ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century, with the commercialization of leisure and elite tourism, shows, museums and exhibitions developed. Many guides were published inviting people to enjoy walking in the street,2 shopping, and visiting big cities as part of a new type of Grand Tour.3 They would list shops and workshops where fashionable wares could be purchased.4 From rococo trade cards to inventions displayed in plate-glass windows, visual devices were used in attempts to stimulate desires for consumer goods.5 As the emerging consumer society relied strongly on non-verbal
language,6 shops became sites of polite culture, not entirely dissimilar to museums.7 A variety of display techniques, such as exhibitions, public shows and demonstrations of goods in showrooms was used. Thus, visual rhetoric played a major part in urban culture and in the emergence of a public milieu.8 Tasteful strategies of display and entertainment fostered new aesthetics of curiosity that were more socially open and that accompanied the commercialization of leisure and pleasure.9
