Research and Innovation

This book focuses on several mythological paintings created by Rubens between 1610 and 1620. Even by the standards of erudition commonly applied to his oeuvre, these works demonstrate a particularly intense engagement on his part with questions of artistic originality and ideal style. Furthermore, their learned themes point to a rarefied audience steeped in classical and renaissance theories. Through these close readings, the author illuminates the importance of the rhetorical conventions of the period for Rubens’s mode of composition, or the intersection of the poetic and the “archaeological” in his approach to themes drawn from classical mythology.

The book has grown out of material presented at the Summer Institute of Connoisseurship of Chinese Calligraphy and Painting at the University of Maryland, funded by a generous three-year grant ($150,000) from the Henry Luce Foundation. The Institute was held from 2001 to 2003. It was attended by scholars from Harvard University, Princeton University, The Ohio State University, the University of California at San Diego, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Maryland, as well as the Palace Museum in Beijing and the National Palace Museum in Taipei. The institute was established to provide intensive training in connoisseurship through firsthand experience with works of art in the Washington, DC area. The goal of the institute was to promote the study both of original works of art and of the fundamental problems in the connoisseurship of Chinese calligraphy and painting, and to enhance the quality of art-historical research and teaching. All essays in the book were either presented or discussed extensively at the institute.

In 1969, Joseph Kosuth proclaimed that “aesthetics…are conceptually irrelevant to art.” More than 35 years later, discussions of conceptual art still focus on the ideas rather than on the material documentation, placing these ideas within a particular social or political discourse. Artists and scholars have continued to argue that the photograph, one of the most common objects used by these artists, is almost arbitrary, with no artistic value. Nancy Foote summarizes this argument in her 1976 essay “The Anti-Photographers,” where she states that conceptual art “strips the photograph of its artistic pretensions, changing it from a mirror to a window. What it reveals becomes important, not what it is.” Due to the context of its production and exhibition, many continue to read the photography of the conceptual artists as neutral, ignoring any artistic possibilities...."

The book provides us a point of entry into the nexus of relationships that structured the encounter between China and the West as experienced by the treaty-port Chinese in their everyday life. Exploring such relationships gives us a better sense of the ultimate significance of Shanghai’s rise as China’s dominant metropolitan center. This book will appeal not only to art historians, but also to students of history, gender studies, women’s studies, and culture studies who are interested in modern China as well as questions of art patronage, nationalism, colonialism, visual culture, and representation of women. The book was based on material produced through a project supported by two generous grants ($125,000) from the Henry Luce Foundation.

In this visually stunning companion volume to a New York Public Library exhibition, art historian S. A. Mansbach offers an overview of the progressive eastern European graphic artists and writers who, in the first four decades of the 20th century, redefined and reshaped culture and its social meanings as they sought to comprehend and interpret the dynamics of a modern, postwar age. Illustrated in color with more than 50 examples of modernist publications, it includes works on paper by such artists as El Lissitzky, Laszla Moholy-Nagy, Karel Teige, Niklavs Strunke, Victor Brauner, and others, all drawn from the Library's extensive holdings of eastern and southeastern European materials. The volume also includes an essay on the growth and development of the Library's collections in this field, as well as a checklist of the exhibition.

This book examines the first generation of artists in Britain to define themselves as history painters, attempting what then was considered to be art’s most exalted category. These ambitious artists, including John Hamilton Mortimer, Henry Fuseli, Alexander and John Runciman, James Barry, James Jefferys, George Romney, John Flaxman, and William Blake, most of whom were born in the 1740s and 60s, were presented with the challenge of how best to compete with the continental old masters when they had only an impoverished native tradition on which to build. They cultivated the concept of the artist as an original genius, a psychological strategy born out of deep-seated anxiety. At the core of this identity formation was the artists’ perception of William Shakespeare, whom they recast as the original genius incarnate. They strove to accomplish in art what they perceived he had accomplished in literature. Theseus’s lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy” (V.i.12) personified for them the Shakespeare of their imagining, and this conception of fine frenzy became the touchstone for their artistic identities, profoundly influencing both their lives and their art. This book pays special attention to their self-portraits in which they proclaim this new identity, one that emphasizes the impassioned and extravagant nature of their personal vision and their claims to original genius.

In 2015, Hariclia Brecoulaki and I published an article examining the emblematic use of the argonaut motif in wall paintings from the so-called Palace of Nestor at Pylos. This study serves as a brief follow-up to that investigation, and offers some preliminary thoughts on the opposing forces of standardization and individualization manifest in the motif's depictions. Through close investigation of the marine creature's anatomy as rendered across different band-friezes at the palace, it is demonstrated that while the design of certain body parts was "fixed," that of others was "flexible," resulting in repetitive compositions that were, in fact, subtly nuanced. Based on this evidence, some preliminary practical and intellectual explanations for this perceived "artistic freedom" enjoyed by the Pylian painters are presented, as are thoughts about composition in Mycenaean art at large.

This article examines fragments of a wheel made terracotta bovid of "Mycenaean" type from the so-called Palace of Nestor at Pylos. The first such figure to be identified in Messenia, the bovid is considered in light of its physical features, excavation contexts, and similarities to published comparanda. An original storage context inside the palace at Pylos is proposed, as is a production date in Late Helladic (LH) IIIA2 or LH IIIB. In the latter period, the use of the figure is tentatively explored in light of local iconographic, faunal, and textual evidence, which points collectively to the bovid's ritual, and perhaps explicitly royal, use.

This article looks at the Late Roman to Medieval periods at the Greek site of Nemea and in the surrounding valley, proposing that an apparent lack of continuity between these periods is less dramatic than past scholars have suggested; the perceived disconnect is in many cases due to inability to identify artifacts from the centuries spanning the two eras.

In the early twentieth century, Sir Arthur Evans’s excavations at Knossos brought to light one of the most visually arresting and interpretively complex artistic repertoires of the Bronze Age Aegean. One facet of this complexity, noted by Evans himself, was the frequent repetition of iconographic motifs between the site’s wall-paintings and decorated ceramics. This paper examines this repetition as it pertains to one particular class of material: Palace Style jars with floral decoration. Using evidence of the jars’ physical attributes, as well as their chronology, contexts, and ritual associations, I explore the possibility that these vessels were not designed to reinforce the iconography of contemporary Final Palatial wall-paintings, as Evans once argued, but rather to replace defunct Neopalatial landscape scenes, for which they provided portable alternatives.