Number 5 December 2011

Anthony Auerbach, ‘The Theoretical Eye’ 5-AA/1

Karen C. Britt, ‘These stones still speak: the progress of research on late Roman and early Byzantine mosaic pavements in the Eastern Mediterranean’ 5-KCB/1

Eliana Carrara, ‘Giovanni Battista Adriani and the drafting of the second edition of the Vite: the unpublished manuscript of the Lettera a Messer Giorgio Vasari in the Archivio Borromeo (Stresa, Italy)’ 5-EC/1

A.A. Donohue, ‘New looks at old books: Emanuel Löwy, Die Naturwiedergabe in der älteren griechischen Kunst’ 5-AAD/1

Maia Wellington Gahtan, ‘Epitaphs in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives’ 5-MWG/1

Eric Garberson, ‘Art history in the university: Toelken – Hotho – Kugler’ 5-EG/1 Tables 5-EG/2

Darrell J. Rohl, ‘The chorographic tradition and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish antiquaries’ 5-DR/1

Nathan J. Timpano, ‘The dialectics of vision: Oskar Kokoschka and the historiography of expressionistic sight’ 5-NJT/1

Ian Verstegen, ‘Vasari’s progressive (but non-historicist) Renaissance’ 5-IV/1

Papers from the colloquium ‘I saperi di Ernst Gombrich: Teoria del visibile e analisi dell’arte’, Venice, March 2009 organised by Paolo Fabbri and Tiziana Migliore

Preface, Paolo Fabbri and Tiziana Migliore, ‘Ernst Gombrich on the knowledge, theory and analysis of art’ 5-FM/1

Giuseppe Barbieri, ‘The criterion of simplicity in interpretation’ 5-GB/1

Omar Calabrese, ‘The bridge: suggestions about the meaning of a pictorial motif’ 5-OC/1

Lucia Corrain, ‘Beyond the cloud. Gombrich and the blindness of Orion’ 5-LC/1

Paolo Fabbri, ‘Beyond Gombrich: the recrudescence of visual semiotics’ 5-PF/1

Stefano Ferrari, ‘Gombrich, Art and Psychoanalysis’ 5-SF/1

Patrizia Magli, ‘How things look. The “Physiognomic Illusion”’ 5-PM/1

Katia Mazzucco, ‘The work of Ernst H. Gombrich on the Aby M. Warburg fragments’ 5-KM/1

Tiziana Migliore, ‘Discovery or invention? The difference between art and communication according to Ernst Gombrich’ 5-TM/1

Richard Woodfield, ‘Ernst Gombrich: Iconology and the “linguistics of the image”’ 5-RAW/1

Papers from a colloquium dedicated to the work of Fritz Saxl, marking the sixtieth anniversary of his death, organized by Claudia Wedepohl and held at The Warburg Institute on 13^th June 2008.

Rembrandt Duits, ‘Reading the Stars of the Renaissance. Fritz Saxl and Astrology^’5-RD/1

Karin Hellwig, ‘Saxl’s approach to Spanish art: Velázquez and El Greco’ 5-KH/1

Dorothea McEwan, ‘Saxl and Boll’ 5-DMcE/1

Papers from the conference ‘Reconsidering the Historiography of the Historical Avant-Garde(s)’, co-organized by Michelle Jubin and Sam Sadow, students on the PhD program in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York, April 2011.

Lori Cole, ‘What is the avant-garde? The questionnaire as historiography’ 5-LC/1

Pierluigi Serraino, ‘[A]rchitecture + [P]hotography + [A]rchive: the APA factor in the construction of historiography’ 5-PS/1

Papers from the colloquium ‘Constructing the Discipline: Art History in the UK’ held in Glasgow in November 2010

Hilary Macartney, ‘Experiments in photography as the tool of art history, no. 1: William Stirling’s Annals of the Artists of Spain (1848)’ 5-HM/1

Katia Mazzucco, ‘1941 English Art and the Mediterranean. A photographic exhibition by the Warburg Institute in London’ 5-KM/2

Christoph Schnoor, ‘Colin Rowe: Space as well-composed illusion’ 5-CS/1

Florian Urban, ‘Built historiography in Glasgow’s New Gorbals – the Crown Street Regeneration Project’ 5-FU/1

Beth Williamson, ‘Art history in the art school: the critical historians of Camberwell’ 5-BW/1

Translations

Hubert Damisch, ‘ The Theoretical Eye’ translated by Anthony Auerbach 5-HD/1

Heinrich Gomperz, ‘On Some of the Psychological Conditions of Naturalistic Art’ originally published as ‘Ueber einige psychologische Voraussetzungen der naturalistischen Kunst’, Beilage der Allgemeinen Zeitung, Jahrgang 1905, Nummer 160, München Freitag 14. Juli, 89-93, Nummer 161, Samstag 15. Juli, 98-101. Translated with an introduction by Karl Johns 5-KJ/1

Miao Zhe: Robert Bagley, Max Loehr and the Study of Chinese Bronzes, Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series, 2008, translated by Wang Haicheng, originally published in Chinese in Dushu, November 2010, 126-33. 5-MZ/1

Riccardo Marchi, ‘Hans Tietze and art history as Geisteswissenschaft in early twentieth-century Vienna’ translated by Clarice Zdanski with an introduction by Riccardo Marchi, originally published as Riccardo Marchi, ‘Hans Tietze e la storia dell’arte come scienza dello spirito nella Vienna del primo Novecento’, Arte Lombarda, 110/111, 1994, 55–66 5-RM/1

Julius Schlosser, ‘A dialogue about the art of portraiture’ Originally published as ‘Gespräch von der Bildniskunst’, Österreichische Rundschau, Volume 6, 1906, 502—516, and republished: Julius Schlosser, Präludien Vorträge und Aufsätze, Berlin: Bard 1927, 227—247. Translated with an introduction by Karl Johns 5-KJ/2

Documents

John Mack, ‘Fetish: Magic Figures in Central Africa’, originally published in Anthony Skelton (ed.), Fetishism: Visualising Power and Desire, London: The South Bank Centre in collaboration with Lund Humphries Publishers, 1995. 5-JM/1

Kimberly A. Smith, ‘Real Style: Riegl and Early 20^th Century Central European Art’, originally published in Centropa: Journal of Central European Art and Architecture 5, n. 1 (January 2005): 16-25. 5-KAS/1

Paul Taylor, ‘Henri Frankfort, Aby Warburg and “Mythopoeic Thought”’ 5-PT/1

Georg Vasold, ‘Riegl, Strzygowski and the development of art’ originally published in Towards a Science of Art History: J. J. Tikkanen and Art Historical Scholarship in Europe, Helsinki: Society of Art History, 2009. 5-GV/1

Reviews

Amanda Claridge: ‘Looking for Colour on Greek and Roman Sculpture’. Vinzenz Brinkmann, Oliver Primavesi, Max Hollein, (eds), Circumlitio. The Polychromy of Antique and Medieval Sculpture. Liebighaus Skulpturensammlung, Frankfurt am Main, 2010 5-AC/1

Jim Harris: ‘Looking at Colour on post-Antique Sculpture’. Vinzenz Brinkmann, Oliver Primavesi, Max Hollein, (eds), Circumlitio. The Polychromy of Antique and Medieval Sculpture. Liebighaus Skulpturensammlung, Frankfurt am Main, 2010 5-AH/1

Vanessa Dion Fletcher and Warren Bernauer: ‘‘Mapping Medievalism: An Indigenous Political Perspective’. Kathryn Brush (ed.), Mapping Medievalism at the Canadian Frontier, London Ontario Canada: Museum London and the McIntosh Gallery, 2010 5-FB/1

Catherine Fraixe : ‘Action Française and culture : Life, Times and Legacy’. Olivier Dard, Michel Leymarie, Neil McWilliam (éds), Le maurrassisme et la culture. L’Action française. Culture, société, politique (III), Villeneuve-d’Ascq, Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2010 370 pp., £20. ISBN 978-2-7574-0147-7 5-CF/1

Eric Garberson: ‘Franz Kugler’. Michel Espagne, Bénédicte Savoy, Céline Trautmann-Waller, Franz Theodor Kugler. Deutscher Kunsthistoriker und Berliner Dichter, Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 2010, ISBN 978-3-05-004645-7, ix + 251 pp, 35 black/white images. 5-EG/3

