11: Dec14

Patricia Blessing (Stanford), ‘Friedrich Sarre and the discovery of Seljuk Anatolia’ 11/PB1

Laura Breen (University of Westminster), ‘Redefining ceramics through exhibitionary practice (1970-2009)’11/LB1

Keith Broadfoot (Sydney), ‘The blot on the landscape: Fred Williams and Australian art history’ 11/KB1

Eva Fotiadi (Free University Berlin/Dahlem Research School and Princeton), ‘The canon of the author. On individual and shared authorship in exhibition curating’ 11/EF1

Kerry Heckenberg (Queensland), ‘Retrieving an archive: Brook Andrew and William Blandowski’s Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen’ 11/KH1

Seth Adam Hindin (Oxford), ‘How the west was won: Charles Muskavitch, James Roth, and the arrival of ‘scientific’ art conservation in the western United States’ 11/SAH1

Ladislav Kesner (Masaryk University Brno), ‘The Warburg/Arnheim effect: Linking cultural/social and perceptual psychology of art’ 11/LK1

Gregor Langfeld (Amsterdam), ‘How the Museum of Modern Art in New York canonised German Expressionism’ 11/GL1

Jennifer Lee (Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis), ‘Medieval pilgrims’ badges in rivers: the curious history of a non-theory’ 11/JL1

Stefan Muthesius (University of East Anglia), ‘Meaningful, entertaining, popular and ‘Bavarian’: art into design in nineteenth century Munich’ 11/SM1

Emilie Oléron Evans (Queen Mary College London and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III), ‘Transposing the Zeitgeist? Nikolaus Pevsner between Kunstgeschichte and Art History’ 11/EOE1

Matthew C Potter (Northumbria University), ‘Breaking the shell of the humanist egg: Kenneth Clark’s University of London lectures on German art historians^’11/MCP1

Luke Uglow (Aberdeen), ‘Giovanni Morelli and his friend Giorgione: connoisseurship, science and irony’ 11/LU1

Fine and decorative arts

Christina M. Anderson (Ashmolean Museum & Oxford) & Catherine L. Futter (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art), ‘The decorative arts within art historical discourse: where is the dialogue now and where is it heading?’ 11/CMCL1

Erin J. Campbell (University of Victoria, Canada), ‘Listening to objects: an ecological approach to the decorative arts’ 11/EJC1

Deborah L. Krohn (Bard Graduate Center), ‘Beyond terminology, or, the limits of “decorative arts”’ 11/DLK1

In honour of Linda Seidel

Andrée Hayum (Fordham), ‘The 1902 exhibition, Les Primitifs flamands: scholarly fallout and art historical reflections’ 11/AH1

Christine B. Verzar (Ohio State), ‘After Burckhardt and Wölfflin; was there a Basel School of Art History?’ 11/CBV1

Madeline H. Caviness (Tufts), ‘Seeking modernity through the Romanesque: G. G. King and E. H. Lowber behind a camera in Spain c. 1910-25’ 11/MHC1

Inventories and catalogues: Material and Narrative Histories

Guest edited by Francesco Freddolini (Luther College, University of Regina) and Anne Helmreich (Getty Foundation)

Introduction

Francesco Freddolini (Luther College, University of Regina) and Anne Helmreich (Getty Foundation), ‘Inventories, catalogues and art historiography: exploring lists against the grain’ 11/FFAH1

New Approaches to Inventories and Catalogues

Jeffrey Moser (McGill), ‘Why cauldrons come first: taxonomic transparency in the earliest Chinese antiquarian catalogues’ 11/JM1

Joseph Salvatore Ackley (Columbia), ‘Re-approaching the Western medieval church treasury inventory, c. 800-1250’ 11/JSA1

Allison Stielau (Yale), ‘The weight of plate in early modern inventories and secularization lists’ 11/AS1

Anne Helmreich (Getty Foundation), Tim Hitchcock (Sussex), William J. Turkel (Western University in Canada), ‘Rethinking inventories in the digital age: the case of the Old Bailey’ 11/HHT1

Reframing Evidence

Francesco Freddolini (Luther College, University of Regina), ‘The Grand Dukes and their inventories: administering possessions and defining value at the Medici court’ 11/FF1

Amy Buono (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro), ‘Interpretative ingredients: formulating art and natural history in early modern Brazil’ 11/AB1

Elizabeth Pergam (Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York), ‘Selling pictures: the illustrated auction catalogue’ 11/EP1

Gottfried Semper and the discipline of architectural history

Sonja Hildebrand (Accademia di architettura Mendrisio, Università della Svizzera italiana), ‘Concepts of creation: historiography and design in Gottfried Semper’ 11/SH1

Elena Chestnova (Accademia di architettura Mendrisio, Università della Svizzera italiana), ‘”Ornamental design is… a kind of practical science”: Ornamental theories at the London School of Design and Department of Practical Art’ 11/EC1

Claudio Leoni (University College London), ‘Art, production and market conditions: Gottfried Semper’s historical perspective on commodities and the role of museums’ 11/CL1

Dieter Weidmann (ETH and Mendrisio), ‘Through the stable door to Prince Albert? On Gottfried Semper’s London connections’ 11/DW1

Translations

Karl Johns (Klosterneuburg), ‘The originality of Kaschnitz’: Guido Kaschnitz Weinberg, ‘The problem of originality in Roman art’ [Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg, Das Schöpferische in der römischen Kunst, Römische Kunst, vol. 1, chapter 4, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1961, 51-73] 11/KJ1

Karl Johns (Klosterneuburg), ‘Riegl and “objective aesthetics”’: Alois Riegl, ‘Objective aesthetics’ [‘Objective Ästhetik,’ Neue Freie Presse, No. 13608, Morning Edition, Sunday, July 13, 1902, ‘Literatur-Blatt,’ 34-35] 11/KJ2

Nóra Veszprémi (Eötvös Loránd University), ‘Lajos Fülep: The task of Hungarian art history (1951)’ [Lajos Fülep, ‘A magyar művészettörténelem föladata (1951),’ in Ernő Marosi ed., A magyar művészettörténet-írás programjai [Programmes of Hungarian art history writing], Budapest: Corvina, 1999, 283–305, edited by Árpád Tímár] 11/NV1

Ester Alba Pagán (Valencia), ‘Juan Alberto Kurz Muñoz and his academic contribution to the study of the history of Russian art’ [Juan Alberto Kurz Muñoz y su aportación a la historiografía del arte ruso. In: Ars longa: cuadernos de arte, 2010, No. 19: 29-38. http://roderic.uv.es/handle/10550/28336%5D 11/EAP1

Documents

Charles W. Haxthausen (Williams College), ‘Beyond “the two art histories”’ [‘Beyond “the Two Art Histories”?’ in Museum’s Utilization and its Future, Annual Report of Institute of Art and Design, University of Tsukuba, Japan, 2006, 48-54 (Japanese) and 71-77 (English).] 11/CWH1

Wilfried van Damme (Leiden and Tilburg), ‘Cultural encounters: Western scholarship and Fang statuary from Equatorial Africa’ [Inaugural address, delivered on the acceptance of an extraordinary professorship at Tilburg University, Netherlands, in 2011] 11/WvD1

