My research on the importance of Acapulco as a part of the maritime Silk Roads highlights the significant artistic fusions resulting from the Manila Galleons and underscores the importance of recognizing Acapulco as a vital part of the Silk Roads. The purpose of my paper is to disprove Eurocentric Hegelian perceptions of art history as originating in the East and evolving in the West by drawing attention to Acapulco’s exports, which oppose the notion of East to West influence and petition a more nuanced, non-linear approach to art history. Moreover, my research draws attention to traditionally marginalized indigenous and immigrant groups and their impact on the development of culture and art on the Silk Roads, reminding historians of the oppression upon which the glamor of the Silk Roads rested. My paper explains the complex history of Acapulco, from a proud Yopitzingo city-state, independent from the Aztec kingdom, to a Spanish colony and endpoint on the Manila Galleon. Acapulco’s shifts in terms of ethnography, economics, culture, and art after the 1500s were largely driven by colonialism. This is reflected clearly in Acapulco’s art, which was indeed colonized. There was very little demand for products made local to Acapulco beyond imitations of other cultures, such as the incredibly popular imitation blue and white ceramics produced in the city or Christian ivory statuettes commissioned by Spaniards. As such, Acapulco shows the erasure of Yope and Aztec culture through the enslavement of an entire civilization. The glaring shifts in the art passing through Acapulco are evidence of the stamping out of indigenous culture and the oppression of a peoples, to the point that the only places where indigenous culture can be seen are through peripheral gleams in the art produced in nearby regions, such as the use of indigenous techniques in tapestry weaving.

In 1845, the French illustrated magazine Le Magasin Pittoresque reproduced the print Costumes de Femme à Panama depicting two Panamanian women in polleras (traditional South American dresses), which was part of the publication’s ongoing effort to cater to men of “discernible” taste. My discussion of this print raises questions regarding the veracity of this depiction of Panamanian women and wonders how much of this composition was informed by France’s colonialist, primitive, and even orientalist imagination. This presentation will argue that prints such as Costumes de Femme à Panama constructed a colonial fantasy for a French audience that ignored or deliberately obscured the nuances of nineteenth-century Panamanian racial dynamics. The term “Latin America” was coined by Michel Chevalier in his Des Intérêts Matériels en France (1838) and later popularized by Napoleon III. This term promoted a shared “Latin” heritage with France and homogenized diverse local populations into a single “racial” category despite the complex notions of race imposed during the Spanish colonial period. France used this tactic to justify its colonial interventions in the region to the Latin American and European public. Similarly, Costumes de Femme à Panama uses costume to denote this homogeneous Latin American identity. Recent scholarship on so-called travel prints draws connections between surviving paintings, prints, and ethnographic studies produced after eighteenth-century scientific expeditions to the Americas. Building upon this scholarship, I juxtapose Costumes de Femme à Panama with similar images and textual descriptions from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century journals and travel magazines. My analysis further explores the use of costume as a visual codifier for race, and I demonstrate that prints were fundamental in perpetuating this “racialized otherness” within the European imagination.

This talk examines the influential but under-examined publishing activity of Mexican artist Adolfo Best-Maugard in the 1920s. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Mexico and the United States lacked a cultural, diplomatic and economic relationship.  However, in the 1920s Mexico entered a period of reconstruction that stimulated American interest in Mexico. Mexican artist Best-Maugard served as one of the first Mexican cultural attachés to the United States following the revolutionary period. In the period between 1922-1923 he conducted a series of lectures in California on his drawing method based on Mexican folk art and seven universal essential forms that he synthesized from designs in pre-Hispanic ceramics. Best-Maugard’s drawing method was subject to the 1923 Mexican book Método de Dibujo that the artist developed for the Mexican Department of Education. Best-Maugard’s lectures in California during the 1920s were revolutionary because they introduced the United States public to Mexican art and they solidified cultural and diplomatic relationships between the United States and Mexico.

In 1926, Alfred K. Knopf published A Method for Creative Design, an English-language edition of Best Maugard’s 1923 Mexican book Método de Dibujo. A Method for Creative Design deviates both visually and conceptually from its Mexican counterpart. The content of Método de Dibujo focuses on creating a national Mexican type of art and making art education accessible to public school students whereas the American edition excludes any political content that could be directly related to Mexico. The American edition introduces Best-Maugard’s theory of the seven essential forms to the US public through a universalizing lens by including images of folk art from a variety of cultures. The change in audience highlights the manipulation of content and images the US edition underwent to satisfy the American market. Contrasting with the Mexican version, A Method for Creative Design emphasizes secular subjects in its illustrations rather than creating nationalistic artistic intentions. I argue that the book, with its essential changes, constituted a form of soft diplomacy.

Modernism in architecture was born in Europe as a response to the rapid urbanization of cities and strived to solve the rising social and environmental problems using practical and utilitarian design. In Mexico, modernist architecture gains momentum on the second half of the 20^th century therefore becoming a style that represents progress and industrialization. Through close analysis of the works San Cristobal Ranch by Luis Barragán and the Central Library at UNAM (Autonomous National University of Mexico) by Juan O’Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra, and Juan Martínez de Velasco we can appreciate how, in comparison to European modern architecture, which focuses on utility, Mexican architecture aims to also identify itself as purely Mexican by incorporating folklore and cultural elements into the architectural space.

Both the San Cristobal Ranch and the Central Library use modernist architectural theory to construct buildings that will help alleviate the problems of a growing city, while also incorporating elements such as material, color, and figurative elements that reference Mexican folklore and culture in order to establish an architectural style that can be identified as purely Mexican.

