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This essay reviews Stephen Moonie’s book Art Criticism and Modernism in the United States (2002), which contributes to the steadily growing field of art-historical research into art criticism. Until recently, art criticism has received scant attention partly because such writing is often considered ...
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This essay reviews Stephen Moonie’s book Art Criticism and Modernism in the United States (2002), which contributes to the steadily growing field of art-historical research into art criticism. Until recently, art criticism has received scant attention partly because such writing is often considered ‘literary’, ‘unacademic’, or constitutively defined by ‘subjectivity’ in comparison to its siblings art history and aesthetics. Moonie’s book focuses upon North American art criticism from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, particularly the writings produced in and around Artforum in dialogue with Clement Greenberg’s difficult legacy. Such criticism dovetailed with developments in contemporary painting, sculpture, and film, but also presented itself as avowedly more intellectual, philosophically engaged, and self-reflexive than other forms of art criticism current at the time. This review, therefore, examines how Moonie elucidates this emergent mode of art criticism, particularly in light of its recourse to philosophical concepts as interpretative aids.

This review considers Sources in Irish Art 2: A Reader, edited by Fintan Cullen and Róisín Kennedy, as a key contribution to the historiography of Irish art. This book, which includes excerpts of texts on Irish art and visual culture from the mid-seventeenth to the early twenty-first centuries, prov...
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This review considers Sources in Irish Art 2: A Reader, edited by Fintan Cullen and Róisín Kennedy, as a key contribution to the historiography of Irish art. This book, which includes excerpts of texts on Irish art and visual culture from the mid-seventeenth to the early twenty-first centuries, provides readers with a valuable guide to the multiplicity of printed materials. These texts include letters, exhibition catalogue essays, and artist statements, as well as art historical reflections. As such, the book points to the importance of broad archival practices in the field of Irish art history. The review essay is prefaced with an overview of the past decade of publishing on Irish art, architecture, and visual studies, making the point that a book like Sources in Irish Art 2: A Reader provides an important map to the intellectual roots of many current debates.

In 1939, the Turkish scholar and art critic İsmayıl Hakkı Baltacıoğlu (1886-1978) spearheaded a campaign of recovery of shadow theatre plays. Known informally as Karagöz plays, these candlelit performances of flat figurines mounted on sticks had been a widespread cultural phenomenon during the Ottom...
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In 1939, the Turkish scholar and art critic İsmayıl Hakkı Baltacıoğlu (1886-1978) spearheaded a campaign of recovery of shadow theatre plays. Known informally as Karagöz plays, these candlelit performances of flat figurines mounted on sticks had been a widespread cultural phenomenon during the Ottoman Empire, but their relevance in the newly built, progress-facing Turkish Republic was questioned by the Turkish intelligentsia. This paper examines Baltacıoğlu’s recuperation of Karagöz as part of a wider phenomenon of cultural revivalism, closely connected to local art historiographical practices that had been developed since the 1920s. These accounts, privileging notions of anachronism, historical duration and the survival of form, paired a deliberate self-orientalising vocabulary to avant-garde terminology adapted from European artistic quarters. Baltacıoğlu’s cultural intervention, whose conservative modernist attitude was politically motivated by his nationalistic beliefs, articulated the shadow theatre plays as mobile carriers of the region’s artistic memory, positioning Turkish art history on an alternative trajectory of influence, memory and progress.

This paper scrutinises Adolf Goldschmidt and Kurt Weitzmann’s publication on Byzantine ivories to reveal its entanglement with contemporaneous art theories and art historical discourses. It identifies the bedrock of the authors’ observations in Heinrich Wölfflin’s stylistic dialectic and in the crit...
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This paper scrutinises Adolf Goldschmidt and Kurt Weitzmann’s publication on Byzantine ivories to reveal its entanglement with contemporaneous art theories and art historical discourses. It identifies the bedrock of the authors’ observations in Heinrich Wölfflin’s stylistic dialectic and in the critical writings by Adolf von Hildebrand and Aloïs Riegl devoted to the subject of relief. Such contextual and critical approaches to the publication allow for a reconsideration of some of the criticisms addressed to it while further questioning the reliability of its analysis. Nevertheless, the article intends to reappraise the innovativeness of the volume and its importance for the history of the discipline, offering an opportunity to reflect on the early research practices that produced some of Art History’s foundational works.

This review discussed the emergence of the Baroque in Italian visual arts as analysed in the book Baroquemania by Laura Moure Cecchini. In this book, the author shows how the baroque is a key element of the history of post-unification Italy which has been often neglected by the relevant scholarship ...
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This review discussed the emergence of the Baroque in Italian visual arts as analysed in the book Baroquemania by Laura Moure Cecchini. In this book, the author shows how the baroque is a key element of the history of post-unification Italy which has been often neglected by the relevant scholarship on the matter. By reinscribing the Baroque within the Italian national paradigm, the book contributes to rewrite an important chapter of the history of Italian art in order to question its own foundational premises of an entirely rational strive to become a modern nation-state. In this way, Baroquemania represent an important addition to the existing scholarship on the relationship between the arts and the construction of national identity.

This article deals with aspects of Alois Riegl’s investigation of Baroque art in light of selected passages of his still unpublished manuscripts. The analysis of this voluminous corpus, in comparison with Riegl’s posthumous publications on the “origins” of Baroque art, reveals not only a much more c...
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This article deals with aspects of Alois Riegl’s investigation of Baroque art in light of selected passages of his still unpublished manuscripts. The analysis of this voluminous corpus, in comparison with Riegl’s posthumous publications on the “origins” of Baroque art, reveals not only a much more comprehensive study of Baroque art, but also a far more complex idea of “Baroque”. The purpose of the article is to advance knowledge about Riegl’s actual contribution to Baroque studies. Particular attention will be paid to both core concepts of Riegl’s analysis of Baroque art and his methodological approach, by highlighting reference models as well as divergences from contemporary research.

Aloïs Riegl’s elucidations of visual particulars in his Dutch Group Portrait of 1902 are not in contrast to but rather inform his theory of the development of group portraiture. Riegl sought to explain the Kunstwollen or ‘will of art’ of Dutch group portraits, what they seek to do as art. Despite hi...
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Aloïs Riegl’s elucidations of visual particulars in his Dutch Group Portrait of 1902 are not in contrast to but rather inform his theory of the development of group portraiture. Riegl sought to explain the Kunstwollen or ‘will of art’ of Dutch group portraits, what they seek to do as art. Despite his errors, his approach is applicable to current interpretations, above all the riddle of Rembrandt’s Staalmeesters, and can thus serve, in a cumulative art historiography, as a means of ‘Vienna schooling’ Dutch art scholarship. Building on Riegl’s analysis, this paper proposes that after reaching an impasse in both his group sketch for and first painted composition of his Staalmeesters, Rembrandt made portrait studies of two sample masters in their account book, and revised his composition to show them responding to his drawings and looking out at him. He thereby embedded portraiture (Riegl’s ‘external unity’) at the heart of his narrative (‘internal unity’). As in his earlier group portraits, he displaced speech by sight and text by image, achieving what Riegl identified as his goal of interfusing the psyches or souls of the figures and the beholder, making them part of a moving, seeing, thinking whole. Rembrandt reflected on the development of his tradition and his own paintings, making his task in the process of portraiture into the subject of his painting, and thereby redeemed his relation to his tradition.

In recent decades, Leo Steinberg’s 1959 article ‘Observations in the Cerasi Chapel’ has been variously characterized as brilliant, extraordinarily insightful, and classic, but its methodological origins and implications have never been studied in detail. A close look at Steinberg’s piece reveals rel...
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In recent decades, Leo Steinberg’s 1959 article ‘Observations in the Cerasi Chapel’ has been variously characterized as brilliant, extraordinarily insightful, and classic, but its methodological origins and implications have never been studied in detail. A close look at Steinberg’s piece reveals relevant antecedents in the writings of several earlier German-language art historians and significant contemporary parallels in Anglophone art writing. But the article, written when Steinberg was better known as an art critic than as an art historian, also provocatively blurred the boundaries between those disciplines and challenged mid-century analytical models. Moreover, Steinberg’s emphasis upon mobile, embodied viewership was soon embraced in the practices of Robert Morris and Alice Aycock, both of whom he taught. An analysis of the contexts in which Steinberg developed his ideas and in which they were received thus complicates and enriches his own account of the genesis of his article, and reveals a complex course of methodological affinities and innovations.

The English-raised Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, the twentieth century’s leading historian of Indian art, is well known for prizing tradition and anonymity and for upholding the position that visualization exercises were an essential part of the creative process. The first part of this article addresses t...
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The English-raised Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, the twentieth century’s leading historian of Indian art, is well known for prizing tradition and anonymity and for upholding the position that visualization exercises were an essential part of the creative process. The first part of this article addresses the role of the English Arts and Crafts Movement and of such lesser-known figures as Sister Nivedita and Lionel de Fonseka in shaping Coomaraswamy’s views. The middle part consists of a discussion of the passages in the nineteenth-century Sanskrit treatise the Śukranīti that Coomaraswamy depended upon to support his opinions. The final part of the article is devoted to the writings of the sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar, author of the standard translation of the Śukranīti. As an opponent of the over-spiritualisation of Indian civilisation, he constructed a universal grammar of art. In this enterprise, he was heavily influenced by the American painter Max Weber.

The following paper by Ursula Drahoss was first presented at the conference “Great Female Art Historians” organized by Heidrun Rosenberg at the Austrian Association of Art Historians (VöKK) from November 4th to 7th 2021. The art historian Anna Spitzmüller (1903–2001) is considered Austria’s very fir...
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The following paper by Ursula Drahoss was first presented at the conference “Great Female Art Historians” organized by Heidrun Rosenberg at the Austrian Association of Art Historians (VöKK) from November 4th to 7th 2021. The art historian Anna Spitzmüller (1903–2001) is considered Austria’s very first woman curator. Spitzmüller worked at the Collection of Graphic at the Albertina from 1927 to 1954 and then switched to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, from where she retired in 1968. In her article, Ursula Drahoss will take a closer look at Spitzmüller’s professional experiences. It can be seen that art historians, despite similar starting points, ended up in different positions in the museum of their time. Besides the analyses and interpretation of biographic data, archival documents, the author will also include Spitzmüller’s subjective experiences from oral history sources.

One of the characteristics of the Vienna School of Art History, as Hans Tietze writes in The Method of Art History, is the conviction that ‘living art is the key to dead art’. The article draws connections between the lively art debates in Vienna in the first decade of the twentieth century, the bre...
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One of the characteristics of the Vienna School of Art History, as Hans Tietze writes in The Method of Art History, is the conviction that ‘living art is the key to dead art’. The article draws connections between the lively art debates in Vienna in the first decade of the twentieth century, the breakthrough of Plečnik’s and Meštrović’s art, and the art historians who, at the beginning of their careers, were just beginning to explore the relationship between the formulation of method and the object of research, and places them in the broader historical context of the situation of small nations just before the dissolution of the monarchy. After the 1914–1918 war, central questions in art and science were reopened at the fringes of the former monarchy. Collaboration between scholars and artists was crucial not only for the development of the professions, but also for the formation of a modern cultural identity and sovereignty in the new multi-ethnic state.

After World War II, the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA), an international NGO of art historians, resumed its scientific activity. Since the first post-war meeting, however, we found that all members were men: famous figures from the History of Art who made up the historiographical pa...
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After World War II, the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA), an international NGO of art historians, resumed its scientific activity. Since the first post-war meeting, however, we found that all members were men: famous figures from the History of Art who made up the historiographical pantheon and built the twentieth-century Western art historiography. During the 1950s, the sole exception was Cécile Goldscheider, Rodin Museum curator, who attended the Bureau sessions and general assemblies as a secretary. There were other female researchers linked somehow to the CIHA, like those involved in the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi project or those who participated in the International Congresses of Art History. Over time, women gained ground and joined the CIHA as full members. Else Kai Sass, Professor at Aarhus University, was first in 1964, followed by Anna Maria Brizio, Klára Garas, and Jean Sutherland Boggs. Until 1979, no woman entered the Bureau. The Mexican Beatriz de la Fuente starred in this milestone. Since the gender gap was a fact, the aim of this paper is to delve into the role and achievements of these female academics within the CIHA during the Cold War period.

The conference Art History and Its Institutions in the Austro-Hungarian Empire marked the 150th anniversary of the establishment in 1873 of the Commission of Art History of the Academy of Science and Arts in Cracow andwas held at the Wawel Royal Castle between 28th and 30th September 2023. The paper...
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The conference Art History and Its Institutions in the Austro-Hungarian Empire marked the 150th anniversary of the establishment in 1873 of the Commission of Art History of the Academy of Science and Arts in Cracow andwas held at the Wawel Royal Castle between 28th and 30th September 2023. The papers presented within four panel dealt with the institutional context of establishing the discipline, biographies of particular researchers and institutional mechanisms, art historical mileus and narratives around them and, last but not least, extra-European archaeology and art history.

This paper provides an in-depth study of Morokoshi meishō zue, the only substantial Japanese illustrated book on the cultural geography of contemporaneous Qing China (1644 – 1911) produced during the Edo period (1603 – 1868). By analysing its appropriations of valuable and recent Chinese publication...
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This paper provides an in-depth study of Morokoshi meishō zue, the only substantial Japanese illustrated book on the cultural geography of contemporaneous Qing China (1644 – 1911) produced during the Edo period (1603 – 1868). By analysing its appropriations of valuable and recent Chinese publications, insertion of Osaka-Kyoto identities, and production networks, this paper situates the book in the late Tokugawa context of social control and deviance. Examining the cultural connections surrounding the book’s production and consumption, this paper also proposes a revaluation of the art-historical cliché of the Japanese literati and reveals the social and political significances of their promotion of Chinese art and culture in early modern Japan.

Edith Hoffmann (1888-1945) was the first important and outstanding female art historian in Hungary. She received her PhD in medieval art in 1910 and worked at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest from 1913 until her tragically sudden death. According to her, around 1910 she also attended the classes ...
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Edith Hoffmann (1888-1945) was the first important and outstanding female art historian in Hungary. She received her PhD in medieval art in 1910 and worked at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest from 1913 until her tragically sudden death. According to her, around 1910 she also attended the classes of Professor Max Dvořák at the University of Vienna. She combined in herself all the virtues of a highly versatile, erudite, theoretical scholar and a practical museum specialist. All this at a time when, as a female intellectual, she had to face many prejudices; still she managed to overcome them. She was in direct daily contact with both the art-historical profession and artists and writers. Not only was she successful as a theorist, with interests ranging from ancient to contemporary art, but as an artist she should also be remembered as an innovator in the genre of shadow painting. I will partly explore Edith Hoffmann’s career opportunities in the light of contemporary Hungarian society, and partly highlight some of the events and moments that connected her to Vienna through her friendships or her museum work. Among others, her close relationship with Johannes Wilde can be mentioned, with whom she corresponded regularly, but she also maintained her connections to Vienna in her later years as well. After World War I, following the collapse of the Monarchy, she was involved as an expert in the process of distributing cultural goods between Vienna and Hungary. Speaking several languages, including German as a mother tongue, Edith had no difficulty in finding her way around Europe’s major cities, especially Vienna.

The establishment of non-European art historical scholarship at the University of Vienna narrates the influence of turn of the twentieth century German academic exchanges between natural sciences and the humanities. A reading of the historiographical approaches of the works of its scholars, Josef St...
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The establishment of non-European art historical scholarship at the University of Vienna narrates the influence of turn of the twentieth century German academic exchanges between natural sciences and the humanities. A reading of the historiographical approaches of the works of its scholars, Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941), Ernst Diez (1878-1961) and Heinrich Glück (1889-1930) on Islamic, Byzantine, Persian, Armenian and Turkish art histories connect to recent biological and geographical research centred at the University of Leipzig. Their works unfold a new understanding of the world’s art geography consequential to the influence of biogeographical approaches of Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) and read parallels to Ratzel’s impact on the universal historical approaches Karl Lamprecht (1856-1915) and the Diffusionist school in anthropology, in which the world geography is imagined as an intelligible organism with migratory and adaptive mechanisms. The approach made possible for these scholars of the Vienna School to take in account of the previously uncharted areas of art history, by tracing flows and interactions of art forms. The discussion on the biogeographical approaches of Diez, Glück and Strzygowski opens new perspectives into the history of world art history and challenges the colonial and the ethnographical emphasis on the museological, object-based premise of non-European art historiography.

This essay analyses the concept of ‘ill-defined area’ that Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) coined in Art & Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960). Gombrich’s insights, seen in light of recent advances in the fields of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, ope...
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This essay analyses the concept of ‘ill-defined area’ that Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) coined in Art & Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960). Gombrich’s insights, seen in light of recent advances in the fields of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, open up new perspectives in the study of images: the biological implications of image perception. Under examination are two specific types of images: partially visible figures and unfinished works of art, that is, open-ended images that distinguish themselves in their inclusion of a significant absence (hence, ‘ill-defined area’), suggested by incomplete forms. These images offer important indications about the role that the beholder’s imagination plays in aesthetic response. In addressing this issue, this study focuses on the representation of human figures that either have features covered or no faces. In the second case, Gombrich talks about the ‘egg shape formula’, and tackles the way beholders perceive it. Considering the neuroscientific research on face perception and filling-in, this paper explores the neural process through which beholders may complete in their minds the blank spaces present in incomplete figures. My argument is that it is possible to find the neural underpinning of imagination, which is at the base of the aesthetic experience of beholders when perceiving figures that are not entirely visible.

This article considers the fundamental role played by self-fashioning in the aesthetic theory elaborated by the Japanese German American art critic Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944) in the early twentieth century. I read this concern with subjectivity in the context of what Hartmann believed to be the ...
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This article considers the fundamental role played by self-fashioning in the aesthetic theory elaborated by the Japanese German American art critic Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944) in the early twentieth century. I read this concern with subjectivity in the context of what Hartmann believed to be the fragile, exiled, connections between word and image. The Symbolist aesthetic Hartmann elaborated in his work as a critic and historian of painting and photography brought with it a consciousness of the suspect and depleted power of words and of their capacity to reflect the world and experience not through exactitude but through suggestion and imprecision. Hartmann the poet worked with that quality of perception in the early part of his career, and the consequences for the potential of language to conjure the world, and of the visual to do the same, provides a central theme in a body of significant critical work that is coloured by his sense of exile and ‘strangeness’.

50 years ago, a woman headed Austria’s largest art museum for the first time. For eight years, Friderike Klauner managed the affairs of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna with untiring commitment. She introduced some innovations, but also preserved traditions in order to make the valuable, forme...
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50 years ago, a woman headed Austria’s largest art museum for the first time. For eight years, Friderike Klauner managed the affairs of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna with untiring commitment. She introduced some innovations, but also preserved traditions in order to make the valuable, formerly imperial art collection accessible to the interested public in various forms. This essay attempts a biographical approach to the successful art historian. It explores her career and her professional achievements. It wonders why so little has been published about her so far and finally asks what still remains of Friderike Klauner to this day.

Helena Blum (1904–84) was one of the most influential Polish art historians, working both as a curator at the National Museum in Cracow and as a researcher at the Institute of Art History at the University of Wrocław. In 1922, she began studying art history and archeology at the University in Lviv. ...
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Helena Blum (1904–84) was one of the most influential Polish art historians, working both as a curator at the National Museum in Cracow and as a researcher at the Institute of Art History at the University of Wrocław. In 1922, she began studying art history and archeology at the University in Lviv. Ten years later, Blum received his doctorate from this university. This was the first dissertation on modern art in Poland. In the 1930s she also studied in France. Blum was one of the key figures in Polish art history after the Second World War. Although she never became director of the National Museum in Kraków, as curator she built up the collection of Polish art in that museum, which was very much influenced by her own taste. Her distinctive curatorial strategies and art criticism influenced the so-called canon of Polish art from 1800 to 1970.

Introduced in 1902 in response to a polemical article by Strzygowski, the category of haptic formulated by Alois Riegl enjoyed a remarkable critical fortune, exquisitely interdisciplinary, throughout the 20th century and beyond. A critical fortune that, not infrequently, has taken the form of a comp...
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Introduced in 1902 in response to a polemical article by Strzygowski, the category of haptic formulated by Alois Riegl enjoyed a remarkable critical fortune, exquisitely interdisciplinary, throughout the 20th century and beyond. A critical fortune that, not infrequently, has taken the form of a complex and radical reinterpretation of the “optical device” postulated by Riegl, reflecting on the construction of space in Egyptian bas-relief. Since the 1990s, significant new interpretations have been made in the Film Studies field by authors such as Antonia Lant and Noël Burch and, in a more openly subversive, transcultural and gender-based key, by scholars such as Laura U. Marks, Jennifer M. Barker and Giuliana Bruno. Although the research converging in the Film Studies field still needs systematic recognition, this branch of studies is partially known. Otherwise, the adoptions and interpolations this notion has received in contemporary art criticism and historiography still constitute a widely unexplored field. Given this scenario, this contribution aims to trace how the notion of haptic has entered the lexicon of Anglo-American theory and criticism through the modernist period. It will try to record affinities, interpolations, and reinterpretations of the Rieglian model to stress this category’s theoretical malleability and vitality. Through the rediscovery of some forgotten sources, such as Louis Danz’s prodromic study on Picasso Guernica (1937) published in 1941, this study aims at analyzing critically how this notion has been experienced by authors such as Herbert Read and Clement Greenberg, showing how the different genealogies, one aesthesiological and the other psychophysiological (defined by Max Dessoir, Viktor Lowenfeld and Ludwig Münz) intertwined determined two alternative epistemic frameworks. Tracing essays and theories is intended to show how this category has become an eccentric critical tool to disorientate and dismantle the Modernist and Rieglian oculocentric discourses.

The following articles contributed to the international conference: ´Great Women Art Historians’, coordinated by the Association of Austrian Art Historians in November 2021 at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. The introduction develops the theme of the conference through the lens of the art historiog...
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The following articles contributed to the international conference: ´Great Women Art Historians’, coordinated by the Association of Austrian Art Historians in November 2021 at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. The introduction develops the theme of the conference through the lens of the art historiography of the Vienna School, tracing how and why the history of three generations of women art historians was wiped out.

Josef Strzygowski, inscribed in the annals of art history as a racialist and an anti-semite, had many devoted Jewish students. Strzygowski cast a long shadow over many of the earliest specimens of Jewish art history in Vienna. In an unpublished article written in English, and in the Beurteilungen of...
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Josef Strzygowski, inscribed in the annals of art history as a racialist and an anti-semite, had many devoted Jewish students. Strzygowski cast a long shadow over many of the earliest specimens of Jewish art history in Vienna. In an unpublished article written in English, and in the Beurteilungen of the Jewish-themed dissertations he supervised, Strzygowski stressed the importance of Jewish art historians studying Jewish art. The forgotten, mostly unpublished efforts of these Jewish art historians working on Jewish topics form a counterpart to the better-known contemporary works of Jewish art history produced in Berlin. This study examines the work of four Jewish doctorandi of Strzygowski, Max Eisler, Otto Schneid, Paul Koeser and Friedricke Nobl-Stern and considers the interplay between anti-semitism, Zionism and entrenched beliefs in the connection between ethnicity or nationality and art during a fateful period for Vienna and for the Jews of Europe.

In 1930, Germany’s first publicly appointed female museum director took office: Hanna Stirnemann took over as director of the Jena City Museum that year. As museum director, she was a pioneer in a profession that had been defined by men until then. This article traces her museum career, which took h...
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In 1930, Germany’s first publicly appointed female museum director took office: Hanna Stirnemann took over as director of the Jena City Museum that year. As museum director, she was a pioneer in a profession that had been defined by men until then. This article traces her museum career, which took her from the Oldenburg State Museum to the Reussisches Heimatmuseum in Greiz and finally to the Jena City Museum. There, she quickly made a name for herself as a museum director and outstanding art historian with a fine sense for an innovative exhibition and event program. The article will also show what happened after Stirnemann was forced to resign from her post by the National Socialists in 1935. After the war, the politically ‘unencumbered’ art historian was rehabilitated as mayor of a small town as well as director of the Rudolstadt Castle Museum and acting director of the Goethe and Schiller Archives in Weimar. In order to escape the restrictive cultural policy of the GDR, she moved to West-Berlin in 1950.

Max Dvořák, one of the pilasters of the Viennese school of art history, is nowadays widely known for the works of his final years as well as for writings on monument conservation. Through a reconstruction of the historical and academic context and a brief presentation of Dvořák’s studies on the tran...
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Max Dvořák, one of the pilasters of the Viennese school of art history, is nowadays widely known for the works of his final years as well as for writings on monument conservation. Through a reconstruction of the historical and academic context and a brief presentation of Dvořák’s studies on the transition period from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century, the author aims to show that the Bohemian scholar made an important contribution to the art historical debate of the time, for which he is hardly appreciated today. This article examines a selection of Dvořák’s early writings from the first decade of the twenthieth century. In particular, the habilitation thesis Das Rätsel der Kunst der Brüder van Eyck (The Enigma of the Art of the Van Eyck Brothers, 1903) is consulted. While many scholars claim that there is a wide gap between his older works and those from the last years of his life, as stated by his former students Karl M. Swoboda and Johannes Wilde in the preface to Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte (1924), it is argued here that Dvořák’s point of view already presents the basic elements of his more mature conclusions at the beginning of his academic career. Likewise, it is reflected on the fact that Dvořák made a remarkable contribution to a new consideration of the transitional period between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, among other workd, with his Enigma, but that this is today attributed not to him but to the cultural historian Johan Huizinga and his work Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919).

The article deals with Franz Wickhoff´s influence on Max Dvořák´s formulation of his late method of art history today widely known as ‘Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte’. The article proposes a thesis that already in Wickhoff´s thinking an inclination toward the ‘geistesgeschichtliche’ interpret...
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The article deals with Franz Wickhoff´s influence on Max Dvořák´s formulation of his late method of art history today widely known as ‘Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte’. The article proposes a thesis that already in Wickhoff´s thinking an inclination toward the ‘geistesgeschichtliche’ interpretation of art history can be evident, as shown on a comparison between his and Dvořák´s interest in the Italian Renaissance art. The other way of Wickhoff´s influence on Dvořák´s art history is shown as grounded in their deep personal relationship that is documented in their mutual correspondence from the early 20th century, recently rediscovered in the Archive of the Institute of Art History of the Vienna University.

The Royal Institute of British Architects possesses one of the finest collections of architectural drawings and one of the jewels in its crown are over three hundred drawings by the celebrated Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. Although cataloguing these drawings began in the 1960s as of late 20...
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The Royal Institute of British Architects possesses one of the finest collections of architectural drawings and one of the jewels in its crown are over three hundred drawings by the celebrated Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. Although cataloguing these drawings began in the 1960s as of late 2023 no printed catalogue has been published. This article examines the historiography of Palladio drawings in Britain: half a century of research, in order to set out what many of the issues regarding the project have been in the last fifty years.

Wooden architecture played a crucial role in Josef Strzygowski’s theory of civilisation. He presented it as the authentic Volkskunst, expressing the inventive spirit of the North, as opposed to the Machtkunst radiating from Rome and Constantinople. Strzygowski, who granted an equal place to Germani...
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Wooden architecture played a crucial role in Josef Strzygowski’s theory of civilisation. He presented it as the authentic Volkskunst, expressing the inventive spirit of the North, as opposed to the Machtkunst radiating from Rome and Constantinople. Strzygowski, who granted an equal place to Germanic and Slavic peoples in this ‘wooden Atlantis’, was a tactical ally for art historians in Central and Eastern Europe, who used timber architecture to construct an autonomous development of national art. At the opposite pole were scholars under the intellectual influence of ‘phantom Rome’ – the Riegl’s and Dvořák’s Vienna. They denied the original character of wooden buildings – perceived as a reflection of monumental architecture – and saw their opponents, whatever the source of their views, as adherents of the pro-Eastern-oriented part of the Viennese school. Today’s history of art history also seems to underestimate the external – mainly Russian – influence on Strzygowski’s concepts.

The emergence of modern Chinese woodcut aesthetics, motifs and techniques during the early twentieth century has long been understood in relation to cultural exchanges between East and West. Art historical narratives have highlighted the influence of European art on East Asian woodcut printing, whil...
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The emergence of modern Chinese woodcut aesthetics, motifs and techniques during the early twentieth century has long been understood in relation to cultural exchanges between East and West. Art historical narratives have highlighted the influence of European art on East Asian woodcut printing, while conceptual, pictorial and technical connections between Chinese and Japanese practices have been neglected. This article reveals previously overlooked Sino-Japanese correlations in the emergence of modern print culture and argues that their absence in the Chinese history of proletarian art served political goals.

The article depicts the emancipation of American art historian Rosalind Krauss from Clement Greenberg. By tracing the refrain from Krauss’s sixth chapter of The Optical Unconscious a personal and professional history of mentorship evolving into intellectual dispute unfolds. Through a close reading o...
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The article depicts the emancipation of American art historian Rosalind Krauss from Clement Greenberg. By tracing the refrain from Krauss’s sixth chapter of The Optical Unconscious a personal and professional history of mentorship evolving into intellectual dispute unfolds. Through a close reading of selected writings by Krauss, the formation and breakdown of the mentor-student relationship between Krauss and Greenberg, and her emergence as an independent and important voice in art history will be reconstructed. Not merely offering biographical information, the article places the refrain in its original context, chapter six of The Optical Unconscious, in order to differentiate between Krauss’ scholarly approach from Greenberg’s ‘pronouncements’. This lays the groundwork for understanding the circular feminist gesture with which Krauss ends the sixth chapter.

This article presents the hypothesis that art schools have enabled art history to digest the new definitions of art from the 1960s and overcome the methodological crisis diagnosed by Arthur C. Danto and Hans Belting; more concretely that the Viennese Kunsthochschulen served as laboratories for the e...
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This article presents the hypothesis that art schools have enabled art history to digest the new definitions of art from the 1960s and overcome the methodological crisis diagnosed by Arthur C. Danto and Hans Belting; more concretely that the Viennese Kunsthochschulen served as laboratories for the experimentation of new art histories. To this end, the ways in which contemporary art was theorised and art history was practised at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst and at the Akademie der bildenden Künste will be studied. The relationship between the Institut für Kunstgeschichte at the University of Vienna and contemporary art will also be examined. By analysing the place of art schools in the history of art history, the research project, briefly presented in this article and intended to be developed over the next few years, aims to contribute to a better appreciation of the role of institutions, actors and networks in art historiography.

This article analyses the sophisticated performance of cultural nationalism in the first instalment of España artística y monumental. It examines how the work’s creators interpreted the Catholic identity of Spain through their political viewpoint aligned with the Partido Moderado, the Spanish libera...
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This article analyses the sophisticated performance of cultural nationalism in the first instalment of España artística y monumental. It examines how the work’s creators interpreted the Catholic identity of Spain through their political viewpoint aligned with the Partido Moderado, the Spanish liberal conservative party; the process by which they sought to make that identity real, concrete, and persuasive, and the roles of historian, politician, and architect played by the work’s illustrator: painter Genaro Pérez Villaamil. Special attention is paid to the intellectual framework that enabled the project, with a particular focus on the epistemology of Romantic historicism and aesthetics, the understanding of the nation as a civilisation, and the weight assigned to architecture as historical proof. The article also scrutinises the readership experience in order to reveal a potential unusually effective nationalist performance of España artística y monumental in its strategic sequencing of monuments, its interpretation of these monuments through a simultaneously visual and verbal discourse, and the broad dissemination achieved by the work thanks to its printed medium.