Christopher S. Wood (New York University), ‘Aby Warburg, Homo victor’ [A translation (back into English, and with some revisions) of the article that appeared in French: ‘Aby Warburg, Homo victor’, in Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 118, 2011/12, 81-101] 11/CW1

Reviews

Lauren Dudley (Birmingham), ‘A Timeless Grammar of Iconoclasm?’: Kristine Kolrud and Marina Prusac (eds), Iconoclasm From Antiquity to Modernity, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, 248 pp., 29 b&w illustrations, £60.00 hardback, ISBN 978-1-4094-7033-5 11/LD1

Emily Gephart (School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), ‘Historical narratives and historical desires: re-evaluating American art criticism of the mid-nineteenth century’: Karen Georgi, Critical Shift: Rereading Jarves, Cook, Stillman, and the Narratives of Nineteenth-Century American Art, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013, 152 pp., 8 black and white illustrations. $74.95 hardback, ISBN-10: 0271060662 ISBN-13 978-0-271-06066-8 11/EG1

Romy Golan (CUNY), ‘Towards a Latin Europe’: Vers une Europe Latine: Acteurs et enjeux des échanges culturels entre la France et l’Italie fasciste, Catherine Fraixe, Lucia Piccioni and Christophe Poupault, eds., Brussels: P.I.E. Lang, 2014, 330 pp., €42.80, ISBN-10: 2875740474 ISBN-13: 978-2875740472 11/RG1

Byron Hamann (Ohio State), ‘A Tesoro de la Lengua Castellana o Español Version 2.0’: Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation, edited by Evonne Levy and Kenneth Mills, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, 552 pp., 91 b. & w. illus., £49.00 hdbk, ISBN 9780292753099 11/BH1

Karl Johns (Klosterneuburg), ‘A monumental step for Riegl and Schlosser in France’: Alois Riegl, Christopher S. Wood, Emmanuel Alloa, L’industrie d’art romaine tardive, trans. Marielène Weber, Sophie Yersin Legrand, Paris: Éditions Macula 2014, 476 pp., 23 col. plates, 126 ill. b/w, 44.00 €, ISBN 978-2-86589-075-0, ISSN 1159-4632 and Julius von Schlosser, Patricia Falguières, Les Cabinets d’art et de merveilles de la Renaissance tardive: Une contribution à l’histoire du collectionnisme, Paris: Éditions Macula 2012, 372 pp., 115 ill. b/w, 31.00 €, ISBN 978-2-86589-073-6, ISSN 1159-4632 11/KJ3

Medina Lasansky (Cornell), ‘The 19th-century construction of the Renaissance’: Katherine Wheeler, Victorian Perceptions of Renaissance Architecture, Farnham England and Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2014, 194 pp., 19 b. & w. illus., £60.00/$104.95, hdbk, ISBN 978-1472418821 11/DML1

Elizabeth L’Estrange (Birmingham), ‘From minor to major: the minor arts in medieval art history’: From Minor to Major: The Minor Arts in Medieval Art History, edited by Colum Hourihane, Princeton: Index of Christian Art, 2012, 336pp., 257 col. plates, 42 b. & w. illus., $35.00, pbk ISBN 978-0-9837537-1-1 11/ELE1

Michele Matteini (New York University), ‘China: the empire of things’: Jason Steuber and Nick Pearce, Original Intentions: Essays on the Production, Reproduction, and Interpretation in the Arts of China, Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press 2012, 302 pp., £48.95, ISBN: 9780813039725 11/MM1

Branko Mitrović (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), ‘The Vienna school and Central European art history’: Jan Bakoš, Discourses and strategies: the role of the Vienna School in shaping central European approaches to art history ‡ related discourses, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013, 227 pp., (Slovak Academy of Sciences, Series of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, 5), £40.00, ISBN-10: 3631644523 ISBN-13: 978-3631644522 11/BM1

Partha Mitter (Oxford), ‘The prehistory of Asian collections in Paris’: Ting Chang, Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris, Aldershot: Ashgate 2013, 210 pp., £60.00, ISBN-10: 409437760, ISBN-13: 978-1409437765 11/PM1

Jennifer Montagu (Warburg Institute), ‘Working from home: the life and art of Giovanni Baratta’: Francesco Freddolini, Giovanni Baratta 1670-1747. Scultura e industria del marmo tra la Toscana e le corti d’Europa, LermArte documenti 10, Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 2013, 358 pp., 291 b&w ill., hbk, £172.40, ISBN 978-88-8265-925- 7 11/JenM1

Eric Moormann (Radboud Universiteit), ‘Antiquity in Weimar’: Martin Dönike, Altertumskundliches Wissen in Weimar. Transformationen der Antike, Bd 25. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2013. vi, 515 p., $112.00, ISBN 9783110313826 11/EM1

Margaret Olin (Yale), ‘Scholarship and Empire’: Matthew Rampley, The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847-1918, University Park: Penn State Press, 2013, 296 pp., $89.95 hdbk, ISBN 9780271061580 11/MO1

Carole Paul (UCSB), ‘Authenticity on display’: Can Bilsel, Antiquity on Display: Regimes of the Authentic in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 304 pp., 8 col. plates, 99 b & w illus., £74.00 hdbk, ISBN 9780199570553 11/CP1

Matthew C Potter (University of Northumbria), ‘Looking for Civilisation, Discovering Clark’: ‘Kenneth Clark – Looking for Civilisation’, An Exhibition at Tate Britain, 20 May – 10 August 2014 11/MCP2

Matthew Rampley (Birmingham), ‘The Persistence of Nationalism’: Michela Passini, La fabrique de l’art national: Le nationalisme et les origins de l’histoire de l’art en France et en Allemagne 1870-1933. Paris, Maisons des sciences de l’homme, 2012, €48.00, xx + 333 pp., ISBN-10: 2735114392 ISBN-13: 978-2735114399 11/MR1

Henry Tantaleán (UCLA), ‘The collected past’: Stefanie Gänger, Relics of the Past. The Collecting and Study of Pre-Columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837-1911, Oxford University Press., Oxford 2014. 311 pp. + 20 ill., £65, ISBN-10: 0199687692, ISBN-13: 978-0199687695 11/HT1

Book received

Gottfried Semper, Gesammelte Schriften, 1878-1884, 4 volumes in 5 volumes. With an introduction edited by Henrik Karge. Reprint: Hildesheim 2008-2014. Cloth. Link

Abstracts

Patricia Blessing (Stanford), ‘Friedrich Sarre and the discovery of Seljuk Anatolia’ 11/PB1

Abstract: The German art historian Friedrich Sarre (1865-1945) is best known as the director, from 1925-31, of the Islamic collection of the Berlin Museums, and for his collaboration with Ernst Herzfeld on the excavation of the Abbasid palaces of Samarra, Iraq, just before the onset of the 1914-18 war. From a historiographical point of view, however, Sarre also deserves attention for his work on the Seljuk architecture of Anatolia, a subject that had been barely studied within the context of Islamic art when he ventured into it. Crucially, Sarre’s study of Seljuk architecture is rooted in the late nineteenth-century appreciation of Persian art, rather in the later focus on a unified Turkish identity that became pervasive in the late 1920s, following ideological shifts after the foundation of the Republic of Turkey.

