Iconographic Themes Research Articles

<em>Restauro storico</em> y <em>sacrae imagines</em> en Évora bajo el gobierno del arzobispo don Teotonio de Braganza (1578-1602)

This essay focuses on the figure of D. Teotonio de Braganca, the Archbishop of Evora between 1578 and 1602, showing the importance of his building projects and artistic decorations, under the sign of Tridentine values. He adapted the principles of ‘restauro storico’ and the revitalization of ‘imagine sacrae’ in the Early Christian sanctuaries of his archdiocese. He promoted a new type of sacred architecture using artists formed in Rome, such as the architect and sculptor Pero Vaz Pereira. The art born in Evora in the late-16th century, under the sign of the Contra-Maniera, achieves a quality that rivals with that of the reign of King John III and the humanist Andre de Resende. Old cults and new iconographic themes emerge with D. Teotonio, such as SS. Mancos, Jordao, Comba and other martyrs considered Evora-born. He ordered several works for Madrid, Rome and Florence to enrich the Cathedral and the Carthusian Monastery founded by him. Thus this period forms one of the most remarkable chapters in Portuguese Tridentine art and deserves to be properly analyzed.

With Regard to the Geometrical Motifs with Antropomorphic Semantics Identified in the Neo-Eneolithic Visual Creation on the Territory of Romania. I. The Point and the Line

The prehistoric visual creation, with certain elements of spirituality, is the mark of a complex symbolic behavior, characterised by the use of the same artistic canons in the Upper Paleolithic until the Neolithic, in spaces and various cultural areas, which explains the identity of some decorative motifs, of geometric structure. These plastic elements, genuine symbols with antropomorphic semantics, represent the hidden motive of a sacred geometry through which it was reflected the multivalency of the archetypes and also and the perenniality of the iconographic themes represented in the prehistoric artistic creation.

Depictions of ships on roman lamps

Roman everyday objects were
 often decorated with motives of the aquatic environment. Very interesting group
 of such a artifacts are roman oil lamps found in the Roman provinces Germania
 Superior and Germania Inferior. They are characterized by repetition of
 iconographic themes connected to river or sea navigation. This paper deals with
 an attempt of interpretation connection between oil lamps and their
 decorations.
 

Impressions cosmopolites sur une collection muséale de peintures patachitra contemporaines du Bengale, au Portugal

In the contemporary work done by rural patua artisans, an Indian folk art, questions about tradition and innovation are interwoven with what I call “cosmopolitan impressions”. Focusing particularly on the recent development of women as painters and performers of the patua folk craft in an expanded market, through a study of the acquisition of a patachitra collection by the Ethnology Museum in Lisbon, I explore the cosmopolitan impressions in the work of such women from the village of Naya. I will analyse a few threads related to the conditions that lead women to become artisans of an art traditionally associated with men, and suggest that the particular attitude encountered within the patua community in Naya has enabled the more or less successful continuity of their activity up to today. First, I briefly outline their contemporary trajectories, before taking a detailed look at their views on their activity, and then I conclude with an overview of their iconographic themes. The combination of these overlapping threads provides evidence for what I call a “cosmopolitan tradition”.

Picasso e il vero volto dell’Arlecchino

Picasso’s famous Harlequin, once in the Staechelin collection and now in the Kunstmuseum, Basel, was painted in 1918 after the artist’s return from his sojourn in Rome, Naples, and Pompeii. The figure stands alone facing the viewer, holding his black mask in his left hand and showing his “true” face. Behind him a cloth hangs on a rope. As an iconographic theme, the harlequin was very dear to Picasso, who painted him many times in various attitudes and styles. The unique feature in this version is the cloth, which never appears in Picasso’s other Harlequin paintings. The present study proposes that it could be a subtle reference to the iconographic themes of the Veronica and the Acheiropoietes. The former could well have been familiar to Picasso from examples in Spain. The latter he may have encountered in Italy - possibly in medieval copies in Rome’s Lateran and elsewhere in Latium.

ST. PETER AND ST. PAUL’S CHURCH IN VILNIUS: A STUDY IN META-CODAL SYMBOLISM OF CHRISTIAN ARCHITECTURE

The paper examines Christian architecture from the perspective of “meta-codal function”, i.e. through examination of architectural symbolism expressed solely by architectural means. Emphasizing symbolic and semantic content of architecture, the paper offers a broader research field of architectural artistry by using a wider iconographic comparison. As a representative of baroque architecture and the most prominent example of architectural symbolism, St. Peter and St. Paul’s Church in Vilnius (1668–1702) has been selected for the research. The iconographic programme of this church is compared to most distinct iconographic themes identified through the analysis of some examples of historic Christian architecture. By this method, the research detaches from the usual stylistic analysis and poses the most basic question in architectural artistry: is architecture capable of expressing the independent artistic content which can translate more than architecture’s general appearance.

