Projects

The Sun King’s Silver: A Technical Study of the Silver Furnishings of Louis XIV

This project is an artisanal reinterpretation of the archive surrounding the famously enigmatic lost silver furnishings made for Louis XIV by royal artisans between 1666 and 1689. The research for this project was undertaken during a fellowship at the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford and was funded by an Endeavour Research Fellowship awarded by the Australian Department of Education in 2018. The first publications stemming from the project are forthcoming in 2022.

Image: Claude Ballin or Nicholas Delaunay, Silver Guéridon with Two Alternative Feet, Paris, mid- to late-seventeenth century. Pen with black ink and grey wash on paper, 49 x 32 cm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, NMH CC 2419.  Photo Cecilia Heisser, public domain.

Performing Transdisciplinarity

This project has reconceived Jean-Benjamin de Laborde’s 1773 luxury songbook Choix de chansons as a fully digitised critical edition. Explore the edition here: https://choixdechansons.cdhr.anu.edu.au/ 

Funded by the Australian Research Council, the project brings together a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the Australian National University, the University of Sydney, the Sorbonne and the Voltaire Foundation, working across the disciplines of art history (Christina Clarke, Mark Ledbury and Robert Wellington), musicology (Erin Helyard), French literature (Nicholas Cronk), and digital humanities (Glenn Roe).

The team is exploring the interrelation and interactivity of images, music, and text in the Choix de chansons and similar cultural objects in the eighteenth century more generally. By reconceiving the illustrated songbook as a multimedia digital interface for sharing and linking deep disciplinary knowledge, this project provides a fascinating glimpse into the sounds, sensibilities, and social mores of late-eighteenth-century France.

Image: Joseph Barthélemy Le Bouteux (artist), François Denis Née (engraver), Untitled, c. 1773, Paris. Engraving. From Jean-Benjamin de Laborde, Choix de chansons Volume 2 (Paris: 1773), 140.

Metalworking Primary Sources Bibliography

This resource brings together historical primary source manuals, recipes and descriptions of metalworking processes, as well as translations of these texts where they are available. Links to digitised versions of these texts are included where these are available; works in copyright are listed for reference only.

Image: Jacques-Raymond Lucotte (artist), Robert Bénard (engraver), “Orfèvre jouaillier, metteur en oeuvre, outils, Pl. 8,” in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers Vol. 25. Image courtesy ARTFL Encyclopédie, University of Chicago.

The Manufacture of Minoan Metal Vessels: Theory and Practice

This study aimed to establish the equipment and methods used to make hammered metal vessels in Crete during the Bronze Age by combining archaeological research with metalsmithing practice.

Image: Photo by Johannes Kuhnen.