Heady Similitudes: Kitty Fisher, Mezzotint Culture, and Material Narratives of Celebrity, ca. 1750

This article positions the mezzotint—typically studied as derivative of the portrait, rather than as a narrative form in its own right—as a primary site for the development of eighteenth-century celebrity. By perpetually reissuing images of duchesses as demi-reps, courtesans as countesses, the mezzotint erased the visual difference between noblewomen and public women, such as courtesans and actresses. Such heady similitudes between "edgy" and socially prominent women gave rise to celebrity, a system by which women of distinct classes and reputations were newly defined in terms of public presence, and simultaneously, thanks to their material embodiment, treated as roughly equivalent and eternally replaceable.