The wall paintings in the Crusader church in Abu Gosh were conserved and restored in two different operations in the last thirty years. While the conservation revealed new iconographies of the original wall paintings, the restoration added and changed details. The discernment between the two allows us once again to discuss the meaning of the original Crusader decoration program as a whole. This article argues that the frescoes decorating the church reference a set of prominent sacred places in the Holy (...) Land, and suggests an interpretation of the murals in regard to the holy place to which it is linked and to the edifice it adorns. (shrink)

This last part of the study of materials and techniques used in Minoan wall-painting discusses the execution of the actual decoration itself. After a brief reminder of our knowledge of the status of the artist and his principal tools, the main stages of the process of execution are described. It thus appears that the number and connection of these différent phases, as well as the painting techniques themselves, depend on the nature of medium used: chalk or cernent. For (...) the identification of the latter, the author proposes a new method, combining macro- and microscopic observations, and using physico-chemical characterisation analyses. (shrink)

Cretan icons often displayed a precious decoration of golden halos with incised, stippled, and/or impressed designs. The present study points out that these motifs should not be interpreted as manifestations of nostalgic and anachronistic attitudes on the part of post-Byzantine painters working in Candia for Greek Orthodox and Catholic clients. Rather, they appear already in several early Cretan works dating around 1400, which took inspiration from technical devices and ornamental motifs worked out in the workshops of Venice during the second (...) half of the fourteenth century and appropriated in icon painting probably through the mediation of mixed-style works produced in both the lagoon region and Venetian-ruled Candia. (shrink)

St Joachim and St Anne Meeting at the Golden Gate, painted by Eugenio Cajés between 1604 and 1605, is the sole remnant of a major commission for the Cercito chapel in the church of San Felipe el Real in Madrid. The painting has been praised by modern critics, who have drawn attention to the painter’s emulation of Italian artistic precedents. Illuminating as this appraisal may be, such an approach does not explain why the patrons chose an iconographic subject (...) that had become increasingly rare, especially since the traditional association of the Meeting with the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin had been questioned in the late sixteenth century. Above all, focussing on the painting’s style fails to take into account the specific context for which this painting was conceived. As it happens, the Cercito family chapel was dedicated to a very particular cult, that of the Holy Child of La Guardia, the purported victim of one of the most notorious blood libels in late medieval Spain. The purpose of the present study is to redress the previous art-historical oversight with regard to this painting, through an in-depth study of the artistic, devotional and socio-cultural significance of the Meeting at the Golden Gate in seventeenth-century Madrid. An analysis of the extensive and to date unpublished archival documentation for the commission makes it possible to reconstruct key elements of the lost chapel. These sources, when read together with devotional texts that circulated at the time, reveal the personal motives that underpinned the foundation and decoration of the Cercito chapel. The reconstruction of the Cercito chapel proposed in this article offers a new perspective on the way in which religious art engaged with the tensions prompted by the issue of the purity of blood, as well as with anxieties related to family and procreation. (shrink)

Stoicism was one of the new philosophical movements of the Hellenistic period. The name derives from the porch (stoa poikilê) in the Agora at Athens decorated with mural paintings, where the members of the school congregated, and their lectures were held. Unlike ‘epicurean,’ the sense of the English adjective ‘stoical’ is not utterly misleading with regard to its philosophical origins. The Stoics did, in fact, hold that emotions like fear or envy (or impassioned sexual attachments, or passionate love of (...) anything whatsoever) either were, or arose from, false judgements and that the sage—a person who had attained moral and intellectual perfection—would not undergo them. The later Stoics of Roman Imperial times, Seneca and Epictetus, emphasise the doctrines (already central to the early Stoics' teachings) that the sage is utterly immune to misfortune and that virtue is sufficient for happiness. Our phrase ‘stoic calm’ perhaps encapsulates the general drift of these claims. It does not, however, hint at the even more radical ethical views which the Stoics defended, e.g. that only the sage is free while all others are slaves, or that all those who are morally vicious are equally so. Though it seems clear that some Stoics took a kind of perverse joy in advocating views which seem so at odds with common sense, they did not do so simply to shock. Stoic ethics achieves a certain plausibility within the context of their physical theory and psychology, and within the framework of Greek ethical theory as that was handed down to them from Plato and Aristotle. It seems that they were well aware of the mutually interdependent nature of their philosophical views, likening philosophy itself to a living animal in which logic is bones and sinews; ethics and physics, the flesh and the soul respectively (another version reverses this assignment, making ethics the.. (shrink)

One of the most extensive ensembles of twelfth-century mural painting still extant in France has recently been reconstituted in the Church of Saint-Silvain at Chalivoy-Milon , a small village located about forty kilometers southwest of Bourges. During the late 1970s and 1980s, conservation work carried out under the auspices of Monuments Historiques recovered the entire chevet program , a portion of which was first discovered in February 1868. The stunning exposure of a complex, predominantly Christological cycle at Chalivoy-Milon (...) sparked my interest in nineteenth-century reports of painted decoration once visible in the nave. That lost painting is the focus of the present study. (shrink)