Strzygowski’s art historical institute in Vienna was unique not only as a resource for the study of ‘Oriental’ art, but also in its gender-balance: between 37% and 54% of the graduates were women. This article takes the Strzygowskian graduates – women and men – as starting point to trace their profe...
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Strzygowski’s art historical institute in Vienna was unique not only as a resource for the study of ‘Oriental’ art, but also in its gender-balance: between 37% and 54% of the graduates were women. This article takes the Strzygowskian graduates – women and men – as starting point to trace their professional trajectories in Vienna and the world. It pursues the twofold aim of combining a historical study with a critique of patriarchal patterns of historiography: Theoretically, the article deconstructs the ‘unconscious androcentrism’ of art historiography, which consists of linguistic and methodological patterns that reproduce patriarchy. The historical study then aims to reconstruct the history of the achievements of Vienna-trained art historians in the field of Asian and Islamic art history. Key question to the historical material is how gender, the Austrian university education, and religion intersected in specific local and temporal situations.

Women art historians, Intersectional art history, Asian art history, Islamic art history, East Asian art history, Oriental art history, art historiography, Vienna School, Society of Friends of Asian A...
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Women art historians, Intersectional art history, Asian art history, Islamic art history, East Asian art history, Oriental art history, art historiography, Vienna School, Society of Friends of Asian Art and Culture Vienna, Gesellschaft der Freunde Asiatischer Kunst und Kultur Wien, Josef Strzygowski, Melanie Stiassny, Emmy Wellesz, Alfred Salmony, Karl With, Stella Kramrisch, Ernst Diez, Mehmet Ağa-Oğlu, Katharina Otto-Dorn, Hilde Zaloscer, Luise Potpeschnigg, Fannina Halle.

The paper states that a main source of Sedlmayr’s methodological as well as political thinking has largely been overlooked. It argues that Viennese philosopher and sociologist Othmar Spann, along with his own main source, romanticist theologian Franz von Baader as well as Spann’s pupil, the Viennese...
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The paper states that a main source of Sedlmayr’s methodological as well as political thinking has largely been overlooked. It argues that Viennese philosopher and sociologist Othmar Spann, along with his own main source, romanticist theologian Franz von Baader as well as Spann’s pupil, the Viennese university teacher Johannes Sauter, were central to Sedlmayr’s art history as well as to his ideological orientation. This is concluded from a comparison of their texts and their biographical data. This approach entails a new reading of Sedlmayr’s early writings and proposes an answer to the question, whether they are related to his political behaviour in the Nazi era

The essay proposes a synthesis of the reception by Italian scholars of Max Dvořák’s art history theories between the 1920s and the 1940s. The resistance to his thought for both linguistic and ideological reasons will be underlined mostly based on the reviews and essays influenced by Adolfo Venturi a...
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The essay proposes a synthesis of the reception by Italian scholars of Max Dvořák’s art history theories between the 1920s and the 1940s. The resistance to his thought for both linguistic and ideological reasons will be underlined mostly based on the reviews and essays influenced by Adolfo Venturi and Benedetto Croce. Reference will also be made to some unlucky attempts to translate and communicate Dvořák’s writings, and to the evidence of a possible dialogue between Vienna and Rome.

It is with a fair amount of certainty the one can state today the importance of the Vienna School of art history for the Polish art historians at the beginning of the XX century, in the interwar period or the 1960s and 1970s, yet very little is known about the years in-between. It is commonly accept...
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It is with a fair amount of certainty the one can state today the importance of the Vienna School of art history for the Polish art historians at the beginning of the XX century, in the interwar period or the 1960s and 1970s, yet very little is known about the years in-between. It is commonly accepted that strong anti-German sentiment during the second half of the 1940s and the domination of the soviet doctrine in the first half of the 1950s both complicated further dissemination of works and methods of the Viennese scholars. A closer look at the matter would suggest that their works and ideas remained present in the polish art history of the period, allowing it to serve as a chain link between the interwar years and the development of the discipline in the following decades.

Alois Riegl’s first and foremost task in his Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, the foundational text of ‘art history as a scientific discipline’, was the definition of its proper subject. The preoccupation of the scientific art history was thus defined as dealing with elements, the developmenta...
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Alois Riegl’s first and foremost task in his Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, the foundational text of ‘art history as a scientific discipline’, was the definition of its proper subject. The preoccupation of the scientific art history was thus defined as dealing with elements, the developmental history of thereof, and the factors that determined that development. The elements in question are ‘form and surface’ (Form und Fläche), or, more precisely, the relation between them which is developed in the course of time and which constitutes different styles, all directed by specific worldviews, different for different time periods and peoples. In the definition of the subject of art history, precisely this conjunction of a style and its prescribing worldview (Weltanschauung) is most significant. It is also the starting point for Riegl’s fellow and following art historians, Heinrich Wölfflin, Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky and Frederick Antal, among others. Riegl, therefore, should be credited with establishing the paradigm for the subsequent art-historical investigation.

The German Museums Association (Deutscher Museumsbund, DMB), founded in 1917, was made up of a few directors. Between 1927 and 1934, the men’s circle opened up to 14 woman employees, who represented the hierarchy of museum staff across the board, from unskilled workers to collection managers to dire...
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The German Museums Association (Deutscher Museumsbund, DMB), founded in 1917, was made up of a few directors. Between 1927 and 1934, the men’s circle opened up to 14 woman employees, who represented the hierarchy of museum staff across the board, from unskilled workers to collection managers to directors. However, the association was also important for female academics who turned to the office as job seekers. Thanks to the preserved applications, including CVs and references, sent to the DMB by female museum service candidates, another dozen little-known or forgotten female actors in the historical art and museum world can be identified. By looking at these early museum women, it can be shown that rigid structures of the institution based on asymmetrical gender relations were set in motion shortly before the staff was replaced on a large scale under National Socialism. The social change in the museums, which the women art historians in the association’s environment had helped to bring about, has probably been lost from view, not least because of this.

In the 1910s and 1920s, female art dealers such as Maria Kunde (Kunstsalon Maria Kunde, Hamburg) championed the art of their time. This commitment of women to contemporary art can also be followed up in exile – for example in London: Ala Story who came from Vienna was not only active in several pro...
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In the 1910s and 1920s, female art dealers such as Maria Kunde (Kunstsalon Maria Kunde, Hamburg) championed the art of their time. This commitment of women to contemporary art can also be followed up in exile – for example in London: Ala Story who came from Vienna was not only active in several progressive London galleries for contemporary art, but also emigrated to the USA in 1940, where she established the American British Art Center in New York. In the post-war period, art dealer Hanna Bekker vom Rath (Frankfurter Kunstkabinett) was an important advocates of the modernists banned by the Nazis, but also stood up for younger artists. The mentioned female gallerists were active in a field of contemporary art, less burdened by competition with male colleagues and offering opportunities for profiling and commitment. At the same time, modern and contemporary art received a significant boost from the activities of these and other female actors.

Is it possible that Anglophone Euro-American scholarship surrounding the Indian city, Chandigarh, focuses too heavily on certain figures associated with its design -such as Swiss-French architect and paragon of architectural modernism- Le Corbusier? With this question in mind, the following article ...
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Is it possible that Anglophone Euro-American scholarship surrounding the Indian city, Chandigarh, focuses too heavily on certain figures associated with its design -such as Swiss-French architect and paragon of architectural modernism- Le Corbusier? With this question in mind, the following article focuses on the Indian architect Aditya Prakash- who worked alongside Le Corbusier during the design of Chandigarh-and the two poetry volumes he produced with Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand. This article contributes to an emerging body of research that suggests the need to de-emphasise Le Corbusier and to better understand the role of the Indian team in the design of Chandigarh. Through the analysis of hitherto under-researched poetry devoted to Chandigarh, this article offers a more nuanced understanding of Chandigarh, Aditya Prakash, and his relation to Le Corbusier.

This article examines how portraiture is presented in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550 and 1568). The Lives claims portraits are to remember the dead and instruct the living; to do this, they must be accurate copies of the sitter. Praising portraits as copies effectively endorses the often-promotional m...
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This article examines how portraiture is presented in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550 and 1568). The Lives claims portraits are to remember the dead and instruct the living; to do this, they must be accurate copies of the sitter. Praising portraits as copies effectively endorses the often-promotional messages of the portraits themselves. However, the book praises some portraits as beautiful and miraculous works in neoplatonic terms. The idealism of neoplatonism is at odds with the requirement to have an accurate copy of the sitter and this apparent contradiction can be understood as a consequence of the unstated purpose of the Lives; to propagandise on behalf of Cosimo I de’ Medici’s Florence. The portraits of the Medici and their associates are praised as both lifelike and exceptional, and thus readers are encouraged to believe that the sitters are actually exceptional.

This article outlines an approach to a manuscript by the art historian Otto Pächt, which engages with the theories of the physicist and philosopher Moritz Schlick. The focus is primarily on Pächt’s exploration of the question, ‘What means Knowing?’. It is argued that Pächt drew significant implicati...
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This article outlines an approach to a manuscript by the art historian Otto Pächt, which engages with the theories of the physicist and philosopher Moritz Schlick. The focus is primarily on Pächt’s exploration of the question, ‘What means Knowing?’. It is argued that Pächt drew significant implications for his art-historical work from Schlick’s ideas. Schlick’s lectures not only encouraged Pächt to consolidate art history as an exactly distinct discipline within the concept of ‘Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung’, but he also influenced his understanding of determining artistic ‘quality’ in a historical context, his scientific approach to artworks, and his notion of modern ‘representation theory’ in the scope of the image theory. Moreover, Otto Pächt’s fundamental conflict with none other than Ernst Gombrich is not least due to his commitment to Moritz Schlick. In times when the possibility of perceiving reality has become increasingly dubious and ‘storytelling’ has become a buzzword in this sense, Pächt’s manuscript is, on the contrary, a resource of thought-provoking impulses. Following him requires limiting art history as an explanatory discipline or renouncing the claim to create ‘reality’.

The review discusses the edited volume Pro Domo. Kunstgeschichte in eigener Sache. The volume aims to analyse systematically an understudied sub-genre of art writing: texts that were written by confidantes of the artists, thus suggesting a specific authority and authenticity as they claim to have ‘i...
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The review discusses the edited volume Pro Domo. Kunstgeschichte in eigener Sache. The volume aims to analyse systematically an understudied sub-genre of art writing: texts that were written by confidantes of the artists, thus suggesting a specific authority and authenticity as they claim to have ‘in-house’ knowledge of the master’s mind. The review situates the volume’s concept and approach within recent discussions on subjectivity in art writing.

The historiography of the fine arts museum in Europe is a narrative that has mostly followed the arc of the developing nation-state after the French Revolution. This approach has often focused on the emergence of the public museum as part of an ‘exhibitionary complex’ that helped to shape an ‘imagin...
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The historiography of the fine arts museum in Europe is a narrative that has mostly followed the arc of the developing nation-state after the French Revolution. This approach has often focused on the emergence of the public museum as part of an ‘exhibitionary complex’ that helped to shape an ‘imagined community’ of patriotic citizens during the long nineteenth century. For the most part these nationally-based perspectives have been extremely productive, but they cannot do justice to many of the museums that emerged in the Austro-Hungarian Empire before its collapse. Indeed, the three authors of this excellent volume remind us that many of the ‘national’ fine arts museums of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire took shape well before the outbreak of war in 1914 and only took on their official status as representatives of their specific ‘nations’ in the years after 1918. Thus, the historiography of museums in central Europe needs a more nuanced approach. As the volume’s editor and contributor Matthew Rampley writes, ‘current state boundaries are not a meaningful framework for the study of museums in Habsburg Central Europe.’ This volume both suggests and models that new framework. To make their point the authors use several, more complicated (social, trans-national, and local) approaches to demonstrate how museums in the Empire’s important cities (Lemberg, Prague, Budapest, Cracow, and Zagreb) emerged from a complex set of Imperial, local and, as the century progressed, civic and nationalist ambitions. Together the authors unanimously argue in favor of viewing Austria-Hungary as a ‘shared cultural space’ with complex interactions that formed a web of relationships across the many nationalities of the Empire—a web that remains invisible to the post-1945 observer. This invitation to complexity is both convincing and compelling and it opens a broad field of new research possibilities. Well-written and exquisitely researched, the volume also inadvertently highlights one of the greatest challenges to future scholars: fluency in the local languages. We are grateful to these authors to have given us this volume in English. Insofar as it models several museological approaches, it can be useful to any scholar who is interested in the historiography of museums in Europe’s long nineteenth century.

This review discussed four volumes under the Oxford University Press’s series ‘Visual Conversations in Art and Archaeology’: Vessels: The Object as Container, Conditions of Visibility, Figurines: Figuration and the Sense of Scale, and Landscape and Space: Comparative Perspectives from Chinese, Mesoa...
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This review discussed four volumes under the Oxford University Press’s series ‘Visual Conversations in Art and Archaeology’: Vessels: The Object as Container, Conditions of Visibility, Figurines: Figuration and the Sense of Scale, and Landscape and Space: Comparative Perspectives from Chinese, Mesoamerican, Ancient Greek, and Roman Art. It assessed the extent to which what the authors of this series termed ‘comparativism of method’ could be a viable approach to tackle long-grained epistemic asymmetries in art-historical methodologies and productively advance a global art history. The volumes succeed in relativising and revising presumed universality of Eurocentric concepts such as ‘figurine’ and ‘landscape’ for a more inclusive discussion in the future, while offering constructive, multidirectional dialogues across regional specialisms. The review further pointed out several limits to the comparativism proposed by the series: specifically the boundary between method and personality in scholarship, the danger of intensifying inequalities of academic resources and infrastructures between the Global North and the Global South, and the need to further open up such dialogues to practitioners outside of ancient art and archaeology.

The relationship between art and religion has long been a major focus of art-historical research. The collection of essays edited by Jorge Tomás García and Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez presents a chronologically wide range of examples in Western art of changes in the appearance or interpretation of ‘cul...
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The relationship between art and religion has long been a major focus of art-historical research. The collection of essays edited by Jorge Tomás García and Sandra Sáenz-López Pérez presents a chronologically wide range of examples in Western art of changes in the appearance or interpretation of ‘cult images’ considered in the light of Robert Graves’s concept of ‘iconotropy’. The category of ‘cult image’, however, particularly as construed here, is too expansive, and the process of ‘iconotropy’ as redefined here too elastic, to contribute either to the understanding of the phenomena under study or to methodological precision.

This review examines the monograph of Margaret Graves, Arts of Allusion, which offers a nuanced argument about visual representation in a disparate group of portable objects dating to between the ninth and thirteenth centuries and created in the heartland of the medieval Islamic world. The study foc...
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This review examines the monograph of Margaret Graves, Arts of Allusion, which offers a nuanced argument about visual representation in a disparate group of portable objects dating to between the ninth and thirteenth centuries and created in the heartland of the medieval Islamic world. The study focuses on what Graves calls ‘archimorphic objects’: portable objects that reference architecture in some way, either through their form or ornament. While many studies have pointed to intriguing formal similarities between small objects and monumental buildings in the medieval Islamic tradition, Graves breaks new ground in her exploration of what the allusion to monumental architecture in portable art reveals about the viewers and makers of these objects. Her detailed analyses of numerous objects that were both quotidian and fabulously crafted demonstrates the importance of allusion, metaphor, and other indirect forms of expression to the mechanics of representation in both visual and literary arts in medieval Islamic civilization.

The volume Willibald Sauerländer und die Kunstgeschichte highlightsthe academic career of one of the more influential German art historians of the twentieth century, who for nearly twenty years headed the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. It focuses on his contributions to the study of ...
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The volume Willibald Sauerländer und die Kunstgeschichte highlightsthe academic career of one of the more influential German art historians of the twentieth century, who for nearly twenty years headed the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. It focuses on his contributions to the study of Gothic art and later periods, and also highlights his methodological innovations in these fields. At the same time, many contributions implicitly or explicitly discuss his choices in the context of post-WW II Western Germany, and the way political debates influenced the development of art history. The explicit call for methodological denazification, as voiced in the 1970s by young academics such as Martin Warnke, was not followed by the slightly older Willibald Sauerländer, who opted to distance himself more implicitly from the previous generation. It was only after his retirement in 1989 that he openly reflected upon his experiences in the immediate post-war period, and even then adopted the position of a neutral observer, even if by then he had already embarked upon an impressive academic career. As such, this volume suggests how institutional history, individual careers and politics intersected in the second half of the twentieth century.

This beautifully and effectively illustrated book explains the various contacts, and their contexts, between Armenians and persons from western Europe, especially Italy, in the period of the Crusades and Renaissance, in Italy and Armenia, and especially in Armenian Cilicia. These included an Armenia...
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This beautifully and effectively illustrated book explains the various contacts, and their contexts, between Armenians and persons from western Europe, especially Italy, in the period of the Crusades and Renaissance, in Italy and Armenia, and especially in Armenian Cilicia. These included an Armenian compound at St. Peter’s, Rome, Roman Catholic missionary establishments in Armenian lands, and trade. Armenian involvement in the production of, and international trade in, luxury fabrics is emphasised. The author shows that western scholars of art history and of artistic transfer have largely neglected the role of Armenians in this, as also in the history of luxury textiles. She offers a discussion of ‘mutual cultural knowledge’ considering Italian influences on Armenians, and a series of case studies dated between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, mostly paintings, in which international artistic transfer is demonstrable. Attention is drawn to the use of foreign alphabets and inscriptions/pseudo-inscriptions in artworks.

This book comprises two primary objectives. First, it seeks to curate an extensive exhibition showcasing diverse African art forms sourced from public museums and private collections in the United States and Europe. The exhibition, featuring about 300 works of art from different countries in Sub-sah...
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This book comprises two primary objectives. First, it seeks to curate an extensive exhibition showcasing diverse African art forms sourced from public museums and private collections in the United States and Europe. The exhibition, featuring about 300 works of art from different countries in Sub-saharan Africa, focuses mainly on the sculptural tradition of Africa. However, a few other works, such as textiles, were featured in the publication supporting the landmark exhibition. Divided into eight thematic sections, the essays by seven authors advocate for an aesthetic appreciation of the arts of Africa based on concepts, criteria and vocabularies of the cultures who made them. The book adopted a contextual or anthropological approach to present cultural case studies and analyse thematic examples from sub-Saharan Africa. The final pages of the book acknowledged pioneers, the ‘fieldwork generations’ who paved the way for the scholarly study of African arts and laid the foundation for analyses of African aesthetics from African perspectives from the 1930s to the present.

he respected art historian Antonio Morassi, as a student under Max Dvořák in Vienna in 1912–16, wrote a thesis on the Renaissance architect Michele Sanmicheli (1487–1559), who was active in Verona and Venice. This, later, formed the basis of an article that was intended for publication but never sur...
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he respected art historian Antonio Morassi, as a student under Max Dvořák in Vienna in 1912–16, wrote a thesis on the Renaissance architect Michele Sanmicheli (1487–1559), who was active in Verona and Venice. This, later, formed the basis of an article that was intended for publication but never surfaced, and the thesis and putative article form the subjects of a new book (Giulio Zavatta, Il Michele Sanmicheli di Antonio Morassi, Treviso: Zel, 2022). The book explores Morassi’s thesis in the context of his experience of the emerging discipline of art history in Vienna, while the thesis reveals itself to be particularly well conceived and informative, and also remarkably prescient of later ways of thinking about Sanmicheli and his architecture.

This review presents a detailed overview of the main arguments in Ian Verstegen’s The New Vienna School of Art History. It critically engages with several of those arguments and explicates the drawbacks of Hans Sedlmayr’s historical analyses. In addition, it provides further context for Sedlmayr’s N...
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This review presents a detailed overview of the main arguments in Ian Verstegen’s The New Vienna School of Art History. It critically engages with several of those arguments and explicates the drawbacks of Hans Sedlmayr’s historical analyses. In addition, it provides further context for Sedlmayr’s NSDAP membership and its repercussions for the members of the New Vienna School. Finally, it clarifies Meyer Schapiro’s position towards Otto Pächt’s idea of ‘national constants’ and the theorization of collective subjectivities by referencing the correspondence and documentation kept in the Meyer Schapiro Collection at Columbia University.

This introductory essay overviews the state of scholarship and controversies in the field of Islamic art, in tandem with the gradual reappraisal of Persian art, from around 2000 to the present. By surveying twenty-year debates concerning the academic and display genre called ‘Islamic art’, as well a...
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This introductory essay overviews the state of scholarship and controversies in the field of Islamic art, in tandem with the gradual reappraisal of Persian art, from around 2000 to the present. By surveying twenty-year debates concerning the academic and display genre called ‘Islamic art’, as well as the reformulating process of the art historical concept ‘Persian art’, this essay seeks an alternative pathway to put several contentious debates concerning art history in general and Persian art in particular into fruitful discussion.

The early history of the study of Parthian art may be profitably divided into three overlapping phases. The first phase, ‘Ordering’, begins with Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s dismissive assessment of Parthian art, at this point known mainly from coins, as derivative and barbaric. The second phase, ‘E...
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The early history of the study of Parthian art may be profitably divided into three overlapping phases. The first phase, ‘Ordering’, begins with Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s dismissive assessment of Parthian art, at this point known mainly from coins, as derivative and barbaric. The second phase, ‘Exploration’, begins in the mid-nineteenth century with the advent of archaeological excavation in Mesopotamia and the documentation of rock reliefs and architectural remains in Persia by travellers such as Flandin and Coste. The third phase, ‘Grand Narratives’, occurs primarily in the 1930s, when the first major efforts to synthesize Parthian art were undertaken by Arthur Upham Pope, Ernst Herzfeld, Neilson Debevoise and Michael Rostovtzeff. While Pope and Herzfeld treated Parthian art as a nadir between the Achaemenid and Sasanian Empires, a view adopted in many subsequent studies, Debevoise and Rostovtzeff considered it to be a vibrant and original phenomenon.

After the recent publication of two previously unknown “Sasanian” silver plates depicting the renowned scene of the chariot of the Lunar God Mah, added to the other five known examples, this article reconsiders one specimen of this series of objects – here addressed as the “Rashy plate” –, the authe...
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After the recent publication of two previously unknown “Sasanian” silver plates depicting the renowned scene of the chariot of the Lunar God Mah, added to the other five known examples, this article reconsiders one specimen of this series of objects – here addressed as the “Rashy plate” –, the authenticity of which appears questionable. Three parameters are considered for discussing this plate: iconography, manufacturing technique and provenance, and all of them are contextualised in the period of the great exhibitions of Persian Art (between the 1930s and the 1960s). The outcome of these exhibitions, besides stimulating scholarly research on previously understudied artistic productions, was the consequent rising interest by museums and private collectors in art objects from the ancient Iranian world. The introduction of possible forgeries, such as the Rashy plate, coherently fits into this increasing demand of the art market.

Although the translations of important scholarship on art history across the different European languages are increasingly common, the same cannot be said about the invaluable articles and books published in non-European languages. In the case of Persian art, the results of research conducted by sch...
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Although the translations of important scholarship on art history across the different European languages are increasingly common, the same cannot be said about the invaluable articles and books published in non-European languages. In the case of Persian art, the results of research conducted by scholars writing in Persian, Arabic or Turkish, are often inaccessible for many Western scholars. Although the translations of important scholarship on art history across the different European languages are increasingly common, the same cannot be said about the invaluable articles and books published in non-European languages. In the case of Persian art, the results of research conducted by scholars writing in Persian, Arabic or Turkish, are often inaccessible for many Western scholars. Accordingly, the aim of the translation of Aʽẓam Naẓarkarde’s work, ‘Painter and artist of the Âstân-e Qods during the Afsharid period’ is twofold. Firstly, the paper highlights the potentials of a heavily underused source for art history by introducing several official documents. Secondly, the reader gains precious insight into the art historical writing and thought within Iran. The translation may shed light on the applied theoretical framework and methodology currently observed by Iranian scholars, as well as on their approach to the study of art history.

Carl Johan Lamm (1901-1981) was a Swedish art historian for Near Eastern studies. For his academic career the situation in Sweden was not favourable, because Near Eastern art studies were not well established. Lamm received considerable help of his parents and was thus able to succeed with his far-r...
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Carl Johan Lamm (1901-1981) was a Swedish art historian for Near Eastern studies. For his academic career the situation in Sweden was not favourable, because Near Eastern art studies were not well established. Lamm received considerable help of his parents and was thus able to succeed with his far-reaching plans to study glass from the Middle East, travel abroad and receive funds for acquisitions and publications. His meeting with the German scholar Friedrich Sarre (1865-1945), gave Lamm the chance to publish his first two publications on the topic of glass and rock crystal from the early and middle Near Eastern period. He was the first to study glass from Iran, but he also published on Oriental textiles and other art topics. The war 1939-45 proved to be a considerable hinderance for his plans. Lamm was not a companionable character and never joined an institution for an academic career despite his outstanding scholarly reputation as the most important scholar in the field of glass studies from the Near East in his time.

This essay is a critical survey of relevant Song dynasty sources that are essential to an understanding of the term Dashi 大食. Scholars in the nineteenth century identified Dashi in Tang dynasty writings as a designation for Arab Muslims. This definition consequently has been and is being applied to ...
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This essay is a critical survey of relevant Song dynasty sources that are essential to an understanding of the term Dashi 大食. Scholars in the nineteenth century identified Dashi in Tang dynasty writings as a designation for Arab Muslims. This definition consequently has been and is being applied to all occurrences of Dashi in Song dynasty texts. However, Dashi in the Song no longer described Arab Muslims, but, as a multivalent term, referred to a variety of peoples and places in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. Contrary to commonly held view, Dashi falls short of providing evidence for an Arab controlled maritime trade from South Asia to China that contemporary scholars suggest. The paper, therefore, calls for a re-evaluation of the alleged Arab influence in Asian maritime trade networks during the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and a closer reading of the Chinese source material.

The paper discusses the ‘discovery’ of Mughal painting at Vienna and the pioneering research dedicated to it from the 1920s onwards by Josef Strzygowski and his circle. The focus is on the so-called Millionenzimmer at Schönbrunn Palace which was decorated in the 1760s under Maria Theresa with collag...
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The paper discusses the ‘discovery’ of Mughal painting at Vienna and the pioneering research dedicated to it from the 1920s onwards by Josef Strzygowski and his circle. The focus is on the so-called Millionenzimmer at Schönbrunn Palace which was decorated in the 1760s under Maria Theresa with collages made of cut-up paintings of the Mughal empire. The dialectics of this unique decoration scheme are unravelled which emerges as a destructive and at the same time emphatic appropriation of the ‘other’. An additional interest is provided by the connection to Rembrandt and Schellinks who copied Mughal miniatures for which the prototypes appear in the Millionenzimmer. The conclusion draws a parallel to Mughal artistic appropriations.

The article surveys the life and output of Eric Schroeder (1904-71), who served from 1938 as (mainly honorary) Keeper of Persian Art at the Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University, mounting choice exhibitions and greatly expanding the collection of paintings. After assessing his two major books – Per...
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The article surveys the life and output of Eric Schroeder (1904-71), who served from 1938 as (mainly honorary) Keeper of Persian Art at the Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University, mounting choice exhibitions and greatly expanding the collection of paintings. After assessing his two major books – Persian Miniatures in the Fogg Museum of Art (1942) and Muhammad’s People. An Anthology (1955) – the focus shifts to his chapters and articles on Persian architecture and book painting. His remarkable range, profound erudition, flood of original insights and peerless prose explains why his best work, as relevant today as ever, should be required reading for students of Islamic art.

Ernst Cohn-Wiener was an unusual wide oriented art historian, whose interests spanned from European and Jewish art, to East Asian and Islamic art and architecture, the latter one is in the focus of this paper. Despite his many contributions in the area of art history he did not get the place he dese...
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Ernst Cohn-Wiener was an unusual wide oriented art historian, whose interests spanned from European and Jewish art, to East Asian and Islamic art and architecture, the latter one is in the focus of this paper. Despite his many contributions in the area of art history he did not get the place he deserved. In the 1920s his interest turned to Islamic Art History and he decided to explore Islamic architecture in Central Asia, a widely unknown field. Two expeditions carried out by him and his wife in 1924 and 1925, resulted in his well-illustrated overview on the Medieval Islamic architecture of Turkestan, published as Turan – Islamische Baukunst in Mittelasien (1930). When he lost his position as a lecturer in 1933 due to the ‘Rassegesetze’ imposed by the ruling Nazis, he emigrated together with his wife via England to India, working for the Maharaja of Baroda until 1939. Their last move was to New York, where Cohn-Wiener died two years later in 1941.

Kurt Erdmann was a German art historian of the first half of the 20th century. Beginning with European architecture and paintings he developed a special interest for ancient Persian art as well as medieval and early modern Middle Eastern art. He became one of the leading art historians on Oriental c...
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Kurt Erdmann was a German art historian of the first half of the 20th century. Beginning with European architecture and paintings he developed a special interest for ancient Persian art as well as medieval and early modern Middle Eastern art. He became one of the leading art historians on Oriental carpets and published numerous major studies which were widely read. As a curator of the Islamic Department of the State Museums in Berlin and as a university teacher he became an influential scholar for generations of students in Germany and in Turkey.

This study examines Baluch carpets’ musealisation and the prejudiced view that carpets woven by Persians are superior to the carpets of tribal groups– a view expressed in 1876 by Robert Murdoch Smith in the exhibition catalogue of the Persian collection he had purchased for the South Kensington Muse...
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This study examines Baluch carpets’ musealisation and the prejudiced view that carpets woven by Persians are superior to the carpets of tribal groups– a view expressed in 1876 by Robert Murdoch Smith in the exhibition catalogue of the Persian collection he had purchased for the South Kensington Museum. To do so, travel memoirs, museum registers and exhibition catalogues in European and US museums ca. 1870s-19030s are revisited. The scope is to refine Baluch weavings as museum objects and delineate how tribal carpets were integrated in museums within ethno-cultural stereotypes in Persian art and the re-discussion between ‘fine’ and ‘applied’ arts.

This article presents a brief history of the Museum of Oriental Art in Rome. Its main focus is its collection of Persian Art: not only because of the objects it contains, but also because of the further activity it has encouraged in the form of exhibitions in Italy and abroad and collaboration with ...
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This article presents a brief history of the Museum of Oriental Art in Rome. Its main focus is its collection of Persian Art: not only because of the objects it contains, but also because of the further activity it has encouraged in the form of exhibitions in Italy and abroad and collaboration with institutions in Iran itself and elsewhere in Italy. This co-operation also includes excavation and research in Iran for example in Isfahan’s Friday mosque and Arg-e Bam and participation in exhibitions in other locations in Italy and abroad.

The so-called Polish carpets were once believed to be woven on Polish looms, even though—as we now understand—they were (most likely) manufactured in the Persian cities of Kashan and Isfahan. Yet, the misattribution of these objects’ origins is still evident in the phrase by which they are referred ...
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The so-called Polish carpets were once believed to be woven on Polish looms, even though—as we now understand—they were (most likely) manufactured in the Persian cities of Kashan and Isfahan. Yet, the misattribution of these objects’ origins is still evident in the phrase by which they are referred to in most English-language art-historical accounts, ‘the so-called Polish carpets’. This essay explores the history of conceptualising these carpets’ artistic geography, from art historians’ belief in their fictional Polish provenience, to their appreciation as some of the most valuable Safavid-era Persian carpets, to recent attempts to move away from defining these objects’ geographic roots in definite terms. With conflicting theories about their artistic geographies vying for attention, ‘the so-called Polish carpets’ are serving here as a springboard for rethinking the spatial dimension of the practice of naming in Art History, particularly the paradox inherent in the idea of artistic origins.