Key words: Friedrich Sarre, Anatolia, Seljuk architecture, Persian architecture, Islamic art, Konya

Laura Breen (University of Westminster), ‘Redefining ceramics through exhibitionary practice (1970-2009)’11/LB1

Abstract: Since the 1960s the field of ceramic practice that developed in the wake of studio pottery has expanded to incorporate diverse uses of clay. In the same period public museums and galleries in Britain have begun to engage with contemporary ceramic works on a more sustained basis. This paper examines how they have attempted to reconcile art-oriented practice, in particular, with existing modes of categorisation through temporary exhibitions. It argues that these ventures also reconstituted the ceramic field, which, like the field of art, became increasingly dependent on context as a means of delineation. It focuses on the period from 1970, when Ceramic Review was founded, to the 2009 exhibition Possibilities and Losses, which craft theorist Glenn Adamson suggested, marks a paradigm shift in ceramics. Extrapolating from Miwon Kwon’s writing on site-specificity it contends that although museums and galleries acted as the functional sites for these exhibitions the discourse around ceramics was a key site of effect.

Keywords: ceramics, museums, medium, exhibition, crafts, decorative arts, clay, pottery, expanded field

Keith Broadfoot (Sydney), ‘The blot on the landscape: Fred Williams and Australian art history’ 11/KB1

Abstract: A defining shift in Australian art historiography occurred with the publishing of Bernard Smith’s 1980 Boyer Lecture series, The Spectre of Truganini. Seeing the exclusion of an Aboriginal presence in Australian art through the ideas of Freud, the history of Australian art, Smith proposed, was a history of repression. After Smith, Ian McLean has developed the most detailed account of the history of Australian art according to this methodology. This essay examines the work of the modern Australian artist Fred Williams in relation to both Smith and McLean’s understanding of the history of Australian art but to expand on their work I argue that, rather than Freud alone, it is Lacan’s refiguring of Freud that offers us the most insight into Williams’s work. Further, insofar as I argue that the history of Australian art is the very subject matter of Williams’s work, his work stands in for a wider project, the understanding of the history of Australian art according to Lacan’s proposal of a foundational split between the eye and the gaze.

Keywords: Australian art history, Fred Williams, Australian landscape, Jacques Lacan, gaze, the uncanny

Eva Fotiadi (Free University Berlin/Dahlem Research School and Princeton), ‘The canon of the author. On individual and shared authorship in exhibition curating’ 11/EF1

Abstract: The writing of the history of exhibition curating in contemporary art has been largely based on the study of a few pioneer curators, such as Harald Szeemann, Lucy Lippard or Seth Siegelaub, who have been lent the status of authors, occasionally comparable to the artist as author. Nonetheless, if one studies systematically innovations and transformations in exhibition-making since the 1960s, which have given to curating the status of distinct profession and its current high prestige, one may find that the image of a charismatic single-author is, to some degree, a construction. Several crucial historical moments in curating, even when labeled by an individual’s name, were nonetheless connected to collective or collaborative endeavors.

Key words: exhibition history, history of curating, art history, contemporary art, museum studies, conceptual art, Harald Szeemann, Seth Siegelaub, Lucy Lippard

Kerry Heckenberg (Queensland), ‘Retrieving an archive: Brook Andrew and William Blandowski’s Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen’ 11/KH1

Abstract: Much of the critical response to Brook Andrew’s reinterpretation of images from a colonial archive in his 2008 series The Island situated the work in a tradition of post-colonial critique of documentary images. But is this an adequate account of either Andrew’s work or the archive in question, William Blandowski’s Australien in 142 Photographischen Abbildungen (1862)? This essay looks at practices involving copying and their impact on understandings of authenticity, the role of art in science, the nature of the observer and visual communication in relation to the broad scope of Blandowski’s archive, but particularly with regard to Andrew’s intervention in it. By examining the way that the past is brought into the present in the Island series, this essay seeks to facilitate a more richly nuanced understanding of these works that is cognizant of the historical issues involved.

Key words: William Blandowski, Brook Andrew, archival art, historiography, contemporary Aboriginal art, colonial illustration, art and science

Seth Adam Hindin (Oxford), ‘How the west was won: Charles Muskavitch, James Roth, and the arrival of ‘scientific’ art conservation in the western United States’ 11/SAH1

Abstract: This article examines the careers of the first two art conservators in North America active outside the north-eastern United States: Charles Muskavitch (1904–2001) and James Roth (1910–1990). Both men trained at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University during the 1930s as part of the initial cohort of modern, ‘scientific’ conservators, and remained professionally active into the 1970s. Muskavitch worked initially in Dallas, Texas, and then, from 1939 onward, in Sacramento, California; Roth spent his entire career in Kansas City, Missouri. It is argued that despite their pioneering contributions, they became peripheral to dominant narratives of conservation history because their modest social backgrounds and geographic distance from major institutions led them to be excluded from the powerful networks that developed among their Ivy League-educated contemporaries in the northeast, which continue to shape U.S. conservation up to the present.

Key words: conservation, restoration, museum studies, Texas, California, Missouri

Ladislav Kesner (Masaryk University Brno), ‘The Warburg/Arnheim effect: Linking cultural/social and perceptual psychology of art’ 11/LK1

Abstract: Aby Warburg and Rudolf Arnheim represent two, mutually complementary, ways of productive interfacing between art history/culture history on the one hand and psychology on the other. It is suggested that neither Warburg´s nor Arnheim´s ideas could have come to form a sustainable theory without taking into account the perspective and focus that preoccupied the other. The article points to possible ways of bridging the gap between the kind of visual cultural and social psychology pursued by Warburg and the perceptual psychology that concerned Arnheim. It is argued that, far from being a matter of just historiographic interest, the attempt to make such connections touches on some key issues and concepts of art theory and its relationship to sciences of the mind and brain today. A conceptual framework is presented in which the approaches of Warburg and Arnheim can be meaningfully integrated. Both thinkers were much preoccupied by the problem of expression. The final section establishes some connections between their respective theories of expression and shows how these theories can be productively extended to address current research on the affective and the empathic response to visual art.

Keywords: Rudolf Arnheim, Aby Warburg, psychology, mind, affect, expression, Pathosformel, vision, perception of art, Gestalt

Gregor Langfeld (Amsterdam), ‘How the Museum of Modern Art in New York canonised German Expressionism’ 11/GL1

Abstract: This paper will consider why and how the negative attitude towards German expressionism in the USA changed abruptly in the second half of the 1930s. At that time Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, played a crucial role in canonizing this art. In order to gain insight into this volte-face, it will be necessary to consider the reception of German expressionism that preceded it as well. In general, this art met with disapproval for a long time. Although it could be seen in the USA since the beginning of the 1920s, it had only very few supporters and collectors.

Keywords: Canonization, Modernism, German Art, Expressionism, Museum of Modern Art, Katherine Dreier, National Socialism

Jennifer Lee (Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis), ‘Medieval pilgrims’ badges in rivers: the curious history of a non-theory’ 11/JL1

Abstract: Medieval pilgrims’ badges are most often found in water. The idea that pilgrims tossed their badges into rivers analogously to modern tourists tossing coins into fountains is often accepted uncritically. As scholars in other fields increasingly take interest in pilgrims’ badges, this idea provides an unreliable art historical foundation for interdisciplinary studies. Investigation into the emergence of this theory reveals not only that is it unsupported by evidence, but that it was not necessarily embraced even by those writers who popularized it. This essay suggests that the theory of ritual deposition was intended to be appealingly familiar to a lay audience. Another interpretation, compatible with modern archaeology and visual studies, may now prove more satisfying to both lay and professional audiences in the twenty-first century.

