Face-Work: Making Hair Matter in Sixteenth-Century Central Europe

Bringing gender history, the history of the body and art history into a conversation with material culture studies, this article argues that the sudden fashionability of beards in Renaissance Europe has been intricately linked with a culture of material and visual experimentation. I propose shifting perspectives from a focus on the symbolism of beards towards examining how early modern ways of material engagement with the matter of hair crafted a visual attention to facial hair that made up the sociocultural significance of beards. Focusing on how people made hair matter, I suggest working with the concept of face-work. In particular, this article maps how the Reformation upheavals and the rise of new visual practices dynamised Renaissance protagonists’ creative engagement with facial hair as a means for staging the self.     

Weapon‐related Cranial Lesions from Medieval and Renaissance Turin,Italy

Archaeological excavations carried out in the square around the Cathedral of S. Giovanni in Turin brought to light burials referable to the medieval and Renaissance periods. The anthropological examination of the skeletal remains allowed to identify two skeletons from the medieval period (10th–11th centuries) and four skeletons from the Renaissance age (15th century) showing weapon‐related cranial injuries. These peri mortem lesions are indicators of interpersonal aggression and in particular of armed conflicts. The two individuals from the early medieval period presented three traumas consisting in sharp force lesions caused by bladed weapons. As regards the Renaissance sample, the majority of the nine peri mortem injuries were sharp force wounds, followed by a blunt force trauma. These distribution patterns might reflect different fighting techniques, whereas the side distribution and location of the skull trauma provide further indications on the fighting modalities. Identification of the weapons that caused these traumas is suggested. The lack of post‐cranial wounds at Piazza S. Giovanni might be explained by the greater attention paid to the head, which was the main target of attack, or by adequate protection of the body through medieval and Renaissance armours. Otherwise, the wounds in the body would have been found only in the soft tissues, with no involvement of the bones. Despite the presence of weapon injuries, the results obtained from the study of the Renaissance sample are different from the findings of other contemporary battlefields. It is highly likely that the individuals of the Renaissance age were not young soldiers employed in war episodes and brought back for burial in Turin after battles that had taken place elsewhere. Instead, they were probably individuals who had died in riots or in other violent city episodes, as the historical records for the Renaissance age seem to confirm. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Do Women Need the Renaissance?

Joan Kelly's path‐breaking article, ‘Did Women have a Renaissance?’, first published in 1977, led historians of women in many fields to question the applicability of chronological categories derived from male experience. Thirty years later, the questioning continues, augmented by doubts about whether all systems of periodisation over‐simplify the diversity of gender. This paper examines what might be lost if feminist historians, in their sensitivity to difference, refuse to apply structures of periodisation. It looks at challenges to both ‘Renaissance’ and ‘early modern’ as conceptual categories and suggests ways in which gender is and must remain central to understandings of these eras.     

REPORT Neurology of the Arts Mansell Bequest Symposium at the Medical Society of London 30 April–1 May 2001

Philosophical instruments were designed to examine phenomena experimentally, rather than by naturalistic observation alone. In the nineteenth century, some instruments were called philosophical toys because they provided popular amusement as well as experimental assistance. They were applied widely in natural philosophy, but attention here is directed particularly to manipulations of perceived space and time and their influence on art. One of the earliest instruments, which had a profound impact on art as well as science, was the camera obscura. It assisted image formation in art before it was applied as an analogy to the eye at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Later philosophical toys were used to address visual perception of motion and depth. Development was initially driven by the need for stimulus control so that the methods of physics could be applied to the study of perceptual phenomena. The principal instruments were invented in the first half of the nineteenth century, and they consisted of simple contrivances that manipulated time and space in ways that had not previously been appreciated. They included thaumatropes, phenakistoscopes, stroboscopes, anorthoscopes, stereoscopes, tachistoscopes, and chronoscopes. Several of these philosophical toys proved to be phenomenally popular, particularly when combined with photography.     

Philosophical instruments and toys: optical devices extending the art of seeing

Philosophical instruments were designed to examine phenomena experimentally, rather than by naturalistic observation alone. In the nineteenth century, some instruments were called philosophical toys because they provided popular amusement as well as experimental assistance. They were applied widely in natural philosophy, but attention here is directed particularly to manipulations of perceived space and time and their influence on art. One of the earliest instruments, which had a profound impact on art as well as science, was the camera obscura. It assisted image formation in art before it was applied as an analogy to the eye at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Later philosophical toys were used to address visual perception of motion and depth. Development was initially driven by the need for stimulus control so that the methods of physics could be applied to the study of perceptual phenomena. The principal instruments were invented in the first half of the nineteenth century, and they consisted of simple contrivances that manipulated time and space in ways that had not previously been appreciated. They included thaumatropes, phenakistoscopes, stroboscopes, anorthoscopes, stereoscopes, tachistoscopes, and chronoscopes. Several of these philosophical toys proved to be phenomenally popular, particularly when combined with photography.     

