Overview

How do our senses help us to understand the world? This question, which preoccupied Enlightenment thinkers in Western Europe, also emerged as a key theme in depictions of animals in eighteenth-century art. This book examines the ways in which painters, sculptors, porcelain modelers, and other decorative designers portrayed animals as sensing subjects who physically confirmed the value of material experience. The independent agency of animals with their own right to free existence, a topic of growing urgency in our own era, emerges in striking and often surprising ways within this early nexus of artistic experimentation. The sensual style known today as the Rococo encouraged the proliferation of animals as exemplars of empirical inquiry in the eighteenth century, ranging from the popular subject of the monkey artist to the alchemical wonders of the life-sized porcelain animals created for the Saxon court. Examining writings on sensory knowledge by La Mettre, Condillac, Diderot and other philosophers side by side with depictions of the animal in art, Cohen argues that artists promoted the animal as a sensory, thinking subject while also validating the material basis of their own professional practice.

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9781350203624

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Reviews

In this landmark study of rare distinction, Sarah Cohen effortlessly combines superlative scholarship with engaging prose. She enlightens her readers with stunningly new insights about things we thought we understood, but did not. We will be engaged with this brilliant book for a very long time. * Christopher M. S. Johns, Former Norman & Roselea Goldberg Professor of History of Art, Vanderbilt University, USA * In this intellectually path-breaking book, Cohen shows how animal imagery prompted new ideas about knowledge, sensation, and the permeable boundary between human and nonhuman life. Her passion for the material comes through on every page. * Meredith Martin, Associate Professor of Art History, New York University, USA * Shedding welcome light on a hitherto under-examined aspect of eighteenth-century French art, Sarah Cohen convincingly aligns representations of animals with a new valorisation of sensory experience that challenged traditionally anthropocentric values. * Emma Barker, Senior Lecturer in Art History, The Open University, UK *

In this landmark study of rare distinction, Sarah Cohen effortlessly combines superlative scholarship with engaging prose. She enlightens her readers with stunningly new insights about things we thought we understood, but did not. We will be engaged with this brilliant book for a very long time. * Christopher M. S. Johns, Norman & Roselea Goldberg Professor of History of Art, Vanderbilt University, USA * In this intellectually path-breaking book, Cohen shows how animal imagery prompted new ideas about knowledge, sensation, and the permeable boundary between human and nonhuman life. Her passion for the material comes through on every page. * Meredith Martin, Associate Professor of Art History, New York University, USA * Shedding welcome light on a hitherto under-examined aspect of eighteenth-century French art, Sarah Cohen convincingly aligns representations of animals with a new valorisation of sensory experience that challenged traditionally anthropocentric values. * Emma Barker, Senior Lecturer in Art History, The Open University, UK *

Author Information

Sarah Cohen is Professor of Art History and Women’s Studies at the University at Albany, USA. She has published extensively on representations of the body, both human and animal. Her first book Art, Dance and the Body in French Culture the Ancien Régime was published in 2000.

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