Papers by Alexander Nagel
Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna
The Art Bulletin, 1997
In a study of that central document of Italian Evangelism ... I wish to thank Gadi Algazi, Leonar... more In a study of that central document of Italian Evangelism ... I wish to thank Gadi Algazi, Leonard Barkan, Elizabeth Cropper, Natalie Zemon Davis, Valentin Groebner, Bernhard Jussen, Thomas Lentes, John Paoletti, Christopher Wood, and my two anonymous Art Bulletin readers for ...
Michael W. Cole and Rebecca Zorach , eds. The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World . St Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Farnham : Ashgate Publishing Company , 2009 . xix + 356 pp. + 1 color pl. index. illus. bibl. $99.95. ISBN: 978–0–7546–5290–8
Renaissance Quarterly, 2010
Journal of Early Modern History, 2019
The association of America and Asia dominated the geographical imagination of Europe for well ove... more The association of America and Asia dominated the geographical imagination of Europe for well over a century after 1492. Narratives and representations of myriad texts, maps, objects, and images produced between 1450 and 1700 reveal a vision of a world where Mexico really was India, North America was an extension of China, South America was populated by a variety of biblical and Asian sites, and American cultural productions and ethnographic features colored conceptions of Asia. While the Amerasian imaginary was later suppressed by Eurocentric and colonialist narratives, here we consider various representations of Amerasia in order to bring it back into visibility. Doing so reveals various forms of mirroring at play, permitting us to understand one of the mechanisms by which Europeans assimilated a dizzying array of new knowledge to their pre-existing conceptual order, and also offering insights into early modern European conceptions of global geography and modernity.
Hell is for White People: A painting from 1515 turns a mirror on its viewers
Cabinet Magazine, 2020
https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/nagel_alexander_10_june_2020.php
It's too early to tell: Marie Denise Villers' 1801 portrait of Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes
4Columns, 2020
https://4columns.org/nagel-alexander/marie-denise-villers
October, 2010
The term "globalization" is often used loosely and with a "presentist" bias, which assumes that a... more The term "globalization" is often used loosely and with a "presentist" bias, which assumes that an international or even global consciousness belongs exclusively to the modern era, or even just the last ten or fifteen years. But the notion of inter-regional or international exchange is hardly new-in fact it has been experienced at different scales practically from the beginning of human history. So I thought it might be interesting for modernists to hear from major scholars in the late-medieval and early-modern periods about how these concepts function in their areas of expertise and also to reflect on how or whether the term "globalization" has in fact migrated back into early modern histories on account of its prestige among modernists, or whether modernists have just seized upon a methodological perspective that has been in use for a very long time in art history. Christopher Wood: I would like to start by drawing a distinction between networks that connote random, often chaotic and contingent circulations of objects and people in general (related to the work of Bruno Latour) and networks as historically specific kinds of infrastructure like the Internet or the telephone or mail system. Barry Flood: Latour actually uses the railroad to make the distinction between the local and the global, invoking it as a translocal (but non-universal) network that is local at all points. However, Latour's network model is very problematic for dealing with so-called premodernity, since it is in thrall to the idea (derived from Deleuze and Guattari) that the extent of pre-modern networks was limited by the need to assert and maintain the territorial claims of political formations. This sharp distinction between modernity and premodernity based on the opposition between territory and network is already present in Immanuel Wallerstein's work on world systems, which emphasizes a difference between world economies and world capitalist economies. According to Wallerstein, the former were limited by the territorial reach of political authorities (typically, imperial formations), while the latter are
London Review of Books, 2016
Imagining the Museum, 2013
Recensioni ad aite riesumati, che rendono purtroppo ancor più mefitica l'aria della madrepatria i... more Recensioni ad aite riesumati, che rendono purtroppo ancor più mefitica l'aria della madrepatria in questo scorcio, tutt'altro che eroico ed esaltante, di secondo millennio.
Res: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics
Creuser dans la langue une langue etrangère et porter tout le langage vers une limite musicale-c'... more Creuser dans la langue une langue etrangère et porter tout le langage vers une limite musicale-c'est ça avoir un style.
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Papers by Alexander Nagel