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The Miracle of the Quails by Jacopo Bassano combines the sophisticated palette one would expect from a Venetian painting with an equally refined composition. Davide Gasparotto of the Getty, which [...]

This article argues that classical visual art played an important role in mediating the relationship between Elizabethan romance and the humanist schoolroom. I advance this claim by following the wayward itinerary through Elizabethan letters of the Greek painter Apelles and his unfinished painting of Venus rising from the sea. In the work of the educator Roger Ascham, the painting serves as an emblem for the fragmented corpus of classical antiquity; Apelles's lost masterpiece enjoys a second life when appropriated in the next generation by John Lyly as a figure for the estrangement of Elizabethan fiction from earlier humanist claims that poetry's purpose was primarily didactic., My story begins with a mere endnote, albeit one of unusually broad scope. In canto 32 of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, the female knight Bradamante repasts at Tristano's castle. As [...]

ART PROVIDES a powerful historical archive through which we can see our lost environmental past. In 1915, the artist Romare Bearden left the South at the age of four; decades [...]

This article examines visual images of the Sewol Ferry disaster and its traumatic aftermath. It focuses on paintings by Hong Sung-dam, who has grappled with visualizing various moments of historical injustice and trauma in his art--particularly the work Sewol Owdl (2014) and paintings exhibited in the exhibition Dulsum, Nalsum (Inhaling and exhaling) (2016). By analyzing Hong's paintings, this article examines communicable and transformative potentials and limitations of visual images in bearing witness to disaster and trauma. It asks how Hong's paintings translate affective feelings of grief, fear, shame, anger, and hope from his multiple perspectives of witnessing as a victim, a survivor, and an observer, and how the paintings may trigger an empathic response that potentially moves viewers to critical thoughts. It shows how the artist urges the viewer to confront the victims'last moments, feel their pain, and listen to theirfinal words. I argue that the uncomfortable but affective images are enacted as a reminder of unjust deaths and facilitate dialogical relations between the artist and the viewer, between the victim and the survivor, and between the living and the dead. However, what is laid bare is the difficulty of representing that which is neither present nor absent, and neither dead nor alive in the state of mourning. Despite some disagreement between the artist and some victims' parents, they all share the same hope that an act of witnessing will lead to remembering what has been done to victims and traumatized survivors, and make possible any productive social changes in consciousness and action. Hong Sung-dam's paintings reclaim the agency of the dead and envision the conditions of possibility for a life in the aftermath of tragedy. Keywords: The Sewol Ferry disaster, Hong Sung-dam, Trauma, Visual images, Mourning, The Art of Witnessing: The Sewol Ferry Disaster in Hong Sung-dam's Paintings 'In somewhere there is no separation, we shall talk about the story that we haven't finished, share the [...]

ABSTRACT This article discusses visual representations of two occasions when Hemingway went into the amateur ring at the fiesta of San Fermin. In 1924, John Dos Passos painted a watercolor [...]

In the popular imagination, Hieronymus Bosch is a marginal figure whose art is full of nightmarish visions. On the quincentenary of his death, is it time to reassess Bosch as [...]

It recently became widely known that the favorite painting of Pope Francis is the White Crucifixion by Marc Chagall. The news stirred up considerable speculation and controversy. Chagall, born Moishe [...]

For nearly two centuries after Charles Le Brun presented his lecture on the visual representation of the passions to the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1668, his [...]

While the enigmatic woman staring out from Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Blue Bower (1865) continues to fascinate first-time viewers, the unusual instrument she fingers--a Japanese koto--is no less intriguing. The [...]

Theory has often been regarded in early modern studies as an irresponsible guest at best, and, at worst, an unwelcome intruder. While early modern cultural production has served theorists well [...]

'I wish ... that you would not attempt to defend my mediaevalisms, which were absurd, but rather say that there was enough good in the works to give assurance that [...]

