Mademoiselle Sculpsit: A Backstory

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Richard Emerson, Perry Gethner, Heather Hyde-Minor, Harry Mallgrave, Anca Matyiku, Joseph Rykwert, Michele Saee, Curtis Small, and Benjamin Young for their contributions to this story.

Notes

1. Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, Wolfgang and Anni Hermann, trans. and eds. (Los Angeles: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1977). Translation of P. Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture. Nouvelle édition, revue, corrigée & augmentée; avec un dictionnaire des termes, et des planches qui en facilitent l’explication. (Paris: Duchesne, 1755). The Herrman translation compares the first and second editions of Laugier’s text and includes the Avertissement from the second edition as well as noting other amendments, but does not include the dictionary of terms and illustrations. On the frontispiece, see Rebecca Williamson, Other Lives: Charles Eisen and Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture, web publication, December 26, 2019, https://drawingmatter.org/other-lives-charles-eisen-and-laugiers-essai-sur-larchitecture/.

2. Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, Wolfgang and Anni Hermann, trans. and eds. (Los Angeles: Hennessey and Ingalls, 1977).

3. Laugier, Essai, xiii (Avertissement) translated as “Gothic” in Laugier, Essay, 150.

4. These drawings do not appear in a 1755 English translation: Laugier, An Essay on Architecture… (London: Osborne and Shipton, 1755).

5. In his dictionary, Laugier maintains that “Pedestals under columns are against nature…” and “One cannot substitute for columns anything that corrupts the idea more [than a pilaster].” He identifies pediments that are not triangular as defective. Laugier, Essai, 36–7n385.

6. This use of a drawing as a negative example of principles defied, the image of transgression, presages Antonio Visentini’s drawings for his 1771 reedition of Theofilo Gallacini’s Errori degli architetti. Visentini would have been familiar with Laugier’s second edition. See Rebecca Williamson, Mi punge vaghezza; ovvero i misteri del mestiere. In Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture, Carolina Dayer et. al., eds. (London, UK and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, 2017).

7. Laugier’s less influential Observations sur l’Architecture was published in The Hague in 1765 and distributed in Paris by Saillant.

8. Françoise de Graffigny, Lettres d’une péruvienne. Nouvelle edition augmentée de plusieurs lettres, et d’une introduction à l’histoire, 2 vols. (Paris: Duchesne, 1752).

9. While practices varied, typically the person conceiving, inventing, or delineating the sketch is on the left, and the engraver is on the right. Sometimes there is only one name, which could possibly (but not necessarily) indicate that the same person drew the base drawing and produced the engraved plates.

10. Germain Boffrand, Livre d’architecture (Paris: Cavelier, 1745)

11. Benezit states that “Quirijin Fonbonne engraved genre subjects, views and history subjects. He worked in Amsterdam in about 1705 and in Paris from 1714 to 1734.” About Anne Fonbonne it indicates only that she was active in Paris and the daughter of Quirijin. Benezit Dictionary of Artists (Paris: Gründ, 2006) vol. 5, 843.

12. D. (Augustin) Calmet, Traité historique des eaux et bains de Plombières, de Bourbonne, de Luxeuil et de Bains (Nancy: Leseure, 1748), 227–231.

13. See Lambert-Sigisbert Adam the Elder, Collection de sculptures antiques, grecques et romaines: trouvées à Rome dans les ruines des Palais de Neron, et de Marius (Paris: François Joullain,1754–5). Plates signed by Anne Fonbonne appear on pages 25–31.

14. See Julia Landweber, “Fashioning Nationality and Identity in the Eighteenth Century: The Compte de Bonneval in the Ottoman Empire,” The International History Review, Vol. 30, No. 1 (March 2008): 1–31.

15. Jean François Daumont was a publisher and seller of prints active in Paris 1740–75.

16. Joseph Guichard Du Verney, Oeuvres anatomique (Paris: Jombert, 1761).

17. Antoine-Grimoald Monnet, Traité de la vitriolisation et de l’alunation, ou l’art de fabriquer les vitriols et l’alun: avec une dissertation sur la minéralisation et sur l’état du soufre dans les mines et les métaux (n.p.: P. Fr. Didot le jeune), 1769.

18. On Laura Piranesi, see Heather Hyde-Minor, Piranesi’s Lost Words (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 183, 189, 223 n6. Hyde-Minor observes that Laura Piranesi demonstrated more skill at engraving than her more famous brother, Francesco. On Wynne and Barbarigo, see Rebecca Williamson Fare e conoscere: l’educazione architettonica nel circolo di Carlo Lodoli, in L’educazione dell’uomo e della donna nella cultura illuministica. Atti dell’accademia delle scienze di Torino, Memorie della Classe di Scienze morali. vol. 24, fascicolo 3, ed. Lionello Sozzi (Turin: Academy of Sciences, 2000), 315–23, and “Giustiniana’s Garden: An Eighteenth-Century Woman’s Construction” in Gendered Landscape: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of Past Place and Space, Bonj Szyzgiel, Lorraine Dowler, and Josephine Carubia, eds., May 29–June 1, 1999, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA (State College, PA: Penn State University Press, 2001), 48-56.

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Rebecca Williamson

Rebecca Williamson directs the Master of Science and Ph.D. programs in architecture at the University of Cincinnati. A registered architect with experience in practice in Europe and the United States, she holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master of Architecture degree from Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Cincinnati in 2006, she taught for five years in France through a partnership between the French National School of Architecture at Versailles and the University of Illinois, and in the urbanism program of the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po).