Numerous influential female protagonists have appeared as common subjects throughout the history of art, such as Penelope (The Odyssey), Mary Magdalene (The Bible), and Little Red Riding Hood. The empowering stories centered around these prominent female figures are relevant both at the time they were told and in the present day. Destijidas (translated to “Unwoven”) by Marianela de la Hoz, an influential artist with roots in Mexican surrealism, is a collection of paintings displaying recognizable female figures with a modern twist. Through the contemporary representation of familiar fictional and historical women, de la Hoz weaves together lessons from tales of women who came before us with the current female experience. Specifically, she alludes to modern issues that primarily affect women, including sex trafficking, abusive relationships, and superficial beauty standards. My research investigates how de la Hoz’s works reimagine past stories to comment on what it means to be a woman in today’s society.

In terms of defining surrealism, surrealist art history has been dominated by a European-centric and male view, and little has been discussed about Surrealism within the Americas or the place women artists have had in the movement. My research furthers the conversations brought out by art historians, such as Michele Greet and Dawn Adés. This theory is continued and expressed in works by other female surrealist artists working in Mexico, and I use the specific examples of Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Frida Kahlo. My research looks at the exhibition In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States (LACMA, 2012) to define the lines between American and European Surrealism and looks at the rise of popular female surrealist artists in the Americas. The exhibition In Wonderland expands female representation and artistic expression which further redefines how we view surrealism.

Alma Lopez’s Our Lady artfully displays an idea many other contemporary Mexican women artists are engaging in conversations about: their religious and cultural identity as a hybrid of Catholic and Indigenous traditions. Paintings, poems, and prints have recognized these two distinct forces influencing female identity and describe them as forming a fusion within the individual Mexican woman, leaving the art (and the artist) neither totally Indigenous nor totally Catholic, but a unique blend of the two. In representing relevant female religious icons such as the Virgin of Guadalupe, Tonantzin, Coatlicue, Coyolxauhqui, and others, we can see how contemporary women pull from the unique syncretism of Aztec and Catholic iconography to form their understanding of their Mexican identity. Their declaration of the unity born from the hybridity of these two influences within themselves is not a novel idea, but rather a crucial part of Mexican history. I am investigating the presence of syncretism in colonial art to show the continuity of this theme between the Baroque and contemporary representations of the same ideas. The church of Santa María Tonanzintla and the Virgin of Guadalupe are two works I will study to show how Indigenous and Catholic beliefs and artistic styles are brought together to inform the culture. Representations of Our Lady of Guadalupe display not only artistic syncretism during the colonial Baroque period in Mexico, but also religious syncretism between Indigenous goddesses and Spanish beliefs about Mary, the mother of Christ; these continue to influence female Mexican identity today.

This paper aims to explore the visual potentialities of Martinican philosopher and poet Edouard Glissant’s concept of opacity from his 1990 publication, “Poetics of Relation”, in the context of Peter Doig’s 2014 exhibition “No Foreign Lands.” By examining the interplay between Glissant’s poetics and Doig’s paintings, this thesis aims to foster a dialogue between these two forms of expression, illuminating the ways in which visual art and philosophy can intersect and inform each other. Doig, a leading contemporary artist of Scottish origin who currently resides in Trinidad, explores themes of identity, memory, and place in his paintings, challenging the notion of fixed and essential identities, instead presenting a fluid and ever-evolving concept of self. In doing so, Doig’s works relate to Glissant’s idea of the right to opacity, which asserts that individuals have the right to maintain a sense of mystery and resist the imposition of fixed identities upon them. The notion of the right to opacity can be understood as a challenge to transparent models of identity construction that seek to impose fixed and essential identities onto individuals reinforcing the binary opposition of the colonizer and the colonized—the Self and the Other. Doig’s paintings, working within a magical realism framework with their dreamlike and surreal qualities, reflect the right to opacity by refusing to provide clear narratives or meanings and inviting viewers to engage in open-ended and imaginative exploration of the artwork. By celebrating the right to opacity, Doig’s paintings resist the forces that seek to reduce individuals to easily recognizable and predictable categories. The study of opacity in Doig’s artwork underscores the significance of visual language—that is the capacity of art to convey complex ideas and emotions—in effectively communicating and translating ideas and thoughts across cultural spaces and disciplines. Working through a post-colonial paradigm, this thesis examines the question of how art can bring about social progress through the political and aesthetic analysis of ten works of art by Doig and how they challenge the seemingly insular and exoticized depiction of the Caribbean. The works under examination are: Grand Riviere, House of Pictures, Paragon, Metropolitan, Moruga, Painting for Wall Painters, Pelican, 100 Years Ago, Untitled (Paramin), and Red Boat. The exploration of Glissant’s concept of opacity in Doig’s artwork offers a unique lens through which to examine the intersection of visual art and philosophy, and to explore the ways in which artists can use their work to resist dominant narratives and create a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of the world.

Museums (their contents, funding, and spatial occupation) have increasingly come under scrutiny as institutions of white supremacy – as spaces of domination, exploitation or harbingers of colonial exploits. It is important to center the human histories that are buried beneath an amorphous understanding of the museum’s violence; more specifically, identifying the people that were exploited or effaced so that the museum may exist. The research begins with the Smith College Museum of Art, investigating the family who funded it. The extensive search for evidence of generational wealth, yielded an obscure will detailing the handover of furniture, animals, and an enslaved girl: June. Alongside this museum investigation, I began looking at the unceded land of Smith College and the history of its spatial planning. The landscape design of Smith was done by Frederick Olmstead II (who directly hailed from a settler colonial family). Through following the legacy of Olmstead’s work, I arrived at Central Park in New York. Central Park was created in 1858 after the dissolution of Seneca Village, a bustling Black community. In the 1870s the Metropolitan Museum of Art was constructed in the park. Beginning with a consideration of Smith College as a locus point (focusing on the museum as well as the surrounding land), I was able to follow threads right up to the Met and its surrounding land. This allows for a comparative understanding of the violence of museum architecture, space, and history. Tracing this history was possible precisely because the archive privileges whiteness, and it is our responsibility as researchers to investigate the gaps and grasp for non-white histories. The existence of museums often depends on the ‘non-existence’ of Black and Indigenous people, and if we wish to do the work of deconstructing/decolonizing museums, we must re-construct their stories, and retrieve their names, first.

