Things Seminar

Dr Maya Corry (History of Art, Cambridge)

Dr Victoria Mills (Research Fellow in English, Darwin College, University of Cambridge)

Abstracts

Maya Corry, Bodily beauty and the soul in Renaissance male portraiture

It was a Renaissance commonplace that a skilled artist could produce a portrait of such naturalism that the subject appeared as if he or she were really present, and alive. Yet some Italian images of young men present sitters not as they were in reality, but as stunning beauties, idealised beyond recognition. Many such works were created in Milan in the late fifteenth century, when Leonardo da Vinci was living and working there, but this type of iconography was popular across Italy and endured into the sixteenth century.

This paper will explore the implications of these artworks for historians interested in early modern concepts of gender and identity. It will investigate the way in which young men who were often derided for their effeminacy could turn to images to reformulate these discourses. It will also explore the significance of this iconography to religious beliefs and practices. Relationships with the divine were often mediated through artworks in this period, and the spiritual value ascribed to masculine beauty could play a central role in shaping devotional, as well as gendered, identity.

Victoria Mills, Bibliomania and the Male Body in the Late Nineteenth Century

Literary depictions of nineteenth-century bibliomania are riddled with the language of disease. Thomas Frognall Dibdin’s Bibliomania; or, Book Madness (1809), for example, is an account of the ‘history, symptoms, and cure of the fatal disease’. While late-Victorian bibliomania is often pathologised and placed in relation to discourses about heredity, degeneration and the fitness of the male body, this paper draws attention to a range of texts in which book collecting is depicted in positive terms. It explores sensory experience and eroticism in depictions of book collecting, focusing on the bibliophilic dandy-aesthetes and shabby bachelor book-lovers in work by Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, George Gissing and Eugene Field.

The paper examines fiction’s account of how men form and reinvent themselves through the act of book collecting and of how male subjects and book-objects blend, transform and physically alter each other. By introducing a phenomenological perspective on the corporeal experience of book love, the paper highlights the interplay of the senses as instrumental in the construction of masculine identities. I use depictions of book collecting to think about how the relationship between past and present is mediated through things and bodily objects and I discuss the alternative histories and genealogies that the individual’s affective investment in books may recover.

Professor Jim Secord (Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge)

Reading science in a utopian world of print

Dr Kristina Lundblad (Division of Book History, University of Lund, Sweden)

Bound to be modern. Cloth bindings and literature as thing

Abstracts

Prof Jim Secord.

For a brief, utopian moment in the late 1820s and early 1830s, the reading of science appeared to offer a remedy for Britain's social, political and religious malaise. Conversation about science pervaded elite society, new institutions for practising and disseminating knowledge were founded, and hundreds of thousands of men and women paid a penny a week to gain access to chemistry, geology, astronomy and other sciences. Even the most esoteric aspects of advanced calculus would, it was believed, become accessible to all. These millennial hopes were based on a perception that the physical quality, price and availability of printed word was being transformed by machine production. Changes in the material form of the book opened up the possibility of reshaping everyday life on a rational basis across the social spectrum.

Dr Kristina Lundblad.

With industrialization in the 19th century, book culture went through a number of changes. Like many other goods, literature began to be sold in retail packages – readymade bookbindings that conveyed the character of the literary content of the book. Objects such as packages and bookbindings took on an increasingly important place in the public and private spaces of modern society, spreading new imagery and symbolic messages. The use and handling of books and packages coincided with a use and handling of trade marks and logotypes and of a new world of images which introduced a number of new elements in everyday life.

In this paper I will concentrate on the emergence of publishers’ bookbindings, and especially decorated cloth bindings: Why did publishers take on the commissioning of bindings, what kind of interaction between technology, economics and aesthetics took place on the book market, how can we understand the changes in binding design and how did modern, decorated bookbindings influence peoples relations to books and literature?

