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This article explores the use and function of the lucido technique in architectural workshops from the Renaissance through the late eighteenth century. By examining evidence from written sources and key drawing collections, the study compares the copying practices of architects with those of artists. The findings reveal that transparent paper was not appreciated as a copying medium in Europe’s architectural workshops until the mid-eighteenth century. When employed, transparent paper was primarily used for copying figure and ornamental drawings that were challenging to transfer using the pricking technique. The paper argues that the marginalization of transparent paper in architectural practice was possibly due to the coating process and the characteristics of the substances employed – vegetable oils and resins – which were incompatible with the working environment of architects. It was only with the commercialization of machine-made wove transparent paper in the early nineteenth century that architects and engineers began to systematically adopt this medium.

This essay looks into the very beginnings of paper photography in the Austrian Empire. It focuses on two salted paper portraits of two most iconic figures of the Slovak National Revival in the mid-19th century, Ľudovít Štúr and Jozef M. Hurban. Created around 1849 by Anastas Jovanović, a Serbian photographer and lithographer based in Vienna, both portraits are the earliest paper photographs today preserved in Slovak collections. The article elucidates not only the salted paper prints’ authorship, origin, ownership and material characteristics, but also the notion of reproduction and circulation of images during the revolutionary years of 1848 and 1849 and by the advent of photography on paper in Central Europe at the same time. Special attention is paid to social and cultural contacts between Slovaks and Serbs around 1848 as a key factor to the photographs’ production.

In the 19th century, one of the most important national events in Hungary was the 1896 millennial celebration of the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin. A central act of the festivity’s symbolical episodes was the erection of the so-called Millennium Memorial (or Millennial Monument) at Heroes’ Square in Budapest. The monument consists of a colonnaded architectural framework that embraces a sculpture gallery featuring Hungarian leaders and rulers. My paper presents the history of the monument from concept to completion. Besides the artistic patterns of the architectural framework designed by Albert Schickedanz, special attention is given to the sculptures of the Hungarian sculptors who worked under the direction of the artist György Zala, as well as to the relations between the sculptors and the artistic scene of Vienna, and to the models they used. In addition to these primarily art historical aspects, my paper discusses the cultural context of the Memorial. It seeks answers to the questions of how the Memorial became a symbol of national identity already at the stage of planning and what ideas about the shaping of the national self-image defined the final form of the Memorial.

The French-Swiss artist and architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965) created a system for architects and engineers to humanize the metric system, paving the way for a new form of architecture. The Portuguese artist José de Almada Negreiros (1893–1970) developed a multifaceted literary and artistic practice, progressively constructing a theory on the relation between art and geometry. There are parallels between these two artists in the way they devoted themselves to geometry and developed a theory with a universalistic approach that extended beyond their artistic production. Le Corbusier's international recognition has led to extensive research and dissemination of his works, whereas Almada's theoretical studies on geometry and art have only recently been the object of systematic research. Recently found documents in Almada's estate shed new light on the author's knowledge of Le Corbusier's Le Modulor, and his critical reception of such work. This paper reveals these documents and examines them in depth to identify both parallels and a structural, theoretical divergence between these authors.

Saxon influences stand out as one of the most notable phenomena in the Late Gothic architecture of Lesser Poland; however, they have been insufficiently discussed to date. Four prominent buildings, likely inspired by Saxon and Lusatian architecture, are analysed in this paper. The first structure under consideration is the cloister around the courtyard of the Collegium Maius of the Jagiellonian University of Cracow. Characterised by its diamond vaults, which are the earliest example of this type in Lesser Poland, the cloister was most probably inspired by the Albrechtsburg in Meissen; it could even have been completed by one of the Meissen masters. The second building examined is the Chapel of Saint James next to the southern tower of Saint Margaret's Church in Nowy Sącz. Its vault was likely a further development of the model from the southwestern bay of the Collegium Maius cloister. The third case study focuses on the Collegium Maius library, erected slightly later than the courtyard. It features two types of net vaults: one is the Saxon modification of the Parlerian design for the Old Town Bridge Tower in Prague, and the other is inspired by the works of Konrad Pflüger in Podelwitz and Görlitz. The last example to be analysed is the gable of the Church of Saint Nicholas in Bochnia. I suggest seeing the closest analogies in the gables of churches and secular buildings in Saxony and Lusatia as well as in the gable of the Church of the Canons Regular of St. Augustine in Żagań, Silesia.

