Marie-Antoinette's Legacy: The Politics of French Garden Patronage and Picturesque Design, 1775-1867 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9789463724241)

Challenging the established historiography that frames the French picturesque garden movement as an international style, this book contends that the French picturesque gardens from 1775 until 1867 functioned as liminal zones at the epicenter of court patronage systems. Four French consorts--queen Marie-Antoinette and empresses Jos駱hine Bonaparte, Marie-Louise and Eug駭ie--constructed their gardens betwixt and between court ritual and personal agency, where they transgressed sociopolitical boundaries in order to perform gender and identity politics. Each patron endorsed embodied strolling, promoting an awareness of the sentient body in artfully contrived sensoria at the Petit Trianon and Malmaison, transforming these places into spaces of shared affectivity. The gardens became living legacies, where female agency, excluded from the garden history canon, created a forum for spatial politics. Beyond the garden gates, the spatial experience of the picturesque influenced the development of cultural fields dedicated to performances of subjectivity, including landscape design, cultural geography and the origination of landscape aesthetics in France.

Author: Susan Taylor-Leduc
ISBN-10: 9463724249
ISBN-13: 9789463724241
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/15/2022
Pages: 316
Format: Hardcover