Search

This thesis examines the ways in which the conception of colour in ancient Greek society differed from our modern understanding, and how a deeper investigation of the theoretical structure of ancient cognition of colour can affect and enhance our interaction with the art and literature of ancient Greece. Previous scholarship rarely focuses on polychromy as its primary study, though discrepancies and subtleties in the handling of colour terminology in literature, or the complex nature of colour used on surviving examples of material culture have been noted. This study places the intrinsic relationship ancient Greek society had with colour at its forefront, and constructs a framework through which we might understand the different connections and associations that they built. In scope, within the bounds of surviving material, this thesis aims to focus on evidence from both the art and text of the Archaic and Classical periods, and upon the societies of mainland Greece, predominantly that of Athens. Source material has been used beyond these delineations as necessary to provide both a richer understanding of the main focus and relevant comparanda. Colour conception is explored in three ways. The first investigates the relationship between colours and the physical commodity used to produce them. This detaches our modern understanding of colour as contiguous and infinitely varied, and investigates colours that are tethered to their source material. In contrast, the second section explores terms which are not attached to any colourant, nor, in fact, any hue. This offers a theoretical explanation for why this structure of designating colours chromatically, intrinsic to modern conception, was not compulsory, necessary, nor often used in the Greek lexicon. Finally, the third approach takes this further, to dig into the fundamental conception of how colours and the world around them were constructed, and the ways in which that understanding affected the ancient Greek approach to the theory of colour. At its conclusion, this thesis argues that not just an appreciation of the existence of colour, but an understanding of the structure of the cognition of ancient polychromy can enhance our understanding of this visual language, a means of communication through a complex web of associations and connotations built up by shared cultural memory and graphic tradition.

This thesis examines the life and artistic career of Anne Greville (1829-1903), nee Charteris, 4th Countess of Warwick. A thorough examination of the countess's archival papers encourages us to broaden the profile of the female aesthete often presented by scholars. Anne's involvement with many of the key elements of the Aesthetic Movement extends and complicates our understanding of the appeal of Aestheticism across the highest levels of society. Furthermore, her introduction of Aestheticism into Warwick Castle, her ancient home, suggests a rethinking of the geography of the movement and its place within the English Stately Home. The research presented draws from the largely unexplored and under-appreciated Warwick Castle Archive held by the Warwickshire County Record Office. It demonstrates how the archive can be used to probe our assumptions of the type of women that were attracted to new developments in art and design during the second half of the nineteenth century. Such rare surviving documents also increases our understanding of how Aestheticism permeated into the highest levels of society and within significant ancient buildings. By examining the distinctively artistic and aesthetic pursuits of the countess, this thesis will explore the role of female aristocratic aesthetes. The first chapter places Anne within the vast context of Warwick Castle, an important historic building and home to a considerable collection of art, in which women played a significant role throughout the centuries. The second chapter investigates Anne's early experiments with interior design throughout the 1850s and 60s, and how she balanced questions of her own interests alongside taste and fashion. The third chapter probes the significance of Anne's work after the 1871 fire at Warwick Castle, with particular attention to her involvement in redesigning the castle's Great Hall and new Library. The fourth chapter explores Anne's interest in the Aesthetic Movement in relation to interiors, focusing particularly on the roles played by printed materials, photography, family and likeminded aristocratic aesthetes. The fifth chapter examines the countess's aesthetic philanthropy, showing that aristocratic women could act as provincial agents of Aestheticism within pre-existing aristocratic models and traditional institutions such as the charitable bazaar. The sixth chapter focuses on Anne's abilities as a creator of art, highlighting the embeddedness of such women within the Victorian Art World alongside its leading artists and figures. This thesis encourages a revaluation of the role aristocratic women played in the Victorian Art World, broadening and complicating our understanding of the appeal of the Aesthetic Movement in late nineteenth-century Britain.

