Iconographic Tradition Research Articles

Profile Chrystusa w „Albumie Orbis” Norwida. Wstępne rozpoznanie

The article presents the profiles of Christ in the second part of Norwid’s Album Orbis in the context of the iconographic tradition. They derive from the Renaissance medals with the image of the Saviour. Particular illustrations have their origins in the tapestry Miraculous Draught of Fishes based on Raphael’s cartoon, a medal with a Hebrew inscription, an image found (according to the reports) around the Roman catacombs and in Lavater’s work. Christ’s ‘portraits’ contained in Album Orbis have been interpreted: they show Jesus as the most important of the famous men, the one who creates the history and is cognizable rationally by science and art. At the same time, He is the incarnated God, occupying a central place in Norwid’s work, both literally and figuratively. This is the manner in which the author expresses the compatibility of rationality and Revelation.

The pathos formulae and their survival (ENG/ESP)

This article attempts to set out and understand what art historian Aby Warburg called Pathosformel (pathos formulae), a key concept in his studies, though he never expressly offered a definition, nor explained what his understanding of it was. The emergence of the concept is traced in his work, deciphering its meaning and its implications for the analysis of images, also from the most significant and recent bibliography on the subject. Finally, the Pathosformel concept is applied to a contemporary photographic image which enables us to better understand its effect in the way it is received by its viewers, thus establishing a dialogue between the iconographic tradition of the past and the present.

Las visiones de Juliana de Norwich entre el estilo gótico y la abstracción

This article presents the relationship between the images that emerge from the visionary experience and the art of the time. The aim is to verify how visionary images fit in many cases the expressive forms coined by the iconographic tradition, which derives in part from the function of images in meditative and devotional practices. The visions of the recluse Julian of Norwich (c. 1342-43-1416), conform to the Gothic style, both by theme (the Passion of Christ) and by the mode of treatment, designed to provoke in the viewer / reader emotions and an intense compassionate feeling. Furthermore, this study will try to show how in the visionary experience new and unusual images can emerge that will only come to build a style or an artistic tendency centuries later.

History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism by Jed Rasula

<i>History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism</i> by Jed Rasula

A Decorated Bronze Belt from Gargul, Iran

ABSTRACTDuring the early first millennium BC, the southern Lake Urmia basin in northwestern Iran was in the throes of political, military and cultural upheaval. Its material culture, as exemplified by the finds at Hasanlu, Marlik and in Luristan, suggests the elite in the area were consumers of fine, locally produced metalwork. This paper discusses the discovery of an artifact that expands our understanding of the material culture of northwestern Iran during the ninth century BC: a decorated bronze belt found at Gargul, Iran. The chance discovery of this belt, which is closely related to a type known only from the most elite contexts at Hasanlu, Iran, provides a hint of the richness and complexity of the entire region. This belt demonstrates that Hasanlu was not the only regional polity wealthy and powerful enough to employ skilled artisans for the creation of sophisticated luxury goods. While the craftsmanship of this belt does not match that of exemplars from Hasanlu, it clearly evidences similarly advanced metallurgical skills, awareness of a range of contemporary and ancient iconographic traditions from the highest reaches of power in Assyria to local sites like Hasanlu, and the means and desire to combine them to aggrandise the bodies and identities of the local elite.

ФРЕСКА «БОГОМАТЕРЬ ВОПЛОЩЕНИЕ С АРХАНГЕЛАМИ» В СТЕНОПИСИ 1502 ГОДА СОБОРНОЙ ЦЕРКВИ ФЕРАПОНТОВА МОНАСТЫРЯ. ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИЯ И СИМВОЛИКА

The article for the first time provides an analysis of iconographic sources of the composition “Saint Mary of Blachernae with Archangels” in Dionisy’s 1502 wall-painting. The author proposes a new interpretation of the fresco as “Synaxis of the Archangel Michael”. For the first time the paper justifies the interrelation of the inscription on the icon with the liturgical text of “Lifting of the Panagia” rite. The author concludes that Holy Virgin image is interpreted as Panagia, and such interpretation seemed to have influence on the Russian iconographic tradition, both in Dionisy’s time and in the earlier period.

