WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2023-04-26DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2023.2168466
Allegra Iafrate
{"title":"‘The chicken or the egg?’ Exploring the dynamics of an ekphrastic cycle","authors":"Allegra Iafrate","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2023.2168466","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2023.2168466","url":null,"abstract":"<p><b>Abstract</b></p><p>This article explores some of the dynamics related to <i>ekphrasis</i> between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, focusing particularly on the often problematic, but always fruitful, interplay between the object and its description. My interest lies, more specifically, in what has often been called ‘reverse <i>ekphrasis</i>’, that is, the process through which the figurative arts engage in producing an equivalent of the verbal text, instead of the other way around. The analysis is structured around a series of case studies related to King Solomon and to the rich artistic patronage attributed to him by the Bible—a patronage that not only was exploited for centuries to create a powerful imagery around kingship, but also had a fruitful effect on the creation of artefacts.</p>","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"54 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71416626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2022.2160194
Barbara E. Mundy
{"title":"Indigenous image theory","authors":"Barbara E. Mundy","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2022.2160194","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2022.2160194","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, which contains an account of the origins of painting, offered sixteenth-century European artists a gift as they struggled to advance the status of painting as an intellectual rather than a mechanical art. The Roman authority was also read by Indigenous intellectuals in New Spain; they described their autochthonous painting practice in an account written in the Nahuatl language to respond to Pliny. This article offers a new translation of their account and a careful analysis that draws on recent work by material scientists to construct an Indigenous ontology of the image, and gives a comparison to the Plinian ideal. Crucial to both accounts is the role of the shadow as it relates to the nature of representation.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"37 1","pages":"260 - 282"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75869273","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2022.2160188
James O'Neill
{"title":"Botanical symbolism in the Hypnerotomachia: botanical signifiers of a humanist handling of interior transformation","authors":"James O'Neill","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2022.2160188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2022.2160188","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article focuses on the botanical specimens and their symbolic purpose in the narrative of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). It examines the questions as to why certain plants are positioned at certain narrative stages, and how the relationship between their aesthetic, medical, literary, and symbolic purpose fits with the narrative. It also examines how this ratiocination of reflecting a developing topography with the interior development of the soul is handled in a wholly humanist–Renaissance manner over earlier treatments of botany in the medieval philosophical dream allegories such as Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la rose and Brunetto Latini’s Il Tesoretto, or the pre-medieval Prudentius’s Psychomachia. 1","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"60 1","pages":"192 - 234"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88481757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2022.2069955
Kristoffer Neville
{"title":"Fischer von Erlach and the Habsburg imperial historians","authors":"Kristoffer Neville","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2022.2069955","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2022.2069955","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The Entwurff einer historischen Architectur (Outline of an Historical Architecture, 1721), by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, architect to the Austrian imperial court, is often seen as a milestone in the literature of architecture, and as the first comparative and universal history of architecture. In part because it has been studied primarily as a work of architectural history, rather than imperial history, it has become relatively unmoored from a large body of earlier and contemporary histories of the Habsburgs and the imperial house. These works cumulatively established a distinct historiographical tradition that informs the content and narrative of Fischer’s book and aligns it closely with a deeply ideological narrative in which a historical line leads directly from the Old Testament patriarchs through Greco-Roman rulers to the Holy Roman Emperors, and from Jerusalem and Rome to modern Vienna. To a substantial degree, this historiography, rather than a nascent architectural canon, determined the contents and presentation of the Entwurff.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"69 1","pages":"111 - 133"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87211669","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2022.2072109
P. Sohm
{"title":"Performing palettes: Doni, Anguissola, and the origins of poeitic self-portraiture","authors":"P. Sohm","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2022.2072109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2022.2072109","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Agnolo Bronzino performs a visual experiment in Anton Francesco Doni’s I Marmi (Venice, 1552). “Do you see these pigments?” he asks as he shows his palette to a group of Florentine artisans. Bronzino had mentally dismantled a painting by Andrea del Sarto and loaded his palette with those pigments that Sarto would have used. With them, he painted a copy of the Sarto. How was this strange mind game rendered as a form of art criticism, as a demonstration of craft and technique, and as a visual exercise for a lay audience who could not paint? Doni’s Bronzino invited viewers and readers to think and see with the imagination and eyes of painters, a strategy adopted by painters of self-portraits, notably Anguissola Sofonisba’s Self-Portrait (Łańcut), c.1555.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"37 4 1","pages":"134 - 153"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86364128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2022.2118491
G. Parkinson
