Jason Nguyen The National Maritime Museum in London houses thousands of artifacts from British nautical history. Among these items is a small handheld globe from 1719 by the British cartographer Herman Moll (Fig. 1). These popular commodities, made of papier-mâché and plaster and wrapped in printed and hand-colored paper, functioned…
Camille Mathieu In a famous 1720 portrait of Scottish financier John Law, founder of France’s first bank (1716) and the Company of the West (1717), he stands in courtly dress in front of a well-manicured, formal French lawn (Fig. 1).[1] His dignified attire matches that of the orderly garden; his…
William N. Goetzmann and Darius A. Spieth In an influential study of the mechanisms of absolutist power, Louis Marin compared the icon of Jansenism, Philippe de Champaigne’s Christ on the Cross (Fig. 1), to the Sun King’s official state portrait by Hyacinthe Rigaud (Fig. 2): Compare two figures of the…
Oliver Wunsch Among the many allegorical representations of the “four continents” created by European artists, Rosalba Carriera’s contribution stands out (Figs. 1-4). Little is known about the circumstances of the commission, though art historians suspect that the Venetian pastellist created her series sometime after her formative trip to Paris in…