which Victoria discusses the role played by China in this development. In assessing the sources he might have consulted in researching the beginnings of printmaking, the paper retraces how historical inquiry into this technology constituted one of the main grounds of cultural confrontation between Europe and China, thus engendering early forms of a global comparative approach in European history writing.

The essay then moves on to survey selections from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century missionary literature on China, which at the time provided the most widespread and read sources on the Chinese Empire, and shows how reports dealing with Chinese arts and crafts were progressively integrated into European art literature. In doing so, the paper also teases out Western attitudes towards Chinese art in order to contextualize Victoria's critical response to it, a response shaped by both the repetition of common clichés and direct experience made possible by the presence of a "Sino-European intercultural book" like Aleni's Jingjie in his private collection.³

Ultimately, the aim of this essay is to bring to the fore the close relationship between art writing and collecting practices and to cast light on how such relationship informed Europe's perception of Chinese pictorial language.

#### Vicente Victoria: Artist, Collector, and Art Historiographer

Vicente Victoria was born in 1650 in the town of Dènia, located on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, between the cities of Alicante and Valencia.⁴ His father, Jacopo, a trad-

<sup>3</sup> I borrow this definition from the special issue The Production and Distribution of Sino-European Intercultural Books in China (1582–ca. 1823): Asian Publishing and Society 12, no. 2 (2022), ed. Nicolas Standaert and Patricia Sieber.

<sup>4</sup> The main studies on Vicente Victoria are Edward L. Goldberg, Patterns in Late Medici Art Patronage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 173–83, notes pp. 344–51; Stella Rudolph, "Vincenzo Vittoria fra pitture, poesie e polemiche," Labyrinthos 7–8, no. 13/16 (1988/89): pp. 223–66; Bonaventura Bassegoda i Hugas, "Noves dades sobre el canonge Vicente Vitoria (Dènia, 1650–Roma, 1709): tractadista, pintor, gravador i colleccionista," Butlletí del Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya 2 (1994): pp. 37–62; Bonaventura Bassegoda i Hugas, "Vicente Vitoria (Dènia, 1650–Roma, 1709), coleccionista de estampas y estudioso de la obra grabada a partir de Rafael," in El Mediterráneo y el Arte Español: actas del XI Con-

er of Italian origin, introduced him to humanistic studies, but the young Vicente manifested a greater aptitude in the arts and expressed the desire to move to Italy to refine his skills in drawing and painting. Thanks to his family connections, Vicente first made contact with the Medici court and moved to Florence by 1675; eventually, in 1678, he went to Rome to attend the art academy that Grand Duke Cosimo III had founded in the Papal city five years before.⁵ Despite his affiliation with the Medici Academy, rather than taking drawing classes from its director, the Roman painter Ciro Ferri (1634–89), Vicente preferred to attend the workshop of Carlo Maratti (1625–1713), the leading painter on the artistic scene in late Baroque Rome, renowned for the classicizing tendencies of his style and for his fondness for Renaissance masters, especially Raphael.⁶

Very little is known about Victoria's artistic production in Rome, which consists of a handful of paintings and prints, most of them dating from the 1680s.⁷ Such scattered evidence demonstrates that Victoria did not distinguish himself as a talented artist, despite the prestigious apprenticeship with Maratti. Indeed, beyond his admiration for Raphael, what Victoria had actually assimilated from Maratti and his intellectual milieu (to which the art historiographer Giovan Pietro Bellori also belonged) was a set of cultural and social strategies for fashioning himself as a learned man of letters, a

greso del CEHA, ed. Joaquín Bérchez, Mercedes Gómez-Ferrer Lozano, and Amadeo Serra Desfilis (Valencia: Comité Español de Historia del Arte, 1998), pp. 219–224; Claire L. Lyons, "Antiquities and Art Theory in the Collections of Vicente Victoria," in The Rediscovery of Antiquity: The Role of the Artist, ed. Jane Fejfer, Tobias Fischer-Hansen and Annette Rathje (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2003) pp. 481–507; Marzia Guerrieri, "Bellori, Vittoria e il collezionismo romano dei disegni," La tradizione dell'"Ideale classico" nelle arti figurative dal Seicento al Novecento, ed. Michela di Macco and Silvia Ginzburg (Genoa: Sagep editori, 2021), pp. 417–27. Further bibliography will be indicated below. His name can be spelled also in two other ways: Vicente Vitoria or Vincenzo Vittoria with the latter mainly found in Italian sources.

<sup>5</sup> Goldberg, "Patterns," pp. 174–75; Rudolph, "Vincenzo Vittoria," pp. 227–28.

<sup>6</sup> A comprehensive monograph on Carlo Maratti is forthcoming; in the meantime, updated bibliography can be found in Maratti e l'Europa, ed. Liliana Barroero, Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, and Sebastian Schütze (Rome: Campisano Editore, 2015); and Maratti e la sua fortuna, ed. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer and Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò (Rome: Campisano Editore, 2016). On the relationship between Maratti and his patron Niccolò Maria Pallavicino, see the classic study Stella Rudolph, Niccolò Maria Pallavicini: l'ascesa al tempio della virtù attraverso il mecenatismo (Rome: Bozzi, 1995). In addition, for his work as principe of the Academy of Saint Luke, see Stefania Ventra, L'Accademia di San Luca nella Roma del secondo Seicento: artisti, opere, strategie culturali (Florence: Leo S. Olschki editore, 2019). In the vast bibliography on Raphael as a model for Maratti, see, among others, Manuela B. Mena Marqués, "Carlo Maratti e Raffaello," in Raffaello e l'Europa. Atti del IV corso internazionale di alta cultura, ed. Marcello Fagiolo and Maria Luisa Madonna (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, 1990), pp. 541–63; Maria Gabriella Matarazzo, "Si compiace della pittura: i rapporti di Gianfrancesco Albani con Cristina di Svezia, Bellori e Maratti," in Il cardinale Gianfrancesco Albani e le arti tra Roma e Urbino. Il ritratto ritrovato, ed. Lucia Simonato (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2017), pp. 55–80; Vincenzo Mancuso, "'Rafaelle da Urbino il gran maestro di coloro che sanno': Maratti, Bellori et l'héritage de Raphaël 'Peintre universel,'" Studiolo 17 (2020/21): pp. 30–49. 7 Bassegoda i Hugas, "Vicente Vitoria," pp. 41–49, also for his artistic production during his stay in Valencia (1688–98).

member of the European Republic of Letters. Hence, after a few years spent in Spain in the late 1680s, where he was appointed canon of Játiva, Victoria returned to Rome and devoted himself to the expansion of his own vast library and impressive art collection, mainly consisting of antiquities, drawings, and prints. Meanwhile, he also turned to penning poetry and art historiography, thus earning admission to the Arcadia Academy in 1704.⁸ To date, his literary output is little known as it remains mainly unpublished, as is the case with the "Academia de Pintura del señor Carlos Maratti" (ca. 1688), an ambitious universal history of art articulated in the form of a dialogue between Bellori, Maratti, and a "dicipulo" (a pupil), in which one can recognize Victoria himself.⁹

Yet, his most famous piece, titled Osservazioni sopra il libro della "Felsina pittrice", per difesa di Raffaello da Urbino, dei Caracci, e della loro scuola (Observations on the "Felsina Pittrice" in Defense of Raphael from Urbino, the Carracci, and their School), actually appeared in print in 1703.¹⁰ As the title shows, the work is a caustic pamphlet directed against Carlo Cesare Malvasia (1616–93) and the anti-Roman stance that informs his Felsina Pittrice (1676). Malvasia's text is a collection of biographies of Bolognese artists, which is aimed at demonstrating the superiority of the Bolognese school against Giorgio Vasari's advocacy of the Tuscan-Roman school of painting in his Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 1550 and 1568). Not only was Victoria's apologia for Raphael and his direct and indirect artistic descendants (especially Annibale Carracci and his pupils) indebted to the practical teachings of Maratti and to the theoretical framework found in Bellori's Le vite de' pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (Lives of Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 1672), but it had also political ends. The Osservazioni, in fact, are addressed to Orazio Albani (1652–1712), brother of Pope Clement XI Albani (1649–1721), both of whom were natives of Urbino. In conjunction with Maratti and Bellori, Clement XI had been promoting the myth of his celebrated "compatriot," Raphael, ever since he was Cardinal Giovan Francesco Albani and before ascending to the papal throne in 1700.

The activity of Victoria as an art collector and art-historiographer needs to be situated within this cultural agenda and his two interests (collecting and writing on the

<sup>8</sup> Rudolph, "Vincenzo Vittoria," p. 250; Bassegoda i Hugas, "Noves dades," p. 40.

<sup>9</sup> Adriano Prandi, "Contributi alla storia della critica. Un'Academia de Pintura della fine del Seicento," Rivista del Real Istituto d'Archeologia e Storia dell'Arte 8 (1941): pp. 201–16; Rudolph, "Vincenzo Vittoria," pp. 231–34; Bassegoda i Hugas, "Noves dades," p. 49. For further literary works by Victoria, see Rudolph, "Vincenzo Vittoria." However, Rudolph's proposal that Victoria was the author of the second part of the Life of Carlo Maratti which Bellori (1613–96) had started and left unfinished at his death has been contested by Donatella Livia Sparti, "La formazione di Giovan Pietro Bellori, la nascita delle Vite e il loro scopo," in Studi di storia dell'arte 13 (2002): pp. 177–248.

<sup>10</sup> Vicente Victoria, Osservazioni sopra il libro della "Felsina pittrice," per difesa di Raffaello da Urbino, dei Caracci, e della loro scuola (Rome: Zanobi, 1703). On the Osservazioni see Rudolph, "Vincenzo Vittoria," pp. 249–53; Giovanna Perini, Gli scritti dei Carracci (Bologna: Nuova Alfa editoriale, 1990), passim.

arts) considered as acting in synergy.¹¹ In fact, the apologia for Raphael played out in the Osservazioni also profoundly influenced his collecting enterprise. A large section of the massive graphic collection that he possessed was dedicated to prints reproducing Raphael's paintings and inventions, ranging from the earliest works by Marcantonio Raimondi (ca. 1480–ante 1534) until the most recent publications by Pietro Santi Bartoli (1635–1700) and Nicolas Dorigny (1658–1746). The extent and quality of Victoria's possessions were famous throughout the Papal city, as evidenced by a letter that Leone Strozzi (1657–1722) addressed to Cardinal Filippo Antonio Gualtieri (1660–1728) in 1709, in which he describes Victoria's collection of engravings as "the finest that exists in Rome, in Italy, perhaps in Europe."¹²

Unfortunately, this celebrated collection was dispersed after Victoria's death, but we find interesting information regarding its conservation and display in the aforementioned "Academia de Pintura," at the beginning of which Victoria includes a description of his house on the Pincio hill, described as "the most delightful borough in Rome."¹³ Among numerous antique objects, paintings, and books, his works on paper were stored in twenty volumes, eight of which were dedicated to prints after Raphael's inventions, arranged to create a visual history of the reception of Raphael's art. We can browse through this section of Victoria's print collection thanks to a catalogue that he had compiled around 1703: the "Indice dell'opere di Rafaello Sanzio d'Urbino" (Index of the Works by Raphael Sanzio of Urbino, fig. 1).¹⁴ The "Indice" was intended as a reference for collectors interested in purchasing Raphaelesque prints. As is the case with most of Victoria's writings, it was never published, and today it survives in two manuscript copies, one kept at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, and the

<sup>11</sup> A parallel to this close relationship between collecting, cataloguing, and art history writing is the case of Pierre-Jean Mariette, on whom see Valérie Kobi, "From Collection to Art History: The 'Recueil' of Prints as a Model for the Theorisation of Art History," in Collecting Prints and Drawings, ed. Andrea M. Gáldy and Sylvia Heudecker (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), pp. 2–18; Kristel Smentek, "Pierre-Jean Mariette's Vasari," in A Demand for Drawings: Five Centuries of Collectors and Collecting Drawings, ed. John Marciari (New York: The Morgan Library & Museum, 2018), pp. 70–89.

<sup>12</sup> "Il più bello studio di stampe che fusse in Roma, in Italia e forse in Europa," quoted in Marzia Guerrieri, "Collezionismo e mercato di disegni a Roma nella prima metà del Settecento: protagonisti, comprimari, comparse" (PhD diss., Università degli studi Roma Tre, 2009/10), p. 32.

<sup>13</sup> Rudolph, "Vincenzo Vittoria," pp. 232–37. For Victoria's collection of drawings see Guerrieri, "Bellori, Vittoria e il collezionismo," and Lyons, "Antiquities and Art Theory," for his collection of antiquities. 14 Vicente Victoria, "Indice dell'opere di Rafaello Sanzio d'Urbino pubblicate coll'intagli delle stampe consacrato alla santità di nostro signore Clemente XI pontefice massimo da don Vincenzo Vittoria patrizio valenziano e canonico di Xativa fra' gl'arcadi detto Eriseno Langiano in Roma l'anno MDCCIII," 1703–4 (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, ms. J7559). Although the frontispiece of the manuscript is dated 1703, both Victoria's reference to his affiliation to the Arcadia Academy and the title "cavaliere" with which he refers to Maratti in the text prove that the actual date of completion was 1704, as noted by Rudolph, "Vincenzo Vittoria," p. 253.

other at Windsor Castle, in the UK.¹⁵ It is a remarkable document; it is one of the earliest catalogues of a private print collection ever written in Europe, as well as one of the earliest assessments of the reception of Raphael's work between the sixteenth and the early eighteenth century.

Corresponding to the organization of his prints into eight volumes, Victoria's "Indice" is divided into eight sections, progressing from the earliest prints, which resulted from the collaboration between Marcantonio and Raphael, to Dorigny's Psyches et Amoris nuptiae ac fabula (1693). The catalogue is introduced by a text containing his heartfelt praise for Raphael, followed by a short but comprehensive history of printmaking, titled "Dell'origine e progresso dell'intaglio delle stampe" (On the Origin and Progress of Intaglio Printmaking).¹⁶ Assuming that the development of image printing derived from the invention of Gutenberg's movable type printing, the text illustrates the evolution and use of the different techniques, including woodcut, engraving on copper, etching, and chiaroscuro woodcut. In so doing, Victoria's "Indice" acquaints the reader with the formal characters of the different printing processes before approaching the description of each Raphaelesque sheet mentioned in the catalogue. Both the "Indice" and the technical-historical digression that it contains are significant for the history and the historiography of printmaking, for the critical and visual reception of Raphael's oeuvre during the Albani papacy, and for the reciprocity between collecting practices and the theorization of art that they bring to light.

#### Questioning the Invention of Printmaking

It is particularly profitable to focus on a specific passage from the "Origin and Progress of Intaglio Printmaking" concerning the invention of printing and the discussion that had arisen among European literati on whether it was a European achievement or had previously originated in China.

First, it is noteworthy that the discussion of the invention of printing is introduced in the context of the "Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns" that marks the very beginning of Victoria's essay. As Victoria puts it:

It is certainly strange that such sublime minds of the ancients, who trod the path of virtue with tireless commitment and who took the hardest ways to get there, after many centuries have left to us the credit for having salvaged from the ravages of time their splendid remains along with ours through [the invention of ] printing on very fragile paper made up of minced and mashed

<sup>15</sup> Rudolph, "Vincenzo Vittoria," pp. 253–62; Bassegoda i Hugas, "Vicente Vitoria," p. 40; Guerrieri, "Bellori, Vittoria e il collezionismo," pp. 423–24. The manuscript consulted for this chapter is held at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, whereas the copy now at Windsor Castle was first discussed by Anthony Blunt, "Don Vincenzo Vittoria," The Burlington Magazine 109 (1967): pp. 31–32.

<sup>16</sup> For its edition, see Bassegoda i Hugas, "Noves dades," pp. 58–62. An extended edition of the manuscript with commentary will be published in the forthcoming book Maria Gabriella Matarazzo, Raffaello di carta. Stampe raffaellesche nell'"Indice" di Vincenzo Vittoria, conoscitore e collezionista.

Fig. 1: Title page of Vicente Victoria, Indice dell'opere di Rafaello Sanzio d'Urbino . . ., 1703–4, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence, ms. J7559, f. 1r

linen:—I say—through [paper] it has been given to us to provide not only for the delightful and the useful, but also for the honest and the necessary.¹⁷

This praise lavished on print technology as a modern invention plays with the contrast between the seriality of its process and the fragility of its medium—paper—which has permitted artistic and literary inventions to overcome the ravages of time. The celebration of intaglio printing as an accomplishment of the moderns was also the starting point of Carlo Cesare Malvasia's "treatise on prints" (trattato delle stampe) —that is the "Life of Marcantonio Raimondi and Other Bolognese Printmakers" with a catalogue of their works, published in the Felsina Pittrice.¹⁸ According to Malvasia, "had printing been discovered in ancient times, an entire Arabia would not have sufficed for the superstitious pagans to incense the altars of its first inventor," considering "the benefits the republic of letters received from this invention" and "the profits that the school of painting derives from it each day."¹⁹ Victoria was very familiar with the Felsina Pittrice —the target of harsh criticism in his Osservazioni, as discussed above—and these introductory remarks from the "treatise on prints" evidently served as a model for the "Indice."

The idea that the invention of printing (both relief and intaglio methods) constituted one of the marvels of post-antique technology was a prevalent trope in the European literature of the time.²⁰ A particularly significant precedent for Victoria's "Indice," which exemplifies the nexus between printing as a central technological advancement, the self-perception of an emerging modernity, and its global horizon, could have been

<sup>17</sup> Victoria, "Indice," f. 16r: "Strano avvenimento per certo, che da tanti sublimi ingegni della vetusta età, i quali batterono con instancabile applicazione il sentiero della virtù, e che tentarono le vie più difficili di condurvisi, fosse poi a noi doppo lungo giro di secoli lasciato il vanto d'aver saputo assicurare dalle ingiurie dell'età le loro rimanenti splendide cose, e le nostre con la stampa sovra fragilissima carta di sminuzzati, e pesti lini composta: che à noi dico riserbato venisse per mezzo di lei il provedere, non solamente al diletto, e all'utile, ma all'onesto, ed al necessario." Cf. Bassegoda i Hugas, "Noves dades," p. 58.

<sup>18</sup> See the recent critical edition, Lorenzo Pericolo, ed., Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Life of Marcantonio Raimondi and Critical Catalogue of Prints by or after Bolognese Masters, introduction, translation, and notes by Naoko Takahatake (London: Harvey Miller, 2012).

<sup>19</sup> Ibid., p. 115.

<sup>20</sup> We find early evidence of this in Leon Battista Alberti's De componendis cifris (ca. 1466), where the author recalls that while strolling in the Vatican gardens with Leonardo Dati, he found himself praising "in the most enthusiastic terms the German inventor who had recently made it possible, by means of a system of moveable type, to reproduce from a single exemplar more than two hundred volumes in one hundred days with the help of no more than three men," quoted in Arielle Saiber, Measured Words: Computation and Writing in Renaissance Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), p. 22. On the impact of the spread of the printing press in early modern Europe, see the seminal work by Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). On the early phase of Gutenberg's method, see Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 21–42.

the Nova reperta series, designed in Florence by Johannes Stradanus (1523–1605) in the 1580s in collaboration with his patron, Luigi Alamanni, and published in Antwerp by Philips Galle (1537–1612).²¹ Its frontispiece, perceptively defined by Lia Markey as "an example of a self-consciously modern image,"²² presents a series of technical innovations shaping modern civilization, which had greatly expanded its horizons after the exploration of the "New World" (fig. 2). The succession of eras is represented by a youthful figure entering the scene on the left and an old, bearded man leaving the stage to the right. As Ernst Gombrich synthesized: "The old age is departing, the new age has arrived—an age marked by a series of new discoveries and inventions" among which both geographical exploration and printing technologies are prominent.²³ In fact, the printing press is so relevant that two separate images are dedicated to it, highlighting the two different procedures of letterpress printing and intaglio printmaking: the Impressio librorum and the Scultpura in Aes, the printing of books and engraving on copper respectively (fig. 3).²⁴ Stradanus' Nova reperta is therefore an inescapable document to understand—in Markey's words—"the conception of technology, invention, novelty, and globalization in the early modern period."²⁵

We observe the interconnection of these elements still fully at play in Victoria's text. On the one hand, the "Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns," at the time fully formalized in the light of the debates taking place at the French Academy in Paris, provides a context for the celebration of printing as the modern technology par excellence.²⁶ On the other hand, Victoria's "global awareness" led him to question the exact origin of the invention and its global context:

We Europeans invented the art of printmaking, although the Chinese are said to credit themselves with its invention and to possess prints more than five hundred years older than ours, but it is hard to imagine that our early printmakers could have learned this technique from these Chinese works, in a time when trade with China was not as developed as it is today.²⁷

<sup>21</sup> See, most recently, Lia Markey, ed., Renaissance Invention: Stradanus's "Nova Reperta" (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020).

<sup>22</sup> Lia Markey, "Introduction: Inventing the 'Nova Reperta,'" in Renaissance Invention, p. 25–39, here p. 25.

<sup>23</sup> Ernst H. Gombrich, "Eastern Inventions and Western Response," Daedalus 127, no. 1 (1998): pp. 193– 205, here p. 196.

<sup>24</sup> Markey, Renaissance Invention, pp. 7 and 22 respectively. In the same volume, see also the critical analyses by Dirk Imhof, "Stradanus's Print Shop and the Practice of Printing in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp," pp. 55–60; and Madeleine C. Viljoen, "Diligent Labor in Stradanus's Engraving Shop," pp. 61–73. 25 Markey, "Introduction," in Renaissance Invention, p. 25.

<sup>26</sup> Marc Fumaroli, La querelle des anciens et des modernes: XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). 27 Victoria, "Indice," ff. 17v–18r: "Si deve à i nostri Europei l'invenzione della stampa, perché quantunque si dica, che i Chinesi si pregiano di esserne stati da antichissimi tempi gli autori, e di aver stampe sopra cinquecento anni più antiche delle nostre; egli è anco vero (qualunque sia la fede, che dar si debba à questi racconti), che da un simil lavoro chinese troppo difficilmente puotero prendere i nostri primi intagliatori l'invenzione, quando non era da quelle lontanissime regioni; ne aperto, ne frequentato, come lo è ora il comercio." Cf. Bassegoda i Hugas, "Noves dades," p. 58.

Fig. 2: Philips Galle (attributed to the workshop of), after Johannes Stradanus, Nova Reperta, frontispiece, ca. 1589–93, engraving, 26.7 × 20.5 cm, in: Nova Reperta (Antwerp: Philips Galle, ca. 1589–93), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. no. RP-P-OB-6833

Although scholars have now established that the earliest evidence of woodcut printing derives from East Asia (China and Korea),²⁸ in European art historiography of the sixteenth century, there were two main schools of thought regarding its origin, locating it either in Italy or in Germany—both inside Europe's borders.²⁹ Giorgio Vasari (1511–74)

<sup>28</sup> On the early phase of woodblock printing in East Asia and its dissemination in Europe, see the classic study by Tomas Francis Carter, The Invention of Printing in China and Its Spread Westward (New York: The Ronald Press Co., 1955); see also Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 2: A Century of Wonder, book 3: The Scholarly Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 78–95; Denis Twitchett, Printing and Publishing in Medieval China (New York: Frederic C. Beil, 1983); Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin, "Paper and Printing," in Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, ed. Joseph Needham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Timothy Hugh Barrett, The Woman Who Discovered Printing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

<sup>29</sup> On the early development of intaglio printmaking in Europe, see David Landau and Peter W. Parshall, The Renaissance Print 1470–1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 1–6, notes p. 373; Ad Stijnman, Engraving and Etching 1400–2000: A History of the Development of Manual Intaglio Printmaking Processes (London: Archetype Publ., 2012), pp. 23–74. It is now established that woodcuts first appeared in Europe in the late fourteenth century, whereas intaglio printing from incised metal plates flourished in the Upper Rhine area in the 1430s. With regard to European primacy, Landau

Fig. 3: Philips Galle (attributed to the workshop of), after Johannes Stradanus, Sculptura in aes, ca. 1589–93, engraving, 20.1 × 27.2 cm, in: Nova Reperta (Antwerp: Philips Galle, ca. 1589–93), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. no. RP-P-1904–1041

proposed two different "foundation myths"³⁰ in his Lives, both set on the Italian peninsula. In the Torrentiniana edition (1550), he attributed the invention of this "art of great utility" (comodità singularissima) to Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), while in the Giuntina edition (1568), the credit was given to the Florentine silversmith Maso Finiguerra (1426–64), who was particularly skilled in the niello technique, from which he is said to have developed the procedure for engraving designs on metal plates.³¹ Previ-

and Parshall maintain that although it first appeared in Germany, "we can consider the genesis of intaglio printing separately in Italy and the North." See Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, p. 3. 30 Sean Roberts, "Inventing Engraving in Vasari's Florence," Intellectual History Review 24, no. 3 (2014): pp. 367–88, here p. 367.

<sup>31</sup> Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi (Florence: SPES, 1966–97), vol. 3, pp. 555–56 and vol. 5, p. 3. On the early development of engraving in Italy see Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, pp. 65–77, notes p. 384. On the origin of engraving for Vasari, see Konrad Oberhuber, "Vasari e il mito di Maso Finiguerra," in Il Vasari, storiografo e artista, ed. Mario Salmi et al., (Florence: Grafistampa, 1976), pp. 383–93; Giorgio Marini, "Vasari e 'il principio dell'intagliare le stampe' nella Firenze del Quattrocento," in Figure, memorie, spazio. La grafica del Quattrocento: appunti di teoria, conoscenza e gusto, ed. Marzia Faietti, Alessandra Griffo, and Giorgio Marini (Florence: Giunti, 2011), pp. 89–107; Roberts, "In-

ous studies have addressed Vasari's desire to attribute an individuality to the "inventor" of printmaking by stressing Vasari's civic pride, and by pinpointing his debt to his literary models, in particular both ancient and humanist heuretic literature.³² Focusing on inventors and their discoveries, the heuretic genre derived from classical models, such as Herodotus' Histories (ca. 430 B.C.), Lucretius' De rerum natura (50s B.C.), and Pliny's Naturalis historia (A.D. 77), and beginning with Boccaccio's Genealogia deorum gentilium (ca. 1350—74), flourished again in early Renaissance literature.³³ Significant examples span from Polydore Vergil's De inventoribus rerum (On the Inventors of Things, 1499) to Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1626), where the fictional Solomon's House hosts two galleries dedicated to "the more rare and excellent inventions" and to the "statues of all principal inventors" (among which also an anonymous "inventor of printing") respectively.³⁴ A case in point is also the aforementioned Nova reperta, which stemmed from a cultural milieu deeply intertwined with the production of the Giuntina—Stradanus, in fact, collaborated with Vasari on several Medici commissions, especially in the Palazzo Vecchio.³⁵ Hence, Vasari's propensity to associate technological inventions with particular names and identities. The version put forth by Vasari in the Giuntina, which crowned Maso Finiguerra as the initiator of engraving on copper, was as imaginative as it was influential, and it also informed the development of Florentine art literature, such as Filippo Baldinucci's (1625–96) Cominciamento e progresso dell'arte dell'intagliare in rame (Beginnings and Progress of the Art of Engraving on Copper, Florence, 1686).³⁶

Nevertheless, the Florentine "mythology" was in contrast with the German hypothesis, which held that image printing derived from Johannes Gutenberg's printing

venting Engraving." Evelina Borea suggested that Vasari linked the method of engraving on copper to goldsmithing in order to ennoble it. See Evelina Borea, "Vasari e le stampe," Prospettiva 60, no. 57, vol. 2 (1990): pp. 18–38. In the same article (p. 35 note 5), she points out that Benvenuto Cellini, in his Trattato dell'oreficeria (Treatise on Goldsmithery, 1568), held a different opinion, arguing that the first to experiment with the burin was Martin Schongauer, who was inspired by Finiguerra's nielli therefore still preserving Florentine primacy.

<sup>32</sup> See in particular Roberts, "Inventing Engraving."

<sup>33</sup> On Boccaccio and his ancient sources, see Paolo Cherchi, "Gli inventori delle cose nelle Genealogie di Boccaccio," in Critica del testo 16, no. 3 (2013): pp. 85–118. Also particularly useful is Patricia Falguières, "Les inventeurs des choses. Enquêtes sur les arts et naissance d'une science de l'homme dans les cabinets du XVIe siècle," in Les Actes de colloques du Musée du quai Branly 1 (2009), in which the author investigates the relationship between the practice of collecting and the interest in inventions.

<sup>34</sup> Francis Bacon, New Atlantis (1626), ed. Gerard B. Wegemer (Irving: CTMS Publishers at the University of Dallas, 2020), pp. 41–42.

<sup>35</sup> Alessandra Baroni Vannucci, "A Flemish Artist at the Medici Court in Florence in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century. Life, Works and Modus Operandi of the Painter-Cartoonist Johannes Stradanus," in Stradanus 1523–1605. Court Artist of the Medici, ed. Alessandra Baroni Vannucci and Manfred Sellink (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), pp. 59–108.

<sup>36</sup> Filippo Baldinucci, Cominciamento e progresso dell'arte dell'intagliare in rame: colle vite di molti de' più eccellenti maestri della stessa professione, ed. Evelina Borea (Turin: Einaudi, 2013), p. 4.

press.³⁷ This was the position maintained by Joachim von Sandrart (1606–88) in his Teutsche academie (1675), in which, discussing the beginnings of the woodcut, he asserts—not without chauvinistic pride—that "the honor of the invention of this beautiful art belongs to our Germans."³⁸ Before him, Abraham Bosse (1602/4–76) also credited Germany with this invention in his Sentiments sur la distinction des diverses manières de peinture, dessin et gravure (Sentiments on the Distinction between Various Manners of Painting, Printmaking and Drawing, 1649).³⁹

While there is a possibility that Victoria was familiar with both Bosse's and Baldinucci's treatises, it is only Vasari and Sandrart who are directly cited throughout the "Indice." Considering these two opposite standpoints, Victoria recognized Germany's primacy, declaring Gutenberg to be the "inventor of carving letters from wood," which "paved the way for others to use a similar technique for printing images."⁴⁰ At the same time, Victoria endorsed Vasari's story regarding engraving on copper, which—he states—was first developed by Maso Finiguerra in ca. 1460 (even though, in a later passage, he admits that one could date Israhel van Meckenem's prints as older than those by Baccio Baldini by comparing the "shape of both the style and

<sup>37</sup> For connections between woodcut and book printing see Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, p. 2; and Arthur M. Hind, An Introduction to a History of Woodcut: With a Detailed Survey of Work Done in the Fifteenth Century (New York: Dover Publications, 1963), pp. 64–140. As for the shared origin of letterpress printing and intaglio techniques, Landau and Parshall defined the hypothesis as "tantalizing and suggestive," while also highlighting that "the differences between these two procedures are more apparent than their similarities. Because book printing is a relief process, it requires a press of a sort useless for printing incised plates in intaglio." Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, p. 3. 38 Joachim von Sandrart, L'Academia Todesca della Architectura Scultura et Pictura: Oder Teutsche Academie der Edlen Bau-, Bild und Mahlerey-Künste, vol. I.3 (Nürnberg: Gedruckt bey Johann-Philipp Miltenberger, 1675–79), p. 101.

<sup>39</sup> Carl Goldstein, Print Culture in Early Modern France: Abraham Bosse and the Purposes of Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 26; Émilie Passignat, "Raccontare l'incisione nella Francia dei curieux de papier, tra Abraham Bosse e Florent Le Comte," in Giorgio Vasari e la Vita di Marcantonio Bolognese, e d'altri intagliatori di stampe: edizioni e fortuna critica 1568–1760, ed. Giovanni Maria Fara (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2021), pp. 131–58, especially pp. 142–44. See Passignat's contribution also for the seventeenth-century French reception of Vasari's account of the invention of printmaking.

<sup>40</sup> Vittoria, "Indice", ff. 18v–19r: "Meglio dunque è dire, che la prima invenzione dell'intaglio di figure è dovuto alla nostra Europa, e che il primo pregio della medesima fu di Gio: Cutemberg Tedesco; perché se bene egli vien detto solamente inventore dell'intaglio de caratteri in legno circa l'Anno del Signore 1442, per li quali in distesa tavola ordinati si die' la prima norma della stampa de' libri, conforme apparisce nel Cicerone de Offitizii appresso il Sig.r Marchese Massimi stampato in Magonza l'anno 1465; e che indi à poco à poco con l'introduzione de caratteri di stagno si condusse alla moderna perfezzione; ad ogni modo egli fù, che aprì la strada altrui di porre in uso una maniera somigliante nello stampare le figure, qual si vede in alcuni libri stampati da Gio Escheembergh in Augusta l'Anno 1486; copiose di figure, e di fogliami, tutto che di stile incolto, e rozzo elle sieno." Cf. Bassegoda i Hugas, "Noves dades," pp. 58–59. Contrary to what Victoria states, Gutenberg's printing press used metal and not wooden movable type.

the figures' draperies").⁴¹ Although Victoria tried to maintain a balance between these two European traditions, his perspective when investigating the beginnings of printmaking proved to be even wider. Thus, he did not dismiss the extra-European hypotheses, especially the one that credited the invention of both text and image printing to the Chinese. Therefore, in his essay, Victoria did not limit himself to taking sides in a mere intra-European dispute, as it was the broader European primacy that was at stake. In other words, it was the Eurasian dimension of the problem that led Victoria to attribute this crucial invention to (in his terms) "our Europeans," ("à i nostri Europei") thus manifesting a broader geographical notion of identity as compared to his predecessors' localism.

The vexata quaestio of whether printmaking originated in either Europe or China had already appeared in the historiography of engraving at least once before Victoria's "Origins and Progress," and that is in John Evelyn's Sculptura, or, The History and Art of Chalcography and Engraving in Copper (London, 1662).⁴² Considered the first treatise solely dedicated to the art of printmaking to be written in Europe,⁴³ Sculptura frames image printing techniques as belonging to the art of sculpture, alongside marble, wood, ivory carving, metalworking, and modelling in clay and wax. In particular, in Chapter III, Evelyn maps out the development of sculptural techniques throughout antiquity and their "decay" during the Middle Ages for lack of enlightened patrons.⁴⁴ Before turning to Chapter IV, which contains the narration "of the invention and progresse of Chalcography in particular" and starts with Gutenberg's typography, Evelyn delves into "some pretensions to the Invention of Copper-cuts, and their Impressions."⁴⁵ As he writes: "Sculpture and Chalcography seem to have been of much antienter date

<sup>41</sup> Vittoria, "Indice", f. 22v: "Anzi, che evidente cosa è, come viene osservato da Giovachino Sandrart esser preceduto il medesimo Israel non solo a lo Schoen, ma ad altri Intagliatori di que' Paesi, e si potrebbe forsi anche argomentare dalla forma dello stile, e degli abbigliamenti delle figure, che precedesse ancora questo Israelle alli stessi Fiorentini Baccio Baldini, e Masso Finiguerra creduti Inventori dell'intaglio." Cf. Bassegoda i Hugas, "Noves dades," p. 60. Both Giovanni Gori Gandellini in his Notizie degli intagliatori (1771) and Giuseppe Pelli Bencivenni (the director of the Uffizi Gallery between 1775 and 1793) in his manuscript Catalogo generale delle pitture arrived at the same conclusion, thus rejecting the Florentine tradition of Vasari and Baldinucci. See Giovanni Maria Fara, Intorno a Dürer: gli antichi maestri tedeschi nel Gabinetto dei disegni e delle stampe degli Uffizi, 1470–1550 (Florence: Giunti, 2019), p. 30.