Robert Gibbs: ‘Gothic Art for the 21^st Century?’. Roland Recht, Believing and Seeing: The Art of Gothic Cathedrals, Translated by Mary Whittall, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2008 5-RG/1

John Mack: ‘Surfaces on African sculpture’. Leonard Kahan, Donna Page, and Pascal James Imperato (eds) in collaboration with Charles Bordogna and Bolaji Campbell with an introduction by Patrick McNaughton, Surfaces: Color, Substances, and Ritual Applications on African Sculpture, Indiana University Press, 2009 5-JM/2

Matthew Martin: ‘Style and Classification in the History of Art’. Robert Bagley, Max Loehr and the Study of Chinese Bronzes. Style and Classification in the History of Art, Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Series, 2008 5-MM/1

Margaret Olin: ‘German Orientalism’. Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship, Cambridge and Washington, D.C.: Cambridge University Press, 2009 5-MO/1

Edward Payne: ‘”Savage Spain”? On the reception of Spanish art in Britain and Ireland’. Nigel Glendinning and Hilary Macartney, eds, Spanish Art in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1920: Studies in Reception in Memory of Enriqueta Harris Frankfort, Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2010, 307pp., 17 colour and 56 b. & w. illus., £50.00 hbk, ISBN: 9781855662230. 5-EP/1

Ulrich Pfisterer: ‘Formal values and the essence of art’. Paul van den Akker, Looking for Lines. Theories on the Essence of Art and the Problem of Mannerism, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2010 5-UP/1

Matthew Rampley: ‘Re-reading Riegl’.Peter Noever, Artur Rosenauer and Georg Vasold, eds, Alois Riegl Revisited. Beiträge zu Werk und Rezeption. Contributions to the Opus and its Reception. Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010. Michael S. Falser, Wilfried Lipp, Andrzek Tomaszewski, eds, Conservation and Preservation. Interactions between Theory and Practice. In Memoriam Alois Riegl (1858-1905). Proceedings of the International Conference of the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee for the Theory and the Philosophy of Conservation and Restoration, 23-27 April 2008, Vienna. Florence: Polistampa, 2010. 5-MR/1

Lou Taylor: ‘Sources for Fashion History’. Peter McNeil, Fashion: Critical and Primary Sources, Berg, Oxford, 2009 5-LT/1

Edmund Thomas: ‘Primary Colours’. Mark Bradley, Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 5-ET/1

Responses

Suzanne Marchand, response to Margaret Olin’s review of German Orientalism in the Age of Empire 5-SM/1

Peter McNeill, response to Lou Taylor’s review of Fashion: Critical and Primary Sources 5-PMcN/1

Paul van den Akker, response to Ulrich Pfisterer’s review of Paul van den Akker, Looking for Lines. Theories on the Essence of Art and the Problem of Mannerism, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2010 5-PvdA/1

Short Reviews

Madhuri Desai: Parul Pandya Dhar (ed.), Indian Art History: Changing Perspectives, New Delhi: D. K. Printworld and National Museum Institute, 2011, 279 pp., 70 b&w illus., ISBN 812460597-1 5-MD/1

Andrew Hopkins: Andrew Leach, What is Architectural History? Polity, Cambridge, 2010 5-AH/1

Kristin A. Phelps: Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara, Manipulating the Sacred: Yorùbá Art, Ritual, and Resistance in Brazilian Candomblé. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005 5-KAP/1

Prassanna Raman: Paul Wheatley, The places where men pray together: cities in Islamic lands, seventh though the tenth centuries, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001 5-PR/1

Conference report

Niamh NicGhabhann, ‘Writing Irish Art History’ 5-NNG/1

Books received

Carole P. Biggam, Carole A. Hough, Christian J. Kay and David R. Simmons (eds), New Directions in Colour Studies, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company 2011. xii, 462 pp. ISBN Hb 978 90 272 1188 0 ISBN E-book 978 90 272 8485 3 5-CPB/1

Mark Cruse, Illuminating the Roman d’Alexandre: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264: The Manuscript as Monument , London: D.S.Brewer 2011, 252 pages , ISBN-10: 1843842807, ISBN-13: 978-1843842804 5-MC/1

Lyckle de Vries, How to create beauty: De Lairesse on the theory and practice of making art, The Netherlands: Primavera Press 2011, 224 pages, ca. b/w 100 ill., ISBN 978-90-5997-102-8 [includes contents, sample chapter ‘Book III – The difference between the Antique and Modern manner’ and index] 5-LdV/1

Parul Pandya Dhar (ed.), Indian Art History: Changing Perspectives, New Delhi: D.K. Printworld (P) Ltd. and National Museum Institute of History of Art, Conservation and Museology 2011, 279 pages, 61 b/w ill., ISBN 13: 978-81-246-0597-4 ISBN 10: 81-246-0597-1 [includes contents, introduction and index] 5-PPD/1

Kasper König, Emily Evans and Falk Wolf (eds), Remembering Forward: Paintings of Australian Aborigines since 1960, London: Paul Holberton 2010, 240 pages, 150 ill. £30, ISBN: 978 1 907372 14 8 5-KEW/1

John Hendrix, Roger Williams and Charles H. Carman (eds), Renaissance Theories of Vision, London: Ashgate 2010, 258 pages, 18 b&w ill., £65.00, ISBN 978-1-4094-0024-0 [includes contents, introductory chapter and index] 5-HWC/1

Christopher R. Marshall (ed.), Sculpture and the Museum, London: Ashgate 2011, 286 pages, 63 b/w ill., £55.00, ISBN 978-1-4094-0910-6 [includes contents, introduction and index] 5-CM/1

Abstracts

Anthony Auerbach, ‘The Theoretical Eye’ 5-AA/1

Abstract: This essay is a critical reflection on the challenge Albers’ work poses to the discourse of art history and criticism, including its canonical extra-disciplinary appeals: to mathematics and individual psychology. The notions of geometry and subjectivity transmitted by Alberti, Dürer, Kant and Monge — and hence via the didactic traditions of the academy and the polytechnic — survive as epistemological wish-images as alluring as any art work. Albers’ works, Auerbach argues, tend to disclose the appearance of geometry as subterfuge. While Albers absconds from his work, the viewer remains, confronted with both the aftermath of modernism and his/her own subjectivity.

Key words: Hubert Damisch; Josef Albers, Sigmund Freud; Jacques Lacan, Leon Battista Alberti; Geometry, Technical Drawing; Structural Constellations

Karen C. Britt, ‘These stones still speak: the progress of research on late Roman and early Byzantine mosaic pavements in the Eastern Mediterranean’ 5-KCB/1

Abstract: The perennial discovery of the archaeological remains of mosaic floors in the eastern Mediterranean has long made them a subject of investigation by archaeologists, art historians, and historians. From the beginning of the study of Byzantine art as a discrete area within art history in the late nineteenth century, the means employed for the investigation of late antique and early Byzantine mosaics have been as varied as the appearance of the mosaics themselves. An examination of the history of scholarship on mosaics shows them to be a microcosm of trends in the study of art history from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. This critical survey of the progress of research on the mosaics of the eastern Mediterranean culminates in an evaluation of the ways in which contemporary scholars have, or have not, contended with earlier approaches and methods as they seek answers to similar and different questions concerning these pavements.

Key words: mosaics; Eastern Mediterranean; Near East; late antique art; Byzantine art; provinces; patronage; identity

Abstract: This essay will focus its attention on the second edition of Vasari’s Lives (Giunti, 1568) that took advantage of the constant collaboration of Vincenzio Borghini (1515-1580), and, secondly, that of Giovanni Battista Adriani (1511-1579). The fortunate rediscovery of the autograph manuscript of the Lettera sull’arte degli Antichi by Giovanni Battista Adriani (Letter on the ancients’ art), inserted in the second edition of Vasari’s Lives (compare Vasari, Vite, ed. by Bettarini-Barocchi, I, 176-227), allows us to reconsider the sources used by the prestigious member of the Medici court to write this section, in primis Pliny. Just from a review of the editions on the market in Florence in the sixties of the sixteenth century, an analysis can begin of the diffusion of the Plinian text both printed and in manuscript form, in order to highlight its continuing transmission from one cultural milieu to another, in an unbroken succession going from Landino’s ‘volgarizzamento’ (1476) to the Italian version of Brucioli (1543) and finally at Domenichi’s translation. Each attempt at an understanding of the Letter should in the future, certainly, start from this manuscript, which shows in a tangible way the collaboration of the Florentine historical writer with Vasari: by documenting the drafting stage with modifications and additions to his text made by Adriani, I think it could also be a useful way to approach the methods used by Vasari to create the Lives, one of the masterpieces of Italian Renaissance literature.