The paper focuses on the gendered self-conceptions of engineers and their relevance for studying world exhibitions. It thus analyses debates in German engineering around 1900 on the relationship between technology and culture in order to reconstruct how masculinity in engineering is understood as a symbolic position of cultural production. This aim necessitates using a concept of 'hegemonic masculinity' as a relational construction. This is illustrated by the example of the professionalisation of modern German engineering from the 1870s on until the turn of the century. In their writings, engineering scholars initially constructed the idea of a 'scientist of machinery' as a symbolically neutralised position of objectivity by following a narrative of progress. Later, the engineer as a 'man of action' supplanted this concept, and emphasis was now placed on a narrative of the technological man whose competence was regarded a talent arising from the nature of his sex. Both historical conceptions of the German engineer are interpreted as a specific mode of masculinity construction, motivated by the need to attain a dominant position, not only with respect to women but also to other social groups of men.

"The Great Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations", held at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851, hosted an array of objects that testified to both artistic and technical virtuosity, while their display served as a spectacle for the public. This paper takes up the rich history of mechanical technologies in the service of art using the example of the machine for reproducing sculptures, which was presented as a cutting-edge innovation at the Great Exhibition. Drawing on the history of early photography and in particular the historical context of various techniques of three-dimensional reproduction (such as the 'photo-sculpture' introduced later in 1862), the process of reproducing and displaying works of art on a small scale will be explored. The study of mechanically minded sculptors, who celebrated the almost magical qualities of their machines and the demonstration of the production processes, reveals their ambition to join the ranks of the great inventors, alongside the situation of the pioneers of early photography. The presentation of sculptures, reliefs and objets d’art in the milieu of technical knowledge, industry and manufacture at the universal exhibition of 1851 is thus put up for discussion, also with a view to subsequent international exhibitions.

This paper explores the intersections between gender, display, and empire at turn-of-the-century world’s fairs in the United States. The 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition serves as a case study. Designed to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal, the 1915 fair was hinged on contemporary notions of manliness and used gender ideology to articulate prevailing ideas and assumptions about the American nation, its new empire, and its influence on the entire world. Indeed, gendered rhetoric found its way into numerous contemporary published tracts, articles, paintings, and popular culture that take on the enormity of the Panama Canal and its implications. Manliness and its mechanical prosthetic, technology, became the arenas through which the United States refashioned its national body and confidently assumed its new role as imperialist on the world stage.

This paper describes the different ways of commemorating the fallen of World War I in Italy between 1918 and 1940. From the collection of examples emerges that there was no homogeneity in the forms of remembrance during these two decades. Rather, we find both a continuous renewal and overlapping of different kinds of commemorative forms. Right after the end of World War I, a spread of spontaneous local monuments is discernible, though the many small war cemeteries rising near the former battlefield areas were already beginning to be perceived as a problem. Shortly before World War II, the construction of huge ossuaries and, later, war memorials was fostered by the Fascist Regime which availed itself of the fallen for ideological and political purposes. Between these two extremes, also other forms of commemoration such as parks or avenues of remembrance were realized. This paper tries not to force coincidences between history and the history of architecture; nevertheless, it understands monuments, parks of remembrance, ossuaries, and war memorials as a kind of seismograph sensitive to the period’s shifts and jolts, and to Fascist policies in particular.

This paper examines the material memorialization of the World Wars in India by looking at the India Gate, the archway located at the center of the Indian national capital, New Delhi. Although dedicated to soldiers who lost their lives in World War I, the India Gate has become a symbolic commemorative monument that represents the sacrifices of all the Indian soldiers who lost their lives in the battles fought by the modern Indian state. Focusing on the multi-textured renderings of history, this paper illustrates how old memories and histories are repurposed and refashioned at the India Gate.

This paper focuses on Italy’s Fascist ossuaries of the First World War. It is intended to show how a methodology that uses images and texts can expose the political purposes that underpinned the creation of the ossuaries, to contribute to the literature on the commemoration of fallen soldiers, and to advance the study of war monuments as expressions of political forces. The paper also represents an attempt to bridge between different approaches to the study of war monuments that have emerged in history and in visual studies. It examines Italian ossuaries of the Great War as both objects and symbols, or as aesthetic configurations and carriers of political meanings. Physical characteristics, such as those associated with context, space and style, are shown to express elements of Fascist ideology relating, for instance, to hierarchy, victory and power.

