New course: The Orléans Collection

The Orléans Collection:
Early modern collecting, the art market and the first museums
Spring 2018. M 3:30- 5:45        Professor Stephanie Porras and Vanessa Schmid, NOMA

This seminar investigates the formation, organization, display and dispersal of early modern art collections, using the magnificent art collection amassed by Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (1690-1723) as a paradigmatic example. The Orléans collection will be the subject of a landmark 2018 exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art to celebrate the city’s tri-centennial, curated by Vanessa Schmid, who will co-teach this course with Professor Porras. The seminar will study the formation and organization of early modern European aristocratic collections, most notably Italian aristocratic and merchant collections such as those amassed by the Medici and Gonzaga families; ambitious royal collectors like Rudolph II and Charles I; and French noble collections from the Valois courts onwards. Students will study the social networks of early modern collectors, reading inventories, travellers’ accounts and theoretical texts to analyze why patrons amassed art collections. The seminar also aims to help students develop an understanding of the increasing professionalism of the early modern art market, the rise of specialist art dealers and connoisseurial practices – particularly in the cities of Paris, Amsterdam and London. The sale of the Orléans collection intersected with the foundation of James Christies’ London auction house and the formation of the first public art museums in Europe. Finally, students will analyze and compare the politics of display and various levels of access to different aristocratic collections, with particular focus on the formation of the Western art historical canon, artists’ use of early modern collections, and the origins of the public museum in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Questions?         Email Stephanie Porras (sporras@tulane.edu)