Keywords: badges, pilgrimage, archaeology, rivers, Canterbury, London

Stefan Muthesius (University of East Anglia), ‘Meaningful, entertaining, popular and ‘Bavarian’: art into design in nineteenth century Munich’ 11/SM1

Abstract: Among European regional stereotypes few come across as strongly and consistently as ‘Bavaria’. Its strength is derived from the ways in which it appears to be firmly and comprehensively grounded in its land and its people.

This article traces the way in which some of the stereotype’s associated forms and images, principally those related to the domestic environment, were first conceived during the nineteenth century. The principal claim is that it was the nineteenth century artists, architects and designers in the Kunststadt Munich, who, helped by the critics, arrived at very specific valorisations of their designs, which could then be applied in an essentialist way to all artefacts of the region, old or new. The article divides the Munich design activities into two phases. During the 1850s designers aimed for a poetic and ‘volkstümlich / popular’ kind of decoration of common objects, including scenes from Bavarian ‘folk’ poetry. In the second phase, during the 1870s and 1880s, interest turned more directly to the domestic environment of Alpine houses, valorising a plain wooden character. Clearly, an absolute belief in in a primeval and unchanging ‘Bavaria’ cannot be entertained any more. But neither should one classify it all as modern kitsch. The latter attitude must be the reason why the subject has hardly been touched on in the copious art histories of Munich so far.

Keywords: History of the methods of defining ‘folk’ art, 19^th century art in Munich, concepts of designer identity, applied arts, furniture, domestic interior decoration, ‘gemütlich’

Emilie Oléron Evans (Queen Mary College London and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris III), ‘Transposing the Zeitgeist? Nikolaus Pevsner between Kunstgeschichte and Art History’ 11/EOE1

Abstract: Throughout his career, the German-born art historian Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-1983) attempted to elevate the history of art and the history of architecture to the status of academic disciplines in Britain, the country to which he had emigrated in 1933. His theoretical approach, centred around the study of the links between artistic forms, national characters and the concept of Zeitgeist, informed the historical language that he gradually caused to spread in the United Kingdom. However, his seemingly unsuccessful attempt to establish himself as a Kunsthistoriker in Britain, indicates the existence of a strong consensus around the idea that national characteristics govern the discipline of art history as much as they govern the art studied.

keywords: Kunstgeschichte, Nikolaus Pevsner, displaced scholar, intellectual immigration, art history as a discipline, Zeitgeist, Wilhelm Pinder, August Schmarsow

Matthew C Potter (Northumbria University), ‘Breaking the shell of the humanist egg: Kenneth Clark’s University of London lectures on German art historians^’11/MCP1

Abstract: This article explores Kenneth Clark’s 1930 lectures delivered to students at London University on the theoretical writings of Alois Riegl and Heinrich Wölfflin. In the first lecture, Clark assessed the methodologies and ideas Riegl employed in his Stilfragen (1893) and Die spätrömische Kunst-Industrie (1901) in order to explore the philosophical ambitions of art history. Clark’s second lecture provided a close reading of Wölfflin’s Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915: Principles of Art History). Together these lectures allowed Clark to critique the extant universalizing humanist frame for cultural history and its allied concepts of beauty and value, stylistic change, the autonomy of art, creativity.

Key words: Kenneth Clark, Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, German art historians, humanism

Luke Uglow (Aberdeen), ‘Giovanni Morelli and his friend Giorgione: connoisseurship, science and irony’ 11/LU1

Abstract: Giovanni Morelli (1816–1891), the nineteenth–century connoisseur, is famous as the inventor of scientific connoisseurship. This reputation was validated in 1880 by his attribution of the Sleeping Venus (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden) to the sixteenth–century Venetian painter Giorgione. In 1890, when attributing to the same artist the Portrait of a Woman (Galleria Borghese, Rome), Morelli referred to Giorgione as ‘my friend’. This seems a strangely unscientific thing to do. This paper will ask the question: why? Perhaps Morelli was being sincere, or perhaps he was being ironic. From a close reading of the text, this paper discusses Morelli as an ironist.

Key words: Morelli, Giorgione, connoisseurship, Kunstwissenschaft, irony

Fine and decorative arts

Abstract: Report on the panel held in New York in 2013 titled ‘The Decorative Arts Within Art Historical Discourse: Where is the Dialogue Now and Where is It Heading?’ at the College Art Association annual meeting. The essay sets out the parameters for the conference, elucidates which texts have played important roles in the formation of the discourse to date and gives précises of the papers that were delivered at the conference along with their varying viewpoints.

Keywords: art history, decorative arts, moveable culture; material culture, design, craft

Erin J. Campbell (University of Victoria, Canada), ‘Listening to objects: an ecological approach to the decorative arts’ 11/EJC1

Abstract: To transcend the divisions in art historical research between high art and decorative art, this study proposes an ecological approach. Drawing on research in the social sciences and humanities, and using the early modern domestic interior as a case study, the essay develops the concepts of environment, ecology, meshwork, assemblage, distributive agency, vital materiality, and matter as social performance, which appear in the work of political scientist Jane Bennett, feminist philosopher Karen Barad, sociologist Bruno Latour, anthropologist Tim Ingold, and others. As the study argues, such concepts provide a phenomenological, integrative, and non-hierarchical framework for the study of the decorative arts within the institutions and practices of art history, allowing art historians to analyse the processes through which the human and the material are intertwined.

Keywords: decorative arts, cultural aesthetics, Early Modern, ecological approach, meshwork, assemblages, distributive agency

Deborah L. Krohn (Bard Graduate Center), ‘Beyond terminology, or, the limits of “decorative arts”’ 11/DLK1

Abstract: Determining the meaning, status, and future of the term ‘decorative arts’ is not merely a question of disciplinary boundaries or institutional practice, idealism or ‘success’, or a pass at the methodological smorgåsbord. This paper argues that the term ‘decorative arts’ has both a specific historical meaning and continuing relevance to other terms such as material culture and design history. This essay discusses the term and its relationship to disciplinary shifts that affected art history, design history in the UK, and material culture in the US. Furthermore, it offers a case study for current scholarship, teaching, and exhibition practice.

Key Words: art history, material culture, decorative arts, history of collecting, exhibition practice

In honour of Linda Seidel

Andrée Hayum (Fordham), ‘The 1902 exhibition, Les Primitifs flamands: scholarly fallout and art historical reflections’ 11/AH1

This essay focuses on the exhibition, Les Primitifs Flamands, which took place in Bruges in 1902. One of the earliest temporary loan exhibitions to have had international impact, it stimulated the first wave of scholarly interest in northern painting. Indeed, though early Netherlandish painters, such as Jan van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden, had been lauded during their own lifetimes, a classical and Italian Renaissance ideal came to dominate the artistic canon of the academy as well as the historical narrative proposed with the emergence of the public museum. The many reviews of this exhibition allow us to track changing attitudes toward style and authorship while the taste for northern art in the broad sense was coming to the fore. Also important are issues of nationalism and nomenclature as the Flamands and the Primitifs of the exhibition’s title are further explored.

