Majismo, a cultural phenomenon that embodied the popular aesthetic in Spain from the second half of the eighteenth century, served as a vehicle to “regain” Spanish heritage. As expressed ...in visual representations of popular types participating in traditional customs and wearing garments viewed as historically Spanish, majismo conferred on Spanish “citizens” the pictorial ideal of a shared national character.
In Framing Majismo, Tara Zanardi explores nobles’ fascination with and appropriation of the practices and types associated with majismo, as well as how this connection cultivated the formation of an elite Spanish identity in the late 1700s and aided the Bourbons’ objective to fashion themselves as the legitimate rulers of Spain. In particular, the book considers artistic and literary representations of the majo and the maja , purportedly native types who embodied and performed uniquely Spanish characteristics. Such visual examples of majismo emerge as critical and contentious sites for navigating eighteenth-century conceptions of gender, national character, and noble identity. Zanardi also examines how these bodies were contrasted with those regarded as “foreign,” finding that “foreign” and “national” bodies were frequently described and depicted in similar ways. She isolates and uncovers the nuances of bodily representation, ultimately showing how the body and the emergent nation were mutually constructed at a critical historical moment for both.
It is with a fair amount of certainty the one can state today the importance of the Vienna School of art history for the Polish art historians at the beginning of the XX century, in the interwar ...period or the 1960s and 1970s, yet very little is known about the years in-between. It is commonly accepted that strong anti-German sentiment during the second half of the 1940s and the domination of the soviet doctrine in the first half of the 1950s both complicated further dissemination of works and methods of the Viennese scholars. A closer look at the matter would suggest that their works and ideas remained present in the polish art history of the period, allowing it to serve as a chain link between the interwar years and the development of the discipline in the following decades.
Raphael’s Ostrich begins with a little-studied aspect of Raphael’s painting—the ostrich, which appears as an attribute of Justice, painted in the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican. ...Una Roman D’Elia traces the cultural and artistic history of the ostrich from its appearances in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to the menageries and grotesque ornaments of sixteenth-century Italy. Following the complex history of shifting interpretations given to the ostrich in scientific, literary, religious, poetic, and satirical texts and images, D’Elia demonstrates the rich variety of ways in which people made sense of this living “monster,” which was depicted as the embodiment of heresy, stupidity, perseverance, justice, fortune, gluttony, and other virtues and vices. Because Raphael was revered as a god of art, artists imitated and competed with his ostrich, while religious and cultural critics complained about the potential for misinterpreting such obscure imagery. This book not only considers the history of the ostrich but also explores how Raphael’s painting forced viewers to question how meaning is attributed to the natural world, a debate of central importance in early modern Europe at a time when the disciplines of modern art history and natural history were developing. The strangeness of Raphael’s ostrich, situated at the crossroads of art, religion, myth, and natural history, both reveals lesser-known sides of Raphael’s painting and illuminates major cultural shifts in attitudes toward nature and images in the Renaissance. More than simply an examination of a single artist or a single subject, Raphael’s Ostrich offers an accessible, erudite, and charming alternative to Vasari’s pervasive model of the history of sixteenth-century Italian art.
In early 20th century, the art historical institute in Vienna led by Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941) offered the unique opportunity to study the arts of Asia and the Middle East at university level ...(fig. I).· 1 The rich material repository for the study of 'Oriental' art - consisting of ca. 4000 books, 52.000 photographs and images, and 20.000 lantern slides - was unparalleled in Europe.2 It attracked a large number of students and turned the institute into a hub for Asian and Islamic art. Numerous guest auditors from all over Europe and abroad further enriched the lively community.3 Between 1910 and 1933, more than one hundred students supervised by Strzygowski completed their dissertations on Northern European, Austrian, Persian, Islamic, Chinese, Japanese and Indian art.4 Suzanne Marchand has directed attention to the strikingly Targe number of female students' at Strzygowski's institute, 'who would make careers outside Central Europe and remain relatively free from racist ideologies' The article pursues the twofold aim of combining a historical intersectional study of the Vienna school with a critique of patriarchal patterns of historiography. This study aims to contribute to research of the co-constitutive relation of art and identity markers such as gender and race.The article consists of three parts: two historical studies (part I and III) embrace a theoretical section on patriarchal patterns in historiography (part II). In the first part, Melanie Stiassny's presidency of the Society of Friends of Asian Art and Culture is the centerpiece of the historical investigation. The society was one of the liveliest in inter war Vienna, and Stiassny, as its managing vice-president, organized exhibitions, broadcasts and adult education, edited the journal of the society, and published articles on Chinese art. Knowledge about Stiassny and the infrastructure of the society sheds light on the processes of valorizing Asian art. It furthermore gives insights into how Strzygowskian graduates built networks and professionalized.23 The second part, the theoretical section, draws on feminist, gender and intersectional studies to analyse patterns and conventions of historiography. A close reading of several articles on Viennese art history reveals how androcentric criteria shape historiography to date. The third part adopts some of the androcentric historiographical criteria such as 'success' to comparatively trace careers of 'successful' women and men art historians.24 Interestingly, their migratory trajectories reveal a gendered and raced pattern of migration: Women and non-European men art historians often found their first academic positions at universities in the Middle East or Asia, whereas European men began their careers at museums in Vienna and Berlin. Eventually, most worked in area studies departments at US-American universities.
At a time when crises—ecological, migratory, pandemic—all have to do with the question of inhabiting and habitability, the history of art can allow us to look at this issue of common, at the ...confluence of the sensitive and representations, imaginations and forms of life. It is the journey towards this observation that the ecological crisis is above all a crisis of representations that Bruno Latour retraces here, in the company of Matthieu Duperrex, by taking a retrospective look at the fruitful links he maintained throughout his life with the environment. 'the history of art.
Schools of art represent one of the building blocks of art history. The notion of a school of art emerged in artistic discourse and disseminated across various countries in Europe during the early ...modern period. Whilst a school of art essentially denotes a group of artists or artworks, it came to be configured in multiple ways, encompassing different meanings of learning, origin, style, or nation, and mediated in various forms via academies, literature, collections, markets and galleries. Moreover, it contributed to competitive debate around the hierarchy of art and artists in Europe. The ensuing fundamental instability of the notion of a school of art helped to create a pluriform panorama of both distinct and interconnected artistic traditions within the European art world. This edited collection brings together 20 articles devoted to selected case studies from the Italian peninsula, the Low Countries, France, Spain, England, the German Empire, and Russia.
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