This thesis examines the evolution of connoisseurship before and after the exhibition 'Art Treasures of the United Kingdom' (Manchester, 5 May-17 October 1857). This work reassesses how the Manchester exhibition affected both technical and critical skills, as well as the professional opportunities, of the Victorian experts of Old Master painting, print and drawing. Scholarship has not shed full light on the complex and interconnected network of critical, technical, religious, and political interactions at the base of the 1857 show. Some relevant issues, indeed, are still unexplored. For instance, scholars have generally ignored Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1819-1897)'s involvement in the 1857 exhibition, as well as the connoisseurial relevance and independence of the Manchester exhibition's 'Art Secretary', Sir George Scharf (1820-1895). This thesis, however, demonstrates that Cavalcaselle operated at Manchester as Scharf's private connoisseurial adviser. Furthermore, this work sheds light on the professional and connoisseurial competition that occurred, after the Manchester exhibition, between Gustav Friedrich Waagen (1794-1868) and Cavalcaselle. This thesis, finally, sheds light on the extent and depth of Joseph Archer Crowe (1825-1896)'s connoisseurship, nor on his substantial importance for the History of Art's development. The argument of this thesis, moreover, is that the absence of some Old Masters that were not displayed at Manchester show has affected, as much as the pictures that Scharf selected for the 1857 show, the connoisseurial and art-historical approach to some specific Old Masters, in particular regards the iconographic, compositional and technical interactions between the Italian and Northern European schools of the late Quattrocento. This work is based on archival research, conducted in the Marciana National Library (Venice), as well as in the National Art Library (Victoria and Albert Museum) and the Heinz Archive (National Portrait Gallery) in London, and in the John Murray Archives (Scottish National Archives) in Edinburgh.

This thesis analyses what performance is and what it does in the court, drawing from theatrical performance. In it, I argue that performance plays a constitutive role in the court, that law and performance are intimately entwined and that law is reliant on performance for its production. In so doing, I consider whether theatre and performance studies research and practice can provide new insights into court proceedings. This is significant because whilst legal scholars draw on analogical comparisons with theatre, there is little sustained engagement with theatre and performance research and practice to inform understanding of legal performance. My original contribution to knowledge is to draw from research and practice in theatre and performance to provide new insights into legal performance in court. Central to my discussion of legal performance in court is the role of the audience, which becomes a guiding direction of the thesis and points to my interest in how the legal performance is perceived by the public gallery. My methodology combines case studies, participant observation and some performance-led research, grounded in theoretical analysis of the intersection of law and performance. Application of performance studies to the law entails a paradigmatic shift in legal research that attends to the practice and performance of law in court. Steering away from the existing work on advocacy as performance, the thesis attends to the audience's experience of the legal performance in terms of space, sound, words, rhythms and digital dimensions. The chapters are structured as something of an experiential journey through court. I first concentrate on the experience of arrival at court and journey through the liminal spaces of the courthouse. From there, I attune to the sounds and silence of the courtroom. From silence, I turn to the words in court. Still looking at the words, I then explore how these words play out in legal performance in a rhythmic manner. The final chapter examines the increasing use of video-link as a means of attending court and the digital futures of legal performance.

