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    Association of Art Historians 2010 4

    Abstracts & Authors Biographies

    Versions of Pygmalion in

    the Illuminated Roman de

    la Rose (Oxford, Bodelian

    Library, Ms. Douce 195):

    The Artist and the Work

    of Art

    Marian BleekeMs. Douce 195, a late fteenth-century copy of the

    Roman de la Rose, contains an unusual sequence of nine

    images for the poems Pygmalion digression, the workof the illuminator Robert Testard. This paper focuses

    on differences between the story of Pygmalion as it is

    told in the text of the Roseand in Testards miniatures.

    Building on scholarship on the Rosethat sees the

    Pygmalion digression along with the poems Narcissus

    episode as the poets reections on poetry itself, and

    on representations of images and the use of frames

    in miniatures throughout Ms. Douce 195, the paper

    argues that the Pygmalion sequence likewise represents

    Testards reections on the changing status of the artist

    and the work of art.Marian Bleeke is Assistant Professor of Art History at Cleveland State

    University. Her other publications include Sheelas, sex, and signicance

    in Romanesque sculpture: The Kilpeck Corbel Series, Studies in

    Iconography, 26, 2005, and George Petrie, the ordnance survey, and

    nineteenth-century constructions on the Irish past, in Medieval Art

    and Architecture after the Middle Ages(Cambridge Scholars

    Press, 2009). The present essay represents the beginning of a project on

    representations of sculptures in medieval manuscript illuminations.

    Art History as Ekphrasis

    Jas ElsnerThis paper makes a case for the essentially rhetorical

    nature of the art-historical enterprise: description is the

    key act which both translates the objects object-hood

    into words appropriable for art-historical argument

    and betrays that object-hood by making the object

    something other than it materially is, a word-picture.

    The act of description is not innocent; it is both the

    product of a series of genres for describing objects and

    it tendentiously helps the object into an initial verbal

    form amenable to the particular discussion the author

    has in mind. Different kinds of art history might beseen as different forms or styles of descriptive strategy,

    and it is perhaps time the discipline as a whole were less

    coy about one of its core procedures one that is at least

    as important as looking itself.

    Jas Elsner is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical

    Archaeology at Corpus Christi College Oxford and Visiting Professor

    of Art History at the University of Chicago. He has been working on

    the problems of description and ekphrasis for years, although this is

    probably the rst time he has fully come out about what he thinks the

    issues are.

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    Association of Art Historians 2010 5

    the personal and emotional histories of the sitters and

    artists. It also draws conclusions about the broader

    social, cultural, religious and artistic contexts that made

    these relatively rare, and frequently problematic images.

    Kate Retford is Lecturer in History of Art at Birkbeck College,

    University of London. Her book,The Art of Domestic Life:

    Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England,was published by Yale University Press in 2006. In addition, she has

    written a number of articles on topics relating to eighteenth-century

    portraiture, gender, and the country house art collection.

    The Art of Swinging Left

    in the 1930s: Modernism,

    Realism, and the Politics

    of the Left in the Murals ofStuart Davis

    Jody PattersonThis article addresses the relations between modern

    art, public muralism, and leftist politics during the

    1930s in the work of Stuart Davis. While this period in

    American art is largely associated with the dominance

    of gurative works and the promotion of what was

    perceived as a tradition of native realism, the art scene

    was considerably more factional and complex thancurrent art-historical scholarship suggests. In addressing

    Daviss approach to muralism, this article examines the

    frequent characterization of realism and modernism

    as antipodes on the aesthetic spectrum and explores

    the potential for understanding modernist forms as

    realist. Furthermore, it seeks to offer an alternative to the

    isolationist emphasis characterizing standard accounts

    of American artistic production in the 1930s, by

    establishing a dialogue with the theories and practices

    pursued by other modernists on the left such as Fernand

    Lger, who similarly understood his approach tomodernism as decidedly realist.