In my presentation, I discuss the historical significance of cabinets of curiosities and collecting practices that provided the foundation for modern museums. Some display practices in contemporary museums can be traced to early cabinets of curiosities and rooms dedicated to collections encompassing “wonders of the world”. Original Wunderkammers, or spaces built for the purpose of housing personal collections, often served to elevate collectors’ social status, provide a physical mark of their intelligence, and display exotic and often exaggerated findings from the newly explored world beyond Europe. The popularity of obtaining power through material wealth and scientific knowledge made cabinets of curiosities, or Wunderkammers, the perfect outlets for public and private collections of individuals wishing to climb the social ladder, or even more so relevant for scholars, doctors and theorists wishing to document growing knowledge about the world. Such spaces provided a unique foundation for how objects were arranged and presented, and thereby allowed for personal expression and experimentation: for example, geological specimens would be presented side-by-side with archeological materials, art objects, taxidermied animals, and preserved insects. Collecting as an art form has also seen its own evolution, evident in the way contemporary museums are designed, as well as how audiences contextualize diverse objects presented together.

As a double major in studio art and art history, I have combined my interest in the historical phenomenon of cabinets of curiosity with my own studio practice, allowing my art historical research to inform my artwork. Similar to the historical practices of collectors, when their personality and interests were flaunted through the objects they collected, much of my thesis has centered around the creation of a physical environment – a room – “populated” by vignettes made with various found and art objects arranged in a particular fashion, considering the act of arranging an art form.

It is easy to characterize Isabella Stewart Gardner’s famous Boston collection at her beloved home in Fenway as eclectic and maximalist. Art of all kinds—paintings, marble sculptures, tapestries—burst from every corner of her Venetian-inspired palace. Looking beyond the surface, however, uncovers Gardner’s intentionality at the heart of her museum. In my thesis, I examine Gardner’s collecting practices and the installation of her Courtyard by focusing on her Greco-Roman antiquities. These pieces—specifically the mosaic in the middle—literally and thematically center the museum. Gardner’s antiquities tie her to a complex network of dealers and collectors working out of Italy and grappling against the new country’s burgeoning desire to claim its heritage. Pursuing this, I primarily focus on her acquisition decision-making process, the provenance of her antiquities, and their subsequent journey to Boston. Next, I describe the present context of Gardner’s antiquities in the Courtyard. Gardner uses her antiquities to guide her visitors through an experience of her courtyard sculpture garden, creating a radical, distinctly feminine space as well as a juxtaposition between the almost static ancient objects and the ever growing, ever blooming flora. Finally, I conclude by connecting Gardner’s “classical” garden to the construction of America’s own claims to a classical heritage. Her acquisition of ancient art reinforces the American imperialist assertion of a cultural legacy that stretched back to Greco-Roman antiquity. Thus, Gardner’s antiquities reinforce her contemporary colonial power structures, even while she attempts to subvert this system.

Adelaide Milton de Groot was a New York art collector and painter who amassed a rich collection of art that she lent and willed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, most of her paintings were never displayed during her life and were deaccessioned after her death. As a wealthy female artist, she was both an insider and an outsider of the art world. This paper will analyze her painting Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition where the exhibition acts as an allegory for her adverse relationship with the New York art world. The composition of the scene and the fences erected around the exhibition are painted in a way that keep de Groot as the painter and the viewer out of the courtyard. Items inside of it, like the motifs of nature, maintain a sense of ease for the elite society the art world wants to contain in its bubble-like canon. Strategically forced onto viewers, elements from the surrounding city are mirrored but distorted in the exhibition for the collection to be seen as life in a specific, idealized way.

With Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition, de Groot reveals how museums do not want people to see the reality of the world, just their curated collection, which contrasts with the diverse collection de Groot was intent on creating. This paper compares de Groot’s struggles and how she confronted them with those of Florine Stettheimer, another quasi-alienated artist with an inclination to depict her city and the world around her as she saw it, rather than how it wanted to see itself. De Groot exposes the façade the art world wants to create because, in actuality, art is about the realness of expression, not an idealized, unrealistic narrative, but de Groot’s philosophy was never put into practice because of the Metropolitan’s disregard of her collection.

As the American Alexander Calder (1898-1976) and Russian Naum Gabo (1890-1977) began developing their own original models and practices for a renewed sculpture for the modern age, they were separated by thousands of miles and nowhere near in contact with each other, yet they each separately arrived at remarkably similar solutions to the same artistic problem. Thus, the question is: How were Calder and Gabo given similar opportunities to separately explore the aesthetic possibilities of modern conceptions of space and time through their radical contributions to sculpture in their careers? A comparative historical analysis of Calder’s and Gabo’s lives and works reveals that the two were provided unique but equal opportunities to explore space and time as formal aesthetic elements of sculpture given their shared context within the history of science—specifically in relation to Einstein’s development in the early 20^th century of a four-dimensional model for spacetime. Research of the lives of the artists shows a very similar development of a mathematical understanding of reality within each of them, which culminated separately in their maturity into a deep appreciation for the beauty of the universe in a radically modern Einsteinian sense. Through an analysis of prime objects within each artist’s oeuvre alongside an attention to important texts and perspectives provided by the artists themselves, the research within this paper shows how a new awareness of universal beauty provided through the lens of Einstein and modern science allowed Calder and Gabo to each invent radically new systems of sculpture which include space and time as formal elements of expression.