Key words: Giorgio Vasari; Vite (Lives); Giovanni Battista Adriani; Lettera a Messer Giorgio Vasari; Pliny the Elder; Naturalis Historia; Vincenzio Borghini

A.A. Donohue, ‘New looks at old books: Emanuel Löwy, Die Naturwiedergabe in der älteren griechischen Kunst’ 5-AAD/1

Abstract: The work of the Austrian archaeologist and historian of classical art Emanuel Löwy was widely read and influential in his own times, but despite his renown as a scholar and teacher, towards the end of his life and long afterwards his writings fell out of awareness, to the extent that in recent attempts to draw attention to his importance, he has been termed a ‘forgotten pioneer’. His most enduring work is his book The Rendering of Nature in Early Greek Art, first published in 1900, best remembered for his attempt to explain persistently non-naturalistic features in Greek painting and sculpture. His ideas are very much in the spirit of his times and have not lost all relevance for current art-historical work.

Key words: Emanuel Löwy; Greek art, naturalism in art; classical archaeology, classical scholarship

Maia Wellington Gahtan, ‘Epitaphs in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives’ 5-MWG/1

Abstract: Many of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives conclude with epitaphs. Some are tomb inscriptions. Others were collected from literary contexts or commissioned by the author. Still others hover in a middle ground being the product of a popular ritual practice of attaching slips of paper with epitaphs written on them to the tomb. Vasari’s use of epitaphs in his biographies with particular emphasis on the social ritual that produced some of them are the subject of this study. Passed over in the secondary literature, epitaph rituals have implications not only for the historical assessment of the individual lives, but also are of broader importance for Vasari’s biographical projects of 1550 and 1568.

Key words: epitaph; Vasari, biography; ex-voto; Renaissance; Giovio; ritual

Eric Garberson, ‘Art history in the university: Toelken – Hotho – Kugler’ 5-EG/1 Tables 5-EG/2

Abstract: This essay offers a contextual reading of the extensive but little studied documentation for the education and subsequent university careers of E. H. Toelken (1785-1864), Gustav Heinrich Hotho (1802-1873) and Franz Kugler (1808-1858), three of the earliest art historians to earn doctoral degrees. Spanning about three decades, from 1804 to 1833, their training occurred during a period of rapid disciplinary specialization within the university. Examination of that training, and the teaching careers built on it, contributes to the larger investigation of how existing university structures and procedures accommodated but also informed emerging disciplines in early nineteenth-century Germany. The essay sets out the relevant academic policies and procedures and gives an overview of those trained and appointed in the historical study of art in Berlin between 1810 and 1840. Documents for Toelken and Kugler are then presented through narrative case histories.

Key words: E.H. Toelken; Gustav Heinrich Hotho; Franz Kugler; Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin; doctoral education; habilitation; teaching of art history

Darrell J. Rohl, ‘The chorographic tradition and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish antiquaries’ 5-DR/1

Abstract: The early modern phenomenon of British Antiquarianism can be traced to the Renaissance rediscovery of the classical chorographic tradition. While the term ‘chorography’ eventually fell out of use, its influence can still be seen in the works of later antiquaries and more current approaches to land and particular places. This paper provides a brief introduction to the history and main concerns of chorography, identifies the continuity of chorographic thinking in the works of the Scottish antiquaries Sir Robert Sibbald and Alexander Gordon, and concludes with a retrospective on the long-term legacy of their work and the role chorography has played in major developments of land-use and studies of Scotland’s past.

Key words: chorography; antiquarianism; Scotland; Robert Sibbald; Alexander Gordon; seventeenth century; eighteenth century

Nathan J. Timpano, ‘The dialectics of vision: Oskar Kokoschka and the historiography of expressionistic sight’ 5-NJT/1

Abstract: In his seminal essay ‘On the Nature of Visions’, Oskar Kokoschka proposes a theory of expressionistic sight that advocates the centrality of both optical and psychological processes in the development of this sensorial construct. The present study argues that Kokoschka’s novel handling of the role of vision in the image forming process implicitly elucidates expressionistic sight as a process fashioned through the dialectical tension that arises from these two prevalent, though oppositional views of artistic vision in the early twentieth century. As such, the historiography of expressionistic sight offered by Kokoschka stands in stark contrast to other prevailing histories written by his interlocutors in fin-de-siècle Germany and Austria.

Key words: Oskar Kokoschka; ‘On the Nature of Visions’; expressionism; inner vision; opticality; dialectic; consciousness

Ian Verstegen, ‘Vasari’s progressive (but non-historicist) Renaissance’ 5-IV/1

Abstract: This article examines the meanings of progress and the improvement of the arts in the writings of Giorgio Vasari, arguing that his vision of progress must be understood in a strictly non-historicist way. Using insights of Maurice Mandelbaum and Jörn Rüsen, the characteristics of the (pre-historicist) exemplary mode of historical understanding are clarified, according to which history is spatial, which principles are timeless, and how the past is understood in terms of the present. Taking this paradigm for granted, many aspects of Vasari’s writings can be clarified for their historical meaning and his scholarly techniques, which are pioneeringly modern, can be divorced from his historical consciousness, which is pre-modern and non-historicist. Introducing the idea of ‘ordinal’ history as a way to understand progress in the Renaissance without passing over to historicism, both Vasari’s understanding of his contemporaries work, as well as the structure of his Lives, is clarified.

Key words: historicism; Vasari; Winckelmann; anachronism

Papers from the colloquium ‘I saperi di Ernst Gombrich: Teoria del visibile e analisi dell’arte’, Venice, March 2009 organised by Paolo Fabbri and Tiziana Migliore

Preface, Paolo Fabbri and Tiziana Migliore, ‘Ernst Gombrich on the knowledge, theory and analysis of art’ 5-FM/1

Abstract: The opening preface to the following collection of essays introduces the papers written for the Venice Gombrich Colloquium (March 2009), dedicated to the cultural inheritance of Sir Ernst Gombrich. A short text, it indicates the main disciplines and the authors involved in the project as landmarks. It sums up all the contributions. It also tries to consider how Gombrich, particularly through Karl Bühler’s visual linguistics, has developed a semiotic method of describing pictures: to analyze signification processes taking places in images. The strength of his approach lies in having enhanced the relationship between the enunciative signification of the artistic image and its communicative role for the viewer, who is its enunciational counterpart.

Key words: Bühler; linguistics; enunciative; enunciational; approach

Giuseppe Barbieri, ‘The criterion of simplicity in interpretation’ 5-GB/1

Abstract: The paper highlights the main features of Ernst Gombrich’s approach to the explication and to the interpretation of Renaissance works. These features are oriented to Karl Popper’s critical rationalism: a strong simplicity that distinguishes him from the more codified and constrained procedure of Erwin Panofsky. Moreover, this examines how the simplicity of Gombrich’s approach well reflects the rationale for the choice of many artistic subjects in the early-modern period, especially for decorative cycles. Some appraisals performed by the author have appeared in several reviews and miscellaneous volumes, which reinforces the hypothesis of a reading based on clarity, as well as adequacy to the Renaissance imagery requirements.