<sup>42</sup> Not unlike Victoria, Evelyn's historiographical endeavor was also closely linked to his collecting interests and connoisseurial skills, as he owned a prominent cabinet of prints. See Anthony Griffiths, "John Evelyn and the Print," in John Evelyn and his Milieu, ed. Frances Harris and Michael Hunter (London: The British Library, 2003), pp. 95–113, here p. 99; Peter W. Parshall, "Art and the Theater of Knowledge: The Origins of Print Collecting in Northern Europe," Harvard University Art Museums Bulletin 2, no. 3 (1994): pp. 7–37, in particular p. 29; Paola Croset, "John Evelyn lettore di Vasari," in Fara, ed., Giorgio Vasari, pp. 107–30, in particular p. 111.

<sup>43</sup> Griffiths, "John Evelyn," p. 95; Parshall, "Art and the Theater of Knowledge," p. 27.

<sup>44</sup> John Evelyn, Sculptura, or, The History and Art of Chalcography and Engraving in Copper (London: Printed by J.C. for G. Beedle and T. Collins, 1662), p. 30.

<sup>45</sup> Ibid., pp. 35 and 23 respectively.

in China then with us; whereall their writings and printed Records were engraven either on Copper plates or cut in Tablets of Wood, of which some we possesse, and have seen more, representing (in all pictures) Landskips, Stories, and the like."⁴⁶ He then goes on to recall that according to Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609) "our first Letters in Europe were ... cut upon Wood, before they invented the Typos aeneos (metal types)," while later on, it was the Jesuit missionary Álvaro Semedo (1585–1658) who "would make the World believe that the foremention'd Chinezes have been possess'd of this invention about sixteenth hundred years," while "some others affirme 3700." Hence—he concludes—"that [the Chinese] were really Masters of it long before us, is universally agreed upon."⁴⁷

### The Chinese Origin of Printmaking in Missionary Sources

It is hardly surprising that in dealing with a Chinese topic Evelyn referred to Jesuit missionary literature. In fact, Semedo's Relação da grande Monarquia da China (The History of that Great and Renowned Monarchy of China) became a staple work in European historiography on Chinese geography, history, and civilization, especially under the Ming dynasty.⁴⁸ First written in Portuguese (Semedo's native language), it was published for the first time in a Spanish translation in 1642, while an abbreviated Italian version appeared in Rome in 1643, followed by French (1645) and English (1655) editions.⁴⁹ While its publishing history demonstrates the wide-ranging and multilingual audience that it soon engaged, Semedo's treatise was part of a much larger corpus of Jesuit missionary literature on China that circulated throughout Europe from the second half of the sixteenth century onwards.⁵⁰

It is noteworthy that within this vast literature on China's mores et instituta discussion on the origin of printing is ever present. Indeed, cross-cultural transfers of tech-

<sup>46</sup> Ibid., p. 33.

<sup>47</sup> Ibid.

<sup>48</sup> Álvaro Semedo, The History of that Great and Renowned Monarchy of China (London: Printed by E. Tyler for John Crook, 1655). For a recent commentary on this text, see Isabel Pina, "Representations of China in Álvaro Semedo's Work," in History of Mathematical Sciences: Portugal and East Asia, V. Visual and Textual Representations in Exchange Between Europe and East Asia, 16th–18th Centuries, ed. Luís Saraiva and Catherine Jami (Singapore: World Scientific, 2018), pp. 31–53.

<sup>49</sup> Isabel Pina, "The European Circulation of Álvaro Semedo's Work," in China-Macau and Globalizations: Past and Present, ed. Lui´s Filipe Barreto and Wu Zhiliang (Lisbon: Centro Cienti´fico e Cultural de Macau, 2016), pp. 90–103.

<sup>50</sup> Donald Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, A Century of Discovery, book 1 and book 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 314–31, 794–815. For a recent and useful survey of early modern Catholic missions to China, see Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, "Imperial China and the Christian Mission," in A Companion to Early Modern Catholic Global Missions, ed. Ronnie Po-chia Hsia (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 344–64.

nology are key factors to understand the emergence of global comparative mindsets that ushered in the production of different world histories during the early modern period. In this respect, it is telling that the first European to have mentioned the possible Chinese origin of printmaking was Paolo Giovio (1483–1552) in his Historiae sui temporis (Histories of His Own Time, 1550–52), considered one of the earliest endeavors in European historiography to significantly broaden its geographical scope of investigation by embracing the Ottoman and the Safavid Empires as well.⁵¹

With regard to European historiography on China, one of the earliest works is The History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China (1585) by the Augustinian friar Juan González de Mendoza (1545–1618).⁵² Here an entire chapter—the sixteenth—is dedicated to "the antiquitie and manner of printing books, used in this Kingdome, long before the use in our Europe," as its title declares.⁵³ According to Mendoza, who had participated in evangelizing missions in Mexico but never in China and thus relied on accounts of other travelers, "the vulgar opinion, that the invention of printing did beginne in Europe in the yeare 1458" is contradicted by the Chinese, who "affirme, that the first beginning was in their countrie, and the inventour was a man whome they reverence for a saint."⁵⁴ Mendoza then stresses that "there are found amongst them many books printed 500 yeares before the invention began in Almaine: of the which," he adds, "I have one, and I have seene others, as well in Spane and in Italie as in the Indies."⁵⁵ This is an important precedent for Victoria's "Origin and Progress," since one can observe a similar relationship at play between the historical analysis of printing technology in China and concrete evidence possessed by the authors—in both cases, books printed in China that had landed in their private libraries.

We also find a discussion about the geographical location of the dawn of printmaking in the most influential early-modern European account on Chinese civilization, Matteo Ricci's memoirs of his mission in China, first published in 1615 in a Latin translation edited by Nicolas Trigault with the title De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas (On

<sup>51</sup> Paolo Giovio, Historiae sui temporis, vol. 1 (Florence: In officina Laurentii Torrentini dvcalis typographi, 1550–52), p. 226; see Lach, Asia in the making of Europe, vol. 1, book 2, p. 777. On Giovio's work as a "missed opportunity" for Renaissance world history, see Giuseppe Marcocci, The Globe on Paper. Writing Histories of the World in Renaissance Europe and the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 121.

<sup>52</sup> The first edition, Historia de las cosas mas notables, ritos y costumbres, del gran reyno de la China, was published in Rome in 1585. For the English edition, referred to here, see Juan González de Mendoza, The History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China and the Thereof, ed. G. M. Staunton, 2 vols. (London: printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1853–54). For an introduction to Mendoza's work, see Nancy Vogeley, "China and the American Indies: A Sixteenth-Century 'History'," Colonial Latin American Review 6, no. 2 (1997): pp. 165–84; Robert Richmond Ellis, "The Middle Kingdom through Spanish Eyes: Depictions of China in the Writings of Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza and Domingo Fernandez Navarrete," Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 83, no. 6 (2006): pp. 469–83; Antonella Romano, "La prima storia della Cina. Juan Gonzales de Mendoza fra l'Impero spagnolo e Roma," Quaderni storici 48, no. 2 (2013): pp. 89–116.

<sup>53</sup> Mendoza, The History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China, vol. 1, p. 131.

<sup>54</sup> Ibid., pp. 131–32.

<sup>55</sup> Ibid., p. 132.

the Christian Expedition in China).⁵⁶ In the first volume, dedicated to the description of Chinese territories, their institutional and social organization, their philosophical and religious beliefs, their economic system, and their arts and crafts, Matteo Ricci (1552– 1610) does not hide his sincere admiration for "their great ingenuity and industriousness."⁵⁷ With regard to printing, he delves into a description of their "ingenious" process, which is very different from the European one due to their writing system and their preference for woodblock printing as opposed to Europe's metal movable-type printing press. Finally, the issue of the beginning of printing technology is also considered:

The art of printing was practiced in China at a date somewhat earlier than that assigned to the beginning to printing in Europe, which was about 1405. It is quite certain that the Chinese knew the art of printing at least five centuries ago, and some of them assert that printing was known to their people before the beginning of the Christian era, about 50 BCE.⁵⁸

Similarly, a few years later Semedo wrote that "according to their books, [the Chinese] have been using [printing] for 1600 years."⁵⁹ It was likely from this passage of Ricci's treatise that Victoria drew the information that the Chinese "are said to credit themselves with its invention and to possess prints more than five hundred years older than ours."⁶⁰

Among later Jesuit historiographers, Daniello Bartoli (1608–85), in the volume from his monumental Istoria della Compagnia di Gesù (History of the Society of Jesus) dedicated to China (1663), states that the "art of printing is very ancient" in those territories, all the while expressing the opinion that it is impossible to establish with certainty whether the European printing press should be considered an autonomous invention or that it originated from the Chinese one.⁶¹ In contrast, Athanasius Kircher (1602–80), in his China illustrata (China Illustrated, 1667), put printing without hesitation among the "many other inventions (that) were discovered in China before

<sup>56</sup> On Trigault's edition, see Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552–1610 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 287–90. For a comprehensive survey of Matteo Ricci's mission, see Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, Matteo Ricci and the Catholic Mission to China, 1583–1610, A Short History with Documents (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2016).

<sup>57</sup> Matteo Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matthew Ricci, 1583–1610, trans. Louis Gallagher (New York: Random House, 1953), p. 87. For a recent edition of the Italian original text, see Matteo Ricci, Descrizione della Cina (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2011).

<sup>58</sup> Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century, p. 87.

<sup>59</sup> Semedo, The History of that Great and Renowned Monarchy of China, p. 35.

<sup>60</sup> Victoria, "Indice," ff. 17v–18r.

<sup>61</sup> For a modern edition, see Daniello Bartoli, La Cina (Milan: Bompiani, 1975), pp. 101 and 115–16. For an introduction to Bartoli as a historiographer, see most recently Simon Ditchfield, "Baroque around the Clock: Daniello Bartoli S.J. (1608–85) and the Uses of Global History," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 31 (2021): pp. 49–73.

we knew about them in Europe."⁶² Finally, the French Jesuit Louis Le Comte (1655– 1728), in his Nouveau mémoire sur l'état présent de la Chine (The New Memoire on the Present State of China, 1696) claimed that "printing, which is but an Art in its infancy in Europe, hath been, from all Antiquity in use in China," also specifying that "it is something different from ours" because of the different writing system.⁶³ In a later section of his treatise, he also adds that "Gun-powder, Printing, and the Use of the Compass ... are Novel Arts in Europe, for which perhaps we are obliged to them [the Chinese]."⁶⁴

This brief overview of the missionary literature on China between the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, which could have been available to Victoria, demonstrates how the invention of printing became a major trope of comparing and contrasting Europe to China. It is important to stress that these texts were widely circulated and read in Europe, and thus, they also significantly shaped the evolution of discourses on art literature. As Elisabetta Corsi has pointed out, by the late sixteenth century, missionary literature had become the main source of knowledge about China. Over the course of the following century, it increasingly affected other fields of intellectual reflection and literary production, especially with regard to natural sciences and technology, including artistic techniques.⁶⁵ In fact, as Evelyn consulted Semedo, so did Sandrart rely on Ricci's and Kircher's writings although he did not openly acknowledge them.

#### From Missionary Reports to Art Literature

It is well known, Sandrart's Teutsche Academie is one of the earliest European art treatises to also take into consideration non-European visual culture, namely Chinese prints and paintings.⁶⁶ After having sketched out the principles that, according to his biased Eurocentric viewpoint, define the aesthetics of Chinese art, Sandrart described several paintings that he allegedly had in his art collection. Scholars who have attempted to identify such paintings have come to the conclusion that—as Michael Sullivan put it—"one doubts whether he ever saw any real Chinese paintings at all."⁶⁷ In fact, as Sullivan has pointed out, Sandrart's description of a lady holding a tame bird in her

<sup>62</sup> From the English edition, Athanasius Kircher, China illustrata, trans. by Charles D. Van Tuyl (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1987), p. 210.

<sup>63</sup> Quoted from the English edition, Louis Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations Made in a Late Journey Through the Empire of China (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1697), p. 190.

<sup>64</sup> Ibid., p. 231.

<sup>65</sup> Elisabetta Corsi, "Editoria, lingue orientali e politica papale a Roma tra Cinquecento e Seicento," in Papato e politica internazionale nella prima età moderna, ed. Maria Antonietta Visceglia (Rome: Viella, 2013), pp. 525–62, here p. 527.

<sup>66</sup> Michael Sullivan, The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art; From the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), pp. 93–94.

<sup>67</sup> Ibid., p. 93.

hand resembles so closely one of the engravings published in Kircher's China illustrata that it leads one to believe that the latter was the image he actually saw before his eyes (fig. 4).

Fig. 4: Unknown artist(s), A Chinese Lady Holding a Tame Bird, 1667, engraving, in: Athanasius Kircher, China monumentis qua sacris qua profanis, nec non variis naturae & artis spectaculis, aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata . . . (Antwerp: apud Jacobum a Meurs, 1667), Stiftung der Werke von C.G. Jung, Zurich

Even Sandrart's critical comments on Chinese artworks appear to be a combination of clichés rather than reflections deriving from close observation. According to the German art theorist, the Chinese mostly paint "without any rule, and only trusting their deceiving eyes. For they do not want to know anything about the excellent use of oil paint, and nothing about the gradual diminution of the hardness of colors, and how to master it."⁶⁸ He then pointed out that they "represent everything simply, only by contours without shadows, they do not give it plasticity as they apply their colors unmixed. They do not know how to make each object stand out, according to its true property, from its neighboring object, whether by making it come forward or by making it recede, or to observe any other thing necessary for lifelikeness."⁶⁹

These remarks on the Chinese artists' lack of perspective, their emphasis on contours at the expense of shading and highlighting, and their ignorance of oil paint are so close to the opinions expressed by Semedo and previously by Matteo Ricci that it is possible that these works informed Sandrart's remarks.⁷⁰ By the mid-seventeenth century, such opinions had already become commonplace. One can find similar comments on China's ignorance of oil paint and the principles of perspective in the treatises by the Jesuit historiographers Semedo and Bartoli.⁷¹ The issue of perspective was particularly crucial for a scientist and literato like Lorenzo Magalotti (1637–1712), secretary of the Florentine Academy of Cimento, who compiled the Relazione della Cina (Report on China) in 1665.⁷² This report is the account of a conversation he had with the Jesuit Fa-

<sup>68</sup> Sandrart, L'Academia Todesca, vol. 1, p. 100: "Hiernächst bedienen sie sich auch einer großen Menge Gemälde / zur Zier und Lustbarkeit / die sie / in mannigfaltiger vorstellung ihres Lebens und Wandels / hoch achten. Sie pflegen aber / fast ingesamt / ohne einige Regeln / und nur nach muhtmaßung ihrer betrüglichen Augen / solche zu verfärtigen. Dann sie wissen nichts von dem vortrefflichen Gebrauch der Oelfarben / auch nichts von temperirung der Härte der Farben / und solche zu gehorsam zu bringen." The English translation is quoted from Thijs Weststeijn, "Vossius' Chinese Utopia," in Isaac Vossius (1618–1689) Between Science and Scholarship, ed. Eric Jorink and Dirk van Miert (Brill: Boston, 2012), pp. 207–242, here p. 215.

<sup>69</sup> Sandrart, L'Academia Todesca, vol. 1, p. 100: "Sie stellen alles einfältig vor / bloß mit dem Umriß ohne Schatten / rondiren nichts / sondern übergehen ganz schlechthin mit Farben ihre Sachen. Sie wissen nicht / wie / in wahrer Eigenschaft / ein jedes Ding der gebühr nach zu erheben / ob es vor- oder hinter sich zu treiben / oder was für andere notwendige Natürlichkeiten zu beobachten." The English translation is quoted from Weststeijn, "Vossius' Chinese Utopia," p. 216.

<sup>70</sup> As pointed out by Sullivan, "The Meeting," pp. 93–94. See also Friederike G. Wappenschmidt, "Sandrarts 'indianischer' Maler Higiemond: eine authentische Künstlerpersönlichkeit oder ein Synonym für die fremdartige Malerei Asiens?" in Aus aller Herren Länder: die Künstler der 'Teutschen Academie' von Joachim von Sandrart, ed. Susanne Meurer, Anna Schreurs-Morét, and Lucia Simonato (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), pp. 14–29. On Ricci's judgment of Chinese pictorial principles, see Marco Musillo, The Shining Inheritance: Italian Painters at the Qing Court, 1699–1812 (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2007), pp. 11–16.

<sup>71</sup> Semedo, The History of that Great and Renowned Monarchy of China, p. 56; Bartoli, La Cina, p. 103. 72 Lorenzo Magalotti, "Relazione della China cavata da un ragionamento tenuto col p. Giovanni Grueber della Compagnia di Gesu nel suo passaggio per Firenze l'anno 1665," in Notizie varie dell'imperio della China e di qualche altro paese adiacente con la vita di Confucio il gran savio della China, e un saggio della sua morale (Florence: Da Giuseppe Manni, per il Carlieri all'insegna di San Luigi, 1697), pp. 1–80.

ther Johann Grüber (1623–80), who had returned from a three-year mission in China and whom Kircher had consulted for his China illustrata. According to Magalotti, despite their sophisticated knowledge of mathematics, their geometry appears "despicable," as they "do not have any notions of perspective or other parts of optics."⁷³ It is of particular interest that in the view of a seventeenth-century polymath like Magalotti, the science of perspective is so deeply interrelated with geometry that its absence undermines the latter.

Likewise, Giovanni Gherardini (1655–ca. 1729), a painter from Modena who spent nine years at the Qing court in Beijing (1698–1707), also dismissed Chinese pictorial tradition as naïve in the report of his journey published in 1700. According to Gherardini, the Chinese "are fascinated by a good drawing, by a well-structured and lively landscape, a natural perspective, but they are not interested in how to achieve that."⁷⁴ Later, in Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie (1751–72), the entry dedicated to Peinture chinoise (Chinese painting) stressed its shortcomings in similar terms: "[I]t only offers a certain taste for slavish imitation; but one notices neither genius, nor design, nor invention, nor correction."⁷⁵

We find an analogous misunderstanding of Chinese aesthetics in Victoria's essay:

Even if we were to grant the Chinese the merit of having taught us how to print images, how much glory it would avail us to have so perfectly raised this art to the highest peak to which it is today. How much blame must be attributed to them for maintaining an awkward and unlearned manner in their prints, except for those that were produced in China either by Europeans or under their direction. This is the case of the prints from the book that is stored in my collection representing the "Life of Jesus Christ" with Chinese characters and paper, which were copied from the Gospels

<sup>73</sup> Lorenzo Magalotti, "Relazione della Cina," pp. 30–31: "Attendono grandemente alla scienza de' numeri, ed hanno un'ignobile spezie di Geometria, ...poiché né della prospettiva né dell'altre parti dell'ottica non hanno alcun lume." The English translation is quoted from Musillo, The Shining Inheritance, p. 10.

<sup>74</sup> Giovanni Gherardini, Relation du voyage fait à la Chine sur le vaisseau l'Amphitrite, en l'année 1698 (Paris: Nicolas Pepie, 1700), p. 18: "Ils sont pourtant charmez d'un beau dessin, d'un païsage bien vif & bien ménage, d'une perspective naturelle; mais savoir comment on s'y prend ça n'est pas là leur affaire." The English translation in cited from Musillo, The Shining Inheritance, p. 127. On Gherardini's journey to China see also ibid., passim, and Sullivan, The Meeting, pp. 60–61, 93.

<sup>75</sup> Louis de Jaucourt "Peinture chinoise," in Encyclopédie, ou: Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de gens de lettres, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, vol. 12 (Neufchastel: chez Samuel Faulche, 1751), p. 278: ". . . elle n'offre qu'un certain goût d'imitation servile, où l'on ne touve ni génie, ni dessein, ni invention, ni correction." Cf. John Anthony George Roberts, "L'image de la Chine dans l'Encyclopédie," Recherches sur Diderot et sur l'Encyclopédie 22 (1997): pp. 87–108, especially p. 103. For a further example of the longue durée of such prejudices towards Chinese art, see Kristel Smentek, "Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Art from China, and Nineteenth-Century French Painting," in Beyond Chinoiserie: Artistic Exchange between China and the West during the Late Qing Dynasty (1796–1911), ed. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Dawn Milam (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 93–121.

by Father Nadal and engraved by Hieronymus Wierix. And despite [the fact that] they are only engraved with the burin in their contours, they are very fine.⁷⁶

By admitting China's primacy in the invention of printing while, at the same time, diminishing its achievements in this technique, Victoria articulates an attitude shared among Europeans concerning Chinese technical and cultural sophistication. The Spanish canon acknowledges the possibility that printing had been practiced in China for much longer than it had in Europe, all the while affirming that European practitioners had perfected the process and obtained more valuable results.

This prejudice was common among early European "sinologists." Kircher, for instance, after having delved into the procedure of printing texts in China, which he compared to that of printing images in Europe, affirmed that "it is certain that European printing is better than Chinese."⁷⁷ This mindset prevailed in the following century, as one can see in the correspondence between the Jesuit missionary to China Dominique Parennin (1665–1741) and the astronomer and secretary of the Académie des sciences in Paris Jean-Jacques D'Ortous de Mairan (1678–1771).⁷⁸ Ample sections were dedicated to discussion about what they believed to be China's technical and scientific backwardness and its inability to advance and perfect the technologies that it had invented—as demonstrated, in Parennin's and Mairan's opinion, by their lack of artillery and the printing press despite the fact they had invented both gunpowder and woodblock printing. Even the French philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778), who considered China "the wisest and best governed country in the world," believed it had failed to perfect its inventions, maintaining them at a level of "mere curiosities," which later the Europeans would take up and develop "to a high level of perfection."⁷⁹

In terms of his aesthetic judgment, Victoria shared the critical stance observed in Ricci, Semedo, Sandrart, Bartoli, Magalotti, and Gherardini. He characterized the Chinese style of painting as "ungainly and unlearned." The Italian original text reads as "maniera goffa e senza disegno;" disegno is a central term and concept of Italian Renaissance art theory, referring to both design and drawing as well as the artist's mental

<sup>76</sup> Victoria, "Indice", ff. 18r–v: "Mà se pure conceder per avventura loro si volesse il vanto di avere insegnato a i nostri il modo di stampare le imagini: quanta gloria ad ogni modo in noi risulterebbe di aver con tanta perfezione migliorato l'arte à quel sommo grado, in cui oggi si trova; altrettanto biasimo à loro sarebbe dovuto d'aver sempre mantenuta una maniera goffa, e senza disegno nelle loro carte, fuorché in quelle che presso di loro furono intagliate da Europei, ò copiate sotto la loro direzione, che tale in effetto sono quelle del libro, che si conserva nel mio studio rappresentanti la Vita di Giesù Cristo con caratteri, e in carta chinese, le quali furono copiate dal libro degli Evangelii del P.e Natale, che intagliò Girolamo Vierix; e con tutto che siino copiate con i soli contorni d'intaglio à bullino, sono assai belle." Cf. Bassegoda i Hugas, "Noved dades," p. 58.

<sup>77</sup> Kircher, China illustrata, pp. 210–11.

<sup>78</sup> Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 83–86. On this point see also Elisabetta Corsi, "Editoria, lingue orientali, e politica papale," p. 546, note 52.

<sup>79</sup> As quoted in Adas, Machines, pp. 88–89.

idea of a picture and its material execution. In other words, disegno is a formal principle and a technique at the same time.⁸⁰ Thus, the words "without disegno" provide an effective synthesis of the opinions previously surveyed, criticizing a lack of chiaroscuro and an ignorance of the principles of perspective, which results in a failed naturalism. Instead of developing new critical categories in order to grasp the formal specificities of non-European artistic expressions, Victoria approached Chinese art through the taxonomies of Renaissance and Baroque art theory, as his European predecessors had done before him, thus preventing him from engaging in a genuine aesthetic appreciation of Chinese artifacts. Therefore, Victoria's writing participates in what Kristel Smentek has described as the "longstanding construct of China as Europe's Other."⁸¹

#### Victoria's Encounter with Chinese Printmaking

Yet, it is of particular importance that Victoria's digression on Chinese printing is related to a specific object that he owned: a Life of Jesus Christ printed in China, whose illustrations were modelled after the Evangelicae Historiae Imagines (Images of the History of the Gospel). This was a collection of 153 folio engravings by the brothers Johannes (1549–ca. 1620), Hieronymus (1553–1619), and Anton II (1555/59–1604) Wierix after drawings by Bernardino Passeri (ca. 1540–ca. 88) and Maarten de Vos (1532– 1603) that illustrate gospel scenes with explanatory texts by the Spanish Jesuit Jerónimo Nadal (1507–80).⁸² Published in Antwerp in 1593, the Evangelicae Historiae Imagines was widely used by Jesuit missionaries across the globe as a visual aid in their preaching activity, to the extent that, according to Matteo Ricci, the images were "more useful than the Bible since with [them], we can explain by placing before the eyes that which we could not perhaps explain with words."⁸³

There were three major editorial projects undertaken by Jesuit missionaries in late-Ming China that adopted the Evangelicae Historiae Imagines as models for illustrations.⁸⁴ First, the Song nianzhu guicheng (念珠規程, Method of Praying the Rosary; hereafter Guicheng), a catechism edited by the Portughese Jesuit João da Rocha

<sup>80</sup> Robert Williams, Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 29–72.

<sup>81</sup> Smentek, "Étienne-Jean Delécluze," p. 94.

<sup>82</sup> Harriet Stroomberg, The Wierix Family. Book Illustrations, ed. Jan Van der Stock, vol. 2 (Ouderkerk aan den IJssel: Sound & Vision Publishers, 2006/7), pp. 8–105. A small number of the 153 prints were engraved by Jean and Adriaen Collaert and Karel de Mallery (see ibid., p. 3). Nadal's Adnotationes et Meditationes in Evangelia, a volume containing the contemplative texts related to each image, was published in Antwerp the following year (1594).

<sup>83</sup> As quoted by Rui Oliveira Lopes, "Jesuit Visual Culture and the Song nianzhu guicheng: The Annunciation as a Spiritual Meditation on the Redemptive Incarnation of Christ," Art in Translation 12, no. 1 (2020): pp. 82–113, here p. 85.

<sup>84</sup> For an overview, see the classic study Pasquale D'Elia, Le origini dell'arte cristiana cinese (1583– 1640) (Rome: Reale Accademia d'Italia, 1939), pp. 67–124.

(1583–1623) illustrating the fifteen mysteries of the rosary, published in Nanjing c. 1619.⁸⁵ Second, Giulio Aleni (1582–1649)'s Tianzhu jiangsheng chuxiang jingjie (天主降 生出像經解, Illustrated Explanation of the Incarnation of the Lord of Heaven; hereafter Jingjie), a visual narration of the life and passion of Christ that unfolds through fiftyseven woodcuts (1637).⁸⁶ Finally, Johann Adam Schall von Bell's (1592–1666) Jincheng Shuxiang (進呈書像, Images in a Booklet Presented to His Majesty), a Life of Christ published in Beijing in 1640.⁸⁷ Its forty-eight woodcuts are derived from a manuscript with miniature paintings commissioned by Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria (1573–1651) that Schall offered to the Chinese Emperor Chongzhen (1611–44) in 1640. These miniatures were mainly based on Dutch and Flemish engravings, among which at least ten are from Nadal's Imagines.

The hybridity of these publications has attracted particular attention in modern scholarship as material evidence of the principle of accommodatio (accommodation), largely practiced by the Jesuit missionaries in their pastoral endeavor. Effectively defined by Andrés I. Prieto as "the adaptation of one's message to one's audience,"⁸⁸ accommodatio was the strategy with which Jesuits engaged non-European peoples in their evangelization effort, adapting Christian values and practices to local customs in order to facilitate the penetration and dissemination of the gospel's messages. In particular, the woodcuts illustrating these Sino-Western publications have been considered examples of visual accommodatio. Engraved by unknown Chinese artists after the Wierixs' prints, they adapted their European models to Chinese codes of visual communication, thus making the Christian message that they carry more accessible to local audiences.

<sup>85</sup> See most recently Oliveira Lopes, "Jesuit Visual Culture and the Song nianzhu guicheng;" Veronica Riavis, "Comparing Western Perspectives and Eastern Axonometries in Jesuit Missions in China between 16th and 18th Century," Disegnare con 13, no. 25 (2020): p. 1–19; and Qu Yi, "Jesuits' Convenevolezza in Printed Illustrations of the Gospel," in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in China, ed. K. K. Yeo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 463–94. The latter two essays also deal with Aleni's work. 86 In the vast bibliography on Aleni's work, see, among the most recent studies, Paul Rheinbay, "Nadal's Religious Iconography Reinterpreted by Aleni for China," in "Scholar from the West:" Giulio Aleni S.J. (1582–1649) and the Dialogue between Christianity and China, ed. Tiziana Lippiello and Roman Malek (Brescia: Fondazione civiltà bresciana; Sankt Augustin: Monumenta Serica, 1997), pp. 323–34; José Eugenio Borao Mateo, "La versión china de la obra ilustrada de Jerónimo Nadal Evangelicae Historiae Imagines," Goya 330 (2010): pp. 16–33; Junhyoung Michael Shin, "The Supernatural in the Jesuit Adaptation to Confucianism: Giulio Aleni's Tianzhu Jiangsheng Chuxiang Jingjie (Fuzhou, 1637)," History of Religions 50, no. 4 (2011): pp. 329–61; Riavis, "Comparing Western Perspectives and Eastern Axonometries;" and Yi, "Jesuits' Convenevolezza." Further bibliography is provided below.

<sup>87</sup> Nicolas Standaert, "Chinese Prints and their European Prototypes: Schall's Jincheng shuxiang," Print Quarterly 23, no. 3 (2006): pp. 231–53; Nicolas Standaert, An Illustrated Life of Christ Presented to the Chinese Emperor: The History of Jincheng shuxiang (1640) (Sankt Augustin: Institut Monumenta Serica, 2007).

<sup>88</sup> Andrés I. Prieto, "The Perils of Accommodation: Jesuit Missionary Strategies in the Early Modern World," Journal of Jesuit Studies 4, no. 3 (2017): pp. 395–414, here p. 395.

Unfortunately, Victoria does not explicitly indicate the title of the book in his possession, but from the information that he provides it is possible to identify it with some degree of certainty. On the one hand, the strong connection that he underscores with the Evangelicae Historiae Images rules out the Jincheng shuxiang, whose illustrations are only partly derived from that model. On the other hand, the subject that he indicates, the Life of Jesus Christ, makes the identification of his book with Aleni's Jingjie more probable than that with the Guicheng: The first is, in fact, an extended visual narration of the Vita Christi, whereas the second is an illustrated rosary manual. In addition, the Jingjie is by far the most widespread illustrated gospel that was produced in China in the seventeenth century, considering its numerous re-editions and the number of the surviving copies (thirty-seven), which significantly outnumber both the Guicheng (seven) and the Jincheng shuxiang (four).⁸⁹

Concerning the woodcuts that they include, previous studies have emphasized that the Chinese artists working on the Guicheng approached the Wierixs' original images more freely. As Nicolas Standaert has pointed out, the illustrations of the Guicheng "more than others have been transformed according to Chinese pictorial conventions."⁹⁰ Yet, while scholars have stressed the closer formal relation of the Jingjie to its European counterpart, the Chinese facets shaping the Jingjie are no less significant. In particular, Qu Yi has underscored that the images from the Jingjie "featuring a selection of Chinese elements and themes, also show an adaptation of Confucianism clearly."⁹¹ By pinpointing specific details, such as the landscape painted on a folding screen located on the background of the scene of The Foot Washing or the floral decorations added to the tablecloth of The Encounter of Jesus with the Sinner and on the curtain of The Last Supper, Qu Yi has shown how the Jingjie's illustrations are fashioned to meet the taste of officials and literati of the late Ming dynasty, namely the readership that the Jingjie intended to engage.⁹²

A stylistic analysis of these woodcuts can also bring to light the significant variations and formal adaptations that the Chinese printmakers accomplished (figs. 5–8). The comparison between the two prints depicting The Agony of Jesus in the Gethsemane Garden from the Evangelicae Historiae Images and from the Jingjie is particularly illuminating (figs. 5 and 6). In his engraving, Hieronymus Wierix sets up a highly contrasted chiaroscuro effect that immerses the scene in a dense nocturnal atmosphere from which the dramatic apex, the angel comforting Jesus, visually stands out through

<sup>89</sup> For copies of Jingjie that are currently known, see Sun Yuming, "Cultural Translatability and the Presentation of Christ as Portrayed in Visual Images from Ricci to Aleni," in The Chinese Face of Jesus Christ, ed. Roman Malek, vol. 2 (Sankt Augustin: Monumenta Serica, 2003), pp. 461–98, here p. 477; for Guicheng, see Yi, "Jesuits' Convenevolezza," p. 464; Standaert, "Chinese Prints and their European Prototypes," p. 234. For another recently identified copy of the Jingjie, see Emily Teo's contribution to this volume.

<sup>90</sup> Ibid., p. 233.

<sup>91</sup> Yi, "Jesuits' Convenevolezza," p. 466.

<sup>92</sup> Ibid., p. 472.

the burst of heavenly light breaking though the sky and falling upon them. By contrast, the atmospheric effects are diminished in the Jingjie illustration, where Wierix's subtle interplay of light and shade is replaced by a pulsating and vivacious pattern of lines. The latter is particularly appreciable in the representation of the clouds that accompany the divine manifestation, whose swirling movements can be compared to the Taoist and Buddhist calligraphic pictorial tradition.⁹³ The dearth of sfumato effects and the predominance of a flowing rhythm of the line is also particularly noticeable in the final woodcut of the Jingjie, illustrating The Coronation of the Virgin. The sacred event is attended by a large and diverse crowd of bystanders (fig. 8). Along with the twelve Apostles, one can notice further Western figures on the right, and a group of Chinese figures gathering on the left. The two groups appear as united by the papal tiara at the center; it is an effective visual representation of Aleni's message of inclusion of Chinese peoples in the Christian project of salvation.⁹⁴

It is unknown how the Jingjie ended up in Victoria's collection, but the very fact that he underscores his ownership of one copy is a sign of his pride in having acquired it. Therefore, on the one hand, it was the presence of this object in Victoria's book collection that stimulated his curiosity about the state and history of printing in China, thus enriching the spectrum of his reading and, consequently, of his historiographical reflection. On the other hand, his notes on the origin of printmaking served the purpose of introducing the readers of the "Indice" to a rarity in his possession, which had arrived in his library from far afield after a perilous journey, thus implicitly emphasizing the variety and singularity of his book and print collection.

Indeed, this was one of the main objectives motivating the publication of the "Indice". In the preface, he recalls that he was asked by the print amateurs to compile a catalogue of his Raphaelesque collection, to be used "for their purchases,"⁹⁵ but it is impossible to disregard the tacit intention to promote his print collection and give it broader visibility by publishing a catalogue. This very same intention motivated the project of the Museo Vittoriano, a series of drawings now stored at the Getty Research Institute reproducing the antique sculptures in his private collection that he intended,

<sup>93</sup> As suggested by Paola Demattè, "Christ and Confucius: Accommodating Christian and Chinese Beliefs," in China on Paper: European and Chinese Works from the Late Sixteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century, ed. Marcia Reed and Paola Demattè (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2007), pp. 29–52, especially p. 36, with respect to Guicheng's Annonciation.

<sup>94</sup> Gianni Criveller, "Cultura visual cristiana en la China Ming tardía," Artes de México 76 (2005): pp. 44–45, especially p. 45. In regard to Aleni's views on the inclusion of China in God's plan of salvation, see Gianni Criveller, "The Dialogues of Giulio Aleni on Christ and China: The Mystery of the Plan of Salvation and China," in Missionary Approaches and Linguistics in Mainland China and Taiwan, ed. Ku Weiying (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2001), pp. 163–81.

<sup>95</sup> This was the same readership addressed by Evelyn in his Sculptura. See Croset, "John Evelyn," pp. 114–15.

