Wealthy Patrons Research Articles

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The Admissions Dilemma

An admissions officer at a graduate business school faces a dilemma. The development office is cultivating a relationship with a wealthy alumnus who wants his daughter to attend the institution. But the young woman's credentials fall short of the school's admissions standards. Excerpt UVA-E-0359 Oct. 28, 2010 The Admissions Dilemma Having just returned from a lengthy meeting with the dean of Birdwood Business School and the director of its development office, Janel Lehman sat down at her desk to gather her thoughts. As Birdwood's director of admissions, Lehman knew her recommendation to admit the daughter of a trustee and prominent businessman would not only have an immediate impact on the future of two applicants, but also might affect the capital campaign Birdwood had recently initiated. Additionally, Lehman realized that her decision would set a precedent upon which future admissions criteria could be based. Birdwood Business School Birdwood Business School had long been regarded as one of the premier business schools in the country. Like other top programs, the school relied heavily on the generous financial contributions of its alumni and other wealthy patrons to help finance the program and its continued development. To maintain its strong academic reputation and its elite status among business school programs, Birdwood attracted top faculty and provided cutting-edge resources and classes to its students. These efforts came at a hefty price, but they set Birdwood apart and allowed it to attract the best applicants and a long list of corporate recruiters year after year. To build and maintain a top program was expensive, and tuition alone did not cover a substantial part of the overall program cost. . . .

Making Morpho butterflies blue

![Figure][1] Morpho rhetenor . Photo credit: Marco Giraldo. For centuries, Renaissance artists pursued the most opulent pigments for their wealthy patrons, and lapis-lazuli-based ultramarine blue was the rarest and most prized of all. Although the lack of natural blue pigments has not

Gregory, Serge Vladimir Antosha and Levitasha: The Shared Lives and Art of Anton Chekhov and Isaac Levitan (review)

REVIEWS 729 hermetic symbolism are called upon to explain his name, the choice of a barrack (lodge) for the meeting with him, his love for singing and his almost feminine features, even his smell of sweat. Other important recurring elements of War and Peace, such as numerology (p. 315), the contraposition of light and darkness, the oak (as tree of life), the comet, the book, the sky, the door, are connected to the same tradition(s). Of particular interest are the idea of death as a form of rebirth to a higher degree of perfection (pp. 350, 355), which explains Prince Andrei’s fate, and the figure of Natasha as personification of Tolstoi’s particular philosophic-religious syncretism. When she speaks of Pierre as ‘dark blue with red’ and ‘rectangular’ she is combining, Faggionato maintains, the traditional colours of Christ’s robe with the hermetic symbolism of divine humanity. Meanwhile, Nikolen´ka’s dream in the epilogue is viewed as an allusion to victory over death and time via connections across generations, ‘in an original interpretation of the alchemic opus as permanent physical and spiritual resurrections of the fathers in the sons’ (p. 368). As we know this solution for Tolstoi was only temporary, and by 1873 he had lost all interest in the hermetic sciences (p. 317). Nevertheless, Faggionato argues that the titles of such late works as Path of Life, Circle of Reading, Resurrection, The Living Corpse demonstrate that Tolstoi had not dismissed a particular way of imagining things, of using words in all their evocative power (p. 369). It is impossible here to do justice to the complexity of this important scholarly study, which should be made available to a wider audience in translation as soon as possible. University of Milan Laura Rossi Gregory, Serge Vladimir. Antosha and Levitasha: The Shared Lives and Art of Anton Chekhov and Isaac Levitan. Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, IL, 2015. ix + 248 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $39.00 (paperback). In his Introduction Serge Gregory comments that, despite the equal billing of the two figures of his title, his focus is principally on Levitan (p. 5). His achievement is to have supplemented the meagre materials on Levitan available outside Russia. He has plumbed sources in archives and libraries in Russia, mainly letters and memoirs relating to the period. Many of the letters were written by Chekhov and Levitan’s mutual acquaintances, mostly women, who loved one or other of the grouping, and sometimes caused painful disagreements or catastrophic fallings in and out of love. SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 730 Chekhov and Levitan were both born in 1860. Both overcame hardship in their early lives, and both experienced a maturation of their artistic prowess in the 1880s and ’90s, accompanied by a substantial and rising popularity. They died within a few years of each other at the height of their creative powers, latterly so undermined by illness: Chekhov of TB in 1904, and Levitan of a weak heart in 1900, possibly brought on by syphilis, contracted much earlier (a topic of particular attention in this study). The counterpointing of these two creative artists draws attention to their small circle of mutual friends, already well known from the extensive materials available on Chekhov’s life. However, it is now clear from Gregory’s work that the love triangles involving Levitan among these friends were especially intense. At the same time, the letters and memoirs provide a fascinating window on the life of artists on private country estates of the period. It was the practice to escape the pressure and climate of the capital cities in the summer months. The luckier ones accepted invitations from wealthy patrons (Levitan occasionally) or, as in the case of both Antosha and Levitasha, they would rent a room or a cottage on the estates of the more impoverished gentry to have time and space to practise their crafts. The correspondence and memoirs not only give information on working practices of the creative artist, but also the leisure times and personal interactions of these summer communities. The reader can trace the sources of Levitan’s Russian landscapes from the various locales he visited and is shown similar...

