This volume focuses on the outstanding contributions made by botany and the mathematical sciences to the genesis and development of early modern garden art and garden culture. The many facets of the mathematical sciences and botany point to the increasingly “scientific” approach that was being adopted in and applied to garden art and garden culture in the early modern period. This development was deeply embedded in the philosophical, religious, political, cultural and social contexts, running parallel to the beginning of processes of scientization so characteristic for modern European history. This volume strikingly shows how these various developments are intertwined in gardens for various purposes.

One of the most imaginative and fascinating artists of eighteenth-century France, Edme Bouchardon (1698-1762) was instrumental in the transition from Rococo to Neoclassicism and in the artistic rediscovery of classical antiquity. Much celebrated in his time, Bouchardon created some of the most iconic images of the age of Louis XV. His oeuvre demonstrates a remarkable variety of themes (from copies after the antique to subjects of history and mythology, portraiture, anatomical studies, ornament, fountains and tombs), media (drawings, sculptures, medals, prints), and techniques (chalk, plaster, wax, terracotta, marble, bronze). With five essays by experts on Bouchardon's sculpture and graphic arts, more than 140 catalogue entries, and a detailed chronology, this book aims to demonstrate the originality of Bouchardon's art within the cultural and social context of the period, while suggesting the subtle relationship between, as well as the relative autonomy of, the artist's two careers as a sculptor and a draftsman. This lavishly illustrated publication represents an unprecedented and thorough survey on this major and unique artist from the Age of Enlightenment, offering indepth scholarship based on unpublished material.

The celebrated French artist Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762) is primarily known as a sculptor today, but his contemporaries widely lauded him as a draftsman as well. Talented, highly innovative, and deeply invested in the medium, Bouchardon made an important contribution to the European art and culture of his time, and in particular to the history of drawing. Around two thousand of his drawings survive—most of which bear no relation, conceptual or practical, to his sculpture—yet, remarkably, little scholarly attention has been paid to this aspect of his oeuvre. This is the first book-length work devoted to the artist’s draftsmanship since 1910. Ambitious in scope, this volume offers a compelling narrative that effectively covers four decades of Bouchardon’s activity as a draftsman—from his departure for Rome in 1723 as an aspiring student to his death in Paris in 1762, by which time he was one of the most renowned artists in Europe. His accomplished and dynamic style is analyzed and copiously illustrated in a series of five interrelated chapters that serve as case studies, each of which focuses on a coherent group of drawings from a particular period of Bouchardon’s career.