Fig. 5: Hieronymus Wierix, after Bernardino Passeri, Christ Praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, 1593, engraving, in: Evangelicae Historiae Imagines (Antwerp: Society of Jesus, 1593), The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession number 86-B24301

Fig. 6: Unknown artist(s), Christ Praying in the Gethsemane Garden, 1637, woodcut, in: Tianzhu jiangsheng chuxiang jingjie 天主降生出像經解, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Cod.sin. 23

Fig. 7: Hieronymus Wierix, after Bernardino Passeri, The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin, 1593, engraving, in: Evangelicae Historiae Imagines (Antwerp: Society of Jesus, 1593), The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Accession number 86-B24301

Fig. 8: Unknown artist(s), The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin, 1637, woodcut, in: Tianzhu jiangsheng chuxiang jingjie 天主降生出像經解, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Cod.sin. 23

but ultimately failed, to translate into engravings and publish.⁹⁶ Therefore, as the main goal of the "Indice" was to promote his Raphaelesque prints, the reference to the Jingjie signals the singularity and uniqueness of his art and books collections even further.⁹⁷

<sup>96</sup> Museo Vittoriano overo raccolta di varj monumenti antichi esistenti nello studio di D. Ferdinando Vit-

Victoria's critical appraisal of these prints is also of particular interest, as it reveals a glimmer of esteem for Chinese printmaking that was unusual among European art amateurs of the early eighteenth century. As copies of the Wierix brothers' engravings, he describes these illustrations as "very fine," despite their formal emphasis on outlines. The usual prejudice towards Chinese aesthetics can be seen in parallel with a previous passage from the "Origin and Progress," in which Victoria enumerates the advances achieved by the art of printmaking in his lifetime, comparing it to painting:

Our prints, except for colour, are in no way inferior to paintings in the resemblance and naturalism of the faces, in the expressions of the passions and the feelings of the soul, in the tenderness and subtlety of the hair, in the reflection of the metals, in the splendor of the jewels, in the different textures, quality, and almost in the colors of the textiles, and in all the perfection that can be expressed with the brush.⁹⁸

By emphasizing the pictorial character of contemporary printmaking and advancing its relation to painting as a yardstick for quality, Victoria's views seem affected by bias not only against non-European art, but also against the artifacts of the early stages of printmaking in Germany and Italy. With their emphasis on the rhythm of the line, fifteenthcentury woodcuts and engravings are denigrated by Victoria; they belong to the "coarse beginnings" of this art and appear as "crude and unpleasant"—not different from the "ungainly" (and linear) manner of Chinese art.⁹⁹ Victoria uses what is distant in time and space in order to present the artistic merits of the time and place he inhabits. It is a strategy of self-definition ex negativo that implies both a rigid teleological idea of progress and an obstinate belief in Europe's cultural superiority.

However, his appraisal of the Jingjie's woodcuts as "very fine" should not be underestimated. While previous studies have focused on the visual accommodatio that these prints exerted on Chinese audiences, Victoria's sentiment demonstrates that they also acted in reverse; it was the European substrate that accommodated the Chinese taste

toria in Roma (1708). The drawings are partly by Saverio Scilla, and partly by Victoria himself (see Lyons, The Collections of Vicente Victoria).

<sup>97</sup> In the vast bibliography on the phenomenon of the European Kunstkammer, Wunderkammer, and cabinets of curiosities, see most recently Krzysztof Pomian, Le muse´e, une histoire mondiale. I. Du trésor au musée (Paris: Gallimard, 2022), especially pp. 392–430.

<sup>98</sup> Victoria, "Indice", f. 17v: "Questi nostri [intagli], toltone il colore nulla hanno che invidiare alle vere pitture nella somiglianza, e naturalezza de i volti nell'espressione delle passioni, e degli effetti dell'animo, nella morbidezza, e stilatura de capelli, nel lustro de' metalli, nello splendore delle gioie, nella distinzione, qualità, e quasi nel colorito degli abiti, ed in tutto ciò insomma che di più raro, e di più perfetto può esprimersi col pennello." Cf. Bassegoda i Hugas, "Noves dades," p. 58.

<sup>99</sup> Victoria, "Indice", ff. 17r-v: "Per discorrerne secondo la verità istorica, torna in acconcio il premettere, che assai rozzi dell'arte dell'intaglio furono i principii; le arti tutte sortiscono ugual nascimento debole, e quasi direi barbaro; ne v'è se non la lunghezza del tempo, e la continua industria d'ingegni elevati, che le conduca à poco all'eccellenza, e alla perfezzione, come appunto è accaduto ne gli intagli, che presentemente si fanno con lavoro maraviglioso, e con maniera gentile diversa affatto da quella cruda, e dispiacevole, con la quale si diè cominciamento all'arte." Cf. Bassegoda i Hugas, "Noves dades," p. 58.

for calligraphic lines to a European viewership. Consequently, Victoria's remarks constitute a relevant episode of the cross-cultural reception of the Jingjie, bringing to the fore its twofold agency. On the one hand, its illustrations were originally conceived as a Chinese adaptation of the Wierix brothers' engravings, specifically designed to address a Chinese audience; on the other, with their circulation throughout Europe, they also facilitated a Western aesthetic engagement with Chinese pictorial systems, despite the enduring prejudices and clichés manifest in Victoria's words. The reception of these prints as observed and commented on by Victoria underpins what Alina Payne has recently described as "the agency of portable art objects."¹⁰⁰ Their very presence in a Roman collection stimulated the curiosity of their owner, posed new questions, suggested alternative readings, ultimately broadening the spatial and historical horizons of Victoria's historiography.¹⁰¹

The ultimate goal of this contribution has been to demonstrate how the hybridity and portability of objects like the Jingjie could engage the inquiring mind of a literato and art collector like Vicente Victoria, impressing a global outreach upon both his collecting ambition and his historical quest. Indeed, between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the visual experience of the world that one could encounter in the Papal city was pervasive, as part of the rhetoric of the Ecclesia Triumphans enforced by the Roman Church in the wake of the Catholic Reformation. It was articulated on different scales and permeated public and private spheres, outdoor and indoor spaces: from the exotica and rarities housed in Kircher's museum in the Roman College and in Victoria's residence on the Pincio Hill, to the monumental representations of the four parts of the world, such as the Continents frescoed on the ceiling of the church of Saint Ignatius, completed by Andrea Pozzo (1642–1709) less than ten years before Victoria finished his "Indice."¹⁰² Such pervasive visual experience, along with the global

<sup>100</sup> Alina Payne, "From Riverbed to Seashore: An Introduction," in The Land between Two Seas: Art on the Move in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea (1300–1700), ed. Alina Payne (Leiden: Brill, 2022), pp. 1–24, here p. 5.

<sup>101</sup> The literature on the agency of exotica and objects of extra-European cultures in European collections is extensive and growing; among others, see Isabel Yaya, "Wonders of America: The Curiosity Cabinet as a Site of Representation and Knowledge," Journal of the History of Collections 20, no. 2 (2008): pp. 173–88; Daniela Bleichmar, "Seeing the World in a Room: Looking at Exotica in Early Modern Collections," in Collecting Across Cultures Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, ed. Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 15–30; Daniela Bleichmar and Meredith Martin, "Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World," Art History 38 (2015): pp. 604–19; and the essays collected in Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds., The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World (New York: Routledge, 2016).

<sup>102</sup> On Kircher's Museum, see Paula Findlen, "Scientific Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Athanasius Kircher and the Roman College Museum," in Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2003), pp. 225–84; John Edward Fletcher, A Study of the Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher, "Germanus incredibilis:" With a Selection of his Unpublished Correspondence and an Annotated Translation of his Autobiography (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 183–86, especially p. 183 note 16 for further bibliography. On Pozzo's fresco ceiling in Saint Ignazio, see Claudio Strinati, "Gli affreschi della chiesa di Sant'Ignazio a Roma," in Andrea Pozzo, ed. Vittorio De Feo and Valentino Marti-

dimension dominating public discourse (as in the case of the Chinese Rites Controversy, which was particularly heated during the Albani papacy), had fostered a "world consciousness"¹⁰³ that would eventually destabilize received systems of knowledge and produce multi-layered historical narratives. The main goal of this essay has been to look at this transformation through the case of Vicente Victoria's collecting activity and "Sino-European intercultural books" like the Jingjie, a cross-cultural object that, in the Eurasian span of its circulation, acted in two directions, mediating between Chinese and European modes of formal representation and visual perception.¹⁰⁴

nelli (Milan: Electa, 1996), pp. 66–93; Thomas Frangenberg, "Andrea Pozzo on the ceiling paintings in S. Ignazio," in Pictorial Composition from Medieval to Modern Art, ed. Paul Taylor and François Quiviger (London: Warburg Institute, 2000), pp. 91–116.

<sup>103</sup> Sanjay Subrahmanyam, "On World Historians in the Sixteenth Century," Representations 91, no. 1 (2005): pp. 26–57, in particular p. 45.

<sup>104</sup> For comparative readings on cross-cultural images resulting from European interactions with other geographical contexts than China, see the recent works by Cécile Fromont, "Penned by Encounter: Visibility and Invisibility of the Cross-Cultural in Images from Early Modern Franciscan Missions in Central Africa and Central Mexico," Renaissance Quarterly 75, no. 4 (2022): pp. 1221–65; and Aaron Hyman, Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2021). For further readings on cross-cultural objects on the move, see the particularly profitable essays in The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of World for Early Modern Religious Art, ed. Christine Göttler and Mia M. Mochizuki (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

#### Gabriel Batalla-Lagleyre The Practice of Drawing as a Tool of Connoisseurship in Eighteenth-Century Europe

In recent decades, the role of the image in the construction of knowledge in early modern Europe has been the subject of several brilliant studies.¹ However, works on scientific forms of visualization generally leave aside the question of the authorship of images, whether drawings or prints.² This absence is understandable; treatises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often fail to mention the names of illustrators, and this silence is correlated with social prejudices concerning craft professions. Yet, the authorship of images was a question that many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholars faced. Not only do their considerations testify to the heuristic value of images but they also deal with the practice of drawing, regarded as a way of confronting tangible objects—as a tool of connoisseurship. Aristocratic scholars, whose humanistic education increasingly included drawing, had to differentiate between drawing as documentation and as art; scientific drawings were not supposed to bear the trace of their creator's hand, only the apprehension of his educated brain.

This early modern cross-disciplinary use of drawing makes it necessary to specify the limits of connoisseurship, here understood as the set of scientific practices based on the material and visual analysis of concrete objects. These objects include both naturalia and artificialia, which today would be assigned to the fields of science, arts and crafts, or fine arts. They also encompass places, sites, or architectures studied outdoors, and experienced as a whole. The actors in this field are the experts of the Republic of Letters, sailors, and aristocratic travelers on their Grand Tour. It covers everyday practices of knowledge and specialized erudite enterprises. While learning to draw for scientific purposes may have been a formalized training, drawing was often put into practice through a random encounter with an object. The further this object is from the visual and material culture of the scholar, the more useful drawing is to compensate for shortcomings in verbalization. Using France as an example, I would like to show how drawing was established as a scholarly tool throughout Europe and how it was also used when confronted with objects from outside of Europe.

First, I will propose a genealogy of this phenomenon, which began in the seventeenth century, when drawing became an auxiliary science to travelling. Then, I will come back to the intersection of the learned practices of drawing in the eighteenth cen-

<sup>1</sup> To mention only the most important ones, on antiquarian knowledge and natural sciences respectively: Francis Haskell, History and Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Lorraine J. Daston and Peter L. Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). 2 With the exception of Daston and Galison, Objectivity, p. 84–98. See also Gabriel Batalla-Lagleyre, "Dessiner en société. Histoire culturelle des pratiques du dessin en amateur dans la France moderne (ca. 1590–1820)" (PhD diss., Université de Bourgogne, 2022).

tury, from the natural sciences to antiquarian knowledge. Drawing was enriched; not only was it a method of recording and communication, but also of understanding and appropriation. Finally, at the end of the eighteenth century, some journeys to the Eastern Mediterranean point to the emergence of a more subjective paradigm of documentary drawing, between the evolution of the artistic status and wonder in front of places and objects until then unknown.

### Drawing, Discovery, and Recording in the Seventeenth Century

The sixteenth century was "the first great age of visual encyclopedias."³ However, visual repertoires were deepened over the seventeenth century, notably by Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657). "Paper museums"—the predecessors of print and drawing collections—worked through accumulation and replaced the heaping up of objects. The image makes it possible to extend scientific inquiry—through the subjective gaze (autopsia)—in the absence of the object of study. Neither Cassiano dal Pozzo nor his colleagues at the Accademia dei Lincei drew. Likewise, the names of the professional draftsmen employed are very rarely mentioned. In one of the Accademia's most significant publications, the Tesoro Messicano, no author's name is attached to its eight-hundred illustrations—as if images were a transparent medium and the identity of the draftsman were an anecdotal matter.⁴

It would be a mistake to think that these scholars were not capable of a theory of images—Cassiano dal Pozzo was Nicolas Poussin's patron. The anonymity of draftsmen was not due to a lack of interest in images but to strong social prejudices. Although historiography has highlighted Peiresc's good relations with some artists, his letters show his contempt for painters.⁵ They were said to be lazy, unreliable, and often ignorant. For Peiresc (1580–1637), knowledge of the object had to precede graphic reproduction, and the intellectual training of painters was too weak for them to succeed. He put in place strategies, either by supervising the draftsmen during their work or educating them about natural history and antiquity. Even so, painters suffer from an essential fault: they value beauty over accuracy and add "many beautiful tiny things" to their drawings.⁶ They pervert images and their recording and communicative function.

<sup>3</sup> David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002).

<sup>4</sup> Francisco Hernández, Rerum Medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus (Rome: Mascardi, 1628). See recently Maria Eugenia Cadeddu and Marco Guardo, eds., Il Tesoro Messicano. Libri e Saperi tra Europa e Nuovo Mondo (Florence: Olschki, 2013).

<sup>5</sup> Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Lettres de Peiresc, ed. Philippe Tamizey de Larroque, 7 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1888–1898).

<sup>6</sup> Letter from Peiresc to Bonnard, April 3, 1630, transcribed in Peiresc, Lettres, vol. 7, p. 690. All translations are by the author.

These social biases work in the other direction. When a scholar produces an image, it is less doubtful. The image then works as the testimony of a scholarly gaze. The astronomer Johannes Hevelius (1611–97) was praised by Gassendi (1592–1655), a correspondent of Peiresc, for drawing and engraving his illustrations himself.⁷ His signatures show his awareness of authorship issues: he signed his plates with the appellations "Observator sculpsit" or "Autor sculpsit," which ensured the quality of the transcription (fig. 1).

Peiresc urged his correspondents to draw, and he himself regretted not being capable of doing so. In his biography published by Gassendi in 1641, a whole paragraph reports that Peiresc would have liked to exchange two fingers of his left hand for the ability to draw with his right hand.⁸ Gassendi's eulogy was intended to create an ethical standard within the Republic of Letters,⁹ and these prescriptions endured. In 1770, the Latin text was translated into French.¹⁰ In fact, Peiresc's arguments in favor of the graphic independence of scholars were often repeated in the eighteenth century.

The optical revolution of the seventeenth century encouraged the drawing practices of scholars. Nevertheless, these practices have long depended on biographical accident. Galileo (1564–1642) drew, but he had been particularly close to painters since his childhood.¹¹ Robert Hooke (1635–1703) drew too, but Peter Lely had trained him as a painter when he was a young orphan.¹² These graphic practices normalized during the ancien régime.

As drawing education spread among the elites, its cognitive and intellectual potential reached a large audience of gentlemen. For them, the objective was first of all military, as proposed by Baldassare Castiglione (1478 –1529): drawing had to keep track of territories in order to communicate them to headquarters.¹³ In 1604, for a French pedagogue, drawing should enable the gentleman to bring back "beautiful and rich savings" from what he had seen when travelling.¹⁴ Henry Peacham (1578–ca. 1644) added a discovery function to this military use. Drawing enables one to bring back:

<sup>7</sup> Letter from Gassendi to Hevelius, March 26, 1644, quoted in Johannes Hevelius, Correspondance de Johannes Hevelius, vol. 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), p. 65.

<sup>8</sup> Pierre Gassendi, Viri illustris Nicolai Claudii Fabricii de Peiresc . . . Vita (Paris: S. Cramoisy, 1641); Pierre Gassendi, Peiresc, 1580–1637: Vie de l'illustre Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, trans. Roger Lassalle (Paris: Belin, 1992), p. 304.

<sup>9</sup> Peter N. Miller, Peiresc's Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 4–5.

<sup>10</sup> Pierre Gassendi, Vie de Nicolas-Claude Peiresc, trans. J.-B. Requier (Paris: Musier, 1770).

<sup>11</sup> Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954); Horst Bredekamp, Galileis denkende Hand. Form und Forschung um 1600 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015).

<sup>12</sup> About Hooke's drawings, see an insightful synthesis in Frédérique Aït-Touati and Stephen Gaukroger, Le Monde en images. Voir, représenter, savoir, de Descartes à Leibniz (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2015), pp. 65–90.

<sup>13</sup> On Castiglione and amateur drawing: Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

<sup>14</sup> Thomas Pelletier, La Nourriture de la noblesse (Paris: Veuve M. Patisson, 1604), p. 89.

. . . from the farthest part of the world . . . whatsoever is rare and worthy the observance, as . . . the forms and colours of all Fruits, severall beauties of their Flowers; of medicinable Simples never before seene or heard of: the orient Colours, and lively Pictures of their Birds, the shape of their Beasts, Fishes, Worms, Flyes, &c ....¹⁵

Fig. 1: Johannes Hevelius, Plenilunium, 1647, etching, in: Johannes Hevelius, Selenographia (Gdańsk: Typis Hünefeldianis, 1647), Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

<sup>15</sup> Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (London: F. Constable, 1634), pp. 124–25.

In 1693, in his Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke (1632–1704) defended drawing as "a thing very useful to a Gentleman in several occasions; but especially if he travels," to communicate the shapes of buildings, machines, costumes, and customs.¹⁶

These learned practices influenced the training of sailors. As early as 1643, a professor of mathematics at a Jesuit college wrote in the manual Hydrographie that pilots should learn to draw in order to represent "many particularities" of "the regions where the ship is boarding," such as mountains, trees, birds, fish, etc.¹⁷ In the same year, philosopher La Mothe Le Vayer (1588–1672) recommended that the explorers sent by the king should know how to "handle the brush or the pencil."¹⁸ Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), in the reform of the merchant navy of 1681, made the presence of a master of hydrography compulsory in the major harbors; these teachers would show drawing to the pilots to make them capable of depicting the harbors, coasts, mountains, trees, etc. In 1689, the reform of the military navy stipulated that the gardes de la marine would also receive lessons from a drawing master. This teaching continued until the end of the eighteenth century. It stimulated the publication of drawing books, and some works testify to the level of competence of certain pupils.¹⁹

In London, in a lecture read in 1694 at the Royal Society, Robert Hooke presented "an Instrument of Use to take the Draught, or Picture of any Thing," a sort of camera obscura.²⁰ For the sake of science, drawing should be a common skill. Hooke recommends it to "navigators and travellers" to bring back from their journeys information on topography, flora, tools of the inhabitants, and so on. I will only give two examples of these learned travelers and draftsmen. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Minim friar Charles Plumier (1646–1704) published botanical works that presented the plants he had discovered in America; he was both the author of the drawings and the prints.²¹ In 1714, the Minim friar Louis Feuillée (1660–1732) began to publish his American—mainly botanical—discoveries. He too was the author of the drawings (fig. 2). In both cases, the travelers signed their illustrations. Feuillée even specified that he was the king's botanist. The scholar's authorship, which works as a proof, was meant to be made public.

Drawing became part of the art of travelling, the ars apodemica. Lawyer Baudelot de Dairval (1648 –1722) authored an essay in 1686 about the usefulness of travelling for scholars, in which he promoted drawing as a necessity for the study of monuments,

<sup>16</sup> John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1693), pp. 190–92. 17 Georges Fournier, Hydrographie (Paris: M. Soly, 1643), pp. 161–62.

<sup>18</sup> François de La Mothe Le Vayer, Opuscules ou petits traictez (Paris: A. de Sommaville et A. Courbé, 1643), pp. 204–5.

<sup>19</sup> A print by a garde de la marine is reproduced in Magali Théron, "Les ateliers de peinture et de sculpture des arsenaux en Provence en marge de l'Académie de peinture et de sculpture de Marseille," Rives méditerranéennes 56 (2018): pp. 147–74, here p. 172.

<sup>20</sup> William Derham, Philosophical Experiments and Observations of the Late Eminent Dr. Robert Hooke (London: W. and J. Innys, 1726), pp. 292–96.

<sup>21</sup> Theodore W. Pietsch, Charles Plumier (1646–1704) and his Drawings of French and Caribbean Fishes (Paris: MNHN, 2017).

Fig. 2: Pierre Giffart, after Louis Feuillée, Epipactis amplo flore Luteo, ca. 1710–14, etching, in: Louis Feuillée, Journal des observations physiques (Paris: Pierre Giffart, 1714), Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

medals, inscriptions, and, more generally, for visiting cabinets: "A traveler would miss his main goal . . . if he could not use the pencil."²² In 1789, an Essay to direct and extend

<sup>22</sup> Charles César Baudelot de Dairval, De l'utilité des voyages, et de l'avantage que la recherche des antiquitez procure aux sçavans, vol. 1 (Paris: P. Auboüin et P. Emery, 1686), pp. 88–89.

the inquiries of patriotic travelers repeated the same praise of graphic skills.²³ Drawing merges with the travel diary. The attentive traveler must keep an account of his journey and have visual annotations alongside.

An autograph practice of drawing is even more important when travel accounts are published. The growing place of images in printed relations gave rise to atypical careers, such as that of the Dutchman Cornelis de Bruijn (1652–1727). Trained as a painter and recognized as such by his peers, de Bruijn was a professional artist. However, his 1698 Voyage to the Levant and his 1714 Travels into Moscovy, Persia, and the East Indies, known throughout Europe, tell a different story. De Bruijn describes painting as an activity developed only in view of his travels.²⁴ This pose was a social necessity, as a painter was certainly not considered a valid scientific interlocutor. Nevertheless, the author insists on his graphic skills. Accuracy of illustrations requires specific production methods—not only must the images be executed on site, but by the author himself. Monetized service relationships, when a scholar uses "mercenary draftsmen," are inferior in principle; paid draftsmen are not driven by "the desire for glory, which is necessary to discover the truth."²⁵ Plus, they lack the "good eyes" and "judgment" necessary to carry out the drawings. The rare case of Cornelis de Bruijn becomes an encouragement for every ambitious traveler to draw for himself.

#### Drawing and Appropriation: An Intersectional Practice

Scholarly uses of drawing follow the evolution of scientific paradigms. Drawing was well adapted to preserving particularities in the scientific culture of rarity that survived into the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century though, its use could have been less obvious when it came to noting common points and species and to establishing laws. However, the mistrust of images was rare. Drawing was valued in an epistemology based on comparison and classification.

The authorial issue was prominent in eighteenth-century literature. The arguments had not changed much since Peiresc, but they were more frequently used. For René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683–1757), in 1734, drawing had hardly any intellectual dimension. The visual sharpness of the scientist does not need the pencil. However, Réaumur was resistant to professional artists because drawing only provides precise information if its practitioner has the a priori visual awareness of the scholar. So, the scientist must supervise the draftsman, and, to do the best, it would be necessary

<sup>23</sup> Leopold Berchtold, An Essay to Direct and Extend the Inquiries of Patriotic Travellers, 2 vols. (London: Robinson, 1789).

<sup>24</sup> Cornelis de Bruijn, Voyage au Levant (Delft: Henri de Kroonevelt, 1700), p. 1.

<sup>25</sup> Cornelis de Bruijn, Voyages de Corneille Le Brun par la Moscovie, en Perse, et aux Indes orientales, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: Wetstein, 1718), pp. 437–38.

"that every observer have himself the talent to draw."²⁶ The independence of the scientist further justifies an education in drawing; sometimes, it is necessary to reproduce "unique moments" during which the scholar does not have "a foreign hand" with him.²⁷ In 1744, in a letter to the naturalist Jean-François Séguier (1703–84), Réaumur explained the advantages of scholars' drawings: Séguier will "better capture the particularities" of his fossils "than would an ordinary draftsman not a naturalist at all."²⁸ Séguier repeated this shortcoming of professionals to the numismatist Joseph Pellerin (1684–1783): "They should be antiquarians and connoisseurs in the part of antiquity for which they are needed: they would see with different eyes."²⁹ These calls to draw were common until the end of the century, in particular in the eulogies read at the Académie des Sciences.

Two of Séguier's correspondents were aware of the intellectual value of drawing, beyond its usual role as a vector of information: Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d'Argenville (1680–1765) and the Count of Caylus (1692–1765). These two men were close to painters and paid attention to drawings as artworks. Dezallier d'Argenville was the first in France to promote drawings as objects to be collected; Caylus was a friend of Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), whose role in the commodification of drawings was fundamental. In 1742, in his Histoire naturelle, Dezallier explained that drawing makes it possible to know the differences between shells, to see "the slightest fold, the fineness of the form, of the contour."³⁰ Drawing develops visual acuity and the ability to propose typologies; it allows the draftsman to "capture the fine details of Nature" and to "appropriate them."³¹ Social biases are linked to these intellectual issues. For the figures, Dezallier took care to employ only "enlightened naturalists," who were able to "convince [the viewer] of the truth" of the images, whereas the painters would have "disguise[d] the natural to give it a more picturesque taste."³²

Drawing "opens the eye," to borrow an expression that André Félibien (1619–95) used about amateur draftsmen as early as 1688. It is indeed an artistic standard that Dezallier transposed to natural history. According to the Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres, the practice of drawing is necessary for connoisseurship, especially for judging masters' drawings. An artistic practice, even a minor one, puts the draftsman "in state to judge better than another." "The operation of the hand forms the taste"

<sup>26</sup> René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des insectes, vol. 1 (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1734–42), p. 54.

<sup>27</sup> Ibid.

<sup>28</sup> Letter from Réaumur to Séguier, January 10, 1744. La Rochelle, Médiathèque Michel-Crépeau, ms. 664, letter 3, transcription: https://seguier.nakala.fr.

<sup>29</sup> Letter from Séguier to Pellerin, February 22, 1769. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, NAF 1074, fol. 209–10, transcription: https://seguier.nakala.fr.

<sup>30</sup> Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d'Argenville, L'Histoire naturelle (Paris: De Bure l'Aîné, 1742), p. 117. 31 Ibid, p. 233.

<sup>32</sup> Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d'Argenville, L'Histoire naturelle . . . augmentée de la Zoomorphose (Paris: De Bure l'Aîné, 1757), p. 11.

and gives intelligence; it shows "the road" followed by painters.³³ It enables the apprehension of artworks not by ideal categories but by their genetics.

Dezallier d'Argenville drew, etched, and painted.³⁴ Yet his practice is heterogeneous, and he did not limit himself to copying. By contrast, the practice of the Count of Caylus was much more standardized.³⁵ The lecture he read at the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1748, on the qualities of amateurs, gives the main keys of interpretation.³⁶ It is an answer to Dezallier, who belonged to an opposite coterie. Caylus insists on the necessity "almost indispensable to amateurs, to copy in any kind, to draw and to paint even from nature," to "practice all the operations of this beautiful art." Through this study, amateurs form their memory of artworks and learn to admire artistic quality. Rivalry with Dezallier explains the reference to painting and nature; Caylus in particular was an etcher, and he limited himself to a role of copyist. He insisted on this limit as proper to amateurs, who start their artistic studies late and can never "compose like a great master."³⁷ It is not a problem. It is not so much a question of training his hand as of acquiring taste and exercising "his eyes," as the practice serves above all an exercise of comparison of artworks.

According to Caylus, the same applies to antiquities. Comparison is the main source of antiquarian knowledge, and "eyes enlightened by drawing notice considerable differences, where the common eye sees only a perfect resemblance."³⁸ This cognitive function takes the lead; it is not necessary that the antiquarian, like the art lover, handles "the pencil with elegance" and composes "like an Artist."³⁹ He must limit himself to acquiring "the accuracy of the eye" and to copy faithfully enough to "embrace an object," "to seize its perfections, or its defects."⁴⁰ Through copying, drawing allows for a micro-historical analysis, at the level of each work, both in the field of antiques and masters' drawings. At a holistic level, it makes one aware of stylistic differences. Besides, the graphic practice of antiquarians is made mandatory by the poor scholarly

<sup>33</sup> Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d'Argenville, Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres, vol. 1 (Paris: De Bure l'Aîné, 1745–52), pp. XXXIII–XXXIV.

<sup>34</sup> On Dezallier d'Argenville, see Anne Lafont, ed., 1740, un abrégé du monde: Savoirs et collections autour de Dezallier d'Argenville (Lyon: Fage; Paris: INHA, 2012).

<sup>35</sup> For Caylus' etchings, see Joachim Rees, Die Kultur des Amateurs. Studien zu Leben und Werk von Anne Claude Philippe de Thubières, Comte de Caylus (1692–1765) (Weimar: VDG, 2006); Alexandra Blanc, Collections et pratiques d'un amateur au XVIII<sup>e</sup> siècle: Les recueils de dessins gravés du comte de Caylus (Neuchâtel: Alphil-PUS, 2013).

<sup>36</sup> Jacqueline Lichtenstein and Christian Michel, eds., Conférences de l'Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, vol. 5 (Paris: Beaux-Arts de Paris, 2007–15), pp. 196–205.

<sup>37</sup> Ibid.

<sup>38</sup> Anne-Claude de Caylus, Recueil d'antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques et romaines, vol. 1 (Paris: Desaint & Saillant, 1752–67), pp. VIII–IX.

<sup>39</sup> Ibid, vol. 3, pp. XIX–XX.

<sup>40</sup> Ibid.

knowledge of professionals; Caylus went so far as to theorize a "quarrel" between engravers and antiquarians.⁴¹

He himself was the author of thousands of etchings, mostly reproducing antiquities and master drawings. In 1750, in his lecture on "Composition," he clarified the cognitive interest of copying.⁴² By reproducing a drawing by Raphael one stroke after the other, he became able to observe "the chains of the composition and the necessity of each part in relation to its whole."⁴³ Caylus thus entered into the mind of the artist, whether it was Raphael or a medalist of ancient Rome. As for the sciences, knowledge is built by experiment and work. In this sense, prints, although they can be distributed to consolidate a scholar's network, are less important than the act that generates them. Caylus did not print many proofs, he sometimes destroyed his copperplates, and his correspondents testify to the difficulty of obtaining his etchings.

The production of etched facsimiles of master drawings emerged as the practice par excellence of connoisseurship, while these drawings played an increasing role in artistic expertise. Social issues impacted this culture of facsimile.⁴⁴ As early as 1724, Pierre Crozat (1661–1740) complained about the difficulty of finding copyists to engrave his drawings; professional engravers made their style too apparent.⁴⁵ In 1731, Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774) complained about the reluctance of professionals to undertake facsimiles: they seek financial gain and impose modern taste on their copies.⁴⁶ The professional image-maker, regarded as a mercenary, is denigrated because of his social position. Two aesthetics are also opposed: erudite drawing has the ambition of analysis, whereas artistic theory favors the tout-ensemble and the effect.

In the 1730s, a practice of reproductive printing was set up around a group that included Caylus, Mariette, the Abbé de Maroulle (1669/74–1726) and the Venetian Zanetti (1689–1767).⁴⁷ One example shows how the knowledge of the connoisseur could be transformed and reified by his graphic practice. When Mariette acquired a drawing by Lodovico Carracci, he mounted it with a copy by the Abbé de Maroulle, certainly to

<sup>41</sup> Delphine Burlot, "La querelle des antiquaires et des graveurs. L'antiquaire, l'artiste et l'illustration savante des antiquités," in L'Artiste et l'antiquaire, ed. Delphine Burlot and Emmanuel Lurin (Paris: Picard/INHA, 2017), pp. 127–42.

<sup>42</sup> Conférences, vol. 5, pp. 594–609.

<sup>43</sup> Ibid, p. 605.

<sup>44</sup> Pascal Griener, La République de l'œil: L'expérience de l'art au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Jacob, 2010); Valérie Kobi, "Les chimères de la République des Arts: Fonction et expérimentation du fac-similé scientifique dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle," in Artistes, savants et amateurs: Art et sociabilité au XVIIIe siècle (1715–1815), ed. Jessica L. Fripp et al. (Paris: Mare et Martin, 2016), pp. 157–69.

<sup>45</sup> Letter from Crozat to Niccolò Gaburri, August 20, 1724, reproduced in Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura ed architettura, ed. Giovanni Gaetano Bottari, vol. 2 (Milan: Giovanni Silvestri, 1822–25), p. 150. 46 Letter from Mariette to Gaburri, May 1, 1731, reproduced in Raccolta, vol. 2, p. 267.

<sup>47</sup> Charlotte Guichard, Les Amateurs d'art à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2008); Kristel Smentek, Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); Valérie Kobi, Dans l'œil du connaisseur. Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774) et la construction des savoirs en histoire de l'art (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2017).

praise the skills of his friend.⁴⁸ This montage bears a cartouche with the attribution to Carracci, and this attribution is repeated on an etched copy by Mariette, dated 1724 and reprinted in his posthumous sale catalogue. Nevertheless, an earlier state of the same etching bears a notation "after the Parmesan," which was later erased (fig. 3). Through the work on the drawing, and its mounting, its copy, the gaze becomes clearer.

Fig. 3: Pierre-Jean Mariette, after Lodovico Carracci (here attributed to Parmigianino), Group of Five Heads, 1724, etching, 10 × 18.7 cm, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

After 1750, the practice of reproductive printing spread beyond Parisian circles. While Caylus and Maroulle engraved drawings belonging to the king or to Crozat, the amateurs who followed them reproduced works from their own collections. In Amsterdam, Cornelis Ploos van Amstel (1726–98) was the author of more than sixty facsimiles. In Flanders, Prince Charles-Joseph de Ligne (1759–92) engraved twenty old master drawings.⁴⁹ These reproductions stressed ownership, and half of the prints are marked "from the collection of Prince Charles de Ligne." Part of the prince's circle, littérateur Sauveur Le Gros (1754–1834) was the author of a Recueil de gravures à l'eau-forte d'après des dessins de différents maîtres, par S. Legros, amateur; in Brussels, the English amateur James Hazard (1748–87) published a Recueil de desseins ... fidelement gravés par Monsieur Hazard, Amateur. In Paris, Charles Vialart de Saint-Morys (1743–95) engraved about one hundred drawings from his collection. After the French Revolution, he began a second series for which he even proposed a frontispiece of his own inven-

<sup>48</sup> The drawing was first published in Smentek, 2014, pp. 101–2.

<sup>49</sup> Xavier Duquenne, "Le prince Charles de Ligne graveur (1759–1792)," in Monte Artium, Journal of the Royal Library of Belgium 2 (2009): pp. 105–30.

tion.⁵⁰ Between Paris and Venice, Vivant Denon (1747–1825) printed about forty reproductive prints. In Provence, the Marquis de Lagoy (1764–1829) engraved forty-seven drawings from his collection.⁵¹ His correspondence makes it possible to specify the social uses of these prints, offered to artists and amateurs. However, the facsimile of artworks, which was a tool in the service of a community, was also a practice of ownership: Lagoy put his own collection mark even on his prints. Printmaking responded to the criticism of collectors who were attacked for accumulating artworks for their personal pleasure. Associated with the Lockean conception of work as the foundation of property, the cognitive appropriation enabled by copying was also a social assertion of property.