This essay offers the first survey of architectural history after the Muslim conquests in the Indian Subcontinent in Urdu, the major Muslim literary language of colonial India. Contributing to the history of art history in non-European contexts, the essay traces the emergence of a deliberately ‘Isla...
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This essay offers the first survey of architectural history after the Muslim conquests in the Indian Subcontinent in Urdu, the major Muslim literary language of colonial India. Contributing to the history of art history in non-European contexts, the essay traces the emergence of a deliberately ‘Islamic’ art history as the outcome of intellectual exchanges between Indian, European, and Middle Eastern authors. Reflecting this mixed provenance, the popular and scholarly texts examined here are termed ‘architectural rekhta’ by using the old name for Urdu (Rekhta: ‘mixed’). In apt architectural metonymy, ‘Rekhta’ was renamed ‘Urdu’ in homage to the Urdu-e Mu‘ala (or Red Fort of Delhi), revealing a conceptual link between the palace of the last Mughal emperors and Urdu as its language based on the centrality of buildings to Indo-Muslim cultural memory. Consequently, when colonial Muslim authors combined elements of European practice with their own concerns to produce their ‘mixed’ mode of art historical writing, architecture became their primary focus. In line with the themes of this special issue of the JAH, this approach examines the ‘post-Persianate’ cultural memory of Indian art of the Islamic period.

In treating illustrated Persian-language manuscript arts from the medieval and early-modern periods, dynasties have come to be associated with Iran and their art forms labelled ‘Persian’ and ‘Iranian’. Materials from sixteenth-century Central Asia— implying the Abu’l-Khairid dynasty (commonly called...
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In treating illustrated Persian-language manuscript arts from the medieval and early-modern periods, dynasties have come to be associated with Iran and their art forms labelled ‘Persian’ and ‘Iranian’. Materials from sixteenth-century Central Asia— implying the Abu’l-Khairid dynasty (commonly called Shaybanid Uzbek, in power 1500—1599)—challenge this classification. Scholarship has witnessed intellectual fissures dividing Iran from Central Asia, and Russian-speaking and Anglophone scholars from each other. These are not pedantic trivialities, but deliberate intrusions of national and political agendas into art historical analyses. The geographic split partitioning Iran from Central Asia has its origins in the historical battles waged between the Safavids and Abu’l-Khairids across the sixteenth century, while the linguistic and ideological rift separating English- and Russian-language academics stems from political divisions from the time of British and Romanov imperial ambitions during the late nineteenth century, through Cold-War tensions spanning the twentieth.

A pioneer in the study of Islamic architecture, Henry Viollet (1880-1955) travelled from Egypt to Central Asia between 1904 and 1913. From his missions, the French architect and archaeologist brought back more than 4,500 written and photographic documents, today kept at the Bibliothèque universitair...
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A pioneer in the study of Islamic architecture, Henry Viollet (1880-1955) travelled from Egypt to Central Asia between 1904 and 1913. From his missions, the French architect and archaeologist brought back more than 4,500 written and photographic documents, today kept at the Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris. These archives document Viollet’s excavations at Samarra and his surveys of Islamic monuments, particularly in Iraq and Iran. In 2021-2022 a scientific project funded by the GIS CollEx-Persée and co-partnered with BULAC and CeRMI has been set up to study part of the iconographic materials stored in these archives (EpiPOM project). In the frame of this project, an international conference was organized in Paris on 23 June 2022 to bring together a network of researchers in the arts of Islam into a collaborative study of this partly undisclosed archival material.

The purpose of this essay is threefold. Firstly, it attempts to introduce the diplomatic and collecting careers of the Austro-Hungarian diplomat Baron Albert Eperjesy (1848–1916), who was the highest representative of his country in numerous European capitals and –between 1895 and 1901– Tehran. Seco...
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The purpose of this essay is threefold. Firstly, it attempts to introduce the diplomatic and collecting careers of the Austro-Hungarian diplomat Baron Albert Eperjesy (1848–1916), who was the highest representative of his country in numerous European capitals and –between 1895 and 1901– Tehran. Secondly, an attempt will be made to contextualise his collecting habits by drawing attention to the peculiarities of Austro-Hungarian collector diplomats. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Persian element of this collection will be discussed within the previously outlined framework, namely, what artworks it did include, how and where he obtained them, and what would be their subsequent fate.

Recent research has sought to deconstruct the narrative of the carpets of South, Central and West Asia created by late nineteenth and early twentieth century European and North American scholars. This article builds on the methodology of that recent historiographical work, but looks at a later histo...
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Recent research has sought to deconstruct the narrative of the carpets of South, Central and West Asia created by late nineteenth and early twentieth century European and North American scholars. This article builds on the methodology of that recent historiographical work, but looks at a later historical moment, the 1970s. Then, as in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the formation of ideas of Iran and Islam through the agency of carpet studies was clearly visible. It explores this process through two exhibitions held in 1976 under the umbrella of the UK-wide World of Islam Festival, Arts of Islam at the Hayward Gallery, London, and Carpets of Central Persia at the Mappin Gallery, Sheffield and the Birmingham City Art Gallery. The article argues that whilst the visibility of carpets in the Festival reinvigorated carpet studies in the short term, its exhibitions failed to offer a sustainable forward path for the discipline. Rather they reinforced already anachronistic ideas about Iran’s role in the material culture of the region and continued to focus carpet scholarship the narrow question of provenience, the place and date of making.

The present review of 20th Century Indian Art focuses on the book’s contribution to debates around ‘global art history’ and ‘world art studies’. What methodological breakthroughs can be gained from the comparative study of regions outside Europe and the USA? Issues such as hybridity and syncretism, ...
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The present review of 20th Century Indian Art focuses on the book’s contribution to debates around ‘global art history’ and ‘world art studies’. What methodological breakthroughs can be gained from the comparative study of regions outside Europe and the USA? Issues such as hybridity and syncretism, primitivism and folk art, nationalism and regional identities, authenticity and derivativeness, belatedness and modernization, are common to discussions of art history in various contexts traditionally regarded as peripheral or marginal. Inverting the vantage point of historical analysis, and examining them from the position of the formerly colonized, undermines established categories and generates novel insights. Such shifts in perspective tend to inflect differently, and may even alter radically, the understanding of terms like primitivism, Orientalism and even art and craft. The article underscores the importance of rethinking commonly held presumptions about dislocation, appropriation, precedence, deviation. Only when art historians can look at the discipline from a multiplicity of cultural and geographical perspectives will it be possible to establish a truly global art history.

The following contribution is based on a first investigation of the historical image archive of the Bruckmann Verlag, one of the largest and most influential German publishing houses in the field of art reproduction at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. As ...
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The following contribution is based on a first investigation of the historical image archive of the Bruckmann Verlag, one of the largest and most influential German publishing houses in the field of art reproduction at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. As only recently the archive is accessible for research at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, this text sets out some initial thoughts, as to why which research convolute and the related photo-objects are particularly recommended for digital projects, as well as to reveal the possible challenges involved.

This paper presents the ERC StG project Venice’s Nissology (VeNiss), a semantic geo-spatial web infrastructure for reconstructing over five-centuries of transformations of Venice’s lagoon islands, alongside their interwoven relationships in a geographically- and temporally-based digital environment....
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This paper presents the ERC StG project Venice’s Nissology (VeNiss), a semantic geo-spatial web infrastructure for reconstructing over five-centuries of transformations of Venice’s lagoon islands, alongside their interwoven relationships in a geographically- and temporally-based digital environment. VeNiss constitutes the first analytical methodology for investigating, interpreting, and visualising, through computational media, the connective dynamics of centre-periphery relations in historic settlements, with specific reference to archipelagoes. Through a transdisciplinary approach, which combines history, architecture, art history, social studies, and advanced digital technologies the research infrastructure enables the intersection of historical data with georeferenced maps, 2D reconstructions, and 3D interoperable models to express the urban processes that shaped the lagoon city from the sixteenth century.

the project, called “Apollo and Daphne and iconographic research: digital methodologies for art history”, focuses on the digitalisation of relevant works of art and extends their use and reuse on the web, eventually exploring some tools that could improve iconographic research. As a case study, 25 ...
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the project, called “Apollo and Daphne and iconographic research: digital methodologies for art history”, focuses on the digitalisation of relevant works of art and extends their use and reuse on the web, eventually exploring some tools that could improve iconographic research. As a case study, 25 works of art representing the myth of Apollo and Daphne produced from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries in all fields of art, such as sculpture, painting and illuminated manuscripts have been chosen. These 25 images belonging from different historical and artistical periods were enough to create an iconographic canon that can been studied using digital tools. The choice of Ovid’s myth was motivated by the deep connection between the text (original and translated) and the huge artistic production on the mythological subject increased by the fifteenth century because of renewed interest in the Latin poem and classical world in general.

The University of Bologna has a long tradition in Digital Humanities, both at the level of research and teaching. This article presents some experiences in developing new educational models based on the idea of transversal learning, collaborative approaches and project-oriented outputs, together wit...
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The University of Bologna has a long tradition in Digital Humanities, both at the level of research and teaching. This article presents some experiences in developing new educational models based on the idea of transversal learning, collaborative approaches and project-oriented outputs, together with the definition of research fields within this vast domain, accompanied by practical examples. The creation of an international master’s degree (DHDK), a PhD programme (CHeDE) and a research centre (/DH.arc) are the results of refining the notion of the DH in a new bidirectional way: to reflect on computational methodologies and models in the cultural sphere and to suggest a cultural approach to Information Technology (IT).

In this letter to the editor, I counter Ian Verstegen’s suggestion in his recent review of my book that Meyer Schapiro’s critiques of the grand theories of the 20th century were anti-theoretical. Rather than sceptical refutations of art-historical theory in general, Schapiro’s engagements with figur...
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In this letter to the editor, I counter Ian Verstegen’s suggestion in his recent review of my book that Meyer Schapiro’s critiques of the grand theories of the 20th century were anti-theoretical. Rather than sceptical refutations of art-historical theory in general, Schapiro’s engagements with figures like Freud and Heidegger betray his awareness that empiricism and pragmatism are themselves philosophical practices.

Originally written in 1905 and included in the volume Problemi di estetica (Questions on Aesthetics), first published in 1910, this short yet dense essay by Benedetto Croce explores the aesthetic and critical implications of the concept of macchia. The starting point of this philosophical investigat...
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Originally written in 1905 and included in the volume Problemi di estetica (Questions on Aesthetics), first published in 1910, this short yet dense essay by Benedetto Croce explores the aesthetic and critical implications of the concept of macchia. The starting point of this philosophical investigation is offered by a little-known volume by Vittorio Imbriani, entitled La quinta promotrice (The Promoting Scene), printed in Naples in 1869, in which the author applies the notion of macchia within the emerging ambit of Art Criticism, in reference to the works of Domenico Morelli and, in particular, his Deposition of Christ, of which he provides a detailed, highly evocative and poetic ekphrasis. Defined by Imbriani as the propulsive force, the preliminary idea of every pictorial creation, the concept of macchia will be associated by Croce with one of the foundational notions of his own Aesthetics and set genealogically in relation with the paradigm of intuition as the truly distinctive quality of art in general, beyond any possible differentiation among the particular arts.

The birth of digital writing, characterized by a process of correction that implies the omission of the preparatory editorial phases of a literary text, has brought about an epochal change in the author-text relationship, now characterized, for the first time in literary history, by the disappearanc...
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The birth of digital writing, characterized by a process of correction that implies the omission of the preparatory editorial phases of a literary text, has brought about an epochal change in the author-text relationship, now characterized, for the first time in literary history, by the disappearance of autograph documentation. This evident loss would seem to threaten the survival of twenty-first century philology, destined to operate despite the absence of the author’s handwritten documents. But the genetic reconstruction of the text, if taken as a speculative habitus and common research practice, can constitute a valid answer and a new possibility for future philological inquiry which combines literature, music and art in a new Hypermedia. The compositional history of the work and that of its dissemination can be exemplified by an exhibition of typologically diverse materials, such as images, sounds, videos, which allow us to contextualize the literary text through a multidisciplinary creative process and to reconnect it to the very important and popular field of intermediality studies. This article proposes a few samples of this new research approach regarding Giovanni Boccaccio and his literary masterpiece Decameron.

The coincidence, in the years 2020–2022, of COVID and increasing worldwide concern about carbon footprints, would appear to culminate in an obvious direction for the future of the DH: the necessity to push forward with mass digitisation so that scholars do not need to fly around the world to study u...
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The coincidence, in the years 2020–2022, of COVID and increasing worldwide concern about carbon footprints, would appear to culminate in an obvious direction for the future of the DH: the necessity to push forward with mass digitisation so that scholars do not need to fly around the world to study unique objects such as manuscripts, and the move to exclusively digital publishing in order to avoid generating carbon footprints for books and journals which, now in 2022, appear to be entirely unnecessary to publish in print and more akin to driving around in a 1950s Cadillac. The proposition to stop most or all print publishing in academia may have been unthinkable even a decade ago, but in the current situation, and the forseeable future, it would be the most effective way for scholarship and scholars to make their contribution to de-carbonisation.

Leopoldo Cicognara’s (1767-1834) Storia della scultura (Venice, 1813-18; second edition, Prato, 1823-24) is a stylistic history of Italian sculpture from the 14th century to his own time, culminating with Antonio Canova. In writing and then revising his survey, Cicognara relied on the art literatur...
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Leopoldo Cicognara’s (1767-1834) Storia della scultura (Venice, 1813-18; second edition, Prato, 1823-24) is a stylistic history of Italian sculpture from the 14th century to his own time, culminating with Antonio Canova. In writing and then revising his survey, Cicognara relied on the art literature that he collected in his own rich library, as well as on direct knowledge of the works – both essential elements for stylistic classification. Cicognara divided his history into five epochs. This paper focuses on the second epoch (incremento/progresso), i.e., on sculpture of the 15th century, in order to demonstrate how Cicognara’s specific working method not only enabled him to correct incorrect dating but also to create the first consistent inventory of Italian sculpture. In the process, he established a canon of works which remains valid today. In the chapter on Venetian sculpture, moreover, it becomes clear how much his interest in art history was an expression of his civic, political and cultural commitment.

Digital editions of books are enjoying a tremendous success in recent years, especially after COVID pandemics limited the access to physical books. But digital editions can be much more than just a digital reproduction of the pages of a printed book. For this reason, the Bibliotheca Hertziana, among...
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Digital editions of books are enjoying a tremendous success in recent years, especially after COVID pandemics limited the access to physical books. But digital editions can be much more than just a digital reproduction of the pages of a printed book. For this reason, the Bibliotheca Hertziana, among other institutions, is investing lot of resources in order to improve the offer of digital publications, with the support of new technologies such as neural text recognition. Crucial points include the use of shared standards such as TEI XML and open source platforms such as TEI Publisher to ensure long-term accessibility and preservation.

The Summer School dedicated to Digital Humanities (DH) for Art History, held between 27 June and 1 July 2022 at the Department of Excellence of the Department of Human Sciences (DSU Scienze Umane) of the University of L’Aquila, represented a singular opportunity for an in-depth snapshot of a discipl...
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The Summer School dedicated to Digital Humanities (DH) for Art History, held between 27 June and 1 July 2022 at the Department of Excellence of the Department of Human Sciences (DSU Scienze Umane) of the University of L’Aquila, represented a singular opportunity for an in-depth snapshot of a discipline that, de facto, has only recently managed to carve out a defined space within academia. This, all the while for decades having been a fundamental component of many research institutes’ activities and at the same time acquiring a predominant role in the vast world of protection, enhancement and dissemination of cultural patrimony.

It is surprising how difficult it is to share hard-won wisdom regarding the Digital Humanities, even in the context of scholarly and academic institutions. Yet this cone of silence and evasion impedes progress, without question, yet it is not clear at all what can be done about this issue if institu...
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It is surprising how difficult it is to share hard-won wisdom regarding the Digital Humanities, even in the context of scholarly and academic institutions. Yet this cone of silence and evasion impedes progress, without question, yet it is not clear at all what can be done about this issue if institutional figures feel they cannot talk about it.

The project envisages the development of innovative and immersive fruitive solutions through the use of an eye tracking device, capable of identifying the points of greatest interest for an observer and, therefore, of suggesting possible set-up criteria useful for maximizing the visiting experience ...
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The project envisages the development of innovative and immersive fruitive solutions through the use of an eye tracking device, capable of identifying the points of greatest interest for an observer and, therefore, of suggesting possible set-up criteria useful for maximizing the visiting experience on a cognitive level. The project focuses on a specific category of frames characterised by a complex wealth of information that is, through the presence of repetitive decorative motifs, also extended to less elaborate types (up to and including images without borders), in order to identify whether and which of these can be considered ‘indices’ and vehicles capable of catalysing the attention of observers towards specific aspects of a visual construct.

The paper presents a digital project I developed for the archive of Enzo Mari preserved at the CSAC (Study Centre and Communication Archive, CSAC) of the University of Parma (Italy) as part of my doctoral thesis. By taking into account the efforts made by national and international institutions, a ...
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The paper presents a digital project I developed for the archive of Enzo Mari preserved at the CSAC (Study Centre and Communication Archive, CSAC) of the University of Parma (Italy) as part of my doctoral thesis. By taking into account the efforts made by national and international institutions, a project of a prototype has been developed, presenting a part of the author’s research and production between the Fifties and the Nineties organised in categories, with the will to share with a large audience of scholars and enthusiasts. The work has been conducted with the digital support of Italian company Hyperborea.

A large section of the print holdings of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin is housed in bulky albums known as Schraubbände (‘screw volumes’). From the outside, these albums are similar to print albums that abounded in private collections before the nineteenth century. But their leaves are not sewn t...
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A large section of the print holdings of the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin is housed in bulky albums known as Schraubbände (‘screw volumes’). From the outside, these albums are similar to print albums that abounded in private collections before the nineteenth century. But their leaves are not sewn together as in a traditional codex structure; rather, they are screwed together between metal rods. The rods can be unscrewed for easy insertion and removal of the mounted prints, while keeping them in the given order. By investigating material and historical aspects of the Berlin Schraubbände, this paper identifies their forerunners in the reliure mobile-albums in use at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, proposes a rationale behind their use at the Kupferstichkabinett in the late nineteenth century, and challenges the traditional discrimination between bound and unbound print collections.

A brief life of Georg Sobotka, the doctoral student of Julius Schlosser afterwards employed at the Berlin museums mentioned in Karl Johns’ article on ‘The young Hans Sedlmayr’. In addition: a bibliography and translations of three reviews: Wilhelm Rolfs, Geschichte der Malerei Neapels; Giuseppe Ceci...
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A brief life of Georg Sobotka, the doctoral student of Julius Schlosser afterwards employed at the Berlin museums mentioned in Karl Johns’ article on ‘The young Hans Sedlmayr’. In addition: a bibliography and translations of three reviews: Wilhelm Rolfs, Geschichte der Malerei Neapels; Giuseppe Ceci, Saggio di una bibliografia per la storia delle arti figurative nell’Italia meridionale; Henry Rousseau, La Sculpture aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles.

In the same year of 1934 as Julius von Schlosser celebrated the eightieth anniversary of the Österreichisches Institut für Geschichtsforschung with his essay ‘Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte’, Eberhard Hempel in his essay, ‘Ist ‘eine strenge Kunstwissenschaft’ möglich?’ claimed that the younge...
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In the same year of 1934 as Julius von Schlosser celebrated the eightieth anniversary of the Österreichisches Institut für Geschichtsforschung with his essay ‘Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte’, Eberhard Hempel in his essay, ‘Ist ‘eine strenge Kunstwissenschaft’ möglich?’ claimed that the younger generation of the Vienna School had relaxed the connection to historical studies and that a volte-face had occurred. Since Hempel has named me as one of the leaders of the ‘younger generation of the Vienna School’, I am justified in refuting his claim. To avoid giving rise to any new misunderstandings, I speak only for myself as an individual and in the indefinite plural only for those who agree with my views. Hempel, who treats his opponents honourably, believes that in his sentences just cited, he was referring only to my opinion alone. Yet this is certainly not the case. All of my previous essays have in a very definite sense – as I intend to make clear here – originated in the desire to make the history of art more ‘historical’ than it now is. I consider myself from the very beginning to have been aligned with the traditional general historical trend of the entire Vienna School. There has definitely not been a ‘volte-face’. The goals are the same, only the paths and the means are some of them different. As I shall presently demonstrate, the method of ‘structural analysis’, which Hempel correctly identifies as characteristic for our conception of the problems but incorrectly viewing it as ‘psychological’ – is a truly art historical method. Guido von Kaschnitz-Weinberg was correct to identify Alois Riegl as the actual pioneer of structural analysis. This is not merely the view of those who have themselves been trained in the tradition of the ‘Vienna School’, but it has also been recognized by others more distant.

The greatest respect one could show would certainly be a renewed and serious consideration of Schlosser’s work – and yet we have another duty which strikes me as more important still, and this is to recognize its significance for the history of art beyond the mere accrual of knowledge. For us art hi...
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The greatest respect one could show would certainly be a renewed and serious consideration of Schlosser’s work – and yet we have another duty which strikes me as more important still, and this is to recognize its significance for the history of art beyond the mere accrual of knowledge. For us art historians, this question is inextricably bound to the other as to whether we have done justice to his work, and as paradoxical as it might sound about such a figure who was given the highest possible honors during his life, I would have to answer in the negative. … I would most like to show that the large and impressive work of Julius von Schlosser is today in no way finished, and that the day it was published is fading behind us, but indeed that Schlosser still has a very living contribution to make to the history of art of our own time, and that it is far from fading. This is very clear as we consider his work in relation to his own time.

The following paper by Silvia Massa was first presented at a session sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America that I chaired on 10 February 2021 at the 109th College Art Association Annual Conference. Entitled ‘The Print in the Codex’, the session considered books transformed through the ...
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The following paper by Silvia Massa was first presented at a session sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America that I chaired on 10 February 2021 at the 109th College Art Association Annual Conference. Entitled ‘The Print in the Codex’, the session considered books transformed through the incorporation of independently printed images. This is the second of two papers from the session to appear in this journal; Sarah Schaefer’s study of the impact of extra-illustration on printing history, ‘Bibles Unbound: The Material Semantics of Nineteenth-Century Scriptural Illustration’, appeared in the June 2022 issue.

The following paper by Silvia Massa was first presented at a session sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America that I chaired on 10 February 2021 at the 109th College Art Association Annual Conference. Entitled ‘The Print in the Codex’, the session considered books transformed through the ...
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The following paper by Silvia Massa was first presented at a session sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America that I chaired on 10 February 2021 at the 109th College Art Association Annual Conference. Entitled ‘The Print in the Codex’, the session considered books transformed through the incorporation of independently printed images. This is the second of two papers from the session to appear in this journal; Sarah Schaefer’s study of the impact of extra-illustration on printing history, ‘Bibles Unbound: The Material Semantics of Nineteenth-Century Scriptural Illustration’, appeared in the June 2022 issue.

The influential art library of Count Leopoldo Cicognara (1767-1834) testifies to his scholarship and bibliophilic passions; it testifies equally to his devotion to providing others, artists and scholars alike, with tools for their work. He valued provenance from contemporary collections, such as tha...
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The influential art library of Count Leopoldo Cicognara (1767-1834) testifies to his scholarship and bibliophilic passions; it testifies equally to his devotion to providing others, artists and scholars alike, with tools for their work. He valued provenance from contemporary collections, such as that of Giuseppe Bossi (1777-1815), or historic collections, such as that of Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553-1617). Key, however, were personal connections with artists, scholars, librarians, and book dealers, who helped shape Cicognara’s library through donations, advice, and their own connections. To document the construction of Cicognara’s library this study analyses his annotated catalogue and draws on correspondence with friends and colleagues, including Gaetano Pinali (1759-1846), Giovanni de Lazara (1744-1833), Francesco Girolamo Cancellieri (1751-1826), and Giovan Battista Vermiglioli (1769-1848). This documentation deepens our understanding both of Cicognara’s conception of his library and of how it represents the cultural world of northern Italy during the Napoleonic era and its aftermath.

This paper, written for the Summer School at L’Aquila, gives a brief overview of the current status of the ongoing research project for the digital edition of the Monumenti storici artistici della città di Aquila e suoi contornicolle notizie de’ pittori scultori architetti ed altri artefici che vi f...
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This paper, written for the Summer School at L’Aquila, gives a brief overview of the current status of the ongoing research project for the digital edition of the Monumenti storici artistici della città di Aquila e suoi contornicolle notizie de’ pittori scultori architetti ed altri artefici che vi fiorirono (L’Aquila, 1848) by Angelo Leosini (L’Aquila, 1818–1881), with particular attention to the task of text transcription and markup.

While I was working on the evolution of Austrian Gothic panel painting, I realized that the whole material could be sorted into multiple genealogies, each of which corresponded to a particular (regional) mode of production, and that within these different genealogies there was always one constant fa...
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While I was working on the evolution of Austrian Gothic panel painting, I realized that the whole material could be sorted into multiple genealogies, each of which corresponded to a particular (regional) mode of production, and that within these different genealogies there was always one constant factor. This constant factor wasn’t something that could be defined by identifying certain homogeneous, regularly or frequently recurring forms. It wouldn’t do either to characterize this constant factor as a specific attitude towards a particular contemporary style or as a particular mode or point of view, the term ‘constant factor’ also implies a constant reflected in the object that is being made. Of course, we are not talking about something that remains the same externally. Rather, one has to imagine a kind of shared ideal, present to the different artists in a variety of vague formulae, which more or less explicitly guides the process of creation and appears, through a constant flux of viewpoints, in ever new guises but in fact remains the same and has to appear differently (and filled with new content) only because, like any ideal conception, it is only roughly approximated in each particular act of creation, so that some unfulfilled demand always remains, which then serves as an incentive for new developments.

Monumenti storici artistici della città di Aquila e suoi contorni colle notizie de’ pittori scultori architetti ed altri artefici che vi fiorirono (L’Aquila 1848), a book by Angelo Leosini, addresses the theme of the city’s identity through the description of its monuments, with the explicit purpose...
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Monumenti storici artistici della città di Aquila e suoi contorni colle notizie de’ pittori scultori architetti ed altri artefici che vi fiorirono (L’Aquila 1848), a book by Angelo Leosini, addresses the theme of the city’s identity through the description of its monuments, with the explicit purpose of tracing the history of L’Aquila’s art for the very first time. Starting from the digitisation and transcription of Leosini’s personal, densely annotated copy in the Biblioteca ‘Salvatore Tommasi’ in L’Aquila, the research project will be rendered in its layered complexity through the publication online of the author’s personal copy ––transcribed, annotated, and with hypertext links to bibliographical and iconographical information supported by advanced user-assisting techniques for searching semantic information.

Decades since the radicalising impacts of ‘theory’ have been levelled into disciplinary practice, what might be invited by a philosophical art history today? I outline the shape of this problem by retracing the presence of the philosophical in early art history, contextualising the emergence of theo...
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Decades since the radicalising impacts of ‘theory’ have been levelled into disciplinary practice, what might be invited by a philosophical art history today? I outline the shape of this problem by retracing the presence of the philosophical in early art history, contextualising the emergence of theory in 20th-century continental philosophy’s self-examination, and surveying the impact and afterlife of the assimilation of French thought, as ‘theory’, into the Anglo-American academy. Faced by an ever-expanding ‘menu of methods’ and interpretive toolkits, the challenge for a philosophical art history today is to interrogate and reverse the conversion of what the French called thought (pensée) into what became theory. By considering the philosophy of thought developed by Gilles Deleuze, and his ideas of ‘superior empiricism’ and ‘constructivism’, I explore one route to such interrogation. I argue that a philosophical art history as a thoughtful art history moves away from preoccupations of methodology to a practice of problematology.

The aim of this project, developed by the conclusion of the Summer School, is to recompose a corpus of sacred images and texts concerning the cult of St. Berardo, the holy patron of Diocese and town of Teramo. This interesting corpus was produced under the episcopates of Vincenzo Bugiatti da Montesa...
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The aim of this project, developed by the conclusion of the Summer School, is to recompose a corpus of sacred images and texts concerning the cult of St. Berardo, the holy patron of Diocese and town of Teramo. This interesting corpus was produced under the episcopates of Vincenzo Bugiatti da Montesanto (1592–1609) and Giambattista Maria Visconti (1609–1638), aimed to liturgical or devotional use in the Cathedral, and preserved in the same church or in its archive.

This paper sets out a concept for a seasonal virtual exhibition located inside the Barbacane Castle on the island of Pantelleria. The virtual exhibition involves the animation of the cultural heritage icons of the island such as the Imperial portraits of Caesar, Tito and Antonia Minore, and the Godd...
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This paper sets out a concept for a seasonal virtual exhibition located inside the Barbacane Castle on the island of Pantelleria. The virtual exhibition involves the animation of the cultural heritage icons of the island such as the Imperial portraits of Caesar, Tito and Antonia Minore, and the Goddess Tanit, and the creation of a fictional 3-dimensional, animated character: an Eneolithic boy. The aim of the project is to educate tourists towards a more conscious tourism on the island through the use of storytelling, augmented reality and animation.

Historical data are challenging to represent, and this is especially true for objects whose identity undergoes several changes – physical and functional – over time, such as historic buildings. In the context of the VeNiss project, we introduce a technical conceptualisation of the philosophical prob...
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Historical data are challenging to represent, and this is especially true for objects whose identity undergoes several changes – physical and functional – over time, such as historic buildings. In the context of the VeNiss project, we introduce a technical conceptualisation of the philosophical problem of identity over time through the lens of the Cidoc-CRM, providing an outline of a data model and a UX/UI solution, both adopted to represent knowledge about the nuanced historical changes of buildings over time.

The article addresses the art historian and leading Renaissance scholar Mikhail Liebman’s 1960s and 1970s texts, which present his understandings of the discourse and methodology of art history. It was a time when the Soviet art history avant-garde, called ‘revisionists’, encouraged by Khrushchev’s ...
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The article addresses the art historian and leading Renaissance scholar Mikhail Liebman’s 1960s and 1970s texts, which present his understandings of the discourse and methodology of art history. It was a time when the Soviet art history avant-garde, called ‘revisionists’, encouraged by Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation policy, began critically reappraising art and art history’s Marxist-Leninist/Stalinist approach. The article seeks to determine why and how Liebman’s art history discourse changed in this new political situation. What was ‘Marxist’ in it and how did he arrive at the ‘social history of art’? I argue that it was the official socialist system of internationalisation which allowed Liebman to attend international forums in his discipline, and hence to be in dialogue with the contemporary Western art historical discourse(s). I also ask how, given the paucity of sources and the ideologically ambivalent conditions in which art historical texts in Soviet Union were created, one can find the right code for reading socialist art histories?

Modern-day research in digital humanities is an inherently intersectional activity that borrows from, and in turn contributes to, a multitude of domains previously seen as having little bearing on the discipline at hand. Art history, for instance, operates today at the crossroads of social studies, ...
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Modern-day research in digital humanities is an inherently intersectional activity that borrows from, and in turn contributes to, a multitude of domains previously seen as having little bearing on the discipline at hand. Art history, for instance, operates today at the crossroads of social studies, digital libraries, geographical information systems, data modelling, and cognitive computing, yet its problems inform research questions within all of these fields, which veer towards making the output of prior research readily available to humanists in their interaction with digital resources. This is reflected in the way data are represented, stored and published: with various intra- and inter-institutional research endeavours relying upon output that could and should be shared, the notion of ‘leaving the data silo’ with a view on interoperability acquires even greater significance. Scholars and policymakers are supporting this view with guidelines, such as the FAIR principles, and standards, such as Linked Open Data, that implement them, with technologies whose coverage, complexity and lifespans vary. A point is being approached, however, where the technological opportunities permit a continuous interoperability between established and concluded data-intensive projects, and current projects whose underlying datasets evolve. This enables the data production of one institution to be viewed as one harmonically interlinked knowledge graph, which can be queried through a global understanding of the ontological models that dominate the fields involved. This paper is an overview of past and present efforts of mine in the creation of digital humanities knowledge graphs over the past decade, from music history to the societal ramifications of the history of architecture. This contribution highlights the variability of concurrent research environments at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, not only in the state of their activities, but also in the ways they manage their data life-cycles, and exemplifies possible combinations of FAIR data management platforms and integration techniques, suitable for different scenarios resulting from such variability. The paper concludes with an example of how feedback from the art history domain called for novel directions for data science and Semantic Web scholars to follow, by proposing that the Linked Open Data paradigm adopt a notion of usability in the very morphology of published data, thus becoming Linked Open Usable Data.