Keywords: ‘primitive’, les primitifs flamands, Max Friedländer, Georges Hulin de Loo, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Hugo von Tschudi, W.H. James Weale

Christine B. Verzar (Ohio State), ‘After Burckhardt and Wölfflin; was there a Basel School of Art History?’ 11/CBV1

Abstract: This paper deals with the legacy of Jacob Burckhardt and Heinrich Wölfflin as founders of the department of art history at the university of Basel, Switzerland. Wölfflin’s pupils became his successors as head of the department and museum from H. A. Schmid, Friedrich Rintelen, Paul Ganz to Joseph Gantner and Hans Reinhardt until the 1960s. Wölfflin’s theories and teachings continued to be propagated throughout this period. During the intellectual isolation of Switzerland during the Nazi period and WWII, Swiss art historians turned to local topics for their research. Gantner’s scholarship then focused on modern and medieval art as well as on issues of aesthetics and art criticism. His pupils primarily chose medieval topics for their dissertations and future research, while some branched out into modern art. While thoroughly grounded in a formalist tradition, they now incorporated a contextual and interdisciplinary approach. In 1939, a strong counterforce to older traditional studies occurred at Basel with the appointment of Georg Schmidt as director of the Kunstmuseum and Kupferstichkabinett. He changed the direction of the museum towards modern and contemporary art and helped establish the present character of Basel as a contemporary art city rather than the traditional city and university it had been known for.

Keywords: Basel University and Kunstmuseum, J.Burckhardt, H. Wölfflin, J.Gantner, G.Schmidt, K. Schefold, H. Reinhardt, P. Ganz, H.A. Schmid, H. Loeb, E. Beyeler, Hans Holbein, Matthias Grünewald, A. Boecklin, W. Kaegi

Madeline H. Caviness (Tufts), ‘Seeking modernity through the Romanesque: G. G. King and E. H. Lowber behind a camera in Spain c. 1910-25’ 11/MHC1

Abstract: Women photographers made considerable contributions to the ‘age of emulsion’ that transformed the way art history was practiced and taught early in the twentieth century. Among American women who made great efforts to record medieval monuments were Vida Hunt Francis, who worked in France c. 1905-15, and Lucy Warren Porter whose work has previously been attributed to her husband, Arthur Kingsley Porter. Georgiana Goddard King of Bryn Mawr College preceded Porter and others in documenting medieval and renaissance sites for the Hispanic Society of America. Her co-photographer Edith H. Lowber has until now been overlooked. The last book they planned together was edited and published posthumously and most of the illustrations they prepared for it remained unpublished. King also had a great interest in modern art, through her friendship with Gertrude Stein. Occasionally the photos recall cubism, and some of her writing verges on modernist écriture feminine.

Key words: Gertrude Stein, Spain, medieval, modern, photograph, New York, Paris, Picasso, Bryn Mawr College

Inventories and catalogues: Material and Narrative Histories

Guest edited by Francesco Freddolini (Luther College, University of Regina) and Anne Helmreich (Getty Foundation)

Introduction

Francesco Freddolini (Luther College, University of Regina) and Anne Helmreich (Getty Foundation), ‘Inventories, catalogues and art historiography: exploring lists against the grain’ 11/FFAH1

Abstract: This text outlines the aim of this collection of essays dedicated to the topic of inventories and catalogues – essential building blocks in art historical scholarship. It situates this body of work in relation to the secondary literature and establishes new directions for art historical analysis concerning inventories and catalogues as advocated by the authors assembled here.

Key words: catalogue, epistemology, genre, historiography, inventory, list, materiality

New Approaches to Inventories and Catalogues

Jeffrey Moser (McGill), ‘Why cauldrons come first: taxonomic transparency in the earliest Chinese antiquarian catalogues’ 11/JM1

Abstract: The term ‘antiquarianism’ is increasingly being deployed as an analytical heuristic for comparing different world traditions of thinking about old things. Central to almost all characterizations of “Chinese antiquarianism” is the construction of a pedigree stretching back to the inventories and catalogs of antiquities produced during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127). Close comparison reveals significant ideological differences between the values implicit in the earliest Chinese inventories of two-dimensional inscriptions on metal and stone, and those underlying catalogues of three-dimensional antiquities like bronzes. By situating these differences within the wider intellectual milieu of the Northern Song, this essay explains how the unique ‘taxonomic transparency’ of ancient bronzes reinforced Neo-Confucianism’s conquest of the Chinese ideological landscape at the dawn of the second millennium.

Key words: Song dynasty, antiquarianism, archaeology, bronzes, epigraphy, inventory, ritual, antiquity

Joseph Salvatore Ackley (Columbia), ‘Re-approaching the Western medieval church treasury inventory, c. 800-1250’ 11/JSA1

Abstract: Medieval church treasury inventories document an astonishing abundance of sumptuous treasury objects that no longer exist. These inventories, however, tend to withhold data of traditional interest to art history with their terse, formulaic, and minimal descriptions. Thus they have been somewhat marginalized. This essay recommends future approaches to these texts. By excavating generic conventions to detect underlying value systems, these inventories become quite voluble regarding medieval attitudes towards precious metalwork, vestments, and other liturgical objects. The approaches discussed here include issues of vocabulary, authorship, and formal convention; the mise-en-page and mise-en-livre of these texts; and their relationship with book inventories.

Key words: church, genre, inventory, medieval, metalwork, treasury

Allison Stielau (Yale), ‘The weight of plate in early modern inventories and secularization lists’ 11/AS1

Abstract: Weight was an essential descriptive category for precious metalwork in early modern Europe because it estimated the monetary value that could be extracted in raw material from the formed object. Rather than mere financial information, recorded weights acknowledged precious metal’s transformational potential, which structured the ‘period eye’ for plate. This essay considers recorded weights of plate in inventories from German speaking-lands, in particular secularization lists that documented church treasures about to be liquidated. To better contextualize and interpret them, this essay establishes the metrological framework that underpinned the weighing of gold and silver, as well as the methodological challenges involved in recovering historical measurements. It also explores some applications for weighing and the analysis of recorded weights in art historical methodology, ultimately arguing for a more consistent use of weight by scholars and curators in the study of metalwork.

Keywords: church, inventory, metalwork, Reformation, secularization, treasury, weight

Anne Helmreich (Getty Foundation), Tim Hitchcock (Sussex), William J. Turkel (Western University in Canada), ‘Rethinking inventories in the digital age: the case of the Old Bailey’ 11/HHT1

Abstract: This paper uses a computational approach to the formal indictments included in the Old Bailey Online for the period 1740 to 1800, to assess the material world of London as seen through a thief’s eyes. Trial reports detailing theft incorporate an implicit inventory of portable objects marked by a specific kind of circulatory exchange value enabled by London’s evolving consumer society. By identifying patterns of significance within the Old Bailey corpora of theft trials, this article will extend traditional humanities practices of close reading by adding a form of distant reading facilitated by computational analysis.

Keywords: computation, digital humanities, inventory, London, Old Bailey, theft, trial

Reframing Evidence

Francesco Freddolini (Luther College, University of Regina), ‘The Grand Dukes and their inventories: administering possessions and defining value at the Medici court’ 11/FF1

Abstract: Inventories produced for princely collections in the early modern period diverged substantially from contemporaneous notarial and legal inventories. By investigating a variety of inventories of the Medici family, from 1553 to 1713, this essay sheds light on such differences and explores the material existence and textual strategies of court inventories, addressing issues of function and authorship, as well as relationships between text, objects and people. This essay also explores the role played by these texts in defining artistic value and collectors’ identities through material and aesthetic discourses.