As there is limited research conducted on the changing cultural policy modes and the impact they have had on the emerging contemporary visual arts fields in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the goal of this thesis is to examine the emergence, development, and maturation of contemporary visual arts in Latvia as a distinct organisational and institutional field between the early 1990s and the 2010s. In doing so, this study examines the role that social and political environments and infrastructures played in shaping the institutional history of the field. The research particularly focuses on the growing influence of the non-governmental sector and the changing behaviour of state actors in the formation of cultural policy trends in Latvia in the aftermath of the rapid disintegration of the Soviet Union and the effects they had on the structuration dynamics of the field. In the context of post-Soviet cultural transition of the 1990s, the term "emergence" represents a qualitative break from the relationships the actors of the new field shared with the past. In order to develop the theoretical framework for the analysis of structuration dynamics, whereby the contemporary visual arts field in Latvia came to be organised and institutionally defined throughout the 1990s and 2010s, this thesis draws on new institutionalism in organizational analysis, conceptualising that "organizations are deeply embedded in social and political environments and that organizational practices and structures are often either reflections of or responses to rules, beliefs, and conventions built into the wider environment" (Powell and Colyvas 2008, 975). The empirical analysis of this thesis is based on the sequential mixed methods research design, employing the social network analysis (SNA) as an integral research strategy during the quantitative data collection phase. In this study, the SNA is critical in expanding the understanding of the examined field and enabling the construction of a dense relational structure of the participating actors beyond the scale of the qualitative interviews, which define the first phase of the research design. Through the lens of the SNA, the field is expressed as patterns or regularities in relationships among interacting units, allowing investigating the constraining and enabling dimensions of these patterned relationships between the actors within the field. Based on SNA, in conjunction with the primary source analysis and the qualitative interviews, the empirical analysis of this thesis establishes that the development trajectory of Latvian contemporary visual arts field is divided into three distinctive historical phases, denoting innovation, local validation, and diffusion. During the innovation phase, representing the post-Soviet transition and lasting from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, the new structures and institutions in contemporary visual arts developed outside the direct influence of the Ministry of Culture, Artists' Union, and Academy of Art. Lacking systemic support and recognition from the "official" actors of the dominant state field of cultural production, the new organizations displayed a trend of autonomous development under the auspices of non-state actors. The positional configuration of the field structure, involving cultural, economic, political, social, and symbolic capitals, indicates that the structuration process, defining institutional development of the field, in its initial - innovation - phase did not occur across all levels, but was very local and professionally defined within a relatively narrow circle of artistic community. The locality where the emerging problem was generated, cognised, classified, and theorised did not represent a national level (top-down) but was peripheral and narrowly professional, denoting a bottom-up approach in institution building and the persistence of a polarised organisational reality. The local validation phase, representing the first decade of the 2000s, indicated a gradual decrease in institutional polarisation between the state and non-state actors and strongly exhibited changing behaviour of the state actors towards the field. During this phase, the emerging field, for the first time, appeared as a political category within the strategic state cultural policy planning documents and the government started playing an increasingly more important role in the constitution of the field. Latvia's accession to the European Union is analysed as the principal external factor, strongly influencing the endogenous changes within the field at the time. During the local validation phase, the field grew to be recognised as national level responsibility that was predominantly cognised, classified, and theorised in political circles, signalling the decrease in dissonance between the policy rhetoric and application, as well as between the localities where the cognition and theorisation processes took place. The diffusion phase coincided with the aftermath of the global economic crisis, which struck the country particularly hard in 2009, and this stage was characterized by increased public-private partnerships (PPP) and by emergence of strong local civil initiatives furthering the institutionalisation project of Latvian contemporary visual arts. During this final phase, the field development and the institutional framework that it represented gradually became legitimised in a wider social environment, comprising larger group of influential and active civic actors who were taking over the institutionalisation project and ensuring institutional reproduction of the field.

This thesis presents a multilayered study of illustrated calendars created between the late fifteenth and the sixteenth century in Northern Italy, or presenting a Northern Italian iconography. They typically depict occupations and zodiac signs characteristic to each month of the year, and were produced in a variety of media, ranging from illuminated manuscripts and printed calendars, to paintings, frescoes and tapestries. The development of the imagery of the months is explored through three chapters arranged chronologically. Chapter 1 examines the theme of the months in the context of a luxurious manuscript book of hours; namely the Offiziolo of Charles VIII, commissioned by Ludovico il Moro from Pietro Birago between 1493 and 1494. It is proposed that the calendar of the Offiziolo echoes the interest in agriculture and astrology typical of the fifteenth-century Milanese court. It is argued that this calendar displays a political language in line with the function of the Offiziolo as a diplomatic gift. The close affinity with a printed calendar is posited for the first time. Chapter 2 investigates the iconographic impact of the vignettes of the months included in the Horae ad usum Romanum published by Bonino Bonini in Lyon, between 1499 and 1501. It has been demonstrated that Bonini's calendar greatly contributed to the standardisation of the iconography of the months in Northern Italy until around the years of the Council of Trent. The aim of this chapter is to explore both the sources and the influence of Bonini's calendar, in order to map the dissemination of motifs across time, borders and different media of production. Chapter 3 explores the changes occurred in the iconography of the months at the end of the sixteenth century, through a comparative study between the series painted on canvas by Leandro Bassano and the illustration of liturgical calendars included in the Missalia Romana, published in Venice between 1477 and 1588. It is proposed that the new iconographic pattern responded to the religious and cultural circumstances featuring the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The power of illustrated calendars to convey significant aspects of the political, cultural, economic and social context in which they were created, renders them a valuable visual document of their time, showing the importance of their study also beyond the boundaries of art history.

