(2021). Title Page. The Art Bulletin: Vol. 103, No. 1, pp. 1-1.

(2021). Editorial Board and Information for Authors. The Art Bulletin: Vol. 103, No. 1, pp. 2-2.

(2021). Message from CAA Executive Director. The Art Bulletin: Vol. 103, No. 1, pp. 3-3.

(2021). Table of Contents. The Art Bulletin: Vol. 103, No. 1, pp. 4-5.

(2021). Art and Time. The Art Bulletin: Vol. 103, No. 1, pp. 6-6.

Abstract The all-embracive frescoes in the crypt of Anagni Cathedral required viewers to practice multisensory forms of beholding that combined bodily movements with sight, memory, and intellect. The crypt’s viewing conditions generated distinct relationships of interdependency between paintings and beholders, which were thematically reflected in the mural’s complex visual program, whose representations

It is frequently recounted that shortly before Michelangelo died, the eighty-eight-year-old artist sat before a fire and burned many drawings. Critical examination reveals various motivations for such a destructive act and elicits suggestions for what Michelangelo might have burned. Mainly because of old age and significant changes in his artistic practice, Michelangelo made far fewer drawings in his

ABSTRACT What was the race from which Christ sprang? Victorian artists, ethnographers, and theologians were preoccupied with locating Christ’s racial origins. Evidence of this religiously motivated genealogical search can be found in portrayals of the so-called Jewish race in nineteenth-century paintings of biblical scenes, such as William Holman Hunt’s The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1854–55)

Abstract Russian Futurist David Burliuk (1882–1967) and Japanese Futurist Kinoshita Shūichirō (1896–1991) were major agents in shaping Futurism in the early 1920s in Japan. The two artists organized exhibitions of the Futurist Art Association and delivered lectures on new art; furthermore, Kinoshita published the Futurist statement “Awaken! Friends! To Fellows of the Futurist Art Association” (1922)

Abstract Inspired by dialogue with Sergei Eisenstein, David Alfaro Siqueiros applied the principles of material dialectics to art’s production, aesthetics, and reception. Central to his experiments was the use of linear perspective and its ancillary, anamorphosis. Siqueiros, like Erwin Panofsky, understood perspective to have both psychological and symbolic potentials and developed an aesthetics of

(2021). Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa, edited by Kathleen Bickford Berzock. The Art Bulletin: Vol. 103, No. 1, pp. 140-146.

(2021). The Endless Periphery: Toward a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto’s Italy, by Stephen J. Campbell. The Art Bulletin: Vol. 103, No. 1, pp. 146-149.

(2021). Flowering Plums and Curio Cabinets: The Culture of Objects in Late Chosŏn Korean Art by Sunglim Kim. The Art Bulletin: Vol. 103, No. 1, pp. 149-153.

(2021). Addendum. The Art Bulletin: Vol. 103, No. 1, pp. 156-156.

Abstract Edgar Degas’s stay in New Orleans in 1872–73, which marked his only visit to the New World, resulted in two remarkable paintings of a cotton office. Linking Southern cotton to the French textiles he frequently depicted and to his works’ paper supports demonstrates the centrality of the material to the artist’s corpus. More broadly, Degas’s cotton office paintings, as well as drawings and letters

There is a relatively unexplored corpus of papyrus drawings made for and used by artisans engaged in the production of textiles in late Roman Egypt. The intentional indeterminacy in such sketches enabled both artistic flexibility and replicative (if not mass) production. An understanding of their employment in the fabrication of items both functional and decorative bears on far-reaching questions concerning

Marisol’s assemblage The Generals (1961–62) assumes a guise of well-worn signifiers of midcentury US patriotic masculinity: equestrian statue, founding father, soldier, and cowboy. At the same time, this sculpture of George Washington and Simón Bolívar on a single horse invokes the very forces Cold Warriors vilified as un-American threats at home and abroad: homoeroticism and Latin American dissent

Odilon Redon admired Paul Gauguin’s use of color, which he called color “derived from that of an other.” A distinctly foreign (as opposed to French) palette is central to both artists’ work, which features striking, nonmimetic colors. Both were reacting against Neo-Impressionist color theory as well as color theorist Charles Blanc’s xenophobic statements about the corrupting influence of color on French

In March 1865, Dante Gabriel Rossetti encountered a black child in London. One year later, a portrait of this child appeared as an attendant figure in his painting The Beloved (1865–66). The context of the artist’s engagements with black subjects and Victorian-era discourses of abolition, race, minstrelsy, sexuality, and labor illuminates his search for this child, as well as the treatment of his portrait