    Jody Patterson completed her doctoral studies on the relations between

    modernist muralism and leftist politics in New York during the New

    Deal era at University College London in 2008. In 2009 she was a

    Postdoctoral Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American

    Art Museum in Washington, DC and, from 2009 to 2011, she is

    a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the Institut National de lHistoire

    de lArt in Paris. She has published book and exhibition reviews

    in the Oxford Art Journal, Art History,and The Art

    Scopic Frames: Devices for

    Seeing China in 1640

    Jennifer PurtleThis essay argues that alternative, imported, monocular

    modes of seeing and conceptualizing vision prompted

    late-Ming picturing of indigenous Chinese, binocular

    visual experience. This essay rst probes seeing in

    late-Ming China by exploring printed illustrations as

    artefacts of visual experience. Then it posits that, in the

    face of Western monocularity, the representation of

    moving and/or projected images reied indigenous,

    binocular Chinese ways of seeing. The essay concludes

    by suggesting that the seventeenth-century circulation

    of optical devices between China and Europe reshaped

    established practices, strategies, and ideas about vision

    in China and Europe.

    Jennifer Purtle teaches the history of Chinese art at the University

    of Toronto. Her recently published and forthcoming work includes:

    Peripheral Vision: Painted Images and Chinese Empires, 9091646

    (University of Hawaii Press, 2010); Looking Modern: East Asian

    Visual Culture from the Treaty Ports to World War II (co-edited with

    Hans Thomsen) (University of Chicago Press, 2009); and essays in

    volumes edited by Wu Hung, Eugene Wang, John Onians, Thomas da

    Costa Kaufmann, and James Elkins.

    A Death in the Family:Posthumous Portraiture

    in Eighteenth-Century

    England

    Kate RetfordThis article explores a number of unusual portraits

    produced in eighteenth-century England in which

    the realms of the posthumous and the living were

    mingled. In some cases, the dead were brought backto life and restored to their rightful place in the family

    unit. In others, such as Joseph Highmores portrait of

    the Lee family (1736), Thomas Gainsboroughs The

    Sloper Family (178788) or The Knatchbull Familyby John

    Singleton Copley (180003), they were included in

    spiritualized form, hovering in a supernatural realm

    above the relatives they had left behind on terra rma.

    The article unpicks the particular circumstances that

    prompted these extraordinary commissions, exploring

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    Book.Her work on modernism in the 1930s has also appeared

    in the Burlington Magazineand in a catalogue essay for

    the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibition Arshile Gorky: A

    Retrospective. She is currently co-editing an anthology of critical texts

    on the New Deal cultural programmes with Warren Carter and Andrew

    Hemingway.

    Garcilaso de la Vega and the

    New Peruvian Man:

    Jos Sabogals frescoes at

    the Hotel Cuzco

    Michael J. Schrefer andJessica WeltonThis article examines the political tenor of Peruvian

    painter Jos Sabogals work at a late and relatively

    unexplored point in his career. It focuses on a series of

    previously unpublished frescoes he painted in 1945

    at a state-run hotel in Cuzco, the Andean city that had

    been the centre of the Inca Empire before the Spanish

    conquest. The study considers the historically themed

    frescoes in the context of the contentious political

    environment in which Sabogal designed and produced

    them and foregrounds their engagement with the

    discourses on national identity that competed for

    prominence in mid-century Peru.

    Michael Schrefer is based at Virginia Commonwealth University, and specializes

    in the art of colonial and modern Latin America. His current research centres on

    visual culture and the state in colonial and modern Peru.

    Jessica Welton is a doctoral student in the Department of Art History

    at Virginia Commonwealth University. Weltons research focuses on

    the representation of native cultures in the twentieth-century art of

    the Americas.

