Self-portraits integrated within narrative scenes by Adam Kraft and Tilman Riemenschneider show a pious identification between the sculptor and the holy person Nicodemus, an association based on the notion that Nicodemus had carved a crucifix. This dual referencing was expanded in the Middle Ages, when artists developed strategies for self-fashioning that were in keeping with the provisions of their commissions and their own concept of self. By presenting themselves as commentator and interlocutor, Kraft and Riemenschneider negotiated their places within the various discourses in which their sculpture participated.

This paper examines a group of towns in southwest France founded during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Many of the towns were designed according to a regular, standardized plan. This paper studies these foundations as formal, historical, juridical, and political phenomena. Moreover, it proposes that the spatial dispositions of the towns be read as a product of the social relations enshrined in their charters.

The dedication of the Ste.-Chapelle in 1248 commemorated the completion of Louis IX's reliquary chapel and consecrated a new locus sanctus. This essay examines the meaning of the Ste.-Chapelle's artistic program, focusing on the interior architecture of the upper chapel. The facadelike structure of tribune and baldachin is understood not merely as a scaffold for the Passion relics but also as a symbolic representation of the throne of Solomon. As such, a reading of the architecture's iconography further explicates the religious and political content of the monument and offers new insight into Louis's patronage.

THE VAST MAJORITY of Native American objects in private and public collections are the legacy of the high period of colonialism that lasted from about 1830 to 1930 (which corresponds closely with what Sturtevant (1969) called ‘The Museum Age’). In the subfield of art history devoted to the arts of Native North America, the most urgent issues surrounding the collecting and display of these objects arise directly from the imperialist histories of their formation. Prodded by Native American activists and academic theorists, historians and curators of Native American art are today rethinking the most fundamental questions: Who has the right to control American Indian objects, many of which are thought by their makers not to be art objects but instruments of power? Who has access to knowledge (even simply the knowledge gained from gazing upon an object of power), only those who have been initiated, or all who pass through the doors of a cultural institution? Who has the right to say what the objects mean, and whether and how they are displayed? And how will Native Americans, as they assume increasingly authoritative roles in museum representation, remake the museum as an institution?.

A reexamination of the ancient literary sources and the early sixteenth-century archaeological record proposes new identifications for, among others, Socrates, Diogenes, Pericles, and Anaxagoras in Raphael's School of Athens. The identification of Socrates suggests that Raphael's depiction may be viewed as the prototype for the theme “The Death of Socrates” in the art of the postclassical era. Represented as a precursor of Christ, Raphael's Socrates also provides a crucial link between the programs of the School of Athens and the Disputation of the Holy Sacrament, both in the Stanza della Segnatura, the Vatican.

Like much of Turner's oeuvre, this painting has usually been interpreted as totally apolitical or mildly patriotic. This article argues instead that it is a far from optimistic assessment of the progressive agriculture promoted by George III, and it is better understood as deeply critical of the social consequences of enclosure. Turner's juxtaposition of turnip cultivation and Windsor Castle, the ragged workers, the implied allusions to the Slough of Despond, the contemporary association of turnips with poverty and with satire directed against the Hanoverian kings, all serve to indict progressive agriculture as a source of increased hardship among the laboring poor.