Diversity Matters: Theoretical Understanding of and Suggestions for the Current Fundraising Practices of Nonprofit Art Museums

Using the theory of the commons and social obligation theory of inclusion, this article critically examines current art museum fundraising practices in the United States that rely too much on traditional White, wealthy patrons. This leads museums to emphasize the limited interests of traditional donors, neglecting the needs of and potential support from their broader communities. This results in the tragedy of the anticommons, where museums are underused by diverse publics. The article advocates for more inclusive relationship-based fundraising practices that build relationships with local community members and include their perspectives on fundraising practices through diversifying fundraising leadership, understanding diverse giving patterns, and utilizing innovative fundraising methods while remaining sensitive to cultural differences.

The ‘Chicago Idea’: Patronage, Authority, and Scientific Autonomy at the Field Columbian Museum, 1893–97

The ‘Chicago idea’, as anthropologist William Henry Holmes defined it, was that a businessman was uniquely qualified to conduct the business of a museum. Chicago philanthropists and businessmen embraced this idea when they appointed Frederick J. V. Skiff, a former world's fair administrator with no scientific training and no museum experience, to be director of the new Field Columbian Museum. Skiff's appointment was somewhat controversial in the scientific community. In 1895, only two years after the museum was first established, the outspoken paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope sharply criticized Skiff's style of management in American Naturalist. By 1897, Skiff's scientific staff was in open rebellion, charging the director with incompetence and worse. The difficulties of Skiff's early tenure as museum director are examined here, with special emphasis on his troubled relationships with the curatorial staff. An examination of the ‘Chicago idea’ — as embodied by Skiff — provides an insight into the tension between wealthy patrons, their hand-picked directors, and curators in America's Gilded Age museums.

Straddle by David Cavanagh

David Cavanagh. Straddle. County Clare, Ireland. Salmon Poetry / Dufour Editions. 2015. isbn 9781910669082 The little town in which I teach has sustained a Thursday-night open-mic poetry event for the last twenty-one years, and I have been a regular part of it for ten of those years. Most of what I’ve heard there, however good or bad, has had a certain open-mic quality to it, something in the way it is oriented toward its audience. I mean this as a compliment; I’m all for poetry that considers its audience, especially when I am in that audience. As a species, the open-mic poem aims to be accessible, engaging, witty, and—occasionally—poignant. This is the kind of poem David Cavanagh attempts— often successfully—to present in Straddle. As the title suggests, Cavanagh’s poems often engage with themes of border crossing, but rather than academic and obtuse poems on the perennially trendy topic of liminality , he offers poems that are accessible in their concreteness and specificity. The theme is often expressed in poems about living in the very porous borderlands of Frenchspeaking and English-speaking Canada. He also writes frequently about crossing back and forth across the US/Canadian border. If the poem “Crossing”—which reads in its entirety, “‘Anything to declare?’ / asks the border guard. / Oh my. Where to begin?”—is a little too pat and pandering, the theme is handled beautifully in the longer “Behind the Plate in Montreal, 1964,” which deftly weaves together a sense of separation by language and religion with a sense of community in sport. That the book is published by a press based in Ireland perhaps adds one more subtle border crossing to the mix. Cavanagh’s best poems achieve not only clarity but also a poignancy that derives from simple wisdom expressed with great vividness and grace: open-mic at its absolute best. These poems include “Neil Armstrong R.I.P,” “Skating on Mallettt’s Bay,” and “The Beautiful Men.” This last is perhaps the collection’s finest. In it Cavanagh, with great economy of language and precision of image, compares to their rugged pioneer ancestors those young fathers cultivating the new masculinity, the revised expectations of fatherhood. The wit lies in that these young men are not in contrast to the rough-and-ready pioneers but rather resemble them in their adventurous spirit of discovery: “The fields and far / mountains of gentleness they’ve fumbled for, / found.” The poem is simple, vivid, insightful, and completely accessible. World Literature in Review 72 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 I’m not among those who ardently bemoan poetry’s migration into academia. I think, in fact, the modern university has nobly stepped into the role once played by wealthy patrons of the arts and thus helped to keep literature alive in an economy indifferent to it. It is crucial, however, that we maintain poetic cultures outside of the university as well: the local open-mic as a remedy for total academic hegemony. Straddle is an example of this other tradition at its best. Benjamin Myers Oklahoma Baptist University Seamus Heaney. Selected Poems, 1988–2013. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2014. isbn 9780374535612 Farrar, Straus and Giroux has published Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems in two volumes, the first including poems from 1966 to 1987, the second, 1988–2013. The strength of the poems in this second volume generally matches that of the first, with certain poems such as “The Rain Stick” and “Postscript” equaling anything in his entire body of work. Although one wishes for the greater fullness of a “complete poems,” thinking with fondness of some poems not included here, this collection nevertheless satisfies and serves to concentrate the muscular poetic force of Heaney. Heaney himself preferred a poetry that was “unfussy and believable” and “the virtue of an art that knows its own mind.” His poetry is restrained and essential yet not terse, cramped, or epigrammatic. His poetics is willing to include “buttermilk and urine” in the same line but eschews flourish and ostentation. Though rhythmically formal , often written in masterful iambic pentameter lines, his verse has the feel of careful , natural speech (as Eliot said it should...

Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross: Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Old South. By Andrew H. M. Stern. Religion and American Culture. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. x + 268 pp. $39.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Southern Crucifix, Cross: Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Old . By Andrew H. M. Stern . Religion and American Culture. Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press , 2012. x + 268 pp. $39.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesAndrew Stern has done a great service in exploring relations between elite white Protestants and Catholics in Charleston, Louisville, and Mobile. Catholicism in the has been at issue at least since the poet Allen Tate observed that the region was a feudal society without a feudal religion, yet historians have reflected relatively little about how Catholic practice and institutions fit into the questions we ask about the region.This brief book adds nuance to the literature on elite Catholics first explored by Jon Wakelyn in 1983, and it should encourage future work. As late as 1840, Catholics in the southern states made up the majority of all American Catholics. They held positions of prominence throughout the region and Catholic institutions served people of all kinds. Jefferson Davis, to cite one example, was educated in Catholic schools in Kentucky.Stern boldly argues that and cooperation, more than violence and animosity, marked Catholic-Protestant relations in the antebellum South (2). This was rooted in Catholics' accommodation to slavery. Catholic Church, like the Protestant churches of the South, mirrored the racial values of its adherents. This gave the church a cultural home in southern society, Stern writes. Southern Protestants supported the institutions--charities, schools, and churches--central to Catholicism, and Catholics supported the institution central to the South (146).The strongest evidence of tolerance came in the cooperation between Catholics and Protestants in building charitable institutions, schools, and churches. Catholic nuns nursed residents of Augusta during a yellow fever epidemic in 1839. In 1836, the Sisters of Nazareth opened St. Vincent Infirmary in Louisville. Catholics opened orphanages in Mobile. Kentucky boasted a large system of Catholic schools that educated many Protestants. Catholics worshipped in buildings owned by Protestants, and raised monies for their own churches from wealthy patrons, who often praised the beauty of Catholic liturgy. The point of cooperation that mattered most, Stern argues, was Catholic support for slavery. In this, he affirms earlier work on the subject, but the focus on cities outside of Maryland and Louisiana, home to the largest numbers of black Catholics in the region, mean that the book does not engage in their experiences.Case studies can be suggestive, and Stern is right to claim that scholars have often focused on the notorious incidents of violence and prejudice against Catholics (two of the most notorious anti-Catholic riots in the period occurred in Louisville and Charleston) at the expense of the more ordinary ways that Protestants and Catholics lived together. …

Augustine beyond the Book: Intermediality, Transmediality, and Reception. Edited by Karla Pollmann and Meredith J. Gill. Brill's Series in Church History 58. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2012. xxiv + 364. $144.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Augustine beyond the Book: Intermediality, Transmediality, and Reception . Edited by Karla Pollmann and Meredith J. Gill . Brill's Series in Church History 58. Leiden, Netherlands : Brill , 2012. xxiv + 364. $144.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesProviding excellent reading and suggesting substantive grist for further research, these fourteen papers were presented at, or commissioned for this volume after, a 2009 conference held at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS).The first section, Visualizations of Augustine, includes Karla Pollmann on as an authoritative figure in life-cycle commissions in the high Middle Ages by competing religious communities. Each used the narrative to promote its claim and status as the true order purportedly established by Augustine. It also includes Vladimir Cvetkovic, who does not use Augustine's teaching in icon theology because his theology of divine light, free will, and grace does not match the Orthodox theology of uncreated light and thus lacks the notion of synergy between God and human beings in their process of deification. Cvetkovic provides a cogent tutorial on the characteristics and theological significance of the dialectics between light and design within distinct forms and functions of the icon. Meredith J. Gill describes convergence of Augustinian themes in Counter-Reformation depictions of living spaces of wealthy patrons that presented fictionalized iconography of Augustine's saintly attributes personifying the Liberal Arts and the active/contemplative dilemma. In these scenes, his shadow is a metaphor for his almost before Creation (as ambivalence, abyss, and falling away), and light for apprehension of God and divine grace.In Dramatizing on Stage, Dorothea Weber writes about as a frequent protagonist in medieval and early modern plays, which were probably intended to strengthen Christian resolve (rather than convert Jews or, laterally, Protestants). Until the mid-eighteenth century, the omniscience attributed to as auctorial character corresponds with his enormous general regard as a teacher of the Church. Thus in plays featuring nothing about his life, was frequently the figure who interpreted the sequence of events and supplied crucial backstories. In later centuries, the Confessions became the primary text for portrayals of an erring man searching for truth who is finally converted. Goran Proot recounts the importance of drama to the Jesuit and Augustinian schools established in the Low Countries in the years following 1574. Bound volumes of detailed performance programs were resources for teachers creating plays for their own classes. Some tens of thousands of school dramas all served both political authorities and the church by robustly affirming Catholic doctrine in splendid festival programmes, processions, and public pageants.The third section, Augustine in Confessionalized Contexts of Spirituality and Devotion, includes Carolyn Muessig on in manuals of sermons for preachers, and how was referred to by lay people who had absorbed pastoral depictions. Julia D. Staykova tells why the early seventeenth century translations of the City of God and the Confessions depended on the widespread popularity decades earlier of St. Augustine's Meditations (or his Manual , or his Soliloquies ), an inauthentic compilation of devotional materials drawn from the Confessions, various medieval meditative sources, and the Bible. Feike Dietz demonstrates the devotional effect of widespread distribution of particular distillation of Augustinian (or Pseudo-Augustinian) thought via early modern printed collections of emblematic mottoes, pictures, and epigrams. …

