Faculty Books

Why the Museum Matters

Why the Museum Matters

Art museums have played a vital role in our culture, drawing on Enlightenment ideals in shaping ideas, advancing learning, fostering community, and providing spaces of beauty and permanence. In this thoughtful and often personal volume, Daniel H. Weiss contemplates the idea of the universal art museum alongside broad considerations about the role of art in society and what defines a cultural experience. The future of art museums is far from secure, and Weiss reflects on many of the difficulties these institutions face, from their financial health to their collecting practices to the audiences they engage to ensuring freedom of expression on the part of artists and curators.
 
In grappling with these challenges, Weiss sees a solution in shared governance. His tone is one of optimism as he looks to a future where the museum will serve a greater public while continuing to be a steward of culture and a place of discovery, discourse, inspiration, and pleasure. This poignant questioning and affirmation of the museum explores our enduring values while embracing the need for change in a rapidly evolving world.

Public Feminism in Times of Crisis: From Sappho’s Fragments to Viral Hashtags

Public Feminism in Times of Crisis: From Sappho’s Fragments to Viral Hashtags

Public Feminism in Times of Crisis examines the public practice of feminism in the age of social media. While their concept of public feminism emerges from a moment of acute crisis (the Trump years and the Covid-19 pandemic), Leila Easa and Jennifer Stager locate its foundations in history, journeying through broad swatches of time looking for connections between the centuries through art and literature and culture. Each chapter focuses on what public feminists do in the world: Public feminists gain control over an archive that otherwise contains or excludes them; they recover their own stories and subjective experiences, sometimes for activist use; they examine images and language that construct women in patriarchal texts; they situate the individual within a collective and the collective within an individual; they confront the limitations of such situating due to the containment of patriarchy and reclaim new systems of power in response; and they resurface a deep history for the alternative strategies of memorializing they employ. In navigating these practices, the authors also attend to the material conditions of writing histories as well as those shaping and enabling public feminist acts and protests more broadly.

Seeing Color in Classical Art: Theory, Practice, and Reception, from Antiquity to the Present

Seeing Color in Classical Art: Theory, Practice, and Reception, from Antiquity to the Present

The remains of ancient Mediterranean art and architecture that have survived over the centuries present the modern viewer with images of white, the color of the stone often used for sculpture. Antiquarian debates and recent scholarship, however, have challenged this aspect of ancient sculpture. There is now a consensus that sculpture produced in the ancient Mediterranean world, as well as art objects in other media, were, in fact, polychromatic. Color has consequently become one of the most important issues in the study of classical art. Jennifer Stager’s landmark book makes a vital contribution to this discussion. Analyzing the dyes, pigments, stones, earth, and metals found in ancient art works, along with the language that writers in antiquity used to describe color, she examines the traces of color in a variety of media. Stager also discusses the significance of a reception history that has emphasized whiteness, revealing how ancient artistic practice and ancient philosophies of color significantly influenced one another.

Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America

Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America

This book examines the reception in Latin America of prints designed by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, showing how colonial artists used such designs to create all manner of artworks and, in the process, forged new frameworks for artistic creativity.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) never crossed the Atlantic himself, but his impact in colonial Latin America was profound. Prints made after the Flemish artist’s designs were routinely sent from Europe to the Spanish Americas, where artists used them to make all manner of objects.

Rubens in Repeat is the first comprehensive study of this transatlantic phenomenon, despite broad recognition that it was one of the most important forces to shape the artistic landscapes of the region. Copying, particularly in colonial contexts, has traditionally held negative implications that have discouraged its serious exploration. Yet analyzing the interpretation of printed sources and recontextualizing the resulting works within period discourse and their original spaces of display allow a new critical reassessment of this broad category of art produced in colonial Latin America—art that has all too easily been dismissed as derivative and thus unworthy of sustained interest and investigation. This book takes a new approach to the paradigms of artistic authorship that emerged alongside these complex creative responses, focusing on the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that the use of European prints was an essential component of the very framework in which colonial artists forged ideas about what it meant to be a creator. 

Andrea Mantegna: Humanist Aesthetics, Faith, and the Force of Images

Andrea Mantegna: Humanist Aesthetics, Faith, and the Force of Images

If the fifteenth century in Italy has been seen as the moment when the constellation of disciplines known as “the humanities” begins to take shape, it was also a time when a “crisis in the humanities” – their value, their limits, who and what they included or excluded – was also manifest. A largely nineteenth century construction of “Renaissance humanism” has indelibly cast humanist pursuits in terms of writing, with arts of making or techne sometimes idealized as a second order manifestation of humanist ideas.