How to See a Scar: Humanitarianism and Colonial Iconography in the Putumayo Rubber Boom

This paper examines Irishman and British consul Roger Casement’s photographs of Indigenous people of the Putumayo Amazonian region. Casement traveled to the Putumayo in 1910 to investigate the crimes committed by the British-registered Peruvian Amazon Company. I argue that both Casement’s photographs and his writings on the role of visual perception in his travel diaries shed light on a crucial concept of visual evidence often eclipsed in scholarship on early photography and the desire for empirical proof. Although Casement insisted that it was necessary to register, in writing and photography, the marks of torture on the bodies of Huitoto and Bora people, he also declared that seeing their scars was a question of ‘point of view.’ In analyzing Casement’s concept of point of view and its relation to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates on the role of experience in the production of knowledge, I argue that photography, for Casement, not only shows, but also teaches the public how to see the indigenous body. I examine Casement’s negotiations with various iconographic traditions – like the anthropometric and the picturesque – and demonstrate how the British consul used the indigenous body to impart upon the public a specific pedagogy of the gaze.

Michelangelo’s Last Judgement: Art and Religion Between Reformation and Counter-Reformation

Michelangelo’s Last Judgement has been a controversial work since it was completed, as the Roman Curia was concerned with the impact of the fresco on Protestants’ criticism. As they opposed to religious art, and fiercely censured the popes’ lack of spirituality, the Roman Curia feared Protestants would use the Last Judgement as weapon against Catholics. Nevertheless, all criticism towards Michelangelo’s work and its consequent censorship came fundamentally from Catholics. Regarded as revolutionary, the Sistine fresco was also deeply indebted to medieval iconographic tradition of the Last Judgement. Michelangelo, in fact, could not have conceived his huge fresco without the inspiration taken from the many preceding iconographic models. This paper shall analyse Michelangelo’s Last Judgement fresco in its compositional structure, and particularly in its iconographic aspects. We shall discuss the elements which aroused the criticism of the Roman Curia, and which could have justified the destruction of the fresco.

Szmaragd cesarza Tyberiusza – „prawdziwe” wizerunki Chrystusa w twórczości Norwida

The article discusses Norwid’s attempts to reproduce the “true face” of Christ recorded on the pages of the second volume of Album Orbis in the form of a small gallery of the Saviour’s images. The collection consists of illustrations from various sources and Norwid’s copies of others’ works, the selection of which clearly reveals the intention of drawing on the iconographic tradition of the first centuries of the Church. The author determines the sources of the Saviour’s images and draws attention to the predilection for profile images, discussing it in the wider context of Norwid’s artistic and literary work.

Justice, Expiation and Forgiveness in the Graffiti and Drawings of Palermo's Secret Prisons

The Steri's prisons are to be investigated as a site of production of a peculiar religious culture: what kind of religiosity emerges, given the heterogeneous composition of the prison population? What religious practices (reciting the rosary, other prayers, lighting lamps, listening to mass celebrated in the corridors, etc.) take place in the cells? What kind of religious interaction take place between prisioners locked up in the same cell?. the pictorial cycle of cell no. 3 on the ground floor allows us to track down the iconographic model at play, identified as votive aediculae and the Via Crucis, as well as the authors' proximity-based iconic memory. But the drawings and graffiti are also linked through iconographic tradition to hagiography and theology, as emerges in the representation of the leviathan. In the reference to the harsh conditions of the prision one can read an implicit delegitimisation and criticism of the actions of a tribunal that does not consider this suffering to be sufficient punishment to merit forgiveness

Classical Humanism vs. Romanticism: two ways of imagining pre-modern torture at the castle of Pöggstall (Austria)