Forms of material cultural repression are at the forefront of modern-day cultural debates and discourse. Over the course of the past twenty years, our theoretical understanding of forms of collective memory has been thoroughly expanded. Simultaneously, the study of damnatio memoriae, the destructive acts against the portraits and inscriptions of a condemned individual in the Roman period, has benefited from the publication of the foundational works of Varner and Flower. However, these studies have thus far focussed on the immediate aftermath of the destructive acts, and the reception of the already-destroyed material. In addition, the question of how damnatio affects the Roman collective memory of the condemned remains unanswered. This thesis aims to answer this question, by examining closely two understudied aspects of the phenomenon - the immediate 'spectacle' of destruction, and its long-term consequences on a condemned individual's surviving 'material legacy'. Focussing on the case study of the city of Rome before the 'crisis of the third century', the interactions with the material legacies of condemned emperors will be examined. Each method of interaction will be analysed separately, considering all types of material from a handful of emperors in each case, to establish the way it influenced how Roman culture remembered 'tyrants'. The immediate 'spectacle' of damnatio will be discussed first, revealing how the destruction acted both to remove the positive identity of the condemned, as well as to begin the creation of a new negative identity to replace it. The long-term consequences will then be examined. Analysis of the acts of successor emperors to deliberately contrast themselves with condemned predecessors reveals how this contrast further engrained the negative identity into the cultural memory of the city. The appropriation of their buildings, furthermore, demonstrates how successors reigning long after the death of a condemned emperor continue to rejuvenate this process, contributing further to the recreation of the condemned's identity. I will argue that close scrutiny of all the consequences of damnatio memoriae reveals a process that transforms the positive identity of a condemned emperor into a negative exemplum of tyranny, embodying the negative qualities that the destruction and denigration of his material legacy condemn him for.

The arts, art-making and creativity are popularly regarded as having value and importance to society and education. Yet, even at their politically most valued they have occupied a marginalised space in English schooling. This thesis is not an argument for more arts as a discipline in the school curriculum, but for art-making as a practice and site for a broader conception of education. It argues that experiencing the practice and culture of art-making provides a fertile and dynamic site for enabling learning, which can integrate different disciplines and encouraged a positive self-view in learners. The thesis draws upon a particular case study, The Imagineerium project, in which children were commissioned alongside professional artists and engineers to imagine, design and make models for a kinetic performance vehicle as part of a public event their city centre. The thesis adopts a multiple, mixed-method approach to the case study, combining traditional methods of questionnaire and interview with ethnographic field notes and participatory methods engaging all participants. Here the compound term 'art-making' refers to the practice of making work in either one or a combination of art forms. It connotes the dynamic and developmental nature of growth, creation, formation but also of construction which interweave with ideas of producing an output and effecting an outcome, here in symbolic forms. The thesis draws on: Dewey's (1934) proposal of making in the arts as central to a conception of education as a democratic, creative and self-motivated process; Ingold's (2013; 2017) emphasis on the sensed, embodied ways of knowing such experiences promote; and Lave and Wenger's (1991) account of communities of practice. I argue for The Imagineerium project, as an emergent 'community of practice' where children experience, in an apprentice-like way, being 'legitimate peripheral participants' and are engaged in art-making as members of a community of practising imagineers (artists, designers and engineers), who collaborate in making. The thesis shows the potential educational benefit of 'art-making as a site' of learning, of more closely reflecting real communities of art-making practice and of educating children collaboratively with members of such communities. Such benefits include a changed power dynamic, increasing children's sense of agency and capability as well as proposing a potentially transdisciplinary curriculum model. The thesis further argues that educators need to promote and engage in educational experiences which foreground embodied learning, which is site-specific, and hence the spatial dynamic of such education.