Key words: simplicity; iconology; Panofsky; Renaissance; figurative; programme

Omar Calabrese, ‘The bridge: suggestions about the meaning of a pictorial motif’ 5-OC/1

Abstract: Developing research begun at the Warburg Institute in 1983, this paper reflects on the construction of meaning in a work of art, through the analysis of the bridge’s function in painting. It tries to reply to some objections the author received there from Gombrich, about the chance of finding a stable content in the configuration of the bridge. Hence, the study reconsiders the concept of ‘motif’ applied to this structure. In a semiotic perspective a motif is partially independent as regards to a single textual organization, because it has a mobile and migrant feature. However, it is also partially flexible as it depends upon the same organization. The inquiry shows that bridge’s internal structure corresponds to the category of a ‘junction’, with two opposite items, ‘conjunction’ and ‘disjunction’. The development of this theoretical object can be carried out also by figures that are not ‘bridges’, in the natural sense of the word. Furthermore, its meaning does not depend upon the number of examples we can find but only upon their relevance for constructing a ‘grammar of cases’. Differently from the traditional iconographical approach, but also from panofskian iconology, the analysis moves not only towards the simple or complex content of a figure but also towards its description.

Key words: bridge; motif; theoretical object; semiotics; connecting

Lucia Corrain, ‘Beyond the cloud. Gombrich and the blindness of Orion’ 5-LC/1

Abstract: The contribution departs from the essential and still very much up-to-date article that Ernst Hans Gombrich, as far back as 1944, devoted to Nicolas Poussin’s painting Landscape with Orion. This article offers a meticulous and mythological interpretation of the painting along with the identification of the figures of Orion, Diana and Vulcan, and the artist’s sources. It is on Gombrich’s study that this reading, which focuses on a semiotic analysis of the complex figurative articulation staged by Poussin, is based. The unique rendering of the landscape in the background, the figure of the giant seen from behind in the foreground, the unusual cloud that spreads like a dark stain on the right side of the painting to fall on the eye of the colossus, Orion’s hand at the very centre of the canvas and the lighthouse above the horizon, are all elements of a pictorial system that is complex, but at the same time coherent and significant. As demonstrated here, the theme of Orion’s blindness is bound to that of skill in artistic creation, in a work that becomes a kind of poetic declaration for the peintre-philosophe. The purpose of this essay is to pay tribute to the Viennese art historian, to his everlasting article on the orion, without which we could never even have attempted to gain a better understanding of Poussin’s painting, making an effort in the meantime to put into practice what the French artist had firmly theorized. The opinion put forward here, is that this also reflects how Gombrich worked. The Viennese scholar never stopped at the ‘aspect’ of things, he never stopped before ‘recevoir naturellement dans l’oeil la forme et la rassemblement de la chose vue’, but always tried to see the image with the modality of the poussinian ‘prospect’, that is, beyond the simple receiving of its form in the eye – as the French painter continues – instead searching ‘avec une application particulière les moyen de bien connoistre ce mesme objet’.

Key words: semiotics; mythology; landscape; Prospect; Orion

Paolo Fabbri, ‘Beyond Gombrich: the recrudescence of visual semiotics’ 5-PF/1

Abstract: Gombrich’s semiological project draws its theoretical and methodical coherence from the direction toward sematology taken by Karl Bühler and his school (Popper and Lorenz). His visual studies, on art in particular, have focused more on the utterance dimension – the iconological ‘lexicon’, the ‘etymology’ of decorative patterns, the ‘symbolism’ of the expression plane – than on the communicational strategies of enunciation. Yet this pronominal and interactive level finds its definition in sematology first and only later in the Benveniste and Greimas analysis. Visual and art semiotics has now widened to the ‘discursive’ dimension, which includes both components – the utterance or the product; the uttering itself as the process of enunciation – and is able to describe and explain the rhetoric that is at the basis of Gombrich’s Situational Logic. In his centenary year, Gombrich, who has preceded and influenced us, continues to lead us as a guide.

Key words: sematology; relations; enunciation; symbols; abstractive relevance; strategies

Stefano Ferrari, ‘Gombrich, Art and Psychoanalysis’ 5-SF/1

Abstract: Gombrich has always shown particular attention to the psychology of art as psychology of representation (and enjoyment) of art. In addition, through his friendship with Ernst Kris, who had been a respected art historian in the staff of the Kunsthisthoriches Museum in Vienna before becoming an important psychoanalyst, Gombrich devoted some fundamental essays on the contribution of psychoanalysis to the study of art. The main novelty and the most original feature of his contribution to this field (and which cannot easily be differentiated in general theoretical terms from that of Kris) lies in his focus on Freud’s theories on jokes and in his adherence to the concept of ‘controlled regression in the service of the ego’, introduced by so-called ego psychology . This allowed Gombrich not only to highlight a perfect relationship between Freud’s theoretical thinking and his conservative attitude in the field of aesthetics, but also to use psychoanalysis to underline the historical and cultural character of the processes of representation and enjoyment.

Key words: art; history of art; psychoanalysis; Ernst Kris; Sigmund Freud; caricature

Patrizia Magli, ‘How things look. The “Physiognomic Illusion”’ 5-PM/1

Abstract: what we call the ‘expressive’ character of sounds, colours or shapes basically arises from nothing else but our own ‘physiognomic’ reactions to those things. This direct primitive signification is difficult to account for. All around us, we see our own face reflected in things. We find this phenomenon not only in the natural world but also in artefacts, independently of the producer’s intentions. We examine objects for the effect they may have on us or we on them, hence the notion of ‘affordances’ (J.J. Gibson), which Ernst Gombrich borrows to describe an object’s ability to ‘afford’ us opportunities or occasions for action. So-called ‘emotional design’ seeks most of its inspiration in this system of relations binding people and things. How does this kind of perception work? What is the validity and limits of its interpretation? How is the emotional effect of objects – the ‘physiognomic illusion’ – created? This paper sets out to explore these issues through the semiotic analysis of objects from the world of contemporary industrial design.

Key words: design; physiognomic perception; intersensorial; enunciative function

Katia Mazzucco, ‘The work of Ernst H. Gombrich on the Aby M. Warburg fragments’ 5-KM/1

Abstract: On January 1, 1936, Ernst Gombrich arrived in London from Austria. His task was to reorganize the last of Warburg’s fragments and, in particular, to revise what was left of the incomplete mnemosyne atlas. The goal of this study and inventory was to collate Warburg’s uncompleted studies with the purpose of putting together an English publication of his collected work. In 1970, the only result of this publishing endeavour was included in the pages of the famous Aby Warburg. An intellectual biography. The history of the intellectual, as well as critical, relationship between Gombrich and Warburg is, then, a posthumous one that was started on British soil. Further marking this distance are certain material and non-material aspects of Gombrich’s work in London, including his relationship with other warburgian scholars.

Keywords: mnemosyne; Bilderatlas; Geburtstagsatlas; Aby M. Warburg; Ernst H. Gombrich; Warburg Institute

Tiziana Migliore, ‘Discovery or invention? The difference between art and communication according to Ernst Gombrich’ 5-TM/1

Abstract: This paper sets out to explore the boundaries between artworks and advertising works in line with the thinking of Ernst Gombrich. His distinction between art and other forms of communication emphasises the importance of ‘discovery’ as opposed to mere ‘invention’. What are the symptoms of an artwork according to Gombrich? The difference with advertising is not ontological at all: anything that comes out of the artist’s top hat and is traded between dealers, gallery owners and collectors is art, whereas any graphic work produced for communication purposes and conveyed by the media is propaganda. Ultimately the most valid distinction lies in the modality and the internal dynamics of the artwork itself. By re-examining some examples provided by Gombrich – from the colour of light in John Constable to Giulio Romano’s Palazzo Te, from Raphael’s Madonna della sedia to Saul Steinberg’s work – this paper delves further into an issue not comprehensively dealt with by Gombrich and whose importance is still underestimated.

Key words: symptoms; rhetoric; semiotics; Steinberg

Richard Woodfield, ‘Ernst Gombrich: Iconology and the “linguistics of the image”’ 5-RAW/1

Abstract: This paper is a product of work in progress on understanding Ernst Gombrich’s Viennese roots and the paradox that despite being the world’s most famous art historian he had comparatively little impact on the practice of the discipline. It is argued that this was, in part, because he was a commentator on the practice of art history rather than the exponent of a method. It was also because his preferred medium was the invited lecture rather than the peer-reviewed article or book. His interest in the ‘linguistics of the image’ was inspired by Julius von Schlosser and his contribution to that topic has been little understood in the Anglophone community because he worked from within a Viennese sematological framework, originating with Heinrich Gomperz’s ‘Ueber einige psychologische Voraussetzungen der naturalistischen Kunst’ and culminating in Bühler’s Sprachtheorie, that did not match the semiotic theories of Saussure and Peirce. However, he was not systematic and he is open to the criticism that he misunderstood or misrepresented Bühler’s Organonmodell der Sprache; in this he was in company with Karl Popper. The paper concludes by considering his essays in Symbolic Images as a flawed application of Bühler’s model.