### Drawing in the Eastern Mediterranean at the End of the Eighteenth Century: Another Episteme

Eighteenth-century scholarly practices of drawing precisely articulate the relationship between the subject who draws, and the object represented. The scholar occupies a privileged position because of his a priori knowledge of the object; the qualities of the subject must permit a form of aesthetic neutrality and truth-to-nature. However, two examples of journeys undertaken in the East by amateur draftsmen testify to an intensification of interest in the draftsman's self at the end of the century. Literary studies have brought this to light for travel narratives, and the analysis of drawings corroborates this epistemological change.⁵²

The journey of the Count of Choiseul-Gouffier (1752–1817) to Greece and Asia Minor, published in 1782, continued the revival of interest in Greece that had begun in 1760.⁵³ A painter and an engineer accompanied Choiseul, even though he was a skilled draftsman himself.⁵⁴ The painter was in charge of the costume plates and the engineer of the architectural and antiquarian surveys, while Choiseul produced picturesque views in which he sometimes posed himself in the act of drawing. Antique drawings were left to a professional, who, acknowledged as an artist and holder of specialized knowledge, was allowed to sign his plates. The Count de Choiseul reserved for

<sup>50</sup> Françoise Arquié-Bruley, Lise Bicart-Sée and Jacqueline Labbé, La collection Saint-Morys au cabinet des dessins du musée du Louvre, 2 vols. (Paris: RMN, 1987).

<sup>51</sup> Béatrice de Moustier, Jean-Baptiste de Lagoy (1764–1829): Un amateur de dessins provençal entre deux siècles, (PhD diss., Sorbonne Université, 2019).

<sup>52</sup> Roland Le Huenen, Le récit de voyage au prisme de la littérature (Paris: PUPS, 2015).

<sup>53</sup> Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier, Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce, vol. 1 (Paris: n.p. 1782).

<sup>54</sup> Odile Cavalier, ed., Le voyage en Grèce du comte de Choiseul-Gouffier (Avignon: Fondation Calvet, 2007); Frédéric Barbier, Le rêve grec de Monsieur de Choiseul. Les voyages d'un Européen des Lumières (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010). One rare drawing by Choiseul, dated 1774, is preserved in Frankfurt am Main, Städel, inv. 1151.

himself the views where the scholarly details, in vast landscapes, were reduced to the rank of motifs. In his text, he often analyzes his journey as a series of paintings and landscapes, according to an artistic and pictorial reading. The feeling of the traveler prevails, and Choiseul insists on his imagination. If he stresses his scholarly readings, his images rather bring into play his status as an artist. By showing himself in the landscapes, he assumes the necessary mediation of a personal gaze in the apprehension of a country largely unknown to the European traveler.

This mediation of the self, within a more narrative than descriptive literary device, is evident in Vivant Denon's Journey to Egypt, undertaken in 1798.⁵⁵ Denon was then in an ambiguous social situation.⁵⁶ Even if he was a wealthy amateur until the French Revolution, political events led him to begin a career as an engraver in 1793. By the time he left for Egypt, Denon's financial situation had improved, and, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, he once again considered himself an amateur. Nevertheless, he adopted a new ideology of the artist, defined in particular by "feeling." In the preface to his voyage, Denon sees himself as a "traveling artist,"⁵⁷ working for scholars and claiming the established conception of drawing as recording and transmission. He insists on the need to draw everywhere, all the time, and to bring back as many sheets as possible. Denon claims an informative relationship to drawing, abandoning the desire to produce a "beautiful drawing" and the "self-esteem" of the artist.⁵⁸ According to him, the illustrations prevail over the text, which was written at a later date. The practice of drawing represents a school of the gaze: "The draftsman, forced to linger slowly on the objects, is forced to consider all the details of it."⁵⁹

However, landscapes are more numerous than plates devoted to precise architectural renderings or objects analyzed in detail. While Denon writes his impressions, and while the narrative follows his different states of mind, drawings favor general views, distant horizons, and dramatic lighting. A comparison with views from the beginning of the century, such as those of Cornelis de Bruijn, shows the shift; in these early pictures, the object is isolated in a neutral landscape. The difference with one of the first illustrated Nile voyages, that of the Danish officer Ludvig Norden (1708–42), is also striking (fig. 4).⁶⁰ In Norden's drawings, the objects virtually show their opposite sides simultaneously. In contrast, Denon offers the reader an empathetic experience. The text insists that the reader must follow the pace and movements of the draftsman.

<sup>55</sup> Dominique Vivant Denon, Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Égypte (Paris: P. Didot l'aîné, 1802). 56 Among the extensive literature on Denon, see Marie-Anne Dupuy, ed., Dominique-Vivant Denon, l'œil de Napoléon (Paris: RMN, 1999). Regarding the drawings made in Egypt: Madeleine Pinault-Sørensen, "Je fis un dessin: Les dessins de Dominique Vivant Denon en Égypte," in Regards sur l'Égypte au temps de Vivant Denon, ed. Francis Claudon and Bernard Bailly (Chalon-sur-Saône: UTB, 2007), pp. 49–96.

<sup>57</sup> Denon, Voyage, p. VIII.

<sup>58</sup> Ibid.

<sup>59</sup> Ibid., p. 307.

<sup>60</sup> Frederik Ludvig Norden, Voyage d'Égypte et de Nubie, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Imprimerie de la maison royale des orphelins, 1755).

In the images, Denon prefers the dynamic zoom effects that simulate movement. He does not present the object but his apprehension hic et nunc; he himself is sometimes present in the illustrations (fig. 5). Images reproduce an experience and its conditions, the first of which is the draftsman's state of mind, sometimes involved in sublime experiences that exclude verbal apprehension. The self is all the more necessary as Denon's journey is made in an unknown territory, in the presence of objects that are not marked out by textual and visual knowledge.

The analytical approach usually proposed by scholars is reversed; Denon does not know the objects he portrays a priori. The sheets accumulate, and he finds it impossible to put them in order, that is to say to compare and classify. Plus, he claims "to give an account of all his sensations, without allowing himself to judge them;" he wishes a "naivety" of the gaze.⁶¹ However, the literary journal is rearranged in Paris as are the drawings. They are even retouched by engravers who have not visited Egypt. Whatever Denon may have written, he was not afraid of embellishments. In this respect, the Journey to Egypt is closer to a literary work like Chateaubriand's Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem than to the Description de l'Égypte, the official publication of Napoleon's campaign.⁶² In the Description, the authors and illustrators are many, subjectivity is diluted, and the images maintain a form of visual neutrality. In contrast, Denon brought back "images" of the mind, "paintings" more than documents, without however abandoning his erudite ambitions. His ambiguous social position and his literary ease allowed for this reversal: Denon spoke both as an artist, a status from now on highly valued, and as a gentleman, accustomed to holding a pen and sharing his emotions. At this intersection, the new status of documentary image was negotiated in the East, based on the subjective apprehension of the environment.

Drawing considered as an analytical tool of connoisseurship depended on a theorization other than that of artists' disegno, which was an instrument of conception more than of recording, a tool of transformation of reality in favor of beauty. As knowledge specialized, sciences and fine arts, two emergent categories, opposed two conceptions of images. These fields of knowledge were shot through with social tensions. The pre-eminence of scholars over scientific drawing was the result of the domination of these scientists—who generally belonged to the elite—over draftsmen whose status was often inferior. Drawing was then appropriated by the former, which tended to reduce the scope of activity of the latter. These conflicts were however disrupted by the estimation of the artist's standing. In Denon's case, favored by the flexibility of his social status, the acceptance of an artistic visualization, with an aesthetic and sentimental ambition, took place in relation to an extra-European elsewhere, textual knowledge of which had not yet matured. The Journey to Egypt was a huge success throughout Eu-

<sup>61</sup> Denon, Voyage, p. 118.

<sup>62</sup> François-René de Chateaubriand, Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem et de Jérusalem à Paris, 3 vols. (Paris: Le Normant, 1811).

Fig. 4: Marcus Tuscher, after Frederik Ludvig Norden, Obelisk of Cleopatra in Alexandria, ca. 1755, etching, in: Frederik Ludvig Norden, Voyage d'Égypte et de Nubie, 2 vols. (Copenhagen: Imprimerie de la maison royale des orphelins, 1755), Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

rope: it legitimized, outside the artistic domain, a singularity of vision and a modality of knowledge specific to the artist, both writer and painter.

Fig. 5: Dominique Vivant Denon, Denon Sketching the Ruins of Hierakonpolis, ca. 1801–2(?), pen and brown ink, brown and grey wash, 11.5 × 32.9 cm, British Museum, London

Julia Kloss-Weber

### Fragonard's Companion Pieces for the Marquis de Véri: The Art of Pendants or a Transcultural Narrative of Modern French Painting

In the field of art history, transcultural themes are still often associated with notions of "otherness," and even of the "exotic." Transcultural analyses generally deal with non-European cultures and involve regions long referred to as "peripheral," in the sense of places where Europe came into contact with the "foreign." At the same time, European cultures are still rarely perceived as constitutively transcultural.¹ This conference publication demonstrates that the eighteenth-century art world must be conceived as globally interconnected. In my article, I want to emphasize once again that Europe should by no means be misrecognized as a monolithic unity; not only must we avoid codifying relations between European and non-European regions in essentializing dichotomies, we must also understand that even within Europe, there can be no question of cultural homogeneity. Instead, image cultures—during the eighteenth century as well as earlier —emerged from processes of transcultural appropriation and translation, with constructions of differences between image cultures being regularly negotiated and renegotiated. With reference to one example, a pair of paintings by the French eighteenthcentury painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard (figs. 1 and 2), I want to highlight that European visual cultures are the result of processes of transcultural entanglements and that the artists themselves thematized these processes of transcultural appropriation in their works. In fact, Fragonard's pendants can be interpreted—as I will suggest—as a painted narrative of modern French painting and as the result of transcultural negotiations.

<sup>1</sup> I am grateful for the constructive feedback on my paper that I received from the participants of the conference Networks and Practices of Connoisseurship in the Global Eighteenth Century; it has been incorporated into this article. Special thanks goes to Ian Pepper, who translated large parts of this text into English.

An exception is Valeska von Rosen, Verhandlungen in Utrecht: Ter Brugghen und die religiöse Bildsprache in den Niederlanden (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015), a study dealing with Caravaggio's pictorial idiom and its appropriation and transcultural translation by Netherlandish painters in the seventeenth century.

Fig. 1: Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Adoration of the Shepherds, ca. 1777, oil on canvas, 73 × 93 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris

### An Odd Image Coupling: "À l'italienne" versus "à la hollandaise"<sup>²</sup>

In Paris in the year 1779, the renowned painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) completed a painting entitled The Bolt (Le verrou) (fig. 2) for the Marquis de Véri (1722–85), a wealthy private collector.³ This image transports the beholder into a sparsely illuminated bedroom, that has become the scene of a tempestuous seduction

<sup>2</sup> Martin Schieder, "'Sorti de son genre:' Genre Painting and Boundary Crossings at the End of the Ancien Regime," in The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), exh. cat., pp. 60–77, here p. 63.

<sup>3</sup> For the Marquis de Véri as a collector see Colin B. Bailey, Chapter 4: "Progressive Taste, Aristocratic Lineage: Louis-Gabriel, Marquis de Véri (1722–1785)," in Patriotic Taste. Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 101–30.

Fig. 2: Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Bolt, ca. 1779, oil on canvas, 73 × 93 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris

if not of an act of sexual violence.⁴ This painted document of the libertinage of the waning ancien régime, with its (for an oil painting) remarkable frankness and directness, seems all the more astonishing when we take into consideration that it was produced as a pendant to a painting executed by the artist circa two years earlier for the same collector (fig. 1), namely an Adoration of the Shepherds—which is to say, a touching motif of Christian iconography. In its simplicity, this image seems sustained by genuine religious sentiment. Meanwhile, the almost bizarre contrast between the two paintings,

<sup>4</sup> The longer one looks at Fragonard's painting, the more questionable the depiction appears in this respect: How is the defensive attitude of the beautiful woman to be classified? Does her self-disguise really simply belong to a socially accepted gender-specific behavioral norm in the eighteenth century, which demanded that women always had to initially refuse in order to conform to the ideal of female innocence? Accordingly, the woman was always the object of male seduction. Is the moment depicted thus only part of a love game? Or, does Fragonard not present us with an incipient rape after all? In my opinion, this is a pictorial representation of roles in a sexual code conceived and established by men at the time, which is so perfidious—and must therefore outrage us today—because it systematically thwarts a clear demarcation between these two possibilities.

conceived and presented as a duet, was already perceived and remarked upon by Fragonard's contemporaries.⁵

That The Bolt was indeed conceived by Fragonard to be paired with the Adoration of the Shepherds has already been emphasized by Martin Schieder—among others and my article builds upon his discussion of Fragonard's pendants for the catalogue to the exhibition The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting.⁶ Regarding the pair of images, Schieder claims that "beyond their identical format, they do exhibit typical characteristics of companion pieces, despite, or perhaps even because of, their differences."⁷ Taken together, the two images enact to cite Schieder further—a "calculated breaking up of the sacrosanct hierarchy of genres,"⁸ since Fragonard has "contrasted a genre scene of earthly passion with a religious cabinet painting of otherworldly humility."⁹ "In these two pastiches," Schieder claims, Fragonard sought "to demonstrate two very different artistic concepts, behind which the subject matter was secondary: expression and sentiment, delicate non-finito [deliberate lack of finish] and the formal rigidity of the beau ideal [ideal beauty]," and finally —and this is of particular importance for the argument I am going to develop—"fine painting in the goût hollandaise [Dutch taste], and painterly brushwork à l'italienne [in Italian style]."¹⁰

<sup>5</sup> See Alexandre Lenoir, "Fragonard," in Biographie universelle ancienne et modern, ed. Joseph Fr. Michaud, vol. 14 (Paris: C. Desplaces et M. Michaud, 1854 [1816]), pp. 601–2, here p. 601: "... comme l'amateur lui en demandait un second (tableau) pour servir de pendant au premier, l'artiste, croyant faire preuve de génie, par un contraste bizarre, lui fit un tableau libre et rempli de passion, connu sur le nom du Verrou."

<sup>6</sup> See Schieder, "Genre Painting," and also Martin Schieder, "Jean-Honoré Fragonard: Study for The Bolt / The Bolt," in The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard, p. 291.

<sup>7</sup> Schieder, "The Bolt." The central arguments of this prescient catalogue entry can also be found formulated in a very similar way in Martin Schieder's more recent essay, "Made in Heaven. Die Kunst des Erfolgs von Jean-Honoré Fragonard," in Fragonard. Poesie und Leidenschaft (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2013), exh. cat., pp. 254–64, especially pp. 258, 259. On The Bolt and its counterpart besides Schieder's publications Danielle Lenhard, "Unraveling the Curtain: Subversive Folds, Cleland's Memoirs, and the Sublime in Jean-Honoré Fragonard's Le Verrou," (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook: ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2013); Mary D. Sheriff, Fragonard. Art and Eroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 130, 131; Guillaume Faroult, Jean-Honoré Fragonard: Le Verrou (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2007); Fragonard amoureux. Galant et libertin (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2015), exh. cat., pp. 208–10.

<sup>8</sup> Schieder, "Genre Painting," p. 63. At this point, this argument seems to be accepted in research. See also the corresponding passages in Lenhard, "Unraveling the Curtain," pp. 134–53, explicitly with reference to The Bolt p. 142.

<sup>9</sup> Schieder, "The Bolt," p. 291.

<sup>10</sup> Ibid. For the last aspect see also Schieder, "Genre Painting," p. 63, as already quoted in the heading of this section.

#### Complementary Antitheticals

Let us take a closer look at the two paintings. While researchers to date have defined them as antithetical, one could argue that they were conceived as both antithetical and complementary—or that their antithetical qualities are conceived as complementary. Which is to say, their differences are by no means arbitrary. Instead, they are antipodal in relation to a common aspect; both compositions are organized along a diagonal line, but these lines traverse the picture spaces in opposite directions. With the Adoration of the Shepherds, it goes from lower right to upper left, in the case of The Bolt, the exact reverse, from upper right to lower left. A comparison also suggests that Fragonard based the two scenes on roughly the same color palette but succeeded—by using very different painting styles—in extracting highly contrasting coloristic effects from this supposedly shared spectrum. Here, a muted tonal underlying atmosphere with seemingly soft and warm sfumato effects, which tend to dissolve the contours of objects; there, a cold and at times almost metallic shimmer, a far more incisive definition of objects, with contours remaining perceptible even in dark, shadowed zones. But on the level of content as well, the disparities between these companion pieces extend beyond Fragonard's decision to juxtapose a touching episode of religious history with a risqué and erotic genre scene. For in both scenes, the sexual innocence (or the lack thereof ) of the female protagonist is of central relevance. And as a pair, as mentioned by Schieder, they undermine the laws that govern the hierarchy of genres; they reveal the inconsistencies between idealistic art theory and artistic practice that could be identified as well in certain religious narratives paintings from the preceding centuries. And once again, these two images are revealed as diametrically opposed in the way they carry out this act of subversion: here, a religious history painting that seems all too sketch-like and genre-style; there, an erotic genre subject that draws upon the formal and rhetorical repertoire of history painting.

### Referentiality Beyond Original and Copy: The Pastiche

With both images, it is a question of so-called pastiche—a term invoked already in the citation from Schieder.¹¹ In the art theoretical terminology of eighteenth-century France, the term pastiche is used to denote a painterly practice referring to other paintings—one employed by Fragonard in both pictures—where the references remain rec-

<sup>11</sup> On pastiche, see Paula Radisich, Pastiche, Fashion, and Galanterie in Chardins's Genre Subjects: Looking Smart (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2014), pp. 33–59; Schieder, "Made in Heaven," p. 257 and recently, Joris Corin Heyder, "Pastiche Aesthetic. A Forger's or a Restorer's Practice," in Works of Art on Parchment and Paper. Interdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Nataša Golob (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), pp. 83–95.

ognizable without the act of appropriation descending into simple or slavish imitation. A pastiche, therefore, is a special form of interpicturality, one that appears in an emphatically imaginative and unconstrained way as an homage to the œuvre or manner of another artist. The art of pastiche was regarded as a manifestation of pronounced artistry and hence enjoyed great prestige. Fragonard's pendants are examples of this art form, so popular during the siècle des Lumières, and as clearly as their referential character emerges, the pictures cannot be reduced to it: always, adaptation and modification, citation and transformation proceed hand-in-hand.

In the case of the Adoration of the Shepherds, the recourse to an existing, earlier painting can be reconstructed in a very concrete way via the intermediate stage of a drawing. During his first stay in Italy, which lasted from 1756 until 1761, Fragonard studied Italian Baroque painting extensively.¹² Among the numerous drawings dating from this sojourn is a sheet (fig. 3) that is clearly indebted to Benedetto Castiglione's Adoration of the Shepherds in San Luca in Genoa (fig. 4). The drawing not only clearly demonstrates Fragonard's creative appropriation of the older master through ingenious modifications but is also a telling example of the consequences of medial translation. Although the composition still follows its model relatively closely, the switch from the majestic format of the altarpiece, with its splendid, vivid color scheme, to the small, intimate, monochrome expressive resources of the drawing seems to have set the stage in important ways for Fragonard's subsequent painterly interpretation. In comparison with Castiglione's work, the drawing already excludes numerous details, simplifying the composition by registering individual areas only schematically. Since the drawing has already deprived the upper half of the composition of much of its significance, with the focus shifting largely to the lower section, it seems only logical that for his painting, Fragonard rejected Castiglione's vertical format, with its ascending compositional dynamic, for a horizontal one. And this decision plays a major role in the formal calming, which is also effected through Fragonard's clearly structured subdivision of the painting into three horizontal segments. Now, the primary level includes those figures found in the drawing in the brightly lit section of the lower half of the picture, although Fragonard shifts the mother and child further into the distance by means of intervening cloud banks.

In this way, Fragonard transforms Castiglione's high Baroque invention, intended for a splendid church interior, into a private cabinet piece, one not only tailored to a completely different functional and representative context, but also to the altered forms of devotion characteristic of the siècle des Lumières.¹³

Because Fragonard arrived at his painted variation of the subject by reducing and concentrating, by dampening the abundance of color to a muted, tonal color scheme, suggesting certain areas only sketchily and setting the depicted figures against a brown-

<sup>12</sup> See Juliane Betz, "Die Anbetung der Hirten / Die Anbetung der Hirten," in Fragonard. Poesie und Leidenschaft, pp. 143–47, here p. 146.

<sup>13</sup> For this context, see Martin Schieder, Au-delà des Lumières. La peinture religieuse à la fin de l'Ancien Régime (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 2015).

Fig. 3: Jean-Honoré Fragonard after Benedetto Castiglione, The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1761, black crayon on paper, 28.8 × 19.4 cm, British Museum, London

ish background that is reminiscent of the empty areas of the ground of the drawing, it (the drawing) still seems emphatically present in the oil version. Fragonard's painted Adoration of the Shepherds, therefore, appears not simply as a pastiche after Castiglione, but also allows the reference to his own drawing after Castiglione to become an integral element of his painting. In a number of respects, in other words, the drawing remains a constitutive reference for the painting.

Fig. 4: Benedetto Castiglione, The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1645, altarpiece in oil on canvas, 398 × 281 cm, San Luca, Genoa

As Schieder has emphasized, the fact that Fragonard's recourse to the Italian painting causes such a prominent effect in juxtaposition with the pendant cannot be exclusively attributed to the existence of an Italian reference object, whose relevance is document-

ed in the drawing, in a way that can still be reconstructed today. Instead, this recourse to Italy emerges to a large extent through the specific mise en scène of the work's presentation with its pendant. And it is so effective, moreover, because certain so-called image cultures—precisely because they always take the form of discursive entities are connoted and semantically charged in specific ways within concrete historical and institutional contexts. And in this instance, this plays an important role in the way in which these pendants were conceptualized.

But first let us consider the counterpart to the Adoration of the Shepherds. Fragonard's second painting, The Bolt, invokes a very different image tradition, namely that of the so-called Dutch fijnschilders (fine-painters), whose most illustrious exponents were Gerard Dou, Frans van Mieris, Gabriel Metsu, and Gerard ter Borch. These painters, whose works are characterized by a consummate and precise handling of paint especially with regard to the rendering of reflective object-surfaces and fabrics such as silk—were exemplary for the formation of the so-called goût hollandaise, a tendency whose impact spread during the course of the French eighteenth century.¹⁴ When considering The Bolt, we should acknowledge that this painting tradition has been translated into a different context with regard to the history of society, mentalities, and taste and that the relation between painterly facture and the depicted contents is reconfigured. With his Adoration of the Shepherds, as we have seen, Fragonard had already drastically reduced and simplified a central motif of Christian iconography; there is nothing of its kind on any Italian Baroque altar. Nor is there a dissolute painting like The Bolt—which depicts a tumultuous seduction, or even an imminent sexual assault—in Dutch seventeenth-century painting. The painters of the Golden Age were celebrated in particular for their genre scenes, but their often highly sexually suggestive images relied upon procedures of allusion or iconographic codes and did not display acts of sexuality in such an explicit way. In Fragonard's picture, the beholder no longer encounters the erotic in the form of the burlesque, nor in a covertly or superficially salacious way, as so often in the art of the Rococo. Although the pictorial category remains the genre, it has at the same time become something different; thanks to the conspicuous formal ennobling of the scene and the impassioned style of its staging, the indecent content acquires the kind of genuine dramatism that had been—in the

<sup>14</sup> In the eighteenth century, both Flemish and Dutch artists were widely collected and received in France with temporally divergent emphases. While Fragonard's sister-in-law Marguerite Gérard (perhaps often in collaboration with Fragonard), Louis-Léopold Boilly, and Martin Drolling were oriented towards the fine-painting style of the masters just mentioned, earlier artists with a rougher/sketchier style such as Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Philips Wouwermann, and David Teniers were among the Dutch artists particularly in demand in the first half of the century. Margret Klinge wrote: "The Paris of the 18th century is the place and time of the great collectors of Dutch painting of the 17th century, so that, not yet distinguishing between Dutch and Flemish artists, one could speak of a 'goût hollandois.'" Margret Klinge, "Chardin le Teniers Français. Genrebilder von David Teniers d. J. in Pariser Sammlungen 1700–1750," in Jean Siméon Chardin. Werk, Herkunft, Wirkung, ed. Dietmar Lüdke (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1999), exh. cat., pp. 57–65, here p. 58, 59, quotation: p. 58. Translation by the author.

tradition of an Aristotelian poetics of tragedy—previously reserved for history painting.

### Modern French Painting as the Product of Transcultural Negotiation

To date research has not asked whether there might be additional reasons for Fragonard's artistic plan to conceive—as Schieder formulates it—an "intimate genre painting à la hollandaise as the antithesis to a religious cabinet painting à l'italienne."¹⁵ In my opinion, the decision to reactivate or to have recourse to these two particular image cultures in the form of pendants was by no means arbitrary and was instead carefully conceived and highly significant. To demonstrate this, we need to examine the collecting context for which these pendants were produced, and beyond that, we have to shed some light on the main lines of development of French painting since the foundation of the French Academy in the mid-seventeenth century.

Amassed in just a few years, the collection of the Marquis de Véri was well-known for its emphasis on contemporary French painting.¹⁶ The core of his picture cabinet was assembled by the year 1773 and consisted mainly of Italian works or works in the Italian manner, among them copies of history paintings by Raphael.¹⁷ Alongside paintings by celebrated French artists of the time and these early Italian acquisitions, the collection included a number of works by Dutch Masters.¹⁸ This may have been a concession by Véri to the prevailing taste; the initial decades of the siècle des Lumières saw a shift, with intimate cabinet pieces by Dutch artist soon becoming even more fashionable than Italian art in the grand goût (grand taste), previously so expensive and in such demand.¹⁹ But the stage had been set for this paradigm shift in art collecting around 1700 by writers on art such as Jean-Baptiste Decamps and Roger de Piles, who placed special emphasis on the painterly qualities of Northern art. In 1727, Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d'Argenville recommended that his contemporaries combine French and Dutch works—together with a few examples of Italian painting—in their collections.²⁰ And when certain collections were dissolved over the course of the eighteenth century, the prices fetched by the Dutch paintings at auction indicate that they

<sup>15</sup> Schieder, "Genre Painting," p. 63.

<sup>16</sup> The Marquis de Véri acquired the core of his collection of modern French masters in the four years between 1775 and 1779. See Bailey, Patriotic Taste, p. 113.

<sup>17</sup> See ibid., p. 105.

<sup>18</sup> See ibid., p. 113.

<sup>19</sup> See Thomas W. Gaehtgens, "Genre Paintings in Eighteenth-Century Collections," in The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard, pp. 78–89, here p. 82; see also Klinge, "Chardin le Teniers Français," p. 59. 20 Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d'Argenville, "Lettre sur le choix et l'arrangement d'un Cabinet Curieux," Mercure de France, vol. 2 (June 1727): pp. 1295–330, here p. 1297: "Un Particulier peut fort bien avoir un amas de bons Tableaux Flamans & François, mêlé de quelques Italiens."

were increasingly able to compete with the Italians, finally even outstripping them. With his early acquisition of Italian works, and his later partial turn toward Dutch artists,Véri's collection also—in spite of his special focus on the modern École française reflects the decisive development in the Parisian collecting culture during the century of the Enlightenment from an initially dominant goût italien to an increasingly ascendant goût hollandais. To summarize the composition of Véri's picture cabinet in imageculture catchphrases, we arrive at the triad Italian-Dutch-contemporary French. By displaying features regarded as characteristic of Italian painting, simultaneously with those typical of the Dutch tradition, Fragonard's pendants mirrored the composition of Véri's picture gallery as flagships of modern French painting while at the same time commenting on important developments in taste, aesthetics, and collecting practices.

But it is possible to identify an even more all-encompassing art historical backdrop for the pendants' references to this coupling of painting traditions, one that is linked to the historical collecting context but at the same time goes beyond it. Probably never before in European art history was the establishment of a national school of art pursued in such a systematic way as it was in the France in the late seventeenth century. Initially, its protagonists looked mainly to Italy, orienting themselves in relation to the artistic achievements of a place where antiquity still seemed tangibly present, the land that was the source of classical-idealist art theory, and the land whose paintings had remained dominant in terms of demand and monetary value well into the eighteenth century—not just in France, but throughout Europe. And it was here in 1666 that the French Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture established the Académie de France à Rome, a foreign branch for particularly gifted young artists, who could now travel to the Eternal City to study the heritage of antiquity, along with works by modern Italian masters, returning later to France bearing their newly acquired expertise. After the death of Louis XIV (1638–1715), when French art was regarded as requiring renewal, the regent succeeded in bringing Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, Sebastiano Ricci, and Rosalba Carriera—among the most celebrated Venetian artists—to Paris.²¹ Italy was still seen as the source for the impulses required for the productive development of French painting. On the other hand, the Dutch tradition had already gained entry to the French metropolis and its art scene. Artistic exchange between Paris and the Flemish provinces stretches all the way back to the Middle Ages. Following the Thirty Years' War—I now quote Dorit Hempelmann—"an independent artist's colony developed in Paris whose center was found on the Pont Notre Dame."²² Testifying to the eminent presence of Dutch or Dutch-born artists in, and significance for, the Parisian art world is the fact that they represented half of the founding members of the

<sup>21</sup> See Pierre Rosenberg, "Chardin–Die Anfänge eines Autodidakten," in Jean Siméon Chardin. Werk, Herkunft, Wirkung, pp. 23–39, here p. 23.

<sup>22</sup> Dorit Hempelmann, "Niederländische Genremalerei des 17. Jahrhunderts," in Jean Siméon Chardin. Werk, Herkunft, Wirkung, p. 217.

Parisian Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in 1648.²³ In summary, French eighteenth-century painting is almost inconceivable without its productive engagement with both the Italian and Dutch traditions.

This is particularly true for Fragonard, who was able to study both image cultures in situ over the course of his career: in 1752, before Fragonard turned away from the Académie royale in order to work as an independent painter serving a private clientele that was as affluent as it was art-obsessed, he received a much-coveted Rome-fellowship, arriving in the Italian capital in 1756 and spending four years there before setting out on a return journey that started in April 1761 and took him to Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Genoa. In the years 1773 and 1774 (immediately before producing his pendants for the Marquis de Véri), he traveled in the company of his patron, Pierre Jacques Onésyme Bergeret de Grandcourt (1715–85), to Flanders and the Netherlands, "which he had presumably already visited in the years 1763 and 1764, and possibly again in 1769."²⁴ And in October of 1773, the painter and his patron undertook another journey, which lead them again to Italy.

When Fragonard began work on the pendants for Véri, the impressions of Italian and Dutch art accumulated during these journeys were still fresh in his memory. And it was certainly no coincidence that Fragonard produced these two paintings that clearly announce their connections to these two artistic traditions for a collector who had devoted himself primarily to contemporary French painting. Arguably, Fragonard, had appeared on the artistic stage as the most versatile and stylistically variable eighteenthcentury French painter, at a time when Paris had advanced to become the leading European art center. With the pendants for Véri, he demonstrated in his full awareness that modern French painting, at least as he practiced it, had appropriated the advantages of both the southern and northern traditions, adapting and hence surpassing them in this process.²⁵ Unquestionably, painted art historical reflection is enacted here in a very self-confident gesture of surpassing.

<sup>23</sup> See ibid.

<sup>24</sup> Juliane Betz, "Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Leben und Werk," in Fragonard. Poesie und Leidenschaft, pp. 20–27, here p. 24.

<sup>25</sup> This argument can already be traced in French art literature of the first half of the eighteenth century. With reference to the art of engraving, the idea is formulated in Crozat, Mariette, and Basan's Recueil d'estampes that the French school had appropriated the advantages of the Italians and the Flemish alike. Using today's vocabulary, one could paraphrase it, saying that transcultural appropriation processes had led in France to a multiplication of the available artistic modes of representation: "The French, whose genius holds something of that of the Flemish, and something of that of the Italians, have found themselves better suited than the latter [Italian and Flemish engravers, comment by the author] to cultivate all the parts that the art of engraving embraces [Les Français, dont le genie tient quelque chose de celuy des Flamands, & quelque chose de celuy des Italiens, se sont trouvez plus propres que les derniers à cultiver toutes les parties qu'embrasse l'art de la Gravure (translation by the author)]." Pierre Antoine Crozat, Pierre-Jean Mariette, and Pierre-François Basan, Recueil d'estampes d'apres les plus beaux tableaux et d'apres les plus beaux desseins qui sont en France . . ., 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1729 and 1742), vol. 1, pp. j–viij, here iij–iv. I thank Valérie Kobi for this reference.

Given that Fragonard valorizes French art in relation to the Italian and Dutch traditions, we must also consider that the two counterparts are at the same time operating in an art-literature context, which Daniela Bleichmar has discussed from an entirely different perspective. Dezallier d'Argenville, cited above, was also the author of a multi-volume publication entitled Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres. The first edition was published in Paris between 1745–52, and the second, expanded edition of 1762 testifies to a significantly increased appreciation of French art and a new national self-confidence.²⁶ As Bleichmar writes:

This biographical dictionary [the Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres, first edition . . .] marked the ascendence of a French appreciation of French artists . . . Dezallier d'Argenville . . . liberated French artists from unfavorable comparisons to Italian and northers painters. The first edition of Dezalliers's Abrégé, published in three volumes in 1745, expressed cautious enthusiasm for French painters; the second edition, which appeared in 1762, more assertively added a new fourth volume entirely dedicated to French artists.²⁷

Possibly even Giovan Pietro Bellori's volume Vite de' pittori, scultori et architetti moderni can be understood as an early harbinger of this development—not only because the Italian art writer included Nicolas Poussin in the circle of Italian and Dutch masters, but also because he dedicated his book to the French minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the financier of the publication as the art-promoting representative of the henceforth leading European nation, at least according to its own aspiration.²⁸

But Fragonard's recourse is not exhausted in the presentation of stylistic varietà. The formal-aesthetic level contributes significantly to the critical message conveyed by the pair of images with regard to the academic hierarchy of genres that still made the depicted subject the decisive factor. While religious painting was especially linked to Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting traditions (but also with Poussin, whose work is probably cited in the figure of the kneeling shepherd in Fragonard's Adoration),²⁹ genre scenes played an essential role in Dutch painting, which had meanwhile conquered the French art market. Although they can by no means be reduced to the corresponding genres, Italian painting stood paradigmatically for the religious peinture d'histoire (history painting), while Dutch painting was primarily associated with the socalled "minor" fields. Consequently, academic debates concerning the ranking of specific subjects can also be regarded as struggles over the status of certain image cultures,

<sup>26</sup> Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d'Argenville, Abrégé de la vie des plus fameux peintres, avec leurs portraits gravés en taille-douce, les indications de leurs principaux ouvrages, quelques réflexions sur leurs caractères, et la maniere de connoître les desseins des grands maître, Par M\*\*\* d l'Académie royale des sciences de Montpellier, 3 vols. (Paris, 1745–52; rev. ed. 4 vols., Paris, 1762).

<sup>27</sup> Daniela Bleichmar, "Learning to Look: Visual Expertise Across Art and Science in Eighteenth-Century France," Eighteenth-Century Studies 46, no. 1 (2012): pp. 85–111, here pp. 86, 87.

<sup>28</sup> Giovan Pietro Bellori, Vite de' pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (Rome: Mascardi, 1672).

<sup>29</sup> See Nicolas Poussin, The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1633, oil on canvas, 160 × 182 cm. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister.

in accordance with their respective connotations. The artistic traditions constructed by Fragonard as references in his pictures were associated primarily with the two pictorial genres that are embodied by the two pendants. Inscribed into the interplay of the Adoration of the Shepherds and The Bolt as pendants is an art historical dimension; the history of the genesis of modern French painting is—in the silent discourse of painting —articulated here as an history of artistic translation and appropriation of Italian and Dutch art respectively. Fragonard's pendants signify modern French painting as emerging from processes of transcultural negotiation with Italian and Dutch traditions. In his pendants for Véri, Fragonard's painted narrative of modern French painting is staged as emphatically transcultural—avant la lettre.