The lavra of Ot’kht’a Eklesia and its twin monastery at Parkhali are located in an isolated, mountainous area of present-day north-east Turkey, which, in the ninth-tenth century, gradually emerged as the politically de facto independent kingdom of Tao-Klarjet’i and as a stronghold of Georgian culture. Both lavras were established on the steep slopes of valleys carved by the tributaries of the Çoruh (Č’orox’i) river by Georgian monks seeking for those “deserts” that, in their opinion, God had reserved to them since (...) the Creation of the world. Thanks to the support of David iii the Curopalates, the churches of Ot’kht’a and Parkhali erected in monumental dimensions and lavishly decorated with a complex, almost identical program of mural paintings in the apses. The present paper aims to show to what extent images could reflect the monastic view of their relationship with the natural world in terms of Biblical allegorism. In particular, it lays emphasis on the multi-layered symbolism associated with the “Holy Zion” - notion and the different ritual, performative, and visual strategies whereby site-bound holiness came to be materially evoked. (shrink)

Existem perto de 140 monumentos portugueses que ainda conservam pintura mural realizada entre os finais do século XV e os meados do século XVI. Por vicissitudes históricas diversas, a distribuição destes monumentos pelo território nacional é muito desigual, verificando-se uma concentração em templos rurais situados sobretudo no território de Entre-Douro-e- -Minho (c. 30%), em Trás-os-Montes (c. 25%) e na Beira Interior (c. 20%).A análise da iconografia destas pinturas permite tirar várias conclusões a respeito das principais devoções da época. Verifica-se (...) que São Sebastião era o santo mais representado, seguido por Santo António (de Pádua), Santa Catarina, São Pedro, São Miguel, São João Baptista e São Tiago, ao mesmo tempo que apenas a Anunciação e o Calvário têm uma representatividade equiparável à dos santos mencionados. Também é possível concluir que a preferência pelos santos referidos não estava dependente da invocação dos templos. Conclui-se, igualmente, que existe uma nítida diferenciação entre as imagens sacras representadas na zona dos templos cujo cuidado pertencia aos fregueses, a nave, e a zona sob a responsabilidade dos padroeiros, a cabeceira. Nesta comunicação pretende-se explicar quais os motivos que justificam a preeminência da representação de determinadas figuras do hagiológio cristão durante o período em causa, bem como a ausência de outras cuja presença seria expectável. Pretende-se explicar também as razões que ditam a diferenciação entre a iconografia das cabeceiras e a iconografia das paredes da nave. A análise conjugada destes dados permite trazer alguma luz sobre os motivos que justificam as principais devoções dos portugueses da época, sobretudo os que viviam em ambientes rurais. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art Education and the Emergence of Radical Art Movements in Egypt: The Surrealists and the Contemporary Arts Group, 1938–1951Patrick Kane (bio)So it wasn’t the aim of the artist to just toss out a work of art. A tradition of the exhibition of the natural, and its meaning was not that it fled from life, but that it had penetrated and plunged into reality. Its meaning was not a prescription (...) or plain exercise in the taste of the sublime, or harmony of forms and charming scenes; and its meaning was not as a decoration of life; it was in its expression of what life inspires in us to give back.—Henry Moore, as quoted by Ramses Yunan, in “The Aim of the Contemporary Artist”1In these crucial days of difficulty, the artists in this country live in tall aristocratic towers.... For this peasant has an art of his own that sustains him, and it is not that art of the educated class.—Kamil Al-Tilmisani (c. 1941–1942)By 1938, as the agrarian crisis in Egypt deepened, the Depression, food shortages, low wages, expropriations of crops, and forced rents opened a polemic among Egyptian intellectuals over the role of the state and the looming threat of fascism. With the dismissal of the government of Mustafa Al-Nahas at the end of 1937, the political turbulence underscored the weakening of the Wafd Party. Opponents of the old Wafdists and supporters of the monarchy resorted to openly fascist tactics, including the establishment of youth organizations and the Blue Shirts, the fascist front of the young Wafdists who modeled themselves on Mussolini’s Black Shirts. The serial crises of agrarian struggles and parliamentary stalemates between [End Page 95] nationalists and monarchists led to increasingly militant stances by the paramilitary fascist organization Misr Al-Fattah (Young Egypt) as a counter to the Muslim Brothers. When Mahmud Khalil resigned from the Wafd and assumed the presidency of the Senate in 1938, his ascension opened a new phase of struggle in politics through culture and the arts.2 In this context, caricatures and satirical sculptures of Khalil appeared in 1939 that parodied him as the icon of a “dictatorship of art.”3 Leading intellectuals from all political stances addressed these issues directly. The cultural journals were peppered with articles on the problems of everyday life and the material crises with such representative titles as ‘Abbas al-Aqqad’s “Food for the Rich,” in which he raised the problem of food shortages and inequity as an issue for reform.4 Within the year, articles in Al-Risala and Al-Thaqafa drew comparisons with French and Italian nineteenth-century landscapes as a model for the recognition of the countryside as a subject. In journalism and the arts, suffering became a part of the recognition of the everyday, as articles appeared on Millet’s nineteenth-century paintings of French peasants.As the war in Europe encroached into the cover pages of Egypt’s cultural journals, Zaki Muhammad Hasan wrote an essay for Al-Thaqafa entitled “The Angelus,” with a reproduction of the 1859 painting by Jean Francois Millet (1814–1874).5 Hasan wrote about Millet’s interest in the “the daily labors of the peasant” as a depiction of the conditions of French peasants. Hasan’s mention of Millet’s own peasant origins, and his listing of paintings of social conditions, including Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners), reflected a broadening interest in the artistic subject of the peasant and the rise of the peasant as artist. Although in Millet’s painting there is a prayer scene of a man and a woman in the fields that is generally regarded as the evening prayer with the sun setting, an Egyptian reader could link the prayer with the issue of workers taking breaks in the fields at a time when the issue of compensation of peasant farm workers was paramount.6 Hasan introduced “The Angelus” to his readers as a Catholic prayer in southern Europe offered at dawn, noon, and sunset and compared the origins of the prayer’s stanzas from the Gospel of Luke 1:28–31 with passages from the chapter on Maryam in the Quran... (shrink)

