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Deploying “Mediterranean” as a frame allows us to articulate significant historical questions that studies of culture construed as monolithic entities do not recognize. But what does it take to develop a multi-faceted understanding of the... more
Deploying “Mediterranean” as a frame allows us to articulate significant historical questions that studies of culture construed as monolithic entities do not recognize. But what does it take to develop a multi-faceted understanding of the dynamic processes of identity formation? This chapter offers a brief literature review of the ways in which Mediterranean studies have entered art history, locating a revisionist trend in the scholarship beginning in the 1970s, when the term Late Antique was re-deployed to pursue concerns with transcultural processes. Current scholarship brings art history into alignment with neighboring disciplines and encourages intra-disciplinary discussion on how to organize research, which sources to use, what kinds of order to seek, how to rethink the category “art” from a more pluralistic perspective, how to study exchanges of philosophical or ideological contexts as well as the circulation of objects, and how to resist notions of fixed truths.
Renaissance Quarterly is the leading American journal of Renaissance studies, encouraging connections between different scholarly approaches to bring together material spanning the period from 1300 to 1650 in Western history. The official... more
Renaissance Quarterly is the leading American journal of Renaissance studies, encouraging connections between different scholarly approaches to bring together material spanning the period from 1300 to 1650 in Western history. The official journal of the Renaissance ...
Contents: Introduction: the historical reception of Leonardo da Vinci's abridged Treatise on Painting, Claire Farago. Section 1 The Italian Reception: What might Leonardo's own Trattato have looked like? And what did it actually... more
Contents: Introduction: the historical reception of Leonardo da Vinci's abridged Treatise on Painting, Claire Farago. Section 1 The Italian Reception: What might Leonardo's own Trattato have looked like? And what did it actually look like up to the time of the editio princeps?, Martin Kemp and Juliana Barone Leonardo and the Florentine Academy, Robert Williams Who abridged Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting?, Claire Farago On the movement of figures in some early apographs of the abridged Trattato, Michael Cole Zaccolini and the Trattato della Pittura of Leonardo da Vinci, Janis C. Bell The first Italian publication of the Treatise on Painting: book culture, the history of art, and the Naples edition of 1733, Thomas Willette. Section 2 The French Reception: The Vita of Leonardo da Vinci in the Du Fresne edition of 1651, Catherine M. Soussloff Poussin as engineer of the human figure: the illustrations for Leonardo's Trattato, Juliana Barone 'A chaos of intelligence': Leonardo's Traite and the perspective wars at the Academie Royale, Martin Kemp Perspective and the Paris Academy, J.V. Field Leonardo's theory of aerial perspective in the writings of Andre Felibien and the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, Pauline Maguire Robison Between academicism and its critics: Leonardo da Vinci's Traite de la Peinture and 18th-century French art theory, Thomas Kirchner. Section 3 The Spanish Reception: The Trattato in 17th- and 18th-century Spanish perspective and art theory, Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga Pacheco, VelA!zquez, and the legacy of Leonardo in Spain, Charlene VillaseA+-or Black. Section 4 The Dutch, German and Flemish Reception: The reception of Leonardo da Vinci's Trattato della Pittura or Traite de la Peinture in 17th-century Northern Europe, Michele-Caroline Heck 'This art embraces all visible things in its domain': Samuel van Hoogstraaten and the Trattato della Pittura, Thijs Weststeijn Rubens and Leonardo on motion: figures, inscriptions, and te
In aiming at more holistic forms of knowledge, interdisciplinary approaches often serve as antidotes to our overspecialized fields developed since the professional discipline’s intellectually formative period in the later nineteenth... more
In aiming at more holistic forms of knowledge, interdisciplinary approaches often serve as antidotes to our overspecialized fields developed since the professional discipline’s intellectually formative period in the later nineteenth century. This paper connects the different strands of discussion on indexicality dispersed in various pockets of art history and cultural anthropology through their shared historical roots, with the aim of understanding art history’s current interpretative challenges in more holistic terms than the modern discipline usually encourages. It is offered here as a critical reflection on art history’s inherited methodologies. A central point of the paper is the importance of Christianity as a frame of reference for visual art, in understanding “index” and “indexicality” and their historical constitution.
