The Light of the Word

2021 ◽  
pp. 20-72
Author(s):  
Sarah C. Schaefer

Chapter 1 introduces the context in which Doré’s biblical imagery emerged by focusing on the status of the Bible in the visual culture of nineteenth-century France, with particular emphasis on book illustration. Relying on photographic documentation of Doré’s original drawings, this chapter begins the process of articulating Doré’s visual language and its relationship to preceding attempts at comprehensive Bible illustration projects. The distinction between “biblical” and “religious” imagery is significant in setting the stage for the Doré Bible, as it was initially produced for French Catholic audiences, a contingent for whom direct engagement with the Bible was historically discouraged or even forbidden. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, biblical illustration in the first half of the nineteenth century reveals the continued centrality of the Bible to artistic and public life in the wake of religious and intellectual upheavals.

Author(s):  
Anca I. Lasc

This book analyzes the early stages of the interior design profession as articulated within the circles involved in the decoration of the private home in the second half of nineteenth-century France. It argues that the increased presence of the modern, domestic interior in the visual culture of the nineteenth century enabled the profession to take shape. Upholsterers, cabinet-makers, architects, stage designers, department stores, taste advisors, collectors, and illustrators, came together to “sell” the idea of the unified interior as an image and a total work of art. The ideal domestic interior took several media as its outlet, including taste manuals, pattern books, illustrated magazines, art and architectural exhibitions, and department store catalogs. The chapters outline the terms of reception within which the work of each professional group involved in the appearance and design of the nineteenth-century French domestic interior emerged and focus on specific works by members of each group. If Chapter 1 concentrates on collectors and taste advisors, outlining the new definitions of the modern interior they developed, Chapter 2 focuses on the response of upholsterers, architects, and cabinet-makers to the same new conceptions of the ideal private interior. Chapter 3 considers the contribution of the world of entertainment to the field of interior design while Chapter 4 moves into the world of commerce to study how department stores popularized the modern interior with the middle classes. Chapter 5 returns to architects to understand how their engagement with popular journals shaped new interior decorating styles.


2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-400 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Horowitz

When the duc de Choiseul-Praslin, a politician and prominent member of the French aristocracy, killed his wife and then poisoned himself in August 1847, the case shook the foundations of the July Monarchy. In the wake of the affair, conservatives used the murder/suicide to argue that love was a respect for hierarchy, while those on the left saw violence and anomie as stemming from inequality. However, both sides saw women’s affections as crucial to public life and social cohesion. This article thus situates the Choiseul-Praslin affair within the politics of affection and family life in mid-nineteenth-century France.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Billingsley

This article examines an iconic example of grangerizing: the Macklin Bible extra-illustrated in 45 volumes by London artist and bookseller Robert Bowyer (1758‐1834) in the first quarter of the nineteenth century (Bolton Libraries and Museums, Bolton, United Kingdom). The principal focus is on the Bowyer Bible as an example of an extra-illustrator’s close engagement with its source publication. The author argues that Bowyer’s practice responds not only to the Bible or the King James Bible, in general, but also to the Macklin Bible, in particular. The article discusses how the Bowyer Bible engages with the Macklin Bible specifically and how it reflects a broader range of concerns in its visual engagement with the Bible. It demonstrates that Bowyer’s curation of biblical visual material evidences both his professional interests as a connoisseur of prints and his personal interests in the visual culture of the Bible that reflect his own piety as well as contemporaneous developments in the study of the scriptures. Other matters discussed in the article are the original function of this Bible, as well as the extent to which it reflects and is distinctive from contemporaneous extra-illustrated books.


Author(s):  
Samuel Morris Brown

Joseph Smith and his Latter-day Saints are caught out of time; they are much like living fossils. Their religious tradition is at once ancient and profoundly modern. While the movement arrived in the nineteenth century, it situated itself in the ancient past and the millennial future. Smith mediated between those times with scriptural translations best understood as targums—oral expansions, revisions, and interpretations that achieve the status of scripture—of the Bible, especially the first eleven chapters of Genesis and their primeval history. These targums reconfigure the Bible and create the possibility of a biblical world occupied by the Latter-day Saints. Smith’s targums and his metaphysics of translation were together concerned with escape routes from three modern prisons: mortal language, flattened time, and individualism.


Afghanistan ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 202-236
Author(s):  
Robert D. Crews

This article explores Afghan Twelver Shiʿi commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn at the Battle of Karbala. It shows how the rites of remembrance and mourning celebrated on ʿAshura in Afghanistan has evolved in important ways from the late nineteenth century to the recent past. More than a pivotal event in the ritual calendar of Shiʿism, ʿAshura has served as an index of Afghan politics—and a field of contestation among state officials, clerical authorities, and the Shiʿi faithful. It has thus been at the center of struggles over the identity of the Afghan nation, the status of the Shia, and ritual practices in public life. Drawing on representations of ʿAshura produced by government authorities, state media, clerics, and lay people, this article examines how different actors have competed to give ʿAshura meaning and to develop distinctively Afghan forms of commemoration.


2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
kari weil

In the Nineteenth Century, France became a nation that ate horse. The introduction of horsemeat into French cuisine marks a rare occurrence in history of a change in attitude, if not taste, towards a once tabooed food. Whether or not to permit hippophagy was, indeed, a matter of great debate at the time, having to do not only with the status of French cuisine, but also with the status of the horse. While the legalization of horsemeat for human food in 1866 was justified primarily on socioeconomic grounds -- horsemeat was a ready and cheap source of protein for those in need -- the consumption of horse remained a controversial idea because of the complex and conflicting affections horses inspired. The debates around hippophagy reveal an increasingly ambivalent attitude toward the horse and its potential subjectivity, especially since horses, in turn, had the power to represent the questionable subjectivity of certain "breeds" of humans and their status within the nation.


2021 ◽  
pp. 73-112
Author(s):  
Sarah C. Schaefer

Chapter 2 examines the Doré Bible illustrations through the lens of the illustrated periodical press. Having begun his career as a newspaper illustrator, Doré approached the Bible with the same aim toward comprehensiveness and compositional variety that one finds in the illustrated press of the time. At the same time, Doré’s images are rooted in the history of biblical representation and are thus dialectically situated in the discourses of contemporaneity and tradition. This chapter also takes into account the role that wood engraving played in the realm of illustration and in Doré’s practice specifically. Used primarily for book and periodical illustration, wood engraving became the most ubiquitous printed form in nineteenth-century Europe. Doré’s aim to elevate the medium to a higher status resulted in a set of illustrations that simultaneously derive from the visual language of journalistic imagery and depart from it in significant ways.


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