Between 1949 and 1953, about 2,100 “unclaimed” artworks returned to France from Germany after World War II were selected by museum professionals and labeled MNR (Musées nationaux récupération). About half of the works are paintings, while thirty percent are decorative arts, and the remaining pieces are drawings, sculptures, folk art, Asian art, and antiquities. This paper presents the so-called AOR (Antiquités orientales récupération), 31 objects entrusted to the care of the Département des Antiquités orientales, Musée du Louvre, which at the time included both pre-Islamic and Islamic objects. Research carried out by the Mission Mattéoli (1997–2000) determined that only two, maybe three, artworks are proven to have been looted by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg during the Nazi occupation of France. The rest of the AOR items were purchases made by German individuals and museums, confirming that the MNR corpus does not equate in its entirety to art plundered from Jewish collections. The study of this portion of the works is an opportunity to shed light on the Near Eastern art and antiquities market in Paris during the war.

This paper shows that the Nazi persecution of Jewish coin dealers and collectors prominent in Germany’s economic and cultural life resulted in a weakening of the domestic numismatic market. The failure of Nazi cultural-economic policy is illustrated by a study of the trade in ancient coins. While the Nazi authorities (e.g., Foreign Exchange Offices, Customs) failed to prevent the export of numismatic assets, the most prominent Jewish dealers were able to reestablish their businesses abroad, especially in Switzerland as the new international trading center for ancient coins. Their non-Jewish German colleagues, in turn, had great difficulty filling the gaps in the supply of ancient coins in the German Reich left by the Jews who had emigrated or fled.

The paper provides a brief overview of art export regulations in the Mediterranean region from the 19th century to the laws adopted in the 1920s and 1930s. It then focuses on the German law of 1919 requiring works of art that were predominantly privately owned and of outstanding value to be entered in a register, the so-called List of Nationally Important Artworks. Once the works were listed in this index, they were subject to authorization for export. Despite the high importance the National Socialists attributed to Greek and Roman art as an eternal art, only one percent of the artworks that were classified as nationally valuable were from ancient periods. The instrumentalization of the export regulation through the National Socialist regime is illustrated by the example of Albert Lévy’s collection of antiquities in Hamburg. For provenance research, it is essential to determine how laws were extended, applied, bypassed, or overruled during National Socialism and, thus, instrumentalized as a means of state power.

This paper discusses the notion of modernism by relating it to three artistic movements – Modernisme, Noucentisme and the Avant-garde – which developed in Catalonia between the 1880s and the early 1920s. From a common commitment to modernity these three movements produced, nonetheless, widely different aesthetic proposals. Notwithstanding their differences, this paper identifies common features in their artistic practices in order to contribute to the ongoing critical review of modernism. Thus, rather than a self-referential, medium-specific quest with abstraction as a natural endpoint, modernism is presented here as an open, interrogative artistic practice engaged in a debate in pursuit of ‘the modern’. This understanding of modernism is then tested against the case of Xavier Nogués, an artist associated with Noucentisme, and his contribution to the artistic debate of his time through the necessarily figurative language of caricature.

This paper discusses the impact of the ideological trends of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne which took place in Paris, in 1937, on Greece's national participation in the exhibition. The modern artworks it showcased will serve as a case study to investigate notions of regionalism. The paper considers the conception and realisation of the Greek pavilion in association with the Exposition's affirmed focus on regionalism and examines the relation between nationalism and regionalism at that time. The Greek pavilion and its artists will also be discussed in regard to the local ideologies they expressed or contributed to generate. The aim of this paper is to highlight how, on the occasion of the 1937 exhibition, the Greek quest for a new form of national art – an authentic expression of "Greekness" able to overturn the European perception, which identified the "Greek" with the "classical" – converged or diverged from European regionalist and nationalist discourses as expressed by the exhibition's commissioner, as well as to draw attention to the paradoxes of this connection.

The subject of this paper is the supposed affinity between painting and poetry as theorised by the linguist Roman Jakobson who played a crucial role for the Russian avant-garde and its close association of painting and poetry. The paper focuses on Jakobson's relation to the two 1913 manifestos "The Word as Such" and "The Letter as Such", written by the poets Chlebnikov and Kruchenyck, and on Jakobson's own (lost) reply. It calls into question the accuracy of Jakobson's claim of having influcenced the poets' manifestos, and describes what Jakobson considered to be the shared 'core elements' of the visual and literary arts. According to him, they share a visuality, not on the level of the written sign or grapheme, but on a deeper level, visible only to the mind's eye.