The Absolute LeonardoReview of:The Lives of Leonardo, ed. Thomas Frangenberg and Rodney Palmer, Warburg Institute Colloquia, ed. Charles Burnett and Jill Kraye, London: The Warburg Institute and Turin: Nino Aragno Editore, 2013. 266 pp. +... more
The Absolute LeonardoReview of:The Lives of Leonardo, ed. Thomas Frangenberg and Rodney Palmer, Warburg Institute Colloquia, ed. Charles Burnett and Jill Kraye, London: The Warburg Institute and Turin: Nino Aragno Editore, 2013. 266 pp. + bw but on the other hand, it is based on a highly reliable source almost contemporary with Leonardo's lifetime.The convergence of the mythic and the individual, biography as fiction and biography as history, has been a topic of research and discussion since the beginning of the twentieth century. It was most famously the subject of Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz's collaborative project, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist, (1934; revised English translation, 1979).1 In 1997, Catherine Soussloff published an important critical study of artistic biography, entitled The Absolute Artist, in which she traces the origins of this problematic to Freud's colleague Otto Rank, whose 1905 manuscript entitled Der Kunstler initially brought h...
What are the methodological implications of a responsibly imagined global art history? The opportunity to contribute to this volume encouraged me to look at the vexed problem of periodization anew. For the topic of our joint endeavor begs... more
What are the methodological implications of a responsibly imagined global art history? The opportunity to contribute to this volume encouraged me to look at the vexed problem of periodization anew. For the topic of our joint endeavor begs the question: how can any open-minded approach take for granted pre- existing categories such as “Renaissance” or “Early Modern” without foreclos- ing on the discussion that “global” art-historical approaches invite? There is no doubt that the first period of intensive global contact developed in the sixteenth century, and this “fact” has been one of the justifications for expanding the field of Renaissance or Early Modern studies to a global arena. Yet the issues are more complex than they first appear
With a special emphasis on regional studies, this chapter takes up the challenge to theorize about the complexities of cultural interaction without imposing ethnocentric categories such as those that historically defined the discipline of... more
With a special emphasis on regional studies, this chapter takes up the challenge to theorize about the complexities of cultural interaction without imposing ethnocentric categories such as those that historically defined the discipline of art history on Euro-American terms. One of the primary obstacles to rethinking the discipline of art history has been the segmentation of our archives by period style and national culture. How can we access this past (and present) without also passing on values that may no longer be tenable but are inherent in our classifying terms and structures? I review issues of shared concern across a wide expanse of methods and subjects under four categories: (1) the problem of universals and universalism; (2) working within a national culture model in a transcultural setting; (3) the epistemic and ontological ground of research; and (4) the ethics of scholarship. I advocate for a material-based, non-transcendental ontology capacious enough to appeal to many different interpretative aims at the center of transcultural approaches, such as what happens when values, beliefs, and information are not held in common. In such cases, interpretation focuses on the heterogeneity of the artwork itself.