This book re-examines the career of one socially and intellectually ambitious artist, Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) and his intellectual network, to re-open questions of the locations of humanism, the notion of “humanist art,” or painting as a form of discourse that far from being ancillary to poetry, history, or rhetoric, served as a model for all three. It will be shown that the place of normativity or typicality that Andrea Mantegna occupies in the History of Art – “Early Renaissance artist,” “artist as antiquarian,” “Albertian perspectivist,” has kept from view the more radical potential of his work for a re-description of early Renaissance painting. The major works examined here – the Ovetari Chapel, the Camera Picta, the altarpieces for Padua and Verona, the Triumphs of Caesar, adopt strikingly original means to address their beholder, and to control and even produce their spatial and ideological milieu, challenging conventional notions of “the gaze” and how it operates in early Renaissance art. Furthermore, Mantegna’s representations entail a striking integration of writing and painting as modes of transmission: Mantegna and his audience were highly attentive to the materiality of text, image, and object in the transmission of knowledge. Several of Mantegna works in which architecture or sculpture are depicted (such as The Introduction of the Cult of Cybele to Rome) seem preoccupied by the stability of meaning in the artistic object in circumstances of displacement or commodification. The Triumphs – a monumental series of canvases programmatically devoted to the “bringing back” of the riches of a lost world – offer a programmatic pictorial characterization of what we now call “Renaissance art,” engaging its stylistic desiderata, its technical accomplishments – and, in ways that exceed any theory committed to writing – its ideological implicatedness.

No other artist before him could boast a celebrity like that of Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), whose career reads like an archetype of Renaissance social ascent. Half a millennium later Mantegna is well-remembered; yet while his importance in any account of a Western Tradition of painting has long been beyond dispute, it has been and remains under-examined and misunderstood. In this provocative re-assessment, based on his Betty Allison Rand lectures at the University of North Carolina 2017, Stephen J. Campbell shows that Mantegna has served the function of illustrating early Renaissance painting, whether the principles of a “humanist theory of art” as prescribed in the De pictura of Alberti, with its elaboration of perspective techniques, or the preoccupation with antiquity and its reconstruction.

While he is rightly regarded a crucial nexus of interaction between the world of the artisan, of the court, and of intellectual life, Mantegna’s importance is still perceived to lie in an early formulation of what is called the “classical tradition,” destined to be surpassed after his death by Raphael and his followers. Campbell argues that the place of normativity or typicality that Mantegna occupies in the History of Art – “Early Renaissance artist,” “artist as antiquarian,” “Albertian perspectivist,” has kept from view the more radical potential of his work for a re-description of early Renaissance painting. In particular, this study of the artist’s major works re-open the questions of “humanist art,” of the relationship between painting and intellectual life, of image-making as a form of discourse that bears a far from passive or ancillary relationship to poetry, history, or rhetoric. Mantegna’s work is shown to challenge and complicate prevailing understandings of the way works of art address their beholders and construct their spatial milieu, of the materiality of painting and the relationship of painting and writing, and the volatile ideologies of classical antiquity as a component of Renaissance painting.

In That Time: Michael O’Donnell and the Tragic Era of Vietnam

In That Time: Michael O’Donnell and the Tragic Era of Vietnam

In That Time tells the story of the American experience in Vietnam through the life of Michael O’Donnell, a bright young musician and poet who served as a soldier and helicopter pilot. O’Donnell wrote with great sensitivity and poetic force, and his best-known poem is among the most beloved of the war. In 1970, during an attempt to rescue fellow soldiers stranded under heavy fire, O’Donnell’s helicopter was shot down in the jungles of Cambodia. He remained missing in action for almost three decades.

Although he never fired a shot in Vietnam, O’Donnell served in one of the most dangerous roles of the war, all the while using poetry to express his inner feelings and to reflect on the tragedy that was unfolding around him. O’Donnell’s life is both a powerful, personal story and a compelling, universal one about how America lost its way in the 1960s, but also how hope can flower in the margins of even the darkest chapters of the American story.