‘Startling; Nay,Almost Repulsive’: Light Effects and Nascent Sensation in John Everett Millais’s The Rescue

Taking Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais’s The Rescue (1855) as a case study of shifting aesthetic and moral frameworks, the essay investigates the ways in which mid-century British debates regarding the proper representation of light effects illuminate anxieties about a physically embodied viewer, one who encountered pictures in individualized ways that required regulation and guidance. Represented light, as an element that had a measurable effect on the senses, clearly stimulated a physical response and therefore brought the body to the fore in the art encounter. Types of painting that forcefully engaged the somatic self could become suspect and consequently subject to a process by which they were designated as ‘sensation’, a category in fraught relation with the disappearing ‘sublime’. Combining close visual analysis, a discussion of The Rescue’s novel subject matter, remarks by its first beholders, and nineteenth-century aesthetic theory, the article reflects on the ways in which discourses of art revealed anxieties about the formation of the modern subject and argues that The Rescue is a node in which the death of the sublime meets the birth of sensation.     

Visual and aural intellectual histories: an introduction

ABSTRACT

If the subject matter of intellectual history is the study of past thoughts, the intellectual history of the visual arts and music may be characterised as the study of past thoughts as they were expressed visually and aurally. Yet this is not always how an intellectual history of art and music has been practiced. More attention is often paid to verbal texts about art or music, rather than to the visual or the aural per se. If we accept that ideas can have visual and aural, as much as verbal form, then the histories of art and music are significant repositories of thoughts of individuals and networks of individuals (creative artists, patrons, institutions) within a given culture and period. But the ways in which those thoughts are articulated as aural or visual “texts”, and the ways in which they can be accessed by those who seek to understand them, will be specific to each art form, and represent a distinctive kind of intellectual activity in each field.     

‘Resemblances to archaeological finds’: Guido Boggiani,Claude Lévi-Strauss and Caduveo body painting

In 1942, Claude Lévi-Strauss published an article on Caduveo body painting in the first number of the surrealist magazine VVV, with the editorial assistance of André Breton and cover by Max Ernst. In the article, Lévi-Strauss uses the photographs of the Caduveo women taken during his fieldtrip in 1935–36, together with drawings of facial designs collected to reflect on their ‘strong originality’, which ‘evokes a very ancient culture, and one full of preciosities’. Amongst these illustrations, there is an engraving taken from Guido Boggiani’s book, I Caduvei, published in 1895. Boggiani, an Italian landscape painter who visited South America in 1887–93, was captivated by the Caduveo graphic art, which he sketched in detail. In 1896 he returned, travelling to Paraguay, this time equipped with a new tool to help his ethnographic research: a photographic camera. Over a period of five years, Boggiani completed more than 400 photographs on glass gelatin plates of various sizes. For Lévi-Strauss, as for Boggiani, the originality of the Caduveo graphic art remained enigmatic, evoking a very ancient culture; it was a topic to which he would return in several of his most influential works. In this article, I focus on the visual images (engraved, drawn, photographed and filmed) that depict the body painting of the Caduveo people in central Brazil by Boggiani and Lévi-Strauss in order to explore the ways in which they enabled an ephemeral art – delicate arabesques painted on skin – to be studied as archaeological vestiges. In the process, I trace the aesthetic sensibility of Boggiani and Lévi-Strauss that provided them with the imaginative tools to do so.     

The Death of Beauty: Goya's Etchings and Black Paintings through the Eyes of André Malraux

Modern critics often regard Goya's etchings and black paintings as satirical observations on the social and political conditions of the time. In a study of Goya first published in 1950, which seldom receives the attention it merits, the French author and art theorist André Malraux contends that these works have a significance of a much deeper kind. The etchings and black paintings, Malraux argues, represent a fundamental challenge to the European artistic tradition that began with the Renaissance, an essentially humanist tradition founded on the pursuit of a transcendent world of nobility, harmony and beauty—an ideal world outside of which, as Malraux writes, ‘man did not fully merit the name man’. Following the illness that left him deaf for life—an encounter with ‘the irremediable’, to borrow Malraux's term—Goya developed an art of a fundamentally different kind—an art, Malraux writes, ruled by ‘the unity of the prison house’, which replaced transcendence with a pervasive ‘feeling of dependence’ and from which all trace of humanism has been erased. Foreshadowing modern art's abandonment of the Renaissance ideal, and created semi-clandestinely, the etchings and black paintings are an early announcement of the death of beauty in Western art.     