Pöggstall castle in Lower Austria has long been renowned to a national public for its ostensibly “authentic” medieval torture chamber located in an upper floor room of the 13th century keep. As recent investigations disclosed, the whole arrangement was not installed before the early 19th century when the Austrian Emperor Francis I owned the estate. The re-assessment of the interior betrays a “romantic” idea of pre-modern torture and punishment that imagined the “dark” Middle Ages as a “counter-draft” to “enlightened” practices of justice and criminal law. Whereas the allegedly “original” torture chamber is in fact an imaginative construction of historicism and romanticism, an inventory of the castle from 1548 lists, among other devices of torture and punishment, a curious item that might theoretically have served the same function. The object is referred to as a prison or a lock called an “iron cow” or “brazen bull”, a term that evokes associations with the legendary antique motive of the bull of Phalaris. The article seeks to examine the object in the light of the literary and iconographic tradition of the “brazen bull” and argues that – whether the Pöggstall bull was really intended to be used as a torture instrument or not – it proves, in any case, that the owners were well-acquainted with “humanistic” traditions of torture in antiquity.

How to Make “Colored” Japanese Counter-Reformation Saints – A Study of an Iconographic Anomaly

Abstract The 1627 beatification of the twenty-six martyrs of Japan was a major milestone in the history of the Church and especially for the missionary orders. These martyrs were the first officially recognized saints from the newly “discovered” lands. However, while the majority of the twenty-six were in fact Japanese, surviving paintings depict them as white-skinned missionaries and without any physical features that would have been considered “typically Asian” at the time. This paper analyzes this iconographic tradition and shows how it can be understood as a consequence of a process of assimilation of Christian Japan into the Catholic world view. Associating particular skin color with true faith and civilization was part of discourses that blended the physical “otherness” of these martyrs. This paper demonstrates how these discourses point to the first seeds of a racial perception of East Asians, which would later become the notion of “yellow.”

Widzialny znak niewidzialnej łaski. Tzw. komplet żywiecki w skarbcu katedry na Wawelu w świetle badań źródłowych i ikonograficznych

Wyjątkowe miejsce wśród tkanin liturgicznych przechowywanych w skarb­cu katedry na Wawelu zajmuje garnitur składający się z ornatu i dwóch dal­matyk, określany jako tzw. komplet żywiecki (ornat — nr inw. KKK tk/334, dalmatyka ze sceną Komunii świętej — KKK tk/334A, dalmatyka ze sce­ną Spowiedzi — KKK 334B). Paramenty uszyto z włoskiego altembasu ok. 1525 r. we Flandrii i bogato ozdobiono haftami figuralnymi według projektu atrybuowanego Lucasowi van Leyden (zm. 1533). Źródła archiwalne jedno­znacznie wiążą komplet żywiecki od 1598 r. z kościołem parafialnym Naro­dzenia NMP w Żywcu (obecnie konkatedra diecezji bielsko-żywieckiej), co wyklucza możliwość jego późniejszego przekazania lub też ewentualnego odkupienia.Wyjątkowość paramentów z Żywca podkreśla program ideowy na­wiązujący do udzielania sakramentów świętych. Z terenu Europy zachowa­ło się tylko kilka przykładów dekorowania tkanin liturgicznych przedsta­wieniami siedmiu sakramentów — np. w kolegiacie St. Vincent w Soignies (Zinnik) z końca XV w., na borcie z niezachowanej kapy z około 1470 r. fun­dacji hrabiego Giacoma de Savoia-Romont (Berno, Bernisches Historisches Museum, inv. 308), na haftach z flandryjskiej kapy z koń. XV w. (Detrorit, Institute of Arts), mimo iż spotykamy realizacje takich przedstawień w in­nych sztukach plastycznych, zwłaszcza w kręgu piętnastowiecznej sztuki niderlandzkiej — malarstwie ściennym, witrażowym, książkowym, rzeź­bie (głównie w dekoracji chrzcielnic) czy też licznie zachowanych rzeźbio­nych lub malowanych retabulach ołtarzowych oraz na tapiseriach.Na omawianym komplecie cykl sakramentalny rozdzielono po­między trzy obiekty — ornat i dwie dalmatyki, dzięki czemu był on wi­doczny w całości tylko wtedy, gdy używało go podczas liturgii trzech du­chownych — kapłan i dwóch diakonów. Pod względem ikonograficznym przedstawione sceny udzielania sakramentów czerpią z bogatej tradycji określającej sposób ukazywania kolejnego sakramentu w oparciu o wcze­śniej wpracowany typ ikonograficzny, który następnie był rozbudowywany przez dodawanie dodatkowych postaci lub też za pomocą wprowadzania charakterystycznych szczegółów czerpanych z codziennej obserwacji ży­cia liturgiczno-religijnego. Punktem wyjścia do budowania poszczegól­nych kompozycji jest łatwo rozpoznawalny „widzialny znak", konstytuują­cy kolejną scenę, za którym kryje się treść odnosząca się do „niewidzialnej łaski" właściwej dla poszczególnych sakramentów. Powstanie tak bogate­go w treści ideowe zespołu haftowanych przedstawień należy wiązać z ży­wym piętnastowiecznym nurtem określanym jako devotio moderna oraz treściami apologetycznymi w kontekście ruchu reformacyjnego Marcina Lutra po roku 1517, negującego naukę o siedmiu sakramentach Kościoła.

