Search

In the middle of the 14th century, the chapel Maria am Gestade at the edge of the medieval city of Vienna was extended by a three-bay chancel with a double narthex and portal. Construction of the tower on a heptogonal groundplan was started at the same time. Besides stylistic and organizational connections with St. Stephan's Cathedral, the innovation of the choir can be seen in the reduction of the mural volume in favor of an enormous increase of the window size. The present paper combines the analysis of written sources with stylistic comparisons including the examination of the stonemarks. A final conclusion is made on the founder's intentions as well as on medieval use of the chancel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From their beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, the world's fairs sought to generate a synthesized body of knowledge about the world by gathering an encyclopedic and didactic collection of objects from a wide array of fields: technology, machinery, handicrafts, the visual arts, performance, and ethnography - knowledge made visible and experienced through artifacts sourced from all over the world. This expanded visual experience can also be understood as one that interprets the gaze as a catalyst for a multi-sensory perception and categorization of material culture, of both two- and three-dimensional objects of vision. Thus, these exhibitions not only synthesized 'the world', but they also synthesized arts, handicrafts, architecture, and technology into an imagined Gesamtkunstwerk. The objects and works of art - handcrafted or machine-made - displayed at the world's fairs were conceived as a mass spectacle as they were turned into the signifiers of a narrative - imagined and presented as coherent - of technological progress, colonial expansion, and artistic innovation. The colonized regions were to stand in contrast to this, with ethnographica and handicrafts presented as traditional, 'authentic'. Nevertheless, a complex network of "shared histories" and transnational interconnections became manifest at the world's fairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay locates a late 19th-century category of objects variously named as 'industrial' or 'decorative arts' within the specifically imperial institutional circuit of the World Exhibitions. Taking up a segment of the World Exhibitions of the 1880s, it traces a history which connects the three cities of Calcutta, London and Glasgow and creates a trail of travelling exhibits and museum collections of this most proliferating category of objects. It follows in particular the career of the Bengali exhibition commissioner and museum curator Trailokya Nath (T.N.) Mukharji and the anthology he compiled on the Art-Manufactures of India for the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888 to map a specific network of commissioning, collecting, cataloguing and documenting India's 'art-manufactures'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June 1854, the second Crystal Palace opened at Sydenham in South London. The media reported keenly on Sydenham's largescale archaeological reconstructions known as the Fine Arts Courts. These exhibits were designed by prominent design reformers as a means to improve public knowledge and public taste. However, the Courts attracted frequently hostile reviews from notable art critics who derided the displays as entertainment spectacles. This essay reevaluates the Courts by examining their deliberate showmanship. I trace the origins of the Sydenham display techniques in the archaeological representations made by the Sydenham Court designers for the London print, performance, and exhibition markets. Following the lead of historians of popular science, this essay emphasises the significance of popular formats and popularisation in Victorian visual culture and knowledge formation. It examines the reconstructions as visualising technologies designed to popularise, stage and communicate Victorian visual knowledge. I argue that both designers and showmen presented a virtual past through shared strategies of showmanship, the staging of expertise, and dramatic, poetic narrative. The Sydenham Fine Arts Courts were complex visual commodities, offering both instruction and diversion. Some Victorian critics found these aims mutually incompatible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This survey on the history of world's fairs since 1851 starts with the losers of this contest in national profiling and industrial competition: Germany and Austria, both former territories of the Holy Roman Empire and belated nation states. Both had been rather unlucky colonisers. Some of the leading colonial states, instead, organised more than three world's fairs in the time span from 1851 until today: France, Belgium, and Spain, all of them Catholic. Holland, the Calvinist colonial power, renounced on this kind of spectacles at all, Great Britain contented itself with two performances. World's fairs don't pay off. While the USA participated regularly since 1876, two spectacular world's fair events, Osaka 1970 and Shanghai 2010, mark the rise of the Asian powers. The history of world's fairs mirrors global politics, diplomacy and wars against the backdrop of late colonial history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the agency of (post)colonial professional self-positioning through globalised forms of representational work. It deepens our understanding of the constraints and duress from the colonial past involved in the making of (post)colonial world's fairs by analysing representational work related to the Moroccan contribution to Expo 2000. It shifts the perspective from the aesthetics of Expo contributions to the process of making aesthetic objects for such a world's fair. Stressing the specific limited and intensified temporality of representational work in the historical context of world's fairs allows for insights into the aspirations of those who are engaged in this mode of project work. Taking an ethnographic perspective onto the working context in the Moroccan Expo office, I will show how the daily practice allowed for a certain 'neverthelessness' when facing the duress of the colonial past, as described by Laura Ann Stoler (2016). Finally, the Moroccan contribution to Expo 2000 will be briefly discussed with respect to later and as yet unrealised pavilions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