Keywords: Inventory, materiality, Medici court, list, textuality, value

Amy Buono (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro), ‘Interpretative ingredients: formulating art and natural history in early modern Brazil’ 11/AB1

Abstract: This essay examines two early modern European texts –– Willem Piso and Georg Marcgraf’s Natural History of 1648 and an anonymous Jesuit manuscript, the Collection of various recipes, of 1766 –– that present an instructive contrast in terms of information density and organization. Informationally rich, the Natural History presents the flora and fauna of Brazil through elaborate botanical, cultural and linguistic accounts and profuse illustrations; the Collection, however, strips away extraneous details and reduces plants and animals to lists of standardized ingredients. These differences raise important methodological considerations for using inventories and catalogues as sources for colonial scholarship, and sheds light on the colonial networks operating in Brazil.

Key words: Brazil, catalogue, colonial, epistemology, inventory, Jesuit, natural history

Elizabeth Pergam (Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York), ‘Selling pictures: the illustrated auction catalogue’ 11/EP1

Abstract: This essay is based upon a survey of reproductions in auction catalogues – from their first appearance in the early eighteenth century until their more consistent use in the second decade of the twentieth century. Examining the role of these illustrations sheds light on how auctions functioned; it was not just the works of art that were traded, but knowledge about those works of art became currency to be exchanged. In contrast to the high end engravings and photographs of luxury illustrated art books, reproductions in auction catalogues – publications produced as ephemeral marketing tools – were of noticeably lower quality. This study of the status of reproductions, therefore, investigates the evolving understanding of art knowledge, both aesthetic and economic, and the interdependence of the market and connoisseurship.

Keywords: auction, catalogue, connoisseurship, France, Great Britain, print, reproduction

Gottfried Semper and the discipline of architectural history

Sonja Hildebrand (Accademia di architettura Mendrisio, Università della Svizzera italiana), ‘Concepts of creation: historiography and design in Gottfried Semper’ 11/SH1

Abstract: In drawing on Gottfried Semper’s archaeological work on the one hand and his design theory on the other this paper questions the contrasting juxtaposition of scientific practice and design practice. It argues that Semper succeeded in making the tension between historiography and design productive for both fields. The linking methodological context is hermeneutics as developed around 1800 and its adaptation in archaeology and the natural sciences. During his formation Semper was introduced into a scientific practice that was based on a combination of empirical research and poetic imagination. Semper integrated this approach into his archaeological and historiographical work, which formed the basis of his design theory. His design theory in turn combined rational and scientific with creative aspects. Semper’s historiography of architecture and his subsequent design theory are finally referred to concepts of evolutionary biology.

Keywords: Gottfried Semper, hermeneutics, archaeology, design theory, creativity, evolution

Abstract: While Gottfried Semper’s time in London generally is considered to have been pivotal for his theoretical work, the impact of his associations at the School of Design has been appraised negatively. However, examination of thematically related lectures and writings by other protagonists of the Department of Science and Art exposes a number of concepts, references and rhetorical elements that Semper had in common with his colleagues. This paper presents examples of shared issues from the lectures of William Dyce, Owen Jones and Ralph Wornum to demonstrate that there is sound basis for re-evaluating the theoretical elements of Semper’s London oeuvre within the broader corpus of contemporary theories of design and ornament.

Keywords: Gottfried Semper, Design Reform, art and industry, design history, Schools of Design, decorative art, nineteenth century, London

Claudio Leoni (University College London), ‘Art, production and market conditions: Gottfried Semper’s historical perspective on commodities and the role of museums’ 11/CL1

Abstract: This paper looks at Gottfried Semper’s notions on the commodity and capitalism. When Semper attended the Great Exhibition, he realized the enormous impact that capitalist industries and interests have had on the arts. The Crystal Palace has always been at the centre of Semper scholarship but the focus has been less on capitalism than on the arts and crafts although Semper’s comments on capitalism are apparent and illustrate that he understood that everything becomes a commodity, even architecture. As a theorist trying to principles of by which art is driven, he analyzes industries and their mass produced objects and tries to come to terms with this. At the same time, he tries to integrate capitalism into his historical and scientific models. This paper tries to unravel Semper’s ideas on capitalism and the way he tries to resolve its problems in artistic production.

Keywords: Gottfried Semper, capitalism, production, Great Exhibition, commodity, commodification, art, architecture, fetishism, ideal collection, history, evolution, London, Design Reform

Dieter Weidmann (ETH and Mendrisio), ‘Through the stable door to Prince Albert? On Gottfried Semper’s London connections’ 11/DW1

Abstract: In the spring of 1849, when the Saxon revolt was defeated, the architect Gottfried Semper escaped from Dresden forfeiting his safe employment at the academy of arts. After a vain attempt to establish himself in France or another European country, he decided to emigrate to North America. Due to a strange accident, he changed his mind and went to London, the most vibrant town of Europe, in the autumn of 1850. He spent five exciting years there. From the first day, he tried to use his connections with more or less important persons for the purpose of professional success. Some of them inspired or enabled him to write and publish sharp-witted and clear-sighted texts. The present article deals with these relations.

Keywords: Gottfried Semper, Emil Braun, Edwin Chadwick, Henry Cole, Thomas Leverton Donaldson, Rudolph Schramm, Karoline Heusinger, Prince Albert

Translations

Abstract: The vindication of Roman art had been a nearly obsessive preoccupation of the earliest serious comprehensive art historians in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century. While the relevant books by Franz Wickhoff and Alois Riegl are quoted more than they are actually read, the work of Guido Kaschnitz is even less well known in spite of the fact that he has placed these fundamental questions on a more solid footing. The present text from a lecture held late in his life and published posthumously can hopefully correct misconceptions of his approach to artistic principles.

Key words: originality in art, allegory, structural analysis, Greek influence in Roman art, existential effects in sculpture and architecture

Abstract: Riegl published this short review of a popular book from France in a very widely read Sunday newspaper not long after the Spätrömische Kunstindustrie and Das hollāndische Gruppenporträt appeared. It touches on many of his favorite subjects in what is probably a more palatable presentation than his voluminous publications with more complex analysis.

Key words: art and science, the human figure and the illusion of motion, subjectivity in art, naturalism and impressionism

Abstract: The Hungarian art historian and theorist Lajos Fülep wrote his programmatic essay The Task of Hungarian Art History as his inaugural lecture given at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1950. Starting from the provocative claim that the history of Hungarian art has not yet been written, the author distinguished ʽart in Hungary’ from ʽHungarian art.’ He argued that not all art created or found in Hungary could be designated as Hungarian art or included in its history, rejecting interwar art historians’ attempts to ʽappropriate’ art created by itinerant artists or other ethnic groups inhabiting the country. His essay called for new, fundamental research: an unbiased investigation of all art found in the historical territory of the country, so that subsequently Hungarian art could be identified within this greater whole. While rejecting appropriation, Fülep did not define Hungarian art by the ethnic origin of the makers; instead, he challenged art historians to prove the existence of clearly recognisable local traditions.

