Beautiful Geography: The Pictorial Maps of Ruth Taylor White

This paper explores the career of Ruth Taylor White, an American cartographic illustrator who published a significant number of pictorial maps from the 1920s into the 1940s. Taylor White’s ‘cartographs’ (as she called them) were characterized by her signature bobble-headed cartoon characters who romped through colourful, attractive landscapes. These visually rich and highly narrative maps simultaneously strove for accuracy and engaged in profound stereotyping with regard to culture, race, gender and class. They reveal not only the aesthetic and conceptual preferences of their maker but also the cultural biases of their middle-class, white American audience.     

Britische Politiker als Liebhaber der Wissenschaft (ca. 1850–1914) — Zur Ideologie des Amateurismus

The various scholarly and scientific endeavours — comprising both arts and sciences —, which British statesmen persued in their leisure time, transcend the mere biographical aspect. In the light of the slow, yet steady professionalisation of educational and political institutions, many of them modernised or newly created in order to achieve what came to be called “National Efficiency”, the literary and scientific pastimes of men, like Gladstone, Morley, Salisbury, Balfour or Haldane, seemed soon to become somewhat obsolete. Yet, it is argued, that the often professedly amateurish activities did not merely display the traditional hobby attitude to the sciences, so characteristic of the wealthy aristocrat, but in some cases revealed a good understanding of the scientific and educational needs of society, leading up to their active advancement. The British amateurs, it would seem, were pleading for providing a balanced higher education and training, rather than going for the technical excellence of the political rival Imperial Germany, which dazzled and, at the same time, intimidated some of them.     

LIME PLASTER AS AN ADHESIVE FOR HAFTING EIGHTEENTH-DYNASTY FLINT SICKLES FROM TELL EL DAB'A,EASTERN NILE DELTA (EGYPT)*

A combination of analytical techniques, including thin-section observations, scanning electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction and X-ray fluorescence analysis, was applied to study the nature and origin of an adhesive used for mounting flint sickle blades to a wooden handle, recovered from early Eighteenth Dynasty culture layers of the multi-layer settlement at Tell el Dab'a, Lower Eygpt. The results obtained from these investigations led to the conclusion that the adhesive is a pure lime plaster, thus providing the oldest evidence for the use of this material as a binding agent so far known in ancient Egypt.     

Rethinking the Politics–Religion Distinction

William T. Cavanaugh argues that the politics–religion distinction presupposes covert commitments that inappropriately support a “migration of the holy” from the church to the state. Despite his strong critical instincts, several of his genealogical propensities appear to stand in tension with his commitments to constitutional democracy and the universality of grace. By contrast with Cavanaugh, John Rawls’ post-metaphysical reformulation of the politics–religion aims to identify a public criterion compatible with a plurality of comprehensive doctrines. Although I commend Rawls for retaining some form of this distinction, I question the possibility of a post-metaphysical standpoint and its compatibility with his commitment to what he calls the “fact of pluralism.” Drawing on Bernard Lonergan’s transpositions of human nature and grace in this paper’s final section, I develop an alternative account of the relationship between politics and religion that aims to harmonize some of the strongest insights from the work of Cavanaugh and Rawls.     

The Real vs the Imaginary: Sir William Chambers on the Chinese Garden

Sir William Chambers was one of the most important English architects in the eighteenth-century, but both in his day and later his international recognition was closely connected with his admiration for and promotion of Chinese art, particularly Chinese landscaping. Between 1757 and 1773, Chambers published three treatises praising the ingenious mixture of nature and art in a Chinese pleasure ground, criticizing the then influential English gardener Lancelot (Capability) Brown, and trying to goad English garden design into the direction of China. He did not achieve his purposes mainly because he mixed what he knew as genuine about the Chinese gardening art with what he fantasized about it. While recent scholarship has focused on his fantasy, this article examines what Chambers knew or imagined about Chinese landscaping, what he and his detractors were for and against, and how the fiasco of his 1772 and 1773 treatises, which he brought upon himself, nevertheless helped to usher in a new phase in the English reception of Chinese landscaping ideas.     

