1. Book reviews Art History.pdf

8/10/2019 1. Book reviews Art History.pdf

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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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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.



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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.

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