Creative Intentions Research Articles

:The Gonzaga of Mantua and Pisanello's Arthurian Frescoes

This book is the first attempt fully to gauge Pisanello's significance as an artist, and it is remarkably successful in doing this. It brings one closer than any earlier publication to the climate of fifteenth-century court art and to the creative intentions of a great court artist. --Sir John Pope-Hennessy, Professor Emeritus, Institute of Fine ArtsThis is certainly one of the most impressive contributions I have seen to the interpretation of courtly cultures in the Renaissance, and it is beyond a doubt one of the most important works on Mantua done in this century. What is more, it is interesting and original in so many ways, and manages at the same time to be so erudite and so lively, that it immediately establishes the author as one of a tiny group of scholars who really do make history and art history work together. Time and again, I found myself nodding in agreement, breaking into a smile at some striking or witty observation, or wishing I had said this or that.--Werner Gundersheimer, Director, The Folger Shakespeare LibraryThe unfinished frescoes by Antonio Pisanello in the Ducal Palace in Mantua have intrigued and puzzled art historians since their rediscovery in the 1960s. In the most extensive discussion in English of these important paintings, Joanna Woods-Marsden identifies the frescoes as a coherent cycle depicting an episode from the prose Lancelot, a thirteenthy2Dcentury French romance. Dating the cycle c. 1447-48, she argues that it was commissioned by Lodovico Gonzaga, ruler of Mantua, and suggests that the work, located in an important reception-hall in the mid-fifteenth-century palace, documents its patron's political and social self-image and ambitions.Not only does the book consider Pisanello's pictorial style in the context of the values, pretensions, and illusions of the Gonzaga court, but it also constitutes a study of his artistic career, of the links between the cycle's pictorial design and the Lancelot's narrative structure, and of Pisanello's physical execution of the frescoes and sinopie.

The Emergence of Forgotten American Folk Artists

discovery came in the 1920's, but the initial passion for its collection cooled noticeably after World War II.1 Its current rediscovery is tied to the mid-1970's burst of national pride that accompanied the bicentennial celebration when once again the glories of traditional creativity were trumpeted and once more high praise was lavished upon the art of the common man. Yet despite this double dose of excitement over folk art, its creators remain anonymous, obscure, and forgotten. In some cases this is to be expected, for all that remains as a testament of their existence is an unsigned and unclaimed carving or quilt. In other cases when biographical details are available, they are thin and scattered, yielding little other than the most general sense of an artist's personality. It is only rarely that folk artists from the past or the present leave behind the documentary materials needed to reconstruct their life histories or to facilitate an analysis of their creative intentions. It would appear, then, that folk art study might become a depopulated discipline focussed more on art than folk, more on works than lives, more on things than persons. This is a condition that once pervaded all folklore scholarship, when folklorists devoted themselves almost exclusively to the study of tales and songs.2 In the 1960's, when American folklorists expanded their view of tradition to include items of material culture, the artifact also became a subject for consideration. But it was also during the 1960's that a concern for cultural context was included on the folklorist's agenda. This intellectual move was accompanied by a shift of attention from isolated aspects of culture such as tale and song texts to whole performances and events. New studies were published which presented tellers as well as tales, singers as well as songs, and artists as well as artworks. The new 'folkloristics' that emerged from this academic transformation has focussed more attention on folk artists and has consequently helped to increase the general awareness of folk art's creators.3 We could say, then, that folk artists are emerging now because more scholars seem to care about them to an extent not seen before. But the simple revision of perspective will not in itself guarantee adequate consideration and understanding of folk artists. This is because the definition of folk art remains so problematic.4 There is still, after fifty years of haggling, no public consensus in America about what folk art is and what works it includes. Consequently there is no certainty about who is a folk artist and who is not. It is critical, then, for those who would ask that proper and deserved credit be given to folk artists to answer one crucial question-What is folk art? The answer, I think, will be found by accepting a tacit assumption of the new

Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Æsthetics: A Survey Based on the Prose Works

Hofmannsthal's Ad Me Ipsum, which appeared posthumously in 1930, was an attempt on the part of the author to reduce his major work to a compact, often gnomic, schema of his creative intentions. Long before the appearance of this confession, which is a compendium of literary interpretation rather than æsthetic evaluation, it was obvious that the premature criticism of the nineties had wrongly classified the poet in the art-for-art's-sake school. Not only were his early plays and lyrics highly colored by an exacting ethos (though its clear formulation came slowly and subsequently), but the various prose-pieces (Gespräche, Reden, Aufsätze, etc.) published at intervals from the early pseudo-authorship of Loris until the close of the poet's life testify to an æsthetic theory in which ethical considerations play an important, if not dominant, rôle.