Dr Tara Hamling (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham)

Decorating the parlour: ‘narrative’ imagery in the middling-level house

Dr Catherine Richardson (Department of English, University of Kent)

“Conferring by the parlour fire”: story-telling and the middling-status house

Abstract

Catherine Richardson. The particular interests in the subject of ‘domestic things’ which we share at the moment – households and material culture – cluster around the book we are writing together: A Day at Home in Early Modern England: The Materiality of Domestic Life, 1500-1700, due to be submitted to Yale next year. The distinctions in approach to those things come from our different disciplinary perspectives: Tara Hamling is an art historian who researches buildings, interior decoration and crafted objects with a particular focus on iconography and the cultural impact of the English Reformation. Catherine Richardson uses literary and dramatic texts alongside historical documents to study the representation of material culture. Our argument about ‘domestic things’ focusses on the middling sort, a group whose emerging identities in this period were partly shaped by the distinctions they were able to establish between the form and function of their domestic environments and those of their neighbours. As their use of household space was central to the development of their identity, we focus on the way our different methods and kinds of evidence can begin to retrieve these patterns of use, examining the interplay between action, things and spaces. Our case study is the parlour, a room considered crucial to the construction of elite identities because of the way it articulated social differentiation, providing a dedicated space for sociability and leisure time, but rarely considered in relation to middling groups. By analysing a range of visual, material, dramatic and documentary evidence, we examine the transitional nature of the form, use and idea of this space in this period and at this social level.

Dr Sally Holloway (Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London)

Romantic Things: the Material Culture of Courtship in Eighteenth-Century England

Sarah Ann Robin (MA BA, Faculty of History, Lancaster University)

Understanding Love through Material Culture: England and America in the Seventeenth-Century

Abstracts

Saly Holloway. This paper will argue that creating, exchanging and physically handling ‘romantic things’ played an indispensable role on the path to matrimony. The paper reconstructs the material world of courtship in England between c. 1730 and 1830 by combining objects in museums, archives and country houses with textual and visual representations of gifts in ballads, poems, novels, letters, diaries, paintings and prints.

Love tokens will be divided into three thematic categories to examine the meanings and purposes of particular gifts: ‘Food’, ‘Textiles’ and ‘The Body’. These categories are used to explore male and female roles in the economy of courtship, how certain gifts changed over time, and over the course of a relationship. The paper draws upon a cornucopia of objects including gingerbread, oysters, ribbons, garters, rings, silhouettes, eye miniatures and hair-work tokens. These romantic objects were vital in guiding courting couples from initial intimacy to a deeper emotional connection.

Sarah Ann Robin. Material culture played a critical role for those who fell in love. Tokens signified promise and intent during courtship, betrothal and afterward. Gifts served the necessary and practical demands of living, and conveyed the wishes, aspirations and personal experiences of the givers. Personal objects brought tangibility to the fragility of life: the hair of a lover could enclose an ocean and keep distant memories alive.Objects commemorated the deceased, becoming agents of comfort for those who were left behind. Furthermore, objects of this period often had numerous owners: they were transferred, exchanged, altered and given; thus informing us of a complex and multifaceted network of relations. Finally, objects occupied both the public and private spaces of love. Some were commemorative and declarative; others were worn against the skin, and hung on the walls of the private, domestic sphere. They were the reminders, reinforcers, consolers and mediators of love.

My talk will consider the multi-pronged approach which I have taken in my doctorate, and that which has led me to these conclusions. Objects reflect the expectations and realities of ‘being in love’ but to think of them as pure reflections is not enough; their study must be a three-dimensional one, not only of mirrored images, but one with different sides, heights and depths, of fabrics, designs and functions. It is this approach which shall be discussed.

Dr Lawrence Klein (Faculty of History, University of Cambridge)

Dr Kate Retford (History of Art, Birkbeck)

Abstracts

Dr Lawrence Klein

The conversation piece and polite culture: images, things and the makers of things

The genre of the conversation piece in eighteenth-century Britain brings to mind a complex but narrow world of ladies and gentlemen who sought to be represented as, in any number of ways, polite.

In this paper, I will use conversation pieces to suggest ways in which others in this society (people who were neither landed nor especially affluent) gained access to elements of polite culture and may have incorporated these elements into the ways they saw themselves.

I will do so in two principal ways.

First, I will talk about visual components of conversation pieces that circulated in accessible forms: painted conversation pieces made reference to specific individuals, their appurtenances and their habits (even if this representation was highly inaccurate); these same visual components could be detached from the painted image and redeployed generically in ways that allowed them to circulate to wider audiences.

