Historical Dress: Books - Baroque and Rococo

This sumptuously illustrated book reveals the decorative seams, exquisite stitching, voluptuous drapery, strict corseting and slashing and stamping that make up the clothing in the V & A's superlative seventeenth and eighteenth-century fashion collection. Using an authoritative text, exquisite color photography and line drawings of complete garments, the reader is allowed the unique opportunity to look closely at clothing, often too fragile to be on display.

Volume 4: The Age of Enlightenment (1650-1800), edited by Peter McNeil. A cultural history of dress and fashion' presents an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. This set of six volumes covers over 2,500 years of dress and fashion.

Dangerous Liaisons focuses on fashion and its interplay with the paintings, furniture, and decorative arts of eighteenth-century France. Set against a background of French Rococo and Neoclassical masterpieces of paintings, furniture, and decorative arts in the Museum's Wrightsman Galleries, these images reveal how French style in fashion and interiors was not only meant to be beautiful, but also to attract, arouse and seduce the viewer.

Marie Antoinette has always stood as an icon of supreme style. Here, 18th-century specialist Weber shows how Marie Antoinette developed her reputation for fashionable excess. As queen, Marie Antoinette used stunning, often extreme costumes to project an image of power. Gradually, however, she began to lose her hold on the French when she started to adopt provocative, "unqueenly" outfits that, ironically, would be adopted by the revolutionaries who executed her.

Close-up look at fashionable eighteenth-century society, in which dress was a symbol of social and political position. Seven American and British authorities on costume and textiles have written the book's essays on the elegant art of dress. Fabrics and their manufacture are illustrated. The book includes a catalogue of more than 400 objects from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The history of all the major textile industries, including wool, linen, silk, cotton and artificial fibres is explored. Processes and technical terms are explained carefully, while the role and impact of textiles in western economies and societies are examined.

Histories of Ornament offers a nuanced examination that integrates medieval, Renaissance, baroque, and modern Euroamerican traditions with their Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and Mesoamerican counterparts.

The Baroque period lasted from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth century. Rich in images encompassing the arts of painting, sculpture and architecture, this work offers a complete and didactic insight into this passionate period in the history of art.

Extravagant and light, Rococo responded perfectly to the offhandedness of the aristocracy of the time. In many aspects, this art was linked to its Baroque predecessor, and is thus also referred to as late Baroque style. While artists such as Tiepolo, Boucher and Reynolds carried the style to its apogee, the movement was often condemned for its superficiality.

The age of the Baroque; a time when great strides were made in science and mathematics witnessed the construction of some of the world's most magnificent buildings. George Hersey explores the ways in which Baroque architecture, with its dramatic shapes and playful experimentation with classical forms, reflects the scientific thinking of the time.

Dance at the French court, 1650-1715 -- Five theatrical personalities, 1632-1729: Lully, Moliere and Beauchamp ; Pecour and Campra

From 1680 until the French Revolution, when legislation abolished restrictions on theatrical enterprise, a single theatre held sole proprietorship of Molière's works. After 1791, his plays were performed in new theatres all over Paris by new actors, before audiences new to his works. Both his plays and his image took on new dimensions.

Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion presents twenty-seven analytical essays on individual plays from the early modern period.

Ballet has been shaped by the Renaissance and Classicism, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Bolshevism, Modernism, and the Cold War.

Relevant chapters: French theatre to 1700 -- English theater to 1800 -- Italy and France to 1800