Art and Art History

En 1928 se publica Romancero gitano que Federico García Lorca había estado escribiendo entre 1924 y 1927. En esta obra el escritor andaluz, a través de los gitanos, quiere representar a la minoría, un mundo de marginados, de perseguidos, de "diversos": negros, judíos, homosexuales, mujeres. El poeta canta, con sentimiento de patente solidaridad, a la cultura gitana exaltándola hasta convertirla en mito moderno.

Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 268 pp, 8 plates, 93 illustrations. ISBN 0-521-56288-0 US. $90. Katherine Crawford Luber's book on Albrecht Diirer has two subjects. The first, as the title suggests, has to do with Diirer's relationship to Venice and the Renaissance in northern Italy; the second concerns Diirer's painting as a neglected but essential facet of his art. Indeed, art historical literature has dedicated little attention to Diirer's painting. The artist's phenomenally successful prints and his contributions to art theory have commanded the interest of most scholars, leaving few pages for a consideration of his painted oeuvre. But as Luber demonstrates, Diirer's paintings, particularly those executed during and shortly after his trip to Venice in 1 505-1 507, are perhaps the clearest indications of his pictorial debt to the Italian Renaissance.

The 16th-century Protestant Reformation shattered the foundations of faith and art. As traditional theology was both besieged and defended, art had to adapt. Of course, a new theology needed new kinds of pictorial extrapolations. But truly, the most interesting change was hidden in plain sight. Subjects that may have looked familiar were in fact utterly new, because subversive ideas and contexts uprooted older meanings. The painting Madonna with Parrots (1533), by Hans Baldung Grien demoted the chaste protectress by transforming her into a flawed, even dangerous, human mother. In the painting, an oddly sultry Virgin shows off her breast, her shoulder, and her chest as a parrot nibbles her neck. The complexities of Baldung's painting underpin debates about the status of the Virgin during the Reformation and the freedom of an artist to tamper with sacred subject matter.

I say that they do travel hither and yon, but that they also remain where they are, because they dream that they travel, since the devil can create an impression in the human mind, and thus a fantasy […]. And let us not be amazed that he can deceive them so completely […]."

The Reformation of Everyday Life Everyday life is that aspect of human culture that is common to all. Parents and children, work and care -these are everywhere. It is in the everyday life of families that religion is lived and traditions are passed on to the next generation. And it is in everyday life that theological core figures are transformed into social imaginaries that guide human life in different ways. 1 It was through everyday life that people in Early Modern European societies felt, dealt with, integrated, or resisted the changes that the Reformation brought with it. This volume focuses on the relationship between the Reformation and everyday life in a number of different contexts. The aim was not to provide a comprehensive overview, but rather to raise the question of the benefits to scholarship of focusing on the religious formation of everyday life. The background is a REFORC conference held in Aarhus in May 2021 as the final conference of a multi-year collaborative 1 Cf. B.K. Holm, "Theologisch-soziale Formationen der lutherischen Wirkungsgeschichte", in H. Assel/ J.A. Steiger/A.E. Walter (ed.), Reformatio Baltica. Kulturwirkungen der Reformation in den Metropolen des Ostseeraums (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2017) 921-32; B. K.

This study investigates the fun-house world of Hans Baldung Grien (1484/5-1545), where virgins are seductive, witches are beautiful, and both are dangerous and enticing.  Baldung’s pictures responded to and perpetuated anxieties and doubts about perception that permeated the culture of Reformation Germany.  Such anxieties transformed virgins into vixens and produced the stereotype of the witch.  Baldung’s pictures anticipated anxious viewers who understood erudite, inside jokes and were inclined to doubt what their eyes seemed to perceive.  Understanding the role of doubt helps explain the power of Baldung’s Reformation period pictures and the ways they intersect with broader cultural trends.  This study of the shifting sands of Baldung’s art began with an observation about Baldung’s curiously sultry Madonna with Parrots, 1533.  By deliberately confusing mood and subject, pictures such as the Madonna with Parrots engender a kind of doubt about accurate perception that preoccupied artists and theologians, and presumably viewers, during the Reformation.  Further complicating the issue is Baldung’s accomplished mimesis.  Previous scholars have wisely reminded us that mimesis is a style, not a statement of fact.  Just as the twenty-first century viewer may encounter a seemingly real image that turns out to be AI - - there are no such people and no such place - -  and wonder if truth can ever be known through the eye, so the sixteenth-century viewer may query the relationship between seeing and knowing when encountering the uncanny reality of linear perspective.  The fictional space of the sixteenth-century picture becomes artistic space, suited for ruminations on holiness, but not holiness itself.

Interweaving traditional academic writing with a more explorative, creative engagement through a fictional dialogue, the (fictional) author and subject of this interview operates under the pseudonym Dr. Tracey Daedalus and is my own alter ego - personifying a research on myth, the hero, other-ness, celebrity, presence and invisibility within literary, visual and popular arts. The dialogue as such encourages an a-synchronicity, which moves towards a more practical means to break the cycle of linear narrative - putting the “I” into writing in order to combat critical distance and traditional patriarchal narratives that would colonise any discourse of other-ness.

William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth has retained a position of continual presence in films with renowned directors such as Orson Welles (1948), Akira Kurasawa (1957), and Roman Polanski (1971) undertaking adaptations on the source text. Though these directors did not feel bound by fidelity within their respective films, fidelity criticism, especially for canonical texts, has retained a privileged perspective in any discourse of adaptation studies. This paper examines adaptations of Macbeth-Jeremy Freeston's Macbeth, 1997; Billy Morrissette's Scotland, PA, 2001; Geoffery Wright's Macbeth, 2006; and Justin Kurzel's Macbeth, 2015-in order to discuss and problematize fidelity criticism in adaptation studies. However, within the field of adaptation studies, as with any cultural or artistic criticism, from what perspective does one observe and with what critical toolbox does one examine a work is paramount for a discussion on the relation of a source text to a new work. Consequently , there have been many schools of thought that have affected critical inquiry and engagement with arts and literature; from the Formalists of the early twentieth century placing import on the form of the work, New Criticism emphasizing close reading and evaluation, Semiotics studying how meanings are made according to a study of signs, to Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction, Feminism, and Queer Theory to name a few. The point of such a brief account of Western literary criticism (which is not exhaustive by any means) acts as a starting point for the perspective of this essay and the inevitable plurality of historical precedence and contemporary trans-textual approaches that must accompany any inquisition into this paper. The paper attempts to build a comparative critique on the relevance of an inquiry on fidelity in adaptation studies and how do the spacio-temporal locale and generic shifts within an adaptation affect the reception of a new work in relation to the former. The paper also analyzes whether time, place, and generic shifts offer a potential escape from the trappings of fidelity criticism. While raising these questions the paper seeks a way out from fidelity criticism through Bundle Theory. Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies (LLIDS)