Pompadour's Medium

Pompadour's Medium reveals the depth of patron, amateur artist, and royal mistress Madame de Pompadour's contributions to the visual arts, long dismissed as superficial and trivial. Her artistic activities centered on an innovative exploration of the relationships between painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts at a moment when advances in reproductive printmaking threatened to flatten the differences between individual mediums. Eighteenth-century France experienced an unprecedented surge in the circulation of images. Increasingly faithful and affordable reproductive prints introduced works of art to ever-widening audiences, while a culture of reproduction was simultaneously thriving at the highest end of the artistic and economic spectrum—in luxury media, such as ceramics, textiles, and metalwork. This book recovers the pivotal role of luxury reproduction in Pompadour's artistic endeavors, and her essential role in cultivating the intermedial approach of her frequent collaborator, painter François Boucher, who tended to think between media. It is only by restoring the centrality of reproductive media in this artist-patron relationship that we can understand the magnitude of Pompadour's and Boucher's contributions to the history of modern art.