    On Ruth Vollmer and

    Minimalisms Marginalia

    Anna LovattThis article considers the work of sculptor Ruth

    Vollmer (190382), who began her artistic career late

    in life after emigrating from Germany to the United

    States in 1935. During the 1960s, Vollmer was a key

    gure in the New York art world, holding salons at

    her home attended by Robert Smithson, Eva Hesse

    and Sol LeWitt, amongst others. These younger artists

    published writings on Vollmers work and owned key

    pieces of her sculpture. But while their work is now

    well known, Vollmers has been neglected in historical

    accounts of the period. Supporters and critics of

    Vollmer have attributed this marginalization to a certain

    anachronism, something I explore further in relation

    to her status as an exiled subject and in relation to the

    accounts of art history.

    Anna Lovatt is Lecturer in Art History at the University of

    Nottingham. She is currently working on a book exploring the role of

    drawing in New York based artistic practices of the late 1960s and

    early 1970s. Her previous publications include: A Space of Encounter:

    On the Paintings of Robert Holyhead, Robert Holyhead, London,

    2009; and Dorothea Rockburne: Intersection, October, 122,

    Fall 2007.

    Association of Art Historians 2010 6

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    Association of Art Historians 2010 7

    ReviewsMatthew Bowman lectures in Contextual Studies at Colchester Institute and

    works for Arts on 5 at the University of Essex. His interests are focused on the

    relationship between art criticism and art history, and notions of temporality, and

    he is a co-founding editor of Rebus: Journal of Art History and Theory.

    Richard Thomson holds the Watson Gordon Chair of Fine Art at the University

    of Edinburgh. Founding director of the Visual Arts Research Institute Edinburgh,

    he was Slade Professor at the University of Oxford in 2009. He is a specialist on

    late-nineteenth-century French art.

    Sarah Monks is a lecturer in Art History at the University of East Anglia,

    specialising in British art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She recently

    completed a book on the representation of the sea in British art.

    Keith Moxey is Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Art History at Barnard College

    and Columbia University in New York. He has published extensively on the

    historiography and philosophy of art history, as well as on sixteenth-century

    painting and prints in Northern Europe.

    Kallirroe Linardou lectures on Byzantine Art in the Department of Theoretical

    Studies on Art, at Athens School of Fine Arts. She has published on the

    relationship between images and texts in byzantine illuminated manuscripts and

    co-edited a book on Byzantine Studies.

    Gerard Foekema studied physics in Amsterdam. His interest in the architectural

    history of India has resulted in two large monographs on Indian temples.

    In 2003, he obtained a PhD in Art History from Leiden University.

    Aris Saraanos teaches art history at Ioannina University in Greece. He has been

    a research fellow at the University of Manchester, the Huntington Library, and

    UCLAs Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. His work on

    art, literature, and the li fe sciences has appeared in Representations, Art

    Bulletin, andJournal of the History of Ideas.

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    Medieval ArmenianRulership in ContextKallirroe Linardou

    Between Islam and Byzantium: Aghtamar and theVisual Construction of Medieval Armenian Rulership

    by Lynn Jones, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, ixvi + 144

    pp., 46 b. & w. illus., 55.00

    The focus of Between Islam and Byzantiumis Armenian

    rulership during the years 884/851045 when

    Armenia was in fact a vassal state of the Abbasid

    caliphate, while Byzantium, although maintaining no

    ofcial representative on Armenian soil, also considered

    it to be a vassal state. The two most prominent Armenian

    families of the period, the Bagratuni with lands in

    the north and the Artsrunik in the south, achieved a

    largely conceptual unity during this period based on a

    common language and a common Christian confession.

    The author proposes a reconstruction and re-

    contextualization of the expression of rulership during

    those years as manifested in investiture ceremonial,

    artefacts, architectural sculpture and royal deeds.

    The paucity of surviving material is problematic and

    Lynn Jones attempts to address this by placing her visual

    sources clearly within the chronological scope and the

    socio-political situation of the period. The volume of

    surviving written testimonies is fairly large and thus

    helps to support her analysis.

