Subject: The Importance
of Supporting Information
Posted By: Wayne Hanley
Date Posted: June 6, 2003, 9:50 AM
Various images were intended for
various audiences/markets—often based the cost of the engravings,
medals, jetons, etc. produced. Some were intended for the mass audience
(and were cheaper) and some for a more educated/wealthy audience
(and were generally more expensive and of finer quality). This is
certainly the case for medals, medallions, and jetons. Thus knowing
the numbers of images produced, knowing how much they sold for, and
knowing more about some of the creators would help to address some
of these questions.
I think that understanding the intent of the creators of these
images is easier to surmise (as compared to their reception), as
Barbara's essay (in particular) alludes to, but I still wonder
about how much of a modern analysis is imposed by historians (again,
some of the ideas discussed, not only in Barbara's essay, but in
Joan's as well). There is also the question of was the intent of
the image consciously (or even unconsciously) understood by the
various audiences of the images.
In my analysis of the “Vivre Libre ou Mourir” medal
[Image
17], for example, specific classical
symbols were included in the image, but did the audience of the
jeton realize that the sixteen reeds of the fasces represented
the sections of Paris? From Parker's work on cult of antiquity
and Dowd's work on David's designs for the various fêtes
we know that the revolutionary leaders sought to educate the audience
about the meanings of various images, but can the intent to educate
equate with popular understanding of the imagery?
It seems to me that answers to these types of questions, in the
absence of additional evidence, can only be answered obliquely
or by inference. Would the frequency of advertising for specific
(or types of) images and a study of the listed prices of those
images, for example, reveal greater insights into the relative
success of a given image (or genre)? Which newspapers advertised
which images? Who read those newspapers? Did the advertised price
of those images change over time? When did the advertisements appear
(i.e., what contemporary events might have added to the audience's
understanding of the image)?
In my own analysis of the early propaganda efforts of General
Bonaparte, for example, it appears that continued reports of his
victories led to an increased advertising for geography books that
corresponded with his areas of operation and that advertisements
for engravings of Bonaparte/or his victories generally ebbed and
flowed with the news of his successes. Knowing these types of tangential
details would greatly enhance our understanding of how the various
audiences of these images received them.
Subject: the need for more knowledge
Posted By: Lynn Hunt
Date Posted: June 23, 2003, 11:16 PM
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 printmakers, 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.
Subject: reading the image
Posted By: Vivian Cameron
Date Posted: July 26, 2003, 2:15 PM
Knowing more about the date, the artist,
the distribution of a print, and the like, as Claudette Hould has
demonstrated, helps
us to stabilize the meaning of a work, as it were. However, as
we all know, images are multivalent with various readings, and “the
reception of any cultural product is subject always to friction,
resistance, and possible remaking,” as Joan Landes has shown. Regardless of the artist's intent, the image acquires its own
meanings, depending on the sites of its display, who interpretes/d
it [here class, race, and gender can be pertinent], when it is
interpreted (reception theory), and the like.
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