Second, I will talk about the way producing polite goods for the people who appeared in conversation pieces left its mark on producers themselves: the mark of politeness.

Dr Kate Retford

The material world of the conversation piece: real things, fabricated things

One of the most compelling aspects of the conversation piece - a mode of small group portraiture which emerged in England in the 1720s and 1730s - has always been its emphasis on ‘stuff’. In these modestly proportioned canvases, sitters are usually pushed back into the picture plane, and full attention is paid to the details of the exteriors and - the subject of my paper – the interiors they inhabit. Stuccowork and carved overmantels are described in intricate detail; care is taken to capture the qualities of mahogany furniture and ceramic ornaments. As Sacheverell Sitwell once put it, this can seem an art of 'live objects, and inanimate persons’.

I want to focus on the questions raised when we have evidence that these spaces are, in fact, entirely fictitious, invented by the artist. Sometimes a conversation piece will represent the patron's actual home with notable accuracy; sometimes elements of that home have evidently been 'tweaked', but, on a considerable number of occasions, these painted rooms and the things they contain are pure artifice, even replicated in different portraits. My paper will ask: How were these interiors fabricated? How were they understood at the time, and how should we understand them now? Crucially, what can they tell us about the eighteenth-century world of material goods and matters of taste and politeness?

Dr Jason Scott-Warren (Faculty of English, University of Cambridge)

Dr Nancy Cox (University of Wolverhampton)

Carved Things, Carved Identities: Early Modern Luso-African Ivories and the History of African Combs

Dr Sally-Ann Ashton (Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge)

Hair combs from Africa and the African Diaspora 1500-1900

Professor Jean Michel Massing (History of Art, University of Cambridge)

The Sierra Leone ivory sculptures

Abstracts

Dr Ashton

This talk will consider both the types and sources of evidence, and the lack of evidence for this single category of object between 1500 and 1900. It will also consider what hair combs can tell us about the transference of culture from Africa to the Americas and Caribbean.

Prof Massing

That stone and ivory carving was practised in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is indicated by the stylistic similarities between certain nomoli and a group of ivories – the so-called Sapi-Portuguese ivories – datable to that period. This is confirmed by Valentim Fernandes (1506-1510), according to whom the Sapi carve “delicate works in ivory such as spoons, salt-cellars and bracelets.” He adds that “In Sierra Leone, the people are very skilful and very talented; all the objects we ask them to carve, they make truly marvellous works in ivory; some make spoons, others salt-cellars, others dagger hilts and other fine works.” He reiterates this point in another telling passage: “…they produce salt-cellars in ivory and spoons and whatever task one sketches for them, they carve it in ivory.” I will study this group of ivories and identify the French model used by the Sierra-Leone carvers, a Book of Hours printed by Thielman Kerver in Paris between 1509 and 1511.

Housing Things: Reconstructing the Interiors of the Soane Museum and the Watts Gallery

Mr Tim Knox (Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) and

Dr Nick Tromans (Curator of the Watts Gallery)

Abstracts

Tim Knox

Housing Things: Reconstructing the Interiors of the Soane Museum

Sir John Soane's Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, London, is the house and collections of the great Neoclassical architect, John Soane. Soane left it to the nation on his death in 1837, with strict instructions that nothing should be changed. However, almost as soon as he died, Soane's elaborate arrangements began to be dismantled and modified - sometimes for very necessary practical reasons, but also sometimes to answer the dictates of taste and decorum. Moreover, as the years elapsed, his decorative schemes were replaced, objects were rearranged, and the day to day needs of the Museum forced changes upon Soane's original vision. Tim Knox, former Director of Sir John Soane's Museum and current Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, discusses the gradual erosion of Soane's legacy, and its revival under a succession of post-War curators of the Museum. He concludes with an account of the Opening up the Soane project, conceived and begun under his own term as Director, which will return even more of the Museum to its exact appearance in 1837, as well as equipping it - in two neighbouring buildings - with the facilities that will enable the Soane Museum to survive into the twenty-first century and beyond.

