Expressions of the Interior: Physiognomic Knowledge in Lavater, Goethe, and Alexander von Humboldt

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-122
Author(s):  
Bryan Klausmeyer

Abstract This article examines the role of Johann Caspar Lavater’s (1741-1801) physiognomic ideas in shaping the relationship between the natural sciences and aesthetics at the turn of the nineteenth century. Using the examples of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s early morphological writing and Alexander von Humboldt’s Ideen zu einer Physiognomik der Gewächse (1806), it makes the case for the importance of Lavater’s »scientific« physiognomy for understanding the discursive- epistemological shift from the sensual empiricism of the eighteenth century to the perception of the invisible around 1800. Far from a direct line of intellectual- historical continuity from Lavater to Goethe and Humboldt, this article contends that the diffuse uptake of physiognomic concepts by exponents of Romantic science gave them a new meaning in relation to the study of ›life‹ and its hidden dynamics as well as with respect to the roles of art and aesthetics in comprehending nature’s ›interior‹.

2021 ◽  
Vol 03 (08) ◽  
pp. 408-427
Author(s):  
Seenaa Jasim Mohammed Seenaa Jasim AL TAEE

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire witnessed ‎attempts to reform the political, economic, military, and social systems ‎according to the European style. Reforms emerged clearly in the ‎nineteenth century, resulting in a conflict between opponents and ‎supporters of reform. Among the manifestations of that dispute was ‎between Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who opposes reform, and Midhat Pasha, ‎who supports reforms. The research was divided into an introduction, a ‎conclusion, and three axes. The first axis dealt with the starting of the ‎development of views between Sultan Abdul Hamid II and Midhat Pasha. ‎As for the second one, it was the role of Midhat Pasha during the reign of ‎Sultan Abdul Hamid II. While the third axis discussed the political ‎position of Midhat Pasha after he was appointed as the (Grand Vizier). ‎The research came out with a set of important conclusions‎‎‎‎. Keywords: The Ottoman Empire, the politician, Medhat Pasha, Sultan Abdul Hamid.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.


1999 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 384-395
Author(s):  
R. W. Ambler

In February 1889 Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln, appeared before the court of the Archbishop of Canterbury charged with illegal practices in worship. The immediate occasion for these proceedings was the manner in which he celebrated Holy Communion at the Lincoln parish church of St Peter at Gowts on Sunday 4 December 1887. He was cited on six specific charges: the use of lighted candles on the altar; mixing water with the communion wine; adopting an eastward-facing position with his back to the congregation during the consecration; permitting the Agnus Dei to be sung after the consecration; making the sign of the cross at the absolution and benediction, and taking part in ablution by pouring water and wine into the chalice and paten after communion. Two Sundays later King had repeated some of these acts during a service at Lincoln Cathedral. As well as its intrinsic importance in defining the legality of the acts with which he was charged, the Bishop’s trial raised issues of considerable importance relating to the nature and exercise of authority within the Church of England and its relationship with the state. The acts for which King was tried had a further significance since the ways in which these and other innovations in worship were perceived, as well as the spirit in which they were ventured, also reflected the fundamental shifts which were taking place in the role of the Church of England at parish level in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their study in a local context such as Lincolnshire, part of King’s diocese, provides the opportunity to examine the relationship between changes in worship and developments in parish life in the period.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-150
Author(s):  
Nicole A. Jacoberger

This article examines the contrasting evolution in sugar refining in Jamaica and Barbados incentivized by Mercantilist policies, changes in labor systems, and competition from foreign sugar revealing the role of Caribbean plantations as a site for experimentation from the eighteenth through mid-nineteenth century. Britain's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century protectionist policies imposed high duties on refined cane-sugar from the colonies, discouraging colonies from exporting refined sugar as opposed to raw. This system allowed Britain to retain control over trade and commerce and provided exclusive sugar sales to Caribbean sugar plantations. Barbadian planters swiftly gained immense wealth and political power until Jamaica and other islands produced competitive sugar. The Jamaica Assembly invested heavily in technological innovations intended to improve efficiency, produce competitive sugar in a market that eventually opened to foreign competition such as sugar beet, and increase profits to undercut losses from duties. They valued local knowledge, incentivizing everyone from local planters to chemists, engineers, and science enthusiasts to experiment in Jamaica and publish their findings. These publications disseminated important findings throughout Britain and its colonies, revealing the significance of the Caribbean as a site for local experimentation and knowledge.


