Abstract This article interrogates the notion that comics that engage with history do so primarily within the scope of the archive. I argue, instead, that drawing and seeing/reading comics are embodied practices that generate meaning and memory in ways that exceed the discursive logic of the archive. Building on existing scholarship on embodied acts of memory within performance studies, I suggest that

Abstract Emma Stebbins’s untraced statue The Lotus-Eater (c.1857–60) purports to illustrate Alfred Tennyson’s poem of the same title, in turn derived from an episode in the Odyssey of Homer. This essay addresses the tension between Stebbins’s sculpture and Tennyson’s text. It brings to the discussion a body of antique visual and literary material to which Stebbins had access, images of and references

Abstract Late medieval English uroscopy diagrams depict twenty colors of urine in bright, often garish, colors and gold leaf, arranged in correspondence to digestive states. This article argues that the use of color in these diagrams reveals medieval ideas about the perception of color more broadly, and that the images themselves could train practices of comparative looking and visual judgment. Appearing

Abstract The work of Dublin-based painter Lorcan Walshe is particularly concerned with the relationship between inscription in its broadest sense and the visual image. His two related series, The Artefacts Project (2007) and Museum Pieces (2008), engage with Ireland’s precolonial past in search of personal artistic, as well as broader cultural, roots during a period when national narratives were being

Abstract Yves Klein’s conceptual project Theatre of the Void is associated with two well-known works: the single appearance of the newspaper Dimanche, which Klein published on 27 November 1960 with a declaration that the world is voided for twenty-four hours; and the iconic image Leap into the Void, which appears in it for the first time. This article reframes the project—by offering an inclusive,

Abstract Letters written over the course of 1859–60 tell of an effort on Charles Baudelaire’s part to republish Charles Meryon’s Vues sur Paris, augmented with descriptive texts by the poet. The collaboration failed and, ever since, readers have wondered what would have come of it. At the same time, Baudelaire was “courting” Victor Hugo, sending him new and not-quite-new poems dedicated to him. At

Abstract The work of the British poet Christopher Logue is characterized by variation, collaboration, and intermedia projects. His output includes poetry set to jazz, printed poster-poems, public poetry performances, film scripts, collaborations with artists, and translations from Portuguese, German and, most significantly, ancient Greek. War Music, an ‘account of Homer’s Iliad’ according to its subtitle

Abstract In the Middle Ages, the image of a sunbeam passing through glass or crystal was a popular metaphor for explaining Mary’s perpetual virginity. One of the most frequently repeated quotations that employs this metaphor has long been attributed to the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot St Bernard of Clairvaux, which might suggest that the emergent Gothic style contributed to its contemporaneous

Abstract In medieval Greek manuscripts, scribes often compared their completion of the transcription of a codex to a ship reaching a harbor. Scholars have noted that this nautical imagery shaped how poets conceptualized their work as authors, but the harbor metaphor also carried over to metaliterary and ekphrastic passages theorizing the affect of images and the built environment. Thus, a technical

Abstract Historians of Renaissance art have long been familiar with Giovanni Aurelio Augurello’s interest in painting and sculpture, while historians of alchemy are aware of his lifelong dedication to the gold-making art immortalized in his masterpiece, Chrysopoeia (1515). Yet the problem of how these interests intersect in the poet’s work has either been disregarded or framed within outdated categories

Abstract Can a writer be considered a visual humorist? If words are the writer’s primary material, can they be bent into caricatural or grotesque formations? Through what filters must words be processed or mediated for comic pictures to emerge? This article seeks to answer these questions by focusing on an understudied short story that Mark Twain wrote in Florence, Italy: “Italian Without a Master

Abstract This study attends to the historical dimensions of the Mexica (or “Aztec”) festival known as the New Fire Ceremony, a ritual that took place every fifty-two years in pre-Columbian central Mexico. The New Fire Ceremony is most often discussed in terms of cosmic renewal and calendrical cycles. This article seeks to situate its cyclically recurring rites within the web of Mexican history, as

Abstract The participation of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus in the imperial triumph of 71 CE at Rome, following the subjugation of Judaea, is a matter of debate; but his account in the Bellum Judaicum along with the relief on the interior south wall of the Arch of Titus document the event for posterity. While Josephus wrote immediately following the Flavian triumph, the completion of the monument

Abstract In 1992, Anne Carson published Short Talks, her first book of poetry. According to her, the book was initially conceived as a collection of drawings. In the process of its being creafted, however, the titles for these drawings gradually expanded until they became forty-five prose poems that ended up displacing the drawings from the final publication. Such displacement not only marked the beginning

Abstract One of South America’s most popular poets, Alfonsina Storni is primarily known for verses of love and passion. During her lifetime, Storni also wrote as a newspaper columnist under the pseudonym Tao Lao. Storni’s association with film has primarily been discussed as part of her friendship with author and cinephile Horacio Quiroga but translations and analyses of Storni’s film-poems, mainly