This dissertation investigates how art, truth, and politics are tightly integrated in Raphael's historical narratives in the Stanza d'Eliodoro. ;The first chapter argues for the importance of paying careful attention to pictorial structure--that close analysis of painting can make a strong contribution to the social history of art. The second chapter begins this interpretive path. It first describes the room's decorative ensemble as a whole and how the histories are located within its complex figurative scheme. Then, drawing upon Martin (...) Heidegger's analysis of postmedieval processes of Vorstellung, it defines the pictorial narratives themselves as representations and concludes that as pictorial representations these narratives appear unable to ground the truth of sacred history. ;Chapter 3 focuses on the Expulsion of Heliodorus, a mural replete with self-referential models of both its own mode of authorship and mode of reception. These self-referential cues help define what it means for the Heliodorus to be not only a pictorial representation but more extensively a work of art. It is Raphael's art of representation that shows forth and validates the metaphysical truth of papal history. ;The latter part of Chapter 3 and all of Chapter 4 offer readings of the Heliodorus as well as the three other histories--the Liberation of St. Peter, Mass at Bolsena, and Repulse of Attila--construing them as theologico-political narratives of the divinity of papal power. All four histories express at the level of narrative form the dilemma of the papacy's contemporary political trajectory only for this predicament to find imaginative "resolution" through the movement of the narrative action. This chapter expounds upon the configurations of historical time in the decorative scheme and how this projects the political unconscious of papal desire. Yet the fifth and final chapter concludes that the Eliodoro narratives are not simply collective wishfulfillments but more properly public symbols that rhetorically address a beholder so to persuade him to accept as true the papacy's desired self-image of its own historical mission. Raphael's art of representation was essential towards this end. (shrink)

Form and content give rise to the question of function in the Saletta delle Dame of the Palazzo Salvadego. It is a uniquely decorated space in which frescos cover the four walls, treating the viewer to an all-round vista of the countryside. Mediating between illusion and reality are eight life-size depictions of women in contemporary dress, whom, set in pairs behind a fictive balustrade, focus their attention towards the centre of the room. In the vaulted ceiling are painted musical instruments, (...) suggesting a possible use for this space. The decorative effect is unlike any other room from this period. This chapter explores the imagery of the Saletta and considers its function within the broader context of frescoed Italian Renaissance rooms. (shrink)

Glazed pottery from Nauplion and Argos (AD 12th-13th centuries): preliminary observations The regions of Argos and Nauplion were indissolubly connected in the Byzantine period and afterwards. This study attempts to examine, through the study of the glazed wares, whether the close ties between the two cities during the 12th and 13th centuries are also reflected in the pottery. Many categories of glazed wares (pottery with incised decoration, "Measles Ware", "Zeuxippus Ware", slip-painted ware, Brown and Green painted Ware, Glaze Painted Ware, (...) "Proto-Maiolica", Italian polychrome ware of the RMR type, "Archaic Maiolica") are presented, comparing the evidence of Argos and Akronauplia. These comparisons lead to comments indicating that whereas, during the 12th century, the two sites had contacts with other regions of the Peloponnese and the eastern Mediterranean, due to historical changes during the 13th century there developped the importation of pottery from various regions of Italy. (shrink)

Wallace-Hadrill's reading of spatial hierarchy does not address the representation of gender in mythological paintings. However, a rough survey indicates that the majority are erotic and/or violent. Erotic depictions common on household items suggest that the Romans were sensitive to this content; the likely use of pattern books in selecting programs for domestic decoration suggests a synoptic awareness of it. This points to the applicability of contemporary theories of representation and power, and Mulvey's model of visual pleasure in narrative film (...) is adapted for this paper. According to Mulvey, film offers two pleasures: scopophilia, which presents the woman as aesthetic-erotic fragments, suggesting but concealing her difference ; sadistic voyeurism, which assumes difference and then investigates, punishes, or forgives it. Both are illustrated in paintings of Ariadne abandoned and rediscovered, and in other paintings which portray either the gaze or erotic violence . While these paintings seem to confirm in relation to gender what the rest of the house says about class and status, some paintings confuse the issue. The male body is often fetishized , and attacked ; gender and role are sometimes deliberately ambiguous . Such transgressions of the boundaries of the male body are not a part of Mulvey's theory, and they suggest the use of gender to complicate as well as confirm the class/status message of the house; two different negotiations of this use are found in the House of the Vettii and the House of the Ara Maxima. One can compare reversals and reassertions of gender, class and status in other evidence, in literature, pantomime and the games. (shrink)

