21: Dec19

General Articles

Eric Garberson (Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond), ‘Architectural history in the architecture academy: Wilhelm Stier (1799-1856) at the Bauakademie and Allgemeine Bauschule in Berlin’ 21/EG1

Jan-Ivar Lindén (Heidelberg and Helsinki), ‘Lived and grasped experience in the aesthetics of Lars-Ivar Ringbom’ 21/J-IL1

Csilla Markója, (Institute of Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), ‘The young Arnold Hauser and the Sunday Circle: the publication of Hauser’s estate preserved in Hungary’ 21/CM1

Ianick Takaes (Columbia University), ‘“A Tract for the Times” – Edgar Wind’s 1960 Reith Lectures’ 21/IT1

Deodáth Zuh (Institute of Philosophy of Research Centre for the Humanities in Budapest), ‘The uncanny concept of Mannerism: A review of Arnold Hauser’s book on the origins of modern art, and its professional background’ 21/DZ1

The influence of the Vienna School of Art History before and after 1918 – Part 1

Petr Kubík and Tomáš Murár (Czech Academy of Sciences), ‘Conference report’, 21/PKTM1

Wojciech Bałus (Jagiellonian University), ‘The place of the Vienna school of art history in Polish art historiography of the interwar period’ 21/WB1

Dubravka Botica (University of Zagreb), ‘Baroque Art in Croatia and the Vienna School of Art History’ 21/DB1

Peter Gillgren (Stockholm University), ‘Felix Horb: Notes in the margins of Max Dvořák, Hans Sedlmayr and Erwin Panofsky’ 21/PG1

Josef Strzygowski, ‘Das Problem der persischen Kunst’, a translation edited with an introduction by Yuka Kadoi (University of Vienna) 21/YK1

Katja Mahnič (University of Ljubljana), ‘Josip Mantuani, First Slovenian student at the Vienna School of Art History and his long obscurity within Slovenian art historiography’ 21/KM1

Tomáš Murár (Czech Academy of Sciences), ‘Oldřich Stefan’s amplification of the Vienna School of Art History’ 21/TM1

A tribute to Charles W. Haxthausen: The Resonant Object

Amy K. Hamlin (St Catherine University) and Robin Schuldenfrei (Courtauld Institute), ‘Introduction: the resonant object’ 21/AHRS1

Graham Bader (Rice University), ‘Kurt Schwitters’ resonant objects: matter and politics in early Merz’ 21/GB1

Victoria Sancho Lobis (Independent), ‘At home in the encyclopaedic museum? Viceregal Latin American Art and its disruptive potential’ 21/VSL1

Robert Slifkin (Institute of Fine Arts, NYU), ‘On Dennis Oppenheim’s marionette theatre’ 21/RS1

Rebecca Uchill (University of Dartmouth), ‘What matters? Returning to perplexity with spurse at the Indianapolis Museum of Art’ 21/RU1

Reviews

Giuseppe Barbieri (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) ‘Immagini e parole: a new Italian collection of essays by E.H. Gombrich, brings a significant contribution to a seventy-year long debate in Italy and abroad’. Review of: Immagini e parole by Ernst H. Gombrich, edited by Lucio Biasiori, Roma: Carocci Editore, collana “Saggi” 2019, 224 p., 73 b. & w. illus., 20.40 €, ISBN 9788843086115 21/GB1

David Cast (Bryn Mawr), ‘Vasari’s words’. Review of: Douglas Biow, Vasari’s Words: The Lives of the Artists as a History of Ideas in the Italian Renaissance, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2018, pp. 256, 41 b/w illus. ISBN9781108472050 (hbk). 21/DC1

Talinn Grigor (University of California, Davis), ‘The Return of the Orient oder Rom’. Review of: Orient oder Rom? History and Reception of a Historiographical Myth (1901-1970) edited by Ivan Foletti and Francesco Lovino, Roma: Viella and Masaryk University 2018, 184 pages,62 b/w illustrations, € 35,00, ISBN: 9788833131047 21/TG1

Ricardo De Mambro Santos ((Willamette), ‘The fabric of evidence: reconstructing the history of Leonardo’s Trattato della pittura and rethinking the narratives of its reception since the sixteenth century’. Review of: The Fabrication of Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della pittura with a scholarly edition of the editio princeps (1651) and an annotated English translation, edited by Claire Farago, Janis Bell and Carlo Vecce, with a foreword by Martin Kemp, Leiden and Boston: Brill 2018, ISBN 9789004353787 e-book, ISBN 9789004353756 hardback, 2 vols, 1303 pages, b/w and colour ill. 21/RDMS1