No Longer Lost in the Wilderness:

No Longer Lost in the Wilderness:

A Kabuki Innovator, Nakamura Kanzaburō XVIII, Dies Too Young: Where Does Kabuki Go from Here?

A Kabuki Innovator, Nakamura Kanzaburō XVIII, Dies Too Young: Where Does Kabuki Go from Here? Laurence Kominz (bio) Kabuki actor, producer, and director Nakamura Kanzaburō XVIII passed away on 5 December 2012, at age fifty-seven, of acute respiratory failure following a half-year battle with throat cancer. Kanzaburō was not just another kabuki star, he was the soul of the art for a huge number of fans, and the hope for kabuki moving in new directions in the future. The “XVIII” indicates that he was the eighteenth-generation actor to bear this name, and his branch of the Nakamura family has owned theaters, managed companies, and directed plays since the early seventeenth century, as well as occasionally providing star actors for the stage. Our Kanzaburō was more, and did more, than all of the above. At the same time that he assiduously studied the work of his illustrious father and other actors of the preceding generation, Kanzaburō’s dedication to kabuki’s heritage as a commoners’ art and his sense that kabuki needed to move in new directions in order to thrive led him to make three big innovations that proved to be immensely successful, both commercially and critically. The foundation of Kanzaburō’s success was his charisma on stage. He was a master of every sort of role—he played intense samurai [End Page 267] avengers, lovesick shopkeepers, and women of every sort, including the horrific avenging ghost of a brutally murdered wife. Small in physical stature, he avoided playing stripe-faced martial superheroes (aragoto roles), but no one on the kabuki stage could rival Kanzaburō as a master of kabuki comedy. He brought his charisma and warm personality to these roles—every member of the audience felt that Kanzaburō was acting “just for me,” and this gave him a fan base greater than any other performer. While other leading actors feel most comfortable in fancy restaurants in the company of wealthy patrons and the artistic elite, Kanzaburō rubbed elbows with fans on the street, hung out with lowbrow television comedians, and avidly followed popular trends in music and contemporary theater. No kabuki actor had a truer compass bearing on what today’s Japanese audiences enjoy. And Kanzaburō came to the conclusion that it was, in fact, just what kabuki audiences enjoyed in the heyday of kabuki in the Edo period (1600–1868): action, personality, intense emotionality, slapstick and wit, and creative hybridization of past and present on stage. He knew that the time had come to break some tried-and-true rules of the kabuki stage, but he often stated that an actor had to first master traditional forms in order to know how, when, and why to break or change them. Kanzaburō (then using the name Kankurō) began to put his ideas to the test in 1994 with Cocoon Kabuki. Theater Cocoon was a new venue in the Shibuya neighborhood—hangout of teenagers and twenty-year-olds, a very different milieu than the National Theater across the moat from the Imperial Palace, and the Kabuki-za, in the posh Ginza district. In Tokyo location means a lot, and collaborating with avant-garde playwright and director Kushida Kazuyoshi, Kan zaburō incorporated elements of underground theater and used a more intimate theater space to create dynamism, excitement, and intimacy reminiscent of Edo period kabuki. The fight scenes in Cocoon plays were incredible—in one play a battle took place in a pond with real water covering the width of the stage, splashing spectators in the front rows; in another play Kanzaburō’s hero fought off an army during a blizzard, to the accompaniment of music by alternative rock musician Ringo Shiina. Kanzaburō’s inherited position of authority, his on-stage brilliance, his imagination as a producer-director, and the commercial success that followed allowed him to assemble a company of actors to support him in his artistic experiments. In 2000 Kanzaburō opened his famous Heisei Nakamura-za, a temporary, moveable tent theater, seating about nine hundred people, that partially recreates an intimate Edo period playhouse. While often situated in Asakusa, Tokyo’s lowbrow entertainment district, Kanzaburō [End Page 268] took his tent theater all over Japan, and even...

