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Wiley-Blackwell Art
History Art History is a refereed journal that publishes essays and reviews on all aspects, areas and periods of the history of art, from a diversity of perspectives. Founded in 1978, it has established an international reputation for publishing innovative essays at the cutting edge of contemporary scholarship. At the forefront of scholarly enquiry, its contributions are opening up the discipline to new developments and to the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches which are increasingly important in a globalised world. Five issues per year: February, April, June, September, November Art History as Ekphrasis
No Abstract Volume 33 Issue 1 (February 2010) - pp. 10-27 Versions of Pygmalion in the Illuminated Roman de la Rose (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms. Douce 195): The Artist and the Work of Art
No Abstract Volume 33 Issue 1 (February 2010) - pp. p 28-53 Scopic Frames: Devices for Seeing China c. 1640
No Abstract Volume 33 Issue 1 (February 2010) - pp. 54-73 A Death in the Family: Posthumous Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England
No Abstract Volume 33 Issue 1 (February 2010) - pp. 74-97 The Art of Swinging Left in the 1930s: Modernism, Realism, and the Politics of the Left in the Murals of Stuart Davis
No Abstract Volume 33 Issue 1 (February 2010) - pp. 98-123 Garcilaso de la Vega and the 'New Peruvian Man': José Sabogal's frescoes at the Hotel Cuzco
No Abstract Volume 33 Issue 1 (February 2010) - pp. 124-149 On Ruth Vollmer and Minimalism's Marginalia
No Abstract Volume 33 Issue 1 (February 2010) - pp. 150-169 Art history: contemporary perspectives on method
No abstract Volume 32 - Issue 4 - September 2009 - pp. 657-663 Sexing the canvas: calling on the medium
The first part of this article explores current art-historical approaches to gender through three case studies: the Venus of Willendorf; Michelangelo; and Artemisia Gentileschi. The second part employs case studies to examine how ideas about gender have historically been articulated and performed through the use of specific media and techniques. There has been little research devoted to how mediums (such as fresco, oil, and watercolour) and techniques (including drip, impasto, and staining) materialize femininity and masculinity. The article seeks to redress this neglect through an examination of some of the ways in which the gendering of materials and modes of art-making has contributed to the construction and deconstruction of sexual difference in the visual field. Artists whose works are considered include Francis Bacon, Thomas Girtin, J.M.W. Turner, and Jack Vettriano. Volume 32 - Issue 4 - September 2009 - pp. 664-689 Phenomenology and interpretation beyond the flesh
This article explores the ethical questions surrounding the phenomenological approach to interpretation in art history. It addresses contemporary art, from postminimalist sculpture to installation. Although the risk of phenomenology is that it merely confirms and reproduces the viewer's perceptual expectations, in fact, on a deeper level, the notion of the ontological intertwining of the viewer and the artwork demands a receptive stance in the face of art. Through an investigation of the notions of embodiment, intentionality, and mode of confrontation, I suggest that phenomenology not only mediates a trenchant understanding of the perceptual experience of the artwork, it is predicated on an acknowledgement of the artwork's alterity from interpretation. In this way, it invites a consideration of the linguistic malleability implicit in the fleshly chiasm that binds the viewer to the artwork. Volume 32 - Issue 4 - September 2009 - pp. 690-711 Surveying contemporary art: post-war, postmodern and then what?
This article looks at influential survey texts on world art history since c. 1980, and considers how they have dealt with the art nearest to them in time. I examine the terminology used, and problems of classification, periodization, and history writing at large. In order to describe how these texts struggle with the terms contemporary and postmodern, I focus on their treatment of conceptual art and two artists: Joseph Beuys and Cindy Sherman. The symbolic and economic consolidation of contemporary art during the last decade or so prompts me to establish a broader frame of understanding, linking it to constructions of the contemporary in the nineteenth century and to the idea of co-existing temporalities for art. Volume 32 - Issue 4 - September 2009 - pp. 712-733 Michel Foucault and the Point of Painting
This article offers a historiographical analysis of Foucault's contribution to art theory by arguing that the philosopher used the medium of painting and its history since Alberti to explore the differences in the concept of realism between 1650 and his own day. I argue that in his four essays on painting written between 1966 and 1976 Foucault took up the relation of painting to knowledge (savoir), particularly the question of how painting means using an innovative approach that he termed historical. Like the phenomenologists who immediately preceded him, Foucault understood painting as related to our understanding of how knowledge is communicated or felt rather than of how it exists as philosophy. This article explores the consequences of Foucault's contribution to the history of painting for both art history and visual studies. Volume 32 - Issue 4 - September 2009 - pp. 734-754 Karl Mannheim and Alois Riegl: from art history to the sociology of culture
Karl Mannheim and Erwin Panofsky took Alois Riegl's concept of Kunstwollen as their point of departure in the development of the sciences of cultural interpretation. This article seeks to elucidate the very different readings of Riegl made by Mannheim and Panofsky, and to show how the sociological appropriation and transformation of the concept of Kunstwollen was central to the development of Mannheim's sociology of knowledge, and in particular to the analysis of 'styles of thought' in his classic study Conservative Thought (1927). The limited reception of Mannheim's synthesis of sociology and art history is interpreted in the intellectual context of Britain immediately after the 1939–45 war. Volume 32 - Issue 4 - September 2009 - pp. 755-784 Art fiction
Fiction about art reveals a parallel extra-academy, extra-museum art history. This essay examines how three novels, all published in 1999, fictionalize early modern Netherlandish painters and paintings. Tracey Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring is 'art-historical fiction' that uses real paintings to craft a fictional Vermeer; Susan Vreeland's Girl in Hyacinth Blue is 'provenance fiction' that brings to life the history of ownership of a fictional painting by Vermeer; and Michael Frayn's Headlong, a tale of a modern-day amateur art historian's quixotic quest for a long lost picture by Pieter Bruegel, is 'art-history fiction'. These novels rely on strategies of Dutch and Flemish genre painting to craft stories of ordinary lives that are made extraordinary by art. Held up as mirrors to our scholarly practices, they confront us with the popular ramifications of recent approaches to works of art and their makers. Volume 32 - Issue 4 - September 2009 - pp. 785-805 Dancing years, or writing as a way out
This essay is concerned with the random and arbitrary nature of the relation between taste, love, desire and knowledge as the basis for disciplinary formation. As an expanded oxymoron it thinks of the constitutive irrationality of the history of art as the space in which it can be shaped politically and theoretically through contingent and singular moments. It understands the Warburgian notion of nachleben not so much as a returning figure of older affective forms as the form of the return of the incomplete in the historically inexhaustible life of images and figures, taking together merging the visible forms in Gerard David, Goya and the photograph of a 1960s tennis star. Volume 32 - Issue 4 - September 2009 - pp. 806-820 The importance of colour on ancient marble sculpture
This article explores the significance of paint and pigment traces for understanding the aesthetics and artistic composition of ancient marble architectural and statuary sculpture. It complements the pioneering technical and reconstructive work that has recently been carried out into classical polychrome sculpture by approaching the subject from the perspective of the cultural history of colour and perception in the ancient world. The study concentrates in particular on the art of imperial Rome, which at the present time is under-represented in the field. By integrating visual material with literary evidence, it first reviews some of the most important pieces of sculpture on which paint traces have survived and then assesses the significance of sculptural polychromy under four headings: visibility, finish, realism and trompe-l'oeil. Finally, it considers some of the ways in which polychromy can enrich our understanding and interpretation of the Prima Porta statue of Augustus. Volume 32 - Issue 3 - June 2009 - pp. 427-457 The sacristy of san marco, venice: form and function illuminated
The sacristy at San Marco in Venice had a crucial functional role, both within the daily liturgical life of the basilica and especially during the ritual activity of Holy Week, which is reflected through its artistic programmes. This article focuses solely on the sacristy as a key site within the church, and its renaissance rebuilding and decoration c. 1491–1546. It examines the major elements of the programme in turn, including the mosaics, door, tarsie and tapestries. For the first time, each of these developments is viewed as complementary to a deliberate and coherent programme revolving around liturgical requirements, iconography of the Passion and overarching themes of triumph and redemption. Without surviving documentary evidence for the instigation of such a monolithic project, this article argues that the sacristy be looked at anew in light of contemporary understanding of the sacristy as a space. The practical and symbolic associations of the sacristy at San Marco are thus considered in this wider typological context in order to illuminate our own appreciation of the development of the sacristy's artistic programme. Volume 32 - Issue 3 - June 2009 - pp. 458-484 Material manoeuvres: sarah churchill, duchess of marlborough and the power of artefacts
The first Duchess of Marlborough has been recognized as a powerful figure in court politics under Queen Anne. Her patronage of artists, sculptors, and architects – Laguerre, Rysbrack, Talman, Wren, Vanbrugh – has been examined by scholars. In this essay I take a different tack. I focus on a series of artefacts that played an important part in the Duchess's life: the jewels she amassed, the Turkish tent that her husband the Duke of Marlborough had used on the battlefield, and a sculpture of Queen Anne that she erected at Blenheim. Drawing on a wide range of sources from her own correspondence and contemporary biographies to caricature and popular print, I ask how an elite woman of immense wealth, but little formal education, strategically employed material things to exert influence socially and politically, and what were the unpredictable consequences thereof. Volume 32 - Issue 3 - June 2009 - pp. 485-515 'Almost true': peter rindisbacher's early images of rupert's land, 1821–26