Stefan Muthesius (University of East Anglia), ‘Modernism and, or versus traditionalism: the work of the Wagnerschűler Leopold Bauer’. Review of: Jindřich Vybiral, Leopold Bauer, Häretiker der modernen Architektur 1872-1938, Basel: Birkhäuser 2018, English Summary, 548 pp., 350 b/w illustrations, 120 colour illustrations, ISBN 978 3 0356 130 62 21/SM1

Elizabeth A. Pergam (Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York), ‘The persistence of national identity in the international art market’. Review of: Art Crossing Borders: The Internationalisation of the Art Market in the Age of Nation States, 1750-1914, edited by Jan Dirk Baetens and Dries Lyna, Amsterdam: Brill 2019, 351 pp. and 45 full-colour ill., EUR 127.00 hdbk, ISBN 978-90-04-29199-7 21/EP1

Daniela del Pesco (Università Roma Tre), ‘The Italian Renaissance in the nineteenth century: revision, revival and return’. Review of: The Italian Renaissance in the Nineteenth Century. Revision, Revival and Return, edited by Lina Bolzoni and Alina Payne, I Tatti Research Series, 1, Harvard University Press-Officina Libraria, Milan 2018, 554 pp., paperback, 17 x 24 cm (6-3/4 x 9-1/2 inches), 105 colour illus., 29 photos, 39,00 € (texts in Italian and English), ISBN 9780674981027 21/DdP1

Arnold Witte (University of Amsterdam and the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome), ‘German Baroque and ‘Sonderrokoko’: canonising and ‘nationalising’ the arts in Germany during the long nineteenth century’. Review of: Ute Engel – Stil und Nation. Barockforschung und deutsche Kunstgeschichte (ca. 1830-1930), Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink 2018, 798 pp, hbk, € 128,- ISBN 978-3-7705-5492-8 21/AW1

Blog

Juliana Barone and Susanna Avery-Quash, Leonardo in Britain Collections and Historical Reception, edited by Biblioteca Leonardiana. Studi e Documenti, vol. 7, 2019, cm 17 x 24, xlvi-456 pp. con 56 tavv. a colori f.t. ISBN: 9788822266248 € 55,25 21/JBSA-Q1

Stefaniia Demchuk (Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine), ‘Putting iconology in the plural’. Conference report on: ‘Iconologies. Global Unity or/and Local Diversities in Art History’, 23 – 25 May 2019, The National Museum in Cracow and Institute of Art History, Jagiellonian University, Cracow 21/SD1

Meital Shai (Independent), The Cosmos at Home. The Fresco Cycle of Villa Grimani Molin at Fratta Polesine, Turin: Silvio Zamorani editore 2019, 384pp., 78 col. plates, 96 b. & w. illus., €28 pbk, ISBN 9788871582405 21/MS1

Abstracts

General Articles

Abstract: This essay extends the examination of the training, institutional appointments, and teaching careers of art historians in early nineteenth-century Berlin begun in volumes five and seven of this journal. It focuses on Wilhelm Stier (1799-1856), who taught architectural history at the Bauakademie, for a time called the Allgemeine Bauschule, from 1828 until his death. Although well known as a teacher and for his submissions to high-profile architectural competitions, Stier has received little in-depth study by historiographers of art and architectural history. His training and professional career are especially well documented in both official archives and his extensive personal papers at the Technische Universität Berlin. These documents clarify Stier’s relationship with Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) and Schinkel’s role in shaping architectural training in Berlin, including the teaching of architectural history. The personal papers also reveal the large role played in Stier’s professional life by his wife, Caroline Oswald Stier (1804-1863).

Key words: architectural history, art history, Bauakademie, Allgemeine Bauschule, Wilhelm Stier, Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Jan-Ivar Lindén (Heidelberg and Helsinki), ‘Lived and grasped experience in the aesthetics of Lars-Ivar Ringbom’ 21/J-IL1

Abstract: Lars-Ivar Ringbom (1901-1971), professor at the Swedish university in Turku (Åbo Akademi) and well known for his works on the iconography of paradise, also worked on fundamental questions of aesthetics and theory of perception. This tendency is especially strong in his early work The Battle concerning Illusion in Painting. Studies in the Essence and Development of Painting (Dissertation in Swedish: Kampen om illusionen i måleriet. Studier i måleriets väsen och utveckling, 1931, 2nd edition 2014). Starting from German Lebensphilosophie and phenomenology, Ringbom develops the heterogeneous character of experience and studies its various artistic forms in the context of a general tension between expressive and intentional aspects. Expressivity is in this context understood as a non-intentional form of meaning. This essay deals with the two central concepts, lived experience (upplevelse) and grasped experience (uppfattande) in relation to similar concerns in the philosophical tradition and tries to show their thematic relevance.

