Search

This paper introduces the Watermark Imaging System (WImSy) which can be used to photograph, document, and study sheets of paper. The WImSy provides surface images, raking light images, and transmitted light images of the paper, all in perfect alignment. We develop algorithms that exploit this alignment by combining several images together in a process that mimics both the "surface image removal" technique and the method of "high dynamic range" photographs. An improved optimization criterion and an automatic parameter selection procedure streamline the process and make it practical for art historians and conservators to extract the relevant information to study watermarks. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated in several experiments on images taken with the WImSy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the results are compared with manually optimized images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The knowledge of the detailed material composition of paper can help art historians, archivist, librarians, paper historians, and conservators to determine the possible age of a document or a work of art. The dating of paper by the identification of specific paper components is especially applicable to paper from the 19th century. In this era, many changes in the paper production technology occurred and new raw materials were introduced in relatively short time intervals. ATR-IR and Raman spectroscopic measurements were used to analyze the chemical composition and structure of papers from the 19th century. The infrared spectra showed the general material composition of the papers. More specific information on the different paper components and their distribution in the paper were obtained by Raman microscopic measurements. The resulting Raman images visualize the detailed chemical structure of the papers including all components such as paper fibers, filler pigments, sizing agents, and color pigments. Special emphasis was made on the spectroscopic identification of different paper fiber types, like straw, esparto, and sulphite and sulfate chemical wood pulp, which were introduced to paper production during the second half of the 19th century. It could be shown that the specific spectral differences in the Raman spectra of the different paper fiber types are related to different amounts of hemicellulose xylan compounds on or in the cellulose fibers. Graphical Abstract [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chassica Kirchhoff, an art historian and curator, has published a book titled "The Thun-Hohenstein Album" which focuses on the study of the second volume of the Thun-Hohenstein albums. These albums consist of drawings of armours and armoured figures from the early 17th century. The book explores the origins, references, and authors of the drawings, as well as the artistic, social, and political contexts in which they were produced. Kirchhoff argues that these drawings were not just technical sketches, but rather tokens of a memorial culture that conveyed symbolic significance. The book is divided into five chapters that analyze different aspects of the album, including plate armour in Augsburg, late medieval martial arts' visual culture, and the commemorative aspect of the drawings related to tournaments. The book also examines specific drawings that celebrate the memories of Maximilian I and Charles V, as well as the Augsburger artistic and intellectual society. Overall, the book offers a unique perspective on the cultural significance of arms and armours beyond their military purposes. [Extracted from the article]

We also quite often organize special themed issues with the help of guest editors: usually there is at least one such issue each year. So if you have a nearly finished paper in process, or you have an idea for a themed issue, please get in touch with me, the editor. I Visual Anthropology i is always looking for well-written papers that contribute to the analysis of visual aspects of culture, whether those papers have been written by anthropologists, art historians, or media specialists. [Extracted from the article]

The article presents a speech by the late Professor Ernst H. Gombrich, delivered on January 4, 1966. Topics included teach art history in art schools, the golden age of art, problems face by the artist in the modern civilization, iconography as an approach to presenting the realities of art in its earlier settings, usage of periods of Greek art and Renaissance art as the most suitable idea for teaching art history, and identification between artistic and stylistic issues.

Sample this: a hypothetical menu book of fish recipes from both sides of the Bengal border; a barbed wire running through the Ichhamati, showing the river's indifference to political borders; a sandstone and fabric pillar standing as a metaphoric monument of unity between religions, commemorating Gandhi's peace march in Noakhali in 1946; an accordion book opening out, unfolding narratives immortalised in Ritwik Ghatak's films. These are some of the artworks that were showcased at The Legacy of Loss: Perspectives on the Partition of Bengal, an Art Exhibition that the Kolkata Partition Museum Trust (KPMT) organised in collaboration with the Kolkata Centre for Creativity (KCC), to commemorate the 74th anniversary of India's Partition. The Exhibition ran from 17 to 29 August 2021 at KCC, and was supported by Tata Steel and the Emami Foundation. Conceptualised and conceived by the late art historian, Dr. Rajasri Mukhopadhyay, and curated by KCC, this was an unique Exhibition on the Bengal Partition by five contemporary artists – Paula Sengupta, Vinayak Bhattacharya, Debasish Mukherjee, Amritah Sen and Dilip Mitra – each with a distinct style and perspective on the theme. As Rajasri Mukhopadhyay put it, Partition provided 'the psychological topography for this Exhibition. The pictorial narratives ... [found here] are embedded in the geographical sites of ancestry, the physical border, the trajectories of nostalgia in refugee colonies, and stories of inherited memories.' This paper will delve into the uniqueness of this Exhibition and argue for the importance of the Arts in preserving cultural memory, something that KPMT strongly believes in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a review of a book titled "Studies on Tantra in Bengal and Eastern India" edited by Madhu Khanna. The book explores the Tantric traditions of Eastern India, with a focus on the concept of Śakti in its various aspects. The volume is divided into three parts, covering topics such as syncretism between Śākta and Vaiṣṇava traditions, the Śākta Pīṭhas (pilgrimage sites), and Śākta theology. The articles in the book provide case studies and specific instances of Tantric traditions in the region. The reviewer notes that the book is a valuable contribution to Tantric studies and may be of interest to scholars in various fields. However, they also mention some typos in the volume. [Extracted from the article]

