The purpose of this thesis is to propose that there is a new way in which the iconography of the Julio-Claudian dynasty can be read by historians. I propose that the mechanism which can be applied to ...the iconography of the Julio-Claudians is that of the 'doctrine of capacities'. The 'doctrine of capacities' suggests that a ruler has 'two bodies', that of their physical, natural body and their 'political' body, or the image which represents the political position they held. Reading the iconography of the Julio-Claudians using this prism suggests that they were adept at using their public image to display a 'political' body. That is, a public image which reflected the manner in which they wished to be portray themselves to those they ruled. Through careful examination of the literary and material evidence available, it is clear that not all of the members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty possessed 'political' bodies, and of those who did, it is clear that each member of the dynasty amended or adapted the 'political' body for their own benefit and to meet their own political needs. This thesis also suggests that the 'doctrine of capacities' is both flexible and adaptable when the images of the Julio-Claudians are examined, not only does the concept allow rulers to deal with a range of issues. Those assessed in this thesis are age, disability, gender and political inexperience. In order to bring this fully to the fore, I have made comparisons to more modern political leaders and, in this way, hope to show the effectiveness to the 'political' body which the Julio-Claudians were able to fashion.
This thesis is a pursuit of a personal diagram poetry, with a submission of part creative work, part critical exploration of selected diagram poetry over the past 50 years. I examine my own work and ...that of pioneering diagram poet Jim Rosenberg as variations of the conceptual diagram, and explore wider examples in the work of contemporary visual poets, arriving at a diagrammatics that creates systems of thought from modalities of materiality, spatiality and iconography. I follow Foucault and Deleuze's pursuit of the diagram as a paradigmatic system, tracing its properties and potentialities in the social field but extract my own version of it, arising from exploration of the philosophical roots of the diagram. I apply DeLanda's realist critique of the diagram, moving it towards the concept of the assemblage and positioning the diagram as an episode of relational interactions that affect surroundings rather than statically record them. Both text and icon as language systems are probed as structures and as signifiers through close application of post-structuralism as the most rigorous interrogation of language's structures. The resulting creative work assumes a position in the gap between the textual and the visual to seek Drucker's 'semantic chords' in a retinal-cognitive collusion of word and image. I merge the visual exteriority of classifications, visual iconography, and associated graphic language, with the interiority of a personal vocabulary, mediated through what I term 'diagrams of disturbance' which seek to destabilise cognition with both the form they take and their challenging subject matter. I use models from the hard sciences to examine the abstract properties of the diagram, while seeking a common ground between word and icon in cognitive linguistics of Lakoff, and seeking underlying structures of diagram poetry in the application of information theory. Arising from the competing elements of word and icon the two halves of the research emerge as both a development of my own diagram poetry and a critical inquiry into diagram poetry as a form.
In the second half of the eleventh century the Venetians erected on the west wall of the Cathedral at Torcello a gold-glass mosaic showing the Last Judgement. For geopolitical reasons, they chose to ...use Byzantine iconography rather than the local Western format. The apparent complexity of the Byzantine format has led scholars to brand it as ‘incoherent’ or ‘lacking in structure’. This thesis seeks to gain a proper understanding of the iconography by setting it in its historical context, asking what meanings the makers saw in the motifs they chose, and why they chose to deploy them as they did at Torcello and elsewhere. All images have an evolutionary history which governs their form, and guides, but does not control, their meaning. Current histories of early Last Judgement iconography are short and purely descriptive. This research offers a new analytical history of form and meaning in Eastern and Western Last Judgement images up to 1150. It examines them as ‘front-line’ artefacts, that is, as developed through time to carry the cognitive and emotional content needed to influence behaviour in accordance with their location and purpose. Iconography is analysed alongside other front-line activities (prayers, hymns, funerary rites, and congregation-facing texts). The analysis shows how, in ‘religion as lived’, inconsistent eschatological beliefs are used in different contexts for different purposes. It then shows how, in visual presentations, such beliefs can be combined to complement and reinforce each other. This process is facilitated by the Eastern concept of time. In the context of post-mortem judgement, this concept is used to reconcile two apparently inconsistent events, the Immediate Judgement at death and the Last Judgement at the end of time. While the Western iconography sets the Last Judgement in the future and ignores the Immediate Judgement, the Byzantine format unites both within a continuous present. The analysis shows how the mosaicists at Torcello combined this concept of time with strong visual guidance to deliver a clear structure and a single, complete, and coherent eschatological vision.
This research investigates the relationship of material and content in art and craft practices to ask not what things mean but how they mean. The principal object of analysis is the art medal, a form ...of small-scale, biface sculpture, normally bearing portrait images that was developed in fifteenth century Italy, and that is still practiced today, worldwide. Through the close analysis of a number of art medals, this research investigates the way in which materiality relates to content, and the processes through which meaning is generated. A synthetic methodology is used. This is based on the key methods and beliefs that can be found in numismatic study, in particular connoisseurship, iconography, and - in more contemporary and especially in university study - ideas of agency. This research presents a synthetic analysis of the most canonical expression of these ideas, by Berenson (19021920), Panofsky (19391955), and Gell (1998) respectively. These are set within a broader intellectual framework through analysis of theories of language (Peirce 1960, Saussure 2006), theories of perception (Böhme 2017, Benjamin 19362008a), and contemporary writing on meaning and surfaces (Ingold 2017, Bruno 2014). In this way, the art medal is both the principal object of study, but it also provides the lens through which new understanding is approached, this lens being set within a broader epistemological framework to establish the generalizability of the research findings. There are two objects that are studied in depth. The first of these is the Limbourg Brothers' medal of Constantine the Great. Using the method and ideas developed in the early stages of the thesis, fresh understanding is developed of the role of this medal in the collection of the Duke of Berry. A significant contribution to numismatic knowledge is developed in the demonstration of the medal's dependency on the iconography of Baldwin II, the last Latin Emperor of Constantinople. As a result of this new finding, it is possible to understand the role of the medal within its broader system of other objects, from which multiple meanings are developed through juxtaposition and material handing. In order to bring the generalizable insights of this research into view, the thesis closes with an analysis of the exemplary craft practice of David Pye. It is shown that meaning emerges through a system of movement in which the hand's faculty of touch plays a constructive role. In its conclusions, this research develops knowledge in relation to the intelligence of making as an emergent process within technical systems of humans, materials, and tools. This research challenges future study to direct attention towards the constructive and generative role of touch in art and craft practices. These insights will be vital as we develop new digital technologies of making.
The objective of this study is to analyze iconographies that show the whaling in the Brazilian Colony, dates back to the sixteenth century and had socioeconomic importance in the formation and ...implementation of people in the cost. This extractivist activity that involved the settlement of large cetaceans was a common scene in coastal areas, such as the Guanabara and Todos os Santos Bays, and Santa Catarina Inlets. In these visual documents we identified the main characteristics of whaling in Brazil: proximity to the coast, slave labor, specialization of work at sea, techniques of capture and processing, and the boats launched in the calm waters of the bays. The whaling iconography produced in Brazil have common elements, recognizable in the redundancy of certain visual arrangements: the chase, the harpooning, the towing, the shredding, the melting, and the storage. The most representative image of fishing is the dramatic moment in which man and animal meet since, in the Basque tradition, being close was paramount.