Pawāyā: An Early Terraced Brick Temple

In the vicinity of the small village of Pawāyā in Madhya Pradesh lie the ruins of Padmāvatī, an important city in ancient times. To date, only one large mound has been excavated at the site, revealing a monumental pyramidal brick structure built in two stages with the earliest phase of construction dating either to the late Nāga or early Gupta period. A temple dedicated to Viṣṇu once crowned the terraces, and although this temple is lost, many interesting and unusual stone and terracotta sculptural fragments survive, most notably an extraordinary lintel once belonging to a gateway of the temple. The aim of this paper is to build up a picture of the architectural form of the terraces and the iconographic themes of the temple. Moreover, insofar as is possible at present, the monument will be situated within its historical context.

Domina Paupertas: the praise of voluntary poverty by St. Francis of Assisi and its reflection in late medieval Spanish painting

As is well known, St. Francis of Assisi heroically embraced evangelical poverty, renouncing material goods and living in abject poverty, in imitation of Jesus Christ. Furthermore, through his writings and oral testimonies collected by his disciples, the saint fervently urged Christians to live to some degree voluntary poverty , of which Christ was the perfect model. By basing this reading on some Poverello’s quotations, this paper intends to show the potential impact that these exhortations from San Francisco to poverty may have had in the late medieval Spanish painting, in some iconographic themes so significantly Franciscan as the Nativity and the Passion of the Redeemer. Through the analysis of a large set of paintings representing both issues, we will attempt to put into light if the teachings of St. Francis on evangelical poverty are reflected somehow in Spanish painting of the late Middle Ages.

La casulla de los apóstoles: una casulla de imaginería en la catedral de Lima

La colección de ornamentos litúrgicos de la Basílica Catedral de Lima es de gran valor, a pesar de la fragilidad de los materiales y de su continuado uso. Estos ornamentos destacan por su singularidad, calidad técnica, cualidades estéticas y suntuosidad, manifestadas tanto en la selección de los materiales como en la riqueza de los temas iconográficos que ostentan, a la vez que reflejan las prácticas cristianas desarrolladas durante el período virreinal y los primeros años de vida republicana. A pesar de su importancia, estas prendas aún no han suscitado el interés de los investigadores y no se han desarrollado estudios al respecto. Esta es una primera aproximación.

Visualizing Belief and Piety in Iranian Shi‘ism

In her book, Ingvild Flaskerud once and for all dispels the idea that Islamlacks and opposes all forms of visual art. Hers is a pioneering work, whichguides her readers through Twelver Shi‘i visual culture in Iran. She framesher discussion by drawing on semiotic theory, particularly Charles SandersPeirce and Roland Barthes, in order to show both the interpretive possibilitiesinherent in visual piety and the ways in which meaning is fixed.Flaskerud is uniquely positioned for writing about visual piety, as she hasalready produced an artistic visual film (“Standard Bearers of Hussein:Women Commemorating Karbala,” 2003) on Shi‘i women’s practices inIran. Visualizing Belief and Piety in Iranian Shi‘ism is a Geertzian “thick description”(Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures) composed of three parts,each of which is followed by black-and-white pictures analyzed in thatpart. The first two parts address two iconographic themes respectively. Thethird discusses the usage of pious art in votive practices and ritual spaces ...

Pierfrancesco Callieri. « ‘Dionysiac’ Iconographic Themes in the Context of Sasanian Religious Architecture », in : D. Kennet, P. Luft, eds., Current Research in Sasanian Archaeology, Art and History. Proceedings of a Conference held at Durh

Pierfrancesco Callieri. « ‘Dionysiac’ Iconographic Themes in the Context of Sasanian Religious Architecture », in : D. Kennet, P. Luft, eds., Current Research in Sasanian Archaeology, Art and History. Proceedings of a Conference held at Durh

