Eighteenth-century Europe was home to a dazzling array of architectural interiors, from priest-holes designed to hide ecclesiastics from Protestant authorities in England to the home theaters of courtesans in Paris. Diverse characters populated these domains. Bluestockings gathered in a Chinoiserie room while guests waited to be served refreshments before taking in Europe’s premier public collection of ancient sculpture.

Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe examines all of these environments and personages, exploring the role architecture and interiors played in fashioning identity in the eighteenth century. The ten essays that it gathers together seek to demonstrate that these spaces served to form a sense of self in creative ways. The book’s editors, Denise Amy Baxter and Meredith Martin, are to be commended for addressing this important question, one that spans a range of fields, and for gathering essays written by scholars from a range of disciplines. Contributing to the recent explosion of interest in eighteenth-century interiors, the volume builds on the work of Katie Scott, Mimi Hellman (both of whom are cited in the introduction), and others.

The four contributions in section one, “Crossing Boundaries, Making Space,” contribute to the editors’ goal of defining interiors as “contested terrain” (1). In the first chapter, Martin considers the growing importance of interior architecture in a wide assortment of eighteenth-century French books. She convincingly argues that French interiors, especially the arrangement and decoration of rooms, along with their aspirational nature, fascinated urban readers. Recently minted nobles, financiers with new money, and women took their places next to the court nobility in serving as the key patrons of architecture. Next, Max Tillmann’s essay takes up the palace in Saint-Cloud that was purchased by the exiled Bavarian Elector Max Emanuel in 1713. The architect Germain Boffrand supervised the renovations of the structure, installing paneling, furniture, paintings, and tapestries. According to Tillmann, the banished elector’s own concerns about his identity and status shaped this work, rather than contemporary French ideas about interior design. In the next essay, Csongor Kis scrutinizes the interiors of the magnificent palace at Würzburg built by the Schönborn and Greiffenklau families. While reigning over a tiny territory, successive generations of prince-bishops built an enormous residence. Politically and militarily sapped by a series of conflicts, most notably the Thirty Years War, the prince-bishops set about creating what Napoleon famously called “the nicest parsonage in Europe.” Inside the palace, innovative interiors like the staircase, White Hall, and Imperial Hall were loaded with stucco decoration and embellished with Tiepolo’s frescos. According to Kis, court etiquette determined the use of these spaces, governing what specific kinds of visitors could see (and what they could not). While the kaisersaal was open to all, very few got to see the small spiegelkabinett (mirror cabinet). The final contribution in this section by Katherine R. P. Clark examines renovations to a country house on the border of England and Scotland in the 1740s. The Clavering family, who owned the house, were Catholics and loyal to the Stuart family, an alliance for which they suffered politically, socially, and economically. Clark contends that the emblems that appear in the large, richly plastered hall served to convey the Clavering’s Jacobite and Catholic allegiances.

Section two of the volume, “The Interior as Masquerade,” opens with Kathryn Norberg’s study of the gilded hôtels built in Paris by courtesans and actresses. In the chapter that follows, Stacey Sloboda explores the London salon of Elizabeth Montagu. Her gatherings of bluestockings discussed education for women and other unconventional ideas in a Chinoiserie room created by Montagu. But Montagu reveled in the frivolity of the room and what she called its “gaudy gout” (136). Sloboda demonstrates that this decorative mode allowed Montagu to camouflage her radical social and intellectual objectives while presiding over her salon as “a true Empress of China in relived state with nodding mandarines around me,” as Montagu described it (137). The final essay considers eighteenth-century Venice. According to Marc Neveu, just as masks disappeared from the stages of the city’s theaters, they became required for audience members. During Carnival, entrance to public spaces like gaming halls and theaters required a mask. Extending Jürgen Habermas’s notions of the public sphere, Neveu concludes that an increasingly complex sense of public interior space emerged during this period in the city on the lagoon.

“The Politics of Display,” the final part of the book, considers collecting not just in the eighteenth century, but the display of eighteenth-century interiors as period rooms in today’s museums. Anne Nellis Richter’s chapter takes up the picture galleries in two private residences in nineteenth-century London. Walter Ramsden Fawkes, an early patron of Turner, and Sir John Fleming Leicester opened these spaces filled with canvases by British artists to paying members of the public. Richter proposes that the galleries helped to mold public taste for British goods and art. In his essay, Jeffrey Collins considers the Capitoline and the Pio-Clementino museums in Rome, two of the most important collections of antiquities in eighteenth-century Europe, focusing on their strategies of display. At the nadir of their political, military, and economic power, a series of popes in the 1700s concentrated on making Rome into a capital of the arts. Created and administered by the papacy, both the Pio-Clementino and the Capitoline focused on ancient marble sculpture. Collins persuasively demonstrates that the interiors at the Pio-Clementino were fashioned to evoke ancient environments like baths, palaces, and temples that served as artistic recreations designed to fire the imagination of visitors, allowing them to experience the ancient world. In the final chapter, Daniel Brewer studies the hôtel Gaillard de la Bouëxière in Paris and its afterlife. Built for an upwardly mobile tax collector who bought a position as a secrétaire du roi in 1719, Gaillard de la Bouëxière joined the ranks of newly minted nobles that were despised by a diverse group in French society for buying their way to noblesse. In 2005, the salon was ensconced as a period room at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Brewer asks how this kind of installation creates complex questions about the nature of history and identity.

While it is difficult to weave a consistent narrative using disparate strands from different societies, customs, patrons, and architects, Baxter’s introduction commendably and clearly does that. To this reader, a key theme that runs through all of the essays in the book, with the exception of Nellis Richter’s chapter on nineteenth-century London galleries, is the power of architecture and interiors to overreach. This volume demonstrates that there was no tidy relationship between architectural grandeur, elaborate ceremonies, rich interiors, and military or economic power. It highlights architecture’s role in attempting to dislodge social order. The essays gathered here consider places (Venice, Rome, Würzburg) and patrons (courtesans, an exiled ruler, a newly minted noble, a Catholic family in a Protestant kingdom, a wealthy English widow with unconventional ideas) that could not be considered powerful according to the traditional ways in which power was construed in the eighteenth century. This collection serves to overturn Norbert Elias’s idea that the structures of institutions and society were reflected in architecture. (Elias appears in both the introduction and the concluding essay in the book, neatly bracketing its contents.) Instead, it provides strong evidence that architecture, interiors, and collections could serve to challenge those configurations. While Elias’s interpretation assumes a strict correlation between architecture and social structure, the heterogeneous group of patrons in this book used architecture to try to change social order through self-promotion.

There are some small editing problems in the book. Nearly all of the illustrations in chapter 6, as well as the image that appears on page 219, include captions that are so terse that it is difficult to understand what is being presented. Are these images prints? If so, where were they published? The list of figures at the start of the book does not clarify this. The sculptor François Girardon is rendered “Girardin” on page 220.

Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe invites readers to explore a glorious collection of environments, making a worthwhile contribution to our understandings of art and culture in the 1700s. Its wide-ranging essays should find a place on the ever-expanding bookshelf devoted to the physical spaces and social codes of eighteenth-century life.