Lihong Liu Fireworks in the early modern world paradoxically wedded a local experience of ephemeral sensations with an impulse to create patterns of perpetual motion. Exploring the custom of fireworks in China alongside their pictorial representations and decorative applications in a transcultural context during the long eighteenth century, this article…
David Mark Mitchell In her memoirs, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun recounted a 1792 viewing of anatomical wax models in Florence as an experience of both awe and horror. First, the detailed replication of complex anatomical mechanisms inspired the painter with reverence for the divine creator; then, a glimpse of…
Robert Wellington What spectacle offers he to our eyes? Is le Cercle alive? It looks like it breathes. Benoist, your ingenious art By a novel secret seems to animate the wax. I admire your rare talent; Your portraits, of an excellent taste, Cause extreme surprise One seems to see…
Charles Kang In 1794, Honoré Fragonard—cousin of the painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard—returned to the Cabinet d’anatomie at the National Veterinary School in the Parisian suburb of Alfort.[1] He had previously worked at the school as a surgeon, anatomist, and preparer of anatomical specimens and models. This time, he was visiting…
Paris Amanda Spies-Gans On July 12, 1789, Parisians began to revolt. News had just arrived that France’s King Louis XVI had dismissed his trusted finance minister, Jacques Necker. Accordingly, in a contemporary print by Jean Baptiste Le Sueur, The Beginning of the French Revolution, the orator Camille Desmoulins advocates…