Keywords: linguistics of the image; Bryson; Goodman; Bühler; Gomperz; Schlosser; Kris

Papers from a colloquium dedicated to the work of Fritz Saxl, marking the sixtieth anniversary of his death, organized by Claudia Wedepohl and held at The Warburg Institute on 13^th June 2008.

Rembrandt Duits, ‘Reading the Stars of the Renaissance. Fritz Saxl and Astrology^’5-RD/1

Abstract: This article discusses Fritz Saxl’s publications on astrological images from the western Middle Ages and Renaissance, from his early study on the representation of the planets (1912), via his catalogues of astrological and mythological manuscripts (1915 and 1927) and his contributions on the depiction of the children of the planets (1919, 1923, 1927) to his booklet on the astrological ceiling in the Villa Farnesina in Rome (1934). It aims to assess the importance of Saxl’s work and to show his development from a close follower of Aby Warburg to an independent theorist, with his own method and approach and his own answer to one of the central issues Warburg had raised – how the integrate the old image of the Renaissance as the revival of classical Antiquity with the new picture of the Renaissance as the birth of the modern rational world presented by Burckhardt during the nineteenth century.

Key words: Fritz Saxl (1890-1948); Aby Warburg (1866-1929); Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968); astrology; Renaissance; planets; planet children; constellations; Villa Farnesina (Rome); iconography

Karin Hellwig, ‘Saxl’s approach to Spanish art: Velázquez and El Greco’ 5-KH/1

Abstract: The paper is an attempt to give a first examination of Fritz Saxl’s research on Spanish art, especially on Velázquez and El Greco. The Viennese scholar, art historian and librarian in the ‘Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg’ in Hamburg since 1920, had studied the paintings of the Spanish masters during a two month sojourn in Madrid in spring of 1927. Saxl conducted his research in preparation for a lecture course on Velázquez and the Spanish painting of the seventeenth century in Hamburg university in the summer semester of 1927. The results of his studies concerns written ‘notes’ on Velázquez and El Greco and photographic material on the later, presented here for the first time. An examination of this material reveals how Saxl is working out lines of development and to query pictoral traditions and models as well as links between Velázquez, El Greco and other European painters of his time. Thus, for his time Saxl shows for the period quite innovative ways and perspectives in the considering the Spanish painting of the Baroque era.

Key words: Fritz Saxl; Velázquez; El Greco; Aby Warburg; German historiography

Dorothea McEwan, ‘Saxl and Boll’ 5-DMcE/1

Abstract: We know of Aby Warburg being Fritz Saxl’s mentor. What is less known is that Saxl had a second mentor, equally important for his research development, Franz Boll, the celebrated classical philologist. The article charts Boll’s involvement in Saxl’s research activities upon leaving university.

Keywords: Fritz Saxl; Aby Warburg; Franz Boll; Verzeichnis astrologischer und mythologischer illustrierter Handschriften des lateinischen Mittelalters; medieval astrology; astronomy

Lori Cole, ‘What is the avant-garde? The questionnaire as historiography’ 5-LC/1

Abstract: In 1928 the Cuban magazine Revista de Avance issued a questionnaire asking, ‘What should (Latin) American art be?’ while the same year the expatriate magazine transition based in Paris, polled its North American contributors asking: ‘Why do Americans Live in Europe?’ and surveyed its European writers to ask: ‘How are the influences of the United States manifesting themselves upon Europe?’ By examining these questionnaires issued across the Atlantic in the same year, I examine the way the genre structures the artistic and political stakes of modernist print communities and illuminates the relationships these magazines establish between aesthetics and the Americas. Questionnaires functioned as print proxies by implying through their reproduction of multiple individual responses a much larger community of writers and readers. Both questionnaires work to interpellate the magazines’ dispersed communities and to emphasize the effects of their dis/location on their artistic purpose, ultimately forming a patchwork historiography of the avant-garde.

Key words: questionnaire; magazines; historiography; Revista de Avance; transition; Americas

Pierluigi Serraino, ‘[A]rchitecture + [P]hotography + [A]rchive: the APA factor in the construction of historiography’ 5-PS/1

Abstract: The APA factor is the triangular foundation which the discursive edifice of Historiography in Modern Architecture rests upon. The production of architecture, its textual and photographic documentation, and the structured retrievability of visual records over time are the mutually interdependent links required for the lasting inclusion of particular buildings and their architects in institutional discourse. This paper illustrates the case study of the Italian architect Gian Luigi Giordani, designer of the Farmitalia Pharmaceutical Factory in Milan, and the Italian architectural photographer Giorgio Casali where the links holding together the APA factor are broken, resulting in their contemporary oblivion.

Key words: architecture; photography; archive; history; memory; magazines; Casali

Papers from the colloquium ‘Constructing the Discipline: Art History in the UK’ held in Glasgow in November 2010

Hilary Macartney, ‘Experiments in photography as the tool of art history, no. 1: William Stirling’s Annals of the Artists of Spain (1848)’ 5-HM/1

Abstract: William Stirling’s Annals of the Artists of Spain (1848) appeared at a key moment in the emergence of art history as an academic discipline. It was the first scholarly history of Spanish art in English, and was well illustrated with engravings. But there was also an additional volume of Talbotype photographic illustrations. Photography, like art history, was still in its infancy, and William Henry Fox Talbot had only recently invented the negative-positive process which allowed multiple photographic images to be produced. The experimental supplementary volume, of which only 50 copies were printed, meant that the Annals became the first photographically illustrated book on art. The new process had many limitations, including chemical instability. Fading began immediately, and Stirling himself regarded the volume as a failed experiment. Nevertheless, it pointed the way in the use of photography, and photographically illustrated books, as essential tools of art history.

Keywords: Early photography; Spanish art; art history methodology; historiography of art; Sir William Stirling Maxwell; William Henry Fox Talbot; Nicolaas Henneman

Katia Mazzucco, ‘1941 English Art and the Mediterranean. A photographic exhibition by the Warburg Institute in London’ 5-KM/2

Abstract: Between 1939 and 1948 the Warburg Institute organized a series of photographic exhibitions. The most important of these, held in 1941, was entitled English Art and the Mediterranean. The various exhibitions all presented distinct research themes according to indications by the Warburg Library. They were also aligned technically as well as in their methodological perspective: the exhibition had no original works, only displaying photographic reproductions, and the exhibitions’ major themes were intended to provide a comparative and multidisciplinary overview of issues that had already been discussed in the area of art history. These events represented a significant encounter between the late nineteenth-century German school of aesthetics and art history and the British cultural and academic contexts. The exhibitions also presented new approaches to British art, through their original conception, as well as a demonstration of a particular sensitivity to visual culture, in terms of a broader understanding of images.

Key words: (Gertrud) Bing; British Art and the Mediterranean; (Fritz) Saxl; (Aby) Warburg; Warburg Institute exhibitions; Warburg Library; (Rudolf) Wittkower

Christoph Schnoor, ‘Colin Rowe: Space as well-composed illusion’ 5-CS/1

Abstract: Architectural historian Colin Rowe, although well known for his intriguing analytical writings on modern architecture, rarely examined architectural space as a scholarly subject-matter. Historians examining Rowe’s writings rarely refer to the issue of space, either. Anthony Vidler, Werner Oechslin, Alexander Caragonne and others have examined Rowe’s investigations into urban space, his analyses of formal principles in architecture, or his critical stance towards the myths of modernism, but have not singled out architectural space as subject matter. Nevertheless, this paper argues that Rowe is indeed one of the few post-war historians writing in the English language to have conveyed analyses of architectural space, particularly in the volume The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa (1976). The paper examines how Rowe understood architectural space as relevant only when not seen as ‘pure’ but ‘contaminated’ with ambiguity and active character: notions of flatness versus depth and horizontal versus vertical, as well as the overlapping of conflicting scales or whole structural or spatial systems are central for Rowe’s reading of architectural space, which is also always infused with an idea of movement. Further, the paper traces influences of Rowe’s approach beyond the obvious influence by Rudolf Wittkower to Heinrich Wölfflin’s style and method, partially conveyed through the translation of Sigfried Giedion’s writings.