This article examines early watercolours and sketches by Peter Rindisbacher, who in 1821, emigrated with his family from Switzerland to the Red River Settlement in Winnipeg, Canada. Rindisbacher's work has been praised, and made use of, for its detailed renderings of clothing and objects typical of the Northwestern fur trade. The article examines both the materiality of the images and the materiality within them, in order to understand his European mindset and training and consider their implications for the veracity of his work, which reflects European stereotypes of Aboriginal people. Viewers' responses to Rindisbacher's images are also explored, and the correlation between the assumption of veracity in these images and expectations about the 'frontier' is noted. Rindisbacher's images both reflect such expectations, and complicate them. Volume 32 - Issue 3 - June 2009 - pp. 516-544 The condition of music: wagnerism and printmaking in france and britain
Scholarship on the impact of Richard Wagner's music and aesthetic theories has traditionally concentrated on fin-de-siècle France. Aubrey Beardsley's Wagnerian prints have recently been the subject of several significant studies, but they have been examined in a British context with little reference to earlier or concurrent developments in France. This article serves as a case study of Anglo-French artistic exchange at the fin-de-siècle, examining some points of interaction between Beardsley and two key French Wagnerian artists, Henri Fantin-Latour and Odilon Redon, in order to throw more light on the complex mixture of political, social and aesthetic discourses that informed all three artists' interest in the intersection of music and the visual arts, as well as their Wagnerian pictorial languages. Volume 32 - Issue 3 - June 2009 - pp. 545-577 Fragmented identities: reading subjectivity in henry tonks' surgical portraits
This article considers the construction of identity in Henry Tonks' portraits of soldiers with facial injuries incurred during the 1914–18 war. The discussion draws on a number of theoretical perspectives to analyse in different ways the relationship between the physical body and the inner self, and provide critical tools for thinking through issues of identity in surgical portraiture, where the surfaces of the face are damaged, and interior flesh is exposed. Tonks' portraits occupy an ambiguous middle ground between portraiture and medical record, and the article analyses the different modes and contexts of viewing required by portraits and by medical illustrations, and considers how a close reading of the viewer's interaction with the portrait sitter in surgical portraits can also suggest ways of theorizing the viewer's experience of other forms of portraiture. Volume 32 - Issue 3 - June 2009 - pp. 578-607 Regarding the spectators of the bayeux tapestry: bishop odo and his circle
The entourage of Bishop Odo of Bayeux contained successful entrepreneurs and talented scholars. There was much to interest both groups in the Bayeux Tapestry which he commissioned. The Norman invasion of England is shown as a major logistical exercise for which the principal model was Caesar's invasion of 54 bce. Like the Romans, the Normans became successful colonists and farmed the land. The Tapestry also has epic qualities, recalling the poetic 'histories' of antiquity, especially Virgil's Aeneid, which provides parallels for episodes and incidents in the Tapestry also found in the written accounts of the Norman invasion. The rhetorical nature of history itself, ideally vivid, allusive and yet truthful, was receiving critical scrutiny at the time as part of a self-conscious revival of classical narrative styles Volume 32 - Issue 2 - April 2009 - pp. 223-249 The immaculate body in the sistine ceiling
A new reading of textual evidence roots the imagery of Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling frescoes in contemporary theological commitment to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The cluster of abstract metaphors contained in a sermon written by Pope Sixtus IV, dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, and the liturgical and devotional texts the sermon inspired, offers foundational source material for the ceiling programme. It is proposed that such an Immaculacy message exists alongside and mutually supports Incarnationist and Eucharistic ones, all rooted in a metaphor of bodily perfection that Michelangelo 'figures' at the level of gender as well. Volume 32 - Issue 2 - April 2009 - pp. 250-289 The concept of 'art' in henrician england
This article suggests revisions to the scholarly orthodoxies concerning the status of art in Early Modern England, particularly during the reign of Henry viii. In the absence of the theoretical discussions of art that existed elsewhere in Europe, one must explore other methodological possibilities. What emerges is a more sophisticated appreciation of art than has been realized. Of particular value as evidence are the royal inventories, which reveal not only the types of art collected, but also the manner of its display. The approaches adopted here, it is argued, have wider applications beyond the study of Tudor England. Volume 32 - Issue 2 - April 2009 - pp. 290-306 Herri met de bles's way to calvary: a silenic landscape
Herri met de Bles's Way to Calvary is a 'visual exegesis' closely related to Erasmus' exegetical theory. Erasmus conceived exegesis as a dialectical tension between the two extremes senses of the Biblical text (literal and spiritual), mediated by the figure of allegory. Not only does allegory designate Christ, but also the veiled language of the Scriptures and Christ's constant use of enigmatic, paradoxical and obscure figures. Interpreted in the light of the Erasmian exegetical model, and related to the figure of the Silenus popularized by the Christian humanist, Bles's landscape reveals the presence of a specific pictorial phenomenon of crypto-anthropomorphosis. This landscape of a procession following a tiny mocked Christ-Silenus, is also a portrait of a gigantic rocky mocking Silenus. This pictorial device is an integral part of the exegetical logic of the picture and is instrumental in inviting the beholder to conversion. Volume 32 - Issue 2 - April 2009 - pp. 307-331 Panoptic visions of london: possessing the metropolis
The role of sight in the experience of the metropolis as a cultural artefact had a special significance in the opening years of the nineteenth century. The visual register of the city was at once static – the panoptic vision – and fluid – the mobile and subjective gaze of the flâneur/euse. This scrutiny of the city as cultural capital operated on several levels. I want to demonstrate the complexities of the interaction of city, consumer/viewer and the role/agency of the textual/visual interlocutor. Any exploration of London as cultural capital must take into account this broader pan European phenomenon. The aim here is not to produce a comparative history, but rather to benefit from the specific points of contact between London and its near neighbour Paris as regards the consumption of the city and its emergence as cultural capital by a range of publics. My frame is the Benjaminian notion of the city as fragment or miniature as played out in his Arcades Project Volume 32 - Issue 2 - April 2009 - pp. 332-350 Winslow homer and the mechanics of visual deadpan
This essay argues for the central importance of the 'gag' to Winslow Homer's early paintings, made during the American Civil War. As his entrée into the New York art world in these years Homer creates a form of visual deadpan that spoke to the 'comical and coffinly' circumstances of the war, resonated with the methods of the period's controversial platform comedians, and answered the critical call for a 'higher sort of humor' that moved beyond the antics of the antebellum comic mode of the 1850s. Volume 32 - Issue 2 - April 2009 - pp. 351-386 Personifications and the ancient viewer: the case of the Hadrianeum 'nations'
This article represents an initial exploration of how allegorical figures were made and viewed in classical antiquity. It focuses on a well-known series of personifications which decorated a second-century ce temple complex in the heart of Rome. Previous studies of these sculpted reliefs have engaged in lively debate about which nations are represented, without ever reflecting on the processes by which the group has been designed and made. Here the individual personifications are replaced within the context of the group, and the fact that even the most cosmopolitan ancient viewer would have found the interpretation of these images problematic is demonstrated. This reading is shown to have wider implications, both for how the Roman world was conceptualized in and through these images, and for the construction of social hierarchies within the city of Rome itself. Volume 32 - Issue 1 - February 2009 - pp. 1-20 Between form and representation: the Frick St Francis
The subject of Giovanni Bellini's St Francis, currently housed at the Frick Collection in New York, has perplexed viewers for more than five centuries. Scholars have suggested several possible texts, but none of these has been proven unequivocally to be Bellini's reference. Instead of proposing a new written source, this paper focuses on the formal aspects of the painting. It will thus appear that Bellini bent the representational conventions of his time to produce a work of pictorial intelligence. The formal quality of the Frick St Francis is assessed through an analysis of the laurel tree in the left of the painting. Overlooked by many, the tree is the key element of the Frick panel. It is the tree that justifies the variety of exegetical readings, exemplifying as it does a conflation of forms and an experienced handling of visual effects. Volume 32 - Issue 1 - February 2009 - pp. 21-51 Mimesis and iconoclasm
What is the enduring power of mimesis? What hold do paintings that mimic perception have over our imagination? This essay analyses Hans Holbein the Younger's portrait of The Ambassadors to assess its magic both for ourselves in the present and for those who first beheld it. The very structure of the work, its facture, is invested with an iconic vitality that we often overlook. Its surface is alive with a thoroughly medieval sense of pictorial presence that Reformation image theory sought to destroy. The shadow of iconoclasm that hangs over these pictures lends them a particular poignancy, for the illusionism that once endowed the dead with afterlife continues to invest them with remarkable ontological power. The to-and-fro of our perceptual encounter with the world insists that we ascribe such paintings an agency that exceeds our own. Volume 32 - Issue 1 - February 2009 - pp. 52-77 Realism and the boundaries of genre in Dutch art
This essay examines the critical, though largely unrecognized, role of generic parody in Dutch art of the seventeenth century. These often subtle parodies point beyond prevailing definitions of realism as surface description to reveal the deeper 'surplus' of reality that lies beneath a given generic convention. As Bakhtin has shown, genres are inherently ideological and exemplary. By undermining their conventions, Dutch artists were also often undermining their accompanying didactic messages and moral norms. They thereby contribute to a multi-layered, frequently ambivalent, form of realism that is at the heart of what is most novel and most 'modern' in Dutch art. Volume 32 - Issue 1 - February 2009 - pp. 78-114 Yuanming Yuan/Versailles: intercultural interactions between Chinese and European palace cultures