Inspired by Hiram Powers’s successful Greek Slave, John Bell debuted The Octoroon at the 1868 Royal Academy exhibition. However, the mobilization of narrative that made Powers’s sculpture acceptable was not applicable for The Octoroon. Instead, racial difference made all the difference, prompting viewers to read the figure’s cold, white marble as hot, sensuous flesh. Bell’s sculpture reflects Victorian

The Impressionist instant was clocked at the center of modern painting at a moment of profound shifts in timekeeping norms and practices. A reevaluation of Claude Monet’s 1877 Gare Saint-Lazare campaign is merited in light of the advancements in synchronized, standard, and national time measures (a process known as the “unification of time”), of which the train station was a key instigator. His group

The Russian émigré Pavel Tchelitchew’s Hide-and-Seek (1940–42)—acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1942—has received almost no contemporary consideration despite the interest it garnered in Tchelitchew’s lifetime and his prominence within the transatlantic artistic culture of the interwar years. Beloved by the public, the work has been neglected in histories of modernism. Analysis of

Looming large in the background of this masterful new narrative of relief sculpture in medieval Italy is Erwin Panofsky’s classic essay “Perspective as Symbolic Form” (1927). Whereas Panofsky saw one-point perspective in Renaissance painting as emerging from the reception of Aristotelian natural philosophy by Scholastic writers and experiments in perspective in Gothic art around 1200, Christopher R

The interface between verbal and visual modes of artistic expression is demonstrated in the work of the poet Antonio Bruni and sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Bruni published verse on Apollo and Daphne and the bronze Urban VIII, epitomizing their poetic effects. Conversely, his ode on the transverberation of Saint Teresa by an angel creates a dramatic mise-en-scène that antecedes the amorous conceits

More than two hundred monumental, carved stone crosses survive from medieval Ireland. Art historians have cast them either as romantic survivals from an exotic, pagan past or as scientific specimens requiring classification and categorization by an objective, detached observer. Shifting to focus on the whole iconographic program and drawing from phenomenological methodologies resituate the tenth-century

In July 1764 the critic Friedrich Melchior von Grimm recalled how the late French economist Vincent de Gournay had noted that “we have in France an illness that takes a terrible toll; this illness is called bureaumania.”1 As Ben Kafka has observed in his compelling study of paperwork in eighteenthand nineteenth-century France, when de Gournay labeled the madness as “a fourth or fifth form of government

Carlo Marchionni, distinguished architect of eighteenth-century Rome, populated his renderings with monumental figures unparalleled in the European tradition of architectural draftsmanship, fundamentally altering the form and function of architectural drawing. The culture of civility, in particular the art of civil conversation, marks the corpus of Marchionni. Expressive figures underscore the central

the politics of an attempted coup, a series of political cartoons, postcards, photographs, a telltale railway map of Cody’s tour, Wild West promotional materials, and artistic caricatures of Cody and his masculinist cowboys. Transnational Frontiers functions best at the level of textual analysis and individual encounter. Burns’s research tracing relations between Wild West Indian performers and French

Abstract When the Schnütgen-Museum in Cologne opened as an autonomous institution in 1932, it became the first collection of medieval artifacts presented in a quasi-”white-cube” display. Despite growing scholarly interest in the rise of modernist museum design in Germany and the museumification of medieval heritage, the radically modern mise-en-scène by the museum’s first director, Fritz Witte, has

of an almost pathological sense of “cosmic kingship” indicates one of the strengths of Anderson’s book: his willingness to engage in complicated historical inquiry. While he sticks closely to his theme, he is always aware of the dangers of essentializing or creating too smooth a narrative. As he puts it, his book “focuses as much on differences as on similarities, as much on antagonism as on common

Penelope J. E. Davies’s book is a longawaited synthesis of building activity in Republican Rome and a lucid account of the ways in which architecture was intertwined with politics before the dawn of empire. Republican architecture is often thought of as a simple preamble to the glorious architecture of the imperial period, and its dispersed and sparse remains are seen in isolation and not as part of

Abstract When early modern individuals commissioned portraits, they likely hoped for stable and long-lasting commemoration. However, portraiture was highly mutable, susceptible of acquiring meanings that diverged from its original patrons’ intentions. Later owners often had portraits repainted, transforming them into religious images that combined individual likeness with markers of sanctity. Examination