Neighbors and Missionaries: A History of the Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine by Margaret M. McGuinness (review)

Reviewed by: Neighbors and Missionaries: A History of the Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine by Margaret M. McGuinness Diane Batts Morrow Margaret M. McGuinness , Neighbors and Missionaries: A History of the Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). xixi + 230230 pages. Historian Margaret M. McGuinness has written a notable study of The Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine (SCD), an extraordinary community of women religious founded in 1910 by Marion Gurney, a convert to Roman Catholicism. This sisterhood began its work in New York's lower East Side. Here its members lived in settlement houses alongside the poor, providing social services, religious education, and sacramental preparation for neglected and impoverished immigrant populations. Their ministry was outside the traditional roles commonly associated with most American sisterhoods that provided education, healthcare, and conducted orphanages, leading McGuinness to characterize the sisterhood as "unknown to most Catholics" (1) and "a well-kept secret even on New York's lower East Side" (2). Gurney's concerns "about poverty-stricken Catholics living in congested urban areas without access to either religious education or sacramental preparation, as well as about those living in rural areas where priests and churches were few and far in between" convinced her "that social settlements were the most effective way to meet the material and spiritual needs of those Catholics she believed were in danger of being lost to the Church" (4). An experienced settlement worker, Gurney held that "Christianity is a social religion in which unity of faith overcomes all class distinctions." She required the sisters to "live among those whom they seek to help, identifying themselves in all that is suitable with the life of their neighbors after the example of our Divine Lord 'who dwelt among us.'" To Gurney, Catholicism was more than a creed. It constituted a way of life in which the "Christian Doctrine class gives the theory—the settlement is the workshop where the theory is put into practice" (9). Chapter one presents Gurney's elite background and her exposure to ideals of social transformation at Wellesley College. It also explores her [End Page 147] intense religious devotion that culminated in her brief membership in an Episcopalian sisterhood. Gurney later converted to Catholicism. In 1898, she co-founded St. Rose of Lima Settlement, the first Catholic settlement house in New York City. McGuinness notes that this institution differed from its Protestant counterparts because it did not seek "civic reform or better living or working conditions." Nor was it "a center for social reform" (32). Instead, Gurney advocated establishing the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine in the United States. She founded the New York Normal Training School for Catechists in 1901, and in 1908 she created the Institute of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine to train as catechists "intelligent women who may feel called to dedicate their entire lives to God in this apostolic labor" (38). Driven by her persistent fear that the Protestant settlements' social services would entice vulnerable Catholic immigrants away from their faith, Gurney convinced the archbishop to grant her community the necessary archdiocesan approval. Chapters two and three discuss the sisterhood's impressive achievements in New York. They established their flagship settlement, Madonna House, on the lower East Side of Manhattan in 1910 and Ave Maria House in the Bronx in 1930. In addition to teaching catechetical and sacramental preparation classes, they operated bread lines during the Great Depression, provided child care for working mothers and taught adults vocational and domestic skills to improve family living standards. To facilitate the Americanization process, the sisters also offered English classes, established troops of Boy and Girl Scouts, and fostered patriotism through military service by organizing the Columbus Volunteers. In the 1920s, wealthy patrons of the sisterhood enabled the purchase of properties for a community motherhouse, a novitiate and two summer campsites in Nyack and Peekskill, New York. The sisters provided their services primarily to Italian immigrants, but served Chinese, Spanish, and other nationalities as well, fulfilling Gurney's intention that the entire neighborhood "knew that the Sisters of Madonna House were there for the good of all without respect to race or creed" (67). However, by 1967...

The Renaissance portrait: from Donatello to Bellini

In words of cultural historian Jacob Burkhardt, fifteenth-century Italy was the place where notion of individual was born. In keeping with that idea, early Renaissance Italy was a key participant in first great age of portraiture in Europe. As groundbreaking artists strove to evoke identity or personality of their sitters-from heads of state and church, military commanders, and wealthy patrons to scholars, poets, and artists-they evolved daring new representational strategies that would profoundly influence course of Western art. More than a mere likeness, fifteenth-century Italian portrait was an attempt to wrest from unpredictability of life and shadow of mortality and image that could be passed down to future generations. The Renaissance Portrait, which accompanies a landmark exhibition at Bode-Museum, Berlin, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, provides new research and insight into early history of portraiture in Italy, examining in detail how its major art centers-Florence, princely courts, and Venice-saw rapid development of portraiture as closely linked to Renaissance society and politics, ideas of individual, and concepts of beauty. Essays by leading scholars provide a thorough introduction to Renaissance portraiture, while individual catalogue entries illustrate and extensively discuss more than 160 magnificent examples of painting, drawing, manuscript illumination, sculpture, and medallic portraiture by such artists as Donatello, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, Pisanello, Mantegna, Antonello da Messina, and Giovanni Bellini. With abundant style and visual ingenuity, these masters transformed plain facts of observation into something beautiful to behold.