This is the first English translation of a seminal text that has exerted a major influence on Hungarian art history writing. It is complemented by explanatory notes providing guidance for the non-Hungarian reader and is preceded by a short introduction which contains a biography of Fülep and a brief overview of his opinions on the question of national art.

Key words: Hungarian art, Hungary, Lajos Fülep, national art, nationalism and art history writing, national identity

Abstract: This is a biographical and bibliographical article, describing and analysing the most important contributions to the world of art by the art historian Juan Alberto Kurz Muñoz. He was a pioneer in the study and promotion of Russian-Soviet art in Spain. He introduced studies of Russian art in the University of Valencia in the last years of Franco and the years of the Spanish transition.

Key words: art historiography, Russian art, Soviet age, University of Valencia

Documents

Abstract: This article, first published in Japan in 2005, constitutes a postscript to a conference and its resulting publication, The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University, which was held at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in April 1999. That conference and publication were intended to serve as a forum for exploring the often tense relationship that exists between the two main branches of the discipline. In this paper I add further observations on the issue and offer proposals for a more productive collaboration between academic and museum-based art historians.

Keywords: museum scholarship, scholarly exhibitions, two art histories, exhibition catalogs, museum studies

Abstract: In this inaugural address, delivered on the acceptance of an extraordinary professorship at Tilburg University, Netherlands, in 2011, Wilfried van Damme examines three approaches that have been characteristically applied within the Western anthropology of art during the last half century. Illustrating these approaches with reference to the study of Fang statuary from equatorial Africa, he discusses a stylistic approach, focusing on anatomical details and proportions of Fang anthropomorphic sculptures; a culturalist approach, highlighting the local meaning and values these sculptures express; and a postcolonial approach, dealing with the Western appropriation and commodification of Fang statues.

Keywords: African sculpture, Fang sculpture, historiography of African art studies, historiography of the anthropology of art

Abstract : This essay reflects on the reception of Aby Warburg’s writings in the last several decades. A common theme of the recent literature is that Warburg was misunderstood or misread by the scholars who looked after the library and the legacy in London, in particular Ernst H. Gombrich. Here it is proposed that Gombrich, with his mistrust of traditional aesthetics, his affirmative humanism, and his hopes for a convergence of humanistic studies with the natural sciences, grasped aspects of Warburg’s thought that much of the recent literature has missed.

Key words: Warburg, Warburg institute, Gombrich, Baxandall, Warburg-Haus Hamburg

Reviews

Lauren Dudley (Birmingham), ‘A Timeless Grammar of Iconoclasm?’: Kristine Kolrud and Marina Prusac (eds), Iconoclasm From Antiquity to Modernity, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, 248 pages, 29 b&w illustrations, £60.00 hardback, ISBN 978-1-4094-7033-5 11/LD1

Abstract: This review examines Kristine Kolrud and Marina Prusac’s edited volume, Iconoclasm From Antiquity to Modernity. The collection of essays covers a broad historical and methodological scope and explores the motives and discourses related to iconoclastic acts, including written sources about iconoclasts and iconophiles. It also considers terminology associated with iconoclastic acts and, through its consideration of modern case studies, proffers various categories of intention. The examples discussed by each contributor raise questions relating to the methods of destruction as well as written accounts about acts of iconoclasm but, overall, the theoretical structure of the volume might be regarded as lacking the critical acumen evident by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel in their larger scale Iconoclash catalogue. Nevertheless, this volume’s contributors explore themes such as memory and power struggles, while also addressing the reliability of material and written sources. This review provides an analysis of each chapter and how they relate to the overall volume and, indeed, existing scholarship on iconoclasm.

Key words: iconoclasm, iconoclash, iconomachy, iconoclasts, iconophiles, cultural heritage, memory, destruction

Abstract: Striving to distinguish their authority as and demonstrate their professionalism, art critics James Jackson Jarves, Clarence Cook, and William James Stillman wrote exhibition reviews, essays, and increasingly self-conscious histories of American art and artists in the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas their writing has often been employed to establish a model of opposed pre- and post-war periodization in American art, Karen Georgi challenges this view, re-evaluating the rhetorical structures through which they set forth their opinions. Despite apparent differences and transformations in their categorical classifications, she finds commonalities in their definitions of art, as well as deeper commitments to the enduring belief in art’s truthfulness, and its moral and didactic purpose.

Key words: James Jackson Jarves, Clarence Cook, William James Stillman, American Pre-Raphaelites, John Ruskin, the Crayon, the New Path

Abstract: In the years between the wars, Republican France and Fascist Italy vied for international regard as the foremost “Latin” nation. The fourteen essays in this book examine a network of people whose activities were characterized by the various declensions of a few key terms: Latinité/Latinità, Romanité/Romanità, and Méditerranéanisme/Mediterraneità —concepts that combined a European transnationalism with enhanced nationalism. As different as their political regimes might have been, France and Italy were nations were culture was first and foremost an affair of State. For those French diplomats and cultural officials on the Right who mistrusted the messiness of the democratic parliamentary system and were haunted by a fear of their nation’s cultural decadence and its alleged subjugation to the North, “Latin” fascism became a beacon. Roughly half of the essays in the book retrace however the fortunes of individual Francophile Italians living in Paris whose activities contributed to promoting and thus legitimizing the art and literature produced under the Fascist regime. Vers une Europe Latine offer a model of interdisciplinary research in rewriting the historiography of a particularly troubled period.

Key words: Latinité, Latinità, Romanité, Romanità, Méditerranéanisme, Mediterraneità

Byron Hamann (Ohio State), ‘A Tesoro de la Lengua Castellana o Español Version 2.0’: Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation, edited by Evonne Levy and Kenneth Mills, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, pp., 91 b. & w. illus., £49.00 hdbk, ISBN 9780292753099 11/BH1

Abstract: As one of a number of just-published explorations in the new trend of global lexicography, the Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque uses 43 keywords, each explored from the perspective first of Spain and then of Spanish America, to engage in generative ways with the challenges of writing balanced transatlantic histories, and of navigating an historical archive that encompasses alphabetic, architectural, visual, material, and sonic traces of the past.

Key words: Transatlantic, Atlantic World, Spain, Spanish America, keywords, interdisciplinary, early modern

Abstract: Two books are reviewed here: a French translation of Alois Riegl’s Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (1901) and Julius von Schlosser’s Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance (1908). The first is supplemented by an introduction by Christopher S Wood and a postface by Emmanuel Alloa, Otto Pächt’s appendix to the second edition (1927), Riegl’s essay ‘Late Roman or oriental?’ and the entry for Alois Riegl in Schlosser’s essay on the Vienna School of art history (1934). The second is prefaced by Patricia Falguières ‘La société des objects’ and she also contributes a postface ‘Lire Schlosser aujourd’hui?’; it also has an abundance of notes. Both volumes have very high production values and are beautifully illustrated. The review focuses on the editorial commentary in the context of the interests and ambitions of both Riegl and Schlosser.

Key words: Alois Riegl, Julius von Schlosser, the Vienna School of art history, Strzygowski, Kunstindustrie, Wunderkammer

Abstract: Katherine Wheeler’s Victorian Perceptions of Renaissance Architecture provides a study of the architecture profession and the history of Renaissance architecture in nineteenth century England. Establishing a canon of Renaissance architectural history was key to the rise of architectural professionalism as well as the education of the architect. As we discover, the study of the Renaissance influenced design in England on all scales while also influencing the design of the architect himself.