Key words: expression, intention, sensation, imagination, illusion, life, phenomenology

Csilla Markója, (Institute of Art History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), ‘The young Arnold Hauser and the Sunday Circle: the publication of Hauser’s estate preserved in Hungary’ 21/CM1

Abstract: In his well-known review of Hauser in the Art Bulletin E. H. Gombrich posed the rhetorical question: ‘has a social historian really nothing to say about Ambrogio Lorenzetti’ s Good Government…?’ The preceding passages reveal that Gombrich found him wanting in the concrete, objective confrontation with the art object, the scanning look of the art historian: ‘This special approach, we may infer, demands of us that we look on the more distant past from the outside as on an interplay of impersonal forces. Perhaps this aloof attitude accounts for the curious lack of concreteness in Mr. Hauser’s references to individual works of art.’ To crown his devastating judgment, he adds that the illustrations got apparently into the book later by favour of the publisher as ‘their captions have a strangely perfunctory character.’ Without taking a closer look at the art political or methodological aspects of the two art historians’ different positions, it is to be stressed that the publication of Hauser’s early art-related criticisms is a significant step, for it reveals a career start with daily reviews relying on face-to-face confrontations with art works, with the process of creating art. These beginnings go back to times prior to the Sunday Circle, to the reviews published in Temesvári Hírlap from 1911 (a symbolic date, the salient year of Hungarian modernism, of the group called the Eight) covering the theatre, particularly the highly visual stage productions of Reinhardt apart from fine art. Young Hauser’s admiration for the stage might have something to do with his professor Bernát (Bernhard) Alexander’s Shakespeare researches, as is his critique of impressionism related to the contemporary, and occasionally astonishingly critical response to the young Lukács. As Hauser’s widow recalled, it was not Mannheim who introduced the young critic to the Sunday Circle, but Hauser had known the Lukács family earlier as a private tutor. Though this piece of information has not been verified by other sources yet, but his early writings reveal the up-to-date knowledge of Lukács’ youthful ideas. This paper will add new data, facts and analyses to complement Hauser’s biography, also relying on the source material published in Enigma.

Key words: Ernst Gombrich, Karl Mannheim, György Lukács, Sunday Circle, Temesvári Hírlap

Ianick Takaes (Columbia University), ‘“A Tract for the Times” – Edgar Wind’s 1960 Reith Lectures’ 21/IT1

Abstract: In the last months of 1960, the art historian and philosopher Edgar Wind delivered that year’s BBC Reith Lectures, which made him a well-known public intellectual. Under the title of Art and Anarchy, Wind criticized throughout six lectures several aspects of modern art. Wind’s critiques, even though the end result of a lifetime of historical research and philosophical speculation on the artistic phenomenon, were formulated in response to contemporary events. According to Wind, Art and Anarchy was a tract for the times. This article describes the reasons why Wind was invited by the BBC to deliver the Reith Lectures of 1960, examines the aims of his critique vis-à-vis the artistic developments of those years, and evaluate his position as a public intellectual questioning the assumption that a wide diffusion of art was intrinsically good for society.

Keywords: Edgar Wind, BBC, Reith Lectures, Art and Anarchy, Art Criticism, Warburgian Tradition

Abstract: The following essay conveys a critical introduction to the edition of three texts on the problem of Mannerism as conceived by Arnold Hauser in 1965. The main article is the trenchant review recently identified as written by Keith Andrews, which is completed by Hauser’s answer and a final note of the reviewer. Their completely parallel approaches reproduce a common dichotomy in the historiography of Mannerism: Hauser’s philosophical book meditates on the dynamism of conventions and creativity in an age of economic and cultural crises having little to say about single artworks and their intermediate position between High Renaissance and Baroque.

Keywords: Arnold Hauser, Keith Andrews, Mannerism, conflicting historiographies, crisis

The influence of the Vienna School of Art History before and after 1918 – Part 1

Petr Kubík and Tomáš Murár (Czech Academy of Sciences), ‘Conference report’, 21/PKTM1

Abstract: The international conference ‘The Influence of the Vienna School of Art History before and after 1918‘, was organised by the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the Department of Aesthetics of the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University and in partnership with the Austrian Cultural Forum and the National Gallery in Prague. It was hosted by the Academic Conference Centre at the beginning of April 2019. The thirty-four participants came from the Czech Republic (Tomáš Murár, Tereza Johanidesová, Petra Hečková, Marta Filipová, Waldemar Deluga), Slovakia (Tomáš Kowalski), Poland (Wojciech Bałus, Magdalena Kunińska, Dorota Kownacka), Austria (Artur Rosenauer, Alexander Klee, Friedrich Polleroß, Eleonora Gaudieri, Yuka Kadoi, Barbara Czwik), Germany (Regine Prange), Sweden (Peter Gillgren), Croatia (Dubravka Botica), Slovenia, (Katja Mahnič, Barbara Murovec, Matej Klemenčič, Rebeka Vidrih, Gašper Cerkovnik), Romania (Greta-Monica Miron, Vlad Ţoca), Turkey (Zehra Tonbul, Verda Bingöl), Russia (Stepan Vaneyan), Ukraine (Mariana Levytska, Stefaniia Demchuk) and the United States of America (Benjamin Binstock, Michael Young, Ty Vanover, Suzanne Marchand).