The short but intense polemic that took place following Giulio Carlo Argan’s review of Albert Erich Brinckmann’s Theatrum novum Pedemontii in 1931 inaugurated international twentieth century scholarly reception of Piedmontese Baroque architecture. Today, it provides a captivating snapshot of the tur...
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The short but intense polemic that took place following Giulio Carlo Argan’s review of Albert Erich Brinckmann’s Theatrum novum Pedemontii in 1931 inaugurated international twentieth century scholarly reception of Piedmontese Baroque architecture. Today, it provides a captivating snapshot of the turbulent and complex disciplinary feuds that prevailed in architectural historiography during the interwar period, often pushing contenders into deep water when attempting to clarify their views. The twenty-three-year-old Argan – later to become one of Italy’s most celebrated academics – had just graduated from the University of Turin when he gave a bravely disapproving review of the latest book by one of Germany’s most prominent architectural historians at the time.

The research project presented here is the creation of a digital life for the art- historical information that emerged from research into the miniatures of the antiphonaries of the Diocesan Library of Chioggia. The result is a small digital space where one can visualize textual and multimedia conte...
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The research project presented here is the creation of a digital life for the art- historical information that emerged from research into the miniatures of the antiphonaries of the Diocesan Library of Chioggia. The result is a small digital space where one can visualize textual and multimedia content concerning the illuminated capilettera found inside three antiphonaries of the Diocesan Library of Chioggia (Venezia), in manuscripts 4523, 4527 and 4528 respectively. An intuitive web platform allows the user to navigate between various general sections and two catalogues through the use of search filters set to refine the selection of items within them.

Since so much emotion has accrued around the figure of Hans Sedlmayr due to his collaboration during the Nazi period in Austria, it has been felt that, however controversial, it might be enlightening to direct attention to less well-known aspects of the earlier part of his prolific, multifaceted and...
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Since so much emotion has accrued around the figure of Hans Sedlmayr due to his collaboration during the Nazi period in Austria, it has been felt that, however controversial, it might be enlightening to direct attention to less well-known aspects of the earlier part of his prolific, multifaceted and influential career.

This project proposal is for the application of IT tools in order to consider a “cross-media” translation of data obtained, so that they can be used as an alternative to simple textual consultation, with respect to the reconstruction of the geography and history of Venetian works of art in the Adria...
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This project proposal is for the application of IT tools in order to consider a “cross-media” translation of data obtained, so that they can be used as an alternative to simple textual consultation, with respect to the reconstruction of the geography and history of Venetian works of art in the Adriatic regions of the Kingdom of Naples between the Middle Ages and the early modern age. The overall aim of the work is namely to carry out an analysis of Venetian presences and influences in the artistic production of Abruzzo, Molise and Apulia, also considering the transversal relations of this area with the Balkan regions under Venetian rule.

The European Commission is currently making efforts to address the persistent gender inequality in the decision-making roles of museums and cultural heritage institutions. This research project – presented in June 2022 at the Summer School in Digital Humanities organised by the Department of Human S...
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The European Commission is currently making efforts to address the persistent gender inequality in the decision-making roles of museums and cultural heritage institutions. This research project – presented in June 2022 at the Summer School in Digital Humanities organised by the Department of Human Sciences at the Universita degli Studi dell’Aquila – explores the extent to which this ‘glass ceiling’ in the sector may be linked with the historical, twentieth-century gender-biased development of the curatorial profession. The project’s research methodology combines archival research and digital humanities with semi-structured interviews and statistical analysis, in order to uncover the circumstances in which women started accessing the curatorial profession in Europe, and to unearth the significance of twentieth-century female curatorial work.

Sam Rose’s book analyses techniques that art historians and art critics use when they write about artworks. These techniques concentrate on five ‘features’ of art-theoretical analysis: authors, contexts, reception, complexity and depth. The analysis that Rose presents is based on an exceptionally e...
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Sam Rose’s book analyses techniques that art historians and art critics use when they write about artworks. These techniques concentrate on five ‘features’ of art-theoretical analysis: authors, contexts, reception, complexity and depth. The analysis that Rose presents is based on an exceptionally extensive survey of art historical literature. At the same time, the book leaves it unclear whether these ‘features’ serve the purpose of acquiring and conveying knowledge about artworks or should we assume that they are merely constitutive of art-historical writing without contributing to art historical knowledge or its transmission.

Eva Kernbauer’s book Art, History, and Anachronic Interventions Since 1990 argues that contemporary artistic historiographies can potentially help us to reconceptualize historiography and to rethink contemporary art’s historicity. Based on thorough analyses of historical and contemporary discourses ...
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Eva Kernbauer’s book Art, History, and Anachronic Interventions Since 1990 argues that contemporary artistic historiographies can potentially help us to reconceptualize historiography and to rethink contemporary art’s historicity. Based on thorough analyses of historical and contemporary discourses of how art has been understood as contributing to historiography and philosophies of history, her analyses of artistic historiographies are not only about uncovering previously unknown histories and archives, but about theoretical reflections on history, history writing and time. This review summarizes Kernbauer’s key arguments, discusses her theoretical approach and the insights the book offers into (artistic) historiography and global art history methodology.

The book examines the genre of Salon caricatural, a special kind of Salon criticism which, made of rows of ‘pocket cartoons’ that poke fun on the art works on display, was a common feature of French satirical journals from the 1840s onwards. Looking closely at prints by Pelez, Daumier, Cham, and Ber...
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The book examines the genre of Salon caricatural, a special kind of Salon criticism which, made of rows of ‘pocket cartoons’ that poke fun on the art works on display, was a common feature of French satirical journals from the 1840s onwards. Looking closely at prints by Pelez, Daumier, Cham, and Bertall, while reading Baudelaire and other contemporary critics, the book examines its rise on the pages of Le Charivari until the end of the Salon in 1881. If French political caricature is characterised by violence and resistance against power, Salon caricature was never primarily oppositional, the book argues. Produced by caricaturists who shared training and pictorial references with Salon artists, it was aiming for laughter, generated by the very act of the translation of the medium of paint into drawing and print. Shifting reproductive technologies were part and parcel of the mechanisms of ‘repicturing’. As insiders’ views on practices of imaging, as well as social and cultural norms of the time, Salon caricatures share their approach with modern art.

Matthew Hayes’ volume examines the influence of nineteenth-century scholarship on the activities of contemporary paintings restorers, and, vice-versa, investigates how the visual effects of conservation treatments impacted contemporary scholarship. This reciprocal relationship is explored in four ca...
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Matthew Hayes’ volume examines the influence of nineteenth-century scholarship on the activities of contemporary paintings restorers, and, vice-versa, investigates how the visual effects of conservation treatments impacted contemporary scholarship. This reciprocal relationship is explored in four case studies, two situated in Italy (Giottesque frescoes and paintings by Titian), on in the United Kingdom (National Gallery London) and one in Germany (the Berlin museums). Hayes focuses on the treatment of paintings from the Renaissance, a period that knew strong interest from nineteenth-century scholars. He weaves together historical archival material (personal notes, correspondence, restoration records, historical photographs, etc.) and period texts (a.o. by Jacob Burckhardt, G.B. Cavalcaselle, Joseph Crowe), into a rich and accessible account, interspersed with examples of historical restoration treatments of well-known paintings and with restorer biographies. The resulting volume provides an entertaining and very accessible entry into the topic, whether the reader comes from (art) history or has a background in conservation.

Terry Smith characterizes Art to Come as a work of art historiography. The eleven chapters that comprise Art to Come–including several previously published essays by Smith–are primarily concerned with describing and analyzing art produced in the past few decades. This review takes up Smith’s invitat...
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Terry Smith characterizes Art to Come as a work of art historiography. The eleven chapters that comprise Art to Come–including several previously published essays by Smith–are primarily concerned with describing and analyzing art produced in the past few decades. This review takes up Smith’s invitation to understand Art to Come as historiography and argues that the book is a model for a mode of art writing that is simultaneously art historical and historiographical.

contemporary art, connectivity, contemporaneity, empiricism, global art history, art of the 21st century, art historical methodology, art history as historiography, interpretive restraint, post-Cold W...
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contemporary art, connectivity, contemporaneity, empiricism, global art history, art of the 21st century, art historical methodology, art history as historiography, interpretive restraint, post-Cold War art, self-reflexivity

Once, when questioned about the originality of Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa (1980), Richard Krautheimer gave one of his rare and atypically acerbic replies: “you obviously haven’t read much Sherlock Holmes”. In many ways the volume discussed here provoked in the reviewer a similar response becau...
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Once, when questioned about the originality of Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa (1980), Richard Krautheimer gave one of his rare and atypically acerbic replies: “you obviously haven’t read much Sherlock Holmes”. In many ways the volume discussed here provoked in the reviewer a similar response because, when reading through a number of the ten papers presented in these conference proceedings, he kept thinking: “but what about Argan?”. In this case Giulio Carlo Argan playing Canon Doyle, to Gilles Deleuze’s Eco, the latter’s Le Pli of 1988 to Argan’s brilliant but overlooked essay “La retorica e l’arte barocca” of 1955 which is not cited a single time in this book nor present in the bibliography. Acknowledging the importance of Argan (mentioned only in passing on p. 22) would not make Deleuze’s work appear any less innovative, but it certainly would have helped explain more persuasively the significant shifts in post-war perception and reception of the Baroque that were part of the historical preamble to the appearance of Leibniz et le baroque.

A review-essay on Annamaria Ducci’s intellectual biography Henri Focillon en son temps. La liberté des forms (2021) that extends this work by presenting a call for a ‘return to Focillon’ within art historical thought that begins with his ability to refocus us on the artwork itself and its capabiliti...
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A review-essay on Annamaria Ducci’s intellectual biography Henri Focillon en son temps. La liberté des forms (2021) that extends this work by presenting a call for a ‘return to Focillon’ within art historical thought that begins with his ability to refocus us on the artwork itself and its capabilities to magnetize content both within and without its historical milieu. Focillon’s real interest in the concept of a milieu and in the artwork’s ability to escape this originary context instigates a rethinking of the ontology, historiography, and the temporality of art. He challenges us to think and write through problematics, to experiment with both aesthetic agency and historical reception; to create new linkages between art and life, history and becoming, along the ἀκμή of the vie des formes—thus conceiving an artwork as a past-future event, as a ‘great ensemble’. Focillon posits that if the work of art is an event, then history is a modulated and controlled form of time as such, which itself is an actual-virtual movement or ‘becoming’. Ontologically art ‘goes further than…illustrate history’, he argues, which is why art historians must learn to encounter ‘modalities of life’ in order to write about how it creates ‘worlds’. Our ‘return to Focillon’ takes place within a threshold wherein the event of art is what matters most, that is, the capacities of a given formal property to harness and magnetize forces within and outside of itself in order to render humanist and post-humanist forces perceptible, sensible, and thinkable.

Julius von Schlosser (1866-1938), Commemorative volume of the Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte (vol. 60, 2021) including 13 lectures devoted to the work of Julius Schlosser. The subjects are treated concretely, without academic ‘discourse’, illustrating the generational span and antithesis of a ...
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Julius von Schlosser (1866-1938), Commemorative volume of the Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte (vol. 60, 2021) including 13 lectures devoted to the work of Julius Schlosser. The subjects are treated concretely, without academic ‘discourse’, illustrating the generational span and antithesis of a relatively prolific career spent between the museum and university during a period important in defining the goals of the discipline.

The “Literature of Art” – Kunstliteratur, Medieval and Renaissance sculpture, museum administration, Neo-Idealism, formalism, Naturalism in art, artistic insularity, Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Ernst Go...
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The “Literature of Art” – Kunstliteratur, Medieval and Renaissance sculpture, museum administration, Neo-Idealism, formalism, Naturalism in art, artistic insularity, Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Ernst Gombrich, Otto Kurz, Benedetto Croce

For the first time, the symposium on the History of Architectural History, organised by Henrik Karge (Dresden) and Sabine Frommel (Paris) at the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome, analysed architectural history as a European phenomenon. The participants – renowned experts from Italy, Germany, ...
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For the first time, the symposium on the History of Architectural History, organised by Henrik Karge (Dresden) and Sabine Frommel (Paris) at the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca in Rome, analysed architectural history as a European phenomenon. The participants – renowned experts from Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Denmark, Poland, Hungary and Greece – described the genesis and development of the historiography of architecture within the panorama of historical sciences, especially in relation to the history of art. Of particular importance is the role that architectural history played in the constitution of national identities in the course of nation building, and thus also national conflicts, in 19th and 20th century Europe. In various contributions, the historians of architecture were examined: art historians, architectural theorists and practical architects have each developed specific perspectives. In this way, the special feature of the Roman school of architecture was elaborated, which consisted in keeping alive the awareness of historical models in the training of architects, even under the reign of 20th century modernism and postmodernism. Finally, current aspects of digital techniques and global aspects in the analysis and visualisation of architecture were also dealt with.

This article is a review of the volume Rediscovering Objects from Islamic Lands in Enlightenment Europe, edited by Isabelle Dolezalek and Mattia Guidetti. The volume claims to shed new light on an underestimated chapter in the historiography of the arts of Islam, particularly in their relation to Eu...
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This article is a review of the volume Rediscovering Objects from Islamic Lands in Enlightenment Europe, edited by Isabelle Dolezalek and Mattia Guidetti. The volume claims to shed new light on an underestimated chapter in the historiography of the arts of Islam, particularly in their relation to Europe. The volume argues that advanced professionalization and scholarly network-building during the eighteenth century have led to important developments which were ground-breaking for the discipline of Islamic art history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The review follows the six object-led chapters of the book and concludes by placing its claim within a larger historiography of the arts of Islam.

Electrically assisted bicycles (e-bikes) can have an important role in enabling UK transport to achieve net zero, improve air quality, increase levels of physical activity and improve mental and physical health. This briefing note examines the current evidence on the environmental and health impacts...
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Electrically assisted bicycles (e-bikes) can have an important role in enabling UK transport to achieve net zero, improve air quality, increase levels of physical activity and improve mental and physical health. This briefing note examines the current evidence on the environmental and health impacts of e-cycling, highlighting why the promotion of e-cycling should be a key component to address UK health, climate and clean air challenges. The TRANSITION Clean Air Network is a UK-wide network, led by the University of Birmingham in collaboration with nine universities and over 20 cross-sector partners, aiming to optimise the air quality and health outcomes of transport decarbonisation; it is funded by UKRI via the UK Clean Air Strategic Priorities Fund, administered by NERC [NE/V002449/1].

Non-exhaust emissions (e.g., brake, tyre and road surface wear) remain largely unregulated in the UK. This briefing note considers what we do and don’t know about non-exhaust emissions, why they are important, how they may respond to future changes, and how we can reduce their impacts. The TRANSI...
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Non-exhaust emissions (e.g., brake, tyre and road surface wear) remain largely unregulated in the UK. This briefing note considers what we do and don’t know about non-exhaust emissions, why they are important, how they may respond to future changes, and how we can reduce their impacts. The TRANSITION Clean Air Network is a UK-wide network, led by the University of Birmingham in collaboration with nine universities and over 20 cross-sector partners, aiming to optimise the air quality and health outcomes of transport decarbonisation; it is funded by UKRI via the UK Clean Air Strategic Priorities Fund, administered by NERC [NE/V002449/1].

Low Emission Zones – also known as Clean Air Zones – aim to achieve compliance with legal air quality objectives by discouraging the use of highly polluting vehicles in urban areas. This briefing note examines current knowledge as to whether these initiatives work, gaps in our understanding and less...
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Low Emission Zones – also known as Clean Air Zones – aim to achieve compliance with legal air quality objectives by discouraging the use of highly polluting vehicles in urban areas. This briefing note examines current knowledge as to whether these initiatives work, gaps in our understanding and lessons for future place- based air quality solutions. The TRANSITION Clean Air Network is a UK-wide network, led by the University of Birmingham in collaboration with nine universities and over 20 cross-sector partners, aiming to optimise the air quality and health outcomes of transport decarbonisation; it is funded by UKRI via the UK Clean Air Strategic Priorities Fund, administered by NERC [NE/V002449/1].

The paper deals with two monographs of contemporary architects, published in Vienna in 1906-1918 by Ferdinand von Feldegg. The founder and long-time editor of the magazine Der Architekt was one of the central figures of the Central European architectural scene around 1900. As the main author of a bo...
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The paper deals with two monographs of contemporary architects, published in Vienna in 1906-1918 by Ferdinand von Feldegg. The founder and long-time editor of the magazine Der Architekt was one of the central figures of the Central European architectural scene around 1900. As the main author of a book about Theophil Hansen from 1893, he became the founder and for a long time the most important representative of the genre of architectural biography in Austria. However, the monographs on Ohmann and Bauer are not part of historical discourse, but arose in the process of formulating the principles of modern architecture and were supposed to prove the historical legitimacy of its more conformist faction. Feldegg presents Ohmann and Bauer as the creator of the synthesis of historicism and modernity as the postulated architecture of the future. At the same time, they appear in the monographs as an antitype of Otto Wagner, whom Feldegg criticized for extreme anti-artistic rationalism. The paper shows the narrative strategies of Feldegg’s monographs and reconstructs the historical and cultural context of both works.

In this first biography of Meyer Schapiro, C. Oliver O’Donnell presents an account of Schapiro as theorist, to connect him more thoroughly to intellectual trends of the twentieth century. O’Donnell makes his case through a series of well-researched “debates” in which Schapiro engaged, including Mart...
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In this first biography of Meyer Schapiro, C. Oliver O’Donnell presents an account of Schapiro as theorist, to connect him more thoroughly to intellectual trends of the twentieth century. O’Donnell makes his case through a series of well-researched “debates” in which Schapiro engaged, including Martin Heidegger and Sigmund Freud. This review considers the interpretation of these encounters and the profile of Schapiro that we are left with.

Andy Warhol’s first language was Rusyn, an East Slavic language related to, but distinct from, Russian and Ukrainian. His mother, Julia Warhola, spoke Rusyn with Andy all her life. Warhol taped her Rusyn-language discourse and oral narratives in three unreleased Factory Diary videos, which provide i...
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Andy Warhol’s first language was Rusyn, an East Slavic language related to, but distinct from, Russian and Ukrainian. His mother, Julia Warhola, spoke Rusyn with Andy all her life. Warhol taped her Rusyn-language discourse and oral narratives in three unreleased Factory Diary videos, which provide insight into Julia’s personality, Warhol’s biography, and the mother-son relationship. Warhol’s film from 1966, The George Hamilton Story, popularly known as ‘Mrs. Warhol’, featured his mother speaking heavily accented English, which Warhol exploited for cinematic comedy. Viewers familiar with Julia’s speech style and the Carpatho-Rusyn context discern a serious effort at communication on her part, which is thwarted by Warhol’s defamiliarization, resulting in what Warhol called creative ‘transmutation’.

In much of the recent literature covering the interaction between religion and aesthetic modernity, modern ‘sacred’ architecture has been understood as an initiative to safeguard an autonomous, separate notion of ‘sacred space’ against the reifying effects of a technocratic modernity. Within this hi...
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In much of the recent literature covering the interaction between religion and aesthetic modernity, modern ‘sacred’ architecture has been understood as an initiative to safeguard an autonomous, separate notion of ‘sacred space’ against the reifying effects of a technocratic modernity. Within this historiographic lens, modern ‘sacred’ architecture is placed in opposition to what the historian of religion Mircea Eliade refers to as the ‘junk space’ of modern profane architecture. However, when examining the conceptual interactions between the Benedictine monks of Collegeville in Minnesota and the Bauhaus-trained architect Marcel Breuer during the course of their collaborative project for an Abbey Church in their religious community (1953 – 1961), a more nuanced picture of the interaction between ‘functionalist’ (modern) and ‘symbolist’ (pre-modern) ideas emerges. Drawing on a key series of documents Breuer collated in a binder throughout the course of the project, this article unpacks the way in which key terms such as ‘functionalism’ and ‘symbolism’ were negotiated across this cultural divide. The first part of the article examines the extent to which Breuer’s architectural design at St John’s could be considered ‘symbolic’. The second part interrogates the reasons behind the rejection of a design for the main window by fellow Bauhäusler, Josef Albers. The article concludes with a coda on how the arguments mobilised throughout the collaboration questions key tenets of much of the historiography which has informed discourses on modern ‘sacred’ architecture.

This article takes as its starting point The Pictorial Bible, considering it as an historiographical vehicle for both biblical imagery and print history in the nineteenth century. The publication is significant alone as a compendium of visual forms, functioning for viewers even today as a vast colle...
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This article takes as its starting point The Pictorial Bible, considering it as an historiographical vehicle for both biblical imagery and print history in the nineteenth century. The publication is significant alone as a compendium of visual forms, functioning for viewers even today as a vast collection of Judeo-Christian pictorial expression in the West stretching back to antiquity. This will become an underlying characteristic of much nineteenth-century scriptural illustration: the attempt to underscore the heterogeneity of the Bible while preserving its status as discursively unified object. What distinguishes this context from earlier moments in the history of the Bible and of print culture are an increased emphasis on historical authenticity and objectivity, and the availability of a diverse set of print processes, each with its own layers of perceived value.

Based on a newly discovered inventory, this article examines the early years of Francesco Leopoldo Cicognara’s book collection. Begun in 1798 as a suitable activity for a diplomat and as a cover for subversive contacts in Masonic circles, the collecting activity is described during the turbulent yea...
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Based on a newly discovered inventory, this article examines the early years of Francesco Leopoldo Cicognara’s book collection. Begun in 1798 as a suitable activity for a diplomat and as a cover for subversive contacts in Masonic circles, the collecting activity is described during the turbulent years between 1798 and 1804. Cicognara’s attitude and interests seem to have changed during these years, so that the focus shifted from purely bibliophilic interests to the content of the books themselves, turning the collection into a scholarly tool for research in art history

This article focuses on the visual material of illustrated volumes of art and architectural histories produced and published by Max Dvořák and his contemporaries. On the one hand, such images were considered necessary instruments to disseminate art-historical knowledge. As ‘visual archives’, they se...
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This article focuses on the visual material of illustrated volumes of art and architectural histories produced and published by Max Dvořák and his contemporaries. On the one hand, such images were considered necessary instruments to disseminate art-historical knowledge. As ‘visual archives’, they served as collections of scholarly working objects. On the other hand, the images moreover became visual representatives of heritage, constructing national identities in Central Europe and having a lasting influence on art historical discourses. This article considers how audience and publishing requirements, technical possibilities of the visualisation and image reproduction processes and lastly ideologies shaped the images of (national) art of the time.

The year of 2021 was remembered as the centenary of the death of Max Dvořák, one of the leading figures of the Vienna School of Art History. The branch of Austrian monument protection represented a lesser-known field of his professional career. This extended report gives an overview of the internati...
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The year of 2021 was remembered as the centenary of the death of Max Dvořák, one of the leading figures of the Vienna School of Art History. The branch of Austrian monument protection represented a lesser-known field of his professional career. This extended report gives an overview of the international online symposium organized by the Monuments Board of the Slovak Republic.

Henry Moore’s fascination with early Italian art manifests itself not only in his work but also in interviews, letters and other texts. His comments on Giotto, Masaccio and Giovanni Pisano are of special interest. They testify to Moore’s admiration for these artists and for qualities in their work t...
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Henry Moore’s fascination with early Italian art manifests itself not only in his work but also in interviews, letters and other texts. His comments on Giotto, Masaccio and Giovanni Pisano are of special interest. They testify to Moore’s admiration for these artists and for qualities in their work that fuelled his own modernist ambitions. They also bear witness to art-historical debates about early Italian art at a moment when it was undergoing a particularly formalist construction. In this article, Moore’s ideas will be situated against the background of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century scholarship on early Italian art. The article will explore to what extent Moore’s observations are comparable to that of contemporary art historians. It will also identify moments where Moore’s ideas offer unique and original perspectives on the work of Giotto, Giovanni Pisano and Masaccio that were not shared by his contemporaries.

In the 1930s Meyer Schapiro introduced the modern painter Fernand Léger to a tenth-century Beatus manuscript (M.644) in the collection of the Morgan Library. This encounter inspired formal changes in Léger’s work during the 1940s, as evidenced by his series of paintings titled Divers and Acrobats. W...
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In the 1930s Meyer Schapiro introduced the modern painter Fernand Léger to a tenth-century Beatus manuscript (M.644) in the collection of the Morgan Library. This encounter inspired formal changes in Léger’s work during the 1940s, as evidenced by his series of paintings titled Divers and Acrobats. While this anecdote has been regularly related in the scholarship on both the Morgan Beatus and Léger’s work, it has never been seriously analyzed. This article looks at this episode in depth and argues that, by treating the mutual influence between the manuscript and Léger’s work as an essential part of the life of each of these artworks, we reassert the importance of art historians in mediating and influencing the course of contemporary art in their own time.

The article revolves around the first Italian edition of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. By reconstructing the history of the reception of Warhol in Italy since the 1960s, I position the book within the cultural moment at the turn of the 1980s. I look at the strategies behind the publication and comp...
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The article revolves around the first Italian edition of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. By reconstructing the history of the reception of Warhol in Italy since the 1960s, I position the book within the cultural moment at the turn of the 1980s. I look at the strategies behind the publication and compare it with the original English edition to assess both the editorial presentation and the quality of the translation. Focusing on the similarities as well as the diverging aspects, I argue that the book reinforced the perception of Warhol in Italy as an influential, yet controversial, figure.

France Stele, Vojeslav Mole and Izidor Cankar, who are considered the founders of Slovenian art history as a modern scientific discipline, were all students of Max Dvořak. Traces of the relationship between Dvořak and his three Slovenian students and of his influence over them can be found in differ...
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France Stele, Vojeslav Mole and Izidor Cankar, who are considered the founders of Slovenian art history as a modern scientific discipline, were all students of Max Dvořak. Traces of the relationship between Dvořak and his three Slovenian students and of his influence over them can be found in different types of sources. I first focus on the preserved personal and intimate documents, their mutual correspondence and on their autobiographical and biographical texts in which we can learn a great deal about Dvořak as a person and teacher. Then I turn to the “historiographical” texts among which Stele’s texts hold a special place; in them he outlined the process of forming the “Ljubljana School of Art History” and defined the origins of its conceptual and methodological framework with one of its key foundations being the ideas of Dvořak.

This paper was originally published on the ninetieth anniversary of Max Dvořák’s death, in ARS – Journal of the Institute of Art History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (2011). It is based primarily on the correspondence between Dvořák and Wilhelm von Bode, the so-called Bismarck of the Berlin mus...
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This paper was originally published on the ninetieth anniversary of Max Dvořák’s death, in ARS – Journal of the Institute of Art History of the Slovak Academy of Sciences (2011). It is based primarily on the correspondence between Dvořák and Wilhelm von Bode, the so-called Bismarck of the Berlin museums. In conjunction with various other sources, this correspondence reveals that Dvořák – who is usually hailed as the founding father of Czech art history – was heavily involved with Bode’s Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft (est. 1908), a very German society of art historians, and that he even drafted the programme of its grand series of art historical publications, Die Denkmäler der Deutschen Kunst (The Monuments of German Art), a monumental undertaking that was projected to stretch to some four hundred volumes.

In histories of modern colour, simultaneous contrast has become something of an idée fixe. From Paul Signac’s 1899 treatise, D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionisme, to Laura Anne Kalba’s celebrated monograph, Color in the Age of Impressionism (2017), all paths seem to lead back to Eugène Chevreul ...
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In histories of modern colour, simultaneous contrast has become something of an idée fixe. From Paul Signac’s 1899 treatise, D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-impressionisme, to Laura Anne Kalba’s celebrated monograph, Color in the Age of Impressionism (2017), all paths seem to lead back to Eugène Chevreul and to the maximization of chromatic intensity. This essay develops an alternative history of modern colour, which simultaneous contrast has thus far outshined—that of iridescence. The Impressionist (and Neo-Impressionist) desire to represent iridescent colours is found to relate to a contrasting—and more paradigmatically Impressionist—aesthetic rationale for the same formal procedures of divided touches, which are typically associated with simultaneous contrast. Through an examination of iridescent colours in cognate fields of glassware, fashion, and photography, alongside close analyses of a few signal paintings by Berthe Morisot, it is argued that by the end of the 1870s, one of the major aesthetic antinomies that would go on to determine later critical debates surrounding avant-gardist and Modernist approaches to colour had already emerged: whether colour’s aesthetic value derives from its meaningfulness within a pictorial representation or from its physiological effects on the viewer’s experience.

In the 1930s, a surging interest in early American vernacular arts, collectively referred to as folk art, converged with major photographic documentation projects of the Great Depression. These twin impulses—to collect the past and record the present—flourished concurrently during this critical peri...
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In the 1930s, a surging interest in early American vernacular arts, collectively referred to as folk art, converged with major photographic documentation projects of the Great Depression. These twin impulses—to collect the past and record the present—flourished concurrently during this critical period in American history. As artists, curators, collectors, and even government administrators sought to define American visual identities that were distinct from Europe, they found symbols of an American culture that was egalitarian, unpretentious, and self-made. The exhibition Photography and Folk Art: Looking for America in the 1930s (The Art Institute of Chicago, 2019) brought documentary photographs and folk art objects together to explore the aesthetic and conceptual connections between two fields—linked by overlapping networks of cultural agents—that had long been studied separately in disciplinary silos. This article details the exhibition’s collaborative research and discovery process, innovative display and interpretive strategies, and ultimately present-day relevance for twenty-first century audiences.

With the creation of the Dip. A. D., formal teaching of art history became mandated in the Uk’s art schools. In a talk to university heads of art history, who would be required to train the required art historians, Gombrich addressed the problem of what they should teach. Far from advocating the com...
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With the creation of the Dip. A. D., formal teaching of art history became mandated in the Uk’s art schools. In a talk to university heads of art history, who would be required to train the required art historians, Gombrich addressed the problem of what they should teach. Far from advocating the common university curriculum, he recommended drawing upon local traditions of art and craft practices. While suggesting that students should have a basic awareness of art history’s historical map, if they should become needed to teach the subject, ‘I should try to investigate with them what it was like to be an artist in the past, what tasks he had to perform and in what concrete contexts the works of art took shape which we still admire.’

This paper focuses on the role German translations played in Warhol’s early and unusually wide critical reception in West Germany. Here he had some of his earliest exhibitions and collectors, here his art and films found an exceptionally appreciative audience. His art-historical reception was govern...
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This paper focuses on the role German translations played in Warhol’s early and unusually wide critical reception in West Germany. Here he had some of his earliest exhibitions and collectors, here his art and films found an exceptionally appreciative audience. His art-historical reception was governed, from the beginning, by the teachings of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, which divided his West German audience into two camps: one that believed his art was Marxist, the other that it was anti-Marxist. This unique reception was key to the chronology and varying quality of the German editions of Warhol’s books.

The early years of Leopoldo Cicognara’s book collection’, the first of two articles by Barbara Steindl that follow, was first presented at the 2019 College Art Association Annual Conference. This article forms a prequel to the second, ‘Collecting art books: the library of Leopoldo Cicognara and his ...
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The early years of Leopoldo Cicognara’s book collection’, the first of two articles by Barbara Steindl that follow, was first presented at the 2019 College Art Association Annual Conference. This article forms a prequel to the second, ‘Collecting art books: the library of Leopoldo Cicognara and his bibliographic system’, which first published in 2014 in Italian. Translation of this article into English forms part of a larger project to expand the reach of the Digital Cicognara Library. Funds for this project have been provided by a grant from the Kress Foundation’s History of Art Grants Program. Steindl’s studies of the Cicognara Library are indispensable to a solid understanding of the history, scope, and organization of the Cicognara library – a historic collection that survives intact as the Fondo Cicognara in the Vatican Apostolic Library.