Working towards the Duce: five recent books on Mussolini

ABSTRACT

Giovanni Freppa (1795–1870), a well-known antiquarian, was instrumental in propelling the Ginori maiolica firm to reinvent the technique of Renaissance lustreware. The so-called ‘Freppa Scandal’ resulted after he sold as authentic Renaissance pieces a number of plates made by Ginori. Freppa was also famous, or rather infamous, for his exploitation of the young sculptor Giovanni Bastianini, whose remarkable neo-Renaissance portrait busts were sometimes sold as authentic Renaissance works. The Louvre purchased for an enormous price a bust believed to be a Renaissance masterpiece; but it was actually executed by Bastianini in 1864 on commission from Freppa, resulting in ‘the Benivieni Affair’. But this article is not primarily intended to expand on Freppa’s transactions in the art world; rather, it highlights his activities in many other spheres, including a failed publishing project with Giacomo Leopardi, among other activities. Freppa was a more complex individual than indicated merely by the two above-mentioned scandals.     

枣庄市徐楼村红铜铸镶青铜器纹饰镶铸特征

红铜铸镶青铜器是春秋时期青铜艺术的杰出代表,红铜纹饰的镶铸特征是器物铸造工艺的直接反映,但红铜镶嵌青铜器的制作技术仍有许多问题有待于研究探讨。为此,通过直接观察法和X光成像技术,分析探讨了枣庄市徐楼村红铜铸镶青铜器纹饰镶铸特征。红铜纹饰有与器身基体等壁厚型和非等壁厚型两种。与器身等壁厚红铜铸镶纹饰和器身基体有平口直接镶铸和红铜预留凹槽镶铸两种方式。与器身非等厚红铜铸镶纹饰则利用红铜纹饰在器身浇铸时形成凹槽,红铜纹饰通过与纹饰相连的红铜支钉固定在范芯或在纹饰底部加入垫片方式镶铸于器物基体中。研究成果为红铜铸镶青铜器的工艺过程研究提供材料和证据。     

Les Ombres Portées et la Renaissance. Un Trait Culturel Peut-Il Revivre ?

The history of art reveals that painters have rarely tried to depict projected shadows. They appeared in the art of ancient Greece, in Greco-roman art, and then disappeared until the 15(th) century. None can be found in Asian art or any other non European art. Yet to date, no scholar has reflected on this troubled history, one that provides a specific link between the Renaissance and classical antiquity. This paper seeks to fill this gap by studying projected shadows as "cultural markers" with a specific history.     

中国古代石雕论——石兽、石人与石佛

In China, during the Han dynasty, large-scale, three-dimensional stone sculpture appeared. Stone animals and stone human figures were erected in front of tombs and on their approach routes. Chinese art, which had long loathed realistic representation of human body, began to turn towards the human body. However, these stone human figures were cloaked in thick garments, and their expression was nothing more than generalized surface treatments. In the first half of the 5^th century, Chinese stone sculpture met an unprecedented foreign influence in its encounter with Buddhist art, and there was a rapid development of human figural sculpture via Buddhist sculptures. In the Tang dynasty, a Chinese style of Buddhist sculpture, fitted with both bodily expression and decorative qualities, matured. On the other hand, the erection of stone sculptures and steles spread in the general classes and in regional areas, given the undercurrent of China＇ s native preference for, and reverence of, jade. Chinese stone sculpture developed amidst a repetition of being greatly swayed by the ＂foreign＂ and held back by the ＇traditional.＇ In the history of Chinese stone sculpture, it was always foreign cultures that brought the opportunity for the birth of new changes.     

Sacrifices of Raw,Cooked and Burnt Humans

Sacrifice is a ritual practice including funerals. Rituals teach people to believe in cultural principles by creating experiences in which they can be apprehended, and therefore rituals produce social order by producing conceptual order. The supreme metaphoric symbol is the human victim. Beyond human sacrifice remains only the sacrificer's own death. The dead humans can be seen as gifts to the gods. There are at least three modes of preparation of the corpse for the gods: it can be sacrificed raw, cooked or burnt. Cremation as a heat-mediated transformation renders possible at least two ways of preparing the corpse. The cremated ones may either be cooked or burnt. The deceased are prepared in various ways to become edible meals for the deities. The humans are as a banqueting sacrifice returned to their land of origin. Social control is defined by hierarchically ordered powers determining who can be sacrificed and in what manner the sacrifice can be made. In this sacrificial practice the whole cosmological world is incorporated in the resurrection of the society, legitimated by the gods through their consumption of a holy meal.     