The paper analyses the key aspects of George Grosz's influence on Croatian art between the two World Wars. A number of artists, especially the members of the association Zemlja, considered Grosz to be an author of similar ideological belief, who advocated an active role of art in society. Grosz's standpoints thus indirectly influenced the formation of the overall cultural atmosphere, marked by the polarization of the entire artistic scene. The artist became one of the key reference points and a figure cited by those who exerted a crucial influence on the formation of Croatian artistic scene between the two World Wars – the writer and one of the most prominent intellectuals Miroslav Krleža and visual artists Krsto Hegedušić and Ljubo Babić. The paper also addresses the circumstances regarding the organization of Grosz's solo exhibition in Zagreb in 1932, along with an analysis of the reception of his work among Croatian art critics.

This paper focuses on the analysis of the ways in which the cult of the Habsburg dynasty was promoted through public monuments in Croatia in the so-called Long 19th Century, from the end of the 18th to the early 20th century. Public sculpture in Croatia at this time was under a strong dominance of the national discourse – it mostly commemorated heroes of the Croatian cultural and sometimes also political history. Compared to the monuments to national heroes, the public monuments dedicated to members of the Habsburg family were smaller in number, and most often more modest in design and size. They can be divided into two basic groups – monuments commemorating events (Ereignisdenkmäler) from Croatian history connected with the Habsburgs, and monuments dedicated directly to individual members of the Habsburg family. The latter type of monuments is defined in this article in terms of what they commemorate and is divided into three groups: 1) monuments commemorating the role of the Habsburg emperors in the implementation of infrastructure projects, 2) monuments commemorating important anniversaries in the lives of individual members of the ruling house, and 3) monuments commemorating visits of Habsburgs to Croatia.

The Zagreb Green Horseshoe, or Zelena potkova in Croatian, is an original urban evocation of the Ringstraße in Vienna that represents an effort to create a characteristic urban space during the era of Historicism. This distinctive 19th century urban project provided an appropriate setting for monuments and sculptural decoration. Squares, parks and main streets thus became a stage where contemporaries encountered monuments to personalities whose memory was to be preserved. The evocation of historical figures as a part of the collective memory is one of the fundamental ideas behind erecting monuments in any public place. Zagreb, as a national metropolis, favoured monuments dedicated to persons who recalled the nation’s glorious past and to highly regarded individuals, artists and poets. This paper focuses on thirteen monuments that were erected from 1866 to 1914 in this model part of the city and discusses issues related to the clients, the artists and the individuals to whom they were dedicated. The monuments that extend along the Zelena potkova can match the monuments on the Ringstraße, both examples are part of a common heritage from the reign of Franz Joseph I of Austria.

This paper focuses on Caspar von Zumbusch, who was one of the leading sculptors of the second half of the 19th century in Vienna. At the initiative of the art historian Rudolf Eitelberger, the German sculptor was appointed to the Academy of Fine Arts (Akademie der bildenden Künste) in Vienna in 1873 and became the founder of the so-called Vienna school of monumental sculpture. By means of a statistical analysis of the matriculation books that serve as reliable documentation of the students enrolled in the Academy, the number and origin of Zumbusch’s students can be determined for the first time. The results show that Zumbusch taught numerous students from all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which made the Vienna Academy the preeminent centre for sculptors in the Dual Monarchy. Once the students had graduated, Zumbusch recommended them for projects and thereby established a large network of sculptors across the Austro-Hungarian Empire towards the end of the 19th century.

This paper aims to define the role of the Bolognese 'nation' in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Rome. The church of Saints John the Evangelist and Petronius, built in 1576 under the Bolognese Pope Gregory XIII, represents the first instance of this congregation's architectural presence in the Eternal City. The community began defining its unique character through a specific figurative language, stimulated by the need to express its own spirituality and local culture as well as to celebrate the role played by a number of famous Bolognese citizens within the congregation and in the Roman Curia. A detailed analysis of the decorative and liturgical programme of this church, as well as archival research in various Bolognese and Roman institutions shed light on the religious, social and artistic practices through which this 'nation' aimed to express its identity.