    The principal question which Jones seeks to

    answer is: what were the expectations associated with

    Armenian rulership? What dened good rulership, and

    ultimately, how was good rulership visually manifested

    and manipulated? The bulk of the book examines the

    limited artistic evidence available. The remainder details

    the answers found in contemporary texts where it is

    explicitly and repeatedly expounded for members

    of both the Bagratuni and Artsrunik families that

    the prime concern of any ideal ruler should be the

    establishment of prosperity in the land and the care of

    the Armenian people.

    Through an examination of narratives

    documenting the evolution of Bagratuni ceremonial

    and the inuence it exerted on that used by the kings

    of Vaspurakan (the Artsrunik ), the author reaches

    the conclusion that the most important expressions

    of Bagratuni royal status and a primary tool of their

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    propaganda was the dual ceremonial bestowal or

    conrmation of their legitimate power. The textual

    accounts of the investitures of the rst two Bagratuni

    kings of Armenia make it clear that there were two

    separate and distinctive investiture ceremonies: a

    secular one that granted the Bagratuni kings the ofcial

    recognition of the caliphate and which acknowledged

    the source of Armenian royal power and ranked the

    newly appointed ruler within the Abbasid sphere of

    inuence, and a subsequent religious ceremony that

    validated the recipients pious worthiness to rule

    as a Christian king. The latter was performed by the

    Armenian catholicos, the chief ecclesiastic of the

    country, and involved the symbolically pre-eminent act

    of crowning. The Abbasid ceremony was secondary to

    the pious symbolism conveyed through the investiture

    performed by the catholicos.

    Like ceremonial, images served to visually

    legitimize and exemplify royal status and piety, yet

    any appraisal of the visual expression of the Bagratuni

    is hampered by the dearth of surviving artworks

    and architecture. No representations of Bagratuni

    rulers survive from the rst half of the tenth century

    to compare with surviving contemporary written

    records. Jones therefore undertakes an exhaustive

    examination of the few surviving royal portraits of

    the second half of the tenth century. She reaches the

    tenuous conclusion that these portraits emphasize and

    advocate the specically Armenian nature of Bagratuni

    kingship, by eschewing any foreign emblems of power,

    and therefore accord well with the ideology of kingship

    mediated through the investiture ceremonies of the

    Bagratuni kings; primacy is given to the pious prole

    of the ruler rather than the recognition of his temporal

    power. Finally, based on minimal and patchy evidence,

    Jones proposes the existence of a secondary Bagratuni

    tradition of royal representation that appropriated

    elements of Islamic iconography.

    The author then turns to consider the visual

    expression of kingship as employed by the Artsrunik

    kings of Vaspurakan and more specically by Gagik

    Artsruni (908943). Her analysis, conceptually

    reminiscent of the exemplary study of the

    iconographical programme of Cappella Palatina in

    Palermo published by Ernst Kitzinger 1949,1 centres

    on the tenth-century palatine church of the Holy Cross

    at Aghtamar, a small island on Lake Van. Over two

    hundred well-preserved gures carved in low relief

    on the exterior walls of the church as well as the

    poorly surviving cycle of frescoes of the interior are

    scrutinized in the context of the churchs palatine

    function. Jones convincingly demonstrates that, when

    studied in juxtaposition, these two cycles convey a

    unied royal message through repeated associations

    of the same elements. They were both carefully

    designed, following the conventions of an established

    1 Church of the Holy Cross, Aghtamar Island, Lake Van, Turkey, tenth century. Photo Paul Magdalino.

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    Caucasian visual repertoire with Islamic iconographical

    appropriations that have only a distant connection to

    Byzantine imperial representation, in order to proclaim

    and to advocate Gagiks temporal power, his piety and

    the orthodox nature of his rule. Unlike the Bagratuni,

    Gagik turned to Islam and exibly incorporated

    elements of Abbasid court architecture, iconography

    and ideology that suited his specic requirements.