So if you have a nearly finished paper in process, or you have an idea for a themed issue, please get in touch with me, the editor. I Visual Anthropology i is always looking for well-written papers that contribute to the analaysis of visual aspects of culture, whether those papers have been written by anthropologists, art historians, or media specialists. We also quite often organize special themed issues with the help of guest editors: usually there is at least one such issue each year. [Extracted from the article]

Recent progress in the realm of imaging technologies has swiftly disseminated fresh methodologies for representing objects, broadening the horizons for scholars such as art historians, archaeologists, conservators, and conservation scientists. Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) and three-dimensional (3D) modeling via Structure from Motion (SfM) have rapidly gained popularity and are being employed by a wide range of users, expanding the possibilities for understanding objects of material cultural heritage from different perspectives. This paper explores the outcomes achieved through the application of these techniques to gain deeper insights into the surface of a bas-relief within a confined space. This methodology enhanced our understanding of the original sandstone surfaces of the bas-relief by integrating RTI and 3D visualization, thereby acquiring a novel investigative tool with enhanced illumination possibilities. A data fusion approach is proposed using photogrammetry to produce a Virtual RTI (V-RTI). In the case study reported in this paper, focusing on one inner wall of the chapel of Ellesiya at the Museo Egizio of Turin, V-RTI was employed to obtain useful surface information in a context where conventional RTI would have been impossible to achieve. Finally, the study compares the different techniques through direct qualitative and quantitative analysis, highlighting possible future developments from both instrumental and methodological points of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1985, Rick Asher and G.S. Gai, jointly edited a volume published by the American Institute for Indian Studies that was titled Indian Epigraphy. Its Bearing on the History of Art. The volume carried 50 papers, short, succinct, but truly important for art historians – the result of a conference held at Varanasi in 1979. My review for the Journal of Asian Studies ended with the comment that this was a book that would find itself on the shelf of any library interested in South Asia. My paper today is a tribute to Rick and his unerring sense of areas of significance in the field in which we have all involved ourselves over the years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper entwines the voices of art historian Dr. Fionna Barber and Artist Scholar Prof. Jools Gilson to propose the critical importance of textile art in contemporary debates about the climate emergency. Framed in collaborative counterpoint to previous work on femininity and water (notably Neimanis 2012, 2017), this discussion focuses on three textile-based projects through two meteorological exhibitions; Mapping Climate Change: The Knitting Map & The Tempestry Project at the Berman Museum of Art in Pennsylvannia, US and Strange Attractors at Tate St. Ives, UK, both 2021. The paper proposes The Knitting Map as a way of thinking about textiles and climate, as well as an artwork. It visits Cork City, the Irish bog, and Cornwall, traversing tropes of landscape, weather and national identity as it tangles textiles, analysis, and story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the circumstances of the foundation and the early stages in the activity of the Commission on Art History of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cracow – the first institutional body dealing with art-historical research on Polish lands. Its establishment in 1873 was an important step in the process of the institutionalisation of Polish art history, a process that should be understood as one encompassing the foundation of university- -level research entities, formulation of programmes and methods of research as well as a development of the community of scholars. For the following half-century, the Commission had played a key role in this process. The first part of the paper deals with a failed attempt to form a ‘commission on the history of art in Poland’ within the Learned Society of Cracow, a body established in 1815, consisting of local scholars, artists and men of letters. In December 1870, Władysław Łuszczkiewicz, a painter and art historian, proposed to set up a commission whose aim would be to gather materials related to art history in Poland (written and visual records). The commission that was to consist mainly of architects and artists, was supposed to study the hitherto unknown historic objects, draw up a sort of survey, and publish images of artworks. Although Łuszczkiewicz’s initiative had won the favour of the Society’s board, the process of its establishment got stuck by bureaucratic procedures, and after a few months was put on hold interminably. Eventually, the Commission on Art History was formed as a part of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, then a newly-established institution, founded under a charter of Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria, using the basic structure of the Learned Society. The circumstances of its foundation have been discussed in the second part of the paper. In the autumn of 1871, in the course of drawing up of the successive versions of the Academy’s statute, the place of art history within the institution’s structures was established. Initially assigned, along with archaeology, to the historical and philosophical department, the discipline (without archaeology) ended up as part of the philological department. As attested by documentary evidence, this assignment resulted from the fact that the compilers of the statute strove to keep an equal number of disciplines within each of the Academy’s departments. Thus, the Commission on Art History was established within the philological department, and its inaugural meeting was held on 11 June 1873. The Commission was headed by the art critic and poet Lucjan Siemieński, and among its members were: the archaeologist Józef Łepkowski, Władysław Łuszczkiewicz, and a few former members of the Learned Society of Cracow; soon they were joined by new membership, including Marian Sokołowski, the future first professor of art history at the Jagiellonian University. Władysław Łuszczkiewicz was the moving force of the Commission in the early stages of its functioning. He, along with Sokołowski, had compiled the Commission’s first scholarly agenda, discussed in the third part of the paper. This programme, publicised in December 1873, was largely based on a similar document drafted for the 1870 ‘commission on the history of art in Poland’, and specified research on Polish art, for instance, by means of making study ‘trips’ intended to examine historic objects in situ, conducting surveys, acquiring visual material, compiling a bibliography of Polish art and publishing the Commission’s own periodical. The programme’s novel element was to include the study of works of foreign art in Polish collections and the work of foreign artists in Poland and Polish artists abroad within the Commission’s remit. The paper’s last subsection presents the Commission’s efforts to establish its own periodical: Sprawozdania Komisji do Badania Historii Sztuki w Polsce [Transactions of the Commission for the Study of Art History in Poland]. The Transactions was the first Polish scholarly art-historical periodical and it played a key role in the development of art-historical research of Polish art. The journal was founded not without difficulties: it took a few years to decide whether the new periodical should be a joint undertaking of the Commission on Art History and the Commission on Archaeology (an option favoured by the Academy’s secretary general, Józef Szujski), or if it were to be published solely by the former body. Eventually, through the efforts of Łuszczkiewicz, the latter conception won, and the first issue of the Transactions, in a luxurious in folio format, with lithographed plates, appeared in the autumn of 1877. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is something queer about Symbolism. Art historians have long acknowledged the links between Symbolist aesthetics and contemporaneous ideas about human sexuality, and even a cursory examination of artworks by male Symbolist artists working across the continent reveals an eyebrow-raising number of muscled nudes, lithe ephebes, and intimate male couplings. The sensual male body could register the artist's erotic desire, even as he put it forth as an idealized emblem of transcendental truth. But perhaps Symbolism's queerness extended beyond subject matter. Scholars have argued that Symbolism was in part defined by a subversive approach to visual semiotics: a severing—we might say a queering—of the ties binding a sign to its established cultural meaning. Similarly, male homosexual subcultures were sustained by endowing established signs and pictures with a uniquely queer significance. This paper seeks to tease out the relationship between Symbolist aesthetics and male homosexuality in terms of a shared sensibility towards pictorial interpretation. Taking as a case study the work of the Swedish Symbolist artist Eugène Jansson, I argue that Symbolism held appeal for homosexual artists precisely because queer subcultures were primed to read subversive meaning into normative pictures. Offering a new reading of Symbolism's sexual valences, I contextualize the movement's attendant artworks within the broader cultural landscape of homosexual signs and symbols and articulate the parallels between Symbolist approaches to the image and queer modes of seeing in the late nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to highlight examples of artistic motifs common throughout Egyptian history but augmented in novel ways during the 27th Dynasty, a time when Egypt was part of the Achaemenid empire and ruled by Persian kings. These kings represented themselves as traditional pharaohs within Egypt's borders and utilized longstanding Egyptian artistic motifs in their monumental constructions. These motifs, however, were manipulated in subtle ways to send targeted messages to audience(s) of this art. Art historians tend to situate visual styles and motifs within the longue durée of artistic tradition and pick a singular, official, and centralized perspective to narrate the history and reception of that art. In the case of Egypt, this perspective is often that of the king, and there is an assumption that there was a monolithic message sent to his people. But we are not dealing with a homogenous people; a diverse population would have had varied reactions to and interpretations of this visual signaling. By highlighting both the augmentation of traditional motifs undertaken by the Achaemenid administration and the multiplicity of perspectives they held for their audience(s), we can better understand ancient art as being dynamic in function and interpretation, rather than as a static snapshot of carbon-copied royal authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the highlights of the international conference titled "The Influence of the Vienna School of Art History" held at the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague from April 15 to 16, 2021. Among the scholars at the conference were Ivan Gerát of Slovakia, Violet Korsakova of Poland, and Barbara Czwik of Austria. Biographical papers about art historian Max Dvořák were also presented. It cites papers about the works of the historian.

Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums are nowadays striving to implement innovative approaches to adequately use and distribute the wealth of knowledge found in cultural heritage. A range of technologies can be used to enhance the viewing experience for visitors and boost the expertise of museologists, art historians, scholars, and audience members. The present work aims to provide an overview of current methods and most pertinent studies addressing the use of the innovative technologies for enhancing the fruition of artifacts in traditional museums in an effort to improve the public experience and education. For all the technologies discussed, the paper focuses on the main results obtained in literature and on their possible implementation in the museal context. The overview demonstrates the liveliness of the world of research in the field of technologies for the digital development of museums and how many technologies commonly used in industry are increasingly finding their way into the cultural sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Artnodes is the property of Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

3D imaging is an increasingly common tool for the investigation of cultural heritage. Painted ceilings offer particular challenges as the art historical requirements necessitate highly detailed and accurate capture of colour textures with sub-millimetre resolution, even of large areas of 100s of square metres, situated in a wide variety of building environments. Geometrical information is also required to represent fully the three-dimensional nature of these sculpted and vaulted ceilings, again at the resolution necessary for both documentation and use by cultural heritage professionals including conservators, restorers, building researchers, architects and art historians. This paper describes a multi-modal campaign of 3D digitisation of three very different sites undertaken as part of the Franco-German Plafond 3D project. We introduce a flexible and adaptable methodology that allows the detailed imaging of large interiors and ceiling paintings in a short period of time and with varying levels of access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Pensamiento, Palabra y Obra is the property of Universidad Pedaggica Nacional and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper argues that our understanding of Internet memes can be enhanced by a comparison with Renaissance emblems as an historical precursor. By incorporating an analysis of visual themes and production contexts, it notes striking parallels around form, conceptions of invention, in-group/out-group dynamics, uneven