Literati Lenses: Wenren Landscape in Chinese Cinema of the Mao Era

Literati Lenses: Wenren Landscape in Chinese Cinema of the Mao Era

Chinese cinema has a long history of engagement with China’s art traditions, and literati (wenren) landscape painting has been an enduring source of inspiration. Literati Lenses explores this interplay during the Mao era, a time when cinema, at the forefront of ideological campaigns and purges, was held to strict political guidelines. Through four films—Li Shizhen (1956), Stage Sisters (1964), Early Spring in February (1963), and Legend of Tianyun Mountain (1979)—Mia Liu reveals how landscape offered an alternative text that could operate beyond political constraints and provide a portal for smuggling interesting discourses into the film. While allusions to pictorial traditions associated with a bygone era inevitably took on different meanings in the context of Mao-era cinema, cinematic engagement with literati landscape endowed films with creative and critical space as well as political poignancy. Liu not only identifies how the conventions and aesthetics of traditional literati landscape art were reinvented and mediated on multiple levels in cinema, but also explores how post-1949 Chinese filmmakers configured themselves as modern intellectuals in the spaces forged among the vestiges of the old. In the process, she deepens her analysis, suggesting that landscape be seen as an allegory of human life, a mirror of the age, and a commentary on national affairs.

Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul

Ottoman Baroque: The Architectural Refashioning of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul

With its idiosyncratic yet unmistakable adaptation of European Baroque models, the eighteenth-century architecture of Istanbul has frequently been dismissed by modern observers as inauthentic and derivative, a view reflecting broader unease with notions of Western influence on Islamic cultures. In Ottoman Baroque―the first English-language book on the topic―Ünver Rüstem provides a compelling reassessment of this building style and shows how between 1740 and 1800 the Ottomans consciously coopted European forms to craft a new, politically charged, and globally resonant image for their empire’s capital.

Rüstem reclaims the label “Ottoman Baroque” as a productive framework for exploring the connectedness of Istanbul’s eighteenth-century buildings to other traditions of the period. Using a wealth of primary sources, he demonstrates that this architecture was in its own day lauded by Ottomans and foreigners alike for its fresh, cosmopolitan effect. Purposefully and creatively assimilated, the style’s cross-cultural borrowings were combined with Byzantine references that asserted the Ottomans’ entitlement to the Classical artistic heritage of Europe. Such aesthetic rebranding was part of a larger endeavor to reaffirm the empire’s power at a time of intensified East-West contact, taking its boldest shape in a series of imperial mosques built across the city as landmarks of a state-sponsored idiom.

Copiously illustrated and drawing on previously unpublished documents, Ottoman Baroque breaks new ground in our understanding of Islamic visual culture in the modern era and offers a persuasive counterpoint to Eurocentric accounts of global art history.

The Endless Periphery: Towards a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto’s Italy

The Endless Periphery: Towards a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto’s Italy

While the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance are usually associated with Italy’s historical seats of power, some of the era’s most characteristic works are to be found in places other than Florence, Rome, and Venice. They are the product of the diversity of regions and cultures that makes up the country. In Endless Periphery, Stephen J. Campbell examines a range of iconic works in order to unlock a rich series of local references in Renaissance art that include regional rulers, patron saints, and miracles, demonstrating, for example, that the works of Titian spoke to beholders differently in Naples, Brescia, or Milan than in his native Venice. More than a series of regional microhistories, Endless Periphery tracks the geographic mobility of Italian Renaissance art and artists, revealing a series of exchanges between artists and their patrons, as well as the power dynamics that fueled these exchanges. A counter history of one of the greatest epochs of art production, this richly illustrated book will bring new insight to our understanding of classic works of Italian art.

Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I

Perfection’s Therapy: An Essay on Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I

Albrecht Dürer’s master engraving, Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about melancholia and an allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences. Zealously interpreted since the nineteenth century, the work also presides over the origins of modern iconology. Yet more than a century of research has left us with a tangle of mutually contradictory theories.

In Perfection’s Therapy, Mitchell Merback discovers in Melencolia’s opacity a fascinating possibility: that Dürer’s masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing. Merback deftly analyses the visual and narrative structure of Dürer’s image, revisits its philosophical and medical contexts, and resituates it within the long history of the therapeutic artifact. Placing Dürer’s project in dialogue with that of humanism’s founder, Francesco Petrarch, Merback also unearths the German artist’s ambition to act as a physician of the soul.

Celebrated by contemporaries as the “Apelles of our age,” and ever since as Germany’s first Renaissance painter-theorist, the Dürer we encounter here is also the first modern Christian artist, addressing himself to the distress of souls, including his own. Melencolia thus emerges as a key reference point in a project of spiritual-ethical therapy, a work designed to exercise the mind, rebalance the passions, remedy the soul, and help in getting on with the project of perfection.

Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India

Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India

From the fluttering fabric of a tent, to the blurred motion of the potter’s wheel, to the rhythm of a horse puppet’s wooden hooves―these scenes make up a set of mid-1980s art exhibitions as part of the U.S. Festival of India. The festival was conceived at a meeting between Indira Gandhi and Ronald Reagan to strengthen relations between the two countries at a time of late Cold War tensions and global economic change, when America’s image of India was as a place of desperate poverty and spectacular fantasy. Displaying Time unpacks the intimate, small-scale durations of time at work in the gallery from the transformation of clay into ceramic to the one-on-one, personal encounters between museum visitors and artists.

Using extensive archival research and interviews with artists, curators, diplomats, and visitors, Rebecca Brown analyzes a selection of museum shows that were part of the Festival of India to unfurl new exhibitionary modes: the time of transformation, of interruption, of potential and the future, as well as the contemporary and the now.

Andrea Mantegna: Making Art (History)

Andrea Mantegna: Making Art (History)

Andrea Mantegna: Making Art (History) presents the art of Mantegna as challenging the parameters of the history of art in the demands it makes upon historical interpretation, and explores the artist’s potentially transformative impact on the study of the early Renaissance.

  • Features an array of new methodologies for the study of Mantegna and early Renaissance art
  • Critically addresses the question of iconography and “literary” art, as well as the politics of the monographic exhibition
  • Includes translations of two seminal accounts of the artist by Roberto Longhi and Daniel Arasse, key texts not previously available in English
  • Explores the Mantegna’s potentially transformative impact on the study of the early Renaissance
Communities of Style: Portable Luxury Arts, Identity, and Collective Memory in the Iron Age Levant

Communities of Style: Portable Luxury Arts, Identity, and Collective Memory in the Iron Age Levant

Communities of Style examines the production and circulation of portable luxury goods throughout the Levant in the early Iron Age (1200–600 BCE). In particular it focuses on how societies in flux came together around the material effects of art and style, and their role in collective memory.

Marian H. Feldman brings her dual training as an art historian and an archaeologist to bear on the networks that were essential to the movement and trade of luxury goods—particularly ivories and metal works—and how they were also central to community formation. The interest in, and relationships to, these art objects, Feldman shows, led to wide-ranging interactions and transformations both within and between communities. Ultimately, she argues, the production and movement of luxury goods in the period demands a rethinking of our very geo-cultural conception of the Levant, as well as its influence beyond what have traditionally been thought of as its borders.

Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art

Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art

Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art concentrates on the visual, material, and built aspects of the Ancient Near East from the fourth millennium BCE to the Hellenistic period. Presenting innovative theoretical approaches to Ancient Near Eastern art history, this volume will be of value to scholars of the Ancient Near East, as well as to those interested in contemporary art historical and anthropological approaches to visual culture.

Art, Ritual, and Civic Identity in Medieval Southern Italy

Art, Ritual, and Civic Identity in Medieval Southern Italy

In Art, Ritual, and Civic Identity in Medieval Southern Italy, Nino Zchomelidse examines the complex and dynamic roles played by the monumental ambo, the Easter candlestick, and the liturgical scroll in southern Italy and Sicily from the second half of the tenth century, when the first such liturgical scrolls emerged, until the first decades of the fourteenth century, when the last monumental Easter candlestick was made. Through the use of these objects, the interior of the church was transformed into the place of the story of salvation, making the events of the Bible manifest. By linking rites and setting, liturgical furnishings could be used to stage a variety of biblical events, in accordance with specific feast days. Examining the interaction of liturgical performance and the ecclesiastical stage, this book explores the creation, function, and evolution of church furnishings and manuscripts.

Remaking College: Innovation and the Liberal Arts College

Remaking College: Innovation and the Liberal Arts College

with Rebecca Chopp and Susan Frost.

As one of the most successful educational enterprises in American history, the residential liberal arts college has long been emulated across all spectrums of undergraduate education in the United States and increasingly around the world. These schools are characterized by broad-based curricula, small class size, and interaction between students and faculty. Aimed at developing students’ intellectual literacy and critical-thinking skills rather than specific professional preparation, the value proposition made by these colleges has recently come under intense pressure.

Remaking College brings together a distinguished group of higher education leaders to define the American liberal arts model, to describe the challenges these institutions face, and to propose sustainable solutions. These essays elucidate the shifting economic and financial models for liberal arts colleges and consider the opportunities afforded by technology, globalism, and intercollegiate cooperative models. By exploring new ideas, offering bold proposals, and identifying emerging lessons, the authors consider the unique position these schools can play in their communities and in the larger world.