### Fragonard's Pendants, Practices, and Discourses of Connoisseurship in Eighteenth-Century France

Véri's collection was distinctive not only because in a remarkably short time, he had assembled a significant collection dominated by contemporary French paintings though it is striking that "morally elevating history painting was notably absent."³⁰ The collection was also as—Colin B. Bailey formulates it—particularly consistently composed of "pairs of pendants and sets of corresponding images."³¹ For example, Véri owned the famous pair of paintings The Father's Curse and The Punished Son by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Sunset and Moonlight by Joseph Vernet.³² Even sculptures by Clodion that can be traced in his possession formed a pair as two copies of antiquities, a Hebe and a Callipygean Venus.³³ The hanging of paintings in a picture gallery in a three-tier system was indeed common practice,³⁴ but in Véri's case, the purchase of paintings and the specific commissioning of works were also guided by this principle in a particularly conspicuous way.

If he was initially only able to acquire a single work, he obviously asked the respective artist to produce a second one for him, which then found its way into his cabinet, fresh from the studio, so to speak. The same seems to have happened in the case of Fragonard's counter pieces, which—as already mentioned—also correspond to each other in format. Whereas in Denis Diderot's and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers the term pendant does

<sup>30</sup> See Bailey, Patriotic Taste, p. 120.

<sup>31</sup> Ibid., p. 126.

<sup>32</sup> Ibid., p. 114, 118.

<sup>33</sup> Ibid., p. 105.

<sup>34</sup> See Mimi Hellman, "The Joy of Sets: The Use of Seriality in the French Interior," in Furnishing the Eighteenth-Century. What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and American Past, ed. Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2007), pp. 129–53.

not appear at all in the sense of a pair of images (vol. 12 dates from 1765),³⁵ there is a rather detailed article on this keyword in the Dictionnaire des arts des peinture, sculpture et gravure published in 1792, which is quite revealing.

The first paragraph addresses quite practical formal aspects, such as the identical size and symmetrical principles of hanging,³⁶ but the second section deals with questions of composition and of "some conformity in the color & in the effect."³⁷ Counterparts should always, so the author demanded, have "some relationship between them."³⁸ Contrasts are expressly desired, but always to a moderate degree:

A painting whose shadows tend to the most vigorous brown will be badly paired with a light painting; a painting of a sad composition, or even an only austere one, will not be a good counterpart to a cheerful painting, nor a landscape to a historical subject.³⁹

In the following text, the tone becomes increasingly critical: one should scarcely assume that two works by old masters formed counterparts. Rather, it was a decorative principle for paintings created for the "petits cabinets" (small cabinets) and "which are rather furniture of taste than very precious works of art."⁴⁰ And furthermore:

The true amateurs of art only seek in the paintings their merit, & do not neglect to acquire a precious painting, which does not have a counterpart: but those which are occupied only with the decoration are not very demanding on the merit of the works, & much on their correspondence.⁴¹

In the last century, graphic artists, it is argued, were not yet under pressure to conceive of their prints and etchings as pendants, but now the counterpart principle dominated art production in this field as well. This is followed by an almost sarcastic section denouncing a narrow-minded form of connoisseurship that reduces art to decorative criteria and symmetrical principles:

<sup>35</sup> Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, 35 vols. (Paris: Briasson et al., 1751–80), vol. 12, 1765, pp. 292, 293.

<sup>36</sup> Dictionnaire des arts de peinture, sculpture et gravure, ed. Claude-Henri Watelet and Pierre-Charles Lévesque, 5 vols. (Paris: L. F. Prault, 1792), vol. 5, pp. 1–3, here p. 1.

<sup>37</sup> "Quelque conformité dans la couleur & dans l'effet," (all translations are by the author), ibid.

<sup>38</sup> "Quelque rapport entre elles," ibid.

<sup>39</sup> "Un tableau dont les ombres tendent au brun le plus vigoureux, sera mal pendant avec un tableau clair; un tableau d'une composition triste, ou même seulement austère, ne fera pas bien pendant avec un tableau gai, ni un paysage avec un sujet d'histoire." Ibid., pp. 1–2.

<sup>40</sup> "Qui sont plutôt des meubles du goût que des ouvrages très-précieux." Ibid., p. 2.

<sup>41</sup> "Les véritables amateurs de l'art ne recherchent dans les tableaux que leur mérite, & ne négligent pas d'acquérir un tableau précieux qui n'a pas de pendant: mais ceux qui ne s'occupent que de la décoration, sont peu difficiles sur le mérite des ouvrages, & beaucoup sur leur correspondance." Ibid.

They [the amateurs of pendants] could even agree among themselves that this symmetrical correspondence makes the first merit of art; it would be to shorten the means of being connoisseurs. If they did not have the right eye, they could become irrefutable connoisseurs by taking a compass.⁴²

What conclusions can be drawn from this encyclopedia entry for Fragonard's pair of paintings, which were created around fifteen years earlier? Was the focus on counterparts already discredited at that time for promoting a superficial and purely formally determined form of art production and reception? If this is true, Fragonard's cunning play with analogies and contrasts, the way he dialectically relates divergences and convergences here, is perhaps all the more telling. Especially since he impressively demonstrates that the formal aspects of painting ultimately cannot be separated from questions of content and significance. Considering his pair of paintings within Véri's collection, it does seem particularly fitting that he pushed the ingenious play with pendant principles to an extreme.

Such a negotiation of art discourses in paintings themselves was indeed no exception in Fragonard's oeuvre.⁴³ And these thoughts can possibly be extended to the aesthetics of production, as well; meaning, can we not also speak here of the artist as a connoisseur? Does not Fragonard with his pair of paintings for Véri, into which not only his art historical knowledge but also the experiences of his travels have been incorporated, show himself to be an artist-connoisseur? Too often Fragonard's paintings have been perceived as frivolous entertainment, losing sight of the distinct conceptual component of his art. But one can argue that an intellectual tendency, whose wit consists precisely in the fact that it has emancipated itself from the dogmatic tendencies of the official academic art theoretical discourse, finds its expression here. And, in this sense, the biographical component of the pendants, which can also be understood as a result of the images Fragonard himself saw and that shaped his visual memory, perhaps even functions as a personal fingerprint. And this may substitute for the classical form of the signature; as elsewhere in Fragonard's work, it is above all the painterly ductus that has so ostentatiously been left visible.⁴⁴

<sup>42</sup> "Ils [les amateurs des pendants] pourroient même convenir entre eux que cette correspondance symmétrique fait le premier mérite de l'art; ce seroit abréger les moyens d'être connoisseurs. S'ils n'avoient pas le coup-d'œil juste, ils pourroient devenir des connoisseurs irréfragables en prenant un compas [sic!]." Ibid., p. 3.

<sup>43</sup> Among the first art historians to explore this aspect of Fragonard's oeuvre was Mary D. Sheriff. See Mary D. Sheriff, "Invention, Resemblance, and Fragonard's Portraits de Fantaisie," The Art Bulletin 69, no. 1 (1987): pp. 77–87.

<sup>44</sup> For this last aspect, see Charlotte Guichard, "Frago: Geste et performance" in La griffe du peintre: La valeur de l'art (1730–1820) (Paris: Seuil, 2018), pp. 132–43.

#### Pendants and Pastiches

Fragonard's pair of paintings, are not only pendants, but also pastiches, or more precisely, they are pendants that unite two different image-cultural references by virtue of their particular pastiche characters. Arising, therefore, is the question of whether a connection exists between these identities, namely their status as both pendant and pastiche.

As we have seen, Fragonard's older picture presents an "Italian" that is no longer "Italian," but now "French," and the second one a "Dutch" that has ceased to be "Dutch," having now become "French" as well. Their combination unites two French pictures, one of which depends as much on "Italian" references as the other does on "Dutch" ones. Within this process, the image-cultural categories have acquired an unsettling ambiguity. For here, referentiality or appropriation emerges as an operation which—in a process that is ultimately interminable—heightens and nullifies an awareness of spatial and temporal distances, accentuating and levelling them, at the same time. It is only by enacting references to them that the notions of the "Italian" or the "Dutch" are engendered in the first place, so that Fragonard's pictures simultaneously produce a definition of "Italian" or "Dutch" painting respectively and at the same time—alone and together—a definition of "French" painting. By no means however are the points of reference chosen arbitrarily; this network of references is not situated in a semantic vacuum but is instead conditioned and framed by concrete art-historical contexts and discourses.

With the pictures for Véri, Fragonard extends the interpictorial in-between of the pendant structure, installed on the wall to be contemplated, into the virtual space of the history of painting via the pastiche character of these two images—and at the same time, at a geographical distance. Here, the negotiations enacted along the "horizontal" axis—which is to say, as pendants—follow the same logic as the "vertical" correlations—which is to say, as pastiches, with their respective art historical references. This means that as pendants, they built up a construction of "Frenchness" through the interplay of two constructions of such "Frenchness." The sheer antagonism of the collision of a "Frenchness," which is inscribed with the ambivalence of being still and yet no longer "Italian," and another "Frenchness," which occupies the interspace of the categories of the "French" and the "Dutch," is captivating. It could hardly be demonstrated more convincingly than in these paintings that holistic, fixed definitions of image cultures inevitably prove untenable with respect to image praxis. For the crux of the matter here, so to speak, is the fact that these two modern French paintings, both from the hand of the same painter, are far more dissimilar in relation to one another (let us remind ourselves here of contemporary perceptions of them as a "contraste bizarre" (bizarre contrast) than either of them is in relation to their respective art historical references. In this way Fragonard's pair of images not only demonstrates that modern French painting resulted from transcultural negotiations, in particular with Italian and Dutch traditions, but also that no inherently homogenous third entity emerged from these negotiations, no image culture that could be regarded as being anything other than transcultural. The adjective transcultural aims precisely at such an understanding of art and culture shaped by the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous as well as by a continuous oscillation between contouring and translation, between referentiality and appropriation.

### Domenico Pino Breaking Grounds: Print Connoisseurship and Resurfacing Antiquities in Naples

In 1783 a major earthquake hit southern Italy, affecting the regions of Calabria and eastern Sicily. Over 30,000 people perished, entire cities were swept away, and the landscape was dramatically transformed.¹ Cracks opened in the ground, lots of land were thrown into the air, turned upside down, or suddenly exposed. These geological transformations are represented in the plates from Michele Sarconi's publication describing the event, Istoria de' fenomeni del tremoto avvenuto nelle Calabrie e nel Valdemone nell'anno 1783 (History of the Phenomena of the Earthquake that Occurred in Calabria and in the Valdemone in the Year 1783, Naples: Giuseppe Campo, 1784) (fig. 1). The phenomenon brought the region, which had remained relatively isolated from the rest of Europe, in contact with the most advanced discourses of the period and with international scholars and amateurs travelling to the area to observe the transformations caused by the earthquake. These included the British diplomat William Hamilton (1730–1803), who left Naples for Calabria as soon as he heard of the disaster, and Ferdinando Galiani (1728–87), former Neapolitan ambassador to Versailles, who prepared a list of suggestions for the Neapolitan state on how to react.² Not only layers of earth that had accumulated over centuries were abruptly catapulted into another temporality, but also the people living in the affected towns, who had been "left behind on the pathway of history"³—so to speak—because of the relative isolation of the region, suddenly met people who had been living in London and Paris, who read Voltaire and Rousseau, and for whom the earthquake was a natural event to be recorded and understood, rather than a punishment from an almighty god. Again, this contrast is emphasized in the plates from Sarconi's treatise where, in the foreground of the ruined landscapes, metropolitan enlightened men meet provincial superstitious women.

These encounters between continental Europe and southern Italy happened at the end of the eighteenth century, when Naples was more or less recognized as a modern capital, and there was little doubt that what was emerging from the viscera of the earth was being met, studied, and managed by modern civilized men; in the images these figures are tellingly depicted wearing clothes in the English fashion. The same could not be said of another major event that interested southern Italy half a century earlier. If not telluric in nature, this event also involved the displacement of huge amounts of

<sup>1</sup> Vincenzo Ferrone, I profeti dell'illuminismo: Le metamorfosi della ragione nel tardo settecentoi Italiano (Napoli: Laterza, 1989), p. 30.

<sup>2</sup> Ferdinando Galiani, Pensieri vari di Ferdinando Galiani sul tremuoto della Calabria ultra e di Messina, codex XXXI, A. 9, Società Napoletana di Storia Patria, 113.A.

<sup>3</sup> "[L]asciate indietro sulla via della storia," Ferrone, I profeti dell'illuminismo, p. 20, translation by the author.

Fig. 1: Antonio Zaballi, after Pompeo Schiantarelli, Fenditure di terreno nel distretto di Ierocarne (Cracks in the Ground in the Ierocarne District), 1784, detail, etching, 34.2 × 24.8 cm, in: Michele Sarconi, Istoria del tremoto avvenuto nelle Calabrie e nel Valdemone nell'anno 1783 (History of the Earthquake that Happened in Calabria and in the Valdemone in the Year 1783) (Naples: Giuseppe Campo, 1784), British Library, London

earth, and it also occasioned an unexpected encounter with the past. I am referring to the discovery of Herculaneum in 1738 (and to a lesser extent to that of Pompeii ten years later). I am suggesting a similarity between the two events as in both cases cracks opening in the ground revealed visions into the unknown: geological phenomena in the case of the earthquake in Calabria, an entire city frozen in time in the case of Herculaneum. If in 1783 it was almost unquestioned that the men on the surface, supervising this encounter, inhabited the European present, in the case of Herculaneum in 1738 it was very much the opposite. The Kingdom of Naples became an independent nation only in 1734, following the collapse of the Spanish Empire after the death of the last Habsburg in 1700. Naples' Spanish heritage, the problems and delays related to the creation of a new state, as well as the way in which the excavations on the slopes of Vesuvius were managed, made the new kingdom look backward, uncivilized, and culturally and temporally aligned with South America or China in the eyes of most Europeans.

My chapter examines prints produced in Naples illustrating the antiquities resurfacing from these cracks. I will focus in particular on prints reproducing ancient Roman frescoes, a category of ancient artefacts that was more or less new to the eighteenth century, and thus required the creation of new parameters of knowledge to be understood and, eventually, translated in print. These engravings were produced in the Stamperia Reale of Naples, the royal press created by Charles of Bourbon (1716–88, King of Naples 1735–59) in 1748. I address the Stamperia Reale as the hub of an international network for the creation and dissemination of such knowledge, around which rotated characters as varied as the Paduan antiquarian Ottavio Antonio Bayardi (1694– 1764), the Italo-Dutch architect Luigi Vanvitelli (1700–73), the Roman printmaker Rocco Pozzi (d. circa 1780), the Tuscan minister Bernardo Tanucci (1698–1783), and the British diplomat William Hamilton. How were prints as exquisite as those of Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte (The Antiquities of Herculaneum Unveiled, Naples: Stamperia Reale, 1757–92), the official publication illustrating and describing these archaeological finds, produced in a city with no tradition of fine printmaking? My argument is that these prints carried a double kind of knowledge. On the one hand, they mediated the encounter with the antique; they functioned as tools for the understanding and circulation of the ancient Roman art they represented. On the other, they mediated the perceived cultural and temporal distance between Naples and the rest of Europe, by projecting, to an international audience, a carefully-curated political and cultural image of those who commissioned and executed the representations.

As is well known, the first antiquities from what would later be recognized as Herculaneum were discovered by accident during the excavations for a well for the newly built country residence of the new King of Naples, the palace at Portici.⁴ Charles immediately devoted part of his private funds to the retrieval of such antiquities, which therefore were from the beginning denoted as his private property.⁵ His original intention was to use them to decorate some rooms in the royal residence nearby, but their number exceeded expectations and soon an entire wing of the palace at Portici was destined to them exclusively, becoming known as the royal museum.⁶ For more than a decade the excavations maintained the status of a private enterprise. The unearthing was not conducted methodically. Rather than excavating along the streets of the ancient city, for example, a team of only twelve diggers broke through the walls of buildings, not knowing what was on the other side. No one recorded where items were found, and objects considered unattractive or not complete enough were simply destroyed. This approach caused indignation among members of the Republic of Letters.

<sup>4</sup> In fact, it is unclear if the discovery of the city was purely accidental, or if Charles had ordered excavations on the same site the Duc d'Elboeuf had found antiquities in 1711. Maria Gabriella Mansi, "I libri del re: Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte," in Herculanense Museum: laboratorio sull'antico nella reggia di Portici, ed. Renata Cantilena and Annalisa Porzio (Naples: Electa, 2008), pp. 115–45, here p. 115. 5 Fausto Zevi, "Gli Scavi di Ercolano," in Civiltà del Settecento a Napoli, ed. Renato Causa (Florence: Stiav, 1979), vol. 2, pp. 58–68, passim; see also Carol C. Mattusch, Letter and Report on the Discoveries at Herculaneum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011), pp. 9–18.

<sup>6</sup> Mattusch, Letter and Report, pp. 41–49; Paola d'Alconzo, "Carlo di Borbone a Napoli: Passioni Archeologiche e Immagine della Monarchia," in Cerimoniale dei Borbone di Napoli 1734–1801, ed. Attilio Antonelli (Napoli: Artem, 2017), pp. 127–45, here pp. 138–40.

In the span of only a few years, between 1738 and 1746, two scholars of international renown, Marcello Venuti (1700–55) and Matteo Egizio (1674–1745), were appointed royal antiquarians to king Charles. Appalled at the state of the excavations, they protested and eventually resigned. Charles Nicolas Cochin (1715–90) and Johann Joachim Winkelmann (1717–68) voiced their dissent in a more public way. After their visit to the museum at Portici, each published an account of their experience, denouncing brutal practices such as the accumulation of fragments of bronze and marble sculptures in the courtyard of the museum almost as if they were trash.⁷ But this was not all. Access to the royal museum was strictly guarded. Visitors were allowed in only with a special permit from the king, and those who managed to obtain one were hastily accompanied through the rooms by a guide (often Camillo Paderni and later Father Antonio Piaggio). Taking sketches or notes in front of the antiquities was strictly forbidden. These measures were aimed at discouraging the publication of illustrated accounts by any third party while the official publication commissioned by Charles was in the making. The miserable state of the excavations, resembling looting rather than archaeological research, and the careful control over access to the museum earned Charles the reputation of a despotic, oriental ruler.⁸ Among the international community, the common opinion was that Charles was depriving the entirety of humanity of knowledge that should have been freely circulated.

Not only were the paintings from Herculaneum compared to Chinese art, but Neapolitans were also compared to the Chinese.⁹ Pierre Hugues d'Hancarville (1719–1805),

<sup>7</sup> Charles-Nicolas Cochin and Jérôme-Charles Bellicard, Observations sur les antiquités de la ville d'Herculanum avec quelques réflexions sur la Peinture & la Sculpture des Anciens & une courte description de quelques Antiquités des environs de Naples (Paris: Jombert, 1754); Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Sendschreiben von den Herculanischen Entdeckungen (Dresden: Walther, 1762) and Nachrichten von den neuesten Herculanischen Entdeckungen (Dresden: Walther, 1764).

<sup>8</sup> For example, Cochin and Bellicard, Observations, p. 50; Winckelmann, Sendschreiben, p. 74; Jean Claude Richard de Saint-Non, Voyage Pittoresque ou Descriptions des Royaumes de Naples et de Sicilie, vol. 1 (Paris: n.p., 1781–86), p. 223.

<sup>9</sup> For contemporary accounts comparing ancient Roman paintings to Chinese art, see Viccy Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain 1760–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 103–4. For the comparison of eighteenth-century Neapolitans to the Chinese, in his Voyage Pittoresque (Paris, 1781–86), Jean Claude Richard de Saint-Non compared Naples to Peking. The grounds on which he based such a comparison are not immediately apparent, especially given that he had never been to China. But considering that the analogy Naples–Peking is introduced in a passage where Saint-Non describes the great number of beggars coming into Naples from the countryside, the so-called lazzaroni, we can speculate that he might have had in mind the description of Peking in Joachim Bouvet's The History of Cang-Hy (1699), reading "there flock'd great numbers of these miserable wretches daily to Peking, in hopes of finding some means of subsistence there." Saint-Non, Voyage Pittoresque, vol. 1, pp. 223–24; and J. Bouvet, The History of Cang-Hy, the Present Emperor of China, (London: F. Coggan, 1699), p. 26. For the impact of Bouvet's publication on the French imagination of China, see C. Klekar, '"Sweetness and Courtesie": Benevolence, Civility and China in the Making of European Modernity', Eighteenth-Century Studies 43, no. 3 (Spring 2010): pp. 357–69, passim, esp. p. 366. Saint-Non was more explicit in his comparison in other passages, attacking the political and economic conditions of the Neapolitan kingdom. See Saint-Non, Voyage Pittoresque, vol. 1, pp. 223–24.

on the other hand, compared modern Neapolitans to ancient Greeks, in disparaging terms. To him and his patron, William Hamilton, the tarantella (a Neapolitan dance), for example, was the direct descendant of the Bacchic dances and rituals they saw depicted on ancient vases. The implication was that the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and its capital, Naples, were other than European both culturally—being uncivilized—and temporally—being backward. The feeling was that, if left in the hands of the Neapolitans, the unprecedented occasion to study a past civilization offered by the discovery of Herculaneum would be wasted forever.

Printmaking was understood by the royal establishment at Naples as an important medium to restore the reputation of the kingdom and claim its firm alignment with the European present. The newly established court, however, had no experience of managing a publishing project of this scale and ambition. In fact, Le Antichità di Ercolano was the result of trial and error. Disegni intagliati in rame di pitture antiche ritrovate nelle scavazioni di Resina (Drawings Cut in Copper of Ancient Paintings Found in the Excavations at Resina, Naples: n.p., 1746), the earliest publication illustrating the finds from Herculaneum, first appeared in 1746, but it was affected by a major fault; its editors failed to understand that the reproduction of antiquities in print was a culturally charged process. In plates 63–68, for example, the winged geniuses (or cupids) are represented as if standing on rustic bases onto which they project their shadow.¹⁰ In the frescoes, however, the figures float against monochromatic backgrounds. Representing the figures as occupying three-dimensional space was a serious misinterpretation of the aesthetic qualities, intention and affect of the frescoes. This first publication was generally considered unsatisfactory, and its printing was halted almost immediately; only three copies of it are known today.¹¹

A second publication, the Prodromo delle Antichità di Ercolano (Introduction to the Antiquities of Herculaneum, Naples: Stamperia Reale, 1752–55), by the Paduan antiquarian Ottavio Antonio Bayardi appeared in 1752. This text was intended to explain how the site had been discovered and identified, and to reaffirm the importance of the event. This publication failed as well, however, as by the fifth volume Bayardi had not yet mentioned the destruction of the city following the famous volcanic eruption of 79 A.D., let alone its discovery by King Charles. Rather, in more than a thousand pages he had discussed the origins of Herculaneum, its mythical foundation by Hercules, and had wandered off into many erudite digressions on various subjects, most of which were only tangentially related to the main topic.¹²

<sup>10</sup> The number of the plates I give here matches the list in the introduction and the number of the plates in the copy in the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

<sup>11</sup> Delphine Burlot, "The Disegni Intagliati: A Forgotten Book Illustrating the First Discoveries at Herculaneum," Journal of the History of Collections 23, no. 1 (2011): pp. 15–28.

<sup>12</sup> Maria Gabriella Mansi, "La Stamperia Reale di Napoli," in Immagini Per il Grand Tour: L'Attività della Stamperia Reale Borbonica, ed. Maria Rosaria Nappi (Rome: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2015), pp. 21–47, here p. 22.

In response to these failures, the Accademia Ercolanense was founded in 1755. This institution consisted of a group of fifteen Neapolitan scholars, who were to meet every other week in the office of the new prime minister, the Tuscan Bernardo Tanucci, in order to compile a text that would adequately describe each of the findings.¹³ To avoid the prolixity of Bayardi's Prodromo, Tanucci reportedly personally edited reports from the Accademia as soon as they were received in order that they be as concise and direct as possible.¹⁴ The text, however, was considered marginal to the publication. Information was to be carried primarily by the engraved plates. Between 1749 and 1752 copperplates were imported from Rome for the equivalent of six hundred ducats.¹⁵ At the same time, the king invited a team of draughtsmen and engravers to Naples. These artists permanently settled in the city and worked in the palace at Portici. To achieve maximum accuracy, they drew and engraved directly after the paintings, sculptures, and other objects steadily accumulating in the royal museum. This part academy, part workshop was later known as the Scuola di Portici. The draftsmen and printmakers worked under the supervision of the Roman engraver Rocco Pozzi, and the quality of their work was to be approved by the royal architect Luigi Vanvitelli.¹⁶ The printmaker and later curator of the royal museum, Camillo Paderni, regularly travelled from Portici to Naples and back. He brought the copperplates engraved at Portici to be printed in Naples; he collected the proofs and brought them for approval to Vanvitelli, who was working at Caserta, eventually returning to Portici to resume his own work. He never failed to claim the expenses for his taxi rides from the Royal administration.¹⁷ Unlike the previous publications, every plate of Le Antichità was created in front of the actual object it was meant to reproduce and, most importantly, under the supervision of a team of antiquarians (the Accademia Ercolanense), two printmakers specialized in the reproduction of antiquities (Paderni and Pozzi), and an architect (Vanvitelli). The new plates were to be much more aesthetically refined and more technically complex (fig. 2).

What is more, the cooperation among these agents resulted in the creation of new standards for the reproduction of antiquities in print. In the lower margin of every

<sup>13</sup> Mansi, "La Stamperia Reale di Napoli," p. 22.

<sup>14</sup> Mansi, "I Libri del re," pp. 130–31.

<sup>15</sup> Aniello D'Iorio, "La Stamperia Reale dei Borbone di Napoli," in Editoria e Cultura a Napoli nel XVIII Secolo, ed. Anna Maria Rao (Naples: Liguori, 1998), pp. 353–89, here p. 367. To put this into context, in the same period six hundred ducats would have bought an entire printing business in Naples, including printing presses, copperplates, a stock of books and prints, as well as the physical shop containing them, see Rosa D'Antò, "I Flauto, Una Famiglia di Stampatori Regi del Secondo Settecento," in Editoria e Cultura a Napoli nel XVIII Secolo, ed. Anna Maria Rao (Naples: Liguori, 1998), pp. 529–38, here pp. 530–31.

<sup>16</sup> Mansi, "La Stamperia Reale di Napoli," pp. 22–23.

<sup>17</sup> Mansi, "La Stamperia Reale di Napoli," p. 23. She in turn references Maria Gabriella Mansi, "Per un Profilo di Camillo Paderni," in Bicentenario della morte di Antonio Piaggio: Raccolta di Studi, ed. Mario Capasso (Galatina: Congedo, 1997), pp. 77–108 and Maria Forcellino, Camillo Paderni Romano e l'Immagine Storica degli Scavi di Pompei, Ercolano e Stabia (Rome: Artemide, 1999).

Fig. 2: Nicola Oraty, after Nicola Vanni, A Woman Making a Votive Offering to Bacchus, ca. 1760, engraving, 34.2 × 24.8 cm, in: Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte, vol. 2 (Naples: Stamperia Reale, 1760), Warburg Institute, London

plate was a scale in both Neapolitan and Roman palms to give an idea of the dimensions of the object reproduced. More importantly, the decision was taken not to complete the missing or damaged parts of the originals. On the contrary, these lacunae were emphasized. In the plates, the fragmented parts are rendered through a rain of dashes, through strokes of the burin, as if to emphasize the mediating role of the engraved reproduction. Likewise, the accompanying text is characterized by an unusually open approach to the interpretation of the objects. When the iconography of a fresco was not clear or certain, the text emphasizes that the proposed interpretation is in fact nothing more than a supposition. This approach to the interpretative gap, rendered both visually in the plates and conceptually in the text, was perhaps the most innovative element of Le Antichità di Ercolano.

As in the plates from Sarconi's Istoria del tremoto, these gaps—or cracks if you wish—were understood as sites for the creation of knowledge, offering the occasion for an encounter. First and foremost an encounter between two temporalities: their eighteenth-century interpreters did not superimpose their taste and sensitivity on the fragmented antiquities by trying to complete them. By emphasizing this lag visually, the prints stress the spatial and historical distance between the representing subject and the represented object.¹⁸ In other words they assert that modern Neapolitans were not like the ancients, as some Grand Tourists argued.¹⁹ But these gaps also offered the occasion for an encounter among members of the international community. They leave space for discussion and debate in order to make sense of what is missing. This was a bold choice, one that was generally appreciated and, as mentioned before, set a new standard. When Ludovico Mirri (d. 1786) embarked on the publication of prints after the frescoes in the Domus Aurea in Rome in the 1770s, for example, he was publicly censured for having completed the missing sections of the frescoes in the engravings.²⁰

The Le Antichità di Ercolano plates were also successful from an aesthetic point of view. When the royal architect Luigi Vanvitelli saw proofs of engravings produced in the Stamperia Reale in 1761, he exclaimed, "they truly look as if they are made in France."²¹ The reference here is not so much to what the prints represented, but to the style of engraving. Between 1747 and 1748, the Neapolitan crown sought the advice of Giovanni Gaetano Bottari (1689–1775) on matters of print production. Bottari had been the editor, together with Anton Francesco Gori (1691–1757), of the Museum Florentinum (1731–66), a folio publication illustrating the Ducal collections in Florence, and was also editing the Museum Capitolino (1741–55), a similar catalogue of the antiquities collection in the Capitoline Museum in Rome. When consulted by Neapolitan officials

<sup>18</sup> Margareta De Grazia, "Anachronism," in Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, ed. James Simpson and Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 14–32, here pp. 28–30.

<sup>19</sup> Many writings from the second half of the century suggest more or less overtly that in eighteenthcentury Neapolitans one could witness the habits, costumes, cults, and even gestures of the ancients, as exemplified by the aforementioned comparison between the tarantella and Bacchic dances in Hamilton and d'Hancarville's Collection of Antiquities. Another important example is An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus lately existing at Isernia, in the Kingdom of Naples (London: n.p., 1786) by William Hamilton and Richard Payne Knight. French writers, such as Saint-Non and the Marquis de Sade, suggested the same in their travel journals. Such an attitude would be internalised by Neapolitans themselves toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, as exemplified by such publications as Andrea de Jorio's La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano (Naples: Fibreno, 1832).

<sup>20</sup> Francesca Guglielmini, "Ludovico Mirri's Vestigia and Publishing in Eighteenth-Century Rome," Print Quarterly 38, no. 1 (March 2021): pp. 29–49.

<sup>21</sup> Maria Gabriella Mansi, "La Dichiarazione dei Disegni: Luigi Vanvitelli", in La Stamperia Reale di Napoli: 1748–1860, ed. Maria Gabriella Mansi and Agnese Travaglione (Naples: Biblioteca Nazionale, 2002), pp. 21–24, here p. 23.

on the choice of engravers for their plates, Bottari recommended Johann Justin Preissler (1698–1771), a printmaker who could produce engravings like those from Paris, but at a lower rate.²² In other words, Le Antichità di Ercolano used as its model contemporary antiquarian publications, which in turn were inspired by fine French engraving. Vanvitelli's exclamation demonstrates that the objective had been reached. Able to produce prints as refined as those from Paris, Florence, and Rome, Naples could finally claim to be a city as modern as these centers. The plates from Le Antichità communicated this message in a perfect European idiom with no signs of a Neapolitan accent.

These technical and stylistic results were achieved through the creation of another hub in Naples, one of expert printers and printmakers. In the same years as artists and antiquarians were invited to move to Naples for the creation of the Scuola di Portici and the Accademia Ercolanense, a team of ten professional printers, mostly from Rome, were also hired by the Neapolitan crown.²³ This specialized personnel, with expertise in inking plates and operating rolling presses, was paid a regular and generous salary and enjoyed such benefits as a lifetime pension.²⁴ Ultimately, this investment proved to be a good one. Most of the plates for the first volumes not only yielded more than two thousand impressions by 1757 but were also repeatedly used throughout the eighteenth century, although some of them were occasionally re-engraved.²⁵ It took extraordinarily skillful printers to take such a large number of quality impressions from a copperplate while limiting the deterioration of the matrix and, therefore, of the image.

The original team of printmakers hired by the Neapolitan crown around 1750, furthermore, most of whom came from Rome (Camillo Paderni (ca. 1715–81), Carlo Nolli, Rocco Pozzi, and Filippo Morghen (1730–1807) from Florence), trained a younger generation of Neapolitan printmakers. These, including Francesco Cepparuli (fl. 1746–67), Pietro Campana (1727–after 79), Guglielmo Morghen (1758–1833), and Carmine Pignatari (fl. 1750–79), can be rightly considered some of the most technically accomplished Italian printmakers of the eighteenth century, able to produce engravings in the "French manner," as it was then known (fig. 3). Most of them, however, from both the first and second generation, were not paid a regular salary by the crown. Instead, they were paid a fee for each drawing provided or copperplate engraved.²⁶ This system of payment, and the fact that the king did not exclusively claim their services, must have en-

<sup>22</sup> "Il Presler (sic) di Norimberga è certamente un bravo intagliatore al pari di quelli di Parigi, ma quei di Parigi non gli conosco tutti; so bene che ve ne sono degli eccellentissimi ma si fanno pagare bestialmente. Di questo Presler ho veduti de' ritratti maravigliosi e per Museo Fiorentino ne ha intagliati quattro o cinque," Angela Gallottini, "Un'impresa editoriale fra Napoli e Roma: Vasi, Piranesi e altri," in Il Mercato delle Stampe a Roma (XVI–XIX Secolo), ed. Giovanna Sapori (San Casciano: Libro Co. Italia, 2008), pp. 117–50, here p. 130.

<sup>23</sup> Mansi, "La Dichiarazione dei Disegni," p. 19.

<sup>24</sup> D'Iorio, "La Stamperia Reale dei Borbone di Napoli," p. 371.

<sup>25</sup> Mansi, "La Dichiarazione dei Disegni," p. 44.

<sup>26</sup> Mansi, "La Stamperia Reale di Napoli," p. 23.

couraged them to take commissions from other parties and, when these were lacking, appeal to the open market.

Fig. 3: Pietro Campana, after Nicola Vanni, Hermes, 1765, engraving, 34.2 × 24.8 cm, in: Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte, vol. 6. (Naples: Stamperia Reale, 1765), The British Library, London

In this way the very same people who had trained at Portici and produced the plates for Le Antichità di Ercolano Esposte collaborated on the realization of another major Neapolitan publication illustrating antiquities little-known to the international community, Pierre-Francois Hugues d'Hancarville's Collection of Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities (Naples [and Florence]: n. p. [Molini], 1767–76 [1776–80]).²⁷ This book illustrated painted vases, mostly from the collection of the British ambassador at Naples Sir William Hamilton, as well as from the collections of other Neapolitan and Sicilian aristocrats, such as the Duke of Noja and the Prince of Biscari. These vases had been collected and studied in Naples since the early eighteenth century. Local antiquarians such as Alessio Simmaco Mazzocchi (1684–1771) had long understood the Greek—or Magna Graecian—origin of such artefacts and, analyzing both the iconography and style of their decorations, had established a chronology that, with few exceptions, is accepted still today.²⁸

Hamilton assembled his collection by buying vases from local collections and vases that had recently been discovered, for example in the excavations at Nola. Following in the footsteps of other Neapolitan antiquarians, Hamilton and d'Hancarville understood vase paintings as the earliest known form of graphic art, earlier still than the wall paintings from Herculaneum. Their publication, including over four hundred plates in total, should therefore be understood next to contemporary works such as Pierre-Jean Mariette's (1694–1774) Traité des pierres gravées (Treatise on Engraved Gems, Paris: Mariette, 1750) and Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of the Art of Antiquity, Dresden: Walther, 1764) as an attempt to reconstruct the development of art in antiquity, and more generally the development of the human psyche. As in Le Antichità di Ercolano, the plates of Hamilton's and d'Hancarville's publication also conveyed important information, and yet they have never been closely analyzed from a technical point of view.

