A lecture by American historian Meredith Martin, posted on Youtube on 12th May, explores wider themes suggested by the "Choiseul Snuffbox" (acquired by the Louvre in 2023).
The Iris Foundation Awards Lecture by Meredith Martin (NYU):
"This interactive lecture will explore the famous Choiseul snuffbox, a tiny but extraordinary monument of the eighteenth century that features views of the Parisian mansion and art collection of the Duc de Choiseul, foreign minister to Louis XV. The snuffbox, or tabatière, became a cause célèbre in France in 2023 when it was offered for sale to the tune of nearly four million euros. The Louvre launched a massive public campaign to raise funds to acquire the box and published a scholarly tome dedicated to giving readers “all the keys you still need to unlock the secrets of this highly prized tabatière.” And yet in all the recent literature around this object, no mention has been made of its deep, unsettling connections to colonialism and enslavement at the level of material, iconography, patronage, and use. This talk will seek to “unpack” this box and will invite attendees to confront its materiality and multisensory dimensions through digital reconstructions produced in collaboration with Bard Graduate Center’s digital humanities technologists.
Meredith Martin is a professor of art history at New York University and a founding editor of Journal18. A specialist in early modern French art and empire, she is the coauthor (with Gillian Weiss) of the prizewinning book The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France (Getty, 2022; French edition 2022), which is related to an exhibition that she and Dr. Weiss are cocurating for the Institut du monde arabe in Paris. Martin is also the author of Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie-Antoinette (Harvard, 2011), and a coauthor of Meltdown: Picturing the World’s First Bubble Economy (2020), which is related to an exhibition she cocurated for the New York Public Library. Together with Phil Chan, Martin reimagined and restaged a lost French ballet from 1739 known as the Ballet des Porcelaines, which premiered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2021 and was performed throughout the US and Europe in 2022. She is currently working on a multimedia collaborative project called Colonial Networks, which explores links between Haiti/Saint-Domingue and the Paris art world during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."
For the acquisition of the box:
No comments:
Post a Comment