    In her nal chapter, Jones analyses the textual

    descriptions centred upon royal patronage and seeks to

    link these records of good rulership with those conveyed

    by royal portraits and ceremonial. Overall, Jones book

    provides a comprehensive and thorough examination

    of a relatively unknown medieval society and its culture

    and is therefore most welcome and appreciated. Last but

    not least, a nal remark about the title of the book, which

    appears somehow misleading; the inuence of Islam

    is denitely present but Byzantium, a neighbouring

    Christian empire at the apogee of its power, is notable by

    its absence and this needs to be explained.

    Notes

    1 Ernst Kitzinger, The mosaics of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo,ArtBulletin, 31, 1949, 27992.

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    Byzantium Voiced throughWords and Images

    Kallirroe Linardou

    Art and Text in Byzantine Culture edited by LizJames, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

    2007, ixvi + 230 pp., 8 col. and 48 b. & w. illus., 47.00

    Art and Text in Byzantine Culturebrings together a collection

    of specially commissioned essays written by an

    international team of scholars that consider how the

    Byzantines wrote about art, how images and written

    words work together on Byzantine artefacts, and how

    the text embedded on artworks contributes to their

    meaning, perception and interpretation.

    The book covers the principal media used by

    the Byzantines (texts, architecture, monumental

    painting, icons and illuminated manuscripts) and it

    has been structured and presented comprehensively.

    All contributors touch upon vital aspects involved

    in the study of art, such as visuality, perception and

    performance. Overall, it is an efciently edited, thought

    provoking volume that addresses interesting questions

    and investigates alternative routes of approach to the

    subject matter under investigation, namely Byzantine

    art, its creators and its audience. It will be of benet to

    specialists and students alike not least for the up-to-date

    select bibliography.

    The volume opens with an introduction by the

    editor that summarizes the history of research and

    addresses the essential questions to be discussed by

    the contributors. Precedence is given to Byzantine

    texts about art, and Ruth Webb engages in a re-

    examination of ekphrasis, a literary sub-genre of

    rhetoric, as demonstrating individualized, culturally

    dened responses to images, in possibly the most

    interesting essay of the volume. She acknowledges

    the cultural specicity of such texts and reads them as

    a testimony of the process of a viewing and aesthetic

    experience that aims to create mental images. The effect

    of ekphrasis is compared to that of seeing something

    directly with ones own eyes. As her case study, Webb

    employs an ekphrasis by a fourth-century churchman

    and writer, Asterios of Amaseia. According to her

    analysis, the result is not just an ekphrasis of a painting,

    but also an ekphrasis of a viewing of a painting by a

    model Christian intellectual who wishes to generate a

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    particular emotional response in his audience and to

    encourage it to accomplish and full the image in its

    own imagination, within a carefully outlined frame that

    Asterios sketches subtly in words.

    Jas Elsner turns to a perplexing text that dees easy

    classication, since it is a deliberate mixing of genres:

    De Aediciisby the sixth-century historian Procopius.

    This careful enumeration of buildings was used by

    the famous historian in order to articulate highly

    ideological arguments about space and its meaning

    within an empire and ultimately to become a testimony

    and celebration of the New Christian Era that the reign

    of Justinian initiated. Monuments are transformed into

    a literary metaphor that is introduced into Procopiuss

    discourse as an encomium of the emperor and his

    virtues whose activity they voice and perpetuate.

    By denition, word and images go together hand

    in hand in illuminated manuscripts and because of

    this, according to Leslie Brubaker, they were capable

    of communicating more powerfully and expressively

    than any other medium in Byzantium. Words, however,

    communicate differently than images, and both

    languages employ different conventions from a

    given reservoir sanctioned by tradition and agreed to

    by cultural consensus. Just like literary topoi within a

    text, visual clichs build up the discourse of images,

    create their structure and dene their perimeters.