Sarah Schaefer’s study of nineteenth-century Bibles is the first of two papers from a session held at the 2021 College Art Association Annual Conference that will appear in this journal. Entitled ‘The Print in the Codex’ and sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America, the session considered...
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Sarah Schaefer’s study of nineteenth-century Bibles is the first of two papers from a session held at the 2021 College Art Association Annual Conference that will appear in this journal. Entitled ‘The Print in the Codex’ and sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America, the session considered books transformed through the incorporation of independently printed images. In tracing the transformation of extra-illustration into standardized illustration, Schaefer provides significant insights for both book and print history. In the next issue of this journal, a paper by Sylvia Massa will consider codices created to house single-sheet prints. The integration of these codices into public collections has frequently meant removing the prints from the bindings altogether and, thereby, removing their historical context. Focusing on developments at the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, her paper sheds light on an overlooked aspect of book and print history of importance to both curators and print historians.

Based on a newly discovered inventory, the article examines the early years of Francesco Leopoldo Cicognara’s book collection. Begun in 1798 as a suitable activity for a diplomat and as a cover for subversive contacts in Masonic circles, the collecting activity is described during the turbulent year...
[ more ]

Based on a newly discovered inventory, the article examines the early years of Francesco Leopoldo Cicognara’s book collection. Begun in 1798 as a suitable activity for a diplomat and as a cover for subversive contacts in Masonic circles, the collecting activity is described during the turbulent years between 1798 and 1804. Cicognara’s attitude and interests seem to have changed during these years, so that the focus shifted from purely bibliophilic interests to the content of the books themselves, turning the collection into a scholarly tool for research in art history

Piotr Piotrowski’s concept of horizontal art history was first formulated in his article ‘On the spatial turn, or horizontal art history’, published in Umění in 2008. Devised for East Central Europe, it derived its impetus from critical geography, which offered him tools for negotiating both the pit...
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Piotr Piotrowski’s concept of horizontal art history was first formulated in his article ‘On the spatial turn, or horizontal art history’, published in Umění in 2008. Devised for East Central Europe, it derived its impetus from critical geography, which offered him tools for negotiating both the pitfalls of western art history marginalising the peripheries, as well as the conceptual framework provided by postcolonial theory. The precepts of the horizontal art history, widely discussed and used both within and outside the region, have been recently re-examined by Matthew Rampley who submitted to Umění a provocative article, assessing its aims and impact, as well proposing a new set of insights on methods and practices of studies on modern art of the region. This text is a review of the debate which, stimulated in turn by Rampley’s contribution, was published in the same issue of Umění in 2021. Guest edited by Steven Mansbach, the issue includes texts by Beáta Hock, Marie Rakušanová, Milena Bartlova, Magdalena Radomska, Jeremy Howard, Raino Isto, Claire Farago, Timothy O. Benson and Éva Forgács.

The text traces the discovery and the history of two important banquet scenes from the Roman catacombs (from the Catacombs of Callixtus and from the Catacombs of Priscilla). It focuses on the interpretations given to the scene from the 19th century onwards and on its fortune in Europe: reproductions...
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The text traces the discovery and the history of two important banquet scenes from the Roman catacombs (from the Catacombs of Callixtus and from the Catacombs of Priscilla). It focuses on the interpretations given to the scene from the 19th century onwards and on its fortune in Europe: reproductions of the scenes found in various churches and chapels up to the middle of the 20th century are here presented. This overview will be useful to understand how the study and reproduction of a single iconography can contribute to a general reconstruction of the development of the discipline of early Christian art history.

This paper discusses the challenges inherent in translating Andy Warhol’s art for television, focusing on the treatment of Pink Race Riot [Red Race Riot] (1963)and The American Indian (Russell Means) (1976 –1977) for the 2022 BBC2 documentary Andy Warhol’s America. The role of the director and produ...
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This paper discusses the challenges inherent in translating Andy Warhol’s art for television, focusing on the treatment of Pink Race Riot [Red Race Riot] (1963)and The American Indian (Russell Means) (1976 –1977) for the 2022 BBC2 documentary Andy Warhol’s America. The role of the director and producer, the interviewees and archival selection are examined in terms of translation from the scripts and editing to the screen. The medium specificity of television is explored, drawing upon interviews with the programme’s creators. What happens in the compression of historical intricacies, political imperatives and art historical debates for the purpose of translation into moving image sequences? What becomes lost, gained, compromised, distorted, fragmented or transposed in the process?

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) is one of the most famous and influential artists of the twentieth century, and a vast global literature about Warhol and his work exists. Yet almost nothing has been written about the role of translations of his words (understood as collaborative creations), and those of his...
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Andy Warhol (1928–1987) is one of the most famous and influential artists of the twentieth century, and a vast global literature about Warhol and his work exists. Yet almost nothing has been written about the role of translations of his words (understood as collaborative creations), and those of his critics, in his international reputation. ‘Translating Warhol’ aims to fill this gap, developing the topic in multiple directions and in the context of the reception of Warhol’s work in various countries. The contemporary artist Ai Weiwei has often said that the first book he read in English was The Philosophy of Andy Warhol because it was easy for a non-English speaker to understand. A closer look—the kind afforded by the intimacy of translation—offers a different picture, however. ‘Translating Warhol’ explores the questions of interpretation raised by the challenges of translating the double meanings, ambiguities, paradoxes, now-obscure cultural references, and slang populating Warhol’s publications. Linguistic as well as other forms of translation are considered. The articles comprising ‘Translating Warhol’ also reveal how, for example, Warhol’s queer identity has been either concealed or emphasized through the process of translation, or how translation has affected the presentation of his political and social positions and attitudes. Translation extends Warhol’s collaborative approach to crafting language, and like it, transmutes and yet also promotes the human understanding we all seek.

Translating time- and context-bound subjects cross-culturally requires creative negotiations that often exceed the usual challenges a translator faces. Translating Andy Warhol’s writings, ever so resistant to translation for multiple reasons explored here, presents layers of complications that migh...
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Translating time- and context-bound subjects cross-culturally requires creative negotiations that often exceed the usual challenges a translator faces. Translating Andy Warhol’s writings, ever so resistant to translation for multiple reasons explored here, presents layers of complications that might make one question if the effort is even worth it. Drawing upon the insights of veteran translator-scholar A.K. Ramanujan and Bhupen Khakkar, India’s first Pop artist, this article speculates on how one may approach a translation of Warhol’s writings into Indian languages other than English and why such an enterprise has yet to be undertaken even if it were to be desirable and possible.

To translate is like playing a violin: more or less off-key, but always off-key. To examine the translations of Warhol—of his words and film images—is to see in evidence an effort, conscious or otherwise, to water down the power of these words and images, to bring them into a normativity that they e...
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To translate is like playing a violin: more or less off-key, but always off-key. To examine the translations of Warhol—of his words and film images—is to see in evidence an effort, conscious or otherwise, to water down the power of these words and images, to bring them into a normativity that they exceed. It is to follow the moment in which a culture digests, for better and worse, what nourishes its body.

The essay explores aspects of translation in connection to Andy Warhol’s first major exhibition in Europe, at the 1968 Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, viewed as a unit of verbal as well as visual texts. The catalogue performed translation as such, of phrases attributed to Warhol. While translat...
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The essay explores aspects of translation in connection to Andy Warhol’s first major exhibition in Europe, at the 1968 Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, viewed as a unit of verbal as well as visual texts. The catalogue performed translation as such, of phrases attributed to Warhol. While translation tends to be understood as a functional mode of transport of original meaning to any position, this study, following the theories of Michel Espagne, focuses on how the show was ‘coded’ into the new space, something which is here contextualised through an exhibition project in Sweden occurring the previous year, Multikonst. The concept of repetition is found as the core message of this translation. It has been argued that the Warhol show had a general negative response locally, but on the contrary, it appears to have resonated well both in intellectual circles and in the Swedish art world in general. In addition, Warhol’s exploration of ‘queer’ identity in his films was discussed openly in Sweden.

This historiographical piece has two main objectives. On the one hand, it sets out to offer the first sustained discussion of the study of – and the tendency to ignore, underestimate, and criticise – Italian neo-medieval architecture. On the other, by focusing on the Italian case, it reflects on the...
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This historiographical piece has two main objectives. On the one hand, it sets out to offer the first sustained discussion of the study of – and the tendency to ignore, underestimate, and criticise – Italian neo-medieval architecture. On the other, by focusing on the Italian case, it reflects on the interplay of architectural history and medievalism studies, making the special claim that, if medievalism and medievalism studies can be defined as the responses to the Middle Ages and the study of those responses, respectively, then ‘neo-medievalism’ and ‘neo-medievalism studies’ shall describe the architectural and artistic manifestations of medievalism and their study. Using the analogy of the ‘Ghost of the Present’, the ‘Ghost of the Future’, and the two ‘Ghosts of the Past’, the article opens by discussing the reasons for the neglect and marginalisation of, and bias towards, Italian neo-medieval architecture. After reconstructing a critical history of the key episodes in scholarship that has touched upon Italian neo-medieval architecture, it proposes an analysis of the notion of – and an apologia for the study of – neo-medievalism beyond the boundaries of space, style, and time.

Transport hubs (for example railway and bus stations) may be important air pollution hotspots contributing significantly to overall pollutant exposure. This briefing note, produced by the TRANSITION Clean Air Network, examines the current evidence and regulatory landscape, and explores potential opp...
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Transport hubs (for example railway and bus stations) may be important air pollution hotspots contributing significantly to overall pollutant exposure. This briefing note, produced by the TRANSITION Clean Air Network, examines the current evidence and regulatory landscape, and explores potential opportunities to reduce exposure in these environments. The TRANSITION Clean Air Network is a UK-wide network, led by the University of Birmingham in collaboration with nine universities and over 20 cross-sector partners, aiming to optimise the air quality and health outcomes of transport decarbonisation; it is funded by UKRI via the UK Clean Air Strategic Priorities Fund, administered by NERC [NE/V002449/1].

In the early 20th century, heritage conservation in Central Europe extended the focus of its interest to old towns seen as a whole. Around the same time, the first buildings in the Modernist style began to be introduced into these historical urban settings, and so the question of their ‘contextualit...
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In the early 20th century, heritage conservation in Central Europe extended the focus of its interest to old towns seen as a whole. Around the same time, the first buildings in the Modernist style began to be introduced into these historical urban settings, and so the question of their ‘contextuality’ arose for the first time. Several texts written by Max Dvořák reacted to both these processes. Dvořák was an opponent of Historicism, and so he did not object to the introduction of Modernism into old towns, but only on condition that a ‘higher architectural unity’ or ‘internal unity’ of old and new was created. Otto Wagner’s designs for the Karlsplatz in Vienna did not meet with Dvořák’s approval because they broke away too radically from the old architectural culture and did not work towards a ‘higher unity’. Dvořák cooperated with the Club for Old Prague on the conservation of heritage sites in Prague. However, the Club had a greater predilection for Modernism than he did. The problem with the terms used by Dvořák lies in their aesthetic nature. This means that they are too open to subjective interpretations.

In his ‘Treatise on the Capacity for Sensitivity to the Beautiful in Art …’ Winckelmann compares the feeling of the beautiful in art with liquid plaster poured over the head of the Apollo. While this reference to plaster as a material is unusual, his view of casts as propagators of good taste was wi...
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In his ‘Treatise on the Capacity for Sensitivity to the Beautiful in Art …’ Winckelmann compares the feeling of the beautiful in art with liquid plaster poured over the head of the Apollo. While this reference to plaster as a material is unusual, his view of casts as propagators of good taste was widely shared. By looking at reactions to casts and cast collections by authors such as Goethe, Christian Gottlob Heyne, John Flaxman and others, this article analyses the complex relationship of notions of good taste on the one side and the perception of plaster casts on the other.

This paper explores the origins and development of the public dialogue between Bernard Smith (1916-2011) and Robert Hughes (1938-2012). Smith and Hughes were giants of Australian art history of the twentieth century. Both, however, followed very different career paths: Smith’s readership was primari...
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This paper explores the origins and development of the public dialogue between Bernard Smith (1916-2011) and Robert Hughes (1938-2012). Smith and Hughes were giants of Australian art history of the twentieth century. Both, however, followed very different career paths: Smith’s readership was primarily academic and local, while Hughes’s audience was popular and international. And yet, despite their differences, a considerable amount of exchange existed between the two. After first locking horns in 1961, Smith and Hughes engaged in public debate intermittently for more than four decades. This dialogue, which transpired in the pages of published sources, especially their reviews and books, was characterised by acrimony and bitterness, as well as moments of conciliation and mutual respect. When contesting issues of common interest, both writers played to their natural strengths. Smith was dominant in the field of art history, while Hughes had the upper hand in art criticism. Each, however, encroached upon the other’s area of expertise: Smith wrote art criticism and Hughes wrote art history. Conflict was greatest in areas where their respective spheres of authority overlapped. Although tensions receded after 1964, when Hughes left Australia, they did not end. Key topics of debate included abstract art and modernism; provincialism and internationalism; and most importantly the vexed issue of Australian cultural isolation, which was defined in terms of Australian art and its relationship to European art history (or, as Smith termed it, ‘Renaissance tradition’).

Johann Joachim Winckelmann collected coins and cited them extensively in his History of Ancient Art and other works. An analysis of his use of them shows that, although he had a good knowledge of them and the relevant literature, he regarded them as being of less importance than the other arts. Nev...
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Johann Joachim Winckelmann collected coins and cited them extensively in his History of Ancient Art and other works. An analysis of his use of them shows that, although he had a good knowledge of them and the relevant literature, he regarded them as being of less importance than the other arts. Nevertheless, his interest inaugurated a new art historical approach to the study of ancient coinage, which was adopted or modified by later important numismatists, such as Joseph Eckhel in Vienna in the eighteenth century and Barclay Head in London in the nineteenth century. Consequently, his views were very influential on the subject, having an impact for some two hundred years, until the middle of the twentieth century. Keywords: Joseph Eckhel, Barclay Head, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, numismatics

This essay deals with two much misunderstood aspects of Winckelmann’s work, his notion of the relations between art and climate and the fierce disputes his environmental model of culture engendered in Britain. Revisiting present-day suspicions towards Winckelmann’s climate language as a reductive an...
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This essay deals with two much misunderstood aspects of Winckelmann’s work, his notion of the relations between art and climate and the fierce disputes his environmental model of culture engendered in Britain. Revisiting present-day suspicions towards Winckelmann’s climate language as a reductive and determinist ‘curiosity’, this essay aims to restore its historical significance as an interactive way of exploring the interconnectedness between the development of art and its changing material contexts, and to reveal its special place in the birth of art history as a discipline. The study of the British reception of Winckelmann’s climate theory remains a rich resource in the critical understanding and historiographical evaluation of his contribution in art history. The controversies it generated produced a mixed and fragmented picture. This essay retrieves the many social, professional, and national interests embedded in these climate-related controversies in art and suggests that such competing motivations marked indelibly understandings of Winckelmann’s art historical model as well as his standing in Britain.

Southampton City Art Gallery is a much admired place of energy and activity. This article investigates the ambitious educational provision developed by Southampton’s art gallery for three decades from the appointment of its first Keeper of Education in 1974. It aims to record a significant moment in...
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Southampton City Art Gallery is a much admired place of energy and activity. This article investigates the ambitious educational provision developed by Southampton’s art gallery for three decades from the appointment of its first Keeper of Education in 1974. It aims to record a significant moment in the history of UK museum education and to consider approaches that may be useful for museums today as they seek to re-connect audiences with art after a testing period of non-physical access due to the global pandemic. It shares new research undertaken for the exhibition, Creating a National Collection: The Partnership between Southampton City Art Gallery and The National Gallery (Southampton, 28 May-5 September 2021), the major outcome of an Art Fund Curatorial Traineeship project between the two institutions (2019–21).

This text discusses the relations between temporality and art in some elucidative texts written by Max Dvořák (1874–1921) in the last years of his short life. Dvořák did not hesitate to see medieval (or older) art as art but he explicitly talked about a change in the understanding of art, or a new c...
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This text discusses the relations between temporality and art in some elucidative texts written by Max Dvořák (1874–1921) in the last years of his short life. Dvořák did not hesitate to see medieval (or older) art as art but he explicitly talked about a change in the understanding of art, or a new concept of art. He described the radical multi-level changes of this concept as ‘an imaginative revolution’, which started a departure from ‘a period of decadence’. However, a closer look at the meanings of ‘revolution’ in several early twentieth century thinkers’ texts and actions (for example these by Lenin, Trotsky and Freud) reveals substantial temporal differences in the way it was understood.

Discussing the relationship of Max Dvořák and Johannes Wilde on the previous study (János (Johannes) Wilde and Max Dvorák or, can we speak about the Budapest School of art history), I proposed – indirectly – the provocative thesis that “there is no Dvořák without Wilde”. What justifies this polari...
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Discussing the relationship of Max Dvořák and Johannes Wilde on the previous study (János (Johannes) Wilde and Max Dvorák or, can we speak about the Budapest School of art history), I proposed – indirectly – the provocative thesis that “there is no Dvořák without Wilde”. What justifies this polarized statement is the set of documents of source value found a few years ago in Wilde’s estate in archives of Budapest and London. Johannes Wilde cherished a profound relationship with his siblings, Ferenc and Margit, who did not have families of their own but lived with their mother Munisi until her death. They are the addressees of the letters of invaluable importance which Wilde wrote from Vienna and later from various stations of his forced exile. Wilde spent longer periods in Vienna twice: first, between 1915 and 1917, he was the student of the Vienna University department of art history led by Max Dvořák, and then, after the fall of the short-lived communist interlude, the Hungarian Republic of Councils, he returned to the Viennese capital as Dvořák’s protégé, colleague and friend. The few years spent side by side deepened their professional and personal relationship so much that when fate put an end to the life of the Czech-born professor still at an early age, Wilde was at the side of his death-bed and informed posterity of the details of this sorrowful event through his letters. In the this paper I am concentrating on the period of 1915–1917, starting with the moment when young Wilde left Budapest and the team of the drawings-and-prints department in the Museum of Fine Arts who knew Dvořák personally – Simon Meller, Frigyes Antal, Edith Hoffmann – upon his director Elek Petrovics’s encouragement who sent him directly to Dvořák to study. Lengthy passages are to be cited from the letters, since these weekly reports offer a direct insight into the life and daily routine of the Vienna School, particularly of the so-called Dvořák seminar and into Dvořák’s teaching methods.

Falser’s voluminous, richly illustrated and meticulously researched book deals with the colonial and postcolonial history of the twelfth century Khmer monument, Angkor Wat. Covering the 150 years (1860 to 2010) history of the temple, spanning Europe and Asia, it sets out to show how the monument an...
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Falser’s voluminous, richly illustrated and meticulously researched book deals with the colonial and postcolonial history of the twelfth century Khmer monument, Angkor Wat. Covering the 150 years (1860 to 2010) history of the temple, spanning Europe and Asia, it sets out to show how the monument and its reputation were made, unmade and re-made in Europe as well as in Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as culture, science and politics became entwined. In Falser’s words, ‘This book project investigates the temple’s material traces and architectural forms as well as the literary and visual representations of the structure, with a view to analysing global processes of transfer and translation as well as the recent proliferation of hybrid forms of art, architecture and cultural heritage.’

Widely acknowledged as the creator of the first coherent model of art historical practice and theory in Poland, Marian Sokolowski played an essential role in shaping the identity of the discipline. This article explores Sokolowski’s connections to the Vienna School and the impact of his choice of me...
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Widely acknowledged as the creator of the first coherent model of art historical practice and theory in Poland, Marian Sokolowski played an essential role in shaping the identity of the discipline. This article explores Sokolowski’s connections to the Vienna School and the impact of his choice of methodological identity on the development of the ‘Cracow School’. In a curriculum vitae submitted in 1876 to the Jagiellonian University, Sokołowski, soon to be appointed as the first chair of art history in Poland, stated that he had studied ‘art history in Vienna under the supervision of Rudolf Eitelberger and Moritz Thausing’. While unsupported by the archival sources, this alleged mentorship has great symbolic significance. The highly institutionalised character of the ‘Cracow School’, as analysed by Stefan Muthesius, ensured that the founder’s choice of methodological affiliation would remain crucial for the identity of this research environment. The longue durée of relations with Vienna, present sometimes only in the sphere of myth (initiated by Sokołowski), would prove vital in determining the normative characteristics of the self-proclaimed ‘school’.

A brief biography and survey of the writings of Julius Lange, an art historian and brother of Carl Lange, the psychologist, who was best known in connection with the James-Lange theory of emotion. Aside from his lecture about Michelangelo’s idiosyncratic relation to his marble blocks, written after...
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A brief biography and survey of the writings of Julius Lange, an art historian and brother of Carl Lange, the psychologist, who was best known in connection with the James-Lange theory of emotion. Aside from his lecture about Michelangelo’s idiosyncratic relation to his marble blocks, written after the Michelangelo celebrations of 1875, we present the English-speaking audience with a review of the publications of Greek grave stelae and three lectures tracing the history of human gestures as they appear and then disappear within the history of art. These are the hand laid on the chest, the heavenward gaze, and the unusual straddling stance. The latter was then further expanded by Johan Jakob Tikkanen in his immortal, unforgotten ‘Studien über den Ausdruck in der Kunst’.

The impact of Max Dvořák is habitually considered to consist of reading his texts. I would like to argue that the key aspect is rather an interpretation and representation and that their mode depends on specific conditions of time and place. A recapitulation of renewed interest in Dvořák in Czech ar...
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The impact of Max Dvořák is habitually considered to consist of reading his texts. I would like to argue that the key aspect is rather an interpretation and representation and that their mode depends on specific conditions of time and place. A recapitulation of renewed interest in Dvořák in Czech art historiography during the 1960s recognizes the strategies that were used to adapt his “idealistic” methodology for the use of the period Marxist-Leninist scholarship. It was only due to success of this re-interpretation campaign that Dvořák was able to fill the position of the “father of Czech art history”.

This paper takes a comparative approach to the later work of Max Dvořák (Czechia 1874–1921) and the early writings of Rudolf Carnap (Germany 1891–USA 1970). The texts will be viewed in their context, with a particular eye to the historical conditions that shaped the problems tackled by both thinkers...
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This paper takes a comparative approach to the later work of Max Dvořák (Czechia 1874–1921) and the early writings of Rudolf Carnap (Germany 1891–USA 1970). The texts will be viewed in their context, with a particular eye to the historical conditions that shaped the problems tackled by both thinkers. My starting point is the dispute around the concepts of Weltanschauung (world-view) and wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung (scientific world-conception) that took place in the 1920s. On the basis of this dispute, it would be easy to conclude that Dvořák’s Geistesgeschichte (often translated as “history of ideas” or “intellectual history”) is the direct opposite of Carnap’s Wissenschaftstheorie (theory of science). However, as this study will prove, such a view is inadequate. The first section concerns the intellectual starting situation of the two thinkers under discussion. The situation in which Dvořák and Carnap operated was shaped by currents rooted in the Enlightenment and in Romanticism. The second section will address what is usually called the nineteenth-century German Bildungstradition (roughly, “educational tradition”; see below), which is relevant to both Dvořák and Carnap, approaching it as a variant of Enlightenment culture. The third section will describe those aspects of the philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey—whose own work was rooted in this specifically German tradition—which was a common source of inspiration for both thinkers, and forms a connection between their respective bodies of work. Building on this, the fourth section will look in detail at Dilthey’s reception in Dvořák and Carnap. Finally, I will demonstrate that Carnap and Dvořák’s approaches are not opposed at all. Rather, they complement and complete one another.

Max Dvořák’s Catechism of conservation [Katechismus der Denkmalpflege], first published during the 1914–18 war, is considered a milestone in the history of heritage conservation. The book emerged out of specific political circumstances, as part of the political agenda of Archduke Franz Ferdinand d’E...
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Max Dvořák’s Catechism of conservation [Katechismus der Denkmalpflege], first published during the 1914–18 war, is considered a milestone in the history of heritage conservation. The book emerged out of specific political circumstances, as part of the political agenda of Archduke Franz Ferdinand d’Este, heir to the Austrian imperial throne. Although the archduke’s involvement may complicate the book’s legacy, the mission of the Catechism is humanistic and open to general audiences regardless of nationality, citizenship or class affiliation. The paper examines Catechism of conservation from the standpoint of its relevance for contemporary heritage conservation. Do Dvořák’s main concerns differ from the concerns of the current generation of conservationists? Which of Dvořák’s points seem outdated, and which are still relevant? How does Dvořák’s approach to heritage value meet current challenges?

It has been shown that it was Max Dvořák who introduced into art-historical research the concept of Mannerism as an independent style that dominated the second half of the 16th century. Dvořák described the art of Raphael’s pupils and of Florentine painters such as Rosso Fiorentino or Jacopo Pontorm...
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It has been shown that it was Max Dvořák who introduced into art-historical research the concept of Mannerism as an independent style that dominated the second half of the 16th century. Dvořák described the art of Raphael’s pupils and of Florentine painters such as Rosso Fiorentino or Jacopo Pontormo not as a decline in artistic development, but as an expression of a change in the cultural mood that needed to be voiced in artistic form. However, the historiography of Dvořák’s conception of Mannerism has to date neglected to devote any attention to how Mannerism actually emerged: what in Dvořák’s conception of art generated the need to describe the art of the late 16th century as a separate artistic style distinct from the Renaissance? As the study shows, the answer to this question may be found in Max Dvořák’s interpretation of the late art of Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Originally published as ‘Michelangelo og marmoret (1876),’ Axel Sophus Guldberg ed., Fra Videnskabens Verden Almenfattelige Smaaskrifter af danske og norske Videnskabsmænd, 3rd ser., Copenhagen: Gad, 1876, Julius Lange, Billedkunst skildringer och studier fra hjemmet og udlandet, København: P. G. Ph...
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Originally published as ‘Michelangelo og marmoret (1876),’ Axel Sophus Guldberg ed., Fra Videnskabens Verden Almenfattelige Smaaskrifter af danske og norske Videnskabsmænd, 3rd ser., Copenhagen: Gad, 1876, Julius Lange, Billedkunst skildringer och studier fra hjemmet og udlandet, København: P. G. Philipsens forlag, 1884, pp. 68-128. Reprinted: Udvalgte skrifter af Julius Lange, udgivne af Georg Brandes og P. Købke, Tredje bind, København: Det nordiske forlag, 1903, pp. 42-77. And in German translation as ‘Michelangelo und der Marmor,’ Julius Lange’s ausgewählte Schriften (1875-1885), herausgegeben von Georg Brandes und Peter Købke, unter Mitwirkung von Alfred Wien übersetzt von Ida Anders, Strasbourg: Heitz, Erster Band, 1911, pp. 45-78.

Netherlandish carved altarpieces have attracted much new scholarly attention over the last decades. The objective of this article is first to provide a comprehensive historiography of the existing body of research, and second to outline the main research trends from the late nineteenth century until...
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Netherlandish carved altarpieces have attracted much new scholarly attention over the last decades. The objective of this article is first to provide a comprehensive historiography of the existing body of research, and second to outline the main research trends from the late nineteenth century until now. Even though Sweden still houses no less than thirty-eight late medieval Netherlandish carved altarpieces, about ten retable fragments, and two wooden Malines statuettes,and much has already been written on the pieces preserved there, an extensive description of this research field is currently lacking. The third aim of this paper is to fill the remaining gap by providing an extensive status quaestionis of the research on Netherlandish carved altarpieces in Sweden.

In 1925, Nikodim Kondakov died in emigration in Prague. During his last years in Czechoslovakia, the Byzantinist had been asked to teach on nomadic art, a topic to which he had devoted only his early career. This essay aims to understand why Kondakov returned to these interests. Kondakov was indeed ...
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In 1925, Nikodim Kondakov died in emigration in Prague. During his last years in Czechoslovakia, the Byzantinist had been asked to teach on nomadic art, a topic to which he had devoted only his early career. This essay aims to understand why Kondakov returned to these interests. Kondakov was indeed not the only scholar drawn to the material culture of nomadic peoples, a topic which became fundamental in Czechoslovakia, a new “nation-state” seeking its identity. This movement was further fostered by the presence of numerous Russian émigrés in Czechoslovakia, who developed the idea of “Eurasia”. These notions came to be explored by scholars from diverse backgrounds, living in Mitteleuropa, a space then shattered by the rise of totalitarianisms and WWII.

This article reconstructs the Neo-Kantian framework of Erwin Panofsky’s theoretical essays of the 1910s and 1920s, demonstrating that the schematic subject/object relation developed in these publications is also implicitly at work in Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form as well as early iconograp...
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This article reconstructs the Neo-Kantian framework of Erwin Panofsky’s theoretical essays of the 1910s and 1920s, demonstrating that the schematic subject/object relation developed in these publications is also implicitly at work in Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form as well as early iconographic studies such as Hercules am Scheidewege. The article then draws on György Lukács and Gillian Rose to argue that there is a circularity in Panofsky’s method whereby the empirically given assumes the role of a ‘quasitranscendental’ a priori object, and furthermore that Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of culture (with which Panofsky was in close dialog) shares this circularity. The aim of this article is not primarily to expose inconsistencies in Panofsky’s method, but rather to suggest that the impasses that art history encountered in its attempts to formalize itself as a discipline may serve as the point of departure for a future materialist art history.

The paper explores the overlooked attention Johann Joachim Winckelmann gave to clothing and clothed statues. It engages with Winckelmann’s self-fashioning, the costume-based analysis through which he traced the cultural trajectory of antique peoples, and his descriptive and rhetorical passages on dr...
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The paper explores the overlooked attention Johann Joachim Winckelmann gave to clothing and clothed statues. It engages with Winckelmann’s self-fashioning, the costume-based analysis through which he traced the cultural trajectory of antique peoples, and his descriptive and rhetorical passages on dress. It identifies the invisible and immaterial qualities which Winckelmann attributed to ‘tasteful’ clothing, and proposes that the elegance of Greek clothing was a signifier for the manifestation and transposition of perfect bodily form to the Greek ideal. This re-thinking seeks to address the focus on the Greek male nude figure as his emblem of ideal beauty and proposes that we should integrate draped statues as well as nude ones into Winckelmann’s historic and aesthetic framework.

In 1887, when art history was concerned with aethetics and the study of individual artist, Lange, like Warburg after him, encouraged the discussion of broader issues of representation, positioning his study of the representation of a human gesture at the intersection of psychology and art history. L...
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In 1887, when art history was concerned with aethetics and the study of individual artist, Lange, like Warburg after him, encouraged the discussion of broader issues of representation, positioning his study of the representation of a human gesture at the intersection of psychology and art history. Lange inspired J.J. Tikkanen and others to conduct more thorough histories of individual gestures, while the enquiry in the formation and tradition of human expressive gestures in art was continued by Warburg, Saxl and Gombrich. My introduction traces these developments from the viewpoint of a more recent, Baxandallian, approach that defines gesture as entirely conventional.

Originally published as ‘Haenden paa Brystet,’ Tilskueren: Maanedsskrift for Literatur, Samfundsspørgsmaal og almenfattelige videnskabelige skildringer, 4th year, 1887, June-July, pp. 455-471, August pp. 571-588, reprinted: Udvalgte skrifter af Julius Lange, udgivne af Georg Brandes og P. Købke, And...
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Originally published as ‘Haenden paa Brystet,’ Tilskueren: Maanedsskrift for Literatur, Samfundsspørgsmaal og almenfattelige videnskabelige skildringer, 4th year, 1887, June-July, pp. 455-471, August pp. 571-588, reprinted: Udvalgte skrifter af Julius Lange, udgivne af Georg Brandes og P. Købke, Andet bind, København: Det nordiske forlag, 1901, pp. 10-48.