Art teaches us not only what to see but what to be.Artists refashion stories with paintbrush and chisel. Their narrations reach back through time to the mysteries of cave painting at Altamira and Lascaux, over seventeen thousand years ago. We no longer know what stories the pictures on those walls were meant to illustrate, but we can try to imagine, even now.1Images speak a different language from words. They tell stories differently. Yet, for many generations, since art history was (...) legitimized as a discipline in American academia, early in the twentieth century2 illustration has been treated with a measure of condescension. Bernard Berenson, among others, intimates, in his Italian Painters of the Renaissance.. (shrink)

This essay draws on Kenneth George's ethnographic study of the Indonesian painter Abdul Djalil Pirous and his art, as well as Pirous's own characterizations of his paintings as “spiritual notes,” to theorize and examine how paintings serve as ethical media. The essay offers a provisional definition of and methodology for “visual ethics” and considers how pictures and language can function quite differently as sites for ethical reflection. The particular painting analyzed here is a large temple mural of the (...) death of the Buddha located at Wat Unnalom, a prominent Buddhist monastery in Phnom Penh, painted in the 1980s by Cambodian artist Sum Pon. After discussing the lifeworld of Pon's Mahāparinibbāna and varied Khmer Buddhist interpretations of the painting, I suggest that the painting's rendering of “moral vision” helps us understand Buddhist ways of seeing more generally. I conclude by returning to George's question about how our understanding of ethics would change if we took pictures as the “fulcrum of moral relationships,” arguing that pictures can embody certain kinds of tensions or paradoxes that are difficult to explain and grasp discursively, such as paradoxes that arise from the inevitability and yet inexplicability of death as well as the tensions between Buddhist aims of cultivating “boundless” love and the particularities of our own individual experiences of love. (shrink)

Deleuze’s philosophy of painting can be seen to pose certain challenges to a phenomenological approach to philosophy. While a phenomenological response to Deleuze’s philosophy is clearly needed, I show in this article how an approach taken in a recent paper by Christian Lotz proves inadequate. Lotz argues that through Deleuze’s refusal to accept the place of representation in art, he is unable to distinguish art from decoration, or to give a coherent account of how the content of art can (...) be represented. I show that this criticism emerges from a misreading of the place of representation in Deleuze’s philosophy. I will argue that by failing to take account of some of the key features of Deleuze’s wider ontology, such as the importance of both the virtual and the actual for his analysis of objects, Lotz’s critique proves unsuccessful. In particular, I want to show that Lotz’s criticisms rest on a failure to attend to the systematic nature of Deleuze’s philosophy, and in particular, the place of Deleuze’s analysis of Bacon within the system as a whole. I will further show that Lotz’s phenomenological defence commits the fallacy of petitio principii, assuming the validity of the phenomenological method in order to justify the phenomenological approach. (shrink)

In The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens Dr. Pickard-Cambridge includes a most useful and convenient collection of south Italian vase-paintings which have been held to throw light on the stage-settings of Greek tragedy. He concludes that they give no evidence for Athens in the fifth century and in particular do not justify the assumption that interior scenes were played in a porch in front of the central door. The second conclusion is true, but some of the vases do show (...) that the central doors could be thrown wide open to display an interior scene. The first conclusion is formally correct, but it should be remembered that the “plays came from Athens, and it is at least possible that the south Italian producers modelled themselves on Athenian producers. In any case these vases are worthy of further consideration. (shrink)

In 1233 a certain R. Joseph bar Moses of Würzburg commissioned an illuminated copy of Rashi's Bible commentary, now in Munich. After the text was finished, the task of illuminating was put into the hands of a Christian painter, apparently a man named Heinrich, who kept a lay workshop in Würzburg . Three years later a giant Bible, now in Milan, was commissioned perhaps by the same patron, but not necessarily in the same city . It, too, was illuminated; this (...) time, however, it cannot be excluded that the paintings were made by Jewish artists. Both manuscripts are richly decorated with narrative scenes involving human figures. In the following decades it became more and more customary for wealthy Jews of Germany and northern France to have their Bibles, prayer books, and other texts adorned with figural miniatures. Yet there is no evidence that during the Middle Ages human figures were painted in any form in a Jewish context before the 1230s. A few textual references from the twelfth century indicate wall paintings and stained-glass windows in synagogues with images of animals and dragons, but none have survived. Some decades after the first illuminated books made their appearance, the most outstanding authority on religious law of his time, R. Meir ben Barukh of Rothenburg , was asked his opinion of this phenomenon. R. Meir was worried, as his reply shows, but not for reasons of religious law; his concern was that images in painted books would distract believers from their pious concentration during prayer. (shrink)

This essay develops a critical interpretation of Gadamer’s account of Renaissance painting. My point of departure is a brief reference in Truth and Method to Leon Battista Alberti, the Italian Renaissance humanist who developed an influential mathematical theory of perspective in painting. Through an explication of Gadamer’s critique of Alberti and of perspective generally, I argue that what is ultimately at stake in Gadamer’s confrontation with Alberti is Gadamer’s opposition to relativism and subjectivism and his downgrading of (...) the importance of the artistic medium for evaluating the truth-claim of an artwork. Against the theory of perspective, Gadamer contends that artworks make substantive claims to truth to which we interpretatively respond. By emphasizing this theme, our discussion resonates with contemporary “hermeneutical realism.”. (shrink)

