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Celebrated connoisseur, drawings collector, print dealer, book publisher and authority on the art of antiquity, Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774) was a pivotal figure in the eighteenth-century European art world. Focusing on the trajectory of Mariette?s career, this book examines the material practices and social networks through which connoisseurs forged the idea of art as an object of empirical and historical analysis. Drawing on significant unpublished archival material as well as on histories of science, publishing, collecting and display, this book shows how Mariette and his colleagues? practices of classification and interpretation of the graphic arts gave rise to new conceptions of artistic authorship and to a history of art that transcended the biographies of individual artists. To follow Mariette?s career through the eighteenth century is to see that art was consolidated as a specialized category of intellectual inquiry-and that style emerged as its structuring analytic device-in the overlapping spaces of the collector?s cabinet, the connoisseur?s portfolio and the dealer?s shop.

Disrupting the common assumption that the Victorians regarded their eighteenth-century predecessors with little interest or with disdain, this volume re-examines these relationships, exposing some of the significant and complex ways in which key aspects and texts of the eighteenth century were situated, read, and transacted with during the post-Romantic nineteenth century. The contributors challenge long-held assumptions about Victorian uses of the past, and offer new insights into how the literature and culture of the eighteenth century helped shape the culture and identity of the nineteenth. This collection of essays by an impressive array of scholars, with a Preface by David Fairer, offers a sharply new assessment of the energizing place of eighteenth-century literature and culture in the nineteenth century. While obviously of great interest to students of eighteenth-century and Victorian literature, the collection will also appeal to readers broadly concerned questions of literary influence, periodization, and historiography.

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