The report concludes the results of the international conference organized on 15-16 April 2021 by the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences to commemorate 100 years since the death of Czech born Viennese art historian Max Dvořák’ (1874–1921). It shows the wide range of profession...
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The report concludes the results of the international conference organized on 15-16 April 2021 by the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences to commemorate 100 years since the death of Czech born Viennese art historian Max Dvořák’ (1874–1921). It shows the wide range of professional work that Dvořák covered during his short life as well as wide range of possibilities of how his work influenced the art history elaborated after his death. The report also shows the plurality in which Dvořák’s art historical research is interpreted today.

Max Dvořák is widely recognized as a key contributor to the tectonic change in the perception of Mannerism amongst art historians. Soviet scholars could not ignore this shift. In this paper, I trace the impact of Dvořák’s writings on Mannerism in Italian and Northern art on generations of Soviet sch...
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Max Dvořák is widely recognized as a key contributor to the tectonic change in the perception of Mannerism amongst art historians. Soviet scholars could not ignore this shift. In this paper, I trace the impact of Dvořák’s writings on Mannerism in Italian and Northern art on generations of Soviet scholars, who had been working on Renaissance/Baroque topics and methodological issues. One can distinguish three periods in the reception of Max Dvořák’s ideas in Soviet art history. The first clash of methodologies occurred in the 1930s when an abridged collection of Dvořák’s essays was translated into Russian. The beginning of the Cold War marked the second period (the 1940s – 1960s), with its enforcement of ideological boundaries and the use of specific vocabulary; and yet, this period was ambivalent – the first efforts at rehabilitation were followed by the new outbreaks of dogmatic austerity. Lastly, I christened the third period, which lasted from the 1970s until the 1990s a ‘Dvořák Revival’ for it flourished with the new positive evaluations of his works and concepts.

Originally published as ‘Et Udtryks Historie’, Tilskueren: Maanedsskrift for Litteratur, Samfundsspørgsmaal og Almenfattelige Videnskabelige Skildringer, vol. 12, August-September, 1895, pp. 565-583, 674-705. Reprinted: Udvalgte skrifter af Julius Lange, ed. Georg Brandes and Peter Købke, vol. 2, Co...
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Originally published as ‘Et Udtryks Historie’, Tilskueren: Maanedsskrift for Litteratur, Samfundsspørgsmaal og Almenfattelige Videnskabelige Skildringer, vol. 12, August-September, 1895, pp. 565-583, 674-705. Reprinted: Udvalgte skrifter af Julius Lange, ed. Georg Brandes and Peter Købke, vol. 2, Copenhagen: Det nordiske forlag, 1901, pp. 89-136.

Daniel Thomas’s first volume of collected writings is a small sample from about a thousand articles written over seventy years. From the time Thomas returned to Australia from Oxford to become the first curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1958, he emerged as a leading ...
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Daniel Thomas’s first volume of collected writings is a small sample from about a thousand articles written over seventy years. From the time Thomas returned to Australia from Oxford to become the first curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1958, he emerged as a leading figure in the Australian art world. Then as the inaugural head of Australian art at the newly established National Gallery, Canberra (1978-1984), and as Director of the Art Gallery of Australia (1984-1990), he developed curatorship as a profession, created national collections with remarkable acquisitions, developed provenance research and much more. This book is essential reading for anyone who writes on Australian art.

In an insightful 1887 essay, the Danish art historian Julius Lange explored the many meanings of a common but overlooked gesture—that of bringing a hand to one’s chest. Through a close study of how this motif changed across centuries of European art, he raised questions about the nature of bodily me...
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In an insightful 1887 essay, the Danish art historian Julius Lange explored the many meanings of a common but overlooked gesture—that of bringing a hand to one’s chest. Through a close study of how this motif changed across centuries of European art, he raised questions about the nature of bodily meaning, its multiplicity, and the forces that shape it—questions that contemporary gesture researchers still grapple with. His essay also raised questions—tantalizing if perhaps unanswerable—about how gesture in art compares to gesture in life.

Giorgio Vasari’s (1511-74) literary contributions to the discipline of art history are incontestable. Rarely has scholarly literature given commensurate weight to his paintings. This article examines one of Vasari’s mid-career works, the Naples Resurrection (1545), and argues that the paintingsimult...
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Giorgio Vasari’s (1511-74) literary contributions to the discipline of art history are incontestable. Rarely has scholarly literature given commensurate weight to his paintings. This article examines one of Vasari’s mid-career works, the Naples Resurrection (1545), and argues that the paintingsimultaneously typifies and singularly challenges the traditions of artistic production of its time through explicit and implicit references to Vasari’s contemporaries, namely Rosso Fiorentino, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Raphael. A careful reading of these borrowings, some of which have long gone unnoticed, provides a new perspective on this often-overlooked painting and offers a deeper understanding of Vasari’s deliberate attempts at self-promotion and his relationship to the art of his time. This article considers how Vasari’s artistic practice embodied sixteenth-century themes of imitation and invention and had larger impacts on individual artistic identities and broader visual memory.

This article explores histories of how the visual arts and art history have been covered in the Australian popular media. Focusing on popular magazines of the mid-twentieth century (such as Pix and The Australian Women’s Weekly) it analyses under-considered examples of how these magazines presented ...
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This article explores histories of how the visual arts and art history have been covered in the Australian popular media. Focusing on popular magazines of the mid-twentieth century (such as Pix and The Australian Women’s Weekly) it analyses under-considered examples of how these magazines presented art history to broad Australian audiences, as well as how these magazines facilitated and revealed diverse audience engagement with the arts. Through these case studies the article argues for the benefits of using intermedial methodologies of popular art historiography, in order to trace and analyse histories of cultural value and popular arts engagement in Australia.

Wilhelm Vöge (1868–1952) was a pioneer of German art history whose scientific work connects profound historical research with a language of description very close to poetry, meant to concentrate his scientific findings in order to get into contact with the creative side of the artistic self. Therefo...
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Wilhelm Vöge (1868–1952) was a pioneer of German art history whose scientific work connects profound historical research with a language of description very close to poetry, meant to concentrate his scientific findings in order to get into contact with the creative side of the artistic self. Therefore, it is interesting that a yet unknown sonnet exists about the Cathedral of Strasbourg and some famous artists of the Upper Rhine, among them Grünewald, the master of the Isenheim altar and the Stuppacher Madonna, written by Vöge himself at the back of his personal copy of his Nicolas-Hagnower-monograph (1929/30) that extrapolates Vöges scientific findings poetically.

While Johann Joachim’s Winckelmann influence on the Neoclassical taste for antiquities and its dissemination north of Italy is well known, it is rarely considered with regard to the study, acquisition, and use of ancient Greek vases. This article seeks to redress this lacuna, considering his enthusi...
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While Johann Joachim’s Winckelmann influence on the Neoclassical taste for antiquities and its dissemination north of Italy is well known, it is rarely considered with regard to the study, acquisition, and use of ancient Greek vases. This article seeks to redress this lacuna, considering his enthusiasm for ancient Greek vases, known in his time as Campanian because of their findspots, visits to Neapolitan collections, and encouragement of others’ acquisition of these antiquities. It considers his introduction of these vases into his History of the Art of Antiquity (1764) and its revision, the value he and his predecessors put on such archaeological materials for the purposes of autopsy, his comparison of their drawings to those of Raphael, thus elevating the perceived and actual value of these otherwise humble antiquities. It also addresses Winckelmann’s precluded influence on the dissemination of the Neapolitan and Sicilian opinion, based on the evidence of inscriptions, that ‘Campanian’ and some other vases found in Italy were produced by ancient Greeks.

This book review discusses the lavishly illustrated catalogue raisonné of the work of Mary Warburg, nee Hertz. Warburg is undoubtedly best known as the wife of art historian Aby Warburg. This catalogue aims to highlight, for the first time, Warburg’s independent achievements as an artist. The review...
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This book review discusses the lavishly illustrated catalogue raisonné of the work of Mary Warburg, nee Hertz. Warburg is undoubtedly best known as the wife of art historian Aby Warburg. This catalogue aims to highlight, for the first time, Warburg’s independent achievements as an artist. The review highlights the merits of the book, in particular its in-depth contextualization of Warburg’s work within the social and cultural history of Hamburg. The review also reflects more broadly on the merits of such large-scale cataloguing endeavours today, especially when ‘minor figures’ such as Mary Warburg are concerned.

In her new book “Gemalte Kunstgeschichte” [Painted Art History] Léa Kuhn argues that the late 18th-century saw not only the rise of modern art historiography as a scholarly discipline, but that artists increasingly painted pictures that reflected on their own historicity. Kuhn develops her argument ...
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In her new book “Gemalte Kunstgeschichte” [Painted Art History] Léa Kuhn argues that the late 18th-century saw not only the rise of modern art historiography as a scholarly discipline, but that artists increasingly painted pictures that reflected on their own historicity. Kuhn develops her argument through close-readings of three self-portraits by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, William Dunlap, Marie-Gabrielle Capet. This review discusses her approach and its the insights it offers for the study of art historiography.

Following a biographical outline of Ludwig Hevesi’s career, the volume chronicles the exhibition life of Vienna from the 1870s to 1910 with the help of Hevesi’s art criticism feuilletons examined in strict chronological order. His critiques are contextualized in contemporary art journalism, confront...
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Following a biographical outline of Ludwig Hevesi’s career, the volume chronicles the exhibition life of Vienna from the 1870s to 1910 with the help of Hevesi’s art criticism feuilletons examined in strict chronological order. His critiques are contextualized in contemporary art journalism, confronting his views with those of his colleagues (e.g. Albert Ilg, Franz Adalbert Seligmann, Hermann Bahr, Franz Servaes or occasionally Karl Kraus). Apart from the reconstruction of the permanently changing individual styles of the painters, new light is cast on the social network of the artistic sphere, sponsorship and the art market from the 1890s onwards. The decisive role of Hevesi in assisting the breakthrough of the Viennese Secession and in shaping the Austrian Canon in painting is demonstrated with an abundance of quotations from contemporary sources.

This richly illustrated publication examines urban views of Spanish cities by Spanish and European travellers, from the 16th century to the 19th century. It was published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias, Spain, in 2019 and consists of three introductory es...
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This richly illustrated publication examines urban views of Spanish cities by Spanish and European travellers, from the 16th century to the 19th century. It was published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias, Spain, in 2019 and consists of three introductory essays and a catalogue. The essays examine the specific problems of the illustrated book, a historical survey that provides an unifying narrative for the pieces in the catalogue, and a short history of urban views of Spanish cities in the early modern period. The catalogue entries are substantial, rigorous, updated and remarkably well illustrated. The ambitious time span, number of geographical areas covered, and variety of nationalities of the travellers, set Imago Urbis apart from previous studies, which are generally limited to a specific region, period, artist or nationality of the representations, thereby providing a unique, comprehensive, and cohesive study which is poised to become a fundamental source of information on the topic.

Recent years have seen a notable growth of interest in the operations of affect and agency in art. Works of art are said to have agency, primarily through their impact on the affectivity of the spectator. This turn is an inflection of a wider phenomenon in the humanities, motivated by interest in th...
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Recent years have seen a notable growth of interest in the operations of affect and agency in art. Works of art are said to have agency, primarily through their impact on the affectivity of the spectator. This turn is an inflection of a wider phenomenon in the humanities, motivated by interest in the theory of affect. Although it has only recently gained visibility, one can trace an art historical interest in affect back to Aby Warburg, whose work emphasised the non-rational, emotional engagement with works of art. This article explores some of the claims that have been made in relation to affect and agency in art, but it also subjects them to critical scrutiny. What does it mean to talk about art having agency? What is its purported significance for art historical inquiry? To what extent does affect theory provide a convincing theoretical basis for the idea of artistic agency? Indeed, what is understood by the idea of agency in such accounts? The article argues that while there are many attested historical cases in which works of art are said to act as if they were agents, these have to be understood in terms of culturally framed attributions of agency, rather than a general theory of affect, which may have a purely tangential significance for art historical analysis.

Sir Charles Lock Eastlake (1793-1865), the first Director of the National Gallery in London, was a figure of crucial significance in the shaping of art historical understanding in Britain between the 1820s and 1860s. His library, consisting of approximately 2,000 volumes, reflects his interests in t...
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Sir Charles Lock Eastlake (1793-1865), the first Director of the National Gallery in London, was a figure of crucial significance in the shaping of art historical understanding in Britain between the 1820s and 1860s. His library, consisting of approximately 2,000 volumes, reflects his interests in the fields of attribution, provenance and the history of artistic techniques. This paper contextualises the Eastlake library by comparing its contents to the Catalogo ragionato dei libri d’arte e d’antichità posseduti dal conte Cicognara (1821), a watershed art bibliography. Eastlake’s library demonstrates his pragmatic and diligent approach to his work and echoes how Leopoldo Cicognara (1767-1834) constructed his collection. The comparative approach sheds light on how these collections intersected on a scholarly level and underlines points of divergence as they developed according to their owner’s aims. It is also hoped that this comparative approach will be applied to other collections, as mentioned within the article.

It is yet unknown if, in the foreseeable future, thanks to rapid increases in artificial intelligence capabilities, databases will take over standard tasks of art historians, such as the stylistic classification of drawings into centuries and schools and the attribution of works to specific artists....
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It is yet unknown if, in the foreseeable future, thanks to rapid increases in artificial intelligence capabilities, databases will take over standard tasks of art historians, such as the stylistic classification of drawings into centuries and schools and the attribution of works to specific artists. However, the digital availability of an almost unimaginably huge volume of pictorial material has already led to major changes in art historical work with Old Master drawings. In an initial step, this paper proposes using the terms ‘top-down design’ and ‘bottom-up processes’, borrowed from the book The Evolution of Minds by American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, to describe the re-positioning of the concept of connoisseurship in light of the digitisation of nearly all collections of drawings in the world. A second step highlights the particular insights that a digital approach to the object can generate in terms of the materiality of the drawing, which will make it necessary to modify the traditional concept of connoisseurship and art historical expertise.

Julius von Schlosser’s Die Kunstliteratur (1924) is a monumental handbook that has been used by generations of art historians. The present paper provides the first systematic analysis of its genesis alongside Schlosser’s biography from 1891 on – his objectives, his path and his doubts. Schlosser red...
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Julius von Schlosser’s Die Kunstliteratur (1924) is a monumental handbook that has been used by generations of art historians. The present paper provides the first systematic analysis of its genesis alongside Schlosser’s biography from 1891 on – his objectives, his path and his doubts. Schlosser redefined the study of written sources in art history by shifting the focus to literary texts. He distanced himself from the study of archival documents (which tended to serve the histories of individual artworks) and instead sought to gain broader knowledge of the ‘spirit’ of each epoch. Around 1922 he envisioned a more modern ‘theory and history of art historiography’, although nothing ever came of it. The second part of the paper shows that, even before 1924, there were attempts to write histories of art literature with sources organised by literary genres and not, as with Schlosser, according to epochs. It argues that the following categories had a major impact on the artistic discourse in early modern Europe: treatises on the arts, artist biographies, histories of artistic monuments, monographs on single artworks, poetry about artworks, topographical works, collection and exhibition catalogues, and art criticism.

The introduction seeks to concretize and expand on crucial connoisseurial practices such as comparing or verbalising. Starting from the three domains of connoisseurship, namely the judgment of an artwork’s quality, the attribution to an artist, and the question whether the art work is an original or...
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The introduction seeks to concretize and expand on crucial connoisseurial practices such as comparing or verbalising. Starting from the three domains of connoisseurship, namely the judgment of an artwork’s quality, the attribution to an artist, and the question whether the art work is an original or a copy, it becomes apparent that connoisseurial practices still play a remarkable role in art historical endeavors. This can be demonstrated with a look at the contributions, which are bringing together and reflecting both historical and current connoisseurial practices.

That four colours were sufficient to differentiate adjacent countries on a map was a 19th century conjecture which has taken 150 years to prove mathematically. In a different sphere, and two and a half millennia earlier in Ancient Greece, many painters including Apelles favoured the use of four col...
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That four colours were sufficient to differentiate adjacent countries on a map was a 19th century conjecture which has taken 150 years to prove mathematically. In a different sphere, and two and a half millennia earlier in Ancient Greece, many painters including Apelles favoured the use of four colours. A story recounted by Pliny in which three or four colours were used to differentiate thin lines, however, serves to link these seemingly disparate observations of the mathematical and the artistic. Furthermore, the use of such few colours to achieve differentiation of adjacent areas can thus be seen to date back to classical times, if not beyond.

How libraries have shaped the writing and reception of art history and criticism was explored in two sessions held at the College Art Association’s 2019 and 2020 annual conferences. The papers, revised and presented in the following pages, employ a range of methodologies to analyse key collections o...
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How libraries have shaped the writing and reception of art history and criticism was explored in two sessions held at the College Art Association’s 2019 and 2020 annual conferences. The papers, revised and presented in the following pages, employ a range of methodologies to analyse key collections of books, prints and manuscripts. In so doing, their authors shed new light on the collections’ creation, organisation, and use. At the same time, the authors demonstrate that libraries constitute underutilized but vital resources for understanding the social, intellectual, and geo-political frameworks that have informed the development of art history as a discipline.

The development of optical devices in the course of the seventeenth century had a profound impact on the history of science, leading disciplines such as physics, astronomy, and biology to a major experimental and visual revolution. The introduction of such instruments in the field of connoisseurship...
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The development of optical devices in the course of the seventeenth century had a profound impact on the history of science, leading disciplines such as physics, astronomy, and biology to a major experimental and visual revolution. The introduction of such instruments in the field of connoisseurship has, strangely enough, attracted less scholarly attention. Yet, as Watteau’s famous Enseigne de Gersaint (1720) testifies, the practice of looking through a lens to scrutinise artworks was already well-established at the beginning of the eighteenth century and considered an important tool of expertise. The present article focuses on the beginning of this tradition, aiming to examine the changes it generated in the reception of artworks as well as to explore its repercussions on early modern art theory. In this context, the role played by vision aids in the art expert’s discourse will be a part

In digital art history, with the help of machine learning, connoisseurship is modelled as learning from examples. We show how this approach can lead to successful operationalisations of connoisseurial concepts on the one hand, and how it raises significant phenomenological and epistemological questi...
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In digital art history, with the help of machine learning, connoisseurship is modelled as learning from examples. We show how this approach can lead to successful operationalisations of connoisseurial concepts on the one hand, and how it raises significant phenomenological and epistemological questions on the other.

Among the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana’s manuscripts are the notes that Rodolfo Lanciani (1845–1929) created while serving in the state archaeological service in Rome from 1871 to 1889. Given that during this time, many discoveries about ancient Roman monuments and topography were made and then de...
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Among the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana’s manuscripts are the notes that Rodolfo Lanciani (1845–1929) created while serving in the state archaeological service in Rome from 1871 to 1889. Given that during this time, many discoveries about ancient Roman monuments and topography were made and then destroyed, his on-site notes and sketches contain irreplaceable information. Because Lanciani felt his state employer had disrespected him, the archaeologist retained the notes in his personal possession for nearly all his life, refusing to cede them to the state archives. Instead, just before his death, he donated them to the Vatican library. This article explores the personal and historical circumstances that led Lanciani to this decision, one which has allowed scholars of ancient Rome’s built environment easy access to this invaluable material.

While Riegl, Dvořák, Sedlmayr and Pächt have each of them aroused widespread enthusiasm at one point or another, the same cannot be said of Julius Schlosser (1866-1938). To speak in general terms about his intellectual trajectory and its significance, one meets two questions, the first rather obviou...
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While Riegl, Dvořák, Sedlmayr and Pächt have each of them aroused widespread enthusiasm at one point or another, the same cannot be said of Julius Schlosser (1866-1938). To speak in general terms about his intellectual trajectory and its significance, one meets two questions, the first rather obvious, and the other quite opaque. Although he wrote and lectured in a style that was difficult, his arguments were consistent and perhaps predictable – a continuation of Wickhoff’s approach, and the principles upheld by the Institut für Geschichtsforschung, as well as something later called structure and system, which is most apparent today in his thoughts about what he called the language and grammar of art, but also in his study from 1889 of the original architectural layout of western European abbeys which is a very early example of a functional analysis. In the last decade or two of his life he seems by contrast to have made some generalizations apparently difficult to reconcile with his earlier devotion to the particularity of historical sources.

Julius von Schlosser, Institut für Geschichtsforschung, Vienna School of art historians, Franz Wickhoff, Kunstgeschichtliche Anzeigen, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Cimabue, Kunstsprache, the language of ...
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Julius von Schlosser, Institut für Geschichtsforschung, Vienna School of art historians, Franz Wickhoff, Kunstgeschichtliche Anzeigen, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Cimabue, Kunstsprache, the language of art, Anschluß

The taxonomic arrangement Adam von Bartsch (1757-1821) devised for the print cabinet at the Imperial Court Library in Vienna fostered the historical analysis of prints by compelling visitors to associate the location of each print impression with the circumstance of its creation. His organizational ...
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The taxonomic arrangement Adam von Bartsch (1757-1821) devised for the print cabinet at the Imperial Court Library in Vienna fostered the historical analysis of prints by compelling visitors to associate the location of each print impression with the circumstance of its creation. His organizational system facilitated research by placing prints in a rational order. Similar to Linnaean classification, the rigid structure of Bartsch’s system described the relationships between prints, specifically their attributions and their creators’ places in a national tradition. By engaging with Bartsch’s taxonomy, the scholars and collectors who visited the Imperial Library absorbed his ideas about authorship, historical development, and national identity.

This essay explores how connoisseurship and formalism from the late nineteenth until the middle of the twentieth centuries contributed to the study of drawing that characterised and shaped sketches as a particular subgenre. By focusing on reoccurring and recontextualised expressions, phrases, and no...
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This essay explores how connoisseurship and formalism from the late nineteenth until the middle of the twentieth centuries contributed to the study of drawing that characterised and shaped sketches as a particular subgenre. By focusing on reoccurring and recontextualised expressions, phrases, and notions used by Heinrich Wölfflin, Bernard Berenson, Max Friedländer, and Bernhard Degenhart, I will argue how drawings were either used to describe painting as a stepping stone for an epochal style or as a quasi-semiotic and graphological approach toward the genre that, in turn, favoured a specific aesthetic ascribed to the artist’s assumed personality. Moreover, the two genres were tied to a set of vocabulary that highlighted both their individual function and aesthetic, yet unfolded a methodologically problematic narrative.

In 1909, the grand couturier Jacques Doucet opened a library dedicated to art history and archaeology. Soon this library, although the result of a private initiative, gained a reputation for scholarly depth and utility, reflected in its reader’s register. The nearly 1,500 individual registration car...
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In 1909, the grand couturier Jacques Doucet opened a library dedicated to art history and archaeology. Soon this library, although the result of a private initiative, gained a reputation for scholarly depth and utility, reflected in its reader’s register. The nearly 1,500 individual registration cards that survive from its early years provide documentation of the public that patronized the first art history library in France. Geolocation of the individual readers provides information on their socio-cultural backgrounds, while network analysis reveals personal and institutional relationships between the library and other institutions such as museums, libraries and universities. A more precise focus on selected readers helps to establish a prosopography that establishes their proximity or heterogeneity. This paper aims to demonstrate the unique role of this institution in the scientific and institutional landscape, both national and international, at a time when art history was emerging as a scientific field.

This book writes the history of a short-lived attempt to create in Prague a home for Byzantine art historians and historians exiled from Russia after the 1917 Revolution. Named after the distinguished Russian art historian, N. P. Kondakov, the Institutum Kondakovianum had a research library, art c...
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This book writes the history of a short-lived attempt to create in Prague a home for Byzantine art historians and historians exiled from Russia after the 1917 Revolution. Named after the distinguished Russian art historian, N. P. Kondakov, the Institutum Kondakovianum had a research library, art collection, a journal, the Seminarium Kondakovianum for Russian, Byzantine, and Migration art, as well as a monograph series that published a book by André Grabar. He was a student of Kondakov in Russia and the future professor at the Collège de France. Byzantium or democracy examines the history of the institute from the 1920s until its demise in the early 1950s and juxtaposes to it Grabar’s career in France during the same period, both little studied.

This is the first book by Julius Schlosser to appear in English. Written in 1907, it offers an excellent translation of a text that is unusually difficult in many ways. It documents the history of collecting in the era before the first art museums, before the definitions of art we are familiar with,...
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This is the first book by Julius Schlosser to appear in English. Written in 1907, it offers an excellent translation of a text that is unusually difficult in many ways. It documents the history of collecting in the era before the first art museums, before the definitions of art we are familiar with, and is based on his work as curator of the Ambras collection then in Vienna and now largely reinstalled in the castle near Innsbruck. It gives insight into one aspect of Schlosser’s early work, but not yet into the better known methodological and theoretical issues that occupied him later.

The volume explores the Eurocentrism that has characterised practices and discourses related to Western art phenomena from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, examining the critical, aesthetic and ideological implications of such a pervasively Eurocentric horizon of references. Through the ad...
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The volume explores the Eurocentrism that has characterised practices and discourses related to Western art phenomena from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, examining the critical, aesthetic and ideological implications of such a pervasively Eurocentric horizon of references. Through the adoption of alternative parameters of interpretation, like the concepts of ‘third space’ and ‘a-historicity’, the book aims to promote a ‘decolonial perspective’ in the study of art, reassessing well-consolidated narratives that reflect, first and foremost, a hegemonic cultural system directly derived from Europe-centered experiences both in the production as well as in the analysis of artworks.

This book review focuses on Jennifer Cooke’s careful and incisive analysis of the different methodological approaches adopted by Millard Meiss in his art-historical writing. Her extensive research in Meiss’s personal letters allows for an intimate portrait of his scholarly interactions, including ov...
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This book review focuses on Jennifer Cooke’s careful and incisive analysis of the different methodological approaches adopted by Millard Meiss in his art-historical writing. Her extensive research in Meiss’s personal letters allows for an intimate portrait of his scholarly interactions, including over thirty years of correspondence with Erwin Panofsky. The originality and importance of Cooke’s perspective on the reception of Meiss’s work in Italy is acknowledged, but it is also suggested that a fully balanced appraisal would have to include the profound influence Meiss had in North America.

Millard Meiss, Erwin Panofsky, Bernard Berenson, Trecento, connoisseurship, iconography, technical art history, Leonetto Tintori, Roberto Longhi, Black Death, Francesco Traini, Giotto, Duccio, Hayden ...
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Millard Meiss, Erwin Panofsky, Bernard Berenson, Trecento, connoisseurship, iconography, technical art history, Leonetto Tintori, Roberto Longhi, Black Death, Francesco Traini, Giotto, Duccio, Hayden Maginnis, Jennifer Cooke

The volume under review here investigates how politics in post-1945 Europe affected the academic, critical and political discourses on art. It focuses specifically (but not exclusively) on the fringes of the continent: the eastern and southern regions, thus highlighting the role played by the discip...
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The volume under review here investigates how politics in post-1945 Europe affected the academic, critical and political discourses on art. It focuses specifically (but not exclusively) on the fringes of the continent: the eastern and southern regions, thus highlighting the role played by the discipline of art history in former Communist countries and erstwhile military (fascist) regimes. The volume also sets out to expand upon the sources of art historiography by tying into the current strand of research on the exhibitionary complex, and by discussing cultural policies and art criticism. The result is an intellectual journey through time and geopolitical space, and across disciplines. Although the volume sets a new agenda in decentralising the approach of art historiography by shifting the focus from a regional to a geopolitical perspective, it has failed to convincingly fill this gap, largely because of the inclusion of criticism and cultural policy, inevitably leading to a fragmented and, at times, superficial view of how politics influences the discourse on the arts.

A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades, edited by Krista Kodres, Kristina Jõekalda, and the late Michaela Marek, is of definitive interest to art historians and scholars of intellectual history of Europe for giving insight into the diverse ways in which art and arch...
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A Socialist Realist History? Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades, edited by Krista Kodres, Kristina Jõekalda, and the late Michaela Marek, is of definitive interest to art historians and scholars of intellectual history of Europe for giving insight into the diverse ways in which art and architectural historians across socialist Central and Eastern Europe engaged with Marxism-Leninism. The wide-ranging contributions reveal that even during Stalinism the discourse on Socialist art history was never static. Slow to modernize during the ensuing Thaw, this discourse evolved in diverse ways within different academic environments. The book makes a highly valuable contribution to the study of art historiography in socialist Europe, deepening our understanding of the complexity and processuality of the discipline’s development, and underlining the need for further in-depth studies. Apart from its interest to art historians, the contributions clearly express the need for a thorough revision of how deeply contemporary art historical research has been shaped by the socialist legacy, particularly with regard to less obvious path dependencies such as methodological approaches.

The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 accelerated the ‘atomization’ of the Vienna School of Art History, which had started with the discussion ‘Orient oder Rom’. This process eventually resulted in the interdisciplinary of ‘The New Vienna School of Art History’, where Sedlmayr was one ...
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The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 accelerated the ‘atomization’ of the Vienna School of Art History, which had started with the discussion ‘Orient oder Rom’. This process eventually resulted in the interdisciplinary of ‘The New Vienna School of Art History’, where Sedlmayr was one of the central figures. His scheme of four-level interpretation of works of art, in which the eschatological level is also considered, can be applied to his own work. This allows for the better understanding of both his method and the logic of his writings as whole entities. Considering the importance of ‘ruins’ for Sedlmayr, the author pays special attention to his text on preservation of monuments, ‘Die demolierte Schönheit…’ (1965), created in Salzburg, a cultural-historical parallel to Vienna, where Sedlmayr spent the last twenty years of his life.

After having been valued mainly as conveyors of visual information, prints in nineteenth-century western Europe came to be recognised as works of art. In some cases this led to a reconsideration of the location of print collections in public institutions, but moving them was not always easy. This ar...
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After having been valued mainly as conveyors of visual information, prints in nineteenth-century western Europe came to be recognised as works of art. In some cases this led to a reconsideration of the location of print collections in public institutions, but moving them was not always easy. This article reconstructs Paul J. Kristeller’s (failed) project to hand over Ortalli albums of prints from the Biblioteca Palatina to the royal art museum in Parma (1893–1898) by tracing arguments used to support or oppose the relocation. By studying local events in the context of a national plan designed to reorganise print collections following foreign examples, the article shows the extent to which the status of prints and print collections grounded the Palatina director’s opposition to the project, and how this contributed to the preservation of the collection’s historical memory and the shaping of current frameworks of public print collections in Italy.

Rosalind Krauss: Between Modernism and Post-Medium’ is a response to an essay, ‘Automat, Automatic, Automatism: Rosalind Krauss and Stanley Cavell on Photography and the Photographically Dependent Arts’, by Irish aesthetic philosopher Diarmuid Costello criticising the prominent American art critic a...
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Rosalind Krauss: Between Modernism and Post-Medium’ is a response to an essay, ‘Automat, Automatic, Automatism: Rosalind Krauss and Stanley Cavell on Photography and the Photographically Dependent Arts’, by Irish aesthetic philosopher Diarmuid Costello criticising the prominent American art critic and historian Rosalind Krauss for her notion of “post-medium” art. Costello objects to the fact that in Krauss’ theorisation a particular post-medium can in principle be practised by only one artist and thus does not allow the comparative judgement and sense of artistic or historical development that the notion of medium implies. This essay by contrast contends both that Krauss’ notion of post-medium does allow comparison and that in the very notion of medium on which Costello relies there is a certain moment of non-comparison, of a particular author or artist making something absolutely novel and unprecedented. Indeed, it suggests that these two qualities of the medium cannot be separated and necessarily imply each other. The author does this with reference to the work of the American “ordinary language” philosopher Stanley Cavell, on whom Krauss draws for her theorisation of the post-medium. Also included is an interview with Krauss herself that raises a number of these matters.

