This dissertation investigates decorative artworks that engaged with various aspects of air as cultural artifacts that produced artistic, scientific, medical, social, and political meanings in eighteenth-century France. In Enlightenment Europe, intellectual discourse regarding diverse facets of air became extremely nuanced, ranging from its role as a socio-aesthetic concept, its influence on health and disease, its climatic manifestations and their moral-political implications, to the advent of artificial flight. The material culture of air developed in parallel with the growing body of aerial theory, offering a wide array of ornamental and utilitarian objects that manipulated or were manipulated by air. I argue that it was primarily through objects such as hand fans, scent vessels, barometers, and ballooning memorabilia that French elite consumers negotiated shifting understandings of invisible entities such as air in the context of everyday life.

As an immaterial element, air depended on tangible representations for its comprehension and manipulation. Engaging with air's diverse dimensions required techniques of visualizing and materializing, two tasks for which material artifacts were uniquely proficient. Taking the theme of air as a conceptual lens, I examine artworks' mediation of the relationship between material practices and abstract concepts. In so doing, I investigate the problem of materializing the immaterial and various approaches to that task, as well as the social implications of experiencing air as an object of scientific inquiry; concern for medical praxis; subject of popular imagination and commercial culture; and a tool for self-representation. I interpret relevant artworks' cultural functions by analyzing their material and visual properties and their representations in visual culture and other forms of cultural production. I anchor my explanation of artifacts' historical use and reception by drawing on documents such as theoretical tracts on art, aesthetics, architecture, science, medicine, and moral philosophy, literary works, periodicals, and memoirs, as well as works of modern scholars in the cultural and intellectual history of the Enlightenment. In this thematic, interdisciplinary project, I offer an art-historical contribution to the field of material culture study, treating decorative art as important historical evidence for interrogating quotidian practices and cultural notions in eighteenth-century France.