This article examines intercultural interactions between Europe and China in the eighteenth century. It focuses on China's greatest imperial palace, Yuanming Yuan, detailing its pivotal importance in contact with Europe. The first section compares Yuanming Yuan with Versailles in order to demonstrate that beneath their mutually exotic appearances lay similarities in how systems of art, architecture and gardens were deployed to reinforce structurally similar court societies. The second section argues that it was this systemic compatibility that made it possible for French and British cultural agents to make sense of Chinese arts through the playful distortions of chinoiserie. Mirroring Europe, the Chinese court simultaneously appropriated European arts in a symmetrical phenomenon of 'Européenerie'. This case study shows that unlike many later Orientalist relationships, the unique compatibility between China and Europe in the eighteenth century made it possible for each society to make the other culturally meaningful. Volume 32 - Issue 1 - February 2009 - pp. 115-143 Faire de son histoire une boucle (noire): ways of looking at Tristan Tzara
A close examination of pictorial and verbal portraits of Tzara, by both himself and others (Breton, Louis Aragon, Picabia, Germaine Everling, Man Ray, Hans Arp) - as filtered in the art and texts of the dadas and their critics through adaptations of cabbalism, Tao-inflected Africanism, spirit photography and Maurice Barrès's ponderously mystical nationalism - yields a peculiar portrait of Paris dada, and of Tristan Tzara's ethical role within it. Anti-Semitic slurs against Tzara, used as weapons in dada power politics, while construable as a knowingly disingenuous use of cliché and caricature, raise questions of idiom. Raoul Hausmann's Mechanical Head: the Spirit of Our Time (1919) is analysed as an exemplary approach to dada portraiture, in which constellations of contradictory readymade attributes and associations, including anti-Semitic stereotypes, configure a tragicomic array of received social constructions, revolutionary aspirations, prejudices and ambivalences that constitute individuals as social actors within and outside dada. Volume 32 - Issue 1 - February 2009 - pp. 144-176 The Social Life of the Byzantine Gift: The Royal Crown of Hungary Re-invented
Inspired by what anthropologists have called the social life of things, this article traces the shifting significations of the Royal Crown of Hungary. As an object central to notions of legitimacy in a land that served as a battleground for Eastern and Western powers during the medieval and modern eras, the crown over its contested history has come to be seen as a composite symbol of political independence and Western cultural affiliation. A thorough archaeology of the crown, however, reveals its origins as an eleventh-century diadem designed for a Byzantine princess. Subsequently this open crown was transformed into the closed crown worn by the king of a powerful and emerging Western monarchy. In the process of this re-gendering, the object was reconceived as papal gift. Bridging both instantiations is the crown's status as a gift, replete with associations of power and subjugation that anthropologists of gift-giving practices have long recognized. Volume 31 - Issue 5 - December 2008 - pp. 602-631 Hercules in Italian Renaissance Art: Masculine Labour and Homoerotic Libido
Hercules was an exemplar of moral and civic virtue when represented in Italian Renaissance art. How he embodied masculinity, however, has not been explored. A popular but complicated figure, he visualized the burdens and tensions of idealized masculinity. By examining his battle against desire, as represented in his struggle with Antaeus, this article points to multivalence and varying receptions, from moralizing allegory to erotic fantasy. It concentrates on imagery from the 'Florentine Picture Chronicle', Pollaiuolo, Mantegna and his circle, and Michelangelo. Volume 31 - Issue 5 - December 2008 - pp. 632-664 Death, History, and the Marvellous Lives of Tintoretto
This article will examine the discursive process of canon formation that occurred in Venice in the 1640s. In 1648 Carlo Ridolfi published Le maraviglie dell'arte; it represented one of the first regional histories of art and stood as a monument against Giorgio Vasari's grand and authoritative lives of the artists. The first half of Ridolfi's Le maraviglie began with the late medieval artist Il Guariento and culminated with the biographies of Titian and Veronese. The second volume opened with Tintoretto and went on to cover the lives of modern Venetian painters working in the early seventeenth century. The deaths of Tintoretto and then of his son Domenico, it will be argued, were the first and last steps that enabled the eventual birth of a luminous master narrative for Venetian art. Volume 31 - Issue 5 - December 2008 - pp. 665-690 A Monument to Intimacy: Joshua Reynolds's The Marlborough Family
This article offers a fresh reading of Sir Joshua Reynolds's celebrated portrait of the Marlborough Family (1777-79), in which the painting is interpreted in relation to the themes of dynasty, connoisseurship, parental tenderness, childhood and intimacy, and as an ambitious assemblage of interacting pictorial elements. The article is designed to suggest new, historically informed ways of approaching and interpreting Reynolds's own work, and hopes to indicate the interpretive richness of the Georgian family portrait as a pictorial genre. It also makes a case for the benefits that continue to accrue from the practice and skill of looking in a concentrated, questioning and patient way at a single work of art. Volume 31 - Issue 5 - December 2008 - pp. 691-720 Aiming High: Porcelain, Sèvres and the Grand Vase
This essay aims to explore the manifold ways in which the creation of the Grand Vase articulated different but mutually reinforcing ideas of 'greatness' in French manufacture in the 1770s and 1780s. Technologically speaking, it aimed to demonstrate by its scale and the vivid perfection of its blue glaze both the mastery of hard paste (and therefore a decisive break with and progress from the manufactory's past) and its perpetuation of those qualities, particularly of colour, that had distinguished and established the reputation of its soft paste wares. However, at a time when the Government was increasingly reluctant to use privileges or patents to secure trading advantages, even for its own royal manufactories, increasingly design became the means by which technological innovation was promoted as a selling point. The vase was no exception. It reproduced, though with significant variation, the antique Medici Vase, greatly admired in France since the seventeenth century when Colbert commissioned copies for Versailles. It thus demonstrated porcelain's potential as a sculptural medium to vie with the antique, and articulated d'Angiviller's ambition for a renaissance of the grand siècle. The history of the conceptualization and production of this work challenges the long-established view of the royal manufactories as conservative: hostile to technical, design and commercial innovation. Volume 31 - Issue 5 - December 2008 - pp. 721-753 From The Royal Academy to A Hotel In Kapunda: The Tour of William Powell Frith's Derby Day in Colonial Australia
Antipodean populations in the 1860s craved visual entertainment and popular spectacle and the 1864-65 exhibition of William Powell Frith's famous Royal Academy picture Derby Day (1856-8) was hailed as the first modern masterwork to tour the Australian colonies. Accompanied by reproductive prints for sale, this single-picture exhibition of mid-Victorian revellers at the Derby held up a mirror of English national life to colonials, and was a commercial enterprise organized by publisher and dealer Gambart & Co. to capitalize on new markets for art. With attention generally only given to the first exhibition of European paintings acquired by the Melbourne Public Library at the time of Derby Day's tour, art historians have never told the story of the painting's Antipodean journey in the mid-1860s, and its Australian impact has been omitted by the few British scholars who have mentioned the tour. Volume 31 - Issue 5 - December 2008 - pp. 754-785 The north looks south: Giorgio Vasari and early modern visual culture in the kingdom of Naples
This article considers how the artist, writer and critic Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) in his canonical text Le vite de più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori characterized the artists working in the city of Naples and the monuments they produced. Through his own experience working in Naples (1544-45) Vasari acquired significant first-hand knowledge of the city and its artistic culture. His account of his experiences and those of other artists who worked in the city portrays Naples as lacking a dominant local artistic tradition and the support of active and interested patrons. With the intention of furthering the central themes and aims of his text, Vasari created a carefully constructed image of Naples as a rhetorical foil for the alleged superior virtue and strength of northern artists and urban centres where art and architecture played a key role in civic pride. Volume 31 - Issue 4 - September 2008 - pp. 438-459 The rise of the court artist: Cavallini and Giotto in fourteenth-century Naples
This article explores the ways in which the Roman artist Pietro Cavallini and the Florentine artist Giotto were received in Naples and subsequently influenced Neapolitan art. Using documents and monuments, it analyses their contribution to the artistic and political image of the Neapolitan court. A number of scholars have based their assessment of the oeuvres of Cavallini and Giotto on the writings of Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari, circa one hundred and two hundred and fifty years, respectively, after the artists lived. This article considers the stylistic, aesthetic, technological and political reasons for the appointment of Cavallini and Giotto to the Angevin court, and the subsequent spread of their style in Naples. As Martin Warnke has discussed in The Court Artist (first published in German in 1985), the late medieval court gave dignities to an artist that affected his reputation. The evidence of this article indicates that the court of Naples in the fourteenth century recognized each artist's individual identity and influence, thus affirming his image and thereby promoting its own. Volume 31 - Issue 4 - September 2008 - pp. 460-483 The local eye: formal and social distinctions in late quattrocento Neapolitan tombs