The central atrium of Washington, DC’s Ronald Reagan Building hides the largest neon artwork in North America. Designed by renowned post-minimalist sculptor Keith Sonnier, the lattice structure of Route Zenith’s neon tubing is meant to orient guests to the sprawling federal complex. Installed through the controversial Art-in-Architecture program, the work has enjoyed relative obscurity during its 25-year lifespan, despite its home in the notorious capstone building of the Federal Triangle. For this paper, I use Route Zenith as a case study to analyze the changing public imagination of federal aesthetics. To do this, I examine the design history of the Federal Triangle, culminating in the Reagan Building, as the exemplary “classic” federal style which communicates civic ideals to its audience. I contrast this history with the many rejections of AIA-produced sculptures, illuminating the alienating effects of abstract works and their illegibility in federal spaces. Sonnier’s work married these two histories in a transitional moment for the AIA and demonstrated a novel approach to integrating an abstract work into an active environment. Through the exploration of the intertwined histories encapsulated in Route Zenith’s installation emerges a new understanding of modern conflicts in “federal” art.

Isabella D’Este (1474-1539) has been regarded by scholars as one of the most important art collectors and patrons in the History of Art. In a male-dominated art market, Isabella’s gender and lack of funds make her collection, comprising works of diverse media such as drawing, painting and tapestries of works, by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea Mantegna, Giulio Romano, and Titian, even more astonishing. As a result, Isabella had an impressive degree of influence on the politics and collecting dynamics of her time. However, in more recent times, Art Historians have shifted their attention to problematic Renaissance court practices, such as acquiring individuals and servants for display and self-fashioning purposes. For example, the presence of dwarves in Early Modern Italian courts was not uncommon, as documented by works of art and archives. Although Isabella D’Este adhered to these practices, her acquisition of Black servants stands out as an exceptionally early instance where European nobility perceived Blackness as a hereditary and secular marker of racial difference – a notion that has developed into the history of slavery.

In my paper, I explore the impetus in Renaissance Art History to explore issues of race, difference, and colonialism through the lens of art collecting, providing unique insights into the motivations behind patronage decisions. In addition to assembling an awe-inspiring art collection, the extensive amount of original surviving letters both written and received by Isabella also makes her one of the most studied collectors in the History of Art. To delve deep into Isabella’s acquisition of Black court servants, I physically analyzed epistolary archives, finding important insights about Blackness in the court of Isabella D’Este. Through close object based visual analysis and research on works of art that depicted Black individuals and were commissioned by Isabella D’Este and her close relatives, I have been able to relate the presence of Black servants and/or courtiers with Isabella’s art patronage. Isabella’s practices have not only influenced the treatment of Black individuals in European aristocratic environments in the following years, but also produced a new Western European vision towards Blackness. Acquiring Black individuals had a role in building a particular visual appearance for Isabella’s court and persona.

Properzia de’Rossi is utterly anomalous. The earliest Italian female sculptor by over two centuries, she was the only woman to receive her own chapter in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. Vasari situates Properzia in a pantheon of exceptional women from history and myth, evoking a longer tradition of particularly excellent women transcending their (then assumed) biological limitations. He describes Properzia as a gifted sculptures and a great beauty, virtuous and accomplished in all household matters: “This Properzia was very beautiful in person, and played and sang in her day better than any other woman of her city.” Properzia is thus portrayed as superior not only in artistic talent but also in conventional measures of womanly grace and virtue. However, primary records paint a wildly different picture of Properzia’s life, revealing that she appeared in court for several violent and destructive acts, including an attack on a fellow artist. These charges were made before Vasari’s Lives were written, and evidence suggests that Vasari was aware of them. This strange discrepancy begs the question: Why did Vasari represent the transgressive Properzia as virtuous?

Vasari’s Lives contains both heroes and villains–artists who represent aspirational conduct, and counter-examples whose moral failings reinforce the other group’s virtues. Properzia, the sole woman given her own chapter, occupies a complicated position within this moralizing structure, in which she is made to represent women artists as a whole. Women were considered intrinsically less capable of artistic production, and female artists thus held an incredibly tenuous position in the Renaissance art scene. This presentation will explore Vasari’s potential motivations for representing Properzia in this flattering light. I argue that portraying female artists as particularly exception was a shrewd negotiation, allowing for the existence of skilled female artists without negatively impacting the status of art.

Lorenzo Lotto’s painting Venus and Cupid is a rarity for the way that it embraces themes of marriage portrait-types, classical iconography, and the role of a wealthy woman in the Cinquecento period. Dated around 1520, it was likely commissioned to commemorate the marriage of a wealthy couple in Bergamo. Unlike a typical marriage portrait however, this one takes a twist. Venus appears to be somewhat mismatched; although her body could be that of a goddess, her face is highly individualized, leaving many scholars and myself to believe that this is in fact an image of the bride. In keeping with the previous scholarship, I argue that Lotto’s Venus and Cupid is not simply an image of Venus, but it is a marriage portrait of a wealthy Bergamese or Venetian woman. This painting highlights how female portraiture in the Cinquecento was starting to break the mold from portraying strictly idealized forms to images where the presence of the individual is pushed forward. Venus and Cupid is also noteworthy in how it confronts the issue of nudity in female portraiture. Support for these arguments will be made through analysis of the composition and the themes of marriage and beauty found within it, by examining Lotto’s history as a portrait artist, and through comparison to other works, both contemporary and ancient. These images will highlight the juxtaposition between the misplaced nature of a relatively recognizable woman within a typically idealized, mythological setting found within Lotto’s uncommon marriage portrait.