{"title":"‘The Constantin Guys of the atomic era’: on the poetic reception of Robert Rauschenberg by Alain Jouffroy and Surrealism","authors":"G. Parkinson","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2022.2118491","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2022.2118491","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Robert Rauschenberg is not usually thought to have had much contact with Surrealism and even spoke openly about his disdain for the movement on some occasions. However, through the period 1958–69, the Surrealists showed great enthusiasm for the ‘poetic’, ‘metaphorical’ resonance of Rauschenberg’s work, a positive response that has since largely been lost. In place of that history, the interpretation of Rauschenberg by John Cage as a ‘literalist’ or ‘factualist’ gained ground and even came to define the artist’s œuvre in some quarters, a reading that Rauschenberg himself approved. Caught in the middle of these two versions of Rauschenberg are the largely untranslated texts of French poet, critic, and ex-Surrealist Alain Jouffroy (1928–2015), which form the substance of this article. Jouffroy pioneered the positive critical reception of Rauschenberg in France from 1961 while he continued to be influenced by his Surrealist past, to the point that his writings on Rauschenberg reveal consistent contradiction under close reading. The highest point of tension was reached across 1963–64 when Jouffroy wrote eulogistic poems devoted to Rauschenberg’s massive silkscreen painting Barge (1962–63) and to Surrealism in L’Antichambre de la nature (1966, written in 1964), alongside key texts of art criticism on Rauschenberg. Culminating in an analysis of the silkscreen and poems, this article argues that while Jouffroy’s writings seem ostensibly to further the Cagean interpretation of the artist, they are riven by an awkward dual loyalty that can be read in support of a ‘poetic’ ‘Surrealist Rauschenberg’.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"3 1","pages":"176 - 191"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81847798","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2022.2113732
Graylin Harrison
{"title":"The birth of Masaniello: poverty, society, and the visual in Naples and beyond","authors":"Graylin Harrison","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2022.2113732","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2022.2113732","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article demonstrates the role of the visual arts, alongside literature, in mythologizing Masaniello (d. 1647) as hero and martyr, despite the limited role he played in the so-called “Revolt of Masaniello” (1647–1648). In addition to printed accounts of the revolt in a variety of languages, Masaniello imagery circulated on paper and canvas, in marble and wax. His likeness was illustrated in chronicles of the uprising, but he also appeared in the “fine” and performing arts, where artists of varied media continuously refashioned his persona, from 1647 well into the nineteenth century. Comparisons are made between a red chalk portrait of Masaniello by Aniello Falcone and several “Old Master” predecessors, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarotti, to reveal how Neapolitan artists consciously inserted the rebel into a visual vernacular that transcended his historical specificity. This, combined with the international circulation of Masaniello print imagery, helped to consolidate the iconography of the Neapolitan peasant, the lazzaro, during and after the Grand Tour. The birth of Masaniello brings to light the quintessential elements of Neapolitan culture: its artistic heritage and political instability, its poverty and popular culture, its spiritual fervor and alleged danger.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"27 1","pages":"154 - 175"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79331440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2023.2166319
E. Barker
{"title":"Woman in a turban: Domenichino’s Sibyl, Staël’s Corinne, and the image of female genius","authors":"E. Barker","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2023.2166319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2023.2166319","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The heroine of Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy (1807) makes her first appearance in the novel ‘dressed like Domenichino’s Sibyl’, wearing an Indian shawl wound into a turban. The aim of this essay is to highlight the contribution that the tradition of Sibylline iconography made to the characterization of the heroine of Corinne by locating Staël in a long line of artists, writers, and patrons, particularly female ones, who adapted and appropriated this iconography for their own purposes over the previous two centuries. A crucial breakthrough was made in the early seventeenth century by Domenichino, who provided the prototype for later generations of artists by painting a freestanding picture of a generic (not, as often said, the Cumaean) Sibyl wearing a turban. Domenichino’s composition nevertheless remained exceptional in its insistence on the primacy of Sibylline inspiration, which helps to account for its role in Corinne as well as for its appeal to other early nineteenth-century writers. Staël’s direct predecessors included the artists Angelica Kauffman and Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, both of whom portrayed female sitters in more or less Sibylline guise, but the most important was Emma Hamilton, from whose famous Attitudes Staël almost certainly derived the motif of the turban fashioned out of an Indian shawl. Staël herself adopted the turban as her characteristic headdress, as did other literary and artistic women after her; its great advantage lay in the way it enabled them to lay claim to Sibylline authority whilst also disavowing any such intent.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"76 1","pages":"235 - 259"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81059222","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
WORD & IMAGEPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/02666286.2023.2168474
Ivan Foletti
{"title":"How to write about images from the medieval world: André Grabar and his Byzantium—the case of L’Empereur dans l’art byzantin (1936)","authors":"Ivan Foletti","doi":"10.1080/02666286.2023.2168474","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2023.2168474","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article investigates how one of the most eminent Byzantinists of the twentieth century, André Grabar (1896–1990), constructed his own methodology in a balanced dialogue between texts and images. At the very core of this study is his monograph L’empereur dans l’art byzantin (1936), which can be seen as emblematic of Grabar’s approach. However, this article investigates not only Grabar’s methodology but also his personal cultural background. I believe that this approach is necessary in the context of the epistemology of art history, since, as has been proven in other important studies, the interplay between history, social situations, and scholarship is crucial.","PeriodicalId":44046,"journal":{"name":"WORD & IMAGE","volume":"34 1","pages":"99 - 110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78932336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}