Hellenistic Court Imagery in the Early Buddhist Art of Gandhara

AbstractThe focus of the paper is on the relationship between Gandharan artistic culture and the presence of a Hellenistic court milieu during the 1stcent. before and after CE in the territories of Ancient Uḍḍīyāna. What emerges from new literary and archaeological evidences are significant interactions between artistic production and the evergetism made by the princes of Apraca and Oḍi: many evidences demonstrate the substantial involvement as donors of these local dynasties in the construction of the sacred landscape. What influence did these local dynasties have in the structuring of religious communication? How was this local power and his Hellenistic background reflected in the images and complex decorative Buddhist monuments? In order to understand the dynamics between power and religious communication in the sacred space of Early Gandharan society not only some well-known iconographic themes are now interpreted as self-representations of an aristocratic habitus, but also the presence of a ‘beholder in the image’ is detected as powerful visual strategy to stage the religious experience as a suggestive ritual performance.

Key moments of terrestrial life of the main biblical characters in sacral iconography of Vojvodina

Beside the motif of death, the motifs connected to pregnancy, delivery and childhood are the most often motifs depicted in Christian iconography in general. They indicate the importance of terrestrial life and living among people of the main Biblical characters: Jesus Christ, the Mother of God and St. John the Baptist. Presenting the key moments of any human life, starting from conception, pregnancy and delivery, maternity and childhood, all the way to death, these iconographic themes try to stress out the double nature of given characters, both divine and humane. The first iconographic presentations of these Biblical events in Vojvodina belong to biography (fresco painting) of the Fruska Gora mountain monasteries. In the middle of the 18th century, in Vojvodina, as well as in all other Austrian countries where the Serbs lived, some artists, who marked the beginning of a new baroque period, appeared. This research raised a question: how is it possible to find biological-medical content in dogmatic, theological teachings of the Bible characters, predominantly the Mother of God and Jesus Christ and events related to them, which were described in Bible and artistically depicted in sacral iconography? The sacral works of art in Vojvodina were analyzed in this research from this aspect. The themes were systematized and, with respect to all religious dogmas, some biologicalmedical and physiological elements in events of these characters' lives were classified into seven thematic groups.

Les gravures rupestres du Chalcolithique et de l’âge du Bronze ancien de la région du mont Bego. Les mythes cosmogoniques des premiers peuples métallurgistes des Alpes méridionales

More than 100,000 graphic signs, of which 40,000 are figurative, were carved on around 4000 rocks in the mont Bego region, in Tende, in the southern Alps, approximately 80 km north of Nice (Alpes-Maritimes). These carved rocks are dispersed at an altitude of 2000 to 2700 m in the high valleys surrounding mont Bego and are regrouped in seven different sectors: the Merveilles valley, Valaurette, val de Fontanalba, val de Sainte-Marie, Valmasque, col du Sabion and the Vei del Bouc lake. The daggers, halberds and axes represented by these carvings make it possible to attribute them to Chalcolithic cultures, like the Remedello, or to early Bronze age cultures, like the Polada or the Rhodanian, and to date them between 3300 and 1800 years BC. Among the 40.000 figurative carvings, very few iconographic themes are represented: corniculates (about 70% of all figurative carvings), harnesses (2.9%), daggers (about 5.4% of all figurative carvings), halberds (1.1%), axes (0.08%), reticulates (5.5%), rectangular or oval shaded zones (6.9%) and several rare anthropomorphous figures. The consistency of the techniques and of the iconographic themes shows that these carvings were not carried out at random. They correspond to a conception of the world, transmitted from generation to generation by way of a graphic code. These representations are in fact ideograms: by carving signs and symbols, these Chalcolithic and Bronze Age populations depicted real or imaginary objects and by combining them, they created ideas in relation to the natural or supernatural world. The rock carvings of the mont Bego region correspond to a symbolic language inscribed in stone at the end of the fourth millenium and throughout the third millennium BC., by the first metallurgic settlers in the southern Alps. The ideograms were thus inscribed on rocks polished by Quaternary glaciers in the sacred Bego mountain. These carvings, the works of agricultural and pastoral populations in the southern Alps during the Chalcolithic and the ancient Bronze age, translate not just the daily preoccupations of these populations who needed rain, sources and lakes in order to fertilise their fields, but also their cosmogonic myths. At the centre of these myths are the bull god, brandishing lightning, master of the storm and provider of fertilising rain, and the high goddess, mother goddess or goddess earth, who needs to be fertilised herself by rain from the sky in order to bring abundance to humans.