In the first centuries BCE and CE, Roman wall painters frequently placed representations of works of art, especially panel paintings, within their own mural compositions. Nathaniel B. Jones argues that the depiction of panel painting within mural ensembles functioned as a meta-pictorial reflection on the practice and status of painting itself. This phenomenon provides crucial visual evidence for both the reception of Greek culture and the interconnected ethical and aesthetic values of art in the Roman world. (...) Roman meta-pictures, this book reveals, not only navigated social debates on the production and consumption of art, but also created space on the Roman wall for new modes of expression relating to pictorial genres, the role of medium in artistic practice, and the history of painting. Richly illustrated, the volume will be important for anyone interested in the social, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of artworks, in the ancient Mediterranean and beyond. (shrink)

In 2008, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon acquired a painting called The Flight into Egypt which was attributed to the French artist Nicolas Poussin. Thought to have been painted in 1657, the painting had gone missing for more than three centuries. Several versions were rediscovered in the 1980s and one was passed from hand to hand, from a family who had no idea of its value to gallery owners and eventually to the museum. A painting that (...) had been sold as a decorative object in 1986 for around 12,000 euros was acquired two decades later by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon for 17 million euros. What does this remarkable story tell us about the nature of art and the way that it is valued? How is it that what seemed to be just an ordinary canvas could be transformed into a masterpiece, that a decorative object could become a national treasure? This is a story permeated by social magic the social alchemy that transforms lead into gold, the ordinary into the extraordinary, the profane into the sacred. Focusing on this extraordinary case, Bernard Lahire lays bare the beliefs and social processes that underpin the creation of a masterpiece. Like a detective piecing together the clues in an unsolved mystery he carefully reconstructs the steps that led from the same material object being treated as a copy of insignificant value to being endowed with the status of a highly-prized painting commanding a record-breaking price. He thereby shows that a painting is never just a painting, and is always more than a piece of stretched canvass to which brush strokes of paint have been applied: this object, and the value we attach to it, is also the product of a complex array of social processes – with its distinctive institutions and experts – that lies behind it. And through the history of this painting, Lahire uncovers some of the fundamental structures of our social world. For the social magic that can transform a painting from a simple copy into a masterpiece is similar to the social magic that is present throughout our societies, in economics and politics as much as art and religion, a magic that results from the spell cast by power on those who tacitly recognize its authority. By following the trail of a single work of art, Lahire interrogates the foundations on which our perceptions of value and our belief in institutions rest and exposes the forms of domination which lie hidden behind our admiration of works of art. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.3 (2005) 115-120 [Access article in PDF] Commentary Seeing Cultural Conflicts Some years ago the great intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin made an important statement about what has become known as multiculturalism: We are urged to look upon life as affording a plurality of values, equally genuine, equally ultimate, above all equally objective; incapable, therefore, of being ordered in a timeless hierarchy, or judged in (...) terms of some one absolute standard.1He distinguishes such pluralism from relativism, which holds that different cultures (or individuals) have tastes or attitudes that are not objectively valid. Multiculturalism is, he thinks, an important position; relativism is not. Berlin describes what has now become a very familiar cliché. There are many diverse social systems. And since each has real value, we try to understand every other culture on its own terms.A great deal has been written recently about cultural conflicts. What can visual art show us about this subject, about relationships between radically opposed societies? Pre-modern civilizations were not usually tolerant of exotic cultures. Islam and Europe were often at war. "The menace of Islam was seen as something which threatened the souls as well as the bodies of Christian Europe."2 But although the Italians often fought with their Muslim neighbors, they did also import carpets to decorate the interiors of palaces and, in Venice, to adorn the facades of their homes.3 And many Venetian paintings depict these Islamic rugs. In Giovanni Mansueti's Miracles of the Bridge at San Lio (1494), now in the Accademia, Venice, or in Vittore Carpaccio's Meeting and Departure of the Betrothed (1490) showing the Episodes from the Life of St. Ursula, carpets are represented. In such pictures, the historian Paul Hills observes:... rich colours in soft textiles overlay the hardness of marble; and the eye of the Venetian painters and their public became attuned to fine degrees of hardness and softness, of fixity and pliancy, as when silken textiles move in a current of air but marbles stand fast. 4The Venetians were famous for incorporating alien artifacts, making them "their own without losing a sense of the exotic and the unfamiliar."5 And so it is unsurprising that painters freely inserted objects from another culture into works of art. The exotic decorative fabrics must surely have inspired the [End Page 115] Venetians. But because Islamic culture was foreign, Renaissance Europeans did not say much about the aesthetic qualities of these carpets.Representations of carpets are also found elsewhere in Italian art. The Siena Cathedral contains frescoes by Pinturicchio (1502-9) showing the life of Pius II, the fifteenth-century Pope. In the sixth scene, he enters Mantua to preside over the assembly called to mount an expedition against the Turks.6 (The venerable Christian capital Constantinople had just fallen to the Muslims.) On the table in the porch sheltering the Pope and his attendants, under some books, is a magnificent carpet. Even as these Christians plot, the room is decorated by art made by their enemies. Perhaps the carpet placed underfoot in this picture is treated as a trophy, like the flags of the defeated foes displayed in military museums. But often in other European paintings, Islamic rugs are depicted set on tables or hung from windows in ways that acknowledge their visual appeal.7Renaissance Italians seem to have had no concern with understanding Islamic carpets. Modern historians, by contrast, interested in the elaborate symbolism of these carpets, note that the rugs serve sacred functions.8 The Quran gives elaborate directions about how and when to pray. But it does not mention carpets. "Apart from mosque lamps the only other furnishing commonly found in mosques was some kind of floor covering," a historian explains.9 "The custom no doubt evolved from the religious requirement that all must enter the mosque unshod." Because carpets are used for prayer, both believers and Christians naturally associate them with religious observances. Non-Muslims also have long made use of these beautiful artifacts, sometimes cautiously—a fourteenth-century Spanish rabbi did say that a carpet depicting the Kaaba... (shrink)