The importation of foreign sculptors to Naples was a common phenomenon which both led to the amalgamation of divergent artistic forms of expression and also paved the way for innovative combinations which fulfilled the desire of the local nobility for hybrid, palimpsest-like tombs. This article examines the broader historical sensorium through which fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Neapolitans drew distinctions between local traditions and imported innovations when choosing artists, types and decorative styles for their funerary monuments. It demonstrates that the Neapolitan nobility was able to assimilate new and imported representational styles because it was accustomed to distinguishing between different styles and forms. A network of visually related monuments and surviving contracts testify to the typological rigour of the visual frameworks and to the recognized potentiality inherent in reinterpretations of earlier formulae. Volume 31 - Issue 4 - September 2008 - pp. 484-504 Building in local all'antica style: the palace of diomede carafa in Naples
This article considers some of the historiographical prejudices which can explain the peripheral status held by quattrocento Neapolitan architecture in both national and international scholarship. It also investigates the misunderstandings of the specific nature of local antiquarian culture. Naples is a paradigmatic and precocious example of a local antiquarian tradition which had no direct link with Florence and Rome, or with the revival of classical orders. Rather, it developed from local sources and remains, still widely visible at the time, both in the city and in its surroundings. Diomede Carafa's palace, built in the mid-fifteenth century in the heart of the historical centre of Naples, exemplifies the specific ways in which buildings in the all'antica style were constructed in Naples. The architecture of the palace reveals not just a full awareness of the ideas and fashions which were then circulating throughout fifteenth-century Italy, but also a striking independence in the choice and use of the available sources. Volume 31 - Issue 4 - September 2008 - pp. 505-522 From social virtue to revetted interior: Giovanni Antonio Dosio and marble inlay in Rome, Florence, and Naples
The present article examines the work of Giovanni Antonio Dosio - a Tuscan-born architect of the late sixteenth century - for patrons in the cities of Rome, Florence and Naples, approaching these projects as part of the socio-artistic practice of displaying magnificence. The article considers the means by which the magnificent work sought to impress, and explores the range of messages that were communicated and evoked by the magnificent act. Dosio's Neapolitan projects shared the complex associations and claims of his work in Rome and Florence, but responded to the unique set of demographic, political and religious circumstances experienced by southern Italy and its capital city. Ultimately, Dosio's projects in Naples aimed at the most universal of claims: vehemently proclaiming Christian piety in the face of Ottoman incursions in the eastern Mediterranean, and laying claim to the worldwide reach of the Roman church which, operating in concert with Spanish imperial interests, extended to the Americas and beyond. Volume 31 - Issue 4 - September 2008 - pp. 523-546 'The face is a mirror of the soul': frontispieces and the production of sanctity in post-Tridentine Naples
This article investigates frontispiece images of saints, including portraits of would-be saints, published in saints' and would-be-saints' Vite in post-Tridentine Naples. It argues that these images, together with their accompanying texts, form part of the manufacturing of the new faces of sanctity of Catholic Reform, with specifically local (Neapolitan) overtones. Frontispiece images of saints operated less as passive adornment of the lives they accompany, than as re-routings of the authority of sanctity in relation to specific-interest groups within Naples, such as enclosed convents. The city of Naples itself is variously figured in these images, but emerges as a perhaps increasingly significant force. Thus, frontispiece depictions of saints participated in the staging of a new Naples as a pious city in special relation to pious reader-inhabitants. The portrait frontispieces accompanying the Vite of female would-be saints depart significantly from the textual lives, which emphasize pain-filled piety rather than ecstatic transports. It is suggested here that they thus evoked both for ecclesiastical authorities overseeing the processes of canonization and for their female devout readers an ideal of modern female religious devotion not as transgressive and miraculous, but as respectable and everyday. Volume 31 - Issue 4 - September 2008 - pp. 547-573 Patronage, standards and transfert culturel: Naples between art history and social science theory
This article focuses on an evaluation of Naples as an artistic centre in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Art-historical theories of centre and periphery as proposed by Kenneth Clark (1962), Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginzburg (1979), and Thomas DaKosta Kaufmann (1995) are based primarily on an assessment of the production and export of art works. They fail to explain the impact of consumer-orientated court societies on artistic development. Taking Naples as an example, the applicability of more recent sociological models are considered - those by Saskia Sassen (1991) and Ulf Hannerz (1992), both based on Immanuel Wallerstein's 'World System Theory' (1974). The criteria Hannerz set forth for a cultural definition of a world city can be applied convincingly to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Naples. The import of foreign artists and artefacts into Naples was not a one-sided affair but was counterbalanced by the export of cultural standards to other centres, where they influenced in return the artistic reception and production. This article argues that the complex dynamics of patronage are, therefore, a question of polycentricity, not only geographically but also socially, and that the dynamics of patronage should be studied with more attention to sociological methods. Volume 31 - Issue 4 - September 2008 - pp. 574-597 The wild man, Charlemagne and the German body
The exceptional image of Charlemagne that surfaced in a printed frontispiece from 1521 shares formal qualities with the German wilde Mann, a folkloric creature who lurked in the margins of civilized society and late medieval art. The use of a wild man to establish Charlemagne's filiation with his modern descendant Charles v strikes the modern viewer as a peculiar strategy. In the visual tradition, the wild man typically represented the rejection of all affects of civilized man and embodied his alter ego. Once understood as an undomesticated contemporary of the late medieval European, personified, here, as Charlemagne, the wild man represents a stage in the evolution of the contemporary German. This essay argues that the rediscovery in Germany c. 1473 of Tacitus's first-century Germania transformed the wild man into the ur-German described in the ancient text and gave him a national identity. Volume 31 - Issue 3 - June 2008 - pp. 283-302 Place, print and miracle: Forlí's madonna of the fire as functional site
The Madonna of the Fire of Forlì is an early woodcut that miraculously survived a fire in 1428, and still resides in the cathedral of Forlì, a city southeast of Bologna. This miracle removed the woodcut from the traffic in images crossing geographic and chronological boundaries in which other early modern prints participated. Since 1428 it has acted instead as a functional site, bound to a single place and able to galvanize disparate local elements into a communal sense of emplacement. This essay explores both that ability to generate a local identity, as well as the Madonna of the Fire's status as a miraculous object. For the transformation of the Madonna of the Fire from quotidian devotional print to miraculous cult icon also activated its ability to work as a functional site by charging overlapping material, geographic and discursive loci with communal significance. Volume 31 - Issue 3 - June 2008 - pp. 303-321 Framing Robert Aggas: the painter-stainers' company and the 'English school of painters'
Drawing on unpublished archival material, this essay offers a new understanding of London's Painter-Stainers' Company during the second half of the seventeenth century. Beginning and ending with a discussion of the English painter Robert Aggas, whose Landscape at Sunset became the centrepiece of an ambitious display of paintings within the Painter-Stainers' Hall, the essay identifies the Company as a vital presence within the cultural economy of the early modern capital. A reassessment of the Company's attitude towards overseas painters during the later 1600s points to the cosmopolitan make-up of the self-styled 'English school' of painting, first chronicled in Bainbrigg Buckeridge's influential An Essay towards an English School of Painters (1706). Volume 31 - Issue 3 - June 2008 - pp. 322-341 Books, prints, and travel: reading in the gaps of the orientalist archive
From about 1780 a thriving publishing industry for travel accounts developed in France, but its rich visual component has not been closely analysed. Taking Auguste de Forbin's Voyage dans le Levant and Marie-Gabriel de Choiseul-Gouffier's Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce as paradigmatic examples, I reconsider illustrated travel books in light of new theories of reading generated by historians of the book. The multifarious nature of these books - juggling word and image, and coordinating the work of a large number of writers, researchers, artists and print-makers - provides a radically alternative model for interpreting travel representation in the age of expansion. Volume 31 - Issue 3 - June 2008 - pp. 342-367 Lack of fit: Tacita Dean, modernism and the sculptural film
In this paper I examine the continuing legacies of the 'sculptural film' for contemporary projected-image work, and consider what is at stake in the shift to which it bears witness, from the material object as model for film, to an explicit - if frequently ruined and derelict - space of projection. The importance of this history is examined through discussion of recent projected-image work by Tacita Dean, notable because in almost every case it is explicitly structured around the camera's exploration of some found physical structure. Modernist uses of the sculptural film - represented, in different ways, in works by László Moholy-Nagy and Richard Serra - are importantly transformed in Dean's work, which draws also on Robert Smithson's earlier reconfiguration of the sculptural and the filmic. Volume 31 - Issue 3 - June 2008 - pp. 368-386 Watching women watching warriors: Nicolas Poussin's Tancred and Erminia and the visuality of Papal court tournaments
Nicolas Poussin's Tancred and Erminia centres on a woman's gaze. In its reference to noblewomen watching jousting knights, a motif present in the source poem, I argue that the format of the painting drew on ritualized practices of viewing. Contemporary depictions of a tournament reveal the specificities of this visuality for Poussin's patrons. In its replication of the classed and gendered spectatorship of papal court jousts, Tancred and Erminia was able to encourage aspiring papal courtiers to empathize with a coveted viewpoint gendered feminine. In so doing, I believe it offered viewers the possibility to identify with a standpoint, a cultural position of viewing constituted through representation. Volume 31 - Issue 2 - April 2008 - pp. 139-158 Dutch genre painting as religious art: Gabriel Metsu's roman catholic imagery
