Knowledge Of Art History Research Articles

Photography: Irrelevant or Indispensable? Pictorial Science from the Perspective of Photography

The digital revolution has given new vigor to the popular belief in pictures as “true” representations of reality. Photography, seen early on as an instrument of scientific objectivity, has always been a cornerstone of this erroneous idea. Two disciplines of the Bildwissenschaft at Humboldt University, cultural science and art history, approach the fallacy from different positions. Friedrich Kittler, from a cultural history perspective, holds that new technologies abolish previous ones (eg., digital kills analog photography). Horst Bredekamp draws upon the accumulated pictorial knowledge of art history to claim that the even new media imagery is only understood in the light of tradition. Both approaches fall short of fully grasping the implications of picture production and reception becoming a mass phenomenon. Art seems to be one step ahead of theory. It reflects media promises, mixing old and new technology: there is no increase in authenticity.

Old Masters' lead white pigments: investigations of paintings from the 16th to the 17th century using high precision lead isotope abundance ratios

White lead (2PbCO(3).Pb(OH)(2)), a common component in 17c. artists' painting materials, was singled out to investigate the potential of lead isotope abundance ratios in the field of authentication and origin assignment. Paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck and other Old Masters of the Northern and Southern schools were chosen for this study. An interdisciplinary approach was chosen using both analytical instrumental methods, art technological and art historical knowledge. Minute samples taken from paintings from selected art collections worldwide were investigated using mass spectrometry, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX). The high precision lead isotope abundance ratios were measured by multiple collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (MC-ICP-MS). The determination of the calcium matrix influence with respect to possible bias effects to the isotope ratios gave clear decision support, to whether a result lies within the stated combined measurement uncertainty of the result, to eliminate time-consuming matrix separations. The scatter plots of the measured isotope abundance ratios for the painting pigments from P. P. Rubens, A. van Dyck and other Flemish painters exhibit a very narrow distribution forming a cluster. The range of the measured ratio (206)Pb/(204)Pb amounts to 0.55% and for the ratio (207)Pb/(204)Pb to 0.2%. The comparison of the data to cis-alpine (Italian) sample pigments from paintings from the same time period reveals a clear distinction between the two fields. With respect to the lead isotope data originating from the ores it is assumed that the pigment isotope ratio distribution can be explained by very distinct origin of raw materials. Presumably, no mixing of different lead ores from Europe took place. The comparison of the measured white lead isotope ratio values (Flemish paintings) and the data from ore samples led to the unexpected conclusion that local ores were not used for the pigment production but British or German sources.

Introducing people to art

Visitors to an art museum are traditionally introduced to the collections and the individual works of art through art historical knowledge although it is well known that this kind of information rarely leads to a proper art experience. An experiment with four different kinds of introductions to the same work of art is described in this article. Before they entered the gallery in which the work of art was exhibited, participants were asked to choose between recordings of a musical introduction, a poetic introduction, a child's response to the work of art in question, or a dialogue between two art historians.Phenomenological analyses of the following interviews reveal a number of influential qualities of each of the four introductions. Personal factors such as spontaneity and expressiveness seem to facilitate personal involvement, whereas instructions and guidelines, especially when presented with authority, inspire cognitive activity and inhibit an existential perspective.