Key words: Colin Rowe; architectural space; modernism; spatial analysis; historiography; Sigfried Giedion; Heinrich Wölfflin; phenomenal transparency

Florian Urban, ‘Built historiography in Glasgow’s New Gorbals – the Crown Street Regeneration Project’ 5-FU/1

Abstract: In 2000, the Crown Street redevelopment in Glasgow’s New Gorbals was completed after a master plan by Piers Gough of the London firm CZWG. Built on symbolically contested grounds that were previously occupied by the Gorbals tenements (1870s-1960s) and the high-rise Hutchesontown flats (1960s-1990s), the new development is a textbook example of neo-traditional design. This article looks at the Crown Street redevelopment as a form of built historiography that inscribes a harmonized account of the past into the urban fabric. Like a written narrative, plan and buildings convey a historic narrative through tropes and character types. The historiographic dimension of the Crown Street redevelopment works on three levels. There is the site, which in various moments in the twentieth century came to signify the urban ‘other’ – the city’s underbelly of crime, plight, and misery – and which, as a result of both gentrification and architectural redesign, is now apparently pacified. There are carefully chosen historic references such as tenement façades, bay windows, underpasses, courtyards, and rues corridors, which communicate certain conceptions about recent history. And there is a municipal strategy for Glasgow’s economic revival, of which the re-writing of history is a part, and which, among others, makes use of the Crown Street redevelopment’s architectural imagery. On all three levels the Crown Street redevelopment reconciles conflicting perspectives: on the one hand a break almost as comprehensive as the modernist upheaval, which involved complete redesign and exchange of the population, and on the other hand the conception of historical continuity and long-lasting community life. Conveying a historical image cleared of ambiguities and imperfections, the Crown Street redevelopment thus communicates a message of both renewal and permanence.

Key words: New Gorbals; Crown Street; neo-traditional urban design; post-modern architecture; historiography

Beth Williamson, ‘Art history in the art school: the critical historians of Camberwell’ 5-BW/1

Abstract: Within the context of a wider study of British art education between 1960 and 2010, this paper takes as its starting point the introduction in 1960 of the Diploma in Art and Design or DipAD in art schools with its attendant requirements for art historical instruction and intellectual enrichment. Beginning with a survey of the Coldstream and Summerson developments in the 1960s, and with specific reference to the teaching of art history, it will consider Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts as a particular case study. The Art History Department at Camberwell was properly established in 1961 by Michael Podro, later to become an influential figure within the discipline of art history from his base at the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex. Referencing Podro’s own thinking on art, this study asks how that might relate to the curriculum he introduced at Camberwell. Further, drawing on the work and careers of those who taught there subsequently, such as Alex Potts, it will also examine how the presence of such individuals might have affected how the curriculum developed over the years that followed.

Key words: art pedagogy; art education; Michael Podro; philosophical aesthetics; psychoanalytic aesthetics; art historiography

Translations

Hubert Damisch, ‘ The Theoretical Eye’ translated by Anthony Auerbach 5-HD/1

Abstract: In his article ‘L’œil théoricien’ (1988), written for the catalogue of an exhibition of works by Josef Albers (1888–1976), Hubert Damisch brought the complex of ideas elaborated in his major work on Renaissance painting to bear on the twentieth century. With reference, on the one hand, to psychoanalysis, and on the other hand to geometry, Damisch juxtaposes the enigma of Albers’ works with the logic of his method, hinting at an interpretation which, like L’origine de la perspective (1987), will borrow from Lacan, Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. Translated from the French by Anthony Auerbach with augmented notes.

Key words: Hubert Damisch; Josef Albers; Sigmund Freud; Jacques Lacan; Leon Battista Alberti; geometry; technical drawing; structural constellations

Abstract: As a specialist in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy during the earlytwentieth century in Vienna, Heinrich Gomperz wrote and presumably also lectured in a characteristically clear style about elusive questions involving emotions and psychology. This essay about naturalism in art covers subjects projected for the third part of his monumental Weltanschuungslehre, which was ultimately never published. His model of the slow emergence of artistic naturalism involves the playful impulse of free imagination, the role of de-mystification or the ‘loss of an aura’ in the developing rationalization of artistic illusion and the relative place of similarity and truth in art.

Key words: naturalism; illusionism; resemblance; image worship; iconoclasm; primitive art; game theory; photography; Romantic irony; symbolism in art; psychology of art; de-formation; conventions in art

Abstract: This essay reviews Robert Bagley’s intellectual portrait of Max Loehr, one of the founding fathers of the western study of Chinese art. Bagley’s book centers on the prolonged controversy between Loehr and Bernhard Karlgren over the history of ancient Chinese bronzes. Karlgren, an eminent philologist, tried to extract chronological information from a classification of décor motifs, an approach that he and many of his readers considered to be scientific and objective. Failing to detect any pattern of change in his material, he declared that all extant bronzes were made during two or three centuries of artistic stagnation, centuries that merely repeated designs invented in some earlier and more creative period that is unknown to us. Loehr by contrast succeeded in tracing a clear sequence of evolving styles in the same corpus of material. These positions were first staked out in the 1930s; most observers sided with Karlgren until the 1960s, when archaeology confirmed Loehr’s sequence. What makes the controversy interesting and instructive is that the right answer did not come from the approach that to this day strikes most readers as the scientific one, it came from a seemingly subjective and intuitive art-historical analysis. In part Bagley explains this unexpected outcome by showing that science as Karlgren conceived it—a rule-bound and mechanical procedure that excludes intuition and judgment—is a layman’s misconception; in essential ways, he shows, it was Loehr’s approach rather than Karlgren’s that was scientific. At a time when the prestige of the hard sciences continues to inspire attempts to import scientific methods into the humanities, Bagley has illuminating things to say about the real substance of those methods. He also has much to say about artistic invention and intentionality, and he clarifies one of art history’s most constantly used yet most ill-defined concepts, the concept of style, by arguing that it is not an intrinsic property of an object considered in isolation but only a shorthand way of talking about comparisons.

Key words: Max Loehr; Bernhard Karlgren; Shang bronze; archaeology/methodology; intentionality; style

Abstract: This article analyzes the Methode der Kunstgeschichte, published in 1913 by Hans Tietze (1880-1954), an important but often neglected figure of the Vienna school of art history, who had been a student of Franz Wickhoff and Aloïs Riegl and was one of Ernst H. Gombrich’s teachers. In the Methode Tietze developed a bold and innovative idea of art history out of a confrontation with momentous intellectual and artistic challenges. These were (1) the discussion about the object and method of the Geisteswissenschaften (human and cultural sciences) in German philosophy, (2) Riegl’s and Wölfflin’s formalism, which Tietze critiqued as insufficient, also in response to the emergence of expressionism, which he courageously and precociously supported, and (3) epistemological debates that questioned notions of ‘objective’ knowledge.

Key words: Hans Tietze; Aloïs Riegl; Franz Wickhoff; Heinrich Wölfflin; Max Dvořák; August Schmarsow; Giovanni Morelli; Wilhelm Dilthey; Ernst Mach; Benedetto Croce; Oskar Kokoschka; Vienna school of art history; art historiography; art history – methodology; expressionism

Abstract: In an unusually popular and readable dialogue form, Schlosser alludes to the classical education he takes for granted in any reader approaching his favourite ‘thorny’ questions from aesthetics and history. These involve the problems of naturalism, impressionism, portrait likeness, psychology of perception and numerous others being bandied around academic circles at the turn of the century. It is of further interest in directly referring critically to his recently deceased friend (Alois Riegl), and being written just at a moment in his career when Schlosser had been casting around the ideas of Ernst Brücke, Konrad Lange, even Henri Bergson, but had discovered the recent contribution of Benedetto Croce, which would colour his approach with an increasing intensity for the remainder of his life. He became what might be seen as the archetypical art historical theorist, but continues to distinguish himself from his successors by his greater consistency.