For the most part the engravings are printed in black, to which a layer of orange has been added by hand with a sponge or a brush (fig. 4). Some of them have highlights in white, also added by hand. No one seems to have noticed, however, that in the decorative borders of some plates, tone was rendered not through cross-hatching with a burin, but with a technique where the plate is roughened with the use of some sort of corrosive solution, probably to be identified with sulfur tone (fig. 5).²⁹ In sulfur prints, powdered sulfur is dusted onto a plate where a design has been created with a layer of oil or some other viscous substance, which has been applied with either a brush or a pen. The particles of sulfur stick to the oil and corrode the plate in a uniform tone.³⁰ The technique was probably invented by Johann Adam Schweickart (1722–87), who worked for Baron Philipp von Stosch (1691–1757) in Florence, making prints after items in his collection, including antiquities, engraved gems, and old master draw-

<sup>27</sup> Noah Heringman, Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 125–53.

<sup>28</sup> Claire Lyons, "The Neapolitan Context of Hamilton's Antiquities Collection," Journal of the History of Collections 9, no. 2 (1997): pp. 229–39, here p. 232.

<sup>29</sup> I thank Antony Griffiths, Kim Sloan, and Emily Floyd for this suggestion.

<sup>30</sup> Antony Griffiths, Prints and Printmaking: An Introduction to the History and Techniques (London: The British Museum Press, 1980), p. 90.

ings.³¹ Schweikart is recorded to have first experimented with sulfur to convey tone in prints in the 1740s, but the technique was further developed by Ignazio Hugford (1703–78) a decade or so later. Hugford directed a printmaking school in Florence, and between 1761 and 1762 edited the Raccolta di cento pensieri di Anton Domenico Gabbiani (Collection of One Hundred Ideas by Anton Domenico Gabbiani, Florence: Stamperia Moückiana, 1762), a series of prints in imitation of drawings where sulfur tone appears to have been used profusely.³²

Fig. 4: Carmine Pignatari, Untitled, 1766, engraving and sulfur tone with hand colouring, 38.4 × 64.9 cm, in: William Hamilton and Pierre Francois Hugues d'Hancarville, Collection of Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities (Naples [and Florence]: n.p. [Molini], 1766 [1776]), private collection, Naples

That a technique originally devised to represent old master drawings was later employed to represent paintings on ancient vases seems significant. The use of a process where the plate could be roughened with a fluid medium applied with a pen or a brush, rather than incised with a burin, had several implications. First, the print was a more accurate translation of the actual painting on the vase, in that the design was similarly created applying a fluid solution with a similar tool. In other words, the reproduction was technically and stylistically closer to the original. Second, it made the plates much more convincing as an argumentative tool, in that using a technique asso-

<sup>31</sup> Antony Griffiths, "Notes on Early Aquatint in England and France," Print Quarterly 4, no. 3 (September 1987): pp. 255–70, here p. 257; Ernst Rebel, Faksimile und Mimesis: Studien zur Deutschen Reproduktionsgraphik des 18. Jahrhunderts (Itzel Berger: Mänder Kunstverlag, 1981), p. 77. I thank Antony Griffiths for this reference.

Fig. 5: A detail of a different plate from d'Hancarville's publication. The parts where the plate is not inked properly show more clearly the different techniques with which the design has been obtained.

ciated with facsimile drawings implied the vase paintings were drawings in their own right.

Such an informed use of printmaking techniques demonstrates that knowledge of antiquity was articulated through reproduction in print. Knowledge was created in the act of breaking through the ground—in this case the etching ground. The point, however, was completely lost when the plates from d'Hancarville's folio edition were later copied in Paris by the firm of Francois-Anne David for a cheaper edition in octavo (1785). There the plates were not only reversed, but also exclusively engraved with a burin; the editors in Paris either lacked knowledge of the print processes or, more likely, of the antique vases to be reproduced. This technically minor, bur conceptually significant, misunderstanding in the copies suggests, once again, that print connoisseurship and the connoisseurship of antiquities went hand in hand.

The plates of Le Antichità di Ercolano and Collection of Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities offer an important occasion to re-evaluate the intellectual and artistic context of eighteenth-century Naples. The discovery of the cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii motivated the Neapolitan crown to put together a team of antiquarians who could assess, record, and interpret the resurfacing objects. Organized in the Accademia Ercolanense, they created new parameters to discourse on completely new categories of antiquities such as ancient figurative paintings. At the same time, they were in close dialogue with the printmakers working for the king. These artists translated new knowledge onto paper and were very ready to experiment with such innovative techniques as sulfur tone. The collaboration between antiquarians and printmakers resulted in the production of prints that surpassed contemporary examples from established printmaking centers, such as Paris and Rome, setting new standards for international antiquarian studies.

### Emily Teo Duke August's Chinese Cabinet at Gotha: Authenticity and Connoisseurship of Asian Objects in Germany

Eighteenth-century Germany witnessed a cultural and artistic preoccupation with China, a phenomenon that has been described as China-Mode (Chinese fashion). ¹ On the level of scholarship, Jean Baptiste du Halde's Description de la Chine, published in 1735 served as the authoritative reference on China for nearly a century. The Description, alongside the accounts of Jesuit missionaries, spurred intense discussion of Chinese culture among such prominent German philosophers as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff. Seeing the potential gains of intercontinental trade, the shortlived Prussian Asiatic Company (1750–57) was established by Friedrich II of Prussia. The interest in China and Chinese artworks was reflected in the aesthetic practices of eighteenth-century German aristocratic residences. Porcelain rooms, which first appeared in the Netherlands, were installed throughout baroque palaces in Germany and were often accompanied by the placement of China-inspired pavilions and teahouses in palace gardens, most famously, the Chinese Teahouse on the grounds of Sanssouci Palace, Potsdam. The European taste for Chinese objects is generally considered to have reached its height in the mid-eighteenth century, before it gradually faded in popularity from the late-eighteenth century onwards.

The Chinese Cabinet in Gotha's Friedenstein Palace was established around 1800, as the China-Mode of the past decades was in gradual decline. Its founder, Duke August of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1772–1822), was an avid art collector and self-professed connoisseur. His longstanding fascination with China motivated his acquisition of Chinese collectibles through various channels. The duke selected East Asian objects from the Kunstkammer (Cabinet of Curiosities) in Gotha for his personal collection and made purchases on the art market via merchants and agents. Since he was known for his taste for Chinese imports, he also received Chinese artworks as personal and diplomatic gifts.

<sup>1</sup> This chapter is based on research funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), project number 442207053.

The publications on the taste for China in Europe are too extensive to list fully. Important publications include Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (London: John Murray, 1961); David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). For the German context, see Wilhelm Richard Berger, China-Bild und China-Mode im Europa der Aufklärung (Cologne: Böhlau, 1990); Dirk Welich, ed., China in Schloss und Garten: Chinoise Architekturen und Innenräume (Dresden: Sandstein, 2010); Christiane Hertel, Siting China in Germany: Eighteenth-Century Chinoiserie and Its Modern Legacy (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019).

During Duke August's lifetime, the cabinet was situated in the corps de logis of the palace, next to his private library, and in immediate proximity to his private apartments. Following his death, the cabinet was relocated to the west tower of the Friedenstein Palace, occupying an area of 400 square meters, across six rooms. A detailed inventory of the cabinet made in 1827 comprised over two thousand entries, with items ranging from porcelain to lacquerware, reverse glass painting, soapstone figures, watercolor albums, paper and stationery, furniture, everyday objects, clothing, materia medica, and naturalia.² Some examples include "Nro. 57 a box with 8 pieces of goldgilded inksticks," "Nro. 296 a pair of silk slippers for ladies embroidered in gold" (fig. 1), "Nro. 665, a gondola with small figures and wheels" (fig. 2).³

Fig. 1: Unknown maker(s), possibly Cantonese, A pair of silk slippers for ladies embroidered in gold, eighteenth century, length 22 cm, Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein, Gotha, inv. no. Eth14S

<sup>2</sup> Many objects from the Chinese Cabinet are still extant in the collections of the Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein. Publications on the collection include Herbert Bräutigam, Schätze Japanischer Lackkunst auf Schloß Friedenstein (Gotha: Schlossmuseum, 1998); Martin Eberle, Götter aus Stein: Die Sammlung chinesischer Specksteinfiguren auf Schloss Friedenstein Gotha (Heidelberg: Morio, 2015); Ute Däberitz, "Zauberwerke asiatischer Kunst: Ein Streifzug durch die Geschichte der Gothaer Ostasiensammlung," Ostasiatische Zeitschrift 27, (2014): pp. 9–24. On Duke August as a collector, see Friedegund Freitag, ed., Luxus, Kunst und Phantasie, Herzog August von Sachsen-Gotha-Altenburg als Sammler (Dresden: Sandstein, 2022).

<sup>3</sup> Anonymous, Catalog des Chinesischen Kabinetts, erhoben am 15. V. 1827, Acte 109, Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein Archiv, Gotha. All translations are by the author.

Fig. 2: Unknown maker(s), possibly Cantonese, A gondola with small figures and wheels, eighteenth century, carved and painted soapstone, length 30 cm, Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein, Gotha, inv. no. C417S

While there was great diversity in the types of objects collected and their geographical origin, which ranged from China to Japan to Southeast Asia and even Britain and France, Duke August elected to use the umbrella term "Chinese" for the collection. The Chinese Cabinet in Gotha was considered by contemporaries to be the largest in Germany, and it became an important point of reference for other collectors with a focus on East Asia. These included the collector of Japanese natural history specimens and ethnographic objects, Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796–1866), a German physician who resided in Japan, and Bernhard von Lindenau (1780–1854), one of Duke August's ministers, who later created a Chinese collection in Altenburg.⁴

Today, Chinese collections in Europe are often interpreted through the lens of chinoiserie and ethnography. The former has been defined as "a trend in Western art, most visible in the architecture and decorative arts of the eighteenth century that is marked by the use of certain Chinese figurative and decorative motifs, forms and techniques (or imitations thereof ) and the favoring of certain broad characteristics of Chi-

<sup>4</sup> Siebold's ethnographic collection is still extant in the Sieboldhuis, Leiden, and the Five Continents Museum, Munich. On his travel to Japan and his collection, see James A. Compton and Gerard Thijsse, "The Remarkable P. F. B. von Siebold, His Life in Europe and Japan," Curtis's Botanical Magazine 30, no. 3 (2013): pp. 275–314. On Lindenau's collection, see Julia M. Nauhaus, ed., Asien in Altenburg, Bernhard August von Lindenau's "chinesische Schätze" (Altenburg: Lindenau Museum, 2014).

nese art, such as asymmetry."⁵ The latter is associated with the establishment of ethnographic museums throughout Europe during the nineteenth century which led to a corresponding shift in the framing and interpretation of pre-existing Chinese collections. Individual objects became "representative" of foreign cultures, as many museums became didactic displays of empire.⁶ While these concepts can be fruitful for understanding longer periods of European engagement with China, they may prove too broad a brush for understanding the nuances of European connoisseurial practice as applied to East Asian objects. "Chinoiserie" as it is usually understood today first appeared in nineteenth-century France and the term was used very differently in its earlier contexts.⁷

It seems then, more useful to assess the concepts of "authenticity" and "Chinese" that were recurrent in discussions of the Chinese Cabinet. These terms, as used by Duke August and his network, had highly specific meanings that diverge from current art historical parlance. For art and cultural historians alike, "authenticity" is a difficult concept to apply to Chinese objects in eighteenth-century European collections: many of these objects were mass-produced in China for a European market and were tailored to conform to European collectors' expectations of Chinese aesthetics.⁸ What parameters then, did eighteenth-century German connoisseurs and their networks use to establish the authenticity of Chinese objects? Furthermore, the liberal use of the term "Chinese" by eighteenth-century connoisseurs can be troubling for modern audiences, who are accustomed to a greater degree of geographical precision when discussing the origins of non-European art. What did connoisseurs such as Duke August consider "Chinese" and what criteria did an object need to fulfill before it could be accessioned to the Chinese Cabinet?

This chapter approaches these questions by exploring how Chinese objects were described in the context of the early modern Kunstkammer, before discussing the emergence of Chinese cabinets in the eighteenth century. It then looks at examples of the

<sup>5</sup> Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam, "Introduction," in Beyond Chinoiserie: Artistic Exchange between China and the West during the Late Qing Dynasty (1796–1911), ed. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 1–15, here p. 9.

<sup>6</sup> The literature on museums as imperial institutions is extensive. See, for instance, John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, eds., The Cultures of Collecting (London: Reaktion Books, 1994); Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 1995); Krzysztof Pomian, Der Ursprung des Museums. Vom Sammeln (Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach, 1998). For studies of museums in Germany, see H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

<sup>7</sup> For a discussion on the origins and history of the term "Chinoiserie," see Chu and Milam, "Introduction" and Kristel Smentek, "Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Art from China, and Nineteenth-Century French Painting," in Beyond Chinoiserie, ed. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam, pp. 93–121.

<sup>8</sup> For discussions on art produced in China for export, see Craig Clunas, Chinese Export Watercolours (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1984); Craig Clunas, Chinese Export Art and Design (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1987); Carl L. Crossman, The Decorative Arts of the China Trade (Suffolk: Antique Collectors' Club, 1991).

correspondence between Duke August and his scholarly and mercantile network to parse their discussions and debates surrounding "authenticity" and the category "Chinese." An examination of the discourse between the collector and his networks reveals the level of care and attention that connoisseurs of Chinese export art devoted towards their holdings, treating them as valuable artworks or natural history specimens worthy of detailed study. The chapter suggests that far from a lack of knowledge about China, the flexible use of the term "Chinese" can be seen as a conscious choice, favored by connoisseurs to fit a specific collecting concept and aesthetic, and as a response to the fluctuating availability of Chinese imports on the European market.

#### Early Modern Kunstkammer and the Eighteenth-Century Chinese Cabinet

The early modern Kunstkammer is often regarded as the predecessor to the modern museum and the earliest examples of European engagement with extra-European objects. With the guiding concept of exhibiting a microcosm of the world, numerous Kunstkammer had sections for "foreign," "exotic," or "Indian" objects, from Africa, the Americas, and Asia.⁹ The terminologies reveal a generalist approach towards categorizing extra-European objects, avoiding specification of the exact geographical origin, while emphasizing its foreign appearance, its distant provenance, and its acquisition via maritime trade.¹⁰

In Gotha, the earliest East Asian imports arrived in the mid-seventeenth century, acquired by Duke August's forefathers from travelers, such as Caspar Schmalkalden (1616–73), a Dutch East India Company soldier who sailed to Japan, Taiwan, and Java. In an inventory of the Gotha collection, undertaken in 1656, they were listed under the broad category of "foreign, Indian and other strange things" (Auswärtige, Indianische und andere frembde Sachen). Three years later, in an inventory of 1659, the entries provided more detail about style and provenance, and described books, paintings, writing instruments, and ink sticks as Chinese. In the eighteenth century, the Dukes of Gotha acquired increasing numbers of Chinese objects. With these new accessions, the Gotha Kunstkammer gradually developed a focus on East Asia, and specific sections were dedicated to Chinese objects in the inventories of 1717 and 1721.¹¹

<sup>9</sup> See Andreas Grote, Macrocosmos in Microcosmo. Die Welt in der Stube. Zur Geschichte des Sammelns, 1450–1800 (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1994); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

<sup>10</sup> Anna Grasskamp, "Unpacking Foreign Ingenuity: The German Conquest of Artful Objects with 'Indian' Provenance," in Ingenuity in the Making: Matter and Technique in Early Modern Europe, ed. Richard J. Oosterhoff, José Ramón Marcaida, and Alexander Marr (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), pp. 213–28.

<sup>11</sup> Dominik Collet, Die Welt in der Stube: Begegnungen mit Außereuropa in Kunstkammern der Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2007), p. 38.

Chinese cabinets were installed in European palaces from the seventeenth century onwards, as a response to a heightened interest in China and the creation of collections and interiors around Chinese themes. Unlike baroque porcelain rooms, specifically Chinese-themed cabinets were not as ubiquitous, and their decoration and function could be quite varied.¹² Certain Chinese cabinets, such as the one in Schönbrunn palace in Vienna, were ornately decorated, with lacquered wall panels and fine porcelain from China and Japan.¹³ Other cabinets stored and displayed collections of Chinese objects. As a collection type, the Chinese cabinet is an amalgam of the early modern Kunstkammer and the Baroque porcelain room. Chinese wares such as porcelain, lacquerware, and soapstones continued to be acquired, alongside furniture, models of objects, prints, and watercolor albums. These cabinets were generally small, socially exclusive spaces, richly decorated for the purpose of displaying the collectors' unique acquisitions, and only accessible to select guests. They could also serve as private, contemplative studies, furnished with a desk for reading and writing.

Chinese cabinets similar to Duke August's in eighteenth-century Germany included that of Duke Anton Ulrich of Braunschweig (1633–1714) and the Chinese Cabinet of the Hessen-Kassel landgraves.¹⁴ August II the Strong, Elector of Saxony (1670–1733), renowned for his extensive porcelain collection, also collected Chinese textiles, costumes, and watercolor albums at his residence in Dresden.¹⁵ Although these collections no longer exist in their original settings, the holdings are still extant in the relevant museum. Typically, only aristocratic collectors had the means to acquire large collections of Chinese goods, given the expense of purchasing from East India Company traders or merchants at the annual Leipzig fair.¹⁶

<sup>12</sup> Gabriele Krist and Elfriede Iby, Investigation and Conservation of East Asian Cabinets in Imperial Residences (1700–1900) (Vienna: Böhlau, 2017); Philipp von Württemburg, Das Lackkabinett im deutschen Schloßbau (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999); Katie Scott, "Playing Games with Otherness: Watteau's Chinese Cabinet at the Château de la Muette," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 66, (2003): pp. 189–248.

<sup>13</sup> See Michael Yonan, "Veneers of Authority: Chinese Lacquers in Maria Theresa's Vienna," Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 4 (Summer 2004): pp. 652–72.

<sup>14</sup> Eva Stroeber, Ostasiatika (Braunschweig: Herzog Anton-Ulrich-Museum Braunschweig, 2002). Ulrich Schmidt, ed., Porzellan aus China und Japan: die Porzellangalerie der Landgrafen von Hessen-Kassel (Berlin: Reimer, 1990).

<sup>15</sup> See Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, "Changing Attitudes towards Ethnographic Material: Rediscovering the Soapstone Collection of Augustus the Strong," Abhandlungen und Berichte des Staatlichen Museums für Völkerkunde Dresden: Forschungsstelle 48 (1994): pp. 26–31; Cordula Bischoff, "August der Starke als Sammler von Asiatika," in La Chine, Die China Sammlung des 18. Jahrhunderts im Dresdner Kupferstich-Kabinett, ed. Cordula Bischoff (Dresden: Sandstein, 2021), pp. 13–22.

<sup>16</sup> On collecting practices in German court contexts, see Christoph Frank and Wolfgang Zimmermann, eds., Aufgeklärter Kunstdiskurs und höfische Sammelpraxis. Karoline Luise von Baden im europäischen Kontext (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2015).

While some eighteenth-century connoisseurs described their practices in prescriptive manuals and treatises,¹⁷ Duke August never explicitly explained his strategy nor his rationale for his Chinese Cabinet in writing. It is also unclear how systematic the duke was in his acquisition strategy, as the inventory of the collection was only compiled after his death.¹⁸ Letters, however, provide insights into his connoisseurial practice. From them we learn that Chinese imperial apartments were one of the earliest models for Duke August's Chinese Cabinet. In a letter to the anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) from 1806, the collector expressed his desire to install Chinese-style state apartments in Friedenstein palace. He requested that Blumenbach acquire and send him a "detailed, colored . . . plan of an authentic Chinese imperial state chamber, that I can imitate, and which I can use to display my rarities. Plafonds, parquets, . . . every single furniture, every carpet, every insignificant detail must be accurate in color, form, situation, and proportion . . . ."¹⁹ Presumably, the descriptions and depictions of richly decorated Chinese interiors circulating in travel accounts and watercolor albums that displayed a panoply of Chinese furniture and decorative items made a strong impression and motivated the duke to shape his collection after these models (fig. 3). The Chinese scholar's study, as a space of contemplation, connoisseurship, and sociability, may have also influenced his concept of the cabinet, and motivated his acquisition of Chinese books, inksticks, painting scrolls, and ceramics (fig. 4).

Further correspondence suggests that the duke's goal was to collect a wide and representative array of exquisite objects. Joseph Meyer (1796–1856), the duke's agent in London, was instructed by the duke's secretary to avoid purchasing duplicates and soapstones, of which there were already plenty in Gotha. Instead, Meyer was to source "rare and beautiful art pieces from China, Persia and India . . . old Chinese lacquerware, brightly colored Chinese paper, small carpets, hats, parasols, and fans."²⁰ In a let-

<sup>17</sup> Charlotte Guichard, "Taste Communities: The Rise of the 'Amateur' in Eighteenth-Century Paris," Eighteenth-Century Studies 45, no. 4 (2012): pp. 519–47, Kristel Smentek, Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 191–95.

<sup>18</sup> Anonymous, Catalog des Chinesischen Kabinetts, erhoben am 15. V. 1827, Acte 109, Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein Archiv, Gotha.

<sup>19</sup> "Bestellen Sie mir doch das Detaillirten, colorirten und nach großen Proportionen aufgenommenen Auf- und Grund-Riß eines ächt chinesischen kaiserlichen Prunck-gemach, das ich nachahmen könnte, und worin ich meine Seltenheiten aufstellen könnte. Plafonds parquete, jede einzelne Wand, jede einzelne Abtheilung, jeder einzelne Schirm, jedes einzelne Meuble, jeder Teppich, jedes unbedeutende Detail muß nach seiner Farbe, nach seiner Gestalt, Nutzen, Localität und Proportion pünktlich, wie jede Lampe, jeder Leuchter, jede Kiste und Kasten, jedes Bild & Säule nachgebildet seyn." Duke August to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, April 6, 1806, quoted in August Emil Leopold von Sachsen-Gotha und Altenburg und Johann Friedrich Blumenbach – Eine Beziehung sui generis, ed. Norbert Klatt (Göttingen: Norbert Klatt Verlag, 2014), p. 48.

<sup>20</sup> "Wenn Sie für die Folge wieder einkaufen, so sehen Sie vorzüglich darauf, Ihm schöne und seltene Kunstsachen aus China, Persien und Indien zu senden . . . alter chinesischer Lack aber, chinesisches buntes Papier, kleine Tapeten, Hüte, Sonnenschirme, Fächer pp., das ist das, was unser gnädigster

Fig. 3: Unknown Chinese artist(s), Canton, Inner Courtyard with Gallery, from Desseins Chinois Coloriés, 1770s, watercolor on paper bound in an album, 38.3 × 30.6 cm, Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein, Gotha, inv. no. C409G

ter to Meyer, the duke describes his goal of achieving a thorough overview of China by purchasing watercolor albums. This medium was popular among collectors for the affordability, portability, and the colorful, compact presentations of a diverse range of Chinese themes.²¹ "I would like to possess the magnificently beautiful, faithful, and artfully painted collections of the luxury, the customs, and the specialties of the Chinese. Paintings of theatres, topography, landscape and natural history depictions from my much beloved, but presently not very esteemed . . . country."²² In nineteenth-century England, China was becoming politically disregarded following the McCartney mission

Herrn gern sieht." Ernst Madelung to Joseph Meyer, January 2, 1818, in Aus Joseph Meyers Wanderjahren, ed. Johannes Hohlfeld (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1926), p. 139.

<sup>21</sup> On the materiality and appeal of Chinese export painting, see Rosalien van der Poel, "Made for Trade—Made in China. Chinese Export Paintings in Dutch Collections: Art and Commodity" (PhD diss. University of Leiden 2016), pp. 54–63.

<sup>22</sup> "Gern besäß ich wohl die herrlich prachtvollschön, treu und kunstreich gemalten Sammlungen des Luxus, der Etikette und der sonderbaren Eigenthümlichkeiten chinesischer Art, Schilderungen aus Schauspielen, topographische und landschaftliche und naturhistorische Darstellungen aus meinem vielgeliebten, aber jetzt nicht sehr geachteten, hoffentlich jedoch nicht von Ihnen verehrten Land." Duke August to Joseph Meyer, May 12, 1818, in Hohlfeld, ed., Aus Joseph Meyers Wanderjahren, p. 35.

Fig. 4: Unknown Chinese artist(s), Canton, Scholar's Studio, folio 123 in: Dessins de la Chine Tom. Costumes & Musiciens, 1800–8, watercolor on paper bound in an album, 36.9 × 41.4 cm, Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein, Gotha, inv. no. C411G

of 1793, which failed to establish diplomatic and trade relations between Britain and China. Historians consider this as a factor for the waning of the Chinese fashion in Europe. Duke August was unfazed by this shift in attitudes. He collected over a dozen Chinese export watercolor albums on a vast array of subjects, such as Chinese architecture, interiors, costumes and rituals, occupations, tea and rice cultivation, and flora and fauna.²³ The range of subjects attest to the connoisseur's desire to possess and display an aesthetically pleasing, encyclopedic microcosm of China within his cabinet.²⁴

<sup>23</sup> A number of these albums have been reproduced in the Comprehensive Illustrated Catalog of Chinese Painting, Third Series, vol. 3: European Collections, compiled by Ogawa Hiromitsu and Itakura Masaaki (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 2015), pp. 254–77.

<sup>24</sup> Alexandra Wedekind, "Zauberwerke Asiatischer Kunst-Bestandkatalog der Alben und Bücher Ostasiens des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts in der Sammlung der Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein," (unpublished manuscript, May 11, 2016); Alexandra Wedekind, "Lifestyle in Kanton um 1800 – Verschiedene Ansätze

#### Authentically Chinese

Building upon the ideas of Walter Benjamin about the original work of art, and from Roland Barthes on authorship, art historical scholarship has reassessed the notion of authenticity and has demonstrated that it was not a concept that existed a priori, but rather a preoccupation that emerged from the discourse of connoisseurs and was influenced by attendant sociocultural conditions.²⁵ Connoisseurs developed strategies to make judgments about artworks and to authenticate them. In the context of Europe in the long eighteenth century, connoisseurs focused primarily on paintings, sculpture, and works on paper, but also engaged with a greater variety of media including coins and small antiquities.²⁶ Practices ranged from close observation of the artwork to the tracing of provenance, to the creation and dissemination of copies and art manuals. Duke August and his network were preoccupied with the question of authenticity (Ächtheit) in their appraisal of new acquisitions. As the art market expanded and the trade in Asian objects increased, connoisseurial practice extended to Chinese export art, which was approached with similar attention and care as European artworks. This approach contrasts with attitudes in the late-nineteenth century, that perceived Chinese export art to be of little aesthetic value and therefore unworthy of study. Connoisseurs prized authenticity and considered imitations to be inferior. Investigations of Chinese artworks, however, were less focused on identifying authorship, whether by a single workshop or artist. Instead, connoisseurs were concerned with the objects' geographical origin and its corroboration of existing knowledge about China gained from travel accounts.

A letter from March 17, 1801 from the Gotha court astronomer Franz Xaver von Zach (1754–1832) to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach describing life-size Chinese mannequins that had arrived in Gotha, is revealing about the qualities that concerned eighteenth-century connoisseurs when assessing the authenticity of Chinese objects:

You have seen the Chinese dolls of our hereditary prince? Since then, he has received four, nearly life-sized Chinese dolls from Copenhagen, a Chinese man and a Chinese woman, a Tartar man and a Tartar woman dressed in full costume. One can dress and undress them, and look closely at each piece of clothing. Their faces and physiognomy are also characteristic. The prince inquires, if you might require a sketch of them for your works. If you do, he will have everything faithfully copied in colors, and painted. (You see that the prince wants to play at being the petit Sir Joseph [Banks]). I assume you would accept, at least for your cabinet, [that] this would be an authentic Contrefey of

zur Betrachtung von Interieurszenen in Chinesischen Exportalben," Ostasiatische Zeitschrift, Neue Serie, no. 29 (Spring 2015), pp. 20–29.

<sup>25</sup> Jeffrey M. Muller, "Measures of Authenticity: The Detection of Copies in the Early Literature on Connoisseurship," in Retaining the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies, and Reproductions, Studies in the History of Art 20 (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1989), pp. 141–49; Charlotte Guichard, ed., De l'authenticite: Une histoire de valeurs de l'art (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2014).

<sup>26</sup> Harry Mount, "The Monkey and the Magnifying Glass: Constructions of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Britain," Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 2 (2006): pp. 167–83.

Chinese and Tartar costumes, because the dolls are certainly authentically Chinese, of that there is no doubt. Would it not be even better, to engage a tailor instead of a painter, to replicate all pieces of the dress (albeit only in European textiles). You only need to say the word and to write to me, and I will take care of the rest.²⁷

The dolls mentioned in the letter consisted of fabric bodies, with appendages of clay or plaster.²⁸ Few have survived the vestiges of time due to their size and fragility.²⁹ Although these objects may seem bizarre and problematic to modern audiences, evoking parallels with the nineteenth-century Völkerschau, in the context of eighteenth-century collectors of Chinese objects, they were prestigious and expensive items, specifically produced in China for export to Europe.³⁰ Museological sources indicate that for decades, the custodians of Friedenstein Palace carefully conserved the pieces, replacing broken limbs, and frequently treating the textiles for moth damage.³¹ The life-size figures were mentioned in multiple publications about the Chinese Cabinet, and when the court painter Justus Heinrich Schneider was tasked in the late nineteenth century with creating a series of paintings of the Friedenstein collection, the display of the Chinese dolls—alongside Chinese musical instruments and Japanese samurai armor— was selected as a quintessential depiction of the East Asian collection (fig. 5).

In von Zach's assessment of authenticity, he highlights qualities such as geographical origin, monetary value, and the Chinese characteristics of the dolls. He stresses

<sup>27</sup> "Sie haben doch die chinesischen Puppen unseres Erbprintzen gesehen? Seitdem aber hat er vier chinesische Puppen fast in Mannsgrösse aus Coppenhagen erhalten, einen Chineser und eine Chineserin, einen Tatarn, und eine Tatarin in vollkommensten Costume gekleydet. Man kann sie ganz an- und ausziehen, jedes Kleidungsstück besonders beschauen, selbst ihre Gesichter und Physionomien sind caracteristisch. Nun läst der Erbprinz bey Ihnen anfragen; ob Sie eine Zeichnung davon, zu Ihrem Werke, und Abbildungen gebrauchen könnten. In diesem Fall will er Ihnen alles sehr getreu mit Farben copiren, und mahlen lassen (Sie sehen wohl der E.[rb]P.[rinz] will den petit Sir Joseph spielen) Ich dächte Sie acceptiren; wenigstens ist es für Ihr Cabinet ein ächtes Contrefey chinesischen und tartarischen Costumes, denn die Puppen sind gewis ächt chinesisch daran ist kein Zweifel. Wäre es vielleicht nicht noch besser, statt einen Mahler einen Schneider zu gebrauchen, und alle Pieçen des Anzuges (freylich nur in Europäischen Zeugen) nachmachen zu lassen? Alles dieses belieben Sie uns zu bestimmen, und mir zu schreiben; so will ich das weitere schon besorgen." Franz Xaver von Zach an Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, March 17, 1801, in The Correspondence of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach Volume VI: 1801– 1805 Letters 1360–1787, ed. Frank Dougherty and Norbert Klatt (Göttingen: Norbert Klatt, 2015) pp. 515–19.

<sup>28</sup> Similar "three-quarter life size figures" from Canton at the Peabody Essex Museum are mentioned in Crossman, China Trade, pp. 315–21.

<sup>29</sup> Dolls that have survived are usually stored in museum depots. See Susan Legêne, "Nobody's Objects: Early-19th-Century Ethnographical Collections and the Formation of Imperialist Attitudes and Feelings," Etnofoor 11, no. 1 (1998): pp. 21–39.

<sup>30</sup> A "large dressed Chinese figure" was part of Jean Theodore Royer's Chinese Museum in The Hague. See Jan van Campen, Collecting China, Jean Theodore Royer (1737–1807), Collections and Chinese Studies (Hilversum: Verloren, 2021), p. 109.

<sup>31</sup> Adolf Bube, Tagebuch des Herzogl. Kunst-und chinesischen Kabinets im Jahre 1857, 8/IV, 1, 1, Goetheund Schiller-Archiv, Weimar.

Fig. 5: Justus Heinrich Schneider, Ostasiatika im Herzoglichen Museum, 1879, watercolor on paper, 22.8 × 32.9 cm, Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein, Gotha, inv. no. G92, 109.8

that the dolls were from Copenhagen, where various imports from Canton were brought by Danish East India Company ships. The ability to trace the acquisitions of the figures directly to China, where they were made by Chinese craftsmen, with Chinese fabrics, and (presumably) after real-life human models, supported their authenticity. The mannequins were not European imitations, but Chinese manufactures—acquired at great expense because of the costs of the objects and the logistics of shipping large, irregular sized items.³² Furthermore, the mention of not only Chinese but also Tartar dolls corroborated knowledge imparted to European audiences by eighteenthcentury accounts of China. Du Halde's publication on China includes a section on "la Tartarie chinoise," which describes the region of Northeast China and its inhabitants, as culturally and linguistically distinct from the Chinese. The more recently published account detailing the McCartney Mission, also made a distinction between the "Chinese" and the "Tartar."³³

Von Zach's characterization of Duke August as "the petit" Joseph Banks, the celebrated president of the Royal Society of London who received, organized, and disseminated natural history drawings and specimens from voyages of exploration to scientific

<sup>32</sup> On chests and boxes as the China trade's main forms of transport, see Meike von Brescius, Private Enterprise and the China Trade: Merchants and Markets in Europe, 1700–1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 154–69.

<sup>33</sup> John Barrow, Voyage en Chine (Paris: Buisson, 1805).

institutions throughout Europe reveals the model and practices which may have inspired Duke August. To observers, the duke seemed to position himself as an influential actor in a scientific community, possessing an eye for ideal, authentic objects that came directly from China to his cabinet, which he would in turn carefully study, have copies made and distribute to members of his network, generating new discussions and knowledge.³⁴ The visual expertise and the production of copies that was so central to eighteenth-century connoisseurship also was modeled on practices within natural history—through careful observation, connoisseurs trained themselves to recognize archetypes, allowing them to establish and place objects in different categories, and make value judgments about the quality and authenticity of objects.³⁵ Distribution, comparison and discussion was based on copies: the dolls' authenticity and rarity, made them valuable for "faithfully copying" by a painter or imitation by a tailor. The seemingly paradoxical "authentic contrefey" has strong parallels with the natural history drawings or models distributed by naturalists. These were made with close attention to the petals, leaves, fur, and feathers, to ensure that the colors used were a faithful representation of nature.³⁶ The scientific value of the copy was based on its verisimilitude to the authentic specimen and was an invaluable source when access to the original was not possible.

The authentic is constantly defined against its foil: the inauthentic imitation or copy. Duke August's preoccupation with authenticity became particularly pronounced as he accelerated his acquisition efforts in his final years. From 1817 onwards, he relied on agents, acquaintances, and merchants to expand his collection. The limitations of remote acquisition meant that Duke August was not always fully confident about an object's provenance. Consequently, he began to emphasize to his agents his desire for authentic foreign products.³⁷ As European demand for Asian goods increased, markets were flooded with "populuxe" objects: cheaply produced European manufactures that appealed not only to the wealthiest echelons of society, but also to the middle classes, who now were able to participate in the consumption of foreign imports.³⁸ Jo-

<sup>34</sup> On Joseph Bank's power and limits within his network, see David Philip Miller, "Joseph Banks, Empire, and 'Centers of Calculation' in Late Hanoverian London," in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 21–37.

<sup>35</sup> Smentek, Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur, pp. 6–8; Daniela Bleichmar, "Learning to Look: Visual Expertise Across Art and Science in Eighteenth-Century France," Eighteenth-Century Studies 46, no. 1 (2012): pp. 85–111.

