Table of Contents

Introduction 1. The Social Animal 2. The Sensitive Animal 3. Monkey Artists 4. The Language of Brutes 5. Animating Porcelain 6. The Soul of Matter Conclusion Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

The proliferation of animal imagery in eighteenth-century art, particularly in France, contributed uniquely to this century’s larger quest to define knowledge acquired through sensory engagement with the material world.

About the Author

Sarah Cohen is Professor of Art History and Women’s Studies at the University at Albany, USA. She has published extensively on representations of the body, both human and animal. Her first book Art, Dance and the Body in French Culture the Ancien Régime was published in 2000.

Reviews

This book considers the inherent vitality and agency of both art objects and animal bodies [and] brings art and intellectual history into dialogue with new work on material culture and human-animal studies … It uses the theoretical lessons of human-animal studies to produce moving new readings of eighteenth-century French visual and material culture.
*CAA Reviews*

In this landmark study of rare distinction, Sarah Cohen effortlessly combines superlative scholarship with engaging prose. She enlightens her readers with stunningly new insights about things we thought we understood, but did not. We will be engaged with this brilliant book for a very long time.
*Christopher M. S. Johns, Norman & Roselea Goldberg Professor of History of Art, Vanderbilt University, USA*

In this intellectually path-breaking book, Cohen shows how animal imagery prompted new ideas about knowledge, sensation, and the permeable boundary between human and nonhuman life. Her passion for the material comes through on every page.
*Meredith Martin, Associate Professor of Art History, New York University, USA*

Shedding welcome light on a hitherto under-examined aspect of eighteenth-century French art, Sarah Cohen convincingly aligns representations of animals with a new valorisation of sensory experience that challenged traditionally anthropocentric values.
*Emma Barker, Senior Lecturer in Art History, The Open University, UK*