Robert Hayden employs innovative modes of signification to unveil and expose race-based violence in the United States. In 'Night, Death, Mississippi' (1966) he defies bildverbot (1) traditions, or the customary [...]

Creating art is like my heartbeat. I need it to survive. --Harry Fonseca Harry Fonseca's work is universal; his art engages world issues and in his career, he continually challenged [...]

In a letter to George Rae in 1873, Dante Gabriel Rossetti reflected on the practical difficulty of displaying his sonnets written to accompany his paintings: 'An inscription is much more [...]

In The Truth in Painting, Derrida insists that Heidegger's treatment of 'a famous picture by Van Gogh' marks 'a moment of pathetic collapse.' While we would agree, we would insist that this example does not render Heidegger's entire philosophy of art suspect. Instead, if his reading of Van Gogh's painting is 'derisory and symptomatic,' it is nonetheless 'significant,' if only insofar as it provides an indication of Heidegger's underestimation of the plastic arts in favor of the elevation of poetry--an underestimation that may be corrected in light of what we might regard as his true philosophy of art. Our aim, then, is to see (with some help from Derrida) what Heidegger could have seen in looking at Van Gogh's Old Shoes were the work not reduced to an illustration in a presentation whose destination is poetry, not painting. What, in other words, would Van Gogh's painting look like were we to view it in light of 'The Origin of the Work of Art,' assuming that the latter does not require insistence on the priority of linguistic work but on the creation of a truth that belongs to the Earth, in the case in point, as the ground of painting? Keywords art, truth, painting, frame, picture plane, ground DOI: 10.1163/156916410X524448

This final installment in our two-part article dedicated to the drawings of Agnolo Bronzino (1503-72) comments on the state of their preservation. (1) The importance of this issue only came [...]

By examining Francisco de Goya's The Duchess of Alba as a Maja (1797), I investigate how the duchess' fascination for and experiences with popular Spanish customs and dress relate to the general shift in aristocratic taste for folkloric traditions during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Alba fashioned herself in part after the fiery maja, whose notorious behavior could be utilized by her for personal and political purposes to experience vicariously the supposed libertine lifestyle of the lower classes. I suggest that this vicarious act--both imagined (in works of art) and real (at the bullfight)--serves as a flirtatious role-play emblematic of aristocrats during the Enlightenment. By focusing on her promotion of nationalistic traits and heroes in her style, patronage, and activities, I consider Alba's fashionable individualism in relation to the broad theme of female agency in the 1700s. Notwithstanding the rumors surrounding the duchess' life, I argue Alba's vital role as a trendsetter at the Spanish court and in artistic and literary circles merits more scholarly scrutiny. Looking to the popular class for inspiration, she proactively challenged conventional feminine roles and conduct, elevating national dress to the level of high couture to assert her individualism. KEYWORDS: Francisco de Goya, Duchess of Alba, maja, majismo, Spanish Enlightenment, Francisco de Goya's Duchess of Alba as a Maja from 1797 (Figure 1) and Jean-Marc Nattier's Madame Adelaide-de-France as Diana from 1745 (Figure 2) feature aristocrats in role-playing portraits. Nattier's [...]

This article reexamines how scholars have approached writing about the domestic setting in Early Netherlandish painting and analyzes the depictions of interiors in the works of some of the fifteenth century's leading artists to begin a dialogue on how domesticity was defined in Northern Europe during the Renaissance. It interrogates the emerging meanings and understandings of domesticity and explores how artists manipulated representations of the home setting to construct signifiers of their artistic production and heritage through a case study of paintings by Robert Campin and Rogier van der Weyden. KEYWORDS: domestic, home in art, panel painting, Netherlandish painting, Flemish, Robert Campin, Rogier van der Weyden, Several recent publications have turned attention to the topic of the representation of the domestic interior in art, both in terms of how artists constructed visions of interiors as a [...]

All artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content. --Theodor Adorno, [...]