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What did early modern European audiences make of the iridescent surfaces of colonial Mexican featherwork? While much previous scholarship relates their appeal to brightness, they also exhibit chromatic instability activated by alterations in the angle of illumination or view. This plurality of viewing experiences mirrored those provided by a range of other popular forms of contingent media such as anamorphic and ambiguous images. In ways both similar and distinct, featherwork exposed conventions of pictorial representation and the limitations of the sense of sight itself, embodying an epistemological dilemma that was especially important to the intellectual culture of seventeenth-century Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spinoza's philosophy of immanence represents a turning point that radically changed our conception of human agency and its relation to infinity. Hans Blumenberg rightly called the principle of immanence "a general hypothesis of the epoch", a principle that applies to philosophy no less than to the sciences and arts in the seventeenth century. This article looks at Dutch paintings by drawing parallels between Spinoza's philosophy and Vermeer's work. Spinoza and Vermeer both deny a dualistic conception of the world and a hierarchical structure between inner and outer spheres. With the example of Vermeer's painting the Milkmaid, this article shows how an analysis of light and colour, time and space, reveal a vision of immanent infinity, with the human agent at its centre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A mysterious force capable of binding things as well as people together and a guiding moral principle, the concept of "sympathy" in the late eighteenth century blurred the boundaries between superstition and Enlightenment rationality. What light might this "sympathy" shed on James Cook's last voyage? What might it say about the induction of artifacts brought back from that voyage into European collections and, correspondingly, the contemporaneous introduction of "European" objects into Pacific cosmologies? Focusing on the materiality of these objects, specifically, the feather, allows us to explore the ways in which "sympathy" both unites and divides these heterogeneous archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1913 and 1914, the connoisseur and Baroque expert Roberto Longhi wrote two texts on the Futurists. Longhi used Heinrich Wölfflin's formalist categories to explain Futurism's formal innovation as heir to the Baroque and as the source of a specifically Italian aesthetics. Longhi analyzed the Baroque and Futurism through the tropes of "Latinity" versus "Germanity." Although he avoided chauvinistic proclamations and racial terminology, his work engaged in conversations about national identity, the place of Italian art in the history of the avant-garde, and the geopolitical aspirations of Italy on the eve of World War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The St. Louis Art Museum’s statue ofReclining Panproved inspirational to many artists of the seventeenth century, none more so than Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione. The artist reproduced the statue in many of his works, making it a symbol of hisinvenzione. Previously, the few reproductions known of the statue have given the impression that Baroque audiences considered it antiquwct 2 e, and of less interest than other antiquities. This article corrects that assumption by examining Castiglione’s, as well as Peter Paul Rubens’, Joachim von Sandrart’s, Nicolas Poussin’s, and Salvator Rosa’s uses of the statue. The artists used thePanas both figural exemplar and symbol for pastoral themes. These artistic responses are here set alongside new information concerning thePan’s seventeenth-century provenance, display, and attribution to Bernini, to reveal theReclining Panas a primary catalyst for the period’s extensive Arcadian and bacchanalian imagery while simultaneously representing lessons of the classical style. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]