reception, and exploitation of maturing new media environments. In both cases, a combination of conventionalised stylistic formats and borrowed referential content free the maker to focus on invention based upon incongruous multimodal juxtaposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1612, the Jerzy Schönfels’ printing house in Braniewo published Tomasz Treter’s posthumous work titled Symbolica vitae Christi meditatio. This cycle of ascetic and mystical reflections was considered by Janusz Pelc to be one of the most interesting emblem books written in the Polish Commonwealth. Also Tadeusz Chrzanowski, an art historian, referred to Treter’s work as quite a unique work of Polish emblem art. The same researcher quoted the originality of some of the concepts and ingenuity of many icons (lacking direct correlates among contemporary emblem collections). In 2018, Alicja Bielak wrote an article in which she identified the three 16th-century emblem works (i.e. Hadrianus Junius’ Emblemata, Claude Paradin’s Devises heroïques and Aneau Barthélemy’s Picta poesis) as graphic sources of Treter’s cycle. The main goal of this paper is to identify another, non-emblematic source of inspiration for the Polish author, namely the 14th-century encyclopaedia Summa de exemplis et rerum similitudinibus by the Italian Dominican Giovanni da San Gimignano. It is argued here that Treter might have come into contact with Giovanni’s treatise during his first stay in Rome (1569–1584) and transposed it into the language of emblems. The first section of the paper shortly discusses the life and work of the Italian Dominican, with the particular emphasis on his encyclopaedia. The core of the article consists of the comparison of Treter’s eight emblems with selected passages from Summa de exemplis and setting these emblems against the background of the European tradition. The following emblems are discussed in detail: Fides, Conversatio sancta, Spiritualis profectus, Humilitas, Poenitentia, Correctio fraterna, Fortitudo and Mansuetudo. The study concludes with the claim that even though Treter uses symbols rooted in contemporary emblem art, he interprets them in a different way than other creators did. On the other hand, one can observe a striking accordance between Treter’s interpretations and the ones by Giovanni da San Gimignano. Unlike other 16th and 17th century emblematists, the Polish priest provides a religious rather than a moral interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By juxtaposing two ostensibly divergent characters, the Jewish art historian and Egyptologist Hedwig Fechheimer (1871–1942) and Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), this paper investigates how both approaches folded time, creating Cubist chronologies. Fechheimer adapted the philological focus of her Berlin School contemporaries to create an ahistorical, anti-teleological grammar of ancient Egyptian art which espoused an artistic affinity between the Egyptians and the Cubist movement. Eisenstein, who held a copy of one of Fechheimer's books in his personal library, took a similar approach in the development of his critiques of historical allegory. This paper looks specifically at two shots of a sphinx during the bridge sequence in the 1927 film October to demonstrate how they correspond to Fechheimer's views on Egyptian art and also function peculiarly within the film. Ultimately, I aim to demonstrate how the interpellations of the sphinx demonstrate a particular critique of historicity that Eisenstein later expands upon in his Ivan the Terrible films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I intend to study the contribution of Aby Warburg, a cultural theorist and an art historian, especially his concern with the relations between memory and history, relations that have been theorized in the late 20th century, but which Warburg anticipated, to a certain degree. In his writings, there can be identified those relations that make memory a metahistorical category or an anti-historical discourse (Pierre Nora, Yosef Yerushalmi); then, his writings can be connected with those of Maurice Halbwachs, the first who approached memory as a social phenomenon. Thus, according to Warburg, collective memory can be regarded as a medium for art, which ensures the survival of images and pathos formulas even when the violence of historical development leads to a decline of the creative spirit. One might say that via a detour through the archaic (Pueblo Indian culture), Warburg managed to reduce the distances which the historical method had established to the Antiquity's vestiges (process that started in the Renaissance). His hypothesis was that the employment in the historical development of Western civilization leads to the atrophy of certain potentialities of the human spirit, which can be addressed in the anti-historicist discourse, specific to postmodernity. In the last part of the paper, I propose to dwell on The Mnemosyne Atlas, Warburg's last project, as a visual synthesis of the research that he conducted throughout his life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes a good leader? This paper takes Socrates in Plato's early dialogues as the starting point for developing three leadership skills that are still relevant today: being on a mission, thinking in questions, and thinking like a beginner. I arrive at these Socratic leadership skills through an interdisciplinary approach to Plato's early dialogues that puts Socrates in conversation with a diversity of thinkers: modern-day business leaders and leadership coaches, educators, Zen Buddhists, and art historians. I show that Socratic leadership skills are valued in today's business world, and I propose concrete exercises that can help anyone acquire these skills. In contrast to Platonic leadership—the leadership skills of the philosopher king—Socratic leadership skills have not been the focus of much investigation. This paper aims to advance a scholarly conversation about Socrates as a leadership model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors discuss a scaffolded, semester-long Wikipedia-editing project developed by a librarian and art history professor for a modern and contemporary African art history seminar. Their goals for the project were to introduce critical information literacy concepts into discussions about art information on the Wikipedia platform with their students, as well as to encourage them to see themselves as information creators. While course participants were tasked with adding research-based content that complied with Wikipedia's point of view, they also generated many ideas for scholarly inquiry into their chosen artist's life and work—a process with which undergraduate students, as emerging art historians, often struggle when they are assigned a traditional paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before the devastation of the Second World War, the well-preserved historic city Narva, on the eastern border of the Republic of Estonia, was known as a pearl of late 17th century Swedish Baroque architecture. The development of the most promising economic and administrative centre