Abstract Bakemonogatari (Monster Story) is a 2009 television anime (Japanese animation) produced by Studio Shaft and directed by Shinbō Akiyuki. To the plot and clever dialogue of the novels on which the show is based, the anime adds several striking filmic elements which create an entirely new layer of expression. Most notable among these elements is the profuse and reflexive use of text on the screen

Abstract Le présent article expose comment les discours sur l’art de la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle édifièrent une conception canonique du pastel. Offrant un cadre conceptuel qui historicise la notion de spécificité des médiums, il détaille les propriétés que les écrits techniques, critiques et encyclopédiques attribuèrent au pastel autour des années 1750–1790. À la fois exploration méthodologique

Abstract In 1912, Wassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866–1944) published a limited edition of Sounds (Klänge), an illustrated book of poems that applied many of the theories discussed in his publication On the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1911). In Sounds, Kandinsky strove to train readers to sensorially perceive images hidden in visual and verbal abstraction. In both word and image

Abstract At the turn of the fifteenth century, architectural ethics acquired renewed prominence in England. A long-established discourse that had been developed by major figures in Europe’s intellectual history, and that threatened to reject all but the most utilitarian church-building projects, was given new energy, as well as a new English vocabulary and a newly extensive application, in heretical

Abstract After the Early Christian period, the practice of depicting Christ’s chest stigma on the right-hand side of his upper torso was an established component of stigmata iconography. Thereafter, this tradition was consistently followed in painted images of stigmatic saints—most notably in representations of St Francis of Assisi. St Catherine of Siena (1357–80) also bore the stigmata, and when her

Abstract In 1855, the Pre-Raphaelite artist–poet Elizabeth Siddal was invited to examine John Ruskin’s collection of medieval manuscripts. Two years later, a manuscript—a Book of Hours, the popular late medieval prayer-book—appeared in Siddal’s painting Clerk Saunders. Siddal’s decision to include a Book of Hours in a scene from a medieval ballad encourages us to explore the painting’s creative strategies

Abstract This article addresses the experimental Detroit-based publisher known as the Alternative Press, which published eccentric works of art and poetry—in the form of bumper stickers and postcards, among other useful objects—between 1969 and 1999. While the Alternative Press is largely unknown to scholars, this article traces its influences on poets, including Victor Hernández Cruz, Robert Creeley

Abstract This article examines how early herbals were produced and illustrated, with a focus on the relationship between the design of the page and that of the production system. It shows that most surviving ancient illustrated herbals were illustrated prior to the copying of the text and thereby privileged the transfer of visual over verbal content. Over the course of the sixth century, however, we

Abstract Geoffrey Hill’s approaches to memorializing the Holocaust in his poetry have been widely examined for his innovative, self-conscious, elegiac practice and their embodiment of the anxieties of the postmemorial witness. His 1998 book-length poem The Triumph of Love attempts to bear witness to the trauma of the Holocaust through numerous cross-cutting and argumentative sections which meditate

Abstract Recent scholarship on journals produced by postwar Italian avant-gardes has focused on artists’ use of publications to engage with aesthetic constructions of international and global modernisms after Fascist isolation. This scholarship, however, has not yet accounted for the different models of internationalism articulated in these publications, especially in those based outside of Italy’s

Abstract This special issue on French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) brings together essays by curators and scholars who have spent time in her Archive, located next to the artist’s home in New York. This article presents the special issue and how it regroups contributions by authors who share the same object of study but who are rarely brought into dialogue with each other. They range

Abstract The Louise Bourgeois Archive (LBA) was established by The Easton Foundation, a charitable and non-profit organization put in place more than thirty years ago by the artist Louise Bourgeois. Since her death in 2010, the Foundation exists as two spaces that are simultaneously distinct and interlinked: one is the former artist’s home and studio and the other, housed in the building next door

Résumé Cet essai offre une vue d’ensemble des archives de Louise Bourgeois et développe une typologie des différents documents qui s’y trouvent. Des journaux intimes, que l’artiste Louise Bourgeois commence à utiliser à l’âge de onze ans et qu’elle continue à écrire durant toute sa vie, aux écrits psychanalytiques des années 1952–1966 découverts au début des années 2000, aux papiers administratifs

Résumé L’ouverture des archives privées de Louise Bourgeois aux chercheurs a joué un grand rôle dans la découverte de l’influence de la psychanalyse sur son œuvre. Mais ses archives offrent des possibilités de découvertes en dehors du champ psychanalytique. En effet, dans les nombreux entretiens qu’elle accorde à partir des années 1980, Bourgeois racontera beaucoup d’anecdotes sur son enfance et sa

Abstract This essay focuses on a current project: to publish a selection of letters between the artist Louise Bourgeois and her husband, art historian Robert Goldwater. A detailed account is provided of an archival object of study, describing a corpus of letters in quantitative and material terms, as well as reporting on the various personal circumstances and historical events to which they refer.