The church of Ss. Faustino and Giovita in Rome was built by the Brescian confraternity in 1575, after they obtained the necessary papal permit for an intervention within the ruins of an unfinished palace of justice (palazzo dei Tribunali) by Donato Bramante. This space played an important role in Rome’s public life, as during the sixteenth century theatrical productions were staged within its walls and one of the first Tiber traghetto dockings was situated nearby. The Brescian community also established a national hospice within the ruins, which was demolished, together with their church, during the late nineteenth-century rebuilding of the Tiber banks. This paper investigates the notion of identity of the Brescian "Nation" (the city of Brescia being ruled by the Republic of Venice, which itself was represented in Rome through different buildings and institutions). It focuses on the activity of Carlo Fontana, the official architect of both the Serenissima and the Brescian confraternity, who designed the new façade of the church of Ss. Faustino and Giovita, as well as many new features of the Venetian embassy in Rome, now known as Palazzo Venezia. Fontana also designed projects in Brescia and neighbouring towns such as Bergamo and Como, as well as different projects in the Veneto, which will be explored here from a comparative perspective.

During the 1880s, Buenos Aires witnessed a boost in the project of founding a national art scene. Interestingly, the founding of such a scene implied, in the first place, the creation of a field of art criticism. Due to the lack of official institutes and public support for the arts, the process of imagining and creating a national art took place both on paper and in the studio. As a result, one specific topos that emerges in this period is the visit to the artist’s studio. This new discursive art space is at first sight small and insignificant, yet as the present study shows, its discovery in art criticism was crucial for the elaboration of a new myth, i.e., that of a national art production to come, observable in its actual birth place. The concept of "the visit to the great artist" had a different meaning in Buenos Aires than, for instance, in Paris. Most of the painters or sculptors were not yet viewed as "great artists". They were precursors or national masters to be. The main focus of this article addresses the question of what this means for the representation of artistic practices and what it tells us about the dynamic of the early art scene.

The aim of this paper is to offer an analysis of the Christian intellectual perspective of choreutic gesture, putting forward the hypothesis that by regulating dancing, late antique bishops became spokesmen for an anthropology of gesture which on the one hand demonised all forms of performative dancing and on the other hand encouraged men to become perfect imitators of an angelic choreia in the Platonic framework. This choreia was supposed to guide the behavioural movement and schemata of men’s bodies. However, it was more than just a characteristic of a presumed Ideal City; it also had to be realised in life on earth, the anticipatory mirror image of the heavenly city.

This article explores a neglected topic: Polish research into the Early Modern period of Silesian art under Socialism. Although this epoch has never been quite as popular as the Medieval period as a subject of art historical research, its position was to fall victim to the ‘re-Polonization’ efforts of Polish art historians during the period after Silesia had been incorporated into the Polish state. This paper gives an overview of the numerous studies on Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture that appeared in the period from the difficult first years after the Second World War until the early 1960s, when the phenomenon of ‘Polonization’ of Early Modern Silesian art began to subside. It raises issues relating to the compatibility of Communist and nationalist ideologies and seeks to give reasons for the stance taken by the art historians involved in the story.

This paper examines the art historical discourse on the Jesuit and University Church in Trnava (Tyrnau, Nagyszombat) in the period before and after the communist takeover of power in Czechoslovakia. It provides insight into the history of research of one of the most significant monuments of early Baroque architecture in the former Danube Monarchy, in order to give an idea of the main problems in the art historical practice under the influence of communist ideology.

The special issue “Precarious Past? Research on Baroque Art and Architecture in East Central Europe under Socialism”, edited by Michaela Marek (†) and Eva Pluhařová-Grigienė, originates from a conference held at Humboldt University of Berlin in 2014. In order to enhance a comparative approach to the still understudied field of art historiography under Socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, the six contributions focus on art historical writing on the Baroque era. This topic, due to its connection with the Church and aristocracy, had an ideologically precarious position within the confines of Marxism-Leninism. The papers highlight the complex relationship between the need to fulfill the new ideological requirements and persisting intellectual, personal, and institutional structures that preceded the communist takeovers.

Henri Matisse’s images in Jazz, created during the disruption of the German Occupation of France, were embedded with symbols of cultural resistance, while his text, which he composed after the defeat of the Germans, reflected the transition to a post-Liberation France. The wartime symbols and allusions camouflaged within these images are readily revealed when consideration is given to two carefully devised interpretative filters that Matisse created. The first, a circus theme embodied in its original title Cirque, and the second, the intricate captions that Matisse accorded to each image. Enhancing the visual quality of his handwritten text with his richly drawn arabesques, he created a new text-image dynamic which gave primacy to the image. The paper reveals a congruency between the text in Jazz, which he declared had no relationship to the image, and the essay he wrote at the same time, "How I made my books”, where he articulated a principle he adopted for his other books, the rapport between the image and the literary character of the text.