Pilgrimage and Pogrom: Violence, Memory, and Visual Culture at the Host-Miracle Shrines of Germany and Austria

Pilgrimage and Pogrom: Violence, Memory, and Visual Culture at the Host-Miracle Shrines of Germany and Austria

In the late Middle Ages, Europe saw the rise of one of its most virulent myths: that Jews abused the eucharistic bread as a form of anti-Christian blasphemy, causing it to bleed miraculously. The allegation fostered tensions between Christians and Jews that would explode into violence across Germany and Austria. And pilgrimage shrines were built on the sites where supposed desecrations had led to miracles or to anti-Semitic persecutions. Exploring the legends, cult forms, imagery, and architecture of these host-miracle shrines, Pilgrimage and Pogrom reveals how they not only reflected but also actively shaped Christian anti-Judaism in the two centuries before the Reformation.

Mitchell B. Merback studies surviving relics and eucharistic cult statues, painted miracle cycles and altarpieces, propaganda broadsheets, and more in an effort to explore how accusation and legend were transformed into propaganda and memory. Merback shows how persecution and violence became interdependent with normative aspects of Christian piety, from pilgrimage to prayers for the dead, infusing them with the ideals of crusade. Valiantly reconstructing the cult environments created for these sacred places, Pilgrimage and Pogrom is an illuminating look at Christian-Jewish relations in premodern Europe.

Italian Renaissance Art

Italian Renaissance Art

Drawing on the most recent scholarship, this book is accessible to students and non-specialist readers, telling the story of art in the great centers of Rome, Florence, and Venice, while profiling a range of other cities and sites throughout Italy. While the book presents the classic canon of Renaissance painting and sculpture in full, it expands the scope of conventional surveys by offering a more through coverage of architecture, decorative and domestic art, and print media. Rather than emphasizing artists’ biographies, this new account concentrates on the works, discussing means of production, the place for which images were made, concerns of patrons, and the expectation and responses of the works first viewers. Renaissance art is seen as decidedly new, a moment in the history of art whose concerns persist in the present. 790 full-color illustrations

Meaning in Motion: The Semantics of Movement in Medieval Art

Meaning in Motion: The Semantics of Movement in Medieval Art

Taking a new approach to medieval art, Meaning in Motion reveals the profound importance of movement in the physical, emotional, and intellectual experience of art and architecture in the Middle Ages. Focusing on the physical movement of objects and viewers, as well as movements of the mind, this richly illustrated collection of interdisciplinary essays explores a wide range of rituals, performances, works of art, and texts in which movement is crucial to meaning. These include liturgical and devotional practices, but also pilgrimage, reading techniques, and the use of art and allegory in late medieval courtly society. The contributors consider movement not only as a physical action but also as an active intellectual process involving the reception of images, one that creates layers of meaning through the multidimensional experience of objects and spaces, both real and imaginary. This novel approach to medieval art, building on the concept of agency and the understanding of ritual as a performative act, is influenced by two anthropological perspectives: Victor Turner’s “processual” analysis of rites of passage and Alfred Gell’s conception of the interactive relationship between art and the viewer as a process. The essays in this volume engage in an interdisciplinary discussion of the significance of movement for the making and perception of medieval art.

A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture

A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture

A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture presents a collection of 26 original essays that explore and critically examine various aspects of the field of Asian art and architectural history. Featuring contributions from both leading scholars and emerging voices, the essays offer the opportunity to engage with the current state of scholarship in Asian art and to discover its rich diversity. In topics that range from ancient tombs and imperial commissions to coinage and cultural interaction, and from gardens and monastic spaces to performances and pilgrimages, this wide-ranging and insightful collection of essays illuminates the wide geographic and temporal range of Asian visual culture.

Authors explore the art of Korea, Japan, China, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and their diasporas, engaging issues related to colonial legacies and global interactions. Written by experts in art history, archaeology, geography, history, and anthropology, the essays are organized around six critical themes that reflect the current state of Asian art scholarship: Objects in Use, Space, Artists, Challenging the Canon, Shifting Meanings, and Elusive, Mobile Objects. With its multilayered presentation and wealth of thought-provoking new insights, A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture is an important addition to current scholarship that will reshape the way we consider Asian art.

Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Collection

Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Collection

Oglethorpe University Museum of Art in Atlanta is pleased to announce a first-of-its-kind  exhibition—Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art from the Collection of Shelley and Donald Rubin. This is the first public display of this collection of more than 50 works from 28 of India’s most famous artists, including Francis Newton Souza, Sakti Burman, and Seema Kohli.

