Unpacking the Choiseul Box: The Iris Foundation Awards Lecture by Meredith Martin (NYU)

Unpacking the Choiseul Box The Iris Foundation Awards Lecture by Meredith Martin (NYU) This interactive lecture will explore the famous Choiseul snuffbox, a tiny but extraordinary monument of the eighteenth century that features views of the Parisian mansion and art collection of the Duc de Choiseul, foreign minister to Louis XV. The snuffbox, or tabatière, became a cause célèbre in France in 2023 when it was offered for sale to the tune of nearly four million euros. The Louvre launched a massive public campaign to raise funds to acquire the box and published a scholarly tome dedicated to giving readers “all the keys you still need to unlock the secrets of this highly prized tabatière.” And yet in all the recent literature around this object, no mention has been made of its deep, unsettling connections to colonialism and enslavement at the level of material, iconography, patronage, and use. This talk will seek to “unpack” this box and will invite attendees to confront its materiality and multisensory dimensions through digital reconstructions produced in collaboration with Bard Graduate Center’s digital humanities technologists. Meredith Martin is a professor of art history at New York University and a founding editor of Journal18. A specialist in early modern French art and empire, she is the coauthor (with Gillian Weiss) of the prizewinning book The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France (Getty, 2022; French edition 2022), which is related