Comparative study of wall paintings in churches dedicated to St Clement in Stará Boleslav and Rome reveals the wide international networking of contemporary agents in artistic transfer. The importance of late twelfth-century wall paintings in St Clement’s in Stará Boleslav – among Bohemia’s foremost medieval monuments – is underscored by their close proximity to the place of the martyrdom and the center of the cult of the country’s patron, St Wenceslas. The Bohemian church’s consecration echoes the Cyril and Methodius mission, (...) resonating with the transfer of St Clement’s relics from the Crimea to Central Europe, then to the Basilica of San Clemente in Rome. The frescoes in the Roman basilica’s lower church have been recognized as an important source for the concept of the paintings. The extensive, and iconographically exceptional, image cycle of St Clement’s life was commissioned by a high-ranking cleric, possibly the Salzburg archbishop, Adalbert of the Přemyslid family. The recent fresco restoration survey has yielded insights into the painting technique and will become the basis for the future rescue and rehabilitation of the Romanesque church’s wall decoration. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 689 Susannah Bartlow White Fear in Universities: The Story of an Assata Shakur Mural No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. No one will teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes if they know that knowledge will set you free. Theory without practice is just as incomplete (...) as practice without theory. The two have to go together. —Assata Shakur, quoted on a mural at Marquette University What does it mean to whitewash? To terminate? I have been tasting and retasting these words on my tongue after a mural of Assata Shakur at Marquette University was whitewashed, and I was fired—terminated —for having supported the mural, ending a fourteen-year career in feminist academia. As the founding director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center (GSRC), my job was to build an academic support office for women’s, gender, and LGBTQ+ education and empowerment. In the center’s third year, Amanda Smith (a Marquette senior) and Jeanette Martín (a community artist and program assistant at the center) envisioned, planned, and executed the Assata Shakur mural project as a way to invite greater community interest. In my role as director of the center, I supported the project, communicated it to senior leaders, and spread the word about the community-painting day in late March 2015. The mural was on display for six weeks at the GSRC before a storm of  Students fill in detail of the Assata Shakur mural at Marquette University’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center. Photograph by Amanda T. Smith. News and Views 691 media coverage in mid-May prompted the university to cover the mural in white paint and fire me for my support of the project. My experience of this process was as rapid as it sounds: I received a few phone calls alerting me that the whitewashing of the mural was imminent and that there was a formal review of my leadership decisions, and I was fired twenty-four hours later. The idiomatic usage of “whitewash” tells us that something is shameful and that it has been, or ought to be, covered up. Whose cover-up was it—and whose shame? Over the six weeks it was on display at the center, the mural invited people into a quiet space off a hallway, and it had sparked discussion among staff, faculty, and students who used the space. The mural was one of very few images of a black woman anywhere on Marquette’s campus, and it contributed to a sense among many students of color that the GSRC was a space in which they were welcomed and safe and where they could be comfortable. Yet in the distortions of white supremacy, the mural looked like a threat, rather than an intellectual and community representation central to the university itself. Other recent cases of faculty repression, from Steven Salaita to Saida Grundy and Zandria Robinson, demonstrate how concerns about liability, finances, and public perception guide administrators ’ decisions about representation on campuses. Far from being liberal utopias, or even spaces that respect speech, universities remain testing grounds when students’ or educators’ actions present direct antiracist critique. What more clear or direct example of antiracist critique than the quotes we chose for the mural: Assata Shakur’s own words asserting the importance of street smarts and intellectual prowess, naming the power invested in knowledge systems and the importance of claiming that power for ourselves? Universities are, in our time, particularly responsive to pressure from the right. Private, nonprofit, advocacy organizations troll university websites looking for evidence of liberal bias; conservative media outlets publish student bloggers who feed the fantasy that the facts of United States history, presented without whitewashing, do not belong in classrooms. In particular, those who study the lives and knowledges of historically marginalized populations are in the crosshairs of right-wing attacks. In the case of the mural—and in each of the other cases cited above— it was either a right-wing news source or a powerful donor or decision 692 News and Views maker who raised concerns about leftist bias, civility, or... (shrink)

In recent years, a trend has emerged in the field of art conservation, the aim of which is to protect street art objects. Attempts to conserve murals face many problems. This is due to various factors – lack of time distance to this type of objects, difficulties in assessing their artistic value, frequent lack of interest of artists in the conservation of their works, material impermanence of murals, their often-occasional nature; also, the fact that most of these objects are not (...) legally protected. The paper discusses the problems faced by an art restorer who wants to save murals. Examples of murals are presented, the conservation of which is not possible, among others, due to the fact that the houses on which they were painted are intended for demolition. There are also examples of murals whose rescue from destruction gained public approval and the conservation of which was carried out. The paintings are in a very poor condition. This is a feature of most murals, which are usually made on old, unrepaired plasters with low-quality paints. Their maintenance is a very difficult task. The presentation shows the various stages of conservation of works lacated in Warsow. The conservation of the murals is carried out in order to preserve street art facilities. Apart from the involvement of art conservators, social support for this type of activity is also important. However, one should be aware that most of murals have no chance of becoming a permanent part of the city landscape. Their fate will be determined by chance. (shrink)

