Manifestations of Venus : Art and Sexuality

by Edited by Caroline Arscott and Katie Scott

• ISBN13: 9780719055218
• ISBN10: 0719055210
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2001-04-07
• Publisher: Manchester University Press

Summary

This fascinating book takes as its starting point the recurrent motif of Venus as the associated figure of Cupid in Western art from the Renaissance to the present day. Original essays investigate issues of art, gender, and sexuality, and bring a particular moment into vivid focus, looking at specific works of painting, sculpture, design, or photography. The essays not only make important contributions to art history, but also to the historical field, and to cultural and gender studies.

Author Biography

Caroline Arscott is Lecturer in 19th-century British Art and Katie Scott is Lecturer in Early Modern French Art and Architecture, both at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	ix
Preface and acknowledgements	xiii
List of contributors	xv
Introducing Venus	1	(23)
Caroline Arscott
and Katie Scott
The seductions of antiquity	24	(15)
Patricia Rubin
Wtewael's Perseus and Andromeda: looking for love in seventeenth-century Dutch painting	39	(30)
Joanna Woodall
Under the sign of Venus: the making and meaning of Bouchardon's L'Amour in the age of the French rococo	69	(21)
Katie Scott
The figure of Venus: rhetoric of the ideal and the Salon of 1863	90	(19)
Jennifer Shaw
Venus as dominatrix: nineteenth-century artists and their creations	109	(17)
Caroline Arscott
Veiling Venus: gender and painterly abstraction in early German modernism	126	(16)
Shulamith Behr
Deco Venus	142	(14)
Tag Gronberg
Monsieur Venus: Michel Journiac and love	156	(17)
Sarah Wilson
Notes	173	(50)
Select bibliography	223	(4)
Index	227