This thesis examines the construction of Chineseness in Britain between 1850 and 1920. It focuses on Chinese people in Britain, the image of China held by the British, and the British space most associated with Chinese presence, Chinatown in Limehouse. While much of the scholarship on Chinese in Britain often takes up eighteenth-century cultural contact and exchange, this dissertation focuses on the proliferation of exchange in the nineteenth century. Although the image of eighteenth-century China was largely associated with a feminine aesthetic perspective, it was in the nineteenth century that Britain increased its intensity of interaction with China, including trade, immigration and cultural exchange transforming British conceptions of Chinese and Chinoiserie. In particular, this thesis considers Limehouse Chinatown and the London Chinese opium dens as sites that shaped hybrid cultures, heterotopian spaces and sites for flâneurs. Drawing on visual and material culture, the thesis offers a new understanding of Chinoiserie and its impact on British views of Chineseness in the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century. It suggests that in addition to assessing the construction of Chineseness in Britain, an analysis of the image of Chinese people and Chinoiserie furthers our understanding of how and why fantasy and fear developed toward China and the Chinese in the nineteenth century. It calls for a re-evaluation of our understanding of nineteenth-century Sino-British relations, arguing that the impact of Chineseness and Chinoiserie on British perspectives should not be overlooked.

This thesis comprises a re-evaluation of the apotropaic Campanian Phallus: a highly familiar and desultorily implemented feature of our discipline’s conceptual toolkit, as well as an enduringly conspicuous element of popular engagement with the ancient world. The nature of the Campanian phallus’ apotropaism varies hugely from scholar to scholar and is yet to be directly interrogated or socio-historically contextualised. Furthermore, its role as an apotropaic device is regularly conflated with the Enlightenment notion of universal fertility worship, most notably articulated by the antiquarian Richard Payne Knight. This thesis’ re-examination of the ideological genealogy of phallic apotropaism in relation to late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archaeological, anthropological and comparative-religious discourse highlights its particular import for the socio-cultural inquiries and concerns of that era. It will be demonstrated that the notion of the phallus as an apotropaic device has more in common with the nineteenth-century reinvention of Payne Knight’s ideas, and with the Enlightenment phallus’ coalescence with late nineteenth-century socio-cultural preoccupations, such as folklorism, mysticism and uncanny states of objecthood and representation. Accordingly, this thesis will expand our understanding of the place occupied by the Campanian apotropaic phallus in the modern imagination and the ways in which it relates to certain stages of our discipline’s history. Having evaluated modernity’s ideological and intellectual relationship with this fabled semiotic conundrum, the latter part of the thesis will revisit the apotropaic phallus at the ancient sites themselves. In this section, it will be shown that the phallus is rarely wholly solemn, apotropaic and symbolic nor wholly sexual, humorous and literal: indeed, its depiction in different contexts throughout the towns regularly capitalised on its capacity for double entendre, reflexive humour, social satire and semiotic ‘code-switching’. In this way, the apotropaic phallus proved a mercurial and perplexing image even for its ancient users and creators.

Early Christian art is of key importance in the mutual transformation of Roman culture and Christianity, the transformation of an anti-imperial offshoot of aniconic Judaism, into the official religion of an iconophilic empire. Despite this, early Christian sarcophagi have often fallen into the gaps between classics, medieval studies, art history, and patristics and biblical studies. Christian funerary commemoration has been characterised as a break, with Christian sarcophagi treated separately to non-Christian, and considered to represent the foregrounding of a very different kind of identity: communal and religious, rather than individual and cultural. This thesis offers a re-viewing of early Christian sarcophagi in their late Roman context. It explores the formation of a newly Christian Roman identity from the late third into the fourth century, and will find that Christian sarcophagus patrons were building on the frameworks of traditional commemoration, and still engaged in elite Graeco-Roman culture. The aesthetics considered here were distinctive in several interrelated ways that also reflect wider trends in late antique visual (and even literary) culture: inherited formal frameworks, an interest in the statuesque, and a self-conscious sense of materiality. The increased interpretative opportunities challenge the characterisation of Christian sarcophagi as less complex and culturally engaged than their predecessors. Roman heritage was made the foundation for the new Christian identity of the fourth century.

