Henri Dès et Gérard Lo Monaco unissent leurs univers dans ce pop-up coloré et élégant qui tournoie tel un mobile virevoltant. Le meilleur de la chanson pour enfants et du pop-up réunis dans un fabuleux carrousel aussi retro qu'acidulé : collector !

An innovative examination of encounters between humans and lions and representations of these charismatic animals in the visual culture of postrevolutionary France In artistic traditions that stretch back to antiquity, lions have been associated with strength and authority. The figure of the lion in nineteenth-century France stood at a crossroads between these historical meanings and contemporary developments that recast the animal's significance, such as the literal presence of lions in public menageries. In this highly original study, Katie Hornstein explores the relationships among animals, spectatorship, and visual production. She examines the fascinating encounters between artists, viewers, and lions that took place--in menageries and circuses, on canvases, and on the pages of books--and out of which, she argues, new perceptions of power, empire, and the natural world emerged. Myth and Menagerie considers a range of visual objects, bringing into dialogue photographs of circus animals, hunting manuals, and zoo guidebooks with sculptures, drawings, and paintings by artists such as Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, and Rosa Bonheur. Illuminating the lives of individual lions against the backdrop of societal change and colonial expansion, Hornstein constructs a fresh theoretical framework for thinking about animals as more than symbols or passive subjects and for acknowledging a history in which both humans and animals had a stake.

Wild animals have fascinated human observers since time immemorial. The story of our interest in collecting, classifying and dominating Nature so that its inner workings could be understood also looms large in the history of science, and thus it is surprising that the history of menageries, zoological gardens and the zoo as we know it today has been so poorly documented. This gap is addressed by Zoo, a comprehensive history of the zoo in the Western world.

Table of contents

Chantal Thomas presents the history of the mythification of one of the most infamous queens in all history, whose execution still fascinates us today. In The Wicked Queen, Chantal Thomas presents the history of the mythification of one of the most infamous queens in all history, whose execution still fascinates us today. Almost as soon as Marie-Antoinette, archduchess of Austria, was brought to France as the bride of Louis XVI in 1771, she was smothered in images. In a monarchy increasingly under assault, the charm and horror of her feminine body and her political power as a foreign intruder turned Marie-Antoinette into an alien other. Marie-Antoinette's mythification, argues Thomas, must be interpreted as the misogynist demonization of women's power and authority in revolutionary France.In a series of pamphlets written from the 1770s until her death in 1793, Marie-Antoinette is portrayed as a spendthrift, a libertine, an orgiastic lesbian, and a poisoner and infant murderess. In her analyses of these pamphlets, seven of which appear here in translation for the first time, Thomas reconstructs how the mounting hallucinatory and libelous discourse culminated in the inevitable destruction of what had become the counterrevolutionary symbol par excellence. The Wicked Queen exposes the elaborate process by which the myth of Marie-Antoinette emerged as a crucial element in the successful staging of the French Revolution.

When animals and their symbolic representations—in the Royal Menagerie, in art, in medicine, in philosophy—helped transform the French state and culture. Peter Sahlins's brilliant new book reveals the remarkable and understudied “animal moment” in and around 1668 in which authors (including La Fontaine, whose Fables appeared in that year), anatomists, painters, sculptors, and especially the young Louis XIV turned their attention to nonhuman beings. At the center of the Year of the Animal was the Royal Menagerie in the gardens of Versailles, dominated by exotic and graceful birds. In the unfolding of his original and sophisticated argument, Sahlins shows how the animal bodies of the menagerie and others were critical to a dramatic rethinking of governance, nature, and the human. The animals of 1668 helped to shift an entire worldview in France—what Sahlins calls Renaissance humanimalism toward more modern expressions of classical naturalism and mechanism. In the wake of 1668 came the debasement of animals and the strengthening of human animality, including in Descartes's animal-machine, highly contested during the Year of the Animal. At the same time, Louis XIV and his intellectual servants used the animals of Versailles to develop and then to transform the symbolic language of French absolutism. Louis XIV came to adopt a model of sovereignty after 1668 in which his absolute authority is represented in manifold ways with the bodies of animals and justified by the bestial nature of his human subjects. 1668 explores and reproduces the king's animal collections—in printed text, weaving, poetry, and engraving, all seen from a unique interdisciplinary perspective. Sahlins brings the animals of 1668 together and to life as he observes them critically in their native habitats—within the animal palace itself by Louis Le Vau, the paintings and tapestries of Charles Le Brun, the garden installations of André Le Nôtre, the literary work of Charles Perrault and the natural history of his brother Claude, the poetry of Madeleine de Scudéry, the philosophy of René Descartes, the engravings of Sébastien Leclerc, the transfusion experiments of Jean Denis, and others. The author joins the nonhuman and human agents of 1668—panthers and painters, swans and scientists, weasels and weavers—in a learned and sophisticated treatment that will engage scholars and students of early modern France and Europe and readers broadly interested in the subject of animals in human history.

A timely and stimulating collection of essays about the impact of Darwin's ideas on visual culture