Ephemeral Spectacles, Exhibition Spaces and Museums 1750-1918

This book examines ephemeral exhibitions from 1750 to 1918. In an era of acceleration and elusiveness, these transient spaces functioned as microcosms in which reality was shown, simulated, staged, imagined, experienced and known. They therefore had a dimension of spectacle to them, as the volume demonstrates. Against this backdrop, the different chapters deal with a plethora of spaces and spatial installations: the Wunderkammer, the spectacle garden, cosmoramas and panoramas, the literary space, the temporary museum, and the alternative exhibition space.

Dominique Bauer is Assistant Professor of History at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Leuven, Belgium, and a member of the Centre d’Analyse Culturelle de la Première Modernité at the Université Catholique de Louvain. Her research focusses on spatial images and interiority in literature and scholarly discourses, mainly in long nineteenth century France and Belgium. She published Beyond the Frame. Case Studies in 2016, a long-term analysis of the interior and anaemic subjectivity. Taking this framework further, she currently studies notions of absence, presence and temporality communicated through spatial images in context. On this theme she published a number of book chapters and articles and a monograph Place-Text-Trace. The Fragility of the Spatial Image in 2018. She recently established the series Spatial Imageries in Historical Perspective with Amsterdam University Press and co-edited, with Claire Moran, a Special Issue of Dix-Neuf, Inside Belgium. In March 2019 she was invited as a research fellow at the Council for Research on Religion at McGill University, Montréal, for her work on the transformation of pre-modern devotional space in fin-de-siècle Belgian literature and modernity. Camilla Murgia is Junior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Lausanne. She studied History of Art at Neuchâtel (MA) and Oxford (PhD) universities. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the works on the French painter, art critic and collector Pierre-Marie Gault de Saint-Germain (Pierre-Marie Gault de Saint-Germain (c.1752-1842). Artistic Models and Criticism in Early Nineteenth-century France, Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2009). She works particularly on 18th and 19th centuries French and British visual cultures, with a particular focus on artistic reception, display, art criticism, printmaking and caricature. Camilla has been Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College (University of Oxford) and has subsequently taught at Neuchâtel and Geneva universities. As Junior Lecturer at the university of Lausanne, she is currently working on a research project on the relation between arts and theatre in the long nineteenth century in France, paying particular attention to the transmediality of theatrical performances and arts.