Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Kristel Smentek
Series : Studies in Art Historiography
Celebrated connoisseur, drawings collector, print dealer, book publisher and authority on the art of antiquity, Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774) was a pivotal figure in the eighteenth-century European art world. Focusing on the trajectory of Mariette’s career, this book examines the material practices and social networks through which connoisseurs forged the idea of art as an object of empirical and historical analysis. Drawing on significant unpublished archival material as well as on histories of science, publishing, collecting and display, this book shows how Mariette and his colleagues’ practices of classification and interpretation of the graphic arts gave rise to new conceptions of artistic authorship and to a history of art that transcended the biographies of individual artists. To follow Mariette’s career through the eighteenth century is to see that art was consolidated as a specialized category of intellectual inquiry-and that style emerged as its structuring analytic device-in the overlapping spaces of the collector’s cabinet, the connoisseur’s portfolio and the dealer’s shop.
Contents:
-Introduction: Art history and the Eighteenth-Century Connoisseur
-Knowledge Economies of the Print Trade [Family Fortunes; The Business of Collecting; The Prince Eugene Commission: A Ready-Made Print Collection; The Recueil, or the Collection Reproduced]
-The Making of a Drawings Connoisseur [Networks; Seeing Through Drawings; The Emergence of the Expert; The Science of the Connoisseur]
-The Collector’s Cut [Framing the Tableau; The Coup d’Oeil; The Knowing Hand]
-Origins: Of Antiquarianism, Aesthetics, and History [Publishing the Traité des pierres gravées; From Antiquarianism to Art; The Progress to Art]
-Conclusion: The Mariette sales
-Select Bibliography
-Index
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