    Consequently, it is legitimate to talk about visual genres,

    namely visual formulae appropriate to a particular

    visual narrative. The strength of the visual genre

    controls subject matter and how it is presented in

    illuminated manuscripts.

    Charles Barber discusses an eleventh-century

    illuminated psalter and its scribe Theodore in order to

    shed light upon the complicated process that transforms

    the written text into a perpetual performative act, which

    conditions our understanding of both the texts origins

    and its modes of reception. Robert Nelson carries the

    discussion into devotional spaces and inscribed holy

    images within them. Abbreviated inscriptions andnomina

    sacraare considered as powerful signs that motivate the

    holiness of the icon bearing them and act as mediators

    between the image and its beholder. Unlike ancient

    commemorative statues, Byzantine icons are not

    speaking objects themselves and they do not perform

    as such. Instead, the inscribed words are animated and

    uttered by the beholder. The result is the creation of a

    distinctive three-dimensional space for the icon that

    is formed by the plane of the panel and the place from

    which and in which it is contemplated and voiced.

    Bissera Pentcheva engages in twelfth-century

    visuality as manifested in the appearance and display of

    luxury icons. Risking a rather impressionistic approach,

    she attempts to outline Byzantine interactions with

    images as evidenced in the epigrams accompanying

    them. She puts forward the hypothesis that the aesthetic

    of plenitude and excess so prominently surfacing

    in several epigrams, and inviting multi-sensory

    encounters of the spectator with the icon, serves and

    ultimately fulls the desire of the donor or the beholder

    to experience what is beyond perception.

    In so far as inscribed names and texts are powerful

    signs and integral parts of the meaning, function and

    interpretation of an image, Henry Maguire argues

    convincingly that their absence requires explanation.

    The most obvious reason for the omission of names

    in pre-iconoclastic art was to expand the referential

    spectrum of the image as well as its effectiveness

    by invoking more than one supernatural power.

    Alternatively, in the case of ex-voto images, since the

    contract was exclusively between the supplicant and the

    holy person displayed, it was not essential to provide

    identifying information to third parties. The study of the

    sixth-century apse mosaics in the basilica of Eufrasius

    at Porec proves this to be the case: the decoration of

    the apse had a dual function, private and public at the

    same time, and therefore identifying inscriptions were

    provided only in the cases where a public audience

    was involved. The anonymous saints were the object of

    private petitions and thus remained unidentied to the

    inconvenience of the modern art historian.

    The last two essays of the volume are dedicated

    to monumental inscr iptions. Amy Papalexandrou

    transfers the analytical focus from the archaeological

    problems surrounding such inscriptions to the

    arena of human experience in order to investigate

    what actually took place within and around such

    monuments and their inscriptions. Her primary aim is

    to explore the hypothesis that Byzantine monumental

    inscriptions as voiced texts could elicit active responses

    from those who engaged in a kind of dialogue with

    them. The reception, performance and context of

    monumental inscriptions are approached through the

    medium of contemporary experience and it is this that

    makes her analysis fascinating.

    Liz James legitimately questions the legibility of

    monumental inscriptions and brings into focus the

    visual properties of the inscribed word. She argues that

    the visibility alone of written words as pure signs was

    signicant in itself, for their iconic power or for their

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    magical or decorative qualities. Seen as such, namely

    as images to be gazed at, inscribed words became

    accessible to a wider audience, not necessarily literate.

    Finally, a remark on the Appendix of Greek

    Texts meant to complement the essays of Pentcheva

    and Papalexandrou. In a volume intended to bring

    forward the interaction of words and images as two

    equally signicant components for the understanding

    of Byzantine art, an appendix containing the Greek

    texts is certainly welcome. Nevertheless, the visuality

    of the written Greek does not perform as it should;

    numerous spelling and accentuation mistakes as well as

    the wrong typeface in the application of breathings in

    almost all epigrams confuse the literate reader/viewer.