Nick Tromans

Housing Things: Reconstructing the Interiors of the Watts Gallery

The Watts Gallery at Compton near Guildford was found in 1904, the year of the death of George Frederic Watts, the Victorian painter of symbolic allegory and of portraits of the great figures of the age. In 2011 the Gallery reopened after a complete refurbishment, undertaken after its picturesque structures had reached a point of dangerous dilapidation. The Gallery has since been the focus of much attention on account of its success as a heritage story. This talk will examine the challenges faced by the Gallery during this period, as it sought to balance the demands of sustainability and of the health of the collection against the cherished legacy of a fragile, eccentric and unique environment

Reconstructing Things: From Colourful Clothes to Paintings and Pigments

Professor Ulinka Rublack (Professor of Early Modern European History, Faculty of History, St John's College, University of Cambridge)

Dr Spike Bucklow (Senior Research Scientist and Teacher of Theory, Hamilton Kerr Institute, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

NB This session will be on Thursday at 1.30pm

Abstracts

Prof Rublack: How can historians reconstruct the symbolic as well as sensate world of colour experience? This talk introduces the audience to a unique experiment in reconstruction. It focuses on the political and emotional meanings of yellow and red in a precise moment in time: the Augsburg Imperial Diet in 1530, one of the key political summits of the German Reformation. It uses contemporary evidence to demonstrates in detail why symbolic languages were so crucial and contested at these meetings, but also uses research on the Fugger merchant company to show that their political outcomes were underpinned by very real financial strategies and economic interests. The paper then concentrates on an explanation of why the head-accountant of the company chose to commission a particular outfit to wear during the summit and shows how an actual reconstruction of historical dress can enrich our knowledge of the past and epistemological approaches.

Dr Bucklow: This paper follows Ulinka's focus on colour and reinforces her suggestion that the reconstruction of things can throw light on aspects of culture that might otherwise remain inaccessible. It recognises that things like colour are intimately linked to material substrates that carry them - dyes in cloth, or pigment in paint, for example. It suggests that, up to and including the nineteenth century, some of the cultural significance of colours was linked to the dyes and pigments that provided them. The paper explores the re-enactment of studio practice based on historic artists' recipes, acknowledging the role of tacit knowledge alongside explicit instructions. With reference to a fourteenth-century Missal in the Fitzwilliam Museum, the reconstruction of two blue pigments using contemporary methods shows that there is more to a colour than meets the eye.

Dr Matthew Hunter (McGill University)

Did Joshua Reynolds Paint his Pictures?

Professor Mark Hallett (Paul Mellon Centre)

Point Counter Point: Josua Reynolds, portraiture and late eighteenth-century exhibition culture.

Abstracts

Matthew Hunter. In May 1773, an open letter to London’s Morning Chronicle lodged a peculiar complaint with Sir Joshua Reynolds. Pigmented ooze—paint—had, in the view of this critic, come to bear in upon British art with undue, defacing force. The problem followed from conceptualizing artistic identity through an excessively literal translation of French Peintre as “Painter, and the materials which ingenious persons of that denomination make use of to display their talents, we have, from that word, calledpaint, which in French is named coleurs.” Closer to the liberal art actually practiced and promoted by Reynolds, this anonymous critic proposed, sculptors and architects could offer useful counter-models: “Why not like these have a peculiar name, Sir Joshua, for your very profession? Why not like these take up at once your classic name? Why not Pictor?” Situated within the rich, period discourse and extensive, modern documentation of Reynolds’s chemical experiments, this paper aims to take theMorning Chronicle’s complaint seriously. It considers the ways in which Reynolds and his contemporaries understood interfaces between paint and image, while exploring the broader stakes (then as now) of apprehending the President’s temporally-evolving chemical works as “pictures.”

Mark Hallett. This talk, which will focus on the portraits submitted by Joshua Reynolds to the annual Royal Academy displays of the 1780s, explores the workings of the painted object within the crowded, ephemeral and spectacular exhibition displays characteristic of the late eighteenth century. Particular attention will be devoted to the ways in which, within the Academy's Great Room, Reynolds's individual portraits of women were played off against each other and against portraits of male subjects, and thereby became part of an extended and highly intriguing form of visual dialogue and counterpoint.