Bourgeois and Aristocratic Cultural Encounters in Garden Art,
1550-1850
edited by Michel Conan
Developments in garden art cannot be isolated from the social changes upon which they either depend or have some bearing.
Bourgeois and Aristocratic Cultural Encounters in Garden Art, 1550-1850 offers an unparalleled opportunity to discover the complex relationships between bourgeois and aristocrats that have led developments of garden art from the Renaissance well into the Industrial Revolution, irrespective of stylistic differences. It shows how garden creation has contributed to blurring social boundaries and to the ongoing redefinition of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. It even illustrates the aggressive use of gardens by bourgeois in more-or-less successful attempts at subverting existing social hierarchies in Renaissance Genoa and eighteenth-century Bristol, England; as well as the opposite, as demonstrated by the king of France, Louis XIV, who claimed to rule the arts, but imitated the curieux fleuristes, a group of amateurs from diverse strata of French society.
Essays in this volume explore this complex framework of relationships in diverse settings in Britain, France, Biedermeier Vienna, and Renaissance Genoa. The volume certainly confirms that gardens were objects of conspicuous consumption, but it challenges the theories of consumption set forth by Thorstein Veblen and Pierre Bourdieu. It also explores the contributions of gardens to major cultural changes like the rise of public opinion, gender and family relationships, and capitalism.
Garden history, then, informs many of the debates of contemporary cultural history, ranging from rural management practices in early seventeenth-century France to the development of a sense of British pride at the expansive Vauxhall Gardens favored equally by the legendary Frederick, Prince of Wales, and by the teeming London masses. This volume amply demonstrates the varied and extensive contributions of garden creation to cultural exchange between 1550 and 1850.
- 2002 392 pages 174 illus. 7 x 10 inches 0-88402-287-0 COBO
$35.00
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