Gabriel Metsu's reputation rests on his popular genre imagery; however, the Dutch artist also produced religious paintings with Roman Catholic symbolism. Archival documents, personal and professional relationships, and a small number of paintings confirm a close engagement with the Dutch Roman Catholic community from his youth in Leiden to his maturity in Amsterdam. Metsu's connections with Roman Catholic painters, poets, and priests in the Netherlands provided the cultural context for his religious art. Moreover, contemporary devotional publications and reproductive engravings after Italian art established iconographic and compositional solutions evident in Metsu's traditional religious scenes and in his genre imagery. Volume 31 - Issue 2 - April 2008 - pp. 159-186 Rustic poseurs: peasant models in the practice of Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton
In the 1850s, Jean-François Millet and Jules Breton relocated their studios from Paris to the French countryside, where they no longer had access to the professional models that posed in urban ateliers. This study examines the evolution of their studio practice within the rural context: it explores their shift from professional to proprietary and peasant models, how the shift inflected the artist/model transaction, and their negotiation of the social structures and standards of decorum of the rural communities in which their studios were located. Volume 31 - Issue 2 - April 2008 - pp. 187-210 Mixed messages in a new 'public' travancore: building the capital 1860-1880
This study examines the building of three nineteenth-century structures in the city of Trivandrum, capital of the erstwhile kingdom of Travancore, a 'Native State' of colonial India. Created in three distinct styles, all were erected during the reign of Maharaja Ayilyam Thirunal (1860-80), and were part of a process of transformative change in the capital and the kingdom at this time. The paper argues that a nascent public sphere first began to take shape in this kingdom during this period, facilitated in part by these projects and the processes they involved. In giving form for the first time to a capital designed not simply or solely for royal display but instead intended to provide for needs that would reshape both the kingdom and its subjects, these projects helped to develop the notion of a civil society in Travancore. Volume 31 - Issue 2 - April 2008 - pp. 211-247 Looking the part: ruminative viewing and the imagination of community in the early modern Low Countries
This essay concerns the visual assertion of corporate identity in Gerard David's Justice of Cambyses (completed 1498). This painting is significant in three respects. First, unlike contemporaneous Flemish treatments of the subject, David's diptych presents judicial practice as earthly rather than spiritual in nature. Second, it privileges the distinction between individuals and the groups they form. Third, it treats Flanders in general and Bruges in particular as the ideal just society. In so doing, David's painting breaks markedly with tradition, positing not only the fact but also the social character of justice. What is more, it does so by defining that character as specifically Flemish, thus articulating a nascent if complex sense of regional identity. Volume 31 - Issue 1 - February 2008 - pp. 1-32 Light, darkness, and African salvation: Velázquez's supper at Emmaus
This study locates Velázquez's Supper at Emmaus (c. 1617/18) within early seventeenth-century debates on the Christian conversion of Seville's African slaves. Through a careful analysis of writings by Sevillian clerics, the essay argues that Velázquez gave pictorial form to discourse on African spiritual 'illumination' and developing theories of skin colour. Treatises by Seville's ecclesiastics also provide crucial insight into the original, elite audience for whom Velázquez surely constructed his African subject. In Supper at Emmaus, Velázquez presented his male beholder with one possession encompassed within another: a female slave in a painting by Seville's most promising young artist. Volume 31 - Issue 1 - February 2008 - pp. 33-56 'Merely mechanical': on the origins of photographic copyright in France and Great Britain
The invention of the medium of photography and its commercialization as a cheap multiple during the 1850s and 1860s led to challenges to extant copyright laws in France and Great Britain. This paper traces the ways that debates over photographic copyright confronted current understandings of originality and mechanization and repeated arguments that had already been raised by laws governing prints and casts. The British Fine Arts Copyright Act of 1862, which extended statutory protection to all photographs, is contrasted with French cases, which struggled to accommodate photographs within the fine arts as defined by the copyright law of 1793. Volume 31 - Issue 1 - February 2008 - pp. 57-78 From women's work to the umbilical lens: Mary Kelly's early films
This essay presents a historical and theoretical account of Mary Kelly's formative involvement in experimental filmmaking in Britain during the early- to mid-1970s. The argument develops by tracing the complex interconnections between Kelly's political engagement with Marxist-feminism and her theoretical involvement with psychoanalysis and film theory. After discussing Kelly's participation in the Berwick Street Film Collective's Night Cleaners (1975) and the London Women's Film Group's Women of the Rhondda (1973), I present a sustained close reading of the artist's first solo work, the film loop installation Antepartum (1974). I argue that Antepartum interpellates the spectator into a feminine subject position. This reading of the film draws upon recent post-Lacanian feminist scholarship in philosophical ethics that focuses on the intrauterine relation. Antepartum offers a politically informed aesthetic experiment that prefigures some of these insights. Volume 31 - Issue 1 - February 2008 - pp. 79-102 The ear of the beholder: spectator figures and narrative structure in Pompeian painting
The debate on spectator figures in Roman painting has traditionally concentrated on their function as virtually meaning-free space-fillers, or on their potential to make external viewers aware of the fact that they are looking at a picture. This article takes a different approach and uses the spectator figures of two frescoes from a house within the Scavo del Principe di Montenegro in Pompeii as a means of exploring the narrative strategies of Pompeian mythological painting. The satyr ear of one of the spectators, which in previous research has gone unnoticed, and the elements of gender masquerading which come with it, form the ground for reconsidering the spectators' contribution to the reception aesthetics of an image, its mythological and its emotive content. The result is a fresh assessment of Pompeian painting as a laboratory for the exploration of visual story-telling and of the shifts in the engagement of Roman audiences with mythological stories throughout the first century ce. Volume 30 - Issue 5 - November 2007 - pp. 665-682 Aesthetics and cultural politics in the age of Dreyfus: Maurice Denis's homage to Cézanne
This article examines the alliance between painterly modernism and right-wing politics in France at the height of the Dreyfus Affair. Political struggles took on an aesthetic dimension in the cultural battles waged around 1900. Maurice Denis's monumental group portrait Homage to Cézanne (1900) serves as the focus of my inquiry. This painting is often cited and reproduced in histories of French modernism, but has yet to be examined within its historical and political moment. Although Homage does not directly reference contemporary political events, Denis's formal and compositional choices in Homage were informed by Adrien Mithouard's right-wing nationalist cultural politics. Volume 30 - Issue 5 - November 2007 - pp. 683-711 Richard Hamilton at the Ideal Home Exhibition of 1958: gallery for a collector of Brutalist and Tachiste art
This essay develops a close reading of Richard Hamilton's Gallery for a Collector of Brutalist and Tachiste Art, his contribution to the Daily Mail's Ideal Home Exhibition of 1958. Included in the Gallery for a Collector was Hamilton's 1957 painting Hommage à Chrysler Corp. The essay treats both the gallery and the painting as 'meta-aesthetic' practices that register something of the aesthetic historicity of their social and cultural moment. To demonstrate how the work relates to the historicity of perception (sensorial, social and political perception) and to the material culture of the time, the essay sets out a number of possible contexts for attending to the painting and the Ideal Home installation. Volume 30 - Issue 5 - November 2007 - pp. 712-737 Happiness with a long piece of black leader: Chris Marker's sans soleil
Chris Marker, best known for his 1962 film, La Jetée, released Sans Soleil in 1982. Sans Soleil migrates quickly between places, time spans and a continual collectomania of images by Marker and other cameramen. Sans Soleil's image repertoire is as fleeting as Marcel Proust's famous, evasive nibble of the scallop-shell shaped madeleine cake. This essay explores Marker's interest in the profoundness of Proustian memory. As Marker claims in his 'sunless' film: 'I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.' Volume 30 - Issue 5 - November 2007 - pp. 738-756 Empathetic vision: looking at and with a performative Byzantine miniature
A Byzantine Gospel Lectionary in Florence contains a detailed description of the liturgical rites on 1 September. The manuscript's illustration for that day is interpreted art historically and then read against that liturgy so as to distinguish the heuristic processes of the discipline from the empathetic vision of the person for whom the manuscript was made and used: the Patriarch of Constantinople. The display that art history assumes and creates is contrasted with a performative spectacle of the Middle Ages. Volume 30 - Issue 4 - September 2007 - pp. 489-502 A faceless society? Portraiture and the politics of display in eighteenth-century Rome
In eighteenth-century Europe portraiture held an important function within the art collections of the elite. The genre had an aesthetic purpose but also a strong social one. Portrait displays were frequent within domestic spaces that held a particular dignity but also offered public accessibility. Portraiture constituted in this sense the elite families a social guarantee and manifested the continuity of their social achievements. However, this general overview may be questioned if we move beyond the all-too-often cited examples of the monarchies of Britain and France. Instead, this article examines the social use of portraiture in eighteenth century Rome with particular reference to the structures of social manifestations of certain papal families. Volume 30 - Issue 4 - September 2007 - pp. 503-520 Laying siege to the Royal Academy: Wright of Derby's view of Gibraltar at Robins's Rooms, Covent Garden, April 1785