Buda Castle, the Royal Palace on the Castle Hill of Budapest, was left in ruins by World War II. It was only in 1949, when the castle was destined to house the new communist government, that plans for its reconstruction were initiated. The architects involved had to deal with a historical heritage that was for the most part disliked by the new political system. This paper analyzes the positions of the protagonists in the debate on the reconstruction of the castle before and after the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. This debate moved between the poles of communist ideology, continuities of a pre-war fascist critique of modernism and a national legitimisation of the Habsburg past perceived as ‘colonial’.

Instead of stabilising the poles of stasis and non-stasis, and narrative and non-narrative, in the 1970s, Julião Sarmento plays within a concomitant scheme: photography and painting, photography and film, stasis and narrative are merged. What is at stake is the possibility of challenging the modernist tenets of photography canonically defined in opposition to painting and cinema. The perversity is not only in the content of some works but also in the very logic underlying the approach to the medium in Sarmento's œuvre, whether through a perversion of the boundaries between the media or by the assertion of the medium itself as perversion. This paper presents a case study that reflects upon the replacement of a structural and negative system with an unsystematic difference (in the sense less of expansion than of the medium's deconstruction). New dimensions concerning the issues of contamination and hybridisation in contemporary art are also brought into play.

By applying the methods of categorisation, comparison and analysis of written sources, this article aims to reveal how Surrealist artistic ideas may have influenced – through the intermediary of the Postmodern movement – architectural trends up to the present time. The paper is organized into three parts, each dedicated to one of the most important Surrealist architectural concepts: the synthesis of the arts, fluidity, and formalistic superficiality and spontaneity. Each section describes how these ideas were underlined in Surrealist art and theoretical texts, compares them to some examples of Postmodern and contemporary architecture, and explains how these ideas were nurtured from the time they emerged until the time they materialized in architectural design.

Over a quarter-century, the Scandinavian artists Jeanna Bauck and Bertha Wegmann painted a series of portraits and interiors in which they commented upon their shared identity as women artists while migrating between the artistic centers of Munich, Paris, and Copenhagen. Drawing from feminist and performance theory, and concentrating on three paintings in which Bauck and Wegmann imagine one another as emerging professional artists by mediated self-representation, the paper discusses the two artists’ collaborative practices. The artists’ correspondence with their mutual friend and colleague Hildegard Thorell, kept in the archive of Nordiska Museet in Stockholm, is presented here for the first time and provides important insights into their artistic companionship. This case study forms part of an ongoing dissertation project on Nordic women painters’ self-representations in the late nineteenth century.

Rapid industrialization and urbanization in Europe and the United States introduced new building types and new methods of construction, leading to important changes in the architectural landscape of major cities. Public and corporate construction proliferated, and design competitions were called upon to identify architectural projects that best suited the needs of a particular state institution or private company. Although initially these competitions were open to all members of the architectural profession, towards the end of the nineteenth century, their format changed to be more effective, with only a restricted number of architects competing for the commission. The present paper focuses on the competition for the New York Life Palace in Budapest and sheds light on its connections with the international trends.

The title of this article recalls a session of the 2012 CIHA congress in Nuremberg – 'CIHA as the Object of Art History' – that analysed the role the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art in the development of art history as a discipline. Only a few years earlier, Heinrich Dilly had drawn an overview of the International Congresses of Art History, together with specialists of other fields. Dilly explained the lack of interest of art historiography for the import of such conferences with the fact that they were 'too big a matter', as the papers had rapidly multiplied, and also 'very large a matter', in the sense that the debate was difficult to frame and, more often than not, the choice of participants depended on a political agenda rather than scientific reasons. This article thus endeavours to tackle this very large matter as a vantage point on the methodological reflection, in the attempt to trace the continuities and discontinuities of the theoretical discourse insofar as discussed in CIHA meetings, from the Lisbon conference in 1949 to that held in Nuremberg in 2012.

This article gives an overview of the very early collections of Māori artefacts in Berlin. These encompass the collections assembled by Johann Reinhold and Georg Forster and others on the famous voyages of James Cook to the South Seas at the end of the eighteenth century, but also objects collected by the North American captain Hadlock at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Later a wide range of German visitors reported from their tours through New Zealand and brought back artefacts and photographs. This paper points out the provenances of the core areas of the Māori collection in Berlin and retraces some shifts in the collecting practices as well as in the museum installations. It will be shown how the perception and evaluation of these objects changed and how they became symbols of identity in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century.