Key words: Vienna School; influence

Wojciech Bałus (Jagiellonian University), ‘The place of the Vienna school of art history in Polish art historiography of the interwar period’ 21/WB1

Abstract: The importance of the Vienna school for establishing the foundations of art history as an independent discipline was recognised in Poland during the interwar period. Yet the term ‘school’ was hardly ever used. Since the main core of Polish scholarship did not move beyond Sedlmayr’s erste Kunstwissenschaft, no conclusions regarding the attitudes of the discipline were analysed or cited. In spite of the full awareness of the theoretical contributions of Riegl and Dvořák, references were made rather to the output of practical researchers, while models for research procedures were taken from Tietze’s textbook. Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte in its pure form was not particularly popular in Poland. Władysław Podlacha developed the psychological interpretation of the work of art, but including only partly within its scope investigation into the spiritual foundations of an epoch. There is no trace of any of Polish scholars’ taking interest in the so-called younger school of Vienna.

Key words: Vienna school of art history, Polish art historiography, Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte, Władysław Podlacha, Vojeslav Molè, Karolina Lanckorońska

Dubravka Botica (University of Zagreb), ‘Baroque Art in Croatia and the Vienna School of Art History’ 21/DB1

Abstract: Art History in Croatia developed under influence of Vienna School of Art History. The ideas of Viennese art history were integrated in all fields of art history, but research of art of the Baroque period was especially close to contemporary development in Vienna. Strong negative attitude towards this period in early art history in Croatia started to gradually changing at the beginning of 20^th century, primarily due to Gjuro Szabo (1875—1943). Szabo was schooled in Nuremberg and Vienna, under strong influence of Alois Riegl. In his article on Style (1914) he adopted Riegls idea of Kunstwollen and in his reports on monuments in Northern Croatia (1912—19) and the later book Kroz Hrvatsko zagorje (1939), he introduced methodology of Riegl in the evaluation of the monuments and art of baroque period. Anđela Horvat (1911—1985) applied most of the Szabo’s methodology and so prolonged influence of the Vienna School into the second half of the 20th century.

Key words: art history in Croatia, Baroque art, Gjuro Szabo, methodology of art history

Peter Gillgren (Stockholm University), ‘Felix Horb: Notes in the margins of Max Dvořák, Hans Sedlmayr and Erwin Panofsky’ 21/PG1

Abstract: With his publications on architectural representations in Late Medieval painting, Felix Horb (1890–1958) positioned himself in relation to his teacher Max Dvořák, his close colleague Hans Sedlmayr and the studies of Erwin Panofsky. Founding his work on a historic-genetic methodology, Horb demonstrated its relevance for understanding important aspects of Giotto’s art and the rise of Renaissance perspective. In close contact with many renowned art historians of the earlier twentieth century, Horb’s work is important not only in itself but also for its critical stand in relation to these scholars. Refuting both the history of style and iconology, Horb took a constructivist approach to art history that was founded in the New Vienna School, and was at the same time highly original.

Keywords: Felix Horb, Hans Sedlmayr, Erwin Panofsky, Pietro Cavallini, Giotto, historic-genetic method, central perspective

Josef Strzygowski, ‘Das Problem der persischen Kunst‘, a translation edited with an introduction by Yuka Kadoi (University of Vienna) 21/YK1

Abstract: Among several publications written by the Vienna School of Art History professor Josef Strzygowski (1862 – 1941) during the first few decades of the twentieth century, “Das Problem der persischen Kunst” (1911), deserves a detailed art-historiographical investigation. Published in the Orientalistische Literaturzeitung, this article is of particular interest as a mirror of stormy exchanges among two of the early 20th-century giants in the emerging research field of what came to be known later as “Islamic art history” – namely the Habsburg art historian Josef Strzygowski and the Prussian archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld (1879-1948).

Key words: Persian art, Josef Strzygowski, Ernst Hertzfeld

Katja Mahnič (University of Ljubljana), ‘Josip Mantuani, First Slovenian student at the Vienna School of Art History and his long obscurity within Slovenian art historiography’ 21/KM1

Abstract: Josip Mantuani was the first Slovenian student at the Vienna School of Art History. Yet after his passing he was forgotten by his own profession for a long time. Important aspect which influenced how his work was assessed in the past is connected with the circumstances surrounding his professional and scientific work. Another reason for Mantuani’s oblivion lies in his personal relationships with the younger generation of art historians, France Stele, Izidor Cankar and Vojeslav Mole. A thorough reading of Stele’s obituaries for Mantuani provides a clear enough picture of how he was perceived as an art historian by his younger colleagues but is also interesting in the light of the subsequent development of the historiographical treatment of Mantuani’s work.

