The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-century Porcelain

Nine art historians analyze the fascination with porcelain figures during the 18th century, placing it within a larger context of social and psychological conditions, and treating the figures with the same rigor usually reserved for painting and sculpture. Among the topics are porcelain, secrecy, and the 18th-century culture of invention; French porcelain flowers and the rhetoric of the garnish; porcelain and theatrical display; the queen's necessaire; porcelain, print culture, and mercantile aesthetics; sugarboxes and blackamoors: ornamental blackness in early Meisson porcelain; and relations between the Royal Academy of San Fernando and the Royal Porcelain Factory of the Buen Retiro. In addition to the many black-and-white photographs throughout the text are 12 color plates. The papers are from a 2006 conference in Boston, Massachusetts. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Alden Cavanaugh is Associate Professor of Art History at Indiana State University, USA. Michael E. Yonan is Assistant Professor of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Art at the University of Missouri-Columbia, USA.