<sup>36</sup> Valérie Kobi, "Staging Life: Natural History Tableaux in Eighteenth-Century Europe," special issue, Lifelike: Journal18 3 (Spring 2017): 10.30610/3.2017.1.

<sup>37</sup> On Duke August's consumption of authentic luxury goods from abroad as a form of aristocratic selffashioning, see Patricia Kleßen, Adelige Selbstbehauptung und romantische Selbstentwürfe. Die queeren Inszenierungen Herzog Augusts von Sachsen-Gotha-Altenburg (1772–1822) (Frankfurt: Campus, 2022), pp. 299–310.

<sup>38</sup> Cissie Fairchilds, "The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods in Eighteenth-Century Paris," in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (Abingdon: Routledge, 1994), pp.

seph Meyer's response to August's request for pineapple wine from Java, for example, reveals the challenges of ascertaining authenticity in a saturated market, where Asian goods were rampantly imitated: "I am unfamiliar with this oriental foodstuff and I can only count on the honesty of the seller . . . I may yet find the opportunity, to acquire an authentic one in original packaging, from an E[ast] India supercargo."³⁹

Collecting in such a climate, Duke August was conscientious about the provenance of Chinese objects. Nevertheless, he was not always able to prevent works of suspect origin from being shipped to Gotha. One contentious purchase was that of six Chinese copperplate prints, which George Sinclair (1790–1868), the son of a Scottish baronet who became acquainted with Duke August whilst studying in Germany, purchased for the duke for £1/19, from a seller which Sinclair only discloses as "Mr N. N.".⁴⁰ After receiving the copperplate prints, the duke deemed them inauthentic European imitations. In his response, Sinclair denies the accusation, insisting that he is a reliable agent, adept at distinguishing authentic artworks from forgeries:

I had almost forgotten to mention that your highness is incorrect for considering the Chinese copperplates as inauthentic [unecht] . . . I have sent them to you solely because of their rarity, and because, no connoisseur [Kenner] who has viewed them, could mistake [verkennen] their native qualities.⁴¹

The vague description makes it difficult to identify the prints in question in the holdings of the Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein. In the 1827 catalogue, works on paper are listed under the section "Of books and works on copper [Kupferwerken]", yet no Chinese copperplate prints are inventoried.⁴² The prints listed are Chinese woodcut prints, such as "Nro 859, fifty-six Chinese woodcuts, that portray the story of Jesus."⁴³ The corre-

<sup>228</sup>–48; Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

<sup>39</sup> Joseph Meyer to Duke August, August 10, 1818, in Hohlfeld, ed., Aus Joseph Meyers Wanderjahren, p. 79.

<sup>40</sup> List of Expenses, May 1817, Geheimes Archiv, EXIII B 12/18, Staatsarchiv Gotha, fol. 9r.

<sup>41</sup> "Bald hatte ich vergessen zu sagen, dass Ew. Durchlaut unrecht haben, die Chinesische Kupferstich für unecht zu halten. Wir geben uns mit Nachahmung solcher Sudeleyen gar nicht ab und ich schickte sie nur wegen ihrer Seltenheit, und weil, wie nur schien, kein kenner, der sie ansicht, ihre vaterländische Eigenthümlichkeit verkennen konnte." George Sinclair to Duke August, September 7, 1817, ibid., fol. 13v.

<sup>42</sup> A three-part copperplate print of European origin depicting a Chinese festival procession has been bound in the album titled Desseins Coloriés Chinois. Interestingly, the copperplate print is not mentioned in the 1827 catalogue entry, which only describes the album as "Nro 849 a [large folio book] in red maroquin binding, containing watercolors of Chinese monuments and buildings". Kee Il Choi Jr. brought to my attention that the copperplate print in question was etched by Isidore Stanislas Helman (1743–1809) in the mid-1780s.

<sup>43</sup> This is the very rare Tianzhu jiangsheng chuxiang jingjie (A History of the Lord of Heaven Who Became Incarnate in the Flesh), a book containing woodblock illustrations of the life of Jesus, published by the Italian missionary Giulio Aleni (1582–1649) in Fujian province in 1637. According to the British Li-

spondence with Sinclair highlights the duke's anxiety about imitations. The lack of a reliable, named merchant who made the sale, and the relatively low cost of the purchase compounds the issue, making it difficult for the connoisseur to be reassured about the geographical origin and authenticity of the prints. Sinclair attempts to assuage the duke's concerns by highlighting the object's "rarity," "native qualities," and appealing to the duke to accept the purchase for his collection.

#### "Chinese," "Indian," and "Oriental"

To conclude, I want to return to the term "Chinese" as used by the duke and his network. Although Duke August consistently described his collection as the "Chinese Cabinet," other observers were not as fastidious. In 1810, in a report on the art collections of the Friedenstein Palace, the Journal des Luxus und der Moden described it as an "Oriental Cabinet which contains the greatest rarities from India and China."⁴⁴ Furthermore, the provenance of the collection was varied; while the duke emphasized his interest in China and insisted on "authenticity," the objects in his cabinet hailed from China, Japan, India, Southeast Asia, or even Europe. These include a sizeable collection of Japanese lacquerware, and the duke's rich collection of decorative fans, several of which were of European manufacture and decorated with Chinese-inspired motifs.⁴⁵ Several non-Chinese objects were singled out in the inventory, including "Nro 56, four tortoiseshell combs (presumably of French origin)," "Nro 82, an oblong box with brightly colored Persian paintings in a green maroquin leather case," "Nro 278, a bronze female figure representing an Indian deity."⁴⁶ Clearly, the duke's preoccupation with authenticity did not translate into a rigorous criterion that excluded objects of non-Chinese origin from entering his cabinet.

A lack of knowledge about extra-European regions is often considered the reason for slippage between "China," "India," and "Orient." This charge is commonly levied upon connoisseurs of Chinese objects in the long eighteenth century, who are deemed to lack knowledge about the "real China," willfully appropriating Eastern cultures to form an aesthetic idea of the "Orient" that only existed in Western imaginations. This rationale does not fully explain Duke August's practice. He was an avid reader of the latest European publications on China. For example, William Alexander's The

brary, there are only thirty-seven surviving copies. That number does not include this previously unreported copy in Gotha. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/illustrated-life-of-jesus-in-chinese. See also Maria Gabriella Matarazzo's contribution to this volume.

<sup>44</sup> Anonymous, "Bemerkungen über die neuen Anlagen und Kunst-Sammlungen in Gotha," in Journal des Luxus und der Moden 25, ed. Carl Betruch (Weimar: Verlag des Landes-Industrie-Comptoirs, December 1810) pp. 756–68.

<sup>45</sup> Ute Däberitz, Sonnenfächer und Luftwedel: Die Fächersammlung Herzog Augusts von Sachsen-Gotha-Altenburg (Gotha: Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein, 2007).

<sup>46</sup> Anonymous, Catalog des Chinesischen Kabinetts.

Costume of China, published in 1805, and Thomas and Daniel Williams' 1810 publication, A Picturesque Voyage to India by Way of China could be found in his personal library. Furthermore, in eighteenth-century Europe, widely accepted definitions of China had been established. Zedler's Universal Lexicon defines China as "a large and extensive country that stretches from the Orient until Asia, which is renowned for its fertility, great riches, beautiful cities and many inhabitants." The entry also cites detailed information about China's geographical boundaries from Jesuit missionaries' reports.⁴⁷

Rather, despite keeping abreast of the latest scholarship on China, non-Chinese Asian objects and Chinese-style objects manufactured in Europe posed new challenges for connoisseurs in the long eighteenth century, and slippage between these categories occurred. It must be emphasized that even though geographical definitions existed, the use of these terms was not as rigorous as audiences would come to expect from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, when Sinologie (Sinology) and Orientalistik (Oriental Studies) became growing academic fields in Germany.⁴⁸ In the wake of these developments, collections became professionalized and extra-European objects were used as artefacts to learn about the history of foreign cultures. As a result, collections were catalogued and labelled with greater precision by curators with training in these academic fields.

The largely-Chinese, yet also geographically varied provenance of the objects in Gotha's Chinese Cabinet is inextricably linked to the figure of the connoisseur. Prior to the establishment of state-regulated museums, connoisseurs exercised considerable agency over the concept and acquisition strategy of their collections. Sitting at the center of a network of traders, agents and collectors, Duke August envisioned an encyclopedic cabinet inspired by Chinese state apartments. Once he professed his specific interest for China, acquaintances, and merchants alike proposed, with varying degrees of success, a range of "Chinese" objects for accession to his cabinet. Although the duke was well-informed, and articulated specific demands regarding the provenance and aesthetics of new acquisitions during his years of collecting, his assessments of the authenticity of Chinese objects were not entirely prescriptive. Rather, connoisseurial judgment was formed through dialogic engagement with members of his network. Although it may seem contradictory, the connoisseur who emphasized his expertise in all matters "Chinese" was not bound by convention to adhere to a strict definition of the term. Duke August may have spent hours closely observing individual Chinese objects that he purchased to ascertain their authenticity and provenance. Nevertheless, in his decades-long endeavor to create one of the leading Chinese collections in Europe, the duke could also adopt a flexible definition of "Chinese" when persuaded by his net-

<sup>47</sup> Johann Heinrich Zedler, ed., Johann Heinrich Zedlers Grosses vollständiges Universallexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, 1731–1754, (Halle: Johann Heinrich Zedler, 1731–54), s.v. "Sina, China, Tschina", https://www.zedler-lexikon.de/index.html?c=blaettern&seitenzahl=791&bandnummer=37&view=100&l=de. 48 Susanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

work, when an object particularly appealed to him, and in light of the varied origins of objects advertised as "Chinese" on the European art market.

#### Charlotte Guichard

## Asymmetries of Connoisseurship in a Globalizing World: The Geopolitics of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century Paris

Although focused on Paris, this chapter begins with Johann Zoffany's conversation piece (fig. 1), painted around 1786–87, in which the painter provocatively staged the development of global networks of collecting and connoisseurship in colonial India. The absence of such a portrait of connoisseurs in French eighteenth-century painting could make us think that Paris lacked similar practices of art connoisseurship in a globalizing world. But a comparison of both cities, metropolitan London and metropolitan Paris, gives us a better understanding of the variety of connoisseurial practices that developed to address new and unfamiliar aesthetic conventions in Europe. This chapter intends to show that metropolitan Paris, although less engaged with the display and study of artifacts from abroad, was also affected by globalizing though asymmetrical connoisseurial practices.

Fig. 1: Johann Zoffany, Colonel Antoine Polier, Claude Martin, and John Wombwell with the Artist in the Background in Lucknow, 1786, oil on canvas, 138 × 183 cm, Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta

In the center of his painting, Zoffany himself looks back at the viewer. Born in Germany, but active in England, the painter spent six years, from 1783 to 1789, in India where he circulated in British imperial society. On the right, John Wombwell (d. 1795), a British East India Company (EIC) accountant, pauses from reading a book. Together with Major Claude Martin (1735–1800), a former weaver born in Lyon, who was also an officer of the EIC, Wombwell admires a watercolor held by an Indian servant, representing Martin's new mansion built in India. Antoine-Louis-Henri Polier (1741–95), a Swiss engineer who worked for the EIC, takes a break from his perusal of an album of Mughal paintings.¹ Displayed on the wall behind are paintings depicting Indian landscapes probably executed by Zoffany. This was not the first time Zoffany portrayed connoisseurship as a social and cultural bond among European elites. In an earlier conversation piece, The Tribuna of the Uffizi (The Royal Collection Trust, Windsor Castle, 1772–77) Zoffany depicted aristocratic European men gathered around Italian masterpieces in Florence. In this more recent canvas, however, the practices of connoisseurship were displaced to the setting of Lucknow, the capital of the province of Awadh, now controlled by the EIC, where the collecting of Mughal art was integral to the self-fashioning of British identities in colonial India.²

In his Lucknow conversation piece, Zoffany also discretely invokes a satirical vein of connoisseurship. Held on a chain by a servant, a monkey stands in front of a picture exhibited on an easel. The monkey gives a sense of playfulness to the painting, but it was also a motif used to satirize connoisseurs. In 1740, the French artist Jean Siméon Chardin (1699–1779) exhibited his painting of a Monkey Antiquarian (Paris, Musée du Louvre) at the Paris Salon. In 1761, the Englishman William Hogarth (1697–1764) published an engraving for the catalogue of the pictures exhibited by the Society of Artists, in which a monkey also posed as a connoisseur at work.³ With this image, Hogarth criticized English connoisseurs who preferred old master paintings to works by living English painters. William Hamilton (1731–1803), the English ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples, and a famous connoisseur of art and antiquities, caused a sensation with his "East India monkey." Named Jack, this black monkey from the Malabar Coast in southwestern India, was a celebrity in Naples who "divert[ed] himself with [Hamilton's] magnifying glass to look at objects, [and who had been taught] to look at medals by way of laughing at antiquarians."⁴ In Zoffany's painting, the monkey

<sup>1</sup> On Polier, see also Friederike Weis's contribution to this volume.

<sup>2</sup> Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East, 1750–1850 (London: Fourth Estate, 2005), p. 71; Romita Ray, "Inscribing Asymmetry: Johann Zoffany's Banyan and the Extension of Knowledge," South Asian Studies, 27, no. 2 (2011): pp. 185–98.

<sup>3</sup> Harry Mount, "The Monkey with the Magnifying Glass: Constructions of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Britain," Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 2 (2006): pp. 167–84; the engraving was made by Charles Grignion after William Hogarth, as the "Tailpiece" for the Catalogue of the Society of Artists at Spring Gardens, 1761.

<sup>4</sup> Collection of Autograph Letters and Historical Documents Formed by Alfred Morrison, second series, vol. 1 (London: Strangeways and Sons, 1893–95), p. 63: Sir William Hamilton to Charles Greville, September 12, 1780.

stands between the shade of a banyan tree and the connoisseurs' world, between colonial nature and the space of polite society. Looking in the same direction as Polier and Martin, the animal mimics their gaze while conspicuously grabbing an exotic banana aping their connoisseurial practices of looking, the monkey playfully casts doubt on their authority. In this painting, Zoffany brilliantly relocated the European satire of the connoisseur to an Anglo-Imperial context and reformulated it.

Enmeshed in international networks of trade and British Empire, connoisseurship addressed an expanding range of material and visual productions in an expanding global field. It therefore reveals aspects of connoisseurial practices that were obscured by canonical European literature about art. As defined by academic hierarchies and artistic theory, connoisseurship was limited to specific items and media. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, in England, France, and Italy, the connoisseur was presented as mostly, if not exclusively, interested in the fine arts: Ephraim Chambers, author of Encyclopedia (1728) defined the connoisseur as "a Person who is a thorow [sic] Judge, or Master in any way; in Matters of Painting, &c."⁵ In Europe, connoisseurship had developed as a set of visual and social skills in the realm of the liberal and visual arts, and these interests remained indebted to conceptions of taste rooted in Eurocentric visions of the world.⁶ In England, Hogarth considered the taste for Chinese painting and sculpture as a "mean taste,"⁷ not to be admired or emulated. In France, Voltaire wrote: "There are vast countries into which good taste has never penetrated . . . there is scarcely any kind of art in which the Asians have ever excelled . . . good taste has only fallen to the lot of a few nations in Europe."⁸ Against these Eurocentric, derogatory views, Zoffany's painting illuminates the extension of connoisseurship and collecting to eighteenth-century global cities. Imperial trade is visually evoked through the red coats of the EIC while a range of colorful products and items—oil paintings, Indian silks and cottons, gouache paintings, a book, and even fruits in a basket—solicit the aesthetic gaze and prompt sensual delight. This is a painting of connoisseurs and for connoisseurs that opens the context to global networks of trade and knowledge. It posits a more inclusive definition of connoisseurship, both in terms of practice and the kinds of objects engaged, than the traditional form proposed in early modern artistic literature focused on European high art.

<sup>5</sup> Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopedia, 2 vols. (London: Printed for James and John Knapton [and 19 others], 1728), s.v. "Connoisseur."

<sup>6</sup> Carol Gibson-Wood, Jonathan Richardson: Art Theorist of the English Enlightenment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000).

<sup>7</sup> William Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty. Written with a view of fixing the fluctuating Ideas of Taste (London: Reeves, 1753), p. 19.

<sup>8</sup> [François-Marie Arouet] de Voltaire, "Goût," in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, vol. 7 (Paris: Briasson et al., 1765), pp. 761–70, for an English translation: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/did2222.0000.168/–taste? rgn=main;view=fulltext;q1=tastehttps://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/did2222.0000.168/–taste?rgn=main; view=fulltext;q1=taste.

To my knowledge there are no French equivalents to Zoffany's visualization of connoisseurship abroad. How can we explain such an absence? This kind of painting—or rather, its absence in French visual culture—raises broader issues about the relationship between connoisseurship and collecting in the French Empire. It also brings to the fore a diversity of reactions, inside Europe, to collecting in an expanding, global economy and the new forms of connoisseurship this global collecting promoted. Thinking about connoisseurship more expansively, through this painting, forces us to consider the tension between connoisseurship as a global skill, enmeshed in international trade and imported luxury goods. Connoisseurship, as it was understood by European elites of the era, was as an exclusive form of knowledge production reserved for European fine arts—even if sophisticated cultures of art connoisseurship did exist outside Europe, especially in early modern Asia. ⁹ In eighteenth-century Paris, the practices of connoisseurship—as defined by Jonathan Richardson—rested on attribution, authentication, and aesthetic judgement. They were the province of privileged and elevated social groups, which represented themselves as taste communities, sharing a language of beauty, aesthetic valuation, and quality, supposedly separated from the world of commerce.¹⁰ The development of international trade in porcelain and other luxury products would transform these practices and hierarchies of connoisseurship in metropolitan Paris in the eighteenth century while artistic artifacts from abroad inspired new technological development and emulation. At the same time, "new players" or entrants to the field of connoisseurship, such as soldiers and adventurers of the new French colonial empire, had less success in establishing their authority as connoisseurs after their return to the metropole.

Four main themes guide the arguments that follows. Connoisseurship developed as an expert taste for a small range of imported products. Through trade with the Qing Empire, a shared taste for Chinese porcelain developed in small circles of Parisian dealers and amateurs, which contributed to the constitution of large European collections of porcelain and promoted the distinctive figure of the "connoisseur." This promotion of a shared globalized taste differed from other forms of appropriation of non-European visual artifacts in Paris, namely technological curiosity. Chinese paintings, in the collection of Minister of State Henri-Léonard Bertin (1720–92), were subject to scientific experimentation and examined for technical expertise. Not described in the language of taste and beauty, these artifacts were instead subject to industrial emulation in the context of rivalry between France and the Qing Empire. With European expansion, new forms of connoisseurship expanded to colonial sites, to include new kinds of objects and to engage unfamiliar aesthetic conventions. In India, a territory disputed by French and English forces, hundreds of Indian artifacts and manuscripts were collect-

<sup>9</sup> Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991); Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

<sup>10</sup> Charlotte Guichard, "Taste Communities: The Rise of the Amateur in Eighteenth-Century Paris," Eighteenth-Century Studies 45, no. 4 (2012): pp. 519–47.

ed by a French military officer, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gentil (1726–99), who brought them to Paris and offered them to the Royal Library (later the Bibliothèque nationale de France) where they are stored today.¹¹ Until their recent rediscovery in the twentieth century, these objects of curiosity continued to be, what in another context have been called "sleeping objects;" "lying in wait"¹² in library storerooms, their value was uncertain. Accumulated abroad by soldiers or marine officers who had developed an interest and knowledge for these lesser-known types of objects and materials, they were housed in European public collections, which lacked adequate knowledge of, and therefore practices of connoisseurship for, these objects. These globalized practices of collecting tell different stories; embedded in imperial histories, they are the basis of the vexed relationship between connoisseurship and the controversial status of collections in the French museums of today.

#### Global Connoisseurship: The Case of Porcelain

Parallel to the promotion of connoisseurship in early modern European artistic literature, which theorized the "science of a connoisseur"¹³ while promoting the value of the visual and fine arts, connoisseurial skills also developed in international trade. As economic historians have noted, connoisseurship required tact, a quality often mentioned in eighteenth-century commerce. Expert in discriminating between levels of quality, identifying similarities and differences between goods and products, connoisseurial practices expanded into the world of trading textiles, dyes, and papers as European trade grew on a global scale.¹⁴ Jacques Savary Des Bruslons in the Dictionnaire Universel du commerce (1723 –30), for example, tried to systematize the knowledge of merchants, consumers, and trade officials. In his entry on wool, he highlighted the "connoisseur" as the person capable of distinguishing between different qualities of the material. As William Reddy notes, Savary's article on plain linen cloth "includes a list of seven points to check when buying a piece of toile. This list places great emphasis

<sup>11</sup> On Gentil's collecting, see also Friederike Weis's and Mrinalini Sil's contributions to this volume. 12 Fanny Wonu Veys, "Awakening Sleeping Objects," in Pasifika Styles: Artists Inside the Museum, ed. Amiria Salmond and Rosanna Raymond (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2006), pp. 119–23; Alice Stevenson, "Lying in Wait: Inertia and Latency in the Collection," in Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt, ed. Mirjam Brusius and Kavita Singh (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 231–39.

<sup>13</sup> On connoisseurship as a form of empirically-based knowledge: Kristel Smentek, Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); Valerie Kobi, Dans l'oeil du connaisseur: Pierre-Jean Mariette, 1694–1774, et la construction des savoirs en histoire de l'art (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2017).

<sup>14</sup> Jean-Yves Grenier, "Une économie de l'identification. Juste prix et ordre des marchandises dans l'Ancien Régime," in La qualité des produits en France (XVIIIe–XXe siècles), ed. Alessandro Stanziani (Paris: Belin, 2003), p. 42.

on the purchaser's ability to judge by eye."¹⁵ Endowed with this visual acuity, the connoisseur was a key figure in the "mercantile imperialism, " which characterized eighteenth-century Europe and its global ambitions.¹⁶

In the luxury Asian porcelain trade, which grew substantially in the eighteenth century with the expansion of the European trade companies, especially the French Compagnie des Indes, expertise was expressed in the language of taste and connoisseurship.¹⁷ The frontispiece for the sale catalogue of Louis Augustin Angran de Fonspertuis (1669–1747), published in 1747, displays European artifacts, such as framed paintings and drawings in portfolios, with distinguished amateurs. It also features a globe on the right of the image that could well evoke non-European art—namely Japanese and Chinese porcelain—which also featured in his collection.

The dealer who organized the sale, Edme François Gersaint (1694–1750), knew how to discriminate between German imitations of Asian ceramics made in Meissen at the time and the "ancient and beautiful Porcelain of Japan and China."¹⁸ In the catalogue, Gersaint chose to associate the figure of the connoisseur with the judgment of porcelain. Adopting the vocabulary of taste was one of his marketing strategies. By introducing porcelain into the world of expertise and aesthetics and positing it as a desirable product, he sought to draw connoisseurs into this new market.¹⁹

The true connoisseurs, however, do not make any comparison between these two Porcelains [Asian and Meissen]. They cannot even get used to the latter [from Dresden (Meissen)], to which they only grant the pleasure of the forms & the choice of figures which have more taste than those of the Indies & which are more familiar to us. They rightly deny it the quality which is essential to Porcelain, and that gives it its name.²⁰

<sup>15</sup> Jacques Savary des Bruslons, Dictionnaire portatif de commerce (Copenhague: Chez les Freres C. & A. Philibert, 1770), s.v. "Wool," p. 461; William Reddy, "The Structure of a Cultural Crisis: Thinking about Cloth in France before and after the Revolution," in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (London: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 261–84, here p. 265. 16 Nebahat Avcıoğlu and Barry Finbarr Flood, "Globalizing Cultures: Art and Mobility in the Eighteenth Century," Ars Orientalis, 39 (2010): pp. 7–39, here p. 11.

<sup>17</sup> Felicia Gottmann, "French-Asian Connections: The Compagnies des Indes, France's Eastern Trade, and New Directions in Historical Scholarship," The Historical Journal 56 (June 2013): pp. 537–52; Goods from the East, 1600–1800: Trading Eurasia, ed. Maxine Berg, Felicia Gottmann, Hanna Hodacs, and Chris Nierstrasz (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Louis Mézin, Cargoes from China: Porcelain from the Compagnies des Indes in the Musée de Lorient (Lorient: Stewart Museum, 2004).

<sup>18</sup> Edme François Gersaint, Catalogue raisonné des bijoux, porcelaines, bronzes, lacqs, lustres de cristal de roche et de procelaine, pendules de goût & autres meubles curieux ou composés, tableaux, desseins, estampes, coquilles & autres effets de curiosité, provenans de la succession de M. Angran, vicomte de Fonspertuis (Paris: Prault et Barrois, 1747), p. 17.

<sup>19</sup> Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet, "Transforming the Paris Art Market, 1718–1750," in Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe, 1450–1750, ed. Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), pp. 383–404.

<sup>20</sup> Edme-François Gersaint, Catalogue raisonné des bijoux, p. vii: "Les vrais connoisseurs, cependant, ne font entre ces deux Porcelaines nulle comparaison. Ils ne peuvent même s'habituer avec cette dernière, à laquelle ils n'accordent que l'agrément des formes & les choix des figures qui ont plus de goût que

A shared taste for Asian porcelains had developed in Paris in the first half of the eighteenth century among circles of amateurs who bought pieces in auction rooms and dealers' shops. International trade drove this commerce, which promoted a new vocabulary of taste along with new visual skills in assessing quality. Twenty years later, in 1767, in the auction catalogue of Jean de Jullienne (1686–1766), porcelain was attributed with the capacity to produce haptic sensations among "connoisseurs" such as the "tact flou" and associated with "the taste for true beauty" (le goût du vrai beau).²¹ Through its material qualities, the transparency of the clay body, and the brilliance and color of its glazes, porcelain had gained an aesthetic status, one comparable to European fine arts, and expressed by reference to taste and beauty.

This new opening of connoisseurship in France to non-European arts and artifacts was visually articulated by the French artist François Boucher (1703–70).²² In his famous trade card designed for the dealer Gersaint in 1740, Boucher included artifacts from the Qing Empire to represent Gersaint's shop: a Chinese magot,²³ a lacquered cabinet with shells and corals, fans, and rolls of painted paper. Similarly, in his less wellknown frontispiece for the Catalogue des tableaux de Mr. de Jullienne, ca. 1756 (fig. 2), Boucher included two Chinese magots, one Chinese statuette, along with shells, and other decorative objects—all depicted with paintings, drawings, and sculptures, the usual objects of European connoisseurship. Together these artifacts signaled the development of a specific taste for, and increasing interest in, Asian porcelains. The imports share the same visual and social space, in a sort of community of objects, with the round forms of the putti echoing the Chinese magots with their large bellies and faces. At the time of Jullienne's public sale, the dealer who organized the auction, Claude François Julliot (1727–94), had a shop in the vicinity of the Louvre palace on rue Saint-Honoré, named "Au curieux des Indes." A true curieux des Indes himself, Jullienne possessed numerous artifacts with non-European provenances in his residence in Paris that scholars have overlooked. These included porcelain and lacquerware, but

celles des Indes & qui nous sont plus familières. Ils lui refusent avec raison la qualité qui est essentielle à la Porcelaine, pour qu'elle en puisse porter le nom."

<sup>21</sup> Claude-François Julliot, Catalogue raisonné de porcelaines de qualités supérieures, tant anciennes, premiers sorte, qu'ancien Japon & la Chine . . . faisant partie du Cabinet de feu M. de Jullienne (Paris: Vente, 1767), p. 6: "On entend par ce tact flou, une certaine sensation que les Connoisseurs ressentent à la vue de ces Porcelaines." See Isabelle Tillerot, "Du 'tact flou et – séduisant des couleurs' chez Jullienne ou l'art de marier tableaux, porcelaines, laques, statuettes, meubles, et autres effets," in Corrélations: les objets du décor au siècle des Lumières, ed. Anne Perrin Khelissa (Brussels: Université de Bruxelles, 2015), pp. 149–81.

<sup>22</sup> Jessica Priebe, François Boucher and the Art of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century France (London: Routledge, 2022).

<sup>23</sup> In the 1751 Encyclopédie, Denis Diderot famously described magots as "figures in clay, plaster, copper, porcelain, chunky [ramassées], counterfeit, bizarre, which we regard as representing Chinese or Indians. Our flats are decorated with them." Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 9 (Paris: Briasson et al., 1765), s.v. "Magots."

also "Indian" jades, weapons from China, India, Turkey, and some "savage" artifacts: one "button from South America" and some "utensils of savages" of unknown provenance.²⁴ The latter were exhibited as trophies in his gallery of European paintings (though they were not reproduced in Boucher's drawing), while porcelain objects filled the entirety of his residence from the summer salon (salon d'été), to the summer cabinet (cabinet d'été), to the gallery.²⁵

Fig. 2: François Boucher, Untitled, frontispiece, eighteenth century, pen and black ink, gray wash, and watercolor, 19.6 × 26 cm, in: Jean-Baptiste-François de Montulle´ (ed.), Catalogue des tableaux de Mr. de Jullienne, ca. 1756, The Pierpont and Morgan Library, New York

Louis Augustin Angran de Fonspertuis and Jean de Jullienne exemplified a new breed of connoisseur, one whose expertise was deeply dependent on colonial and imperial French trade. Angran de Fonspertuis was named syndic (shareholder representative) of the French West Indies Company in 1745. Close to John Law and the Orléans family, he surely invested in the Mississippi Company founded in 1717 for the exploitation of

<sup>24</sup> Julliot, Catalogue raisonné de porcelaines, pp. 285 and 290.

<sup>25</sup> Estate inventory, Jean de Jullienne, March 25, 1766, Paris, National Archives, MC/et, XXIX, 529.

Louisiana during the Law Scheme.²⁶ Jullienne's wealth was partly derived from colonial trade and speculation, and he too was a significant shareholder of the Mississippi Company.²⁷ Both invested their new wealth, acquired through international trade, in the collecting of European fine art objects, but also porcelain, lacquerware, and other imports. As the director of the Gobelins Manufactory in Paris, which produced royal tapestries, Jullienne must have developed a strong skill in discriminating between dyes and textiles, a "tact" that he also applied to porcelain. Their social worlds, overlapping between international trade and amateurship,²⁸ allowed them to demonstrate a shared taste for, and expertise in, judgments of European fine arts and non-European luxury products. We do not have images of Jullienne's porcelain collection. Although on a different scale, it must have mimicked porcelain rooms at the courts of the European monarchs. Exhibited in his house at the Gobelins Manufactory and comprised of almost four hundred pieces,²⁹ his collection of porcelains materialized the trans-imperial trade between France and China as well as a new shared, global connoisseurship focused on these imported luxury goods.

### Technical Expertise: A Culture of Imitation and Industrial Emulation

International trade and imperial French expansion were accompanied by the circulation of non-European artifacts, qualified as "curiosities" in Parisian sale catalogues or guides to the city. Beyond curiosity and wonder, some of these items, notably Chinese paintings, raised questions relating to their technologies and materials. These were as much a mystery as porcelain had been in the first half of the eighteenth century.³⁰ At the end of the eighteenth century, two French collectors were motivated by an interest in the study of Chinese material culture and more specifically paintings, which were largely disregarded by Europeans at the time except for their colors.³¹ Marie Joseph Louis d'Albert d'Ailly, duke of Chaulnes (1741–92) and Henri-Léonard Bertin both as-

<sup>26</sup> Rochelle Ziskin, Sheltering Art: Collecting and Social Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2012).

<sup>27</sup> Isabelle Tillerot, Jean de Jullienne et les collectionneurs de son temps. Un regard singulier sur le tableau (Paris: Éditions de la MSH, 2010), p. 46.

<sup>28</sup> Sarah Easterby-Smith, "Selling Beautiful Knowledge: Amateurship, Botany and the Market-Place in Late Eighteenth-Century France," Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2013): pp. 531–43.

<sup>29</sup> Sylvia Vriz, "Le duc d'Aumont et les porcelaines d'extrême-orient de la collection de M. Jean de Jullienne," Revue de la société des amis du musée national de céramique 22 (2013): pp. 89–98, here p. 89. 30 Bertrand Rondot, ed., Discovering the Secrets of Soft-Paste Porcelain at the St. Cloud Manufactory ca. 1690–1766, (London: Yale University Press, 1999).

<sup>31</sup> Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt, "Chinois," in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, vol. 3 (Paris: Briasson et al., 1751), p. 347. "The Chinese . . . fail absolutely in taste and form... they have beautiful colors and bad paintings."

sembled "cabinets de curiosités chinoises" (cabinets of Chinese curiosities) in Paris. Bertin was the minister of state between 1763 and 1780, with responsibility for, among other things, the East India Company, the manufacture of cotton and painted canvas, and agriculture. His collections and his his long-running project of publishing "reliable knowledge of China" extended earlier initiatives developed under Louis XIV.³² The duke of Chaulnes had no official duties; he was a noble, studying arts and sciences as an amateur, who had inherited collections from his family. He was the nephew of Joseph Bonnier de la Mosson (1702–44), famous for his cabinet of natural curiosities in Paris. His father Michel Ferdinand d'Albert d'Ailly, duke of Chaulnes (1714–69), was a physicist and member of the Royal Academy of Science who had also exhibited an interest in Chinese art and material culture. Two paintings from China were even displayed on the wall of his cabinet of curiosities in 1757.³³ Marie Joseph developed his own collection, housed in his residence on the rue de Bondi in Paris. One room was filled with natural history specimens (shells and corals) along with textiles, arms and games, described as "Chinese" and "Indian."³⁴ Neither Bertin nor the dukes de Chaulnes had traveled to China, and both were highly dependent on the information they received from the French Jesuits at the imperial court of Beijing. At the courts of Versailles and Beijing, the geopolitics of connoisseurship resulted from a emulation that lasted for centuries, a rivalry between empires, which had started in the seventeenth century.³⁵ The lasting presence of the Jesuits in Beijing reflected the lasting interest in European art and technology at the Qing court. Likewise, the collections of Bertin and Chaulnes were shaped by the selections made by the French Jesuits, who translated and explained the meaning of the artifacts they sent to their correspondents in Paris in meticulous notes.³⁶

<sup>32</sup> John Finlay, Henri Bertin and the Representation of China in Eighteenth-Century France (London: Routledge, 2020).

<sup>33</sup> Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d'Argenville, L'histoire naturelle éclaircie dans une de ses parties principales, la conchyliologie (Paris: n.p., 1757), p. 117. The painting on the wall may have been the "Vue du Palais de l'Empereur de la Chine, peint à la Chine, monté sur toile, avec son contrepoids pour le suspendre, en deux cartes," see Catalogue des livres du duc de Chaulnes (Paris: n.p., 1770), item 3679.

<sup>34</sup> Luc-Vincent Thierry, Description raisonné de cette ville, de sa banlieue et de tout ce qu'elle contient de remarquable, vol. 2 (Paris: n.p., 1787), pp. 681–83; Constance Bienaimé, "Les objets 'de la Chine' dans les collections des ducs de Chaulnes," in L'Extrême-Orient dans la culture européenne des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, ed. Florence Boulerie, Marc Favreau, and Éric Francalanza (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2009), pp. 151–65.

<sup>35</sup> Marie-Laure de Rochebrune, ed., La Chine à Versailles: art et diplomatie au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Somogy; Versailles: Château de Versailles, 2014).