The topic of my research is the irrational and the ways it was accommodated through the visual arts of the modern era. In particular, I explore this theme through the relationship between Dionysos and Apollo. Ever since Nietzsche's 'Die Geburt der Tragodie' (1872), the polarity of the two gods has been codified in Western culture. Yet while their discrepancy as opposites has been widely discussed, they are two sides of the same coin, sharing similar traits since Antiquity. Beginning with an introduction on the cultural climate of the nineteenth-century, I argue that Nietzsche's principles had been anticipated by the exponents of German Romanticism and found earlier sources in the Humanism of fifteenth-century Italy, when Plato's writings in praise of 'madness' were rediscovered. While investigating significant aspects of Western cultural heritage, I trace the sources of Nietzsche's ideas, confronting these with examples from the visual arts. To this end, I first re-consider the ancient Dionysos and his transformation in the Middle Ages. I then analyse which aspects of the god were favoured in the Renaissance and which Dionysian narratives were re-produced. Within this framework, I assess the multifaceted character of the god and the meanings he acquired according to different periods, places and requirements. `Bacchus, id est vinum' recites a popular formula, but from Michelangelo to Caravaggio and beyond, this was not the only Dionysian guise to be known in the modern era. While often represented as a merrymaking god of nature, either alone or participating in Bacchanals and his Triumphs, darker aspects could be chosen to represent his world. It is the madness and disorder, as well as the reasons for their revelation (or omission) in specific contexts that I explore, in the belief that they provided the roots for Nietzsche's dualistic formulations and many a modern coniunctio oppositorum.

This thesis examines the works of three ‘forgotten’ British artists, working from the late nineteenth century and well into the 1920s. In a period which saw momentous changes associated with the onset of modernity, artworks appeared to speak of revivalism, tradition, even nostalgia, rather than the new. Thomas Cooper Gotch, Robert Anning Bell and Frederick Cayley Robinson shared an interest in the spiritual, the unseen and immaterial, which they expressed through representations of women, placing faith, broadly, in ‘the feminine’ as synonymous with humanity’s neglected ‘spirit’ in the modern, materialistic world. The eclectic and contradictory nature of the artworks examined, their complex and ambiguous representations of womanhood and female spirituality were expressive of the condition of modernity in its rich, varied forms. These artworks are analysed in the context of an important historical moment for the feminist movement, since all three artists addressed the explosion in female agency related to contemporary feminism, the ‘gender crisis’ and the Suffragette movement. By placing artworks in this context, I have attempted to bring women, their presence in the public sphere and visual culture, their discovery of a ‘feminist voice’ in this period, into the frame. Women imagined invigorating movements, from the confines of the domestic interior into the airy heights of mountain tops, using languages of righteousness and joyous expectancy, and the artworks examined provide visual analogues and commentaries on these feminist possibilities and new imaginative aspirations. While all three artists mediated the visual ‘types’ of womanhood available within art languages, they created quite distinct images of women. Representations range from Gotch’s female Messiah, where woman’s spiritual power originates in her innocence and purity, Bell’s images of Amazonian strength allied with a closer female relationship with nature, to more occult versions in Cayley Robinson’s paintings, related to theosophy. The artworks participated in a tremendous moment of hope for women in their endeavours toward autonomy and fulfilment. In presenting women’s spiritual role as humanity’s redeemer, these paintings reveal how art may envisage intangible forms of spirituality and emancipatory possibilities.

Sibyl cycles in Northern and Central Italy, in the Early Renaissance. Previous published scholarship listed twenty-two sites. I now know of forty. Twenty-three of these may be considered Early Renaissance works of art and are the subject of this study. This study is not primarily engaged with history of Art but with the history of Ideas. That is, it is not a study of the painters. their methods and status but rather with the study of the development of the genre. its textual sources, the content of the inscribed oracles. the development of the pictorial conventions and symbolism. the transmission of these and the cultural significance of the genre. The dissertation is concerned with artistic styles and techniques only in so far as they illuminate the pictorial origin of the works and their iconographic significance in terms of the ideas conveyed. It describes and defines regional sub-genres. each with clear rules and conventions. These have not previously been identified and no comprehensive national conspectus exists. Structure of the Dissertation The dissertation is in three parts. The first part addresses the nature and origin of Sibyls (who and what they were) and their significance in cultural history until the Renaissance. Part Two is concerned with the origins and transmission of text and iconographic conventions in the Renaissance Sibyl cyeles. Pari three is a catalogue and survey of each Sibyl cycle site in Central and Northern Italy, along with a comprehensive photographic record. Great destruction of some cycles has taken place since the 1960s and the compilation of a complete photographic record is urgent and a significant aim of the present work. There are few published coloured photographs of the full cycles. none complete except for Siena. This dissertation is wide in scope and is in large part a catalogue and survey of all known Italian Sibyl cycles. Because of the limitations of a Doctoral dissertation. at times the transition from one site to another may appear abrupt and disjunct. Nonetheless, the structure is logical and careful. Sites are arranged chronologically, according to genre. The reader is directed to the detailed table of contents, if a review of structure and order be required. Research Method The method of research was to form a comprehensive list of Sibyl sites in Italy by consulting published English and Continental books. journals and locally produced historical papers as well as word of mouth advice in Italy. I visited all the sites and made a photographic record. Origin and transmission of text was established by consulting contemporary manuscripts that either specify the oracle text or describe the original Orsini. and other, frescos. These manuscripts are widely scattered in Europe and difficult of access so, where possible, a significant example of each kind of manuscript is reproduced in photographs or photocopy, transcribed and translated in the Appendices to the dissertation.