The publishing tycoon Rudolf Mosse (1843-1920) donated over 700 objects to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin between 1892 and 1894, among them the Green Head from a royal statue of Amasis (ÄM 11864). Most had been acquired on the antiquities market by Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch (1827-1894) during his journey to Egypt in 1891-1892, which was financed by Mosse. Leaving aside postcolonial discourse regarding the appropriation of ancient Egyptian artifacts by European travelers and scholars, this case study highlights another important and long-neglected aspect of the early history of German Egyptology: patronage or private support provided by Jewish entrepreneurs. Only recently a wider public was reminded of the engagement of James Simon (1851-1932), the most significant sponsor of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society), whose gifts to the Egyptian Museum in Berlin included the painted bust of Queen Nefertiti. This article--which is based on the findings of a multi-author volume published jointly by the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam and the Egyptian Museum in Berlin--discusses the prehistory of the seizure and sale of Mosse's private art collection in 1934, including Egyptian antiquities, and the attempted damnatio memoriae of him. The goal is to open a discussion with a broader, more complex approach, employing strategies of provenance research, to document the efforts and achievements of Jewish patrons of the arts and thus avoid their reduction to victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collection of antiquities displayed at Gołuchów castle in Poland by Izabela Działyńska was one of the largest private collections in Europe of ancient works of art from the Middle East, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Ancient pottery, stelae from Cyprus, fragments of Roman marble sculpture, and a large collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts were exhibited in the Greek Vases Hall, the Antiquities Hall, and the Egyptian Hall. The invasion of Poland by Nazi troops on 1 September 1939 and the attack of Soviet troops on 17 September started a two-front war in Poland. On 28 September 1939, the German-Soviet Frontier and Friendship Treaty was signed, marking the border between the two aggressors on Polish lands along the line of the rivers San-Bug-Narew-Pisa. This division of Poland continued until the German invasion of the USSR in June 1941. As a result of these wartime events, the collection of Izabela Działyńska was dispersed. Many of the objects are now in various museums in Poland, but some, including ancient artefacts and other valuable works of art, are considered lost. It cannot be ruled out that some were destroyed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I examine the methodology and resources used to trace the provenance of three ancient Greek and Roman sculptures in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). They belonged to Karol Lanckoroński (1848-1933) of Vienna, were looted during the Nazi era, and were returned to the Lanckoroński family following World War II. In discussing these sculptures, I consider the relative challenges of researching ancient works of art compared to Modern and Early Modern European paintings and sculptures, drawing on other case studies of Nazi-era looting from the collection of the MFA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with some ancient objects from the collection of leading National Socialist Hermann Göring that are on loan to the Berlin Antikensammlung from the Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Originally, they were stored or displayed at Carinhall, Göring's estate ca. 60 km from Berlin, where he kept his precious works of art. The antiquities were not the most important part of his collection. However, some interesting questions arise about the provenance of the objects and the reasons why he displayed certain archaeological objects in Carinhall. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two Roman objects in the J. Paul Getty Museum, a bronze statuette of the moon goddess Luna and a cornelian gem were among the handful of classical antiquities purchased for Adolf Hitler's unrealized "Führermuseum" in Linz. This study presents new provenance research that tracks their itineraries from European private collections to the gallery of Kurt Walter Bachstitz, a prominent Jewish art dealer active in The Hague between the 1920s and the 1940s. His precarious personal and business relationships with German art agents expose how ordinary commerce was entangled with coerced sales in the Nazioccupied Netherlands. Informed by debates over the status of works that had changed hands on wartime art markets, in 2015 the Dutch Restitution Committee recommended that the gem be returned to Bachstitz's heirs but rejected their claim for the statuette. Having passed through various collections following their restitution after World War II, the two objects were reunited at the Getty in 2017. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classical antiquity was appropriated by the Nazis and held up as the ideal in the rhetoric, propaganda, art, and architecture of National Socialism. In this article the rhetoric and preference for the classical aesthetic are examined against the practice of collecting antiquities among the Nazi elite, especially by Hitler and Göring. It would seem evident that Greek and Roman antiquities would have been much desired by Hitler and the upper echelons of the Nazi party and would have been sought after in the quest for great works of art for museums in the Reich, especially for the "Führermuseum" in Linz. Yet, there is only limited evidence to show that this was, in fact, the case. Insights and explanations for this discrepancy are gleaned from synthesizing the evidence for collecting classical antiquities during the Nazi era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction presents an overview of the research questions and the challenges involved in studying the fate of Middle Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities during the Nazi era. Since the antiquities markets and the methods of trade, disappearance, and confiscation of ancient archaeological objects varied a great deal across Europe and the Middle East during the Nazi period, this article examines the evidence in individual countries, both in source countries where the archaeological objects originated and in market countries where antiquities were collected, traded, or confiscated--including the United States. Finally, some conclusions gleaned from this broader study are presented, including from the articles in this special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of RIHA Journal is the property of RIHA - International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