This article sheds fresh light on women who have been important benefactors to the National Gallery from its foundation in 1824 to the present (2020), largely in terms of donating paintings but also through financial aid to support the acquisition of paintings and frames, building work, staff posts,...
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This article sheds fresh light on women who have been important benefactors to the National Gallery from its foundation in 1824 to the present (2020), largely in terms of donating paintings but also through financial aid to support the acquisition of paintings and frames, building work, staff posts, publications, exhibitions, and various public events. Through a mixture of case-studies and basic data analysis, the following set of core questions is addressed: (1) Who were the Gallery’s women donors? (2) Which paintings did they give and in what other ways have they been generous to the Gallery? (3) What patterns within their donating can be discerned? (4) What were their motivations for their gift giving? (5) Why have their donations been easy to lose sight of? (6) What is the Gallery doing now, ahead of its 200th anniversary in 2024, to draw attention to the significant contributions of its women donors past and present? It is hoped that the information compiled here will act as a useful reference point for others in the field when probing similar types of provenance records and will encourage readers to share information to help us fill persisting gaps in our data.

This article deals with Ruskin’s contribution to art education and training, as it can be defined by comparison and contrast with the government-sponsored art training supplied by (to use the handy nickname) ‘South Kensington’. It is tempting to treat this matter, and thus to dramatize it, as a p...
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This article deals with Ruskin’s contribution to art education and training, as it can be defined by comparison and contrast with the government-sponsored art training supplied by (to use the handy nickname) ‘South Kensington’. It is tempting to treat this matter, and thus to dramatize it, as a personality clash between Ruskin and Henry Cole – who, ten years older than Ruskin, was the man in charge of the South Kensington system. Robert Hewison has commented that their ‘individual personalities, attitudes and ambitions are so diametrically opposed as to represent the longitude and latitude of Victorian cultural values’. He characterises Cole as ‘utilitarian’ and ‘rationalist’, as against Ruskin, who was a ‘romantic anti-capitalist’ and in favour of the ‘imaginative’. This article will set the personality clash in the broader context of Victorian art education.

Population censuses in societies that are deeply divided along ethnic, religious or linguistic lines can be sensitive affairs – particularly where political settlements seek to maintain peace through the proportional sharing of power between groups. This brief sets out some key findings from a resea...
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Population censuses in societies that are deeply divided along ethnic, religious or linguistic lines can be sensitive affairs – particularly where political settlements seek to maintain peace through the proportional sharing of power between groups. This brief sets out some key findings from a research project investigating the relationship between census politics and the design of political institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kenya, Lebanon and Northern Ireland.

In spring 2018 the University of Birmingham announced that it would be the first global top 100 and Russell Group University to open a branch campus in Dubai. Initially this would take the form of an incubator campus providing capacity for approximately 350 students across 4 disciplines with a targ...
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In spring 2018 the University of Birmingham announced that it would be the first global top 100 and Russell Group University to open a branch campus in Dubai. Initially this would take the form of an incubator campus providing capacity for approximately 350 students across 4 disciplines with a target of opening a full scale campus in 2020, accommodating up to approximately 4,500 UG and PG students. A library was required; however there would be no dedicated library staff in Dubai and no additional staffing resource within the UK. Library Services therefore faced the challenge of setting up a library from scratch, at arm’s length, with no additional resource. In this article, we mainly focus on the work relating to reading lists, and acquiring and licensing content.

The resolution of images recovered using diffuse optical tomography without spatial prior information is inherently limited due to the diffusive nature of light transport in scattering dominated biological tissue. Several studies have previously reported an improvement in depth sensitivity in near i...
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The resolution of images recovered using diffuse optical tomography without spatial prior information is inherently limited due to the diffusive nature of light transport in scattering dominated biological tissue. Several studies have previously reported an improvement in depth sensitivity in near infra-red spectroscopy by considering the subtraction of two neighbouring measurements. A nearest neighbour, spatial derivative based algorithm is presented, in which the difference between neighbouring source-sharing source-detector pairs is considered for tomographic reconstruction. Using a circular, inward-facing optode geometry, it is shown that deeper abnormalities in oxyhaemoglobin, deoxyhaemoglobin and water can be recovered with better localisation and contrast as compared to reconstructing using absolute values of multi-wavelength data. Relative improvements of up to 25% in quantitative accuracy of recovered physiological values are demonstrated at better resolution for cancerous tissue in a heterogeneous breast model, when using this proposed spatial derivative based parameter reconstruction.

Aligning with student engagement and promotional strategies, a Pop-up Library project was initiated at the University of Birmingham. This involved setting up temporary, staffed stalls in different locations across campus in order to informally communicate with students and effectively take ‘the Libr...
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Aligning with student engagement and promotional strategies, a Pop-up Library project was initiated at the University of Birmingham. This involved setting up temporary, staffed stalls in different locations across campus in order to informally communicate with students and effectively take ‘the Library’ to them. This article discusses the planning and implementation of the Pop-up Library, including the rationale for the initiative. Details are given of the stalls themselves, the wide range of staff involved, the many locations trialled, the promotional materials used, and the ways in which the venture was advertised and subsequently evaluated. Results of a questionnaire used on the stalls are presented. Conclusions are drawn as to the effectiveness of the Pop-up Library as a communication tool, with particular emphasis on breaking down barriers between students and library staff, and proactively raising students’ awareness of the many ways Library Services can enhance their learning.

In autumn 2012, the University of Birmingham launched FindIt@Bham, a Primo-based Resource Discovery Service, after a series of focus groups with students and staff to help determine its initial configuration and customisation. This paper presents the results from a large-scale online survey and focu...
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In autumn 2012, the University of Birmingham launched FindIt@Bham, a Primo-based Resource Discovery Service, after a series of focus groups with students and staff to help determine its initial configuration and customisation. This paper presents the results from a large-scale online survey and focus groups that were conducted to poll users’ attitudes to the service over twelve months later, adding to a small body of research on user satisfaction with established resource discovery services. From the survey the overall level of appreciation was high with 71.13% rating FindIt@Bham to be ‘Good’ or ‘Very Good’. The level of appreciation was compared across undergraduates, postgraduates (taught and research) and academic staff which revealed that undergraduates are the group of users most happy with the service with academic staff being least satisfied. The reasons for this discrepancy are considered, along with users’ behaviour and a discussion of their perceptions of individual functional areas. The survey results led to focus group activities tailored to extract deeper information on system usage and satisfaction. From these combined activities, future customisations and developments to FindIt@Bham such as tuning of result relevancy, improved online help and additional functionality can be prioritised.

The University of Birmingham is currently investing in its library and systems. A three year programme of activity, completed in Autumn 2013, has seen a review of all printed monograph material held by Library Services and the implementation of a new resource discovery solution, ‘in-house’ reading l...
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The University of Birmingham is currently investing in its library and systems. A three year programme of activity, completed in Autumn 2013, has seen a review of all printed monograph material held by Library Services and the implementation of a new resource discovery solution, ‘in-house’ reading list software and a library management system. During this period, it has been announced that funding will be provided for a new Main Library which is due to open in Autumn 2016. Combined, this investment will allow the University to better support the University’s learning, teaching and research agenda. This article will focus on the resource discovery system (RDS) which was launched in September 2012. The article will consider why an RDS was required; it will give details about the implementation of the system as well as the extensive customisation which was made to the ‘out-of-the-box’ product. The value of user focus groups during the customisation process will be discussed as well as some technical tips and advice for anyone considering doing similar customisation. The article will conclude by considering the impact of the new system during its first year of operation.

The aim of this article is to report some of the work undertaken by a nursing “think tank”, focussed on examining the causes of poor nursing care in hospitals, and potential solutions. A “think tank” was convened which incorporated widespread discussion with national, regional and local stakeholder...
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The aim of this article is to report some of the work undertaken by a nursing “think tank”, focussed on examining the causes of poor nursing care in hospitals, and potential solutions. A “think tank” was convened which incorporated widespread discussion with national, regional and local stakeholders, a critical literature review, and a focus group of senior nurses. It was found that there are no widespread systems of staff support that help nurses working in hospitals to cope with the emotional component of their work. This is one element that contributes to nurses providing poor care. A number of approaches to staff support have been developed that warrant further study. If episodes of poor care are to be prevented it is necessary for hospital boards to recognise the importance of supporting nurses in managing the emotional labour of caring. The introduction of routine systems of staff support should be considered. In addition to highlighting and condemning poor care, it is important to seek solutions. This article offers a new perspective on an enduring problem and identifies approaches that can be part of the solution.

The world of work continues to change. Labour markets in most countries are increasingly shaped by policies of neoliberal deregulation while strategies of flexibility dominate public policy and corporate strategy across an array of sectors. At the forefront of these changes are the myriad labour mar...
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The world of work continues to change. Labour markets in most countries are increasingly shaped by policies of neoliberal deregulation while strategies of flexibility dominate public policy and corporate strategy across an array of sectors. At the forefront of these changes are the myriad labour market intermediaries that are used by workers and employees to enhance their ability to navigate ever more complex and volatile labour markets. For some, mediated employment, recruitment and work practices mean greater career progression and profit making ability, but for many others, it means increased precarity, vulnerability and insecurity. This paper critically reviews existing literature within geography on three types of private labour market intermediary, namely temporary staffing agencies and contract brokers; executive search firms and headhunters; and informal intermediaries such as gangmasters. The final section addresses the future for research in labour geography and, in particular, suggests new ways in which to broaden our understanding of labour market intermediaries and their impact on worker agency.

The central questions this paper seeks to address are: 1) What are the attitudes of first year medical students in a Japanese medical school towards the varieties of English that exist in the world? More specifically, do these students consider mother tongue varieties of English to be disproporti...
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The central questions this paper seeks to address are: 1) What are the attitudes of first year medical students in a Japanese medical school towards the varieties of English that exist in the world? More specifically, do these students consider mother tongue varieties of English to be disproportionately superior to other varieties of English? 2) What implications do those attitudes have on the teaching of English within the context of a medical English conversation class in a Japanese medical school?

Peter R. R. White, describes ‘systemics’ as that which provides an ‘account of the grammar of the language as it is used in actual social situations and hence is concerned at all times with the meaning, communicative functionality and rhetorical purposes of language’ (2000). This analysis examines t...
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Peter R. R. White, describes ‘systemics’ as that which provides an ‘account of the grammar of the language as it is used in actual social situations and hence is concerned at all times with the meaning, communicative functionality and rhetorical purposes of language’ (2000). This analysis examines two scientific texts, one for specialists and one for a general audience using the systemic framework devised by M. A. K. Halliday. Through the identification and analysis of the lexico-grammatical differences between the two texts using aspects of the systemic framework, this paper seeks to determine the stylistic and communicative consequences of these differences.

This paper overviews women artists’ contribution to early Australian art historiography, especially focusing on the period 1900-1945, but extending to considering the diverse and changing status of women artists and the evaluation of women’s art in public culture from the postwar period up to the ea...
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This paper overviews women artists’ contribution to early Australian art historiography, especially focusing on the period 1900-1945, but extending to considering the diverse and changing status of women artists and the evaluation of women’s art in public culture from the postwar period up to the early twenty-first century. Two particular lines of enquiry are emphasised concurrently: an overview of feminist and consciously interventionist art historical/theoretical gestures, but equally women’s contribution to disseminating an understanding of art historical narratives in Australia, prior to the establishment of the Herald Chair of Fine Arts at University of Melbourne. These accounts are drawn from primary sources that substantially have not been consolidated or compared before in an academic context and reveal a widespread practice of public lectures and radio broadcasts across Eastern Australia around art historical themes particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as back to the Federation period.

women artists, feminist art history, women art historians, art history in Australia 1900-1950. Carnegie corporation, Australian public galleries 1900-1950, Violet Teague, Margaret Preston, Mary Cecil...
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women artists, feminist art history, women art historians, art history in Australia 1900-1950. Carnegie corporation, Australian public galleries 1900-1950, Violet Teague, Margaret Preston, Mary Cecil Allen, Vida Lahey

This paper uses an innovative analysis of an individual’s cognitive processes to investigate a real-life example of processing rendered subconcious by a mask that shared characteristics with the varied feature. In about half the participants, integrative performance on the object was better than ana...
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This paper uses an innovative analysis of an individual’s cognitive processes to investigate a real-life example of processing rendered subconcious by a mask that shared characteristics with the varied feature. In about half the participants, integrative performance on the object was better than analytical performance on the feature. The cognitive processes mediating this achievement varied among assessors. In a few, the integrative judgment discriminated levels of the feature directly through sensory processes (subceptually). The others succeeded by implicitly using the analytical concept to achieve feature discrimination in overall object recognition.

Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism offers an opportunity to consider T.J. Clark’s contribution to the discipline of art history. Farewell transforms the polemical tone of the social history of art into to an elegy for modernism’s unrealized promise. Yet an attentive reading of...
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Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism offers an opportunity to consider T.J. Clark’s contribution to the discipline of art history. Farewell transforms the polemical tone of the social history of art into to an elegy for modernism’s unrealized promise. Yet an attentive reading of its argument discloses a far more subtle intervention within recent attempts to revise the history of modernism. This paper will consider these issues through a discussion of Farewell, focusing of the performative dimension of Clark’s argument, which renders on a rhetorical level the aesthetic strategies of the modernist avant-garde. Clark’s program for the social history of art may remain unfulfilled, yet it is exemplary in this failure. Key words: T.J. Clark, Modernism, Avant-Garde, Art and Politics, Art and Society, Social History of Art

This paper traces an historiography of the problematic category ‘decorative arts’ and considers how the aesthetic hierarchies implicit in this term are given concrete expression in the display strategies of the art museum. The manner in which the art museum, as a framing device for material culture,...
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This paper traces an historiography of the problematic category ‘decorative arts’ and considers how the aesthetic hierarchies implicit in this term are given concrete expression in the display strategies of the art museum. The manner in which the art museum, as a framing device for material culture, might actively participate in the breaking down of these traditional hierarchies of Art History is considered. It is suggested that a juxtaposition of differing display strategies, bringing to the fore the art museum’s role in the imputation of contingent meanings to the artefacts it displays, may provide a way forward for encyclopaedic art museum collections.

Alois Riegl was one of the seminal art historians of the early twentieth century, but very little is known about his career as adjunct-curator of textiles at the Austrian Museum for Art and Industry. He worked at the Museum from 1884 and combined this position with University teaching until he left ...
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Alois Riegl was one of the seminal art historians of the early twentieth century, but very little is known about his career as adjunct-curator of textiles at the Austrian Museum for Art and Industry. He worked at the Museum from 1884 and combined this position with University teaching until he left this post to become a full Professor of Art History at the University of Vienna in 1897. While interest in Riegl has shown no signs of abating in recent years, most scholars continue to debate Riegl’s theories and methods. The aim of this paper, however, is to demonstrate just how much of Riegl’s theorizing was brought into focus by practical issues at the Museum for Art and Industry. As recent studies have indicated, Riegl was much more than an ivory tower theoretician; his work reverberated with the type of cross-disciplinary cultural criticism we associate with the intellectual life of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Another goal of this paper is to contribute to our expanding understanding of Riegl in his social and institutional contexts. Finally, it traces ways in which Riegl used his early exposure to Nietzsche, particularly Nietzsche’s second Untimely Meditation (The advantages and disadvantages of History to life) to craft his responses to contemporary artistic and social crises in the final decade of the nineteenth century.

This essay presents a critique of recent historiographic considerations of German art historians in the United States. It traces this history back to Johann Valentin Haidt in the eighteenth century. Using Princeton as a point of reference, it traces the innovations in the history of the discipline i...
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This essay presents a critique of recent historiographic considerations of German art historians in the United States. It traces this history back to Johann Valentin Haidt in the eighteenth century. Using Princeton as a point of reference, it traces the innovations in the history of the discipline in the United States that were developed largely independent of the impact of German émigrés, and then turns to consider the possible impact of German speakers. Finally it takes issue with the idea of German Jewish identity in art history.

This essay is the concluding chapter of a study of the work of Max Loehr (1903-1988), an art historian whose visual analysis of unprovenanced Chinese bronzes famously anticipated the discoveries of archaeologists. It argues that Loehr’s strictly pragmatic understanding of style is implicit in the da...
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This essay is the concluding chapter of a study of the work of Max Loehr (1903-1988), an art historian whose visual analysis of unprovenanced Chinese bronzes famously anticipated the discoveries of archaeologists. It argues that Loehr’s strictly pragmatic understanding of style is implicit in the daily practice of most art historians, but that most of our explicit uses of the word, including such everyday expressions as ‘Romanesque style’ and ‘style of Raphael’, presume the existence of a mysterious, indefinable entity that is both a property of the object and a disembodied agent evolving independently of artists and objects. Not surprisingly, no procedure for ascertaining the style of an object has ever been described. The failure to recognize that style is not a physical property but only a shorthand for talking about comparisons is responsible for many classic confusions in art history. Finding the causes of a style or explaining its evolution (‘the origin of the Gothic style’, ‘the evolution from Renaissance to Baroque’), relating styles to times or cultures or nations, relating them across media (‘Baroque painting’ and ‘Baroque music’)—these are fictitious problems, artefacts of a mistaken belief in a thing called ‘style’.

The paper is a brief survey of the historiography of Maithil painting after independence. Tracing the roots of current perceptions of Maithil art to the 1949 article of W.G. Archer, the paper demonstrates how his interpretations were articulated by Maithil and non-Maithil scholars and promoters of M...
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The paper is a brief survey of the historiography of Maithil painting after independence. Tracing the roots of current perceptions of Maithil art to the 1949 article of W.G. Archer, the paper demonstrates how his interpretations were articulated by Maithil and non-Maithil scholars and promoters of Maithil art to project a regional, caste-based and national identity. It also looks at the ways in which Maithil art got misinterpreted with the arrival of western scholars in Mithila. The paper reviews the recent shifts in the historiography of Maithil painting by examining the emergence of Harijan Madhubani art. It examines how the legacy of colonial interpretations, romanticization of past history and debates on innovation and tradition, have changed the trajectories of the historiography of Maithil painting in the past few decades.

Nineteenth-century studies of the Orient changed European ideas and cultural institutions in more ways than we usually recognise. ‘Orientalism’ certainly contributed to European empire-building, but it also helped to destroy a narrow Christian-classical canon. This book provides the first synthetic...
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Nineteenth-century studies of the Orient changed European ideas and cultural institutions in more ways than we usually recognise. ‘Orientalism’ certainly contributed to European empire-building, but it also helped to destroy a narrow Christian-classical canon. This book provides the first synthetic and contextualised study of German Orientalistik, a subject of special interest because German scholars were the pace-setters in oriental studies between about 1830 and 1930, despite entering the colonial race late and exiting it early. The book suggests that we must take seriously German orientalism’s origins in Renaissance philology and early modern biblical exegesis and appreciate its modern development in the context of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century debates about religion and the Bible, classical schooling, and Germanic origins. Introduces readers to a host of iconoclastic characters and forgotten debates,seeking to demonstrate both the richness of this intriguing field and its indebtedness to the cultural world in which it evolved.

Although Julius Schlosser is well known by name and as a source for bibliographical references, very few art historians are familiar with the substance of his forty year teaching career which inspired the likes of Kris, Kurz, Bodonyi, Gombrich and many others. Die Kunstliteratur of 1924 became his f...
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Although Julius Schlosser is well known by name and as a source for bibliographical references, very few art historians are familiar with the substance of his forty year teaching career which inspired the likes of Kris, Kurz, Bodonyi, Gombrich and many others. Die Kunstliteratur of 1924 became his fifth and final such handbook, and was published with the intention to elucidate the pre-history of the history of art as an academic discipline. It is natural that Giorgio Vasari has a place at the core of such a story. However, Schlosser possessed an unrivalled knowledge of the relevant written and theoretical sources, and his unusually consistent approach found Lorenzo Ghiberti to be the actual founder of the subject and Winckelmann to have finally overcome the relatively pernicious influence of Vasari. This chapter from the centre of his book therefore still today remains the best critical account of Vasari’s writings from a broader point of view.

The intellectual development of Max Dvořák (1874-1921), one of the protagonists of the ‘Vienna School of Art History’, was characterized by a constant process of methodological self-criticism. His changing views on Medieval Art are known above all by two texts: The Enigma of the Art of the Van Eyck ...
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The intellectual development of Max Dvořák (1874-1921), one of the protagonists of the ‘Vienna School of Art History’, was characterized by a constant process of methodological self-criticism. His changing views on Medieval Art are known above all by two texts: The Enigma of the Art of the Van Eyck Brothers (1904), strongly influenced by Wickhoff and Riegl and by an ‘impressionistic’ view of modernity, and Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Sculpture and Painting (1918), an essay dating to Dvořák’s late, ‘expressionistic’, period. Knowing only these two texts, the decisive turn undertaken by Dvořák around 1920 could be interpreted as a sudden change of paradigm. As the paper wants to show, this view has to be revised after having read and analyzed Dvořák’s hitherto unpublished university lectures on Western European Art in the Middle Ages which were given four times from 1906 to 1918.

This essay originated as an editorial for an issue of Perspective devoted to periodization. It traces the critique and dismantling of this conception in art history, and argues that even most recent literature suggests that the problematic of periodization has not been resolved, and will not easily ...
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This essay originated as an editorial for an issue of Perspective devoted to periodization. It traces the critique and dismantling of this conception in art history, and argues that even most recent literature suggests that the problematic of periodization has not been resolved, and will not easily be.

This essay is an expanded version of a paper delivered in 1989 at a colloquium organized around a replica of the Doryphorus acquired by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Winckelmann’s treatment of Polyclitus serves to introduce a wider consideration of the structure and method of his history of cla...
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This essay is an expanded version of a paper delivered in 1989 at a colloquium organized around a replica of the Doryphorus acquired by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Winckelmann’s treatment of Polyclitus serves to introduce a wider consideration of the structure and method of his history of classical art. It is argued that, contrary to assertions that he developed his history on the basis of his empirical observation of works of classical art, Winckelmann instead adopted historiographic schemata derived directly and indirectly from ancient authors. The ancient texts themselves reflect not so much authentic information about the visual arts as formulations from a tradition of histories of the ‘technai’, the arts of civilization, that were often linked with political history. Pliny’s famous statement of the decline of art is re-interpreted in this light.

Introductory chapter: This important book puts forward a new interpretation of Roman decorative art, focusing on the function of decoration in the social context. It examines the three principal areas of social display and conspicuous consumption in the Roman world: social space, entertainment, ...
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Introductory chapter: This important book puts forward a new interpretation of Roman decorative art, focusing on the function of decoration in the social context. It examines the three principal areas of social display and conspicuous consumption in the Roman world: social space, entertainment, and dress, and discusses the significance of the decoration of objects and interiors within these contexts, drawing examples from both Rome and its environs, and the Western provinces, from the early Imperial period to Late Antiquity. Focusing on specific examples, including mosaics and other interior décor, silver plate, glass and pottery vessels, and jewellery and other dress accessories, Swift demonstrates the importance of decoration in creating and maintaining social networks and identities and fostering appropriate social behaviour, and its role in perpetuating social convention and social norms. It is argued that our understanding of stylistic change and the relationship between this and the wider social context in the art of the Roman period is greatly enhanced by an initial focus on the particular social relationships fostered by decorated objects and spaces. The book demonstrates that an examination of so-called 'minor art' is fundamental in any understanding of the relationship between art and its social context, and aims to reinvigorate debate on the value of decoration and ornament in the Roman period and beyond.

The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore provides a revisionary critique of the art of Abanindranath Tagore, the founder of a ‘national’ school of Indian painting, popularly known as the Bengal School of Art. It categorically argues that the art of Abanindranath, which developed as part of what ...
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The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore provides a revisionary critique of the art of Abanindranath Tagore, the founder of a ‘national’ school of Indian painting, popularly known as the Bengal School of Art. It categorically argues that the art of Abanindranath, which developed as part of what has been called the Bengal Renaissance in the 19th–20th centuries, was not merely a normalization of nationalist or orientalist principles, but was a hermeneutic negotiation between modernity and community, geared toward the fashioning of an alternate nation, resistant to the stereotyping identity formation of the nation�state. It also establishes that his art—embedded in communitarian practices like kirtan, ālponā, pet-naming, syncretism and storytelling through oral allegories—sought a dialogic social identity within the inter-subjective contexts of locality, regionality, nationality and trans-nationality. This book is well-illustrated with many of Abanindranath’s creations. It will be a rich reference work for students, researchers and academics from various subject areas such as arts and humanities, sociology and cultural studies, and would be precious for artists, art collectors, connoisseurs, museums and art galleries.

Generally considered as a monument of erudition and examined almost exclusively from a philological point of view, Julius von Schlosser’s “Kunstliteratur” (Vienna, 1924) is seldom analyzed, on the contrary, from a theoretical, conceptual or philosophical perspective. This paper provides a critical r...
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Generally considered as a monument of erudition and examined almost exclusively from a philological point of view, Julius von Schlosser’s “Kunstliteratur” (Vienna, 1924) is seldom analyzed, on the contrary, from a theoretical, conceptual or philosophical perspective. This paper provides a critical reading of Schlosser’s restrictive concept of “written sources” putting it in relation with a larger network of intellectual exchanges, in which Croce’s aesthetic premises and Vossler’s linguistic investigations play an important role in the process of epistemological distinction between “Kulturgeschichte” (History of Culture) and “Kunstgeschichte” (History of Art).

The Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (KBAR T) working group was set up in January 2008 as a joint UKSG and NIS O initiative to explore data problems associated with the OpenURL supply chain. The Recommended Practice from Phase I of KBAR T—NIS O RP-9-2010, KBART: Knowledge Bases and Related Tools—wa...
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The Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (KBAR T) working group was set up in January 2008 as a joint UKSG and NIS O initiative to explore data problems associated with the OpenURL supply chain. The Recommended Practice from Phase I of KBAR T—NIS O RP-9-2010, KBART: Knowledge Bases and Related Tools—was released in January 2010 and provides guidance on the role and importance of accurate and timely metadata supply to link resolver knowledge bases, along with a practical set of recommendations for metadata transfer.

The debate over scholarly communications and the future of publishing continues to simmer. Open Access is seen to be a Good Thing in principle, but how does it work, how much does it cost and who pays for it? A pilot study in supporting "gold" and "green" Open Access at the University of Birmingham ...
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The debate over scholarly communications and the future of publishing continues to simmer. Open Access is seen to be a Good Thing in principle, but how does it work, how much does it cost and who pays for it? A pilot study in supporting "gold" and "green" Open Access at the University of Birmingham is examining the costs to the institution and the requirements of the funders, researchers, research administrators and the library. Information from the pilot will be used to recommend a practical way forward that meets the needs of different research disciplines and cultures, in the context of the University’s research strategy.

This paper considers enjoyment of formal education for young people aged 14 to 16,largely from their own perspective, based on the view of around 3,000 students in England. The data includes documentary analysis, official statistics, interviews and surveys with staff and students. Enjoyment of schoo...
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This paper considers enjoyment of formal education for young people aged 14 to 16,largely from their own perspective, based on the view of around 3,000 students in England. The data includes documentary analysis, official statistics, interviews and surveys with staff and students. Enjoyment of school tends to be promoted by factors such as successful social relationships, small classes, variation in learning, and students having some control of their learning. Enjoyment tends to be inhibited by perceived lack of respect or concern by teaching staff and passive pedagogy. For some disengaged students, a work or college environment with more adult relationships appears to restore enjoyment and enthusiasm. Enjoyment, unlike attainment for example, is not particularly stratified by the standard student background variables. Nor is there evidence of a clear school effect. This means that enjoyment should be easy to enhance more widely, positively affecting the learner identities of all young people, including the more reluctant learners.

The paper is an attempt to locate both scholars’ views in the discussion of the direction and scope of the ‘Wiener Schule’. Warburg, who corresponded with members of the ‘Wiener Schule’, and Saxl, who was trained by its teachers, whilst reading the important books of its members, never wanted to be ...
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The paper is an attempt to locate both scholars’ views in the discussion of the direction and scope of the ‘Wiener Schule’. Warburg, who corresponded with members of the ‘Wiener Schule’, and Saxl, who was trained by its teachers, whilst reading the important books of its members, never wanted to be drawn into their research agenda. Warburg was clear that he wanted to pursue a different form of ‘Kulturwissenschaft’, all but untranslatable into English, possibly approaching a term like cultural ‘science’. Saxl, whilst sympathetic to individual proponents of the ‘Wiener Schule’, realized that its analysis of artistic production would not be shared by scholars working in the KBW and/or the newly established university in Hamburg. The result was friendly coexistence in equidistance.

Transmissibility is an essential concept for any discourse on historiography and aesthetics. In fact, this concept traverses the contemporary impasse of art historical critical practice. Although explicitly associated with Walter Benjamin, the entirety of Hannah Arendt’s work on art and history is p...
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Transmissibility is an essential concept for any discourse on historiography and aesthetics. In fact, this concept traverses the contemporary impasse of art historical critical practice. Although explicitly associated with Walter Benjamin, the entirety of Hannah Arendt’s work on art and history is premised on transmissibility as well. It allows them to conceive a space of history from within the aesthetic, the world of artifice. This essay reads Benjamin and Arendt alongside and against one other in order to rethink art and history without resorting to eschatology or the histrionics of political theology. In creating this virtual historiography—Arendt-Benjamin—it conceives transmissibility as an aesthetic-historiographic concept that renders an openness between past and future, poiesis and aisthesis. Writing the history of art becomes the creation of a passage between what-has-been and artifice; it becomes the opening of history into life, an event of recollection.

Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence is a compilation of the conference papers from the 32nd International Congress in the History of Art organised by the International Committee of the History of Art (CIHA), edited by conference convenor Professor Jaynie Anderson. Crossing C...
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Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence is a compilation of the conference papers from the 32nd International Congress in the History of Art organised by the International Committee of the History of Art (CIHA), edited by conference convenor Professor Jaynie Anderson. Crossing Cultures is an in-depth examination of the effect of globalism on art and art history. Covering all aspects of art—including traditional media, painting, sculpture, architecture and the crafts, as well as design, film, visual performance and new media—it explores the themes of conflict, migration and convergence in the visual, symbolic and artistic exchanges between cultures throughout history. Edited by Professor Jaynie Anderson.

This essay examines the role of music in shaping Riegl’s conception of Kunstwollen and thus his conception of the history of art as a whole. Indebted both to Schopenhauer’s appreciation of music as an expression of the ultimate reality, that thing-in-itself which he calls the Will, and to Hanslick’s...
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This essay examines the role of music in shaping Riegl’s conception of Kunstwollen and thus his conception of the history of art as a whole. Indebted both to Schopenhauer’s appreciation of music as an expression of the ultimate reality, that thing-in-itself which he calls the Will, and to Hanslick’s notion of music as tonal forms in motion, likened at one point to a moving arabesque, Riegl understood the Kunstwollen to be the ultimate object of a properly “scientific” art history, that thing-in-itself which the history of art must assume to exist as the condition of its own possibility as a science. Immaterial and dynamic, it displaces the focus of art-historical inquiry from the individual art object; its radical potential is at odds with the object fetishism of contemporary art history.

This essay examines the use of the term “Romanesque” as an artistic style and time period for architecture, sculpture and other arts photographed and published in a journal and multiple series of books by monks at the abbey of la Pierre-qui-Vire in Burgundy between 1951 and 2001. Although the term s...
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This essay examines the use of the term “Romanesque” as an artistic style and time period for architecture, sculpture and other arts photographed and published in a journal and multiple series of books by monks at the abbey of la Pierre-qui-Vire in Burgundy between 1951 and 2001. Although the term suggests a coherent body of work with related qualities, the actual imagery destabilizes our understanding of how one can actually define Romanesque. At the same time, the artfully composed photogravure illustrations and inclusive survey of sites strongly influenced art historians of the twentieth century by reinforcing notions of geographic workshops, bringing a fresh, modernist aesthetic to well known material, and publishing photographs of many unknown works for the first time.

