attributed to James Anderson Arch of Constantine, Rome 1856 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
Robert Howlett St Bretodes Bay, Jersey ca. 1858 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
Charles Nègre Statue of Spartan Soldier 1859 albumen silver print Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
"Napoleon represented the last onslaught of revolutionary terror against the bourgeois society which had been proclaimed by this same Revolution, and against its policy. Napoleon, of course, already discerned the essence of the modern state; he understood that it is based on the unhampered development of bourgeois society, on the free movement of private interest, and so forth. . . . Yet, at the same time, he still regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a purse-bearer. . . . He perfected the Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution. . . . If he despotically suppressed the liberalism of bourgeois society – the political idealism of its daily practice – he showed no more consideration for its essential material interests, trade and industry, whenever they conflicted with his political interests. His scorn for industrial hommes d'affaires was the complement of his scorn for ideologues. . . . Just as the liberal bourgeoisie was opposed once more by revolutionary terror in the person of Napoleon, so it was opposed once more by counterrevolution during the Restoration, in the person of the Bourbons. Finally, in 1830, the bourgeoisie put into effect its wishes of the year 1789, the only difference being that its political enlightenment was now complete, that it no longer considered the constitutional representative state as a means for achieving the ideal of the state, the welfare of the world, and universal human aims but, on the contrary, had acknowledged it as the official expression of its own exclusive power and the political recognition of its own special interests."
– from The Holy Family (1844) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, quoted by Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project (Harvard University Press, 1999)
Felice Beato Yokohama Belle ca. 1866-67 hand-colored albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
Kusakabe Kimbei Japanese Tattoo ca. 1870-90 hand-colored albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
Anonymous photographer Apollo Sauroktonos, Vatican Museum ca. 1870-90 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
According to Francis Haskell, various excavations have yielded at least half a dozen ancient Roman copies of the Apollo Sauroktonus (above). All of them, scholars agree, were based on a famous (lost) Greek bronze of Praxitiles showing Apollo with a lizard, as described in detail by Pliny. Unusually, Renaissance and Baroque connoisseurs did not assert (or not often) that any of the copies was in fact the original statue. Yet so celebrated was the literary reputation of this particular original that the copies themselves earned nearly the same prestige as the statues then certainly believed to be genuine and Greek (even though later scholars would reassign almost all of them to the Romans and/or to Renaissance restorers).
The example above, photographed at the Vatican in the 19th century, is wearing one of the standard-issue, pale-terracotta, extra-large fig-leaves that could be spotted everywhere in those days, but would be impossible to find a trace of now.
Giovanni Bianchi Study in the Sheremetev Palace 1870s albumen silver print Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
Carleton Watkins Thurlow Lodge, San Mateo 1874 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
Anonymous photograph Cloud Study ca. 1870-90 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
Adolphe Braun Gambarogno, Switzerland ca. 1875-82 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
James Anderson Avenue of Trees, Villa Borghese, Rome before 1877 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
I.W. Taber Union Square from Geary, looking toward Nob Hill ca. 1870-90 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
Julius M. Wendt Mildred sitting in a birch tree - Albany, New York 1903 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
Eugène Atget Staircase, rue Saint Jacques 254 1907-08 albumen silver print Getty Museum, Los Angeles |