With his series of pilot portraits during the First World War, the Viennese painter Karl Sterrer made a significant contribution to the depiction of a modern heroic figure. It has not yet been analysed in the context of the modern soldier and his masculinity, which came under strain in the brutal trench warfare. At the mercy of an abstract war machine, the common soldiers could hardly find heroic moments to impress. Only a few new types of troops, such as the aviators, succeeded in doing so, which gave them a great deal of public recognition and made them part of modern visual culture. Ultimately, they were seen as New Man, above the horrors of modern warfare. At the same time, they were also role models for a noble habitus that met the phenomena of modernity calmly. This aspiration was evident in their elegant countenance, their extraordinary physiognomy. Unlike previous attempts in art history, however, this article provides a look at the conservative take on the subject - by a traditional, academic artist. This focus underlines the extent to which old and new soldierly values overlapped in modernity and became actualised by different artists regardless of their political orientation. The same applies to the stylistic realisation, which intertwines traditional elements with those of new movements such as New Objectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides information about the early provenance of the Paolo Veronese painting entitled Saint Catherine of Alexandria in Prison in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The painting can most likely be traced back to sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Augsburg. Descriptions that match the Veronese painting are found in the inventories of works of art of two very wealthy Augsburg merchants: one is in the post mortem inventory of Octavian Secundus Fugger (ca. 1600/1601), the other in a list of works of art from the collection of Hans Steininger (ca. 1641/42). Octavian Secundus Fugger only occasionally bought paintings from Venice, never seeking to amass a systematic collection of art. The deeply religious Catholic merchant, who was a strong supporter of the Jesuits, hung his picture of Saint Catherine, along with other religious paintings, in the antechapel of his house, and it remained at this location until the early 17th century. The painting's later owner, however, the Lutheran textile merchant Hans Steininger, was a highly educated art collector who created one of the most illustrious collections in Augsburg. In his Kunstkammer, Veronese's painting was displayed in the company of mythological female figures, nymphs, and Venus, accompanied by a whole series of paintings by renowned artists such as Hans von Aachen, Christoph Amberger, Paris Bordone, Hans Burgkmair, Joseph Heintz the Elder and Titian. Steininger's collection was dispersed after his death, but many of the paintings he owned can still be identified. Veronese's Saint Catherine of Alexandria may be one of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1920s and '30s the fourteenth-century Italian artist Paolo Uccello was appropriated as a precursor of Surrealism in the French surrealist discourse. Pivotal were two texts, a mini-play and an essay, that the playwright Antonin Artaud, then in his surrealist phase, dedicated to Uccello between 1924 and 1926. This article analyses both texts and shows the construction, by Artaud, of Uccello as his potential double, and especially as someone dedicated to mind over matter, a key facet of Uccello's reception as a fellow traveler of Surrealism. It identifies an artwork ascribed to Uccello, discussed by Artaud and thought imaginary, as a panel currently in the Louvre. Finally, it shows that an imagined biography of the artist by the symbolist writer Marcel Schwob forms the key hypotext for Artaud and other surrealists, with strong echoes of Vasari's vita of Uccello, which was in turn Schwob's hypotext. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay offers a Latourian account of the wood sculptor Nicolas Pineau's design process via a reading of Jean-François Bastide's novella La petite maison. It argues that the conventional form assumed by his drawings or 'inscriptions' - the indications of scale, the delineation of options, the signatures and marginal notes - can be read as traces of seduction that helped 'translate' potential patrons to a taste for Rococo. The essay further suggests that the activation of the taste at the point of commission was kept alive in the designs executed by the bi-modal asymmetry that is characteristic of the goût pittoresque because its exercise was considered a mark of refinement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The place where design and art intersect is drawing with its elastic capability of functioning as the whole, the preparatory and the supplementary work. Drawing doesn't only occur at the level of individual practice but can be part of wider "graphic events" where concerted acts of recording, performing, inventing and disseminating link diverse visual practices across time. Two such discursive events are discussed as paradigms: the accidental finding of the Villa Aurea in the 1480s in Rome and Alois Senefelder's lithographic publication of the illustrated Book of Hours of Emperor Maximilian I in 1808. Both were stylistically influential