No matter the point in history, women often encounter numerous conflicting expectations and standards they are meant to follow. Art plays an important role in presenting symbols and role models through which these ideas are expressed; recurring frequently throughout the Renaissance, for example, we see use of the Virgin Mary to highlight the ideal woman. However, another woman appears throughout Christian art to foil her. Mary Magdalene was used frequently in representations of the life of Christ to show very conflicting parts of what it was expected to mean to be a woman. This paper looks at how her portrayal of both the extreme holiness of a saint, and the scorned sinfulness of a harlot reflect the contradictions women of the time were also facing in a male dominated, and heavily tiered society. Mary Magdalene’s symbolism is rooted in what’s almost like a game of telephone, being passed on from artist to artist as opposed to direct references in biblical texts. When it comes to the references and gospels that she does have, these are often twisted or even ignored altogether to make her fit the narrative of societal expectations of women in the renaissance. Her contrast with the Virgin, and with Christ himself, mirror the stark contrast in her own characterizations. Through this, the place of a woman in Renaissance society can begin to be dissected. In this paper, I will explore representations of Mary Magdalene in images throughout various pieces of both her own story and the story of Christ, including her redemption, The Crucifixion and Deposition of Christ, and the interactions between them when Christ rises, to demonstrate the highly contradictory nature of the standards placed upon women.

The Madonna of the Svezzamento (c. 1610-1612, Palazzo Barberini Corsini) is a Baroque devotional painting of the Madonna and Child which was only recently attributed to Artemisia Gentileschi by experts in the field. This presentation interprets the subject of Mary and her son Jesus within this painting, focusing on the picture’s attention to the humanity of Christ through the intimate and communicative gaze of its subjects. The painting depicts the process of svezzamento, or “weaning,” which is not particularly common in the pictorial tradition of the relationship showing the Madonna and Child, a tradition which defines the mystery of Jesus’ Incarnation through submission to his human mother. Utilizing comparisons of Artemisia’s contemporaries, as well as the works of theologians from the apocryphal writings of the New Testament to medieval Biblical commentaries, this presentation traces evidence of Mary’s relationship as a kind and authoritative mother to her son, who was both fully human and fully divine, presenting inspiration for Artemisia’s revolutionary work. Through discussion of the contrast in the Renaissance pictorial tradition of utilizing the image of the fully nude Christ child as an artistic interpretation of the Incarnation, this presentation aims to make claims about the Weaning Madonna as Artemisia Gentileschi’s innovative interpretation of a traditional theological subject.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is undoubtedly one of the most influential Italian painters in the history of art. The uniqueness of his work lies in part in its relationship to the sacred: Caravaggio often depicts holy figures as vulnerable human beings, in a sense closer to the believers who contemplate them.

In 1606, Caravaggio played a game of palm with one of his old acquaintances, Ranuccio Tomassoni. Soon old quarrels resurfaced and Ranuccio was mortally wounded by the painter. Caravaggio fled to the fiefdom of the Colonna family. He would then have painted the picture on which I would like to focus my remarks: Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy. The painting, attributed to Caravaggio by Roberto Longhi, is rather unknown to the general public because it is kept in a private collection in Rome and has only been exhibited twice in the world.

The Archbishop of Genoa, Jacques de Voragine, tells us about the life of Mary Magdalene: according to him, she was a former sinner with a dissolute life, who decided to give herself completely to Jesus. Towards the end of her life, she retreated into a cave to devote herself to prayer. Once a day, she would experience spiritual ecstasy: it is precisely this moment that Caravaggio wanted to depict in this painting.

The neutrality of the composition directs the viewer’s gaze to the figure of the saint in full ecstasy. The viewer is then forced to note the realism of her flesh and the accuracy of her expression, which borders on sexual ambiguity. Without a solid knowledge of the context, the simplicity of the scene leads the viewer to doubt the holiness of this woman. My paper addresses the question of how Caravaggio’s representation of this saint reinforces the intimate and real nature of the relationship that unites believers to the Christian religion.

Canonized religious paintings often depict angels and holy figures as helpers and docile accessories: delicately soft, airily beautiful, and radiant(ly white). However, biblical imagery describes angels as anthropomorphic, eye-covered creatures, and history indicates the Jewish ethnicity of biblical characters. Through research on Caravaggio’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt, I question how and why holy bodies are often constructed as racially white. Using post-structuralist analysis, my research investigates how formal strategies of painting inform a complex reading of white identities and conceptions of holiness. First, I argue that racial scrubbing of the Holy Family fabricates whiteness as the normative default, falsely deracializing whiteness. By associating white beauty standards displayed by the Holy Family with superior religious morality, I link racially coded beauty standards to a violently forged white supremacist painting language. However, the homoerotic notes of the temptingly lovely angel complicate the default state of normative whiteness in regard to sexuality. As a result, the formation of whiteness through angelic bodies becomes more nuanced as it challenges the heteronormative default as much as it perpetuates the default of religious Eurocentrism. Through my work, I urge scholars to study the complex violence of the fabrication of epistemically and metaphysically violent painting languages while also seeking alternate constructions of holy bodies.

This paper examines how the sculpted corpse of Saint Cecilia (1600), as rendered by Stefano Maderno (1570-1636) in the basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome, seeks to transcend the bounds of Christian time and space. Commissioned by Cardinal Paolo Emilio Sfrondrato (1561-1618) during his preparatory renovations of his titular church of Santa Cecilia for the Holy Year of 1600, the formulation of the sculpture acts as an archaeological record. It is a record not only in its accuracy to the actual corpse of Cecilia that was discovered during the late 16th century excavations, but also the continuum of Christian history that spanned backwards from the transfer of Cecilia’s corpse to the basilica in the ninth century, and all the way back to her martyrdom there in the third century CE. It is my assertion that the entrusting of the “replica” that is Saint Cecilia to Maderno, who up until its commission had largely worked on restoring and replicating antique works, reinforces the power of Christian archaeology in the years of the newly reformed Catholic Church. Approaching the life of the sculpture from a holistic vantage point, this paper answers questions ranging from the fields of religious history, literature, and tradition, to ideas about materiality and its intersections with artistry, antiquity, and gender.