Elizabeth Alice Honig’s Jan Brueghel and the Senses of Scale opens by simulating for the reader the experience of viewing a very small work on copper by Jan Brueghel. A full-page illustration shows a painting in its actual size (7.2 × 10.2 centimeters, or 27/8 × 4 inches) surrounded by a deep frame. In the image a mouse crouches next to a cut rose set in a blank indeterminate space registered only

A mysterious force capable of binding things as well as people together and a guiding moral principle, the concept of “sympathy” in the late eighteenth century blurred the boundaries between superstition and Enlightenment rationality. What light might this “sympathy” shed on James Cook’s last voyage? What might it say about the induction of artifacts brought back from that voyage into European collections

This issue of The Art Bulletin marks the conclusion of my term as editor-in-chief. As such, it brings with it the temptation to look back through the collective voices of past articles in an attempt to chart the field’s dominant strains. Tracking the course of art historical thinking over the past three years of my editorial tenure, my methodological compass has been steadily pointing toward one direction:

Conservation science has raised a number of epistemological questions. Debates around time-based media and obsolescence have fostered a growing attention to the historiography of conservation. The problems that it has highlighted are vital for considering not only contemporary art but also disciplinary approaches to earlier periods, particularly the Renaissance.

Scholarship about the art of the Dutch golden age has long been characterized by seemingly insurmountable rifts. From the 1960s on, the iconological approach, which discerned hidden meaning even in simple still lifes and landscapes on the basis of emblem books, was pitted against skeptics who felt that the “reading” of Dutch paintings as texts did not do justice to their visual qualities. Whereas this

Throughout the Weimar Republic, the modern realist painters associated with the New Objectivity explored the effects of surface materiality and psychological detachment as they depicted the popular social type of the New Woman looking sachlich—sober, sporty, practical, and functionally dressed. The fashionable surfaces of Lotte Laserstein’s New Woman pictures provide an opportunity to reevaluate Neue

In 1899, a German archaeologist in northern Peru excavated an enigmatic ceramic bottle from an ancient Moche tomb. The vessel’s deathly potato-head chamber is marked by a plethora of human/tuber “eyes” that are further conflated with stones regurgitated from a sea lion’s gut. This replete object, which represents a subject at once human, animal, vegetable, and mineral, bears multiple currents of meaning

In Byzantine studies, the impetus to think about the senses and perception was initiated well over twenty-five years ago, fitting into broader theorizations of visuality and visual studies. During these decades, the other senses have come to the foreground in scholarship focused on material culture that has been closely modeled on how we have studied visuality.1 It is in this context that Bissera V

13. See Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2011); Hillel Schwartz, Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang & Beyond (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2011); Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2010); Peter Krapp, Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture (Minneapolis: University

Long regarded as paradigmatic in histories of modern art in Asia, abstraction assumed new urgency in the hands of ink painters like Jung Tak-young (1937–2012). During the politically and socially turbulent early decades of postwar Korea, Jung played an exemplary role in the Korean emergence of a self-consciously abstract ink painting through sustained experimentation that included rejecting the use

Henri Matisse produced three famous “decorative landscapes” in Tangier in 1912. New documents throw fresh light on the physical and cultural milieu in which they were made. Unpublished photographs of Henri and Amélie Matisse in the grounds of the Senya el Hashti (Villa Brooks), Spanish army maps, and the artist’s letters reveal much about this Anglo-Moroccan heterotopia and the process by which Matisse

11. On the calipers as an image indicating Melancholy’s disrupted activity of creation and measure, see Sohm, “The Limits of Knowledge,” 17–21; and Susan Dackerman, “Dürer’s Melencolia I: An Allegory of Creation,” in Inspired: Essays in Honor of Susan Donahue Kuretsky, ed. Elizabeth Nogrady, Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, and Mia M. Mochizuk (Poughkeepsie, NY: Vassar College, Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center

Contemporary readers may think it a matter of superstition that certain kinds of images and objects through the medieval and Renaissance periods were considered to have transformative powers on their viewers—to have the capacity to convert or redeem, to leave an imprint on the mind or body, to protect lives in times of war and plague, to heal the sick and wounded, and to soothe the soul. In his foundational

In his book 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, Darby English considers a remarkable yet little-known moment in postwar modernism, when a number of artists of color embraced Color Field or, as the author calls it, color painting—the blandly elegant nonobjective art associated with Clement Greenberg’s theory of medium specificity—as a means of asserting not only their freedom to create as individuals

of total naturalism, of the unbelievably and monstrously lifelike.”3 In contrast, it was a writer contemporary with Degas, Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose artistic commitments at this point were suspended between a radical naturalism and a more Symbolist aesthetic, who perhaps best got to the heart of what makes this sculpture, and its sophisticated sculptural experimentation with effects of illusionistic