The Old Testament in Byzantium (review)

Reviewed by: The Old Testament in Byzantium Joseph A. Munitiz S.J. The Old Testament in Byzantium. Edited by Paul Magdalino and Robert Nelson. [Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Symposia and Colloquia.] (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Distrib. Harvard University Press. 2010. Pp. viii, 333. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-884-02348-7.) In December 2006, while Dumbarton Oaks was undergoing major renovation, the Byzantine Studies department hosted a symposium on the Bible [End Page 81] in Byzantium in the Freer Gallery of Art to coincide with an exhibition on early Bibles. The present volume includes a selection of the papers presented on that occasion. In the introduction the editors raise three questions: how did Byzantines, Jews, and Christians “encounter” the text; how did the Christians “use” the text; and how typical was the Byzantine reaction when compared with that of contemporary cultures. Subsequent chapters point to the importance of the prophetologia (books of liturgical readings); James Miller examines the real channels by which most people came to know the Old Testament in auditory fashion, and Georgi Parpulov analyzes the psalters written mainly for the piety of the wealthy. John Lowden presents a more specialized case in the elaborately decorated Octateuch manuscripts, which only very wealthy patrons could afford and probably formed a tiny trickle as far as dissemination of the text was concerned. Two chapters tackle the subject from a historiographical perspective: Elizabeth Jeffreys’s discussion of how the Old Testament account influenced Byzantine chronicles, and Claudia Rapp’s text on how it provided models for emperors in the early period. Clearly, as Derek Krueger discusses, the scripture text was a dominant presence in Byzantine monasticism, but, as Robert Ousterhout points out, it can hardly be said to have had any practical impact on Byzantine architecture. Two final chapters reach beyond the borders of the Empire—Ivan Biliarsky presents the evidence for the impact of Old Testament models on medieval Bulgaria, and Jane Dammen McAuliffe examines their effect on the Qur’ān. The handsome volume is well up to Dumbarton Oaks standards, with only a few errata noted (p. 12n44, vaut in place of veut; p. 233, perhaps “at” has misplaced “as” on the penultimate line; p. 255n1, misspelling of Complutense). All eleven chapters are the work of specialists, some renowned for their previous publications and clearly of the highest quality. All repay careful study, and all provide new insights. Yet so much remains to be done. Lowden (pp. 110n15, 131) and Jefferies (p. 170n67) only briefly refer to the major question faced by students of the Old Testament in Byzantium—what texts of the Septuagint were commonly available? Certainly not that published in the twentieth century by Alfred Rahlfs, nor indeed that of the Göttingen editions. These attempt to reproduce the earliest text, but presumably it is the “Byzantine” tradition that one should consult, although it has been shown that a late Byzantine exegete, like the monk Malachias, was using a Lucianic text.1 In second place, so much remains to be said about the questions that ordinary laypeople, not just clerics, were asking about Old Testament texts—questions preserved in the many “Questions and Answers,” erotapokriseis (such as those of St. Anastasios of Sinai), and the [End Page 82] catenae with which the Byzantines demonstrated their immense interest in the “divine” text. Joseph A. Munitiz S.J. Campion Hall University of Oxford Footnotes 1. J. R. Busto Saiz, “The Biblical Text of ‘Malachias Monachus’ to the Book of Wisdom,” ed. N. Fernández Marcos, La Septuaginta en la Investigación Contemporánea (V Congreso de la IOSCS) (Madrid, 1985), pp. 257–69. Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press

Frederic Crowninshield: a Renaissance man in the Gilded Age

Frederic Crowninshield: A Man in the Gilded Age. Gertrude De G. Wilmers and Julie L. Sloan. Amherst, MA, and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. 352 pages. $39.95 (hardcover).In 1860, historian Jacob Burckhardt popularized the term Renaissance to describe the late Middle Ages period in Italy during which the greatest artists of Western Civilization flourished. In the years following Burckhardt's novel historiography, American artists trained in France and Italy, like Massachusetts-born Frederic Crowninshield, ushered in a renaissance of their own in the United States. In a fashion similar to its predecessor, artistic creativity, innovative techniques, and money generated from commercial expansion fueled the American version. The heir to old wealth, Crowninshield deplored the crass materialism of the nouveau riche robber barons who funded much of the art produced in the late nineteenth century, but he also believed that his work would inspire both his wealthy patrons and the common workingman with an appreciation of the more surreal and beautiful things in life that could not be assigned a cash value.This attractive and lavishly illustrated volume is divided into two parts. The first section traces Crowninshield's biography from his birth into one of Boston's wealthiest established commercial families in 1845 through to his death in Italy in 1918. It is impossible to separate his life story from his art. His patrimony afforded him the opportunity to pursue his career independent of financial concerns, and it provided him many commissions through his impressive social connections. His greatest influence on other artists came through his seven-year stint as an instructor at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where he instituted an original curriculum that included summer sessions, a course on murals (the first such class in the United States), and readings in the literary classics because he believed artists had to have a solid cultural foundation. He further broadcast his vision of art through his one book, Mural Painting (1886), and in magazine articles.The second and larger section is a detailed critical examination of Crowninshield's art. The chapters are arranged by genre: stained glass, mural designs, and painting. Running three times longer than the next longest, the chapter on stained glass reflects what the authors considered to be their subject's most important artistic contribution. Julie Sloan is an expert on stained glass with several publications to her credit, and is clearly in her element discussing this topic. The authors argue that the most innovative and original work of the American renaissance was done in this field. Even though Crowninshield was overshadowed by contemporaries Louis Comfort Tiffany and John LaFarge, Crowninshield produced important works of his own-some of which can still be seen throughout New England. …