Shelley and Donald Rubin, passionate collectors of Himalayan art for over 30 years, are the founders of the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City. Mr. Rubin is a 1956 Oglethorpe alumnus.

With imagery from all walks of life, from the poorest citizens to dynamic deities, the works of Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest focus on India’s people: individual characters gazing back at us, men and women inhabiting spaces urban and rural, kneeling bodies meditating and praying. India’s modern and contemporary art affirms that the modern is global.

“These works celebrate everyday life in South Asia and its diasporas, from the most mundane moments to the most transcendent,” said curator Dr. Rebecca M. Brown. “This is an extraordinary opportunity for museum visitors to connect with the art of modern India.”

Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India

Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India

Gandhi’s use of the spinning wheel was one of the most significant unifying elements of the nationalist movement in India. Spinning was seen as an economic and political activity that could bring together the diverse population of South Asia, and allow the formerly elite nationalist movement to connect to the broader Indian population.

This book looks at the politics of spinning both as a visual symbol and as a symbolic practice. It traces the genealogy of spinning from its early colonial manifestations in Company painting to its appropriation by the anti-colonial movement. This complex of visual imagery and performative ritual had the potential to overcome labour, gender, and religious divisions and thereby produce an accessible and effective symbol for the Gandhian anti-colonial movement. By thoroughly examining all aspects of this symbol’s deployment, this book unpacks the politics of the spinning wheel and provides a model for the analysis of political symbols elsewhere. It also probes the successes of India’s particular anti-colonial movement, making an invaluable contribution to studies in social and cultural history, as well as South Asian Studies.

Art for a Modern India, 1947-1980

Art for a Modern India, 1947-1980

Following India’s independence in 1947, Indian artists creating modern works of art sought to maintain a local idiom, an “Indianness” representative of their newly independent nation, while connecting to modernism, an aesthetic then understood as both universal and presumptively Western. These artists depicted India’s precolonial past while embracing aspects of modernism’s pursuit of the new, and they challenged the West’s dismissal of non-Western places and cultures as sources of primitivist imagery but not of modernist artworks. In Art for a Modern India, Rebecca M. Brown explores the emergence of a self-conscious Indian modernism—in painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, film, and photography—in the years between independence and 1980, by which time the Indian art scene had changed significantly and postcolonial discourse had begun to complicate mid-century ideas of nationalism.

Through close analyses of specific objects of art and design, Brown describes how Indian artists engaged with questions of authenticity, iconicity, narrative, urbanization, and science and technology. She explains how the filmmaker Satyajit Ray presented the rural Indian village as a socially complex space rather than as the idealized site of “authentic India” in his acclaimed Apu Trilogy, how the painter Bhupen Khakhar reworked Indian folk idioms and borrowed iconic images from calendar prints in his paintings of urban dwellers, and how Indian architects developed a revivalist style of bold architectural gestures anchored in India’s past as they planned the Ashok Hotel and the Vigyan Bhavan Conference Center, both in New Delhi. Discussing these and other works of art and design, Brown chronicles the mid-twentieth-century trajectory of India’s modern visual culture.

Beyond the Yellow Badge

Beyond the Yellow Badge

In 13 essays by leading art historians, and a critical introduction by the editor, Beyond the Yellow Badge seeks to reframe the relationship between European visual culture and the changing aspect of the Christian majority’s negative conceptions of Jews and Judaism during the Middle Ages and early modern periods. By situating their subjects within a broad continuum of historical and critical issues, the authors inquire into such questions as the shifting politics of toleration and intoleration; the role played by anti-Judaic legends in the formation of Christian cults; the role of positive evaluations of Hebrew, Jewish learning and Christian hopes for Jewish conversion; and the transformation of religious anti-Judaism into its modern racial and nationalistic counterparts. The book will be of special interest to art historians, cultural historians, students of Christian theology and Jewish history, and to educated general readers.

Ancient Near Eastern Art in Context: Studies in Honor of Irene J. Winter by Her Students

Ancient Near Eastern Art in Context: Studies in Honor of Irene J. Winter by Her Students

Through published works and in the classroom, Irene Winter served as a mentor for the latest generation of scholars of Mesopotamian visual culture. The contributions to this volume in her honor represent a cross section of the state of scholarship today.