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin County Civic Center was a major late work that condensed the architect’s ideas about modern bridges in landscapes that he had developed over the previous twenty years. In this, his largest building and most important governmental commission, Wright drew on not only his earlier ideas for bridges but also European modernist bridges in concrete that he had long admired, and

In 1906, Auguste Rodin created more than 150 drawings of the Cambodian Royal Ballet, a troupe brought by King Sisowath to the Colonial Exposition held in Marseille. The drawings’ apparent simplicity belies their complex relations to colonial politics, the Cambodian dance technique, and Rodin’s artistic project. Diffused through the mass media, they both habituated viewers to Rodin’s controversial style

Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (2018) is one of the most successful exhibitions to have been held at the Met Breuer space for modern and contemporary art, and for good reason. In this space, the museum has made something of a specialty of themed shows that cross traditional geographic and chronological boundaries, of which Like Life is a particularly ambitious and notable instance. Its success

The lintels of Yaxchilan Structure 23 are among the most famous of all Maya monuments. Dedicated by Ix K’abal Xook in 726 CE, while her husband Itzamnaaj Bahlam III was the ruler of Yaxchilan, these sculptures are both a tour de force of carving and a powerful demonstration of ancient women’s agency. Yet in their original context, the lintels were hard to see, raising questions about the nature and

During World War II, Georgia O’Keeffe created a series of foreboding paintings of New Mexico’s Bisti Badlands, which she named the “Black Place.” Produced within a wartime image ecosystem in which photographs, films, and cartography vividly communicated the power of air war to obliterate humanity and nature, O’Keeffe’s “Black Place” series grappled with the war’s destruction and shifts in perceptions

Against the backdrop of colonialism, European writers and artists exalted art from Africa, but it was in the midst of the Cold War that midcentury Soviet and American scholars pursued Africanist art histories as distinct academic fields. Their concurrent projects, revealing divergent approaches and methodologies, burgeoned amid international programs and interdisciplinary research climates, in an era

The vast exhibition of Italian art held at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1930 was treated by Francis Haskell in his last book, The Ephemeral Museum (2000). However, the general questions raised by this Anglo-Italian collaboration prompt deeper consideration. The time period covered by this exhibition, the mediums included, and the Renaissance examples chosen all bear further scrutiny, both

Between 1913 and 1914, the connoisseur and Baroque expert Roberto Longhi wrote two texts on the Futurists. Longhi used Heinrich Wölfflin’s formalist categories to explain Futurism’s formal innovation as heir to the Baroque and as the source of a specifically Italian aesthetics. Longhi analyzed the Baroque and Futurism through the tropes of “Latinity” versus “Germanity.” Although he avoided chauvinistic

Serving in Ferrara during World War I, Giorgio de Chirico exchanged his trademark cityscapes for cloistered rooms, stacked with wooden slats and implements, boxes, and biscuits. Pressing fragments close to the picture plane, these “Metaphysical” interiors appear given over to stifling confinement. James Thrall Soby once described them as “still lifes . . . for which the word ‘claustrophobic’ does not

In 1579 Perú’s viceroy sent off a gift to King Philip II in Spain: the Incas’ gold effigy of the dawn-sun (Punčaw), seized from the rebel Inca nobles of Vilcabamba.1 Described by the viceroy as a male figure the size of an infant, the object was likely a work of postcontact cultural improvisation, so much native Andean ideology poured into a sculptural genre made newly potent by European piety: off

Giovanni Battista Falda’s 1676 map of Rome is the most celebrated representation of the city produced during the seventeenth century. It subsumes a vast array of information but is also an exquisite visual image that opens worlds when read as a work of art. Numerous minds and hands went into its making: from Maratti’s figures of Religion and Justice to the aureole of shields containing the publisher’s

Historically and art historically, Italian Renaissance and Baroque art have been our discipline’s foundational fields. From Heinrich Wölfflin to Bernard Berenson to Erwin Panofsky and beyond, one can’t begin to enumerate the many fine scholars in that field. What, then, could be the benefit of an “Italian issue” of The Art Bulletin now? And in what sense could it be more than a return to the preferred

The concept of romanità (Romanness) is used as a framework for exploring the modes of spectatorship elicited by the floor mosaics from the Foro Mussolini’s Piazzale dell’Impero, a space designed by Luigi Moretti and inaugurated in 1937. While the piazzale’s floor mosaics clearly evoked the formal features of ancient Roman pavements, they also resulted in a kinesthetic viewing experience that recalled