This dissertation seeks to explore how national identities were manifest in eighteenth-century Scottish art. Understanding national identity to be a cultural and political phenomena, it considers symbols of national identity and examines in aesthetic and economic terms how the fine arts were both implicated in, and capable of expressing, the significant changes in national identity apparent in Scotland following the ’Forty-Five. The first chapter concerns itself with the issue of art and identity in Scotland between cl750 and 1800, and surveys the relevant literature, before introducing other significant issues pertinent to this research: the Enlightenment and Improvement. Chapter two recognises that previous studies of Highland portraits have examined them from an ‘external’ perspective. It investigates the implications of this for the viewer, and proceeds to analyse them from an ‘internal’ perspective intended to reveal the sitters’ motivations, to conclude that they are aristocratic images of authority, and its loss. The construction of the myth of the Highlands is thus expounded visually. If these symbols offer little evidence for an identity in flux, it is questionable whether individuals’ portraits can express national identity. Yet such a claim, it will be argued in chapter three, can be made through the desire to collect and order portraits by nation, and its relation to the Enlightenment discourse of the role of the individual in forming civil society. In this context, in chapter four, the aesthetic qualities of Allan Ramsay’s 1753-4 portraits will be argued as having been of particular significance to their Scottish sitters, being formed by Ramsay’s participation in Enlightenment Edinburgh society. Evidence for this position will be adduced through his paintings and writings, though the influence of physical setting is also considered. Finally, in chapter five, a study of Edinburgh art markets in comparison with those of English provincial cities addresses the question of whether Scotland was a nation, or province of England. The synthesis of existing literature and an original survey of art-related newspaper advertising reveals the Edinburgh market to be distinctive, though increasingly reliant upon London. The co-existence of local and national culture is found to be an important dialectic in the market, just as the dialectic between Scottish and British culture was found to be so generally in this dissertation. In conclusion, chapter six argues that while Scottish art must be considered as part of the history of British art, the desire amongst Scots to be part of a British nation was a significant force in shaping Scottish visual culture.

This thesis has two main aims: to give information about attitudes to painting among the French symbolist poets and critics, 1885-1895 and, from here, to examine the place of painting in the work of three of the most important poets of this period. After introductory remarks on the tradition of inter-arts comparisons in French nineteenth-century aesthetic theory and on the methodological problems raised by the study of such comparisons (together with the inadequacies of previous work on the subject for the period in question), chapter two examines Albert Aurier's definition of pictorial Symbolism in order to show that the reluctance of symbolist poets and painters alike to accept it is based upon differences in attitudes among both groups to the subject-matter of painting. These different attitudes in turn influence interpretations of pictorial form which are studied in chapter three. Particular attention is paid to those poets and critics who seek to assimilate visual values within verbal models of expression as part of a wider search for a synthesis of the arts. The thesis then goes on to study the work of three poets who apply, in their experiments with poetic language the lessons taken from a profound understanding of specific painting. Chapter four discusses Manet’s influence upon Mallarmé’s poetic style through a detailed analysis of the changes made by the poet to successive versions of 'L'Après-midi d'un faune' ; Chapter five, the influence of Seurat's divisionist technique upon the 'vers libre' of Gustave Kahn; chapter six, that of Gauguin's synthetist style upon the abstract poetic language of Alfred Jarry. Through these poets, the thesis attempts to show the extent to which pictorial reference and analogy contributed to certain fundamental developments in modern French poetry.