of the Kingdom of Sweden in the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland was halted as a result of the Great Northern War. However, after the bloody and destructive siege of 1704, there was a short period in which Peter I tried to highlight Narva as his victory trophy, which was to undo the disgrace of his previous defeat in the Narva battle of 1700, resulting in several construction projects (for example the house, or “palace”, of the Tsar himself and the remodelling of one of the churches into the orthodox cathedral). According to the personal testimony of Domenico Trezzini, famous first architect of St Petersburg, his first work in Russia was the city gates in Narva. Letters exchanged between construction project leader Ulyan Senyavin and governor general Alexander Menshikov confirm that the “architect from St Petersburg” was heading the construction of the city gates at least in 1705. Moreover, Peter I probably personally revised the design for the sculptural programme, demanding the figure of Paul the Apostle be set above the gates. The citations of these and other relevant sources were published by the recent biographer of Trezzini Konstantin Malinovsky, attracting the attention of the author of the present paper. Partly because of misinterpretations of earlier Russian authors Malinovsky did not manage to reach a conclusion as to whether it was a temporary triumphal arch in the place of the breach, or a real city gate, and if so which gate. In the Russian State Military Historical Archives in Moscow, among a full set of drawings documenting the fortifications of Narva as of 1728, i.e. shortly after the Great Northern War, there is also one sheet dedicated to the Emperor´s Gate that surprises with its rich sculptural decoration. During the Swedish era the new gate designated for the same location, in between the bastions of Gloria and Honour, was to be called the King´s Gate. Despite the opinion of the eminent Swedish art historian Sten Karling that this gate was built of stone before the 1704 siege, a closer look at the Swedish fortress plans (especially that of 1703 found only recently) makes it highly improbable. It is quite likely that the gate was made by Trezzini out of carved stones collected on the site before the war, which might explain the close resemblance of its architecture to the earlier Swedish fortress gates, especially Karl´s Gate in Riga. The Emperor´s Gate on its own became the prototype for Peter´s Gate at the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, as Peter I himself ordered it to be made “resembling the one in Narva”, although the gate itself was throned by St Peter, another of Peter I spiritual patrons. Trezzini, as is now clear, took over almost all the sculptural décor from Narva, expanding on it. The symbolic meanings of the statuary, here only covered at the most basic level, are ripe for further discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper gives priority to the painter's point of view regarding the issue of vision, color and the essence of colorisms. It brings forward the message of a unique work of art that analyzes the issue of color throughout the history of European art, penned by the Polish art historian Maria Rzepińska. The text also tackles the issue of color in contemporary visual art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It's known that any form of communication uses signs. Communication through signs, the imagistic dimension of artistic creation, has been the basis of all periods of cultural development of humanity. Understanding these periods in human history has been a constant concern for historians, art historians and archaeologists. For example, the translation (the decoding) of the hieroglyphs (i.e. visual narratives) allowed the understanding of the complexity of the Egyptian culture. Another example comes from the time of ancient Rome, where visual narratives contain complex infographic messages. The war periods followed by peace were an opportunity for cultural affirmation and development in which infographics played an important role. The power of the prominent figures of the Roman Empire was also due to the use of infographics on the emblematic monuments. This paper aims to bring a new perspective on the cultural history of humanity through the presence of infographics as a political tool for transmitting complex messages. The study presented in the paper is a decoding of the Adamclisi Monument, a Roman triumphal piece of architecture located in southern Romania, used to show a strong cultural and political message about war and peace. By transferring the symbols, shapes and human images from the metopes of this monument into contemporary visual form, one can lead to new ways of rendering historical and cultural events in a contemporary artistic interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author uses the microanalysis of a single videotaped session with a neurodiverse child to find insights into the process by which change takes place in analysis. In this analytic play session, change is generated through a rhythm of "match, disruption, and reunion" on top of which, like a carrier wave, a narrative is co-created about the "stability" of the relationship. In keeping with the theme of Jonathan Palmer's inspiring paper relating psychoanalysis with the creative act of painting, the author links her observations of the clinical session with two other forms of art – a Wallace Stevens poem ("Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird") and an essay on Romanesque art by the art historian, Meyer Schapiro. Both the psychoanalytic session and these examples of art illustrate the centrality of co-creation in the dyads (analyst-patient, author-reader, and sculptor-viewer). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Professor Jim Davis, an esteemed scholar and editor of Nineteenth Century Theatre & Film, has sadly passed away. Known for his extensive research on theatre history, Jim's work covered a wide range of topics including actors, adaptation, and audiences. He was a supportive mentor to new scholars and a prolific editor, collaborating on projects and organizing research events. His scholarly editions were highly regarded, and a symposium and special edition of the journal will honor his contributions. Colleagues remember Jim for his approachability, sense of humor, and generosity. The text consists of personal reflections and memories from various individuals who had the privilege of knowing and working with Jim, highlighting his intellectual curiosity, dedication to his work, and impact on the field of theatre studies. [Extracted from the article]