Common usage,presumption and verisimilitude in sixteenth-century theories of juridical interpretation

The question of how common usage could be constitutive for the meaning of linguistic expressions has been discussed by Renaissance philosophers such as Lorenzo Valla, and it also played an important role in Renaissance theories of juridical interpretation. An aspect of the analysis of common usage in Renaissance theories of juridical interpretation that concerns the role of presumption has not yet found much attention. Renaissance jurists such as Simone de Praetis, Nicolaus Everardus, and Aimone de Cravetta saw that both the usage of Latin by practitioners of law and the vernacular common usage of ordinary people often differed from the technical definition of legal concepts as laid down by ancient jurists or modern legislators. In some cases, they ascribed both to Latin and to vernacular common usage the power of changing the meaning of juridical terms. Still, they were aware of the fact that matters of common usage involve always a degree of uncertainty. The methodological notion of presumption is one of the concepts that figured most prominently in Renaissance approaches to the problem of uncertainty, and, in particular, it was applied in the analysis of meaning-change of legal concepts through common usage.     

Death in Flames: Human Remains from a Domestic House Fire from Early Iron Age,Denmark

This paper presents osteoarchaeological analyses of the human skeletal material from a burnt down house in Jutland, Denmark, dated to the first century bc . We describe how the osteological analyses of this complex site were approached and illustrate how we reconstructed the death of the human victims. Besides basic osteological analyses, we also tried to reconstruct the posture of the deceased humans using 12‐in. posable wooden mannequins. Along with bones from several domestic animals, skeletal elements from six human individuals were recovered. All individuals were located in the eastern end of the house—the byre end. The demographic structure indicates a small family household. Our posture reconstruction further proposes that they did not die of asphyxiation while sleeping: At least two of the individuals were lying face down, trying to protect themselves. Two other individuals were lying on their side in crouching positions, which cannot be ruled out as examples of pugilistic attitude. However, we suggest this is rather unlikely. The humans could have died as they failed to rescue their invaluable animals from the fire. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A “Crisis” in the Making: The Correspondence of Hans Baron and Paul Oskar Kristeller

This article summarizes and contextualizes the vast unpublished correspondence between Hans Baron (1900–1988) and Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905–1999), two of the most prominent twentieth-century scholars of Renaissance Humanism. It details how Baron and Kristeller came to take their first steps in Renaissance scholarship in Germany before political circumstances forced them into exile; it recounts the story of their emigration and their strategies for survival in Italy, Britain, and the United States; it reveals the impact of the American academy on their intellectual journeys and the extent to which they self-consciously stood for a methodology on the verge of extinction. Most important, the correspondence provides us with a personal etiology of the rebirth of Renaissance studies in the postwar period and of the concrete genesis of some of the books that brought it about.     

Tracing Medieval and Renaissance Alabaster Works of Art Back to Quarries: A Multi‐Isotope (Sr,S, O) Approach

Multi‐isotope fingerprinting (sulphur, oxygen and strontium isotopes) has been tested to study the provenances of medieval and Renaissance French and Swedish alabaster works of art. Isotope signatures of historical English, French and Spanish alabaster source quarries or areas are revealed to be highly specific, with a strong intra‐group homogeneity and strong inter‐group contrasts, especially for Sr and S isotopes. The chosen combination of isotope tracers is a good basis for forensic work on alabaster provenance, allowing verification of hypotheses about historical trade routes as well as identification of fakes and their origin. The applied analytical techniques of continuous flow isotope ratio mass spectrometry (CF–IRMS) and thermal ionization mass spectrometry (TIMS) only require micro‐samples in the low‐milligram range, thus minimizing the impact on the works of art.     

‘The development of higher urban life’ and the geographic imagination: beauty, art, and moral environmentalism in Toronto, 1900–1920

The existence of school art leagues in Toronto, which sought to use beauty and art in the public schools as a means of sensitizing children to aesthetics, can be explained through their ideational affiliation with the city beautification impulse. In Toronto, a chief proponent of city beautification and the link between city beauty and school art was the painter, city planner, and art educator, George Agnew Reid, who regarded city beauty as more than an exercise in urban cosmetics; city beautification relied on extant beliefs in the morality of beauty and its putative efficacy as a shaper of human behaviour in the city, especially the ennoblement of the working and immigrant classes. The resulting ‘moral environmentalism’ of beautification changes the way we should think about early city planning, ultimately revealing the geographical imaginations of those contributing to the moral environmentalist milieu.