Keywords: Josip Mantuani, France Stele, Slovenian art historiography, Provincial Museum of Carniola, Vienna School of Art History

Tomáš Murár (Czech Academy of Sciences), ‘Oldřich Stefan’s amplification of the Vienna School of Art History’ 21/TM1

Abstract: The study interprets the art historical method developed by Oldřich Stefan in the late 1930s and early 1940s as an amplification of the method of the Vienna School of art history. Stefan was professionally an architect, but during his studies in 1920s he also attended art-historical seminar of Vojtěch Birnbaum, a pupil of Alois Riegl and Franz Wickhoff. Birnbaum at the Charles University in Prague developed Riegl’s method of art history, mostly represented by his notion of a ‘baroque principle’ in the history of architecture, published in 1924. The influence of the Vienna School of art history in Prague was elaborated also by Antonín Matějček, a follower of Max Dvořák and colleague of Birnbaum at the Prague University. The tradition of the continuation of the Vienna School in Czech art historiography is widely researched mostly in connection to the conceptions of Matějček’s students, who influenced Czech art history in the second half of the 20^th century, unlike Birnbaum’s students. However, beside Růžena Vacková it was Oldřich Stefan who profoundly connected his art-historical thinking to the Vienna School tradition, mostly to Birnbaum’s and also Dvořák’s thinking – the methodological foundations of his own theory Stefan elaborated in connection with the historical disruption of the known world by the Second World War. How the study suggests, Stefan amplified the methodological assumptions of the Vienna School in order to restore the impaired reality of the advanced 20^th century.

Keywords: Vienna School of Art History, Czech art historiography, Oldřich Stefan, Vojtěch Birnbaum, Max Dvořák, theory of style

A tribute to Charles W. Haxthausen: The Resonant Object

Amy K. Hamlin (St Catherine University) and Robin Schuldenfrei (Courtauld Institute), ‘Introduction: the resonant object’ 21/AHRS1

Abstract: This introductory paper introduces The Resonant Object, a special issue of the Journal of Art Historiography which honours the intellectual legacy of Charles W. Haxthausen’s teaching and the landmark conference ‘The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University’. Taking Haxthausen’s allegorical understanding of Italo Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies as its point of departure, this paper centres the notion of the resonant object within its historical context and in dialogue with shifting frameworks of knowledge. The notion is inspired by Haxthausen’s fifty years in the discipline as academic, as curator, as intellectual, as mentor, and as colleague. The paper serves as a preface to four long-form essays by Haxthausen’s former students that feature new research on a broad range of resonant objects and topics.

Key Words: Charles W. Haxthausen, The Resonant Object, The Two Art Histories, Italo Calvino, Museum Studies, Clark Art Institute

Graham Bader (Rice University), ‘Kurt Schwitters’ resonant objects: matter and politics in early Merz’ 21/GB1

Abstract: Examining a selection of 1919 works by the German artist Kurt Schwitters, this essay argues that the artist’s early forays into collage and assemblage (what he dubbed ‘Merz’) can be understood as material instantiations of essential political questions at the time of their making. Above all, Schwitters sought in his works to concretize, and thus open for creative questioning and play, the processes by which people and things are defined, given value, and merged into integrated wholes. To pursue this argument—which is positioned in relation to the structuring binary of Charles W. Haxthausen’s 1999 Clark Art Institute Conference ‘The Two Art Histories’—the essay looks closely at Schwitters’ material components and techniques, and considers his negotiation, in the immediate wake of World War I, of the competing aesthetic programs of Berlin Dada and Herwarth Walden’s Sturm gallery.

Key Words: Kurt Schwitters, Merz, collage, Dada, Sturm, German avant-garde, Charles W. Haxthausen

Victoria Sancho Lobis (Independent), ‘At home in the encyclopaedic museum? Viceregal Latin American Art and its disruptive potential’ 21/VSL1

Abstract: This article situates recent focus on Viceregal Latin American art within the broader growth of scholarship and museum activity in the field of Latin American and Latino/a art. The significance of where and how institutions display Viceregal Latin American is explored specifically in the space of the encyclopaedic museum. An account of recent milestones reached by major American civic museums is provided as background for the present critical moment of decision-making facing several of the same institutions. Different sites of display are proposed and considered as productively disruptive of the often-unexamined standards that govern museum practice and, in turn, assert a material pedagogy.