through the popularising of 'grotesque' configurations that unify heterogeneity through linearity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 essay offers a Latourian account of the wood sculptor Nicolas Pineau's designprocess via a reading of Jean-François Bastide's novella La petite maison. It argues that the conventional form assumed by his drawings or 'inscriptions' - the indications of scale, the delineation of options, the signatures and marginal notes - can be read as traces of seduction that helped 'translate' potential patrons to a taste for Rococo. The essay further suggests that the activation of the taste at the point of commission was kept alivein the designs executed by the bi-modal asymmetry that is characteristic of the goûtpittoresque because its exercise was considered a mark of refinement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The place where design and art intersect is drawing with its elastic capability off unctioning as the whole, the preparatory and the supplementary work. Drawing doesn't only occur at the level of individual practice but can be part of wider "graphic events "where concerted acts of recording, performing, inventing and disseminating link diverse visual practices across time. Two such discursive events are discussed as paradigms: the accidental finding of the Villa Aurea in the 1480s in Rome and Alois Senefelder's lithographic publication of the illustrated Book of Hours of Emperor Maximilian I in 1808. Both were stylistically influential through the popularising of 'grotesque' configurations that unify heterogeneity through linearity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The painter and etcher Theodoor van Thulden (1606-1669) was documented as a master in Antwerp from 1626, though not long thereafter, at the beginning of the 1630s, he would move to France. The aim of this article is to reconstruct why he chose to return to Antwerp in 1634 by analyzing three possible factors in his relocation: family obligations, a position as churchwarden at the church of St. Jacob, and the Joyous Entry of the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Spain into Antwerp on 17 April 1635. The investigation includes a reconsideration of the sources that have generally been used to reconstruct his biography, as well as a study of previously unknown archival material. From all these sources it can be deduced that van Thulden was probably in direct contact with Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) at the beginning of his career, and that it was Rubens who encouraged him to return to Antwerp. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of RIHA Journal is the property of RIHA - International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study presents a hitherto unpublished painting of The Man of Sorrows, located in Břevnov monastery in Prague, by the Rudolfine court painter Hans von Aachen. The aim is to investigate not only the provenance of the work and the presumable commissioner, Abbot Wolfgang Selender of Prošovice, but also the painting's place in Von Aachen's oeuvre, possible sources of inspiration for its iconography as well as formal design in Italy and Prague. Among other findings, a technological survey conducted during its restoration revealed a man's face in the lower layers of paint, possibly a portrayal of the Emperor Rudolf II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unpublished legacy of Valentin von Saebisch (1577-1657), arguably Silesia's most eminent architect in the former half of the seventeenth century, includes a set of four drawings representing a Lutheran church design. This post-and-beam design stands out from other examples of this kind with its richness and variety. This important testimony to church architecture, perished in the ravages of the Thirty Years' War, has yet to be fully investigated by researchers. The design by Saebisch is a perfect testimony to the reception of Prague architecture created under the reign of Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) and the technical standards used by the architects of that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to give for the first time an overview of the form and function of women artists' signatures in early modern Europe, with a particular focus on Italy. Through an analysis of the frequency with which women artists signed their works as well as the iconic and textual form of the inscriptions, it establishes a number of peculiarities that distinguish female from male signing practice. It attempts then to explain these differences by the specific sociocultural conditions under which artistic activity by women was possible and accepted. The central thesis is that the frequency and particular textual form of women's signatures were prompted by the special interest of patrons and collectors in works created by female artists. Rather than an expression of their authors' self-assurance as artists in a field dominated by men, as earlier scholarship tended to assume, the characteristics of female signing practice were often an index of their limited autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artistically gifted courtier Francisco de Holanda (1517/1518-1584) left several manuscripts, containing both texts and drawings, in a quantity and of a consistency rarely seen in sixteenth-century Portugal. Holanda's contributions to architectural knowledge are well known among scholars, yet their relevance has not been fully acknowledged. Some obstacles need to be overcome: a one-sided disciplinary approach, a disproportionate focus on the influence of treatises, and the seductive pull of an eccentric personality. Beyond the debate on his contribution to artistic practice or even to the idea of classical antiquity, his achievements had a bearing on Portuguese culture in a wider and more complex sense than has previously been discussed. Educated in royal circles, at a time when imperial overseas ambitions depended strongly on military expertise, Holanda lent his skills as a painter to the task of espionage through his drawings of foreign fortifications, while making a significant contribution to the development of architectural language and thus to the emergence of the architect's profile. As such, a reassessment of the legacy of this artistically talented courtier is long overdue. Rereading his works and putting all the pieces together gives us a better insight into the bonds between art theory and architecture, fortification and urban design, from the position of a cultured non-specialist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