Situating Global Art is a richly conceived contribution to contemporary global art studies with an extensive bibliography, useful summaries of the main issues and events, and case studies by curators, art historians, and artists. It... more
Situating Global Art is a richly conceived contribution to contemporary global art studies with an extensive bibliography, useful summaries of the main issues and events, and case studies by curators, art historians, and artists. It developed out of an international conference by the same name organized in 2015 by the International Research Training Group, Interart Studies, at the Freie Universität, Berlin. The volume aims to continue the work of the conference by presenting a "discursive arena" for addressing the many ways that institutional structures can be reinvented for different critical purposes (Introduction, p. 21). The four contributing editors describe their collaborative effort of coming to terms with the concept of global art from different angles and disciplinary backgrounds as "decolonizing art historical knowledge and replacing binary epistemological models… with more relational approaches focusing on contacts, flows, and circulations, as well as global relations of production" (p. 12). Sixteen chapters and a substantive introduction make a timely contribution that goes beyond the dominant Euro-American discussion by including numerous case studies of curatorial projects rooted in specific historical circumstances in other parts of the world, including Morocco, Haiti, Seoul, and Singapore. There are also critical discussions of Documenta and other international biennials around which the contemporary global art discourse has been shaped since the late 1980s. The editors conceive their brief as a critical intervention into the "emancipatory project …[of] revising the canon" by shifting attention to
The question I have been grappling with since Donald Trump was shockingly and quite possibly illegally elected President of the United States is how to practice art history so that my scholarship has some kind of meaningful agency in the... more
The question I have been grappling with since Donald Trump was shockingly and quite possibly illegally elected President of the United States is how to practice art history so that my scholarship has some kind of meaningful agency in the current political climate. Here I introduce a tale of two exceptional immigrants who tried to make a difference during an earlier constitutional crisis in the US. Distinguished poet laureate, playwright, statesman, university professor, and political activist, Archibald MacLeish was the son of a Scottish-born dry goods merchant. During the same years that MacLeish was a Professor of Rhetoric and
Oratory at Harvard standing up to McCarthyism, Hannah Arendt was writing
in Cold War America with a very different memory of the past several decades.
At present, “visual culture” and “visual art” are ubiquitous terms widely applied to all kinds of cultural production as neutral, inclusive language, even a fitting sequel in an expanded field of interdisciplinary scholarship to the more... more
At present, “visual culture” and “visual art” are ubiquitous terms widely applied to all kinds of cultural production as neutral, inclusive language, even a fitting sequel in an expanded field of interdisciplinary scholarship to the more restrictive category “art” of European origin. Much is owed to understanding the category “visual art” as a historically and culturally specific construct. Yet as this volume attests, we are still addressing the vexed question of what it means to historicize vision.
Beyond the academy and aside from the epistemological issue of where to make the cut between the past and a present that is constantly sliding into the past, there is the considerable problem of imagining what and how history should be... more
Beyond the academy and aside from the epistemological issue of where to make the cut between the past and a present that is constantly sliding into the past, there is the considerable problem of imagining what and how history should be brought to bear on the subject of global art. THIS PDF INCLUDES THE ENTIRE JOURNAL ISSUE
The opportunity to speak at this conference encouraged me to think together three of the main categories that partition the discipline of art history into subdisciplinary formations: geog- raphy, periodization, and collective identity.1... more
The opportunity to speak at this conference encouraged me to think together three of the main categories that partition the discipline of art history into subdisciplinary formations: geog- raphy, periodization, and collective identity.1 As recently as ten years ago, attempts to conceive a world art history assumed that continents like the Americas were an obvious and relative- ly uncontentious way to organize the discipline in an expand- ed field. However, geography, as cultural geographers such as Derek Gregory and Irit Rogoff insist, is neither natural nor neu- tral.2 Geography is a concept, a sign system, and an order of knowledge established at the centers of power, an epistemic category grounded in issues of positionality. By occupying new positions, we can introduce questions of critical epistemology, subjectivity, and spectatorship.3
The methodological challenge is to theorise the complexities of cultural interaction without imposing ethnocentric categories. s an art historian who has done so much to expose the racial (and sometimes racist) underpinnings of art... more
The methodological challenge is to theorise
the complexities of cultural interaction without imposing ethnocentric categories. s an art historian who has done so much to expose the racial (and sometimes racist) underpinnings of art historical accounts since
the professionalisation of the discipline in the nineteenth century, Rampley is raising a fundamental issue here: how well do art historians understand what critical transcultural studies are trying to dismantle? Rampley describes a situation in East-Central Europe in which the national paradigm remains the governing framework for a variety of conceptual and pragmatic reasons that
are likely to continue for many if not most researchers
in small academic communities. This is due to lack of funding, jobs, access to resources, linguistic barriers, and the existing structure of state and private institutions that support the arts, which includes the national focus of this esteemed journal. What compels scholars who function within the national culture paradigm to change their ways if the new approaches are simply choices in the carousel of art historical possibilities?