Keywords: Viceregal Latin American Art, Colonial Latin American Art, Spanish Colonial Art, museum studies, methodology of display, Charles W. Haxthausen, Cuzco

Robert Slifkin (Institute of Fine Arts, NYU), ‘On Dennis Oppenheim’s marionette theatre’ 21/RS1

Abstract: Between 1974 and 1978 the American artist Dennis Oppenheim staged a series of dramatically lit and oftentimes disturbing tableaux featuring motorized, less-than-life-size marionettes that jerkily moved to a pre-recorded soundtrack of the artist’s voice or music recorded by the artist. Described by Oppenheim as surrogates for himself these marionettes often engaged in acts that would be impossible for actual human bodies to perform. Producing effects of bodily immanence that often engendered affective responses in viewers through overtly mechanical means, these works addressed the challenges of exhibiting performance-based works in conventional gallery settings. This essay considers the ways in which Oppenheim’s surrogate pieces explored the anxieties and antimonies of liberal humanism at the end of the 1960s in which a political allegiance to liberatory and pluralistic politics entailed – at least for a large part of the liberal population – a necessary reduction if not negation of one’s own social position.

Key words: Dennis Oppenheim, marionette, anti-humanism, installation art, minimalism, Charles W. Haxthausen

Rebecca Uchill (Universityof Dartmouth), ‘What matters? Returning to perplexity with spurse at the Indianapolis Museum of Art’ 21/RU1

Abstract: In honour of Charles W. Haxthausen with an offering on the museum side of his ‘two art histories’, this paper reflects on the exhibition sub-merging: a wetland project by the art collective spurse, which I organized in 2006 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Using a series of conceptual protocols drawn from theories of knowledge production from Bruno Latour and others, the artists looked at processes of decision-making that consecrate ‘What Matters’ to the museum (and which material ‘matters’ become sanctioned for recognition within it). The project forced awareness of and discussions about representation, access, and valuation. Our process of producing the exhibition, described in this article, also explored the rich conceptual potential of incongruities in departmental policies or disciplinary methods within the organization. Ultimately, this project explored the reality that a museum – like any commons – is not just one institution or thing, but a multitude of propositions.

Key Words: spurse, Bruno Latour, perplexity, institutional critique, exhibition display, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Newfields, art and science, Charles W. Haxthausen

Reviews

Giuseppe Barbieri (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) ‘Immagini e parole: a new Italian collection of essays by E.H. Gombrich, brings a significant contribution to a seventy-year long debate in Italy and abroad’. Review of: Immagini e parole by Ernst H. Gombrich, edited by Lucio Biasiori, Roma: Carocci Editore, collana “Saggi”, 2019, 224 p., 73 b. & w. illus., 20.40 €, ISBN 9788843086115 21/GB1

Abstract: This Italian edition of a collection of essays (hitherto unpublished in Italian) by E.H. Gombrich allows us to rethink the connection between words and pictures from a sensibly different perspective from the discussions of the early 2000s. The focus is neither on the insurmountable conflict between the now prevailing visual code and the verbal one, nor on the pictorial and iconic turns: Gombrich invites us to re-examine this relationship starting from history and art history. In Italy, this perspective has remained marginal until the emergence of “micro-history” in art, accompanied by a series of exhibitions that focused no longer on the artist but rather on the context. A perspective that deserves to be rediscovered…

Key words: E.H. Gombrich, interdisciplinarity, focus on context, words and pictures, visual syntax

Abstract: This is a slim, careful volume that in its implication, ranges far and wide across the culture of the arts in the Renaissance. The immediate subject is a group of terms that appear in the account of the lives of the artists – though that exact word he never used – written by Giorgio Vasari and published first in 1550. This is a text that Biow is prepared to sees as more than a set of stories or of biased judgments, more indeed than a simple source of information, but rather as a record of values and culturally shared forms enlisted, as he sees its purpose, in the solving of artistic problems defined within the material processes of the making of art . All ways of doing things have their advantages and disadvantages; here in this study what we might think of as both the encyclopaedic and the more general ways of reading Vasari are thoroughly and nicely balanced.

Key words: Vasari, Le Vite, Accademia del Disegno, professionalism, genius, night

Talinn Grigor (University of California, Davis), ‘The Return of the Orient oder Rom’. Review of: Orient oder Rom? History and Reception of a Historiographical Myth (1901-1970) edited by Ivan Foletti and Francesco Lovino, Roma: Viella and Masaryk University, 2018, 184 pages, 62 b/w illustrations, € 35,00, ISBN: 9788833131047 21/TG1

Abstract: This review traces the expansion of the 1901 Orient oder Rom Debate launched over a century ago by Viennese art historians as an unresolved art historical and historiographical question that has become increasingly more relevant to our interdisciplinary and globalized art historical methods and subjects.