Re-Placing the Holy Land in Lope de Vega's Isidro: poema castellano (1599)

Lope de Vega's Isidro: poema castellano (1599) includes an extended episode in which the protagonist journeys to Jerusalem. This episode has been widely ignored by critics, who have discarded it as symptomatic of Isidro's problematic hybridity (i.e. its heavy-handed erudition and uneasy engagement with epic conventions, in a poem still read as a fundamentally intimate, lyrical paean to the Castilian countryside). This paper argues, on the contrary, that Isidro's eminently political programme of constructing an encomium of the new Court capital, Madrid, hinges precisely on manipulating models of sacred geography and history established during Isidro's extended Holy Land ekphrasis, models that are subsequently appropriated throughout the poem in a bid to sacralize national territory. Far from constituting an onerous distraction from the poem's eminently local interests, then, I propose to rehistoricize the Holy Land voyage, arguing that Isidro's journey—and particularly its centrepiece, an ekphrastic description of the biblical East—is in fact central to advancing those very interests. I further argue that the poem's Holy Land description draws on popular iconographic and cartographic traditions, as embodied in the work of Jesuit Jerónimo Nadal and mapmaker Christian van Adrichem.

Motivstudier. Kontinuitet og fornyelse i ornamentale hybridformer fra antikken til ca. 1600

Representations of hybrids of human figures, plants, and animals were prolific in all media in sixteenth-century Italian art. The motif is known back from Greek and Roman antiquity, both in poetry and visual art, which the artists of the sixteenth century – or the renaissance – claimed to revive. Yet the representations of hybrids from these two periods within the history of art differ remarkably. And at the same time they belong to an iconographic tradition that did not disappear in the medieval period, an observation which blurs the picture of these ornaments as rediscovered and revived in the renaissance. How then do motifs such as foliate heads or other phyto- or zoomorph creatures develop in visual art from antiquity to ca. 1600? The topological method can be applied to a tracking of these motifs over time in order to stress continuity and analyze the transformations which took place through the centuries. This article reflects on some methodological and historiographical aspects of studies of motifs in art history. In a double-sided strategy it both aims at challenging the persistent notion of the renaissance as a period rejecting the middle ages and reviving antiquity (i.e. it stresses the continuity of the sixteenth century with the preceding centuries); and it suggest some characteristics of the visual paradigm of sixteenth-century Italian art (i.e. it describes some of the innovations of the period).

How Love for the Image Cast out Fear of It in Early Christianity

Iconoclastic and iconophilic impulses have long vied for pre-eminence in Christianity, coming to one particularly fraught crisis point in the Byzantine Iconomachy of the eighth and ninth centuries. Funding both impulses, this paper argues, is a profound Platonic ambivalence about the image. For Plato, the image not only deceives and enslaves; it also reveals and inspires. Plotinus, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, John of Damascus, and Theodore of Stoudios articulate their own iterations of Plato’s hopes and fears about the image as they attempt different strategies for resolving these dueling inclinations. This paper traces the evolution of image theory across these thinkers to illumine how Theodore of Stoudios’ approach magnifies Platonic image hopes and quells fears in a way that prepares for the ongoing resolution of image anxiety in the iconographic tradition. More than a purely historical interest, this arc of image thought have continuing relevance for image theory today.

