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| 5. How would our analyses change if we
knew more about the date, engravers, designers, producers, merchants
and distribution of the images in question? What do the images reveal
about class or gender? What can the style and rendering of an image
disclose about the political ideology or psychological predisposition
of the engraver, printer, or patron? How might one get at the intent
of the image makers compared to the reading produced by contemporary
viewers. |
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The
Importance of Supporting Information Wayne Hanley,
6-6-03, 9:50 AM |
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the
need for more knowledge Lynn Hunt,
6-23-03, 11:16 PM |
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on
the need for more knowledge Barbara Day-Hickman, 7-3-03, 4:12
PM |
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A
different perspective Warren Roberts, 7-9-03,
1:33 PM |
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reading the image Vivian
Cameron, 7-26-03,
1:45 PM |
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| Subject: |
the need for more knowledge |
| Posted
By: |
Lynn Hunt |
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| Date
Posted: |
6-23-03, 11:16
PM |
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The questions - and Wayne’s
thoughtful response - both demonstrate that we are just
beginning to dig up the kinds of supporting evidence
that could help us make sense of the thousands of prints
of the revolutionary and Napoleonic decades. Art historians
have spent literally centuries digging up this kind of
information about famous and not so famous painters and
sculptors. I suspect that much more can be found out
about print designers, printmakers, and print sellers.
The men who catalogued the De Vinck collection, for example,
gathered much precious information when they put together
the catalogue at the turn of the 20th century. Bits and
pieces of further information have appeared since then,
but few have been willing to risk their careers in an
area where the pay-off is still uncertain. What is probably
needed is some kind of vast collaborative undertaking,
multi-scholar but also multi-national. There is information
in newspaper advertisements, as Wayne suggests, and also
in notarial records about particular print makers, and
probably in bankruptcy proceedings. One person could
find information about one or perhaps a handful of printmakers
but would have difficulty surveying the whole field.
We need something like the Kennedy and Netter study of
plays, though advertisements for prints were probably
less consistent than notices of performances. Without
this kind of information, we always fall back on iconographic
study and rely on our sense of the corpus (of some 30,000
or so images). The difficulties should not be underestimated.
Anyone who has worked on the Histoire de France collection
on microfilm in the Estampes Department knows that images
are categorized by the date of the event they represent,
not by the likely date of their production. So it’s not
even possible right now to say with certainty that more
images were produced in say, 1789-1791, than in 1792-1794
(which I believe to be true), much less to explain why
this might be so. |
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