2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Ann Compton

The mid-nineteenth century critical discourse compartmentalized art and industry by crediting each with specific powers. Manufacturing was identified with the development of technologically advanced processes, materials and products, while fine artists were given authority over the aesthetic aspects of industrial design. The idea that the two sectors had separate areas of responsibility has proved extremely enduring, and continues to influence our perceptions of Victorian manufacturing. This article contributes to the wider task of re-evaluating the relationship between art and industry in nineteenth-century Britain by examining the role of design in potteries and art metalworking firms from the manufacturer’s perspective. It shows that contrary to the picture painted by Victorian critics, design was central to the ambitions and commercial operations of manufacturing businesses. Crucially, decisions about the recruitment of design staff were shaped by the close connection between the creation of new products at the drawing board, and their fabrication in the workshop. Since each branch of manufacturing had its distinctive characteristics, there were significant practical, aesthetic and commercial advantages for manufacturers in employing experienced designers who knew the trade, and were fully conversant with production practices. Unless a professional sculptor joined a firm, they were unlikely to have this inside knowledge, which made commissioning one-off designs from artists a riskier proposition. Manufacturers found that one of the best ways to get around this was to make reductions of sculptures, and initial demand for statuettes in Parian suggested they would be profitable for all concerned. In the end, the market did not live up to its early promise, but the publicity given to Parian statuettes compensated manufacturers and sculptors. Overall, it was this increased public exposure for art manufactures that was the prime benefit of the mid-nineteenth century critical discourse for the industrial sector.


2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-79
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Moutafov

This article focuses on the significance of the Orthodox painters’ manuals, called hermeneiai zographikes, in the development of post-Byzantine iconography and painting technology and techniques in the Balkans during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using a number of unpublished painters’ manuals (Greek and Slavonic) as primary sources for the study of Christian and Ottoman culture in the Balkan peninsula, it is possible to examine perceptions of Europe in the Balkans, in particular the principal routes for the transmission of ideas of the European Enlightenment, as well as the role of artists as mediators in the processes of ‘Europeanization'.


2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-269
Author(s):  
Waïl S. Hassan

Abstract According to a well-known narrative, the concept of Weltliteratur and its academic correlative, the discipline of comparative literature, originated in Germany and France in the early nineteenth century, influenced by the spread of scientism and nationalism. But there is another genesis story that begins in the late eighteenth century in Spain and Italy, countries with histories entangled with the Arab presence in Europe during the medieval period. Emphasizing the role of Arabic in the formation of European literatures, Juan Andrés wrote the first comparative history of “all literature,” before the concepts of Weltliteratur and comparative literature gained currency. The divergence of the two genesis stories is the result of competing geopolitical interests, which determine which literatures enter into the sphere of comparison, on what terms, within which paradigms, and under what ideological and discursive conditions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (139) ◽  
pp. 52-74
Author(s):  
Henrique Espada Lima

Abstract This article examines postmortem inventories and notarial records from Brazilian slaveholders in southern Brazil in the nineteenth century. By discussing selected cases in detail, it investigates the relationship between “precarious masters” (especially the poor and/or disabled, widows without family, and single elderly slaveholding women and men) and their slaves and former slaves to whom they bequeathed, in their testaments and final wills, manumission and property. The article reads these documents as intergenerational contractual arrangements that connected the masters’ expectations for care in illness and old age with the slaves’ and former slaves’ expectations for compensation for their work and dedication. Following these uneven relationships of interdependence and exploitation as they developed over time, the article suggests a reassessment of the role of paternalism in Brazil during the country’s final century of slavery. More than a tool to enforce relations of domination, paternalism articulated with the dynamics of vulnerability and interdependency as they changed over the life courses of both enslaved people and slave owners. This article shows how human aging became a terrain of negotiation and struggle as Brazilian slave society transformed throughout the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
William Tullett

Starting with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s experience of the Royal Institution lectures of 1802, this chapter sets out the relationship between smell, chemistry, and environmental medicine in the period from the 1660s to the 1820s. Putridity and putrefaction had long been associated with bad smell, but what the chemical investigations of the mid-eighteenth century succeeded in doing was separating the stink of putridity from its unhealthy qualities. Eudiometers, devices for measuring the quality of air that enjoyed a short vogue in the later eighteenth century, were one way of replacing the, now untrustworthy, sense of smell. Ultimately smell became a useful analogy for thinking about airborne disease or contagious particles, but by the early nineteenth century most physicians and chemists no longer believed that all smell was disease.


2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-116
Author(s):  
Floris Solleveld

Abstract What happened to the Republic of Letters? Its history seems to stop at the end of the eighteenth century. And yet, in the nineteenth century, there still existed a community gathered in scholarly societies, maintaining a transnational correspondence network and filling learned journals. The term indeed becomes less frequent, but does not go entirely out of use. This article traces the afterlives of the Republic of Letters in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, it investigates texts that attempt to (re)define the Republic of Letters or a cognate, the wider diffusion of the term, and the changing role of learned journals in that period. While most attempts to reinvent the Republic of Letters failed miserably, they indicate a diagnosis of the state of learning and the position of scholars in a period of transition, and in doing so they contradict an ‘unpolitical’ conception of the Republic of Letters.


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