This essay examines the circumstances surrounding the first exhibition of Joseph Wright of Derby's epic contemporary history painting View of Gibraltar during the destruction of the Spanish Floating Batteries, 13 September 1782. This intensely dramatic depiction of siege warfare was the centrepiece of a one-man show, held by the artist at Robins's Rooms, Covent Garden, between April and June 1785, an exhibition staged in direct rivalry with the Royal Academy, of whom Wright had fallen foul two years earlier. It is argued that the iconography of the exhibition, in concert with a number of associated publications, deliberately highlighted the confrontations, contests and infighting between artists that were such a marked feature of the London art world of the mid-1780s. Volume 30 - Issue 4 - September 2007 - pp. 521-544 'Walking for pleasure'? Bodies of display at the Manchester Art-Treasures Exhibition in 1857
The scale, ambition and, arguably, the art-historical significance of the Art-Treasures Exhibition held in Manchester in 1857 was unprecedented in Britain, and has not been equalled subsequently. In all over 16,000 works of art were gathered together in the Art-Treasures Palace at Old Trafford, and when the exhibition closed after five months, over 1,300,000 visitors had passed through its turnstiles. Prince Albert officially approved the venture on condition that the exhibition would provide more than the 'mere gratification of public curiosity' and should instead 'enable, in a practical way the most uneducated eye to gather the lessons which ages of thorough and scientific research have attempted to abstract'. In effect, a wide and inclusive public was being invoked via the familiar metonymic substitution of the 'eye' for the person of the spectator and yet it was the quantity and conduct of visitors walking, looking and consuming bodies that provoked a stream of commentary and debate, and that constituted an unofficial register of the exhibition's success. Recovery of the experiences and observations of the 'social body' of the exhibition shows that neither the coded messages of the display schema nor the example set by prestigious visitors were able to direct the behaviour and aesthetic responses of many spectators. In that sense, the practices and public of the Art-Treasures Exhibition were very specific to the conditions of mid-nineteenth-century Manchester, yet stand as a salutary example to exhibition historians and curators today. Volume 30 - Issue 4 - September 2007 - pp. 545-565 Museum studies now
The purpose of this short article is to summarize briefly the current state and direction of museum studies in relation to academic priorities and pressing issues facing museums today, including new buildings, access, revisionist art history, commercialism and repatriation. It ends by questioning the rapid expansion of museum studies programmes on both sides of the Atlantic. Volume 30 - Issue 4 - September 2007 - pp. 566-570 The logic of spectacle c. 1970
This essay uses the Japan World Exposition of 1970 (Expo '70) to explore the logic of spectacle. It focuses on three discrete aspects of the event: a week-long hunger strike and protest, staged in the Tower of the Sun, the architectural icon of the Expo; the exhibit within the Tower, created by a leading artist to shake his audience out of their contemporary anomie; and the design of the Expo site as a whole, intended by leading architects as a model for cities of the future. The essay argues that the significance of spectacle as communication, as proposed by protestor and artist, can only be understood in the context of spectacle as system, visible in the work of the architects. The success of the latter, moreover, was not premised on the logic of representation, providing a particular account of the world, but on a logic of accommodation, ensuring that the Expo could account for contingency. In Osaka at least, the spectacle worked well inasmuch as it could afford to be somewhat indifferent to what was put on display. Volume 30 - Issue 4 - September 2007 - pp. 571-589 Display at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 1968-1975
This essay examines the innovative sequence of permanent historical displays created at the National Portrait Gallery under the directorship of Roy Strong in the late 1960s and early 1970s and establishes a series of contexts for them. It looks back to display at the gallery in earlier decades in order to examine how this reflected varying degrees of public engagement. This leads to an exploration of the place of Strong's displays within the cultural politics of the later 1960s, notably their relationship to the policies of Labour Minister the Arts, Jennie Lee. The final context is the development of a popular historical consciousness during the period, a phenomenon in which the visualization of history played a crucial role. Volume 30 - Issue 4 - September 2007 - pp. 590-610 Narratives of display at the National Gallery, London
This article looks at the history of methods of display at the National Gallery, London, since the appointment of Kenneth Clark in 1934 and traces the changing philosophies and attitudes to the collection through an examination of the surviving documentation. In describing the different approaches to the display, it is possible to deduce an archaeology of changing ideas as to how works of art should be viewed: either in isolation from their surroundings, as was the orthodoxy during the 1960s or surrounded by richly opulent, neo-Victorian interiors, the orthodoxy of the 1980s, or with supplementary information on the contents of individual galleries, as introduced in 2004. Volume 30 - Issue 4 - September 2007 - pp. 611-627 'Our gods, their museums': the contrary careers of India's art objects
The paper looks at the way the Western art museum today functions as a complex site for the production of new orders of 'religious' value around Indian sculpted objects. One of its main points is to foreground the ambivalence and instability of identities - the unresolved tensions between sacred and aesthetic tropes - that surround the contemporary lives of India's art objects, both within and outside the precincts of museums. Over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries India offers her own internal history of the growth of the institution of the museum, alongside the disciplines of archaeology and art history, and the unfolding of a long tradition of scholarship and connoisseurship around such collected and conserved objects. Yet, it will be shown, that these historical and artistic consecrations are neither stable nor sealed, and remain continuously prone to contestations. The essay explores the positioning of sculpture as the reigning Indian art object in American museum spaces - while also tracking some of the clashing custodial claims, especially some of the recent modes of religious re-inscription of these objects, that threaten to dislodge their parallel lives as 'works of art'. Central to the story here is the theme of the travels abroad of Indian sculpture, and the drama of their returns and repatriations. Volume 30 - Issue 4 - September 2007 - pp. 628-657 Murat Aydemir Mieke Bal and Shahram Entekhabi's Glub (Hearts) of 2004, comprising an art film and a video installation, inquires into the Middle Eastern and North African practice of eating roasted sunflower, pumpkin and other seeds as it has taken hold in the city of Berlin. Bal has called the work an instance rather than an object of 'cultural analysis', the term that she has espoused for her critical practice. Cultural analysis engages its object in relation to theoretical concepts and socio-cultural contexts without, however, reducing it to a case or illustration of either. This essay builds on the cultural analysis that Glub carries out by addressing the practice of seed-eating, described by one commentator as a 'social event and an art form', in a number of frames. These frames overlap but do not amount to a comprehensive description of the work, adding to the density or 'thickness' of the object at stake. Initially, the work is considered in the context of Bal's recent academic work. Further, there is discussion of Glub's peculiar and strategic rendering of Berlinian 'street life', which both suspends and reinforces the recognizability of the contemporary Western metropolis. Finally, the article addresses the ways in which the work engages with the possibilities and pitfalls of the cross-cultural translation of an everyday cultural detail. Volume 30 - Issue 3 - June 2007 - pp. 307-325 Giovanni Careri
Drawing on Mieke Bal's construction of a critical history of art, which facilitates the extension of Walter Benjamin's philosophy to the visual arts, this essay reconsiders Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel in Rome, attentive to the conditions that allows the work of art from the past to appear in the present. Two forms of anachronism are proposed: the first may be understood as constituting the temporal structure of the Sistine Chapel up to its completion in 1542; the second, by contrast, is concerned with our 'present' and is a more audacious form of anachronism defined by the relationship between Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and the Chapel, particularly the 'Ancestors of Christ'. In elucidating these connections, Careri proposes 'constellation' rather than influence to signify deep and problematic relations. Volume 30 - Issue 3 - June 2007 - pp. 326-348 Hanneke Grootenboer
This essay explores Mieke Bal's mode of reading pictures through an analysis of several Annunciation paintings. Annunciation paintings have often posed a stumbling block to arthistorical interpretation. Supported by Bal's method of visual analysis, the author suggests that the problem of interpreting the Annunciation results in part from iconography's insufficiency, as well as its sexually repressed subject matter, as well as from their embedding in the formal apparatus of perspective. Grootenboer contends that the problem of the Annunciation lies in the mystery of the Incarnation as much as in perspective's presumed innocence as a transparent method for rendering the mystery visible. The author's aim is to demonstrate the complicity between perspective, also called construzione legittima, and the theme of the Annunciation has eventually legitimized an infinite unravelling of the secret. Volume 30 - Issue 3 - June 2007 - pp. 349-363 Visual archives as preposterous history
Three examples of artistic archiving - Christian Boltanski's archival installations, Ydessa Hendeles's installation Partners: The Teddy Bear Project and Peter Forgacs' film Maelstrom, which is based on archival home footage - are situated in relation to the privileged and respected position of the archival medium in Holocaust studies. This reading of three contemporary works of art takes its cue from Mieke Bal's notion of preposterous history, elaborated in Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (1999), where she demonstrates the idea that art's engagement with what came before it involves an active reworking of the predecessor. In light of Bal's argument, archival practices by Boltanski, Hendeles and Forgacs are perceived as preposterous in relation to the archival genre they adopt. They do not comply to the genre and to the qualities assigned to it through the course of history, but in their practices they foreground, each in their own way, aspects and qualities of the archival mode so far unacknowledged or repressed. Volume 30 - Issue 3 - June 2007 - pp. 364-382 What does a woman want? Art investigating death in Charlotte Salomon's leben? Oder theater?