Batik Belanda: Transformed Identities Cross Boundaries in the Visual Arts (Or: Eliza van Zuylen and Creativity at the Margins)

Originating on the north coast of Java, batik Belanda (Dutch batik) favoured motifs of buketan or bouquets of flowers inspired in part by European motifs, in contrast to traditional Javanese patterns. It might initially seem these are merely adapted wholly into the vigorous graphic language of the indigenous batik aesthetic — but it is more interesting than that. This is a fascinating example of inter culturation, through the transformation of personal identities and the crossing of both artistic and scholarly boundaries in the visual arts.Patterns of colonial intermarriage played a key role in the development of this art form. At the end of the eighteenth century, when the VOC went bankrupt, many Indies-born spouses of Dutch colonials stayed on in Java, as did wives of successful Indo-Europeans established there. The exclusion of Indo-European women from the European upper class freed them to cross strict boundaries of craft tradition not only in design but also in marketing: while local Javanese women made batiks at home for their own use, these women began manufacturing batik for sale. Some became well known, their work sought after by wealthy European, Chinese, and Indonesian patrons. This essay presents as an example the life and work of one of the most successful of these entrepreneurs, Eliza van Zuylen. Despite conceding the exceptional technical quality of batik Belanda, early scholars gave it short shrift — even denigrating it as 'bad taste'. Subsequent revival of interest indexes a scholarly reappraisal of this remarkable art form that challenged boundaries on so many fronts.

1744.1 "How Is It, Umpire?" The 1744 Laws of Cricket and Their Influence on the Development of Baseball in America

Last Monday afternoon, a match at cricket was play'd on our Common for a considerable Wager, by eleven Londoners, against eleven New Yorkers: game was play'd according to the London Method; and those who got most notches in two Hands, to be the Winners.1The earliest surviving laws of cricket are preserved on the edge of a handkerchief titled The Laws of the Game of Cricket. In small crowded text, the laws frame a picturesque scene of an early cricket match. batsmen wield archaic curved bats in front of two-stump wickets, the bowler is poised to release an underhand delivery, and two umpires stand on the field.2 Clearly modeled after one of cricket's most enduring paintings, Francis Hayman's Cricket in the Mary-le-bone Fields,3 the handkerchief also shows scorers with their tally sticks in the foreground.4 Eight and a half years later in November 1752, these same laws were typeset for the first time in the New Universal Magazine as The Game at Cricket, as settled by the Cricket-Club, in 1744, and play'd at the Artillery Ground, London. And finally, these same laws were printed in pamphlet form in 1755 as Game at Cricket, as Settled by the Several Cricket-Clubs, Particularly That of the Star and Garter in Pall-Mall.5From 1744-1755 the wording of the laws remained largely the same, apart from modernizing ye to the, and dropping the older practice of referring to the ball as she. Thus all three versions represent the first recognized laws of the game. While the laws themselves may not have altered, other changes are telling. titles, for instance, show a progressive adoption of this code, at least among London clubs. three different formats-from decorative handkerchief to London periodical to portable printed pamphlet- also reflect a growing desire to standardize the competitive game. 1755 pamphlet was clearly produced for distribution to those interested in a more regulated and formal game.These developments are of most interest to a baseball readership when compared to equivalent measures in baseball a century or so later. There are similarities. most obvious and fundamental is that the earliest laws of cricket, like their counterparts in baseball, are nowhere near sufficient to play the game from scratch; they simply prescribe a few elements (probably the ones most disputed) of an otherwise known custom of play.In September 1743, London's widely read Gentleman's Magazine was sourly critical of the increasing popularity of cricket, observing that noblemen, gentlemen and clergy had made butchers, coblers [sic] or tinkers their companions in the game.6 Newspaper references to the game are plentiful around this time even before its first laws were formalized. For example, in a great Cricket- Match, attended by the Prince of Wales in 1733, Surrey Men and 11 of Middlesex ... were very hard match'd: the Surrey Men beat only by three Notches.7 In another example, a great Cricket-Match in July 1740 between the Gentlemen of London and the Gentlemen of Chislehurst took place at the popular Artillery-Grounds.8 game was sufficiently familiar in 1738 for the London Daily Post and General Advertiser to describe Balls of Fat in a butchered sheep's caul as round like a Cricket-Ball.9In general, cricket in southeast England in the 1740s was far more uniform and more widely played than baseball was in America in the 1840s. Indeed it had been played by commonly accepted rules for decades. Why then did it take so long to codify the game formally?The signed Articles of Agreement by & between His Grace the Duke of Richmond and Mr. Brodrick for two cricket matches in 1727 provide a partial answer. This was a time when formally organized cricket matches, as opposed to village matches, were played on private enclosed fields. Wealthy patrons fielded a mix of gentlemen and paid talent (employees or recruits from local villages) and indulged in large wagers on the matches. …

‘Enlightened Protestants’: the improved shorescape, order and liminality at early seaside resorts in Victorian Ireland