Abstract Critics have become increasingly cognisant of the limitations of interpreting Louise Bourgeois’s artworks through the lens of autobiographical and psychoanalytic narratives, preferring a focus on their form. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss the function of these narratives in her œuvre altogether, for a study of the archival material reveals a different use of narrativity that is

Abstract Through a focus on ‘Moi, Eugénie Grandet’, one of the last exhibitions Louise Bourgeois worked on before her death in 2010, this article explores the artist’s writings, both public and private, and her interactions with writers, to assess the potentially literary nature of her written and visual works. Arguing that Bourgeois’s dialogues with Honoré de Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet is a contemporary

Abstract Eighteenth-century American periodicals utilized depictions of taverns and coffee houses to aid subscribers in their navigation of complex political environments. Many eighteenth-century artists and publishers drew upon public knowledge of the significance of small variations in drinking habits, imported beverages, and tavern life as a communication strategy. Public knowledge of, and interest

Abstract This article reads Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial in parallel with Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–16). It sets the novel within the context of the Grünewald revival in France and Germany during the first part of the twentieth century. The revival culminated in a wave of veneration that turned the altarpiece into a symbol of national suffering in the closing days of World War

Abstract Since the early twentieth century, the carved sarcophagus of Alfonso Ansúrez has been considered a central work of Spanish medieval art. Nonetheless, its singular imagery remains enigmatic and its contentious modern history largely unexplored. The late eleventh-century sarcophagus of the young noble Alfonso Ansúrez is both exceptionally clear and frustratingly enigmatic. Inscriptions label

Abstract This article explores the evolving manifestations of Yiddish in the work of contemporary artist Mel Bochner. A founding figure of American conceptual art, Bochner has continuously re-examined the unstable nature of language. Yet, as the following paper will argue, Bochner’s postvernacular invocation of Yiddish calls into crisis this central contention of his work. Beginning with an analysis

Abstract The essay attempts to draw a parallel between the ascetic, negative late modernist aesthetics of Samuel Beckett and Alberto Burri, tracing their post-humanist poetics and artistic practices of impoverishment, achievementlessness and their responses given to the crisis of humanist European culture and of a modernist ethos of mastery in the wake of WW2. It attempts to show how Burri’s works

Abstract Ekphrasis, understood as a metaphor for encounter, serves as a literal vessel for an encounter between Nahua and Spanish worldviews in the illustrated bilingual Spanish and Nahuatl encyclopedia Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (mostly written 1547–78), overseen by Bernardino de Sahagún in collaboration with Nahua scholars. Crucially, the function of ekphrasis—intensified verbal

Abstract The first half of the eighteenth century saw a tendency among early British novelists to frame their fictional narratives with theoretical deliberations that helped to situate their texts within the complex network of fictional taxonomies and conventions. Typically in the form of authorial prefaces, these commentaries were implicitly or explicitly intertextual, invoking other texts and authors

Abstract This article presents a cross-cultural, diachronic, and comparative analysis of the representational aspects of picture-writing through the use of hieroglyphs in ancient Egypt and their revival in early Renaissance Europe. The two phenomena will be discussed with a focus on the functionality of the sign within the non-textual sphere, highlighting such similarities as the glottographic nature

Abstract Whereas the fictiveness of narrative perspective is taken for granted in literature, it also emerges as a salient element in the experiences of pictorial art and architecture as part of a viewer’s internal response to their altered views of reality. Whether a visual technique or a narrative one for shaping the way things are seen, perspective assumes that the conditions of seeing an object

Abstract Andrea Pozzo’s larger, more famous frescoes have tended to supercede his small, 1682 corridor outside St Ignatius Loyola’s private apartments in Rome. And yet, the site is more than just a prelude or footnote to his other, grander works in Mondovi, Rome and Vienna. The corridor stands out because it exploits radical disjunctions between perception and belief, subject and frame, and vision

Abstract As the Narrator in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) explains: “Those little Spaces between our Chapters may be looked upon as an Inn or Resting-Place.” An inn is a prepositional sort of building: it is between here and there; one travels to or from it; it links villages and towns and cities; it is on the road and on the way. Inns became increasingly important in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century

Abstract How was narrative point of view developed through an optical device? In between Richardson’s publication of Pamela in 1740 and Fielding’s publication of Tom Jones in 1749, a device known as the zograscope first appeared in England in 1745. Whether appearing as a tabletop mirror or a wooden box, the zograscope allowed its users to see the world in three dimensions and in color from the comfort