Fragments of painted plaster found in the destruction layer of three first floor rooms in the House of Seals and of one first floor room of the House of the Sword had broken from the ceiling. They allow the restoration of the schema in the room of the House of the Sword and of two of the rooms in the House of Seals, the latter in colour. Composed of bands surrounding a quadrangular field, these décorations, evoking carpets stretched on the (...) ceiling, are richer (costly pigments, gold leaf) and more complex (some fifteen motifs) than those in tombs of the same period, which adopted the same « carpet » composition and which borrowed from the same repertoire, often confirmed by the textiles. Since we know of no other ceiling decoration in habitation rooms, it is unwise to contrast the exuberance of these ceilings with the tomb ceilings. The room that could not be restored had moreover a much more perfunctory decoration. (shrink)

Lucas van Valckenborch’s Winter Landscape hangs in the Kinsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It was painted four hundred years ago as one of a set of the four seasons. Measured by sales of reproductions, it is one of the most popular paintings in the museum, though it is by no means the most distinguished example of the genre to which it belongs. The picture is a snow scene. In the long series of represented planed that recede from foreground to horizon, fallen (...) snow covers fields and roves. Across the surface of the canvas and scarcely diminishing in scale from bottom to top, touches of white paint represent falling snow. It is not a small painting, and these are not mere feathery indications, but palpable dabs from a loaded brush. To a taste fed on Modernist painting—or, for the pedantic, to a prejudice fuelled by Modernist accounts of painting—it is by virtue of this surprising frankness that the painting achieves more than mere anecdotal charm. It is not the illusion of depth in the picture that holds our sophisticated attention, nor the atmospheric re-creation of a leaden sky, nor do we admit to being engaged by the over-rehearsed animation of the peasants. What gives us pleasurable pause is the strange and distinctive form of skepticism about appearances that is set in play when the allure of imaginative depth meets resistance from the vividness of decorated surface.5 5. Wollheim uses the term ‘twofoldness’ for ‘this strange duality—of seeing the marked surface, and of seeing something in the surface.’ In his account this experience leads to a thematizing of the image, which ‘ushers in representation.’ Translated into his terminology, my suggestion would be that the Winter Landscape can be seen as catering to a Modernistic taste for the thematizing of ‘twofoldness’ itself. Charles Harrison is staff tutor and reader in the history of art at the Open University. He is the author of English Art and Modernism 1900-1939 , and he is now completing a second volume, English Art and Modernism 1940-1985. He is co-author of A Provisional History of Art & Language , and his most recent book—Essays on Art and Language—is due out in 1989. He has been associated with the Art & Language group since 1971 and is editor of the journal Art-Language. (shrink)

The aim of the following paper is to show that it is not possible to penetrate into the depths of Nikolay Raynov's universe and to comprehend its wholeness, without posing and investigating the question about the origin or the foundation of his various creative occupations, i.e his novels, philosophic and theosophic writings, art history and critique, paintings, decorative design etc. This question is far too complex to be answered briefly without being simplified, and therefore two main directions will be articulated: (...) the recption of Orphism developed in Plotinus' and Porphyry's Neoplatonism – which is the basis of modern Theosophy –, and the synthetic understanding of art, which puts Raynov's views in close proximity to Wassily Kandinsky and Nicholas Roerich. (shrink)

Italian ms 63, now in the John Rylands Library, contains fifty-four images of monstrous births, both human and animal. The manuscript was probably completed in the mid-eighteenth century and was owned by Edward Davenport of Capesthorne Hall and later by the Manchester-based physician David Lloyd Roberts. This article explores the possible sources for some of the images, which range from descriptions or illustrations in well-known publications on monsters, to popular pamphlets, to drawings and paintings. An analysis of the choice (...) of subject matter and the ways in which the source material has been used places the manuscript within eighteenth-century collecting practices and emphasises the multivalency of the monstrous. (shrink)

