New Addition: Célestin Nanteuil's 'Gargantua'

Célestin Nantueil, Gargantua. (Undated, c.1840–50). Lithograph.

In this avant-Romanticist “portrait” of Rabelais' medieval satirical character, Gargantua's head and body has been replaced with a scene of the industrializing city of Paris as a collapsing colonial vortex drawing in people and goods from across the world. The skewed perspective, refusal of illusionistic depth and scale, and the compositional emphasis on the frame reflect Nanteuil's radicalisation of medieval aesthetics. The Revenant archive contains a letter by the art historian and Nanteuil specialist Nathan Chaikin in which he attempts to locate a print from this run (fortunately, as the print in his own set of reproductions shows, he tracked down a copy in better shape than this!)