The monastery of Holy Savior has been the subject of much scholarship, but the liturgical reform requested by King Roger II of Sicily and carried out by the first archimandrite, Luke of Rossano, and the latter's struggle to establish seemly equipment, has been largely neglected. Given its potential relevance for the material setting of the monastery's early manuscript collection through the middle of the twelfth century, this seems an oversight. Art historians have repeatedly claimed that the monastery's lofty status could have enabled the spread of Byzantine models to Norman Sicily, especially in relation to figurative arts and manuscript decoration. This paper discusses the same assumption from the opposite perspective. It explores the main tendencies of manuscript decoration at San Salvatore based on the extant evidence from the monastery's early collection. Building on the paleographical and codicological observations provided in the past decades (mostly by philologists), I examine the manuscripts in terms of decorative practice and artistic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, aligned with contemporary thinking in terms of patient-centered care and co-creation of patient care, highlights the limitations of the reductionist approaches to psychiatry, offering an alternative, "emergent" perspective and approach. Assuming that psychopathological phenomena are essentially relational, what kind of epistemological framework and 'logic of discovery' should be adopted? I review two standard methods I call 'ticking boxes' and 'drafting arrows'. Within the ticking boxes framework, the clinician's main goal is to discover whether a patient showing psychopathological phenomena meets pre-given diagnostic criteria. The process of discovery can be compared to two people assembling a puzzle where the patient has the pieces and the interviewer has the image of the completed design. Drafting arrows consists in constructing pathogenetic diagrams that display linear causative relationships between variables connected by an arrow to other nodes. These explanatory narratives include psychodynamic (motivational) and biological (causal) diagrams. I argue for a third approach called 'linking dots', a method of discovery based on the emergent properties of psychopathological phenomena. I build on and develop the approach to images and discovery devised by art historian Aby Warburg in his atlas of images Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. The visual constellations created by Warburg in the panels of the Bilderatlas can be understood as a method to reveal the layers of memory and the web of relationships manifested in them, inviting the viewer to participate in the production of meanings, forging ever new connections between the images. It is the viewer's acts of perception that draw relationships between singularities. I suggest that this method is of enormous significance in the context of today's socio-cultural transformation processes and related forms of psychopathological conditions, which can no longer be comprehended using the categories of existing knowledge systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent and how are today's increasingly interconnected and porous real and virtual worlds conditioning and even determining research in Art History? Several art historians have pointed out that, as the globe becomes hyper-connected, the discipline is shifting its focus from local and national questions to global or worldwide issues. This paper aims to analyze this shift in the historiography of medieval Iberian art. I argue that research is indeed being reshaped by the removal or the crossing of physical, epistemic and virtual boundaries as well as by pushing forth an increasing interest in connectivity. Additionally, I propose to cross or remove surviving rigid boundaries still further, to construct more flexible and fluid epistemic limits, and to establish additional connections at several levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The review discusses a collective volume of papers Strony Joanny Pollakówny (Aspects of Joanna Pollakówna) edited by Anna Kozłowska and Jan Zieliński (2017). It includes interpretations of Pollakówna's poetic, essayistic, and biographical output, an analysis of reception of her works, and a bibliography. Beyond doubts it is a fundamental book for Pollakówna's monographers, not only of her as a poetess and essayist, but also art historian, translator, and authoress of books for children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two main aspects were studied in the paper. The first consisted in establishing the authenticity of a painting made in the manner of the painter René François Ghislain Magritte (1898-1967), by determining the nature of the pictorial materials and their state of conservation, highlighting some archaeometic characteristics. The second aspect refers to the validation of the assessment carried out in 2003 by the art historian Amelia Pavel (1915-2003), which is considered by art critics to be superficial in few authentications. The painting "The Hope of the Son's Return" was made by Rene Magritte, in the period between 1960-1962, as Amelia PAVEL also reveals. This corresponds archeometrically and chemometrically, by determining the age of the pictorial materials and the support, as having been executed in 1962. The aestheticoartistic expertise combined with through multispectral techniques (IR, UV, and VIS Reflectography) and microscopic (Optical Microscopy, Stereomicroscopy, SEM-EDX), highlight the certain attributes of authenticity, the painting being by René Magritte. As for the previous expert's inscription on the back of the painting, graphoscopic and archaeometric analysis revealed that it belongs to Amelia Pavel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

3D digitisation of metal artefacts, regardless of the use of passive and active sensors and low or high costs technologies (digital photogrammetry, laser scanning, structured light 3D scanning) represents a challenge above all due to the high reflectivity, absorptivity and scattering of the materials, as documented by the specialistic literature (Frost et al., 2020, Hallot et al., 2019, Nicolae et al., 2014). Regardless of the size and material, mobility and immobility of the elements, artworks preservation and restoration involve intervention and collaboration between different specialists, such as restorers, conservators, diagnosts, architects, surveyors, modelers, archaeologists and art historians. This multidisciplinary process requires a virtual container aimed at systematisation and sharing of digital products and data deriving from heterogeneous diagnostic and applicative activities (Farella et al. 2022, Ferretti et al. 2022, Fiamma 2019). According to these premises, this paper shows a low-cost Scan to HBIM process aimed at digitisation of a complex reflective metal artefact, an altar frontal composed of several pieces characterized by different metal materials, functions, sizes and topological complexity (level of decorative detail). Therefore, this system is approached considering its individual components and its morphological-compositional complexity as a unique piece. The entire process has been tested both in research and didactic field, using low-cost tools for acquisition (cameras, smartphones, computers) and software open source for processing, filtering, editing and sculpting digital photogrammetric copies of highly reflective artefacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnographical paper re-explores the ancient remains of Sultanganj, Bihar, reports