This special issue compiles papers presented at the 2015 “Gottfried Lindauer – Painting New Zealand” conference organized by the Technische Universität Darmstadt and the Nationalgalerie Berlin. Both the issue and the conference itself constitute an extension of the acclaimed exhibition “Gottfried Lindauer – The Māori Portraits”, shown between 20 November 2014 and 12 April 2015 in the Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin, and present an array of scholarly and theoretical perspectives. The essays reflect in microcosm current larger research and archival work and are thus able to place the work of the artist, hitherto discussed mostly in an ethnographic context, into an already globalized framework shaped by transcultural contacts.

This paper surveys ‘representations’ of Māori in connection with museums and international exhibitions from 1873-1925, in particular through works of art by painters such as Lindauer and taonga (treasures) made by Māori people themselves. It questions the postmodern analysis of objects and public display in terms of representation, along with the politics of identity that go with it, arguing instead that using a framework of visual culture, actor-network theory and indigenous agency illuminates these objects in a different, and altogether more complex way. In particular it draws on historical Māori accounts of their critical but enthusiastic engagement with western cultures of collection and display, and explores how this evidence might underpin new methods of analysis both in the study of colonial art and its histories and contemporary museum practice.

Recent publications on the historiography of modern Spanish architecture have once again made C. Flores' major work, Arquitectura Española Contemporánea (1961), the focus of their scholarly attention. Flores' text is portrayed as an important contribution to the Modern Movement in the context of the Franco regime. However, the significance of W. Gropius and the Bauhaus was not mentioned. This omission becomes all the more peculiar when considering Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture (1941), with which Flores was well acquainted through the 1955 Spanish translation. This paper analyzes Flores' genealogy of modern architecture at the textual level. In addition, it addresses the visual level of his book, for the first time uncovering a narration that contradicts a straightforward illustration, yet reveals Flores' stance vis-à-vis modern architecture and the Bauhaus.

This paper examines the ways Mies van der Rohe has dealt with the phenomenon of mechanization of all areas of human life, that ever since the mid-twenties was becoming an increasingly controversial political issue. Building on a number of philosophical essays on the role of modern large-scale technology, especially those by Friedrich Dessauer, Mies advanced a strategy that can be described as the aesthetic transcendence of industrially-produced technical items. By positioning his architecture in this manner, he warded off all accusations of purely economically-motivated rationalism. What Mies considered to be a “spiritual” approach to architecture has also defined the program of the Werkbund that he presided at that time and has laid the foundation for his postwar work.

The paper analyses the diminishment of the importance and significance of the medieval tower houses in Trogir caused by social, political, and economic changes as well as by the urban development and the changes in the city defence system. The findings suggest that the decline of the towers had already begun during the 13th century. Eventually it resulted in the preservation of only a few, who have, however, been subjected to subsequent remodelling.

This article describes the conditions and working processes of the Department of Military Cemeteries established at the Headquarters of the Imperial and Royal Army of Austria in Cracow, 1916-1918. Particular attention is paid to the designs prepared by the architect Dušan Jurkovič (1868-1947). The domain of commemorative architecture represented a novel task to the architect, formerly renowned for his emphatic style synthesizing vernacular architecture and Art Nouveau. Leaning on his close acquaintance with the traditions of Carpathian wooden architecture, he thoroughly studied the language of classical monumental architecture and developed a distinctive and poetic style for his sepulchral ensembles. This paper elucidates the architect’s development, his considerations, and the typology of his cemeteries and monuments, explaining also the significance of Jurkovič’s Galician experience for his later career.

Jerusalem sites representing the Passion of Christ shape the landscape of Catholic Central Europe. Several architectural evocations of Jerusalem commemorate contemporary agony, namely local victims of the World Wars. Placing soldiers within the narrative of Christ’s Way of the Cross serves a political-ideological agenda as well as a psychological need of local populations, giving meaning to the soldiers' deaths and placing them in a salvific context. In this paper two case studies, the Calvary of Klagenfurt and the Way of the Cross in Syców (Groß-Wartenberg), are presented to highlight this phenomenon.