An art work that refuses the boundaries of word and image, image and music, that was made in defiance of art history's preferred models of style, movement and period, Charlotte Salomon's vast interdisciplinary project Leben? oder Theater? (1941-42) challenges art history but responds well to models of feminist reading of visual narrative and semiotics proposed by Mieke Bal's practice of cultural analysis and working with concepts. Viewed since its belated discovery as a largely autobiographical text, Charlotte Salomon's huge work is here examined through the lens of two concepts: Benjamin's 'theatre of memory' and Braccha Ettinger's idea of 'art working'. Taking seriously the interrogative form of the title, the article asks both how an art work can be an investigation and what this art work was questioning. Close reading of key images that explore the inner worlds of three women that form a counter series to the overt narrative sequence of the final text, the text is analytically 'listened to' in order to plot out the nature of the questions it poses about life, death, creativity through a memorial restaging of the lives and deaths of four women and one man. Focusing on the visual strategies in the paintings, the visual and acoustic leitmotifs that pictorially define the major 'players', and tracing the semiotic and affective freight of the colour blue, the article examines the journey the work performed for the artist through the prism of Ettinger's proposal about 'art as a transport station of trauma' that might open up to trans-subjective border space in which the trauma of loss can be encountered and worked through. Volume 30 - Issue 3 - June 2007 - pp. 383-405 Reading, writing, filming, dreaming, dressing
A conversation with Mieke Bal, as recounted by longtime friend, Michael Ann Holly. Many subjects emerge along the way, both serious and light: about the state of the world, about the discipline of art history, about reading art and writing about seeing, about memories and past times. Volume 30 - Issue 3 - June 2007 - pp. 406-417 Killing kool: the graffiti museum
In 1975 Jean Baudrillard offered a profound theoretical analysis of postmodern graffiti in his now legendary essay 'KOOL KILLER, or The Insurrection of Signs', in which he claimed that urban graffiti would operate against the symbolic order. Graffiti were non-signs, without meaning but with strength. Some twenty-five years later Mieke Bal offered another view on graffiti in her article 'The Subject of Cultural Analysis'. Unlike Baudrillard, Bal not only regards graffiti beyond an opposition between word and image, but she understands the public act of writing on a wall as the basic operation of culture: culture operates as an exposition or an expository discourse considered analogous to a speech act. This article explores these contrasting interpretations through three examples: a German autobahn, an online website and the Berlin Wall, before it was demolished in 1989. Volume 30 - Issue 3 - June 2007 - pp. 418-431 Aesthetics of intermediality
If 'art thinks', as Mieke Bal contends, what are the operative concepts it generates, and how do visual culture studies capture the nature of aesthetic or visual thought? This essay analyses contemporary art projects by Gabriel Orozco, Candice Breitz, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, and iCinema as both 'gestural' and 'intermedial' productions. Invoking a concept of gestural criticism derived from Georgio Agamben, Bennett argues that gesture is an operative method rather than subject matter in art, and a key to understanding mediality and relations between media. This focus is extended into a broader methodological argument for visual cultural studies that attends to the specifics of media and aesthetic operations within an interdisciplinary field, building on methodological critiques by both Bal and Brian Massumi, and citing the precedent of Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne project. Volume 30 - Issue 3 - June 2007 - pp. 432-450 Je vous
This essay reconsiders the relations between photography and Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, suggesting that Proust's whole novel is 'about' photography. Re-reading Mieke Bal's The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually prompts an address to and reworking of Bal's concept of focalization. Photography's inventors, early practitioners, techniques and processes are discussed, as well as later accounts, such as Walter Benjamin's 'Little History of Photography'. It is argued that Proust not only documents the crises precipitated in Western subjectivity by photography, but also helps us to see that this medium really is the 'pencil or nature', the claim made by Henry Fox Talbot. Reflecting throughout on the relationships between the first-person pronoun, ever present in In Search of Lost Time, and the second-person pronoun, the essay concludes with an analysis of the exchanges between the two and a consideration of the interplay between the film projector and the still camera to dramatize perception in Chantal Akerman's film The Captive (2000), based on Proust's The Prisoner. Volume 30 - Issue 3 - June 2007 - pp. 451-467 Secular charity, sacred poverty: picturing the poor in Renaissance Venice
The poor were depicted with increasing frequency and prominence in Venetian art of the sixteenth century. This new level of visualization within the fictive space of representation indirectly reflects contemporary attempts to exclude poveri and other undesirables from the actual space of the city. Increased state involvement in poor relief stimulated a new iconography of secular charity featuring almsgiving by patrician officials, presented in an hierarchical manner that pointedly departs from the more communal depictions in paintings commissioned by the city's non-noble scuole. But it was in religious painting for the city's churches and monasteries that the visual imagery of poverty was most dramatically improved, with reference both to sacred and devotional texts stressing poverty as a sacred value and to formal models from antique and High Renaissance art. The povero increasingly appeared as an idealized human archetype whose suffering and humility associated him directly with Christ. The article concludes by arguing that the symbolization of the poor as significant sacred actors in visual art was an aspect of their repression and exclusion in the social domain. Volume 30 - Issue 2 - April 2007 - pp. 139-169 To see or not to see? The presence of religious imagery in the protestant household
The essay focuses on two case studies of seventeenth-century domestic decoration, at Lanhydrock House in Cornwall and the Butterwalk in Dartmouth, North Devon: both plasterwork ceilings with complex iconography, both dating from the 1630s, and both created by Puritan patrons. It is proposed that due to inherent physical difficulties in the process of viewing, our study of figurative imagery on ceilings requires an interpretive approach which places the visual qualities of the imagery second to the impact of its presence. In short, the meaning of the imagery is less important than its effect. In pursuing this argument, the essay draws from ideas and approaches within the interdisciplinary field of visual studies; specifically, an interest in the physical dynamics of viewing and the mechanics of visual perception, allied with an awareness of the specificity of visual experience according to historical and cultural context. This focus on questions of the visual is allied with anthropological and archaeological approaches focusing on the relationship between art, belief and behaviour. The essay concludes that placing religious imagery on ceilings within the domestic interior allowed Protestant patrons to exploit the power of the visual in the service of reformed faith while minimizing the risk of idolatrous abuse. Volume 30 - Issue 2 - April 2007 - pp. 170-197 Utopia lost: allegory, ruins and Pieter Bruegel's Towers Of Babel
Beginning with the ubiquity with which art history discusses Pieter Bruegel the Elder's work as allegorical - and the Tower of Babel paintings are no exception - I offer a reassessment of this by contributing to the ongoing debates within Breugel studies on methodology, and, until now, outside of them, on Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory. Through a close reading of the paintings, the art historical literature on the paintings, and a philosophical interpretation of the Tower of Babel narrative, I intervene in the methodological debates by proposing an alternative conception of the dialectical aspects of Bruegel's paintings. I then suggest how an understanding of the dialectical character of the paintings, and a necessarily overdetermined hermeneutics of them, can add to our knowledge of Bruegel's work, and put pressure on our comprehension of Benjamin's writings on allegory and ruins. Volume 30 - Issue 2 - April 2007 - pp. 198-216 Involved spectatorship in archaic greek art
It is argued that models of spectatorship developed by Alois Riegl and Richard Wollheim offer a productive means of understanding how the Archaic Greek eye cup works. Eye cups represent the faces of particular mythological creatures who expect to see their mythical counterparts in the space occupied by spectators. The decoration of the cups is structured so as to invite the beholder to enter imaginatively into the Dionysiac world. Some representations of silens shown with frontal faces invite a similar response. A significant amount of Archaic poetry experienced, like the vases, in symposia also induced symposiasts temporarily to adopt fictional or mythical personae. As Nietzsche observed in The Birth of Tragedy, a comparable form of involved spectatorship is also at the heart of early Greek drama. A common aesthetic conception of involved spectatorship manifested itself concretely in several different media or cultural forms in late Archaic Greece. Volume 30 - Issue 2 - April 2007 - pp. 217-246 Low art, popular imagery and civic commitment in the French Revolution
