Research and Innovation

Authored short, object-centered essays on the dissemination of statues of Queen Victoria across the British Empire and reproductions of Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave in a range of media.

Winner of the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History 2015. Between 1777 and 1784, the Irish artist James Barry (1741-1806) executed six murals for the Great Room of the [Royal] Society of Arts in London. Although his works form the most impressive series of history paintings in Great Britain, they remain one of the British art world's best kept secrets, having attracted little attention from critics or the general public. James Barry's Murals at the Royal Society of Arts is the first to offer an in-depth analysis of these remarkable paintings and the first to demonstrate that the artist was pioneering a new approach to public art in terms of the novelty of the patronage and the highly personal nature of his content. Ultimately, as this book seeks to show, the artist intended his paintings to engage the public in a dialogue that would utterly transform British society in terms of its culture, politics, and religion. In making this case, the book brings this neglected series into the mainstream of discussions of British art of the Romantic period, revealing the intellectual profundity invested in the genre of history painting and re-evaluating the role Christianity played in Enlightenment thought.

One of the highest-quality replicas of the Achilles and Penthesilea group was excavated at Aphrodisias in 1966-67. Recent research has identified additional fragments belonging to the group. Study of these fragments clarifies our knowledge of this important Roman replica and its Hellenistic original. The Aphrodisias replica was discovered in its late antique context, in the Tetrastyle Court of the Hadrianic Baths. The Achilles and Penthesilea was juxtaposed with a replica of the so-called Pasquino Group and a nude male torso wearing a chlamys. All three statues faced east, toward the main square of the city, the North Agora. Our study elucidates the thematic intent behind this sculptural ensemble and the poignancy of the contrast between Penthesilea and her pendant, the young warrior in the Pasquino group. The material from Aphrodisias, together with its known find context, allows for new reconstructions of a major Greco-Roman statue group and elucidates this statue's repair and display throughout the fifth century C.E.

Focusing on the relationship between ancient Rome and modern America, the Pellegri Grant supports innovative teaching and research on the part of its grant winners. I have used part of this grant to support graduate instruction on archaeological excavation on the Bay of Naples and to facilitate my own research and publication.

Ancient Greek and Roman art provides a window through which one can gain an appreciation for ancient self-consciousness of, and engagement with, images. In particular, this chapter addresses Greek and Roman representations of art and architecture that appear as metapictures within larger images. I refer not only to images of the same kind as their support (vases on vases, for instance) but also to metapictures more generally - that is to say, images of vases, sculpture, or architecture represented in other media. This chapter demonstrates that metapictures can be understood as significant documents for our understanding of the underlying intentions of their artists and even the contemporary reception of images and practices of image making in antiquity.

The work of this prolific master ranged from sensuous Salon marbles to luxury objects in gold and modest utensils in zinc. He played a major role in integrating the decorative arts with fine art. The young Rodin collaborated with him intermittently over two decades.

Before his death at the age of twenty-seven, Jean-Michel Basquiat completed nearly 2,000 works. These unique compositions—collages of text and gestural painting across a variety of media—quickly made Basquiat one of the most important and widely known artists of the 1980s. Reading Basquiat provides a new approach to understanding the range and impact of this artist’s practice, as well as its complex relationship to several key artistic and ideological debates of the late twentieth century, including the instability of identity, the role of appropriation, and the boundaries of expressionism. Jordana Moore Saggese argues that Basquiat, once known as “the black Picasso,” probes not only the boundaries of blackness but also the boundaries of American art. Weaving together the artist’s interests in painting, writing, and music, this groundbreaking book expands the parameters of aesthetic discourse to consider the parallels Basquiat found among these disciplines in his exploration of the production of meaning. Most important, Reading Basquiat traces the ways in which Basquiat constructed large parts of his identity—as a black man, as a musician, as a painter, and as a writer—via the manipulation of texts in his own library.

This study provides a new analysis of the pictorial ensemble of the Torre de la Parada, the hunting lodge of King Philip IV of Spain. Created in the late 1630s by a group of artists led by Peter Paul Rubens, this cycle was completed by Diego Velázquez. Despite the lack of a written program, surviving works provide eloquent testimony of several themes revolving around Neostoic ideals of self-restraint and prudent governance. Rubens set the moral tone through his serio-comic Ovidian narratives, complemented by Velázquez’s portraits of ancient philosophers, and royals and fools of the court. This study is the first to consider in depth their joint artistic contributions and shared ambition.

From earliest times, angels have been instruments of salvation and retribution, agents of revelation, and harbingers of hope. In effect, they are situated at the intersections of diverse belief structures and philosophical systems. In this book, I focus mainly on medieval and Renaissance Italy, and I consider the Christian and Jewish traditions from which Early Modern conceptions and representations derived. I trace the iconography of angels in text and visual form, beginning with Dante and his precursors through such lights as Pico della Mirandola; and from Fra Angelico to Raphael and beyond. I argue that angels are touchstones and markers of each era’s intellectual self-understanding, theological doctrines, and artistic imagination.

Steven Mansbach stresses in the tradition of his own discipline the overwhelming importance of urban centers in his predominantly rural "Eastern Europe". It is cities which shape artistic regions, and this the more so in a part of Europe where there are fewer cities than in other parts. This is one of the reasons why Mansbach in his 2013 Oskar Halecki Lecture analyzes (and visualizes) the "capital modernism" of the only "Baltic metropolis" - Latvia's capital Riga.In looking at Riga's central role not only for Latvia but for all three Baltic countries and the wider Baltic Sea Region, Mansbach aptly applies Klaus Zernack's post-Haleckian meso-regional concept of "Nordosteuropa" which constructs a 'Mediterranean of the North' reaching from the Neva to the Kattegat - a region of enhanced economic, military, cultural, political, and ethnic cooperation and conflict from the Nordic Wars of the early modern period to the interwar years of the 20th century. As Mansbach demonstrates with the example of the city on the Daugava's modernism, after Hanseatic commercialism, Russian imperialism and Latvian nationalism also Soviet communism left its visible impact resulting in "a novel eclecticism" by "a quixotic intermingling of Riga's inventive modernism and constraining Soviet politics." Northeastern Europe lives on, and the Soviet legacy, unwelcome as it may be today, is a constituent part of it - as can be seen in Riga.