This essay examines the introduction of the seaside in Victorian Ireland in relation to the construction and representation of cultural identities, particularly those of the Protestant landed classes. The discussion is set in the context of the creation of early English seaside resorts, a number of which, like the Irish seaside, were established by large landowners for wealthy patrons. Seaside development is related to a nineteenth-century discourse of ‘improvement’ common to both England and Ireland. This discourse acquired special significance in Ireland where it encountered a congruent discourse of religious identity that attributed habits of orderliness to the Protestant ruling class in contrast to the disorder associated with Catholics. The making of the seaside in Ireland embodied typical colonial practices of marking ownership of territory and demonstrating progressiveness. It also entailed imposing a ‘Protestant’ orderliness that delimited it from the surrounding country and Catholic homesteads to provide an improved shorescape as a setting for proper conduct. It has been argued that English resorts like Brighton, and the beach generally, functioned as liminal spaces. This essay concludes by exploring to what extent the new Irish seasides presented opportunities for liminal experience that might disrupt the presentation of new forms of orderliness.

The Value of Verse: Storytelling as Accounting in Froissart's Dit du florin

The Value of Verse:Storytelling as Accounting in Froissart's Dit du florin Eliza Zingesser (bio) Et [Philozophie] dist, "Amis, se tu savoiesQue c'est grant cose de loengeEt com prisie en est li enge,Plus chier l'aroies a avoirQu'en tes coffres nul grant avoir." And [Philosophy] said, "Friend, if you knewWhat a great thing praise isAnd how prized is its kind,You would want it more dearlyThan any great sum in your coffers." (vv. 395-99) Froissart, Le Joli Buisson de Jonece The Dit du florin was written in Avignon in 1389, shortly after Froissart's visit to the castle of one of his patrons, Gaston Phébus, count of Foix and viscount of Béarn. In this 492-line dit, Froissart takes his last, misshapen coin as an interlocutor, conversing about the circumstances in which he lost most of the money paid to him by the count in compensation for his poetic services. The coin advises him to offset his loss by seeking further monetary rewards from four other patrons: Bureau de la Rivière, the count of Sancerre, the dauphin of Auvergne and the viscount of Acy (vv. 428-43), each of whom receives praise specifically with respect to his financial largesse. The text's most recent [End Page 861] editors, Kristen M. Figg and R. Barton Palmer, describe it as a "begging poem, whose circulation among the men it praises would be intended to elicit an appropriately generous response" (15). I think, however, that Michel Zink is rightly skeptical of Froissart's self-deprecatory posturing. Zink points out that while the author figure appears to be berating himself for his inability to hold onto his money, the coin presents another side of his career, reminding him (and readers) that he has written books that will immortalize him as a writer ("Le temps, c'est de l'argent" 1460). The present article seeks to show that the façade of modesty and self-criticism of the Dit du florin is more superficial than has been realized. Couched in a frame in which Froissart appears to rebuke himself while praising his patrons is in fact a subtle demonstration of the power of the writer, who, through his stories (contes), does the real accounting (compte), determining the worth of various patrons, who may even be counts (comtes) such as Gaston Phébus, count of Foix. On several occasions (vv. 107-08, 276-77, 331-32, 381-82), Froissart invites readers to contemplate the link between these three homophones—not always orthographically distinct in Middle French—suggesting that the writer wields more influence when it comes to the assessment of value than the wealthy patrons whose image he can manipulate at will.1 While Zink offers a reading of the coin in the Dit du florin as a symbol of time and memory, I will argue that it might be understood equally well as a double of the written text. There are two salient parallels between currency and poetry, both of which Froissart seems to have been sensitive to.2 First, the value of coins, like the value of words, is not real or inherent but rather the result of contractual agreement.3 This was particularly true in the Middle Ages, when actual currency used as payment (monnaie de change) was distinguished from the money used for accounting and the determination of value (monnaie de compte).4 Moreover, poetry, like [End Page 862] currency, is a medium of exchange (involving ideas in one case and goods in the other) (Shoaf passim). Froissart suggests other parallels between accounting and the writer: currency circulates widely, and, at least within the context of the Dit du florin, is able to tell of its travels. Additionally, it is via written records that a patron's reputation—which might be thought of as a kind of "value"—is established for posterity. The association of coinage and artistic production probably makes its earliest appearance in medieval poetry in the figure of Nature's forge. In his deployment of this figure, Froissart follows in a line of illustrious writers including Macrobius, Bernard Silvestris, Alan of Lille, Heldris of Cornwall...

Vereinsgeselligkeit und soziale Integration von Arbeitern in Deutschland, 1860-1914

Abstract This article scrutinises the development of social clubs that recruited their members both from the working and the middle classes, inquiring as to how club membership influenced the social relations between the classes. It shows that due to state interference and dependence on patronage, the singers', shooters', gymnasts' and ex-servicemen's clubs strengthened social inequality rather than serving as a place for sociable exchange between the classes. Towards the end of the century, this changed slightly as popular activities such as choir contests and gymnastic tournaments became more prominent and provided club members from lower classes with the opportunity to gain social recognition. However, the potential of popular culture to foster sociability was not realised to its full extent. In the absence of alternative funding sources, leisure clubs were still dependent on contributions from wealthy and influential patrons. This was different in the British case, where market actors such as news pub...