By way of a case study devoted to Jean-Jacques Hauer (1751-1829), one of the minor figures making their Salon debut in the French Revolution, this essay explores the relations between art and historical events in times of radical transformation. A citizen-artist serving with the National Guard, the painter was a humble practitioner enjoying his greatest success at the height of collective militancy known as the sans-culotte movement. The French Revolution allowed Hauer to go public, and most of his ouvre is closely tied to its tangled politics. Representations from the death of Marat to the plight of the royal family are examined in the context of shifting discourses, sectionary politics and civic commitment. Volume 30 - Issue 2 - April 2007 - pp. 247-277 Site, seeing and salvation in fourteenth-century Avignon
This article explores anew the well-known frescoes by Simone Martini above the entrance to the Cathedral of Notre-Dame-des-Doms in Avignon. A new reading is facilitated in three ways: by considering the full range of possible iconographic and stylistic sources for these frescoes; by considering the content of the lost side-wall frescoes as well as the surviving frescoes; and by calling into question the methodologies and assumptions about influence and sources that have normally been brought to bear on the paintings. The whole ensemble is seen as a monument specific both to its time and its place, in which the patron, the Roman cardinal Jacopo Stefaneschi, expresses his hopes for salvation using the metaphors of vision and sight. Volume 30 - Issue 1 - February 2007 - pp. 1-25 Raoul Hausmann's revolutionary media: dada performance, photomontage and the cyborg
This article argues that Hausmann's poetry and performance practices of 1918 and 1919 prepared the ground for the cybernetic imagery that became prevalent in his caricatures, photomontages and assemblages of 1920. Through an examination of Hausmann's poetry and performance strategies, his concept of human identity, and his understanding of the relationship between sexuality and social revolution, a new understanding of Hausmann's visual concerns is developed. In particular, this article investigates why Hausmann's portraits often undermined their sitter's identity; why Hausmann sometimes emphasized sexuality in his representations; and why, in addition to reminding their viewers of mechanized war, Hausmann's images of the human-machine interface anticipated many of the ideas inherent in the concept of the cyborg developed in the later twentieth century. Volume 30 - Issue 1 - February 2007 - pp. 26-56 The serial spaces of Ana Mendieta
The work of the Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta has often been criticized for embracing the traditional alignment of woman and nature, an alignment which is generally perceived as reliant upon essentialist ideas about female identity. Recent commentators have defended Mendieta's work against the charge of essentialism by interpreting her work through the lens of Judith Butler's idea of gender as performance. Mendieta's work, it is argued, destabilizes identity by emphasizing the repeated performances of this alignment. In other words, the emphasis falls on the 'deed' rather than the 'doer', to use Butler's terms. While the capacity of Mendieta's work to sustain these different readings points to its richness, essentialism still remains a scare term, despite feminist literature from the 1980s and 1990s. This article considers Mendieta's Silueta series in the light of this reconsideration of essentialism. Volume 30 - Issue 1 - February 2007 - pp. 57-82 An impossible love: subjection and embodiment in Paula Rego's possession
Paula Rego's work is frequently considered in terms of a feminist subversion of the tenets of patriarchy. Here, I analyse a group of seven panels made in pastel, in order to throw light on the relationship between obedience and resistance in the formation of female subjects in Rego's work, exploring the interpellative underpinnings that shape and constrain them. Examined in relation both to the imagery of hysteria deployed by nineteenth-century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and to the Freudian concept of transference, Possession, I argue, performs the condition of an impossible love in its address to an object empowered by the very relationship that instates it as object. I propose that Rego's work may be read in relation to a feminist politics that acknowledges the Symbolic Order and its paternal legacy. Volume 30 - Issue 1 - February 2007 - pp. 83-103 Titian's veils
Volume 29 - Issue 5 - November 2006 - pp. 771-795 Architecture, gender and politics: the Villa Imperiale at Pesaro
Volume 29 - Issue 5 - November 2006 - pp. 796-826 History illuminated: William Holman Hunt's London Bridge
Volume 29 - Issue 5 - November 2006 - pp. 827-859 Artisans, consumers and corporeality in signac's parisian interiors
Volume 29 - Issue 5 - November 2006 - pp. 860-886 Art and construction in Britain in the 1950s
Volume 29 - Issue 5 - November 2006 - pp. 887-925 The errant image: Rogier Van Der Weyden's Deposition from the Cross and its copies
Volume 29 - Issue 4 - September 2006 - pp. 540-562 Signposts of invention: artists' signatures in italian renaissance art
Volume 29 - Issue 4 - September 2006 - pp. 563-599 Locating 'China' in the arts of sixteenth-century Japan
Volume 29 - Issue 4 - September 2006 - pp. 600-624 Georgianism and the tenements, Dublin 1908-1926
Volume 29 - Issue 4 - September 2006 - pp. 625-659 Statues in the square: hauntings at the heart of empire
Volume 29 - Issue 4 - September 2006 - pp. 660-697 The buddha goes global: some thoughts towards a transnational art history
Volume 29 - Issue 4 - September 2006 - pp. 698-720 Rebecca Belmore and James Luna on location at Venice: the allegorical indian redux
Volume 29 - Issue 4 - September 2006 - pp. 721-755 Michelangelo's Bacchus and the Art of Self-Formation
Volume 29 - Issue 3 - June 2006 - pp. 345-386 'Conchas Legere': Shells as Trophies of Repose in Northern European Humanism
Volume 29 - Issue 3 - June 2006 - pp. 387-413 Enveloping Objects: Allegory And Commodity Fetish In Wenceslaus Hollar's Personifications Of The Seasons And Fashion Still Lifes
Volume 29 - Issue 3 - June 2006 - pp. 414-443. The Phantasm Of Aesthetic Autonomy In Whistler's Work: Titling The White Girl
Volume 29 - Issue 3 - June 2006 - pp. 444-475 'This Threatening And Possibly Functioning Object': Lee Bontecou And The Sculptural Void
Volume 29 - Issue 3 - June 2006 - pp. 476-502 Roman replications of Greek art at the Villa della Farnesina
Volume 29 - Issue 2 - April 2006 Making an impression: replication and the ontology of the Graeco-Roman seal stone
Volume 29 - Issue 2 - April 2006 Statue, cult and reproduction
Volume 29 - Issue 2 - April 2006 Reading replications: Roman rhetoric and Greek quotations
Volume 29 - Issue 2 - April 2006 Representation, replication and collecting in Charles Townley's late eighteenth-century library
Volume 29 - Issue 2 - April 2006 The two cultures: connoisseurship and civic honours
Volume 29 - Issue 2 - April 2006 Renaissance gothic: pictures of geometry and narratives of ornament
Volume 29 - Issue 1 - February 2006 Correct delineations and promiscuous outlines: envisioning India at the trial of Warren Hastings
Volume 29 - Issue 1 - February 2006 Paris circus new york junk: Jean Dubuffet and Claes Oldenburg, 1959-1962
Volume 29 - Issue 1 - February 2006 Raining, drowning and swimming: Fu Baoshi and water
Volume 29 - Issue 1 - February 2006 Re-visioning the Hopi fourth world: Dan Namingha, indigenous Modernism, and the Hopivotskwani
Volume 29 - Issue 1 - February 2006 Let there be irony: cultural history and media archaeology in parallel lines
Volume 28 - Issue 5 - November 2005 Unfurled
Volume 28 - Issue 5 - November 2005 Re-reading inscriptions in Chinese scroll painting: the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries Volume 28 - Issue 5 - November 2005 The imaginative dimension of an early eighteenth-century garden: Wentworth Castle
Volume 28 - Issue 5 - November 2005 Faith in materials: Christ Giving the Keys to Saint Peter by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Volume 28 - Issue 5 - November 2005 Giving up on history? Challenges to the hierarchy of the genres in early nineteenth-century France
Volume 28 - Issue 5 - November 2005 Henri Labrouste and the lure of the real: romanticism, rationalism and the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève
Volume 28 - Issue 5 - November 2005 Something is happening
Volume 28 - Issue 5 - November 2005 Le Voyageur : the perfect traveller
Volume 28 - Issue 5 - November 2005 Altarpieces and agency: the altarpiece of the Society of the Purification and its 'invisible skein of relations'
Volume 28 - Number 4 - September 2005 Inside/Interiors: Chardin's images of the family
Volume 28 - Number 4 - September 2005 Patterns of attention: from shop windows to gallery rooms in early twentieth century Berlin
Volume 28 - Number 4 - September 2005 Subject of history? Anna Wetherill Olmsted and the Ceramic National exhibitions in 1930s USA
Volume 28 - Number 4 - September 2005 Art history and cultural difference: Alfred Gell's anthropology of art Volume 28 - Number 4 - September 2005 |
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