Search results for ""author mary d. sheriff""
The University of Chicago Press Enchanted Islands: Picturing the Allure of Conquest in Eighteenth-Century France
In Enchanted Islands, renowned art historian Mary D. Sheriff explores the legendary, fictional, and real islands that filled the French imagination during the ancien regime as they appeared in royal ballets and festivals, epic literature, paintings, engravings, book illustrations, and other objects. Some of the islands were mythical and found in the most popular literary texts of the day--islands featured prominently, for instance, in Ariosto's Orlando furioso, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, and Fenelon's, Telemachus. Other islands--real ones, such as Tahiti and St. Domingue--the French learned about from the writings of travelers and colonists. All of them were imagined to be the home of enchantresses who used magic to conquer heroes by promising sensual and sexual pleasure. As Sheriff shows, the theme of the enchanted island was put to many uses. Kings deployed enchanted-island mythology to strengthen monarchical authority, as Louis XIV did in his famous Versailles festival Les Plaisirs de l'ile enchantee. Writers such as Fenelon used it to tell morality tales that taught virtue, duty, and the need for male strength to triumph over female weakness and seduction. Yet at the same time, artists like Boucher painted enchanted islands to portray art's purpose as the giving of pleasure. In all these ways and more, Sheriff demonstrates for the first time the centrality of enchanted islands to ancient regime culture in a book that will enchant all readers interested in the art, literature, and history of the time.
£48.00
The University of Chicago Press The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art
Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842) was an enormously successful painter, a favourite portraitist of Marie-Antoinette, and one of the few women accepted into the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. In accounts of her role as an artist, she was simultaneously flattered as a charming woman and vilified as monstrously unfeminine. In this study Mary D. Sheriff uses Vigee-Lebrun's career to explore the contradictory position of "woman-artist" in the moral, philosophical, professional, and medical debates about women in 18th-century France. Paying particular attention to painted and textual self-portraits, Sheriff shows how Vigee-Lebrun's images and memoirs undermined the assumptions about "woman" and the strictures imposed on women. Engaging ancien-regime philosophy, as well as modern feminism, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and art criticism, Sheriff's interpretations of Vigee-Lebrun's paintings challenge us to rethink the work and the world of this controversial woman artist.
£40.00
The University of Chicago Press Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France
In eighteenth-century France, the ability to "lose oneself" in a character or scene marked both great artists and ideal spectators. Yet it was also thought this same passionate enthusiasm, if taken to unreasonable extremes, could lead to sexual deviance, mental illness, and even death. Women and artists were seen as especially susceptible to these negative consequences of creative enthusiasm - and women artists doubly so. Mary D. Sheriff uses these very different visions of artistic enthusiasm to explore the complex interrelationships among creativity, sexuality, the body, and the mind in eighteenth-century France. Drawing on evidence from the visual arts, literature, philosophy, and medicine, she scrutinizes the different forms of deviance ascribed to male and female artists. Sheriff also demonstrates that the perceived connections among sexuality, creativity, and disease also opened artistic opportunities for women - and creative women took full advantage of them.
£27.87