Keywords: Renaissance historiography, history of the profession, architecture texts

Abstract: From Minor to Major: The Minor Arts in Medieval Art History is a collection of sixteen essays on subjects traditionally considered ‘minor’ or ‘decorative’ in the history of art, from coins to tapestries. The authors tackle the historiography of the discipline and of their own material, as well as offering new readings and approaches and pointing up areas for further research.

Key words: art historiography, decorative arts, applied arts, secular arts, history of collections

Abstract: Original Intentions: Essays on the Production, Reproduction, and Interpretation in the Arts of China is a collection of studies on the creation, circulation, and reception of three-dimensional objects from the Bronze Age to the modern times. This review concentrates on the volume’s methodological approach to and conceptual framing of issues like authenticity, and originality. The essay brings the volume and individual essays in relation to ongoing debates on materiality and making in the fields of Chinese and Western art, arguing for the possibility of a cross-cultural history of the material world.

Keywords: materiality, forgery, authenticity, Chinese art

Abstract: Jan Bakoš’s recent book Discourses and strategies: the role of the Vienna School in shaping central European approaches to art history ‡ related discourses presents a comprehensive picture of the Vienna School of art history from its inception in the mid-nineteenth century to the influence it exercised on Central European scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century. Although the book is a collection of essays that have been published or presented in the past it is very coherent in the perspective it provides. A particularly important merit of the book is the presentation of the works of Slavic- and Hungarian-speaking art historians that are often ignored in contemporary English-speaking scholarship.

Keywords: Vienna School of art history, Central European art history, ideology and art history

Abstract: The work deals with three major collectors of Asian art in Paris in the 19^th century. Enrico Cernuschi and Émile Guimet (founder of Musée Guimet) acquired their substantial collection through travelling abroad while Edmond Goncourt amassed his collection at home through dealers. As the author argues, the influential postcolonial critiques of museum collections as instruments of power and authority do not take into account labour and social relations, and somatic experiences of travels to Asia. Cross-cultural encounters between Europe and Asia led to subtle inversions of power, undermining European sense of superiority. Additionally, she throws light on extensive networks and complex political, commercial, monetary relations, especially bimetallism, as well as the material conditions that affect art collection.

Key words: Postcolonial, museum, travellers , Enrico Cernuschi, Émile Guimet, Edmond de Goncourt, Asian art, Chinese bronzes

Abstract: This monograph describes the life and work of a major marble sculptor who, after his initial training and a period of work in Florence, returned to his native city of Carrara. There he developed the family workshop, where he was able to control the making of marble sculpture from the quarries through the transportation by ship to the installation. With the aid of many assistants, including his brothers and cousins who were also sculptors, he produced not only figurative sculpture but ornamental marble doorways, chimney-pieces, and columns with their bases and capitals. He had gained the patronage of the king of Denmark and the Duke of Marlborough, Madama Reale in Turin, and (through his friendship with Filippo Juvarra) the king of Spain, but he seldom moved from his home, preferring to export his sculpture to many cities in Italy and abroad.

Key words: art education, Giovanni Baratta, Baratta family of sculptors, Pietro Guerrini, Domenico Guidi, Filippo Juvarra, Giovanna Batista Savoia Nemours, Massimiliano Soldani, Carlo Tantardini

Abstract: Review of a book on Goethe and his friends and their study of Antiquity, as gleaned from the publications they read. The figure of Winckelmann served as an example to these scholars and one of the editors of his works, C.L. Fernow, gave lectures on Greek art based on Winckelmann’s work. A series of his lectures is published here for the first time.

Keywords: study of antiquity during the enlightenment, Weimar around 1800, Goethe, Winckelmann, Fernow, Schulze

Abstract: Matthew Rampley’s The Vienna School of Art History examines the early era of the famed group of art historians, curators and art functionaries against the Habsburg Empire that framed their enterprise. It takes into account the centrifugal forces of identity, nationalism and Imperial ideologies that informed their ideas and preferences. A desideratum is the project of relating formal analyses by the thinkers he studies to the ideological allegiances that he uncovers in their thought.

Key words: Matthew Rampley, Habsburg Empire, Vienna School of Art HIstory, Franz Wickhoff, Alois Riegl, Jacob von Falke, Marian Sokolowski, Izador Krsnavi, Albert Ilg, Camillo Sitte, Rudolph Eitelberger

Abstract: Can Bilsel’s Antiquity on Display: Regimes of the Authentic in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum presents a history of the Pergamon Museum from its conception in the late nineteenth century to the present. Focusing mainly on its formative period, Bilsel analyzes its iconic displays and explores the various contexts and practices that conditioned their creation, with a particular emphasis on the concept of authenticity in historic preservation. This review provides a summary of the contents of the book and examines Bilsel’s arguments, while also offering some comments on the broader history of displaying antiquities in museums.

Keywords: antiquity, archaeology, architecture, authenticity, display, historic preservation, museums

Abstract: This review focuses upon the art historiographical lessons to be learned from the ‘Kenneth Clark – Looking for Civilisation’ exhibition at Tate Britain. It considers the challenges represented by art galleries choosing to present displays centred on art historians generally and Clark in particular. The political contexts that existed during Clark’s career and the recent exhibition are mapped in order to explore both how the actions of this democratic patriarch were motivated by his understanding of the shortcomings of humanist and Marxist ideologies, and how an opportunity for reassessment has presented itself since the declining dominance of the New Art History.

Keywords: Kenneth Clark, connoisseurship, abstraction, television, New Art History, humanism, Marxism

Abstract: This review considers Michela Passini’s study of the intertwining of nationalism and art history in France and Germany between 1870 and 1933. It emphasises the importance of Passini’s work on casting light on the neglected field of French art historiography, and the striking parallels it throws up between the two countries. Commending the insights generated by this comparative analysis, it also draws attention to some of the questions that remain to be answered. In particular, while nationalism in German art history in particular is a well known phenomenon, it presents a narrative that parallels that elsewhere in Europe. As such, the question has to be asked whether and in what way German and French art history was distinctive. Were their nationalistic politics merely episodes of a larger story, or did they present a separate story?

Key words: nationalism, France, Germany, Gothic, Renaissance, Focillon, Fontainebleau, Worringer, Gerstenberg, Birnbaum

Henry Tantaleán (UCLA), ‘The collected past’: Stefanie Gänger, Relics of the Past. The Collecting and Study of Pre-Columbian Antiquities in Peru and Chile, 1837-1911, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2014. 311 pp. + 20 ill., £65, ISBN-10: 0199687692, ISBN-13: 978-0199687695 11/HT1

Abstract: A summary outline and analysis of Stefanie Gänger’s Relics of the Past, discussing some of the main topics treated in the book. This book is an important contribution to understanding the emergence of archaeology in Peru and Chile through the activities of collectors’ interest in its antiquities. The book reconstructs the political context where this practice was developed and introduces debates about the roles of indigenous people and the agendas of the creole elites from the Chilean and Peruvian republics. It goes on to conclude with a discussion of these activities in the context of collecting in Europe and America.

Keywords: archaeology, collecting, antiquities, Peru, Chile

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