Chapter Two sets the scene, providing the context of regional networks within which global circulations of law were elaborated. The chapter shows how Malay elite figures such as Abu Bakar navigated regional and familial networks to make space for themselves in imperial and colonial hierarchies. Abu Bakar’s story encapsulates the ambition, sense of self-invention and possibility that accompanied Malay elite exploration of the world in the nineteenth century, explorations made both possible and needful by colonial and imperial encounter. These explorations also gave rise to a welter of new and pressing anxieties around recognition, authority and legitimacy, and representation. Tensions proliferated, between belonging and innovation, authority and representation, recognition and invention. Where textual archives often served to efface or resolve these tensions, visual material often captured them, in all their creativity, anxiety, and alterations. Chapter Two places these archives in conversation, in order to explore the critical utility of elite biography as a problematic for global Islamic history, against an imperial backdrop.

Not the Conclusion. Romans acquired ancient Greek statues to exhibit in public spaces, and they used classical sculptural styles and types in their own works. They made exact copies by overcasting old bronzes, and dealers probably fooled them into thinking these were antique. We are just as enthusiastic about undersea finds today as were the Romans. Statues described as “brasses” in the eighteenth century are now described as bronzes or more specifically as copper alloys. New technologies have widened the scope of our studies, but analyses of the bronze or of the clay core cannot distinguish Greek from Roman bronzes, but they can sometimes link two or more bronzes to a single foundry or lead us to where a bronze was produced. Noninvasive studies are being developed for the study of ancient bronzes, inside and out. There is still much to investigate.

As popular culture prospered in the mid nineteenth century, it targeted middle-class women as an emerging audience of consumers. It encouraged women to take pleasure in domesticity and nurturing families as women’s appropriate role in society. Modern scholars either castigated or ignored these works until feminism’s rise in the 1970s–1980s, when scholars reevaluated bestseller domestic or sentimental novels for their rightful place in popular culture. They also reclaimed other popular forms of sentimental culture, including Godey’s Lady’s Book magazine (1830–1898) as well as household manuals like Catharine Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) that offered a middle-class “cult of domesticity.” Sentimental culture also extended to piano sheet music and other parlor entertainments like daguerreotypes, photograph albums, and stereographs that were supposed to be the means for women creating strong family bonding in affectionate leisure time together.

Chapter 4 examines three works: the Falucho monument, both in its creation and in its initial location in Buenos Aires and its subsequent relocation; the portrait of Eusebio de la Santa Federación, a jester by Juan Manuel de Rosas, which differs from other images of the same figure; and the representations of Tía Rosa, a pastry seller on the streets of Buenos Aires in the nineteenth century. It should be noted that, during this period, portraits of Afro-Argentines are rare and limited to military personnel, especially toward the end of the century. These three portraits depict a common soldier, a female pastry vendor or a cook, and a buffoon. So the question is why three people were portrayed who had trades or fulfilled roles effectively but not exclusively performed by a large part of the Afro-Argentine population. This assignment of social and labor roles, similar to those they were forced to perform during slavery, became stereotypical. This operation circumscribed Afro-descendants to the past, banishing them from the present in which the images were produced, and hence from the future as well.

Chapter 5 focuses on two biographical compilations of Afro-Argentines who are considered role models for the community. These biographies not only present a written portrait of each individual but also include a corresponding visual portrait, a feature that enriches the compilations. They were an attempt to construct an Afro-Argentine memory and imaginary, and the construction of this collective memory implied affection, bonds of proximity, and even intimacy The inclusion of portraits shows how important images were to the promoters of the publication in their role as mentors of the community. On the one hand, the inclusion of engravings was a way of complying with the precepts of progress and civilization, given the growing development of illustrated publications at the time. On the other hand, the possibility of seeing and recognizing the faces of notable people implied an affective dimension of which Afro-Porteño intellectuals were aware. This was because, in addition to being individuals who enjoyed a certain prestige (to a greater or lesser extent) not only within the group but also in the rest of Buenos Aires society, the members of the community were in almost daily contact with them and their relatives, often as friends.