Juan Ramon Jimenez y la pintura

Juan Ramon Jimenez y la pintura. By Angel Crespo. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1999. 237 pp. Juan Ramon Jimenez, La muerte. Ed. Diego Martinez Torr6n. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1999. 176 paginas. Angel Crespo (1926-95) published his study of Juan Ramon Jimenez's artistic talents in 1974 (Universidad de Puerto Rico, 315 pp.). It has long been unavailable, although it is recognized as a unique piece of research, as well as the authoritative study on the Nobel Laureate's talents for painting, drawing, sketching, typography, and knowledge of art history. The University of Salamanca has decided to republish it (as part of their Acta Salamanticensia series) because it has never been available in Spain. That is a sound decision, not just because Crespo's study is a mine of information and solid scholarship but also, I suggest, because it might inspire younger scholars to attempt an ekphrastic reading of Jimenez's work. (Ekphrasis is never mentioned in Crespo's study.) Crespo's knowledge of art and art history was profound and he clearly demonstrated how Jimenez's familiarity with painting and painters informed his poetic idealism. He divided his study into three distinct sections. In the first, he engagingly reconstructed the chronological evolution of Juan Ram6n's lifelong passion for painting and painters. In the second, he recovered a host of Jimenez's drawings and paintings and analyzed them chronologically (they include, for example, a child's doodles, a young man's talented oils and an old man's nostalgic sketches). In the third section, Crespo dealt with theories of art, with styles and tastes. His focus was diachronic and he covered much terrain; he demonstrated the impact of painting on Juan Ram.6n's poetry, and he tactfully pointed to the logical inconsistencies in some of Juan Racoon's views on art (e.g., sobrerealismo) and artists (El Greco as the first Cubist). Crespo helped us understand many aspects of the genius of Juan Racoon Jimenez, not least of which is the genesis of Jimenez's High Modernism, or as Crespo describes it, the way his symbolismimpressionism incorporated Renaissance idealism. I welcome Salamanca's republication of this book but must note that page references in footnotes (e.g. to the appendices) still refer to the 1974 Puerto Rico edition. One of the paintings Angel Crespo discovered in his research is of a white swan on a tree-lined lake (125). This is surprising because Jimenez avoided the swan as a symbol in his published poetry. …

DREI MITTELALTERLICHE SCHLŰSSELDENKMÄLER DER KUNSTGESCHICHTE UNGARNS - RESTAURIERT

Summary The study is devoted to a critical analysis of the recent conservation work made in the course of the millennary festivities on three important monuments of Hungarian art history. These important sources of art historical knowledge were treated by different methods of preservation (from conservation to reconstruction or new building). The adequacy of these methods is discussed in this paper. The monuments in question are as follows: the ruins of the royal Provostry Church of the Blessed Virgin in Székesfehérvár (11th to 15th centuries; see also P. Biczó below), the royal (later archiepiscopal) Castle in Esztergom (earlier buildings: 10th to 12th century, existant buildings: late 12th to 16th century with later alterations), the Royal Residence in Visegrád (14–15th centuries, see also L. Varga below).

Edith Wharton in context: essays on intertextuality

Tintner provides a detailed analysis of the complex interplay between Wharton and Jameshow they influenced each other and how some of their writings operate as homages or personal jokes. So deeply was James in Wharton s confidence, Tintner argues, that he provided her with source models for a number of her characters. In addition, Wharton found in his fiction structures for her own, especially forThe Age of Innocence. Tintner also brings her considerable knowledge of art history to bear in her study of art allusions in Wharton s work. Wharton s response both to the Italian painters active before Raphael and to the English Pre-Raphaelites of a generation before her own is analyzed here in three essays. These pieces demonstrate Wharton s sensibility to changes in art tastes and collecting, the inheritance of Rossetti s revolutionary paintings in the unfinished novel, The Buccaneers, and the importance of home inThe Glimpses of the Moon, as demonstrated by Wharton s use of Tiepolo s fresco in the church of Scalzi. Tintner concludes by considering Wharton s literary legacy and who Wharton has figured in the imaginations of recent writers, including Richard Howard, Louis Auchincloss, and Cathleen Schine. Tintner finds some part of Wharton s personality or work evoked in a number of contemporary works and argues that this presence signals the beginning of an increasing influence.

Digital Culture and the Practices of Art and Art History

Part of a symposium on how digital technologies affect the practices of art and art history. The writer discusses new possibilities and problems that arise from the introduction of digital imagery and networking into the teaching of art history. New computer-based technologies confront teachers of art with many opportunities, but a great deal remains to be done to find the most effective pedagogy to take advantage of them. Teachers must remember that their art historical knowledge and their experiences of how students learn are their most important assets. It is that knowledge that will allow them to give “added value” to the countless images of works of art that new technologies are making available.