Abstract After the rise of monumental fascist architecture in Europe and the subsequent devastation of the Second World War, architects struggled to come to grips—via writing and design—with what should follow. In the view of architects, artists and cultural critics, monumentality in architecture and urbanism was no longer tenable—tainted as it was by the fascists’ use of classicism, monumental scale

Abstract When I was a boy in St. Louis, Missouri, I grew up across the street from the house of Norris K. Smith, an art historian who taught at Washington University. As I have gotten older, I associate this experience with a picture in Smith’s last book–a book about Renaissance perspective and a kind of career summation he published in 1994 called Here I Stand: Perspective from Another Point of View

Abstract The dominant practice in Western map studies has been to consider maps as “sovereign,” that is, as individual images separated from the material context of their production, circulation, and consumption. Book studies, also, have generally overlooked maps when considering graphic elements such as engravings and photographs. Yet many maps are located within, and contribute to, the larger arguments

Abstract Contemporary lyric series deploy many strategies from forensic (courtroom) rhetoric to persuade their readers that an injustice has taken place. Ekphrasis is one of the primary overlapping strategies in both forensic rhetoric and the lyric, documenting what cannot be seen, what has been lost, or framing an object to serve persuasive ends. Returning to ancient definitions of ekphrasis as any

Abstract The adaptation of texts by contemporary British-Somali poet Warsan Shire for Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade, released in 2016, raises several questions about poetic representation in the twenty-first-century mediascape. Shire’s poems, which have been composed for a variety of media, ranging from print distribution to audio recordings to online circulation, serve as transitions between the

Abstract The Poliorcetica (Vat. gr. 1605) is a Byzantine treatise on siege warfare, composed by the so-called Heron of Byzantium, which was illuminated with drawings and schematics for the construction and use of military tools and structures in the eleventh century. Using an object-oriented lens, this article looks closely at the word-image relations used by the Poliorcetica’s author to engage the

Abstract Dorothea Tanning’s painting Fatala (1947) reveals a solitary female figure reaching her hand through a door. This borrows plainly from an artist renowned for rendering women as statues or storefront mannequins: the Greek-born Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, whose early corpus formed one of Surrealism’s most prominent—and fraught—precedents. Yet Tanning’s canvas also conjures up another

Abstract The closely interrelated enterprises in the humanistic world of the Republic of Letters, especially in the production of emblem books, created collaborations between artists and scholars. The production of emblem books, with their characteristic interplay between word and image, creates a place where humanists and artists could meet. Consequently, not only did men of letters use pictorial

Abstract Best known as a caricaturist who skewered the politicians and social mores of nineteenth-century France, Honoré Daumier also had a deep and abiding engagement with the seventeenth-century playwright Molière. This article examines Daumier’s paintings of Molière’s plays Le Malade imaginaire (1673) and Les Fourberies de Scapin (1671), initiated shortly after Daumier was fired from a thirty-year

(2021). The French fragment. Word & Image: Vol. 37, The French Fragment from Revolution to Belle Époque, pp. 1-5.

Abstract This essay uses the work of the French artist Antoine-Jean Gros as a prompt to reconsider the means by which historical meaning was narrated and disseminated in Napoleonic France, analysing several interrelated pictorial, discursive, and material practices. It proposes that several of Gros’s large-scale paintings participated in an early nineteenth-century model of historical meaning that

Abstract The Sèvres porcelain Service des Départements (begun 1824) was an ambitious attempt to depict the whole of France, including its colonies, on a set of dessert plates. It was conceived as both an encyclopedic account of France’s riches and a way of tangibly offering the nation to its monarch, Charles X. But in the 1820s, France remained a fragmented and disconnected entity. To picture it, the

Abstract With the rise of interest in ancient Mesopotamia in the nineteenth century, the lamassu, the human-headed winged bull that guarded many Assyrian palace entrances, occupied a unique position in the popular imagination. As a signifier of an ancient civilization that was being revealed to European audiences for the first time, the lamassu embodied multiple discourses of fragmentation with respect

Abstract Henri Zerner and Charles Rosen’s meditation on the significance of the Romantic “fragment” is followed a few pages later by a passing reference to Alexander Cozens’s A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (1785–86). They do not elaborate on the treatise’s relevance for their argument, except to observe that Cozens’s “blots” show an early engagement

ABSTRACT Soon after his move, in 1855, to the Channel island of Guernsey, Victor Hugo bought a large house, which he called Hauteville House after the quarter of Saint Peter Port in which it was located. Over the next six years, he led a massive decoration campaign, during which he transformed the interior of the house into what many contemporaries saw as an ultimate form of self-expression. One of

ABSTRACT This article identifies a group of paintings by Edgar Degas as “bureau pictures,” representations of workplaces, creative or commercial, in which piles of paper are spread on desks. Through his depiction of paper, as well as his affective casting of the way in which human figures relate to their piles of paper, Degas explores the intertwined gestures of creative and bureaucratic labor. Paper’s