This chapter examines the social and material preparations that households made for an impending birth. Family members were fascinated by the look and size of women’s bellies, so much so that women’s stomachs were often highlighted in portraits and they featured prominently in correspondence. Married women’s ‘big bellies’ were celebrated because they displayed the fruitfulness of the family, whereas unmarried women sought to conceal their pregnant state. The process of buying and borrowing things for childbirth including linen, baby clothes and birthing stools have often been represented as hallmarks of a celebratory and extravagant female culture that excluded male family members. This chapter finds instead that male family members were key players in this material culture. Added to this, correspondence shows that men were active in imagining the appearance and nature of unborn children in ways that embedded them within their family-to-be. This material and emotional investment was, however, entirely dependent on marital fidelity by wives. Men’s domestic and fiscal honour was intertwined with the performance of women’s bodies.

This chapter starts from Jacob Burkchardt’s famous contention that Renaissance Italy saw the birth of the modern individual. While acknowledging the limitations of this thesis, the chapter argues that a reconfigured notion of individualism can still have value in capturing aspects of Italian Renaissance culture. Renaissance Italians invested considerable energies in crafting attractive and distinctive social selves, and practices of self-fashioning, ranging from verbal and visual self-portraiture to dress and material culture, attained a high degree of sophistication. This phenomenon has generally been studied within elite contexts, but evidence is emerging that, by the Late Renaissance, such practices extended into lower strata of society. Case studies considered in the chapter range from famous elite self-fashioners such as Isabella d’Este and Pietro Bembo, to the disruptive, socially mobile figure of Pietro Aretino, born the son of a shoemaker, to actual shoemakers, tailors, and woodcarvers of the mid to late sixteenth century, whose material possessions, recorded in inventories, give evidence of intriguingly sophisticated and culturally aspirational selves.

It is impossible to understand how American Patriots first mobilized men, women, and children in support of their Revolution and then created a new political culture for their new republic without studying Revolutionary-era material culture. American Patriots made their Revolution through creating and destroying things. As they toppled statues, dumped tea, raised liberty poles, and made homespun clothes and uniforms, Americans also crafted Revolutionary politics and societies. From acts of iconoclasm to the origins of “made in America,” the material culture of the American Revolution allows us to consider how civilians at home, as well as the military, protested imperial politics, fought a civil war, and fashioned new political identities, building a common cause as they created and destroyed material culture.

The recent wave of visual material studies in modernist poetics warrants renewed consideration of the means by which Lowell engaged, resisted, and reflected on photographic practices. Lowell’s photographic modes vary with shifting styles and subjects. Early in his career, Lowell invokes photographs and snapshots as material artifacts in portrait and self-portrait genres. In this mode, the surface of the photograph collects descriptive details that rhetorically situate the “record of a life” as one that, Lowell insists, must be believed to be “true,” and “real,”although obviously manipulated. Photography also functions as a metaphor for putting the photographic looking “on stage” to examine different ways of seeing. In later work, epistemologies of photography become models for the action of poetic autobiography and for performances of writing. Connections between photography and poetic practice are considered in autobiographical prose and major poems in Life Studies, For the Union Dead, and Day by Day.

Chapter 3 offers a close look at the visual history of the war. By situating printed images in the field of political communication, it addresses a neglected but vital area of early modern Venetian politics. Rather than taking the military provenance of news pictures for granted, the chapter problematises the double transfer of intelligence from manuscript to print and from the battlefield to the marketplace. The reformatting of images born out of the documentary practices of the army and the optics of colonialism in new pictorial formats yields insight into the political economy of printmaking and the impact of the military on metropolitan visuality. The chapter shows that, more than carriers of information, prints were key components of the affective politics of wartime that infused the Venetian public sphere with imperial ideals and nurtured sentimental attachment to the state.