A Soaring Look at the Picture Book

A Soaring Look at the Picture Book William Moebius (bio) The Picture Book Comes of Age: Looking at Childhood through the Art of Illustration, by Joseph H. Schwarcz and Chava Schwarcz. Chicago and London: American Library Association, 1991. Joseph Schwarcz would have had much more to say had he lived to complete the making of The Picture Book Comes of Age. It is a measure of his generous spirit that even now, four years after his death in 1988, the reader encountering his latest and last book must from time to time feel his passing acutely, and with each turn of the page mourn the loss to all of this teacher whose insight into the images in picture books and into the feelings and needs of children went so much further than most contemporary critics of the genre have managed. When Joseph Schwarcz died at age seventy-one in 1988, he had published Ways of the Illustrator: Visual Communication in Children's Literature (Chicago: ALA, 1982), as well as a host of articles in German, English, and Hebrew. He had taught for fifty years "as if he were born to it," as Betsy Hearne, who met him at the University of Chicago, asserts in a eulogy that serves as her foreword to this posthumous volume. Rescued from the pit through the dedication of Chava Schwarcz, his widow, and ALA editor Tina MacAyeal, The Picture Book Comes of Age is a work destined to exemplify for years to come the possibilities of picture book analysis, exceeded only by Jean Perrot's Du jeu, des enfants and des livres (Paris: Editions du Cercle de la Librairie, 1987). As originally planned, Schwarcz's book was intended to address first the representations of the physical world, particularly of body and gesture, then those of such psychological elements as identity formation, and, finally, those of the social sphere. Clearly, in many ways the book exceeds the promise of its original plan, while in a few, less important ways, it falls short. When the book soars, as it does especially in the treatment of the work of Anthony Browne, it goes well beyond the boundaries of psychological reference and [End Page 185] other "matter" toward a consideration of the aesthetic principles that make Browne's work so successful. Schwarcz's writing reaches its heights when it acknowledges and develops levels of interpretation and response rarely accorded picture book art, an art too often treated in vacuo and not as an integral part of the history of images. Schwarcz's knowledge of art history is reflected both in his excellent handling of design and compositional issues and in his alertness to pictorial allusion. He gains credibility and persuasiveness by emphasizing the immediacy of a particular picture book reading experience without denying the relevance of extensive study elsewhere. With such timely disclaimers as "the philosophical and psychological implications are too complex and far-reaching to be sorted out in the present context" (103), Schwarcz gives us the room and, implicitly, the encouragement we need to test our own observations and answers. Among the "areas" of representation he explores, Schwarcz writes with unparalleled sensitivity and acuity when he examines the psychological dimension of the story and its images. The second chapter, "A Close Look at a Picture Book," in which he follows a "diagram of emotional states" to visualize what goes on in the mind of Peter, the protagonist in Ezra Jack Keats's Whistle for Willie, is a masterpiece of picture book interpretation. The next four chapters (on "Stress and the Picture Book," "Love and Anxiety in the Supportive Family," "Grandparents and Grandchildren," and "Longing for Love, Contending for Love") sustain the quality of writing and insight, despite chapter titles that some may find awkward or sentimental. It may be that after reading his rich analyses of two works by Anthony Browne in chapter 6, we meet the accelerated treatment of a greater variety of texts in chapter 7 ("The Emergence of Identity") with regret. The slight disappointment we may feel with this chapter may also lie in the initial prominence accorded Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment, even as "different psychological persuasions" are mentioned but not named (84...

Disciplining Art's History

The nature and status of art historical knowledge is one of the most contested issues in the humanities today. Art history is a relatively young discipline—established in a systematic form by Gennan scholars such as Riegl and Wölfflin in the late nineteenth century but widely taught in universities only much more recently—and perhaps for this reason, its boundaries and methods seem to be in constant flux. Yet in certain constituencies within the discipline today, there is a premature self-confidence about the field's proper objects and its methods of inquiry, a confidence often adopted in reaction to the field's current spate of self-reflection and the ensuing calls for change. Because this confidence is maintained in many quarters now—and because many art historians would therefore question the picture of a discipline in flux that I will paint—the paradox arises that the field is contested not only by 'revisionist' scholars but also, however unwillingly, by those who must now defend their established methods as central to what they construe as a difficult but ultimately mature and stable discipline. If there is a unifying trend in art history today, it is this widespread attention to the discipline itself, to its historiography and proper methodology. But as I will show, the vision of the field—the answers to questions about what art is, how to write its history, and what we know when we do write it—depends to an extraordinary extent upon whose point of view is solicited. My aim here is to give an introduction to the methodological and epistemological questions being asked in the field of art history now, and to suggest their import for the future of the discipline. Let me begin with two examples that display the deep-set assumptions about knowledge that are typical of art history and that remind us of the boundaries and points of contention that exist between would-be traditional and would-be revisionist views.

The Structure of Art-Historical Knowledge and Art Education

The Structure of Art-Historical Knowledge and Art Education