Art and Artifice in Visual Culture

Sonia Coman, Ph.D. is a Contributor and Consultant at Smarthistory and Director of Digital Engagement at Washington National Cathedral. Vasile-Ovidiu Prejmerean is a Ph.D. Candidate at Université de Fribourg, Switzerland. Michael Yonan is a Professor of Art History and Alan Templeton Endowed Chair in the History of European Art, 1600–1830, at the University of California, Davis.

Part 1 Artifice and Spectatorship 1. Fractured Perception: Drawings, Prints, and Verres Casses 2. Rococo Aesthetics and the Problem of Trompe l’Oeil 3. Degas’s "Histories" and the Foreshadowing Artifice of Self-Candaulism Part 2 Haptic Illusions 4. Suggestive Surfaces: The Self-Referential Texture of Woodgrain in Japanese Woodblock Prints 5. Reconsidering the Origins of Yongzheng Guwantu: From the Aniconic Period to Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra 6. Fooling Art History: John F. Peto and William Harnett Part 3 Alternative Realities 7. First Nations’ Wampum Belts: A Colonial Vision of Artifice in Eighteenth-Century New France 8. "An Opportunity to Grapple with the Picture Plane…": The Stereo-Illusion’s History of Frustration 9. Self-Reference and Medium-Reference in Virtual Reality and Trompe l’Oeil