In recent years, there has been increasing scholarly interest in the history of museums, academies and major exhibitions. There has been, however, little to no sustained interest in the histories of alternative exhibitions (single artwork, solo artist, artist-mounted, entrepreneurial, privately funded, ephemeral, etc.) with the notable exception of those publications that deal with situations involving major artists or those who would become so - for example J.L. David?s exhibition of Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) and The First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874 - despite the fact that these sorts of exhibitions and critical scholarship about them have become commonplace (and no less important) in the contemporary art world. The present volume uses and contextualizes eleven case studies to advance some overarching themes and commonalities among alternative exhibitions in the long modern period from the late-eighteenth to the late-twentieth centuries and beyond. These include the issue of control in the interrelation and elision of the roles of artist and curator, and the relationship of such alternative exhibitions to the dominant modes, structures of display and cultural ideology.

In recent years, there has been increasing scholarly interest in the history of museums, academies and major exhibitions. There has been, however, little to no sustained interest in the histories of alternative exhibitions (single artwork, solo artist, artist-mounted, entrepreneurial, privately funded, ephemeral, etc.) with the notable exception of those publications that deal with situations involving major artists or those who would become so - for example J.L. David?s exhibition of Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) and The First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874 - despite the fact that these sorts of exhibitions and critical scholarship about them have become commonplace (and no less important) in the contemporary art world. The present volume uses and contextualizes eleven case studies to advance some overarching themes and commonalities among alternative exhibitions in the long modern period from the late-eighteenth to the late-twentieth centuries and beyond. These include the issue of control in the interrelation and elision of the roles of artist and curator, and the relationship of such alternative exhibitions to the dominant modes, structures of display and cultural ideology.

This edited collection traces the impact of monographic exhibitions on the discipline of art history from the first examples in the late eighteenth century through the present. Roughly falling into three genres (retrospectives of living artists, retrospectives of recently deceased artists, and monographic exhibitions of Old Masters), specialists examine examples of each genre within their social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. Exhbitions covered include Nathaniel Hone’s 1775 exhibition, the Holbein Exhibition of 1871, the Courbet retrospective of 1882, Titian's exhibition in Venice, Poussin's Louvre retrospective of 1960, and El Greco's anniversaty exhibitions of 2014.

Spaces of Connoisseurship explores the ‘who’, ‘where’ and ‘how’ of judging Old Master paintings in the nineteenth-century British art trade, via a comparison of family art dealers Thomas Agnew & Sons (“Agnew’s) and London’s National Gallery.

The world that shaped Europe's first national sculptor-celebrities, from Schadow to David d'Angers, from Flaxman to Gibson, from Canova to Thorvaldsen, was the city of Rome. Until around 1800, the Holy See effectively served as Europe's cultural capital, and Roman sculptors found themselves at the intersection of the Italian marble trade, Grand Tour expenditure, the cult of the classical male nude, and the Enlightenment republic of letters. Two sets of visitors to Rome, the David circle and the British traveler, have tended to dominate Rome's image as an open artistic hub, while the lively community of sculptors of mixed origins has not been awarded similar attention. Rome, Travel and the Sculpture Capital, c.1770?1825 is the first study to piece together the labyrinthine sculptors' world of Rome between 1770 and 1825. The volume sheds new light on the links connecting Neo-classicism, sculpture collecting, Enlightenment aesthetics, studio culture, and queer studies. The collection offers ideal introductory reading on sculpture and Rome around 1800, but its combination of provocative perspectives is sure to appeal to a readership interested in understanding a modernized Europe's overwhelmingly transnational desire for Neo-classical, Roman sculpture.

This book expands the art historical perspective on art’s connection to anatomy and medicine, bringing together in one text several case studies from various methodological perspectives. The contributors focus on the common visual and bodily nature of (figural) art, anatomy, and medicine around the central concept of modeling (posing, exemplifying and fabricating). Topics covered include the role of anatomical study in artistic training, the importance of art and visual literacy in anatomical/medical training and in the dissemination (via models) of medical knowledge/information, and artistic representations of the medical body in the contexts of public health and propaganda.

Political and cultural history and the arts combine in this engaging account of 1790s France. In 1799, when the French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) exhibited his Intervention of the Sabines, a history painting featuring the ancient heroine Hersilia, he added portraits of two contemporary women on either side of her—Henriette de Verninac, daughter of Charles-François Delacroix, minister of foreign affairs, and Juliette Récamier, a well-known and admired socialite. Drawing on many disciplines, Norman Bryson explains how such a combination of paintings could reveal the underlying nature of the Directoire, the period between the vicious and near-dictatorial Reign of Terror (1793–94) and the coup in 1799 that brought Napoleon to power. Hersilia’s Sisters illuminates ways that cultural life and civil society were rebuilt during these years through an extraordinary efflorescence of women pioneers in every cultural domain—literature, the stage, opera, moral philosophy, political theory, painting, popular journalism, and fashion. Through a close examination of David’s work between The Intervention of the Sabines (begun in 1796) and Bonaparte Crossing the Alps (begun in 1800), Bryson explores how the flowering of women’s culture under the Directoire became a decisive influence on David’s art. With more than 150 illustrations, this book provides new and brilliant insight into this period that will captivate readers.