An introduction to the very first issue of the Open Access ejournal, Journal of Art Historiography, outlining its central concerns and programme for the future: ‘With the launch of this journal it is hoped that the fundamental problems of the practice of art history will re-enter the arena to become...
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An introduction to the very first issue of the Open Access ejournal, Journal of Art Historiography, outlining its central concerns and programme for the future: ‘With the launch of this journal it is hoped that the fundamental problems of the practice of art history will re-enter the arena to become a central, no longer marginal, activity. Perhaps, as well, art historians will start talking to cultural historians, ethnologists, philologists, archaeologists, museum professionals and other members of the community interested in those artefacts subsumed under the notion of “the history of art”‘.

Fritz Novotny was repeatedly described as a member of the New Vienna School. In my paper I argue that Novotny’s relation to this group is rather ambiguous because Novotny, in spite of all similarities in the descriptions of formal qualities, had a very different attitude towards the role of the indi...
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Fritz Novotny was repeatedly described as a member of the New Vienna School. In my paper I argue that Novotny’s relation to this group is rather ambiguous because Novotny, in spite of all similarities in the descriptions of formal qualities, had a very different attitude towards the role of the individual artwork than Sedlmayr and Pächt. Instead of aiming at a definite decision whether or not to include Novotny in the New Vienna School, the article demonstrates that opinions on this question can be interpreted as the result of different academic traditions in the Anglo-American and the German-speaking scientific communities.

There is a very close, indeed intrinsic, connection between the notions of image and time. Images are incomplete unless they are moving ones – unless, that is, they happen in time. On the other hand, time cannot be conceptualized except by metaphors, and so ultimately by images, of movement in space...
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There is a very close, indeed intrinsic, connection between the notions of image and time. Images are incomplete unless they are moving ones – unless, that is, they happen in time. On the other hand, time cannot be conceptualized except by metaphors, and so ultimately by images, of movement in space. That only the moving image is a full-fledged one is a fact that was fully recognized and articulated by Ernst Gombrich. Also, Gombrich entertained, and argued for, a rich and well-balanced view of the relationships between pictorial and verbal representation. An antidote to the unholy influence of Goodman, Gombrich deserves to be rediscovered as the figure whose work is ideally suited to providing a founding paradigm for a truly successful philosophy of images.

This paper examines the Aboriginal Art revolution that has occurred over the last 40 years in Australia, and in particular, the idea that we should understand Aboriginal art as a form of contemporary art. Not only does the Aboriginal arts movement challenge the legitimacy of Australia’s sovereignty ...
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This paper examines the Aboriginal Art revolution that has occurred over the last 40 years in Australia, and in particular, the idea that we should understand Aboriginal art as a form of contemporary art. Not only does the Aboriginal arts movement challenge the legitimacy of Australia’s sovereignty through its legal claim to and spiritual connection with the land, but it challenges broader historical and art historical myths – the inevitability of the demise of Aboriginal cultures, and artistic myths about the ‘universality’ of art. Artistic claims to the ‘right to appropriate’, if this is what is required for expression of their artistic vision, show themselves to be elements cultural hegemony of colonisation.

The following interviews with Michael Baxandall were conducted in Berkeley on February 3rd and 4th of 1994. The content of these interviews include general responses about developments in art history in the years between 1960 and 1985, a period of dramatic modifications in the discipline. Among the ...
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The following interviews with Michael Baxandall were conducted in Berkeley on February 3rd and 4th of 1994. The content of these interviews include general responses about developments in art history in the years between 1960 and 1985, a period of dramatic modifications in the discipline. Among the issues are the rise of the social history of art and the sources from anthropology that informed Baxandall’s concept of the ‘Period Eye’. Baxandall talks about his own work, his personal intellectual history, and the scholars of past and current generations who influenced him. Other topics include Baxandall’s professional trajectory, the Warburg Library, and aspects of cultural history having to do with Renaissance Humanism. These interviews first appeared as an appendix to the PhD dissertation by Allan Langdale, Art History and Intellectual History: Michael Baxandall’s Work between 1963 and 1985, U. C. Santa Barbara, 1995.

John White and John Shearman were two of Johannes Wilde’s most brilliant students at the Courtauld. Although Wilde did not espouse a method his own concentration on site-specifics of works of art and interest in reconstruction, which was such an important component in his students’ work, can be trac...
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John White and John Shearman were two of Johannes Wilde’s most brilliant students at the Courtauld. Although Wilde did not espouse a method his own concentration on site-specifics of works of art and interest in reconstruction, which was such an important component in his students’ work, can be traced back to Vienna school interests in intense knowledge of the artwork and parallels some of the classic pronouncements of the ‘second’ Vienna school of Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt. By examining Wilde’s method, and various of White’s and Shearman’s studies, this point is demonstrated.

In the present essay of 1936, Julius Schlosser seems to have originated the term of ‘die Wiener Schule de Kunstgeschichte’. After surviving a period of exasperating rivalry with Josef Strzygowski, seeing so many colleagues go to their graves before completing their favorite projects, and possibly si...
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In the present essay of 1936, Julius Schlosser seems to have originated the term of ‘die Wiener Schule de Kunstgeschichte’. After surviving a period of exasperating rivalry with Josef Strzygowski, seeing so many colleagues go to their graves before completing their favorite projects, and possibly since Wilhelm Waetzoldt decided to omit Austrians from his Deutsche Kunsthistoriker, there were several reasons for a man of his age, experience and critical vigor to take stock of a development which seemed to be heading into an uncertain future.

Julius v. Schlosser, The Vienna School of the History of Art - Review of a Century of Austrian Scholarship in German Including a list of members edited by Hans Hahnloser Dedicated to the spirit of Theodor von Sickel and Franz Wickoff on the 25th anniversary of their deaths and the occasion of t...
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Julius v. Schlosser, The Vienna School of the History of Art - Review of a Century of Austrian Scholarship in German Including a list of members edited by Hans Hahnloser Dedicated to the spirit of Theodor von Sickel and Franz Wickoff on the 25th anniversary of their deaths and the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Österreichisches Institut für Geschichtsforschung A translation of ‘Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte‘, Mitteilungen des österreichischen Institut für Geschichtsforschung Ergänzungs-Band 13, Heft 2, Innsbruck: Wagner 1934

This essay examines some theoretical and methodological aspects of Michael Baxandall’s book Giotto and the Orators. Humanist observers of painting in Italy and the discovery of pictorial composition of 1971. It includes reflections on the book’s reorientations of the scholarly debate over the relati...
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This essay examines some theoretical and methodological aspects of Michael Baxandall’s book Giotto and the Orators. Humanist observers of painting in Italy and the discovery of pictorial composition of 1971. It includes reflections on the book’s reorientations of the scholarly debate over the relationship between Renaissance/Early Modern humanism and painting, as well as consideration of the linguistic theories that either directly or tangentially inform Baxandall’s method. Sources such as Wittgenstein, Cassirer, Ordinary Language Philosophy, and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis are discussed. Some of the book’s aims and methods are clarified by a comparison to Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism of 1951.

As was often the case with Vienna School art historians, Max Dvořák (1874-1921) contributed a significant amount to the theory and practice of monument preservation. This paper considers his reactions to the precarious situation of artistic heritage during and after the first world war, which he con...
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As was often the case with Vienna School art historians, Max Dvořák (1874-1921) contributed a significant amount to the theory and practice of monument preservation. This paper considers his reactions to the precarious situation of artistic heritage during and after the first world war, which he conceived as a conflict between spiritual and material values. In writings that betray a less than objective patriotism, Italy emerges as Dvořák’s principal antagonist, whilst critical voices in Austria – that of Karl Kraus in particular – undermined his position by calling for an end to the so-called monument cult.

On the basis of their substantial publications and widely publicized polemics, Alois Riegl and Franz Wickhoff are justifiably considered the founding figures of the so-called Vienna School of Art History. The historical accident that specialized journals did not previously exist, and meetings and pu...
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On the basis of their substantial publications and widely publicized polemics, Alois Riegl and Franz Wickhoff are justifiably considered the founding figures of the so-called Vienna School of Art History. The historical accident that specialized journals did not previously exist, and meetings and public discussions of the methodology of the history of art did not yet regularly take place, should not however obscure the fact that a coherent and outspoken tradition already existed. When Moriz Thausing held his inaugural lecture in 1873, he was delineating a course of study which linked the history of art to the other disciplines as he must have himself already have been teaching for nearly a decade. His discussion of the nature of art and the method of its historical study as distinct from related subjects and particularly philosophical aesthetics are worth recalling in the context of the origins of the academic study of the history of art.

The present article is divided in two parts. The first one deals with the contribution of José E. Burucúa’s book: Historia, Arte, Cultura. De Aby Warburg a Carlo Ginzburg to the field of Warburgian studies. The following aspects receive particular attention throughout this article: (i) the growing i...
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The present article is divided in two parts. The first one deals with the contribution of José E. Burucúa’s book: Historia, Arte, Cultura. De Aby Warburg a Carlo Ginzburg to the field of Warburgian studies. The following aspects receive particular attention throughout this article: (i) the growing importance of Warburg’s thought in relation to the crisis of the major 20th century historical narratives and the linguistic turn; (ii) the relevance of certain concepts (such as das Nachleben der Antike, the Denkraum and Pathosformeln) to the present field of cultural studies, and (iii) Burucúa’s position regarding the current theoretical disputes taking place among those intellectuals influenced by Warburg’s ideas. The second part reproduces an interview with the Argentinean art historian, in which he discusses in detail certain cultural phenomena, through a Warburgian perspective.

The holist view is that the creativity of an author is the manifestation of the creativity of the group he or she belongs to; the individualist view is that the creativity of the group is merely the sum of the creativities of the individuals who constitute that group. The holist understanding of hum...
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The holist view is that the creativity of an author is the manifestation of the creativity of the group he or she belongs to; the individualist view is that the creativity of the group is merely the sum of the creativities of the individuals who constitute that group. The holist understanding of human creativity was particularly widespread among Weimar-era historians and their almost unanimous tendency to adopt holist historical explanations constitutes a collective phenomenon in its own right. The paper explores the problems of providing an individualist explanation of this phenomenon.

My paper discusses the methodical question of the cultural unconscious, taking up the concept of “mentalities” by the Annales school of historiography, and Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “habituality”. The scope is to describe contemporary manifestations in philosophy, literature and artwork in epistem...
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My paper discusses the methodical question of the cultural unconscious, taking up the concept of “mentalities” by the Annales school of historiography, and Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “habituality”. The scope is to describe contemporary manifestations in philosophy, literature and artwork in epistemic terms. Is there a modernist mentality, encompassing different disciplines, genres, and authors? In a case study, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen, and Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematism are subjects of a discourse analysis. Their common denominator is the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, whose legacy is paradigmatic for the intellectual field between European Symbolism and avant-garde.

The essay investigates the way Strzygowski, Dvořák and Tietze interpreted contemporary architecture, and also traces the basic premises of the Vienna School in their views. Viennese art historians, namely Dvořák and Tietze, shared a critical attitude toward historicism and eclecticism of he 19th cen...
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The essay investigates the way Strzygowski, Dvořák and Tietze interpreted contemporary architecture, and also traces the basic premises of the Vienna School in their views. Viennese art historians, namely Dvořák and Tietze, shared a critical attitude toward historicism and eclecticism of he 19th century with their contemporaries. They regarded Otto Wagner as the most influential architect of the generation of 1900, but at the same time, they protested his belief that architectural form could be based solely on constructional reason and utility. They defined the notion that art emerges first from nonmaterial ideals. In opposition against architectural realism, based on the characteristics of technological society, they hold that architecture should be a product of imaginative subjectivity. Unlike advocates of empirical utilitarianism, finding their voice at the time, they stressed on importance of cultivating artistic tradition.

The essay analyzes the philosophical and methodological premises of Julius von Schlosser’s most important contribution in the field of art historiography: Die Kunstliteratur, published in Vienna in 1924. It examines Schlosser’s adoption of paradigms drawn from Croce’s aesthetics and Vossler’s lingui...
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The essay analyzes the philosophical and methodological premises of Julius von Schlosser’s most important contribution in the field of art historiography: Die Kunstliteratur, published in Vienna in 1924. It examines Schlosser’s adoption of paradigms drawn from Croce’s aesthetics and Vossler’s linguistics in order to understand his radical shift from a positivistic method of research to an idealistic conception of the critique as a verbal (repeatable) evocation of the visual (unrepeatable) experience of art. According to Schlosser, works of art, given their relation to intuition, should not be considered potential objects of knowledge, but more appropriately vehicles for an inner, spiritual transformation. Since the “purest essence” of art cannot be reached beyond the “unique moment” of aesthetic experience, Schlosser’s critique no longer tries to analyze the “real centre” of a work of art – namely its “artistic” values – but limits itself to the description of the material conditions closely related to its creation. By means of a “concentric” approach, Schlosser thus investigates any element that belongs to the “historical grammar” of a “language”, giving up any conscious attempt to determine the real “centre” of a work of art, i.e. the untranslatable beauty of its “style”.

One of the most prominent philosophical legacies in the historiography of art history is Erwin Panofsky’s debt to Immanuel Kant. Structurally and thematically, Panofsky imports philosophy, embodied by Kant, into the body of the younger discipline. I will argue that it is Kant’s vision of cosmopolita...
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One of the most prominent philosophical legacies in the historiography of art history is Erwin Panofsky’s debt to Immanuel Kant. Structurally and thematically, Panofsky imports philosophy, embodied by Kant, into the body of the younger discipline. I will argue that it is Kant’s vision of cosmopolitanism that governs the relationships between philosophy and art history for Panofsky. What I call “theory reception” – how Panofsky received Kant and how art history in the U.S.A. received Panofsky, however much he may have downplayed the theoretical aspects of his later work – was in part determined, as it often is, by political factors. I will also ask what would it mean for art history to be cosmopolitan now? To approach these questions, we need to move away from both art history and philosophy to study the re-engagement with the term cosmopolitan in other contemporary discourses.

This article constitutes a detailed critical reading of Edgar Wind’s early work, focussing, in particular, on his German philosophical writings concerning art, art history and art-historical methodology. Through comparisons with the authors Wind tackled (Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, Hans Tietze) ...
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This article constitutes a detailed critical reading of Edgar Wind’s early work, focussing, in particular, on his German philosophical writings concerning art, art history and art-historical methodology. Through comparisons with the authors Wind tackled (Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin, Hans Tietze) and by whom he was influenced (Erwin Panofsky, Alois Riegl), this article shows Wind’s contribution towards a redefinition of art history as an autonomous discipline and his plan of a concrete systematic study of art (konkrete Kunstwissenschaft) confronting the important heritage of the thought of Riegl. By following the path which brought Wind to the definition of a systematically organized table of ‘artistic problems’ – which are fundamental to the art interrogation – supposed to work as a kind of compass for the art historian, this article aims to contribute to the understanding and interpretation of such concepts as ‘style’ and the Riegelian Kunstwollen.

In this contribution, we present an overview and discussion of the key policies, trends and issues in UK education. The focus in the initial sections is more on the school system of early and compulsory education. Later sections focus also on post-compulsory and higher education, and links to the wo...
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In this contribution, we present an overview and discussion of the key policies, trends and issues in UK education. The focus in the initial sections is more on the school system of early and compulsory education. Later sections focus also on post-compulsory and higher education, and links to the world of work. There are four home countries in the UK – England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales – with increasingly divergent education systems. Where possible and relevant we distinguish these systems, especially at the start of the chapter. However, it is not possible within space constraints to provide detailed discussion of the distinctive legislative framework in each home country and for the purpose of this chapter we have focused primarily on England, which is the most populous of the home countries.

Japan and the U.S. have a long intimate relationship. Both have a history together that has included some of the most epic clashes and collaborations of all time. It stands to reason that even though both countries differ markedly in culture, values, socially accepted norms and conventions, there ex...
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Japan and the U.S. have a long intimate relationship. Both have a history together that has included some of the most epic clashes and collaborations of all time. It stands to reason that even though both countries differ markedly in culture, values, socially accepted norms and conventions, there exist similarities as well, especially in the way mass media texts are related to the social domains for which they exist. This critical analysis of two editorial news articles covering the tragedy at Virginia Tech in April of 2007 - one from a Japanese/International perspective and the other from an American perspective - will attempt to show, through critical discourse analysis, how the authors’ texts, reflect and serve to at least contribute to defining the society for which they have been written (Coulthard, 1991). Norman Fairclough, who is considered one of the founders of critical discourse analysis, lays the foundation upon which this analysis is built. This analysis will first identify five “aspects of textuality” (Fairclough, 1989) as they appear in the articles, and then will proceed with the Fairclough’s “interpretation of the interaction” in part 2. Part 3 is devoted to explaining how the identification and interpretation above “are inserted in social action” (Fairclough, 1992a and b, 1995). How discourse is shaped by relations of power and ideologies will be brought to light in parts two and three through a critical analysis looking at the following five aspects: 1) visibility and invisibility, 2) consistency, 3) modality, 4) relational processes, and 5) common sense appeal.

This paper builds upon an earlier analysis presented in this journal. Using official figures for school compositions and for outcomes at KS4 from 1997 to 2007, this paper considers each of the annual cohorts of new Academies in England, from 2002 to 2006. It shows that their level of success in comp...
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This paper builds upon an earlier analysis presented in this journal. Using official figures for school compositions and for outcomes at KS4 from 1997 to 2007, this paper considers each of the annual cohorts of new Academies in England, from 2002 to 2006. It shows that their level of success in comparison to their predecessors, national averages, their changing compositions, and their changing exam entry practices, are insubstantial. Of course some schools are gaining higher scores since Academisation, but others are gaining lower scores. Using the most recent results available there is no clear evidence that Academies produce better results than local authority schools with equivalent intakes. The Academies programme therefore presents an opportunity cost for no apparent gain.

This background paper is concerned with the intersection between Hinduism and international development. It provides an overview of existing studies, discusses the views of some of the main academic interpreters who have drawn attention to links between Hinduism and issues relevant to development, a...
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This background paper is concerned with the intersection between Hinduism and international development. It provides an overview of existing studies, discusses the views of some of the main academic interpreters who have drawn attention to links between Hinduism and issues relevant to development, and refers to relevant religious organizations.The paper is divided into three main sections. The first section aims to clarify what is meant by the 'Hindu Tradition'. In the second section, the relationship between Hinduism and some concepts and debates relevant to development (social ethics, including human rights and inequality; political systems; and attitudes towards economics, including notions of wellbeing, poverty and wealth) are explored. The final section contains a more focussed investigation into some important contemporary development issues and the ways that Hindus might approach them.

Managing references is a labour intensive, but necessary part of Information Management. Referencing correctly ensures that appropriate credit is given to sources and authors used to support research, avoids plagiarism and provides evidence that adequate research has been undertaken. If references a...
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Managing references is a labour intensive, but necessary part of Information Management. Referencing correctly ensures that appropriate credit is given to sources and authors used to support research, avoids plagiarism and provides evidence that adequate research has been undertaken. If references are found incomplete and hence are untraceable then there is a serious problem for you, your organisation and your users. There are now a growing number of reference software packages which can help both you and your users in this process. This article outlines what reference software is, issues to consider when choosing a package to support with examples of software packages and concludes with information about a campaign to simplify the whole process!

At the University of Birmingham, 2008 was the first time that library staff were involved in a Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), and by ensuring the completion of all record elements and the sourcing of over 4,000 items, they became an integral part of the process. This article highlights the info...
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At the University of Birmingham, 2008 was the first time that library staff were involved in a Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), and by ensuring the completion of all record elements and the sourcing of over 4,000 items, they became an integral part of the process. This article highlights the information retrieval and metadata skills that they brought to the task, and the lasting benefits of involvement in the project, from better quality output data to enhanced processes for the ongoing collection and validation of publication information. In addition, there is a greater awareness of the skills and expertise of librarians in this area, which will remain even more pertinent for support in the successor to the RAE, the Research Excellence Framework (REF).

In their technical report “On the bitopological nature of Stone duality” Jung and Moshier axiomatise a bitopological space as a d-frame, which can equivalently be described as a partial frame, a structure with two orders, one being a special Scott domain and the other a complete lattice. The rich ...
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In their technical report “On the bitopological nature of Stone duality” Jung and Moshier axiomatise a bitopological space as a d-frame, which can equivalently be described as a partial frame, a structure with two orders, one being a special Scott domain and the other a complete lattice. The rich interaction of these two orders arises from a ternary operation on distributive lattices and is informally known as the 90-degree-lemma. Motivation for considering a second order originates in Belnap’s four-valued logic. The infinitary connections of the two orders are based on a set of axioms which are derived from the Stone duality for bitopological spaces. In this paper it is shown that the axioms given by Jung and Moshier contain some previously unknown redundancies. The redundancies yield an isomorphism of two categories, one having special Scott domains as objects and the other a certain type of complete lattice.

This article explores whether and the extent to which the Islamic tradition espouses particular development models. Specifically the purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of recent materials produced by relevant Islamic institutions and by some of the main academic interpreters, in order t...
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This article explores whether and the extent to which the Islamic tradition espouses particular development models. Specifically the purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of recent materials produced by relevant Islamic institutions and by some of the main academic interpreters, in order to assist in the development of a basic conceptual understanding of the factors that may influence particular Islamic approaches to development issues encountered in the field. As background, first some trends in the study of Islam are identified, and then a brief history of Islamic civilization is sketched. The paper then moves to explain the basic tenets of the Muslim face, followed by a description of the main Islamic sects. The article finally moves to an exploration of some key pan-Islamic organizations, and their role in development.

This paper provides a review of literature that bears on the relationship between Sikhism and development. At its most general level, this review raises the question of whether the Sikh tradition is compatible with or hinders development, as generally understood in the mainstream 'development discou...
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This paper provides a review of literature that bears on the relationship between Sikhism and development. At its most general level, this review raises the question of whether the Sikh tradition is compatible with or hinders development, as generally understood in the mainstream 'development discourse.'Various facets of development are discussed by examining the Sikh scriptural writings on those subjects, and how Sikh norms and beliefs have evolved into particular ethical practices bearing on developmental issues. Thus, the teaching of Sikhism on key development concepts and practices, such as wealth, poverty and inequality, are discussed along with related topics of debt, credit and usury. The paper also tests a popular image of Sikhs' contribution to rapid economic development in Indian Punjab and juxtaposes it with the contemporary crisis in Punjab agriculture, which is marked by decreasing productivity and an environmental crisis.

Both reactive and deliberative qualities are essential for a good action selection mechanism. We present a model that embodies a hybrid of two very different neural network architectures inside an animat: one that controls their high level deliberative behaviours, such as the selection of sub-goals,...
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Both reactive and deliberative qualities are essential for a good action selection mechanism. We present a model that embodies a hybrid of two very different neural network architectures inside an animat: one that controls their high level deliberative behaviours, such as the selection of sub-goals, and one that provides reactive and navigational capabilities. Animats using this model are evolved in novel and dynamic environments, on complex tasks requiring deliberative behaviours: tasks that cannot be solved by reactive mechanisms alone and which would traditionally have their solutions formulated in terms of search-based planning. Significantly, no a priori information is given to the animats, making explicit forward search through state transitions impossible. The complexity of the problem means that animats must first learn to solve sub-goals without receiving any reward. Animats are shown increasingly complex versions of the task, with the results demonstrating, for the first time, incremental neuro-evolutionary learning on such tasks.

This article describes Phase 2 of the ICT Skills project, which used the WebCT Virtual Learning Environment to deliver information literacy and IT Skills training materials to 2nd and 3rd year undergraduates at the University Of Birmingham. It describes the aims of the project, the development of le...
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This article describes Phase 2 of the ICT Skills project, which used the WebCT Virtual Learning Environment to deliver information literacy and IT Skills training materials to 2nd and 3rd year undergraduates at the University Of Birmingham. It describes the aims of the project, the development of learning objects in conjunction with partner schools, responses from the wider academic community, and feedback from the Information Literacy practitioner community. It also discusses the problems and issues surrounding embedding Information Literacy learning objects within the curriculum and the student experience. The authors conclude by identifying the beneficial outcomes of the project.

This paper provides an overview of the literature concerning African Traditional Religion and its relationship to development. Given the shortage of material pertaining specifically to this topic, the paper attempts to use the available broader literature to shed light on how the religious tradition...
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This paper provides an overview of the literature concerning African Traditional Religion and its relationship to development. Given the shortage of material pertaining specifically to this topic, the paper attempts to use the available broader literature to shed light on how the religious tradition views certain concepts related to development, how these concepts have evolved over time, and how the religion underpins the social and cultural attitudes and behaviour of Africans. The paper is also intended to provide a basic overview of the religious tradition to readers who may be unfamiliar with it.

The main aim of this background paper is to provide an understanding of the development studies literature and how this has evolved over time, to inform work on the relationships between religions and development, especially for those who are engaging in research on development issues for the first ...
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The main aim of this background paper is to provide an understanding of the development studies literature and how this has evolved over time, to inform work on the relationships between religions and development, especially for those who are engaging in research on development issues for the first time. Central to this review is an understanding of 'development' and how it has been conceptualised from different perspectives and in different areas. the review starts by examining the meaning of 'development', and different approaches to development, starting from classical understandings to contemporary conceptualisations.The debates leading to the current pre-occupation with 'poverty reduction' are summarised, with a specific section devoted to conceptions of poverty. In section 4, self-styled alternatives to the mainstream areas of development literature are discussed briefly. Finally an outline some areas within the development studies literature that deal with issues of religion/faith is included.

The aim of this study is to provide a background paper that is concerned with the intersection between Buddhism and international development. Firstly, it provides a brief overview of Buddhist teachings, beliefs and practices; secondly, it will discuss the relationship between Buddhist values and ke...
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The aim of this study is to provide a background paper that is concerned with the intersection between Buddhism and international development. Firstly, it provides a brief overview of Buddhist teachings, beliefs and practices; secondly, it will discuss the relationship between Buddhist values and key development concerns; and, finally, it will provide a more focussed investigation into some areas of development and the way that Buddhists might approach them (i.e. ecology;economics, poverty, debt and borrowing; gender; and peacebuilding).

This paper aims to give an overview of thinking on development and related issues in the major Christian traditions. The paper is divided into five sections: Roman Catholic social teaching; liberal Protestantism and social Christianity; the Ecumenical movement and liberation theology; Conservative-E...
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This paper aims to give an overview of thinking on development and related issues in the major Christian traditions. The paper is divided into five sections: Roman Catholic social teaching; liberal Protestantism and social Christianity; the Ecumenical movement and liberation theology; Conservative-Evangelical and Fundamentalist movements, and Pentecostal and independent indigenous churches. The paper concludes by summarising Christian attitudes to the key concepts of the Religions and Development project and Christian approaches to the key issues.

This paper reviews literature that is concerned with the role of religion in public administration and management. Firstly we provide some conceptual clarifications and then go on to examine and compare the key features of the traditional/bureaucratic model and the new public management model (NPM),...
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This paper reviews literature that is concerned with the role of religion in public administration and management. Firstly we provide some conceptual clarifications and then go on to examine and compare the key features of the traditional/bureaucratic model and the new public management model (NPM), as well as the theoretical frameworks and values that underpin them. We then move to assess the extent to which the mainstream literature in public administration/management considers aspects of values and beliefs and the role of religion with respect to these. This section also reviews literature that discusses the influence of culture on public administration and development. In section four we review the few studies that have directly addressed the role of religion in public administration/management, and finally, in section five, we attempt to identify research gaps.

Recognition of social diversity and difference has, over the last few decades, had a profound impact on development theory. Concerns of the different needs, roles and experiences of various gender, disability, age, and ethnicity groups have started to shape how theorists and practitioners alike enga...
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Recognition of social diversity and difference has, over the last few decades, had a profound impact on development theory. Concerns of the different needs, roles and experiences of various gender, disability, age, and ethnicity groups have started to shape how theorists and practitioners alike engage with development issues. Until very recently, however, the literature has been peculiarly silent on the role and place of religion. In this working paper, which introduces the University of Birmingham's state-of-the-art Religions and Development Programme (RAD), the reasons for this relative neglect of religion are explored alongside a delineation of RAD's central research questions.

The EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service) project is building on previous e-thesis (or EDT) initiatives, and co-ordinating the work of some of the key players in the UK to develop a service for finding, accessing and archiving digital copies of Doctoral theses produced in UK higher education inst...
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The EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service) project is building on previous e-thesis (or EDT) initiatives, and co-ordinating the work of some of the key players in the UK to develop a service for finding, accessing and archiving digital copies of Doctoral theses produced in UK higher education institutions. Key issues for the project are the development of a sound financial basis for a successful service, the provision of advice needed by authors and university staff on handling intellectual property rights, and protecting legitimate needs for confidentiality. EThOS will also establish workable and standards-based procedures for populating e-thesis repositories with current and retrospectively-acquired digital versions of theses and associated metadata. These developments must also fit with universities’ own internal administrative arrangements and regulations. The project aims to deliver an e-thesis infrastructure that is both technically and financially sustainable, together with a full supporting toolkit of guidance, standards and procedures.

This article focuses on the field of adoption to illustrate how an interpretative methodological approach to a single extract of research text can suggest diverse ways of making sense of an adoptive parent’s experience. We seek to demonstrate an approach to understanding text as narrative using a sh...
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This article focuses on the field of adoption to illustrate how an interpretative methodological approach to a single extract of research text can suggest diverse ways of making sense of an adoptive parent’s experience. We seek to demonstrate an approach to understanding text as narrative using a short extract from a long interview with an adoptive mother. Our analysis of this fragment sets out to show the richness, complexity and ambiguities of the respondent’s experience as they are expressed in her words. An argument is briefly presented for the utility of this approach for social work practitioners working in the area of adoption and fostering, and, by implication, in other areas of social work. Key words: narrative, adoption, meaning, text, user-centred

The educational inclusion of pupils with special, or additional, educational needs is being promoted internationally. One would expect that professionals for whom the group identity as ‘special professional’ is both important and perceived as being under threat, would only be supportive of inclusion...
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The educational inclusion of pupils with special, or additional, educational needs is being promoted internationally. One would expect that professionals for whom the group identity as ‘special professional’ is both important and perceived as being under threat, would only be supportive of inclusion if it could be orchestrated in a way which fosters that identity. This paper provides a review of the research literature concerning social group identification and perceived threat with particular reference to out-group derogation, perception of group structure and in-group affirming behaviour. This review provides the context for findings from a scale about social identity (devised for this research) concerning an e mail group oriented to professionals working with children with special needs (N=105). The survey identified three social identity factors (perceived typicality, public reference to the group and identification with prototypical group members). High (compared with low) e mail group message senders were less likely to see themselves as typical of workers in the field but more likely to identify with SEN as a group. The work has conceptual interest in that it supports recent theorising in social identity, and in an area for which there is a need for a greater variety of studies having good ecological validity. The work also has considerable relevance as an example of the possible application of psychological theories to the special needs context of fostering effective change concerning inclusion and integration.

These three short pieces were entries to a competition on "Tricky Stats" that were each published in British Psychological Sciety's monthly periodical, The Psychologist, in 1994 or 1995. [There is a slightly longer unpublished version of the piece on 'scales' at the end of this e-paper. See also a s...
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These three short pieces were entries to a competition on "Tricky Stats" that were each published in British Psychological Sciety's monthly periodical, The Psychologist, in 1994 or 1995. [There is a slightly longer unpublished version of the piece on 'scales' at the end of this e-paper. See also a short communication by this author in the journal Appetite (53, 438-441) for 2009, called "The basics of quantitative judgment."] The series then ended.