«¡España viva!»: Personifications of Spain in Lope de Vega's «comedias de santos»

This study concerns the personification Espana as she appears, briefly, in four saints plays by Lope de Vega. It presents an analysis of her function, character, and likely appearance. It argues that Lope deploys Espana –in the majority of cases in commissioned plays forming part of public festivals of national significance– to advocate the hispanicization of the lives of non-Spanish saints and of universal Catholic dogma. The essay argues further that, influenced by the iconographic and emblematic traditions, Espana is characterized by Lope as courteous and genteel at home, but feisty and belligerent when faced with foreign adversaries, her appearance on stage probably reflecting aspects of that character.

Thinking the Obvious

This article traces the steps taken by a particular person, Peter, towards an assisted voluntary death, in Switzerland, in order to grasp and analyse the negotiations that accompany such an undertaking, as well as the carrying out of such a contemporary manner of dying. Two moments in particular are observed, which reveal two distinct and interconnected concerns. The first moment is that of medical examination, one step of the process through which the manifest justifications for requesting assistance with voluntary death are evaluated. The article takes up the “obviousness” of the demand, considering that its multiple significations, contextualized within Peter’s life history, can more soundly be apprehended with the help of Roland Barthes’s idea of the “Neutral”, or “desire for Neutral”, characterised as the search for a mode of semiotic engagement that eludes or thwarts signifying oppositions. The second moment is that of the assisted suicide itself, in which the particular sequence of gestural movements during dying are grasped by way of a double iconographic tradition, that of compassion and lamentation, so as to make available their ethical and aesthetic stakes.

Knowledge and practice pictured in the artist’s studio. The ‘art lover’ in the seventeenth-century Netherlands

This article examines the long overlooked representation of the ‘art lover’, or liefhebber, in the artist’s studio in the seventeenth-century Netherlands and the ways in which the liefhebber’s image coalesced with a larger cultural discourse of connoisseurship, amateurship, and artistic practice. It situates these images in the iconographic tradition of the Flemish collector’s cabinet, and demonstrates how the values inherent to the konstkamer became part of the visual language and meaning of the studio visit. Drawing academies, manuals, and art theoretical treatises reshaped the role of the art lover in and outside of the studio, ennobling artist and art lover alike. In this way, Dutch and Flemish artists, such as Pieter Codde, Frans van Mieris and Michael Sweerts, ‘pictured’ a new form of artistic knowledge and modernized an iconographic tradition.

Contenuto e significato del prologo al Narciso di Hryhorij Skovoroda

Hryhorij Skovoroda (1722-1794) was an alumnus at the Kyivan Mohyla Academy, an institution founded in 1632 that played a crucial role in Eastern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its courses were held primarily in Latin, and Greek and Hebrew were also taught. Skovoroda is considered the last exponent of Ukrainian baroque and founder of Eastern European philosophy. The significant influence of his thinking can be found in many Russian and Ukrainian writers and thinkers. The article focuses on the writing and publication of Skovoroda’s dialogue Narcissus and its Prologue. The figure of Narcissus is, unusually, positive for Skovoroda and connected to the theme of know thyself in the Augustinian sense. He was led to make this association by an iconographic tradition which can be traced back to certain late medieval representations of Narcissus as a symbol of the contemplative life. From the ontological point of view, it is suggested that Skovoroda’s ontology is a Christian Plutarchism: a transformation of Stoic individual hegemony into an ability to grasp the invisible divine, in a perspective close to St. Augustine. The Prologue is Skovoroda’s philosophical testament: an original synthesis of Latin culture and humanism with modernism and Hesychasm’s spirituality.