“The Story of the Man Who Whitened His Face”: Bernini,Galileo, and the Science of Relief

This essay argues that Bernini orchestrated the relief surfaces of his sculptures through an exacting science of optical perception. It connects his understanding of the relief structure of his sculptural work to Galileo’s contemporaneous discovery of the cratered surface of the moon to contend that art and science shared similar concerns in the visual analysis of relief perceived as patterns of light and shadow. Through a full contextualisation of one of Bernini’s many workshop aphorisms, about a man who whitened his face, it demonstrates the scientific, art-theoretical, and practice-based considerations that informed Bernini’s understanding of optics in the sculptural rendering of facial likeness through the medium of white marble.     

The rise and fall of “individualism” before and after the May Fourth Movement

Abstract

“Individualism” was one of the most important philosophical trends in the May Fourth era, heavily influencing youths seeking personal liberation and independence. However, not long after the May Fourth Movement, positive associations with individualism gradually receded. Compared with devotion to “nation” or “society,” the quest for individual independence was repeatedly criticized as almost synonymous with “selfish.” There were two reasons for this: first was opposition stemming from a traditional Chinese respect for collectivism; second was that individualism had become the theoretical basis for private capitalist production following the First World War and its founding values were coming under increased scrutiny. As the Second World War unfolded, the fight for survival benefitted the promotion of collectivist values and the idea of social organisms. Individualism declined and eventually became supplanted by a heavily politicized form of collectivism.     

“The Hunting of the Earl of Rone.” The Emergence of “New” Folklore Motifs: Individual Creativity and Group Control

In 1798, a French expeditionary force under General Humbert landed in County Mayo to support the United Irishmen's rebellion. Both the French and their local allies were eventually defeated by British and Yeomanry troops, but the memory of the events and personalities of “the Year of the French” was still strong when the Irish Folklore Commission started its collecting mission in the 1930s. This article suggests that the folk narratives of these events can be collated into an alternative, and more democratic, version of the rebellion. Popular interest rested not with the French general (except as a scapegoat for defeat) but with local men (and women) of less elevated status. The common people of Ireland were, in their own narratives, less directed from above and more agents in their own right. These are less a corrective to the supposedly “authoritative” histories written by professionals and diffused through the media and education system, than a coherent, alternative historiography.1 The ballad “The Men of the West” was composed by William Rooney, one of the most enthusiastic organisers of the centenary commemorations of 1798. The ballad was set to the air of “Eoghan Cóir,” a song attributed to the eighteenth‐century Mayo poet Richard Barrett [Riocard Bairéad], who was implicated in the Rebellion.      

“The artifice of eternity”: The Wanderings of Oisin and the Byzantium poems

Yeats’s poetry and drama centre on conflict, and crucially, on the clash between the mortal and the eternal. In this essay, I focus on the way in which The Wanderings of Oisin foreshadows and informs the treatment of eternity in Yeats’s later Byzantium poems. The Wanderings of Oisin explores the intensity of human longing for the eternal despite our time-bound nature, prefiguring his later impassioned though analytical Byzantium poems. Although the Byzantium poems seem initially to glorify eternity at the expense of human life, this essay traces the complexity of Yeats’s desire. Previous criticism has understated the extent to which Yeats’s poetry actively resists the siren song of eternity. The Byzantium poems problematise the eternity that they seem to desire, and this article reveals them as inflected by the way in which The Wanderings of Oisin questions the value of the eternal realm in the light of mortal heroic values. The “intensity, solitude, defeat” of the artist are inevitable, but there is a victory of sorts won from the poet’s deliberate inability to commit to any version of the eternal that preclude his own power and humanity. Yeats’s poetry runs the gamut between versions of desire that express an overweening desire for resolution even as they retain their resistance to any single pure state of being, if any such state is possible.     

The Figure of Man and the Territorialisation of Justice in ‘Enlightenment’ Natural Law: Pufendorf and Vattel

Discussions of early modern philosophical anthropology in postcolonial studies often treat it as tied to Eurocentric conceptions of civilisational supremacism and to the ideologies of imperialism and colonialism served by these conceptions. In discussing the conceptions of man contained in two key early modern doctrines of the law of nature and nations – those of Samuel Pufendorf and Emer de Vattel – this paper casts a sceptical eye on the postcolonial accounts. The anthropologies deployed by Pufendorf and Vattel relate not to European imperialism and colonialism but to intra-European problems associated with the formation of territorial states and the bellicose relations between them.     

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.     

The New Nature of Things? Canada's Conservative Government and the Design of the New Environmental Subject

Since coming to power in 2006, Canada's government under Stephen Harper has worked to recalibrate federal regulatory, legislative and economic development frameworks as they overlap in the littoral zone of the environment. We argue that Harper's Conservative government is pursuing a totalizing strategy in reconfiguring the desired Canadian environmental subject. This strategy approaches an integrated design that eclipses the incremental strategic options most Canadian federal governments have understood themselves to be constrained by. This design's basic features include the discursive strategies employed to collapse “the environment” into a singular resource extraction paradigm, a programmatic concentration of power to the executive branch of the Canadian government, and a classical conservative ideology that associates environmental regulation and management with dominion over and improvement of national territory, to the exclusion of other frames and relations. We query the articulation of consent and certainty in relation to the environment and extractive economies in Canada.     

Museums and the ‘Death of Experience’: singularity,interiority and the outside

This paper discusses a number of well-known critiques of the museum that seek to identify it as a problematic space for experience. The key argument put forward is that we can find within that analysis a critical geography around the museum that help us to understand the work that it does in relation to experience. Three spatial motifs are drawn from this analysis and discussed: the singular, the interior and the outside. The paper argues that museums since the nineteenth century have established a topos for experience based on a mimetic realism around the experience of both culture and history through the first two of these spatial expressions. Through them museums produces a fabulation of culture and history that supplements for the lack of topos for experience found within modern society as a whole. The latter spatiality – that of the outside – is found in the form of the absent–presence of the event in relation to the archiving principle of the museum, thereby continually unsettling the first two expressions and calling them into question. This dynamic reveals the museum as a space to critically think about what it does with experience and the importance of spatial analysis for that.