This paper sheds light on the history and the design of military cemeteries for the Jewish victims of the First World War in Germany. Many Jews welcomed the beginning of the World War as a good opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism, proving that Jewish Germans were part of German society. During the Weimar Republic, anti-Semitism increased, and since 1933, it was part of the national socialist governance policy. Under these circumstances the commemoration of Jewish war victims did not only fulfill the basic desire for mourning, but was a political task emphasizing the Jewish contribution to the war. The erection of monuments and memorial tablets in Jewish cemeteries, synagogues, and other institutions had started as early as in 1916. After the end of the war, the design of such monuments became an important task for Jewish architects. In the Jewish cemeteries of many bigger cities, special areas for soldiers were established with standardized tombstones and memorials. Their design and iconography rely on both the general traditions of war remembrance emphasizing the "sacrifice" for the country and the tradition of Jewish religion, culture, and community.

This article addresses the commemorative practices in Flanders from World War I through World War II. In particular, the paper investigates the challenges faced by the primary belligerent countries after WWI: How to commemorate the dead soldiers that lay along trench lines from Belgium into France? Flemish and Belgian nationalist concerns affected the implementation of postwar national cemeteries. The article examines both the material embodiment of World War I – for instance the heldenhuldezerken – and the meanings attributed to commemoration and remembrance of the war dead.

In early January 1669, prince Cosimo de' Medici (1642-1723, Grand Duke of Tuscany 1670-1723) crossed the Portuguese border, with an entourage of more than forty companions. During his short visit to Portugal (from 9 January to 1 March), he established contacts with the high nobles of the Portuguese court and familiarized himself with the political and economic history of Portugal, recently liberated from the Spanish Crown. In the aftermath of this visit, he commissioned fifteen portraits of the generals of the War of Restoration (1640-1668). The present paper will focus on the commissioning of these works, analysing the mediators of this process and the historical and artistic context of the Portuguese 17th century.

The paper explores the history of the restoration of Bratislava Castle, the typical symbol of Slovakia's capital. It concentrates on the extensive reconstruction of the castle carried out in the late 1950s and 1960s under the former Czechoslovak communist regime. The story of Bratislava Castle is peculiar not so much because of the way in which the past was violated and history used for the transient goals of political leaders, but because of the way in which the castle was nationalised through a historicising reconstruction. The final utilitarian act of all the previous ideological manipulations of the castle was the erection of a new building within the castle walls. It was built after the Velvet Revolution in 1989 to serve the needs of the new independent Slovak parliament. Nationalistic illusionism had again joined forces with utilitarianism, this time to produce an architectural language known as commercial Baroque.

Rafael Barradas' Vibrationism is often recognised, together with Planism and Ultraism, as one of the first avant-garde movements to emerge in Spain. However, little attention has been paid to its intellectual roots and its Catalan and European context. This paper will examine the birth of Vibrationism as the Uruguayan painter's response to his contact both with the European avant-garde, in particular Futurism and Simultaneism, and especially with the Catalan context in which it appeared. The brief story of the movement shows us how some of the more consistent answers to the pictorial issues raised by the European avant-garde of the 1910s were to be found in what has traditionally been understood as its periphery.

By re-evaluating the anthropophagic understanding of the cannibal's alterity, this paper proposes Antropofagia as driven by a collaborative cosmopolitanism. It shows how Antropofagia antagonised the status quo of the Brazilian academies, broaching its commitment to national issues on the ethno-racial structure and the cultural identity of a young Republic. Antropofagia anticipates Frampton's ideas on Western post-modern stances, undermining the Eurocentric narrative on the succession of, and difference between, modernism and post-modernism. As a sophisticated Arrière-Garde that not only tackled universal civilisation from without, but also from within, Antropofagia emancipated Brazilian cultural production in relation to that of the centre for it problematized, within a post-colonial reality, cultural and political burdens as heavy as those inherent to the local-global relation.

This paper aims to contrast the particular uses of the modern categories of ingenuousness and primitivism both in José de Almada Negreiros and Ernesto de Sousa within their broader presence in twentieth century art. In so doing it seeks to contextualize multiple ways of understanding modernity and its legitimation through discursive practices. Ernesto de Sousa reinterpreted an idea of modernity that followed up on Almada Negreiros' modern experience. The concept of "voluntary ingenuousness" was developed by Almada after the 1920s, but it had its roots in the futurist proposals he embraced in the first decades of the twentieth century. Primitivism and ingenuousness were the fundamental terms for Almada Negreiros and Ernesto de Sousa through which they reinvented themselves as well as modernity and forged liberty within a dictatorship regime.