Key words: art historiography, Czechoslovakia, Iran, Orient oder Rom, Orient, Riegl, Rome, Strzygowski

Ricardo De Mambro Santos ((Willamette), ‘The fabric of evidence: reconstructing the history of Leonardo’s Trattato della pittura and rethinking the narratives of its reception since the sixteenth century’. Review of: The Fabrication of Leonardo da Vinci’s Trattato della pittura with a scholarly edition of the editio princeps (1651) and an annotated English translation, edited by Claire Farago, Janis Bell and Carlo Vecce, with a foreword by Martin Kemp, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018, ISBN 9789004353787 e-book, ISBN 9789004353756 hardback, 2 vols, 1303 pages, b/w and colour ill. 21/RDMS1

Abstract: This publication provides a scholarly-conducted English translation of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Trattato della pittura”, and examines, in a cohesive collection of essays written by specialists in the field, the complex process of elaboration, transformation and circulation of textual as well as visual materials that led to the creation of this refined volume, printed in Paris in 1651. By means of rigorous micro-historical analyses, the various essays offer a detailed, all-encompassing reconstruction of the different channels through which Leonardo’s autograph notes were reinterpreted and disseminated, from the compilation of the manuscript known as “Libro di pittura”, assembled by Francesco Melzi in the second half of the sixteenth century, to the circulation of these materials in contexts such as sixteenth-century Florence or seventeenth-century Casteldurante, exploring, in particular, the crucial parts played by Cassiano dal Pozzo and Nicolas Poussin in Rome and by Raphael Trichet du Fresne, Roland Chambray and Charles Errard in Paris.

Key words: Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della pittura, Renaissance art theory, Cassiano dal Pozzo, Nicolas Poussin drawings, textual studies

Stefan Muthesius (University of East Anglia), ‘Modernism and, or versus traditionalism: the work of the Wagnerschűler Leopold Bauer’. Review of: Jindřich Vybiral, Leopold Bauer, Häretiker der modernen Architektur 1872-1938, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2018, English Summary, 548 pp., 350 b/w illustrations, 120 colour illustrations, ISBN 978 3 0356 130 62 21/SM1

Abstract: Leopold Bauer counted among the most prominent of the numerous pupils of Otto Wagner and was fully involved with the creation of the distinctive geometric forms of the Secession movement, first in interior design and in the planning of the sizeable Villa. His Villa Reissig in Brno (Brűnn) of 1901-2 is probably the best-preserved building of its kind of the movement. By 1910, however his sympathies also turned towards more traditionalist Classical-Baroque forms when dealing with public commissions. Contemporary critics and later art historians never forgave him for that. The second part of Bauer’s career was mostly spent in his native Moravia, now no longer part of the Hapsburg Empire but of new Czechoslovakia, especially in Opava (Troppau). A rich and diverse output of houses churches offices, hospitals and other tasks is given here the fullest illustration and interpretation by the author, concentrating throughout on the issues of modernity, anti-modernity and a third way.

Key words: Vienna Secession/Wagnerschule design, Vienna Secession style villas and interior design, Interwar Architecture in Czechoslovakia, Architecture of Opava (Troppau), Definitions of Modernism – Anti-Modernisms and its problems

Elizabeth A. Pergam (Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York), ‘The persistence of national identity in the international art market’. Review of: Art Crossing Borders: The Internationalisation of the Art Market in the Age of Nation States, 1750-1914, edited by Jan Dirk Baetens and Dries Lyna, Amsterdam: Brill, 351 pp. and 45 full-colour ill., EUR 127.00 hdbk, ISBN 978-90-04-29199-7 21/EP1

Abstract: With their edited volume of essays dedicated to case studies of the art market during the long nineteenth century, Jan Dirk Baetens and Dries Lyna bring together research into specific cases that provide examples of the increasing internationalization of the commercial art world. This review examines each contribution and the ways in which the cases studied support the editors’ analysis of the conditions that characterized the circulation of art within Europe and America.

Key words: art market, nationalism, internationalism, cosmopolitanism, taste, art history, collecting

Abstract: The book examines the Italian Renaissance revival as a Pan-European event: a commentary on reshaping of the Renaissance in the nineteenth-century perceived as deeply problematic. On the field of an ample range of disciplines—history, literature, music, art, architecture, urban planning-, the Italian Renaissance revival marked the work of a group of figures as diverse as E. M. Forster, Heinrich Geymüller and Adolf von Hildebrand, Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt, H. H. Richardson and R. M. Rilke, Giosuè Carducci and Francesco De Sanctis. An important theme addressed in the book is that of post-unification Italy’s architecture and attitudes towards the need to materialize in urban spaces the new reality of a united country and culture. The contradiction in attitudes towards the Italian Renaissance emerges also from the studies presented in the volume’s Part IV, ‘Building the Backdrop: The Nineteenth Century City’. Though some perceived the Italian Renaissance as a Golden Age, a model for the present, others consider it as a negative example, comparing the resurgence of the arts with the decadence of society and the loss of a political conscience. The positive model had its detractors, and the reaction to the Renaissance was more complex than it may at first have appeared. Through a series of essays by international scholars, volume editors Lina Bolzoni and Alina Payne ‘recover the multidimensionality of the reaction to, transformation of, and commentary on the connections between the Italian Renaissance and nineteenth-century modernity’.