new findings of interest to archaeologists and art historians of eastern India and attempts to explain the historical context for the emergence of the site. Intervowen are prevailing popular conceptions of recovered old images and their place in the living traditions of a complex socio-religious pilgrimage town. It explores the local community's response to a recent threat to this cultural heritage and demonstrates how popular conceptions of the life and location of ancient images offer a complementary model for the protection and preservation of ancient heritage in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers a general overview of the Lithuanian art historical research published during the three decades of Independence (1990-2020). The paper discusses the changes in institutional and academic life, the spectrum of methodological approaches, as well as the key art theoretical publications and their authors. The overview aims to assess the current situation in the art historical discipline and fascilitate the debates around the question whether Lithuania has managed to develop its own school of art theory. The analysis of the publications (mostly monographs) by the Lithuanian art theorists has conclusively shown that such school does already exist. In terms of its organisation, Lithuanian art theoretical school matches all the academic criteria: education is provided at all levels, and the dissemination and continuity of research, both empirical and theoretical, are ensured. The school has already gone through two or even three phases of development. The first stage, spanning between 1990 and 1998/99, was rich with significant achievements in the sector of education: it saw the launch of the first art theory doctorate programme in Lithuania, as well as the establishment of the Institute of Art Research, and the Vilnius Academy of Arts Publishing House. During the period, Kaunas Vytautas Magnus University launched their art theory programme, while the Culture and Art Institute in Vilnius had acquired two art theory departments. The second stage (2000-2010/12) saw a rapid growth of the number of publications, widening of the art theoretical specialisation, and further development of research methodologies. Along with the formal analysis and methodologies of iconography and iconology, came the outlines of social art history. All the spheres of art history became equipped with various methods of source research and interpretation. Among the main fields of research were the history of ecclesiastic and devotional art (patronage and heritage of mansions and urbanite art). One of the leading research problems of the time - the relation of text and image. The third stage covers the period of 2010-2020, and instead of the focus on the oldest examples of art historical heritage to the art of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In Lithuania, the methodological innovations started gradually taking root only after the year 2000, therefore there are still many possibile routes to explore. Most texts emoploy a combination of different methodologies, varying between iconology, phenomenology, and semiotics. This helps the research to better grasp the multiplicitous nature of the analysed phenomena, although this sometimes comes at the expense of the narrational coherence and constructiveness of conclusions. The Lithuanian school is predominantly national-based. This has many advantages, although sometimes this makes it difficult to distribute the research internationally. Despite all the developments within the Lithuanian art history as a discipline, international collaboration via conferences, projects, publishing, and media still leaves much to be desired. Due to the reliability of documented information, Lithuanian art historians are able to produce a particularly high level of in their work with sources. Rather than emerging as a circle of followers around a particular prominent individual, the Lithuanian art theoretical school is a result of a number of colleagues - art historians and critics - practicing mutual support and exchange of ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Psychosozial is the property of Psychosozial-Verlag GmbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Art Inquiry is the property of Lodz Scientific Society / Lodzkie Towarzystwo Naukowe and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article discusses the work and legacy of Frederick M. Asher, a scholar of South Asian art and architecture. Asher's final book focused on the site of Sarnath, where the Buddha gave his first sermon, and he emphasized the importance of understanding the people who built and inhabited the site throughout history. The article also highlights a symposium held to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS), an institution that Asher supported and reshaped during his career. The symposium explored themes of institution building, infrastructure, and interconnections in South Asian art history. The article concludes by acknowledging the contributions of other scholars and honoring the late Kavita Singh, who gave a keynote speech at the symposium. [Extracted from the article]

With the increase in massive digitized datasets of cultural artefacts, social and cultural scientists have an unprecedented opportunity for the discovery and expansion of cultural theory. The WikiArt dataset is one such example, with over 250,000 high quality images of historically significant artworks by over 3000 artists, ranging from the 15th century to the present day; it is a rich source for the potential mining of patterns and differences among artists, genres, and styles. However, such datasets are often difficult to analyse and use for answering complex questions of cultural evolution and divergence because of their raw formats as image files, which are represented as multi-dimensional tensors/matrices. Recent developments in machine learning, multi-modal data analysis and image processing, however, open the door for us to create representations of images that extract important, domain-specific features from images. Art historians have long emphasised the importance of art style, and the colors used in art, as ways to characterise and retrieve art across genre, style, and artist. In this paper, we release a massive vector-based dataset of paintings (WikiArtVectors), with style representations and color distributions, which provides cultural and social scientists with a framework and database to explore relationships across these two vital dimensions. We use state-of-the-art deep learning and human perceptual color distributions to extract the representations for each painting, and aggregate them across artist, style, and genre. These vector representations and distributions can then be used in tandem with information-theoretic and distance metrics to identify large-scale patterns across art style, genre, and artist. We demonstrate the consistency of these vectors, and provide early explorations, while detailing future work and directions. All of our data and code is publicly available on GitHub. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estonian manorial architecture has been a topic of interest to architectural and art historians for the last hundred years, but hundreds of wooden manor houses, of which many still exist day, have largely remained unnoticed. The reason for this lack of research into wooden architecture are manifold but can most easily be associated with socially complex relationships and previous research methods, resulting in the only monograph to date, Gustav Ränk's Die älteren baltischen Herrenhöfe in Estland (1971), which analysed wooden architecture in the 17th century, known in Estonia as the Swedish period. Since it is generally accepted that previous classifications of wooden architecture do not allow for great conclusions, the aim of this article is to give an overview of the architectural genesis of wooden manor houses during the manorial 'golden era', asking how modern ideas made their way into local architecture. In this regard, this paper also deals with architectural treatises and handbooks from the 18th and early decades of the 19th centuries and the question of the adaptation of architectural theorists' ideas to local architecture. The genesis of Estonian wooden manorial architecture can be divided into three distinguished periods that are similar to the overall development of manorial architecture in the Baltics. Although the very first wooden noble residences built at the beginning of the 18th century were small urbaltisch buildings with a central chimney that resembled those built in the Swedish era, newer architectural forms more in touch with the architectural trends of the time appeared on lands that had either escaped the negative consequences of the Great Northern War and plague or had been donated by the Russian rulers. In other places, manorial architecture continued with the traditions, which began to change more strongly in the second half of the century, reflecting the landlords' greater need for representative purposes. This not only brought changes to construction techniques but also to the buildings' overall appearance: most wooden dwellings doubled in size and were decorated according to late Baroque or early Neoclassical elements. More major changes took place in the first decades of the 19th century, which gave contemporaries a chance to describe wooden dwellings as 'light and summery', testifying to changes in building traditions. Since at this stage of research only a handful of building masters, masons and construction carpenters are known to have worked in the building of wooden manor houses, this article suggests that the landlords may also have drawn the ground plans themselves, with the help of architectural treatises and handbooks of the time. Although the architectural ideas of Nikolaus Goldmann, Friedrich Christian Schmidt and David Gilly are tangible, it is possible that in many cases the influence was more indirect and depended on the general stylistic and technical changes of the period. This architectural conservativism can partly be explained by the fact that Baltic manors largely depended on local craftsmen and peasants from nearby villages, but also by the nobility's general aversion to all things new. A much more accessible treatise for many noblemen at the time may have been the economic handbook written by local pastor August Wilhelm Hupel, which included some thoughts on the building process; however, since he did not introduce any new architectural ideas, but rather carried on with the local traditions, it is possible that his ideas were put to practice elsewhere, where landlords did not actively live. The same conclusion can be drawn about the standardised model façade projects, which made certain façades compulsory for cities in the Russian Empire in the early decades of the 19th century, but had very little effect on Estonian wooden manor houses. Although this article brings clarity to many aspects of wooden manorial architecture, the most important contribution to the history of Baltic manorial architecture is bringing attention to the fact that wood as a building material was not only widespread but held a dominant role in building practice. This not only emphasises Baltic manorial architecture's peripheral role on the map of European art, but also creates new perspectives to delve deeper into the connections with Scandinavia and other countries, where the material played a part in the building practices of the higher and lower strata of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to the discovery of linear perspective in the fifteenth century, European artists based their compositions more on imagination than the direct observation of nature. Medieval paintings, therefore, can be thought of as 'mental projections' of space rather than optical projections, and were sometimes regarded as 'primitive' by historians as they lacked the spatial consistency of later works based on the rules of linear perspective. There are noticeable differences in the way objects are depicted in paintings of the different periods. For example, human figures in pre-linear perspective works often vary greatly in size in ways that are not consistent with the laws of optics. Some art historians have attributed this to 'hierarchical scaling' in which larger figures have greater narrative significance. But there are examples of paintings that contradict this explanation. In this paper we will consider an alternative to the hierarchical scaling hypothesis: that medieval artists used relative size to elicit empathy and to reflect the perceptual structure of imagination. This hypothesis was first proposed by the art historian Oskar Wulff, but has largely been dismissed since. We argue that artists of this period, far from being naïve, used sophisticated techniques for directing the attention of the viewer to a particular figure in a painting and encouraging them to 'see' the depicted space from that figure's point of view. We offer some experimental evidence in support of this hypothesis and suggest that the way artists have depicted space in paintings has an important bearing on how we imagine and perceive visual space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though in the last few years we have witnessed a general rediscovery of female artists, the same has not happened for female Italian art historians whom have contributed in the art history making of the XX century. On the occasion of this conference I meant to remember Maria Luisa Ferrari, born in Cremona in 1929. No mention of her even in the endless internet world, no page passing on her biography and most important studies, starting from her dissertation thesis, discussed in Pavia with Edoardo Arslan in 1954, on the painter Giovan Pietro da Cemmo, published in Milan two years later. I hereby present some unpublished excerpts part of the correspondence with her first mentor, from which power games and "religion wars" among different art history schools of thought strongly emerge. My paper is dedicated to the human and professional events of the scholar and to the fundamental importance of her work for the period and in future perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]