Throughout and succeeding the seventeenth century, countless works by the acclaimed Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) have been recognized as pinnacle contributions to the Baroque period that sanctioned him as one of the most prominent sculptors in the history of Western art. Despite the veneration of his later esteemed works, a single sculpture has been virtually disregarded altogether in the trajectory of Bernini’s career — its consequence reflected in the scarcity of contemporary scholarship on the piece. Bernini’s Bacchanal: A Faun Teased by Children, housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, appears as a seemingly trivial and less-than-life size marble statue with a Bacchic motif; its main subjects are a faun, three putti, and a vining tree. While the present scholarship on Bacchanal has contributed to the chronological harmonization of Bernini’s artistic career and has proffered relevant discourse on a pedantically overlooked masterpiece, academics have yet to consider Bacchanal’s intimate sanctioning of escapism. This research seeks to present a unique perspective on Bernini’s Bacchanal: A Faun Teased by Children (ca. 1616-17) to articulate that the intention of the sculpture was to offer a means of metaphorical abscondence from the theological and social restrictions that afflicted the Early Baroque period through a homage to the credence of classical antiquity and an adulation of the humanist ideals of the Renaissance. In situating Bernini’s Bacchanal in the context of the Early Baroque period, this paper will consider Bernini’s Bacchic muses and their individual significances as representational figures of pleasure and inebriation in classical mythology and the Renaissance, thus illuminating their relationship to escapism.

To see how Hellenistic style influenced Buddhist art in the near-East and Central Asia, three examples of Buddha statues from three cities in the Tarim Basin surrounding the Taklamakan Desert will be studied to show how the different styles of local cultures attribute to detailing while the broader Hellenistic influence pervades Buddhist imagery in Central and eventually East Asia. The main statue studied is the Torso of Buddha from the Hermitage Museum. This statue is from the 6^th century CE and made from painted clay and loess. The first comparison piece is the Standing Buddha. The second comparison piece is Fragment of a Halo with Buddha Figure from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This statue is from the 6^th-7^th century CE and is made of painted stucco. Through these three examples, I study how each figure is depicted in terms of formal composition and through how the relationship between garments and the body can indicate cultural influence from Hellenistic Greece. Through this study, it can be seen that the nude body depicted through fabric permeates its way into the visual canon of societies, and its presence serves as a reminder of the influence of Greek sculpture on the forms and techniques of realism that changed the likeness of the human figure in art. Hellenistic drapery serves an aesthetic of power and reverence for changing the way nude bodies are depicted with dignity, and it is this drapery that becomes a signifier and manifestation of this Hellenistic power in art across cultures.

In Japanese figure paintings from the 13th through 19th century, there is a ubiquitous facial expression associated with the founder of Zen Buddhism, Daruma, characterized by a ferocious and intense countenance, with large eyes, an upward gaze, severely arched eyebrows, and an exaggerated frown or grimace. Its prevalence throughout Medieval Japan demonstrates its artistic significance. This study focuses on this visage, referred to by some scholars as Daruma Face. My research concerns the origin, employment, and subsequent diffusion of this notorious expression throughout Japanese culture. Although Daruma paintings are often an essential feature of a collective study of Zen painting, he and his iconographic expression rarely function as the primary subjects of study. Previous scholarship has identified the significant features, evolution, and symbolic meaning associated with Daruma Face, but has only done so in the context of Daruma paintings. My research broadens the narrow scope of the field on Daruma Face by revealing its pre-Daruma origins and far-reaching implications for medieval and contemporary philosophical thought and artistry. I propose that the origin of the iconic Daruma Face, despite its naming, was first employed among representations of Tantric Buddhist deities before being adopted into the iconographic repertoires of Buddhist guardian figures. I reason that Daruma Face functioned as a visual shorthand for the ferocity of these guardians. I further suggest that Daruma Face was then applied to Daruma paintings beginning in the 13th century, supplanting earlier paintings that emphasized his serenity. This, I argue, was a result of the appropriation of Zen by the Kamakura Shogunate (1192-1333) for the purpose of galvanizing and consolidating a warrior culture. Finally, I demonstrate how Daruma Face evolved into a cultural typesite for the Zen tradition, and as such was emulated in the portraiture of monks and warriors. Daruma Face was later incorporated into mass-produced prints and decorative arts during the Edo Period (1615-1868), reflecting its commercialization and integration into popular culture.

In Chinese Buddhism, it was believed that after death, the deceased passed through the courts of the Ten Kings of Hell before being reborn. Paintings depicting this theme act as manifestations of the kings’ courts, instilling fear in the viewer through their vivid depictions of the king as a judge overseeing the torture of the deceased. Existing scholarship on the Ten Kings focuses on the iconography and style of Tang (618-907) and Song (960-1279) dynasty examples, emphasizing a compositional evolution from the iconographic and narrative, scripture-based modes, to the hanging scroll format, where each king is represented in his own court. However, limited surviving paintings from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) leave a gap in the understanding of the Ten Kings and Buddhist hell during this period.

Using a rare surviving set of five Ming dynasty Ten Kings of Hell scrolls at the Harvard Art Museums, I argue that religious contexts, visual characteristics, and intermedial references within these paintings reflect the notion of the intermediate. Hell in Chinese Buddhism is a state of intermediate existence; I first discuss the ritual contexts and religious iconographies of these paintings as visualizing the passage between death and rebirth. Next, I analyze the visual and stylistic characteristics of the Harvard set, assessing how pictorial motifs are arranged and recycled throughout the set in a formula that allows the paintings to convey the notion of a liminal, intermediate space. Finally, I discuss how the pigments in the Harvard set perform intermedial references to textiles and decorative arts; these intermedial references both reinforce the authoritative relationship between the Ten Kings and the deceased and reflect the broader visual and material culture of the Ming dynasty court.