La sculpture en marbre à Chypre à l’époque hellénistique et sous l’Empire : essai de bilan

The study of the marble sculpture discovered in Cyprus has been much neglected in comparison with that of works in limestone and terracotta. Only that from the sanctuaries of Soloi-Cholades and the group of the Roman period found in the gymnasium and theatre at Salamis have been published in detail. This check-list represents the main collection of material for the Greek and Roman periods attested in the large cities of the island, arranged by archaeological context (sanctuaries, public buildings, residential areas). It is noteworthy that the site of Kourion has yielded an especially interesting assemblage, as with the “ Villa of Theseus” at Paphos. These data give rise to numerous questions – the origin of the marble, places of production, choice of iconographic themes, etc. – to which answers would have to be sought in the context of a new programme of research.

The Nimrud bowls: New data from an analysis of the objects

AbstractThe metal vessels known as the “Nimrud bowls” were discovered in the North-West Palace at Nimrud. Despite their clear archaeological context, the style and the iconographic themes of their decoration clearly betray that they are not the work of Assyrian craftsmen. Traditionally, they have been connected to the so-called “Phoenician bowls”. Today, a more general Levantine origin for the Nimrud bowls is proposed, although it has hitherto not been possible to determine their exact provenance. A review of the Nimrud bowls focusing specifically on their shape and decoration techniques provides new hints, hopefully contributing to a better understanding of the manufacture and function of these vessels. Furthermore, some characteristics shared by these vessels highlight the unity and homogeneity of the cluster and help to identify the manufacturers.

The fresco at the entrance to Danilo II church of the Mother of God at Peć

The fresco at the entrance to Danilo II church of the Mother of God at Peć

Black-Figure vases in the collection of the British School at Athens

Although some of the black-figure vases presented here were studied by Beazley and others, many are published for the first time. This article provides a summary of the collection followed by a catalogue of the objects by fabric and shape, and an illustration of each piece. The fabrics include Athenian, Corinthian, Boeotian and Euboean. A wide range of shapes, styles and iconographic themes are represented. An appendix of largely unpublished Athenian black-figure from the site of Kynosarges, excavated by the BSA (1896–7), appears at the end.

Vested Interest: Redressing Jews on Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling

A yellow circular badge, or Jewish signum, was painted by Michelangelo on the left shoulder of Aminadab, an ancestor of Christ located prominently in the lunette above the papal throne. Although previously overlooked, the badge has profound importance. This essay explores the implications of this sign as a quintessential indicator of demeaned status in a society that demarcated Jews by imposing degrading dress codes, legislated their role as moneylenders, and subjected them to humiliating public spectacles. Michelangelo's inclusion of the badge opens new lines of inquiry about iconographic themes in the chapel, his representations of Old Testament personages, and his own attitudes toward the Jewish community. The conflicting discourses discussed in this essay underscore the complexity and deep-seated ambivalence of the role of Jews in Christian theology and society.

L'INFLUENCE DE LA PENSÉE OCCULTISTE SUR LE SYMBOLISME BELGE: BILAN CRITIQUE D'UNE "AFFINITÉ SPIRITUELLE" À LA FIN DU 19e SIÈCLE

Since a few years, the number of studies devoted to occultism and esotericism is increasing in the humanities. Nevertheless, the relationship between occultism and painting has been rarely investigated, even though it is known that many artistic movements, such as Romantism or Surrealism, have been deeply influenced by occultist thought. This paper attempts to investigate the occultist influence upon one of the most important artistic movement of the 19th century, Symbolism, focusing especially on Belgian Symbolism. This study is partly inspired by a number of recent publications that do demonstrate the closeness between these two movements, but without discussing their actual historical connections. A historical approach, however, allows us a new perspective on symbolist painting, which has too often been presented merely as reflecting a mysterious aesthetic (not really for scholarly reasons, but rather because only few authors have tried to understand its stylistic background and sources of influence). A systematic study of the connections between occultism and Belgian symbolism proves to be fruitful in several respects. It can be demonstrated that Symbolism was the concrete medium of expression of the occultist revival of the late 19th century; a revival which, without Symbolist painting, would probably not have had the same scale. Discreet by nature, occultism found in painting a proper medium to embody its ideas and theories. Reversely, Symbolism found in occultism a source of icono-graphic themes, subjects or patterns; and it can be demonstrated that occultism contributed in a very concrete manner to the elaboration of the symbolist style. Thus, this article purports to throw new light on the occultist revival of the late 19th century, and to make possible an investigation of the emergence of Symbolist aesthetics. © Koninklijke Brill N V, Leiden, 2002.