Slovenian sculptor Josip Urbanija (1877-1943) received his initial training in workshops in Ljubljana, Selce pri Škofji Loki and Klagenfurt, then he studied with Hans Bitterlich at the Academy of Fine Arts (Akademie der bildenden Künste) in Vienna shortly before the First World War. He spent the war years in Bosnia, where he completed two monuments. After the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, he settled permanently in Vienna. This is partly the reason why his life and work have hardly been researched and are almost unknown. The aim of the present study is to provide insight into the origin of two monumental sculptural groups initially named Quelle (Water Spring) and Tunnelbrecher (Tunnel Breaker). In addition, it also discusses later names of the two plaster artworks and examines what they reveal about the intended functions of the sculptures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the course of the 19th century, Czech society underwent an intensive process of national revival and emancipation from Vienna. This, of course, was also projected onto the field of visual arts: For a long time, under the influence of Czech nationalists, surveys of developments in the arts field did not include German-speaking artists from the Czech lands, such as the brothers Max and Franz Metzner or Hugo Lederer. Contacts between both individuals and institutions and Vienna thus became extremely complicated, and after 1900 they were generally considered undesirable by Czech nationalists. In 1902, the Mánes Fine Arts Association, which can take much of the credit for promoting modern art in the Czech milieu at that time, organized an exhibition in Prague of the works of Auguste Rodin, whose artistic style fundamentally influenced Czech sculpture in the first decade of the 20th century and disrupted the monopoly enjoyed until then by Josef Václav Myslbek. In contrast to Myslbek's conventional equestrian monument to St Wenceslas, two other national monuments in Prague, the statues of Jan Hus (by Ladislav Šaloun) and of František Palacký (by Stanislav Sucharda) reflect the fascination with Rodinesque pathos at that time. The politically motivated suppression of contacts between the Czech milieu and Vienna and German-speaking countries on the one hand, and the support for intensive communication with Paris on the other, contributed to the progressive tendencies in Czech art before the First World War and to its exceptional plurality of styles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Long 19th Century saw the development of modern arts policy in many European countries and also in the Habsburg monarchy. Although the creation of national codes was not yet completed at that time, the measures adopted for the promotion of the arts did play an important role in the cultural development of Central Europe at the turn of the century. In fact, the efforts of various generations of politicians and administrators aiming at creating some sort of cultural identification patterns, which were oriented to the common State, left their mark in the collective memory. Most notably, a remarkable effort was made to give broader parts of the population access to the arts. Hence, the promotion of the arts soon became one of the tasks of the modern "cultural State", whose effects were going to last beyond the end of the Monarchy. The basis for these common communication spaces was not to be found in a Habsburg-Austrian "Leitkultur" (core culture) focused on Vienna, but in the acceptance of the cultural diversity existing in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the genealogy of Expressionism in Uruguay as an artistic form that, within the framework of a figurative art trend of social and popular orientation, questioned the hegemonic guidelines regarding the cultural identity under construction in the first half of the twentieth century. Taking as an example the representation of the rural landscape and the gaucho, the article describes the incorporation of Expressionist principles and values to reveal both the persistence of the primitive in the project of the modern nation and the consequences of the incipient industrialization on the human experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders the relationship between Anders Zorn’s (1860–1920) Omnibus paintings. Two large-scale versions exist for the Omnibus motif (Omnibus I and Omnibus II), both of which have historically been viewed as official works that were exhibited by Zorn during the years 1892–1893. Drawing upon recent technical analyses of the artist’s oil paintings, together with relevant archival sources, a discussion is put forward with the aim of reconfiguring the earlier Omnibus I (1891) version as an initial sketch (esquisse) to the later Omnibus II (1892). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1930s in Polish art criticism were marked by crisis and exhaustion of previously respected artistic values. Critics of that time were surprisingly unanimous in their belief that the fault rested with the artists – particularly those whose pursuit of increasingly innovative artistic means led them to break ties with the society, enclose art within the ivory tower of avant-garde '-isms', those hermetic laboratories of theoretical speculation. In the eyes of the majority of then-active journalists, it was modernism that became the synonym of the crisis that afflicted contemporary culture – a crisis whose basic symptoms included the lack of spirituality, power of expression, or interest in the human being. Those statements identifying the general 'malaise' of the era came with attempts to pinpoint the reasons for this state of affairs as well as find solutions to overcome the obvious impasse of Polish (or wider, European) culture, and visual arts with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.