Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s Note: New Baggage for Old MastersJohn CunnallyJohn Cunnally Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMore“Most people look at a painting with their ears,” runs the old Chinese proverb, although I suspect this is actually a bit of cynical Yankee wit of the P. T. Barnum variety, disguised as a pearl of ancient oriental wisdom. Those of us who teach art history know very well how difficult it is to persuade students to abandon what they have already been told about a work of art, replacing this inherited sagacity with the evidence of their own eyes and the discoveries of their own research. Perhaps we have good reason to be thankful that so many of these students come to our classrooms with zero prior knowledge of the subject, possessing the unbiased innocence of the “transparent eye-ball” that Emerson experienced only in moments of transcendental ecstasy.The essays in this issue of Source, while ranging in topic from ancient Rome to postwar School of New York, share the common goal of refreshing the verbal “baggage” carried by a work of art, replacing some bit of long-established information with a fresh finding born of personal visual observation and hands-on investigation. While it may never be possible for us to separate the eye from the ear by experiencing an artistic artifact as a purely visual phenomenon without the interference of verbal baggage of some sort, the six scholars in this issue can at least proclaim (like Mimi in Rent) that they have been “looking for baggage that goes with mine.” Their contributions involve the recalibration of the date of a work (Goring), clarifying its iconographic content and social context (Sevilla-Sadeh, McCall), and identifying its specific literary and visual sources (Manca, Turner, McCarthy).A well-known Roman mosaic in the Vatican Museums, known as the Asàrotos òikos (“unswept floor”), creates the illusion of a dining room floor covered with the fallen remnants of a messy banquet—chicken bones, crab claws, fruit pits, nutshells—even a tiny mouse nibbling at the scraps. In our first essay Nava Sevilla-Sadeh notes that another section of the same mosaic floor depicts a series of tragic theater masks, although the latter are almost never shown when the floor is illustrated in art history textbooks. Far from presenting a thoughtless Roman pastiche of incompatible Greek motifs (the usual explanation for the juxtaposition), the Vatican floor seems to offer an integration of the abject with the divine, a concept entirely compatible with classical religious and philosophical thought. The state of abjection or decadence (literally, a “falling down” from greatness) was considered a necessary prelude to the elevation of the soul to immortality and divine status, a process acted out on the Greek stage and in the Dionysian mysteries.Timothy McCall examines a portrait of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, painted by Piero Pollaiuolo during the duke’s state visit to Florence in 1471. Aware of the function of costume in signaling and confirming elite status in Renaissance Italy, McCall focuses on Pollaiuolo’s presentation of the duke’s attire, especially the brilliant red stone that hangs as a pendant on his chest. Such gems were eagerly sought and commanded high prices, not just for their inherent rarity, but because they were believed to possess apotropaic and healing powers. Many individual stones acquired their own proper names, achieved celebrity, and were gifted and exchanged, like marriageable daughters, as tools of diplomacy and dynastic alliance. McCall identifies the duke’s pendant as a balas stone known as il libro because of its booklike shape. It had earlier belonged to King Alfonso of Naples and then Lorenzo de’ Medici, who sold it to Sforza to help cement their political agreement. Having traveled so far from its native Afghanistan, the adventurous balas was last reported in the hands of the French king Louis XII, part of the loot acquired during his conquest of Milan.Among the iconographic and compositional invenzioni attributed to the fertile imagination of Michelangelo is the scene of the Temptation on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, showing Eve sitting on the ground in front of her standing partner. Earlier depictions of this episode invariably portray the first couple upright, standing side by side or flanking the tree of knowledge. As Joseph Manca observes, Michelangelo’s design places the head of Eve next to the groin of Adam, and “we would not be the first to point out that Eve maintains a position suggestive of fellatio.” Manca confirms the artist’s intent to evoke an act of oral sex, citing the passage in the Song of Solomon where the poet’s bride recalls, “I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.” The use of the Song of Solomon by Michelangelo, or rather by his theological advisor (Giles of Viterbo?), is consistent with the Solomonic character of the chapel itself, whose proportions and decoration followed the biblical description of the first Temple of Jerusalem, highlighting the role of the pope as heir to the Old Testament kings.A Flemish tapestry of the mid-sixteenth century showing Mercury visiting his lover Herse in her bedroom is the subject of James Grantham Turner’s essay. The composition is plainly based on the famous scene of the wedding of Alexander and Roxana which decorates the master bedroom of the Villa Farnesina, painted by Raphael’s associate Sodoma in 1519. But, as Turner points out, this bedchamber in the private upstairs piano nobile was not available to visitors of the villa in the sixteenth century—unlike the more accessible loggie of Galatea and Psyche on the ground floor—and we know of no copies or engravings of Sodoma’s fresco from that period. So how did the tapestry weaver, Willem de Pannemaker of Brussels, learn about the details of the Alexander and Roxana fresco? Turner suggests that “the draftsman who supplied the weaver’s cartoon had direct, living knowledge” of Sodoma’s painting, most likely transmitted to him via the workshop of Raphael’s pupil Giulio Romano in Mantua.The Irish actor and dramatist Charles Macklin, famous for portraying Shylock on the London stage for almost fifty years, was the subject of a portrait painted by John Opie, here analyzed by Paul Goring. Though undated, the painting is usually assigned to 1792 because it was copied in an engraving inscribed with that year. Goring, however, provides evidence to redate it to 1788, soon after Macklin (at age eighty-nine) suffered a loss of memory while performing, and was forced to retire from the stage. Opie’s portrait is unusual in presenting Macklin as a writer rather than an actor. Goring makes the case that the painting was part of an attempt by Macklin to reinvent his public image, depicting him as still active and creative in the writing of plays, if not performing them. In fact, Macklin’s comedies were especially popular. His slapstick bedroom farce, Love à la Mode, was recently revived by the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, leaving its audience (in the words of one critic) “in stitches of laughter.”Our last essay, by David McCarthy, focuses on a polychrome wooden sculpture of 1962 by H. C. Westermann, in the form of a forty-inch-high question mark bedaubed with multicolored splashes of enamel paint. Dismissed by the critics of the day as “ugly,” “vulgar,” “burlesque,” and even “repulsive,” Westermann’s punctuation mark has certainly improved with age, and we can now appreciate its ironic self-awareness as questionable art and its goofy pop-art aesthetic. McCarthy further demonstrates the vernacular origins and droll urbanity of the piece by revealing its debt to the graphic work of Saul Steinberg, whose witty vignettes and playful letterforms were a much-beloved feature of the New Yorker magazine from the 1940s onward. In 1961 Steinberg published a series of cartoons featuring question marks transformed into modernist paintings and statues, or disguised as fashionable patrons visiting an art gallery. Whether Westermann intended his sculpted punctuation to evoke the inscrutability of contemporary art, or the puzzlement of its viewing public, we will never know. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Source Volume 39, Number 3Spring 2020 Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/707739 Views: 307Total views on this site © 2020 by Bard Graduate Center. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.