When the Jesuits began their conversion efforts in Japan, they utilized the same tactics that the Buddhist monks had used in the 6th century, as well as “enlightening” the Japanese people with the traditions and beliefs of western art. Like the Jesuit priests, Buddhist monks highlighted similarities between Shintoism and Buddhism to convert the population. Considered the native religion of Japan, Shintoism is powerfully connected to nature but does not teach of an afterlife, unlike Buddhism. Buddhism created a revolution in Japanese art, but the ideals and significance of a Japanese watercolor or ink painting could not be more different than those of Europe. However, the style of Shinto temples was recycled during the creation of Buddhist temples further reflecting the integration of these religions. Architecture also differed significantly, which is why the Jesuits created churches that greatly resemble Buddhist temples. While the Jesuits may have found overlapping morals and beliefs between the two religions, the traditional architecture and art styles of the Japanese were so deeply rooted in their culture. This factor, coupled with instability in the government and the eventual mistrust of the Spanish, both physical and religious conquest ultimately failed. To fully understand why Christianity ultimately failed, one must examine artworks from Europe and Japan, in this paper specifically from the Italian Renaissance and Heian period, both which are considered “golden periods” in each respective culture. Because of this, art will reflect cultural ideals, beliefs, and values. The clash of cultures and the political instability of Japan also played a crucial role. Ultimately, Christianity was outlawed and only practiced illegally, but European ways of art were mostly forgotten and/or destroyed.

This essay investigates Andrea del Verrocchio’s bronze David (c. 1465) as a reflection of the attitudes towards homosocial and homoerotic relationships within the social contexts of Medici rule. The iconography of the biblical character David is integral in establishing Medicean political and social authority, but the homoerotic decorative elements of Verrocchio’s David was also essential in establishing a Florentine tolerance for the freedom of male sexuality. This paper examines Lorenzo de’ Medici’s relationship with Angelo Poliziano as well as his role within the regulation of homosexual sodomy throughout his social and political influence in the Palazzo della Signoria. These homoerotic and homosocial aspects of Lorenzo’s life reflect a unique and fluctuating attitude towards homosexual activity, yet they are characteristic of the Medicean engagement with renaissance gay culture. This essay explores how the homoerotic imagery of David interacts within a public space to demonstrate the public’s receptivity to homosexuality when attached to the authority of the Medici family. This essay aims to augment scholarship on Verrocchio’s David by emphasizing not only the object’s association with Medicean and Florentine wealth and power, but ultimately the public and private aspects of homosexual culture within Florence.

Albarelli – maiolica earthenware jars designed to hold ointments, drugs, or medical ingredients- were essential to the function of a Renaissance apothecary shop and to any Florentine utilizing apothecary products in their home. The ubiquity of albarelli in the city’s private and public spheres during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a testament to the demand for apothecaries in the face of perpetual fear of sickness, and a desire to maintain a physical health unique to the identity of each Florentine. In addition to protective drugs and medicines, however, Florentine apothecary shops provided a multiplicity of products that were used to advance social status, including the raw material and pigments demanded by painters and sculptors and ingredients and foodstuffs sought by wealthy Florentines seeking to showcase illustrious dining or banquet displays. This paper focuses on the critical role played by the Florentine apothecaries at the Speziale al Giglio and the Convent of San Caterina da Siena in the management of Florentine anxiety of illness and as providers and commissioners for artistic innovation. It centers on an examination of albarelli that contained purgative drugs, the most prolific medical product distributed at each of these apothecaries, to reveal the significance of emptying the four humors- blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm- within the practice of Renaissance medicine. Ultimately, this paper demonstrates that lay and convent apothecaries yielded distinct gendered social settings, which emphasized the interconnectedness of science and the visual arts in Renaissance Florence.

The popularity and severity of response to witchcraft rose and fell throughout European history. A particular craze struck the continent in the 1560s, resulting in the imprisonment and death of a disproportionate number of women, previously unheard of before this spike. Some scholars have pointed to the Malleus Maleficarum (1485) as an inciting text in this highly misogynistic witch craze, however, it was out of print by the 16^th century and most Europeans were illiterate. With the rise of print media and mass production of images, it is likely that art became increasingly important in communicating morals and ideals to the lower classes. This research paper focuses on a singular woodcut by Hans Baldung Grien, arguably his most well-known, Witches Sabbath (1510). The discussion revolves around the iconography of the image as a subversion of Christian sanctity, especially with the counterfeit rituals, reference to original sin and the witch as foil of the Virgin Mary. An iconological approach is taken to conclude from both contemporary text and image that Baldung’s work betrays male anxieties about women’s power and agency in society and contributed to misogynistic attitudes. The paper also briefly addresses socioeconomic and political factors in the creation and reception of the image, such as Baldung’s powerful connections and the targeting of lower-class women in the witch trials. From this analysis is inferred a broader conclusion about how Witches Sabbath contributed to enduring and irreversible violence in the form of witch hunts, trials, and executions in 16^th century Europe.

In the 1670s, the anatomist to the court of French King Louis XIV, Claude Perrault, published several textbooks on the subject matter of natural history and comparative anatomy, including his celebrated Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire Naturelle des Animaux. The book first appeared in 1671, later in a revised and expanded edition in 1676, and several modified reprints between 1733-1734. This book became one of the most famous natural history projects carried out in seventeenth-century Europe and it was consequently translated into English, Dutch, Latin and German, and smaller abridged versions. Perrault’s study provided detailed descriptions of dissections and anatomical studies of animals from the Royal Menagerie at Versailles and a smaller one at Vincennes in Paris. Perrault derived the content for this work from the experiments he conducted with a small circle of scientists at the Royal Academy in Paris. Court engraver and illustrator Sébastien Le Clerc created the anatomical illustrations based on Perrault’s dissection notes. Prior research and analyses of Perrault and LeClerc’s works focus on their scientific and historical importance as seminal efforts to codify science as a field and object of study. There is comparatively less research on the images within the books as works of art and the formative role these artistic works play in advancing science in a way that made it accessible to wider audiences. This essay shows that the images within the books should be considered and evaluated as individual works of art, created at a time where the line between art and science was blurred and rather the two subjects worked together more cohesively, while also examining the purpose of the textbook and images through a postcolonial lens. By considering the artistic influences, formal characteristics, and colonial implications of these engravings, we can better understand how they, and Perrault’s larger body of work, impacted both scientific and artistic communities.