Key words: portraiture; likeness; aesthetics; art literature; impressionism; naturalism; illusionism; iconoclasm

Documents

Abstract: This article was originally published as a catalogue essay accompanying an exhibition exploring the idea of ‘fetishism’ in western art and thought. It discusses a well-known African example, the nkisi and related objects of the Kongo peoples of west central Africa and examines its uses and significance. Expectations based on their encrusted surfaces and nailed appearance – and on the apparent disjunction between indigenous belief and practice and Christian mission – have led to the application of the term ‘fetish’; in reality their purposes move well beyond those of vague magical application. Their appearance is compared with that of the shiny, well-patinated dynastic sculpture of the Kuba further into the equatorial forests. If one is conventionally regarded as about magical agency the other is discussed as an adjunct to royal legitimacy. Yet their divergent appearances are, it is suggested, a product of a convergent idea that for an object to have an active role in human affairs it needs to be activated.

Key words: ‘fetish’; nkisi; Kongo; Kuba; patination; surface

Kimberly A. Smith, ‘Real Style: Riegl and Early 20^th Century Central European Art’, originally published in Centropa: Journal of Central European Art and Architecture 5, n. 1 (January 2005): 16-25. 5-KAS/1

Abstract: Kimberly A. Smith discusses the ways in which the understanding of style was articulated by intellectuals working in the late nineteenth century, primarily in Germany and Austria, and the epistemological repercussions of this shift in thinking for both the theory and practice of central European art in the years before World War I. Smith focuses in particular on the writings of Alois Riegl, in which this approach to thinking about style came to its most influential fruition, and proposes that Riegl’s conception of form had implications for artistic practice. Riegl’s methodological understanding of artistic form drew connections between morphological types and perceptions of reality, thereby altering the ways in which artists could conceive of aesthetic authenticity. Style itself could be seen as the harbinger of truth, opening up the possibility that any style might offer a genuine revelation of the real. Yet as Smith shows, the Rieglian theory of meaningful form may have encouraged an artistic pluralism that subverted the very Kunstwollen theory of historically unified style from which it sprung.

Key words: art; art history; central Europe; expressionism; form; Kunstwollen; reality effect; Alois Riegl; style; Werkbund

Paul Taylor, ‘Henri Frankfort, Aby Warburg and “Mythopoeic Thought”’ 5-PT/1

Abstract: This is the text of a lunchtime lecture given at the Warburg Institute in the spring of 2004. It formed part of a series concerned with past Warburg scholars, and was devoted to the work of Henri Frankfort, Director of the Institute from 1949 to 1954. The first third of the lecture was a rapid account of his career; the remainder of the lecture was an analysis and criticism of the concept of ‘primitive thinking’ in the work of Frankfort and Aby Warburg.

Key words: Henri Frankfort; Aby Warburg; mythopoeic; primitive; pre-Greek; animism; ancient Egypt; ancient Near East

Abstract: The lifelong rivalry between Alois Riegl and Josef Strzygowski, both prominent members of the Vienna School, not only had personal, but mainly methodological and ideological reasons. Born and raised up in the very eastern parts of the Hapsburg monarchy, both Riegl and Strzygowski were strongly interested in the status of art beyond the academic canon. Their research on widely ignored subjects like folk art, baroque, and late antiquity, clearly reflect the shared intention to enlarge the field of art history writing. In doing so, however, they came to complete different results. Whereas for Strzygowski art history must be seen as a permanent struggle between a dominant powerful art (“Machtkunst”) and diverse suppressed artistic ideas, Riegl emphasized the concept of mixing cultures. For him art was always the result of different, antagonistic and dissident artistic streams. This idea of a transforming art – art that is in a constant flux, always creating new forms and values – was rigidly fought by Strzygowski. For the latter, whose anti-Semitic writings reflect an irrational fear of hybrid cultural forms, art only gains a certain cultural value when it is ‘pure’, untouched by external influences.

Key words: Alois Riegl; Josef Strzygowski; Machtkunst; cultural diversity; Hapsburg monarchy

Reviews

Abstract: New scientific methods now being applied to the analysis of traces of pigments and gilding on ancient Greek and Roman marble statuary, and other marble artefacts, have the potential to revolutionise our understanding of the relationship between form and colour in antiquity. At present the enquiry is still in its infancy, but the papers delivered at a conference held in Frankfurt in 2008, reviewed here, provide a general introduction to the subject and to a wide range of work in progress.

Key words: polychromy; XRF; UV-VIS absorption spectroscopy; gas chromatography; Persian Rider; Alexander Sarcophagus; Peplos Kore; Phrasikleia; Copenhagen Polychromy Network; pigments; circumlitio; Delos; Small Herculaneum Woman; gold-leaf; lead foil; Egyptian blue; madder; organic binders; painting on marble; lacquer; Winckelmann; Pompeii

Abstract: The polychromy of medieval sculpture in Northern Europe is addressed in five of the articles in Circumlitio, which together form an important part of the editors’ project to bring the study of the coloured surfaces of sculpture out of the realm of technical reports and into the mainstream of sculptural scholarship. The five articles comprise surveys of techniques and materials (Harald Theiss) and of the field in general (Stefan Roller), and case studies of a major monument, Sluter’s Well of Moses at the Chartreuse de Champmol (Susie Nash), the raw material of the dyestuff madder (Dieter Köcher) and the reconstruction of the polychromed surface of a fourteenth century St George at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum,in Nuremberg (Arnulf von Ulmann). In his review, the author discusses some of the historiography of polychromy, examining in particular the treatment of Italian sculpture, whose study is not the focus of Circumlitio, giving context to the essays at hand within the wider field.

Keywords: Circumlitio; Theiss; Roller, Köcher; von Ulmann; Nash; polychromy; surface; sculpture; materials; techniques; madder; Champmol; Well of Moses; Herder; Donatello; Sluter; Malouel; virtual reconstruction

Abstract: Mapping Medievalism, a collection of essays written by a professor and nine graduate students, is an examination of the role of settlers’ imagination of Europe’s middle ages in the development of Canadian culture. The project aims to be inclusive of Aboriginal histories, and some authors grapple with the colonial implications of the settlers’ imagining of the medieval. This review provides an indigenous political perspective on the book, and argues that some essays provide useful insight into colonial processes. However, some essays approach colonialism in a non-productive fashion and, ultimately, the publication falls short of its aim to be inclusive to Aboriginal histories.

Key words: Aboriginal; Ontario; medievalism; art; colonization; Upper Canada; frontier

Abstract: This book is the result of a collective work on the intellectual hegemony which the Action Française exercised in France in the interwar period. It studies some of the main actors who constructed Maurrassism, the stategies which allowed them to dominate French cultural life from the beginning of the 1920s to the end of World War II and their ideology. It shows how this ideology was disseminated in different fields, history, literature, music, etc. and how this plural approach contributed to the success of a movement whose aim was to disqualify the very idea of democracy.

Key words: Action Française; culture; politics; Maurrassism

Abstract: Reviews a collection of essays based on papers delivered at the Berlin conference (2008) celebrating Franz Kugler (1808-1858), a key figure in the disciplinary history of art history and an active player the cultural and intellectual life of Berlin in the mid-nineteenth century. Written by historians, art historians, and historians of literature, these essays examine Kugler’s work as an art historian, critic, journal editor, Prussian bureaucrat, poet, and member of several art and literary societies.

Key words: Franz Kugler; historiography; survey texts; cultural history; Berlin school of art history; German art; art journals

Abstract: A translation of a book originally published in 1999, ‘Believing and Seeing’ expresses the nature of this volume more clearly than its subtitle, ‘The art of the gothic cathedrals.’ The prominence of the arts as a means of expression for devotion is central to its discourse. A highly idiosyncratic book that has perhaps suffered a little from the passage of time and translation, it is full of revealing citations and insights. But it is methodologically fluid and needs to be read with a more current bibliography, especially the Gothic Architecture of Paul Frankl as revised by Paul Crossley.

Key words: gothic cathedrals; art; belief; liturgy

Abstract: The book reviewed here has potential interest to a wide range of readers, whether researchers and academics, museum, curators, conservators or connoisseurs. It examines the perception of surface as an aspect of the indigenous understanding of sculpted objects in sub-Saharan Africa, treating of questions of materials, patination, colouration and use. It includes both survey essays and case studies (on the Bamana of Mali and the Yoriuba of Nigeria) in a compendium which has suggestive implications beyond the immediate field of the Africanists to whom it is principally addressed.