Key words: European art, Romanticism, Italian literary criticism, opera, melodrama, history of women

Arnold Witte (University of Amsterdam and the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome), ‘German Baroque and ‘Sonderrokoko’: canonising and ‘nationalising’ the arts in Germany during the long nineteenth century’. Review of: Ute Engel – Stil und Nation. Barockforschung und deutsche Kunstgeschichte (ca. 1830-1930), Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2018, 798 pp, hbk, € 128,- ISBN 978-3-7705-5492-8 21/AW1

Abstract: In her book on the historiography of German Baroque and Rococo art during the period 1830-1930, Ute Engel discusses how the rediscovery of the German Baroque led to the canonization of many monuments and artists. She argues that, although there was a growing tendency toward nationalist rhetoric in the long nineteenth century, especially after 1870, no consistent or coherent impact of it on art history can be discerned. This leaves open the issue how art historical discourse was related to nationalism; whether the academic informed the political discourse, as is sometimes argued, or vice versa. What does become clear in Engel’s book is firstly that not so much the Baroque but especially the Rococo became identified with ‘Germanness’. Secondly, it shows that there was a growing tendency not toward a pan-German concept of style, but toward a regional approach of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art – so Bavarian and Prussian became almost more important categories for art historical discourse than mere ‘Germanness’.

Key words: Baroque and Rococo painting and architecture, Germany, Austria, 19th-century nationalism

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Abstract The study of the legacy of Leonardo da Vinci in Britain has remained largely overshadowed by that of other Italian Renaissance artists. What was actually known of Leonardo’s work? Were particular aspects of his legacy favoured? This volume investigates how Leonardo’s artistic, theoretical and scientific work has been received in Britain from the seventeenth century onwards. It offers new information concerning the provenance of certain key works and considers their significance for the formation of important British private and public collections. It also addresses the crucial issue of what was considered to be an original work by Leonardo, encompassing related discussions on the roles of versions and copies. In addition, it investigates the shaping of early academic discourse and the appearance of the first English editions of the ‘Treatise on Painting’, as well as considering the publication of English anthologies of his writings and methodological approaches to Leonardo studies. At the same that this volume focuses on the historical reception of Leonardo and his followers’ works in Britain, it makes a wider contribution to studies concerning cultural and intellectual exchanges between Italy and Britain.

Key words: Collection, Leonardo da Vinci, Reception

Abstract: This report looks at the conference ‘Iconologies. Global unity or/and local diversities in art history’ held by the Jagiellonian University in cooperation with the National Museum in Cracow on 23 – 25 May 2019. The dichotomy of the conference agenda was embedded into the structure of this conference report. The former section encompassed presentations on the ‘conventional’ iconology of Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky and its methodological confrontations with visual studies. The latter focused on ‘local iconologies’ and included case studies championing the idea of either presence or absence of the iconology in the Soviet and post-Soviet setting.

Key words: iconology, Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, local iconologies, phenomenology, Soviet art historiography.

Meital Shai (Independent), The Cosmos at Home. The Fresco Cycle of Villa Grimani Molin at Fratta Polesine, Turin: Silvio Zamorani editore, 384pp., 78 col. plates, 96 b. & w. illus., €28 pbk, ISBN 9788871582405 21/MS1

Abstract: Villa Grimani Molin, today Avezzù, is a prestigious noble rural residence adorned with a precious, yet peculiar fresco program. Many attempts have been made to decipher these frescoes, though with very meagre results, mainly because of the absence of basic archival documentation regarding the identities of the architect, the painter and even the main patron responsible for the commission of the villa and its decoration. In order to overcome this barrier, the topic is approached according to the principals of Microhistory, by means of a preliminary, exhaustive documentary reconstruction that surpasses the common archival boundaries of the art and architecture historian. This approach has enabled to answer most of the preliminary questions, providing the essential cultural foundations for the iconographic study of the frescoes, on which the book is centred. The detailed analysis of every scene creates a vivid reconstruction of the cosmological philosophy of the villa’s family members, characterized by an extremely erudite and fascinating syncretic attitude, seeking to unify multiple world-views into one universal form of wisdom, encompassing paganism, Judaism, Catholicism, heretic thought and esotericism. Beyond the presentation of a single case study and its original iconographic discoveries, the book hopes to inspire art and architecture historians how to approach their objects of study when the more standard channels are not able to provide enough background information regarding their origins or function.

Key words: Villa Grimani Molin, microhistory, iconography, iconology

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