When Lev Tolstoy died in 1910, he was a literary celebrity, famous well beyond the borders of his native Russia. His death became one of the first truly international media events of the twentieth century. But the public hunger for images of the great man was already prominent much earlier in his life, when both commissioned and unsolicited portraits and photographs proliferated, creating an international Tolstoy iconography. Throughout the twentieth century, artists, filmmakers, and writers attempted to create their own vision of Tolstoy, either embracing or opposing, but always engaging with, this visual canon. This chapter discusses Tolstoy as a subject of art in painting, cinema, and the theatre, exploring the impact of celebrity-generated images on his representation in these media. First, it focuses on well-known portraits and sculptures of Tolstoy, from Ilya Repin’s famous paintings to Oleg Kulik’s playful installations, as well as controversial frescoes and advertising images. It then moves on to chart a very short history of Tolstoy’s appearance on film, first as a celebrity and then as a character. The final part of the chapter discusses Tolstoy’s postmodern afterlives in the works of Viktor Pelevin and in contemporary Russian theatre.

Representing Samuel Johnson, whose towering intellect and larger than life persona dominated his era, posed a challenge for portrait painters and caricaturists alike. His public image, which coalesced over several decades, has continued to mutate and proliferate long after his death. Expanding the idea of serial portraiture, this chapter examines pairs or clusters of related images across various artists and media, focusing on the formative function of Johnson’s portraits in and after life and their central role in mythologizing him as a literary colossus. This chapter is particularly interested in tracing how visual representations of Johnson morphed over time, were appropriated and reproduced, and interacted dialogically, creating a kaleidoscopic, multifaceted, complex portrait of Johnson. As his close ties with artists, his support of artistic institutions, his print collection, and his collaboration in the creation of numerous portraits amply demonstrate, Johnson was not the ignorant philistine disinterested in his image that he at times

professed to be.

Chapter 3 charts the prevalence of physical description in Senecan tragedy, arguing that this is not a symptom of Rezitationsdrama, but a consequence of Seneca’s interest in physiognomy and pathogonomy, both of which use bodily signals to evaluate the quality of people’s internal psychological / emotional / mental states. Like coherence and exemplarity, physiognomic analysis unites the quasi-personal and purely fictional elements of character, on the one hand by encouraging audiences to infer a psychology behind characters’ surfaces, and on the other by focusing attention on textual signs and symbols. This chapter discusses the confluence of bodily and mental states in Seneca’s Phaedra and Oedipus.

In and after 1819, particularly after Peterloo, support for radical change among disfranchised Londoners broadened.The conspirators themselves were ‘ordinary Britons’.In no senses part of the ‘mob’, they were craftsmen with families who were losing craft status and income in the worsening post-war economy. Many had the common disabilities of the poor, but Wivell’s extraordinary prison portraits show their common humanity. Most were shoemakers, a craft that was famously literate, thoughtful, and radical.

The chapter charts what we know of Thistlewood’s early Lincolnshire years, his character and appearance, his gentlemanly status and modest wealth, his fecklessness and gambling, the birth of his illegitimate son Julian, and his marriages – particularly to Susan, who stayed with him to the end.It follows his increasing radicalisation after the family’s arrival in London in 1811 and his joining Evans’s Society of Spencean Philanthropists in 1814.

This chapter looks at what the author calls a “system of visual communication” in the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires. It focuses on “portrait concepts,” which refers to the double process of inventing an ideological image of the king’s public body, on the one hand, and maintaining the conventions of particular visual media, the interests of the composer, and the expectations of the recipients, on the other. The portrait concept thus encapsulates communication and exchange before it reaches the viewer’s eyes. Von den Hoff identifies three different periods in terms of their visual systems of communication. Between 323 and 280 BCE, during the Wars of Succession, there was close entanglement between Ptolemaic and Seleucid portrait concepts. They drifted apart in the subsequent period (280–160) due to dynamically changing local challenges. In the final period (160/40 to c. 100), there was a renaissance of earlier types of portraiture. The author’s emphasis on imperial entanglement in the first period, diversification in the second, and historicizing endeavors in the final period raises questions about the local background to which the visual representation of the kings responded.