A Bayesian approach to rapid seismic vulnerability assessment at urban scale

The seismic vulnerability of city centers is commonly assessed by extending the study methods applied to single buildings to urban aggregations. This approach is not always applicable at territorial scale, as it is uneconomical in terms of time and costs. An innovative method provides reasonable large-scale a priori estimation of parameters not directly evaluable from the exterior of buildings by elaborating values which can be measured from the outside. Those parameters are treated as continuous variables, by assigning them a suitable probability density function. The Bayesian approach is adopted, which allows the update of initial hypotheses by using new data gathered during on-site surveys. In this regard, a rapid survey form for the on-site data collection is proposed. An example of its application to a façade of a building structural unit in Santo Stefano di Sessanio in L’Aquila province (Italy) is proposed, showing promising preliminary results for buildings belonging to Italian historical centers.     

The religious geography of Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode”: popery,presbytery, and parti-coloured picts

ABSTRACT

Marvell’s “Ode” (1650) is an English poem about a British problem – a problem further problematized by religion. The “Ode” lauds Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish campaigns, but English responses to these “colonial” wars were in reality complicated by protestant infighting among presbyterians, independents, and sectarians. Writers like Milton and Nedham rallied English support for Cromwell’s Irish campaign by recycling Spenserian stereotypes of Irish catholic barbarity. But Milton and Nedham also undercut English protestant unity by flinging these same anti-catholic stereotypes at Scottish presbyterians in Belfast and Edinburgh. Departing from previous studies, this article argues that Marvell’s “Ode” eschews Milton and Nedham’s anti-Presbyterianism in ways calculated to elide, rather than divide, protestant communities. The article explores how the “Ode” presents Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish campaigns as exclusively anti-catholic (rather than anti-presbyterian) crusades, comparing Marvell’s presentation of Cromwell in the “Ode” with his identification of Cromwell as an anti-catholic crusader in “First Anniversary” (1655). Both poems anticipate in this respect Marvell’s later anti-catholic, but pro-nonconformist, approach to Ireland in Rehearsal transpros’d (1672–1673). The article is therefore concerned to root Marvell’s post-Restoration commitment to protestant tolerationism within the anti-catholic language of the “Ode”.     

Railway Architecture: The Great Northern Railway (Ireland) at Dundalk

ABSTRACT

This article is adapted from the dissertation ‘Railway Architecture: The Great Northern Railway (Ireland) at Dundalk’, completed by Siobhan Osgood for the MPhil in Art History: Art + Ireland, where it was awarded a distinction. The study provides an historical analysis in the context of architectural development and broader railway culture in Ireland to provide an interpretation and understanding of the use of polychromatic yellow, red and black brickwork to create a visual identity for railway architecture. The use of accented colours to pick out key features is repeated across a series of buildings, thus creating a distinctive style of ‘brick-branding’. These are most prominent in the town of Dundalk, where the GNRI had its central engineering works at the halfway point on the Dublin to Belfast mainline and at the point where the Irish North line extended west and north. The buildings were each intricately designed by the GNRI's first chief engineer, William Hemingway Mills, a second-generation railway engineer who merged the roles of architect and engineer using an amalgamation of architectural designs from his earlier career in Derby, Scotland, Mexico and Spain. Mills thus created his own ‘Millsian’ style of industrial architectural design.     

Nomadic,ecstatic, magic: Arctic primitivism in Scandinavia around 1900

The aim of this article is to delineate the term “Arctic primitivism” in an aesthetic context and, by means of three examples from Scandinavian artists whose works were also the subject of ethnological discussions, to give an illuminating impression of Scandinavian Arctic primitivism around 1900. First some conceptual considerations about the combination of Arctic and primitivistic discourse will be presented. Then three examples for the “primal conditions” of an aesthetic conception of Arctic primitivism will be discussed: the nomadic, the ecstatic, and the magical. They serve as counter principles to modern categories such as spatial fixedness, linear chronology, and rational thought. Emilie Demant Hatt’s visual art stands for the nomadic principle; the Swedish cartoonist Ossian Elgström deals with ecstatic states; and the poems of Danish “eskimologist” William Thalbitzer show his fascination with indigenous magical incantations as an alternative to rational thought. All examples illustrate the artists’ interest in an authentic and uncorrupted culture, which they reflect on with awareness of inauthenticity and second-hand acquisition. The effects of duplication, simultaneity, and secundarity arising from the three principles drive a reflective discourse on media through which awareness of the crisis of modernity is sublimated, revealed, or made the subject of artistic exploration.