With a special emphasis on regional studies, this chapter takes up the challenge to theorize about the complexities of cultural interaction without imposing ethnocentric categories such as those that historically defined the discipline of... more
With a special emphasis on regional studies, this chapter takes up the challenge to theorize about the complexities of cultural interaction without imposing ethnocentric categories such as those that historically defined the discipline of art history on Euro-American terms. One of the primary obstacles to rethinking the discipline of art history has been the segmentation of our archives by period style and national culture. How can we access this past (and present) without also passing on values that may no longer be tenable but are inherent in our classifying terms and structures? I review issues of shared concern across a wide expanse of methods and subjects under four categories: (1) the problem of universals and universalism; (2) working within a national culture model in a transcultural setting; (3) the epistemic and ontological ground of research; and (4) the ethics of scholarship. I advocate for a material-based, non-transcendental ontology capacious enough to appeal to many different interpretative aims at the center of transcultural approaches, such as what happens when values, beliefs, and information are not held in common. In such cases, interpretation focuses on the heterogeneity of the artwork itself.
Discussions about the "global turn" in Art History are gaining more and more space. Since the end of the last century, art historians have turned their procedures and methods towards deepening the connections, exchanges,... more
Discussions about the "global turn" in Art History are gaining more and more space. Since the end of the last century, art historians have turned their procedures and methods towards deepening the connections, exchanges, interdependencies, mobility and visual cultures shared between geographically diverse groups. The researches carried out in this context opened new paths for materialities, works and objects little studied or known. It is increasingly necessary to encourage research that connects the various regions and cultural forms. How can the insights of regional and local studies be integrated into an inclusive international network of scholarly activity? We invite creative theoretical proposals and strategic case studies from all fields, places, and times to envision a future for global art history by focusing on connectivities, negotiated cultural differences, and dynamic historical processes. Such a disciplinary future resists the logic of economic globalization, avoids the national framing of its objects of investigation, eschews hierarchies of genre, rejects ahistorical presentism, and puts into question unexamined claims to universality.
What are the methodological implications of a responsibly imagined global art history? The opportunity to contribute to this volume encouraged me to look at the vexed problem of periodization anew. For the topic of our joint endeavor begs... more
What are the methodological implications of a responsibly imagined global art history? The opportunity to contribute to this volume encouraged me to look at the vexed problem of periodization anew. For the topic of our joint endeavor begs the question: how can any open-minded approach take for granted pre- existing categories such as “Renaissance” or “Early Modern” without foreclos- ing on the discussion that “global” art-historical approaches invite?
There is no doubt that the first period of intensive global contact developed in the sixteenth century, and this “fact” has been one of the justifications for expanding the field of Renaissance or Early Modern studies to a global arena. Yet the issues are more complex than they first appear
We speak of collaboration as if it were a readily available mode of working, but in fact collaboration is not widely practiced in the humanities. Nonetheless, collaboration across disciplines is absolutely essential to reimagining art... more
We speak of collaboration as if it were a readily available mode
of working, but in fact collaboration is not widely practiced in the humanities. Nonetheless, collaboration across disciplines is absolutely essential to reimagining art history in the grip of the climate crisis. The art historian as narrator traditionally emulates the imagined singularity of the artist. Our previous collaborations are many—we have published in different venues, delivered joint papers, offered advice, taught seminars together, and so on. There have also been two formal collaborations, from which we draw the following observations.