Key words: Colour; patination; surface; Yoruba; Bamana

Abstract
Robert Bagley’s monograph uses his mentor Max Loehr’s work on Shang period Chinese bronzes as the starting point for a critical examination of issues surrounding the art historical notion of ‘style’. Bagley critiques the tendency by much art history to the reification of ‘style’, an intellectual construction, and dismisses the idea that ‘style’ can somehow embody the characteristics of a ‘Zeitgeist’. Bagley argues for the independence of artistic and aesthetic concerns in explaining developments in the formal characteristics of objects of material culture, without the need to appeal to external forces such as literary sources or a symbolic system. We must take seriously, Bagley suggests, that visual effect, independent of other considerations, was a characteristic consciously pursued by artists of the past.

Key words: style; classification; Max Loehr; typology; aesthetic intent; decoration

Abstract: This analysis of Suzanne L. Marchand’s German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship reads her contribution in part against the background of Edward Said’s path breaking book Orientalism. Differences lie in her more expansive understanding of the term ‘Oriental’ to include the Far East and her concentration on German scholarship. Approaches to Orientalist scholarship are often judgmental. Marchand complicates the discourse by speaking to the individual and institutional circumstances, and not overestimating the effect that scholars have when they talk truth, or even merely ideas, to power. Her treatment of scholarship of visual art and of Jewish learning are the areas that could benefit from more nuanced thought and more research.

Key words: Orientalism; Jewish art; German scholarship

Abstract: This review evaluates the first scholarly study exclusively dedicated to the reception history of Spanish art in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1920. Progressing systematically through the different chapters, it highlights the various responses and perspectives that are addressed in the book. Issues of taste and collecting are examined, followed by historiographical concerns such as the methods and techniques of writing, illustrating and reproducing Spanish art in the nineteenth century. Shifting attitudes towards Spain and Spanish art are also explored, as are the roles of prominent figures in disseminating knowledge and appreciation of Spanish art, notably Sir William Stirling Maxwell and Richard Ford. Finally, the review outlines the critical fortunes of Spain’s foremost artists: Murillo, Velázquez, Ribera, Zurbarán and Goya. It ends by suggesting how this study could be expanded methodologically, considering the reception history of Spanish art in the light of important literature on reception theory and aesthetics.

Key words: Spain; Spanish art; reception; Britain; Ireland; Golden Age; Goya

Abstract: The problem of the categorical definition of the nature of art was often regarded as the central challenge of art history. Paul van den Akker examines the history of this problem from the eighteenth century to the 1960s. Thus his book addresses ‘the essence of art history’. In order to do so, he uses the extremely contradictory discussions of ‘Mannerism’ and the use of the line in mannerist art as a relevant case study, and this is supplemented with extensive excursuses on historic concepts of ‘classical art’, of Renaissance painting, of medieval art, or connoisseurship. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Heinrich Wölfflin, Alois Riegl and John Shearman play key roles in van den Akker’s book. The review mainly asks for the specificity of the analytical categories and the changing role of the visual material used by the antiquarians and early art historians from the later seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries to illustrate and accompany their texts and arguments.

Key words: historiography of art history 1700-1970; mannerism; form and essence of art; Johann Joachim Winckelmann; Heinrich Wölfflin; John Shearman

Abstract: This review examines two recent publications concerned with the legacy of Alois Riegl. It considers these books as examples of the changing landscape of Riegl scholarship, in which the traditional concern with issues of methodology (notably the meaning and function of Riegl’s concept of the Kunstwollen) has given way to an engagement with his place in the wider cultural and academic politics of the Habsburg Empire. The review examines Riegl’s engagement with disciplines such as national economy, ethnology, Islamic studies and archaeology.

Key words: Riegl; Vienna School; monument protection; Kunstwollen; Habsburg Empire; Islamic studies; national economy; ethnology; archaeology

Lou Taylor: ‘Sources for Fashion History’. Peter McNeil, Fashion: Critical and Primary Sources, Berg, Oxford, 2009 5-LT/1

Abstract: This review discusses the intended function of the publication of this massive four volume fashion history/fashion studies primary source material. This travels from the late medieval period to today in terms of its analysis of dress in its cultural and historical place. Whilst praising the breadth and alert choice of selected texts and authors, the review regrets that more attention was not paid to material culture approaches to the study of dress, past and present.

Key words: fashion history; fashion studies; material culture; primary sources

Edmund Thomas: ‘Primary Colours’. Mark Bradley, Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xiii, 267 pp. No plates or illus. £60.00 hdbk. ISBN 978-0-521-11042-6. 5-ET/1

Abstract: This article reviews Mark Bradley’s monograph Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. This book is the first major study in English of the conceptual history of colour in ancient Rome. It re-examines a range of Latin philosophical, rhetorical and literary texts, focusing on the period of the late Republic and early Empire. The work considers Roman attempts to understand the colours of the rainbow and assimilates the role of metaphorical colour in rhetorical presentation to the addition of colour through cosmetics. It ends with a consideration of the colours of the Roman triumph in comparison with modern ceremony. The book will be useful for philologists, philosophers and historians and is accessible to students. Its conclusion is that colour was a negotiable concept, leading to the confusion of appearance and reality, a conclusion which applies particularly to the specific historical and cultural context of Neronian Rome. The book raises the further issue of how these theoretical principles were applied to the interpretation of visual evidence, as well as wider uses of colour in social and religious contexts.

Key words: colour; Rome; rhetoric; cosmetics; rainbow; triumph; marble

Responses

Suzanne Marchand, response to Margaret Olin’s review of German Orientalism in the Age of Empire 5-SM/1

Peter McNeill, response to Lou Taylor’s review of Fashion: Critical and Primary Sources 5-PMcN/1

Short Reviews

Madhuri Desai: Parul Pandya Dhar (ed.), Indian Art History: Changing Perspectives, New Delhi: D. K. Printworld and National Museum Institute, 2011, 279 pp., 70 b&w illus., ISBN 812460597-1 5-MD/1

Andrew Hopkins: Andrew Leach, What is Architectural History? Polity, Cambridge, 2010 5-AH/1

Kristin A. Phelps: Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara, Manipulating the Sacred: Yorùbá Art, Ritual, and Resistance in Brazilian Candomblé. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005 5-KAP/1

Prassanna Raman: Paul Wheatley, The places where men pray together: cities in Islamic lands, seventh though the tenth centuries, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001 5-PR/1

Conference report

Niamh NicGhabhann, ‘Writing Irish Art History’ 5-NNG/1

Abstract: This is a short report on two events which addressed the critical historiography of Irish art, architecture and material culture, both titled ‘Writing Irish Art History’. The first was a student-led research day, with papers which challenged received strategies in the writing of Irish art, and included keynote addresses by both Professor Tom Dunne and Dr. Róisín Kennedy, and a performance by Dr. Nicholas Johnson and Nathan Gordon adapted from Samuel Beckett’s Three Dialogues from Georges Duthuit. The second event reviewed here was a session at the 2011 Association of Art Historians’ Annual Conference at Warwick, which brought together several scholars who contributed close readings of individual key texts and documents towards a critical investigation of the historiography of Irish art, and queried the categories of Irish art and its institutional implications. These events are placed in the context of the absence or presence of the debate on historiographical practices relating to Irish art history over the past decade.

Key words: Irish art; Ireland; TRIARC; Association of Art Historians; Circa; historiography; review

Books received

Christopher R. Marshall (ed.), Sculpture and the Museum, London: Ashgate 2011, 286 pages, 63 b/w ill., £55.00, ISBN 978-1-4094-0910-6 [includes contents, introduction and index] 5-CM/1

Announcements

The Warburg Institute: A Special Issue on The Library and Its Readers, Common Knowledge, Issue 18, number 1 (available January 2012) 5-CK/1

‘Josef Strzygowski and the sciences of art’, preliminary conference programme, 29-31.03.2012, Bielsko-Biała, Poland 5-JS/1

Voices in Art History: AAH Oral Histories 5-AAH/1

Abstracts

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