Focusing on the genre painting of Clara Peeters, Judith Leyster and Rachel Ruysch, this paper contextualizes the misattribution of their works to contemporaneous male painters and explains the ramifications of these misattributions for the field of art history. In some cases, works made by Peters and Leyster, or other female Dutch Baroque artists, are attributed to prominent male artists such as Frans Snyders or Frans Hals. Art connoisseurs and collectors also attributed works by female painters to their husbands or fathers, as was the case for several works by Leyster. To complement the analysis of female artists from northern Europe, this paper also considers some of the gender issues of biography of women, acknowledging figures like Artemisia Gentileschi, an artist whose modern fame derives largely from her biography as a victim of rape. By examining the history of connoisseurship in the seventeenth century—when art dealers cultivated a clientele drawn from the Grand Tour in Europe—my paper demonstrates that dealers faced increasing motivation to raise the purchase price of paintings by assigning them to well-known male artists, as buyers were both gullible and indifferent to the details of a work’s creation. I then follow connoisseurship practices up to the present, ultimately tracing the connection between connoisseurship and the art historical understanding of the seventeenth-century women artists’ role in history. These three women artists, prominent during their time, are under-explored in scholarship as well as the history of their loss in reputation which this paper examines. Seeking to answer why many of these misattributions took so long to come to light, this paper explores the reattribution process for paintings by Peeters and Leyster, considers the possible catalysts for these reattributions, and shows why it is important to bring long overdue recognition to these women artists.

Among its primary functions, the mirror serves as a tool that enables people to see their appearance. By its very nature, a mirror reflects the subject presented to it. Water, bronze, metal… any polished materials that reflect light can be used as a mirror. The mirrors in early modern Dutch cabinets are no exception. People see themselves in these various mirrors, from the miniature mirrors in Petronella Oortman (1656-1716)’s dollhouse, to the ancient, yet foreign, Chinese bronze mirror in Nicholaas Witsen (1641- 1717)’s collection, to the mirrors in perspectiefje explicitly designed for the center stage of collectors’ cabinets. Yet, self is always a hidden concept; humans can see everything in this world directly, expect their own faces. The reflection of the self, in the mirror, requires one to probe deeper than the surface appearance. While the primary function of each type of aforementioned mirror remains the same, the role of the mirror in the cabinet shifts away from its primary use. Against the background of the development of the Venetian mirrors during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this presentation investigates into the role, function, and purpose of the mirrors in the Dutch cabinet in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I argue that, through engaging with the self through body proximity, mimesis, and theatrum mundi, the mirrors in the early modern Dutch cabinets contribute to the production of knowledge and aid the perception of self through a universal reflection of the singularity of things, people, and experiences. Requiring active perception, they translate the ousia (reality) into the phainomenon (appearance), which ultimately places human agency to the center of an amplified experience of wonder.

This paper explores societal treatment of feminine rage through its two most prolific artistic icons: the Apocrypha’s Judith and the Gorgoneion Medusa. On the surface the two seem parallel as the vanquisher and the vanquished, though a deeper exploration reveals the basis of their symbolism, the complicated phenomena of feminine rage. Though generally Judith and Medusa exist as an ideal and a threat respectively, both women have a definitive, variable development that will be traced through artworks from their conception to the modern day. The viewer bears witness to a departure from the fierce protective symbol of Medusa and the unwavering faith and strength of Judith at the hands of countless patriarchal systems in their attempt to control each narrative. The characterization, revision, and reception of these figures throughout the art canon speaks volumes about feminine rage and its effects in society. The source of this exploration is an early assignment of gender to emotion, which carries on through the centuries and informs the artistic choices in portraying these women, and whether they should adhere to or reject the precedent. Every piece depicting Judith or Medusa can be reduced to that single dichotomy, and the choice of the artist on that matter reflects their own feelings as well as the opinion of their era. One finds that the aspects of convergence and divergence between the two characters relies on an outside view of their actions, especially in regard to virtue and sensuality. Each major revision of these two women centers around society’s complicated view of women’s sexuality and autonomy, as it is central to both of their identities. Modern women have already begun to unravel the muddied narratives of these women, and this understanding of their true meanings will lead to a true reclaiming and reinvention of feminine rage.

This paper discusses the Enlightenment’s influence on Romanticism through its development and establishment of political, philosophical, and religious freedoms. There is an interdisciplinary implementation of the use of sociology as a source of change when it comes to art in the Period of Pathos. Instead of focusing on the Romantic’s opposition to the truth, the Enlightenment brought about, in this conversation, there is a focus on the harmony of both periods’ ideals and themes. By utilizing qualitative research methods through chronological, historical, and biographical processes, this paper demonstrates the importance of the Enlightenment on Romantic art. The use of handwritten lecture notes, non-fiction books, and academic journals accomplish this. The conclusions made regarding the influence of the Enlightenment on Romanticism displayed that there was one primary factor that caused the most significant amount of transformation. This factor proved to be the revolutionary aspect of the Enlightenment, including its political and philosophical revolutions. This galvanized the turning point which led to the inception of the Romantic’s focus on emotions, the human experience, and the sublime. This is displayed through Goya’s experiences with the political climate in Spain as the court painter for King Charles Ⅲ and King Charles Ⅳ, alongside witnessing the horrors of the Peninsular War. In this conversation, Goya’s Third of May will be the focus, a painting acting as the visual representation of both the artist’s personal turning point and the culmination of both periods’ values. This is evidenced by his displays of emotion, evocativeness, and religious fervor, fused with focuses on human nature, gritty authenticity, and forward-thinking. The nexus of periods typically seen as diametrically opposed is brought together and unified in this paper through Goya’s art.