Diplomacy by Design: Luxury Arts and an “International Style” in the Ancient Near East, 1400-1200 BCE

Diplomacy by Design: Luxury Arts and an “International Style” in the Ancient Near East, 1400-1200 BCE

Art and international relations during the Late Bronze Age formed a symbiosis as expanded travel and written communications fostered unprecedented cultural exchange across the Mediterranean. Diplomacy in these new political and imperial relationships was often maintained through the exchange of lavish art objects and luxury goods. The items bestowed during this time shared a repertoire of imagery that modern scholars call the first International Style in the history of art.

Marian Feldman’s Diplomacy by Design examines the profound connection between art produced during this period and its social context, revealing inanimate objects as catalysts—or even participants—in human dynamics. Feldman’s fascinating study shows the ways in which the exchange of these works of art actively mediated and strengthened political relations, intercultural interactions, and economic negotiations. Previous studies of this international style have focused almost exclusively on stylistic attribution at the expense of social contextualization. Written by a specialist in ancient Near Eastern art and archaeology who has excavated and traveled extensively in this area of the world, Diplomacy by Design provides a much broader consideration of the symbolic power of material culture and its centrality in the construction of human relations.

Asian Art

Asian Art

Asian Art is the first comprehensive anthology of important primary documents—from inscriptions and imperial decrees to travelers’ accounts and writings by artists—and the very best contemporary scholarship that has been produced on Asian art history. This unprecedented volume offers a portrait of the rich artistic traditions in China, Japan, Korea, India, and Southeast Asia.

Across time periods, media, cultural contexts, and geography, this volume traces several thousand years of Asian art, from the terracotta armies of the First Emperor of Qin to late twentieth-century installation art. Featuring accessible introductory material for each extract and arranged in an easy-to-navigate chronological structure, it will prove an essential companion to any study of Asian art history.

 

The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este

The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este

The Renaissance studiolo was a space devoted in theory to private reading and contemplation, but at the Italian courts of the fifteenth century, it had become a space of luxury, as much devoted to displaying the taste and culture of its occupant as to studious withdrawal. The most famous studiolo of all was that of Isabella d’Este, marchioness of Mantua (1474–1539). A chief component of its decoration was a series of seven paintings by some of the most noteworthy artists of the time, including Andrea Mantegna, Pietro Perugino, Lorenzo Costa, and Correggio.

These paintings encapsulated the principles of an emerging Renaissance artistic genre—the mythological image. Using these paintings as an exemplary case, and drawing on other important examples made by Giorgione in Venice and by Titian and Michelangelo for the Duke of Ferrara, Stephen Campbell explores the function of the mythological image within a Renaissance culture of readers and collectors.

France and the Holy Land:  Frankish Culture at the End of the Crusades

France and the Holy Land:  Frankish Culture at the End of the Crusades

with Lisa Mahoney (co-editor).

During the First Crusade launched in 1095, thousands of Europeans fought to liberate Jerusalem from the Seljuk Turks. By 1099, they had succeeded, and in the decades that followed, Franks settled in the newly conquered territory, creating a rich intellectual and cultural life. They wrote poetry and histories of their experiences, erected churches and castles, and commissioned illuminated manuscripts, frescoes, sculpture, and more. The majority of the crusaders and settlers were French, so the art and culture of France were of abiding importance to them. But the settlers did not merely transfer French artistic forms to the Levant; they also incorporated ideas and images from Byzantine and Islamic neighbors.

In France and the Holy Land, Daniel H. Weiss and Lisa Mahoney bring together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to shed light on the many aspects of this Frankish crusader culture. The authors examine the art, poetry, and architecture of crusader Paris, look at the imprint the Frankish settlers left on the Levant, and explore cultural exchange between the Franks and both Byzantines and Muslims.

Although the crusaders’ struggle to hold the occupied lands was ultimately futile, their stay in the Levant produced a unique and fascinating intellectual and cultural flowering that was neither Western nor Middle Eastern, but a distinctive melange of both. These thoughtful, provocative essays from prominent medievalists profoundly broaden and deepen our understanding of this significant historical period.

Contributors: Annemarie Weyl Carr, Southern Methodist University; Rebecca W. Corrie, Bates College; Anthony Cutler, Pennsylvania State University; Anne Derbes, Hood College; Jaroslav Folda, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; David Jacoby, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Bianca Kühnel, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Gustav Kühnel, Tel Aviv University; Stephen G. Nichols, The Johns Hopkins University; Robert Ousterhout, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Scott Redford, Georgetown University; Jonathan Riley-Smith, University of Cambridge; Mark Sandona, Hood College.

Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City

Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City

Considering the reception of the early modern culture of Florence, Rome, and Venice in other centers of the Italic peninsula, this book reexamines the Renaissance as a form of translation of a past culture. It assumes that the Renaissance attempted to assimilate the lost, or fragmentary, worlds of the Roman emperors, the Greek Platonists, and the ancient Egyptians. These essays, accordingly, explore how the processes of cultural self-definition varied between the Italian urban centers in the early modern period, well before the formation of a distinct Italian national identity.

Die Kreuzritterbibel/The Morgan Crusader Bible/La Bible des Croisades

Commentary Volume in German, English, and French (Faksimile Verlag Luzern, 1999). Italian translation published as La Bibbia dei Crociati

The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe

Christ’s Crucifixion is one of the most recognized images in Western culture, and it has come to stand as a universal symbol of both suffering and salvation. But often overlooked is the fact that ultimately the Crucifixion is a scene of capital punishment. Mitchell Merback reconstructs the religious, legal, and historical context of the Crucifixion and of other images of public torture. The result is a fascinating account of a time when criminal justice and religion were entirely interrelated and punishment was a visual spectacle devoured by a popular audience.

Merback compares the images of Christ’s Crucifixion with those of the two thieves who met their fate beside Jesus. In paintings by well-known Northern European masters and provincial painters alike, Merback finds the two thieves subjected to incredible cruelty, cruelty that artists could not depict in their scenes of Christ’s Crucifixion because of theological requirements. Through these representations Merback explores the ways audiences in early modern Europe understood images of physical suffering and execution. The frequently shocking works also provide a perspective from which Merback examines the live spectacle of public torture and execution and how audiences were encouraged by the Church and the State to react to the experience. Throughout, Merback traces the intricate and extraordinary connections among religious art, devotional practice, bodily pain, punishment, and judicial spectatorship.

Keenly aware of the difficulties involved in discussing images of atrocious violence but determined to make them historically comprehensible, Merback has written an informed and provocative study that reveals the rituals of medieval criminal justice and the visual experiences they engendered.

Art and Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis

Art and Crusade in the Age of Saint Louis

The reign of Louis IX of France is widely recognized as one of the most important in the history of medieval France. Art and the Crusade in the Age of St. Louis examines the art patronage of the French king during the formative period of his reign. Focusing on the Sainte-Chapelle (the palace chapel and reliquary constructed in Paris) and the Arsenal Old Testament (an illuminated Bible made to commemorate the king’s disastrous crusade to the Holy Land). Daniel Weiss examines these works within their social, political, and religious contexts. This study offers a new perspective on the meaning of art during a defining moment in the history of medieval France and, more generally, thirteenth-century society in the East and West.

Cosme Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics, and the Renaissance City, 1450-1495

Cosme Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics, and the Renaissance City, 1450-1495

In the city of Ferrara, a major cultural and artistic center of Renaissance Italy, Cosme Tura (c. 1430-1495) came to prominence as painter to the Este court. This book offers a new and wide-ranging approach to Tura’s life and his enigmatic and stylistically idiosyncratic works. Stephen Campbell takes the career of Tura as a starting point for the investigation of such intriguing issues as the fifteenth-century artist’s role and status in both court and urban culture and the bearing these conceptions may have had on Tura’s distinctive style. Campbell also provides an account of the role of the image in Ferrara’s religious, political, and intellectual life, broadening our understanding of the Renaissance beyond traditional discussions of visual culture that focus on Rome, Florence, and Venice. The author discusses also how Tura and his contemporaries addressed local themes of ethnic, political, and religious tension in their works. Among the works by Tura that this book examines closely are a cycle of paintings of the Muses created for the Studio of Leonello d’Este in 1447; an altarpiece commissioned by the powerful Roverella family, showing the Madonna enthroned on the Tabernacle; and four organ-shutter panels for Ferrara Cathedral depicting St. George and the Princess and an Annunciation. Campbell shows how the fascinating peculiarities of Tura’s individual works resonate within the broader cultural contexts defined by the court, ecclesiastical groups, and humanist thinkers. Further, Campbell argues that Tura’s work anticipates later inventions associated with Leonardo da Vinci at the court of Milan and with Mantegna at Mantua.

Santa Maria Immacolata in Ceri. Pittura sacra al tempo della riforma gregoriana-Sakrale Malerei Imzeitalter der Gregorianischen Reform (Arte e storia) (Italian and German)

Santa Maria Immacolata in Ceri. Pittura sacra al tempo della riforma gregoriana-Sakrale Malerei Imzeitalter der Gregorianischen Reform (Arte e storia) (Italian and German)