<sup>36</sup> For example, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Réserve, 0e-89–4, Yuzhi Gengzhi tu (Illustrations of Agriculture and Sericulture). A note, still preserved in the album at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, was added to the manuscript in Beijing before its shipment to Paris, by Jesuit Joseph-Marie Amiot who lived at the Qing imperial court between 1751 and 1793. Destined for his French correspondents who could not read Chinese, it explained the signification of the engravings. Those engravings were notably appreciated for their artistic quality. They were executed after paintings of an unnamed Chinese

In these collections, knowledge production and expertise were not conveyed in the language of taste and connoisseurship but rather in the language of technique. Expertise was conceived as a step toward industrial imitation and emulation and corresponded to the wider interest of Chinese scholarship.³⁷ Bertin and Chaulnes collaborated in the 1780s, and they shared many items of their collections with other interested individuals to increase technical knowledge of Chinese material culture. Their interests also encompassed musical instruments,³⁸ but I will concentrate on their analyses of Chinese paintings: the matter and materiality of their paint, pigments and technique. Connoisseurship in Europe may have occasionally involved the material manipulation of artworks,³⁹ but for Bertin and Chaulnes, the examination of Chinese paintings relied primarily on technical and material expertise. Quite remarkably, their cabinets were conceived as laboratories for material experimentation, which was intended to promote innovation and stimulate the French luxury goods industry. In 1785, Bertin explained his motivations to his correspondent in Beijing, the Jesuit Joseph Amiot:

To make the most of the many curious objects you have enriched my cabinet . . . I shall invite chemists to analyze the productions which are unknown to them, physicists to classify them, and artists to take advantage of the resources and new ideas which the collections which you have provided me with can offer them.⁴⁰

Chinese paintings were accordingly put to the test. Along the lines of other experiments with Chinese imports he had directed,⁴¹ in 1781, Bertin lent a "volume de dessins relatifs à l'architecture chinoise" (an album of drawings related to Chinese architecture) (fig. 3) from his collection to Chaulnes so that he could experiment with Chinese painting techniques. Chaulnes' conclusions were presented in a report to the Academy of Sciences in Paris entitled Sur la manière de peindre comme les Chinois sur leur papier & avec leurs couleurs (On How to Paint Like the Chinese on Their Paper & with Their Colors), which was published in 1783. He praised Chinese knowledge in the arts and even placed it at the same level as the "European nations:" "This collection & that of Mr. Bertin put me in a position to confirm & to demonstrate that [the Chinese] have

41 Kristel Smentek, "China and Greco-Roman Antiquity: Overture to a Study of the Vase in Eighteenth-Century France," special issue, Multilayered: Journal18 1 (Spring 2016): 10.30610/1.2016.3.

painter dubbed by Amiot "the Chinese Titian." On the Yuzhi Gengzhi tu see Perrin Stein, "Boucher's Chinoiseries: Some New Sources," The Burlington Magazine 138, no. 1122 (September 1996): pp. 598–604. 37 Alexander Statman, A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2023).

<sup>38</sup> François Picard, "Joseph-Marie Amiot, jésuite français à Pékin, et le cabinet de curiosités de Bertin," Musique, images, instruments. Revue française d'organologie et d'iconographie musicale 8 (April 2006): pp. 69–86.

<sup>39</sup> Kristel Smentek, "The Collector's Cut: Why Pierre-Jean Mariette Tore Up His Drawings and Put Them Back Together Again," Master Drawing 46, no. 1 (2008): pp. 36–60.

<sup>40</sup> Henri-Léonard Bertin to Joseph-Marie Amiot, December 21, 1785, fol. 45v., Paris, Institut de France, Ms 1522.

almost as much knowledge in the Arts as any European Nation."⁴² The experiment Chaulnes describes in the report is a curious mix of chemistry, art, and science. Chaulnes was fascinated by the long-lasting and vivid colors used in Chinese paintings. He especially noted their resistance to water and their strong contrasts.⁴³ To gain a better technical understanding of them, he identifies the components of Chinese paintings: paper, vegetal glue, and pigments. While he acknowledges the technical knowledge and skills of Chinese painters, he only positively evaluates them in technical terms. The praise was neither aesthetic nor formulated in the language of taste and connoisseurship. Three academicians, chemist Pierre Joseph Macquer (1718–84), a specialist in dyes and colors, Auguste Denis Fougeroux de Bondaroy (1732–89), a scientist who conducted research in botany, physiology, chemistry, and archaeology, and a M. de Montigny—probably French engineer Etienne Mignot de Montigny (1714–82), reported on Chaulnes' results. All were experts on sciences and techniques—not art connoisseurs. They concluded favorably, but not without ambiguity, that:

We could not invite him too much to continue his research on the arts of the Chinese nation; [ if China] is less advanced than us in the physical sciences, its Antiquity, its long practice of the arts, its patience, its industry made it make greater progress in several arts, it would be important for us to reach [these arts].⁴⁴

Bertin's and Chaulnes' collections were incorporated into a larger project of political economy. As director of the porcelain factory of Sèvres between 1774 and 1780, Bertin intended to stimulate French industry with innovations inspired by imported luxury goods. In addition to his engagements with Chinese imports, he was also interested in India's material and visual culture. From Bertin's correspondence, we learn that two manuscripts from "Indoustan" sent by Gentil, the French military officer in India, to the French Indologist Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805), were copied at the Sèvres factory in 1777.⁴⁵ The album Histoire des Pièces de Monnoyes

<sup>42</sup> [Marie Joseph Louis d'Albert d'Ailly, Duke of Chaulnes], Mémoire sur la manière de peindre des Chinois sur leur papier et avec leurs couleurs (Paris: L. Jorry, 1783), p. 2: "Cette collection & celle de M. Bertin me mettent en état d'assurer & de démontrer que [les Chinois] ont presqu'autant de connaissances dans les Arts qu'aucune Nation européenne."

<sup>43</sup> Paris, Académie des Sciences, Archives, Dossier Chaulnes, January 20, 1781: "L'éclat et la vivacité des couleurs surpasse tout ce que nous avons de plus beau dans ce genre; elles ont de plus l'avantage de résister à l'eau dont la moindre goutte tache et délaye toutes nos détrempes."

<sup>44</sup> Paris, Académie des Sciences, Archives, Dossier Chaulnes, January 20, 1781: ". . . on ne sauroit trop l'inviter a continuer ses recherches sur les arts de la nation chinoise; si elle est moins avancée que nous dans les sciences physiques, son antiquité, sa longue pratique des arts, sa patience son industrie lui ont fait faire de plus grands progrés dans plusieurs arts, il seroit important pour nous de les atteindre." In 1783, a copy of a painting on silk was executed by a draftsman at the Architecture Academy for the Duke of Chaulnes: Rapports d'experts, 1712–1791. Procès-verbaux d'expertises d'œuvres d'art, ed. Georges Wildenstein (Paris: Les Beaux-arts, 1921), pp. 136–37.

<sup>45</sup> Letter from Henri-Léonard Bertin to Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, August 21, 1777, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, NAF 8872, fol. 31: "Je suis fort aise Monsieur que vous ayiez été con-

Fig. 3: Unknown artist(s), Two-story house, eighteenth century, 27 × 36 cm, in: Unknown artist(s), Essai sur l'architecture chinoise, eighteenth century, département des Estampes et de la photographie, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, réserve, Oe-13 (A)-Pet-Fol, fol. 25 (from Henri Bertin's collection)

qui ont été frappées dans l'Indoustan (The History of Coins Minted in Indoustan) (1773) (fig. 4) was meant to serve as a visual resource for the production of new luxury goods:

As for the metallic history . . . we will use it well if we dare to do it at the factory, but we are quite [eccentric] in this century in which we live, to hope that [it would appeal to] the taste of the public, which is, as you know, the God of Manufacturing, however, if we put the whole collection on two or three cabarets, the curiosity of the thing would be well done [well positioned] to tempt the rich and, among them, some English lords, but I doubt that our people would dare to undertake it if they were not ordered to do so.⁴⁶

tent de la copie de l'histoire de l'Indoustan; on me fait esperer qu'à la fin du mois nous aurons et pourrons vous livrer de même l'autre ouvrage."

<sup>46</sup> Ibid.: "Quant à l'histoire métallique, vous n'etes pas bien au fait; on s'en servira bien si on ose le tenter à la Manufacture mais nous sommes bien zinzolinis [farfelus] dans le siècle où nous vivons pour espérer que le goût du public qui est comme vous croyez bien le Dieu de la Manufacture, y donnât, cependant si on mettoit toute la collection en deux ou trois cabarets, la curiosité de la chose seroit bien faite pour tenter les gens riches et entrautres quelques seigneurs anglois, mais je doute que nos gens osassent l'entreprendre si cela ne leur etoit commandé."

Fig. 4: Unknown artist(s), Untitled, 1773, 24.5 × 17.5 cm, in: Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gentil (ed.), Histoire des Pièces de Monnoyes qui ont été frappées dans l'Indoustan, 1773, département des Manuscrits, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Fr. 25287, fol. 48

Bertin proposed that the porcelain factory of Sèvres should copy Indian medals to display them on a set of "cabarets" (trays, usually in lacquer, on which a Chinese porcelain service was displayed), which would then be sold to rich elites, notably English. Aware of the "public's" unfamiliarity with the aesthetics of Mughal paintings, Bertin hoped to stimulate consumption through a culture of imitation and technical emulation.⁴⁷ Unfortunately, no traces of such copies exist today in the archives. But Bertin's correspondence reveals that expertise and knowledge in his collection were part of a larger political economy, which rested on the development of local manufacturing, industrial competition, and import substitution. Bertin and Chaulnes's collections played an important role in the diffusion of knowledge about Chinese arts and crafts, reprising the strategies of industrial espionage that had characterized the very beginning of Bertin's enterprise in the 1760s.⁴⁸ However, their collections, devoted to the diffusion of knowledge, replication, and experimentation within circles of savants and artists, remained at odds with the scholarship of the metropolitan connoisseur, which was based on attribution, authentication, and aesthetic judgement. While the porcelain trade, promoted by dealers, had succeeded in creating international taste communities which could exchange through shared practices of connoisseurship, these communities still resisted the incorporation of non-European paintings. Savants and amateurs engaged with Chinese art through science and technology, while their scholarly activities started to incorporate the language of aesthetics and connoisseurship only in the nineteenth century.⁴⁹

### Connoisseurship Abroad and the Fate of "Sleeping Objects"

The divergence of connoisseurship, knowledge, and collecting produced unexpected effects when artifacts collected abroad were brought to metropolitan Paris. Trade between Europe and Asia, and the French colonization of India, facilitated the arrival of Indian paintings, manuscripts, and objects in Paris. Brought to Europe by soldiers, adventurers, East India Company officers, and agents, these items had been collected in the field, in highly asymmetrical situations. In Paris, sustained study of these artifacts, however, remained rare; from private collections to public museums, many of these items remained "sleeping objects," stored but rarely displayed. They remained

<sup>47</sup> Sébastien Pautet, "Fausses porcelaines, vraies innovations? Tôles vernies, économie de la variété et invention technique dans la seconde moitié du xviii<sup>e</sup> siècle," Les Cahiers de Framespa 31 (2019): http:// journals.openedition.org/framespa/6337.

<sup>48</sup> John Finlay, Henri Bertin and the Representation of China, pp. 8–39.

<sup>49</sup> Ting Chang, Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Kristel Smentek, "Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Art from China, and Nineteenth-Century French Painting," in Beyond Chinoiserie: Artistic Exchange between China and the West during the Late Qing Dynastie (1796–1911), ed. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Jennifer Milam (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 93–122.

potential objects for connoisseurship and expertise that would develop later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁵⁰

Some "Indian paintings" appeared in Parisian auction rooms, though they were an infrequent presence. The category of "Peintures indiennes," as distinct from "Curiosités indiennes" appeared in the auction catalogue of the naturalist Pedro Franco Davila, late in the century.⁵¹ His collection, sold in 1767, consisted of "Curiosities in Nature and Art" (curiosités de la nature et de l'art). Authentication of these paintings, which were described as "precious," rested on their French colonial provenance. The catalogue mentioned that some "volumes [a painting collection of Hindu gods and temples] had belonged to a famous Brahmin of the territory of Madras, from whom they passed into the hands of the French, when they took control of this place in 1745."⁵² However the historicity and provenance of the pieces often remained uncertain and most of the time was not even mentioned. Descriptions of Indian paintings were based on material elements (scale and materials) rather than on their formal qualities. The category "Peintures indiennes" in Davila's sale catalogue was inserted into a larger section titled "Peinture à gouache," which included natural history illustrations and Chinese paintings. Indian and Chinese paintings were understood and classified through their material and technique, as gouache was associated with miniatures and natural history paintings in European tradition.⁵³Attributions to named artists and formal descriptions remained absent in this section.

In contrast to its absence in Paris, the connoisseurship of Hindu and Mughal art developed among foreigners in colonial India. While he was on the subcontinent, Jean-Baptiste Gentil assembled a collection that he brought with him from Faizabad to Paris in 1778. In 1752, Gentil embarked for India, where he would stay for twentyfive years. As an infantry officer, he resided at the court of Bengal and then moved to Faizabad, to the court of Shuja-ud-Daula, Nawab of Awadh and Vizir of the Mughal Empire, where he was finally appointed as an official French agent to negotiations with English forces.⁵⁴ Gentil returned to France in 1778, after the death of the Nawab Shujaud-Daula in 1775 and the establishment of British rule in India. During his stay, Gentil

<sup>50</sup> Mirjam Brusius and Kavita Singh, eds., Museum Storage and Meaning: Tales from the Crypt (London: Routledge, 2017).

<sup>51</sup> See Juan Pimentel, "La naturaleza representada: El gabinete de maravillas de Franco Dávila," Elites intelectuales y modelos colectivos: Mundo ibérico (siglos XVI–XIX), ed. Monica Quijada Mauriño, Jesus Bustamante García and François-Xavier Guerra (Madrid: CSIC, 2003), pp. 131–54.

<sup>52</sup> Catalogue systématique et raisonné des curiosités de la nature et de l'art qui composent le cabinet de M. Dávila, vol. 3 (Paris: Briasson, 1767), p. 197, item 893: ". . . ces livres avoient appartenu à un Brame célèbre du territoire de Madras, d'où ils passèrent entre les mains des François, lorsqu'ils se rendirent maîtres de cette Place en 1745."

<sup>53</sup> Antoine-Joseph Pernety, Dictionnaire portatif de peinture, sculpture et gravure (Paris: Bauche, 1757): "Gouache."

<sup>54</sup> Francis Richard, "Jean-Baptiste Gentil, collectionneur de manuscrits persans," Dix-Huitième siècle 28 (1996): pp. 91–110; Chanchal Dadlani, "Transporting India: The Gentil Album and Mughal Manuscript Culture," Art History 38, no. 4 (2015): pp. 748–61.

amassed a collection dedicated to Indian art, manuscripts, and artifacts such as medals, weapons, and natural history specimens. Gentil's intention was to offer it to the royal French collection,⁵⁵ though the British allegedly offered him 120.000 rupees for it.⁵⁶ In 1777, he had already sent a series of manuscripts to Paris from Faizabad, which included Persian and Sanskrit manuscripts, dictionaries, and poetry.⁵⁷ The year Gentil returned to France, he offered "oriental manuscripts and drawings . . ., as well as gold and silver medals"⁵⁸ to the Royal Library, a center of Orientalist knowledge and antiquarianism since the seventeenth century.⁵⁹ His medals augmented the king's collection of antiquities, contributing to knowledge of the history of India and of the Asian peninsula (fig. 5).

Gentil's knowledge of India relied on his linguistic skills in Persian and his capacity to draw on the skill of local painters and writers at the court of Faizabad, who produced numerous albums of paintings, which synthetized and translated Mughal history, for him. His albums "manifest a clear impulse to collect, catalogue, and describe,"⁶⁰ but what forms of connoisseurship on Hindu and Mughal Indian paintings existed in Paris? Universal histories, encompassing Indian antiquity, had been published; linguistic knowledge had also developed. A chair of Turkish and Persian languages at the Collège de France was created in 1773. In the relocation of his collection,⁶¹ Gentil could rely on Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, himself a traveler to India during the Seven Years War (1756–63). Today considered as one of the first field Indologists, Anquetil-Duperron was Gentil's correspondent and a close friend of the keepers of the King's Library in Paris, Abbé Jean Paul Bignon and Abbé Jean Jacques Barthélemy. Gentil had met Anquetil-Duperron in India, and in 1774, he had sent him Sanskrit manuscripts, many translated into Persian.⁶² Like Anquetil-Duperron who had brought many Indian manuscripts back to Paris, Gentil's practice of collecting manuscripts and artifacts benefited from the French alliance with the Awadh province during the Seven Years War. Therefore, his collection was undertaken in a larger political proj-

62 Richard, "Jean-Baptiste Gentil," pp. 94–95, 98.

<sup>55</sup> Roselyne Hurel, Miniatures & Peintures Indiennes: Collection du département des Estampes et de la Photographie de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2 vols. (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2010). Gentil did not immediately deposit the integrality of his donation to the king's library: Letter to the Abbé Gentil, December 18, 1778, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, NAF 8872, Fol. 99.

<sup>56</sup> Jean-Baptiste Gentil, Mémoires sur l'Indoustan ou Empire Mogol (Paris: Petit, 1822), p. 7.

<sup>57</sup> "Manuscrits envoyés de Faizabad, au nord du Bengale par M Gentil, Chevalier de St Louis, chargé des affaires du Roy auprès du Nabab de Oud, et déposés à la bibliothèque du Roi en 1777," Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, NAF 5440, fol. 21.

<sup>58</sup> "Note sur le dépôt de M. Gentil," Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Medal Cabinet, Archives, 3 ACM 39. Gentil offered ninety-nine medals from Nepal, the Coromandel Coast, and of the Mughal emperors.

<sup>59</sup> Nicholas Dew, Orientalism in Louis XIV's France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

<sup>60</sup> Dadlani, "Transporting India," p. 751.

<sup>61</sup> Bénédicte Savoy, Felicity Bodenstein, and Merten Lagatz, eds., Translocations: Histories of Dislocated Cultural Assets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023).

Fig. 5: Unknown artist(s), Untitled, 1773, 24.5 × 17.5 cm, in: Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gentil (ed.), Histoire des Pièces de Monnoyes qui ont été frappées dans l'Indoustan, 1773, département des Manuscrits, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Fr. 25287, fol. 49

ect and shared "a mercantilist conception of knowledge based on the desire to enrich the state, to feed the prosperity of the nation" with Anquetil-Duperron.⁶³

When Gentil returned to France in 1778, Anquetil-Duperron introduced him to Bertin, who had already received manuscripts from Gentil in Faizabad. To secure his position and to establish his authority as a scholar, Gentil managed to obtain personal recognition by the king, whom he met twice in 1778 and 1785. At his first audience, Gentil offered Louis XVI items from his collection: his illustrated album "Abrégé historique des souverains de l'Indoustan," a saber, as well as a portrait of the Nawab Shuja-ud-Daula with his sons, painted in 1774 after a canvas by Tilly Kettle. The portrait given by Gentil was placed in the king's private apartments in Versailles in 1778.⁶⁴ Despite the importance of the original Persian and Sanskrit manuscripts he had collected, and the quality of his painted albums, with texts penned in French and illustrated by painters at Faizabad, Gentil's position as a connoisseur remained largely ignored by scholars in the academic institutions. Similarly, Anquetil-Duperron did not gain full recognition in the French Republic of Letters.⁶⁵ Moreover, while Anquetil-Duperron published his translations of the sacred texts of Hinduism and numerous dissertations at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, which finally allowed him to be appointed as pensionnaire at the Academy in 1785,⁶⁶ Gentil never published his manuscripts, which remained in the Royal Library; his Mémoires were only published by his son in 1822.⁶⁷

Soldier or field Indologist? French agent to the Awadh court or connoisseur? Thinking about connoisseurship abroad forces us to confront the geopolitics of collecting as the arrival of new players, such as soldiers and adventurers, remained largely ignored in the networks of European connoisseurship. Their own social status differed from the social milieu of European connoisseurs,⁶⁸ while the collections they accumulated abroad were deemed unartistic. Gentil's collection, given to the Royal Library, was kept in storage. According to Chanchal Dadlani, almost hundred and fifty objects are now held in the National Library in Paris, the present incarnation of the Royal Library.⁶⁹ For almost two centuries, the status of these items remained uncertain in the National Library's collection. Neither considered to be art nor valuable objects

<sup>63</sup> Stéphane Van Damme, "Capitalizing Manuscripts, Confronting Empires: Anquetil-Duperron and the Economy of Oriental Knowledge in the Context of the Seven Years' War," in Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires: A Decentered View, ed. Laszlo Kontler, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani, and Borbala Zsuzsanna Török (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 114.

<sup>64</sup> Jean-Baptiste Gentil, Mémoires sur l'Indoustan, p. 310.

<sup>65</sup> Lucette Valensi, "Éloge de l'orient, éloge de l'orientalisme. Le jeu d'échecs d'Anquetil-Duperron," Revue de l'histoire des religions 212, no. 4 (1995): pp. 419–52.

<sup>66</sup> Van Damme, "Capitalizing Manuscripts," p. 120.

<sup>67</sup> Jean-Baptiste Gentil, Mémoires sur l'Indoustan ou Empire Mogol (Paris: Petit, 1822).

<sup>68</sup> Pascal Griener, La République de l'œil. l'expérience de l'art au siècle des Lumières (Paris: O. Jacob, 2010).

<sup>69</sup> Dadlani, "Transporting India," p. 758

of study, they had a potential value and represented an epistemological challenge,⁷⁰ that was only fulfilled at the end of the twentieth century with the development of interest and expertise born out of a debate on museums in the post-colonial context.

These case studies bring into view the shifting practices of connoisseurship, expertise, and knowledge production in an eighteenth-century Paris that was increasingly aware of foreign artistic conventions and modes of making. Mercantile imperialism dominated the traffic in imported arts and products and relied on skillful dealers, who implemented the language and practices of connoisseurship in the porcelain trade. With French expansion, new artifacts were collected, often in situations of asymmetrical power dynamics. Some of these artifacts were imitated in Paris, producing innovative products that it was hoped would appeal to the "taste" of rich consumers for luxury goods. Medals of Hindustan were considered as "curiosities" to be copied in porcelain at the Sèvres factory, while Chinese gouache paintings were emulated and copied by French painters, provoking debates on colors and pigments, which had an enduring legacy in the nineteenth century.⁷¹ New forms of technical expertise, driven by commerce and innovation, and based on a culture of imitation and emulation, opened alternative and more inclusive definitions of art as craft. However, an asymmetry remained; these forms of knowledge and expertise were not described in the language of connoisseurship reserved for European art. Collections of non-European artifacts were rarely organized according to learned taxonomies, while the histories of these imported artifacts remained debated—even if a new appraisal of the antiquity of the Chinese and Mughal Empires had led to a pluralization of antiquity in the eighteenth century.⁷²

Within Europe, relationships between metropolitan cities and their empires differed significantly. In the eighteenth century, British society made room for its colonies and its products in the metropole, creating an "imperial popular culture."⁷³ Zoffany's group portrait manifested the importance of the colonies, materialized in portraits and crafted objects, in British imperial society, overseas and at home. France, where the conversation piece did not develop as a pictorial tradition, offered few possibilities for such a visual celebration of connoisseurship in a globalizing world. More generally, French and British imperial visual cultures differed in the eighteenth century, drawing from different pictorial traditions.⁷⁴ In Georgian London, the material presence of the

<sup>70</sup> For a comparison with archeological artifacts in the nineteenth century, see Mirjam Brusius, "The Field in the Museum: Puzzling Out Babylon in Berlin," Osiris 32 (2017): pp. 264–85.

<sup>71</sup> For this legacy from Michel-Eugène Chevreul to Gottfried Semper, see Isabelle Kalinowski, "Opus plumarium: Gottfried Semper et l'art chinois de la juxtaposition des couleurs," Revue germanique internationale 26 (2017): pp. 123–42.

<sup>72</sup> Charlotte Guichard and Stéphane Van Damme, eds., Les Antiquités dépaysées. Histoire globale de la culture antiquaire au siècle des Lumières, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022).

<sup>73</sup> Kate Fullagar, The Savage Visit: New World People and Popular Imperial Culture in Britain, 1710– 1795 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

<sup>74</sup> In France, in the first half of the eighteenth century, galanterie and commerce became powerful schemes to visualize and imagine the French empire. See Charlotte Guichard, Colonial Watteau. Empire, Commerce and Galanterie in Regency France (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2022).

British Empire in India was more assertive. In the 1770s and 1780s, Indian imports accounted for up to twenty percent of James Christie's sales in London, and they could be evaluated as high art.⁷⁵ Many of them were also housed in the Oriental Repository. Founded in 1798 and opened in 1801 as the India Museum, this was the first British institution explicitly dedicated to non-European collections.⁷⁶ Its early collections consisted of the souvenirs of missionaries and naval officers, which escaped Enlightenment taxonomies and highlighted the "contested, volatile status of Hindu images in several nineteenth-century collections."⁷⁷ In Paris, the canonical and Eurocentric tradition of connoisseurship was negotiated in the spaces of private collections, sometimes at the highest levels of the government, in relation to crafted objects that came from afar, despite their lesser visibility in public collections, institutions, and auctions. Behind the label of "curiosity," a multiplicity of attachments and interests unfolded in a couple of Parisian collections containing objects from abroad, testifying to mimetic and technological rivalries between empires in a globalizing world. Today, housed in archives and storerooms, these objects and images reveal the plurality of the geopolitical forces that drove knowledge, connoisseurship, and empire in eighteenth-century France.

<sup>75</sup> Natasha Eaton, "Nostagia for the Exotic: Creating an Imperial Art in London, 1750–1793," Eighteenth-Century Studies 39, no. 2 (2006): pp. 227–50; Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters. A History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977).

<sup>76</sup> Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, p. 171.

<sup>77</sup> Natasha Eaton, "Colonial Iconoclash: Mimetic Rivalry, Collecting and Idolatry between India and Britain," in Acquiring Cultures. Histories of World Art on Western Markets, ed. Bénédicte Savoy, Charlotte Guichard, and Christine Howald (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018).

### Biographies of Authors and Editors

Gabriel Batalla-Lagleyre is a teaching and research assistant at the University of Poitiers, France. He recently defended his PhD dissertation on the emergence of amateur drawing practices in early modern France (ca. 1590–1820), and is currently working on a new project devoted to the inscription of dates on artworks from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. In addition, he has published several articles in international journals on the historiography of the seventeenth century and architectural drawing in the early nineteenth century.

Kit Brooks is the Japan Foundation Assistant Curator of Japanese Art at the National Museum of Asian Art (NMAA) in Washington, DC. Brooks holds a PhD in Japanese art history from Harvard University (2017) and specializes in prints and paintings of the Edo and Meiji periods. Their primary research interests revolve around the reevaluation of "eccentric" artists of the eighteenth century and special prints that emulate the visual qualities of other media, such as surimono and takuhanga. Brooks has held positions at the British Museum, Harvard Art Museums, and the Children's Museum in Boston. They curated the exhibition Uncanny Japan: The Art of Yoshitoshi (1839– 1892) at the Worcester Art Museum (2015) and cocurated Living Proof: Drawing in 19th-Century Japan at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation (2017–18). Brooks' most recent exhibition, Ay-Ō's Happy Rainbow Hell (NMAA, 2023), is the first exhibition in the US dedicated to the psychedelic Japanese visual artist Ay-Ō (b. 1931).

Maureen Cassidy-Geiger is an independent curator and scholar with special expertise in European decorative arts, architectural history, and Dresden court culture. Her exhibitions include Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts, ca. 1710– 63 (Bard Graduate Center, New York, in 2007–08); The Grand Cure: A Disabled Saxon Prince and his Tour of Italy, 1738– 40 (Dresden State Museums, 2018); and The Art of Architecture: Beaux-Arts Drawings from the Peter May Collection (New-York Historical Society, 2021). Cassidy-Geiger lives in New York. Her publications are found on: wellesley.academia.edu/ maureencassidygeiger.

Charlotte Guichard is Directrice de recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and Professeure attachée at the École normale supérieure in Paris. She works on visual and material cultures of modern Europe, eighteenth-century French art, and the history of collecting and the art market. Her most recent book is Colonial Watteau. Empire, Commerce, and Galanterie in Regency France (Deutscher Kunstverlag and Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, 2022).

Caitlin Karyadi is assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong. She is a historian of Japanese art and visual culture, specializing in early modern Japanese imagery and its transregional contexts. She received her PhD Degree from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University in 2023. Her current book project re-evaluates processes of canonization across premodern East Asia through the example of the Chinese painter Shen Nanpin (1682–ca. 1760) and his outsized Japanese legacy.

Julia Kloss-Weber studied art history, modern German literature, and philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin. In 2010 she finished her PhD on French sculpture of the Enlightenment, Individualisiertes Ideal und nobilitierte Alltäglichkeit. Das Genre in der französischen Skulptur der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts which was published by Deutscher Kunstverlag in 2014. After working as a research fellow at the Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, she began a postdoctoral project on Mexican art of the sixteenth century from which her habilitation thesis, Images of Alterity – Alterity of Images. The Transcultural Potential of Images in Processes of Translation between New Spain and Europe in the 16th Century (in press) is derived. She has held lectureships and a Vertretungsprofessur in the departments of

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Art History at the Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf and the University of Bern and is currently Vertretungsprofessorin in the Department of Art History at the University of Hamburg.

Valérie Kobi is assistant professor at the Université de Neuchâtel, Switzerland. She also leads the PRIMA research group Bibliothèques et musées en Suisse entre 18<sup>e</sup> et 19e siècles (Swiss National Science Foundation). Her first book Dans l'oeil du connoisseur. Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694– 1774) et la construction des savoirs en histoire de l'art (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017), aimed—through the example of the French collector Pierre-Jean Mariette—to define the different stages that marked the formation of knowledge in eighteenth-century art history and, more broadly, to question the role played by the figure of the connoisseur in this dynamic. She is currently working on her second book The Artificial Eye: Art Theory and Optical Revolution in Early Modern Europe (working title).

Chonja Lee is lecturer in early modern art history at the University of Neuchâtel and postdoctoral researcher within the project Bibliothèques et musées en Suisse entre 18e et 19e siècles. Lee obtained her PhD 2015 at the University of Zurich with an interdisciplinary thesis on images of the plant soul in French fine arts, dance, and film around 1900. She is a former fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Schweizer Institut für Kunstwissenschaft, the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte in Paris, and Princeton University. She has taught at the Universities of Geneva, Zurich, Bern, and Munich and cocurated the exhibition Exotic? Switzerland looking Outward in the Age of Enlightenment (Lausanne, Palais de Rumine, 2020–21), for which she was awarded the Young Science Prize of the Walter Benjamin Kolleg. She is currently completing a monograph on designs of printed cotton textiles for the transatlantic trade.

Maria Gabriella Matarazzo is currently the Beinecke postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. She holds a PhD in art history from the Scuola Normale Superiore (2020). She has been awarded postdoctoral fellowships at the SNS, funded by the Fondazione 1563 and the Fondazione Archivio del Moderno (2021–22), and Villa I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2022–23). Her research has also been supported by visiting scholarships at New York University (2016) and at Johns Hopkins University (2018–19). Her forthcoming monograph Raffaello di carta focuses on the reception of Raphael's work between the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century through the case study of Vicente Victoria as a print collector and connoisseur.

Domenico Pino is a PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at University College London. His doctoral research focuses on printmaking in eighteenth-century Naples, tackling center-periphery debates, issues of nationalism, temporality, and cultural appropriation within Europe. He was the 2020 Michael Bromberg Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings of the British Museum, London and a fellow of the Center for the Art History of Port Cities at the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples in 2022–23.

Émilie Roffidal is a senior researcher at CNRS, attached to the FRAMESPA-UMR 5136 laboratory in Toulouse. She is an early modern art historian, specializing in the history of artistic circulation in the eighteenth century. She co-directs a program on the networks of artistic academies (ACA-RES) in transnational and global perspective. Her research also focuses on material culture, with a particular interest in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sculpture, taking into account the cultural, symbolic, and sensorial dimensions of the objects and their exhibition spaces. Co-responsible for theme 3 of the FRAMESPA laboratory "Creation-Production" and responsible for the "Scientific Worlds" axis of the Labex SMS (Structuration des Mondes Sociaux), her work is in close dialogue with the social sciences.

Mrinalini Sil is a PhD candidate in visual arts at the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her dissertation, "Art in the Age of Transitions: Power, Politics, and Culture in Murshidabad Paintings from Early Modern Bengal" studies the involvement of diverse cultural players in the production and circulation of Murshidabadi paintings and artistic sensibilities in the long eighteenth

century. Her research interests include Mughal and Provincial Mughal paintings, the long eighteenth century, patronage, and the history of collecting in early modern India. She was a member of the curatorial team for Rajas, Nawabs, and Firangees: Treasures from the French and Indian Archives 1750–1850 (National Museum, New Delhi, 2019). Her research has been supported by the Nehru Trust at the V&A, the Indian Council of Social Science Research, and the INLAKS Shivdasani Foundation.

Kristel Smentek is associate professor of art history in the Department of Architecture at MIT. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century European graphic and decorative arts in their transcultural contexts. She is the author of Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Ashgate, 2014; Routledge, 2017), co-curator of the exhibition Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment (Harvard Art Museums, 2022–23), and co-editor of its accompanying catalogue. She is currently completing Disorient: Arts from China in Eighteenth-Century France, a book investigating French responses to Chinese imports over the course of the long eighteenth century.

Emily Teo is a cultural historian with research interests in Chinese-European cultural interconnections from the early modern period until the nineteenth century. Currently, she is a research fellow at the Gotha Research Centre of the University of Erfurt. Her scholarship focuses on the historical, cultural, and social processes which informed the widespread practice of collecting Chinese objects in Germany. She is the principal investigator of the research project "Strategies of Collecting and Displaying China in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Gotha's Chinese Cabinet," funded by the German Research Foundation from 2021–24.

Friederike Weis received her PhD in 2005 from the Department of Art History at the Freie Universität Berlin. She previously served as Assistant Curator at the Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin. Since then, she has specialized in Mughal and Persianate arts of the book with a particular focus on transcultural perspectives. She was a postdoctoral fellow for the project Connecting Art Histories in the Museum: The Mediterranean and Asia (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence). In 2014, she co-curated the exhibition Joseph and Zulaykha: A History of Influence among India, Persia, and Europe. From 2014 to 2018, she carried out the DFG-funded project Autonomous Pictures? Figural Motifs in Persian Drawings and Paintings in the Diez Albums at the Berlin State Library. Since 2019 she is the principal investigator of the DFG-project Indian Albums of the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century Between Tradition and Documentation: The Polier and Swinton Albums in the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in the Museum of Asian Art.

# Image Credits

#### Kobi and Smentek


#### Brooks


#### Cassidy-Geiger


#### Roffidal


Figs. 3–5: Photos © Thomas Duvergé, Bibliothèque Méjanes, Aix-en-Provence

#### Weis


Fig. 6: Artwork © The University of Manchester

#### Karyadi

Fig. 1: Kyōto Bijutsu Kurabu, ed. Tōshi Yamada Teibē Yamada Sadashichi ryōke nyūsatsu mokuroku. Kyoto: Kyōto Hinode Shinbunsha, 1926.

Fig. 2: Maeda Kōshaku-tei, ed. Maeda Kōshaku-ke onzōki nyūsatsu mokuroku. Tokyo: 1925.

Fig. 3: Photo © Sen-oku Hakukokan Museum, Kyoto

Fig. 4: Tōkyō Bijutsu Kurabu, ed. Bō shishaku Edo kyūke shozōhin nyūsatsu. Tokyo: Tōkyō Bijutsu Insatsusha, 1931.

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#### Sil

Figs. 1–5: Artworks © Bibliothèque nationale de France

Fig. 6: Artwork © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

#### Matarazzo


#### Batalla

Figs. 1, 2, 4: Artworks © Source gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France


#### Kloss-Weber


#### Pino

Fig. 1: Artwork © British Library Board Figs. 2, 4, 5: Author's photographs Fig. 3: Artwork © British Library Board

#### Teo

Figs. 1–5: Artworks © Stiftung Schloss Friedenstein Gotha, aus den Sammlungen der Herzog von Sachsen Coburg und Gotha'schen Stiftung für Kunst und Wissenschaft

#### Guichard

