Bernard Picart

Wie kent niet de bekende prent Les Free Massons, die verscheen in Bernard Picart’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde? Jammer genoeg bereikte de onderstaande aankondiging ons wat laat:

Conference: At the Interface of Religion and Cosmopolitanism: Bernard Picart's Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723-1743) and the European Enlightenment, 6-8 december 2007.
A conference at the Getty Research Institute and the Clark Library. Organized by Margaret C. Jacob, UCLA, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, Universiteit Utrecht. Co-sponsored by UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, the Getty Research Institute, and the Netherlands Consulate-General of Los Angeles.

Bernard Picart (1673-1733) was one of the most prolific and talented engravers of his age. He was also intellectually curious, and a player in internationally connected social circles - some with a penchant for Deism and Spinozism. Together with Jean Frédéric Bernard, a French language bookseller and publisher of Huguenot stock based in Amsterdam, he published a seven-volume folio work that sought to capture the ritual and ceremonial life of all the known religions of the world: Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723-1743). Bernard supplied the 3000 pages of the text while Picart engraved over 250 illustrations.
Its first volume offered the world one of the most sympathetic portraits then available of European Jewry. Despite being the work of two French Protestant refugees and done in Amsterdam, the book attempted to be reasonably accurate about Catholic customs and to cast a more favorable light on the so-called "idolatrous peoples" who on the whole appeared in most of the travel literature as barbarous and even without any religion at all. In the life time of Picart the Dutch Republic stood at the heart of the European book trade. Picart and Bernard took full advantage of the opportunities they found in their adopted land, and the Cérémonies in its various translations sold a remarkable 3000 copies. Its translation into Dutch and English removed some of the more radical comments about religion found in the original French text, but those translations, and one in German, meant that Picart's images became the standard means of portraying many of the world's religions until well into the nineteenth century.

Programma en papers zijn tot 21 december 2008 toegankelijk op de website van het congres.