Je ne vais pas raconter comment sont apparues ces disciplines jumelles que furent l'histoire de l'art et l'anthropologie, même si leur création comme des activités réciproquement exclusives fut déterminant. Plutôt que de s’interroger sur... more
Je ne vais pas raconter comment sont apparues ces disciplines jumelles que furent l'histoire de l'art et l'anthropologie, même si leur création comme des activités réciproquement exclusives fut déterminant. Plutôt que de s’interroger sur leurs origines, il s’agit d’expliquer pourquoi le paradigme scientifique dominant de l'évolution a doté de bases communes deux disciplines pourtant bien distinctes, l'une portant sur « l'art des civilisations » et l'autre sur la « production des mondes primitifs ».
Soon after he arrived in London in Autumn 1877, the young German art historian Jean-Paul Richter began his monumental study of Leonardo’s manuscripts. The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci appeared in 1883, accompanied by many drawings... more
Soon after he arrived in London in Autumn 1877, the young German art historian Jean-Paul Richter began his monumental study of Leonardo’s manuscripts. The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci appeared in 1883, accompanied by many drawings also published for the first time.1 Access to Leonardo’s literary corpus was considerably greater by the time Edward MacCurdy published the first edition of his Leonardo da Vinci’s Note-Books in 1906.2 These two famous anthologies document a sea-change in the historical reception of Leonardo’s writings that is the subject of this chapter. Richter intended his anthology to provide a model of art-historical practice for studying the complex body of words and images that comprise Leonardo’s works on paper. Less well remembered today is the manner in which he also intended a new, more accurate version of Leonardo’s treatise on painting.
This essay takes what one might call a transverse path through the prehistory of “genius” since the first appearance of the term “ingegno” and its synonyms and alternatives in the literature on the visual and spatial arts around 1400. By... more
This essay takes what one might call a transverse path through the prehistory of “genius” since the first appearance of the term “ingegno” and its synonyms and alternatives in the literature on the visual and spatial arts around 1400. By the mid-seventeenth century the European empire was established across the globe through its various colonial outposts and trading net- works. What does the visual artist’s ingenuity have to do with it?
How did Leonardo’s manuscripts pass from his private notes to the pub- lic domain? One important aspect of current research initiatives is the widespread interest in large-scale knowledge systems and recovery of tacit artisanal knowledge.... more
How did Leonardo’s manuscripts pass from his private notes to the pub- lic domain? One important aspect of current research initiatives is the widespread interest in large-scale knowledge systems and recovery of tacit artisanal knowledge. The focus of this chapter is on Leonardo’s practice of both painting and writing as conjoined, open-ended, ongoing processes of innovation, experimentation, and revision. The combined evidence of word and image, theory and practice, suggests that Leonardo pursued the art of painting in line with contemporary understanding of the productive sciences, rather than any philosophical commitment to non finito. Leonardo’s successful working method as a consulting engineer with its focus on process rather than product offers a better analogue to his apparent lack of concern with finishing the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, which is the focus of the following discussion3.