There is no such thing as ART. There are public monuments and celebrations of victories, icons, religious teaching, civic pride, courtier flattery, family legitimation, secularization of the sacred, celebration of the ordinary as ordinary, attempts to shock, political statements, making money, decoration of homes, corporations, visual debates on what the world looks like—debates about what the world is—debates about what we see. On the other hand, we can look at anything—clouds, a tree, a face, a road, a herd of cows (...) in a field—as if they were works of art, finding a composition of patterns and resonances of color, texture, and form. Directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, works of art.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 107-114 [Access article in PDF] A Comparative Study of Artistic Play and Zoukei-Asobi[Tables] "Artistic Play" and "Zoukei-Asobi" Recently, I found an article in Art Education which led me to believe that "artistic play" is not as popular among North America art educators as it is in Japan. 1 For Japanese art educators, especially at the elementary level, this word is well-known as (...) a key term. In Japanese we say "zoukei-asobi." "Zoukei" means "plastic arts activities" and "Asobi" means "playing." I recognized that the basic concept of "artistic play" has something in common with that of "zoukei-asobi." In this article I will identify this as "J-artistic play." The aim of this essay is to compare the meaning of "J-artistic play" by studying its use in Japan and the United States. The Curriculum Guidelines for Art Education in Japan Before considering J-artistic play, I should explain the national guideline for art education in Japan, since the objectives and contents of J-artistic play are prescribed by this guideline. We have had a national guideline since 1872 though this has changed drastically to resemble the American model after World War II. The subject corresponding to "Visual Art" in the elementary school is "Art and Handicraft (Zuga-Kousaku)." "Zuga" means drawing and painting, "Kousaku" means design and craft. The current guideline is divided into three parts (I-III) as shown in Table 1.The first shows a general goal of art education in the elementary school. The second describes the objectives and contents of each grade. The third indicates some key points of teaching for teachers. In the elementary school the curriculum sequence falls into three steps. The content is divided into the two areas ("Hyougen" and appreciation), and Hyougen is divided further into "artistic play" and "art-making." [End Page 107] [Begin Page 110]I should make some comments on Hyougen. In this guideline, Hyougen is used both as expression and representation. In traditional Japanese aesthetic consciousness, "expression, representation, and decoration" constitute a kind of trinity. The concept of J-artistic play was introduced into the national guidelines for art education in1977. 2 At first, this was available only for grades 1 and 2 in the elementary school, but since 1998 the concept has been extended to grades 1 and 6, as shown in Table 1. About the Property of J-artistic Play The activities in J-artistic play do not refer to any traditional art forms, such as painting, sculpture, or handicraft, nor are they derived from any specific art forms. In fact, the purpose for the introduction of this concept into the national guideline is to protect children from falling into conventional ways of representation as found in the traditional art forms. The promoters of J-artistic play thought that the preconceived ideas found in such existing art forms, such as painting might depress children's spontaneous and free expression. Some concepts from contemporary art, such as performance art, have also influenced J-artistic play.As Eliza Pitri said, "Play is spontaneous and voluntary. It is not obligatory but is freely chosen by the player." Though schooling is compulsory and a student cannot choose it independently, advocates of J-artistic insist that the character of "play" in the school curriculum should be an original and undifferentiated form of learning. One of the advocates of J-artistic play explains the significance of artistic play as an operation of integrated intelligence. 3 Artistic play is different in function from ordinary expressing activities. Ordinary expressing activity works with a blank drawing paper as sterile space, conditioned, virtual...laboratory. Contrarily artistic play works with raw materials, living places, and real environments, and is composed of organized and integrated formative activity by working on the subjects that make conditions for human, objective, and phenomenal interaction. Reorganization of intelligence and the opportunity for acquiring new intelligence are embedded in the activities that work interactively. Here we note that children will learn a reality from the interaction between the person and his... (shrink)

Painted ceramics occupy an important place in ancient Chinese art and are the result of creative activity of people of primitive society. A large number of Neolithic patterns on ceramics are similar to those signs and symbols that were made on jade products of the same period. Such patterns resembled drawings made by hand and represented realistic and abstract ornaments, plant, zoomorphic patterns, etc. Thus, the subject of this study is the so-called "jade" patterns on painted ceramics of the Neolithic (...) era. The object of the study are objects of painted ceramics of the Neolithic era in China. Special attention is paid to the consideration of the specifics of ceramic products, as well as the features of their decors. The semantics of images on objects of Chinese painted ceramics is complex and ambiguous. The study revealed that it is associated with the development of human thinking, people's understanding of natural phenomena, awareness of the changing seasons, as well as the emergence of animism and totemic culture. These patterns had different interpretations, while they were not only a way of expressing the feelings and experiences of primitive people, but also a way for them to record important events from life, similar to modern memoirs. Thus, the novelty of this article is its comparative nature, manifested in the comparison of ornaments of painted ceramics and ancient Chinese jade products. (shrink)

One of the important theological issues for ancient and medieval thought was to account for the existence of evil. Augustine provided an aesthetic explanation: evil exists for contrast, to let the good stand out more prominently. Thus, just as a painting that uses both dark and bright colors, the universe that contains both good and evil is beautiful as a whole. The argument was debated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Alexander of Hales, as well as the Franciscan tradition (...) in general, strongly supported the Augustinian position. The article discusses a previously unknown debate between Albert the Great and Bonaventure about this issue and suggests that Bonaventure is defending his fellow-Franciscan Alexander. (shrink)

As two different art categories, literature and painting use temporal words and spatial images respectively to convey information and narrative. In addition to the pursuit of visual decoration, the paintings in books and periodicals in the period of the Republic of China were widely and profoundly influenced by the literature of the same period from the aspects of the style of expression, the theme of content and the creative techniques, thus breaking through the limitations of their own media and (...) achieving narrative effects like literary. The reflection of literary thoughts and trends in theme, the translation of classical novels in content and the use of literary techniques such as metaphor, synaesthesia and “Bixing” in the expression techniques that further highlighted the functional value, aesthetic value, and historical value of the images. In the visual information age, only by maintaining the characteristics of their own media and absorbing the narrative advantages of other artistic media, can images break through the limitation of plane static space and achieve a narrative effect with more artistic appeal and ideological and cultural depth. (shrink)