Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward: Historical and Global Perspectives

Description

Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2020 With the dramatic rise of Freemasonry in the eighteenth century, art played a fundamental role in its practice, rhetoric, and global dissemination, while Freemasonry, in turn, directly influenced developments in art. This mutually enhancing relationship has only recently begun to receive its due. The vilification of Masons, and their own secretive practices, have hampered critical study and interpretation. As perceptions change, and as masonic archives and institutions begin opening to the public, the time is ripe for a fresh consideration of the interconnections between Freemasonry and the visual arts. This volume offers diverse approaches, and explores the challenges inherent to the subject, through a series of eye-opening case studies that reveal new dimensions of well-known artists such as Francisco de Goya and John Singleton Copley, and important collectors and entrepreneurs, including Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and Baron Taylor. Individual essays take readers to various countries within Europe and to America, Iran, India, and Haiti. The kinds of art analyzed are remarkably wide-ranging-porcelain, architecture, posters, prints, photography, painting, sculpture, metalwork, and more-and offer a clear picture of the international scope of the relationships between Freemasonry and art and their significance for the history of modern social life, politics, and spiritual practices. In examining this topic broadly yet deeply, Freemasonry and the Visual Arts sets a standard for serious study of the subject and suggests new avenues of investigation in this fascinating emerging field.

Reva Wolf is Professor of Art History, State University of New York at New Paltz, USA. Alisa Luxenberg is Professor of Art History, University of Georgia, USA.

* Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2020 * Covering an impressive range of arts, essays touch on Meissen porcelain, etchings and engravings by Hogarth and Paul Revere, paintings by Goya and Copley, photographic portraiture of African American masons, and even masonic folk art in contemporary Haitian voodooism. * Choice * Readers of this book will be rewarded with a greater understanding of the history, importance, and pervasiveness of masonry over the centuries, and its important role in the development of our own country. * Journal of American Culture * This book is a wonderful, detailed scholarly work which explores the relationship between Freemasonry and the visual arts and vice versa ... The book is beautifully illustrated with numerous colour and black & white images that help reveal the way the visual arts, particularly architecture, were influenced by and in turn influenced Freemasonry. * Leonardo Reviews Archive * The book is copiously illustrated with 16 color plates and roughly 9 black-and-white figures illustrating each of the essays ... Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. * CHOICE * Explicating the vast network of interconnections between Freemasonry and the visual arts in multiple societies from the 18th century onward, this book is an invaluable resource of information and analysis. Wolf and Luxenberg have gathered a series of brilliantly insightful essays. * Edward J. Sullivan, Helen Gould Shepard Professor of the History of Art, New York University, USA * This is a much-needed book on an important subject. The links between freemasonry and the visual arts are many, but their scope has not been fully appreciated. Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward demonstrates how freemasonic symbols and ideas permeate a wide range of visual products, from architecture and urban planning to paintings and porcelain, and how freemasonry's influence can be detected in settings far from the lodges themselves. The book presents a global perspective on its subject, offering essays on Portugal, Iran, and Haiti alongside the better-studied settings of Britain and the United States. It likewise offers models for analyzing fragmentary or hidden historical experiences. Freemasonry and the Visual Arts suggests that art offers opportunities to tap into histories that otherwise would remain lost to us. * Michael Yonan, Professor of Art History, University of Missouri, USA * The enormously rich visual culture generated by Freemasonry has not received the attention it deserves from art historians. This pioneering collection of essays provides fascinating and tantalising illustrations of the rich artistic legacy of Freemasonry in many different countries ranging from Europe and America to Haiti, Iran and India across media including paintings, prints, metalwork, jewellery, ceramics and architecture. * Andrew Prescott, Professor of Digital Humanities, University of Glasgow, Scotland *