T hree decades ago passionate debates over the nature of signification in art history taught us that context is never neutral, never a given, but produced by the author's interpretative strategies, as much in need of elucidation as the... more
T hree decades ago passionate debates over the nature of signification in art history taught us that context is never neutral, never a given, but produced by the author's interpretative strategies, as much in need of elucidation as the "event" it ostensibly explains. 1 There are many ways not to contextualize Leonardo's Paragone, the famous passages collected in the Parte prima of his Libro di pittura compiled by his student Francesco Melzi (1491/3-1567), still in progress at Melzi's death. 2 First of all, the title Paragone is not original, but inserted by the nineteenth-century editor of the first printed edition, Guglielmo Manzi. 3 It is telling that there is no Renaissance genre by that name and even cognates of paragone occur rarely in art criticism before the mid-sixteenth century. The sixteenth-century literary debates on the relative merits of painting and sculpture (and other media, sometimes dealing with other kinds of material evidence altogether), occasionally mention the oral exercise of "dar paragone" and "far paragone". 4 What we know as the comparison of the arts began as a meta-discourse about the many acts of visual judgment that go into making individual works of art. The surviving literary evidence highlights
Reviews two important contributions to the study of Early Modern Northern European art theoretical literature, a dictionary of art terms and an edited volume of case studies on writings on art published between 1600 and 1750 in German,... more
Reviews two important contributions to the study of Early Modern Northern European art theoretical literature, a dictionary of art terms and an edited volume of case studies on writings on art published between 1600 and 1750 in German, French, English, and Dutch. These two volumes are the first systematic comparison of artistic vocabulary in four languages as the terms appeared in a range of publications indebted to Italian sources. They study the literature from c. 1604, when Karel Van Mander s Schilder-boek was first published, until c. 1750, when Alexander Baumgarten introduced the term "aesthetics" to establish the analytical philosophy of art. Broadening the study to several countries and languages shows both the fragmentation of a received discourse and the emergence of common elements in an evolving, dynamic conception of painting.
This article examines some of Leonardo's activities in the final decade of the Quattrocento, a key period for the development of his theoretical considerations of painting and for the rapid development of his artistic practice... more
This article examines some of Leonardo's activities in the final decade of the Quattrocento, a key period for the development of his theoretical considerations of painting and for the rapid development of his artistic practice involving collaborators under his direction. It asks how knowledge was generated in and circulated through Leonardo's workshop by comparing autograph manuscript evidence from this period to the London Virgin of the Rocks. A direct relationship between the visual and textual evidence is further supported by the new physical information about the underdrawing and superimposed paint layers. With an explanatory text at hand, assistants could be taught the highly complex principles governing the reflected play of light and shadow as Leonardo describes in his notes. Without such guidance, the subtleties would be difficult if not impossible to achieve based on direct observation alone. It proposes concrete connections between Leonardo's notes, collaborati...

And 113 more

in Imagined Spaces/Places, ed Saija Isomaa et al, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, 3 – 26.
Research Interests:
The purpose of convening this panel is to critically reflect on the direction that early modern or “Global Renaissance” art history has taken in the wake of Reframing the Renaissance. What small victories can we celebrate in the midst of... more
The purpose of convening this panel is to critically
reflect on the direction that early modern or “Global Renaissance” art history has taken in the
wake of Reframing the Renaissance. What small victories can we celebrate in the midst of a more democratized arena of early modern art history? Where have we failed, and how can we do better? The distinguished panel that we have here today, some of whom were original contributors to the volume, and others who cover geographical and thematic areas that broaden the volume’s original comparative focus on just Europe and Latin America, will provide us with much food for thought. Our panelists will reflect on issues of pedagogy, the problems with ocular-centrism, the ramifications of Burkhardtian frameworks in the shaping of Islamic art history, and the reception of Reframing in educational contexts beyond the United States, among many others. Each mini-presentation will be organized around a single image, and after all of the presentations, we look forward to facilitating what we hope to be a fruitful discussion among the panelists and members of the audience.
Research Interests:
This is the comprehensive program (including abstracts of all the speakers) of the seminar "How to cut and share the global pie..." which was co-organized by Franziska Koch (Heidelberg University) and Birgit Hopfener (Carleton University)... more
This is the comprehensive program (including abstracts of all the speakers) of the seminar "How to cut and share the global pie..." which was co-organized by Franziska Koch (Heidelberg University) and Birgit Hopfener (Carleton University) at the "9th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present" (ASAP/9) taking place at Oakland/San Francisco in October 2017. It included many members of the Research Network for Transcultural Practices in the Arts and Humanities (RNTP).
For the ASAP-website see: http://asap9.org/seminars/
Announcement of book publication.
Research Interests:
Francesca Fiorani is the author of this book review. The authors of the book are also listed here.